I riverberi della Coscienza di Zeno nei romanzi italiani degli anni Sessanta

This article analyses the reverberations of La coscienza di Zeno in 1960s Italian novels. If Berto, in Il male oscuro, explicitly declared his debt to Svevo, the research is here extended to texts such as La nuvola di smog, La noia, La vita agra, Il maestro di Vigevano, Memoriale, Capriccio italiano, Il padrone, and Dissipatio H.G. Among the common features, it is worth mentioning the humour and the ineptitude; the irony towards medicine and the ambivalent dialectic health/disease, success/failure; cigarette smoking and the difficult relationship with the father; the references to mental illness, psychoanalysis and dreams; the apocalyptic imagery. The main hypothesis concerns, however, a structural element, namely the use, in the autodiegetic novels of the years of the ‘economic miracle’, of an I-narrator who is not only unreliable, but also idiosyncratic, humoral, and sometimes even neurotic/psychotic. The Zeno model would thus emerge in the ‘many truths and lies’ that these doubly alienated protagonists tell the reader, in their obsessive, apologetic and pseudo-essayistic elucubrations.