I and I: Narcissicm and the novel, in Italo Svevo

Agreeing with friend WS that Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno does not hold up as well as I'd hoped on re-reading: when I first read it, in youth, circa 1968, in J Hillis Miller's course on the modern novel, it was striking and fresh and original and hilarious, a voice unheard of and worthy, at least in Miller's syllabus, to stand beside Joyce and Conrad and Forster and Woolf. And today? Yes, still hilarious I have to say - many, many passages that I'm marking in the margins with a brief notation - Ha! - including some noted yesterday: last cigarette, the 54-muscle limp, plus numerous odd phrasings and observations by this highly eccentric, egotistic, narcissistic, solipsistic, you name it, eponymous narrator. I hold to the observation in yesterday's post that he's one of the great eccentric voices in modern literature. But the price for that eccentricity is spending 400 pages in his company, not always an easy task. Am now reading the section Wife and Mistress, in which Svevo shows Zeno at his worst: he's just married Augusta and finds to his surprise that he deeply loves her (even though not attracted to her - when asked if his wife is beautiful he replies: That's a matter of taste). But he begins to yearn for something, someone else - a mistress, surprise surprise. A friend takes him to see an impoverished would-be chanteuse who lives with her elderly mother in some rented rooms and makes a pittance by doing embroidery. Zeno realizes she has no talent, but agrees to pay for music lessons, then to pay her some kind of stipend - all in the service of great art, of course. He goes to see her, throws himself on her - and flatters himself into believing that this pitiful thing actually loves him: he cannot or will not see the sexism and the power dynamics and the class dynamics going on her, she's completely dependent on his largesse and willing essentially to prostitute herself to keep his financial support. A complete narcissist, he doesn't see this at all: he's like that professor that the Times wrote about last week who actually believed the model he'd met on line had fallen in love with him. What keeps Zeno, and the novel, from being despicable is his overall awareness that he is a sick man seeking a cure that that he conveys his own situation with both a complete dishonesty - unable to see his exploitation of Carla, for example - and complete honesty, including every detail of all of his humiliations and failures, at the same time and in balance. That tension between confession and repression is truly one of the foundations on which great modern fiction rests.