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In the textual city seeing is reading

Serena Freeland

Carlo Emilio Gadda was not a Roman himself, came from a very different part of Italy – the North, Milan. It is of great interest to examine why he turned to Rome for inspiration for his Pasticciaccio, how his worldview appropriated the Eternal City.

There is no fixed setting for the novel, even though its pivot is to be found at n. 219 of via Merulana. This is a straight, leafy, early 20^th century, middleclass avenue of no special character, but at either end stand two imposing baroque churches, San Giovanni in Laterano and Santa Maria Maggiore, with porticoes-mouths gaping open. Like Piazza Barberini – with its four fountains and S. Francesco dei Crispi –, like Palazzo Zuccari in D’Annunzio’s Il piacere, here the baroque and the grotesque allude to something much deeper in the reality of the façade.

Dombroski claims that in Quer pasticciaccio Gadda makes his depth the surface: in Via Merulana he opens up that depth, the darkness and the secrecy of reality. Although «la vita è un flusso continuo che cerchiamo d’arrestare, di fissare in forme stabili» (Pirandello), Gadda does this – this surgical opening and revelation of the town – by choosing very specific points of Roman reference (such as the Romanesque church of the Quattro Santi, which allude to Liliana’s pure, incandescent nature). Like Pirandello, he is indeed only too aware that conflict in life comes from trying to shape forme stabili, to construct surfaces (while within, the flusso continues to rush us on…). So, although he gives us “Rome”, he is never keen to stay still, hurrying us (from place to place), loosing us (in a criss-cross of streets and avenues). Just as these roads are like «linee che s’intersecano» (Calvino), just as the linearity of a telephone call can become a jumbled confusion (beginning of chapter VI), so too is the reader lost within the walls of Gadda’s labyrinth.

The baroque does this by means of its lack of apparent gravity centre. Whereas in classical art, the centre is where all is pulled towards, now the reader must suffer a ride of convex, concave and unpredictable forces. Interestingly, however – almost paradoxically, in a sense –, although the baroque is asymmetrical, seemingly without a centre; although, as Dombroski claims, Gadda’s narrator has «no centre from which he may stray», Rome itself is a magnetic force, a multi-ethnic centre attracting people, attracting stories from all over the country. (One wonders if Gadda knew the legend of Piazza Vittorio: an old Conte lived there, in a castle that still remains, home to many black cats; by means of magic he drew people from the four corners of the world – una molteplicità di cause convergenti?…)

One element of the baroque is the lack of linearity, of clearly defined vectors within its architecture, and within the text. The reader is forced down decoy after decoy. It is enough to mention Angeloni, the two anonymous women seen on the stairs, Valdarena’s poor alibi, Retalli and the knife, and so on. This is of course common place in a detective novel, but the difference here is between false clues and clear decoys that lead the reader away from the monument he is admiring (and enjoying) – the corpse? –, away from the action only to lose himself in a series of dead ends. It is the deformation of classical Rome into Bernini’s and Borromini’s Rome that Gadda takes advantage of – «conoscere è deformare» (Meditazione milanese). He is trying to get closer to reality, to the flusso, by deconstructing Bakhtin’s «space is time made visible». Time consists of a series of fractal loops, cyclical motions in both plot and direction that gives the reader dizzy frights – a sort of reader’s Stendhal syndrome?

Yet if the baroque is anti-classical, deformed and asymmetrical, Gadda attempts to give order to the pasticcio. Basic polarities (of good and evil, dark and light, saintly and carnal) are his attempt to give the reader just a little help along the confused streets of Rome (the reader however may still have to retrace his steps to get his bearings right, and even retrace entire chapters…).

And just as we think we have found our way, we are actually, by means of free-association, spun around and given a new perspective on our surroundings. I for one, having presumed that Liliana died a saintly death and having travelled as far as the oneiric propriety of the Pestalozzi dream (naked nuns?… lifted skirts?… the «Contessa Circia» wearing cardboard-plaster knickers? – chapter VIII), I had to go back to the very beginning of my gita turistica, as the episode threw further light on the kind of death Liliana had met.

The book has no beginning or no end but protrudes out of the void that is the unknown, the unexplainable. And Ingravallo, «onnipresente su gli affari tenebrosi» (chapter I), is our guide, with no clear itinerary defined. A caravaggesque chiaroscuro is cast on the characters: alternately light and dark throw them into the audience or onto the stage. Who is observing? are we looking, or is the monument looking at us? is our gaze subjective, or in fact objective? Indeed, to see Rome through Gadda’s eyes, to attempt to follow him spatially, visually, is to experience the tenebrous side of via Merulana – to uncover the depths, to get a glimpse of the roaring waters below.