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Semester 1, 2011-2012 EN 3261 European Literature

Alberto Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle (1907 – 1990)Contempt [ Il Disprezzo] (1954)

 Notes for the two lecturesA few biographical pointers:

• Born into a Jewish-Catholic Roman family;• First novel Gli indifferenti [The Indifferent Ones] (1929) published at own expense;

o Moravia claimed that it was the first existentialist novel;• Critical of Italian Fascism and later bourgeois materialism;

In a 1954 Paris Review interview, Moravia claimed that he was not a moralist, but qualified this:“Social criticism must necessarily, and always, be an extremely superficial thing. But don’tmisunderstand me. Writers, like all artists, are concerned to represent reality, to create amore absolute and complete reality than reality itself. They must, if they are to accomplishthis, assume a moral position, a clearly conceived political, social, and philosophicalattitude; in consequence, their beliefs are, of course, going to find their way into their work.

What artists believe, however, is of secondary importance, ancillary to the work itself. “

Initial impressions (telling a book by…?)

 http://images.google.com.sg/imgres?imgurl=http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n28/n141302.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/m/alberto-moravia/ghost-at-noon.htm&usg=__AM1qPcdkNsBPy_pE733ywlGfjMA=&h=350&w=198&sz=20&hl=en&start=2&um=1&tbnid=pNDZeGXtXe5EqM:&tbnh=120&tbnw=68&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522ghost%2Bat%2Bnoon%2522%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN;http://www.assemblages-de-mots.com/blog/images/Le%20mepris.jpg;http://pro.corbis.com/images/U1383297.jpg?size=67&uid=%7B8ECDB383-6972-4D33-B097-8592459EF6CF%7D.

Some background:

Italian cinematic neo-realism (essentially, the ten years after WW2):

• Moravia is often thought to have been working in this tradition, even if Contempt is not the best example of it;

• Working and middle-class lives;• Often amateur actors (“real” people playing “real” people);• Cp. Battista on neo-realism’s decline, pp. 83, 84;

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o By 1954, neo-realism losing importance, as Battista notes and Moravia’sintrospective style demonstrates;

• e.g.o Vittorio de Sica, Bicycle Thieves (1948) de Sica also filmed Moravia’s La ciociara

(English title: Two Women; 1958)o Luchino Visconti, La Terra trema (The Earth Trembles) (1948)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2BqIJ1PE1U• As neo-realism waned, attention was paid to the act of perception (introspection) and the

medium of perception, esp. the faculty of sight (cp. the French nouveau roman or new

novel ):• Thus Contempt speculates about Molteni’s perceptions (can he trust them?) and similarly

comments on the relation between life and the cinema;o cp. Le Mépris (Godard, 1963)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzJlwWR_WHI;and an updated version using part of the soundtrack:

• gangster movie Casino (1995): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzSUP0XNDO0&feature=related.

Moravia was seen as an essential modern writer in his time; is he “our” (or “your”)contemporary?

• “a curious mixture of anachronisms, conventions, and of rebellions” (Frank Baldanza,“Mature Moravia,” Contemporary Literature 9.4 [Autumn 1968], 507);

• “the impossibility of tragedy in a world in which non-materialist values seemingly lackedany right to exist; where moral conscience had become so hardened that people acted fromappetite only and were more or less automata” (Moravia, Man as an End 79; qtd. inBaldanza 519)

• Are the characters singular individuals, or can they be seen as types?

Some themes:

• “Moravia’s novels are always ‘about’ sex and money. They are always ‘about’ failedcommunication and the problematic of representation. They are always ‘about’ alienatedlives” (Margaret Brose, “Alberto Moravia: Fetishism and Figuration,” NOVEL 15.1(Autumn 1981), 62).

Moravia’s work involves, and seems structured around, the theatrical (here also the movies).

• Sets and structure:• Sets, e.g.

o The urban, Roman: small apartments, cramped conditions (pp. 16 and 25; cp. thedrive along the Appian Way, p. 115);

o The idyllic, rural, Capri: Battista’s villa (pp. 151 and 159):cp. Godard’s film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-SYpoLrVwI

• tripartite structure:o Originary situation;o Development of this;o Dénouement: tragedy? Irony?

• The orginary situation:

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o Two openings, as Molteni gropes for a point of departure for the deterioration of hisrelationship with his wife and its trag[ed]ic outcome (i.e. );

o his selling out to the movies (working for Battista [p.4]);

The ride to Battista’s house (pp. 5 ff.)

Analysis:• Molteni is reflective only through necessity (last line of p. 4 and top of p. 5);• He believes that meaning is gauged proleptically, strategically, as given by later events, not

inherent: Molteni cannot live in the moment;• He demeans Emilia by thinking that he is safe with her, that she will love only him (thus this

shows his overconfidence), that she could not be attractive to Battista 9after all, he mightthink, she was only a typist);

• Or he seems to her ignorant of the possibility, would not “act like a man” (?) in thinkingother women attractive and acting on this impulse or any impulse) as Battista, more self-confidently, might do;

• He is always either too late or too premature in his thinking and acting/speaking on it:over-confident in his power to keep his wife even if the richer, more forceful producer Battista takes an interest, or not wanting to admit to himself that he wouldn’t care that muchif she went with him?

(background reason for this seeming indifference and distance: ).

Title and the uses of disenchantment:

• “Contempt” signifies a relation where one party depreciates the actions, intentions andfeelings of another;

o Yet who is contemptuous of whom, or of what, first here?o cp. The Odyssey (below) in Rheingold’s view, a story of a man who loves his

wife but is not loved in return (p. 89): the opposite in the novel?o

How does Molteni’s resentment of Emilia (e.g. “rancor” p. 18; “irritation” p. 20)relate to contempt?o If it is the same, or closely comparable, then it is HIS contempt we should

look at, while he makes us believe that she is contemptuous of him (cp. p.103: Emilia uses the word to describe her attitude to Molteni (but heretranslated as “despise”);

o cp. p. 63: yet there is a credible cause for such a look in her eyes, in that hehas jumped to conclusions about her lying to him about going to her mother’sand has in fact just lied to her mother on the phone);

o Self-contempt/self-loathing on Molteni’s part?;o How is this related to self-pity, even a martyr-complex (e.g. p. 112)?

o Sold out to the movies:• Impossible to be an egotist there (p. 39);• Meretricious (working for money: note that Molteni twice describes

Emilia as being like a prostitute in the same pages (35, 38);• Intellectual snob (thinks his colleagues inferior, p. 40);

o Feels trapped by what certain readers might call Emilia’s “nesting” (e.g. her reaction to the new flat, p. 19 and esp. p. 20);

o A “silence of the mind” (p. 3);

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o class issues:• he sees himself as superior to Emilia as she is a typist (p. 21, 78);• he has stereotypical notions about her class (p. 111-112);• the novel shows many social and class types, e.g. Pasetti, Battista;

o in all, he has a romantic vision of himself, the starving artist with thecharming, witty and attractive partner, and has to face that this is not hisreality (p. 21);

• view of artistic endeavour as the product of genius, rather thanworkaday production: cp. Walter Benjamin etc. (cp. p. 41);

o he has not yet reached the level of objective disenchantment with his ideals,which would make him face them better;

o  p. 22: he says that he is becoming objective about his subjective feelings of resentment, etc., but this is just the politics of identity (again, we see theunreliable narrator):

• he would be a fair [or in this case, foul] weather friend of the leftistetc. parties he mentions (p. 23), united with them only in adversity;

 Note: a previous English translation was called A Ghost at Noon; why?

Unreliable narrator:

• Often (rather parochially) seen as a characteristic of 20th-century modernist writing (butextends back to Socrates and other Greek writers);

• Distinction between what the narrator knows and what s/he allows the readers/addressees toknow:

o e.g. here there is one major fact about Emilia which he knows but we don’t knowuntil the end;

o i.e. . . . . . . . .

• yet, conversely, the reader can read into Molteni’s conduct, lack of engagement with theworld, etc. character traits of which he might be unaware;• how is it that the kiss with the typist has slipped to the back of his memory as a possible

cause (even if we should discount it) of his alienation from his wife? (cp. pp. 92, 97, 106:how do you read Emilia’s response here?);

• once the reader is aware that the narrator is unreliable, s/he begins to read into events andmatters narrated, to find the essence of what the narrator is being unreliable about:

o yet reading into events is exactly what Molteni does;o Emilia seems much less complex, reflective

 p. 11: he can find many reasons, she none; e.g. p. 10: she says she doesn’t want to go to Battista’s because the evenings

there bore her: do we take this at face value? Molteni doesn’t (p. 10);• degrees of unreliability:

• the narrator keeps quiet about what s/he knows (e.g. ): irony;• the narrator doesn’t or cannot know the truth, but acts as if s/he does (ignorance or 

 bad faith): e.g. p. 84, he criticizes Battista on grounds that would equally apply to him

(pliability);

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• Molteni is wavering, indecisive, yet so convinced that each of his transientconvictions and reasonings is correct (e.g. rather humorously in the lift, p. 61; or pp. 65, 90);

Fear of speaking out:

• gender politics intercrossed with humanist and historical-political reasons (and cp. Marias);• Molteni lacks courage and imagination: to act on his impulses and to find a way to resolve

his problems (e.g. pp. 42 , 46, 56, 59);• He calls himself “all nerves and imagination” (p. 49) but (outside of the script-writing

context) his nerves prohibit the workings of his imagination;• Instead, he jumps to conclusions, comes to “rash interpretations” (p. 65):

• that Emilia had lied to him about going to her mother’s (p. 62): he doesn’t listen to her  plausible explanation first;

• that Emilia no longer loves him, isn’t interested in what he does (e.g. pp. 43, 47, 53, 56);• Esp. p.55, on the director Pasetti’s wife;• Look closely at the section pp. 47 to 56:

o on p. 47, he “feels” Emilia no longer loves him; on p. 56 it’s a “fact,”

“indubitable” and a “conclusion,” a “conviction” not only that she doesn’t lovehim (which can be altered) but can’t (which can’t);o He says that he cannot understand how this indifference has come about; is it

clear?• He makes his mind up with the vaguest of proofs (e.g. p. 103);• This provocative insistence in turn leads to Emilia’s change that she doesn’t love him

“now” (p. 104 [actually, the Italian says that she “no longer” loves him]), i.e. after hehas reduced all the possible reasons for her attitude and conduct to his subjective notionof the “truth” (i.e. the truth is what he wants it to be, what he has convinced himself itis).

“sad mediocrity” as theme (R.W.B. Lewis): how to make this interesting for the readers?• Empathy for Molteni? A despicable character? Abject?•  Neurosis, Angst, egocentricity, intellectualism

ISSUES:

Questioning values

• The internal and the outer worlds: the latter seen as the source of fiction (whether plays or films) and therefore internalized.

Epistemology/psychology:

• all ideas become subjective for Molteni, products of his own reasoning processes;• He has no external yardstick to measure the validity of his reasoning:

• e.g. p. 11: he is convinced Emilia doesn’t love him because she is not so clingy (whilehe is, and would want her to be): normative state of affairs?

•  No productive sense of fashioning the future in the relationship; all instead concernedabout material well-being, stereotypical notions of being a good provider;

Anomie:

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• Émile Durkheim (1897): normlessness; incapacity for an individual to keep up with suddenteconomic etc. change; gap between belief systems and achievement levels;

• Molteni is happiest when he is thoughtless, acting automatically (e.g. pp. 3, 116);• Modernist predicament;

Inauthentic existence:

• “contempt” [“disdain”] as one such inauthentic stance?• Yet where, in bourgeois materialist, not to say also in Fascist society, is this authenticity to

 be found? Who/what sanctions or guarantees its authenticity?• The search for the aesthetic authentic:

o Plays vs. movies;o The “real” Homer:

Molteni raves against Battista’s profit motive and Rheingold’s psychologicalHomer, yet what guarantees his own views, given that he IS working for money (for whatever reasons) and has no greater access to the Homericreality than Rheingold does?;

Does Molteni actually LIKE his position?

• He has come to cherish, even fetishise, his supposedly precarious relations, including thosewith his wife and his employer:

• His own criticisms of them reveal his need to appear critical to himself, and the problemswith his wife—although indubitably based on his pusillanimity, even indifference to her (e.g. his brainless acquiescence to Battista’s desire that Emilia ride in his [Battista’s] car [p.5])—can also be seen as moves to fill in a rather mundane, average existence with her.

Narcissism and voyeurism:

• acts of attention and “disattention” (the literal translation of the title of another of his

novels)The Odyssey

• Homer’s epic of course of Odysseus’ ramblings on his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War;

• Clearly spectacular stuff, monsters, colossal natural forces, supernatural powers, women of  power, etc.;

• A vehicle for money-spinning, as Battista implies;• Caught between escapist fantasy (Battista) and reference to contemporary psychological

states (tension between Rheingold and Molteni).

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I faraglioni (p. 152) from the Villa Krupp

“Europeanisation”:

• On the one hand, nationality plays a distinctive role:o e.g. p. 154: Battista commends Molteni for being Italian, while Rheingold is

German;o “Rheingold” is the name of an opera by Richard Wagner (1869):

German mythology, dwarfs giants gods and river maidens;o (aside: in Godard’s version, the Battista character is American);o Yet nationality extends to region:

Rheingold’s point that the Odyssey is to the Mediterranean people what theBible is to the Anglo-Saxons (p. 85);

• So, and on the other hand, there are many pan-European influences:o Use of great pan-European works like the Odyssey;o References to other texts of world literature:

Petrarch 161, Joyce 206, Dante 210;

The Petrarch sonnet p. 161 is one of many dedicated to Petrarch lost loveLaura, and includes the lines that death had taken her away from him; Molteni does not quote these lines here:

• Because Italian readers would know it (e.g. from having to memoriseit for school classes);

• Because it would give away Emilia’s death:o Too painful for him to allude to proleptically?o Doesn’t want to add a “spoiler”?

o Battista sees analogies between the Odyssey and popular movies etc. (p. 86):   Atlantis is a 1932 movie by G. W. Pabst, made in three different language

versions:

 http://www.coolfrenchcomics.com/atlantide.htm

The sea:

• E.g. pp. 148, 151, 152, 194, 250;• Rebirth, integration, freshness, catharsis (esp. p. 152);• But also death (esp. p. 194, suicidal thoughts);• Cp. the longing for silence throughout the novel, e.g. p. 235;

Narrating an impasse: mapping from the first to the second halves of the novel:

• The novel is clearly split, about half way, between the Rome and the Capri scenes;• Thematically, there are several important correspondences:

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o  p. 163: Molteni catches Emilia kissing Battista as she had once caught him kissingthe typist;

o  p. 168: Emilia looks at Battista as Pasetti’s wife looks at him;o Molteni is reflective only through necessity (last line of p. 4 and top of p. 5);o  pp. 230-31: Molteni returns to Emilia’s point that he isn’t a man, and his criticism of 

this as a stereotypical view (cp. p. 220), thus showing his sense of his own

superiority;•  by such extensions, Molteni is perhaps prolonging the narrative as he knows that the time on

Capri was brief;• Molteni continues to extrapolate from the incidentals of Emilia’s criticism of him, such that

 by pp. 199, 204, he says that they didn’t love each other:o But where did his lack of love for her come from, at the same time as he wants to be

with her?o Perhaps as a defence against the inevitable ending of the novel, where he has to

narrate her loss.Transcendence projected but denied:

•

 p. 165 (and throughout): Molteni looks for truth behind and thus independent of appearances, intentions, etc., rather than as an intrinsic aspect of them;o Cp. p. 228: contempt on an overriding attitude, independent on the contemptuous

 person’s view of the other person’s actual actions and his/her intentions;o Comparatively, Molteni gives us enough to state that he despises Emilia for her lack 

of education, her social standing, etc., i.e. independent of what she does.• Last two chapters:

o Emilia’s ghost? (ch. 22);o (ch. 23): Cannot be: the timing isn’t right;o So we are left with the possibility of transcendence, world beyond death (cp. a

“Catholic version”) and a view that all is psychological;o Yet why would Molteni discard Rheingold’s psychological view of the Odyssey to

fall back on this kind of interpretation of events at the end? Cp. Rheingold on Odysseus’ passivity and Penelope’s disdain for it (p. 187)

and Molteni’s view of this analysis, p. 195; Perhaps because of his divided self, the unsustainability in a world of loss

and instability of his seemingly secular worldview; His abject self: cast off from social imbrications (partnerships, family, job),

at odds with himself (cognitive dissonance throughout the novel—he hardlyknows his own mind).

Conclusion:

The melancholy, abject self as narrator:• Such narratives are common in mid-20th-c. European literature (Genet, Sartre, Camus,

Orwell);• Paradox of narration:

o  Narration implies a relation between self and other (narrator and narrated), but heredisengagement is the norm, so can it be narrated as such?

o So we have a novel of negative engagement:

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o Contempt retains a view of the object, gives the self a reason to live in thisnegative but self-reinforcing relation;

o And when it is gone, it needs to be narrated again until there is closure andclarity; but the whole strategy of the relation of contempt is that there is nosuch clarity as the contempt is independent of any actual consideration of theother person’s actions.

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