Creative Entanglements: Gadda and the Baroque PDF
Preview Creative Entanglements: Gadda and the Baroque
CREATIVE ENTANGLEMENTS This page intentionally left blank ROBERT S. DOMBROSKI Creative Entanglements: Gadda and the Baroque UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1999 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-802044905 © Printed on acid-free paper Toronto Italian Studies Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Dombroski, Robert S. Creative entanglements : Gadda and the baroque (Toronto Italian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0802044905 I. Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 1893-1973 - Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series. PQ4817.A33Z6351999 853'.9i2 C99-93O366-X This book has been published with the help of a grant from the City University of New York. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. In memory of Gian Paolo Biasin and Gregory Lucente, insigni gaddisti This page intentionally left blank Contents PREFACE IX 1 Gadda and the Baroque 3 2 Baroque Solitude: Disillusion and the Ruins of War 20 3 Creative Bodies: Theory and Practice of the Grotesque 43 4 A Baroque Ethics 74 5 A Baroque Mystery 96 APPENDIX: Gadda and Fascism 117 NOTES 135 REFERENCES 145 INDEX 149 This page intentionally left blank Preface In this book I have attempted to establish a definitive point of entry into the work of Italy's most original, intricate, and now most celebrated, contemporary Italian novelist, Carlo Emilio Gadda.1 My foremost con- cern is to show how his aesthetic principles generate forms embodying a destructive power designed to combat the outrages of modern exist- ence: namely, the conflictual life of risk and hazard generally associated with capitalist modernization. Among the many approaches to Gadda's world, the 'baroque' has seemed to me the most direct and useful. All of Gadda's texts incorporate strategies of deception and complexity; they combine elements of high and low culture in a way aimed at arousing the senses and provoking the mind, and the comic and lyrical drive behind them emerges from a melancholy oriented towards ruin and death. These are all essential features of the baroque.2 Gadda's baroque imagination also suggests a link with the main intel- lectual concerns of the present, as, for example, with the principles of cosmogenesis at the base of some of today's most challenging architec- tural theory. The cosmogenic world view, to quote Charles Jenks, 'is the idea that the universe is a single, unfolding self-organizing event, some- thing more like an animal than a machine, something radically intercon- nected and creative, an entity that jumps suddenly to higher levels of organization and delights us as it does so' (Jencks 1995: 125).3 According to this view, to understand the real as a system, we must be willing to abandon the Aristotelian-Christian conception of a rational external world in all of its mechanistic, modern variants in favour of a world that is in essence creative, unpredictable, and mysterious; a world not of lin- ear design, but of twists, folds, undulations, and fractured planes; a world in which the unexpected and multivalent has supplanted the pre-
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