Pubblichiamo oggi un estratto dall’introduzione al volume a cura di Adele Bardazzi, Eugenio Montale A Poetics of Mourning, Peter Lang 2023. Ringraziamo l’autrice e la casa editrice per la disponibilità.
Discourses of Mourning
How, if at all, is the language of lyric poetry appropriate for articulating mourning and speaking from the perspective of the mourner? One answer to this question can be found in the way apostrophe works, which Culler sees as a defining element of the lyric genre. In brief, apostrophe invokes a presence while simultaneously creating a distance between the speaker and the addressee. What happens when the apostrophized enters speech? Before answering this question, it is necessary to discuss how mourning works and its relationship to poetry.
Studying Montale’s shades in order to shed light on his eschatological vision inevitably involves an engagement with death, mourning, and memory, all of which are key themes in Montale’s poetry. As Philippe Ariès has eloquently discussed, death, once so discursively omnipresent in the life of Western communities, has been increasingly marginalized in twentieth- century Europe.[1] Although the current discourses on mourning might seem to differ, Ariès’ Western Attitudes Toward Death is helpful in providing, for the purpose of this book, a historical and cultural contextualization of Montale’s poetry. As Ariès explains, death has not only been gradually effaced as a subject matter; it has also become shameful and forbidden to the point of becoming unspeakable.[2] In short, the modern attitude towards death involves an absolute interdiction on the subject in order to preserve ‘happiness’:
The interdiction on death suddenly follows upon the heels of a very long period – several centuries – in which death was a public spectacle from which no one would have thought of hiding and which was even sought after at times. The cause of the interdict is at once apparent: the need for happiness – the moral duty and the social obligation to contribute to the collective happiness by avoiding any cause for sadness or boredom, by appearing to be always happy, even if in the depths of despair. By showing the least sign of sadness, one sins against happiness, threatens it, and society then risks losing its raison d’être.[3]
Significantly, this interdiction on death, according to Ariès, makes mourning an even more difficult and painful experience. It is no longer perceived as a necessary period, encouraged by society; rather, it is considered a ‘morbid state which must be treated, shortened, erased’.[4] As a result, the modern subject lacks the emotional ability to record and process their losses. Thus, as Emanuela Tandello explains, poetry acquires two fundamental functions:
It answers death by displaying private grief publicly and in doing so it reaffirms the centrality of human emotions related to loss and bereavement, taking on the responsibility of passing on traumatic knowledge by framing it and allowing it to be processed.[5]
Nowadays, the most topical debates in literary criticism revolve around this relationship between poetry and mourning. Two major works on mourning and loss – Giovanni Nencioni’s seminal essay ‘Antropologia poetica?’ [Poetic Anthropology?] and Ramazani’s Poetry of Mourning – are particularly helpful in understanding how discourses of mourning function in Montale’s poetry.[6] Nencioni’s essay is relevant in that it highlights the dialogic nature of modern lyric poetry, in which the ‘dialogo con i defunti’ [dialogue with the dead] is a fundamental element. This is important when considering Montale’s ‘care ombre’ [beloved shades], without whom the poetic subject would be deprived of his main means of glimpsing the ‘oltrevita’ [afterlife]. Nencioni stresses that lyric poetry essentially reactivates key anthropological structures, such as the funeral elegy:
L’evocazione dei morti, prima di divenire un genere poetico, fu un rito arcaico, un atto di effettiva, riconosciuta comunicazione con l’aldilà, che i poeti antichi, Omero come Eschilo, hanno finto nel racconto o nell’azione scenica senza però alterarne il valore; il quale si è in gran parte mutato col ritrarsi dell’antichissimo rito nel codice poetico, ma non tanto da non separare, con un residuo di carica antropologica, il primo nostro colloquio dal secondo, dandogli un suggello di verità che significa conservazione o recupero, a diverso titolo della comunicazione.[7]
[the evocation of the dead was an archaic rite before it became a poetic genre, an act of effective, acknowledged communication with the beyond that ancient poets such as Homer and Aeschylus employed in stories and on stage without, however, diminishing their value. That largely changed with the retreat from ancient rites in the poetic norm, avoiding the separation of the first from the second and leaving a residue of anthropological elements that give it the stamp of truth indicating preservation or recovery, towards a different kind of communication.]
More importantly, as Nencioni highlights, the role of poetry is not only to display structures of communication such as those of our shared communication system, but also to propose a structure that has been rejected by society:
Il codice poetico dispone di strutture proprie, che possono coincidere esteriormente con quelle del codice comune, ma hanno una funzione diversa; e la diversità della funzione può essere dovuta alla conservazione di un contenuto arcaico ormai rifiutato dalla norma comune, e alla assunzione di contenuti da forme poetiche.[8]
[The poetic code has its own structures, which may coincide externally with those of the common code of communication, but have a different function; and the diversity of the function may be the result of the preservation of archaic content now rejected by the common norm, and the absorption of content from poetic forms.]
In other words, lyric poetry, including the elegy, acquires the crucial role of allowing us to reconnect and dialogue with the dead in a way that is no longer possible in everyday life. Similarly, Ramazani investigates this idea in relation to the modern elegy, focusing on the ways in which modern elegies challenge normative ways of mourning imposed by society.[9] According to Ramazani, they do so by actively engaging with the disruptiveness of death and mourning.
Montale’s poetics of mourning for his liminal shades is worthy of attention as it deviates from traditional discourses of mourning and the elegy’s conventional consolatory machinery. I borrow the term ‘elegy’s consolatory machinery’ from Ramazani, who uses it in his Poetry of Mourning.[10] Ramazani’s study analyses how mournful poetry is inflected by changing historical contexts and, in particular, how it interacts with and relates to societal practices governing mourning. In his pioneering book The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats, Peter M. Sacks observes that an elegy is a poem of ‘mortal loss and consolation’.[11] However, as Ramazani argues, Sacks’ compensatory model is helpful when studying what he calls ‘canonical’ and ‘traditional’ elegies, but not ‘modern’ elegies, which often do not offer any consolation. According to Sacks, two examples of canonical elegies that conform to his compensatory model are Edmund Spenser’s ‘Astrophel’ and John Milton’s ‘Lycidas’. It is worth noting, however, as Ramazani highlights, while ‘tracking the [modern] elegy’s melancholic turn’, that both poems offer consolation, but also anticipate key characteristics of the modern elegy (for example, ‘masochism, irresolution, irredemption, aggression, and self-criticism’).[12] In other words, in the melancholic development that took place in the modern elegy, the ‘part became the whole, the thread the weave in the transformation of a major lyric genre’.[13]
Montale’s mourning is not strictly melancholic, a tendency that Ramazani identifies in the majority of modern elegies in that they often reject any end to mourning and any replacement of the lost object of love, unlike most traditional elegies. In other words, Montale’s elegiac poetry departs from the classical binary view of the so-called ‘work of mourning’, as initially presented by Sigmund Freud in his well-known essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), which has served as the basis for almost all subsequent approaches to grief.[14] As this book will suggest, Montale’s mourning is never fully accomplished. Thus, I contend that it is productive to engage with one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, who, however, has seldom been considered in relation to Montale or the wider Italian literary tradition: Jacques Derrida.[15] I will demonstrate that Derrida’s concept of ‘demi-deuil’, translatable as ‘half-mourning’, ‘mid-mourning’, or ‘semi-mourning’, is the most faithful lens through which to view Montale’s poetic depiction of mourning.[16] In doing so, I will illustrate how Montale’s mourning deviates from the traditional representations and ideologies of both ‘healthy’ mourning and ‘unhealthy’ melancholia. In fact, Montale’s poetic subject resists what, in Freudian terms, is considered successful mourning and asserts the impossibility of replacing the lost object of love.
By considering the relationship between poetry and mourning from a Derridean perspective of ‘demi-deuil’ [half-mourning], I offer a new perspective on Montale’s so-called ‘fanciulla morta’ [dead maiden], whereby mourning subjects are no longer viewed as negatively dominated by the death of the Other, but are, rather, devoted to preserving the relationship with the dead, contrary to the Freudian notion of ‘getting over’ and ‘moving on’ after loss.
[1] Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
[2] ‘A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.’ Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death, p. 92.
[3] Ibid., pp. 93-94.
[4] Ibid., p. 100.
[5] This view is proposed by Emanuela Tandello throughout her article ‘A Note on Elegy and Self-elegy in Leopardi’s Canti’, Appunti Leopardiani 4:2 (2012).
[6] Giovanni Nencioni, ‘Antropologia poetica?’ [Poetic Anthropology?], Strumenti critici 19 (1982), 243-258; now in Tra grammatica e retorica [Between Grammar and Rhetorics] (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), pp. 161-175; Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994).
[7] Nencioni, ‘Antropologia poetica?’, p. 173.
[8] Ibid., p. 172.
[9] See, in particular, the introductory chapter of Ramazani’s Poetry of Mourning, pp. 1-31.
[10] Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, p. 3. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy. Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 3.
[11] Sacks, The English Elegy, p. 3.
[12] Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, p. 10. There have also been other reinterpretations of these poems that challenge Sacks’ reading, such as Stanley Fish’s reading of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, which highlights how the poem plays with ‘the traditions of consolation’(‘Lycidas: A Poem Finally Anonymous’, Glyph 8 (1981), 1-18, 6). Similarly, Anselm Haverkamp observes that Milton rejects ‘the elegiac mode of consolation’ (‘Mourning Becomes Melancholia – A Muse Deconstructed Keats’ Ode on Melancholy’, NLH 21 (1990), 693-706, 698-699).
[13] Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, p. 10.
[14] Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), in The Standard Edition to the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), XIV (1957), pp. 143-258. As Ramazani points out, ‘psychoanalysts as varied as Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein, John Bowlby, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva have reinterpreted and reinvented its ideas [Freud’s essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’], and literary critics and theorists have extended its terms into discussions of everything from the literature of the Holocaust and AIDS to such genres as tragedy, elegy, and the novel.’ Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, p. 28. For overviews of classical psychoanalytic accounts of mourning, see Geoffrey Gorer, Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain (London: Cresset Press, 1965), pp. 136-152; Lorraine D. Siggins, ‘Mourning: A Critical Survey of the Literature’, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 47 (1966), 14-25; Beverly Raphael, The Anatomy of Bereavement (New York: Basic Books, 1983); and Catherine M. Sanders, Grief: The Mourning After (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1989), pp. 22-41.
[15] My use of Derrida’s ‘demi-deuil’ [half-mourning] is rooted in the works of two scholars who have approached loss and mourning in the Italian literary tradition from a Derridean perspective: Emanuela Tandello and Jennifer Rushworth. Tandello, ‘A Note on Elegy and Self-elegy in Leopardi’s Canti’; Jennifer Rushworth, Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
[16] On Derrida’s ‘demi-deuil’ [half- mourning], see Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 257-409 (p. 335 for ‘mid- mourning’); and Derrida, ‘ “Dialanguages” ’, in Points … Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber and trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 132-155 (p. 153 for ‘semi- mourning’).
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