The Time of Indifference Alberto Moravia, First Published: 1929 Type of Work: Psychological realism Time of Work: 1929

Setting: Rome Characters: Mariagrazia Ardengo, Carla Ardengo, Michele Ardengo, Leo Merumeci, Lisa The Novel On the eve of her twenty-fourth birthday, Carla Ardengo longs to escape her dreary existence, to find a new life. Visiting the Ardengos this evening is Leo Merumeci. He is a frequent guest because he is the lover of Carlas widowed mother, Mariagrazia, and the holder of the mortgage on the Ardengos fashionable villa. Leo has become tired of Mariagrazia, who has been his mistress for fifteen years; he propositions Carla, and she agrees to come to his apartment the next day. Lisa, who had been Leos lover and fiancee before he met Mariagrazia, is also at the villa. Mariagrazia suspects that Lisa and Leo want to renew their affair and that Lisa has come to her house to arrange a rendezvous. The object of her quest, however, is not Leo but Michele, Mariagrazias son. Just as Carla consents to give herself to Leo, Michele agrees to see Lisa. Leos attempted seduction suffers a setback at Carlas birthday party the next day. To make her more pliable, he fills her glass again and again with champagne, so that by the end of the meal she is drunk. They go for a walk on the villas grounds, where they happen upon an old shed conveniently equipped with a bed. Just as Leo prepares to have sex with Carla, she becomes ill from the wine, and he must wait until night to consummate the affair. Lisas hopes, too, are temporarily dashed. She has lured Michele to her apartment with the promise of interesting a rich relative in him and so securing a good position for the youth. When Michele arrives the next morning, no relative is waiting. Lisa goes into the hallway, pretending to call him, but Michele sees that she does not even pick up the phone, and he leaves. When Michele returns later that day, he finds Leo alone with Lisa; again Michele leaves. By the time he makes his third visit, Lisa knows all about Leos relationship with Carla. Michele accuses Lisa of chasing after Leo, but she replies that Leo would not have her; he already has Micheles sister. Although Michele does not feel anger on learning about his sisters affair, he senses that he should act. He buys a cheap pistol, goes to Leos apartment, and tries to kill him. Michele has forgotten to load the gun, so his attempted murder fails. Carla, who has been sleeping with Leo, emerges from the bedroom to learn the cause of the confusion. Michele seizes the

opportunity to urge her to abandon Leo, arguing that the family can sell the villa and pay Leo what they owe him. Leo knows that if the Ardengos put the villa on the market they will get far more than the eight hundred thousand lira that they owe him. He will thus lose the house, his new mistress, and perhaps his old mistress as well. Consequently, he offers to marry Carla, allow the Ardengos to continue to live in the villa, and find Michele a job. Michele still opposes the marriage, but Carla consents because, even though she does not love Leo, she is eager for the money, fine clothes, and parties that the marriage will bring her. Following the confrontation at Leos apartment, the two Ardengo children return home. Carla and her mother prepare to attend a masked ball, a fitting emblem of the life of concealment that they lead. Michele and Lisa, meanwhile, plan yet another tryst, and he promises that this time he will not rebuff her advances. The Characters Michele is the first of a number of effete intellectuals appearing in Alberto Moravias fiction. He would like to feel passion, to love Lisa and despise Leo, but he cannot. His only response to life is indifference, because he lacks any moral sense. Although he pretends to be angry when he learns that his sister has become Leos mistress, he had in fact considered selling Carla to him in exchange for an allowance. If Leo had preferred Lisa, Michele was prepared to give her up for the same terms. Whereas Michele feels nothing, Carla suffers deeply. Seeing her present life as barren, she longs for change and will do anything to effect it. She even agrees to Leos proposition and then his proposal, only to realize, too late, that nothing has been altered; she is merely taking her mothers place. Lisa, too, hopes for redemption. She thinks that Michele will bring sunshine, blue sky, freshness, enthusiasm into her gray world. Given Micheles character, Lisa is doomed to disappointment: Enthusiasm is hardly one of his attributes. The gap between her imagination and reality is evident when her would-be lover first comes to her apartment. She has been fantasizing about an elaborate seduction, but all that she can say when Michele arrives is, Well, how goes it? At the end of the novel her affair with Michele is still inchoate despite Micheles promise to accept her advances. Even if they do sleep together, her life will change no more than Carlas, since neither Leo nor Michele can offer any realistic hope of salvation. Michele, Carla, and Lisa would like to change their situation but cannot. Mariagrazia and Leo, on the other hand, want everything to stay the same. The former dreads poverty and the loss of social position so much that she consents to her daughters marriage to her own former lover, a man who claims to regard Carla as his almost daughter. Leo, too, wants to retain his comforts, including the pleasant Ardengo villa and sex with Carla. If he must sacrifice nominal bachelorhood to keep these, he will, but he tells himself at the end of the

novel, Even when youre married, youll be the same old Leo. He will still chase any woman he desires and will remain a frequent guest of Mariagrazia. Themes and Meanings As Michele ponders his condition, he observes, Once upon a time, it appeared, men used to know their paths in life from the first to the last step, but now it was not so; now ones head was in a bag, one was in the dark, one was blind. And yet one still had to go somewhere; but where? All the characters are groping blindly in a world that has lost what Moravia calls the traditional scale of values in the aftermath of World War I. This blindness is perhaps best symbolized by the scene at the beginning of the novel when the electricity fails in Mariagrazias house. In the ensuing blackness, Mariagrazia seeks vainly for Leo, who is hiding behind the curtains and flirting with Carla, and Lisa arranges an assignation with Michele. The entire novel is suffused with gloom and blackness. Much of the action occurs at night, and the rest unfolds under the rainy, gray skies of winter, the season of death. This bleakness also invades the characters houses. Mariagrazias drawing room is cold and bleak. An arch divides it into two unequal parts, emblematic of the present and the future. Little light shines in the present, where the characters sit, and the other section, the future, offers no change: It remained plunged in a shadowy blackness in which reflections from mirrors and the long shape of the piano could barely be distinguished. The dark future merely reflects and repeats the grim present. Just as the Ardengos gloomy drawing room embodies that familys life, so Lisas apartment exposes her sad experience. Inside she looks at the mute, dead shapes of old pieces of furniture and a gray, chilly bathroom with dull, painted pipes; outside all she can see is an equally dull piece of red roof. From a distance, her drawing room seems an exception to this pervasive gloom, and it is here that she plans to seduce Michele, who, like the room, appears to hold out hope for change. Upon closer examination, though, one finds the same desolation here as everywhere else: the upholstery was discolored and in places threadbare,...the sofa was torn and the cushions shabby. Neither this drawing room nor Michele will offer relief from the general dreariness. To escape this oppressive reality, Moravias characters construct dreamworlds. Carla imagines a new life. Michele seeks a pure woman, neither false nor stupid nor corrupt, and wants a world governed by instinct and sincerity. Mariagrazia harbors visions of wealth and a beauty that will retain Leos love for her. They are not above lying to themselves and others to support these fantasies. Thus, Lisa conjures up a rich relative to induce Michele to visit her, even though she could just as easily have invited him without the pretense. Michele tries repeatedly and unsuccessfully to assume emotions that he does not feel; Mariagrazia pretends to a superiority over Lisa which she lacks. Even though the characters often look at their reflections in mirrors, they fail to see themselves and their world as it is, for they have lost touch with reality.

Critical Context Moravias depiction of middle-class life as dull, gloomy, and false shocked and stimulated Italian audiences when the novel first appeared. The product of a bourgeois upbringing, Moravia revealed his own boredom with that existence. His critique went beyond a personal aversion to middle-class values: It anticipated the existential view that people have become so self-absorbed that they cannot relate to any world outside themselves. Moravias characters are as much strangers as Albert Camus, and like Jean-Paul Sartres, they can find no exit from their self-enclosed worlds. Moravias work thus provided a powerful and early exploration of the modern condition. Equally significant for Italian literature, it did so in the novel form. Italy was known as the land of poets: Dante, Petrarch, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso. In 1929, the Italian novel was barely one hundred years old. Moravia had attempted to write this novel as a tragedy rather than as prose fiction, and many of these dramatic elements remained in the final version. For example, it relied heavily on dialogue and monologue, and it adhered closely to Aristotles unities of time and place, with the locale confined to three houses in Rome and the action unfolding over a period of forty-eight hours. By choosing to use the novel rather than a more classical genre, however, Moravia encouraged others to adopt that mode as well and so impelled Italian fiction toward its important place in world literature. IN 1929, THE FIFTH YEAR of the Fascist era and the twenty-first year of Alberto Moravia's life, the Italian literary world was stunned by the appearance of his first novel, The Time of Indifference. Moravia established himself as a world-class literary writer with a novel whose caustic denunciation of middle-class fumbling in the face of fascism yanked the Italian novel out of d'Annunzio's gauche Gothicism and into the more fragmented and agonized perspectives of modernism. The Time of Indifference establishes the bedrock of the author's mental melodrama: modern consciousness as a numbed Prufrockian animal, its busy lifelessness portrayed with austere poignancy. A deceptively simple story - concerns the reactions of members of a terminally bored, bourgeois family to impending financial crisis...family throws itself at the mercy of a slick parasite, Leo, who is making love to both mother and daughter while fleecing them in the bargain. set in Rome : five characters, the events of a few days, the intrigues of families and lovers.
protagonist is Michele Ardengo, a young man in confused but furious rebellion

against the emptiness of bourgeois life; Mariagrazia, his widowed mother desperately clings to her bored & unscrupulous lover, Leo Merumeci, who sexually covets her daughter, Carla Carla, his sister has no hope of marriage or career and bleakly prepares to give herself to Leo as well.

 Lisa, a frequent visitor is Leo's former lover,ostensibly Mariagrazia's friend , a

woman who feels she is in the final late bloom before age destroys beauty. She longs to make Michele her lover, but he is bored and disgusted by her pretenses, her vanity, her desperation All five are cast loose on the sea of modern life - obsessed with what they want, what they feel they are owed, the wrongs that have been done them, their loneliness. What Moravia destroys forever in this pitiless novel is the illusion that a world of ever-growing material comfort can ever feed the human soul. Michele, if for no other reason than his actions bring the drama to its climax. When Michele discovers that Leo is seducing his sister, he wants to respond aggressively and decisively, but can't act on his indignation and as usual, after an initial surge of energy, his resolve dissipates and indifference threatens to halt any action. Michele's indifference was a flat white screen on which sorrows and joys passed like shadows without a trace. And this inner inconsistency was reflected back to him and communicated to him by his external world: everything around him was weightless, worthless, as fleeting as the play of light and shadows. Moravia's use of internal monologues is extremely clever and effective in conveying Michele's pain in particular. The novel itself displays elements of the dramatic play in its unity of time and setting, but one may agree with Moravia that its stronger achievement is its claim as the first existential novel. Moravia slips in and out of the minds of five characters, but he makes Michele the most acutely aware of his ineffectuality and whose morbid egotism, combined with his acceptance of a passive social role, is far too strong. Michele can't bear the fact that : "the deception and abjection that filled his own soul was what he saw also in others, always. Impossible to scour from his eyes that discouraged and impure film that interposed itself between him and life." The novel highlights contraststhe light and dark of film images, the good and evil of moralityonly to smear them away. The archetypal Moravian scene is starkly chiaroscuro, a cross between an operating table and a movie set: Moravia's prose gives off the feeling that the narrative could drift into darkness at any time, like a camera lens suddenly snapped shut. As the critic Nicola Chiaromonte rightfully claims in his fine essay on Boredom, Moravia's novels and stories "are not naturalistic, or even realistic narratives, but repeated demonstrations of the unbearable reality of the dead world, a world in which consciousness is both awake and inert." Michele is aware of the film that interposes itself between him and lifethis acknowledgment of the mechanisms of despair protects him from amoral complacency but also torments him. The modern mind attempts to cleanse itself, to "scour away" what it believes to be painful impurities, to think its way out of irresolution. At its best, Moravia's fiction is an artful, if necessarily risky, solipsistic surgery: the living part of the mind methodically attempts to slice away its own dead tissues, the cerebral celluloid that interposes itself between thought and action.

The problem is that Moravia's characters can't remove the film, the mental screen that separates them from the world. Frustrated that he is observing life rather than living it, Michele does not have the assurance of the traditional values or community that would help him protect spontaneity from the rigidity of fascism.Summary On the eve of her twenty-fourth birthday, Carla Ardengo longs to escape her dreary existence, to find a new life. Visiting the Ardengos this evening is Leo Merumeci. He is a frequent guest because he is the lover of Carlas widowed mother, Mariagrazia, and the holder of the mortgage on the Ardengos fashionable villa. Leo has become tired of Mariagrazia, who has been his mistress for fifteen years; he propositions Carla, and she agrees to come to his apartment the next day. Lisa, who had been Leos lover and fiancee before he met Mariagrazia, is also at the villa. Mariagrazia suspects that Lisa and Leo want to renew their affair and that Lisa has come to her house to arrange a rendezvous. The object of her quest, however, is not Leo but Michele, Mariagrazias son. Just as Carla consents to give herself to Leo, Michele agrees to see Lisa. Leos attempted seduction suffers a setback at Carlas birthday party the next day. To make her more pliable, he fills her glass again and again with champagne, so that by the end of the meal she is drunk. They go for a walk on the villas grounds, where they happen upon an old shed conveniently equipped with a bed. Just as Leo prepares to have sex with Carla, she becomes ill from the wine, and he must wait until night to consummate the affair. Lisas hopes, too, are temporarily dashed. She has lured Michele to her apartment with the promise of interesting a rich relative in him and so securing a good position for the youth. When Michele arrives the next morning, no relative is waiting. Lisa goes into the hallway, pretending to call him, but Michele sees that she does not even pick up the phone, and he leaves. When Michele returns later that day, he finds Leo alone with Lisa; again Michele leaves. By the time he makes his third visit, Lisa knows all about Leos relationship with Carla. Michele accuses Lisa of chasing after Leo, but she replies that Leo would not have her; he already has Micheles sister. Although Michele does not feel anger on learning about his sisters affair, he senses that he should act. He buys a cheap pistol, goes to Leos apartment, and tries to kill him. Michele has forgotten to load the gun, so his attempted murder fails. Carla, who has been sleeping with Leo, emerges from the bedroom to learn the cause of the confusion. Michele seizes the opportunity to urge her to abandon Leo, arguing that the family can sell the villa and pay Leo what they owe him. Leo knows that if the Ardengos put the villa on the market they will get far more than the eight hundred thousand lira that they owe him. He will thus lose the house, his new mistress, and perhaps his old mistress as well. Consequently, he offers to marry Carla, allow the Ardengos to continue to live in the villa, and find Michele a job. Michele still opposes the marriage, but Carla consents because, even though she does not love Leo, she is eager for the money, fine clothes, and parties that the marriage will bring her. Following the confrontation at Leos apartment, the two Ardengo children return home. Carla and her mother prepare to attend a masked ball, a fitting emblem of the life of concealment that they lead. Michele and Lisa, meanwhile, plan yet another tryst, and he promises that this time he will not rebuff her advances. The Characters Michele is the first of a number of effete intellectuals appearing in Alberto Moravias fiction. He would like to feel passion, to love Lisa and despise Leo, but he cannot. His only

response to life is indifference, because he lacks any moral sense. Although he pretends to be angry when he learns that his sister has become Leos mistress, he had in fact considered selling Carla to him in exchange for an allowance. If Leo had preferred Lisa, Michele was prepared to give her up for the same terms. Whereas Michele feels nothing, Carla suffers deeply. Seeing her present life as barren, she longs for change and will do anything to effect it. She even agrees to Leos proposition and then his proposal, only to realize, too late, that nothing has been altered; she is merely taking her mothers place. Lisa, too, hopes for redemption. She thinks that Michele will bring sunshine, blue sky, freshness, enthusiasm into her gray world. Given Micheles character, Lisa is doomed to disappointment: Enthusiasm is hardly one of his attributes. The gap between her imagination and reality is evident when her would-be lover first comes to her apartment. She has been fantasizing about an elaborate seduction, but all that she can say when Michele arrives is, Well, how goes it? At the end of the novel her affair with Michele is still inchoate despite Micheles promise to accept her advances. Even if they do sleep together, her life will change no more than Carlas, since neither Leo nor Michele can offer any realistic hope of salvation. Michele, Carla, and Lisa would like to change their situation but cannot. Mariagrazia and Leo, on the other hand, want everything to stay the same. The former dreads poverty and the loss of social position so much that she consents to her daughters marriage to her own former lover, a man who claims to regard Carla as his almost daughter. Leo, too, wants to retain his comforts, including the pleasant Ardengo villa and sex with Carla. If he must sacrifice nominal bachelorhood to keep these, he will, but he tells himself at the end of the novel, Even when youre married, youll be the same old Leo. He will still chase any woman he desires and will remain a frequent guest of Mariagrazia. Themes and Meanings As Michele ponders his condition, he observes, Once upon a time, it appeared, men used to know their paths in life from the first to the last step, but now it was not so; now ones head was in a bag, one was in the dark, one was blind. And yet one still had to go somewhere; but where? All the characters are groping blindly in a world that has lost what Moravia calls the traditional scale of values in the aftermath of World War I. This blindness is perhaps best symbolized by the scene at the beginning of the novel when the electricity fails in Mariagrazias house. In the ensuing blackness, Mariagrazia seeks vainly for Leo, who is hiding behind the curtains and flirting with Carla, and Lisa arranges an assignation with Michele. The entire novel is suffused with gloom and blackness. Much of the action occurs at night, and the rest unfolds under the rainy, gray skies of winter, the season of death. This bleakness also invades the characters houses. Mariagrazias drawing room is cold and bleak. An arch divides it into two unequal parts, emblematic of the present and the future. Little light shines in the present, where the characters sit, and the other section, the future, offers no change: It remained plunged in a shadowy blackness in which reflections from mirrors and the long shape of the piano could barely be distinguished. The dark future merely reflects and repeats the grim present. Just as the Ardengos gloomy drawing room embodies that familys life, so Lisas apartment exposes her sad experience. Inside she looks at the mute, dead shapes of old pieces of furniture and a gray, chilly bathroom with dull, painted pipes; outside all she can see is an equally dull piece of red roof. From a distance, her drawing room seems an exception to this pervasive gloom, and it is here that she plans to seduce Michele, who, like the room,

appears to hold out hope for change. Upon closer examination, though, one finds the same desolation here as everywhere else: the upholstery was discolored and in places threadbare,...the sofa was torn and the cushions shabby. Neither this drawing room nor Michele will offer relief from the general dreariness. To escape this oppressive reality, Moravias characters construct dreamworlds. Carla imagines a new life. Michele seeks a pure woman, neither false nor stupid nor corrupt, and wants a world governed by instinct and sincerity. Mariagrazia harbors visions of wealth and a beauty that will retain Leos love for her. They are not above lying to themselves and others to support these fantasies. Thus, Lisa conjures up a rich relative to induce Michele to visit her, even though she could just as easily have invited him without the pretense. Michele tries repeatedly and unsuccessfully to assume emotions that he does not feel; Mariagrazia pretends to a superiority over Lisa which she lacks. Even though the characters often look at their reflections in mirrors, they fail to see themselves and their world as it is, for they have lost touch with reality. Critical Context Moravias depiction of middle-class life as dull, gloomy, and false shocked and stimulated Italian audiences when the novel first appeared. The product of a bourgeois upbringing, Moravia revealed his own boredom with that existence. His critique went beyond a personal aversion to middle-class values: It anticipated the existential view that people have become so self-absorbed that they cannot relate to any world outside themselves. Moravias characters are as much strangers as Albert Camus, and like Jean-Paul Sartres, they can find no exit from their self-enclosed worlds. Moravias work thus provided a powerful and early exploration of the modern condition. Equally significant for Italian literature, it did so in the novel form. Italy was known as the land of poets: Dante, Petrarch, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso. In 1929, the Italian novel was barely one hundred years old. Moravia had attempted to write this novel as a tragedy rather than as prose fiction, and many of these dramatic elements remained in the final version. For example, it relied heavily on dialogue and monologue, and it adhered closely to Aristotles unities of time and place, with the locale confined to three houses in Rome and the action unfolding over a period of forty-eight hours. By choosing to use the novel rather than a more classical genre, however, Moravia encouraged others to adopt that mode as well and so impelled Italian fiction toward its important place in world literature.