From border to front

Critical opinion is divided on the conspicuousness of Trieste in Svevo’s work. This essay argues that the figure of the international border helps us understand the fictive image of space in La coscienza di Zeno (1923). The epistemological instability of the text resides in the gap between a ‘peripheral’ Triestine dialect and a ‘core’ standard Italian: a problem of space-in-language. The aporia of Zeno’s truthful-mendacious narrative becomes associated with the territorial status of language. In a geo-political fable, Zeno is stranded on the Austro-Italian border on the day war breaks out between those nations: what is represented is a paradox of space and not a naturalistic setting. Referring to Montale’s and Robbe-Grillet’s responses to Svevo, I finally associate Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a Kafkan ‘minor literature’ with Svevo’s own deterritorialized vernacular. Svevo’s novel, innovatory because ‘semi-peripheral’ (Moretti), is part of a Mitteleuropäisch atopian modernism whose poetics are, in Musil’s phrase, ‘without qualities’.