Rethinking the apocalypse: Zeno’s Conscience and Death Stranding

ABSTRACT

The moment we live in is a moment of multiple crisis – environmental, political, economic, and viral – a moment, that is, where the reality of damage, fallibility and faultiness, and the ensuing fear, anxiety, rage, trauma, protest, and mobilisation have reached a critical point. Past and present narratives of crisis and trauma can help navigate this process. In this article we have chosen to focus on Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience (1923) and Hideo Kojima’s videogame Death Stranding (2019) for several reasons. The most important of all are Svevo’s and Kojima’s choices to deal with the trauma of crisis by emphasising and investigating the process leading to crisis, and of focusing on the zone in-between the ‘normal’ and the unknown. In so doing both narratives underscore the significance of ruins, desolation and the broken as a backdrop for rediscovering everyday life and forging meaningful connections in a fragmented world.

KEYWORDS:

• Svevo
• Kojima
• apocalypse
• trauma
• crisis
• the in-between

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The authors acknowledge that the articulation of crisis and trauma in this article is informed by the perceived threat of extinction as it is, and has been, experienced in the system of advanced capitalism. The angle of inquiry may be partial yet responds to a widespread and contagious chain of global events that instead of abating is intensifying.

2. On the concept of video game as text see for instance Hancock (2019) and Beavis (2014).

3. On smoking in Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience see also Cepach (2012), pp. 108–132; Klein (1993), pp. 77–103.

4. ‘Present-day life is polluted at the roots’, writes Svevo at the end of Zeno’s Conscience (2001, p. 436).

5. Zeno’s Conscience ends with these statements: ‘Perhaps, through an unheard-of catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. When poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness.’ (2001, pp. 436–437).

6. A fitting example is Michelangelo Antononi’s 1962 film L’eclisse where a quasi-apocalyptic atmosphere and environment frame the whole movie (Bartoloni, 2016; Pinkus, 2003; Ryhm, 2012).

7. On Svevo and his time and society see also John Gatt-Rutter (1973, pp. 123–146).

8. See for instance Morin (2009); and Bartoloni (2016), pp. 50–52.

9. Barnaba Maj has provided an excellent translation into Italian and commentary of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ (Kafka, 2008).

10. The original manuscript of Zeno’s Conscience has been lost, most probably destroyed in 1945 when Villa Veneziani, Svevo’s former residence, was destroyed by an air raid.

11. In the letter dated 9 February 1923 Frescura writes: ‘The end of your book – indeed the last period – recalls an image of mine, of the last and only man (Diciotto milioni di stelle), and also some sections of the Diario di un imboscato. We have the same anguished vision of the future. Good for us we won’t be there’ (Maier, 1973, p. 100).

12. Other apocalyptic texts written around Svevo’s time include Ugo Ojetti’s Il Vecchio (Ojetti, 1898), for which John Gatt-Rutter has stressed possible affinities with Zeno’s Conscience, Karl Kraus’ The Last Days of Mankind (1915–1919), Emile Zola ‘s La joie de vivre (1884), for which Mario Lavagetto has traced connections with Svevo’s novel, Camille Flammarion’s La fin due monde (1894), about which Giovanni Palmieri has written of direct influences on Zeno’s Conscience (Gatt-Rutter, 1988, Lavagetto, 2004, p. LXXX;, p. 159; Palmieri, 1994, p. 418). Paolo Bartoloni has looked for affinities between Svevo’s apocalyptic ending in Zeno’s Conscience and Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Critique of Violence’ (2015, pp. 159–167). On the ambiguous ending of Zeno’s Conscience see also Franco Petroni (in Sechi, 2009, pp. 35–45).

13. John Gatt-Rutter’s biography of Italo Svevo remains the most exhaustive account of Svevo’s life (1988).

14. The similarities between author and character are so striking that in a letter to Eugenio Montale, Svevo felt it necessary to distance himself from Zeno. He wrote that while writing the novel he fully impersonated his character but emphasised that while it was true that the book was imitating an autobiography, it was not his autobiography: ‘It is true that Zeno’s Conscience is a completely different thing from the previous novels. But think that it is an autobiography and not mine’ (Svevo, 1966, p. 779).

15. ‘His first devices seemed extensions of his arm and couldn’t be effective without its strength; but, by now, the device no longer has any relation to the limb. And it is the device that creates sickness, abandoning the law that was, on all earth, the creator’ (Svevo, 2001, p. 436).

16. Paolo Bartoloni has indicated a possible regenerative impulse influenced by religious thought in the last pages of Zeno’s Conscience (Bartoloni, 2015, pp. 165–166).

17. ‘Review my childhood? – writes Zeno in ‘Preamble – More than a half-century stretches between that time and me, but my farsighted eyes could perhaps perceive it if the light still glowing there were not blocked by obstacles of every sort, outright mountain peaks: all my years and some of my hours’ (Svevo, 2001, p. 5).

18. ‘Now my brow does wrinkle, because each word is made up of so many letters and the imperious present looms up and blots out the past’ (Svevo, 2001, p. 5).

19. For a detailed history of the genesis of the game and its interpretation, also see Fournier (2021).

20. On the relationship between postapocalyptic narratives and video games see Fuchs (2016) and Fraser (2016).

21. ‘Having gone through two university departments, I was fairly cultivated, thanks also to my long inertia, which I consider highly educational. He, on the contrary, was a great businessman, ignorant and active. But from his ignorance he drew strength and peace of mind, and I, spellbound, would observe him and envy him’ (Svevo, 2001, p. 62).

22. Mitchell’s article is available at https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/present_tense_2020_an_iconology_of_the_epoch/#:~:text=Present%20Tense%202020%3A%20An%20Iconology%20of%20the%20EpochAll%20these%20figures,a%20specific%20moment%20or%20epoch (accessed November 18, 2023).

23. ‘I will spend my remaining free time writing. To begin with, I will write sincerely the story of my therapy’ (Svevo, 2001, p. 403).