Alberto Moravia: Fetishism and Figuration

Abstract

Alberto Moravia is probably Italy's most prolific novelist, and in spite of a host of post-modernist contenders for title, he is unquestionably its most controversial. Over span of some fifty years, Moravia has published better than forty book-length works. Novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, film writer, travel writer, journalist and editor; theatre critic for Italian weekly L'Espresso; co-founder and editor of Nuovi argomenti-Moravia's presence on Italian literary scene is an insistent one. Not one week passes, it seems, that Moravia does not publish something. And everything he publishes contributes to growth of what Italians call il caso Moravia, that scandal which has continued from his first novel, The Time of Indifference (1929), down to his latest, Time of Desecration (1979). Moravia's first novel scandalized Italian public by virtue of its brutal portrayal of bourgeois life under Fascism and its inauguration of a new realism in Italian letters. The realistic portrayal of Italian society was a secondary result, so it seems, of a more primary apprehension of a psychological, even ontological problem, that of man's need for an authenticity which conditions of his life rendered impossible. Moravia has often asserted that The Time of Indifference was first Existentialist novel of Europe, as well as first genuinely Marxist and Freudian novel. The question of priority aside, this claim has a certain general validity insofar as Moravia had from first, apparently, hit upon common concern with question of authenticity that each of these movements had problematized. Predating Sartre's Nausea by nine years, The Time of Indifference is archetypical of catalogue of forms of inauthenticity which Moravia would examine persistently over course of his long writing career. The title of The Time of Indifference (Gli indifferenti, literally, the indifferent ones)' prefigures Moravia's obsessive interest in forms which inauthenticity, modes of our failures to connect meaningfully with reality, can take. Subsequent titles of his works represent a veritable anatomy of such failed connections: mistaken ambitions (Le ambizioni sbagliate, 1935); conformism (II conformista, 1951); disdain (II disprezzo, 1954); boredom (La noia, 1960); automatism and fetishism (L'automa and II feticcio, 1963); and fixation or bad faith (L'attenzione, 1965). To this list we must of course add those forms of inauthenticity examined so ironically in Moravia's last work, emptiness and desecration (La vita interiore, 1979). This last novel adds terrorism to by now familiar Moravian topoi of sex and money. Significantly, La vita interiore (Time of Desecration) was banned in Rome under Italy's obscenity laws, rekindling once again issues originally raised in 1929 with appearance of The Time of Indifference. The work has been dismissed as simply filthy by some reviewers and cited by others as proof of