The World is an Artichoke

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 pasticciaccio 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]