Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana.(That Awful Mess on Via Merulana). The “mess” or “muddle” of words, images and metaphors: the mimesis of life also provides traces and signs of the changing of things in death and dreaming
Contents
The theory of “gnommero” or “gliuommero”, a word, which in dialect means skein: tangle, mess, knot, muddle:
- Of investigation.
- Of surnames
- Menegazzi, Valdarena;
- Mussolini’s nick-names: “Deadhead (with a cocked hat/with plumes)”, ‘Fierce-face,’ Buce, Maledito Merdonio consule (pestilent dictator Maledito Merdonio), Omnivisibile fetente salutato salvatore d’Italia (Omnivisible, fetid, saluted Saviour of Italy) (vs. “The invisible Omnipresent” here means Satan, though elsewhere God), Big Jowl” etc, etc. (The Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies quotes forty two other aliases).
- Two tremendous mimetic, comic issues:
- Signora Pettacchioni
- The telephone-calls muddle
- The muddle of Liliana’s body: a bloodcurdling tragic issue, with some jarring juxtapositions (the “macaronis”)
- The chaos of the ego: “Everyone of us appears to me as a tangle, or knot, or twine of physical and metaphysical connections [...] the events which can be registered from an external biography or from a more wide-ranging history of the circumstantial background, horribly subvert, and sometimes totally destroy, the noble constellations of internal linkages, which owe their existence to the native industriousness of the spirit [...]”. From C. E. Gadda, “Come lavoro”, 1946, now in Id, I viaggi, la morte.
- A terrible muddle: Elvira Pacori and the muddle of arts and duties
- The muddle of the hen’s rope
- The stolen jewels
- Pestalozzi’s dream
Introduction, comment and reading with four voices. Liceo E. Q. Visconti, Rome, 2001.
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