More Saints In Strange Places

My recent visit to the home town of Carlo Emilio Gadda provided me with a chance to visit the churches that he would have known as a child and to test my theories, such as they are. I postulated that he had some interest - an intellectual interest - in the lives of certain of the saints, and that he uses some of these same saints in an interesting way in his art.

I make the point in my PhD (out next year, in all good libraries. Maybe.) that an artist often has to make his or her work live outside of the work. Just as Ovid uses the template of Roman myth to write his poetry, Gadda uses the characters of Catholicism to anchor his text in a cultural context that is, in one sense at least, fixed and unchanging. The extreme example for me is Martin Creed's Work 232 in which he appeals to the entirety of human experience as validation for his art.

Gadda's saints, however, are not quite fixed in place. They are like Latin, a dead language that is acquiring new words. About 10 years ago, when I studied in Rome, I had a friend whose job it was to translate Papal encyclicals and speeches into Latin from Polish. He told me that when the Pope referred to things and objects that did not exist in the Latin of the lexica, a decision had to be made over creating a new word and describing it. I remember telling me about a particularly troubling debate over the word 'pizza'. Similarly, the lives of the saints are open books, and much deconstruction, re-reading and psychoanalysis (and psychobabble) are therein performed.

Anyway. In one of the churches I hit the jackpot, with my Motherly Triumvirate in its full glory. St. Anthony of Padua, St. Joseph and St. Christopher all depicted in art in the church. These are the only 3 male saints commonly depicted with any sort of child, and this is a circumstance that interests me because of the use that Gadda makes of it. It seems to me that these very three are set up in opposition in his works to the childless. The patermaternal image of these saints is a wonderful way to suggest, to hint at the pain felt by characters whose lives are not blessed (yes, blessed) by the biological completeness they crave. When Gadda uses this supertext, he is moving us above and beyond our reading, and into a world beyond the novel wherein the characters dream with us.