That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [0]
by Carlo Emilio Gadda
translated by William Weaver
introduction by Italo Calvino
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Copyright © 1957,1982, 1991,1997 by Garzanti Editore s.p.a. Copyright © 1999, 2000 by Garzanti Libri s.p.a.
English translation copyright © 1965 by George Braziller Publishers. Reproduced by permission of George Braziller, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 1984 by Italo Calvino
All rights reserved.
Published in Italian as Querpasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 1893-1973. [Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. English]
That awful mess on the Via Merulana / by Carlo Emilio Gadda ; introduction by Italo Calvino ; translated by William Weaver, p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)
INTRODUCTION
TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD
THAT AWFUL MESS ON THE VIA MERULANA
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INTRODUCTION
by Italo Calvino
IN 1946, when he started That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, Carlo Emilio Gadda intended to write not only a murder novel, but a philosophical novel as well. The murder story was inspired by a crime that had recently been committed in Rome. The philosophical inquiry was based on a concept announced at the novel's very outset: nothing can ever be explained if we confine ourselves to seeking one cause for every effect. Every effect is determined by multiple causes, each of which has still other, numerous causes behind it. Every event, a crime for example, is like a vortex where various streams converge, each moved by heterogeneous impulses, none of which can be overlooked in the search for the truth.
A view of the world as a "system of systems" had been expounded in a notebook found among Gadda's papers and published after his death. Using his favorite philosophers, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant, as a starting point, the writer had constructed a "discourse on method." Every element of a system contains within it another system; each individual system in turn is linked to a genealogy of systems. A change in any particular element results in a breakdown of the whole.
What matters most is how this philosophy of knowledge is reflected in Gadda's style, in his language, which is a thick amalgam of folk expressions and learned speech, of interior monologue and artistic prose, of various dialects and literary quotations. The same philosophy is also apparent in the narrative, where the slightest details are enlarged until they occupy the entire frame, concealing or effacing the overall design. And so it happens in this novel, where the murder story, little by little, is forgotten. We seem about to discover the murderer's identity and motive when the description of a defecating hen demands our attention more strongly than the solution of the mystery.
The seething cauldron of life, the infinite stratification of reality, the inextricable tangle of knowledge are what Gadda wants to depict. When this concept of universal complication, reflected in the slightest object or event, has reached its ultimate paroxysm, it seems as if the novel is destined to remain unfinished, as if it could continue infinitely, creating new vortices within each episode. Gadda's point is the superabundance, the congestion, of these pages, through which a single complex object—the city of Rome—assumes a variegated form, becomes organism and symbol.
For, again, this book is not meant to be only a detective novel or a philosophical novel, but also a novel about Rome. The Eternal City is the true protagonist of the book, with its social classes ranging from the middle bourgeoisie to the underworld, the voices of its various dialects surfacing in the melting pot, its extroversion and its murkiest unconscious. In this Rome, the present blends with the mythical past, Hermes and Circe are invoked in connection with the most plebeian vicissitudes, and characters who are domestic servants or petty thieves bear the names of Aeneas, Diomedes, Ascanius, Camilla,