Boredom - Alberto Moravia [1]
In 1960, he published this novel, La noia, in which he and his old enemy, boredom, came boldly to grips. In his work, and also in his conversation, Moravia was fond of analyzing; his novels sometimes read like explications. He had a habit of asking his interlocutors—and himself—a rhetorical question, then answering it. Years later, speaking at a Yale conference about Pasolini, Moravia referred to his late friend as Italy’s great modern “civil poet.” Then, typically, he asked: “What is a civil poet?” And then, equally typically, he answered his own question with acute and arresting originality.
Similarly, in La noia, before getting into the complexity of the story, he defines his (or his stand-in protagonist’s) concept of noia, boredom. “The feeling of boredom originates for me in a sense of the absurdity of a reality which is insufficient, or anyhow unable, to convince me of its own effective existence.... For me, therefore, boredom is not only the inability to escape from myself but is also the consciousness that theoretically I might be able to disengage myself from it, thanks to a miracle of some sort.”
Dino, the bored narrator of Moravia’s novel, is a direct descendant of Michele, the adolescent antihero of The Time of Indifference; but with the added emotional baggage of his greater experience (and the author’s). Michele’s clumsy, botched murder attempt is reflected in the anticlimactic violence of Dino’s conclusion.
Similarly, Cecilia—Dino’s rather sullen but patient mistress—is related to Adriana, the woman of Rome, and to many other female characters in Moravia: rationally immoral, strange compounds of honesty, resignation, and independence, anomalous products of the working class, without bourgeois hypocrisy or ambition, women of frank sensuality but also clear-eyed and, in their way, courageous.
In defining the moral and intellectual boundaries of Cecilia, Moravia exploits—as he did with the protagonists of The Woman of Rome and Two Women and of many stories—his gift for portraying a typically Roman caste, a step or two above poverty, but not yet middle-class: people who can use money, and have a practical attitude toward the transactional possibilities of sex, and yet who can also exhibit an absence of envy that would seem to make their situation the more lamentable.
In real life, in conversation, Moravia evinced a wonderful sense of humor. As he told stories, his own infectious laughter often interrupted him. His fiction is not generally considered humorous; but there are times, in La noia, when it is hard to suppress a smile, especially when the curious Dino subjects Cecilia to one of his interrogations, questioning her implacably about her family, her home, her friends, her past lovemaking. For all his desperation, Dino is, finally, a great comic creation. At times, the reader may wish that Moravia had written a sequel to this novel, telling the same story but from the point of view of Cecilia, seeing her lover as a weird, middle-class eccentric, a compulsive asker of, to her, pointless questions.
British and American publishers, having acquired the rights to La noia, must have balked at the idea of publishing a book entitled Boredom. Wouldn’t that be begging for trouble? So they, or perhaps the translator Angus Davidson, came up with a more alluring title: The Empty Canvas. But make no mistake: this is not a book about painting, or even about not painting; it is about noia. Many people who are not translators—and they include some editors—are convinced that every word in a given language has an exact, or nearly exact, equivalent in a second language. Alas, the word “boredom,” which the expert Davidson has had to use in the body of the text, seems