[NOTE: this paper is not yet fully referenced]
This is how Charles Altieri opens his chapter on 'Reconstituting Subjects':
The project of undoing humanist self-congratulation required transforming intentionality into textuality. Then, rather than concentrate on the nobility of writers' aspirations to mean, critics could force readers to confront the contingencies and the slippages in the objects actually produced: and rather than dream of taking personal responsibility for history, we would have to face history's awesome power over us, even in shaping the very terms by which we imagined ourselves to be shaping it. But having disseminated meanings into textual operations, theory still needs some category by which to explain what calls us to modes of response and responsibility within this new freedom. And having developed powerful tools for cultural critique, theory finds itself without strong accounts of how it might serve social ends or to whom those accounts are responsible.
This formulation is an extremely helpful prop in approaching the problematic posed by subjectivity in Svevo, as I shall try to show. Altieri is taking as read the deconstruction of the subject as autonomous moral agent resulting from Wittgenstein's renegotiation of 'I' from its pronominal status as an effect of language on the one hand and on the other hand Althusser's equation of the subject with subjection within societal processes - a deconstruction further pursued by Barthes and Derrida. Hence his quest to reconstitute subjects. 'Barthes and Derrida set the stage superbly,' writes Altieri, summing up his discussion of their critique of the subject, 'by calling into question the traditional equation of subjective identity with self-reflexive consciousness.' This is still very relevant to the Svevian problematic. Approaching the conclusion of his chapter, Altieri draws on Foucault to get beyond this impasse, but affirms the need to go 'well beyond' Foucault as well:
We need versions of first-person singularities that will sustain much richer third-person forms of judgement binding individuals to collective norms, at least in those arenas like economics and politics where rights and obligations remain inescapable concerns. An ethics that cannot address those concerns ultimately cannot even speak adequately about the beauty of an individual life ... The more we stress singularity, the more we also need terms for mutual intelligibility and mutual trust. The more we fear the tyranny of subjection, the more we must develop a dialectical sense of how agents can use cultural grammars without being entirely subsumed within the parameters of those grammars; otherwise we risk fleeing one tyranny by cultivating the even more destructive confines of solipsism and a micropolitics that is unable to postulate terms for negotiating life in large nation-states.
Positing the nation-state as the polar opposite to the micropolitics of the self has a peculiar ring in a world in which the term 'globalization' hides a long-standing reality under the guise a forward agenda, but this point too is teasingly relevant to the Svevian problematic. In fact, it provides a convenient cue to get closer to my subject. Shortly after the outbreak of the Great War, in August 1914, Ettore Schmitz, alias Italo Svevo, travelled on behalf of his in-laws' firm of manufacturers of ship's paint, going from Trieste, then part of Austria-Hungary, to Cologne in Germany, which was Austria-Hungary's ally. His job was to supervise the commencement of paint production in a local factory. At such a moment, it is hard to imagine that the customer in Germany could be any other than the German Imperial Navy. The world-famous Veneziani underwater paint had greater strategic importance that one might think. It retarded the fouling of ships' hulls by marine growths, thus enabling the vessels treated with it to maintain higher speeds and go for longer periods without overhauls: two considerable advantages in the naval war which was developing between Britain and Germany (as well as between other belligerent navies). The Veneziani firm had been supplying the British and other navies from as far back as 1901. Ettore Schmitz, writing to his wife in German on open postcards, told her on 3 September: 'You know how I've always pursued the interests of the firm but this time I cannot persuade myself to desire its interests.' This lack of enthusiasm overrides Svevo's affection for the country where he received his education between 1874 and 1878 and his admiration for the efficiency and unity of purpose of the German people as they went into war, although Germany and Austria were still nominal allies of Italy, to which he avowed loyalty.
The Great War thus brought to a head two moral issues which had been looming on the horizon for him since the beginning of the century - indeed, since he had thrown in his lot with the Veneziani business in 1899. One was his pacifism, which was heightened by the horrific scale and technological intensity of the war; and the other his knowledge that he and the firm he worked for were enriching themselves out of that war. In a diaristic jotting dated April 1905 and recording his return from his fourth trip to London, involving as it did a train journey across Italy, France and England, he notes: 'Attraversando tanta vita che non amo pur mi commossi e a tutti i campi vicini e lontani augurai di cuore di dare doppia messe affinché i popoli sieno ricchi e buoni.' ['Traversing so much life towards which I bear no love I was nevertheless moved and I wished all the fields both close and distant a bumper harvest so that the peoples may be rich and good.'] This ties up with Svevo's lifelong preoccupation with lotta, which provides the title of his first published literary work and the structuring concept of Una vita, extrapolated from Darwin and intertwined with the Schopenhauerian bellum omnium contra omnes, which passes through the para-scientific speculation of the unpublished essay 'La corruzione dell'anima' and several war-time literary fragments of a humanitarian pacifist bent and finally culminates in the drafts for a pacifist programme posthumously published under the title 'Sulla teoria della pace.'
That philanthropical motif of the 1905 diaristic note recurs in another jotting dated 13 June 1917 - the period that we could call the prehistory of La coscienza di Zeno:
Quattro anni or sono, poco prima della guerra mondiale, intrapresi un grande viaggio che mi fece attraversare l'intera Europa. Ricordo che, passando, augurai che tutti i campi dessero buoni frutti e che i contadini vestiti nelle più varie fogge avessero il premio dovuto al loro lavoro. E me parve di aver fatto una grande cosa e che Napoleone avrebbe potuto invidiarmi. Poi, quando scoppiò la guerra mondiale, io ebbi dolore per ogni disfatta perché io, certamente, per liberarmi dall'odio non avevo avuto bisogno della guerra.'
Here we have the close connection between the Great War and the autobiographical urge, which appears not to have surfaced in Svevo since the well-known 'Noto questo diario...' of December 1902, which he abandoned in disgust at the imagery of aggression and strife which surfaced in it, the already quoted passage from April 1905 about travelling across Europe, and the note of 10-1-1906 about the years passing without leaving a trace. Now, in 1917, Svevo's widow recorded, 'he began to collect his ideas on numerous scraps of paper for a book of memoirs which was never completed,' and she quotes from the same passage from which I have just quoted. Yet the only other surviving reflective passage with an autobiographical implication securely attributable this period is that of 25 October 1917, which concludes:
Con le persone che 'non conosciamo' c'è una sola difficoltà: siamo ancora meno sinceri del solito. Forse quando usciremo dallo spazio e dal tempo ci conosceremo tanto intimamente tutti che sarà quella la via alla sincerità. Ci daremo subito del 'tu' e c'irrideremo tutti come meritiamo. Morirà finalmente la letteratura che fa purtroppo tanta intima parte del nostro animo e ci vedremo tutti fino in fondo. Prospettiva macabra..
This in effect displaces the possibility of knowledge of another self to a dimension beyond time and space, a metaphysical dimension that sounds like an afterlife, but is also the afterlife of literature. Literature is thus posited as the problematical attempt to achieve this 'sincerity,' this transparency of one's own self and that of others. In default of a true metaphysical dimension outside time and space, literature provides a quasi-metaphysical dimension, a hypothetical sphere in which we can explore and investigate human motivation and the workings of the mind, and approximate to the desired 'sincerity,' to human truths.
But Svevo abandons autobiography proper (which he implicitly includes in 'literature') for its fictive analogue, centred on the figure of Zeno in La coscienza di Zeno. Since he never divulged his reasons for doing this, we can only speculatively explore the issues involved. And since the figure of Zeno only in some salient respects (his lifelong resolve to give up smoking, the moral lineaments of his wife) resembles his creator, we can also only speculatively explore the connections between the two.
Svevo did of course put his name to the Profilo autobiografico - an autobiography of sorts, written in the third person from a first draft by his friend, the journalist Giulio Césari, and then much revised by Svevo himself. This conceals as much as, or more than, it reveals, and fulfils the 'autobiographical pact' in the sense of presenting the author's desired self-image. It starts off by trying to explain away the unpatriotic-sounding pseudonym 'che sembra voler affratellare la razza italiana e quella germanica,' to an officially ultra-nationalist Fascist Italy who had not long before fought a horrendous war against the Germanic powers. And it devotes much space also to explaining away Svevo's dilettantism, his failure ever to devote himself entirely to literature. In doing so, it is a systematically deceitful public relations exercise, making out, first, that Ettore took up employment as a clerk at the Unionbank in 1880 because of his father's financial collapse, which in fact did not come until 1882; second, that he joined the Veneziani paint-manufacturing firm in 1899 because of the failure of Senilità, whereas in fact he was already actively seeking an entry into the firm before Senilità was published in 1898; and third, that his pen was idle for virtually the entire period from 1899 to the last years of the war, whereas in fact scarcely a year went by without at least some modest literary output.on his part The 'autobiographical pact' here is certainly not situated beyond time and space in a dimension of transparent truth and sincerity. The investments of the public self are very much in evidence. But Paolo Briganti has also ably shown how apparently inconsequential remarks in the Profilo are traces of more hidden investments by that self which do not lend themselves so readily to the distinction between public and private.
One of these traces Briganti accounts for as a trace of a narrative previously outlined in a letter to Prezzolini, but does not explain. This is Svevo's reference, in the Profilo autobiografico, to his pacifist treatise:
E lo Svevo s'accinse ad un'opera quasi letteraria, un progetto di pace universale suggerito dalle opere dello Schücking e del Fried. Naturalmente a questo mondo non si può mai pensare niente senza arrivare al padre d'ogni letteratura, l'Alighieri. Con un certo ribrezzo lo Svevo si adattò. L'opera che ne risultò non esiste più.
Three draft pieces of Svevo's pacifist project have in fact survived, though Svevo appears never to have tried to publish them. To call attention to something as no longer existing seems a highly idiosyncratic speech act. It highlights a significant absence, a silence, it plants a clue to something in the literary creation that is being heralded, the novel La coscienza di Zeno, born out of the war and published not long after, and - perhaps - prompted in part by a thwarted pacifist urge: 'Nel diciannove .. [Svevo] s'era messo a scrivere La Coscienza di Zeno. Fu un attimo di forte travolgente ispirazione. Non c'era possibilità di salvarsi. Bisognava fare quel romanzo. Certo, si poteva fare a meno di pubblicarlo, diceva.' The Profilo highlights the Great War as the catalyst of Svevo's grand return to novel-writing ('Lo Svevo continuò a vivere fra violino e fabbrica fino all scoppio della guerra.' 806. 'Allo scoppio della guerra italiana lo Svevo si trovò chiuso a Trieste.' 808), largely, it is true, by the leisure it enforced on him. This leisure was filled with four main elements: psychoanalytical pursuits and reflections on war and peace (signalled in the Profilo) and literary and autobiographical interests (mentioned in his widow's Vita di mio marito.) Of these, the pacifist investment is the least self-evident and has been the least investigated.
Svevo criticism has in fact not given much weight to the entry of the war into the narrative of La coscienza di Zeno. It is almost taken for granted as an empirical given that war is the deus ex machina that supplies the novel's resolution. There has been little or no examination of how it constitutes an epiphany directed at the reader over the heads of the characters who are 'writers' within the novel - Zeno himself, and his piratical editor, the psychoanalyst Dr S. Little attention has been given to the structuring and abrupt restructuring of the novel's chronotope. Why does Svevo have Zeno meet Dr S. and embark on recording his experiences early in 1914, just a few months before the outbreak of war? And why does Zeno's relationship with the Doctor run for nearly a year, including first the writing of his autobiography and then the actual treatment dating from roughly a month or two before the outbreak until about a month before the Italian intervention which catches Zeno and his family on opposite sides of the Austrian-Italian frontier? And why, after that again, does Zeno's diary extend almost another year? From a narrative conducted, in chapters 2 to 7, seemingly outside historical time, or unrelated to it, and centred always in Trieste, the eighth chapter suddenly takes the form of dated diary entries (with the presence of war rapidly invoked: 'In questa città, dopo lo scoppio della guerra, ci si annoia più di prima' ['Life in this town, since war broke out, is more boring than before']) and moves the narrative scene, for the epiphany of war itself, on a deceptively idyllic spring day, to a rural area along the frontier, on the other side of the Carso plateau from Trieste. History, from being parodied in Zeno's date fetishism over 'last cigarettes', now comes into its own in deadly earnest, overtaking Zeno in a new scansion of narrative time in which the narrator is no longer the redactor or manipulator of his past but is carried on by an ever-moving present and subject to the onrush of an unknown future (the sequel to La coscienza di Zeno, 'Un contratto,' overturning the novel's ending in which Zeno has achieved financial success and imagined health). This is what, in a teasingly parallel narrative, Bernshtein, developing the ideas of Bakhtin and Likhachev, called 'epic time' or 'open time,' but could simply be called 'historical time.'
As he moves out of the Schopenhauerian cognitive dimension of memory, and is enmeshed in the present tense of action, Zeno loses what coscienza he may have achieved and exults in his apparent triumph in the struggle for life and his success in war-time commerce: 'Ammetto che per avere la persuasione della salute il mio destino dovette mutare e scaldare il mio organismo con la lotta e soprattutto col trionfo. Fu il mio commercio che mi guarí e voglio che il dottor S. lo sappia.' (477) ['I do admit that in order for me to be persuaded of my own health my destiny had to change and warm me up with struggle and above all with triumph. It was my commercial activity that cured me and I want Dr S. to know that.'] Zeno's words 'lotta' and 'trionfo' refer to business competition, but given the immediate historical context they cannot but evoke the struggle of nations and the triumph hoped for out of the horrendous war then going on.
Here is part of the performativity of Svevo's text, a speech act and an intervention in history calculated to outrage the ultra-nationalism of a Trieste and of the new Fascist Italy for whom that war had been a heroic struggle and a hard-won triumph, with the 'redemption' of Trieste itself for Italy as one of the dearest prizes. The hostile silence that the novel encountered in Italy, and especially in Trieste, is testimony to its over-performativity, its excessive success in demystifying war.
The pacifist investment can be related to something as far back in Svevo's life as his school days in Segnitz, Germany (1874-78), and the influence of his headmaster Samuel Spier, who demonstrated in 1870 against the German invasion of France and suffered imprisonment and ruin as a result. That Spier had not been forgotten appears from a jotting of Svevo's of the end of 1925: 'Povero Spier! Adesso che a lui penso egli giace sottoterra tranquillo. E io, quassú, anche tranquillo. Egli fece quello che poté ed è quello che faccio anch'io ora.' ['Poor Spier! Now as I think of him he lies tranquil beneath ground. And I, above ground, tranquil too. He did what he could and that is what I am now doing also.'] Zeno's incoscienza as a war profiteer can be read as the sign of a further investment by the author - his quite conscious unease at the wealth which the firm to which he belonged was making out of selling paint for Dreadnoughts and U-boats and other warships of Britain and Italy on one side and Austria-Hungary and Germany on the other side in the Great War.
I now return at last to the dialogue with Altieri with which I opened this paper, for in all of the foregoing we have been grappling with the elusive issue of authorial intention deduced from the text and supported by extra-textual evidence. We have also been grappling with the issue of self-knowledge and its limits, truth-telling and its limits, as projected by Svevo through the figure of Zeno. Altieri considers the centrality of questions of truth in the artwork within recent aesthetic theory: 'While aesthetic theory has managed for the most part to turn away from questions of beauty it seems oddly bound to questions of truth.' Whether or not we consider it 'odd' that aesthetic theory should concern itself with issues of truth, we can accept with Altieri that 'truth functions' inside or outside the artwork are highly problematic, undecidably so, in all probability. This problematical undecidability gives great appeal, I think, to the program he outlines for aesthetic analysis and criticism: 'Therefore, I propose that we shift our attention from the relations between interpretive statements and their objects to the positions that works of art make available for reflecting on ourselves as interpreting subjects ...', a program that he defines as 'a proleptic phenomenology that is intended to clarify the various powers cultivated for readers by the range of positions they are invited to occupy as interpreters ...' (291-2). In order to 'reconstitute subjects' he takes issue with Lyotard's apparently investment-free 'grammar of pronouns' (315) to replace it with 'an affective grammar of pronominal functions' (294). In order to compensate for the limits of third-person objectivity and first-person subjectivity, he invokes the second person: 'We need to understand the distinctive role the second person plays in giving the arts the personal and cultural force to impose pressures on our expressive lives and to cultivate modes of judgement not reducible to cognitive criteria.' (293-4). This recuperation of the personal and the experiential through what is in effect a non plus ultra of pluralism is seen by Altieri as the condition of the reconstitution of the subject, the 'I,' with its 'singularities' and 'contingencies':
If the 'I' is to have significant force, it must be the kind of entity that appeals to reasons without being determined by them: the 'I' must be a force we read through its investments and judgements, not an abstract measure to which we refer those activities. (295)
All this is very suggestive if related to La coscienza di Zeno. Zeno's fictive 'I' is problematically projected not merely as text and textual 'content'. It is above all a speaking position, realized as a speech act, addressed to a specific second person, Dr S. (though we must note that Zeno's text only refers to Dr S. in the third person), but addressed also to itself, Zeno's 'I' as 'thou,' and also to the (fictive) paper Zeno is writing on, the page blanche which stands in for the blankness of being itself. But of course, we are the actual readers of the text, the overt addressees of Dr S.'s fictive publication and the real addressees of Italo Svevo's publication. Svevo is ventriloquially and quizzically addressing us through his alter egos: we as readers are therefore faced with two distinct operations, to read Zeno's 'I,' and to read that different 'I' that lies behind it, Svevo's 'I,' each of them as an 'entity that appeals to reasons without being determined by them,' as 'a force we read through its investments and judgements, not an abstract measure to which we refer those activities.'
We began with the issue of historic responsibility and the evasion of it, the one courting the risk of the 'tyranny of subjection,' the other of a fall into solipsism (which is merely one version of the tyranny of subjection). If we take seriously Altieri's agenda of 'a proleptic phenomenology that is intended to clarify the various powers cultivated for readers by the range of positions they are invited to occupy as interpreters,' that means we do not rest in any one interpretive stance. Zeno is and is not 'cured,' humanity is and is not terminally diseased, Svevo (and we) are and are not responsible for the crimes and catastrophes of history, ethical issues such as these are and are not central to the text, or to our lives. Rather, all interpretations, all readings that can be entertained and sustained need to be measured against one another, and conflicting interpretations, where they are undecidable, held in suspension. No text more than La coscienza di Zeno so encourages the proliferation and competition of meanings within such tight parameters - is there a self? what is it? how can it be known? (i.e., what truths is it capable of?) what control does it have over itself? what responsibility does it have for others? what responsiblity does it have for a collective human history? Thus, we can consider two recent readings of the novel, partly overlapping and partly opposed. Giuliana Minghelli takes Zeno as Svevo's 'unfinished' man, the corrupt soul, cunningly sheltering in the shadow of first one 'mammoth' and then another, knowing each better than they know themselves, who is however finally caught out in the open acting as a war profiteer, whereas Ada and Carla are credited with realizing ethical autonomy and an ethical alternative. Luca Curti, on the other hand, reads the novel through well-focussed Schopenhauerian glasses which suggest that the self is unchangeable and knowable only from within through memory, and concludes that Zeno has achieved this self-knowledge by the end of the novel and has been cured of his original optimism in seeking a cure, i.e., happiness. Both these readings provide powerful insights, and both of them indirectly support the thrust of the present paper in adducing authorial investments in anthropological and metaphysical truth functions which are ultimately also autobiographical in their reach, allowing the inference that an autobiographical impulse on Svevo's part is expressed in the fictive analogue of Zeno's autobiography. These two (and other readings) can be measured against each other, drawing out their further implications in terms of the constitution of subjects and the possibility of ethics.
(La Trobe University)