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A Resentful Journey

Individual research interests and sheer curiosity determine how a collection of essays is read. A volume thus comes alive in ways that were not anticipated by its editors. Yet a preface is a formality with a purpose: mostly, that of sorting out in advance those patterns that unify and those that distinguish the articles that follow. The reader may then salivate — gaddianamente — in anticipation of the good bits, or resolutely skip the offending items. This Baedeker-like function seems inescapable in a preface, even in a medium as open-ended as the web.

The eleven perspectives in the Journal can be taken in any order, but an order does exist and may be profitably adhered to. The journal, that is, reads like a self-standing volume, a stock-taking exercise in the Gadda field today. It takes one from the general to the particular, from the wider context to the most specific of motives; it journeys from the reductive slogan the Italian Joyce — admittedly little more than a useful flagpost for the non-initiated — to the very private origins of that explosive plurilingualism.

To begin with, the focus is wide-angled, placing Gadda within the larger framework of the macaronic tradition (Sbragia). In the second instalment, tantalising questions are asked about the secret connections with another great name of modernism, Joseph Conrad (Bertone). The camera then pans in ever closing circles, as the formal aspects of Gadda’s style are assessed (Guglielmi and Manzotti), resting, at the core of this issue, on the central theme of the Baroque (Dombroski and Raimondi). In the next four essays, the focus is narrowed further, inevitably by concentrating on the two major novels. First, by looking at Cognizione with an eye to the peculiar geography of Gadda, discussed both in its internalised, lyrical version (Luperini) and in the displaced, split/doubled external one (Grignani). Then by examining nets and knots in Pasticciaccio (Amigoni), and by tracing its plot through the incessant thematic doubling (Pedriali). At the furthest end from the opening macaronic overview, the Journal closes with the most intimate study of the set, subtly delving into Gadda’s family album (Terzoli).

Non-specialists will find in Albert Sbragia’s The Modern Macaronic the ideal introduction to the Gadda world, offering them a concise and exhaustive crash-course in gaddology that deftly crams in biographical detail, historical insight and critical assessment. For the hurried visitor, this may very well be all the Gadda that’ll ever be needed. But there is much to fascinate the most consummate gaddista also. Sbragia’s discussion focuses on the most striking aspect of Gadda’s, his spectacular use of language, tracing its roots to the macaronea of Renaissance Northern Italy. A whole genre — the European narrative from Folengo to Flaubert —, not just the unageing questione della lingua from Folengo to Fo, is thus looked at. The findings apply not simply to Gadda, but also to Joyce and Céline – the classic comparative trio in Gadda studies (for those interested in further links with fellow modernists, incidentally, there is a brilliant study by Nicoletta Pireddu on Gadda and Beckett in the Archive). Sbragia’s incisive line of enquiry concludes by exiting the strictly comparative field, with fruitful methodological implications. In Joyce, Gadda and Céline, he argues, premodern modes of representation re-emerge to displace the modern myth of subjective totality and mimetic realism by resorting to a poetics that is temporally pitched behind rather than beyond that enduring myth. Viewed from this perspective, the standard ultra-modern tag becomes hardly applicable to Gadda’s peculiar brand of macaronic.

Sbragia’s approach is continued in the two-way comparativism of Manuela Bertone’s Curioso caso Gadda-Conrad. In 1953 Bompiani published a translation of The Segret Agent. Gadda, the translator, had almost certainly subcontracted the work. Bertone shows, however, that some of the departures from the original come from Gadda’s pen. Did he have, then, an active interest in Conrad? In the case of his other translations, the poetic licences do signal an ongoing appropriation. Can we at all date it, as well as prove it, in this instance? Led by a surefooted curiosity, Bertone turns to Quer pasticciaccio and finds evidence of a Conrad presence already in the 1946 unfinished version published in Letteratura. Similarities in the cast of characters — the main couple, the childless woman, the child-substitutes, the agent as philosopher —, their constitutive plurilingualism, the way in which the story revolves around the tragedy of a woman blinded by the denial of maternity, all this reveals more than a passing acquaintance with The Segret Agent. It strongly suggests that a younger Gadda had read the work, perhaps following Cecchi’s influential praise. Should we conclude from this that Conrad, of all writers, acted as the catalyst for Gadda’s most novelistic plot? The coincidences keep indeed piling up, for it was in 1953, right at the time of the translation, that Gadda resumed work on the unfinished Pasticciaccio. Of course, the many questions Bertone raises with regard to the comparative case remain unanswered, but only rhethorically so — in the end, curiosity does not kill the case, so to speak, but digs to unexpected depths into crucial aspects of the Gadda subject matter.

Racconto italiano (written in 1924, but published posthumously in 1983) is Gadda’s own Les faux-mannayeurs. The overrunning material prevents the notebook from metamorphosing into the novel, life from mutating into art, leaving the author with no choice but to deal with unmediated life. Yet within the transitional metatext, the chances of survival of the genre are also desperately debated: in theory at least, multiple points of view and subtler plot construction represent the best strategies for any rescue operation. The practical challenge Gadda faces from then onwards, Guido Guglielmi explains in his Gadda and the Form of the Novel, consists in arriving at a multi-perspective interior narrative dominated by one poetic idea. To this end, his philosophical investigations would prove decisive stepping stones. By the time of Meditazione milanese (1928), Gadda’s mindset is more or less established. From Spinoza he has learnt the identity of extension and thought; from Leibniz, the infinity of monads; from Bergson, that the world exists in a state of becoming, that the systematic arrangement of factual data, rather than leading to certainty, merely reproduces what is already known. Manzoni, however, acts as a warning against stretching the novel form to its limits. The puzzle of how best to represent life’s incongruity within a congruous context, of how to carry off the juggling act between the extremes of oversimplification and overproliferation — in Gadda’s eyes, that most modern of undercurrents in Manzonian lore — is self-consciously examined on Gadda’s desk. The struggle is between the conflicting needs of (philosophically informed) adhesion to reality and (authorially controlled) cohesion of discourse. After many projectual failures, Gadda’s mature compromise, Guglielmi argues convincingly, satisfies both his original challenges: multiplicity and construction. The former entails the assimilation of the world’s languages as his own voice; the latter, a strategy of unified fragments that while failing to reconstitute totality, nevertheless achieve something very close to his totality.

Fragments come even more to the fore with Emilio Manzotti’s study of Gadda’s descriptive procedures. Like Plato’s God, Gadda geometrises formless reality. To catch him at work, Manzotti sifts, literally, through the manifestations of disorder, through the many broken, emptied, derelict objects left by the roadside. His analysis of passages from La cognizione is rightly painstaking, proving conclusively that the accumulation of alternatives and comments — the excess representation Gadda reserves to a reality that is no longer whole —, is grafted upon a simple, straightforward binary structure. It is in this way, Manzotti argues, that Gadda risks succumbing to infinite metonomy, but to a large extent succeeds in containing it. Perspectives multiply around the object: micro-perspectives, that is, which easily engender reader fatigue. Yet, despite the rioting exuberance of the materials, the undaunted structuring will of the writer manages to deliver even the classically crescendoed closures. This may be misread as a sheer virtuoso performance, but it should be registered instead as a transcription of the mind’s perceptual stamp on what it perceives, as evidence of its profound need for disciplined polyphony between the poles of order and disorder. For the reader, of course, there remains the challenge of how to match the powers of this exacting mind over the longer distances — Manzotti rightly guards against approaching Gadda exclusively on the small scale, against employing atomistic readings that would be essentially astructural and antinovelistic.

Proliferation and its interplay with absence and loss, with a melancholy oriented towards ruin and death, take a new slant in Robert Dombroski’s Un’etica barocca (appearing here for the first time in its Italian version). Of the theory of monads, Gadda may well discern the redeeming splendours. In practice, though, all he experiences is monadic solitude. The subject is indeed the house without windows and shut from contact: something that, on logical grounds alone, should not exist. Since monadic solitude cannot be negated, since Hamlet’s dilemma loses one of its horns (being in the world is in fact neither conceded nor conceivable), the crucial determinant of the novel’s form becomes the void – itself a void with a difference, however. Dombroski fills it, arrestingly, as he draws on the games of Baroque excess described by Deleuze in Le pli. By his lights, those games are the paradigm of the way in which Gadda refuses to give in to the ravages of absence. The unstoppable flow of words pugnaciously marshalled on the page tracks no empty semblance of the thing lost. Nihilism is strongly resisted, as abundance invades the narrative space and compulsively appropriates any available square on the board in a triumph of plénitude. Literature, Dombroski goes on to argue, also provides ready-made disguises which the subject may wear simultaneously, thus assuming the cloaks of Oedipus and Don Quixote, Hamlet and Stephen Dedalus, all rolled into one. The resulting subject as pastiche meets one further need of the deprived self: the concealment of grief through its exhibition as contempt. What we as readers experience is entrapment by and exclusion from the text’s code. We can only gaze with the helplessness of a mesmerised quarry at the grotesque masks that stare at us from amidst the ganglial spires of Gadda matter.

The study of Gadda’s baroque continues with Ezio Raimondi, in an approach combining Deleuze, Bakhtin and the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre. While still trusting positivist science, Gadda explores the inverted metaphysics that can be derived from Leibniz’s theory of perception. The body, Gadda believes, has reserves of darkness and depth that science will not reach. In them, he maintains, lies a guarantee, or at least a promise of freedom. But already in Apologia manzoniana, his earliest personal manifesto, Gadda casts a Baroque, diagonal light across the page. As in Caravaggio, this comes with an angle and a quality that suggest a distant source. Reached by it, the body emerges from the surrounding darkness. Indeed, both darkness and light are its elements, as both reveal its inner workings in the eternal present of matter. However, the subject attached to the body is a time-bound narrative unfolding from a position of limited participation to the infinity of matter. Put differently, and following an argument that becomes more and more compelling as we progress: issues of mortality and morality, the subject’s actual distance from the light source and the struggle between society and the body prevent Gadda from reaching the conclusions Deleuze arrives at from the same Leibnizian premises. In L’Adalgisa, Gadda’s first mature work, an all-too-human horse takes part in the contemporary tales of the living body. It also becomes the focus of the expanding metatext in the footnotes, rearing its fiery head at the evil to be vanquished – the corporeality of the dragon, compliments of the grotesque art of Cosmé Tura in the St George. The senseless power of life as mere biology is the hard lesson Adalgisa learns as she scrubs moss and mould off a funeral monument; it is what youth mercilessly expresses, as Caravaggio, youth’s supreme painter, has shown. Gadda may be forced to accept the world as unscrutable mechanism, but he also denounces its vacuousness. The body may perhaps compensates for the loss of a true metaphysics. Infinity, complexity, multiplicity can be experienced through it. Yet, the epiphany of the slanted light seems confined to a canvas – transferred to life, it fails to congeal. Saddled with too much imaginative baggage, Gadda’s revolt against the unseeable, unseatable rider (and could that sympathetic equine reference indicate oblique Swiftian affinities?) lashes out unremittingly. It has all the fury of a transcendental positivist armed with the Baroque ethics of the visual arts.

Contini was the first to claim that for Gadda only the present exists. According to Romano Luperini, this is not to be understood in the lyrical, contemplative sense. La cognizione, in his view, is a puzzle of genres, a simultaneous, angled construction in four voices: the editor’s and the author’s in the preface; the poet’s in the exit macaronic text, Autunno; and the narrator’s from within the tale. Each in their own way, the voices-genres try to distance themselves from the protagonist’s plight, but fail. The resulting pastiche denies the tragic; it filters and mimics an entire tradition, rather. Literature thus ends up consisting in the exhibition of the artifice, a sure sign of failure on part of the humanistic project supported by the literati in the 1930s. Here Luperini contrasts the two great solariani, Gadda and Montale, through the landscape and house motifs they share. No visiting Clizia brings relief to Gadda’s neurosis; protection by logos and utopia leads to further negation in his case. Following the acquaintance with grief, there remains indeed only the present, but not that of the body, nor that of the symbolic. For Luperini, what is everlasting in La cognizione is the laceration of the mind. Fakeness of discourse (the construction by genres) and of referent (as in the grotesque South American setting) contribute to the construction of the frozen narrative inhabited by the Gaddian subject. It is because time for the mind has stopped that Gadda resorts to allegorical pastiche, one of the modern variants of allegory proper, as Luperini has decisively demonstrated in his work on the modern Italian canon.

Taking off where Luperini left, almost verbatim in fact, Maria Antonietta Grignani turns her attention to the Hispanic pole of La cognizione. The hispanidad, in Gadda’s case, comes from obvious literary sources (Manzoni, Cervantes, even Pirandello), first-hand experience (the year he spent in Argentina), and a personal anthropology that is both deterministic and semi-legendary (with the mother responsible for her son’s Teutonically systematising half, and the father for his innate, disruptive quixotism). La cognizione is, of course, no South American novel – the hispanic overtones betrays, more than anything else, Gadda’s intense desire to emulate the great Manzonian novel with its co-presence of Iberian and Italian elements within a Lombard setting. Similarly, Gadda’s earlier travel writing is no travel writing at all, even when it focuses sensitively on the spatial restlessness of the suffering subject. But Gadda did travel nevertheless, and he could be a perceptive, if unconventional, observer of new peoples and their customs, as Grignani shows in an exquisite reading of the Gaddus fuori di casa. In Argentina Gadda does not expect to find an Eldorado ruled by reason and imagination. Yet, if it is not disappointment that drives him back, he returns home rather hastily after little more than a year, having stored the sub-equatorial perspective in his mind for future reference. Years later he falls back on it for his most autobiographical narrative. Any degree of cohesion that is achieved in Cognizione depends largely on the double fictional geography that parades Brianza as South America. That geography is the agon where the difficult balancing act of Gadda’s constitutive double and triple textuality is played out. Italy’s truest features are exposed in this manner, but the means have become more indirect than ever. Not only that: the South American experience, Grignani argues, contributes actively to the making of the novel. Periphery, in Gadda’s post-American ethics, is the place where connections become loose, the organic borders on the disorganic and languages hybridise. In La cognizione, Brianza and Milan Gadda’s original centre truly go down under, where they are forced to reveal the periphery lurking deep at the heart of what one thought was, truly, home.

In Quer pasticciaccio, instead, the Roman disguise does not produce an obvious Milanese metafiction. If the native Milan is behind this Rome, the fact is not advertised in any way. Yet the need for a double geography, for a spatial duplicity, so to speak, giving cohesion to Gadda’s multi-tongued discourse, still applies. But how is a double textuality to be founded on a double geography in this case? For in Gadda’s most advanced narrative reality weighs indeed on every textual event. Spatial mimesis is as exacting as in Joyce’s Ulysses; time is clearly marked and flows with acceptable if varying speeds as in Balzac or Proust. In a highly provocative reading, Ferdinando Amigoni probes the Italian masterpiece of 20th century polyvocality on the basis of the tenets of 19th century realism: mimesis, sequence and closure. Quer pasticciaccio, on his findings, is no abstract construction, no anti-novel. The metaphor that suits it most is that of the power plant producing energy from the properties of the terrain. The poetics describing it best is that of mimesis of an entire action, and solution through sudden recognition – Aristotle’s ideas. The infinite interrelatedness of reality is still, by all means, the theory behind the text. In this respect, Gadda has not moved on since Meditazione milanese, something that may have been signalled by the author himself in the the story’s temporal tag: anno Dei 1927. Yet, if extra tempus, as in the mind of God, infinite narration equals infinite entanglement, the human narrator, like time itself, must play God’s better file organiser. That is to say, he must come up indeed with the best of all possible worlds, the one in which complexity can be unravelled in a functional way. Quer pasticciaccio, according to Amigoni, is just that – the best connected narrative to be written since the official demise of mimetic realism. The dual-disjunctive structure of the novel, the fact that everything, even the setting, doubles and splits, is not meant, as Amigoni proves, to lead us astray; on the contrary. The Roman countryside plays the mirror image to the centre, holding the key to the solution of the urban crimes. All that Gadda’s world requires is simply our best reader attention.

With an incipit lit-up (or overshadowed?) by the Inspector’s philosophical convictions, Quer pasticciaccio wears its theory very firmly on its sleeve. The idiomatic, literal level of the story is equally prominent, though. And yet to go hunting for the plot is not the obvious thing to do in a Gadda context. To put that opening theory to the test, nevertheless, Federica Pedriali argues – continuing the argument conducted by Amigoni – that plot-retrieval can be an effective analytical strategy. Climaxes, for instance, are not announced in the initial, somewhat authoritative instructions to the reader. Nonetheless a climax is reached in chapter IV, somewhat disproving the theory’s wholeness. The victim’s crime, the poetic justice of the murder, the killer’s psychology are all registered at that point. In the ensuing collapse of the first Pasticciaccio (the version published in Letteratura in 1946), the action is relocated from the centre to the periphery, taking the Inspector to where connections have indeed become loose and the organic more than ever borders on the disorganic. On the threshold between History and Nature, Time and the Body, Ingravallo faces the classic encounter with the Other as a female suspect. The reader, unlike Ingravallo, exits the text relatively unscathed, in the comforting conviction that nothing too personal or too out of kelter with current postmodern thought was meant. However, this is the story as told by the novel as theory. The oneiric level of the investigations – the one so poorly represented, textually, by Gadda’s own adaptation of the plot in Palazzo degli Ori –, takes over in the second part of Pasticciaccio. This would have led to a double finale, had Gadda followed the instructions of his aborted film script to the end. That he did not, bears witness to the impossibility of catharsis in his world. Yet even this very impossibility is written into a text that ultimately outwits its own theory.

Doubles and masks are Gadda’s solution to the urgency of the autobiographical content, liberating it to the point of allowing the occasional lifting of the disguise. But like most Gadda, the strategies of concealment and revelation can also get quite contradictory. «Narrare intorbidando le acque» is, after all, the poetics that the ageing writer confesses to having practised throughout his career. For instance, while the image Gadda chose for the cover of the 1963 Cognizione – a serene painting by Bellotto –, does not suggest the existence of a link between the story and the author’s life, that of the 1971 edition most definitely does, showing the Gadda family in the garden of the real villa that is also the theatre of the fictional action. All too aware of such strategies, Maria Antonietta Terzoli sets about examining the photographs of the Effigie archive with cautious alertness. A cross-check from image to novel and back confirms that the two sets of gaddiana coincide. Did Gadda write from the photographs as well as from memory? If he did, has that too become part of the narrative? And how are the images to be treated now that they are shareable? Resisting any emotional temptation, Terzoli’s progress through the archive is paced along the rigorous rhythms of philology. The crucial questions she intersperses in her work are invariably cogent. In all this, photography itself, both as a medium and as a research tool, comes under scrutiny. The persona and the image are interchangeable; yet the latter, capturing a presence, speaks of an absence; when the absence is that of the dead, to look at their images amounts to a form of desecration. No mere book illustrations, the photographs we see here do imply the possibility of a reductio ad unum of Gadda’s baffling textuality. That we end up scrutinising them as we would any of his pages (or a Caravaggio painting, for that matter), is perhaps proof that all the previous articles in the Journal have mobilised our watchfulness in all things Gadda.

Federica G. Pedriali
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, October 2000