Thus the trauma of the trenches is transfigured in the great literature of the 1990s

Wound theory. It is the one that was employed by Edmund Wilson to read Hemingway’s work as a series of circles radiated by the bomb that hit him during the First World War. The release a few months later of the new edition of Journal of War and Prison of Gadda, of the finally rediscovered War from Céline’s manuscripts (both for Adelphi) and, earlier, the new critical guise of The unfinished stories by Tolkien (Bompiani) allows you to turn the same splinter in your hands, stuck in the heart of three young soldiers and future writers, located in different points of the same conflict, for which the quantum leap of horror experienced by an entire generation will converge then in decisive works for the literary ‘900, more or less close to the events themselves, with different outcomes yet converging more than one might think. it would seem theincipit banal than a joke – there was an Italian, a Frenchman and an Englishman… – and instead it is a matter of a point of no return, from which the gaze of the father of the noir definitive, of the rabid dog of “Journey to the end of the night”, of the creator of Middle-earth will be transformed forever.

“To him who has established and increased awareness of national life in our spirit, we ask the comfort of consent and work in an anguished hour of life, so that one of our ancient rights is not disregarded”. It is with a bitter grin that one reads the letter in which a university Gadda asked D’Annunzio to help him get accepted at the front. What he will then report in his newspaper will be anything but heroic and shining. “Shits: they are scattered, of all sizes, shapes, colours, of every quality and consistency, in the immediate surroundings of the camps: yellow, black, ash, dark, bronze: liquid, solid”. The hundreds of pages have the hypnotic strength of a now tight, now loose march, including lists, sketches of places and fellow soldiers. All already covered by the prose that would tell the cognitive and expressive maelstrom of contemporary man: “With the greed of a beast, with snake-like voluptuousness, my lips, my palate, goiter and stomach collected turnip gruel from the bowl” . The violence of the world massacre is more than the sum of the individual events, it is a climate that infects everything, which perhaps was already lurking under everything: “Pain brutalizes me and demeans me and empties my soul: outwardly I don’t know how to manifest it. I also experience it being with others, but the conversation goes on: if there’s something to smile about, I smile… I can’t write about it, but it’s too much; too much pain, the horror of the night and the loneliness of the soul”. He seems to tend the relay to Céline who years later takes his cue from “all the noise they wanted to make… that is, in short, the horror” that hammers his temples in the torn fields. The external chaos of war has an internal counterpart, the “storm noise that I carried with me”. All of Céline is already there, in that growl in contrast with the whole universe, from the sky full of mad clouds to the torrents soiled by discharges of diarrhoea. “I used my torture to get rid of it”.

Tolkien’s option will be different again. Every writer must first find his own region, and it will be precisely the trauma of the trenches that will give the young philologist’s secret vice for his imaginary “fairy tongues” a dramatic center from which much of his mythology will develop, starting with the fall of the elven city of Gondolin, on whose walls the tanks and machine guns of the Somme are pouring down: they only saw them then, and how ever will they see them until the Great End comes. Some were entirely of iron, with joints of such craftsmanship that they could slide like slow rivers of metal or coil around and over any obstacle that came before them; others, of bronze and copper, were endowed with hearts and spirits of flaming fire, and these annihilated anything in front of them with their dreadful puffs.” But the ultimate key to all three gazes is perhaps nestled in Céline’s own words, the yearning to grasp, express and perhaps thus save, in the chaos unleashed on the whole world and which engulfs individual faults and choices, the note for this should have been, and the whole range of options to tempt us, from Manzoni’s jumbles to blasphemous scatology to austere clarity of the epic: “Where I was I would have liked, if I really had to die, a music more mine, more alive to face that passage. It doesn’t change. It is still possible to kick the bucket, to exhaust poetry, poetry is all that comes first, all the slaughters, the tribulations, the tortures that precede the last strangulation. Then you have to be very short or very rich”.