Literature and fascism in Italy, pt. 4

This is the fourth of a series of posts exploring literature in Italy from before, during, and after the second World War. For part 1, on Bontempelli’s The Chess Set in the Mirror, see here. For part 2, on Calvino’s The Path to the Spider’s Nest, see here. For part 3, on Ortese’s The Iguana, see here.

Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno is published a year after Mussolini assumes power in Italy. The basic frame is this: A psychiatrist publishes his patient’s (the titular Zeno’s) autobiographical sketches. The evident intent of the sketches, assigned by the psychiatrist, “Dr. S,” as psychiatric homework, so to speak, is for Zeno to achieve some self-knowledge. Both Dr. S and Zeno seem to agree the project was a failure. There is even a degree of antagonism between the two: Thus, Dr. S notes in the preface that his publication of Zeno’s ‘confessions’ is an act of “revenge,” and in the last chapter Zeno mocks the doctor and the practice of psychiatry in general.

What stands out about Zeno, as a work of the interwar period, and perhaps more generally as a work announcing the collapse of one world (call it the nineteenth century) and the advent of another (call it the twentieth century), is, in short, the failure of this project: the failure by Zeno to achieve self-knowledge through self-inquiry.

From the perspective of the official fascism of Italy at the time, we might see in Zeno two things. The first would be precisely the opposite of the sacrifice of individualism that fascism champions. Zeno is a work entirely—a fascist might say: decadently—devoted to the pursuit of self-inquiry. The second thing we might see in Zeno, however, is a sort of reductio of the ‘liberalism’ that fascism rejects. Zeno sets out to discover the sources of his (relatively low-intensity) pain and suffering, and he gets no answers. Zeno’s failure is individualism’s failure: an argument for the primacy of collective identity.

In that sense, we might say that Zeno is an ambivalent work, exemplifying (if we accept fascism’s characterization of the underlying issues) both the obsessions and the contradictions of individualism. Zeno is a work simultaneously complicit with and subversive of fascist ideology. What might decide the issue, however, in favor of a subversive reading is the thought that Zeno isn’t a work of navel-gazing. Or: Zeno doesn’t just fail to know himself. He deceives himself. Zeno isn’t a novel about self-knowledge; it’s a novel about self-deception. It is also about the failure of intentions, about the failure of the will—not exactly propaganda for fascism.

Intention and failure

The bulk of Zeno, fittingly, is about the mismatch between Zeno’s intentions and his attempt to realize them. The book opens describing Zeno’s practice of having a “last cigarette,” a constant and reenacted failure of conviction to quit smoking (4ff.). In a chapter on his marriage, he wallows between half-passions for several women before settling on one—and being rejected; before asking her sister, who rejects him; before asking her other sister, who at last accepts him (these last two happening in quick succession in a single evening). The chapter on a business venture not only ends with its failure, it seems to begin with its failure, and merely sustains this status throughout its life, from failure to complete catastrophe.

Indeed, Zeno is nothing if not an exploration of the diversity of forms of intention’s strange relation with reality. Intentions aren’t realized at all, or come about in opposite ways, or waver constantly—as in the chapter on his mistress, where we find Zeno constantly resolving to do or even to feel the opposite of what he does or feels. Sometimes he acts with the external aspect of intention though having none at all: He describes feeling an “agonizing impatience” to see his mistress, but for what he doesn’t know: “whether it was to tell her I must give her up for ever or to take her in my arms” (133). He expresses puzzlement about why he acted the way he did, specifically why he didn’t end things with the mistress earlier. “It is easy to laugh at anyone for being wise after the event,” he notes, “but it is almost as useless to be wise before it” (136). In Zeno, knowledge, like intention, fails at the door to the world.

The mismatch between intention and realization is moreover connected by Zeno at one point to language itself:

The foolish words that escape us sometimes react more violently than the most discreditable deeds due to a passionate impulse. . . . [A] foolish tongue acts independently, in the interests of a small part of our being which otherwise would feel itself to be defeated, and continutes to simulate fight when the fight is already over. Words are spoken with intention to wound or caress, and often they turn against the mouth that utters them and burn it. (197)

In that way, Confessions of Zeno itself is—though in ways that would be by definition unfathomable to its reader—a failure of intention, a failure to do the thing Zeno sets out to do.

Pain and health

An interesting contrast with Zeno might be Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich, published about four decades before Zeno. Ilyich, like Zeno, lives a more or less shallow bourgeois existence, develops a pain in his side; the pain morphs into an illness, and he dies of it. But the pain provides occasion for reflection on and then moral clarity about his life, and with his death he accomplishes a truly meaningful act. In Ilyich, pain is a vehicle for self-knowledge; it calls Ilyich out of his empty existence, compels him to self-reflection.

Like Ilyich, Zeno suffers one form of pain (or another) throughout the book, and is—sometimes anyway—bothered by it in the same more or less existential way. That is, the pain seems never to be just pain (just physical pain) but the tying of a knot of his entire being.

The source of the pain, however, is obscure, as Zeno tells a few different stories of its origin, the first indeed beginning with mention of the fact that “for some years past I had looked on myself as ill” (67). In this first story, he meets an old acquaintance at a bar; the acquaintance has rheumatism and a resultant limp. Zeno himself then suddenly—caused to think of his leg as his friend discusses his own (68–9)—has a limp, too. (Here incidentally note how the consciousness of his leg produces the pain.) In a later episode, a man competing with him for the affections of the sister of Zeno’s future wife (the sister being the woman Zeno had originally wanted to marry) draws Zeno in a ridiculous caricature (91ff.). The embarassment causes Zeno (or, although this may not be a distinction, causes Zeno to become aware of) a pain in his hip and side that persists in some fashion the rest of his life (although it does travel around his body a bit).

In an Ilyich version of Zeno, the pain is a metaphor for Zeno’s loose relation with reality, and overcoming it would be Zeno’s triumph. But we find nothing like this in Zeno. After describing the caricature episode, Zeno reflects, now in his old age, that

I have whole chests full of medicines, and they are the only ones that I keep tidy myself. I love my medicines, and know that even if I give one up I shall go back to it sooner or later. And I don’t consider I have wasted my time. I might have been dead long ago, who knows of what ghastly disease, if my pain had not simulated each in turn so as to induce me to get cured before it had time really to take hold of me. (93)

The pain in Zeno is not an occasion for seeking a cure; it is rather an occasion for seeking the act of seeking a cure. Perhaps one way Zeno and his psychiatrist misunderstand each other turns on Zeno’s not really even wanting a cure. In describing his practice of repeatedly smoking a last cigarette, Zeno notes that “Ill-health is a conviction, and I was born with that conviction” (7).

Ultimately, what Zeno is burdened by isn’t bodily pain or illness, but his constant reflection on and awareness of that pain and illness. Indeed, he sees the two as related. His wife Augusta is to him the picture of health, but she has no awareness of it; for “she had no conception of what health really is. Health cannot analyse itself even if it looks at itself in the glass. It is only we invalids who can know anything about ourselves” (107). The very act of description, of bringing to consciousness, seems to infect its subject with questionability. As he attempts to describe “the source of [Augusta’s] well-being,” he reflects that he knows that he “cannot succeed, for directly I start analysing it I seem to turn it into a disease” (104).

Zeno is a mostly comic novel full of the sort of funniness you would expect from a mismatch between intention and realization. Then something happens that ruins the mood of the book. That something is the First World War.

War and reflection

First some background. Zeno takes place in a landscape of shifting borders—national, linguistic, political. Trieste in 1915–16 is not part of Italy; it is still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For his part, Zeno is repeatedly contented to speak German when encountering soldiers in the end of the novel. Indeed Italo Svevo, “Svevo” meaning “Swabian,” was born Aron Ettore Schmitz, a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At one point, Zeno—echoing Svevo himself, perhaps—laments that he was compelled to write his confessions in Italian, as he is one of those “who talk dialect but cannot express ourselves in writing” (270). The very language of Zeno—written during, we could imagine a dyed-in-the-wool Triestian (not Zeno) saying, the Italian occupation of Trieste—is testament to the subject’s alienation in the context of broad social upheaval.

In May of 1915, Zeno, Augusta, and their daughter are staying in Lucinico, which happens to be just on the other side of the border, inside Italy. On May 23, Zeno goes for a long walk, which brings him to the other side of the border. That very day, Italy declares war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and immediately the border is shut down. He is forced to go to Trieste without his wife and daughter, and he appears more or less contented, at the last mention of them, to spend the duration of the war alone.

It is interesting, first of all, to compare the immediacy of the relation between the military events of May 23 to a much earlier episode in the novel, in which Zeno sends flowers to his future mother-in-law and her daughter (one he doesn’t marry) on May 5, the anniversary of Napoleon’s death, as he notes (63). In this earlier instance, the historical and political reference reads as absurd, like sending flowers to someone on the anniversary of Gorbachev’s death. In this earlier instance, the relation between political forces of this magnitude is abstract. With the advent of the First World War, the relation becomes intimate. Fascism might have us believe that the confluence of state and individual is a source of meaning; Zeno exemplifies quite the opposite idea. The more the state encroaches on Zeno, the more absurd his relation to the world becomes.

Zeno nevertheless is primed for the onslaught against meaning that is large-scale industrial destruction. Earlier he reflects, in conversation with his brother-in-law, that life is “neither good nor bad; it is original,” and he privately reflects:

I felt as if I were seeing life for the first time, with all its gaseous, liquid, and solid bodies. If I had talked about it to someone who was strange to it . . . . he would have remained gasping at the thought of the huge, purposeless structure. He would have asked: ‘But how could you endure it?’ And if he had inquired about everything in detail, from the heavenly bodies hung up in the sky which can be seen but not touched, to the mystery that surrounds death, he would certainly have exclaimed: ‘Very original!’ (220)

“Original” here seems to have the same salience as describing a text whose meaning is unclear as “rich.” A student who writes a “rich” text writes something that is meaningless, and the nicest thing to say about it is that it’s cute they made the attempt. Appropriately, as an explanation of the meaning of “original,” Zeno continues:

But the more I thought of it the more original life seemed to me. And one did not need to get outside it in order to realize how fantastically it was put together. One need only remind oneself of all that we men expect from life to see how very strange it is, and to arrive at the conclusion that man has found his way into it by mistake and does not really belong there. (Ibid.; my emphasis)

The dated diary entries of the last part of the book (269ff.) suggest that these earlier parts were written before the outbreak of the war. Thus, Zeno doesn’t need separating from his family by the Austro-Hungarian army to find human life a mistake. He finds it that way, so to speak, all by himself. The war, and the absurd way it slices his domestic life in half, is a sort of externalization of the sentiment of absurdity that Zeno is already tuned into. It brings that absurdity into the open.

Indeed, Zeno’s war life is a fairly contented one; he does nothing, is troubled by nothing (290). By contrast, before the war, he comments on his brother-in-law’s financial ruin that

to comfort him was out of the question. In my opinion, not even people who are more innocent and more unhappy than Guido [his brother-in-law] deserve pity, otherwise there would be no room for anything but that feeling, which would be very tedious. The law of nature does not confer the right to be happy, on the contrary it condemns us to pain and suffering . . . for nature does not calculate, she only makes experiments. (245)

In other words, the Zeno who is trapped on the other side of the border from his family by a sudden declaration of war has already accepted nature’s absurdity and the absurdity of human existence and effort.

Zeno and fascism

Zeno may be ambivalent about self-knowledge, but ultimately it occupies an entirely different moral universe from that of fascist ideology, in a number of dimensions, and perhaps above all in terms of the complete absence of the possibility of vigor. Fascism, we might say, favors a vigorous subject: one who has mental clarity about their self and the world they live in; and who has the psychological, emotional, and physical capacity for bringing that vision into action. Zeno has no clue who he is or where he is, and his fairly exhaustive attempts to discover these result only in further confusion.

In the end, Zeno also favors a certain reductivism incompatible with the ‘spiritual’ high hopes of fascism. Zeno’s illness, it turns out, was diabetes (278). His lifelong ‘struggle’ had no spiritual meaning at all. It wasn’t psychosomatic, it didn’t have to do with his father’s death, his contorted marriage proposal, the convolutions of his affair, or the long-winded failure of a business venture. Of course it had nothing to do with ‘Italy’, which exists now on this side, now on that side of him, as the whims of history have it. Zeno’s struggle was his body’s inability to control the amount of sugar in his blood.

Zeno’s ultimate resolution to abandon his psychiatrist’s project doesn’t result from his having achieved some grand spiritual insight about ‘man’s destiny’. He simply dumps it (and, by the way, manages, in a decidedly non-fascistic pursuit, to make loads of money in the meanwhile).

Another way to capture the salience of Zeno would be to see it as entirely the opposite sort of response to the First World War as the black shirts’, for whom fascism offered the delightful prospect of permanent mobilization, of meaning through violence. For Zeno, the war erases the significance of the pursuit of meaning. (In other words, we could imagine a Zeno who, without the war, goes on writing his Confessions forever.) Thus, mocking his doctor, whom he imagines expecting Zeno to send him “more confessions of weakness and ill-health,” Zeno declares himself cured: “I am cured!” and he describes his health in a telling allusion to the war:

I not only have no desire to practise psychoanalysis, but no need to do so. And my good health is not merely the result of feeling myself to be a privileged person among so many martyrs [of the First World War]. It is not only by comparison with others that I feel myself to be well: I really am well, absolutely well. (290)

He casts scorn on the entire project of reflection on the causes of grief, saying “pain and love . . . cannot be looked on as a disease just because they make us suffer” (291). He imagines, on the last page of the book, two humans: one who invents a terrible bomb; and the other who uses it to erase all humanity. With that the earth will be “free at last from parasites and disease” (292).

Now, what were the parasites? What was the disease? The answer isn’t that it was humans—that is too general. On the same last page Zeno argues that “every effort to procure health is in vain. Health can only belong to the beasts, whose sole idea of progress lies in their own bodies” (ibid.). Animals adapt their bodies to new demands; humans attempt, and fail, to adapt nature to themselves. Fascism’s attempt to mold people to the ends of the state would be simply a latest failure in that long history.

The “parasite,” the “disease” referred to in the end, is the distinctively human way of seeking health. Whatever Zeno’s ambivalence toward the projects of ‘liberalism’ and ‘individualism’ may be (not Zeno’s or Zeno’s expressions, of course), the rejection of the pursuit of health and meaning—in short, the rejection of the very possibility of vigorous life—flies in the face of fascistic ideas about human destiny and the will. Indeed, these are precisely the sorts of projects Zeno presents in the end as a planetary disease, bent perhaps anyway on wiping itself out.

Text

Two translations are widely available.

• The Confessions of Zeno is a translation by Beryl De Zoete from 1930, and this is the edition I worked from. Most recently (as in the linked version) it was published by Actuel Editions in 2022.
• Zeno’s Conscience was translated by William Weaver and published by Vintage in 2003.

It’s probable Weaver’s is the better translation for current readers.