SOURCE: Tench, Darby. “Quel Nòme Storia: Naming and History in Gadda's Pasticciaccio.” Stanford Italian Review 5, no. 2 (1985): 205-17.

[In the following essay, Tench warns against any simplistic reading of Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana, noting that comparisons to the Aeneid in the work are muddied by the dualities Gadda poses.]

“Se so' sparati a via Merulana”: and don Ciccio, investigator for the Questura di Roma, feels a lump in his throat, a palpitation of the heart, a fear that the magnificent Signora Liliana Balducci is involved. The victim of the present crime—a jewel heist—is however not Signora Balducci, but rather her across-the-hall neighbor, the Countess Menegazzi. Only three days later, Liliana Balducci will be dead, herself the victim of an assassin's knife.

Two crimes, one address: via Merulana 219. This is the “ambo non auspicato”¹, the unexpected bothness of the crime, which, in its implication of a connection between disparate events, threatens to make some sense of the “nodo, o groviglio, o garbuglio” (p. 3) which structures or rather deconstructs the world of Carlo Emilio Gadda's Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana.

This unexpected duality threatens our reading of the novel as well. Gadda, drawing heavily on the Aeneid and other classical sources—among them canonical Roman law and history—offers onomastic and periphrastic teasers to the reader who, eager to make linguistic, literary, and historical connections, may fail to recognize the inherent duplicity in duality. As it becomes increasingly apparent that the novel's protagonist is “il nostro mondo detto latino” (p. 1), he or she may be tempted to draw an equation analogous to that which don Ciccio eventually casts aside: two texts—the Aeneid and the Pasticciaccio; two empires—the Augustan and the Fascist; one Address, one History: Rome.

The trajectory which leads from the Pasticciaccio back to the Aeneid is however a piste absurde. The topographical connection is irrelevant, whether it is a stairwell on via Merulana or Rome itself. The implication of a connection or continuity may be rejected with reference to rhetorical and historical categories which, as they themselves succumb to the “groviglio” which informs the novel, place in doubt not only the idea or the stability of language, but the idea or even the possibility of History as well.

The concept of duality is indeed a tempting “trap” for the casual reader of Gadda's works. Gadda's concept of “polarization,” outlined in the Meditazione Milanese, seems to posit a cognitive dualism which, like the historical and onomastic dualism in the Pasticciaccio, is ultimately misleading:

Chè relazione implica almeno sdoppiamento o polarità; … ingenuo è in realtà tutto il modo di procedere per enunciati e dimostrazioni, quando tutto invece è indestricabilmente convinto e si codetermina: … L'atto della coscienza è un atto di polarizzazione (almeno); è una crisi euristica o giudizio euristico contrapponente alcunchè ad alcunchè, anche sè a sè.²

Gian Carlo Roscioni rightly points out the significance of Gadda's “almeno” in the first and third passages cited above: the use of “at least” in fact indicates that the reductive schematization implicit in the notion of polarity is rare, if not anachronistic, in Gadda's work.³ In the Pasticciaccio, however, it is possible to trace the outlines of just such a reductive duality, in historical and onomastic terms: and, subsequently, to observe this process of polarization turn against itself.

Gadda's onomastic exploitation of Virgil's “historical” epic, the Aeneid, transcends the mere misappropriation of the name. The crisis which befalls the name in the Pasticciaccio is not merely its transformation into misnomer. Rather it is the rejection of all nominative categories, proper and improper alike. In observing that “Enea Retalli, son of Anchise and Venere Procacci,” is “named after” Virgil's Aeneas, our emphasis must fall on the “after” rather than on the “named”—that is, on the disjunctive possibilities between the name and its designated object. It is not the name so much as naming which undergoes a crisis in the Pasticciaccio. The thief named Aeneas—the impious transgressor “named after” a hero known above all for his piety—is therefore not the paradigmatic figure of Gadda's novel; for he is merely the misapplication of the name. Rather it is Corporal Pestalozzi, who demonstrates an active irreverence for naming in his constant referral to Diomede Lanciani, the alleged assassin of Signora Balducci, as “Ganimede”—simply because “Ganimede was a name more easily filed in the archives of memory than Diomede” (p. 305; italics mine).

Gadda's manner of designating things and people thus vitiates the very notion of naming. In her study of the revision of the Pasticciaccio from serial (in Letteratura, 1946) to book form (1957), Alba Andreini gives fitting emphasis to the onomastic aspect of Gadda's “tendenza al ludismo e al pastiche”:

Alle favole riporta anche lo scherzo sulla parola: Gadda lo applica soprattutto ai nomi di persona, ed in questo ambito il riesame è totale. Non c'è più alcun nome o quasi che resti immutato … Ingràvola [which of course became “Ingravallo” in the 1957 version—D. T.] era di inopportunamente dannunziano; il “Farfarello” (of the 1957 novel) … viene ad echeggiare diavoli danteschi al posto di “Frulla” [in the 1946 serial edition], … e il Pestalozzi conserva il ricordo dell'originario Pestal'ossi.⁴

An examination of earlier works also sheds light on Gadda's developing sensitivity to the significance of naming. An entry in the Giornale di guerra e di prigionia (1915-1918; published in 1955 by Sansoni and in 1965 by Einaudi) is a portent of (cog)nominal fascination to come:

Tecchi mi è buon compagno delle ore di studio; ha un pò compreso il mio stato, ha penetrato il complicatissimo sistema morale che corrisponde all'etichetta del mio nome.⁵

The recent edition of Gadda's hitherto unpublished first novel, Racconto italiano di ignoto del novecento, affords precious insight into the young writer's struggle with the “systemization” that plot and character development require. (“Legare i personaggi: per ora è questa per me la maggiore difficoltà: ‘l'intreccio’ dei vecchi romanzi, che i nuovi spesso disprezzano. Ma in realtà la vita è un ‘intreccio’ e quale ingarbugliato intreccio!”⁶) The continuous revision of names in the book, as Dante Isella points out in his critical preface, moreover not only contributes to the obscurity of the plot,⁷ but above all betrays an acute literary and linguistic awareness in the making.

Gadda appears on the other hand to disesteem the name and the naming process in the final pages of the Meditazione Milanese, where he declares “il mio profondo disinteresse per le questioni di nomenclatura.” However, inasmuch as he lumps names together with “carte, bolli, titoloni ed oricalchi, biglietti di visita, e sontuose designazioni: e tutto ciò non sarà se non polvere e ombra,” it seems reasonable to attribute this “nominal” antipathy to Gadda's amply documented discomfort with, and consequential manipulation of, any kind of “euresi già avvenuta.”⁸ At any rate, Gadda's “profound disinterest” in nomenclature—in the sense of “nome proprio” and “nome comune” alike—probably reflects not only a reticence with regard to any fixating systemization of reality, but also a certain egocentric mysticism; quasi quasi a “doctrina ignorantia” with regard to the Self: in the same passage in which he classifies names as among life's sumptuous but ultimately meaningless designations, he proclaims that “anch'io, ultimo essere, non posso di me altro dire se non le parole che di sè dice il biblico Primo: ‘Sum qui sum.’”⁹

This onomastic reticence or confusion is endemic not only to Gadda's perception of reality, but to his construction of a mytho-poetic world as well. In the Cognizione del dolore, the case of Pedro Mahagones seems to indicate that Corporal Pestalozzi, who has little respect for the designating or discriminating function of the name, would feel quite at home in the Lukones of the Cognizione:

Un bel giorno, tutt'a un tratto, si venne a sapere universalmente che un certo Pedro Mahagones, e cioè appunto il vigile ciclista di quella zona, che tutti lo conoscevano per Manganones o Pedro, non era affatto Manganones, nè (per dir meglio) Mahagones, e tanto meno Pedro: ma quello era invece il nome e cognome di un prozio materno e il suo vero nome, invece, era Gaetano Palumbo.¹⁰

It is important to note, however, the peculiarly phonic quality of Gadda's earlier novel, where the denial of meaning is accomplished through sound rather than semantics. Names are “onomastic abstractions” (p. 110) to Gonzalo not because of thematic or historical inconsistencies, but because of the cacophony they produce:

ebbe l'aria di navigar nel vago: confondeva facilmente le Juane con le Pepite, e anche con le Teresite: ma più che tutto, a terrorizzarlo, era l'insalata delle Marie e Marie proclitiche, cioè le Mary, le May, le Marie Pie, le Anne Marie, le Marise, le Luise Marie e le Marie Terese.

(pp. 109-10)

In the Pasticciaccio, on the other hand, History becomes the means by which the name is deprived of its discriminating function. In direct reference—to Enea Retalli, Diomede and Ascanio Lanciani, Lavinia Mattonari—and in periphrastic reference—to the carabinieri-centaurs of San Marino, to the cerberus who guards Castel Bruciato, to the sarta-sibilla of Due Santi—Gadda draws on and plays with Virgil's historical epic about the founding of Italy. On a purely onomastic level, Gadda seems to have populated his “latin world” with heroes and heroines of antiquity. We may then be startled to discover that these heroes and heroines are thieves, petty criminals, prostitutes, and murderers.

We should not forget, however, that the subject of the novel is not “il nostro mondo latino,” but “il nostro mondo detto latino.” If the discriminating power of words is suspect in the Pasticciaccio—note for instance the colloquial conflation of the relatively innocent and more deadly meanings in the term “assassino,” assigned by the crowd of rubberneckers at via Merulana to the Menegazzi burglar and the Balducci murderer alike—then names, in their hyper-signification, are doubly treacherous. This same “collettività fabulante” (p. 30), which indiscriminately doles out blanket designations such as “assassino,”¹¹ is also responsible for the names of don Ciccio's assistants: “Gaudenzio, noto alla malavita come er Biondone,” and “Pompeo, detto invece lo Sgranfia.” Nomina are decidedly not numina in the Pasticciaccio: they are nicknames, surnames, additions, and superimpositions. Gadda in fact makes us aware of their nonessential nature from the opening sentence of the novel: “Tutti oramai lo chiamavano don Ciccio” (p. 1; italics mine).

The Cratylian connection, then, is missing in Gadda's use of classical sources. Names are as erratic and unstable as the reality which they purport to designate. Gadda's conflation of semiotically shaky names and ontologically tenuous kinships moreover leads us to suspect the stability of the signified as well as the signifier, and to conclude, with critic Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti (and with Gadda himself; cf. n. 11 of this essay), that Gadda perceives a certain grotesqueness and element of the baroque as immanent, a priori, in external reality.¹² When don Ciccio perceives the “groviglio” behind “quel nome nipote” (p. 12), he also perceives the nature of the relationship between naming and kinship, a relationship based on the common incapacity to establish connections. The adoption of a name in the Pasticciaccio is in fact as temporary, as conditional, and ultimately as meaningless as Liliana Balducci's “provisional” adoptions (p. 153), as nieces, of teenage country girls.

In the Pasticciaccio, cross-currents of genealogy indicate that the macrocosmic mess of history is reflected in the microcosmic tangle of kinship.¹³ Ascanio is not Enea's son in the Pasticciaccio, as he was in the Aeneid, but rather Diomede's brother. The woman who at first is referred to as his grandmother turns out to be a young aunt of his mother. Liliana Balducci fantasizes about a relationship with Giuliano, “champion” of the Valdarena clan, whom she calls cousin, considers a brother, and is in reality a generation younger than she: roughly in the position of a nephew.

This kinship at a step removed in fact plays an important part in the novel. There seems to be no linear history, no direct line of descent in this “mondo detto latino.” Instead of mothers, there are aunts (Elviruccia, Marietta), pseudo-aunts (Liliana, Zamira), and pseudo-grandmothers (Ascanio's great-aunt at the market-place). There are no Creusas, no Roman matriarchs, only a baroque confusion of women without children of their own. The few births in the novel proceed mostly from inhuman mothers: the great Ovary of the Septimontium releases a stream of country Venuses onto the city of Rome; an ocean liner discharges American girls from its womb onto Italian soil; and the chamber-pot at Castel Bruciato, newly delivered of its burden of jewels by Corporal Pestalozzi and his assistant, strongly resembles a woman just out of labor, “così smagato e sminuito da ricolmo invece che era” (p. 287).

Kinship, along with naming, undergoes a correlative crisis in the Cognizione del dolore. “Ma Gonzalo? Oh, il bel nome della vita! una continuità che s'adempie” (p. 176). Gonzalo, however, perceives the lie in his mother's affirmation of the inviolability of kinship, for she herself has violated it in her “scelta materna” of houseguests and other people's children over her own son. “Sono stato bimbo anch'io!” he cries (p. 119):

Poi aveva maledetto e rimaledetto tutti i parenti, compresi quelli che non erano mai esistiti davanti alle leggi, nel timore di tralasciarne alcuno, od alcuna.

(p. 185)

In the second part of the novel, the “Idea Matrice della Villa” is revealed to be not only Matrix, but Mater as well. “Consustanziale ai visceri, e però inalienabile dalla sacra interezza della persona” (p. 184), it is another of Gadda's inhuman mothers, like the ocean liner, the mountain, the chamber-pot of the Pasticciaccio: “tutto ciò che nasceva dalla Villa, o dalla Idea-Villa, era manifestazione e modo dell'essere” (p. 207).

Maternity is therefore not an altogether human event in either the Cognizione or the Pasticciaccio. However, this is not to say the women, in the latter novel particularly, are infertile or incapable of giving birth. On the contrary, the “nepoti albane, fiore della eterna gente sabellica,” are sexually willing and almost aggressively fertile. There was no longer any need to take the Sabines by force, writes Gadda; “le albane ci pensavano loro, oggi, a scegne a fiume” from the mountains into Rome (p. 13). The very sight of these alban women arouses in the men “demographic hopes” for the “eternal spring of the Patria,” for the future of Italy (p. 181).

The promise of future Roman progeny which flashes forth from the eyes of Assunta Crocchiapani, however, remains unfulfilled, primarily because there is no inseminating force or even presence to match its ferocity. Diomede Lanciani, who in his blond beauty seems to constitute “la difesa della razza … della gente latina e sabellica … uno da rappresentare in bellezza il Lazio e la sua gioventù, al Foro Italico” (p. 200), never makes an appearance in the novel and in fact escapes from Rome. So too does Enea Retalli, equally if not so descriptively attractive to women, leave the site where his Virgilian “namesake” founded an entire people. Gadda's continued insistence on the procreative capabilities and the Roman heritage of the women in fact highlights the impotence of the men who remain. It is significant that don Ciccio himself, wildly desirous of Assunta whenever he sees her, is at the end of the novel paralyzed, almost repentant, even as he comes close to wringing from her a confession of accomplice to murder.

The absence of mothers and fathers alike in the Pasticciaccio implies and results from the demise of the Roman patriarchate. The final scene of the novel, in its juxtaposition of an authoritatively Roman and fecund woman (Assunta, who exudes “un fascino, un imperio tutto latino e sabellico” [p. 8]) with a mute and dying old man (Assunta's father, rotting and sexless, on whose deathbed the very possibility of Roman patriarchy seems to wither and decay) mocks paternal authority and paternal tradition, the cornerstones of ancient Roman society. So too does don Ciccio's repentance and withdrawal at the novel's end refute the possibility of such an authority reestablishing itself in this particular “latin” world.

The denial of patriarchy is the denial of institutional history, of what Nor Hall has termed the “paternal façade of Roman Law.”¹⁴ If we turn then from our paradigm of history to History itself—that is, from family genealogy to the history of a society, of its institutions, of its public function—we find that the groviglio which exists behind “quel nome nipote”—behind the façade of kinship—lies behind “quel nome Storia” as well.

Critics have by and large ignored the institutional character of Gadda's “so-called latin world,” having concentrated instead on its bucolic nature. A representative example would be Benedetti, who writes:

Molto significativo è il riferimento alla latinità e ai tempi lontani, relazione che avvolge inevitabilmente tutti i personaggi legati alla campagna laziale … Il riferimento ai tempi lontani trascende il tempo reale della vicenda, portando fuori della dimensione storica presente la problematica dei personaggi. Si sottolinea così l'eterna e inalterata vicenda biologica della vita …, etc.¹⁵

The roots of Gadda's interest in the bucolic aspect of Italy's Roman heritage are clearly evident in “Apologia manzoniana,” Gadda's debut article for Solaria (1927). Even here, however, the politico-historical polemic is dominant:

Si direbbe che la spenta socialità del mondo si sia trasformata in queste generazioni rurali come il sogno di pace d'un pensionato. Ma quanto è costata alla lupa la sua pax Augusti!¹⁶

The same lament—how great the cost of the Augustan Peace—may be heard in the Pasticciaccio, but in a much drier, and more piccante vein. Nonetheless, Gadda's vicious contortion of History against itself in the Pasticciaccio is already heralded in the “Apologia manzoniana”:

Negli atroci silenzi la legge si fa irreale, perchè nessun termine di giusto riferimento le è conceduto. Nulla esiste più, nulla è più possible socialmente: reali sono soltanto gli impulsi della fuggente individualità. “Memento, quia pulvis es.”¹⁷

Roman history may in fact be seen as the diachronic unfolding of its greatest legacy, Roman law. Gadda consistently reduces this inheritance into a pile of paper. He depicts Rome not as a historical structure but rather as a great bureaucratic brood-hen, squatting over a stack of molding and softening documents—among them, no doubt, the Codex Justinianus—which might in a more favorable light be termed the structuring principle of history. “Roma doma … Roma cova. In sul pagliaio de' decreti sua” (p. 231). This ironic subversion of a popular Fascist slogan is echoed in Gadda's surrealist and Salvador Dali-like description of a Rome which is elsewhere touted as being gloriously eternal: “pareva n'orloggione spiacciato a terra, che la catena de l'acquedotto claudio legasse … congiungesse … alle misteriose fonti del sogno” (p. 230).

The Claudian acqueduct leads back not to History, then, nor to law, but rather to a dream—to the mythos which ultimately governs storia and fabula alike in the novel. Thus, writes Gadda, the abominable spells and sticky roots of Zamira Pacori's magic “entangle the souls” not only of Ovid, but of Lucan as well (p. 176). Epos is deprived almost entirely of its historical or structural content; it is instead a Viconian “collettività fabulante” of “serve, padrone, broccoli” (p. 26). Historical dating becomes as absurd a proposition as naming. The Ides of March, for example, is the date the heat goes off at via Merulana 219—that is, if it is not already off by the nones or kalends (p. 23). Another date, March 23, eventually blocks the novel's progress altogether, as the narrative continuously folds back on itself in the latter half of the book.

It is Zamira Pacori, the sibyl with the oriental, unclassical, ahistorical name, who holds the real power in this “mondo detto latino.” She controls “the clear thread of alban time,” writes Gadda, spinning it from around the distaff of her prophecy, so that “i giorni e i casi parevano orbitare d'attorno a lei, sorgere e vanire da lei” (pp. 177-78). In her sibyl's cave, the subterranean bottega-laboratorio at Due Santi, she calls forth the “elysian gathering of the souls” of carabinieri and other passers-by who might be interested in her “nieces,” her “catechumens,” her assistants (p. 181). She instructs Diomede in the secret rites of her Orphic mysteries—that is, she offers him her own oral handbook of the art of courtly love, always controlled, always profitable, always designed to bring more country Venuses into the bottega. Gadda's descriptive lingering over Zamira's mouth—“quel rictus, quel voto” (p. 175)—indicates that the “abyss” of the cave into which Diomede thrusts himself is the ahistorical or even anti-historical category which qualifies Zamira Pacori as the very embodiment of myth: “del (suo) nome e dei (suoi) portamenti, palesi o velati, a non dir secreti o splendidi, il mito s'era fatto scopritore o troviere e poi divulgatore e trombettiere” (p. 168; italics mine). Myth, moving from disinterested discoverer to vocal partisan, outmaneuvers history; the hissing prophecies—the sibilare of the sibyl—overcome the weight of written law.¹⁸

Opposing the piles of documents and decrees, Pestalozzi's list of stolen jewels being a prime example, Zamira in fact turns Rome's greatest legacy against itself in her slavering and whispering of Orphic incantations. Roman law, in its formative stages, stressed the authority of the spoken over the written word: “Uti lingua nuncupassit,” the sixth of the Twelve Tables of ancient Roman customary law proclaims, “ita ius esto”: whatever shall be declared orally—literally, by tongue—that shall be law.¹⁹ Zamira thus brings the law into being even as she violates it with her Orphic pronouncements. She is transgressor and law-giver at the same time: much like Orpheus himself.

Much like Liliana Balducci, who receives her initiation into the world of myth in the form of a Hermetic visitation (p. 120). Liliana's “provisional” adoption of young women violates the essential nature of kinship in a twofold manner: first, in her attempt to impose a bond where none exists; second, in her qualification of the adoptions as conditional—which kinship can never be. Her “deity” is therefore Hermes, thief and lawgiver, transgressor and legislator at the same time. He visits Liliana under cover of darkness, ordering her to make a will—a paper, a law—whose express purpose is to violate what Roscioni calls the bourgeois “istinto del possesso,” in its joyous casting off of material goods.²⁰

This simultaneous act of transgression and systemization lies at the heart of the novel. The law in the Pasticciaccio is itself a transgression, a violation against the “groviglio.” Gadda, by turning the law against History, ultimately turns History against itself (just as, throughout the novel, he turns naming, or rather the name itself, against the very idea of nomenclature). In the Pasticciaccio, “l'unicità della Storia si deroga in una doppia storiografia” (p. 173), as the carabinieri and the questura, “smelling or sensing the [Hegelian] idea, the invisible Form” (p. 180), wrangle over History as though they were rats in Zamira's laboratory, and History were a crumb of pecorino: “metà me, metà te” (p. 173), “una partita di do ut des” (p. 168).

A double historiography: l'ambo non auspicato. The duality which informs the novel is shown to be duplicitous, deceptive in its positing of a structure which does not exist. It imposes itself—provisionally—on the novel at every level, from the historical—the Rome of Augustus, the Rome of Mussolini; to the literary—Virgil's heroes and heroines, Gadda's petty crooks of the same names; to the generic (the Pasticciaccio as detective story)—two victims, two suspects, two girlfriend-informants; and finally to the most banal and trivial: at the arrest of Ines Ciompini, for example, a dead chicken and a beat-up pair of shoes are brought in so that the police can reconstruct—by proxy—the theft which she allegedly committed.

The myth is of course that duality implies some sort of connection, whereas in reality it implies just the opposite.²¹ A crime cannot be reconstructed on the basis of a duplicate chicken; neither can a text or a history be reconstructed on the basis of onomastic or referential imitation. Gadda condemns the reductive tendencies of History just as he condemns the Fascist reduction of the state into a “trepotente camorra,” a thrice-powerful mob. Ultimately, however, Gadda's polemic, like that of Nietzsche in Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie, transcends the immediate political situation: it is History itself, or rather an excess thereof, which constitutes, in Montesquieu's words as quoted by Gadda himself, the “‘novello’ ravage de l'Etat” (p. 88).

Notes

1. Carlo Emilio Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (Milan: Garzanti, 1957), p. 57. All subsequent citations of the Pasticciaccio refer to this edition.

2. Gadda, Meditazione Milanese (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), p. 273. Italics mine.

3. Gian Carlo Roscioni, “Introduzione” to ibid., p. vi.

4. Alba Andreini, “Storia interna del Pasticciaccio,” in Filologia e critica, 6, no. 3 (September-December 1981), 424. Italics mine.

5. Gadda, Giornale di guerra e di prigionia (Turin: Einaudi, 1965). Italics mine.

6. Gadda, Racconto italiano di ignoto del novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), p. 86.

7. Dante Isella, “Prefazione” to ibid., p. xviin.

8. Cf. e.g., Gadda, Meditazione Milanese, p. 273: “Abituati a manovrare lo strumento d'una nomenclatura già fabbricata sul rappricciante e monstruoso groviglio d'un'euresi già avvenuta”; also ibid., p. 218: “Così la nomenclatura comune è insufficiente a dipingere il fatto.”

9. Ibid., p. 296.

10. Gadda, La cognizione del dolore (Turin: Einaudi, 1963), p. 49. All subsequent citations of the Cognizione refer to this edition.

11. Carla Benedetti also remarks upon the ambiguity of the term “assassino,” as it is used by Gadda's chattering “epos,” in Una trappola di parole. Lettura del Pasticciaccio (Pisa, ETS, 1980), p. 70. The objection that “assassino” is used in common, everyday, nonliterary language to mean more than just “murderer” is certainly valid. It can only be answered with Gadda's own countercharge to the observation that his writing is “baroque”: “Barocco,” he writes in the preface to the Cognizione, “è il mondo, e il G. ne ha percepito e ritratto la baroccagine” (p. 32).

12. Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti, La narrativa italiana del dopoguerra (Bologna: Caselli, 1965), p. 44.

13. Cf. Gadda, Meditazione Milanese, p. 257: “E così non vi è differenza nessuna fra le ‘gentes’ o ‘familiae’ di relazioni e le vere e proprie genti e familie, che sono sistemi di relazioni fra i sistemi: (pacchi di fazzoletti nel magazzino di fazzoletti).”

14. Nor Hall, The Moon and the Virgin: Reflections on the Archetypal Feminine (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. xvi.

15. Benedetti, Una trappola di parole, p. 31.

16. Gadda, “Apologia manzoniana,” in Solaria 2, no. 1 (January 1927), 45.

17. Ibid., p. 44.

18. The figure of Zamira Pacori finds its paradigm in that of a “myth for our time,” namely Carmen (expounded by Mérimée and Bizet in the nineteenth century, more recently by Saura, Rosi, Godard, and Peter Brook). In a recent article entitled “Carmen, l'alterità” (Alfabeta 7, no. 68 [January 1985], 34), Rosella Prezzo calls Carmen “un mito d'oggi,” which, “al contrario del mito di Edipo, non racconta la storia dello svelamento di un enigma, ma un enigma che si fa storia” (italics mine). Prezzo's observations on the “otherness” of Carmen have interesting implications for a study of Zamira's pivotal role in the unveiling of the fallacy of “system” (duality) offered by Naming and History in the Pasticciaccio: “Chi scombina la dicotomia tra realtà e finzione e confonde questa ‘coppia di valore’ è proprio la figura di Carmen … Godard ha tenuto a precisare che il suo film non si chiama Carmen ma Prénom Carmen. La verità di Carmen sta tutta in questo “prima” del nome, pré-nom in questa assenza innominabile, irrappresentabile … Carmen è allora questo canto indicibile nel linguaggio simbolico dell'uno: pluralità irreducibile al Nome Proprio. Esiliato dal senso di doversi costituire come io proprio [earlier in the article, Prezzo observes that “la legge del Medesimo, il nome proprio del Padre instauri l'autorità simbolica di tutto ciò che è uno”—cf. Hall, The Moon and the Virgin.], la sua prossimità è l'intervento che disturba il fenomeno”: what better way to describe Zamira Pacori—again, the subterranean madam-cum-dressmaker with the oriental, unclassical, and ergo ahistorical (within the strictures of the “mondo detto latino”) name, than as the interrupting element which disturbs the “phenomenon” of History?

19. Lex duodecim tabularum (451-450 B.C.), vi, 1; cited in Herbert F. Jolowicz, Historical Introduction to the Study of Roman Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), p. 146. For further discussion of the spoken formulation of early Roman law, see William W. Buckland, A Manual of Roman Private Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 262 ff.

20. Roscioni, La disarmonia prestabilità. Studio su Gadda (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 134.

21. Benedetti offers an acute analysis of the function of analogy in the Pasticciaccio, wherein, by virtue of an excess of simile, Gadda demonstrates “come le parole siano un terreno infido, persino quando si afferma che una cosa è ‘come’ un'altra” (Benedetti, Una trapolla di parole, p. 43). Her stylistic observations carry important implications for a study of duplicity and duality in the Pasticciaccio: “Potrebbe sembrare riduttivo, data l'insolita densità figurale della scrittura gaddiana, insistere ancora sulle similitudini, ma il loro schema di base, di due termini cioè legati da un modalizzatore comparativo (‘come’ e i suoi derivativi) rappresenta un modello analogico privilegiato da Gadda” (p. 41; italics mine). The further characterization of Gadda's “procedimenti stilistici” within the Pasticciaccio as presenting a “double-edged weapon” (“un'arma a doppio taglio,” p. 50; italics mine), is however misleading. Benedetti in fact falls into the very “trap of words” which the novel presents to the reader. Her mistake is to place the Pasticciaccio within a dialectic of representation and irrepresentability, whereas in fact the positing of a duplicitous duality is itself an ontological statement, a “representation,” so to speak, of how reality works. (“Questo vuoto di oggetto”—which, according to Benedetti, constitutes the “content” of the Pasticciaccio—“diviene lo spazio problematico dell'opera, lo spazio entro cui si mouve la rappresentazione senza mai colmarlo” [p. 9; italics mine]).