What It Is
The house is the image with which Vitangelo Moscarda explains to the reader what man does with the world and with himself: he takes stones from the mountain, squares them, sets them one on top of another, and what was mountain becomes house. The novel uses the object on several scales. There is the house in which he lives with his wife, which his father had built after the mother's death and left unfinished, with an arched gateway without a door. There is the empty house he gives to Marco di Dio. There is the house where he was born, which five people see in five ways. There is the house men build for feelings, the church. And there is, at the end, the almshouse where he comes to live, where he has no house at all.
Where It Appears
In ch. II of Book II, to prove that each person's reality has no more consistency for others than smoke, Vitangelo describes the house he lives in: unfinished, open, with the courtyard that the neighborhood women took as theirs after his father's death, and a small apartment, made from the father's rooms, rented by Quantorzo to an old man who thinks him an imbecile.
In ch. VI of Book II he asks the reader whether he has seen a house being built, and makes the mountain answer that it is a mountain and does not move, contradicting him with the ox carts that already carry it away:
Io - dice la montagna - sono montagna e non mi muovo. - Non ti muovi, cara? E guarda là quei carri tirati da buoi. Sono carichi di te, di pietre tue., I, says the mountain, am a mountain and do not move. You do not move, dear? And look over there, those carts pulled by oxen. They are loaded with you, with your own stones.
In ch. VII of Book II he describes the comfort the house gives the reader, and why being reminded of the mountain irritates him:
non più cose, ma quasi intime parti di voi stessi, nelle quali potete toccarla e sentirla quella che vi sembra la realtà sicura della vostra esistenza., no longer things, but almost intimate parts of yourselves, in which you can touch and feel what seems to you the secure reality of your existence.
In ch. XI of Book II the image reaches its full form, applied to the man himself:
L’uomo piglia a materia anche se stesso, e si costruisce, sissignori, come una casa., man takes himself too as matter, and builds himself, yes indeed, like a house.
In ch. VIII of Book III he takes five people to the house where he was born: to someone who lives in a hovel it is a fine palace, to someone with artistic taste an ordinary house, to someone who avoids the street out of a sad memory something to look at askance, and to someone who looks at it with affection a beloved place, because across the way lived that person's mother, a close friend of Vitangelo's mother. The same goes for him, who was born there:
Cinque imbecilli. Uno in ciascuno. Cinque imbecilli che vi stanno davanti, come li vedete da fuori, in me che sono uno e cinque come la casa, five imbeciles. One in each. Five imbeciles standing before you, as you see them from outside, in me, who am one and five like the house.
In ch. III of Book IV, at Stampa's notary office, he asks about an empty house that belongs to him, and in ch. VII of Book IV he makes Marco di Dio a gift of a house on Via dei Santi, number 15, with ten thousand lire for a laboratory. In ch. II of Book VI it is his own house that empties when Dida leaves, leaving orders to pack his things into trunks and send them to her father's house. In ch. V of Book VII the image returns in the God from outside, the one who has the house and the servants:
Non basta loro averli dentro, nel cuore, i sentimenti: se li vogliono vedere anche fuori, toccarli; e costruiscono loro una casa., it is not enough for them to have feelings inside, in the heart: they want to see them outside too, to touch them; and they build a house for them.
In ch. III of Book VIII Sclepis's plan gives Vitangelo, instead of a house, a cot in the almshouse, and in ch. IV of Book VIII he lives in the countryside, far from the city, nameless.
What It Means
The house is the symbol of the construction that gives form to what, without it, would be loose matter. Man builds himself, the reader builds himself, religious feeling builds itself, and each construction is real as long as the cement of the will and the constancy of feelings hold. The house also weighs most when it is missing: the comfort of ch. VII of Book II, which gives the reader proof of existing, shows what Vitangelo loses when the house empties in ch. II of Book VI and when, in the almshouse, he gives up everything. That is why the symbol runs through the themes of Identity, Money and wealth, and God and the divine.
The novel gives the house two faces that do not resolve. In one, it is man's work, the gesture of someone who will not accept living under the open sky and invents shelter, and the little creature that stuffs the armchair has something the text almost admires. In the other, it is a prison: the chapter on facts, forms, and acts (ch. VII of Book III) treats the form given to a life as a penalty that cannot be escaped. Vitangelo lives the first when he builds the house argument for the reader, and he lives the second when his house is Gengè's. The novel's ending, which leaves him without a house, without a name, and without a form, is read as liberation or as loss depending on which face one weighs more.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Identity, Appearance and reality, Money and wealth, God and the divine.
- Themes in the work: Identity, Appearance and reality, Money and wealth, God and the divine.
- Characters: Vitangelo Moscarda, Marco di Dio, Quantorzo, Moscarda's father.
- Related symbols: Gengè, the form Dida gives her husband, and the tree and the cloud, what remains when there is no house.