The Nuclear Bomb in Zeno’s Conscience.
Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience consists of a series of writings by the protagonist Zeno Cosini, written for his psychoanalyst – Dr. S. The novel deals with smoking a last cigarette (or attempting to), the death of father, his marriage, his wife and mistress, his business and entrepreneurial matter and finally in a shift in narrative, the reader enters in Zeno’s diary. He writes about his overall experience throughout psychoanalysis and his complete disdain for the process.
In order to read about the nuclear bomb which, the discussion is centre around today, the reader must reach the final page of the novel
“When poison gas is no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness.” (Svevo, 437)
The novel was self-published and released in 1923. Within the narrative the final entry into the diary is March 24, 1916. The nuclear bomb was not invented yet. In history, it has only been used twice in war. Both in 1945, dropped by the USA on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Zeno’s Conscience was self-published in 1923 by Italo Svevo. Svevo lived in the city of Trieste, on the Adriatic, Italia Irredenta. The nuclear bomb is mentioned on the very last page of the novel. It is the culmination of a psychoanalysis the protagonist Zeno Cosini is receiving off a Dr. S. The reason the nuclear bomb is mentioned is due to the war that raged across Europe. The final section is written, in a diary style, during the years of the war 1915-1916. The First World War and its bloodshed showed the world that in all the progress in the machine, industry and technology, it was the human race that was being decimated by the fruits of modernity.
Why did Svevo imagine this nuclear bomb? How was he able to prophesize the invention of a bomb of such total destruction, of such instantaneous massacre?
In the final chapter of Zeno’s Conscience the narrative follows the thoughts of Zeno as they deal with the school of psychoanalysis. Zeno thinks of the dreams of his youth, the images he has invented and the ones that have faded with time. He struggles to remember what happened and what did not. He is haunted by spectres of his memory. The tree-lined paths he walks as an older man are different to the those of his childhood. Family members have died, friends gone, lovers are distant ripples in his subconscious, as time goes on the drift further and further from him until he cannot picture their face no more.
In the final chapter is written in the years 1914-1916. War is broken in Europe. Modernism, the exaltation of the machine, industry and technology has resulted in blood-dimmed warfare. The machine promised progress but now all that the society battered by World War One can see is bloodshed brought upon by the machine gun, the tank, the plane, the gas, the grenade, the shrapnel and the shells.
The fabric of the human experience was being ripped and rethread. Manifestos demanded change in myriad ways and styles. Architects saw form in the function. Dadaists put urinals in museums. Cubists portrayed the fragmented perception of reality. Writers broke away from tradition, waking up from the nightmare of history. Futurists called for total destruction and the incessant quest for the new.
As you read in Zeno’s conscience, Trieste was a place of shipping, business, trade and commercial exploits, an innovative, future-looking place not hampered by nostalgia. All such characteristics meant the ideas of the Futurist Filippo Marinetti attracted interest. As he wrote in the Futurist Manifesto, published on the front-page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909:
“We wish to glorify war – the sole cleanser of the world”
As well as such statements, the manifesto called for the burning down of museums, libraries and academies, for the worship of the racing card and the beauty of speed, to smash down the mysterious doors of the impossible and sing for the love of danger among other demands written with a passionate intensity. Futurism believed in a fresh start for everything, artistically, politically, socially, historically. A ceaseless turning wheel of creative destruction: the fetishization of the new and the denial of the past.
Marinetti in return thought of Trieste as an ideal model for his explosive theories, and called it la nostra bella polveriera, ‘our beautiful powder-magazine’. (Morris, 55)
In 1910, a great futurist meeting was held at the Politeama Rosetti. Many members of the local intelligentsia were there, James Joyce perhaps, his friend Italo Svevo also. Even if they were not there, the town was plastered in posters and advertising for the Futurist meeting. In fact, Marinetti in 1909, declared Trieste, alongside Milan and Paris as the capitals of Futurism. Marinetti liked Trieste, in his manifesto Battaglie di Trieste he described the Adriatic as the “red tinderbox of Italy.” (McCourt, 87)
Most of the intelligentsia thought Marinetti went too far in demanding the burning of libraries and the flooding of museums, but nevertheless, he spoke well on the need to unshackle society from the shackles of tradition – the Modernist mantra. (Morris, 55)
Svevo, a modernist writer, must have been aware of the Futurists. When we read the last page of Zeno’s Conscience, the imagery brings the words of Marinetti to mind.
The war breaks out during the narrative of Zeno’s Conscience. The war, Marinetti’s sole cleanser of the world – was ‘cleansing’ the world of young men, shot down by the machines the Futurists adored. Their aims in their manifestos were coming to fruition.
The dread that came to the society of the First World War and the years after, when it was published in 1923, society was broken and the future bleak.
Zeno’s final notes in the section Psychoanalysis are both prophetic and pessimistic. He writes the Futurist dream, complete destruction and endless creation of the new. This is a mutated modernism, a modernism of massacre, a modernism of mutiliation, a modernism destined to end in a boom.
To use the lines of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot:
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
Now to mutate them: I will show you fear in a nuclear bomb, in a dust cloud, in a wandering nebula, in a last cigarette stubbed out on a brick.