"If I were healthy, my right leg wouldn't have prevented me from moving... I certainly don't have the idea of writing a novel." This was the beginning of Alberto Moravia's rise to the literary scene. Illness can change the way life is lived and perceived. Proust, McCullers, and Sontag are all. This is the persecution of "limitation"—the mind and observation must be constantly sharp, and the life energy must be released instead. Moravia was tossed by tuberculosis for nearly a decade, and as a teenager, he spent most of his time in bed rest. This did not affect the birth of the standard-bearer of Italian literature in the 20th century. He has a lot of time to "take over" the legacy of his predecessors and has enough patience to learn various languages. Recuperation can always give the writer leisure to experience a long time, like "In Search of Lost Time" or "Magic Mountain".
Italian writer Alberto Moravia (1907-1990)
As early as the age of 16, Moravia began to brew the novel "The Indifferent Man", which was written at the age of 21. Debut is the peak, often there are hidden worries about lack of stamina, but Moravia uses the peak to prove the staying power of creation. "Roman Woman", "The Same Stream", "Despise", almost every work is a classic of film and television adaptation. The reason for this is that he has gone his own way, which is different from both the critical realist tradition and the modernist stream of consciousness, and the flood of new realism. He bases the depth of psychoanalysis on worldly customs, social ills and symptoms of the times, just as Henry James paired with half a Merimé.
In my opinion, Moravia plays an important chain link. He took on dostoevsky's superiority in psychological fiction, placed it on the foundation of the novel of social problems, and opened the precursor of existential literature. The indifference and alienation of The Outsider, and the resistance of Disgusting to the outside world, began early in Moravia. Camus's admiration for him is more like a tribute: "Our Italian friends embody in all their creations today a kind of open-mindedness, a heartfelt enthusiasm, a distinct simplicity, which is slightly lacking in our French works." ”
Novel air pressure and atmosphere master
Moravian is good at creating novel air pressures, such as the control of high pressure and the vortex of low pressure. It creates an overall picture of mood that precedes the conflict of events. "Contempt" writes about the contradictions between a couple in emotional cognition, quite abstract and hidden. Ricardo thinks his wife Emilia no longer loves him. The wife initially denied it, and eventually bluntly stated that she despised her husband, but did not say why. This refers to the conflict between recognition and evidence. If we borrow the legal principle of "who advocates, who proves", the novel is insoluble. It raises the question of literary convictions, namely feelings and language, which is primary and what should we believe? Its essence is a doubt about the reliability of the narrative.
Contempt by Moravia
The parts that the husband can neither prove nor falsify are the core of the novel. It corresponds precisely to the indifference of the wife, neither acknowledging nor denying it. The novel's form of direction is driven by inference assumptions, and it is not until the end that the possible reason for the contempt is thrown out: the wife believes that her husband intends to give himself to the producer in order to work—even if she cheats in person, it does not provoke her husband's reaction. This kind of intellectual self-esteem, nervously desperated hesitation, and repeated vacillation weakness can all be summed up as "not like men." This statement of the wife completely destroys the husband's deduction and cunning, speculation and justification.
What is there to write about this story? It is easy to fall into the superficiality of the "seven-year itch". But the writer intends to analyze the process of emotional encroachment on internal friction. The text of the novel is to find and understand the symptoms of marriage. The unsolvable dead knot can only rely on the diffuse expression of silent confrontation by emotion. It relies on a dual narrative, manifested as contrast and synchronicity. Only by juxtaposing the two lives can we compare and survey the changes in bodily consciousness and verbal response before and after the survey. Its function is to participate in the present feelings and understand the present moment of life with the appearance of the past. Reality usually only gives people a flat moment. Only when the husband compares the tenderness and sweetness of the past can he experience the desertification and decay of emotions. It inadvertently stitches together the positive and negative of the story: love and contempt, truth and contrivance, authenticity and falsehood.
Moravia even used the epic Odyssey to echo the contemporary couple, constituting a secondary "subtext". Ricardo took over the task of adapting the epic script. Like Chandler, he cursed and grinned as a screenwriter and despised the vulgar understanding of directors and producers. The director wants to adapt it into a fantasy blockbuster with exotic adventures, and the producer wants to turn "Odyssey" into a psychoanalytic family drama - Penelope has no love, only loyalty; Odyssey escapes from his family, and his subconscious mind causes him to be blocked on the road and difficult to return. This stabbed Ricardo in his loveless marriage to Emilia. The novel forms a strong confrontation, and the narrative is achieved by argument. Ricardo looks at epics and life with a sense of sublimeness and lyricism far from reality. Apparently, the wife and the producer are on the opposite side of the utilitarian world. Emilia's death in a car accident means that the writer forever deprives Riccardo of the opportunity to argue and persuade his wife.
The writer blunts all the twists in the marriage so much that it is difficult to find moments of conflict and events. For example, the light and dark boundary of the sketch is not a clear line, but a transition surface of the turn. The mood of the novel is not a definite inflection point, it relies on the character's perception verification, the area of perception of the change of consciousness. The writer subtly completes the emotional reversal, just like a good singer makes people unable to find a breathing point. He cut to the essence of life—trivial deposits, superimposed perceptions, and illusions that always make people wishful thinking.
"Interior novels" with family dramas
In 1929, Moravian's debut novel, The Indifferent Man, laid the groundwork for a new layout. I think the secret is to write "indoor novels" in the form of "family dramas" while delving into social psychology and moral observation. As Calvino puts it, Moravian "regularly submits works that contain different definitions of morality over time in our time, closely related to customs, social changes, and popular ideological indicators." "The Indifferent Man takes a family perspective on the moral wasteland of the Italian propertied class, the total collapse of social psychology. The structure of the novel is highly dramatic, from scene to time: a short period of time in a villa, without branches and complicated characters. The novel was originally titled "Five People and Two Days", as illustrated by "The Arden Family and Lisa and Melumeche".
It establishes the geometric form of the relationship between the characters: the mother and sibling form a core triangle, representing Leo the intruder (the mother's lover), acting as the "distraction" of the farce Lisa. Moravia uses Leo to pull the family's triangular apex, first possessing her mother, then coveting her sister, and clashing with her younger brother. More dramatically, the characters are two-sided in a large loop. Lisa is Leo's former fiancée, her mother is Leo's current lover, her sister commits herself to Leo in pursuit of a "new life", and Lisa seduces her brother. This "turntable treatment" implies ethical dislocation and confusion, and the tension and superposition of contradictions.
The Indifferent Man by Moravia
Moravia tests the morality of literature, where the limits are. "The Indifferent Man" is reminiscent of "Lolita", the mother's lover, who plays the daughter's calculation. At the same time, it also features both Edgar Poe and Wilde's symbolic depictions of decay and contempt, such as the combination of The Collapse of The House of Usher and The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Almost every interior arrangement points to a spiritual metaphor. The repressive suffocation of the villa, the vulgarity of the furniture, reveals the possession control of the mother, the hypocrisy and glitz, and the stupidity of Lisa's pretending to be naïve and the debauchery of showing off the style. This allegorical psychoanalysis of the artifact environment is particularly wonderful.
Preferring to remain indifferent rather than pretending to be "very moral." Moravian presents an extreme "divergence" of speech and psychology: each line of dialogue insincerely becomes a "reverse", suppressing the diametrically opposed mind-brain consciousness. Her sister, Carla, knew that Leo was greedy and cunning, whether she was her mother's lover or dedicated herself to him. Younger brother Michelet both felt deeply disgusted and vulgar about Lisa and accepted her flirtation with pity. This paradox speaks volumes about the essence of indifference—unconsciousness, lack of action, the ability to give up love and hate. Like a descendant of Hamlet, Michelet was unable to take revenge, bought a gun but did not get a bullet, and even Leo's "fur" did not touch.
Psychoanalysis and Differential Reality
Realism, there are always many faces. What we are most happy about is critical realism, such as Balzac's macroscopic, extroverted critique of totality, human analysis. I would like to correspond to this, which can be called psychological realism, which focuses on differential, introverted mental reality, and Moravia is one of these categories. If the former insists on reproducing the world in the mirror, the latter intends to consider the mirror itself. Both "Contempt" and "The Indifferent Man" are research writings on the nature of the mind. It has an experimental temperament and explores the limiting and complex structure of the character's psychology.
Despising has a surroachronal sense of reality, anticipating how material bases (property, work, and income) shape physical desires and transform gender relations. This kind of materialism, at the same time, cuts to the difficulty of survival, and despises the vulgar flood of "sweet and cool" in literary and artistic creation. Moravian writes about the overwhelmingity of the decision, which is the reaction of the chain that comes backwards. The protagonist needs a house to win the love of a woman, and the repayment of the loan can only do disgusting work, driven by people. Writers question the reliability of ideals and reality almost simultaneously. Also the theme of "The Moon and Sixpence", "Despising" writes anti-poetic, anti-illusion, anti-epic pain.
It is reminiscent of the concerns of new literature since May Fourth, such as Lu Xun's "Wounded Death" and Mao Dun's "Creation". Intellectuals are unable to implant ideological smugness on gender relations and family feelings. This contrast between powerlessness and superiority is the frustration of enlightenment. "Contempt" has always been a hint at the wife's class and typist status, belonging to the uncivilized culture. And the odyssey seems to have become a self-comparison of husbands, symbolizing the wisdom of civilization. This is similar to Mao Dun's writing of a "new woman" in which a man creates a pair of dengs.
Carla and Emilia may be of the same type—the unknown chaotic void. Emilia has nowhere to go without her husband, and Carla has no "new life" from her old home, just as Nala doesn't know what to do after she runs away. Moravia could not give an answer; he himself was a member of bourgeoisie and did not want to oppose anything. He simply "laid out the truth about a Bourgeois family, truthfully portraying what each person was doing and in his state of mind", and "I just wanted to get out of — even if only temporarily — the suffocating atmosphere and environment." (Editor-in-charge: Li Jing)