That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [1]
A novel of Rome, written by a non-Roman. At the time he wrote That Awful Mess, Gadda knew Rome only from having lived there a few years in the 1930s, when he had worked as director of the Vatican's thermoelectric plant. He was in fact Milanese and closely identified with the bourgeoisie of his native city, whose values of concrete practicality, technical efficiency, and moral principle he saw being swept away as another Italy—conniving, raucous, and unscrupulous—prevailed. But even if his stories and his most autobiographical novel, Acquainted with Grief, are rooted in the society and dialect of Milan, it is That Awful Mess that brought him to the attention of a wider public, a novel written to a large extent in Roman dialect and where Rome is seen and comprehended with an almost physiological penetration, in its most infernal aspects, like a witches' sabbath.
Gadda was a man of contradictions. An electrical engineer, he tried to master his hypersensitive, anxious temperament with a rational, scientific mentality, but he simply exacerbated it instead; and in his writing he gave vent to his irascibility, his phobias, his fits of misanthropy, which in his everyday life he repressed behind the mask of ceremonious politeness belonging to a gentleman of another age.
Critics considered him a revolutionary in his use of language and narrative form, an expressionist, a follower of Joyce. He had this reputation from the beginning in the most exclusive literary circles, and it was renewed when the young members of the avant-garde in the 1960s acknowledged him as their master. But in his own literary taste, he was devoted to the classics and to tradition (his favorite author was the sage, calm Man-zoni), and his model in the art of the novel was Balzac. His own work displayed some of the fundamental gifts of nineteenth-century realism or naturalism in its portrayal of characters, settings, and situations through their physical substance, through material sensations as, for instance, the tasting of a glass of wine at the dinner with which the book opens.
Fiercely critical of the society of his time, animated by a visceral hatred of Mussolini (seen in his sarcastic description of the emphatic set of the Duce's jaw), Gadda shied away from any kind of radicalism in politics; he was a moderate man of order, respectful of the law, who looked back with nostalgia toward the sound administration of an earlier time; a good patriot, he had been a conscientious officer in the First World War, had fought, and had suffered. This was a fundamental experience for him, though he never got over his indignation at the harm done by incompetence, expediency, vel-leity. In That Awful Mess, which takes place in 1927, during the early years of Mussolini's dictatorship, Gadda does not confine himself to a facile caricature of Fascism: he conducts a minute, extensive analysis of the effects on the daily administration of justice caused by a failure to respect the separation of powers as envisioned by Montesquieu, to whom there is explicit reference.
This constant desire for concreteness, for verification, this appetite for reality are so strong in Gadda's writing that they create a kind of congestion, hypertension, blockage. The characters' voices, thoughts, and sensations, the dreams of their unconscious, are mingled with the author's omnipresence, his fits of impatience, his sarcasm, and the fine network of cultural references. As in the performance of a ventriloquist, all these voices coincide in a single speech, sometimes in the same sentence, with shifts of tone, modulation, falsetto. The structure of the novel is stretched out of shape from within by the excessive richness