“In the Flash of an Eye a Multiplicity of Things”: The Poetics of the (In)Finite in James Joyce and Giacomo Leopardi

Joyce-Leopardi: Biographical and Ideological Connections

James Joyce’s literary method notoriously relies on intertextuality and on the construction of a complex web of references that encompasses different historical periods, literary traditions and cultures, and even aesthetic notions deriving from visual and kinetic arts. Such an interdisciplinary and intertextual method reaches its climax in Finnegans Wake, a work aimed at recreating, through language and through a profound awareness of etymology and philology, the whole history of humankind in its evolutionary process. Joyce famously incorporates quotations and references in a new hybrid language in which all particles of speech atomistically combine and create a simultaneous narration in which different spatiotemporal realities merge. Within such an intertextual method—which is already operational in Joyce’s early and more traditional works such as Dubliners and Chamber Music—the European romantic tradition plays a crucial role.

Joyce often draws on romantic authors such as Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, at once demonstrating, as has been extensively argued by a number of critics, his debt to their writing and his ambivalent attitude toward the romantic tradition and its limitations.¹ Among the sources that Joyce derives from the romantic tradition, one should indubitably include Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), to whom Joyce obliquely refers in selected but significant instances, which, thus far, have received scarce critical attention. In light of Joyce’s extremely precise compositional method, those references appear more than coincidental, and they provide an insightful and novel interpretation of Joyce’s ideas on the aesthetic category of the romantic. As a matter of fact, Leopardi represents a unique romantic voice that itself surprisingly also reveals an awareness of the limits of the romantic rule. In addition, his approach to poetry combines both literary and philosophical elements, in a fashion that significantly paves the way to the modernist canon. This explains why, after the publication of the complete collection of the Canti, in 1845, Leopardi’s fame grew exponentially, as recently noted by Alessandro Carrera, who pointed out how authors such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sainte-Beuve, and Melville “recognized in him one of the most important voices of nineteenth-century literature.”² Joyce explicitly and significantly refers to Leopardi in his early essay on Irish poet James Clarence Mangan (1907), in the notebooks for Finnegans Wake, and, as I intend to suggest, in at least two passages of Finnegans Wake. Although brief and apparently unintentional, such allusions reveal how significant Leopardi’s influence was in Joyce’s early formation. Concurrently, a close comparative reading of both authors uncovers salient similarities that shed further light on Joyce’s poetics. In addition, it is worth mentioning that the two authors’ lives and personalities show a number of remarkable connections both on a literary and on a biographical level, which may further account for Joyce’s fascination with the Italian poet. The two authors were both radical thinkers who responded to historical crises in a revolutionary way; they had a similar nomadic and erratic lives characterized by self-exile, and they often suffered the troubles of censorship for overtly opposing their countries, cultures, and religions.³

As Scarlet Baron remarks, according to C. P. Curran Joyce had been reading Leopardi since 1901 as part of his university course and, later, according to Richard Ellmann, his Triestine library held a copy of Leopardi’s Poesie.⁴ John McCourt notes passages from several Italian authors and annotations on Leopardi’s book Pensieri in the large notebook Joyce used for his Italian lessons with Alessandro Francini Bruni during his years in Trieste.⁵ Joyce especially focuses on the sections in which Leopardi expresses the existential troubles derived from censorship, which undoubtedly appealed to him as he was painfully experiencing negative reactions to the publication of Dubliners.⁶ What is more revealing, in the light of this comparative analysis, however, is the seemingly offhand reference in “James Clarence Mangan,” an essay that indirectly reveals Joyce’s opinions on the Italian poet. Here, Mangan is declared “weaker than Leopardi, for he has not...