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Two ideas of providence. Gadda and Manzoni

Francesco Ziosi

Nei Promessi sposi si parla sempre di denaro: tante berlinghe, tante parpagliole, tanti scudi… una delle ragioni per cui mi piacciono.

C. E. Gadda

This essay deals with a very major topic in Gadda scholarship, the relation between Gadda and Manzoni. I prefer to call it a relation between the two, and not simply Manzoni’s influence on Gadda, because I share with many the opinion that Manzoni is no longer the same author after Gadda. This relation is, in one, geographical, literary and philosophical. Given its scope, I had to have an angle to tackle it from. With that in mind, I chose to work on the idea of providence in the two authors. The aim was to pose (at least to pose) the following questions: is it possible to trace any superior plot in the Mess? and is there, in the end, a Gaddian provvidenza?

Worship

From Milan, 14 November 1893, to Rome, spring 1973. Manzoni haunts Gadda’s life, literally, from the cradle, suitably located in Via Manzoni no. 5, to his last days, when friends would take turns to read him the great novel – a sort of Freudian father Gadda was never able to kill (Pecoraro 1998a: 4-5). Gadda’s veneration went far beyond ordinary literary admiration. From the first paragraphs of his Apologia manzoniana he feels indebted, even more as human being than as a writer: «Egli volle parlare da uomo agli uomini, ai miserabili uomini» (SVP 592).

To men, and not to Man. The focus is on the world’s drama and its dissonances: on the radical experience of this awful mess which is life (de Lucca 1996: 59). Not only that. Gadda and Manzoni share the idea that somewhere (somewhere above us, for Manzoni) there is necessity – something subtler and greater than Homeric fate. For Gadda this is the force that takes «il vano spasimo della nostra vita verso il necessario cammino». We busy ourselves, we run with inertial determination towards the grave. Hence, our busy Milan (that brutta e mal combinata città) is also our perfect symbol. The symbol of reality.

Manzoni and Gadda (or Gadda and Manzoni, for that matter) also share an idea of authorship. They believe in the role of writers, of novelists especially, in trying to reconnect reality, at least to some extent. In Manzoni, that is, Gadda recognises his own uncompromising attempt to penetrate the ultimate dark origin, the evil of the world – in Meditazione milanese he even credits Manzoni with actual suffering for the tragic historical events that shaped the early 19th century (de Jorio Frisari 1996: 64-65).

Contradictions

It couldn’t have been otherwise. Gadda’s admiration for his senior had to have its contradictions and idiosyncrasies. His reading of Manzoni may even start from an anti-manzonian perspective, and does suffer from preclusions, on the function of the narrator and on linguistic matters, most notably (Amigoni 2004; Donnarumma 2001a: 45-66; Matt 2002; Mattesini 1996: 57). Besides, emulation of the master can sound more like parody, at times. And what about the next point? Gadda admired Manzoni chiefly for his novel – but was quite critical of his poetic output:

«Il Manzoni ti piace anche come poeta?»
«Come poeta meno. C’è qualcosa di sballato anche nella Pentecoste. “Spose che desta il subito | balzar del pondo ascoso…” Il pondo non è ascoso…». (Cattaneo 1991)

t is however by looking into the business of narration that we can get to the core of the matter.

Baroque

Let’s start from Guido Guglielmi’s assessment: Gadda could not be a classical narrator as Manzoni was (Guglielmi 1997: 27). One could indeed question whether Manzoni himself was a classical narrator. Reading the Betrothed and the Mess one after another, one definitely perceives more consonances than differences. Yet there is a crucial difference between the two, and it is semantic. For Manzoni the signified (ultimate meaning) implies having to compromise, to reconcile on the side of the signifier. Gadda too can believe in ultimate reference. But unlike Manzoni he attempts to catch it by trying to follow every idiosyncrasy of the spoken word. This is not merely due to the historical gap dividing the two writers; Manzoni was not a full realist, and Gadda was not entirely at home in the 20th century. Indeed both styles have a baroque patina to them which prevents exclusive identification with standard literary practices: it is the baroque which springs from a common desengaño at the spectacle of the world (Dombroski 2002: 31). But even so, their specific approach to the baroque is also quite different.

For Manzoni, in fact, the baroque is a paradigm to be looked at from some distance – i.e., from the distance of present time, or rather, from a form of authorial self-consciousness on time. Gadda operates the other way round. He chooses to tackle the world and its baroqueness frontally, dispersively, pervasively, and without final reductio ad unum (which is what Manzoni attempted through nearly lifelong revision of his work). Manzoni and Gadda, that is, have in common the initial perspective, the clash between real and rational effort, between the world as it is and the world as it should be. Gadda identifies this clash as the theoretical hard core (and hard beauty) of the Betrothed. Thus, thanks to Gadda, Manzoni ceases to be the author we knew and didn’t love: the author we studied at school.

Barocco è il mondo is Gadda’s notorious motto. Even the attempt to reconcile reality through a metaphysics is nothing but baroque. And yet, as 17th century Italian painting itself shows, the outcomes of this effort can be strikingly different. Different outlooks on providence tend to play a key role in this. Certainly they play a key part in the case at hand. (1)

Providence

Let’s put aside that piece of admirable wisdom they taught us at school. Providence for Manzoni is really no more and no less than the acknowledgement that the human mind has limits in understanding what counts: the connections between events. This kind of providence is far from being reassuring, doesn’t go with the law: behave well, someone will credit this to you, whether down here or up there. And in fact, in the end the happiest character of the Betrothed is the one who, with his cowardice, gets the whole «shipwreck of mainland» going, to use Nigro’s brilliant phrase; it is don Abbondio, the very character Gadda felt personally closer to. (2) Thus the lesson learnt of the epilogue, the famous «sugo di tutta la storia» («[...] i guai vengono bensì spesso, perché ci si è dato cagione; ma che la condotta più cauta e più innocente non basta a tenerli lontani»), strikes more for its precariousness, than as a recipe for happiness.

Could he have stopped at this, Gadda would have surely believed in such providence. He understood only too clearly that Manzoni’s providence was something more than (simply) jansenistic (Contini 1989: 73) – and well before Raimondi he had no doubt that this was a romanzo senza idillio. We may for ever be driven to seek ultimate causes, but the portrait of Ingravallo, in the opening of the Mess, turns into a veritable manifesto against this attitude:

Sosteneva, fra l’altro, che le inopinate catastrofi non sono mai la conseguenza o l’effetto che dir si voglia d’un unico motivo, d’una causa al singolare: ma sono come un vortice, un punto di depressione ciclonica nella coscienza del mondo, verso cui hanno cospirato tutta una molteplicità di causali convergenti. Diceva anche nodo o groviglio, o garbuglio, o gnommero, che alla romana vuol dire gomitolo. Ma il termine giuridico «le causali, la causale» gli sfuggiva preferentemente di bocca: quasi contro sua voglia. (RR II 16)

And yet Manzoni also successfully plays the master puppeteer, directs human action, pulls the strings – in the book at least, all returns to the one. Quoting once more from the Apologia:

Egli disegnò con un disegno segreto e non appariscente gli avvenimenti inavvertiti: tragiche e livide luci d’una società che il vento del caso trascina in un corso di miserie senza nome, se caso può chiamarsi lo spostamento risultante della indigenza, della bassezza, della ignavia politica (pubblica), della cieca ignoranza, della paura d’una razza e dell’avidità e dell’orgoglio d’un’altra. Se caso può chiamarsi la noia della vita, sensuale e disorganica, che fa ricercare nel male i veleni di un più fosco desiderio, d’una più abominevole discesa verso cupi silenzi.

Gadda reveres Manzoni for constructing a coherent symphony out of such mess. One could dare counter argue that Manzoni’s design is literally not invisible. Francesco Gonin’s illustrations of the 1840 edition (under the strict supervision of Manzoni) are indeed no accessory, so much so that the book should not be read without. (3) For his part, instead, Gadda has no high stance from where to design and to lead. His world does not know Manzoni’s vertical hierarchies – with him we are facing the cauldron.

Gadda’s quest is practical, couldn’t actually be any more down to earth, having gone thus far. Liliana’s murderer must be found through trial and error – a much harder bet than Manzoni’s, and with a design solution which is truly baroque (and could have had John Donne agree):

freely men confess this world’s spent,
when in the planets and the firmament
they seek so many new; they see that this
is crumbled out again to his atomies.

In end, even in Gadda’s Mess a finale is reached, literally. Ingravallo has perhaps understood, and has almost repented. Gadda’s ethos does not allow him to indulge, the process (the text) must be interrupted: in the cauldron one follows chance motion, bubbles of matter held together with no reason or cause. To be able to follow is Gadda’s only providence, and Pasticciaccio is its manifesto. Is there greater intellectual consciousness in Manzoni? Hard to say. He can certainly draw the mess to a coherent, almost stoic coming together, as you have got to keep on living, in spite of all. But, as for Gadda, what’s left is negation. Gonzalo’s – or Ingravallo’s.

Characters

In order see our two ideas of providence in action it may be useful to focus on characters. On first impressions Don Ciccio Ingravallo and cardinal Federigo Borromeo have very little in common. Here the physical description of the two – holy cardinal and unholy inspector:

[…] La carità inesausta di quest’uomo, non meno che nel dare, spiccava in tutto il suo contegno. Di facile abbordo con tutti, credeva di dovere specialmente a quelli che si chiamano di bassa condizione, un viso gioviale, una cortesia affettuosa; tanto più, quanto ne trovan meno nel mondo […] ammirato per la soavità de’ suoi modi, per una pacatezza imperturbabile, che si sarebbe attribuita a una felicità straordinaria di temperamento; ed era l’effetto d’una disciplina costante sopra un’indole viva e risentita. Se qualche volta si mostrò severo, anzi brusco, fu co’ pastori suoi subordinati che scoprisse rei d’avarizia o di negligenza o d’altre tacce specialmente opposte allo spirito del loro nobile ministero. Per tutto ciò che potesse toccare o il suo interesse, o la sua gloria temporale, non dava mai segno di gioia, né di rammarico, né d’ardore, né d’agitazione: mirabile se questi moti non si destavano nell’animo suo, più mirabile se vi si destavano […].

[…] Di statura media, piuttosto rotondo della persona, o forse un po’ tozzo, di capelli neri e folti e cresputi che gli venivan fuori dalla metà della fronte quasi a riparargli i due bernoccoli metafisici dal bel sole d’Italia, aveva un’aria un po’ assonnata, un’andatura greve e dinoccolata, un fare un po’ tonto come di persona che combatte con una laboriosa digestione: vestito come il magro onorario gli permetteva di vestirsi, e con una o due macchioline d’olio sul bavero, quasi un ricordo della collina molisana […].

Nothing could be more different – extraordinary versus ordinary, spiritual versus material, aristocratic versus state-employed. Yet the function of the two characters is paradoxically similar. Both in fact can and should resolve, transform chaos into order. To do this, they have got to be somehow exceptional – i.e., they must be distinguishable from the rest of us. But while this is evident for the cardinal, what is special about Ingravallo, who seems to be the portrait of the perfect uomo qualunque?

Ingravallo’s exceptionality lies, I would say, in the last brush strokes given to his description: a memory of Molise hills. In the grotesque world of fascist Rome, this is a sort of fragment of authenticity, and lends our man an ethos: he must find the murderer. Ultimately, he perhaps? almost? succeeds, more through chance than will or acumen; whereas Manzoni’s cardinal is an island of firmness and integrity in the world’s stormy sea, along with fra Cristoforo and the Innominato after the conversion. Keeping to these three resolute points Manzoni’s general shipwreck can thus be salvaged and turned into the one design. For Gadda, instead, the design will never be one – though it can certainly be unique.

Notes

1. In the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, for instance, Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1600) is faced ideally by Domenichino’s Stories of Saint Cecilia (1620). The classical composure of the latter seems to reproach the crudeness of the former – A. Battistini, Il Barocco (Roma: Salerno, 2000), 27. Gadda saw Caravaggio’s works first in 1922, as part of an exhibition held in Florence, then also and most profitably through Longhi’s masterly Caravaggio interpretations (Marchesini 2005: 116-21; Raimondi 2003: 133-80).

2. S.S. Nigro, Naufragi di terraferma, introduction to A. Manzoni, Fermo e Lucia (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), xiii-xxxix (xiii); Cattaneo 1991: 56. It is interesting to notice why Gadda felt close to Don Abbondio: «per la confessione che fa a se stesso della sua reale condizione umana. È il personaggio che vede più chiara la propria posizione, al di fuori di ogni esortazione teatrale […] vera mancanza di spirito esibitivo, narcissico, gratuito […] il più vicino alla mia mancanza di teatralità, di messa in scena […]», (Arbasino 1977).

3. Nigro 2002: xvii. In these illustration one could read a sort of reprise of the Jesuitical rhetoric of persuasion (Battistini 2000: 49-50).