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He philosophized on the danger an animal risked because of its appetite.
- Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience
IN 1907, Ettore Schmitz was a novelist manqué, working for his wife's family's paint firm in Trieste, when he hired James Joyce to tutor him in English. Joyce admired Schmitz's writing, self-published under the pseudonym Italo Svevo, and found his student's character compelling (he may have been one of the models for Leopold Bloom.) Years later, in 1923, when Svevo published La Coscienza di Zeno, Joyce found him a publisher in Paris. The book became a sensation in avant-garde circles and has preserved an idiosyncratic fascination ever since.
One reason for the persistent appeal of Zeno's Conscience (title of the most recent English translation) is its unusual engagement with psychoanalysis. It is the story, in effect, of a failed analysis, told by Zeno Cosini. Zeno is a Trieste businessman in his fifties who has spent his fife seeking remedies for mysterious ailments (insomma, fevers, muscle pains) for which doctors can find no organic cause. He is convinced, for a time, that his illnesses are traceable to his addiction to smoking, which he cannot break because he loves the repeated but fleeting moments of exhilaration that quitting brings every time he tries it. After decades of hypochondria and other maladies of self-absorption, he has turned to psychoanalysis for a cure, and his analyst has asked him to write an autobiography as part of that therapeutic regime. On nearly every page, Zeno's narrative reveals his failure to achieve the self-knowledge that psychoanalysis claims to foster and provide. Zeno tries to tell the truth about himself, but only fitfully, and rarely succeeds. "One of the great jokes of Svevo's novel," writes James Wood, "is that Zeno thinks he is psychoanalyzing himself while busily resisting formal psychoanalysis."
But Svevo's purpose is not to dismiss psychoanalyis. Instead he suggests that its therapeutic consequences can be more complex than even its subtlest defenders (including Freud) acknowledged. Zeno's Conscience points to the fundamental tension between Freud's desire to make psychoanalysis a medical science, rational and intelligible, and his deep distrust of anything that claimed to be common sense. It is not easy - or ultimately even possible - to dismiss clarity of understanding as a...