Zibaldone
Page 3
The prose of the Zibaldone—dense but clear, elegant but simple, and familiar as Italian prose never had been, and never would be again—is always taut, interrogative even when it is affirmative. The Zibaldone is a field of hidden tensions that the reader is urged and almost obliged to uncover and interpret: horizontal tensions, between contiguous thoughts, which appear to confront different problems but in fact respond to the same question; vertical tensions, between different fields, which share structures, themes, images, forms of thought; chronological tensions, evident if one follows a thought in its development through the years; and, finally, tensions between external and internal, that is, between the fragments of quoted texts and the way in which they are rewritten in Leopardi’s text. Often these tensions are manifested in apparent contradictions that Leopardi refuses to resolve, and which he uses as tools for pursuing continuous variations, even when the subject might seem closed once and for all. As an obvious comparison, we might think of the Essais of Montaigne, but we should remember that because Leopardi is situated at the end, and not the beginning, of the pathway of modernity he is permitted a radicalness of questions that finds a precise correspondence in a structure of thought that is much more discontinuous, dramatic, and problematic, giving up the free but completed course of the essai and entrusted for the most part to private writing: as though by now too much skepticism surrounded even the possibility of addressing a public in which Leopardi—sharing, without knowing it, the intuitions of Goethe’s Faust and prefiguring the analyses of Tocqueville—no longer had any faith (Z 4271, 4346–47, 4367, 4471).
Unlike the Essais, in short, the Zibaldone is not a work, but has, in a certain sense, become one and continues to become one as the cultural conditions that it foresaw come into existence. It is continuous and linear, but is not directed in any teleological sense: each thought stands on its own, it always begins again, with a slight indentation at the beginning of the first line, and nearly always concludes with a date. The typical form of the diary, then, but one that Leopardi bends to almost exclusively intellectual use, seldom if ever speaking directly about himself, except in a general perspective (as indeed does Henry Adams in his autobiography). The multifaceted and supple solution that he adopts, one that is perhaps unique, is a forerunner of so much fragmentary philosophical writing, with its intolerance of systematic philosophical forms, from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein, from Benjamin to Valéry to Simone Weil. One might think of the thousands of “etc.”s that are scattered through the text and force the coherence of the argument in the direction of the “vague” and the mystery of what is not said. The difference is that—in a further contradiction—Leopardi finds this form while constantly searching for the unity of the system, in which he is similar to Pascal, a thinker with whom he is profoundly in harmony in many other respects, or with the Novalis of the Allgemeine Brouillon, whom he did not know at all.
But perhaps the Zibaldone can best be defined as a hypertext, with the added dimension of time. It has already been said that Leopardi made use of a network of movable slips that function as points of intersection. Further, the single thoughts often refer to preceding ones, or in fact take off from these, like buds springing from the discourse, with the retrospective formula “For p.…” This system is reinforced, over the years, by continuous rereadings of the manuscript, which make use of, in certain phases, the draft of indexes, two partial ones going back to the early 1820s (not reproduced in this edition), and the last, the most imposing and nearly complete, realized in 1827 on the basis of slips of paper. Again the text is produced in a hermeneutic circuit of reading and writing, but this time it is not in the relationship between the quotation from someone else and the comment of the author but rather within the same subject-author, who coincides only in part with his past self, because he has been modified by the passage of time.
If one looks at the Naples manuscript (now available both in print and on CD-ROM), a contrast leaps to one’s eyes: the original page, which is usually very clean, with regular, easily legible handwriting, as if it were printed, has been altered by accretions of material that have accumulated between the lines and in the margins; the words take on almost fantastic shapes as they fill the available spaces, in handwriting that varies over time, as does the color of the ink and the form of the pen strokes: a slow crystallization of corrections, additions, clarifications, marked by time. And constant references ahead to later thoughts, not yet written at the moment the page was drafted: “See p.…” A printed edition can render this stratification only in a synchronous way, but readers should know—and remember as they read—that under the two-dimensional surface of the page lies a reticular structure buried in time. The Zibaldone, from this point of view, takes on the contours of an autobiography, or an intellectual archaeological dig, and represents in its own distinctive ways the modern—yet still Augustinian—temporal abyss explored by the great Romantic autobiographies, starting with Wordsworth.
The project is the progressive polarity of this text in continuous tension (like pleasure) between past and future. As long as the Zibaldone loses its original function, it tends to become also a laboratory for other works. The partial indexes of the early 1820s are useful for the draft of the first twenty Operette morali of 1824; in the last years many notes, of the aphoristic type, are preparatory sketches for the future book of Pensieri, or a revision of the youthful Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients (Z 4477). The great workshop for these projects is the index of 1827, to which Leopardi, who, in Bologna in 1826, had read Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (and perhaps also the Dictionnaire of Bayle), devoted himself, with the idea of reusing the limitless materials of the Zibaldone. Between 1827 and 1829 some notes are preceded by a title that refers to entries in the index or to the “separate slips not referred to in the 1827 Index”: “Moral etiquette,” “Humanity of the ancients,” “Social Machiavellianism,” “Manual of practical philosophy.” As for other works, only titles remain, in the files preserved in Naples: “Encyclopedic dictionary of literature,” “Encyclopedia of chitchat,” “Encyclopedia of useless knowledge and things that aren’t known, or Supplement to all encyclopedias.” A comparison with the virtual meta-encyclopedias that are available today would not be far-fetched, evoking a future scenario whose danger Leopardi, anticipating Flaubert, was aware of: the connection between the broadening of knowledge and its impoverishment. The heir of eighteenth-century encyclopedism, and since childhood considered “super-encyclopedic” (Z 273: “They thought I was a poet, rhetorician, physicist, politician, doctor, theologian, etc., in short, super-encyclopedic”), he understood that opening up thought to an infinite world would explode the linear orientation of discourse, the traditional categories of genre, and bring about the overcoming of typographical two-dimensionality, leading toward netlike structures in continuous evolution. “When a writer intends to produce a book, it is all the more necessary,” he wrote when the Zibaldone was near its end, “that he must know how to limit himself, that he take diligent care to circumscribe the argument, both in the minds of readers and especially in his own intention, and that he impose on himself an obligation not to exceed the terms established” (Z 4484, 6 April 1829).
But he was the first not to heed this reminder not to go beyond the limits. As early as 1819 he founded modern Italian poetry on the rush of thought beyond the hedge that “cuts off the view.” The journey of the Zibaldone was doomed to failure from the start: a failure that was, however, transformed, in the modern manner, into energy, making the failed work a continuous prelude, a book of the future.
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Giacomo Leopardi: A Short Biography
Giacomo Leopardi was born on 29 June 1798, the first son of Count Monaldo Leopardi and the Marchioness Adelaide Antici. A brother (Carlo) and a sister (Paolina) were born soon after, and the three children were to become close companions during their childhood and adolescence. Both parents were scions of established land-owning aristocratic families in the hill town of Recanati sou
thwest of Ancona, in what is now the Marche region; at the time it was one of the most conservative corners of the Papal States. Monaldo—a self-conscious survivor of the ancien regime who until his dying day dressed in black and wore the side-sword that was the symbol of his caste—had come into his inheritance early, but spent recklessly, made bad business decisions, and by the time of his marriage had mortgaged most of his property. In 1803, the day-to-day running of the estate was taken over by the iron-willed Adelaide, who kept up aristocratic appearances but maintained strict control of the rest of the family’s expenditure. These straitened circumstances persisted throughout Giacomo’s life, until all the debts were finally paid off, in 1842, five years after his death.
Giacomo, Carlo, and Paolina were educated together at home by private tutors, following courses of study with annual exams that were held first in the presence of the family, and later before a wider public. Monaldo, who had intellectual ambitions of his own, was the presiding genius of the schoolroom. His plan for Giacomo was to produce the perfect Catholic gentleman, enjoying all the privileges of a rentier existence, whose ambition ideally would be centered on the imposing Palazzo Leopardi and its rightful place in the society of Recanati, and whose intellectual world, shaped by Jesuit principles of instruction, would harness the forces of logic and reason (and their ordained language, Latin) to the service of the true faith. It was an education that encouraged both prodigious amounts of rote learning (especially in the early years) and, later, in the “philosophy class” of 1810–12, fine honing of the competitive skills of argument and rebuttal: acquired resources that would serve Leopardi magnificently in later years.
Already before he entered his teens, it was evident that the young Leopardi was exceptionally able. His hunger for reading and knowledge was fed by the rich library that his father had first begun to enlarge in the 1790s, and that, by the time Monaldo opened it (in principle) to the citizens of Recanati in 1812, had grown to more than ten thousand volumes, many of them acquired from the forced sale of convent libraries; it still exists today, virtually intact. It was here, with his father across the table, that Leopardi, having completed his formal education at the age of fourteen, first taught himself Greek, and subsequently Hebrew, began to translate and to produce volumes of philological commentary for publication (whether in limited scribal form or, from 1816, in printed editions), and embarked on autonomous volumes of erudition, a History of Astronomy in 1813, and the Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients (1815), which is both a compilation and a repository—for future memory—of classical myth and fable. Later, in the Zibaldone, he will recall these years as the happiest time of his life: “quietly occupied in my studies with nothing else to disturb me, and with the calm and certain hope of a happy future,” of a kind that can only occur “in a youth of that age, or at least, of that experience” (Z 76, L’s emphasis).
The idyll could not last. His emulation of his bookish father, his desire to please and impress him in every respect, soon risked becoming a competition between them, one that, psychologically, neither of them could win. His hunger for love, unassuaged by his mother’s rigid devotion to duty above affection (mercilessly portrayed in a celebrated passage of the Zibaldone: Z 353–56), was met by a father’s love no less conditional than it was sincere: there was no room in it for the son’s real autonomy. Yet that autonomy was asserting itself. The already respected philologist began to become a poet in his eighteenth year, and it was in poetry initially that he could tentatively explore, and to some extent exorcise, undefined but fearful feelings of unhappiness and despair (the theme of early death is first adumbrated in the canticle Appressamento della morte, composed in late 1816). In 1817 he confided his first, infrequent, thoughts to another “secret” document, which was to become the Zibaldone. At the end of that year, a visit to Recanati by his beautiful cousin Geltrude Cassi Lazzari, a prototype of imposing, although idealized, womanhood that would haunt his writings, provoked a surgical self-analysis in prose and the first, self-conscious, poem to be admitted years later to the canon of his published verse, under the title Il primo amore (“First Love”).
During these years of late adolescence and early adulthood, Giacomo made increasingly confident approaches to the outside world of literature as well as that of scholarship. Between June 1816 and November 1817, his name appeared seven times in the Milanese journal Lo Spettatore as the author of essays, translations, and a series of satirical poems. Its editor and publisher, A. F. Stella, who would provide Giacomo with some soul-destroying but necessary literary work in the 1820s as well as publishing his Operette morali (see below), was also the indirect link to the most important friendship Leopardi made in these years, that with the Piacenza man of letters Pietro Giordani, one of the most celebrated literati of the day, who unexpectedly responded to a round-robin letter Leopardi had sent on the occasion of the publication in the Spettatore of his translation of book II of the Aeneid. Deeply affected by Giordani’s critical appreciation of his work and by the older man’s generous empathy toward a cultural nobody twenty-five years his junior, Leopardi opened his heart in an intensely emotional epistolary exchange with Giordani starting in March 1817, in which he insisted on the provincialism of Recanati and what he himself called his “immoderate desire for glory,” but also gave worrying signs of his fragile health and growing unhappiness. Neither Giordani nor Stella could (or would) help with getting Leopardi’s major literary-theoretical essay Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry, written in early 1818, into print. The Discourse, triggered by a review of Byron’s Giaour (there are a number of references to it in the early pages of the Zibaldone, but it was only published in full in 1906), was an impassioned, but closely reasoned, demonstration that feeling was no invention of the moderns in general, or the Romantics in particular, but was manifest in classical literature, indeed was all the stronger and more authentic inasmuch as those feelings were close to nature, still linked to humanity’s origins, while the “feeling” of the Romantics was an artificial construct. The moderns should therefore value that poetry above all, and try to approximate to it as much as possible, for poetry understood in this classical way was the last redoubt of nature in the modern, civilized, scientific world. The poetry of the ancients was in the fullest sense a poetry “of the heart,” unlike the sentimentalism of the Romantics, which was affected, narcissistic, and exhibitionist, the poetry of a heart worn on the sleeve. The Discorso stands out as a declaration of faith in poetry, a defense of poetry, to which, although his ideas will change radically over the years, Leopardi will remain loyal. It ended with a rousing call to Leopardi’s peers, his generation of “young Italians,” offering himself as a spokesman in defense of the national culture, an ambition that he would soon put into action with the publication in Rome (1819, but with the date “1818”) of the two poems that were to become famous, or, among conservatives, infamous, as the “patriotic poems,” All’Italia (“To Italy”) and Sopra il monumento di Dante che si preparava a Firenze (“On the Monument to Dante Being Erected in Florence”).
In June 1819 Leopardi officially came of age, although because of his precarious health the primogeniture had already been passed to Carlo. It was a time of reckoning, more severe even than the reckoning Leopardi had been making with himself for years, in his head and on paper. In July, Giacomo and Carlo planned an unlikely escape from home, involving falsely obtained passports and an intermediary who proved unreliable. With his past mastery in emotional blackmail, Monaldo put the passports in a drawer and told Giacomo he was free to take his whenever he wanted. The father’s disapproval, fueled by Giacomo’s unsuitable friendship, as Monaldo saw it, with the liberal Giordani (Giordani had stayed in Recanati in September 1818, and had not allayed Monaldo’s suspicions) and by unsuitable poems (never published), one on a dying woman, another on a woman murdered with her aborted child by her abuser with the assistance of a surgeon, not to mention the published political ones, now loomed over the household, and over Gia
como in particular. During these months the crisis was coming to a head for other reasons too, most important the young man’s rapidly deteriorating health, a condition of prolonged near-blindness, and the constant pain and discomfort caused by his worsening physical deformity: a hunchback had formed in his teens, accompanied by deterioration of the spine and a host of other maladies that may or may not have been related, brought upon himself, as Leopardi and his family believed, by excessive devotion to study. In the summer of 1819, the cruel ineluctability of his condition, the feelings of guilt that it aroused, the sense of isolation that the correspondence and friendship with Giordani had both assuaged and exacerbated, the failure of his work to receive the unstinting praise that he had hoped for and at some level expected, the retrospective horror of “seven years of mad and desperate study” of which he had written to Giordani in March 1818, the grim uncertainty about what the future might hold, all combined to plunge Leopardi into one of the blackest of the more or less extended episodes of melancholia from which he suffered throughout his life.
Introspection now became Leopardi’s dominant mode, tangibly so for the next five years. Continuing the prison model of his childhood, he did not leave Recanati, he barely left the house, apart from a long-awaited six-month stay in Rome, as the guest of his uncle Carlo Antici over the winter and early spring of 1822–23. It was an immensely productive period. Between 1819 and the end of 1823, at an accelerating pace from the second half of 1820 on, and with the exception of the visit to Rome, Leopardi patiently filled his notebook on an almost daily basis: four-fifths of the Zibaldone’s 4,526 pages would have been written by the time he began work on the Operette morali in January 1824. This is an introspectiveness that has the curious property of looking outward, or, to avoid the senseless paradox, it is the concentrated effort of a mind that looks to the outside to examine itself and examines itself in order to measure what is without. Concentrated, inward-looking, patiently accumulating.