The order of the world in the chaos of things: the object in the prose of Carlo Emilio Gadda

The article discusses the motif of the object in the prose of the twentieth century Italian writer C.E. Gadda. Gadda’s attitude towards objects reflects his philosophy according to which the world of (physical and psychological) phenomena is a product of intersecting possibilities and creates a “convolution” of relations – impossible to describe in its entirety – that materializes as an object, event or person. Any understanding of the chaos of the world can only be merely partial and fragmentary. Objects and matter constitute a fundamental component of the narrative world presented by the writer. By using specific stylistic figures of speech (i.e. enumeration, list or catalogue) and distorting the standard language through neologisms, synonymy and calque, Gadda assigns the roles of full-fledged protagonists to the objects, being indispensable constituents of chaos. In itself, an attempt to describe chaos by applying such measures constitutes an attempt to find harmony and order