[In the following essay, Bondanella argues that "The Hoax" illustrates why Svevo should be considered a forerunner of the Italian absurd. ]

Though there is no longer any need to introduce Italo Svevo's major novels to informed audiences in Europe or America, few scholars have examined his short fiction in detail. What criticism does exist on the minor works often emphasizes them as autobiographical documents; and while a biographical approach to Svevo's works is often fruitful, such an approach obscures the importance of the minor works in the development of Svevo's thought. Many contemporary critics choose to read Svevo's novels as a reflection of a deep sociological crisis in twentieth-century European society. Hence, the importance of these short works is often overlooked because they do not always fit into the picture of the Svevo engagé proposed in many recent studies. I should like to suggest that not the least of Svevo's contributions to modern Italian fiction lies in his uniquely sensitive apprehension of the irrationality and incomprehensibility of life. If Svevo is the father of the modern Italian psychological novel, he is also—with Kafka and Pirandello—the precursor of such recognizably absurdist writers as Dino Buzzati, Italo Calvino, and Eduardo De Filippo. The lengthy story "The Hoax," written in 1926 and published in 1928 by Solaria, a Florentine avantguard literary journal, deserves special attention in this regard, for not only does it propose a view of reality that shows Svevo to be a precursor of the Italian absurd, but it also contains an important expression of Svevo's opinions about the nature of art and its role in dealing with the absurdity of the human condition.

Two issues are involved in "The Hoax": the incomprehensibility of life and the response of the artist to this condition. To the first issue Svevo has linked the story of a cruel joke played upon Mario Samigli. This part of the story, the basis of the title, presents Svevo's view of life as absurd. Mario Samigli is an unsuccessful author whose single book, Youth, has been forgotten, it would seem, by all except Mario and his brother. A friend and another artist manqué, Enrico Gaia, plays a cruel trick on Mario by pretending to have found a German publisher for the long-forgotten novel; he hires a man to impersonate a publisher's agent who gives Mario a worthless check for 200,000 kronen. Not suspecting any deceit, Mario entrusts the worthless piece of paper to his business partner, who, thinking it to be genuine, speculates on the money market with his own money and makes a fortune for Mario by purchasing money futures on the stock exchange before the hoax is discovered.

The ontological presupposition of this short story is very simple—life is absurd, irrational, incomprehensible. Man is endowed with reason in order to understand his world, yet he discovers that reason is of no use to him. This disturbing idea is presented in such a matter-of-fact manner by the narrator that the reader can scarcely question its validity in Mario's world. Life, for Mario, is itself a hoax, a unpredictable joke played by some unknown power upon him and the human mind. This is essentially the same view of life put forth by Mario's fictional predecessor Zeno Cosini when he remarked that life is neither bad nor good but "original": "the more I thought of it the more original life seemed to me. And one did not need to get outside it in order to realize how fantastically it was put together. One need only remind oneself of all that we men expect from life to see how very strange it is, and to arrive at the conclusion that man has found his way into it by mistake and does not really belong here" [The Confessions of Zeno] As Albert Camus remarked in his definition of the absurd, the "divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity . . . the absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world" [The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. by Justin O'Brian, 1955]. Both Zeno Cosini and Mario Samigli live in a world that obeys no human laws, follows no human logic, and seems to be ordered in such a capricious manner that man is a stranger to it by virtue of his innate inability to comprehend its rules. One key distinction, however, separates Zeno Cosini and Mario Samigli, for while Zeno is presented in The Confessions of Zeno as being in the process of discovering the absurdity of human existence, Mario simply accepts this view of life as a fact, a natural phenomenon.

This plot of "The Hoax" provides a background for the second important issue in the story, the place of art in an absurd world. The response to the absurd is the true theme of this work, for whether we label life "original" or "absurd," the end result for fictional characters inhabiting such a universe is the same—they must either despair or they must seek some alternative to maintain their lives and their sanity intact. For writers of Svevo's generation, as R. W. B. Lewis has noted, art was the response given in the face of the universal pressure of death, the feeling at the bottom of the apprehension of the absurd; the protagonists of such writers of this generation as Proust, Joyce, Mann, and Svevo are often artists or men of artistic sensibility, protagonists who reflect their creators' conviction that art is the one truly redemptive power left to man. Svevo, very much a part of his day in his respect for art, thus presents the plot of the story in order to set the stage for the second and more important part of the work, the response of literature to the incomprehensibility of human life. Svevo describes Mario as having "all the dreamer's instinct to protect his dream from contact with the crude realities of life." All of Svevo's main characters—not only Mario but also Alfonso Nitti, Emilio Brentani, and Zeno Cosini—possess imaginations that allow them to reconstruct their world in such a way that it may be rendered more comprehensible and more hospitable to their own ideals. Far from being an attribute of old age, senilità taken in its literal rather than metaphorical sense, this quality is a positive strength in Svevo's characters, enabling them to survive and even to triumph over the "reality" recognized by more normal figures in his works. Mario possesses this essentially literary imagination, compared by Freud to the child's attitude at play, an attribute which, for Svevo, was necessary for the artist: "The author's habit of scratching out a sentence that displeases him makes it easy for him to accept that others should cancel things too. He describes reality, but eliminates whatever does not conform to his reality" ["The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming," in On Creativity and the Unconscious, 1958].

In his own literary career, Svevo first wrote within the conventions of French naturalism. After the publication of A Life (1892), he discovered that his talents lay in a more introspective type of psychological fiction, illustrated in his own works by As a Man Grows Older (1898) and The Confessions of Zeno (1923). "The Hoax" represents a rejection by Svevo of simple representational realism as the proper goal of the writer. It is not an accurate portrait of his society the artist should paint but only his own reality, his own fantasy. Life has its own rules, albeit absurd ones, but literature follows other dictates. Svevo would have agreed with his more famous contemporary, Luigi Pirandello, who drew a line between life's absurdity and the nature of art: "life, happily filled with shameless absurdities, has the rare privilege of being able to ignore credibility, whereas art feels called upon to pay attention to it. Life's absurdities don't have to seem believable, because they are real. As opposed to art's absurdities, which to seem real, have to be believable" [The Late Mattia Pascal, trans. by William Weaver, 1966]. Like Svevo himself, Mario Samigli (Svevo's figure of the artist) finds it impossible to repeat the realism of his earlier novel Youth in later attempts to compose a new book; he discovers that the tenets of realism are a restraint upon his own imagination:

It would have been impossible for him to write another novel like the old one, which had sprung from his admiration for people who were his superiors in rank and fortune, and which he could only observe through a telescope. . . . And it never occurred to him to describe a humble sort of life like his own, exemplary in conduct and endowed with the kind of strength that came from absolute surrender, a surrender which permeated his whole being and which he would certainly never have thought of as anything remarkable. He did not know how to approach a subject which seemed to him so uninteresting, a weakness common enough among those to whom high life has remained a sealed book. So in the end he gave up writing about human beings and their way of life, be it hig or low, and devoted himself exclusively, or so he thought, to animals: he began to write fables.

To broaden Svevo's own metaphor, Mario rejects both the "telescope" of realism and the "microscope" of introspection or self-analysis in his works and follows a middle course. His animal fables, created by giving artistic form to events from his own dreary life, represents a closed world of the imagination. In his fables, biographical events, removed from their true context, become philosophical statements about the human condition in much the same manner as Svevo himself often put events or people from his own life into his works. The fables originate in Mario's life and are occasioned by his encounters with its absurdity, but such events take on meaning only when they are written down on paper in a new form where order and meaning are imposed by he artist upon the chaotic material of life. In a sense, Mario's own life is his art, but the absurdity of his life is transformed by his imagination until his writng assumes a therapeutic quality. By reorganizing his own life into an artistic pattern with his animal fables, Mario is able to come to terms with the absurd world he inhabits. The plot of each fable is the same—the description of feeding crumbs to sparrows—but no less than nineteen different statements about the human condition (each based upon Mario's own life) are wrought from this apparently banal framework.

Each time the reality of the outside world interrupts this artistic process, it becomes impossible for Mario to write. As long as he believes that his earlier novel is about to be published, for example, Mario can no longer transform events of his own life into fables: "It was weeks since he had made any or even dreamed of one. His thought had been chained by success to his old novel, which he was studying in order to rewrite it; doing it up, and filling it with new stuffing; trimming it with fresh images and turns of expression. Success was his golden cage." As soon as he learns of the hoax played upon him by his friend Enrico Gaia, Mario's creative powers return and fables again become possible for him. Paradoxically, only failure as a writer in the commercial marketplace allows Mario's literary imagination to function.

Though Mario fails to gain financial success with his novel, the absurd turn of events brought about by the hoax, his newly acquired fortune, and his ability to write fables sustains his life. He sees the conclusion of the hoax as a natural phenomenon since in his world, "aberrations from the normal had definitely become the rule." In fact, the absurdity of the human condition is so far-reaching that the hermetic world of his own fables is the only one he can comprehend: "And Mario, with his pockets full of money, looked on and studied the phenomenon with surprise. He muttered in his bewilderment: 'It is easier to understand the life of sparrows than our own. Who knows whether our life doesn't seem to the sparrows simple enough to be expressed in a fable?'" Confronted by a world ordered without any apparent rationality, it is no wonder that Mario Samigli chooses to live in a private dream world constructed by his own imagination. In the world of fables, the cruelty and pointlessness of existence is not ignored, but life is now ordered by art into a form which has some aesthetic meaning. Unlike his own life, which seems to lack any purpose whatsoever, the closed world of art has a goal, for it satisfies a human need in Mario, the need for self-expression and rationality. As Mario puts it, "you can get anywhere you like with a fable, if you know where you want to go." Knowing where one wants to go in life is much more difficult.

The two elements of the structure of "The Hoax" are not equally important. Though the hoax is not as central to the work as the title might indicate, the account of the trick played upon Mario and its absurd result is not "inconsequential" as one critic has claimed. It is necessary to render Svevo's opinion of the absurdity, irrationality, or, as Zeno Cosini puts it, the "originality" of life. It is precisely because of this situation that art is important. It must not be assumed that Svevo was so naive as to assert that art is a panacea for man's problems; in fact, the narrator even once calls Mario's fables "illusions." But the illusion of art is a vital part of the human response to the condition of the absurd for Svevo. One must bear in mind that "The Hoax" was written after Svevo had shown a serious interest in Kafka and Pirandello (two masters of the absurd) and after writing his own Confessions of Zeno, a work which is only now being linked with the absurdist trend in contemporary literature. Svevo became more and more philosophical during the last years of his life, and he increasingly saw art or illusion as a kind of therapeutic "cure" for the world's insanity. "The Hoax" is a development beyond Zeno, where the absurd is first recognized by Svevo as the principle of organization in the universe. In the short story, the "originality" of life is simply assumed; it no longer requires demonstration, and the conclusion of the hoax played upon Mario Samigli is hardly a surprise even to the protagonist. The story also points toward the unfinished sequel to Zeno that Svevo was beginning before his death in that it underlines the crucial role of art and illusion in dealing with life. In segments of this sequel that were completed, appropriately translated into English as Further Confessions of Zeno, there is one passage that is the continuation of Mario Samigli's reliance upon literature as a means of dealing with life and which helps to determine exactly what Svevo meant to portray in this character who wrote animal fables based upon his own life. Zeno re-examines his autobiography done during therapy and discovers that only that part of the past that he had committed to paper, only that part to which he, like Mario in his fables, had given artistic form still existed for him. The rest was dead and forgotten:

Oh! the only part of life that matters is contemplation. When everybody understands that as clearly as I do, they will all start writing. Life will become literature. Half of humankind will devote itself to reading and studying what the other half has written. And contemplation will be the main business of the day, preserving it from the wretchedness of actual living. And if one part of human kind rebels and refuses to read the other half's effusions, so much the better. Everyone will read himself instead; and people's lives will have a chance to repeat, to correct, to crystallise themselves, whether or no they become clearer in the process.

Though Svevo sensed the absurdity of life that all modern writers feel, he drew back from the abyss of nothingness he saw. As so many of his contemporaries did, he chose to view art and illusion, with their ordering of experience, as a viable response to this human predicament. "The Hoax" is an important artistic statement of this response of the imagination to the absurd and is a key to the development of Svevo's thought after the publication of The Confessions of Zeno. His views place him squarely in the generation of James Joyce and Marcel Proust, to whom he has often been compared for essentially incorrect reasons, and set him apart from another generation of writers like Camus, Silone, or Moravia who, in R. W. B. Lewis' words, tried to transcend the sense of nothingless both groups of writers felt, not by the absolute value of art but by "an agonizing dedication to life."