[In the following essay, Benedetti states that the mourning and grief expressed in La cognizione del dolore has its roots in Freudian “reality-testing,” which explains the macaronic style in which Gadda seeks relief from his negative feelings.]

La cognizione del dolore is the story of Gonzalo Pirobutirro d'Eltino's misdeeds. At first, they come out through the ‘bad epos’ of the inhabitants of Lukones, but almost all of them target either Gonzalo's mother or the objects and images she cherishes. One episode in particular seems to have captured the general imagination. It was said that the hidalgo-engineer, in a fury, stamped on an old family watch, and later, still angry, trampled on his dead father's portrait before his terrified mother's eyes. The community rumour mill is unable to explain his bizarre behaviour, and takes sides against him, although the perceptions of the various Peppas, Battistinas, Josés, and Palumbos do not shed any light on those events. The peon employed at the villa Pirobutirro maintained that the señora's son carried within him the seven deadly sins entangled in his belly like snakes. Gonzalo's own point of view is no less twisted: while prey to an ‘interpretive delirium,’ he lays the blame for his grief on the villa, the taxes, the bells, and the charitable gestures of his parents, who are guilty of having given to strangers the money and affection that should have been his. Otherwise, he gets angry at the ‘crazy’ community which neglects sound economic principles and good, needy fellows, while it showers money on all sorts of rascals, cretins, and sly-stupid people. To complicate matters, the mother's point of view also prevents us from recognizing the real causes of Gonzalo's grief. In other words, Gadda's treatment of grief is far from a clear explanation of how Gonzalo becomes acquainted with it, as the title of the novel seems to promise. Most of all, it is far from providing a satisfactory interpretation of the sorrowful experience it portrays. In his Introduction to La cognizione del dolore, Contini compares Gonzalo's desecration of the paternal image to Proust's Mademoiselle Vinteuil, who is an equally stray character, in Remembrance of Things Past (Contini 1963, 7). The comparison demonstrates just how ‘provisional and poor’ Gadda's hermeneutic of grief appears once it is compared to Proust's. Mademoiselle Vinteuil, who forces her woman lover to spit on her father's portrait, displays a sadistic cruelty representative of all such profanations as well as the psychological reasons that provoke them. The monstrous peculiarity of her gesture is connected to the universality of a ‘law’ of cruelty, and it is represented and interpreted as such. Instead, no universal law—neither psychological nor of any other origin—appears in Gadda's novel to explain Gonzalo's fits of rage against people, animals, and objects. His fury remains enigmatic, neither interpreted nor interpretable. All things considered, the very concept of neurosis, turned as it is into Gonzalo's mysterious and ‘obscure’ illness (whose causes and forms cannot be analysed), explains nothing. Furthermore, the comparison with Proust demonstrates another feature of Gadda's ‘acquaintance with grief,’ one that is closely related to the weak hermeneutic Contini referred to. In a sorrowful experience, truth can be found only by he who distances himself from it, who manages to perceive the universal in the observation of small details. As if on a stage, the author of Remembrance of Things Past looks at his characters through his ‘telescopic’ eye, and observes them from a distance. As if he were watching the inhabitants of a different planet, Proust studies human beings and their grief, and tries to deduce the laws that govern their movements. In contrast, Gadda makes Gonzalo's grief undergo the opposite process: he represents it in its stubborn properties, which remain undeciphered, without reference to a ‘law’ or to a universal. Instead, properties and features are multiplied. His writing plays host to many deforming viewpoints, and it is itself deformed by them. He mixes epic and elegy; the grotesque and the satirical are thrown together into the same pot, though not with a recipe that will permit the truth to come forward. Grief remains unshaped, raw. We are quite far from the tragic conception of knowledge and from one that is able to reassemble fragments.¹ To know does not mean to stand above passions as it would in a Stoic ethics (according to which to know meant only to give voice to one's grief in its immediacy). Acquaintance is not general knowledge, but simply the acquisition of data on this particular grief—but only on this one. We should recall that Mademoiselle Vinteuil is just as much an autobiographical projection as Gonzalo is. Therefore, it is not sufficient to point out that Gadda builds his search for knowledge around an all-too-personal matter, unless one prefers to forget his obvious lack of distance. Rather, it is necessary to say that the very concept of grievous acquaintance includes and involves the subject who is representing his own grief.

Gonzalo's malady consists of two basic ingredients: anger and melancholy. Hidden behind that angry man seized with ‘beastly fits of rage,’ one can perceive a secluded, ‘melancholic beast’ who is constantly ruminating over his ills. However, these two feelings—anger and melancholy—while apparently opposed, are actually very closely connected: both stem from what may be described in the Freudian sense as ‘the original loss of the object’ that Gonzalo suffers from. His interpretive delirium is based on the fact that, in the reality surrounding him, he sees only objects that are not meant for him. Many of the objects in La cognizione del dolore share one peculiarity: they are denied to Gonzalo while they are granted freely to others, to all others. At the top of the long list, one can see the ‘ossobuchi’ that are gobbled down by pompous bourgeois in fashionable restaurants—quite a gastronomic match for the three shrivelled peppers that the hungry hidalgo is given by his mother when he comes home to a poorly lit house. In addition to the ‘ossobuchi,’ there are gold watches, sweets, figs, cookies, and praise, all of which were denied to Gonzalo in his childhood, while they are now granted by his mother to the colonel's stupid grandson, along with free French lessons. Whenever one of these signs of past offence makes an appearance, Gonzalo bursts into rage. But even harmless objects such as the church bells, the pears in the orchard, onions, the peon's clogs, the laundress's goitre, even hens, fleas, and cicadas, which had nothing to do with what was denied him, may provoke him: the bells are a sign of his father's stupid generosity, which he had paid for; the onions grow in a field beside the villa his father built, to the detriment of his family's wealth; and, like the bells, the cicadas are guilty of celebrating the glory of light, and of life. The sense of loss is metonymically transferred onto all objects, and Gonzalo's melancholy takes in the entire universe, which is but a heap of objects not meant for him and which are therefore meaningless. They enter his field of perception only as bearers of grief. Suffice it to recall the passage that portrays Gonzalo while he is listening to the story of a car accident: a poor mountaineer who used to carry his pannier to the downtown market to sell his home-made cheese, is run over by a car. In the village, he is known as ‘the cream-cheese man,’ a precision which transforms a meaningless detail into a significant one. However, for Gonzalo, ‘cream-cheese’ is an unnecessary, incoherent object that, like all others, is only a painful landmark: ‘Il figlio dové concedere ai formaggini di entrare anche loro nel cerchio doloroso dell'appercezione. Era il bagaglio del mondo, del fenomènico mondo’ (CD [La cognizione del dolore], 627) [The son had to permit the cheeses to enter the painful circle of his apperception. This was the world's baggage, of the world of phenomena (AG [Acquainted with Grief], 75)].

Gonzalo's perceptive field is often called, in the novel, a ‘cerchio doloroso’ [a grievous circle]. Enclosed within are the disconnected elements of the world which remind him of the original loss that tore the cosmos to pieces: ‘Le cicale franàrono nella continuità eguale del tempo, dissero la persistenza: andavano ai confini dell'estate’ (CD, 633, my emphasis) [The cicadas collapsed even in the continuity of time: they spoke of persistence: they reached the boundaries of summer (AG, 84)]. All unity seems loose and flimsy. The story of the medical examination, for example, is interrupted twice in a row by an unnecessary and insubstantial detail: the creaking of a woodworm. Its reappearance, a few pages later, is worth quoting in its entirety:

[Gonzalo] guardava al di là delle cose, dei mobili: un accoramento inspiegabile gli teneva il volto e anzi quasi la persona. Come quelli che vi hanno un fratello o un figlio: e li veggono fumare, fumare, i vertici dell'Alpe senza ritorni, fioriti di cùmuli, in un rombo lontano. Il tarlo cavatappi non desisteva dal suo progresso; dopo l'accumulo d'ogni intervallo precipitava alla commemorazione di sé.

(CD, 623)

[[Gonzalo] looked beyond things, beyond the furniture; an inexplicable grief seized his face and, indeed, almost his whole person. He was like those who have a brother or a son: and they see the peaks of the Alp without return smoking, smoking, budding with cumuli, in a distant rumbling. The corkscrew woodworm did not desist from his progress; after the accumulation of every interval he hastened to remind them of himself.]

(AG, 71)

No matter where the glance of the melancholic falls, it reads the loss of an object, and mourns as if for the loss of someone dear, a child, or perhaps a brother who never returned from war (cf the allusion to ‘i vertici dell'Alpe senza ritorni’). In the same vein: ‘Un clacson della camionale: e il vuoto delle cose’ (CD, 678) [The automobile's horn, from the highway, and the vacuum of all things (AG, 139)]. Elsewhere, Gonzalo's melancholy is stressed by particular stylistic modulations that aim at dissolving the concrete aspects of objects: ‘la cucina era dominata dalla inutilità lucida del rame in pensione, appeso ad una parete’ (CD, 716; my emphasis) [The kitchen was dominated by the gleaming uselessness of the pensioned-off copper, hanging on one wall (AG, 188)]. Gonzalo does not see ‘shining and useless copper objects’ hanging from the wall. He sees ‘uselessness itself,’ the useless sheen that covers up the object. We find here a turn in style that is very frequent in Gadda's prose. According to Roscioni, it is a turn that characterizes symbolist and post-symbolist prose style: it consists of using an abstract noun (such as ‘uselessness’) instead of simply an adjective (‘useless’), followed, in Italian, by the genitive ‘del rame.’ In Gadda's hands, Roscioni sees a ‘gnoseological’ motivation behind this tendency: to seize objects through the perception of objects (Roscioni 1975, 22). However, one should add that the most important feature of this tendency is that it permits Gadda to represent in writing the absence of the object itself, which disappears behind the form, thus becoming an empty phenomenon. In place of concreteness, we find its rich, shiny, yet perfectly useless appearance. Meanwhile, the reduction of the object to a mere appearance is coupled with a mocking remark, an allusion to its being ‘in pensione,’ a ‘retired’ object replaced with modern and more functional pots. Gonzalo's anger at the objects is one with the melancholy he feels for their loss.

What Freud called ‘mourning’—to detach one's libido from the lost object of love in order to recover it—is, for Gonzalo, the only possible form of ‘acquaintance with grief.’ It is the same mourning process we find in the pathological mourning typical of depressive or melancholic syndromes (even if in these the loss is removed from consciousness). Mourning is connected to a ‘recognition of reality,’ as Freud calls it, that is an analysis of all the objects that were linked to the original investment. This process is extremely painful, because the separation from the love object is repeated in an indefinite series of separations. Gadda's acquaintance with grief resembles Freud's ‘reality-testing’: an examination of ‘each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it’ (Freud 1963, 245). The fragments of the world surrounding Gonzalo are hypercathected piecemeal, and in reference to each of them is re-enacted the painful detachment from the idea of the plenitude of things. Each object is questioned and excavated, until it becomes an empty image. An example is the villa, which became for the mother almost a new internal organ. In fact, the villa is nothing: taxes, mortgages, an orchard that produces pears hard as stones, lice-ridden chickens, and a precarious wall which should have stood as a mark of private possession but which in fact afforded no protection for him either. Gadda's criticism of private property is a good demonstration of how this mournful recognition of reality works. Gonzalo, who never owned anything because everything was denied to him, manages to treat the wound inflicted on him by showing how illusory possessions are. In an unpublished fragment of La cognizione, after explaining how the sense of his family property had become an obsession for Gonzalo (a sort of delirious attachment to domestic objects, even to unmatched glasses), Gadda concludes, apparently contradicting himself:

In realtà nulla egli aveva cercato di possedere nel mondo: e aveva dato tutto come perduto, sempre e preventivamente. Et quod vides perisse, perditum putes.

(Cited in Roscioni 1975, 134-6)

[In reality he had tried to possess nothing in the world: and had given everything for lost, always and preventively. Et quod vides perisse, perditum putes.]

By a strange paradox, the grief for a loss can be cured if one believes everything is always lost in advance. This means that the whole world is lost, and that all objects are transformed into an empty appearance. And this is why the distancing glance—always cathartic when it is not conciliatory—plays no role in Gadda's acquaintance with grief. What needs to be expressed is above all the loss along with the deforming perception of it, since this way of processing grief is mourning itself.

Gadda's writing, though, is not limited to simple lamentation. Often, it is enhanced by sudden moments of comedy. One could say that the analysis of reality ends up being fruitful, as if the libido detached itself from the lost object of love to make itself available again. The offended subject, by showing the emptiness of things, sometimes manages to free himself from his anger, to soften his melancholy, and to rebuild the exhilarating ‘macaronic’ game with the objects he has by now deprived of their immanent meaning. Contini has pointed out that both the comic spirit and the ‘maccheronea’ perform a pacifying function in Gadda (Contini 1963, 10-11). It is not a complete reconciliation, but a kind of movement that is constantly returning to itself, a sort of alteration of euphoric moments, typical, generally, of manic-depressive states. In Gadda's hands, the ‘maccheronea,’ as an expressive instrument, is inseparable from his almost obsessive habit of disparaging objects to which his writings seem to be devoted. After all, according to Contini, Gadda does believe (perhaps against his own will) in the outside world. The world which presents itself to the offended writer as a ‘richly, greedily desirable world,’ is not made of whole objects but can be seen only through the deforming perception of the mourning subject. The ‘macaronic’ game concentrates on what is left of things once they have been flayed by the melancholic glance, once they have become unable to convey meaning as such. The ‘maccheronea’ is a divertissement granted to the melancholic, just as is Benjamin's allegory, though in a different fashion. And since it is inseparable from melancholy, ‘maccheronea’ is always on the point of turning into anger: it is bound to be followed by a destructive gesture.

Gadda himself states, although indirectly, that the ‘maccheronea’ is an old cure for resentment and grief. In a 1947 article, following Contini's analysis in which Gadda's writing was for the first time defined as ‘macaronic’ (Contini 1974), Gadda talks of ‘merry signs’ of ‘maccheronea,’ which, according to him, should not be confused with the bitter tones of satire, nor with the desolate glance of the melancholic:

Dire per maccheronea è dunque, talvolta, adeguarsi al comune modo e gusto, un rivendicare e un risolvere le istanze profonde contro i piati stanchi, un immergersi nella comunità vivente delle anime, un prevenire o un secondarne in pagina l'ingenito impulso a descrivere, la volontà definitrice del reale, per allegri segni Tenui sfumature, sottili vincoli o precipitati trapassi, dalla satira alla maccheronea Dalla malinconia alla maccheronea.

(VM [Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana], 498)

[To speak through the macaronic is, therefore, at times, to adapt to common habit and tastes; it is a way of vindicating and resolving important issues against over worked disputes; it is an immersion into the living community of souls, an anticipation or seconding of the innate impulse to describe in writing the defining contours of reality by means of merry signs. Tenuous nuances, subtle links, or precipitous transitions, from satire to the macaronic; from the melancholic to the macaronic.]

In this context, to plunge into the living community of souls is a positive act for Gadda because it implies the mitigation of the exasperated subjectivity which sees only offence in all objects. The ‘maccheronea’ in fact ‘polverizza e dissolve nel nulla ogni abuso’ (ibid., 496) [pulverizes and dissolves every abuse into nothingness]. It prevents what is useless or false from passing for valuable or true (in this respect, it fulfils the deforming task that usually belongs to the acquaintance with grief). But it does not become sterile denial. On the contrary, it is ‘gioia del dipingere al di là della forma accettata e canonizzata dai bovi: è gioia dell'attingere agli strati autonomi della rappresentazione, all'umor pratico della genté (498) [the joy that comes from depicting beyond the form accepted and canonized by the dimwits: it is the joy that comes from drawing from the autonomous strata of representation, it alludes to the practical humour of the people]. Gadda, however, is also alluding to the subtle ties that connect the ‘maccheronea’ with melancholy and satire (therefore with anger and with undecanted spite). The laughter which punctuates Gadda's mournful recognition with its ‘precipitous transitions’² is the same as that which may burst out during mourning and which psychoanalysis considers of a maniacal nature. According to Melanie Klein, the typically maniacal triumph over the object hinders not only the pathological mourning of the melancholic, but also normal mourning, as Freud argued. For, in fact, an ambivalence between love and hatred towards the lost object is always at work, and mourning can alternate with the desire to destroy and the desire to debase the object, to annihilate it. When such a conflict of ambivalence takes over, there can be no release: guilt feelings are kept alive, while a persecution complex grows (fear of the object; it may seek revenge) which strengthens maniacal defences. The normal outcome of mourning goes beyond this catch-22 via its painful ‘reality-testing.’ The subject recovers his/her trust in external objects and, simultaneously, the ability mentally to restore and preserve the lost object. Only at this stage does mourning, like all suffering caused by unhappy experience, become productive. Melanie Klein recalls that ‘painful experiences of all kinds sometimes stimulate sublimations’ (Klein 1975, 360). In Gadda, instead, precisely as is the case in melancholic states, the conflict of ambivalence is not overcome: the subject loosens the libidinal fixation only by becoming aggressive towards or by destroying the object. It is precisely this triumph that prevents mourning from being a reconstructive process.

Roscioni once pointed out that Gadda's title is reminiscent of a verse in Ecclesiastes: ‘He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow’ (1:18) (Roscioni 1975, 117). He pointed it out as a confirmation of the pessimism that pervades the novel—a pessimism that conceives of knowledge only as a way to make grief grow. But Roscioni's remark doesn't sufficiently consider Gonzalo's ‘cognizione.’ We know that, for Gadda, to know does not mean to suffer less: he is actually quite critical of Stoic ethics according to which some good or some happiness is granted to the wise. In the Meditazione milanese, he writes that knowledge ‘è per ciò stesso confessione e dolore’ (MM [Meditazione milanese], 893) [is for that reason confession and pain]. But if knowledge does not relieve one of grief, then it is not what grief is originally made of. In Gadda grief is a necessity, it is inevitable. Gonzalo's illness is not the result of an accumulation of knowledge about all things and their vanity, but rather a destiny provoked by an original catastrophe: the consequence of a misdeed or an offence which tore apart the good reality of the ethical organism. His awareness of vanitas vanitatum, or better, of the emptiness of all things, is by no means what gives rise to grief. On the contrary, it is the instrument of restoration. Like pale melancholic Hamlet, Gonzalo too is summoned to avenge a wrong he has not committed—a task which is necessary but unjustified. In Gadda's language that is called a ‘negazione delle parvenze non valide’ [negation of invalid appearances].

For the Spinozian author of the Meditazione milanese, the ‘good’ is inseparable from the principle of ‘the common good’ which coincides for society (and for any other organism) with the preservation of all wealth and of all potential developments. Evil is whatever dissipates wealth, such as a bad business transaction which wastes capital, or a murder, which terminates not only the victim's life, but also biological continuity, the genetic series. Evil is ‘a partial non-being’ (MM, 692) which endangers the good reality of the organism. The organism reacts by imposing a reconstruction of the broken tissue, a ‘reconnection to reality’ (693). Thus a bad business transaction provokes a consumption of money: ‘quel consumo è elemento riparatore o nemesi […] dell'affare sballato’ (694) [that consumption is the repairing element or nemesis … for the bad transaction]. The same is true for a murder:

Il poeta e drammaturgo inglese William Shakespeare scrisse un'opera di teatro intitolata ‘Amleto, Principe di Danimarca’ che è ricchissima di significazioni non ancora tutte, forse, messe adeguatamente in luce. —Egli mostra l'inammissibilità o irrealtà del delitto che perverte la stoffa del reale ingenerando altri delitti espiatori o rammendi della stoffa.

(692)

[The English poet and playwright William Shakespeare wrote a work entitled ‘Hamlet, Prince of Denmark’ rich in meanings all of which perhaps have not been adequately considered. He shows the inadmissibility or irreality of the crime that perverts the fabric of the real generating other crimes that expiate or mend the fabric.]

Gadda adds that the process of repair is not meant here in the Christian sense of atonement, but rather as a ‘terribile senso di ripristinamento logico-teorico o intrinseco alla realtà’ (ibid., 692) [terribly strong sense of logical-theoretical restoration, intrinsic to reality]. The murderer must be punished, or even killed, for he upsets the natural order. About Hamlet, Gadda writes:

Nel dramma l'idea ‘vendetta’ è chiarita con l'idea (che assume un vero e proprio carattere finalistico) di ripristinamento dell'ordine naturale turbato.³

[In the tragedy the idea of ‘revenge’ is clarified through the idea (which has a truly final character) of restoration of the natural order that had been upset.]

Like Hamlet, Gonzalo is summoned to avenge a crime against the common good. In the ‘mondo […] delle non-borse di studio al buono’ (CD, 763) [world … which grants no fellowships to the good] he sees not only the offence directed against himself, but the offence against economy and reason (CD, 764). The organism, the ‘ragioni oscure e vivide della vita’ [obscure and vivid reasons of life], calls for compensation. The compensation is, in this case, if not another crime, at least something that has a great deal to do with murder: negation.

La sua secreta perplessità e l'orgoglio secreto affioravano dentro la trama degli atti in una negazione di parvenze non valide. Le figurazioni non valide erano da negare e da respingere, come specie falsa di denaro.

(703)

[His secret perplexity and secret pride rose to the surface within the woof of his actions in a negation of nonvalid appearances. Nonvalid depictions were to be negated and to be rejected, like false specie, counterfeit money.]

(AG, 170)

The revenge in which Gonzalo is instrumental consists of unearthing the non-being that the original catastrophe introduced into reality. A ‘non-being’ no one else can see: no one else is endowed with the grievous perception of it. Therefore, the ‘cognizione del dolore’ (in which ‘dolore,’ grief, is not the object but the subject of knowledge) is a distorting eye in charge of an ethical mission. Ethical, that is, from the standpoint of the organism. As Gadda points out: ‘la ricostruzione morale operata da Amleto costa a lui e alla sua schiatta la rinuncia alla vita’ (VM, 584) [the moral reconstruction introduced by Hamlet costs him and his descendants the renunciation of life]. The organism can reconstruct itself only by annihilating whatever is personal. Totality, which follows its natural necessity, is being ‘reconciled’ with reality, but the grief-stricken subject is irredeemably threatened by ‘non-being,’ as well as by the objects that happen to be seen by him. Hamlet's pallor surfaces on Gonzalo's face: it is the ‘lento pallore della negazione.’

Cogliere il bacio bugiardo della Parvenza, coricarsi con lei sullo strame, respirare Il suo fiato, bevere giù dentro l'anima il suo rutto o il suo lezzo di meretrice. O invece attuffarla nella rancura e nello spregio come in una pozza di scrementi, negare, negare […]. Ma l'andare nella rancura è sterile passo, negare vane immagini, le più volte, significa negare se medesimo.

(CD, 703-4)

[To seize the lying kiss of Appearances, to lie with her on the straw, to breathe her breath, to drink in, down into the soul, her belch and strumpet's stench. Or instead to plunge them into rancor and into contempt as into a well of excrement, to deny, deny … But the progress of rancor is a sterile footstep; to deny vain images, most of the time, means denying oneself.]

(AG, 171)

To punish and to die: this is what Hamlet was supposed to do in order to complete the repairing process. In contrast, Gonzalo can achieve that goal only through self-denial. The ‘cognizione del dolore’ does not enrich the subject, but rather empties it. The subject is denied tragic catharsis but also the kind of catharsis towards which tends Schopenhauer's pessimism: catharsis through the elevation of oneself to the role of a pure subject of knowledge, one that has overcome contingency. In Gadda's perspective, to recognize in one's own grief everyone else's grief, to feel horrified before a world filled with suffering, would mean to fail to fulfil the obligation of reconstructing that totality imposes on the subject. The main feature of this ‘cognizione del dolore’ that condemns the subject to particularity is not negation (which frees one from the will of living), nor ascent, but rancour.

At the core of Gadda's ‘gnoseological grudge,’ the immanent principle of his writing—the search for multiple causes and for their infinite relations—stands the question and problem of ethics, and the problem of the necessity of evil. When Gadda speaks of causes, he alludes to the causes of evil. The necessary causes slip the limits of subjective perspective. In Gadda, disorder, mess, and chaos are always ethical disorder and chaos, a terrifying distortion which is necessary but not comprehensible. In a note included in the essay ‘Abozzi per temi per tesi di laurea,’ Gadda notes an interesting remark. ‘“The time is out of joint,” says Hamlet, “O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”’⁴ Yet, evil is always necessary, even if it seems unjustified. The central idea of Stoic ethics—and Gadda finds it in Spinoza as well—according to which good and evil necessarily coexist, is clearly expressed in Meditazione milanese: ‘il male è una coesistenza eticamente periferica del bene’ (MM, 681). But men cannot understand the connection that allows what appears to be evil to become good in reference to totality. Gadda's theory of knowledge, based as it is on the Leibnizian idea of ‘combination-possibility,’ displays the impossibility of the realization of Spinoza's ethical duty: when the world appears as ‘la tabella delle infinite combinazioni possibili’ (727) [the chart of the infinite combinations that are possible], it becomes impossible to reconstruct the cause of evil, to seize its necessity.

Gadda's work in its entirety is centred on a question concerning evil. Particularly in his early writings, Racconto italiano and Novella seconda, Gadda seems to feel it is his duty to represent the incredible stories of ‘anime difformi’ [deformed souls] in order to demonstrate that ‘anche i fatti normali e terribili rientrano nella legge, se pure apparentemente sono exlege’ (RI [Racconto italiano], 405) [abnormal and terrifying acts, too, are part of the law, even if apparently they are outlawed]. Gadda's early interest in researching the causes of evil is aroused by the ethical duty stressed by Spinoza, which also promises a sort of liberation from passions to acknowledge the natural necessity of all things, including evil, and to comply serenely with it. If we forget this important point, we cannot understand why the failed reconstruction of causes becomes such a dramatic issue in Gadda. The ‘cognitive failure’ which Gadda's critics mention so often is an ethical failure, not a gnoseological one. The possibility of cathartic knowledge vanishes at the same time as the possibility of reconstructing the necessary causes of evil. The specificity of Gadda's acquaintance with grief lies in the fact that Spinoza's ethics, and the bit of stoicism connected to it, is never completely refuted, only denied. It is kept in mind as an impossible aspiration, an element of unresolved polarity, a blocked tension: on the one hand, the inevitability of the particular, on the other, the aspiration to the universal. Thus, grief can only be absolute negativity. It is unreconcilable, but it is not even the symbol—as Adorno would say—of the falsity of reconciliation in an unreconciled world. For Gadda, grief is a mean particularity, the bitter fruit of human ignorance. The obscure perception, typical of grief, is confused by those passions that Spinoza would have classified among the most negative ones—hatred, wrath, resentment, remorse, and sadness—which can frequently be found in Gadda's writings. There lies the paradox of the ‘malignant inker,’ as Gadda calls himself, who cannot stand his own malignancy, though he considers it to be inevitable (VM, 504).

Gonzalo's grief has therefore nothing to do with the lamentation of the individual who complains about his ephemeral existence or the absence of purpose in life. His tragedy has to be seen at a different level. He does not complain that things have no purpose for individuals, but that the individual—one individual, himself—can neither help the universe achieve its goal, nor preserve the good reality of the organism. The organism can be preserved only through improvement, by passing from the individual to that which is different, or, as Gadda says, from n to n + 1. N is the particular that has to be negated to make room for that which is different, the n + 1, a still unknown quantity, but which is considered ‘better’ in relation to reality—by means of a certain teleology that Gadda himself recognizes as Fichtian (SVP [Scritti vari e postumi], 758). Frequently, Gadda uses evolutionistic concepts to explain his ethical thinking:

La funzione crea l'organo: cioè si affacciano nella storia biologica delle relazioni (p. e. relazioni luce, relazioni moto) che poi vengono deferite a sistemi specializzati (occhio, gambe). Ma ciò non avviene di colpo: poco a poco, sine saltu, per tentativi, riprove, correzioni. É l'euresi. É l'intravedere una possibilità sistematica per il moto. Donde gli arti.

(785)

[Function creates the organ: that is, in biological history relationships present themselves (e.g., light, movement) which are then assigned to specific systems (the eye, legs). But this does not come about all at once: [but rather] little by little, sine saltu, by means of trial and error. It is a heuristic process. It is to foresee a systematic possibility for movement. Whereby limbs.]

An individual contributes to this heuristic process by detaching himself from the powerful call of the particular that aims only at self-preservation. For an individual, the only possible happiness (forbidden to Gonzalo) lies in the love of becoming, in that kind of heuristic process that drives towards new, unexplored horizons. This is what Gadda calls a heroic feeling: it belongs to the hero who goes to war to sacrifice his own n (life) for ‘the country's becoming,’ but also to the man who procreates to preserve humankind. In his introduction to Hjalmar Bergman's I Markurell, Gadda describes old Markurell's self-denying love for his son in these terms:

Bergman esprime nel suo Markurell questo spirito di ascesa, questa tenace volontà di persistenza, di miglioramento biologico e quindi economico: Questa lotta per guadagnare il futuro al proprio sangue […] Un demone si agita in Markurell: il demone genetico.⁵

[Bergman expresses in his Markurell this spirit of ascent, this tenacious will to persist, to biological (and therefore economic) improvement: this struggle to secure the future for his own stock … A demon agitates Markurell: the demon of genetics.]

Both ethics and genetics are the sacrifice of the individual to the human species. The particular certainly suffers when it detaches itself from its own particularity, since ‘è legge di natura che ogni azione trovi ostacoli e ogni divenire si laceri con dolore e con tormento dal suo essere’ (MM, 791) [it is the law of nature that every action meets with obstacles and that every becoming is torn with grief and torment from its being]. But this is not Gonzalo's grief, in the same way that it is not Markurell's, when he discovers that his son is not his own child, or Liliana Balducci's who has been condemned to sterility. Markurell, Liliana, and Gonzalo, in different ways, are acquainted with that particular grief that Gadda calls ‘second degree’ grief. They cannot have access to n + 1, they know only ‘l'ambascia del non poter divenire’ [the anguish of not being capable of becoming], like people forced to stand still instead of building, therefore being only a burden to the community while living within it ‘come cosa morta o come perturbazione retrogrediente’ [as dead things or retrograding perturbation]. Gonzalo's grief is that of someone who sees himself as a torn member of a larger reality, of a vaster organism, who is ready to sacrifice himself but is bound to his n, to the sterile negation of his ‘fragmented self’ (744):

Il degenerare verso l'io n immemore del suo possibile ascendere ad n + 1, può essere determinato da cause estrinseche ai poteri dell' io personale. Quando ogni compito si chiude oltre il limite raggiunto dall'n, e tutto non per colpa nostra, rovina in una negazione atroce; allora ultimo baluardo di realtà, come talvolta al naufrago, non ci rimane che il nostro misero significato n, il nostro io consolidato negli evi; e su quello esercitiamo la nostra lugubre ora, come chi ha le gambe paralizzate si diverte a risolvere dei ‘solitaires’ con le carte.

(770-1)

[The deterioration to the n self, lifeless in its possible ascent to n + 1, may be determined by causes that are extrinsic to the powers of the individual self. When every project terminates beyond the limits reached by n, and not for any fault of ours, it falls into atrocious negation; then our final bulwark of reality, as for the shipwrecked sailor, is nothing but our miserable meaning n, our own self, consolidated with the passing of time, on which we exert our lugubrious sense of the present, like someone who with paralysed legs takes pleasure in winning at solitaire.]

The founding principle of all expressionistic writing is the impossibility of the transfiguration of grief. For, to be able to express the particular in its deformed and deforming immediacy means to hold a subjectivity that is not reconciled nor reconcilable with the universal. In Gadda, the vestiges of subjectivity filter, by their deforming action, everything that is being represented. Moreover, they derive from the very impossibility of mediation between the particular and the universal. But in Gadda, the terms of the problems are overturned: the particular is ‘evil’ precisely because it tends to persist, while the world, with its lack of a human dimension, is not. Anger against those objects that are not for oneself becomes anger against that very self which is separated from objects. The hurting subject is the ‘foul guts,’ and is able to say nothing about nothing, as Gonzalo argues in his tirade against personal pronouns:

Io, tu … Quando l'immensità si coagula, quando la verità si aggrinza in una palandrana … da deputato al Congresso, … io, tu … in una tirchia e rattrappita persona, quando la giusta ira si appesantisce in una pancia, … nella mia per esempio … che ha per suo fine e destino unico, nell'universo, di insaccare tonnellate di bismuto, a cinque pesos il decagrammo … giù, giù, nel duodeno … bismuto a palate … attendendo … un giorno dopo l'altro, fino alla fine degli anni … Quando l'essere si parzializza, in un sacco, in una lercia trippa, i di cui confini sono più miserabili e fessi di questo fesso muro pagatasse … che lei me lo scavalca in un salto … quando succede questo bel fatto … allora … è allora che l'io si determina, con la sua brava monade in coppa, come il càppero sull'acciuga arrotolata sulla fetta di limone sulla costoletta alla viennese … Allora, allora! É allora, proprio, in quel preciso momento, che spunta fuori quello sparagone di un io … pimpante … eretto … impennacchiato di attributi di ogni maniera … paonazzo, e pennuto, e teso, e turgido … come un tacchino […] oppure saturnino e alpigiano, con gli occhi incavernati, con lo sfinctere strozzato dall'avarizia …

(CD, 637-8)

[I, you … When the immensity coagulates, when truth becomes wrinkled in an overcoat—of a Deputy in Congress—I, you … in a mean and shrunken person, when righteous wrath becomes heavy in a belly … in mine, for example … which has as its end and only destiny, in the universe, the stuffing of tons of bismuth, at five pesos the decagram … down, down into the duodenum … bismuth by the shovelful … waiting … one day after the other, to the end of one's years … When being becomes separated into a sack of foul guts, whose boundaries are more miserable and more foolish than this foolish, taxpaying wall … which you can climb over in one leap … when this fine business happens … then … that's when the I is determined, with its fine monad upon it, like a caper on the rolled up anchovy on the lemon slice over the Wiener schnitzel. Then, then! That precisely is the very moment! That lousy, incomparable I … swaggering … erect … beplumed with attributes of every sort … purplished and feathered, and taut, and turgid … like a turkey … or else Saturnine and Alpine, with eyes hallowed in distrust, with the sphincter blocked by avarice. …]

(AG, 88-9)

Gonzalo's anger is also an anger directed against the expressionist self, the self which lets itself complain about his loss, thus consolidating his poor, sterile negativity. In this respect, as well, Gadda's ‘cognizione del dolore’ is no different from the pathological mourning of the melancholic, who deals with himself as an object, who directs towards himself all the hostile feelings that were originally directed towards things (Freud 1963, 244-5). Thus Gadda's writing attacks, disparages, and empties the only resource available to expressionists; the comic wrench which turns sad fragments into exciting baroque fantasies is yet another scornful gesture against the self.⁶

The impossibility of unifying multiplicity around an immanent meaning gives way to allegory. Gadda's loss of the object corresponds to the loss of meaning that Benjamin called ‘allegorical soullessness’ (Benjamin 1977, 183). The painful lived experience is not transfigured through symbol; we are left with an incoherent bunch of uninterpretable fragments. If they have any meaning at all, they expect to be given it from the outside, as redemption. Like Kafka, although by other means, Gadda turns lived experience into an enigma upon which is placed the highest of all enigmas: the necessity of grief. But Gadda, unlike most expressionists, exiles truth into an abyss where no hope of redemption can reach it. Writing fills that abyss with ‘merry signs.’ Words, their redundancy, dissolve the pathos of truth. The libido, with its voracious desire for accumulation, turns to language:

I doppioni li voglio tutti, per mania di possesso e per cupidigia di ricchezze: e voglio anche i triploni, e i quadruploni, sebbene il re cattolico non li abbia ancora monetati: e tutti i sinonimi usati nelle loro variegate accezioni e sfumature, d'uso corrente, o d'uso rarissimo.

(VM I, 490)

[I want all the double-sided coins to satisfy my mania for possession and desire for wealth. I want even the triples, and the quadruples, even if the Catholic king has yet to mint them: and all the synonyms in all of their different meanings and nuances, whether of current or very rare usage.]

Gadda's word is not willing to solve the enigma of grief. Instead, it becomes a fantasy, a resonant appearance to be played with by the melancholic. Just as for Benjamin, the fragments to which the melancholic attributes an arbitrary meaning are the ‘divertissement’ of allegory, the possibility of play with and in language. But this ‘divertissement’ is a sad one if the euphoric time of the comic mode is not granted to it. The comic is what characterizes Gadda's allegory. What makes Gadda's expressionism so different from that of the other expressionists, his ‘maccheronea’ from the landscapes of stones and ruins, his violence from the violence of lamentation, is what his ‘philosophy’ draws from Spinoza: a contempt for vacuous subjectivity. It is also what his writing keeps repeating: the destructive gesture which overwhelms the self and its ‘childish vanity.’

Notes

1. The relationship between knowledge and grief in the novel's title is generally understood by criticism in the tragic sense as knowledge of grief achieved through experience, that is by means of its representation in narrative. The only interpretation that departs from this point of view has been advanced by Gian Carlo Roscioni who refers the title back to a verse from the Book of Ecclesiastes: ‘He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’ As we shall discuss below, in contrast to the tragic sense of knowledge acquired through grief, here it is not grief that generates knowledge, but knowledge that generates grief. I shall argue that neither of these interpretations suffices to explain the relationship between knowledge and grief in Gadda. Grief for Gadda is neither the object nor the instrument of knowledge, nor its product, but rather its subject, in the sense in which it is commonly said that a person who is suffering from grief sees things with a deforming eye. I believe that the ‘cognizione del dolore’ should be understood as a kind of subjective genitive: as knowledge that has for its subject the deforming eye of grief.

2. Gadda's comment on the ballad by Villon that contains the famous quip ‘je riz en pleurs’ illustrates better than anything else what he means by ‘precipitati trapassi’: ‘Una meravigliosa capacità di singhiozzare tra le lacrime, la risata che si alterna alla preghiera, alla pietà filiale: la voce più vera del dolore, la desolata contemplazione del proprio destino. La invocazione alla Madonna, nella celebre ballata del “Testamento”: e subito dopo la beffa del l'avara meretrice, che non ha corrisposto l'amore. Questa ineguagliata attitudine a cangiar di tono da una strofe all'altra, da un verso all'altro—questa mescolanza—così drammaticamente iridata di pathos e di scherno avvicina François Villon a due grandi poeti: Catullo e Shakespeare’ (VM, 527) [[the poet's] marvellous capacity to sob amidst tears, his laughter that alternates with prayers and filial piety: his most genuine voice of grief and the desolate contemplation of his own destiny. His invocation to the Blessed Virgin, in the famous ballad of the ‘Testament’: followed immediately by the practical joke of the avaricious whore, who did not return his love. This unequalled aptitude for changing tone from one stanza to another, from one verse to another—this mixture—so dramatically lined with pathos and contempt raises François Villon to the level of two great poets: Catullus and Shakespeare].

3. This passage is taken from an unpublished manuscript (‘Abbozzi di temi per tesi di laurea’) that Gian Carlo Roscioni cites in his edition of Meditazione milanese (1974), 353.

4. Hamlet, I.v, cited by Roscioni, MM, 353.

5. Introduction to Hjalmar Bergman, I Markurell (Turin: Einaudi 1982). Gadda wrote his introduction to the novel in 1944, at the same time or just prior to the magazine version of Quer pasticciaccio. In his commentary, he pinpoints what will become the central theme of Quer pasticciaccio: the ‘sentimento della discendenza’ [feeling of hereditary derivation] that animates the Valdarena ‘tribe,’ and the ‘senso di coerenza (oltreché di coesione) etica e genetica proprio delle società chiuse o remote’ [sense of ethical and genetic coherence (as well as cohesion) typical of closed and distant societies] that forms the background for the drama of Liliana Balducci's maternity manquée.

6. The expressionistic self takes the sadness of objects as its strength. By contrast, in Gadda, all that the self remembers of its inane destiny is transformed suddenly into a ‘merry sign.’ For example, in La cognizione, the hen and the dragonfly at least once are invested with Gonzalo's melancholic gaze, as emblems of loss: the hen does not hatch an egg for him, and the dragonfly soars over the walls surrounding his villa, in mocking denial of his property's inviolable rights to privacy.

References

Benjamin, Walter. 1977. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: New Left Books.

Contini, Gianfranco. 1963. Introduzione alla ‘Cognizione del dolore.’ Turin: Einaudi.

———. 1974. Esercizi di lettura. Turin: Einaudi.

Freud, Sigmund. 1963. ‘Mourning and Melancholia.’ In The Complete Psychological Works. Translated by James Strachey. Vol. XIV. London: The Hogarth Press.

Klein, Melanie. 1975. ‘Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States.’ In Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works. New York: The Free Press.

Roscioni, Gian Carlo. 1975. La disarmonia prestabilita. Turin: Einaudi.