Alberto Moravia Research Articles

Naipaul's ‘India’: History and the myth of antiquity

In Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s sequel to Empire, there is a fragment called ‘Two Italians in India’. The two writers, Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini, for these two theorists represent even in their differences of attitude to India essentially an identical species or as they say, ‘fable of the two faces of Eurocentrism: “They are utterly different from us” and “They are just the same as us”’.2 The theorists end on a homiletic note about the singular nature of Indian difference ‘in itself’. Indian singularity is the perfect expression of the value these two place on the multitude, what they call the ‘dynamic relation of the common’. In this article, I amgoing to look at V. S. Naipaul’s writing on India. For Naipaul, difference prevents the emergence of common interest. In Naipaul’s non-fictional strategy, rendering the dynamic relation of the Indian multitude involves the mobilization of India’s past. Unlike the three Italians and an American I began with, there is no way Naipaul can write about India’s spontaneous reality (Pasolini’s ‘l’odore dell’India’ or Moravia’s ‘un’idea dell’India’) without figuring India’s present in relation to its past. I am not making a case for any distended modern sense for India, neither am I concerned with the peculiar modality this sense might reproduce for domesticating India – in Hardt and Negri’s subtitle – for democracy in the age of empire. I am limiting myself to the specificity of Naipaul’s vision of India and the way India’s past, its singularity-in-difference, so to speak, intrudes into this vision.

Vidal and Mailer

My own most cherished memories are of the writers I crossed paths with in Rome-Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer, Joseph Heller, Pete Hamill, Muriel Spark, Francine du Plessix Gray, Donald Barthelme, Giorgio Bassani, Alberto Moravia, Luigi Barzini and Italo Calvino. But the one I got to know best was, surprisingly, Gore Vidal. I say surprisingly because Vidal had a reputation as cold, remote, and impersonal, if not downright imperious. Yet from the first he was hospitable to Linda and me, and invited us for drinks at his apartment. The evening was hot, the air heavy with humidity, and though it was late October, a summer thunderstorm felt imminent. We caught a bus on the Gianicolo that careened downhill into Trastevere crammed with commuters. It was rush hour-one of the four traffic jams that Roman drivers endure each day-and cars stalled on Ponte Garibaldi. I didn't mind. From the bridge, we had mesmeric views of the Tiber, flowing dark and turbid below us, and of the dome of St. Peter's, gleaming like a bishop's miter off to our left. Back then I was more familiar with Vidal's non-

Enigmas of Modern Jewish Identity

C ^ x *rhat is left of identity when both language and religion are gone? This is the question posed at the outset of a monograph on six twentieth-century Italian writers whom the author, the late H. Stuart Hughes, designates asJewish.1 The difficulty of answering his own question is not reduced because of his choice of writers: Italo Svevo and Alberto Moravia were baptized Catholics whose novels barely contain anyJewish characters. Also a Roman Catholic was the mother of Natalia Ginzburg, who herself grew up without any religious instruction. Both Carlo Levi and Primo Levi suffered under Italian fascism for their political activities, rather than for the faith that they did not practice; nor did either have a strong sense of peoplehood. Of Hughes's writers, only Giorgio Bassani-the author of Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, translated in 1965 as The Garden of theFinzi-Continis, adapted into a famous film by Vittorio De Sica-wrote fiction in which Jewish life was presented not merely as a parenthesis, and he showed a keen interest in cultivating his ethnic heritage. The Jewish patrimony of these half-dozen authors is therefore an elusive one. A distinctive Jewish language had already disappeared in Italy a couple of centuries earlier, and so fully had most of its Jews propelled themselves from the severities of law and ritual that, as Hughes noted, Reform Judaism exercised no attraction because it seemed so unnecessary. Although Carlo Levi and Primo Levi brandished priestly appellations, the surnames of many Italian Jews-a synonym like coreligionists does not seem apt-have often been drawn from the towns their families inhabited. How might the historian of modern Jewry penetrate what Freud, in a seemingly offhand remark to the B'nai B'rith in Vienna in 1926, called innere Identitat?

Enigmas of Modern Jewish Identity

What is left of identity when both language and religion are gone?" This is the question posed at the outset of a monograph on six twentieth-century Italian writers whom the author, the late H. Stuart Hughes, designates as Jewish. 1 The difficulty of answering his own question is not reduced because of his choice of writers: Italo Svevo and Alberto Moravia were baptized Catholics whose novels barely contain any Jewish characters. Also a Roman Catholic was the mother of Natalia Ginzburg, who herself grew up without any religious instruction. Both Carlo Levi and Primo Levi suffered under Italian fascism for their political activities, rather than for the faith that they did not practice; nor did either have a strong sense of peoplehood. Of Hughes's writers, only Giorgio Bassani--the author of Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, translated in 1965 as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, adapted into a famous film by Vittorio De Sica--wrote fiction in which Jewish life was presented not merely as a parenthesis, and he showed a keen interest in cultivating his ethnic heritage.

The Architecture of Imagery in Alberto Moravia's Fiction

The Architecture of Imagery in Alberto Moravia's Fiction

Homage to Pasolini on the Twentieth Anniversary of His Murder

Pier Paolo Pasolini, born in Bologna on March 5, 1922, and raised in the Friuli region of Venetia, is, in the words of Alberto Moravia, the major Italian poet of the second half of the twentieth century. He was also a filmmaker, novelist, and political journalist of genius. He was murdered twenty years ago, on November 2, 1975.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Architecture of Imagery in Alberto Moravia's Fiction

The Architecture of Imagery in Alberto Moravia's Fiction

A testemunha ocular: algumas considerações sobre 1934 de Alberto Moravia

Este artigo procura contextualizar a obra de 1934, do escritor italiano Alberto Moravia, no âmbito do panorama da literatura italiana contemporânea, ressaltando os aspectos referentes à crise do intelectual na sociedade contemporânea.

Readers and mythic signs: the Oedipus myth in twentieth-century fiction

Debra A. Moddelmog offers the first book to explore fully the process of reading and interpreting myth in fiction.Some literary scholars view myth criticism as passe, an approach to literature that enjoyed a heyday in the l950s and 1960s before being replaced by approaches that are considered to be more theoretically sophisticated and satisfying, such as feminism, new historicism, and deconstruction. Moddelmog argues that there are many good reasons not to cast out myth criticism from the community of critical approaches. Most obvious among them is that myth has attracted many writers of this centuryfrom James Joyce to Thomas Pynchon, Virginia Woolf to Flannery O Connor, Thomas Mann to Alain Robbe-Grillet, William Faulkner to Alberto Moraviaand that to ignore myth is to dismiss an essential part of their work. Moddelmog suggests that by reconstruing the relationship between myth and literature, we will find that mythic approaches are frequently not only necessary but also highly stimulating, engaging readers in many varieties of questions, quests, and conclusions.Thus in this study she provides a poetics for myth in twentieth-century fiction, arguing that the nature of myth is to inspire interpretation, that every myth carries with it an intertextual body of theories regarding its meaning and yet remains capable of evoking new meaning. When used in fiction, myth therefore functions like a language, with the reader attempting to negotiate meaning for the myth or its key actions, its mythemes, while at the same time responding to the interpretive cues of the text itself. Because of the complicated demands placed on readers by both the myth and the text, readers who pursue myth in fiction are not simple translators or reactors but rather are participants in a dialogue involving numerous texts, a dialogue that is finally interminable.In support of the poetics she proposes, Moddelmog presents several chapters devoted to the study of twentieth-century fiction in which the Oedipus myth appears. Each chapter focuses on a specific interpretative issue that is related to the experience of reading myth in fiction but one that also examines a genre of fiction in which the Oedipus myth recurs. Chapter 3 (on the science fiction of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Philip Jose Farmer, Philip K. Dick, and Roger Zelazny) reveals not only how a single mytheme can evoke a complex reading process but also how each reading of a work containing a myth influences the next reading of a similar work. Chapter 4 (on antidetective works written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, and Thomas Pynchon) addresses genre questions that the mytheme as structural unit calls forth. Chapter 5 (on psychological fiction written by Flannery O Connor, Alberto Moravia, and Max Frisch) looks at the appropriation of the Oedipus myth by psychoanalysis and the consequences of that appropriation by those who are reading and writing after Freud.

Say It with Flowers: Imagistic Representations of Women in Alberto Moravia's Prose

Alberto Moravia was one of the most important and thoroughly discussed writers of contemporary Italy. His recent death in the autumn of 1990 has drawn even more focus upon his works. His fiction has always been dissected by Italy's circle of literary critics; indeed, anything by Moravia has attracted the immediate attention of serious scholars (as well as the general reading public), not only in Italy but in almost every other country in the western world. This is attested to by the large number of translations of his novels, short stories and essays into the major languages (English, French, German and Spanish, among many others). Moravia wrote over thirty novels and short story collections. As with most great single-authored bodies of work, the thematics of his fiction are matched by creative and effective writing, especially in his use of an extraordinary amount of imagery (specifically metaphor and simile) to develop his characters; but when Hegel wrote on plants and animals, women and men, he could never have predicted what Moravia's works would have yielded to the careful reader some onehundred years later. Nor could he have foreseen the uniquely Moravian turn, the imagistic attribution of flora and fauna predominantly to the women of his fictive creation, not to mention the addition of the gourmet component. Throughout Alberto Moravia's complete works, there appear some 850 different similes and metaphors (about 1750 images in all); many are repeated time and again. Most of these images, about 1450, refer

Woman as Object: Language and Gender in the Work of Alberto Moravia

Alberto Moravia is one of the best known and most widely translated writers to come out of contemporary Italy. This study suggests new ways of reading his fiction in the context of recent works of feminist and cultural theory about gender, the structure of subjectivity and the processes of narrative. It argues that an analysis of Moravia's presentation of contemporary man is incomplete without looking at his vision of women. Sharon Wood aims to show this narrative form to be a traditional moralising exploitation of women, the medium for Moravia's own preoccupation with man. Wood's reassessment goes beyond the feminist criticism of the 1970's which dwelt on the context of Moravia's work. She suggests that he is confined by form, this his use of language and gender reflects, rather than challenges, Italian society, and is linked to a political vision that is ultimately reactionary.

Woman as Object. Language and Gender in the Work of Alberto Moravia

Woman as Object. Language and Gender in the Work of Alberto Moravia

'For better, for worse': Elements of irony and reversal in Alberto Moravia's <I>L'Amore coniugale</I>

'For better, for worse': Elements of irony and reversal in Alberto Moravia's <I>L'Amore coniugale</I>

Why Has Incest Always Been Repressed? A Conversation with Alberto Moravia

Curious relations between taboos and pleasure are implicit in "The Life", now being filmed by Giovanni Soldati.

Why Has Incest Always Been Repressed? A Conversation with Alberto Moravia

Curious relations between taboos and pleasure are implicit in "The Life", now being filmed by Giovanni Soldati.

Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of the Italian Jews, 1924-1974

1. The Most Ancient of Minorities 2. Exercises in Futility: Trieste and Rome The Redeemed and the Eternal City Italo Svevo's Discomfort: Premature Aging and Belated Fame Alberto Moravia's World-Weary Adolescents 3. Two Captives Called Levi Fascism and Italian Jewry The Physician. Painter Don Carlo: Exile and Wonder-Worker The Chemist Primo: Poet of the Concentration Camp Prisoners of Hope 4. The Moment of Recollection: Turin The Testimony of Four Memoirists Natalia Ginzburg: The Painful Apprenticeship Natalia Ginzburg: The Arrival and the Departure of the Jews 5. The Moment of Recollection: Ferrara The Incomparable Walled City Giorgio Bassani: To the Paradise Garden Giorgio Bassani: The Splendor of Death The Cycle Closed 6. The Meanings of Survival Notes Index

Holograms of Humanity: The Negative Reality of Alberto Moravia's Postwar Novels

Holograms of Humanity: The Negative Reality of Alberto Moravia's Postwar Novels

Alberto Moravia: Fetishism and Figuration

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

The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology

level: entry into enclosed space emergence from it. What is not easily explained is something else: the stability of this schema even in cases where direct link with the world of myth has been consciously broken. When Pushkin in Prophet gave an exceptionally precise and detailed picture of acquiring the gift of Shamanism (that is to say prophecy) and one which has now received confirmation in wide variety of texts right down to such details as the insertion into the mouth of a small snake which embodies magical powers (Propp, 1946: 79), he did not know the sources which the modern ethnographer has at his disposal. In the same way we can understand his poem without calling to mind the parallels from the prophet Isaiah and from the Koran which probably were the closest sources for the images of initiation in Prophet (see Old Testament, Isaiah 6; Kashtaleva, n.d.; Chernjaev, 1898). To appreciate Pushkin's text it is no more necessary to know of the link between its images and rituals of initiation (or consecration as Shaman) than it is necessary for our ability to speak language to know about the origin of its grammatical categories. Such knowledge is useful, but it is not minimal condition for the understanding of the text. The hidden mytho-ritual carcass has turned into formal grammatical foundation for the construction of text about the death of the old man and the re-birth of the clairvoyant. We find this double process on the one hand the forgetting of the content side of the initiation complex to the point of its complete formalization and consequent transformation into something not consciously felt by the reader (not perhaps even by the author), and yet on the other, the presence of this, now unconscious, complex of ideas most conspicuously in Alberto Moravia's novel Disobedience. The story concerns modern youth's growth into manhood. The novel touches upon modern questions of youthful rebellion, of rejection of the world, and the tormented transition from rebellious egotism and the cult of self-destruction to the open acceptance of life. Yet the plot movement is structured according to an ancient schema: the end of childhood (the end of the first life) is marked by constantly increasing attraction to death, conscious breaking of the ties linking the hero to the world, (rebellion against his parents, against the bourgeois world, turns into rebellion against life as such). This is followed by lengthy illness which brings the hero to the point of death and is an unambiguous substitute for it (the pages describing the dying youth's delirium are equivalent to the descent into the world beyond the grave in mythological texts). The first involvement with woman (the sick boy's nurse) signifies the beginning of the return to life, move from nihilism and rebellion to acceptance of the world, to new birth. This clearly mythological schema, reproducing the classical contours of initiation, culminates in the expressive final image of the This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 05:42:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Asia: The Red Book and the Great Wall: An Impression of Mao's China By Alberto Moravia, from Italian Ronald Strom. Secker & Warburg, London. 1968. 158p. 25sh

Asia: The Red Book and the Great Wall: An Impression of Mao's China <i>By</i> Alberto Moravia, from Italian Ronald Strom. Secker &amp; Warburg, London. 1968. 158p. 25sh