Me and My Organ

...Rico sees everything m the worst light Faces are masks and reality is fundamentally adverse and out to thwart him In fact, he is so embattled and suspicious that it is hard to believe he lives m Italy, where almost every passing traveler has at some time encountered the warmth and helpfulness of total strangers Yet all the people m Two meet m relative positions of power and weakness-one is on top, the other underneath...

...Two ends with a poignant scene in which Rico submits to the demands of "him" and, giving up Sublimation, goes back to his wife As she opens the door, he exposes himself, gigantic as ever Greeted by this familiar sight, Fausta takes hold of "him" as if it were a donkey's tail and pulls her husband unceremoniously into the flat A final triumph tor Wholeness, for affection and eroticism as a natural part of life Yet it is the dialogue, rather than its moral point, that seems most plausible, for it permits this most self-concentrated of authors to fix his thoughts upon nothing more than opposite aspects of himself, and to wander over the imposing terrain of modern ideology without ever leaving home...

...In the same way, Miller and Roth moved in on us with conviction because they legitimately sensed they were liberating us from a tradition of guilt There is a tremendous mounting tension in their unrestrained language because it plays to the ears of an inhibited audience But Moravia does not fit well into the uniform of our revolution and, in this switch from the mood to the physiology of sex, looks as though he is taking a large and awkward tango step backward...

...Alienated, Projected, and Expropriated Heavy sarcasm about names and catchwords is usually wielded by those with a thin smattering of knowledge, who feel sophistication is expected of them...

...Even in the realm of psychology, it is forms, movements, whatever can be detachedly noticed by an outsider, that Moravia specializes in He is particularly acute at describing routines of work, the organization of rooms, and the malevolence of furniture, as in the scene where Rico visits his mother...

...Whenever there is a spare moment, Two becomes a dialectical treatise on "Sublimation," the holy grail of Rico and the bane of the reader, who is assailed on every page by that word or its elephantine opposite, "Desublimation" (implying, like "defrocked" and "dethroned," a fall from grace) According to Rico, these expressions encompass the world's two classes, temperaments and moralities, although there is some confusion as to exactly who falls into which The sublimated include successful artists, commercial entrepreneurs like Protti, anyone with sang-froid and self-sufficiency like Maurizio or Rico's mother or, for an elusive reason, the Italian masses The desublimated include poor Fausta, always ready to make love, Mussolini, presumably a creature of impulse, but mainly the hero, who is a slave to the remarkable proportions and boastful, demanding disposition of "him," described as "like a whale dying stranded and dying on a deserted shore," or "like a dirigible which, detached from its moorings, hovers in the air," or "vigorous and massive as a young oak tree, with all the veins in relief like clinging creepers ". The prose, like its subject, is highly inflated Yet it may have been for the sake of writing a halt dozen of just such congested passages that Moravia forsook the languorous sex interludes, resonant with emotion and esthetics, of novels like Conjugal Love, where the narrator perused for hours the contours of the beloved There is not a trace of languor in Two, and sex is treated with pop-eyed bluntness...

...Me and My Organ Two: A Phallic Novel Bi Alberto Moravia Fanar, Straus and Gnoux 353 pp $7 95 Reviewed by Isa Kapp Unlikely as it seems, the form of Moravia s most recent novel is an interminable squabble between the hero and his sex organ The two companions, always together, share a series of bizarre amorous adventures that never reach the desired conclusion Rico accosts a woman with tightly closed legs in the safety deposit vault of a bank and falls m love, but she rejects him in favor of masturbation He pays court to a round little cook, but his mother fires her He exposes himself in church to a middle-aged tourist with brash childish buttocks, but she sails past with her head modestly sunk into her chest after giving him an acknowledging blush He tries to become a film director by seducing the producer's dinosaur-shaped wife, but his organ lets him down...

...I waited for a long time m that silent house, face to face with the twentieth century furniture, and my anger increased The sideboard formed of a number of superimposed cubes flanked by two cylinders, the upholstered chairs shaped like hip-baths, the massive table supported on an enormous short round stem, reminding one of a mushroom all these were there as representatives of my mother ". Moravia is at his best when such exact enumeration of shape and color reconstructs and confirms for us his own jaundiced and joyless image of the world The problem of Two is that it contains a moral, and what is more, a very humanistic and forward-looking one The dialogue between desire and discipline, between feeling and convention, is meant as a serious critical portrait of the nervous, status-oriented middle class, concerned with careerism and depending for self-regard on what other people think of them Moravia is also saying that this split between senses and spirit is bound to be destructive, that our post-Freudian age has lost the capacity for instinct and for high art...

...It was natural for Moravia, who wrote his first book, The Time of Indifference, in 1929 under the Fascist regime, to assume that it behooved him to be politically sophisticated Yet the political dialogue in his fiction, while couched m a recognizable and accurate vocabulary, bears the same relation to genuine understanding and interest as rubbery polyester fabrics do to wool and cotton A lot of energy goes into the imitation, but the texture of the real thing is missing...

...Perhaps the new starring role for the phallus is merely a question of age Some people, as they grow older, feel they can no longer afford the delicacy of their youth, and want to reappropriate their bodies with coarse talk More likely, Moravia has been reading Henry Miller (whose self-confidence he cannot aspire to) and Philip Roth (whose bravura and humor he will never achieve) and trying to outstrip them That might explain the prolonged passages on the psychology and dynamics of female masturbation, though they sound authentic to the last convulsion, they have a depressing clinical effect on the reader...

...These frustrations only add fuel to the quarrel of the two, who act, in the hands of their uxurious author, exactly like an old married couple They scold, nag, complain, know each other's faults and understand that they are bound together for life...

...Whatever you take their dialogue to represent-id vs ego, instinct vs reason, the spontaneous vs the conniving self-your mind tends to be distracted from any intellectual content by the nomenclatural handicap It's not easy to adapt to a sex organ called "he" (when accusing) or "him" (when accusative) What really matters, though, is how long you can bear to stay in the vicinity of a Moravia hero In Two, as m many another dispiriting Moravian tale, he is a dour, pretentious fellow who inhabits the brown study of his own ineffectuality A would-be artist and man of words that belie his feelings and alienate his listeners, he is, like the hero of the earlier A Ghost at Noon and the author himself, a movie scriptwriter who despises his trade...

...What he really wants, I believe, is precisely to keep on dancing like a pro to new kinds of music, and not to let the world pass him by He is like Rico explaining to the producer why he is the proper director for a film about young revolutionaries, to be called "Expropriation...

...The hero feels subservient with the producer, Protti, who is authoritarian and condescending, with his arrogant young Leftist collaborator, Maurizio, who considers him bourgeois, with his oppressive middle-class mother, who disapproves of his paunch and his womanizing, and even with his sex organ, which eggs him on to undignified exploits The only one he can manage to cow is his wife, Fausta, whose apartment he has left on the assumption that artistic creation requires continence From time to time he mortifies her, to enjoy the happy sensation of being on top though chaste...

...But Protti, I know all about protest For me the works of Marcuse, Horkehimer, Adorno, Marx, Lenin and Mao held no mysteries I'm in a position to prove to you that protest arose contemporaneously in Germany from the same source that gave us Nietzsche in the United States from the hippy and beat movements as well as from the Oriental influences of the Zen and Tao type ". Moravia, in addition, thinks he is in a position to prove to us that he knows his Marx and Freud well enough to make fun of them In a hurry to get to work, he goes in for considerable mixing and matching Not content with representing his young Marxist scriptwriters as shallow and dogmatic, he insists they are also sexless, and he devises a mod table of contents that sports jargon like Castrated Instrumentalized...

...Though Moravia has from the beginning been taken seriously by intellectuals (he was first published in America by Partisan Review), a solid examination of ideas has never been his strong suit His talent is for objective observation-of mechanics (he describes m Two a meeting of young Communists where the applause, the length of the speeches and the chanting of "Che Yes, Rico No" is directed by a system of flashing yellow, red and green traffic lights), of minute gestures and expressions that reveal character (The Fancy Dress Party, a satire about a Latin American dictatorship written m 1941, focuses on corrupton of character, not politics or economics), of external conditions (like the fatigue and violence and hunger that accompany the upheaval of war in Two Women...

...It seems a shame that Moravia, who has in the past been both frank and subtle when he wrote about sex, should now capitulate to the American style large-scale, wholesale and speedy After all Europeans (and particularly Italians) have always taken sex much more for granted than we have An American stare is easier to break than an unrelenting Italian one, for it is contradicted by some internal mechanism of immediate remorse...

...It all makes perfectly good sense, but Moravia is not Silone and it is not in him to create situations that call upon men to transcend themselves He excels at diminishing them, isolating their faults, especially their propensity for self-deception, and elaborating the process of their rationalizations...