«He tried throughout his life to represent the world as a tangle, or a tangle, or a ball, to represent it without attenuating its inextricable complexity, or better said the simultaneous presence of the most heterogeneous elements that contribute to determining every event».
Italo Calvino frames the path of Carlo Emilio Gadda. A happy definition even if it does not fully describe the richness and complexity of a “giant” of Italian literature that literary critic Angela Guiso gives an account of in the book “Gadda and the culture of the 20th century” that will be presented on Friday 20 September at 5 pm in the conference room of the State Archives. Speakers include, in addition to the author, the director of the Archives Enrico Trogu and the journalist Maria Paola Masala. Gadda is placed in the stormy 20th century, in the short century crossed by mourning and unspeakable barbarity but also, eternal contradiction, by extraordinary cultural and artistic impulses. The “Gran Lombardo” is a protagonist of 20th century culture. According to Angela Guiso, «he can be placed close to Alfred Kubin, Gottfried Benn, Fernando Pessoa and Friedrich Durrenmatt and find elements of consanguinity in other “hypersensitive” – Calvino docet – artists of the twentieth century». And again: «The investigation into Gadda's relationships with contemporary European culture reveals him as a prophet of aristocratic narratological solutions and a refined interpreter of psychoanalytic and philosophical statements alongside Mikhail Bachtin, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the commentators of the cultural loops of his time». He is within the twentieth century, within its multiple artistic and literary expressions. Never a stranger, indeed ready to enrich himself with the ideas he feels closest to his sensitivity.
The relationship with Sardinia
Carlo Emilio Gadda, a graduate in electrical engineering, faces his first work experience in Sardinia as an employee of an electrical company based in Cagliari and Portovesme. It is also a very important moment for his literary education. He spends a few months on the island, which is reflected in letters to family and friends, with digressions on the climate and the character of the Sardinians, and in technical writings, "another face of the Gaddian prism - Angela Guiso notes - no less luminous than others". In the book, with a wealth of references, there is also space for this period of the human and intellectual story of the author of "Pasticciaccio".
«The use of a specific language – explains the author – was already, obviously, available to the Engineer, who, with his first work experience, finally knew the fundamental step from theory to practice».