Trieste, perhaps more than any other city, is literature; this encapsulates the paradox of a geographically peripheral place, which seems remote but has become a laboratory where all the central themes of the twentieth-century crisis have been actively explored. In keeping with this aspect, it is Trieste’s most illustrious sons who have written about it: Saba, Magris, but above all Italo Svevo. Writing about Trieste, from Trieste, is ultimately to decide not to have a single homeland: to have no borders, no prejudices, no enemies, and to remain suspended with the mind in a limbo where everything becomes possible.
“I realised for the first time that the most important and decisive part of my life lay within me, irrevocably.” This sentence encapsulates much of the life and literature of Italo Svevo, the pseudonym that Aron Hector Schmitz—born in Trieste on 19 December 1861 into a Jewish middle-class family—chose to adopt as a tribute to the Central European culture that has always characterised the capital of Venezia Giulia.
Influenced by French realist writers, Schopenhauer’s philosophy and the writings of Sigmund Freud, Svevo introduced an analytical view of reality into Italian literature, one that was subject to constant introspection and always attentive to the stirrings of the conscience. The exploration of the unconscious, often tinged with irony and the grotesque, takes centre stage in his works, which invariably feature an anti-hero afflicted by an ‘illness’ that is nothing other than the existential crisis of a society devoid of values. Starting from this theoretical and philosophical premise, Svevo’s heroes—of whom Zeno Cosini is the absolute emblem—possess a ‘sacred flaw’, a deficiency to which they become attached and passionate, conveying to the reader the sensation of an existence that appears to them both tragic and comic, just as consciousness is an absurd game of more or less conscious self-deception.
In line with this conviction, Svevo, as a narrator, gradually adopted a distinctive narrative structure over the years, as if he were translating the geographical and historical landscape of Trieste into a narrative form: the novel in the traditional sense is thus structurally replaced by the diary, an open-ended, boundless format in which the story unfolds in the first person and presents no hierarchy among the events recounted. Further confirming the fragmentation of the narrator’s identity, of his existence ‘on the frontier’ between Mediterranean impulses and Habsburg discipline, Svevo’s protagonist is no longer a fully rounded figure, a character, but a reflected evocation constructed through memory—that is, what he seeks to reconstruct through his consciousness. The progression of the narrative consequently becomes more circular than goal-driven; a wandering of which Zeno’s illness, with all its futile yet timely resolutions to give up smoking, remains the example in the story. Echoing Trieste’s vocation as a city-world, Zeno’s illness is, in this sense, on the one hand ‘imaginary’, on the other ‘real’: imaginary because it is invented, real because it effectively conditions his entire life.
The real disease is therefore not so much smoking (which, in any case, remains unresolved in the novel), but alienation: the sharp divide between the reason with which he critically analyses the contradictions of reality and the will (the feelings) with which he attempts to confront them—an ambition that remains perpetually powerless, conformist and empty. In this condition, psychoanalysis serves not as a therapy but merely as a method of investigating the symptoms of the illness: it can only offer an awareness of the abyss, not the experience of overcoming it. In practice, Svevo uses psychoanalysis to condemn the hypocrisy of bourgeois society with the same logic by which, throughout his intellectual journey, he has brought together contradictory and difficult-to-reconcile strands of thought: on the one hand, positivism, which starts from Darwin’s teachings to arrive at Marxism; on the other, the negative and anti-positivist thought of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; from all of them he takes the critical elements and the analytical and cognitive tools rather than the overall ideology.
Similarly, in terms of style and expression, Svevo effectively adopts the technique of the interior monologue and stream of consciousness, resulting in a text characterised by a constant shifting of temporal planes: events are presented in an entirely subjective chronology that blends planes and distances, past and present, in a ceaseless flow. This is a conception of time which, pioneered by Marcel Proust, draws on the philosophy of Henri Bergson as reinterpreted through the influence of James Joyce. From Joyce, whom Svevo met personally in Trieste and with whom he became friends, comes in particular the idea of the exploration of human consciousness as a continuous, inescapable activity that is at the same time incapable of arriving at an answer. For this reason, Svevo, alongside Pirandello and Kafka, is one of the leading voices in the European chorus that, at the beginning of the 20th century, discovered the enigmatic and obscure face of existence as a testament to the individual’s failure in the face of life. Men who, far from being defined by their social nature, find their defining trait in the most secret and obscure impulses that paralyse them; dissociated and contradictory interpreters of thought and action; individuals who are always utterly incapable of reacting.
Svevo lived and wrote all this in one of Italy’s most literary cities, often observing the world from one of Europe’s most story-rich spots, the Caffè San Marco; a place where everyone used to go – Svevo, Joyce and Saba – at a time when it was rivalling the city’s other salon par excellence, the famous Caffè degli Specchi in Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia. Right here, in one of the most beautiful squares in the world, opening out on one side onto the Gulf of Trieste, one can enjoy a boundless horizon that spans two nations, along a rocky coastline that appears both Mediterranean and Nordic: rocky, windy, wild, with faded but crazy colours and harsh light, a contrast of sharp white, silver and leaden grey.
On closer inspection, Italo Svevo could only have been born here, written from here, and taken Trieste as the setting for his wanderings through the labyrinths of human consciousness: a city standing directly by the sea, a vertical jolt where water, hills and stone appear part of a single picture; where every wall, every street, every building seems to be made of marble but, in reality, is all made of wind and paper.
Paper written with the sullen grace of a confession to oneself.
photo from Wikipedia – Dan00nad
