The Struggle Against Boredom

...They make clear—as does The Empty Canvas—that Moravia's concern with objects as the messengers of reality transcends enormous differences in narrative technique and link him with RobbeGrillet and the other "objective" French novelists...

...Moravia has never been a greater master of comedy than in some of the jealousy episodes...

...Then, when I thought I was about to plunge, car and all, into this gigantic Cecilia made of earth, the whole prospect changed there were no longer any legs or sex or anything...

...The Empty Canvas constitutes the most humane statement of the struggle...

...As his bathetic comedy of lust develops, Dino's efforts to obtain possession of a reality which will focus his own existence seem more and more desperate...

...The dominating theme of my work," he said "seems to be that of the relationship between man and reality [in which] the world has become dark and unplumbable or—worse still—it has disappeared...

...At the outset, Dino confronts us with a neutral object which dissolves before him as if he were one of the painstaking voyeurs in the inanimate world of Alain Robbe-Grillet: "As long as I can say that this tumbler is a glass or metal vessel made for the purpose of putting liquid into it so long shall I feel that I have some sort of a relationship with it, a relationship close enough to make me believe in its existence and also in my own...

...The physical possession of Cecilia becomes a Sisyphean gesture in a phantasmagoria of frantic repetitions, and the jealousy which ensues is less concerned with Dino's mistress than with guarding his own being...

...Reviewed by JACKSON I. COPE Department of English, Johns Hopkins University Those critics who mercilessly spur on the novelist toward novelty and experimentation customarily stigmatize Alberto Moravia as a fallen writer chanting a dead ritual of Hollywood sex and violence in the shadow of the Via Veneto...

...Dino's search for proof, ocular proof, is reminiscent of—and often worthy of comparison with—Humbert Humbert's mad attempts to catch Lolita in the act...

...This time, he is an artist, febrile with boredom, whose painting cannot survive the associations of a wealth which unites him to a depravity-worn mother (another frequent figure in the Moravia canon...

...But Moravia has steadfastly resisted the easier lures of extravagant experimentalism or doctrinaire existentialist preaching to distinguish himself as a master of the traditional symbolic narrative...

...Nowhere has Moravia so fully justified his recurrent story elements of money, sex and violence as natural symbols...

...The family resemblance has historical roots, of course: The Frenchmen owe a large (if not always grateful) debt to James Joyce's former secretary, Samuel Beckett...

...Moravia traces the origins of his esthetic order to a 1926 reading of Ulysses...

...The struggle against the "boredom" generated by detachment from the objective world is the authentic province of Moravia's explorations...

...Thus, like Nabokov, Moravia repeatedly poises lyricism and farce in haunting balance: "When we were in the car I did not even wait for Cecilia to close the door properly before I started off at full speed stretches of country, partly mown and partly grassy, made me think of her belly, rounded hillocks of her breasts, irregularities in the ground, of her profile and hair...

...More than humor and poetry recommend this novel, however...

...Fantasies of betrayal are pursued lovingly to the neglect of quite open infidelities of the flesh...

...Dino comments that Cecilia "had been born with the detachment from external things which to me seemed an intolerable change from a very different original state...

...The book is a compound of familiar Moravian ingredients...

...It is not accidental that these remarks were prepared for a French audience...

...Dino, narrator and protagonist, is the recurrent young Roman aristocrat...

...She bids well to make a second victim of Dino, whose appetite grows insatiable by degrees and inevitably becomes a consuming jealous insanity when Cecilia turns her attention to a young actor...

...Indeed, the grotesque poetry of the sex fiend in Nabokov's American Odyssey seems to have reached the hills of Rome...

...This struggle triggered the postured imitations of feeling which made an emotional spastic of Michele, his earliest protagonist (The Time of Indifference, 1929...

...But, in a psychic short-circuit, Dino finds the objective world of sofas, armchairs, tumblers and people suddenly turned off, and now can see nothing before him "but darkness and an empty void...

...His solution is to reject the canvas for the bedroom, and he takes as mistress Cecilia, a young primitive whose sexual prowess, made monstrous through her own detachment, has reportedly killed one older painter already...

...Or again I saw the road curving in between two long, curving hills...

...In a radio talk three years ago, Moravia directed us toward this pattern...

...The same note was echoed in early reviews of his latest novel, The Empty Canvas (issued in Italy as La Noia —"Boredom...

...The idiom," Moravia added, "is that of things...

...it reached a crescendo of horror a decade ago in The Conformist, where detachment was the norm of an entire society...

...It is wholly fitting that Moravia should leave Dino ultimately where his long analysis of "boredom" began: with an inarticulate thing, a simple and inviolate object impinging steadily upon his gaze as he lies alone, a happy victim of his own violence...

...The art of The Empty Canvas justifies the apparent paradox of Moravia's reference to himself as an "ideological" writer in an account which begins: "I think I was born with a story-telling vocation...

...as though what to me seemed a sort of sickness was, in her, a sane and normal fact...