Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo

First published:La coscienza di Zeno, 1923 (English translation, 1930)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: From the 1880’s to 1916

Locale: Trieste, Graz, and Lucinico, Austria

Principal Characters:

• Zeno Cosini, the protagonist, a businessman
• Augusta Malfenti Cosini, his wife
• Guido Speier, his business partner
• Ada Malfenti Speier, his sister-in-law, Guido’s wife
• Carla, Zeno’s mistress, an aspiring singer
• Giovanni Malfenti, his father-in-law
• Olivi, the administrator of Zeno’s family business
• Dr. S., Zeno’s psychoanalyst

The Novel

In “The Last Cigarette,” the first of the six major sections of Confessions of Zeno, Zeno Cosini chronicles his efforts to quit smoking and the amusement of others at his increasing indulgence in the habit. This account of his intended abstinence helps to establish his larger attempt to make some sense of his life: “[D]id I really love cigarettes so much because I was able to throw all the responsibility for my own incompetence on them?” Zeno goes on to outline the numerous defects in his character, including hypochondria and the desire to possess most of the women he meets.

Confessions of Zeno is presented as the protagonist’s autobiography, written to further the work he is doing with his psychoanalyst, Dr. S. If the first section offers fairly superficial information for Dr. S., the second, “The Death of My Father,” is more substantial. Zeno considers his father’s death the most important event in his life because, with it, he lost faith in his own possibilities. He is bitter at his father for dying before he has had a chance to prove himself. The dying man is angry for reasons Zeno cannot fathom and strikes his son at the very moment that he dies. Zeno decides that the violence cannot have been intentional, but his father strikes an even greater blow after his death by leaving his business to Olivi, an employee, rather than to the ineffectual son whom he clearly does not trust.

In “The Story of My Marriage,” the most comic chapter, Zeno makes Giovanni Malfenti his business mentor and father-substitute. He decides, even before meeting them, that he will marry one of Malfenti’s four daughters. He chooses Ada, the most beautiful one, and pursues her like a clumsy schoolboy. His courtship of Ada is so awkward that she thinks he is interested in Augusta, her plain sister. After being refused by both Ada and Alberta, their pretty younger sister, he gives in and proposes to Augusta—all on the same day. Although he tells Augusta that he loves Ada, she marries him.

“Wife and Mistress” describes Zeno’s marriage and his surprise at finding that he loves Augusta: “I discovered that far from being a blind beast driven by another’s will, I was a very clever man.” His affection for his wife, however, does not prevent him from taking the first opportunity to acquire a mistress. Zeno convinces himself that he needs and deserves Carla, an aspiring singer. He rationalizes his adultery with the argument that it strengthens his marriage by making him feel even more tender and passionate toward Augusta. He soon decides, however, that he despises Carla and wants to be rid of her. When she falls in love with the singing master he has hired for her, Zeno’s ego forces him to try to keep her.

The section “A Business Partnership” focuses on Zeno’s relationship with Guido Speier, who has married Ada. Perversely, Zeno would rather try to teach business practices to the impulsive Guido than learn them from Olivi at his own office. He sees his devotion to the irritating Guido as “either a real manifestation of disease or of great benevolence, both of which qualities are closely related to each other.” Zeno indulges Guido despite his friend’s unwise investments and an affair with Carmen, who works in their office, because he admires recklessness. Hoping to make Ada regard him more highly, Zeno promises to supply the money to save Guido’s failing business. Ada has lost her beauty through ill health, and Zeno feels both desire and disgust for her. She refuses to allow him to bail out her spoiled husband. In an attempt to make Ada give him the money herself, Guido takes a poison he knows will not kill him if he receives prompt medical attention. Through a series of mishaps, a competent physician arrives too late to save Guido’s life. Ironically, Zeno recovers most of the business losses on the day of Guido’s funeral. Ada, however, continues to blame him for the tragedy.

In the final section, “Psycho-Analysis,” Zeno attacks Dr. S.’s treatment for having made him “more unbalanced and in worse health than ever.” He considers it ridiculous that the psychoanalyst has reduced all of his miseries to an Oedipus complex. Zeno determines that he no longer needs Dr. S. and within a year reports that he has cured himself through exercise, a renewed interest in business, and “self-persuasion.”

The Characters

Italo Svevo succeeds in making the reader sympathetic to his characters by exposing their humanity and weaknesses. Despite his neuroses and lies, Zeno triumphs through his sense of humor and irony. He is a hypochondriac because he needs a disease to impose some order on his rather pointless life: He is in ecstasy when he thinks that he has diabetes. His imaginary illnesses are, in an ironic sense, more serious than the real diseases that plague his father and Ada. His sickness has no cure—regardless of his self-delusion at the end of the narrative. He also thinks that business is a source of form and discipline and resents Olivi for doing the work he could do himself, yet he finds little of the same order at Guido’s office. His quick settling of Guido’s affairs shows that he could force himself to be a good businessman. He is simply too self-indulgent.

Zeno’s motivations are complex and contradictory. He is at first devoted to Guido as a public display of his indifference to losing Ada, but a true affection eventually develops, making Ada’s harsh judgment of him after her husband’s death more painful. While vacationing in Lucinico during the war, Zeno tells a peasant that the fighting will not spread to his village. He does not want the man to worry, but he is also being irresponsible. He has tricked himself into thinking that all of his lies are equally harmless.

Humor and irony come into play most strongly when he tries to explain himself: “Everything I have put down in my notebooks proves quite clearly that I have, and have always had, a strong impulse to become better; this is perhaps my greatest misfortune.” Why, then, does he lie so much? He tells Carla that the then-beautiful Ada is his wife so that she will think twice about leaving him. He habitually exaggerates, claiming, for example, that his father’s striking him “deprived me of all my courage and of all joy in life.” This statement comes from a man who lives for comfort and pleasure. Zeno fluctuates inexplicably between melodramatic despair and what he calls “my usual incurable optimism.”

The other characters in the novel are important only as satellites to this self-centered storyteller. Augusta is the most notable figure; only she recognizes the comic nature of her husband’s life. She loves Zeno uncritically and is the true source of order in his life.

Critical Context

Confessions of Zeno is considered to be the first novel to employ Freudian theory extensively. Svevo had read Sigmund Freud’s works and discussed his ideas with a friend who was a psychoanalyst, as well as with James Joyce. (He sent a copy of the book to Freud, who did not acknowledge receiving it.) The influence of Svevo’s friend Joyce may be seen more clearly in the novel’s modernist characteristics. It has been called the first modern Italian novel for its representation of the totality of a person’s social and psychological existence. It is also a notable example of modernism in its treatment of time, as Zeno rearranges the events of his life to support his rationalizations: “Time, for me, is not that unimaginable thing which never stops. For me, but only for me, it comes again.” He also complains that time “is really very ill-ordered!” Zeno is the epitome of the modern person desperately seeking order in a period when chaos is on the rise.

Zeno is in the tradition of Sinclair Lewis’ George Babbitt and Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman: the businessman who, above all else, wants to be well liked. As a self-serving liar, he is one of the best examples of the unreliable narrator. In the Jewish literary tradition, he is also a classic schlemiel, a comic fool who wants his weaknesses to be seen as his strengths. Confessions of Zeno has been widely admired by post-World War II American novelists. Its protagonist resembles the schlemiels in the fiction of Saul Bellow, Bruce Jay Friedman, and Philip Roth. Though Svevo has influenced many Italian writers, including Alberto Moravia, Confessions of Zeno, his masterpiece, has been compared more often with the works of German writers, particularly Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain, 1927). This connection is only fitting, given Ettore Schmitz’s German ancestry and his pseudonym, which means “Italo-German.”

Bibliography

Biasin, Gian-Paolo. “Zeno’s Last Bomb,” in Literary Diseases: Theme and Metaphor in the Italian Novel, 1975.

Furbank, P.N. Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer, 1966.

Lebowitz, Naomi. Italo Svevo, 1978.

Lucente, Gregory L. “The Genre of Literary Confession and the Mode of Psychological Realism: The Self-consciousness of Zeno,” in Beautiful Fables: Self-consciousness in Italian Narrative from Manzoni to Calvino, 1986.

Moloney, Brian. Italo Svevo: A Critical Introduction, 1974.