Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo

As Elizabeth Hardwick points out in her preface, “Everything about Svevo was somehow split in two, his psyche and his very existence.” Born Ettore Schmitz, he took the pen name Italo Svevo—the Italian Swabian, an apt name for a man both Italian and German by heritage, raised in Trieste, a city that belonged, in time, both to Austria and to Italy.

When Zeno’s wife leaves him in Dr. Muli’s clinic, to be imprisoned by a nurse named Giovanna until he quits smoking, she smiles and wishes him strength. Paradoxically that smile, “which I so loved”, wakens in him a feeling that “an enterprise undertaken with such seriousness was doomed perforce to fail at once” he’s lost before he’s begun!

On the eve of his death, Zeno’s father laments that he can’t convey his life’s wisdom to his son: “Oh, how I would like that! I see into things; and I see what is right and true and also what isn’t.” But he will die without imparting his knowledge—and Zeno will remain convinced that “I could learn nothing from him.” Svevo captures life’s tragicomedy so lucidly; Zeno’s folly is comic, inevitable, and appalling all at once.

Zeno’s first encounter with his future wife’s family is with the patriarch, Giovanni Malfenti. Zeno is highly educated and “cultivated”; while Malfenti is “a great businessman, ignorant and active”. Malfenti’s ignorance gives him “strength and peace of mind”—and Zeno, like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, envies him, and tries to imitate him.

Zeno expresses the truth that romantic love is a fantasy: of Ada, he says, “She was the woman I had chosen, she was therefore already mine, and I adorned her with all my dreams, so that the prize of my life would appear more beautiful to me.” Not, generally, a good recipe for a relationship…

When his old friend Tullio tells him about his vast medicinal intake of lemons, Zeno considers it a great idea, although he dislikes lemons—because “Complete freedom consists of being able to do what you like, provided you also do something you like less.” An interesting definition of freedom!

No reader can forget Zeno’s mistaken courtship in the darkness of the séance: fantasy (that the fabrics against which he brushes, and the little foot, belong to Ada) must encounter reality: only after his confession of love does he realize his arm is around Augusta’s waist.

Guido’s caricatures of Zeno are the catalyst for physical pain that “was never thereafter to leave me.” More than Ada’s rejection, Zeno attributes his agony to the fact that Guido’s “drawing [was] so superior to mine.” Not only the superior hair, and the superior violin playing, but also the superior drawing!

Zeno, having upset Augusta on their honeymoon by imagining his possible death from gangrene (!), observes that “health doesn’t analyze itself, nor does it look at itself in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves.” Self-consciousness and illness are inseparable— or, to put it another way, philosophy is neurosis.

For Zeno, adultery and smoking—compulsive behaviors both—seem much the same. In both cases, he deludes himself that he can control himself, when in truth he is controlled by his appetites.

When Glenn Gould practiced the piano he turned on the vacuum cleaner, the better to appreciate his playing. In a similar way, Zeno’s affair with Carla only makes him love Augusta more.

Zeno’s desire to please again precipitates callous behavior, when Carla insists he spend the night while Augusta is at her dying father’s bedside: he refers to this as a “sacrifice.” Is his a greater betrayal because of the circumstances? He tells himself it’s “childish” to think so.

Zeno, incorrigible liar, pretends to Carla that Ada is his wife: “I may have thought that the more beautiful she found my wife, the more she would appreciate the man who sacrificed… such a woman to her.”

Zeno then turns to his friendship, and business relationship, with his brother-in-law Guido: flattered by the invitation to join Guido’s business, he later wonders, “Why should I feel good in that position simply because I believed my great friendship for Guido signified a great indifference toward Ada?” Once again, the motivations behind Zeno’s actions are perverse and objectively inscrutable!

Guido’s violin, that source of early envy for Zeno, proves “a kind of Achilles’ spear in the variety of its functions”—a seductive music for Carla as it had been for Ada, it then becomes a buffer between Guido and his wife at home. Music, in Zeno’s Conscience, plays as much a role as do some characters…

Zeno’s dream—not his first, of course—upsets Augusta because she feels it reveals his continued attachment to Ada (an attachment he is always at exhausting pains to deny—methinks he doth protest too much!). Does the truth lie more in dreams than in wine? “When you are caught dreaming, it’s hard to defend yourself,” Zeno says: stripped of the superego, the id will have its day…

Zeno doesn’t really believe Guido has attempted suicide, because he has failed. Again, his virility is in question: “It’s an action unworthy of a man!” And any “seamstress…in her humble room” can successfully commit suicide if she chooses. Even when he visits Guido and Ada, Zeno tries to read the scene as one of Guido’s falsehoods: “Did he remember he was to simulate the great effect of the morphine?”

Zeno has perhaps unusual ideas about what’s objective and what’s subjective—or perhaps not so unusual? He thinks that beauty, for example, which he deems “a woman’s health” (!), is for him (or another man) to decide. Hence he is amazed that “Ada believed she was still beautiful!”

The series of mishaps that lead to Guido’s death are worthy of Zeno at his most absurd—each small failing or obstacle compounds the situation, from the maid’s loss of the note for the doctor in the rainstorm (the doctor named “Mali,” which in Italian means “evils”), to Zeno’s failure to reproach said doctor for his negligence…

When Ada puts forward her (highly plausible) understanding of events—that Zeno never loved Guido, indeed hated him; and that she herself, in envying Zeno and Augusta’s marriage, also failed to love her husband—Zeno initially cannot accept it. But hearing her creates in him uncertainty: “I saw that her words had created a new world, like all words that are not true.”

"Old as I am, for some time women have no longer looked at me. If I stop looking at them, then all ties between us are severed.”