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NICOLA CHIAROMONTE
frustrated desire for possession and consciousness takes its impetus. The
relationship between the painter and the girl is naked, mechanical and
clean as a bone-or better, as a skeleton. No one has depicted a series
of carnal acts, frenzied yet cold in their automatism-nudity, desire
and
its
outlet-with such complete lack of complacence, such impas–
sive truthfulness. For Moravia does not describe bodies or their acts;
he makes us feel their existence and, at the same time, their unreality:
their refusal to
be
comprehended, their mechanicalness, their blind
fatality. In the void of boredom, the triumph of physical love over every
other vital impulse is represented with an annihilating vehemence that
recalls the triumph of death and decay over earthly vanities and
pleasures in the frescoes at Pisa.
"At first.. .it (physical love) seemed to me something very na–
tural. . . . But now it struck me above all by its lack of naturalness, like
an act that was in some way against nature, that is, artificial and absurd.
Walking, sitting, lying down, climbing, descending and all such bodily
actions now seemed to me to have a necessity, and therefore 'a natural–
ness of their own. Copulation, on the other hand, seemed to me an
extravagant tour de force for which the human body was not made and
to which it could adapt itself only with strain and effort. Everything,
I thought, can be done easily, with grace and harmony, everything
except the act of love. The very conformation of the two sexual organs,
the female organ difficult of access, the male organ unable to reach its
goal autonomously like an arm or leg, but needing, rather, to be aided
by the whole body, seemed to me to indicate the absurdity of sexual
intercourse."
Moravia does not say that this is love. He says that in the situation
in which we find ourselves, it would be dishonest to represent it in any
other way. On the other hand, he seems to be saying that in the situa–
tion in which we find ourselves sex, denuded as it is of any vibration
of the spirit, is also a truth, the only access we still have to nature.
Etre la matiere,
the last words of Flaubert's St. Anthony, expresses the
only form of mystical longing of which modern man is capable. True
hell is not there: true hell is in the unnecessary, in all that hides us
from ourselves, hiding from us the fact that we are living in a morally
dead world. This reality is described by Moravia with unequaled ferocity
in the parts of the novel showing the relationship between the hero and
his mother and describing the luxury, money, empty words and per–
manent spiritual blindness of a being in whom possessiveness and greed
are walled within the most deadly of the passions : inert self-satisfaction.
I t is from such places as the villa where this woman lives that boredom
spreads out over the world.
Nicola Chiaromonte
(translated by Barbara Loeb Kennedy)
