Dante in the Hands of a Modernist Glutton. Notes on C.E. Gadda’s Narrative Deformations of the Comedy Mathijs Duyck Of all Italian modernist writers, Carlo Emilio Gadda is without doubt the one who most painstakingly dialogues with, and radically deforms, canonical models of Italian literature.1 In his writings, be they fictional or non-fictional, he skillfully blends centuries of Italian literature and arts (and the most savory bits of European culture) into a broth, a brodaglia, which he then uses as a basis for his own innovative haute cuisine.2 In this paper, I would like to reflect on one of the main ingredients preferred by the voracious author, Dante’s Comedy, and its important function in the creation of the peculiar texture and flavor of Gadda’s works. The inter-textual connections between Gadda and Dante have hitherto mainly been examined within the boundaries of the traditional critical frame of “plurilinguism” (plurilinguismo) shaped by Gianfranco Contini, which has dominated Gadda studies from the 1940s to the end of the century. This perspective situates both authors on the chronological extremities of a “plurilinguistic line” that runs through Italian literary history and thus develops an alternative tradition with regard to Petrarch’s “monolinguism.”3 The prevailing [End Page 353] interest in the formal and stylistic qualities of the prose, inherent in this approach, has brought to the surface an enormous quantity of Dantesque nutrients in Gadda’s broth, certainly not limited to those texts employing archaic “Tuscanizing” dialects (such as Eros e Priapo or the Primo libro delle favole), as is shown by the long lists of luoghi danteschi established by scholars such as Scorrano and Bertolini.4 However, the focus on language and style does not fully cover this entangled inter-textual “muddle” (gnommero), to put it in Gadda’s own terms. Since the 1990s, a growing insight in the author’s laboratory of notes, manuscripts, and unpublished works has fostered scholarly interest in Gadda as narrator, and in particular in the relation between his research on narrative, his interaction with precedent models of storytelling, and his own narrative experiments.5 This “narrative turn,” as one could describe it, re-frames the relations between the modernist author and the literary tradition and leads to ask what specific function Dante’s masterpiece has in Gadda’s reflection on storytelling. In the following pages, I aim to demonstrate how Gadda’s readings of Dante can help to understand the intricate connections between his early theoretic texts and experimental narratives such as Il castello di Udine and La cognizione del dolore. It is no exaggeration to state that the posthumous publication of two unfinished works, written in the 1920s and brought to light in the final decades of the 20th century, has led to a revolutionary revision of the interpretive frames applied to Gadda’s writings. On the one hand, the Meditazione Milanese (1928), a philosophical treatise sui generis, offers an invaluable insight into Gadda’s symbiotic perspective on gnoseology, metaphysics and ethics, which constitutes the basis for the construction of his fictional world(s) and his way of writing and storytelling. On the other hand, one finds the Racconto italiano di ignoto del Novecento (1924–25), Gadda’s first big novel project, which progressively transforms into a reflection on narrative, also referred to as the Cahier d’études, and which will be the starting point of my discussion. The Cahier heavily draws on Aristotle’s Poetics, and in particular on the distinction between epic poetry and tragedy, on which Gadda models his own [End Page 354] distinction between two types of narrative discourse, i.e. the “direct play” of the author (or gioco ‘ab exteriore’) and the “indirect play” (also gioco ‘ab interiore’). This opposition is basically described as a choice between different kinds of poetic expression, or, better, different ways of transmitting the “poeticized substance” (materia poetizzata) to the reader (474).6 Although the term “lyricism” (lirismo), with which Gadda continually refers to this poetic expression, may sound misleading, the essential criterion of distinction between these types, as in Aristotle, is the mode of focalization: whereas in the first case the discourse is directly enunciated by...