ABSTRACT
The former option is suitably represented by the unaccomplished Fulmine, whereas the latter is best embodied by La cognizione del dolore — a novel in which a grotesque, hardened individual is set against the stiff stupidity of the world. Carlo Emilio Gadda early works are characterised by an ambiguous handling of laughter: on the one hand, his satire tends to reveal the author's perception of bourgeois society as the realm of stupidity. On the other, this attitude is sometimes contradicted by the attempt to establish a dialogue with the most trivial standards of middle-class humour. Gadda rather represents individual whims as a pathological reaction to an even more whimsical and unreasonable society, in which common sense has been replaced by standard nonsense. The moral education of the youth; the damages caused by abstraction in pedagogy are, in fact, a leitmotif of Gadda's fiction as well as of his autobiographical writings.
