Zeno's Conscience

by Pericles Lewis

Italo Svevo, a Triestine novelist and a friend of James Joyce, exemplifies the modernist tendency to hope for a momentary transcendence of the flux in his Zeno’s Conscience (1923). In the novel, Zeno undergoes psychoanalysis and tries repeatedly to quit smoking. He records in his notebook the date of each “last cigarette,” generally preferring dates that seem “significant,” like 9/9/99, 1/1/01, or 3/6/12, but eventually experimenting with totally random dates. Thus each day in his life may bring Zeno’s own minor form of the millennium—his final success in quitting smoking.[1] Yet Svevo’s novel ends with a much bleaker vision of the final things, as Zeno, contemplating the first world war, predicts the invention of a weapon that will destroy the entire human race.[2]


  1. ↑See Hollington, “Svevo, Joyce, and Modernist Time,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin, 1976), pp. 430-42.
  2. ↑This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 165-166.

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