Alfonso Nitti’s Inertia or Impotentiality: Reconsidering Ineptitude in Italo Svevo’s Una Vita (2025)

Abstract

Introduction

Many scholars have assumed that Italo Svevo’s main characters are inetti [inept people], passive figures unable to achieve their goals and therefore subject to negative judgment. Strange as it may sound, the actual term ‘inetto’ [inept], on which a whole critical tradition has been based, is mostly absent from Svevo’s texts with a few exceptions. For instance, the novel Una vita [A Life] (1892) was originally entitled Un inetto [An Inept Person], the word ‘inettezza’ [ineptness] is present in the short story ‘Una lotta’ [‘A Fight’] and Senilità [As a Man Grows Older] contains one mention of respectively ‘inettitudine’ [ineptitude] and ‘inetti’.1 Nevertheless, the word inetto has become a direct correlative of Svevo’s characters, specifically describing someone who is inactive, unable to carry on their actions and weak. I argue that most scholarship has locked Svevo’s ‘inept’ character in a negative definition because much criticism understands this form of life exclusively against the background of an alleged superiority or priority of action and productivity. Building on the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s recent reconceptualization of impotentiality, I bring forward new evidence for a reinterpretation of Svevo’s representation of ‘ineptitude’ as a mechanism that allows the character to resist merging with capitalist society and a bourgeois mentality thanks to his ‘inertia’.

Today, it is mostly thanks to Agamben that the concepts of potentiality and especially of impotentiality have been rediscovered. This latter concept plays a significant role in his philosophy as it suggests an alternative way of being that leads to his theory of inoperosità [inoperativity]. Without delving too far into the details of Agamben’s philosophy, he believes, building on Aristotle, that since potentiality is always simultaneously a potentiality to not-be then true potentiality is only that which conserves its impotentiality – its potentiality to not-be – when passing into actuality.2 This theory fundamentally challenges the concept of actuality and undermines the presumed necessity of the passage from potentiality to actuality. The possibility of undermining this assumption is crucial since the idea that a potentiality exists in order to be actualized has defined the history of human identity and value in Western society, often leading to forms of exploitation and exclusion. In other words, actualization, manifested as activity and productivity, has become the primary value to determine who we are and how valuable we are in the society in which we live. Aside from Agamben’s solution for how impotentiality preserves itself in actuality, the importance of his contribution to the Western understanding of human identity is the fact that he was able to pave the way toward a definition of human identity also based on what we can not-do and not-be. But is this something really new? By examining ‘ineptitude’ and ‘inertia’ in Svevo’s Una vita through the lenses of Agamben’s concepts, this article demonstrates how the priority of activity and productivity was already challenged by some modernist authors who, in turn, attempted a positive re-evaluation of forms of impotentiality.

The representation of ineptitude in the arts, and in literature in particular, is the mirror of a broader social phenomenon characterizing the modern world toward the end of the nineteenth century: a general crisis of the notion of man and male identity, and correlatively of action and virility.3 The multiplication of ‘inept’ characters and men ‘without qualities’ or ‘from the underground’ in literature mirrors the transformation in bourgeois society from the competition phase to monopolistic concentration and mass society; on the one hand, this transformation downgrades the traditional middle class, but on the other, it creates a new middle class, albeit one that is anonymous and de-personalized in the midst of ever more unreachable economic and bureaucratic powers.4 Considering this historical and economic context, Guido Baldi explains that it is understandable how, in the pages of the writers of this period, ‘l’impotenza sociale dei ceti medi, la declassazione del ruolo intellettuale e la crisi della nozione di individuo’ [the social impotence of the middle class, the demotion of the intellectual role and the crisis of the notion of the individual] translate into the representation of a character defined by ‘impotenza psicologica’ [psychological impotence] and the impossibility of incarnating a father figure – which should also be understood as a symbol of the struggle with patriarchal society.5 In other words, we are facing ‘la crisi del personaggio come portatore di “agency”’ [a crisis of the character as a carrier of ‘agency’] typical of high modernism.6 As a matter of fact, this character is not the only typical figure of this literary historical period according to Baldi’s survey, recently confirmed by Matteo Palumbo.7 Beside the representation of inept characters – ‘weak creatures, defeated, incapable of choosing and acting, of achieving personal fulfillment in their relations with others, cloistered in contemplation’8 – an archetype of the exceptional man rises. An extraordinary sensibility favours this character: he is superior to the masses, a worshipper of his ego and capable of living in a higher dimension, be it aesthetic or mystic. He is a champion of action: an aggressive, strong and dominating Übermensch.9

As accurate as Baldi’s historical and social explanation of the emergence of these two different characters may be, these two kinds of protagonists seem to be in themselves historically situated and limited by the criticism’s own historical and cultural understanding. The positive evaluation of strength, action and productivity creates a negative perception of weakness, incapacity and inaction. In this sense, like many other critics who have interpreted ineptitude exclusively in negative terms, Baldi continues to tune into a particularly Italian cultural wavelength, one that is characteristic of Umbertine Italy, specifically in the decades of Crispi’s hegemony, which was oriented toward the strengthening of the bourgeois state characterized by efficiency, ability and a political ideology that aimed to overcome the miseries of the time through myths of aptitude and strength.10 In contrast with this positivistic ideology, I draw attention to another type of character present during these years, although often unnoticed. It may be described as inept and mainly characterized by incapacity, but contrary to a conventional definition, in this character incapacity becomes a potentiality to not-act or to not-be and, by extension, a potentiality to make the dominant social and economic structures inoperative. It is this third type of character that we find in some of Svevo’s texts and that few critics have recognized.11

We already find a negative definition of the word ‘inetto’ in the first reviews of Svevo’s novels,12 and it acquires even more strength among critics in the 1960s and 1970s, including Giacomo Debenedetti. Debenedetti explains that the contemporary aesthetic rejection by critics and the reading public against the different type of literature embodied in James Joyce’s, Marcel Proust’s and Svevo’s texts was symptomatic of a more profound change.13 At stake was the representation of a different kind of individual who provoked the most intense, moralistic reproaches.14 Svevo was subject to the same accusations that were directed at Joyce and Proust. For Debenedetti, these criticisms especially addressed the unveiling of the inner desires and motives governing human beings, hitherto considered taboo. With regard to Svevo, however, I argue that this aspect was not the only one against which his readership was revolting. Svevo was also depicting a type of inept character that contrasted with the idea of male identity that predominated at the turn of the twentieth century, namely the idea of the ‘superuomo dannunziano’ [D’Annunzio’s Superman], the man of action and of will-to-power, the man of progress who was able to dominate nature through technology and science. We should not forget that Svevo wrote and published his novels in a political atmosphere characterized by irredentism and later by interventionism. Some regions of Italy still under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire wanted annexation to the Italian peninsula. Successively, these tendencies converged and partly fueled the interventionist movements that demanded Italy’s declaration of war on Austria in World War II. Both these chauvinistic and militaristic ideologies were based on violent action and on an understanding of masculinity based on strength, efficiency and performance. It is clear how representing an inert and impotent character, a character who does not join the fight and who does not work according to capitalistic values of productivity, is a radically anachronistic gesture that was neither understood nor welcomed. These ideological views inspired much of the criticism against Svevo’s characters and influenced the scholarly understanding of ineptitude as an exclusively passive and negative phenomenon.

Debenedetti, in the conclusion of his argument, admitted that once Svevo’s readership of the 1920s and 1930s was able to understand – though not necessarily to appreciate – Svevo’s new ‘analytical’ novel, the times were then mature enough to applaud Svevo as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century alongside Joyce and Proust.15 Yet, it is worth noting that the success that Svevo achieved as a Modernist author was not shared by the figures he invented; his inept protagonists were – and often still are – solely regarded as inactive and powerless, unable to achieve and realize what they want.16 This perception should make us reflect on how strongly our perspective is still dominated by the assumption that action and productivity are exclusively positive values. More recently, however, the worth ascribed to productivity has come to be scrutinized and, in some cases, even to be viewed with suspicion. This has corresponded to the emergence of interpretations that have in part attempted to disconnect ineptitude from negative values and judgments. Among the first critics who attempted this re-evaluation are Renato Barilli and Giuseppe Antonio Camerino. The former recognized ‘un potenziale positivo’ [a positive potential]17 in ineptitude while the latter claims that the category of ineptitude, despite being characterized by an inferiority complex, by the refusal to fight or to act and by a contemplative attitude, nonetheless proves a weapon against the bourgeois society that stigmatizes and laughs at these inept figures. In other words, it is this very ineptitude that allows the single individual to avoid assimilation to ‘le regole formali e alienanti della società borghese. […] La salvezza dell’individuo consiste nel rifiuto totale sia dell’attività pratica sia dei valori sociali e del codice morale dell’ambiente affaristico’ [bourgeois society’s formal and alienating rules. […] Individual salvation consists in the entire refusal of both practical activity and social values and the moral code of the business environment].18 In a similar way, Lia Fava Guzzetta maintains that ineptitude may thus appear as ‘un tentativo paradossale e disperato, di contestazione e di messa in discussione di questa società iper-attiva e iper-tesa esclusivamente all’affermazione e al possesso’ [a desperate and paradoxical attempt at contesting and calling into question this hyper-active society, hyper-oriented exclusively to self-affirmation and possession].19 Some more recent books orient themselves in the same direction. For instance, Giuliana Minghelli admits that Svevo’s protagonist, as an ‘abbozzo’ [sketched figure], corresponds to a ‘pure state of potentiality’.20 Similarly, Deborah Anderson recognizes that Svevo’s characters’ ineptitude takes the form of a potentiality in which ‘human embodiment’ manifests and corresponds to an ideological refusal of the capitalistic rationalization and colonization of reality.21

This necessarily cursory review of the literature nonetheless allows us to see how the critique of the category of ineptitude is divided into two primary currents; the current that seems to have mostly influenced perceptions of Svevo’s protagonist is the one that has read and still reads the inept figure in a derogatory manner. Yet, all these distinct and, at times, opposite interpretations share, rather than call into question, the very assumption that ‘inetto’ and ‘inettitudine’ are the terms to be analysed and employed to define Svevo’s characters.22 This article shows that the analysis of ineptitude through the terms ‘inerzia’ and ‘inerte’ can tell us something new about this category. This reinterpretation will reveal that the figure of the inetto and the category of ineptitude may in fact hide a form of impotentiality that has nothing to do with inaction or incapacity, but rather involves a different type of non-action that may lead us not only to a reconsideration of this figure in literature, but also to a reconsideration of the value we attribute to action to define identity and of the alternative identity that can be based on this particular form of impotentiality.

Alfonso Nitti: Inertia or impotentiality

Let us start with Svevo’s very first novel Una vita, originally titled Un inetto.23 Alfonso Nitti is an employee of the bank owned by the Maller family. His occupation is not of primary importance within the bank’s hierarchy; he is ‘un impiegato’ [a clerk] who copies and typesets the letters signed by Maller. The narrator appoints him and some of his colleagues as ‘scrivani’ [scriveners or copyists].24 The peculiarity of this job connects Alfonso to another famous scrivener in literature: Herman Melville’s Bartleby in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’. Massimiliano Tortora25 and Jobst Welge26 associate Una vita with the figure of the employee and thus of Bartleby, although they neglect important similarities between these two characters’ copy work.27

Alfonso’s job consists of transcribing and copying offer letters for the bank. He does not like this occupation nor is he even particularly interested in it:

Non trovandoci altro più forte interesse, Alfonso, per legare l’attenzione al lavoro, usava quand’era solo di declamare ad alta voce la lettera. […] Leggendo ad alta voce la frase e ripetendola nel trascriverla, scriveva con meno fatica perché bastava il ricordo del suono nell’orecchio per dirigere la penna.28

[To keep his attention on his work, Alfonso was in the habit when alone of declaiming aloud, for lack of anything more interesting, the letter he was writing. […] By reading out a phrase and repeating it as he transcribed it, he reduced the effort of writing because he needed only the memory of the sound to direct his pen.]29

Alfonso feels obliged to continue the copy work imposed on him by Sanneo, his supervisor, who at times commissions him to write letters about contracts or bookkeeping, a ‘lavoro più variato e più piccolo’ [more varied and smaller job],30 a task for which the bank needs only a bunch of ‘imbecilli’ [fools], as Alfonso’s supervisor calls them.31

As with Bartleby, the fact that Alfonso’s work consists of copying is an essential part of his later revolt against capitalist society. According to Thomas E. Peterson, the activity of copying is crucial because ‘only once a scribe has absorbed a tradition does a meaningful innovation become possible’.32 In this light, Alfonso’s copy work simultaneously indicates his subjugation and assimilation to bourgeois society and the necessity of participating in this society to imagine a way out of it. A similar dynamic is reflected in Una vita’s structure. Indeed, if we closely follow Alfonso’s action of copying, from its unfolding at the bank to the Maller family’s ‘salotto’ [salon], Alfonso’s copy work corresponds to the first part of the novel, in which Alfonso attempts to and succeeds in copying the bourgeois and capitalist standards set by the Maller’s family. On the other hand, the second and third part of the novel, corresponding respectively to his decision to leave Annetta and to his suicide, represent the refusal of homologation and the envisioning of an alternative way of life.

Just as Bartleby succeeded in rendering capitalist dynamics inoperative by means of his famous phrase ‘I prefer not to’, so Alfonso’s possibility of escaping from conventionality and capitalist society lies in an allegedly negative aspect of his character: his ineptitude, or better still, his inertia. As Giuseppe Langella notes, it is telling that, in a novel whose title was originally ‘Un inetto’, Svevo prefers other demonyms to define his character.33 Langella examines only the antonyms we find in Tommaseo’s Dizionario dei sinonimi under the entry ‘atto, abile’ [fit for, capable] such as ‘inabile’ [unable], ‘incapace’ [incapable] and thence the term ‘malcontento’ [discontented]. Surprisingly, however, he does not consider two high-frequency words: inerte [inert] and inerzia [inertia]. I argue that these are the words around which Svevo models some of his characters34 and in which the concept of impotentiality meets that of resistance. Indeed, the narrator often describes Alfonso as ‘inerte’, frequently connecting this aspect of his character with a state of daydreaming:

Si propose di fare ordine sul suo tavolo ma rimase là inerte, seduto a sognare. Dacché era impiegato, il suo ricco organismo, che non aveva più lo sfogo della fatica di braccia e di gambe da campagnolo, e che non ne trovava sufficiente nel misero lavorio intellettuale dell’impiegato, si contentava facendo fabbricare dal cervello dei mondi intieri.35

[He thought of putting his desk in order but sat there inert, daydreaming. Ever since he had become a clerk, deprived of the physical exercise of country life and mentally stifled in his work, his great vitality had taken to creating imaginary worlds.]36

While the words inerte and inerzia have remained almost completely unanalysed in Svevo criticism,37 many critics have drawn attention to the contemplative, daydreaming aspect of some of Svevo’s protagonists. This daydreaming stands in opposition to the process of ‘annientamento e soffocamento che le strutture sociali della borghesia dirigente operano sull’individuo’ [annihilation and asphyxiation that the bourgeoisie’s social structures impose on the individual], in which Camerino recommends scholars situate Svevo’s representation of ineptitude.38 In this context, Camerino claims that ineptitude ‘[è] l’unica condizione che permette al singolo di sfuggire all’ingranaggio dell’assimilazione’ [is the only condition that allows the individual to escape the mechanism of assimilation]39 and break from the capitalist world and bourgeois activism: the opposite of states of passivity, immobilism and of the inability to act.

Similarly, Alfonso’s inertia does not correspond to laziness or to an unwillingness to work, as symbolized by the messiness of his desk, but rather to a resistance to what Novella di Nunzio terms a certain type of ‘practical work’.40 That Alfonso is not properly lazy, that he does not lack ‘la volontà’ [the will to work], but ‘la capacità’ [the capacity to do so], is clear from the following passage: ‘il povero peccatore [Alfonso] se ne andava da Sanneo a udire una grande predica sul disordine, la quale non lo migliorava perché non era la buona volontà che gli mancasse, era la capacità; il suo era un difetto organico’41 [‘the poor culprit [Alfonso] would go off to Sanneo and listen to a long sermon on disorder, which did nothing to improve the situation because he lacked not goodwill but capacity. His defect was fundamental’].42 Here Svevo refers to a defect, inertia, that deeply affects Alfonso’s internal organization. This defect is not organic, for otherwise Alfonso would not be able to carry out his work at all. That this is not the case is also confirmed by Sanneo and his superiors’ complaints not about Alfonso’s inability to work, but about his slowness, his messiness and his inability to do more than what he actually does. Indeed, Miceni, one of Alfonso’s other supervisors, tells him to write the first letter more quickly so that the other scriveners can use it as a template, but

Alfonso non sapeva scrivere presto. Gli toccava rileggere più volte prima di saper trascrivere una frase. Fra una parola e l’altra lasciava correre il suo pensiero ad altre cose e si ritrovava con la penna in mano obbligato a cancellare qualche tratto che nella distrazione gli era venuto fatto disforme dall’originale.43

[Alfonso was incapable of copying fast. He had to re-read every phrase a number of times before transcribing it. Between words he would let his thoughts run on to other subjects and then find himself with pen in hand, forced to cancel some part in which he had absent-mindedly deviated from the original.]44

Alfonso’s slowness lies in his distraction and paradoxically in his inability merely to copy mechanically. The excerpt continues:

Anche quando gli riusciva di rivolgere tutta la sua attenzione al lavoro, non procedeva con la rapidità di Miceni perché non sapeva copiare macchinalmente. Essendo attento, correva sempre col pensiero al significato di quanto copiava e ciò lo arrestava.45

[Even when he managed to turn his whole attention to his work, it did not proceed with the speed of Miceni’s because he could not get the knack of copying mechanically. When he was attentive, his thoughts were always on the meaning of what he was copying, and that held him up.]46

Alfonso’s inertia does not refer to an inability or impossibility to act, as is made clear by the fact that Maller and Sanneo cannot but praise and recognize Alfonso’s diligenza [diligence]: ‘Ho piacere di vedere ch’ella sia ancora qui; ciò mi dà prova della sua diligenza, della quale del resto non avevo mai dubitato’47 [‘I am glad to see you’re still here, a proof of diligence, which anyway I’d never doubted’].48 Later on, Sanneo is surprised that a young man like Alfonso who shows a desire to work cannot do more.49 These examples demonstrate that it is, indeed, possible and important to disconnect the word inertia and thus ineptitude from a purely negative definition that has often equated these two terms simply with incapacity, impossibility or sheer lack of work.

The time Alfonso wants to devote to his voluntary job of reading and studying at the library also shows that he is indeed willing to do a certain kind of work:

Le cieche obbedienze a Sanneo, le sgridate che giornalmente gli toccava sopportare, lo avvilivano; lo studio era una reazione a quest’avvilimento. […] Ogni istante di tempo fuori di ufficio od anche all’ufficio ove in un ripostiglio teneva alcuni libri, lo dedicava alla lettura. Erano in generale letture serie di critica o di filosofia, perché di poesia e di arte stancavano meno. Scriveva, ma poco; il suo stile, poco solido ancora, la parola impropria che diceva di più o di meno e che non colpiva mai il centro, non lo soddisfaceva. Credeva che lo studio lo avrebbe migliorato. Non aveva fretta e quel poco che faceva era a compimento di un orario che s’era prefisso per il suo lavoro volontario.50

[That blind obedience to Sanneo, the scenes he had to endure daily, disgusted him; study was his recreation. […] Every second of his time outside the office – or even in the office where he kept a few books in a cupboard – he spent reading. Generally, he read serious works of criticism and philosophy, which he found less tiring than poetry or art. He also wrote, but very little; his style was not formed, and he felt thwarted by inappropriate words which never quite hit the target. He thought study would improve this. He was in no hurry, and the little he did was in accordance with a timetable which he had laid down for his own work.]51

This passage illuminates different aspects of Alfonso’s character. On the one hand, it serves to counter the idea that Alfonso is unwilling to work and, on the other, it highlights his inability to do a certain type of work. The voluntary activity Alfonso takes up is in fact a form of resistance to the mechanical, fast-paced and constrained job of the scrivener, who is only required to copy without thinking. The time spent at the library, whether or not successful in making him a real philosopher or writer, is a way through which Alfonso is trying to escape the intellectual limits his occupation imposes on him. This different type of activity runs counter to the one he is performing for the bank in two important ways. First, it requires thought whereas the copy work just requires the ability to read words without understanding their meanings, as that may be a source of distraction. Second, the voluntary job Alfonso is undertaking does not have a goal other than general improvement. Here the ‘sogni da megalomane’ [megalomaniacal dreams]52 are not yet formulated explicitly; they remain driving forces with no actual stated purpose. This action aiming at general improvement rather than at a specific individual achievement or form of material enrichment stands in opposition to the job at the bank, where everyone works not only for their salary, but also in the hope of climbing up the hierarchy and obtaining a powerful and prestigious position within bourgeois society.

But if Alfonso is willing to work and to act, in which sense should we consider him inerte? Alfonso’s inaction and passivity are a particular form of non-action as the term inertia in fact already implies. Inertia comes from the Latin word inertia which literally means without art. ‘In’ is the negation of the word ertia, which is derived from ars-artis [art]. Originally, the term ‘art’ encompasses any corporeal or spiritual ability as it is active.53 In particular, the Sanskrit root ‘ar’ refers to the idea of setting in motion or moving toward something. According to Tommaseo and Bellini’s dictionary – the most prominent Italian dictionary of the nineteenth century – though inerte refers to ‘Chi non ha alcun’arte, o non ha tale o tal’arte’ [those who do not possess any or a specific art], the term art should be taken in the broader sense of ‘Esercizio; giacchè Exerceo e Ars e il gr. ̓Αρετὴ hanno forse l’orig. stessa’ [Exercise; since exerceo and ars in Latin as well as the Greek Αρετὴ perhaps share the same root].54 Tommaseo thus affirms that the word in-ertia refers to an activity not being exercised, rather than an inability or impossibility of acting. Indeed, as Tommaseo mentions, ‘In cose che non richieggono alcuna abilità, non ha luogo inerzia’ [in things that do not require any ability, it does not take place inertia].55 Inertia then does not apply to activities that do not require any ability.56 In addition, and very importantly for our purposes, ‘inertia’ is connected to the idea of resistance: ‘anco, Resistenza a ubbidire, a secondare l’altrui volontà’ [also, Resistance to obey, to follow the will of others].57 Tommaseo and Bellini’s dictionary lays the groundwork for the link between inertia and resistance.58

In this light, saying that Alfonso is in-erte – that is, not in action, without act – does not simply mean that he cannot act/work or does not have the ability to act/work. If ars refers to a specific way of being characterized by activity or motion, in-ertia refers to a different way of being that is without such activity or motion, but nevertheless has the potential for this motion or activity. Borrowing Agamben’s terminology, this way of being has the impotentiality to move or act. This is the ‘organic defect’ afflicting Alfonso. The nature of his being lies in this impotentiality to actualize his actions, leaving them open to the potentiality to not-be. This can be interpreted as the character’s possibility of developing further and avoiding fossilization in a fixed actuality,59 rather than as an inability or impossibility of acting, which would put the character in a situation of absolute immobility. For this reason, we could say that Alfonso’s impotential way of being has the power to make inoperative, at least in the first and last part of the book, the conventional way in which action is perceived as a realization directed to a specific and interested end.

The scholarly neglect of such an important and recurrent word in Svevo’s text and the rarity of its interpretations in terms that are not exclusively negative illustrate how difficult it has been for us to recognize a positive value in what is lacking, incomplete or impotential. Yet, Svevo admired this particular state of privation and defectiveness characterizing human beings. Consider, for instance, the fragment included under ‘L’uomo e la teoria darwiniana’ [Man and Darwin’s Theory],60 in which Svevo states:

Io credo che l’animale più capace ad evolversi sia quello in cui una parte è in continua lotta con l’altra per la supremazia, e l’animale, ora o nelle generazioni future, che abbia conservata la possibilità di evolversi da una parte o dall’altra in conformità a quanto gli sarà domandato dalla società di cui nessuno può ora prevedere i bisogni e le esigenze.

[I believe that the animal which is more capable to evolve is that in which a part is continuously fighting against the other for supremacy, and that animal, now and in the future generations, that conserves the possibility of evolving in one or the other direction according to what the future society, the needs of which nobody can foresee now, will ask from him.]61

For Svevo, the living being that has the best chance to survive in a future society is the animal whose development has not stopped and therefore has not crystallized in a fixed entity. More precisely, he adds that it is the open ‘possibility’ of developing in whatever direction that allows this future animal to survive and keep evolving according to the needs of the community in which this animal lives. The possibility of never fossilizing into an act or an entity is in fact a potentiality that always preserves in itself the potentiality to not-be – that is, its impotentiality. This conflict between a fixed actuality and an open potentiality is highlighted by Minghelli:

Only what resists what is, by remaining in a pure state of potentiality, can speak of and shape the future. […] but that which is present in any given context as the force and actualization of a form is, in fact, severed from the future.62

Svevo ascribes this potentiality to human beings generally and to himself specifically: ‘Nella mia mancanza assoluta di uno sviluppo marcato in qualsivoglia senso io sono quell’uomo’ [in my absolute lack of a marked development in whatever sense I am that man].63 The word choice is crucial here: it is the lack of a unilateral direction of development that makes Svevo the open being he describes. According to Svevo, this potential being will remain as such insofar as it is not arrested by a perfecting process that will turn this ‘abbozzo’ into a fully formed being: ‘Naturalmente quando l’evoluzione avrebbe messo su quest’abbozzo degli organi più decisi, questi sarebbero […] pur un arresto’ [naturally, when the evolution puts on this sketch being more determined organs, these would still be a stop].64

In the essay ‘La corruzione dell’anima’ [‘The Corruption of the Soul’], supposedly written around the time of La coscienza di Zeno [Zeno’s Conscience], Svevo narrates a fictional history of the creation of the world where once again he attributes to humankind the impossibility of fossilizing and remaining forever identical to itself. In this text, it is the discontent that prevents human beings from fossilizing:

Nacque il malcontento e torvo uomo. Imperfettissimo non ebbe le ali e neppure quattro mani come i quadrumani né quattro piedi come le fiere ma sempre due mani e due piedi soli […] Questo suo malcontento lo faceva andare e l’oggi doloroso s’illuminava della dimane incerta, imprecisabile ma luminosa di speranza. […] Egli voleva tutto, sempre tutto. Tutte le ore del giorno e tutti i climi della terra dovevano essere suoi. […] La bestia nuova era nata e le sue membra invece che perfezionarsi quali ordigni divennero capaci di maneggiare quelli ch’essa creò. […] così l’uomo benché sempre torvo e malcontento si riprodusse uguale per poter maneggiare gli ordigni che si erano cristallizzati.

[The discontent and grim man was born. So imperfect, he neither possesses wings, nor four hands as the four-handed nor four feet as animals, but always only two hands and two feet […] His discontent moved him, and the sorrowful today was illuminated by the uncertain, indefinable and yet bright of hope tomorrow. […] He wanted everything, always everything. Every hour of the day and every climate of the earth had to be his. […] The new beast was born and his limbs instead of perfecting themselves as tools, became capable of handling the tools that the beast created for itself. […] so, man, although always grim and discontented, reproduced himself always in the same shape in order to handle the tools which had crystallized.]65

This discontent, this impossibility of feeling satisfied in the place and moment one is in and with what one has and is, allows certain human beings to remain open to further development. Here Svevo is partly praising the potentiality and, most importantly, the impotentiality that prevents humans’ potential from turning into a fossilized act. In human beings, indeed, fossilization has moved onto the ‘ordigni’: the instruments human beings create and use to defend themselves and obtain what they want.

The passages above support my hypothesis that the inept characters in Svevo’s work, and Alfonso in particular, do not correspond simply to the representation of passive characters who are not able to carry out certain activities. Through these figures, Svevo is celebrating the impotentiality, the potentiality not-to, that would allow some of his protagonists to remain open beings, able rather than unable to develop in any direction for the very reason that this being can ‘not-develop’ in a unilateral direction. However, there is much more at stake than the simple appreciation of open potentialities: there is also the possibility of suggesting a form of not-being, a form of in-action that will allow Alfonso to escape from the conventions in which the external world wishes to constrain him. But before I dive into these conclusions, I explore the type of life and restrictions Alfonso will first attempt to copy and from which he will ultimately escape.

As already mentioned, Alfonso’s work as a copyist is performed at an existential level once he accesses Maller’s salotto and encounters Annetta, Maller’s daughter. Alfonso begins to copy those who represent the extreme opposite of his current way of being: ‘i lottatori’ [the fighters]. Embodied by Macario and the members of the Maller’s family, i lottatori represent those who are able to exploit and successfully join the capitalist and bourgeois way of life. The narrator makes sure that the reader knows this transformation is happening, and that this new life is in fact opposed to the one that Alfonso was conducting before:

Il nuovo metodo di vita di Alfonso era dannoso ai suoi studi perché il primo risultato del suo spesso aggirarsi all’aria aperta fu il bisogno di quest’aria e l’incapacità di rimanere a lungo in quella rinserrata. Talvolta, uscito dall’ufficio si avviava verso la biblioteca, ma di rado sapeva vincere la sua ripugnanza fino a restarci oltre mezz’ora; lo prendeva un’inquietezza invincibile che lo portava all’aperto a incantarsi su qualche molo, senza idee e senza sogni, unica preoccupazione quella di assorbire molto di quella brezza marina di cui s’immaginava di sentire immediati i benefici effetti.66

[Alfonso’s new way of life was damaging to his studies, because the first result of his frequent outings was a need for yet more air and an inability to stay shut up for long. Sometimes, he would move towards the library on coming out of the office but could seldom stay there more than a half-hour; he would be seized by an invincible restlessness which took him out into the open to stand riveted to some quay, with no ideas or dreams in his head, his only preoccupation being to absorb that sea-breeze, whose beneficial effects he thought he could feel at once.]67

As happens elsewhere in Svevo’s texts, once the protagonist starts embracing the ‘active’ life as opposed to his natural one, his intellectual tendencies and daydreaming begin to give way to a restless activity alongside the emerging need to see immediate profits from his actions. Alfonso wants to derive instant benefits even from an apparently purposeless walk near the sea. Self-interested and individualistically driven acts now replace his former conduct that was originally marked by no specific individual purpose. Slowly, Alfonso transforms himself into that animal that ‘per natura’ and ‘a tempo debito’68 [‘instinctively’ and ‘at the right second’]69 can fall on its prey and that Macario did not believe he could ever become. How can we therefore define Alfonso as a being who is inactive or unable to achieve what he desires? Alfonso is the man of potentiality because he is able to direct himself in a variety of directions and so he is not yet fossilized in the way that Macario is. By conceiving of Alfonso’s being as characterized by impotentiality, we can make sense of his ineptitude as well as his success in imitating the way of life of the ‘lottatori’. The potentiality to not-be allows him to develop in any direction without ever reaching a perfected form or becoming fossilized in one identity. This is why the scrivener Alfonso can become Annetta’s predator, while also leaving her and going back to the countryside where his mother is dying and eventually returning to the city, where Maller, informed of his seduction, assigns him to an even lower occupation in the bank until his death by suicide. Alfonso is a much more complicated character than critics have allowed him to be when defining him only in opposition to Macario.

As the narrative unfolds, Alfonso becomes Macario and, if it is possible, a more successful version of him. Alfonso remembers that

Tempo prima Macario gli aveva detto che lo riteneva incapace di lottare e di afferrare la preda, ed egli di questo rimprovero si era gloriato come di una lode. Ora egli aveva provato che Macario s’era ingannato sul suo conto.70

[Some time before Macario told him that he considered him incapable of fighting and sizing his prey; at that time he had gloried in this criticism as if it were a praise. Now he had shown that Macario was mistaken.]71

He goes on to say that ‘questi lottatori ch’egli disprezzava lo avevano attirato nel loro mezzo e senza resistenza egli aveva avuto i loro stessi desideri, adottato le loro armi’72 [‘The struggling people whom he despised had drawn him into their midst, and without putting up any resistance he had felt the same desires, adopted their weapons’].73 Critics have ascribed too great a role to Macario,74 who remains a secondary character and does not occupy much space in the text. Reading Alfonso in juxtaposition with Macario has only the effect of reinforcing a reading that privileges an interpretation of Alfonso exclusively as a passive and weak character, while in turn recognizing the superiority of Alfonso’s antagonist.75 Consider, for instance, Giampaolo Borghello’s affirmation that Alfonso’s alleged inferiority can only be perceived in contrast with the life of ‘i fortunati che “sanno vivere”’ [the lucky ones who ‘know how to live’],76 and that it is this comparison that gives Alfonso ‘la tangibile misura della sua inferiorità, della sua inettitudine’ [the tangible sense of his inferiority, of his ineptitude].77 Yet, it is the critic who perceives a juxtaposition between Alfonso and Macario and, more importantly, who places the latter on the side of ‘superiority’ and the former, with his ineptitude, on the side of ‘inferiority’.

Indeed, why should ‘ineptitude’ be inferior, especially considering Svevo’s perspective on the creature who can always develop in any direction? In fact, Alfonso, the allegedly inept character, studying late at the library after work and unable to copy his letters faster, does succeed in copying the life of i lottatori by becoming one of them. It is this final recognition on his part that prompts Alfonso’s suicide, not with the aim of purifying or punishing himself or others, but of opposing through his inertia – that is, his impotentiality, his potentiality to not-be – the familial and social conventions restraining him. Inertia thus becomes Alfonso’s way out, his tool to react against the form of life of the lottatore. But if Alfonso succeeds in embracing the capitalistic ideology Macario preaches, according to which money and individualistic self-interest is the only yardstick that counts, why then, after seducing Annetta and thus bringing himself a step away from entry to the high bourgeoisie, does Alfonso decide to flee to the countryside where his mother is dying and consequently renounce any hope of social climbing? Surely it is not out of devotion to his mother, since he fantasized about leaving the city even before being informed of his mother’s condition. It is also unlikely that the reason lies simply in Alfonso’s incapability of choosing between accepting or refusing bourgeois ideology and, in this moment of indecision, returning to the village of his birth.78 This escape is an assertion of impotentiality, of the potentiality to not-be the self-interested and profit-driven man he has become. Barilli interprets this passage as a reaction in the sense of a suspension and a deviation from the course of events that seemed to imprison him in the fixed character of the ‘social climber’ who seduced Annetta for the only reason of obtaining access to that part of society otherwise inaccessible to him.79

To understand what Alfonso finds in the countryside, I look to the character of Alfonso’s mother and her function. In Svevo’s œuvre, the mother is often an ambiguous character, not always described as a loving figure.80 Her asking about his job and how soon Alfonso will become a director of the bank, as well as her curiosity about the presence of a woman in Alfonso’s life, reinforces two cornerstones of bourgeois society. However, the character of the mother is also there to represent a kind of action and love that is selfless in two ways. First, she is described as the provider of selfless love: Alfonso’s mother’s humble love for her husband, manifested in the manners and gestures she conserves after her husband’s death, is compared to the vanity of Annetta, who would have made Alfonso rich but also subjected him to this privilege.81 The mother is also an idealized symbol of disinterested love, and the tendency towards idealization is a characteristic of the Alfonso we encountered in the first part of the novel. Second, and perhaps most importantly, she also becomes the object of Alfonso’s own selfless love. As he recognizes:

Era una vita ben strana quella ch’egli conduceva in quella stanza, tutto il giorno occupato a convincere l’ammalata che il suo male non era grave o a tentare di alleviarglielo. […] Era tanto lontana l’epoca in cui aveva amoreggiato con Annetta!82

[It was a strange life he led in that room, busy all day either convincing the sick woman that her sickness was not serious or trying to alleviate it. […] How far away seemed the time of his love-making to Annetta!]83

Alfonso is aware that, by leaving Annetta, he is renouncing a great fortune that his mother would have convinced him to accept despite her warnings. However, soon Alfonso is not able to think of Annetta anymore: ‘non soltanto non poteva più sognare, ma neppure riflettere, perché l’imminenza del grave avvenimento che andava compiendosi sotto ai suoi occhi gliene toglieva la facoltà’84 [‘He could no longer dream, could not even reflect, because the imminence of the event nearing its climax beneath his eyes hampered his every faculty’].85 The lexical choice in this passage is telling: a selfless action can only be anticipated by an impotentiality or the privation of a potentiality, in this case to dream and think. In-ertia, precisely the potentiality to not-be or do, functions as what Di Nunzio calls an ‘arma antiborghese’ [anti-bourgeois weapon],86 which is required in order to counter the logic of capitalist society. By going back to his origins – but also literally to Alfonso as he was at the beginning of the novel – Alfonso is able to find again the inert core of his being, characterized by disinterested actions and thoughts, and it is in the light of this transformation that we should read his suicide.

Even these ‘origins’ have been likewise corrupted by the self-interested mentality of bourgeois and capitalist society, as the dispute over Alfonso’s mother’s house-sale shows. Alfonso’s mother’s death should not be confused with the end of a more sincere and selfless world – rather, it marks a moment of transition: the possibility of a self-less action falls onto Alfonso’s shoulders, as some of Alfonso’s last reflections before the end of this section reveal:

Rimasto solo, fu la prima volta che Alfonso ripensò alla sua avventura in città. […] Non poteva appassionarsi per cose avvenute tanto tempo prima e delle quali non voleva riconoscersi responsabile. Egli ora era un uomo nuovo che sapeva quello che voleva. L’altro, colui che aveva sedotto Annetta, era un ragazzo malaticcio con cui egli nulla aveva di comune.87

[Alone again for the first time Alfonso thought over that adventure of his in the city. […] He could not feel passionate about things that had happened so long before, although he considered himself almost responsible for them. Now he was a new man who knew what he wanted. The other person, the one who had seduced Annetta, was an ailing boy with whom he had nothing in common.]88

This is the first place where the narrator attributes the adjective ‘malaticcio’ [sickly] to Alfonso’s life of seduction and self-interested action. There is a change in self-awareness in Alfonso, albeit one that momentarily fades once he is again immersed in the seducing way of capitalist life in the city. In Alfonso, a selfless purpose is emerging, one that will lead him to suicide:

Se Annetta non lo amava più egli usciva dalla vita, vi perdeva ogni interesse e nella vita contemplativa cui intendeva di dedicarsi non avrebbe avuto il bisogno di adulare o di fingere e non correva il pericolo di ritrovarsi un bel giorno nel cuore un amore nato dalla vanità o dalla cupidigia. Sarebbe vissuto con la sua franchezza natia, coi desideri semplici, sinceri e perciò duraturi.89

[If Annetta no longer loved him, he would opt out of life, lose all interest in it and, in the contemplative life to which he intended to dedicate himself, would have no need to flatter or pretend, and run no risk of one fine day finding himself involved in another love affair born of vanity or cupidity. He would live with desires that were simple, sincere and everlasting.]90

From this passage, it is clear what Alfonso wants to reject; the novel could well end here. Its final part, however, adds the important detail that Alfonso is not simply promising to leave life, being unable to live according to its rules; on the contrary, his suicide shows how by embracing his potentiality to not-be, he is able to make inoperative the system that requires him to fight in order to succeed.

Alfonso’s suicide

Rivers of scholarly ink have been used to describe Alfonso’s suicide, and many of these descriptions are tinged with the same negativity attributed to the definition of ‘ineptitude’. As already briefly mentioned, from Debenedetti’s first critical essays in the sixties to the beginning of the twenty-first century, the dominant interpretation of the category of ineptitude in Svevo is a negative one, with a few exceptions. In the case of Una vita, this negative reading of ineptitude seems to go hand in hand with an interpretation of Alfonso’s suicide as the mark of his weakness and utter defeat.91 By interpreting Alfonso’s inertia as a form of resistance through impotentiality, we can reclaim Alfonso’s suicide as a will-less act, an act of resistance through in-action, a rebellion against the rules through a privation that makes these conventions inoperative by using his potentiality to not-be. This reading still confirms that Schopenhauer acts in Svevo’s poetics as a ‘false aim’,92 but does not see in Alfonso’s suicide the realization of an individualistic will or a defeat. We should reconsider Alfonso’s suicide in similar terms to the ones applied to understanding Bartleby’s expression ‘I prefer not-to’. This formula does not mean that Bartleby does not want to copy or that he does not want to leave the office; he simply would prefer not to do so.93 Through the imagery of suicide Svevo then is not trying to assert a death drive nor a desire to live, both expressions of the will; instead, Alfonso wants to disable ‘la lotta’ [the fight] that life brings with it.94 While he is meditating about the possibility of suicide, Alfonso reflects on Schopenhauer’s theories: ‘Schierava dinanzi alla mente tutti gli argomenti contro al suicidio, da quelli morali dei predicatori a quelli dei filosofi più moderni; lo facevano sorridere! Non erano argomenti, ma desideri, il desiderio di vivere’95 [‘He assembled up in his mind all the arguments against suicide, from the moral ones of preachers to those by modern philosophers; they made him smile. They were not arguments, but expressions of a wish, the wish to live’].96 Svevo is not trying to replicate Schopenhauer’s philosophy in fiction. As Mario Sechi reminds us, ‘in Svevo gli schemi della dottrina filosofica vengono sistematicamente scomposti e “falsificati” quand’anche siano assunti come affidabili bussole di orientamento’ [in Svevo the schemes of a philosophical doctrine are systematically deconstructed and ‘falsified’, even when they are assumed as reliable compass for the orientation].97

Nor can his suicide be interpreted as the realization of a twentieth-century cliché, now emptied of any ideological meaning.98 Certainly, Alfonso’s suicide’s lack of any tragic connotations tells us that, in the modern capitalist and deeply individualistic world in which Alfonso is moving, tragedy is no longer a viable genre, as Mara Santi reminds us.99 Yet, Alfonso’s decision to not be part of the fight is a form of impotentiality – the potentiality to not-act according to the same rules, and to not-be what capitalistic society expects Alfonso to be – veiled by anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist values. In a similar way, Tortora frames Alfonso as a rebellious figure who enacts ‘“una vera e propria forma di resistenza” contro un potere che giudica iniquo’ [‘a real form of resistance’ against the power that he judges unfair].100 He emphasizes that Alfonso does not want to subvert the power that overpowers him, although Tortora in the end seems to agree with a more traditional reading of Alfonso when he admits that the rebel is necessarily doomed to annulment. Alfonso no longer wants to partake in the fight, only to disable the system that produces this fight.101 Alfonso cannot subvert the power constraining him using its same means; if he were to do so, it would replicate that same power rather than destroy the system on which it is based. It is not solely a matter of ‘wanting’ to fight unjust power, as Tortora puts it;102 it is a matter of the way in which it is possible to do so, and I argue Alfonso finds his way in embracing his impotentiality.

That Alfonso has finally adopted a different form of life is clearly stated a few pages after he returns to the city:

Si trovava, credeva molto vicino allo stato ideale sognato nelle sue letture, stato di rinunzia e di quiete. […] Non desiderava di essere altrimenti. All’infuori dei timori per l’avvenire e del disgusto per l’odio di cui si sapeva l’oggetto, egli era felice, equilibrato come un vecchio […] Era sempre più quieto che negli anni di malcontento passati prima alla banca, inquieto e ambizioso volendo alla cieca secondo le sensazioni del momento. […] Non sognava miglioramento della sua posizione alla banca. […] Intorno a lui, alla banca stessa, si lottava con un accanimento che gli faceva sentire meglio l’elevatezza della sua posizione, lontana da quella lotta tanto accanita quanto meschina.103

[He was, he thought, very close to the ideal state he dreamed of in his reading, the state of renunciation and quiet. […] He did not want things to be different. Apart from fears for the future and regret at the hatred of which he knew himself to be the object, he was content, balanced in mind as an old man. […] He was anyway calmer than in those discontented years he had spent at the bank before, years of restless and ambitious living in accordance with the blind sensations of the moment. […] An improvement of his position in the bank was not among his dreams. […] Around him in the bank went on battles whose savagery made him realize better the superiority of his own position above such struggles, petty as they were savage.]104

Alfonso does not want to abandon life, but rather the fight that life requires because of that ‘malcontento’ [discontent] that characterizes human beings. Reading this passage in parallel with the excerpt from ‘La corruzione dell’anima’ discussed earlier reveals how Svevo’s position with regard to human malcontento is more nuanced than it may seem, and impotentiality helps us clarify this. Discontent is what prevents human beings from fossilizing and, by theorizing it, Svevo partly attempts to celebrate human potentialities. At the same time, in this passage from Una vita, Alfonso nearing his end is described as ‘felice’ [content] and distanced from those ‘anni di malcontento’ [discontented years] driven by restlessness and ambition. The lexical choices Svevo makes in the passage above contrasts with his appraisal of malcontento in his first essay and demonstrates that, while celebrating human beings’ potential to remain open, Svevo simultaneously critiques a certain form that malcontento takes: ambition and the impossibility of being satisfied. Minghelli suggests that

it becomes rather arduous at this point to see how the push toward change – movement and restlessness – is more life-giving than that towards adaptation and fixity. As the opposition between being and becoming and its implied hierarchy of value is put into question, the narrator redirects the reader’s attention to an in-between space, what could be defined, oxymoronically as a dynamic space of being.105

The concept of impotentiality may reveal itself to be useful in this case too. The impotentiality, the potentiality to not-act, to not-necessarily-move-forward, is what prevents this discontent, which is openness towards the future, from turning into the blind and restless desire always to want more. In this light, Alfonso’s suicide represents the radical gesture of embracing the potentiality to not partake in the fight. It is this gesture that allows Alfonso’s potential being to avoid turning into a restless and dissatisfied being, always looking for more.106

Alfonso’s suicide then is a necessary gesture in the dynamic of the novel, despite what some critics have argued,107 because it is his only way to escape from ‘la lotta’ and ‘i lottatori’ who will keep calling Alfonso back to fight. Alfonso has refused the predatory life of earlier years and is now content with his inert being. Yet, Maller and Annetta still feel threatened by Alfonso: by their logic, based on self-interest and social climbing, they believe Alfonso will try to blackmail them. As a punishment, Maller intends to transfer him from the mailroom to accounting and Federico Maller, Annetta’s brother, aims to challenge him to a duel to the death. Through these actions, they want to bring Alfonso back to the level of i lottatori – to the level of action, of which they know the rules and which they are thus able to understand and control. Alfonso cannot take part in the duel and opts instead for suicide: not because he is afraid, nor because he wants to escape, but because the only action by means of which he can resist being dragged into the fight and into the society ruled by laws that he no longer accepts, is a non-action, a potentiality to not-participate.108 He is freed by his in-ertia and in-eptitude understood as the potentiality to not-do, to not-live. The narrator tells us that Alfonso felt himself ‘incapace alla vita’ [incapable of living].109 The potentiality to not-live allows the inept and inert Alfonso to render inoperative that organism ‘che non conosceva la pace; vivo avrebbe continuato a trascinarlo nella lotta perché era fatto a quello scopo’110 [‘that knew no peace; while it was alive it would continue to drag him into the struggle, because that was what it was there for’].111

Conclusion

If today we can reconsider the representation of the inetto and the category of ineptitude in a different light, it is because, as Romano Luperini reminds us, literary criticism is a way to historicize the present that not only discusses the historical origin of certain literary phenomena, but also puts them in relation with us and our own epoch. It is this ‘ri-sistemazione’ [resystematization] of the historical materials that grants a degree of objectivity to a critical analysis while also openly revealing the contemporary and thus subjective nature of the re-interpretation.112 Impotentiality is not a contemporary concept, but what is contemporary is the possibility of unearthing its unconventional meaning. The conditions that determine our beliefs, as Charles Taylor puts it,113 have evidently changed, but this does not make our perspective anachronistic with regard to modernism. On the contrary, our perspective situates us in a convenient position from which it is possible to see new connections with the past that have hitherto gone unnoticed and intervene in the modernist debate from a fresh angle.

Reading impotentiality as a form of resistance to bourgeois and capitalist society reinforces the idea that a part of modernism seeks to reject social conventions, the mechanization and alienation caused by capitalism and the lack of values and individualism linked with the emergence of the bourgeoisie. Our reading inscribes Svevo in this literary tradition and confirms him as a modernist writer. Yet, it also problematizes his involvement, for his representation of the inept figure, as I have argued, can no longer be interpreted simply as ‘il trionfo dei brutti e degli inetti’114 [‘the triumph of the ugly and the inept’], which has been considered a characteristic of modernism. Svevo is not depicting the Nietzschean revenge of those who cannot act. Alfonso’s strength does not lie in a weakness, but rather in the potentiality to not-act and not-belong. What I have argued in this article is that Alfonso’s choice leaves room for a different type of interpretation, one that also sees in Alfonso’s potentiality to not-participate in the fight not a moment of passivity or inaction but of critique. Several implications emerge from this interpretation.

If this impotentiality is neither immobilism nor violent revolution but a form of inoperativity which undermines the system by disabling it without engaging in a direct fight, then we can also see how Alfonso does not align with the characterization of the bourgeoisie. Mimmo Cangiano explains that the ideology of the bourgeois class corresponds to ‘le due vene principali del pensiero e della letteratura modernista [in Europe]’ [two principal veins of modernist literature and thought [in Europe]],115 respectively the conservation of the status quo and essential values alongside the transformative energy, which allowed it to win over feudal ideologies. The literary harbinger of impotentiality does not comply to this binary model. Characters like Alfonso and Bartleby open up space for a different figure and, at the same time, for a different manifestation of modernism – one that confirms modernism’s distance from some avant-garde movements and rewrites the boundaries between them.

Certainly, a rigid contraposition between these two categories is neither possible nor auspicial, as Luca Somigli and Eleonora Conti remind us.116 And yet, by placing the emphasis on the potentiality to not-act, the figure of the inert character distances itself, and thus the modernism that it represents, from those avant-garde movements which emphasized action, active revolution and war. In this sense, reading ineptitude as impotentiality adds another perspective from which to look at the possible overlapping or distinct aspects of modernism and the avant-garde, and creates the space for a point of view that neither allies with elitism or nationalism nor with the bourgeois middle class. It is a point of view that does not wish to align itself in any way, but that instead wishes to belong without giving up its potentiality to not-belong. Ultimately, this is the most important lesson that impotentiality can teach us: calling into question the way in which human beings identify and therefore how, and whether, they belong in a community.

If action and actualization define what we have to do and realize in order to belong, so far the possibility of belonging has been dictated on the basis of a set of identical and actualized characteristics and actions present in the members of a certain community and so was their exclusion in the absence of these predetermined qualities. However, it is evident that, as Agamben suggests:

Among beings who would always already be enacted, who would always already be this or that thing, this or that identity, and who would have entirely exhausted their power in these things and identities – among such beings there could not be any community but only coincidences and factual partitions.117

Salvatore Pappalardo is pointing in a similar direction when he states that ‘scholars of literary modernism, generally focused on the abstract master-narratives of the nation, have largely overlooked the national indifference of authors and their fictional characters, in which a lingering suspicion of the political fiction of the nation survived’.118 Until very recently, modernism scholars have neglected to show how non-national commitments in the populations living in the Habsburg Empire, for instance, are the result of ‘the quotidian reality of multilingual speakers and their flexible commitments to different linguistic, cultural, and religious communities, an attitude dictated by shifting social and economic opportunities’.119 The potentiality to not-belong even in these concrete cases does not express a form of backward immobilism or a violent rebellion against the nation; it is the embracing of a way of living that is based on human impotentialities rather than on fixed actualities. Certainly, I do not wish to suggest simplistically that impotentiality is the solution, and I am aware of the privileged standpoint and historical context from which it is possible to pursue this type of thought. It is and was not possible everywhere and in every epoch to not-act and not-participate. For these reasons, impotentiality should be understood as a suggestion, a way of thinking that aims critically to question every form of life and thought that identify human identity exclusively with their actuality and activity and in turn points to alternative ways in which we can understand who we are also in terms of what we can not-be and can not-do.

1

See Giuseppe Langella, ‘Una vita e “il dizionario dei sinonimi.” Per una revisione della categoria sveviana dell’inettitudine’, Letteratura Italiana Contemporanea, 35 (January–April 1992), 171–89, and more recently Riccardo Cepach, ‘Il dottore si ammalò… Come il medico ammalato fa il paziente sano (nell’opera di Svevo)’, in Guarire dalla cura. Italo Svevo e i medici, ed. by Riccardo Cepach (Trieste: Comune di Trieste, 2008), pp. 133–84.

2

Giorgio Agamben, Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 183.

3

Guido Baldi, Le maschere dell’inetto: lettura di ‘Senilità’ (Torino: Paravia scriptorium, 1998), p. 18.

4

Ibid., p. 19.

5

Ibid., pp. 19–20. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.

6

Luca Somigli and Eleonora Conti, Oltre il canone problemi autori opere del modernismo italiano (Perugia: Morlacchi Editori, 2018), p. 10.

7

Matteo Palumbo, ‘Una vita’, in Svevo, ed. by Claudio Gigante and Massimiliano Tortora (Roma: Carocci, 2021), pp. 21–41 (p. 28).

8

Baldi, Le maschere dell’inetto, p. 37.

9

Ibid.

10

Luigia Abrugiati, Il volo del gabbiano: fenomenologia dell’inettitudine nella letteratura italiana fra Ottocento e Novecento (Lanciano: R. Carabba, 1982), pp. 23–31.

11

Some recent contributions are less indebted to a traditional understanding of Svevo’s characters and attempt to rethink the figure of the inept character in a less conventional light. These include Saskia Ziolkowski, ‘Svevo’s Uomo Senza Qualità: Musil and Modernism in Italy’, in Gender and Modernity in Central Europe: The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Its Legacy, ed. by Agatha Schwartz (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010), pp. 83–101 and Chiara Marasco, ‘Dall’inetto al vegliardo. Italo Svevo e la sublimazione dell’inferiorità’, in L’immaginazione è una vera avventura’. Italo Svevo e il tempo ultimo della scrittura (Rome: Aracne Editrice, 2019), pp. 113–22. Similarly, Francesca Serra re-examines the word ‘inept’ and shows that it was typical of the medical vocabulary of Svevo’s time and that, in this context, the word would relate to the three spheres of incompetence in Svevo’s ineptitude: the inability to act, to seduce and to succeed economically. Francesca Serra, ‘Non pensare a un inetto. Esperimento sveviano’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 197.660 (2020), 511–47.

12

Eugenio Montale is one exception. In his texts on Svevo, Montale never mentions the protagonist’s ineptitude, incompetence and unsuccessful action. See Eugenio Montale, Lettere: Italo Svevo con gli scritti di Montale su Svevo (Bari: De Donato, 1966).

13

Giacomo Debenedetti, Il romanzo del Novecento (Milan: La nave di Teseo, 1971), p. 191.

14

Joyce, Proust and Svevo’s readers were revolting ‘contro la visione, contro l’idea dell’uomo che risultava da quei romanzi, ai quali pure si contestava la capacità di comunicare storie e vicende di uomini concretamente plasmati a immagine e somiglianza dei personaggi fino allora apparsi nei romanzi. Più che letterarie, le obiezioni contro Proust e Joyce furono moralistiche’. Debenedetti, Il romanzo del Novecento, p. 191.

15

Debenedetti, Il romanzo del Novecento, p. 331. ‘Svevo riesce ad affermarsi perché finalmente l’ottica del lettore è stata messa in grado di percepire il romanzo analitico, vedendovi bene o male un tipo di romanzo vero e proprio. Bene o male, ripetiamo, perché quel modo di percepire il cosiddetto romanzo di analisi non era necessariamente un modo di accoglierlo e di accettarlo positivamente: era soltanto un ammetterne l’esistenza, che non impegnava ad apprezzarlo’.

16

See Maryse Jeuland-Meynaud, Zeno e i suoi fratelli: la creazione del personaggio nei romanzi di Italo Svevo, 1st edn (Bologna: Pàtron, 1985), p. 31. See also Luigia Abrugiati, who interprets ineptitude as ‘una incapacità assoluta, una mancanza totale e irrimediabile di qualità adatte all’esistenza’. Luigia Abrugiati, Il volo del gabbiano: fenomenologia dell’inettitudine nella letteratura italiana fra Ottocento e Novecento (Lanciano: R. Carabba, 1982), p. 12.

17

‘L’imperfezione e l’inettitudine rivelano tutto il loro potenziale positivo’. Renato Barilli, La linea Svevo-Pirandello (Milan: Ugo Mursia, 1972), p. 42.

18

Giuseppe Antonio Camerino, ‘Il concetto d’inettitudine in Svevo e le sue implicazioni mitteleuropee ed ebraiche’, Lettere italiane, 25.2 (1973), 190–214 (p. 206).

19

Lia Fava Guzzetta, Il primo romanzo di Italo Svevo: una scrittura della scissione e dell’assenza (Messina: G. D’Anna, 1991), p. 62.

20

Giuliana Minghelli, In the Shadow of the Mammoth: Italo Svevo and the Emergence of Modernism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 26. See also Riccardo Cepach, ‘Lo Zeno abbozzo. ‘Potenza’ del non-finito sveviano’, in La coscienza di Zeno: un secolo dopo, ed. by Claudio Gigante and Matteo Palumbo (Naples: Paolo Loffredo, 2023), pp. 25–40.

21

Deborah Amberson, Giraffes in the Garden of Italian Literature: Modernist Embodiment in Italo Svevo, Federigo Tozzi and Carlo Emilio Gadda (London: Taylor and Francis, 2017), p. 26.

22

Giovanni Palmieri confirms that ‘inept’ is still ‘la parola chiave della poetica sveviana’. Giovanni Palmieri, Svevo, Zeno e oltre: saggi (Ravenna: Giorgio Pozzi editore, 2016), p. 95.

23

In Italian, unlike in English, the word inetto can be a noun and/or an adjective. In this article, I treat this word as an adjective as much as possible, but this difference should be kept in mind.

24

Romanzi e continuazioni, ed. by Nunzia Palmieri and Fabio Vittorini, in Italo Svevo, Tutte le opere, ed. by Mario Lavagetto (Milan: I meridiani Mondadori, 2004), pp. 4–1234 (p. 14). From now on, I reference this text as RC.

25

Tortora recognizes that ‘Un dato che si cita sempre, ma che in fondo non ha mai pesato realmente nell’interpretazione di Una vita, è il fatto che Alfonso Nitti è un impiegato’. See Massimiliano Tortora, ‘La ribellione vana e inevitabile di Alfonso Nitti’, Strumenti critici, 147.2 (2018), 273–94 (p. 4).

26

Jobst Welge, ‘Svevo’s Una vita, “Inettitudine”’, in Italo Svevo and His Legacy for the Third Millennium, ed. by Giuseppe Stellardi and Emmanuela Tandello (Kibworth Beauchamp: Troubador Publishing, 2014), ii, 86–101.

27

Svevo tells us in the Profilo Biografico that ‘La vita d’Italo Svevo alla Banca è descritta accuratamente in una parte del suo primo romanzo Una vita’. See Italo Svevo, Racconti e scritti autobiografici, ed. by Clotilde Bertoni, in Tutte le opere, ed. by Mario Lavagetto (Milan: I meridiani Mondadori, 2004), pp. 800–01. Even though Svevo claims that the source of inspiration for this job was his own years spent working at the bank, it is important to leave space for other possible interpretations. The possibility that Alfonso’s copy work is not exclusively a contingent choice but a pondered one allows us to build associations with other modernist protagonists such as Bartleby and find patterns to describe the controversial historical period of modernism.

28

RC, pp. 16–17, my emphasis.

29

Italo Svevo, A Life, trans. by Archibald Colquhoun (London: Pushkin Press, 2000), p. 17, my emphasis.

30

RC, p. 49.

31

RC, p. 43.

32

Thomas E. Peterson, The Revolt of the Scribe in Modern Italian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), p. 3.

33

Langella, p. 176. The rarity of the presence of the terms ‘inept’ and ‘ineptitude’ in Una Vita could also be explained by an enforced process of ‘cleansing’ that Svevo’s editor might have imposed on his text before publication; still, a similarly low frequency of these terms in Svevo’s later novels and short stories may signify that for Svevo there were better words to describe his characters.

34

My interpretation of the term inertia as impotentiality applies to Alfonso Nitti and Zeno Cosini, but not to Emilio Brentani because, as Novella di Nunzio argues, Brentani ‘presenta un’identità intellettuale dissimile’ from that of Nitti and Cosini. Novella di Nunzio, ‘La differenza tra il concetto di inettitudine e il concetto di senilità’, in Italo Svevo and His Legacy for the Third Millennium, pp. 74–86 (p. 74). In Senilità, the term inertia is not used to define the protagonists’ openness, their potentiality not-to or a form of resistance. It rather refers to ‘un dolore, un rimpianto continuo, delle ore interminabili d’agitazione, altre di sogni dolorosi e poi d’inerzia, il vuoto, la morte della fantasia del desiderio, uno stato più doloroso di qualunque altro’. These are the words that, after renouncing his mistress Angiolina, Emilio, the protagonist of Senilità, uses to describe what it means to be inert. RC, p. 547.

35

RC, p. 17.

36

Svevo, A Life, p. 18.

37

Tortora briefly mentions the term ‘inertia’ in his analysis of Vegliardo and argues that here Zeno achieves ‘inertia’. In reality, inertia had characterized Svevo’s characters since much earlier and Zeno, if anything, returns to the initial inertia of the Zeno’s Conscience’s years, which he had temporarily abandoned during the war period. See Massimiliano Tortora, ‘Non ho scritto che un romanzo solo’: la narrativa di Italo Svevo (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2019), p. 140. Matteo Palumbo also mentions the term ‘inerzia’ [inerzia] without discussing it further (‘Una vita’, p. 28).

38

Giuseppe A. Camerino, Italo Svevo e la crisi della Mitteleuropa (Naples: Liguori, 2002), p. 55.

39

Ibid., p. 65.

40

Di Nunzio, p. 76.

41

RC, p. 68.

42

Svevo, A Life, pp. 57–58.

43

RC, p. 14.

44

Svevo, A Life, p. 16.

45

RC, pp. 14–15.

46

Svevo, A Life, p. 16.

47

RC, p. 18.

48

Svevo, A Life, p. 18.

49

Ibid., p. 58.

50

RC, p. 70.

51

Svevo, A Life, p. 59.

52

RC, p. 70.

53

See Ferruccio Calonghi and Karl Ernst Georges, Dizionario latino-italiano: secondo la sesta ed ultima ed. tedesca, 3rd edn (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1898).

54

Niccolò Tommaseo and Bernardo Bellini, Dizionario della lingua Italiana (Turin: L’Unione Tipografico-Editrice, 1865), <https://www.tommaseobellini.it/#/items>.

55

Ibid.

56

Tommaseo mentions other meanings connected to the term inertia. For instance, ‘inerte’ also refers to an inertia of thought that may be linked to a lack of will or stupidity, but the lack of will is always related to action insofar as the unwillingness is an unwillingness to act. Ibid.

57

Ibid.

58

Finally, Tommaseo mentions the scientific and physical description of the term inertia: ‘Proprietà per la quale la materia conserva indefinitamente lo stato in cui la mettono le forze’. This definition initially seems beyond the scope of this article, which aims to reinterpret Alfonso’s ineptitude or inertia in light of a theory of impotentiality. But even in this other sense, inertia would still refer to a potentiality. Indeed, as Aristotle explains in Book ix of his Metaphysics, there are two ways to understand potentiality: one is active and the other is passive. The former refers to the potentiality of the artist, for instance, to create a sculpture and the latter refers to the potentiality of the stone to be turned into a sculpture. Similarly, then, inertia could be interpreted as the potentiality to be changed or moved by something or someone else. However, I argue that this is not the meaning that best applies to Alfonso’s potentiality. Despite the contextual instances influencing Alfonso’s life, the protagonist neither remains in the same state for the entire novel nor does he change because of others’ expectations and desires. On the contrary, it is always Alfonso who decides when to turn his impotentiality, his potentiality not-to, into an actuality, which in his case, can never be final. Ibid.

59

Francesco Paolo Botti describes the inept character in similar terms as a ‘demone dell’intatta potenzialità evolutiva, della plurima flessibilità ai destini venturi, maschera neutra e cedevole di “uomo senza qualità”’. Botti, ‘Incanti e morbi d’autunno: diagramma dell’ultimo Svevo’, in Il secondo Svevo, ed. by Francesco Paolo Botti, Giancarlo Mazzacurati and Matteo Palumbo (Naples: Liguori, 1988), pp. 157–181 (p. 169).

60

Federico Bertoni suggests that this fragment might have been written around the years of La coscienza di Zeno, but it is almost impossible to date it with certainty. Federico Bertoni, ‘Apparato genetico e commento’, in Teatro e saggi, ed. by Federico Bertoni, in Tutte le opere, ed. by Mario Lavagetto (Milan: I meridiani Mondadori, 2004), pp. 1187–1903 (pp. 1618–24). From now on, I reference Teatro e saggi as TS.

61

TS, p. 849.

62

Minghelli, In the Shadow of the Mammoth, p. 26.

63

TS, p. 849.

64

Ibid., pp. 849–50.

65

Ibid., pp. 885–86.

66

RC, p. 93.

67

Svevo, A Life, p. 77.

68

RC, pp. 104–05.

69

Svevo, A Life, p. 86.

70

RC, p. 227.

71

Svevo, A Life, p. 182.

72

RC, p. 228.

73

Svevo, A Life, p. 182.

74

Consider the following instances: Debenedetti affirms that ‘esaminati meglio, i personaggi di contorno convergono tutti a indicare, misurare, drammatizzare i rapporti attivi o passivi che il protagonista ha con la vita e il mondo esterno’. Giacomo Debenedetti, Saggi critici: nuova serie (Roma: O.E.T., Edizioni del secolo, 1945), p. 44. See also Elizabeth Schachter who states that Svevo’s protagonists, ‘sexually inhibited, passive, and “senile” m[e]n of fantasy’, desire to be like their counterparts and unsuccessfully imitate them, who in turn are described as ‘sexually liberated, overtly aggressive, and successful […] m[e]n of fact’. Elizabeth Schächter, Origin and Identity: Essays on Svevo and Trieste (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2000), p. 65.

75

Recently, Tortora similarly argued that Alfonso feels inferior in comparison to Macario. Yet, the passage mentioned by Tortora only establishes that Macario has always felt superior; it does not prove instead that Alfonso felt inferior. The text itself tells us otherwise when describing Alfonso’s feeling of superiority for not being part of the bourgeois society. Tortora, ‘La ribellione vana e inevitabile di Alfonso Nitti’, p. 280. See also Palumbo, ‘Una vita’, p. 33.

76

Giampaolo Borghello, La coscienza borghese: saggio sulla narrativa di Svevo (Roma: Savelli, 1977), p. 59.

77

To quote one more example: ‘In un ipotetico mondo in cui il bacillo del “caos della volontà” si fosse sparso e nessun uomo sapesse vivere, evidentemente non ci potrebbe essere quella costante frustrazione che viene invece data dall’incessante confronto con chi ci è “metafisicamente” superiore’. Ibid.

78

Ibid., p. 97.

79

Barilli, La linea Svevo-Pirandello, p. 69.

80

Consider, for instance, the short stories ‘L’assassinio di via Belpoggio’ and much later ‘La madre’. Moreover, Borghello has argued for a possible Oedipal complex implicit in the mother when she declares to Alfonso that he does not need to love her [Annetta] nor anyone else unworthy of his love. RC, p. 289.

81

Svevo, A Life, p. 214.

82

RC, p. 284.

83

Svevo, A Life, p. 226.

84

RC, p. 290.

85

Svevo, A Life, p. 231.

86

Di Nunzio, p. 79.

87

RC, p. 304.

88

Svevo, A Life, p. 242, my emphasis.

89

RC, p. 305.

90

Svevo, A Life, p. 242.

91

In 1982, Palumbo’s position toward Alfonso’s suicide is ambivalent. He claims that ‘L’etica della rinuncia di Schopenhauer appare una maschera che non nasconde la verità dell’impotenza’. Matteo Palumbo, ‘La gaia coscienza’, in Il secondo Svevo, ed. by Francesco Paolo Botti, Giancarlo Mazzacurati and Matteo Palumbo (Naples: Liguori, 1988), pp. 74–135 (p. 82). However, their book ends with the opposite conclusion, suggesting how the characters’ lack of action may be read as a revolt against the closure of normativity and modern conventions. And yet, the difficulty of rehabilitating ineptitude, and Alfonso’s suicide with it, is clear from the critical analyses that followed. In 1985, Jeuland-Meynaud claims that Svevo ‘odia il suo personaggio contro il quale ritorce la propria aggressività paurosa’, and for this reason Svevo eliminates the protagonist Alfonso Nitti at the end of Una vita. In this sense, she argues, Alfonso’s suicide would correspond to that end-of-the-nineteenth-century rejection of the decadent writer, embodied by how he has segregated himself in an arrogant solitude and favoured solipsism and narcissism. Jeuland-Meynaud, p. 66. In 1977, Borghello inaugurates the reading of Alfonso’s suicide as ‘l’atto meno schopenhaueriano dell’intero romanzo’. Borghello, p. 103. In 1989, Luca Curti adds to this view, describing Alfonso as ‘un inetto […] che non sa leggere la sua vita, né il suo rapporto con gli altri, che desidera la vita ma (per troppo desiderio) se la guasta e allora, appunto per amore di quella vita che non riuscirà ad avere, si uccide’. Three years later, Langella agrees with this interpretation and similarly reads Alfonso’s suicide as the Schopenhauerian assertion of the rule of the will. Luca Curti, ‘Svevo e Schopenhauer. Per una rilettura di Una vita’, Italianist, 9.1 (1989), pp. 66–74 (p. 67); Langella, ‘Una vita e “il dizionario dei sinonimi”’, p. 171.

92

Barilli, La linea Svevo-Pirandello, p. 40.

93

Agamben, Potentialities, p. 255.

94

RC, p. 396.

95

RC, p. 395.

96

Svevo, A Life, p. 312.

97

Mario Sechi, ‘Etica e verità: Sul pessimismo radicale del primo Svevo’, Strumenti critici, 13.2 (1998), pp. 259–92.

98

Mara Santi, ‘La memoria letteraria nei romanzi di Italo Svevo: appunti per una poetica dell’italianità’, in Antichità/Unità: Storia, cultura e cinema in Italia, ed. by Luciano Curreri (Rome: Nero su bianco, 2013), pp. 62–83 (p. 71).

99

Santi, p. 71.

100

Tortora, ‘La ribellione vana’, p. 287.

101

Ibid., p. 287.

102

Ibid. ‘Alfonso Nitti […] si lascia alle spalle le sue tradizioni moralistiche […] per aderire a un mondo – quello dei Maller – che vuole combattere’. My emphasis.

103

RC, pp. 340–41.

104

Svevo, A Life, pp. 269–70.

105

Minghelli, p. 38. Amberson, on the contrary, neglects this negative aspect of discontent and thus misses the opportunity to show the difference between ‘restlessness’ and ‘impotentiality’. Amberson, p. 50.

106

I agree with Amberson who recognizes that A Life ‘challenges literary models in which the hero is valorized on the basis of his ability to perform transformative action or, to put it another way, to actualize his potential to manipulate and dominate his reality’. Amberson, p. 50. However, Amberson’s goal is different since the critic wishes to demonstrate how ‘only in the space of the inadequate, infirm and unevolved human organism that waits can embodiment be thoughtfully experienced. This embodied waiting or temporal rupture is traditionally the place of potentiality’. Ibid.

107

I therefore disagree with Barilli who claims that the suicide plays a secondary part in the novel. See Barilli, La linea Svevo-Pirandello, p. 70.

108

It is not even a stoic renunciation of life, as Luca Curti claims. See Curti, ‘Svevo e Schopenhauer’, p. 70.

109

Svevo, A Life, p. 312.

110

RC, pp. 395–96.

111

Svevo, A Life, p. 312.

112

Romano Luperini, Dal modernismo a oggi: storicizzare la contemporaneità (Rome: Carocci editore, 2018), p. 12.

113

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007).

114

Luperini, p. 26.

115

Mimmo Cangiano, La nascita del modernismo italiano: filosofie della crisi, storia e letteratura, 1903–1922, 1st edn (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2018), pp. 11–12. ‘Non semplicemente la difesa dei valori immutabili, delle essenzialità, ma il proteggere, da un lato, quella capacità trasformativa della storia che l’ha condotta alla vittoria contro le ideologie di matrice feudale’.

116

Luca Somigli and Eleonora Conti, Oltre il canone: problemi, autori, opere del modernismo italiano, 1st edn (Perugia: Morlacchi Editore, 2018), p. 12.

117

Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 21.

118

Salvatore Pappalardo, Modernism in Trieste: The Habsburg Mediterranean and the Literary Invention of Europe, 1870–1945 (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), p. 26.

119

Pappalardo, p. 26.

© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.