[In the following excerpt, Bouchard notes the ways in which some of Gadda's early writings exhibited his growing sense of an open-ended, ambiguous reality.]

MORALUZZA:
E' bene rimettere alle parole e alle favole un mandato provvisorio e, direi, una limitata procura … incastonar le parole nella necessità del momento, sì con un certo senso del limite loro. …

Carlo Emilio Gadda, I viaggi la morte¹

A SMALL Advice:
[It is best to return to words and fables their provisional mandate and, if I am allowed to say so, their limited proxy … it is best to set words in the necessity of the moment, yes, and with a certain sense of their limits.]

Italian critics traditionally have interpreted the writings of Carlo Emilio Gadda as the practice of a belated modernist whose totalizing projects of noumenal, absolute knowledge have tragically run amuck.² This assessment has been legitimated not only by the idealism that informs Gadda's war diaries, Giornale di guerra e di prigionia 1915-1919, but also by the unavailability, till 1974 and 1983 respectively, of two of Gadda's major writings: Racconto italiano di ignoto del novecento (1924) and Meditazione milanese (1928). In this chapter, I propose a more comprehensive account of Gadda's work by taking into consideration not only the parabola of the war diaries but also the writings that follow. My intent is to suggest how, as early as the mid-1920s, Gadda was questioning the premises of idealism while patterning that profoundly nonmodernist economy of signification that informs his novelistic production of the thirties.

GADDA AND THE MODERNIST IDEAL: THE WAR DIARIES

Between August 24, 1915, and December 31, 1919, Gadda kept a diary covering the events surrounding his participation in World War I and recounting his arrival on the front, his capture at Caporetto, his imprisonment in Germany and, finally, his return home to the news of the death of his younger brother, the beloved Enrico. Available in print as early as 1955, Gadda's war diaries have been correctly interpreted as the endeavor of a young man full of modernist ideals.³ Unlike [Louis Ferdinand] Céline, for whom the war represented the horrifying outcome of a dying Western civilization and culture, Gadda believed that a conflict was needed to restore Italy to the sociopolitical and moral values of the nineteenth century, now undermined by internal divisions and external aggressions. Moreover, as Manuela Bertone has acutely noted in her “I diari del ‘tempo perduto’” (41 ff.), it is quite likely that Gadda saw the war as the perfect opportunity for him to restore his family's name to the prestige it had enjoyed during the period of the kingdom of Italy under the direction of the “destra storica.” Readers familiar with the author's biography will recall that his ancestors had included aristocrats, such as Paola Ripamonti, who had married Gadda's grandfather, and rather prominent politicians like Carlo Emilio's uncle Giuseppe Gadda. An active participant in the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian independence and unification, Giuseppe Gadda had been a successful minister of public works in the Gabinetto Lanza-Sella between 1869 and 1873. Despite such glorious ancestry, however, by the turn of the century, the prestige of the Gadda family had been seriously weakened. The failure of Gadda's father, Francesco Ippolito, in a silk-business venture coupled with the construction of a villa well beyond the family's means, had seriously diminished the family's affluence. With the death of Gadda's father in 1909, his mother, Adele Lehr, took over the family's finances. Her poor administrative skills only resulted in sending the family into even more difficult years of financial hardship.

The opening pages of the first volume of Gadda's diaries, titled Anno 1915 giornale di campagna, and dating from August 24 to February 15, 1916, seem to confirm the compound of feelings and motivations that pushed Gadda toward an active support of the conflict. The preface of the volume, signed in Latin with the name “Gaddus.—1915,” discloses the possibility of individual heroism offered by the war, the potential for individual epic deeds. The orderly, legal-sounding prose that immediately follows the Latinate signature reveals the “public” origin of the diary:

24 Agosto 1915.

Il bollettino del Ministero della Guerra del giorno 5 agosto 1915 mi nominava, dietro mia richiesta del 27 marzo u.s., sotto-tenente ufficiale della milizia territoriale, arma di fanteria, con destinazione al 5 Alpini.—Il comando reggimentale di Milano a cui mi presentai il 17 agosto mi destinò al magazzino di Edolo.—Il 18 sera ero a Edolo, dopo aver prestato il giuramento a Milano.

Edolo, 24 agosto, 1915.

CE Gadda.—

—Carlo Emilio Gadda.—⁴

[August 24th, 1915.

Following my request of March 27, on August 5, 1915, the bulletin of the Ministry of War nominated me to the position of official second lieutenant of the territorial militia, regiment of infantry, with destination the Fifth Alpine battalion.—On August 17th, I reported to the regimental command, and was destined to the warehouse of Edolo.—On the evening of the eighteenth, after taking my oath in Milan, I reached the town of Edolo.

Edolo, August 24th, 1915

C. E. Gadda.]

Within the text itself, the presence of words of intolerance for the present state of Italy and of long passages recollecting painful moments of childhood and youth confirm once more the plurality of motives that brought Gadda to support the war as a corrective to a derealized personal and public history. Yet Gadda's ambitions are quickly put to the test. His days in Edolo are spent in the boredom of useless tasks and in the company of soldiers lacking the discipline and the organization that Gadda deemed necessary to achieve heroic feats. Nonetheless, armed with what the second section of the diary, entitled Giornale di guerra per l'anno 1916, calls “la mia dose di idealismo, di pazienza, di speranza, di fede inalterabile” (567) [my dose of idealism, of patience, of hope, of unalterable faith], Gadda continues to await his chance to participate in history, while lamenting the decay of the Italian nations and of its soldiers. The following passage is a case in point. The page departs from the orderly, controlled prose of the preface to become a space to vent sentiments of anger, frustrations, and rage: “Ma io devo e voglio combattere. Lascio che i porci, i ladri, i cani, gli impostori sgavazzino e faccio il mio dovere” (481) [But I must and I want to fight. I leave the pigs, the dogs, the impostors to debauch and I fulfill my duty]. Then, at the beginning of October 1917, his Diario di guerra per l'anno 1917 announces the long-awaited transfer to the main Isonzo front. The possibility of heroic deeds finally seems to realize itself when, on October 25 of the same year, Gadda is defeated at Caporetto. The event not only marks the beginning of a long period of imprisonment in the camps of Rastatt and Cellelager—events that Gadda will describe in the last volume of his diary, Vita notata. Storia—but represents the wane of the young Gadda's dreams: “La tragica fine” (663) [The tragic ending]. After the armistice, Gadda returns home. To the embitterment of Caporetto is now added the pain of a tragic loss: the death of his brother Enrico during a test flight. Prey to feelings of total disillusionment, Gadda comes to the realization that not only does a gulf exist between ideal and empirical reality but that all dreams of personal and historical order are ultimately defeated by the chaos and messiness of the world:

Se la realtà avesse avuto minor forza sopra di me, oppure se la realtà fosse di quelle che consentono la grandezza (Roma, Germania), io sarei un uomo che vale qualcosa. Ma la realtà di questi anni … è merdosa; e in essa mi sento immedesimare e annegare.

(863)

[If reality had less hold on me, or if it had been one of these realities that allow greatness (Rome, Germany), I would be a man worth something. But the reality of these years … is shitty; and in it I feel myself identifying and drowning.]

And precisely because the diary was intended as the record of heroic deeds, to the wane of all dreams of personal and historical order corresponds the end of textuality itself. By the author's own admission, the diary has become a pointless endeavor, a writing unworthy even of private memory:

Non noterò più nulla, poiché nulla di me è degno di ricordo anche davanti a me solo. Finisco così questo libro di note.

Milano, 31 dicembre 1919. Ore 22. In casa.

Qui finiscono le note autobiografiche del periodo post-bellico; e non ne incominciano altre né qui né altrove.

Carlo Emilio Gadda

Milano, 31 dicembre 1919

Fine delle mie note autobiografiche e di tutte le note raccolte in questo libro. CEG

Milano, 31-12-1919.

(867)

[I will no longer record anything, because nothing in my life is worthy of memory, even before myself alone. I end here this book of memoirs.

Milan, December 31, 1919. 10.00 p.m. At home.

The autobiographical notes of the postwar period end here and will not be resumed—either here or elsewhere.

Carlo Emilio Gadda

Milan, December 31, 1919

This is the end of my autobiographical notes and of all the notes collected in this book. C.E.G.

Milan, 12-31-1919.]

Back among the civilians, Gadda completes his university degree and begins working as an engineer. In 1924, upon returning from Argentina, where he had been employed by La Compañia General de Phosphoros, he abandons momentarily his career to dedicate himself to the composition of Racconto italiano di ignoto del novecento, to which will follow the 1928 Meditazione milanese. Available in print only in 1974 and 1983, respectively, these texts not only bid farewell to the idealism of the diaries but announce the author's pivotal role in the context of twentieth-century narrative. While Racconto translates the experience of World War I into the failed account of an orderly, finite narrative, Meditazione seeks to give a philosophical underpinning to the chaos and messiness of the world. It also lays the groundwork for that poetics of metamorphic representation that will shape Gadda's future novelistic production.

THE UNREPRESENTABILITY OF THE REAL: RACCONTO (1924)

Composed in 1924 in response to a 10,000-lire literary prize for a novel offered by the publisher Mondadori, Racconto is Gadda's first attempt at a major creative endeavor.⁵ Originally intended as the story of the fall of a good character in the troubled society of postwar Italy, today Racconto is little more than a “Cahier d'études,” alternating “studi,”⁶ or attempts at fictional composition, with a series of metafictional commentaries, or “note” (393), on the studi themselves. Despite their looseness and fragmentation, Gadda's note are most important for the purpose of this discussion, as they articulate with great clarity the author's awareness of the impossibility of translating a messy, chaotic reality in a traditional model of representation. Indeed, after having announced, in the first note, the subject matter and the main lines of development of his tale, by the second note, Gadda declares to be unable to decide the general tone to be assumed by his story. On one hand, his individuality is pluralized in five voices, which correspond to just as many worldviews and perspectives:⁷

Nota Cr 2.—(24 marzo 1924—ore 16.30)

Tonalità generale del lavoro. E' una grossa questione. Le maniere che mi sono più famigliari sono la (a) logico-razionalistica, paretiana, seria, celebrale—E la (b) umoristico-ironica … la (c) umoristico seria manzoniana. … Posseggo anche una quarta maniera (d) enfatica tragica, ‘meravigliosa 600’. … Finalmente posso elencare una quinta maniera (e), che chiamerò la maniera cretina, che è fresca, puerile, mitica omerica. …

(396)

[Note Cr 2.—(March 24, 1924—4:30 p.m.

General tone of the work. It is a big question. The manners that are more familiar to me are the manner (a); logico-rationalistic, Paretolike, serious, cerebral—And the manner (b); humoristic-ironic … the manner (c); serious, Manzonilike humor. … I even have a fourth manner, the manner (d); emphatic, tragic, “marvelously 1600s.” … Finally, I can mention a fifth manner, the manner (e), which I will call the naive manner. It is fresh, puerile, mythic, and Homeric.]

On the other hand, the objects of his intended representation cannot be defined according to the antithetical—and therefore unambiguous—attributes of “a, b, c” (464) but, like Gadda's kaleidoscopic subjectivity, are open to permutation and change of roles. In Gadda's words, characters are becoming “a e b” (464) and are revealing their nature as “omnipotenziali” (463) [omnipotential]. Even the setting of the novel comes to be implicated in this open-ended state of being. Despite Gadda's intention to represent postwar Italian society, his extant attempts at fictional composition reveal that the original fabula was expanded to embrace a number of other, often unrelated narrative topics, including stories of convoluted murders and melodramatic romances. In short, as one of Gadda's notes puts it, the narrative plot is becoming a complex tangle, “e quale ingarbugliato intreccio!” (460) [and what a complex tangle!], subject to the open-ended movement of reality: “il comporsi e il ridecomporsi, il continuo trasformarsi” (493) [the composition and the decomposition, the continuous transformation].

The representational impasse revealed in these theoretical notes and fictional fragments of Racconto—an impasse that has been described felicitously as “the impossibility for the twentieth-century novel to propose, once more … a global, comprehensive representation of life”⁸—brings Gadda to lay the groundwork for an alternative model of narration.⁹ Toward the end of Racconto, he timidly suggests that perhaps it would be better to abandon the will to order phenomena in stable verbal structures and begin instead to write by a “Mischung” of expressions and through the colliding superimposition of discourse and counterdiscourse, thesis and antithesis, point and counterpoint. The result of this synthetic writing would be “un romanzo psicopatico e caravaggesco” (411) [a psychopathic, Caravaggio-like novel]. An almost Bakhtinian¹⁰ example of grotesque and polyphonic representations, Gadda's “psychopathic novel” would be more suitable to articulate the baroque¹¹ reality of life: “Pensavo stamane di dividere il poema in tre parti, di cui la prima La Norma, (o il normale)—seconda l'Abnorme … terza La Comprensione o Lo Sguardo sopra la vita (o Lo sguardo sopra l'essere)” (415) [This morning I thought about dividing the poem in three parts: The first part would be the Norm (or that which is normal); the second part the Abnormal, … and the third part, the Comprehension or the Look upon life (the Look upon being)].

Despite these suggestive commentaries, however, Racconto falls short of actualizing such a work. Since the novel's fluctuating point of view would engender accusations of “variabilità, eterogeneità, mancanza di fusione, mancanza di armonia, et similia” (461) [variations, heterogeneity, lack of integration, lack of harmony, and so on], and its plot “‘contraddizione!, incoerenza!, incertezza!, ecc.’” (472) [contradiction!, incoherence!, uncertainty!, etc.], fear of criticism prevents Gadda from transforming Racconto into more than an early and yet crucial reflection on the impossibility of a metaphysical mode of representation. In short, Gadda foresees the possibility of an alternative model of narration, intuits the future of a novel unwilling to confine existence in the rigidity of traditional form and discourse, but cannot yet commit to a corresponding writing practice. Instead, Gadda chooses to turn to the terrain of philosophical speculation—namely, to the pages of Meditazione milanese, from where he will further explore the elusive, baroque nature of experience.

FROM BEING TO BEINGS: MEDITAZIONE MILANESE (1928)

Written in 1928 as a dissertation for a degree in philosophy, which Gadda had begun in 1922, Meditazione emerges out of an intellectual climate profoundly influenced by the neo-Hegelianism of Benedetto Croce. However, instead of reflecting this climate, Meditazione mounts an important critique to the ideality informing modernist epistemic figurations. These include Croce's endeavor, but also transcendental phenomenology and structural linguistics.¹²

Introduced by a title and a preface that disclaim the absoluteness of traditional philosophical discourse—Meditazione being from the lesser, more provincial city of Milan and a work reputedly tainted by “limiti” and “deficienze,”¹³ [limits and “deficiencies”], the text suggests a larger revisionary context by aligning itself with those thinkers who have questioned the main frames of the Western mind: “Come i lettori avvertiranno, di queste idee una buona parte già si affacciarono qua e là, sia pure in contesti diversi, allo spirito umano” (622) [As readers will notice, several of these ideas have emerged, albeit in different contexts, throughout the human spirit]. The first section of the work, aptly titled “Critica del concetto di metodo di alcune posizioni ermeneutiche tradizionali” (625) [Critique of the concept of method in some traditional hermeneutic positions], fulfills the reader's horizon of expectations. The section harks back¹⁴ to the metamorphic thought of the pre-Socratics and also draws upon the antimetaphysical insights of Bruno, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Kant, and Bergson to unsettle the structures of ideality: “dissolverò li eroi e le armi loro … le loro armi dedalee” (675) [I will dissolve the heroes and their arms … their Daedaluslike arms]. Thus, in “Il dato e l'inizio della attività relatrice (627 ff.) [The datum and the beginning of relational activity], Gadda resumes the Kantian critique of apodictical categories and argues that the frames of inquiry that are supposedly indubitable and first in themselves are in fact historical and contextual, subject to further mutation and definition (628). For this reason, what is conceived today as infinitely small or great, be it the atom or the infinite, will be displaced tomorrow, just as the Ptolemaic system was supplanted by the Copernican (712-19).

Next to the dissolution of a priori and absolute categories, Gadda demolishes another myth, notably the idea of a stable, self-identical substance. In the section “La grama sostanza” (631) [The false substance] Gadda inserts his argument in the line of the radically temporal differentiation and spatial coimplication of being proposed by the pre-Socratics, Bruno, Spinoza, and Bergson. He writes that the concept of substantiality depends upon a perceptual illusion whereby a quantitative decrease in mobility and complexity has been taken as a mark of stability and self-sameness. This illusion, he adds, is akin to what one experiences during a game of chess, when the move of certain pieces creates the optical illusion of the fixity of the remaining ones. And precisely because the concept of a self-identical substance is a mythopoetic creation, Gadda suggests to preface the term “substance” with the epithet of “grama” (633) [false], so as to avoid all future confusion.

The dissolution of apodixis and substantiality illustrated thus far, is followed by the demolition of the equation of existential well-being with sameness and closure. Gadda argues that, from the Platonic struggle to impose form on the “Khora” of matter, or what he calls “la lotta platonica fra üle e morfé” (637) [the platonic struggle between matter and form], to the epistemologies informing “il cervello pleistocenico della borghesuccia” (666) [the pleistocenic brain of the petit bourgeois], happiness has been associated with a static experience of life. In reality, however, such experience is only conducive to an imperfect, illusory condition of well-being. In Gadda's words, “questa immagine della felicità è assolutamente fittizia … la felicità … è tutta consegnata al compito, all'azione, al divenire. … Il concetto statico di felicità ripugna con tutte le manifestazioni della vita” (643) [this image of happiness is absolutely false … happiness is given by duty, action, becoming. … The static concept of happiness goes against all manifestations of life].

In subsequent sections of Gadda's dissertation, the corollaries of these arguments unfold to encompass traditional definitions of subject, object, and occurrence. Echoing here, as Beckett will, Spinoza's idea of the “affect,” Gadda suggests that since the human self participates in the complexity and temporality of the real, it cannot be thought as a centripetal monad, but is composed of molecules that combine and recombine in multiple figurations: “un insieme di relazioni non perennemente unite” (649) [a compound of relations never perennially unified]. Like the subject, the object does not escape chronotopic differentiation—that is, change in time and space. In one of the many wonderfully prosaic examples that function as mirrors to reflect the materialistic intent of the work, Gadda writes that the object is like a “gnocco” (655), the Italian potato noodle whose contours become gradually coimplicated with the sauce, the cheese, and the other gnocchi served on a plate. As for what regards occurrences, Gadda observes that the “ipotiposi della catena delle cause” [the hypotiposis of the chain of causes] is the result of an artificially imposed conceptual category. For this reason, he proposes to replace the line of ananke—“de(la) curva della ananche” (407)—with that of the rhizomatous network (650); a figure, that is, better suited to articulate occurrences as the product of molecular relations and becoming.

After this Rabelaisian meal, “una spiacevole agape” (675) [a displeasing banquet], the author moves to the “pars construens” of Meditazione. Under the umbrella-concept of “euresi” [heuresis], he patterns an alternative relation to the baroque nature of the visible. Broadly summarized, euresi is a provisional and extensional configuration. Because it originates as a critique of the identity-thinking of the speculative tradition, and in a deep respect for substance's complexity and immanence, it undoes the violence of reductive structures of opposition and finality. Further, it also promotes relations and contaminations of borders, contingency and open-endedness. In Gadda's words, the practitioners of euresi seek “il maggior numero di relazioni” (713) [the greatest number of relations] and the amplification of the “n + 1” (695). Nonetheless, these same practitioners are conscious that all amplifications are but “paus(e)” (702) [pause(s)], Lyotardian local “stations” of knowledge, rather than final, absolute destinations. In other words, the relational increase of euresi does not tend toward the exhaustiveness and totality of an hyperintegrative system, or what Gian Carlo Roscioni in La disarmonia prestabilita has called Gadda's totalizing desire of “Omnia circumspicere” (63 ff.). On the contrary, every step of the euresi is always subject to further displacement. As Jacqueline Risset has written compellingly in “Carlo Emilio Gadda ou la philosophie à l'envers,” Gadda's Meditazione reverses traditional philosophical premises since “it can never become a system, precisely because it strives towards the impossibility—of the system itself.”¹⁵ A number of comments voiced by Gadda further illustrate this crucial point and show how Gadda's encyclopedia remains open, a monadology whose extension is unchecked by the Leibnitzian central monad. Anticipating critical observations that euresi seeks to enclose the totality of knowledge—“nella biologia, nella sociologia, nel diritto, nella botanica, nella economia umana, ecc.” [in biology, sociology, law, botany, human economy, etc.]—Gadda replies that “Troppo enorme sarebbe il lavoro e dieci volumi non basterebbero” (784) [The work would be too extensive, and ten volumes would not suffice]. In another passage, he notes that neither superstructures nor “Ersätze” exist (783), but only systems of relations whose limits are “provvisori o removibili” (677) [provisional and removable].¹⁶ Moreover, the text also provides several icons to emphasize the open-endedness of the euresi. It includes a drawing of a source of light that becomes increasingly weaker as its rays move from the center to the periphery (700), an open bookshelf whose outer right-and left-side volumes are leaning diagonally (679) and, mirroring the geometries of Samuel Beckett's essays of the 1930s, even a polygon with one side left open (799).

Given these premises, it follows that, unlike metaphysical idealism, euresi presupposes a weaker epistemic subjectivity. To reprise one of Gadda's example, it is a subjectivity ready to drift across oceanic waters aboard an unstable boat: “Io parto dal traballante ponte della mia caravella … per osservare: e non sono il celigena disceso dall'assoluto … ma un grumo di relazioni … un groviglio di maglie del reale” (676) [I leave from the unstable bridge of my boat to observe: and I am not the celestial being who has descended from the absolute … but I am a compound of relations, a tangle in reality's web].

The implications of this epistemic model are far-reaching since, as Guido Guglielmi has suggested, following the Spinozian extension of “ordo rerum” into “ordo idearum,”¹⁷ Gadda derives from his self-proclaimed “arzigogolata filosofia” (696) [convoluted philosophy] both an ethics and an aesthetics. Good and evil, happiness and pain in all their social and cultural manifestations, are in fact defined in Meditazione according to their degree of relation and open-endedness. Echoing here, as Musil had done in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930-43),¹⁸ the Machian view of dissolution of truths into values, Gadda argues that neither “Il Male” (744 ff.) [evil] nor “Il Bene” (756 ff.) [good] can be framed by a corpus of fixed, static attributes, but are categories relative to contextual interpretation. Moreover, additionally implicating ethics within the larger frame of euresi, Gadda argues that “Il bene: o realtà” (689) [good: or reality] occurs when no relations and convergences have been excluded, when no selection and reduction have been imposed on life. Conversely, evil emerges with the decomposition of life's relations, with the rigidity of simplicity and finality of the “non-vita” (802) [nonlife]. Elsewhere in Meditazione, he again stresses this point by commenting that the greatest extensionality has “la massima eticità” (691) [maximum ethical value], whereas evil is “il regresso dal significato n + 1 ad n o il non accedere ad n + 1 durante l'attività euristica o creativa” (763) [the reduction of the meaning of n + 1 to n, or the failure to achieve n + 1 during the heuristic or creative activity].

Even more significant to the purpose of this discussion is the unfolding of euresi in the field of artistic practice, which might have been influenced by Gadda's interest in the Kantian theory of the sublime and in Schopenhauer's notion of aesthetic will-lessness and “pietas.”¹⁹ Quite possibly bearing in mind the failure of Racconto in the actualization of an alternative novel, Gadda writes that “heuristic” artists not only do not fear the coordinates of “tempo-spazio” (707) [time-space] but, equipped with their weaker attitude of “sentimento” (795 ff.) [feeling], are willing to follow the baroque meandering of the world. They do so by a rhetorical practice that is diametrically opposed to the Cartesian and structuralist axis of opposition and closure. In a passage that brings to mind the famous example of the “8:25 p.m. Geneva-to-Paris” train described by Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, Gadda inaugurates his departure from the structuralist model of language and the idealism that it implies.²⁰ Indeed, Gadda comments that those who use words according to ideals of logic and finality—“freddamente e antistoricamente astraendole dal vivente e vissuto e raggiunto contesto di una lingua” (844) [coldly and ahistorically abstracting words from the living, lived, and achieved context of a language] are not artists but apprentice telegraphers in a train station (845). As a possible alternative, Gadda proposes (839) a linguistic model closer to Gianbattista Vico's theory of heroic metaphors from Scienza Nuova. These are figures built extensionally and analogically. As such they are removed from the abstractions and generalizations of philosophical language and are closer to the metamorphic, ever-changing nature of being.²¹

A POETICS OF “HEURISTIC” WORDS: GADDA'S ESSAYS (1927-29)

The poetics of “heuristic” words that has emerged from the final pages of Meditazione was clearly at the center of Gadda's concerns. In fact, in the years immediately framing the composition of Meditazione, Gadda had dedicated two essays to the topic: the 1927 “I viaggi, la morte” and the 1929 “Le belle lettere e i contributi espressivi delle tecniche.”²² In “I viaggi, la morte” Gadda returns to the issue of the relationship between writing and the representation of life intended, as in the pages of Meditazione, as a succession of time and space. The targets of Gadda's critique, however, are not the philosophers of idealism, but fantastic authors and symbolist poets. While the former are said to transcend reality through the production of phantasmagoric narratives, the latter do so by way of a practice based upon symbols of infinity and closure. And since, as Gadda puts it in Meditazione, a chapter of aesthetics is also a chapter of ethics, he cannot but condemn these writers for having abstracted themselves from the reality of experience: “La poesia … Quando voglia prescindere ‘in absoluto’ da un qualunque motivo della realtà complessa, rinnegarne un qualunque vincolo, si trasforma in arzigogolato ricamo, in ‘immaginosa finzione,’ nel senso più dilettantesco della parola” (580) [When poetry seeks to transcend, “in absoluto,” any one aspect of the complex reality, when it seeks to deny reality's ties, it transforms itself into ornate embroidery, into an “imaginary fiction,” in the most dilettante-ish sense of the word].

A viable alternative to this type of writing is proposed by Gadda in his second essay, “Le belle lettere e i contributi espressivi delle tecniche.” Here he describes a language capable of actualizing the Vichian process introduced in Meditazione through a poetic word open to the ambiguity and temporality contained in the heteroglossia—that is, in the patrimony of lived and living speech-styles:

elaboratori del materiale estetico … sono un po' tutti … : agricoltori, avvocati, operai, preti, ingegneri, ladri, puttane, maestri, nottambuli, monache, bancarottieri, marinai, madri, ex-amanti, marchese, politicanti, vecchi danarosi, fattucchiere, malati, notai, soldati. Tutti, tutti.

(479)

[Everybody … elaborates aesthetic material … : farmers, lawyers, workers, priests, engineers, thieves, whores, teachers, nightwalkers, nuns, bankrupt fellows, sailors, mothers, former lovers, marquises, politicians, rich old folks, witches, sick people, public notaries, soldiers. Everybody, everybody.]

As this quotation suggests, one of the most immediate correlatives to Gadda's conception of artistic language is that creation is no longer the domain of the demiurge, of the “homo faber,” but becomes a nonauratic, collective endeavor. Hence, in this same article, Gadda not only proposes to conceive of the writer as a mason, building a wall with the bricks made by others, but extends an explicit invitation to abandon idealist views of authorship: “lo schilleriano gioco, ov'egli assume quella stessa parte che nell'universo il Creatore” (484) [the Schillerian game, where he plays the part of the Creator of the universe].²³ Nonetheless, Gadda does allow for some measure of creativity but relocates it in a reworking of the formed material, in a manipulation of the already said. This manipulation ranges from neutral citation and replay to negation by way of strategies of parodic reversal and uncrowning.²⁴ A longer quotation from the text finalizes well Gadda's rhetorical project:

Lo scrittore ha davanti a sé delle realtà storiche, esterne, come il cavatore ha dei cubi di granito da rimuovere. E' impossibile dimenticare una così povera e spesso dimenticata verità. Lo scrittore a sua posta rimove e coordina queste realtà date (storiche, esterne), o le ricrea, o, meglio, conferisce ad esse quel supersignificato che è il suo modo d'espedirsi.

(476)

[External realities stand in front of the writer like those chunks of granite that a miner has to remove. It is impossible to forget such a simple and often forgotten truth. For his own part, the writer removes and coordinates these given realities (historical, external), or he recreates them, or better yet, confers upon them that added meaning which is his own way of proceeding.]

Notes

1. Gadda, “Meditazione breve circa il dire e il fare,” I viaggi la morte, Saggi giornali favole e altri scritti I, 454; my translation.

2. This metaphysical interpretation of Gadda's writings was initiated by Giancarlo Roscioni, the administrator of the Gaddian archive and obviously the only critic to have access to the author's unpublished material. In La disarmonia prestabilita, Roscioni formulated Gadda's project as the Cartesian “Singula enumerare” in order to “Omnia circumspicere.” Because Gadda, argued Roscioni, sought to establish the identity of the single by taking into account encyclopedic frames of knowledge, the project was doomed, as Leibnitz's history of the house of Braunschwig in Annales Brunsvicienses had been. Following Roscioni, a number of critics have made analogous arguments. For an excellent sampling of this reception, see Ceccaroni, Leggere Gadda. Other works from the 1980s and the 1990s continue this interpretative tradition. Benedetti, for example, in Una trappola di parole, reads Gadda's narratives as the unsuccessful attempt to turn chaos into cosmos. Sbragia, “From the Novel of Self-Ridicule to the Modern Macaronic,” 169-70, sees Gadda as a mythopoetic modernist, questing for wholeness and transcendence; so do Stragà, “La scrittura del disordine,” 85-101; Stellardi, ‘“La luce ohe recede,” 123-36; and Gabetta, “Gadda e il caledoscopio dell'euresi,” 15-43. The few studies to have resisted Roscioni's school of interpretation, and to which I am much indebted, are Contini, Quarant'anni d'amicizia; Guglielmi, “Gadda e la tradizione del romanzo,” 17-37, La prosa italiana del novecento, 211-43; and Fratnik, L'écriture détournée.

3. On this point, see Dombroski, Introduzione allo studio di Carlo E. Gadda; Bertone, “I diari ‘del tempo perduto,’” in Il romanzo come sistema, 35-54; Guglielminetti, “Gadda/Gaddus: diari, giornali e note autobiografiche di guerra,” 127-39, and Sbragia, C. E. Gadda and the Modern Macaronic, 43ff.

4. Gadda, “Giornale di guerra e di prigionia 1915-1919,” in Saggi giornali favole II, 441; all citations will be from this collective edition and will be given parenthetically in text.

5. This is true if one excludes the short tale “La passeggiata autunnale” written during his imprisonment, and a handful of poems that Gadda wrote between 1919 and 1921, while working as an engineer for various companies.

6. Gadda, Racconto italiano di ignoto del novecento, Scritti vari e postumi, 393.

7. In a later note, Gadda even goes as far as to suggest that he may have more than five voices, and if he were to describe them, he would need a very large painter's paillette: “non basterebbe nemmeno la mia propria tavolozza; ho il violetto e l'indaco, il bleu e il verde, ma mi mancano il cioccolato e l'arancione” (Racconto, 602) [not even my pallette would suffice; I have the purple and the indigo, the blue and the green, but I am missing the chocolate and the orange].

8. “… l'impossibilità del romanzo novecentesco di proporre ancora una volta … una rappresentazione globale, omnicomprensiva, della vita,” (Isella, “Prefazione,” xviii; my translation).

9. Galdenzi Capobianco, in “Cronache da un labirinto,” 173-207, points out that the composition of Racconto corresponds to the appearance of several new theoretical approaches to the novel. These include Ortega y Gasset's Ideas sobra la novela (1925), Thibaudet's Le liseur de roman (1925), Muir's The Structure of the Novel (1928), and Sklovskji's Theory of Prose (1929).

10. In addition to a chronological concomitance with Mikhail Bakhtin's work (Freudianism dates from 1927, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship 1928, Problems of Dostoevsky's Art and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language 1929, “Discourse in the Novel” 1934-35) Gadda's conceptualization of the novel's form bears striking resemblance to Bakhtin's. On this point, see Raimondi, Barocco moderno, and particularly Segre, “Novità su Gadda,” 3-4, and Intrecci di voci.

11. On the notion of a baroque reality, compare also Gadda's 1952 piece “L'Editore chiede venia del recupero chiamando in causa l'Autore,” now printed as appendix to Gadda, La cognizione del dolore, 480: “grottesco e barocco … legati alla natura e alla storia” [grotesque and baroque … tied to nature and history]. Gadda's interest in French and Spanish baroque literature is also well documented. He often alludes to Rabelais and Cervantes and translated Quevedo's El mundo por de dentro, Barbadillo's La peregrinacíon sabia for the volume Narratori Spagnoli. In 1945, he wrote “Rappresentare la ‘Celestina,’” I viaggi la morte, Saggi giornali favole e altri scritti I, 534-38. For additional discussion on Gadda and the baroque, see Stellardi, “Il barocco nella scrittura di Gadda,” Raimondi, Barocco moderno, Manganaro, Le Baroque et l'ingénieur, and Dombroski, Creative Entanglements.

12. The work of Saussure was recommended to Gadda by Contini. See Contini, Lettere a Gianfranco Contini, 108.

13. Gadda, Meditazione milanese, Scritti vari e postumi, 621.

14. As does Deleuze in his The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque. See, in particular, the chapter “What Is Baroque?,” 27-38.

15. “… elle ne peut jamais se refermer en système, puisque ce qu'elle travaille, c'est précisement ‘l'impossibilité’—du système—,” (Risset, “Carlo Emilio Gadda,” 950).

16. Compare also the following statement in Gadda's “Tecnica e poesia,” Gli Anni, Saggi giornali favole e altri scritti I, 246: “Esistono limiti. La cognizione e la confessione dei propri limiti è un dovere; ed è un motivo essenziale della verità” [Limits exist. The knowledge and the confession of one's limits is a duty; and it is an essential motive for truth].

17. I owe this observation to Guglielmi's “Gadda e la tradizione del romanzo,” 30. In La prosa italiana del novecento, 213, Guglielmi had also noticed how Gadda “interrogandosi sulle res è ricondotto al problema dei nomina.”

18. A similarity not surprising considering Gadda's exposure to German culture. He had been a pupil of the German physicist Max Abrahams, a reader of Wittgenstein and von Hofmannsthal, and a student of German philosophy. Between 1925 and 1931, his work as an engineer also took him on numerous trips to the Ruhr. For additional discussion on Gadda and Musil via Mach's conception of the “real,” see Roscioni, “Introduzione,” Gadda, Meditazione milanese, xvi, n. 3, and De Benedictis, La piega nera, 203 ff. However, the most interesting comparison between the two writers remains the one provided by Calvino, Lezioni Americane, 101-20.

19. There are references to Schopenhauer both in Racconto, 450, and Meditazione, 834. Lucchini, in “Gli studi filosofici di Gadda,” 230, n. 23, notices that Gadda's copy of Kant's Critique of Judgment is unmarked except for the section “analitica del bello, analitica del sublime” [analytic of the beautiful, analytic of the sublime].

20. Roscioni, in “Introduzione” to Gadda, Meditazione milanese, xviii, n. 1, acknowledges the similarities between this text and the 1915 Course in General Linguistics and imputes them to Gadda's and Saussure's reading of Vilfredo Pareto's theories of interactive economies. The similarities include Gadda's use of the comparison with the chess game and the relational and differential value of the pieces on the board. However, mirroring the outcome of his earlier La disarmonia prestabilita, Roscioni ends by neutralizing Gadda's project and suggests that it tends to a hypermodel of structuralism. Elio Gioanola has made analogous observations and has described Gadda's project as a type of ur-structuralism: “Struttura delle strutture” [structure of structures] (L'uomo dei topazi, 173). An analogy between Gadda and Saussure has also been noticed in Cannon, “Notes on Gadda's Critical Essays,” 67-71, and Manganaro, Le Baroque et l'ingénieur, 92.

21. It is well known that the composition of Meditazione coincides with Gadda's reading of “La Scienza Nuova” for a contribution to “Fiera Letteraria” of 1929. The piece is reprinted as “La ‘Scienza Nuova,’” Scritti dispersi, Saggi giornali favole e altri scritti I, 691-97. On the issue, see also Battistini, “Gadda, Vico e un'edizione della ‘Scienza nuova,’” 381-86.

22. Both essays are reprinted in I viaggi la morte, Saggi giornali favole e altri scritti I, 561-86 and 444-54 respectively.

23. Compare also the 1936 essay “Meditazione breve circa il dire e il fare,” I viaggi la morte, Saggi giornali favole e altri scritti I, 444-54. Here Gadda declares that his endeavor is so stripped of aura that it might not even reach the most immediate audience of family members: “non perverrò nemmanco ai figlioli, non che ai nepoti” (“Meditazione breve,” 444), [I will neither reach the children nor the nephews].

24. On the issue of parody, compare again “Meditazione breve circa il dire e il fare” 452-53, where Gadda promises to shake “le terminologie e i sistemi fraseologici inadeguati” [inadequate terminologies and phrases], and the following preface from the prose collection Il castello di Udine, “Tendo al mio fine” (1934): “Tendo a una brutale deformazione dei temi che il destino s'è creduto di proponermi come formate cose ed obbietti: come paragrafi immoti della sapiente sua legge” (Romanzi e racconti I, 119) [I tend towards a brutal deformation of the themes that fate has attempted to present to me as final things and absolute objects: as immutable paragraphs of its wise law].