The second is the French Enlightenment, and the forms of politics it took in the Revolution, an event whose inherent weakness—because its instrument was philosophy, not nature—Leopardi recognizes, but which he credits with confronting the decadence of the absolute despotism established by Louis XIV, and with stimulating a tentative return toward nature by setting in motion “great and powerful passions” and restoring some sense of nationhood, “a certain palpitation,” in dead nations, by a means that Leopardi calls “half-philosophy,” which is undoubtedly fleeting, but is yet something (Z 1077–78; cf. 2334–35).

The elasticity of Leopardi’s terminology, between “nature” and “civilization,” “civilization” and “barbarism,” and the intermediate variants of the latter terms, which is further explored in “Nature, society, culture,” is particularly visible in his treatment of social organization across time. It allows for significant fluidity of thought, which is also psychologically and intellectually persuasive in a text that is itself marked by the passing of time, but also the recuperation and reconsideration of that past. The radicalization of Leopardi’s thought, marked by the “Everything is evil” entry written in Bologna on 19 April 1826 (Z 4174ff.), points forward to the trajectory of his great satirical poem, Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia, where the frantic deliberations of the Florentine liberals facing defeat in 1830–31 dwindle into a vision of the afterlife from outer space, and a hollow laugh.

[MC]

Language and Style

For Leopardi, language is everything. The Zibaldone is an extraordinary linguistic and stylistic edifice, the forge of modern Italian prose, but also a laboratory of theoretical and practical analysis of the languages that he knew well: Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish (with an occasional late incursion into English). His is a true and proper obsession that we can usefully trace back to its decidedly philosophical and anti-idealist orientation. Like Giambattista Vico, Leopardi is interested in the history of mankind and in the institutions in which it has taken form; and he is interested in the primal brute matter preexisting before this history, the silva, the original forest in which man, as Vico states at the beginning of the New Science, found refuge from the condition of barbarity: this is language itself (Z 1268, 1276–83). Nothing human exists outside of language; and everything, as Leopardi reaffirms—ideas, literature, style, national history—is incarnated in and by language. “Ideas are enclosed and as if bound up in words, like gems in rings, in fact they are incarnated like the soul in the body” (Z 2584, see also 1657). This conception is clearly inspired by the thought of Condillac and the idéologues, mediated by Soave and Sulzer; but Leopardi’s striking metaphor takes on unexpected weight when used by an intellectual of Christian formation.

Leopardi’s strong sense of history puts him in the same family as the Rousseau of the Essai sur l’origine des langues (which, however, he did not know); but Leopardi demonstrates a greater analytical concreteness that he picked up from the methodology of natural history (Buffon, read by the poet at an early age) and from his familiarity with antiquarians and interpreters of ancient inscriptions. Words are classical relics, archaeological ruins, fossilized bones of extinct animals. Leopardi hypothesizes the primordial linguistic beginnings of history, forms of expression not yet articulated (Z 1102), then gradually the creation of the alphabet, the distinction between letters, the division into individual languages from a single origin; and above all, the infinite process of differentiation by means of continual linguistic variations whose traces we find in those museums of the natural history of languages that are his beloved historical dictionaries: Du Cange (Greek and Latin), Forcellini (Latin), Scapula (Greek), Alberti (French), and naturally the Crusca (Italian). And this wide spectrum of philological riches does not even take into account Leopardi’s interest in Hebrew, or—and his was among the first in Italy—in languages such as Sanskrit and Chinese.

By virtue of his etymological and morphological competence, and his reconstruction of entire families of languages, Leopardi took an important step beyond the fantastical etymologies proposed by Vico; and in fact, he anticipates methodologies and discoveries from the yet-to-be-founded discipline of historical linguistics. But as was also the case with Vico, Leopardi’s analyses sought answers to questions that were more general and philosophical in nature. Languages develop by distancing themselves from nature along a trajectory of corruption that parallels civilization’s growth in rationality, avers Leopardi (Z 1459, 2112–14). At their origins, languages are “naturally and blithely irregular” (Z 978), and their distinctive characteristics are freedom, individuality, the infinite richness of a few but powerful lexical roots, indefiniteness, and poeticity. Then, pronunciation and graphic systems gradually and inevitably move to unify them so that they become artificial systems, codified by lexicographers; and as they gain in precision, they lose all contact with that natural, oral, and maternal origin which alone can confer efficacy, freshness, and energy to a language (Z 1247–48).

Leopardi recuperates the anthropological lesson of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia while also anticipating the tension between the two polarities of language that Ferdinand De Saussure will call parole and langue. He then applies these to a concrete schema that is at once historical and metaphysical-theological: from the ancient to the modern, from the extreme poetic freedom of ancient Greek and Hebrew to the most geometrical of languages, written and modern par excellence, French. It is a complex scheme, and in no way simplistic: Leopardi does not take a position in favor of either of these two dimensions, but rather demonstrates their interaction (see, for example, his thoughts concerning the possibility of universal languages; and Z 1028 for a discussion of English). His reflection is oriented above all toward the present and the future, and asks to be understood as a cultural politics (see his proposal for a universal European dictionary, Z 1213–29).

After centuries of debate about “la questione della lingua” (the language question)—from Dante to Bembo and Speroni, to Monti and Perticari, all names cited frequently in the Zibaldone, up to Manzoni (interestingly, never named), and anticipating Graziadio Ascoli—Leopardi proposes, along the model of the Greeks (Z 2829–31), to graft modernity onto the trunk of tradition. Many of the metaphors he uses are borrowed from the vegetable kingdom; language is like a plant that must be cultivated but not denatured, it must grow by setting down its roots. Language should not be locked into the stylistic norms of the Trecento (fourteenth century), nor to the strict use of dictionaries, as the purists would have it; but neither should it imitate the artificiality of French. Above all, a language should not be composed primarily of termini—terms that signify only as nomenclature, and which narrowly define an object—but, rather, should flourish as a living organism, comprised of parole, words (Leopardi picks up here and revalorizes the distinction from Beccaria, Z 109–10; 1234–36): parole are capable of gathering in “accessory ideas,” that is to say, the multiple and dynamic interconnections of reality itself.

There is no contradiction, therefore, between Leopardi’s appreciation of the precision of the lexicon of scientific writers, on the one hand, and of the ambiguity of poetic words, on the other. Leopardi gestures toward a language that would be at one and the same time clear and indefinite, simple and unfamiliar, modern and archaic, true and beautiful (Z 1356–61); and which would reduce the distinction between the oral and the written to a minimum (Z 1247–48). This series of tensions between opposites gives birth to the straightforward and elegant prose of the Zibaldone, unequaled in the history of Italian literature (see Leopardi’s definition of his own style on Z 950, 3050). Nietzsche was certainly correct, even though he did not know the Zibaldone, when he observed that Leopardi was the greatest prose writer of his century. No other writer had sought and achieved a greater perfection of style; but this perfection, as Leopardi himself says, should not be perceived as conscious and artificial, or as recherché; it must appear spontaneous. Thus, by means of careful study, the writer should seek to return to a lost condition, one extremely close to the vitality and creativity of oral cultures, to a simple but also passionate style, free, irregular, full of both defects and exceptions (see, in the light of these qualities, Leopardi’s comparison between the myth of Homer, the “non-writer” poet, and Virgil, who, however beloved, represents the “literary” poet: Z 2977–79).

The paradoxical motto of Leopardi—this most learned, most grammatical writer, who almost never makes a mistake—is that beauty “is a slap at universal grammar,” and indeed, is an “infraction of its laws” (Z 2419). This leads us to the aesthetic of the ugly and the imperfect, the search for the strange and for contrasts, the reflections on the “je ne sais quoi” (from Montesquieu) or “sprezzatura” (from Castiglione), on the rapid style of Horace, and on the interrupted or intermittent style of the earliest prose writers (Herodotus) and in the ancient Hebrews. Nothing terrifies Leopardi—stylistically speaking—as much as boredom and uniformity. What underlies all of these literary-historical considerations, the analyses of specific texts and the theoretical proposals, is the unifying idea of a form of writing that would invite the participation of the reader, inviting his reaction.