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Lexicalization of a scatological image
in La cognizione: hacer una pera revisited

Raffaele Lampugnani

The grotesque depiction of human society through language is perhaps the most conspicuous characteristic of Gadda’s work and one which has earned him the name of barocco and macaronico. (1) Contini in 1934 first drew attention to the Milanese writer with a telling title, Carlo Emilio Gadda, o del pastiche (Contini 1989: 3-10). More recently, in his essay Gadda testimone d’una lingua condivisa, Ottavio Lurati observes how «all’interno di quel mistilinguismo con cui la corrosiva miscela dei suoi pastiche cattura i nodi più triti della vita e delle convenzioni sociali, si esercita una sorta di sdoppiamento ironico che intacca i valori dati come acquisiti e indiscutibili» (Lurati 1995: 284). In general, contextual criticism has focused consistently, and with good reason, on Gadda’s unique exploitation of the language, while increasingly aware that Gadda’s manner of expression is closely connected with his worldview. As Albert Sbragia suggests in his study The Modern Macaronic, this is «the paradox of Gadda’s poetics of the macaronic, what he himself more frequently referred to as his grotesque and baroque epistemology, his knowledge of grief» (Sbragia 1996a: 27).

The relationship between Gadda’s language and his position on ethics (including his perception of others) has scarcely ceased to preoccupy critics. In the introductory note to La critica e Gadda, Giorgio Patrizi recalls the authors that have enriched Gadda’s culture, and underlines the psychological complexity of his work: «L’anamnesi gaddiana», he states, «contiene imprevisti di ogni tipo e d’altra parte verifiche di impressioni di primo acchito: la prosa si costruisce proverbialmente sulla nevrosi e le tensioni libidiche, le sublimazioni dei desideri, le rimozioni e i ritorni, i feticci, tutti circolanti senza sosta all’interno [del] linguaggio» (Patrizi 1975a: 19). Patrizi goes on to indicate that, once extrapolated, it would be desirable to re-introduce these elements in the text in order to analyse the crystallisation of key images. The stumbling block in dissecting and then reconstructing the text, according to the critic, lies in the «polivalenza» of Gaddian discourse and the difficulty to find a common denominator, to redefine and isolate a single strand of elements. Such analysis is further complicated by the tendency towards incompleteness, dispersion, «poliedricità», «pluridimensionalità», «differenziata molteplicità», concepts expressed with some variants by the majority of the critics (Flores 1973: 7; Roscioni 1995a: 9).

Commenting further on the two planes of expression and content, Patrizi also identifies a scatological aspect of Gadda’s psychology: «La comunicazione segnica […] al primo livello come discorso retorico, prendendo velocità si ingorga in figure straniate ma ossessivamente capaci di vita autonoma, appunto in attività mitopoietica; al secondo livello come disgregamento degli oggetti […] si bruciano alla temperatura della scrittura, elevatissima, tanto per l’élan elegiaco, quanto per l’abbassamento scatologico». The aim of the present study is to corroborate Patrizi’s hypothesis and demonstrate how in La cognizione del dolore in particular Gadda renders both his life-view and existential malaise in scatological excremental images through the use made of the Spanish language in the fictional Pastrufazio. I will argue, more specifically, that the phrase hacer una pera, connected thematically with the Pirobutirro genealogy, may provide a key to understand Gadda’s covert expression of personal and social malaise.

In La cognizione del dolore Gadda establishes an autobiographical congruity also found to a degree elsewhere in his narrative. His discourse has not changed, nor has his ideological stance. But here he gives a more specific, circumscribed account of an enduring emotional trauma. An undisclosed existential male oscuro, a sense of subjective and desperate anguish transpires through Cognizione, a poignancy which is due to the close identification of the protagonist, Gonzalo, with the author: Gadda himself referred to his work as a tragic autobiography.

Yet the novel is not merely an autobiography. As critic Pietro Citati maintains, «Gadda non avrebbe mai potuto scrivere: questo sono io, questa mia madre, questa la villa che, un tempo, possedevo a… Le sue ombrose cautele, i suoi continui timori, la rete delle sue resistenze l’hanno indotto a inventarsi uno schermo» (Citati 1963: 14). The vision and psychological frame of mind of Gonzalo coincide with Gadda’s own. Yet the author here enjoys the freedom of analysis and of psychological penetration which are made possible by the fictional framework of an otherwise autobiographical work. That is to say, the screen provided by fiction allows Gadda to manipulate all elements and events about his own life. Now he can indeed direct at Gonzalo the expressions of love and hate he feels about himself – an ill-fitting mind in a maladjusted society.

The identification of the author with Gonzalo gives his narrative a new dimension: from the objective caricature of a world alienated from the writer, Gadda moves to an ambiguous representation of reality which is both estranged, and an integral part of the author’s identity; nowhere else do we feel to this extent that the author is drowning, to use his own expression, in the «realtà merdosa». (2) The ambivalence that Gadda feels for his surroundings extends to his own person and his family, with self-irony and contempt (cfr. Dombroski 1970: 373).

The novel develops along two main thematic paths: the perception of the «male invisibile» and the grotesque, monstrous representation of human society. These two apparently different thematic areas are intricately combined in Gadda’s view of the world; they were reduced to a common denominator by his traumatic experiences: it is precisely the awareness of evil (male) which distinguishes and alienates Gonzalo from the rest of society. Dolore may be related to an existential anguish derived from an irrational, ill-defined perception of one’s condition, the thought of immanent death, the erosion and levelling of time. The protagonist of Cognizione infers «il nome del dolore» from sounds reverberating in the distance «dal tempo vuoto» (RR I 714). Images of pain of life and its flux are finger posts scattered through the novel.

Certain images seem to indicate that the roots of Gonzalo’s anguish originate in a transcendental realisation of the futility and corruptibility of human existence. (3) But in fact the depth of Gadda’s anguish and desperation is lost if we do not appreciate his own participation in the human condition, or his feeling that he is just a cog in the mechanism of life. The author in the novel points to life as a self-perpetuating, futile cyclic pattern of corruption and regeneration of corruptible material. The concept seems consistent with the thoughts expressed in Meditazione milanese with regard to the necessary «deformarsi essere-divenire» which is aptly encapsulated by an image given in the chapter La grama sostanza:

La mia grama sostanza esiste in quanto soltanto esistono dei mutamenti e corrompimenti: essa è, per esprimermi con una grossa imagine, la parte ancora dura e coriacea di un pollo qua e là putrescente. (SVP 632)

Gadda’s literary projection, Gonzalo, shares fully with the rest of society the evil and corruptibility that he associates with humankind, and the author’s use of Spanish is important to our understanding of his self-irony and debasement. (4) Moreover, an important referential point included towards the end of the first chapter of Cognizione has not been analysed in its true light.

The action in the first half of the story begins with Gonzalo sending for the local doctor. As the doctor walks to the house, he ponders on information received from the servants, and on his own knowledge of his patient’s background to produce a comprehensive anamnesis of Gonzalo. His thoughts go back to the very beginning of the Pirobutirro family:

Egli discendeva in linea maschile diretta da Gonzalo Pirobutirro d’Eltino, stato già governatore spagnolo […]. (RR I 605)

Further on we read:

Si riteneva da taluni, specie da un dotto genealogista di Pastrufazio, a cui altri, però, davano del visionario, e altri di impostore e di venduto, e fabbricante di duchi senza duchea, che i Pirobutirro avessero poi a dover ripetere nobiltà e sangue dai Borgia, e che in onore di San Francisco Borgia e di Don Pedro Ribera, detto lo Spagnoletto, ricevessero non di rado, al Fonte, i nomi baptesimali di Pedro, o di Francisco. Il bibliotecario capo dell’associazione fra i coltivatori di pere (con sede a Pastrufazio), che, manco a dirlo aveva villa e peri in quel di Lukones, nel numero di novembre 1930 del periodico dell’associazione, intitolato La pera, sviluppò anzi una sua curiosa tesi filologica, in onore non si sa bene se dei Pirobutirro o delle pere butirro, e cioè che hacer una pera, nell’idioma di Castilla la Vieja, significasse compiere una grande azione. (RR I 606)

An attempt to elucidate the meaning of the expression hacer una pera is found in a note to the text in the critical edition of La cognizione del dolore by Emilio Manzotti. The critic, after consulting the Diccionario de Argentinismos discloses the Milanese sense of the phrase, concluding that the meaning must be «far cilecca, far fiasco, fare un errore» (Gadda 1987a: 105). Manzotti’s interpretation does expose the novel’s contemptuous intentions with regard to the genealogy of the Pirobutirro family, but an additional layer of interpretation is also possible, with due regard for the overarching derisory intentions of the text. In particular, the phrase acquires significance in view of the doctor’s preceding thoughts on the degeneration observed in the Pirobutirro lineage:

Povero viscerame degli umani […] di viscere in viscere: di trippa in trippa! […] Oh!, lungo il cammino delle generazioni, la luce!… che recede, recede… opaca… […] E dolorava il respiro delle generazioni, de semine in semen, di arme in arme. Fino all’incredibile approdo. (RRI 604)

Maria Antonietta Grignani in her recent article L’Argentina di Gadda fra biografia e straniamento revisits Manzotti’s statement, interpreting the phrase contextually by quoting a parallel expression in Milanese dialect:

hacer una pera non ha il significato del modismo argentino, ove vale gabbare qualcuno, ma un valore fraseologico possibile solo nell’universo dei frutticoltori della Brianza di Gadda e dell’epopea che nel romanzo aureola le pere. Il modo di dire a sua volta rovescia in positivo il valore della locuzione milanese fa on per (fare cilecca).

It seems that this clarification should not exclude a further level of interpretation. The notion of evil generating evil, rot self-perpetuating in geometric progression is quite central to Gadda’s parody of aristocratic lineage (5) and requires closer scrutiny. Thus the great deed which closes the preceding quote clads with an aura of epic adventure and virtuous tradition what turns out to be base masturbation if we were to look for the expression hacer una pera in Camilo José Cela’s Diccionario secreto. At least such is the meaning in Castilla, the same Castilla la Vieja which the chief librarian of the pear growers’ association mentions in his bizarre philological theory. As Cela explains, the phrase refers to: «masturbarse, que originó la forma de hacerse la pera o una pera id., por evolución semántica de pera, pija, a pera, acto de la masturbación…». (6)

Gonzalo Pirobutirro (alias Gadda) inherits the misery of decaying self-indulgence as the rightful hidalgo: rotten pear from rotten pear, corrupt descendant from corrupt ancestor, in a time-honoured ascendancy which can be traced bask to the Borgia clan, albeit at the risk of grave doubts to be cast on the genealogist’s integrity. Self-perpetuating rot is masked as hidalguía in the dual geo-graphical and linguistic disguise: indeed the setting of the novel is South America, which disguises the Lombard countryside of Brianza, and the expression hacer una pera pertains to Castilla and not South America, just as hidalguía has no specific place-reference outside the Iberian peninsula. It should be noted that Gadda himself gives an additional clue in the prose L’editore chiede venia del recupero chiamando in causa l’autore when he separates the word hidalgo according to its original constituent words: hijo-de-algo (RRI 762), drawing the reader’s attention to the genealogical connection suggested by the etymology.

Again, it should be noted that Gadda has mockingly alluded to his own genealogy in Meditazione milanese, in a context that seeks to illustrate his perception of reality as a system of «pulsante deformazione»:

«Le gentes di relazioni sono infinite… e si mescolano e si aggrovigliano, e si disperdono e nascono e crescono: e per dar vita a me ci son voluti padre e madre, quattro nonni, otto bisnonni, sedici trisnonni, e poi trentadue, sessantaquattro, ecc. ecc.» Il critico: «Voi discendete da antichissima stirpe…» (SVP 778)

The use of this theme, frequent and intensive in Cognizione, is also found elsewhere. In the short story San Giorgio in casa Brocchi, it is conveyed specifically through the portrait and the speech of eminent professionals, such as «illustrissimo professor Frugoni», himself a worthy specimen of what sarcastically might be termed the noble reproduction of rot which he describes in detail: «la pera marcia […] la pera marcia, che fa diventare marce tutte le altre! […] E quelle che diventano marce dopo sono più marce della prima! […] è il bacillo del marciume… che si propaga… con una rapidità fulminea!» (RR II 678). Another related personage is Ingegner Colombo, «Gran Cordone» and illustration of many other gran cordoni. It is hardly necessary to point out the grotesque and phonetic resonance of the colloquial Italian expression gran coglione, suggesting that handed-down corruption is not merely genetic, but includes social interaction and behaviour.

No doubt, the seeds of Gadda’s male oscuro are to be found in the writer’s own psychological inventory; as the Milanese writer insisted, «Tutte le volte che rivado nel passato non ci vedo che dolore: le sciagure famigliari […] l’educazione manchevole, le torture morali patite, le umiliazioni subite, la sensibilità morbosa che ha reso tutto piú grave» (SGF II 486). Malaise is inherent in human condition: «il male oscuro […] lo si porta dentro di sé per tutto il fulgurato scoscendere d’una vita» (RR I 690). Gadda sees male as part of existence itself, dwelling within the «tenebra corporea» of each human being, sadly bearing witness to the corruptibility of our existence. Somewhat irrationally, it is associated with the «interna miseria», which is extruded by the surgeon in the short story Anastomòsi reinforcing other expressions that Gadda uses to extrinsecate his existential malaise, such as «nefando pasticcio della vita esteriorizzata» and «groppo purpureo» (SGF I 336, 338).

Scatological images become the emblems of male and the mental association is established whenever corrupt elements attract the attention of the author. Some conceptual associations are subjectively induced, stemming from incidental images engraved in the conscience of the writer as a child, and subsequently enriched and given psychological complexity with each superimposed layer of meaning. As Gadda states in the short story Una tigre nel parco, «i maggiori fatti del nostro spirito […] attingono dalla sorgente infantile il loro vigore nucleare» (SGF I 74). Many emblematic images perceived in Gadda’s childhood are carried through life; they are charged with profound psychological significance and form the basis for a more mature intellectual awareness: our present is influenced by our childhood experiences. The first, rudimental acquisition of awareness in Gadda dates back to his early perception of evil in the form of excreta found in a public park, both through the senses and through speculative re-elaboration:

la mia mente di signorino incontrava per le prime volte il male morale, e le mie zampe di tigre la malignità effettuale del male fisico. I miei sensi, già avidi di cognizione pativano […] il mio animo sgomento […] [conosceva] la paura. (SGF I 79)

Thus we are faced with the dichotomy of male fisico and male morale. But male morale may also be attributable to a process of conditioning which has taken place within Gadda’s own family. Certain leit-motifs in his work, such as towers, retaining-walls and other «imaginative di case, di protezione, di chiusura […] di esclusione», all originate from parental neglect and a desire for love, order and protection. Gadda’s rancor is directed towards his parents and towards the house in Longone, which symbolises their unethical, egotistic behaviour. Pears, and more specifically, pere butirro, (7) which Gadda’s father, Francesco, planted all around the house are a conspicuous example of nuclear stimulation in the young author’s fertile imagination.

Gadda elaborated this image, and coined the surname Pirobutirro for his protagonist; through the use of the Spanish phrase examined earlier and on the basis of internal analogy, the image was thus incorporated in his perception of male and crystallised into a scatological emblem of corruption with ironic, contemptuous effects and grotesque overtones.

University of Monash