• Editorial Board
• Journal
• Current Issue
• Past Issues
• Monographs
• Supplements
• Reviews
• Gadda Prize
• Conferences
• Resources
• Gadda Texts
• Archives
• Catalogues
• Bibliographies
• Pocket Gadda
• Glossary
• Search Site
• What’s New
• About Us

A Pocket Gadda Encyclopedia

Federica G. Pedriali

Years ago Bob Dombroski asked me a teaser of a question. He knew how to push one in one’s subject, mine for some reason having become Gadda’s mark of Cain. Was I attempting to read Bruno, the cyclist of L’Adalgisa, as a return from the dead by one very specific persona? I meant exactly that: but could I prove it?

Then came EJGS, in 2000, and the gamble of the first special issue, in early 2002. A Pocket Gadda Encyclopedia, no more than an empty shell of an idea, had been lying dormant as part of another multi-part project, A Companion to Gadda. It suggested itself as a test of strengths. Would a PGE manage to actively engage the wide scientific community?

First there had to be a lemma, a sample of possibilities, to get the game of commitment going on the contributors’ part. Bruno got going. It must be among the very last things Bob ever read. Oh he liked it, but he had another teaser for me: did I know the saint for knee trouble? It was jocular. In that sense it was in character. And I was more than happy to oblige. Yet my Dictionary of the Saints wouldn’t help. I reported back complaining the lack of a content index. Neither of us suspected this was to be our last exchange of emails. The PGE couldn’t but be in his memory.

Then came the excitement, in late 2002. EJGS was at the receiving end of commitment well invested. The lemmas were coming in thick and fast. By the second dozen it was clear. The excitement had to give in to temptation. You had to network the stuff. At least, as far as it was feasible. Certainly, till you couldn’t take the material process any longer. It was pretty obvious why other webs would not do it. A database, yes, but interconnectivity? run manually?

And yet, laborious and even questionable – for what is it exactly that one does when connecting virtual objects? opening up, or closing in? –, the experiment made a lot of sense. We had made Gadda’s code of practice our own, had we not, for some reason.

Those gluey conceptual dumplings of his, and of ours. Spinaci linked with Merda, but also with Bruno. And both linked with Fascismo, and Fascismo back to Merda, or on to D’Annunzio. Pages from the previous issues, from the Archive, from any of the Resources could be brought back as if new at the slightest textual provocation by the fresher company, and vice versa. The heavy traffic of links to and from the PGE completely changed the way the site worked. It gave ideas.

And we had but scratched the surface of a Gadda encyclopedia. There was even greater excitement in that realisation. We had Alberi but not Tarlo. Carnevale and Corpo but not Cibo. Iper-romanzo but not Calvino. We had Bruno, more seriously, but not Bruno, Giordano. The first edition was out in early 2003. 33 contributors. 70 lemmas. For a total word size of over 100,000 words. Some 300 pages in print, had we published a book, even on a conservative page equivalence. And for all that, the gaps showed.

And they go on showing, in the 2004 enlarged edition, for this is work in progress of the big kind. Platone, still to date but an empty signpost (connected site-wide: undoable, unless you have the will power of the desperate), could keep it up indefinitely, and stand indeed for our Form (a subtle kind of contrappasso, perhaps, but nonetheless: renewed apologies, its time will come).

A PGE in book format? Many have enquired about such thing. Again, it would make perfect sense, no need to explain why or how. Two different works, ultimately. Two different modes of reader response. We are working on it.

Feel like having a go at Fine (s.m., s.f.)?

Edinburgh University
January 2005