SOURCE: "Gadda, Pasolini, and Experimentalism: Form or Ideology?" in From Verismo to Experimentalism: Essays on the Modern Italian Novel, edited by Sergio Pacifici, Indiana University Press, 1969, pp. 246-69.

In the following excerpt, Ragusa compares the works of Pasolini and Carlo Emilio Gadda and explores each writer's relationship with experimentalism.

The subject of this essay is threefold—threefold precisely in the sense which the title implies of simply juxtaposing the names of two writers and a concept rather than relating them more closely at a deeper level. To do full justice to the complex development of Carlo Emilio Gadda, to the equally complex but entirely different development of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and to the multiple aspects of linguistic and structural experimentation in Italian literature, three distinct and quite extensive studies would be required.

The connection between Gadda and Pasolini is not genetic. Although to the hasty reader the two...