Reading Gadda, 1. History measured «al lume del dopo»: aesthetic intentions in the new edition of the «Giornale di guerra e di prigionia»

Abstract

The contribution offers an analysis of the unpublished pages of Gadda’s Giornale di Guerra e di prigionia (now published in the new Adelphi edition). In addition to being an important reservoir of future gaddian writing, they show at the beginning the need of the aspiring writer to establish a relationship between life and expression. In barrack 15 in Celle, during the last months of his imprisonment in 1918, Gadda completed his apprenticeship driven by the desire to understand what to do with the war experience deposited in his Journal and established the need to overcome diary writing by looking at it «al lume del dopo». The desire for that autobiographical material (Vita notata) to be organized and ‘reworked’ into writing (Pensiero notato) indicates a direction of work. The prose of war, filtering the trauma of that experience, represents the distant outcome of that path intuited by Gadda as necessary for the first time in these pages of the Giornale in which, also if confusedly, he declares his autobiographical poetics.