109M L N

MLN 119 (2004): 109–134 © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Literature as the Experience ofBoundary Crossing: Gadda’s

Descent to Hell and the Solution toThat Awful Mess of Via Merulana

❦

Manuela Marchesini

per un “Gadda narratore (…) persino piùtemerario del Gadda stilista”

Gianfranco Contini, Quarant’anni di amicizia, 53.

I will attempt a reading of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s second and lastnovel, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, published by Garzantiin 1957, through an interpretation of its vexata quaestio par excellence:Pasticciaccio’s supposedly open ending.1 Virtually everyone interestedin Gadda, whose number has grown considerably during the last twodecades on both sides of the Atlantic, has written on the subject I amaddressing: Gadda’s ending to That Awful Mess of Via Merulana.2 My

1 Carlo Emilio Gadda, Opere, edizione diretta da Dante Isella (Milano: Garzanti,1988) I will refer to specific works of Gadda by indicating their location in this multi-volume edition with the initials of that particular volume—for example, the twovolume Romanzi e racconti will be RRI or RRII, and so on. For the English translation,see Gadda, That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, translated by William Weaver (New York:G. Braziller, 1965).

2 Here is a list of the most relevant contributions to the subject matter. Contini,Quarant’anni di amicizia. Scritti su Carlo Emilio Gadda (1934–1988) (Torino: Einaudi,1988); Cesare Segre, Intrecci di voci. La polifonia nella letteratura del Novecento (Torino:Einaudi, 1991); Alba Andreini, Studi e testi gaddiani (Palermo: Sellerio, 1988); Andreiniand Roberto Tessari eds., La letteratura in scena Gadda e il teatro (Roma: Bulzoni, 2001);

110 MANUELA MARCHESINI

analysis will focus mainly on the last three chapters of the novel andit will interlace with Dante’s Comedy, but also with Alessandro Manzoni,Roberto Longhi, Virgil, and Homer. Joining a recent although variedcritical effort, I will argue that my findings prompt a reassessment notonly of Pasticciaccio but of the whole body of Gadda’s work; therelation between Pasticciaccio and the rest of his works; the nature ofGadda’s fascination with Fascism; his relation to Neorealism; therelation between creative and reflective prose and, last, but not least,

Giancarlo Roscioni, La disarmonia prestabilita. Studio su Gadda (Torino: Einaudi, 1969);Guido Lucchini, L’istinto della combinazione. Le origini del romanzo in Carlo Emilio Gadda(Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1988) Jaqueline Risset, “Gadda ou la philosophie à l’envers,”Critique 282 (1970) then included as “Carlo Emilio Gadda o la filosofia alla rovescia” inL’invenzione e il modello (Roma: Bulzoni, 1972) 156–64; Progetto di descrizione del rapportoletteratura-filosofia in Gadda (Roma: Savelli, 1975); Robert Dombroski, “Gadda: fascismoe psicanalisi,” (Napoli: Guida, 1984); “Travestimenti gaddiani: verso il compimento deldolore,” Scrittori, tendenze letterarie e conflitto delle poetiche in Italia, eds. Rocco Capozzi andMassimo Ciavolella (Ravenna: Longo, 1993); Creative Entanglements (Toronto: Univer-sity of Toronto Press, 1999); Manuela Bertone and Robert Dombroski, eds. Carlo EmilioGadda. Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); EmilioManzotti, Stefano Agosti “Quando il linguaggio non era in vacanza: una lettura delPasticciaccio,” Le lingue di Gadda, ed. Maria Antonietta Terzoli (Rome: Salerno Editore,1996); Albert Sbragia, Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic (Gainesville:University Press of Florida, 1996); Manuela Bertone, Il romanzo come sistema e differenzain Carlo Emilio Gadda (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1993); Corrado Bologna, “Il romanzocome ‘cognizione’ e ‘rappresentazione:’ Gadda,” Letteratura italiana, VI, ed. AlbertoAsor Rosa (Torino: Einaudi, 1986); Walter Pedulla, Carlo Emilio Gadda. Il narratore comedelinquente (Milano: Rizzoli, 1997); Italo Calvino, Lezioni americane. Sei proposte per ilprossimo millennio (Milan: Garzanti, 1988); Guido Guglielmi, La prosa italiana delNovecento. Umorismo. Metafisica. Grottesco (Torino: Einaudi, 1986); Ferdinando Amigoni,La più semplice macchina. Lettura freudiana del “Pasticciaccio,” (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995);Raffaele Donnarumma, Gadda. Romanzo e pastiche (Palermo: Palumbo, 2001); FedericoBertoni, La verità sospetta. Gadda e l’invenzione della realtà (Torino: Einaudi, 2001);Giuseppe Bonifacino, Il groviglio delle parvenze. Studio su Carlo Emilio Gadda (Bari:Palomar, 2002); Carla Benedetti, Una trappola di parole. Lettura del “Pasticiaccio,” (Pisa:Ets, 1980); Maurizio De Benedictis, La piega nera Groviglio stilistico ed enigma dellafemminilità in C. E. Gadda (Anzio: De Rubeis, 1991); Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld,Born Illiterate: Gender and Representation in Gadda’s “Pasticciaccio” (Leics: TrobadourPublishing, 1999); “Regemination in Gadda’s Pasticciaccio,” Quaderni d’italianistica, 16.1(Primavera 1995): 117–21; Goffredo Ripamonti, “Finito e non finito in Quer pasticciacciobrutto de via Merulana,” MLN 94. (Jan. 1979): 1–15; Robert A. Rushing, “La sua tragicaincompiutezza: Anxiety, Mis-Recognition and Ending in Gadda’s Pasticciaccio,” MLN116 (2001): 130–49; Cesare Segre, “Le tre rivoluzioni di Carlo Emilio Gadda,” Ritornoalla critica (Torino: Einaudi, 2001) 67–80.; Luca Alessandri, “L’autore nel Pasticciaccio,”Lingua e stile, 31.1 (marzo 1996): 79–100; Giuseppe Stellardi, “Casi, cause e concause:il groviglio psicologico, etico e gnoseologico del Pasticciaccio gaddiano,” Studi eproblemi di critica testuale 41 (ottobre 1990): 127–38; JoAnn Cannon, “The Reader asDetective: Notes on Gadda’s Pasticciaccio,” Modern Language Studies 10. 3 (Fall 1980):41–50.

111M L N

the issue of gender boundaries in the economy of Gadda’s literaryenterprise.3

Pasticciaccio’s famous incompleteness, the lack of solution to whatafter all is a detective story, has been its most discussed feature, alongwith the artful, “macaronic” (as Contini labeled it) quality of itslanguage. Gianfranco Contini asserts that “il Pasticciaccio è, anchenell’ultima edizione, un libro incompiuto; ma, precisazione ben piùimportante, un libro, se non proprio così impostato intenzionalmente,accettato deliberatamente come incompiuto.”4 Gadda himself, per-haps tired of being repeatedly asked about the novel’s open ending,would tell Dacia Maraini (in a 1968 interview) that Pasticciaccio is“letterariamente concluso”: “il poliziotto capisce chi è l’assassino equesto basta.”5 I would like to embrace the risk implicit in takingContini’s assertion a step further, while at the same time acceptingGadda’s at face value. In my view, Pasticciaccio—the book deliberatelyaccepted as “incomplete”—is, in all the senses I can think of, acompleted work.

Pasticciaccio was published on two different occasions. First, be-tween 1944 and 1946, it was serialized in the journal Letteratura, andlater, in 1957, it was published in book form by Garzanti.6 Betweenthese two dates stands the so-called Palazzo degli ori, a cinematic scriptbased on the earlier serialized Pasticciaccio and written for Lux Film,presumably in 1947–48.7 No film would ever be realized from it. Themain feature of Il palazzo degli ori is that it has been unequivocallydesigned to provide the culprits of the two crimes. In this respect,nothing could be more removed from Il palazzo degli ori than the 1957book version of Pasticciaccio, the book we read nowadays. As a matter

3 Carla Benedetti’s discontent with Gaddian “departimentalized” reception is thespringboard for her discussion of literary criticism tout court in Il tradimento dei critici(Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002). For a reflection on Contini’s total criticism and theauthors discussed here, see also Donnarumma, Gadda and Manuela Marchesini,Scrittori in funzione d’altro: Contini, Longhi, Gadda (Modena: Mucchi, forthcoming 2004)and Marchesini, “Lo stile come modo di conoscere: Gianfranco Contini fra RobertoLonghi e Carlo Emilio Gadda,” Lettere italiane 2 (2001): 295–314.

4 Contini, Introduzione ad “Accoppiamenti giudiziosi,” Quarant’anni di amicizia. 45–46. “Se la fine sia stata soltanto abbozzata o non abbia proceduto oltre la elaborazionementale è cosa del tutto secondaria di fronte a questa accettazione, che Gadda difese(per la verità senza troppa fatica) contro le insistenze editoriali.”

5 Gadda, “Per favore, mi lasci nell’ombra.” Interviste 1950–1972, ed. Claudio Vela(Milano: Adelphi, 1993) 172.

6 For the story, Gadda, Il Pasticciaccio (1957), I viaggi e la morte, SGF I; and GiorgioPinotti, “Nota a Quer pasticciaccio,” RRII, 1137–69.

7 Gadda, Il palazzo degli ori (Torino: Einaudi, 1983).

112 MANUELA MARCHESINI

of fact, in the last version Gadda did what he could in order to erasethe many elements of the earlier serialized Pasticciaccio which couldpossibly take the reader in the direction of the script, namely towardsthe solution to the mystery. Gadda was aware that his audience longedfor a closure to Pasticciaccio’s twofold plot, one centered on a minoroffense (a jewelry robbery) and the other one on a horrific crime (amurder), both perpetrated at 219, Via Merulana. He knew that hisaudience was looking forward to the fourth “tratto” of Pasticciaccio’sserialized version, a chapter that was “desiderato dai lettori,” as Gaddawrites in a letter to his editor, because of its clear hint at theidentification of the assassin.8 But although he was, as for most of hislife, in serious financial need (“per un’anima eletta, com’è la mia,anima insediata, per ora, in un corpo nutricando a pane” VM 511),he would not please his public, and would always firmly stand by hischoice of apparently denying a solution to the mystery. Also, he wouldnot be involved in the actual filmic version of Pasticciaccio, Un maledettoimbroglio (1959) directed by Pietro Germi. The fact is, I would argue,that Gadda had indeed already provided his readers with a form ofclosure, although different from the closure indicated by the last“tratto” of the serialized Pasticciaccio. In contrast, the ending of the1957 edition of Pasticciaccio is rather, and unsurprisingly so, a literaryone, a literary answer to the mystery—and therefore, one of thoseanswers that, as Gadda’s beloved Manzoni would say, changes thenature of the question itself.

Moreover, the final chapters included in the 1957 volume are thelast pieces of writing belonging to a broader novelistic project thatGadda would consent to see published. Thus, those very same pagesare Gadda’s literary testament—the testament of a modern Dantewho has set his comedia in 1927 Rome. Although for years (until atleast 1959) Gadda would talk of a “sequel” to Pasticciaccio, he endedup by sticking to hell. But it is a peculiar hell that, as we will see,contains also the other two realms of Dante.

Last but not least, the 1957 Pasticciaccio not only marks the endingof Gadda’s creative adventure but also the claim to Gadda’s belatedfame. Indeed, Pasticciaccio’s publication as a volume succeeded inbringing to Gadda what had eluded him since the thirties, when hewas the cult author of a small number of connaisseurs: popular successwith large audiences. “Sono diventato una specie di Lollobrigido,” he

8 Gadda, letter of 6 Sept. 1957 (Archivio Garzanti), RRII 1153.

113M L N

would say in 1957, with a wink also to his own cross dressing habit, “diSofío Loren, senza aver i doni delle due impareggiabili campionesse.”9

Such a paradoxical fusion of beginning and ending is the properemblem of the extravagant quality of Gadda’s overall life and art, hisbeing bound to the status of, in Contini’s word, “un fuoriserie.”

Note that I deliberately avoid the label of “neurotic,” because Iwould like to distance myself from the many readings that more orless explicitly link Gadda-the-man’s “neurosis” to Gadda-the-author’salleged “tragic incompleteness.”10 Indeed, Gadda saw himself as “untraumatizzato dalla vita,” like the Manzoni he loved; nonetheless, thistrauma had no impact whatsoever on his supposed inability or evenless on his determination to “conclude” the Pasticciaccio—quite thecontrary, I would argue. The composition of chapter VIII of Pasticciaccio,in 1956, is tied “all’ulteriore complicato sviluppo chiusura,” Gaddawrites to Garzanti the September of that year: “Ora sono al momentocritico dell’aggiustamento narrativo, nel senso che sto mettendo apunto la chiusura, le scene e lo schema, secondo quanto già stabilitoda tempo” (RRII 1148). Pasticciaccio the novel shows, particularly inrelation to its earlier versions as well as to other works, to what extentliterature makes available what otherwise would remain unarticulated,providing a space for what Wolfgang Iser calls the co-presence of themutually exclusive.11

Even so, a solution to Pasticciaccio would, by itself, take us only thusfar, as many authoritative interpreters have pointed out, since thisnovel is not a mystery in the sense of Agatha Christie’s or ConanDoyle’s—although it is most certainly endowed with the logical rigorand consistency one can expect from a engineer who graduated fromMilan’s Politecnico.

First, Pasticciaccio’s ending is relevant insofar as it relates to Gadda’spoetics. Its core may be compressed into a formula whose brevitydoesn’t affect its force and validity: getting to know (“conoscere”) andrepresenting (“rappresentare”) are, in Gadda’s world, two aspects ofthe same process. Whereas for Vico it was verum factum convertuntur,

9 Dombroski, “Gadda,” 110.10 I agree with Robert Rushing as to the approach, less on the proposed alternative.11 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); The Fictive and the Imaginery: Charting LiteraryAnthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Wolfgang Iser andSanford Budick eds. The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); The Range of Interpretation (New York:Columbia University Press, 2000).

114 MANUELA MARCHESINI

for Gadda the essential issue is that literary practice must ceaselesslytransform itself into a quest for knowledge (or acquaintance with it), and,conversely, that such a quest must endlessly turn itself into a literarypractice.

In Gadda’s view, such dialectics provide literature with its peculiardepth—at least insofar as literature is more than a mere holiday ofthe mind, what Blanchot called a pure inner smile. There is no doubtthat Gadda belongs to that lineage of European writers, like Manzoni,Cervantes, Joyce, Dante, or Calvino, who see themselves as moralistsof a kind: “Quando scriverò la poetica, dovrà, ognuno che si propongaintenderla, rifarsi dal leggere l’Etica: e anzi la Poetica sarà poco piùche un capitolo dell’Etica: e questa deriverà dalla Metafisica” (VM444).

Second, and by the same token, Pasticciaccio’s ending is relevantinsofar as it leads us to the broader issue of ending and closure, inliterature and beyond. As Frank Kermode points out, “men, likepoets, rush ‘into the middest,’ in medias res,” they are born and theyactually die “in the middest”—which is the reason why busyingoneself with beginnings and endings has always amounted to makingsense of life.12 At stake here, in other words, is more than a single,individual literary poetics. Rather, we are dealing with the idea of lifeand its meaning (if any), along with the idea of the place (if any) thatliterature at large occupies in such big picture.

Indeed, if figuring out the solution of a detective story is fun, whatis really important is that, while we proceed toward the answer, thequestion that first prompted us gets radically altered. When thereader of Pasticciaccio, who has embarked on a hermeneutical/detective quest, finally turns back to look upon the ground she hascovered, she finds out that she has learned how to play quite adifferent game. In other words, against a cognitive, mimetic concep-tion of literature and representation in the tradition of Aristotle,Plato, and Descartes to which the traditional mystery genre belongs,Gadda makes us experience literature as a mode of knowledge, as aninexhaustible performance of the mystery of life, because “al fondocupo di ogni rappresentazione è ritrovabile ancora quello stessogermine euristico ch’è la sintesi operatrice del reale” (VM 488).

I believe that Pasticciaccio, and in particular its final three chapters,have been engineered to be as close as possible to that “dark bottom”

12 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1967) 7.

115M L N

where “aesthetics” and “pragmatics” (I am still quoting Gadda)coincide. It is that dark bottom where the morass of relations thatmake up the forever tangled reality finally comes to confront its ownsingular, single nature, where all the differentiating and boundarycrossing that has been going on since time immemorial finallyconverge into singularity, where the multiplicity of the shatteredmirror, which to Gadda is the truth of the delusional psychological“identity,” its dissociation, comes to confront its primeval unity, wherethe principium contradictionis, the palace of ethics and, last but notleast, all gender related boundaries finally collapse into a singlepoint, a radical overturning of Dante’s “il punto a cui tutti li tempison presenti”: the End (Par. XVII, 18).

In this respect, it seems to me that Gadda’s novel responds to andembodies ideas formulated in a different arena by Wolfgang Iser. Isercompounds in an eclectic way European hermeneutics/receptiontheory with the anthropological work of intellectuals like VictorTurner and Clifford Geertz.13 Turner drew upon Dilthey’s concept ofexperience (Erlebnis) against Kantian cognitivism while Geertz as-serted the fictional dimension of all anthropological narratives. ForTurner, the proper finale of an experience is a performance. There-fore, the anthropology of experience is bound to become theanthropology of performance as well. For Geertz, all ethnographicalnarratives are intrinsically fictitious, constructed, with no ontologicalbasis. Iser leverages this context to impress an “anthropological turn”upon his literary theory. Staging, he claims, is part of our anthropo-logical makeup. In order to understand themselves, and penetratetheir own boundaries, human beings must step out of themselves.Therefore, fictionality, staging in general, and therefore translation atlarge, are all deeply engrained in the functioning of human beings.In particular, literary fictionality, although not the pattern for allfictions, is certainly a prominent paradigm for what fictionality canbring about. Within such a context, the boundary-crossing feature ofliterary fictionality, i.e. its ability to point outside itself, (to history,philosophy, ethics, daily life) is not merely one of its attributes, butrather its hallmark. Here one could propose an argument in favor ofa new (I mean, found anew) sense of literature’s relevance. In other

13 Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986);Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books,1973); Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 2000).

116 MANUELA MARCHESINI

words, literature is important not so much for what it says as for howit says it.

Remembering Benjamin’s image for the dialectician, one couldobserve that “it is not enough . . . to have sails at one’s disposal. Theart of setting them is the decisive factor” (N9, 8).14 It is that how thatmakes literature irreducible to any one of its parts, functions, or uses.Literature is closer to the body of Boccaccio’s Alatiel (Decameron, II,7)who, regardless of the substantial number of men she slept with,nonetheless comes back to the rightful husband as pristine as she was:“Bocca basciata non perde ventura, anzi rinnuova come fa la luna.”15

Let us now see to what extent Gadda’s Pasticciaccio is the performanceor staging of that boundary-crossing, explorative activity which iscalled literature.

I will focus my attention on the chapters that Gadda either rewritesor writes anew in 1957, eleven years after the serialized publication.Let me now, for the sake of my exposition, recall the novel’s plot. Weare in Rome, in February 1927, shortly after Mussolini’s rise to power.The fascist order must reign, and nothing is supposed to trouble it.But two different crimes take place, a few days apart, on the samefloor of the bourgeois palace in Via Merulana 219, which is calledalternatively the “golden palace” and the “sharks’ palace” (because ofthe disputable past reputation of its wealthy tenants). First, a jewelrytheft at the expense of a countess Mantegazzi, and second thehorrible murder (with another jewelry theft) of Liliana Balducci. Thethirty-five year old officer Francesco (Ciccio) Ingravallo, from Molise,is working on the first robbery case when Liliana’s body, horriblydisfigured, is found on the floor of her apartment. Ingravallo wasacquainted with the murdered lady, to whom he had clearly beenattracted. The novel thus narrates the confusing, intertwined vicissi-tudes of the double investigation. The detective story’s tension buildsprogressively towards the end of the narration. As we said, nothingshould trouble the peace of the fascist order, particularly the sanctityof the home and of the family. Thus, to speed up the investigations,officer Ingravallo will be doubled in his functions by a colleaguebelonging to the archrival corps of Carabinieri, corporal Pestalozzi.

14 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project; tr. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.Prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedeman (Belknap Pressof Harvard University Press: Cambridge and London, 1999) 473–84.

15 Marchesini, “Le ragioni di Alatiel (Decameron II.7),” Studi sul Boccaccio 22 (1995):257–76.

117M L N

In the last three chapters of the story, carabiniere Pestalozzi locatesthe stolen Mantegazzi property in the house of a suspect, whilecommissario Ingravallo, in spite of his determination, apparently failsto unveil the identity of Liliana’s murderer. A confrontation ensuesbetween Ingravallo and a possible female suspect, Assunta Crocchia-pani, a young woman of great sensual appeal who had been Liliana’smaid and whom Ingravallo had already met, before Liliana’s death, ata dinner at Balducci’s. Ingravallo attempts to raise a disgusted j’accuseto the woman; his self-confidence, however, leaves him immediatelyafter its very first articulation. Assunta, indignant, flatly denies theaccusation. Here is how Ingravallo’s last words come together in theconcluding sentence of the book: “Egli non intese, là pe llà, ciò’ chela sua anima era in procinto d’intendere. Quella piega nera verticaletra i due sopraccigli dell’ira, nel volto bianchissimo della ragazza, loparalizzò, lo indusse a riflettere: a ripentirsi, quasi.” Here the bookends.

As soon as this sentence is taken as a sign of Ingravallo’s frustra-tion, of his inability to grasp the truth, according to conventionalreadings, the same frustration is fatally reflected back to the wholenovel: the Pasticciaccio becomes a “tragically incomplete” novel writ-ten by a “tragically neurotic” man.

To substantiate my dissatisfaction with this interpretation, I wouldlike to underline the two series of events that lead to that ending: thetwo parallel journeys, bordering the city of Rome and its countryside,that “carabiniere” corporal Pestalozzi and the 35 year old “commissariodi polizia” officer Ingravallo embark upon on the very same day,taking off at the same hour, with the scope of furthering the twoinvestigations.

Let us begin with the first journey:

Mercoledì ventitre, pensò. Difatti. Levò gli occhi alla torre, che unasgrondatura di luce pressoché gialla, da una lampadina schermata, tingevaad alto e di striscio . . . Sei e venticinque nell’orologio della torre: quantonel suo proprio, esattamente. In accompagno aveva comandato quelmilite, [Cocullo detto Farafiliopetri] che già gravava col boffice sulretrosella [della motocicletta di Pestalozzi] e stava per tirare i piedi inbarca a sua volta, stringendo il superiore alla vita, con le due mani, eattendendo il primo sparo del motore. Lui, col destro, calcò: reiteròsull’avvio. Il cilindro principiò alfine a gorgogliare, tutta la macchina afremere, a batter l’ali. Il piantone salutò sull’attenti: fu superata la soglia.(RRII 189)

118 MANUELA MARCHESINI

First of all, please note the date, March 23, at daybreak—a date thatGadda stresses over and over. March 23 is very close to the springequinox, which coincides with the journey of the Dante the Pilgrim,“peregrino del mondo di cognizione” as Gadda will call him in 1961.16

After all, Singleton observes, “it is spring, therefore, traditionally a“season of good hope,” “the more so” he continues—“in that it is alsothe time of Incarnation.” Seventy pages later, the second journey,Ingravallo’s, will take place on that very same day, although Gaddadevilishly both veils and unveils the coincidence: “Don Ciccio[Ingravallo], intanto, neppur lui non aveva perso tempo. Rincasato amezzanotte emmezzo, “lunedì ventuno marzo Benedetto da Norcia,enunciò l’appeso al chiodo calendario . . . col foglio di due dì primache la sora Margherita s’era scordata di togliere” (RRII 258).

Safely astride Pestalozzi’s motorbike, this novel Don Quixote andSancho Panza set out for a flight that reenacts Dante and Vergil’sflight on Geryon’s back towards the entrance of Malebolge, in InfernoXVII. Gadda even keeps the realistic detail of Dante’s embrace:“I’m’assettai in su quelle spallacce: / sì volli dir, ma la voce non vennecom’io credetti: “Fa che tu m’abbracce. ”/ Ma esso, ch’altra volta misovvenne / ad altro forse, tosto ch’io montai / con le bracciam’avvinse e mi sostenne” (Inf. XVII, 91–95). The idea of thresholdcrossing is reinforced throughout the whole episode, as well as theidea of the descent of the mare (“cavalla” 190) with its riders down a“forte pendio” (RRII 189), as slippery as the sin of fraud, notoriouslypunished in Inferno’s eighth circle or Malebolge. Here is Gadda:

La svolta non diede luogo a ruzzolata. Ma pesavano, i due, sui fascioni. Ilciottolato era lùbrico, in forte pendio: una pellicina di belletta, in qualchetratto, lo rendeva più pericoloso. La cavalla coi due cavalcatori in gropparotolò giù trattenuta, bofonchiando, piegò a dritta, poi a manca verso laporta del borgo, tra muraglie di peperino nere ed ombre, sotto afinestrette quadrate, cui munivano rugginosi ferri ad incarcerare latenebra. Alcuna civica lampadina dondolò suo saluto ai fuggenti, in quellapovertà scura e petrosa di paese: mensola dai licheni e dai muri che siritraevano a scarpa, quasi di cortine di castella . . . Discesero fino alla portadel borgo. (RRII 190)

Rome and its surroundings provide the geographical and existen-tial space for Gadda’s upside down “città di Dite” (Inf. VIII, 67–75)which looms in the distance with its fiery ramparts, threatening and

16 Gadda, “A Raffele Mattioli dedicando queste pagine,” Verso la Certosa (SGF I, 278).

119M L N

splendid. Pestalozzi stops the motor to contemplate, to cast themorning horoscope (263) (“[a] strologare il mattino,” 190) in agesture which resonates with Aeneas’s interrogation of the Sybil inbook VI of the Aeneid, just before entering Hades. Pestalozzi lays hiseyes on an overturned version of what Dante saw on the threshold ofLower Hell, the spatial collector of the gravest sinners:

Lo buon maestro disse: “Omai, figliuolo,s’appressa la città ch’ha nome Dite,coi gravi cittadin, col grande stuolo.”Ed io: ‘Maestro, già le sue meschitelà entro certe ne la valle cerno,vermiglie come se di foco uscitefossero.” Ed ei mi disse: ‘il foco etternoch’entro l’affoca le dimostra rosse,come tu vedi in questo basso inferno.”

(Inf. VIII 70–75)

Pestalozzi’s inverted landscape retains Dante’s disquieting topog-raphy while creating a scene worthy of Manzoni’s landscape views,increased by the coloristic ecphrastic ability of his equally belovedRoberto Longhi:17

Era l’alba, e più. Le vette dell’Algido, dei Carseolani e dei Veliniinopinatamente presenti, grigie. Magia repentina il Soratte, come unarocca di piombo, di cenere. Di là dai gioghi di Sabina, per bocchette eportelli che interrompessero la lineatura del crinale, il rivivere del cielo sipalesava lontanamente in sottili strisce di porpora e più remoti ed affocatipunti e splendori, di solfo giallo, di vermiglione: strane lacche: nobiliriverberi, come da un crogiuolo del profondo. Spentasi la tramontana ilgiorno innanzi, ecco, ad alternare gli auspici, la bava calda, sulla pelle e sulviso, l’alito gratuito e omai cadente d’una strapazzata di scirocco. Di là, dadietro a Tivoli e a Càrsoli, flottiglie di nubi orizzontali tutte arricciolate dicirri, con falsi-fiocchi di zafferano, s’avventavano l’una dopo l’altra abattaglia, filavano giosamente a sfrangiarsi: indove? dove? chissà! . . . Labili,cangevoli fuste, bordeggiavano a quota alta e irreale, in quella specie disogno capovolto che è il nostro percepire, dopo il risveglio ad alba,bordeggiavano la scogliera cinerina delle montagne . . . (RRII 190–91)

Our perception of Rome is an overturned dream that takes usstraight to the famous episode of Pestalozzi’s actual dream, as he

17 Ezio Raimondi, Barocco moderno: Carlo Emilio Gadda e Roberto Longhi (Bologna:C.U.S.L., 1990); Micaela Lipparini, Le metafore del vero: percezione e deformazione figurativain Carlo Emilio Gadda (Ospedaletto, Pisa: Pacini, 1994).

120 MANUELA MARCHESINI

recalls it during the ride. As he speeds, always rigorously “in discesa”(192), in a sultry day whose “mugginess seemed to have drunk theswamps” (Weaver 265), (“Era giornata lasca, il dolco aveva bevuto aipadùli”) towards the tavern/workshop/brothel of i Due Santi,Pestalozzi recalls at ease “l’interminabile sogno della notte” (RRII192). Once again, earlier on in the narration, Ingravallo had drawn aconsideration that perfectly prepared not only Pestalozzi’s reversedperception of Rome/city of Dis but also his famous dream: “Il mondodelle cosiddette verità, filosofò [Ingravallo] non è che un contesto difavole: di brutti sogni. Talché soltanto la fumea dei sogni e dellefavole può avere nome verità. Ed è, su delle povere foglie, la carezzadi luce” (RRII 119). Pestalozzi’s dream, indeed, once it’s beenoverturned to produce a quantum of reality, becomes perfectlyproleptic of the real experience that awaits him at the tavern of i DueSanti. The carabiniere, who is after the stolen jewelry of countessMantegazzi, has dreamt of a bright yellow topaz undergoing a seriesof Dantesque metamorphoses. After all, perpetual transformation isDante’s punishment for thieves in Inferno XXIV and XXV, andPestalozzi plus his squire are just hours away from catching the thiefof Mantegazzi’s jewelry. In the oneiric grammar, the “topazio” changesfirst into a “topo/topazio” whose yellowness calls for the yellow lampsof a train. The “pazza” race of this train, duplicated by that of the“topo/topazio,” takes Pestalozzi and his squire first to Casal Bruciato’srailroad station (where the jewels will be discovered) then it hurlsthem all, at full speed, “nella tenebra circea” of the night, “verso legore senza foce del campo Morto,” “dove i nomi si diradano” (RRII193), “to that point where names thin out,” as much as they do thinout indeed, very shortly, in the spectral silence of the modern Judeccawe are bound to reach.18

Let us just briefly recall the Circean part of the dream (OdysseyXX), and Gadda’s explicit merging of the Homeric tale of feminineseduction and cunning with the obsession with a Narcissistic virilitytypical of the fascist era and its female crowds. Gadda’s intent isclearly parodic of both. I would like to suggest, however, that thedisturbing, misogynistic nature of this dream, with its open fear offemale sexuality and rejection-desire of the phallus, is not to benecessarily transferred from Pestalozzi (the dreaming fictional char-acter) to the authorial point of view. In other words, Pasticciaccio the

18 “To that point where names thin out” is Diaconescu’s translation, Born Illiterate 59.

121M L N

novel, being a work of fiction and a complex fabric of narrativevoices, is remarkably different from texts like Eros e Priapo. This latteris a harshly polemical work, whose supposedly antifascist discourseremains, as Barbara Spackman has convincingly argued, still verymuch internal to the fascist discourse it aspires to condemn.19 In Erose Priapo, the responsibility of the collusion with fascism is clearlydependent on the same fascist discourse that it supposedly attacks,i.e. it is drawn along clearly demarked gender lines, in the tradition ofMachiavelli’s raped Fortuna now turned to the female fascist crowdthat asks to be raped. But Eros e Priapo, although published in 1967after an almost complete abortion—“È un inedito da distruggere”Gadda would write to Vittorio Sereni in 1959 (SGF II 1001)—wasoriginally written in 1944–45, in other words alongside the first,serialized version of Pasticciaccio. Moreover, the composition of Eros ePriapo had been abandoned in favor of Pasticciaccio. If I am notmistaken, the difference between Eros e Priapo and Pasticciaccio couldnot be greater, and illustrates the difference between what Iser callsexplanatory fictions and exploratory ones.20 It is precisely in the erasureand deliberate mingling of all boundaries, and especially of genderboundaries, that I would pinpoint the difference between Pasticciacciothe book, which is Gadda’s creative testament, not only from therefused pamphlet Pasticciaccio, but from also from the previous serialversion of Pasticciaccio published in Letteratura, and even more so fromthe aborted cinematic script. As an increased and variegated scholarlyattention indicates, I see the issue of gender as the generative matrixof Gadda’s writings.21 Its core could be rephrased and summarized asa powerful story of becoming acquainted with gender—whence the grief,because Gadda tied such acquaintance (or knowledge) with the ideaof a “tabe” or disease. In this respect, Gadda’s opus, and in particularPasticciaccio as the culmination of his artistic endeavor, is not only ona par with the great narratives of modernism, from Joyce’s to Proust’sand Woolf’s, but proceeds, perhaps, several steps further.

As Pestalozzi’s dream of Circe and Nereids nicely anticipates hisdaylight encounter with sorceress/fortune-teller/panderer ZamiraPacori and her girls/workers/prostitutes, so does the shrine episode

19 Barbara Spackman, Fascist virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

20 Iser, “What is Literary Anthropology? The Difference between Explanatory andExploratory Fictions,” ed. M. Clark, Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature inTheory Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

21 See esp. Diaconescu-Blumenfeld.

122 MANUELA MARCHESINI

that has Pestalozzi’s squire (also called Farafiliopetri, with a nick-name) as its protagonist. This time, however, it is in the humorousvein of Sancho Panza or, more to the point, of don Abbondio.Indeed, Gadda’s reference text here is the opening scene of I promessisposi, where the oblivious eyes of Manzoni’s Abbondio see a shrinealong with “qualcosa che non si aspettava, e che non avrebbe volutovedere,” i.e. the two “bravi” who spark the story plot.22 Same location,same display of a sacred image to popular devotion. Manzoni’spainting, just like the tall shrine which catches the squire’s torpidattention just before they enter the tavern of i Due Santi, is a “vecchiapittura, alquanto sbiadita e calcinosa nel colore,” which portrays “duesicuramente santi” (RRII 196). Abbondio’s souls of purgatory were ahumorous prefiguration of his coming troubles, and so is the Latinsentence painted on the shrine next to the tavern’s entrance. It reads:“saepe propòsui venire ad vos et prohìbitus sum usque adhuc. Pauliad Romanos: I–13” (RRII 199), (“oftentimes I purposed to come untoyou, but I was let hitherto”) and it spells serious troubles for him andhis companion: nothing less than a timeless desertion of God! Thesquire’s peace of mind, however, will be hardly touched, sheltered ashe is by his ignorance of a Latin he can hardly syllabify—hopefully thereader will be touched, though, and to this purpose Gadda repeatsthe sentence, in a footnote, to make sure that the reader will not missthe point. From now on we can hardly expect any help from above.

The tavern of i Due Santi, which our heroes eventually reach,displays both the humoristic features of the eighteenth-century comicnovel as well as the much more troubling, and equally realistic, traitsof a Gaddian Malebolge of fraud, where “sospetto, reticenza, derisione,

22 Pedriali Federica, “Of Saints and Toes: Baroque Connectives in Gadda’s Pasticciaccio,”Forum Italicum, 35, 2 (Fall 2001) 351–67. Gadda writes: “La storia gloriosa della pitturanostra, di una parte di sua gloria è tributaria agli alluci. La luce, e gli alluci, sonoingredienti primi e ineffabili d’ogni pittura che aspiri a vivere, che voglia dire la suaparola, narrare, suadere, educare: subjugare i nostri sensi, evincere i cuori al maligno”(RR II 196–7). Gadda’s word play luce/alluci is an allusion to the teachings of RobertoLonghi, whose main critical acquisition to the history of Italian painting was preciselythe realistic discovery of lume to juxtapose to colore. A confirmation also in Gadda’s letterto Livio Garzanti, on April 8, 1957: “Tutto l’episodio della cappelletta con i due santiPietro e Paolo è immaginato (ma su dati reali): e vuol essere pittura di costume siaetico-religioso, sia estetico e pittorico. Non credo che Contini, e forse nemmenoLonghi, lo spregerebbero del tutto” (RR II 1148). See, Roberto Longhi, Three Studies(Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Stanley Moss-Sheep Meadow Press, 1995) (now availablein English) and the new tr. of Longhi’s Piero della Francesca, tr. and pref. David Tabbat,intr. Keith Christiansen (Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Stanley Moss-Sheep MeadowBook; [Lebanon, N.H.]: Distributed by the University Press of New England, 2002).

123M L N

insidia” (RRII 200) reign. As a matter of fact, the progressive gravityof sins is respected by the succession of Pestalozzi and Farafilio’sencounters: first the deceptive fortuneteller Zamira, then the liarLavinia Mattonari, then the thief herself (her cousin, CamillaMattonari). On the one hand, Pestalozzi and his squire in theirdealings with Zamira Pacori attempt to exert their own self-control, tohold on to the “validità procedurale” of their male, carabinieresquerationality. On the other hand, the sorceress/witch Zamira doeswhatever she can to break “la consecuzione degli atti e dei fatti”which will soon lead to the rational “carabinieresco miracolo” (RRII112) of the jewelry’s discovery. It is a clear confrontation betweenmale powers of reason and female powers of dark irrationality. Butduring Pacori’s questioning, one of her girls, Lavinia Mattonari,enters the scene before realizing the presence of the two officers inthe tavern. Pestalozzi, whose suspicions have been roused by Zamira’sreticence, triumphantly notices the topaz ring on the girl’s hand. Atthis point Lavinia cannot but reveal its source: it has been given to herby her cousin, Camilla Mattonari. The squire and the two girls thenboard a buggy bound to Camilla’s home, followed by Pestalozzi on abike. Needless to say, we are bound to descend even more (301),touching on the way a bridge of the “Divino amore.” Pasticciaccio’stoponomy, and even more so since it is not fictional,23 reveals Gadda’sreverence for the eighteenth century comic novel (Fielding) and itsrhetorical devices, especially antiphrasis—as Pasticciaccio’s onomasticslikewise attests.

To greet them on the threshold of Camilla’s house, our pilgrimsfind the “furibondi latrati di un bastardaccio di cui quasi non sivedevano gli occhi, ma i denti radi e canini con paura, tant’erasannuto ed irsuto, mezzo spinone e mezzo maremmano . . . ma perbuona sorte a catena” (RRII 218). This chained hound (whoserelation to a previous chained hen calls for a separate filing in achapter devoted to Pasticciaccio’s bestiary) is reminiscent both ofCerberus (Inf. VI, 22–33) and especially of the aggressiveness ofMalebranche and its demons to the pilgrims, barely restrained byVirgil’s (somewhat shaky) authority in Inferno XXI (67–71): “Con quelfurore e con quella tempesta / ch’escono i cani a dosso al poverello /che di subito chiede ove s’arresta, / usciron quei di sotto al ponticello, /e volser contra lui tutti i runcigli.” Indeed, Gadda makes the pointtwice, thanks to a new barking crisis of the dog:

23 Amigoni, La più semplice 45–49.

124 MANUELA MARCHESINI

L’indemoniato idiota . . . [della cui] maledetta gargana . . . palesava ilrossore cavernoso . . . la [cui] veemenza . . . raddoppiò sino al parossismo. . . ma la saldezza di catena e carità di spago, era anzi cordella, quantopure a fatica ne lo ritennero . . . cerbero in licenza sulla terra e sui colli,dove si fosse appiazzato ad opera tracannando lo immeritato lume, ladolce aura dell’aperto loro cielo: coeli jucundum lumen et auras.” (RRII221)

The Virgilian quotation is strikingly appropriate: these are the wordsthat Palinurus’s wandering soul addresses to Aeneas during theirbrief and touching encounter in Hades (Aeneid VI, 363). Conse-quently, one cannot be surprised if in Gadda’s “Casal bruciato” “l’arias’era assopita e parea ristagnare da basso” (RRII 222) while even “ipennacchi di fumo” left by the bypassing train “s’erano sbandati unpoco dalla sede e gravavano ora, bianchi e inutili, sul verde fradiciodelle novali” (RRII 222).

This infernal beast provides a proper introduction to the discoveryof Mantegazzi’s stolen property that will soon follow. The jewels,painstakingly described by Gadda in famous pages, are relevantbecause of their genuine immutability vis à vis the treacherousimpermanence of the sublunary world. In Gadda’s universe, dia-monds are really a girl’s best friend—and very possibly the only goodguys around, too.24 Pestalozzi and his squire, then, like “due angeloni”(239), escort the two cousins, “la nuova speranzella di regina Coeli,”while the road, unsurprisingly, “saliva” (RRII 241), (“La strada, perl’appunto, saliva.”) It’s the signal that their adventure in hell is over.Indeed, Pestalozzi has mentally left the issue of the other stolenproperty, Balducci’s jewels, to the care of officer Ingravallo.

To him will now befall the task of pursuing the culprit of theheinous theft and homicide, and thus to continue the descenttowards this novel, Dantesque lower hell’s “[il] dritto mezzo delcampo maligno” (Inf. XVIII, 4–5).

On the topical morning of March 23, we witness don CiccioIngravallo’s awakening and meticulous morning ablutions. Since theday before, he has arranged for a car to take him around, an oldwreck that has seen better days, lent to him by the chief of thepolitical section. Like Pestalozzi before him, don Ciccio too is flankedby an assistant, Sergeant Di Pietrantonio. As he rides through theawakening Rome, Ingravallo rolls down the window to contemplate

24 For different evaluations see Enrico Gioanola, L’uomo dei topazi. Saggio psicanaliticosu C.E. Gadda (Genova: Melangolo, 1977) 130–49. Amigoni, La più semplice (82–89;112–9) Donnarumma, Gadda (59–60).

125M L N

the church of Santa Maria Maggiore: “Enunciazione disegnata edestrutta ad arte” he reflects, “sulla sommità di quello che dovevaessere stato nei lontani secoli il “monte,” il Viminale, . . . aveva sueradici nell’ombra, nella oscurità della diritta via discendente enell’intrico di tutti i rami” (RRII 263).

The overbearing presence of the church of Santa Maria Maggiorerefers back to the church of mount Soratte in Pestalozzi’s previousjourney and, like the latter, is rooted into the shadows, too. After aquick augury casting that punctually doubles Pestalozzi’s (“DonCiccio sporse il capo, tentò levar gli occhi alle nuvole, per ilpronostico del giorno” RRII 263) the ensuing scene is a lyricaldescription that again reiterates Pestalozzi’s, only with the city inplace of a countryside:

Tutte le nuvole si vedevan correre: una fuga di cavalle; traversavano illistone chiaro, a momenti azzurro, del cielo, tra due grondaie parallelle: siavventavano nun si sa dove, solerte coorte. I rami e i platani della Merulanafuron selva, allo svoltare, intrico, per lo sguardo, sul discendere parallelodei fili, di cui si alimentavano i tramme. (RRII 264)

Even the motif of the wandering clouds is being represented again—a detail which takes us to a curious coincidence. In a 1957 letter to hispublisher Garzanti concerning potential Italian alternatives to thetitle Pasticciaccio, Gadda’s second option, after the first one “Erpalazzo de l’oro” (“formula,” he comments, “che ricorre nel testo”)spells precisely “Nuvole in fuga.”25 I will defer a discussion of the thirdand last alternative that Gadda mentions in his letter to the end of thepresent essay. Returning to Ingravallo’s ride through Rome and itssuburbs, one understands that what we are now witnessing is not anew journey, but the doubling of the same one.

During his hell-bound journey, Don Ciccio, like Pestalozzi, makesan intermediate stop, this time to the carabinieri station in Marino,where he is updated on the progress made by the rest of the searchparty. Hearing that his rival has been commanded to i Due Santi,while someone else is pursuing Enea Iginio Retalli, author of theMantegazzi theft, don Ciccio feels he has lost his bearings on the caseas well as the purpose of using the car. It’s just a moment, then heregains his wits: “Sapete se la Crocchiapani Assunta . . . è già statainterrogata a domicilio?” (RRII 266). Le voilà, don Ciccio has deviseda worthy destination for himself and his old car.

25 Gadda, Archivio Garzanti, 14 maggio 1957 in Pinotti, Note RR II 1152.

126 MANUELA MARCHESINI

After a few intermediate stops, they head off to Assunta’s house,among “ulivi, e le lor fronde d’argento cenere,” in the punctuallymuggy weather (“a dolco” RRII 267). As the car completes its descentamong jolts and jumps, we are meticulously carried around, oncemore, through all the different places we encountered earlier on inthe narration: i Due Santi, Santa Fumia, Casal Bruciato, the bridge ofthe Divino Amore. . . It is as if Gadda wanted to sum up the situation,just before a different sort of event takes place. Indeed, as in Dante’sComedia, all infernal rivers meet in the frozen lake of Cocytus; Gaddawants to prepare us for the quantum leap represented by AssuntaCrocchiapani’s homeplace: a place called Tor di Gheppio—and “fargheppio” is a proverbial expression which means “to die.”

Here is how we are led to perceive Tor di Gheppio:

La straducola motosa discendeva: poi si rassodò: le carreggiate si dilataronoa pozze, colme, controluce, d’acqua livida, piombo fuso celeste argento . . .Pareva l’avesse dopo poco a doversi smarrire nelle terre, nel solo. . . .Fumacchi pesavano ancora a mezz’aria, immobili, come rappresi da magia:relitti d’una testé dissolta parvenza: bianchi, quasi ovatta, o d’un biancoirreale di vapore. La sagoma affumata del trenetto . . . somigliò il NeroPersonaggio . . . e nel silenzio della campagna e nel muto stupire dellecose, d’una impronta di piè di capro è rimasto al solo il sigillo, e poco solfoper l’aria. “Tor di Gheppio è là,” fece il volonteroso ometto indicando, “laCrocchiapani abita là, in una di quelle case che vedete.” (RRII 268)

We have indeed reached Hell’s pit, where lake Cocytus is perpetu-ally frozen by the sweeping wings of Lucifer’s towering body, thusconstituting the ninth and last circle of Hell (Inf. XXXII). It is nowtime to observe that in Dante’s cosmogony the bottom of Hell is, inSingleton’s words, “near the center of the earth, which in thePtolemaic conception is the central point of the whole materialuniverse,”26 and that at the very, very beginning of Pasticciaccio, thesecond page of chapter one, during Ingravallo’s dinner at theBalducci’s, when don Ciccio had to “reprimere, reprimere” (RRII 20)his attraction to the sensual maid Assunta who was serving at thetable, he had drawn an interesting consideration precisely about her.He had to repress a “visione” at whose “centro” were “quegli occhidell’Assunta: quell’alterigia: come fosse una sua degnazione servirli atavola. Al centro . . . di tutto il sistema . . . tolemaico: già, tolemaico.Al centro, parlano con rispetto, quer po’ po’ de signorino” (RRII 20).

26 Dante, The Divine Comedy, tr. with a commentary by Charles S. Singleton, vol. I, part2 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970–1975) 582.

127M L N

This is no coincidence: in spite of her name, eyes, and vision-likepresence, all elements which we will consider shortly, Assunta isunequivocally, and she was meant to be, responsible for Liliana’shomicide—regardless of whether she, or her lover, Diomede Lanciani,materially did it.27

But there is more to support this inference. As one will remember,Dante’s Cocytus is divided into four concentric areas, in which fourcategories of traitors are punished. The fourth, and innermostsubdivision of Cocytus, Judecca, is devoted to those who betrayedtheir benefactor; and what else will don Ciccio throw at Assuntaduring their final confrontation, if not the following words:

“‘O saccio,‘o saccio, chi v’ha data [la ciambella per il padre malato]: e purechillo vaso . . . e la coperta pure . . . vell’ha dati . . . [sic] una ch’à avutosubbito ‘o compenso, p’ ‘a bontà sua. Nun far del bene, si nun è che vuoiave’ mmale, dice ‘o proverbio. Cussì è. Nun parlate? Nun ricordate? . . . Lasignora Liliana potete dire! Che’ è stata sgozzata da un assassino! . . . qua-le” favellò “aggio saputo il nome, il cognome! . . . [sic] e dove sta: e cosafa.” La ragazza sbiancò e non disse a.” (RRII 275–76)

Gadda has even kept Dante’s punishment for Assunta’s sin, al-though transferred into the body of her father! Dante’s sinnersnotoriously lie down, in spectral silence, under a thin layer of ice (“làdove l’ombre eran tutte coperte, / e transparien come festuca invetro” Inf. XXXIV, 11–12); a powerful image indeed of a veritable,spiritual death. Likewise, Assunta’s father, who happens to be on hisdeathbed also, is not only designated as “il male” (“the evil,” notWeaver’s “the Illness”) but also connoted as, indeed, a “festuca invetro”: “un corpiciattolo disteso, come un gatto secco adagiato aterra: una faccia ossuta e cachettica posava sul cuscino, immota, d’ungiallo-bruno da museo egizio: non fosse stato, invece, l’albore vetrosodella barba” (RRII 273).

In short, Assunta is the culprit. Taking up an old resolve, thatperhaps dates back to the pages of Eros e Priapo, Gadda has managedto bring his novel to literary completion thanks to a modern“riedizione diplomatica del testo critico” of the Commedia.28 But onemay ask: what for?

27 Ronconi in his theatrical rendition and Amigoni reach the same conclusion.28 Gadda, EP, SGF II, 308: “Quando io apro la Commedia mi preoccupo di aver

davanti un testo plausibile (testo critico) della Commedia, non un centone di refusi eun intruglio di orecchiate approssimazioni al testo. La mia anima vuol fotografare iltesto della Commedia virgola per virgola, lettera per lettera: opera in sé una sorta diriedizione diplomatica del testo critico.” The italics are in the text.

128 MANUELA MARCHESINI

Let us now come back to Dante in Gadda, for the last time. Dante’sitinerary is a journey of redemption and salvation, with hell as its firststation, whereas Gadda’s search for truth begins and ends in Assunta’seyes, in a sort of abominable inversion of the supreme visionexperienced by Dante in Paradiso XXXIII. Dante’s culminatingexperience is portrayed as a concert of reflecting looks—a stream ofmirroring looks that harmoniously binds together the onlookerBeatrice with her blessed companions, Bernard, who pleads for Danteby looking up to the Virgin, who in turn intercedes for Dante bylooking up to God, while Dante the Pilgrim does the same, thusdrawing his journey to completion: “Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fumaggio / che ‘l parlar mostra, ch’a tal vista cede, / e cede la memoriaa tanto oltraggio” (Par. XXXIII 55–57).29 Instead, at the end ofPasticciaccio we are faced with a culprit, quite literally a demon fromthe deepest hell who, nonetheless, being an Assunta, holds the eyesand the countenance of the most revered and blessed characters ofDante’s poem—from Beatrice to the Virgin Mary herself, a coinci-dence that is obliquely secured not just by the mention of Titian’spainting in one of Fumi’s broodings, but also by the fact that thecontext of Fumi’s words is clearly equivocal in a sexual sense—“L’Assunta! . . . ‘O ritratto d’ ‘a Madonna spaccato!” (RRII173).30 Theblasphemy of Assunta’s portrayal in the closing scene of Pasticciaccio isas mysterious as the series of apparent non-sequiturs that make up thelast interaction between Assunta and Ingravallo, thus providing themuch debated closure to Gadda’s detective story. The scene whereIngravallo violently scolds Assunta—just as Beatrice scolds Dante in

29 I am grateful for Albert Ascoli’s eyes which brought to my attention this line ofexploration: Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin: “Vinca tua guardia i movimenti umani: /vedi Beatrice con quanti beati / per li miei prieghi ti chiudon le mani!” / Li occhi daDio diletti e venerati, / fissi ne l’orator, ne dimostraro / quanto i devoti prieghi le songrati; / indi all’etterno lume s’addrizzaro, / nel qual non si dee creder che s’invii/percreatura l’occhio tanto chiaro. / E io ch’al fine di tutti i disii / appropinquava,si’com’io dovea, / l’aror del desiderio in me finii. / Bernardo m’accennava, esorridea, / perch’io guardassi suso; ma io era / già per me stesso tal qual ei volea: / chéla mia vista, venendo sincera, / e più e più intrava per lo raggio / de l’alta luce che dasé è vera” (Par. XXXIII 37– 54).

30 “Ate stanze nce vonno pe cchille ppeccerelle, [American girls tourist in Rome]mormoro’ [Fumi], “L’Assunta!” esclamò: di Tiziano Vecellio!” e il cognome, in quellastanzaccia della questura, aggiunse decoro al nome: quasi d’un tipo colle carte inregola, che il sospetto non potesse neppure sfiorare. “’O ritratto d’ ‘a Madonnaspaccato! Co chille sette angele ‘e ceralacca ncoppa ‘a capa! . . . ” We then learn thatFumi, who had been “vice commissario” in Venice, got mixed up with one of the sixmadonnas by Giovanni Bellini,—another, minuscule proof of Gadda’s great fondnessfor pasticci.

129M L N

Purgatory XXX—and urges her to take responsibility for Liliana’smurder, suffers an extraordinary twist when, instead of the girl, it isIngravallo who happens to end up frozen into repentance. Indeed, ifAssunta is the culprit, as it seems reasonable to maintain, why doesIngravallo need to retract his accusation to the point of almostrepenting ?

“No, sor dotto’” pleads the girl, “no, no, nun so’ stata io!” Il gridoincredibile bloccò il furore dell’ossesso. Egli [Ingravallo] non intese, là pellà, ciò che la sua anima era in procinto d’intendere. Quella piega neraverticale tra i due sopraccigli dell’ira, nel volto bianchissimo della ragazza,lo paralizzò, lo indusse a riflettere: a ripentirsi, quasi.

While in Dante’s Hell things get mixed up because it is hell, inGadda’s Pasticciaccio, they get mixed up because this is just the way itis. As Jaqueline Risset puts it, when referring to Gadda’s well-knownpassion for Leibniz, Gadda subscribes to a monadology without asupreme monad—i.e. without a God setting it in order.31 What I amtrying to get at is that the structural mold of Dante’s Inferno works asa fine fit for Gadda’s purposes, but up to a certain point. In his view,in fact, the mind boggling doubling typical of hell, the unreliability ofthe experiences we go through while crossing it, are not steppingstones towards a journey of salvation but permanent and historical traits.After all, this is Rome 1927, not hell. In other words, the unreliability,the fraud, the doubling that are portrayed in the course of thenarration necessarily touch everything and everyone—including, ofcourse, our modern pilgrim of knowledge, Francesco Ingravallo. AsGadda the “philosopher” has argued over and over again, we cannever be outside the pasticcio of relationships which constitute reality.We are, and we remain, on what Gadda calls, with Rimbaud, “la toldadi una nave trascinata dalla tempesta” (MM SVP628). This is, Ibelieve, the reason behind the widely noticed doubling of everything;in Pasticciaccio, doubling of settings, of events, of places, of names, ofpeople and, most importantly, doubling of the characters’s psychol-ogy, like Ingravallo/Pestalozzi and respective squires on the onehand, while on the other hand, returning to the final scene, we havethe mirroring of Ingravallo and Assunta.

In other words, as Tor di Gheppio, the grim bottom of Gadda’s

31 Risset, “Carlo Emilio Gadda” 159: “A questo livello, il testo di Gadda inventa unaspecie di parossismo del sistema leibniziano: una combinatoria infinita, una circolaritàsenza ricorsi: il sistema è sganciato—funzionante al di fuori di ogni riferimentoassoluto, senza rapporto con un termine prescritto, punto fisso d’intendimento.”

130 MANUELA MARCHESINI

hell, accommodates Pasticciaccio’s ending, it also provides the spacefor a paradoxical synthesis of paradise and purgatory. In Pasticciaccio’sending, Gadda collapses Dante’s realms into a single one. He takesinstability, doubling, and confusion—infernal features that have beenso far consistently enacted along the narration—to their utermostextremity. In the last page of Pasticciaccio we witness the culminatingsteps of the climactic, gradual loss of distinction that has started outthe very moment the novel began, and that makes it so difficult forthe reader to follow the plot. The two last occurrences I am referringto are the description of Assunta’s dying father, and the extraordi-nary, Heracliteian identity of opposites that is Assunta’s and Ingravallo’sconfrontation.

Here is how the description of Assunta’s dying father unfolds inthe text: “Tutto tacque. Non si capiva s’era un vivo o s’era un morto:s’era un omo o una donna, cui . . . fosse spuntata quella barba:maschia barba, come soleva dire, anche delle barbe femminili, ilfondatore dell’impero quinquennale” (RRII 273). Assunta’s father,this emblem of spiritual decay, embodies to the highest degree thecollapse of all distinctions, even of the basic distinctions of life/death,male/female, as he lies forever fixed in his frozen, voiceless, enig-matic body. He is certainly not alone, especially in Pasticciaccio. On thecontrary, he is the supreme instance in the progressive distortions ofsexual identities that is typical of Pasticciaccio. From the cryptohomosexual Angeloni to the potentially lesbian Liliana and nieces;from the gyneceum of Santarella’s family, (“Di maschio, in casa su,non c’era che lui: a non computare la maschia boce del buce.” RRII143) imperiled by the behavior of a gramophone, a “meravigliosoordegno” capable of “tramu[tarsi] . . . con la più perfetta disinvoltura,da maschio in femmina e viceversa: per conturbanti alterazionid’impasto: dal duca di Mantova in Gilda, e da Rodolfo in Mimì” (RRII143); to the doubling of the same striking behavior in Virginia, whofor the Corpus Domini celebrations, as a scandalized don Corpirecalls, “nun aveva avuto er core de rifaje er verso de li canonici desan Giovanni, all’ufficio? Co la voce d’omo? Che solo er diavolopoteva avejela prestata, in quer momento” (RRII 126).

At the bottom of a Roman, 1927 Inferno, at the end of the game ofshattered mirrors that has been the novel so far, when Ingravallo/Pestalozzi eventually comes to face the true identity of the murderer,what he sees in the mirror of Assunta’s eyes is . . . himself. In Assunta’sfeminine eyes, in that powerful, black, sexual vertical line on herforehead, he inevitably sees himself—not just himself as Liliana’s

131M L N

murderer (by force of desire), but as the seductive young womanAssunta is. Assunta, c’est lui—whence, the need of repentance, to“ripentirsi.” At once damning Lucifer and salvific Madonna, Assuntais a perfect match for Ingravallo who, in turn, fulfills his role being atonce Beatrice reprimanding her pupil, inviting him to acknowledgehis sins, and Dante the Pilgrim eventually crashed by the awareness ofhis guilt (Purg. XXX). Unfortunately, in Gadda’s cosmogony therewill be no Lethe available to erase his own memory, wash the past sins,and appease his soul. The novel coherently ends at this precisejuncture—on an epiphany of a different sort from Proust’s, Joyce’s,and Woolf’s, but nonetheless a visione.

Besides and beyond being a novel of doublings, Pasticciaccio tellsthe story of an innermost “deformation” in the sense of a loss ofcontours, a loss of boundaries, gender boundaries, whose awarenessor “knowledge” is painfully reached at the end of Ingravallo’sjourney—quasi, almost. When the journey ends, the novelistic gameof mirrors collapses into the singularity of the ultimate “germineeuristico.” It is a reversal, a distortion of Dante’s divine vision that istragic only as far as the reader deems it such—after the compositionof the Pasticiaccio’s ending, Gadda becomes, in this respect, a readeramong other readers. It is important to stress that Gadda the authorhas engineered his ending, and the whole Pasticciaccio, as a totallysecular, impure comedia. All the doubles of the story (the detectives,their helpers, the thieves, their male lovers) as well as the spaces theylive (from the bourgeois interior of Merulana 219 to the surroundinglandscape of Rome and its vicinity) are part of a single comédiehumaine which races towards Ingravallo and Assunta’s showdown.This is, I believe, the reason why in Gadda’s aforementioned 1957letter to his publisher, the third and last of his tentative titles to themystery novel is, necessarily, “L’Assunta.”

Unlike the silence and erasure that Gadda, the author, oncebecome famous, will implore for himself and for what he had oncecryptically labeled as his “tabe,” the silence and erasure of Pasticciaccio’sfictional ending speaks the truth of all impermanence, and bows outof a prescriptive moral. Quasi refers not to the fact of the accom-plished epiphany, but rather to its intrinsic meaning: remorsefulrepentance or final acceptance? At the end of Pasticciaccio, do we facea spiritual death or a regenerative vision? Is it good? Is it bad? Is itAssunta or Lucifer? Shall one despair? Shall one rejoice? Is Pasticciacciothe blackest tragedy imaginable, or the most exhilarating comedywhere, dulcis in fundo, Ingravallo rises to the expectations which,

132 MANUELA MARCHESINI

aroused ever since his inception by the fact of his being a “philoso-pher” of sorts, had often been frankly frustrated by the delivery of theactual character? This is left to the responsibility of the reader todecide—but for sure, and Gadda would certainly agree on this, oneshould keep on reading, just to get there.

Gadda has conceived the Pasticciaccio as the epic of a modernpilgrim of knowledge who, having set out for his/her journey in agodless world, eventually comes to tell the story of an immemorialloss—the loss of a framework that for Ingravallo (and he’s certainlynot alone, even in the novel) amounts to becoming acquainted withthe perfectly innocent “sin” that proceeds from this statutory lack ofboundaries. I can hardly think of something more at odds with anyfascist discourse than this last point, where I see one of the matrices ofPasticciaccio.

We are left with the spectacle of this famous fold in Assunta’sfrowning forehead which, along with the many other cuts, wounds,knives, and orifices that are interspersed into the narration, hasprompted a series of Freudian and Lacanian readings focused on themore or less successful attempt of Ingravallo to separate from themother and achieve his masculinity (“dar lancia in Abisso” RRII 178)by force of his eventual acknowledgement of the feminine (as anearthly container). Perhaps Gadda is ahead of both Freud and Lacan,though, since his entire fictional enterprise has always been builtupon his keen awareness of psychological identity as a mere construc-tion—I being the most hideous of all pronouns. Ingravallo/Assunta’sepiphany, in spite of its negative, imperfect mode (no/quasi), sounlike Molly Bloom’s yes, Lily Briscoe’s final touch to her painting, orMarcel’s resurrection by force of memory from his own ashes,manages still to be such—the vision of a moralist of a kind, for whomethics, poetics and metaphysics coincide.

At the end of the novel, Ingravallo the Pilgrim is staged to attest theextent to which gender is not about given alternatives but instablerelationships. Ingravallo’s lack of articulation is in fact articulatingwhat derives from Gadda’s secular view: that in a godless world thereis no Evil—just evil. Thus, innocence and culpability, althoughperfectly discernible, are inextricably intertwined and prone toreverse into other. The black fold in Assunta’s forehead then, besidessymbolizing a negated feminine sex and a castrated male identity,could be just another sign of the fact that we have indeed reachedrock bottom hell, i.e. the closure to which all earlier wounds, cuts,and orifices have been rushing. I find some geological support to my

133M L N

argument in one of Gadda’s journalistic pieces, significantly titled Unromanzo giallo nella geologia, of 1934. It is a travel narrative relating theauthor’s journey in Abruzzi after the shocks of the 1915 earthquake,flanked by a local engineer as a guide, to survey the condition of theIncile dike system, an area that human labor had cleared of watersand given to cultivation. It is difficult to refrain from seeing in thesefew pages one of the blueprints for the journey Pestalozzi andIngravallo will embark upon, years later, in fiction—a further confir-mation, if needed, of the nature of Gadda’s laboratory, Gadda beingthe writer who during his whole career kept writing the same singlebook, unobservant of any compartmentalization. The words of thelocal engineer—“il paesaggio non è se non affiorante parvenza dellaragione e della causa geologica” (SGF I 147)—ring true not only ofthe Dantesque, Vergilian journey portrayed in the last three chaptersof Pasticciaccio, but of the whole novel.32

In this passage, a non-fictional version of so many fictional motivesof Pasticciaccio, one is tempted to glimpse the grammar of Gadda’sinventions: “lo spacco della fessura infernale” whence the infernalriver originates according to the ancient religion of the Marsi people,returns appropriately inscribed in Assunta’s forhead, whose body isappropriately fixed in Casal Bruciato as in a lake Cocytus of sorts; thecultivation of herbal filters returns into the oneiric Mantegazzidreamed by Pestalozzi and in Zamira Pacori’s witchlike specialtyremedies. Perhaps I am succumbing to the mirage-like quality of

32 Before the construction of the “pozza” of Incile which collects the waters fromhigher places, “il Fucino aveva un suo foro naturale, per quanto lunatico, nellaspaccatura di faglia che tuttavia corre lungo circa tra chilometri della riva ocidentale ,da Luco de’ Marsi all’Incile.

Si immagini una fenditura dritta, ostruita da franamenti e da massi, larga poco piu’o poco meno d’un metro, accessibile agli scalatori quanto un crepaccio di ghiacciaio;dal fondo buio e perduto (…) In alcun punto logorato dale acque precipiti, laspaccatura si apre in caverne e voragini d’aspetto carsico: ivi, paurosamente,l’inghiottitoio si beveva il supero d’acque del lago, agia come lo sfioratore d’un bacino.L’antica religione de’ Marsi pavento’ ivi l’inizio del fiume infernale, il Pitòneum, chedecedeva, per cateratte nere, all’Erebo popolato di ombre. Perche’ poi questo Pitòneopatisse, di tempo in tempo, le sue misteriose intasature, e’ problema ancora dibattuto:v’ha chi lo immagina discendere ad abissi piu’ profondi del mare.

Luco, alla sponda, sorge presso la citta’ disparita e la sacra selva di Angizia, cheVergilio ricorda: amiamo immaginare i sacerdoti della federazione vi convenissero neiriti propiziatori della dea, vigile sulla sua gente, e custode della sanita’ e del male alleoscure porte dell’Erebo. Il culto delle arti e dell’erbe medicamentali, le nenie degliincantatori di serpi rivivono nella magica anima del poeta che commemora nomi egenti del Fucino, e gli incanti del sopore vipereo: “Cantus somniferi et Marsis quaesitaein montibus herbae.” (SGF I 149)

134 MANUELA MARCHESINI

Pasticciaccio, to its ever proliferating relationships, but I wonderwhether Pasticciaccio’s ambition was, as for the Incile dikes, to be a“bianca opera che ha validità magica a vincere l’imperfetta costruzionedella natura” (148)—of a literary sort, of course. To go back to myopening remarks, this literature is concerned with the performativeenactment of a loss of articulation, a lack of a framework. One cannotdeny, as Gregory Bateson says to his daughter in one of his metalogues,that frameworks are very important things indeed—but the action ofcrossing their borders is perhaps even more so.33 In my view, suchcrossing and melting of borders is precisely the “solution” toPasticciaccio, its literary solution, of course. Francesco Ingravallo’scharacter has been orchestrated by Gadda in order to eventuallyconfront the morass of unstable relationships that he is; to finally see,recognize and almost condemn (or forgive) his masculine throughhis feminine self—their coexistence being a genuine ontological andliterary rendition of the “germine euristico ch’ “è la sintesi operatricedel reale” (VM 488). Francesco Ingravallo “umile cercatore di verità”ends up facing simultaneously the culprit and himself—herself as theinnocent culprit. Through Ingravallo/Assunta, Pasticciaccio stages atruth that goes well beyond the first skin of Gadda’s infamousmisogyny and chauvinism, a truth that wants to be grasped, articu-lated and appropriated by the reader—who is always, inevitably, its—not his—reader.

University of California, Berkeley

33 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972).