SOURCE: Lucente, Gregory L. “System, Time, Writing, and Reading in Gadda's La cognizione del dolore.” In Beautiful Fables: Self-consciousness in Italian Narrative from Manzoni to Calvino, pp. 222-45. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

In the following essay, Lucente develops a complex argument on the nature of self-reflexivity in discussing La cognizione del dolore.

The relationship between language and other systems of thought and praxis, scientific as well as philosophical ones, occupied Carlo Emilio Gadda's concerns from his early studies on. These studies included the work he did for his laurea in electrical engineering (as well as for his subsequent professional experience first in Italy and then in Argentina) and his readings on the topic of his unfinished thesis for a second laurea, which was to have treated the philosophy of Leibniz. Gadda's interest in systems of order (of predictability and/or closure) and disorder (of uncertainty and...