Svevo, Blogging and the Future of Literature Giuliana Minghelli (bio) The ethos of writing, and the status of the writer and that unruly object known as literature, preoccupied Italo Svevo throughout his career. From the beginning, Svevo wrote about writing.1 Be it salvation or ruination, writing is the crucial experience in the life of his characters. Novel writing, shared dreaming, diary keeping, literary criticism, or fable-telling contests, the act of writing—and the ancillary act of dreaming—is the dramatic action in Svevo’s narrative world. Perhaps with the exception of Zeno (but even in his case we could argue to the contrary), life comes as an after-effect of literature.2 Rather than granting a secular after-life, writing for Svevo’s characters is what inaugurates (or thwarts) the possibility of living. As the double name Ettore Schmitz/Italo Svevo dramatizes, the two distinct regimens of living and writing are experienced and thought of by Svevo not as separate experiences but as coterminous, coalescent, overlapping instances, fluidly conversing with one another. This essay will explore Svevo’s original interweaving of life and literature through a reading of his theory of artistic expression and his socio-cultural analysis of [End Page S126] literary practice. In a turn-of-the-century panorama revolutionized by new media of mass communication, Svevo’s reflection bears important insights for our own turn of the century’s new practices of writing and living fostered by the Internet, in particular the phenomenon of blogging. Svevo’s mixing of life and literature could be read simply as a biographical effect, the unfortunate outcome of life’s contingencies: the story of a talented writer forced by economic necessity and marriage to set aside pen and paper and become a businessman in his in-laws’ paint factory. And yet, what we might call Svevo’s double allegiance is first of all an ontological condition of the poet, as he does not fail to remind us: “il sognatore … fa sempre una doppia vita e tutt’e due equivalenti per intensità” (“Echi modani,” Teatro e saggi 1088). This being the case, Svevo’s circumstances are in a way nothing but a footnote to what constitutes an inescapable condition, described by Svevo as “quella mia certa assenza continua ch’è il mio destino” (“Soggiorno londinese,” Teatro e saggi 899). On yet another level, and one of particular import for the present reflection, Svevo’s double life generates very specific material conditions under which literature is produced. The unwonted quotidian confrontation between the imperative to dream and write and the necessity to function in the world of business offers the occasion for what Bertolt Brecht defined as Umfunktionierung, the functional transformation of the task of the writer and the form and instruments of literary production. Because of his double status as writer and worker (even if managerial rather than proletarian), Svevo embodies the tensions and new possibilities that are central to modern art. Highly conscious of these changes, Svevo early on reflected on the new status of the writer in the pages of the Triestine daily L’indipendente. In a series of articles, the young journalist and aspiring writer sketched a cultural analysis of contemporary literary and theatrical production that precociously explored the changing roles of the various cultural players—author, public, critic—in fin de siècle society. Before we unravel the originality of Svevo’s position, it will be helpful to place him in the context of Italy’s cultural scene at the time. The fate of the poet, the role of the reading public, and the future of “good” writing were urgent questions in Italy as well as in Europe. Maria Grazia Lolla outlines a double tension informing cultural attitudes toward reading and writing in Post-Unification Italy.3 On [End Page S127] the one hand, faced with a dramatically low literacy rate, the government and the educational system tried to increase readership and foster a national literature. Whether popular, explicitly pedagogical or artistic, a flourishing literature was perceived as a necessary basis for strong nation building. However, as the internal publishing market expanded and readership grew, the image of the reader as a subaltern subject was transformed into...