INTRODUCTION

My paradise lies in the shadow of my sword. At bottom, all I had done was to put one of Stendhals maxims into practice: he advises one to make ones entrance into society by means of a duel. And how well I had chosen my opponent! Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1888) Ta gnration est ne dun vnement quelle na pas connu. (Your generation is born out of an event that it did not experience.) Olivier Rolin, Tigre de papier (2002)

1. In 1818, from Weimar, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe happened to comment upon a striking phenomenon:
Romantico! questa voce strana per le orecchie italiane, sconosciuta finora in Napoli e nella felice Campania, in Roma usata tuttal pi fra gli artisti tedeschi, muove da qualche tempo gran romore in Lombardia e particolarmente in Milano.

(Romantic! this term, a strange one to the Italian ear, thus far unknown in Naples and in happy Campania, and used in Rome for the most part by German artists, raises since quite a while much clamour in Lombardy, and particularly in Milan.)1

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In restricting the uses (and abuses) of the term Romantic to Milan and Lombardy, Goethe individuated one of the most crucial features of Italian Romanticism, which would definitely have a deep impact on its later developments. The first group of writers and intellectuals labelling themselves as Romantics were all based in Milan, which at the time was part of the kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia that had been created as a constituent state of the Austrian Empire at the Congress of Vienna. This coincidence may sound quite obvious once we consider how, in many ways, everything had begun precisely a few miles from Milan, at a bridge in Lodi, exactly twenty years before:
On 15 May 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of the youthful army which had just crossed the bridge at Lodi and let the world know that after all these centuries, Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of valour and of genius of which Italy was the witness within a few months reawoke a slumbering people In the Middle Ages, the republican Lombards had given proof of a valour equal to that of the French, and deserved to see their town razed 1

Classicism and Romanticism in Italian Literature to the grounds by the emperors of Germany. Since they had become loyal subjects, their main business was printing sonnets on little pink taffeta handkerchiefs whenever a girl belonging to some noble or wealthy family happened to get married Which effeminate customs were a far cry from the profound emotions aroused by the unforeseen arrival of the French army. Soon new and passionate customs arose. An entire people realized, on 15 May 1796, that everything it had respected hitherto was supremely ridiculous and sometimes odious.2

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At least this in 1838, while drafting the much-celebrated incipit of The Charterhouse of Parma was Stendhals opinion, namely the point of view of someone who had both experienced life under the French revolutionary army and the complexity of Italy as a political battlefield during and after the Napoleonic Wars. At the time when Stendhal was writing these pages, the quarrel pitting Classicists against Romantics that had monopolized the Italian literary scene in the late 1810s and early 1820s had already begun to die out, and many of its protagonists had been scattered and dispersed. Madame de Stal, who had first launched the dispute through an article published in January 1816 in the journal Biblioteca italiana, had died in 1817.3 Three years later, at the age of forty, Ludovico di Breme passed away. Silvio Pellico (17891854), Federico Confalonieri (17851846) and Pietro Borsieri (17881852), who between 1818 and 1819 had animated the literary and scientific journal Il Conciliatore, experienced a bitter imprisonment in the pilberk fortress in Brno, Moravia. They were later forced into exile to the United States, France or Belgium like their former companion Giovanni Berchet (17831851). Giacomo Leopardi (17981837), who had entered the quarrel with its most complex and radical contribution, the Discourse on Romantic Poetry (which, however, remained unpublished until 1906), had died in Naples one year before, in 1837. In 1838, while Stendhal was writing The Charterhouse of Parma, the problem of Italian Romanticism had therefore been pushed into the background. The Austrian repression had in any case shown well, and since the beginning, how the question, from the point of view of imperial censorship, was essentially a political one. As late as 1825, the filo-Romantic clergyman and scholar Giuseppe Montani (17891833) wrote that In Italia si cominciano a stampar libri ove si asserisce che un romantico non pu essere che un uomo torbido e nemico del buon ordine sociale (in Italy books have started to appear in which it is asserted that a Romantic cannot help but to be a wrongdoer and an enemy to the proper social order), thus associating lidea di romantico a quella di malfattore (the idea of the Romantic and that of the criminal).4 And yet Stendhal explicitly pointed out how, after the battles of Valmy, Austerlitz and Marengo, even the act of writing could no longer be the same: and that if a different kind of literature had been possible in Italy different, namely, from the occasional sonnets printed on handkerchiefs the

Introduction

ultimate reason had to be found in that date of 15 May 1796, which had opened an irremediable fissure between a before and an after. From Stendhals perspective, the Italians of the Ancien Rgime were a slumbering people who, having forgotten their former glory, had welcomed the triumphal arrival of Napoleons army with a sort of astonished wonder. A gerontocratic and motionless society, which had been numbed by centuries of foreign domination, had suddenly had to face a new kind of army whose soldiers laughed and sang all day long; they were not yet twenty-five and their commanding general, who was twenty-seven, passed for being the oldest man in his army.5 Quite interestingly, Stendhal located Italys past miracles of valour and of genius in the political fights for independence of medieval communes, whereas the legacy of the Roman Empire was implicitly transferred to the French one. By presenting the commanding general as the only legitimate successor of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, Stendhal reaffirmed nothing but Napoleons intentional self-construction of authority, meticulously pursued in his writings and speeches through the conscious employment of quotations and rhetorical structures borrowed from classical sources, such as Plutarchs Parallel Lives and Suetoniuss The Twelve Caesars. Through revolutionary and Napoleonic propaganda, revolutionary Europe was therefore made into the venue of a rebirth of antiquity, in turn grounded in mutability, energy and enthusiasm rather than in the melancholic regret for lost former glory.6 The shock caused by the Napoleonic army had also impacted Italys literary scene, suddenly transforming, to the eyes of reawakened Italians, all of the literature they had been producing up to that point into something ridiculous and sometimes odious. Stendhal made the conventional sonnets printed on little pink taffeta handkerchiefs into the ironic emblem of a certain kind of literary production that we could abstractly label as Classicist: a literary praxis grounded in the repetition of stereotyped formalisms and preconceived structures, which was not meant to convey profound emotions, but was rather directed towards the celebration of mundane events; an occasional, frivolous and mawkish kind of literature, profoundly detached from reality and therefore quintessentially artificial. Having as its foundational principle the Classicist precept of imitation (imitatio), this practice of poetry-making proposed a relationship with classical antiquity that was radically antithetical to the Neoclassical inspiration of revolutionary aesthetics, grounded instead in the emulation of the ancients (mulatio) and in the acknowledgement that doing like the ancients (and even outdoing them) was possible. Whereas the latter was identified by Stendhal with a propulsion directed towards newness and change, Classicism epitomized the inactivity of pre-revolutionary Italy, which Napoleon definitively dissolved in the Battle of Lodi.

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2. In November 1816, Marie-Henri Beyle not yet Stendhal was in Milan. The quarrel between the Classicists and the Romantics was at its peak, and Milan was its epicentre. After Stals article, several journals such as Lo Spettatore, Biblioteca italiana, Il Corriere delle dame and the Gazzetta di Milano had published strong replies from the Classicist side. Stal herself replied, in a letter published in the June issue of Biblioteca italiana,7 and in the same month Ludovico di Breme defended her with the pamphlet Intorno allingiustizia di alcuni giudizi letterari italiani (On the Injustice of Some Literary Judgments in Italy).8 In September, Pietro Borsieri composed another pamphlet or, better, a micro-novel, which moved between several literary genres and supported the Romantics arguments by applying their exact literary precepts to the space of writing with the title Avventure letterarie di un giorno o consigli di un galantuomo a vari scrittori (Literary Adventures of One Day, or Advice from a Gentleman to Several Writers),9 which had also been the target of several attacks. In opposing the Classicists defence of national tradition to the Romantics propulsion towards an opening of Italian culture to foreign influences and models an operation that had been initiated by the Swiss Germaine de Stal the quarrel thus perfectly epitomized the recurrent diatribe between Italian self-perception and the foreign image of Italy, described as such by Giulio Bollati in his essay on Italianness as a cultural construct:
nella simultaneit di primato e di decadenza, di inferiorit oggettiva ipercompensata da un senso invitto di superiorit, si istituisce uno degli schemi pi caratteristici e pi stabili dellintera storia italiana. Limpietosa perseveranza degli stranieri nel considerare lItalia essenzialmente un paese di rovine e di memorie, e le confutazioni incessanti in risposta, obbediscono, nella gara degli opposti etnocentrismi, a regole precise, stabilite assai presto nel tempo (one of the most typical and persistent patterns of Italys entire history is grounded in the simultaneity of primacy and decadence, and of actual inferiority overcompensated by an innate feeling of superiority. Foreigners pitiless perseverance in considering Italy as nothing but a landscape of ruins and memories of the past, as well as the incessant confutations in reply, obey fixed rules in the competition of opposite ethnocentrisms, rules that are dictated in a very early phase)10

The entry of Stendhals journal for 12 December 1816 vividly describes the atmosphere of the first months of the quarrel. The setting of the passage is the Milanese theatre La Scala:
I am a daily visitor to signor di Bremes box at la Scala. The company there assembled consists entirely of men of letters Signor di Breme is a man of great education and intelligence, well acquainted with the ways of society. He is a passionate devotee of Madame de Stal, and a great patron of literature I rarely fail to make an appearance, evening by evening, in his box Here, quite frequently, I meet Monti, the greatest of all poets now alive Silvio Pellico, a man of sound sense and solid education, perhaps may scarcely hope to rival Monti in the power and luxuriance of

Introduction his style Signor Pellico is extremely young still When I am together with signor di Breme in his box, a frequent visitor is signor Borsieri, a man of Gallic intelligence, vivacious as quicksilver and sparkling with audacity. There is also il marchese Ermes Visconti, whose notions appear sensible, sound and even tolerably precise, notwithstanding his profound admiration for Kant Signor Confalonieri, a man of staunch courage and a true patriot, is a regular visitor There is also signor Grisostomo Berchet, who has taken a certain number of poems by Brger and published them in an excellent Italian translation I know of nothing in all Paris which compares with this box, where, every evening of the week, the host will receive some fifteen or twenty visitors, each in his own field a distinguished man; and when the conversation flags, there is always the music.11

In Ludovico di Bremes box at La Scala, Stendhal happened therefore to meet all the principal supporters of Romanticism, the same people who between 1818 and 1819 would give birth to Il Conciliatore. Almost all of them had been taking part, although from different backgrounds and from different political positions, in the political and intellectual life of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy from 1805 to 1814. At least at the beginning, the Classicist/Romantic quarrel seemed therefore to replicate, in the guise of a literary skirmish, the opposition between conservatives (several of which were generally drawn up on the Classicist side) and those who had been politically and intellectually trained under Eugne de Beauharnaiss kingdom, and who, moreover, had been inspired by that experience even moving from anti-Napoleonic perspectives, as it was in Confalonieris case in drafting a programme of national independence. It would be wrong, however, to excessively schematize the quarrel in a political way. Actually, with significant exceptions as is the case of Trussardo Caleppio (b. 1784) and his filo-Austrian journal LAttaccabrighe, whose anti-Romanticism had mainly political motivations the entire quarrel took place within the shadow cabinet (governo ombra), as Bollati terms it, of the Italy that was to come:12 namely, within an elitist intellectual community that, although moving from different and often clashing positions, recognized the necessity and the inevitability of Italian national independence. The quarrel works therefore as a first laboratory for the definition and shaping of what Italian culture and identity would be, in terms of literary canon, relationship with foreign strains of thought, openness to innovation, and the dialectics between tradition and the avant-garde. At the same time, it appears as a litmus test for the several tensions that would later deeply affect the political process known as the Risorgimento, in particular the movements quintessentially elitist nature. The debate aimed to conciliate (without resolving) the dichotomies between progress and tradition, revolutionary instances and pragmatic moderatism.13 In these crucial years, during which the orphans of Waterloo from both sides started elaborating a political ideal of Italy, Romanticism, in particular, becomes the portmanteau word for a long-range intellectual programme, explic-

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itly literary in its open and public form, but underneath, a political and subversive one. The inspirational figure is Madame de Stal, who in her treatise on Germany, De lAllemagne (181013), had t[aken] the German term Romantic as a perfect label for her own global agenda, and sold this private agenda to Europes half-formed anti-Classical reactions.14 Quite subtly, in her aforementioned 1816 article in Biblioteca italiana, Stal never uses the term Romantic (nor that of Classicism). She proposes instead that Italian literates undertake a massive endeavour of translations from foreign literatures, mainly German, English and French, in order to open themselves up to a European dimension which is, in fact, identified with Northern European trends. From this perspective, Stals is a particularly Meridionist gaze.15 Throughout the text, Stal employs images that come interestingly close to the dialectic between slumber and reawakening articulated in Stendhals incipit to The Charterhouse of Parma. Unless they undertook a quick process of modernization, Stal writes, Italians would stagnate in un sonno oscuro, donde neppure il sole potrebbe svegliarli (in a dark sleep, such that even the sun could not re-awaken them).16 Only by doing this will Italy be able to contribute to the construction of a new literature, by leaving aside the antica mitologia (ancient mythology) whose favole sono da un pezzo anticate, anzi il resto dEuropa le ha gi abbandonate e dimentiche (fables have been long outdated; in fact the rest of Europe has already abandoned and forgotten them).17 The Italian literary scene, to Stals eyes, is polarized around two main trends, both of which can be subsumed under the label of Classicism: on the one hand, there are the eruditi che vanno continuamente razzolando le antiche ceneri, per trovarvi forse un granello doro (erudite scholars who constantly go scratching amongst the ancient ashes, where they may find at best a speck of gold);18 on the other, those writers who raccozzano suoni vti dogni pensiero, esclamazioni, declamazioni, invocazioni, che trovan sordi i cuori altrui, perch non esalarono dal cuore dello scrittore (throw together sounds that are emptied of every thought, and exclamations, declamations, invocations that fall on deaf hearts, because they were not exhaled from the writers own heart).19 For the Napoleonic Stendhal and the anti-Napoleonic Germaine de Stal the problem is therefore the same: the age of revolutions has opened a fissure at all levels, and to go back is impossible. The post-revolutionary writer must therefore choose between sleep and reawakening, between profound emotions and empty formalism, and between inanity and action. In other words, even if neither Stal nor Stendhal employs the quarrels keywords in explicit terms, the choice for them both is between a stale and slumbering Classicism and a (Romantic?) worship of passions that exhale from the writers own heart. Thus, in the space of twenty-two years, and from the two opposite sides of the political barricade, Madame de Stal and Stendhal agree on a specific point: that as far as literature is concerned, one surely cannot go back to sonnets printed on handkerchiefs.

Introduction

When he enters the debate between January and March of 1818 with the text known as Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry, Giacomo Leopardi is not yet twenty, a philologist and a poet, the firstborn of an ultra-conservative aristocratic family from a small village in the Papal States. His fathers memoirs include a significant anecdote: at Napoleons entrance in the Marches region in 1797, Leopardis father Monaldo had the opportunity to see the General from the town halls window, but preferred not to attend, giudicando non doversi a quel tristo lonore che un galantuomo si alzasse per vederlo (judging that such a scoundrel did not deserve the honour of a gentleman getting up to see him).20 As we will see, the same attitude grounded in an a-temporal understanding of aristocratic and humanistic ethics will pervade Leopardis contribution to the quarrel, once the scoundrel will no longer be Napoleon the parvenu, but modernity as a whole. Whereas for Monaldo tale cultura soltanto una crosta che ricopre anacronistiche prerogative di classe, in Giacomo aristocratici saranno innanzitutto il disinteresse e la dedizione votati ai valori etici, estetici, intellettuali di quella cultura (such culture is only a cover for anachronistic class-privileges, for Giacomo aristocratic will first and foremost mean disinterestedness and the worship paid to the ethical, aesthetic and intellectual values of that culture).21 Still, as is clear, nothing could be more remote from the cosmopolitanism of the Milanese intellectual scene than such a provincially aristocratic context, and, as a matter of fact, Leopardis first experiments in writing philological treatises, scholarly compilations from ancient authors, and translations from the classics look, at first glance, like a perfect example of the attitudes criticized by Madame de Stal in 1816.22 Leopardis Discourse therefore appears to be an ambiguous and complex textual object, whose peculiarities make it difficult to frame within fixed schemes, especially within the very narrow ones of the Classicist/Romantic quarrel. Aiming to support the arguments of Classicism, it equally proposes itself as an artistic manifesto for a renovation of Italian culture, pursued through a critical engagement with classical antiquity, of which Italian literature is seen as the most privileged heir. By questioning both the harsh rejection of classical tradition advocated by the Italian Romantics and the sterile precept of imitation reaffirmed by Classicists, the Discourse outlines new perspectives for modern literature in a provoking and original project of engagement with tradition, grounded in the lucid acknowledgement of the cultural fracture produced by the Enlightenment at the dawn of modernity. At the same time, what appears even more striking is Leopardis challenge to the most crucial problems of European early nineteenth-century culture such as those of the sublime, of the birth of modern historical discourses, of the opposition between naive and sentimental poetry, and eventually of the possibility itself of making poetry in a post-Enlightenment age without any direct confrontation with its major thinkers. Leopardis formation had been that of an early nineteenth-century classical philologist, enriched

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by the readings that he could find in his fathers vast, if dispersive, library, mainly composed of books randomly bought from the libraries of suppressed monasteries and religious congregations during the French domination.23 Moreover, operating in such a provincial context as the Papal States of Bourbon Restoration times, Leopardis knowledge of contemporary European culture is mostly determined by the biased mediation of the Italian editorial market, which was primarily centred in more international settings such as Milan. Despite (or, to some extent, precisely because of ) these limitations, Leopardis operation results in a problematized and original re-discussion of the relationship of modernity with classical antiquity, and in the possibilities themselves of its survival in an age of secularization and disenchantment. For all of these reasons, the Discourse enjoyed a peculiar editorial afterlife. On 27 March 1818, Leopardi sent the first part of it to the Milanese publisher Antonio Fortunato Stella, asking for the text to appear in Lo Spettatore. Stella never replied, perhaps because of his personal implications with the Romantic scene or because of the vicissitudes of the Milanese press (Lo Spettatore ceased publication in December 1818, and Stella himself was part of the editorial staff for Il Conciliatore).24 The Discourse kept haunting Leopardi for several years as an aborted project. In December 1818 he included the Discorso della poesia romantica among a list of forthcoming works;25 again, in 1829, he mentioned in his secret journal, the Zibaldone, the possibility of a Discorso sul Romanticismo.26 As we have seen, the Discourse would be only posthumously published in 1906.27 The Discourse remains a haunting textual object for literary criticism as well, since it directly challenges the problem of Italian Romanticism and the very legitimacy of speaking about such a concept in the first place. Actually, as we will see, the ideological and aesthetic position of Milanese Romantics is on the one hand a partial and reductive one, taking as its main aim a renovation of the Italian literary scene without any sort of clear or unitary programme, and by borrowing scattered ideas and themes from European trends, most notably from the German Sturm und Drang. On the other hand, we witness such an author as Leopardi who, while questioning and demystifying Italian Romanticism in the name of a strongly asserted continuity with classical antiquity, nonetheless presents themes and arguments that nowadays we would ascribe without reservations to a broadly intended category of Romanticism. The point, of course, is not to support (as has often been done) the idea of Leopardi as a Romantic malgr lui, but rather to analyse the peculiar features of the Italian literary scene during the Bourbon Restoration years, and to ask ourselves to what extent is may be legitimate to speak of Romanticism in the case of Italy. As we will see, one of the main tensions that animates the quarrel from the beginning is the problem of enhancing or rejecting the continuity of Italian literature with classical antiquity and the Renaissance, a problem that would be incomprehensible

Introduction

for the German Romantics (although Goethe, who had extensively travelled throughout the peninsula, understood well how this constituted the specificity of the Italian case). For the British Romantics, too, John Keats for example, this was simply not a problem.28 The direct and unmediated continuity between the Greco-Roman world and Italian literature and culture formed one of the most resistant cores of Italian identity throughout the decades of the Ancien Rgime, giving birth between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to a massive programme of intellectual renovation in the name of Classicism pursued in poetry by Giovanni Vincenzo Gravinas treatise Della ragion poetica (1708; On Poetic Reason) and in theatre by the example of Scipione Maffeis Merope (1713) that paved the way for Italian Neoclassicism, later concretized in the works of such authors as Giuseppe Parini (172999), Vittorio Alfieri (17491803) and Ugo Foscolo (17781827).29 Ignoring or misunderstanding the Italian singularity on this aspect means engendering a double optical illusion, which has affected Italian and foreign criticism on the topic for decades. On the one hand, the victory, in the long run, of several instances raised by the Italian Romantics, especially in terms of periodization and the construction of a national literary canon, may determine a general misinterpretation of the Classicists reasoning (including Leopardis), and may have led to a distorted perception of the context of Leopardis oeuvre, and of the Discourse specifically. The lack of attention given to the Quattrocento, the Renaissance and the eighteenth century in Francesco De Sanctiss monumental Storia della letteratura italiana, published in 18701 after Italian political unification, shows how the periodization proposed by the Milanese Romantics became a dominant position, thus making Leopardis choices in terms of references and canon as testified, for instance, by the Zibaldone virtually incomprehensible to a modern audience. The survival of this theoretical frame has therefore engendered a systematic undermining of the Classicist position in the course of the quarrel, as well as an objective difficulty in placing Leopardis text within that context. On the other hand, the ambiguities and peculiarities of the Italian case make it problematic to frame these intellectual experiences within the strains of European Romanticisms. The most eloquent symptom of the puzzling nature of Italian Romanticism is the collection Romanticism in National Context, edited in 1988 by Roy Porter and Mikul Teich, in which Italian Romanticism is completely ignored, and in which Leopardi is not even mentioned.30 Still do we necessarily have to speak about Romanticism? 3. As Franois Hartog claims, literary quarrels and battles of books are never neutral acts.31 Every dispute opposing the Ancients against the Moderns is a breach (brche) a term that Hartog borrows from Hannah Arendt32 through which a new regimen of historicity (rgime dhistoricit) erupts within an old paradigmatic frame, the revolutionary implications of which are, however, still

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impalpable; nor is it clear whether a rupture is actually at stake. The quarrel would therefore appear as a monadic unity in which past and future coexist, a dialectic image to speak in Walter Benjamins terms embodying a tension without solving it, mirroring in a prism-like fashion the indefiniteness of historical transition. Like Aby Warburgs formulas of pathos (Pathosformeln), dialectic images are made of time: they are crystals of historical memory, crystals that are phantasmatized and around which time writes its choreography.33 From this angle, Napoleon breaching the bridge at Lodi epitomizes modernity breaching and questioning the political, philosophical and literary ivory tower of Ancien Rgime Italy. It would not be improper to speak of the Napoleonic Wars as a cultural trauma, assuming with Jeffrey C. Alexander that Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memory forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.34 Political Restoration, aimed at surmounting this traumatic fissure, can be understood as a process of repression, in which the repressed element secretly resurfaces within the domain of literature, polarized in a dynamic tension between tradition and change, fixedness and mutability, eternity and the transience of fashion. Hence the virulence of the quarrel, its apparent vainness and inanity, and at the same time its pointed and vital questions in terms of identity, legitimacy, innovation through tradition and vice versa: in the years of Restoration, the quarrel opposing Classicists and Romantics works as a palimpsest and a testing ground of the Italy to come. This consideration also allows us to bypass the problems of literary definitions, and to put in their place the tensions that arise in the aftermath of political, social and cultural trauma, whose full extent is perceived and interpreted by Leopardi with an unprecedented acuity. In a 1991 article Franco DIntino compared Leopardis intellectual parabola to the social ascent of Julien Sorel in Stendhals Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), arguing that both were performing the subtle game of the Faustian hero as the only resource left to young men in the Bourbon Restoration years, when possibility of direct action was perceived to be forever lost.35 Actually, the projected entrance of Leopardi who was born in 1798, one year after Napoleons triumphal entrance in Milan into the literary scene through the Discourse comes very close to the narrative structure termed by Franco Moretti as Waterloo Story, and to thus being one of the forms of early nineteenth-century Bildungsroman: a (failed) attempt at social recognition, replacing a search for glory that in another time just twenty years before could be pursued in more direct and more gratifying ways.36 Raised in a provincial context, and within the enclosed space of a library that, by borrowing Michel Foucaults words, we could call an espace la fois rel et fantastique (a space that is at the same time a real and a fantastic one)37 in which ancients and

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moderns coexisted side by side,38 Leopardi saw the quarrel inflaming Milan as an opportunity for making his entrance into the world. His first attempt, after a first one sent to the Biblioteca italiana on 7 May 1816 (mainly devoted to strictly literary questions), is a letter sent on 18 July 1816 to the same journal, intended as an answer to Stals article and tellingly opened by a metaphor evoking the image of a duel: Io non taccio il mio nome perch la illustre Dama [Stal] non asconde il suo, ed egli mi par non sia cosa da uomo magnanimo quel combattere sempre a visiera calata (I do not conceal my name because the illustrious Dame does not conceal hers, and it does not seem to me to be suitable for a gentleman always to fight with his visor lowered).39 Two years later, in the Zibaldone, he notes that, having read Ludovico di Bremes review of Byrons Giaour in the journal Lo Spettatore,40 he intends to write a detailed answer, this entry thus being the first embryo of the Discourse:
Finisco in questo punto di leggere nello Spettatore n. 91 le Osservaz. di Lod. di Breme sopra la poesia moderna o romantica che la vogliamo chiamare, e perch ci ho veduto una serie di ragionamenti che pu imbrogliare o inquietare, e io per mia natura non sono lontano dal dubbio anche sopra le cose credute indubitabili, per avendo nella mente le risposte che a quei ragionamenti si possono e debbono fare, per mia quiete le scrivo. (I have just finished reading in the 91st issue of Lo Spettatore Ludovico di Bremes observations on modern or Romantic poetry whatever we want to name it, and since I have seen in them a series of arguments that can be tricky or troubling, and by nature I am not un-inclined to doubt, even things that are believed to be beyond doubt, given that I have in my mind the answers that one can and must give to those arguments, I write them down for the sake of my own peace of mind)41

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Modern and Romantic are, for Leopardi, synonyms, and by questioning Bremes Romanticism Leopardi defies what he perceives to be the most dangerous consequences of intellectual modernity as a whole its insatiable longing for newness and its worship for the mutability of fashions, opposed to the ancients search for glory and tension towards immortality. In the letter sent to the Biblioteca italiana on 18 July 1816, he showed a full awareness of the fracture separating the ancients from the moderns:
quando voleano descrivere il cielo, il mare, le campagne, si metteano ad osservarle, e noi pigliamo in mano un poeta, e quando voleano ritrarre una passione simmaginavano di sentirla, e noi ci facciamo a leggere una tragedia, e quando voleano parlare delluniverso vi pensavano sopra, e noi pensiamo sopra il modo in che essi ne hanno parlato (when the ancients wished to describe the sky, the sea, the country, they first observed them directly, and we, instead, pick up a book by some poet; and when they wanted to portray a passion they imagined feeling it, whereas we ask someone to read a trag-

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Classicism and Romanticism in Italian Literature edy for us; and when they wanted to speak about the universe they thought about it, and we think about the way they talked about it)42

The nature of this fracture pervades Leopardis thought, not in the sense of a restoration of antiquity, which he feels to be impossible, but as the tension towards the attainment of an ancient effect through the fullest acknowledgement of the intervened fracture. All of Leopardis literary outcomes of these years, his political speeches and poems, his autobiographical sketches, and his poems on various subjects, move in the direction of a paradoxical negotiation of antiquity with modernity, and of the experiment of being quintessentially ancient by fully accepting the challenge posed by modernity. Within this context, the Discourse is intentionally meant to be an explicit act in self-construction of both authority and authorship. Significantly, in this text Leopardi decides to perform himself not only as an Italian, but first and foremost as a young man, sharing concerns that pertain to an entire generation:
Io [o Giovani italiani] non vi parlo da maestro ma da compagno non vesorto da capitano, ma vinvito da soldato. Sono coetaneo vostro e condiscepolo vostro, ed esco dalle stesse scuole con voi, cresciuto fra gli studi e gli esercizi vostri, e partecipe de vostri desideri e delle speranze e de timori ([O Young Italians,] I do not speak as a teacher, but as a companion I do not exhort you as a captain, but I invite you as a soldier. I am of the same age as you, I am a fellow disciple of yours, I come from the same schools as you and I have been brought up with the same studies and exercises as yours; I share your same desires, your hopes and your fears)43

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Thus, while attacking the Romantic vogue as the temptation of modernity, aiming to invade Italy through the most subtle of seductions (the charm of newness, which only concedes an illusion of poeticity), Leopardi chooses to place his own experience within a narrative frame constituting the veritable symbolic form of modernity,44 the entrance into the world of a young man that when portrayed in novels takes the name of Bildungsroman. Within this narrative structure, Moretti claims, uncertain exploration of social space (termed by Moretti mobility) and unexpected hopes that are going to remain perennially dissatisfied and restless (interiority)45 determine a shift from real youth into a symbolic one:
at the turn of the eighteenth century much more than just a rethinking of youth was at stake. Virtually without notice, in the dreams and nightmares of the so called double revolution, Europe plunges into modernity, but without possessing a culture of modernity. If youth, therefore, achieves its symbolic centrality this is because Europe has to attach a meaning, not so much to youth, as to modernity In the first respect, youth is chosen as the new epochs specific material sign because of its ability to accentuate modernitys dynamism and instability. Youth is, so to speak,

Introduction modernitys essence, the sign of a world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than in the past If inner dissatisfaction and mobility make novelistic youth symbolic of modernity, they also force it to share in the formlessness of the new epoch, in its protean elusiveness. To become a form, youth must be endowed with a very different, almost opposite feature the very simple and slightly philistine notion that youth does not last forever. Youth is brief, or at any rate circumscribed, and this enable, or rather forces the a priori establishment of a formal constraint on the portrayal of modernity dynamism and limits, restlessness and the sense of an ending: built as it is on such sharp contrasts, the structure of the Bildungsroman will of necessity be intrinsically contradictory.46

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For Leopardi, mobility takes the shape of a constant temptation, concretized in 1819 into a failed attempt to escape from his hometown, and later until 1830, when he would leave forever taking shape as a complex game of departures from and returns to Recanati. At the same time, and as far as interiority and the theme of lost illusions are concerned, it is worth remarking how the very year 1819 witnesses Leopardi drafting the narrative experiment known as Vita abbozzata di Silvio Sarno (Sketched Life of Silvio Sarno),47 in which the autobiographical nature of the vicissitudes of the protagonist are evident to our posthumous gaze, drawing our focus to their ultimate emptiness. From the beginning, Leopardis self-narration incorporates both of the Bildungsromans themes of mobility and interiority, but also celebrates youth and its illusions only after they are gone: the future can only be perceived from a backwards gaze, as would happen in the 1829 poem Le Ricordanze (The Recollections):
E che pensieri immensi, Che dolci sogni mi spir la vista Di quel lontano mar, quei monti azzurri, Che di qua scopro, e che varcare un giorno Io mi pensava, arcani mondi, arcana Felicit fingendo al viver mio! Ignaro del mio fato, e quante volte Questa mia vita dolorosa e nuda Volentier con la morte avrei cangiato.

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(ll. 1927; And what immense ideas, what tender dreams the sight of that far sea inspired in me, those blue hills I can see from here and planned to cross one day as I invented secret worlds, hidden gladness in my life! ignorant of my fate and of how often I would gladly have exchanged this sad and barren life of mine with death)48

The Discourse is therefore Leopardis entrance into the world, the only way he can find for performing heroic actions and having a civil impact on society in an age in which this had become impossible. Conceived as a veritable duel, the Discourse explicitly challenges Ludovico di Bremes arguments in reviewing Byrons Giaour, but actually tackles modernity as a whole, presenting itself as the literary

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manifesto of a highly problematized and revolutionary Classicism that was destined to remain un-followed outside Leopardis oeuvre itself. Hence the main purposes of this book attempting a reassessment of the problem of Italian Romanticism through an analysis of the Classicist/Romantic quarrel and of Leopardis problematic relationship with Romanticism and its main issues, and providing the first complete English translation of his Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry to the wider community of scholars in nineteenth-century and Romantic studies. After following in the first chapter the main themes and arguments animating the quarrel, as well as the ways Leopardi relates to them in his text, in the second one I put Leopardis Discourse into the broader context of his literary and theoretical works from 1816 to 1827, when the publication of the Operette morali signals the beginning of a new phase in his intellectual development. This same year can also be symbolically taken as the terminus ad quem of the Classicist/Romantic quarrel itself, which, after weakening during the early 1820s, witnesses a feeble resurgence in 18256 following the publication of Vincenzo Montis Sermone sulla mitologia (Sermon on Mythology), which reactivates the debate on the use of classical mythology in literature.49 Still, 1827 sees the concurrent publication of Leopardis Operette morali and of the first edition of Alessandro Manzonis novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), two works that although produced from completely different angles and with divergent ideological aims aimed to become the foundational texts of new Italian literature (and the following vicissitudes, witnessing an overwhelming supremacy of Manzonis masterpiece, would open interesting possibilities for speculating about alternate cultural histories: but this would be a topic for another book). In any case, from 1827 on the debate will definitely take other directions, and Leopardis work itself will witness in 18289 the radical experience of the so-called canti pisano-recanatesi (poems written between Pisa and Recanati), leading him to the creation of a new kind of poetry. This moment of sudden and uncontrolled inspiration leads Leopardi to a wide reassessment of his previous poetic activity, leading in 1835 to the final order and arrangement of his book of poems, collectively entitled Canti. One of them, La sera del d di festa (The Evening of the Holiday), had been composed between 1819 and 1821, following the poetic programme outlined in the Discourse, and had been variously re-elaborated over the years. The analysis of this poems complex gestation, together with a telling example of the afterlife of the notion of Romanticism in Leopardis Zibaldone, will be the subject matter of my conclusion, which aims to show how the reflection outlined in the 1818 manifesto leads Leopardi, in the long run, to a radical and unprecedented negotiation of antiquity and modernity, history and memory, within the space of his poetry. Roughly speaking, the main subject matter of this book can be summarized as follows: the history of a young gentlemans entrance into the world, in a context

Introduction

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in which the superficial and apparently motionless restoration of a previous status quo coexists with the living memory of a recent revolutionary past, and in which a young mans search for glory must negotiate with the fact that a sordid battle of books has replaced the possibility of direct action that was once within reach. It is actually the plot of a Bildungsroman, and certainly as we have seen we are not much distant from either Fabrizio Del Dongos vicissitudes in Stendhals The Charterhouse of Parma or, as far the miserable competitiveness of the modern cultural scene is concerned, from Lucien de Rubemprs traumatic encounter with the Parisian literary market in Balzacs Illusions perdues (183743).50 As in Stendhal and Balzac, the post-revolutionary heros story raises significant questions about legitimacy and tradition, usurpation and subversion, and ultimately as we will see about fatherson relationships, and consequently about the ways in which a (usually male) youth may find his place in the world. The family romance of post-revolutionary Europe metamorphoses, in the Italian literary battlefield, into the Classicists and Romantics respective confrontations with tradition, each being a possible answer to a conflict that is quintessentially an Oedipal one. Leopardis answer, as we will see, tries to outline a third possibility, whose relevance does not only apply to the literary field, but rather entails a different way of narratizing the post-revolutionary status of the subject. 4. From this perspective, Giulio Bollati was surely right in seeing Stendhal as luomo della Restaurazione, luomo che, come noi, vive soffrendo la restaurazione (the Restoration man, the man who, like us, lives by suffering the restoration).51 Like us, says Bollati: the second time, the word restoration is spelled with a lowercase initial, signalling how Bollati was speaking of another restoration, different from the Bourbon one, affecting the present and us specifically. In 1991, when he released this interview, restaurazione had for Bollati a specific meaning, already heralded in his use of the word in an article of 1983, in which he complained of the vuoto lasciato dalla frettolosa rinuncia al marxismo e dalla restaurazione della secolare cultura-letteratura italiana (emptiness left by the hasty abandonment of Marxism and by the restoration of the age-old Italian culture-literature).52 Restoration meant therefore the end of the cultural and political dream of the 1960s, concretized by the intellectual ideal of impegno53 that, in Bollatis words, was identified with la trionfante certezza di poter essere comunisti restando eventualmente liberali e letterati sempre (the triumphant confidence of being able to be communists while possibly remaining liberals, and scholars always).54 The Italian Communist Partys actual abandonment of Marxism, and its dissolution, on 3 February 1991, into the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (Democratic Party of the Left), doubtlessly enhanced this impression of political and cultural reflux, and Bollatis last interviews between 1995 and 1996 describe the decay of Italian culture in singularly apocalyptic tones.55

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It is easily understandable, therefore, how Bollati could use Stendhal as a paradigmatic example of someone who had experienced an age of revolutions and had later to face the call back to order of the restoration. From a Stendhalian perspective, the novel of such an age a Chronique de 1830, chronicle of 1830, the second subtitle to Le Rouge et le Noir could not help but be the story of a self-exile, the experience of sublimating Napoleons defeat into the meticulous seduction of Mathilde de La Mole, as the only possibility left by the new order. Stendhals (and Bollatis) perception of the revolutionary years and of the later reflux pertained thus to someone who had directly joined that experience, and who spent later years bitterly regretting the past. Still, Leopardis example provides another paradigmatic case, quite different from that of Stendhal. Leopardis post-revolutionary hero the speaking young subject of the Discourse, Silvio Sarno has not seen the years of revolution, or was too young to take part in them. Something occurred before his birth (Leopardi, as we have said, was born in 1798, one year after Napoleons first Italian campaign) that produced a fracture, after which nothing would be the same, although the Congress of Vienna restored a semblance of order. Paternity is at stake here, once the French Revolution by executing the king-father symbolically dissolved the patriarchal structures from which descend the timelessness and self-legitimization of authority and tradition. Post-revolutionary political authorities will have to prove their legitimacy to rule, in the same way that cultural canons can be (and actually are) questioned by such typically post-revolutionary movements as the avant-garde. From this angle, if we consider how paternity is connected in Lacanian theory to the Symbolic order and therefore to language the fact that post-revolutionary issues find their battlefield in the literary domain does not sound like a substitute or a surrogate for a political confrontation that has become impossible. In fact, it seems rather appropriate. But what about the children of the revolution? 5. In an interview released in 1993 to Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace (born in 1962) described the experience of postmodernism by pointedly employing the metaphor of parenthood:
For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when youre in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while its great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cats-away-lets-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobodys got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and theres a cigarette burn on the couch, and youre the host and its your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. Its not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that its 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebodys thrown up in the umbrella stand and were

Introduction wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. Were kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course were uneasy about the fact that we wish theyd come back I mean, whats wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact arent ever coming back which means were going to have to be the parents.56

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Precisely this passage formed the central core of a paper presented in London, on 2 October 2008, by the Italian writer Wu Ming 1.57 A member of the writing collective called Wu Ming, Wu Ming 1 had published in April of that year a memorandum entitled New Italian Epic,58 later issued as an autonomous book,59 in which he proposed to individuate a rhizomatic strand in Italian literature from 1993 onwards, characterized by a contamination between literary genres and styles, a new attention to ethical and political commitment, and an underlying allegorical nature aimed at mirroring the tensions of the present. Being a peculiarly Italian phenomenon, arising directly from Italys geo-political specificity in the course of the Cold War and from the liberation of energies following its end (which explains the fact that the starting date was fixed in the early 1990s), the New Italian Epic was characterized by a global rethinking of postmodernism. As Wu Ming 1 writes,
Nelle Postille al Nome della Rosa Umberto Eco diede una definizione del postmodernismo divenuta celeberrima. Paragon lautore postmoderno a un amante che vorrebbe dire allamata: Ti amo disperatamente ma sa di non poterlo dire perch una frase da romanzo rosa, da libro di Liala, e allora enuncia: Come direbbe Liala, ti amo disperatamente. Negli anni successivi, labuso di questatteggiamento port a una stagflazione della parola e a una sovrabbondanza di meta-fiction: raccontare del proprio raccontare per non dover raccontare daltro. Oggi la via duscita sostituire la premessa e spostare laccento su quel che importa davvero: Nonostante Liala, ti amo disperatamente. Il clich evocato e subito messo da parte, la dichiarazione damore inizia a ricaricarsi di senso. Ardore civile, collera, dolore per la morte del padre, amour fou ed empatia con chi soffre sono i sentimenti che animano le pagine di libri come Gomorra, Sappiano le mie parole di sangue, Dies irae, Medium, La presa di Macall etc. Ci avviene in assenza di strizzate docchio, senza alibi n scappatoie, con piena rivendicazione di quelle tonalit emotive (in the Postscript to the Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco gave a definition of postmodernism that became very famous. He compared the postmodern author to a lover who would tell his beloved one: I love you desperately, but who knows that he cannot say so because it is a romance-novel sentence, like those of Liala, and he therefore says: As Liala would say, I love you desperately. In later years, the abuse of such an approach resulted in a stagflation of speech and in an overabundance of meta-fiction: telling about ones own act of telling in order not to tell anything else. Nowadays the way out is to change the premise and place the emphasis on what really matters: In spite

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Classicism and Romanticism in Italian Literature of Liala, I love you desperately. By evoking and immediately putting aside the clich, the declaration of love starts again regaining sense. Civil ardour, anger, sorrow for the death of the father, amour fou, and empathy with those who suffer are the feelings that animate the pages of such books as Gomorrah, Sappiano le mie parole di sangue, Dies irae, Medium, La presa di Macall etc. This happens without any sly wink, any alibi or pretext, by fully reclaiming those emotive tones)60

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Quite symptomatically, at the same time as it aroused a significant debate in the Italian media and in foreign universities, the New Italian Epic memorandum met with strong resistance (with several, and praiseworthy, exceptions) from certain areas of the Italian cultural scene and academia, as if Italian culture were unconsciously repeating the diatribe of 1816, focusing on sterile questions about labels and definitions or introducing innumerable distinctions and taxonomies. The sylloge of rhetorical fallacies employed by the detractors of New Italian Epic, compiled by Wu Ming 1 himself, presents striking affinities with the arguments employed by the Classicists of two hundred years before, showing again how the dichotomies between tradition and newness, preservation and avant-garde, national heritage and foreign inspiration, still form a tensive core within Italian culture and society.61 Equally, the whole affair was connected with issues of parenthood, legitimacy and usurpation. Authors belonging to the same generation as Wu Ming 1 (and not only) doubtlessly had to confront with the revolts of 1968 and their legacy which lasted until 1977, and even into the early 1980s in Italian culture and society. In other words, for Wu Ming 1, exactly as for Leopardi, the revolution and the dethronement of the father had already taken place: which, as Foster Wallace would put it, is great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. No surprise, therefore, if paternity after the revolutionary decade of 196877 and the so-called years of lead has become a pressing question in Italian theory and psychoanalysis in recent years, leading the Lacanian psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati to coin the notion of a Telemachus Complex, opposed to the Oedipal one embodied by the revolts of 68 and 77; whereas La condizione desistenza del padre Edipico il conflitto (the condition for the existence of the Oedipal father is conflict),
la novit dei nostri anni sembra essere proprio la mancanza di un conflitto simbolicamente strutturato fra le generazioni. Siamo in presenza cos di una violenza erratica non pi organizzata dallEdipo. I giovani di oggi assomigliano a Telemaco che guarda il mare e che si aspetta che qualcosa dal mare torni (the newness of these years seems precisely to be the absence of a symbolically structured conflict between generations. We witness therefore an erratic violence that is no longer structured by the Oedipus complex. Youths of today resemble more Telemachus who gazes at the sea, and waits for something to return from it)62

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Leopardis answer, as we will see, is quite different, in answering the problem of the fathers absence by moving away from both the Classicists ideal of continuity with tradition and the Romantics liberating dream of dethronement. For Leopardi (as for David Foster Wallace and Wu Ming 1), the father is already dead, and the subject has precisely been deprived of the possibility of performing the parricidal act that alone makes the construction of subjectivity possible. Hence the impossibility of playing the role of Telemachus, the one who constantly and passively waits to be taught that one can do exactly nothing, after an Oedipal upheaval in which he was unable to take part. Hence the incessant attention to language, as the only way of finding ones own place within a Symbolic order that is no longer structured by the father, but rather by his far more castrating absence. For Leopardi, the only conceivable and honest answer to this absence would therefore be to re-charge and to re-enrich with new meanings those very passions, words and things that the death of the father has allegedly made threadbare and clichd: and which are not so if properly employed (this, ultimately, the message of the Discourse). With elegance, we may add, and discretion; and with a deeply ethical commitment.

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