Farewell to the essayist

Walter Pedullà, the critic seeker of contradictions

Born in Siderno, Calabria, on 10 October 1930

27 December 2024

Walter Pedullà, il critico cercatore di contraddizioni

3' min read

The name of Walter Pedullà, who was born in Siderno, Calabria, on 10 October 1930 and passed away last night in Rome, remains forever linked to that of a certain twentieth century that probably never ended and that he, for his part, never tired of recounting, deploying, as he was wont to do, all the tools that literature can and must draw on when it sets out to interpret.

In him, in his books, in his work as a cultural organiser in his capacity as a university lecturer, as a militant critic, as a journalist and as an intellectual in the service of the community (up to his chairmanship of RAI in the early 1990s), there has always been a profound sharing between worldview and critical scheme, as if the need to tell one's story that men manifest, the need to give order to something that is born in the form of magma, sought its own law to become shared matter.

This is the lesson that Walter Pedullà has left us at the end of a life spent on culture, which began in his distant Calabrian origins, and which only a couple of years ago he himself wished to narrate in the form of an intellectual autobiography in Pallone di stoffa (2021).

His has been a magisterium of life before being a method of reading, begun in the shadow of another great 20th century master, Giacomo Debenedetti, and carried on consistently, without distractions or second thoughts, testifying to a long-standing loyalty to the principles that are part of his boundless curiosity for knowledge and that have taken on consistency in the many books with which his career as an essayist is studded, from LLiterature of well-being (1968) to Basedow's disease or the avant-garde (1975), from Myths. Finzioni e buone maniere di fino millennio (1983) to the Novecento segreto di Giacomo Debenedetti (2004), up to the more recent Giro di vita (2010) and Il mondo visto da sotto (2016), just to name a few.

The names that chase each other in his critical incursions are those of Svevo, Tozzi, Gadda, Pagliarani, Malerba, D'Arrigo, Sciascia, as well as the never forgotten countrymen Alvaro, La Cava and Strati. And this helps to understand that there is a twentieth century crossed in Pedullà's manner, inaugurated under the banner of the rebellious avant-gardes, of movements in turmoil, of magazines, daughters of a youthful restlessness that marked the century without ever abandoning it, indeed turning any element of weakness into a strong point, starting with the "weapons of comedy", as the title of a book that opened the new millennium unequivocally indicated.

There is something that haunts Walter Pedullà's writing on every page: that vocation to unearth contradictions without making a drama out of them, to seek keys to interpretation where the decades we have left behind seem to stop and take a breath, to pause in a phase of fatigue, at the centre of revisitations that smack of reflux. All this because the 20th century is and remains an elusive, contradictory territory, permanently refractory to any attempt at classification or labelling.

And precisely by virtue of this fleetingness, which contains infinite dangers but projects its fascination everywhere, Walter Pedullà's books aim to find a way out of the great laboratory of ideas and forms that has been the previous hundred years, they spin and parade balls around the most decisive critical questions (language and anti-language, novel and anti-romance, Alexandrian style and engagement, centre and periphery), at times threading their way through a horizon that is apparently arranged according to the image of a geometric chessboard and instead manifests a Gaddian gnommero nature.

This, too, remains for us: the brilliance of style, the willingness to transpose in an even eccentric tone the essential junctures of a very uneven literature, the pursuit of the dizziness and the somersaults of an era that has even gone beyond the threshold of postmodernism, elevating machines to myths and then destroying their ethical and aesthetic value.

Pedullà's Novecento is an experience that bursts, overturns, desecrates, mystifies, provokes, demolishes and reconstructs.

No century has generated such an extensive number of antinomies, has swallowed up in the short space of a few years what the literati of another era would have chewed up and digested with who knows how much slowness. "Alfonso Nitti" - we read in one of the many quotations - "entered a verist novel at a very young age and came out suicidal from a text that in the meantime had become as modern a novel as one by Joyce and Proust can be".

Such a clear definition is by no means synonymous with instability; if anything, it reproduces the same dizziness we feel when we lean out from the terrace of a skyscraper.