SOURCE: de Lucca, Robert. “Revealed Truth and Acquired Knowledge: Considerations on Manzoni and Gadda.” Modern Language Notes 111, no. 1 (January 1996): 58-73.

In the following essay, de Lucca discusses the influence of nineteenth-century Italian author Alessandro Manzoni on Gadda and compares and contrasts their views on the function of literature.

The difficulties of which Carlo Emilio Gadda complains in writing Racconto italiano del novecento, and his recourse to the works of Alessandro Manzoni in an attempt to solve them, spring partly from the tension, that I wish to discuss at present in relation to Manzoni, Gadda feels in trying to translate an organic and exhaustive vision of the complexity of reality, born of philosophical and scientific studies, into a narrative structure.¹ Related to this is Gadda's feeling that the act of literary creation must be informed by an epistemological and subordinately ethical vision, which is, for him, its condition for...