SOURCE: Roscioni, Gian Carlo. “Gadda as Humorist.” In Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Manuela Bertone and Robert S. Dombroski, pp. 11-24. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Roscioni discusses the relationship of Gadda's humor to that of English author Lawrence Sterne and his disciples.]

In reference to what is, broadly speaking, the ‘macaronic’ matrix of Gadda's literary style, Gianfranco Contini specifies repeatedly that such a label does not allude to a documentable lineage. Folengo and Rabelais, he states, ‘are obviously not Gadda's “sources,” but rather colleagues of high stature [engaged] in a formal practice that could be defined as expressionistic mannerism,’ and he goes on to say that Gadda ‘owes nothing to Dossi and his descendants […]; he belongs naturally to the line of benefactors that includes Folengo, Rabelais and the later Joyce’ (Contini 1989, 82, 86, emphasis mine). In a word, Contini is referring to a typology, rather than a genealogy. For the most part, the lesson implicit in these clarifications has been taken to heart wisely, for no one, as far as I know, has attempted to define and measure Gadda's alleged indebtedness to the writers of the macaronic tradition.

I have underscored Contini's caution in this regard because my study is also based on findings and considerations that are essentially typological in kind. Moving from the premises of Contini's first decisive contribution to Gadda studies, entitled ‘Carlo Emilio Gadda, o del “pastiche”’ (Solaria, 1934), I propose to suggest some possible implications. The result will be that, travelling along paths parallel to those charted by Contini, I will have the chance to encounter writers whom an unmistakable family resemblance permits us to relate to Gadda. I do not assume, however, that any future research into borrowings or specific comparisons can hope to be more promising than what has been unequivocally discouraged by Contini in relation to the macaronic.

A good point from which we can begin to discuss the pastiche in Gadda and other writers is provided in a footnote contained in Marina Fratnick's book L'écriture détournée, which draws our attention to the largely different use of the word ‘pastiche’ in French and Italian criticism (Fratnick 1990, 106n). Once we have distinguished literary texts written ‘à la manière de’ from those composed under the sign of multilingualism, it becomes apparent that only the latter, at least in Italy, have been studied. It is true that Contini has occasionally taken into consideration even the former, as is attested by the inclusion of Edoardo Calandra into his Antologia degli scapigliati piemontesi; but this is a wholly limited case. By contrast, multilingualism has recently been the subject of much discussion, indeed perhaps too much.

Multilingualism is of course a much more interesting phenomenon; but perhaps even literature ‘in the manner of’ deserves some attention: in the first place, because texts that imitate other texts with the prevailing, although not exclusive, intention to parody them are in fact less detached than one thinks from multilingualism (actually they could help us focus on some of multilingualism's more important aspects); secondly, because the comparison between what, to avoid confusion, I shall call pastiches à l'italienne and pastiches à la française, from a didactic standpoint (Gadda would say ‘heuristic’) can be useful as a means of orientation.

The first thing that comes to mind in this regard is that the most famous of Italian novels, I promessi sposi, begins with a pastiche, understood in the sense of ‘in the manner of.’ This did not escape Gadda's attention, for he mentions the introductory pages of I promessi sposi more than once, expressing a judgment that, admittedly, leaves me perplexed. In his opinion, Manzoni shows in the Introduction ‘his fascination … with baroque historiography and oratory’ (SGF I, 1174). Everything leads us to believe the contrary: that, far from being attracted to the baroque, Manzoni intended to mimic a kind of writing which wavers—as we read in Fermo e Lucia—‘between what is at once awkward and affected, crude and pedantic’ (Manzoni 1968, 7). But whatever may have been Manzoni's intentions, two considerations are in order.

The first is stylistic. Manzoni's mimetic powers do not prevent anyone in the least familiar with the vocabulary and rhythm of seventeenth-century prose from noticing the dissonances contained in the first two pages of I promessi sposi. This is not the place for a detailed analysis; let it suffice to say that instances of strained syntax or the use of forms extraneous—because either too ancient or too modern—to the writing practices of the Seicento would discourage any relative expert from attributing unequivocally the passage to a writer of that century. Nor should it surprise us, since anachronisms and minor dissonances are inevitable when facing difficulties of this kind. Moreover, as a result of this, it is difficult to separate neatly the two varieties of pastiche. Actually one could say that in writings à la manière de there is no talent that holds sway, for—except in very short texts—the pasticheur always shows his hand. Put differently, the pastiche à la française tends often to become an unintentional and, most of the time, awkward pastiche à l'italienne. In any case, the objective difference between the two kinds of writing consists more in the author's intentions than in the results achieved.

Yet the scantness of the sample provided does not prevent us from considering Manzoni as an occasional pasticheur (in France, incidentally, there is not one scholar of this kind of literary activity who would refrain from mentioning the name of La Bruyère, author of a much shorter seventeenth-century pastiche). And the unexpected recruitment of such an illustrious writer into the ranks of the pasticheurs obliges us to reconsider the history and the very nature of a genre that many readers are inclined to treat either with diffidence or admiration, depending on one's perspective or the current cultural fashion. It is as if the writers devoted to the pastiche formed a sparse platoon of irregulars, misfits, or Bohemians, positioned next to solid battalions of orthodox, disciplined, and well-groomed troops.

But why is this an opportune moment to re-examine the history of the pastiche, be it either French or Italian? If Manzoni's contribution to the genre is very modest, the same cannot be said of a previous literary experience, also linked to the name of a famous novelist, which is no doubt significant. I am referring to Ugo Foscolo, author of the Viaggio sentimentale di Yorick lungo la Francia e l'Italia, who exhibits himself in a pastiche à la française with the Rabelaisian ‘Fragment’ contained on the sheet of paper with which La Fleur wrapped the butter for Yorick's breakfast. These are pages—Foscolo is intent on having us know—that ‘Yorick did not translate into antiquated English,’ (Foscolo 1951a, 148n) but that Didimo Chierico (that is, Foscolo) capriciously decided to render in an Italian midway between classical and archaic. If the language of Sterne's Sentimental Journey is anything but conventional, Foscolo does not hesitate to implant, here and there, in the English writer's story what at another time he called his imposturette (Foscolo 1951b, VI, 709n1). Nor should it be forgotten that the original translation project—as documented in a letter to Niccolò Bettoni of May 1806 (Foscolo 1952, Epistolario, II, 107)—foresaw the addition of pages to Sterne's text attributed to a certain Cookman: a name, not chosen by chance, which seems to allude, if not exactly to a pastiche, at least to a recipe of complex literary gastronomy.

It is not necessary to dwell here on the well-known fact that the translation itself of Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey is often carried out—either on account of allegiance to the original or by translator's licence—according to the principles, or with the ingredients, of a pastiche à l'italienne—alternating and mixing voices and forms uncommon to contemporary modes of expression.¹ If in the Sesto tomo dell'io Foscolo compared himself to a musical instrument ‘capable of producing all kinds of sounds and made especially for modulation’ (Foscolo 1991, 24), it is because even then he had in mind orchestrations quite similar to Sterne's, a writer whose ‘fantasies’—Didimo Chierico explains—‘erupt altogether, simultaneously discordant and very disquieting, hinting at more than they state, and usurping sentences, words and orthography’ (Foscolo 1951a, V, 40). The latter operation seems to contain embryonically some of the elements of what Gadda will call the ‘spastic use’ of language.²

The linguistic and stylistic characteristics of Foscolo's Viaggio were well known to Gadda who, presenting Eros e Priapo to Alberto Mondadori in 1945, wrote: ‘The text is largely composed in an archaic, sixteenth-century Tuscan prose with various dialectal interpolations (Roman and Lombard). It thus recalls linguistically Balzac's Contes drolatiques or Foscolo's translation of Sterne's Sentimental Journey.’³ However, such a wholly accidental reference is not what puts us on the track of would-be Foscolian imprints in Gadda's writing. My motives for insisting on Foscolo, or, better, on Foscolo's Sternism, are fundamental for other reasons.

A good starting point is the ‘humoral tone’ in which Gadda, writing to Mondadori, says he wants to record images and events. Not so long ago, in a lengthy digression on Gadda's numerous journeys during the 1920s, I mentioned how in the records and letters documenting these travels the author appears often as the protagonist of a ‘sentimental journey,’ a story, I maintained, ‘in which the optic, humor and personality of the observer count more than the things observed’ (Roscioni 1993, 3). But let Gadda himself explain how that kind of narrative takes shape. We read in ‘compositional note’ 33 of the Racconto italiano di ignoto del novecento:

Io vedo, io viaggiatore, che il capo-stazione fa questo e questo. E lo vedo ai miei fini, non ai suoi. E riallaccio il suo muoversi con i miei antecedenti e susseguenti, con i miei interessi, con le mie percezioni, non con le sue. Egli si muove ‘per me,’ nella mia intenzione e non ‘per sé’ e ‘secondo sé.’

(RI [Racconto italiano di ignoto del novecento], 465)

[I, the traveller, see that the station master does this and that; I see him from my own point of view, not from his. I connect his moves to my former and subsequent objectives, to my personal interests, to my insights, not to his. He moves ‘for me’ according to my intentions, not ‘for’ and ‘by’ himself.]

Having discussed several times both the literal and the metaphoric role the journey plays in Gadda's works, and the literary tradition to which it belongs,⁴ I should now like to better define its ‘sentimental’ character. But first we need to correct a mistaken notion. Sterne's title no doubt alludes to the protagonist's troubles of the heart, but perhaps not only to them. Like the word sentimento in classical Italian or sentiment in eighteenth-century French, the then English usage of ‘sentiment’ includes, besides emotional import in the modern and current sense of the word, other experiences and psychological processes. Among the more important meanings listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, we find ‘mental attitude’ and ‘opinion or view.’ Of these meanings ‘opinion’ strikes me as particularly important, because the word appears in another, no less famous, of Sterne's title pages. The complete title of Tristram Shandy is The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The novel is in fact based on one or more characters whose opinions, the title page states, count more than their actions. We are dealing with reasonable thoughts or judgments, shared, unfortunately, by only a few people; but also often with outlandish ideas, fixations, and paradoxical speculation, which, stated and analysed in more or less long digressions, end up forming the very substance of this outstanding story. Everyone remembers the relationship Sterne formulates between the name given to a person at baptism, or the shape of his nose, and his character and destiny.

An analogous eccentric and fastidious habitus of opinion and reflection runs through Gadda's stories. The characters Gadda deploys exclusively to express comic or tragic ideas on the nature of the world or on life and death (Cavaliere Digbens of La Madonna dei Filosofi or the ‘buon Padre Lopez’ of La cognizione del dolore) are in reality few and marginal. Yet, there are numerous protagonists in the novels and stories who air their opinions on disparate events and problems with systematic abundance. I am thinking naturally about those thoughts that stem from the ‘rovello interno’ [internal torment] of Gonzalo Pirobutirro or from some ‘teoretica idea’ [theoretical idea] of Detective Ingravallo ‘sui casi degli uomini: e delle donne’ [on the affairs of men, and of women] (CD [La cognizione del dolore], 607, and QP [Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana], 16). Enumerated quasi-didactically in a series of expositive propositions—‘Sosteneva, fra l'altro’ [He sustained, among other things], ‘Diceva anche’ [He also would say], ‘E poi soleva dire’ [And then he used to say], ‘Voleva significare’ [What he meant was]—Ingravallo's opinions are interspersed with the comments of his listeners who are unanimous in emphasizing their unique character: ‘sostenevano che leggesse dei libri strani’ [they insisted that he read strange books]; ‘Erano questioni un po’ da manicomio: una terminologia da medici dei matti’ [they were slightly crazy problems: his terminology was for doctors in looneybins] (QP, 16-17). But above all I have in mind the reflections and opinions of characters from other stories on themes much more futile or trivial. Some good examples are the problems discussed by the ‘Captain on leave’ relative to the mechanical pianos of travelling musicians or to the flush-mechanisms of the bathroom toilets: ‘Stando alle sue opinioni’ [According to his opinion]; ‘secondo il modo di vedere del capitano Gaddus’ [according to the point of view of Captain Gaddus]; ‘Egli opinava che’ [His opinion was]; ‘Dacché il capitano Gaddus opinava altresì’ [Since Captain Gaddus believed likewise] (CD, 969, 970, 973, 975). It goes without saying that the expression of these theories (sentiments and opinions) is accompanied, both in Gadda and in Sterne, by the often exhilarating description of the strange behaviour they inspire in those individuals who hold them.

Returning to Foscolo, it is unfortunate that Sterne's teachings (like the narrative or stylistic experiments undertaken in directions different from those signalled by Ortis), hold for us an almost solely historical interest. A quick appraisal: some meritorious attempts at different modes of writing, many works left in their initial stages, a good number of interesting projects, but few genuine results. Il sesto tomo dell'io is a title that promised much more than the text actually delivered. The translation of Sentimental Journey itself, in spite of its resonance throughout the nineteenth century, was more enterprising than convincing as a project. It is difficult not to subscribe—with greater indulgence, I hope—to the reservations advanced by Carlo Dossi, a writer hardly biased (at least in principle) against literary operations of this kind.

Yet taking account of the strengths displayed in these ventures, the one success Foscolo achieved was in the creation of Didimo Chierico, the progenitor of the Italian branch of a dynasty of characters whose most fortunate and successful descendants are precisely those opining and theorizing souls we encounter in some of Gadda's works. Portrayed with an eye attentive to British models, Didimo seems to have absorbed from the island fog a melancholic and ironic extravagance, a quaintness of behaviour (more than of speech) which will be handed down to Gonzalo and Captain Gaddus.

He held securely to [Foscolo writes in the Notizia intorno a Didimo Chierico] strange systems; and they seemed to be an integral part of him. From these systems and from the perseverance with which he applied them to his way of life derived a behaviour and system of beliefs that were the subject of laughter … He had no love for cats because they seemed to him more taciturn than other animals; yet he praised them because, like dogs, they profited from society, and, as night owls, from freedom. He regarded panhandlers to be more eloquent than Cicero in perorating and more expert phrenologists than Lavater. He did not believe that anyone who lived next door to a butcher or near the gallows was trustworthy. He believed in prophetic inspiration and actually presumed to know its sources. He blamed a wife's first infidelity on her husband's nightcap, dressing gown, and slippers.

(Foscolo 1951a, V, 177-8)

It should be noted that, notwithstanding ‘the subject of laughter,’ these ‘sentences’ presuppose a disconsolate vision of human life and a radical pessimism in regard to the effectiveness of the means available to confront it: ‘He once said to me that many tortuous paths cross the great valley of life,’ etcetera: ‘Human reason, Didimo used to say, labours with mere abstractions; it begins unwittingly from nothing; and after a lengthy journey we return with open eyes terrified by the nothingness.’ ‘Moreover, it seemed to me that he felt somewhat of a dissonance in the harmony of the world’ (ibid., 177, 179, 185).

In spite of the obvious differences between Didimo (Yorick and Tristram, as well) and Gonzalo or Captain Gaddus, it seems that there is enough in these remarks and attitudes to recognize the family resemblance referred to above. In both cases we have characters who are not only different from the rest of human kind, but, on account of their changeable behaviour and moods, are at times different from themselves. Is there any better way of representing them than in a falsetto mode, through artificially produced tones, beyond the normal range? If an expedient appropriate to this end is writing in a language that doesn't exist (because it is arbitrarily made up of different languages), another no less pertinent means is to attribute to these characters abstruse beliefs regarding the most concrete things, and rigorous theories regarding life's most frivolous accidents. The sentences they pronounce thus affirm the solitary and cantankerous wisdom of someone who does not want to be part of the multitude, while denouncing the bitter, ridiculous experience of an individual who opines and speculates on life and forgets to live.

Furthermore, when the Racconto italiano was published, the attention of many readers, forewarned by the volume's editor, was drawn to the particularly interesting ‘compositional notes’ which constitute a veritable incunabulum of Italian narratology. There have even been attempts to compare these notes to then contemporary, or subsequent, reflections of theoreticians and writers from other countries. If we ask ourselves what made Gadda consider certain questions, we come up with different, but not necessarily contradictory, answers. For example, one could bring up Gadda's experience in civil engineering, for is not the development of a plot in some way a problem of construction theory? It is equally legitimate to suppose that the young writer's theoretical and epistemological propensities led him to delve into what he calls (in the same compositional note) ‘il punto di vista “organizzatore” della realtà complessa’ (RI, 461) [the ‘organizational’ point of view of reality in its entirety].

For a writer like Gadda to discuss so meticulously problems of narrative organization could at first sight seem incongruous. Doesn't he himself propose (in the above-cited letter to Alberto Mondadori) a book in which the reader encounters images and events ‘recorded in a humoral tone’? The fact of the matter is that there is a tight connection between those organizational problems and the author's humours. In the first article published on the Madonna dei Filosofi, Gadda is defined (in its very title) Un umorista [A Humorist] (Linati 1931). Carlo Linati's definition, shared at that time by other reviewers, is just as fitting now. But, regrettably, these critics and Linati himself to a certain degree, speak of humour in the now current usage of the term. We should not forget that up until then, as Linati certainly knew, the word had a fundamentally different meaning. Dossi writes that ‘a humorist, according to the dictionaries, is a person who is fickle and bizarre’ (Dossi 1988, 103, n1759). In other words, the word denoted a person who from time to time fell prey to one of the four humours of Galen: sometimes melancholic, sometimes cheerful, sometimes apathetic, sometimes irascible; also capable of combining in one disposition humours that appear totally incompatible. Dossi states: ‘Bruno's motto “in tristitia hilaris, in hilaritate tristis” could be the motto of humour’ (ibid., 197, n2416).

Gadda has often spoken of his humours. For example, in a letter to Ambrogio Gobbi (25 August 1916), he writes: ‘Cosa vuoi che ti dica di me? Sono sempre il Gaddus, sempre più balogio che mai, sempre più merluzzo, sempre più sconclusionato, svirgolato, sfessato ma sempre più bilioso e pieno d'invettive contro tutti’ (Gadda 1983, 30-1) [What do you want me to say about myself? I'm always Gaddus, always as much of a dullard as ever, always more of a nerd, always more incoherent, miserable, downhearted, but always more irascible and full of invectives against everybody]. However, it is the literary rather than the psychological dimension of humour that interests us here. In this regard, Dossi, who under the influence of Jean Paul had planned to write (but never did) a book devoted entirely to this subject, has made some decisive pronouncements.

Two fundamental presuppositions are clearly stated in the Note azzurre. The first concerns the object of the story: ‘A humorist,’ Dossi writes, ‘describes himself rather than his heroes’; the second is instead technical in kind: with most contemporary writers ‘the concern is purely in the story, while with the humorists, it is in the fabric of the story’ (Dossi 1988, 325, n3210; 213, n2490). From the standpoint of composition, the humorists' favourite theme (autobiography) is one of the most delicate. As scholars of autobiography have attested, speaking about oneself gives rise to various problems, beginning with the decisive question of the relationship between the author of the book and the voice in the story that says ‘I.’ Moreover, writers like Sterne or Gadda portray themselves in ways wholly different from other writers. The autobiography of the humorist is, so to speak, hyperbolic. It is the self-portrait of a person who looks at himself in a circus mirror that makes things look either bigger or smaller than they actually are. Why are the ‘Viaggi di Gulliver, cioè del Gaddus’ titled so? Because Gaddus, just like Gulliver, feels, from the time of the experiences recorded in his Giornale di guerra, much bigger or much smaller than those around him; in any case, very different from them.

The humorist, however, also enjoys looking at himself in such other mirrors as those found, say, in tailor or barber shops, mirrors that multiply his image, at times ad infinitum. ‘The “I” of Tristram Shandy is at once Laurence Sterne and his two creations Tristram Shandy and Parson Yorick; and it is all three simultaneously and turn by turn.’⁵ In Gadda's stories, we witness much less a duplication of the subjects identifiable with whoever says ‘I,’ than processes of superimposition or doubling, often accompanied by strange name games. This happens in La Madonna dei Filosofi, where the story of Gadda's brother Enrico, who was killed in the war, becomes absorbed in the story of a boy called (what a coincidence) Emilio, in which are mixed the traits and experiences of the Gadda brothers. And how about the comparison Gadda institutes in an ‘exemplum’ of the Meditazione milanese between the opposite war behaviour of two soldiers whose names are Carlo and Emilio? (MM [Meditazione milanese], 695-6) The humorous matrix of such an operation is clearly manifest. Did not Carlo Alberto Pisani Dossi assign to Carlo Dossi the task of writing the Vita di Alberto Pisani?

Apart from the game itself, it is useful to recognize in exercises of this kind a need that, already transparent in Sterne and other writers, becomes explicit in Gadda. One of the teachings we find in the compositional notes of the Racconto italiano is that the creation of characters—the first, fundamental act of every narrative—is secondary to the ‘necessità di creazione di una personalità dell'autore’ (RI, 479) [need for the creation of an authorial personality]. We must not confuse this position with the apparently similar one held by the romantics. In Gadda's case, as confirmed by other experiences at that time in literature and theatre, the author's search for himself is, in some way, internal to the work and, thus, ‘ironic’; it contributes to shifting the emphasis from (to use Dossi's formula) the ‘story’ to the ‘fabric of the story.’

The shift is realized by introducing a metalinguistic component, or at least a reflexive, opining dimension, into the narrative, which alters the traditional pre-eminence of the ‘story’ over its accompanying elements. ‘The humorist writer,’ we read in another ‘blue note,’ ‘must render the plot barely interesting, so that the reader in his desire to devour the book does not skip over all those minute and acute observations that constitute humour’ (Dossi 1988, 135, n2174). Although Gadda is hardly inclined to sacrifice plot, he indulges in every kind of ‘observation’ and ‘diversion,’ both in the text and in the footnotes; nor does he refrain from including explanatory notes where one would least expect to find them.

As for his overriding disposition to metacommentary, it does not appear only in the novels and in the ‘compositional notes.’ It suffices to leaf through the Giornale di guerra to find the following consideration, dated 20 September 1918: ‘Credo che il modo migliore per notare queste cose sia il rappresentarle cronologicamente e dal mio punto di vista, da spettatore insomma’ (GGP [Giornale di guerra], 812) [I think the best way of taking note of these things is to represent them chronologically and from my point of view, in sum, as a spectator]. The desperate recluse of Cellelager finds therefore a way of dwelling on the narratological problem par excellence, namely, point of view, and doing so even in writings and circumstances that are the least suitable.

Let us venture a conclusion. Disparate texts and documents seem to prove that a narratological problematic is intrinsic to stories written in the Sternian or humorous vein. Naturally, not all writers are aware of it to the same degree, as not all are interested in discussing the theoretical and technical aspects of composition. In Gadda this interest was so acute that we should not be surprised by the questions and discussions that accompany or recur in his records or fictions. Given the personality of the protagonists and the kind of events narrated, that kind of speculation on the ‘fabric’ of the fable constitutes, in reality, the most natural of complements to the fable itself.

Although writers like Foscolo, Dossi, and Gadda have taken part in the affairs of Italian Sternism, the balance sheet regarding this experience is, on the whole, not a positive one. Reconstructing the history of Sternism, more than seventy years ago, Giovanni Rabizzani called Foscolo ‘the first modern Italian humorist’ (Rabizzani 1920, 107). His assessment is essentially correct. One wonders, however, why Foscolo knew how to give us only a small portrait of Didimo Chierico. Was it perhaps because the forces that urged him to follow different paths got the best of him? Probably yes. Among the good and bad reasons that provoked Gadda's tenacious contempt in Foscolo's regard, there is an issue to which Dossi, without mentioning Foscolo, calls our attention: ‘Humour in Italy’—he writes in another ‘blue note’—‘had much difficulty developing. Glorious family traditions often led the family to ruin. Italy always believed too much in Greece and Rome’ (Dossi 1988, 148, n2269).

I truly believe that if Foscolo did not write his own Tristram Shandy the principal reason was that at that time, in Italy, there was neither a sound and respected tradition in the novel to parody, nor, above all, a reading public capable of understanding Sterne's ironic signals. This does not detract from the fact that even Foscolo's numerous and different pursuits had contributed to the whimsical and episodic character of his humour. The problem interests us to the extent to which Gadda, the Italian writer who has travelled the farthest on the paths created by Swift and Sterne, had to work within a notably unreceptive literary and cultural milieu, tackling problems not always in consonance with the poetics of humour and, at times, actually opposed to it.

In his review of La Madonna dei Filosofi, Linati, having evoked the figure of Dossi (‘this Monseigneur of humour’), makes incidental reference to the so called ‘extravagants’ from the other side of the Channel. Seventy years later, both references, although pertinent, appear inadequate in relation to the phenomenon under examination. When I was writing the piece mentioned above on Gadda's continual changes of residence during the twenties, on the conflicts with his landladies, and on his perpetual search for new places to live, I came across by chance a page in the Viaggio sentimentale di Yorick on the wanderings of Smelfungus. We read in Foscolo's translation:

He left with hypochondria and irascibility, and every object he touched became discoloured and deformed; and he had to narrate an odyssey of disastrous incidents … and that they had skinned him so that he defied Saint Bartholomew and diabolically roasted him alive at every tavern he visited … ‘And I'll tell it,’ Smelfungus used to cry out, ‘I'll tell it to the world.’ ‘Tell it to your doctor,’ I replied, ‘it would be better.’

(Foscolo 1951a, V, 68-9)

This reference to the doctor as the only person capable of understanding the things that pass through the mind of the neurotic traveller will remind Gadda's readers of the episode in La cognizione del dolore in which Gonzalo—quasi-accepting the invitation extended to Smelfungus in the Viaggio sentimentale—decides to entrust to a doctor truths about himself that are suggestive of a malady very similar to Smelfungus's hypochondria and irascibility.

However curious it may seem, this coincidence separates rather than unites the two texts. That which for Sterne is a quip, for Gadda and the culture of his age was a very serious problem. If more than two chapters of the Cognizione are devoted to Gonzalo's visit and conversation with the doctor, it is because the doctor has become Gonzalo's only possible, albeit inadequate, interlocutor. Problems that once fell to the competence of the moralist, if not the theologian, are now the prerogative of science. As a result, Gadda, rather than a ‘sentimental traveller,’ is a ‘minimissimo Zoluzzo di Lombardia’ (AN [Anastomòsi], 243) [miniature Zola from Lombardy] who, besides talking about himself, talks about many other things; and he does so, when the occasion is right, with the spirit, objectivity, and language of science.

It would take too long to disclose all the instances and reasons impelling Gadda to separate himself from Sternian prototypes and their Italian epigones. It cannot be denied, however, that a certain Sternism, however unwitting—Contini would call it natural—constitutes an essential part of his art. If Gadda knows how to handle successfully any subject, it is above all when he talks about himself that his pages are inimitably brilliant. Dossi's receipt for humour, in his case, works exceedingly well.

Let me add that comparing Gadda to other humorists or ‘sentimental’ writers contributes to better verify and justify aspects of his work and poetics which, if considered by themselves, would lose much of their significance. Among these aspects one can actually find unsuspected hierarchies. While Sternism—as attested by the examples of Foscolo and Dossi (as well as other Italian and foreign authors)—seems to involve, or favour, a certain dose of the macaronic or of the pastiche, the opposite does not hold true. Neither the macaronic in itself nor the pastiche have ever been capable of sustaining narrative thematics or, much less, narratological problematics of any kind whatsoever. Might then humour be the catalysis of phenomena regarded up to now as chapters of different stories that, inadvertently, converge in Gadda's work?⁶

Notes

1. To give some idea of the spirit animating Foscolo's literary operation, let us recall what he had written in one of the first drafts of the ‘Notizia intorno a Didimo Chierico’ about two of the alleged translations of the Sentimental Journey: ‘The second [translation] is in a Boccaccesque style with many long verbal transpositions, which is bothersome, but not bad; what is bad in my opinion is the large number of antiquated words that, although not found in Boccaccio, are scattered here and there in writers preceding him. The third [translation] is written so that whoever translates into French doesn't have to change a syllable; moreover, it resembles many contemporary books’ (Foscolo 1951a, V, 229).

2. I have cited various passages written by Gadda on this theme in La disarmonia prestabilita, 17.

3. Letter dated 25 Nov. 1945, cited by Giorgio Pinotti in SGF II, 995.

4. See my review of the new edition of Contini's Antologia degli scapigliati piemontesi, edited by Dante Isella, entitled ‘Gli antichi padri di Joyce e Gadda’ (La Repubblica, 15 Feb. 1992: 3).

5. See John Cowper Powys's introduction to Tristram Shandy (London: Macdonald 1949, 29).

6. A brief postscript. The role I have attributed to Foscolo in this study is not intended to confuse those readers who see in Sterne's Italian translator above all the target of Il guerriero, l'amazzone, lo spirito della poesia nel verso immortale del Foscolo. As I have already remarked, there is more than one Foscolo. His more assiduous readers know that among the ‘Prose originali’ contained in the manuscript ‘Piano di studi’ we find the following title: ‘L'uomo e la verità. Saggio filosofico sotto il nome di Olocsof’ (Foscolo 1951b, VI, 6). Well, if Gadda detested Foscolo, a secret affinity perhaps linked Alì Oco de Madrigal to Olocsof.

References

Contini, Gianfranco. 1989. Quarant'anni di amicizia. Scritti su Carlo Emilio Gadda. Turin: Einaudi

Dossi, Carlo. 1988. Note azzurre. Milan: Adelphi

Foscolo, Ugo. 1951a. Prose varie d'arte (= PV). Vol. V. Edited by Mario Fubini. Florence: Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo

———. 1951b. Scritti letterari e politici dal 1796 al 1808 (= SLP). Vol. VI. Edited by Giovanni Gamberin. Florence: Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo

———. 1952. Epistolario. Vol. II. Edited by Plinio Carli. Florence: Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo

———. 1991. Il sesto tomo dell'io. Vol. V. Edited by Arnaldo Di Benedetto. Turin: Einaudi

Fratnik, Marina. 1990. L'écriture détournée. Essai sur le texte narratif de C. E. Gadda. Turin: Albert Meynier

Gadda, Carlo Emilio. 1983. Lettere agli amici milanesi. Edited by Emma Sassi. Milan: Il Saggiatore

Linati, Carlo. 1931. ‘Un umorista.’ L'Ambrosiano. 9 May

Manzoni, Alessandro. 1968. Fermo e Lucia. In Alberto Chiari and Fausto Ghisalberti, eds, Tutte le opere, Vol. II. Milan: Mondadori

Rabizzani, Giovanni. 1920. Sterne in Italia. Rome: Formiggini

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

———. 1993. ‘Gadda cerca casa.’ La Repubblica, 14 Aug.

Sterne, Laurence. 1949. Tristram Shandy. London: Macdonald