V.S. Pritchett once wrote about the novelist’s knack of
“showing how people live in one another’s lives.” This is not only a concise
way of talking about what novelists do – it also points to a large economic
fact, which is that people do live in one another’s lives. Surprisingly,
economists are, for the most part, blind, or at least hesitant, about seeing
this fact. They have even systematized this blindness and called it the
‘micro-foundations of the economy.’
Unfortunately, all too often novels, when they are
considered from the aspect of economics, are considered to be free zones over
which preconceived economic theories and ideas roam. But one can think of two
other relations of the novel to economics – one is as a test of economic ideas,
and the other is as a source of economic ideas. It might well be that the
social interactions involving exchange, the symbolization of value, gifts,
scarcity – are rehearsed in a
sophisticated way in certain novels to the extent that the economist should
learn from the novel, rather than the other way around.
I’d like to put these consideration in the background against which I am writing these notes
about Italo Svevo’s novel, Zeno’s
Conscience.
Let’s begin with the novel’s premise. In a short note by Dr.
S., Zeno’s journal is presented to the reader as an act of malice on the part
of Dr. S., and a means of ‘catching’ his former partient. In other words, the
novel begins with the breaking of a contract, that of privacy between the
doctor and the patient. It begins outside the law, so to speak. Zeno’s own
notion is that his memoirs are therapeutic, serving one end: to help him break
the habit of smoking.
Thus, on the one hand, we have the broken contract to which
the book owes its existence as a published object – and on the other, we have
the desire to break a habit to which the book owes its existence in the mind of
the narrator.
Before I begin with the second form of the book’s existence,
let’s look at what is implied in Doctor S.’s premise – that a book not only has
an inward side of content, but an outward side that objectifies that content.
The book is a product of writing. Writing creates an object. And objects are
not, contra the economist’s grand model, all the same kind of commodity. If
they take on the form of the commodity, they take on that form because their
use value for people living in each other’s lives varies not just in terms of
some original position in which a preference is expressed, but in the way that
preference is lived with. For instance, there is addiction. There is routine.
As Svevo’s novel was translated into French, it began to be
noticed in Italy. The poet Montale wrote an enthusiastic review that, to an
extent, introduced the Italian intelligentsia to Svevo, this half German Triestian
Jew, whose language, according to his English translator, William Weaver,
seemed “flat, unaccented, even opaque.”
Svevo wrote Montale a rather extraordinary letter,
expressing his thanks and correcting Montale’s assumption that Svevo was a
modernist writer linked to Joyce and the literary schools of Paris. Instead, Svevo took the view that writing
was a form of performance and manufacture – and even a form of bad habit.
“I feel the need to tell you that I don’t believe that the
difference between Conscience and the two preceeding novels should be searched
for in the influence of the most modern literature. I was very unaware of that
literature when I was writing, since after the failure of Senilita, I forbade
myself literature. I even had a ruse to help myself from falling bak into it: I
studied the violin and I conscretated to it, for twenty years, all my free
time. I read a lot of Italian novels, and among the French, the greatest
authors of our time. I know English, but not enough to easily read Ulysses,
which I am now reading slowly with the help of a friend. As to Proust, I am now
hurrying to to acquaint myself when, last year, Larbaud told me that in reading
Senilita (which, like you, he loves especially), one thinks of that writer.
“It is true that Conscience is a completely other kind of thing than the preceeding novels. But
just think that it is an autobiography and not my own. Much less than Senilita.
I put three year into writing it in my free moments. And I proceeded in this
way: when I found myself alone, I tried to persuade myself I was Zeno. I walked
like him, like him I smoked, and I stuck on my past all of thos of his
adventures that resembled my own, for this sole reason: that the evocation of a
personal adventure is a reconstruction that easily becomes an entirely new
construction, when one succeeds in placing it in a new atmosphere. And it
doesn’t lose so much the taste and value of a memory, no more than its sadness.
I am sure that you understand me.” [Translated from Ecrits
intimes, essais et lettres trans.
by Marco Fusco, 1973]
For a reader of Zeno’s
Conscience, this is a pretty astonishing letter, since it seems to be both a
distancing from Zeno and a usurpation of his style of audacity – the peculiar
audacity of the fool that we can see, as well, in the Jewish jokes that Freud
loved, and in Kafka’s never-say-die men, who are continually scheming to get
into the Castle.Remember, Kafka howled with laughter when he read his own
stories to his friends, according to Brod.
In Svevo, that audacity
takes the peculiar form of hypochondria and addiction – which are, in turn,
exemplary forms of routine. Svevo even takes writing as an addiction that he
prevents himself from falling back into by taking up another routine, one that
he knows he is bad at – just as a recovering
alcoholic will take up cigarette smoking, and a cigarette smoker, gum.
This, of course, is a
whole other dimension of revealed preference.
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