“In the Flash of an Eye a Multiplicity of Things”:
2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.49.1.1
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoJames Joyce's literary method notoriously relies on intertextuality and on the construction of a complex web of references that encompasses different historical periods, literary traditions and cultures, and even aesthetic notions deriving from visual and kinetic arts. Such an interdisciplinary and intertextual method reaches its climax in Finnegans Wake, a work aimed at recreating, through language and through a profound awareness of etymology and philology, the whole history of humankind in its evolutionary process. Joyce famously incorporates quotations and references in a new hybrid language in which all particles of speech atomistically combine and create a simultaneous narration in which different spatiotemporal realities merge. Within such an intertextual method—which is already operational in Joyce's early and more traditional works such as Dubliners and Chamber Music—the European romantic tradition plays a crucial role.Joyce often draws on romantic authors such as Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, at once demonstrating, as has been extensively argued by a number of critics, his debt to their writing and his ambivalent attitude toward the romantic tradition and its limitations.1 Among the sources that Joyce derives from the romantic tradition, one should indubitably include Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), to whom Joyce obliquely refers in selected but significant instances, which, thus far, have received scarce critical attention. In light of Joyce's extremely precise compositional method, those references appear more than coincidental, and they provide an insightful and novel interpretation of Joyce's ideas on the aesthetic category of the romantic. As a matter of fact, Leopardi represents a unique romantic voice that itself surprisingly also reveals an awareness of the limits of the romantic rule. In addition, his approach to poetry combines both literary and philosophical elements, in a fashion that significantly paves the way to the modernist canon. This explains why, after the publication of the complete collection of the Canti, in 1845, Leopardi's fame grew exponentially, as recently noted by Alessandro Carrera, who pointed out how authors such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sainte-Beuve, and Melville “recognized in him one of the most important voices of nineteenth-century literature.”2 Joyce explicitly and significantly refers to Leopardi in his early essay on Irish poet James Clarence Mangan (1907), in the notebooks for Finnegans Wake, and, as I intend to suggest, in at least two passages of Finnegans Wake. Although brief and apparently unintentional, such allusions reveal how significant Leopardi's influence was in Joyce's early formation. Concurrently, a close comparative reading of both authors uncovers salient similarities that shed further light on Joyce's poetics. In addition, it is worth mentioning that the two authors' lives and personalities show a number of remarkable connections both on a literary and on a biographical level, which may further account for Joyce's fascination with the Italian poet. The two authors were both radical thinkers who responded to historical crises in a revolutionary way; they had a similar nomadic and erratic lives characterized by self-exile, and they often suffered the troubles of censorship for overtly opposing their countries, cultures, and religions.3As Scarlet Baron remarks, according to C. P. Curran Joyce had been reading Leopardi since 1901 as part of his university course and, later, according to Richard Ellmann, his Triestine library held a copy of Leopardi's Poesie.4 John McCourt notes passages from several Italian authors and annotations on Leopardi's book Pensieri in the large notebook Joyce used for his Italian lessons with Alessandro Francini Bruni during his years in Trieste.5 Joyce especially focuses on the sections in which Leopardi expresses the existential troubles derived from censorship, which undoubtedly appealed to him as he was painfully experiencing negative reactions to the publication of Dubliners.6 What is more revealing, in the light of this comparative analysis, however, is the seemingly offhand reference in “James Clarence Mangan,” an essay that indirectly reveals Joyce's opinions on the Italian poet. Here, Mangan is declared “weaker than Leopardi, for he has not the courage of his own despair.”7 The sentence unmistakably asserts Joyce's admiration for Leopardi by pointing out the strength and the courage of the poet in facing a personal and professional life disseminated by difficulties and brave efforts. In this respect, Scarlet Baron's genetic study of Flaubert and Joyce highlights an allusion to Leopardi in notebook VI.B.8, in which Joyce writes the sentence “Leopardi changes not / his spots.”8 As Baron argues, the sentence is a variation of a biblical idiom from Jeremiah, in which the metaphor of the leopard was originally used to stress the impossibility of change (“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?”). Joyce turns the biblical question into a negative affirmation in order “to assert both fixity and change.”9 Baron notes that Joyce's concern was obviously with intertextuality, as he shared Leopardi's interest in originality and erudition, in the idea that identifying marks imposed by society and culture, though being immutable like the leopard's spots, do not prevent a mutation that can lead to a radical change in the artist's formation. In addition, it can be argued that the sentence alludes to Leopardi's boldness and his determination not to change his ideals, not to accept any political and existential compromise with his environment. The famous Leopardian heroic declaration, “I will never bow to any person in the world and my life will be a continuous despise of despises and derision of derisions,” besides strikingly echoing Stephen Dedalus's Luciferian “non serviam,” can be connected to Joyce's brief but intense references to Leopardi in “James Clarence Mangan” and in Finnegans Wake.10Joyce's 1907 essay on Mangan denounces the Irish tradition fueled by Celtic Renaissance, and it explores the theme of exile and the function of art in recreating the truth of experience. It opens with a striking metaphor that considers poets as “storage batteries of a new energy,” another explicit reference to the simultaneous novelty and fixity that must be seen as the common ground among “certain poets,” among which we can surely include Leopardi: There are certain poets who, in addition to their virtue of revealing aspects of the human consciousness to us that were unknown until their age, also possess the more questionable virtue of embodying in themselves the thousand conflicting tendencies of their age, of turning themselves into, so to speak, storage batteries of a new energy.11The activity of such poets thus revolves around two parallel modes of expression, namely the exploration of inner life through writing (“revealing aspects of the human consciousness”) and a deep analysis of the social and political environment (“embodying in themselves the thousand conflicting tendencies of their age”). The two modalities are fundamental and simultaneous constituents of both Leopardi's and Joyce's literary methods and aesthetic intentions; they are “two names for one thing,”12As expressed in Stephen Hero, the artist must be “capable of absorbing in himself the life that surrounds him,” since he is “the intense centre of the life of his age to which he stands in a relation than which none can be more vital.”13 Nevertheless, the poet must not only provide a social criticism of his age (which ultimately proves sterile) but has to combine the two discourses and voice simultaneously the crisis of the environment and the crisis of the individual. In this way, the poet offers a lucid portrait of the artist immersed in history and yet, at the same time, detached from it. In this light, art is the container and the signifier of a universal message that doesn't apply only to its historical contingency. Joyce's contention is made clear in the continuation of the first paragraph of the essay, in which he sarcastically hints at the admiration that these only-committed writers blindly receive from their audiences: For the most part, it is by this latter aspect rather than the former [“embodying in themselves the conflicts of their age”] that they become esteemed by the masses which, as they are by nature incapable of evaluating any work of straight-forward self-revelation, hasten to pay homage by some act of munificence to the invaluable support which a poet's individual affirmation lends to a popular movement.14The merit of the true poet, on the contrary, is to intermingle a universal and a personal discourse, to travel the “imaginary itinerary through the particular universal,” and to present a revelation that is both an enlightenment of the consciousness and a lucid analysis of the social mechanisms in which such a consciousness is located, so as to make apparent their reciprocal influence and their concomitant participation in the process of artistic re-creation.15 Such a precise definition of the artist undoubtedly applies to Giacomo Leopardi, whose literary work constantly and insightfully addresses the same parallel concern. On the one hand, he composed a series of lyrical poems and “epiphanic” idylls that recreate what he calls the “adventures of his soul” and, on the other hand, he also wrote a number of critical and committed poems devoted to the social, political, and religious situation of Italy. The same political and social civil commitment is noted by Joyce in Mangan's poetry. His poetry not only “remembers the aspiration of one who has suffered and who is moved to great cries and gestures when that sorrowful hour rushes upon his heart” but at the same time, far from being only an externalization of the lyrical self, is also “a revolt against artifice, against actuality,” and especially, it shows the character of being “at war with his age.”16 The two directions in poetry seem to fuel each other and, in the course of Joyce's essay, to elicit each other, revealing thus the necessity of combining them in order to achieve real poetry. This leads us to consider the formal distinction between romanticism and classicism, which is famously explored by Joyce but is also the most relevant characteristic of Leopardi's writing.Although he was contemporary to the greatest European romantic poets, Leopardi fiercely refused to label his poetics as merely romantic, and today, his writing is still regarded as an acute combination of neoclassical and romantic elements. Leopardi praised the European rationalism that emerged in the Renaissance and came to define the Enlightenment, and he ideologically refused the excesses of the romantic rule and its cult of medieval history and traditions. Even so, he still employs some of the most significant features of romanticism and contends with typically romantic themes such as the fracture between the self and the world, the philosophical dichotomy between human beings and nature (and between nature and civilization), feelings of suffering, anguish and loneliness, and the search and the Sehnsucht for a kind of sublime infinity, both spatial and temporal, to be achieved through the poetic imagination. Nevertheless, his literature neither follows a unilateral direction nor pertains to one single literary current. In the early essay “Discourse of an Italian about Romantic Poetry” (1818), Leopardi had already stated his aversion to the romantic will to transport poetry “from the visible to the invisible, from things to ideas, and to transmute it from being material, fantastic and corporeal, into metaphysical, reasonable and spiritual.”17 The verb “transmute” triggers a direct reminder of the young Stephen Dedalus's aesthetic theory in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (where the artist, being a “priest of eternal imagination,” has “to transmute the daily bread” of existence), a theory that, as it is well known, was treated in the most ironical way by the mature Stephen and by Joyce himself.18 Moreover, Leopardi criticized the romantic attitude of breaking the real link between poetry and nature, as well as the excessive fracture between nature and civilization and between reason and nature. Owing to his sensualist formation, he advocated, on the contrary, for a kind of poetry that would rely directly on the senses and that would therefore have a visceral impact on the reader: the origin of any artistic emotion was to be found in a direct and vibrant bond with nature. Leopardi felt that such a relationship had disappeared in the disproportion of the too artificial and self-centered “romantic self.” His intention was thus to create a kind of poetry able to reconstruct, on an imaginative level, that primitive relationship with nature that had been destroyed, on an intellectual level, by modern civilization and reason. The only possible alternative was, therefore, to look back at the works of ancient writers and artists, to study their methods and to imitate their techniques. Nonetheless, such an approach had to avoid theprolix, pedant, and artificial classicism that Leopardi likewise rejected. His particular classical style is a precise denouncement of the sterile attitude of hiscontemporary culture, of a modernity that, under the mask of subjectivity, has “atrophied man's sensorial and imaginative faculties.”19 We see a vibrant echo of this notion in Joyce's essay “The Universal Literary Influence of the Renaissance,” although he refers to the twentieth century and “present day materialism”: But in the midst of this complex and many-sided civilization the human mind, almost terrorized by material greatness, becomes lost, denies itself and grows weaker. Should we then conclude that present day materialism, which descends in a direct line from the Renaissance, atrophies the spiritual faculties of man, impedes his development, blunts his keenness? Let us see.20Joyce's concern with the atrophying of the spiritual faculties echoes Leopardi's same preoccupation and it sheds light on their similar reflection on romanticism and on their shared belief in the need to break away from a literary tradition that, though obviously different, was equally felt as sterile and limiting.The ironic treatment of Stephen Dedalus as a Byronian figure has been carefully examined by a number of critics starting with Hugh Kenner's seminal essay “The Portrait in Perspective.” Kenner's contention concerns Stephen's ideas about “the loveliness that has not yet come to the world” and that has to be found within the artist's soul.21 Kenner famously highlights how Joyce's ideas were at odds with the ones of his character. He argues that “the genuine artist reads signatures, the fake artist forges them,” a definition that compendiously describes Joyce's poetics in this respect. Kenner affirms that Stephen's Neoplatonic aesthetics and romanticism are mocked and despised by Joyce: in the light of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, it is evident that instead of becoming a real artist, Stephen only became a self-centered and sterile intellectual.22 Stephen's own self-portrait, which in Finnegans Wake becomes “a poor trait of the artless,” is thus also a criticism of a romantic attitude, even though Joyce employs and reenacts several romantic elements and features, just as Leopardi does (114.32). In Stephen Hero, Joyce had already stated his opinions on the classical/romantic debate, in a passage that still proves determinative in understanding his late poetics: A Classical style is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or any fixed country: it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and of satisfaction and patience. The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and no more by others than by its own, is an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them. The classical temper on the other hand, ever mindful of limitations, chooses rather to bend upon these present things and so to work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered.23Joyce praises the classical style for its awareness of certain limitations and thus for being ability to go beyond the initial elements of poetry (“the present things”) and to enter the very core of their meaning. The same dichotomy is evident throughout Joyce's production: in Dubliners, in Ulysses, and, finally, in Finnegans Wake. In Joyce's last novel, in fact, at least two passages that contain significant references to Leopardi directly revolve around classicism.24 The first of these bears the same ideological distinction within a term, “romanitis,” which alludes both to romanticism and to classicism, praising and at the same criticizing the two: I can easily believe heartily in my own spacious immensity as my ownhouse and microbemost cosm when I am reassured by ratio that the cube of my volumes is to the surfaces of their subjects as the sphericity of these globes is … to the feracity of Fairynelly's vacuum. I need not anthropologize for any obintentional (I must here correct all that school of neoitalian or paleoparisien schola of tinkers and spanglers who say I'm wrong parcequeue out of revolscian from romanitis I want to be), downtrodding on my foes. (151.10)25The coincidence of two opposite concepts, namely the coincidence of a “spacious immensity” and the “smallest microcosm” (similar to a “microbe”), is felt “heartily” and “earthily” at once and is here filtered by a romantic subjectivity signaled by the repetition of the possessive “my” (“my spacious immensity”; “my ownhouse”). The effect is even more ironical because of the use of the adjective “spatious,” which reminds the reader of a key term used by Gabriel Conroy, who felt his days were “less spatious” than those of the past. Jacques Aubert argues that the expression was “an echo of Tennyson,” which, having become a cliché, was deliberately chosen by Joyce in order to emphasize the bitter irony of the episode.26 The ironical treatment of both the excesses of romanticism and those of classicism is then further specified in the expression “neoitalian” (which amalgamates “Italy” and “neoclassicism”) and especially in “paleoparisien,” a term that blurs the Greek “paleo” (“ancient”), “parisien,” and “Leopardi,” suggesting the fusion of classical and romantic elements in the style of Leopardi and his distinct ideological and political engagement with the French Revolution (“parisien”).This idea is also expressed in the French “parce que” and in “revolscian,” a revolution, or “rivolta” (“revolt”), against “romanities,” a malady of romanticism and/or of the roman times as well. Criticism of the romantic attitude is reinforced soon afterward, on the same page: “What the romantic in rags pines after all tomtompions haunting crevices for a deadbeat escupement and what her importunes our Mitleid for in accornish with the Mortardhella taradition is the poorest common-guardiant waste of time” (151.17–21). The passage shows a mocking disapproval of the romantic canon and, in addition, it explicitly refers to Italian popular culture via the ironic presence of the word “mortadhella,” the famous Italian cold cut meat (which is here combined both with the term “mortar,” seen as a linking agent for different traditions, and with the Italian “morta,” i.e., “dead”). Presence of Italian language and culture is also to be found in a passage from the first book of Finnegans Wake, in which the reference to Leopardi is even more evident thanks to the ironical allusion to his poem “Ad Angelo Mai.” Like Leopardi's poem, Joyce's linguistic construct stresses again the importance of preserving the ancient traditions as milestones in the formation of our language and culture: poor pucker packing to perdition, again and again, ay, and again sfidare him, tease fido, eh tease fido, eh eh tease fido, toos topples topple, stop, dug of a dog of a dgiaour, ye! Angealousmei! And did not he, like Arcoforty, farfar off Bissavolo, missbrand her behaveyous with iridescent huecry of down right mean false. (68.18)The exclamation “Angelousmai” combines “angelo mai,” “my angel” and the adjective “jealous” that can be read in its meaning of “solicitous” or “vigilant” in guarding something precious, a connotation that is reinforced by the expression “tease fido” that phonologically mimics the Italian “ti sfido” (“I defy you”) and by the word “bissavolo” (“great grandfather”). As noted by Hansruedi Isler, the expression clearly reflects on the poem written by Leopardi in 1820, in which the poet glorified the Jesuit philologist Angelo Mai for having found and published Cicero's work De republica, together with other Greek and Latin manuscripts that he later edited and published.27 Leopardi wrote a preliminary annotation to the long poem, explaining his linguistic choices and, more relevantly, giving lucid reasons for his opposition to the newly created Vocabolario della Crusca (Dictionary of the Crusca Academy). One of the first and most famous language dictionaries, the Vocabolario della Crusca was published in Venice in 1612. The Cruscans used a sieve to “purify language,” sifting good words from bad ones in order to produce a “perfect language.” Their rules, for instance, enforced the proper use of words against slang expressions, the goal being to establish a set of definite and stable principles of linguistic usage in order to maintain a high standard of the Italian language. His own language, Leopardi claimed, far from accepting the rules of the Cruscan dictionary, derived from the languages of ancient poets, including Dante, Petrarch (both being renowned sources for Joyce himself), and classical writers. Among these, Leopardi praised the writers who were able to employ language in a personal way and, simultaneously, he fiercely condemned the practice of the dictionary. According to him, in fact, the application of such rules to literary art could only preclude the development of language, since they would obliterate that linguistic richness that had developed along the course of the history of language and of literature.Leopardi, therefore, exploits the blessed event of Angelo Mai's discovery and employs it as a pretext to write a committed poem, which vehemently deplores the discrepancy between a glorious past and a bleak present. The past age was blooming and diversified, owing to the gift of the imagination that vibrantly fueled the content and the value of poetry, while, on the contrary, the present only reveals its emptiness, sterility, and mediocrity. All the admirable qualities of the past, in fact, are conveyed by what Leopardi calls “poetic language” (i.e., a musical language capable of recreating the undetermined and flowing state of things and of grasping the ineffable), while all features of the present age are voiced through crude expressions such as “desperate forgetfulness,” “boredom,” “strenuous endeavours,” “suffering,” “cowardice,” and so forth. Leopardi achieves a language able to unify classicism and modernity, combining a syntactical and argumentative lucidity with an existential disquiet as well as objectivity with subjectivity. It is in this period (1818–1820), with “Ad Angelo Mai” and two other “canzoni civili” (“To Italy” and “On Dante's Monument”) that Leopardi starts attempting a kind of poetry faithful to great classical models and yet, at the same time, novel on a sentimental level, enabling him to achieve a personal style that is now labeled as “romantic classicism.”28 The end of the poem, which invokes the beneficial past, adduces this stylistic and thematic feature: Segui; risveglia i morti,Poi che dormono i vivi; arma le spenteLingue de' prischi eroi; tanto che in fineQuesto secol di fango o vita agogniE sorga ad atti illustri, o si vergogni.(Revive the dead, since all the living sleep!Dead tongues of ancient heroes arm anew;Till this vile age a new life strive to winBy noble deeds, or perish in its sin!)29On a thematic level, the dichotomy between a heroic past and a bleak present calls to mind the feeling that Gabriel Conroy constantly underlines when he compares the “less spacious days” of his present to the “less thought-tormented” music of the past. As a matter of fact, the ideological and epiphanic structure of Joyce's “The Dead” might be regarded as condensing the same transition, a transition from “historical pessimism,” according to which the nonfelicitous attitude of the modern human beings is caused by their historical situation, to “cosmic pessimism,” caused by human beings' awareness of the ineffability of their nature and of their temporary existence that culminates in death.30In light of the close connection between Joyce and Leopardi that resounds in the multivoiced and multifaceted prose of Finnegans Wake, it is perhaps not surprising that Joyce's approach to romanticism in his early writing is similar to Leopardi's. In particular, Leopardi's modern and novel reconceptualization of the very (romantic) notions of time, space, imagination, and infinity, which he mainly carries out in the poem “L'infinito” (“The Infinite” [1819]), can be argued to have significantly informed and influenced Joyce's writings. Although it is well acknowledged that Joyce's treatment of such themes reveals its debt to the writings of Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, one can also claim the influence of Leopardi's poetics and of his inventive stylistic and ideological approach.31Starting with “Ad Angelo Mai,” one may note that the poem contains various references to an infinite conception of time and space (related to the past), a conception that is simultaneously opposed to images of confinement, limitedness, and suffocation (related to the present). As an example of the glorious times of the past, Leopardi depicts the figure of Columbus, who was committed to the “boundless deep” and who defied “nature's every obstacles”: Ma tua vita era allor con gli astri e il mare,Ligure ardita prole,Quand'oltre alle colonne, ed oltre ai litiCui strider l'onde all'attuffar del soleParve udir su la sera, agl'infinitiFlutti commesso, ritrovasti il raggioDel Sol caduto, e il giornoChe nasce allor ch'ai nostri è giunto al fondo;E rotto di natura ogni contrasto,Ignota immensa terra al tuo viaggioFu gloria, e del ritornoAi rischi. Ahi ahi, ma conosciuto il mondoNon cresce, anzi si scema, e assai più vastoL'etra sonante e l'alma terra e il mareAl fanciullin, che non al saggio, appare.(But thy life then was with the stars and the sea,Liguria's hardy son,When thou, beyond the columns and the shores,Where oft, at set of sun,The waves are heard to hiss,As he into their depths has plunged,Committed to the boundless deep,Didst find again the sun's declining ray,The new-born day didst find,When it from us had passed away;Defying Nature's every obstacle,A land unknown didst win, the glorious spoilsOf all thy perils, all thy toils.And yet, when known, the world seems smaller still;And earth and ocean, and the heavenly sphereMore vast unto the child, than to the sage appear). (19)The heroism of Columbus and the glory of his enterprise that “enlarged” the world suddenly is scaled down at the end of the stanza (“when known, the world seems smaller still”) and is definitively undone in the following stanza, in which the focus is again on a bleak present devoid of all heroism and committed to a “dull vacuity”: Nostri sogni leggiadri ove son gitiDell'ignoto ricettoD'ignoti abitatori, o del diurnoDegli astri albergo, e del rimoto lettoDella giovane Aurora, e del notturnoOcculto sonno del maggior pianeta?Ecco svaniro a un punto,E figurato è il mondo in breve carta;Ecco tutto è simile, e discoprendo,Solo il nulla s'accresce. A noi ti vietaIl vero appena è giunto,O caro immaginar; da te s'appartaNostra mente in eterno; allo stupendoPoter tuo primo ne sottraggon gli anni;E il conforto perì de' nostri affanni.(Where now are all the charming dreamsOf the mysterious retreatsOf dwellers unto us unknown,Or where, by day, the stars to rest have gone,Or of the couch remote of Eos bright,Or of the sun's mysterious sleep at night?They, in an instant, vanished all;A little chart portrays this earthly ball.Lo, all things are alike; discoveryBut proves the way for dull vacuity.Farewell to thee, O Fancy, dear,If plain, unvarnished truth appear!Thought more and more is still estranged from thee;Thy power so mighty once, will soon be gone,And our poor, wounded hearts be left forlorn.) (19–20)The opposition introduced between the child and sage in the previous stanza mirrors a wider dichotomy between past and present that echoes throughout Leopardi's work. Here, it presents a double meaning that combines a historical and an existential view: the poet stresses both the historical contrast between a classical glorious time and a barbarian present, and the perceptual difference between the early youthful imagination and the disenchanted, quasi-nihilistic attitude of adult life. This theme strongly characterizes all of Leopardi's later poems and allows him to deepen and expand his reflection about the relationship between reality and imagination, as well as about the different perceptions of time and space we have at different stages of our formation.Leopardi's profound speculations about the nature of time as both eternal and divisible into instants of acute perceptions are echoed in Joyce's theory
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