Fragmentariness and performance: Leopardi’s autobiographical sketches

The essay directs attention to Leopardi's habit of ironising and even undermining expectations that he should appear as the author of an immaculately structured opus. Observing parallels with Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and other Romantic works, the essay emphasises the ostentatious incompleteness of many of Leopardi's texts, in which the Plato-conscious motif of the imperfect recollection of erotically charged song regularly reappears. In particular, the essay examines Leopardi's notes towards an autobiographical novel, entitled "Vita abbozzata di Silvio Sarno" – "abbozzata" signifying 'sketched' or 'drafted.' Invoking Coleridge's above-quoted account of the activity of the mind in reading, the author suggests that the peruser of these manuscript notes is required not so much to read as to perform or 'execute' the text, as though it were a song score, as it leaps from point to point in a series of 'etceteras' towards the inevitable death of the poet – and then ends in mid-sentence.