SOURCE: Dombroski, Robert S. “Overcoming Oedipus: Self and Society in La Cognizione del dolore.” Modern Language Notes 99, no. 1 (January 1984): 125-143.

[In the following essay, Dombroski deconstructs the Freudian complexities of Gadda's fictional autobiography as evidenced in its dream sequences, concluding that the protagonist's narcissism and rebellion against the mother figure are disguised evidences of anti-fascism.]

In Part One of La cognizione del dolore, during Doctor Higueroa's visit to the Pirobutirro villa, Gonzalo says that he has dreamt a “frightening dream.” This comes at a crucial moment in the exchanges between the doctor and him, when tormented by the thought of never occupying first place in his mother's affection, he confesses his frustrated need for maternal love and care: “Sono stato un bimbo anch'io. … Forse valevo un pensiero buono … una carezza no; era troppo condiscendere … era troppo”!¹ The account the novel already has given us of Gonzalo's experience and action describes clearly his untenable position of entrapment in the life of his mother, the dynamics of which we now expect to see disclosed in the dream. Our anticipation is furthermore heightened by the ironic conflict of opinions on the dream's potential significance. In another fruitless attempt to relieve his patient's anguish, the doctor attempts to depreciate the event, calling it mere “bewilderment”, a momentary “phantasma”; while Gonzalo, undaunted by the physician's solicitude, regards the vision philosophically as a means of extricating himself from the enslavement of reason, of breaking the holds of power exercised by the dialectic (definition, categorization, abstraction): “E' rifiutare le sclerotiche figurazioni della dialettica, le cose vedute secondo forza” (Ibid). He then expands this thought, using a familiar Pirandellian image: “La forza sistematrice del carattere … questa gloriosa lampada a petrolio che ci fuma di dentro … e fa il filo, e ci fa neri di bugie, di dentro … di bugie meritorie, grasse bugiardosissime … e ha la buona opinione per sé, per sé sola. … Ma sognare è fiume profondo, che precipita a una lontana sorgiva, ripullula nel mattino di verità” (Ibid). There follows the metaphor of the serpent: “… Un sogno … strisciatomi verso il cuore … come insidia di serpe. Nero.” So according to Gonzalo, truth and treachery are entwined in the dream process. The manifest dream gives solace in the resolution of the dilemma engendered by the mutually opposing actions of desire and repulsion, immersing the dreamer into the “deep river” of human pre-history; but its latent content is nonetheless terrifying.

The text prefacing the dream-narration may be taken as a cautionary measure, for it allows that a kind of uncertainty be created in the reader, uncertainty whether he will confront in the dream the real world of Gonzalo's destructive instincts or whether—as Freud has taught us—the “glorious lamp” of reasoned discourse will again “smudge” us with lies. Gonzalo's preemptive statements function then to prevent the reader from accepting as intimate truth what he will remember of his dream, while simultaneously, they may be seen to justify the form in which the dream will be reported: that is, not as a chronicle of events to be decoded and transformed into the dream's latent meaning, but as the relatively free wandering of the character's mind in connection with those events. In other words, Gonzalo's sense of the falsity of logical discourse is correct. So he must recreate the dimension from which truth will emerge, knowing fully that his re-creation is a veil very much like that which conceals the face of the tall, dark figure of his dream.

That the dream will concern his mother seems evident from the action that precedes it. The story's nucleus consists wholly in the problematical Oedipal relationship between mother and son. But the way it concerns her is not altogether clear.

Gadda introduces the dream into his story within the context of Gonzalo's fragmented thoughts about his mother's age and ill-health: “La mamma è spaventosamente invecchiata … è malata …” (Ibid). There follows the displacement of the mother's sclerosis to the “figurations of the dialectic” which, according to Gonzalo, the dream-occurrence is capable of rejecting: “[Sognare] è rifiutare le sclerotiche figurazioni della dialettica.” Here, as in the dream, the boundaries of logic have been violated. Such a figurative operation which demonstrates the arbitrariness of the sign and the language-thought condition of possibility, may be considered generally as just another Gaddian expression of “la baroccagine del mondo.” But keeping more in tune with the novel's overriding Oedipal theme, the mother-dialectic equation, generated by verbal displacement, reflects the neurotic subject's desire to locate its own position within the established social order. The mother (family) and the dialectic (institutionalized culture and law) are both figures of power: they both occupy for Gonzalo places of dominance within—to use a familiar Deleuzian notion—the Oedipal territory of repression. They stand for fixity, truth and sanity, everything on which the well-constituted ego rests. Dreaming eludes (rejects or forgets) these Oedipal codes by resisting fixity with flow (“fiume”), surface with depth (“profondo”), being with becoming (“ripullula”), death with birth (“mattino”). La Cognizione del dolore embodies the signifying process of which Gonzalo's dream is a particular, symbolic instance: the tension toward “schizophrenizing,” that is, the impulse pervading the text to destroy the oedipal ego and with it the countless forms of oedipal repression, through the freeing of narcissistic desire. In other words, Gonzalo's double bind consists in the fact that he is forced to remain within the sphere of oedipal domination by either accepting a neurotic identity or internalizing the social world, i.e., becoming “normal.” The only way of escaping this neurosis-normality impasse is through the dissolution of self, the withdrawal into the adirectional flow of desire.²

In the dream account, instead of a line of narrative, Gadda presents a series of repeated images meant to expose the forces within Gonzalo's mind that generated them. The images are related dynamically, through exclamation and ellipses, as to reproduce the anguish involved in the process of simultaneous telling and concealing.

We shall examine first the associations the narration emphasizes through compulsive repetition. Gonzalo's dream experience is conveyed in images of hopelessness and desolation, for example, “Gli anni erano finiti. … Ogni finalità, ogni possibilità, si era impietrata nel buio. … Il tempo era stato consumato. … Ogni mora aveva raggiunto il tempo, il tempo dissolto.” For Gonzalo, everything has happened, there is no future, no possibility. Past and future have been turned into stone. The house is empty and a darkness prevails from which emerges the black figure or shadow of a woman. The principal association is between the darkness and emptiness of the outside world and the motionless, veiled woman whom the reader presumes is Gonzalo's mother. We may notice, however, the relationship between her and the dreamer dissolves in the oxymoron of “oscura certezza.” Is it Gonzalo's mother? Has she come back from the dead? Or is she mourning the death of another? Is the horrible, superhuman force that prevents her from loving the same that crushes her? The fact that Gonzalo is both the dreamer and the interpreter makes it impossible for us to see his vision clearly without the overcoding recriminations of his conscience. What we have are fragments of a dream; the fragmenting serves to distance us, while the metaphors of “darkness”, “silence,” “shadow” and “petrification” are attempts at distancing the terror of the vision. The narrator will, in fact, even try to distract us more by breaking the unity of the dream-account with the suggestion (to the reader) that it may all be just tragic literature: “Sotto il cielo di tenebra. … Veturia, forse, la madre immobile di Coriolano, velata. …”

But the precision with which Gonzalo reconstructs the clarity and ambiguity of his dream—the varied diction and syntax of the death-theme, full of assonances, verbal repetition and literary allusions, and its symmetrical organization in three stratified moments—gives the text the appearance of a stylistic model, forged precisely to demonstrate the impenetrability of the mystery it encloses.³ Yet, this stylistic overloading, at the very moment it conceals, forces one to dwell on the importance of the procedure, on the act and modality of disguise itself.

La cognizione del dolore offers, in fact, a number of structurally relevant patterns of dissemblance, beginning with its imaginary South American setting in which the people, institutions, geography and history of early twentieth century Italy (chiefly Lombardy) are easily recognizable. Then, with the protagonist Gonzalo, we have a transparent mask of autobiography, covered by the more concealing disguise of grotesque caricature that produces a tragic-comic deformation of the self, a form of baroque objectification meant to disclose only some traces of what is claimed to be the subject's extraordinary experience. In this vein, it can hardly go unnoticed that Gadda comments on his story in the form of an imaginary dialogue between author and editor. By giving the impression that the writing belongs to someone else, he skirts the problem of outright deception, while, at the same time, creating a boundary between his self-portrait and personal history, the true essence of which he portrays as absent, as a story that cannot be written. So it is not by chance that, in the novel's first part, the theme of the threatening quality of reality, emerging from Gonzalo's “dialogo gnoseologico,” meshes and concludes with the comic ruse of Palumbo Mahagones' feigned deafness. Consequently, Gadda releases the reader from the grip of Gonzalo's delirium, placing before him, on the threshold of his presentation of the Mother, a more sustained diversion. Put differently, the tragic biography (or autobiography) at the novel's core is potentially too revealing, too full of “unconfessable” subject matter; so it must be controlled through the modalities of disguise: in general, by its transformation into “literature.” For by being revealed as “literature,” it displaces the reader's attention from the coordinates of tragic existence expounded in the story to the alienating functions of the artifice. This form of masking produces a double, or split, textual identity which cannot be reconciled in or reduced to either of its component parts.

But, if this is so, can the text be understood as a coherent message? Luperini has pointed out that Gadda uses literature primarily as a means of estrangement, his immediate purpose being to prevent one from viewing the literary work as anything but an artificial operation, essentially linguistic in character, which produces knowledge by revealing the contradictions and unexpected connections among things.⁴ But as such, literature is determined by the relativity of empirical data and is thus incapable of offering syntheses. The literary work then becomes a kind of tribunal at which the signifying capabilities of literature are made to account for themselves; in contesting literary convention or signification, the work contests itself. Gadda's texts, therefore, retain a kind of degraded cognitive potential, generated by an overriding nostalgia for totality which Gadda expresses in spite of his clear awareness of the ideological liability of such an impulse. The tragic and sublime style of Shakespearean drama, mimicked throughout La cognizione del dolore, indicates Gadda's concern with re-capturing the unity of the classic vision, while its position within the work's general discourse confers on it the function of parody. This is to say that Gadda's concern with totality as a lost ideal appears too as one among other languages, objectified and estranged by assignment to the characters (Gonzalo or la Señora), Gaddian alter-egos, whose identities Gadda is careful never to fuse with his own. In this way—Luperini and others correctly argue—Gadda's texts may be viewed as a “discourse on language”: a “meta-language” that reveals the cognitive limitations of the very realities they express.

But even if, following Luperini, we account for Gonzalo's dream as a discourse on the limitations of a cognitive appropriation of the unconscious mind, we cannot help but notice that the estrangement produced by the disguise, because of its obsessive stylization, calls attention back to the protagonist's desire to reveal himself at the very moment he shows his need to conceal himself. Thus the danger of being found out or exposed, rather than being nullified, becomes dramatized. Gadda's “meta-language” may then be seen as a symptom of self-concealment, as a way of “depersonalizing” the text, draining it of its subjectivity, conferring to it a kind of figurative death, analogous to the all-engulfing death expressed in the dream's end-of-time fantasy.

From a psychoanalytical standpoint, the dream's network of imagery and allusion reproduces the impulses and deep emotions that characterize Gonzalo's love-hate relationship with his mother. Using the setting of the terrace and deserted house, Gadda conveys first his character's sense of exclusion, of being “outside”, then his more complex feelings of loss and abandonment. The deaths of Gonzalo's father and brother, his immediate rivals for maternal affection commit the hero to a situation of desperate longing for the mother they have had and he has not; on the other hand, this feeling is offset by guilt and remorse for his unconscious wish for their deaths, promoted by either his desire to possess his mother, or the recognition of his not being in her womb, which makes him sad and fearful. The emptiness of the house, indeed, symbolizes the absence of maternal love, but, perhaps more importantly, it is a sign of existential desolation and solitude: the protagonist's inner emptiness, the deadness he experiences from his lack of an autonomous identity, from this inability to dissociate himself from the life of his mother.

In other words, the mother carries on in Gonzalo's life the functions of object and other, that is, she is the bearer of pleasure and the missing part of self that he desires to claim. Her death would then spell a rupture of this dependence. But in Gonzalo object and other have become inextricably embedded as two aspects of the same entity. This is why Gonzalo feels here the all-embracing power of deadness, of “possibility turned into stone.” While he wishes his mother's death as a means of self-liberation, he cannot extricate himself from it, that is, from her. The concluding dream-image shows that the force of death falling upon her originates in Gonzalo and is generated by him: “Questa forza nera, ineluttabile … più greve di coperchio di tomba … cadeva su di lei! come cade l'oltraggio che non ha ricostruzione nelle cose. … Ed era sorta in me, da me! …” The metaphor combines the opposing desires of possession, conveyed in the sexual nuance of “falling upon” and “covering”, and the annihilation of the threat to self which his mother represents. In order to fill his own emptiness, he must destroy the other, but he cannot destroy the other without destroying self. At the dream's end, in fact, the impulse to kill the mother is equivalent to the murdering of self: “E io rimanevo solo.” This return to isolation confirms Gonzalo's acceptance of nonbeing, the preservation of Oedipal dependence in the memory of grief (of the signs of Oedipal dominance): “gli atti … le scritture di ombra … le ricevute.” Emptiness wins out; the dream-account finishes elliptically as to indicate “absence” which is also “omission” or “deletion”.

The abundance or totality which Gonzalo longs for can only be achieved by literally filling in the gaps, supplying the meaning that his fragmented discourse willfully omits. Such an operation implies removing the mask of language, which is equivalent to the renouncement of isolation. Gonzalo must exist separated from his mother only because he is so absorbed in her. To accept integral relatedness with her means passing from a “neurotic” identity, characterized by uncertainty and fear, to a “psychotic” union with the other. It is this fullness, expressed through longing,—we repeat—that is terrifying.

Perhaps the major difficulty one confronts in reading La cognizione del dolore is establishing the distance that separates the narrator from the author and the major characters. With Gonzalo, Gadda produces an external image of self, projected in the form of impulses and instincts that are contained within and determined by a specific history. He extends his self-image to include its presence in the minds of others as this presence, or appropriation, has been perceived, reflected upon and systematized by his ego. This latter mode of self-projection becomes the novel's narrating voice which functions as a screen between the instinctual world of Gadda-Gonzalo and the reader. In other words, the narrator, as the Gaddian ego, calibrates the allowable, operative distance between author and public; as the ego, it functions to safeguard the author from direct exposure through the filter of ironic estrangement. The degree to which the psychological distance can be maintained by means of narrative control depends on the gravity of the impulse: that is, the narration, which contains both narrator and character, is ultimately determined by the forces of passion and not by any predetermined narrative schema.

The styles of La cognizione depend to a large extent on the degrees of difference and deviation that separate the narrator emotionally from Gonzalo's object-relations. The geographical and social setting and the episodes relatively extraneous to Gonzalo's inner world are written with various kinds of humor, ranging from ironic understatement to more direct and engaging forms of comic incongruity, such as the listing of the tricks unsuccessfully played on Pedro in order to catch him at his game of deception. But as we are brought closer to Gonzalo's personal world, into the social context of the country villa, grotesque caricature and outright derision dominate. The narrator produces the deformation as the expression of Gonzalo's perspective, just as the deformed perspective of the others generates the caricature of Gonzalo. As the reader's eye probes the center of this world of perverted images, it focuses on the tragedy of mother and son, on their isolation, loneliness and frightful dependence on one another. It is here at this psychological juncture of deep emotional involvement that the distance separating narrator and characters abruptly diminishes, causing a kind of seepage of one existential perspective into the other, so that the original, fictional distinctions between narrator and characters have all but disappeared.

Although in the first part of the novel the doctor's presence ensures that the monitoring role of the narrating ego be kept intact, in the second, we are brought into a relatively direct, unmediated contact with Gonzalo and la Señora. The narrator speaks through the kind of “deep consciousness” present in Gonzalo's account of his dream, which is now projected onto the consciousness of the mother. The narrator-Gonzalo literally plays the part of la Señora and focuses on his identity through her eyes. As in the dream, death occupies center stage. The Señora's thoughts are filled with memories of her youngest son, killed in the war. Here, as elsewhere, Gadda structures his fiction as the double of his own experience. The crucial feature of this representation of the mother is the persistent sense of futility she expresses. With the death of her son, she was left hopeless, confined to isolation and emptiness. The narrating voice charts her movements as to indicate her next-to-death like being. She wanders about aimlessly: “come cercando il sentiero misterioso che l'avrebbe condotta ad incontrare qualcuno: o forse una solitudine soltanto, priva d'ogni pietà e d'ogni imagine. Dalla cucina senza più fuoco alle stanze, senza più voci. …” Like King Lear to whom she is compared, she suffers, while outside the raging storm, conspiring against her, appears to be at once the extension of her prolonged agony and the symbol of her self-destructiveness. Her existence crystallizes in a descent into the darkness of the earth. The following paragraph offers the best description of the Señora's position, one which synthesizes the entire issue of the absence of the other and the mother's inability to achieve autonomy from the memory of her dead son:

Nessuno la vide, discesa nella paura, giù, sola, dove il giallore del lucignolo vacillava, smoriva entro l'ombre, dal ripiano della mensola, agonizzando nella sua cera liquefatta. Ma se qualcuno si fosse mai trovato a ravvisarla, oh! anche un lanzo! avrebbe sentito nell'animo che quel viso levato verso l'alto, impietrato, non chiedeva nemmeno di poter implorare nulla, da vanite lontananze. Capegli effusi le vaporavano dalla fronte, come fiato d'orrore. Il volto, a stento, emergeva dalla fascia tenebrosa, le gote erano alveo alla impossibilità delle lacrime. Le dita incavatrici di vecchiezza parevano stirar giù, giù, nel plasma del buio, le fattezze di chi approda alla solitudine. Quel viso, come spettro, si rivolgeva dal buio sottoterra alla società superna dei viventi, forse immaginava senza sperarlo il soccorso, la parola di un uomo, di un figlio.

(p. 172)

The mother in this position of isolation and emptiness shows a curious resemblance to her son. If we look closely, we see, in fact, that the episode of Gonzalo's dream, narrated in the first person by the protagonist, and the presentation of the mother by the narrator share the same phenomenological characteristics of the experience of self. In both instances, existence is depicted in images of terror, darkness, death and, particularly, of desolation and abandonment. The separate dimensions of mother and son are thus united in the voice of the narrator who, as Gonzalo's ego, controls the representation of the mother so as to ensure that our perception of her conforms to Gonzalo's. But beneath the articulate forms that express the mother's consciousness there lies a potential for reversal of the psychological themes that characterize her. The fact that she cannot reach the other may well mean that the other cannot reach her. The more she feels protected in the private world of her villa by the wall and the Nistituto, the more this world is subjected to dangers from the outside (symbolized by the tempest): that is, the more (from Gonzalo's point of view) it becomes a public world, inhabited by friends, servants and peasants, who in the son's mind are all rivals for her love.

.....

Having considered up to this point Gonzalo's action primarily in relation to the Oedipal object (or objects), we shall now focus on the protagonist as a “narcissistic subject.” For Gadda's continuous preoccupation with narcissism suggests that it may be a highly appropriate sphere of reference for understanding not only how the hero absorbs the conditions of “dolore”, but how he reacts to them—in a word, how Gonzalo attempts to overcome his Oedipal fate.

In La cognizione del dolore narcissism carries out a dual function. Thematically, it appears as a type of Nietzschian ego-inflation which the narrator from time to time presents as an index of psycho-pathological delusion. On the other hand, narcissism is also the primary expressive mode of narrating subject. Consider, for example, Gonzalo's aggressive response to his mother's desire for solitude. This instance of “interpretative delirium” or narcissistic rage, as it were, is generated by the doctor's suggestion that the ailing Señora leave the villa to be examined by a specialist in a nearby town. For Gonzalo, her refusal indicates selfishness and sparks his tirade against the grandiose inflation of the ego:

Bel modo di curarsi! … a dire: io non ho nulla. Io non ho mai avuto bisogno di nessuno! … io, più i dottori stanno alla larga, e meglio mi sento. … Io mi riguardo da me, che son sicura di non sbagliare. … Io, io, io! … Il solo fatto che noi seguitiamo a proclamare … io, tu … con le nostre bocche screanzate … con la nostra avarizia di stitici predestinati alla putrescenza … io, tu … questo solo fatto … io, tu … denuncia la bassezza della comune dialettica … e ne certifica della nostra impotenza a predicar nulla di nulla, … dacché ignoriamo … il soggetto di ogni proposizione possibile.

(pp. 123-124)

In a typically Freudian manner, the associative process is meant to lead us to the real subject of Gonzalo's aggression, “the subject of every possible proposition”: the Father, whose name it “is useless to take in vain.” The logical constants of language have no fixed truth value because they are the instruments of an oppressive code imposed by a tyrannical father. To predicate something of something means to reaffirm this authority and, particularly, to retain the separation between the I and the other. In other words, it functions to nourish the narcissistic self by objectifying the other. Gonzalo, then indicating the paternal subject, turns his rage against its historical symbol, the bell tower:

Quello [il suono] che ha appena finito di venir fuori di là … dalla matrice di quelle mènadi scaravoltate a pancia all'aria … col batacchio per aria. … Bestie pazze! per cui ho patito la fame, da bimbo, la fame! Cinquecento pesos! cinquecento: di munificenza pirobutirrica: cinquecento pesos! con la maglia rattoppata … i geloni ai diti … i piedi bagnati nelle scarpe … i castighi! perché i diti gelati non potevano stringere la penna … col mal di gola sul Fedro … con sei gradi di amor paterno addosso … e un fumo da far inverdire le meningi … perché il caro batacchio venisse buono … buono agli inni e alla gloria … il batacchio … a intronare la cara villa, con le care patate, nel caro Lukones …

(pp. 124-125)

According to Gonzalo's story, the five hundred pesos were donated by his father, in times of severe financial hardship, to the town for the construction of a bell tower.⁵ The father's narcissistic character and tyrannical authority are relived and negated through the sexualization of their repressive symbol (“il batacchio per aria … a intronare. …”). In a preceding diatribe, which we will discuss presently, Gonzalo had transformed the bells into monstrous penises which ejaculate their sound on the plush and sultry countryside. But, interestingly, the protagonist's invectives against the narcissism of paternal authority are also a way of re-establishing a relationship with the father in terms of power. Not being able to tolerate his father's selfish, fanatic attachment to the countryside and villa (both figurations of the mother), he seeks to belittle that devotion through artful polemics. Paradoxically, the balance of power falls to the side of the son, as he exhibits narcissistically the omnipotence of his pen, the one once rendered impotent by his father's prodigality.

According to the model offered by Otto Kernberg, we may view Gonzalo's aggressive temperament and rages as a defensive position.⁶ His life as a recluse, separated from human contact, is, in Gadda's own interpretation, his response to the “dis-sociality” of others: “Il suo male richiede un silenzio tecnico e una solitudine tecnica: Gonzalo è insofferente della imbecillagine generale del mondo, delle baggianate della ritualistica borghese; e aborre dai crimini del mondo” (p. 37). But in the novel, as well as in the Preface (p. 36), this position conceals the hero's extremely problematical subjectivity which has been weakened by maternal neglect. Beneath the “grandiose self” that attacks “la follia e la cretineria degli altri” we have the experience of the ravenous child who seeks empathy from his mother for his emerging self. The type of rage characteristic of Gonzalo is an “oral rage” which intends to devour (linguistically, that is) everything in sight, including the self as subject. His anger or “delirio interpretativo” may be then seen as both the negation and continuation of this deeper aspect of his experience.

In suggesting ways of interpreting the rather manifest psychoanalytical content of La cognizione del dolore, we are confronted with the obvious methodological problem of reducing the text to an illustration of something beyond itself, moreover, to a form of pathology. Can pathology itself explain the novel's contents? What is to be made of the clinical evidence present there? On the one hand, the continual flashing throughout the work of Freudian signifiers, to be sure, encourages a psychoanalytical reading of the text. On the other, the very transparency of psychoanalytical content in the surface narrative modifies the terms of the problem, for we are not inferring that beneath the text's literal meaning there exists a latent psychoanalytical content and that the text is its evidence, but that the literal meaning and its psychoanalytical content are equivalent. The fact that the text demands a psychoanalytical response from the reader complicates further the methodological question, for at the very moment the narrator documents Gonzalo's malaise, he provides a rationale for its symptoms, which, ultimately, serves as its meaning. The surface narrative has, in other words, a distinctively Freudian character, its thematics being essentially those of a Freudian meta-psychology.⁷

This surfacing of “deep meaning” produced by Gadda's psychoanalytical writing of the text has clearly an important historical function. It is Gadda's response to fascist Italy's rejection of Freudian ideas, intellectually at the hands of Crocean and Gentilian neo-idealism (the materialist base of Gadda's culture is notable in all of his writings) and, culturally, according to the popular notion, strengthened by fascism, of Latin purity and decorum.⁸ In this sense, few, if any, literary texts of the 1930's can compare with La cognizione del dolore for its outright subversiveness. Gadda's complete negation of the basis of institutionalized society (maternity, family and community) strikes to the heart of fascism's grand objective to re-institute order and obedience as fundamental social values.

Yet, by opposing psychoanalysis to fascism in this way, by focusing intensively on a malady that defies the remedies of tradition and civilization, Gadda conceals, tactically, the material determinants of his and his character's predicament, producing thereby a deformed or caricatural image of history. A follower of both Kant and Freud, Gadda directs our perception to realities outside of or beyond the world of appearance, particularly to that part of Gonzalo's mind behind the phenomenal self which neither he nor we can ever directly know but which influences profoundly the sense of self experienced and represented. But unlike his great contemporary Pizzuto, Gadda does not erase the experiential world of his characters, but only hides it from our observation. History surfaces, nevertheless, in moments of extreme tension, as for example, in Gonzalo's fierce tirade against the tolling of the bells:

Dodici gocce, come di bronzo immane, celeste, eran seguitate a cadere una via l'altra, indeprecabili, sul lustro fogliame del banzavóis: anche se inavvertite al groviglio dell'aspide, molle, terrore maculato di tabacco. Vincendo robinie e cicale, e carpini, e tutto, le matrici del suono si buttarono alla propaganda di sé, tutt'a un tratto: che dirompeva nella cecità infinita della luce. Lo stridere delle bestie di luce venne sommerso in una propagazione di onde di bronzo: irraggiàrono la compagna del sole, il disperato andare delle strade, le grandi verdi foglie, laboratorî infiniti della clorofilla: cinquecento lire di onde, di onde! cinquecento, cinquecento!, basta basta, signor Francisco, ma questo qui non fa male … di onde, di onde! dalla torre: dal campanile color calza, artefice di quel baccano tridentino. Furibonda sicínnide, offerivano il viscerame o poi lo rivoltavano contro monte, a onde, tumulto del Signore materiato, baccanti androgíne alla lubido municipalistica d'ogni incanutito offerente.

(pp. 110-111)

Here, even the most cautious of amateur Freudians would not hesitate to show how a particular stimulus has opened the door to the unconscious, from which explodes a fury of resentment and guilt that derives, in one way or another, from sexual repression. At the center of the description we find, in fact, an insertion which would appear to further substantiate the Freudian hypothesis: “cinquecento lire di onde, di onde! cinquecento, cinquecento!, basta basta, signor Francisco, ma questo qui non fa male … di onde, di onde! dalla torre. …” As the only segment of the passage without a textual referent, we must follow the clue provided by the name Francisco. Given the autobiographical character of the story, our quest is easily satisfied: signor Francisco, Gonzalo's father, can be no other than Francesco Ippolito, Gadda's father. The utterance then expresses the antagonism between Gadda and his father. The free associative process brought about by the bells has revealed the existence of a psychic reality that the mind has removed from consciousness because of its unpleasant or unconfessable content. With the Oedipal model, we can then go on to reduce the narrator's hysteria to its underlying cause. The bells, symbolic of paternal authority and oppression, activate the invective directly against the father's sexual predominance. The narrator's narcissistic verbal action becomes a means of displacing or removing attention from the real object of Gadda's contempt, his father, and by extension, the Father, metonymized into the Phallus.

But following this line of reasoning, we run the risk of making Gonzalo's self into a psychoanalytical generalization. The kind of experience from which it is derived, however, has a particularly historical character which must be re-constituted lest we diminish the social value of Gadda's isolated characters who see the external world as encroaching upon their freedom. In the above-cited passage, we have noted how the narrator's spontaneous outburst was interrupted by what on the surface amounts, more or less, to a “looseness of association”: the mention of Signor Francisco in relation to “five hundred lire worth of sound waves.” As the punctuation suggests, the sentences are meant to be complementary and, as a result, the narrating mind, rather than wandering away from the point at which it began (as is typical in schizophrenic discourse), moves toward a concreteness of association, one which relates Francisco, money and countryside. We observe in La cognizione del dolore that Signor Francisco's unsuccessful speculation causes the family's bankruptcy and therefore its separation from the organic and productive relations with the community. Humiliation destroys Gonzalo and forces him to retreat to the villa, to become an isolated, narcissistic individual.⁹ This situation describes the fundamental insecurity affecting the family under capitalism, derived from a breakdown of the bonds of mutual dependency, which makes room for the elaboration of narcissistic object relations. In this situation we find the basis for Gadda's relationship with fascism.

Criticism has often brought our attention to the fact that the world Gadda is writing about from 1933 to 1940, albeit disguised in an imaginary South American setting, is in effect the world of Italian fascism, and that the narrator's numerous spells of verbal aggression are actually directed toward fascism. Pietro Pucci was among the first to discuss fascism's oblique presence in the story, arguing, in fact, that the tolling of the bells is a “metaphor for fascist propaganda,” referring ostensibly to a rite heralding the arrival of a party hierarch or an imminent radio broadcast by Mussolini, and that the narrator's tirades reflect “the spiritual atmosphere of disgust and, at the same time, of impotence which is the exact transcription of a sentiment diffused in the Italian anti-fascists between the two wars, conscious either of the uselessness of their animosity or of that which was to happen.”¹⁰ And more recently Luperini has posed the question of the quasi-identity of the Mother with Mussolini and fascism. In the affection la Señora displays toward others, Gonzalo sees both the betrayal of his frustrated desire for love and her submission to the “bourgeois self” as a means of gaining the admiration and respect of her fellow citizens and thus coercing them into relationships of dependency: “L'errore della madre è della stessa natura di quello di Mussolini (perché riguarda la reintegrazione dell'io nelle forme stolte che sole sono possibili nella società e nell'ideologia borghese), è il segno d'un stortura oggettiva la quale a sua volta è alla base del ‘male oscuro’ del figlio.”¹¹ Thus Luperini brings together the psychological, social and political aspects of Gonzalo's malaise: “Nevrosi e rabbia sociale sono in Gonzalo due facce di una stessa realtà. Esse sono presenti anche quando i motivi del ‘dolore’ potrebbero sembrare del tutto privati e riguardare solo l'individuale nevrosi del protagonista.”¹²

Readings such as these, by pointing out the correspondences between fascism and society in the novel, help define a historically verifiable object against which the protagonist directs his anger. We may even go further and state that, generally speaking, fascism is the novel's principal referent and that Gonzalo's conflicts derive from fascism's ever-present forms of oppression, as symbolized by the wall and the Nistituto. But to conclude from this, as does Pucci, that Gadda's invectives, sarcasm and over-all aggressive verbalization convey his disgust and frustration for not being able to combat the menace efficiently leaves not only the anxiety of his language unexplained, but also contradicts what we have been able to learn about Gadda's life.¹³ On the other hand, if, following Luperini, we draw an analogy between fascism and the Mother, whose actions are an offence to Gonzalo's reason and critical intelligence, we are left to account for the modalities of deception and what we have described as transgressed ego-boundaries between the narrator, Gonzalo and the Mother.

In psychoanalytical terms, Gadda saw represented in fascism a nonsublimated erotic-narcissistic impulse, whose causes are to be found in the pulsations of a libidinally contaminated ego. If on the one hand this proposition is correct and wholly confirmed in Eros e Priapo, on the other it is incomplete, because for the sake of a clinical diagnosis, it ignores a number of social and cultural references contained in the polemics. Furthermore, if we view Gadda's anti-fascism strictly from a Freudian standpoint, we are forced to conclude that it was Gadda's intention and purpose to represent all forms of auto-sexuality as manifestations of an arrested sexual development, contrary to “normal” sexuality whose objective is procreation and, therefore, the inclusion of offspring into the social order. Narcissism would then be in his view an exclusively pathological symptom, linked to schizophrenia, which must be treated in order to preserve the social order. But Gadda's polemics are too radical and pessimistic to be considered simply a psychoanalytical critique of fascism. (Gonzalo, let us not forget, suffers from a malady that cannot be medicated.) Instead, the theme of narcissism in Gadda's works goes beyond its direct references to fascism and possesses a character which is more philosophical than psychoanalytical. For example, at the outset of “L'Egoista” we find the following observations on the interrelationship of elements in reality:

Chi immagina e percepisce se medesimo come un essere “isolato” dalla totalità degli esseri, porta il concetto di individualità fino al limite della negazione, lo storce fino ad annullarne il contenuto. L'io biologico ha un certo grado di realtà: ma è sotto molti riguardi apparenza, vera petizione di principio. La vita di ognun di noi pensata come fatto per sé stante, estraniato da un decorso e da una correlazione di fatti, è concetto erroneo, è figurazione gratuita. In realtà, la vita di ognun di noi è una “simbiosi con l' universo”. La nostra individualità è il punto di incontro, è il nodo o groppo di innumerevoli rapporti con innumerevoli situazioni (fatti od esseri) a noi apparentemente esterne. Ognuno di noi è limitato, su infinite direzioni, da una controparte dialettica: ognuno di noi è il no di infiniti sì, e è il sì di infiniti no. Tra qualunque essere dello spazio metafisico e l'io individuale (…) intercede un rapporto pensabile: e dunque un rapporto di fatto. Se una libellula vola a Tokio, innesca una catena di reazioni che raggiunge me.¹⁴

Ironically, these generalizing concepts respond to the problem of fascism in a more historically particular way than the psychoanalytic perspective, insomuch as they identify narcissism according to the syndrome of fragmentation and atomization of social life, characteristic of modern capitalist development. Pathological narcissism becomes in this sense a metaphor for contemporary mass culture which was heralded by the fascist system of cultural communication: its deformation of Logos in Eros and its creation of phallic images of objects of consumption. That is to say, Gadda's anti-fascist polemics are no doubt “metahistorical” if we view them solely directed against fascism qua political regime; they become, by contrast, more historically certain, if we consider them levelled against fascism as a social custom, as a narcissistic social phenomenon. Thus, the narcissistic object in Gadda may be viewed not only as the complex of activities that reflect and celebrate the needs of the individual, but rather as the structuring of needs and desires by means of forms of self-gratification, which is symptomatic of mass culture. It is, in other words, a criticism of the ego conceived as the highest form of popular existence; in the Freudian sense, as it were, a critique of the “neurotic normalcy” of the ego.¹⁵

If this is so, how then do we account for Gonzalo's narcissism? Can we give only a clinical explanation of its symptomatology? Or does it too have a cultural side to its manifestations which needs to be explored?

Perhaps the simplest way of describing Gonzalo's position within Gadda's critique of society is to adopt the notion, cited above, of the dialectical self. Gonzalo is “il no di infiniti sì, e il sì di infiniti no”. His being illustrates the dialectic of narcissism, insomuch as he resists the weight of patriarchal domination (Mother, villa, wall, Nistituto, society) by creating his own “grandiose self” which rebels against deformation through narcissistic eccentricity. His narcissism (and with it Gadda's entire literary enterprise) becomes, in a Marcusian sense, an emancipatory force. Narcissistic isolation is Gonzalo's refusal to accept repressive society; the real or figurative killing of his mother signals his rebellion against the lure of re-integration, that is, the seeking of ego-gratification by participating in commodity and labor markets.

At the same time, Gonzalo's narcissistic withdrawal from society dialectically negates narcissism. We may see how this comes about by considering again the essential character of mass culture which Gadda's polemical object, fascism, in many ways prefigures. To the isolated self, the word of God, the printed word or political propaganda represent a universal image. The neurotic instability of the self or, as in Gonzalo's case, the self on the threshold of psychotic dissolution can be recompensated and re-integrated through the acceptance of society, that is, in the unity of market commodities. In fascism, Gadda discerns all the symptoms of this process from the initial existential predicament that produces it to the ecolalia that marks its grotesque character. Gadda writes to represent their deformation, while simultaneously shielding himself from contagion behind the ambiguous mechanism of the pastiche.¹⁶ In La cognizione, the Oedipal ground of repression, the family as reflected in the social images of society, has been violated by the subject's pervasive desire. Oedipus has been overcome by Narcissus.

Notes

1. Carlo Emilio Gadda, La cognizione del dolore, Torino, Einaudi, 1963, p. 119.

2. One may recall in this respect a passage from “I viaggi la morte” where Gadda shows his attraction to the “schizophrenizing” of the symbolist poets: “Il migrare dei simbolisti è un determinare nuove fortune spaziali, nuove conoscenze e nuove sensazioni astratte dall'impulso coordinante dell'io, è un perdersi nella casualità oceanica; il morire è un accedere a più vasta dissoluzione, a più sconfinata casualità, ove ogni impaccio sia tolto dei vincoli d'ogni teleologia. Filosoficamente questo anelito verso il caos adirezionale rappresenta un regresso alla potenza primigenia dell'inizio, ancora privo di determinazioni etiche: una ricaduta nell'infanzia dell'essere, se così è lecito dire,” in I viaggi la morte, Milano, Garzanti, 1958, p. 196.

3. Cf., Carlo de Matteis, “Oltraggio e riscatto, interpretazione della Cognizione del dolore di C. E. Gadda,” L'Approdo Letterario, 53, XVII (1971), pp. 62-63.

4. Romano Luperini, Il Novecento, Torino, Loescher, 1981, Vol. II, p. 493 passim.

5. See La cognizione del dolore, cit., p. 101.

6. Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism, New York, J. Aronson, 1975.

7. See, Robert S. Dombroski, Introduzione allo studio di Carlo E. Gadda, Firenze, Novedizioni Enrico Vallecchi, 1974, p. 101.

8. Essential in this respect is Gadda's essay “Psicanalisi e letteratura,” in I viaggi la morte, Milano, Garzanti, 1958, pp. 41-60.

9. Gadda, in fact, stated: “La mia infelicità maggiore proveniva dalla povertà della mia famiglia. Per quanto nei primi anni abbiamo avuto delle condizioni abbastanza buone, poi le cose si sono aggravate per errori economici di mio padre. Spendeva più di quanto potesse poi recuperare. Non era un bravo uomo d'affari, sia detto con rispetto. Era un maniaco della terra, della campagna, della gente brianzola. … Aver comprato una piccola proprietà nella Brianza … proprio quando non avrebbe dovuto comprarla, perché era già in cattive condizioni, con tre bambini da mantenere e non era neanche giovane. … Di questa proprietà ho parlato nella Cognizione del dolore. … La povertà mi ha umiliato di fronte al ceto civile borghese al quale la mia famiglia apparteneva, almeno nominalmente.” Ernesto Ferrero and Dacia Maraini, “C. E. Gadda: come scrittore, come uomo,” Prisma, 5, 1968.

10. Piero Pucci, “The Obscure Sickness,” Italian Quarterly, II, 42 (1967), pp. 43-62.

11. R. Luperini, Op. cit., p. 509.

12. Ibid, p. 511.

13. See R. S. Dombroski, Op. cit., pp. 145-168.

14. I viaggi la morte, cit., p. 281.

15. Cf., Stuart Ewen, “Mass Culture, Narcissism and the Moral Economy of War,” Telos, 44, 1980, pp. 77-78.

16. “Lo hidalgo, forse, era a negare se stesso: rivendicando a sé le ragioni del dolore, la conoscenza e la verità del dolore, nulla rimaneva alla possibilità. Tutto andava esaurito dalla rapina del dolore. Lo scherno solo dei disegni e delle parvenze era salvo, quasi maschera tragica sulla metope del teatro.” La cognizione, pp. 204. (Emphasis mine).