| dc.description.abstract | To establish the terms within which the relationship between the myth and Carlo
Emilio Gadda develops is a complex operation, both because it is in itself difficult to
disentangle oneself from the writer's innumerable ‘messes’, and because, considering
the positivistic and rationalistic nature of the Engineer, it would seem obvious to affirm
that the author's thought is to be considered essentially 'anti-mythical'. However,
observing the development of his 'philosophizing by narrating' starting with the
Giornale di guerra e di prigionia (1915-1919) and continuing with the Racconto
italiano di ignoto del Novecento (1924-1925), the Meditazione milanese (1928-1929)
and the writings gravitating around Eros and Priapo (1944-1945), we will be able to
identify in the myth not only the object of an almost continuous and uninterrupted
dialogue, but also an inescapable presence at the base of the development of every
gnoseological process that involves the human being.
Even if in the literary production of the writer the myth continues to be prey to a
demystifying desecration - in line, moreover, with the framework of the twentieth
century - it is undeniable that it reveals a deeply more complex nature: in the wake of
Platone, Gadda has always tried to assert the supremacy of logos over mythos, so that
reality could be somehow controlled and ordered by keeping the chaotic irruption of
'monsters' at bay, but then he ended up admitting the need for a 'compromise', justified
by the complementarity of the two components, since in the same measure vital afflatus
of every human being. In this regard, we find it extraordinarily significant that the task
of affirming this consideration at the end of this long 'meditative path' on the myth is
given to the Gaddus most famous alter ego, that is, the commissioner Ingravallo,
protagonist of Pasticciaccio (1957), who, although professing to be a rationalist since
the beginning of the novel, confronting himself daily with a magical-pagan
anthropological reality, will be forced to admit how the myth represents an autonomous
cognitive path to access the understanding of reality. [edited by Author] | it_IT |
