|
 Italian
novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Gadda is considered
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 deforming
the language he could portray the multiplicity of reality. In this
Gadda used such devices as parodic and comedic modes, dialects,
deliberate misspellings, and obscure constructions. Italo Calvino
called Gadda the last of the great Italian narrative modernists,
who use his fiction to probe the nature of reality.
"I want the doublet-doubloons (i doppioni), all of them, for
the sake of my mania of possession and greed, and I also want
the triploons, and the quadriploons, even if the Catholic King
has not yet coined them."
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 and Gadda was brought up by her mother who lived
beyond her means. Gadda fought in the World War I and was taken
prisoner by the Germans. In 1920 he received a degree in engineering,
and worked until 1935 at his profession in various countries. In
1926 he joined a literary group around the Florentine review Solaria.
In the 1940s Gadda became a full-time writer, living mostly in Rome.
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
(1934) 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 (1946),
was set in the imaginary South American land of Maradagàl, a modification
of the Brianza region of north of Milan. The central character is
a self-portrait, shown particularly in his relationships with his
brother and his mother. The misogynous tone of the work 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
Italia, added with dialects, puns, technical jargon, made-up words,
and foreign words. His macaronic style is enriched with classical
allusions, which stand in 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 case at the same address. Liliana Balducci, who is for
Ingravallo the epitome of womanly grace, is murdered, but there
are too many leads. Ingravallo finds the cache of stolen jewellery
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,
a linguistic pastiche of the narration and its attack on the formal
body of language, and there also is an overabundance of information.
Le maraviglie d'Italia (1939) was a travel book. In Eros
a Priapo (1967) Gadda attempted to explain Fascism as the degeneration
of bourgeois values. Gadda received several awards, including the
Formentor Prize (1957) and the International Prize for Literature
(1963). He died in Rome on May 21, 1973.
For further reading: Encyclopaedia of World Literature
in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 2);
La piega nera by Maurizio De Benedictis (1991); Carlo Emilio Gadda:
Contemporary Perspectives, ed. by Manuela Bertone and Robert S.
Dombroski (1998); 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)
|
