Calvino

Carlo Emilio Gadda tried all his life to represent the world as a knot, a tangled skein of yarn; to represent it without in the least diminishing the inextricable complexity or, to put it better, the simultaneous presence of the most disparate elements that converge to determine every event. He was led to this vision of things by his intellectual training, his temperament as a writer, and his neuroses. As an engineer, Gadda was brought up on the culture of science, equipped with technical know-how and a pos- itive fervor for philosophy. The last of these, incidentally—his passion for philosophy—he kept a secret: it was only among the papers discovered after his death in 1973 that we learned of his rough draft for a philosophical system based on Spinoza and Leibniz. As a writer—thought of as the Italian equivalent to James Joyce—Gadda developed a style to match his complicated epistemology, in that it superimposes various levels of language, high and low, and uses the most varied vocabulary. As a neurotic, Gadda throws the whole of himself onto the page he is writing, with all his anxieties and obsessions, so that often the outline is lost while the details proliferate and fill up the whole picture.

For Musil, knowledge is the awareness of the incompatibility of two opposite polarities. One of these he calls exactitude—or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality—while the other he calls soul, or irrationality, human- ity, chaos. Everything he knows or thinks he deposits in an en- cyclopedic book that he tries to keep in the form of a novel, but its structure continually changes; it comes to pieces in his hands. The result is that not only does he never manage to finish the novel, but he never succeeds in deciding on its general outlines or how to contain the enormous mass of material within set limits.