Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Alberto Moravia: Contempt


"…those great sea spaces" - Villa Malaparte, Capri

In Alberto Moravia’s Contempt (Il Disprezzo, 1954), a young screenwriter, Riccardo Molteni, narrates the dissolution of his marriage to Emelia against the backdrop of his having been hired to write a film adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey. Moravia takes Homer’s characterization of Ulysses’ twin hungers “for home and wife” and literalizes them into a disturbingly bleak yet acidly comic depiction of a modern man trying to comprehend his wife’s contempt for him.

In the first sentence, the word “perfect,” used retrospectively by Molteni to describe the first two years of his marriage, informs the reader that, as a narrator, Molteni is unreliable even to himself. In trying to understand what happened to the “perfection” of his marriage, Molteni conducts a purely intellectual, existential self-interrogation akin to that of Beckett’s Molloy but as coldly analytical, obsessive and solipsistic as that of the badger-like narrator of Kafka’s “The Burrow.” The frequency of words like “bored, ““ordinary” and “monotonous” underscores Molteni’s dissatisfied state as he tries to uncover the origins of Emelia’s contempt, a response understandable to the reader given Molteni’s navel-gazing inability to decide or act. Molteni attempts first to frame Emelia’s coldness in terms of the institutional marital roles he expects her to play as “a born housewife, with, “in her love of home…more than the natural inclination common to all women,” and as sexual serveuse. The couple’s sexual relations become reduced to pure mechanics, stripped of any human intimacy. When Molteni justifies the acquisition of a new apartment as an effort to satisfy his wife’s alleged domestic inclinations, he ponders Emelia’s motives at the very moment the couple have sex on the empty apartment’s dirty floor, interpreting her temporary ardor as a functional expression of her love of home – a scene at once appalling and absurdly comical.

All of this would be rich fodder for depicting a failed modern marriage, but Moravia also turns Contempt into a meditation on art, materialism and the alienated, disaffected state of post-war Italy. The title fits a pattern in Moravia’s other novels of the period: Boredom, The Conformist, Bitter Honeymoon. Unable to tease apart boredom from happiness or to see his relations with Emelia as any kind of partnership, Molteni fears his marriage to this “uncultivated, simple typist” from a class lower than his own imperils his “precious literary ambitions.” Though he aspires to write for the theatre, he lacks courage to pursue his own art. In a lengthy passage on the economics of cinema (among other things, Contempt offers stimulating observations about the film business and the intersection of art and commerce), Molteni describes himself as essentially a cog in a system of production run by the producer and director, voicing a complaint that might issue from any worker in a bureaucracy: “he is himself chosen, he does not choose.” He justifies writing for money using the same rationale used for acquiring the new apartment: an effort to provide for Emelia’s domestic, material desires. Despite his complaints, it’s telling that we learn little of what Molteni’s serious art might be.

The tenuousness of both the marriage and Molteni’s commitment to art is amplified when the film’s producer, Battista, with a leering interest in Emelia more evident to the reader than to Molteni, invites the couple to his villa on Capri where they’ll work on The Odyssey with the German director, Rheingold. With this shift in setting, three visions of how The Odyssey might be filmed are respectively put forth by Battista, Rheingold, and Molteni. The “great ape” Battista, whose pronouncements on cinema echo Mussolini’s call for a renewed Italian film industry to produce uplifting spectacles, wants a Hollywood-style action film. Rheingold demands a focus on Ulysses’ relationship with Penelope that will delve into its Freudian aspects:  “a film about a man who loves his wife and is not loved in return.” The descriptions of these proposals – including a catalog of kitsch elements by Battista and a lacerating rant by Rheingold against James Joyce’s treatment of The Odyssey in Ulysses - make for among the high points of Contempt’s comedy. Squeezed between the Scylla and Charybdis of these proposals, the purist Molteni rejects any approach that would eviscerate the presence of the gods and not take the poem on its own terms, asserting a “belief in reality as it is and as it presents itself objectively.” In this vision one can see echoes of his relationship to Emelia, a passive craving for things to be simply as they’re supposed to be, emphasized by Molteni’s frequent and unsurprising praise of disinterestedness and “purity,” equated at times with a desire for self-extermination. Although Molteni dismisses Rhinegold’s desire to put The Odyssey “on the dissecting table” to reveal its “internal mechanisms,” Molteni’s approach to understanding his own marriage suggests “…the particular gloom, entirely mechanical and abstract in quality, of psychoanalysis”:

I must have an explanation with her, I must seek out and examine, I must plunge the thin, ruthless blade of investigation into the wound which, hitherto, I had exerted myself to ignore.

Though Molteni is oblivious, odious even, he retains the murmur of a sympathetic aspect, for example, in his rejection of the ugliness of Battista and Rheingold s visions of art and in occasional astute glimpses of himself as “an unfortunate creature…torn between egotism and affection, incapable of choice or decision.” He is at perhaps his most sympathetic when, rowing into Capri’s Red Grotto after Emelia has left him, he hallucinates her return, a moving depiction of loss and one of the few times Molteni abandons the rigidity of his purely intellectual ruminations, drifting instead into poetry and dreams in an underworld setting right out of The Odyssey. But if Molteni is a Ulysses figure, it’s in his being lost at sea in his relationship to his wife; the perils he battles in trying to reach her are largely of his own making. A weak, ineffective man who can only rationalize, Molteni is incapable of heroic action or of transcending the psychological, economic and social conditions of his time. Seeking explanation, he is blind to the origin of his wife’s contempt, even when she ascribes the destruction of their love to his “character.”

When at the novel’s end Molteni returns to Capri after his wife’s symbolically absurd death - her neck broken when Battista swerves his red sports car to avoid an ox-drawn cart - he appears scarcely more enlightened than on the novel’s first page. Enshrining the memory of his wife in Capri’s “great sea spaces,” that abstract blue haze of sea and sky from which Ulysses sailed past this island purported by some to be the home of the sirens, Molteni’s relation towards Emelia in death holds the same distance it held for her in life, as though he’s remained tied to the mast, ears plugged, alone with himself – or more comically, as though he’s become like the isolated indigenous blue lizard of the Faraglioni rock towers just off Capri’s shore. He finishes writing “these memories,” hoping for an “an image of consolation and beauty” to free him. If consolation and beauty are to be found amid the deep existential unease conveyed in Contempt, they are almost exclusively those of art, of encountering a masterfully achieved and compelling novel that refuses easy answers and strips away illusions. Comfort reading? Hardly. 


Other posts from the Contempt group read to which this belated post belongs may be found at the links below:








16 comments:

  1. Tremendous review, Scott. Well, I'm going to have to read Contempt, no two ways about it. Interesting you should mention how this novel has something to say about the alienated, disaffected state of post-war Italy. I've been following with interest the various of reviews of Contempt and the novel does seem to reflect a kind of stasis...it must have been a difficult period for the inhabitants of Italy. The different visions of how The Odyssey might be filmed are interesting too - I wonder if they reflect (or at least hint at) some of the possible future directions for the country itself?

    Anyway, your review (alongside the others I've seen so far) certainly pushes Contempt up the pecking order. I'm still trying to keep a lid on the book buying, but this is high on the list. It sounds deeper and more intense than Agostino...very intriguing.

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    1. Thanks very much, Jacqui. I found writing about this novel difficult but increasingly rewarding the more I delved into it. And yes, by all means, since you liked Agostino so much, I think you'll appreciate Contempt.

      I can't say much about how much Contempt reflects on the state of 1950's Italy - or rather how it reflects on Italy as opposed to the more general rise of materialism and consumerism in post-war Western life. There's certainly a universality to Moravia's ideas, but I'm always curious to know, in translated literature, how certain elements may have particular resonances in their country of origin. I already knew about Mussolini's aim in creating the great Italian film studio Cinecittà, and so when I read Battista's idea for The Odyssey it seemed an obvious allusion. But I'm sure there are many more things like that I did not get.

      And thanks for the nudge to get me to finish writing this up!

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  2. I second what Jacqui says about the "tremendous review," Scott! I think you might have finally persuaded me about the extent of the black humor I'd overlooked with the reference to Battista's recommendations for Ulysses and, more provocatively, that sex scene on the apartment floor that Molteni described so appalingly. Also, I like how you characterized the grotto scenes near the end as the equivalent of "an underworld setting right out of The Odyssey." How true! How ironic! In short, this post was very much worth the wait--thank you!

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    1. Thanks Richard, both for the kind words and for setting this group read in motion! I think on a second read you may find the comedy hard to miss, but it's true that it's so well blended with a kind of atrociousness that one can easy focus on the latter. Being able to see ways in which Moravia uses setting to evoke elements of The Odyssey was certainly helped by a quick visit to Capri last year; for example, when I read that Battista's villa overlooked the Faraglioni rocks, I recalled reading that, at least locally, they're believed to be the sirens' home. It's interesting how Riccardo's narrative itself, in these hallucinatory scenes, somehow manages to do what he himself can't - to convey the poetry of a "modern" Odyssey with neither the spectacle of Battista nor the intellectualism of Rheingold. I may well join you for Boredom!

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  3. Ah, your review makes the novel more appetizing than Richard's lovely flailing. Such contrary views are always interesting.

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    1. It's always good to have some contrary views, and I've much enjoying seeing the ones about this book. I can well understand Richard's distaste, though; despite the comedy and the expert writing, I'm not sure Moravia will ever be a favorite author for me. I like my illusions.

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  4. It may not be comfort reading but it does sound interesting.

    Using issues that occur inside a marriage for an allegory reflecting the outer world seems to be literary device seems appealing and effective.

    The Odyssey connection is especially interesting to me and seems to be something a theme for me this year, having just made it through Ulysses as well as a rereading of the Odyssey itself, I am currently reading Margaret Atwood's The Penelepiad.

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    1. Brian, this is definitely a book to add to your Odyssey themed year. Actually, i think one could start an Odyssey-related reading group that could go on for many years. I'm starting a re-read of the Fitzgerald translation - planned before I read Contempt, but the latter has suggested some some particular passages to which to pay special attention. I'm curious about that Atwood book.

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  5. Great review Scott. I picked The Conformist as it was on my shelves but Contempt certainly sounds like a must read, at some stage. The parallels with The Conformist seem quite strong, particularly the marriage to a woman from a lower class and the husband's loyalty to ideas of what should be rather than any connection to his own desires.

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    1. Thanks, Séamus. I'm starting to get the sense that Moravia's novels of disaffection may work together, since those like you who've read another of them keep mentioning parallels (as if the titles themselves don't suggest them!). I may read Boredom, since that appears to be the next Moravia group read, but I'd better get started...

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  6. Tremendous indeed! That you manage sympathy for our unreliable narrator even after casting such an observant eye over his self-deceptions was a lovely touch. You are a generous reader. The hallucination scenes were among my favorite in the book, but they actually lessened my sympathy for the protagonist as I felt that it took some unexplainable outside force for him to see his circumstances with any objectivity. Hope you are joining us for Boredom?

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    1. Thanks very much, Frances - and thanks too for co-hosting this group read. I can understand the lack of sympathy you have for Riccardo in the hallucination scenes. I just think the grotto scene is the one moment in which one is allowed to feel the tragedy of his self-deception. But of course he becomes unsympathetic again at the end by seeking out the blue "purity" of sky and sea in which to "fix" his image of Emelia.

      I don't know if I'll join for Boredom, but will certainly be reading the responses to it.

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  7. How fascinating that you took the one word, "perfect", from the first sentence and extrapolated that on how unreliable Molteni was as our narrator. It is wonderful to me that one word can indicate so much if the reader is careful, and perceptive, as you are.

    Later on you say, "he lacks courage to pursue his own art" which is true enough. And for me, he lacks courage to pursue much of anything. When he does come to his senses enough to pursue his wife, it is too little too late. I think we talked about his timidity before, which to me is one of his ultimate downfalls. Others point to his egotistical nature, but that wasn't as severe to me as his lack of courage.

    I'm looking forward to reading more of Moravia with Boredom this July (what, in a day or two?). And, your photo of Capri makes me long to return...

    (Sorry that it took me so long to respond; I've been so ill with this recent surgery.)

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    1. Bellezza - Thanks for commenting, and I'm very sorry to hear about the surgery. I hope you have lots of attentive support (and a pile of books to help you through).

      Yes, I think that one word really gives away Molteni's whole game right from the start. He's in love with a fantasy. His pursuit of a cold, stable perfection - rather the opposite of embracing conflict and tumult and the normal anxiety that comes with living - continues through right to the last page.

      I don't think I have time to get to Boredom, at least not this time around. But I too wouldn't mind returning to Capri. I had only about four hours there - just enough time to hunt down and find Malaparte's house, rather a personal obsession - and the real star of Jean-Luc Godard's film adaptation of Contempt.

      Hope you are better soon.

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    2. Thanks for your well wishes, every day is better. And since I won't be in Capri any time soon, I think I ought to at least see the film of Contempt. You have mentioned it several times, each one only strengthening my desire to see it.

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    3. I'm glad to hear you're improving. I'm be curious to read your take on the film version of Contempt. It's interesting/amusing to see how Godard chooses to interpret the filming of The Odyssey.

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