[In the essay below, Champagne finds the ancient Pharmakon 's dual quality in Svevo's short fiction and discusses the author's use of language as an alternate order to time and space. ]

"Il caso Svevo" bears witness to the displacement of Italo Svevo's corpus in time and place. It has not been until the 1950's, some twenty years after his death, that Svevo's work has begun to receive the attention it is due. This attention has been especially productive in university communities in and out of Italy—environments quite different from the Triestine settings of Svevo's fiction. Such a displacement of time and place has also formally and thematically existed within Svevo's short fiction. In reaction to the documentary needs for localized details so characteristic of French Naturalism, Svevo's short fiction explores a paradox implied in La Coscienza di Zeno, which Freccero has pointed out [in "Italo Svevo: Zeno's Last Cigarette," in From Verismo to Experimentalism, ed. by Sergio Pacifici, 1969]: "The paradox is a form of the ancient paradox of Zeno of Elea, transposed from the mysteries of space and motion to those of Augustinian duration and time." This paradox portrays the ambivalence of living in mixed tenses, vacillating between the oversimplified categories of past, present, and future time. In effect, Svevo's creative presentation of this condition in his short fiction is a commentary on the act of writing as a displacement of the Platonic myth of pharmakon, especially as Jacques Derrida has developed it for us ["La Pharmacie de Platon," in La dissémination, 1972]. The myth of pharmakon concerns the ambivalent drug which may at once be hygienic and poisonous to one's physical well-being. The very term pharmakon is suggested to us by the title of one of Svevo's short stories—"Lo specifico del Dottor Menghi." The specifico may be an alchemical drug that does not necessarily have to be effective. Hence, it may cause negative as well as positive reactions. The effect of deliberate falsifications in La Coscienza di Zeno achieves a similar ambivalence as Zeno invents several incidents as well as the order in his memoirs, according to his own admission and that of Dr. S. There are numerous other examples of the narrator's deliberate falsification of his account. These lies have personal redemptive functions for the narrator while they preclude his readers from sharing his whole perspective. Even Svevo the author participates in this insincere narrative-art as his irony often plays tricks on his characters, and sometimes even on the careless reader. As Paula Robison has presented this narrative falsification, one understands that: ". . . Svevo loves trickery. And especially he loves to contemplate the kind of trickery that men perpetuate on themselves: the lies they tell themselves in order to disguise through rationalization the dictates of the unconscious, to preserve their self-esteem, and to continue functioning in civilized society. For the Svevo hero, lying is a means of survival" ["Una Burla Riuscita: Irony as Hoax in Svevo," Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, Spring, 1972]. And so is it also true for Svevo the writer who perpetrates the ambivalence of writing as pharmakon. Let us now examine the elements of time and place, both in their formal and thematic realizations, to exemplify this commentary on the condition of writing in the short fiction of Svevo.

I. Time as a Grammatical Entity

Time—as a linear succession of regression of moments into the tenses of past, present, and future—is questioned as an effective ordering process of human behavior by Svevo's short fiction. Continually slipping in and out of the tenses of a linear chronology, Svevo's protagonists creatively re-construct "time" to their own advantage, as Zeno tells us in "II Vecchione": "II tempo fa le sue devastazioni con ordine sicuro e crudele. . . ." External order, whether it be naturalistic or psychoanalytical, also intimidates Alfonso Nitti, Emilio Brentani, and Zeno Cosini in the three major novels of Svevo. In the shorter fiction, this threat of external order is transformed, on the formal and thematic level, into an arrangement of "time." In effect, the Svevian "hero" internalizes "time" to create an anti-chronological order of moments. The irony of attempting to fix "Le confessioni del vegliardo" to the specific date of 4 April 1928 becomes underscored as the old man ponders his temporal displacement: "È quel futuro quello ch'io vivo. Va via senza prepararne un altro. Perciò non è neppure un vero presente, sta fuori del tempo. Manca un tempo ultimo nella grammatica." He feels himself carried along by the fluidity of his life. There is no formal sequence of past-present-future which certainly orders his life for him. In "II Vecchione," the old man was haunted by ". . . l'ansiosa speranza del futuro." Such a continual displacement of time causes confusion for the Svevian protagonist who seems to exemplify the Svevian realization that: "Continuo . . . a vivere in un tempo misto come il destino dell'uomo, la cui grammatica ha invece i tempi puri che sembrano fatti per le bestie." These "mixed tenses" present an ambivalent temporal awareness which becomes the privileged formal order that allows one to retreat from the external order of such categories as past, present, and future time. This theory of "mixed tenses" is a formal order insofar as it allows the suspension of sequential chronology within a Svevian narrative.

Thematically, the "mixed tenses" provide an interesting insight into Svevo's understanding of the grammatical nature of existence. Similar to Derrida's "grammatologie" ("une science de l'écriture bridée par la métaphore, la métaphysique et la théologie" [De la Grammatologie 1967]), Svevo's grammatical vision is also a Weltanschauung which comments on the very act of creative writing without the systematic implications of Derrida's proposal. Such a "grammatological" conception of the existential act of writing implies a bond between the formal presentation and the thematic discussion of "mixed tenses." Svevo's concern for old age and youth attains an added dimension with this suspension of "mixed tenses" whereby one can continually participate in both old age and youth, despite one's age. Indeed, Zeno admits in "Umbertino" that "io sono uomo che nacque proprio a sproposito" because in his youth old age had been respected and now in his old age youth is respected. Old age and youth seem continually to contrast with one another. However, the complementary nature of these two is vividly portrayed by the image of Zeno and Umbertino, grandfather and grandson, walking along hand in hand along some railroad tracks which, like the problem of old age and youth, seem to come together in the far-off distance. In "La Nouvella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla," this complementary nature is specifically referred to as the old man writes in his educational treatise Il vecchio that an old man "è infatti . . . nient'altro che un giovine indebolito." In the same story, the doctor suggests to the old man that "la gioventú molto spesso piglia delle malattie, ma sono usualmente delle malattie prive di complicazioni, Invece nei vecchi anche un raffreddore e una malattia complicata." Because of the infirmities which degenerate both states of youth and old age, one of their common denominators is disease. It is important that the linear passage of time does not necessarily link old age to youth in an evolutionary concept, similar to Darwin's theory, with which Svevo was quite familiar.

Although time is not evolutionary, it is nevertheless a creation of fluidity by the protagonist. As Reto Fasciati noted in his thesis: "Innovatore egli è veramente quando sa fondere passato e presente in un unico tempo della coscienza, in una 'Einbildungskraft' senza limiti temporali, in un tempo che domina gli eventi e non ne è dominato" [Italo Svevo-Romanziere Moderno, 1969]. Indeed, Svevo's narrative art portrays the erasure of the temporal limits of past, present (and also future) so that one might escape the external determination such as that of Taine's race, milieu, and moment so respected by the French Naturalists. As in the old man's view of the ties between old age and youth, the continuity between Zeno and his son Alfio is an especially negative one: "Grave, insopportabile, quello di veder rinascere nei miei figliuoli i miei piú gravi difetti." ("Umbertino".) Hence, this negative continuity of internalized time tends to erase external limits and to create a dream-like "reality."

The dreams literally played an important role in "Corto Viaggio Sentimentale," "Vino Generoso," "Una morte," and "La Novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla," among other minor roles. Perhaps it is the unconscious which may contain the secret movement of internalized time. Furbank has presented the unconscious in Svevo as ". . . the part of the mind which knows the truth but can only communicate it through the garbled and grammar-less language of dreams" [Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer, 1966]. In the dream-world, Svevo's protagonists portray an associative world, unhampered by the external order of linear chronology. In the first pages of "La Novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla," the old man interrupts his narrative to tell of the earlier episode wherein the young girl and her mother visited him at his office. In effect, the narrator suspends his story in a future-anterior tense by postponing his future story with a previous encounter. Thus, the linear sequence of events is disturbed by associational reporting, as in a dream. The dream, however, is denied as a regression from the world by the Svevian protagonist: "Non era la mia la vita del sogno e non ero io colui che scodinzolava e che per salvare se stesso era pronto d'immolare la propria figliuola" ("Vino Generoso".) The dream is a creation of his world in much the same manner as the Svevian protagonist internalizes the erratic fluidity of time. The freedom of surpassing the limits of external time allows the protagonist to create his own organization of time and space, as in "II Vecchione": "ma io qui nella mia stanzetta posso subito essere in salvo e raccogliermi su queste carte per guardare e analizzare il presente nella sua luce incomparabile e raggiungere anche quella parte del passato che ancora non svani." The internai temporal order of "mixed tenses" thus organizes events and places according to an internal sense of history and geography.

II. Space and Displacement of Origin

The problem of organizing time and place in an internal sense of history and geography seems to be a spatial process of ordering for the Svevian protagonist. Space, rather than "place" which implies the definite localization of geographical position, becomes another transposition of temporal relationships for the Svevian "hero." Space, as the relative organization of place to a subjective narrator, displaces the localization of place as well as time. Hence, an origin in time and place becomes increasingly difficult to establish. As a result, "geography" is transformed into a temporal problem as the voyage and the alcoholic trance cause one to forget localization and to become displaced into a dream-like state created by an almost free association. In "Corto Viaggio Sentimentale," Aghios especially feels this dislocation of geographical place, as telephone poles and landscape become fused into one another as he looks out from the train: "I pali e la campagna o una parte di vita fuggono senz'essere visti o sentiti." Indeed, the journey can substitute for the effects of wine, as in "Vino Generoso," because a voyage can actually dislocate one's physical presence just as the dream displaces one's consciousness of present time: "Il vino era stato smaltito nella corsa traverso gli spazi siderei e non lo turbava piú" ("Corto Viaggio Sentimentale".) One may wonder what may be the positive production of such dislocations and displacements. As Furbank has explained, Svevo's narrative art is closely tied to such positive aspects in his longer novels: "As a novelist, Svevo's mind worked all the time by leaps of analogy; they became the fibre of his writing." And these leaps of analogy may provide us with insight into the organization of space within his short fiction.

Similar to Aghios in "Corto Viaggio Sentimentale" who "ora bisognava tentare di procurarsi un posto," Svevo also seemed to be looking for his specific place among the various possibilities of narrative form. Experimenting with the burla ("Una Burla Riuscita"), the novella ("La Novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla",) the fable ("Una Madre",) the confession ("Le Confessioni del vegliardo",) the sentimental journey ("Corto Viaggio Sentimentale",) among other less obvious short fictional forms, Svevo appears to be playing games of the displacement of narrative space. The "leaps of analogy," whereby Svevo may be speaking of his own role as creative artist through his transformations of various formal traditions, may give us insight into the spatial intervals of his fiction. In each of the forms cited above, Svevo has lengthened the form and added elements which make the movement of his narrative extremely slow. Hence, the temporal pace of the narrative has been transformed by Svevo's experimentation with space. For example, in "Una Burla Riuscita," Mario continually creates fables of sparrows to comment upon his experience. However, in contrast to "La Madre," which exemplifies Professor Mancini's insight that "as a fabulist, Svevo subjects man and life to a pitiless but passionate critique, exposing the sad and pitiful spectacle of human absurdity and self-deception," Mario's fables allow for esthetic distance between Mario and the narrator, as well as between Mario and his fables. This esthetic distance allows a spatial interval to exist between the human and the animal conditions of existence. The similarities may be too obvious in an evolutionary universe as conceived by Darwin. Perhaps Svevo is implying that one should study the differences and the spatial intervals between man and animal. The narrator of "Una Burla Riuscita" tells us that "è difficile di conoscere le origini di una favola." And he may also be speaking of the origins of all creative writing—they are not discoverable either. We have only studied their displacements in time and place into a different spatial awareness. In effect, the writer becomes a creative historian and geographer in much the same manner as Mario who had created a new living-being with his novel Una giovinezza: ". . . gli appariva vitale come tutte le cose che simulano d'avere un capo e una coda" ("Una Burla Riuscita".) Mario had created new dimensions of time and place within which his novel could enjoy a life of its own, independent of its poor acceptance by critics in the world of three-dimensional place and linear time.

III. An Alternate Order—Language

Such a creative presentation of space precludes a mimetic esthetic. In fact, there seems to be a dissociation of sensibility operating within Svevo's narrative whereby there is no rapport between objective and subjective realities. Much irony is directed at Svevo's protagonists who seek "objective" verification of their consciousness. For example, Zeno, in "II Vecchione," is troubled by his frequent flights of imagination and looks for a mirror to localize himself: "In certi instanti impensati mi pare essa ritorni, e debbo correre allo specchio per mettermi a posto nel tempo. Guardo allora quei tratti deformati sotto il mio mento da una pelle troppo abbondante per ritornare al posto ch' è il mio." The irony of the mirror is that Zeno is merely reflecting his own subjective self back upon himself. He is using himself to verify the very existence he has created through his writings. As Zeno will later say in "La Confessioni del vegliardo," "la vita sarà letteraturizzata." Life itself will become this consciousness of space transformed into writing. Svevo creates his own spatial order within which characters, who cannot find their time or place in external society, become part of the subjective time and place they have created for themselves. As Camerino has pointed out for us [in "II concetto d'inettitudine in Svevo e le sue implicazioni mitteleuropee ed ebraiche," Lettere Italiane, Vol. 25, April-June, 1973], "la natura immobile è una metafora: il singolo disadattato, oppresso nei ghetti moderni, s'illude di poter evadere in qualche modo. L'individuo incapace, rifiuta la sforzo e ricerca il mito." This Svevian individual also goes further and re-constructs another myth as a substitute for the external dimensions of time and place, within which he could find no position. In writing, however, the Svevian protagonist finds a personal myth which is very different from life itself. Biasin has underscored the creativity of this myth of writing: "The words that are 'made up of letters' in space and time, the 'graphic signs,' the written words opposed to the spoken ones—all point to the difference, and différance, between literature and life" ["Zeno's Last Bomb," Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, Spring, 1972]. This différance was conceived by Jacques Derrida to portray the active sense in which literature must create its own system apart from any other world that might exist. Even more than Montale's portrayal of Svevo as "the poet of our bourgeoisie—a judging and destructive poet" [Lettere con gli scritti di Montale su Svevo, 1966], Svevo's own short fiction attests to his creative poetic. Time and space are re-presented as functions of Svevian protagonists who posit language as an alternate order to the commonly accepted localizations of linear time and three-dimensional place.

This hypothesis about Svevo's alternate order of language is interesting since he has often been accused of writing ". . . sentences of extraordinary clumsiness, a sort of laboriousness and roundaboutness which reveals not so much carelessness as a genuine incapacity for handling syntax" [Furbank]. However, Furbank's rather negative presentation of Svevo's innovative syntax should be contrasted with Maier's view of Svevo the poet: "Poiché Italo Svevo, se non è stato un grammatico emunctae naris e un corretto manipolatore della sintassi, ha saputo essere qualcosa di piú: un artista autentico e, diciamo pure, in tutta l'estensione e nell'antico significato creativo del vocabolo, un 'poeta'" [La Personalità e l'opera di Italo Svevo, 1961]. Perhaps these negative and positive views of Svevo's style are inherent in the work of an avantgarde, "pure artist" who seeks to go beyond the esthetic of his day. Biasin tells us [in "Literary Diseases: From Pathology to Ontology," Modern Language Notes, Vol. 82, (January, 1967)] that the disease imagery which pervades Svevo's fiction appears to be a "gnomic category applicable to the individual and society, to the self and the world. . . ." And indeed this "gnomic category" of disease may be Svevo's awareness that writers of the early twentieth century were too occupied with a polished literary style whereby words entailed epistemological certainty. This "disease" may be his way of portraying the unfitness of society for the individual. Hence, a new order must be created wherein the individual with his consciousness may exist to experiment with all his creativity. This order, which would later become the obsession of the phenomenological school, is that aspect of language which deals with the interplay of consciousness and the unconscious.

If artistic language—as Svevo portrays it through his protagonists—is an interplay of consciousness and the unconscious, one may well wonder whether order is possible at all. Are we merely observing the negation of time and place? It seems that Svevo's protagonists are similar to Zeno (and perhaps to Svevo himself as the avant-garde writer) in that he receives energy from his process of denial. Mark Meyer observes this will in Zeno: "No longer does Zeno appear an incredulous, bemused observer, but as an almost impatient participant in an ordering process which finally can accommodate, confirm, and extend, by negating, that order" ["Zeno: His Fictions and His Problems," Sub-Stance, Vol. 1, Spring, 1972]. This energy had caused Zeno to set up his own subjective order with his dictionary-styled memoirs in La Coscienza di Zeno and with his dated confessions extending to "Le confessioni del vegliardo." These collections reflect unconscious needs to escape personal habit and to create a new spatial order which transcends man's tendency toward stifling habit: "M'abituo con fatica ad essere come sono oggi, e domani ho da sottopormi alla stessa fatica per rimettermi nel sedile che s'è fatto piú incomodo ancora" ("Il Vecchione".) Collecting his personal facts into a language which is inherently ordered rather than externally disciplined by habit, the Svevian writers, such as Zeno and Mario, exemplify the insight that "of course, writing entails order" [Albert N. Mancini, review of the Johnson-and-Furbank translation of Further Confessions of Zeno, by Italo Svevo, Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 8, Summer, 1971]. But the Svevian order of writing is the immanent organization of language which implies new roles for the acts of reading and writing.

As a result of the immanent organization of language, reading becomes a manner of deciphering the spatial order of words. Mario, in "Una Burla Riuscita," speaks of the role of the modern reader who must combine the images rather than the words of a particular text: "Degli scrittori il lettore frettoloso non mormora neppure la parola e passa a segno come un viandante in ritardo su una via piana." And such a reading must be a critical combination of these images because a writer might very well be another Gaia who considers his art to be a practical joke, an esthetic game of one-upsmanship: "È infatti un artista il burlone, una specie di caricaturista il cui lavoro non è agevolato dal fatto ch'egli non ha da lavorare, ma da inventare e mentire in modo che il burlato si faccia la caricatura da sé" ("Una Burla Riuscita.") Hence, Svevo's short fiction calls upon the reader to question his previous methods of reading to see if they are still applicable in confronting Svevian writing.

Svevian writing at times seems to be a remedy for the "gnomic disease" referred to by Biasin. As the Svevian protagonist becomes aware of his own innate propensity for failure within society, he creates a subjective adjustment by internalizing and then transforming time and place into various spatial dimensions. There is an implied commentary on the ambivalent nature of Svevo's own writing in these various subjective internalizations. As an avantgarde writer, unappreciated by his own age because of his variations from the accepted esthetics, Svevo implements a writing which is a pharmakon, that is, a remedy and a poison for the human situation. On the one hand, many Svevian protagonists, in his major novels as well as in his short fiction, feel the need to write in order to systematize and regulate the disorder of their social lives. Hence, writing has a personally redemptive feature in its creative exploration of the human spirit and in its organization of new spatial dimensions. On the other hand, writing, as in Curra's search for his origins in "La Madre," will also entail the discovery of the painful realization that it is doomed to failure and incompleteness. In the fable "Un Artista," the Creator explains to the artist the nature of his artistic soul: "L'anima che ora ritorna a me, è quella di un artista ma dimenticasti di portare con te il tuo organismo perché veda perché la tua anima ne fu suffocata." Hence, the artist must necessarily seek his origins in order to complete the cycle which constitutes his very nature. However, the ultimate irony directed against the creative writer is that he is doomed to failure because such ideas as education, progress, completeness, localization, and even succession are seriously questioned by Svevo's very style. Once again, we realize that "l'ironia è ancora uno strumento-chiave della narrativa del triestino" [Albert N. Mancini, "Svevo e la recente critica anglo-americana," Forum Italicum, Vol. 4, December, 1970]. As readers of Svevo's short fiction, we must especially suspend our belief in life in order fully to appreciate the binary movement of writing as pharmakon. And suddenly we realize that our own lives have been written into that literary displacement.