Kryzys tożsamości a koncepcja zdrowia i choroby w powieściach Itala Sveva
Identity crisis and a conception of health and illness in Italo Svevo’s novels

Author(s): Wiesława Kłosek
Subject(s): Studies of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Summary/Abstract: Italo Svevo, an Italian writer, who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, elaborates on discourse about health and illness dichotomy on three levels on which develops the subject’s identity: individual, social and universal. Main characters of the analysed novels (A Life, Old Age, Zeno’s Conscience) personify disintegrated subject who is aware of their own physical, mental and moral decay. Illnesses, obsessive self‑analysis lead them to find the truth about themselves which is accordingly displaced and does not lead to synthesis and integration of disintegrated subject.Svevo also depicts subject’s crisis in a context of bourgeois civilisation’s crisis. On the subject’s social plane the protagonists polemicize with the order of the bourgeois world but they are not able to go beyond the limits of social identity.In his reflections on the human condition at the turn of the century, the Italian writer identifies life with the terminal illness. In the ongoing process of civilization, an individual loses their humanity and their intelligence changes into destructive power which is driven against themselves.The opposition of health and illness which is constantly present in Svevo’s novels makes him an analyst of the most important illnesses of individual, society and mankind in his period. The illness’s category becomes a metaphor which means a state of identity crisis. On the other hand, the category becomes a tool for knowing and a stage which lead to health recovery. Apocalyptic vision of the end of the world which ends the last novel, shows the possibility of health recovery only under the condition of total annihilation of mankind — incarnation of illness. It may be a new beginning announcement and some kind of rebirth but Italo Svevo does not say whether a reborn mankind is better.

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