In the Shadow of the Mammoth: Italo Svevo and the Emergence of Modernism by Giuliana Minghelli (review)

1072 Reviews In the Shadow of the Mammoth: Italo Svevo and the Emergence of Modernism. By Giuliana Minghelli. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xi + 238 pp. ?32. ISBN 0-8020-3638-4. I firstcame across Minghelli's work, when working on Svevo, in the shape of her article 'In the Shadow ofthe Mammoth: Narratives of Symbiosis in La coscienza di Zeno', MLN, 109 (1994), 49-72, which in the present volume forms part of the last chapter. In the intervening years, Minghelli's thesis on this large extinct animal has itself grown to mammoth proportions. This book reads like a symphonic poem, the overture articulating the grand theme that is developed with variations and leitmotifs in the ensuing movements. We begin with an adventure story set in prehistoric times, La Guerre dufeu (1909), by a popular Franco-Belgian writer,J.H. Rosny aine, about a pact between the mammoth and man in which the more fragile creature is allowed to survive. Svevo was inspired to write his own version, 'L'uomo e la teoria darwiniana', where man, a 'uomo di abbozzo' (a man who is but a sketch), offershimself as a slave to the gentle, gigantic mammoth, and in exchange for protection, he lives in its shadow (p. 4, Minghelli's emphasis), developing weapons and tools in order to live eventually an independent existence. The bond, the symbiosis, that exists between the two, man and mammoth, is one of 'mutual contamination [. . .] between strength and weakness' (ibid.). This is the overarching premiss from which everything else follows. Thus Tri? este, a city 'in abbozzo' with its myriad ethnic contaminations, exists in the shadow of Austria-Hungary. It is in the shadow of Florence and the ideal ofthe Tuscan language that Italo Svevo and his contemporaries wrote. Svevo emerged from the shadow of the nineteenth-century Realist and Naturalist traditions, and fromwithin this shadow he 'forever changed the physiognomy of the Italian literary tradition', opening it out to 'modernist experimentation and contamination' (p. 13). Minghelli elaborates her analysis of Svevo's two fables 'L'uomo e la teoria dar? winiana' and 'La corruzione dell'anima', which, she argues, are central to a complete understanding of Svevo's ceuvre. On the problematic dating of the firstfable, Brian Moloney, in his review of this book in Italian Studies, 59 (2004), 166-68, contends that it is in fact three separate fragments, the second of which may be a discarded paragraph from La coscienza di Zeno. Minghelli then turns her attention to Giacomo Debenedetti's critique of Svevo's ceuvre, which was the firstserious and sustained appraisal to be published in Italy (1929). His thesis is that Svevo's limitations as a novelist are due to the fact that 'he left his Jewish origins in the shadows' (p. 51). This leads on to the Weininger connection and a rereading of the passages in La coscienza di Zeno where Weininger is mentioned by Guido in his tirade against women. Minghelli suggests that farfrom espousing these ideas, Zeno wishes to see them refuted: 'In Svevo's hands, Weininger becomes his vehicle to represent ironically, and thus distance, the misogyny permeating a whole society' (p. 69). In the remaining chapters (3-6), devoted primarily to Svevo's three novels, Min? ghelli posits the relationships between the male protagonists and women in terms of symbiosis and contamination; in short, they are a reworking of that between the 'uomo di abbozzo' and the mammoth. For example:' If [Alfonso's] mother can provide a faithful,silent shadow in which Alfonso can pursue his dreams?like the primitive man his evolution in the shadow ofthe mammoth?Annetta's shadow is a disquieting one' (p. 80); Amalia, Emilio's sister in Senilitd, lives in the shadow of her brother's adventure with Angiolina; the deceptions and disguises of the latter highlight the contaminations that are intrinsic in her affairwith Emilio; Augusta, Zeno's wife, is 'like the pacific mammoth [who] lives unconscious of herself and her surroundings' (p. 178); Carla, Zeno's lover, 'lives in the shadow of her small and modest apartment MLRy 99.4, 2004 1073 [. . .] and in the long shadow cast by Augusta's presence' (p...

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