[In the following essay, de Lucca discusses the influence of nineteenth-century Italian author Alessandro Manzoni on Gadda and compares and contrasts their views on the function of literature.]

The difficulties of which Carlo Emilio Gadda complains in writing Racconto italiano del novecento, and his recourse to the works of Alessandro Manzoni in an attempt to solve them, spring partly from the tension, that I wish to discuss at present in relation to Manzoni, Gadda feels in trying to translate an organic and exhaustive vision of the complexity of reality, born of philosophical and scientific studies, into a narrative structure.¹ Related to this is Gadda's feeling that the act of literary creation must be informed by an epistemological and subordinately ethical vision, which is, for him, its condition for existence. In the face of the progressive rationalization and specialization of knowledge and its various procedural branches, each establishing its own cognitive methods, mechanisms of production and communication, literature must assert more, be more than a cult of l'art pour l'art, defending its precarious position in what are called the human sciences. Just what, then, is the specificity of literature, and where can it be positioned, for Gadda and Manzoni? What are the important differences in their respective theories of literature? What are the relationships between, and reciprocal implications of, literature, theory of literature and philosophy?

Manzoni's Del romanzo storico, Dell'invenzione, and his long, programmatic letters tell us of his distress—resolved only by renunciation—over literary invention, what he perceived as the differences between historical fact and the verisimilar invention of poets. Poets take necessary liberties with the reality of events, as even historians must in creating their narratives. The difference between the two narrative modes is that poets, as we might say today, present the memory of a past that has never been present. To the young Manzoni, that is one of the freedoms granted by God to men in their pursuit of truth—the “vero morale” of which he writes in his letters—in the absence of God's special revelation.² If, for the younger Manzoni, the “garbuglio” of the human heart and the “avvenimenti inavvertiti,” the obscure events and mechanisms of history, may be attributed to the design of a transcendant Providence, the truths of which it is the writer's job to persuade mankind, not quite so for Gadda the agnostic who, without the illumination of faith, nevertheless registers, at the start of his career as a writer, the need to supply himself with a rational explanation. The quality in Manzoni that makes Gadda most “manzoniano” is not a sort of biological attachment, strong as this was, to the land of his precursor's birth, nor the equally powerful tendency to rethink his own life through that of Manzoni's. Neither is it entirely the ethical perspective of Manzoni's analysis, nor the Caravaggio-like detail and color of his design, nor the minute diagnosis of evil in human society. All of these, reiterated by critics examining the relationship between the two authors, are important.³ But I think it is useful to concentrate on what probably draws Gadda most to Manzoni: the extreme importance of the gnoseological function of art's representation of reality, its action upon that reality, and the effect of temporality in literature.

For the young Manzoni, and for Gadda, literature, because it is, declaredly, a mixture of reality and unreality, is the key to the scrutiny of what Robert Musil calls the “nicht-ratioïde Gebiet”: a non-ratioid area (the coinage is Musil's) which embraces all that which cannot be organized in a system and reduced to rules and laws.⁴ The engineer and writer Gadda, with his obsession for total systems, manifest from early on in Racconto italiano (1924) and Meditazione milanese (1928), seems to be both attracted to, and reluctantly dissenting from, classical determinism and positivism. According to classical determinism, as expressed in the French mathematician Laplace's Philosophical Essays on Probabilities, if an intellect, which at any given moment knew all the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it, were vast enough to submit its data to analysis, it could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom. For such an intellect nothing could be uncertain, and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.⁵ Since human life is finite, deterministic models can be perceived only with small, delimited phenomena, and not always then, as contemporary physics and chaos theory in mathematics have tried to demonstrate (chaos theory in mathematics deals with random behavior in deterministic systems). A systematic mind applied to complex systems, such as an historical event, the weather, or any human behavior, runs into great difficulty because all we can see is a tiny part of an enormously complicated motion, which appears random and structureless. The idea that such systems are in fact calculable given the enormous amount of time and data necessary is deterministic. By Gadda's time, physicists knew that deterministic models could be used for only a small set of phenomena.⁶ According to the uncertainty principle in quantum theory, which Gadda knew, we cannot simultaneously specify the exact position and velocity of any particle. This means that all we can do is calculate the probability that small particles will behave in a certain fashion, so classical deterministic models are of limited use in studying the elementary phenomena and structure of matter. The universe is systematic, on one level, and a-systematic on another. A fellow engineer-narrator, Musil, described the tension between determinable mathematical systems and the apparently a-systematic movements of human events in his novel The Man Without Qualities:

But there was something else that he had also had on the tip of his tongue, something about mathematical problems that did not admit of any general solution, though they did admit of particular solutions, the combining of which brought one nearer to the general solution. He might have added that he regarded the problem set by every human life as one of these. What one calls an age—without knowing whether one should by that understand centuries, millennia, or the span of time between schooldays and grandparenthood—this broad unregulated flux of conditions would then amount to approximately as much as a chaotic succession of unsatisfactory and (when taken singly) false attempts at a solution, attempts that might produce the correct and total solution, but only when humanity had learnt to combine them all.⁷

But Gadda believed that all systems are infinite and therefore incalculable in time, regardless of their random or determined state. From as early as 1924, Gadda worked on his own “teoria del carattere provvisorio e indefinito delle conoscenze fisiche, sotto un aspetto catalogico o di progressus,” emphasizing the inevitable introduction of temporality in the reconstruction and representation of infinite systems.⁸ He based his ideas, in part, on the study of Leibniz, who considered, as do theorists of science today, all our empirical knowledge as a series of provisory steps.⁹ Gadda's poetics, founded on his scientific and philosophical views, especially on the concept of “deformazione”—that every element of reality and the language used to represent it are constantly changing—is the opposite of the more common metatemporal poetics which confers on literature a power of eternity that distinguishes it from or holds it superior to a process of becoming. His works are, then, constant and successive mediations with the external world and his own stages of consciousness, inseparable and ceaselessly deformed and deforming. But they cannot be mediations toward systemization, if the system or systems are infinite, which is what Gadda holds.

One cannot study a living economy, or a nation, or a mind, with exactness, by isolating a small part. For one thing, one's experimental subsystem will be constantly perturbed by uncontrollable outside influences. A sensitive seismometer will record not just earthquakes, but also the footsteps of the janitor pushing his mop down the hall. Physicists go to extremes to isolate such unwanted effects, but when dealing with human behavior, or the mechanisms of human action, what does one isolate and eliminate? It is difficult to judge accurately what is or is not pertinent to what we call an historical event. If, as Manzoni writes in Del romanzo storico, “Dallo storico più coscienzioso, più diligente, non s'avrà, a gran prezzo, tutta la verità che si può desiderare, né così netta come si può desiderare,” where would this total truth, free of our conjectures, come from, if not either from divine revelation or an impossible, deterministic calculation that takes the entire universe into account?¹⁰ The great French mathematician, Poincaré, was aware of this problem in science. If the scientist had at his disposal infinite time, it would only be necessary to say to him: “Look and notice well.” All reality would be disclosed. But as there isn't time to see everything he must make a choice, that is, artificially limit a system.

Gadda, following the same reasoning, despite his obsession with systematic totality cannot systematize because, among other things, he is convinced in keeping with his time that the nature of human behavior is part of an infinite system of relations. That system is impossible to enclose, eliminating possibly pertinent information, without betraying reality. Manzoni cannot resolve the system that underlies human events, because of the relationship between human morality and the justice and working of God, who is for him inscrutable. God's creation, however, lets us discern a small part of His truth: Manzoni describes, in I Promessi Sposi, a theodicy. The hard job of the narrator, no less than for the philosopher, is, for Manzoni, to “mettere in luce e alla prova la metafisica latente e sottintesa, della quale le azioni sono conseguenze più o meno mediate.”¹¹ Reversing the terms, a poet examines human events to arrive, as far as possible, at their secret mechanism. According to Manzoni's early, overly optimistic (in the light of his later anti-literary writings) pronouncement to M. Chauvet in a letter concerning the classical unities in tragedy, “ogni segreto dell'animo umano si svela, tutto ciò che determina i grandi avvenimenti, che caratterizza i grandi destini, si palesa alle immaginazioni dotate di sufficiente carica di simpatia. Tutto quello che la volontà umana ha di forte o di misterioso, che la sventura ha di sacro e di profondo, il poeta può intuirlo; o, per meglio dire, può individuarlo, capirlo, ed esprimerlo.”¹²

Much as he would like to, Gadda cannot share this faith. He does partly share Manzoni's limiting belief, one that both positions the poet in society and poses his activity as merely the last word in historical interpretation. The poet's attendibility lies in the congruency of his invention with noted facts. For Gadda, the writer “rimuove e coordina … realtà date (storiche, esterne), o le ricrea, o, meglio, conferisce ad esse quel supersignificato che è il suo modo di espedirsi”: concepts that he would have certainly found in Manzoni, especially in Del romanzo storico.¹³ But Manzoni, in that theoretical work, seems to reject the historical novel for its mixture of reality and unreality, while admitting the same thing in historical analysis. “Quando la mente riceve la notizia d'un positivo che ecciti vivamente la sua attenzione, ma una notizia tronca e mancante di parti o essenziali, o importanti, è inclinata naturalmente a rivolgersi a cose ideali che abbiano con quel positivo, e una relazione generale di compossibilità, e una relazione speciale o di causa, o d'effetto, o di mezzo, o di modo, o d'importante concomitanza, che ci hanno dovuto avere le cose reali di cui non è rimasta la traccia.”¹⁴ The only difference, Manzoni says, is that the historian points out just where he is introducing the unreal, the conjecture, while the poet presents the unreal in the most persuasive, and verisimilar, terms possible, at pains to attribute real status to both historical events and his inventions. Things are a bit different, since Manzoni's time: we now tend to think that the specificity of fiction's rhetorical mode is clear. History, also, in the words of Paul de Man, is considered by more readers to be “no longer characterized as a labor governed solely by the principle of utility, and on the basis of which it becomes possible to remove in a radical way both art and poetry from its sphere of action.”¹⁵ In Manzoni, and in Gadda especially, the pressing requirement of analysis, the alternation between observation and reportage of events and reflection concerning their causes, render the distinctions between “literature,” “philosophy,” and “history” unclear. On one hand, both deny the separation between image and concept, and the attribution of the former to poetry and the latter to philosophy that result in a negation of philosophical literature and metaphorical philosophy. On the other, one gets the impression, reading both authors, that if there is, as Manzoni claims in Lettera sul Romanticismo, a “vero morale,” to be placed aside a “vero storico,” literature, in their view, is the discursive type best suited to the negotiation.

For the older Manzoni of Del romanzo storico, history, not poetry, reveals a trace of a theodicy, but it is a type of history + n (witness Manzoni's “historical” work, Storia della colonna infame, with its adjunct of moral considerations), just as writing for Gadda is, as we have seen, a kind of poetry + n. Just as valid for Manzoni is Gian Carlo Roscioni's admonition that “per chi in Gadda studi la ‘letteratura’ la presenza accanto ad essa della ‘filosofia’ non indica un prima o un al di là della ‘letteratura’ quanto piuttosto l'estrema consapevolezza dei problemi conoscitivi sottesi alla ‘deformazione’ espressiva, allo scrivere.”¹⁶ Only that, for Manzoni, by the time of Del romanzo storico, the “vero positivo” cannot be the domain of the belles lettres. In the end he refuses literature for just that reason. Literature, in Gadda's view, is part of, and acts on, reality. But it “encompasses” reality no more, and no less, than activities such as science and history. It can, however, to a greater extent than other types of discourse, formally mirror the limitations of the tools given to man, in whatever field he works in his dealing with reality. The poet moves in the universe of infinite variables. His problem is that of finding a rhetoric that symbolically and analogically recreates life “con i mezzi e dentro i termini propri del pensiero.”¹⁷ Manzoni, as literary theorist, rejects the methods of fiction. “Il mezzo,” he writes, “e l'unico mezzo che uno abbia di rappresentare uno stato dell'umanità, come tutto ciò che ci può essere di rappresentabile con la parola, è di trasmettere il concetto quale è arrivato a formarselo … Ed è il mezzo di cui si serve la storia. …”¹⁸ That is, Manzoni defends history for the same reasons that some, at the end of our century, revindicate poetry.

Another question which I think bears on what Cesare Segre calls Manzoni's sacrifice of his artistic greatness on the altar of a superior rationality, is the following. Let us suppose that for Gadda, “literature” and “philosophy” are about the same work, with, perhaps, different “modi di espedirsi.” In philosophical terms what do we have in front of us when we read his fiction? To answer this it helps to study Gadda's early discourse on method, Meditazione milanese. There, as in Manzoni's theoretical works, the cognitive goal is often expressed as an analysis of the system of relations among things. The narrative form, the author implies in Meditazione milanese, involving as it does temporality, a change of state ascribable to a temporal duration and organized by some form of causality, is the only epistemological model available to one who wishes to verbalize a cognitive act. For Gadda, “l'istinto della combinazione è nell'universo,” and Manzoni is praised in 1924 precisely because “con un disegno segreto e non appariscente egli disegnò li avvenimenti inavvertiti.”¹⁹ Manzoni, whose faith required the submission of reason, willed not by some irrational and inferior energy, but by reason itself, believed in an infinite deus absconditus and ignotus.²⁰ But the style of his thought is superlatively that of a writer who distrusted abstraction, and who asserted, as a Catholic, that reality and the world exist, that the finite object exists and that the mind must explore them as far as is possible, adapting itself to them and resisting temptations to idealism, that is, to fabrication. Gadda's cast of mind was similar, though agnostic, a fact that makes a difference, above all in terms of style. Italo Calvino partly confirms this with his observation that Gadda “attraverso una genetica combinatoria mira a una mappa o catalogo o enciclopedia del possibile, e, risalendo una geneologia di cause e concause, a collegare tutte le storie in una, nell'intento eroico di liberarsi dal groviglio dei fatti subìti passivamente contrapponendo loro la costruzione d'un ‘groviglio conoscitivo’—o noi dicemmo, d'un “modello”—altrettanto articolato.”²¹ This attempt, if it really is at the root of Gadda's narrative, as Calvino and some critics, notably Roscioni, claimed, would draw him to a Manzoni who made it an article of artistic faith in the famous letter to M. Chauvet that “Una delle più importanti facoltà della mente umana è … quella di cogliere, fra gli avvenimenti, i rapporti di causa e di effetto, di anteriorità e di conseguenza che li legano; di ricondurre a un punto di vista unitario, e come in virtù di un'unica intuizione, molti fatti separati dalle condizioni del tempo e dello spazio.”²² Calvino noted, in commenting Gadda's work, that “la complessità dei vorticosi processi di transformazione si espande in labirinti concentrici e non tarda ad avere ragione del più ostinato ottimismo gnoseologico.”²³ If this is true for Gadda, which I doubt, it is certainly not so for Manzoni, for whom reason can lead only to a partial cognition of the totality of events and must itself consent to the act of faith. Manzoni's faith includes a gnoseological optimism, of which the revelation of faith, in addition to reason, is an essential part. Both artists, however, Gadda from a scientific point of view, and Manzoni from a religious one, possess a confidence in the external reality that guides them through successive approaches and corrections, sustains their deep respect for and study of texts, and inspires the extensive search for a language or languages adequate to the objects under review. For Manzoni the search for this proper language means, in the full of his career, the renunciation of literature. The vast linguistic differences between the two artists come from their different positions concerning the limitations of human, that is, finite, science. But for the younger Manzoni, and for Gadda, literature, in some way, discovers the omissions of philosophy. The difference is that Manzoni has literature plus faith in divine revelation. It is this difference, more than any other, that makes Gadda Manzonian in his gnoseological and ethical research, and anti-Manzonian in terms of language and style.

For Gadda, narrative, in coordinating “realtà date,” confers on what is presented to the senses a “supersignificato che è il suo modo di espedirsi.” The writer creates nothing, Manzoni teaches, and the artist's genius consists of an extension of the operation of the historian. To arrive by this method without the hope of religious revelation—and “method” for Gadda means not some universal key but a principle of organization of portions of reality—at the sought-after total map of the possible, it would be necessary to consider an infinity of events and causes, with a corresponding infinity of symbolic or analogical approaches. The “opera esige che il modello agisca sugli innumerevoli con innumerevoli modi,” and the artist attempts to form “la tabella delle infinite combinazioni.”²⁴ The task is impossible, of course. As Gadda was well aware, there is an unsolved conflict between determinism and an infinite model. In a study of causal loops, the logician Michael Dummett points out that at least since Thomas Aquinas the idea of an infinite causal chain appears logically impossible:

In Aquinas' proof for the existence of God or first cause, he says that one cannot go back to infinity in a sequence of causes, that is, that you cannot have an infinite descending causal chain, where by descending causal chain I mean a sequence each term of which other than the first is a cause of that preceding term. […] It might be possible to give a precise characterization of an infinite deductive structure, in the form of a tree: each statement standing below one or more other statements from which it follows by a valid principle of inference. Since it is infinite, however, there must be at least one branch of the tree that does not terminate, that is, has no tip; and, if so, the proof establishes nothing. […] In the infinite proof, we have no reason for accepting any of the statements occurring along the infinite branch as true, and hence no reason for accepting the conclusion.²⁵

Such conflict between positivistic determinism and infinite systems transforms, however, Gadda's art from a traditional nineteenth-century model into something new: an attempt at a unified representation of infinity and disorder. The theme of the “logica combinatoria” that results in reality often comes to the fore in his text as something close to parody. One instance is in Adalgisa, with the mock genesis of the behavior of the youth Bruno, who simply appears passing on his bicycle and ogling Adalgisa as she talks to her sister-in-law on the street:

Bruno ripassò, alto e calmo, sulla sua bicicletta. Anche il suo sangue, traverso i millenni, doveva aver comportato e risolto tutta una serie di problemi infinitesimali. Gli imponderabili atti e moti, le intime e quasi inavvertite volizioni, le oscure e tormentose delibere, le profonde elezioni dell'istinto, i minimi sopralivelli della scelta, “les petites perceptions,” s'erano lentamente stratificate negli evi, affiorando nella risorgiva di una persona. L'oscuro tendere, l'oscuro volere, l'oscura fermezza, l'oscura fede: l'oscura fatica della sopportazione, l'oscura negazione e ripudio delle cose abominevoli, la scelta degli atti vitali, il raggiunto essere, alfine, come di chi emunto alfine risorga: nel giorno!, dalla tomba infernale della miniera.²⁶

Clearly, if the desire of the agnostic artist is to somehow arrive at a “legatura e inquadratura generale” of a system retained infinite, and the artistic enterprise itself is a deforming agent of that system, as Gadda declares fully aware of the logical consequences, his operation must be severely limited. Gadda's digressive, centrifugal styles simultaneously call attention to, and, according to critics such as Calvino and Roscioni, hopelessly seek to transcend, this limitation. But certainly the meditation on the paradox of human existence, as a desire for eternity that can only take shape in the finitude of the moment, underlies those styles. “Poetry,” writes Paul de Man, “becomes the putting into language of the failure of the truth to found itself. And since the process of becoming is what constitutes the very experience of this failure, poetry appears as the logos of this becoming.”²⁷ Gadda used the word “deformazione” while de Man used “le devenir” (“becoming”), but the meaning is probably the same. As Eduardo Saccone writes concerning Tomasi di Lampedusa, following the same discourse on temporal process and poetry developed by de Man, “That which remains, child of consciousness and also chance, lacking totality, itself the fragment of a totality that has never existed … is a work that has resigned itself to the transformation of the eternal into the temporal: a poetry whose necessarily temporal character has been recognized, wherein the desire for eternity can be expressed only in the finiteness of the moment.”²⁸ According to Meditazione milanese any portion of reality is defined as a “grumo di relazioni,” that is, existing insofar as it is a part of a system of relations: we say one event when what we really mean is our finite perception of an infinite number of relations. “Non è possibile pensare un grumo di relazioni come finito, come un gnocco distaccato da altri nella pentola. I filamenti di questo grumo ci portano ad altro, ad altro, infinitamente ad altro: ma ciò dico non nel senso dibattuto e noto del regresso delle cause finite e progresso degli effetti finiti […]. Ma dico invece ciò nel senso di una coestensione logica. …”²⁹ That is, no “grumo di relazioni” being closed and autonomous, the confines of a system are always arbitrary, a matter of convention, “determinate in base al grado di approsimazione dell'analisi che ci interessa di istituire.”³⁰

An author, if he desires, can structure his novel so as to present a closed system, like the game of chess, providing us with a narrative that, as Gadda writes in Meditazione milanese, “essendo un gioco finito e chiuso ci dà l'idea di un cosmo logico, con premesse che la chiudono, come un muro chiude un giardino.”³¹ Most great literary works are built thus. The great novels of the nineteenth century follow, in the main, an investigative epistemological paradigm, based on the presupposition of an immobile, finite and objective reality. But as Gadda is aware, the force of the modern artist, as well as the philosopher, may consist in exploding this view. For Gadda reality is mobile, infinite and infinitely differentiated by perception: “Conoscere significa deformare.”³² Reality is not a result of perception. Analysis itself is part of the “gioco di interpendenze,” or system, therefore constantly and ineluctably deforming the universe by its relations to it like any other part, according to the cardinal theories of modern physics and philosophy. Since “ogni elemento di un sistema è … anch'esso sistema, i cui propri elementi sono tutti deformati da una modificazione del sistema più comprensivo,” any reality is “un'ermeneutica a soluzioni multiple: come un enigma che avesse un numero infinito di soluzioni.”³³ Any view which does not integrate, in a “coestensione logica,” all possible relations that ever were and ever can be, is, for Gadda, defective, arbitrary, abstract (“astratto è ciò che non tiene contro di tutte le correlazioni, di tutte le implicazioni possibili,” Gian Carlo Roscioni comments in his study of Meditazione milanese).³⁴ In short, any human view at all. As finite beings we deal with the abstract, with systems conventionally closed, that are really infinite. And the abstract is defined as what is only partially real, a mixture of reality and irreality. But it follows logically that, if the universe is an infinite series of combinations, every possible combination should occur, sooner or later. Does this include every conceivable combination? No: we could conceive something against the known laws of physics, like the poet Alfieri ascending the heavens without an airplane (one of Carducci's poetic images mocked by Gadda), or reversing an irreversible phenomenon, like bringing back the dead.³⁵ The inventions of art, however, that describe possible phenomena, may be mirrored in reality at some point: “Io vagheggio con la fantasia una certa signora X, un ‘mio’ personaggio … Succede che a Brembate o a Garbagnate, c'è davvero la signora X. Si tratta, come ognuno capisce, di uno incidente combinatorio, che cade sotto il principio di Eisenberg.”³⁶ Clearly, this is a game of logic, but it helps to explain why Gadda, with his insistence that the artist must merely coordinate givens of reality, using a symbolic system (language) which is a “lavoro collettivo, storicamente capitalizzato in una massa idiomatica,” believes in the validity of poetry, as Manzoni in the end did not. If, as Roscioni says, in Meditazione milanese Gadda “lo scrittore … prende il sopravvento sul filosofo,” it is not only because there is an emotional, vitalistic tendency in its language, but because Gadda realizes in Meditazione milanese that the fact that language is temporal means no one type of discourse has the advantage in mirroring the total, totalitarian view of God, or of an infinite being who has gathered all data, all the givens of reality, past, present and future. If the All (“le Tout”) were instantaneous, noted Paul Valéry in his Cahiers, or given in its entirety, there would be no language. Man must order, n + 1 and so on, the data of reality. In the ordering is the analysis, itself a deforming agent upon those data. Not so God, or the total view.³⁷

It should be clear from what was said above that our view of the universe must logically be “abstract.” For Gadda in the scientist is mirrored the modern artist, for he too is gathering and arranging, in time, data. For him, “chiusura” equals “errore.” The nature of scientific activity precludes closure, yet admits it of necessity: the modes of science are a model for the impossibility of closure of a system, although the scientist must choose and limit, recognizing that his choices are a matter of convenience and do not reflect the nature of the reality under observation.³⁸ Out of the work of the artist, the philosopher or the scientist, it may happen that, as Italo Calvino writes “ci aspettiamo che la filigrana segreta dell'universo stia per apparire in trasparenza,” but we know now, or think we know, that our expectation is “sempre delusa come è giusto.”³⁹ The “unfinished” nature of major narratives like the Pasticciaccio (which is the only novel actually concluded by Gadda) or La cognizione del dolore, which Gianfranco Contini called “torsi narrativi,” is, then, a deliberate feature, akin to the circular form, at once closed and infinite, adopted by Joyce for Finnegans Wake, who coupled it with an invented language whose portmanteau words are formed to provide as many significations as possible, none privileged. In Meditazione milanese Gadda deals with similar conceptual models, though his narrative takes another form entirely. Calvino writes for many critics when he states that Gadda is “diviso tra l'aspirazione a scrivere ogni volta una storia naturale del genere umano e il furore che lo congestiona ogni volta al punto di fargli interrompere i suoi libri a metà.”⁴⁰ Now, there is, in Gadda, little doubt concerning the aspiration, or the furor, but a cursory study of Meditazione milanese helps explain that the “interruption” of his narratives is a voluntary artistic manifestation of his philosophical position. Both Gadda's famous digressions and the apparent fragmentation of his narratives result from a philosophy and its consequent theory of language. Gadda's own contradictory statements when discussing the finished or unfinished support this view. Those philosophical and linguistic convictions may well be frustrating, based as they are on the impossibility of rational, universal knowledge, but they need not be any more frustrating for an artist than for the scientist. Any scientist knows, as does Gadda, that our knowledge is and will always be partial, and our descriptions limiting and deforming. Gadda's furors are not really those of a disappointed gnoseological optimism, although there may be some of the frustration or nostalgia we feel at our loss of the total systems of our past. His furors have to do with moral concerns. Manzoni himself knows that our knowledge must be partial, but he believes in the possible, total revelation of divine grace, when language is no longer necessary.

A narrative, like any scientific investigation, must, in some fashion, be “closed.” But because the artist ought to confer on events that super-signification “che è il suo modo di espedirsi,” any such closure, even merely formal and conventional, is both rejected and accepted, as it must be. In Gadda, therefore, the tension between philosophical convictions and the exigencies of narrative, which claims to explain in some way “more” than history, or philosophy, is in some way unresolved, as it was for Manzoni. But he does not commit the error, idealistic and positivist, of supposing a separation between theory and practice, and between the object under exam and analyst, which in art resolves into the separation and opposition between representation and reality to be represented.⁴¹ For Gadda the notions of subject and object are not isolated, one from the other, but correlated: both part of an inexhaustible process of “deformation,” understood phenomenologically and cognitively. In this process, no reality remains “identical to itself” and self-sufficient. The world consists of an “ermeneutica a soluzioni multiple.” In the Gaddian narrative there is no dialectical relationship between phenomenon and essence.

Manzoni, in Del romanzo storico, makes it clear that the artist should invent nothing, his operation being an appendix to the task of the historian. That is, the material must come from events which have been generally perceived, from history. In the letter to M. Chauvet, which precedes the essay on the historical novel by many years, Manzoni had written: “I fatti, perché più conformi alla verità, per così dire, concreta, possiedono nel più alto grado quel carattere di verità poetica … Il nostro poeta incontra nella storia un'azione che gli interessa di prendere in esame, nel cui fondo vorrebbe penetrare; è così interessante che egli desidera conoscerla in tutti i suoi aspetti e farla conoscere nel modo più completo, più vivo.”⁴² Manzoni the poet becomes, in the end, the historian-moralist of Storia della colonna infame. But what is the truth of a reality that results, for Gadda, from an infinite series of combinations? Are there really different grades of abstraction in human discourse? Are the words of the poet, somehow, closer to or farther away from life than those of the philosopher or scientist? Is an historian more “truthful” than the historical novelist? These are questions dealt with, by Gadda, through his insistent awareness of the deformation inherent in observing and choosing “i fatti,” and the resulting pertinence of what looks like infinite digression. His resolution of the crisis that led Manzoni to abandon art, a crisis of rationality which might have been, paradoxically, resolved using the religious conviction that our truth is never complete here below, is the realization that all human discourses are mixtures of reality and irreality. All discourses are “partial,” all “abstract,” and subject, as human products, to “error”—the poetic “errare” of Ariosto.

Notes

1. The notebook containing notes for and sections of the narrative is the “Cahiers d'Ètudes” Gadda kept during the composition, never completed, of the Racconto italiano del novecento in 1924. See C. E. Gadda, Racconto italiano del novecento (Torino: Einaudi, 1983). Dante Isella, to whom we owe the publication of the work sixty years after its composition, has written a thorough biographical and historical preface. Angelo Colombo, in an article entitled “Manzoni nel ‘Racconto italiano’ di Gadda” (in Otto/Novecento, gennaio-febbraio 1985, pp. 19-35), stresses the “struttura fortemente ellittica” of the narrative.

2. Manzoni's Jansenist studies play a role in his theories concerning the limits of human science. See E. Gabbuti, Il Manzoni e gli ideologi francesi (Firenze: Sansoni, 1936).

3. For a summary review of current critical opinions concerning Gadda's Manzonism, see A. Andreini, Studi e testi gaddiani (Palermo: Sellerio, 1983), pp. 17-54.

4. See Musil, in an essay entitled Skizze der Erkenntnis des Dichters, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. II, pp. 1042-59, (Reinbeh bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978). English translation in Precision and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 62.

5. See Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice?, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 10-11.

6. “The scientists of a hundred years ago were well aware that a deterministic system can behave in an apparently random way. But they thought that it wasn't really random; it just looked that way because of imperfect information. And they also knew that this false randomness only occurred in very large, complicated systems—systems with enormously many degrees of freedom, enormously many distinct variables, enormously many component parts. Systems whose detailed behaviour would forever be beyond the capacity of the human mind.” Does God Play Dice? p. 53.

7. Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (English translation, London: Secker and Warburg, 1954), Vol. 2, pp. 64-65.

8. The quote comes from the unpublished “Quaderno climaterico” that Gadda kept during in 1928, now in the Fondo Garzanti. Quoted in Guido Lucchini, Gli studi filosofici di Carlo Emilio Gadda (1924-1929) (Strumenti critici 75, anno IX, no. 2, maggio 1994 (Bologna, Il Mulino), p. 236. Gadda, in Meditazione milanese, constantly stresses the opposition between human finitude and reality, which is made up of an infinity of infinitely co-dependent systems. “Ora è possibile che solo il sistema della conoscenza umana debba essere in sé chiuso e perfetto? Unica eccezione alla regola? No. E così tutti i sistemi filosofici contengono certamente un residuo o errore di chiusura.” Meditazione milanese, p. 743.

9. Leibniz is quoted in Guido Lucchini, p. 236: “Si può dire, insomma, che nelle cose che non conosciamo se non empiricamente, tutte le nostre definizioni son soltanto provvisorie.” From G. G. Leibniz, Nuovi saggi sull'intelletto umano, part II, books III-IV. Cited in Lucchini, note 41.

10. The quote is from A. Manzoni, Scritti di teoria letteraria (Milano: Rizzoli, 1990), p. 211.

11. Ibid., p. 9.

12. Ibid., p. 11.

13. C. E. Gadda, Saggi, giornali, favole I (Milano: Garzanti, 1991), p. 476, in the essay Le belle lettere e i contributi espressivi delle tecniche.

14. Scritti di teoria letteraria, p. 213.

15. De Man, Critical Writings, p. 54.

16. Gian Carlo Roscioni, La disarmonia prestabilita (Torino: Einaudi, 1975), p. 209. Leopardi's 1823 declaration in his Zibaldone is also pertinent: “É tanto mirabile quanto vero che la poesia la quale cerca per la sua natura il bello e la filosofia ch'essenzialmente ricerca il vero, cioè la cosa più contraria al bello, sieno le facoltà più affini a loro, tanto che il vero poeta è sommamente disposto ad essere gran filosofo e il vero filosofo ad esser gran poeta, anzi né l'uno né l'altro non può esser nel gener suo né perfetto né grande, s'ei non partecipa più che mediocremente dell'altro genere, quanto all'indole primitiva dell'ingegno, alla disposizione naturale, alla forza dell'immaginazione … La poesia e la filosofia sono entrambe del pari quasi le sommità dell'umano spirito, le più nobili e le più difficili facoltà cui possa applicarsi l'ingegno umano.” (Zib. II, 845, 8 sett. 1823).

17. Eduardo Saccone, Conclusioni gaddiane: finito e non finito nel “Pasticciaccio,” in Conclusioni anticipate su alcuni racconti e romanzi del Novecento (Napoli: Liguori, 1988), p. 164. The chapter contains a concise discussion of the stylistic manifestations of Gadda's philosophical convictions, which moves beyond Gian Carlo Roscioni's pioneering study La disarmonia prestabilita.

18. Scritti di teoria letteraria, pp. 216-17.

19. See Gadda's essay Apologia manzoniana. Cfr. note 11, p. 679. Guido Lucchini in his article on pp. 223-47 mentions in passing a fact that has not been examined: the similarities between Jansenist thought, which of course may have come to him above all through Manzoni, and Gadda's investigation of infinite systems and the limits of science.

20. The religion of Gadda is a topic that no one, to my knowledge, has discussed. He was clearly not an atheist. See C. E. Gadda, «Per favore, mi lasci nell'ombra» (Milano: Adelphi, 1993). Gadda comments on his religious beliefs in several interviews, for example, on pp. 154-74, interview with Dacia Maraini.

21. Cited in Aldo Mastropasqua, Il progetto e lo scacco in Giuliano Manacorda, ed., Gadda, progettualità e scrittura (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1987), pp. 49-50.

22. A. Manzoni, Scritti di teoria letteraria, p. 7.

23. Aldo Mastropasqua, p. 50.

24. C. E. Gadda, Meditazione milanese in Scritti vari e postumi (Milano: Garzanti, 1993), p. 740. Roscioni writes: “… se il dato è «qualcosa di non semplice in sé», se ogni sistema è fatto di sottosistemi e così all'infinito, coordinare questo «qualcosa» signifca tener conto di un numero praticamente illimitato di fatti, e registrare le infinite relazioni che essi sottintendono. A Gadda non sfuggono i pericoli e la sostanziale impraticabilità del programma.” Roscioni, p. 200.

25. M. Dummett, Causal Loops, in The Nature of Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 155-56.

26. C. E. Gadda, Adalgisa (Torino: Einaudi, 1963), p. 240.

27. De Man, p. 62.

28. See Saccone's article, “Nobility and Literature: Questions on Tomasi di Lampedusa,” MLN, 106 (1991), pp. 159-78. The passage in the article refers to Paul De Man in his essay Process and Poetry; cfr. note 8.

29. Meditazione milanese, p. 645. See also p. 650: “Ogni anello o grumo o groviglio di relazioni è legato da infiniti filamenti a grumi o grovigli infiniti.”

30. Ibid., p. 648.

31. Ibid., p. 646.

32. Ibid., p. 668. Gadda adds: “Così io penso al conoscere come ad una perenne deformazione del reale, introducente nuovi rapporti …”

33. Ibid., p. 748.

34. Roscioni, p. 183.

35. Actually, the current cosmological theory of the Big Bang, according to which the cosmos began with an explosion and subsequent expansion of the universe, posits also a Big Crunch, when all matter boomerangs and comes back together in one “mass.” During this contraction, in the physicist's view, time would literally run backwards. Scientists, however, maintain the impossibility of reversing irreversible processes. The image of Alfieri's flight is ridiculed by Gadda in an interview with Alberto Arbasino, reprinted in «Per favore, mi lasci nell'ombra», pp. 115-116.

36. Gadda refers to the theory of W. Heisenberg (the “Eisenberg” of the quote), known as the Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics. This states that it is impossible to know simultaneously both the exact position and velocity of any particle. Gadda seems to derive from this an impossibility of predicting the future according to deterministic models: hence the impossibility of predicting the future existence or non-existence of a real “signora X.” See Per favore, mi lasci nell'ombra, cfr. note 21, p. 39.

37. Evil, for example, for Gadda, following Spinoza, is due merely to our ignorance of the total reality. In the margin of Il pensiero di Spinoza by A. Guzzo, Gadda writes: “Insomma, o identificazione di perfezione e realtà, imperfezione e “mera carentia,” e la distinzione di vari gradi di perfezione è impossibile; o affermazione di una differenza di gradi della perfezione, e “perfezione” non è più lo stesso che ‘realtà.’” Cited in Guido Lucchini, Gli studi filosofici di Gadda, p. 233, n. 34. See also the chapter in Meditazione milanese entitled Il Male.

38. See for example Meditazione milanese, p. 740: “Solo la scienza sembra non soffrire di contraddizioni: perciocché essa non costituisce mai un sistema totale, ma una pluralità di posizioni …”

39. Cited in Aldo Mastropasqua (cfr. note 19), p. 49.

40. Ibid., p. 49.

41. See Saccone, cfr. note 12, p. 164.

42. Scritti di teoria letteraria, p. 7.