[In the following essay, Lucente develops a complex argument on the nature of self-reflexivity in discussing La cognizione del dolore.]

The relationship between language and other systems of thought and praxis, scientific as well as philosophical ones, occupied Carlo Emilio Gadda's concerns from his early studies on. These studies included the work he did for his laurea in electrical engineering (as well as for his subsequent professional experience first in Italy and then in Argentina) and his readings on the topic of his unfinished thesis for a second laurea, which was to have treated the philosophy of Leibniz. Gadda's interest in systems of order (of predictability and/or closure) and disorder (of uncertainty and/or randomness) was already apparent in the book of philosophical-scientific essays entitled Meditazione milanese (Milanese Meditation), composed in 1928.¹ As Gadda's fiction repeatedly demonstrates, however, when these seemingly logical questions are applied to the actions of human beings, they are inevitably complicated by the all too human aspects of desire, knowledge, and will. Because of such complicating factors, the otherwise logical problems of system and method in Gadda's narratives quickly take on the distinctively Gaddian flavor of aggression, of melancholy, and, just behind these, as though in melancholy's mirror, of terror.

The elements of literary self-consciousness so rife in Gadda's novels serve repeatedly to highlight these affective and logical difficulties, which Gadda perceives as integral parts of the worlds that his works create and describe. In La meccanica (Mechanics), written primarily between 1928 and 1929 but not published until 1970, the most notable aspects of literary self-consciousness are those that will recur in still more marked fashion in his mature fiction, such as the fascination with the incorporation of dialect into literary language, the fairly open intertextual allusions to the Latin and Italian literary tradition (as embodied most notably here by the figures of Caesar, Manzoni, and D'Annunzio), and the intrusively self-identifying authorial commentary and footnotes, all of which serve to emphasize the author's powers and his evasiveness, including his ability to make his appearance in his own works however he pleases, in a manner that makes one think of Hitchcock or Truffaut, or, even more relevantly, of Joyce.

The self-conscious aspects of Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana), published at first in installments in 1946-47 and then in book form in 1957, go considerably further than those of La meccanica. In Gadda's Pasticciaccio, the author's obsession with the lexical and grammatical eccentricities of multiple dialects (predominantly those of Naples, Rome, and the province of Molise) works continually to focus attention on the novel's own heterodox language and on its status as a linguistic artifact. As both earlier and later in Gadda's narrative production, a checkerboard of specifically literary allusions and pastiches recur in the Pasticciaccio; but they take a back seat to the most insistently self-proclaiming literary element of the narrative, its form as a mock giallo, or detective story, in which each new turn in the labyrinthian puzzle openly calls for a new attempt at interpretation both from the narrative's central character (the investigating police officer, Don Ciccio Ingravallo) and from the reader. Indeed, as the narrator comments in chapter 7, the entire book often appears to take on the form of an ongoing referto, or police report, although its account, like Gadda's other works, is destined to remain inconclusive and in certain respects open-ended.

Even though both La meccanica and Quer pasticciaccio are self-reflexive in important ways, by far the most significant of Gadda's three novels in terms of literary self-consciousness was the last to be completed, La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with Grief).² This is the case partly because in La cognizione the question of self-reflexivity is posed in regard to a character who is not only the protagonist but also, within Gadda's story, a writer himself, indeed, the writer of a novel. Like Gadda's other novels, La cognizione del dolore has a complicated publishing history. The bulk of the novel first appeared between 1938 and 1941 in the Florentine literary review Letteratura (the same review that published the installments of the Pasticciaccio in the 1940s). This and subsequent material were then put together and published by Einaudi in 1963. As distinct from Gadda's other novels, however, La cognizione's first publication between two covers was not the final version to appear. In 1969, the novel was brought out by Braziller in an English translation that included two concluding chapters which had been written much earlier but which had never been published. By Gadda's agreement, this material was also added to Einaudi's definitive edition of 1970. Since these two concluding chapters affect both the plot and the themes of the novel in a fundamental way, the 1970 version is in many respects a new novel rather than merely a reissue of an earlier one or a new edition with an unimportant addendum. On account of this new and very different form—and despite the significance of the novel's thematics for the social and political period in which it was first written—I have chosen to consider La cognizione del dolore as a novel completed in 1970, one that, from the historical perspective of its reception, falls after rather than before the neorealism of the postwar years and Lampedusa's revivification of the historical novel in the late 1950s. Among other results, this choice places Gadda's Cognizione closer to the “Gruppo 63,” which acknowledged Gadda as one of their few Italian models, and thus ties Gadda's novelistic production more closely to the interests and practices of the Italian experimental novel of the 1960s.

The version of 1970 does not change La cognizione's setting or the opening parts of its format. The novel is still a linguistically complex pseudo-giallo laden with autobiographical details and set in a fictitious South American country that obviously bears greater similarity to Gadda's Lombardian Brianza than to any existing region or country of Latin America. In the versions prior to 1970, the novel's meandering story line, consisting principally of the oddly ambivalent relationship between mother and son and of the vaguely threatening relation between the night watchmen's organizations overseen by the state (reminiscent at least in its social and official attributes, of Italian Fascism) and the Pirobutirro family as homeowners, has no particular ending. In the early editions, rather than reaching any sort of conclusion the novel simply wanders off, as though the form of its own discourse were indeed as haphazard and “loquacious” as is, in the narrator's words, life itself (7; 5).

In the 1970 version the novel is still open-ended, but it is no longer totally inconclusive. With the addition of the mother's terrifyingly violent murder, revealed in what is now the last chapter, the possibilities for interpretation of the plot (i.e., who killed her and why) are at least set forth, if not decided. As in La meccanica and, mutatis mutandis, in Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, the novelistic technique of delayed exposition does eventually lead to a revelation of sorts, however uncertain and tenuous the project of interpretation may remain. This second of the two chapters included in 1970 has received a great deal of critical commentary—no doubt because of the crucial information it adds to the novel's plot as well as the violence that this information reveals. This has not been so, however, for the first of the two added chapters. This lack of critical attention is especially pertinent in the present context because of our focus on literary self-consciousness: in the first of these two appended chapters the son, Gonzalo, is said to be at work on a novel. To see just why this revelation is essential to the novel's thematic complexity, however, it is necessary first to retrace the major yet far from unambiguous path that language and writing have followed throughout the narrative as a whole.

The first striking passage in this regard occurs in chapter 3, more or less midway through the first of the novel's two main parts.³ Gonzalo is in the process of telling Doctor Higueróa that his reclusive mother has a repugnance not only for doctors but for any medical attention whatever when, out of the blue, Gonzalo erupts in what the doctor finds an incomprehensible condemnation of the first-person pronoun:

“Bel modo di curarsi! … a dire: io non ho nulla. Io non ho mai avuto bisogno di nessuno! … io, più i dottori stanno alla larga, e meglio mi sento. … Io mi riguardo da me, che son sicura di non sbagliare. … Io, io, io!”

E di nuovo si lasciava prendere da un'idea, e levò la voce, rabbiosamente: “Ah! il mondo delle idee! che bel mondo! … ah! l'io, io … tra i mandorli in fiore … poi tra le pere, e le Battistine, e il José! … l'io, io!. … Il più lurido di tutti i pronomi!. …”

(123)

“A fine way to take care of yourself! … to say: ‘there's nothing wrong with me. I've never needed anyone!. … The farther away the doctors stay from me, the better I feel. … I can take care of myself, that way I'm sure not to make mistakes’. … I, I, I!”

And again he allowed himself to be seized by an idea, and he raised his voice, angrily: “Ah! the world of ideas! What a fine world!. … Ah! the I, I … among the almond blossoms … then among the pears, and the Battistinas, and José!. … The I, I. … The foulest of all pronouns!”

(86)

When the doctor gives voice to his amazement at his patient's outburst (“Quando uno pensa un qualchecosa deve pur dire: io penso”; “When a person thinks something or other, he still has to say: ‘I think’”) Gonzalo responds first by mixing Descartes together with Hamlet, in a typically Gaddian pastiche, and then by extending his condemnation to include all personal pronouns:

“… I think; già: but I'm ill of thinking …” mormorò il figlio. “… I pronomi! Sono i pidocchi del pensiero. Quando il pensiero ha i pidocchi, si gratta, come tutti quelli che hanno i pidocchi … e nelle unghie, allora … ci ritrova i pronomi: i pronomi di persona. …”

“ … ‘I think,’ true: ‘but I'm ill of thinking’ …” the son murmured. “… Pronouns! They're the lice of thought. When a thought has lice it scratches, like everyone who has lice … and in the fingernails, then … you find pronouns, the personal pronouns.”

Gonzalo's rage derives in part from what he perceives as his mother's claims of self-sufficiency, her asserted lack of need for anyone else, including him. Of course, the son's own narcissism is offended by his mother's exclusion of him, since, from Gonzalo's point of view, everyone should need him—even though, if that were the case, if someone actually did require his active attention, he would doubtless refuse such an advance because of the other side of his self-absorption: narcissistic withdrawal. More than anything, Gonzalo wants the right of first refusal, which on his part will predictably lead to his rejection of every offer; and this psychological ambivalence and confusion on the part of the focus character accounts for a good deal of the confusion and uncertainty in the narrative itself.

Despite this apparent hegemony of the “io,” with which all relations seem to begin and end, its status is precisely what Gonzalo insists on calling into question. As is regularly the case, Gonzalo casts his recrimination in seemingly abstruse terms, in this instance in the terminology of linguistics—which is one of the reasons why the doctor finds his comments so difficult to comprehend. But any reader of Gadda will be quick to apprehend that the import of the son's bitter remark moves well beyond language itself to the other systems of logic and social relations on which language depends and for which, in Gadda's narratives, it often serves as a model. According to Gonzalo, the impersonality of thought gives way to the individual identity of the thinker in the form of the pronouns which name that identity, but the system of relations between individuals, thoughts, and pronouns is itself far from stable. The “io” is the shiftiest and the most offensive of all pronouns because, while supposedly representing the fixity of subjective identity, it in fact only accomplishes such identification through systematic isolation of the subject, that is, through exclusionary violence and through the unwarranted assertion of unified sameness at the expense of difference. This distortion is possible only because the “io” appears to remain the same even though it names different people and different versions of the same person over time. Gonzalo claims, moreover, that this representational lie extends to all the personal pronouns, and in the following paragraphs he concentrates on the “io/tu,” or “I/thou,” relationship (124-25; 87-89).

This extension of Gonzalo's otherwise Pirandellian considerations of the status of pronouns well past questions of epistemology to social relations, when coupled with the speaker's anguish, suggests that something more important than the abstract logic of various systems is at stake here. Indeed, what Gonzalo is really objecting to becomes apparent as his ramblings—seemingly disjointed and diffusive but, for all that, aiming toward a specific end—culminate in the chapter's concluding lines. After proceeding with his condemnation of the “io” that breaks up the continuity of being and the impersonal unity of ideas, Gonzalo finally gets around to the “io” that he dislikes most: that of the controlling authority of society, here the state, which would oversee his possessions and control him through taxes and levies. Both the doctor and the peon (who for the moment does not understand that Gonzalo's wrath is directed also at him) remain silent as Gonzalo explicitly criticizes the “io” of all the “altri,” or others, of society. At the same time, Gadda, through his character's excesses, implicitly puts in doubt the health of Gonzalo's own bourgeois “io,” with its fetishistic attachment to its possessions:

“Io, io, io!. … Ma lo caccerò di casa! Col pacco de' suoi diritti legato alla coda … fuori, fuori!”. …

“Il muro è gobbo, lo vedo … ma il suo segno, il suo significato rimane, e agli onesti gli deve valere. … Dacchè attesta il possesso: il sacrosanto privato privatissimo mio, mio! … che è possesso delle mie unghie, dieci unghie, delle mie giuste e vere dieci unghie!”. …

“… Dentro, io, nella mia casa, con mia madre: e tutti i José e le Battistine e le Pe … le Beppe, tutti. … Via, via! fuori … fuori tutti! Questa è, e deve essere, la mia casa … nel mio silenzio … la mia povera casa. …”

(127)

“I, I, I!. … But I'll drive him out of the house! With his packet of rights tied to his tail … out, out! …”

“The wall is humpbacked, I see it … but its sign, its meaning, remains, and for everyone honest it should retain its value. … For it attests to possession: the sacrosanct private, most private mine, mine! … which is the possession of my fingernails, ten nails, of my right and true ten nails!”. …

“… Inside, I, in my house, with my mother: and all the Josés and the Battistinas and the Pep … the Beppas, all. … Away, away! out … out with all of them! This is, and must be, my house … in my silence … my poor house.”

(90-91)

As “io” progresses to “mio,” “I” to “mine,” the train of Gonzalo's thought becomes somewhat clearer. By first putting in doubt the status of the individual subject in regard to his mother, Gonzalo merely begins the loop that will end not with questioning but instead with his affirmation of his own individual unity amidst the endless hordes of “others.” That this affirmation occurs only as a reaction to the threat of others' encroachment on his possessions and his house (here in the obvious Freudian association of the house with the mother), merely reaffirms the precariousness of Gonzalo's forced perception of personal stability and integrity. This integrity is especially precarious, moreover, when it is seen not so much in personal as in social terms, in the relation between the world of Gonzalo's property and the world outside.

This odd mixture of openness and closure, impersonality and individualization, identity and differentiation, had already been present, however subtly, in Gonzalo's initial condemnation of the “io,” the “foulest” of all pronouns, and in his description of pronouns as the “lice” of thought caught in one's fingernails. But the social as well as logical and psychological aspects of Gonzalo's reasoning (if it may be termed that) are apparent only in the image's reprise, when he speaks in anguish of the “possesso delle mie unghie, dieci unghie, delle mie giuste e vere dieci unghie” (“possession of my fingernails, ten nails, of my right and true ten nails!”). As we noted earlier in terms of the two attitudes of Narcissus, one the megalomaniacal feeling that the world only mirrors the self, the other that the self only exists in withdrawal from the world and in total self-absorption, Gonzalo again espouses a system of personal and social relations that is at once, and in seemingly contradictory ways, open and closed, never ending and perfectly complete.

In this scene, these thematics of openness, closure, and melancholy are connected with the act of writing through a secondary reference, one made in passing to the early years of Gonzalo's lifelong occupation and writing, when his father's extravagance in building the familial villa with its ostentatious belfry meant that there were not sufficient funds to heat the house, with the result that Gonzalo's fingers, covered with chilblains, were too cold to hold the pen for his studies (all of which Gonzalo recollects under the rubric of “castighi,” or punishment, 125; 88). At this point in the novel, therefore, the self-reflexive aspects of the text remain principally focused, first, on language as a system rather than on writing or narrative as such and, second, on the relations between language and the unity, or disunity, of the individual subject.

This cluster of linguistic and psychological interests, along with the often discussed “unfinished” nature of Gadda's works (especially in evidence prior to the 1970 editions of La cognizione), explains the admiration that many of the members of the trenchantly avant-garde Gruppo 63 had for Gadda as a novelist. The fascination with language and with the rapport between language, meaning, and society is apparent both in the theoretical essays and in the experimental novels of such Gruppo 63 writers as Edoardo Sanguineti, Nanni Balestrini, Angelo Guglielmi, and Giorgio Manganelli. Though their highly self-conscious fictions did not immediately demonstrate any convincingly successful line in regard to these topics in literary practice (partly, to be sure, because of the extraordinary literary and political diversity of the group's members), their widely publicized meetings and discussions following their first gathering in Palermo in 1963 did place these topics at the forefront of Italian critical discussion. Before reviewing where these issues lead within Gadda's narrative, however, we should return briefly to the psychological aspects of the relation between mother and son, which is central to the novel's eventual denouement, and to those of Gonzalo's other familial relations.

Gonzalo's rage, which is one of the major symptoms of the inexplicable disease that the doctor hopes to treat, is abundantly apparent in his relationship with his mother. She often seems to be the object of his outbursts, whether she deserves such treatment or not. Indeed, the scene just discussed opens with a mild rebuke from the doctor on this very point. Gonzalo was upset by the taxes levied on the estate, the responsibility for which he and his mother inherited at his father's death, and he had ended up yelling at her, even though he claims he did not mean to do so: “Ma intanto ha gridato … e ha gridato con lei!” (122; “But still you shouted … and you shouted at her!” 85). There are, of course, two other family figures, both absent, who are also objects of Gonzalo's wrath and/or his remorse: his father and his brother. The parallels with the situations of Coriolanus (mentioned in the text), Oedipus, and Christ are important here;⁴ but, given the added ingredient of the absent brother, the most pressing and most instructive similarity in Gadda's novel is the autobiographical one between Gonzalo and Gadda himself.⁵

Gonzalo's anger at his spendthrift father can be viewed in practical and in symbolic terms. As a child, Gonzalo felt he suffered deprivation because of his father's excessive expenditures on the villa, and he continues to suffer because of the state's imposition of taxes on the property, taxes that the son claims he is ill-prepared to pay. In symbolic terms, matters are somewhat less straightforward. As the figure of the arbitrariness of authority, the father ends up being collapsed with the state in a way that, had the father lived, would have seemed odd at best in real life, since the father, too, would have been subject to the state's powers. The father's absence facilitates this symbolic conflation of the forces of authority, but it also makes Gonzalo's relation to his nemesis all that much more difficult, since, in practical terms, Gonzalo finds himself doing battle against a figure whom he literally cannot defeat. Nonetheless, a victory of sorts is possible, albeit a tenuous and uncertain one. For the bell tower—which is at once the image of phallic authority and expression and the agency of Gonzalo's own expressive undoing (since, because of it, he could not even hold his pen)—Gonzalo has a present remedy: expression through writing. This does not mean that Gonzalo necessarily has the last laugh, since he must constantly renew this expressive activity if his victory, however partial, is not to be overturned by the lasting force of the state and the continuing burden of the taxes on the villa. In both a practical and a symbolic sense, therefore, time itself is what makes Gonzalo's victory possible while also making it only that: time, by means of its creation of an absolute past as well as its continuous progression furnishes the condition that makes the game potentially winnable even while making it unending and therefore winnable only in potentia.

The relationship between Gonzalo and his brother is even less clear than that between father and son. All that is evident—here as in Gadda's own life—is that the death of the brother has caused a continuing sense of loss in the closest survivors. At the end of the narrative, just before the revelation of the horrible attack on the mother, Gonzalo's bed is found unslept in and his worktable bare except for an open book and a photograph, of his brother, untouched by time, still smiling “dopo tant'anni!” (263; “after so many years!” 231). So even though the connections between Gonzalo's writing, his feelings for his brother and father, the passage of time, and his rage are less clear than the mechanics of his relation with his mother, which is the rapport foregrounded in the latter sections of the narrative, it is nevertheless important to see that these background relations are implicated in Gonzalo's own psychological makeup and in his current day-to-day relations with others.

It is not difficult to see what the major components of that makeup are.⁶ Its outward signs are evident in both the form and the content of Gonzalo's discourse: in the obsessive self-reference, jealousy, and paranoia of the narcissist; in the free-floating anxiety that attaches first to one object and then to another without ever permitting a satisfactory, stable object relation (or an extrafamilial relation of any sort, since even though Gonzalo claims to have willfully renounced marriage in favor of freedom, it is obvious that his freedom to exercise his will, to love and work on his own in the world, is not so much the point as is the character disorder that impedes him from engaging in any meaningful worldly endeavor outside the home); and, finally, in the rage that incites his often belligerent logorrhea and that, on occasion, manifests itself not only in his words but also in his threatened deeds (such as in his openly hostile treatment of his father's portrait [96-97, 186; 59-60, 153]; in his menacing eruption at his mother even as he seems to realize that he should have identified himself—“sono io”; “it's I”—and asked her pardon [247; 214]; and in his outrageously high-handed treatment of the peon [205-12; 172-79]).

What could possibly be the cause of such bizarre symptoms? This is, of course, the one question that Gadda's text elicits but refuses to answer. We can nonetheless hazard an approach toward the internal reasons for this psychic mechanism (as distinct from its external constellation of symptoms) by reconsidering the problems of the narcissistic character disorder and of grief. In a well-known essay, Freud pointed out that whereas mourning generally has a defined series of stages (from the initial reaction to the loss of the beloved, to working through the ambivalent memories and feelings attached to the lost object, and then to eventual recovery), melancholia, as a prolonged facet of the personality, does not necessarily have either a clearly established external origin or a definite course of development.⁷ While mourning involves the loss of the object and subsequent ambivalence, melancholia adds to these a third factor, what Freud terms the regression of libido into the ego, which, in a violent confusion of identity and difference, then takes the other as the self by internalizing the ambivalence toward the lost object—in the keys of both love and hatred—thus perpetuating the struggle around the object within the subject. This struggle—now an internal one—is a battle over which the subject has no immediate control, and its one possible resolution is for the internally cathected libidinal energy to become free again, the results of which, however, are continual rounds of mania and/or the re-deflection of the libido into (now libidinally reinforced) narcissism. For Freud, this continuing conflict, inherent in the mechanism of melancholia, acts like a painful internal wound, one that cannot be easily healed since it cannot be directly reached.

It is essential to see that Gonzalo's familial attachments to his father and brother, whether understood in the mode of rage or of lament, are so significant in the novel precisely because they are so vaguely defined. Gadda portrays the effects while leaving the causes to be divined by the reader. In the end, the symbolic presentation of these familial relations confirms Gonzalo's personality and his difficulties as a narcissist in a way that is perhaps less obvious than is done through his relation with his mother but that, for all its indirection, is no less powerful. Indeed, as post-Freudian studies of narcissistic character disorders have shown, the next step in the deepening of such disorders often leads to antisocial personality structures, which add, to the phenomenon of extreme narcissism, severe superego pathology.⁸ So even though in practical terms Gonzalo is not the likeliest perpetrator of the awful crime revealed at the novel's conclusion, the violent expression of his seemingly inexplicable rage could, by symbolic extension of Gonzalo's menacing comments and of what the reader already knows about him, turn him into one of the possible suspects for that role.⁹

As is evident over the course of the narrative, and as we have seen earlier from another perspective, the vagueness and uncertainty of Gonzalo's familial development is most precisely focused in the primary textual relationship, that between Gonzalo and his mother. Again, the ambiguity of attachment and withdrawal is an aspect of each character's reaction to the other. In the later parts of the novel, the dialectic of openness and closure within each character's personality and between them is set against the backdrop of the father's house, with its emptiness and its Freudian game of exclusion (involving the mother's primal horror vacui [180; 146]; the “marriage bed” [265; 234]; and even allusion to the Dioscuri, of which only one now survives [181; 148]). But the imagery and the thematics of the later parts of the novel remain murky. All that can be stated with certainty is that the “male oscuro” (“obscure illness”) of the earlier sections of the novel is ever-present here, too, with its thematics of order and disorder, identity and difference, reason and uncertainty, system and randomness, and its constant miasma of seemingly necessary yet also inexplicable grief.

These thematics come together in a particularly pointed way in the scene in which Gonzalo is revealed to be at work on a novel, as though writing and representation were of special cogency in understanding what La cognizione del dolore is all about. The discussion of Gonzalo's activity as a novelist is preceded in the first of the two added chapters by a series of allusions to, and/or jokes on, Plato, Manzoni, and Carducci, as well as by various references to Gonzalo's studies. At the same time, it picks up the thread of literary discussion and reference that runs throughout the novel (including, from the very first pages, autobiographical self-reference: “uno scrittore arzigogolato e barocco, come Jean Paul, o Carlo Gozzi, o Carlo Dossi, o un qualche altro Carlo anche peggio di questi due, già così grami loro soli,” 52; “a labyrinthine and baroque writer, like Jean Paul, or Carlo Gozzi, or Carlo Dossi, or some other Carlo even worse than these two, already so sorry in themselves,” 13). It is clear from the first part of the novel—in which the Pirobutirro family is described as “tutta gente di penna” (101; “all people of the pen,” 63), and in which, shortly afterwards, the doctor cautions Gonzalo against his habitual reading and, worse, against writing his “memoirs,” and prescribes instead what the doctor considers healthful fresh-air activity—that Gonzalo is not only studious but also an author of sorts, one of the narrative's “letteratàzzi” (157; “litterateurs,” 122). But only in the added material of the concluding sections does the narrator expand on Gonzalo's writerly occupation:

Gli piaceva talora di fantasticare: e si lasciava fare come una carezza, da chi? da chi? se non dalla vana luce d'un pensiero, labile come raggio d'autunno.

Immaginava che qualche sodalizio gli avrebbe regalato un piccolo orologio, da polso, visto che nessuna donna ci aveva pensato, mai: nessuna donna? la mamma, la povera mamma. Fantasticava che la patria maradagalese lo incuorasse a perfezionare quel suo scarabocchio di romanzo:

e te molesta incita
di poner fine al Giorno
per cui, cercato, a lo stranier ti addita.

Ma sapeva benissimo che se ne fregavano tutti, nel modo più completo, e che il romanzo, legato a dei personaggi veri e a un ambiente vero, era stupido quanto i personaggi e l'ambiente. Stai fino! C'era altro da fare e a cui pensare, nel Maradagàl e in tutto il Sudamerica a quei lumi di luna. E soprattutto era certo, o quasi, di doversi considerare un deficiente.

Un romanzo! Con dei personaggi femmine! Con quel po' po' di pratica che Cristo gli aveva fatto fare, tanto non intorpidisse, della psiche umana! Della psiche! E anche della sua stessa.

(238-39)

He enjoyed daydreaming at times: and he allowed himself to receive a kind of caress, from whom? from whom? if not from the vain light of a thought, ephemeral as the ray of autumn's sun.

He imagined that some society would present him with a little watch, a wristwatch, since no woman had ever thought of it, ever: no woman? Mama, poor Mama. He daydreamed that the Maradagalese fatherland would encourage him to perfect his scrawl of a novel:

and, vexatious [the fatherland] urges you
to complete The Day
for which, sought after, you are pointed out to the foreigner.

But he knew very well that none of them gave a damn at all, and that the novel, bound to real characters and a real environment, was as stupid as those characters and that environment were. Fat chance! There were other things to do and to think of, in Maradagàl and in all of South America in times like these. And above all he was sure, or almost, that he was to be considered a fool.

A novel! With female characters! With all that experience that Christ had made him have, so he wouldn't become dull, experience of the human psyche! The psyche! And also of his own.

(206-7)

In terms of the thematics of openness and closure that we have considered so far, the most noteworthy aspect of this passage is Gonzalo's concern for the limitations inherent in novelistic representation. Before Gonzalo's thoughts lead him to such considerations, however, he first notes the pleasure of indulging himself in fantasy and in the “vain light” of thought, an image that foreshadows the vain and sorrowful decadence of the poem appended at the novel's conclusion, entitled “Autunno,” or “Autumn.” Gonzalo then imagines the honorary gift to be conferred upon him, one that fulfills the obligation of recognition as no woman had ever done, with the possible exception of his mother. The novel on which Gonzalo is working, the narrative that would be the true object of the award, is then alluded to by means of a verse from Parini's (uncompleted) satirical poem, Il giorno; and this last step finally takes Gonzalo's meandering thoughts up to his consideration of representational limits.

What, in Gonzalo's opinion as expressed here, is the problem with novelistic representation? In brief, since novels are tied to real characters and a real environment—which is to say to the literary depiction of characters in relation to others and to their physical surroundings—the literary product is bound to be as limited, or as “stupid,” as those characters and that environment. In aesthetic terms, the problem that Gonzalo outlines has to do with the nature and value of meaning in representational fiction. According to these reflections, the meaning of any narrative can only be as significant as the subject matter that it seeks to re-create. Gonzalo's despair at what he takes to be the uselessness of fiction in the real world spurs him not only to castigate the endeavors of fiction-writing in a country and in a period in which there were many more important things to do, but also to deprecate himself as a writer, which is to say, in this context, as a fool (“un deficiente”). This passage seems fairly straight-forward, especially by comparison to the halting, self-contradictory nature of so much of Gonzalo's reflections; but the instructive addition of the qualification “o quasi” (“or almost”) again underscores the characteristic uncertainty of Gonzalo's thoughts. This sentence leads, moreover, to the character's expression of his deep-rooted ambivalence about his literary project, which was to include not only female characters but also his experience of the human psyche in general and of his own mind in particular.

As is so often the case in Gadda's novel, what seems here to begin in celebration leads to denigration and ends—though, as we shall see, the term “end” is appropriate only by half—in ambivalence and confusion. Fantasy and the pleasures of thought seem at first to be good, that is, as long as they are unrestricted, abstract, as ephemeral as daydreams. Once imagination is channeled into expression through the rigors of writing, and, worse, submitted to the limitations of specifically novelistic discourse, its value is diminished not only for Gonzalo but also, in his opinion, for his entire potential audience. As creative randomness hardens into fixed system—much like the abstract thought that is described as becoming infested with the “lice” of pronouns in Gonzalo's earlier diatribe—fantasy's worldly import and its intellectual significance necessarily become limited. This position is consistent, more or less, with Gadda's comments throughout the Meditazione milanese and with several of his most marked narrative interests and procedures in La cognizione: first, in the repeated play on the oddities and the veracity of literary representation in his own works and particularly in the locus classicus of Carducci's “Canzone di Legnano”; second, in the text's various jokes on language as system and limitation (242, n. 1, et passim; 210, n. 54, et passim); and third, in Gadda's constant questioning of the integrity of the individual subject in terms of both understanding and will.¹⁰

Despite such indications, however, Gadda's text is not a brief for randomness as opposed to determinism, freedom as opposed to restriction, openness as opposed to closure, or for either side of any similar opposition. This is the case because, in Gadda's work, the two sides of such oppositions can never be satisfactorily split. Both parts remain mixed together, and both remain in force. Just as surely as attempts at systematic rigidity lead to exclusion and diminution of value, randomness and uncertainty lead to anguish and, beyond that, when reincorporated into rigidity, to terror. It is neither fixity nor uncertainty by itself that gives rise to the “male oscuro” with which Gonzalo's will and his whole being are afflicted but rather the perception of chaos in relation to order. As Gonzalo seems to believe near the conclusion of the earlier version of the novel, a few pages before his excursus on novel-writing, “nulla accade senza ragione” (214; “nothing happens without a reason,” 181). But this does not mean that the reason can be divined or understood amid the real mixture of order and disorder that constitutes the world. The perception that this mixture is finally incomprehensible results, for the narcissistic subject of La cognizione del dolore, in the vertigo that is constantly renewed by his perception of the world itself. Oddly enough, though again understandably so within the framework of narcissism, this vertiginous reaction seems at once the result of the perception of chaos and the cause of chaos. In short, the “invisible” illness is itself the moving force of the grief that is so painful because, as we have seen, it is now untouchable, both prior and omnipresent. In this respect, it is akin to Gonzalo's perception of the awful notes hovering in their system of “clauses” over the human-fashioned world of man and that of nature—and over the profound, unknowable abstraction of time and space as he looks across his property just after his ambivalent reflections on his novel of the human psyche—“come la cognizione del dolore” (240; “like the knowledge of grief,” 208).¹¹

Is there a version of material life that would provide an escape from this impasse? How could one create a universe in which everything was open yet at the same time closed, random yet ordered, free yet at the same time logical, understandable, reasonable and comfortable? This is the cul de sac of narcissism: the longing for a world in which one perceives the disordered existence of others, of “gli altri” to which Gonzalo constantly alludes, only in relation to the stability of the self, as the Platonic image of specular reflection in the pupils of others near the end of Part Two suggests.¹² But neither the impasse nor the longing to escape it has any worldly egress, and this for a basic reason, apparent in one of the elements of Gonzalo's reflections that we have not yet considered, his obsession with time. Gonzalo's ruminations on the temporal advancement of human generations and on the passage of time occupy a central position in his excursus on novels cited above; and his typically ambivalent invocations/imprecations of time (“Gli anni!”; “The years!”) resound like a leitmotif throughout the narrative, especially in its middle and later sections. But the point at which time, and the movement of human life through time's open yet closed system, is of most urgent significance occurs in the second of the two appended chapters, during the description of the mother's hideously battered body.

The discovery and depiction of the body is the high point of the chapter, indeed the climactic moment toward which the novel's plot now seems, in retrospect, to have been slowly building all along. The discovery scene resembles that of the murder in Quer pasticciaccio brutto in certain effects of description and attitude (though in Quer pasticciaccio the murder comes near the beginning rather than at the conclusion); and it recalls, in its temporal notations, both the horror that death, as the end of one aspect of time, evokes in Don Ciccio and the overall aura of sorrow that is regularly associated with the detective's perception of time throughout the novel. In the narration of La cognizione's concluding chapter, moreover, the temporal progression of the narrative itself is underscored by the striking alteration in narrative pacing, rhythm, and focus. The combination of these effects serves to reemphasize the specifically narrative (rather than merely linguistic) self-consciousness that has been part of the story since Gonzalo's excursus on fictional representation.

When the concluding chapter opens, Gonzalo and his mother are absent from the scene, and the focus has suddenly shifted to the pair of cousins who work as night guards for a neighboring property owner. After a brief introduction to the guards, the narrative relates the guards' approach toward the Pirobutirro villa and then, following the general alarm, the approach of the larger group within the house toward the mother's bedroom, all of which is described in lucid, streamlined prose. Gone are Gonzalo's meanderings, his labyrinthian psychological conflicts, his oddly deflected statement of his concern for his studies and his books, and his mother's assertions and protestations. In these pages, the narrative proceeds as though it were in fact a giallo, one that was at last getting to the point. It is true that what the guards eventually find does not solve any of the narrative's dilemmas, but in the shock of the revelation, it does provide the narrative's apex, the various aspects of which are repeated almost immediately in the description of the communal reaction at what is gradually disclosed by the doctor's semiritual cleansing of the body:

Per detergere, ci vollero pazienza e tempo, al dottore, mentre i presenti inorridivano. … L'emorragia aveva imbrattato il capo, il viso, le labbra, il coagulo si era aggrumato e stagnato ne' capelli, nell'orecchio destro, sulla faccia, sotto il naso: anche dal naso era venuto molto sangue: il lembo del lenzuolo, il cuscino, ne erano atrocemente arrossati.

Si comprese da tutti, al riscontrare delle tracce di sangue sullo spigolo del tavolino da notte, verso il letto, che il capo così ferito doveva avervi battuto violentemente; forse qualcuno doveva averla afferrata a due mani, pel collo, e averle sbattuto il capo contro lo spigolo del tavolino da notte, per terrorizzarla, o deliberato ad ucciderla. Terribile fu e permaneva a tutti l'aspetto di quel volto ingiuriato, ch'essi conoscevano così nobile e buono pur nel disfacimento della vecchiezza.

Ora tumefatto, ferito. Inturpito da una cagione malvagia operante nella assurdità della notte; e complice la fiducia o la bontà stessa della signora. Questa catena di cause riconduceva il sistema dolce e alto della vita all'orrore dei sistemi subordinati, natura, sangue, materia: solitudine di visceri e di volti senza pensiero. Abbandono. …

Nella stanchezza senza soccorso in cui il povero volto si dovette raccogliere tumefatto, come in un estremo ricupero della sua dignità, parve a tutti di leggere la parola terribile della morte e la sovrana coscienza della impossibilità di dire: Io.

(268-69)

To cleanse required patience and time, of the doctor, while the onlookers were horrified. … The hemorrhaging had bloodied the head, the face, the lips; the coagulation had clotted and stagnated in the hair, in the right ear, on the face, below the nose; also from the nose had come a great deal of blood: the edge of the sheet, the pillow, were atrociously red with it.

It was understood by all, at seeing the traces of blood on the edge of the night table, toward the bed, that the wounded head must have struck against it violently; perhaps someone had gripped her with both hands, by the neck, and slammed her head against the edge of the table, to terrify her, or with intent to kill her. For all, the sight of that outraged face was terrible and so remained, when they had known it noble and good even in the decay of old age.

Now swollen, wounded. Debased by a wicked cause operating in the absurdity of the night; with the Señora's trust and her very goodness as accomplices. This chain of causes led the sweet and lofty system of life back to the horror of the subordinate systems, nature, blood, matter: solitude of viscera and of faces without thought. Abandonment. …

In the unaided weariness where the poor countenance had to collect itself, swollen, as if in an extreme recovery of its dignity, it seemed to all that they could read the terrible word of death and the supreme awareness of the impossibility of saying: I.

(236-37)

The “chain of causes” that contaminate the “lofty system of life” with the baser, literally “thoughtless” systems of “nature, blood, matter” results in the same end—though with a specially violent and horrible twist—that all systems involving individual humans necessarily reach sooner or later, depending on the eccentricities of desire and will and the worldly motions of chance: “decay” and death. For the individual, death is an end. For all others, however, it is only an end point, since life goes on. The continuation of life in terms of the audience is given by Gadda's text, moreover, in the layered elements of a metaphor that is both linguistic and literary: the viewers “read” the “terrible word of death” and, at the same time, the end of the other's expressive subjectivity, the impossibility of her saying “I.”

The seemingly unnatural horror of the scene, which even ritual is inadequate to cancel completely, is thus transmitted to the bedside audience in the natural and human terms of the ending of individual subjectivity amidst the communal perception of death. The abstract, apparently logical system of pronouns leads, as in the anguish underlying Gonzalo's earlier deprecations, to complex, unsystematic questions of subjectivity and perception. That these perceptions in fact stimulate the re-creative imagination and the interpretive faculties of the onlookers (expressed in the strangely impersonal but not depersonalized, because communal, form “Si comprese da tutti”; “It was understood by all”) only underscores the complexities of all perception and all descriptive systems. Such systems, of course, include the novel's own organization as a giallo with a striking conclusion but with no definite indication of the crime's perpetrator, a necessary element in the normal interpretative closure of the genre. In the end, just as Gadda's novel is finished without closure, so the system of the doctor's art is capable of working against the horror of the absurdity of incomprehensible and therefore terrifying violence only in part, since nothing in this world is absolute; all is contingent, uncertain, incomplete, including, as the narrator suggests in the very next sentence (the first in the final paragraph), art itself: “L'ausilio dell'arte medica, lenimento, pezzuole, dissimulò in parte l'orrore” (my italics; “The help of medical art, soothing, bandages, dissimulated in part the horror,” my italics).

When systems come in contact with human beings, no system is perfect—not time, not language, not writing, not even art. Reasons and relations among causes and effects necessarily exist, but no one can know them all. They remain, as Don Ciccio knows, inevitably multiple, contingent. If, as Heidegger saw, the perception of time's finality, of death, turns human beings back on themselves and so back into the infinite contingencies of their existence in and through time, that progression is still not the cause of grief but only its motion. Man perceives the motion, whereas the cause, like the “cause” of Freudian melancholia, remains hidden, or at best partially glimpsed, perceived in its effects rather than in its presence.

This motion is also, of course, that of Gonzalo's halting, anguished ruminations and more generally of Gadda's narrative itself, though it is important at this point to begin to distinguish the author from his character. It is true that the character disorder of narcissism is one that wants to stay forever open and closed, in the fashion of Narcissus poised above the pool without being either distracted by others or immersed in death. It may seem, moreover, that writing, art, can provide a way to maintain this situation by immortalizing it. But again, such a solution can succeed only by half. Gadda's disinclination to finish his works was notorious, and all of the elaborate extratextual apparatus of La cognizione del dolore (from the spurious introductory claim by the editor, through the numerous “authorial” footnotes, to the concluding poem) only reaffirms the author's distaste for a unified, closed artifact. But despite Gonzalo's anguish and Gadda's own concerns, writing is never as unending, as expressively “loquacious,” as life itself. Its system, finally, is bound within the covers of the printed book. True, the reader, with every reading, reactivates that system and brings it to life once again; and in this sense, evocative of William Faulkner's equally humanist understanding of the “motion” of art, writing does escape the dead end of narcissism's eventual conclusion.¹³ But this is so only for the character and for the book itself, not for its author. The author must live in the world and meet his end there too, as the narrator of La cognizione knows so well: art can dissimulate the world's horrors, but only in part.

The self-conscious effects and the insistent “metacommentary” of Gadda's novels can and do suggest that their author knows this impasse, but they cannot lead him out of it.¹⁴ In the end, balanced between the chaos of utter randomness and the rigidity of utter certainty, Gadda's novels conclude by offering yet another vision of the relation between these two aspects of life and of the “obscure” or “invisible” illness that the perception of this relationship engenders. At the end the author, if not his book, must cede to the force majeure of system and time over which he has only partial control, consigning his own discourse to the world, in which it is thus cut off from the sovereign life of authorial subjectivity. As this subjectivity becomes an object for others, it suffers the inevitable fate at the conclusion of all worldly systems, open and/or closed, knowledgeable and/or mystified, rational and/or irrational: death. However, by acquiescing to the finished system of the printed book, Gadda gives up his sovereignty as subject while regaining it as object, through the literary sorcery that permits the writer to disappear as presence only to return as the expressive revenant of his own discourse, in the ghostly capacity to speak despite the inability to say or to write “I.” As the activity of writing hardens into its product, into the established order of the written and published word, the author dies the literary version of the “little death” that grants him, although now in another guise, renewed life. In the end, the startling array of self-reflective literary devices (including the pastiches for which Gadda is justly renowned) that contribute to distinguishing the author from his character also aid him in establishing his own privileged—however contingent—position as creator.

The literary self-consciousness of Gadda's novel is even more radically fragmented than that of Pirandello's Uno, nessuno e centomila, since now both the individual subject and the novel itself are internally divided, contingent, and split, in their form and their substance, from the very start. Gadda's radical conception of the individual in society and of the work of art was no doubt the reason for the appeal that his works held for the experimentalist Italian writers of the 1960s and 1970s; but before moving on to other recent authors, there is one further passage in this concluding chapter that might help to clarify our considerations so far and to extend them to include, in a more open fashion, some of Gadda's social concerns.

We have seen how time, death, and art come together in the novel's final scene within the activity of reading. Although this is the most obvious conjunction of such elements within this particular frame, it is not the only one. This conjunction also occurs more subtly in an earlier scene, one already alluded to from a different perspective, when the intruders enter the son's room and see the photograph of his deceased brother on his writing table, the brother standing by his plane with a machine gun in his hand and a smile still on his face “dopo tant'anni!” (“after so many years!”). One of the group lingers to look carefully at the photograph and then reads a few lines of the open book on the otherwise cleared table. The lines—“Ma le leggi della perfetta città devono. …” (“But the laws of the perfect city must …”)—concern a primary topic in idealist civil philosophy from Plato to the Enlightenment and beyond. (In fact Plato's Laws has been mentioned earlier in the novel, along with the Timaeus, the Parmenides, and the Symposium, as part of Gonzalo's regular reading material.) After this brief delay, the reader rejoins the others, and a few paragraphs later, the narrative ends with the discovery of the mother's body.

The inevitable failure of the kind of ideal society outlined in utopian thought, with its enlightened leaders and populace and, in Plato's version, its system of guardians—indeed the failure of any social system that neglects to come to terms with the inescapable disorder of human life and with the evil causes “operating in the absurdity of the night”—seems fairly clear in Gadda's novel, particularly in light of the narrative's concluding scene. Oddly enough, in Gadda's thought the rigid narcissistic posturing of social superiority is what leads the way to the reciprocal violence and the communal horror of warfare (suggested in the photograph by the machine gun and the plane), which signals not the order of social community but the breakdown of that order on an international scale, an insight that Gadda had begun to set forth in his critique of Fascism in Eros e Priapo. The outrage of the concomitant destruction of life is one of the results of a rigidity that cannot tolerate flexibility or of an order that does not knowledgeably provide for the possibility of disorder (though not for disorder's dominance in the opposite yet paired extreme of social anarchy). This outrage, this loss of life's “dignity,” is in fact one of the synonyms for death, to which it stands in a relation of reciprocity rather than of cause and effect. As the narrator of La cognizione comments in the novel's opening chapter in regard to the attempts at proving an absolute theorem by means of experiments with a live cat (which prove the theorem but also result in the animal's melancholy and finally in its death): “Ogni oltraggio è morte” (77; “Every outrage is death,” 39).

Art, like the photographic representation of Gonzalo's aviator brother (evocative of Gadda's own deceased aviator brother) or like Gadda's own self-consciously literary creations, can mitigate the horror of death, can deny its fact with a seemingly invincible—because frozen, timeless—smile. But it can do so only to a certain extent, since it entails the relinquishing of authorial sovereignty and since it depends on the viewer, the reader, the audience, for its magic to work. At the same time, the audience's understanding, its ability to participate, imagine, and interpret, is something over which the creating subject does not have final control. Indeed, the transient viewer/reader of the photograph and of the book within Gadda's text does not understand the photograph of the brother or the import of the book's passage in any sense that is similar to the external, empirical reader's understanding of Gadda's novel. As an artist, Gadda can use his self-reflexive knowledge of this situation to shield himself from the unpredictable contingencies inherent in the reception of his works, but he cannot escape them altogether. All he can do (like Svevo in this regard) is to place his wager on the purgative and so finally healthful activity of writing itself, in the hope that the metaphorical death of the artist will eventually mean the continued life of his works in and through others, in and through his works' existence in the world.

Something of the sort is suggested, too, by the imagery at the very end of La cognizione del dolore, as, outside the room where the doctor is completing his task, wringing the water and alcohol from the bloodstained bandages, the cock suddenly crows (“perentorio e ignorante, come ogni volta”; “peremptory and unaware, as always”) and, in a pastiche of the epic simile typical of Gadda for its play on cause and effect, rouses the dawn from the distant mountains: “La invitava ad accedere e ad elencare i gelsi, nella solitudine della campagna apparita” (“[The cock] invited it to proceed and to number the mulberry trees, in the solitude of the countryside, disclosed”). Despite the awful, incomprehensible night of death, life continues, not only in and through those who have witnessed and perhaps understood something of the meaning of the mother's death but with in the daily dawning of nature itself. At the same time, the interpretative faculty of the empirical reader is aroused—even if also frustrated and/or confused—by this inconclusive conclusion, which seems to trail off rather than really end, and through which Gadda's book now continues to live in its audience. In a doubly analogous fashion, the Signora, too, gains new life, both inside and outside the book, as the dark blood of her murder is transformed through the conventions of literary symbolism into the life force of nature, in the color of the mulberry trees numbered in their order by the proceeding dawn. Life's force and its stability are thus restored, though for the moment only, in art and in reality. The senseless, yet not meaningless, death at the heart of Ovid's story of Pyramus and Thisbe, which underlies the literary symbol, as well as the abortive nighttime meeting of the would-be lovers kept by society from consummation of their bliss, is once again replayed in the eerie confusion of its parts and in the oddly deflected revisions and metamorphoses of narcissistic desire, in which both man and nature now appear to play their parts. The conclusion of Puck's romantic comedy (the illusive nocturnal hobgoblin mentioned as perhaps inhabiting the grounds directly after the now absent Gonzalo's meditations on the novel), with its full-blown Shakespearean pastiche of Ovid's tale, takes on the darker cast of its nighttime meaning in combination with what is here the real though “invisible” evil of death. But again, the interpretative vitality of this last descriptive gambit can succeed only if the reader's faculties also participate, thereby turning the “death” of the character and that of her author into the renewed life of literary experience, and the renewed challenge of literary interpretation.

Notes

1. Meditazione milanese, ed. Gian Carlo Roscioni, Einaudi Letteratura, 34 (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), the concluding section of which is entitled “Il sentimento e l'autocoscienza,” or “Sentiment and Self-Knowledge” (235-97).

2. References in the text are to La cognizione del dolore, introd. Gianfranco Contini (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), with the English from William Weaver's translation Acquainted with Grief (New York: Braziller, 1969), which on occasion I have altered for accuracy. I have retained Gadda's extensive use of periods (which do not indicate ellipsis) throughout the quotations.

3. Aspects of this key scene are also discussed in a similar vein by Pietro Pucci, “The Obscure Sickness,” Italian Quarterly 11, no. 42 (1967): 43-62, published in Italian as “Il male oscuro,” Belfagor 23, no. 1 (1968): 91-98; and Robert S. Dombroski, “Overcoming Oedipus: Self and Society in La cognizione del dolore,” Modern Language Notes 99, no. 1 (1984): 125-43, esp. 134-36.

4. The importance of the story of Christ in Gadda's work is treated (in terms of its similarities to the work of Joyce in this regard) by Rinaldo Rinaldi, La paralisi e lo spostamento: Lettura della “Cognizione del Dolore,” Collana di critica letteraria, 1 (Leghorn: Bastogi, 1977), 66-69. Gadda's interest in the mother/son/absent father at the heart of Christianity showed up in a striking variety of contexts. Among these, see the conclusion of the essay “Anastomòsi” (1940), in Le meraviglie d'Italia-Gli anni (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), 268; the end of “Psicanalisi e letteratura” (1946), in I viaggi la morte (Milan: Garzanti, 1958), 60; and, less directly linked to the Virgin but even more openly tied to guilt and the continuing act of confession, the end of Gadda's interview with Dacia Maraini, Prisma 5 (May 1968): 14-19, rpt. in her E tu chi eri? Interviste sull'infanzia (Milan: Bompiani, 1973), 9-21. There is also a notably odd version of Christian sexuality, again involving a game of exclusion, at the end of chapter 3 of La meccanica, “I bianchi” (Milan: Garzanti, 1974), 110.

5. Gadda's anger at the hardships caused by the expenses of his father's house in the Brianza is well known. He discussed it openly in his 1968 interview with Dacia Maraini, in which he also mentions its direct connection with the situation described in La cognizione del dolore (10). Gadda's grief over the death of his brother, Enrico, a flyer killed just before the end of World War I, is movingly documented in the March 1919 pages of his Giornale di guerra e di prigionia (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), 358-61 et passim.

6. The narrative's patent appeal to interpretation in a psychoanalytic vein has been discussed by many critics, among them Michel David, La psicoanalisi nella cultura italiana, Preface by Cesare L. Musatti (Turin: Boringhieri, 1966), 458-66; Carlo De Matteis, “Oltraggio e riscatto, interpretazione della ‘Cognizione del dolore’ di C. E. Gadda,” L'approdo letterario 17, n.s. 53 (March 1971): 33-70; Elio Gioanola, L'uomo dei topazi: Saggio psicanalitico su C. E. Gadda, Il melangolo, 2 (Genoa: I1 Melangolo, 1977), esp. 91-218; Romano Luperini, “Nevrosi e crisi dell'identità sociale nella ‘Cognizione del dolore,’” Problemi, no. 60 (January-April 1981), 66-73; and Dombroski, “Overcoming Oedipus,” in which Dombroski extends his psychoanalytic interpretation to include broader issues of social history, and his recent expansion of his position, “Gadda: Fascismo e psicanalisi,” in his L'esistenza ubbidiente: Letterati italiani sotto il fascismo, Esperienze, 99 (Naples: Guida, 1984), 91-114.

   Also of interest in this regard are Gadda's own comments on the status of the individual ego scattered throughout his writings and especially in “Emilio e Narcisso” (1949) and “L'egoista” (1953), both in I viaggi la morte, 257-79, 281-96; “Psicanalisi e letteratura”; and his book-length indictment of Fascist ethics, narcissism, and sexuality, Eros e Priapo: Da furore a cenere (Milan: Garzanti, 1967).

7. “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1966-74), 14:243-58.

8. For recent discussions of this topic (all of which deal with the splitting of objects between love and hatred and all of which are indebted in one fashion or another to the work of Melanie Klein), see Herbert Rosenfeld, “A Clinical Approach to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Life and Death Instincts: An Investigation into the Aggressive Aspects of Narcissism,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 52, pt. 2 (1971): 169-78; Otto F. Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism, Classical Psychoanalysis and Its Applications (New York: Aronson, 1975), 16-18; James S. Grotstein, “The Psychoanalytic Concept of the Borderline Organization,” in Advances in Psychotherapy of the Borderline Patient, ed. Joseph LeBoit and Attilio Capponi (New York: Aronson, 1979), 149-83; and Peter Giovacchini, Treatment of Primitive Mental States, Classical Psychoanalysis and Its Applications (New York: Aronson, 1979), 201-393.

9. On the conclusion of the narrative and the various real and/or metaphorical possibilities for “solution” of the crime (along with information found among Gadda's notes after his death), see Gian Carlo Roscioni, “La conclusione della Cognizione del dolore,” Paragone 20, no. 238 (1969): 86-99.

10. Gadda mentions the importance of Carducci in his early readings (read after Manzoni and before D'Annunzio) in “Intervista al microfono” (1950), in I viaggi la morte, 109-12. (Gadda's continuing lovers' quarrel with Manzoni, who sees the dark terror beneath the baroque surface of life but tries not to face it too directly, is recorded in Gadda's 1924 essay “Apologia manzoniana,” rpt. in Antologia di Solaria, ed. Enzo Siciliano, introd. Alberto Carocci, Antologie, 2 [Milan: Lerici, 1958], 175-84.)

11. The conception of grief as the recognition of irrational chaos in battle with order has been discussed in a wide variety of contexts regarding Gadda's works. See, for example, Dombroski, Introduzione allo studio di Carlo E. Gadda, Saggi di cultura contemporanea, 8 (Florence: “Nuovedizioni” Vallecchi, 1974), 19 (Dombroski eventually extends the notion of disorder to include war itself [45]); Gian-Paolo Biasin, “La penna, la madre,” ch. 5, of Malattie letterarie, Nuovi saggi italiani, 18 (Milan: Bompiani, 1976), 157-90; English ed.: “The Pen, the Mother,” in Literary Diseases: Theme and Metaphor in the Italian Novel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), 127-55, in which Biasin takes his lead from Gadda's “Anastomòsi”; Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, Poesia e narrativa del secondo Novecento, 2d ed., Civiltà letteraria del Novecento, Saggi, 2 (Milan: Mursia, 1967), 208-12, in which Bàrberi Squarotti denies the concept of mimesis of reality in Gadda's works and emphasizes the psychological effects that reside behind the baroque appearance of Gadda's fictional worlds; Renato Barilli, La barriera del naturalismo: Studi sulla narrativa italiana contemporanea, 3d ed., Civiltà letteraria del Novecento, Saggi, 7 (Milan: Mursia, 1980), 121-50, in which Barilli sees Gadda as still interested in the mimetic representation of life and, therefore, as remaining within literary naturalism even while straining at its limits; Olga Ragusa, “Gadda, Pasolini, and Experimentalism: Form or Ideology,” in her Narrative and Drama: Essays in Modern Italian Literature from Verga to Pasolini, De Proprietatibus Litterarum, Series Practica, 110 (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 134-55, in which Ragusa argues for Gadda as an obviously complex modern novelist but one with a traditional view of man in relation to his environment and to others; Enrico Flores, Accessioni gaddiane: Strutture, lingua e società in C. E. Gadda (Naples: Loffredo, 1973), 132-41, in which Flores discusses rhetorical and other technical similarities between Gadda and Joyce; Guido Baldi, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Civiltà letteraria del Novecento, Profili, 24 (Milan: Mursia, 1972), 104-29, in which Baldi points out that Gadda's characteristically chaotic pastiche (also discussed in Contini's introduction to the novel, 7-28) includes as one of its effects that of critical distance and so, along with it, the possibility of critical evaluation; and Gian Carlo Roscioni's influential study, La disarmonia prestabilita: Studio su Gadda, Saggi, 453 (Turin: Einaudi, 1969).

12. This image plays a central role in Alcibiades I 132-33, in which the subject under discussion is the Delphic maxim “Know thyself” and in which the proto-Gaddian topics of the relational nature of human knowledge and of human identity, will, and possession are stressed (for Plato, as distinct from Gadda, with divine knowledge as the ultimate, stable goal).

13. Faulkner stated this belief in a 1956 interview with Jean Stein for the Paris Review, rpt. in Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews, ed. and introd. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1958), 138-39.

14. Guido Guglielmi discussed the effects of “metalanguage” in Gadda's narrative in “Lingua e metalinguaggio di Gadda,” in Letteratura come sistema e come funzione, La ricerca letteraria, Serie critica, 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 128-37. For subsequent treatments of this topic, see Jacqueline Risset, “Carlo Emilio Gadda ou la philosophie à l'envers,” Critique 26, no. 282 (1970): 944-51, esp. 945; Romano Luperini, Il Novecento, 2 vols. (Turin: Loescher, 1981), 2:493 et passim; and Dombroski, “Overcoming Oedipus,” 29-30, in which Dombroski notes that the effect of critical estrangement created by metalanguage in La cognizione (a notion also discussed by Luperini) serves as a means of critical revelation in terms of the book's characters and at the same time, through the mechanism of the pastiche, as a protective shield in terms of its author (130-43).