The loss that is at the origin of all other losses is that of the voice. Following Vico and Rousseau, Leopardi’s thought is, from the very outset, a profound and original meditation on the anthropological changes inherent in the revolution brought about by print and book culture, which destroyed oral culture. For Leopardi, poetry is conceivable only as voice, song, the material emission of sound and breath. Modern poetry can only be, therefore, an imperfect recuperation, an attempt to produce a reechoing of that lost voice within a psychic structure by now totally written and rational. The figure of Homer is central to these concerns, which helps explain the enthusiasm with which Leopardi, in 1828, welcomed the studies of Wolf on the Homeric question (Z 4314–27, 4343–67, 4392–97); this in turn leads him to a comparison with the thought of Vico (Z 4395–97). This also explains Leopardi’s deep interest in music, an art whose path followed the same decline as that of poetry; indeed, originally these two were deeply identified but then later painfully separated (“… the disastrous separation of music from poetry, and of the figure of the musician from that of the poet,” Z 3229). What Leopardi valorized in music was primarily its purely material basis (see, e.g., Z 1721–23); but he also considered melody to be a genuine expression of the feelings and energies of the people. Melody was capable of directly inspiring the soul (Z 3208–33), in contrast with harmony, which presupposes custom and the intervention of the intellect (cf. Z 1871–78). This was one of the functions of the dramatic chorus of the ancient dramas, whose powerful effect on the audience (of a moral as well as an aesthetic nature) was due, on the one hand, to its being accompanied by music and, on the other, to the fact that poetry issuing from the many mouths of one multitude returns to its originary and anonymous popular voice (Z 2804–809).
However, everything changes in the modern period: poetry almost disappears from the public squares (with a few exceptions that Leopardi documents with the spirit of an anthropologist, e.g., Z 4388–89), and the “live voice of each person reaches only a short distance and only a few people.” In contrast, “[w]ritten texts pass through the hands of the entire nation and endure even after the one who made them can no longer speak” (Z 1203). Modernity, characterized by the diffusion of a written culture, has lost the memory of the oral origins of poetry; this insight is reaffirmed by Leopardi in 1831 by his choice of Canti as the title of his volume of poetry. Leopardi based his choice on several reflections in the Zibaldone dating from 1828, on “letteratura antiscritturale” (“literature before writing”), and on the ancient figure of the rhapsodist (Z 4355ff.). Consonant with these reflections is Leopardi’s interest, shared by many Romantics influenced by Herder, in the collections of popular songs that were appearing throughout Europe (Z 4336–40). It would be impossible to appreciate Leopardi the poet without recognizing to what extent he considered the goal of a modern popular poetry absolutely unrealizable, short of an almost apocalyptic revolution: “unless and until the poetry of whatever modern literature is, I do not say reformed, but completely abolished, and another is created that is new, through and through” (Z 4347). There is no way to know with certainty what Leopardi had in mind in this prefiguration of the destruction of the poetic tradition (“it is necessary to de-perfect it, to return it to a kind of infancy, to a roughness, sacrificing beauty for utility”), but clearly the hypothesis, put forth in another note, of a future split into “two kinds of poetry and literature, one for the knowledgeable, the other for ordinary people” (Z 4388) seems now, two centuries later, to be prophetic.
There is no doubt that Leopardi succeeds in pushing beyond even the threshold of modern poetic theories; and once the Zibaldone is known to English-speaking audiences, it should no longer be possible to omit him from the genealogy of the post-romantic lyric tradition. His startling innovation endures even if the system of literary genres to which he refers remains substantially that of pre-modern times, which he conceives of in an essentially chronological hierarchy: first, the lyric, then the epos, and finally drama, the last genre and the one most alien to “men of genius” because it presupposes the ability to occupy the subject position of other people (Z 4234–36).
Leopardi also dedicates quite a number of reflections to prose, understood as a practical expressive form, simple and free, and, according to this logic, one that must have preceded the development of verse in human discourse (Z 4354, 4390, 4522). This insight is all the more remarkable because of the fact that, in all probability, primitive prose, very close to spoken language, had only been preserved in a few fragments which somehow managed to escape the ineluctable grammaticalization and rationalization of discourse (cf. Z 4435–38 on Democritus). In general, prose should be characterized by simplicity and by the maximum adherence to the materiality of the object, without the indefiniteness and multiplicity of connotation that characterize poetry (Z 374–75; but see also Z 1901). For this reason, one cannot speak of a language being fully realized if it does not have a simple, familiar, efficacious prose; this explains the privileging of the sixteenth over the fourteenth century in the history of Italian literature (Z 1384–86). Of the prose writers that Leopardi collected together in a Crestomazia in 1827, he feels most sympathy for those writers “of things” (to use an expression dear to the great nineteenth-century critic Francesco De Sanctis). These would be the prose writers, especially the epistolographers, of an elegant familiar style (Caro, Della Casa) as well as historians, political theorists, treatise writers, and scientists (Z 3741), above all when they rise to the heights of precision, clarity, and simple elegance (Galileo, Bartoli: Z 1312–15). These are the models that inspire the prose of the Zibaldone.
It should not come as a surprise that we find no reflections here on the novel, the modern written genre par excellence. Leopardi does not deal with the novel, even though in a short note he ranks it above the genre of drama in importance (Z 4367). This is understandable inasmuch as the tradition of the Italian novel is, in the early 1800s, almost nonexistent, with the notable exceptions of the poetic prose of Ugo Foscolo’s epistolary novel Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis) of 1802, and Alessandro Manzoni’s historical novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed). Manzoni’s novel was published in 1827, at the very time when the Zibaldone was in fact almost reaching the end of its own trajectory. Leopardi was interested above all in stressing the fact that poetry was destined for decadence; and indeed, that the future would be a time in which poetry—he prophesized—would assume the characteristics of prose (Z 2171–72). It is for this reason that Leopardi was searching for a radically new form of poetry, beyond a consideration of literary genres, one that as early as the first entries of the Zibaldone he would call a new poetry “that has no name at all” (Z 40).
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Scientific Knowledge and Natural History
On first reading, the Zibaldone does not appear particularly rich in scientific observations. But as we go through it more carefully, the sciences emerge as a privileged position from which to clarify certain non-secondary aspects of Leopardi’s thought and poetics. In its very form, the Zibaldone can be read as a kind of “laboratory notebook,” and could have on its front page the motto of the Galilean Accademia del Cimento, Provando e riprovando (“Try and try again,” to which one might also link the “chief apophthegm of Periander”: “Everything is exercise,” Z 1717). To the despair of readers and interpreters, Leopardi returns again and again to the same questions, looking at them from different, often divergent, angles. This is not so unlike the way in which leading scientists of the late eighteenth century behaved and wrote when they were dealing with phenomena—particularly those that concerned the life sciences—that demanded the meticulous repetition of observations and the creation and “experimental” testing of different hypotheses. Besides, the sciences played a significant role in Leopardi’s education, and were at least as crucial in the defining of his poetic horizon as was his study of the classics. The Dissertazioni filosofiche, written in his early adolescence (1
811–12) are followed by the Storia della astronomia (1813). The titles of the “Dissertations” give us a lead as to his early scientific interests: hydrodynamics, elastic fluids, light, astronomy, and electricity, among others. The authors that Leopardi draws on for information in his father’s library include François Jacquier, Saverio Poli, Vincenzo Dandolo, and Jean Sauri; authors of treatises, manuals, or popular textbooks that summarize the state of a post-Newtonian physics run through with stirrings of novelty that include the analysis of the forces active in nature, and in particular of electric fluids (a topic that is also present in the Zibaldone: see Z 3645, 4252).
In the Zibaldone, however, Leopardi draws primarily on Francesco Algarotti, the author of very popular books about Newtonianism, and Buffon, whose Histoire naturelle (of which there was an Italian translation in the Leopardi library) offers a complete and up-to-date “encyclopedia” of the natural world, embracing man, animals, minerals, and even chemistry with a strong literary and philosophical emphasis. Buffon supplies Leopardi with an immense store of information and prompts for some of the most important themes to be dealt with in the Zibaldone: the central role of animal observation (already addressed from a philosophical point of view in his youthful dissertation on the souls of animals), especially in relation to man (Z 3792); the use of animals as models of social organization (Z 287–88, 587–88); reflections on the variety of the human species (Z 49, 1957, 3652); the fundamental reflection on unhappiness, on the duration of life, and on death (Z 1547, 4092). Thus, the Zibaldone marks the passage—which is personal but also relates to the development of science in the late eighteenth century—from the idea of nature as a “fixed” and harmonious order that can be subjected to classification and mathematical description to an idea of nature that is run through with continual transformations, something that is living and historicized even while it works according to recognizable laws and is animated by recognizable forces. A central feature of this transformation of scientific knowledge in Europe is the spread of operational and technical disciplines such as chemistry and mineralogy, but also medicine, and even agriculture and animal husbandry. The Zibaldone registers Leopardi’s interest in questions of chemistry and the analysis and decomposition of bodies into simple elements (Z 808, 1275, 3239)—but also, by analogy, of the parts of speech (Z 2006). But physical and chemical materialism, which at an earlier stage was Leopardi’s preferred heuristic model (Z 1958–59)—one that was able to warrant an essentially “adaptable” and harmonious model of the natural world—is later subject to harsh criticism (cf. the long, fundamental passage dated 23 August, 1823, Z 3237–46). Beginning in 1824, and concurrently with the destruction of the principle of noncontradiction (Z 4099–101), chaos and chance become the rule of a natural world made up of a mass of facts that can no longer be either interpreted or controlled.
One interesting aspect of Leopardi’s thinking about the sciences is his analysis of their historical evolution, which also illuminates more general features of human culture. The author Leopardi uses most in this regard is Louis Dutens and his Recherches sur l’origine des découvertes attribuées aux modernes (1766). Dutens believes that almost all the discoveries by the moderns should be attributed to the ancients, who had already made them; his attack on the “arrogance of the moderns” is one that echoes loudly in the sensibility of Leopardi (Z 4507–508). If modern science, “thanks to the greater number and accuracy of observations” (Z 4291), is capable of dismantling ancient errors, it is not capable of attaining to positive truths (Z 2711–15). Despite his agreement with Dutens, Leopardi does recognize that revolutions and ruptures are possible in matters of knowledge, and therefore also of scientific knowledge, and that they have great importance in civil life too. So it should not be a surprise that he devotes himself to the hero worship of the great modern scientists and savants, a feature that in a certain sense draws him close to his own time—and distances him from ours—but that also has an autobiographical dimension to it. Leopardi recalls the contrast between Descartes’s lively features and poor physical constitution (Z 207) and celebrates his poetic genius (Z 3245). He sings the praises of Copernicus, whom he thinks of as revealing “a plurality of worlds” (Z 84), and of Galileo, who transformed physics (Z 1532)—not forgetting Newton and Locke, of course, who, together with Galileo and Descartes, “have truly changed the face of philosophy” (Z 1857).
Notwithstanding the role attributed to the “heroes” of science, Leopardi’s view on the origin of the arts and sciences is a radical one, without any hint of triumphalism: discoveries nearly always come about by chance (Z 836), as is shown, for example, by the art of glassmaking (Z 2602–603), and by chemistry (Z 2605–606). His insistence too on the role and fruitfulness of error in the civil, religious, and imaginative life of man, if reread from the perspective of science, goes against the idea that the development of knowledge is linear and progressive. Here Leopardi is working up an idea of knowledge in general that is surprisingly modern, focused as it is on serendipity and the “fallibility” of specific branches of knowledge. Technical and scientific knowledge, in fact, only appears to improve men’s lives (cf. Leopardi’s farsighted exposé of technical progress that sometime in the future will make his own time seem uncivilized and barely developed, Z 4198). So true spiritual progress “has consisted up until now, not in learning but mainly in unlearning, in knowing more and more that we do not know, in realizing we know less and less, in diminishing the number of cognitions, in narrowing the breadth of human understanding” (Z 4190). Error also defines a differentiation between branches of knowledge. It is under the aegis of Buffon that Leopardi posits the distinction between the exact sciences (first and foremost, mathematics) and the natural sciences, which, being more open to the imagination, offer more literary and philosophical possibilities (Z 2731). It is no surprise that Leopardi is interested in science writing, and also in strictly topical questions such as the scientific practice of terminology (Z 1219) and the possibility of translating scientific terminology into other languages without the state of the different disciplines being altered (Z 3764). In the long run, all the sciences, including mathematics, are rooted in the imagination, so much so that Newton can be likened to Homer, no less (Z 2132–33; see also Z 3978 on mathematics that proceeds by paradigms, examples, and suppositions).
Leopardi’s vision of biological life—derived, as we have seen, from Buffon, but drawing also on other sources (for example, the Encyclopédie), not always identified—is focused on the loss of anthropocentrism and on the dissolution of all hierarchical models in the living world. He is clearly aware of the development of the various “transformist” and pre-evolutionist theories that were some of the main novelties of his day, and that—just as in Leopardi’s thought—often refer back to theories of antiquity, and especially to Lucretius. The species are linked, one to the other, and if there is a particular excellence about the human species, it is to be sought in a physical disposition—which, however, is present in all animals, and which Leopardi defines as habituation, or conformability, a true and proper adaptive disposition centered on a plurality of organs, and therefore of faculties. Man is the animal in which conformability is greatest (Z 1568–69), and is therefore the only one to produce culture and civilization, but also “discontent” and unhappiness, as Leopardi says in two passages in which he reuses, and reverses, the traditional image of the scale of beings (Z 2899–900, 3380). Built into habituation and conformability is a disposition to self-destruction that puts the very existence of the human species at risk; as with all other animal species, the existence of humanity is no longer guaranteed by any providential order (see Z 216–17, 223, and notes). Writing in the late 1820s, Leopardi notes the natural “modifications” that appear monstrous because they tend toward the very destruction of the species that develops them (Z 4461–62). In the end, there is no recognizable purpose in nature, a thesis that Leopardi demonstrates with the use of a very up-to-date example, referring to the rudimentar
y organs of certain animals (Z 4467–69).
The notes referring to the body, in its material and physical aspects, also have the ring of autobiographical experience about them. They belong to a line of bodily self-observation with a long tradition behind it, contiguous with medical knowledge, but that is also connected with writing and literature (one might think of Montaigne’s Essais, for example). In this area as well, however, Leopardi crosses his own experiences with information that he gets from the scientific literature and from the enormous amount of medical information meant to stimulate various kinds of self-help that had characterized the second half of the eighteenth century (Z 352, on the German doctor Hufeland; other medical sources were available to Leopardi through his friendships with doctors such as Gaetano Cioni, Francesco Puccinotti, and Giacomo Tommasini). Behind these reflections we will always find the fundamental leitmotif of the decline of physical vigor in the human species, attributable to civilization, which creates a paradox for modern man, who is weaker precisely because of his greater physical disposition to habituation and conformability (Z 831), against which the state of medical science has not progressed much since Hippocrates’s time (Z 1338). But (perhaps because of their origin in antiquity) Leopardi is prepared to accept branches of knowledge such as the study of physiognomy (Z 3201) and phrenology (Z 3200–201). Medicine provides artificial stimulants to a vigor that is now lost, operating in a way that cannot be defined as natural (Z 1980), and is in the end comparable to every other kind of technical and scientific knowledge seen through the radical cognitive skepticism of the last phase of the Zibaldone (Z 3977). But even within this latter development of Leopardi’s thought, the body and bodily sensations retain an extraordinary and almost unique ability to reach truth and poetry. The insistence with which Leopardi returns to the theme of odors as stimuli to pleasure and illusion is significant: in pages that are relevant today, the control and civilizing of odors is in fact a sign of the languishing of human faculties (Z 1537–38, 1803–804, 1942). His wide-ranging thinking about the senses—smell, touch, sight—is the product of a reflection that is both scientific and poetic, and it is one of the most original and suggestive themes of those that recur in the Zibaldone.
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