Costan-Zeno's Conscience

Italo Svevo's epic schlemiel's tale

Add it to the blurb discourse: sometimes a list of contemporaries gives you the wrong idea about someone. My copy of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (Volume 2, the unfinished part that’s focused on different shades of Austrian perversion) announces, via The New Republic, that “Musil belongs in the great constellation of European novelists, in the company of Joyce, Proust, Kafka and Svevo…” And so Italo Svevo, without reading him, seemed to me to be in that league of big serious modernists, formal innovators with a prickly relationship to readerly accessibility. I love all of those authors’ works, to be clear, but books like Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, The Castle and especially The Man Without Qualities require a bit of an effort, an effort that’s easily put-offable compared to more welcoming texts on the to-be-read list. And so I put off Svevo, imagining that Zeno’s Conscience would be some thorny month-long process requiring a guidebook and careful annotation. What an unexpected pleasure, then, to finally get around to Zeno and instead find something of a romp, a first person narrated (but not Joycean or Woolfian thick stream of consciousness) series of perfect comic setpieces, a book that defines a sensibility that might be called ‘modern’ but is more timeless than that: the endlessly delusional self-justifier, the object of analysis who finds an excuse for anything. Zeno, as a type, is a rejoinder to all our contemporary notions of self-care and self-improvement, someone who will eternally do better, or do the right thing, but only tomorrow, when things are more convenient for them, or maybe next week, but definitely sometime soon, they promise…. In William Weaver’s translator’s introduction in my edition, he compares Zeno to Jaroslav Hasek’s Good Soldier Svejk, but Zeno is less like Svejk – a good natured dullard with a subversive passiveness – and more like George Costanza: monstrously self involved, a little stupid, and hyper-reactive to every slight, real or imagined. And yet, like George, or any other schlemiel, one can’t help but relate to and even love him a little bit. My own “great constellation” consists of Zeno, Svejk, and Constanza hogging the night sky.