Inner Workings

by J. M. Coetzee

  Zeno Cosini, the hero of Svevo’s third novel and the masterpiece of his maturity, is a middle-aged man, comfortably married, prosperous, idle, drawing an income from the business founded by his father. On a whim, to see if he can be cured of whatever it is that is wrong with him, he embarks on a course of psychoanalysis. As a preliminary his therapist, Dr S, asks him to write down his memories as these occur to him. Zeno obeys in five story-length chapters whose subjects are: smoking; the death of his father; his courtship; one of his love affairs; one of his business partnerships.

  Disappointed in Dr S, whom he finds obtuse and dogmatic, Zeno stops keeping appointments. To compensate himself for lost fees, Dr S publishes Zeno’s manuscript. Hence the book we have before us: Zeno’s memoir plus the frame story of how it came to be, ‘an autobiography, but not my own’, as Svevo put it in a letter to Montale. Svevo goes on to explain how he dreamed up adventures for Zeno, planted them in his own past, then, deliberately eliding the line between fantasy and memory, ‘remembered’ them.9

  Zeno is a chainsmoker who wants to give up smoking, though not strongly enough to actually do so. He does not doubt that smoking is bad for him, he longs for fresh air in his lungs – the three great death scenes in Svevo, one in each novel, feature people who gasp and strain terrifyingly for breath as they die – yet he rebels against the cure. To give up cigarettes, he knows at some instinctive level, is to concede victory to people like his wife and Dr S, who, with the best of intentions, will turn him into an ordinary, healthy citizen and thereby rob him of cherished powers: the power of thinking, the power of writing. With a symbolism so crude that even Zeno has to laugh at it, cigarette, pen, and phallus come to stand for one another. The story ‘The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl’ ends with the old man dead at his writing-desk, a pen clenched between his teeth.

  To say that Zeno is ambivalent about smoking and therefore about being cured of his undefined malady is barely to scratch the surface of Svevo’s corrosive yet curiously gay scepticism about whether we can improve ourselves. Zeno is dubious about the therapeutic claims of psychoanalysis as he is dubious about the notion of cure itself; yet who would dare say that the paradox he comes to embrace by the end of his story – that so-called sickness is part of the human condition, that true health consists in embracing what you are (‘Unlike other diseases, life . . . admits of no cure’) – does not itself invite sceptical, Zenonian interrogation?10

  Psychoanalysis was somewhat of a craze in Trieste at the time when Svevo was working on Zeno. Gatt-Rutter quotes a Triestine schoolteacher: ‘Fanatical adherents of psychoanalysis . . . were continually swapping stories and interpretations of dreams and telltale slips, carrying out amateur diagnoses of their own.’ (p. 306) Svevo himself collaborated on a translation of Freud’s On Dreams. Despite appearances, he did not consider Zeno to be an attack on psychoanalysis as such, merely on its curative claims. In his view he was not a disciple of Freud’s but a peer, a fellow researcher into the unconscious and the grip of the unconscious on conscious life; he took his book to be true to the sceptical spirit of psychoanalysis, as practised by Freud himself if not by his followers, and even sent Freud a copy (it was not acknowledged). And indeed, in the larger picture, Zeno is not just an application of psychoanalysis to a fictional life, or just a comic interrogation of psychoanalysis, but an exploration of the passions, including such meaner passions as greed and envy and jealousy, in the tradition of the European novel, passions to which psychoanalysis proves only a very partial guide. The sickness of which Zeno does and does not want to be cured is in the end no less than the mal du siècle of Europe itself, a civilisational crisis to which both Freudian theory and La coscienza di Zeno are responses.

  La coscienza di Zeno is another of Svevo’s difficult titles. Coscienza can mean modern English conscience; it can also mean self-consciousness, as in Hamlet’s ‘Conscience does make cowards of us all.’ In the book Svevo glides continually from one sense to the other in a way that modern English cannot imitate. Evading the problem, De Zoete entitled her 1930 translation Confessions of Zeno. For his new translation, William Weaver gives up on ambiguity and settles for Zeno’s Conscience.

  Weaver has published translations of, among other Italian writers, Luigi Pirandello, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Elsa Morante, Italo Calvino, and Umberto Eco. His translation of Zeno into appropriately unobtrusive, low-key English prose is of the highest standard. In one detail, however, the English language lets him down. Zeno makes a great deal of play on the malato immaginario versus the sano immaginario, rendered by Weaver as the ‘imaginary sick man’ and the ‘imaginary healthy man’. (pp. 171, 176; chapter 6 of the original) But immaginario here is not, strictly speaking, ‘imaginary’ but ‘self-imaginedly’, and a malato immaginario is not, strictly speaking, an imaginary sick man but a man who imagines himself sick.

  Zeno’s malato immaginario is from the same stable as Molière’s malade imaginaire, and it is Molière whom Zeno’s wife clearly has in mind when, having listened to him going on and on about his ailments, she bursts into laughter and tells him he is nothing but a malato immaginario. By invoking Molière rather than more up-to-date theorists of the psyche, she in effect attributes her husband’s ailments to a predisposition of character. Her intervention sets off Zeno and his friends on a pages-long discussion of the phenomenon of the malato immaginario versus the malato reale or malato vero: may a sickness born of the imagination not be more serious than one that is ‘real’ or ‘true’, even though it is not genuine? Zeno takes the inquiry a step further when he asks whether, in our age, the sickest of all may not be the sano immaginario, the man who imagines himself healthy.

  The entire disquisition is carried on with a great deal more point and wit in Svevo’s Italian than is possible in circumlocutory English. De Zoete is a step ahead of Weaver here in giving up on English and resorting to French: malade imaginaire for malato immaginario.

  Published at Svevo’s own expense in 1923, when he was sixty-two, Zeno was reviewed here and there, but in no case by a leader of critical opinion. One Triestine reviewer said he was put under pressure to ignore the book, since whatever else it might or might not be, it was clearly an insult to the city.

  For old times’ sake, Svevo sent a copy to Joyce in Paris. Joyce showed it to Valery Larbaud and other influential figures on the French scene. Their response was enthusiastic. Gallimard commissioned a translation, though on condition that cuts were made; a literary journal ran a Svevo issue; PEN hosted a banquet for Svevo in Paris.

  In Milan an appreciative overview of Svevo’s work appeared, signed by Montale. Senilità was reissued in its revised form. Italians began to read Svevo widely; a younger generation of novelists adopted him as a godfather. The right reacted with hostility. ‘In real life Italo Svevo bears a Semitic name – Ettore Schmitz,’ wrote La Sera, and suggested the Svevo craze was part of an all-embracing Jewish plot.11

  Buoyed by the unexpected success of Zeno, revelling in his newfound fame, Svevo set to work on a number of pieces whose common theme is the ageing self with its unquenched appetites. These may or may not have been intended to fit into a fourth novel, a sequel to Zeno. They can be found, in translations by P. N. Furbank and others, in volumes 4 and 5 of the five-volume uniform edition of Svevo’s writings published in the 1960s by the University of California Press in the USA and by Secker & Warburg in the UK but now out of print. It is time for a reissue.

  Volume 5 also contains a translation of the late play Regeneration. Svevo never lost his interest in the theatre and wrote numerous plays over the years, even when working for the Venezianis. Only one, The Broken Triangle, was staged during his lifetime.

  Svevo died in 1928 from complications after a minor automobile accident. He was buried in the Catholic cemetery of Trieste under the name Aron Hector Schmitz. Livia Veneziani Svevo, reclassified as a Jew, spent the war years, along with the Svevos’ daughter and the daughter’s third son, hiding out from the purification squads. This third
son was shot by the Germans during the Triestine uprising of 1945. The other two sons had by that time perished on the Russian front, fighting for Italy and the Axis.

  (2002)

  2 Robert Walser

  ON CHRISTMAS DAY, 1956, police in the town of Herisau in eastern Switzerland received a call: children had stumbled upon the body of a man frozen to death in a snowy field. Arriving at the scene, the police first took photographs, then removed the body.

  The deceased was soon identified: he was Robert Walser, aged seventy-eight, missing from a local mental hospital. In his earlier years Walser had won somewhat of a reputation, in Switzerland and in Germany too, as a writer. Certain of his books were still in print; someone had even published a book about him, a biography. During a quarter of a century spent in mental institutions, however, his own writing had dried up. Long country walks – like the one on which he had perished – had become his main recreation.

  The police photographs showed an old man in overcoat and boots lying sprawled in the snow, his eyes wide open, his jaw slack. These photographs have been widely (and shamelessly) reproduced in the critical literature on Walser that has burgeoned since the 1960s.1Walser’s so-called madness, his lonely death, and the posthumously discovered cache of secret writings became the pillars on which a legend of Walser as a scandalously neglected genius was erected. Even the sudden growth of interest in Walser became part of the scandal. ‘I ask myself,’ wrote Elias Canetti in 1973, ‘whether, among those who build their leisurely, secure, dead regular academic life on that of a writer who had lived in misery and despair, there is a single one who is ashamed of himself.’2

  Robert Walser was born in 1878 in the canton of Bern, the seventh of eight children. His father, trained as a bookbinder, ran a store selling stationery. At the age of fourteen Robert was taken out of school and apprenticed to a bank, where he performed his clerical functions in exemplary fashion until without warning, possessed by a dream of becoming an actor, he decamped and ran off to Stuttgart. There he did an audition, which proved a humiliating failure: he was rejected as too wooden, too expressionless. Abandoning his stage ambitions, he determined to become – ‘God willing’ – a poet.3 He drifted from job to job, writing poems, prose sketches, and little verse plays (‘dramolets’) for the periodical press, not without success. Soon he was taken up by Insel Verlag, publisher of Rilke and Hofmannsthal, who put out his first book.

  In 1905, with the aim of advancing his literary career, he followed his elder brother, a successful book illustrator and stage designer, to Berlin. As a prudent measure he also enrolled in a training school for servants and worked briefly as a butler in a country house, where he wore livery and answered to the name ‘Monsieur Robert’. Before long, however, he found he could support himself on the proceeds of his writing. His work began to appear in prestigious literary magazines; he was welcomed in serious artistic circles. But the role of metropolitan intellectual was not one to which he found it easy to conform. After a few drinks he tended to become rude and aggressively provincial. Gradually he retreated from society to a solitary, frugal life in bedsitters. In these surroundings he wrote four novels, of which three have survived: Geschwister Tanner (The Tanner Children, 1906), Der Gehülfe (The Factotum, 1908), and Jakob von Gunten (1909). All draw for their material on his own experiences; but in the case of Jakob von Gunten – the best known of the three, and deservedly so – that experience is wondrously transmuted.

  ‘One learns very little here,’ observes young Jakob von Gunten after his first day at the Benjamenta Institute, where he has enrolled himself as a student. There is only one textbook, What is the Aim of Benjamenta’s Boys’ School?, and only one lesson, ‘How Should a Boy Behave?’ The teachers lie around like dead men. All the actual teaching is done by Fräulein Lisa Benjamenta, sister of the principal. Herr Benjamenta himself sits in his office counting his money, like an ogre in a fairy tale. In fact, the school seems a bit of a swindle.4

  Nevertheless, having run away from what he calls ‘a very very small metropolis’ to the big city – not named but clearly Berlin – Jakob has no intention of retreating. He gets on with his fellow students; he does not mind wearing the Benjamenta uniform; and besides, going downtown to ride the elevators gives him a thrill, makes him feel thoroughly a child of the modern age. (p. 40)

  Jakob von Gunten purports to be a diary that Jakob keeps during his stay at the Institute. It consists mainly of his reflections on the kind of education he receives there – an education in humility – and on the strange brother and sister who offer it. The humility taught by the Benjamentas is not of the religious variety. Most of their graduates aspire to be serving men or butlers, not saints. But Jakob is a special case, a pupil for whom lessons in humility have an added inner resonance. ‘How fortunate I am,’ he writes, ‘not to be able to see in myself anything worth respecting and watching! To be small and to stay small.’ (p. 155)

  The Benjamentas are a mysterious and, on first acquaintance, forbidding pair. Jakob takes it as his task to penetrate their mystery. He treats them not with respect but with the cheeky self-assurance of a child who is used to having his mischief-making excused as cute. He mixes effrontery with patently insincere self-abasement, giggling at his own insincerity, confident that candour will disarm all criticism, and not really caring if it does not. The word he would like to apply to himself, the word he would like the world to apply to him, is impish. An imp is a mischievous sprite; but an imp is also a lesser devil.

  Soon Jakob begins to gain ascendancy over the Benjamentas. Fräulein Benjamenta hints that she has become fond of him. He pretends not to understand. In fact, she discloses, what she feels for him is perhaps more than fondness, is perhaps love. Jakob replies with a long, evasive speech full of respectful sentiments. Thwarted, Fräulein Benjamenta pines away and dies.

  As for Herr Benjamenta, once hostile to Jakob, he is soon manoeuvred to the point of pleading with the boy to be his friend, to leave the school behind and come wandering the world with him. Primly Jakob declines: ‘But how shall I eat, Principal? . . . It’s your duty to find me a decent job. All I want is a job.’ Yet on the last page of his diary he announces he is changing his mind: he will throw away his pen and go off into the wilderness with Herr Benjamenta. To which one can only respond: With such a companion, God save Herr Benjamenta! (p. 172)

  As a literary character, Jakob von Gunten is not without precedent. In the pleasure he takes in picking away at his own motives he reminds one of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and, behind him, of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the Confessions. But – as Walser’s first French translator, Marthe Robert, pointed out – there is in Jakob too something of the hero of the traditional German folk tale, of the lad who confronts the giant in his castle and emerges victorious. Franz Kafka admired Walser’s work (Max Brod records with what delight Kafka would read aloud Walser’s humourous sketches). Barnabas and Jeremias, Surveyor K.’s demonically obstructive ‘assistants’ in The Castle, have Jakob as their prototype.

  In Kafka one also catches echoes of Walser’s prose, with its lucid syntactic layout, its casual juxtapositions of the elevated with the banal, and its eerily convincing logic of paradox. Here is Jakob in reflective mood:

  We wear uniforms. Now, the wearing of uniforms simultaneously humiliates and exalts us. We look like unfree people, and that is possibly a disgrace, but we also look nice in our uniforms, and that sets us apart from the deep disgrace of those people who walk around in their very own clothes but in torn and dirty ones. To me, for instance, wearing a uniform is very pleasant because I never did know, before, what clothes to put on. But in this, too, I am a mystery to myself for the time being. (p. 4)

  What is the mystery in or about himself that Jakob finds so intriguing? In an essay on Walser that is all the more striking for being based on a very incomplete acquaintance with his writings, Walter Benjamin suggests that Walser’s people are like characters from a fairy-tale that has come to an end, characters w
ho must from now on live in the real world. They are marked by ‘a consistently heartrending, inhuman superficiality’, as if, having been rescued from madness (or from a spell), they must tread carefully for fear of being swallowed back into it.5

  Jakob is such an odd being, and the air he breathes in the Benjamenta Institute is so rare, so near to the allegorical, that it is hard to think of him as representative of any element of society. Yet Jakob’s cynicism about civilisation and about values in general, his contempt for the life of the mind, his simplistic beliefs about how the world really works (it is run by big business to exploit the little man), his elevation of obedience to the highest of virtues, his readiness to bide his time, awaiting the call of destiny, his claim to be of noble, martial descent (whereas the etymology he himself hints at for the name von Gunten – von unten, ‘from below’ – suggests otherwise), as well as his pleasure in the all-male ambience of the boarding school and his delight in malicious pranks – all of these features, taken together, point toward the type of petit-bourgeois male who, in a time of greater social confusion, would find Hitler’s Brownshirts attractive. (p. 124)

  Walser was never an overtly political writer. Nevertheless, his emotional involvement with the class from which he came, the class of shopkeepers and clerks and schoolteachers, ran deep. Berlin offered him a clear chance to escape his social origins, to defect, as his brother had done, to the declassé cosmopolitan intelligentsia. He tried that route and failed, or gave up on it, choosing instead to return to the embrace of provincial Switzerland. Yet he never lost sight of – indeed, was not allowed to lose sight of – the illiberal, conformist tendencies of his class, its intolerance of people like himself, dreamers and vagabonds.

  In 1913 Walser left Berlin and returned to Switzerland ‘a ridiculed and unsuccessful author’ (his own self-disparaging words).6 He took a room in a temperance hotel in the industrial town of Biel, near his sister, and for the next seven years earned a precarious living contributing sketches to the literary supplements. Otherwise he went on long country hikes and served out his obligations in the National Guard. In the collections of his poetry and short prose that continued to appear, he turned more and more to the Swiss social and natural landscape. Besides the three novels mentioned above, he wrote two more. The manuscript of the first, Theodor, was lost by his publishers; the second, Tobold, was destroyed by Walser himself.