For a striking example of what else was happening in Italian
literature contemporary to Gabriele D’Annunzio, one could hardly find a writer
more different than Italo Svevo in his 1898 novel Senilità. Though I
read the work two months ago, Senilità proved such a knockout that I’m determined
to post about it.
I’ll start with the book’s title, which began as Il
Carnavale di Emilio – Emilio’s Carnival - the choice of translator
Beth Archer Brombert (the book has been previously translated as the lifeless As
a Man Grows Older). However, Senilità appears parenthetically on
cover and title page to acknowledge Svevo’s insistence that this, the book’s
original published title, was indispensable. In the book’s introduction, Victor
Brombert argues that “carnavale,” with its etymology rooted in “denial of the
flesh,” better conveys the work’s central thematic concerns to English
readers on whom the nuances of the curious word “senilità” might be lost. Brombert
defines the term, in the context of Svevo’s writings, as a kind of “ironic
ennui…a permanent premonition of life as disaster, a deep skepticism concerning
one’s own potential, a ceaseless mediation on vulnerability and death, a wisdom
that can be put to no use…” – well, his catalogue of approximations goes on.
The word’s seemingly endless and ambiguous suggestions sum
up the more or less entrenched psychological state of Svevo’s chief character, 35-year-old
virgin Emilio Brentani, both office clerk and fiction writer – “two occupations
and two objectives that were quite distinct” - just one of many contrarieties that
plague Emilio’s life. Primary among these, however, is his pursuit of
Angiolina, an alluring young lower class woman about whom, from the novel’s
first line, we know Emilio feels conflicted: “With his first words to her, he wanted to
inform her straight away that he had no intention of getting involved in a
serious relationship.” Even as Emilio begins courting Angiolina and taking
strolls with her about town (we are in Trieste, still a part of the
Austro-Hungarian empire, late 19th century), he tries to rationalize
his desire by pinging back and forth between two extremities. First is a
devotional but condescending Pygmalion-like attitude aimed at elevating
Angiolina’s coarser manners and simple intellect:
Would it not have been better to make
her less honest and more calculating? Once he asked himself the question, he
had the brilliant idea of taking upon himself the education of the girl. In exchange
for her gift of her love, he could give her only one thing: an understanding of
life and the art of enjoying it.
Emilio thinks of Angiolina as “Ange” while in this mode, yet
quickly shifts to an opposing pole of moral indignation and jealousy concerning
any attention this young allumeuse
gives to other men, whose antennae clearly pick up on the glances that go
everywhere, perhaps indicating even her availability.
Emilio’s conflict is amplified by his admiration for and
envy of a debonair and worldly friend, Balli, a handsome sculptor, who warns
Emilio away from the “vulgar” Giolina though is not himself immune from her
pull. Finally, Emilio must also navigate the psychological tensions his new
relationship creates with Amalia, the lonely, homely sister with whom Emilio
has lived and cared for since their parents’ death.
Between this domestic obligation and the thirst for
adventure, the duties of office and aspirations of art, and especially between sexual
desire and a compulsion to justify it both morally and socially, Emilio inhabits
a solipsistic shadow-land of indecision, impulsiveness, and self-absorption. In
thrall to Angiolina, he ignores Balli’s advice. He ignores his sister’s needs, with devastating results. Having
written one unpublished novel – “the
story of a young artist whose health and talent had been ruined by…a heroine in
the style of the time: part woman, part tigress” – he lets his writing
languish, turning all of his attention to making headway with Angiolina while
alternately condemning her for not being the woman he expects her to be.
250 pages of such indecisiveness and navel-gazing could test
any reader’s patience, but Svevo pulls it off through a darkly comic tone, an
especially nuanced and humanizing psychological depiction of his characters,
and by shifting points of view and indirect narration that permit the reader to
observe his creatures, even the duplicitous Angiolina, with sympathy. Unlike
those of Svevo’s other principal characters, Angiolina’s thoughts remain hidden
from us, underscoring her objectification. Externally, though, we witness her
relative poverty, simplicity, and almost poignant inability to refuse the
attentions she attracts. Emilio’s first visit to Angiolina’s home reveals her
humble station in a manner that divides the reader’s perception between
Emilio’s self-absorption and sympathy for Angiolina’s situation. Despite
Emilio’s almost intolerable “senilità,” his flashes of self-awareness
illuminate the novel’s psychological landscape such that one longs for him to
see the daylight he continually extinguishes, often comically: “Emilio then
lamented his sorry fate but with so much self-irony that he cleared himself of
all ridicule.”
Further engaging the reader’s interest is a complex set of
psychological transferences between Emilio, Angiolina, Balli and Amalia as
their “elective affinities” attract and repel under Svevo’s obvious interest in
Freud. My reference to Goethe is intended. Svevo’s novel fits awkwardly in the
context of other Italian literature from the period, as this Trieste native of
German-Italian-Jewish origins (real name Ettore Schmitz) seems aligned more with writers from the north (I thought of Theodore Fontaine and Stefan
Zweig, as well as Arthur Schnitzler’s erotically-charged La Ronde, which appeared just a year before, but those of you
who’ve read more Germanic literature than I will know better). Senilità
is so pared down to the bare bones of the relationship’s psychological
underpinnings – what little exists in the way of description functions largely as
staging – that one can scarcely believe Svevo and D’Annunzio were
contemporaries. Far from D’Annunzio’s indulgence in fin-de-siècle decadence,
Svevo already anticipates the claustrophobic psychological novels of Alberto
Moravia. Even the conquest of Angiolina, when it finally arrives, is reduced,
linguistically, to a comically unadorned fact, brutally stripped of romance and
anathema to the fantasies that Emilio has nurtured for more than half the novel:
“Then she gave herself to him, or more precisely, she took him.”
In fact, Senilità is so deeply introspective, its
scope focused so tightly on Emilio’s ruminating psychological state, that
little light from anything else gets through, the narrative being notable for
what it excludes. A case in point is a scene during Trieste’s annual carnival in
which Emilio learns from Balli that Angiolina may be betraying him with a
common umbrella vendor. Where a realist like Zola might have leapt at the opportunity to describe the masks, costumes and revelry in the streets, Svevo shoves all
that out of sight to focus almost entirely on Emilio's alternately murderous,
alternately forgiving anxiety. The chapter plays out in a void as existential
as physical, as Emilio wanders the dark streets hoping to catch Angiolina “in flagrante,” the city appearing to the
reader as Emilio must see it: empty unless the object of his elusive search
seems to come into view:
In the distance he thought he saw her
again. A reflection, a shadow, a movement, everything took on the shape and
demeanor of the phantasm that eluded him. He started to run, hoping to catch up
with her, not calm and ironic as he had been on the slope of via Romagna, but
firmly intent on becoming violent with her. Happily, it was not she. In his
misfortune, Emilio felt as through all the violence he had been about to
unleash on her was now directed to himself, leaving him breathless and without
hope of reason or control. He bit his hand like a lunatic.
In a similar manner, the social and historical context of the
novel remains in the margins. One does, though, gain an acute sense of male
prerogative in Trieste, a manner of behavior in which sexual mores are codified
in ways constitutionally unattainable to the emotionally immature and mercuric Emilio.
In that first visit to Angiolina’s home, he feels a pang of both jealousy and
envy at seeing photographs of numerous men on her bedroom walls, including one
whom, he recalls, had once said to him, “The women I deal with are unworthy of
constituting an offense to my wife.”
As one might expect, none of this mental tumult ends well
for the parties involved. One would be unlikely to want to read the novel
Emilio might have constructed from his experience, as the insipidity of so many
of his ruminations, by themselves, would be nearly unreadable. But the authorial
distance Svevo imposes upon his poor author allows us to see both how Emilio
might have written his own story and how he would have gotten it wrong, an
ironic detachment and sentimentality that eclipses an ability to see himself as
he is. In addition, the patient arc of Svevo’s vision cements Emilio’s tortured
thoughts together at this remove, creating an indelible portrait of a soul
wrapped up in illusion, aware of it only in intermittent glints and glimmers, yet unable to
achieve the action necessary to surmount his own weaknesses.
Fortunately, Svevo’s exquisite novel triumphs in Emilio’s
place. It’s small wonder that James Joyce, who promoted the literary career of
Svevo after discovering the writer in one of the English classes Joyce taught
in Trieste, admired the novel so much that he could recite its final pages from
memory. One can imagine a young Emilio serving as the model for the young boy in Joyce’s “Araby,” burning with
shame at having his romantic illusions shattered. Yet he is no young boy, and
it would be difficult to imagine any epiphany truly taking hold.
