Zeno’s Conscience

"Let’s make a quick comment about Svevo. Svevo was not his real name. His real name was Schmitz and he grew up as a German speaker in the area of Trieste where there was a big linguistic mix, so Italian was his second language. He had written a number of books which he self-published, which was quite common at that time, and received no attention at all really, so he was a failure in that regard. He worked as a businessman and he was quite successful in a company producing industrial paints for painting ships and things like that, which was a fairly big business in the Trieste area, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It’s one of the first novels ever written about psychotherapy and he sets out to give Zeno’s whole lifetime as told to his psychotherapist. It’s a completely hilarious novel because what it’s setting out to show is that Zeno really has no idea who he is and the idea of explaining yourself to anybody is completely crazy. There is an extremely famous chapter that is about the attempt to stop smoking, which is one of the reasons why he is with his psychotherapist. It’s a wonderful comedy about a man who makes all kinds of promises to himself and to others about stopping smoking but then finding it completely impossible not to want a last cigarette. He always wants his ultimate cigarette. He does things like deliberately putting himself in jail for a week but then he bribes the jailer to bring him cigarettes. He has a bet with another man that they can both stop smoking and then immediately he starts cheating on it. The whole book is an attempt to show the difficulty of having any identity. The next section of the book looks at the way he got married – there are four sisters in a family and he falls in love with one and then moves on to another and, finally, moves on to the one he thought was the most ugly and in whom he had previously shown no interest until she showed an interest in him. There is always this comedy of not knowing who you are or behaving in the most absurd way. But one of the things that makes it a lot fun with Zeno is that instead of things ending tragically – as they always do in Verga – he always falls on his feet. Like the woman he married who is absolutely right for him, even though he didn’t really choose her. There’s also one of the most wonderful accounts of having an affair that you can read anywhere. It’s just an absolutely brilliant account of how Zeno seduces or is seduced by this young woman and how he squares this with his conscience at home. It’s completely brilliant in its analysis of character and also incredibly entertaining. It’s hard to think of a book from that period in England that is simply so entertaining. He pokes an enormous amount of fun at the idea of psychotherapy but the whole book is inspired by this mining of behaviour and character and, in a sense, the book has a therapeutic vocation in its exposure of the difficulty of having an identity but also the fact that we don’t really need to have an integrated identity, which might be reassuring for some people. Many writers at the time were attacking a sort of naive vision of Freudian therapy but I think deep down there’s an immense fascination with the Freudian process."