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from the start, he should present us with the fact of consciousness, that
he should make us feel at work the worm of consciousness. A book of
his, therefore, is not a fable; it is above all an experience of truth. There
are dozens of writers capable of describing outward appearance and
sensation more clearly, more gracefully than Moravia. But there is no
one to equal him in seizing the moments in which reality, piercing
through the mist of velleity and pretense, begins to exist and to take on
the meaning of its own overwhelming essence. These are the moments
in which we feel that sureness of a man who has plumbed the depths of
his own experience, who, when he speaks, arrives immediately at what
is
important.
It
is then that Moravia succeeds in eliciting the feeling of
extreme uneasiness and depression from a gesture, a physical contact, a
glance, or the most opaque piece of matter. It is this, not the "joy of
narrating," that gives the story its impetus, and it is toward this that the
story moves. The plot is the "objective correlative" of his irremediable
condition of the soul. It arises from the author's desire to force it into
the structure of a daily reality conceived as a "commonplace" of ex–
perience, not from a wish to depict the progress of a real action
in
the
continuity of real time.
La N oia
seems to me an admirably concise, sharp and energetic
example of this fundamental, constantly repeated situation. In its
moral and artistic economy, it is perhaps the most successful of all
Moravia's work.
The hero of the novel is an abstract painter who one day, "at last
authentically inspired after so many attempts," hurls himself on the
picture he is painting and slashes it to piece with his knife. After this
he feels free either to begin all over again or else to recognize frankly
the fact that he has failed. "A failure, not because I was unable to
paint pictures that were pleasing to others; but because I felt that my
paintings did not permit me to express' myself, that is, to delude myself
into thinking that I was relating to things."
Here then
is
a man facing a truth which, though extremely dis–
heartening, is yet better than an illusion. He is alone before an image of
himself "for various reasons unbearable," in an atonic world. He can
do, or let himself go and do, anything at all. One day he finds himself
making a gesture to a girl. "As she passed under my window, I saw her
look up at me, but this time without smiling. I raised my hand to take
the cigarette from my mouth, but instead I found myself making an
unmistakable sign to her to come back." That is how things happen, the
writer seems to be saying; that
is
how we become involved in reality.
From this involuntary gesture, at once gratuitous and inevitable,
the gist of the tale, the story not of love or eroticism, but of the
