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Language and Style
For Leopardi, language is everything. The Zibaldone is an extraordinary linguistic and stylistic edifice, the forge of modern Italian prose, but also a laboratory of theoretical and practical analysis of the languages that he knew well: Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish (with an occasional late incursion into English). His is a true and proper obsession that we can usefully trace back to its decidedly philosophical and anti-idealist orientation. Like Giambattista Vico, Leopardi is interested in the history of mankind and in the institutions in which it has taken form; and he is interested in the primal brute matter preexisting before this history, the silva, the original forest in which man, as Vico states at the beginning of the New Science, found refuge from the condition of barbarity: this is language itself (Z 1268, 1276–83). Nothing human exists outside of language; and everything, as Leopardi reaffirms—ideas, literature, style, national history—is incarnated in and by language. “Ideas are enclosed and as if bound up in words, like gems in rings, in fact they are incarnated like the soul in the body” (Z 2584, see also 1657). This conception is clearly inspired by the thought of Condillac and the idéologues, mediated by Soave and Sulzer; but Leopardi’s striking metaphor takes on unexpected weight when used by an intellectual of Christian formation.
Leopardi’s strong sense of history puts him in the same family as the Rousseau of the Essai sur l’origine des langues (which, however, he did not know); but Leopardi demonstrates a greater analytical concreteness that he picked up from the methodology of natural history (Buffon, read by the poet at an early age) and from his familiarity with antiquarians and interpreters of ancient inscriptions. Words are classical relics, archaeological ruins, fossilized bones of extinct animals. Leopardi hypothesizes the primordial linguistic beginnings of history, forms of expression not yet articulated (Z 1102), then gradually the creation of the alphabet, the distinction between letters, the division into individual languages from a single origin; and above all, the infinite process of differentiation by means of continual linguistic variations whose traces we find in those museums of the natural history of languages that are his beloved historical dictionaries: Du Cange (Greek and Latin), Forcellini (Latin), Scapula (Greek), Alberti (French), and naturally the Crusca (Italian). And this wide spectrum of philological riches does not even take into account Leopardi’s interest in Hebrew, or—and his was among the first in Italy—in languages such as Sanskrit and Chinese.
By virtue of his etymological and morphological competence, and his reconstruction of entire families of languages, Leopardi took an important step beyond the fantastical etymologies proposed by Vico; and in fact, he anticipates methodologies and discoveries from the yet-to-be-founded discipline of historical linguistics. But as was also the case with Vico, Leopardi’s analyses sought answers to questions that were more general and philosophical in nature. Languages develop by distancing themselves from nature along a trajectory of corruption that parallels civilization’s growth in rationality, avers Leopardi (Z 1459, 2112–14). At their origins, languages are “naturally and blithely irregular” (Z 978), and their distinctive characteristics are freedom, individuality, the infinite richness of a few but powerful lexical roots, indefiniteness, and poeticity. Then, pronunciation and graphic systems gradually and inevitably move to unify them so that they become artificial systems, codified by lexicographers; and as they gain in precision, they lose all contact with that natural, oral, and maternal origin which alone can confer efficacy, freshness, and energy to a language (Z 1247–48).
Leopardi recuperates the anthropological lesson of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia while also anticipating the tension between the two polarities of language that Ferdinand De Saussure will call parole and langue. He then applies these to a concrete schema that is at once historical and metaphysical-theological: from the ancient to the modern, from the extreme poetic freedom of ancient Greek and Hebrew to the most geometrical of languages, written and modern par excellence, French. It is a complex scheme, and in no way simplistic: Leopardi does not take a position in favor of either of these two dimensions, but rather demonstrates their interaction (see, for example, his thoughts concerning the possibility of universal languages; and Z 1028 for a discussion of English). His reflection is oriented above all toward the present and the future, and asks to be understood as a cultural politics (see his proposal for a universal European dictionary, Z 1213–29).
After centuries of debate about “la questione della lingua” (the language question)—from Dante to Bembo and Speroni, to Monti and Perticari, all names cited frequently in the Zibaldone, up to Manzoni (interestingly, never named), and anticipating Graziadio Ascoli—Leopardi proposes, along the model of the Greeks (Z 2829–31), to graft modernity onto the trunk of tradition. Many of the metaphors he uses are borrowed from the vegetable kingdom; language is like a plant that must be cultivated but not denatured, it must grow by setting down its roots. Language should not be locked into the stylistic norms of the Trecento (fourteenth century), nor to the strict use of dictionaries, as the purists would have it; but neither should it imitate the artificiality of French. Above all, a language should not be composed primarily of termini—terms that signify only as nomenclature, and which narrowly define an object—but, rather, should flourish as a living organism, comprised of parole, words (Leopardi picks up here and revalorizes the distinction from Beccaria, Z 109–10; 1234–36): parole are capable of gathering in “accessory ideas,” that is to say, the multiple and dynamic interconnections of reality itself.
There is no contradiction, therefore, between Leopardi’s appreciation of the precision of the lexicon of scientific writers, on the one hand, and of the ambiguity of poetic words, on the other. Leopardi gestures toward a language that would be at one and the same time clear and indefinite, simple and unfamiliar, modern and archaic, true and beautiful (Z 1356–61); and which would reduce the distinction between the oral and the written to a minimum (Z 1247–48). This series of tensions between opposites gives birth to the straightforward and elegant prose of the Zibaldone, unequaled in the history of Italian literature (see Leopardi’s definition of his own style on Z 950, 3050). Nietzsche was certainly correct, even though he did not know the Zibaldone, when he observed that Leopardi was the greatest prose writer of his century. No other writer had sought and achieved a greater perfection of style; but this perfection, as Leopardi himself says, should not be perceived as conscious and artificial, or as recherché; it must appear spontaneous. Thus, by means of careful study, the writer should seek to return to a lost condition, one extremely close to the vitality and creativity of oral cultures, to a simple but also passionate style, free, irregular, full of both defects and exceptions (see, in the light of these qualities, Leopardi’s comparison between the myth of Homer, the “non-writer” poet, and Virgil, who, however beloved, represents the “literary” poet: Z 2977–79).
The paradoxical motto of Leopardi—this most learned, most grammatical writer, who almost never makes a mistake—is that beauty “is a slap at universal grammar,” and indeed, is an “infraction of its laws” (Z 2419). This leads us to the aesthetic of the ugly and the imperfect, the search for the strange and for contrasts, the reflections on the “je ne sais quoi” (from Montesquieu) or “sprezzatura” (from Castiglione), on the rapid style of Horace, and on the interrupted or intermittent style of the earliest prose writers (Herodotus) and in the ancient Hebrews. Nothing terrifies Leopardi—stylistically speaking—as much as boredom and uniformity. What underlies all of these literary-historical considerations, the analyses of specific texts and the theoretical proposals, is the unifying idea of a form of writing that would invite the participation of the reader, inviting his reaction. This also explains Leopardi’s interest in ideograms (anticipating Ezra Pound, inspired, a full century later, by an essay by Fenollosa), or in those languages composed of “a string of unconnected images, whose relationships the reader has to guess at” (Z 944–45)
. For Leopardi, the most learned and grammatical of the great modern poets, style is dialogue, writing is action, language is the most beautiful of all human cults (Z 2916), and, crucially, the most powerful antidote to boredom.
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Metaphysics, Theology, Philosophy
The Zibaldone serves as Leopardi’s privileged arena for a tormented clash between Christian thought and the classical-pagan world. The severe religious education provided by his family, above all by his mother, as well as the continuous study of the works of the Catholic apologists, left an indelible mark on Leopardi’s thought. But religious rigor was unable to survive the impact of the sensuality and the luminosity of Greek poetry, read by Leopardi in the original as early as 1814, when he was still an adolescent. The crisis came to a head in 1819, when, in the grip of a deep depression and having become almost totally blind, Giacomo attempted to flee Recanati. The Zibaldone, born in 1817, took shape in 1820, precisely as an attempt to provide an intellectual elaboration of the nature of this crisis.
The one tenet of the Christian vision that Leopardi initially saves is, in essence, the idea of the fall of man due to his insatiable desire for knowledge, according to the poet’s own personal rereading of Genesis (Z 393–429). Yet this idea was also part of the patrimony of the Greeks, which accounts for Leopardi’s interest in the myth of Psyche (Z 637–38, 2939–41). As a matter of fact, by hypothesizing a perfect world beyond this life, Christianity contributed to the rationalization of faith (Z 1059–60, 1065), thereby destroying what for the Greeks had been a natural tendency for self-illusion and the belief in happiness in this life. Indeed, Leopardi was one of the first to perceive in Christianity the cause of secularization (especially in views similar to those of the early nineteenth-century priest Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais). Only early Christianity remained a period of powerful illusions and intense passion. For Leopardi, science and religion were but two aspects of the same trajectory of mankind’s spiritualization.
The above considerations lead to two fundamental trains of thought that will permeate the entire system of the Zibaldone:
1. The idea of a return to a pre-metaphysical condition, that is to say, to a time preceding the fall (Z 304–305). But because this return is impossible without a miracle (Z 403), man is doomed either to live forever in a state of nostalgia or to attempt to return to nature and to antiquity by other means (Z 416). The goal of philosophy can only be to neutralize itself (Z 304–305), which leads Leopardi to conceptualize an “ultra-philosophy” or a “half-philosophy” (Z 114–15, 520) that might bring man back to a pre-metaphysical state. This regressive tendency is then oriented primarily around two poles: first, the myth of nature as a universal order, not constructed by man (opposed therefore to reason), in which meaning coincides with things as they are. This leads the poet beyond any theological perspective and toward an anthropological interest in the primitive (sustained in his early phases by Rousseau’s strong influence on him), in the attempt to establish whether the perfection of man (due to his greater adaptability) was preordained by nature, or whether it was an accidental development of the trajectory (see “Nature, Society, Culture”). The second direction of this regressive tendency revolves around the myth of a specific historical human society, that of antiquity, and in particular that of the Greeks, in which beliefs (or illusions) remain purely within the horizon of the sensible (rituals, adherence to a national identity, the cult of heroes, and so on) and in which there is no urge to construct a separate world beyond that of the real. In this view, Leopardi is in harmony with a large part of eighteenth-century European culture, above all German, from Winckelmann to Goethe, from Hölderlin to the young Schlegel. Ancient polytheism is viewed as a religion of the senses, not of reason, which allows both plurality and the valorization of earthly things; indeed, it allows them to be fully enjoyed (see “Ancients and Moderns”).
2. The dominant axis of Leopardi’s thought is therefore its marked anti-idealism (Z 601–606, 4111), which can be characterized as an anti-Platonism, especially because of its opposition to the notion of innate ideas. His philosophical target could not have been Hegel, at that time, as it was for Arthur Schopenhauer, whose first edition of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation) was published in 1819, at the very moment that the Zibaldone was taking shape. Leopardi never followed the path of academic philosophy, and did not know very much about Kant. He returns directly to the origins, to Greek philosophy, and finds his main antagonist in Plato. Even as he praises Plato’s gifts as writer and poet, Leopardi attributes to him the invention of metaphysics, with the same boldness that readers will find, many years later, in Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872).
Once the Platonic theory of innate ideas is destroyed, Leopardi avers, the notion of God is also destroyed (Z 1342), as well as the concept of the absolute (Z 1462–63). The tension between the absolute and the relative is the underlying framework of the Zibaldone. Leopardi’s thought is unquestionably oriented toward the second pole, that of anti-idealism and relativity, despite being accompanied by many ambiguities (above all in regard to the notion of the poetic function). It draws its inspiration from the Aristotelian–Theophrastian line of thought (for its ethical pragmatism and its tendency to observe data scientifically), and from eighteenth-century empiricism as derived from Locke (whom Leopardi reads in the light of ancient skepticism). “There is almost no other absolute truth, except that All is relative. This must be the basis for all metaphysics.” (Z 452).
All of Leopardi’s fundamental categories derive from this early discovery of relativism: unity vs. multiplicity, perfection vs. imperfection, uniformity vs. variety, stasis vs. movement (motion), rule vs. exception, writing vs. orality. The universe is conceived as a system in continuous motion, the site of infinite possibility and multiplicity of absolutes; nature is seen as variety; history as a succession of phases cannot be explained by any teleology, to be understood only as a series of different perspectives; education, as both exercise and habituation, is entirely dependent on circumstances. All of Leopardi’s other interests are reducible to these same polarities: his interest in natural history (Buffon); in the theory of climatological change (Montesquieu); in political, anthropological, and psychological diversity (the study of variation in human behavior in his notes on “Moral etiquette” and on “Social Machiavellianism” referred to in the 1827 Index). So, too, for Leopardi’s views on the history of ancient and modern politics (Xenophon, Aristotle, Guicciardini, Frederick II), as well as his privileging of “practical philosophy” (in particular, the stoicism of Epictetus) over all other forms of abstract ethics. This holds true also for both his study of linguistic change and the war he wages against the uniformity of language. Leopardi’s aesthetic relativism and the theory of grace as imperfection (again, Montesquieu, one of the primary sources for the early pages of the Zibaldone) are also consistent with this position, as are, finally, his reflections on the anthropological development from orality to writing, his cult of Homeric poetry, and his poetics of the indefinite.
This wide spectrum of interests demonstrates to what extent Leopardi’s thought is constantly immersed in the flux of human history. His model is a pre-Platonic Socrates, whose philosophy remains close to nature (Z 1360), and expressly not the ancient and modern metaphysical thinkers, much less the German school of philosophy (Leibniz and Kant among others), which Leopardi dismisses, even without knowing them firsthand. For him, “metaphysical” generally means abstruse, incomprehensible, confused (Z 1354, 4233). The thinkers closest to him, in terms of both subject matter and mode of thinking, are in a sense precisely two “dilettantes” just like him, both historians of humanity: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose second Discourse he read very early on, and Giambattista Vico. Indeed, of all of the Italian thinkers, Leopardi is the legitimate heir of Vico, even if it is unclear when he actually first read The New Science (we can document his reading with certainty only in the
later years: see Z 4392ff.).
Nevertheless, because Leopardi’s thought never strays from human and existential experience—indeed, it starts precisely from these grounds (as in Rousseau and in the slightly younger Kierkegaard)—he is forced to abandon the terrain of history (Z 4138–39) when he fully grasps the universal law that regulates the relations between man and the rest of the universe. He will call this law the fundamental “contradiction”—the law by which nature drives man to seek pleasure (see his “theory of pleasure,” Z 165–83) while at the same time prohibiting him from attaining it. One can easily understand how Schopenhauer, with whom he is often compared, might have considered Leopardi, his contemporary, a true soul mate. Nature, victorious, undefeated, escapes all efforts at description (“nature conceals itself as much as possible”: Z 446); it remains incomprehensible and infinitely superior to those beings it creates and then destroys, all the while paying no heed to them. This “terrifying but … true proposition” is the “conclusion of all metaphysics” (Z 4169).
This conclusion, prepared for by the entirety of Leopardi’s thought, and brilliantly enacted in the “Dialogue Between Nature and an Icelander” (1824), cancels out his humanism, thus bringing us to an absolutely inhuman world composed of deaf and blind materiality undergoing continuous transformation (see the notes on Strato, Z 4248). From this perspective, Leopardi—the heir of both ancient materialism and modern science—casts an icy glance over the history of mankind, and no longer even considers the possibility of a fall from an original state of plenitude. The only possible theology would be one that, at best, posits a fall from the origins of the universe itself (and it is not incidental that some critics have found traces of gnosticism in Leopardi’s work). The “conclusion” thus also effectively puts an end to his diary called the Zibaldone, which radically changes both form and function in its last few hundred pages. Leopardi’s dominant perspective had always been historical, anthropological, psychological, and aesthetic at the same time, and thus was able to sustain the possibility of a mode of thinking at once discursive, propositional, and even narrative. But when this perspective ran up against the evidence of an absolute and immutable truth, the effect was devastating and gave rise to two fundamental conclusions.
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