SOURCE: Cannon, JoAnn. “The Reader as Detective: Notes on Gadda's Pasticciaccio.” Modern Language Studies 10, no. 3 (fall 1980): 41-50.

[In the following essay, Cannon discusses the ways in which Gadda mocks traditional detective novel conventions in Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana.]

Until the publication of Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957) and La cognizione del dolore (1963) in single volumes,¹ Carlo Emilio Gadda was conspicuously neglected in Italy by all but a small circle of “initiates.”² Since the publication of his two masterpieces, Gadda has not only been acknowledged in Italy as one of its most important modern novelists, but he has also been recognized by an entire generation of experimental writers as their forerunner. Gadda has remained a relative unknown in this country, however. This is perhaps due to the peculiar difficulty of translating his works: the mélange of dialects, neologisms, puns, clichés, idiomatic expressions, and “syntactical pyramids” which characterizes the Gaddian text does not lend itself easily to translation.³ In addition, the myth of Gadda as a difficult writer, slyly perpetuated by the author himself, is, like all myths, not completely unfounded. Gadda, who refers to himself as “a baroque and quibbling writer”⁴ and who commiserates with the unfortunate student doomed to writing a thesis on his works, is not so “accessible” as Svevo, Pavese, Moravia, Silone or other twentieth century novelists whose names are generally recognized outside of Italy. However, the very complexity of the Gaddian text offers unique rewards to the undaunted reader.

The Pasticciaccio [Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana], translated into English by William Weaver under the title That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, is ostensibly a detective novel. The detective novel or giallo, named after the yellow paper on which popular detective fiction was first printed in Italy, is the ideal vehicle for Gadda: the giallo reflects the tension between chaos and order which subtends the Gaddian text and at the same time objectifies the author's penchant for investigation of all sorts. Most of Gadda's works contain some element of detection.

The Cognizione [La cognizione del dolore], Gadda's most autobiographical novel, is technically an unsolved giallo: the entire novel consists of the construction of clues which prepare the reader for the crime of matricide, although the murderer of Gonzalo's mother is not revealed.⁵Eros e Priapo, Gadda's paroxysmal analysis of fascism, begins with an exhortation to the reader to help determine “la causale del delitto”⁶ (“the cause or motive of the crime”); in this case the crime refers to the atrocities perpetrated by Mussolini's fascist régime. In a short story entitled “Anastomòsi” (“Anastomosis,” a surgical joining of one hollow organ to another), an operation performed by a skilled surgeon is portrayed as a kind of investigation into the “pasticcio” of the patient's innards, “una sequenza informe di molli enigmi” (“a shapeless sequence of pliable enigmas”).⁷ The surgeon, through his expertise, is able to restore order to the “groppo purpureo” (“purple knot”).⁸

In “Un romanzo giallo nella geologia” (“A Detective Novel in Geology”), geological research, which devises hypotheses to explain “la catena delle cause remote” (“the chain of remote causes”), is characterized as a form of detection.⁹ The motive power behind all of Gadda's works is his desire to “risalire il flusso delle significazioni e delle cause” (“to retrace the flux of significations and causes”).¹⁰ The Pasticciaccio externalizes this desire in the adoption of the detective genre.

Gadda's work may to some extent be situated within a general pattern of exploitation of the detective genre by the avant-garde.¹¹ The classical tale of ratiocination inaugurated by Poe and perpetuated by Conan Doyle, Leblanc, and Christie is subverted by writers like Borges, Nabokov and Robbe-Grillet. The impact of the metaphysical detective story is largely dependent upon its deviation from a set of strictly formulated rules. Detective fiction is the most highly codified of all literary genres. The outraged protests evoked by Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which allegedly breaks an unwritten law barring the narrator from the list of suspects, testify to the extent of codification of detective fiction.¹² Individuals aspiring to membership in the London Detection Club, a British association of distinguished detective writers, must take an oath that they will observe certain rules of “fair play.”¹³ Because of this high degree of codification, the writer who adopts the genre awakens certain expectations in the reader. Gadda's Pasticciaccio, like the metaphysical detective fiction of the Post-Modernists, systematically thwarts those expectations. Before discussing the significance of Gadda's deviation from the norms of the giallo, let us first take a closer look at the relationship between Gadda's novel and the classical detective genre.

The Pasticciaccio deals with two crimes in the same apartment building on Via Merulana in Rome: the theft of Contessa Menegazzi's jewels and the subsequent murder of her neighbor Liliana Balducci. Already in the first pages of the novel the underlying philosophy of the classical tale of ratiocination is undercut. If the beginning of a novel is important because it prepares the reader for “the direction in which the events and their significance are to move,”¹⁴ this is doubly true of detective fiction. Jacques Barzun, in his outline of the ideal detective story, describes the preamble in this way: “philosophic in tone, and if possible paradoxical or otherwise arresting. It sets the mood by providing a sample of what Poe called ratiocination. … The detective theorizes upon some aspect of life which the story will bear out, though he himself does not as yet know this.”¹⁵ Gadda obligingly provides us with just such a philosophic preamble in his giallo. But his detective, Don Ciccio Ingravallo, is a far cry from the mathematical logician epitomized by Poe's Dupin.

He sustained … that unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed. … [T]he crime was the effect of a whole list of motives which had blown on it in a whirlwind … and had ended by pressing into the vortex of the crime the unfeebled “reason of the world.” Like wringing the neck of a chicken.¹⁶

This image of reason brutally strangled overthrows the philosophy of the classical detective story, in which the power of the intellect is triumphant. From Poe to Conan Doyle, the pure tale of ratiocination consists of the application of reason to the reconstruction of events and their causes. But Gadda's unorthodox detective casts this operation into doubt.

Before either of the crimes is committed, Ingravallo is invited to dinner at the Balducci's. It is during this dinner that the detective senses a mystery about Liliana which he investigates in an interior monologue. He deduces from a series of clues that Liliana is not content: “when hearts heave a sigh, then sorrow is nigh, as the saying goes” (p. 12). The entire episode, including this popular proverb, is a parody of deductive reasoning, the mainstay of detective fiction. Liliana is obsessed with her inability to bear children: each year she adopts a niece who becomes a surrogate daughter. Ingravallo handily unravels this “groviglio” (“tangle”)—the first enigma which he encounters in the novel. This picture of the detective who assembles clues to form a hypothetical solution is (perhaps falsely) gratifying. While the preamble seems to undermine the reassurance provided by the typical giallo, this passage acts as a fulfillment of the reader's expectations. Only later does the reader realize that this is an ironic fulfillment of his expectations: the facile solution of the less significant mystery is not followed by a similar solution of the mystery of Liliana's death.

Some weeks after the dinner at Balducci's, Contessa Menegazzi's jewels are stolen; three days later Liliana Balducci is found murdered in the neighboring apartment. Liliana's cousin, who discovered the corpse, is held for questioning. For a brief period there seems to be some evidence connecting him to the crime—some of Liliana's jewels and ten one-thousand lire notes are found in his possession—but when it is proven that these were gifts from his cousin, Valdarena is released. Having no other lead, the investigators question Liliana's priest, Don Lorenzo Corpi, about the victim's spiritual condition. Don Lorenzo only confirms what Ingravallo had deduced at the beginning of the novel. However, the validity of the priest's testimony is immediately cast in doubt. “Don Lorenzo remarked … that he could fully confirm what was written above, that is to say, what had emerged from the amnesic uncertainty of afterwards, encouraged by the police to become certainty” (p. 174). Retrospective reconstruction of events, the device which allows the typical giallo to function, is dismissed as a fallacy. This ironic intervention on the part of the narrator is clearly aberrant: in classical detective fiction, the narrator is complicitous with the investigator. The story is often told from the point of view of a cohort of the detective, such as Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories or Hastings in many of Christie's Poirot novels. The narrator, who though an accomplice of the investigator is not so astute as his partner, recounts the process whereby the detective reconstructs the sequence of events leading to the crime. Thus he implicitly acts as an accomplice to the reader. Even if the story is told from an objective, third-person point of view, the narrative voice is expected to be supportive of the detective's enterprise. In the Pasticciaccio, however, the narrative voice works in opposition to the detective and, implicitly, to the reader, thereby undercutting any attempt to make sense of the puzzle.

While the investigation into the Balducci murder grinds slowly to a halt, the detectives receive a tip from carabinieri headquarters regarding the Menegazzi case. The carabinieri have discovered a green scarf allegedly worn by the jewel thief and have identified its owner as one Iginio Retalli from the neighborhood called Torraccio. Dr. Fumi, the police commissioner, recalls having apprehended a woman from Torraccio in a routine round-up of prostitutes and calls her in for questioning. The sleuths begin the second session of this interrogation by inquiring about “that girl friend of her girl friend.” (It is not altogether clear why they are even interested in the girl.) Ines denies any knowledge of the girl, claiming that she only saw her once, at night, on a country road. What road? “It was a dirt road: where there was a field … and a church, but without any priests in it, it has a long name with tondo in it” (p. 223). The process whereby they force Ines to concur in identifying the church as Santo Stefano Rotondo is immediately invalidated by the narrator: “After having snapped at her, the four of them, like four dogs at a doe … they succeeded in the end in wrenching from her lips the calming lie, the plausible lie: the one which, contradicting or resolving all the previous ones, seemed finally the truth” (pp. 223-24). Again the narrative voice undermines the machinery of detection: the “truth” arrived at through the third degree—one of the most effective devices in the typical giallo—is characterized as mere sophistry. Adding insult to injury, this precarious truth does not serve them. After their laborious interrogation (described in a long paragraph whose syntax is as belabored and tortuous as the interrogation itself), it becomes apparent that the discovery of the name of the church is of absolutely no use to the investigators. “With all these logistics … the bloodhounds seemed to sink deeper into the mud” (p. 224). Instead of proceeding inexorably to piece together the information which will lead them to the solution, Ingravallo and the other investigators become increasingly entangled.

Ultimately the logic of the investigators proves ineffectual in the face of mystery and magic. This force is personified by Zamira, Ines' former employer, “a mender and re-weaver, trouser-maker, dyeress … seer, clairvoyant, card-reader … Oriental Wizardress” and procuress. The introduction of such a character in a detective novel breaks one of the ten commandments of detection as outlined by Ronald A. Knox: “No Chinaman must figure in the story.”¹⁷ This cryptic interdiction has been interpreted by Jacques Barzun as a reference to the world of magic which must be banished from detective fiction.¹⁸ But this world insinuates itself into the Pasticciaccio in the figure of Zamira. Just as the investigators seem to have found the lead which would provide the solution to the Menegazzi theft, Zamira begins to cast a spell on them. Faced with the “unreason of the powers of darkness,” Sergeant Pestalozzi clings to the “objective clarity of ratiocination.” But the logic of the investigators is depicted as an “arbitrary and therefore illicit intervention into the private operations of magic” (p. 295). The assembling of a sequence of facts to form a hypothetical solution is shown to be more miraculous than the magic of Zamira.

The novel insistently undermines the possibility of a rational construct which would provide a solution to the mystery. The peculiar nature of the evidence in the Pasticciaccio is a case in point. The successful functioning of the typical giallo depends upon the possibility of identifying an object and upon the subsequent introduction of this object as evidence in some way connecting the culprit to the crime. The evidence functions as part of an all-encompassing system. Robbe-Grillet uses the example of Exhibit X in detective fiction to show how we attempt to impose a fallacious kind of order on the world. “The evidence gathered by the inspectors … seem chiefly, at first, to require an explanation, to exist only in relation to their role in a context which overpowers them. And already the theories begin to take shape: the presiding magistrate attempts to establish a logical and necessary link between things; it appears that everything will be resolved in a banal bundle of causes and consequences, intentions and coincidences.”¹⁹ In the Pasticciaccio the evidence does not lend itself to this kind of subsumption in a system of signification. When the green scarf worn by the jewel thief is recovered at the Ciurlani firm, to which Zamira has subcontracted various articles to be dyed, it has been transformed. The scarf is supposed to be dyed brown, but having undergone only the first of two immersions, it is somewhere between green and brown. The reader is tempted to ask, with the suspect's girlfriend, how the carabinieri manage to identify the scarf and, thus, to link its owner to the Menegazzi crime. “Because of the scarf, all right: but that scarf can't speak” (p. 340). Later in the novel, when Sergeant Pestalozzi spots a ring on the finger of one of Zamira's seamstresses, he claims that it is one of Countess Menegazzi's stolen jewels: “‘this is the topaz I've been hunting for for two days: this is it!’ as if his professional wisdom, operating in his cranium ab aeterno, had allowed him to recognize it instantly. In reality he was seeing it then for the first time, and he had been hunting for it for two hours, if, after all, it really was a topaz, and not a piece of bottle, perhaps” (p. 292). By casting into doubt the very identity of that evidence, as well as denying it any significance (“that scarf can't speak”), the text thwarts the reader's desire to fit the evidence into a logical pattern. Once again drawing upon Robbe-Grillet, one may say that although “they may conceal a mystery, or betray it, these elements which make a mockery of systems have only one serious, obvious quality, which is to be there.”²⁰

To summarize: there is a consistent “mockery of systems” or neat cognitive constructs on the thematic level of the Pasticciaccio. Although this marks a clear departure from the typical giallo, we should modify the claim that the text thwarts the reader's expectations. Certainly the expectations aroused in the reader by the generic choice are unfulfilled. The attentive reader, however, begins to alter his expectations in light of textual indices such as those noted above. The reader almost comes to expect that the enigma will never be solved. The malfunctioning of “the spirit, or the devil, of the ‘reconstruction of events’” (p. 347) sets the stage for the large-scale derailment of the investigation. The account of the dream which Sergeant Pestalozzi has the night before his visit to Zamira's shop is an allegorical description of derailment. (Earlier in the novel, the narrator distinguishes the inherent truth of dreams from the fictional character of “so-called truths.”) In the dream, the Rome-Naples express is in pursuit of a topaz which obviously represents both the Countess's stolen jewels and the solution or “truth” which the investigators are trying to reach. The train is derailed in its pursuit of the topaz and becomes lost in the Circean shadows. Sergeant Pestalozzi's dream foreshadows the permanent derailment of the investigation. Ingravallo and the other sleuths are in the end unable “to sum up, rationally; to pull the threads, one might say, of the inert puppet of the Probable” (p. 382). Although the lesser of the two mysteries is solved (the jewels are recovered and the thief's accomplice is apprehended), the “originator” of the Menegazzi crime remains free; more importantly, the investigation into the murder leads to a dead end.²¹ “Every hypothesis, every deduction, no matter how well constructed, turned out to have a weak point, like a net that is unravelling …” (p. 348).

What is the significance of the novel's “inconclusiveness”? In his book La disarmonia prestabilita (The Preestablished Disharmony) Gian Carlo Roscioni examines Gadda's notes and early drafts of the novel and concludes that the author always strove for a well-structured plot in which all of the narrative strands would ultimately be tied up. Nonetheless, the loose narrative structure of Gadda's texts and the fact that so many of his works remained unfinished indicate to Roscioni the author's gradual succumbing to the “abhorred reality of the pasticcio.”²² Another critic, Robert S. Dombroski, essentially agrees with Roscioni. Dombroski has compared the final version of the Pasticciaccio, published in 1957 by Garzanti, with the original version of the novel, serialized in five installments of the literary magazine Letteratura in 1946. In the revised version, Gadda deleted information which implicated Virginia, one of Liliana's adopted daughters, as the murderer. Dombroski concludes: “In abandoning the original structure of Quer pasticciaccio, Gadda reveals his reluctance to accept the existence of events governed by final cause. For since the universe itself is without a reasoned plan, the novel would falsify reality by offering an illusion of finality.”²³ While Roscioni and Dombroski disagree on the extent to which Gadda intended the novel to be digressive, open-ended, “incomplete,” both agree with the majority of critics on the implications of the novel's open-endedness. Regardless of the author's intentions, the “meaning” of the novel is said to lie in the triumph of unreason, of disorder, of the pasticcio.

Similar readings of the metaphysical detective fiction of Robbe-Grillet, Borges and Nabokov have located the “meaning” of the stories in their defeat of syllogistic order.²⁴ But Gadda's novel (as well, I suspect, as other examples of metaphysical detective fiction) does not represent a simple subversion of the detective genre—the obverse side of the rational puzzle presented in the classical tale of ratiocination. If we examine the Pasticciaccio from the perspective of the reader, then the open-endedness of the text may be read in a different way.

Detective fiction not only sheds light on the function of the reader's expectations in his interaction with the text; it also dramatizes the operation performed by the reader of all texts. Detection is a metaphor of the reader's search for meaning in the fictional work. The cognitive activity of the investigator engaged in solving the mystery parallels the cognitive activity of the reader as he attempts to make sense of the text. As Wolfgang Iser has suggested in his analysis of the reading process, the reader will always attempt to fill in the “gaps of inconsistency” in the text and thereby give it a configurative meaning which it constitutively lacks. “While expectations may be continually modified, and images continually expanded, the reader will strive, even if unconsciously, to fit everything together in a consistent pattern.”²⁵ This is precisely what the reader of the typical giallo attempts to do. But in the reading of any text there is a conflict between the configurative meaning which the reader forms of the work and the “alien associations” which cannot be made to fit into the pattern. “In the oscillation between consistency and ‘alien associations’ … the reader is bound to conduct his own balancing operation, and it is this that forms the esthetic experience offered by the literary text.”²⁶ In one of his critical essays, Gadda describes just such a balancing operation as the primary requirement of the reader. “It is obvious that I have demanded and still demand of the novel that something of fascinating mystery … a balancing of probability and improbability. …”²⁷ Although neither Iser nor Gadda speaks of the detective story in this context, in fact detective fiction provides a model of the reader's literary experience.

In the typical detective story, the oscillation between consistency and “alien associations” is arbitrarily resolved in the solution. The most insignificant detail is in the end incorporated into a system of signification. Poe's Dupin stories are paradigmatic of this hermeneutic closure: at the conclusion, the reader is able to retrace his steps and fit each detail into a meaningful pattern. The story is written in function of the solution inasmuch as the solution explains all the apparently alien or extraneous information. The Pasticciaccio represents the antithesis of this kind of closure. The reader of the novel is confronted with a proliferation of extraneous information which has no connection to the crime. This is not to be confused with the “legitimate clue which the writer, by exercise of his skill, persuades his audience to misinterpret, and which is quite within the rules of the game.”²⁸ The Pasticciaccio is instead replete with digressions which have no bearing on the solution of the mystery. The narrator of the Pasticciaccio, like all Gaddian narrators, is easily side-tracked: the derailment of the narrator is particularly striking in Chapter Six, in which Zamira is first introduced. One of the digressions in this chapter centers around Maresciallo Santarella, a frequenter of Zamira's laboratory who avails himself of her services as procuress. The passage, which is nearly impossible to trace in all its meanderings, follows this sequence: the marshall brings sweaters to Zamira to be dyed—they are women's sweaters, because he had one day married a woman (who was not too “inflated”)—he lived with nine women (they are listed as the wife, her mother, her chaste sister, three daughters not yet old enough to be unchaste and two tenants who were on the point of becoming unchaste, but have since re-entered into chastity because of the withdrawal of the potential “unchastifier”)—the Marshall is the only male in the household, except for the male voice on the radio, a radio which the Marshall got in Milan where he had followed the tracks of two men named Salvatore. Another masculine voice comes from the gramophone, when it plays the male (sometimes it also plays the female) … and so on. All of this information regarding Santarella stands isolated in the text; it has no pertinence to the plot, inasmuch as the solution of the mystery is concerned. For the reader, the passage remains a fragment—a piece of a puzzle which does not fit together into a coherent picture. The sum of these textual fragments is an open-ended work.

If the detective novel may be read as a metaphor of the reader's search for meaning in the text, what is the difference between the experience offered to the reader by the typical giallo and that offered by the Pasticciaccio? As Pierre Macherey has observed, the classical detective novel provides a clear example of one kind of reading: the tendency to treat the text as an unnecessary detour from its hidden meaning.²⁹ In detective fiction there is a temptation to take a short cut and go directly to the solution of the mystery. By the same token, in the reading process there is a temptation to view any text as subordinate to its “secret,” or immanent meaning. But the revelation of that secret in a sense erases the story. This corrosive secret or “truth” is in opposition to the text itself, which exists entirely in the detour separating the end from the beginning.

The Pasticciaccio exists entirely in that textual space characterized as a detour. The digressive, open-ended structure of the novel renders impossible the kind of reductive reading outlined by Macherey. But it is not only on the structural level that the novel resists being reduced to a neat pattern. If we extend the analogy between the cognitive activity of the detective and the cognitive activity of the reader, then the undermining of all facile constructs on the thematic level of the text implies a parallel undermining of such constructs on the level of the reader's projection onto the text. And the absence of closure in the form of a solution to the crime further suggests that the reader cannot subsume the textual fragments into a single configurative meaning. By withholding the final solution, the Pasticciaccio underscores a constitutive feature of the literary text, which is “characterized by the fact that it does not state its intention, and therefore the most important of its elements is missing.”³⁰ The typical giallo presents the illusion of a reader who reconstructs that missing element just as the investigators reconstruct the events leading to the crime. But the Pasticciaccio instead lays bare the open-ended, polyvalent nature of the literary text, locus of a plurality of meanings.

Notes

1. Both novels first appeared in serialized form in the literary magazine Letteratura. The Cognizione, published in Letteratura between 1938 and 1941, was only slightly revised for the 1963 Einaudi edition. Two previously unpublished final chapters were included in William Weaver's English translation of the novel in 1969 and were subsequently added to a new Einaudi edition in 1970. The Pasticciaccio, published in five installments in 1946, was substantially revised for publication by Garzanti in 1957. See Robert S. Dombroski, “Some Observations on the Revision of Quer pasticciaccio, MLN, 86 (January 1971), 61.

2. The influential literary critic Gianfranco Contini was among the first to recognize Gadda's importance. See “Primo approccio al Castello di Udine,” in Esercizy dileturra (Torino: Einaudi, 1974), pp. 151-57; “Carlo Emilio Gadda traduttore espressionista,” in “Varianti il altra linguistica (Torino: Einaudi, 1970), pp. 303-07; Introduction to La cognizione del dolore (Torino: Einaudi, 1963), pp. v-xxiii; Introduction to L'Adalgisa (Torino: Einaudi, 1960), pp. vii-ix.

3. It should be noted that translations of Gadda's works in other languages have been more successful than William Weaver's English translations. In Germany, Gadda is especially well known thanks to Toni Kienlechner's excellent translations of the Pasticciaccio and the Cognizione. See Toni Kienlechner, Erkenntnis des Schmerzes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975) and Der Grässliche Bescherung in der Via Merulana (Munich: Piper, 1957).

4. Carlo Emilio Gadda, La cognizione del dolore (Torino: Einaudi, 1970), p. 14.

5. As Gian Carlo Roscioni has pointed out, Gadda tries to persuade the reader of the Cognizione that Gonzalo could not have committed the crime, that the matricide exists only on an imaginary level. See “La conclusione della ‘Cognizione del dolore,’” Paragone, 20 (December 1969), 86-99.

6. Carlo Emilio Gadda, Eros e Priapo (Milan: Garzanti, 1967), p. 40.

7. Carlo Emilio Gadda, Le meraviglie d'Italia (Torino: Einaudi, 1964), p. 264.

8. The word groppo is part of an entire semantic field in Gadda's texts including nodo (knot), groviglio (tangle), garbuglio (muddle), gnommero (skein), and of course pasticcio (mess) and pasticciaccio (awful mess) which range in connotation from the knot which can be untied to the hopelessly entangled mess. All of these terms are used by Gadda to describe the tangle of causes which are hidden behind every phenomenon.

9. Gadda, Le meraviglie d'Italia, p. 74.

10. Gadda, La cognizione del dolore, p. 49.

11. For an analysis of the relationship between detective fiction and the avant-garde see Michael Holquist, “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction,” New Literary History, 3 (Autumn 1971), 135-56.

12. Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure (New York: Biblo & Tanner, 1968), p. 130.

13. Haycraft, The Art of the Mystery Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), pp. 197-99.

14. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Johns Hopkins, 1974), p. 263.

15. Jacques Barzun, The Delights of Detection (Criterion Books, 1961) pp. 13-14.

16. Carlo Emilio Gadda, That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, trans. William Weaver (George Braziller, 1965), pp. 5-6.

17. Haycraft, The Art of the Mystery Story, p. 195.

18. Barzun, pp. 16-17.

19. Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel (Grove Press, 1965), p. 22.

20. Ibid., p. 23.

21. In an interview with Dacia Maraini, Gadda insists that the novel is complete inasmuch as Ingravallo understands who the murderer is at the conclusion. See Dacia Maraini, E tu chi eri? (Milan: Bompiani, 1973), p. 19.

22. Gian Carlo Roscioni, La disarmonia prestabilita (Torino: Einaudi, 1969), p. 98.

23. Dombroski, p. 72.

24. Holquist, p. 155.

25. Iser, p. 283.

26. Ibid., p. 286.

27. Carlo Emilio Gadda, “Un'opinione sul neorealismo,” in I viaggi la morte (Milan: Garzanti, 1958), p. 251.

28. Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure, p. 255.

29. Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1966), pp. 28-29.

30. Iser, “Interdeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction,” in Aspects of Narrative, ed. J. Hillis Miller (Columbia, 1971), p. 43.