Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Professional Alchemy, or How to Make Bread from Air and Literature from Science

Abstract

This article examines writings by Carlo Emilio Gadda dedicated to industrial technologies used to produce fertilizers from atmospheric nitrogen. Although these essays, along with other writings of the 1930s explaining scientific concepts to a popular audience, have been essential to recent reconsiderations of Gadda’s affective and intellectual relationship to fascism, scholars have neglected the fundamental importance in Gadda’s thought of the technologies themselves. These industrial processes — and the call for their invention — focalize a critical intellectual current of the nineteenth century: a new awareness of scarcity and related anxieties about population growth. Engaging with work by Michel Foucault and Mitchell Dean, I note the emphasis on labour that follows from this concern with scarcity and ‘overpopulation’. What results is a cruel riddle of governmentality: labour is the antidote to the scarcity engendered by overpopulation; but the reproduction of labouring bodies results in further overpopulation, and thus further scarcity. The solution to this riddle — vital to the development of fascism — is the promise offered by synthetic fertilizers: that of nourishing labourers with thin air. This article proposes that Gadda uses these technologies as a philosopher’s stone, catalysing another alchemical process: that of his own professional transformation from engineer to writer.