The Jewish Decadence by Jonathan Freedman

Author:Jonathan Freedman [Freedman, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT000000 Literary Criticism / General, LIT004210 Literary Criticism / Jewish, LIT004130 Literary Criticism / European / General, ART015100 Art / History / Modern (late 19th Century To 1945)
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Schopenhauer as schlemiel: Italo Svevo’s Comic Catastrophism

Freud not only sails his intellectual ship into the harbor of Schopenhauer’s thought but sets up camp and builds his own little fortress there. And that fortress then is turned into a little town all its own, filled with Freudian figures, with comic as well as tragic examples of self-baulking, self-defeating, and ultimately triumphantly absurd human beings acting at their self-destructive, repetition-compulsion-driven best. The town to which I refer might also be called Trieste or, more specifically, the Trieste of Italian-Jewish novelist Ettore Schmitz, who published under the pen name Italo Svevo, a name which means “the Italian-Swabian,” indexing his mixed descent from a German Jewish and Italian Catholic background.

James Joyce’s friend and local informant—much of Leopold Bloom’s own non-Jewish Jewishness seems to have been modeled on him—Svevo/Schmitz was profoundly shaped by his reading of Schopenhauer, whom he first encountered in his twenties. A secondary but not inconsiderable interest was Freud, whom he read in his thirties. These influences are conjoined in his novel La cosieza de Zeno (1923), famously translated into English as The Confessions of Zeno, recently retranslated with the better title Zeno’s Conscience (even better, given the resonances of the Italian word, might be Zeno’s Consciousness). Building on Svevo’s previous novels, in which he invented his distinctive narrative method and found his voice, Zeno’s Conscience offers a seriocomic take on the Schopenhauerian worldview, emphasizing the absurdity and self-defeating quality of the psychology of what one might call (after Roland Barthes’s l’homme racinien) “l’uomo svevoien,” that characteristic self-defeating, self-baulking, self-destructive yet triumphantly persevering male of Svevo’s novels. As we shall see, the figure is made up of Schopenhauerian elements and, secondarily but importantly, Freudian ones, but he also resembles a figure out of Jewish comic narratives—that of the schlemiel. Putting this comic staple of the Jewish imagination together with the deep structural pessimism he imbibed from Schopenhauer is Svevo’s great contribution to the traditions of Jewish humor and Schopenhauerianism alike.

Svevo seems to have first encountered Schopenhauer in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Although he was also steeping himself in Émile Zola and other naturalist writers, Schopenhauer appears to have stood out as first among equals. Indeed, Svevo’s wife tells us that he chose the name Svevo because of the “memory of the cultural influences he had received in adolescence in Germany, where the influence of Schopenhauer had been the strongest.” She adds, “Throughout his life Schopenhauer was and remained his favorite philosopher: he owned his complete works and often quoted whole passages from memory.”29

Schopenhauerian themes pervade Svevo’s early novels Una vita (A Life, 1892) and Senilità (Senility or Old Age; translated as As a Man Grows Older, 1898), which narrate various forms of erotic frustration, dead-end jobs, failed lives—all rendered, by our stereoscopic view of the systematic misapprehensions of their narrators and the conditions they describe, ludicrous, to invoke a category Schopenhauer saw as close to the essence of comedy itself, that is “the sudden apprehension of an incongruity between such a concept and the real object” (World as Will and Representation 2:91).

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