What It Is
Vitangelo Moscarda's nose leans to the right, and it is the first thing the novel says about him. The observation comes from his wife, Dida, calmly and with a "dear," on the day she finds him in front of the mirror pinching one nostril, and she drags behind her a list: the eyebrows like two circumflex accents, one ear that sticks out more than the other, the little finger, the right leg. It is the minimal, verifiable defect that he checks and acknowledges, and it is enough to undo the idea he had of himself. More than a physical trait, it is the point where the discovery begins: there is a fact of the body that everyone sees and he has never seen.
Where It Appears
In ch. I of Book I the wife's remark is the trigger of the novel, and the greater hurt is not the defect but having lived so many years with the same nose without knowing it:
Mi pende? A me? Il naso? - E mia moglie, placidamente: - Ma sì, caro. Guàrdatelo bene: ti pende verso destra., it leans? On me? My nose? - And my wife, placidly: - But yes, dear. Look at it well: it leans to the right.
In ch. II of Book I he asks a friend whether he is looking at his nose, and the friend already knew. From there, the thought that dominates him from then on takes hold of him:
Mi si fissò invece il pensiero ch’io non ero per gli altri quel che finora, dentro di me, m’ero figurato d’essere., instead, the thought took hold of me that I was not for others what until then, inside myself, I had imagined myself to be.
To get even, he asks the same friend whether he knows he has a dimple in his chin. The friend goes to a barber, finds out it is true, and afterward is seen before three shop windows. The contagion spreads through Richieri: the townsfolk pass from window to window examining a cheekbone, a corner of the eye, an earlobe. A week later a man asks him, anxiously, whether it is true that he blinks his left eyelid, and, calmly, points out a tuft on the back of his neck that the common women take as a sign that the next child will be a boy. Moscarda says he will have it cut off, and hears the reply that closes the scene:
Oh, ma quest’è niente! - esclamai. - Me lo posso far tagliare. - Negò prima col dito, poi disse: - Ti resta sempre il segno, caro, anche se te lo fai radere., oh, but that is nothing! I exclaimed. I can have it cut off. He first shook a finger in refusal, then said: The mark stays with you, dear, even if you have it shaved.
In ch. IV of Book I he argues that others link his ideas to a nose he has never looked at, and that if the ideas were serious and the nose comic, they would laugh. In ch. VII of Book I, before the wardrobe mirror, he sees that the nose leans but has a fine aquiline cut, and concludes that the body was made this way without depending on him. In ch. II of Book IV, as he prepares for the first experiment, he describes the Mr. Moscarda he is about to destroy: 1.68 meters tall, red-haired like his father, with a nose that leaned to the right like that of Dida's dear fool, Gengè.
What It Means
The nose is the smallest of defects, and so the cleanest proof of the thesis: a fact that can be checked, and yet no one could see it alone. The passage from the nose to the dimple, the shop windows, and the tuft shows that the discovery is not personal: everyone carries, in the body, a version of himself that others see and he does not, and Identity becomes a question, not a thing. The defect on the neck, which the scissors cannot reach, gives the symbol its limit: what others know about us is not within the reach of the will of the one who carries it. That is why Appearance and reality begins with the nose and reaches the whole body, all the way to the poor, ownerless body that the mirror of ch. VII of Book I gives back.
The nose can be read as a pretext: the vanity of an idle man, who discovers a defect and takes a complaint of vanity to absurdity. It can also be read as the entry point of a problem that vanity does not explain: Vitangelo reacts with a bodily shock and, in a few lines, moves from the crooked nose to a question about the whole of himself. The book allows both, and the irony of the first chapter, in which he receives as a concession what had been denied him as a right, suggests that vanity is the door and not the house. In the end, when the face no longer matters to Vitangelo (ch. IV of Book VIII), the nose returns as an absence: it is what he has stopped checking.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Identity, Appearance and reality, Madness.
- Themes in the work: Identity, Appearance and reality, Madness.
- Characters: Vitangelo Moscarda, Dida.
- Related symbols: the mirror, in which the nose is checked, and Gengè, the name and the doll with which Dida calls her husband every minute.