Moravia began to write about the middle class in 1927 with the short story "Cortigiana stanca," his first attempt at fiction to be published. It tells of the end of a depressing relationship between a woman and her younger lover who can no longer afford to keep her in the style she is used to and whose energy is absorbed in trying to "dominare il malessere che l'opprimeva." Hard upon its heels Gli indifferenti (1929) was also set in a middle-class milieu and dealt with similar problems, as was the case for other stories of the period such as "Inverno di malato" and "Fine di una relazione." But any analysis that sees this early fiction as a conscious attempt by Moravia to present a critique of middle-class life is necessarily conditioned by a retrospective view of the writer's ideas and literary production. The fact is that at stage in his development Moravia knew no other milieu than the bourgeois one he portrays and the sense of defeat, emptiness, futility and inertia which informs his early work represents a view of life in general not a judgement aimed specifically at the life style of the bourgeoisie. It represents, in other words, no elaborate consciousness of social divisions or class differences or of the shaping of man by history and environment. As Giancarlo Pandini has it, "i personaggi si muovono in un quadro privato."

Only later, when political experience, travel and observation of injustice in society have broadened the writer's consciousness, will we be able to see Moravia's fiction as consciously expressing or reflecting any kind of social or political commitment. This starts to be seen in Le ambizioni sbagliate, the less than successful long novel of 1935, but more especially in the Racconti surrealistici e satirici, first published in 1940 and 1944 and mingling stories of idiosyncratic or ordinary individual lives with message-bearing tales which often carry a powerful cutting edge. Examples of the latter are "L'epidemia," under which title the collection was later published, and more especially "Primo rapporto sulla terra dell Inviato speciale' della luna" where the moon visitor on earth simply cannot bring himself to believe that "foglietti di carta colorata o . . . pezzetti di metallo in forma tonda," money that is, can possibly be the real reason for the "diversità così enormi" in the way the different classes live. "Strano paese," he is forced to conclude, Overt class analysis, or at least juxtaposition, is also the hallmark of stories not part of this collection such as "Andare verso il popolo" (1944) and the short novel Agostino (1944) considered by some, for its delicate many-facetedness, to be the finest example of Moravia's fiction.

Anti-Fascism and growing sympathy with the working-class cause will lead Moravia in the immediate post-war period to concentrate much of his creative energy on writing not so much about the middle class, whether in terms of individual portrayals or to offer a social critique, as about characters and situations from proletarian life with the indignities, discomforts and oppressions inherent therein. So emerge La romana (1947), La ciociara (1957) and, more significantly in the context of the present study, the short stories of Racconti romani (1954) and Nuovi racconti romani (1959). These stories present a vivid gallery of characters, events and circumstances based on the writer's imaginative observation of the life of the capital, peopled in the main by "gente che vive in modo precario, in mezzo a mille difficoltà, a mille preoccupazioni, ricorrendo ad infiniti espedienti per chiudere la giornata in modo proficuo." Yet it would not be fair to say that these "racconti" have an explicit class bias or ideological message, even when, as in a story like "Romolo e Remo," they portray working-class poverty in its direst form. Remo, for whom "l'urgenza della fame non si può paragonare a quella degli altri bisogni," is shown tricking an expensive meal out of his old army friend Romolo who himself lives with his family in "miseria completa, assoluta." This tale, told in tragicomic vein, has an ambivalence towards its material which has led one critic to talk about Moravia's "negative sympathy" for the working class.

But to what extent does class sympathy or ideological commitment provide a key at all? To grasp the nature of these stories (and indeed of Moravia's post-war racconti in general) it is perhaps useful to consider that the writer had to say in 1958, in a piece he wrote entitled "Racconto e romanzo," in which he attempts to define the difference between the two genres. In a novel, he says, the characters "hanno .. . un lungo, ampio e tortuoso sviluppo che abbina il dato biografico a quello ideologico e si muovono in un tempo e in uno sgazio che sono insieme reali ed astratti, immanenti e trascendenti." Those of a short story, however, "son colti in un momento particolare, ben delimitato temporalmente e spazialmente, e agiscono in funzione di un determinato avvenimento che forma l'oggetto del racconto." They are "personaggi non ideologici, visti di scorcio o di infilata secondo le necessità di un'azione limitata nel tempo e nel luogo; .. . un intreccio che tragga la sua complessità dalla vita e non dall'orchestrazione di una ideologia purchessia." As literary theory goes, this is by no means an unchallengeable view and indeed many of Moravia's earlier stories are, as we have seen, informed precisely by that "ideologia" he here claims can form no part of the short story. But it is, I believe, a view that sheds a good deal of light on the forms Moravia himself gives to and the methods he uses in his own short stories, starting with the Racconti romani and going right through his collections over the following two decades (L'automa, Una cosa è una cosa, Il paradiso, Un'altra vita, Boh). If over this period he moves from working-class to middle-class settings for his stories, throughout his characters remain caught in that "momento particolare" and are never presented through any kind of ideologically slanted vision but "in funzione di un determinato avvenimento che forma l'oggetto del racconto." Any class-specific conclusions to be drawn from these stories are largely in the eye of the beholder and are far from being the explicitly present feature which they could be in earlier stories and which they are quite definitely in the longer works of the period such as Il conformista, La ciociara and then La noia. La noia is especially significant in that it marks the writer's return to his "existentialist" roots but with the added dimension now of a conscious critique of bourgeois society, a focus to be carried on with varying degrees of narrative success in later novels such as L'attenzione (1965), lo e lui (1971) and La vita interiore (1978).

That the distinction between "racconto" and "romanzo," theorized by Moravia, seems to hold with respect to his own fiction helps, I believe, in a correct interpretation of the "lone" short story entitled "Seduta spiritica" which was first published in 1960. This story did not and has never appeared in any volume of Moravia's collected "racconti." It was delivered by Moravia to Dina Rinaldi and Leone Sbrana, for inclusion in Racconti nuovi, a collection of short stories by various Italian writers of which they were the editors. It then appeared in another anthology of Italian short stories, Novelle del Novecento, published in Britain in 1966 and later brought out in the United States. This anthology has gone through several reprints since its first publication (the most recent in 1988) and, being widely read by aspirant and practicing Italianists in the English-speaking world, has for many been the way in which Moravia's writing was introduced to them. And the only critical word which, so far as I know, has been written on "Seduta spiritica" appears in the introduction to Novelie del Novecento where its editor, Brian Moloney, states: "Moravia's 'Seduta spiritica' is a satire on middle-class gullibility." He goes on to say that the story is representative of the theme of "the corruption of the bourgeoisie," which recurs often in Moravia's work.

It is hard, particularly for non-specialists, not to be influenced by cold print, especially when what they are reading is written by an expert whose views on a writer are based on far more than just a single story in an anthology. And my own experience of teaching and receiving reaction on Moravia is that readers of the stories in this anthology have rarely failed to be influenced by the judgement Moloney passes on "Seduta spiritica." Since this judgement is clearly at variance with Moravia's own literary theorizing on the nature of the short story and since this story has found itself in a formative role in introducing Moravia's fiction, a useful purpose seems to me to be served in taking a close look at "Seduta spiritica" and seeing if what we find in it bears out the interpretation Moloney provides for his readers. And if we find that it is not primarily about an aspect of what we have indeed seen to be one of the writer's common themes, "the corruption of the bourgeoisie," how does this story fit (or does it fit at all?) into the main areas of concern to be found in Moravia's fiction?

"Seduta spiritica" has neither characterization nor complexity of plot. It tells, in a first-person narrative, the story of an individual who arrives for a social gathering at the home of someone he does not know having been invited by a third party. He quickly realizes he has made a mistake and come to the wrong house but he resolves to stay and perhaps amuse himself at the expense of his hosts who have taken him for a medium about to conduct a seance. As things get more difficult, however, he decides to slip away. There is little "action" therefore and much of the story's flavour, attraction and readability lies in its depiction of milieu and the people in it. The house is described as the property of "gente ricca ma senza gusto, piena di quei mobili dorati fabbricati in serie che rimangono nuovi e stranieri fino al giorno in cui vengono rivenduti al rigattiere." The living room is "sfarzosamente illuminato" with ugly furniture "in stile Luigi quindici," the women are "ingioiellate" and the guests all wear "goffi vestiti." They are wealthy middle-class people, "professionisti e burocrati" as the narrator calls them, and from the way they are described it is easy to be drawn into empathy with the narrator's obvious distaste for their world and their life style. Even more so when with mocking terms like "solennità" and "ansiosi e compunti," to render their bearing and their attitude he tells us of their preparations for some strange ceremony of whose nature he is still unaware. Up to this point a reading of the story as "a satire on middle-class gullibility" would seem justified, but what happens after and in fact constitutes the bulk of the narrative, will, as we shall see, militate against such an interpretation.

As soon as he realizes the nature of the ceremony (i.e. that it is a seance), the narrator's attitude changes: "Allora provai una curiosa sensazione; come di vergogna per l'impulso di giuoco che mi aveva guidato fino a quel momento." He no longer feels like playing some kind of trick on these people but comes to reflect on the fact that, in their attempt to communicate with the supernatural, they are "degni piuttosto di rispetto che di scherno." He then goes on to compare his own situation with that of an explorer in a tropical forest who comes upon a native tribe engaged in a totemic ceremony. The explorer would not find the sight laughable and, despite the fact that the narrator's experience is taking place in a modern city, why should he laugh? Why after all should these people be denied their magic rites, their culture, any more than "negri seminudi"? This makes him begin to revise his position and a further analogy he now uses enables him to see them in a truly favourable light. He thinks of how a typical group of Italians thrown together socially would normally behave. They would be discussing economics or politics, each would be trying to outdo the other by talking as loudly as possible ("strilli" is the word used to describe the noise they would be making) and none would be listening to what the others had to say. Here, instead, he sees "facce tese e attente," here he sees people in genuine communion who do not feel the need to display their egos, even if it does take belief in some kind of magic to unite them in this way: "Così, riflettei, non ci voleva meno del soprannaturale, sia pure quello dei tavoli giganti, per riunire gli uomini e far tacere i loro egoismi."

At this point the tasteless decor and everything else that seemed to symbolize the defects of these people fade from the narrator's view as he is struck by the realization that what truly unites these people is not a belief in the supernatural at all but something that lies "fuori della casa," to be precise "la presenza della notte primitiva" and "il terrore di questa notte." The sentence in which he makes this discovery reads:

E per un momento i brutti mobili in stile Luigi quindici, i goffi uestiti, la luce elettrica, le pareti stesse della sala scomparuero dai miei occhi e io avvertii fuori della casa la presenza della notte primitiva, tenebrosa e infinita, e capii che ciò che riuniva quelle persone era il terrore di questa notte.

I have quoted it in full for it seems to me to be the very kernel of the story, the passage from which its fundamental meaning can be drawn. Twice in quick succession the word "notte" is used, qualified in the first case by words emphasizing negative features easily associated with it ("primitiva, tenebrosa e infinita") and connected in the second to the even stronger and more significant "terrore." This image of the dark night, fathomless and fearinspiring, replacing as it does concerns which are now made to seem trivial by comparison, points neither to a continuing desire on the part of the narrator to amuse himself at his hosts' expense nor to some kind of supernatural explanation as I have sometimes heard suggested, but to a statement of the dark terrifying alienation which the world outside means to man and his need to find some means of communing with others in order to escape from it. The shouting and not listening of people talking "economia e politica" has told us that everyday social intercourse precludes real communication between human beings. But here these believers in magic, for all that what they do may on the surface seem worthy of mockery, are managing by shared activity to overcome the alienated individualism which informs modern society and which inspires a profound feeling of terror in all those who are part of it, including, as we shall see, the narrator himself.

With this discovery the narrator decides he must find a way out of the situation which will be honorable both for himself and his audience. He does so by getting them to agree to put out the lights so that the skeptic he claims to know is present can leave. Then, since he is the skeptic, he is the one who slips away. But the story does not end here. On leaving the house he sees "una figura di uomo che guardava incerto al numero, sul pilastro," the real medium. He directs him in and then he goes off, as the final words of the story tells us, "nella notte"—"io mi allontanai nella notte." If further evidence were needed of the story's central point, it is here in this final "notte." This close presses home the theme present in the key sentence quoted earlier of life outside the walls of the house being dark and full of terror. And it is in this terror that man in modern society, symbolized now by the narrator, must live unless he can find the communion with others inherent in some kind of shared purpose or commonly-held belief. So the character who began the story as the superior being who could look down on others for their conformism, bad taste and gullibility, ends it as the unfortunate outsider, the one not lucky enough to be able to enjoy the unselfconscious association with others which would rescue him from the alienation and solitude of a hostile atomized environment.

This analysis makes it difficult to accept the view of the editor of Novelle del Novecento that "Seduta spiritica" reflects the concern found in Moravia's fiction with "the corruption of the bourgeoisie." The story seems to provide little evidence that the writer's concern is to put across a specifically class-based or ideological message. What Moravia does rather is to create a vividly drawn situation (I have already suggested that a good deal of the literary attraction of this story lies in its mocking depiction of milieu) in which believable interaction can take place between characters aiming at what the writer has elsewhere referred to as "la ricerca dell'assoluto." The principal aspect of that "assoluto" reflected here is the alienation of man in a world which presents itself to him as frightening and incomprehensible. To reduce this story's point to a criticism of middle-class values is both to relativize it and to see it in the shadow of Moravia's longer fiction of the Sixties which undeniably has a clearly delineated class-based dimension but whose genre, as far as Moravia is concerned, allows it to.

This non-class-specific alienation of "Seduta spiritica" links it to many of the other short stories of the time, in particular those collected in L'automa (1963), Both the theme of tormented noncommunication and the form in which it is expressed are echoed by stories such as "L'automa," "Il viaggio di nozze," "L'angoscia" and "La testa contro il muro." But, perhaps more importantly, "Seduta spiritica" also takes us back to Moravia's starting point in "Cortigiana stanca" and Gli indifferenti where the overwhelming sense of spiritual emptiness carried no conscious ideological implication. If Moravia was, as some critics have suggested, the father of European existentialism, then perhaps we can say that it is in his short stories especially that the echo of existentialism continued to be heard throughout the writer's long literary career.