Gli atti mancati e i lapsus della memoria e della parola. Un excursus nell'incompetenza del personaggio di Zeno.

In the age of European Modernism, the novel’s character undergoes a progressive erosion of his personality, in ethical, ideological and existential terms. He turns out to be increasingly inadequate to face life’s challenges. Furthermore, sometimes he cannot even look for or find a meaning for his own individual self. However, such personality erosion does not generate any psychopathological disorder. The actions of the characters created by Stendhal, Flaubert, Turgenev, Dostoevskij, Goncarov and Grillparzer are typically antiheroic because their intentions and projects are hampered by an external context which preempts their choices and confounds their motivations. When they act, they always retain a strong inner core of authenticity. As the twentieth century dawned, the novel witnessed deep uneasiness at the intellectual, emotional and personality levels. The case of Italo Svevo may help us focus on the crucial transition from the ideological crisis of the novel’s character to his structural deconstruction. The main character of his first novel, Una Vita (A Life, 1892) already shows Svevo’s ability in portraying certain damaged areas within human consciousness. In the character’s ineptness Svevo identifies the undermining power of reverie, a disturbing element in Alfonso Nitti’s working and studying skills which acts as a stimulus towards an immediate reward of his own narcissism. Furthermore, Svevo traces, in Nitti’s sentimental and erotic experiences, the clues of a tragic struggle between desire and morals, which would inevitably lead the main character to resignation and death. In his very strong but somewhat unrepresentative second novel, Senilità (As a Man Grows Older, 1898), the hero’s unhappy conscience reaches a sort of alarmingly mean egotism, going beyond any scruple of conscience in order to survive. However, it is with La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience, 1923) that Svevo, relying on his own knowledge of Freud’s work, faces the full spectrum of the character’s own loss of control. This novel can be interpreted as a true experiment in “semiotics of the unconscious”: when Zeno acts, speaks and writes, he expresses his unrest in all possible forms of symbolic, linguistic and rhetorical representations, ranging from language and memory lapses to aborted or careless actions. Of all these we find traces in Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). However, Zeno also has a creative resource which perhaps allows him to steer clear of the pathological fixation of disorder (including somatisation): it is Witz, whose strategies of diversion and disburdening of the neurotic conflict include self-disparagement and clownish, Charlot-like behaviour, all of which aim at giving some kind of dynamic equilibrium to his flawed personality. It is well-known that Svevo put to fruition the English-style humour of Sterne, Dickens and Shaw with the aim of elaborating a style of writing with a therapeutic or even self-therapeutic function. Zeno the narrator is the maker of Zeno the character, and in turn Svevo is the director who dictates the conditions of this endless, parody-like “performance”. The personal, life-long war fought by the diseased character against the middle-class “health” and values has an uncertain outcome. On the one hand, it might result into a path to a more evolved form of wisdom; on the other hand, it bears witness of the fragility and powerlessness in the face of a global tragedy which escapes from the control of ethics and reason as well as art.