Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Italo Svevo et al - Emilio's Carnival (Senilita) B...
James Joyce depended on patrons, but in one instance bestirred himself to promote someone else' work, that of a businessman named Ettore Schmitz (1861-1928) who hired Joyce as a tutor in English when Joyce was especially needy in Trieste. Without Joyce's encouragement, Zeno's Conscience (1923) is unlikely to have been written and the earlier (1898) novel Senilitá (translated in the 1930s as "As a man grows older" and now as Emilio's Carnival) would be unknown. Joyce thought the earlier book Svevo's masterpiece and more modern(ist) than Zeno's Conscience (about which I wrote at http://www.epinions.com/content_61522808452).
Rather than a stream of consciousness like Ullyses or Zeno's Conscience, Emilio's Carnival is written by a narrator who enters the consciousness of three of the four main characters, Emilio a 35-year-old failed writer and desultory businessman (who goes to the office only for part of the morning), his spinster sister Amalia, Emilio's friend Balli, a sculptor producing nothing who is Amalia's fantasy groom, and the "hussy" Angiolina, who is Emilio's mistress, the fiancee of another man, and engaged in other ways with various other men about Trieste. Amalia has practically no life: she is confined to home and to arranging her brother's comforts. Emilio goes out into the world of trysts and cafes (and to a job of sorts) but, like Amalia, is tormented by imagined love and keenly felt slights and rejections that are less imaginary than the triumphs of love.
Joyce particularly liked the idealization as an angel of compassion and tender feeling in Angiolina at the end of the book, after Emilio has made a break with her that provides him even less satisfaction than his jealousy-wracked relationship with her and her impoverished family had provided him. As Victor Brombert notes in the introduction to his wife Beth's new translation of the book, "the 'real' Angiolina is of little importance. Senilitá is not about her but about her besotted Emilio... [who] is no more gifted for living an adventure than for writing about it." Emilio tries to write the story of his affair, but when he reads what he has written he is dismayed to discover that "the man bore no resemblance to him whatever, and the woman retained something of the woman-tigress of his first novel without her vitality. He realized that the truth he was attempting to relate was less credible than the dreams he had fabricated as reality. At that moment he felt despairingly sluggish and was overcome with anguish."
"Despairingly sluggish" would be a good description of not only Emilio, but of Zeno. Svevo's protagonists are smug and alternate between obliviousness and hypersensitivity. They become agitated, but are nearly incapable of action, and particularly unable to break with their mistresses despite frequent resolves to do so. Like Emma Bovary, the anti-heroes of Svevo's novels dream and scheme more than they live, cannot be satisfied, cling to fantasies of great loves, and are incapable of clear analyses of their situations. Their dreams and dalliances are not capital crimes, however, and they lumber on.
"Emilio's carnival" was Svevo's working title. The title of "senility" in the title under which the book was published and which Svevo defended seems to me (and obviously to Ms. Brombert) as misleading. Emilio is only 35 and his indecisiveness has nothing to do with advanced age. Carnaval does not loom large in the story, either, however. The annual Carnaval occurs midway through the book, but the lurch from everyday reality is, I think, the Emilio's affair with Angiolina; the reversal of humdrum reality is paltry, but takes more than a day or a week.
Although Zeno's Conscience is longer than Senilitá, it is much more entertaining, perhaps because Zeno has less conventional delusions than Emilio's. Although I don't suppose jealousy is ever going to go out of date, the concern with being two-timed by a mistress seems very 19th-century. The book is set in a prosperous provincial segment of the society in which Freud developed his ideas, which was the same society about which Schnitzler and Musil wrote, in which panic and neurasthenia spread through the affluent strata.
Emilio is not as ethnically complex as Schmitz or his hometown of Trieste. Schmitz's nom de plum means the Swabian (German) Italian and he was part of the Jewish bourgeoisie assimilated within the Hapsburg (Austro-Hungarian) Empire when he wrote Senilitá. (The character of Leopold Bloom that Joyce drew in part on Schmitz is clearly Jewish; Schmitz's wife was Joyce's model for Anna Livia Plurabelle.) The population of Trieste was primarily Slavic, though Emilio seems to be Italian. The kind of relationship with a beautiful, lower-class woman and her family's alternating connivance and expressed outrage could have taken place in Vienna as easily as Rome, and it was in Vienna that Freud treated the "hysteria" of women like Amalia, so the characters, situations, and attitudes fit a wider world than the peculiar culture and society of Trieste.
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