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Description by Alternatives
and Description with Comment:
Some Characteristic Procedures of Gadda’s Writing

Emilio Manzotti

It has been observed, on the basis of an oft-cited passage from I viaggi la morte, that representation in Gadda tends to a kind of diachrony, a kind of historicisation of the fact, thus superimposing upon the contingency of the present characteristics of the past and hypothetical developments of the future. The present condition of the object or event in representation appears simultaneously laden with its past and pregnant with its future. (1) Fragments of reality, more than circumscribed contingencies, are «moments of a process of becoming», «intervals of a deformation as it is happening». (2)

Thus, in the month of March, as described in Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, the trees on the side of a Roman road are seen in the «critical moment of transition between winter’s past, which is no longer, and the future of spring’s rebirth, which has not yet arrived» (Manzotti 1993c: 18): «I platani e i rami della Merulana furon selva, allo svoltare, intrico, per lo sguardo, sul discendere parallelo dei fili, di cui si alimenta-vano i tramme: ancora scheletriti nel marzo, con di già un languore in pelle in pelle, tuttavia, na specie de prurito per entro la chiarità lieta e stradale della lor còrtica, fatta di scaglie e di pezze» (Pasticciaccio, RR II 264; my emphases). The modifiers thus inscribe in the present, as signalled by the symmetrical adverbs ancora (still) and di già (already), clearly visible traces of the past and delicate anticipations of the future.

Something analogous also occurs (and this time with a kind of microscopic diachrony, embedded in the adjectives) in a passage of Cugino barbiere, the first story of Accoppiamenti giudiziosi, regarding the lettuces with which the curious neighbours of Zoraide pretend to be busy: (3)

Zoraide aprì finalmente ed uscì lei sul terrazzino, decisa. Sui terrazzini da lato e di fronte, nel sole tepido, c’erano già per qualche loro occorrenza altre diciassette donne, quale appoggiata alla ringhiera e quale in sulla porta come per entrare od uscirne, e quale con un rugginoso coltello dal defunto manico a rimestare dentro vasi o cassette di probabili lattughe o di garofani: intenzionata poi a dacquarli, tanto per concludere. (RR II 599; my emphases)

The first pole of the binary alternative lattughe/garofani (lettuces/carnations) is qualified with probable: they are lettuces, God willing, to be, while the instrument of domestic horticulture is a knife with a defunct handle: colloquially, the handle is history.

As is well known, this kind of collocation of diachronically distinct moments manifests a more general tendency of Gadda’s prose towards «infinite metonymy». (4) It manifests also what we might otherwise call the «representative kaleidoscope», that is, a tendency to refract the whole within the individual unit, to wrap the individual entity in that network of associations which, in a relational conception of the world, constitutes its identity. Furthermore, even on the narrative level, this principle has novel implications; particularly in its aperspectivism, in that seeming absence of a hierarchy among the tesserae of narrative discourse which was so acutely observed by Pietro Citati at the time of the re-release of La cognizione del dolore.

In this essay, I propose to designate two modes of the Gaddian kaleidoscope which until now, as far as I know, have been passed over in silence. Limiting myself to the sphere of description in the strict sense, I will distinguish two recurring representative procedures entirely characteristic of the author: (1) description by alternatives and (2) description with comment. Concerning both I will analyse in detail a brief passage drawn from La cognizione del dolore. The results of such an effort, however, are applicable more generally to Gadda’s literary and journalistic production as a whole; indeed, the results are equally valid for his representation of actions, processes, and situations as well as that of description.

Description by alternatives gathers together diverse aspects of the represented object with the varying of specific dimensions and parameters. If, as in the case that we shall discuss, the object represented is a path, and if one privileges, among those dimensions possible, that of travelling along the path, we shall then obtain from time to time new assertions by introducing and varying the parameters such as (a) the means of locomotion, (b) the direction, (c) the frequency of travel, (d) the sex of the travellers, (e) their profession or social status, and so on. One thus generates not a finite, contingent, or static description, but a summation, a plurality of descriptions, a sort of description of unlimited potential, one capable of passing through a whole series of possible concrete manifestations. This is, in other words, description carried out by alternatives, that is, by means of variants, situations, and manifestations complementary to each other. Their very abundance and variety, together with the superimposition and clash of different parameters, opens the way to the typically Gaddian play between the poles of order and disorder, between a meticulous listing by genus and species on one side, and chaotic combination on the other.

For its part, description with comment is a description achieved through non-homogeneous layers with respect to the textual type or level. More specifically, and in elementary terms, it is a description that includes within itself some form of digressive comment. There are, that is, jumps in the level of representation. At certain points in the narrative, notations are inserted, as apparent digressions, which comment, justify, generalise, and so on, at a clearly higher level of discourse, upon the notations of the first level. This counterpoint of description leads to, among other effects, a palpable slowing of descriptive velocity, and above all it relativises, or even denies, the narrative value of individual notations.

However, in the course of the following analyses, it should be kept in mind that the foregoing descriptive types are almost never purely expressed as the one and only organising procedure of a description. Upon each (and the two are often combined) Gadda superimposes his usual techniques of disharmony, which have already been noted and more or less extensively described by other critics. Those techniques include thematic drift through chains of anadiplosis, the progressive loosening of syntactic linkages, the unbalanced elements of a parallel structure, the mutation and multiplication of differentiating criteria among successive elements of an opposition, and so on. Some of these techniques will be discussed briefly as the occasion arises.

1. Description by alternatives

We begin by examining a single instance of the type of description which we defined as by alternatives, that which has been alluded to above as similar to a road or path. This choice is by no means arbitrary, if we take into consideration that, for Gadda, streets, like large buildings, are a concentration of vie (à la Perec), the true and proper generators, through the infinite possibilities of chance, of new combinatorial events (cf. the «pandemonio della via», SGF I 45). This choice, then, like all choices, presupposes a paradigm, and an extremely extensive one at that. Once our attention has been drawn to this phenomenon, we seem to find nothing else as we read Gadda’s work, page after page. It will be sufficient here to produce two passages, without failing to mention the one from the Accoppiamenti already cited above, where the anaphora of quale introduced three alternatives of feigned behaviour in a narrative unit packed with covert motives (curiosity). The first extract is from Mercato di frutta e verdura (Meraviglie d’Italia). Here, there are bicycles «aggruppate a quindici a quindici come dei muli all’addiaccio», that «paiono non altro attendere se non robusti galloni ed i glùtei saluberrimi del proprietario»:

il quale, ammantellato e baffuto, le riconduca alla nativa cassina. Fendendo col naso la nebbia, dove si sperde, al passare, ogni salice dopo il compagno. O nel sereno splendore della primavera, dimesso il mantello, avvistando dietro i filari de’ pioppi un campanile, poi l’altro, poi l’ultimo: capisaldi trigonometrici (per i redattori del catasto e dei mappali di base) sopra il rinverdire di ogni pioppo. (SGF I 43; my emphases)

The second of the two gerunds (Fendendo… avvistando) is placed in a separate sentence and lengthened by the recapitulatory apposition (of the various belfries) capisaldi trigonometrici, a specific example of linear thematic progression by means of anadiplosis. In the same story, there is an even more striking example, with an elaborate hierarchy of alternatives, which are, seemingly, lined up:

tra le infinite carrette vagano pochissime ombre, le tuniche semoventi di alcuni conduttori: sàgome allampanate d’un color piombo o marrone scuro. Tra il Goya e il Magnasco, con un[a] flanella cinerea che gli infagotta il collo e la gola tossicolosa, col naso che gòcciola: o sono invece dei gobbetti membruti, e trascineranno il loro carretto ai mercatini lontani lamentando a scatti, con urli ritmati, e per quanto duri tutto il tragitto, i rinviliti prezzi dell’üga bell’üga; o dei nani, i quali fermi a un cantone con il negozio, ti guardano: e nell’adunca mano, sorreggono un pomo da poterlo lustrare di gomito: o hanno una spazzola-caravella, da spazzolare, ai primi di agosto, la prima pubertà della pesca agostana. (SGF I 44; my emphases)

There are also instances, in this tendency to exhaust all possibilities, of alternatives that are poorly integrated into the context. The aut aut seems, then, to be an a priori form of thought, superimposed like a perceptual stamp upon the reality described, without concern for that piece of reality’s own intrinsic constitution. That is, for example, what happens in Terra lombarda, one of the pieces collected in Gli anni. In the following quotation, cues for the alternatives are written in upper-case italics and counterposed assertions in lower-case italics:

Ricordo che gli uomini camminavano […] Il contadino dalle scarpe grevi e chiodate percorreva gravemente la strada campestre: taciturno […] Tra due siepi di spino O due file di salci O d’alti pioppi, quando il fosso adacquatore lungheggiasse, col suo dolce filo, il consueto andare della polvere. La chiarità d’estate si infarinava di bianche miglia, in cima alle quali erano le cose necessarie e solenni, la compera, la vendita, la pluralità degli esseri addobbata de’ suoi scuri panni, la silente preghiera, la Messa cantata: da tutti. O, dopo lungo pensiero, il disco del sole si tuffava negli ori e nei carmini, dietro scheletri d’alberi, come in una pozzanghera di liquefatto metallo. La cimasa delle pioppaie veniva celandone l’estrema dipartita: solo, qualche frustolo d’oro, O una goccia, di quel fuoco lontano, durava a persistere nell’intrico nero delle ramaglie.

D’estate, INVECE, il popolo dei pioppi, unanime, trascolorava nella sera: le raganelle, dai fossi, dalle risaie, sgranavano dentro il silenzio il dolce monile della sera: con un cauto singhiozzo la rana, per più lenti intervalli, salutava lo zaffiro della stella Espero, tacitamente splendida. S’era affacciata alla ringhiera dei pioppi. (SGF I 211-12)

Leaving aside the minor, subordinated alternatives in the first paragraph, the specific difference between the two poles of the alternative is reconstructible at first sight as that between two moments of a summer day: the noon hour (chiarità dell’estate) is being counterposed to sunset. But the scheletri d’alberiand l’intrico nero delle ramaglie immediately impose a second factor of variation, and that is the season: summer versus winter. Even so, immediately after, in the paragraph that follows, an unexpected invece reintroduces almost ex novo the summer season, even while maintaining the time of day constant. It is thus possible to summarise the oppositional scheme as follows:

(DAY + SUMMER) → (EVENING + WINTER) → (EVENING + SUMMER)

This scheme is, at least to a degree, circular, and one of its effects is to introduce into the description an idea of completeness, of having exhausted all the possible manifestations of the real.

The passage which we will now examine in detail presents a complex logical architecture that, especially in the second paragraph, is based essentially on the combinatorial possibilities offered by the concatenation of alternatives. It is drawn from one of the lyric heights of La cognizione del dolore, the final section of the seventh segment (the third of the second part, the segment that concluded the first version in Letteratura, and the first edition of the novel in 1963). It concerns the minute description of the country path that runs along one side of the Pirobutirro property: a description whose archetype is set down in Racconto italiano (SVP 425-26), and which is summarily sketched out in the first part of La cognizione during the conversation between Gonzalo and the doctor (RR I 641; Gadda 1987a: 191-92) and is then taken up, as we shall see, more extensively a third time in the last segment (RR I 739-42; Gadda 1987a: 442-47). The passage is as follows:

Di là dal muretto, una stradaccia. Ghiaiosa, a forte pendenza, con lùnule di piatti infranti, o d’una scodella, tra i ciòttoli, od oblìo di un rugginoso baràttolo, vuotato, beninteso, dell’antica salsa o mostarda: tratto tratto anche, sotto il livido metallo d’un paio di mosconi ebbri, l’onta estrusa dall’Adamo, l’arrotolata turpitudine: stavolta per davvero sì d’un qualche guirlache de almendras, ma di quelli!… da pesarli in bilancia, diavolo maiale, per veder cosa pesano; parvenze, d’altronde, che la magnanimità del nostro apparato sensorio, aiutata da onorevole addobbo di circostanze, non può far altro, in verità, se non fingere di non aver percepito.

Percorsa da pedoni radi, la strada: e talora, in discesa, da qualche ciclista di campagna con bicicletta-mulo; o risalita dal procaccia impavido, arrancante sotto pioggia o stravento, o zoppicata non si sa in che verso da alcuni mendichi ebdomadari, maschi e femmine, cenciose apparizioni nella gran luce del nulla. Vaporando l’autunno, vi sfringuellàvano battute di ragazzi birbi, a piedi nudi, en busca de higos y de ciruelas, che arrivano a divinare per telepatìa di là d’ogni chiuso: d’orto (salvo l’orto del prete) o di signorile giardino. Vi si avventurava pure, col settembre, qualche puttanona d’automobile sfiancata dagli strapazzi, dagli anni, imbarcando magari tutta una famiglia gitante, con due litri di pipì a testa in serbo per la prima fermata, pupi e pupe, e il chioccione di dietro, spaparanzato a poppa, che soffocava con la patria potestà del deretano i due fili d’erba delle due figliolette maggiori. Pareva che una Meccanica latrice di prosciutti si avventasse contro l’assurdo, ruggendo, strombazzando, schioppando, sparando sassi da sotto le gomme, lacerando con ruggiti del motore e con gli strilli de’ suoi sbatacchiati Argonauti-donne il tenue ragnatelo di ogni filosofia. (RR I 713-14; Gadda 1987a: 380-82)

Graphically, the description appears to be articulated in two paragraph-moments, each of whose incipit exhibits identical phenomena in parallel: the ellipsis of the verb (an existential v’era, at first, and the auxiliary of the passive, later) and above all the dislocation to the right of the subject, a stylistic shift, which, as Terracini once pointed out, was dear not only to Pirandello, but also to lyric prose writers at the beginning of last century century. Of the two moments, the first enumerates intrinsic aspects of the referent (treating, that is, a sort of physical geography, into which the presence of man is none the less already intruding), the second lists the modes of utilisation – in a word, the human geography: it concerns the road in so far as it is used by different types of passers-by. Let’s begin with a few words on the first moment, before concentrating our attention on the second.

After opening with a detached phrase that poses the descriptive theme (and places it spatially, and evaluates it disparagingly: stradACCia), the first moment is composed, schematically, of a ternary list of qualifiers: three juxtaposed assertions of the descriptive theme, one adjectival, one adverbial, and one complexly prepositional (composed, that is, by a co-ordination of prepositional syntagmata):

Here, it seems, we are well within the bounds of the classical syntax of the textual type known as description: after an introductory existential phrase, comes a series of assertions. When scrutinised, however, the usual descriptive syntax appears as a sort of pretext or, better, a sort of useful point of departure for manoeuvres that solicit various modes of reading. In particular, this happens through the imbalance caused by the dimensions of the last assertion (con lùnule […]). The latter, decidedly more lengthy and complex than the preceding two, and provided with two harshly dissonant digressive codas, contains, in effect, another ternary co-ordination with a final destabilising element, whose first element is in its turn binary in its specification (di piatti infranti/ d’una scodella). We can represent the resulting disjunctive scheme as follows:

Particularly noteworthy, in this disjunctive scheme, is that its different elements are subjected to an extraordinary syntactical and semantic elaboration, whose artificiality contrasts and redeems its own insignificance, the leaden weight of the brute fact. This is a virtuoso performance which, let it be said in passing, the translations all tend more or less, for no good linguistic reason, to conjure away.

Sticking to the bare facts, that is, setting aside the superimposed elaboration, the three referents named and located tra i ciottoli (the last of which is tratto tratto, which is to say, at intervals, thus present iteratively) are nothing other than insignificant or unpleasant appearances (parvenze). These are described in the following order: (1) slivers of plates and bowls; (2) an empty can (or perhaps several, given the attractive force of the other plurals); and finally (3) faeces. However, to begin with, Gadda, like Plato’s God, geometrises: he geometrises the humble and formless reality of the slivers of plate, by representing them as instances of the noble geometric shape, consisting of the intersection of two unequal arcs, which is called the lùnula.

This is a shape, it should be noted, that is especially dear to the author, who recycles it from the distant past of Racconto italiano – «quelle caratteristiche lùnule di terraglia» (SVP 426) – and uses it another two times in La cognizione. Beyond the occasion on which it is used to describe the bags under the doctor’s eyes: «Le occhiaie gonfie, a lùnula» (RR I 753; Gadda 1987a: 468), it appears precisely in the re-describing of the same road about fifty pages further on (RR I 740; Gadda 1987a: 443). In two other occurrences outside of La cognizione,the term is, on the contrary, provided with an erudite gloss. In Crociera mediterranea, we read:

Lùnula, detta di Ippocrate, è la porzione del piano definita da un arco di circonferenza e dalla semicirconferenza che curerai tracciare prendendo a diametro la corda di quello. Questa figura è quadrabile (per comparazione e diffalco) senza il sussidio del calcolo integrale. E la sua quadratura occupò anche Leonardo nel «De ludo geometrico». (Castello, RR I 216, n. 57)

And in L’Adalgisa, the term is again associated with plates – «aveva ridotto in lùnule una trentacinquina di piatti» (RR I 319):

Lùnula è la superficie piana definita da un arco di circonferenza e dalla semicirconferenza costruita sulla corda di quello, assunta per diametro. (Teorema di Ippocrate sulle lùnule del triangolo retto). (340, n. 27)

Pursuing the same line of attack, though with a change in stylistic register (from techno-scientific to poetic), the baràttolo, the second humble parvenza related to the road, is presented obliquely through the hypostatisation of one of its past and present qualities: that of having been abandoned, or that of lying now in desolate abandonment (oblìo), with its antidiphthong accent mark. The slash of symbolist literary sensibility is then immediately contradicted by the clin d’œil of beninteso applied to an idiot notation (but notice the alternative of antica salsa o mostarda). This turning of the quality (that is, the condition of the can as forgotten or abandoned) into the noun oblìo moreover introduces the harmonies of poetic memory into the description. Oblìo, I believe, seems to allude with caricatured extremism to the use (already somewhat strained) Pascoli made of it in the first verse of Nella macchia (Myricae): «Errai nell’oblìo della valle | tra ciuffi di stipe fiorite, | tra querce rigonfie di galle».

Not dissimilarly, the third appearance is (at first) designated by a distancing circumlocution hinged upon the abstract onta (which also appears at the end of the first segment, «Onta, per lui, e rammarico immedicabile» – RR I 605; Gadda 1987a: 102-03): «l’onta estrusa dall’Adamo», with its symbolist syntax homologous to that of oblìo and extended moreover to the antecedent circumstantiation («sotto il livido metallo d’un paio di mosconi ebbri»). (5) The designation is then immediately after taken up again by an apposition which is also impressionistically periphrastic: l’arrotolata turpitudine. Just as for oblìo, in the word onta it is almost obligatory to read a literary reference. In this case it is to D’Annunzio, whose Elettra Gadda boasted knowing completely by heart. I am referring to the arched coupling of A Roma (vv. 186-87), «di contro all’Onta | dell’Uomo» (where l’onta is counterposed to Potenza), especially if one considers that in Gadda’s syntagma l’onta estrusa dall’Adamo, the article in front of Adamo revives (6) the etymological uomo which in Hebrew is adham.

The elaboration of this description holds still other surprises. After the appositional refrain already mentioned (l’arrotolata turpitudine), the colon introduces a sibylline and trivial explanation concerning the origin of the merde: due presumably to the indigestion of some almond nougat (7) (in Spanish, guirlache de almendras), genuine nougat this (cf. stavolta sì), and not figurative like the broken glass (schegge di bottiglia) of the preceding paragraph. Simultaneously, however, these merde are a «torrone di mandorle» in the same way as those mandorlate left behind (piantate) by other roguish boys upon the Milaneserovine dei fortilizi spagnoli, ruins, one should note, that are described as «sgretolate come torroni secchi» (RR I 733; Gadda 1987a: 426). And this suggests a startling metonymic analogy to certain frantumi di tegoli which in the archetypal description of Racconto italiano (SVP 426-27) a passer-by on the stradaccia removed with his bastoncello. The image seems to be hatched right out of Manzoni: «e buttando con un piede verso il muro i ciottoli che facevano inciampo nel sentiero» (I promessi sposi, ch. I). There then follows a final comment in an abstract, psychological-philosophical tone reminiscent of James, initiated by a new apposition (parvenze), which generalises upon the contingent turpitudini of the road: it is quite dissimilar in tone to the development to which it is attached.

Though constructed upon a simple and symmetrical framework, the first paragraph becomes difficult to enjoy as description. Inevitably, the accumulation of the ornate and of collateral information masks the structural elements. It is worthwhile to compare the different treatment that is given to the image of the stradaccia nearly halfway through the ninth and last segment (RR I 739-42; Gadda 1987a: 442-47). The schema of this description B is very close to the schema of the one discussed above (which for clarity we shall call description A): the first two qualifiers (ghiaiosa, a forte pendenza) having been fused in the predicate è una cateratta di pietrisco, e ciottoli, the third reappears in its prepositional format (from the same starting point: con lùnule di piatti), though acquiring along the way a fourth and final addition (uno o due spazzolini):

Un sentierino lo taglia quel campo [= «un breve campo di banzavóis»] e immette sulla civica strada, già descritta, che costeggia il già descritto muro dei susini: questo ente civico, designato nei mappali catastali come «Civica strada alla costa», dove lambisce il muriccio dei susini è una specie di cateratta di pietrisco e ciottoli grossi come bocce, e alcuni anzi come cocomeri, ma molto più duri, con lùnule di piatti rotti e fondi di bicchieri e bottiglie assai taglienti, qualche barattolo vuoto, diverse merde di colore e consistenza diversa, e uno o due spazzolini frusti da denti, abbandonati al destino delle cose fruste, beninteso.

Nessuno mai vi transitava di notte, perché la stradaccia, che in definitiva e dopo assai rigiri e sassi e guizzi di lucertoloni dai roveti, discende a Lukones, non congiunge in modo diretto dei centri abitati. Disserve solo qualche campicello di banzavóis macilento e le ville con mutria di Svizzera, occupate […].

Nessuno dunque passava da quella strada nelle ore mute della notte: o forse, talvolta, con la bicicletta senza fanale, il Palumbo, che doveva infilare il bigliettino in una qualche punta de’ cancelli, una villa sì e una no. (My emphases)

Despite the relatively pervasive presence of digressing notes in the tone of the comic naïf (I mean in particular the comparison and correction of come cocomeri, ma molto più duri, the recycling of beninteso and the somewhat stale play on the word fruste), the description here appears to be more readable, even if it is also surely more banal. Its referentiality is not, all told, impaired by the superimposition of a different key. The humour (in its low form) and the heterogeneity of certain ingredients (for example, the pedantic use of assai to intensify taglienti, together with the deprecation of diverse merde) do not lead the reader too far off the track of the traditional descriptive syntax of the list.

The informed reader of La cognizione will recall that the elaborative level of the final two segments belongs to an earlier draft, which has simply been tagged on to the rest of the text, out of an understandable editorial decision to present the work as completely as possible. In Letteratura and in the first edition of Einaudi’s «Supercoralli», La cognizione ended with this segment, just one page beyond the passage that we are analysing here. In description A, on the other hand, the greater degree of elaborative care leads to the explosion of the individual descriptive units in autonomous directions: autonomous in style and in elaborative processes. One outstanding component of that autonomy seems to be, in fact, the different method of connecting the units, which in the less elaborated description B is the conjunctive type, while in the more highly elaborated A, we find the alternative type.

We arrive now at the second paragraph, in which, as has already been noted, the human geography is foregrounded. First depicted as ghiaiosa, a forte pendenza, the road is now percorsa, risalita, zoppicata etc.; and that by a multiplicity of users, (8) almost in antithesis to the Nessuno mai vi transitava […] la notte of description B, that has only the hypothetical, though significance-laden, exception of Manganones on his bicycle: «Nessuno dunque passava da quella strada nelle ore mute della notte: o forse, talvolta, con la bicicletta senza fanale […]».

But the isolated rustic path that leads to the Pirobutirro villa, a true and proper umbilical cord that ties it to the external world, appears to be narratively animated even before, even outside of this description. In a brief span of time, the reader finds first, on his way up, the doctor, walking, even though a potential cyclist: «Tentava il buon medico, i primi ciottoli della postrema sassonia: una stradaccia affossata nei due muri y por suerte nelle ombre delle robinie e d’alcuni olmi, per l’ultima pazienza de’ suoi piedi eroici» (RR I 604; Gadda 1987a: 97); he finds there «Battistina in discesa» (RR I 609; Gadda 1987a: 116), who has a long conversation with the doctor on the path; then Gonzalo’s mother herself, who has gone down («con queste strade!») to the cemetery; also the «nipotino del Di Pascuale» (RR I 630; Gadda 1987a: 163-64) and a little later Manganones on his bicycle, going up and coming back down. The passage that we are analysing is thus a kind of generalising compendium of all this commotion. (9)

The first qualification of the stradaccia in the second paragraph is that it is simply, with an anodyne verb, neutral in respect to the particular means utilised, percorsa: passed along by pedoni without further individuation (thus travelled on foot) and with reduced frequency (radi). To this first very general descriptive note is added by means of co-ordination (note: with the word e) a doubling of the complement of the agent (= e […] da qualche ciclista di campagna con bicicletta-mulo). As often happens in Gadda’s prose, the result (thanks to the morphology of qualche and to the shift of the quantifier from adjective, radi, to adverb: talora) is a more individuating, more precise annotation than the first. Its specific difference consists (beyond its many variations of linguistic realisation) in the choice of bicycle as means (recall that the doctor is another potential user-cyclist of the stradaccia), counterposed to the absence of means, and in the specification, also absent at first, of the direction of travel: in discesa. It is also necessary to call the reader’s attention back to the adverb talora, a sort of stylistic signature of the author, his instrument of choice for inserting particular events into a habitual practice, and vice versa for varying the fixity of it: in short, for describing that which is contingent over the backdrop of a paradigm of alternatives. (10)

The paragraph’s opening appears to be dominated by the verb of motion at its beginning, expanded by a pair of co-ordinated, piled-up complements, which we will call a and b. With the disjunction o, the development that follows (= c) introduces an alternative (singular) in respect to b and to a: passing along the road is now the procaccia (= postman), in place of the back-road cyclists and the pedestrians. But at the same time, given that the verb risalita incorporates the direction that first was expressed adverbially (= in discesa), c works also as alternative to the verb percorsa of a, which is no longer simply implied as it was in b. Syntagma c is thus attached to both b and, on a higher level, a, or better to the unit formed by a and b.

The variation in the passage from b to c is, moreover, multiple, and not merely binary: beyond the agent (i) and the direction (ii), the numbers (iii) and definition (iv) of the agents change; and again (v) their frequency (talora, versus the absence of indications); (vi) the means: the bicicletta versus (presumably) on foot; and (vii) the modality: the absence of modality (unless one may read it into bicicletta-mulo versus the participial specification (arrancante, etc.) of one. The apparently simple alternative based on a binary opposition in effect turns out to be a chimera of heterogeneous oppositions. With a classically crescendoed closure, the final development of the sentence (= d) multiplies the differential elements (again, as in b, a plural, again the mention of the frequency, and so on). In particular it integrates in the verb, from which by compensation the directional component is given, the modality that first was external: zoppicata (limped over) and the question of direction thus raised is declared unknown (non si sa in che verso). Finally, a hermetically symbolist apposition reformulates the description of the agent (cenciose apparizioni nella gran luce del nulla).

The complex system of permanences and variations in the first part of the paragraph can be visualised schematically in the following table:

verb of motion	frequency	direction	mode	agent	number	means
travelled				those on foot	rare	(on foot – integrated in the agent)
[travelled]	at times	in descent	(expressed by mule-bike)	(some) back-road cyclists	some	on bicycle
ascended (includes direction)		ascending (in verb)	trudging in the rain, etc.	fearless postman	one	(on foot – but not explicit)
limped over (includes mode and means)	hebdomadal	unknown direction	(limping – integrated in verb)	beggars	a few	(on foot – integrated in verb)

A simple syntactic module of participle + complement of the agent + dislocated subject thus furnishes at the beginning of the paragraph the woof of a process, which is reiterated with mounting complexity, within which the individual photograms of the stradaccia progressively acquire autonomy. In other words, the description appears to be executed from various perspectives, constructed by juxtaposition and summation of independent tesserae.

The autonomy of the component images also becomes syntactical in the second part of the paragraph, in which appear two elaborated tableaux (d and e) of battute and country outings, now introduced by predicates vi sfringuellavano and vi si avventurava. The first, a happy image of unbridled freedom, I would venture, means more than the contextually incongruous vociare, cicalare set down in the lexicons. In my opinion, the meaning of vi sfringuellavano is closer to move about, from place to place, like finches; in other words, it integrates the movement and its modality. But the most salient aspect of the new development d is not so much in the verbal neologism or in the dash of Spanish it contains as in the gerund vaporando l’autunno, which adds a further factor of variation, that of the season, to the preceding series, a factor that has been retained and specified (= col settembre) in the concluding development of the passage. That same development is itself a description completely articulated in two moments, the second analogical, at least in the beginning (Pareva) if not in the final gerunds of the series, (11) and the first referential, but with an extended modality («imbarcando magari tutta una famiglia gitante») which isolates once again an alternative hypothetical episode. The conclusion returns the descriptive excursus to the particular of the novel’s protagonist, distracted in his refuge from the noble idlings which the silence induces.

In conclusion, the second paragraph, as is moreover somewhat the case in the first, with its focalisations of diverse segments, offers the road with a description not in the usual sense of the word: that is, a representation of the contingency of an entity or of a situation. Rather, the second paragraph furnishes the reader what might be called a summation of various possible contingencies: the juxtaposition of several or many of the different aspects, among them alternatives, of a kaleidoscopic reality. It therefore provides a description by alternatives, a description which condenses into one the usually disjointed, rather than concomitant, many-sidedness of reality.

2. Description with comment

As has been said above, description with comment is a description consisting of dishomogeneous layers. It includes moments at a higher level, one of almost metareferential comment, providing justifications, generalisations, and so on, with respect to the normal descriptive plane. This type of description, I believe, responds to a widely (and quite successfully) deployed tendency in Gadda’s writing: the juxtaposition of precise observations on contingent facts along with their valuation, which is to say, a sort of comment on the datum, or an abstraction drawn from it. Moreover, the speculative aspect, dominant in certain parts of Gadda’s work, is never altogether absent; implicitly or explicitly, it is found also in the parts which are more decidedly narrative, and can, as in Quer pasticciaccio and La cognizione, attain important dimensions.

Thus, the technique involves continual excursions, starting from contingency and moving towards a representative plane of greater generalisation, and successive brusque returns to the preceding level. Such a tendency, which according to the author is deeply rooted in his method of work, in his constant attempt to impose a «poetic idea» upon «many injections of classical readings» (Gadda 1993b: 49), seems to respond (to name a few of the causes) to Gadda’s incapacity in principle to limit himself to a single thread, to the single voice. Or, positively, it may respond to a profound need for polyphony, for the paradigmatisation of the individual fact (whence the plurality of perspectives) according to an approach similar to that of Tacitus in history and morals (whence the type of plurality). The result is a representation with levels which are grafted on, one of which is often that of the maxim, of the apothegm.

There is, to take an example from the catalogue of Gonzalo’s cruelties (Manzotti 1984: 332-56), that famous paragraph about the falling cat, about the cat thrown from the third floor of the villa for experimental purposes, or out of a sadistic impulse. (This is a passage that attracted the critical attention of Pasolini, and that finds, beyond its parallel with The Brothers Karamazov, which has been written about extensively, another surprising as well as fortuitous correspondence with Büchner’s Woyzeck.) (12) In and of itself, the act has no such implications, at least not that Gonzalo is aware of; it is merely aimed at functionalising a very general principle of rational mechanics (the theorem of impulse or of the conservation of momentum: «impulse equals the change of momentum» <I = MV>), which he intends to check through a concrete application. But, beyond that, the paragraph is sealed by a second principle formulated in the mode of a maxim («Perché» etc.), isolated for greater strength in a separate sentence: «Poiché ogni oltraggio è morte». This is a formula that grasps a further abstraction which can be drawn from the concrete fact, this time related to the moral mechanics of the protagonists, human or animal, of La cognizione or of life, and so intuitively self-evident as not to require any verification at all.

Now, however, let us turn to a particular instance of description by comment with a detailed consideration of the opening of the second segment of the first part of La cognizione, a selection characteristic of Gadda’s intensely written, semantically concentrated prose:

Al passar della nuvola, il carpino tacque. È compagno all’olmo, e nella Néa Keltiké lo potano senza remissione fino a crescerne altrettanti pali con il turbante, lungo i sentieri e la polvere: di grezza scorza, e così denudati di ramo, han foglie misere e fruste, quasi lacere, che buttano su quei nodi d’in cima. La robinia tacque, senza nobiltà di carme, ignota al fuggitivo pavore delle Driadi, come alla fistola dell’antico bicorne; radice utilitaria e propagativa dedotta in quella campagna dell’Australasia e subito fronzuta e pungente alla tutela dei broli, al sostegno delle ripe. Fu per le cure d’un agrònomo che speculava il progresso e ne diede sicuro il presagio, vaticinando la fine alle querci, agli olmi, o, dentro i forni della calcina, all’antico sognare dei faggi. Dei quali non favolosi giganti, verso la fine ancora del decimottavo secolo, era oro e porpora sotto ai cieli d’autunno tutta la spalla di là della dolomite di Terepáttola, dove di qua strapiomba, irraggiando, sulla turchese livellazione del fondovalle, che conosciamo essere un lago. La calcina, manco a dirlo, per fabbricare le ville, e i muri di cinta alle ville: coi peri a spalliera. (RR I 608; Gadda 1987a: 111-15)

Inserted in its context, this passage, despite its isolated position at the beginning of a segment, takes the form of a descriptive stop related to a broader unit that in turn sets the stage for the first major scene of the novel: the philosophical dialogue between the good doctor and his patient. (13) «Ripresa descrittiva del paesaggio e satirica» (Gadda 1987a: 350) is how Gadda labelled it. The doctor’s progress, to the same degree as other durational actions in other places, keeps being reactualised at regular intervals so as to furnish, together with the character’s equally recurrent reactions or comments, a solid framework for (by nature) disordered reflections.

The representation is thus articulated in two superimposed and parallel layers: one external, elemental, progressive, and the other mental and associative. This second layer contains within itself departures from homogeneity: the thoughts of the doctor, which, though they essentially keep turning towards his patient, display a process of alternation, with recurring increments of abstraction or generality, belonging to the type that we have discussed above. In these thoughts, the doctor, even if his voice is at times indistinguishable from that of the author, indulges in considerations of general validity; he philosophises (filosofeggia), for example, meditating aphoristically upon alimentary habits (as the precocious disciple, in this regard, of Dr Bircher-Benner), or in the mawkish accents of a moralist, he intones upon the fate of mankind. This is where, in particular, the justly celebrated passage concerning the «cammino delle generazioni» is found: «Oh! lungo il cammino delle generazioni, la luce!… che recede, recede… opaca… dell’immutato divenire. Ma nei giorni, nelle anime, quale elaborante speranza!… e l’astratta fede, la pertinace carità. Ogni prassi è un’ immagine,… zendado, impresa, nel vento bandiera…» (RR I 604; Gadda 1987a: 97-98).

The passage under scrutiny, which is, as has been said, a tessera of a larger unit organised through parallel and superimposed layers, belongs, with its comprehensive description of natural events (and so, with extremely slackened narrative thrust), to the low narrative layer. This layer consists of the chronological relation of minor actions (or really of their textual reactualisation, of their being renamed), actions of minimal relevance to the plot, which are none the less implied by other actions which are really quite central. We shall now see that this low narrative layer, or at least the segment with which we are dealing, is organised, and even more visibly so, according to a scheme homologous to that of the mental excursus. That is to say, it is organised by regular alternations between the specific and the general, with a sinusoidal trajectory with respect to the generality of the themes touched upon and the references made.

One will notice, to begin, that our passage essentially depicts a sudden silence in the countryside, an impromptu pause in the duration «senza termini» (strictly speaking, without spatial limits, which is to say, spread over the entire countryside) of the cicada’s song. The cicadas, suddenly, (14) fall silent (tacciono) – with an almost technical verb, in the literary Koiné, for the interruption of a durational activity (just recall the adynaton in Ovid’s Ars I, 271, «vere prius volucres taceant, aestate cicadae»). Those who fall silent in the representation are in reality not so much the cicadas, which are not named anywhere in the paragraph, but metonymically, the trees in which the cicadas are perched, with which they are completely at one (as was suggested in the compositional note mentioned above, with its juxtaposition of carpino-cicala). In fact, only two, among all the types of trees, fall silent: the carpino and the robinia, and they do so, in the text, at a distance, the hornbeam in the first and the locust tree in the third sentence, that is, in a discontinuous way despite the isochronic nature of the event.

As a coded representation of the cicadas falling silent, of the countryside’s becoming quiet, the passage turns out to be tightly tiled in with prior and subsequent moments of the promenade: it is joined to a note on the surroundings found on the first page: «La cicala sull’olmo senz’ombre [note here the pairing of two singular genera] friniva a tutto vapore (15) verso il mezzogiorno, dilatava la immensità chiara dell’estate» (RR I 606; Gadda 1987a: 105), and taken up again and pursued in its turn pages later by an analogous notation on the surroundings (this time with a plural): «Le cicale, risveglie, screziavano di fragore le inezie verdi sotto la dovizie di luce, tutto il cielo della estate crepitava di quello stridìo senza termini nell’unisono d’una vacanza assordante» (RR I 612-13; Gadda 1987a: 123). Thus, in succession: the song of the cicadas, its sudden cessation in our passage, and its eventual resumption (where risveglie presupposes the twin tacque) and duration – with the usual iterative actualisations: for example, «Il toccare delle undici e mezza […] metallo immane sullo stridere di tutte le piante»; «Il crepitìo infinito della terra pareva consustanziale alla luce»; «la luce della campagna; screziata di quella infinita crepidine»; «E le cicale, popolo dell’immenso di fuori, padrone della luce» (RR I 615, 621, 622; Gadda 1987a: 128, 129, 143, 144).

The silencing, or better, the alternation of song and silence, appears to be synchronised in this passage with an alternation of another sphere of perception: that between light and shadow over the landscape. The cicadas, «bestie di luce» (RR I 625; Gadda 1987a: 151), fall silent each time the passing clouds project a shadow over the countryside. (16)

This passing of clouds overhead is recurrent (see, for example, the innovative space-time adverbial: «come se parlasse tra sé e sé, o tra una nuvola e l’altra» – RR I 623; Gadda 1987a: 146), and belongs to the perceptual stereotypes of the author, who is sensitive to every rhythmic scansion of time and space ranging, in La cognizione and elsewhere, from the «giro breve» of the woodworms to the «numero di bronzo», «dopo desolati intervalli» (RR I 714; Gadda 1877a: 384), and, in Gli anni (SGF I 211-12), to the frog, which «per più lenti intervalli» with respect to the tree frog greets the «zaffiro della stella Espero, tacitamente splendida» with its «cauto singhiozzo». It is worth noting that this perceptual and representational scheme may already have been prefigured in the goliardic onomastics of the unpublished Villa in Brianza, even if there it was only (partially) implied:

Nuvole strane trasvolavano nel torrido cielo, da Bergamo sopra l’Albenza, da Lecco, bel nome lombardo, come anche Menaggio e Chiavenna. I cumuli enormi si morulavano, come a simboleggiare future tempeste. La cicala immensa, a tratti, taceva e più lontane e remote cicale dicevano malinconiose desolazioni della terra, popolata di brianzoli.

(The relevant parts are in italics; the «beautiful Lombard name» is an obvious reference to Carducci’s Odi Barbare, Per la morte di Napoleone Eugenio, v. 33: «Ivi Letizia bel nome italico».)

To return to the passage under discussion, linguistically the synchronisation is not so much asserted as suggested by the circumstantial «Al passar della nuvola» (implied in the third sentence), which compresses, by eliminating the usual intermediary term, the overly explicit formula of the first draft version with its double circumstantiation: «Nell’intermettere della cicala, trasvolando la nuvola, si tacitò il carpino» (a version which, in the order b-a-c, foregrounded the standard b term and the figurative c).

At the passing of each cloud, therefore, the chirping of the cicadas ceases, and, figuratively, the vocal trees fall silent. It will not be overlooked that the context here has led to the insertion of the singular represented event into a series of events of the same kind (it is Gadda’s tendency, to which we have already referred apropos the adverb talora, to place the single fact within series of similar facts). But it is above all important at this point to bring out how the alternation and synchronisation of lights and sounds correspond elsewhere in the text to a pattern (so to speak) of engaging in speculation, and are essential to our comprehension of La cognizione. Many pages and segments further on, in a different scenic unit, but in a similar temporal and psychological situation, Gonzalo, on the terrace of his villa contemplates the passage of the clouds: «Nubi transitavano, dalla montagna, in quel cielo, così sereno e ampio da parere infinito» (RR I 731; Gadda 1987a: 420). And at «ogni ombra», in the suspension of time, there comes from the depths of the countryside, «ritenuto e profondo come la cognizione del dolore», the desperate cry of the cuckoo:

Per intervalli sospesi al di là di ogni clàusola, due note venivano dai silenzi, quasi dallo spazio e dal tempo astratti, ritenute e profonde, come la cognizione del dolore: immanenti alla terra, quandoché vi migravano luci ed ombre. E, sommesso, venutogli dalla remota scaturigine della campagna, si cancellava il disperato singhiozzo. (RR I 731-32; Gadda 1987a: 421-23)

Beyond the confines of different scenes which are nonetheless similar, an identical scansion rules over the flow of immobile days: intervals of light and pauses of shadow, and correspondingly, on the sunny countryside, the deafening unison of infinite cicadas; and, in the shade, the solitary voice, the extended cry of the cuckoo hidden in the thickets. The structuring of natural perception thus finely reflects the oppositions on which La cognizione is built: that between plurality (the others, the many, the everybody, the faceless multitude of calibans) and singularity, and those between sociality and solitude, between the natural and the cultural, between clamour and silence, between act and thought. At one of the poles, there is the solitary cuculo, Gonzalo, in one of his darker moments of existence (despite the sunny moments of verbal outpourings, which alternate with the saturnine).

Let us now return, after these contextual excursuses, to the representational organisation of our paragraph. In it, the minuscule event of a sudden sonorous clouding over of the countryside, subsequently reversed, as seen from the re-emergent risveglie (RR I 612; Gadda 1987a: 123), is depicted in two discontinuous temporal moments, and the more important of these is flooded with bits of information which are placed on a clearly more significant level of generality. Schematically, the paragraph can be outlined with the formula:

A

B

A′

B′,

or more analytically:

[ _____ ]		[ _________ ]		[ _____ ]		[ _________ ]
A	A	B	B	A′	A′	B′	B′

in which the reflective moments B and B′, which are of greater length, are inserted after the two moments A («Al passar della nuvola, il carpino tacque») and A′ («La robinia tacque») of concrete representation. This further alternation is prolonged through hysteresis even if less rigorously, in the following paragraph and in the beginning of a moment C («Quella straduccia che il medico doveva risalire andò a lungo nell’ombre, non già dei carpini radi, ma delle robinie senza fine […]»). Moment C is homologous to moments A and A′; it is developed in its turn after a long descriptive insertion about the locust, by a further reflective moment D’ («La sua mediocre puzza la fece considerare utile ai molti […]») in series with B and B′, only to come back down finally to E: «Un quadrupedare tra i ciottoli tolse il dottore ai pensieri: levò il capo […]». What results is a trajectory that might be called sinusoidal, which can be illustratively transposed into a two-levelled scheme which visually displays the upswings into generalisation in a protracted alternation between the concrete and the general:

	B		B′		D′
A		A′		C		E

As a fragment of a prior draft (the only one, in fact, to have been preserved) attests, the scheme described here seems to have been present from the beginning, or at least from a very early stage. This is a fact that is not irrelevant for understanding the genesis of Gadda’s writing. The fragment is presented here with the standard editorial markings:

Nell’intermettere della cicala, trasvolando la nuvola, si tacitò il carpino. È una sorta d’olmi, nella Néa Keltiké potati senza remissione, fino a crescerne altrettanti pali del telegrafo lungo i sentieri o >le strade il polverone delle strade le strade< la polvere. Di grezza scorza, e così diradati di ramo e di fronda, con foglia povera e frusta, quasi lacera. Si tacitò la robinia senza nobiltà di passato, né studio <di rustico [p. ill. cassata] veterano>, né >canto< lode >di antica buccolica bucolica< di faunesca fistola o >di smarrita< canto [p. ill.] di>malinconiosa< smarrita bucolica: radice utilitaria e propagativa dedotta in quella campagna dall’Australasia e subito fronzuta e padrona d’ogni ripa, d’ogni brolo. Fu per le cure d’un agronomo progressivo >ch’ebbe< che diede sicuro il presagio: >e< <egli> <su quel fondamento […]> scontò la fine alle querci, agli olmi >;< : o, dentro i forni della calcina, all’antico sognare dei faggi; dei quali non favolosi giganti, verso la fine ancora del >decimosettimo< decimottavo secolo, era oro e porpora sotto ai cieli >dell’< d’autunno tutta la spalla di là della dolomite di Terepàttola, dove di qua strapiomba, e <dorata> splende, <come >apparizione< muro di regni non >tocchi< valicati> sulla >chiarità< livellazione turchese del lago. La calcina, manco a dirlo, per fabbricare le ville: e i muri di cinta delle ville: coi peri a spalliera.

We now come to a minute examination of the articulation A B A′ B′ of the paragraph, and especially of the two so-called reflective moments B and B′. In A and A′, thanks to the personification imposed through the deployment of the verb tacere, the protagonist is the countryside, of which (merging narration and description into one: the verb is in the past tense – specifically, passato remoto or distant past – remote from the narration of events) a specific alteration is presented.

The interposed elements B and B′, with a sudden leap to the level of generalisation, lead instead away from the narration-description, to a level that is less concrete, and more abstract: in order to introduce what might be called encyclopaedic information about the referents, in order to load these referents with history and knowledge: of economic, botanical, literary, and mythological culture. The hornbeams that fall silent in A are those named somewhat affectedly with a singular generic noun («Il carpino») which are planted along the stradaccia being travelled by the doctor, or along other nearby paths. But suddenly, in B, the reference is extended generally, with the implied subject of the new sentence («è compagno […]»), to all the hornbeams of Nea Keltike (Lombardy, the Po Valley) and correspondingly, the assertion becomes habitual, with the use of the factual present tense (from tacque to è compagno, to lo potano, etc.), and in fact is applied after the colon, with a third metamorphosis of the reference, to the plural of carpini-pali, which is to say, the condition to which the care of the peasants reduces the defenceless popolo.

Underneath the virtuosity of the mutating denotation and the thematic kaleidoscope (evident in the progressive diminution of focus right down to the leaves of the trees) there are, in contrast to what is contingent, solid notions of botany and agronomy, not unworthy of the pages of a Politecnico: the hornbeam, companion to the elm, and not simply associated with it (although the elm does accompany the doctor on his way – RR I 604; Gadda 1987a: 97), tends to be treated as a thicket (in particular, the sparse fronds, «foglie misere e fruste, quasi lacere» had been utilised as feed for the livestock. Pascoli’s Viola, too, «facea brocche di carpino e d’ontano»), denuded of all their lateral branches, thus producing the appearance of «pali con il turbante»; also, the qualification of the bark, grezza, is reminiscent of the «cortice […] scabro» in the line of Forcellini, which bears testimony, moreover, with references to Pliny and Cato, to the plant’s noble, bucolic history.

The robinia, which in A′, analogously, falls silent, is instead, for its part, a new tree, without tradition, propagated during the eighteen hundreds to supplant the autochthonous flora of the Po Valley for (according to the narrator) primarily economic reasons. A tree without qualities (the first three are negative: senza + negative noun and twice ignota + positive noun), the locust tree catalyses the polemical vis of a narrator who completely forgets about his character. A remark from an incomplete and earlier text, Viaggi di Gulliver cioè del Gaddus, is recycled and inserted here: the «arbore pungentissimo» of locusts was the sixth «generazione di felicità» grown thick «nella felice Breanza»: «più feconda che non le mosche sopra al risotto o i pesci gobbi in Eupili». And in both places, Manzoni is charged for his real or purported propagation of the locust (RR II 965).

Two trees, therefore, in the two referential moments A and A′; or better, two types of trees, associated by their practical role but in a certain way counterposed. The first, the ancient one, is seen as the victim of ruthless necessity («lo potano senza remissione») yet also the cause of its own tendencies to humility («foglie misere e fruste, quasi lacere»); and the second is seen as the triumphant creature of utility. One thus discovers again an opposition homologous to that between light and shadow, between cicadas and cuckoo.

We have thus far analysed the binary architecture of our passage, which alternates between description and comment, an architecture noteworthy for its complex correspondences and patterns, and one which is certainly unusual in twentieth-century Italian prose. How typical it is of Gadda’s writing is further illustrated by the superimposition of procedures which disrupt the equilibrium of the logical schemes so as to compromise their consistency from within, introducing a spontaneous playfulness in the very place where rationality seemed to rule supreme.

One might consider, in particular, the pattern of the symmetrical dispositivo A B / A′ B′. The formal rigidity of the pattern is mitigated in at least two ways. On one side, more subtly, the syntactic modality of the transition from A to B and from A′ to B′ intervenes: this is done first across the boundaries of the sentences («il carpino tacque. È compagno all’olmo»), and later, in a more insidious manner, within the same phrase or sentence, straddling the boundaries of syntagma («La robinia tacque, senza nobiltà di carme»). Irregularity is thus grafted upon regularity, the former feeds off the latter. And on another side, the mitigation is effected by means of a more obvious asymmetry between B and B′. The B’ segment turns out to be longer and above all more complex than the B. This complexity derives from several characteristic (characteristic not by their nature but in their mode, frequency, and mass) techniques of expansion:

i) essentially digressive progression or linear thematic drift (see beginning of section 1);
ii) progression through expolitio of parallel subthemes.

The juxtaposition of qualifying negatives («senza nobiltà […] ignota al […] come alla […]) and positives (part of which are conceivable as justifications of the negatives: «senza nobiltà di carme […] perché dedotta […]») with which B’ begins is in effect developed, after a period, by a new sentence. The new sentence returns to and elaborates one piece of the new, significant, rhematic information – on the first level of the preceding sentence: «dedotta in quella campagna […] Fu per le cure di […]».

In other words, having started from the locust’s introduction into Europe from distant lands (Australasia – here Gadda is confusing the locust and the acacia) he arrives at speaking of the person mainly responsible for that modification, which had such a great impact upon the ecosystem. And he then continues in the same way, taking up again and developing the element, or one of the rhematic elements of the preceding unit in a new syntactic and semantic unit. The rhematic enumeration «alle querci, agli olmi, o […] all’antico sognare dei faggi» is rethematised at the beginning of the new sentence with «Dei quali non favolosi giganti […]» and the new sentence reproduces within itself twice more the process of linear thematic progression. Now, however, it occurs under the strictest anadiplosis by contact, antecedent + relative: «della dolomite di Terepàttola [= Resegone or rather, I believe, Grigna, near Terepàttola-Lecco] dove [= mentre essa, cioè la quale invece] di qua strapiomba del fondovalle, che conosciamo essere un lago».

The quadruple thematicisation of rhematic elements takes the reader far away from the initial theme of B, the locusts of a plainly utilitarian present: it takes one back in time to the «popolo senza frode» of the great trees – querci olmi faggi – of the Lombard countryside of the nineteenth century, not without a hint of Ariosto (see Orlando Furioso I, 33: «Il mover de le frondi e di verzure, | che di cerri sentia, d’olmi e di faggi»; moreover, even the return «dei quali non favolosi giganti» seems to remind us generically of the Orlando Furioso); or it takes us, as in the opening of the I promessi sposi, to the affectionate present of a countryside dear to the author’s own gaze, like the «turchese livellazio del fondovalle, che conosciamo essere un lago». In contrast to the drift of these themes, the second expansion technique named above, progression through expolitio of parallel subthemes, takes over at this point. In other words, the author decides to go (partially) back up the digressive chain, recycling the new theme – «La calcina» – from the same sentence from which the beeches and other «non favolosi giganti» had been extracted:

vaticinando la fine alle querci_a, agli olmi_a, o, dentro i forni della calcina_b, all’antico sognare dei faggi_a. Dei quali non favolosi giganti_a, verso la fine ancora del decimottavo secolo, era oro e porpora sotto ai cieli d’autunno tutta la spalla di là […] La calcina_b, manco, a dirlo, per fabbricare le ville, e i muri di cinta alle ville: coi peri a spalliera.

(The underlining and the subscripts illustrate the scheme with which the return is constructed, which is, comprehensively, of the type: a₁, a₂b, a₃ / a_1-3b, or more simply: a b / a′ b′)

The last and briefest member of the segment B′; is thus forced, instituting a parallelism, to re-establish the equilibrium compromised by a progressive marginalisation of the centre of gravity.

The same thing is evident in the opening paragraph of La Cognizione, which, having set out in a direct line to establish in detail the historical and spatial co-ordinates of the narration, soon pours forth in an unstoppable cascade of anadiplosis, marked at moments by feigned attempts to climb back up the thematic chain. This procedure is simultaneously a narrative beginning and a parodic caricature of the techniques of narration. Analogous phenomena of thematic drift occur in many other places, confirming the importance for Gadda’s style of centrifugal forces which are meant to balance, on the level of writing and of cognition, the ratio of syntax, logic, and other values. The following passage is an example for one and all:

[…] l’immagine del vecchio colonnello medico, che lui pure aveva avuto occasione di conoscere, se non proprio all’Ospedale Militare Centrale di Pastrufazio. Del vecchio medico, e colonnello nonostante tutto, dal mento quadrato, dal colletto insufficiente al perimetro, col piccolo gancio ogniqualvolta sganciato, sul collo: che appariva quasi bendato dalla bianca benda militare. Bende ch’egli aveva visto, egli Gonzalo, ai distesi: non mai bianche, nel monte. (RR I 668; Gadda 1987a: 245)

The combining into linearity of concrete observations of reality and excursions into commentary results, as has already been said about the amassing of ornate elements in the passage analysed in part 1 of this essay (and as is true, furthermore, for the elements of every complex alternative structure), in a palpable slowing down of the text, which in a complex way devalues the narrative relevance of the very description contained within it.

In this process, secondary themes acquire autonomous resonance, and harmonic notes associated with the principal themes are amplified. That is what, I believe, happens in our passage in regard to the song of the cicadas theme. This theme, which in the representation of the noon hour returns innumerable times in the La cognizione (one of Gadda’s «greatest metaphoric orchestrations» according to Pietro Citati), (17) can hardly be said to have no more significance than a mere descriptive fact. On one side, it resonates with rich literary allusions – recall what has been said about the author’s method of work. Firstly, his similarities with Ariosto – for example, the memorable verses in Orlando Furioso, VIII, 20, «sol la cicala col noioso metro | fra i densi rami del fronzuto stelo | le valli e i monti assorda, e il mare e il cielo» (Gadda’s locust tree, too, is «subito fronzuta»), which Carducci in Risorse di San Miniato al Tedesco (well known to Gadda, as a letter to Contini attests) had referred to in an ironic polemic within a lovely eulogy to cicadas: «Nelle fiere solitudini del solleone, pare che tutta la pianura canti, e tutti i monti cantino, e tutti i boschi cantino: pare che essa la terra dalla perenne gioventù del suo seno espanda in un inno immenso il giubilo de’ suoi sempre nuovi amori co ’l sole».

But on another side, the vigilant omnipresence of the cicadas does not seem extraneous to a certain mannered Hellenism – one thinks, moreover, of a page of Meraviglie d’Italia in which the light of Hellas is evoked: «quella luce che già vide Zeusi, immota ed immensa tra le foglie digitate e setose, assordata dal disteso frinire» (Mercato di frutta e verdura, SGF I 49) – with perhaps as well an explicit allusion to one of the most famous myths of Plato’s Phaedrus. In it, the cicadas are fated to be the ears of the Muses, to whom they carefully report concerning how the Muses are being honoured by men: in particular, they reveal to Calliope and Urania those who «pass through life philosophising». Thus, for many reasons, Socrates concluded, «we must continue our discourse and not abandon ourselves to the noonday sun». And, in fact, «Per non dormire […]» is precisely the exclamation Gonzalo uses in acceding to the doctor’s story (RR I 659; Gadda 1987a: 227): which is certainly a D’Annunzian expression, but one spoken by a protagonist who cultivates his philosophical musings; who reads the Parmenides (RR I 715; Gadda 1987a: 386), the Symposium and perhaps the Laws (RR I 727; Gadda 1987a: 411), and who rejects the clamour and the surrounding appearances of the world because they do not allow him to «raccogliersi ne’ suoi studi filosofici o algebrici», (L’Editore chiede venia del recupero chiamando in causa l’Autore, RR I 764; Gadda 1987a: 492). The «bestie della luce» are thus the faithful witnesses to Gonzalo’s «not abandoning himself to the somnolence of the midday; witnesses, in fact, of his philosophical dialogue with the doctor, in which the alternation of theoretical and plainly quotidian sections (the latter entrusted mostly though not entirely to the doctor) seems to reproduce the alternation of song and silence, of light and shadow, in the introductory description.

A few words in conclusion: reading (the descriptions of) Gadda. In the preceding pages, we have individuated two descriptive techniques, that of description by alternatives and that of description with comment, which are particular to Gadda’s prose. We have also maintained that such techniques are traceable to a tendency to infinite metonymy, to seeing in every parcel of reality the network of relations, the «web of infinite references» (Emilio e Narcisso, SGF I 638) which constitutes it. An identical motivation links the two descriptive techniques to well known phenomena such as the superabundance (sometimes) of footnotes, or the jumps in tone or even in language, in the arrangement of the words in a sentence. Without exaggeration, it is legitimate to affirm that all of Gadda’s prose is governed by a principle of generalised association, which systematically subjects his writing, line by line, word by word, to a metonymic explosion.

However, the natural consequence of this fact, if we want to follow the author’s multiple excursions, is that the average speed of our reading is necessarily greatly diminished in comparison to that for a hypothetical standard turn-of-the century narrative. It could be said that Gadda’s pages demand a reading that is slow, painstaking, and attentive to detail. In effect, many of Gadda’s narrative constructions are often, as has been said about La cognizione, static structures, more essay or treatise and confession than narration. And particularly static are many of the descriptions, where there is no sense in trying to find the usual narrative functions (to establish the framework of the action, to create a Stimmung, to introduce indices of judgement, and so on).

While this is altogether true, there are different modalities of slow-paced reading. I think it is quite mistaken to think of Gadda as a writer to approach solely on a small scale, because of his lingerings, deviations, and returns, exploring minutely and without pre-established itineraries the associative meanderings of his sentence structure and lexicon. That is to say, it is mistaken to approach his work by employing a reading which is essentially astructural, antinovelistic in its atomism. In Gadda’s writing, the static quality and the associated metonymic explosion are in reality a calculated result of an undaunted structuring will: they are one aspect of the unstable equilibrium between the two counterposed forces of order and disorder, of structure and dispersion.

As a result, an adequate reading of Gadda’s descriptions (and of his writing in general), requires, beyond a total readiness to abandon oneself to its spontaneous excursions, its leaps of associative fantasy, the effort to reconstruct the rigorous architecture that potentiates and triggers off its opposite: an aleatory centrifugality.

This architecture is certainly manifested on a small scale, within the paragraph and portions of it, as has been seen in parts 1 and 2 of this paper; none the less, it is also manifested in the macro-structures, and an attentive reading should always depart from the latter. A description like that which opens the second segment – «Al passar della nuvola, il carpino tacque» – acquires meaning and function only if we insert it, as we have endeavoured to do in the first paragraphs of part 2, into the narrative context that justifies it and that it in turn relativises. Reading certain descriptions by Gadda correctly is thus equivalent to doing justice simultaneously to their static quality and to their negated dynamism, to their character of being both fragment and indispensable tessera in the narrative mosaic.

Université de Genève