That Awful Mess on the via Merulana Read Free Page A

death of Signora Liliana. The reader feels that he has probed deeply enough already into the evil and horror of the world and that yet another, worse revelation of it would be more than the reader, the author, and the protagonist Ingravallo could bear. Though students of Gadda's work might not agree, one also suspects that his novels were born to be fragments, like certain imaginary ruins in Venetian painting, perfect parts of impossible wholes.
    Il pasticciaccio occupies in contemporary Italian literature the position that Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, and The Man without Qualities occupy in the literatures of their respective countries; but as these three works do not resemble one another, so Gadda's novel resembles none of them. Joyce and Gadda have this much in common: a fascination with language, and a revolutionary attitude towards the use of language in fiction. From the time of Manzoni on, the "problem of language" has been a central theme in all Italian discussion of the art of writing; the literary language that Manzoni fixed and made national was, for some authors, both a guide and a strait jacket. And, even in the last century, Verga and other novelists were working towards bringing the language of daily life into fictional descriptions of daily life. The dialect theater helped create the dialect novel.
    But Il pasticciaccio is not a dialect novel. Gadda uses the language of his characters to help portray them: his detective, Ingravallo, speaks a mixture of Roman and Molisano; the Countess Menegazzi lapses frequently into her native Venetian. The author himself, when writing from his own point of view, uses all of these, but also uses Neapolitan, Milanese, and occasional French, Latin, Greek, and Spanish expressions. At the same time he expoits all the levels of Italian, spoken and written: the contorted officialese of the bureaucracy, the high-flown euphemisms of the press, the colorful and imaginative spiel of the vendors in Rome's popular market in Piazza Vittorio. And at the same time, Gadda's vast erudition, in such disparate and recondite fields as philosophy, physics, psychology, and engineering, is frequently evident—all of this fused into a single, difficult, rich, yet flowing style.
    Grim as its story sometimes is, and bitter and bleak as the author's attitude towards the world may be, Il pasticciaccio is basically a satirical work. And the targets of Gadda's satire are scattered: at times his lighthearted whimsy touches some friend's foible or attacks the pretensions of some innocent public figure (like the poor President of the Italian Touring Club who campaigned for more road signs); at other times, with Swiftian saeva indignatio, Gadda lashes out at the Fascists, their followers and their dupes, the destroyers and despoilers of life.
    Another Gaddian contradiction: his ferocity is counterbalanced by his timidity, and often his attacks are so thoroughly veiled as to be incomprehensible to all but the author himself (even his victim remains unaware). This quality gives, at times, a curious allusiveness to his prose and lifts what would be a personal vendetta to a larger, more universal level.
    The reader will note that Gadda does not hesitate to accept as his own the verbal difficulties or spoonerisms of his humbler characters. The Romans are notoriously bad at getting names right (as any foreigner whose name contains a "w" will well know), so that detective Ingravallo may also be called Incravallo, Ingravalli, or Incravalli, and the hapless Countess Menegazzi's name is mispronounced so often that it becomes hard to remember how it really should be spelled. There is confusion even in place names, and one locality, mentioned often in the latter part of the book, is called, indifferently, Torraccio and Torracchio.
    The Romans are also fond of giving people titles. An accountant named Rossi is never called Signor Rossi, but always Ragioniere (accountant) Rossi. Thus any official, however minor, is