Uno squarcio sulla tela dell’oggettività. Studi sul mito in Carlo Emilio Gadda

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]