Irresistible Signs: The Genius of Language and Italina National Identity 9781442695269

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Scripts of Vernaculars and Collective Characters in Early Modern Europe
2 Ut Lingua, Natio: Dominique Bouhours’s Genius of the Nation and Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s Italian Republic of Letters
3 Giambattista Vico, the Vernacular, and the Foundations of Modern Italy
4 Translating Genius: Cesarotti, Ossian, and the Question of National Character
5 Towards Sameness: Leopardi’s Critique of Character, and the End of the Nation
Irresistible Signs? A Postscript and the Question of Media
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

IRRESISTIBLE SIGNS The Genius of Language and Italian National Identity

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PAOLA GAMBAROTA

Irresistible Signs The Genius of Language and Italian National Identity

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2011 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4298-0

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks Toronto Italian Studies Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Gambarota, Paola Irresistible signs : the genius of language and Italian national identity / Paola Gambarota. (Toronto Italian studies series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4298-0 1. National characteristics, Italian, in literature. 2. Italian literature – History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Toronto Italian studies PQ4053.N29G34 2011

850.9′358

C2010-906445-3

This book has been published with the assistance of a grant from Rutgers University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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1 Scripts of Vernaculars and Collective Characters in Early Modern Europe 22 2 Ut Lingua, Natio: Dominique Bouhours’s Genius of the Nation and Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s Italian Republic of Letters 59 3 Giambattista Vico, the Vernacular, and the Foundations of Modern Italy 99 4 Translating Genius: Cesarotti, Ossian, and the Question of National Character 145 5 Towards Sameness: Leopardi’s Critique of Character, and the End of the Nation 190 Irresistible Signs? A Postscript and the Question of Media Notes

235

Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgments

The generous help of numerous friends and colleagues as well the financial support of different institutions enabled me to write this book. I wish to thank my mentor at Yale University, Paolo Valesio, particularly for encouraging me when I began my research to confront my political preconceptions and my stylistic mannerisms. I have enjoyed warm and unwavering support from my colleagues Andrea Baldi, David Marsh, and Laura Sanguineti White of the Italian department at Rutgers. Elizabeth Leake and Alessandro Vettori, also of the Italian department at Rutgers, perused the final manuscript with good humour and offered crucial comments. Conversations and correspondence with Roberto Dainotto, Ernesto Livorni, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Caterina Mongiat, Lino Pertile, Edward Stankiewicz, Jonathan Steinberg, and Maria Truglio, who read the manuscript in part or as a whole, provided important suggestions, encouragement, and detailed comments at different stages of the revisions. My dynamic mentor Rudy Bell offered precious advice in decisive moments, and Doris Sommer was a steady source of encouragement. Juliette Wells, who was my first English teacher, Cyndy Brown, and especially my dear friend Scott Surrency helped me with my improbable prepositions and my dangling participles. I thank Scott also for his help with the translations of the quotations. Financial support for my research came from the Giles Whiting Foundation and from the Lauro De Bosis Fellowship at Harvard. The Rutgers Research Council awarded me a generous grant for the publication of the book. Additional support came from the Remigio Pane fund. I wish to thank the managing editor, Anne Laughlin, and the staff at the University of Toronto Press for their professional help, and Angela Wingfield for her perceptive and careful copy-editing of the

viii Acknowledgments

manuscript. Ron Schoeffel, the Toronto Italian Studies series editor, has been a gracious, patient, and expert guide. An expanded version of my discussion of word order in the works of Bouhours and Vico appeared in the Romanic Review 97, no. 3–4 (2006). A brief account of my arguments about Vico and Dante has been accepted for publication in the conference proceedings of the International Association for the Study of Italian Language and Literature (20, 2011). I am happy to be able to thank at last the friends who have helped me to navigate the exotic waters of American life and academia: Melissa Vogelsang-Sokolow, for giving me ‘a room of my own’ when I most needed it, and much more; Sherry Roush for her loyal and steady presence; Meike Werner for her wise insights and her illuminating smile; and Johanna Bodenstab for repeatedly bringing me back to the realities of the world. This book is dedicated to my husband, friend, and mentor of twentytwo years, Peter (Petr, Pietro) Demetz, who, when asked about his roots, usually answers, ‘I am not a potato.’

IRRESISTIBLE SIGNS The Genius of Language and Italian National Identity

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Introduction

Whoever is so misguided as to think that the place of his birth is the most delightful spot under the sun may also believe that his own language – his mother tongue, that is – is pre-eminent among all others; and as a result he may believe that his language was also Adam’s. To me, however, the whole world is homeland, like the sea to fish … And although for my own enjoyment, there is no more agreeable place on earth than Florence … I am convinced that there are many regions and cities more noble and more delightful than Tuscany and Florence, where I was born and of which I am citizen, and many nations and peoples who speak a more elegant and practical language than Italian. Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia It was I who was adopted by the genius of the language, which, directly I came out of the stammering stage, made me its own so completely that its very idiom I truly believe had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record I haven’t learned a new word nor had new thought or feeling in Bangla for nearly half a century. I don’t need to. According to group-norms, as a native-born speaker, I have automatic membership in the world’s most articulate, most imaginative, and most intelligent club. Bharati Mukherjee, The Way Back

What makes a German German, an Italian Italian? When I moved from Berlin (where I had lived for two years) to the United States in

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Irresistible Signs

the 1990s, carrying my Italian mother tongue across a new border, I experienced once again the constraints of my Italian habits of communication. I wondered how much of my everyday unease depended on the very simple fact that I did not even have the words in my mother tongue to reflect some fairly typical situations (such as a waiter having the time to ‘kid’ when he seemed awfully busy to me). Had the vocabulary and structures of my mother tongue insulated my adult self in an impermeable skin, ‘made in Italy’ only? How much is a person shaped by the language that she or he shares with millions of other people, and conversely how far does a language bend to an individual’s personality? I believe that the answers to these questions lie in the narratives that instruct us about our relationship to language and, more precisely, in the particular answers that we choose – from the simplest tale, in which I tell myself that Italian is my mother tongue (concealing to myself my mother’s irrepressible Neapolitan), to the more general story about the Italian language. Add to these tales theoretical accounts about the connection between language and Weltbild (image of the world), which alert me to the way in which my Italian vocabulary and syntax filter out and parcel the flux of my perceptions, inevitably stamping them with the collective outlook. What struck me from my new perspective in the United States was how pervasive are the narratives that tie language to nationhood. In Italy scholars and pundits have been busy reassessing what it means to be an Italian (at least, since the mid-nineties).1 The growing European integration, the claims of minority languages, and the confrontation with the increasingly varied cultures of new immigrants tend to reignite the ethnic definition of the nation, with language at its centre. In the United States the idea of citizenship and the values of the constitution prevail. Yet, both Italy and the United States seem to share a general concern about the monolingual nation.2 Today multilingualism and multiculturalism challenge the traditional definitions of the nation more strongly than ever before. In Italy the law for the protection of historical linguistic minorities, which has officially recognized minority speakers (Friulian, Sardinian, Albanian, Ladino, Catalan, Occitan, Greek, Slovenian, German) and has been operative since the beginning of the millennium (September 2001), is still controversial.3 At the same time, the large number of immigrants, speaking languages very different from Italian, is further complicating Italy’s linguistic map and the image of the nation. Here in the United States, language politics

Introduction 5

have occupied a central place in recent public discussions that have addressed language rights, the relation between language and culture, the growing use of Spanish, endangered languages, and language education and have even questioned whether singing the American anthem in Spanish undermines or strengthens the American national identity.4 In Who Are We? The Challenge of America’s National Identity (2004), for example, Samuel Huntington worries about the alleged resistance of Latino immigrants to sharing the common American language and describes it as a ‘major potential threat to the cultural and possibly political integrity of the United States.’ His worries exist in spite of the factual evidence that proves him wrong.5 Turning to Italy, Eric Hobsbawm explains the formation of the nation as follows: ‘For Germans and Italians, their national language was not merely an administrative convenience or a means of unifying statewide communication … It was even more than the vehicle of a distinguished literature and of universal intellectual expression. It was the only thing that made them Germans or Italians and … thus provided a central argument for the creation of a unified nation.’6 But how can one speak of an Italian ‘national language’ before (and even after) 1860, the year of Italy’s unification, when linguists rightly believe that Italian only became an actual mother tongue (that is, spoken at home since the speaker’s birth) in the second half of the twentieth century, thanks to the diffusion of radio and television?7 Even on the one hundredth anniversary of the Italian unification (1961), the linguist Emilio Peruzzi complained that Italians share a common language to talk about lofty topics such as the immortality of the soul but have no common words to name everyday objects such as shoelaces.8 As late as 1991, Arrigo Castellani and Claudio Marazzini reported on the rather unusual decree issued by the Ministry of Maritime Trade (Ministero della marina commerciale) to restrict to two legitimate denominations (spigola and branzino) the use of names for expensive sea bass, which had been variously designated in Italy’s coastal regions as ragno, lupo, luasso, lovazzo, and so on, causing confusion and, at times, fraudulent sales.9 Crossing borders, I became increasingly curious about the origin of narratives that bind one language to one nation, and I began to explore the European debate from which the myth of vernaculars as quintessential manifestations of nations emerged. I encountered the notion of the ‘genius of language,’ which I have come to see as the ideological nucleus of linguistic nationalism or the movement that identifies politi-

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Irresistible Signs

cal borders with the area in which a particular language is assumed to be spoken. Understood either as the stubbornly resistant, untranslatable core of an idiom or as an all-engulfing cultural matrix, the genius of language has been felt as a palpable presence starting in the Renaissance, when intellectuals studied and translated the Greek and Roman classics.10 It is equally sensed today, for example, by diasporic writers living between languages, as revealed in a recent collection of essays significantly entitled The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongues (ed. Wendy Lesser). The notion of the genius of language became an international sensation starting with the second half of the seventeenth century. It stirred acrimonious fights in French, German, English, and Italian literary journals and pamphlets, in which writers tended to align themselves along national lines and to defend the genius of their written vernaculars. It was the fashionable topic of eighteenth-century discussions and competitions in European national academies, and it preoccupied, in more or less intensive ways, serious European philosophers such as John Locke (1632–1704), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–80), and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) who understood the ambivalent potential and force of such a notion. Clearly, the historical debate on the genius of language itself is wide ranging. It spans different fields (such as philosophy of language, theories of translation, and literary criticism), various national literatures (French, English, Italian, and German), and at least two centuries (from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century). It started officially when the orientalist Amable de Bourzeys coined the phrase génie de la langue in his speech presented at the Académie française on 12 February 1635 – in the academy’s first month of existence – and endorsed the systematic study of the distinctive properties of languages (their différent génie) in relation to the temperaments of the populations that speak them.11 It culminated in the theories on the Genie der Sprache and its Nationalcharacter developed at the turn of the eighteenth century by German philosophers Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). With the eminent exception of studies on these German philosophers, insistently considering their political arguments,12 the historical debate has been often examined within the contexts of linguistics and rhetorical theories. Numerous surveys trace the significance of the notion of

Introduction 7

the genius of language to the birth of language typology, as well as for theories of metaphor.13 Linguists and scholars of language theories obviously take notice of the ‘nationalization’ of the debate, when the notion was emphatically and consistently linked to national character,14 but they often treat the element of national character as a late ‘degeneration’ that is ‘at the fringes of scientific discourse’ and in the service of nationalism, culminating in the racist work of German linguists.15 Some theorists admit that it would be important to investigate the relationship between the Renaissance ‘blooming of grammatical treatises and the development of a consciousness of language as a national heritage.’16 Yet they seem to shun a direct analysis of the national arguments emerging from the debate on the genius of language, mainly because to them such arguments appear ‘more significant for the history of national stereotypes than for that of linguistic ideas.’17 This book focuses precisely on the definitions of the genius of language that explain it as the quintessential manifestation of the genius of the nation or of national character and on the contributions of Italian writers to this myth in particular. Thus I consider the recent explosion of theories of the nation and new approaches to language ideology18 as a unique opportunity to re-examine the traditional debate and to put its analyses into dialogue with the current discussion on language and national identity. I begin my investigation by charting the ideological premises of the genius of language in order to locate the sources of the symbolic force of high literary vernaculars. In other words, I question how the written idiom of an elite could come to be linked to an entire national – and largely illiterate – population who actually spoke different, and at times mutually unintelligible, vernaculars. I argue that the merging of two ideas in sixteenth-century treatises on vernaculars was crucial to the formation of the genius of language: (1) the belief that differences in sounds are semantically significant and express differences of perception; and (2) the notion of a collective disposition, which was consolidated in theories of government and in medical treatises according to the scientific parameters of the time. Four case studies from the debate on the genius of language – on the early controversy stirred up by the French grammarian and literary critic Dominique Bouhours (1628–1702) and by Lodovico Muratori’s response (1672–1750); on Giambattista Vico (1668–1744); on Melchiorre Cesarotti (1730–1808); and finally on Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) – follow my investigation of the ideological prerequisites of the debate. These case studies allow

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Irresistible Signs

me to focus on two fundamental questions: Which types of national communities are implied in these writers’ representations of the genius of the Italian vernacular? What are the relationships between such images and later understandings of the nation? My choice of authors and texts also aims to offer a sense of the broad range of discourses affected by the idea of the genius of language, that is, literary history, language philosophy, theories of translation, and political theory. Prominent canonical writers such as Ugo Foscolo and Alessandro Manzoni, who wrote extensively on language issues, appear only at the margins since they chose to abandon the contentious topoi that had fuelled the eighteenth-century controversy on the genius of language – particularly the rhetorical strategies conflating the high literary idiom and spontaneous speech – and to look ahead, searching for ways to create the conditions for a hegemonic national language mastered by all of Italy’s (bourgeois) peoples.19 Building on Vico’s historicism and the theories of the French idéologues, they concentrated their efforts, more realistically, on understanding the social nature of human language as well as the causes of the substantial gap between Italy’s supra-regional written language and its numerous spoken tongues, and on finding solutions to bridge that gap.20 Although my analytical chapters focus on Italian intellectuals who addressed the myth of the genius of language, they necessarily include a few other European interlocutors. The overarching argument of my case studies is that representations of vernaculars developed in the debate on the genius of language not only reveal much to us about the ways in which national communities were imagined but also shape different representations of the nation. I contend that one cannot draw a neat distinction between an early stage of the debate – which allegedly provided solid formal descriptions of languages – and a later ‘degenerated,’ nationalist phase, as many theorists of language have done. From its inception, the discourse on the genius of language was never fully innocent of (proto)nationalist implications. On the contrary, it established the foundation of the twoway construction of linguistic nationalism or, to abandon this muchtoo-loaded definition, the long-standing discourse in which the alleged mother tongue and the nation legitimate each other. Revisiting the historical debate on the genius of language in light of new paradigms and ideas developed in recent discussions on language and national identity deepens our understanding of linguistic nationalism and of the ways in which individual representations of the national language became dominant in Italy. More important, it stretches our

Introduction 9

ability to imagine the many possible relationships between language and nation. Signs of Nations Modernist theories of nationalism have drawn attention to the role of language and communication in the modern process of internalizing the nation. Benedict Anderson, for instance, asserts that the nation, ‘from the start, was conceived in language, not in blood.’21 Hobsbawm, too, for example, understands the force of the high-culture language not only as the medium of communication of the nationalist counterelite and the potential official language of the future nation, but also as the symbolic marker of some stable commonality that could make the nation appear ‘more “eternal” than it really was.’22 By emphasizing the semiotic nature of national identity, they have paved the way to studies of languages and representations within the context of nationalism. Yet, in spite of their emphasis on language, they do not analyse how the ‘national language’ was constructed, how it was formed and represented.23 Thus, while scholars of language neglect the analysis of the political arguments of the debate on the genius of language as lacking epistemological value, sociologists and political scientists turn away from analysing the discourse on the national language because they regard it as an a posteriori legitimation of nationalism that did not substantially contribute to the actual formation of nations.24 However, in the case of Italy in particular, where the long-standing discourse on the shared language began with Dante Alighieri’s De vulgari eloquentia (ca 1304) and is still very much alive today, an analysis of this discourse in relation to the national question is crucial – so much so that historian Jonathan Steinberg, in his article ‘The Historian and the Questione della Lingua,’ has wondered, ‘The odd thing about the questione della lingua is how rarely historians ask it.’25 I believe that since the national language is as much imagined as is the nation, analysing the making of this construct and the relations of its representations to images of the nation is an important step towards understanding ideas of the nation itself. For instance, Anderson’s description of the nation as a constructed community that ‘presents itself as simultaneously open and closed’26 can also be applied to the representations of the national language, which is also imagined as a closed and stable system in which one is born and, at the same time, as

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Irresistible Signs

a historical repertoire open to change, to the ‘naturalization’ of foreign idioms, and accessible to those who want to acquire it. Modern theorists of nationalism agree that, in order to be a nation, a group must have an image of itself as a nation.27 I argue that the debate on the genius of language delivered precisely the needed unifying images by singling out features of written vernaculars and turning them into icons of nations. Thus rhetorical strategies and semantic drifts that characterized the creation of the genius of those vernaculars ended up informing the nationalist discourse as well. In my view, accepting the modernist definition of the constructed nation and recognizing that terms such as nation and national had different connotations before the rise of modern nationalism does not necessarily imply giving up the study of whether and how previous definitions and meanings are connected to modern ones and ultimately, as John Breully puts it, to ‘the project of gaining or using power’ developed by nationalists.28 In other words, I believe, to return to my two fundamental questions, that it is worth asking which types of communities are implied in literary representations of the Italian standard language and how they are related to the models of nation envisioned later for unified Italy.29 I have therefore re-examined the debate on the genius of language by looking at the different claims about language as the building blocks of images of the Italian community. I consider how these cultural fragments and scraps that draw on linguistic behaviour are re-appropriated, given new meaning, and combined in a ‘coherent package of propositions’ of origins and boundaries.30 As Alexander Motyl has shown, ‘A nation exists, or comes into being, when people sharing a lifeworld believe in a set of complementary propositions regarding origins and otherness.’ Indeed, ideas about origins lend the nation authenticity because they provide it with a place in time, while propositions concerning boundaries grant it ‘present-day uniqueness’ and thus provide the nation with a place in space.31 In other words, it is the continuity of the boundary defining the national community, as much as the stability of the content of narratives about that community, that matters to my study. My building-blocks approach helps me identify and analyse relevant aspects in dense, at times difficult, texts without having to assume predetermined and possibly anachronistic models of the nation. What do we gain from re-examining the discourse of the genius of language in light of newer theories of national and linguistic identity? First of all, a more nuanced classification of the Italian model of

Introduction 11

nationalism. Indeed, the ways in which theorists of nationalism have handled the Italian case are rather simplistic. They often mention Italy as a textbook case of linguistic nationalism, and, as we have seen in Hobsbawm’s account, they quickly lump it together with Germany into one category, namely the ethnic, collectivistic model of nation.32 Indeed, the recent scholarship concentrating on a highly selective literary canon from the Risorgimento period has brought the Italian case closer to a Blut-und-Boden, naturalistic type of nationalism and has confirmed this label.33 For example, statements such as the following, by nineteenth-century patriot Carlo Cattaneo (1801–69), who paradoxically supported a pluricentric, federalist Italy, clearly endorse the orthodoxy of linguistic nationalism: Nazione è come dire nascimento di pensieri: e i pensieri ci nascono nella lingua materna: ond’è che nazione e lingua vanno del pari. E si consideri che a definire se un’associazione d’uomin sia naturale o artificiale, ogni altro criterio, fuor di quello della lingua, sarebbe dubbioso … essendo disputabili i confini veri che separano l’una dall’altra contrada, oscure e favoleggiate le origini e le genealogie dei popoli, sofisticabili gli oracoli della storia. Solo non può negarsi né porsi in dubitazione il fatto che alcuno sia nato, e parli, e pensi in un determinato idioma. Questa, a dir vero, è la nota caratteristica e il plasma dei concetti; questa l’impronta nativa e non cancellabile dell’ingegno; questa, in una parola, la patria dell’anima.34 [Nation is as if to say birth of thoughts; and thoughts are born to us in our mother tongue; and so it is that nation and language are one and the same. It should be borne in mind that in determining if an association of men be natural or artificial, every other criterion besides that of language would be doubtful … the true confines that separate one district from another being arguable, the origins and genealogies of peoples being obscure and mythical, and the oracles of history being subject to sophistry. The fact that someone was born into and speaks and thinks in a particular language can be neither denied nor put in doubt. This truly is the characteristic sign and the plasma of concepts; this is the innate and inalienable imprint of genius; this, in a word, is the fatherland of the soul.]

Here Cattaneo presents the ‘national language’ as the innate mould of the mind and the only natural proof of nationality. However, if we consider the Italian involvement in the debate on the genius of language, the story becomes more complicated. We notice, on one side, that the

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Irresistible Signs

Italian questione della lingua provided crucial arguments to European sixteenth- and seventeenth-century praises of vernaculars, which articulated the notion of the genius of language and thus nascent arguments of linguistic nationalism. On the other side, Italian intellectuals, particularly those considered in this book, show a strong awareness of the clash between the deeply ingrained humanist idea of the universality of culture and a keen perception of the geographical and historical relativity encoded in language. They staunchly resist the hardening of nationalist arguments about language into theoretical dogmas. My close analysis of the discourse of the genius of language shows that there are a number of problems that arise from too quickly classifying Italy as an example of linguistic nationalism in one and the same category with Germany, a nation that has always claimed a more compact ethnic make-up than has Italy. One problem is related to the understanding of linguistic nationalism as an ethnic model, which, in my view, stems precisely from the reifying use of the construct national language. Indeed, if the national language remains an unreflected assumption, one risks mistaking culture for ethnos and thus runs the danger of assuming a view of culture as ethnically homogeneous and monolingual. A closer look at the Italian contributions to the debate on the genius of language, however, reveals that a keen attentiveness to Italy’s ethnic and linguistic mesh runs throughout the Italian discourse on the national language. It is an awareness that informs not only the literary reflections but also the self-perception of Italians and even canonical nationalist texts.35 Clearly, for a long time in Italy the local identity and the supra-regional (later national) identity were not necessarily perceived as incompatible.36 In a story of Italy’s path to nationhood, this awareness of Italy’s multi-ethnic identity must be accounted for. But how do we account for the gap between these long-standing perceptions and the image of the monolingual nation? The discourse on the genius of language spells out the elements of the unifying force of the literary vernacular, and its analysis can reveal the sources of the appeal of the monolingual nation. I argue that this force can be better understood if one abandons overburdened paradigms and adopts more flexible models of analysis. My case studies show that theoretical models of national communities, usually neatly separated, can be consistently co-present in traditional definitions of the Italian language and nation. For instance, the traditional distinction between the so-called perennialist view, which grounds nations in recurrent symbolic ties (for example, ethnic rites,

Introduction 13

myths, or symbols), and the constructivist perspective, which defines nations as invented or imagined communities, does not hold for my Italian cases.37 The focus on the genius of language also becomes particularly productive for the understanding of linguistic nationalism in another way. Theorists of nationalism, in some consonance with scholars of language theories, who regard the nationalization of the genius of language as a late ‘degeneration’ in the service of nationalism, tend to view the discourse on the national language as an a posteriori legitimation of the nation, the late product of nineteenth-century ethnic nationalism. Hans Kohn, for instance, argues that ‘before nationalism, language was rarely stressed as a fact on which the prestige and power of a group depended,’ a statement that is easily undermined by an even fleeting glance at the texts from the debate on the genius of language.38 Hobsbawm, too, believes that the identification of nationality with the language of ‘the people’ was the late creation of nineteenth-century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder.39 Like many theorists of the nation, he sketches a chronological trajectory from ‘good’ civic-political nationalisms (France, England) to ‘bad’ ethnolinguistic movements (Italy, Germany, or the Czechs), a trajectory in which language becomes the dominant criterion for nationhood only very late.40 My analyses of the debate on the genius of language show that the building blocks of linguistic nationalism were long in the making, starting with seventeenth-century discussions of vernaculars that began consistently to link the genius of language to the genius of the nation. Such discussions articulated nascent arguments of linguistic nationalism and reveal that this ideology was the offspring of universalizing rationalist thought rather than the quintessential creation of German Romantic language philosophy, as the established consensus claims. The Force of Genius I have argued that transitional, linear narratives that present linguistic nationalism as a late degeneration of the discourse on national vernaculars, a nineteenth-century fabrication of nationalist philologists, obstruct the understanding of the way in which crucial arguments were formed. My case studies show that the distinction between an early stage of the debate on the genius of language, which ostensibly provides solid semantic and typological descriptions of vernaculars, and its later nationalization does not always hold true. I contend, rather,

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Irresistible Signs

that the very act of connecting arguments of origin and boundaries in the single notion of genius of language, characterized by a personification of language, marked the invention of an organic model of the nation in which the alleged mother tongue naturalized or, as theorists would say, internalized the nation. I believe therefore that the oscillations between the use of terms such as ingegno, indole, and disposition (translating the Latin ingenium) and the words génie, genio, genius, and Genie (from the Latin genius) are not irrelevant. Such oscillations have to be accounted for, case by case, since they signal different takes on the link between the language and the nation. Deriving from the same root (gen), which refers both to birth and to knowing, genius and ingenium share numerous meanings, but they also set up a series of oppositions. Etymological studies of the words genius and ingenium characterize the term ingenium (the force of combined mental faculties) by its lower rank with respect to genius, a position that is reinforced by its neutral gender and its inanimate quality.41 They also emphasize its continuity in the Spanish and Italian popular usage (ingenio, ingegno), corroborated by its presence in numerous dialects – in contrast to the substantial shift in medieval French and English in which engin acquired the quality of artificialness and was preserved, for instance, in associations with machines.42 The term genius, however, used in classical Latin to name a protective god (of individuals, peoples, or places) or the begetting spirit embodied in the family by the paterfamilias, is masculine and animate and disappeared from everyday language during the Middle Ages due to its incompatibility with Christian belief. It was basically retrieved for modern use in sixteenth-century French.43 The changing meanings of the two words (ingenium and genius) clarify their extraordinary versatility and explain how they became a fertile environment for diverse ideologies. The term ingenium, still used by seventeenth-century authors writing in Latin and later adopted by some participants in the debate on the genius of language in its vernacular translations (ingegno, ingenio, engin/esprit, wit), was used both in rhetorical and in medical treatises and could indicate a natural disposition as well as acquired aptitudes, according to context and ideology.44 The term genius, which certainly integrated some of the meanings accumulated by ingenium in the course of its steady and continuous history, is endowed with a different power. It seized on the fundamentally religious perception of a protective divinity and the analogy with divine creative power, a perception that had already been secularized and exploited in late antiquity in order to articulate a state religion.45 It also

Introduction 15

condensed nascent aesthetic values of autonomy and expressivity that lent themselves to new ideological functions. In genius, the link between the two meanings of its root, gen, ‘to generate’ and ‘to know,’ does not simply point at the natural disposition to connect ideas and thus to generate new ones (as in ingenium) but implies institutional power. Linked to gens ‘tribe, people,’ genius refers both to the male’s reproductive power, which ensured the continuity of the patrilineal line and the immortality of the tribe, and to the act of recognition performed by the father when putting the child on his knees (genus), that is, to institutional birth.46 Thus its use in the debate allowed the conflation of institutional regimentation and spontaneous creation. Born a woman, the mother tongue yielded its natural, creative potential to the masculine genius of the institutionalized, written language, guaranteeing the naturalness and continuity of the community, the people, and the race.47 Etymologically connected to origins (genesis, genos, gigno), the genius of language was capable of condensing elements of disparate aesthetic, pedagogical, and linguistic traditions. The aesthetic meanings of genius emerged in Britain during the seventeenth century with the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (who also intervened on the issue of national character) and came to reinforce the hegemonic function of the genius of language.48 Tied to the idea of a productive imagination able to newly shape the materials coming in through the senses, genius also became the example to be imitated. In its application to a person, who was a genius rather than having genius, it also implied the notion of cultural leadership: the genius worked for the spiritual benefits of the collective, not for his own happiness and goods.49 As a rule- and form-giving force characterized by its exceptional originality, it was ‘a force that would crack open the social bonds of taste and political ideology.’50 In Immanuel Kant’s canonical definition, genius was ‘the innate disposition, through which nature gives art its rules.’51 On this basis I argue that whenever the term genius is preferred to esprit, ingegno/indole, or wit, issues of rank and lineage, of exceptionality and autonomy, are implicitly accentuated and must be taken into account. It is striking that when genius is preferred, as for instance in Bouhours’s texts (examined in chapter 2), the discussion tends to gravitate around the old notion of a perfect and exemplary language, establishing one’s own language as superior. Thus, employing the word genius can often signal a competitive national attitude; at the same time, it can also suggest an understanding of the relation between language and identity that emphasizes agency and expressivity.

16

Irresistible Signs

The many facets of the term genius and its highly amphibious nature explain the ability of the discourse about the genius of language to address a fundamental array of identity issues (gender, character, descent, autonomy). A discourse of this kind can be viewed as part of the ideological process that has been described by British critics such as Raymond Williams and, more recently, Terry Eagleton as the ‘accommodation of inclinations’ to the desired political project.52 Eagleton assigns to modern aesthetic values a double-edged function that can also be seen at work in the debate on the genius of language. He shows how the modern aesthetic can be put to use by absolute states to shape and control the concretely sensual, by helping reason penetrate ‘the rabble of the senses’ once it has become clear that rationalistic thought has left them untouched.53 Yet he argues that the same values, integrated in the notion of autonomy, informed the project of the emerging bourgeoisie to free itself from feudal autocracy and to envision an ethic and a way of cognition that did not alienate the particular, the body, the individual. In Eagleton’s account, the same value can be seen as a symptom of absolute power and, at the same time, a challenge to it. By integrating the particulars of languages, previously regarded as accidents, into organic, autonomous systems, the discourse on the genius of language participates in a similar project. Indeed, the characteristics of a national vernacular, once declared organic and peculiar to it, acquired a greater force in shaping both collective and individual identity, sustaining the internalization of the nation. Once the peculiarities of a high-culture vernacular were explained as the intrinsic manifestation of affects and perceptions shaping the genius of the language, rather than as rhetorical conventions, any transgression of such features could be perceived as a form of self-violation.54 Rhetorical and grammatical conventions turned into powerful elements of identity, conflating political interest in cultural uniformity and individual self-definition. I argue that the highly amphibious genius of language allowed the continuity between absolutist and nationalist cultural policies. Its pervasiveness from the seventeenth century onward is astounding. It constituted the core issue in a variety of discourses. It emerged in the philosophical explanations of language diversity and in the reflection on the relationship between language and mind, it shaped the debate on the limits of translation, and it contributed important building blocks to the foundations of the modern idea of nationality. Concentrating on the merging of the genius of language and national character, my book provides representative examples of these various issues.

Introduction 17

The Discourse of the Genius of Language: Panning and Four Close-Ups In chapter 1, which pans across sixteenth-century representations of literary vernaculars that linked language and collective character, I take apart the elements that formed the unifying symbolic force of highculture idioms. I argue that the force and credibility of such representations were sustained by the revival of Epicurean, naturalist approaches to human diversity and the rise of absolutist polities. Naturalist views explained the differences in communicative behaviour as the expression of the differences in dispositions and perceptions of diverse surroundings. Indeed, the study of the expressive qualities of languages, traditionally confined to the classification of styles and characters in treatises of poetics and rhetoric, was applied to the understanding of language diversity and nations. At the same time, absolutist polities endorsed language policies that fostered ever-increasing cultural uniformity. These two trends combined, consolidating the narratives that had joined vernaculars and collective characters. My pan pauses on the writings of the Florentine humanist Benedetto Varchi (1503–65) and the Spanish physician Juan Huarte (ca 1529–88) and then traces their immediate impact on the discourse of language and national identity, particularly conspicuous in France and England. In my textual analyses I dismantle rhetorical strategies and semantic drifts that conflated natural speech and institutional, written idioms and turned the verbal behaviour of specific classes or groups (literati, the Florentine senate, the working classes, the ancient Franks) into icons of entire polities. My analysis of these processes of iconization shows that representations of language which developed in the praises of vernaculars – the traditional site of the debate on genius – not only contributed to the making of languages but also shaped the drawing of boundaries among people.55 For instance, followers of Varchi such as Henri Estienne (ca 1531– 98) and Etienne Pasquier (1529–1615) proved the autonomy of French national identity from the Roman heritage by identifying brevity as the feature distinguishing French from other neo-Latin tongues. They drew the boundary separating France from Spain and Italy, by contrasting this French feature (which they derived by the original monosyllabic roots of the Franks) to the syntactic complexities of Italian and Spanish (which they viewed as a direct Roman heritage), and explained brevity as the expression of the ‘frankness’ and straightforwardness of the French people. In their arguments, based on a naturalist, expressive

18

Irresistible Signs

view of language, issues of origin and boundaries are tightly knit. I believe that the power of the practices of iconization stems from their pervasiveness. They may be produced by simple speakers, that is, by mere participants in a specific sociolinguistic system, but they also inform the reflections of literary scholars, philosophers, and ethnographers in their attempts to rationalize or justify perceived language features and uses. By aligning linguistic and ethnic categories in order to match representations, these sixteenth-century writers established the foundation of the link between the genius of language and national character, ultimately contributing to the equation of one language, one culture, and one nation. Following my general hypothesis about the formation of this ideological chain as the result of the combination of expressive approaches to human diversity and absolutist policies, my four case studies concentrate on the fundamental question about the images of national communities that are implicit in representations of the genius of vernaculars. I ask about the relations of these images to later models of the nation. In chapter 2, I analyse the highly controversial positions of the French grammarian and literary critic Dominique Bouhours, and the response of the Italian critic and historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori. Here I argue that Bouhours’ inclusive representations of the French high literary idiom are the true source of the political power of his arguments. The significance of Bouhours, usually characterized for his narrowly rationalist outlook, is twofold in my story. I contend that by conjoining the new rationalist paradigm enforced in linguistic thought by the grammarians of Port-Royal with the expressive view of language, he was able to collapse the distinction between spontaneous speech and its ‘naïve simplicity,’ with the value of clarté in written French (which meant mostly direct word order) endorsed by contemporary grammarians. This allowed him to endow the ‘French people,’ including lower classes and women, with the possession of the genius of the French language. I argue that by extending the reach of the genius of the French nation across class and gender distinctions, Bouhours anticipated the nationalist symbolic elevation of the entire population of the polity to sovereign agency, a move often described as the foundation of nationalism.56 I focus on Muratori’s response to Bouhours’ claims of French superiority, among the many voices that rose in Italy against Bouhours, because not only was Muratori, in contrast to his contemporary Italian responders, able to disassemble Bouhours’ rhetorical constructions, but he did not miss the political significance of

Introduction 19

their inclusiveness. I contend that his apparently fleeting participation in the Bouhours controversy ultimately informed his monumental historiographical effort; in particular, it shaped his determination to question elitist and monogenic images of the Italian identity. Chapter 3, on Vico, charts a more complicated reaction to Bouhours and, in my view, a move towards a more homogeneous characterization of the Italian language and identity. My double agenda in this chapter is more explicit. I trace Vico’s take on the genius of language and the images of the nation implied in his representations of both vernaculars and ancient classical languages. But I also search for the relations of Vico’s arguments to the ideas of the nation that were put forward by his nationalist followers during the Risorgimento. On the one hand, how creative were they in their reworking of Vico’s thought and, on the other hand, which values, gleaned from an unbiased, more contextualized reading of Vico, could honestly be put at the service of his followers’ own agenda? I show that in Vico’s writings polemical arguments often interfere with his theoretical stance. For instance, his defence of the excellence of the Italian ingenia or minds as shaped by the figurative genius of the Italian language clashes with his strong theoretical opposition to the hardening of the discourse of genius into cultural relativism. Vico feared that the discourse of genius would enforce the belief in the untranslatability of cultures across time and space, and he fought against this perception with all his might. His difficulty in reconciling his representations of vernaculars with his philosophical principles becomes tangible in his shifting position on Dante’s language, in which he increasingly endorses a monogenic origin and emphasizes its purity and sublime primitiveness. Vico’s attempt to create a foundational myth for modern Italy with Dante’s and, I argue, his own language catered to future nationalist ideologies. His interpretation of vernacular as the expression of the plebeians’ emancipation remains, however, a powerful fable of democracy that inspired, for instance, the democratic thought of a charismatic Risorgimento leader such as Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72). The tension between beliefs perceived as universal and values regarded as specific to national cultures also informs Melchiorre Cesarotti’s writings, the subject of chapter 4. Here I investigate the ways in which the notion of the genius of language, which was linked to the belief in the untranslatability of national character, interfered with theories and practices of translation. Cesarotti’s version of the Poems of Ossian (1763–1805) and his accompanying reflections on translation

20

Irresistible Signs

show that he viewed the friction among different cultures as the productive force that shaped individual as well as collective identity and created a dynamic sense of what universal values might be like without reifying universals. Translations were to him one privileged site of such a friction. Contrasting Cesarotti’s thought against the foil of Bonnot de Condillac’s ideas of the genius of language, I argue that Cesarotti’s experience as a translator shaped his view of an inclusive, polyphonic nation in progress that was able to embrace cultural diversity – a view that stands in stark contrast not only with the aesthetic theories but also with the nationalist ideologies that were being developed in his time. Muratori, Vico, and Cesarotti reveal their uneasiness both about the extreme cultural relativism that made the talents, values, and languages of peoples depend on their national character, and about a form of universalism that discredited differences as deviations from universal human nature. In chapter 5, I argue that Giacomo Leopardi’s famous paradoxical style of thought is the product of his direct reflection on this unease and of his search for a new philosophical language that could adequately articulate it. I read Leopardi’s linguistic ideas as an integral part of his discourse on the nation, and I believe that his paradoxical approach to the myth of the genius of language in particular can be better understood against the background of the shifting political and semantic framework recently described by Maurizio Viroli in his For Love of Country as the ‘nationalization’ of classical patriotism.57 If one takes apart the overlapping of the ‘universal’ vocabulary of traditional republican patriotism and the ‘particularistic’ language of nationalism, Leopardi’s radical republicanism comes to shine, and his application of the republican vocabulary to the discourse of the genius of language sheds light on the paradox of modern nationalism. In the arduous style of his Discorso, Leopardi prophetically exposes the fundamentally homogenizing force hidden behind the defence of the cultural and political autonomy championed by nationalists. Anticipating an insight that has been clearly enunciated only by contemporary theorists of the nation, he denounced both the loss of true diversity and the new model of the nation as an organism that promoted cultural uniformity within and outside of the boundaries of the state.58 I provide English translations of all quotations. Unless otherwise noted, these translations were prepared by Scott Surrency. The resistance displayed by the authors considered in this book to myths of national uniformity – whether ethnic or linguistic – stands

Introduction 21

in stark contrast to the rise of nationalism in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. It drew attention to the simple fact that the exclusion of the foreigner as ‘the other’ who overtly belongs outside the nation necessarily began with exclusion within, or with the institutionalization of an abstract, uniform paradigm of subjectivity imposed on the very individuals who were assumed to be the authentic members of the community. The manifold representations of the common Italian vernacular cast doubts on an all-too-direct link between the national language and the modern nationalist project (one culture, one language, one centralized state). Yet, from the beginning of the Risorgimento movement, no one wanted to be reminded of the diversity of the Italian peninsula, which was perceived as a humiliating rather than a productive condition. Indeed, when unification became an urgent political issue, the constructivist arguments articulated in the language debate tended to be obscured, probably because they undermined the effort to effectively represent the desired unity of the nation.59 In the course of my study, confronted with the vast array of possible Italies envisioned in the debate on language, I have come to believe that if a long-standing sense of a shared Italianness ever existed, it was badly betrayed by a lack of imagination.60 When Alessandro Manzoni, as the newly elected senator of a young unified Italy, wanted to impose the Florentine spoken idiom in all schools of the multidialectal nation, linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli reminded him, with good common sense, that Florence was not Paris.61 Today the stubborn attempt to adopt in Italy a highly centralized model that had succeeded in France and elsewhere looks like a failure to imagine a national form and national policies that would be more adequate to Italy’s cultural makeup.62 Restoring the friction between language and the nation by taking apart the ideological chain that has linked them so tightly together may be a way to free our political imagination.

1 Scripts of Vernaculars and Collective Characters in Early Modern Europe

It is only by breaking at any point the nexus between the existence of language, grammar, people, and state that thought and praxis will be equal to the tasks at hand. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics

For a long time, political interests, intercultural encounters of various sorts, and rhetorical strategies together contributed to the creation of narratives that linked language and national character and eventually transformed elements of poetics into national essences. In the present chapter I argue that the myth of the genius of language, which linked the idiosyncrasies of vernaculars to national characters, was the effect of the systematization of different areas of knowledge concerning human diversity.1 This systematic effort, which began in the second half of the sixteenth century, was driven by the rise of absolutist polities and was marked by the revival of Epicurean, naturalist explanations of human diversity, which emphasized natural rather than conventional causes of verbal and other forms of behaviour. Sixteenth-century systematizations substantially affected ancient ethnic characterizations and anecdotal anthropological observations and turned them into a proper taxonomy of national character. Clearly, in order for the nexus between the peculiarities of a language and the national character to be possible, two assumptions had to become accepted. First of all, the different populations assembled in one polity had to be regarded as one individual, endowed with a unique and permanent character that motivated the individual’s behaviour and made the actions predictable.2 It was in the interest of heads of absolut-

Scripts of Vernaculars and Collective Characters 23

ist states to promote policies that fostered these perceptions. Second, the study of language was to emphasize its expressive function, so that vernaculars, even when they were far from coinciding with the usage of the actual populations gathered in one polity, could be construed not only as the natural, ‘maternal’ languages of those populations but also as the quintessential expression of their character. Indeed, sixteenthcentury studies of language and comparisons among vernaculars, even when directed at identifying essential elements of universal grammar, inevitably drew attention to the ‘irregularities’ or peculiarities of individual tongues and soon gave way to the search for the causes of the unique essence of each language, or its genius. In a typical circular mode, genius of language and national character were to be invoked alternatively to explain differences in customs and behaviour, including ‘deviations’ from the assumedly universal linguistic norm. In the following sections I argue that in the second half of the sixteenth century Epicurean approaches to human diversity and the needs of absolutist polities promoted two specific conceptual conflations that are crucial to the later discourse of the genius of language as well as to arguments of linguistic nationalism. Indeed, in defining national vernaculars, writers (and politicians) often conflated spontaneous speech and formal, literary language by attributing characteristics of the one to the other and vice versa. The category of the maternal language was instrumental to their arguments. At the same time, classifications of nations tended to single out particular behaviours of specific classes or groups and to identify them with the inclinations of all populations gathered into the polity or nation. In other words, in the systematic attempts that produced classifications of languages and nations, the mother tongue overlapped with the literary idiom, and the ‘lower classes’ (from time to time, the bourgeoisie, the working class, the plebeians) were identified with the ‘people,’ or the nation. We know by now that, whether they be products of ingenuous analogies or of lucid political aims, these juxtapositions also characterize the formation of nationalist ideology. My examples of the overlapping of these notions as driven by the absolutist push towards cultural uniformity and informed by naturalist views of human diversity can be found in Benedetto Varchi’s Ercolano (1570), a dialogue on the virtues of the Florentine language, and Juan Huarte’s Examen de ingenios para la ciencias (1575), a popular scientific systematization of collective temperaments. The arguments of Varchi (1503–65), especially those addressing the merits of the natural speech

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Irresistible Signs

‘of the Florentine senate and people’ and the advantages of mingling with the volgo to improve one’s own language, created a matrix for the rhetorical strategies linking language, people, and polity. They were appropriated by French and English grammarians, who applied them to their respective languages. Huarte (ca 1529–88), as a doctor and the author of a tract that demonstrated that psychological traits were affected by climate and geography, conferred scientific credibility to narratives that linked geographical areas and specific character traits. His Examen also introduced the idea that a nation possesses a collective disposition that makes its population unable to practise specific activities and disciplines with success. Both Varchi and Huarte expressed an outright confidence in the autonomy and superiority of their cultures, Florentine and Spanish respectively, a confidence that was sustained by the absolutist policies practised in their states by Cosimo I de’ Medici and Phillip II of Spain. The activities and relations of Varchi’s followers and Huarte’s translators represent the convergence of the interest in collective characters and the study of vernaculars in a very concrete way. I argue that these activities nationalized Varchi’s and Huarte’s theories by turning standard vernaculars into the icon of national character. They provide evidence for my claim that the ideological framework for the myth of the genius of language was long in the making and was put together from arguments developed in the late sixteenth century. Scholars of different disciplines, while emphasizing different circumstances, agree that the Renaissance period marks a new starting point in the systematic effort to understand and rationalize cultural diversity. Events of great consequence such as the encounter with the New World, which triggered an epochal turn in the ethnographic discourse, and the Reconquista, with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain that ultimately aimed at the congruence of religious and national identity, added new connotations to the experience of alterity.3 The revival of classical antiquity with the rediscovery of ancient historical and ethnographic achievements not only constituted in itself an encounter with the artifacts of different populations from various places and times but also provided a rich storehouse of narratives about other peoples’ customs and languages to be studied and differentiated. Both discoveries – the New World and the ancient texts – presented a large number of intellectuals with the illusion of direct contact with cultures that appeared radically different in time and space. Authentic information seemed to be readily available, yet for most of those writers

Scripts of Vernaculars and Collective Characters 25

participating in the flourishing ethnographic discourse the only real encounters were with manuscripts and books in libraries, that is, with representations of customs, behaviours, and languages. The pressing task of translating the newly discovered ancient manuscripts into Latin or vernacular revealed all the difficulties of rendering peculiar idioms or notions specific to a particular culture, and the emphases created by a particular word order, thus raising the question of the origin and causes of the untranslatable ways in which each language organizes ideas and words. The territorial rationalization and centralization of European states, accompanied in the second half of the sixteenth century by a fundamental shift in the view of sovereignty, has also been regarded as an essential element of this new historical and cultural environment that was favourable to novel distributions of collective characterizations.4 The diffusion of power characteristic of the feudal polities of the Middle Ages was giving way to centralized monarchies that began to consolidate and unify their territories. Maps, which fixed the shape, location, and size of the new monarchies, became, as Leersen argues, ‘the new mirrors of kings.’5 At the same time, the populations stretching throughout the length and breadth of the new states became aware, as Hagen Schulze notes, that the king was no longer the head of one of many aristocratic factions of the state but rather the ruler of the entire nation, and consequently the crown began to acquire a strong symbolic unifying force.6 The new Spanish, French, and English monarchies were centred around the power of the king and therefore cannot be considered analogous to nation-states in which the people is defined as ‘the bearer of sovereignty.’ However, like the modern nation, they increasingly required a higher degree of internal cultural uniformity in order to function. The congruence of polity and culture, a key element of nationalism, as Gellner has shown, was becoming vital to the consolidation of their territories as well as to the administration and the economy of centralized states. It was in the interest of absolute monarchies not only to promote national sentiments that fostered the loyalty of the different populations aggregated in their states but also to sustain linguistic policies aimed at creating a pool of interchangeable subjects that could fulfil the needs of a vast bureaucratic apparatus.7 Nationalist movements appropriated the ideology of cultural homogeneity and built on the policies of absolutism. Leerssen summarizes the relationship between the historico-political context and the new ethnographic discourse as fol-

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Irresistible Signs

lows: ‘Europe was becoming a modular system of separate states, each with a recognizable territory, language, and profile. And by the same token, cultural thought on the diversity of the world was beginning to systematize.’8 From Fictional Characters to Collective Identities Speech is the character of the soul.

Bernard Lamy, La Rhétorique ou l’art de parler European ethnographic discourse as well as ethnic stereotyping go back to classical antiquity, as do explanations of diversity that appeal either to physical conditions such as climate and territory or to cultural factors such as laws and religion.9 Encyclopedic descriptions of peoples were already to be found in Herodotus, yet it was Isidore of Seville’s compilation Etymologiae sive originum (ca 600) that made available to the Middle Ages a series of topoi extracted from ancient geographers and classical authors.10 But before the territorial rationalization of European states these topoi were far from being stable or systematic. Studies of imagology have shown that the systematization of national characteristics began in the late sixteenth century, when contrastive-comparative lists of character traits and psychological dispositions were compiled. These collective characterizations were organized around a few steady oppositions (Ancients/Goths, south/north, weak/strong, central/peripheral) and distributed among various nations.11 Scholars of imagology tend to identify Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetices libri septem (1561; in particular, book 3, chapter 16, entitled ‘Natio sive genus’), with its obsession for completeness and its taxonomic method, as the major reference for the genre of character studies. This genre flourished in neo-Aristotelian poetical writings as well as through the seventeenthcentury revival of Theophrastus’s Characters (ca 319 BCE), particularly in France.12 It is worth pausing here to consider that the early phase of the systematization of national characteristics, which took place during the late Renaissance, occurred primarily in works of poetics. Modern scholars notice that national characterizations assign specific actorial roles to specific nations, attributing temperamental traits that help explain their allegedly collective behaviour and actions; consequently, national characterizations tend to gravitate to narrative and dramatic registers.13 Furthermore, since fictional works require the suspension of disbelief,

Scripts of Vernaculars and Collective Characters 27

they also make national stereotyping more easily acceptable. Thus, it should not be surprising that national characteristics were systematized in metaliterary works such as treatises of poetics. I would like to stress that in novels and, more substantially, in plays, character is conveyed through utterances and expressive style. Hence authors of poetics often discuss which kinds of idioms, style, or vocabulary represent a particular character or type in a more appropriate and verisimilar fashion. By reflecting on the most adequate utterances and attitudes of ‘foreign characters’ in works of fiction, literary theorists came to consider, even invent, the identity of nations and its causes. In Italy, for instance, Giovan Giorgio Trissino wrote at length, in the ‘Sesta divisione’ of his Poetica (1562), about convenient ways to represent characters from different nationalities. Even before his fellow humanist Scaliger, who advised poets to look for the peoples’ ingenia in their history and in the people’s mouth (‘ex ore vulgi’),14 Trissino not only distributed psychological and moral traits according to the country of birth but also suggested searching for these quintessential traits in popular sayings and proverbs, offering a long list of examples.15 Of course, these types of idioms do not condense some ancient and authentic wisdom about national characters; rather, their effect of verisimilitude is based on their frequent reiteration and wide circulation, which make them easily recognizable and thus make them appear true.16 In the course of the seventeenth century, traditional classifications of vices and virtues, composed for the use of scholars and poets, were increasingly applied to national collectivities in popular works of poetics and literary theory such as Traiano Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso (1612–13), Jules de la Mesnadiere’s Poétique (1640), and Jean de la Bruyère’s Caractères (1668). These texts combined literature and anthropology and produced varied catalogues of national properties that provided vast materials for charts of peoples.17 Popular moral cartography, which had mapped human passions, vices, and humours for the orientation of an imaginary traveller through the intricate moral landscape of humanity in general, gave way to tableaux of nationalities that distributed sins and merits across nations.18 This systematizing impulse culminated in the tableaux of nationalities, or matrices, that tabulated national characteristics under different headings, listing categories as varied as eating habits, manners, languages, types of clothing, education, religion, intelligence, vices, and prevailing illnesses. Leersen mentions, among the most popular charts, the table published in the encyclopedic treatise Specula physico-mathematico-historica notabilium ac

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Irresistible Signs

mirabilium scientiarum by the Dominican Johannes Zahn (Nuremberg, 1696), which catalogued the differences of ‘the five most important nations in Europe, the German, Spanish, Italian, French and English ones’ in an anecdotal listing that betrays Zahn’s satirical intentions. Leersen agrees, however, with Louis van Delft and Franz K. Stanzel that by listing many more nationalities the later Austrian Völkertafel or ‘Tableau of Nationalities’19 exerted a unique influence and was reproduced in numerous painted and printed copies between 1690 and 1720. Twelve nationalities were represented by figures in traditional dress, arranged in the horizontal top row from left to right in a west to east pattern, while the vertical columns distributed the various specific characteristics. Leersen observes that the form of the matrix itself imposed specific rules: ‘A value must be filled in for each of the nationalities. It would not do to leave any of the squares blank … Nor would it do to list similar values in different squares: each of the squares has to say something different.’20 The very choice of form reveals that in the course of the seventeenth century European nations began to define their identities on the basis of their mutual differences – ‘they will come to see their character, their individuality, in those aspects in which they differ most from others’ – repressing and distorting their commonalities.21 Clearly, the transition from fictional characters to collective identities was affected by naturalist approaches to human diversity, which I discuss in my next section. These approaches emphasized the expressive function of language and, in particular, showed that differences among languages expressed the impact of different environments on bodies and sense perceptions. The new classifications of populations were shaped by the belief that various expressions of human perceptions, as represented in books and reports, constituted a solid foundation for the classification of real peoples.22 The question to ask at this point is how was it possible that poetical typologies in the ancient Theophrastic tradition (which portrayed types and individual characters representing classes, professions, countries) and loose, unsystematic descriptions of peoples could be transformed into a pseudoscientific taxonomy of collective characters that became increasingly relevant to numerous disciplines. Even studies of legal systems and forms of government such as the classical treatises by Jean Bodin (Les six livres de la République, 1576) and, much later, Baron de Montesquieu (L’esprit des lois, 1748) drew on these taxonomies.23 One answer can be found in the advent of the absolutist polity. Indeed, the political function of constructs identified as national characters was ac-

Scripts of Vernaculars and Collective Characters 29

centuated by the transformation of early modern polities into absolutist states and later into aspiring nations in which the congruency of polity and culture became fundamental to the functioning of a vast bureaucratic apparatus and a centralized administration. The scholarly revival of naturalist, Epicurean trends in explanations of human diversity enhanced the credibility of such constructs. Obviously, representations of populations and languages, which even in ancient times were part of disparate literary genres, have never been politically innocent. Classics such as Aeschylus’s Persians, Xenophon’s Cyropedia, and, more conspicuously, Aristotle’s Politics came to define Greek identity versus Persian culture, even postulating (as did Aristotle’s Politics) ‘natural slavery’ as a disposition of particular populations that should therefore be assigned as slaves to masters and domesticated (Politics, 1254a, 15ff.). Greek love for liberty was typically opposed to the Persian inclination to be mastered, which was used to explain their despotic government as well as their defeat.24 I consider Jean Bodin, with his famous chapter entitled ‘What Order and Course to Be Taken, to Apply the Form of Commonwealth to the Diversity of Men’s Humours, and the Means to Discover the Nature and Disposition of the People’ in the fifth book of Les six livres de la République, the pioneer of that modern trend in political theory that culminated in Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois. Strongly influenced by Hippocrates’ and Galen’s theories about the influence of climate on physical and moral traits, Bodin builds on both biblical and classical sources.25 He distributes ‘all the nations of the earth’ into three areas equidistant to the equator, from the Antarctic and from the tropic, and divides each area again into a northern, a middle, and a southern region.26 He rehearses and, at the same time, substantially complicates several classical commonplaces by considering the peculiar mixings of temperaments occurring within the various nations, offering infinite variations of traditional stereotypes. Thus he estimates that the strong, violent, bellicose, and freedom-loving northerners can be ruled only by force. The peoples of the middle region are the most temperate in esprit and body and the most apt in jurisprudence, political science, and rhetoric and are therefore fit to live in republics. The most ingenious of all, the ‘subtle’ southerners, are inclined to occult and natural sciences, contemplation, and mathematics and are governable only through the transcendent and superior power of religion.27 Bodin devotes entire sections of his text to explaining recent political conflicts between Spain and France by appealing to the character traits derived from their na-

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turel. The Spanish people, being more southern (‘beaucoup plus Meridional’),28 enjoy the advantage of their ingeniousness, inner coldness, and contemplative inclination, while the French people are vehement, active, and more diligent, but less calculating. Italians, who in Bodin’s portrayal are a mixture of Spanish and French and as such more accomplished than either of them, come off particularly well, especially in comparison with their later characterization as an effeminate people of cicisbei.29 For instance, Bodin legitimates French interference in Italian affairs, maintaining that the French naturel, characterized by straightforwardness, diligence, and quickness in all their actions, is more compatible with the political and military interests of Italians.30 There are many intriguing arguments in Bodin’s chapter on the characters of peoples, yet I would like to draw attention to those aspects that are relevant to my discussion of the genius of language and strengthen my claim that the revival of naturalist, Epicurean trends, together with the rise of absolutism, contributed to the consolidation of the notion of national character. Bodin’s determinist inflection of the naturalist approach to diversity should not come as a total surprise. We know that when Bodin was writing Les six livres de la république, he had barely escaped the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572 and was worried about finding ways to fend off the anarchy and the chaos that he had experienced in a period of brutal religious conflicts. His attempt at rationalizing the workings of power led to his fundamental reflection on sovereignty and his confidence in absolutist forms of government. A major theoretician of absolutism who believed that sovereign authority had to be concentrated in the king and yet must be exercised in accordance with divine and natural laws, Bodin felt the need to theorize the relation between forms of government and peoples’ natural characters, ultimately reinforcing the idea of the people’s uniformity – a crucial ideological instrument of both absolutist and nationalist states.31 Bodin’s work reveals the political function of the reification of poetical typology. While the characters ‘nationum’ of Scaliger, for instance, systematized mere ‘accidental’ traits, Bodin classified the naturel of different peoples, or the essential collective characters that allowed the prediction of collective behaviour and could therefore constitute a foundation of political theories. Language itself, however, is considered only very briefly in Bodin’s account, at the end of his chapter about peoples’ temperaments, and in order to prove, once again, that the force of ‘heavens, winds, waters, and earth’ is much stronger than any other condition. ‘The people of

Scripts of Vernaculars and Collective Characters 31

the North, or that dwell upon mountains, having a more inward heat, deliver their words with greater vehemence and more aspiration than the people from the East or the South, who interlace their vowels more sweetly and avoid aspiration.’32 The sounds of a tongue are determined by the nature of the terrain in which people are born and live, and come to distinguish different peoples or different tribes. The same language can undergo changes in the ways it is pronounced, according to the geography and climate of the place to which it is transported, as in the case of the ‘Saxons’ pronouncing the word for horse ‘Pferd’ and the Fleming pronouncing it ‘Perd.’ Clearly, language is seen here only as a physical fact, a question of mere sounds, which Bodin presents as yet another strong proof of the force of climate on bodies and not as an index of a collective outlook (‘that the nature of the place does greatly change the nature and pronunciation of men’).33 It is still a far cry from the emphasis on the expressive function and on the semiotic importance of signifiers that was necessary to consolidate the connection between features of vernaculars and national character and to invent the genius of language. The Politics of the ‘Maternal Language’ It is only in the second half of the [twentieth] century that a sizeable part of the population started using only or mainly Italian, and we therefore find children who can be described as native speakers of Italian rather than dialect. Giulio C. Lepschy, Mother Tongues and Other Reflections on the Italian Language

The political relevance of naturalist approaches to language – that is, approaches that posit a direct link between language and bodily perceptions, and language and passions – is apparent from the beginning of the discussion about the specific features of individual vernaculars. Interest in the uniqueness of each vernacular, which later led to the search for the genius of each individual tongue, originated in the struggle to release early modern European cultures and polities from the constraints of Latin as well as imperial and papal control. In the fifteenth century the idea of the maternal language functioned within this struggle not as a reference to a given natural language but rather as an emblem of a geographic space perceived as culturally homogeneous or, as the cultural historian Raffaele Pinto puts it, a ‘criterion to organize

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the linguistic consciousness’ of people belonging to that space.34 According to Pinto, it was a symbol that allowed the perception of what was a prevalently written, literary language as maternal and natural, promoting the ‘internalization of linguistic alterity’ in the service of political centralization.35 In other words, the category of maternal language is the pre-eminent site of the conflation of natural speech and formal, standardized language that founds linguistic nationalism. It was implicit, as we shall see, in Dante Alighieri’s linguistic thought, and later informed the dispute (1435) between Biondo Flavio and Leonardo Bruni about whether Latin had ever been a natural, ‘a-grammatical’ spoken language rather than a gramatica or an artificially created literary convention. More famously, the idea of maternal language sustained Lorenzo de Medici’s cultural-political program in favour of Florentine vernacular as a model for the whole peninsula. The Raccolta aragonese (1477), a collection of vernacular poetry dedicated to Federigo of Aragon, the son of King Ferdinand of Naples, well represents Lorenzo’s program of cultural hegemony. A few years later, in the proem to his Comento, the commentary on a selection of his own lyric poetry (ca 1482–4), Lorenzo presented Florentine, the tongue ‘in which I was born and fed’ (‘quella lingua nella quale io sono nato e nutrito’), his ‘maternal language, as common to the whole of Italy’ (‘l’essere comune a tutta Italia la nostra materna lingua’), articulating even more explicitly the political function of the Florentine vernacular tradition.36 Lorenzo clearly referred to the literary idiom. Nevertheless, he had no problem in declaring the written vernacular as both Florentine and Italian nor in invoking the general category of maternal language, which allowed the transcending of regional and social boundaries and reinforced the perception of Italy as a homogeneous cultural space. He openly revealed his ambitions by connecting the fate of Florentine vernacular with the ‘prosperous success and increase of the Florentine empire,’ a success that was precluded by internal political unrest and by the French invasion that forced the Medici family into exile.37 The idea of maternal language, conflating spontaneous speech and the written idiom of an elite, found an even more direct political use in the series of French royal edicts from 1490 onward.38 I would argue that its use marks the inception of that process of internalization of the nation that is usually viewed as a much later phenomenon, belonging to the second half of the eighteenth century. Dante’s assertion of the superiority of vernacular over gramatica (‘Huarum quoque duarum nobilior est vulgaris,’ De vulgari eloquentia,

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I, i, 4) has been seen as the very first ‘Declaration of Independence of the modern languages.’39 His view of the vernacular as the first and natural language of humans (‘quia prima fuit humano generi usitata … tum quia naturalis est nobis,’ I, i, 4) and, in its Italian manifestation (‘vulgare latium’), as the noblest among the ‘simplicissima signa’ of Italianness (I, xvi, 3–4), became the heart of a long-standing nationalist interpretation of his treatise.40 Even a trained linguist such as Antonio Gramsci unequivocally asserted that the De vulgari eloquentia ‘must be essentially considered as an act of national cultural politics.’41 Yet Dante himself was ultimately interested in endorsing the linguistic creation of the ‘doctores illustres’ (among whom he placed himself), not an actual, natural mother tongue. He discredits all vernaculars spoken in Italy as a possible literary language and even downplays how much his ‘illustrious vernacular’ was actually based on his native Tuscan. Indeed, it has been argued that it was rather Dante’s famous statement in his Convivio that extolled the merits of the mother tongue.42 In the Convivio, XIII, 4, Dante emphasized the natural link between the language and the individual by describing the vernacular as a physical element of his own essence. He presents a powerful image of his own vernacular as the ‘fire that had joined’ his parents and contributed to his conception (‘Questo mio volgare fu congiungitore de li miei generanti, che con esso parlavano, si come ‘l fuoco è disponitore al fabbro che fa coltello’). Dante’s vernacular was both cause and essence of his own existence (‘è lui essere concorso a la mia generazione, e così essere alcuna ragione del mio essere’) since, as Pinto argues, it had been ‘the mediation between man and woman at two levels, sexual (fu congiugnitore) and verbal (con esso parlavano), both the means of communication of his parents and the condition of his biological existence.’43 Linked to procreation, the vernacular of Dante’s Convivio is the maternal language par excellence. If his statement from the Convivio had been retrieved in the Italian questione della lingua, instead of the arguments from the De vulgari eloquentia, it could have fostered the internalization of the literary language in Italy. But the Italian questione della lingua rather built on Dante’s idea of illustrious vernacular, a language forged by an intellectual elite, in which Dante included himself and his poet friends.44 Indeed, when Giovan Giorgio Trissino resuscitated the De vulgari eloquentia (1529), he utilized Dante’s unfinished treatise to support his idea that the vernacular of the Three Crowns, which he conflated with the idiom used in the contemporary Italian courts, ought to be named Italian instead of Tuscan or Florentine, in order to reflect better its super-

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regional character. In his Prose della vulgar lingua (1525), Pietro Bembo firmly established the literary Tuscan of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarca as the model for the written language of Italy, paying lip service to the idea of the natural language (against the artificial Latin) only in the introductory part of his dialogue.45 However, many Florentine intellectuals such as Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Claudio Tolomei (1492–1556), Giovan Battista Gelli (1498– 1563), and Benedetto Varchi (1503–65) resented the interpretations of Dante’s and Italy’s language as a literary convention or a courtly koine, insisting on the Florentine origin of the literary language and its natural quality.46 It is in their work, and particularly in Varchi’s as we shall see in the next section, that the naturalist explanation of language merged with the collective outlook of the people. ‘The people is the one who speaks, therefore the tongue is named vernacular; the people is the architect of language’ (‘Il vulgo è quel che parla: dunque il parlare è vulgare; il vulgo è architetto della lingua’), Tolomei, for instance, maintained in Il Cesano de la lingua toscana (written ca 1530, published in 1555).47 I believe that it was the revival of naturalist explanations of human diversity, and particularly Epicurean tenets about language and origin, that provided the philosophical framework for new narratives that merged the novel perceptions of language diversity and collective identity. Indeed, if language diversity were understood as the expression of humans’ different perception of different surroundings, the diverse literary vernaculars that were asserting themselves against the dominance of Latin in the Middle Ages could be construed as the natural spontaneous expression of individual nationes. In his famous Letter to Herodotus, preserved in Diogenes Laertius’ Vitae Philosophorum (ca 3 CE; book 10, 34–83), Epicurus rejected the conventional origin of names and maintained that they expressed men’s perceptions of their surroundings. ‘Names did not originally come into being by convention but the very natures of men, which undergo particular feelings (páthe) and receive particular perceptions (phantásmata) according to the tribes (éthne) they live in, expelled air in particular ways as determined by each of their feelings and perceptions, in accordance too with the various local differences among the tribes’ (10, 75).48 According to Epicurus, linguistic convention is introduced only later, within each tribe, in order to avoid ambiguity and superfluous wordiness. Like his Latin follower Lucretius in De rerum natura (1 BCE), Epicurus presents language as the expression of needs and affects, which in turn are shaped

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by the speakers’ physical and societal environment. Stefano Gensini notes that Epicurean theories had circulated for centuries through the mediations of several classical authors, yet the publication in 1472 of Ambrogio Traversari’s Latin translation of Diogenes Laertius’s Vitae Philosophorum, which includes Epicurus’s extant letters (reprinted seventeen times) and Poggio Bracciolini’s 1417 discovery of a manuscript of De rerum natura, printed in 1473, made these theories more directly accessible. A measure of the integration of Epicurean tenets into traditional explanations of human diversity, which occurred during the sixteenth century, is offered by the encyclopedic scholar Girolamo Cardano, who, in ‘De hominis natura et temperamento’ (book 12 of his De subtilitate [1551]), dared to explain language diversity as the result of natural differences, not of God’s punishment.49 To Cardano, differences in languages were not a mere matter of labels and sounds, as in the Aristotelian interpretation, but involved the semantic processes.50 They not only reflected differences in the nature of places (‘locorum natura’) and in the living usage of the common people (‘vulgus dum sine cura profert, illas viciat et adulterat’) but also expressed differences in perceptions, the ‘affections of the human soul (animi affectus).’51 In other words, Cardano questioned the uniformity of human nature and encouraged the investigation of different temperaments and characters. The impact of linguistic Epicureanism on humanist ideas concerning language has a complicated and vast history that has been reconstructed only in part.52 Here I want to emphasize the aspects of this revival that are relevant to the birth of the myth of the genius of language. It is important to note that the retrieval of naturalist approaches to linguistic and cultural diversity, grounded on Epicurean tenets, weakened the traditional conventional hypothesis and drew attention to the interaction of mind, body, and environment, both natural and social. The Aristotelian belief in the primacy of abstract concepts (regarded as the universal element of language) over the material aspect of words (viewed as merely accidental) was altered by an increased understanding of the interdependence of signified and signifier and by a consideration of the natural constraints of language. The expressive qualities of languages, once they were also recognized as expressions of particular ways of perceiving specific natural and social environments, were analysed not only as rhetorical conventions but also as natural, spontaneous manifestations of those perceptions. Humanists’ intensive occupation with the study of language in its natural and historical understanding inaugurated the typological study of languages, while the systematic

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study of human dispositions gave substance to the collective narratives that shaped the identities of the new increasingly centralized polities. The People’s or the Writers’ Language? Benedetto Varchi’s Ercolano In my preceding remarks I have claimed that, in their own attempt to promote the primacy of Florentine as the model for the written language, Florentine humanists such as Claudio Tolomei, Giovan Battista Gelli, and Benedetto Varchi retrieved the notion of natural language and emphasized its close link to the mind of the people. They expressed the perception of language as an organic, autonomous whole, endowed with a distinctive character that was related to the collective outlook of a specific community, a perception that prepared the ground for the myth of the genius of language.53 The idea that each language has its own unique perfection had already been articulated in famous defences of the vernacular, such as Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo delle lingue (1542) and Joachim du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549), which was modelled on Speroni’s dialogue. Indeed, both writers defended the dignity and autonomy of their respective vernaculars, which they regarded as independent systems with matrices residing in their users and not exclusively in literary texts.54 But they still perceived linguistic differences as accidental occurrences not affecting signification and conveyed a sense of unease in asserting the dignity of vernacular cultures against classical traditions.55 Varchi’s bold celebration of the superiority of Florentine over all contemporary vernaculars, and even over Latin and Greek, made a truly exceptional claim for the times. Regarded by linguists as a true compendium of Renaissance linguistic knowledge and a pioneering study of sociolinguistics and language typology,56 Varchi’s Ercolano (written between 1560 and 1565, widely circulated, but published only in 1570) figures in my pre-history of the debate on the genius of language as an early and authoritative instance of the conflation of spontaneous speech and literary language and the related overlapping of the people (as social class) and the People (as those who can exercise their political rights). I keep returning to these semantic drifts since they characterize not only the discussion on the genius of language but also the discourse of linguistic nationalism. Their emergence in a work written as part of a cultural program that served the needs of the increasingly centralized authoritarian rule of Cosimo de’ Medici, which marked the death of the

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Florentine republic, reinforces my claim that these shifts are connected to the rise of the absolutist polity. Indeed, the historical context of Varchi’s Ercolano (ER) points to the new form of political promotion of the vernacular in Florence. Varchi was one of the anti-Medici Florentine exiles recalled to Florence by Cosimo I de’ Medici in order to strengthen the Florentine cultural primacy, as part of his effort after a period of crisis in the Medici leadership to build consensus for his absolutist style of government.57 Varchi soon became ‘consul’ of the Florentine Academy, directly sponsored by Cosimo, and was entrusted with writing a history of the Medici family under the significant title of Storia fiorentina. Viewed in its political framework, Ercolano appears to be an attempt to return the sovereignty over the Florentine language to the people of Florence, since all major grammars and studies of the vernacular, as well as the best vernacular poetry, had been produced by northern Italians. The most influential among those studies, Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua (1525), had concentrated on the written language of the so-called Tre Corone, discrediting spoken Florentine and even asserting that Florentines would be at a disadvantage when conversing at court and writing because their spoken idiom would interfere with good usage. Varchi succeeded in putting Bembo’s claim of the superiority of the Three Crowns in the service of the supremacy of the Florentine language and people. Like Speroni, Varchi defines the regularity and perfection of a language not as the result of artistic efforts but as qualities intrinsic to it. Yet while Speroni defended the autonomy of all vernaculars, never stating the superiority of one particular language, Varchi concentrates on showing the unique richness, beauty, and expressivity of actual Florentine usage, often conflating the distinctions between written and spoken language and manipulating categories of naturalness and originality in order to assert its primacy. Varchi’s definition of language reveals his clear intuition of its social nature: Lingua, o vero Linguaggio, non è altro che un favellare d’uno o più popoli, il quale, o i quali, usano, nello sprimere i loro concetti, i medesimi vocaboli nelle medesime significazioni, e co’ medesimi accidenti.58 [Language, or rather speech, is nothing more than the speech of one or more peoples who, in expressing their thoughts and ideas, use the same words in the same way and with the same accidental characteristics.]

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Varchi here characterizes language on the basis of the speakers’ community, not of a literary canon. In order to be considered a language, a tongue must be ‘in use by a people’ and must be learned from the surrounding persons (ER, 182) – a far cry from Bembo’s then-dominant opinion according to which only an idiom that had produced great writers constituted a language. Against the lingua cortigiana, endorsed by Baldassarre Castiglione (1478–1529) and Lodovico Castelvetro (1505–71), Varchi argues that since the courtly idiom is not spoken by any ‘people’ (popolo, here understood as a ‘natural’ speech community), it cannot be regarded as a proper language (‘E a provare che la lingua Cortigiana non è lingua, basta dire che ella non è, e mai non fu naturalmente favellata da niuno popolo,’ ER, 182, italics mine). Varchi’s use of the word people throughout his dialogue articulates the typical ambivalence of the vernacular term, in Italian, French, Spanish, and English, which came to signify both ‘the People’ as the whole of the citizenry or the political body, and the ‘people’ as those belonging to the inferior social classes. Such an internal split – as opposed to the Romans’ juridical distinction between populus and plebs, also expressed in the difference of words – and the particular will to suppress this split constituted the foundation of the modern project of the nation.59 In a famous passage, Varchi does offer a detailed differential definition of the people. Yet he otherwise seems to exploit – or perhaps to be caught in – the ambiguities of the word, especially when it comes to legitimizing the Florentine language against Dante’s and Bembo’s authority and to demonstrating the merits of its naturalness. In such contexts, he indeed seems to use the demotic connotation of the word. Since Varchi himself repeatedly conflated the connotations of the term people, it is even more surprising that he offers a whole section in which he distinguishes among (1) the speech of the plebeians (‘popolazzo’), to be disregarded; (2) the use of the illiterates (‘idioti’), who cannot speak correctly; (3) the speech of educated people (‘non idioti’), who speak their native tongue correctly but do not know any foreign language; and finally, (4) the use of the literati, who know not only their native language but also Latin and Greek (ER, 323–4). He establishes the speech of the educated people of Florence (no. 3 above) as the norm for the common vernacular of Italy. Against the accepted belief of his time, Varchi claims that naturalness is crucial not only to pragmatic communication but also to artistic forms, both in prose and in verse.60 He repeatedly declares that writers would substantially improve their language by mingling with the Florentine people (ER, 343, 347, 449)

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and even produces a copious sample of popular idioms and proverbs that, he maintains, could not be found in books but only in the natural usage of ‘the Senate and the Florentine people’ (‘se non da coloro, i quali l’hanno in uso nel lor parlare quasi da natura … il Senato, e ’l Popolo Fiorentino,’ ER, 148). Explaining his statement, however, Varchi suddenly includes in the people of Florence all classes, especially those that constituted what in the previous century were called the popolo minuto and the whole peasantry. E si favellano, che è più là, non dico da’ fattori de’ barbieri e di calzolai, ma da’ ciabattini, e da’ ferravecchi …; e non è sì tristo artigiano dentro a quelle mura che voi vedete (e il medesimo dico de’ foresi e de’ contadini) il quale non sappia di questi motti e riboboli. (ER, 148) [And what is more, they are used not, I say, by barbers and shoemakers but by cobblers and hucksters …; and there is not so miserable a tradesman within those city walls that you see there (and I’d say the same of rustics and farmers) who doesn’t know these sayings and quips.]

Varchi here is willing to overcome the self-imposed limits of educated speech and to breach social boundaries, reassuring his interlocutor Cesare that he could learn Florentine usage even from Varchi’s maid (ER, 149). His attempt to include the native lower classes into the Florentine polity prefigures the symbolic elevation of the plebeians to sovereign people that characterizes nationalist ideologies.61 Precisely because Varchi’s definition of the people, based on the speech of the ‘non idioti,’ is very specific and sophisticated, one could read his substantial and lengthy treatment of Florentine popular idioms not as an inconsistency or as the whim of a folk enthusiast but rather as a conscious hegemonic attempt. Indeed, this inclusion allows him to emphasize the image of naturalness, which he needs in order to legitimize his preference for Florentine and, at the same time, to imply the inclusion of the people (as class) into the People (as polity). The fact that naturalness (‘naturalità’), in Varchi’s view, can only stem from ‘Fiorentinità’ (ER, 335) and thus must be acquired directly from the common Florentine people (here he uses the term volgo, not popolo) and by rejecting input from other Italian regions (ER, 180), reinforces the vision of a tight correspondence among the natural, cultural, and political units, a correspondence that was necessary to produce the phantasm of one uniform and undivided people and a much-needed prop in Duke Cosimo’s absolutist polity. In

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fact, when Varchi rejects the mixing of elements from different Italian tongues, he does it on the basis of a classification that considers Italy’s other vernaculars as ‘foreign’ (‘è che tutti gli altri parlari d’Italia, qualunque che sieno, sono, verso il Fiorentino, forestieri,’ ER, 180), different, and ultimately inferior to Florentine (‘lingue diverse e diseguali,’ ER, 172). Although the various Italian vernaculars, including Florentine, all developed from the corruption of Latin after the barbarian invasions, to Varchi they remain different tongues of common origin but unequal in value and dignity: Ma non hanno già né la medesima, né la quasi medesima nobiltà, o per non avere scrittori, o per non gli avere tali, che possano loro dare fama e riputazione, quali sono …, brevemente, quasi tutte l’altre lingue Italiche, verso la Fiorentina. (ER, 173) [But they have neither the same nobility nor anything even resembling the same nobility, either for a lack of writers or for a lack of writers who might bring them fame and renown; such are …, briefly, almost all the other Italic languages in relation to the Florentine tongue.]

The problem with such statements is that, after insisting throughout his treatise that his object is the spoken language (‘favellare’) and not the written language, Varchi reintroduces the authority of writers as a criterion to account for the superiority of Florentine. Despite Varchi’s appreciation of natural speech and his view of language diversity as a sign of nature’s perfection – and not of human limits – he can only envision a one-way process in which ‘foreigners’ learn from the Florentines, and yet nothing ‘foreign’ is admitted as such in the Florentine language. Thus in the end Varchi upholds a new form of purity, one different and yet as equally rigid as Bembo’s orthodoxy of the Three Crowns. While Bembo insisted (1525) on the strict imitation of a narrowly defined literary ideal, Varchi’s version of purity boils down to an interdiction of mixing languages from different regions, even when those tongues are related, like Italy’s vernaculars. In his selection of a common language for Italy, Varchi replaces the aesthetic principles of Dante and Bembo with criteria of political hegemony. The arsenal of individual arguments that were later recycled in the European debate on the genius of language clearly emerges from those passages of the Ercolano in which Varchi directly addresses issues of origins and boundaries – the same issues that shape ethnic models of

Scripts of Vernaculars and Collective Characters 41

nations – while attempting to legitimize Florentine primacy. In his reconstruction of the origin of Florentine (‘Quesito quinto’), Varchi accepts Bembo’s and Speroni’s ‘teoria della catastrofe,’ according to which the volgare was born out of the corruption of Latin through the barbarian invasions, and dismisses the theory of other fiorentinisti, who explained the excellence of their tongue by its Etruscan origin and by the claim that Florence had never experienced a lengthy foreign occupation. Pressed to explain the reason for Florentine linguistic superiority over other Italian tongues that shared the same origin, Varchi did not hesitate to attribute the Florentine perfection to the ‘subtle and ingenious’ (‘sottili e ingegnosi’) Florentine people: ‘Such they are, always have been, and thus they succeeded better and earlier than other populations in polishing it [the language]’ (ER, 200). His argument, positing a collective character of the Florentines, can here be read as a mere rhetorical tribute to his hometown, to which he had just been allowed to return. The problem is that Varchi also insists on his explanation later, in the last quesito of his dialogue in which he firmly returns the Italian standard vernacular to the Florentine polity, while developing an awareness of what could be considered the prototype of the genius of language. Varchi begins his last section by reaffirming the solid boundaries of Italian vernaculars and again declaring them, as he had done in the quesito terzo, to be different from and unequal in value to Florentine. He then rejects as a chimera Dante’s Italian vernacular (‘which has left its scent in every city but made its home in none,’ De vulgari eloquentia, I, XVI, 5)62 and unmasks as a nonsensical lie (‘parole vane e finte,’ 474) Trissino’s Italian koine, or that mixed, Tuscan-based vernacular that had been used at the Italian courts and their chanceries at least throughout the first half of the sixteenth century – a language that Trissino had proclaimed to be universally understood in the entire Italian peninsula. Varchi rejects the Italian koine, arguing that the analogy with ancient Greek was wrong since the Greek koine was not the result of an integration of dialects, but their lingua madre, that is, a language that preceded all of them (ER, 471). The Greek dialects were four ‘different and equal’ languages (‘lingue diverse eguali,’ ER, 172), that is, according to Varchi’s classificatory criteria, mutually comprehensible and of equal standing. The lingue italiche, instead, were different from, unequal to, and foreign to Florentine; the Italian Cinquecento koine, the courtly language praised by Trissino and others, was not their native language but a mixture of all of their languages, and therefore

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could only be regarded either as a combination of many languages or as a degenerated tongue (‘imbastardita’) but not as a proper language. Throughout the dialogue Varchi repeatedly emphasizes the nobility of native languages, specifying that only languages and words spoken by the communities in which they have originated are to be considered natìe. In the last quesito, Varchi reminds Cesare that a language cannot be considered natural if it has not been learned from the nurse. Yet, asked to explain the significant presence of non-Florentine words in the language of Florence, Varchi appeals to the ‘alchemy’ of languages (archimia), the force that allows them to make foreign words their own: Le lingue n’hanno una [alchemy] … perciocchè ogni volta che accettano e mettono in uso qualsivoglia parola forestiera, la fanno divenire loro. C.: Non si può negare, ma elle non saranno mai così proprie, come le natìe. V.: Basta, che elle saranno o come i figliouli adottivi, che pure sono legittimi, e redano, o come quei forestieri quali col tempo divengono bene spesso degli Anziani, e de’ più utili e più stimati della città. Non sapete voi che per una legge sola d’Antonino Pio tutti gli uomini ch’erano sotto l’imperio Romano, furono cittadini Romani? (ER, 470–1) [Languages have a certain alchemy about them … by which, each time they accept and put to use whatever foreign word, they make it their own. C. This cannot be denied, but such words will never belong entirely to a language as do its native ones. V. It is enough that they will become either like adopted sons, who are even legitimate and thus heirs; or as those foreigners who with time often come to be counted among the elders and the most useful and esteemed citizens of the city. Do you not know that by one single law of Antonino Pio all men who resided within the borders of the Roman Empire were citizens of Rome?]

Here Varchi attempts to envision a process of inclusion and naturalization of imports that does not undermine the purity of Florentine. It is interesting that such a process is described in juridical (‘figlioli legittimi’) as well as political terms (‘cittadini’), articulating both the open and closed nature of language and polity, an ambiguity that served the Florentine hegemonic program well. When Cesare objects to Varchi’s analogy by noting that languages have no emperors who can decide on the naturalization of words and phrases, Varchi answers that languages possess a force of their own embodied in their peculiar properties and ‘bizarre turns’ (‘capestrerie,’ ER, 472).63 The force of languages consists

Scripts of Vernaculars and Collective Characters 43

precisely of their ability to adapt and give new form to foreign imports. In his choice of words (‘la forza,’ ‘conforme’) Varchi shows a dynamic understanding of the formative power of languages, which is usually associated with eighteenth-century linguistic thought.64 However, as also happens in the debate on the genius of language, Varchi cannot restrain himself from resorting to external explanations in order to state, once again, the superiority of Florentine. Comparing Florentine to the Attic language, he maintains that their conformity of structures can only be explained by the similarity in ‘the subtlety of the air and, consequently, of the wits’ acumen’ that characterizes both the city of Florence and the city of Athens (‘in quanto alla sottigliezza dell’aria e conseguentemente all’acume degl’ingegni,’ ER, 473). Varchi’s search for the causes of the peculiar properties of languages reveals his awareness that political power can turn a local tongue into the maternal language of an entire nation. Referring to the nationalization of the languages of Paris and Castille, which improperly (‘impropriamente’) turned narrowly confined natural tongues into national languages named French and Spanish, Varchi jokes that calling the common written vernacular Italian instead of Florentine would be like calling a king of Tuscany ‘King of Italy’ (ER, 431). Championing the rights of the maternal language, Varchi reinforces the congruence of language and polity, praising Duke Cosimo, whose providential advent (‘per ordinamento de’ cieli’) returned the Florentine language to its legitimate owners (‘padroni e giustamente signori’) and strengthened the repossession through the foundation of the Florentine Academy (ER, 492–3). Varchi, backed by Cosimo’s ambitions, does not seem at all troubled to promote Florentine living usage as the norm for the written language for the whole of Italy. Varchi’s treatment of the merits of Florentine reveals a true understanding of the social dimension of language and a sound political realism, but his conflation of geographical and social distinctions, of mother tongue and standardized literary language, anticipates the strategies of the debate on genius. By conferring substance and dignity to commonplaces and polemical stances through its theoretical approach and linguistic insights, Varchi’s dialogue turned into the matrix of the numerous European tracts that praised the ‘excellence’ of individual national vernaculars and celebrated their primacy. His masked elitism, implying the rejection of all other languages of Italy and manifested in his constant reference to canonical writers in a work purportedly dedicated to speech, was immediately noticed

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by his foreign imitators. In France, Henri Estienne, whose Précellence du langage françois (PR) (1579) was modelled on the Ercolano, noticed Varchi’s betrayal of his own goal, the defence of spontaneous speech, and sardonically remarked that poor Italians were always supposed to take a pen in the hand before starting to speak.65 Varchi and his Italian followers had created so much confusion that spontaneous speech in Italy had become a Platonic idea (‘Benedetto Varchi et autres … ont tellement brouillé les cartes que le vray et nayf langage Italien n’est plus qu’une idée Platonique,’ PR, 20). Estienne criticized the way in which Italian scholars treated the actual speech of Italians, the dialects; of course, he did not have a hard time finding evidence for the Italian obsession with purity in Bembo’s and Varchi’s warnings against dialects, especially those influenced by the ‘oltramontani,’ regarded as barbarous and primitive. Rather, French people, Estienne maintained in anticipation of the inclusive arguments of his French followers in the debate on genius, had the same attitude towards dialects as did the ancient Greeks, who endowed local languages with dignity and wholeheartedly used them to enrich their common language (PR, 168–9). Both in France and in England – two centralized states that required an increasingly higher degree of internal cultural uniformity in order to function – scholars liberally borrowed and adapted individual arguments from the Italian questione della lingua. Varchi’s Ercolano in particular, directly or indirectly, became the blueprint for writings in praise of national vernaculars that defined the peculiarities and merits of their respective tongues. Like Varchi, his followers too employed the inclusive category of maternal language, which allowed them to incorporate all diastratic and diatopic variations in their ‘national languages.’ But they worked on the solid assumption that English and French consisted in the usage of the courts of London and Paris.66 In divided Italy, Varchi’s arguments made sense only within the compact Florentine polity; their impact outside it was quite limited. The late sixteenth-century debate over the Italian vernacular continued to produce a wide array of positions and arguments. The questions revolved around which version of the vernacular (the literary, written version or the vernacular spoken by educated Florentines); whose usage (the language used in Italy’s courts or the one used by canonical writers); and which idiom (the Trecento or the Cinquecento) should be adopted by the writers. There was not even an agreement on the name to be given to the common literary vernacular (Italian, Florentine, Tuscan, or courtly language). Varchi shaped arguments and rhetorical strategies

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that characterized the later debate on the genius of language, but the link between nation, language, and the people was consolidated only by French scholars who recycled and expanded his arguments in the attempt to reverse cultural hierarchies and impose a French cultural hegemony. Scripts of Collective Identities: Juan Huarte’s ‘Examen de ingenios para la ciencias’ Does not everybody attribute the capacity of the Florentines and the stupidity of the people of Bergamo to the difference there is between the air of Bergamo and Florence? Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music

Varchi’s lighthearted assumption of a Florentine mind affected by the subtle air of Florence appears less puzzling in its highly theoretical context if one considers that ancient ethnic topoi were becoming scientific notions in the physician Juan Huarte’s Examen de ingenios para la ciencias (1575). Indeed, Huarte’s theories about the connections of the body and mind to the natural environment re-established the scientific standing of ancient Epicurean tenets and thus the credibility of narratives of collective identities. Drawing on classical sources such as Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Plato, and following, as he acknowledges, the ‘groundplot’ of Galen’s Natural Faculties, Huarte’s Examen de ingenios para la ciencias (1575) offered a scientific study of the relationship between intellectual dispositions (ingenios), physical features, and environment.67 Despite its early inclusion in the Index Prohibitorum of Portugal (1581), Spain (1583), and the Vatican (1604),68 the Examen was reprinted seventy times just before 1700 and was soon translated into seven languages, including French (1580, under the title of Anacrise), Italian (1582), English (1594), and Latin (1622). Moreover, each translation appeared in several editions within a short period of time; Camilli’s Italian version, for instance, reached four printings by 1590.69 What struck me most is the circumstance that the different translators of the Examen were scholars who, like Varchi, engaged in language typology and attempted to define the characteristic traits of their own tongues. Camillo Camilli, who translated the book into Italian (1582),70 compared the features of Tuscan and Castilian in a study accompanying his widely used Tuscan-Castilian

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dictionary (1600). Richard Carew, who translated into English Camilli’s Italian version of the Examen (1594), also penned the popular essay The Excellencie of the English Tongue (1595–6). Repeatedly plagiarized in England, Carew’s Excellencie appropriated for the English language Varchi’s definition of the merits of Florentine. Joachim Caesar, who translated the Examen into Latin for his German audience (1622), was active in the German language academy Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, which was charged with the emancipation of German syntax and vocabulary from Latin. The impact of Huarte’s book, which appeared a few months before Bodin’s Le six livres de la République (1576), spread throughout the eighteenth century; although it is improbable that Bodin knew the Examen, the emergence of similar interests in such varied disciplines as the medical and the political sciences shows how pervasive the notion of collective character, its causes, and effects was becoming in those years.71 Huarte’s sophisticated theory demonstrated that every mind is endowed with its own type of ingenium, the result of a close interaction between the body and the environment, which produces a unique combination of the basic elements, mixed in different degrees according to age. Si el entendimiento estuviese apartado del cuerpo y no tuviese que ver con el calor, frialdad, humidad y sequedad ni con las demás calidades corporales, seguirseía que todos los hombres ternían igual entendimiento y que todos raciocinarían con igualdad.72 [If the understanding were severed from the body and had nought to do with heat, cold, moist, and drie, nor with the other bodily qualities, it would follow that all men should equally discourse.] (Carew, trans., The Examination of Mens Wits [EX])73

The variety of dispositions and talents could not be understood independently from bodily qualities and sense perceptions, from environment and climates. Huarte’s main goal, however, was to match dispositions and academic disciplines. He aimed to define with increased precision individual dispositions – rather than collective characters – in order to endorse pedagogical methods tailored to the students’ distinctive talents. In order to do so, he proceeds by first establishing the impact of basic

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environmental temperatures and bodily qualities (moist, hot, dry, cold) on human mental faculties (memory, imagination, and understanding). He then classifies and discusses a large spectrum of disciplines and areas of learning according to the mental faculty on which they are primarily dependent. In matters of language and closer to the discourse that connected vernaculars to collective dispositions, Huarte forcefully questions the use of Latin – or, as a matter of fact, of any other language learned after childhood – as a medium to study those disciplines that require understanding and imagination, such as theology, natural and moral philosophy (understanding), or poetry and politics (imagination). He argues that languages and grammar require a strong memory since they are totally arbitrary, not a matter of rules and reason (EX, 104). Thus a person endowed with a disposition for theoretical matters, which is dependent on a good understanding, will never master an acquired language. Y, así, ninguno de los graves autores fue a buscar lengua extranjera para dar a entender sus conceptos; antes los griegos escribieron en griego, los romanos en latín, los hebreos en hebraico, y los moros en arábigo; y así hago yo en mi español, por saber mejor esta lengua que otra ninguna.74 [Therefore none of the grave authors attended the learning of strange tongues, thereby to deliver their conceits; but the Greeks wrote in Greek, the Romans in Latine, the Hebrews in Hebrue language, and the Moores in Arabique, and so do I in my Spanish, because I know this better than any other.] (EX, 105)

Huarte’s scientific argument in favour of the use of maternal languages in all branches of philosophy, theology, and poetry shows in his explanation of the incompatibility of Spanish speakers and the Latin language, a rather deterministic turn. In contrast to northern people, who ‘have a want of understanding … and much moisture, … which is known by the whiteness of the face, and the golden colour of the hair’ (EX, 116), people in temperate zones like Spain, identifiable because they are ‘somewhat brown’ and ‘have black hair,’ are endowed with bad memory but good understanding and thus, Huarte concludes, lack the skills to learn Latin (EX, 117). Like Bodin, Huarte ascribes the primacy in technological invention (clocks, engines, and the like) to the northern people and links their primacy to their internal mixture of moisture and heat (‘the much cold of the country calleth back the natu-

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rall heate inward,’ EX, 117). Spaniards, instead, can claim a superior understanding of theoretical disciplines: Pero metidos en dialéctica, filosofía, teología, escolástica, medicina y leyes, más delicadezas dice un ingenio español en sus términos bárbaros, que un extranjero sin comparación.75 [But set them to Logicke, to Philosophie, to School-divinitie, to Phisicke, or to Lawes, and beyond comparison a Spanish wit, with his barbarous terms, will deliver more rare points than a stranger.] (EX, 117)

Huarte not only sets Spanish scholars free from the constraints of Latin by adducing a scientific argument against the necessity of learning classical languages; he also claims for Spain, on the basis of the Spaniards’ physical disposition and natural environment, a specific type of cultural supremacy. In contrast to Varchi, who applied the naturalist view of language (with its emphasis on the expressive functions) to link the peculiar virtues of Florentine speech to the collective ingegno of its Florentine speakers, Huarte does not connect the peculiarities of the Spaniards’ national ingenio to those of the Spanish language directly. Rather, he appears concerned with proving the relevance of a particular climate (temperate) to a specific disposition (weak memory and powerful understanding) and ultimately to an idiosyncrasy towards language acquisition. Even when he summarizes the claim of his classical predecessors according to which ‘the difference of nations, in the composition of the body as well as in conditions of the soul, stems from the variety of climate’ since climate determines a particular quality of life and nurture, he immediately corrects his all-too-general use of nation, adding that a great variety of manners and wits can also be noticed in places that are not very distant from each other (EX, 22–3). Besides this mention of his predecessors’ belief in climate as a factor determining the character of nations and a reference to the Germanic use of bathing newborn babies in cold water, the passage about the Spaniards’ ingenium is the only example in the Examen that adduces a specific nationality (Spanish) as opposed to others (Flemish, Dutch, English, and French). As a rule, Huarte tends instead to either refer to climate zones or use general terms such as North/Northern and South/ Southern. A rare instance, Huarte’s line of reasoning about Spaniards and Latin, is particularly significant. It attests to Spain’s robust cultural self-

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confidence, an attitude rooted in Phillip II’s consolidation of power and absolutist policies, and, more important, it connects the high status of the maternal language, acquired independently from the cultural prestige of classical idioms, to a natural collective disposition. Finally, the leap from psychological types (for example, contemplative) to national characters (for example, the Spanish) was taken. The Examen triggered several debates on ingenium, language, and origin. In Germany, the commentary and attacks on Huarte by the famous Jesuit Antonio Possevino in his Cultura ingeniorum: Examen ingeniorum Johannis Huartis expeditur (1593) prompted an animated discussion among pedagogues, philosophers, and physicians, especially in language academies such as the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft and the Löbliche Hirten-und Blumenorden an der Pegnitz, even before Huarte’s tract began circulating in Joachim Caesars’ Latin version (1622).76 In France, Descartes displaced Huarte’s popularity in the second half of the seventeenth century. Yet Descartes’ Regulae ad directionem ingenii (1628) and his keen awareness that the mind cannot free itself from the ‘disturbances’ of the senses or from a disadvantageous physical disposition of the organs revealed that the Spanish physician was among his major interlocutors.77 The debate on Huarte’s view of the interaction of body, mind, and environment – reinvigorated by the publication of the anonymous Theophrastus redivivus (1659) that propagated naturalist theses and by Pierre Gassendi’s more accurate retrieval of Epicurean views of origin in Philosophiae Epicuri Syntagma (1658) – shaped Vico’s, Montesquieu’s, and Herder’s anthropology, to name only the most prominent eighteenth-century thinkers who searched for the principles and origins of nations and types of government. Although Vico never quotes Huarte explicitly, he follows his steps in the pedagogical reflections of the orations and develops his theory of the ingegno within the frame of the Italian Huarte debate.78 Huarte was to become also the model for young Herder’s attempt in his Geschichte des menschlichen Verstandes to balance rationalist, moral, and naturalist views of human development, which expanded the traditional study of the influence of climate on individuals and nations.79 Huarte’s success and vast diffusion certainly derived from his ability to weld together naturalist, Epicurean tenets with different philosophical traditions. At the same time he rejected and resurrected traditional authorities and offered cross-disciplinary analyses that became relevant to doctors, jurists, teachers, grammarians, and poets. Although his Exa-

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men was devoted to the scientific investigation of psychological traits of individuals and the ways in which those traits disposed people to or alternatively barred them from specific types of activities and disciplines, it introduced the idea that a nation possessed a collective disposition. Thus, another important building block of linguistic nationalism – that is, the idea that a nation has a natural collective disposition and behaves like one individual possessing one mind – was construed on the basis of what were considered the scientific parameters of the day. Collective Dispositions, Nationalized Shall we then bear the name of French, that is to say, frank and free men, and yet enslave our minds under an alien tongue? Etienne Pasquier, Letter to Adrien de Turnèbe

At the turn of the sixteenth century the consolidation of power in the person of the monarch progressively weakened the centrifugal influence of the nobility, both political and cultural, and promoted an image of populations gathered in the nation-state as one homogeneous body with one mind. Although absolutism at this point in time may have been more a rhetoric than a political reality, as some historians suggest,80 its cultural effects are visible, particularly in France and England, in the surge of writings on the excellence of national vernaculars at the end of the sixteenth century and, later, in the flourishing of pamphlets on national characters. I believe that this literature, in which the study of vernaculars and the ethnographic discourse on collective dispositions closely interacted, drew on the regained popularity of naturalist views of human diversity established by scholars such as Varchi and Huarte, but nationalized their arguments in order to enhance the status of the new nation-states. In late sixteenth-century characterizations of vernaculars, however, Varchi’s and Huarte’s equation of the vernacular and the collective mind was altered by two elements. It was affected by new ethnographic assumptions on the origins of various populations, assumptions that began to replace traditional mythological narratives. Furthermore, collective dispositions were systematically identified with national character and defined entire nations rather than specific, local populations or larger and more generic types such as Northern and Southern peoples. These changes are evident in Henri Estienne’s Précellence du langage françois (1579) as well as in Etienne Pasquier’s monumental Recherches

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de la France (1560–1611). I claim that these works, with their nationalizing shift, provide a good insight in the immediate ideological context from which the genius of language (that is, vernaculars as expressions of national characters) emerged. A French grammarian and printer, Henri Estienne dedicated his Précellence to Henri III, the King of France, after having fallen into disgrace with the strict Geneva authorities for the publication of his Deux dialogues du nouveau langage françois italianizé (1578). Estienne – whose father, Robert, ‘printer to the French King,’ and a famous grammarian himself, had been forced to move his printing business to Geneva when he joined the Reformed Church – fought all his life against the Italian influence at the French court and its impact on the French language (Catherine de’ Medici was Henri III’s wife). The Dialogues had condemned Italian as the vehicle of the corruption not only of the French language but also of French mores and had proposed to ban it from the court. In La Précellence du langage françois Estienne attempted to legitimate his idiosyncrasies with theoretical and linguistic arguments. He appropriated for the French language Varchi’s definition of the virtues of the Florentine tongue and, at the same time, drew on ethnographic assumptions concerning the ancient culture of ‘the Gaulois’ (the Gauls, whom he often confused with the Franks) to support his claims. Mimicking Varchi’s stance, Estienne’s tract aimed at demonstrating the superiority of French over all European vernaculars by attributing to French the same qualities praised by Varchi in the Florentine speech: richness, sweetness, and gravity. At the same time, La Précellence discredited Italian as a derivative language with a lax and effeminate cadence by drawing on theories developed in the Italian questione della lingua. Indeed, he extrapolated individual arguments concerning the Latin heritage, the borrowings from French tongues, the rhythm of the Italian sentence – first articulated in Bembo’s Prose, Varchi’s Ercolano, and Lodovico Castelvetro’s critique of Varchi – and turned them into faults. As Estienne heavily relies on concepts and ideas generated and rehearsed in the Italian language debate (PR, 14–22), it is crucial that we look at what is original in his work in order to identify his strategies aimed at nationalizing Varchi’s arguments. We have seen in the section on the Ercolano that Estienne, in contrast to Varchi who declared all Italian dialects incompatible with and inferior to Florentine, explicitly acknowledged France’s different dialects and linguistic strata as a source of strength and copiousness rather than

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one of shame and contempt (PR, 167–8, 201). Furthermore, modifying Speroni’s and Varchi’s trope of the language as a house, he repeatedly employed for French the metaphor of a landlord whose mansion is so grand and well furnished that he can allow himself additional residencies in the country, or honour his ancestors’ abodes. Comparing the French speaker to a landlord who is in control of his own means, he elevated the status and stability of Parisian French against the uncertain position of Florentine in Italy (PR, 167, 184). The implication of this comparison is that Estienne’s version of the maternal language is far more inclusive than Varchi’s and as such has the power of drawing more disparate and larger constituencies towards an affiliation with the French national identity. Estienne’s inclusive attitude was adopted with great effectiveness by Dominique Bouhours, as we shall see in the next chapter, although Bouhours mentioned explicitly only linguistic variations related to class and gender, carefully avoiding any mention of the dialects and languages of France. Estienne’s other significant deviation from the arguments of his model concerns his list of the merits of French. To Varchi’s richness, sweetness, and gravity he added brevity, a quality that Varchi had explicitly criticized as a source of obscurity. Estienne, instead, defended this virtue as one of the primitive, naive characteristics of French, inherited from the Gauls. Contrasting the noble and virile brevity of French to the mollesse of the Italian language, he explained this advantage as a heritage of the Gauls’ monosyllabic tongue (PR, 64). The proud appeal to ethnic origins that distanced the French from the Roman character was beginning to take root in France. Even though it tied France to Northern European cultures that were still considered barbarous, references to Gauls and Franks were increasingly used to claim French cultural superiority (indeed, Bouhours turned the barbarous origins of France into its true strength). Estienne’s use of the Gallic heritage efficiently provided the basis for ‘complementary propositions regarding boundaries and origin’ that could establish the prerequisite for the French nation.81 As a means to create boundaries, the appeal to the Gauls separated France from Italy and the all-engulfing Latin heritage and defined the cultural autonomy of the nation. As a tale of origin, it lent the nation an aura of antiquity and authenticity. The cross-pollination between definitions of vernaculars modelled on Varchi and the new nationalizing discourse on collective dispositions characterizes Etienne Pasquier’s arguments about French origins

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in an even more explicit way. A convinced Gallican who as a lawyer fought the influence of papal Rome and the Jesuits in the French courts, Pasquier recycled in numerous chapters of his Recherches de la France (1560–1611) what were becoming linguistic and ethnic topoi of cultural supremacy in a strongly anti-Italian way. Although Pasquier was neither a grammarian nor a linguist, he consistently cited in his history assumptions developed in contemporary descriptions of the French language as conclusive evidence of the origin of French customs and institutions in a manner that does not differ much from Vico’s method in the Scienza nuova. For instance, Pasquier espoused Estienne’s idea of brevity as a virtue of the French language, but he interpreted brevity explicitly as an expression of national character, the sign of the nobility inherited by the French nation from the Gauls, and contrasted it to the mollesse of the Italian people. Like Varchi and Estienne, Pasquier devoted great attention to popular sayings and proverbs, in which he saw the mind of the French people at work. Although he, like Estienne, was very much aware that the primary source of the French vocabulary was Latin, he drew attention to the Gallic (and at times even Greek) origin of words and idioms and often produced creative etymologies in order to demonstrate the independence of French from Latin. Estienne defined the virtues of French as independent from Latin and Italian (and rather closer to Greek), in order to rescue French from the feared Italianization.82 As an historian, Pasquier was rather interested in providing the French people with a pedigree that was independent of the Roman heritage in order to legitimize the hegemony of the French nation. Like Estienne, Pasquier does not present literary French as different from or incompatible with other regional languages, but he calls variations that are internal to the ‘us’ (‘nous autres François’) langages and not dialectes, as does Estienne.83 Furthermore, in applying his us-them logic, he constructs the ‘them’ as linguistically homogeneous: Nos langages tant en particulier comme en general, accompagnent la disposition des nos esprits … Ainsi voyez vous entre nous autres François, le Normand assez advisé en affaires trainer quelque peu sa parole, au contraire le gascon escarbillat par dessus tous, parler d’une promptitude de langage, non commun à l’Angevin … et l’Espagnol haut à la main produit un vulgaire superbe et plain de piaffe. L’Allemant éloigné du luxe parle un langage fort rude. Et lors que les Italiens dégénérans de l’ancienne force du Romain, firent plus profession de la délicatesse que de

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Irresistible Signs la vertu, aussi formerent-ils peu à peu de ce langage masle Romain, un vulgaire tout efféminé et molasses.84 [Our languages, in particular as well as in general, follow the disposition of our spirits … And so you see among us French the Norman, sufficiently shrewd in business, trickle out his words slowly; or the Gascon, lighthearted above all, speak with a quickness of tongue not common to the Angevin … and the haughty Spaniard produce an arrogant and impatient language. The German, removed from lavishness, speaks a very coarse language. And since the Italians, devolving from the ancient might of the Romans, made a profession more of delicacy than of virtue, so they formed gradually from this masculine Roman language one that is completely soft and effeminate.]

Pasquier too brings the ethnic diversity of France back to one original lineage, the Gauls, to whom he devotes seven chapters of his history. Indeed, he repeatedly uses the phrase nous Gaulois as interchangeable with nous autres François whenever he wants to suggest the original uniformity and commonality of the different ethnic groups governed by the French state. As Clark Keating observes in his monograph, Pasquier even manages, ‘by somewhat wishful thinking,’ to present the loose tribal organization of the Gauls as the matrix of the French monarchy.85 In defining this original lineage, Pasquier draws on climatic explanations and, at times, even applies to his Gauls Huarte’s argument about the difficulties of Spaniards in learning Latin. Huarte had recommended that Spaniards should not be forced to learn Latin, because their contemplative disposition was incompatible with such an activity. Pasquier maintains that Gauls could not learn Latin well, because the promptness of their spirit and the brevity of their language were incompatible with Latin qualities. Anticipating the refrain of the discourse on the genius of language, he concludes that in the encounter with the Romans they succeeded in creating an idiom that was the adequate expression of their character (‘selon la commodité des leurs esprits et de leur langue’).86 I view Estienne’s and Pasquier’s ideas, which combined questions of origin and boundaries of the nation with the inclusive category of the maternal language, as crucial precedents for the emergence in France of the myth of the genius of language as the manifestation of national character. Their inclusive arguments strengthened the centripetal force of high French culture, as Bouhours well understood. They also rep-

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resent the trend, embraced later by Bouhours, to demonstrate the excellence of France by attacking other vernaculars – particularly Italian, which was too dangerously close to the court and thus to the heart of the nation – and by connecting the shortcomings of languages to those of entire nations. If one compares the treatment of foreign idioms in the English and French tracts that praise the respective vernaculars, one notices that English scholars did not hesitate to acknowledge the peculiar beauties of other vernaculars from which the English tongue proudly borrowed its strengths.87 During the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I the increasing number of grammars identifying the autonomous structures of English, independent from the Latin construction, expressed the growth of national self-confidence and a proud emancipation from the tutelage of Rome.88 However, writings on the merits of the English language rarely questioned the dignity and worth of other vernaculars in an absolute way.89 Probably the most compelling contrast to the trend represented by Estienne and Pasquier is provided by Richard Carew (Huarte’s English translator) in his Excellencie of the English Tongue (1595–6). In fact, his essay was modelled on La Précellence and retrieved Estienne’s characterization of French (based on Varchi’s Florentine) to account for the qualities of English, ‘Significancie, Easinesse, Copiousnesse, and Sweetnesse.’90 However, when Carew comes to discussing copiousness and sweetness, he makes the effort to mention both merits and limitations of other vernaculars: ‘The Italyan is pleasante but without synews as a still fleeting water. The French delicate, but euen nice as a woman, scarce daring to open her lippes for feare of marring her countenance. The Spanish majestical, but fulsome, running too much on the O and terrible like the duell in a play. The Dutch manlike but withall very harsh, as one readie at euerie word to pike a quarrel.’91 Here Carew’s figurative language shows the fascination of Huarte’s translator with collective character. Although there is no explicit mention of national temperaments, languages are personified and viewed like characters in a scene. Here the spectacle of language, which, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, was still a matter of theatrical fiction in Trissino’s Poetica (1562), has become all too real. Carew’s type of personifications anticipates a pervading feature of the writings on the genius of languages, in which a further step is taken and the character of the personified language is attributed to the character of the nation. As in Estienne’s tract, Carew’s Excellencie approaches diversity of dia-

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lects and registers with an inclusive attitude (‘for we have Court and Countrey English, we have Northerne, and Southerne, grosse and ordinarie, which differs from each other not only in the terminations, but also in many words, termes, and phrases’).92 However, Carew does not debase entire states, and praises diversity, both internal and external to the nation, as the true source of the richness and ‘sweetness’ of the English tongue. For Carew, the historical strata as well as the continuous borrowing from other vernaculars contribute to the well-tempered richness of English. Carew’s arguments are not an exception in writings on the English language. His attitude towards polygenic origins was widespread and produced an image of English as a polymorphic and demotic idiom, shaped by imports from different tongues as well as by the people’s speech.93 It was a view of language that also refracted the ideal of the people’s sovereignty, a move unimaginable in sixteenth-century France and Italy and probably only comparable to Varchi’s view of the Florentine popolo as the genuine bearer of the common language. It did not take long for images of collective dispositions to be consolidated into national characters and popularized in England through fashionable pamphlets with titles such as A Character of England (1659), The Character of the Low Countries (1659), The Character of Scotland (1659), The Character of Spain (1660), The Character of Italy, or the Italian Anatomized by an English Surgeon (1660), and A Character of France: To Which Is Added ‘Gallus castratus’ (1660). Often published anonymously, these pamphlets reified sixteenth-century collective dispositions by conflating customs of individual classes or groups with entire nations viewed as homogeneous bodies.94 They perfected the nationalization of collective identities already visible in Estienne’s and Pasquier’s writings and put their generalizations into the service of propaganda of different stripes. In the story presented so far, I have argued that national sentiments, fostered by absolutist policies, combined with a consistent Epicurean trend to promote the consolidation of patchy narratives and anecdotal evidence of peoples’ traits into integrated theoretical arguments. These arguments provided the foundation of both polemical claims, driven by more or less overt political agendas, and highly theoretical philosophical analyses. The firm hold of Epicurean tenets permeating natural and human sciences stretches from physician Huarte’s theories of the natural dispositions through Pierre Gassendi’s own revival of

Scripts of Vernaculars and Collective Characters 57

Epicurus (1592–1655) to the anthropological linguistics of Giambattista Vico (1688–1744), Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–80), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), and Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), to name just a few writers who addressed the question of the genius of language over the course of at least two centuries.95 I would like to conclude here by noting it is not a coincidence that it is difficult to find writings in sixteenth- and even seventeenth-century Germany on the vernacular that present it as the essence of the German collective self and that can therefore be connected to the debate on the genius of language. Indeed, in German language philosophy, usually associated with the creation of the idea of language as the manifestation of the people’s soul, Epicurean approaches to human diversity and the expressive view of language were established only much later, at least in comparison to Italy, England, and France. The category of maternal language had only an instrumental function and informed a practical program rather than a nationalist ideology – probably because, even in the writings of seventeenth-century scholars, the idea of words as being imitations of things (‘Abbilder der Dinge’), rather than expressions of perceptions, prevailed.96 The material aspect of language was not considered constitutive of meaning or of the self – a view that emerges only in Leibniz’s writings, and even then somewhat timidly, if one compares his statements to John Locke’s famous claims on words and societal values (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1689; see book III, chapter 5, on words for composite ideas). In Germany Huarte’s theories became popular only after Gotthold Ephraim Lessing translated the Examen into German (1752, Prüfung des Verstandes). Indeed, even Luther’s Muttersprache, with its deep roots in the popular idioms of the East Middle German area, was either rejected or only tentatively accepted in the rest of Germany.97 As Helmut Walser Smith, a scholar of German nationalism, suggests, Luther’s main goal was a closer communion with God, not with the German nation; until the eighteenth century, language in Germany ‘was important, but as something exterior to the self.’98 Naturalist approaches to human diversity and the emphasis on the expressive function of language were crucial to the internalization of the nation that was articulated in the debate on the genius of language. They were put in the service of nationalist arguments in France first and in Germany only much later. After reading a sample of sixteenth-century writings in praise of ‘national’ vernaculars, one can look back only with regret to Dante’s reflection in his De vulgari eloquentia:

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With its ironical inception and the embracing of a world citizenship that is presented as happily compatible with both his love for Florence and his praise of Italy’s ‘illustrious vernacular,’ Dante’s splendid passage makes painfully clear what a precious outlook was being lost in the sixteenth century and in the centuries to come.

2 Ut Lingua, Natio: Dominique Bouhours’s Genius of the Nation and Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s Italian Republic of Letters

After a first tentative appearance in Amable de Bourzeys’ speech at the Académie Française (12 February 1635),1 the notion of the genius of language as a function of national character burst onto the European scene like thunder when the dialogues Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugéne (1671) and La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (1687) began to circulate in numerous editions and translations. Written by the Jesuit Dominique Bouhours, a member of the Académie Française and a lexicographer of great erudition with a talent for witty and aggressive polemic, the dialogues declared the superiority of the French language and culture over all other European civilizations, stirring up a heated debate that was to last longer than half a century and turn the name of ‘Père Bouhours’ into an emblem of French chauvinism.2 Bouhours’s comparative reflections on the genius of European languages and the respective literatures questioned not merely the languages’ own quality and the accomplishments of the learned communities who spoke and wrote them but also the achievements of entire nations. It is not surprising that of the nations attacked in his dialogues Italy and Germany reacted most bitterly in their literary communities. Unlike Spain, Italy and Germany could not claim national institutions other than a literary language shared to differing degrees by various regional and social groups, and therefore their identities as nations were more susceptible to being defined exclusively as a synecdoche of particular linguistic practices. With no other national institutions to observe, Bouhours could derive the genius of the Italian and the German language from particular habits and images of their literary communities and relate the weaknesses of their literature to an assumed national character that the literary community was unable to control.

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Bouhours’s books began to be debated in Italy around 1698 within the private literary circle of Gian Giuseppe Orsi, a Bolognese marquis and a promoter of scholarly pursuits who was very much in touch with contemporary French culture. Ludovico Antonio Muratori was the first Italian intellectual to reply to Bouhours’s attacks, in his Vita di Maggi (1700). Yet Orsi’s book Considerazioni sopra un famoso libro franzese intitolato Della maniera di ben pensare nelle opere di spirito (1703), dedicated to the classical scholar Anne Dacier (famous for her translations of Homer and for her part in the querelle), is usually considered to be the beginning of the public debate commonly labelled in Italian literary history as the Orsi-Bouhours polemic.3 The debate lasted more than three decades, with contributions printed in (among other journals) the Mémoires de Trévoux, a cultural organ of the Jesuits and of Bouhours’s defenders; and the Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia (1710 and following), mostly by Orsi’s partisans. At first the Italian response, though motivated by wounded national pride, concentrated on aesthetic issues and ideals of eloquence, addressing in particular La manière de bien penser and only occasionally the dialogues ‘La langue française’ and ‘Le bel esprit’ of the Entretiens (E). But gradually the French-Italian controversy began to shape new forms of national sentiments, generating the sense that the creation of national cultural institutions was a vital necessity. In my reading of the Orsi-Bouhours polemic, Muratori and Vico figure prominently because I believe that, among the Italian respondents, they were the ones who most deftly confronted the political implications of Bouhours’s attack.4 In the following sections I analyse Bouhours’ protonationalist arguments about the connection between language and nation, particularly those in his dialogue ‘La langue française,’ and then proceed to explore their impact in Italy, especially on the work of Muratori. In my assessment, Bouhours’s significance is twofold. I argue that by integrating the popular expressive view of language in the new rationalist paradigm enforced by the grammarians of Port-Royal, Bouhours was able to collapse – and quite convincingly – the distinction between the ‘naïve simplicity’ of spontaneous speech and the value of clarté in written French (which meant mostly direct word order). This move allowed him to endow the simple speech of peasants and women with the possession of the genius of the French language and to present an inclusive image of the ‘French people.’ By extending the reach of the genius of the French nation across class and gender divides, Bouhours anticipated the symbolic elevation of the entire population of the state to a sover-

Bouhours’s Genius of the Nation and Muratori’s Republic of Letters 61

eign agency, a characteristically nationalist move. I believe that Muratori, in contrast to his contemporary Italian respondents, did not miss the political importance of Bouhours’s inclusive arguments, and in his monumental historiographical work he put them to use in order to question elitist and monogenic images of Italian identity. Bouhours’s long-lasting popularity in Europe was certainly due to his penchant for polemic, but it may also have been related to his ambiguous stand in the endless and intricate querelle des anciens et des modernes, a debate that promoted a contextual, historical interpretation of any cultural artifacts, ancient as well as recent, thereby transforming the historical consciousness of scholars of antiquity. Bouhours’s La manière de bien penser (M) constituted a manifesto of bon sens applied to both ancient and modern authors. It propagated many of Nicolas Boileau’s neoclassicist principles by offering more than five hundred pages filled with positive and negative examples from Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish literature, and by advocating a perfect union of lucid thought and clear writing. Eudoxe, one of the two characters in the dialogues – whose name identifies him as the man of sound opinions (eu ‘good’; doxein ‘to form an opinion’) who does not like works of wit (‘ingenieux’) when they are not equally reasonable and natural (‘raisonnable & naturel’)5 – declares, ‘If the obscurity stems from the thought itself, I condemn the Ancients as well as the Moderns.’ (‘Si l’obscurité vient de la pensée mesme, je condamne les Anciens comme les modernes.’)6 While in his speech at the French Academy Bourzeys had recommended a variety of evaluative standpoints that acknowledged the diversity of linguistic contexts, Bouhours elected to use a simple criterion for judging literary works from any given culture, whether it be Greek, Latin, French, Italian, or Spanish. That criterion was raison, which he was wont to combine with naturel and clarté, and it allowed him to cut through any partisan positions. Actually, by proposing the moderne (that is, French neoclassical) ideal of reason as the instrument with which to evaluate literary works, he implicitly – and perhaps not really consciously – declared his position in the querelle and replaced the old uniform standard of evaluation with a new, equally rigid norm. The ambiguity of Bouhours’s position, which conjoined rationalist and naturalist principles, is reflected in his ambivalent status in the eyes of his audience: considered by the French primarily as a supporter of the anciens, he was seen as a moderne by most of his Italian critics.7 Such a perception shaped the reception of his dialogue on the French language in the Entretiens, in which Bouhours connected French cul-

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tural superiority to the genius of the French language and, ultimately, to the character of the French nation. ‘La langue française’ is not a particularly original work of linguistics, nor does Bouhours’s characterization of the different European populations advance beyond the stereotypes of his time. The dialogue assembles many themes from the numerous existing descriptions and defences of French that characterized it as the more apt vehicle of the natural order, the language of clarté and of civilized conversation. Yet it presents such arguments in the form of a pamphlet that celebrates the superiority of French over other Romance languages. ‘La langue française’ also turned the commonplaces of the time concerning the supposed characters of nations into objects of scholarly attention, articulating, for the first time in an extensive way, the rising interest of European scholars in the relationship between language and nation. Furthermore, the dialogue constitutes a significant example in the history of the debate because it documents the first combined use of the two terms génie de la langue and génie de la nation.8 Bouhours is usually portrayed as a Cartesian mind both by his contemporaries and by later critics; his ideas on language were perceived as a weak version of the Port-Royal linguistic theories and are still often identified as such.9 I would argue, however, that the power of Bouhours’s provocation, at least in Italy, stemmed from his ability to construct an argument that nationalized the Cartesian values largely accepted by the Italian intellectual community, turning even common goods such as reason – which had become the ground for the international intellectual exchange within the republic of letters – into a natural property of the French. Within the Port-Royal rationalist tradition, as we shall see, Bouhours defined his own expressive approach to the individuality of languages. In contrast both to the Renaissance conception, which tended to stress the grammatical basis of a language’s uniqueness, and to the rationalistic view, which considered all peculiarities as deviations from the universal grammar, Bouhours drew on the naturalist trends and conceived the character of a language in terms of expressivity. According to Bouhours, each language constitutes a particular way of expressing the perceptions of a people: it is ‘a particular art to make us see those perceptions, to paint them’ (‘un art particulier … de les fair voir et de les peindre,’ E, 46). Thus different characters of languages, he maintains, are like the diverse talents of different painters. Like many critics of his time,10 Bouhours attempted to overcome the tension between the mimetic criterion and an expressive understanding of language by broadening the compass of nature to include human

Bouhours’s Genius of the Nation and Muratori’s Republic of Letters 63

nature, and, in particular, ‘reasonable sentiments.’ In this way, he could assert that French, the modern idiom considered by him most appropriate for imitating nature as it is, is also the langue du cœur, capable of truly expressing the tenderest of feelings (‘exprimer les plus tendres sentiments du cœur,’ E, 57) and of imitating without artifice what happens in the soul (‘ce qui se passe dans l’âme,’ E, 58). Bouhours’s attempt is an early example of the re-evaluation of the passions that accompanied that peculiarly French revival of the sublime style inaugurated by Boileau’s Art Poetique (1669) and by his subsequent translation of Longinus (1674). The French revival implied the domestication of the violent element of the passions – a domestication that, as we shall see, Giambattista Vico resisted with all his might – and culminated in the efforts of the encyclopedists to rehabilitate human nature and emotions after having repressed their destructive potential. Bouhours participated in that domestication and applied his own definition of naturalness to an evaluation of languages that turned individual affects into icons of nations. Judging languages according to their agreement with nature, he finds that Spanish ‘usually makes its object bigger than it is and goes far beyond nature’ (‘fait pour l’ordinaire les objets plus grands qu’ils ne sont et va plus loin que la nature,’ E, 46), while Italian is not able to imitate nature as it is and invariably ‘embellishes’ it (‘embellit,’ E, 47). French, rather, expresses things ‘exactly as they are’ (‘exprime les choses précisément comme elles sont,’ E, 48). Bouhours not only condemns Spanish and Italian writers for abusing figures of speech, diminutives, and superlatives, but he attributes such faults to the genius of their languages and ultimately, as we shall see, to their national character. His treatment of the question of word order, which would become a fundamental issue in eighteenth-century discussions on language diversity, constitutes an instructive example of the ways in which a naturalist approach to language emphasizing expressive aspects as signs of national dispositions contributed to the conceptual construction of collective characters. Bouhours condemns the hyperbaton (the use of an unexpected word order) – or inversion, as the French started to call it – and criticizes every transposition of words as a device that results in sheer ‘disorder,’ identifying it as typical of languages such as Latin, Spanish, and Italian. He asserts that the Italian and Spanish peoples are caught in the abuse of bizarre arrangements, which they perceive as the quintessence of elegance and are therefore unable ‘to achieve that imitation of nature, in which the perfection of languages consists’ (‘ne pouvant pervenir à cette imitation

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[de la nature] en quoi consiste la perfection des langues,’ E, 48). Finally, he appropriates the ‘natural’ construction for his native French: ‘The French language is probably the only one that follows the natural order exactly and that expresses thoughts in the way in which they occur in the mind’ (‘C’est que la langue française est peut-être la seule qui suive exactement l’ordre naturel, et qui exprime les pensées en la manière qu’elles naissent dans l’esprit,’ E, 55). Bouhours was not the first to oppose the use of figurative speech and syntactic devices such as the hyperbaton, for ancient rhetoricians had commonly warned against their risks. Quintilian, in particular – at the time of Bouhours, the most quoted Latin author in matters of rhetoric – discussed the danger of obscurity resulting from the use of daring transpositions in long sentences.11 The order of the sentence, however, had been always discussed in terms of eloquence. Even Longinus, the promoter of genius and sublimity who saw the hyperbaton as the ‘truest mark of passion’12 – a rhetorical figure able to both express and evoke passions – treated different syntactic constructions as different conventions and debated their virtues and faults according to their relative effectiveness. The modern controversy over word order, instead, concentrated on the question of whether the reversed or the direct word order was the natural form of expression. Having roots in the Port-Royal Grammar and exerting influence throughout the eighteenth century, the controversy engaged such philosophers as Vico, Denis Diderot, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, César C. Du Marsais, Melchiorre Cesarotti, Giacomo Leopardi, and Johann Gottfried Herder and culminated in two distinct positions that provided a kind of mirror to each other. In the articles ‘Langage’ and ‘Inversion,’ the Encyclopédie (1765) condemned the use of inversions as ‘contre nature.’13 In his Fragmenten ueber die neuere deutsche Literatur (probably written around 1764), however, Herder reclaimed Inversionen as quintessential to nature and in particular to the nature of the German language and people; according to him, they expressed an original and uniquely German individuality.14 Philosophical attention to syntactic order grew especially intense once Descartes had established the arrangement of words as the most important proof of human reason, as distinguished from other animals’ abilities: Car c’est une chose bien remarquable qu’il n’y a point d’hommes si hébétés et si stupides, sans en excepter même les insensés, qu’ils ne soient capables

Bouhours’s Genius of the Nation and Muratori’s Republic of Letters 65 d’arranger ensemble diverses paroles, et d’en composer un discours par lequel ils fassent entendre leurs pensées, et qu’au contraire il n’y a point d’autre animal, tant parfait et tant heureusement né qu’il puisse être, qui fasse le semblable.15 [For it is quite remarkable that there are no men so dull-witted or stupid – and this includes even madmen – that they are incapable of arranging words together and forming an utterance from them in order to make their thoughts understood; where there is no other animal, however perfect and well-endowed it may be – that can do the like.]16

Animals, too, use sounds to express and communicate their needs, but only human beings are able to arrange the few sounds available to them in infinite combinations in order to express the most refined nuances of their thoughts. Descartes also warned against confusing speech with those ‘natural movements that express passions’ (‘mouvements naturels qui témoignent les passions’)17 and that are shared by all animals. Once syntax – the most complex level of arrangement of signs – became the very index of humanity, theorists of language began to pay greater attention to its forms and variations. The Port-Royal grammarians assigned syntax to the uppermost mental operation of judging and proceeded to redefine its rules.18 In the chapter on syntax from the Grammaire générale et raisonnée (1660) – the book’s final chapter – the writers concede that, in contrast to the ‘syntax of agreement’ (‘Syntaxe de Conuenance,’ the agreement in gender, number, and so on), the ‘syntax of government’ or the order of words is ‘almost totally arbitrary’ (‘la syntaxe de regime est presque toute arbitraire’)19 and thus is very different in all languages. Nevertheless, when they proceed to describe the order of words in the sentence, they propose as an ideal model the ‘natural order’ (‘l’ordre naturel’), defining it as follows: ‘Lors que toutes les parties du discours sont simplement exprimées, qu’il n’y a aucun mot de trop ny de trop peu, & qu’il est conforme à l’expression naturelle de nos pensées.’20 (‘When all the parts of discourse are simply expressed, and where there are no extra words and no missing words, and where the discourse is in conformity with the natural expression of our thoughts.’)21 The authors of the Grammaire do not elaborate further on their definition of natural expression, describing it instead ex negativo by discussing four different forms of transgression – syllepsis, ellipsis, pleonasm, and hyperbaton – that parallel their natural rules. Although they state that such ‘irregularities’ (‘irregularitez’) can sometimes con-

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stitute ‘perfections and beautifications of language’ (‘quelquefois des perfections & des beautez dans la Langue’),22 they condemn their use and promote the analogical word order of French (the subject-verb-object sequence) as the natural syntactic order. Moreover, they conclude the chapter (and thereby the entire book) with a now-famous praise of French as a language that refrains from syntactic figures for the sake of clarity and naturalness. The English editors and translators of the Port-Royal Grammar (1975) note the irony of such a conclusion: the allegedly general grammar ends ‘with so blatantly ethnocentric a pronouncement.’23 The Port-Royalists clearly attempt to universalize, or at least to propose as a model, some characteristics of their own language. However, when they add that French, in spite of its simplicity, is second to none in beauty and elegance, one can still sense their concern that their idiom might not be seen as a medium for majestic eloquence. Apparently aware that the ideal they were promoting still collided with the rhetorical preferences of their time, they appeal to the distinction between the need for grammatical codification and the requirements of style. Bouhours’s evaluation of the Romance languages is grounded in the definition of the natural order developed both in the Grammaire and in La logique, ou l’art de penser (1662). Yet Bouhours tends to erase the distinction between grammar and rhetoric and to exploit repeatedly the confusion between langue and literary parole in order to assert the superiority of French. It is a confusion already noted in Varchi’s arguments, but in Bouhours, as in the Port-Royalists’ discussion of syntax, the epistemological ground is the pre-Lockean or Cartesian belief in the correspondence between the rationality of the mind and the rationality of things. Like the Port-Royalists, Bouhours never doubted this assumption, taking for granted the conformity between the system of signs and the order of things. Such a postulate actually shapes his belief that the French language reflected that order with total transparency, while languages such as Italian and Spanish could not imitate it as it is. Yet while the Port-Royalists’ position may represent a transitional stage and a necessary premise for Bouhours’s theorization, it was Bouhours’s nationalization of aesthetic values and linguistic norms that provoked the hostilities. Indeed, his expressive definition of language allowed him to transform rhetorical figures such as indirect word order and hyperbole into icons of nations, but it was his rationalist perspective, presenting elements of modern French prose as universal and natural signs of reason, that provided the necessary premise for his claim of French superiority.

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Bouhours does not hide the circumstances that the universality of French was sustained by the aggressive cultural policies pursued by the French absolutist state. On the contrary, he describes at length the historical vicissitudes and various institutions that forged the character of French, even comparing the perfection achieved under Louis XIV to the excellence of the Latin used under Augustus.24 Bouhours argues that a strong and glorious monarchy that financed and encouraged the study of all the sciences and established the Académie française with the goal of preserving the purity of French had essentially contributed to the development of an advanced idiom, especially by supporting the use of the vernacular in official documents, the sciences, and education, and at court.25 Boasting of the numerous nations that spontaneously embraced French as the language of learned communication because of its ‘unmatched superiority,’ Bouhours acknowledges that its universality was backed by the politics of a powerful, expanding centralized state. At times, his tone assumes a rather brutal imperialistic flavour, as, for instance, when he declares it a fortunate circumstance that French was already fashionable in the capital of the Netherlands, reasoning that the population would not have to learn it by force when the French established full domination. A markedly historical perspective emerges in Bouhours’s description of the political conditions that contributed to the perfection of the French language, but it is a historical perspective that he applies in an eminently partisan way: the development of the French language leads to excellence, whereas the transformation of Italian brings only decay. Following the traditional celebration of the Gallic heritage (Estienne and Pasquier), Bouhours insists on the ‘barbarous’ origins of both the French language and the French nation, constantly occupied with war, and yet he interprets those origins as a sign of vitality and as a prediction of longevity. Moreover, in contrast to Estienne, who did not hide the range and strength of French dialects, Bouhours concentrates on the pure French ‘gold’ present in the language of all of France’s speakers, stressing homogeneity rather than variety. As we shall see in the next chapter, Bouhours’s amplification of the barbarous element returns in Vico’s language philosophy, constituting the core of his classification of languages. However, while Vico attributes a premature development to the ‘overly subtle’ (‘dilicatissime’) French and Greek languages, Bouhours contrasts the barbarous, vital element of French with the early over-refined Italian tongue. In Bouhours’s view, Italian achieved the refined elegance of Petrarch too early and therefore was doomed to a premature decay, as the decline of the Italian Seicento idiom proved.

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His narrative draws on the traditional position of the trecentisti – under attack since the middle of the sixteenth century – who believed that the Italian poets of the fourteenth century had created the most perfect language and that their idiom therefore had to be regarded as the model for standard literary Italian. Even the Accademia della Crusca, which essentially endorsed the credo of the trecentisti, included the vocabulary of Torquato Tasso (Bouhours’s favorite object of attack) only in the third edition of its dictionary (1691; the first edition appeared in 1612). Bouhours’s description tends to downplay the regularity and stability already achieved by literary Italian since the sixteenth century. These qualities were not susceptible to being threatened by literary experimentation, including the influence of the baroque. The real challenge for early eighteenth-century Italian was its potential use in a wider range of disciplines and across a variety of social groups.26 As we have seen, Bouhours is ready to resort to the rule of progress when speaking of the French language, but he selects the category of decay when dealing with the history of Italian or Spanish. Yet his historical account of the development of French and its barbarous origin clashes with his claim that the French language has the innate ability to mirror the norms of reason and nature. I believe that the difficulties of reconciling his universalist perspective with his keen awareness of the historicity of language led him to rely on the myth of genius. In ‘La langue française,’ for instance, Ariste remarks that Eugène’s understanding of linguistic change, hailed as the very strength of the French language, also implies decay and death and as such is not compatible with his conviction that French will preserve its perfection and remain the universal language of knowledge. Ariste asks whether the naïvete – the essence of French – will be able to resist time, literary fashions, and foreign influences; Eugène replies by turning again to the genius of the nation as the ultimate guarantor of continuity. Fashionable and extravagant artifices will not take root, he argues, since they will be cast off by ‘that simple, natural and reasonable attitude that is the character of our nation and something like the soul of our language’ (‘cet air facile, naturel et raisonnable qui est le caractère de notre nation et comme l’âme de notre langue,’ E, 122–3). The idea of the genius of the nation emerges whenever Eugène, the apologist for the French language, stumbles into contradictions that undermine his thesis regarding the superiority of his own language or when he needs to explain the origin of linguistic diversity. Assuming that ‘each nation has always spoken according to its own genius’

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(‘chaque nation a toujours parlé selon son génie,’ E, 60), Eugène views each language as the expression of the nation. From his perspective, the understanding of nation and language coincide. However, Bouhours did not have the anthropological insight and the historico-juridical knowledge of a Vico, and so he ends up describing the different national characters and how they affect the respective languages in a deterministic way. The Greeks, with their refined and voluptuous lifestyle, created a sweet and delicate language; the Romans, fully absorbed by their aspiration to glory, spoke a noble and proud language, more suited to command than to persuade. The superb and grave Spaniards created a pompous and hyperbolic language; the coarse Germans speak a rough and irregular idiom; while Italians have ‘an effeminate and languid’ (‘molle et efféminée’) language that reflects their temperament and their customs (E, 60). French people are ‘naturally brusque, lively and fiery’ (‘naturellement brusques, et qui ont beaucoup de vivacité et de feu’) and have created a natural, concise, and terse language (E, 60). Ironically, Bouhours celebrates the beauty of his own language by quoting, even in Italian, a few of Tasso’s lines from the Gerusalemme liberata – ‘Non copre habito vil la nobil luce, / E quanto è in lei d’altero e di gentile / E fuor la maestà regia traluce / per gli atti ancor de l’essercitio humile’ – the work of a poet whom Bouhours takes to represent all the ills of the Italian language and its lack of logic. Clearly, the presumed national characters are essentially derived from images and styles conveyed by contemporary literature, not reconstructed via geographical, political, historical, or economic facts – as Montesquieu would do later in his De l’esprit des lois (1748). Therefore, Bouhours’s argument is often circular, since the only common denominator that allows him to identify as nations all the objects of his comparison consists in the alleged fact that these groups share a common language. In Bouhours’s comparison, England and Holland, the two countries that were closest to the modern understanding of nation (ascribing national sovereignty to ‘the people’), are strikingly absent. Paul Hazard helps us understand a probable reason for their exclusion in a telling passage from The European Mind: ‘The intellectual hegemony of Europe had always been family heritage, as it were; a sort of heirloom confined to the Latin races. In the days of the Renaissance, Italy was the tenant-in-tail. Then it was Spain’s turn to have her golden age. Finally, France succeeded to the heritage. Any suggestion that the barbarous northerners should ever presume to dispute the scepter with these

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queenly races would have seemed both impertinent and absurd.’27 Indeed, it would be several more years before England would arouse the cultural curiosity of continental Europe, with the turning point being, according to Hazard, the 1697 treaty of Ryswyck, imposed on France by William of Orange, which inflicted a shattering blow to the pride of Louis XIV’s nation. As we shall see, Hazard’s image of the family and other metaphors drawn from the same semantic field constitute a significant element of Muratori’s rhetoric; his various presentations of the Italian vernacular as ‘a sister’ of French and Spanish, at other times the privileged ‘daughter’ of Latin, or in his last writings the humiliated ‘mother,’ allow us to trace the changes in his attitude towards language diversity and its relationship to the concept of nation. Very early in Bouhours’s dialogue, the competition among languages is reduced to a comparison of French, Spanish, and Italian. These ‘three modern languages, the most fashionable in the world’ (‘les trois langues modernes qui ont le plus de vogue dans le monde,’ E, 66), compete for the prestige of their Latin mother and, in particular, for the status of the universal language of knowledge. The political implications are strongest in the rivalry between French and Spanish, which also reflects the two nations’ very real competition for the control of Italy. Italian, however, was still a rival to be feared, only in so far as the growing popularity of opera made it the language of courtly entertainment in many European countries. In a passage that must have stirred the bitterness of Italian literati, Bouhours alludes to Italy’s unfortunate political situation. Drawing on the traditional argument of some Renaissance humanists who identified Italian as a corruption of classical Latin under barbarous influences, he concludes that the close similarity of the Italian language to Latin is more a sign of servitude and shame than a reason for glory. On the contrary, French with its autonomous morphological and syntactical structures revealed, in Bouhours’s view, the character of ‘a language that has been formed by a free people rather than by one born in servitude’ (‘une langue qui a plus l’air d’avoir été formée par un peuple libre que d’être née dans la servitude,’ E, 111). Bouhours here envisions liberty and autonomy in ethnic rather than political terms, endorsing a (proto)nationalist rather than a republican definition of freedom. In his definition, it is the ethnic homogeneity and purity of the polity that counts, not the freedom of its individual members. His endorsement of a monogenic and monolingual nation plays down the common Latin origin of Italian, Spanish, and French in order

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to construct France’s population as an autonomous ethnic group, ultimately sanctioning an ethnic form of inclusiveness. Indeed, at the core of Bouhours’s nationalistic propaganda is an inclusive attitude that has been overlooked by his interpreters28 and yet reveals the crucial emancipatory element of early nationalism in all its potential. In traditional defences of vernacular languages the evidence of their dignity consists in their literary achievements, while the model of spoken language is courtly conversation. Instead, when Bouhours defines naturalness as the character of French, he presents the speech of French women and peasants as the best examples of the language, the ultimate evidence of its perfection, and the guarantor of its stability. Thus, when he introduces language as the expression of collective experience, he also redefines the speakers, or the bearers of the shared experience, in more inclusive terms: Il n’y a rien de plus juste, de plus propre et de plus naturel que le langage de la plupart des femmes françaises. Les mots dont elles se servent semblent tout neufs et fait exprès pour ce qu’elles disent, quoiqu’ils soient communs; et si la nature elle-même voulait parler, je crois qu’elle emprunterait leur langue pour parler naïvement. (E, 57) [There is nothing more precise, proper, and natural than the language spoken by the majority of French women. The words they use seem utterly fresh and created expressly for what they say, although they are common; and if nature itself could speak, I believe that it would borrow their language in order to speak naively.]

Here Bouhours presents women as the bearers of that naturalness that he has identified, since the beginning of the dialogue, as the genius of the French language. To choose women as the best representatives of the national language constituted a provocation for Italian intellectuals. Even an enlightened mind like Muratori, who actually shared Bouhours’s values of reason and bon sens, could not avoid mocking Bouhours’s reliance on women’s speech. In Della perfetta poesia italiana (PP), Muratori notes that Italian women leave the care of well-rounded speech (‘bel parlare’) to men, and in a provocative tone he points out the significance of the fact that the ‘weak sex,’ not the ‘virile sex of the warriors,’ provided the standard of a flabby language such as French.29 Bouhours instead is willing to extend French genius not only to women but also across social and regional barriers. Challenged by his

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interlocutor to provide evidence for the endurance of French genius, Eugène replies that, in spite of historical changes and social and regional differences, French had already proven itself able to preserve its quintessential simplicity over the course of time as well as in the mouths of different speakers: Le langage de nos ancêtres a beaucoup de la naïveté du nôtre, comme l’or chargé de crasse e de terre a l’essence de l’or le plus pur et le plus fin. Et cela paraît visiblement dans nos vieux auteurs qui, avec toute leur négligence, ont une naïveté admirable: de sort qu’on prend autant de plaisir à les lire qu’à entendre un villageois de bon sens, qui parle mal à la vérité, mais qui parle naturellement. (E, 104) [The language of our ancient authors possesses much of the naivety of our own, like rough gold, which has the same essence as the most pure and refined gold. And this is apparent in our old writers who, in spite of their negligence, show an admirable naivety, so that it is as much a pleasure to read them as it is to listen to a peasant with common sense, who, to tell the truth, speaks badly but speaks naturally.]

The asperity and irregularity of ancient French, as well as the unrefined speech of country people, reveal the same essence as does the modern polished idiom, the result of assiduous refinement. The genius of French appears here as the innate possession of all French people, whom Bouhours, in his dialogue ‘Le bel esprit’ (also from the Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène), collectively endows with common sense (‘bon sens’) as a national prerogative. In conclusion, ‘La langue française’ is neither a manifesto of rationalistic linguistics nor a simplistic work of propaganda. Bouhours’s speculations on the genius of languages may constitute, as Stefano Gensini puts it, a ‘rhetorical move used to sanction the superiority of French.’30 Yet Bouhours’s work also draws attention to the connection between language and its community of speakers and constructs a national speaker who is no longer exclusively identified with the writer. Though Bouhours privileges use and reason (‘usage’; ‘raison’) as the main criteria by which to judge languages, with use always subordinated to reason (as in the Port-Royal Grammar), his reflection contains many productive dissonances. His expressive notion of language is at odds with his neoclassicist principle of imitation. His historical vision, according to which languages and nations have their own particular

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life cycles, contrasts with his image of the French language as a perfect entity destined to endure eternally. His idea of the peculiarity and historical specificity of individual languages is conflated with the myth of the universality of French. Bouhours’s thought thus moves on the threshold between traditional humanistic beliefs and new images of diversity introduced by modern science as well as by the discovery of ‘savage worlds.’ The humanistic ideal of perfection and the organic vision of history as constituted by cycles of birth, growth, ripeness, and decay coexist in Bouhours with the notion of linear progress and perfectibility upheld by the natural sciences. I have argued that Bouhours resorts to the unmediated link between the genius of language and the genius of the nation in order to bridge these crucial discrepancies. Yet, by attributing features of contemporary written idioms to the genius of their respective nations, he articulates the ideological premise of linguistic nationalism, the movement underlying the political unification of countries such as Italy and Germany and the beginnings of which are usually associated with Herder and Romantic language philosophy. If, as different scholars of nationalism assume,31 each modern nation emerged when its populace was elevated from plebeians to people and the people became, at least nominally, the bearer of national sovereignty, then Bouhours’s argument, which extends the range of the bearers of French genius across gender and class divisions, can be seen as a symbolic prelude to the discourse of linguistic nationalism. Bouhours’s dialogues thus represent a transitional stage, occurring well before the semantic stabilization of the terms nation and people, as documented in the literature after 1750.32 Moreover, when Bouhours chooses French women and peasants, not writers or nobility, as the ultimate evidence of French superiority, he establishes a powerful image of participation that will become a decisive engine of all nationalisms. The French population, of course, was very far from the ideal organic language community evoked by Bouhours, and yet the absence of a real homogeneity did not weaken the image’s power to bring the uniform nation into existence. Such a power was enhanced by Bouhours’s ability to absorb in his reflection on language the conflicting elements that were crucial to French nationalism. If it is true that nationalism makes no distinction between the imaginary participation of a group defined as a nation and the same group’s engagement in specific actions,33 then Bouhours’s rhetorical connection between the genius of language and the genius of nation articulated the logic of linguistic nationalism at a very early stage.

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Disassembling Genius: Muratori’s Response to Bouhours It took years for Italians to respond to Bouhours’s attacks, and it is significant that the date of the Italian response coincides with the years of the Spanish War of Succession (1702–13), during which Italy figured in international politics as just another little province at stake.34 Such a circumstance probably increased the level of sensitivity of Italian intellectuals, especially since at this point in history they could no longer boast about Italy’s cultural prominence, which had already been lost to France.35 The frustration and shock over the loss of cultural hegemony is tangible throughout the debate, which in Italy is traditionally designated as the Orsi-Bouhours polemic, probably because the Marquis Orsi, himself a tedious writer with little sense of poetry, served as the champion of Italian letters by untiringly defending and encouraging the imitation of the classical and Italian authors that were condemned by Bouhours as obscure or convoluted. Orsi’s theoretical defence of metaphors and their cognitive value has been abundantly analysed and convincingly praised by interpreters such as Benedetto Croce, Andrea Sorrentino, and Stefano Gensini,36 who have read it in the context of traditional Renaissance and baroque theories of tropes and judged it a lucid critique of Bouhours’s narrow rhetorical criteria. I consider Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s rebuttal a more productive focus for analysing the issues of national identity emerging in the early phase of the debate. First of all, one cannot ignore that by endorsing the principle of autorizzamento, which allowed or ‘authorized’ solely the aesthetic devices that could be found in classical authors, Orsi not only undermined his own ideas about the cognitive function of the figures of speech but also bound, with a very narrow definition, modern Italian culture to its classical heritage, barring any bid for a novel and autonomous identity. Muratori – one of the most important historians of Italy, a resolute advocate of cultural reform, and a declared moderne – understood the drawbacks of Orsi’s orthodox classicism but, more important, was able to disassemble Bouhours’s constructions and identify the political implications of his arguments. Indeed, the large number of essays, articles, and letters published in response to both Orsi’s and Bouhours’s theses between 1705 and 1710 show that the participants were clearly divided along national lines,37 with the Italians rehearsing several commonplaces of the querelle and mostly reinforcing Orsi’s arguments against Bouhours’s application of rationalistic criteria to works of imagination. However, in spite of their partial attitude, the

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majority of Italian respondents did not directly address the political issues raised by Bouhours – a sign, perhaps, of their sense of impotence with respect to the Italian political conditions. Their wounded pride prompted them to found the Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia in 1710, which announced in its very name the intention to create a national cultural forum in an era when the Italian nation did not exist. The birth of the Giornale was the result of the resentment elicited by the attacks against Italian culture that had been launched in the Mémoires de Trévoux and in the German Acta eruditorum. ‘How much longer can we bear to hear that in Italy studies languish, good taste has perished, and wits have weakened? How much longer shall we leave the trumpets of fame in the hands of foreigners?’ lamented the editor of the Giornale in the preface to the first number.38 The Giornale set out to prove that arts and knowledge were still flourishing in Italy, yet the second and third issues offered extended summaries of the Italian responses to Bouhours, immediately prompting a chain reaction of new replies. The question of the Italian cultural prestige remained so essential for Italian intellectuals that, as late as 1735 (more than fifty years after Bouhours’s attacks), numerous texts of the Orsi-Bouhours polemic were collected in two volumes and published in Modena, together with the Italian translation of La manière. As late as 1791, in the completely different political climate following the French Revolution, some of Bouhours’s arguments were taken apart, once again, by Giovanni Francesco Galeani Napione in his Dell’uso e dei pregi della lingua italiana, a full-fledged manifesto of linguistic nationalism in which language was presented as the foundation not only of the cultural but also of the political nation and as the primary means of its social cohesion.39 And yet, among the Italian respondents, Muratori remained the only Italian scholar to address explicitly the political concerns of the debate. He understood that his compatriots’ neglect of the broader political issue risked legitimizing Bouhours’s entire project of stereotypes, an ideology tying the nation’s essence to specific linguistic practices, and the nationalization of modern values such as common sense, reason, naturalness, and civility, which Bouhours wanted to claim as exclusively French prerogatives. The debate on Bouhours not only gave rise to some of Muratori’s most important cultural enterprises (for example, his design for an ‘Italian Republic of Letters,’ 1703, and his monumental antiquarian studies of the Italian modern identity, 1723–42) but, I argue, also changed his vision of the Italian nation and language. Muratori meticulously took

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apart Bouhours’s arguments from ‘La langue française’ that linked language and national character in Della perfetta poesia (written under the French occupation, circulated as a manuscript by 1703, and published in 1706). Later, however, he turned the merely academic controversy into a cultural praxis that began to correct the perception of the Italian collective past as a uniform continuation of the Latin heritage. He succeeded in organizing the intellectual community all over Italy in an effort to rescue, edit, and collect a variety of documents and materials from the neglected medieval years, drawing attention to a despised period of Italian history. His project articulated a different narrative of Italian identity, presenting it as a function not exclusively of the high literary tradition but also of a shared experience of the past as preserved in documents and materials of everyday life. Finally, Muratori’s new inclusive approach in his late writings challenged the monogenic paradigm of the nation advanced by Bouhours and used by him to explain the Italian inferiority. From the beginning, Muratori participated in the French-Italian controversy by acting on two fronts: rebutting Bouhours’s attacks with the talent of a modern Ideologiekritiker and organizing a supra-regional cultural network able to prove those attacks wrong. Muratori’s strategies reveal a keen awareness that collective representations are shaped by the means or media articulating and circulating ideas and by their semiotic features. He realized that national images – the genius of nations – were a matter of communication and that, if Italians wanted to take charge of their image and overcome the subaltern position they had been assigned, they had to promote an internal discussion over the redefinition of modern Italian culture through institutions that linked the whole territory of Italy. In 1702, when Modena (the town in which he used to work as ducal archivist and librarian of the Este family) was occupied by the French army in the course of the Spanish War of Succession, Muratori began to plan the institution of the Italian republic of letters in Primi disegni della repubblica letteraria d’Italia esposti al pubblico da Lamindo Pritanio (Op). Written under a pseudonym, it was published in Naples with the date 2 April 1703, though it could not actually be circulated until 1704. It was an open letter that called all Italian scholars and intellectuals to common action for the advancement of the Italian language, the sciences, and the arts. Ironically, the tone of his preamble is entirely in tune with some of Bouhours’s characterizations of Italian literary habits as vain and effeminate; it is a satire of the futile activities (singing competitions and ‘grandi affari d’amore’)40 organized by the

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myriad of Italian academies, the number of which – more than three in each city – was grotesquely disproportionate to their achievements. Muratori proposes the institution of a single academy for the whole Italian territory, modelled after the centralized structure of the English and French academies. The republic had to adopt a real constitution, with national laws and rules regulating access, hierarchy, and functions, but also guaranteeing for itself a relative independence from the influence of the many princes and rulers of Italy. Only the unity and organization of all the ‘great minds of Italy’ could impose serious reforms, such as the introduction of Italian language and letters as a subject of study in schools as well as the use of vernacular in all kinds of writings, especially in the sciences and experimental philosophy:41 ‘Noi non possiamo servir meglio alla gloria dell’Italia, che è uno de’ primi oggetti della nostra confederazione, quanto col rendere sempre più gloriosa la nostra lingua e dolcemente sforzando i letterati e i popoli lontani ad impararla’ (Op, vol. 1, 185). (There is no better means to serve the glory of Italy, which is one of the prime goals of our confederation, than to make our language more and more glorious and, by this means, to gently induce foreign literati and populations to learn it.) Here Muratori envisions a truly hegemonic action. Using the vernacular rather than Latin for philosophical and scientific works of international interest, as the French had done at least since Descartes, was for Muratori the most effective means of restoring Italy’s international prestige, which could not be defended by military action. Within the Italian territory he demands the universal use of Italian in every institution, the establishment of more libraries and archives, the foundation of journals fostering intellectual exchange, quality control of publications, and, finally, the reform of universities and schools, in particular by amending the system of access to education and by privileging merit over raccomandazioni. In contrast to the traditional idea of the republic of letters that was characterized by cosmopolitanism and a shared lingua franca, Muratori’s republic, with its constitution and laws, appears actually as a substitute government entrusted with a national cultural politics, a stand-in for the non-existent Italian state. In spite of Muratori’s obstinate appeals (he continued to draft several open letters on the subject) his republic did not become a reality. The reactions of some of his colleagues reveal that at this point in time Italian intellectuals continued to perceive their cultural space through either universal or local parameters such as the cosmopolitan republic of letters or the local academies.42

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Simultaneously with his plan for the republic Muratori embarked on correcting in Della perfetta poesia italiana (1706) Bouhours’s representation of the Italian language and letters. The French-Italian controversy on the genius of language constitutes the subtext of the first three books of Della perfetta poesia, which somewhat paradoxically articulated a didactic and moral vision of literature (art has to be submitted to the law of the city) clearly dependent on French models.43 Della perfetta poesia also outlined a new plan for a cultural reform and offered, in its fourth book, an anthology of contemporary Italian poetry that was to confute Bouhours’s portrait of the current state of Italian letters. As is typical of the first half of the eighteenth century, Muratori debates the genius of language when addressing the use of tropes and their translatability.44 His understanding of the notion of the genius of language decouples language from national character and often reveals Muratori’s unease with the notion itself, especially when it runs the risk of questioning the universality of human nature. His definition is not really original, being more or less a retrieval of the linguistic understanding developed by Renaissance scholars, which stressed internal linguistic ‘causes’ rather than external (geographical or political) explanations. 45 And yet, in contrast to the majority of Italian respondents, who endorsed classicist norms, he discusses the genius of language in a context that clearly places him on the side of the modernes. To Muratori, Latin and Greek tropes are ‘foreign ornaments,’ alien to the Italian language, and as such should not be excessively cherished, as had happened, for instance, in the contemporary anthology Poesie italiane, latine, greche (1701) by Andrea Marano and Antonio Bergamini, who apparently had forgotten that they were writing in Italian. In his critique of Gian Vincenzo Gravina’s classicist poetics, which recommended transplanting Latin and Greek tropes in the vernacular language in order to avoid the faults of Seicento poetry (false concepts, inflated style, frigid witticism), Muratori introduces his idea of the genius of language as an irreducible core of structures unique to individual languages: Ogni Lingua ha certe forme di dire, certe construzioni, tanto sue proprie, che non possono acconciamente accomunarsi coll’altre Lingue. Di tali proprietà moltissime se ne truovano nella Favella Ebrea, che i Greci, e Latini non oserebbero trasportare nel loro Idioma. Altre ne hanno i Greci, che non si convengono a’ Latini; ed altre i Latini, i Greci, e gli Ebrei, che non ben s’adattano all’Italica Lingua. Che se taluno vuol pure da un Linguaggio all’altro far passare queste proprietà, dee dimesticarle alquanto, e ri-

Bouhours’s Genius of the Nation and Muratori’s Republic of Letters 79 durle per quanto si può intelligibili, e chiare nell’altro Linguaggio. Altrimenti sarà straniero il suo Stile, né si comprenderanno i suoi sentimenti dalla maggior parte di coloro, che parlano, e intendono quella Lingua: il che senza dubbio non è virtù ma difetto. (PP, vol. 1, 85–6) [Every language has certain idioms, certain constructions that are so peculiar to its nature that they cannot be accommodated in other languages. There are many such properties in Hebrew, which Greek and Latin writers would not dare transport into their idioms. Other properties are appropriate to Greek but are not becoming to Latin speakers; and some Latin, Greek, and Hebrew properties do not fit the Italian language. And if one wants to transfer these unique properties from one language into the other, one has to domesticate them in some way and render them as far as possible intelligible and clear in the other language. Otherwise, his style will be foreign and his feelings will not be understood by the majority of people speaking and understanding his language, which is without doubt a fault, not a virtue.]

In his definition of the uniqueness of each language, which lies in its idioms, constructions, and significations that cannot be adequately rendered in other languages, Muratori draws on traditional Renaissance language theories, and yet he also appears to be worried about questions of communication and the issue of the ‘Italianness’ of the translated locutions. His idea that the translator should exclude any element that might be perceived as foreign expresses a common belief of the time, which resulted in a praxis of translation (the belle infidèle) that strove to accommodate modes and turns of the original to the contemporary stylistic canon of the target language and attune it to the aesthetic sensibility of the receiving literary community.46 This type of translation reflected the belief in an inviolable, innate genius of language, a belief with which a refined translator such as Cesarotti wrestled his entire life (see chapter 4 herein). It is striking that although Muratori here explicitly expresses his concern for the habits of the reading community, he is not interested in addressing the question of whether and to what extent the uniqueness of a language can be considered an expression of national customs and conventions, a question that was so central in Bouhours’s vision. Instead, his analogy between the properties of languages and traditional customs reveals – especially in his choice of words – Muratori’s hesitation to fully embrace the newly revived expressive view of language:

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Muratori’s phrasing, both in this and in numerous other passages (‘abito,’ ‘vestiti,’ ‘ornamenti’), signals his tendency to look at words as mere clothing of concepts, as external accidents, precisely at the same moment in which he asserts their untranslatability and considers their unique way of communicating perceptions. Muratori’s insistence on calling the particular tropes of individual languages ornaments contradicts his own assumption that figures of speech are not ornamental artifices but the ‘natural language of affects’ (‘il linguaggio naturale degli affetti,’ PP, vol. 1, 220 and 461), a formulation that he borrowed from his poet friend Maggi.47 This unresolved tension between the belief in the unique and untranslatable way of articulating perceptions embodied in the genius of language, and the ideal of the natural and universal expression of sensations and feelings will be directly addressed in Vico’s anthropological vision of language development, as we shall see in the next chapter. But in Della perfetta poesia (1706) Muratori’s unease with cultural relativism and his determination to divorce language from nation prompted him to reject the historicist approach to culture. For instance, in his evaluation of Hebrew poetry Muratori appeals to an impervious genius of language to undermine historical considerations. His reflections are a far cry from the almost contemporary commentaries on Hebrew poetry by Augustin Calmet and Claude Fleury (1708 and 1713), in which the new distinctions between modern and primitive languages, popular and cultured poetry, are viewed as fundamental differences and applied to the aesthetic evaluation of Hebrew poetry.48 While Calmet and Fleury promoted the respect of differences and emphasized the hermeneutical value of the relations of the artwork to the external context, both geographical and historical, Muratori continued to explain differences in terms of the intrinsic idiosyncrasies of languages, undermining any historical and societal factors.49 In his

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view, translators must bow to the genius of the receiving language and change the ‘overcoat’ (‘sopravveste’) of the beauties of Hebrew poetry, ‘dressing its verse in a somewhat modern fashion’ (‘vestirli alquanto alla moderna,’ PP, vol. 1, 161), if they want their readers to appreciate those ancient beauties. Muratori’s recurring analogy of clothes (and his quite reductive vision of the evocative power of words) clearly originates in his determination to enforce the universality of human nature and to reject any nationalistic claims of supremacy in language, culture, or moral stature: Tolte le particolari forme di dire della Favella Ebraica, il fondo di quella sacra poesia non è differente da quel de’ Greci, Latini, Italiani, e Franzesi … Tutti gli uomini, benché diversi fra loro di nazione, di costumi, e di studi, non son però differenti nel sentir le cose. Essendo la Natura una sola in ciascuno, essendo comuni a tutti le passioni, e amando tutti il Bello, il Buono, il Vero. (PP, vol. 1, 161–2) [Stripped of the particular locutions of the Hebrew language, the depth of that sacred poetry is not different from that of the Greek, Latin, Italian, and French people … All human beings, although diverse by nation, customs, and education, are not different in the way in which they perceive things. Nature is one and the same in every person; passions are common to everyone, and everyone loves beauty, good, and truth.]

This passage closely resembles Voltaire’s later statement on the unity of nature at the end of his enquiry into national customs (Essai sur les moeurs, 1744).50 As for Voltaire, for Muratori the differences in expressions and artifices (‘artifici’) among national literatures are not the sign of a more or less acute innate national character – as maintained one of Bouhours’s characters in the dialogue ‘Le bel esprit’ – nor the result of people’s differing abilities to grasp aesthetic, cognitive, or moral values.51 All visible disparities are due simply to ‘the greater or lesser cultivation of studies’ (‘maggiore, o minor coltura de gli studi,’ PP, vol. 1, 162) in the respective nations. Every people and every language is capable of creating and appreciating beauty, according to Muratori, who places classical and Germanic languages side by side (‘altrettanto pur nelle Lingue Tedesca, Inglese, Danese,’ PP, vol. 1, 163) – an unusual thought for his time that provoked the angry reactions of Italian classicists.52 Muratori’s definition of genius is rooted in a view of language that

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emphasizes grammatical structures and communicative functions rather than its figural and expressive aspects. It clearly draws on the tradition of the Renaissance linguistics of Speroni and Pietro Sforza Pallavicino and comes very close to Descartes’ position as articulated in his Discours de la méthode (part 1, D I, 4–7).53 Muratori embraces their conviction that the merits and features of a language – its genius – should be judged more according to the doctrine and reason of the subject matter than to the sound and disposition of words. Like the Aristotelian character Peretto (corresponding to Pomponazzi) in Speroni’s Dialogo delle lingue,54 he believes that the excessive time and care devoted to Latin, a dead and foreign language, is the cause of the barbaric quality of Italian used in schools, not some inborn, intrinsic flaw in character. In contrast to Varchi and Bouhours, Muratori does not try to blur the difference between spontaneous speech and standard written language. On the contrary, when it comes to his representation of the Italian language, he reinterprets the analogy with Latin by reviving the theory according to which even the Roman Empire had two types of language: the spoken vernacular, learned from nursemaids and spoken by the volgo; and the ‘grammatical’ language of the writers, which had to be learned and cultivated with diligent effort. Muratori asserts that such a distinction applies also to the Italian language. Claiming to follow Dante’s ideas from the then still-controversial De vulgari eloquentia, Muratori recalls the poet’s differentiation between the thirteen volgari, or the regional spoken dialects (Dante actually speaks of ‘at least fourteen,’ 1, X, 7)55 and the volgare illustre, which Muratori interprets as referring to the language of the Italian courts. He then proposes to call Dante’s volgare illustre ‘italiano grammaticale’ in order to distinguish it from the dialects. Here he departs from Dante’s contention that the volgare was more noble and universal than the gramatica because it was ‘natural’ and common to all, not artificial and agreed upon only by the literati.56 Indeed by naming the idiom shared by Italian literati volgare illustre, Dante symbolically envisioned (and practised in his vernacular writings) the ennoblement of everyday speech rather than the imposition of a national grammar. Muratori, instead, identifies the gramatica as the appropriate paradigm, the ‘grammatical’ language as proper Italian and the only possible common idiom (‘propriamente per Linguaggio Italiano s’intende quel Gramaticale, che da i Letterati s’adopera,’ PP, vol. 2, 623): [The Gramaticale] è uno solo per tutta l’Italia, perché in tanti diversi luoghi d’Italia è sempre una sola e costante conformità di parlare, e scrivere, per

Bouhours’s Genius of the Nation and Muratori’s Republic of Letters 83 cagione della Gramatica. Questo dunque si ha necessariamente a studiar da tutti, come comune a tutti gl’Italiani, e come quello che da ciascuno si adopera nelle Scritture, nelle Prediche, ne’ pubblici ragionamenti, e che in ogni Provincia, Città, e luogo d’Italia è inteso ancor dalle genti più idiote. (PP, vol. 2, 620) [It (the Gramaticale) is one for the whole of Italy, because, thanks to grammar, there is always one and the same way of speaking and writing it in all the different places of Italy. This Italian therefore must be necessarily studied by everyone as the language common to all Italians, as the language that must be used by everyone in writings, sermons, public discussions, and as the language that is understood in every province and town of Italy, even by uneducated people.]

This somewhat redundant passage, stylistically quite unusual for Muratori, reveals his emotional perception that the only thing that Italian people could build in common was the literary language, which, with its codified grammar, could be preserved as the sole stable element unifying the population of a country ruled by numerous and ever-changing foreign nations and speaking a large number of at times mutually unintelligible dialects. This unification could happen only if the lingua franca of the literati were adopted in churches, schools, judiciary courts, and all other public institutions that had previously used Latin. Muratori’s gramaticale coincides with the set of rules established by the Italian grammarians of the sixteenth century (although he actually names only Bembo’s work) and was not the language of Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante, which was privileged by the Crusca. In fact, rejecting Bouhours’s assertion (based on the Crusca tenets) that Italian had achieved its excellence at its very beginnings, Muratori dates the golden era of Italian two centuries later.57 The Trecento literary language could hardly be regarded as the paradigm since it had not been clearly codified and its vocabulary was very unstable. Only the sixteenth-century gramaticale had achieved the necessary degree of excellence and stability. Thus, while claiming to rely on Dante’s idea of a common volgare, Muratori rejects Dante’s own language – a language capable of incorporating many different popular and local elements – as a model for standardization. We shall see how Vico, on the other end of the spectrum, would build a myth of origin for modern Italy on precisely the ‘barbarous’ idiom of Dante. Muratori instead re-

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jects the integration of social and local varieties into the ‘common’ language, envisioning the imposition from above of a unitary idiom, the sixteenth-century literary language. In contrast to Bouhours, he is not interested in erasing internal differences or in elevating peasants and women to the status of equal bearers of linguistic virtues, and he never hides his opinion that the national language is the work and concern of the literati. Discussing the modernization of Italian, for instance, he has no doubt that the introduction of new elements into the language and the decision about their compatibility with its genius should be determined by the judgment of the excellent authors of the nation (PP, vol. 2, 623, 627). By regarding the literati as the exclusive measure of the domestication of new and foreign idioms, Muratori reveals that Italian writers operate in fact as the self-appointed guardians of the genius of language rather than its carriers and are not equal to all other speakers. Indeed, Muratori’s understanding of the ‘linguaggio d’Italia’ as the literati’s language prompted his friend and trusted reader Anton Maria Salvini to ask him, ‘Where is this Italy?’ (Ove è quest’Italia?), and to argue that a language that was not really spoken by any population could not be considered the common, shared language of a country. In the absence of a political body, Salvini added, Muratori’s ‘parlare italiano’ was a pure abstraction.58 I believe that it is precisely because Muratori envisioned the national language as a construction of writers, and not as the natural expression of a shared outlook, that he was able to take apart and resolutely denounce the defective syllogisms that were adopted by Bouhours in order to connect the genius of language to the genius of nation and build his argument of French superiority. Muratori promptly identified Bouhours’s conflation of the language system with the literary conventions of his time and recognized that faults attributed by the French critic to the Italian language per se (excess of diminutives, superlatives, antitheses, figures of speech, and the monotony of the sound in prose writing) were actually defects of the writers, of ‘those who think and speak, not of the Language with which they talk’: Sono le Lingue Ministre affatto indifferenti dell’uomo, affinché esso per mezzo loro spieghi gl’interni suoi concetti. Se questi son ridicoli, e scipiti, o se son gravi, e ingegnosi, il biasimo, e la lode è dovuta non alla Lingua, cioè allo strumento, con cui si spiegano, ma bensì alla mente che sì fatti li concepì. (PP, vol. 2, 648)

Bouhours’s Genius of the Nation and Muratori’s Republic of Letters 85 [Languages are quite indifferent ministers of men, so that men can express through them their own inner concepts. If the latter are ridiculous and dull or if they are grave and ingenious, the blame or the praise should go not to the language, that is to the instrument through which they unfold, but to the mind that conceived them in that way.]

Here Muratori unravels the mechanism of iconization. Bouhours had singled out a few aspects from mostly contemporary poems and had collapsed the stylistic features of those particular instances of literary language – one could say, the literary parole – with the grammatical structures of the Italian language itself, the langue. Bouhours spoke as if the excesses of the most recent literary idiom were irreparable and as if they had changed once and forever the thought structures of its speakers. Muratori instead views language as a transparent, highly flexible medium moulded by users and not as an organism of its own. Finally, Muratori disentangles Bouhours’s juxtaposition of the genius of language with the ingenium of the entire population: Non so con qual connessione mettesi a rispondere intorno all’altra conformità di cui punto non si parlava, e conchiude: che gli Ingegni Franzesi son più, che gl’Italiani, simili a gli antichi Latini per cagione del buon Gusto loro … Non è già cosa nuova, che da questi due Dialogisti si confondano insieme le Lingue, e gl’Ingegni; perché presso che tutti gli argomenti, co’ quali qui si combatte contra gl’Italiani, s’aggirano su questo continuo Equivoco. (PP, vol. 2, 671) [I do not know which kind of connection he makes in order to establish from that (the resemblance between the French and Latin language) the other similarity, which he had not addressed at all, and so he concludes that the minds (Ingegni) of the French are more similar to those of the Latins than of the Italians … It is not the first time that the two dialogists confuse languages and minds (Ingegni); in fact almost all arguments directed against the Italians turn on such a misunderstanding.]

This passage shows again that there is a certain amount of shortsightedness in Muratori’s vision, which at times risks reducing all rhetorical aspects of language to accidents or mere ornaments. Yet it also attests to his awareness of the ways in which ethnic stereotypes could arise from the literary medium. He clearly recognized that Bouhours had

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manipulatively ascribed negative features of contemporary poetry to the essential character of the Italian language and then transferred those stylistic aspects to the character of the Italian people, using it as a causal explanation: Quando anche il temperamento e i costumi de gl’Italiani fossero oggidì molli, ed effeminati, quali si vogliono far credere, tuttavia poco propriamente dir si potrebbe, che la nostra lingua ha da essere tale anch’essa. (PP, vol. 2, 664) [If also the temperament and customs of the Italian people were nowadays lax and effeminate, as he wants us to believe, nevertheless one could not assert properly that our language, too, has to be such.]

Here Muratori unveils Bouhours’s simplistic generalization, which treated an alleged characteristic of the Italian people (‘lax and effeminate’) as the source of the disturbing character of the language. To further disprove such a deterministic connection, he reminds his readers that Italy was living in a barbaric age of wars and rude habits when its language was born in all the early refinement praised by Bouhours. The well-known anecdote about Charles V and his linguistic preferences, reported by Bouhours as an additional proof (‘lui qui disait que, s’il voulait parler aux dames, il parlerait italien; que, s’il voulait parler aux hommes, il parlerait français; que, s’il voulait parler à son cheval, il parlerait allemand; mais que, s’il voulait parler à Dieu, il parlerait espagnol … Charles-Quint avait une grand idée de notre langue: et il l’appelait langue d’État,’ E, 62), was too poor a piece of evidence to assess the characters of entire nations. Told differently in different nations, it showed, according to Muratori, that perceptions of national temperaments are relative and change according to the subject of the perception. Muratori’s response to Bouhours in Della perfetta poesia shows not only his skill as a critic of language ideology but also his insight into the nature of nationalistic discourse. He sees clearly the interconnection of national pride with resentment and fear – a relationship that has been substantiated by modern collective psychology.59 In his tenth and last chapter, Muratori points to the source of French resentment by assigning Bouhours’s dialogue on the French language to the polemic genre of the pamphlet to which it belonged and by describing it more accurately as a panegyric on France, as opposed to a perhaps more needed

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‘philosophical history of modern languages’ (‘Istoria Filosofica delle Lingue moderne,’ PP, vol. 2, 673). Under the pretence of describing his own language, Bouhours had produced polemical exaggerations that could be evaluated, according to Muratori, only within the context of the old French language debate. Nourished by famous French intellectuals such as Egide Ménage and Claude Favre Vaugelas and culminating in Louis-Augustin Alemand’s Nouvelles observations, ou Guerre Civile des François sur la Langue? (1688), the French debate confronted the striking example of the early codification and stability of the Italian language. Muratori refers to the apprehension generated by the competition with a language like Italian that had been incessantly subjected to examination and improvements since its literary beginnings, due (as the language historian Claudio Marazzini confirms) to the late humanistic conviction that the merits of languages were not intrinsic to their nature or embedded in their grammar but rather the result of a cultural process.60 Indeed, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Italian literary language had achieved such a level of codification and regularity that writers could afford diverse literary experiments, including those involving dialects and baroque extravagances. Though Italian literati would continue to lack a national political identity long after Bouhours penned his attacks, their literary idiom, or their national linguistic identity, had been secured long before him. Bouhours shows a clear awareness of the high level of standardization of the Italian language, and Muratori suggests that the stability of the Italian language was the true source of Bouhours’s acrimony, together with the preoccupation that the French language might undergo the same ‘decay’ as Italian had undergone. Such a preoccupation is barely hidden by Bouhours’s appeal to the eternal character of the French people, to the extent that one could only laugh at his attacks: M’immagino io perciò, che a lor muova la collera, siccome a noi muove il riso, quell’udire alcuni, i quali avvisandosi d’apportar gran Nome alla lor Nazione, e Favella, disavvedutamente le tirano addosso l’odio altrui, perché non sanno lodarla senza mille esagerazioni, o senza offendere la gloria de’ vicini, e insieme la Verità medesima. (PP, vol. 2, 677) [I imagine therefore that they (the serious French scholars of Italian language) are moved by anger, as we are by laughter, when hearing some writers who, intending to bring fame and popularity to their nation, thoughtlessly draw upon her someone else’s hate, and this only because

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Setting Bouhours’s work apart from the serious studies of Romance language produced by prominent French linguists and placing it in its appropriate framework as national propaganda, Muratori denies any theoretical truth to Bouhours’s all-too-direct connection between the genius of languages and the genius of nations and concludes his critique by directly questioning a discourse of cultural supremacy based on resentment and fear. To sum up my arguments about Muratori’s achievement in Della perfetta poesia, I would like to emphasize his pioneering insight into the rhetorical and psychological mechanisms underlying the discourse of linguistic nationalism. He is able to take apart Bouhours’s analogical construction of evidence, resolutely reject the unmediated connection between languages and national characters, and develop a view of the genius of language that ultimately questioned the very premise of the concept. I should add, however, that Muratori’s ideas about the national language were based on a neat divide between educated and uneducated people, with the living speech of the latter conveniently severed almost from the high idiom. He envisions modernization only as the broadening of the scientific and philosophical vocabulary instrumental to the growth of knowledge and as the imposition of the ‘italiano grammaticale’ on the population, without considering the role of different regional and social registers in linguistic standardization. His identification of the national language with the language of men of letters is the opposite of Bouhours’s attempt to displace features of the literary language onto the people or genius of the nation. Bouhours’s discourse on genius created the image of the French nation as a compact group of speakers sharing a common (‘naïve,’ ‘simple,’ ‘natural’) way of experiencing reality and expressing their experience across social and geographical differences. But there is no doubt that whenever Muratori appeals to the ‘use of the Italian Nation,’ he refers exclusively to the literary community, enforcing the hegemonic role of the cultural elite in the Italian institutions that later took the lead in forming the nation and acculturating Italians to their own abstract view of Italianness. Perhaps it is worth noting that Muratori’s writings show how a constructivist understanding of language, as opposed to an organic

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perception, can be put in the service of the project of a nation built from the top down. Creating a Different National Image: Muratori’s New Rhetoric of the Fatherland Muratori soon abandoned the polemic over the genius of language and occasionally returned to the French-Italian controversy when solicited by friends and colleagues, for instance when Orsi asked him to intervene against Bouhours and the Jesuit fathers from Trévoux in defence of Lucan (1706).61 In his later scattered responses one can easily notice that Muratori’s understanding of diversity became somewhat more nuanced; he admitted, for instance, that when evaluating works of art, it was wrong to express a moral judgment based on the values of the interpreter rather than the norms of the artist’s time and culture. Yet he separated moral judgment from aesthetic evaluation, which he still considered to be founded on a universal paradigm of buon gusto.62 Muratori’s perception of Italy’s intellectual life and literary production became increasingly negative, as revealed in particular by his correspondence. He never tired of denouncing Italian backwardness – a topos that has haunted Italy’s image ever since. Although he firmly rejected Bouhours’s politicization of the language issue, he accepted this challenge and took it into the field of historiography. He was determined to appropriate the national image by reinterpreting the Italian Middle Ages, an era of the Italian past that had been misconstrued as the beginning of the end but was in fact the birth of the modern nation.63 He began to doubt whether one could build a nation exclusively on the shoulders of writers, and worked for the rest of his life to understand Italy’s past better and to help build an identity for modern Italy that would set it apart from an exclusively Latin legacy. Italy’s self-image needed desperately to be freed from a narrative that presented its history as the continuation of the decadence of the Roman Empire; in his attempt to accomplish just that, Muratori began to articulate a new rhetoric of the fatherland. The model for his project on Italian antiquities was, again, French scholarship, with its traditional study of Gallic society going back to Petrus Ramus’s Liber de moribus veterum Gallorum (1559) and, as we saw in chapter 1, massively developed by Pasquier, whose study had allowed French historians to assert the originality and uniqueness of their own nation among the other neo-Latin cultures. Methodologically, the School of Saint-Maur led the way with

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the much-admired studies of Jean Mabillon and Bernard Montfaucon.64 Following their example, Muratori devoted an impressive amount of energy to collecting charters and chronicles from the Italian Middle Ages, a period that was still considered barbaric and had been badly neglected by previous historians. He began to view it not as a time that obscured the noble, classical heritage of Italy but as an era that could disclose the truth about modern Italian identity. The vast collection of Rerum Italicarum Scriptores (1723–38), the six-volume history Antiquitates italicae medii aevi (1738–42) – which Muratori abridged and translated into Italian – and the Annali d’Italia (1744–9) testify to the strength of his conviction. In Italy it was a dramatic change of paradigm, and yet Muratori was actually joining in the frantic search for origins – or, as Hobsbawm would put it, the ‘invention of tradition’65 – which had already began, however, in the second half of the seventeenth century, as vividly described by Paul Hazard: ‘Every country wanted to prove that it had a longer pedigree than any of its rivals, and delved back as far as it could into the past to see what titles to nobility it could unearth. Each boasted that it had a language, a poetry, a prose tradition, a civilization older than any of the rest, and each haughtily declared that its neighbors were nothing but pretentious upstarts.’66 The competition for noble origins was nothing new. Princes and kings had always searched for ancient and noble forefathers, but with the advent of the experimental method and the emphasis on observable truth they were no longer content with the mythological constructions of epic poets that linked them to ancient Greek or Roman heroes. The tales of their noble stock had to be grounded on historical documents and preserved in official archives. Muratori had already been part of these efforts, as he had been called to Modena by the duke of Este to give order to his library, reorganize the archive, and research the beginning of the house of Este. His work resulted in two volumes of Antichità estensi (vol. 1, 1717; vol. 2, 1740), originally commissioned by the duke to legitimate the Estes’ rights to the territories of Comacchio and Ferrara against the claims of the Papal States. Now, however, in several European countries the search for origins started to concern not only single noble lineages but whole ethnic groups; it was intended to assert the prestige of autochthonous customs and institutions developed independently from ancient empires and to construct a story about the past that would legitimate a present vision of the polity’s future. Indeed, with his Rerum Italicarum, Muratori was no longer working in the service of a prince but, as he writes in a quite emotional tone, ‘to secure

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for Italy, my mother, with all the strengths I dispose of, a useful and decorous service’ (‘nulli parcere labori, quo Italiae parenti meae commodum hoc, et decus, quibus possem viribus pararem,’ Op, vol. 1, 486). Two decades after the failure of his proposal for an Italian republic of letters, he was able to create his small ‘republic’ of scholars from many regions of Italy, who helped him assemble the collection Rerum Italicarum Scriptores. The correspondents exchanged approximately twenty thousand letters, and the result of this extraordinary mobilization was a fundamental collection of two thousand documents of different kinds (chronicles, poems, statutes, memoirs, and certifications) that chronicled the history of Italy in the Middle Ages, from the sixth to the fourteenth century.67 Muratori’s general preface to the Rerum Italicarum, published in 1723, laments Italy’s tardiness in taking part in historical and archival research. It names, from the beginning, all the famous scholars from France, Germany, England, Holland, and Bohemia who had engaged in such research, often covering even Italian history (Muratori himself corresponded with many of them, including Leibniz). Muratori condemns the mental indolence of the Italian literati who continued to endorse commonplaces about the Italian Middle Ages without really knowing it: ... preoccupanda est haec nonnullorum malesana opinio, quae fortasse eruditionis progressum apud Italos hactenus non modicum remorata esse videtur. Sunt enim, quibus ii [sic] tantum scriptores in admiratione ac pretio habentur, qui dum res graeca et romana stetit, floruere. Nulla proinde alia eruditio eos delectat, quam quae veterum Graecorum, Romanorumque facta, mores, ac opera exhibet. Subsequuta vero secula, ex quo nempe romanum delinavit imperium, eorum oculis nisi barbariem, horrorem, ac vitia sive in literis, sive in moribus spirant. Hinc in historiam, scriptoresque inferioris aevi praeceps contemtus, ne dicam nausea, et aversus animus ad attingendam … Et ne quid dissimulem, olim et ego adolescens in ea eram sententia, quam tamen subinde exui, atque ab ea recessurum puto, quicumque rem serio et acie mentis adhibita secum tacite versaverit. (Op, vol. 1, 490) [Now, it is necessary to prevent an unfounded opinion, which has considerably delayed until now the progress of culture in Italy. People regard as admirable and worthy only the writers of flourishing Greece and Rome. No other study, therefore, pleases them except for that of the facts, cus-

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Such a passage calls for several observations. That Muratori writes his appeal opposing the excessive concentration on classical studies in Latin, of all languages, is a significant sign of the continuing ambivalence and difficulties experienced by Italian literati when attempting to define Italian cultural identity. In the same preface, for instance, Muratori writes that the Italian documents of the collection did not need to be translated because ‘our language is widely spread also abroad’ (‘quum nostra haec lingua in exteris quoque regionibus late floreat,’ Op, vol. 1, 523). However, since he uses Latin for the preface, he must have still been convinced that he would be able to address a larger, less provincial audience by doing so, or perhaps he was still caught in the prejudice that a major scholarly enterprise had to be presented in Latin. It is interesting that he expresses his opinion in the form of a personal conversion (a similar confession returns in his autobiographical letter to Giovanni Artico di Porcìa).68 Indeed, Muratori suggests that a strong identification with classical culture was an imminent and persistent danger to Italian intellectuals because it prevented them from developing a modern and autonomous identity. When he accuses Italian men of letters of having missed the opportunity to explore their own history and of having left it to foreign scholars, he repeatedly evokes the image of a guilty sleep (‘even foreign scholars, while we were sleeping, as a matter of fact snoring, … put much effort into collecting our riches,’ Op, vol. 1, 492; ‘Only Italy, then, shall eternally sleep, a prey to inertia?’ Op, vol. 1, 516).69 As he prompts them to wake up to a new awareness of the nation’s past, he does not shy away from appealing to the emotions in order to prepare the ground for his own scandalous thesis about the true origin of the Italian nation. He resorts to the figure of the nation as the unfortunate and humiliated mother, neglected by her sons: Nam aut nimium superbientis, aut delicati, dicam etiam ingrati animi est, Italiam tantummodo victricem ac triumphantem velle nosse, victam vero atque ab exteris nationibus subactam aversari. Eadem est utroque rerum

Bouhours’s Genius of the Nation and Muratori’s Republic of Letters 93 statu mater nostra, atque illius non minus felicem, quam adversam fortunam cognoscere ad filios potissimum specta. (Op, vol. 1, 490) [It is the sign of a much too proud, fastidious, or better still, ungrateful soul wanting to know only about the victorious and triumphant Italy and to turn away from her when she is defeated and subdued by foreign nations. She is still our mother, in the one and in the other condition, and it is the particular duty of her sons to know both her good and her bad fortune.]

Only after evoking a few times the image of the mother and appealing to her sons’ compassion does Muratori suggest that Italians might have bastard origins and ‘barbaric blood’ in their veins. Studying the barbaric Middle Ages suddenly means discovering part of their heritage: Eoque magis, quod ex iis ipsis gentibus, quarum fatiscente romano imperio Italia dominationem sensit, et quas barbaras appellare consuevimus, ut verisimilis coniectura fert, plerique origine trahimus. (Op, vol. 1, 490) [All the more so, as we probably originate in large part precisely from those populations who came to dominate Italy during the decay of the Roman Empire and whom we usually call barbarians.]

Muratori carefully introduces the acknowledgment of the barbarous, or non-Latin, origin of the nation within a rhetorical frame based on the motifs of the humiliated mother and on the narrative of nations awakening from a long sleep, two images that become the matrix of the nineteenth-century Risorgimento mythology.70 The nation is personified and given a single and unitary past, an experience of humiliation, and one and the same relation to all of her sons. Of course, Muratori was simply urging Italian intellectuals to study Italy’s history, not to liberate the country from foreign occupation, as the Risorgimento intellectuals advocated. Yet the retrieval of images of Italy as the humiliated mother both created continuity with the literary tradition (for example, Petrarca’s canzone ‘Italia mia,’ quoted also in Machiavelli’s famous patriotic ending of Il Principe)71 and allowed later intellectuals to employ these images as a means of mobilizing the emotions of much larger groups by recontextualizing them. The image of a sleeping national consciousness that has to be awakened constitutes the foundation of the essentialist version of national-

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ism, which assumes the existence of a nation and a national character as something that has always been there and simply needs to be retrieved. Later, such an image was no longer perceived as a mere figure of speech and gave birth to the idea of the nation as a perennial element intrinsic to the folk and needing to be articulated, or brought to the level of consciousness, by patriotic intellectuals.72 Taken in isolation, Muratori’s passages could belong to a Risorgimento text, and their sentimental rhetoric gives the reader quite a jolt within the general enlightened tone of the preface, which promises to offer ‘a clear and well-ordered exposition of the facts as well as the love for truth.’ This should prompt us to reconsider any automatic assumption that enlightened universalistic ideals and nationalistic feelings exclude each other.73 On the contrary, they might be two sides of the same coin. It is important to bear in mind, however, that by referring to the barbaric component and even emphasizing its different elements (Longobard, Visigothic, Ostrogothic), Muratori breaks the monolithic cultural identification of the Italians with the ancient Romans. He even consolidated his collective narrative of a partly Germanic modern Italy in his own dissertations Antiquitates italicae medii aevi, which he began in the early 1720s, published in six volumes between 1738 and 1742, and kept summarizing and translating into Italian until his death. The Antiquitates, describing the history of the governments, laws, rites, customs, arts, commerce, and language of the Italian population during the Middle Ages, mark the transition from Muratori’s concern with erudite history to his anthropological and ethnic interests (curiously signalled by the recurrence, in his late writings, of the term etnici for ‘uncivilized populations’). I consider the dissertations 32 and 33 on the Italian language, which respectively describe the origins of Romance language from the Latin spoken by the volgo (32) and search for the etymology of Italian words in ‘Germanic’ languages (33), emphasizing the ‘barbarous’ components of Italian culture. Both dissertations are pioneering studies that shatter the traditional literary framework of the questione della lingua and apply sociological as well as philological criteria to language issues.74 In dissertation 32, Muratori returns to the questions presented in Della perfetta poesia (book III, chapter 8,) and yet explicitly rejects the idea that languages are homogeneous and uniformly used even within the same epoch. He traces the different stages of Latin by analysing numerous inscriptions and documents, drawing attention to vernacular elements, which in his opinion constitute the origin of the Italian vernacular. ‘One

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does not have to wait for the arrival of Goths and Longobards in Italy to find the signs of corruption in the Latin language’ (‘non s’ha da aspettare l’arrivo de’ Goti e Longobardi in italia, per trovare già introdotta la corruzione del linguaggio latino,’ Op, vol. 1, 631), he writes, referring to the copious evidence of deviations from classical Latin assembled by foreign scholars and in his own collection of inscriptions, Tesoro nuovo delle vecchie iscrizioni. He thus refutes the theory (represented by, among others, Girolamo Castelvetro) that all ills started with the Gothic and Longobardic dominations. Analysing the numerous legal documents from the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, he maintains that the late Latin in which they were written was different from the language spoken by the population, which was probably much closer to vulgar Italian. For Muratori, it was the use of the volgo that brought ‘a colour of barbarism’ (‘un colore di barbarie,’ Op, vol. 1, 633) into the Latin language and that continued to bring change to vernacular languages: ‘It is characteristic of living languages to be divided into several dialects; and there is no kingdom or province in which, although everyone understands the common language, all of the population speaks it in the same manner and with uniformity.’75 The division into dialects, he adds, is characteristic not only of Italian but also of linguistic practices in France, Germany, Spain, and Great Britain. Muratori insists on the internal heterogeneity of national tongues and firmly rejects the myth of a universally spoken, uniform idiom identical with the literary language, with the people’s speech, and coinciding with the territory of the nation – the myth endorsed by Bouhours and by linguistic nationalists. Bouhours did not deny historical change from the early primitive French to the clear and refined modern idiom, and yet he construed a permanent character of French (identified with its naturalness) present in each stage of its development as well as in the speech of people from different classes and regions. Instead, Muratori is not willing to gloss over synchronic differences and, in dissertation 33 on etymologies, puts forth the understanding of the national language as a ‘copious storehouse’ (‘dovizioso magazzino,’ Op, vol. 1, 641) in which local idioms, popular speech, and high literary language, though assembled together, are not available to each speaker in the same way. Muratori alludes again, after so many years, to Bouhours’s statements on the quantity and variety of the words and phrases at a native speaker’s disposal (‘Convien anche andar cauto in sentenziare che una lingua di qualche nazione abbondi più delle altre nella quantità e varietà di voci,’ Op, vol. 1, 640), but he adds that to assert that a par-

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ticular nation possesses a rich variety of locutions does not mean that those locutions really belong to each speaker of the nation. Emphasizing the municipal aspect of Italian, Muratori argues that the people (‘il popolo’) of each city attend to a particular use of the language and have their own reservoir of idioms and sayings, while men of letters who know foreign languages create new expressions and disseminate them through their writings. It was a mistake, he insists, to concentrate on the literary idiom and derive the Italian vocabulary exclusively from Latin, Greek, and Provençal. Clearly, Muratori has come a long way from his early understanding of national languages and even confesses his earlier mistake, made under the influence of Égide Menage, the famous scholar of the Italian language. The few Provençal locutions that entered Italy, Muratori claims, were used only by writers and never adopted by the people. The Arabic and Germanic languages, instead, were the key to reconstructing the etymology of the everyday Italian lexicon: Forse a qualche minore ingegno parrà disonore il riconoscere da’ barbari l’accrescimento di questa lingua, siccome altri ancora si vergognano di trarre dai popoli boreali i princìpi della lor nazione, quasiché sia solamente onorevole il discendere da Troiani, Greci e Romani, il che è una vecchia pazzia. (Op, vol. 1, 637) [Perhaps to some mediocre minds it will seem a dishonour to recognize that our language was increased by the barbarians, in the same way that others are still ashamed about tracing the origin of their nation to the boreal populations, as if the only honourable ancestors were the Trojans, the Greeks, and the Romans, which is an old folly.]

Here Muratori is criticizing his colleague Scipione Maffei, the founder of Il Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia, whose history of the city of Verona had downplayed the presence of the Germanic populations in Italy that in fact had left more northern ancestral traces in Italian families than Maffei wanted his readers to believe.76 At the same time Muratori is clearly attempting to isolate Italian from French even further, thus rendering the frequent and intermittent French occupations of northern Italy less acceptable. He also parted ways with Giusto Fontanini’s theory of the common lingua romana spoken in all non-Germanic territories of the empire. Here Muratori’s representation of the Italian vernacular accentuates the influence of Germanic and Arabic languages as the origin of its individual and unique character, or its genius.

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The general tone of Muratori’s dissertations on the Italian language reveals how problematic it still was to undo the myth of classical ancestors and Latin purity in Italy. Yet by asserting his determination to fight both the old and the new myths of national uniformity and to ‘search,’ as he puts it, ‘not for what we like, but for what is true’ (‘di trovare non quel che piace, ma quel che è vero,’ Op, vol. 1, 639), Muratori clears the field for the rewriting of Italian collective history according to his own values. It is striking that, as in Della perfetta poesia, his later narrative is characterized by the sharp division between the people and the men of letters. This time, however, the people are the bearers of local particularity, ‘barbarism,’ and vitality while the literati operate as the legitimate guardians of the supralocal high culture. Muratori’s activity as historiographer (and probably Bouhours’s lesson too) led him to redefine Italian identity as shaped not exclusively by the canonical literary tradition but also by an experience of Italy’s past that was shared by different groups and classes. I believe that Muratori’s later writings on Italian antiquities are of great interest to scholars of nationalism for several reasons. First, they document the beginning of the shift from the language of patriotism to the language of nationalism. Muratori, for instance, uses the term patria in Latin as well as in Italian (in the preface to the Antichità italiane) to refer to the entire Italian nation, actually anticipating what is usually considered the first attested use (Gian Rinaldo Carli, 1765). Patria, as is well known, was commonly used only to designate one’s specific birthplace, a village, or a city. Then, ‘in the modern era,’ according to the UTET historical dictionary of the Italian language, the term was ‘linked to the concept of nation (understood as a moral persona, a protagonist of history) as it developed at the end of the eighteenth century.’77 Muratori does not appear at all in the UTET entry, and yet he not only employs the word in its modern connotation (‘the personified nation’) but also applies it to the entire territory of Italy, including Sicily (‘Italiae quippe partem Siciliam esse satis exploratum est,’ Op, vol. 1, 517) – not an obvious inclusion in his times.78 Moreover, Muratori’s antiquarian studies question the boundaries between the notions of national character and national identity, as well as the opposition between ethnic and national identity recently set up by scholars of nationalism.79 Perry Anderson distinguishes between the discourse of national character, in which character is thought to be a settled, innate disposition, and the idea of national identity, which always involves some self-awareness or the reflexive dimension of a self-conscious projection. Within such a distinction, memory becomes

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crucial to identity, not to character.80 However, in Muratori’s account of the Italian past, the discourse of an existing link analogous to consanguinity – to be acknowledged and mobilized for the good of the nation – as well as the idea of identity as grounded in memories deliberately chosen are not at all incompatible. The reflexive dimension of Italianness (or, as Connor would put it, the awareness of the subjective nature of national consciousness) that enabled Muratori to recognize the ethnic heterogeneity of Italy, and even to document it in his antiquarian studies, coexists with his emotional appeal to a common ancestry and is not at odds with it (as Connor assumes).81 Muratori was able to look at national identity both as an outsider and as an inside observer. His perspective as an outsider lent him enough distance to undo the mechanisms of nationalist ideology, to understand its roots in fear and resentment, and to recognize as analogical constructs the images that expressed those feelings. But with his courageous perception as an insider, he decided not to ignore the heterogeneity of Italian identity. Bouhours, by blurring the distinction between the standardized literary language and the spontaneous speech, was able to interpret features of written idioms as expressions of national dispositions and to provide (on such an unstable ground) a justification of the monolingual nation. He successfully established the monolingual nation as a compelling paradigm of inclusion, a model that would serve France well even in her revolutionary future. Muratori’s late studies of the Italian language put forth a polygenic nation and envisioned a more complex but also more truthful model of inclusiveness, which regrettably found scarce appeal among his fellow ‘guardians of the nation.’ Collecting medieval documents that had been neglected due to the Italian obsession with a Latin heritage, Muratori acquired the acute awareness that any construction of identity is a highly provisional and shaky affair. In spite of his efforts to tell a different story, nineteenth-century patriots decided to simplify the ancient tale of the violated mother tongue and to restore her honour by banishing her mixed children instead of welcoming them as good citizens. Only a few champions of what I would call linguistic republicanism – among them Cesarotti and Leopardi (chapters 4 and 5) – will plead for the naturalization of bastard idioms.

3 Giambattista Vico, the Vernacular, and the Foundations of Modern Italy

Si eius disputationis, summis dignae philosophis, illa pars vera est: linguis ingenia, non linguas ingeniis formari. (If there is any truth in this statement, which is the theme of a famous debate, ‘genius is a product of language, not language of genius.’) Giambattista Vico, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione1

Giambattista Vico did not intervene directly in the heated exchanges between Italian and French writers over the genius of language, and he probably knew the actual texts of the controversy only through the summaries that appeared in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia – a journal in which he repeatedly defended his own De antiquissima italorum sapientia against the sharp attacks of his reviewer (1711–12, probably Bernardino Trevisano).2 Even so, Vico did not fail to mention the all-too-current debate on language and national character that was stirring the Italian and French intellectual communities, in his inaugural oration entitled De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (DR) for the academic year 1708 at the University of Naples, with the Spanish viceroy in attendance. In contrast to Muratori, Vico was not so much interested here in debunking Bouhours’s effective strategies that conflated written idiom with spontaneous speech and linked rhetorical features and national dispositions. Rather he was keen on addressing the power of the language in which students were educated and their minds and world view shaped. This mention in his 1708 oration is only one instance among many of Vico’s explicit allusions to the French-Italian controversy, which I analyse in the first section of this chapter. Indeed, in his writings Vico often returned to the topoi of the French-Italian controversy, and in his

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Principi di scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni (Scienza nuova) in particular he placed them in a broader philosophical frame. In this chapter I read Vico’s writings with two primary aims in mind. First of all, I want to define Vico’s specific contribution to the debate on genius, which helps us, I believe, to understand better his uncertainty concerning the role of the ingenium in the development of language. His frequent allusions to the famous debate document the vagueness and the semantic drifts that characterized the terms of the polemic at its beginning, and in particular the notions of genius, ingenium, and esprit; these were ambiguities that could be exploited, as we shall see, for different political or religious agendas. These allusions show that by 1731 Vico was able to reappropriate in a creative and original way the crucial notions of the debate, to integrate them in his philosophical system, and to use them to support his own values. Seeing more than a mere competition between French and Italian culture or an attempt at the preservation of classical models, Vico believed that the debate was to decide the very future of the humanities and, more specifically, their potential as the ideological glue of societies.3 My second goal is to understand the relations between the models of the nation implicit in Vico’s representations of language and the later interpretations of his nineteenth-century nationalist followers. Therefore, I read Vico’s Scienza nuova in its oblique relationship to the FrenchItalian debate and its various issues by analysing his explanation of language diversity, his narrative of the origin and character of national vernaculars, and his parallel drawn between Homer and Dante as founders simultaneously of languages and nations. I argue that Vico’s treatment of such issues not only responded ‘di fianco’ (tangentially)4 – as he stated in 1731 – to the fashionable controversy but also provided crucial arguments that merged aesthetics and politics and were able to legitimize language as the foundation of the nation. Languages and Ingenia, or ‘Is There Any Truth to the Theme of That Famous Debate?’ When addressing the relationship between language and ingenium within the pedagogical and polemical context of the orations, Vico unequivocally reverses Bouhours’s interpretation of the French national genius. Bouhours presented the national character as the element shaping the génie of the language and guaranteeing the universality of modern French. Vico, instead, argued that different languages mould

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ingenia differently, bestowing upon them various degrees of creative power.5 Bouhours’s and Vico’s individual choices of words are particularly revealing. Bouhours’s génie, which was a recent Latinism in the French of his time, carried into French the metaphysical connotations of the Latin word genius, referring to a divine innate force.6 Vico, who responded to the arguments of the debate primarily in Latin texts, preferred instead the term ingenium. Originating in Matteo Pellegrini’s and Emanuele Tesauro’s traditional studies, Vico’s understanding of ingenium, as is well known, is particularly loaded.7 Although susceptible to different interpretations, it is considerably stable in one respect. For Vico, ingenium remains, from De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709) through De antiquissima italorum sapientia (1710) and until the last edition of Scienza nuova (1744), the proper faculty of knowledge. It is the ability to connect disparate phenomena by finding a medium term, that is, a linking sign (visual or aural) that is apt to materialize and stabilize the discovered connection between those dissimilar phenomena and thus ultimately create new knowledge. In De antiquissima italorum sapientia (DA), ingenium is regarded as the mental faculty that produces true knowledge of human things by combining real elements. It governs human inventions such as geometry and arithmetic – as the Italian name shows, ‘those who excel in applying their ingenium to these disciplines we Italians call ingegneri’ (‘et qui in earum usu excellent, ingegneri Italis appellantur their application’).8 Here, however, ingenium is still distinguished from the faculty of memory-imagination, which mixes memorized images in a false way, producing, for example, hyppogryphs and centaurs (DA, 97). Instead, in the Scienza nuova of 1744, ingegno is explicitly described as one and the same faculty as memory and imagination; with them, it constitutes the founding triad of invention.9 As we shall see, this understanding crucially altered Vico’s view of language in its interaction with body and mind. Given the weight of ingegno in Vico’s entire philosophical system, it is striking that within the framework of his few specific responses to the genius controversy, he uses the term ingenium in its narrow classical meaning of ‘talent,’ sharply distinguishing it from the term genius, of ‘sacred nature’ – the notion mystifyingly employed by Bouhours. This is apparent in the following passage of Vico’s late oration De mente heroica (1732): ‘Quoquoversus ingenia circumagite, abditas et abstrusas vestras facultates scrutaminor, ut vestrum ignotum forsan splendidioris naturae genium agnoscatis.’10 (Whatever path your inclinations will lead you, keep searching within yourself for your hidden and mys-

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terious faculties so that you might discover your secret genius, which is of an even more luminous nature.) Here Vico addresses university students and encourages them to search for their hidden genius (‘ignotum genium’), which is clearly defined for its splendid and impenetrable nature and considered superior to whatever individual inclination (‘ingenia’) students might possess. His distinction draws upon the humanistic tradition that opposed genius as an innate power of divine origin (the daemon originating in the religious semantic field) to the ingenium examined for instance by Huarte, which was a quality that could be nourished and enhanced through education and diligence.11 Vico’s emphasis on the classical meaning of ingenium (talent) in his response to the French-Italian debate suggests his will to steer away from the innatism evoked by Bouhours through the use of the neo-Latin génie. This apparently neat opposition between ingenium and genie is complicated by the irregular interference of Vico’s philosophical understanding of ingenium as the cognitive power able to connect dissimilar phenomena. Such an understanding emerges, for instance, in one of his few explicit allusions to the French-Italian debate, the well-known passage from the oration De nostri temporis studiorum ratione that addresses the drawbacks of the ‘new [French] analytical method’ or Descartes’ deductive logic, in relation to the advantages of eloquence in educational curricula. Here Vico presents the French language as intrinsically ‘dull’ and ‘stilted’ in its form, and as ‘tenuous and thin’ in its sound. With its richness in abstract words, its lack of metaphors, and the shortness of its sentences, French appears to him splendidly suited to analytical thought but at the same time unable to rise to any great sublimity or splendour (‘omnis sublimis ornatique dicendi characteris impos,’ DR, 140). Reversing Bouhours’s causal explanation, which attributed the qualities of languages to national characters, Vico then explicitly ascribes the ability to invent the analytical method to the intrinsic characteristics of the French language. Quare, si eius disputationis, summis dignae philosophis, illa pars vera est: linguis ingenia, non lingua ingeniis formari, hanc novam criticam, quae tota spiritalis videtur, et analysim …, uni in orbe terrarum Galli vi suae subtilissimae linguae excogitare potuerunt … Nos vero lingua praediti, quae imagines semper excitat; unde uni Itali pictura, sculptura, architectura, musica omnibus orbis terrarum nationibus praestiterunt, quae, actuosa semper, auditorum mentes in res longe dissitas et remotas vi similitudinum transfert. (DR, 140)

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[Consequently, if there is any truth in this statement, which is the theme of a famous debate, ‘genius is a product of language, not language of genius,’ we must recognize that the French are the only people who, thanks to the subtlety of their language, were able to invent the new philosophical criticism that seems so thoroughly intellectualistic, and analytical geometry … We Italians, instead, are endowed with a language that constantly evokes images. We stand far above other nations through our achievements in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. Our language, thanks to its perpetual dynamism, forces the attention of the listeners by means of metaphorical expressions, and prompts it to move back and forth between ideas that are far apart.] (DR, 40–1)

For Vico, it is the character of a language that shapes and governs the ingenia, or the talents of the people speaking it (for example, the French people’s talent for analytical thinking and the Italians’ talent for arts), and not the other way around. Since the French language is ‘overly subtle’ (‘subtilissima’) and thus more apt to articulate an analytical rather than a synthetic and ‘acute’ thought process, only the French (‘uni in orbe terrarum’) could have produced the abstract analytical method. Vico even explains his qualifications of French and Italian in visual terms by drawing a parallel with geometric forms: Neque enim tenue idem est atque acutum: tenue enim una linea, acutum duabus constat. In acutis autem dictis principem obtinet locum metaphora, quae est omnis ornatae orationis maxime insigne decus et luculentissimum ornamentum. (DR, 116) [It should be emphasized that tenuity, subtlety, delicacy of thought is not identical with acuity of ideas. That which is tenuous, delicately refined, may be represented by a single line; acute by two. Metaphor, the greatest and brightest ornament of forceful, distinguished speech, undoubtedly plays the first role in acute, figurative expressions.] (DR, 24)

Vico illustrates the term subtle (‘tenue’) with the image of a continuous line that guides the mind in a step-by-step linear thought process, but associates the term acute with two merging lines that create an entire space and, consequently, denser semantic webs. By doing so, Vico contrasts causal logic, which in his representation proceeds from one cause to another in a thin thread, with the thick ‘ingenious’ understanding that results from the convergence of disparate perspectives, and is able

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to grasp the particular object both in its universal and in its contingent aspects. Here Vico uses terms that emphasize the ornamental aspect of figurative acute language, yet in Scienza nuova (as we shall see) figures of speech become distinctly cognitive instruments as well the only powerful means of building consensus. Vico’s argument about subtle and acute languages and ingenia would remain completely obscure without the reference to the specific cognitive operations of ingenium. Indeed, when characterizing Spanish and Italian as acute languages that constantly evoke images (‘quae imagines semper excitat,’ DR, 140) and therefore nurture the ingenium, Vico draws upon his view of ingenium as the mind’s specific ability to link disconnected elements in an instant synthesis that creates new knowledge. For Vico, this is a faculty unknown to the French people, who instead excel only in subtle reasoning. Revealing a more detailed knowledge of the French-Italian debate than one would expect, Vico comments that the very fact that French writers tend to translate the term ingenium with esprit (denoting that very different faculty that produces abstract analyses and is proper to subtle minds) shows little understanding and consideration for the true power of ingenium (‘Et quum hanc mentis virtutem distracta celeriter, apte et feliciter uniendi, quae nobis “ingenium” dicitur, appellare volunt, “spiritum” dicunt, et mentis vim quae compositione existit, re simplicissima notant,’ DR, 140). By stating that a French speaker can develop synthetic and imaginative abilities only with difficulty, Vico suggests that the individual mind is determined by its linguistic environment. For this reason his brief allusions to the language debate in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione have often been viewed as a remarkable anticipation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, or the idea that different languages shape their speakers’ perception of the world and their minds’ operations in different ways.12 It is a suggestive interpretation, yet I cannot share the view usually accompanying it, according to which Vico articulates a neutral, purely philosophical acknowledgment of cultural diversity and thus ‘passes over [scavalca] Bouhours’s nationalistic arguments.’13 In my view, the context of the passage in question reveals that Vico’s stance in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione mirrors rather than prevails over Bouhours’s ideological approach. Indeed, not differing from Bouhours’s iconizing logic, Vico lists some negative features of contemporary written French and assigns them to the French language per se, closely recalling the selective strategy of Bouhours’s attacks and, in

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particular, his manipulative confusion of the features of contemporary written idioms with the langue, or the language system. Like Bouhours, Vico links languages and collective minds in a quasi-deterministic way when he concludes that because of their language characteristics French minds too tend to be stilted and tenuous. Although he reverses the causal order, his arguments share with Bouhours’s representations of languages a tendency to treat the language and the people as homogeneous and isomorphic objects, one acting on the other. They both apply, consciously or not, the logic of iconization to their analysis of languages and reify historical traits of languages and nations. When, for instance, Vico declares that the character of the Italian language makes Italians the keenest nation, second only to Spaniards (‘unde Itali post Hispanos acutissimi nationum,’ DR, 140), he differs from Bouhours only because he emphasizes the primacy of the character of the language over that of the people. Yet both writers reify their concepts and produce linguistic icons of nations. Vico’s emphasis on the primacy of language is strengthened in his juridical work, Opere giuridiche (OG), particularly in its second volume De constantia iurisprudentis (1721), in which the power of the ingenium is again explained by the force of the individual language (‘Ingeniorum solertia principio linguis debetur’).14 Yet Vico’s interest has already shifted away from the impact of language on the individual’s psychological development – the core issue of De nostri temporis studiorum ratione– to the search for recurring and universal principles in the development of collectives. Thus, in De constantia iurisprudentis Vico produces a historical typology of institutions and languages that spans across ethnic and geographic boundaries and characterizes, for instance, all ‘primitive’ peoples as ingeniosi, regardless of their physical and material differences.15 If there ever existed natural differences in ingenium, he argues, they are to be attributed to climate and geography (‘Ingenium faciunt caeli temperies,’ OG, 453). The determinist perspective that characterizes the link between language and ingenia in the passage from De nostri temporis studiorum ratione discussed above is transferred to the relations between language and natural environment in De constantia iurisprudentis. In a somewhat rudimental version of Huarte’s Epicurean approach to human diversity, a humid and frigid climate bestows an obtuse ingenium, while a warm and thin air produces an acute one (OG, 453). In De constantia iurisprudentis, more than in Vico’s previous works, ingenium is rooted in a body that is heavily affected by its natural environment, by its impact on the senses and

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imagination.16 Stimulated by its surroundings, the ingenium invents human institutions such as languages and laws, but it is up to reason to accomplish and perfect them (‘Ingenii virtus est invenire, ut est rationis perficere,’ OG, 453). Vico accentuates the primacy of the language system when he summarizes in De constantia iurisprudentis one of the most widely discussed issues of his times, that is, whether languages per se confer force to the writers’ style or whether it happens the other way around. His answer, which retrieves Varchi’s position from the Ercolano, is straightforward: ‘While languages provide writers with the expressive power of sentences, writers confer to languages the refinement, variety, and ornament of locutions.’ (‘Quod linguae scriptoribus dant sententiarum vim, scriptores linguis locutionis cultum, copiam, ornamentum,’ OG, 463.) The force or weakness of writers’ sentences is determined by the specific nature of their languages; only the ornamental aspects are fully in the power of writers. In this corollary, which sharply brings to mind Condillac’s later statements on writers’ agency in his Essais sur l’origine des connoissances humaines (1746, which I discuss in chapter 4), individual linguistic agency applies to refinement rather than creativity, and individual speakers appear limited in their expressive possibilities by the characteristics of their languages. Grounded on a reifying understanding of language, this perception feeds the myth of an inescapable, impervious genius of language. One among the few later references to the ‘theme of the famous debate,’ as Vico puts it (DR, 140),17 the renowned letter to Francesco Saverio Estevan (12 January 1729), a brilliant document encapsulating all of his mature ideas, appropriates Bouhours’s topos to criticize the Cartesian resistance to classical languages: Così egli è adivenuto che si condanna lo studio della lingua greca e latina …; e pure sì fatto studio ci può unicamente informare della maniera di pensare saggia e grande de’ romani ed esatta e dilicata de’ greci …, perché le lingue sono, per dir così, il veicolo onde si stransfonde in chi le appara lo spirito delle nazioni. (Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, vol. 1, 334) [And so it has come to pass that the study of Greek and Latin is condemned …; and yet only such studies can inform us of the great and wise manner of the thinking of the Romans, and the precise and refined manner of the thinking of the Greeks …; because languages are, so to speak, the medium by which the spirit of the nations is transfused in those who learn them.]

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Like Bouhours, Vico here claims that the spirit of a nation is incarnate in its language. Yet Bouhours used his theory of the French innate national genius to endorse the superiority of reason as embodied in the French contemporary language and to claim French as the new universal language. Vico instead acknowledges here that languages shape and pass on different modes of thinking only in order to restore the status of Greek and Latin, which had been vitally weakened by the prevailing idea that clear reasoning and true knowledge remained such, even when expressed (as Descartes put it, in an anti-elitist attitude) in low Breton.18 In contrast to De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, Vico’s letter to Estevan develops Bouhours’s premises without entering into competition with them because, within this new context, the fate of ancient languages – the common goods of an international scholarly community – is at stake. Like Bouhours, Vico also speaks of the spirit of a nation, but, in contrast to the French Jesuit, he understands it here as a way of seeing that is developed through high-culture idioms and is embodied in literature, not in a fictional language of the people. In Vico’s letter, the spirit of the nation is not Bouhours’s inescapable, naturally given matrix that informs languages nor the product of language that shapes the collective mind of an entire population (as Vico suggested in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione). It is instead the work in progress of education developed through the exercise of language. Even when Vico links differences in languages to national spirits, he is very far from Bouhours’s doctrine of an immanent genius of the people (for example, the eternal, collective naivety of the French) that determines the genius of the language. Only within the theoretical context of Scienza nuova, as we shall see, was Vico able to develop a comprehensive anthropological explanation for the rhetorical theories that both he and his Italian colleagues had invoked until then to defend the value of ingenium and its tropes against Bouhours’s attacks. Vico himself draws attention to the fundamental shifts that led to his new anthropological perspective and inevitably affected his take on the genius debate. One essential change emerges in his defence of the first edition of his Scienza nuova against the criticism advanced by Johann Burckhard Mencke in the prestigious Acta Eruditorum Lipsiensia.19 In this defence (Vici vindiciae, 1729) ingenium is no longer sharply distinguished from reason and its truth as in De antiquissima italorum sapientia, but constitutes their necessary foundation.

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Nec quae de synthetica dicimus, analytica methodus quicquam obturbat, quae ex quadam divina ingenii occulta vi nata est, qua ipsi algebristae divinari sibi videntur, quum suis rationibus recte subductis vera demonstrant.20 [The analytic method in no sense upsets what we are saying about synthetic geometry, for it stems from a godlike, hidden power of ingenuity (ingenii) that makes students of algebra feel as if they were divining when they arrive at demonstration of truth by means of a well-conducted rational process.]21

Reason and ingenium now belong together as properly human faculties, in contrast with the ‘erring ridiculing’ (closer to a wandering bestial condition) that was displayed by his reviewer, the ‘vagabond’ (‘erron’) and ‘mocker’ (‘derisor’) Mencke.22 In this way, ingenium becomes the proper faculty of knowing. Instead of merely reversing the arguments of the debate Vico, in the Vindiciae, begins to reappropriate vital notions such as reason for his own representation of ingenium and to reorganize entire semantic fields. For instance, he gives the phrase genius of language a negative meaning, as the sign of a divisive and destructive particularity: Non temere heic ab errone vox ingenium delecta: ea enim exprimit linguae genium, qua novatore loquuntur, quum dicunt quod Ecclesia RomanoCatholica disputationum ingenio, non instrumenti, hoc est Evangelii, veritate nitatur.23 [Not by chance at this point is the term ingenuity (ingenium) used by this vagabond; this term in fact reveals the (genius of the) language with which the Protestants express themselves when speaking of the Roman Catholic Church, as they claim it is based on the ingenuity of argumentation and not on the truth of the foundation of Christianity, that is, the Gospel.]24

Here, Vico attacks Mencke’s manipulative association of the faculty of ingenium with the false sophistry of the Catholic Church and dismisses it as a typical expression of the distinct genius of the Protestants’ language and its captious nature. In this particular context Vico employs the phrase linguae genium to denote a limited, deformed vision that cannot attain universality and generates separateness rather than commonality. By doing so, he expressed his anxiety about the disintegration of

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Western Christian culture, symbolized by the decadence of Latin as lingua franca, and revealed the sentiments that drove his lifelong search for a common denominator of humanity apt to counteract cultural and ethnic Balkanization. Yet, even more decisive to Vico’s shifting view of the link between language and nation was the theoretical and methodological revision of Scienza nuova, which began, as he claims in his well-known addition of 1731 to his Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da sé medesimo, by acknowledging the fundamental shortcomings of both De universi iuris uno principio et fine uno liber unus and the first Scienza nuova. By 1731, Vico recognized that his juridical work had wrongly set out to interpret the primitive mind starting from the paradigms of philosophers, when it should have taken the opposite course.25 He also admitted that the first Scienza nuova faultily treated the ideas conceived by the primitive ingegni as apart from the origins of languages instead of considering them as one and the same thing, given that the first event interpreted as sign by the primitive bestioni was indeed also the first thought.26 In Vico’s definitive vision of human history as man-made, which is grounded on the literal meaning of the Greek verb poiein (‘to make’), the sublime ‘poetic’ power – the ingenium of the bestioni – literally makes human institutions by interpreting and producing signs (‘semata’). By construing from thunder (perceived as the growling of the sky’s divine body) a heavenly language that called for interpretation, the primitive ‘poets’ established the first semiotic system and the first religion. The mental activity of those primitive ingenia that produced the interpretation of natural events as divine injunctions was semiotic and social praxis at the same time; it begot language and community simultaneously. Avoiding the all-too-pagan genius, Vico’s direct reflections on the French-Italian controversy written before 1731 constituted an opportunity to define ingenium more closely. Vico sensed that, firmly rooted in the senses and seamlessly bound to memory and imagination, this peculiarly human power to create topoi, or ultimately an ethical common ground, was susceptible to being undermined by the constraining force of the ‘linguae genium.’ In his reflections he elaborated the languagemind equation and shed light on both the potential and the limits of the genius of language. To be sure, by 1731, Vico had defined his own distinctive philosophical vocabulary as well as formed the building blocks of his anthropological paradigm shift that responded di fianco to the genius debate.

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Rhetoric as Anthropology: Historicizing Language and Mind Within the theoretical frame of the last Scienza nuova (1744), the all-toocrude isomorphism of languages and ingenia that characterizes Vico’s direct response to the genius debate in his pedagogical and polemical writings gives way to an intricate interaction between languages and political institutions. Once he had identified the ingenium as the natural human ability to see the connections among different phenomena, to encapsulate those connections in tropes of illuminating evidence, and thus to create knowledge, the central task of the last version of his Scienza nuova remained to describe the work of the ingenium in history, particularly its materialization in that fundamental institution that is language, in all its historical shapes. In this section I sketch the role of language in Vico’s new anthropological frame by concentrating on issues relevant to the debate on genius, which can be summed up in the question of how and what language signifies. I argue that Vico’s definition of natural signification, which constitutes the foundation of his criteria for describing and evaluating languages, challenged the claims of the universality of French, the crux of the French-Italian exchanges on the genius of language. First of all, let me state what is well known. Vico’s parlare – the word most often used in Scienza nuova (SN) for ‘language’ – refers to representation and communication as well.27 We have encountered the understanding of language as parlare already in Varchi’s Ercolano (1576), which begins with a list of the Florentine synonyms and antonyms of this verb and concentrates on the expressive and communicative function of language. Yet Vico’s parlare designates both the encapsulation of a perception into a sign and its transmission through different types of media. It includes the original gestures and actions (for example, Tarquinius Superbus cutting off the heads of poppies); the ostensive use of objects (‘parole reali,’ such as the frog, and the mouse used by Idanthyrsus to answer Darius the Great); marks (for example, those made to claim the ownership of fields); coats of arms; and, of course, verbal signs.28 According to Vico, all these signs, including words, signify by nature, not by convention. Yet his concept of natural signification does not describe signs or arrangements of signs that reflect – in Bouhours’s words – ‘things exactly as they are’ (‘les choses précisément comme elles sont,’ E, 48). Such an ability is reserved, in Vico’s view, for the sacred language invented by Adam, to whom only God granted divine onomathesia, that is, the giving of names to things according to

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the nature of each. To the author of the last version of Scienza nuova, who emphatically abandons the affiliation with Plato’s Cratylus that had informed De antiquissima italorum sapientia (1710), any effort to recover a natural speech capable of naming the order of things or their essences is in vain since the very nature of things, as far as human beings can understand it, does not depend on immutable essences or innate ideas. ‘The nature of institutions is nothing but their coming into being at certain times and in certain guises.’29 (‘Natura di cose altro non è che nascimento di esse in certi tempi e con certe guise, le quali sempre che sono tali, indi tali e non altre nascono,’ SN, 147.) More specifically, the nature of human institutions, especially language, which is the root of all of them, is given by a contingent and historical interpretation of their material environment, physical as well as social. Human institutions cannot be studied and known as if they possessed an intrinsic and absolute nature, since their very being depends on disparate variants as well as on changing human perceptions. They must be studied as facts (‘factum,’ ‘facere’) made by human beings in specific circumstances, and not as data (‘datum,’ ‘dare’) given a priori. Language, first among all institutions, is shaped by its immediate and contingent environment as much as it contributes to the shaping of its own ability to perceive that environment. Thus, the natural parlare, which Vico understands as the interpretation of natural phenomena as signs as well as the creation and communication of signs, cannot be a rational and immutable arrangement of abstract symbols but rather the combination of imaginative topoi (‘universali fantastici’) consistent with the perceptions of a primitive mind that projects its violent affections and urgent needs onto its rudimentary surroundings. ‘For that first language … was not a language in accord with the nature of the things it dealt with …, but was a fantastic speech making use of physical substance endowed with life.’ (‘Poiché cotal primo parlare … non fu un parlare secondo la natura di esse cose …, ma fu un parlare fantastico per sostanze animate,’ SN, 401).30 Clearly, Vico’s common mental dictionary of mankind was not the Port-Royal logic but rather a preverbal imaginative language created by the primitive ingenium of gross heroic minds, which ‘were entirely immersed in the senses, buffeted by passions, buried in the body’ (‘tutte immerse ne’ sensi, tutte rintuzzate dalle passioni, tutte seppellite ne’ corpi,’ SN, 378). The elements of this original language were a natural and necessary product of fear, ignorance, and want. They constituted the hermeneutic tools of a primitive poetic logic, not the

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artificial ornaments of literary language or the products of refined and subtle minds. Vico’s new anthropological frame allowed him effectively to demonstrate that not only are tropes the original and natural expression of affections – a claim that was raised again later by philosophers such as Diderot and Herder – but also they are interpretations of the world, cognitive instruments of a mode of understanding that is different from deductive or inductive knowledge. It is ‘the sort of knowing,’ as Isaiah Berlin puts it, ‘which participants in an activity claim to possess as against mere observers, the knowledge of the actors as against that of the audience … knowledge by sympathetic insight into those of others, which may be obtained by a high degree of imaginative power.’31 By turning figures of speech, not abstract logic, into the very index of human nature, Vico reoriented the whole debate on genius. In contrast to the previous Italian responses, his naturalization of tropes pushed the discussion from the rhetorical sphere into the anthropological. He used tropes, as Andrea Battistini eloquently puts it, ‘to understand the cognitive system of a remote age in which man, lacking reason, filtered every form of learning through passions.’32 Indeed, by historicizing human nature Vico effectively countered the innatism implicit in the terms of the debate. Furthermore, his turn to historical anthropology allowed him to resist the contemporary tendency to universalize modern French prose in the name of nature and in the service of French linguistic nationalism. Vico understood that the French rationalistic mode of knowledge, with its rejection of rhetoric and eloquence, challenged any understanding of how the human mind works and how human motivations arise. It risked reducing language and knowledge to analytical thought, denying any cognitive value to the senses, emotions, and imagination. More important, by replacing the signs created by the ingenium, which was able to integrate conflicting and disparate perspectives, abstract rational languages conveyed only one individual line of reasoning. Therefore, they were bound to obstruct the building of a consensus within human communities and to undermine any internal cohesion of the polity. Signs of Nations: Vico’s Explanation of Linguistic Diversity and His Evaluation of Languages After defining the nature of human language and of institutions in general as the result of a contingent affective interpretation of the surround-

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ings, Vico is able to explain linguistic diversity, too, as the expression of different interpretations of disparate environments. Hypothetically, identical phenomena can only arise from identical conditions. Thus, Vico’s national languages emerge from distinct environments that prompt their populations to look at things and needs from different points of view and to name differently the various aspects that they extract from their general sensory perceptions. In Scienza nuova, Vico’s historical typology of languages (and of nations) aims to identify their common universal traits as they emerge in different historical stages, rather than their unique individual characters. His typology depends largely on philological evidence, which is dubious at times, and does not concentrate on the category of nationality as we understand it today. Indeed, Vico’s term nazione refers broadly to a system of institutions in constant change (religion, marriage, burial, and all laws related to them).33 Considered in relation to modern ideologies, Vico’s nation is neither a community of blood (a racial group) nor a given, uniform entity; instead, like Vico’s people, it is a highly composite, ever shifting political body, or rather a mixture of heterogeneous, at times conflicting, parts.34 Therefore, Vico’s ideas on the specific interaction between individual national vernaculars and their speakers’ collective habits or dispositions can be identified only indirectly by analysing his explanation of linguistic diversity and his representations of different vernaculars.35 Vico’s attempt to explain language diversity has occasioned a large variety of interpretations based on canonical theories that range from the Aristotelian view – according to which differences affect only sounds, not mental images – to the opposite postulate of universal grammar to linguistic relativism.36 Yet, however different these interpretations might be, they tend to neglect the shifting contexts of Vico’s discourse on language (even within the same edition of Scienza nuova), or what I would call his prismatic approach. Indeed, in his treatment of the intricate interaction of languages and polities Vico emphasizes the different material, institutional, and psychological elements affecting that interaction, depending on the context and the perspective from which he considers a language or a nation. The multiple connotations of the terms language and nation in Scienza nuova are the most evident manifestation of his perspectivism and of the syncretic cognitive style peculiar to his thought.37 I argue that Vico’s style of philosophy does not allow for one single hermeneutic narrative about language as a function of different societies. I am inclined to believe that Vico intentionally devised a style that would prevent such a type of narratives,

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and yet it is my contention in this section that, particularly in his categorization and evaluation of languages, polemical arguments that indirectly responded to the French-Italian controversy eventually interfere with his theoretical reflection. Even if we look at just a few changes occurring in the transition from one edition to the next, we immediately notice that they are not clear cut. For instance, in the first Scienza nuova (1725) (SNP), diverse sense perceptions are explained as functions of different environments, physical and societal, which account for differences in proverbs and in names of animals, plants, minerals, and sites.38 Significantly, the most elaborate example concerns modes of paternity or authority. In this same edition Vico lists twelve basic properties of the patres, which make up the ‘mental dictionary common to all nations’ (‘dizionario di voci mentali comune a tutte le nazioni’), in order to explain how different peoples found different names for the same human necessities – for example, by emphasizing different functions of the fathers ‘according to the diversity first of places and climates and later of nature and customs’ (‘secondo la diversità de’ loro siti, cieli e quindi natura e costumi,’ SNP, 387). The most diverse populations shared a universale fantastico, or an imaginative concept of the fathers, and yet they named that concept differently according to the roles that they assigned to the fathers within their own societies (princes, priests, warriors). In the last edition of the Scienza nuova, however, Vico occasionally turns to theories of climate to explain how peoples came to regard the same necessities of human life from different points of view (SN, 1088–91), and ultimately how linguistic and cultural diversity originated (‘as the peoples have certainly by diversity of climates acquired different natures,’ SN, 445).39 But when he mentions (and misquotes) his own mental dictionary of the fathers as ‘a very full example’ (‘pienissimo saggio’) of the various aspects of the same human phenomenon that can be named, producing different words (SN, 445),40 he eliminates all details – that is, his twelve examples, their analysis, and explanation presented in the first Scienza nuova. This abridgement suggests that Vico was too anxious about cultural fragmentation and too busy identifying the common sense of all nations to continue emphasizing linguistic diversity as a diversity of world views. He understood the significance of his discovery, which revealed the clash at the core of the Enlightenment project between the deeply ingrained humanist idea of the universality of cultural values and a keen perception of the geographical and historical relativity encoded in language. However, he decided to keep his focus on the

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commonalities and to extend to all vernaculars the property of natural signification, rejecting the accepted hypothesis of the conventional character of vernaculars. In contrast to Bouhours, who ascribed to the innate genius of French the ability to signify naturally (which to him meant to reflect the logic of reason transparently), Vico endows all vernaculars with the power to signify by nature: Ma delle lingue volgari egli è stato ricevuto con troppo di buona fede da tutti i filologi ch’elleno significassero a placito, perch’esse, per queste lor origini naturali, debbono aver significato naturalmente. Lo che è facile osservare nella lingua volgar Latina (la quale è più eroica della greca volgare, e perciò più robusta quanto quella è più dilicata), che quasi tutte le voci ha formate per trasporti di nature o per proprità naturali, o per effetti sensibili; e generalmente la metafora fa il maggior corpo delle lingue appo tutte le nazioni. (SN, 444) [The philologians have all accepted with an excess of good faith the view that in the vulgar languages meanings were fixed by convention. On the contrary, because of their natural origins, they must have had natural significations. This is easy to observe in vulgar Latin (which is more heroic than vulgar Greek, and therefore as much more robust as the latter is more refined), which has formed almost all its words by metaphors drawn from natural properties or sensible effects. And, in general, metaphor makes up the great body of the language among all nations.] (SN, 444)

In vulgar languages, words appear to have arbitrary significations because the metaphorical chain of translations from the natural bodily signifier (for example, the original gestures and onomatopoeia) to the articulate sign cannot be easily reconstructed. Recovering the natural significations becomes even more arduous when languages mix and appropriate elements from different idioms. Yet, the bodily features of the early language leave their traces in the ‘heroic tropes,’ that is, onomatopoeia, monosyllables, metaphors, traslati (that is, names of body parts or of natural objects used to signify abstract concepts), and circumlocutions, which – Vico concludes – must have constituted not only the original elements of vernaculars but even the largest part of their body (SN, 444). In the course of the last Scienza nuova, it becomes clear that the elements described as characteristic of each individual historical stage (mutoli, heroic tropes, articulate signs) are in fact synchronic aspects

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of languages, present in various degrees within different languages throughout the ages.41 Nevertheless, Vico continues to explain tropes as expressions of nature and origins (rather than more or less conventionalized perceptions) and to assign greater value to languages rich in tropes, arguing that they tell more about the origins of human institutions. Indeed, he considers the persistence of tropes as a sign of the creativity of the ingegno as well as the guarantee of its preservation. In Vico’s classification and evaluation of languages, cognitive and aesthetic criteria go hand in hand. First of all, languages that have preserved figurative and onomatopoeic modes of significations (the heroic tropes) are the key to understanding the obscure past of their peoples, their customs, laws, and deeds: ‘The vulgar tongues should be the most weighty witnesses concerning those ancient customs of the peoples that were in use at the time the languages were formed’ (‘i parlari volgari debbon esser i testimoni più gravi degli antichi costumi de’ popoli, che si celebrarono nel tempo ch’essi si formaron le lingue,’ SN, 151). To students who are able to reconstruct the chain of metaphorical transformations, languages bear witness to the historical changes of cultures, ‘from the forests to the academies.’42 In Vico’s representation, vulgar languages that carry heavy traces of the heroic tropes are not only the historians’ most useful tools but also the most pleasing languages. Indeed, his famous corollary from book 2 of Scienza nuova ultimately reveals how deep the aesthetic element is ingrained in his cognitive criteria: Quanto le lingue sono più ricche di tali parlari eroici accorciati tanto sono più belle, e per ciò più belle perché son più evidenti, e perché più evidenti sono più veraci e più fide; e al contrario, quanto sono più affollate di voci di tali nascoste origini sono meno dilettevoli, perché oscure e confuse, e perciò più soggette ad inganni ed errori. (SN, 445) [Languages are more beautiful in proportion as they are richer in these condensed heroic expressions; they are more beautiful because they are more expressive (evidenti); and because they are more expressive they are truer and more faithful. And on the contrary, in proportion as they are more crowded with words of unknown origin, they are less delightful, because they are obscure and confused and therefore more likely to deceive and lead astray.] (SN, 445).

Languages that are richer in metaphorical and figurative elements are

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not only windows open onto the imaginative thinking of our ancestors but also more beautiful and truer or more faithful to the original human nature. In this corollary, Vico describes languages that are rich in loans from foreign idioms with the adjectives obscure and confused, which polemically mirror the Cartesian pair clear and evident. Thus he displaces the faults of obscurity and confusion, which Bouhours and other Cartesians attributed to languages rich in acutezze (such as Italian and Spanish), onto abstract languages such as French that in his perspective are not only less useful to scholars but are likely to deceive minds and obscure truth. Vico’s ideas of natural signification and of proximity to origins ground his two broad categories of lingue madri (languages rich in tropes such as Hebrew, Latin, and German) and abstract, philosophical languages (Greek and French). Neither category includes Italian, the classification of which remains less explicit. Indeed the most puzzling aspect of Vico’s typology is that it does not include the category of neoLatin tongues nor does it refer to the common Latin matrix of French, Spanish, and Italian in order to explain shared features. Instead, Vico prefers to couple German with Latin (and French with Greek) and to present the two mother languages as key instruments for reconstructing the common nature of nations – the true subject of his new science:43 Lingua di nazione antica, che si è conservata regnante finché pervenne a suo compimento, dev’essere gran testimone de’ costumi de’ primi tempi del mondo. Questa Degnità ne assicura che le pruove filologiche del diritto naturale delle genti (del quale, senza contrasto, sappientissima sopra tutte l’altre del mondo fu la romana) tratte da’ parlari latini sieno gravissime. Per la stessa ragione potranno far il medesimo i dotti della lingua tedesca, che ritiene questa stessa proprietà della lingua romana antica. (SN, 152–3) [A language of an ancient nation, which has maintained itself as the dominant tongue until it was fully developed, should be a great witness to the customs of the early days of the world. This axiom assures us that the weightiest philological proofs of the natural law of the gentes (in the understanding of which the Romans were unquestionably pre-eminent) can be drawn from Latin speech. For the same reason scholars of the German language can do the like, since it retains this same property possessed by the ancient Roman language.] (SN, 152–3)

The entire Scienza nuova is actually an application of Vico’s etymo-

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logical belief that Latin – the mother language he knew best – provides important philological proofs of the natural law and the most reliable evidence of the nature of the institutions shared by all nations, their historical development, and the pattern of courses and recourses of history. While the canonical parallel in Vico’s time paired German and Greek, Vico constructs the similarity of German and Latin by maintaining that both languages are characterized by the stark continuity of heroic traits as shown by their plentiful figurative features, monosyllabic roots, inversions, and autochthonous geographical and historical names. German in particular is to him ‘the only living heroic language,’ and therefore he encourages the scholars of the German language to employ his etymological principles and follow the method of his new science, promising that ‘they will make marvelous discoveries’ (SN, 471).44 Vico’s representation of mother languages also emphasizes the political autonomy of a linguistic community as the condition for preserving their heroic features. This is even clearer in paragraph 452, which states that German is a mother language because foreign nations never entered that country to rule over it (‘è lingua madre perocché non vi entrarono mai a comandare nazioni straniere,’ SN, 452). According to Vico, political autonomy ensures the purity of a language and allows the preservation of uninterrupted metaphorical chains, which guarantees consistency and transparency of meaning and ultimately the opportunity to know humanity’s past. In other words, Vico can claim to value both tropes and purity for sheer cognitive reasons, arguing that languages formed by the mixture of various tongues cannot transmit the sequence of metaphorical significations. Mixed languages can only lead astray both historians and simple speakers since all their users cannot be in full control of their meanings. While expressivity, autonomy, and purity distinguish the mother languages among all other articulate tongues, an overly subtle (‘dilicatissimo’) and abstract character sets apart philosophical languages such as Greek and French. The parallel between Greek and French as developed in Scienza nuova marks a turn from Vico’s previous statements, especially if one considers that the characterization of Greek as a philosophical language in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione was still presented as a strength, not as a weakness.45 The shifting characterization of Greek in Scienza nuova is in my opinion the most significant evidence of the interference of polemical arguments with Vico’s philosophical ideas. Of course, the new parallel reflects Vico’s intention to accentuate

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the relations between the cognitive activity of ingenium and the body, with its sensory and affective functions. Yet it is difficult to overlook that his view of Greek as a tenuous and abstract language is tailored to his long-standing polemic against modern French. Indeed, when taken by itself separately from French, Greek continues to be adduced as evidence of the poetic wisdom and the most ancient customs of humanity, as in the discussion of the ‘true Homer’ in book 3.46 Instead, in Vico’s polemical analogy between Greek and French, their over-refined character was constructed as the result of the abrupt and ‘unnatural’ turn of the two nations from barbarism to highly refined civilization. The French and the Greek peoples shared the fate of a premature clash between barbarism and civilization, a clash in which ignorance and the most sophisticated sciences collided.47 Because of this clash and in contrast to the Germans and Romans, who preserved within their languages the heroic tropes and with them the thought structures of the heroes, Greek and French peoples simultaneously acquired primitive myths, stemming from the divine age, and a language that was extremely abstract and refined in its vocabulary and structures. Moreover, these over-refined features clashed with the barbaric elements of their phonological development because their tongues were stiff and inept at combining consonants with vowels (SN, 159). Such dissonances make up the very nature of Greek and French and confine ancient myths to the separate sphere of the marvellous and irrational. As there is no continuity in the structures of these languages, myths can only be perceived as ‘false narratives’ – a perception that bars French and Greek speakers from any understanding of their own history or of the common institutions of nations.48 Furthermore, the accelerated cultural development of the French and the Greek nations, which has produced precociously sophisticated idioms of ‘greatest refinements’ that are ‘the best of all for scientific reasoning,’ also has turned their speakers into ‘over-refined’ (‘assottigliati’; ‘affilatissimi’) minds, ‘incapable of any great work’ (SN, 159). It is easy to recognize as quotations from his own De nostri temporis studiorum ratione a number of Vico’s statements concerning Greek and French as lingue dilicatissime. They ultimately carry over the polemical line of thought of the earlier oration into the theoretical system of Scienza nuova. Thus, despite Vico’s claim that his assessment of the value of languages is purely theoretical or a function of his etymological principles for reconstructing the origins of human institutions, many of his remarks defy his scholarly criterion by passing absolute judgment on

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the potential of a particular language to cultivate ingenium, or even to access truth. He does not refrain from returning to the chauvinistic tone of the polemic on the genius of language. It is important to point out, however, that while a few passages of the last Scienza nuova still recall Vico’s previous polemical characterization of French, the emphasis has shifted from an almost deterministic relation between the character of a language and the natural talent of its speakers to the historical explanation of the character of the language as the result of a nation’s political and cultural development. Within such a development, autonomy or self-governance, as we have seen, is introduced as the necessary condition of the excellence of a language. Therefore, it is even more striking that Vico grants exceptional status to the Italian vernacular and emphasizes its extraordinary continuity with heroic Latin and its poetic character, since this characterization actually undermines his own postulate concerning freedom from foreign domination as the condition for preserving ancient linguistic features (SN, 152). He alerts his readers to the exceptionality of Italian, for instance, when he explains the etymological example of mercatanzie ‘merchandise’ and mercare ‘the branding of cattle or other merchandise for sale’ in order to demonstrate that Italian had preserved in these words the original imaginative concepts encapsulated in the character of Mercury (the inventor of laws and letters), first articulated in the Latin mother tongue (SN, 483). Vico suggests that it is not only the parallel of thought and expression that must be admired (‘dee recar maraviglia,’ SN, 483) but especially the fact that it was preserved into modern times despite the circumstance that Italians, unlike Romans and Germans, had indeed been subjected to many different foreign dominations (such as Vico’s Naples, alternatively governed by the two different nations of Spain and Austria within just a few decades).49 In spite of Italy’s history, Italian is presented as a language rich in heroic tropes, and its literature celebrated as close to the canto of early popular poetry (SN, 462). Although Vico does not place Italian in any specific category, he ultimately does not offer any explicit indication that he has abandoned the view articulated in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione according to which Italian is an ingenious language ‘that constantly evokes images’ (‘Nos vero lingua praediti, quae imagines semper excitat’) and ‘prompts minds to move back and forth between ideas which are far apart’ (‘mentes in res longe dissitas et remotas vi similitudinum transfert,’ DR, 140). The only significant change in his representation of the Italian language occurs, as I will argue in the last section of this chapter,

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in his interpretation of Dante’s vernacular and in his parallel drawn between Homer and the author of the Comedia. Here I would like to draw a few preliminary conclusions on the issues related to the debate on genius. When characterizing and comparing languages in Scienza nuova, Vico implicitly operates with opinions and judgments originating in his polemical response to the genius debate – judgments that, as we have seen, tend to reify the relationships between language and mind or between language and climate. Within this context, he ends up stereotyping national languages in order to reinforce his principles of historical development. When searching for an explanation of cultural and linguistic diversity, however, Vico breaks out of the constraining frame of the debate about whether the genius of the nation informs the character of the language or vice versa, in favour of a complex model for the interaction between nation and language, which includes consideration of socio-political and economic elements. If by genius is meant an innate and steady character either of the people or of the language, then Scienza nuova weakened both notions in their function of direct causes of one another and asserted instead the primacy of material historical conditions. ‘The order of the ideas,’ Vico maintains, ‘must follow the order of things’ 50 (‘l’ordine delle idee dee procedere secondo l’ordine delle cose,’ SN, 238) whenever historians are attempting to explain the development of institutions, including that of languages and nations. For Vico, the order of things is no longer the logical order allegedly reflected in nature but the historical unfolding of material conditions – a process proceeding from the forests and the huts to the villages and the cities and finally to the academies (SN, 239). Vico clearly had no intention of developing the relativistic line of thought that can be read into the few passages discussed above (some of which, significantly, he left out of the 1744 edition). Nor did he believe in innate and immutable essences manifesting themselves in different phonetic forms, since he assumed that language differences always operate at the semantic level. For example, the early fathers are named differently according to the aspects and functions valued within the historically changing social organizations of different populations.51 Vico’s radically historical outlook, as well as the prominence given to the preverbal imaginative language in his interpretation of the making of institutions, consigns to the background the issue of linguistic relativism. For Vico, as for his later admirer Croce, radical historicism ‘marked not the intellectual crisis of the modern era but the solution to this crisis.’52

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In conclusion, Scienza nuova unravelled the theoretical implications of the myth of the genius of language, questioned its reifying premises, and tested its limits and risks. Vico certainly viewed languages as contingent, affective interpretations of disparate historical environments that prompted their populations to look at things and needs from different points of view and to name their various aspects differently. Yet in Scienza nuova he resisted the hardening of his ideas concerning diversity into a theory of cultural and linguistic relativism that could have sanctioned the untranslatability of cultures and widened the rifts separating language communities. I believe, however, that the polemical thread counteracting the claims of the universality of French, which we have seen emerging in Vico’s language typology, is not the only – if somewhat tenuous – element of his language philosophy that his nineteenth-century nationalist followers were able to appropriate for their own ends. In the following sections I explore the relations of Vico’s ideas on vernacular as a type and of Italian, in particular, to the later language myth of the nation. The Birth of the Vernacular from the People, or a Tale of Linguistic Sovereignty In Vico’s philosophical system language is identical with the law that institutes the nation: it manifests the sovereignty, always shifting, of those who hold the power (‘potere’), which is for Vico based strictly on ownership (‘podere’) (SN, 433). Language is the commandment to end the bestial wandering (‘errare,’ both ‘wandering’ and ‘err’) and to establish the first consecrated union of marriage – the first human institution.53 Vico’s original language, consisting of ritual actions performed by fathers in the early family states, is both divination (the interpretation of the divine auspices) and the transmission of the first laws to their families. It is the expression of the sovereign divine power of the early fathers, who were priests and patriarchs subject only to God (SN, 256, 630). Sovereignty, however, shifts together with changing human institutions.54 Thus, if the primitive mute language of signs and objects (‘per cenni o corpi,’ SN, 32, 225) articulated the law of the early fathers-priests, the poetic language of symbols and tropes expressed the sovereignty of heroes in aristocratic polities that followed the early patriarchies. Finally, the ‘vulgar language’ or vernacular was born out of the people’s claim for justice and presented a tangible expression of their acquired sovereignty.

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Or, siccome la lingua eroica ovvero poetica si fondò dagli eroi, così le lingue volgari sono state introdotte dal volgo, che noi dentro ritruoveremo essere state le plebi de’ popoli eroici: le quali propiamente de’ latini furono dette ‘vernaculae,’ che non potevan introdurre quelli ‘vernae’ che i gramatici diffiniscono ‘servi nati in casa dagli schiavi che si facevano in guerra,’ i quali naturalmente apprendono le lingue de’ popoli dov’essi nascono. Ma dentro si truoverà ch’i primi e propiamente detti ‘vernae’ furono i famoli degli eroi nello stato delle famiglie. (SN, 443) [Now as the heroic or poetic language was founded by the heroes, so the vulgar languages were introduced by the vulgar (dal volgo), who were the plebs of the heroic peoples. By the Latins these languages were properly called vernacular. They could not, however, have been introduced by those vernae defined by the grammarians as slaves born of enslaved prisoners of war, for these naturally learn the languages of their parents’ peoples. But the first and properly so-called vernae were the famoli of the heroes in the state of the families.] (SN, 443)

Vico repeatedly corrects the traditional etymology of vernae (‘servi nati in casa … non fatti in guerra,’ SN, 915), rejecting the opinion that vulgar languages were created by foreign slaves. He appears anxious to prove the autochthony of vernaculars and to refute the hypothesis that they were born from the impact of foreign and barbarous languages on high-culture idioms. We know that the autochthony of languages and laws constitutes an indispensable element of Vico’s system. It allows him to argue that entire peoples unknown to each other develop similar mental, social, and political habits, and to prove the common nature of nations.55 Within this context, linguistic purity is the foundation of Vico’s etymological method and the necessary condition for the historical understanding of a nation’s institutions. Yet Vico’s linguistic purity is not grounded on biology or blood lineage nor is it used, at least in the theoretical frame of Scienza nuova, as the foundation of an intrinsic superiority of one culture over the other. Indeed, Vico not only rejects the belief that the early family states originated from conquests and the enslavement of foreign peoples (the vernae) but also disputes the opinion according to which the original family-states consisted only of the early fathers’ blood relatives. Si è comunemente oppinato, e da’ filologi e da’ filosofi, che le famiglie nello stato che dicesi ‘di natura’ sono state non d’altre che di figliuoli; quando

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elle furono famiglie anco de’ famoli, da quali principalmente furon dette ‘famiglie’: onde sopra tal manca iconomica stabilirono una falsa politica. (SN, 552) [Philologians and philosophers have commonly supposed that the families in the so-called state of nature included children only, whereas in fact they included famuli also, and that was the original reason for their being called families. On this maimed economy a false politics has been erected.] (SN, 552)

In early societies, the true socii or associates of the pious fathers were the famoli (SN, 258, 552–8, 1016, 1099), those weak primitive people who sought refuge on the fathers’ lands (‘campi’) in order to save their lives (‘campare,’ SN, 776) from violent and still-lawless wandering giants. The alliance that gave birth to the primitive family states was based on mutual advantage, since the famoli offered their services in exchange for protection. Thus the fathers’ power extended not only over the person and property of their own children but also over those of the famoli, the family servants who did not have access to the sacred laws, religious marriages, inheritance, and ownership. Vico explains that the name patria, ‘shortened from patria res,’ originally designated the ‘interest of the fathers’ (SN, 601) only, not of all male members of the polity. By rejecting the hypothesis of the foreign origin of the famoli/vernae and their vernaculars and by disputing the biological nature of the early family states, Vico emphasizes the political and class-related factors characterizing the ‘low’ birth of ‘vulgar languages’ and presents the famoli’s adoption of an articulate verbal language as a clear act of political empowerment: La terza fu la lingua umana per voci convenute da’ popoli, della quale sono assoluti signori i popoli, propia delle repubbliche popolari e degli Stati monarchici, perché i popoli dieno i sensi alle leggi, a’ quali debbano stare con la plebe anco i nobili; onde, appo tutte le nazioni portate le leggi in lingue volgari, la scienza delle leggi esce di mano a’ nobili. (SN, 32) [The third was the human language, using words agreed on by the people, a language of which they are the absolute lords, and which is proper to the popular commonwealth (repubbliche popolari) and monarchical states; a language whereby the people may fix the meaning of the laws by which the nobles as well as the plebs are bound. Hence, among all nations, once

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the laws had been put into the vulgar tongue, the science of laws passed from the control of the nobles.] (SN, 32)

Vulgar tongues are not merely, as traditional language history puts it, plebeian means of communication. Born out of the need for written laws, they constitute the vehicle of a new, more humane form of justice applicable to everyone, regardless of social status. Along with the vulgar language, ‘the people’ emerges as an autonomous entity that gives itself its own rules – which is ultimately Vico’s understanding of freedom. This explanation of the birth of vernaculars is eminently political. Indeed, Vico’s civitates, the written laws, and the articulate vulgar tongues are born simultaneously from the famoli’s rebellion and their claim for equity. Before their rebellion there was no need for written laws; on the contrary, it was in the interest of the heroes (and the fathers and the nobles, in their respective polities) to keep the laws secret. Vico strengthens his arguments about the ‘low’ origin of vernaculars by applying his version of language history to Egyptian, Greek, Latin, and German history, and maintains that vulgar languages were born to express the lower classes’ needs in everyday life. Yet when he provides historical examples for his identification of written vernaculars with the people, the term the people has little to do with family servants or the plebeians of his general narrative. That happens, for instance, in his examples from Latin and Italian in which the people allegedly exercise their right to decide about their own language: E dee concepirsi esser provenuto da libera loro convenzione, per questa eterna propietà: ch’è diritto de’ popoli il parlare e lo scriver volgare; onde Claudio imperadore avendo ritruovato tre altre lettere ch’abbisognavano alla lingua Latina, il popolo romano non le volle ricevere, come gl’italian non han ricevuto le ritruovate da Giorgio Trissino, che si sentono mancare all’italiana favella. (SN, 439) [This language must be understood as having sprung up by their free consent, by this eternal property, that vulgar speech and writing are a right of the people. When the emperor Claudius found three additional letters necessary to the Latin language, the Roman people would not accept them; nor have the Italians accepted those devised by Giorgio Trissino, though their lack is felt in Italian.] (SN, 439)

Obviously, the rejection of such reform proposals was not an action

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of the populace but the result of a consensus achieved among writers. Here the people cannot possibly signify the lower classes or the entire population of the Italian peninsula (who were speaking different dialects and were unable to read and write literary Italian even in Vico’s own times) but those classes empowered by their capacity to make full use of a written language. In numerous similar passages Vico suggests the image of a sovereign Italian people endowed with the right to assert their own language and to continue to decide their fortunes dal basso, in an autonomous and collective fashion. Such an image articulates the powerful political myth that links the vernacular language and a collective by the principle of self-determination – a myth that not only became one of the most effective motivating forces of the Risorgimento but also expressed a principle that was embraced by many other European nationalist movements as well. Reading Vico on language and the people through the lens of the new Romantic cult of the individual national soul, both Italian Risorgimento intellectuals and European patriots abandoned Vico’s emphasis on juridical autonomy and turned him into the genealogist of nationality understood as identical to language.56 The historian Alberto Banti regards Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823), the Neapolitan patriot renowned for his historical analysis of the failure of the 1799 Neapolitan republic, as the first Risorgimento intellectual to interpret Vico’s ideas on language and nation as proof that a community must be a culturally and linguistically homogeneous group in order to assert itself as a nation.57 Yet Cuoco’s arguments were complex, rigorous, and realistic about the lack of such a homogeneity, even within the small ‘Neapolitan Nation.’ It is only in later interpretations that we find the parental metaphor of common descent and the representation of the nation as a natural community, as Banti himself has shown in his analysis of different kinds of texts of the Italian Ottocento (memoirs, philosophical treatises, political pamphlets, and patriotic poetry). A classic example is Carlo Cattaneo’s laconic statement, which seamlessly identifies nationality with language and is often quoted as an example of the organicist view that shaped Italian nationalism: ‘Today there is no other possible bond between peoples besides that of nationality, or rather that of language.’ (‘Oggidì non v’è altro possibil vincolo fra i popoli che quello della nazionalità, ossia della lingua’).58 Some interpretations even understand Vico’s view of language as the privileged providential sign of a racial bond.59 The liberal patriot Pasquale Stanislao Mancini (1817–88), for instance, who was professor of

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international law in Turin, preceptor of the future crown prince of Italy, and, after the unification, minister of public education (1862, in Urbano Rattazzi’s short-lived cabinet), retrieved the topos of the debate on language and nation through Vico but associated the genius of the people with biological lineage. Ora che dinota il gran numero delle lingue, se non la destinazione provvidenziale della società umana a comporsi di tante nazionalità distinte, ciascuna con vita ed essere suo proprio? E le lingue de’ popoli lasciano intorno a ciò minore incertezza che i tratti e le forme del corpo, in niuna altra parte meglio rivelandosi il genio e lo stato intellettuale di una nazione che nel suo idioma e negli accidenti stessi che lo distinguono. Nelle lingue si riflette pure la filiazione delle razze.60 [Now what does the great number of languages reveal, if not the providential destination of humanity to consist of so many distinct nationalities, each one with a life and existence of its own? And the languages of the peoples leave much less uncertainty about this than do the body’s traits and forms, and in no other aspect are the genius and intellectual state of a nation better revealed than in the language and in the very characteristics that set that language apart from others. Language even reflects the origins of the various races.]

Relying on traditional arguments from the genius debate, Mancini takes the organic connection between language and nation for granted and uses it to reinforce his naturalistic vision of the nation. It is not Vico, but his late interpreters, who suggests the biological foundation of the link between language and nation.61 Vico himself had a more complicated vision of the people. When presenting the birth of vernaculars, he carefully distinguishes between the two terms plebs and the people, using only the latter to refer to the low classes that have already succeeded in determining the meaning of the law in their own language (SN, 32) and have become juridical subjects; by way of religious marriages, they have acquired the right to own property as well as to pass it to their legitimate heirs. In his retelling of Roman history Vico deals with the phrase the people even more carefully. Indeed, whenever lawmakers and historians use this phrase indiscriminately, he takes apart their generalizations by specifying of which class, in which function, and of which historical age we speak. For instance, analysing the supposedly popular liberty instituted by

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Brutus, he explains that, from the times of the kings and until the extension of connubium (lawful marriage) to include the plebeians, the so-called Roman people were in reality composed of nobles alone (SN, 662). Vico is very keen on maintaining such distinctions because he was convinced that the misunderstanding of the terms people and popular had been the source of the most dangerous mistakes made by political historians. Unfortunately, his precise differentiations were lost on many of his followers in Italy and elsewhere.62 For instance, analysing Jules Michelet’s idealized reading of Vico, Alain Pons recognizes that ‘there is no trace of populism’ in Vico’s use of the terms people and popular nor any myth of a sacred folk that could sustain Michelet’s interpretation.63 For Pons, Vico does not view the common sense of the people as embodying a mystical unity; on the contrary, like the philosophers’ knowledge, ‘vulgar’ wisdom is shaped by contingent necessities of social and spiritual life.64 Vico’s vision of the folk was ‘more strictly historicist than that of Michelet’65 and avoided making the people the exclusive depositary of truth – as did later Giuseppe Mazzini, another enthusiastic follower. Vico shows a deeper sensibility for the historicity of words and of social categories than do some of his nineteenth-century followers. He idealizes neither the plebeians’ claim for justice nor the nobles’ concessions; instead, he presents the achievement of written laws not as the victory of some ethical imperative but, so Croce reminds us, as the result of a conflict of merely egotistic interests – a hard-fought process requiring compromise on both sides. Yet even Croce, who is inclined to understate Vico’s political significance, knowing very well that Vico was not a proto-Marxist revolutionary, has to admit that Scienza nuova describes the changes brought about by the rise of the people and by the political victories of the plebeians as the achievement of a more humane and just society.66 In fact, the political and economical advantages of the plebeians’ emancipation are made clear. By conceiving their progeny within religious marriage and by ending what Vico regards to be bestial promiscuity, the plebeians acquire the right to legitimate heirs and ownership. Nevertheless, Vico appears more preoccupied with the plebeians’ ethical transformation than their political emancipation. In his account, the plebeians’ claim for written laws is presented as their realization ‘that they were of like human nature with the nobles and should therefore be made equal with them in civil rights’ (‘riconoscessero essere d’ugual natura umana co’ nobili, e ‘n conseguenza che dovevan esser con quegli uguagliati in civil diritto,’ SN, 414). The em-

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phasis is repeatedly placed on the plebeians’ access to laws as the occasion that transforms their impious passions into virtues and turns ‘great vices into civil happiness’ (SN, 132).67 Vico’s account of the plebeians’ advancement to humanity cannot be unequivocally placed within the tradition of classical republicanism, not only because Vico discredited ancient patriotism as ‘an ignoble attachment to particular interests and to power’68 but also because in Vico’s assessment of the different forms of government the plebeians’ liberation can unfold in republics as well as in monarchies. Moreover, according to Vico, while democratic republics are constantly threatened by the erosion of common sense through the prevailing of private interests, monarchies can more easily avoid egotism and political fragmentation – the real drawbacks of civilization – because they delegate to an individual the care of the common good.69 They are less threatened by the ‘recourse of barbarism’ and, in particular, by the ‘barbarism of reflection’ that turns men into even more inhumane beasts than does the primitive barbarism of the senses (SN, 1106). In conclusion, in his account of Roman history, Vico explicitly rejects definitions of the people as an ethnically or socially homogeneous and fixed entity, presenting it instead as a bearer of sovereignty that is instituted in a constantly shifting balance of power. Clearly, Vico’s use of the notion the people is highly sophisticated and self-reflective. It conveys the inevitable tensions among different contexts, in particular between the historical and the theoretical perspective, and bars any single unifying interpretation. Within the juridical context, Vico is interested in emphasizing the principle of equality in which all members of the people are bound by the same rules, whatever class they might belong to. He thus regards the vulgar sovereignty expressed in the vernacular laws as the more humane achievement of the ‘age of men.’ Within his ethical view of history, which envisions the redemption of fallen man and the sublimation of his bestiality, the plebeians’ creation of vernaculars expresses their suddenly acquired awareness of their own divine origin and of their right to language. It is a process of education in its etymological sense because it draws the plebeians away from a bestial condition into a human condition, thus achieving the taming of a potentially disruptive and anarchic multitude. Despite these complexities, Vico’s explanation of the birth of the vernacular as the result of a class struggle internal to each and every nation, as well as an event that elevates the plebeians to a group of people equally empowered, participates in that productive image of the sover-

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eign people that is the foundation of the modern nation.70 By implying that language in its verbal vulgar stage is the law that articulates the plebeians’ actual needs, he firmly binds self-determination to language. A Myth of Origin for Modern Italy: Dante (and Vico) as Founder of the Nation Un popolo autore è un’idea ben bizzarra e d’un capo alquanto vesuviano. Melchiorre Cesarotti, L’Iliade d’Omero recata poeticamente

Vico’s concern with the perception and representation of Italy, which risked being monopolized by talented polemicists such as Bouhours who questioned Italy’s cultural hegemony in Europe, becomes palpable not only in his polemical writings but also in his revisions of the ancient history of the Italian peninsula and, even more clearly, in his reworking of the parallel drawn between Dante and Homer. In this section I show that in the course of these revisions Vico increasingly tightened his arguments concerning the origins and boundaries of the Italian nation, fastening them to the principles of autochthony and continuity and disputing historical accounts (even his own) that drew on foreign influences in order to explain the cultures of the peninsula. I argue that when Vico abandoned his polygenic explanations, particularly in his reinterpretation of Dante, he offered a foundational myth for modern Italy that provided his nationalist followers with a model for their monolingual nation. Vico’s interpretation of the Italic, pre-Roman cultures (which were to become the focal element of Italian identity in the work of his follower Cuoco) changes from De antiquissima italorum sapientia (1710) to the last edition of Scienza nuova (1744). In De antiquissima Vico identified an ancient ‘Italic wisdom’ as the source of the highly sophisticated philosophical vocabulary present in early Latin and attributed the metaphysical and scientific theories transmitted through that vocabulary – including the principle of the verum factum, the true foundation of his own thought – to the original populations that preceded the Roman occupation of Italy.71 He maintained that the Romans, who were exclusively occupied with farming and war, could not have created the learned phrases abounding in their language. Rather, they borrowed them, unaware of their philosophical meanings, from older Italic tongues such as Etruscan and Ionian, which in their turn – and this became a problem for him later – had preserved the philosophi-

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cal knowledge of the ancient Egyptian colonies. When his thesis was attacked in the Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia (1711) – the same organ that published summaries from the French-Italian debate on the genius of language – he insisted in his response that the better part of Latin was imported (‘bonam et magnam linguae partem ad Latinos importatam’) first to Latium and then to Magna Graecia and that the ancient Italic wisdom came originally from Egypt.72 The last version of Scienza nuova exhibits very few traces of this theory and tends to present instead the primitive populations of Italy as either violent lawless giants or as armed priests (the ‘Curetes’ of ancient Italy; SN, 594, 762), stressing their barbarous and creative nature. Vico does recall two instances in which the early Romans were still living in their heroic times when, excelling at war, they began to occupy the entire territory of Italy and take their vulgar speech from the populations of Latium, whose ‘vulgar tongues were already well advanced’ (SN, 160, 763). Yet he does not mention the Egyptian philosophy or repeat his claim that the Romans absorbed the philosophical ancient wisdom from the Italic past; rather, he emphasizes the differences in the historical stages of the Italic and the Roman cultures. Indeed, the idea that primitive populations could master rational thinking and produce a philosophical vocabulary had become truly incompatible with Vico’s new vision of the beginnings, in which all ancient nations are viewed as barbarous and their differences depend on their material environment and on the historical stage that each nation has reached. In Scienza nuova, as we have seen, Latin is primarily a mother language that has preserved the features of the heroic times without disruptions or mixtures, and together with German constitutes the most reliable philological tool to prove the autochthonous origin of all ancient institutions.73 Vico has no interest in weakening the privileged status of Latin by discussing possible external influences.74 A similar resistance seems to guide another revision that was also meant to emphasize the autochthonous, independent nature of Roman culture. In De nostri temporis studiorum ratione Vico supported the thesis of the foreign origin of Roman jurisprudence (‘leges bona ex parte a Graecis accepissent,’ DR, 206) and of the Roman language (‘quae externas habere origines,’ DR, 204). However, in Scienza nuova he uses a host of etymological analyses to prove that the laws of the Twelve Tables were an autochthonous creation and did not, as traditionally believed, come to Rome from Greece. Since the principles of his Scienza nuova postulate that ancient myths are true history (‘storie vere e severe,’

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SN, 7) and therefore do not allow him to dismiss the myth of the Greek founder Aeneas as a false narration, Vico feels compelled to reinterpret it in order to do away with the legend of the Romans’ foreign origin. Retrieving the thesis about the italoi developed more elaborately in De universi iuris uno principio et fine uno liber unus, he claims that the Romans were indigenous from the internal territories of the peninsula and conquered a Greek city on the coast; having encountered the refined culture of the Greeks, they started to ‘boast of illustrious foreign origins’ and to call the Greeks ‘their true founders’ (SN, 766). Against the myth of the Greek Aeneas, Vico privileges the legend of the indigenous Romulus, which he extensively analyses as an instance of the emergence of the pious giants who established the nations (SN, 561, 771, 1062). Although these two corrections are obviously targeted to reinforce the principle of autochthony – the foundation of Vico’s etymological method – they set up a sharp opposition between foreign and indigenous (‘Italic’) cultures, inevitably strengthening the illusion of an original tight commonality among all Italic populations. Continuity and homogeneous origin constitute Vico’s main preoccupations also when he revises his account of the beginnings of Italy and Italian in his parallel drawn between Homer and Dante. Indeed, Vico moved away from his previous view of Dante as the solitary, absolute poet of the beginnings who created an Italian koine by putting together fragments from disparate dialects; instead, he presented Dante’s poetry as a pure manifestation of the Tuscan tongue and of a shared cultural repertoire of all Italians. Although it clearly retrieves individual ideas developed in sixteenth-century commentaries on Aristotle (by Giulio Cesare Scaligero, Lodovico Castelvetro, and Giovan Giorgio Trissino),75 Vico’s comparison of Homer and Dante should be linked to his response to the querelle des anciens et des modernes and placed, in particular, within the context of the so-called Homeric question.76 Vico had already rejected the simplistic opposition of ancient and modern culture in his De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, in which he had distilled and praised the distinctive achievements of both ages in order to propose what he viewed as a more balanced educational curriculum. In his subsequent writings he began pleading for a contextual understanding of all human artifacts and urged his fellow scholars to consider the Homeric texts in their historical and linguistic context rather than according to assumedly timeless and universal values. The Homeric poetry had to be judged according to standards of evaluation different from those applied to modern literature.77 In the last edition of Scienza nuova

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he pursues his intention to historicize Homer and yet ends up regarding him as a poetic character, the creation of an entire nation, analogous to the poetic characters of Achilles and Ulysses attributed to him. Homer’s poems then become the collective expression of the ‘common sense’ of the Greek people from the heroic age rather than the product of one individual’s imagination.78 Understood as the Greeks’ true history, the Iliad and the Odyssey are presented as descriptions of the historical transition from the age of heroic virtue (incarnate in the violent and implacable character of Achilles) to the times of heroic wisdom (embodied in the patient and astute Ulysses). It is the transition from a primitive society, in which strong and capricious individuals dominate, to a more humane one, in which persuasion and judgment are critical. Vico’s discussion of the ‘discovery of the true Homer’ in book 3 of Scienza nuova considers the implications of poetic characters as creations of an entire nation, adapting his understanding of the sublime from the previous books to the new context:79 I quali due caratteri, avendogli formati tutta una nazione, non potevano non fingersi che naturalmente uniformi (nella quale uniformità, convenevole al senso comune di tutta una nazione, consiste unicamente il decoro, o sia la bellezza e leggiadria di una favola … Di che rimasero due eterne proprietà in poesia: delle quali una è che ‘l sublime poetico debba sempre andar unito al popolaresco; l’altra, ch’i popoli, i quali prima si lavoraron essi i caratteri eroici, ora non avvertono a’ costumi umani altramente che per caratteri strepitosi di luminosissimi esempli. (SN, 809) [These two characters, since they had been created by an entire nation, could only be conceived as naturally uniform (in which uniformity, agreeable to the common sense of an entire nation, alone consists the decorum or beauty and charm of a fable) … Hence derive two eternal properties of poetry: one that poetic sublimity is inseparable from popularity (popolaresco), and the other that peoples (i popoli) who have first created heroic characters for themselves will afterward apprehend human customs only in terms of characters made famous by luminous examples.] (SN, 809)

In the previous books of Scienza nuova Vico assigned the sublime mode to the beginnings, that is, to the perception of primitive man confronted with overwhelming forces, such as the thunder interpreted as a message issued from the divine body of the sky. Here he expands his anthropological principle by making the sublime primarily the ex-

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pression of the people, of a quintessentially collective experience. In book 3 the function of the imaginative characters is to articulate the people’s perception of realities and, at the same time, to establish common customs and values. Thus the actual meaning and force of values, of beauty for instance, depends on perceptions that are ‘agreeable to an entire nation’ (SN, 809). The sublime is the category in which both primitives and the people – the collective body that achieves access to shared laws by creating its own language – tend to think, create, and express themselves. Through the sublime mode of thought, which coalesces public values into poetic characters, consensus is created. Therefore, the sublime pertains not only to the historical beginnings of nations but also to the ever-present mechanisms in which consensus is formed or, as Catherine Labio has recently put it, ‘origins are not just past, but also present. They remain encoded in our mind, which retains the traces of its modifications.’80 I would add that, by linking the sublime imagination to ignorance and by assigning a more vivid presence of the sublime to the minds that are not entirely governed by reason, that is, the minds of those who have not yet achieved full access to literacy and the law (the plebeians, children, women; SN, 412–72), Vico suggests that the sublime manifestations of the imagination are the sole forces able to create consensus across class and gender. Thus, in addition to the historical and the psychological, there is a social dimension to Vichian origins that tightly links aesthetics and politics. For Vico, however, the perceived uniformity of the poetic characters – the result of the sublime way of thinking – is not socially constructed and imposed. Rather, it is a spontaneous, shared interpretation of the surrounding world, fundamentally based on sense perceptions as shaped by primitive affects. Evidently, in his treatment of the Homeric question, Vico begins to develop a theory of folk poetry as the natural mode of expression of the people and as the true articulation of their thoughts and customs. Such a theory seems to imply the notion of a collective mind, of an organic Volk sharing common thought structures that produce common customs and institutions.81 We know that this theory, in Herder’s later inflection, was fervently embraced by the advocates of linguistic nationalism. Assuming the rich long-standing discussion on Vico and Herder,82 I want here to emphasize that (pace Isaiah Berlin) Vico’s senso comune, in contrast to Herder’s individual Volksseele, is not the unique and separate character of an individual people but rather a form of judgment that is immanent in disparate manifestations and therefore guarantees con-

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tinuity among the different historical forms of human communities.83 Vico’s senso comune is ‘a judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race’ (SN, 142). It is based on a primary sensory and imaginative experience of the outside world and is common to all human groups. Ideally, given the same conditions, individuals and nations will have the same sense response and create the same images and ultimately the same institutions. Herder instead tends to draw attention to the uniqueness and irreducibility of each Volksseele, which contains its own peculiar ideal of perfection, completely independent of all comparison with the Seelen or the characters of other peoples. In Herders’ words, ‘Germans cannot become Greeks or Romans or ancient Hebrews.’84 Vico would have probably agreed with such a statement. Yet he also believed that different nations living through the same historical stage will necessarily display more similarities than differences; for instance, the early heroic Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Italians share the same mode of perception of their primitive surroundings. Vico’s theoretical view of nations as autarchic organisms that develop according to internal laws does not imply the uniqueness and untranslatability of their cultures, which are instead fundamental both to the myth of the genius of language and to the later Romantic vision of Herder. On the contrary, it serves as the foundation of his theory of the common principles (‘princìpi,’ that is, both beginnings and fundamental laws of development) of all nations.85 Indeed, only by showing that different peoples had developed the same institutions and undergone the same historical courses without ever coming into contact with each other was Vico able to establish his science of the common nature of nations. Furthermore, in their reactions to the French idea of universal progress Vico and Herder point in different directions that reflect different preoccupations. As he writes in a letter to Gherardo degli Angioli, Vico is worried about ‘a philosophy that professes to kill all faculties of the mind derived by the body, and above all imagination’ (‘che professa ammortire tutte le facoltà dell’animo che li provvengono dal corpo, e sopra tutte quella d’immaginare,’ Opere, vol. 1, 316). He is particularly concerned with the disintegration of a humanitas that is embodied in the common Latin language as well as in all lingue madri (for example, German). In fact, one could even say that Vico shared the French philosophes’ idea of a universal humanity, though for them it was based on reason, for Vico on common sense.86 Vico worried about the growing gap between intellectuals and masses, a gap that proved fatal in the

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failure of the Neapolitan republic (1799), and believed that one could look back to the beginnings of human communities in order to recover the faculties that are shared by all and are lost in the process of civilization. Herder also proposed to look back to origins, but he wanted to retrieve the authentic, unique cultures of individual nations that, in his view, had been disintegrating as a result of the universal ‘Frenchifying’ trend. Despite these significant differences with later Romantic thought, Vico’s interpretation of Homer as the expression of the specific culture of an entire population in a particular historical moment contributed a fundamental element to the development of historism. His understanding of the sublime as an anthropological rather than merely rhetorical category provided a strong foundation for the crucial eighteenth-century transition from aesthetic historism to general historism.87 At the same time, when Vico revised his parallel drawn between the Homeric poems and Dante’s Comedia, on the basis of his new understanding of popular poetry in the last edition of Scienza nuova, changing the premises developed in De costantia iurisprudentis (1721),88 he contributed a vital component to the Italian national movement – the myth of a natural, original commonality among all Italic populations. In his juridical work Vico presented Dante’s role in the creation of the Italian language as fully analogous to Homer’s. Homer confronted the extreme linguistic poverty of his own age by collecting idioms from all over Greece, ultimately creating the most sublime poetry in the Greek language. Likewise, Dante, born during the return of barbarism and in the age of the ‘mute idiom,’ created his poetic language by collecting native ways of speaking from the various populations of medieval Italy. In De costantia iurisprudentis Dante is presented as the absolute original Italian poet (‘ex sese primum natus, ex sese quoque poeta factus absolutissimus,’ OG, 471) because he literally made (‘poiein’) his own language and thus, like Homer, rose above the mute barbarism of his time. Vico maintains his conviction about Dante’s mixed language in the first Scienza nuova (1725): Come certamente Dante Alighieri, nel cominciarvisi a mitigar la barbarie, andò raccogliendo la locuzione della sua Divina Comedia da tutti i dialetti d’Italia. Onde, come nella Grecia non provenne poeta maggior d’Omero, così nell’Italia non nacque poeta più sublime di Dante, perché ebbero entrambi la fortuna di sortire incomparabili ingegni nel finire l’età poetica d’entrambe le nazioni. (SNP, 312)

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[As certainly, Dante Alighieri went gathering the words and phrases of his Divine Comedy from all the dialects of Italy, when barbarity began to abate. Thus, as in Greece there was no greater poet than Homer, so in Italy no poet more sublime than Dante was ever born, since both had the fortune of being endowed by nature with incomparable ingegni when the poetic age of both nations was coming to a close.] (SNP, 312)

In these lines Vico has not yet developed his theory of Homer as an imaginative character created by the Greek people, but he presents both Homer and Dante as historical figures of transition who usher in a new age by articulating in their vernaculars the new values that institute their nations. This theory is substantially expanded in the letter to the young poet Gherardo degli Angioli (26 December 1725), which elaborates the famous fable of the Italian Middle Age as a violent and ‘mute’ era that gave birth to Dante as ‘the poet,’ or the actual maker of the heroic language. Vico’s letter was written to encourage Gherardo, whose poetic manners were far from the ‘delicate’ taste of his time and closer to the ‘coarse’ Dante.89 At the same time, the letter praises the creative force of barbarism and claims that all of the greatest inventions of humanity occurred in barbarous times, in which the ingenium was stronger than subtle reason. In order to sustain his mythical characterization of the Middle Ages as the return of barbarism and the fertile ground for Dante’s sublime ingenium, Vico does not shy away from distorting a few facts, including the easily verifiable dates of technological inventions. He exaggerates the ferocity and anarchy of the factions (the Guelphs and the Ghibellines) by making them responsible for pushing society back to the conditions of the primitive woods (‘selve’), for opening the door to foreign invasions, and for turning Italy into a new Babel in which communication happened only by mute signs.90 Vico’s account of the Italian Middle Ages also insists on the role of religion as the only force that could ultimately control anarchic bestiality. He presents the chierici as analogous to the original fathers-priests and identifies their monopoly over language, an impoverished and bastardized Latin, and their absolute power as expressed in ecclesiastic orders. Being born in the age of a ‘fiera e feroce barbarie,’ Dante necessarily possessed a powerful ingenium that allowed him to create the language that would empower the Italian people, by collecting the vernacular voices from all Italian populations (‘Per tale povertà di volgar favella, Dante … dovette raccogliere una lingua da tutti i popoli d’Italia, come Omero’).91 Finally, in order to strengthen the analogy between Homer

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and Dante and their transitional function, Vico introduces the comparison between the atrocities described in the Iliad and those presented in the Inferno, between the peaceful and patient manners of the souls in Purgatorio and Paradiso and the ‘heroic patience’ of Ulysses.92 The letter to Degli Angioli definitively ties Dante’s sublime creativity to the barbarism of his age. Yet even more significant is Vico’s revision of the Dante-Homer parallel, in the Discoverta del vero Dante ovvero Nuovi princìpi di critica dantesca – also known as Giudizio sopra Dante and written, according to Croce, around 1729. Anticipating in its title the third book of Scienza nuova, on the ‘vero Omero,’ and quoting the subtitle of the whole work (‘nuovi principi’), this essay announces itself as an altogether new direction of Dante criticism. Vico himself has changed his mind on Dante’s language and now defines Dante’s work as ‘a pure and vast source of beautiful Tuscan sayings,’ vigorously attacking the ‘false opinion’ according to which ‘Dante gathered his sayings (“i parlari”) from all the dialects of Italy.’93 He never acknowledges his own earlier support of this mistaken view and attributes it instead to ‘sixteenth-century scholars of the Trecento Tuscan language.’94 In Vico’s narrative those scholars, noticing that many of Dante’s idioms could be found only in the spoken dialects of other Italian populations but not in the works of writers, had wrongly assumed that Dante had gathered his idioms from disparate dialects and employed them in his Comedia. Against this view, Vico argues that, since there were very few writers of the vulgar tongue in the other cities, Dante would have had to travel to all those cities in order to learn those sayings – an impossibility. He adds that ‘in those times Florence must have had the majority of the sayings shared by all the other cities of Italy; otherwise the Italian tongue would not have been the same as the Florentine tongue (‘Doveva pure in que’ tempi Firenze avere la maggior parte de’ parlari comuni con tutte le altre città dell’Italia: altrimenti l’italiana favella non sarebbe stata comune anco alla fiorentina’).95 In this oddly circular argument Vico assumes that the language of Florence possessed the most part of the sayings held in common with all other cities of Italy, assuming an Italian speech (‘italiana favella’) that expressed the natural uniformity of the Italians of the Middle Ages, a speech that was and remained refracted in all Italian vernaculars, and particularly in the Florentine idiom. Like Varchi, Vico understates the differences among the dialects and conflates the Italian language with the Florentine tongue by asserting that the latter had preserved most of the shared elements and therefore an original Italian common core. Vico even appeals to the Ac-

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cademia della Crusca for a true understanding of the question, asking them to send throughout Italy a catalogue of all idioms apparently foreign to the Tuscan language in order to discern which ones are still used and in what ways. Onde sarebbe mestieri agli accademici della Crusca che mandassero per l’Italia un catalogo di sì fatte voci e parlari, e dagli ordini bassi delle città, che meglio de’ nobili e degli uomini di corte, e molto più da’ contadini, che meglio de’ più bassi ordini della città conservano i costumi ed i linguaggi antichi. [Hence it would be necessary for the Accademia della Crusca to send throughout Italy a catalog of such words and sayings, especially among the lower orders of the cities, who preserve the ancient customs and languages better than the noblemen and the men of courts, and then among the peasants, who actually preserve even better than the lower orders of the cities such customs and languages.]96

This passage clearly revives several ideas of Renaissance linguistics discussed in my first chapter, such as the priority of spoken living idioms over written languages and the hypothesis that the unique character of a language is easier to discern in popular sayings and proverbs than in the high idiom.97 Vico’s insistence that the lower social status of speakers, and not merely their geographical isolation, should be the main criterion for research recalls Varchi’s idea to send out among the Florentine populace Italy’s writers who wanted to learn good Italian. Yet Vico’s recommendation emphasizes antiquity and, more importantly, resonates with his suggestive narrative about the birth of vulgar language from the people. It explicitly poses the people (of all Italian cities, not only Florence) as the carrier of Italian linguistic identity and confers on them an entirely new dignity. Even in those years when the authority of the Accademia della Crusca was often contested, it was certainly a bold idea to send out among the volgo the scholars of the academy, who usually picked each individual word from carefully selected literary texts in order to enforce what they viewed as the authentic original language. Furthermore, to make Dante the only sublime writer who had preserved that original repertory of Italian heroic sayings was definitely a new beginning. Indeed, it questioned the contemporary revival of traditional literary language advocated by the Arcadia movement in the form of a return to Petrarca, whom Vico describes in the Discoverta

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as delicate, a term that in his aesthetic and philosophical system is akin to decadent.98 It challenged the taste and sensibility of a time in which Italian literati – perhaps only with the exception of Gian Vincenzo Gravina – perceived Dante’s language as rough and unrefined and, as such, an unviable model.99 Finally, in the Discoverta, Dante is no longer the pure self-made, solitary poet of De costantia iurisprudentis but instead a spirit ‘infused with great public virtues, above all, magnanimity and justice,’ shunning all ambitious, effeminate, and delicate manners (952).100 He is the sublime author who recorded the original poetic language, the shared signs of the Italian people, and therefore the authority that established their senso comune. Drawing on Longinus’s characterization of the sublime, which brings together public virtue and passionate language, Vico exploits here the political element of this category in full. Transported within the frame of the last version of Scienza nuova (1744), Vico’s tale of Dante and his comparison with Homer acquire additional meanings due to his heavily syncretistic use of the term poetic, which, as Angus Fletcher has shown, collapses the homo sapiens with the homo faber (the ‘poet’ and the ‘maker’) by turning all human activities and achievements into instances of poetry.101 The ‘master key’ of the work offers a crucial example: Principio di tal’origini e di lingue e di lettere si truova essere stato ch’i primi popoli delle gentilità, per una dimostrata necessità di natura, furon poeti, i quali parlarono per caratteri poetici; la qual discoverta, ch’è la chiave maestra di questa Scienza, ci ha costo la ricerca ostinata di quasi tutta la nostra vita letteraria, perocché tal natura poetica di tai primi uomini, in queste nostre ingentilite nature, egli è affatto impossibile immaginare e a gran pena ci è permesso d’intendere. (SN, 34) [We find that the principle of these origins both of language and of letters lies in the fact that the first gentile peoples, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters. This discovery, which is the master key of this Science, has cost us the persistent research of almost all our literary life, because with our civilized natures we moderns cannot at all imagine and can understand only by great toil the poetic nature of these first men.] (SN, 34)

Vico’s ‘discovery’ creates the perfect framework for his repudiation of a purely subjective theory of authorship and authority.102 Here the people of Greece are the true poets and authors both of the imaginative

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characters contained in the Homeric texts and of the character ‘Homer’ himself. Of course, Vico could not contest Dante’s historicity and declare him too an imaginative character created by the Italian people. Yet his new vision of the Homeric texts as ‘true and serious’ history inevitably affects his understanding of Dante as the first historian of Italy, the ‘Tuscan Homer who sang only historical events’ (SN, 786). The characterization of the Italian Middle Ages as a ricorso of barbarism offers the appropriate stage for the elevation of Dante to sublime poet, the ‘maker’ of a new beginning. At the same time, it offers the proof of the maravigliosa corrispondenza between all barbarous ages (SN, 564). Vico’s change of mind about Dante’s Italian vernacular (from Italian koine to ‘pure Tuscan’) displays the same oscillations that have characterized the long-standing interpretation of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia and his description of the vulgare illustre.103 However, Vico’s revision has either been discussed as a mere footnote in the traditional questione della lingua or has been totally ignored, as if it were a detail that does not affect Vico’s thought on language in any significant way.104 Yet, considered within the context of the struggle over representations of the nation, Vico’s final decision to regard Dante as the Tuscan Homer ultimately not only supported the claim that the first Italian written vernacular was a pure, unmixed language, against the hypothesis of a composite idiom assembled from fragments of different dialects or born under the impact of foreign dominations and tongues,105 but it also sustained the proud belief in an original cultural unity of the Italian peninsula, a perspective that also shaped Vico’s revisions concerning the foreign substrata (Egyptian and Greek) of Italy’s ancient cultures. Dante’s own view of the Italian vernacular as the expression of shared ethical values – those ‘very simple features, of manners and appearance and speech’ (‘simplicissima signa et morum et habituum et locutionis,’ De vulgari eloquentia, 1, XVI, 3) by which, as Dante himself put it, the actions of the Italian people could be judged – backed Vico’s semiotic definition of national identity. Dante, however, referred to signa produced by doctores illustres (1, XV, 6) like himself, by men who excelled by virtue both of their ingenio and of their knowledge (‘excellentes ingenio et scientia,’ 2, I, 5). Vico instead emphasized the primitive, sublime, and uniform quality of those signs in order to endow them with the same qualities of all natural tongues and to claim Dante’s language as the original language of a nation. Vico’s new fable of the Italian Middle Ages and of Dante as the Tuscan Homer is certainly more consistent both with the explanation of

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the origin of articulate languages that was offered in the last edition of Scienza nuova and with its claim that the ‘poetic’ language was not the refined product of individual poets, who created with it ‘false myths’ (conscious fictions), but rather the primitive language of the people, the medium of their first written norms, and a document of their true history. Vico’s revised account of Dante also reflects his distaste for mixed languages, which he characterizes as deceptive cognitive tools because the history of their metaphorical meanings is unknown to the general speaker as well as to the scholar (SN, 445). Declaring Dante’s written Italian vernacular a pure language meant not only validating it as a reliable source for historical enquiry but also transfiguring Dante’s Comedia into the true and original national narrative – a foundational myth. Although Vico’s change of mind about Dante appears motivated by questions of consistency, his account of the self-creation of the people through the volgare (a birth that coincided with their demand for written laws and with their recognition of their own sacred nature) bound the vernacular language to the notion of sovereignty. Projected onto the background of the plebeians’ emancipation through the vernacular, his new fable of Dante acquires startling political force. As a sublime idiom (sublime in Vico’s own redefinition as ‘popolaresco’), Dante’s language was a language of the people that could speak to and for the people, appealing to their common sense, and thus restore the societal bond threatened by the new ‘barbarism of reason.’ If sublime imagination belonged not only to the primitive human beings but also – and above all – to those who were from time to time disenfranchised (plebeians, women, children, and illiterate people in general) because the laws were not expressed in their language, Dante’s sublime vernacular had not exhausted its potential. As the voice of the people, it presented an alternative to both the modern trend towards an abstract philosophical language (French) and the fashion of highly sophisticated literary idioms (the baroque and the Italian Arcadia), which risked alienating the volgo and tossing societies into anarchy.106 Cultural homogeneity, sublime (popular) quality, instrument of political empowerment – Vico’s characterization of Dante’s language provided those who read it from a nationalist perspective with all the ingredients for a recipe of national identity.107 Whatever Vico’s political perspective might have been – reactionary, as Mark Lilla for instance has argued, or progressive, as numerous Marxist interpreters have implied (I myself am inclined to view Vico as a conservative thinker) – there is no doubt that his reflections on the

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relationship between language and community articulated an emancipatory and inclusive vision.108 His vision absorbed, as we have seen, several lessons proceeding from the international debate on the genius of language. Indeed it appropriated the inclusive element of the representation of vernaculars but also anticipated the dangers of a reified language and of a deterministic understanding of its link to community. At the same time, Vico’s representation of Italian, in conjunction with his preference for pure idioms (albeit explained by scientific criteria), was open to being used, or misused, as an endorsement of the monolingual nation. In conclusion, I would like to suggest that Vico’s own choice of language is not irrelevant to the issues at stake in the genius debate. I believe that his decision to write his major work in a peculiar Italian that adhered to his sublime princìpi of the nation (both ‘principles’ and ‘beginnings’), together with his determination to turn around (‘rovesciare’) traditional historical narratives, was also an attempt to mark and define Italianness in his own way. As is well known, in the course of his revisions of Scienza nuova Vico accentuated the syncretic element of his thought style, for instance by offering different points of access to his science – visual (the ‘dipintura’), geometric or rationalist (the principles, postulates, and corollaries), and poetic (the figurative style and myths) – that targeted different modes of perception and understanding, potentially integrating different sensibilities and ideologies. He modified his rhetorical style, as we know from the detailed analyses of Fubini and Battistini, by accentuating the expressive and figurative elements both in his syntactic constructions and in his narrative style in order to achieve a greater sense of pathos.109 In his attempt to move away from the refinement of the Italian Arcadia as well as from what he saw as the excessive abstractedness of rationalist prose, Vico created his unique language of affections. A language with such features, recalling the heroic tropes, not only begot consensus, as he believed, but also mimicked the language of beginnings. It is likely that Vico felt more and more that he himself had to put forward a model of expression and communication that would be able to counter the trend towards cultural and political disintegration. With the creation of his peculiar style he attempted perhaps to transform himself from a rigorous professor of rhetoric, teaching and writing in a perfectly polished Latin, into one of the new poets or makers of a novel Italy. The case study presented in the next chapter discusses the original contribution to the controversy on the genius of language by Melchiorre

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Cesarotti, a writer and philosopher who sharply criticized Vico’s idea that folk poetry was the product of an entire people (the crazy idea of a ‘Vesuvian brain,’ Cesarotti commented, alluding to the volcano in Vico’s city of Naples), and convincingly challenged linguistic purism. Nevertheless, Cesarotti learned precisely from Vico, as the footnotes of his translation of The Poems of Ossian document, that universal human values exist only in their different historical manifestations and that these differences do not necessarily entail the untranslatability of cultures or the incompatibility of national characters.

4 Translating Genius: Cesarotti, Ossian, and the Question of National Character

In our age of migrations, cultural exchanges and shifts, the question of the possible and necessary translatability of cultures is essential. Wolf Lepenies, The Translatability of Cultures

Long before Simonde de Sismondi discredited the fatalistic connection between the miserable conditions of Italians and their southern climate (1807–13),1 Melchiorre Cesarotti rejected the ‘natural’ causes of the genius of language, that is, climate and the people’s innate psychological disposition, challenging many entrenched ideas, in his Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue (1785). In this chapter I explore the relations between Cesarotti’s original reflections on the genius of language and his experience as the translator of James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian (1760– 3). I analyse the ways in which the accepted link between the genius of language and national character affected theories and practices of translation and reinforced both national stereotypes and allegedly universal moral and aesthetic standards. I show that Cesarotti (1730–1808), a prolific translator from Greek, French, and English, experienced firsthand the limits and possibilities of languages, soon realizing the extent to which the approaches to translation that were usually presented as opposites (for example, literal or free translation) were actually both dependent on an understanding, almost fetishized, of the genius of language and its permanence. Furthermore, he discovered that both approaches tended to suppress differences and blatantly hid the internal diversity of cultures. Cesarotti’s experience with The Poems of Ossian constitutes an ideal object of analysis not only because it reveals the interferences between

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the concept of the genius of language and the ideas of translation but also because of the circumstances of the inception and publication of Macpherson’s text.2 In fact, the controversial status of Macpherson’s Ossian, which was regarded by some readers as a genuine and rare document of an exhausted nation and its disappearing culture (as Macpherson had claimed) but by others as a skilful fake, forced Cesarotti to reflect on the relations of language, culture, and nation and to come to terms with issues of authenticity and invention, the very principles that were shaping different nationalisms. Thus Cesarotti’s lifelong occupation with Ossian (1763, 1772, 1801) led him to challenge the accepted view of the genius of language as a stable and untranslatable element that reflected the unique character of the nation, an insuperable barrier between national cultures. It prompted him to write his celebrated essay on language, Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue, and to produce the original theoretical distinction between the ‘grammatical’ and the ‘rhetorical’ genius, which ultimately influenced his understanding of national character and his idea of the nation. In his attempt to debunk the fetish of the genius of language and to prevent nationalists from monopolizing the project of the nation, Cesarotti rescued the classical republican vocabulary that emphasized freedom (of the individual writers) and the possibilities of naturalization (of words), articulating an inclusive image of language and ultimately of the nation. It is my contention that, while revising his version of Ossian and modifying his theoretical views on language and translation, Cesarotti began to consider the idea of universality beyond its opposition to cultural relativism and perceived both universals and the nation as processes rather than a priori givens, an insight that has been revalued in today’s discussion of universal values and the reinterpretation of the Enlightenment. Although a rather obscure figure today, Cesarotti was so renowned in his own day that writers from all over Europe – including Germaine de Stäel, the eager observer of national characters and literatures – visited his villa in Selvaggiano almost as a religious pilgrimage. He was one of the first acolytes and the mediator of the Ossian cult in Italy, which would soon turn into the cult and imitation of his Ossian, or cesarottismo.3 His most prominent admirer was Napoleon Bonaparte, who read Ossian in Cesarotti’s Italian version and eagerly sent for Cesarotti during his first occupation of Padua,4 naming him one of the chiefs of the new government and later assigning him a lucrative pension. Legend has it that, during his last days on Saint Helena, Napoleon’s favorite book remained Cesarotti’s Poesie di Ossian.5 These poems enjoyed immense

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popularity both in Italy and abroad, prompting Stendhal to encourage poets to emulate Cesarotti, who had been able to produce an Ossian that was far more beautiful than the original (‘suivez les traces de Cesarotti; il nous a donné un Ossian, que les Anglais eux-mêmes viennent étudier avec respect, tant il est plus beau que l’original’).6 In Italy in particular, their impact on contemporary poetical language was exceptional and inaugurated the Italian Romantic idiom.7 The Italian patriot and exile Ugo Foscolo secured Cesarotti’s fame in Britain by dedicating the first of six portraits of contemporary Italian authors, written at the request of London publisher John Murray, to Cesarotti.8 In his youth, Foscolo himself was an overly sentimental Ossian enthusiast;9 in his 1818 portrait he maintained that the ‘harmonious’ and ‘soft’ verses of the Poesie di Ossian ‘breathe an ardent spirit, altogether new,’ constituting ‘an incontrovertible proof of the genius of Cesarotti.’10 Foscolo ranks both Cesarotti’s Ossian translations and his Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue among the Italian classics, although he criticizes Cesarotti’s opportunistic political conduct as ‘not distinguished for its constancy.’11 Foscolo was far from being the only famous admirer.12 In his Vita, noted playwright Vittorio Alfieri writes that Cesarotti’s Ossian ‘struck’ and ‘possessed’ him (‘questi furono i versi sciolti che davvero mi piacquero, mi colpirono e m’invasarono’), declaring that he owed his own art of tragic blank verse ‘to no one else but Virgil, Cesarotti and [his] own self’ (‘non … da altri che da Virgilio, dal Cesarotti, e da me medesimo’).13 Alfieri even dramatized thirteen poems from Cesarotti’s Ossian, perhaps as an exercise to develop his own tragic idiom.14 Finally, Giacomo Leopardi not only adapted cadences and motifs of Cesarotti’s Ossianic verse in his own poetry, but, as we shall see in my next chapter, he also applied Cesarotti’s republican vocabulary to his own reflections on language and the nation. Discovering the Celtic Character Scholars agree that a combination of factors promoted the popularity of Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian.15 They accentuate the renewed international attention to origins and to nature in its pure state, which balanced the eighteenth-century ideology of progress and control of nature, and emphasize the emergence of the new sentimental taste, expressed, for instance, in Richardson’s successful novels. These two trends combined in the search of the modernes for autochthonous cultural roots independent of the high classical tradition ubiquitously absorbed by the most

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disparate European societies. Such cultural circumstances, they believe, prepared the ground for the Ossian cult in Europe and the flourishing of the folkloristic discourse.16 In particular, the literary critic André Lefevere regards Macpherson’s publication more as a challenge to the rigid aesthetic and social norms of late Augustan England than as the self-proclaimed act of patriotism meant to rescue his own cultural tradition. Lefevere, who recommends evaluating literary translations from the point of view of their function within the cultural system (polysystem hypothesis),17 maintains that with their ‘pseudo-translations,’ writers tried to bestow respectability on their alternative poetics by claiming – somewhat paradoxically at first – that that poetics had roots in a long and venerable tradition, ‘unjustly forgotten.’18 In Lefevere’s opinion, the fact that the challenge to the accepted ideology came from the outside granted both the selfdefined translator and his work a relative immunity since, having been produced outside the ‘native’ system, the work could not be judged according to native standards. Regardless of Macpherson’s intention, his publication of The Poems of Ossian vigorously furthered an alternative poetics to the neoclassical taste.19 The violent and lasting polemics following the publication of Ossian, however, contradict Lefevere’s assumption of immunity. In his introduction to Fingal (1761–2), Macpherson appears to follow the strategy elucidated by Lefevere, lamenting ‘the prejudices of the present age against the ancient inhabitants of Britain, who are thought to have been incapable of the generous sentiment to be met with in the poems of Ossian.’20 Instead of addressing the aesthetic criteria motivating the rejection of his work by literati such as Samuel Johnson, Macpherson reflects on the incommensurability of the two worlds, attacking the ethnic and social prejudices of civilized nations: ‘If our fathers had not so much wealth, they had certainly fewer vices than the present age … the general poverty of a nation has not the same influence that the indigence of individuals, in an opulent country, has upon manners of the community. The idea of meanness, which is now connected with a narrow fortune, had its rise after commerce had thrown too much property into the hands of a few’ (The Poems of Ossian and Related Works [Oss], 36). In this passage one can easily recognize the Rousseauian myth of the natural goodness of man and his corruption through civilization. Yet this mythical element does not weaken the political force of Macpherson’s words. The painful sense of privation, which causes discontent and avidity, arises from a disadvantaged na-

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tion’s encounter with wealthier nations and their subsequent exploitation of the unjust distribution of goods and rights. Such passages stirred the political emotions of both Scottish and British patriots. National history and culture were certainly central concerns to both Macpherson and his readers, and one cannot overlook the fact that Macpherson’s work, as we know it today,21 was part of a much larger effort to preserve and codify the Gaelic cultural tradition, an effort inspired by the contemporary international interest in national cultures and characters. In his numerous prefaces, Macpherson repeatedly suggests to his readers that Ossian’s compositions should be valued as traces of the origin of the Scottish nation as well as for their poetic merit: ‘The history of those nations which originally possessed the North of Europe, is little known … The vanity of the Romans induced them to consider the nations beyond the pale of their empire as barbarians: and consequently their history unworthy of being investigated. Some men … having early imbibed their idea of exalted manners from the Greek and Romans writers, … scarcely ever afterwards have the fortitude to allow any dignity of character to any other ancient people’ (Oss, 205). In this passage from the preface to Temora (1763), written to answer the doubts and accusations prompted by his first publication of the Fragments (1760), Macpherson expresses his intention of restoring dignity of character to the Celts. In his belief that the antiquity of nations is ‘founded on the authority of poems’ (Oss, 49), Macpherson shows his keen awareness of the way in which national myths are built. Aesthetic and political preoccupations are closely linked in the European vicissitudes of Ossian’s reception. Recent trends in cultural studies have emphasized the role that national identity played in the popularity of Ossian and have encouraged a substantial critical revision of Macpherson’s Ossian.22 Critics Dafydd Moore and Fiona Stafford have analysed contemporary reactions to Macpherson in British publications, calling attention to the inevitable political significance of a work that identified civic virtue and delicate sentiment with the Celtic population, whose language was proscribed by the government. Even fifty years after the poems’ first publication, the political implications of their reception can still be discerned in Matthew Arnold’s doubleedged interpretation: lecturing on Celtic literature, Arnold characterized its spirit with the Ossianic phrase, ‘They came forth to war, but they always fell,’ accentuating the military ineptitude of Ossian’s characters. At the same time, Arnold called for the extinction of Welsh as a spoken language and for the institution of a Celtic chair at Oxford, an

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initiative that would sanction the tongue as a dead language.23 However, as Moore rightly warns, it is an ideological oversimplification to either declare Macpherson a Scottish nationalist who indirectly supported the Scottish militia campaign of the late 1750s, or accuse him of ‘misrepresenting the Gael and his history in order to legitimate the cultural suppression and assimilation of the Gaeltachd’24 carried out in the second half of the eighteenth century. Outside of Great Britain, the issue of national identity particularly appealed to German intellectuals. Ossian’s characters proved that, in addition to the light-hearted naivety of the ancient Greeks, melancholy too was an Ur-sentiment and, in particular, the natural disposition of northern people confronted with the overwhelming power of nature. In his ‘Dissertation Concerning the Antiquity of the Poems of Ossian,’ Macpherson himself states that ‘the manners and customs of the two nations [Celtic and German] were similar’ (Oss, 44).25 Younger German intellectuals, weary of classicist rules and of imitating classical authors, searched for their original identity in Macpherson’s ‘translations,’ recognizing in them their own sentimental attitude and melancholic sensibility. With Ossian, these characteristics suddenly gained a pedigree and the authority of antiquity.26 In contrast to the manifest interest of German poets in the issue of national identity, Cesarotti’s first enthusiasm – at least as documented in his letter to Macpherson – appears to be motivated exclusively by aesthetic interest. Only with time did Cesarotti, recognizing that he needed to study and convey the specific cultural context of the poems, draw closer to the Celtic character in order to understand and mediate more clearly the significance of Ossian. Cesarotti, a classical philologist and a member of the neoclassical Arcadia, could not easily identify with the ethnic origins of some primitive people from northern Europe. For him, the encounter with Ossian was, first of all, the ‘discovery … of a new poetical world’ (‘découverte … d’un nouveau monde poétique’),27 the inspiring literary experience of a young scholar and poet who, until that encounter, had written in the poetical idiom of the Arcadia. One can barely recognize Cesarotti’s moderate, usually ironical personality in the enthusiastic tone of his letter to Macpherson (as early as 1763) in which he conveys his intention of translating Ossian: Non je ne puis revenir de mon ravissement. Votre Ossian m’a tout-à-fait enthousiasmé. Morven est devenu mon Parnasse, et Lora mon Hippocrène. Je rêve toujours à vos Héros; je m’entretiens avec ces admirables enfants

Cesarotti, Ossian, and the Question of National Character 151 du chant; je me promene avec eux de coteau en coteau. (Cesarotti, Epistolario [Ep], vol. 1, 10) [I cannot recover from my ravishment. Your Ossian has completely stirred me. Morven has become my Parnassus, Lora my Hyppocrenes. I dream all the time of your heroes; I converse with those admirable children of ancient song; I walk with them from place to place.]

Cesarotti, who had never hidden his impatience with the Italian partisans of the anciens, seems to have found a new home, new fellow men, and a new aesthetic ‘religion’ (the letter is signed ‘votre confrère en Ossian’). Like all European intellectuals of his time who were mesmerized by Ossian, Cesarotti saw in the poems – as he wrote to Macpherson – ‘a sublimity and simplicity that show the strongest imprint of nature’ (‘une grandeur et une simplicité qui portent en soi la plus forte empreinte de la nature,’ Ep, vol. 1, 13). Like all Ossian enthusiasts, Cesarotti welcomed the change of perspective that Macpherson’s ‘discovery’ brought about to the stilted querelle des anciens et des modernes. As Cesarotti argues in his letter, Ossian’s poems might well corroborate the opinion that ancient poets are superior to modern, but at the same time their utter ‘irregularity’ confutes the classicist rules and canon. In Cesarotti’s view, the poems simply show that ‘poetry of nature and sentiment is superior to poetry of reflection and esprit’ (‘la Poésie de nature et de sentiment est au dessus de la Poésie de reflexion et d’esprit,’ Ep, vol. 1, 10). Even when mentioning his intention of translating the poems in blank verse, Cesarotti emphasizes his literary interest and speaks as a poet who hopes ‘to absorb better the spirit of his model and to appropriate its manners’ (‘de me remplir mieux l’esprit de mon modèle, et de m’approprier ses manières,’ Ep, vol. 1, 11) and to prove to all conservative fellow philologists – as he wrote later to his friend Michael van Goes – that ‘Ossian is the greatest genius that ever appeared on the poetic stage’ (‘Ossian è il più gran genio che sia mai comparso sulla scena poetica,’ Ep, vol. 1, 136). While working on his translation, however, Cesarotti began to consider the peculiarity of the Caledonian national character as a direct cause of the difficulty of his mediation. It was an utterly new experience to him since, while translating classical and French works, he had always criticized translators that adduced the genius of language or respect for the national character to justify their adoption of classical

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tropes or their rejection of French manners and idioms. In his Ragionamento sopra l’origine e i progressi dell’arte poetica (1762), Cesarotti indirectly defends his own Voltaire translations by attacking writers who uncritically embrace national values and customs: they may well become popular because they flatter the taste of their fellow citizens, he argues, but they are responsible for impairing their countrymen’s ability to recognize ‘nature’ and ‘truth’ ‘when [the latter are] not dressed in the fashion of their own country’ (‘se non abbigliata alla foggia del suo paese’).28 At the same time, judging Latin and Greek translations, Cesarotti warns against the ‘universal despotism’ (‘despotismo universale,’ Dal Muratori al Cesarotti [MC], 64) of one single national taste over all other nations, interestingly alluding to the cult of classical authors in Italy rather than to the recent dominance of contemporary French culture, a culture that he in fact endorsed.29 Yet, when it came to presenting his Ossian to the Italian audience, he felt that the particular manners and customs of the Celtic people could not be ignored. They constituted the major obstacle to the aesthetic enjoyment of Ossian since they were ‘the source of a host of expressions, manners, and attitudes’ that would impede the reader at each step.30 In an attempt to overcome this obstacle, Cesarotti put together a large apparatus of prefaces, ‘dissertations,’ and notes in which he often draws on theories of national character. He prefaces his second and third editions with a long ‘Preliminary Essay on the Caledonians,’ which contains all the information he could gather from contemporary literature as well as from the poems. He derives alleged ‘Caledonian customs’ primarily from the Ossianic texts themselves, relying on other scholars (primarily Hugh Blair, but also Macpherson) for information about political history.31 This scholarly essay, however, also contains unprecedented moments of identification with the northern people. In one very personal moment, for instance, Cesarotti admits that he does not possess any first-hand knowledge of Caledonian history and offers his own explanation for the ruin of Ossian’s people, reasoning that ‘some chief from the confining lands invaded Morven and took the command from Ossian’ (Cesarotti, Poesie di Ossian [PO], vol. 1, 71). That would explain why the poet, whom the poems reveal to be a valorous soldier and the son of King Fingal, never presents himself as the head of the nation (‘capo della nazione’) but instead offers the image of himself as a ‘wretched, lonely and deserted old man’ (PO, vol. 1, 71). Cesarotti's reflections on the causes of Ossian’s miserable condition assume a personal resonance as he discusses the misfortune of ‘living

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in a weak and decayed generation of men, very different from that of his forefathers, and deprived both of heroes and of poets’ (PO, vol. 1, 71). The brief, sudden change of tone from the dry scholarly idiom to a distinctly emotional language hints at his identification with that political misfortune. It is not surprising, then, that his pathetic image of the bard as a warrior and a poet living in unlucky times appealed to a later generation of writers, shaping the self-stylization of patriotic poets such as Alfieri and Foscolo as well as the bitterly disenchanted Leopardi. The notion of national characters itself recurs whenever Cesarotti feels that the peculiarities of idioms and situations call for an explanation, especially in the Osservazioni, that is, the annotations following each poem. For instance, commenting on Ossian’s delicate and innocent images of love, Cesarotti defines specific national ways of representing love, before establishing Ossian’s originality: Basta notare la diversità con cui fu trattata questa passione dai poeti delle altre nazioni. L’amore dei Greci e dei Latini è un bisogno fisico e materiale; quello degli Italiani è spirituale; quel dei Francesi bel esprit. L’amore di Ossian … ha per base il sentimento; perciò è tenero e delicato, e il suo linguaggio non è spiritoso ma toccante. Si riferisce ai sensi, ma tra questi sceglie quelli più puri, quali sono la vista e l’udito: quindi non è astratto, né grossolano, ma naturale e gentile. (PO, vol. 1, 175) [It suffices to note how differently this passion has been treated by poets from other nations. The Greek and Latin representation of love shows a physical and material need; the Italian is spiritual; the French bel esprit. Ossian's love … is a sentiment; therefore it is tender and delicate, and its language is not witty but touching. It is related to the senses, but chooses the purest ones, such as sight and hearing; it is neither abstract nor vulgar but natural and gentle.]

Following the contemporary trend of attributing psychological traits to nations, Cesarotti here nationalizes various aspects of love. He seems concerned with rejecting the stereotypes of Italian lasciviousness and effeminacy when he characterizes the Italian’s love as a spiritual love.32 He insists, however, on the superiority of Ossian’s representation of love, the most tender and pure. One would never find an image relating to the sense of touch in Ossian’s poems, he notes approvingly (PO, vol. 1, 175).

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In order to explain cultural diversity, the Osservazioni also draw on Vico’s theories about the first poetical language and its relation to the cultural stages of a nation.33 Vico had argued that in order to interpret any ancient artifact, one had to understand the human nature of that particular time, including its contingent environment. In order to justify the copiousness of comparisons, the lack of abstract concepts, and the personification of natural elements in the Ossianic poetry, Cesarotti quotes Vico’s explanations of how early nations elaborated perceptions through images and similarities, making a virtue of the imperfection and deficiencies of their early languages (PO, vol. 1, 168–9, 174, 223, 226). Although convinced that Ossian was a universal genius, even greater than Homer, Cesarotti came to believe that his poems could be understood only if readers were brought closer to Celtic culture both through the invention of a new, more congenial language and through an external apparatus that familiarized them with the Celtic character. In the course of his study and translation of Ossian, he produced an intricate paratext made up of aesthetic, linguistic, and anthropological reflections, which paved the way for his redefinition of the relationship between language and nation. The clash between his neoclassical sensibility, nourished by French literature, and his fascination with the Ossianic style shattered Cesarotti’s early understanding of universal values and moved him closer to Vico’s perspectivism. However, as we shall see in the next section, Vico’s approach was used by Cesarotti just as a starting point that allowed him to develop his unique interpretation of language and popular poetry as collective blueprints that did not erase individual active involvement. Between Invention and Authenticity: The Poems of Ossian as a Script of Collective Identity The history of the Ossian reception has shown that the belief in the poems’ authenticity constituted the actual condition for their veneration.34 Readers who believed that the poems were authentic remains of the ancient Caledonian culture and the work of an ancient Caledonian author admired their original aesthetic qualities. Those who considered them a falsification, instead, perceived them simply as bad poetry or, in Samuel Johnson’s words, as ‘a mere unconnected rhapsody, a tiresome repetition of some images.’35 The enthusiasm of readers was triggered

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by the emotion of a ‘direct’ encounter with the culture of an ancient nation that was ‘in a great measure incorrupted’ (Oss, 5), as Macpherson states in the preface to the Fragments (1760). Cesarotti’s own position is more complicated. His contemporaries as well as later scholars have counted him among the supporters of the poems’ authenticity. In my view, however, Cesarotti appears more convinced of the aesthetic merits of the Ossianic texts, which for him culminated in their moral value,36 than of their authenticity per se. A close look at his early letter to Macpherson reveals that, initially, he was not at all persuaded of the genuineness of the texts. When discussing the dispute over Ossian’s antiquity, for instance, Cesarotti remarks that Ossian’s delicate sentiment as well as his precise and ‘judicious’ choice of characters ‘seem to announce’ not natural naivety but ‘the most consummate art, one which is able to refine nature without touching it’ (‘semble annoncer l’art le plus consommé, qui sait dépurer la nature sans y toucher,’ Ep, vol. 1, 14). Asking Macpherson for some clarification, Cesarotti seems to encourage a kind of confession by nonchalantly mentioning that ‘people of esprit, to whom the whole dispute is utterly indifferent … would find much more power of spirit in a moderne who had been able to transform himself in Ossian than in Ossian himself’ (‘Il y a des personnes de bon sens, et d’esprit, à qui toute cette dispute est fort indifférente … et qui trouveroient bien plus de force d’esprit dans un moderne qui auroit su se transformer en Ossian, qu’en Ossian lui-même’ Ep, vol. 1, 13). Cesarotti even comes close to impertinence when, at the end of his letter, he asks Macpherson once again whether he is to admire him as ‘a man of lumières and esprit’ or as the ‘greatest painter of nature’ (Ep, vol. 1, 14). Nevertheless, Cesarotti concludes that, to him, the question of the authenticity of the texts is actually irrelevant (‘Qu’ Ossian soit ancien, ou non, il le sera toujours par le style,’ Ep, vol. 1, 14). While Cesarotti’s first response to the issue of authenticity is ambivalent, his later dissertation, included in the 1772 edition of his translation (‘Ragionamento storico-critico intorno le controversie sull’autenticità dei poemi di Ossian’), offers an insight into some of the criteria presumably adopted by Macpherson. Without having access to the sources that have become available in more recent times, Cesarotti anticipates, with surprising perspicacity, assumptions of today’s Ossian scholarship37 and reframes the whole discussion by shifting the question of authenticity from the texts themselves to the poetical voice. First, he resolutely denounces the misunderstandings engendered by both sides:

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In questa controversia, per opinione dell’autore, v’è da una parte e dall’altra confusione ed ambiguità. Macpherson e i suoi difensori o non vollero o non poterono produr senza equivoco i manoscritti desiderati: ma gli avversari che ne facevano così ansiosa richiesta, non avevano la minima conoscenza delle canzoni caledonie, né alcun di loro era in grado di intenderle, non eccettuato il gran Johnson. (PO, vol. 1, 105) [In this controversy, there is, in my opinion, confusion and ambiguity on both sides. Macpherson and his defenders either did not want to or could not produce the requested manuscripts without misunderstandings; but the challengers who requested them did not have the least knowledge of Caledonian songs, nor were they able to understand them, the great Johnson included.]

In order to avoid idle polemics, Cesarotti decides to confront the issue in a very direct way. Asking whether the popular songs attributed to Ossian ‘exactly matched Macpherson’s poems’ (PO, vol. 1, 106), he answers that ‘this cannot be stated in an absolutely certain way’ (‘ciò non può affermarsi assolutamente,’ PO, vol. 1, 106). Myths and heroes mentioned in the poems recur throughout the Scottish and Irish traditions, Cesarotti argues, and the songs actually found by Macpherson and Smith, whether orally transmitted or written down, must have differed from place to place and been very uneven. Subject to all possible alterations and corruptions, Ossian’s poems had been inevitably combined with other popular tales or later songs. Macpherson, according to Cesarotti’s reconstruction, had collected all the materials he could, compared the different texts, consulted some informants, and chose the variants that seemed ‘more coherent to the general character’ of the bard (PO, vol. 1, 107). Then he ‘put together the various fragments in the most reasonable way, according to the natural connection of the subject matter’ (‘accozzati varj squarci nel modo il più ragionevole secondo la connessione natural del soggetto,’ PO, vol. 1, 106), and finally translated them. Cesarotti perhaps attributes to Macpherson more philological scruples than the Scottish writer himself actually applied to his work. Indeed, we know by now that Macpherson used the materials drawn from the popular tradition to write his own texts,38 and he may have proceeded as described by Cesarotti only in his first publication (Fragments of Ancient Poetry, 1760). Yet at the end of his dissertation Cesarotti offers another double-edged conclusion:

Cesarotti, Ossian, and the Question of National Character 157 Egli [Macpherson] … non possedeva l’Ossian legittimo, il quale non si trovava in alcun’altra edizione, benchè fosse disperso in tutte. Il vero Ossian era solo nella compilazione fatta da lui, e trascritta dalla sua mano. (PO, vol. 1, 108) (He [Macpherson] did not possess the legitimate Ossian, which could not be found in any single version of the retrieved songs, though he was scattered in all of them. The true Ossian was only in the compilation made by him and transcribed by his hand.)

By stating here that the texts accessible to the modern reader are, in a sense, Macpherson’s own construction, Cesarotti reveals his sense that a quest for the authentic authorship is highly problematic and, when applied to popular art, utterly absurd. The only concrete elements that, in Cesarotti’s view, speak for the authenticity of the work are the images, turns of phrases, and idioms infused with the delicate and melancholic individual sensibility of the poet Ossian. Cesarotti does believe that there once existed a bard named Ossian, who wrote epic poems celebrating the historical deeds of his people, and although he refuses to locate him chronologically, Cesarotti is sure that Ossian’s poetical voice could not be that of a moderne. By not giving up the figure of the individual author, Cesarotti departs from both Vico and the Romantic idea of folk art in which the author either disappears within the collective tradition or does not exist at all, to be replaced by a more or less weak transcriber of oral poetry. Instead, in Cesarotti’s interpretation of the Ossianic question, two individuals are involved in the process of handing down popular tradition: the bard, with his unique voice, who establishes that tradition by defining it in songs, and the transcriber, who reproduces it by empathizing with it. I would suggest that Cesarotti did not believe that Macpherson’s prose was the literal translation of ancient manuscript texts that had been preserved in their integrity, as Macpherson stated. He did believe, however, that Macpherson had effectively restored an authentic ancient poetic voice, its recurrent motifs, its naive style, and its melancholic attitude.39 By granting authenticity to the material components and the poetic voice, Cesarotti transcends the constraints of the discussion of whether the Ossianic texts published by Macpherson were the authentic creation of an ancient bard or a mere falsification. In his rejection of the idea of folk art as an anonymous collective creation, Cesarotti sug-

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gests that national myths should actually be seen as scripts produced by individuals and available to other individuals for their making and remaking. Beyond the ‘Belle Infidèle’: Cesarotti’s Reflections on His Remaking of Ossian Cesarotti does not discuss at length Macpherson’s own method of translation or his choice to use prose, perhaps because he rightly regarded the Ossian texts as Macpherson’s construction rather than actual translations. Perhaps he also avoided an explicit discussion of these matters because Macpherson’s strategies – as described in the various prefaces, which were well known to Cesarotti – represented the absolute opposite of his own theoretical views on translations and, as such, contributed to his uneasiness.40 Macpherson himself recounts at length his resistance to translating the poems, which he later overcame only in order to rescue ‘the genuine remains’ (Oss, 5) of the Celtic nation: ‘Though he [the translator] admired the poems, in the original, very early, and gathered part of them from tradition for his own amusement, yet he never had the smallest hopes of seeing them in an English dress. He was sensible that the strength and manner of both languages were very different, and that it was next to impossible to translate the Gaelic poetry into anything of tolerable English verse; a prose translation he could never think of, as it must necessarily fall short of the majesty of an original’ (Oss, 50). Before submitting his unorthodox translation in ‘measured prose,’ Macpherson bows here to contemporary and accepted views on translation. He hints at the incompatibility of the genius of English – the ‘civilized’ tongue of a modern nation – and Gaelic, the ancient idiom of a ‘people so free of intermixture with foreigners and so strongly attached to the memory of their ancestors’ (Oss, 50). He refers to the then-established opinion according to which a literal prose translation was not an acceptable way to make available foreign works of art in all their aesthetic merits, but rather a way to learn a foreign language. These reflections constitute the necessary concession to a literary community accustomed to belles infidèles such as Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer, which aimed to please educated readers by reflecting their taste. Yet the aesthetic of genius required different ways to look at translation, which were codified by Romantic thinkers and translators. As

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Hans-Wolfgang Schneiders notes, ‘Through the turn to an aesthetic of “naturalness” and originality, the translator’s classical dilemma acquires a new dramatic quality. When not only the meaning and the main formal features but also the uniqueness of the author, of the language and of the people have to be translated, then the translator is confronted with a utopian task.’41 The question of fidelity (or, after the French manner, infidelity) no longer concerned the text exclusively but referred also to the genius of the author, of the language, and of the nation – all, by definition, indefinable and irreducible. By the end of the century the translator’s dilemma came to be defined as the choice between respecting or sacrificing the genius of one’s own people, as stated in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s letter to August W. Schlegel (23 July 1796).42 In his own translations Humboldt chose to challenge ‘his people’s language and taste’ in order to give them a taste of the ‘foreignness’ of the original. He went on to redefine the issue of fidelity: Soll aber das Uebersetzen der Sprache und dem Geiste der Nation dasjenige aneignen, was sie nicht, oder was sie doch anders besitzt, so ist die erste Forderung einfache Treue. Diese Treue muss auf den wahren Charakter des Originals, nicht auf seine Zufälligkeiten gerichtet seyn … Mit dieser Ansicht ist freilich nothwendig verbunden, dass die Uebersetzung eine gewisse Farbe der Fremdheit an sich trägt.43 [If translation is to give the language and the spirit of a nation that which it does not possess in another form, then the first requirement is always fidelity. This fidelity must direct itself to the true character of the original and not rely on the incidentals … a necessary corollary to this view is that translation should indeed have a foreign flavour to it, but only to a certain degree.]

Within the new context the classical opposition between literal, word-for-word translation in prose (which fundamentally served the learning of foreign languages) and free translation (which competed with the rhetorical beauties of the original, accommodating it to the linguistic structures of the target culture)44 assumes a new meaning. Suddenly a prose translation that sacrificed the genius of the target language and culture in the name of genius of the original acquired an ethical value. Opening up to the foreign and making room for its idiosyncrasies became the new ethical imperative for translators, even

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when this meant challenging the cultural and linguistic habits of the receiving community.45 Writing at least twenty years before Humboldt and Friedrich Schleiermacher, who codified the ‘foreignizing’ translation, Macpherson did not explicitly articulate the new credo, yet his assertions about his ‘extremely literal’ (Oss, 6) translation constitute a vigorous legitimization of this approach. As he insists in every preface and dissertation, ‘even the arrangement of words in the original has been imitated, to which must be imputed some inversions in the style, that otherwise would not have been chosen’ (Oss, 6). Compared to Macpherson’s statements, Cesarotti’s general thoughts on translation are inspired by completely opposite principles. Cesarotti does not have an original theory to offer but develops a few reflections, scattered but distinctly original, concerning the immediate problems encountered in his work on Ossian. 46 When discussing issues of translation in abstract terms, Cesarotti tends to espouse the French theorization of the belles infidèles or translations that were tailored to both the aesthetic and the moral values of the target audience and left the genius of the target culture untouched. He endorses the belles infidèles theory even when introducing his Ossian translation of 1772 in a Discorso preliminare, which listed a few canonical requirements: domesticating the original to the modern values of clarity, civility, reason (‘rischiarar,’ ‘rammorbidirlo,’ ‘rettificarlo’), as well as rewriting it according to contemporary taste (‘abbellirlo,’ ‘gareggiar con esso’). Yet in the same introduction Cesarotti reveals as his major fear the act of ‘disfiguring’ the original and weakening its expressive force.47 Even later, in the preface to his Corso ragionato di letteratura greca (1781), Cesarotti castigates ‘the fundamentalists of fidelity’ (‘rigoristi della fedeltà’) and endorses the belle infidèle: È opinione comune dettata dalla mediocrità ed accolta dal pregiudizio, che niuna traduzione possa mai uguagliare il suo originale, e che sia molto se vi si accosta. Niente di più vero se si parla di quelle traduzioni fredde ed esangui … lavorate con quella infedelissima fedeltà che sacrifica ad una parola arbitraria o una frase inconcludente tutti i pregi e le qualità dello stile, o con quella pedanteria scolastica che, per mostrar d’intendere l’etimologia d’una voce, stempera un’espressione viva e rapida come un lampo in una fredda perifrasi grammaticale, o finalmente con quella goffa e servil timidezza per cui l’inteprete sembra uno schiavo cogli abiti del suo padrone. (MC, 300–1)

Cesarotti, Ossian, and the Question of National Character 161 [It is common opinion, a mediocre and a prejudiced one, that no translation can equal the original and that it is enough if it draws near to it. Nothing is more true, if one speaks of those cold and bloodless translations… produced with that very unfaithful fidelity that sacrifices all stylistic merits to an arbitrary word or an inconclusive phrase, or with that school pedantry that, to show off the knowledge of the etymology of a word, waters down a lively and illuminating expression into a frigid grammatical periphrasis; or, finally, produced with clumsy and servile shyness, which makes the interpreter look like a slave with the clothes of his master.]

Cesarotti promotes stylistic equivalence and rhetoric dignity (‘decorum’) as prior requirements that cannot be fulfilled by pursuing grammatical equivalence. His statement could be overlooked as the rehearsing of a commonplace were it not for his insistence on the rhetoric of power relations, in particular the terms servilità (servility), padrone (master), and schiavo (slave), a rhetoric that recalls the tone of Saint Jerome’s famous passage in the letter to Pammachius, in Liber de optimo genere interpretandi (‘He transported other people’s thoughts into his own language, with the prerogative of a conqueror who takes prisoners away’).48 In contrast to Saint Jerome’s image of the Roman translator as a conqueror – identified by Hugo Friedrich as ‘one of the most rigorous manifestations of Latin cultural and linguistic imperialism’49 – Cesarotti’s metaphor reveals that he is worried rather about the status of the target language (Italian), which might end up looking like ‘a slave with the clothes of his master.’ It is perhaps no coincidence that Cesarotti’s most aggressive attacks on servile fidelity occur in his reflections on the translation of the classics. In Italy the classicists’ credo was the dominant ideology, and Cesarotti, a classical scholar himself, hoped to encourage a freer relation to the classical canon. By following the example of the French infidèles as well as of Pope, whose Homer Cesarotti fervently admired, Italian translators would enrich their mother language, even surpass the originals, and thus re-establish an autonomous, dignified identity for the native culture and language. Such principles guided Cesarotti’s early translations from Greek (Aeschylus’ Prometheus and Pindar’s odes, 1754) and French (Voltaire’s tragedies Cesar’s Death and Mohammed, 1762).50 However, he looked back on them – as he writes in a letter to his friend Michael van Goens (1768) – as being a professional necessity (‘cotesti signori mi persuadono inoltre con un argomento stringente, quest’è che si mostrano dis-

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posti a pagare le mie fatiche,’ Ep, vol. 1, 137) or ‘something done to kill time’ (Ep, vol. 1, 105) during his youth. Instead, the Ossian translation was ‘a whole different work,’ which, as he admits to van Goens, ‘has cost me considerable spiritual strain’ (‘tutt’altro lavoro; mi costò molta tensione di spirito,’ Ep, vol. 1, 105). The many revisions of the translations, which lasted almost forty years, offer a tangible expression of Cesarotti’s difficulties. While continuing to revise his translation, Cesarotti felt compelled not only to present his readers with a massive apparatus articulated in prefaces about the historical background, dissertations on the customs of the Caledonians, commentaries on the single poems, and general annotations offering the most disparate kinds of information, but also to explain concrete problems of translation and justify his own translating strategies. In spite of his general statements, he mitigates his endorsement of the French theory when it comes to mediating his own work and justifying ‘unorthodox’ choices. The fact that Cesarotti accompanied his translation with a complex system of paratexts, and even a dictionary that collected all ‘most singular words and expressions … with the explanation of the most obscure manners’ (‘Raccolta delle parole ed espressioni più singolari … colla dichiarazione dei modi più oscuri,’ PO, vol. 3, 303), immediately places his work in a different category. A belle infidèle, in fact, was supposed to stand on its own because its very goal was to adapt the original to the expectations of the target audience, thus creating a poetical work that was in itself easily enjoyable. Cesarotti instead seems to support Macpherson’s contention that Ossian’s peculiar images and expressions were deeply rooted in the Celtic culture and could be enjoyed and understood only if readers were brought closer to that culture through an external apparatus. At one point, in the same Discorso preliminare in which he declares his affiliation with the French tradition, Cesarotti also rehearses Macpherson’s defence of solecisms, declaring that he has intentionally preserved some mannerisms of the original ‘that would not be tolerated in a poem written originally in Italian’ (PO, vol. 1, 8). He even admits his pride over introducing these unusual expressions, which, he hoped, could bestow some ‘not unhappy tones’ on the Italian poetical language and impart ‘some new turns’ to its style (PO, vol. 1, 8).51 Describing the results of his own translation, Cesarotti insists on his search for a middle way that, he fears, has displeased nearly everybody, both those who demand ‘a more scrupulous exactitude’ and those ‘who would have liked

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it better if I had forgotten that Ossian was a Caledonian and had disfigured him to make him Italian’ (‘alcuni brameranno forse un’esattezza più scrupolosa; altri per avventura avrebbero voluto ch’io mi fossi scordato affatto che Ossian fosse Caledonio, e che lo avessi sfigurato per farlo Italiano,’ PO, vol. 1, 10). Later, in his Osservazioni to Comala, he explains his middle way as the outcome of his struggle to avoid ‘two cliffs’ (‘due scogli’): the stiffness of literal translations and, what he considers to be even worse, the inexactitude of paraphrases that lend manners to the original that are ‘opposed to its poetical genius, or to the particular modification of its spirit’ (PO, vol. 1, 322). The Osservazioni to Comala, which constitute an important source on his method, illustrate in detail the strategies adopted in order to achieve an emotional equivalence in the rhymed sections of the poem, such as taking expressions or locutions used by the author in similar passages and transferring them where he needed them to fill the verse. On other occasions he had to add some ‘perceptions … implicit in the sentiment of the author, or directly following from it’; however, Cesarotti immediately assures his readers that he had scrupulously avoided adding ideas or expressions that did not exactly fit the manners of the original (‘la terza avvertenza infine, di guardarmi scrupolosamente dall’ammettere idee o espressioni che non fossero esattamente conformi al modo di pensare e di esprimersi del mio originale,’ PO, vol. 1, 322). In the Osservazioni to Comala, we can sense Cesarotti’s respect for the idiosyncrasies of the original, his partial willingness to ‘move the reader toward the writer,’ opening up a trajectory that is opposed to the logic of the belles infidèles, which instead – to again use Schleiermacher’s image – pushed the writer toward the reader.52 Cesarotti knew that in order to draw his audience closer to Ossian’s spiritual attitude, he had to invent both a language and a verse congenial to Ossian’s creations: Io non avea per instrumento della mia fatica che una lingua felice a dir vero, armoniosa, pieghevole forse più di qualunque altra, ma assai lontana (dica pur altri checché si voglia) dall’aver ricevuto tutta la fecondità e tutte le attitudini di cui è capace, e, per colpa dei suoi adoratori, eccessivamente pusillanime. (PO, vol. 1, 12) [I had no other means in my effort than a beautiful language, to tell the truth, harmonious and flexible perhaps as no other, but (in spite of what others might say) this language was very far from having assumed all

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the attitudes of which it is capable and, because of the worshippers of its purity, it was still excessively timid.]

Denouncing the limits of the Italian poetical language was almost an act of national treason. Indeed, while the complaint about the lack of modern idioms and of scientific terminology in the Italian prose had become a commonplace of eighteenth-century discussions, the quality of the Italian poetical language had never been questioned at home with such determination. Even a reformer like Muratori, who vigorously drew attention to the lacunae of the Italian literary tradition, nevertheless celebrated in Della perfetta poesia the superiority of the Italian lyrical language over other European poetical idioms, proudly compiling an anthology of contemporary poetry with a few mediocre texts. With his complaint, Cesarotti attacked the last stronghold of the Italians’ brilliant self-image, heavily undermining the Italian canon, or the true foundation of national identity. Even more than the limits of the Italian poetical language, Cesarotti stresses the ‘insuperable obstacles’ (PO, vol. 1, 322) that he encountered in the Italian versification. The Italian verses, including the traditional blank verse (‘endecasillabo sciolto’), were not adequate to render Ossian’s rapid, intense, and short rhythm (‘la maniera estremamente concisa serrata e rapida,’ PO, vol. 1, 322): Certo è che nella poesia italiana io non aveva alcun esempio preciso dello stile e del numero che conveniasi alla traduzione d’un poeta così lontano dalle nostre maniere; e che mi convenne tentar una strada in gran parte nuova. (PO, vol. 1, 323) [The one thing certain is that in the Italian poetry I did not find any precise example of the style and number that would be appropriate to the translation of a poet so far from our manners; and that I had to test a path that was new for the most part.]

Instead of forcing the cadence of the original into familiar schemes, Cesarotti was ready to experiment both with the endecasillabo, whose traditional form was characterized by a ‘periodic swaying’ (‘ondeggiamento periodico,’ PO, vol. 1, 322) that was hostile to the Ossianic staccato, and with the shorter verses of the melodrama tradition. His experiment became an ongoing probe of the relational nature of cultures and identities.

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‘Spettacoli regolarmente irregolari’: National Characters as Dialogical Constructions The discrepancies characterizing Cesarotti’s thoughts on translation express the constant adjustments he made and the variety of strategies he adopted in order to meet the challenge of translating Ossian. One could not easily say of Cesarotti what Paul van Tieghem states of Pierre Le Tourneur and his Ossian prose translation, that ‘he gave to his contemporaries precisely the doses of exactitude which they could take.’53 Cesarotti dares to experiment with language and metre, offering new creations by intentionally moving between different practices – such as free adaptation applied especially to the lyrical parts, and the scrupulous rendering of the original when it comes to conveying its motifs and aesthetic sensibility. For this reason, interpreters of Cesarotti’s translation (for example, Walter Binni, Sergio Gilardino, Guido Baldassarri, Giuseppe Coluccia, and Francesca Broggi)54 tend to agree in characterizing his work as eclectic, hybrid, or uneven in its results, yet they offer substantially different evaluations, even opposite judgments, based on different features.55 They all recognize the numerous instances in which Cesarotti closely follows Macpherson’s texts, and they acknowledge that between the first and second editions and again between the second and third, Cesarotti decisively drew closer to the original.56 On the other hand, interpreters also tend to agree that Cesarotti’s most striking ‘infidelities’ – when they do not arise from outright plain incomprehension of the English text57 – originate from two main concerns: the metrical requirements of some lyrical parts (for example, songs of the bards; odes; and epitaphs)58 and the demands of verisimile, or coherence, both logical and psychological (the translation of the episode of Morna [Fingal, vol. 1, verses 192–287], with Cesarotti’s numerous ‘corrections’ and explanatory notes, is a favorite example of these scholars). These infidelities have too often been considered from today’s perspective as a necessary Italianization.59 For instance, critics such as Binni argue that if Cesarotti had produced a prose version, the Ossianic motifs, emotions, and manners, and with them the pre-Romantic sensibility, would never have entered the Italian poetical tradition, which was characterized by a sharp discontinuity between prose and poetry.60 Cesarotti’s choice to render Ossian’s poems in verse obeyed formal concerns of the Italian tradition that excluded the contamination of prose and poetry. I believe that his translation in verse could be viewed as a restora-

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tive translation, a rendering that took into account the features of the original Celtic songs as they could be deduced from the clues to the Celtic verse and popular songs offered by Macpherson himself, and moved back beyond Macpherson’s prose version.61 Indeed, Cesarotti tried to respect the distinction between the lyrical parts and the epic parts that were described by Macpherson as characteristic of the original Gaelic texts, by employing various combinations of metres (versi polimetri, mostly consisting of quinari and settenari) with occasional rhymes for the lyrical parts, and the endecasillabo sciolto for the narrative or epic parts. Moreover, when he uses the endecasillabo, Cesarotti often attempts to follow Macpherson’s syntactic units and tends to maintain the length of Macpherson’s episodes.62 These solutions show that Cesarotti clearly perceived the rhythmic measure of Macpherson’s prose and was able to derive the rhythm of his own blank verse from it. He created new rhythms and functions for the endecasillabo sciolto in order to render Macpherson’s staccato prose; to replicate its alliterations, assonances, and inversions; and to endow the Italian verse with new cadences and intonation that were more congenial to the perception of nature and the peculiar pathos of the original. Such creations are unanimously considered Cesarotti’s finest and most original achievement. During the eighteenth century, poets such as Paolo Rolli and Giuseppe Parini adopted the endecasillabo to convey modern themes (for example, city life and its modern customs), while drawing on classical features (Rolli’s Catullian terzina; Parini’s Latinate syntax).63 Thus the unrhymed endecasillabo had become associated with ‘a rationalistic and classicist vision’ that insisted on avoiding the facile musicality imparted by rhymes.64However, Cesarotti lent this verse an unusual broken rhythm, with new sentimental intonations and with strongly dramatic effects. A few examples of his translating strategies will show the extent to which Cesarotti absorbed the features of the Ossianic style and meshed them into his Italian verse. The following passage from Fingal (vol. 1, verses 65–74) exemplifies the broken and jarring style that Cesarotti imparts to the usually majestic and, at times, monotone flow of the blank verse: The spear of Cuchullin, said Lugar, Son of the sea, put on thy arms! Calmar, lift thy sounding steel! Puno! Horrid hero, rise: Cairbar from thy red tree of Cromla. Bend thy white knee, o Eth; and descend from the streams of Lena. Calto, stretch thy white side as thou movest along the whistling heath of Mora: thy side that is white as the foam of the troubled sea, when

Cesarotti, Ossian, and the Question of National Character 167 the dark winds pour it on the murmuring rocks of Cuthon. Now I behold the chiefs. (Oss, 55–6) [L’asta di Cucullin: qua, qua, brandi, elmi; Compagni all’arme. Vestiti l’usbergo Figlio dell’onda: alza il sanguigno acciaro Fero Calmár. Che fai, su sorgi, o Puno, Orrido eroe: scotetevi, accorrete Eto, Calto, Carban: tu ‘l rosseggiante Alber di Cromla, e tu lascia le sponde Del patrio Lena: e tu avanza, o Calto, Lunghesso il Mora, e l’agil piede impenna. Or sì gli scorgo: ecco i campion possenti.] (PO, vol. 1, 143)

The translator’s omissions are conspicuous: Cesarotti leaves out the long simile (‘thy side that is white as the foam … Cuthon’), changes the characterization of Cuthon (instead of the side, white like a wild wave, a light foot – a Hellenizing change, one could say), and omits the description of the Mora landscape (‘the whistling heath’). In the previous editions, Cesarotti translated the comparison literally, while in the definitive version he put both the omitted elements in a footnote, remarking that this ‘was not the right time to notice the whiteness of Cuthon’s side, and to represent it with such an inopportune prolixity’ (PO, vol. 1, 142–3). In fact, the repetition of the words ‘thy white side,’ especially with the wordy variation ‘thy side that is white as,’ slows down the tempo of the warriors’ hectic preparations for the battle. The comparison with the breaking waves, however, adds an element of violent power to the fast rhythm of the warrior’s movements, while the repeated mention of the white side conveys the perception of their human vulnerability – a mixture that is the mark of the Ossianic sensibility. In his translation, Cesarotti exaggerates the rhythmic effect of the original lines and concentrates it in a few verses in order to emphasize better the vibrating and broken character of the Ossianic style. In fact, these verses stand out from the background of the immediately preceding and following lines, which have a much calmer rhythm, generally with only one caesura in the middle. By concentrating on the sense of hearing and on the speed of the rhythm, Cesarotti sacrifices other effects (for instance, the synaesthesia of the original passage – amply recuperated, however, in other passages) and accentuates the contrast between the two modes.

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Cesarotti concentrates on conveying the Weltanschauung of the original by endowing the blank verse with sentimental, melancholic tones and with a meditative element, especially in the apostrophes to nature, to the elements, and to a dead or distant beloved. Some of these passages, such as the first song from the Songs of Selma (‘Stella maggior della cadente notte / deh come bella in occidente splendi!’ ) and the poem Dartula, with the poet’s numerous unanswered questions to the moon or the evening star, have gained renown through Leopardi’s adaptations.65 Dartula (verses1–6) opens as follows: Daughter of heaven, fair art thou! The silence of thy face is pleasant. Thou comest forth in loveliness: the stars attend thy blue steps in the east. The clouds rejoice in thy presence, O moon, and brighten their dark-brown sides. (Oss, 140) [Figlia del ciel, sei bella; è di tua faccia dolce il silenzio; amabile ti mostri, e in oriente i tuoi ceruli passi seguon le stelle; al tuo cospetto, o luna, si rallegran le nubi, e ‘l seno oscuro riveston liete di leggiadra luce.] (PO, vol. 2, 40)

Here Cesarotti reproduces the syntactical units of Macpherson’s prose and creates assonances in the same position as in the original (facciadolce, ‘face-pleasant’; liete-leggiadra-luce, ‘brighten-dark-brown’), yet he employs the inversions differently. A closer look at the passage shows that Cesarotti shifts the inversions in an attempt to render the same emphasis as Macpherson. In the context of Macpherson’s passage in which the sentences present a subject-verb-object syntactic structure, the inversion in the first syntagm (‘fair art thou’), for instance, emphasizes the attribute fair. Cesarotti achieves the same effect as Macpherson, the emphasis on fair, by avoiding the first inversion and placing bella before the caesura. At the same time, by avoiding this inversion, he sets, right from the beginning, the plain and intimate tone that in the original characterizes the colloquial dialogue of the poet with the moon. Cesarotti often adopts similar strategies. In Ryno’s song, for instance – another magisterial passage, echoed by Leopardi’s La quiete dopo la tempesta – he translates the line ‘The wind and the rain are over: calm is the noon of day’ with ‘Già tace il vento ed il meriggio è cheto.’

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He renders the emphasis conferred to are over by the pause (the colon) with the inversion at the beginning, which accentuates tace. Then he conveys the emphasis over calm, created in the original through the inversion, by placing cheto at the end of the verse. With such microscopic devices Cesarotti recreates the quintessential Ossianic combination of highly lyrical and colloquial tones, which came to constitute a main element of Italian modern poetry. Furthermore, in order to endow the Italian blank verse with new motifs, cadences, and intonation that could render the peculiar pathos of the original, Cesarotti activated for modern Italian poetry a whole vocabulary and an entire series of sounds that channelled into modern Italian culture different forms of sentimentality and representations of nature. Building on Vico’s understanding of the sublime,66 he was able to revive, for instance, images and idioms from the rather unknown Torquato Tasso’s Re Torrismondo; accumulated words with an energic vibrato sound (fumeggia, serpeggia, romoreggia); and selected terms saturated with harsh assonances (stride, strepita, striscia, spicca, spezza, spruzza, sbocca), which retrieved Dantes’ phonemic series from the Inferno.67 Finally, a particularly intriguing example of Cesarotti’s effort to draw closer to the original consists of his attempt to reproduce Macpherson’s numerous epithets and synaesthetic characterizations by creating a remarkable number of neologisms, mostly hyphenated words. One could say that Cesarotti was able to introduce hyphenated terms by drawing on the traditional translation of Greek epithets. Many of them fall into line with the Hellenizing tradition (occhi-azzurro, occhi-ceruleo, dolce-ridente, bianco-velate, lungo-crinita) and were in fact later absorbed into Italian neoclassical poetry by, for instance, Vincenzo Monti and Ippolito Pindemonte.68 Yet the expressionistic quality of many others (brando-baleni, fosco-rotante, lungo-urlante, ondi-battuto, vario-stridente, rosso-rotante) finds its equal only in the futurist creations; others (dolcelanguente, gemmi-sparse, dolce-lagrimante, atro-velata, lieve-tremante, foscolucente) filter a languid sentimentality into the Italian language that later found its way into Italian symbolism.69 While in the epic parts Cesarotti seems to follow the original more closely, creating tones and manners that were new to the Italian tradition, in the squarci lirici or lyrical parts he appears heavily dependent on both the Arcadia tradition and the manners of Italian melodrama. This becomes visible in the versification as well as in his lexical choices

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and tone. In the following passage from Temora (vol. 3, verses 140–7), in which the bards begin celebrating the victorious return of Fingal, the original is barely recognizable: A distant sun-beam marks the hill. The dusky waves of the blast fly over the fields of grass. (Oss, 246) [Di gioia foriera piacevole auretta, lusinga l’erbetta con dolce sospir. E l’ultimo raggio del sole che cede, già parte, già riede al nostro gioir.] (PO, vol. 2, 132)

The passage offers an extreme example of Cesarotti’s wish to conform to the taste of a contemporary Italian audience, in this particular case, by conveying an atmosphere of joy in a familiar manner. In his translation the rhymes create a facile rhythm with a varied musicality, which markedly contrasts with the laconic tone of the original lines, in which the assonance of the s seemed to simulate the hissing of the wind. The landscape of the original passage (dusky, blast, fields of grass) is a representation of a northern sunset, while the Italian passage suggests a milder nature through the use of diminutives. Cesarotti employs diminutives quite often in lyrical sections (most frequently erbetta, arboscelli, auretta, venticello, tenerello), reminding us of Bouhours’s stereotyping of the Italian language. Cesarotti seems to use diminutives especially to domesticate attitudes and attributes that, in his perception, impute a too tragic or wild element to either nature or women characters.70 Yet, given Cesarotti’s proven talent, it is difficult to attribute such domestication to the Enlightenment limitations of his perception or to his stylistic inability to render the original. In other passages of the same song from Temora, Cesarotti effectively renders the original effects, such as the staccato expressing the impetuous course of a swollen river: Allor se stesso incalza di balza in balza, e spuma e strepita,

Cesarotti, Ossian, and the Question of National Character 171 e massi sgretola, e piante sbarbica; la morte rotola nell’onda che tuona fra tronchi e sassi. (Temora, vol. 3, verses 97–104; PO, vol. 2, 129)

The contrast between an expressionist and a melodic style characterizes Cesarotti’s Ossian so much that a few poems (for example, La Notte and Berato) seem almost exercises in chiaroscuro, contrasting dark with sunny elements, expressionistic and broken rhythms with light cantabile lines, landscapes evoking terror with idyllic natural scenes. The question arises of what to make of such contrasts. Binni has explained the hybridism or incoherence of Cesarotti’s text as an expression of ‘limits typical of his Enlightenment mentality’ (‘limiti illuministi della sua mentalità’);71 according to him as well as other scholars, Cesarotti’s rationalistic vision did not allow him to fully embrace the Ossianic, Romantic Weltanschauung. Moreover, Cesarotti was unable to shake off the elements of his taste for Arcadia and his love for Metastasio’s melodrama and therefore felt inclined to filter the Ossianic sensibility through these traditions, especially in the lyrical sections. Cesarotti intuits the new but is unable to create a coherent style to convey his intuition. On a less negative note, Broggi maintains that Cesarotti’s approach to translation produces ‘a hybrid text highlighting the lack of an appropriate language, recreating a synthesis that may be considered to be credible, and bringing together the fundamental issues of Ossianic aesthetics.’ Cesarotti developed innovative ideas in the only way that was possible, given the state of the Italian literary idiom and the mentality of his audience. These arguments, framed within rigid chronological and aesthetic grids (for example, Enlightenment or Romanticism; rationalist or sentimental), are not entirely convincing, especially because in many passages Cesarotti shows himself to be truly congenial to the tones of the original and demonstrates impressive poetical skill. I believe rather that he intentionally evokes the tensions among different elements. By juxtaposing different sensibilities and traditions, he wants to highlight each of them individually and define their various features more deftly. The fact that the dissonant passages mostly contrast natural landscapes or social behaviours (for example, different approaches to love and different kinds of interactions between men and women) seems to suggest that Cesarotti deliberately recreates the collision between different

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worlds (the northern and the southern, the ancient and the modern, the sublime and the pleasant) – perhaps with the intention of scrambling cultural stereotypes and revising universal values.72 This hypothesis is supported by a selection of Cesarotti’s writings from the period following his Ossian translation, which point to his taste for irregularity and dissonance. Whether announcing to his friends his plans for the landscaping of the park in his villa at Selvaggiano or describing places visited, Cesarotti always praises landscapes that mix contrasting scenes. Writing to Francesca Morelli in March of 1802, for instance, Cesarotti first mentions his Ossianic relationship to Giuseppe Barbieri, explaining why he calls him Oscar, like the son of Ossian, and then evokes the landscape of Bassano where Barbieri lives: Esso potrebbe essere una scuola di pittura per i paesisti; esso presenta un aggregato di vedute che formano un teatro di spettacoli naturali, sempre interessanti e sempre vari. Il coltivato e ‘l silvestre, l’ameno e l’orrido, le colline, i monti, le montagne offrono gruppi, intrecci, contrasti di forme, di colori, di aspetti, che arrestano e trasportano ad ogni passo. (MC, 539) [It could be a school for landscape painters; it presents an assemblage of vistas, which constitute a theatre of natural scenes, always interesting and varied. The cultivated and the wild, the pleasant and the frightful, gentle hills and steep mountains, offer groups, mixtures, and contrasts of forms, colours, aspects, which hold the attention of the observer and, at the same time, carry him away at each step.]

This description of the landscape in Bassano could well stand for the dissonance of tones, colours, and modes of his Ossian, which constituted a school of landscapes and sentiments for the new generation of poets. Later, in his fragment Saggio sul bello, Cesarotti also tried to codify his personal taste for contrast by identifying traditional examples that represented this aesthetic sensibility: Il simmetrico ripugna ai due sommi generi, il grande e il patetico. Demostene, Bossuet, Tacito, Ossian sono bruschi, irregolari, sprezzanti … [I]l valente Giardinista … ha per assunto di unire insieme le varie scene campestri, accozzandole quasi a caso colla stessa negligenza della Natura; ma facendo che l’ordine e il disordine successivi o mescolati servano a darsi un risalto reciproco.73

Cesarotti, Ossian, and the Question of National Character 173 [Symmetry does not befit the two highest genres, the grand and the pathetic. Demosthenes, Bossuet, Tacitus, Ossian are rough, irregular, haughty. … [A] skilful gardener’s goal is to create a variety of scenes, by mingling them, almost at random, with the same negligence as Nature; but he makes sure that order and disorder, in succession or mixed, bring out their particular qualities more distinctly.]

After mentioning literary examples of the sublime style, Cesarotti returns to the image of the skilful gardener who is able to create a varied landscape by jumbling different scenes together, almost at random, contrasting order and disorder and bringing out more clearly the character of the individual scenes. Cesarotti believes that what he calls ‘regularly irregular spectacles, contrasted without system’ (‘spettacoli regolarmente irregolari, e contrastati senza sistema’)74 elicit a certain productive irritation: they prevent satisfaction, yet, at the same time, they challenge the imagination. In other words, by defying expectations, they open up the spectators or readers to new experiences and perspective, preparing them to recognize human values in all their different disguises. In the aesthetic fragment, Cesarotti’s reflections refer to art in general, and it is conceivable that similar principles also guided him in his Ossian translation. Indeed, when speculating on the translator’s task in his letters to Clementino Vannetti, Cesarotti reinforces his view that by rubbing different national tastes against each other, the translator sharpens his readers’ sense of differences and their intuition of universals. Cesarotti understood that collective identities are dialogically constructed, and universal values can only be intuited when, to borrow Judith Butler’s terms, even the repudiated, weak element (in turn, the barbaric, the effeminate, the outmoded) is readmitted into the process of remaking values.75 Discussing some new translations with Vannetti, a classicist and a translator himself who had expressed his concern over the introduction of ‘barbarisms’ through the increasing translations of the oltramontani (northern European writers), Cesarotti cautiously accuses his interlocutor of chauvinism or, in his words, ‘a perhaps excessive prejudice.’ He warns him against ‘his credible patriotic spirit, which is, however, all the more seductive the more it is honest’ (‘stia in guardia contro lo spirito di plausibile patriottismo, tanto più seducente quanto più onesto,’ MC, 512). The worst faults of literature, he argues, are actually linguis-

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tic purism, excessive timidity in experimenting with style, and aversion to novelty. These were unfortunately ‘the dominant characters of Italianism’ (‘i caratteri dominanti dell’italianismo’), which one could easily find in writers ‘who pride themselves in keeping intact the national taste’ (‘che si piccano di conservar intatto il buon gusto nazionale,’ MC, 507–8). When his interlocutor reminds him that the characters of languages are unique and incompatible, Cesarotti proposes for the first time his famous distinction between the grammatical and the rhetorical genius of the language, the former immutable, the latter constantly modified by original writers (MC, 509). Such a distinction, later developed in his philosophical essay on language, allows him to redefine the task of the translator, which, he insists, does not consist in searching for the ‘colours of one nation or the other’ (‘i colori d’una nazione o dell’altra’), but rather in showing the numerous modifications of nature and life (MC, 512). For Cesarotti, making room for the foreign is not a concession to a folkloristic anthropological curiosity or the contemplation of an unmediated and incommunicable ‘other,’ but instead an exploration of the infinite, diverse manifestations of common humanity.76 Cesarotti again showed his readiness to defend both the aesthetic merits and the political innocence of a literary ‘impasto,’ in a passage from his article ‘Sul Francesismo,’ written much later in response to the numerous attacks following the publication of his Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue. In particular, it addressed Galeani Napione’s essay Dell’uso e dei pregi della lingua italiana (1791), which accused Cesarotti of an overtolerance (‘tollerantismo’) that ‘could be fatal to our literature and our national character’ (MC, 432): Del resto conservisi pure intatto il genio grammaticale, vero custode della lingua, ma non si tolga al genio rettorico il diritto di migliorarsi e perfezionarsi, o di prendere a suo grado tutte le facce; e se uno scrittor non volgare, pieno lo spirito di tutte le forme del bello, ricco la memoria e fecondo l'immaginazione di mille colori diversi, presenta un impasto di stile ben temperato, che ricordi talora lo stile d'una nazione diversa, ma si conservi pur nostro ed originale nella sua mistura medesima, non si voglia tosto accusarlo senza esame come depravator della lingua, quando forse dee chiamarsi benefattore dell'eloquenza. (MC 453) [Preserve the grammatical genius, the true guardian of the language, but do not deprive the rhetorical genius of its right to improve and perfect itself, or to assume all the aspects it likes. And if a fine writer, filled with

Cesarotti, Ossian, and the Question of National Character 175 all the forms of beauty, endowed with a rich memory and a fertile imagination of a thousand different colours, presents a well-tempered pastiche of styles that recalls, at times, the style of a different nation, by remaining original and Italian in his very mixture, one should not accuse him of corrupting his own language without careful examination of his work, when instead he might be called a benefactor of eloquence.]

Again, this passage could be read both as Cesarotti's justification of his own style in the Ossian translation and as a rejection of the fundamentalist view of the genius of language, which banned the exchange of idioms, manners, and attitudes among literatures of different tongues. Cesarotti’s intention and hopes emerge when he defines his audience in his Discorso preliminare. In 1772 he had given up on his classicist colleagues and their ‘superstitious tyranny’ and appealed instead to the younger generation (‘credetti che Ossian allora uscito mi desse opportuna occasione, non già di ricreder quest’uomo [un classicista], ch’era impossibile, ma di convincer i giovani e i men prevenuti,’ PO, vol. 1, 20). He wanted to offer them the opportunity to shake off their ‘national prejudices’ and the ‘idolatry’ of the classics by presenting them with the work of a ‘northern’ poet who had surpassed Homer in the creation of characters and in his representation of the human condition (PO, vol. 1, 20). His Ossian actually succeeded in counteracting the classicists’ dominance, even more so because the opposition came from such a renowned scholar and translator of Greek literature, a professor at a prestigious school for classical philology. What Cesarotti could not foresee, however, was that the values and attitudes of his Ossian would shape the struggles of the new generation of poets and intellectuals to understand their political environment and their possible part in it. The figure of the warrior bard of a people formerly powerful but then fallen into political impotence would inspire the self-definition of patriots such as Foscolo, and inform the existential attitude of a Leopardi that mixed patriotic pride and the melancholic awareness of its futility. By articulating the Romantic anthropological vision of poetry as an act expressing and at the same time reinforcing the sense of an ethnic community, Ossian established new scripts for collective identities and fulfilled the desire of the poet vates to ‘overcome the loneliness of the individual writing process.’77 At this point, the extent to which Cesarotti participates in the practice of the foreignizing translation should be clear. Despite the fact that some of his reflections and translating strategies appear close to the

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German Romantic theories and practices that defined a bad translation as one that consistently negated the foreignness of the original, for Cesarotti the experience of the foreign is not a goal in itself but rather the gateway to the universals, a means to conjure them up in the midst of dissonance.78 With his peculiar montage technique of translation, Cesarotti avoided the pitfalls of the chauvinist attitude implied in Schleiermacher’s theory of the foreignizing translation, which was viewed as a means of global cultural domination.79 By making available in the same text both the foreign and the native elements, Cesarotti may have produced a hybrid, but he certainly invited his readers to an open discussion. For him, openness seems to be an attempt more to transcend national differences than to assert their equal dignity, which was, for instance, the main objective of Herder’s translations and collections of Volkslieder.80 Although the translator Cesarotti experiments with language and forms, his primary goals do not appear to be intentionally promoting irritations, making the mother language unfamiliar, or achieving the Verfremdung effect that is one of the principles of the Romantic translator. Rather, he seems aware that mere aesthetic curiosity or the spectacle of otherness per se can easily turn into what Kwame Anthony Appiah has called ‘spectatorial diversity,’ a diversity that is essentially there for our appreciation.81 It risks weakening the moral force of difference by making it available to a merely aesthetic enjoyment rather than to the intellectual and practical questioning of contingent values. Framed within the oppositional grid of Enlightenment and Romanticism, invention and authenticity, universalism and cultural relativism, Cesarotti’s Ossian translation can be interpreted as a hybrid medley, and his disparate reflections on translation as proof of his aesthetic and philosophical limitations. I suggest instead that we look at Cesarotti’s translation as a deliberate experiment with universals, his way of navigating competing claims of universality and, at the same time, exposing their limits. His Ossian should be taken as an expression of his belief that universality is not a pre-established, static assumption of exchanges and communication but rather ‘a process or condition that cannot be reduced to any of its modes of appearance.’82 Viewed from the framework of today’s Enlightenment debate, Cesarotti’s imaginative medley reminds us that if, as Appiah puts it, there are faults in the historical Enlightenment project, they consist not so much in the search for universals but in the lack of imagination in exploring the range of what human beings have in common.83

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The Polyphonic Nation: Rhetorical Genius and National Character as Works in Progress In 1785 when, at the request of his colleagues at the Paduan Academy, Cesarotti decided to intervene in the discussion on the genius of language, this topic had already provided the theme of several treatises and debates, including the famous philosophical competition at the Berlin Academy in which philosophers such as Herder and de Brosse participated and Johann David Michaelis won with the essay Dissertation sur l’influence réciproque des opinions et des langues (1759), a text well known to Cesarotti. In fact, by Cesarotti’s own concession, his Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue was written following ‘the steps of the most renowned philosophers of the century.’84 While the Lockean empiricist interpretation of the origin and formation of language constituted its philosophical background, Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746), especially its sections on the genius of language, was its fundamental inspiration. By 1758, when Condillac moved to Italy to become tutor to Duke Ferdinand of Parma, grandson of Louis XV, his reputation had been well established.85 He had been elected a member of the Berlin Academy in 1749, after the publication of his Traité des systèmes, and was elected a member of the French Academy in 1768, one year after he had left the position in Parma. Although heavily indebted to French sensationalist philosophy, Cesarotti’s contribution to the European debate on the genius of language draws its originality, I believe, from his experience with Ossian. His desire to filter the Ossianic modes, idioms, and cadences into the Italian poetical idiom, his despair when confronting the lack of equivalent modes in the Italian literary tradition, and his will to enhance the resources of his native language led him to expand the terms of the debate. The fact that issues of translation and the expansion of languages by comparison with different tongues constitute the centre of his essay, setting it apart from the contemporary discussion, confirms the strong impact of his experience, as translator, on his theoretical view of language. In this section I compare Cesarotti’s thought on the genius of language and nation with Condillac’s ideas in order to define better the original elements of Cesarotti’s vision. We shall see that Cesarotti assumes the topos of the relation between standard vernacular and national character consecrated by the competition at the Berlin Academy, only to shatter the unified myth of the genius of language and take apart its building blocks with an almost sociological sensibility.

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He makes way for a polyphonic view of language based on an ongoing process of translation that involves standardized national languages as well as different dialects, registers, and both chronological and sociological strata. His representation of language ultimately projected an image of the nation that proved incendiary for his times. Both Condillac and Cesarotti tend to view language as a formative force rather than as a mere instrument of communication. To them, language is an element in which one is born and formed and which therefore inevitably shapes one’s identity. Both are concerned with the way in which language affects knowledge, yet their ideas are heavily influenced by the history of their respective tongues. Condillac is concerned more with conserving the character of the French language than with its change. In his view, which reflects the history of his country, the national language is developed only when the nation state has been solidly established. Influenced by the contemporary cultural status of France, he tends to ignore the exchange among languages and its advantages. France was at the zenith of its cultural prestige; its language was the international tongue of the intellectual exchange and seemed therefore to have reached a stage of perfection that entitled it to the status of a universal idiom. Yet French had become a highly centralized language, strictly shaped at the one court of the nation, and had developed, through the institutional concern with its national purity, in Voltaire’s words, the character of ‘a proud beggar woman disdaining alms.’86 Cesarotti, instead, appears well aware that the search for purity, the dominance of one dialect over the others, and the idolatrous attachment to the literary language of the ‘golden’ cultural eras could only impoverish a national language. The whole first part of his Saggio consists of propositions rejecting any reifying view of the national language. For Cesarotti, as for his predecessor Muratori, no language has intrinsic merits or faults; its aesthetic qualities are characteristics of style, not innate attributes. There is no ‘pure’ language: every language is born of the aggregation of diverse idioms. A truly pure language would be the jargon of a primitive group, not the language of a nation. No language is inalterable. No language is uniformly spoken within a nation. No language can be established by mere authority, but has to receive the free consent of the majority (‘il libero consenso del maggior numero,’ MC, 309). Although he admits the need for a dominant dialect shared by the whole nation, which foreigners too can easily learn and employ all over

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the country, Cesarotti also denounces its disadvantages. A dominant dialect introduces an artificial and uniform taste, which tends to establish as virtues the peculiar and arbitrary forms of that dialect, even when they are irregular or uncouth (MC, 311). Meanwhile other dialects of the nation are consigned to local oral exchange so that, in the course of time, a trove of words, expressions, and manners is lost to the entire language community. Cesarotti, who does not use the term language for any Italian tongue, rejects dialectal particularism (for instance, the Tuscan predominance) and insists on the contribution of all dialects to the common language. He endorses the compilation of dialectal dictionaries which would constitute a valuable reservoir for the enrichment of the national language and, at the same time, would preserve ‘the different ways of perceiving and feeling of the various peoples of Italy’ (‘i diversi modi di percepire e sentire dei vari popoli,’ MC, 421). He even formulates dialects’ contribution as an ‘original right’ (‘le province d’Italia hanno dunque comuni tutte le parti costitutive della lingua, ed hanno perciò tutte un diritto originario ed inalterabile sopra di essa,’ MC, 402). Cesarotti believes that dialectal idioms, judiciously filtered by writers, must be assimilated into the national language whenever the latter lacks alternative expressions. In order to guarantee the circulation of words and expressions from all Italian provinces in the common language, Cesarotti insists on the presence of representatives from all the comuni, or municipalities of Italy on a national committee overseeing the development of the national language and the redaction of different dictionaries (etymological, dialectal, and of common usage). Against the growing rigidities of the monolinguistic logic, at home and abroad, Cesarotti defines the national language as being the result of an ongoing interaction among dialects (‘the dominant dialect,’ the other regional dialects, ‘the dialect of cultivated people’) and of the incessant friction with foreign languages, ancient and modern. The power of writers and translators to build on this intricate exchange and to establish new idioms becomes fundamental. Condillac’s and Cesarotti’s remarkably different views and experiences of the national language shape also their individual definitions of the genius of the language and its relation to the national character. Condillac and Cesarotti share the general narrative, both assuming the traditional proposition according to which the genius of a language expresses the character of the nation that speaks it. However, their interpretations of the two terms differ substantially. For Condillac, climate and government form the character of the people. Climate imparts ‘a

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greater degree of vivacity or of phlegm’87 and the disposition to one form of government or the other. Dispositions arising from the climate, however, are subject to numerous changes – with the nature of the country, the exchange with neighbouring populations, and changes of government all contributing to alter ‘the first propensities’ of a nation. Although Condillac rejects the idea that climate is the only real cause of the nation’s character and of its progress, he later reintroduces the climatic factor as an ‘essential condition’ (‘une condition essentielle,’ Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines [EO], 186). To Condillac the genius of a language is originally formed from the people’s character and consists of the combination of the nation’s ideas – its peculiar genius – with ‘different adventitious notions’ (‘différentes idées accessories,’ EO, 193). In order to exemplify their relation, Condillac mentions the numerous Latin words referring to agriculture and implying an idea of dignity and grandeur, which they do not have in French. He explains that at the beginning of the empire Romans were still living off agriculture and that therefore this activity had a social prestige that the Latin words reflected and preserved for a long time since, according to Condillac, the character of languages does not change as easily as that of the people. Although Condillac asserts that the genius of language can be developed ‘with the assistance of eminent writers’ (‘par le secours des grands écrivains,’ EO, 185), he establishes numerous conditions that must be achieved before writers can begin displaying their talents: 1. Le climat est une condition essentielle; 2. Il faut que le gouvernment ait pris une forme constante, et que, par là, il ait fixé le caractère d’une nation; 3. C’est à ce caractère à en donner un au langage, en multipliant les tours qui expriment le goût dominant d’un peuple. (EO, 188) [1. The climate is an essential condition. 2. It is requisite that the form of government be settled, so as to fix the character of a nation. 3. It is this that gives a character to the language by multiplying such phrases as express the prevailing taste of a people.] (EO English translation, 290)

Condillac’s requirements do not really grant writers much agency. He maintains that there cannot be a superior genius until the language of a nation has been considerably improved (‘ne peuvent avoir des génies supérieurs qu’après que les langues ont déjà fait des progrès consid-

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erables,’ EO, 188), and he makes even the success of the most talented writers dependent on the quality of a language (‘le succès des génies les mieux organisés dépend tout-à-fait des progrès du langage,’ EO, 187). Passages like these remarkably weaken Condillac’s previous statement about the power of eminent writers to perfect the language, and confer a circularity to his argument. Not even a genius like Corneille could have overcome the difficulties of a defective and limited language to become the great master he was, according to Condillac’s view (EO, 189). Condillac recognizes that great writers tend to distinguish themselves from the crowd, seeing and feeling in a manner peculiar to them, which they cannot communicate without inventing ‘new turns of expression’ (‘de nouveaux tours,’ EO, 189). Yet he immediately restricts their licence, adding that whenever a writer ‘deviates’ from the rules of analogy and departs from the character of his own language, ‘he speaks a foreign tongue and ceases to be understood’ (‘on parle un langage étranger et on cesse d’etre entendu,’ EO, 192). He further limits the writer’s agency when distinguishing between languages that are intrinsically analytical and others that are essentially imaginative, rejecting the opinion according to which all languages are equally adequate for all kinds of writing. Echoing Vico’s prejudices, he maintains that an analytical language such as French, while very apt for philosophy, could never have produced a Milton (EO, 191–2). Condillac tends to present the character of a language both as the limit to the writers’ creativity and as the frame within which they must create if they want to be understood. In his description the writings of poets become the strongest ‘pictures’ of the character of a language and, as such, untranslatable. The man of genius finds the character of language (EO, 188), rather than contributing to its creation, as if this character were something entirely intrinsic to the language and, once shaped by the national character, difficult to alter. Writers are more users than creators of language. Condillac has a somewhat autarchic vision of national languages and cultures, as if they were homogeneous and uniform entities isolated from any exchange. He endorses a monolinguistic logic, by which progress in the arts and sciences is achieved only by submitting to and leaving intact the genius of the national language. Cesarotti’s view of the relation between the genius of language and the national character expresses an almost opposite vision of the advancement of knowledge.88 For Cesarotti, the arts and sciences thrive when the national language is expanded through the exchange with different cultures, by which he refers not only to different national

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cultures but also to the cultures of various populations subject to one common government or merely sharing a language, as well as to the interactions of oral and written, popular and high cultures. In order to overcome the growing chauvinistic resistance and to promote the expansion of Italian, Cesarotti felt that he had to redefine the notion of the genius of language, which had become an inviolable ‘idol – commonly believed to be haughty, intractable, self-sufficient, and scorning every communication and commerce’ (‘idolo come si crede comunemente, superbo, intrattabile, sufficiente a se stesso, sdegnatore di qualunque comunicazione o commercio,’ MC, 355). In Cesarotti’s view, this idol arises from the inability to make distinctions and, in particular, from the confusion of different aspects of the character of languages, namely the grammatical and the rhetorical genius. The grammatical genius depends on specific morphological and syntactic features and, once the language has been codified, cannot easily be changed. Cesarotti offers the example of Italian and its lack of cases, which makes its grammatical genius essentially incompatible with that of Latin. He tends to keep to a minimum the inalterable part of languages, at times reducing the grammatical genius to the system of endings in nouns, verbs, and adverbs. Thus in his analysis, the hyperbaton – the topic of the most heated linguistic debate throughout the eighteenth century – goes back to being an individual rhetorical choice rather than the sign of a people’s character or the mark of the genius of language. The rhetorical genius is a highly composite factor that is frequently altered ‘according to the general system of ideas and sentiments that prevails in the different nations, leaving its marks on the language thanks to the work of writers’ (‘l’altro [dipende] dal sistema generale dell’idee e dei sentimenti che predomina nelle diverse nazioni, e che per opera degli scrittori improntò la lingua delle sue tracce,’ MC, 356). As with Condillac’s genius of the language, Cesarotti’s genius too constitutes the ‘expression of the national genius’ (‘il genio della lingua è propriamente l’espressione del genio nazionale,’ MC, 394). But Cesarotti does not leave the term national genius unexplained, as if it were some intrinsic and innate quality of a people. He instead dissolves this concept into the notion of dominant culture – hegemony, we would say today with a Gramscian term – or ‘the system of ideas and feelings’ that prevails in a nation in a particular time, reminding his readers that such a system is far from being inalterable since political and economic changes affect it, exerting in turn a vigorous impact on language:

Cesarotti, Ossian, and the Question of National Character 183 Ora chi non conosce le vicissitudini morali e politiche delle nazioni e la loro influenza … che trasforma un popolo d’eroi in una greggia di schiavi, e al rozzo e libero linguaggio della schiettezza repubblicana sostituisce la politezza lusinghiera e l’ingegnosa urbanità della corte? (E viceversa, cangia un popolo di filosofi umanissimi e di gentilissimi cortigiani in un gran club d’eroi sanculottici, e al molle frasario del bon ton sostituisce i termini originali e sublimi di terrorismo, guigliottina, settembrizzare.) (MC, 394) [Who is not aware of moral and political vicissitudes … that transformed a people of heroes in a herd of slaves and substituted the brusque and free idiom of republican simplicity for the flattering refinement and ingenious urbanity of the court? (And vice versa, everybody is aware of the vicissitudes that turn a people of most humane philosophers and gentle courtiers in a grand club of sansculotte heroes and substitutes the flabby phrases of the bon ton with original and sublime words like ‘terrorism,’ ‘guillotine,’ and ‘to septemberize.’)]

As evident in this passage, political vicissitudes and their immediate impact on language are very much on Cesarotti’s mind, especially in his 1801 edition, in which he added a footnote (in parentheses in my text) alluding to the French Revolution. Cesarotti’s extreme example counters Condillac’s assertion that the genius of language changes only very slowly and tends to stay the same for a long time, even after political change has already affected the customs and habits of the nation. In Cesarotti’s perspective, writers take on a major role because they are the first to become aware of the transformations occurring in ‘the intellectual system of their century’ (‘il sistema intellettuale del secolo,’ MC, 398), as well as being the main agents of change within the dominant culture. According to Cesarotti, through the writers’ linguistic creations cultural change is absorbed and established, and the new national genius, of which the nation is only vaguely conscious (‘ne vagheggia l’idea’), ‘powerfully bursts, triumphing on the despotism of schools’ (‘il genio della nazione scoppia con forza e trionfa sul despotismo della scuola,’ MC, 398). Here Cesarotti rejects Condillac’s claim that once the national language has achieved stability, the writers’ quest for novelty necessarily leads them to ‘deviate’ from the rules of analogy and thereby to pave the way for the decline of the language (‘s’écarter de l’analogie; ainsi … de préparer la ruine d’une langue,’ EO, 192). Instead, Cesarotti intuits the difference between langue and parole and insists that modes, turns of phrases, and idioms are inexhaustible

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– just as in nature, in which species are limited but individuals show an immeasurable diversity. Except in the case of empty phrases, which are defects of style, not of ‘the language,’ novel expressions are signs of the ‘novelty of things’ and should be welcomed as carriers of different ways of seeing and feeling (MC, 373). One must consider such a distinction before deciding whether the writer introducing novelties ‘should be called the corrupter or the benefactor of his language’ (‘se debba dirsi corruttore o benefattore della lingua,’ MC, 397). Cesarotti’s view of the writers’ role in relation to the genius of the nation, or ‘the system of dominant ideas,’ presents some analogies with Gramsci’s ideal of the hegemonic function of the intellectuals and their interaction with larger social groups.89 Cesarotti’s intellectuals are not an elite, alienated from the vast majority of the people, who can impose their own version of national character or can divine the intrinsic Voksgeist. Rather, they share needs, ways of feeling and judging, and in particular the impact of ‘moral and political causes’ on a world view (MC, 398). Yet, in the ‘silent struggle between the sense of reality and desire’ (‘tacita lotta fra il senso reale, e’l fattizio’), in their search for identity, writers are more apt to break with the accepted norms by dialoguing with other systems of values from other times, other countries and other classes, and to establish their alternative perceptions. For Cesarotti, hegemonic discourse and a national language can only be achieved through voluntary acceptance of norms, an acceptance that is motivated by different types of interests – political, social, and economic. Of course, Cesarotti is mostly interested in the freedom of writers, not of classes, and he presents the writers’ power of articulating new values and making them available to others (in all its liberating potential), thereby affecting not only language but also each individual’s range of choices. Once Cesarotti has guaranteed writers’ freedom of creation by admitting the possibility of transforming the rhetorical genius without disfiguring the national language, he defines in detail the means of renewing and expanding it. He devotes numerous sections to ‘The Writers’ Rights in Relation to the Language’ (titled Diritti degli scrittori rispetto ai vocaboli; Del diritto di ringiovenire i termini; Diritto di ampliare il senso; Diritto di coniar termini nuovi) and considers, for instance, the revival of old words, the creation of new figurative meanings, the invention of neologisms (with a whole section for compound words, his favourite device in the Ossian translation), and loans from ancient languages as well as from modern foreign tongues and Italian dia-

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lects. The most interesting section related to issues of national character deals with idioms (‘idiotismi’), usually considered impossible to transport from one culture into the other. Cesarotti argues that since idioms always consist of ‘unusual configurations of words forming an intelligible sense’90 and which are slowly assimilated into mainstream language, it is unclear why a language should resist an unusual foreign configuration – once the latter has been adapted to the morphological and syntactical structures of the receiving language – more than an unusual national configuration. Distinguishing between grammatical idioms and rhetorical idioms, he judges the former as completely superfluous affectations (for example, egli vi ha instead of c’è – a contemporary calque from il y a; or triveloce instead of velocissimo, from très forte) but vigorously defends the translatability and effectiveness of rhetorical idioms. In Cesarotti’s definition, rhetorical idioms are ‘expressive configurations’ conveying particular nuances and gradations of perceptions and feelings and, as such, do not strictly belong to one nation more than to another but are in the jurisdiction of whoever feels and conceives in an analogous way (‘sono configurazioni espressive, che … atteggiano i sentimenti e ne rappresentano i diversi gradi … e per conseguenza non sono propriamente più d’una nazion che dell’altra, ma di giurisdizione comune di chiunque sente o concepisce in un modo analogo,’ MC, 390). Grammatical and rhetorical idioms may confer ‘a certain national taste to language’ (MC, 388), yet there is no reason that elements showing some similarity to foreign modes or idioms should be considered a threat to the nation’s integrity: Ogni nazione ben esaminata raccoglie nei caratteri tutte le altre … Se dunque la costituzione interna d’uno scrittore lo approssima talora ad un’altra nazione più che alla sua, com’è possibile che le sue maniere non sentano di questa natural somiglianza? Servendosi dell’espressioni che più gli convengono, egli non toglie l’altrui, anzi nemmeno lo riconosce per tale, ma si prevale del proprio ovunque lo trovi. (MC, 390) [Every nation, if well examined, contains the characters of all the others … If a writer’s inner constitution brings him closer to a nation that is not his own, how is it possible that his manners should not reflect this natural similarity? By expressing himself in the way he feels more adequate, he does not take away anything from anybody, he does not even recognize it as a foreign property, but he actually avails himself of his own proper manner, wherever he finds it.]

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Such a passage challenges many pervasive opinions and expectations of the time. It questions the idea of the national character as the homogeneous and unique essence of one single people. It defends the writer’s freedom against the increasing pressure to represent the nation and legitimize a prefabricated national discourse.91 It also endorses the contemporary credo of originality, yet as freed from its ties to ethnic origins or roots. Finally, it is a defence of Cesarotti’s own work, both his translations and his linguistic reflections. The numerous attacks immediately following the publication of the essay Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue offer a measure of his challenge.92 Cesarotti goes beyond advocating tolerance of words and idioms felt to be foreign, as means for expanding the language and advancing knowledge. Intuiting the relational nature of identity, he actually argues that only through the friction with foreignness do people shape their own language and identity freely and consciously.93 In this perspective, translations, to which the essay devotes substantial attention, are a privileged space of productive friction.94 Comparing the language of translations to the movements of an athlete, Cesarotti distinguishes it from the (native) writer’s language, which he likens to the ‘natural and steady composure’ of man’s walking: Un traduttore di genio … è costretto in un certo modo a dar la tortura alla sua lingua per far conoscere a lei stessa tutta l’estensione delle sue forze, a sedurla accortamente per vincere tutte le sue ritrosie irragionevoli e ravvicinarla alle straniere, a inventar vari modi di conciliazione e d’accordo, a renderla in fine più ricca di flessioni e d’atteggiamenti senza sfigurarla o sconciarla. (MC, 392) (A translator of genius … is forced in a certain sense to torture his language in order to let it experience all its potential reach. He must seduce it [‘her’] cautiously in order to overcome its unreasonable coyness and to draw it closer to the foreign language. He has to invent different ways of reconciling the two languages and to make his own richer in modes and tones without disfiguring it.)

Here Cesarotti assigns to translation an autonomous status, freeing translators from the obligation to conform to the stylistic standards and aesthetic norms of their native culture or the genius of language. Good translators are inventors who subject their language to new ‘movements’ in order to stretch its expressive capacities, challenging

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and correcting the limitations of their own language and knowledge. In contrast to the Romantic ideal of translation as a contemplation of differences in national character, Cesarotti’s translation is an instrument for moving away from national genius, understood both as an innate character and as a desirable ideal to be attained. To him, translation is a space for probing one’s own ethics. Instead of embracing a cultural program leading to a rigid uniformity and to what Croce calls ‘the philologist’s nationalism’ (‘il nazionalismo da filologo’),95 Cesarotti encourages linguistic policies that cultivate flexibility and openness. He envisions a free circulation of words, expressions, and ultimately knowledge among diverse cultures, with the image of a language in mind that, ‘like wax, must lend itself to all forms’ (‘la lingua dee prestarsi a guisa di cera a tutte le forme,’ MC, 388). His use of the verb dee (must) in a traditional metaphor (used already by Castiglione), in which we expect the simple descriptive mode, reveals that Cesarotti sensed the ability of language to express diversity as an ethical imperative. Cesarotti’s representation of language resisted not only Condillac’s autarchic monolingualism but also the nascent nationalistic ideology that posited the cultural uniformity of the polity.96 While for Condillac there is one people, one language, and one nation, for Cesarotti, who was obviously affected by his own experience as an Italian, a nation is not a culturally homogeneous and uniform body but consists of different popoli, speaking different dialects, perceiving and feeling in different ways, and sometimes living in very disparate environments. For him, the nation can only be established by voluntary affiliation or the desire to belong to a super-local community. It materializes almost as the horizon for a work in progress, a project constantly renewed through the cultural and political exchange among different peoples and nations, rather than a condition that can be fully attained or the retrieval of a natural community. Cesarotti’s polyphonic nation can be better delineated if considered with the background of ‘the birth of the language of Nationalism’ in the second half of the eighteenth century, as recently described by Maurizio Viroli.97 If we bear in mind two basic types of the nationalistic discourse of this historical period – as represented by the ideas of Cuoco, the Neapolitan patriot writing about the failure of the Neapolitan Republic, and by Herder’s more popular views – we see that Cesarotti does not agree with either of the two. According to Viroli, the ideas of Cuoco represent the nascent perception of the importance of connecting poli-

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tics and culture, patria and nation. The Neapolitan Republic had failed because the patriots looked at an abstract ideal of liberty and polity that was fitted to French culture yet was not suitable to the need of the common culture of the Neapolitan people.98 For Cuoco, patriotism, or love for republican freedom, had to build on the cultural unity of a nation (in his case, the Neapolitan nation).99 To Herder, the cultural unity of a nation was given by nature and transcended political arrangements. It did not depend on the state and had a higher status than the state itself.100 Like Cuoco and Herder, Cesarotti no longer spoke the languages of early eighteenth-century politics, namely cosmopolitanism and provincial patriotism. Defending his own linguistic views against ‘patriotic’ critics such as Napione and Velo, Cesarotti insisted that his proposals were inspired by love of the nation and not by patriotic fanaticism – clearly opposing national as the positive attitude to patriotic as referring to chauvinist parochialism.101 Yet, unlike Herder, Cesarotti did not believe in a naturally given national character nor did he view cultural uniformity as the essential foundation of the nation as Cuoco did. With the French civic definition in mind, he strenuously attempted to rescue the nation from any nationalistic ideology, emphasizing a national culture that was not the expression of an already existing spiritual unity but the hard-won and constantly shifting outcome of a dialogue among different cultures. The astonishing contrast between the fortune and popularity of Cesarotti’s Ossian, in which the figure of the defeated warrior-poet Ossian embodied his people’s misfortune, and the patriotic attacks following the publication of his essay on language, Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue, constitutes the most striking evidence that Cesarotti’s views clashed with contemporary political interests. In pre-unification Italy the cultural uniformity of the nation was increasingly ascribed to natural data (birth on Italy’s soil, common blood) rather than to elective participation, and language was taken for granted as a natural possession. The myth of Ossian perfectly fit the narrative chosen by Risorgimento intellectuals to legitimate their struggle. It was the story of the birth of the nation from an act of violence, namely the military conquest of Italy by barbarous populations that suppressed the liberty of the autochthonous people.102 According to this narrative, the traumatic collision with a different ‘race’ strengthened their awareness of belonging together, creating memories of common suffering and struggles for liberty.103 Nobody wanted to be reminded of the all-too-real diversity of the Italian peninsula, which was perceived as a humiliating condition, an

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outright threat to the nation,104 rather than as a productive dissonance that could strengthen it, as Cesarotti suggested in his essay on language. The contrast between the enthusiastic response to Ossian and the hostility aroused by Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue reveals the irresistible rise of the nationalist myth of the organic monolingual nation on the Italian intellectual scene. Cesarotti’s model belonged to the future, perhaps.

5 Towards Sameness: Leopardi’s Critique of Character, and the End of the Nation

The right of nations was born after nations were extinct. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone Nationalist ideology suffers from pervasive false consciousness. Its myths invert reality: it claims to defend folk culture while in fact it is forging a high culture; it claims to protect an old folk society while in fact helping to build an anonymous mass society … It preaches and defends cultural diversity, when in fact it imposes homogeneity both inside and, to a lesser degree, between political units. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism since 1780

By the time Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) had started to analyse the connection between language and national character, the identification of nationhood with language had become an accepted truth. Nineteenth-century patriots rarely questioned the construct of ‘national language’ and instead presented it either as a natural fact linked to the birth on Italy’s soil, as Banti demonstrates in his survey of the Risorgimento canon (ca 1800–50), or as a necessary task to be fulfilled, as recommended in more realistic post-unification writings such as Manzoni’s famous report on language to the Ministry of Public Education (1868).1 Thus Leopardi was among the last Italian intellectuals to look back at the issues of the old French-Italian controversy and to question the myth of the genius of language. His use of notions inherited from the eighteenth-century debate – that of a national disposition (‘indole nazionale’) for instance – usually embarasses interpreters of his philosophy,

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who view these notions as the obsolete remains of an essentialist perspective that obscure Leopardi’s originality.2 Yet I believe that the study of Leopardi’s participation in the old discussion in light of his understanding of the nation is extremely productive. I argue that the replacement in Leopardi’s writings of the term genius with words such as indole, carattere, and disposizione (in his own redefinition) must be seen as a clear signal of his determination to question the innate and cryptic element of the link between languages and nations that was nourishing nineteenth-century linguistic nationalism. Furthermore, his systematic redefinition of the notion of character, a fundamental component of his relativist vision, undermined the tendency, increasingly common in the nationalistic discourse of his time, to naturalize the idea of nation. It is my contention that Leopardi understood that the myth of the genius of language constituted the resistant core of contemporary nationalisms and was paradoxically the engine of a thrust towards uniformity that had begun with the cultural policies of the absolutist state. As we have seen in the previous chapters, Muratori, Vico, and Cesarotti share an uneasiness both about the extreme cultural relativism that sanctioned the untranslatability of national cultures and about a reifying universalism that turned differences into deviations from nature. In Leopardi’s monumental collection of philosophical thoughts, which has come to be known as Zibaldone (ca 1817–1832), this uneasiness became a fundamental object of his reflection. In contrast to Vico who feared the rise of narrow national perspectives masked as new universal credos, Leopardi worried about the loss of true diversity that, from his far-sighted perspective, was barely hidden by the contemporary assertion of national identities. He intuited what Gellner today calls the pervasive false consciousness of nationalist ideology, which preaches to preserve primordial customs but creates the new mass culture, and claims to defend diversity but instead promotes homogeneity. Leopardi’s deliberate exploration of his predecessors’ unexamined uneasiness prompted him to search for a new philosophical language adequate to the challenge, a language that scholars still find difficult to define with precision. I argue that Leopardi’s thought style, with its characteristically paradoxical turns, impermeable to dialectic, is the most telling expression of his conviction that relationship between cultures cannot be defined from a transcendental stance or an overarching third dimension. Thus the ability to assess one’s own position and categories becomes crucial, an ability that continues to make Leopardi’s thought relevant to contemporary philosophy. Seen from the perspec-

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tive of his idea of the nation, however, Leopardi’s paradoxical style is also a function of that fundamental shift from the discourse of classical republicanism to the language of nationalism described by Viroli in his For Love of Country.3 Indeed, in the post-Napoleonic years (after 1815) the two vocabularies – still clearly separate in Cuoco’s writings, for instance (1801, 1806) – began to overlap; soon, as Viroli has shown, patriotism was ‘nationalized,’ in a shift accompanying historical events that altered the make-up of Europe forever. Times had indeed changed dramatically since Cesarotti’s first edition of Ossian (1763) and Saggio (1785), as Leopardi’s political preoccupations amply reveal. He was born after the French Revolution to a conservative aristocratic family in the provincial town of Recanati in the Papal State and began publishing in 1816, after the Congress of Vienna had ratified the restoration of the old dynasties and the borders of 1789, preceding Napoleon’s ‘liberation’ of Italy.4 The seventeenyear-old poet celebrated the restored order as the return of peace and prosperity in the oration All’Italia (1815), in one of his last lapses into an ultraconservative position. In time, he developed into a radical albeit sceptical republican, one with little patience for the compromises of constitutional monarchists and moderate liberals. Leopardi’s radical republicanism makes any attempt to place him on the left or the right a hopeless enterprise.5 In my analysis, I have found that the most reliable common denominator of his political positions is his unflinching antimoderatism, which has interestingly prompted a recent scholar to compare him to the American Unabomber.6 With the historical constellation of events changing, the meaning of nation was changing too. All over Europe the idea of nationality was on its way to becoming the foundation of the legitimacy of the modern state, while in Italy, once again divided into several states, the term nation had nonetheless acquired a new concrete sense.7 As Bollati reminds us, the school myth according to which the Italian patria became a political entity after 1815 is not completely wrong. Indeed, in the years between 1796 and 1814, the Italian Jacobins had formulated a national program, and although they had not been able to carry it out themselves, their project to unify the nation, ‘duly revised and purged of any revolutionary and radical elements,’ was taken over ‘by the moderates, that is, the political representatives of landowners and notables.’8 Leopardi clearly shared with his Romantic fellow patriots the longing for a politically autonomous and culturally prestigious patria as well as the organic vision of the nation as ‘one big individual’ (‘come un

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grande individuo’).9 But he pushed the nation, defined organically, into the past, particularly to ancient Greece. Indeed he believed, as we shall see in the last two sections of the present chapter, that in ‘civilized,’ rationalist times the nation was no longer a viable political project, because it was grounded on an inhumane ‘hatred of the foreigner.’ The shifting political and semantic framework, together with Leopardi’s effort to elaborate a philosophical discourse of contingency, explains the difficulties of his paradoxical style as well as the striking ideological ambivalence of his contribution to the debate on the genius of language. In my analysis I begin by exploring Leopardi’s characterization of national languages, which was informed by his linguistic concept of freedom, his main typological criterion of evaluation. After the failure of patriotic insurrections both in Naples and in Piedmont, Leopardi concentrated his reflections on issues of language and nationality. Indeed, his Zibaldone (Zib) – particularly in the years between 1821 and 1824 – became a ‘scrittura delle lingue,’ as Leopardi claimed in a letter of 3 July 1821 to his friend Pietro Giordani: La mia scrittura sarà delle lingue … Ora questa materia domanda tanta profondità di concetti quanta può capire nella mente umana, stante che la lingua e l’uomo e le nazioni per poco non sono la stessa cosa … È vano l’edificare se non cominciamo dalle fondamenta. Chiunque vorrà far bene all’Italia, prima di tutto dovrà mostrarle una lingua filosofica, senza la quale, io credo ch’ella non avrà mai letteratura moderna sua propria, e non avendo letteratura moderna propria, non sarà mai più nazione.10 [My writing will be on languages … Now this subject requires as much profundity of concepts as the human mind can understand, it being the case that language and man and nationality are almost the same thing … Whoever wants to benefit Italy first of all must show her a philosophical language, without which I believe that she will never have a proper modern literature, and … will never again be a nation.]

In 1821 Leopardi’s point of departure was clearly the concomitance of language, man, and nationality assumed in the debate on genius, and yet the realities of nineteenth-century Italy suggested that rather than being taken as a given, such a concomitance presented itself as a task. At this point Leopardi was aware that his homeland fulfilled neither the cultural nor the political requirements of a modern nation, lacking as it did both advanced philosophical and scientific knowl-

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edge and the political structures of a nation state. He seems particularly concerned that even Italy’s survival as a cultural nation might be at risk. Besides Leopardi’s reflections on the relations between language and nation, I discuss his critique of modern nationalism as articulated both in Zibaldone and in his Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani (1824). Conceived for a journal publication – probably Giovan Pietro Viesseux’ Antologia – but left unpublished until 1906, Discorso draws on the established genre of the description of national characters. It was directly inspired by Germaine de Staël’s observations on the Italian character in her novel Corinne, ou de l’Italie (1807). However, in contrast to de Staël, who ‘breezed through history, literature, and many countries of Europe seeking out essences and characters,’ as Morroe Berger, the American editor of a recent collection of de Stäel’s writings, puts it,11 Leopardi questioned the notion of character and its consistency as typically understood in contemporary thought. His unrelenting weakening of this notion subverted the terms of the old controversy about the genius of language, which were becoming the ground of new forms of nationalism, and became an integral component of his critique of the nation as unfit for modern times and societies. Ultimately Leopardi’s reflection on the themes of the old controversy proved to be the springboard for his prescient critique of nationalism. The Republic of Language: Citizenship to Foreign Idioms, or the Impossible Task of an Autochthonous Renewal Leopardi never published his planned scrittura delle lingue, but his numerous tables of contents and indexes with which he collected and reorganized the many pages dealing with language and nation give us a rather precise idea of his thought on these topics.12 Considered within the context of the debate on the genius of language, the crucial element consists, in my view, in his application of the vocabulary of classical republicanism to the questions concerning the evaluation and the expansion of national languages. Yet, before discussing his evaluation, based on his concept of linguistic freedom, it might be useful to take a brief look at Leopardi’s view of language in order to gain a better appreciation of his evaluative criteria. Leopardi’s idea of language was shaped by the sensationalist approach, particularly by Locke’s rejection of innatism, as mediated by the French idéologues.13 Leopardi believes that there are no innate ideas

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in the human mind and that all human knowledge results from sense perceptions: La mente nostra non può non solamente conoscere ma neppure concepire alcuna cosa oltre i limiti della materia … Diciamo che l’anima nostra è spirito. La lingua pronunzia il nome di questa sostanza, ma la mente non ne concepisce altra idea … Immagineremo un vento, un etere, un soffio … immagineremo una fiamma; assottiglieremo l’idea della materia quanto potremo, per formarci un’immagine e una similitudine di una sostanza immateriale; ma una similitudine sola. (Zib, 602–3) [Our mind cannot conceive of, let alone know, anything beyond the limits of the material … We say that our soul is spirit. The tongue pronounces the name of this substance, but the mind does not conceive of another idea of it … We will imagine a wind, an ether, a breath …, we will imagine a flame; we will refine the idea of matter as much as we are able in order to form an image or a likeness of an immaterial substance; but it remains a likeness only.]

In other words, all that human beings can know is matter: everything that is supposed to exist beyond or outside the material world ‘lies in perfect obscurity’ (Zib, 602). It is language that allows us to imagine immaterial substances, spiritual matters, and ethical issues, yet we should never forget that such thoughts are mere analogies and that in fact we do not know anything about those immaterial substances, not even whether they really exist.14 Within Leopardi’s materialist vision, language is the very foundation of our symbolic worlds, of our cultures. If the mind cannot conceive of anything that does not have a material basis, then words – which Leopardi views as the ‘bodies’ of thoughts – are the mind’s indispensable tool, and language is the constitutive element of ideas and knowledge.15 Since, for Leopardi, words are cognitive instruments, he strongly believes in the merits of multilingualism and in the strengths of cultures that foster it, such as the Roman Empire, during which the literati knew both Latin and ancient Greek; the European Renaissance, when Latin coexisted with the vulgar languages; and the Enlightenment, when French was Europe’s lingua franca: Il posseder più lingue dona una certa maggiore facilità e chiarezza di pensare seco stesso, perchè noi pensiamo parlando. Ora nessuna lingua ha forse tante parole e modi da corrispondere ed esprimere tutti gl’ infiniti

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particolari del pensiero. Il posseder più lingue e il poter perciò esprimere in una quello che non si può in un’altra … ci dà una maggior facilità d’intenderci noi medesimi applicando la parola all’idea che senza questa applicazione rimarrebbe molto confusa nella nostra mente. (Zib, 94–5) [Having more languages bestows a certain greater ease and clarity of thinking for oneself because we think by speaking. Now perhaps no single language has as many words and expressions that correspond to and express the infinite particulars of thought. Possessing several languages and thus the ability to express in one that which cannot be expressed in another … gives us a greater ease of understanding ourselves by applying the word to the idea that without such an application would remain very confused in our mind.]

In this passage, languages are both instruments of and obstacles to thinking because no single language possesses enough words to express the infinite variety of thoughts. The knowledge of other languages offers more opportunities to bring ideas into existence. Indeed, for Leopardi, an idea that is not defined in words is not available to the senses and therefore does not actually exist. Leopardi’s view of language as the means of the creation of ideas constitutes the foundation of his criteria for evaluating different idioms. If the ability to think depends on language, the best language is the ‘richest,’ the one that has the potential to be equal to the variety and abundance of perceptions and thoughts. Since languages are built on the economic principle of combining the same signs in numerous different ways, the richest language is the one that has preserved the ability to produce infinite combinations in all varieties of registers. Leopardi encapsulates these merits in his notion of freedom (‘libertà’), a complex idea that encompasses a language’s variety and adaptability as well as the concrete possibility of free creation in spite of established rules and conventions. He distinguishes three types of languages: (1) those ‘free in their nature and de facto,’ that is, ancient Greek and English; (2) those ‘free in their nature but not in their actuality,’ that is, the Italian language as reduced by pedants; and (3) those languages that are ‘not free, neither in nature nor de facto, such as French.’16 It is important to note that Leopardi prefaces his classification by clarifying that his typology refers to languages that are already completely formed, with a complete set of rules. In fact, all languages that are not yet formed or actually stabilized are obviously free both in their char-

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acter and de facto (‘tutte le lingue non formate sono libere per indole e per fatto,’ Zib, 1048), but they are all bound to lose this original freedom due to changing historical and socio-political conditions. Thus Leopardi applies the terms free and freedom to two different stages of languages: to the primitive condition of all languages, on which he never elaborates at length, and to their formation, or to the stage in which they are stabilized and regulated. In striking contrast to contemporary language theorists, Leopardi is not particularly interested in the free, authentic character of primitive language and significantly dismisses as a ‘foolish dream’ (‘frivolo sogno,’ Zib, 1272) the investigation of origin that is so crucial to the discourse on the genius of language and to the naturalization of the nation. As for the freedom of the formed language, he explains that it ‘originates in perfect knowledge, not in ignorance’ (Zib, 704); it is a quality that is consciously cultivated by writers and speakers as well; it is not an innate virtue. Leopardi moves within the framework of the French-Italian controversy when he appropriates the opposition evident in that debate and divides all formed languages into two categories: those ‘architettate sul modello dell’immaginazione,’ that is, free, imaginative languages that are varied, associative, and flexible; and those ‘architettate sulla ragione,’ or geometric languages that are rigid, analytical, and uniform (Zib, 1045). Like Vico, Leopardi considers French the geometric idiom par excellence and explains this quality as being the result of the relatively recent formation and regulation of French during a time in which reason and its mathematical criteria were fully developed. What distinguishes Leopardi’s characterizations from the previous discourse, however, is his application of the concept of freedom to language qualities, as well as his emphasis on the historicity of such freedom. The interaction of freedom with historical time begets a more nuanced evaluation, which, for instance, takes into consideration both what is lost and what is gained in the ‘geometrization’ (‘geometrizzazione’) of language, depending on the historical context: Le circostanze hanno voluto che ella (la lingua francese) ricevesse una forma stabile in un tempo moderno, e da questa forma fosse ridotta ad essere lingua precisamente di carattere moderno. Non è dunque maraviglia se le cose moderne non la corrompono. (Zib, 1050–1) [Circumstances have desired that the French language receive a stable form in a modern time and that from this form it be shaped into a lan-

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guage of a precisely modern stamp. It is no wonder therefore that modern things do not corrupt it.]

Because the French language was formed in modern times, the modern vocabulary does not clash with its geometric character; French can invent and acquire modern words without corrupting its indole (character). In this sense, French is the freest in developing its vocabulary (‘liberissima sia per legge o per fatto nelle parole,’ Zib, 1050) although not free in its structures and style. Unlike Vico, Leopardi concedes the attribute of universality to the French language. Vico, as we have seen, thought of the universal language as the original ‘mental idiom’ articulating bodily perceptions common to all human beings; Leopardi, with his heightened sense of contingency, distinguishes between an ancient and a modern universality, defining the latter as follows: L’universalità di una lingua deriva principalmente dalla regolarità geometrica e facilità della sua struttura, dall’esattezza, chiarezza materiale, precisione, certezza de’ suoi significati ec. Cose che si fanno apprezzare da tutti, essendo fondate nella secca ragione, e nel puro senso comune, ma che non hanno che far niente colla bellezza, ricchezza … dignità, varietà, armonia, grazia, forza, evidenza. (Zib, 243; see also Zib, 838–54; 1021–5) [The universality of a language derives principally from the geometric regularity and the facility of its structure, from the exactness, material clarity, precision, certainty of its meanings, etc. Things that make themselves appreciated by all, being founded in dry reason and in pure common sense, but that have nothing to do with beauty, wealth …, dignity, variety, harmony.]

This description of the universality of a language is a far cry from Vico’s assessment. Leopardi seems convinced that, in modern times ruled by reason, only a geometric language, firmly regulated, precise and uniform, can be called universal. He actually builds on Vico’s definition of common sense, which changes as human beings turn from primitive bestioni who act according to sense perception, into men who construct truth on the basis of rational operations. However, Vico did not push his definition of the universality of language as far as Leopardi did, for he believed that a language, in order to be a truly universal means

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of cognition, had to preserve its imaginative qualities. Vico’s universal language, as seen in chapter 3, encapsulates aesthetic, ethical, and cognitive values; Leopardi’s linguistic universalism, instead, has nothing to do with beauty and imagination and everything to do with the historical moment.17 It is striking that the Zibaldone notes from the end of March 1821, after the liberal insurrections in Naples and Piedmont, strongly emphasize the convergence of written and spoken idiom as a fundamental feature of the universal language. Although a language can neither spread nor stabilize without the work of writers, it is only through a steady interchange with speech that a modern written language can become universal (Zib, 838–54). In the times of the masses the cultural nation must be expanded, its language opened up; Leopardi sees this process occurring in France, missing in Italy, and having totally eluded the Latin (Roman) nation (‘così accade alla Francia, il contrario in Italia, il contrarissimo nel latino’). While Dante’s language could still offer inspiration for a universal language because his written idiom, in his time, remained understandable to the people and even embraced popular idioms (Zib, 2127), Latin was not a feasible model for Leopardi. Here again, Leopardi definitely parts ways with Vico, who presented Latin as the sublime and imaginative mother language, rivalled only by Hebrew and German. Leopardi instead maintains that Latin departed too soon from its popular indole, severing itself from speech. By abandoning its simple constructions and its vernacular elements and acquiring highly artificial, tortuous, and intricate structures immediately after its formation, Latin became an exclusively written idiom, lacking universality (Zib, 858–61). In contrast with French and Latin (which Leopardi considers to be not free), Italian, he claims, is free in its indole because, among all modern tongues, it was formed in a ‘very ancient’ period, the Trecento, and thus was not subject to the meticulous geometricizing rules of modern reason during its formation (Zib, 1047). Italian was also formed with a free character because in its early regulated form it drew from the imaginative and varied idiom of the common people. Moreover, it was able to preserve its free character for a long time because Italian writers had always regarded the Trecento as the ‘richest, eternal, and inexhaustible source of our language’ (Zib, 707), and, in contrast to modern French writers, they never ceased to draw on the riches and beauties of the ancient idiom. Political conditions also favoured the freedom of Italian, that is, its capacity to adapt to diverse contents and functions through a variety of styles and registers.

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La gran libertà, varietà, ricchezza della lingua greca ed italiana (siccome oggi quella tedesca), qualità proprie del loro carattere, … riconosce come una delle principali cause la circostanza contraria a quella che produsse le qualità contrarie nella lingua latina e francese: cioè la mancanza di capitale, società nazionale, di unità politica e di un centro di costumi, opinioni, spirito, letteratura e lingua nazionale. Omero e Dante (massime Dante) fecero professione di non voler restringere la lingua a veruna o città o provincia d’Italia. (Zib, 2126–7) [The great freedom, variety, richness of Greek and Italian (like German today), proper qualities of their character, … recognizes as one of the principal causes the circumstance contrary to the one that produced the opposite qualities in Latin and French: that is to say the lack of a capital city, national culture, of political unity and of a cultural center of customs, opinions, spirit, literature and national language. Homer and Dante (especially Dante) made a profession of not wanting to restrict language to one single city or province in Italy.]

This passage places Italian on par with German and Greek, significantly loosening it from its genealogical links to its mother language as well as its modern sister. The lack of a political centre and ultimately of a nation – which Leopardi, like many literati of his times, laments elsewhere as the reason for modern Italy’s loss of cultural prestige – becomes fundamental because it contributes to the formation and preservation of a rich and free language. Here and elsewhere Leopardi echoes Vico’s early view of Dante’s language as a composite idiom. However, while Vico abandoned this view in his later writings, Leopardi builds on it his positive parallel with Greek and German (recall that Vico paired Latin and German, the two lingue madri).18 Clearly Leopardi’s application of his notion of freedom altered the characterization of national languages that emerged in the controversy over genius. In particular, the historicity of freedom constantly blurs his categories, as happens when he clarifies that Italian, though free also in its formed character (‘per indole’), has lost its freedom de facto (‘per fatto’) in the last one and a half centuries. To complicate things further, his characterization of Italian oscillates back and forth over the course of two years. Indeed, in the notes of 1821 he continues to present Italian as the only modern language that has preserved its freedom (Zib, 1956). In 1823, however, he is inclined to stress the loss of freedom as

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revealed by the decrease in variety and flexibility and begins to search for its causes. Leopardi destroys the frame of the old controversy and breaks the continuity of myth making when he emphasizes the literariness of the Italian language and analyses the political causes of its changes. More important, he realistically addresses the vast discrepancy in Italy between the literary and the spoken idioms, which would become the main concern of writers such as Foscolo and Manzoni, who ignored the debate on the genius of language with its myth of the unity of Italy’s tongues. The Italian (literary) language had lost its freedom for various reasons. The predominance of the purist ideology with its rigid orientation towards the Trecento literary idiom within the Accademia della Crusca – the very institution in charge of the language’s care – had fatally affected the flexibility and variety of Italian, producing writers that were ‘completely empty and irrelevant but pure ‘ (‘scrittori vuotissimi e nulli ma puri,’ Zib, 798). In addition, the writers’ passive acceptance of the highly conventional received idiom had deepened the gap between the written and the spoken language, cutting the regulated language off from its richest source of variety and liveliness. Finally, Italy’s cultural decay or, as Leopardi prefers to name it, the ‘interruption of literature’ (‘la letteratura interrotta,’ Zib, 3323) had completed the loss of freedom of the language. Leopardi repeatedly laments the standstill of one hundred and fifty years, during which very few original writers emerged, certainly not enough to break this exceptional period of arrested development: ‘Just as our literature came to a halt, so did our language, too. … It is now more than 150 years since Italy has either created or cultivated for itself any kind of literature’ (‘così fermata tra noi la letteratura, fermossi anche la lingua … sono oggimai più di centocinquant’anni che l’Italia né crea, né coltiva per se verun genere di letteratura,’ Zib, 3319). As an interest-bearing capital (‘un capitale fruttifero’), language has to be reinvested in order to continue ‘bearing fruit’ (Zib, 765–6). A nation has to invest in and cultivate all possible disciplines, producing knowledge about ‘all perceptions and all objects of life that fall in the realm of language’ (‘tutte le cognizioni e tutti gli oggetti della vita che cadono nella lingua,’ Zib, 587) in order to possess a free language, rich in all its parts and registers. Leopardi blames the dearth of modern literature and science in Italy as a fundamental reason for the inability of the Italian language to express contemporary contents, feelings, thoughts, and perceptions, an inability already

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lamented by Cesarotti while translating Ossian (1763, 1772, 1801). Leopardi, too, felt this lack in a particularly acute way because he was trying to create a modern illustre prose for his Operette morali: Certo è veramente dura e deplorevole la condizione dell’italiano il quale avesse nella sua mente cose degne d’essere scritte … perocch’egli … non avrebbe una lingua naturale in cui scrivere – come l’hanno i francesi ec. atta a potervi subito scrivere, com’ei l’abbiano competentemente coltivata e studiata … ma converrebbe ch’egli si fabbricasse l’istrumento con cui significar le sue idee. (Zib, 3331) [It is certainly hard and deplorable the condition of the Italian who might have in his mind things worthy of being written down … since he would not have a natural language in which to write – as the French have one suitable for writing immediately and directly, having competently cultivated and studied it – … rather it would be necessary for him to create the instrument with which to signify his ideas.]

In Leopardi’s assessment, a contemporary Italian writer had to create his language ‘with his own hands’ (‘colle sue mani,’ Zib, 3328), establishing at the same time some kind of continuity with the past idiom – an enterprise that was not without difficulties given that the Italian literary language was formed in an ancient time and that bridging an ‘interruption’ of a hundred and fifty years inevitably seemed an arduous task. As a disciple of the French idéologues, Leopardi does not shy away from once again investigating the material, that is, the historical and political conditions responsible for the interruption of literature in Italy, and it is striking that the loss of freedom of the language ends up coinciding with the loss of autonomy of Italy’s polities. In the entries of 10 and 11 November 1823 he writes extensively on Italy’s political impotence as the ‘absolute cause’ of the decay of its language and culture (Zib, 3858–60). He identifies the origin of Italy’s cultural decay with the beginning of Italy’s political dependence in the Seicento.19 In a long series of passages, he draws a direct link between the political crisis and the poverty of Italian and establishes, in a somewhat reductive mode, that the arrest of the language, ‘which always follows things and corresponds to things,’ reflected the political passivity of the country (Zib, 3862). Leopardi’s search for a balance between innovation and continuity

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or, in his terms, the question of how to ‘make’ the modern Italian language without completely giving up the characteristic freedom of its old literary idiom, intensely absorbed his attention in the years 1821–3. His first worry concerned the difficulty of reattaching (‘riannodare’)20 the modern idiom to Italy’s tradition, the only one in Europe that had been able to produce two lingue illustri or literary languages, namely Latin and Italian.21 Such a circumstance, Leopardi suggests in a few passages, offered some hope for a modern rebirth of Italian by drawing on the language’s own resources and creating new words derived from Italian roots. One would need to ‘open the doors’ to the words already belonging to the nation’s current usage, the richest and most legitimate source of idioms (Zib, 787). In addition, writers should reactivate the potential of compound words – a form of linguistic creativity that, though foreign to Italian usage, had been actively endorsed by Cesarotti in his translations and later by Vincenzo Monti in his Proposte (1817–26). Leopardi suggests combining established words (as in passatempo, valentuomo, beccafico, capomorto), Italian roots and prepositions (as in sopraggiungere, indiare), and Italian roots and suffixes (such as the adverbial -mente [torvamente] or the verbal ending -eggiare).22 Yet Leopardi’s vision of the close intertwining of language, culture, and politics ultimately weakened his confidence in the self-regenerating power of the Italian language. Nearly all passages dealing with its internal renewal end on a pessimistic note, realizing that the ‘interruption of literature,’ the Italian cultural decay, was an irreparable event. In order to renew the Italian language one had to ‘put Italy back on its feet’ and ‘re-make’ the Italians’ mind – a task that certainly was not feasible in the span of a generation (‘Giacchè per rimetter davvero in piedi la lingua italiana, bisognerebbe prima in somma rimettere in piedi l’Italia, e gl’italiani e rifare le teste e gl’ingegni loro,’ Zib, 799). Thus Leopardi’s hope of binding the contemporary literary language to the traditional idiom by reviving Italy’s cultural life gives way to a different solution: E così con mio dispiacere predico che seppur avremo mai lingua moderna propria, questa non nascerà dall’antica … ma nascendo dalla nuova letteratura, a questa sarà conforme: ed essendo di origine straniera, ci si verrà appoco appoco appropriando e pigliando forme nazionali … a proporzione che la nuova letteratura diverrà nazionale, e metterà radici in Italia, e si nutrirà e crescerà del nostro terreno, e produrrà frutti propri italiani. (Zib, 3333)

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[And so it is with displeasure that I predict if we are ever to have a properly modern language, it will not be born from the old one … but being born from a new literature it will conform to it: and being of foreign origin, it will go little by little borrowing and taking national forms … just as the new literature will become a national one, and will put roots in Italian soil, and will be nourished and grow on our land, and will produce purely Italian fruit.]

Here Leopardi envisions a productive opening up of the Italian literary community to European contemporary culture as the only way to regenerate the interrupted Italian language. Although he regrets the loss of a seamless continuity with the old native tradition (‘con mio dispiacere predico’), he does not represent the integration of foreign manners and idioms as a corruption of the national indole, nor as a loss of identity. On the contrary, Leopardi seems confident that Italian culture will appropriate the foreign material in its own unique way. Once again, it is a republican vocabulary, based on the acquisition of rights rather than on the privileges of birth, that gives life to Leopardi’s vision of renewal. In his rebirth of Italian, foreign words and idioms must be treated ‘as if naturalized and must share in all rights and considerations’ given to native words (‘come naturalizzate e debbono partecipare ai diritti e alle consideraz. delle sopraddette,’ Zib, 791). He calls attention to all of the words of Greek, French, and German origin that sounded completely familiar to contemporary Italian ears because they had lost their ‘foreign appearance and costume’ (‘la sembianza e il costume straniero,’ Zib, 794), and he urges Italians not to regard as foreign those idioms and words that have established ‘stable residence in everyday usage’ (‘stabile domicilio nell’uso quotidiano,’ Zib, 790). In his opinion, instead of scorning every new foreign idiom or word that enters their language, Italians would do better to admit them to Italian citizenship in a more affirmative way (‘riceverle nella cittadinanza della lingua,’ Zib, 796). Many foreign words had become indispensable to modern communication and circulated spontaneously in the nation, being used without any awareness, study, or judicious adaptation. It was time to consciously ‘invite them to become part of the already recognized words and expressions, and to participate in the honors owed to the citizens of proper speech’ (‘che le inviti, e le introduca a far parte delle voci o modi riconosciuti, e a partecipare degli onori dovuti ai cittadini della buona lingua,’ Zib, 790). Many of these passages, written in the critical month of the revolu-

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tions of March 1821, are more original for their rhetoric than for the concrete solutions they propose in order to overcome the linguistic crisis. Leopardi is not the first intellectual to suggest a judicious intake of foreign idioms; Cesarotti, as we have seen in the previous chapter, also endorsed their adoption. Yet Leopardi’s insistence on the images of citizenship and freedom is worthy of note. On the one hand, it simply points to the fact that, for Italians, language was the only locus of the nation. On the other hand, Leopardi ultimately casts the notion of citizenship as an elective attribute, not as an exclusive right of birth related to blood or soil. Qualities, values, and virtues are appropriated or ‘naturalized’; they are neither inborn nor perennial. Instead of giving in to the contemporary nationalization of republican patriotism, Leopardi applies the language of republicanism (liberty and citizenship) to the debate on language. The image of the national community that he suggests through his characterization of languages contrasts markedly with contemporary trends. Indeed, even intellectuals such as Vincenzo Gioberti, a friend of Leopardi’s who insisted on the imperative of ‘making the Italians’ and thus revealed a more or less constructivist view of the nation, were striving in their writings to stretch nationhood beyond the political and cultural definition. Contemporary writers invented and reinforced images, especially parental images that suggested the natural character of the national community, thus appealing to the sentiments of love for the community of kin rather than to the love of freedom and of the republic. Leopardi’s abandonment of the family metaphor, his concentration on the elements of the formed language instead of its congenital qualities, and his definition of linguistic naturalization (‘citizenship to foreign words’) bluntly defied that trend. Habit, Second Nature, Character Leopardi’s confidence that a foreign culture could be successfully naturalized originates, I believe, in his ideas of assuefazione (habit) and second nature, two concepts that emerge in very different contexts (including moral, social, and psychological) and are rooted in his relativistic perspective as well as in his vision of history as a movement away from nature. While his analysis of language disavowed the conflation of mother tongue and literary language, a core component of the myth of the genius of language, his systematic reflections on habit and second nature undermined the innate understanding of character. These

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reflections ultimately articulated his most consistent critique of the natural nation. In the wake of Germaine de Staël’s popular writings at the turn of the nineteenth century, the isomorphic relationship between language and nation had become something of a commonplace. There are enough statements in Leopardi’s Zibaldone that endorse what has been called de Staël’s ‘empire of stereotypes,’23 and they are usually prefaced by repetitive general claims that rehearse the refrain of the traditional debate (‘Qual è la nazione e la letteratura, tale la lingua e viceversa,’ Zib, 2090; or ‘Ogni lingua perfetta è la più viva, la più fedele, la più totale imagine e storia del carattere della nazione che la parla,’ Zib, 2847).24 Of course, the addition of a third term – literature – to the relationship between language and nation not only bars the conflation of written and spoken idioms but also reveals that the nation, in these passages, is understood as the community of people sharing the high-culture idiom. Leopardi endlessly elaborates on the detail of this relationship in ways that question the very usefulness of notions such as national character and even indole (disposition). In spite of his insistent use of the term character, his consistent application of the concepts of second nature and habit to linguistics, aesthetics, ethics, and psychology fundamentally disputes the essentialist view of nature, making any articulation of the natural nation impossible. Let us begin by examining Leopardi’s critique of the genius of language: Ma da che cosa stimiamo noi che sieno derivate in lei (nella lingua italiana) queste qualità? Forse dalla sua primitiva ed ingenita natura ed essenza? Così ordinariamente si dice, ma ci inganniamo di gran lunga. Le dette qualità, le lingue non le hanno mai per origine né per natura. Tutte presso a poco sono disposte ad acquistarle, e possono non acquistarle mai. (Zib, 766–7) [But from what do we think these qualities are derived (in the Italian language)? Perhaps from its primitive and inborn nature and essence? So it is ordinarily said, but we deceive ourselves exceedingly. Languages do not possess their qualities neither by origin nor by nature. All languages more or less are disposed to acquiring them, or not.]

In this passage, inborn nature and essence are deceiving myths, while the idea of disposition is crucial. Leopardi explicitly criticizes current opinion regarding the innate and essential qualities of languages

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(‘primitiva ed ingenita natura ed essenza’), which in the old controversy easily lead to assertions of the undisputable supremacy of this or that other national language. Asserting that the characteristic qualities of a formed language are not inborn or intrinsic to its nature but acquired, he balances the chances of all cultures. According to Leopardi, as we have seen, all languages initially possess the same free disposition and therefore can potentially acquire all possible qualities. This equal disposition, however, results in different qualities according to the various circumstances. Their acquisition actually depends on numerous factors: the size of the territory in which the idiom is spoken; the commerce with other nations; the mobility of the population; the historical, moral, and physical circumstances of a nation; and the writers’ ability to stabilize the changes resulting from the impact of such factors. Leopardi often invokes climate as an explanation of linguistic and cultural differences and, like his master Rousseau, appears to assume the sharp opposition of the characters of southern and northern nations, even endorsing De Staël’s theory of the translatio of civilization from the south to the north (‘la civiltà progredisce … dal sud al nord,’ Zib, 1027; see also 4256).25 He devotes an extraordinary number of entries to the southerners-northerners opposition , but, as will be seen in his Discorso sopra lo stato presente de’ costumi degli italiani (1824) as well, he is mostly occupied with warning about the deceptive nature of this opposition. Moreover, his concept of time intersects these romanticized spaces in an idiosyncratic way,26 destabilizing any linear or even circular framework and transfiguring the meridionalità into a category of time rather than space (‘L’antichità medievale e la maggior naturalezza degli antichi, è una specie di meridionalità nel tempo,’ Zib, 4256). Leopardi further undermines the constructs of northern and southern characters by insistently pointing out ‘how little is the influence of what we call natural’ in the human world (‘tanto è piccola la parte di quel che si chiama il naturale,’ Zib, 1830) and by emphasizing the paradoxical quality of arguments that are built on supposedly natural differences.27 In numerous entries, he remarks that opposite natural causes can result in the same character (whether of language, of literature, or of the people) and vice versa, according to the different societal and political circumstances and to the way the natural causes are dealt with in the different cultures. Even the apparently simple and unequivocal natural fact of climate cannot serve as a stable ground to deduce the character of languages and peoples.28 The acquired qualities themselves, which constitute the second na-

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ture or the formed character of a language, keep changing according not only to circumstances but even to speakers’ diverse perceptions. Thus the assumed character turns into a completely unstable notion. In a self-reflexive passage (Zib, 236–7), Leopardi remarks that what he defines throughout Zibaldone as the affectation of the French language depends on his own habit and customs and might sound instead neutral to the native speaker.29 The perception of affectation can thus result from the cultural otherness of a language and its ability to defy our own habits and expectations, as the Muratori-Bouhours polemic amply exemplified. Leopardi’s concepts of habit and disposition shape not only his linguistic thought but also – and more fundamentally – his anthropology. Leopardi maintains that nature provides each individual species, including human beings, with the same disposition, rather than with specific innate faculties, talents, and ideas. As for human beings, even imagination and reason are not faculties that all possess from the outset, but dispositions that one may or may not actually acquire (Zib, 1662). Following the path of the French idéologues, Leopardi develops his anthropology around the idea that all values and faculties depend on the extreme disposition of human beings to adapt to external circumstances. Indeed, he believes that if there is any innate faculty, given by nature to all humans, it is their adaptability (‘assuefabilità’): La stessa assuefabilità deriva in gran parte dalla assuefazione e ne riceve consistenza, aumento, gradazione. L’assuefabilità non è altro che disposizione. Tuttavia se vogliamo chiamarla facoltà, questa è l’unica facoltà naturale, essenziale, primitiva ed ingenita, che abbia qualunque vivente. (Zib, 1828) [The same adaptability derives in large part from habit and receives from it consistency, increase, nuance. Adaptability is nothing other than disposition. But if we wish to refer to it as a faculty, this is the only natural, essential, original, and innate faculty that anyone can be said to possess.]

Here human beings are both endowed by nature with the ability to form habits (‘assuefabilità’) and also shaped by habit (‘assuefazione’), which makes them adapt to external circumstances. Habit even governs the degree to which human beings are capable of adapting to different situations; quoting the then popular cases of individuals raised and living in the exclusive company of animals, Leopardi reminds his

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readers of the infinite potentialities intrinsic in human adaptability, in their ‘somma conformabilità’ (Zib, 2691–2). Throughout Zibaldone, he insists on proving habit to be the true foundation of all values, including beauty, goodness, and truth (‘Not only beauty but perhaps most of the things and truths we hold to be absolute and general are relative and particular,’ Zib, 208). Habit imperceptibly (‘quasi insensibilmente’) creates and destroys values that human beings hold as permanent and universal, the products of nature or divine providence (Zib, 208). Leopardi provides numerous examples that prove the contingent nature of aesthetic, moral, and cognitive values, often addressing the power of fashion (for example, the differences between European and African perceptions of physical beauty, Zib, 8, 49, 1195, 1409, 2559, 3088)30 as well as the romantic idealization of nature and emotions. He rejects the idea of erotic love as the quintessence of nature, arguing that the individual acquires and is not born with a specific sexual orientation. Even ‘what appears’ to be the spontaneous inclination of a man towards a woman, ‘the most natural, most genuine, less contrived, most inherent, less apt to be acquired’ of all perceptions, ‘is in no way natural but acquired, in fact entirely produced by the circumstances’ (‘non è per niun modo naturale né innata, ma acquisita, ossia prodotta di pianta dalle circostanze,’ Zib, 3303). Civilization shapes even the habits that regulate the most intimate aspects of human interaction through banal, material accidents such as clothes, which prescribe specific behaviours: E così da una circostanza così materiale, com’è quella de’ vestimenti – … dai costumi e leggi sociali circa le donne – nasce nell’uomo un effetto il più spirituale …; da una circostanza così accidentale un effetto così intimo …; finalmente da una circostanza non naturale nasce un effetto che universalmente si considera come il più naturale, il più proprio dell’uomo, il più assolutamente inevitabile, il meno acquistabile, il meno producibile da altra forza che dalla stessa mano della natura, il più congenito ec. (Zib, 3309) [And so from a condition so material, such as that of dress – … and from the customs and social laws concerning women – there is born in man the most spiritual effect …; from a condition so incidental, an effect so intimate …; finally from an unnatural condition there is born an effect that is universally considered the most natural, the most characteristic of man, the most absolutely inevitable, the least obtainable, the least producible except by the very hand of nature, the most congenital, etc.]

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Leopardi’s passages on love, which uncover the social constitution of feelings, challenge the contemporary Romantic cult of emotions that held them to be the most obvious and direct signs of nature.31 The insistent cumulative style of Leopardi’s conclusion, which lists all of the illusory categorizations (‘the most natural,’ ‘the most absolutely inevitable,’ ‘the quintessentially inborn’), reveals Leopardi’s frustration with a human inability to recognize what is in fact man-made and not given by nature. Leopardi develops his way of thinking to its extremes and declares that the postulate ‘everything is relative’ is the only absolute truth and ‘the basis of all metaphysics’ (‘Non v’è quasi altra verità assoluta se non che Tutto è relativo. Questa dev’esser la base di tutta la metafisica,’ Zib, 452). His full-fledged concept of habit as a second nature and his vision of the extreme dependence of the individual’s human development on external circumstances clash with the assumption of an original and permanent character, of individuals as well as of nations. One particular entry draws attention to the irrelevance of blood relations in matters of character, thus further weakening the most powerful rhetorical tool of contemporary nationalistic discourse, namely the familial image of the national community.32 Written on 30 June 1823, this lengthy entry is significantly placed in the middle of a substantial group of linguistic reflections that compare the characters of different languages and their relationship to the national indole.33 It functions as a reminder that generalizations about nations should be taken for what they are, namely provisional hermeneutic tools, not essential structures. This entry, taking up several pages, discusses the expectation of similarity and full understanding between two brothers, turning a commonplace into a philosophical tale. Here Leopardi assumes the existence of two brothers of exactly the same age who, having shared a common environment and common experiences for a prolonged period of time, can also be assumed to have acquired the same habits and to understand and trust each other. Already at this point in his argument Leopardi asserts that the brothers’ similarities will be easily recognized as the result of similar circumstances, not the consequence of their blood relation (‘not by natural force of blood relation, which is nothing and imaginary and has nothing to do with fostering and maintaining that intimacy,’ Zib, 2862).34 The community and intimacy attributed to the blood relationship is for Leopardi an imaginary one; indeed, it is based on societal rather than biological circumstances. As the entries continue, Leopardi discusses the disparity introduced

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in the brothers’ characters by the different experiences that they encounter once they have entered the wider society. He restates the refrain of Zibaldone, according to which human beings and values are fundamentally shaped by societal circumstances (‘What does this mean, if not that in the characters of men 99 per cent is the result of circumstances?’ Zib, 2863).35 However, the considerations immediately following impart a new turn to his refrain. It is impossible that the two brothers could have encountered the same ‘minute circumstances and events,’ even if they have lived in the same society and in the same place. Even minimal accidents, Leopardi adds, substantially contribute to diversify the characters of human beings in infinite and considerable ways.36 Leopardi concludes his anecdote by remarking that if external circumstances cause divergence of character between two brothers who have grown up together in the same environment for several years, one must assume an infinite diversity within the national ‘family.’ In later entries (19 August 1823, for example) Leopardi applies his consideration of character even more explicitly to the nation, asserting that between individuals of the same or of diverse nations there exists a real difference in nature and talent (‘anche tra individui di una stessa o di diverse nazioni esiste dalla nascita una reale differenza d’indole e di talento,’ Zib, 3202). Individuals, from the same nation or not, necessarily differ from each other because each human being is endowed with a ‘disposition to difference’ (‘un principio e una disposizione di differenza,’ Zib, 3202). In nature, there is infinite multiformity, infinite differentiation. In the human world, uniformity is the product of culture, not of nature. In order to accentuate the fleeting quality of character, Leopardi goes so far as to maintain that the inexhaustible diversity of circumstances is such that the same individual will ‘vary character and talent even in the course of the same day’ (‘si trova, per così dir, vario d’indole e di talento dentro la stessa giornata,’ Zib, 3204)! Leopardi’s critique of character questions its objectification by demonstrating the unpredictable impact of changing circumstances on the development and on the variations of character. Convinced that each individual experiences and elaborates even the same conditions in different ways, Leopardi rejects the arguments that apply to or derive from a collective body or the concept of national character. He explicitly questions blood relation as the foundation of similarities of character, challenging the image of the nation as a community of kin. By questioning the validity of the parental link as the grounds for comparing and describing individuals, Leopardi disqualifies its figurative application

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used to naturalize the perception of the fundamentally conventional national community. His insistence on the irreducible differences among individuals and their unpredictable development definitively destabilizes the core concept of the genius debate by presenting character – of the individual, of the language, and of the nation – as a phenomenon that is developed through habit, not an essence that is given once and for all. Character thus becomes a particularly volatile, highly unstable concept. At the same time, his understanding of nature as the realm of infinite differences and as opposed to culture –which he viewed as the exclusive source of uniformity in the human world – turned the natural, organic nation into an oxymoron. Italians, or the People without a Character Absolute disintegration and dismemberment has always been an essential feature in the national character of the inhabitants of Italy, in ancient as well as in modern times … Improvisation characterizes the genius of the Italians; they pour out their very souls in art and the ecstatic enjoyment of it. Enjoying a naturel so imbued with art, the state must be an affair of comparative indifference, a merely casual matter to the Italians. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of History37

With its title and opening, Leopardi’s Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani (1824) (DS) announces itself as yet another trendy essay on the manners and customs of the Italians.38 With the growing popularity of Italy on the map of the European grand tour, the number of works in this genre had proliferated enormously, and Leopardi believed that the judgment on Italian society by foreign visitors, at least since De Staël’s Corinne (1807), had considerably softened: ‘One can well say that today, in contrast to the past, when foreigners err about us, they do so rather to our advantage than to our disadvantage.’39 Leopardi mentions Giuseppe Baretti among the Italian observers, who had judged Italians with harshness but was too sharp-tongued to be taken seriously (DS, 49).40 Leopardi is determined to speak honestly and freely as only a foreigner could do and not to sacrifice truth to selflove. Why would he want to convey flattering formalities to his own nation, his family, his brothers (‘alla mia propria nazione, quasi alla mia famiglia e a’ miei fratelli?’ DS, 50), he asks, in an attempt at captatio benevolentiae. Yet after a few pages, we discover that Leopardi’s Discorso is a particular kind of thought experiment. It declares itself

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to be a study of the impact on the Italian character of the spiritual crisis brought about by the philosophy of the Enlightenment (‘the death of illusions,’ or the collapse of foundational values, as we would say today), especially after the French had imported their new ideas into the peninsula. Soon enough, however, the stereotyping discourse about national character, its nature and causes, is replaced by original sociological observations on the function of the società stretta, or modern civil society, a term that Leopardi borrows from Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Eloise (1761, ‘sociéte resserrée’).41 Finally, the essay delivers a definitive blow to the ‘we’ embraced at the beginning, subverting any wisdom about collective character. Fundamentally, Discorso denounces the lack of civil society in Italy or of a public sphere. However, Discorso is not an absolute endorsement of civil society or of civilization. Leopardi views civilization from a perspective similar to that of Rousseau, as humanity’s progressive estrangement from nature: a history of decay, not of progress. Nevertheless, he considers civilization to be the only possible antidote to itself: La civiltà che sotto molti aspetti è chiamata e veramente è corruzione, pure infondendo lo spirito di onore mediante l’uso della società e la stima dell’opinione pubblica che di là nasce … opera oggidì in modo che mancando generalmente, più o meno, gli altri principi morali, e gli altri aiuti e garanti della morale, i costumi dov’è minor civiltà, cioè corruzione, quivi sono più corrotti, o vogliam dire in somma più cattivi … la civiltà ripara oggi quanto ai costumi in qualche modo i suoi propri danni. (DS, 78) [Civilization – which in many aspects is called and truly is corruption, even though it infuses the spirit of honour through the use of society and the esteem of public opinion from where honour is born… – works today in such a way that, since it generally lacks, more or less, other moral principles and the other aids to and guarantees of morality, customs are more corrupt, or we might say in short more wicked, where there is less civilization, that is to say corruption. … in regard to customs, civilization today makes amends for the very harm that it causes.]

Modern civilization constitutes the only foundation of morals after the end of illusions. Once all metaphysical foundations have been destroyed, values are constituted through the consent of civil society or, in Leopardi’s term, of the società stretta.

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In Discorso, the società stretta is a sociological entity, a socio-economic elite that consists of people who are free from primary needs. Their life is occupied with social exchange, the conversazione, and they are mainly concerned, in Leopardi’s words, ‘with the opinion that others have of them’ (‘della opinione altrui verso loro,’ DS, 52). The concern with one’s own reputation within the narrow society constitutes, in Leopardi’s view, the only possible and yet shaky ground of morals in contemporary societies, especially since ‘refined men of those [civilized] nations are just as ashamed to do evil as they are to appear in society with a stain on their clothes or with a ragged and worn-out garment’ (DS, 54).42 People refrain from evil deeds not out of a desire for good or a sense of duty but just because they would look bad. Leopardi does not seem to believe truly in the effectiveness of internalizing socially constructed values and disparages social consent, reducing it to a matter of appearance and ‘buon tuono,’ or bon ton. Nevertheless, he does not underestimate the power of societal pressure, concluding that wherever the ‘narrow society,’ with its bon ton requirements, is missing, ‘there morality lacks every foundation, and society every tie, except for force, which will never produce good customs or ban bad ones’ (‘quivi la morale manca d’ogni fondamento e la società d’ogni vincolo, fuor della forza, la quale non potrà mai né produrre i buoni costumi né bandire o tener lontani i cattivi,’ DS, 54–5). With respect to morals, Leopardi views Europe as divided between ‘civilized’ nations such as France and England, in which the elite’s consensus forms the grounds for social and moral values, and ‘ignorant’ nations such as Russia and Spain, in which prejudice persists as the foundation of values.43 Within his classification, post- Napoleonic Italy constitutes an isolated case in between: L’Italia è, in ordine alla morale, più sprovveduta di fondamenti che forse alcun’altra nazione europea e civile, perocché manca di quelli che ha fatti nascere ed ora conferma ogni dì più co’ suoi progressi la civiltà medesima, ed ha perduti quelli che il progresso della civiltà e dei lumi ha distrutti. (DS, 71) [Italy is, in terms of morals, more ill-equipped when it comes to foundations than any other civilized nation of Europe, because she lacks those foundations that she brought forth and that civilization itself now confirms each day more with her advances, and she has lost those foundations that the progress of civilization and its luminaries have destroyed.]

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Italy, the birthplace of ancient traditional values, here stands out as a community without moral foundations. Once the French army had imported the revolutionary ideas and the new moral philosophy of the Enlightenment, the old metaphysical grounds of morals were destroyed. Italy, however, in contrast to France and England, did not possess the social institutions that elsewhere spread and sustained the new buoni costumi. Without a cultural centre, a national theatre, an ‘Italian audience’ (‘un pubblico italiano,’ DS, 56), or a modern literature, Italy continued to lack the disciplines and spheres of action typical of the creation, advancement, and negotiation of values within modern societies. In the absence of the modern measures of values – as constituted in civil society, public opinion, and conversazione, or civilized social exchange – indifference, cynicism, and egotism prevail. There is no commitment to common values, so much so that ‘the uses and customs in Italy are generally reduced to this: each person follows his or her own use and custom, whatever that might be’ (DS, 76).44 A peculiar form of egotistical anarchy governs Italy. Therefore, Leopardi adds, one cannot even speak of Italian customs in a proper sense. Italians share only habits; they act not according to values that they have consciously appropriated – that is, customs – but merely follow mechanical habits, which they are ready to transgress whenever the habits clash with their egotistical interest. Their indifference to common values is ‘perfect, totally rooted, and constant’ (‘l’indifferenza che ne risulta è perfetta, radicatissima, costantissima,’ DS, 79). In Leopardi’s Discorso, Italians emerge as a people without self-awareness and self-esteem and, as such, unable to be ‘a people’ at all.45 At this point, we should ask whether and how the contemporary idea of national character operates in Discorso. One could argue, first of all, that the behaviour of the Italians as described by Leopardi actually constitutes the Italian character. Yet Leopardi suggests that only awareness of one’s own customs and traditions makes a people into a nation, interestingly foreshadowing today’s view of national identity as the product of a self-image.46 He addresses not only the views developed in the eighteenth century by the French philosophers who limited their analysis of national character to the leisured classes, but also the new perspective of post-revolutionary intellectuals who extended their reflection to all ranks. In Germany, for instance, it was the folk (Volk) who were identified as the privileged carriers of the national character.47 In Leopardi’s Discorso, national character ends up being neither the prerogative of civilized nations nor the manifestation of the folk. In-

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deed in modern, civilized nations, according to Leopardi, peoples share a public sphere and acquire common customs sustained by the società stretta or civil society. Yet the nature of civil societies turns all different peoples into one single entity that reaches beyond national boundaries and is defined by its socio-economic status (‘freedom from primary needs,’ or ‘la mancanza de’ bisogni primi,’ DS, 51): Per mezzo di quella società più stretta, le città e le nazioni intiere, e in questi ultimi tempi massimamente, l’aggregato di più nazioni civili, divengono quasi una famiglia, riunita insieme per trovare nelle relazioni più strette e più frequenti che nascono da tale quasi domestica unione, una occupazione … che senza ciò menerebbero il tempo affatto vuoto, e tali sono rigorosamente parlando tutti gli uomini, salvo gli agricoltori e quelli che ci proccurano il vestito di prima necessità. (DS, 51) [By means of that more tightly knit society, entire cities and nations – and, especially in these present times, the assemblage of more civilized nations – become almost one family, reunited together to find in the closer and more frequent relations that are born from such a domestic union, as it were, an occupation … since without this occupation, their time would be meaningless; and all men are, strictly speaking, do-nothings, except farmers and those who provide us with the most basic and essential of clothing.]

In this passage, as in many Zibaldone notes from the same period (1824), modern society seems incompatible with national identity, at least as defined by Leopardi. Modern society tends to produce cosmopolitan values that are rational, instrumental, and uniform. They are not rooted in an organic community but are merely shaped through conversazione, through an ‘enlightened’ and yet superficial social exchange that, by hiding emptiness and the lack of metaphysical beliefs, becomes the only ground for a modern ethics. In Leopardi’s Discorso, national character is not even incarnate in the people, that is, in the peasants and low classes, whom Bouhours endowed with the authentic spirit of the nation and whom Vico viewed as the depositary of the original ‘sublime’ language.48 Leopardi does not embrace the Romantic view of ‘the people’s soul’ and describes, with aristocratic aloofness, if not condescension, the Italian populace (‘popolaccio’) as a group of individuals who are as much disenchanted, cynical, and concerned with mere distractions as are the Italian elites –

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the only extenuating circumstance being that the popolaccio, in contrast to the elite, does not possess the intellectual means or the leisure time to engender values or internalize them through conversation. Leopardi’s critique of the contemporary discourse on national character culminates in the last section of Discorso. Here his reflections on the lack of society in Italy turn into a convoluted analysis of the causes of collective behaviour that were most discussed in Leopardi’s time, namely ‘the climate and the national character that results from it’ (DS, 79). This final section is particularly tortuous. Here the ‘materialist’ Leopardi seems to go back to the theories on the influence of climate on nations in order to derive, in an almost deterministic way, the nations’ characters. Yet he ends up demonstrating that such theories leave the observer of modern nations completely helpless. Here I want to look at his arguments more closely. Leopardi begins the final section of Discorso by applying a chain of accepted oppositions – warm/cold; imagination/reason; nature/civilization; ancient/ modern – to the polarity of southern and northern nations apparently in order to define the character of the Italian people.49 He rehearses the stereotype of southern nations, and Italians in particular, as the warmest and most imaginative and lively peoples. But then he insistently prepares the readers to accept his conclusive paradoxical argument or, as he presents it, ‘a factual truth that is evident, although it seems singular and monstrous’ (‘una verità di fatto che salta agli occhi, sebbene sembra singolare e mostruosa,’ DS, 81; and again, ‘è tanto mirabile e simile a paradosso quanto vero’; or ‘Tutto questo, torno a dire, sembra mostruoso e contraddittorio,’ DS, 82). His ‘factual truth ... singular and monstrous’ is that Italy, the southernmost nation of Europe, ‘is a dead nation, the coldest, the most philosophical in its daily life, the most cautious, indifferent, insensitive, the most difficult to move by ideals, the least governed by imagination, not even for a moment.’50 Northern nations, instead, are ‘the warmest in spirit, the most imaginative de facto,’ as well as ‘the most sentimental in character, spirit, and customs, and the most poetical in their actions and daily life.’51 Leopardi tries to explain his paradox by arguing that the most lively and sensitive spirits tend to fall into the opposite qualities more easily when disappointed by circumstances, while people who are colder and cautious in their ‘illusions’ are paradoxically ‘less cold and cynical in their disillusionment’ (DS, 79). Once again, climate and geography are misleading, but it is ultimately the very notion of the character of nations that is utterly unreliable.52 Like his shifting characterization of national languages in

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Zibaldone, Leopardi’s paradox in the final section of Discorso subverts his own attempt to attribute any character to nations. Thus, as more than historical entities, his Italians without a character become a philosophical theorem and a symbol of the fate of nations. The collapse of all metaphysical foundations and the slipping away of any stable quality shape Leopardi’s theoretical reflections on the death of the nation, which paradoxically reveal how tightly his ideas depended on the internalized nation that he so convincingly criticized. The Rise of the Società Stretta and the Death of the Nation The extensive entries in Zibaldone and Discorso on the state of the Italian customs clearly show that Leopardi followed closely the current discussion on language and nation and was very much aware of the late stages of the debate. In a Zibaldone note of August 1821 he diagnosed that ‘all Europe [was] busy with bringing back language and literature to be their national property,’53 and recognized the surge in popularity of the new Romantic images of the folk among European literati. To them, the main issue was no longer finding a balance between a free circulation of europeismi and the uniqueness of individual languages but rescuing the authentic character of the people, as preserved in folk speech – in fact, inventing the national character.54 In contrast to his contemporaries, who were inclined to promote the nation as the distinctive and most adequate expression of the individual soul of the people, Leopardi perceived the rise of the modern nation as a movement towards sameness that was progressively suppressing real cultural diversity. Once again, Leopardi’s point of departure was his observation of languages, which reveals the extent to which he had absorbed the idea of the isomorphism of language and society that had been generated by the old controversy. However, Leopardi was also an accomplished philologist, fluent in Latin and French, and the author of masterly translations from ancient Greek. He had a very clear knowledge of the history of ancient and Romance languages55 and noticed that all civilized idioms were rapidly adopting not only similar syntactic structures but also a common vocabulary connected to the new disciplines and to the modern European sensibility:56 Da qualche tempo tutte le lingue colte di Europa hanno un buon numero di voci comuni, massime in politica e in filosofia, ed intendo anche quella filosofia che entra tuttogiorno nella conversazione, fino nella conversa-

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zione o nel discorso meno colto, meno studiato, meno artifiziato. (Zib, 1213) [For some time all the refined languages of Europe have had a good number of common words, especially in politics and philosophy, and I mean also that philosophy that appears in regular, everyday conversation, even in conversation or speech that is less refined, less studied, less artificial.]

This ‘nomenclatura universale’ (Zib, 1215) was pushing aside the articulation of individual and idiosyncratic perceptions, in a move towards linguistic uniformity that reflected the success of scientific ideology and of its trust in denotative, univocal description – a belief that, in Leopardi’s view, informed contemporary metaphysical, moral, and political knowledge as well. Looking at the vocabulary, the various registers and contents of modern European idioms, Leopardi sees more similarities than differences, and he is ready to interpret this observation as a sign of current and future trends. Indeed, he considered language the ‘termometro’ of society,57 the indicator of and evidence for historical and social change; this termometro, in his reading, showed the indisputable phenomenon that European countries in fact tended to differ less and less culturally. Leopardi regarded the European trend towards linguistic uniformity as the most forceful sign that ‘all the world’ tended compulsively to conform (‘tende oggi tutto il mondo a uniformarsi,’ Zib, 1215) and that true cultural diversity was on the wane. In a historical moment in which nation states, aided by the intelligentsia, were busy promoting what has been called the internal nation, conceived as ‘an extension of the interiorized self,’58 by imposing homogeneous national cultures as authentic expressions of the people’s soul, Leopardi was able to see through the nationalist rhetoric. In his perception, the modern national discourse was actually neutralizing the very cultural differences that it claimed to retrieve. There remains in Leopardi’s thought, however, a nostalgia for the nation that continued to provide him with a normative model. But how? Leopardi distinguishes between, on the one hand, an ancient, authentic nation, which is based on the perfect juxtaposition of individual and collective interest as well as on the ‘hatred of foreigners,’ and, on the other hand, the modern absolute nation state, which advances the interests of an oligarchy (if not of the sole despot) while promoting equality among nation states. Leopardi does not hide that his true nation

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of ancient times was founded on the institutions of extended private property and slavery. It was a small-scale polis consisting of a loose community of highly individualist equals who rarely fought wars except in order to defend their own properties: ‘The nation that was still in some way a nation did not tolerate … the pure whim’ of its military leaders, or ‘forced and frequent enrollment,’ or ‘heavy taxation for the sake of war.’59 In such a polity, defence of the fatherland coincided with the protection of private interests, since the citizen owned private property and could lose or acquire it through wars (‘anticamente il privato perdeva individualmente le sue proprietà perché individualmente ne aveva,’ Zib, 897). Therefore, wars were fought by actual enemies, not by indifferent subjects who did not have anything to lose (‘anticamente combatteva il nemico contro il nemico, oggi l’indifferente contro l’indifferente,’ Zib, 900). Indeed, defeat meant total destruction, loss of both property and liberty. The defeated were captured, kept as slaves, and treated ‘almost like a different race’ (‘quasi come un’altra razza,’ Zib, 915). Furthermore, since these slaves took care of the daily material needs of the citizens, freeing them from any hard labour, they substantially enhanced the internal liberty and equality of the victorious nation (Zib, 910–17). The modern nation state was a completely different affair. With internal liberty and equality almost non-existent, wars had been fought – at least for the last two centuries, according to Leopardi – in the interest of a narrow elite or at the whim of one leader. Speaking, for instance, of the growing armies in the service of Louis XIV and Napoleon, Leopardi asserts: Ma da che il progresso dell’incivilimento o sia corruzione, … hanno estinto affatto il popolo e la moltitudine, fatto sparire le nazioni, tolta loro ogni voce, ogni forza, ogni senso di se stesse, e per conseguenza concentrato il potere intierissimamente nel monarca … allora le guerre sono divenute più arbitrarie e le armate immediatamente cresciute. (Zib, 905) [But ever since the progress of civilization, or rather corruption, and the other causes that I have already explained many times have extinguished completely the people and the multitude, have made nations disappear, have taken away those nations’ voice, every power, every sense of themselves, and in consequence have concentrated power solely and entirely in the monarch …, now wars have become more arbitrary and armies have sprung up immediately.]

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Modern civilization has destroyed the republic and disenfranchised the people, and, as a consequence, modern wars are completely arbitrary and fought by mass armies in the interests of the few. To Leopardi, these are the proofs that the rise of the modern nation state was actually the final act of disintegration of the true nation. For the future, he foresees an indefinite growth of armies and a permanent state of war in the service of states, not of peoples. Yet one cannot say either that Leopardi’s authentic nation is an ethical imperative to be fulfilled. Indeed, it is rooted in his sceptical anthropology and, particularly, the free play of human drives. Rewriting Rousseau, Leopardi endows human beings with the drive of amor proprio, an instinctive egotism that is the immediate source of the innate hatred of one individual for another. Therefore, human beings, by nature, are not fit to live in societies (‘nessun vivente è destinato precisamente alla società’).60 Only the smallest (‘scarsa nel numero’) and the most loose (‘lassissima’) society can survive as such, Leopardi argues. It is an ‘accidental’ and ‘temporary community of interests’ (‘società accidentale,’ ‘passeggera identità di interessi,’ Zib, 873) that sustains only what each member has in common, without jeopardizing his or her particular inclination or individual interest. According to Leopardi, only in this society is each individual effectively motivated to pursue the ‘minimal’ common good since this does not threaten his or her particular good. Therefore, only in this kind of society is ‘love of the fatherland’ (‘amor patrio’) possible. In order for this small and loose but durable society to preserve some inner cohesion, however, the individual must project the drive of ‘self-love’ onto his or her closest fellows and the ‘hatred of the other’ as far away as possible, that is, onto individuals that do not share the same common interest: Ora non potendo il vivente senza cessar di vivere spogliarsi né dell’amor proprio, né dell’odio verso altrui, resta che queste passioni prendano un aspetto, quanto si può migliore … che l’amor proprio dilati quanto più può il suo oggetto … e che l’odio verso altrui si allontani quanto più si può, cioè scelga uno scopo più lontano … Ecco dunque l’amor patrio e l’odio per gli stranieri. (Zib, 891) [Now a living thing not being able to rid himself either of self-love or of hatred towards others without ceasing to live, there remains the fact that these passions assume, as much as possible, a better appearance … so that self-love widens its object as much as it can … and so that hatred towards

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others distances its object from itself as much as possible, that is to say it chooses a further object … And so we have love of country and hatred of the foreigner.]

Here both the love of the fatherland and the hatred of foreigners are presented as the least evil, the result of the projections onto distant objects of the actual drives of self-love and hatred of the other, which otherwise would beget a permanent state of violence.61 Distance allows the utmost hatred (against foreigners) without everyday friction. Furthermore, the hatred of foreigners not only satisfies human drives but also legitimates the total annihilation of the defeated foreign nation and the reduction of its citizens to slaves without rights who can do the work required in the state of society, thereby freeing the ‘native’ from the ‘unnatural’ societal burdens (Zib, 880–9). If the members of a society successfully project their self-love onto the community and their hatred of the other onto foreigners, they will constitute a strong nation that behaves like an individual trying unconditionally to prevail over ‘the other.’ (‘Quella nazione dove regna fortemente e vivacemente ed efficacemente l’amor nazionale, è come un grande individuo, e alla maniera dell’individuo, amando se stessa, si ama di preferenza e desidera, cerca di superare le altre in qualunque modo,’ Zib, 889).62 Love of the fatherland and hatred of foreigners are for Leopardi illusions, myths or scripts that channel human drives and shape the polity but are without foundation, whether ethical or metaphysical. Nevertheless, he considers ancient nations, which successfully realized such projections, to be superior to modern societies because at least the ancients’ mythical thinking inspired heroic deeds and feelings: Considerate le antiche lassissime società, e vedrete che amor di patria … che calore in difenderla, in procurare il suo bene, in sacrificarsi per gli altri ec. … Osservate i nostri tempi. Non solo non c’è più amor patrio, ma neanche patria. (Zib, 876) [Consider the ancient and loose societies and you will see such love of fatherland … such passion in defending it, in providing for its good, in sacrificing oneself for others, etc. … Observe our times. Not only is there no longer love of fatherland, but there is not even a fatherland.]

Modern states, on the other end, cannot bring forth the fatherland. In fact, in contrast to the ‘very loose’ (‘lassissime’) ancient societies in

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which individuals vigorously pursued and defended a minimal common good because it did not threaten their self-love, modern nations imprison individuals in a thick net of prescribed relations that are regulated in the most minute detail: Ciascuna società è così vincolata 1. dall’obbedienza che deve per tutti i versi, in tutte le minuzie, con ogni matematica esattezza al suo capo, o governo, 2. dall’esattissimo regolamento, determinazione, precisazione, di tutti i doveri e osservanze, morali, politiche, religiose, civili, pubbliche, private, domestiche ec. che legano l’individuo agli altri individui. (Zib, 874–5) [Every society is so bound: 1. by obedience that it owes in all aspects in all the minutia, with all mathematical exactness, to its head or government, 2. by the most exact regulation, determination, specification of all duties and moral, political, religious, civil, public, private, domestic observances that tie one individual to others.]

Leopardi’s società ristretta or stretta represents the triumph of geometricization in the human world because its full regulation of all aspects of life equalizes not only the individuals within the single state but also all citizens of the civilized world in their lack of freedom. Thus the rise of this modern social order was turning ‘Europe into one single family, so much de facto as in regard to the opinion and respective deportment of governments, nations, and individuals of diverse nations’ (Zib, 875).63 Contemporary Europe, established by the Congress of Vienna (1815), was in Leopardi’s view one single nation governed by a social oligarchy that formed one compact body (‘l’Europa è piuttosto una nazione governata da una dieta assoluta,’ Zib, 875). Within this structure there was no room for his ideal of the nation, and the failure of the democratic insurrections in Naples and Turin (1821) seemed to confirm his analysis. According to Leopardi’s theory, the death of the nation is a direct consequence of the società strette in another sense as well. The thick net of rules and regulations characterizing the new social order violates the innate instinct of individuals to spontaneously pursue their own particular interests, to such an extent that they cannot identify with the common goal and therefore retreat in a radical egotism. Like Freud later on, Leopardi was not convinced that civilization could be internalized without residues; on the contrary, civilization made drives and

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desire even more dangerous. Perceiving modern society as excessively repressive of their particular good, individuals ultimately convert selflove into ‘universal egotism’ (Zib, 877). The narrow society creates such an acute friction among its members that they turn their hatred against their close fellow, not against the foreigner as happened in ancient nations. In such a society, real and effective love of the fatherland has no place. While Leopardi explicitly identified his ideal nation with the Greek polis and, in general, with ancient republics, his understanding of the nation was clearly shaped by the contemporary organic vision. The idea that a nation in order to endure has to act and feel as an individual (‘come un grande individuo,’ Zib, 889) belongs to the ideological repertoire of his times, and in particular to the internalization of the nation or the increasing conflation of individual self-realization and nationalization that began in eighteenth-century Europe. Yet in Leopardi’s ancient (true) nation, the people as a whole act together only in order to serve a common minimal good while individuals can continue to pursue their own diverse private interests. The modern organic nation, instead, is based on the assumption that collective and individual good coincide, while the actual individual, with his or her own needs, desires, and interests, disappears in the community and is expected to sacrifice everything for the good of the nation. Leopardi does not share the optimistic rhetoric of the brotherhood of free nations either (‘un sogno non mai realizzabile,’ Zib, 892) – a utopia that in Italy was well represented by Giuseppe Mazzini. Leopardi is convinced that the drives of self-love and hatred of the other cannot be suppressed, but only transformed into the love of the fatherland and hatred of the foreigner as had been the case in ancient Greece. In the modern civilized world, where hatred of the foreigner is morally not allowed and where institutions such as slavery are not sustainable, the nation cannot subsist. Although we might not agree with Leopardi’s psychological interpretation of nationalism based on a reductive view, at times, of drives and their rather mechanical operations, his intuition of the discursive, mythical nature of these sentiments, their relational quality, and their societal implications creates an utterly idiosyncratic perspective on the debate on language and nation. Together with his unprejudiced study of language, his intuition led him to recognize and interpret differences and similarities in entirely novel ways. Thus, for instance, analysing the growth of a shared linguistic reservoir of Europeanisms (which shaped, among other things, the international philosophical and politi-

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cal vocabulary), Leopardi recognized in the midst of the most fervently nationalistic years a trend towards uniformity that was transforming Western Europe. In his description of modern languages, the modern state, and warfare, he clearly shows that he grasped the continuities between absolutism and nationalism, and in particular their common need for bureaucratic regimentation and cultural uniformity, so as to create interchangeable individuals.64 The language policies of absolutist states had been just the beginning of the modern movement to create these new types of subjects. Educated in secular values, standards of purposive rationality, and abstract principles, they were systematically trained for administration and war and equipped to serve equally well both the raison d’état and the good of the nation – values that were certainly more abstract than the welfare of their immediate communities. Leopardi understood that, in order to subsist, the modern nation state would continue its push towards linguistic and cultural standardization. These are remarkably far-reaching insights, but they do not balance the striking ambivalences of Leopardi’s contribution to the discourse on the genius of language and national character. I have argued that some of these ambivalences are linked to the shifting political and semantic framework of the turn of the nineteenth century, particularly to the nationalization of the traditional discourse of republican patriotism described in detail by Viroli.65 Leopardi criticized this modern nationalization, though not always successfully. In spite of his declared materialism, Leopardi’s reflections show the marks of a repressed metaphysical quest, the sediment of Romantic origin, understood as an ahistorical condition, purely determined by nature, in which humans are made out of something more than infinite desire or libido, as Freud would say.66 Several critics, among them Guido Guglielmi, have identified the figure of death as the metaphysical matrix governing Leopardi’s understanding of human society and history: human beings leave behind nature, pure life, as soon as they are born and enter society; in the real world there is only second nature – acquired, shifting, self-destroying. Thus there is no point in denying the tragic element of Leopardi’s vision, yet I would not side with Guglielmi when he believes that Leopardi ‘sees in history not what is gained but only what is lost.’67 Indeed, Leopardi’s critique of the nation is Janus-faced; it turns both against the past and against the present. After retrieving the noblest value of ancient republican patriotism – liberty – and applying it to his classification of languages, he often remarks that the actual liberty of the ancient republican nation was based

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on private interest and slavery rather than sacrifice for the common good and equality. However, he denounces the modern national state, to which he even denies the title of nation, as the definitive destruction of individual liberty and as the triumph of sameness. Yet he does not deny its thrust to reduce ancient cruelty. Leopardi understood that there was no alternative to civilization and even presented every emergence of the ancient republican liberties, however minute, as a risorgimento of the forces of nature, which in modern times only advanced civilization could make possible, as he argues in his typically paradoxical fashion (Zib, 3802, 4289). This is why I would rather embrace Walter Benjamin’s heroic view of Leopardi as a ‘paradoxical pragmatist (‘der paradoxe Praktiker’) who understands that ‘pursuing what is right in the worst of worlds is not just a matter of heroism, but also of stamina and acumen, of slyness and curiosity.’68 Indeed Leopardi’s metaphysical figure of thought – death – constitutes the foundation of his strongly perspectivist critique of human institutions including languages and nations. This perspective, however, as Leopardi’s later writings confirm, does not exempt intellectuals from responsibility and engagement. On the contrary, precisely because he believes that human beings are irreparably cast off by nature and incessantly acquire diverse qualities while adjusting to their surroundings, it becomes fundamental to reflect and act on this interaction. Indeed, it was the intellectual indolence of his fellow intellectuals, too busy fighting about linguistic purity, that most infuriated Leopardi: ‘For a long time now Italian writers, pure and impure, have been abstaining from thinking’ (‘da gran tempo gli scrittori italiani, puri ed impuri, si sono egualmente dispensati dal pensare,’ Zib 799). Leopardi’s monumental effort to destabilize accepted notions of language, character, and nation, strenuously reversing any expected conclusions, was certainly an attempt at breaking thought habits, even his own.

Irresistible Signs? A Postscript and the Question of Media

One does not learn languages to bolster identity … one ventures out to touch the other. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Close Reading1

The effort on the part of infants to acquire a verbal language (in order to reach out to the mother?) consists in recognizing and translating signs into other signs; it is, in other words, an act of heterolingual communication. For infants, ‘the mother tongue is amorphous,’ indeterminate,2 not a fixed system of rules or a grammar to be learned, and yet adults feel their first verbal interaction – the mother tongue (or tongues) – not only as an intimate possession but also as a unified homogeneous object. Promoters of linguistic nationalism build precisely on this feeling of intimacy and objectification when they produce analogies between the perception of our first language(s) and an institutionalized standard idiom. Their analogies suppress the linguistic differences internal to the territory that is targeted for nation building, as well as the intrinsic hybridity of any act of communication. Consequently their monolingual nation suddenly appears as the most natural form of community that as such ought to coincide with state boundaries. This book is aimed at defusing the narrative and rhetorical devices that have automatically linked one language to one culture and one state. In analyzing the master narrative of the genius of language as a manifestation of national character – which I view as the core of linguistic nationalism – my emphasis is on contingency. I have examined the ways in which this narrative has been invoked or rejected in specific contexts and how its scraps and pieces – its building blocks – have been

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put to use for different political projects and, intermittently, for nationalist goals. Challenging accepted assumptions about linguistic nationalism as an original creation of German nineteenth-century philosophy and, more important, as the unique foundation of late organic nations, my book questions the validity of a narrative that distinguishes between early ‘good’ nations and later ‘bad’ ones. In his introduction to the English translation (1988) of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts (1836), Hans Aarsleff has clarified the intellectual consequences of what he calls ‘the official mothballing’ of the nineteenth-century study of language that preserved ‘accounts of the late eighteenth-century philosophy of language to which Herder and Humboldt are said to have reacted against.’3 This study contributes to the airing out of the ‘mothballed’ issues by identifying the long-standing building blocks of the myth of language as the nation’s Weltbild or outlook, by proposing a different historical perspective and testing the ideological consistency of those issues. It turns out that expressive approaches to language that foster the interpretation of the rhetorical features of a particular literary idiom as the characteristics of the collective disposition of an entire population, as well as strategies that conflate the written standardized idiom and spontaneous speech or that identify the linguistic behaviour of a particular group with the language of the nation, have been around for a long time and have served, for instance, both absolutist and nationalist cultural policies. Are these signs taken for nations irresistible? Under what conditions do they thrive, and when are they abandoned? Searching for answers in the French-Italian debate, I have uncovered various degrees and types of resistance. Under closer scrutiny, the contribution of Italian intellectuals to the myth of the genius of language seems to be characterized by the resistance to the ethnic and biological, Blut-undBoden understanding of culture and nation. Short cuts connecting the literary idiom and the nation are frequent, but a keen awareness of Italy’s multiculturalism remains. This awareness is not always perceived as incompatible with a unified supra-regional Italian identity. Already in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentiae (ca 1304), the search for the common features of an ‘illustrious’ Italian vernacular was paired with the recognition of Italy’s multilingualism and the explicit goal of creating a political or ‘curial’ language. For Dante, it was a shared ethos informing common action, not a shared ethnos, that could unite Italy’s populations (XVI, 3–4). Indeed the absence of correspondence between the geo-

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graphical area named Italy and one single ethnos might have sustained the force of assimilation wielded by this name and the cultivation of the Italian language as a contingent means of integration. This pluralistic attitude was possible also because literacy and multilingualism, as Naoki Sakai has pointed out, had not yet been severed. Literacy did not mean being able to transcribe the mother tongue in writing and to articulate formally one’s own familiar culture;4 on the contrary, for a long time and particularly in Italy (to Vico, for instance), to become literate meant learning to write in a ‘foreign’ language. It is mostly during the Risorgimento and later in the Fascist period that the awareness of Italy’s multiculturalism and multilingualism troubled Italian intellectuals and political leaders, who were unable to transcend the frame of the monolingual nation and to conceive as natural or simply viable the distinction between political language(s) – necessary to the functioning of the state (and of democracy) – and the actual languages spoken in their country. Until the beginning of the twentieth century the vast majority of the population was illiterate and spoke in different, at times, mutually unintelligible tongues, and narratives concerning the nation’s mother language (including the discourse of the genius of language analysed in this book) remained both controversial and relevant only to a very narrow elite. In contrast to Germany, where the national language was represented as the mother tongue of a rural Volk and the primal mark of the German character,5 in Italy it was harder to hide the fact that Italian was the means of communication shared by a mostly urban, literate elite. It was a language characterized by the prevalence of ancient and high literary registers – easy to employ when discussing philosophy but of hardly any use in the kitchen – and thus its features continued to convey an elite or exclusive vision of the nation. Therefore, the discourse of the nation’s mother language, when used as an instrument of nationalist propaganda, always ran the risk of being counterproductive: the actual diversities of the tongues spoken in Italy could draw attention to the differences among Italy’s populations rather than to the assumedly shared culture. Indeed, during the nineteenth-century Risorgimento when necessity arose to draw larger (bourgeois) groups into the fight for the unification of Italy, other media proved to be more efficient in articulating the image of Italy as a nation. Painting and maps, opera and songs, and the ubiquitous tricolore flag provided more effective means for the persuasion of a middle class that felt at home in different local languages. At the beginning of the twentieth century, extended public educa-

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tion, radio, and the big screen offered the most efficient means for the sedimentation of Italian multilingualism, while in the 1950s and 1960s television almost succeeded in wiping out dialects as well as minority languages. The fact that my generation, educated in the 1960s and 1970s, became almost monolingual could make us prone to accept the narratives of the monolingual nation. Of course, narratives of the primal national language become easier to resist when political participation broadens, and true social mobility (that is, not one engineered from above) ensues. This seems to have happened in Italy in the twenty years during which I have been living abroad, and I am happily surprised (and slightly melancholic) when I see young Italians from different social classes switching nonchalantly between standard Italian and dialect (which I was made to feel ashamed to speak), even sprinkling their conversation with the occasional English word or phrase. And yet judging from the controversy that followed the law for the protection of historical linguistic minorities, the refusal of the multilingual nation is still strong.6 Let me be clear. I do not question the necessity of a shared political language (or two or more if the state has the resources to support them) to be made available through education to all citizens as a means of political participation. The problem begins when state institutions and media enforce an identitarian view of that language, forcing its interiorization and leading citizens to frame their understanding of themselves and their integrity within the discourse of the monolingual nation – in other words, when people are viewed as true Italians and loyal citizens only if they identify exclusively with the Italian language. Perhaps there are hopes that Italians will be able to acquire not only a ‘roundtrip ticket from dialect to Italian and back,’ as Tullio De Mauro anticipated,7 but also attention to and respect for the other languages that surround them in Italy. This may be possible, as Sakai suggests, especially if one begins to think of language itself as the site of hybridity, and every verbal exchange as a heterolingual address or act of communication that is possible only because speakers are different, separate, distant from each other, not organically identical. Taking apart the elements of the compulsory monolingual nation may be beneficial not only to individual nations. Sakai has argued, in fact, that the reified notion of the natural national language ‘may well be an accomplice to and even essential for the universalism of transnational capitalism’ by helping to ignore that the global use of English introduces English itself as ‘an element for heterogeneity where a na-

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tion and a language do not correspond to each other at all.’8 In other words, a critique of English-language imperialism that is predicated on the naturalized national language may reinforce the juxtaposition of a national (political) language and national culture and help to suppress the actual diversity of polities. While this book has concentrated on the uses of languages as icons of nations, I want to suggest that, particularly in the case of Italy, it would be useful to study, in a comparative fashion, the ways in which the different and from time to time dominant media that have articulated and circulated the images of Italy as a nation have affected these very images. Indeed, a collective image – whether discursive (transmitted from above) or dialogical (a product of the interaction of a ‘me’ and a ‘thou’) – is always a function of its medium.9 In multicultural Italy, beginning with the literary language, as we have seen, and continuing today with the all-too-direct impact of television, media have obviously played a crucial role in all major political transitions.10 In the course of my studies for this book, I have come to believe that analyses of nationalisms that fail to question the structures of the media they call into play and deem foundational can only produce flawed models. Classical studies of nationalism have already raised the issue of media. Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), for example, with its focus on the role of print media, particularly novels and newspapers but also poetry and songs, builds his theory of the nation not only upon the ability of print media to transcend bodily presence, uniting people across time and space and thus creating an illusion of closeness, but also, I would add, upon their ability to allude to a transcendent presence, to a ‘real object’ outside the medium, the nation. Fundamental tenets of media theory inform his interpretation of the nation. Indeed, if signs link us, as Klaus Wiegerling puts it, to what is not present, to what one can be connected to only through mediation, the signs are also able to endow what they refer to with a particular sense of value (if not necessarily an aura of sacrality): what is really important, authentic, and valuable is what is not present.11 The vital function of media, and in particular of homogeneous means of communication in the formation of nationalism, as well as the role of communication itself in the dissemination of nationalist ideas were clearly recognized by Gellner in his conclusion to Nations and Nationalism (1983). He even specifies that the medium does not merely transmit an idea that happens to have been fed to it; it is the medium itself that engenders the core idea of nationalism: ‘The most important and persistent message is generated by the medium itself, by the role which

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such media have acquired in modern life. That core message is that the language and style of the transmission is important, that only he who can understand them, or can acquire such comprehension, is included in a moral and economic community … What is actually said matters little.’12 Gellner here presents a radical view of the role of media in ideologies of nationalism, but he is not interested in pursuing his thesis on the role of media, because he believes that nationalist ideologies do not possess any epistemological value (since they ‘suffer from pervasive false consciousness’) and a study of such ideologies is of no assistance in understanding nationalism.13 Given Gellner’s concentration on the economic and social structures related to nationalism, his refusal to follow up on his intuition is not surprising. Yet I want to draw attention to the fact that the same image or message (the unity of the polity as a nation) transmitted by different media acquires different meanings, even independently of the recipients’ abilities to interpret it. Indeed, every medium, as classical theories of media maintain, delivers not only the relative information but also its whole medial context, which affects the reception of the information. A medium inevitably transmits its own ideology. Although I share Gellner’s and Hobsbawm’s sceptical view of a purely discursive definition of the nation, which risks underestimating the role of social and economic conditions, I am convinced that failing to integrate media analyses and political theories means also missing the opportunity to further test established theoretical models of nationalisms. For example, in the long-standing dispute over which model of the nation is more effective in inspiring strong feelings of loyalty and in forging more ‘virulent’ forms of nationalism (the civic, based on interest and consensus, or the ethnic, based on ideas of common lineage and culture), theorists such as Walker Connor and Gregory Jusdanis have argued that the ethnic model, with its appeal to images of common blood and family links, has a stronger emotional impact and has proven more effective in sustaining radical forms of nationalism.14 Yet a closer look at Connor’s German and Italian examples reveals that they are primarily taken from the early propaganda of twentieth-century regimes.15 I believe that, if one takes into account the considerable shift in media that occurred at the beginning of the last century (the pervasive circulation of photographs, the increasingly omnipresent radio, the popularization of moving images), the effectiveness and the emotional force of twentieth-century nationalism is more likely explained by the effectiveness of the new mass media than by the power of the (ethnic) message.

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Post-classical theoretical studies have concentrated on discourse analyses of nations as social constructions and on the essential role that media have played in providing more or less coherent images of the nation. The topic of national identity in different media, from highculture symbols (literary works, paintings, monuments) to banal, everyday symbols (coins, flags, anthems, maps, news, stamps), has been explored for years now.16 However, when the structures of the medium and the relations of its specific features to the image of the nation remain unanalysed, numerous questions are left open; for example, it remains unclear which aspects of the medium (style, rhetoric, message, addressee, context of the transmission) are hospitable to nationalism and in what ways. I believe that a theoretical and historical overview of how the Italian nation has been invoked and shaped through the succession and overlapping of media is overdue. It should look at the language debate; the musical theatre, radio, and cinema; how they have intersected; how they have informed the hegemonic discourse; how they have changed the representations of the nation; and how they have targeted ever larger, less educated groups within different contexts, from leisure time to the workplace. I am well aware that numerous monographic studies concentrating on the Italian national identity in individual media have been produced – from analyses of images of the nation in Risorgimento media to studies of the photography, cinema, and fashion shaping the fascist nation.17 But I have in mind a study, most likely a collective one, which would identify theoretical patterns relating different types of media to models of the nation. An analysis of the changes in the representation of the Italian nation as related to media’s specific functions can develop not only a more articulated reading of the Italian case, beyond linguistic nationalism, but also a more satisfying assessment of how different paradigms of the nation are construed and actually intersect. In conclusion, what scholars of literature, the visual arts, and music can contribute to the theoretical study of paradigms of the nation is the awareness of the specific forms and limits of each particular medium. Neglecting the question of the medium, making it transparent or all encompassing, could mean erasing that friction between signs and ‘lifeworld’ that provides the space for individual choice and for political action – the human space that classical theorists of language such as Vico and Herder identified as what distinguishes human beings from beasts. Perhaps it would be more fitting for our time of mass migrations and global media to endorse – as Spivak and Appiah, among others, have

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recently done – an education that separates languages from identity issues – national, ethnic, and otherwise – thereby restoring the friction between language and the experience of the world.18 In the end, not being fully at home in language may be the condition that we all share as human beings.

Notes

Introduction 1 To name only a few: Alberto M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento; Maurizio Bettini, ‘Contro le radici: Tradizione, identità, memoria,’ 5–16; Ernesto Galli della Loggia, L’identità italiana; Umberto Levro, Fare gli italiani; Luigi Materazzi, ‘Kontinuität und Widersprüche des Italienischen Nationalsymbols’; Ilaria Porciani, La festa della nazione; Gian Enrico Rusconi, ed., Nazione, etnia, cittadinanza in Italia e in Europa; Loredana Sciolla, Italiani. 2 The literature on the Italian language issue within the new social and political context is rapidly increasing. For an introduction and an extensive bibliography see Anna Laura Lepschy and Arturo Tosi, eds., Multilingualism in Italy, and Howard Moss, ‘Language and Italian National Identity,’ 98–123. For the European context see Charlotte Hoffmann, ed., Language, Culture, and Communication in Contemporary Europe. For an introduction to the issue of linguistic and national identity in the United States see Ronald Schmidt Sr, Language Policy and Identity Politics in the U.S., and Carol L. Schmid, The Politics of Language, 3–100, 168–78. Schmid’s book offers a historical perspective on language policy and conflict in the United States – or of what she calls ‘the imagined linguistic homogeneity of the US’ (9) – as well as an excellent bibliography. 3 Mair Parry, ‘The Challenges of Multilingualism Today,’ 47–59. 4 See the recent conversation between Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? A good introduction to the question of linguistic identity in the United States is Schmid’s The Politics of Language; see note 2 of this chapter. See also Doris Sommer, ed., Bilingual Games. 5 Sociologists like Orlando Patterson have shown that the evidence pro-

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6 7

8

9 10

11

12

duced by Huntington is quite shaky. Indeed statistics prove that nearly all children of recent immigrants, whatever language they speak at home, come to use English as their first language; they are assimilating much more rapidly than are previous generations of immigrants (The New York Times Book Review, 16 August 2009, 23). See also Amitai Etzioni, ‘The Real Threat,’ 477–85, and Jim Sleeper’s review of Who Are We? in George Mason University’s History News Network. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 102–3. Giulio Lepschy has emphasized the peculiarity of Italian, characterized by an ancient literary language and a very recent mother tongue, in ‘Mother Tongues and Literary Languages,’ 3–34. See also Martin Maiden, ‘The Definition of Multilingualism in Historical Perspective,’ and Giulio Lepschy, ‘What Is the Standard?’ 31–46 and 74–81. ‘Noi abbiamo oggi un vocabolario nazionale per discutere dell’immortalità dell’anima, per esaltare il valor civile, per descrivere un tramonto … ma non abbiamo un vocabolario comunemente accettato ed univoco per parlare delle mille piccole cose della vita di tutti i giorni, quali sono appunto le stringhe delle scarpe.’ Enrico Peruzzi, Una lingua per gli italiani, 15. Claudio Marazzini, Da Dante alla lingua selvaggia, 15. To my knowledge, Edward Stankiewicz was the first scholar to explore the emergence of this issue in Renaissance linguistics. See Stankiewicz, ‘The “Genius” of Language in Sixteenth Century Linguistics,’ 177–89, and ‘The Typological Study of Language During the Italian Renaissance,’ 231–9. I would like to point out, however, that the authors he analyses never use the phrase genius of language, which in my reading becomes the crucial instrument for binding together political and theoretical arguments. His speech examines causes and products of the different ‘geniuses’ of languages, making several concessions to the commonplaces of the time. Bourzeys explains different styles of eloquence with the peculiar génie of each language and then presents the génie de la langue as a product of temperament – both ‘of the region and of the people’ – government, and social customs. Amable de Bourzeys, Discours sur le dessein de l’Académie et sur le différent génie des langues, 235. The original text, as it appears in the manuscript of the Bibliothèque Nationale, has no title. The bibliography on this topic is vast. For a recent perspective see Tuska Benes, In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in NineteenthCentury Germany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008); Anja Stukenbrock, Sprachnationalismus Sprachreflexion Als Medium Kollektiver Identitatsstiftung In Deutschland (1617–1945) (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005).

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13 Stefano Gensini has devoted numerous studies to the notions of genius of language and ingegno. He has defined the ‘identity’ of Italian linguistic thought as characterized by the conjunction of a linguistic theory based on the concepts of ingenium and metaphor (‘una teoria linguistica a base ingegnoso-metaforica’), and an uncommon sensitivity to the social dimension of linguistic facts. His arguments include also my authors (Vico, Muratori, Cesarotti, and Leopardi) in such a tradition; see L’identità dell’italiano, 67, and Volgar favella. My book often dialogues with his studies. Luigi Rosiello was the first scholar to offer a brief semantic analysis of the term genius of language, documenting a fundamental shift in its meaning. In fact, the genius of language designated the idea of an autonomous organization of formal elements when it emerged in Claude Lancelot’s Latin grammar. Later, under the influence of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s theories, as Rosiello argues, it referred to the system of representation that expresses logical and experiential links between the ideas that constitute the genius of nation. See Rosiello, ‘Analisi semantica dell’espressione “genio della lingua” nelle discussioni linguistiche del settecento italiano,’ 374–85. Hans Helmut Christmann presents some corrections to Rosiello’s history of the term, showing that the notion appeared for the first time not in the Port-Royal grammarians but in the speech of the orientalist Amable de Bourzeys presented to the Académie francaiÿe in the year of its founding. See Christmann, ‘Bemerkungen zum génie de la langue, and Beiträge zur Geschichte der These vom Weltbild der Sprache; and Christiane Schlaps, ‘The “Genius of Language.”’ More recent surveys of the French-Italian controversy within its literary context are Maria Grazia Accorsi and Elisabetta Graziosi, ‘Da Bologna all’Europa,’ and Claudio Viola, Tradizioni letterarie a confronto. 14 Both linguists and scholars of language ideas are inclined to construe narratives of transitions. To linguists, the debate on the genius of language constitutes an early example of comparative linguistics that articulated the transition from a descriptive mode that presents the outward features of languages as constitutive of their genius to an explanatory trend that refers differences of genius to ever deeper structures of thought. In the words of Christiane Schlaps, it is ‘the relocation of the genius of language from surface features to inner organization’ (‘The “Genius of Language,”’ 381). But see also the above-mentioned studies of Stankiewicz and Rosiello, as well as Werner Hüllen, ‘History and Approaches of Language Typology,’ vol. 1, 234–49. To scholars of language theories, the debate moved from a static (taxonomical) to a dynamic (organological) view of language that accentuates genius as creative force rather than essential structure. They argue

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16 17 18

19

20

that in the second phase of the debate on the genius of language the causes of genius were found not only in the peculiar structures of languages but in specific cognitive faculties and bodily perceptions, and thus in the speakers’ physical and material conditions. See Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen; Gensini, ‘Ingenium/ ingegno fra Huarte, Persio e Vico,’ 30–34; and Elisabetta Graziosi, ‘Spirito, ingegno, intelletto, ragione,’ 327–60. Schlaps, ‘The “Genius of Language,”’ 379. For a similar trajectory see Gerhard C. Gerhardi, ‘The “génie des langues” and the Rise of Linguistic Nationalism,’ 26–1. Of course, there are numerous studies on this notion in the German Romantic philosophy of language of Herder, Fichte, and Wilhelm von Humboldt that focus on nationalist arguments. Stefano Gensini, ‘Rhetoric, Philosophy of Language and the Study of Languages in the Humanistic Tradition,’ 27. Hüllen, ‘History and Approaches of Language Typology,’ 243. In ‘Regimenting Languages,’ Kroskrity suggests different definitions of language ideology, among others: ‘sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization of justification of perceived language structure and use’ (Silverstein 1979); and ‘the ideas with which participants and observers frame their understanding of linguistic varieties and map those understandings onto people, events, and activities that are significant to them’ (Irvine and Gal 2000). The shared research of Judith Irvine and Susan Gal on linguistic differentiation, the work of Michael Silverstein on Whorfianism and nationality, and the study on John Locke and Herder by Briggs and Baumann have provided me with models and tools to identify individual arguments and rhetorical moves recurrent in the genius debate and relevant to my topic. All these studies are now collected in Kroskrity, ed., Regimes of Languages. I consider, however, Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘La production et la reproduction de la langue légitime,’ in Ce que parler veut dire, to be a pioneering study of language ideology. Foscolo, for example, searches for the origins of the Italian language in literary history, not in a mythical Italian national character or in the history of an imaginary ‘people’ (‘La storia di una lingua non può tracciarsi se non nella storia letteraria della nazione’). ‘Epoche della lingua italiana,’ in Opere di Ugo Foscolo, 929. He explicitly talks of the literary constitution (‘costituzione letteraria,’ 1051) of the Italian language. Foscolo’s writings on language concentrate on its anthropological aspects, the origin and development of the literary language, the Italian literarylinguistic tradition, and the socio-political role of eloquence. On Foscolo’s linguistic ideas, see Sebastiano Timpanaro, ‘Sul Foscolo filologo’; Maurizio

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25 26 27 28

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Vitale, ‘Il Foscolo e la questione linguistica del primo Ottocento,’ 1–3: 59–89; Gensini, ‘Linguaggio e bisogno di storia nel primo Ottocento: La problematica di Ugo Foscolo,’ in L’identità dell’italiano, 77–88. Manzoni’s theoretical reflections develop various trends from the French idéologie while his practical efforts both as a writer and later as an Italian senator, as is well known, converge on the creation of an Italian popular language. The bibliography on Manzoni’s linguistic interests is immense; extensive bibliographical information can be found in the conference proceedings entitled Manzoni: ‘L’eterno lavoro’; Atti del Congresso internazionale sui problemi della lingua e del dialetto nell’opera e negli studi di Alessandro Manzoni (Milan: Centro nazionale studi manzoniani, 1987). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 145. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 61. For a critique of these authors’ use of homogeneous standardized language see Kroskrity, ‘Regimenting Languages,’ 1–34; and John E. Joseph, ‘Language in National Identities,’ 92–131. Kroskrity believes that the failure to investigate the role that language theories play in the creation of national languages and of nations constitutes ‘a downloading of a nationalist ideology and not its analysis’ (‘Regimenting Languages,’ 30). Among theorists of the nation, Liah Greenfeld and Daniel A. Bell represent true exceptions. Greenfeld investigates the formation of national languages and its impact on models of the nation. Unfortunately, she does not consider the Italian case. Her analyses of the English and the French cases, however, have been an invaluable model (Greenfeld, Nationalism, 275–395).With ‘National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible,’ Bell devotes an entire chapter to language in the revolutionary period (The Cult of the Nation in France, 169-97). Bell’s analysis, however, could have profited from a consideration of the long-standing debate on the genius of language. For instance, he views as a novelty the ideals promoted by the revolutionaries to reshape the French national character, moving the debate away from ‘frivolity and politeness’ and bringing it closer to ‘simplicity and virtue.’ Yet such ideals, including the pride at the ‘barbaric,’ naive element, can already be found in Pasquier’s historical work and later in Bouhours’ ‘La langue française,’ which I discuss in chapters 1 and 2. In The Social History of Language, ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter, 199. Ibid., 146. The question of the nation as a symbolic construct has become central at least since Hans Kohn’s The Idea of Nationalism (1944). John Breully, ‘Changes in the Political Uses of the Nation,’ 90. Here Breully defines the pre-modern uses of the word nation mainly as ‘an ethnographic

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30 31

32 33

label for barbarians or the political self-description of kingdoms’ (91). For a survey of the pre-modern uses of the term see Guido Zernatto, ‘Nation: The History of a Word,’ and Greenfeld, Nationalism, 3–12. I am certainly not the first scholar to propose this type of analysis. The work of Ernesto Sestan on the Middle Ages, for instance, is a pioneering analysis of the building blocks of nationalisms, formed very early and later integrated into modern national projects (Ernesto Sestan, Stato e nazione nell’alto medio evo; for his relation to the modernist theoretical frame see especially the first chapter, 13–44). Recent studies of early modern Europe have shown that national sentiment and national consciousness, though not articulated in terms of nineteenth-century nationalism, have informed views of language since the Renaissance. William J. Kennedy has recently presented persuasive arguments about the role of Petrarchism in France, England, and Italy in turning sixteenth-century European vernaculars into the expression of larger, supra-regional affiliations, articulating early national sentiments. Timothy Hampton has explored the cultural debates that marked Renaissance France, showing how specific literary forms shaped French national identity. William J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism, and Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century. See also Marina Marietti, Marcel Gagneux, et al., eds., Quêtes d’une identité collective chez les italiens de la Renaissance; Herfried Münkler and Hans Grünberger, eds., Nationenbildung; and Aldo Scaglione, ed., The Emergence of National Languages,. For a critique of the chronological limits set by modernists, see also Guy Hermet, Histoire des nations et nationalisme en Europe, especially the introduction and 39–66. See Alexander J. Motyl, ‘Inventing Invention,’ 68. Ibid., 69. I have found Motyl’s critique of the constructivist hypothesis particularly useful in approaching the gap between the modernist and the longue durée perspectives. Arguing that inventing or imagining the nation presupposes both pre-existing building blocks that can be combined in ever new narratives and conscious human agency, Motyl specifies the conditions in which the ‘construction’ of the nation occurs. The building blocks must belong to what he calls the ‘lifeworld’ of the group imagined as a nation; that is, they must be drawn from ‘the intersubjectively held knowledge claims’ that a group takes for granted (‘Inventing Invention,’ 62). See also Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 99–101. See for instance, Alberto Banti’s La nazione del Risorgimento. Arguing against Federico Chabod’s and Benedetto Croce’s classical liberal interpretation of Italy as a voluntaristic nation, Banti develops a convincing exam-

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ple of the ethnic classification, based, however, on selective materials from the Risorgimento. He shows that the national discourse of the Risorgimento exploited the ‘geo-parental’ semantic field: for example, a particular obsession with the family’s integrity and purity, whether biological or ethical; the analogy with the history of Christ and of the Christian community, with its images of sacrifice, martyrs, redemption, and resurrection; and, finally, the honour code concerning warriors and women. Banti demonstrates that the canone risorgimentale actually endorsed the organic idea of nation as a natural community of blood and soil. Carlo Cattaneo, ‘Dell’insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e delle successive guerre,’ 272. If we look closer at this passage, however, we realize that it labels accounts of ethnic origins as fables. The historian Emilio Gabba maintains that the awareness of a multi-ethnic Italic identity was already developed in anti-Roman function by different populations subjugated by Rome; ‘Alcune considerazioni su una identità nazionale nell’Italia romana,’ 15–21. It re-emerges, for instance, in Vincenzo Gioberti’s myth of the Italian cultural primato, which construed Italy’s supremacy because and not in spite of its extraordinary melting pot that fused pre-Roman (for example, Etruscan, Greek, and other Mediterranean populations), Roman, and Germanic cultures. Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (1843), introduction by Gustavo Balsamo Crivelli (Turin: UTET, n.d.). It is even recognizable in the clumsy disclaimers of the 1938 Manifesto della razza. ‘The Manifesto of Race (1938),’ in A Primer of Italian Fascism, ed. Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 173–5. This has been the case throughout the Renaissance, when trans-regional feelings lent political substance to the common Italian identity. See Riccardo Fubini, ‘L’idea di Italia fra Quattro e Cinquecento,’ 53–66. For a convincing analysis of a modern example of the relation between the ‘regional’ Neapolitan element and the Italian national identity in Gentile’s organicist reading of Vico, see Roberto Maria Dainotto, ‘The Dialectic of Region and Nation: Giovanni Gentile, Particular Italian,’ in Place in Literature, 136–62. For a critique of the civic versus ethnic distinction, see Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups, 132–46. Brubaker proposes to abandon this overburdened distinction and adopt instead the more modest yet practical alternative between ‘state-framed’ and ‘counter-state’ understandings of nationhood, an alternative quite similar to the categories of ‘slowly emerging nations’ and ‘nations by design’ defined by Hugh Seton-Watson in his Nations and States, 1–14.

242 Notes to pages 13–14 38 Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, 7. If one unconditionally accepts the modernist perspective of the link between language and nation summed up in Hans Kohn’s statement, then one has to either claim an exceptional status for Italy or declare the Italian nation a paradox. 39 Herder, actually, linked the ‘spirit of language’ (Sprachgeist) with the soul of the people (Volksseele) and did not refer to the nation. He even viewed the nation as a threat to the authentic Volksseele, which risked being distorted or fixed in a rigid form by national institutions. See Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder, 61 and 206–7. It was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in his Reden an die deutsche Nation (1807–8), who translated Herder’s ideas into incendiary political arguments, and then Wilhelm von Humboldt, who linked the two concepts of the spirit of the nation and the spirit of the language (Über die Verschiedenheiten des menschlichen Sprachbaues, 1827–9). Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schriften zur Sprachphilosophie, Werke 3, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1963), 144–367. 40 See also Anthony D. Smith: ‘The notion that nations are really language groups, and therefore that nationalism is a linguistic movement, derives from Herder’s influence’ (National Identity, 75–6). See also Sue Wright, ‘Language as a Contributing Factor in Conflicts Between States and Within States,’ 222. When it comes to the role of language debates in the formation of national discourse, even pioneering linguists such as John Edwards and Joshua Fishman tend to see linguistic nationalism as an exclusive creation of nineteenth-century thought. Indeed, both Edwards and Fishman indirectly reinforce the narrow chronological frame established by modernist theorists of the nation for the formation of arguments linking language and nationality. While they acknowledge the virulence of linguistic nationalism as the ideology that has fuelled numerous nationalist movements, they continue to view the discourse joining language and nationality as a creation of German nineteenth-century philosophy and as the unique foundation of late national movements. John Edwards, ‘Language and Nationalism,’ in Language, Society and Identity, 23-46; Joshua Fishman, Language and Nationalism, 40–55, and ‘Nationality-nationalism and nationnationism,’ 39–51. 41 See Franz-Joseph Meissner, Wortgeschichtliche Untersuchungen im Umkreis von französisch Enthousiasme und Genie, 100–1 and 126. 42 See Cristina Vallini, ‘Genius/ingenium: Derive semantiche,’ 3–26; Meissner, Wortgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, 1–3 and 117–30. 43 Vallini, ‘Genius/ingenium,’ 3–4; Meissner, Wortgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, 143–79. 44 See Meissner, Wortgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, 122–6; Gensini, ‘In-

Notes to pages 14–17

45 46 47

48

49 50 51

52 53

54 55

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genium/ ingegno fra Huarte, Persio e Vico,’ 52–3; and Graziosi, ‘Spirito, ingegno, intelletto, ragione,’ 353–4. Meissner, Wortgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, 312. Vallini, ‘Genius/ingenium,’ 14–15. For a critique of the gendered discourse see Christine Battersby, ‘Genius and Feminism,’ 292–8; Battersby, Gender and Genius; Françoise Gadet and Michel Pêcheux, La langue introuvable, especially 47–8; Friedrich A. Kittler, ‘The Mother’s Mouth,’ 25-69; and Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism, 16–19. For a brief historical account of the aesthetic development of genius, see Timothy Gould, ‘Genius,’ 287–92, and Meissner, Wortgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, 266–87. For a more extensive study see Penelope Murray, ed., Genius. For the French context see Georges Matoré and Algirdas J. Greimas, ‘La naissance du “génie” au XVIIIe siècle,’ 256–72. See also Roberto Romani, National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914, 11–14. For an ideological critique I rely on Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, especially the introduction and the chapter entitled ‘The Law of the Heart: Shaftesbury, Hume, Burke,’ 31–69. Battersby, ‘Genius and Feminism,’ 296–7. Gould, ‘Genius,’ 289. ‘Genie ist die angeborene Gemüthsanlage, durch welche die Natur der Kunst die Regel giebt,’ Kritik der Urteilskraft: Kants Werke (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968), vol. 5, 307. I am grateful to Doris Sommer for having drawn my attention to this aspect as relevant to my topic. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 14. It is a pity that Eagleton does not consider Vico’s philosophy, which could have been a dense example of the double-edged nature of the modern aesthetic. Ibid., 20. I have dealt with the issue of word order in my essay ‘Syntax and Passions,’ 285–307. My analysis of iconizations relies on methodological models developed in recent studies of language ideology. Judith Irvine and Susan Gal have identified three semiotic processes – iconization, recursivity, and erasure – by which people link representations of linguistic differences to groups and turn those differences into indexes of entire groups. Judith T. Irvine and Susan Gal, ‘Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation,’ 35–83. In the process of iconization, for instance, linguistic features appear to be essential indexes of groups, as if a linguistic feature manifested or displayed a group’s inherent nature or essence. Recursivity, instead, involves the projection outward of an opposition that is internal to a group in order to distinguish and define new groups. Erasure is described as the process

244 Notes to pages 18–21

56 57

58 59

60

in which some speakers or linguistic activities or phenomena go unnoticed or are explained away because they are inconsistent with the assumed representations. In this process, a group or a language may be imagined as homogeneous, and its internal variation disregarded. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 6–7. See also Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990), 89–98. Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country. See the chapter titled ‘The Nationalization of Patriotism,’ 140–60. Given the pervasive presence of classical models, especially in Renaissance and eighteenth-century culture, Viroli’s precise assessment of the distinction between the discourse of patriotism and the language of nationalism has provided me with finer instruments to keep the two ideologies apart in the periods in which the terms nation and patria are used indistinctly. It allowed me to identify with more confidence the rhetorical moves that put deep-rooted classical values in the service of nationalism, as well as crucial passages in which the two discourses are juxtaposed without full awareness. See Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, particularly 39–62. Alberto Banti demonstrates that Risorgimento national symbols, images, and rites emerging in literature, music, and the visual arts as well as in personal correspondences and memoirs built on paradigms of unity that were strongly rooted in the Italian Christian tradition but that also exploited biological metaphors. See Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, and, for the articulation of Italian national myths in different arts and disciplines, see Immagini della nazione nell’Italia del Risorgimento, ed. Alberto M. Banti and Roberto Bizzocchi. More recently, Christopher Duggan has devoted a chapter to the patriots’ efforts to deal with what they viewed as Italy’s fractured past, in The Force of Destiny, 90–115. Recent historians of the Renaissance have shown that the inability of Risorgimento intellectuals to identify with the Renaissance idea of Italy prompted them to overlook the Italian political space that had already been created with the first Lega italica (1454) and to declare, instead, the Renaissance notion of Italy a mere literary myth. In fact, a solid common political culture for a modern Italy, as opposed to Latin Italy, had forcefully emerged, and its most characteristic institution was the shared language of public chanceries written in caratteri italici, or italics. Such culture not only sustained trans-regional feelings but also lent political substance to the common Italian identity. See Riccardo Fubini, ‘L’idea di Italia fra Quattro e Cinquecento,’ 53–66. See also Giuseppe Galasso, L’Italia come problema storiografico, 168–9; Vincent Ilardi, ‘Italianità Among Some Italian Intellectuals in the Early Sixteenth Century,’ 339–67.

Notes to pages 21–5

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61 ‘Se Firenze fosse potuta diventare Parigi, tutti i culti italiani oggi avrebbero sicuramente l’identico linguaggio dei fiorentini, ma è altrettanto sicuro, che il linguaggio di siffatta capitale dell’Italia non sarebbe il fiorentino odierno, e forse non si potrebbe pur dire un dialetto toscano.’ Ascoli, ‘Proemio all’ Archivio glottologico italiano,’ 115–16; on the contrast between Florence and Paris see 107–17. 62 A keen awareness of Italy’s ethnic and cultural meshwork runs throughout the discourse on the Italian identity. The absence of an univocal correspondence between the geographic designation and one exclusive ethnic group has been traditionally viewed as the actual source of the power of assimilation exerted by the name Italy, ‘its ability to act as a contingent instrument of cultural and political integration’ in different ways and epochs. See Francesco Prontera, ‘L’Italia nell’ecumene dei greci,’ 13, and Emilio Gabba, ‘Alcune considerazioni su una identità nazionale nell’Italia romana,’ 15–21. Aldo Scaglione offers a similar argument, lamenting the intellectuals’ and politicians’ inability to envision a political solution that could express the Italian civilization and its specific historical forms. ‘La sfida che allora perdemmo non fu di trapiantare la Francia in Italia, ma di inventare una soluzione che esprimesse un modello misurato su una realtà in cui le autonomie cittadine non solo avevano avuto uno sviluppo e una funzione come in nessuna parte d’Europa, ma erano ancora – pur con i loro limiti – i motori più importanti della crescita economica … Gli italiani … non furono capaci di costruire una forma politica all’altezza della civilltà che avevano saputo elaborare’ (Scaglione, Italiani senza Italia, 82). 1 Scripts of Vernaculars and Collective Characters in Early Modern Europe 1 For an overview of this early encyclopedic systematization see Frank K. Stanzel, ed., Europäischer Völkerspiegel, and Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, eds., Imagology. 2 Of course, the assumed predictability of this character conferred scientific credibility to these taxonomies of nations. 3 See Hampton, ‘History, Alterity, and the European Subject,’ in Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century, 195–226; Sergio Zatti, ed., La rappresentazione dell’altro nei testi del Rinascimento, particularly, Zatti’s preface, ‘Premessa,’ 7–10. Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 16–39. 4 Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century, 196; Joep Leerssen, ‘The Poetics and Anthropology of National Character,’ 63–75. 5 Leerssen, ‘The Poetics and Anthropology of National Character,’ 63.

246 Notes to pages 25–7 6 See Hagen Schulze, States, Nations and Nationalism, 114–36, and Hermet, Histoire des nations et nationalisme en Europe, 67– 85. 7 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 35–8. 8 Leerssen, ‘The Poetics and Anthropology of National Character,’ 64. 9 Both Aristotle (Politics) and Plato (Laws), for instance, blend physicogeographical and political factors, recognizing the differences caused by climate as well as the possibility of moulding the character of the people through legislation. See Wilfried Nippel, ‘Ethnic Images in Classical Antiquity,’ 33–44; and Romani, National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 7–8. 10 Historical studies of ethnic characterizations usually survey a fairly compact group of authors, of which I can only list Herodotus, Isidore, Tacitus, Plinius, Bartholomeus Anglicus, Johannus Boemus, Cornelius Agrippa von Nettelsheim, Jean Bodin, Giovanni Botero, Juan Huarte, and John Barclay. See the surveys in Beller and Leerssen, eds., Imagology; Stanzel, ‘Zur literarischen Imagologie,’ 9–39; and Margaret Trabue Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. 11 For an excellent analysis of the structural patterns and the ambivalent polarity of national stereotyping, see Leerssen, ‘The Rhetoric of National Character,’ 267–92. 12 Leerssen, ‘Imagology,’ 17; Louis Van Delft, Littérature et anthropologie; Jean Stewart, introduction to La Bruyère, Characters (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Classics), 7–24. A few historians of the Renaissance period, however, have suggested that rather than originating in literary theory, the first records of ethnic characteristics in modern times can be found in diplomatic commercial papers. See Lewis Einstein, The Italian Renaissance in England, and literary historian Olga Zorzi Pugliese, ‘The Development of the Discussion on Italian and Other Cultures,’ 139–88. 13 See Leerssen, ‘The Rhetoric of National Character,’ 275; and John E. Joseph, Language and Identity, 2–6. 14 Iulius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, 228. 15 ‘Inghilterra, a la tavola da la mattina a la sera … Spagna, di fuori bello, e dentro la magagna; Lombardo, fedele e leccardo; Fiorentino, il corpo e l’anima al quattrino; Romano, giorno e notte con l’anima in mano; Senese, pazzo a sue spese; Genovese, moro bianco; Napolitano, fuori d’oro e dentro vano … Brescian, mangia broda, Veronese, caoso, Vicentino, ladro et assassino.’ Giovan Giorgio Trissino, La quinta e la sesta divisione, vol. 2, 124. This passage reveals that in contrast to other European nations, Italians were not really viewed as one single people with homogenous customs and manners. It is worth recalling that Trissino, playwright and author of

Notes to pages 27–9

16 17

18

19

20 21 22

23

24

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the famous dialogue Il Castellano (1529), favoured the mixed koine of the Italian courts, against both the orthodox Trecento canon and the preferred Florentine. Leerssen, ‘The Rhetoric of National Character,’ 281–2. La Bruyère was also the French translator of Theophrastus’s Characters. His Caractères was reissued many times in the course of the seventeenth century, until 1694. For a thorough analysis of this question in seventeenthcentury French literature, see Van Delft, Littérature et anthropologie, 137–80. On the work of Boccalini within the context of national characterizations and his impact on Baltasar Gracián, see Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus, ‘Der Völkervergleich in der Allegorie: Graciáns El Criticón und Boccalinis I Ragguagli di Parnaso,’ in Europäischer Völkerspiegel, 139–53. Van Delft analyses extensively the relationship between moral cartography and national characterizations, including the tableaux, in Littérature et anthropologie, 19–97. The Völkertafel or ‘Tableau of Nationalities’ has been extensively analysed in the exceptionally detailed study entitled Europäischer Völkerspiegel, ed. Stanzel. Leerssen, ‘The Poetics and Anthropology of National Character,’ 69. Ibid. The retroactive impact of this systematizing effort on theories of the arts can be weighed in the enormously influential Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719) by Jean-Baptiste Dubos, which reveals how established the scientific rationalization of national character had become and how much climatology had been accepted as an explanation of those characters. Climate allowed Dubos to postulate constant national characteristics and to systematically explain the cultural achievements of individual nations as products of physical environment and of the quality of the air as determined by climate. It also allowed him to distinguish between authentic and apparent shifts in national character, maintaining that true national properties were altered only by climate changes. See Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, ‘Klimatheorie und Nationalcharacter auf der “Völkertafel,”’ 119–37. The relationship between Bodin’s theory of dispositions and governments and Montesquieu’s ideas is the subject of Etienne-Maurice Fournol, Bodin: Prédécesseur de Montesquieu. See Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Persian Empire and Greek Freedom,’ 61–75; and Nippel, ‘Ethnic Images in Classical Antiquity,’ 38–41. In his recent study on national character in Britain and France from 1750 to 1914, Roberto Romani identifies the origin of the connection between politics and

248 Notes to pages 29–32

25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37

38

national characterization in the classical discussions about the suitability of different peoples to liberty. He notices, for instance, that Plato’s Laws warned against laying down laws that disregarded the character of citizens, especially against those traits that depended on the natural environment and climate. Laws and governments that ignored the people’s character were doomed to fail. Romani, National Character and Public Spirit, 8. Romani shows that, in the modern era, this notion was consistently put to use in political and economic philosophy to assess ‘the relationship between a free government (and/or a market economy) and the quality of citizens’ (3). Bodin has very few references to modern texts; Juan Luis Vives is the most conspicuously quoted among the modern authors. Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République, vol. 5, 12–13. Ibid., 38–42. On this topic, see Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature. Bodin, Les six livres de la République, 25. For the history of this stereotype, see Robert Casillo’s The Empire of Stereotypes, 57–8, 68–9, 116–24; Silvana Patriarca, ‘Indolence and Regeneration,’ 322–49. Bodin, Les six livres de la République, 25–6. On the relationship of Bodin’s thought to absolutism, see Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory. Bodin, Les six livres de la République, 56. Here I quote from Richard Knolles’s translation The Six Bookes of a Common-Weale, 568. Knolles, The Six Bookes of a Common-Weale, 568. Raffaele Pinto, ‘La donna come alterità linguistica,’ in La rappresentazione dell’altro nei testi del Rinascimento, ed. Sergio Zatti (Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi Editore, 1998), 24. Ibid. See ibid., 19. On the Medici family and Florentine linguistic hegemony, see Theodor J. Cachey, ‘Latin versus Italian,’ 19–33; Severina Parodi, ‘L’Accademia della Crusca interprete della coscienza nazionale,’ 113–20; and Claudio Marazzini, Breve storia della lingua italiana, 98–101. On the French edicts, which progressively eliminated the use of Latin and regional languages, and the rise of vernaculars as official languages, see Ian Parker, ‘The Rise of the Vernaculars in Early Modern Europe,’ 321–51; Pinto, ‘La donna come alterità linguistica,’ 27. Of course, the ‘langaige maternel’ imposed as the language of court proceedings and legal document by these ordonnances, culminating in the edict of Villers-Cotterets (1539), was certainly not the language actually spoken in all regions of

Notes to page 33

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41 42

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France. Yet by connoting the standardized literary vernacular as maternal, the edicts fostered the perception of a natural quality of the literary vernacular, a perception that was intended to weaken the awareness of local and social differences. Steven Botterill, ‘Introduction,’ in Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. S. Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xviii. Dante’s hunt for the illustrious Italian vernacular was combined with his extraordinary assertion of his own originality (‘neminem ante nos,’ I, i, 1) and of the poets’ authority (‘doctores illustres’), whose political relevance, in Dante’s opinion, could be further enhanced if only there were a curia to unify their efforts. There is a long-standing debate in Italy about the significance of Dante’s Italianitas in nationalist terms. A whole spectrum of positions is represented, from interpreters who are convinced that Dante is actually speaking of a national political body coinciding with the extension of Ytalie loquela, like Ileana Pagani in La teoria linguistica di Dante, 141–3; to those who use the terms national and political in a broader sense, like Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo and G. Vilnay (see Angelo Mazzocco, Linguistic Theories in Dante and the Humanists, 108–58); and, finally, those who reject this interpretation in the name of Dante’s universal, European perspective, like Mazzocco himself (see 150–1). Dante’s concerns were clearly both political and aesthetic. On De vulgari eloquentia, see also Alessandro Raffi, La Gloria del volgare; Marianne Shapiro, De vulgari eloquentia: Dante’s Book of Exile. Gary P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, offers an original and compelling analysis of Dante’s discourse on language. More recently, Albert Russell Ascoli has explored the relationship between Dante’s concept of language and his idea of authorship, in Dante and the Making of a Modern Author. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 2350. Pinto, La donna come alterità sessuale, 27–8; see also Gensini, ‘Epicureanism and Naturalism in the Philosophy of Language from Humanism to the Enlightenment,’ 52. Pinto, La donna come alterità sessuale, 25. The extraordinarily varied positions articulated in the Italian debate on language risked accentuating the awareness of the gap between the literary language and the tongues actually spoken on the peninsula. Whether they stressed the social and cultural distance from the maternal languages, like Bembo’s idiom of the Trecento literary canon and Trissino’s and Castiglione’s courtly koine, or emphasized a geographical and cultural belonging to a particular community, as the supporters of Florentine usage did, these positions rarely articulated an inclusive perspective.

250 Notes to pages 34–5 45 Bembo praises the natural language ‘acquired from the nurse’ only in the first few exchanges among the interlocutors of his dialogue, just when he needs to assert the primacy of the vernacular over Latin, yet he soon abandons natural speech and presents the Trecento literary language as the model for Italy’s language. See Prose della volgar lingua, 269–74. 46 Stressing the natural quality of the literary language and its closeness to Florentine native speakers’ usage, however, could also have underscored Italy’s linguistic fragmentation and excluded the majority of Italians as inevitably alien to the ‘maternal language.’ This risk emerges in Machiavelli’s arguments in Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua (published only in 1730), which identifies the model of the literary language in Florentine living usage, a language that was accessible only to native speakers and could not be imitated by non-Florentines. 47 Quoted in Gensini, ‘Epicureanism and Naturalism,’ 53. 48 Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, 16. 49 Gensini has construed the polemic between Scaliger and the encyclopedic scholar Girolamo Cardano as the most striking instance of the integration of Epicurean and Aristotelian ideas. Scaliger defended the Aristotelian interpretation of linguistic diversity as a matter of signifiers, not of semantic processes, while Cardano promoted the natural explanation suggested by Epicurus. Gensini, ‘Epicureanism and Naturalism,’ 58–9. In ‘De hominis natura et temperamento,’ Cardano describes language diversity as the result of natural differences, depending both on environmental and on psychological factors. It is the nature of the place (‘locorum natura’), the influence of the always changing living usage of the common people (‘vulgus dum sine cura profert, illas viciat et adulterat’), and human expressive needs (‘omnes animi affectus possint explicari’) that bring about language diversity. In his Exotericarum exercitationum libri (1576), Scaliger instead insisted on the uniformity of nature and defended the orthodoxy of the Babel myth by reinforcing the idea that Hebrew was the one and only tongue of humankind and that linguistic diversity was the result of God’s punishment. 50 Interestingly enough, Cardano insistently uses the category of ‘materna lingua’ to encompass actual regional varieties. 51 Girolamo Cardano, introduction, De Subtilitate Libri XXI, in Opera Omnia, 564. 52 For an analysis of Epicurean trends in linguistics, see Gensini’s excellent overview in ‘Epicureanism and Naturalism from Humanism to the Enlightenment,’ which covers the period from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century; Paolo Rossi, ‘Discussioni sulle tesi libertine su linguaggio

Notes to page 36

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e barbarie,’ 319–49; and Richard Nate, ‘Natursprachtheorien des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,’ 93–115. For the philosophical relevance of this revival in language studies, see Ernst Cassirer Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 90–9 and 136–7; the impact of Epicureanism on scientific theories of origin is explored in Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time, 94–5; 217–18. 53 Indeed, the claim that ‘ciascuna lingua ha sua perfezione e suo suono e suo parlare e scientifico’ was first articulated by Leonardo Bruni in his Vita di Dante (1436). Yet Edward Stankiewicz has drawn attention to the Renaissance origin of this idea, later expressed by the term genius of language. He has shown that the works of Florentine scholars such as Tolomei, Varchi, and Gelli articulated early on both the perception that each living language is endowed with peculiar linguistic properties that make up its distinctive character, and the discovery that this character depended on the structure of the language, not on its vocabulary. These scholars realized that each language possessed a core of untranslatable aspects and yet recognized that these unique properties depended on a language’s peculiar structures. They invoked internal explanations (that is, linguistic factors), discussing issues of syntax (word order), idioms, expressive forms (pejoratives, augmentatives, diminutives), and vocabulary (compounds, derivatives). Stankiewicz, ‘The “Genius” of Language in Sixteenth-Century Linguistics,’ 177–89. See also Stankiewicz, ‘The Typological Study of Language during the Italian Renaissance,’ 231–9. For a brief theoretical survey of the expressive view of language, see Charles Taylor, ‘Language and Human Nature,’ in Human Agency and Language, 215–47. 54 Speroni supported the use of vernacular in all disciplines, arguing that dead languages such as Latin and Greek could not be used with full mastery since one could not resuscitate the will and intentions of the ancient people who had formed them. To use Latin and Greek by picking words and phrases from one or the other author was like wanting to build a human being with pieces from many bodies, or like trying to rebuild a palace without knowing the architects’ original idea; Dialogo delle lingue, 200. Speroni’s metaphor implies the idea of language as an integrated whole. In his text, however, the competing metaphor of clothing, which also returns in his follower Du Bellay, reveals the persisting parallel perception that linguistic differences are accidental and do not affect the substance of signification. At times Speroni rehearses traditional Aristotelian beliefs, in particular the conventional hypothesis according to which, in all languages, names signify by artifice and consent (‘artificio,’ ‘beneplacito,’ 193) and thus are accidental, while the mind’s concepts are universal: ‘Per la qual cosa, così come senza mutarsi di costume o di natione, il Francioso

252 Notes to pages 36–8

55

56

57

58 59 60

e l’Inglese, non pur il Greco e il Romano, si può dare a filosofare; così io credo che la sua lingua natìa possa altrui compitamente comunicare la sua dottrina’ (193–4). Speroni argued that since truth resides in the concepts, not in sounds and letters, any language can disclose and convey it (197–8). See also Du Bellay’s passage in La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, ed. Henri Chamard, 61, which is a literal translation of Speroni. In Du Bellay’s famous treatise, for instance, the defence and the illustration of the French language went hand in hand; despite his fervent love of the ineffable ‘je ne scay quoy propre seulement [à elle]’ to French, Du Bellay was nonetheless convinced that the excellence of Latin and Greek writings could not be matched in any vernacular. La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, 36. On the relationship of language, poetry, and national identity in Du Bellay, see Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism, 77–93; Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century, 150–94; Marc Bizer, ‘Qui a païs n’a que faire de patrie,’ 375–95. Bizer interprets Du Bellay’s ‘je ne scay quoy’ as a quality common to all languages, but Du Bellay, whose Deffence was in large part a translation of Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo delle lingue, in fact refers to the indefinable uniqueness of the genius of each individual language, the concept developed by Renaissance linguists. Linguists regard Varchi’s Ercolano as exceptional for its time, particularly for its attention to the social dimension of language, its concentration on actual usage rather than literary tradition, its theoretical approach to language classification, and its insistence on the expressive aspects of speech. Michael T. Ward, ‘Benedetto Varchi and the Social Dimensions of Language,’ 176–94. On Varchi’s linguistic ideas, see Claudio Marazzini, ‘L’Ercolano di Benedetto Varchi,’ vol. 1, 267–73; and Stankiewicz, ‘The Typological Study of Languages during the Italian Renaissance,’ 231–9. For an introduction to Varchi and his historical and cultural context, see Umberto Pirotti, Benedetto Varchi e la cultura del suo tempo. More recently, Salvatore Lo Re, La crisi della libertà fiorentin, has focused on Varchi’s relationship to Florentine politics. Cosimo I’s cultural program is analysed also in Konrad Eisenbichler, ed., The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. Benedetto Varchi, L’Ercolano, 161. Hereafter ER and cited parenthetically in the text. For a discussion of this conflation, see Agamben, Means Without End, 29–36; and Greenfeld, Nationalism, 6–9. ‘Voglio bene che sappiate che anco nelle maniere nobili così di prose, come di versi occorrono molte volte alcune cose che hanno bisogno della naturalità Fiorentina’ (ER, 335).

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61 This semantic shift, which occurred first in early sixteenth-century England, ‘signaled,’ according to Liah Greenfeld, ‘the emergence of the first nation in the world, in the sense in which the word is understood today, and launched the era of nationalism.’ Greenfeld, Nationalism, 6. 62 Varchi actually denies the authenticity of the De vulgari eloquentia, claiming that its ideas were not compatible with Dante’s thought and stature: ‘Quanto all’autorità del libro De Vulgari Eloquio, già s’è detto, quell’opera non essere di Dante, sì perchè sarebbe molte volte contrario a se stesso, come s’è veduto, e sì perché tale opera è indegna di tanto uomo’ (ER, 485). 63 Varchi identifies the causes of linguistic differences in environmental conditions – natural, social, and political – considering those differences from a systematic approach rather than as deviations from the ideal structures of classical languages. 64 See, for instance, Cassirer, who has had many followers. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 88–9. 65 Henri Estienne, La Précellence du langage françois, 20. Hereafter PR and cited parenthetically in the text. 66 In England the principle of good English (the usage of a particular geographical area and society) is codified in extreme detail by George Puttenham in his Art of English Poesy (1589) as ‘the usuall speech of the court, and of London and the shires lying about London within sixty miles, and not much above.’ Quoted in Cecil Grayson, ‘The Growth of Linguistic National Consciousness in England,’ 168. 67 Huarte, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, 23. On Huarte’s classical sources, see Guillermo Serés, ‘Fuentes Antiguas,’ in Examen de ingenio para las ciencias, 70–107. 68 Huarte accepted forty-four mandatory changes, yet the comparison between the principe and the sub-principe edition shows that he altered the detail, not the principle. See Guillermo Serés, ‘El libro y la Inquisición,’ 110–18; and Carmen Rogers, ‘Introduction’ in the facsimile reproduction of Carew’s translation, The Examination of Mens Wits (1594) by Juan Huarte: Translated out of the Spanish by M. Camillo Camilli; Englished Out by Richard Carew (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1959), p. VIII. 69 On the vicissitudes of the translations of the Examen, see Rogers, ‘Introduction,’ pp. VIII-XI. 70 Camilli’s version came out in Venice and had already been issued four times by 1590. 71 On Bodin and Huarte, see Gabriel A. Pérouse, L’examen des esprits du Docteur Juan Huarte de San Juan, 61–9. 72 Huarte, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, 355.

254 Notes to pages 46–53 73 I quote from Carew’s translation The Examination of Mens Wits (1594) by Juan Huarte, 75. Hereafter EX and cited parenthetically in the text. 74 Huarte, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, 399. 75 Ibid., 417. 76 Almost two centuries after the first publication of the Examen, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing himself translated it into German (1752), with the telling title Prüfung des Verstandes, which turned the variety of mental and bodily faculties encompassed by Huarte’s notion of ingenio into a simple ‘intellect.’ On Huarte’s reception in Germany, see Martin Franzbach, Lessings Huarte-Übersetzung (1752). On the impact of the Examen on the German discussion on language in particular, see 27–31 and 44–8. 77 Noam Chomsky mentions the Examen as a source for Descartes in his Cartesian Linguistics (1966). For a comparative analysis of Huarte and Descartes, see Pérouse, L’examen des esprits du Docteur Juan Huarte, 144–55. 78 This is particularly evident in the sixth inaugural lecture entitled ‘On the Proper Order of Studies’ (1707) and in the famous De ratione (1709). On Vico and Huarte, see Gensini, ‘Ingenium/ingegno fra Huarte, Persio e Vico,’ 29–69. 79 After Joachim Caesar’s translation into Latin, the popularity of the Examen was revived by Lessing’s German translation (1752). See Franzbach, Lessings Huarte-Übersetzung, 131–6. 80 See Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974), and Government and Society in Louis XIV’s France, ed. Roger Mettam (London: Macmillan, 1977). 81 Motyl, ‘Inventing Invention,’ 69. 82 ‘Nostre langage avoit deux competiteurs, l’Italien et l’Espagnol, je n’ay combatu que l’un, asçavoir l’Italien. Je di donc que je n’ay voulu m’attacher qu’à luy … l’ Espagnol: veu que je l’estime luy estre beaucoup inferieur …; quelques Italiens avoir osé preferer leur langage non seulement au nostre, et à tous les autres vulgaires qui sont aujourdhuy, mais aussi au Grec et au Latin’ (PR, 14–15). Here Estienne is clearly referring to Varchi’s statements. 83 Here I part ways with Christmann’s interpretation, which, leaving out Pasquier’s passages on Normans, Guascons, and Angevins, places Pasquier’s observations in one and the same line as Bouhours’ thought. Indeed, Pasquier not only does not hide the ethnic diversity of France but also uses the term esprit instead of génie, and, moreover, in the plural; thus it is difficult to assume that he was a direct antecedent of Bouhours’ arguments. In fact, as I argue in my introduction, I consider the use of the term genius a significant turn. See Hans Helmut Christmann, ‘Bemerkungen zum génie de la langue,’ 74.

Notes to pages 54–6 84 85 86 87

88

89

90 91 92 93

94

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Etienne Pasquier, Les Recherches de la France, 1504. Clark L. Keating, Etienne Pasquier, 49. Pasquier, Les Recherches de la France, 1504–5. For an overview of the English approach to the question of language in the early modern period, see Werner Hüllen, ‘Characterization and Evaluation of Languages in the Renaissance and in the Early Modern Period,’ 234–49. On the ways in which English humanists dealt with the humiliating account of British antiquity in classical literature and on the particular use of classical fables both as foundational myths and also as ‘a dispensation for vernacular writing’ in Renaissance England, see Sean Keilen, Vulgar Eloquence, 1–31. On the relationship of the question of language to national identity, see Grayson, ‘The Growth of Linguistic National Consciousness in England,’ 167–73. When Richard Mulcaster, for instance, celebrated the achievements of the English tongue as an accomplishment of the whole nation in his famous grammar The First Part of the Elementarie (1582), he also proclaimed his admiration for Latin and Italian culture: ‘I love Rome, but London better, I favor Italie, but England more, I honor the Latin, but I worship the English.’ Quoted in Hüllen, ‘Characterization and Evaluation of Languages,’ 241. On Mulcaster, see also Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism, 167–8. One can still observe this trend in V.J. Peyton’s History of the English Language (1771), written almost two centuries after Mulcaster and Carew, when English cultural confidence could no longer be challenged. ‘Our tongue is as copious, pithy, and significative as any other in Europe. I will not say as sacred as the Hebrew, nor as learned as the Greek; but as fluent and nervous as the Latin, as polite as the French, and as amorous as the Italian.’ Quoted in David B. Paxman, ‘The Genius of English,’ 30. On this topic, see also John Woodhouse, ‘The Reluctant Academicals,’ 175–84. Richard Carew, ‘The Excellencie of the English Tongue,’ 36–7. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 42. Manifestations of linguistic nationalism were not missing in England. The so-called antiquarians (William Camden, 1551–1623; Richard Hare, d. 1611; Meric Casaubon, 1599–1671), for instance, celebrated England as the most noble of the Teutonic nations and endorsed the use of words of Germanic stock over the Latinate vocabulary for religious reasons as well. Hüllen, ‘Characterization and Evaluation of Languages,’ 241. A Character of England and A Character of France were probably penned by the polymath John Evelyn, an influent member of the Royal Society. A Character of England turned a social class, the aristocracy, into the icon of English decadence during the Commonwealth and the Protectorate. The

256 Notes to pages 57–9

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96

97 98

implication was that only the king could restore England’s prestige. See Guy de la Bédoyére, ed., The Writings of John Evelyn, 74–90. The pamphlet on France is advertised in the 1660 edition of The Character of Italy (London: Brooke, 1660). For general information on these writings, see Adolphus William Ward and Alfred Rayney Waller, eds., The Cambridge History of English Literature, VII, 445. Cassirer insists that modern theories of language are heavily indebted to Epicurus; Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 90–9, 130–4. See also Hans Aarsleff, ‘The Tradition of Condillac,’ in From Locke to Saussure, 146–209. Jürgen Schiewe, Die Macht der Sprache, 63. Defences of the dignity of the vernacular as well as philological works, aimed at purifying the language and freeing it from its dependence on Latin and foreign vocabulary and syntax, appeared in remarkable numbers only in the seventeenth century when the first language academies, modelled on the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, were founded. On the spread of Luther’s German, see John T. Waterman, A History of the German Language, 128–36. Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History, 47.

2 Ut Lingua, Natio: Dominique Bouhours’s Genius of the Nation and Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s Italian Republic of Letters 1 Bourzeys’ speech, presented to the French academy in the year of its founding, endorsed the systematic study of languages (their différent génie) in relation to peoples’ temperaments. It examines causes and products of the different geniuses of languages, making several concessions to the commonplaces of the time. Bourzey explains different styles of eloquence in terms of the peculiar génie of each language, then presents the génie de la langue as a product of temperament (both ‘of the region and of the people’), government, and social customs. Amable de Bourzeys, ‘Discours sur le dessein de l’Académie et sur le différent génie des langues,’ ed. James Dryhurst, Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 81, no. 2 (1971): 235. The original text, as it appears in the manuscript of the Bibliothèque Nationale, has no title. On Bourzeys’ speech see Hans Helmut Christmann, ‘Bemerkungen zum génie de la langue,’ 65–79. 2 The most comprehensive monograph on Bouhours is still George Doncieux, Le Père Bouhours. The claim of the universality of French is usually associated with the much later essay De l’universalité de la langue française (1784) by Antoine de Rivarol, an essay that won the prize in the Berlin Academy competition on the topic of the universality of French.

Notes to pages 60–1

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3 To this day, the most detailed accounts of the Orsi-Bouhours polemic remain Giuseppe Toffanin, L’Arcadia; and Stefano Gensini, ‘Motivi linguistici in Arcadia: La polemica con Bouhours,’ in L’identità dell’italiano, 3–39. Among the most recent surveys, see Maria Grazia Accorsi and Elisabetta Graziosi, ‘Da Bologna all’Europa,’ 84–136. 4 Within the German language community, then divided into numerous small principalities and kingdoms, intellectuals defended the Italian culture in an indirect attempt to restore the honour of the German people. For instance, when the erudite Johann Friedrich Cramer rejected Bouhours’s arguments from ‘Le bel esprit’ (Entretiens, 1671) – especially those concerning the belief that Germans, like all ‘Northern nations,’ were not capable of wit – he argued that whoever dared consider French esprit as superior to the ingenium of ancient Greeks and Renaissance Italians, though understandably blinded by patriotism (‘amore patriae obcoecatum’), should be regarded as insane (‘Insanum in modum’; ‘eo dementiae profecto’). Vindiciae Nominis Germanici, Contra Quosdam Obtrectatores Gallos (Berlin: Johann Michael Rüdiger, 1694), 6. Among the German respondents, the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz criticized Bouhours’s inflated attacks against Italian culture, in a letter to Sophie Charlotte, the queen of Prussia, and later addressed Bouhours’s notion of esprit in his philosophical work Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (1703; book 2, II, 2). In Switzerland, Béat Louis de Muralt replied to Bouhours’s nationalist view in his Lettres sur les Français (1697), expressing the German middle classes’ rejection of French cultural hegemony. Against the French culture of appearances and esprit, Muralt proposed a sentimental education of the heart. Even as late as 1754, the German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a genuine cosmopolitan intellectual, evoked the ghost of Bouhours and his unfortunately popular prejudices. Reviewing a French book that treated German literati fairly, Lessing expressed the hope that the cultural war was finally over. See Wilfried Barner, ‘Res publica litteraria und das Nationale,’ in Nationen und Gelehrtenrepublik, ed. Wilfried Barner and Albert M. Reh, 89. 5 Dominique Bouhours, La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (1687), 2. Hereafter M and cited parenthetically in the text. 6 Ibid., 463. 7 Actually, Bouhours made the distinction between customs (ethics ‘moeurs’) and esprit (wit and works of art ‘ouvrages d’esprit’) and maintains that in conduct and behaviour, ancients and moderns are equal (‘nous avons du bon sens, de l’élevation, & de la justesse pour le moins autant que les Grecs & que les Romains,’ La manière de bien penser, 139). He elaborates on

258 Notes to pages 62–7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24

this thought in a later work, explaining that the superiority of antiquity is just an effect of chronological distance (‘l’éloignement le grossit’), yet he recognizes the excellence of the ancients in the arts, admitting that their excellence could simply derive from the advantage of having come first and thus serve as a model. See Pensées ingenieuses des anciens et des modernes, 113. Christmann, ‘Bemerkungen zum génie de la langue,’ 71–4. See Radouant, introduction to Bouhours, Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (hereafter E and cited parenthetically in the text), 23. See also Simone, History of Linguistics, 202–3. See Cecilia Gallotti, ‘Un capitolo del confronto ragione/passioni,’ 77. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, vol. 3, 205. For the discussion on transposition, see vol. 3, ii, 14. Longinus, On the Sublime, 43. ‘Inversion,’ in Encyclopédie, vol. 8, 856. For an extensive analysis of the French discussion in the eighteenth century, see Ulrich Ricken, Grammaire et philosophie au siècle des lumières. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, 50. Discourse on the Method, trans. Robert Stoothoff, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 140. Discours de la méthode, vol. 1, 51; Discourse on the Method, 140. According to Joseph, even in the late nineteenth century, the expression of emotions is contrasted to the rational operation of the mind and viewed as being on par with animal language. Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal (1872) placed this belief within the framework of modern evolution. Joseph, Language and Identity, 16. They regarded judging to be the ‘proper action of our minds and the manner in which we think’ (‘qu’on peut dire estre proprement l’action de nostre esprit, & la manière dont nous pensons’). Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, Grammaire générale et raisonnée (1660), 29. I keep the French of the original (for example, ‘estre’). Trans. Jacques Rieux and Bernard E. Rollin, General and Rational Grammar: The Port-Royal Grammar (Paris: Mouton, 1975), 171. Arnauld and Lancelot, Grammaire générale et raisonnée, 141. Ibid., 145. Rieux and Rollin, General and Rational Grammar, 173. Ibid., 173. Arnauld and Lancelot, Grammaire générale et raisonnée, 141. Rieux and Rollin, General and Rational Grammar, 175, n. 8. Seventeen years later, on 27 January 1687, a similar comparison provoked the protest of all classicists within the Académie; this time the ‘modern’

Notes to pages 67–74

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26

27 28

29

30 31 32 33 34

35

259

Charles Perrault started off the most acrimonious phase of the querelle by reciting his irreverent Poème sur le Siècle de Louis le Grand: ‘Je vois les anciens, sans plier les genoux; / Ils sont grands, il est vrai, mais hommes comme nous; / Et l’on peut comparer, sans craindre d’être injuste, / Le siècle de Louis au beau siècle d’Auguste.’ Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences, with an introduction by Hans Robert Jauss, 165. See also Hyppolyte Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des anciens et des modernes, 141. Drawing a comparison between the development of French and the different development stages of Latin, Bouhours echoes the traditional argument (already reformulated by Renaissance language theorists such as Baldassar Castiglione and Sperone Speroni) according to which change is the defining element of language, and only languages that are able to change are capable of achieving superior refinement. See book I, XXXVI, of Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, 62–3. Speroni, Dialogo delle lingue, in Opere, 184. See Claudio Marazzini, ‘Preclusioni e pregiudizi: Il dibattito sul Vocabolario,’ in Storia della civiltà letteraria italiana, ed. Giuseppe Beccaria, Concetto del Popolo, and Claudio Marazzini (Turin: UTET, 1996), 98. Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 55. This is the case, for instance, of Radouant’s introduction; Rosiello, ‘Analisi semantica dell’espressione’; Gensini, Volgar favella; and Simone, History of Linguistics. ‘Le femmine italiane … lasciano questa cura e gloria a gli uomini. Può contarsi per miracolo, e per un rarissimo pregio della sola Francia, che quivi il sesso debole sia quel, che dia la norma del bene, acconciamente parlare … Egli è però vero, che … una singolar proprietà di quel linguaggio si è l’esser molle, tenero, affettuoso … Perciò in Francia al sesso molle e tenero si conviene ed è naturale la lingua franzese, che al sesso virile tutto guerriero, valoroso, e consecrato alla gloria delle armi.’ I quote from the recent edition: L.A. Muratori, Della perfetta poesia italiana, vol. 2, 662. Hereafter PP and cited parenthetically in the text. Gensini, L’identità dell’italiano, 9. Kohn, ‘The Sovereign Nation’ in The Idea of Nationalism, 185–259. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 7. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 160–5. See Benedict Anderson, ‘Introduction,’ in Imagined Communities, 5–7. Stuart Woolf’s History of Italy, 1700–1860 follows the origins of the nineteenth-century national movement, going back to the frustration of eighteenth-century political aspirations. Historian Marco Cuaz has recently offered a useful overview of the his-

260 Notes to pages 74–6

36

37

38

39

40

torical context of the Italian cultural crisis that began at the end of the sixteenth century and stretched throughout the eighteenth century, in ‘L’immagine dell’Italia nella cultura europea del Settecento,’ 67–88. Benedetto Croce, Storia dell’età barocca in Italia;Andrea Sorrentino, La retorica e la poetica di Vico, 85–105; Gensini, Volgar favella, 67–75. The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce has described Orsi’s position and, more generally, the meaning of the Italian debate as the ‘defense of the rights of imagination and of poetic freedom against the consequences of intellectualism and French neo-classicism’ (Storia dell’età barocca in Italia, 221). However, he cannot resist asserting that this debate, with its implicit acknowledgment of Italian decadence, also constitutes the beginning of Risorgimento ideals. Croce’s description of the general theoretical principles underlying the somewhat redundant debate is accurate. (Croce probably approved of the separation of rhetorical and political issues characterizing Orsi’s perspective.) Yet many of the texts that kept the polemic alive for so many years insist on the imitation of the classical authors based on the principle of the autorizzamento and too often offer prefabricated recipes for poetry, sanctioning at times a notion of imagination that barred rather than encouraged invention. Only one Italian moderne, the cosmopolitan intellectual Francesco Montani, defended Bouhours, in a public letter published anonymously and inevitably attacked in the Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia. See Toffanin, L’Arcadia, 49–56; and Accorsi and Graziosi, ‘Da Bologna all’Europa,’ 129–33. ‘Come soffriracci più ‘l cuore di lasciar correr grido, che in Italia sieno mancati gli studi, perito il buon gusto, infievoliti gl’ingegni? Come vorremo noi lasciare ancora in mano degli stranieri tutte le trombe della fama?’ Scipione Maffei, ‘Introduzione al Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia,’ 206. ‘L’avere una lingua propria … che giovi a imprimere in loro cuore un carattere originale, e si’ fattamente proprio della nazione, talché ne risulti il più vivo interessamento per il pubblico bene, sparso ne’ diversi membri di essa, e la più intima e salda unione del corpo politico, e degli ordini di persone che li compongono.’ Galeani Napione, Dell’uso e dei pregi della lingua italiana, vol. 1, 4. On Napione, see Mario Puppo, ‘Lingua e cultura nelle discussioni del Settecento,’ 11–134; Marazzini, ‘Il confronto con il francese,’ in Storia della lingua italiana, I Luoghi della codificazione, 291–5; and Gensini, ‘Traduzioni, genio delle lingue, realtà sociale nel dibattito linguistico italofrancese (1671–1823),’ 25–8. L.A. Muratori, Primi disegni della repubblica letteraria d’Italia, in Opere, ed. Giorgio Falco and Fiorenzo Forti (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1964), vol. 1, 178. Hereafter Op and cited parenthetically in the text.

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41 It is easy to recognize the influence of Bacon in Muratori’s definition of the tasks of the ‘Republic,’ especially when he suggests that identifying the lacunae in each science and art should be made a priority. His emphasis on experimental philosophy also reveals Bacon’s impact. 42 Francesco Bianchini, for instance, represented both positions when, in response to Muratori’s appeal, he argued, on one side, that true knowledge was universal and could not belong to any nation in particular and, on the other, he stated, ‘Io non ho mai creduto che si possano unir gli ingegni italiani troppo divisi di luogo e differenti idee.’ See Aldo Andreoli, Nel mondo di Ludovico Antonio Muratori, 155, 183. See also Cuaz, ‘L’immagine dell’Italia nella cultura europea del Settecento,’ 76–7. 43 Though he claimed to be on Orsi’s side, Muratori shared several values with French colleagues such as Bouhours, including the ideal of good taste as regulated by reason, and the value of naturalness in eloquence. Della perfetta poesia articulated a number of aesthetic principles directed against different literary positions, French as well as Italian. Muratori appeals, for instance, to the ideal of the buon gusto universale both to campaign against what he calls the ‘gusto marinesco’ (the baroque style of the Marinist poets) and to reject the principle of autorizzamento, or the justification of devices through classical examples used by his friend Orsi to defend Italian poetry against Bouhours’s attacks. He embraces Bouhours’s ideal of naturalness both in oratory and in poetry but defends a moderate use of tropes and inversions in poetry. He insists on truth (‘il Vero’) as the object of art but qualifies it as a ‘vero nuovo,’ consisting of truths that are uncommon (‘non communale’) and capable of evoking wonder (‘maraviglia,’ the quintessential baroque principle) either through the choice of the subject or with the help of stylistic devices. His historical reconstruction of Italian letters insists on the excellence of the Seicento scientific prose; though he admits the decadence of the poetic language denounced by Bouhours, he limits it to the years between 1620 and 1680, identifying the beginning of a renewal in the Arcadia movement. Muratori also echoes the moral arguments developed by the French modernes in the early stages of the querelle, when, in the name of art as minister of virtues and good customs, he condemns even Homer for presenting the gods as faulty beings and for offering a dangerous image of divinity to uneducated people. See PP, vol. 2, 546–7. 44 Anton Maria Salvini’s essay ‘Sopra il tradurre’ (1734) is another good example of the interaction between the notion of the genius of language and ideas on translation. For an overview of this topic, see Gensini, ‘Traduzioni, genio delle lingue,’ 9–36.

262 Notes to pages 78–81 45 See Stankiewicz, ‘The “Genius” of Language,’ 177–89. 46 A good example would be Boileau’s translation of the Perì Hypsous (1674), in which Longinus’s rhetorical values were filtered through external criteria of ‘civility’ and ‘agreeability.’ Traité du sublime, in Boileau, Œuvres complètes, 374. Boileau’s preface to the translation of the Peri Hypsous (the first French translation of Longinus), which significantly ends with an example of the sublime from Corneille’s verse (340), can be seen together with his later Réflexions critiques on Longinus (1694) as an attempt to ‘Frenchify’ the original category of the sublime. 47 Maggi used this formulation in a letter to Camillo Ettorri, who quoted it in his Il buon gusto (1696). See the editor’s note 2, in Op, vol. 1, 93. 48 See Allan Megill, ‘Aesthetic Theory and Historical Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century,’ 29–62, in particular 40–7. 49 He asserts, for instance, that uneducated people express their perceptions with splendid images but in ‘natural words,’ that is, with simplicity and ‘without much reflection or doctrine.’ A cultivated person, instead, would express the same passions in a more refined rhetoric and ‘with a deeper penetration in the truth of the experienced affect.’ Two equally cultivated speakers of different tongues, however, would articulate the same feeling in even more dissimilar ways because of the unique character of each individual language (PP, vol. 1, 162). 50 ‘Tout ce qui tient intimement à la nature humaine se ressemble d’un bout de l’univers à l’autre; que tout ce qui peut dépendre de la coutume est différent, et que c’est un hazard s’il se ressemble. L’empire de la coutume est bien plus vaste que celui de la nature; il s’étend sur les moeurs, sur tous les usages; il répand la variété sur la scène de l’univers: la nature y répand l’unité; elle établit partout un petit nombre de principes invariables: ainsi le fonds est partout le même, et la culture produit des fruits divers.’ (Whatever concerns human nature is the same from one end of the universe to the other, and what is dependent upon custom differs. The dominion of customs is much more extensive than that of nature, and influences all manners and all usages. Nature establishes unity, and everywhere settles few invariable principles.) Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations, vol. 2, 810; English translation, W.F. Fleming, Essay on the Manners and the Spirit of Nations, in The Portable Voltaire (New York: Viking, 1949), 555. 51 One must add, however, that what is lost in Muratori’s position is the perception of the mutual relation between language and thought. Such a limit becomes tangible, for instance, when he discards as totally unfounded Bouhours’s connection between a language and its speakers’ minds, a relation seriously considered by John Locke and Gottfried W. Leibniz and

Notes to pages 81–3

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54 55 56 57

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intensely discussed throughout the eighteenth century by philosophers such as Vico, Condillac, and Herder. See Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 73–108; H. Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, 42–83; and Raffaele Simone, History of Linguistics, vol. 3. ed. Giulio Lepschy, 177–215. See Op, vol. 1, 88–9, note 2. ‘Mais je croyais avoir déjà donné assez de temps aux langues … J’estimais fort l’éloquence et j’étais amoureux de la poésie, mais je pensais … Ceux qui ont le raisonnement le plus fort, et qui digèrent le mieux leurs pensées afin de les rendre claires et intelligibles, peuvent toujours le mieux persuader ce qu’ils proposent, encore qu’ils ne parlassent que bas breton et qu’ils n’eussent jamais appris de rhétorique,’ Descartes, Discours de la méthode, vol. 1, 6. Within the Italian tradition such a vision goes back to the controversy between Ermolao Barbaro and Pico della Mirandola. Later the neo-Aristotelian philosopher Pomponazzi, also a character in Speroni’s Dialogo delle lingue, promoted once again the priority of content (‘philosophy’) against the abuse of rhetoric. In Speroni’s dialogue, Peretto (Pomponazzi) replies to the Lascari, who cannot imagine Aristotle’s thought expressed in the Lombard dialect, that this would not make much of a difference: ‘Ed io … arei detto non doversi la filosofia dolere, perché ogni uomo, per ogni luogo, con ogni lingua il suo valore esaltasse. Questo farsi anzi a gloria che a vergogna di lei; la quale se non si sdegna d’albergare negli intelletti Lombardi, non si dee anche sdegnare d’esser trattata dalla loro lingua’ (196). Speroni, Dialogo delle lingue, 191–2. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill, 25. See Dante, De vulgari, 1, 3. Polemical positions against the activity of the Accademia della Crusca were hardly new in Muratori’s time. Only two years after the first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1612), Paolo Beni, a professor from Padua, published the Anticrusca (1614); in 1655, in a short treatise entitled Il torto e ‘l dritto del non si può, the Jesuit father Daniello Bartoli complained about the absence of contemporary idiom in the second, slightly modified, edition of the dictionary (1623). See Marazzini, Storia della civiltà letteraria italiana, 97–9. Muratori’s polemic, however, differs from previous attacks on the Crusca in his insistence on the necessity of a centralized institution. Although his tone is at times somewhat ambivalent, he neither tries to ridicule the efforts of the Crusca scholars nor considers the academy itself as superfluous. He wishes that the same institution had attended to the compilation of a new, more inclusive dictionary that would embrace the modern idiom. Muratori attempts to reinterpret the goals of

264 Notes to pages 84–92

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59 60 61

62 63

64

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the Crusca and to present its activity in a different light in order to assert his own vision of standardization, emphasizing grammatical codification in combination with lexical innovation, as opposed to the Crusca’s almost fetishistic preservation of the Trecento vocabulary. Salvini’s notes were published in the second edition of Della perfetta poesia italiana (1725). They are quoted in Andreoli, Nel mondo di Ludovico Antonio Muratori, 183–9. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 14–17. See Marazzini, Storia della civiltà letteraria italiana, 98. ‘Lettera in difesa di Lucano al marchese Giovan Gioseffo Orsi,’ Op, vol. 2, 1724–47. The polemic over one verse of Lucan (‘Victrix causa deis placuit sed victa Catoni,’ Pharsalia, vol. 1, 128), which Bouhours had found wrong and impious, has been the object of several analyses. See Croce’s summary ‘Un verso di Lucano nell’estetica del Sei e Settecento,’ 346–53. ‘Lettera in difesa di Lucano,’ Op, vol. 2, 1725–7. Muratori anticipated the later and equally imposing effort of Simonde de Sismondi, whose monumental history of the Italian medieval republics (1818) convinced Italian intellectuals to turn to the Middle Ages in order to discover the roots of their nation. Sismondi’s history provided Italian patriotic writers with a host of medieval stories that became the basic plots for their historical plays and novels. See Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny, 96–8. His method consisted in considering only sources that were close to the facts to be reconstructed, possibly ocular or at least local testimonies, and in comparing several sources. See Andreoli, Nel mondo di Ludovico Antonio Muratori, 291. On Muratori as historian and philosopher of history, see Sergio Bertelli, Erudizione e storia in Ludovico Antonio Muratori; Giulio de Martino, Muratori filosofo. E.J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition. See Hobsbawm’s introduction, 1–14. Hazard, The European Mind, 388-89. See Giorgio Falco’s preface to Rerum italicarum scriptores, Op, vol. 1, 479–85. For a comprehensive description of the collection, see Vittorio Fiorini, ‘Comunicazione al congresso internazionale di Scienze Storiche,’ introduction to Rerum italicarum, vol. 1, no p. n. ‘E qui tra i miei abbagli non vo’ dissimularne uno: cioè in mia gioventù altro io non aveva in testa che antichità greche e romane … per lo contrario mi facevano male agli occhi le fatture de’ secoli susseguenti, la loro storia, i loro scrittori, riti, costumi, imbrogli … Mi rido ora di me stesso. Anche quel barbaro, anche quell’orrido (me ne avvidi più tardi) ha il suo bello

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e dilettevole … oltre che la verità per se stessa è sempre un gran bello.’ Muratori, ‘Lettera a Giovanni Artico di Porcìa,’ Op, vol. 1, 26–7. Porcìa was compiling biographies of the Italian literati as written by themselves and had asked Muratori for his in July 1721; Muratori’s autobiographical letter, however, was published only after his death, at his own request. Vico’s Vita was also written on this occasion. ‘Intuebar exteros ipsos, dormientibus, imo stertentibus nobis, de gloria nostra solicite cogitasse, multumque aurum, ac labores non modicos impendisse, ut divitias nostras colligerant’ (Op, vol. 1, 492); ‘Una Italia, quaeso, aeternum inertissima dormiet?’ (Op, vol. 1, 516). See Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 86–108, 151–69. On the different personifications of Italy as a servile or humiliated woman in Italian poetry from Petrarch to Leopardi, see Lowry Nelson, ‘Leopardi First and Last,’ 334–44. See Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 48–9; Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. A similar argument for the German context emerges from Hans-Martin Blitz, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland. On Muratori’s models and his place in contemporary philology, see Claudio Marazzini, ‘La filologia,’ in Storia della lingua italiana, 285–9. ‘Proprio è d’ogni lingua vivente l’essere divisa in più dialetti, né v’ha regno, anzi né pure provincia, in cui ancorché ognuno intenda la lingua comune, pure tutti i popoli la parlino nella stessa maniera ed uniformità’ (Op, vol. 1, 635). Scipione Maffei had published his Verona illustrata in 1732. For a comparison of Maffei’s, Muratori’s, and Giusto Fontanini’s ideas on the origin of the Italian language, see Claudio Marazzini, ‘Muratori e la tradizione storico-filologica,’ 9–27. ‘In età moderna, in rapporto col concetto di nazione (concepita come persona morale protagonista della storia, quale venne delineandosi alla fine del XVIII secolo).’ Salvatore Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (Turin: UTET, 1984), vol. 12, 835. The first use of the word with such a connotation, also according to the UTET dictionary, occurred in the wellknown article ‘Della patria degli Italiani’ by Carli, published in the journal Il Caffè (1764), followed by uses in Vittorio Alfieri, Ugo Foscolo, and Giovanni Berchet. In France, many years earlier, when Joachim du Bellay used the word patrie for the first time, he was criticized for employing what then sounded like an affected Latinism. ‘Pour le devoir en quoy je suys obligé à la patrie.’ Henri Chamard, ed., La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549), 88–9.

266 Notes to pages 97–101 78 Marco Cuaz analyses in detail several travel descriptions, clearly showing that the inclusion of both the Alps and Sicily into the Italian imagined territory came into being only during the last two decades of the eighteenth century. ‘L’immagine dell’Italia,’ 69–72. 79 For the distinction among these concepts, see Perry Anderson, ‘Fernand Braudel and National Identity,’ 251–78; Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism. 80 Anderson, ‘Fernand Braudel and National Identity,’ 268. 81 According to Connor, the ethnic group may be readily discerned by an outside observer, but until its members are themselves aware of the group’s uniqueness, it is merely an ethnic group, not a nation. In his view, the ethnic group may be other-defined, while the nation must be selfdefined. The idea that an ethnic group is homogeneous, however, is (according to Connor) always created by outside observers. See Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism, 196–208, 214–23. 3 Giambattista Vico, the Vernacular, and the Foundations of Modern Italy 1 De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, in Giambattista Vico, Opere, vol. 1, 140. Trans. Elio Gianturco, On the Study Method of Our Time, 40. Hereafter both cited in text as DR, followed by the respective page numbers. 2 According to Fausto Nicolini, Vico had also no direct knowledge of the texts of the querelle des anciens et des modernes that addressed the Homeric question, which was a pivotal issue of Scienza nuova. See Fausto Nicolini, Commento storico alla seconda scienza nuova, vol. 2, 9. 3 For the relation of Vico’s thought to the civic tradition in the humanities, see Michael Mooney, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric, especially the chapter ‘Pedagogy: Ingenuity and Public Life,’ 84–170. 4 Writing in 1927, Andrea Sorrentino was the first scholar to identify the passages in Vico’s work that refer to the so-called Orsi-Bouhours polemic, which in Italy developed in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia. Sorrentino, who follows Crocean aesthetic criteria and categories, devotes a whole chapter to the controversy, concentrating on the issue of the acutezze and their relationship to truth and verisimilitude, and underscoring the continuity of Vico’s thought with the Seicento discussion of tropes (Tesauro, Peregrini, Sforza-Pallavicino). Sorrentino, La retorica e la poetica di G.B. Vico. Fubini is, to my knowledge, the first critic to draw attention to the political background of the discussion and to what he calls the ‘manifestations of the nascent national conscience,’ in the short essay ‘Vico e Bouhours,’ in Stile e umanità di Giambattista Vico, 171. 5 See Gensini, ‘Ingenium/ingegno fra Huarte, Persio e Vico,’ 29–69.

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6 Bouhours sporadically resorted to the term esprit in order to designate natural inclination (in Latin, ingenium). He distinguishes between the expressions il a bon esprit, which refers to the liveliness and penetration of the mind devoted to the studies, and il a un bon esprit, which is used to characterize solidity and common sense in general behaviour. He admits only the use of ingenieux/ingenieuse as an adjective of esprit. See his voices ‘esprit’ and ‘ingenieux’ (with the examples personne ingenieuse and personne d’esprit) in the Suite des remarques nouvelles sur la langue françoise, 122–3, 174. 7 Vico’s notion of ingegno has been the object of several analyses: more recently Mooney, ‘The Age of Splendor and Wit,’ in Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric, 60–7; Antonino Pennisi, ‘Calcolo versus Ingenium in Giambattista Vico, 191–211; Jürgen Trabant, ‘Memoria-Fantasia-Ingegno,’106–22; Trabant, ‘Ingegno e paternità,’ 265–79; Pennisi, ‘L’ingenium e i segni muti,’ 281–94; Marco Veneziani, ‘Ingenium e ingegno nelle opere di Vico,’ 295– 325. 8 De antiquissima italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda, in Giambattista Vico, Opere, ed. Francesco Saverio Pomodoro (Naples: Stamperia de’ Classici Latini, 1858), vol. 1, 123. Trans. L.M. Palmer, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, 97. Hereafter both cited in text as DA and followed by the respective page numbers. 9 See Trabant, ‘Memoria-Fantasia-Ingegno,’ 109–14. 10 Vico, ‘De mente heroica,’ in Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, vol. 1, 392. 11 As a faculty susceptible to being developed, ingenium was linked, for instance, to the study of classical authors, their imitation, and the practice of rhetorical rules. See Meissner, Wortgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, 120–37, 156–79. 12 See Andrea Battistini in the annotations to De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, in Opere, vol. 2, 1345, n. 3. Gensini too reads it as the first appearance in Italy of the idea ‘that languages, instead of following thought in a conventional way, condition its genesis and development.’ For him, Vico does not indulge here in a ‘reverse act of linguistic imperialism.’ Gensini, L’identità dell’italiano, 24. Such a reading was suggested by De Mauro at the end of his well-known article ‘Giambattista Vico: From Rhetoric to Linguistic Historicism,’ in which he maintains that for Vico, ‘language does not transmit experience, it conditions it.’ Yet De Mauro explains that this kind of reasoning clearly belongs to the set of problems concerning linguistic pedagogy, admitting that ‘Vico does not insist on developing in detail the (decidedly antirhetorical) pedagogical consequences of his linguistic historicism’ (294–5). For the status of the linguistic relativity hypothesis today, see John A. Lucy, Language Diversity and Thought.

268 Notes to pages 104–8 13 Gensini, L’identità dell’italiano, 24. 14 In Vico, Opere giuridiche, 453. Hereafter cited in text as OG. 15 ‘Statuendam est … primos ingeniosos homines … nihil aliud quam ingeniosos pueros fuisse: nam linguae mentes solertes faciunt,’ ibid. 16 See Veneziani, ‘Ingenium e ingegno nelle opere di Vico,’ 316–17. 17 Later references to the genius debate can be found in his correspondence and in the late oration De mente heroica (1732). In these writings the theme is, at times, reduced to a rather generic and simplistic formula, which never resurfaces in Scienza nuova. In De mente heroica, the adagio of the debate emerges in a brief formulaic statement (‘linguae sint ferme naturalia morum vehicula,’ Opere, vol. 1, 382). Here too languages are vehicles of cultures, not grids that condition them. 18 ‘Ceux qui ont le raisonnement le plus fort, et qui digèrent le mieux leurs pensées afin de les rendre claires et intelligibles, peuvent toujours le mieux persuader ce qui’ils proposent, encore qu’ils ne parlassent que bas breton et qu’ils n’eussent jamais appris de rhétorique.’ Descartes, Discours de la méthode, 6. 19 In his Vindiciae, Vico suddenly distinguishes between the terms acuto and arguto, which he had previously used interchangeably both in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione and in De antiquissima italorum sapientia. The distinction between acuta dicta, or the product of the ingenium’s activity (‘vera facere’), and arguta dicta, or the work of feeble and narrow fantasy (‘finguntur ab infirma brevique phantasia’), allows Vico to clarify his own anthropological approach to the various cognitive functions. Vici vindiciae sive Notae in Acta eruditorm lipsiensia, in Opere, ed. Francesco Saverio Pomodoro, vol. 4, 185–6. On the distinction between dicta acuta and dicta arguta, see Mooney, ‘Ingenuity and the dicta acuta,’ in Vico and the Tradition of Rhetoric, 135–58. 20 Ibid., 185. 21 Donald Philip Verene, ‘The Vici Vindiciae: Translation and Commentary,’ New Vico Studies 24 (2006): 156. 22 Vico’s additional argument of self-defence, namely the reference to his paternitas as one among his essential merits, entertains an apparently eccentric relation to his distinction between acuta and arguta dicta. Yet it shows, as Jürgen Trabant has suggested, that Vico was interested in aligning his own reproductive power with institutional paternity (that is, the entry into humanity through settling down with one single companion and thus initiating social institutions) and with his authority as the writer or the ‘father’ of a ‘new science.’ Trabant, ‘Ingegno e paternità,’ 279. Such a powerful chain of associations brings Vico’s ingenium closer to the Romantic

Notes to pages 108–11

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philosophy of genius and divine generation. Indeed, in human genius, as in God, intellectual, practical, and physical creativity coincide. At the same time, it brings to the fore elements of lineage and divine quality, the same connotations of the term génie that were exploited in the debate on language and nation and that Vico had previously shunned. On the issues of paternity and patrilinearity, see also Gian Balsamo, Pruning the Genealogical Tree, on Vico in particular, 84–6, 231–3; Paolo Rossi, ‘Vico, le donne, i matrimoni,’ 490–4. Vico, Vici vindiciae sive Notae, 184; italics mine. Donald Philip Verene, ‘The Vici Vindiciae,’ 153; parentheses mine. ‘Gli dispiacciono i libri del Diritto universale, perché in quelli dalla mente di Platone ed altri chiari filosofi tentava di scendere nelle menti balorde e scempie degli autori della gentilità, quando doveva tener il cammino tutto contrario; onde ivi prese errore in alquante materie’ (Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da sé medesimo, in Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, vol. 1, 79). [Vico is dissatisfied further with the Universal Law because he tried therein to descend from the mind of Plato and other enlightened philosophers into the dull and simple minds of the founders of the gentile peoples, whereas he should have taken the opposite course (The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin, 194).] ‘Errò [Vico] certamente nell’ordine, perché trattò de’ princìpi dell’idee divisamente da’ princìpi delle lingue, ch’erano per natura tra lor uniti’ (ibid.). [He erred, if not in the matter, certainly in the arrangement, because he treated the origins of ideas apart from the origins of languages, whereas they were by nature united (Engl. trans., 194).] The semiotic rather than purely linguistic frame of Vico’s parlare is explored in J. Trabant, Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs. See also Trabant, ‘Tristi segni,’11–27; Vincenzo Vitiello, ‘Parlare scrivendo, cantando,’ 89–102. See Principi di scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni, in Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, paragraphs 433–437. Hereafter cited in text as SN; the numbers correspond to the traditional division in paragraphs, numbered originally by Fausto Nicolini in his 1928 critical edition and maintained in all main editions for convenience of reference. On the meaning of parlare see Trabant, ‘Parlare scrivendo,’ and ‘Parlare cantando,’ in Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs, 81–106. English translation by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). Vico develops his idea of interpretation in relation to the etymology of patrare in SN, 448.

270 Notes to pages 112–13 31 Isaiah Berlin, ‘A Note on Vico’s Concept of Knowledge,’ 376. Ernst Cassirer’s brief discussion of Vico in Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, vol. 1, drew attention to Vico’s ‘affective’ vision of language (language as a natural expression of affections), placing it in the context of the Romantic discussion of the character of languages and nations, and thus initiating canonical comparisons with Rousseau, Hamann, and Herder. By interpreting Vico’s mother languages (Latin and German) as affective expressions of the ‘character of their nations’ (‘den Character ihrer Nationen’) (93), Cassirer invited scholars to reflect for the first time on Vico’s anthropological views of individual national languages. 32 Andrea Battistini, ‘Vico and the Passions,’ 119. 33 When Vico speaks of nations, he directs his attention to their common origins. Following the etymology nascor, natus, Vico draws attention to the conditions of the birth of a people and its civic institutions. For the American editors and translators of Scienza nuova there is no anticipation of modern nationalisms in Vico’s use of the term. In their introduction they identify three different emphases of the term nation: ‘In the first place, in his ideal or typical case, the important thing is not race or lineage but a system of institutions. In the second place …, a nation is assumed to be isolated from other nations, not to ensure purity of racial stock, but to ensure that its system of institutions shall develop independently of every other … In the third place, a nation is identified … genetically by a system of institutions continually changing, whose changes are due not to external influences but to internal stresses, to a sort of internal logic in which, for example, the class struggle plays a principal role.’ Max Harold Fisch, introduction to The Scienza nuova of Giambattista Vico by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, xx–xxii. The first meaning of Vico’s nation refers to the communities born with the first institutions (religion, marriage, and burial) common to all nations. The second and third meanings are the indispensable foundations of Vico’s science. Ultimately the autarchy of individual nations strengthened Vico’s thesis according to which nations develop common institutions independently from any actual exchange among them. 34 See also Giuseppe Mazzotta’s assessment of Vico’s people: ‘Just as unity is not a given, preexistent order, so is a people made of contrasting and heterogeneous parts. The reality of such a mixture belies the possibility of a primordial unity in the political sphere.’ The New Map of the World, 178. 35 My reading of Vico’s ideas on language heavily relies on the research of the so-called Italian school. See Antonino Pagliaro, ‘Lingua e poesia secondo G.B. Vico,’ 287–443. Tullio de Mauro (1968) has drawn the study

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of Vico’s linguistic ideas away from the almost exclusively aesthetic and rhetorical approach into the realm of linguistic historicism. See T. de Mauro, ‘Giambattista Vico: From Rhetoric to Linguistic Historicism,’ 279–95. In her numerous writings, Lia Formigari places Vico, together with Muratori, Genovesi, Ortes, and Denina, within the Settecento discussion on civic rhetoric and its role in the organization of social consensus. See L. Formigari, Signs, Science and Politics and Historical Roots of Linguistic Theories. In a number of essays and books Antonino Pennisi has defined a southern tradition, starting with Gravina and continuing with Vico, Galiani, Genovesi, and Cuoco, among others. According to Pennisi, the southern tradition moved away from a logistic and merely grammatical approach; adopting a political and pedagogical perspective, it concentrated on issues of linguistic creativity and of communication across diverse social classes. See Pennisi, La linguistica dei mercatanti. Gensini includes Vico in his studies on the identity of Italian linguistic thought, placing him at the core of a tradition characterized by ‘the singular conjunction between a linguistic theory based on the concepts of ingenium and metaphor (‘una teoria linguistica a base ingegnoso-metaforica’) and an uncommon sensitivity to the political nature of linguistic facts.’ Gensini, L’identità dell’italiano, 67. 36 Raffaele Simone identifies these three paradigms as basically shaping all explanations of linguistic diversity, in ‘Unicità del linguaggio e varietà delle lingue in Port-Royal,’ 85–103. Interpreters such as Gensini, de Mauro, and Battistini have seen Vico’s ideas on language diversity as an anticipation of the relativistic approach, while Luigi Rosiello represents the opposite interpretation. Comparing Vico’s ideas with Condillac’s theory, which was particularly important for Cesarotti (see chapter 4), Rosiello notes that while Condillac sees reflected in national languages those particular ways of organizing thoughts that individual nations develop through various social institutions, Vico regards language differences as a problem of phonetic articulation. Rosiello thus pushes Vico’s ideas on linguistic diversity into the old Aristotelian frame, which Vico otherwise decidedly rejects. Defining Vico’s interpretation of language diversity as ‘a genuine theoretical breakthrough,’ Stephen Greenblatt laments that ‘Vico’s insights have scarcely been fully explored in our own times’ (Learning to Curse, 31–2). I agree with Greenblatt, yet the particular passage from Scienza nuova (133) that he quotes to support his claim rehearses a common opinion of Vico’s time that is not peculiar to Vico. For an overview, see Frank Nuessel, ‘Vico and Contemporary Views of Language.’ 37 On Vico’s syncretism, as both a literary and a cognitive mode, see Angus

272 Notes to pages 114–16

38

39

40

41

42

Fletcher, ‘On the Syncretic Allegory of the New Science,’ 25–43; Antonio Corsano, ‘Vico e la tradizione ermetica,’ 72–84. See Princìpi di una scienza nuova intorno alla natura delle nazioni per la quale si ritruovano i princìpi di altro sistema del diritoo naturale delle genti (1725), in Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, paragraphs 385–6. Hereafter cited in text as SNP and the numbers of the paragraphs. In considering climate and customs to be elements of the nature of peoples contributing to the differences among languages, Vico seems to rely on the most common contemporary opinions. Indeed, the climatic explanation was advanced by Dubos in his Réflexions critiques (1719) and later by Espiard in his Essai sur le génie et le caractère des Nations (1743). Vico mentions in the last edition fifteen properties instead of twelve. He believes, in naming the early fathers, that one nation might have considered men ‘with regard to their appearance or power, the other with regard to their customs, undertakings, or whatever else it may have been’ (SN, 445). Vico addresses such question in SN 446, though he makes clear that the ‘mute’ aspect prevails at the beginnings of civilization, while ‘articulate’ language predominates in the third stage: ‘As gods, heroes, and men began at the same time …, so these three languages began at the same time, each having its letters, which developed along with it. They began, however, with these three very great differences: that the language of gods was almost entirely mute, only very slightly articulate; the language of heroes, an equal mixture of articulate and mute, and consequently of vulgar speech and of the heroic characters used in writing by the heroes, which Homer calls semata; the language of men almost entirely articulate and only very slightly mute’ (SN, 446). Most of Vico’s interpreters tend to stress the phenomenological perspective and to consider the three language stages as different synchronic aspects of language rather than successive chronological phases. An exception to such a perspective can be identified in Vico’s substantial revision of the hyperbaton, which in his earlier interpretations risked undermining his construction of origin and of natural significations. See my article ‘The Syntax of Passions,’ 285–307. Pagliaro’s ‘Lingua e poesia secondo G.B. Vico,’ 411–24, remains the best analysis of the ways in which the phenomenological and the historical perspectives intersect in Vico’s understanding of language. Such reconstruction must proceed from the ‘universal principle of etymology,’ which establishes that words are transferred from physical objects and from their properties to signify abstract and spiritual concepts (SN, 237); at the same time, the reconstruction must follow the historical se-

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quence of human institutions, from the primitive forests to the academies (‘prima furono le selve, dopo i tuguri, quindi i villaggi, appresso le città, finalmente l’accademie,’ SN, 239). 43 The axioms LXIII–LXVII describe Vico’s theory of etymology, which grounds the evidence presented in the book and shapes the structures of Vico’s thought. Interpreters have shown that Vico’s ideas on etymology changed over the course of time. Within the project of the Liber metaphysicus, etymologies are the key to essences, to the properties of things; in De universi iuris uno principio et fine uno liber unus, they are not only the means to interpret the laws but also, as in Scienza nuova, the most important tool of the historian. See Pagliaro, ‘Lingua e poesia secondo G.B. Vico’; Vittorio Mathieu, ‘Vico e Leibniz,’ 267–301; A. Bertolini, ‘Vico on Etymology,’ 93–106. 44 Although Vico does not have a direct knowledge of his German sources, he invariably adduces German examples (mostly from Tacitus) as ultimate proof that particular customs such as monogamous marriages, dowry, the oath of loyalty, and the forefront position of chiefs in war belong to the most ancient history of all nations.Vico draws his ideas on the German language and culture from treatises, old and new (Tacitus, Lipsius, Rechenberg, Bernegger, Peisker, and Morhof) rather than from a direct knowledge of the German language. Because of his limited knowledge Vico turns to German examples mostly when speaking of ancient customs and laws for which he can draw on Tacitus’ Germania. He maintains, for instance, that ‘the Germans, like the Romans, kept intact the first institutions of their nations’ (SN, 507). Situating the German ‘nation’ among other ‘ancient gentile nations’ such as the Chaldeans, Scythians, and Egyptians (SN, 32), Vico describes it as ‘the wildest and most savage of all the nations of Europe’ (SN, 1056). At the same time, he characterizes modern Silesia as ‘a province inhabited almost entirely by peasants’ in which ‘the people are born poets’ (SN, 471), anticipating the German Romantic myth of Volksdichtung. See Gustavo Costa, Le antichità germaniche nella cultura italiana da Machiavelli a Vico. 45 ‘The Greek language was autochthonous, and so fertile in potential developments that it was admirably fitted to express not only all the occurrences of common, everyday life, but the most recondite and abstruse ideas of all sciences and arts in apt terms, the beauty of which was commensurate with their appropriateness and felicity’ (DR, 74). I have modified the Gianturco translation to add the important qualification of autochtony (‘Graeci namque sua utebantur lingua,’ DR, 204), which is contrasted to the foreign origin of the Roman language.

274 Notes to pages 119–21 46 Vico carries on his polemical line concerning the parallel between Greek and French even in the late inaugural speech given at the Accademia degli Oziosi (1737), in which he turns to the parallel between the late Greek of syllogisms – ‘a language that, like a very subtle and pure veil of soft wax’ (‘come un sottilissimo puro velo di molle cera’), stretched itself over the abstract forms of their thoughts – and the bare and abstract language of contemporary French philosophy, ‘which is so thin and stretched (‘così sottile e stirato’) that, if it breaks in the mind of a reader who fails to understand one proposition, it will be impossible for him to understand the whole.’ In Opere, vol. 1, 406. Against the aridity and inefficacy of such languages, Vico recommends the oxymoric ‘regulated disorder’ (‘regolato disordine’) of Demosthene’s style and Cicero’s copious, torrential speech. 47 ‘The Greek philosophers hastened the natural course that their nation was to take, for when they appeared, the Greeks were still in a crude state of barbarism, from which they advanced immediately to one of the highest refinement while at the same time preserving their fables both of gods and of the heroes’ (SN, 158). In France the clash happened in the middle of the barbarism of the twelfth century, when Peter Lombard began to lecture on the subtlest issues of scholastic theology (SN, 159). 48 Indeed, Vico rarely invokes French words and idioms as evidence for his universal concepts; the only reference to the French nation proving an ancient custom concerns the Salic law, which he compares to the Roman law of succession in order to strengthen his assumption about the common nature of this custom. 49 The English translation (‘by a wonderful parallel in thought and expression lasting to our own time’) does not convey Vico’s emphasis on the exceptionality of the Italian case. 50 Again, the English editors translate cose (things) with institutions; in fact, this term covers all the things listed by Vico in the successive axiom (‘the order of things proceeds as follows: first the forest, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies,’ SN, 239), except for one, namely the forests (‘le selve’). The term selve is certainly meant to describe a historical condition of human beings that determines the stage both of their culture and of their language, yet human beings are also a state of nature. In contrast to the other stages, the selve can be overcome only thanks to an original intuition of the divine, an act of the human mind that in Vico definitely expresses the will of divine providence, or the divine spark within the human mind that allows the bestioni to elevate themselves from the condition of all other beasts and reveals to them their participation in the divine essence.

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51 Vico was convinced that human beings in similar conditions would develop similar behaviours, given their predisposition to assume the existence of divine entities (and this might be the only innate idea or rather innate disposition in his system). 52 Donald R. Kelley, The Descent of Ideas, 273. 53 On language and law in Scienza nuova and the relationship to the Italian tradition begun with Lorenzo Valla, see Donald R. Kelley, The Foundation of Modern Historical Scholarship; John D. Schaeffer, Sensus Communis, 145–7. 54 Vico’s understanding of sovereignty in comparison with Jean Bodin’s is analysed in Antonella del Prete, ‘Vico et Bodin,’ 43–53; see also Mazzotta, ‘The Theater of the Law,’ in The New Map of the World, 162–81; Mark Lilla, The Making of an Anti-Modern. 55 Perhaps it is not superfluous to clarify that in Vico’s explanations, autochthony does not necessarily go together with ethnic purity. 56 There are a few articles and a detailed book identifying Vichian aspects and ideas in the works of Risorgimento intellectuals. However, a critical analysis of Vico’s impact is still missing. Francesco Brancato, Vico nel Risorgimento; Giulio Bonafede, ‘Presenza di Vico in Gioberti,’ 206–37; Michele Cataudella, ‘Sugli scritti vichiani di N. Tommaseo,’ 77–81; Pompeo Giannantonio, ‘Motivi vichiani nel De Sanctis,’ 534–46; Dario Faucci, ‘Vico e De Sanctis,’ 171–9; Massimo Piermarini, ‘Il carattere della filosofia italiana da Vico a Rosmini,’ 193–205. 57 Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 114–19. Maurizio Viroli makes a similar assessment of Cuoco in For Love of Country, 107–11. 58 Carlo Cattaneo, ‘Dell’insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e della successiva guerra,’ 272. 59 For instance, when Giandomenico Romagnosi defined his own concept of etnicarchia as the principle of nationality as naturally given, he called it the ‘ultimate and universal scienza nuova,’ drawing on Vico’s ideas. Quoted in Enrica di Ciommo, I confini dell’identità. Teorie e modelli di nazione in Italia, 108. Like Vincenzo Gioberti’s use of Vico’s distinction between the ‘two peoples’ forming the original nation, Romagnosi’s etnicarchia was (wrongly) inspired by Vico. Discussing the origins of the Roman people, Gioberti rejected Niebuhr’s warning that political states do not necessarily imply blood relations. After having embraced Vico’s theory of the origin of the nation from the pact between the ‘fathers’ and the vernae/famoli (the weaker men who put themselves under the protection of the fathers), Gioberti asserted the necessity (‘necessità storica e filosofica’) of reconstructing the original blood lineage. Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (1843), introd. Gustavo Balsamo Crivelli (Turin: UTET, n.d.), vol. 3, 169–71.

276 Notes to pages 127–9 60 Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, Della nazionalità come fondamento del diritto delle genti, quoted in Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 164; italics mine. However, liberal and democratic intellectuals such as Michelet or Mazzini also drew on Vico’s idea of the people, producing indeed a fertile misunderstanding. 61 Henry Louis Gates, for instance, views Vico as one of the many political thinkers (including Montesquieu, Hegel, and Hippolyte Taine) who contributed to a theory of culture as the reflection of historical periods and national spirit – a theory that, according to Gates, ultimately legitimized an objective vision of race. H.L. Gates, ‘Writing, “Race,” and the Difference It Makes’ (1985), in Loose Canons, 45. 62 On Romantic and later interpretations of Vico’s people, see Robert Cox, ‘Vico Then and Now,’ 44–56; in particular, on Vico and Michelet’s peuple, 51–2. 63 Alain Pons, ‘De la ‘nature commune des nations’ au Peuple romantique,’ 47. On Vico and Michelet, see also Guido Fassò, ‘Un presunto discepolo di Vico,’ 483–550. 64 ‘Entre la sagesse “vulgaire” des peuples et la sagesse des philosophes, il n’y a pas de différence de nature. Ce ne sont que les expressions diverses d’une même sagesse qui se déploie dans le temps et qui, sous toutes les formes qu’elle prende, exprime toujours le même rapport aux exigences de la vie sociale, à la vérité, à la justice, à Dieu.’ (There is no natural difference between the ‘vulgar’ wisdom of the common folk and that of the philosophers. These are but different expressions of the same wisdom that unfolds over time and that, under all the forms that it assumes, expresses always the same relationship to the necessities of society, to truth, to justice, and to God.) Pons, ‘De la ‘nature commune des nations’ au Peuple romantique,’ 47. 65 Ibid. 66 See Croce, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico, 194. 67 Quoting this statement in his chapter ‘Repressing and Harnessing the Passions,’ Albert O. Hirschman comments that ‘there is no elaboration and we are left in the dark about the conditions under which that marvelous metamorphosis of destructive “passions” into “virtues” actually takes place.’ The Passions and the Interest, 17. I believe that Vico makes absolutely clear in Scienza nuova as well as in his pedagogical writings that such marvellous transformation happens through humanistic education, one that takes the passions seriously, and autonomy or a just legislation articulated in the language of the people who are subject to it. 68 Viroli, For Love of Country, 68. Viroli views Vico’s analysis of ancient patriotism as a radical critique ‘designed to destroy modern men’s fantasies

Notes to pages 129–31

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70 71

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and illusions … Ancient patriotism and ancient politics must simply be forgotten’ (67, 69). Vico’s critique of Roman so-called popular republics was indeed radical, yet it was designed, I believe, to demonstrate that ‘timeless values have no place in historical judgments’ (Cox, Political Economy, 53). Mark Lilla analyses at length Vico’s perplexities concerning the republican form of government, which Vico viewed as the cause of the emergence of reflection and rational philosophy and thus as a first step towards the ‘barbarism of reflection’ (scepticism) and egotism. G.B. Vico, 209–17. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 7. For an interpretation of De antiquissima within the context of the antiquarian search for an Italian identity and also as an early instance of the southern historiography inspired by anti-Spanish sentiments, see Giuseppe Giarrizzo, ‘La storiografia meridionale del Settecento,’ 177–239. On Cuoco and the Italic cultures, see Annalisa Andreoni, ‘Dalle favole alle istorie,’ 211–51. ‘Il perché verisimile, anzi necessaria cosa, egli è che gli Egizii signoreggiando tutto il mare interno, facilmente per le sue riviere avessero dedotto colonie, e così portato in Toscana la loro filosofia’ (‘Risposta di Giambattista Vico all’Articolo X del Tomo VIII del Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia,’ in Opere, ed. Francesco Saverio Pomodoro, vol. 1, 164, 165). [The reason for its coming was probably, nay quite certainly, that the Egyptians, having mastered in the Mediterranean Sea completely, could easily settle colonies along its coasts. Thus they have brought into Etruria their philosophy (trans. L.M. Palmer, in On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, 154).] When Vico develops the details or the philological proofs for his triadic vision of history, he draws on the Roman political and juridical systems – the history that Vico knows best – while the evidence from the history of other nations is often vague and inconsistent. Croce and Meinecke insist that Vico treated the Romans not as Romans but as a historical example; Lilla convincingly reconstructs the ideological attitude underlining Vico’s selective choice and his ‘half-hearted’ endorsement of Greek civilization in ‘The Constancy of Rome,’ in G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern, 108–21. He is even willing to sacrifice his general principle that spatializes chronological developmental stages, attributing temporal antecedence to geographically marginal spaces. Barbara Ann Naddeo has studied the ways in which Vico correlates spatial distance from the centre with temporal antecedence, making of juridical assimilation the principle of his developmental theory as well as his world historical model. See Naddeo, ‘Vico Anthropologist: from Civic to World History,’ 103–18.

278 Notes to pages 132–3 75 On Vico’s relation to these commentaries, see Sorrentino, La retorica e la poetica di G.B. Vico, and B.H. Haddock, ‘Vico’s Discovery of the True Homer,’ 583–602; Mazzotta, The New Map of the World, 140–61. Mazzotta insists that Gravina’s discussion of the parallel drawn between Homer and Dante constitutes the immediate polemical context for Vico’s argument. 76 The most comprehensive discussion on Homer in the eighteenth-century Italian debate can be found in Andreoni,‘Dalle favole alle istorie.’ On Vico and the querelle, see Sergio Campailla, ‘A proposito di Vico nella Querelle des anciens et des modernes,’ 181–92; Joseph M. Levine, ‘Giambattista Vico and the Quarrel between Ancients and the Moderns,’ 55–79. Fausto Nicolini’s ‘Divagazioni omeriche,’ 55–278, still offers invaluable detail. 77 On Vico and the aesthetic historism, see Erich Auerbach, ‘Vico and Aesthetic Historism,’ 110–18; on the development of aesthetic historism, see Megill, ‘Aesthetic Theory and Historical Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century,’ 29–62. 78 In De universi iuris uno principio et fine uno liber unus Vico firmly condemns as erroneous the interpretation of the Orpheus myth that attributes to individual poets the creation of poetry and the foundation of religions and laws; poetic language is the ‘common language’ of the primordial people with which they founded the first religions and laws. ‘Error est quod putarint linguam poetarum semper propriam, numquam communem fuisse. Veritas est linguas religione et legibus conservari. Omnes dicunt primos poetas falsas deorum religiones et, religionibus, civitates fundasse; fatentur primos scriptorum poetas quoque fuisse; et in proximo non agnorunt poeticam primam gentium fuisse linguam, qua primae ipsarum leges et religiones fundatae sunt’ (OG, 451). 79 Book 3 of Scienza nuova has received a good deal of attention; see Battistini’s ‘Bibliografia,’ in Vico, Opere, vol. 2, 1928–9. More recent publications, besides the already quoted Andreoni’s Omero italico, include Catherine Labio, ‘Vico’s Genetic Principle,’ 35–65. Mazzotta effectively concentrates Vico’s argument into four points: ‘First, Vico repudiates the subjective theory of the author. Authority does not reside in an individual. Political authority determines the shape of the two epics … Second, the poems are an encyclopedia of Greek dialects … Third, poetry is history, rather than a mimesis of reality as both Plato and Aristotle, with different emphases, believe. As history, poetry does not generate atemporal truths as allegorists and makers of philosophical mythologies think. Fourth, poetry, and not philosophy, is the foundation of knowledge and of the city.’ The New Map of the World, 150–1.

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80 Labio, Origins and the Enlightenment, 49. 81 On Vico’s understanding of the Homeric texts as ‘poesia popolare,’ see Pagliaro, ‘Omero e la poesia popolare in Giambattista Vico,’ 445–74. 82 Among the canonical studies, see Isaiah Berlin’s revised edition of Three Critics of the Enlightenment and Valerio Verra’s ‘Linguaggio, storia e umanità,’ 333–62. For a factual assessment of Herder’s knowledge of Vico, see George A. Wells, ‘Vico and Herder,’ 93–102. Recent contributions include Megill, ‘Aesthetic Theory and Historical Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century,’ 50–61, and Gensini, ‘Linguaggio e natura umana,’ 147–62. 83 In his Vico and Herder Berlin views Vico as a forerunner of Hamann, Herder, and the Romantic movement. He compares in particular Herder’s Volksseele (the soul of the people) and Vico’s senso comune and sees them both as incarnate in the people’s language and literary monuments (61) or as ‘the collective social outlook’ (85). But Herder’s Volksseele is the unique and irreducible character of a people that is shared only by its members. 84 Herder, Noch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, quoted in Berlin, Vico and Herder, 206–7. 85 In Friedrich Meinecke’s words, ‘His peoples were certainly not endowed with any specific individual Volksgeist, or national spirit … He [Vico] taught the development of the type, the characteristic specimen of a people, but without the development of the individuality.’ Historism, 47. Pagliaro believes that Vico attributed such uniformity only to primordial people, viewing it as determined by the common elemental needs shared by all ‘primitive’ human beings. Pagliaro, Altri saggi di critica semantica, 471. 86 I strongly disagree with part of the interpretation as well as with the genealogy put forth by Zeev Sternhell in The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition. Sternhell reads Vico through Croce and Berlin, turns him into a radical relativist, and thus misses Vico’s highly sophisticated brand of historism. To him, Vico is the ‘first link’ in the chain of the ‘cult of the particular and the rejection of the universal’ (2) – ultimately, as the choice of Fraktur on the cover of the book makes clear, an antecedent of Nazi ideology (sic). 87 Megill has argued that historism, usually viewed as a creation of German historical thought, first came into being within the realm of aesthetics, and he regards Vico and Herder as the authors of ‘the first two great theoretical formulations of the historicist position in the eighteenth century.’ ‘Aesthetic Theory and Historical Consciousness,’ 51. 88 For a detailed description of this development, see Mario Fubini, Stile e umanità di Giambattista Vico, 173–205.

280 Notes to pages 137–41 89 See David Marsh, ‘Notes on Translating Vico’s New Science,’ 51–65. 90 Vico, ‘A Gherardo Degli Angioli,’ in Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, vol. 1, 317. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid., 319. 93 Vico, ‘Discoverta del vero Dante,’ in Opere, ed. Fausto Nicolini, 951. English translation: Vico, ‘The True Dante,’ trans. Cristina Mazzoni, 58. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., 951; English translation, 59. 96 Ibid. 97 See Stankiewicz, ‘The “Genius” of Language in Sixteenth Century Linguistic,’ 183–4. 98 On the connotations of the term dilicato, see David Marsh, ‘Notes on Translating Vico’s New Science,’ 51–65; Paolo Cristofolini, ‘Vico in lingua dura e dilicatissima,’ 77–80. 99 See Croce, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico, 211; Mario Fubini, Stile e umanità di Giambattista Vico, 173–205; On Vico and Gravina see Mazzotta, The New Map of the World, 155–9; Maria Grazia Pia, ‘Gravina e Vico,’ 55–74. 100 Vico, ‘Discoverta del vero Dante,’ 952; English translation, 59. 101 Fletcher, ‘On the Syncretic Allegory of the New Science,’ 28. 102 On the issue of Dante’s authority and authorship, see Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author. 103 As is well known, Dante defined the vulgare illustre as a language that rose above all municipal idioms, yet found an echo, or in his words, a ‘scent,’ in each Italian city (‘quod in qualibet redolet civitate, nec cubat in ulla,’ 1, XVI, 4). Such a language could possess a larger echo in one town than in another (‘potest tamen magis in una quam in alia redolere,’ 1, XVI, 5) and hence had to be regulated on the model of Latin. After the discovery of De vulgari eloquentia, Dante’s description was used in the debate on language – the questione della lingua – to endorse conflicting versions of Italian: on the one side, a language, artificially created by writers and courtiers, that reflected the mixed idiom of the Italian courts (‘lingua cortigiana’), and, on the other side of the debate, the pure Trecento Florentine idiom. For a detailed account of the history of the interpretation of De vulgari eloquentia, see Karl Otto Apel, Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico, 104–29, and, more recently, Mengaldo, Shapiro, Mazzocco (see note 40 in chapter 1 herein), and Claudio Marazzini, ‘Il De vulgari eloquentia nella tradizione linguistica italiana,’, VII-XXIX. For a new assessment of Dante’s ideas on language, see Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author.

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104 Mentioned in passing by Fubini as an instance of purism (Stile e umanità di Giambattista Vico, 193), this change in Vico’s understanding of Dante’s language has been overlooked by Pennisi both in his La linguistica dei mercatanti and in his article ‘“Calcolo” versus “Ingenium” in Giambattista Vico,’ 199–211; it also emerges in a footnote as the reason for Haddock’s puzzlement in his ‘Vico’s Discovery of the True Homer,’ 600, n. 106. Fubini is, to my knowledge, the only scholar who addresses this shift, and yet he does not analyse its larger implications for Vico’s thought on language and nation. Paolo Rossi, who dedicates a section to the parallel between Homer and Dante, does not notice the shift in the interpretation of Dante’s language. The only change he sees is in the emphasis on the primitive quality of Dante’s poetry. Le sterminate antichità, 60–68. 105 Vico does not mention the impact of foreign tongues, Provençal or Germanic languages – a far cry from Muratori’s search in the Antiquitates, which stressed the foreign component (mostly Germanic) of the Italian language. Muratori’s view of the origins, moreover, led him to give preference to the language of the Cinquecento Italian prose because it was more refined and regulated than the Trecento idiom and thus more adequate to the contemporary need for a modern prose. 106 Vico also integrated into Scienza nuova his view of contemporary literature, which he more explicitly articulated in his correspondence (for instance, in the letter to Degli Angioli), characterizing the Italian baroque era as ‘a highly delicate and tender age’ (‘tempi più inteneriti e molli,’ SN, 909). For Vico’s relation to the literary taste of his time and his involuntary role of ‘sovvertitore della poetica classicistica,’ see Fubini, Stile e umanità di Giambattista Vico, 173–205. 107 On the myth of Dante and the Risorgimento mentality, see Andrea Ciccarelli, ‘Dante and the Culture of Risorgimento,’ 77–102. 108 Mark Lilla, G.B. Vico. For an overview of Vico and Marxism, see Giorgio Tagliacozzo and V. Hayden White, eds, Vico and Marx. 109 Fubini and Battistini have pioneered the modern study of Vico’s style. Fubini devotes two major chapters of his Stile e umanità di Giambattista Vico to the lexical and stylistic analysis of the first and the definitive edition of Scienza nuova. Battistini analyses figures of sound as well as the conative aspect of Vico’s prose in La degnità della retorica, 51–100, 173–241. See also Giovanni Nencioni, ‘Corso e ricorso linguistico nella Scienza nuova,’ 39–62. As of today, the most thorough analytical study of the relationship between Vico’s use of language – including visual and typographic elements – and his thought style is Stefania Sini, Figure vichiane.

282 Notes to pages 145–7 4 Translating Genius: Cesarotti, Ossian, and the Question of National Character 1 See Sismondi’s introduction to his Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen age. On Sismondi’s role in the shaping of Italian identity, see Bollati, L’italiano, 84–8, and more recently, Duggan, The Force of Destiny, 96–9. 2 For a recent overview of these issues, see Giuseppe Coluccia, Tradizione e traduzioni. 3 Charles Sackville, an English friend who also helped him translate the first edition (1763), showed him Macpherson’s work for the first time in Venice. A large section of Marzot’s book Il gran Cesarotti, 323–404, is dedicated to the cesarottismo in Italy. 4 Paul van Tieghem devotes several pages to Napoleon’s obsession with Ossian and to his high opinion of Cesarotti in Ossian en France (1924), vol. 2, 3–38. 5 Chateaubriand reports this legend in his Mémoire d’Outre-Tombe; see Karl Weitnauer, ‘Ossian in der italienischen Litteratur bis etwa 1832, vorwiegend bei Monti,’ 258. 6 Henri Beyle de Stendhal, ‘Des périls de la langue italienne’ (1818), 95. 7 This impact has been thoroughly documented in Weitnauer, ‘Ossian in der italienischen Litteratur bis etwa 1832,’ 251–321; Sergio M. Gilardino, La scuola romantica; and more recently, Francesca Broggi, The Rise of the Italian Canto. 8 The other five ‘national writers’ were Giuseppe Parini, Vittorio Alfieri, Ippolito Pindemonte, Vincenzo Monti, and Foscolo himself. Ugo Foscolo, Essay on the Present Literature of Italy (1818) in Opere, vol. 2: 1395–1562. 9 ‘Bacia la mano al Cesarotti; egli viene talvolta a rompere le mie cupe meditazioni. La luce di quest’angelo è tutelare e vivificante; la presenza di quest’uomo è consolatrice e soave.’ This passionate letter was written to Paolo Costa (April 1796). But see also Foscolo’s correspondence with Giuseppe Gratti (13 February 1796), Tommaso Olivi (8 September 1796), and Cesarotti, especially, 28 September 1795, from Venice. In Epistolario, ed. Plinio Carli, respectively, vol. 1, 31; 20–24, 35, and 17–18. 10 Foscolo, Essay on the Present Literature of Italy, 1411–12. Foscolo also admired Cesarotti’s Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue because of its defence of the poets’ linguistic creativity and ability to make linguistic discussion engaging through its elegant eloquence: ‘His prose is endowed with all the qualities that constitute a superior writer. The depth is no obstacle to the clearness [sic] of his ideas; his manner is free, his phraseology abundant, his periods harmonious. He is lively, yet graceful; he is not so copious as to be tedious, nor so brief as to be obscure’ (1415).

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11 Ibid., 1417. Foscolo is alluding in particular to Cesarotti’s assent to Napoleon’s policy after Napoleon ceded Venice to the Austrian (Campo Formio, 1797). 12 For an account of the reception as well as the cult of Cesarotti in Italy, see Giulio Marzot, ‘Cesarotti e cesarottismo nella cultura italiana,’ in Il gran Cesarotti, 323–404; Walter Binni, Preromanticismo italiano, 125–70. 13 Vittorio Alfieri, Vita, 159, 194. 14 Vittorio Alfieri, Estratti d’Ossian e da Stazio per la Tragica. 15 See Johannes Anderegg, ‘Werther und Ossian,’ 124–30; Paul Hazard, ‘L’invasion des littératures du nord dans l’Italie du XVIIIe siècle,’ 30–67, in particular 47–51; Walter Binni, ‘M. Cesarotti e la mediazione dell’Ossian’ (1941), in Preromanticismo italiano, 157–70; Gilardino, La scuola romantica, 40–7; 95–105. 16 On the impact of Macpherson on the growth of the study of folklore, see James Porter, ‘Bring Me the Head of James Macpherson,’ 396–435. 17 Lefevere avowedly borrows this notion from the Russian formalists: ‘The term “polysystem” denotes that a literature is never, at any moment in its history, the monolithic whole which textbooks tend to present it as, but rather … a collocation of different, often antagonistic, trends, dominated by the set of literary works a given era accepts as “canonized.” This canonized literature comes under attack from the other trends, which try to displace it and achieve canonized status themselves.’ ‘Beyond the Process,’ 55. 18 Considering Macpherson’s work as mere invention, not a resurrection and revitalization of traditional materials, Lefevere mistakenly places Ossian in the same category (‘pseudo-translations’) with Chatterton’s Rowley poems, which were entirely created by Chatterton. ‘Beyond the Process,’ 56. For an assessment of such a comparison, see Ian Haywood, The Making of History. 19 Macpherson’s effort was also sustained by the new sensibility for ‘primitive’ poetry, the pathetic and picturesque, developed by a more and more conspicuous part of the English literary community. See René Wellek’s discussion of the contemporary collections of ancient poetry and of the theory of primitivism, in A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, vol. 1, 124–32. Coluccia, Tradizione e traduzioni, 81–84. See also John Dwyer, ‘The Melancholy Savage,’ 164–206. 20 James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill, 35–6. Hereafter Oss and cited parenthetically in the text. 21 See Gaskill’s and Donald Meek’s essays in Gaskill, Ossian Revisited, 1–18 and 19–48; and Gilardino, ‘Il patrimonio letterario celtico,’ in La scuola romantica, 1–26.

284 Notes to pages 149–54 22 For a discussion on this approach, see Dafydd Moore, ‘Heroic Incoherence in James Macpherson’s “The Poems of Ossian,”’ 43–59, and the introduction to Gaskill, Ossian Revisited, 1–18. 23 Moore, ‘Heroic Incoherence,’ 55. 24 Ibid. 25 Macpherson, however, corrects Tacitus’s opinion that the ancient Caledonians were of German origin: ‘Germans, properly so called, were not the same with the ancient Celtae. The manners and customs of the two nations were similar; but their language different. The Germans are the genuine descendants of the ancient Daae, afterwards well known by the name Daci … [W]hether the Caledonians were a colony of Celtic Germans, or the same with the Gauls that first possessed themselves of Britain, is a matter of no moment at this distance of time’ (Oss, 44). 26 See Anderegg, ‘Werther und Ossian,’ 126–8. 27 Cesarotti, Epistolario (hereafter Ep and cited parenthetically in the text), vol. 1, 9. 28 In Dal Muratori al Cesarotti, vol. 4, ed. Emilio Bigi, 64. Hereafter I cite this anthology with MC and parenthetically in the text. 29 Interestingly, Cesarotti believes that ancient poets were prisoners of the ‘flattering’ attitude, leading their people to believe that their own customs were the most perfect among all nations. In contrast to modern poets, they did not aspire to ‘cure the minds of their fellow countrymen’ of prejudices (‘risanar le menti de’ loro nazionali,’ MC, 63). 30 Cesarotti, Poesie di Ossian: Tradotte da Melchior Cesarotti (hereafter PO and cited parenthetically in the text), vol. 1, 24. 31 For Cesarotti’s sources, see Gilardino, La scuola romantica, 71. 32 On stereotypes of Italians in eighteenth-century Europe, see Cuaz, ‘L’immagine dell’Italia nella cultura europea del Settecento,’ 79–82. On Italian sexual laxity and effeminacy in particular, see Roberto Bizzocchi, ‘Cicisbei,’ 63–90; and Patriarca, ‘Indolence and Regeneration.’ 33 On Cesarotti’s use of Vico, see Andrea Battistini, ‘Le idee di un cervello “alquanto vesuviano,”’ 133–57. Cesarotti’s Ossian played an important part not only in educating the young generation to the cult of Vico but also in diffusing Vico’s thought abroad. Robert T. Clark has shown that many of Vico’s ideas were filtered in Germany through Michael Denis’s translation of Ossian, in which numerous notes were not made by Denis but were translated from Cesarotti’s Osservazioni. Clark even identifies literal borrowings from Cesarotti in Herder’s works, maintaining that Cesarotti’s Osservazioni were the main source of Herder’s knowledge and interpretation of Vico. Clark’s thesis is quite convincing, given the fact that

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no other scholar among those concerned with this question (Croce, Berlin, Auerbach, Verra) has been able, to my knowledge, to offer a more concrete evidence of Vico’s impact on the German philosopher. R.T. Clark, ‘Herder, Cesarotti and Vico,’ 645–71. Also, Friedrich August Wolf encountered Scienza nuova for the first time through Cesarotti, in particular his work on Homer – as Wolf himself reveals in a well-known letter to Cesarotti (1802); see Anthony Grafton, ‘Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf,’ 101–29. For an overview of the history of the reception in Europe, see Gaskill, ‘Ossian in Europe,’ 643–78. On the negative judgments of the aesthetic quality of Ossian expressed by Johnson, Schiller, the late Goethe, and Schlegel, see Anderegg, ‘Werther und Ossian,’132. As an advocate, like Muratori, of the docere principle, the moral function of art, Cesarotti perceived the Ossianic texts accordingly. Building on Macpherson’s reflections, he emphasized the moral superiority of Ossian’s poems, in particular ‘the moral perfection’ and the ‘humanity’ of their characters (PO, vol. 1, 225), over classical epic. (Cesarotti even compiles a list of the Ossianic heroes’ virtues, which accompanied his translation; see Caratteri, PO, vol. 3, 268–71.) Figures likes Fingal and Oscar, who do not surrender to insensate violence and unrestrained passions but instead show delicate sentiments, true humanity, and the ability to make arduous moral decisions, could never be found in Homer’s poems, according to Cesarotti: ‘To entertain, teach and move through an harmonious and picturesque language: this is the problem which the poet has to solve with his work. And I dared to believe … that Ossian, in more than one instance, has solved it better than Homer’ (PO, vol. 1, 17). See Gaskill, ‘“Ossian” Macpherson: Towards a Rehabilitation,’ 113–46; Fiona Stafford, The Sublime Savage; Kristine Louise Haugen, ‘Ossian and the Invention of Textual History,’ 309–27. Deryck Thomson has demonstrated that Macpherson had collected authentic Scottish Gaelic ballads, employing several scribes to record oral as well as written materials, but introduced a great deal of his own. The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson’s ‘Ossian.’ Cesarotti’s critique of Wolf, who had ‘scruplelessly sacrificed’ the author Homer and declared Homer’s historical text as unreconstructable, reveals Cesarotti’s belief in the existence of Ossian. K.L. Haugen, ‘Ossian and the Invention of Textual History,’ 322–3; see Haugen also on the interrelation with the Homeric question and scholars such as Robert Wood, A.F. Wolf, and Q.E.D. Blackwell. Here I part ways with Emilio Mattioli, a historian of translation theory,

286 Notes to pages 159–60

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43 44

45 46

who regards Cesarotti’s reflections as a ‘Settecento theorization’ that anticipates Romantic theories (‘Storia e poetiche del tradurre’). Yet Cesarotti’s general principles (the distinction between the translator as grammatico and the translator as poet and emulator, for example) reveal instead Cesarotti’s debt to the classical Ciceronian tradition. See Hans-Wolfgang Schneiders, Ambivalenz des Fremden, 35–61; and Hugo Friedrich, ‘On the Art of Translation,’ 12–13. Mattioli concentrates on Cesarotti’s late preface to his Homer translations and on the Osservazioni to his translation of Demosthenes’ ‘Second Philippic’; he does not discuss Cesarotti’s thoughts about his translation of Ossian, perhaps because he is aware of their nontheoretical nature. He rightly considers Cesarotti’s approach to translation as a good example of the transition from the French to the Romantic manner, but maintains that ‘Cesarotti’s theory of translation is not compact and unitary.’ ‘Storia e poetiche del tradurre,’ 196. Schneiders, Ambivalenz des Fremden, 118, my translation. See also Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign. ‘Any translator must inevitably encounter one of the following obstacles: he will cleave with too much accuracy either to the original, at the expense of his people’s language and taste, or to the originality of his people, at the expense of the work to be translated.’ Quoted in Berman, The Experience of the Foreign, ix. W. von Humboldt, ‘Einleitung,’ xix. Translation by Sharon Sloan, in Biguenet and Schulte, eds., Theories of Translation, 58. Such tradition of translating in which ‘the target language, Latin, dictates the rules’ goes back to Cicero and Saint Jerome. See Friedrich, ‘On the Art of Translation,’ 12–13. On the ‘foreignizing’ translation and its link to nationalist ideas, see Lawrence Venuti, ‘Nation,’ 99–147. Gilardino maintains that the very fact that Cesarotti uses the term trasportare (‘to transport’) for his translation instead of tradurre (‘to translate’) in the title of his 1763 edition is a declaration of intent. By using the verb trasportare, he endorses the position of the French theory of appropriation and emulation. In a detailed research of the semantic value of different terms for ‘translation,’ Schneiders shows that in France the term traduire had already become the verbum proprium for translating in the second half of the eighteenth century, with verse translation identified as ‘after the French manner,’ and version, instead, designating the literal, wordfor-word translation in prose. Yet in Italy, according to Schneiders, the variety of terms does not serve a specific semantic differentiation, much less a specific theoretical distinction, with all the numerous terms used

Notes to pages 160–2

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48 49 50

51

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for ‘translating’ (rendere, tradurre, traslatare, interpretare, voltare, volgarizzare, including trasportare) being absolut synonym (‘absolutely synonymous’) (Schneiders, Ambivalenz des Fremden, 28). I would argue that, more than signifying a theoretical position, the distinction in the title between tradotte for Macpherson’s translations and trasportate for his own has a merely descriptive function (Poesie di Ossian, figlio di Fingal, Antico poeta celtico, Ultimamente scoperte e tradotte in prosa Inglese, da Jacopo Macpherson, e da quella trasportate in verso italiano dall’Ab. Melchior Cesarotti). The fact that Cesarotti has to specify by adding in prosa and in verso is a sign that those specifications are not implicit in the two terms. His distinction probably underlines that he did not translate from the original language (how could he thus have ever given a literal, word-for-word translation?), if it did not plainly serve the rhetorical criterion of varietas. Moreover, Cesarotti could not allude to this theoretical distinction between Macpherson’s and his translation, since he believed in the aesthetic merits of Macpherson’s translation as one that succeeded in conveying the voice of Ossian. ‘Del resto, se mi si mostra che ho sbagliato il senso dell’autore, ch’io l’ho sfigurato, o gli ho fatto perdere qualche parte di bellezza o di forza, io accetterò queste censure per buone e valide, e soffrirò volentieri di esserne corretto o ripreso. Ma se mi si vuol dar carico di aver procurato in varj luoghi di rischiarar il mio originale, di rammorbidirlo e di rettificarlo, talora anche di abbellirlo e di gareggiar con esso, confesso ch’io sarò più facilmente tentato di pregiarmi di questa colpa, che di pentirmene’ (PO, vol. 1, 12–13). ‘Quasi captivos sensus in suam linguam victoris iure transposuit.’ Hieronymus, Liber de optimo genere interpretandi: Epistula 57,’ 14. My translation. Friedrich, ‘On the Art of Translation,’ 13. The Voltaire translations, which Cesarotti sent to Voltaire via Carlo Goldoni, were accompanied by two critical essays, one ‘Ragionamento sopra il diletto della tragedia,’ the other ‘Ragionamento sopra l’origine e i progressi dell’arte poetica’ (both 1762). In neither does Cesarotti comment on the nature and process of translating. In ‘Ragionamento sopra l’origine e i progressi dell’arte poetica,’ however, he attacks the cult of the national genius when it is used to bar innovations and the expansion of the language. ‘Io so bene che alcune di queste locuzioni non sarebbero sofferte in una poesia che fosse originariamente italiana, ma oso altresì lusingarmi che abbia a trovarsene più d’una che possa forse aggiungere qualche tinta non infelice al colorito della nostra favella poetica, e qualche nuovo atteggiamento al suo stile’ (PO, vol. 1, 8).

288 Notes to pages 163–6 52 Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, ‘On Different Methods of Translating,’ in Biguenet and Schulte, eds., Theories of Translation, 42. 53 Van Tieghem, Ossian en France, 323. 54 Binni, Preromanticismo italiano, 155–210; Gilardino, La scuola romantica, 75– 94; Guido Baldassarri, ‘Sull’Ossian di Cesarotti,’ in Rassegna della letteratura italiana, VIII, 3 (settembre–dicembre 1990), 21–68; Coluccia, ‘I problemi della traduzione,’ in Tradizione e traduzioni, 83–100. Broggi, The Rise of the Italian Canto, 282–3. Only partial analyses of Cesarotti’s Ossian exist. Much work remains to be done, especially since Gaetano Costa has published an edition of the 1801 version with all the published variants (1763, 1772) in Un moderato delle lettere: Le varianti ossianiche di Cesarotti. The manuscripts have never been found. 55 See, for instance, the extreme of Weitnauer’s insistence on Cesarotti’s attention to the original, and Binni’s assertion regarding Cesarotti’s domestication of Ossian. 56 Baldassarri has demonstrated this conclusion in detail in ‘Sull’Ossian di Cesarotti,’ in Rassegna della letteratura italiana VIII, 3 (settembre–dicembre 1990), 21–68. 57 Baldassarri has identified many misunderstandings related to the ambiguity of the original; see ‘Sull’Ossian di Cesarotti,’ in Rassegna della letteratura italiana, VIII, 1–2 (gennaio–agosto 1990), 6–19. 58 Cesarotti lists them in the ‘Indice poetico’ under the heading ‘Pezzi rimati,’ PO, vol. 3, 300–2. 59 See Binni and Croce in Binni, Preromanticismo italiano, 156, 210. Also Broggi, The Rise of the Italian Canto, 282. 60 Preromanticismo italiano, 152, 194. 61 In the preface to Fragments (1760) Macpherson describes the Celtic verse as ‘simple’ and ‘smooth,’ with rare rhymes and with lines of varied length (Oss, 6). In his annotations to Temora, Macpherson specifies that Ossian’s poems consisted of ‘lyric pieces, scattered throughout,’ as well as of ‘ recitatives,’ or narrative parts written in ‘a measured sort of prose rather than any regular versification.’ He laments that the lyrical parts in particular, ‘beautiful in the original,’ were heavily weakened when ‘stripped of numbers and the harmony of rhyme’ (Oss, 492). In order to offer his readers a glimpse of the poems’ beauties, Macpherson presented them with a ‘specimen of the original of Temora,’ a poem with lines of various length, some rhymes and assonances. He also added to the edition of 1773 a ‘Fragment of a Northern Tale’ in both prose and verse translation, remarking that it was ‘doubtful which of them is the most literal version’ (Oss, 410).

Notes to pages 166–9

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62 By breaking Macpherson’s prose into arbitrary verses, following the syntax and punctuation, Gilardino has shown that in the epic parts the number of verses so obtained corresponds to the number of blank verses in Cesarotti’s translation, and that when the coincidence is not a verseby-verse correspondence, Cesarotti at least tends to respect the length of Macpherson’s episodes. La scuola romantica, 76–7. 63 For a discussion of the use of endecasillabo in the eighteenth century, see Mario Fubini, ‘La poesia settecentesca nella storia delle forme metriche italiane,’ 38–56. 64 Giulio Ferroni, Storia della letteratura italiana, 444. 65 The case of Leopardi is particularly intriguing. In a few passages from Zibaldone he criticizes Cesarotti’s attempt to transplant national features of northern literature into the Italian culture, risking the ‘corruption’ of Italian poetry ‘through the settentrionalismo’ (Gilardino, La scuola romantica, 128). Yet the poet Leopardi absorbed Ossianic modes and tones, sometimes literally appropriating Cesarotti’s expressions in his own poems. Leopardi’s position recalls the criticism by the late Foscolo in Chioma di Berenice: ‘Come può l’uomo nato fra popoli di gran tempo usciti dallo stato eroico, e sotto il beato cielo d’Italia, imitare la magnifica barbarie d’Ossian, e tentare di trasportarne nelle sue solitudini? … Lasciate quest’albero nel suo terreno, poiché trapiantato tralignerà.’ In Opere edite e postume (Florence: n.d.) vol. 1, 268. See Gilardino, La scuola romantica, 95–137. However, while Leopardi seems worried about the purity of the Italian tradition, Foscolo’s doubts are more concerned with the authenticity of the original. Yet both poets were disappointed more with the bad imitations of Cesarotti’s Ossian than with Cesarotti himself. Gilardino also shows the similarities between the beginnings of Leopardi’s canzone All’Italia and Cesarotti’s La guerra d’Inistona (133–4); he has offered the most detailed treatment of Cesarotti’s impact on the next generation of Italian poetry. The most extensive study of Leopardi’s debt to Cesarotti is Broggi’s The Rise of the Italian Canto, which argues that Cesarotti’s ‘canzon del pianto’ is the true starting point of Leopardi’s Canti. 66 Vico had already revived the sublime pathos and images with his own Italian prose and his understanding of Homer and Dante. Cesarotti fuses the modern sentimental sensibility with Vico’s sublime, creating a whole new mode. On this topic, see Gustavo Costa, ‘Melchiorre Cesarotti, Vico, and the Sublime,’ 3–15. 67 In a recent edition of Le poesie di Ossian (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2000) Enrico Mattioda has identified in the footnotes many of Cesarotti’s quotations from Tasso’s Re Torrismondo in Le poesie di Ossian. On Cesarotti’s lexical

290 Notes to pages 169–76

68 69

70

71 72

73

74 75 76

77

78

choices, see also Ugo Perolino, ‘Introduzione,’ in Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue, i–xxiv. See Weitnauer, ‘Ossian in der italienischen Litteratur bis etwa 1832,’ 267. For an extensive treatment of Cesarotti’s compound terms, see Weitnauer’s appendix ‘Die sprachlichen Neubildungen Cesarotti’s in seinem Ossian,’ in ‘Ossian in der italienischen Litteratur bis etwa 1832,’ 309–15, and Gilardino, La scuola romantica, 79–83. Gilardino argues that Cesarotti consistently adapts women characters to the Italian poetical tradition, omitting attributes and description that accentuate cruel and savage attitudes. Instead, he tends to discard lengthy descriptions of male beauty, conferring to male figures more majestic and hieratic features. La scuola romantica, 83–9. I would add that Cesarotti’s tendency to confer a certain static and hieratic quality affects women characters as well (see, for instance, the description of Comala – ‘fa del braccio colonna / all’infiammata guancia’ – in Comala, PO, vol.1, 299) and that in the lyrical parts, especially when praised by their beloved, even men are not spared an arcadic grace (of Fingal, for instance, ‘sempre caro e vezzoso,’ PO, vol. 1, 309). Binni, Preromanticismo italiano, 175. Francesca Broggi has argued that Leopardi adopted Cesarotti’s hybrid style in order to bring about an awareness of the differences among various historical sensibilities, ‘with a freedom of movement and thought that he enjoys also thanks to the endeavors of a translator such as Melchiorre Cesarotti.’ Broggi, The Rise of the Italian Canto, 283. This means that Leopardi ascribed a similar function to Cesarotti’s dissonances. Saggio sul bello, in Opere scelte, ed. Giuseppe Ortolani, vol. 1, 363. On Cesarotti’s aesthetics, see Binni, Preromanticismo italiano, 125–211; and Coluccia, Tradizione e traduzioni, 81–100. Cesarotti, Saggio sul bello, 364. ‘Restaging the Universals,’ in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 3, 11–43. For a theoretical discussion of the limits of the ‘ideology of exotic’ in relation to translation, see Paolo Valesio, ‘The Virtues of Traducement,’ 1–96; and Butler, ‘Particular and Universal in the Practice of Translation,’ in Butler, Laclau, et al., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 162–9. See Andrea Battistini and Ezio Raimondi, ‘La figura dello scrittore: Scoperta di una poetica storica e antropologica,’ in Letteratura italiana: Le forme del testo; Teoria e poesia (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), vol. 3, 1, 185. On the function of semantically dissonant discourse in relation to translation, see Butler, ‘Particular and Universal in the Practice of Translation,’ 163.

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79 Lawrence Venuti argues that Schleiermacher viewed the foreignizing translation also as ‘an important practice in the Prussian nationalist movement,’ and that his arguments rested on ‘a chauvinistic condescension toward foreign cultures.’ Yet Venuti agrees that the advantages of that practice in undermining a concept of nation based on the assumption of a uniform and self-enclosed culture prevail over the drawbacks. The Translator’s Invisibility, 99. Wolf Lepenies regards the activity of translating in itself as a way to stabilize the cultural identity of a nation, although he only mentions the example of German Romantic translators such as the brothers Schlegel and Ludwig von Tieck. He speaks of an Übersetzungsprivileg (a translating privilege), that is, the ability to ‘force other cultures to express themselves in a foreign idiom,’ which functions as the index of a nation’s power and ultimately expresses itself in a sense of cultural superiority. See Lepenies, ‘Die Übersetzbarkeit der Kulturen,’ 100–2. 80 Here I do not fully agree with Andreas Poltermann’s interpretation of Herder’s intention, in ‘Antikolonialer Universalismus,’ 217–59. 81 Kwame Appiah, The Ethics of Identity , 149–51. 82 Butler, Laclau, et al., ‘Introduction,’ in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 3. 83 Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 258. 84 ‘Anzi si pregia d’aver seguito le tracce dei più celebri ragionatori del secolo sulla parte filosofica delle lingue;’ Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue, MC, 305. In the 1800 edition Cesarotti added numerous notes indicating the work of the philosophers from whom he had borrowed the various ideas. This essay has gained a steady place in the history of the debate on the genius of language. Indeed, Cesarotti’s original theoretical distinction between the grammatical and the rhetorical genius allowed him to overcome some rigidities and contradictions of his predecessors. See L. Rosiello, Linguistica illuminista, 87–90. Mario Puppo, Critica e linguistica del Settecento, 73–111. Raffaele Simone, History of Linguistics, 197–203. Coluccia, Tradizione e traduzioni, 15–80. 85 On the impact of Condillac’s theories on Italian language thought, see Gensini, ‘Il confronto teorico: Condillac e la “linea” vichiana,’ in L’identità dell’italiano, 54–74. Francesco Algarotti was probably the most faithful mediator of these theories with his essays Saggio sopra la lingua francese and Saggio sopra la necessità di scrivere nella propria lingua (both 1750), in which he explains the causes of the genius of language with the same causes identified by Condillac. See Gensini, ‘Traduzioni, genio delle lingue, realtà sociale,’ 22–3. 86 Voltaire’s letter to Beauzée (15 January 1768), quoted in Cesarotti, nel

292 Notes to pages 180–1 Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue, in MC, 381–2. The preoccupation with the impoverishment of the French language due to the strenuous activities of the Académie had been already expressed by Fénélon in his famous Lettre à l’Académie of 1716 (‘On a appauvri, desséché et gêné notre langue’). Gensini, ‘Traduzioni, genio delle lingue, realtà sociale,’ 11. 87 ‘Le climat donne plus de vivacité ou plus de flegme, et par là dispose plutôt à une forme de gouvernement qu’à une autre,’ Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746), ed. Raymond Lenoir, 184. Hereafter EO and cited parenthetically in the text. English translation by Thomas Nugent, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1971). 88 In his Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue Cesarotti corrects some ideas expressed in Ragionamento sopra l’origine e i progressi dell’arte poetica (1762), in which he discouraged the imitation of other national cultures. In his Ragionamento he considers the ‘genius of the nation’ as one of the three main obstacles to the progress of art (together with the cult for one single poet and abstract rules) and defines it as the arbitrary product ‘of chance, passion, or ignorance’ (‘dal caso, dalla passione, o dall’ignoranza,’ MC, 63), not as the dominant system of ideas. He argues that a national tradition, like a plant ‘that grows differently according to the different nature of the soil’ (‘secondo la diversa indole dei terreni diversamente cresce’), cannot be ‘transplanted’ into a foreign climate, in which it ‘will produce unripe or insipid fruits’ (‘produrrà frutti acerbi o sciapiti,’ MC, 65). Following Voltaire’s opinions on the esprit of nations (Essai sur les mœurs, 1754, 1769) and his distinction between the universal genius and the national genius (Essai sur la poésie épique, 1728), Cesarotti warns against the confusion between universal ideals and their particular national incarnations. In contrast to Voltaire, who, in his attempt to establish a universal ethical ground, laments the decay of the classical model that in his view had at least succeeded in creating ‘une seule république des lettres’out of so many different peoples, Cesarotti attacks the idolatry of classical authors. Interestingly, Cesarotti believes that ancient poets were prisoners of a ‘flattering’ attitude, leading their people to believe that their own customs were the most perfect among all nations. In contrast to modern poets, they did not aspire to ‘cure the minds of their fellow countrymen’ (‘risanar le menti de’ loro nazionali,’ MC, 63). Cesarotti’s attack against the cult of the national genius seems, within the context of the Ragionamento, to be a justification of his own translation of Voltaire’s tragedies. It is ironic that Cesarotti recognizes the confusion between universal ideals (‘truth,’ ‘beauty’) and their particular features in ancient Greek and Latin societies,

Notes to pages 184–7

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but then conflates universal values with their French contemporary incarnations. Ernesto Laclau’s interpretation of Gramsci’s hegemony in relation to the notion of universality can shed new light on Cesarotti’s linguistic and aesthetic ideas. ‘Identity and Hegemony,’ in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 44–89. ‘L’idiotismo, considerato nel suo materiale non altro essendo una configurazione non comune di parole formanti un senso intellegibile,’ MC, 388. Books turn ‘simple individual actions’ into ‘expressions of the character of the century’ even forcing the man of letters to become the interpreter of the society to which he belongs, the very sensitive ‘thermometer’ of historical change. See Andrea Battistini and Ezio Raimondi, ‘La figura dello scrittore: Scoperta di una poetica storica e antropologica,’ 182. See Cesarotti’s Avvertimento, in MC, 426–34, in which he responds to the most insidious attacks of Giambattista de Velo in ‘Del carattere nazionale del gusto italiano’ and Galeani Napione in Dell’uso e dei pregi della lingua italiana (1791). On Cesarotti’s polemic with Napione, see Gianni Grana, ‘Lingua italiana e lingua francese nella polemica Galeani NapioneCesarotti,’ 338–53. On the dialogical or relational quality of identity, see Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 17–35, 62–72; and the collection of essays Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. On the role of the ‘other’ in the constitution of national identity, see Ulf Hedetoft, Signs of Nations, especially chapters 2 and 3. A good example of the effectiveness of such an approach is Linda Colley, Britons, which explores British national identity on the basis of the assumption of its relational construction in antagonism with the French. See the section of Saggio titled ‘Usefulness of Translations,’ identifying translations as ‘the only means of knowing one’s own language, its limits and its strengths’ (MC, 392); and the proposal for a national committee for the Italian language, in which Cesarotti suggests the translations of the major works from ‘all languages’ as a means of revealing the real needs of Italian (MC, 424). On the productive relation of language and translation studies in Italy, see Maria Denes Rosser, ‘A Consideration of the Interrelationship between Language and Translation Studies in Eighteenth-Century Italy,’ 48–58; and Coluccia, ‘Tradizione della lingua e traduzioni dalle lingue,’ in Tradizione e traduzioni, 15–80. Grana, ‘Lingua italiana e lingua francese nella polemica Galeani Napione– Cesarotti,’ 347. Cesarotti’s zealous patriotic detractors like Napione and De Velo, who

294 Notes to pages 187–8

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99 100 101

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accused him of francofilia, shared the monolingual logic of their French antagonists. Vittorio Alfieri’s attacks on French in his Misogallo (1792) offer an insight into contemporary sentiments. Alfieri’s attitude has been convincingly linked to Napione’s ideas on language (1791) by Antonio Porcu, ‘La Vita dell’Alfieri come vicenda linguistica,’ 245–69. See also Elena Borelli’s excellent essay ‘Language and Identity in Vittorio Alfieri’s Vita’; and Marazzini, Piemonte e Italia: Storia di un confronto linguistico (Turin: Centro Studi Piemontesi, 1984). Carlo Denina is probably the only contemporary Italian figure showing acuteness, knowledge, and openness that are similar to Cesarotti’s, especially in his Sur le caractère des langues et particulièrment des modernes (1785). Like Cesarotti, Denina also denied any natural causes (climate, psychological disposition) of the characters of languages, responding to Antoine de Rivarol’s arguments from the prize dissertation De l’universalité de la langue française (1784). In Carlo Denina, Storia delle lingue e polemiche linguistiche: Dai saggi berlinesi 1783–1804, ed. C. Marazzini (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1985), 3–34. Denina, however, ended up renouncing Italian and promoting the adoption of French as the official language of Piedmont in 1803, after the state had been annexed to France by Napoleon. On Denina, see Marazzini, ‘Un intervento innovatore nella questione della lingua,’ 245–59. Viroli, For Love of Country, 95–139. Bollati convincingly shows that Cuoco’s apparently democratic position barely hides his conservative intent. Cuoco, who wanted to guarantee the two basic services that the people could offer in order to build the nation – production and defence – defines the due reward for the people in terms of moral recognition for their patriotic, heroic virtues, not in terms of material and political advancement. His project implied the work of persuasion, the people’s education on the virtues of citizens, which ultimately were defined from the vantage point of the Neapolitan landowners and intellectuals. L’italiano, 62–70. Ibid., 110–11. See Berlin, Vico and Herder, 180–6; and Viroli, For Love of Country, 121. See Cesarotti’s letter to Napione (MC, 458–9), and Cesarotti’s statement on Dante in the Saggio, ‘il suo zelo era più nazionale che patriottico … [Dante] lungi dall’adular un dialetto particolare, padroneggia la lingua stessa’ (MC, 407). On the long history of the discourse of Italy as victim, see Natalia CostaZalessow, ‘Italy as a Victim,’ 216–40. Manzoni’s Discorso su alcuni punti di storia longobardica is probably the most forceful, eloquent document of such a narrative. See Bollati, L’italiano, 88–93. See Banti, ‘Le invasioni barbariche e le origini delle nazioni,’ 30.

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104 Bollati recalls the anguished letter of Manzoni to Lamartine, in which the Italian writer asks his correspondent not to be reminded of the cultural ‘division’ of his country. ‘Si veda l’orrore con cui Manzoni respinge il nome stesso di “diversità,” in una lettera al Lamartine dell’aprile 1848: “n’avez-vous pas senti, grand et bon Lamartine, qu’il n’y avait de mots plus durs à lui (to Italy) jeter que selui de diversité, et que ce mot … résume pour elle un long passé de malheur et d’abaissement?”’( L’italiano, 61). See also Duggan, The Force of Destiny, 90–100. 5 Towards Sameness: Leopardi’s Critique of Character, and the End of the Nation 1 Dell’unità della lingua e dei mezzi per diffonderla. In Risorgimento Italy the debate on language, which addressed a phenomenon tangible to any Italian, risked further emphasizing the country’s actual diversity. Already in 1802–3 different paradigms were beginning to prevail: the figural interpretation of history typical of the Risorgimento; Christian images and myths (including sacrifice, martyrs, and the sacred brotherhood in Christ); and the parental semantic field that naturalized the idea of the nation as family. These paradigms, unlike the scholarly language debate, were more effective among the larger population since they capitalized on images, symbols, and myths that were deeply rooted in Italian popular culture. See Banti’s reconstruction of the ‘canone risorgimentale’ in La nazione del Risorgimento, 3–53. It is important to stress that in the Italian peninsula literacy was extremely limited. Therefore, when the patriots understood that, in order to implement political unification, the cultural nation had to be expanded, they began to exploit a larger variety of media, especially visual arts (painting and sculpture) and music (opera, popular songs). See Making and Remaking Italy, ed. Albert Russel Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg, 26–118; and Banti and Bizzocchi, Immagini della nazione, 89–111, 133–56. 2 See, for instance, Paolo Possiedi, ‘Leopardi progressivo?’ 39–50. Possiedi states: ‘certe categorie storiografiche e antropologiche che Leopardi mette in opera sono per noi obsolete e scadute. Tale è la nozione settecentesca di indole di nazione, che noi tendiamo a percepire come essenzialistica, tale l’idea di un medioevo tutte e solamente barbarico’ (40). 3 Viroli, For Love of Country, 140–60. 4 For a detailed account of Leopardi’s attitude towards the political events of his time, see Giuseppe Talamo, ‘Leopardi e la storia d’Italia a lui contemporanea,’ 69–90. 5 Leopardi’s political thought has received a great deal of attention. Much

296 Notes to pages 192–4

6 7

8 9

10 11 12

of the critical work deals with the patriotism of Leopardi’s songs or with his general political views rather than concentrating on his critique of nationalism; see, for example, Fabio Russo, Leopardi politico, especially the bibliography, 236–9; and the collection Il pensiero storico e politico di Giacomo Leopardi. There has been a long-standing quarrel between the champions of a progressive, rationalist Leopardi (Binni and Cesare Luporini take the lead) and critics who emphasize the antidialectic, sceptical nature of his political thought (for example, Guglielmi and Rigoni). Binni, La nuova poetica leopardiana, and Luporini, Leopardi progressivo (originally 1947, but republished on many occasions, with some additions in the last edition, 2006). Guido Guglielmi, ‘Tragicità e contraddizione in Leopardi e Gramsci,’ 97–114; and Mario A. Rigoni, Saggi sul pensiero leopardiano, but see also Rigoni’s more recent introduction to the anthology G. Leopardi, La strage delle illusioni, 9–35. For a recent take on this polemic, see Possiedi, ‘Leopardi progressivo?’, 39–50. On Leopardi’s radical republicanism, see Enrica di Ciommo, I confini dell’identità, 57–82. Thomas Harrison, ‘Leopardi, Unabomber,’ 51–7. Like the majority of scholars of Italian nationalism, Banti privileges the impact of the semantic shift fostered by the French Revolution and, following Hazard’s La revolution française et les lettres italiennes, 1789–1815, identifies the spring of 1796 as the turning point after which the new political connotation of the term is established in Italian writings. Giulio Bollati, introduzione to Crestomazia italiana, by Giacomo Leopardi, ix. ‘Come un grande individuo,’ Zibaldone, ed. Rolando Damiani (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), 889. Hereafter Zib and cited parenthetically in the text. The numbers refer to the manuscript pages, following an established convention of Leopardi scholarship. G. Leopardi, Epistolario, vol. 1, 515. Morroe Berger, introduction to Politics, Literature, and National Character, by G. de Staël, 80. Recently, two collections of the Zibaldone notes on language have appeared: G. Leopardi, Circa la natura di una lingua; and G. Leopardi, La varietà delle lingue. Today studies on Leopardi’s linguistic ideas abound. The 1991 international conference on Lingua e stile di Giacomo Leopardi is only one example of recent attention to these issues. Lingua e stile di Giacomo Leopardi: Atti del VIII Convegno internazionale di studi leopardiani. Among the essays from this collection I would like to single out Maurizio Dardano’s ‘Le concezioni linguistiche del Leopardi,’ an extensive and detailed survey of the critical literature on the topic; and Gensini’s ‘Leopardi e la lingua italiana,’

Notes to pages 194–9

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which discusses Leopardi’s general views on the relationship between language and thought, his vision of the modernization of Italian, and finally, his position within the Italian debate on language in the Ottocento. However, I take my cue from Stefano Gensini’s pioneering study Linguistica leopardiana, which remains the most extensive and accurate work on the subject. Destutt de Tracy and Charles de Brosses are the idéologues most often mentioned by Leopardi. In Italy, Francesco Soave, the translator of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was also the major mediator of French idéologie, with his essay Ricerche intorno all’istituzione naturale d’una società e d’una lingua. Submitted to the Berlin Academy for the 1771 essay competition, Soave’s essay draws heavily on De Brosse’s Traité la formation méchanique des langues (1765), though quotations from Rousseau, Condillac, and others are frequent. He explicitly states his divergence from Herder’s ‘abstract’ view of language and society in his introduction (‘Herder abbraccia il proposto argomento più in universale. E più in astratto, io l’esamino più in particolare, … più in concreto,’ xvi) but adopts Vico’s general concept of lingue madri; see 126–7. The most recent and detailed study of the impact of the idéologie, in particular of De Tracy’s ideas, on Italian language theories is Roland Bernecker, Die Rezeption der ‘idéologie’ in Italien. Gensini also has a chapter on the idéologie in the early Italian Ottocento in his Volgar favella, 205–41. Franco Lo Piparo has written a monographic essay on its impact on Leopardi’s language thought: ‘Materialisme et linguistique chez Leopardi,’ 361–87. There are several analogies on Leopardi’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought. Nicholas Rennie’s recent study Speculating on the Moment offers an excellent and updated comparative analysis. See also Massimo Riva, ‘Leopardi, l’inattuale,’ 59–80; and Alessandro Carrera, ‘Nietzsche e Leopardi,’ 11–36. ‘Tutto è materiale nella nostra mente e facoltà. L’intelletto non potrebbe niente senza la favella, perchè la parola è quasi il corpo dell’idea la più astratta. Ella è infatti cosa materiale, e l’idea legata e immedesimata nella parola è quasi materializzata’ (Zib, 1657). ‘Parlando dunque delle lingue dopo che sono perfettamente formate, io trovo rispetto alla libertà, tre generi. Altre libere per natura e per fatto, come l’inglese. Altre libere per natura ma non in fatto, come si vuole oggi ridurre la nostra lingua da’ pedanti … Il terzo genere è delle lingue non libere né per natura né in fatto, come la francese’ (Zib, 1048–9). On Vico and Leopardi, see Vincenzo Placella, ‘Leopardi e Vico,’ 731–57, which basically describes Leopardi’s quotation of Vico; and appendice I in

298 Notes to pages 200–6

18

19

20

21

22 23

Gensini’s Linguistica leopardiana, 251–68, which constitutes a useful point of departure. More recently Giuseppe Prestipino has compared Vico and Leopardi in light of Gramsci’s theories, in Tre voci nel deserto. Leopardi’s view of the German language oscillates between the opinion that German constitutes the model of an innovation that does not give up the imaginative character of the ancient language, and the idea that German is a language without a character. On Leopardi and Germany, see Manfred Lentzen, ‘I Tedeschi e la Germania nello “Zibaldone” di Giacomo Leopardi,’ 319–28. Lentzen concentrates on Leopardi’s oscillations in the interpretation of the German character (‘philosophical’ or ‘imaginative’) and explains them as analogous to the poet’s personal development. Leopardi believes that, although Italy was no longer a political power during the sixteenth century, its courts, even if small and weak, were nevertheless still governed by Italian dynasties. In this period, Italians were still in charge of their own political and economic affairs, and Italian armies existed. Leopardi draws a direct link between these circumstances and the abundance of Italian words pertaining to all the sciences and arts in the language of the Cinquecento (Zib, 3855–7). ‘È difficile, interrotta per lungo spazio la letteratura, e dovendo quasi ricrearla, riannodare la lingua a lei conveniente colla già antiquata lingua illustre della nazione, colla lingua che fu propria della nazionale letteratura prima che questa fusse totalmente interrotta’ (Zib, 3322). On this point, see Gensini, ‘Leopardi e la lingua italiana,’ in Lingua e stile di Giacomo Leopardi, 21–73. ‘Formata una volta una lingua illustre, cioè una lingua ordinata, regolare, stabilita e grammaticale, ella non si perde più finchè la nazione a cui ella appartiene non ricade nella barbarie … niuna delle altre nazioni state civili in antico, sono risorte a civiltà moderna e presente … niun’altra può mostrare due lingue illustri da lei usate e coltivate generalmente (come può far l’italiana)’(Zib, 2694–5). He offers these examples: vezzo/vezzeggiare; favore/favoreggiare; verso/verseggiare; pargolo/pargoleggiare (Zib, 1241). Robert Casillo’s The Empire of Stereotypes is, to my knowledge, the most extensive treatment of De Staël’s ideas on Italy and national characters and their impact in Europe. See also Simone Balayé, ed., Madame de Staël et l’Europe. On Leopardi and de Staël, see Rolando Damiani, ‘Leopardi e Madame de Staël,’ 538–61; Silvia Ravasi, Leopardi et Madame de Staël; Nicola Serban, Leopardi et la France; Rigoni, ‘Leopardi e i costumi degli italiani,’ in Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani, ed. Marco Dondero (Milan: BUR, 1998), 5–24.

Notes to pages 206–9

299

24 Yet here is an important variation in Leopardi’s version of that refrain. The addition of the term literature to the equation not only reveals that the language in question is the literary idiom, as we have seen in the previous section, but also bars the conflation of the standardized language with the spoken idiom, a conflation necessary to the construction of the genius myth. 25 ‘La principale cause qui les [langues] distingue est locale, elle vient des climats où elles naissent,’ J.-J. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues (1781), 118. See also chapters 9 and 10 on the formation of southern and northern languages, 120–41. For Leopardi’s interpretation of the opposition between southern and northern characters, see Leopardi’s own index under the heading ‘Caratteri meridionali e settentrionali’ (Zib, 3114). On Leopardi’s vision of the south as a compact notion, see the recent Augusto Placanica, Leopardi e il Mezzogiorno del mondo. 26 On this topic, see Rennie, ‘Leopardi,’ in Speculating on the Moment, especially 129–94, and Margaret Brose, Leopardi sublime, 83–117. 27 In entries Zib, 3922–7, Leopardi not only expresses his reservations about categories such as northern and southern as criteria for understanding customs and attitudes of nations (Zib, 3924–5) but also questions the validity of applying the category of gender in order to understand the infinite diversity of human psychology (Zib, 3926–7). Leopardi concludes: ‘Bisogna aver molta pratica ed abilità ed abitudine di applicare i principi generali agli effetti anche più particolari e lontani’ (Zib, 3927). 28 ‘È notabile come cagioni dirittam. contrarie provocano gli stessi effetti … ond’è che … le fantasie del gelato e buio settentrione rassomigliano assai più a quelle del fervido e brillante mezzogiorno, che de’ climi temperati’ (Zib, 1831). ‘Quanto le disposizioni naturali siano influite dalle circostanze accidentali, assuefaz. ec. si può anche rilevare osservando le fisionomie’ (Zib, 1829). See also the numerous passages on the paradoxes of climate written in March 1821 and August 1823. 29 ‘Tutto quello che ho detto dell’affettazione dei francesi, della loro impossibilità di esser graziosi ec. bisogna intenderlo relativamente alle idee che le altre nazioni o tutte o in parte, o riguardo al genere … hanno dell’affettaz. grazia ec. … Anche l’affettaz. è relativa, e la tal cosa parrà affettaz. in un paese e in un altro no, in una lingua e in un’altra no, o maggiore in questa e minore in quella, dipendendo dalle abitudini, opinioni ec.’ (Zib, 236–7). 30 The phenomenology of fashion is also the topic of Leopardi’s famous Dialogo della moda e della morte, which articulates the irreparable break with tradition reflected in the relentless symbolic drift of Leopardi’s own philosophical language. On the topic of fashion, see Monica Martelli, ‘Genere

300 Notes to pages 210–12

31

32

33

34

35 36 37 38

39

umano, moda e morte in Giacomo Leopardi,’ 257–76; and the recent Fabrizio Patriarca, Leopardi e l’invenzione della moda (Rome: Gaffi, 2008). Even writing about suicide and its perception as an act against nature, Leopardi caustically asks: ‘Qual natura? Questa nostra presente? Noi siamo di tutt’altra natura da quella ch’eravamo’ (Zib, 2402). There are a few other entries in Zibaldone that challenge the idea that blood relations can be a reliable criterion to classify (in a physiognomic sense) and understand the individual human being. They are mostly intended to strengthen his argument about the formative power of external circumstances and habit (Zib, 1828–30). Here I would like to suggest the usefulness of a syntagmatic reading of the Zibaldone entries, which are usually extracted from their material context and either read together with Leopardi’s poetry and fictional work or collected according to topic (language, pleasure, fatherland, nature, history) or to philosophical categories. ‘Non per forza naturale della congiunzione di sangue, la qual forza è nulla e immaginaria, e niente ha a che fare nel produr quella confidenza o nel conservarla’ (Zib, 2862). ‘Cosa vuol dir ciò, se non che nei caratteri degli uomini, novantanove parti son opera delle circostanze?’ (Zib, 2863). ‘Anche la somma di cose minutissime basta a produrre grandissimi e visibilissimi effetti sull’indole degli uomini’ (Zib, 2863). Translated by J. Sibree (New York: Collier & Son, 1956), 538. On Discorso and its European literary context, see Rigoni, ‘Leopardi e i costumi degli italiani,’ 5–24; and Ezio Raimondi, ‘Un poeta e la società,’ 30–66. For brief discussions of its political significance, see Ernesto Galli della Loggia, L’identità italiana, 88–91, and Salvatore Veca, ‘Introduzione’ to Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’Italiani, ed. Maurizio Moncagatta (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991), v–xiii. Marco Dondero’s Leopardi e gli italiani is a philological reconstruction of the date and circumstances of the composition, sources, and manuscripts. On the style of Discorso, see Gennaro Savarese, ‘Lingua e stile nel Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degll’Italiani,’ 235–50. For a survey of its various interpretations, see Moncagatta, ‘Dossografie leopardiane,’ in Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’Italiani (1991), by Leopardi, 1–34. For an essaystic approach, see Franco Ferrucci, Nuovo discorso sugli italiani. Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani, critical edition by Marco Dondero (Milan: BUR, 1998), 48. Hereafter DS and cited parenthetically in the text. The literature on Italy and the grand tour is vast. Among the most recent studies, see Roderick Cavaliero, Italia romantica;

Notes to pages 212–16

40

41

42

43

44 45

46

47 48

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Maura O’Connor, The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination; and Attilio Brilli, Il viaggio in Italia. On the image of southern Italy, see Atanasio Mozillo, La frontiera del Grand Tour. Franco Venturi, ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia,’ 987–1481, is a classic overview of the image of Italy mediated by European travellers and scholars. For an extensive bibliography, see the excellent annotations in Casillo, The Empire of Stereotypes, 233–304. Accounts of Italian manners by Italian literati circulated widely, at least since Pietro Calepio’s Descrizione de’ costumi italiani (1727). The essay chronologically closer to Leopardi was Carlo Denina’s Considérations d’un italien sur l’Italie (1796). Rousseau, Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 163, 171, 179. For a discussion of the notion of sociéte resserrée in Rousseau, see Romani, National Character and Public Spirit, 39–46. ‘Gli uomini politi di quelle [civili] nazioni si vergognano di fare il male come di comparire in una conversazione con una macchia sul vestito o con un panno logoro o lacero’ (DS, 54). Leopardi’s assessment of Russia’s stage in the progress of civilization builds on Rousseau’s evaluation of the different times of peoples’ growth. See Romani, National Character and Public Spirit, 39. ‘Gli usi e i costumi in Italia si riducono generalmente a questo, che ciascuno segua l’uso e il costume proprio, qual che egli sia’ (DS, 76). ‘E certo che il principal fondamento della moralità di un individuo e di un popolo è la stima costante e profonda che esso fa di se stesso, la cura che ha di conservarsela (né si può conservarla vedendo che gli altri la disprezzano)’ (DS, 68). Before Benedict Anderson’s famous definition of the nation, Hans Kohn, defining the nation as a state of mind, suggested that without a mental image of the nation to which one feels to belong, there is no nation (The Idea of Nationalism, 16–17). A recent discussion of national identity as a question of self-image can be found in Perry Anderson, ‘Fernand Braudel and National Identity,’ 260–9; and Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism, 196–208, 214–23. See Romani, National Character and Public Spirit, 3. Leopardi does not believe in the people as a reservoir of natural poets or in entire populations of poets (for example, Vico’s idea of the German people). Yet he is convinced that by drawing from the popular idiom and transfiguring it, language can gain expressivity, energy, and grace: ‘Ricchezza che importi varietà, bellezza, espressione, efficacia, forza, brio, grazia, facilità, mollezza, naturalezza, non l’avrà mai … veruna lingua che non abbia … continuamente approfittato ed attinto al linguaggio popolare,

302 Notes to pages 217–18

49

50

51

52

53 54

non già scrivendo come il popolo parla, ma riducendo ciò che ella prende dal popolo, alle forme alle leggi universali della sua letteratura e della sua lingua nazionale’ (Zib, 1247–8). For an excellent philosophical analysis of Leopardi’s use of the categories of identity and difference, see Marco Fortunato, ‘Leopardi tra identità e differenza,’ 243–56. ‘La più morta, la più fredda, la più filosofa in pratica, la più circospetta, indifferente, insensibile, la più difficile ad esser mossa da cose illusorie, e molto meno governata dall’immaginazione neanche per un momento, la più ragionevole nell’operare e nella condotta, la più povera, anzi priva di affatto di opere di immaginazione’ (DS, 80). Leopardi develops his negative characterization of Italy in a very long paragraph. ‘I più caldi di spirito, i più immaginosi in fatto, i più mobili e governabili dalle illusioni, i più sentimentali e di carattere e di spirito e di costumi, i più poeti nelle azioni e nella vita’ (DS, 81). Charles-Victor de Bonstetten acknowledges similar difficulties in his L’Homme du midi et l’homme du nord (1824), published in the same year as Leopardi was writing his Discorso, and mentions the possibilities of education and legislation to counteract the effects of climate. See Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius, 27–31; and Casillo, The Empire of Stereotypes, 28–9. For a theoretical discussion of climatology, especially in Montesquieu, see Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (In Theory), 52–86. ‘E in tutta Europa si travaglia a richiamar le lingue e le letterature alla loro proprietà nazionale’ (Zib, 1515). Like the romantic patriots, Leopardi valued folk speech or, in his words, the favella popolare, but he did so for aesthetic reasons that are fundamentally different from the ideology of the folk’s soul. According to Leopardi, only the ‘perfect’ and formed language is the most complete image of the nation, not popular speech: ‘Ogni lingua perfetta è la più viva, la più fedele, la più totale imagine e storia del carattere della nazione che la parla … Ciascun passo della lingua verso la sua perfezione, è un passo verso la sua intera conformazione col carattere nazionale’ (Zib, 2848). To Leopardi, popular speech is instead a rich source of beauty and variety for the literary language, especially for poetry. It is valuable not because it expresses the authentic collective soul of the people, in which the poet can participate by adopting its idiom, but rather because it is the quintessence of spontaneous creativity, vagueness, and indefiniteness – three fundamental qualities of poetry in Leopardi’s poetics. Moreover, Leopardi insists that popular language must be carefully filtered in order to elicit the desired aesthetic effects: poets cannot write as the people speak (‘non già scriven-

Notes to pages 218–22

55

56

57

58 59

60

61

62

303

do come il popolo parla,’ Zib, 1248). On Leopardi’s distinction between parole and termini, and his belief that the vague parole and not the denotative termini is the very essence of poetry, see his notes Zib, 80, 1226, 1234–6, 1900. As we know from the 13 July 1821 letter to Pietro Giordani, Leopardi wanted to write a work about the characteristics of southern (meridionali) languages. Leopardi does not care much about the debate on inversion; in fact, he often attacks the preservation of the Latinate syntax in modern Italian, considering it an old-fashioned and convoluted device. ‘Non parlo mica di quelle inversioni e trasposizioni di parole, e intralciamenti di periodi alla latina, sconvenientissimi alla lingua nostra … ma parlo di quella libertà, di quelle tante e diversissime figure della dizione … cha la rendevano similissima … alla greca’ (Zib, 686). ‘E le lingue sono sempre il termometro de’ costumi, delle opinioni ec. delle nazioni e de’ tempi, e seguono per natura l’andamento di questi’ (Zib, 1215). Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History, 41. ‘La nazione che era ancora in qualche modo nazione, non tollerava facilmente 1. di guerreggiare pel puro capriccio del suo capo, e in bene di lui solo, 2. le leve forzate, o almeno eccessive, 3. l’eccesso delle imposte per far la guerra’ (Zib, 903). ‘L’individuo si preferisce agli altri, dunque cerca di soverchiarli in quanto può, dunque … l’odio degli altri è una conseguenza necessaria ed immediata dell’amor di se stesso, il quale essendo innato anche l’odio degli altri viene ad essere innato in ogni vivente. Dal che segue per primo corollario che dunque nessun vivente è destinato precisamente alla società, il cui scopo non può essere se non il ben comune degl’individui che la compongono: cosa opposta all’amore esclusivo … che ciascuno inseparabilm. ed essenzialm. porta a se stesso’ (Zib, 872–3). I had the privilege of attending Paolo Valesio’s seminar on Leopardi at Yale, 2000–1, in which we discussed Leopardi’s ideas in light of Freud’s theories. Here I relate Leopardi’s pre-Freudian insights to the specific question of the nation. Leopardi never defines foreigners in more precise terms. However, given that his model is the Greek polis, one can assume that foreigners are the barbaroi, or the people who babble – actually those who did not speak a Greek dialect. He considers the ambivalent meaning of words such as hostis and hospes – both ‘guest’ and ‘host,’ ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ – ‘a proof of the ancient national hatred’ (‘prova dell’antico odio nazionale,’ Zib, 1163).

304 Notes to pages 223–9 63 ‘L’Europa forma una sola famiglia, tanto nel fatto, quanto rispetto all’opinione e ai portamenti rispettivi de’ governi, delle nazioni, e degl’individui delle diverse nazioni’ (Zib, 875). This statement closely recalls Rousseau’s polemic in Emile against the uniformity brought about by modern civilization, yet Rousseau laments the loss of an original character that once manifested itself even in the physiognomy of peoples (‘The Frenchmen of today are no longer the big fair men of old; the Greeks are no longer beautiful enough to serve as an artist’s model; the very face of the Romans has changed,’ quoted in Romani, National Character and Public Spirit, 42). This original character has been lost because of the increased exchange and mixing among diverse peoples; see Romani, 42. As we have seen, Leopardi considered talk about origins to be foolish, particularly when it came to ideas of character and dispositions. He strongly upheld the historicity and the cultural nature of collective behaviour. 64 The link between absolutism and modern nationalism has been analysed by A.D. Smith in ‘Neo-Classicist and Romantic Elements in the Emergence of Nationalist Conceptions,’ 54–87. Ernest Gellner discusses at length ‘the objective need for homogeneity’ of the nation state, ‘which can only function with a mobile, literate, culturally standardized, interchangeable population.’ Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 46. See chapters 3 and 4 of his book. 65 Viroli, For Love of Country, 140–60. 66 On Leopardi’s metaphysical approach to politics see Norbert Jonard, ‘Leopardi e la politica,’ 237–47. 67 ‘Della storia Leopardi non vede ciò che si acquista, ma unicamente – come nessun altro scrittore e poeta europeo coevo – ciò che si perde.’ Guglielmi, ‘Tragicità e contraddizione in Leopardi e Gramsci,’ 106. 68 Walter Benjamin, ‘Giacomo Leopardi, Gedanken,’ 118. Trans. Rennie, Speculating on the Moment, 140. Irresistible Signs? A Postscript and the Question of Media 1 PMLA 121, 5 (2006): 1612. From the proceedings of the October 2005 conference ‘The Humanities in Human Rights: Critique, Language, Politics,’ cosponsored by the MLA and the Graduate Center, CUNY. 2 Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 21. 3 Aarsleff, introduction to On Language, by Wilhelm von Humboldt, xxxiii. 4 Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 20 –22. 5 Germanic myths of the unified, original Volkssprache and the ‘free Teutonic people’ were first reinforced by humanists’ rediscovery of Tacitus’ Germa-

Notes to pages 230–3

6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13

14 15 16

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nia (1425) and later by Luther’s reform writings (for example, An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation, 1520), not to speak of his German translation of the Bible. Poggio Bracciolini discovered the manuscript of Germania in the monastery of Hersfeld (1425). It was transferred to Rome, transcribed, and published by Enea Silvio Piccolomini. Ironically, Piccolomini, as the head of the imperial legation in Regensburg (1454), called for a crusade against the Turks but was rebuffed by the German princes, who advised that the emperor tend rather to his empire of German tongue (‘Teutsch gezunge’), which was in a state of utter chaos, and resist the economic exploitation of Rome. See Hagen Schulze, Staat und Nation in der europäischen Geschichte, 140 –3. Parry, ‘The Challenges of Multilingualism Today,’ 47-59. Tullio de Mauro, ‘Un biglietto d’andata e ritorno,’ 9–12. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 19. I know that there is a tendency to employ the term media for modern mass media or electronic media only, but I identify as a medium any system of symbolic signs carrying intellectual representations, for example, premodern images, theatre, print media, as well as cinema, radio, television. Matthew Hibberd offers convincing arguments about the key role of media in Italy’s history as a nation, from unification to today, discussing the ways in which ‘governing parties and individuals in Italy have traditionally been able to assert strong influence over media institutions and companies …; the close relationship between political elites and media professionals,’ among other issues. The Media in Italy, 2. David Forgacs analyses some commonly accepted assumptions about the question of media and Italian national identity, clearing the way for the historical project I am proposing in this postscript, in ‘Mass Media and the Question of a National Community in Italy,’ 142–62. Medienethik (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1998), 31. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 127. Ibid., 124. Though he clearly underestimates the interaction of the different aspects of communication (sender, message, addressee, context of the transmission) and reinforces instead his thesis that the conditions of production (in this case, the homogeneity and the pervasiveness of the media, which produce the sense of community) are the weightiest component of nationalism. Connor, Ethnonationalism (1994), and Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation. Connor, Ethnonationalism, 196–209. Michael Billig has convincingly argued that everyday objects and types of

306 Notes to pages 233–4 behaviour reinforce the boundaries of the nation perhaps even more effectively since they function in a semi-conscious way. Banal Nationalism. 17 To mention just a few: Alberto Banti and Roberto Bizzocchi, eds., Immagini della nazione nell’Italia, (Rome: Carrocci, 2002); Albert Russell Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg, eds., Making and Remaking Italy; the already quoted Bedani and Haddock, The Politics of Italian National Identity; and Eugenia Paulicelli, Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004). 18 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Close Reading,’ PMLA 121, 5 (2006): 1608– 17; Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 99–105, 116–17.

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Index

Aarsleff, Hans, 228 absolutism, 16, 17–18, 22–5, 28–30, 37, 39, 49, 50, 56, 67, 191, 225, 228 Académie française, 6, 59, 61, 67, 177, 256n1 Accademia degli Oziosi, 274n46 Accademia della Crusca, 68, 83, 139, 201, 256n96, 263n57 Aeschylus, 29, 161 Agamben, Giorgio, 22 Alemand, Louis-Augustin, 87 Alfieri, Vittorio, 147, 153, 265n77, 282n8, 293n96 Alighieri, Dante, 3, 58, 100, 130, 132, 136, 253n62; and De vulgari eloquentia, 9, 57, 82, 228; and Homer, 138, 141, 200, 278n75, 281n104, 289n66; and language, 19, 32–4, 38, 40–1, 83, 121, 136–42, 169, 199–200, 249n40, 280n103, 281n104 Anderson, Benedict, 9, 231, 301n46 anthropology, 22, 27, 49, 57, 69, 80, 94, 107, 109–10, 112, 133, 136, 154, 174–5, 208, 221, 238n20, 268n19, 270n31 antiquarians, 75, 97–8, 255n93

antiquity, 14, 52, 61, 139, 149–50, 155, 257n7; classical, 24, 26 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 176, 233 Arcadia, 139, 142–3, 150, 169, 171, 261n43 Aristotle, 29, 45, 132, 246n9, 263n53, 278n79 Arnold, Matthew, 149 Ascoli, Graziadio Isaia, 21, 245n61 assonance, 166, 168–70, 288n61 Austria, 28, 120, 283n11 autorizzamento, principle of, 260n36, 261n43 Bacon, Francis, 261n41 Baldassarri, Guido, 165, 288nn56–7 Banti, Alberto, 126, 190, 240n33, 244n59, 296n7 barbarians, 40–1, 69, 93, 96, 149, 239n28 barbarism, 97, 119, 129, 136–8, 141–2, 274n47, 277n69 Barbaro, Ermolao, 263n53 Baretti, Giuseppe, 212 Bartoli, Daniello, 263n57 Battistini, Andrea, 112, 143, 271n36, 281n109

340

Index

Bell, Daniel A., 239n24 Bembo, Pietro, 34, 37–8, 40–1, 44, 51, 83, 249n44, 250n45 Beni, Paolo, 263n57 Benjamin, Walter, 226 Berchet, Giovanni, 265n77 Bergamini, Antonio, 78 Berger, Morroe, 194 Berlin, Isaiah, 112, 134, 279n86 Berlin Academy, 177, 256n2, 297n13 Bianchini, Francesco, 261n42 Binni, Walter, 165, 171 Blair, Hugh, 152 Boccalini, Traiano, 27 Bodin, Jean, 28–31, 46–7, 246n10, 248n25 Boileau, Nicolas, 61, 63, 262n46 Bollati, Giulio, 192, 294n98, 295n104 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 146, 192, 214, 220, 282n4, 283n11 Bouhours, Dominique, 7, 15, 18–19, 52, 54–5, 59–64, 66–76, 78–9, 81–9, 95, 97–8, 99–102, 104–7, 110, 115, 117, 130, 170, 216, 254n83, 257n4, 257n7, 259n25, 260n37, 261n43, 262n51, 264n61, 267n6. See also under Orsi, Gian Giuseppe boundaries, 10, 14, 17–18, 20, 40–1, 52, 54, 130, 227; ethnic, 105; geographic, 105; national, 216, 305n16; social, 32, 39 Bourzeys, Amable de, 6, 59, 61, 236n11, 237n13, 256n1 Bracciolini, Poggio, 35, 304n5 Breully, John, 10, 239n28 Broggi, Francesca, 165, 171, 290n72 Brosses, Charles de, 297n13 Brubaker, Rogers, 241n37 Bruni, Leonardo, 32, 251n53 Butler, Judith, 173, 290nn75–8

Caesar, Joachim, 46, 49, 254n79 Caledonia, 151–2, 154, 156, 162–3, 284n25 Calmet, Augustin, 80 Camilli, Camillo, 45–6, 253n70 Cardano, Girolamo, 35, 250n49, 250n50 Carew, Richard, 46, 55–6, 255n89 cartography, moral, 27, 247n18 Cassirer, Ernst, 237n14, 251n52, 256n95, 270n31 Castellani, Arrigo, 5 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 38, 51, 132 Castiglione, Baldassarre, 38, 187, 249n44, 259n25 Cattaneo, Carlo, 11, 126 Celts, 149–50, 152, 154, 158, 162, 166, 284n25, 288n61 centralization, political, 21, 25, 29, 32, 36, 44, 67 Cesarotti, Melchiorre, 7, 19–20, 64, 79, 98, 130, 144, 145–7, 150–8, 160–79, 181–9, 191–2, 202–3, 205, 237n13, 271n36, 282n10, 283nn11–12, 284n29, 284n33, 285n36, 285nn39–40, 286n46, 287n50, 288n55, 288n58, 289n62, 289nn65–7, 290n70, 290n72, 291n84, 292n88, 293n89, 293n94, 293n96 character, collective, 17, 41, 46, 55; national, 7, 15–24, 30–1, 48, 50, 53–5, 59, 62–3, 68, 76, 78, 81, 94, 97, 99–100, 145–6, 151–2, 174, 177, 179–81, 184, 186–8, 190, 206, 211–13, 215–18, 225, 227, 238n19, 239n24, 247n22, 247n24 chauvinism, 59, 120, 173, 176, 182, 188, 291n79 Chomsky, Noam, 254n77

Index Christianity, 14, 108–9, 240n33, 244n59, 295n1 Christmann, Hans Helmut, 237n13, 254n83 clarity, 66, 160, 196, 198 Clark, Robert T., 284n33 climate, 24, 26, 29, 31, 46, 48–9, 105, 114, 121, 145, 179–80, 207, 217, 246n9, 247n22, 247n24, 272n39, 293n96, 302n52 Coluccia, Giuseppe, 165 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 6, 20, 57, 64, 106, 177–83, 187, 237n13, 262n51, 271n36, 291n85, 297n13 Congress of Vienna, 192, 223 Connor, Walker, 98, 232, 266n81 consciousness, national, 93, 98, 240n29 Corneille, Pierre, 181, 262n46 Cramer, Johann Friedrich, 257n4 Croce, Benedetto, 74, 121, 128, 138, 187, 240n33, 260n36, 266n4, 277n73, 279n86, 284n33 Cuaz, Marco, 259n35, 266n78 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 126, 130, 187–8, 192, 270n35, 294n98 customs, 23, 24–5, 56, 69, 81, 90, 92, 94, 114, 117, 133–4, 150, 152, 166, 183, 191, 200, 208–9, 213–17, 236n11, 256n1, 257n7, 261n43, 262n50, 272nn39–40, 273n44, 284n25, 284n29, 292n88, 299n27; ancient, 116, 119, 139, 273n44, 274n48. See also under Italy Dainotto, Roberto Maria, 241n36, 302n52 Degli Angioli, Gherardo, 135, 137–8, 281n106

341

De Mauro, Tullio, 230, 267n12, 270n35, 271n36 De´ Medici, Cosimo, 24, 37 De Medici, Lorenzo, 32 Denina, Carlo, 271, 293n96, 301n40 Denis, Michael, 284n33 Descartes, René, 49, 64–5, 77, 82, 102, 107, 254n77; Cartesian thought, 62, 66, 106, 117 dialects, 14, 21, 31, 41, 44, 53, 95, 178–9, 187, 230, 278n79, 295n5, 303n62. See also French language: dialects; Italian language: dialects; vernaculars dictionaries, 45, 97, 162, 179, 263n57, 265n77 Diderot, Denis, 64, 112 dispositions, 14–15, 17, 29, 36, 45–9, 54, 56, 97, 113, 150, 180, 206–8, 211, 304n63; collective, 7, 24, 47, 49–50, 52, 56, 228; national, 63, 98, 99, 190; psychological, 26, 145, 293n96 dissonance, 72, 119, 172, 176, 189, 290n72 diversity, 26, 30, 56, 73, 89, 114, 122, 176, 184, 191, 211, 231; cultural, 20, 24, 35, 104, 114, 121, 145, 154, 190, 218–19; in France, 54, 254n83; human, 17–18, 22–3, 28–9, 34–5, 50, 57, 105, 299n27; in Italy, 21, 188, 295n1; language, 16, 17, 34–5, 40, 55, 61, 63, 68, 70, 100, 113–14, 121, 187, 250n49, 271n36 domestication, 63, 79, 84, 160, 170 Du Bellay, Joachim, 36, 251n54, 252n55, 265n77 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, 45, 247n22, 272n39 Du Marsais, César C., 64

342

Index

Eagleton, Terry, 16, 243n53 Edwards, John, 242n40 Egypt, 125, 131, 141, 273n44, 277n72 encyclopedias, 26, 27, 278n79; encyclopedists, 35, 63, 250n49 English language, 6, 14, 44, 55–6, 158, 196, 230–1, 235n5, 239n24, 253n66, 255n89 Enlightenment, the, 114, 146, 170–1, 176, 195, 213, 215 Epicureanism, 17, 22, 23, 29–30, 34–5, 45, 49, 56–7, 105, 250n49 Epicurus, 34–5, 57, 250n49, 256n95 Estevan, Francesco Saverio, 106–7 Estienne, Henri, 17, 44, 50–6, 67, 254n82 Europe, 4, 6, 8, 12, 21, 25–6, 28, 31, 59, 61–2, 69–70, 90, 126, 130, 146, 148–50, 192, 194, 195, 203, 212, 214, 217, 218–19, 223, 224, 225, 240n29, 246n15, 255n89, 298n23 Evelyn, John, 255n94

257n4; intellectuals, 87, 99, 103, 178. See also French-Italian controversy; French language Franks, 17, 51–2 French Academy. See Académie française French-Italian controversy, 60, 76, 78, 89, 99–100, 102, 104, 109–10, 114, 131, 190, 197, 228 French language, 14, 17–18, 38, 43–5, 51–3, 55, 59–64, 66–8, 70–3, 85–7, 95–6, 100–4, 107, 110, 117–20, 122, 142, 145, 178, 180–1, 195–200, 202, 204, 208, 218, 252n55, 255n89, 256n2, 259n25, 274n46, 274n48, 291n86, 293n96; dialects, 51–2, 67 French Revolution, 75, 183, 192, 296n7 Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, 46, 49 Fubini, Mario, 143, 266n4, 281n104, 281n109 Fubini, Riccardo, 241n36, 244n60

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 6, 238n15, 242n39 Fishman, Joshua, 242n40 Flavio, Biondo, 32 Fletcher, Angus, 140 Fleury, Claude, 80 Florentine Academy, 37, 43, 256n96 Fontanini, Giusto, 96 Forgacs, David, 305n10 Foscolo, Ugo, 8, 147, 153, 175, 201, 238nn19–20, 265n77, 282n8, 282n10, 283n11, 289n65 France, 13, 17, 21, 26, 29, 44, 49, 50–2, 54–7, 69–71, 74, 91, 95, 98, 178, 199, 214–15, 240n29, 247n24, 248n38, 255n94, 265n77, 274n47, 286n46, 293n96; culture, 54, 60, 152, 188,

Gabba, Emilio, 241n35 Gal, Susan, 238n18, 243n55 Galeani Napione, Giovanni Francesco, 75, 174, 188, 293n96 Galen, 29, 45 Gassendi, Pierre, 49, 56 Gates, Henry Louis, 276n61 Gauls, 51–4, 284n25 Gelli, Giovan Battista, 34, 36, 251n53 Gellner, Ernest, 25, 190, 191, 231–2 gender, 14, 16, 18, 52, 60, 65, 73, 134, 299n27 Gensini, Stefano, 35, 72, 74, 237n13, 250n49, 267n12, 270n35, 271n36, 296n12 geography, 24, 31, 105, 217 German language, 4–5, 46, 54, 59,

Index 64, 69, 81, 94–6, 117–19, 125, 131, 135, 199–200, 204, 229, 232, 254n76, 255n93, 257n4, 270n31, 273n44, 281n105, 298n18 Germany, 6, 11–13, 28, 48, 49, 57, 59, 73, 91, 120, 135, 150, 215, 284n25, 294n33, 304n5; intellectuals, 150, 257n4. See also German language Gilardino, Sergio, 165, 286n46, 289n62, 289n65, 290n70 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 205, 241n35, 275n59 Giordani, Pietro, 193, 303n55 gramatica, 32, 82–3 grammarians, 7, 18, 24, 49, 60, 83, 123, 237n13. See also Port-Royal Gramsci, Antonio, 33, 182, 184, 293n89 Gravina, Gian Vincenzo, 78, 140, 270n35, 278n75 Greece, 29, 44, 61, 69, 81, 90–2, 96, 106, 119, 131–3, 135–7, 140–1, 150, 193, 224, 241n35, 257n4, 274n47, 292n88, 303n62, 304n63. See also Greek language Greek language, 4, 36, 38, 41, 47, 53, 67, 78–9, 96, 106–7, 109, 115, 117–19, 125, 136, 145, 152, 161, 169, 195–6, 200, 204, 218, 251n54, 255n89, 273n45, 274n46, 278n79, 303n62 Greenblatt, Stephen, 271n36 Greenfeld, Liah, 239n24, 253n61 Guglielmi, Guido, 225, 295n5 Hampton, Timothy, 240n29 Hazard, Paul, 69–70, 90 Hebrew language, 47, 79, 81, 117, 199, 250n49, 255n89 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 6, 13, 49,

343

57, 64, 73, 112, 134–6, 176–7, 187–8, 228, 233, 238n18, 242nn39–40, 270n31, 279n83, 279n87, 284n33, 297n13 Herodotus, 26, 246n10 Hippocrates, 29, 45 Hirschman, Albert O., 276n67 historicism, 8, 121, 267n12, 270n35 historiography, 19, 61, 89 historism, 136, 278n77, 279nn82–7 Hobsbawm, Eric, 5, 9, 11, 13, 90, 232 Holland, 48, 55, 69, 91 homogeneity, 19, 50, 56, 73, 105, 126, 129, 132, 181, 186, 190–1, 231, 304n64, 305n13; cultural, 25, 31–2, 142, 187, 219; ethnic, 12, 70, 266n81; linguistic, 53, 67, 94, 227, 235n2, 243n55 Huarte, Juan, 17, 23–4, 45–50, 54–7, 102, 105, 246n10, 253n68, 254n76 humanism, 12, 35, 70, 73, 87, 102, 114, 276n67, 304n5 Huntington, Samuel, 5, 235n5 hyperbaton, 63–5, 182, 272n41 iconization, 17–18, 85, 104–5, 243n55 identity, 15–16, 24, 161, 178, 186, 204, 227, 234; collective, 16, 20, 34; ethnic, 12, 97; linguistic, 10, 87; national, 5, 7–10, 12, 17, 24, 27, 74, 97–8, 141–2, 149–50, 164, 215–16, 233, 291n79. See also under Italy idioms, 3, 6, 7, 17, 25, 27, 33, 38–9, 44, 49, 53–4, 56–7, 63, 66–9, 72, 79, 82–4, 88, 95–6, 115, 119, 136, 138–9, 141–3, 147, 150, 152–3, 157, 158, 164, 169, 175, 177–9, 183, 185, 196– 8, 200, 202, 218–19, 227, 249n44, 251n53, 263n57, 274n48, 280n103, 281n105, 301n48, 302n54; foreign,

344

Index

10, 55, 84, 117, 186, 204–5, 291n79; high-culture, 107, 123, 206; literary, 8, 18, 23, 32, 85, 87, 96, 142, 171, 201, 203, 228, 299n24; spoken, 21, 37, 139, 199, 206–7, 299n24; written, 17, 32, 73, 98, 99, 105, 199, 201, 206, 228 immigrants, 4–5, 235n5 ingenium, 14–15, 46, 48–9, 85, 100–2, 104–12, 119–20, 137, 237n13, 257n4, 267n6, 267n11, 268n19, 268n22, 269n35. See also language, genius of innatism, 102, 112, 194 intellectuals, 5–6, 8, 24, 45, 69, 121, 127, 135, 151, 175, 183–4, 215, 226, 260n36, 276n60. See also under France; Germany; Italy inversion, 63–4, 118, 160, 166, 168–9, 261n43, 303n56 irregularity in language, 23, 65, 69, 72, 151, 172–3, 179 Irvine, Judith, 238n18, 243n55 Isidore, 23, 246n10 Italian language, 3–5, 8, 10, 12–14, 17, 19, 21, 31–3, 40–1, 43–5, 51–5, 58, 59, 63, 66–70, 77–9, 82–7, 90, 94–8, 103–5, 117, 120, 122, 125–6, 132, 136, 138–9, 141–3, 161–2, 164, 169–70, 179, 182, 184, 196, 199–206, 228–30, 235n2, 236n7, 238nn19–20, 249n40, 280n103, 281n105, 293n94, 293n96, 296n12, 298n19, 303n56; dialects, 51, 82–3, 87, 126, 132, 137–8, 141, 263n53; vernacular, 8, 21, 40–1, 44, 70, 94, 96, 120, 138, 141–2, 228, 249n40 Italy, 4–5, 8, 9, 11–13, 17, 18, 19, 27, 32, 44, 52, 56, 57, 59–60, 62, 69–70, 74–7, 80, 83–4, 86, 89–98,

120, 127–8, 130–2, 136–9, 141, 143, 146–7, 152, 161, 177, 179, 188, 190, 192–4, 199–203, 212–15, 217, 224, 228–31, 240n29, 240n33, 241n35, 242n38, 244n60, 245n62, 249n40, 266n4, 267n12, 295n1, 297n13, 298n19, 305n10; culture, 74–6, 94, 100, 169, 204, 255n89, 257n4, 289n65; customs, 86, 212, 215, 218, 246n15; identity, 19, 61, 75–6, 87, 89–90, 92, 97, 130, 139, 228, 233, 237n13, 241nn35–6, 244n60, 245n62, 270n35, 305n10; intellectuals, 8, 12, 33–4, 60, 62, 71, 74–7, 89, 92–4, 99, 126, 188–9, 190, 228–9, 244n60, 245n62, 264n63, 275n56, 294n98; literati, 70, 82, 87, 91–2, 140, 264n68, 301n40; poetry, 68, 78, 163–5, 169, 177, 261n43, 289n65, 290n70; unification of, 5, 10, 21, 73, 127, 190, 228, 229, 295n1, 305n10. See also French-Italian controversy; Italian language Johnson, Samuel, 148, 154, 156 Joseph, John E., 258n17 Jusdanis, Gregory, 232 Keating, Clark, 54 Kennedy, William J., 240n29 Kohn, Hans, 13, 239n27, 242n38, 301n46 koine, 34, 41, 132, 141, 246n15, 249n44 Kroskrity, Paul V., 238n18, 239n23 Labio, Catherine, 134 La Bruyère, Jean de, 27, 247n17 La Mesnadiere, Jules de, 27 Lamy, Bernard, 26

Index language, genius of, 5–16, 18–20, 22–4, 30–1, 35–6, 40–1, 43, 45, 51, 54–5, 57, 59, 72–3, 78–80, 84–5, 88–9, 99, 106, 108–10, 120, 122, 131, 135, 143, 145–6, 151, 175, 177, 180–3, 186, 190–1, 193–4, 197, 201, 205–6, 225, 227–9, 236n10, 237nn13–14, 239n24, 251n53, 261n44, 291nn84–5 language ideology, 7, 86, 238n18, 243n55 language typology, 7, 36, 45, 122 Latin language, 14, 17, 25, 31–2, 34–6, 38, 40–1, 45–9, 53–5, 61, 63–4, 67, 70, 77–9, 82–3, 85, 92, 94–7, 101–2, 106–7, 109, 115, 117–18, 120, 125, 130–1, 135, 137, 143, 152–3, 180, 182, 195, 199–200, 203, 237n13, 248n38, 250n45, 251n54, 256n96, 259n25, 270n31, 280n103, 286n44 Leerssen, Joep, 25, 27–8 Lefevere, André, 148, 283nn17–18 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 6, 91, 257n4, 262n51 Leopardi, Giacomo, 7, 20, 57, 64, 98, 147, 153, 168, 175, 190–226, 237n13, 289n65, 290n72, 295n5, 296n12, 297nn13–14, 298nn18–19, 299n24, 299n27, 299n30, 300n31, 300n33, 301n43, 301n48, 302n50, 302n52, 302n54, 303n56, 303nn61–2, 304n63 Lepenies, Wolf, 291n79 Lepschy, Giulio, 236n7 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 57, 254n76, 257n4 Le Tourneur, Pierre, 165 Lilla, Mark, 142, 277n69, 277n73 lingua franca, 77, 83, 109, 195, 197 linguistics, 6, 57, 62, 72, 82, 139, 206,

345

237n14; sociolinguistics, 9, 18, 36. See also under homogeneity; identity; nationalism; naturalization; relativism; republicanism literati, 17, 38, 77, 83–4, 97, 148, 195, 200, 218, 257n4. See also under Italy Locke, John, 6, 57, 66, 177, 194, 238n18, 262n51 Lombard, Peter, 274n47 Longinus, 63–4, 140, 262n46 Louis XIV, 67, 70, 220 Lucan, 89, 264n61 Lucretius, 34 Mabillon, Jean, 90 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 34, 93, 250n46 Macpherson, James, 145–52, 155–8, 160, 162, 165–6, 168–9, 282n3, 283nn18–19, 284n25, 285n36, 285n38, 286n46, 288n61, 289n62 Maffei, Scipione, 96, 265n76 Maggi, Carlo Maria, 80, 262n47 Mancini, Pasquale Stanislao, 126–7 Manzoni, Alessandro, 8, 21, 201, 295n104 Marano, Andrea, 78 Marazzini, Claudio, 5, 87 Marsh, David, 280n89, 280n98 Marxism, 128, 142 Mattioda, Enrico, 289n67 Mattioli, Emilio, 285n40 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 19, 128, 224, 276n60 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 270n34, 275n54, 278nn75–9 media, 76, 110, 229–33, 295n1, 305nn9–10, 305n13 Megill, Allan, 279n87 Meinecke, Friedrich, 277n73 Ménage, Egide, 87, 96

346

Index

Mencke, Johann Burckhard, 107–8 metaphor, 7, 52, 70, 74, 102–3, 115–16, 118, 126, 142, 161, 187, 205, 237n13, 244n59, 251n54, 270n35 Michaelis, Johann David, 177 Michelet, Jules, 128, 276n60 Middle Ages, 14, 25, 26, 34, 89–91, 93–4, 137, 138, 141, 240n29, 264n63 Mirandola, Pico della, 263n53 modernization, 84, 88, 296n12 monolingualism, 4, 12, 70, 98, 130, 143, 179, 181, 187, 189, 227, 229–30, 293n96 monosyllables, 17, 52, 115, 118 Montesquieu, Baron de, 28, 29, 49, 69, 276n61 Montfaucon, Bernard, 90 Monti, Vincenzo, 169, 203, 282n8 Moore, Dafydd, 149–50 mother tongue, 3–5, 8, 11, 14–15, 23, 33, 43, 58, 98, 120, 205, 227, 229, 236n7 Motyl, Alexander J., 10, 240n31 Mukherjee, Bharati, 3 Mulcaster, Richard, 255n89 multiculturalism, 4, 228–9, 231 multilingualism, 4, 195, 228–30 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, 7, 18, 20, 60–1, 70–1, 74–98, 99, 164, 178, 191, 208, 237n13, 261nn41–3, 262n51, 263n57, 264n63, 264n68, 281n105, 285n36 Naddeo, Barbara Ann, 277n74 nationalism, 7, 9–10, 18, 20–1, 25, 71, 73, 97, 126, 146, 187, 192, 194, 224– 5, 231–3, 240n29, 253n61, 270n33, 295n5; linguistic, 5, 8, 11–13, 23, 32, 36, 50, 73, 75, 88, 112, 134, 191, 227–8, 233, 242n40, 244n57,

255n93, 295n5, 295n7, 304n64, 305n13 nationhood, 4, 12, 13, 190, 205, 241n37 naturalism, 11, 17, 22, 23, 28, 29–31, 34–5, 48–50, 57, 61–3, 127 naturalization, linguistic, 10, 42, 98, 112, 146, 197, 205 naturalness, 15, 37–9, 63, 66, 71, 75, 95, 159, 261n43 neoclassicism, 61, 72, 148, 150, 154, 169 Nicolini, Fausto, 266n2, 269n28 Orsi, Gian Giuseppe, 60, 74–5, 89, 260n36, 261n43; Orsi-Bouhours polemic, 60, 74–5, 257n3, 266n4 Ossian, 19, 144, 145–58, 160, 162–7, 169, 171–3, 175–7, 184, 188–9, 192, 202, 283n18, 284n33, 285n36, 285n40, 286n46, 288n61, 289n65 Pagliaro, Antonino, 270n35, 272n41, 279n81, 279n85 Pallavicino, Pietro Sforza, 82 Parini, Giuseppe, 166, 282n8 Pasquier, Etienne, 17, 50, 52–6, 67, 89, 239n24, 254n83 patriotism, 20, 93–4, 97, 129, 148, 173, 175, 188, 192–3, 205, 225, 244n57, 257n4, 276n68, 293n96, 294n98, 295n5 Patterson, Orlando, 235n5 Pellegrini, Matteo, 101 Pennisi, Antonino, 270n35, 281n104 Perrault, Charles, 258n24 Peruzzi, Emilio, 5 Petrarca, Francesco, 34, 93, 139 Petrarch, 67, 83, 240n29 Phillip II, 24, 49

Index philology, 13, 94, 113, 115, 117–18, 124, 131, 151, 156, 175, 187, 256n96, 277n73, 300n38 philosophy, 47–9, 56, 77, 100–4, 109, 113, 126, 131, 135, 140, 176–7, 190–1, 193, 210, 213, 215, 217–19, 228–9, 242n40, 243n53, 247n24, 261n41, 268n22, 274n46, 277n69, 277n72, 278n79, 298n18, 300n33; and language, 6, 8, 13, 16, 19–20, 34, 57, 64, 67, 73, 87–8, 117–18, 122, 130, 142, 181, 193, 224, 228, 238n15, 299n30; philosophers, 18, 49, 64, 109, 112, 124, 128, 177, 183, 215, 262n51, 269n25, 274n47, 276n64, 291n84 Pindemonte, Ippolito, 169, 282n8 Pinto, Raffaele, 31–3 Plato, 44, 45, 111, 246n9, 247n24, 269n25, 278n79 poetics, 17, 22, 26–7, 78, 148, 302n54 poetry, 32, 37, 47, 74, 78, 80–1, 86, 90, 120, 126, 132–4, 136, 140, 144–5, 147, 151, 154, 158, 164–5, 175, 231, 260n36, 278nn78–9, 283n19, 302n54; blank verse, 147, 151, 164, 166, 168–9. See also under Italy polemics, 19, 43, 56, 59, 61, 86–7, 100, 110, 114, 117–22, 130, 148, 156, 260n36, 263n57, 274n46, 278n75, 304n63 polities, 25, 29, 31, 36, 113, 122, 125, 202, 231; absolutist, 17, 22–3 Poltermann, Andreas, 291n80 Pons, Alain, 128 Pope, Alexander, 158, 161 Port-Royal, 18, 60, 62, 65–6, 111, 237n13 Possevino, Antonio, 49 propaganda, 56, 71–2, 88, 229, 232

347

Provençal language, 96, 281n105 proverbs, 27, 39, 53, 114, 139 psychology, 26–7, 49, 86, 88, 105, 113, 134, 145, 165, 205–6, 224, 250n49, 293n96, 299n27. See also dispositions, psychological; traits, psychological querelle des anciens et des modernes (quarrel between the ancients and moderns), 61, 74, 78, 132, 147, 151, 258n24, 261n43, 266n2 Ramus, Petrus, 89 rationalism, 13, 16, 18, 49, 60–2, 66, 72, 74, 111–12, 131, 143, 166, 171, 193 reason, 16, 47, 61–4, 66, 68, 71–2, 75, 82, 106–8, 112, 115, 119, 134–5, 137, 142, 160, 197–9, 208, 217, 261n43 relativism, 121, 191, 205, 271n36, 279n86; cultural, 19–20, 80, 146, 176, 191; linguistic, 104, 113, 121–2 religion, 14, 26–7, 29, 109, 113, 137, 151, 270n33, 278n78 Renaissance, 6–7, 24, 26, 36, 62, 69– 70, 74, 78–9, 82, 139, 195, 236n10, 240n29, 241n36, 244n57, 244n60, 246n12, 251n53, 252n55, 255nn87– 8, 257n4, 259n25 republicanism, 20, 205; classical, 129, 192, 194; linguistic, 98 rhyme, 163, 166, 170, 288n61 rhythm, 51, 164, 166–7, 170–1 Risorgimento, 11, 19, 21, 93–4, 126, 188, 190, 229, 233, 241n33, 244nn59–60, 260n36, 275n56, 295n1 Rolli, Paolo, 166 Romagnosi, Giandomenico, 275n59

348

Index

Roman Empire, 42, 82, 89, 92–3, 195 Romani, Roberto, 247n24 Romanticism, 126, 135–6, 147, 157–8, 165, 171, 175–6, 187, 192, 210, 216, 218, 225, 238n15, 268n22, 270n31, 273n44, 279n83, 285n40, 291n79 Rosiello, Luigi, 237n13, 271n36 Rossi, Paolo, 281n104 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 148, 207, 213, 221, 270n31, 297n13, 301n43, 304n63 Sakai, Naoki, 229–30 Salvini, Anton Maria, 84, 261n44, 264n58 Scaglione, Aldo, 245n62 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 26–7, 30, 250n49 Schlaps, Christiane, 237n14 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 160, 163, 176, 291n79 Schmid, Carol, 235n2 Schneiders, Hans-Wolfgang, 159, 286n46 Schulze, Hagen, 25 sentiment, national, 25, 56, 60, 240n29 Sestan, Ernesto, 240n29 Simone, Raffaele, 271n36 Sismondi, Simonde de, 145, 264n63 Smith, Anthony D., 242n40, 304n64 Smith, Helmut Walser, 57, 303n58 Soave, Francesco, 297n13 sociology, 9, 94, 177–8, 213–14, 235n5 Sorrentino, Andrea, 74, 266n4 sovereignty, 25, 30, 37, 56, 69, 73, 122, 129, 142, 275n54 Spain, 17, 24, 29, 45, 47–8, 59, 69, 95, 120, 214

Spanish language, 5, 14, 17, 24, 43, 47–8, 55, 63, 66, 68, 70, 104, 117 Spanish War of Succession, 74, 76 speech, 37–9, 43, 56, 60, 64–5, 71–2, 79–80, 84, 88, 95, 103, 125, 131, 141, 199, 204, 218–19, 252n56, 272n41, 302n54; natural, 17, 23, 32, 38, 40, 111, 250n45; spontaneous, 8, 18, 23, 32, 36, 44, 60, 82, 98, 99, 228 Speroni, Sperone, 36–7, 41, 52, 82, 251n54, 252n55, 259n25, 263n53 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 227, 233 Stäel, Germaine de, 146, 194, 206–7, 212 Stafford, Fiona, 149 Stankiewicz, Edward, 236n10, 251n53 Stanzel, Franz K., 28 Steinberg, Jonathan, 9 Stendhal, Henri Beyle de, 147 stereotyping, 62, 75, 153, 172, 206, 213, ethnic, 26, 85; of language, 121, 170; national, 7, 27, 29, 145, 217 Sternhell, Zeev, 279n86 syntax, 4, 17, 46, 64–6, 70, 143, 166, 168, 182, 185, 218, 251n53, 256n96, 289n62, 300n33, 303n56 Tasso, Torquato, 68–9, 169 temperament, 3, 6, 23, 26, 29–30, 35, 69, 86, 236n11, 256n1; national, 55, 86 Tesauro, Emanuele, 101, 266n4 theology, 47, 274n47 Theophrastus, 26, 28, 247n17 Thomson, Deryck, 285n38 Three Crowns, 33, 37, 40 Tolomei, Claudio, 34, 36, 251n53

Index Trabant, Jürgen, 268n22 Tracy, Destutt de, 297n13 traits, 56, 113, 118; character, 24, 26, 29–30, 247n24; of language, 45, 105; moral, 27, 29; physical, 29, 127; psychological, 24, 27, 50, 153. See also dispositions; temperament translation, 6, 14, 16, 19–20, 25, 79, 81, 104, 115, 145–6, 148, 151–2, 158–67, 169–79, 185–7, 227, 261n44, 262n46, 270n33, 283n18, 285n40, 285n42, 285n44, 285n46, 287n50, 288n61, 290n72, 292n88, 293n94; foreignizing, 160, 175, 184, 291n79; free, 145, 159; literal, 145, 157–9, 163; theories of, 6, 8, 19; untranslatability, 6, 19, 25, 80, 122, 135, 144, 146, 181, 191, 251n53 Traversari, Ambrogio, 35 Trissino, Giovan Giorgio, 27, 33, 41, 55, 125, 132, 246n15, 249n44 tropes, 52, 74, 78, 80, 107, 110, 112, 115–20, 122, 143, 152, 261n43, 266n4 uniformity, 30, 35, 54, 95, 133–4, 138, 187, 191, 211–12, 219, 225, 250n49, 279n85, 304n63; cultural, 16–17, 20, 23, 25, 44, 187–8, 225; national, 20, 97 United States, 3–5 universalism, 20, 176, 191, 199, 230 Van Delft, Louis, 28, 247n18 Van Goens, Michael, 161–2 Vannetti, Clementino, 173 Van Tieghem, Paul, 165 Varchi, Benedetto, 17, 23–4, 34, 36– 46, 48, 50–53, 55–6, 66, 82, 106, 110, 138–9, 251n53, 252n56, 253nn62–3, 254n82

349

Vaugelas, Claude Favre, 87 Venuti, Lawrence, 286n45, 291n79 vernaculars, 5, 7–8, 12–14, 16–19, 22– 5, 31, 33–4, 36–8, 40–1, 43, 47, 55–7, 67, 71, 77–8, 82, 94–5, 115, 122–7, 129, 137, 142–3, 177, 199, 240n29, 250n45, 251n54, 252n55, 256n96; literary, 7, 12, 17, 34, 248n38; national, 13, 16, 44, 50–2, 57, 100, 113; written, 6, 10, 32, 125, 255n88. See also under Italian language Vico, Giambattista, 6, 7–8, 19–20, 49, 53, 57, 60, 63–4, 67, 69, 80, 83, 99– 144, 154, 157, 169, 181, 191, 197– 200, 216, 229, 233, 237n13, 243n53, 262n51, 264n68, 266nn2–4, 267n7, 267n12, 268n19, 268n22, 269n30, 270n31, 270nn33–5, 271n36, 272nn39–41, 273nn43–4, 274n46, 274nn48–50, 275n51, 275nn54–5, 275n59, 276nn60–1, 276nn67–8, 277n69, 277nn73–4, 278nn78–9, 279n83, 279nn85–7, 281nn104–6, 281n109, 284n33, 289n66, 297n13, 301n48 Viesseux, Giovan Pietro, 194 Viroli, Maurizio, 20, 187, 192, 225, 244n57, 276n68 Voltaire, 81, 152, 161, 178, 287n50, 292n88 von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 6, 159, 228, 238n15, 242n39 Wiegerling, Klaus, 231 Williams, Raymond, 16 Wolf, Friedrich August, 284n33, 284n39 Zahn, Johannes, 28