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Carlo
Emilio Gadda (November 14, 1893 – May 21, 1973) was an Italian
writer and poet. He belongs to the tradition of the language innovators,
writers that played with the somewhat stiff standard pre-war
Italian language, and added elements of dialects, technical jargon and
wordplay. There is some debate amongst scholars as regards Gadda's sexual
orientation. In his book on the homosexual painter
Filippo De Pisis, writer
Giovanni Comisso described an evening in which he and De Pisis
went for a beer with Gadda and philologist
Gianfranco Contini, during the course of which Gadda asked De Pisis to
summarize the various types of "irregular" love.[12]
According to Italo Calvino (Introduction to That Awful Mess on the Via
Merulana, 1984) Gadda was "a bachelor oppressed by a paralyzing shyness in
any female presence." Certainly, his work demonstrates a strongly subversive
attitude towards bourgeois values, expressed above all by a discordant use of
language interspersed with dialect, academic and technical jargon and dirty
talk.[13]
This is particularly interesting as the criticism of the bourgeois life comes,
as it were, from the inside, with the former engineer cutting a respectable
figure in genteel poverty.[14]
Gadda was a practising engineer from
Milan, and he
both loved and hated his job. Critics have compared him to other writers with
a scientific background, such as
Primo
Levi,
Robert Musil and
Thomas Pynchon—a similar spirit of exactitude pervades some of Gadda's
books. Among Gadda's styles and genres are
baroque,
expressionism and
grotesque.[1][2][3][4][5]
Carlo Emilio Gadda was born in Milan in 1893, and he was always intensely
Milanese, although late in his life
Florence
and Rome also became an influence. Gadda's nickname is Il gran Lombardo,
The Great
Lombard: a reference to the famous lines 70-3 of
Paradiso XVII, which predict the protection
Dante would receive from
Bartolomeo II della Scala of
Verona
during his exile from Florence: "Lo primo tuo refugio e 'l primo ostello /
sarà la cortesia del gran Lombardo/ che 'n su la scala porta il santo uccello"
("Your first refuge and inn shall be the courtesy of the great Lombard, who
bears on the ladder the sacred bird").[6]
Gadda's father died in 1909, leaving the family in reduced economic
conditions; Gadda's mother, however, never tried to adopt a more modest style
of life. The paternal business ineptitude and the maternal obsession for
keeping "face" and appearances turn up strongly in
La cognizione del dolore.
He studied in Milan, and while studying at the
Politecnico di Milano (a university specialized in engineering and
architecture), he volunteered for
World
War I. During the war he was a lieutenant of the Alpini corps, and led a
machine-gun team. He was taken prisoner with his squad during the battle of
Caporetto in October 1917; his brother was killed in a plane—and this
death features prominently in La cognizione del dolore. Gadda, who was
a fervent nationalist at the time, was deeply humiliated by the months he had
to spend in a German POW camp.
After the war, in 1920, Gadda finally graduated. He practiced as an
engineer until 1935, spending three of those years in Argentina. Among Gadda's
less well-known achievements is the construction, as engineer, of the Vatican
Power Station for Pius XI.[7]
The country at that time was experiencing a booming economy, and Gadda used
the experience for the fictional South American-cum-Brianza
setting of La Cognizione del Dolore. After that, in the 1940s, he
dedicated himself to literature. These were the years of fascism, which found
him a grumbling and embittered pessimist. With age, his bitterness and
misanthropy somewhat intensified.
In
Eros e Priapo (1945) Gadda analyzes the collective phenomena that
favoured the rise of Italian Fascism, the Italian fascination with
Benito Mussolini.[8]
It explains Fascism as an essentially
bourgeois movement. Eros e Priapo was refused in 1945 by a
magazine for its allegedly obscene content, and would only be published for
the first time in 1967, by Garzanti. The 1967 edition, however, was expurgated
of some of what Gadda considered the most heavy satiric strokes. The
unexpurgated original 1945 edition will be published in 2013.[9][10][11]
In 1946, the magazine Letteratura published, in five episodes, the
crime novel Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, which was
translated into English as
That Awful Mess on Via Merulana. It experiments heavily with language,
borrowing a great deal from several Italian dialects. It is also notable for
not telling
whodunnit at the end.
Gadda kept writing until his death, in 1973. The most important
critic of Gadda was
Gianfranco Contini.
In 2017, the Sweden Royal Academy published after 50 years the secret list
of nominations for the 1966
Nobel Prize for Literature. Gadda was candidated for the first time by the
Italo-American linguist and polyglot
Mario Andrew Pei.[15]
My published books:
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