introduction from classicism and romanticism in italian literature

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Copyright – 1 – INTRODUCTION My paradise lies ‘in the shadow of my sword’. At bottom, all I had done was to put one of Stendhal’s maxims into practice: he advises one to make one’s entrance into society by means of a duel. And how well I had chosen my opponent! Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1888) Ta génération est née d’un événement qu’elle n’a 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 tutt’al più 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 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 devel- opments. e 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. is 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 aſter all these centuries, Caesar and Alexander had a successor. e 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

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Page 1: Introduction from Classicism and Romanticism in Italian Literature

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INTRODUCTION

My paradise lies ‘in the shadow of my sword’. At bottom, all I had done was to put one of Stendhal’s maxims into practice: he advises one to make one’s entrance into society by means of a duel. And how well I had chosen my opponent!

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1888)

Ta génération est née d’un événement qu’elle n’a 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 fi nora in Napoli e nella felice Campania, in Roma usata tutt’al più 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

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 defi nitely have a deep impact on its later devel-opments. Th e fi rst 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. Th is 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 aft er all these centuries, Caesar and Alexander had a successor. Th e 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

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to the grounds by the emperors of Germany. Since they had become ‘loyal subjects’, their main business was printing sonnets on little pink taff eta handkerchiefs when-ever a girl belonging to some noble or wealthy family happened to get married … Which eff eminate 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

At least this – in 1838, while draft ing the much-celebrated incipit of Th e Char-terhouse of Parma – was Stendhal’s 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 battlefi eld during and aft er 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 Staël, who had fi rst launched the dispute through an article published in January 1816 in the jour-nal Biblioteca italiana, had died in 1817.3 Th ree years later, at the age of forty, Ludovico di Breme passed away. Silvio Pellico (1789–1854), Federico Confa-lonieri (1785–1846) and Pietro Borsieri (1788–1852), who between 1818 and 1819 had animated the literary and scientifi c journal Il Conciliatore, experienced a bitter imprisonment in the Špilberk fortress in Brno, Moravia. Th ey were later forced into exile – to the United States, France or Belgium – like their former companion Giovanni Berchet (1783–1851). Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), 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 Th e Charterhouse of Parma, the problem of Italian Romanticism had therefore been pushed into the background. Th e 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 fi lo-Romantic clergyman and scholar Giuseppe Montani (1789–1833) wrote that ‘In Italia … si cominciano a stampar libri … ove si asserisce che un romantico non può 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 ‘l’idea di romantico a quella di malfattore’ (the idea of the Romantic and that of the criminal).4 And yet Stendhal explicitly pointed out how, aft er the battles of Valmy, Austerlitz and Marengo, even the act of writing could no longer be the same: and that if a diff erent kind of literature had been possible in Italy – diff erent, namely, from the occasional sonnets printed on handkerchiefs – the

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ultimate reason had to be found in that date of 15 May 1796, which had opened an irremediable fi ssure between a ‘before’ and an ‘aft er’.

From Stendhal’s perspective, the Italians of the Ancien Régime were a ‘slumbering people’ who, having forgotten their former glory, had welcomed the triumphal arrival of Napoleon’s 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-fi ve and their com-manding general, who was twenty-seven, passed for being the oldest man in his army’.5 Quite interestingly, Stendhal located Italy’s past ‘miracles of valour and of genius’ in the political fi ghts 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 Alex-ander the Great and Julius Caesar, Stendhal reaffi rmed nothing but Napoleon’s 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 Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and Suetonius’s Th e Twelve Caesars. Th rough revolutionary and Napoleonic propa-ganda, 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

Th e shock caused by the Napoleonic army had also impacted Italy’s literary scene, suddenly transforming, to the eyes of reawakened Italians, all of the litera-ture they had been producing up to that point into something ‘ridiculous and sometimes odious’. Stendhal made the conventional sonnets printed ‘on little pink taff eta handkerchiefs’ into the ironic emblem of a certain kind of literary produc-tion 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 celebra-tion of mundane events; an occasional, frivolous and mawkish kind of literature, profoundly detached from reality and therefore quintessentially artifi cial. Hav-ing 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 (æmulatio) and in the acknowl-edgement that ‘doing like’ the ancients (and even outdoing them) was possible. Whereas the latter was identifi ed by Stendhal with a propulsion directed towards newness and change, Classicism epitomized the inactivity of pre-revolutionary Italy, which Napoleon defi nitively dissolved in the Battle of Lodi.

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2. In November 1816, Marie-Henri Beyle – not yet Stendhal – was in Milan. Th e quarrel between the Classicists and the Romantics was at its peak, and Milan was its epicentre. Aft er Staël’s 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. Staël 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 all’ingiustizia 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 letter-arie 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 infl uences and models – an operation that had been initiated by the Swiss Germaine de Staël – 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 simultaneità di primato e di decadenza, di inferiorità oggettiva ipercompensata da un senso invitto di superiorità, si istituisce uno degli schemi più caratteristici e più stabili dell’intera storia italiana. L’impietosa perseveranza degli stranieri nel con-siderare l’Italia 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 Italy’s entire history is grounded in the simultaneity of primacy and decadence, and of actual inferiority overcom-pensated 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 fi xed rules in the competition of opposite ethnocentrisms, rules that are dictated in a very early phase)10

Th e entry of Stendhal’s journal for 12 December 1816 vividly describes the atmosphere of the fi rst months of the quarrel. Th e setting of the passage is the Milanese theatre La Scala:

I am a daily visitor to signor di Breme’s box at la Scala. Th e company there assem-bled 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 devo-tee of Madame de Staël, 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

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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. Th ere is also il marchese Ermes Visconti, whose notions appear sensible, sound and even tolerably precise, notwith-standing his profound admiration for Kant … Signor Confalonieri, a man of staunch courage and a true patriot, is a regular visitor … Th ere is also signor Grisostomo Ber-chet, who has taken a certain number of poems by Bürger 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 fi ft een or twenty visitors, each in his own fi eld a distinguished man; and when the conversation fl ags, there is always the music.11

In Ludovico di Breme’s 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 diff erent backgrounds and from diff erent polit-ical positions, in the political and intellectual life of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy from 1805 to 1814. At least at the beginning, the Classicist/Roman-tic 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 Eugène de Beauharnais’s kingdom, and who, moreover, had been inspired by that experience – even moving from anti-Napoleonic perspectives, as it was in Confalonieri’s case – in draft ing a programme of national independence. It would be wrong, however, to excessively schematize the quarrel in a political way. Actually, with signifi cant exceptions – as is the case of Trussardo Caleppio (b. 1784) and his fi lo-Austrian journal L’Attaccabrighe, 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 mov-ing from diff erent and oft en clashing positions, recognized the necessity and the inevitability of Italian national independence. Th e quarrel works therefore as a fi rst laboratory for the defi nition 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 aff ect the political process known as the Risorgimento, in particular the movement’s quintessentially elitist nature. Th e 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. Th e inspirational fi gure is Madame de Staël, who in her treatise on Ger-many, De l’Allemagne (1810–13), had ‘t[aken] the German term ‘Romantic’ as a perfect label for her own global agenda, and sold this private agenda to Europe’s half-formed anti-Classical reactions’.14 Quite subtly, in her aforementioned 1816 article in Biblioteca italiana, Staël 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, identifi ed with Northern European trends. From this perspective, Staël’s is a particularly ‘Meridionist’ gaze.15 Th roughout the text, Staël employs images that come interestingly close to the dialectic between slumber and reawakening artic-ulated in Stendhal’s incipit to Th e Charterhouse of Parma. Unless they undertook a quick process of modernization, Staël writes, Italians would stagnate ‘in un sonno oscuro, d’onde 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 anti-cate, anzi il resto d’Europa le ha già abbandonate e dimentiche’ (fables have been long outdated; in fact the rest of Europe has already abandoned and forgotten them).17 Th e Italian literary scene, to Staël’s 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 d’oro’ (erudite scholars who constantly go scratching amongst the ancient ashes, where they may fi nd at best a speck of gold);18 on the other, those writers who ‘raccozzano suoni vôti d’ogni pensiero, esclamazioni, declamazioni, invocazioni, che … trovan sordi i cuori altrui, perché 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 writer’s own heart).19 For the Napoleonic Stendhal and the anti-Napoleonic Germaine de Staël the problem is therefore the same: the age of revolutions has opened a fi ssure at all levels, and to go back is impossible. Th e post-revolutionary writer must therefore choose between sleep and reawakening, between ‘profound emotions’ and empty for-malism, and between inanity and action. In other words, even if neither Staël nor Stendhal employs the quarrel’s keywords in explicit terms, the choice for them both is between a stale and slumbering Classicism and a (Romantic?) wor-ship of passions that ‘exhale from the writer’s own heart’. Th us, in the space of twenty-two years, and from the two opposite sides of the political barricade, Madame de Staël and Stendhal agree on a specifi c point: that as far as literature is concerned, one surely cannot go back to sonnets printed on handkerchiefs.

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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 fi rstborn of an ultra-conservative aristocratic family from a small village in the Papal States. His father’s memoirs include a signifi cant anecdote: at Napoleon’s entrance in the Marches region in 1797, Leopardi’s father Monaldo had the opportunity to see the General from the town hall’s window, but preferred not to attend, ‘giudicando non doversi a quel tristo l’onore 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 Leopardi’s contribution to the quarrel, once the ‘scoundrel’ will no longer be Napoleon the parvenu, but moder-nity as a whole. Whereas for Monaldo ‘tale cultura è 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 fi rst 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, Leopardi’s fi rst experiments in writing – philological treatises, scholarly compilations from ancient authors, and translations from the classics – look, at fi rst glance, like a perfect example of the attitudes criticized by Madame de Staël in 1816.22 Leopardi’s Discourse therefore appears to be an ambiguous and complex textual object, whose peculiarities make it diffi cult to frame within fi xed schemes, especially within the very narrow ones of the Classicist/Romantic quar-rel. Aiming to support the arguments of Classicism, it equally proposes itself as an artistic manifesto for a renovation of Italian culture, pursued through a criti-cal 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 reaffi rmed 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 Leopardi’s challenge to the most crucial problems of European early nine-teenth-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. Leopardi’s forma-tion had been that of an early nineteenth-century classical philologist, enriched

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by the readings that he could fi nd in his father’s vast, if dispersive, library, mainly composed of books randomly bought from the libraries of suppressed monas-teries and religious congregations during the French domination.23 Moreover, operating in such a provincial context as the Papal States of Bourbon Restora-tion times, Leopardi’s 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, Leopardi’s 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 aft erlife. On 27 March 1818, Leopardi sent the fi rst 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 Milan-ese press (Lo Spettatore ceased publication in December 1818, and Stella himself was part of the editorial staff for Il Conciliatore).24 Th e 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 post-humously published in 1906.27

Th e 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 fi rst 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 reser-vations to a broadly intended category of ‘Romanticism’. Th e point, of course, is not to support (as has oft en been done) the idea of Leopardi as a Romantic malgré 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 clas-sical antiquity and the Renaissance, a problem that would be incomprehensible

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for the German Romantics (although Goethe, who had extensively travelled throughout the peninsula, understood well how this constituted the specifi city of the Italian case). For the British Romantics, too, John Keats for example, this was simply not a problem.28 Th e 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 Régime, giving birth between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to a massive pro-gramme of intellectual renovation in the name of Classicism – pursued in poetry by Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina’s treatise Della ragion poetica (1708; On Poetic Reason) and in theatre by the example of Scipione Maff ei’s Merope (1713) – that paved the way for Italian Neoclassicism, later concretized in the works of such authors as Giuseppe Parini (1729–99), Vittorio Alfi eri (1749–1803) and Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827).29 Ignoring or misunderstanding the Italian singularity on this aspect means engendering a double optical illusion, which has aff ected Ital-ian 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 Leopardi’s), and may have led to a distorted perception of the context of Leop-ardi’s oeuvre, and of the Discourse specifi cally. Th e lack of attention given to the Quattrocento, the Renaissance and the eighteenth century in Francesco De Sanctis’s monumental Storia della letteratura italiana, published in 1870–1 aft er Italian political unifi cation, shows how the periodization proposed by the Mil-anese Romantics became a dominant position, thus making Leopardi’s choices in terms of references and canon – as testifi ed, for instance, by the Zibaldone – virtually incomprehensible to a modern audience. Th e survival of this theoreti-cal frame has therefore engendered a systematic undermining of the Classicist position in the course of the quarrel, as well as an objective diffi culty in plac-ing Leopardi’s 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. Th e most eloquent symptom of the puzzling nature of Italian Romanticism is the collection Roman-ticism in National Context, edited in 1988 by Roy Porter and Mikuláš 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 François Hartog claims, literary quarrels and ‘battles of books’ are never neutral acts.31 Every dispute opposing the ‘Ancients’ against the ‘Moderns’ is a breach (brèche) – a term that Hartog borrows from Hannah Arendt32 – through which a new ‘regimen of historicity’ (régime d’historicité) 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. Th e quarrel would therefore appear as a monadic unity in which past and future coexist, a dialectic image – to speak in Walter Benjamin’s terms – embodying a tension without solving it, mirroring in a prism-like fashion the indefi niteness of histori-cal transition. Like Aby Warburg’s ‘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 Régime Italy. It would not be improper to speak of the Napoleonic Wars as a cultural trauma, assuming – with Jeff rey C. Alexander – that ‘Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horren-dous 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 fi ssure, can be understood as a process of repression, in which the ‘repressed’ ele-ment secretly resurfaces within the domain of literature, polarized in a dynamic tension between tradition and change, fi xedness 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 palimp-sest and a testing ground of the Italy to come.

Th is consideration also allows us to bypass the problems of literary defi ni-tions, and to put in their place the tensions that arise in the aft ermath of political, social and cultural trauma, whose full extent is perceived and interpreted by Leopardi with an unprecedented acuity. In a 1991 article Franco D’Intino compared Leopardi’s intellectual parabola to the social ascent of Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s 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 aft er Napoleon’s 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 recogni-tion, 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 pro-vincial context, and within the enclosed space of a library that, by borrowing Michel Foucault’s words, we could call an ‘espace à la fois réel 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 infl aming Milan as an opportunity for making his entrance into the world. His fi rst attempt, aft er a fi rst 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 Staël’s article and tellingly opened by a metaphor evoking the image of a duel: ‘Io … non taccio il mio nome perché la illustre Dama [Staël] 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 fi ght with his visor lowered).39 Two years later, in the Zibaldone, he notes that, having read Ludovico di Breme’s review of Byron’s Giaour in the jour-nal Lo Spettatore,40 he intends to write a detailed answer, this entry thus being the fi rst 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 perché ci ho veduto una serie di ragionamenti che può imbrogliare o inquietare, e io per mia natura non sono lontano dal dubbio anche sopra le cose credute indubitabili, però avendo nella mente le risposte che a quei ragionamenti si possono e debbono fare, per mia quiete le scrivo.

(I have just fi nished reading in the 91st issue of Lo Spettatore Ludovico di Breme’s 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 argu-ments, I write them down for the sake of my own peace of mind)41

‘Modern’ and ‘Romantic’ are, for Leopardi, synonyms, and by questioning Breme’s Romanticism Leopardi defi es what he perceives to be the most danger-ous 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 osser-varle, e noi pigliamo in mano un poeta, e quando voleano ritrarre una passione s’immaginavano di sentirla, e noi ci facciamo a leggere una tragedia, e quando voleano parlare dell’universo 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 fi rst 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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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

Th e nature of this fracture pervades Leopardi’s thought, not in the sense of a res-toration of antiquity, which he feels to be impossible, but as the tension towards the attainment of an ancient eff ect through the fullest acknowledgement of the intervened fracture. All of Leopardi’s literary outcomes of these years, his political speeches and poems, his autobiographical sketches, and his poems on various sub-jects, move in the direction of a paradoxical negotiation of antiquity with modernity, and of the experiment of being quintessentially ancient by fully accepting the chal-lenge posed by modernity. Within this context, the Discourse is intentionally meant to be an explicit act in self-construction of both authority and authorship.

Signifi cantly, in this text Leopardi decides to perform himself not only as an Italian, but fi rst 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 v’esorto da capitano, ma v’invito 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 fel-low 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

Th us, while attacking the Romantic vogue as the temptation of modernity, aim-ing 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 dissatisfi ed 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 fi rst respect, youth is chosen as the new epoch’s ‘specifi c material sign’ … because of its ability to accentuate modernity’s dynamism and instability. Youth is, so to speak,

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modernity’s ‘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 ‘sym-bolic’ 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 diff erent, 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 end-ing’: built as it is on such sharp contrasts, the structure of the Bildungsroman will of necessity be intrinsically contradictory.46

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 depar-tures 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 draft ing 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, Leopardi’s self-narration incorporates both of the Bildungsroman’s themes of mobility and interiority, but also celebrates youth and its illusions only aft er they are gone: the future can only be perceived from a backwards gaze, as would happen in the 1829 poem ‘Le Ricordanze’ (Th e Recollections):

E che pensieri immensi,Che dolci sogni mi spirò la vistaDi quel lontano mar, quei monti azzurri,Che di qua scopro, e che varcare un giornoIo mi pensava, arcani mondi, arcanaFelicità fi ngendo al viver mio!Ignaro del mio fato, e quante volteQuesta mia vita dolorosa e nudaVolentier con la morte avrei cangiato.

(ll. 19–27; 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 oft en I would gladly have exchanged this sad and barren life of mine with death)48

Th e Discourse is therefore Leopardi’s entrance into the world, the only way he can fi nd 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 Dis-course explicitly challenges Ludovico di Breme’s arguments in reviewing Byron’s 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 des-tined to remain un-followed outside Leopardi’s oeuvre itself.

Hence the main purposes of this book – attempting a reassessment of the problem of Italian Romanticism through an analysis of the Classicist/Roman-tic quarrel and of Leopardi’s problematic relationship with Romanticism and its main issues, and providing the fi rst complete English translation of his Dis-course of an Italian on Romantic Poetry to the wider community of scholars in nineteenth-century and Romantic studies. Aft er following in the fi rst chapter the main themes and arguments animating the quarrel, as well as the ways Leop-ardi relates to them in his text, in the second one I put Leopardi’s 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. Th is same year can also be symbolically taken as the terminus ad quem of the Classicist/Romantic quarrel itself, which, aft er weakening during the early 1820s, witnesses a feeble resurgence in 1825–6 fol-lowing the publication of Vincenzo Monti’s 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 Leopardi’s Oper-ette morali and of the fi rst edition of Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I promessi sposi (Th e Betrothed), two works that – although produced from completely diff erent angles and with divergent ideological aims – aimed to become the foundational texts of new Italian literature (and the following vicissitudes, wit-nessing an overwhelming supremacy of Manzoni’s 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 defi nitely take other directions, and Leopardi’s work itself will witness – in 1828–9 – 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. Th is moment of sudden and uncontrolled inspiration leads Leopardi to a wide reassessment of his previous poetic activity, leading in 1835 to the fi nal order and arrangement of his book of poems, collectively entitled Canti. One of them, ‘La sera del dì di festa’ (Th e Evening of the Holiday), had been composed between 1819 and 1821, following the poetic programme outlined in the Dis-course, and had been variously re-elaborated over the years. Th e analysis of this poem’s complex gestation, together with a telling example of the aft erlife of the notion of Romanticism in Leopardi’s Zibaldone, will be the subject matter of my conclusion, which aims to show how the refl ection outlined in the 1818 mani-festo 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 gentleman’s entrance into the world, in a context

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in which the superfi cial and apparently motionless restoration of a previous status quo coexists with the living memory of a recent revolutionary past, and in which a young man’s 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 Dongo’s vicissitudes in Stendhal’s Th e Charterhouse of Parma or, as far the miserable competitiveness of the modern cul-tural scene is concerned, from Lucien de Rubempré’s traumatic encounter with the Parisian literary market in Balzac’s Illusions perdues (1837–43).50 As in Stend-hal and Balzac, the post-revolutionary hero’s story raises signifi cant questions about legitimacy and tradition, usurpation and subversion, and ultimately – as we will see – about father–son relationships, and consequently about the ways in which a (usually male) youth may fi nd his place in the world. Th e family romance of post-revolutionary Europe metamorphoses, in the Italian literary battlefi eld, into the Classicists’ and Romantics’ respective confrontations with tradition, each being a possible answer to a confl ict that is quintessentially an Oedipal one. Leopardi’s answer, as we will see, tries to outline a third possibility, whose rel-evance does not only apply to the literary fi eld, but rather entails a diff erent way of narratizing the post-revolutionary status of the subject.

4. From this perspective, Giulio Bollati was surely right in seeing Stendhal as ‘l’uomo della Restaurazione, l’uomo che, come noi, vive soff rendo la res-taurazione’ (the Restoration man, the man who, like us, lives by suff ering 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, diff erent from the Bourbon one, aff ecting the present and us specifi -cally. In 1991, when he released this interview, ‘restaurazione’ had for Bollati a specifi c 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 Ital-ian 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 Bollati’s words, was identifi ed with ‘la trionfante certezza di poter essere comunisti restando eventualmente liberali – e letterati sempre’ (the triumphant confi dence of being able to be communists while possibly remaining liberals, and scholars always).54 Th e Italian Communist Party’s 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 impres-sion of political and cultural refl ux, and Bollati’s 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 para-digmatic 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 Napoleon’s defeat into the meticulous seduction of Mathilde de La Mole, as the only possibility left by the new order. Stendhal’s (and Bollati’s) perception of the revolutionary years and of the later refl ux pertained thus to someone who had directly joined that experience, and who spent later years bitterly regretting the past. Still, Leopardi’s example pro-vides another paradigmatic case, quite diff erent from that of Stendhal. Leopardi’s 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 aft er Napoleon’s fi rst Italian campaign) that produced a fracture, aft er 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 fi nd their battlefi eld 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 McCaff ery, David Foster Wal-lace (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 you’re 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 it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody’s got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there’s a cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host and it’s your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re

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wishing the revel would end. Th e 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. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back – I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasi-est feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back – which means we’re going to have to be the parents.56

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 writ-ing 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 lit-erature 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 Italy’s geo-political specifi city 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 fi xed 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 defi nizione del post-modernismo divenuta celeberrima. Paragonò l’autore postmoderno a un amante che vorrebbe dire all’amata: ‘Ti amo disperatamente’ ma sa di non poterlo dire perché è una frase da romanzo rosa, da libro di Liala, e allora enuncia: ‘Come direbbe Liala, ti amo disperatamente’. Negli anni successivi, l’abuso di quest’atteggiamento portò a una stagfl azione della parola e a una sovrabbondanza di ‘meta-fi ction’: raccontare del proprio raccontare per non dover raccontare d’altro. Oggi la via d’uscita è sostituire la premessa e spostare l’accento su quel che importa davvero: ‘Nonostante Liala, ti amo disperatamente’. Il cliché è evocato e subito messo da parte, la dichiarazione d’amore inizia a ricaricarsi di senso. Ardore civile, collera, dolore per la morte del padre, amour fou ed empatia con chi soff re sono i sentimenti che animano le pagine di libri come Gomorra, Sappiano le mie parole di sangue, Dies irae, Medium, La presa di Macallè etc. Ciò avviene in assenza di strizzate d’occhio, senza alibi né scappatoie, con piena rivendicazione di quelle tonalità emotive

(in the Postscript to the Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco gave a defi nition of postmod-ernism 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 stagfl ation of speech and in an overabundance of meta-fi ction: telling about one’s 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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of Liala, I love you desperately’. By evoking and immediately putting aside the cliché, 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 suff er are the feelings that animate the pages of such books as Gomorrah, Sappiano le mie parole di sangue, Dies irae, Medium, La presa di Macallè etc. Th is happens without any sly wink, any alibi or pretext, by fully reclaiming those emotive tones)60

Quite symptomatically, at the same time as it aroused a signifi cant 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 uncon-sciously repeating the diatribe of 1816, focusing on sterile questions about labels and defi nitions or introducing innumerable distinctions and taxonomies. Th e syl-loge of rhetorical fallacies employed by the detractors of New Italian Epic, compiled by Wu Ming 1 himself, presents striking affi nities 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 aff air was connected with issues of parenthood, legiti-macy 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 cul-ture 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 – aft er the revolutionary decade of 1968–77 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 d’esistenza del padre Edipico è … il confl itto’ (the condition for the existence of the Oedipal father is confl ict),

la novità dei nostri anni sembra essere proprio la mancanza di un confl itto simbolica-mente strutturato fra le generazioni. Siamo in presenza così di una violenza erratica non più organizzata dall’Edipo. … 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 struc-tured confl ict between generations. We witness therefore an erratic violence that is no longer structured by the Oedipus complex. Youths of today resemble more Telema-chus who gazes at the sea, and waits for something to return from it)62

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Leopardi’s answer, as we will see, is quite diff erent, in answering the problem of the father’s absence by moving away from both the Classicists’ ideal of continu-ity 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 perform-ing the parricidal act that alone makes the construction of subjectivity possible. Hence the impossibility of playing the role of Telemachus, the one who con-stantly and passively waits to be taught that one can do exactly nothing, aft er an Oedipal upheaval in which he was unable to take part. Hence the incessant attention to language, as the only way of fi nding one’s own place within a Sym-bolic 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 clichéd: and which are not so if properly employed (this, ultimately, the message of the Discourse). With elegance, we may add, and discre-tion; and with a deeply ethical commitment.