Zeno Cosini, the fictional (and somewhat autobiographical) author of Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno, writes the following fable:

THE CRAB (impaled on a hook, reflectively):
Life is
sweet, but one must watch where one sits down.

THE JOHN DORY (just off to the dentist): Life is
sweet,
but one must rid it of those treacherous monsters
who
hide steel fangs in tasty flesh.¹

Both the crab and the John Dory fish of the fable are able to accept life in a way that Zeno himself is unable to do despite his efforts throughout most of the writing of his confessions. What Zeno does not realize when he writes the fable for the amusement of his fellow office workers is that the reason his crab and fish are able to accept life is that they are facing death.

Although Zeno in his confessions refers repeatedly to death—the death of others (his father, Copier and Guido) as well as death in the abstract—he does not really confront it or allow it to be incorporated into his vague notions about life until his own habit of daily existence is interrupted by the war. Zeno mentions his experiences and thoughts about death only in order to aid in the process of his psychoanalysis. He feels that he is searching out the basis of a psychological problem; his analyst, Dr. S., has suggested that Zeno write about his life, hoping that "in the effort of recalling his past he would bring it to life again, and that the writing of his autobiography would be a good preparation for the treatment" (preface).

What the psychoanalyst does not realize, and what Zeno does not realize until more than a year after writing the major portion of his confessions, is that Zeno's underlying problem is not one of psychology (although he may indeed have serious psychological problems) but of metaphysics. His concern, even fascination, with death, as revealed in the confessions, indicates the ontological problem which pervades the whole of his expression and explanation of his life. Zeno is actually attempting to identify his being, to grasp the continuity of his essential self as he exists in time. In writing his confessions Zeno reveals his efforts to find pattern and structure in his existence from childhood up to the present. He seems, however, not to be conscious of this intent; he believes himself to be reporting the facts of his existence for analysis by Dr. S.

The very structure of the confessions indicates Zeno's search for order as he writes about his life. By dividing his autobiography into sections, he can classify life as a series of major events: the last cigarette, the death of his father, the story of his marriage, wife and mistress, a business partnership, and finally, psychoanalysis. Svevo has not allowed his character the comfort of fitting into a job category, a category which serves as identification for most men (one is a doctor, a professor, or a business man, for example). He is a man of leisure who is desperate to know what his existence means. He deals with this problem on a subconscious level by attempting to identify himself in relation to the external world of fixed objects and objective knowledge. When this fails, he searches internally for the meaning and explanation of his being—also without success.

Zeno reports his sense of the loss of an external and objective reality with the death of his father. The extremely self-conscious Zeno, who is bewildered by the sense of continual change in life, sees his father as something quite stable in the midst of an otherwise uncertain world: "My pursuit of health had led me to study the human body. He, on the other hand, had succeeded in banishing from his memory all thoughts of that terrible machine. As far as he was concerned the heart did not beat, and he had no need to remind himself of valves and veins and metabolism to explain why he was alive. . . . For him the earth was motionless and solid, poised between its poles" (p. 30).

The death of his father is significant for Zeno psychologically (as Dr. S. later points out), but it is clear from his expression of the experience that it is also significant ontologically. Zeno feels that it is necessary to "go into my father's story in so far as it helps me to recollect my own." He further justifies his recollection saying: "Probably no one will believe me, but this brief note records the most important event in my life" (p. 27). Zeno becomes rather explicit about the ontological effect that his father's death has on him: "My father's death . . . was an unmitigated catastrophe. Paradise had ceased to exist for me, and at thirty I was played out. . . . I cannot help believing I should not have lost that happy and inspiring faith [in my possibilities] if my father had not died. His death destroyed the future that alone gave point to my resolutions" (p. 28). Lee Jacobs, in her article, "Zeno's Sickness Unto Death," explains that "Zeno's father served as a stationary pole around whom the son could freely orbit until the death of his father fragmented Zeno's certainty about ever finding a coherence of identity. The death of his father represents the death of God in Zeno's life."² His father had been an objective point for Zeno to stand in relation to, a source for his own identity from his earliest memory up to the present. The father provided his son with some sense of continuity through thirty years of existence, and during this time Zeno had remained childishly dependent on his father, as he is later dependent on others, to make decisions for him. Therefore, with the death of his father imminent, Zeno can only ask himself: "What is there for me to do in the world now?" (p. 40).

At the end of the chapter concerning "the death of my father" Zeno asserts that after his father's death "I returned to the religion of my childhood and held to it a long time" and that "I daily with my whole heart commended my father's soul to the care of some unknown being" (p. 54). But a belief in an external and objective "higher being" outside himself is a fabrication, a rationalization for Zeno. He had previously told his father that he looked upon religion "simply as a phenomenon to be studied like any other" (p. 35). Later, after his marriage, Zeno compares his own intellectual study of religion (reading Renan and Strauss and "a critical edition of the Gospels") to his wife's easy-going, non-introspective practice of the conventions of religion: "Religion for me was a very different thing. If I had only believed, nothing else in the world would have mattered to me" (p. 152). Because religion cannot provide the objective knowledge of reality that he is searching for, Zeno substitutes superstition for it, at times, as a guide to behavior. At a dinner party with his in-laws, Zeno listens to his ill father-in-law jealously curse another guest who reaches for a glass of wine: "That is the third! May it turn to gall in his stomach!" Zeno reacts with superstition: "This pious hope would not have troubled me if I myself had not been eating and drinking at the same table, and had not realized that every mouthful of wine I drank would have a like blessing bestowed on it. So I began eating and drinking secretly" (p. 202). During the same meal he reacts similarly to a malicious comment made by his father-inlaw by crossing his fingers "under the table to avert his wish, which I know boded me no good" (p. 205). At another point in the confessions Zeno listens to Guido's statement that it is a bad omen to pay one's debts too quickly, and again he reveals his superstitious nature: "It is indeed a widespread superstition at all gaming-tables that other people's money brings one good fortune. I don't really believe this, but when I play I omit no precaution" (p. 324).

Because he is unable to really believe in a higher being and because he has lost his father as a stable point of reference, Zeno looks to other people in his environment, hoping to identify his place in existence by defining himself in relation to society. One of these people is a kind of father-substitute, in fact his future father-in-law, Giovanni Malfenti. In a search for identity Zeno attempts to imitate what appears to be an enviable reality, the personality of a man he admires. After admitting that Giovanni Malfenti "was so entirely different from me and from anyone whose friendship I had enjoyed up to that time" (p. 56). Zeno continues to explain his own actions: "When I admire anyone I at once try to be like him. So I began to imitate Malfenti" (p. 57). What Zeno admires in Malfenti is not great intelligence, insight or purpose, but rather his ignorance: "He . . . was an important business man, ignorant and pushing. But his ignorance gave one an impression of quiet strength which fascinated me. I loved to watch him and envied him for what he was" (p. 56). Zeno is fascinated with Malfenti for the very reason that the man is "ignorant" in the sense that he does not seem to be constantly questioning the "realities" of everyday life by which he lives. Malfenti, for example, has a list of business commandments, which he copies into Zeno's notebook in order to help him. His world runs quite smoothly by a set of established rules.

Even more fascinating to Zeno—although also somewhat confusing—is the world of women. In his autobiography, his relationship to various women apparently provides him with an illusion of continuity. He is always generalizing about women even when talking about an individual woman such as his wife or his mistress. Because his attitudes towards women (as a category, not as individuals) can provide Zeno with this illusion of continuity in existence, he emphasizes the role of women as he relates the story of his life. Henri Bergson in his essay on art and reality in Laughter explains this kind of emphasis: "My senses and my consciousness . . . give me no more than a practical simplification of reality. In the vision they furnish me of myself and of things, the differences that are useless to man are obliterated, the resemblances that are useful to him are emphasized; ways are traced out long in advance along which my activity is to travel. . . . The individuality of things or of beings escapes us unless it is materially to our advantage to perceive it."³

Admittedly, there is psychological significance in Zeno's comments about women, as demonstrated in his assertion that "it is a great sign of inferiority in a man not to understand women" (p, 74). But Zeno's statements also indicate that his generalizations concerning women are motivated by an attempt to establish the opposite sex as a stable and objective point in his small world. There are both psychological and ontological implications in his vision of a wife: "All the qualities lacking in myself, and which I longed to possess, I gave to her; she was to become not only my wife but a second mother to me, who would equip me for a full virile life, encourage me to fight and help me, to be victorious" (p. 73).

Throughout the Confessions Zeno attempts to define "women" by various characteristics in order to establish them as a fixed point of reference for himself. But even Zeno is unable to do this. He says at one point: "Women always know what they want" (p. 172), but at another time he says: "It is difficult for men to know exactly what it is that women do want, for they often do not know themselves" (p. 331). He also observes: "Women always insist on the fiction that they have been raped" (p. 190), but at another point in his narrative he seems to put at least one woman in the role of seductress: "When I go over the story of my first infidelity I have distinctly the sense of having been seduced" (p. 167). At the very beginning of the confessions Zeno recalls telling the psychoanalyst of "my troubles with women. I was not satisfied with one or even with many; I desired them all!" (p. 12). Later, however, in speaking of his friend, Copier, Zeno says, "I don't know why the poor man had such a mania for talking about women" (p. 155). It is his own emphasis on women that Zeno perceives, and he makes various other generalizations about women: "Women are made like that. . . . Their life can never be at all monotonous" (p. 208);. .. no woman can consent to be slighted in public, whatever treatment she may put up with in private" (p. 226); Women are always like that, and Augusta was unusually excited, even for a woman, at the thought of my personal losses" (p. 294); and . . ."for a woman to remain passive is a form of giving consent" (p. 321).

From the viewpoint of psychology, Zeno might be viewed as the male ego that must assert his superiority over the female species in order to conceal his own feelings of inadequacy or inferiority. From an ontological viewpoint, however, he may be viewed quite differently. By generalizing about women Zeno is able to classify and objectify them. He tries to present them as creatures that exist according to certain predictable and set standards—"women always" . . . or "women never" . . . or "all women" . . . or "no woman . . ." To Zeno, who feels himself to be without any such stable standards of behavior, a lost being in the flux of time, the position of "women" (as he sees it) is somewhat enviable. Women do not seem to have to think about what they are doing, as he does. His comments about his wife, Augusta, illustrate this envy as well as the desire to find such untroubled certitude in existence for himself. He says at one point: "I became so fond of her that I formed the great hope that I might in the end grow like Augusta, who was the personification of health" (p. 140). The insecurity of his own existence and his envy of his wife's existence is evident when he talks about her: "Augusta walked boldly along the path so many of her sisters have trodden before her on this earth: those who are content to find all their happiness in law and order, or else to renounce it all together. . . . I felt obliged to treat it [her security] with the same respect I had previously shown to spiritualism. It might be true, and so might faith in human life" (p. 141).

Poor Zeno who is so bewildered by time and change in life is startled to find in observing his wife that "every act of hers showed that she believed in eternal life" (p. 141). He envies what he sees as Augusta's state of health, that is, her ability to exist in the present moment and to be able to find meaning in objective, stationary forces in a well-ordered sense of time. Zeno explains:

I understood at last the meaning of perfect health in a human being, when I realized that for her the present was a tangible reality in which we could take shelter and be near together. I tried to be admitted to this sanctuary. (p. 141) . . . [For Augusta] the world goes round but everything else stays in its place. And these stationary things are of immense importance; a wedding-ring, jewels and clothes . . . also her evening dress, which must on no account be worn in the daytime, and only in the evening if I put on dress clothes. Then there were hours of meals . . . and also bedtime. All these hours had a genuine existence and were always in their right place. (pp. 141-142)

Zeno finds too, that Sunday Mass, the Austrian and Italian officials ("who made the streets and houses safe for people") and the doctors ("who had gone through all their medical training in order to cure us if by some unhappy chance we fell ill") were all sources of external authority and security for his wife, Augusta.

But Zeno finds comfort in none of these things. He even attempts to attribute an objective reality to time itself. He finds "significance," for example, in certain dates: "First day of the first month in the year 1901. Even today I feel that if only that date could repeat itself I should be able to begin a new life" (p. 11). Zeno himself states his attempt to make the abstract idea of time a reality: "And then Time, for me, is not that unimaginable thing that never stops. For me, but only for me, it comes again" (p. 11). But as much as Zeno would like to find concrete reality in the concept of time, to be like his wife, or at least "be admitted to this sanctuary," he is a man who finds only that "time is really very ill-ordered" (p. 381) and that there is no reality he can grasp that is external to himself which might help him to affirm his place in existence.

For Zeno then, there is no objective reality by which he can discover the meaning or the value or even the certainty of existence. The concepts of religion, of other individual personalities, of society, and of time do not provide Zeno with the organizing and identifying force for which he is searching. Gian-Paolo Biasin, in his article "Literary Disease: From Pathology to Ontology," explains that through the character of Zeno, Svevo is able to express "the breaking down of a whole 'vision du monde' which is to be replaced by another: the world of objects is no longer a 'datum' of certainty; the world of others is no longer meaningful in itself or its institutions. What comes to the fore is awareness of the self, with all the ambiguities and the anguish inherent in the discovery of how unstable, contradictory and absurd the relationship of the self to the world of others and of objects can be.⁴

By the time Zeno begins his confessions he has turned to the "self," trying to find identity and continuity of existence within himself rather than through the external world and its concepts of objective reality—which indeed present him only with contradiction and confusion. When Zeno does attempt to look within himself, however, it is not consciously for the meaning of existence but for the basis of his so-called psychological problems. Indeed, he begins his autobiography with his account of "the last cigarette:"—"When I spoke to the doctor about my weakness for smoking he told me to begin my analysis by tracing the growth of that habit from the beginning" (p. 5). Zeno explains how enduring his habit has been: "My days became filled with cigarettes and resolutions to give up smoking, and, to make a clean sweep of it, that is more or less what they are still. The dance of the last cigarette which began when I was twenty has not reached its last figure yet" (p. 9). But the "last cigarette" problem is deeply based in Zeno's ontological dilemma. The fact that he chooses to emphasize this habit in his confessions indicates the meaning of the last cigarette as a symbol of continuity in existence. Zeno the boy smoked cigarettes and tried to stop just as Zeno the man over fifty smokes cigarettes and tries to stop. Although he has physically altered and his world has been constantly changing, Zeno can feel that there is still something that is essentially his own being, that is, the organism that smokes cigarettes and tries to break his habit. That the problem is metaphysically based can be demonstrated in the fact that Zeno couples his "last cigarette" with attempts to discover the meaning of life: '"2 February, 1886. Today I finish my law studies and take up chemistry. Last cigarette!!' That was a very important last cigarette. . . . I was irritated by canon law, which seemed to me so remote from life, and I fled to science in the hope of finding life itself. . . . That last cigarette was the emblem of my desire for activity (even manual) and for calm, clear, sober thought" (p. 9).

More evident than the last cigarette throughout the autobiography is the development of various diseases, aches, and pains in the physical organism, Zeno Cosini. Again, it is the psychological aspect, the problems of the "malade imaginaire" that Zeno thinks he is revealing for Dr. S.'s benefit. But again, he actually indicates that his psychological need is stimulated by an ontological concern. Zeno's condition of ill-health is caused by his constant efforts to observe his own actions and thoughts, to conduct his self-analysis. Disease in any form is for Zeno a manifestation of this extreme consciousness of self. Perhaps the best example of this problem, as noted by several critics, is Zeno's limp.⁵ His friend, Tullio, has told him that "when one is walking rapidly each step takes no more than half a second, and in that half second no fewer than fifty-four muscles are set in motion." Zeno reacts characteristically: "I listened in bewilderment. I at once directed my attention to my legs and tried to discover the infernal machine. I thought I had succeeded in finding it. I could not of course distinguish all its fiftyfour parts, but I discovered something terrifically complicated which seemed to get out of order directly I began thinking about it. I limped as I left the cafe." (pp. 94-5).

Because Zeno wishes to observe life at every point he is unable to deal with the constant flux of time. He describes his problem of ill-health in connection with his violin playing and metaphorically demonstrates his inability to give himself up to the flow of time and the rhythm of life:

I could play well if I were not ill, but 1 am always pursuing health even when I am practicing balance on the four strings of a violin . . . after I have been playing one of those rythmic figures it clings to me and I can't escape from it, but get it mixed up with the following figure so that I play it out of time. . . . The music that is produced by a well balanced physique is identical with the rhythm it creates and exploits; it is rhythm itself. When I can play like that I shall be cured. (pp. 103-104)

Zeno's problems in writing his confessions are much the same as his problems in playing the violin—trying to be conscious of each act and thought, and trying to arrange all of these individual moments of action and thought into a coherent pattern that will define "Zeno." The very act of writing is a conscious attempt to organize the events of his life and to impress the account with a sense of continuity in order to assert the reality of his existence in time. From the beginning, however, Zeno realizes the difficulty (if not the actual impossibility) of bringing the whole of his life to conscious expression. Bergson has explained this problem in saying that "between nature and ourselves, nay, between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed; a veil that is dense and opaque for the common herd,—thin, almost transparent, for the artist and the poet" (Bergson, p. 151). Zeno begins with this problem in his introduction: "See my childhood? Now that I am separated from it by over fifty years, my presbyopic eyes might perhaps reach to it if the light were not obscured by so many obstacles. The years like impassable mountains rise between me and it, my past years and a few brief hours in my life. . . . The present surges up and dominates me, the past is blotted out" (p. 3). And in the final chapter of the confessions, Zeno shows himself well aware of what he has attempted to do in writing his autobiography. He asserts that "a written confession is always mendacious. We lie with every word we speak" (p. 368). He realizes that he has not presented "reality" at all: "And by dint of pursuing these memory-pictures, I at last really overtook them, I know now that I invented them. But invention is a creative act, not merely a lie . . . I thought my dream-pictures really were an actual reproduction of the past. . . . I remembered them as one remembers an event one has been told by somebody who was not present at it" (pp. 368-69).

Zeno's last chapter, "Psychoanalysis," is written in May of 1915 and finally March of 1961. There is a space of time of one year between this last section and the earlier confessions, which were interrupted by the war. Within this time, Zeno has confronted the paradox of life and has discovered why all his attempts to find the meaning of existence, whether in external objects and objective knowledge or in the depths of his own personality, have failed. He has determined that life cannot be defined except in death. His attempts to classify specific behavior, particular thoughts, and certain moments have not been successful because each succeeding act or thought or moment in time has modified, in some way, the preceding actions, thoughts and moments. Only at the end point of all these fragments can the totality be asserted or defined. John Freccero in his article, "Zeno's Last Cigarette" explains that "in Zeno's purely spatial imagination, the present moment is conditioned by the one that went before, that one in turn conditioned by its predecessor, and so on, back into the past, toward the origin of the individual and of the species. In a sense, then, the past exists in the present, and moves with it into the future."⁶ It is through this concept that Zeno Cosini is analogous to the ancient Zeno of Elea. Freccero explains the "puzzle of Zeno of Elea:"

If we imagine the trajectory of an arrow flying through space, it must be said that at any given moment it occupies a given space and is therefore momentarily motionless, requiring another moment before it can occupy the next successive position. Hence the trajectory is made up of an infinity of successive moments for the gradual transition from place to place. But these infinite moments cannot be said ever to reach the continuity that we perceive. Motion itself cannot be deduced. At each separate moment the arrow is motionless, all the time it is moving. Just as one can never place enough mathematical points side by side in order to make up a straight line, it is impossible to deduce the trajectory of the arrow from the logical states, the transversal cuts, that go to make it up. It will never reach its target. (Freccero, p. 52)

The "arrow" is analogous to the present moment of consciousness in Zeno Cosini's imagination. This present consciousness follows a path from the past into the future. The path, the pattern of all those present moments, can only be viewed at the end point—death. Actually, Zeno has unconsciously hinted at this concept throughout his confessions showing himself concerned but also frightened by the final "present moment." It may even be said that he has a certain preoccupation with death—but little real understanding of its possible significance for him. On the night before Zeno's father takes to his death bed, the father tells his son: "I feel as if I knew almost everything. It must be the result of my great experience" (pp. 36-7). He wants to pass on this great knowledge to Zeno but is unable to express himself: "What I am after is not at all complicated. It is only a matter of finding a single word, and I know I shall find it" (p. 37). But if he did actually grasp a kind of totality of experience, it went with him to his death. Zeno later realizes that "the word he had been searching for, which he so much wanted to confide to me had escaped him forever" (p. 51). The arrow must complete its trajectory; the present moments are completed at the moment of death.

At one point, Zeno even expresses the idea that life must be viewed in terms of death, not because he believes it, however, but because he is trying to impress Ada in the days of courtship: "I stuck to my idea, and asserted that death was really the great organizing force of life. I was always thinking about death and so I had only one sorrow: the certainty that I must die. Everything else became so unimportant that I could welcome it with a smile, even laugh at it. I think my reason for talking in this way was that I wanted to show them I had a sense of humor, which had often before made me popular with women" (p. 71). It is only after the shock and violence of war that Zeno realizes the truth of such a statement. In his last entry (in March of 1916), Zeno relates his realization that his past attempts at analysis (both self-analysis and psychoanalysis) have been useless. To be classified in the context of the Oedipal Complex does not allow for life's totality, for the completed path of the ancient Zeno's arrow. Categorization is false, as Zeno sees it, because it does not admit to the flux of time and life. Zeno Cosini says of his written confession: "I should be able to write it all over again with absolute certainty now; how was it possible for me to understand my life when I did not know what this last part was going to be? Perhaps I only lived all those years in order to prepare for it!" (p. 397).

In his final vision, Zeno places himself in the context of all mankind. Life for all men is finally defined only in the face of death: "Life is a little like disease, with its crises and periods of quiescence, its daily improvements and setbacks. But unlike other diseases life is always mortal. It admits of no cure" (p. 397). And it is man who has made life a disease, according to Zeno. "Health," he says, "can only belong to the beasts, whose sole idea of progress lies in their own bodies"—not in the machine which "creates disease because it denies what has been the law of creation throughout the ages" (pp. 397-398). His vision for the world, as for himself as an individual, can only be death. As an individual, only at the last moments of all the moments in a life can the whole, the totality, be grasped—without the diseased and distorted interpretations of analysis. Similarly, the world of man can only be restored to wholeness, to health, by death: "Perhaps some incredible disaster produced by machines will lead us back to health" (p. 398).

Zeno's is a dark view of man—"parasites and disease." It is not his Oedipal Complex or any other psychological problem that leads Zeno to his viewpoint, however. It is his attempt and subsequent failure to grasp reality within life—before death—that has led him to his pessismistic onotology. There is no hope here for the "death and resurrection" conversion that might be expected at the end of one's "confessions." And Zeno's truest words are expressed in his final vision:

We need something more than psychoanalysis to help us. (p. 398)

¹ ítalo Svevo, Confession of Zeno, trans. Beryl DeZoete (1923; rpt New York: Vintag-Knopf, 1958), p. 279.

²Italian Quarterly, 11, No. 44 (Spring 1968), 59.

³ Henri Bergson, Laughter, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: MacMillan Co., 1911), pp. 151-152.

⁴Modern Language Notes, 82 (Jan. 1967), 80.

⁵ See especially P. N. Furbank, Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer (London: Secker and Warburg, and Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966) and Gian-Paolo Biasin "Literary Disease: From Pathology to Ontology" (note 4 above).

⁶Modern Language Notes, 77, No. 1 (1962), rpt. in Sergio Pacifici, ed., From Verismo to Experimentalism; Essays on the Modern Italian Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), pp. 36-37.