The subject of my lecture is the contemporary novel as an encyclopedia, as a method of knowledge, and above all as a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of the world.
I could have chosen other novelists to exemplify this “ calling” so typical of the present century but I chose Gadda because his philosophy fits in very well with my theme, in that he views the world as a “system of systems” where each system conditions the others and is conditioned by them. 
In his brief pieces, as in each episode in one of Gadda’s novels, the least thing is seen as the center of a network of relationships that the writer cannot restrain himself from following, multiplying the details so that his descriptions and digressions become infinite.
Even before science had officially recognized that observation intervenes in some way to modify the phenomenon being observed, Gadda knew that “to know is to insert something into what is real, and hence to distort reality”.