CRASSH

In this contribution I wish to draw attention to some stereotypes of madness, omnipotence and despair, which surround Italo Svevo’s famous apocalyptic conclusion to La coscienza di Zeno (1923).  Faustian tales of an all-powerful scientist-inventor, who accidentally or deliberately causes world cataclysm, go back at least as far as Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon (1862). In 1901, M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud offers the first book-length description of an individual destroying the entire world and surviving its destruction as the founding-father of a new civilization. In Svevo’s treatment, such unacknowledged models are explored as powerful metaphors of schizophrenic consciousness. End-of-world narratives appeal to a solipsistic sense of grandeur: they are fantasies about a consciousness, which has obtained omniscience and perfect control over the world. Narcissistic visions of absolute power, however, may also culminate in a terrifying sense of absolute responsibility. Self-reflexivity, in its most extreme form, can bring about experiences of world catastrophe and a collapse of the self. In my paper, I intend to approach this idea through a comparative reading of Svevo’s novel, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1903) and Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (1911). As I hope to show, psychoanalytic theories of paranoia may greatly facilitate our understanding of last-man narratives and of apocalypse fiction in general.