Acquainted with Grief by Carlo Emilio Gadda

First published:La cognizione del dolore, 1938-1941, serial; 1963, book; 1970, expanded (English translation, 1969, expanded)

Type of work: Antistory

Time of work: 1925-1933

Locale: The mythical city of Pastrufazio in Maradagal, South America

Principal Characters:

• Gonzalo Pirobutirro De Eltino, the protagonist, an engineer and writer
• Senora Elisabetta Francois Pirobutirro, his mother
• Doctor Higueroa, their family physician

The Novel

Maradagal is a South American country based upon Carlo Emilio Gadda’s native Lombardy, specifically the Brianza region north of Milan. As Acquainted with Grief begins, Maradagal has recently ended a war with neighboring Parapagal, and both countries are experiencing modest economic recoveries. Gonzalo Pirobutirro de Eltino, a middle-aged engineer and writer,lives with his widowed seventy-three-year-old mother, Senora Pirobutirro, in their decaying villa outside the city of Pastrufazio. He has summoned the family doctor to the villa to have a checkup. Most of the first part of the novel is devoted to Doctor Higueroa’s thoughts about Gonzalo’s reputation in town as a stingy, temperamental misanthrope who is cruel to his ailing mother. This part also includes the physician’s conversations with the servant, Battistina, and with Gonzalo himself.

Gonzalo is tormented by what he imagines is his mother’s lack of affection for him; by her perpetual mourning for his brother, who was killed in the war with Parapagal; and by his late father’s having squandered most of the family’s money on their elaborate villa. Gonzalo believes that he suffered as a child because of his father’s excessive expenditures, and he continues to suffer by having to pay taxes on the estate. (All these elements of Gadda’s story are autobiographical.) Gonzalo is also disgruntled by his mother’s illusion that the family is still well-to-do and by her paternalistic attitude toward peasants. He suspects that she cares more for the servants than for him.

Acquainted with Grief was serialized in the Florentine literary review Letteratura between 1938 and 1941, but it was not published in book form until 1963 (with the inclusion of a fictitious dialogue between Gadda and his publisher about the “recovery” of the manuscript). The 1969 English translation and a 1970 Italian edition include two additional chapters. The first of these looks at Gonzalo’s efforts to write a novel, and the second offers a strong plot element. Gonzalo has refused the services of the Nistituo, a vigilante patrol hired by his neighbor, who fears thieves. On the night Gonzalo finally leaves home for good, the neighbor’s security men hear strange noises coming from the villa. They find Senora Pirobutirro critically wounded, stabbed by an intruder; she says that her son was not involved in the attack. Like Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957; That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, 1965), Acquainted with Grief is incomplete, ending without resolving the identity or motives of the attacker, though he may be an agent of the Nistituo.

The Characters

Acquainted with Grief is dominated by the lethargic sensibility of Gonzalo, caught in “the spreading shadows of neurosis.” He recognizes and disdains his neuroticism, but he is also repulsed by what passes for normality in his society, represented for him by his mother’s bourgeois values. Although Gonzalo is not the first-person narrator, the book is, in effect, his confession.

Gonzalo resents his parents for pursuing money, success, and prestige during his childhood while denying him attention and love. His neurosis centers on his ambivalent attitude toward his parents, and their country estate, for which he believes his life has been sacrificed. Gonzalo is tormented by not being first in his mother’s affections and, at the same time, he is frustrated by his need for maternal love. Partly as an attempt to reject his family ties and partly because he sees everyone as a rival for his mother’s attention, Gonzalo threatens and persecutes his mother. Since he both despises and desires his mother’s jewels, it is appropriate that they are stolen in the attack on Senora Pirobutirro. It is also fitting that one of Gonzalo’s last acts is to trample on a portrait of his father, an outburst against both the person and his property.

Gonzalo displays the jealousy and paranoia of a narcissist. As an aloof, ironic observer of the life around him, he becomes increasingly isolated. He is troubled by his view of a slovenly, incompetent world and by his repression of his anger at this world. His final tragedy is his awareness that love of no kind will ever touch him.

Like her son, Senora Pirobutirro is neurotic and narcissistic, though on a smaller scale. She claims to be self-sufficient, needing no one, including Gonzalo, but this attitude completely contradicts the reality around her. She fools herself into thinking that she possesses the economic and social status which she enjoyed when her husband was alive, for without such delusions, her life would be even emptier. Everything she does and stands for offends Gonzalo, especially her obsession with the memory of her dead son.

Critical Context

Acquainted with Grief received the Fomentor International Literary Prize and is considered by many to be Gadda’s masterpiece. As a portrait of suffering, it is a more human book than That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, and in it, Gadda takes even greater pleasure in linguistic gyrations. The novel has been called a major work of modernism, earning comparisons with the fiction of Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and William Faulkner, especially the latter’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). Burdened with maintaining a myth of family respectability, Gonzalo resembles Faulkner’s Jason Compson.

Acquainted with Grief encompasses two centuries of Italian literary traditions. Gadda’s Maradagal recalls not only his own Brianza but also that region as it is depicted in Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1840-1842; The Betrothed, 1951). Acquainted with Grief was embraced by the Italian avant-garde writers of the 1960’s as indicative of what they were attempting to achieve in their fiction, influencing the works of Nanni Balestrini, Angelo Guglielmi, Giorgio Manganelli, and Edoardo Sanguinetti. It inspired them through its use of language, its psychological insights, its fragmentation of reality, and its hostility toward contemporary society.

Bibliography

Adams, Robert Martin. “Carlo Emilio Gadda,” in After Joyce: Studies in Fiction After Ulysses, 1977.

Biasin, Gian-Paolo. “The Pen, the Mother,” in Literary Diseases: Theme and Metaphor in the Italian Novel, 1975.

Dombroski, Robert S. “Overcoming Oedipus: Self and Society in La cognizione del dolore,” in Modern Language Notes. XCIX (January, 1984), pp. 125-143.

Lucente, Gregory L. “System, Time, Writing, and Reading in Gadda’s La cognizione del dolore: The Impossibility of Saying ‘I,’” in Beautiful Fables: Self-consciousness in Italian Narrative from Manzoni to Calvino, 1986.

Pacifici, Sergio. “Carlo Emilio Gadda: The Experimental Novel,” in The Modern Italian Novel: From Pea to Moravia, 1979.