Why Read the Classics? (29 page)

The world’s reality presents itself to our eyes as multiple, prickly, and as densely superimposed layers. Like an artichoke. What counts for us in a work of literature is the possibility of being able to continue to unpeel it like a never-ending artichoke, discovering more and more new dimensions in reading. It is for this reason that I maintain that amongst all the important and brilliant authors about whom we have spoken in these days, perhaps only Gadda deserves the name of a great writer.

La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with Grief)
is on the surface the most subjective work imaginable: it is almost nothing but an outpouring of pointless despair. Yet in reality it is a book packed with objective and universal meanings.
Quer pasticciaaio brutto de via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana)
, on the other hand, is totally objective, a portrait of life as it swarms around, but it is at the same time a deeply lyrical book, a self-portrait hidden between the lines of a complex design, as in those children’s games where they have to discern amidst the tangles of a wood the image of a hare or the hunter.

On
La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with Grief)
Juan Petit said something very perceptive today: that the key emotion in the book, the ambivalent love-hatred for the mother, can be understood as a love-hate for his own country and his own social milieu. The analogy can be extended. Gonzalo, the protagonist, who lives in isolation in the villa overlooking the village, is the bourgeois who sees that the landscape of places and values that he once loved has been completely overturned. The obsessive motif of his fear of thieves expresses the conservative’s sense of alarm at the uncertainty of the times. To face up to the threat of burglars a
body of night vigilantes is set up which should return security to the villa’s owners. But this organisation is so suspect, so dubious, that it ends up by becoming for Gonzalo an even graver problem than the fear of thieves. The references to Fascism are constant but they are never so precise as to freeze the narrative into a purely allegorical reading and to prevent other possible interpretations.

(The vigilante service should be formed by war veterans, but Gadda continually casts doubts upon their much vaunted patriotic merits. Let us recall one of the basic nuclei of Gadda’s oeuvre, not just of this book: having fought in the First World War, Gadda saw it as the moment when the moral values which had come to the fore in the nineteenth century found their highest expression, but also as the beginning of their end. One might say that for the First World War Gadda felt both a possessive love and at the same time a shock-induced terror from which neither his inner spirit nor the external world would ever be able to recover.)

His mother wants to enlist in the vigilante service but Gonzalo obstinately opposes her. On to this disagreement, on the surface purely a question of form, Gadda manages to graft an unbearable tension, as in a Greek tragedy. Gadda’s greatness resides in his ability to tear through the triviality of anecdote with flashes of a hell that is at the same time psychological, existential, ethical and historical.

The close of the novel, the fact that the mother wins out by joining the night-time vigilantes, that the villa is ransacked—it seems—by the guards themselves, and that in the thieves, attack the mother loses her life, could suggest a narrative that ends within the closed circle of a fable. But it is easy to realise that Gadda was less interested in this closure than in the creation of tremendous tension, which is expressed in all the details and digressions of the story.

I have sketched out one interpretation along historical lines: now I should like to attempt an interpretation in philosophical and scientific terms. Gadda’s cultural background was positivism, he had a degree in engineering from the Milan Politecnico, he was obsessed with the problems and terminology of the practical and natural sciences, so he lived through the crisis of our times as the crisis of scientific thought, moving from the security of rationalism and nineteenth-century belief in progress to the awareness of the complexity of a universe which gave no reassurance and was beyond all possibility of expression. The central scene in
La cognizione
is when the village doctor comes to see Gonzalo, a confrontation
between a confident nineteenth-century image of science and the tragic self-awareness of Gonzalo, of whom we are given a merciless and grotesque physiological portrait.

In his enormous output, published and unpublished, and made up for the most part of works a mere ten or twenty pages long, amongst which is some of his best writing, I will mention a piece written for the radio in which Gadda the engineer discusses modern buildings. He begins with the classical composure of a Bacon or a Galileo describing how modern houses are made with reinforced concrete; but his technical precision gradually gives way to mounting irritation and colourful language when he explains how the walls in modern houses cannot contain the noise; he then moves on to a physiological section on how noises react on the encephalon and the nervous system; and finishes with verbal pyrotechnics which express the exasperation of the neurotic victim of noise in a huge urban block of flats.

I believe that this piece of prose represents not only the entire range of Gadda’s stylistic capabilities, but also the full gamut of his cultural significance, his kaleidoscopic range of philosophical stances from the most rigorous technical-scientific rationalism to this descent into the darkest and most hellish abyss.

[1963]

What Carlo Emilio Gadda had in mind when in 1946 he began writing
Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana)
, was a detective novel but also a philosophical novel. The detective plot was inspired by a crime that had recently taken place in Rome. The philosophical novel was based on a concept enunciated in the very first pages: nothing can be explained if one simply looks for a single cause for every effect, since every effect is determined by a multiplicity of causes, each one of which in turn has many other causes behind it; hence every event (for example, a crime) is like a vortex into which different currents flow, each one moved by different springs, none of which can be overlooked in the search for the truth.

A vision of the world as ‘a system of systems’ was expounded in a philosophical notebook found amongst Gadda’s papers after his death (the
Meditazione milanese)
. The author, starting from his favourite philosophers, Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant, had constructed his own ‘discourse on method’. Every element in a system is in turn a system itself; every single system is linked to a genealogy of systems; every change in an element implies the alteration of the entire system.

But what counts even more is how this philosophy of knowledge is reflected in Gadda’s style: in the language, which is a dense amalgam of popular and erudite expressions, of interior monologue and studied prose, of various dialects and literary quotations; and in narrative composition, in which minimal details take on giant proportions and end up by occupying the whole canvas and hiding or obscuring the overall design. That is what happens in this novel, in which the detective story is gradually forgotten:
maybe we are just on the point of discovering who committed the murder and why, but the description of a hen and the excrement it deposits on the earth become more important than the solution of the mystery.

What Gadda wants to convey is the boiling cauldron of life, the infinite stratification of reality, the unravellable knot of knowledge. When this image of uni venal complexity, which is reflected in the slightest object or event, reaches its ultimate paroxysm, it is pointless for us to speculate whether the novel was destined to remain unfinished, or whether it could have gone on ad infinitum, opening up new vortices inside every episode. The thing that Gadda really wanted to convey was the congested superabundance of these pages through which one single, complex object, organism and symbol, takes shape, the city of Rome.

Because we must immediately point out that this novel is not intended to be just a mixture of a detective and a philosophical novel, but also a novel about Rome. The Eternal City is the book’s real protagonist, in its social classes from the most middling of the middle classes to the criminal underworld, in the words of its dialect (and of its variety of dialects, particularly southern ones, which bubble up in this melting-pot), in its extrovert nature and in its darkest subconscious, a Rome in which the present mixes with the mythical past, in which Hermes or Circe is evoked in connection with the most trivial incidents, in which characters who are domestics or petty thieves are called Aeneas, Diomedes, Ascanius, Camilla, or Lavinia, like the heroes and heroines in Virgil. The noisy, down-at-heel Rome of neorealist cinema (which was enjoying its heyday at that very time) acquires in Gadda’s book a cultural, historical and mythical depth that neorealism neglected. And even the Rome of art history comes into play, with references to Renaissance and Baroque painting (like the passage on the saints’ bare feet, with their enormous big toes).

The novel of Rome, written by a non-Roman. In fact Gadda was from Milan and identified closely with the middle class of his native city, whose values (practicality, technical efficiency, moral principles) he felt were being overturned by the predominance of another Italy, a cheating, noisy, unscrupulous Italy. But even although his stories and his most autobiographical novel
(La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with Grief))
are rooted in Milanese society and dialect, the work which brought him to the attention of the wider public is this book written mostly in Roman dialect, in which Rome is seen and understood with an almost physical involvement in even its most infernal aspects, like a witches’ sabbath. (And yet, by the time he
wrote the
Pasticciacdo
, Gadda had only known Rome from having lived there for a few years in the 1930s, when he had found employment as overseer of the heating systems in the Vatican.)

Gadda was a man of contradictions. An electro-technical engineer (he had used his professional skills for about ten years, mostly abroad), he sought to control his hypersensitive and nervous temperament by means of a scientific, rational mentality, but only succeeded in making it worse; and he used his writing to give vent to his irritability, phobias, and outbursts of misanthropy, which he tried to suppress in real life by donning the mask of a gentleman from a bygone age full of courtesy and good manners.

He was considered by the critics as a revolutionary in terms of narrative structure and language, an expressionist or follower of Joyce (a reputation which he enjoyed right from the start even in the most exclusive literary circles, and which was reinforced when the young writers of the new avant-garde in the 1960s acknowledged him as their model). And yet as far as his personal literary tastes were concerned, he was devoted to the classics, and tradition (his favourite author was the sedate and wise Manzoni) and his models in the art of the novel were Balzac and Zola. (He possessed some of the basic qualities of nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, such as the portrayal of characters, milieus and situations through physical details, and through bodily sensations, such as savouring a glass of wine at lunch, with which this book opens.)

Fiercely satirical towards the society of his day, and driven by a quite visceral hatred for Mussolini (as is proved by the sarcasm with which this book evokes Mussolini’s tough-jawed look), Gadda in political terms was totally alien from any form of radicalism, a moderate law-and-order man, respectful of the laws, nostalgic for the sound administration of yesteryear, a good patriot whose formative experience had been the First World War which he had fought and suffered in as a scrupulous officer, constantly indignant at the damage which can be caused by improvised solutions, incompetence, or being overambitious. In the
Pasticciacdo
, whose action is supposed to take place in 1927, at the beginning of Mussolini’s dictatorship, Gadda does not simply go in for a facile caricature of Fascism: he analyses in great detail what effects are produced on the daily administration of justice by the failure to respect the division of Montesquieu’s three powers of the state (the reference to the author of
L’Esprit des lois
is explicit).

This continual need for something concrete and detailed, this appetite for reality is so strong as to create a kind of congestion, hypertension and
even blockages in Gadda’s writing. His characters’ voices, sensations, and the dreams of their subconscious are mixed up with the author’s constant presence, with his bursts of intolerance, his sarcasms and the dense network of cultural references. As in a ventriloquist’s performance, all these voices overlay each other in the one discourse, sometimes with changes of tone, modulations, and falsetto notes all in the same sentence. The novel’s structure is altered from within, through the excessive richness of the material represented and the excessive intensity with which the author overloads it. The existential and intellectual trauma of this process are all left implicit, while comedy, humour, grotesque transformations all form the natural means of expression of this man who always lived most unhappily, tormented by neuroses, by the difficulty of his relations with others, and by the terror of death.

He did not set out with plans of innovations in form to revolutionise the structure of the novel: his dream was to construct solid novels obeying all the rules, but he never managed to bring them to completion. He kept them in their unfinished state for years, and would decide to publish them only when he had given up all hope of completing them. One feels that just a few pages more would have been enough to round off the plot of
La cognizione del dolore
or the
Pasticciaccio
. Other novels he cut up into short stories and it is no longer possible to reconstitute them by reassembling their various fragments.