Svevo, Proust and the Novel of the Jealous

Abstract

The theme of jealousy has been recurrent in European novels from the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Senilità (1898) and Un amour de Swann, –the second part of Du côté de chez Swann (1913)– share this theme, which is related to the notion of illness. Jealousy as a disease contracted by the protagonists of these novels has direct implications in new aesthetic forms of the Fin-de-Siècle’s novel genre. This paper analyses hermeneutically and from a comparative perspective the composition of the novel of jealousy and the figure of the jealous. It argues that this composition of the plot inclines the selected novels to take a decadent style that recovers the mimesis (at a time when l'art pour l'art attempts against it). This recovery of mimesis or the novel of the jealous is an aesthetic creation that establishes an explicit link with social praxis through the jealous bourgeois (petit or haute bourgeoisie) and his detective actions, which, however, have no purpose that achieves truth or morality. Consequently, since it does not obey a practical goal, the novel of the jealous man concludes sterile.