Italo Svevo
La Coscienza Di Zeno

The key is provided by Zeno himself in the concluding chapter: “una confessione in iscritto è sempre menzognera. Con ogni nostra parola toscana noi mentiamo!”

The great theme of the "lie" that in “Senility” was confined to just one character and used by him to defend the inalienable right to personal freedom, completely explodes in “Consciousness” but with a decisive difference: the narrative structure constructed by Svevo.

The lies that Angiolina told Emilio Brentani - a very jealous lover and therefore exasperating, oppressive, and ridiculous - were unveiled from time to time by the third-person narrative in which the authorial intrusions contradicted what the woman said through a practice aimed at seeking a sort of complicity with the reader, who was left amazed by the blindness of the poor lover.

Zeno's memories, on the other hand, are told in the first person; it is the I-narrator who orchestrates the narrated world, and the only point of reference is his voice.

And what is Zeno's voice like? Sly, treacherous, captious, vaguely self-apologetic, filled with lapsus, always elusive and never firm.

That “con ogni nostra parola toscana noi mentiamo!” seems nothing more than yet another lie through which the protagonist justifies all the previous ones. If it is true, in fact, that the Italian language at the time Zeno writes is to be considered almost a foreign language for the inhabitants of Trieste - so much so that "parola toscana" is used instead of "parola italiana" - the suspicion that even this time he is not saying everything he thinks is great. There is more to it.

The point is that - being the narration in the first person - we have nothing to fill the gaps left by Zeno: his lies are replaced by nothingness, and that "nothingness" is the only alternative to the "everything" that is narrated.

But why does Zeno lie? And also: are his lies conscious or do they configure as an unconscious defensive strategy?

In the literary fiction staged by Svevo, Zeno's memories are written by him at the psychologist’s invitation ("scriva, scriva! Si vedrà tutt’intero!") to cure a kind of congenital inertia, an inferiority complex that is somatized in intermittent limb pains and systematic anxiety attacks.

The nascent psychoanalysis - remember that “Consciousness” was written in 1923 - had been a real Copernican revolution in the way of considering oneself within a social context, but Svevo - disdainful skeptic and proud anti-positivist - considered it only as a tool for and by novelists rather than an infallible cure against the spleen of modern man.

Zeno is certainly not a double of Svevo, but if it is true that the author “lends” numerous personal experiences - the obsession with smoking, for example - to his character, it is equally true that the character “possessed” his author who found himself thinking or walking like his character before proceeding to write. In a letter to Montale who asked for clarifications about the novel, Svevo replied that it was "an autobiography, but not mine" coining a formula that seemed to indicate a mixed literary genre that hybridized authorial thought with the interpretation of the character of Stanislavskijan derivation.

I believe that both theses can be supported: Zeno lies because he acts as a spokesperson for an authorial creed or because, as an autonomous character, he can do nothing else to "defend" himself from the psychologist’s invasiveness.

Not only that, it is precisely by lying that he guarantees healing as evidenced at the end of the novel.

I do not know if Svevo knew Dostoevsky’s work, but if lies soothe the disease, it is an idea that the Russian author had already exposed a long time before: “non c'è nulla di più piacevole che parlare della propria malattia, pur di trovare un ascoltatore; e quando si comincia è ormai impossibile non mentire; è una cosa che serve perfino di cura all'ammalato.”

With all due respect to the salvific power of psychoanalysis, Svevo degrades the figure of the psychologist to a mere passive listener of the patient’s lies.

But that’s not all yet.

In “Zeno’s Conscience,” psychoanalysis is used almost as a springboard to achieve a potentially endless novelistic construction.

After the novel’s publication, Svevo took up Zeno’s adventures again through the “Continuations”: five unrelated fragments that show a Zeno now in his seventies who persists in writing his memoirs.

But if he has now been freed from the hated psychoanalysis, why does he do it?

Even in this case the key is provided by Zeno himself: "The only important part of life is reflection. When everyone understands it as clearly as I do, everyone will write. Life will be turned into literature. Half of humanity will be devoted to reading and studying what the other half will have noted. And reflection will occupy the maximum time thus subtracted from horrible real life."

A perspective in which what will be written - even if a lie - will serve to unleash that vital energy so necessary to overcome certain existential crises, and what will be hidden - and thus will constitute everyone’s hidden treasure - will merge, thus becoming the only antidote against daily miseries, the purest distillate of human life that will free itself from the adventitious ballast of everyday life in a potentially endless process.

It is possible - if not probable - that Svevo came to this solution thanks to his friend James Joyce, particularly referring to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in “Ulysses,” where the "full stop" was put only for an authorial whim, but which could have extended without a solution of continuity.

The "full stop" for Svevo was the road accident that took his life in Motta di Livenza, depriving us of his fourth novel that probably would have had Zeno and his lies as the protagonist once more.

And we poor readers, defrauded of the part of passive listeners, will forever be deprived of one of the greatest jests conceived in the history of literature.

That of a fictional character who frees himself from his anxieties thanks to the lies he tells to flesh and blood people.