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Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) | |
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Italian novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, who was originally educated as an engineer. Gadda was one of Italy's most daring experimental writers. His style has been compared to that of Joyce, Proust, and Musil. Gadda revolted against conventional literary expression and thought that only through fragmentary, incoherent language could he portray the multiplicity of the disintegrated world. In this Gadda used such devices as parodic and comic modes, learned references, dialects, deliberate misspellings, and obscure constructions. Italo Calvino called Gadda the last of the great Italian narrative modernists, who used his fiction to probe the nature of reality. Gadda's novel That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (1957) is considered his masterpiece. "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." (Italo Calvino in Why Read the Classics?, 1999) Carlo Emilio Gadda was born in Milan into an upper middle-class family. His father died when Gadda was a child; the family also lost its fortune in industrial speculations. Gadda's mother was of German origin. An ambitious woman forced to bring up her family alone, she lived beyond her means. Like his brother, Gadda fought in World War I. The death of his brother was a shattering experience for Gadda. He was taken prisoner by the Germans, where he met Ugo Betti, later well-known dramatist, poet, and novelist. After the war Gadda took the stand that England was Italy's new enemy. He admired Mussolini but later in life he satirized the dictator's rhetoric in the pamphlet Eros a Priapo. It was published in 1967 but Gadda began to work with it in 1944 in Rome, where he had been transported from war-torn Florence by the English High Command. In 1920 Gadda received a degree in engineering, becoming the designer and describer of the Vatican power-station. He worked until 1935 at his profession in various countries. In 1926 he joined a literary group around the Florentine review Solaria. He also wrote short pieces for Letteratura. Works from this period were later included in La Madonna dei filosofi (1931) and Il castello di Udine (1934). La meccanica, set in Milan during World War I, was written in 1924 and 1928-29, but not published until 1970. In the 1940s Gadda became a full-time writer, living mostly in Rome in a cheap apartment house. Between 1950 and 1955 Gadda worked for RAI, the Italian radio and television network. Gadda's first collection of essays, Madonna dei filosofi, appeared in 1931. It was followed by Il castello di Udine and other collections of memory pieces and short stories. They showed Gadda's masterful manipulation of literary style and his gift for merciless psychological and sociological analysis. Giornale di guerra e di prigionia (1955) recorded Gadda's experiences in World War I. His early writings were collected in I sogni e la folgore (1955), in which he condemned empty oratory and revealed the misuse of language by fascism. Among his targets was Mussolini's highly individual "plain-speaking" rhetoric. His first major novel, La gognizione del dolore (1963), first appeared in serial form in Letterature in 1938. The story was set in the imaginary South American land of Maradagàl, a modification of the Brianza region north of Milan. The central character is a self-portrait, shown particularly in his relationships with his brother and his mother. Gadda's misogynous tone has been explained by personal attitudes of the author and by the general atmosphere of the age it portrays. Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana was serialized in 1946 and published as a volume in 1957. The story was set in Fascist Rome, and revolved around a murder and jewel robbery. The language of the novel, known as Il pasticciaccio, was literary Italian, with the addition of dialects, puns, technical jargon, and made-up and foreign words. His macaronic style Gadda has enriched with classical allusions, which stand in marked contrast to the different Roman and other Italian dialects. In the narration Police Commissioner Francesco Ingravallo's thoughts and emotions form a web of relationships between the external facts, witnesses, secondary characters and their dialects. He is first assigned to a burglary case at Via Merulana, and then sent to solve a murder at the same address. Signora Liliana Balducci, who is for Ingravallo the embodiment of femininity, is murdered, but there are too many leads. Inspector Ingravallo finds the cache of stolen jewelry in a chamber pot under an old woman's bed. The novel concludes without anything having been established or proven. The pasticciaccio (awful mess) of the title refers to many things: to the crime itself, it is also the human body, the instrument and object of the crime, linguistic pastiche of the narration, and there also is a surplus of information. The solution of the mystery eventually becomes unimportant. But in a film script, Il palazzo degli ori (1983), which Gadda wrote at the same time as he wrote the first draft of the novel, the plot is clarified. It was never produced, and it has nothing to do with the film Pietro Germi made from the book in 1959. Le maraviglie d'Italia (1939) was a travel book. In Eros a Priapo, published by Livio Garzanti, Gadda attempted to use psychoanalysis to explain Fascism which he saw as the degeneration of bourgeois values. Gadda received several awards, including the Formentor Prize (1957) and the French International Prize for Literature in 1963 for La gognizione del dolore. His last publications include I Luigi di Francia (1964), a historical satire, Il guerriero, l'ammazzone, lo spirito della poesia nel verso immorale del Foscola (1967), a satirical play, and Novella seconda (1971). Gadda died in Rome on May 21, 1973. He once confessed that his creative effort was largely directed towards "vengeance": a lyrical or comic vengeance for the awful things that "fate" does to men. It has been said that Gadda was "fundamentally a moralist, and that he does not believe in the possibility of human progress". In Who Is Who in the Twentieth-Century Literature (1976) Martin Seymour-Smith wrote that "a mania for listing facts co-existed in him with a satirical impulse that was so impassioned as to be lyrical." For further reading: Naso E L'Anima: Saggio Su Carlo Emilio Gadda by Giancarlo Leucadi (2001); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, vol. 2, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999); Creative Entanglements: Gadda and the Baroque by Robert S. Dombroski (1999); Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. by Manuela Bertone & Robert S. Dombroski (1998); Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern MacAronic by Albert Sbragia (1996); La piega nera by Maurizio De Benedictis (1991); Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. by Manuela Bertone and Robert S. Dombroski (1998); Challenging the Norm: The Dialect Question in the Works of Gadda and Pasolini by Laurie Jane Anderson (1977); Introduzione allo studio di Carlo Emilio Gadda by R.S. Dombroski (1973); 'Moral Commitment and Invention in Gadda's Poetics' by R.S. Dombroski, in Revista di Letterature Moderne Comparete 25, no. 3 (1972); 'Gadda, Pasolini, and Experimentalism: Form or Ideology?' by O. Ragusa, in From Verism to Experimentalism, ed. by S. Pacifici (1969); Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic by Albert Sbragia (1996); Challenging the Norm: The Dialect Question in the Works of Gadda and Pasolini by Laurie Jane Anderson (1977) - See also: Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic by Albert Sbragia Selected works:
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