Gabrielle Sims ‘Thinking in Fragments’ abstract September 2010
Gabrielle SIMS (New York University)
Speaking about infinity without recourse to fragments: Leopardi’s “L’infinito” as a challenge to the sublime ellipsis
It is a peculiarity of Leopardi’s 1819 L’infinito that it contains not a single fragmentary utterance, but is instead composed of four complete sentences. This is striking not only because poetry as we think of it in the modern sense is a fragmentary discourse – a style that began with the very Romantics who were Leopardi’s contemporaries. But it is even more striking in a poem about infinity, particularly when that poem takes on the challenge of populating that infinity, as it were, with enumerations of its contents: the past seasons, the present one, the wind, the silence. Such a repetitive structure in the construction of infinity is consistent with the procedure of the mathematical sublime, which in the hands of the Romantics and Enlightenment thinkers on the subject is linguistically managed with the fragment and the ellipsis. These are the traditionally appropriate tools for articulation of the ineffable. Indeed the breakdown of discourse in the face of something much greater than oneself is both a commonplace and a crucial philosophical and religious notion that humanity will naturally be frustrated in its attempts to reach – physically and linguistically – the divinity or greatness of which it feels itself a part and to which it feels entitled. That the Romantics and Enlightenment thinkers fairly quickly overcome their fragmentary humility, recovering both language and equilibrium, tells us that the fragment is generally also used as a temporary measure on the way to a successful reach toward the supernatural.
What, then, do we make of Leopardi’s refusal of the fragment even at the height of necessity? My paper argues that this gesture highlights the importance of L’infinito’s focus upon its object rather than the poet’s subjective mental processes, one of Leopardi’s many challenges to his contemporaries. It also tells us that Leopardian infinity perhaps admits of no such divisions in the first place. Indeed the closing image of the poet absorbed into the ‘mare’ acts out the materialist model of absolute continuity between human subjectivity and the external universe.
Gabrielle Sims is currently a PhD candidate at New York University in the department of Italian Studies, where she also received her Master's with a thesis on Brunetto Latini's rhetorical theory and transformations in medieval Italian poetics. She graduated in English literature and Italian Studies from the University of Western Australia before moving to New York, where her early research interests were Medieval poetry, rhetoric, and natural philosophy in Italy. She is currently writing a dissertation on the poetry and prose of Giacomo Leopardi in relation to the eighteenth century geological concept of deep time, which incorporates the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives proper to her background and academic goals. Her current research focuses upon poetry and poetics from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, theaesthetics of nature,the history of science, pastoral literature, and the idea of the nation as natural entity. Her postdoctoral research plans include an annotated translation of Leopardi's Storia dell'Astronomia.