Creative Entanglements: Gadda and the Baroque

162 Pages·1999·8.066 MB·English

by  Robert S Dombroski

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-