Strumenti critici | 2023 | N. 163

The article aims to provide an overview of issues preliminary to the study of Carlo Emilio Gadda, which was radically changed, between 1974 and the 1980s- 1990s, by the emergence of decisive posthumous works and overall philological rearrangements, and it looks into Gadda’s vast and controversial critical fortune. The extremely fast contemporaneity suggests the need to adopt a flexible, plural, and “multipliedµ critical way of looking at Gadda’s work, refraining from any form of rigidification of methods and theories. All of this under the signs of plurality and multiplicity, which were always invoked by Gadda in his unstable and great work of narrator and essayist.

In light of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s theoretical observations on reality as a polarity of ever-changing elements of which time can be considered a “semblanceµ, the article dwells on some aspects and images of temporality in Gadda’s narrative, examining some of the related thematical implications and semantic inflections.

Reconstructing the Milanese context in which Carlo Emilio Gadda and his younger brother Enrico matured their interventionism, the article provides an account of how the two brothers lived the months between August 1914 and June 1915. By offering new insights into the already available documentation and by taking into account some unpublished materials kept in the Gadda archives of Florence and Villafranca di Verona, the article analyses Carlo Emilio’s disposition towards war, showing how his vision deviated from other currents of interventionism.

The article provides an overview of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s personal library, investigating its development over time and its inner articulation. The books which were property of Gadda are now kept in four different archives (Rome, Villafranca di Verona, Florence, and Milan). On the basis of manuscript markings and of other elements, the article reflects on when Gadda might have acquired and read some of the books, also establishing new connections between the books and Gadda’s studies/work experiences. The article concludes that Gadda had a relation of «respectful distance» with the books he owned, with only some of them being considerably annotated and consumed. The article is concluded by a list which details 111 title of books which are known to have been part of Gadda’s collection until 1971 and yet are now missing.

The article explores landscape representations in Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Meditazione milanese (1928; published posthumously in 1974). Through an in-depth textual analysis focusing on discursive and rhetorical aspects of Gadda’s descriptions of landscapes, the article sheds light on the role of landscape in Meditazione, as well as on the effects that landscape representations have on Gadda’s essayistic style on a more general level. The analysis shows how the combination of lyricism, narration and essayistic style that is typical of Meditazione does not undermine its argumentative incisiveness, but rather enhances it.