Zeno’s Return

Zeno’s Conscience was published in 1923, when selves were forged on Freudian’s fainting sofas. Accordingly, it takes the form of journal entries that its narrator maintains at the behest of his psychoanalyst. The disgruntled doctor introduces his client’s confessions by noting that he is publishing them ‘in revenge’; Zeno has betrayed him, he tells us, by abandoning analysis. But the patient persists with one aspect of his treatment, even when he no longer has any hope of being healed: like a true incurable, he goes on writing, scribbling the last sections of Zeno’s Conscience long after he accepted the intransigence of his Oedipus complex and his fears of castration. As it turns out, his graphomania persists even when his native novel is over: A Very Old Man, newly translated by Felicia Randall and published by New York Review Classics last year, contains a new store of Zeno’s post-analysis reflections.