Giacomo Leopardi

In ‘Il Pensiero dominante’ the dominant but sweet fixation holds the poetic ‘I’ hostage (lines 1-2). This fixation could be compared to an unfulfilled desire for the Other which, however, has the power to elevate the spirit (lines 137-38). This Leopardian Other is as elusive and fictitious as the Lacanian one and its Stilnovistic ascendancy renders eloquent and adept what is crucial to Lacan: the fictitiousness of woman at the heart of courtly love poetry (lines 19-20). In this poem the palpable desire for life permeates the verses not in spite of but rather because of the desire for the Other (lines 80-1). The endlessness and irrepressible nature of this desire is also the poetic voice’s wish to find reconciliation with life and thus with itself. This desire is seen as the only justification (line 82) for human life defined as ‘to suffer so much for no other reason’ (line 84). The poetic voice’s quest for detachment from the cruel and base outside world is not merely a quest for self-sufficiency. Rather it is associated with the desire for the Other that also highlights the irreducible gap between the desire for recognition and the recognition of desire (lines 86-7). The painful desire for the Other is an illusion (line 111). This desire is, however, also a form of resistance (line 114).

The remarkable thing about Leopardi’s conception of love when it is inspired by a real woman is that it has the power to survive the knowledge that it is an illusion. In ‘Il pensiero dominante’, a real woman, generally identified as Fanny Targioni Tozzetti, has inspired a dream – the word ‘love’ itself is not mentioned – that has completely taken hold of the poet’s mind and yet he knows it is a dream. The poem is an emphatic statement of love’s power and exclusiveness: it alone can transform life into a paradise on earth; it is the only thing which gives meaning to life and makes life preferable to death; it is so powerful it can survive the knowledge that it is a dream.

In ‘Il pensiero dominante’ the poet is certain that the illusion of love will remain with him for the rest of his life, because every time he compares the illusion with the reality, that is with the real woman who has fired his imaginative dream, she inspires an even greater vision of happiness in his mind. At the end of the poem, the poet turns to address the angelic beauty of the reality; ‘angelic’ beauty, because with the beautiful illusion of love the world is transformed into a paradise on earth. In this poem more than any other in the Canti, the poet comes closest to experiencing the blessed state he describes right at the end of ‘Storia del genere umano’ when Love the divinity comes down from heaven to reside for a short while in the gentlest and tenderest hearts. Thus in ‘Il pensiero dominante’ the poet, knowing that love is not a reality, calls the thought of love divine among illusions.

With every lost opportunity, every fancied snub, Leopardi’s first adolescent attitude to love hardened and became crystallized. What he feared was not merely a rebuff; perhaps his real dread was rather of suc­cess—and of finding, then, the deeper dissatisfaction he had always foreseen, the ‘unaccountable void that nothing can fill’. Geltrude Lazzari, Teresa Malvezzi, and now Fanny Targioni, what were they for him but shadows on a wall­ — paper silhouettes of his ‘heavenly original’, la donna che non si trova. Nowhere is this attitude more clearly revealed than in the poem which Leopardi wrote at the height of his love for Fanny Targioni, Il pensiero dominante. This poem is not addressed to his lady, but to his abstract idea of love—his obsessive ‘dominating thought’.

He wrote, he thirsted during the dusty emptiness of social intercourse, as a wayfarer on a stony mountain seeks a green meadow. Only in his obsession could he feel himself like the gods; only then could he experience the sense of supreme power, of superhuman exaltation, that comes even to unrequited lovers; only then, fully realize the triviality of all the rest of life. Its dangers—even death, the ‘supreme necessity’—lost their power to alarm; all human opinions, ambitions, pride, became of small account. For more than a year Leopardi thus lived upon two planes: sometimes sitting, in his new blue suit, in the pen­umbra of Fanny Targioni’s drawing-room—a silent, incon­gruous figure among the somewhat flashy young men, the florid ladies, who assured the success of her evening parties; sometimes a god-like lover, dwelling alone in the pays des chimères.

In ‘Amore e morte,’ the poetic voice presents the desire for love at a juncture with desire for death, both considered in this poem as the most desirable aspects of human life (lines 1-4). The rich fervour of life can also be seen through the desire for death, just as in ‘Dialogo d’Ercole e di Atlante’ the rich fervour of life on earth is accentuated by being reduced to mechanical actions. The paradoxical striving for two mutually exclusive goals recalls once more Lacan’s statement: ‘Man’s very desire is constituted […] under the sign of mediation: it is the desire to have one’s desire recognized. Its object is a desire, that of other people, in the sense that man has no object that is constituted for his desire without some mediation’ (Écrits 148). Desire for life, the Leopardian ‘a loving feeling’ (line 29), and desire for death, the ‘fierce desire’ (line 43), are two sides of the same coin as Freud later argues in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and as Lacan subsequently elaborates in his distinction between demand and desire. The desire for death in this poem almost prefigures the Lacanian moi’s desire for fusion manifesting itself in an underlying death wish that remains unfulfilled. Desire for death in ‘Amore e morte’ not only reflects the futile quest that is the nature of human desire but it is also elevated to become an act of magnanimity: ‘death’s gentleness’ (line 73).

Amore e morte is an appropriate poem to follow Il pensiero dominante because Leopardi considers a desire for death the first effect of true and powerful love, and in love (according to his extraordinary conception of love), he himself desires only to die. In terms of Leopardi’s perception of human life, love and death are the most beautiful things the world has to offer. In Leopardi’s terms lovers become wise because love makes them see life for what it really is. People who experience true and powerful love desire death because they feel they cannot live in a world without the vision of happiness which their love has inspired. It seems that the sheer intensity of what they know to be insatiable longing makes them desire death and gives them the courage to die. In the poem, with the vision of happiness love inspires, the courage to kill oneself is reborn. The poet is convinced that people who experience true and powerful love understand the sweetness of death; even the man who did not know the truth before and therefore did not despise life, even the shy young girl who was afraid to die. At the end of stanza 2 the poet taunts the world who laughs at those who kill themselves for love’s sake. In the context of Amore e morte, ‘peace’ and ‘old age’ are actually the worst things that can be wished on anyone because they are the opposite of ‘love’ and ‘death’ respectively. He is not out of love at the end of the poem; his weary desire to fall asleep in the bosom of death is the direct consequence of the vision of happiness love inspires.

Love and Death appear as the twin protagonists of a Leopardian myth, in which Love stands for the creative principle of life, Death for the powers of destruction; but at the end of the poem the figure of Death—ardently invoked by the poet—has suffered a shadowy identification with the beloved woman herself; and thus, in seeking death, the lover also finds fulfillment.

In ‘A se stesso’, the cleaved ‘I’ is even more pronounced, and in that split the poetic voice is, in a more accentuated manner than in the above-mentioned poems, in conflict. As Perella points out, nothing in the Canti is as starkly desolate as the epitaphic ‘A se stesso,’ in which Leopardi, announcing the death of hope and desire, commands his heart to stop beating. In this poem the poetic ‘I’ is an Other to itself, and in this sense is Lacanian through and through. In this conflict, which echoes the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, lies the poetic ‘I’’s subjection and attempt to resume control over the Other. The poetic ‘I’, however, both desires and recoils from this Other, who in this case is the repository of sentiment, a source of acute pain and suffering (lines 2-3). The poetic ‘I’’s utterances, which oscillate between ‘io’ (‘I’) and ‘noi’ (‘we’), attempt to eliminate the Other as it laments a desire that is no longer. The presence of words here, as in Freud’s fort/da game, is inextricably bound up with an absence (lines 7-8). Words are uttered forcefully but seem powerless in the face of an infinitely malevolent universe. In ‘A se stesso’ the effort of the poetic voice to come to terms with its own utterances, and consequently its own suffering, can be equated, from a Lacanian perspective, to an apparently futile desire for the Other.

From the outset the poetic ‘I’ immediately attempts to assume control over the Other in an urge to acquiesce suffering (lines 1-2, 6-7). But the soothing, hushed tones blend in with the harshness of a poetic voice that has turned dour and cynical in an effort to totally eliminate the Other as revealed through its repetition of absolute words: ‘per sempre’ [‘forever’; line 1], ‘estremo’ [‘ultimate’; line 2], ‘per sempre’ [‘forever’; line 6], ‘mai’ [‘never’; line 10], ‘l’ultimo’ [‘last’; line 12], and ‘l’infinita’ [‘boundless’; line 16]. The mercilessness of the poetic ‘I’’s predicament is clear enough (lines 9-10). Thus, on the one hand, the poetic ‘I’ unremittingly fails to detach itself from life (lines 13-16); on the other hand, the mind is bound to move in a repetitious cycle that keeps revisiting ‘l’inganno estremo’ [‘the ultimate illusion’]; (line 2). Once more, this two-way movement corresponds to Lacan’s expression that not to want to desire and to desire are the same thing. Desire is insatiable; desire is an act of seeking without finding that both underlines and undermines it. The ‘inganno estremo’ will never cease haunting.

In ‘A se stesso’, the illusion has dis­appeared for ever. Given the value of illusions in Leopardi’s perception of human life, given that love is the last illusion to survive, we cannot wonder that its loss occasions the despair so powerfully conveyed in this short poem. Leopardi had used a past definite of ‘perire’ before to convey irrevocability in the Canti but never with so great effect as in lines 1-3. The starkness of ‘A se stesso’ has tremendous impact. In sixteen lines there are twelve sentences with only two subordinate clauses, lines 3 and 15, and two coordinates, lines 8 and 10. The imperatives addressed to his heart, the sound repetitions, the oxytones, the nouns denoting quality, all hammer out the finality of the poet’s loss. The pain that he had feared had come—and when it passed away, it took with it what was most vital in him. After the destruction of this last ‘illusion’, Leopardi lived on for four more years, but he wrote no more love-poems, and he brought to an end the great day-book in which, for seven years, he had jotted down all his thoughts. Some vital spring was broken—‘not hope alone, but all desire had fled’. Once again Leopardi lays before us ‘the hidden and mysterious cruelty of human destiny’, but this time he employs no argument, points no moral: we hear something simpler and more moving: a human cry of pain.

‘A se stesso’ refers to the final break with Fanny Targioni Tozzetti—loneliness, humiliation, sense of betrayal, self-mistrust—the profound weariness that engulfed him.

Jagged stalks, dusted with snow, recede to a row of bare trees marking the horizon: On both sides of the highway, stubble fields stretch out.

̶  Do you know Leopardi, Sprague?
̶  Yes. Do you?
̶  No.
̶  He’s the brother I never had. I feel very close to him.
̶  Really? Tell me about him.

And thus I came to speak of my beloved Giacomo, of his early understanding that life is nothing but a process of losing: ‘The only people who truly live until their death are those who remain children all their lives.’ I spoke of his pitiless mother, haunted by a sense of sin, incapable of touching her children. I spoke of the boy bent over his books, freezing in his father’s library. Homer and Virgil, Dante and Tasso, Seneca and Cicero: These were Giacomo’s intimates. I spoke of his overwhelming longing for the tenderness of a woman, a tenderness he would never know. ‘Intelligent enough to appreciate his genius, vulnerable enough to be kind’: He never met such a woman. His scoliosis, the hump on his back, was but the visible sign, I asserted, that he’d been marked out for sorrow. And thus he was hurt into poetry. As you warmed to my portrait, I spoke of Leopardi’s ethics of lucidity, his refusal of abstraction, his recognition of the individual as an absolute. His poetry, I explained, in restoring presence to things, creates a silence in which memory can speak. Suffering, mourning and solitude—yes, but in a graceful moon on a quiet night there is the promise of a woman and a shared life: Leopardi is the poet of tenderness.

̶  The brother you never had, hey?

Your eyes shine and I see mine in them: I want to wrap my arms around you, I want to press your body to mine. Or just fall down at your feet.