Joyce and Svevo

(The above postcard was sent by Joyce to Svevo with an ironic comment. Can you read it?... It was sent on 26 th July 1912 from "Stephen Dedalus" to "Hector Schmitz". Svevo - changing the title of his first novel-wrote: "A portrait of an artist as an old". Very good sense of humour, isn't it?!... do you agree?)

First of all Leopold Bloom is a Jew with Hungarian origins. Although in the book he’s not “technically” Jewish (his mother is Irish) his roots are important to define his personality and view of the world. He’s a Jewish fictional persona that becomes an embodiment of Jewish archetypes, neurosis, trends of thoughts and deepest ideas, influenced by the common cultural and religious tradition.
Behind the character of Leopold Bloom there might be actually a man called Ettore Schmitz, a Jewish man from Trieste who then became famous in Italy as a writer under the pseudonym of Italo Svevo; he was a writer that would turn Italian literature upside-down similarly to how Joyce did with the Anglo-American one.
Joyce found inspiration in him and reproduced in his work some of the Italian man's psychological traits and life events, also shaping "his Dublin" on the city of Trieste, located in the North-East of Italy.
In 1907, James Joyce became Italo Svevo's English teacher and mentor, a professional relationship that soon became a strong friendship. The two men shared a lot of “elective affinities”. Joyce realized his pupil was very curious about literature, new theories of psycho-analysis, philosophy and nontraditional writing styles. Svevo, son of Francesco Schmitz and Allegra Moravia, was actually a very educated man. In Germany he had attended the Brussel Institute where he had the chance to read Schiller, Goethe, Schopenhauer and his contemporary writers.
Trieste in those years was bursting with ideas, intellectuals, writers and it became a crossroad fro the literary and the publishing industry. Its economy was booming along with its culture: poets, artists and musicians created their groups, and gathered at events and parties hosted by very influential families.
Before Svevo met Joyce he had already tried to become a writer. He published, mostly at his expenses, Una Vita and Senilità but since his work did not receive much attention, he became a businessman. However, at the time he met Joyce, he was still involved with writing diaries, short stories and random thoughts that afterwards became the basis of a new revolutionary book: Zeno’s Conscience, a classic in modern literature that is now studied in every high-school and university.
Joyce’s Ulysses features an extensive and original use of the "stream of consciousness" technique, a style that allows the author to report his thoughts in written form without literary filters or rambling, often revealing hidden or strange implications.
Svevo, on the other side, is more rational in his style but in his book -a fictional diary published by a revengeful psychiatrist that wants to get back at his client- the border between conscious and subconscious thoughts is often not clear. If you analyze it carefully there are various contradictions between the actions and the thoughts of the characters, between his expectations, imagination and reality and his rational ethic and needs. Zeno is a modern character and, just like Bloom, he is a anti-hero.
There is much more to be said about the collaboration or the influence that these two writers had on each other. There is much more to be said about the reason why these characters are important for their own countries and for the Jewish world and image.
Prof Manno