Dante and Gadda: Outsider Prophets

This paper compares Dante Alighieri’s and Carlo Emilio Gadda’s “missions of writing” as forms of isolated resistance realized through literature, and, at the same time, as ways of overcoming literary, linguistic and social resistance. My argument is that they share the outsider condition of the satirist and of the prophet: different figures who have in common a mission of all-encompassing truth. I will focus on the passages where the two writers directly or indirectly reflect upon the relationship between language and truth. These passages will be put into dialogue to form a single comparative discourse, which builds on some fundamental Dante’s echoes in Gadda’s texts. Dante’s task, with the Commedia, is to be a prophet for all humanity. In Paradiso XVII Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida predicts to the pilgrim both his future exile and his divine task of reporting his whole journey in the afterlife. Dante’s suffered exile is presented as the essential condition for him to accomplish his poetic/prophetic task: the breadth of its subject and its divine inspiration require him to detach from earthly matters and to be «a party onto himself», gaining the outsider’s freedom. This freedom is also, specifically, freedom of speech: Dante must use all the infinite variety of language, even «harsh» words, to find the most effective way to deliver a universal ethical message. Gadda, in his essay Tendo al mio fine and in his anti-Fascist pamphlet Eros e Priapo, assigns to himself the task of outsider “prophet”, looking exactly at Dante’s prophetic model: from his anguished isolation, and clearly thanks to that, he will oppose the predominance of “good” historical and literary subjects and the fraudulent power of Fascist rhetoric, in order to explore the deforming obscure «reasons of life» and drag up truth through a in that «mud» of lies. For this purpose, all kind of language is allowed and needed. The isolated freedom of Dante and Gadda is the necessary condition to ask of language and literature a «new task»: that of resisting fraud and revealing the all-encompassing truth about reality, by overcoming, for this purpose, literary, linguistic and social resistance.