The Ideal Fascist: The Conformist, Alberto Moravia
Alberto Moravia’s protagonists, in the novels of his I’ve read, are almost self-consciously off-putting: narcissistic, self-loathing, compulsive, and sour. The experience of reading his novels can be like poking a bruise, both compelling and nauseating. In The Conformist, published in 1951 and set in 1938 Rome and Paris, Moravia makes explicit what his other novels gesture at: these are men whose lives have been warped by fascism.
We first meet Marcello Clerici, the titular protagonist of The Conformist, as a young boy:
Throughout his childhood, Marcello was as fascinated by objects as a magpie. Perhaps because at home his parents, more from indifference than austerity, had never thought to satisfy his desire to possess; or perhaps because other instincts, deeper and as yet obscure, took on in him the mask of greed; he was constantly assailed by furious desires for the most diverse objects. A pencil with an eraser at the tip, an illustrated book, a slingshot, a ruler, a portable rubber inkpot — any trifle could stir his soul, first to an intense and unreasoning longing for the coveted thing, then, once he possessed it, to an astonished, enchanted, unlimited satisfaction. Marcello hda a room all his own in the house, where he slept and studied. Here, all the objects scattered on the table or closed up in the drawers held for him the character of things still sacred or lately dsconsecrated, according to whether their acquisition was recent or long-standing.
We also quickly learn that the objects Marcello covets the most are weapons — not children’s toy weapons, but the real thing. He’s excited by violence, and his parents, the father rageful and the mother volatile, let his escalating acts pass unnoticed. He satisfies his violent urges first on a flowerbed, then on the garden lizards, and then on the family cat. But he also carries a horror that his urges make him abnormal. He tries to enlist a friend in his violence, hoping that his desires will be revealed as commonplace; when the friend refuses, Marcello is enraged. He’s torn between his compulsions and his desire to be normal, and he longs for a set of rules to cling to, finding solace in the uniformed regiments of boarding school.
Marcello, still a child, escalates to killing a man: a pedophile chauffeur who grooms and lures him with the promise of the gift of a pistol. Marcello is not comforted at all by the knowledge that in killing this man he was defending himself against rape — it was his desire for the pistol that brought him into danger in the first place, and he’s ashamed by thoughts of how he manipulated the older man into the promise. The encounter makes him feel deviant, cursed, unclean. And here Moravia muddies the source of Marcello’s underlying feeling of deviance: his ostensible forbidden desire is for violence, but there are also hints that he may be homosexual.
As a man, with Mussolini ascendant in Italy, Marcello finds comfort in aligning himself with fascism, which seems to offer him the promise of normalcy. It has rules, order, structure, hierarchy — everything he lacked as a child — with the promise of violence underneath. But his relationship to fascism isn’t quite as simple as blind loyalty. Amid the boorish bureaucrats of Mussolini’s regime, he notices and is repulsed by their sordidness, their corruption, their tastelessness. But none of it can shake him, since it aligns with his vision of the world. He reflects:
It was the same when people he trusted told him about other important public figures — that they were stealing, or incompetent, or using their political influence for personal ends. He registered this sort of news with an almost gloomy indifference, as if these kinds of things had ceased to concern him from the moment he made his choice, once and for all; and he didn’t intend to change it. Besides, such things no longer surprised him, since in a certain sense he had taken them for granted for as long as he could remember, with his precocious awareness of the less amicable aspects of man. But above all, he perceived that there could be no relationship between his loyalty to the regime and the exremely rigid morality that informed his own conduct. The reasons for that loyalty had origins deeper than any moral standard, and they were not about to be shaken by a hand feeling up a woman’s bottom in a state office, or by a theft, or by any other crime or error. He couldn’t have said, precisely, what these origins were; the dull, opaque veil of his stubborn melancholy came between them and his thoughts.
In a key scene, Marcello confesses his boyhood killing to a priest, longing to be condemned and castigated for his crime. To his disappointment, he realizes that the priest is more concerned about whether he performed any sexual acts with the chauffeur than he is about the murder. The church, he realizes, cannot be the object of his loyalty. Only obedience to the fascist regime can satisfy his obscure needs.
The principal plot of The Conformist concerns Marcello’s mission to assist in the assassination of his former mentor, Professor Quadri, who has fled Italy out of fear of persecution and has been leading anti-fascist organizing efforts from exile in Paris. Marcello has recently married a bourgeois young woman named Giulia, and uses the opportunity of his honeymoon to travel to Paris and meet Professor Quadri (on making the offer to the secret police, he reflects that “the boundary between fanaticism and servility [is] not very precise”).
In Paris, of course, his loyalties are shaken: he immediately is struck with desire for Professor Quadri’s beautiful wife Lina, and suddenly realizes that a different path could have been open to him — one characterized by love and freedom rather than rigid conformity. Quadri’s wife is, however, off-limits to him: not only because she is married, but because she herself is gay.1 Lina entertains Marcello’s advances only to get closer to his wife. The four of them, Quadri and Line, Marcello and Giulia, visit a lesbian nightclub, and Marcello watches the two women dance, full of despair:
For a moment he watched, with obscure and painful amazement, the two embraced and dancing women. Giulia was smaller than Lina and they were dancing cheek to cheek; and at every step, Lina’s arm seemed to squeeze Giulia’s waist more tightly. It was a sad and incredible sight. This, he couldn’t help thinking, was the love that in a different world, with a different life, would have been destined for him, the love that would have saved him, the love he would have enjoyed.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s film adaptation of the novel (trailer here) is a masterpiece, and in my opinion even superior to its source material (which is fascinating and astute, but often suffers from heavy-handedness). Jean-Louis Trintignant excels at playing uptight losers, and he plays Marcello’s creepy uptight loserdom to the hilt. The Conformist is a psychological portrait not just of an ideal fascist but of anxious masculinity: a horror of sexuality, weakness, and deviance, and a longing for rules — with violent enforcement — to obliterate whatever might be hidden in the darkest self.
I was moved to read The Conformist after listening to the Unclear and Present Danger podcast episode about the movie, which you can find here.
I think we can understand Lina as a stand-in for Marcello’s sublimated desire for homosexual love. Her name is a feminized version of that of the chauffeur — Lino — whom Marcello kills in the novel’s first section. Those better versed than me in queer literary theory would probably have more to say here.
- Very compelling - A question, was the book originally written in Italian?