Eugenio Montale: The Poetry of the Later Years by Éanna Ó Ceallacháin

Abstract

MLR, 98.2, 2003 479 The following fivechapters offerliteraryanalyses (with some biographical interconnections ) of the novels, especially Senilitd and La coscienza di Zeno. The two chapters dealing with the latter (respectively, on time and narration, and on psychoanalysis) are particularly fine. The third chapter looks at Don Juan figures, represented by the Antagonists, who all profess buccaneering attitudes towards women. Of these, Balli seems the most convincing instance. The protagonists emerge rather as would-be selfdeluding Don Juans, though it might have been rewarding to pursue Zeno furtherin this respect, given his avowed (and partly attested) promiscuous interest in all women but only with respect to specific physical features. Chapter 4 deals with 'sacred and profane love', bridging biography and the novels. The metabiographical dimension of Schachter's book leads consistently in the direction of aesthetic self-transcendence by the implied author as against the real-life author: 'the artist transcends the prejudices and limitations of the man, and the timelessness of his art transforms the dominant attitudes of his age' (p. 104). This is the salvation by the pen with which the book concludes, and implicitly goes beyond the merely individual redemption ofthe author to a potentially wider redemptive function through publication. This well-researched and well-produced volume, virtually free of typographical errors, and equipped with an excellent bibliography, represents an important addition to the 'ltalian Perspec? tives' series and adds to our understanding of both Svevo's life and his works, and of the relationship between the two. La Trobe University, Melbourne John Gatt-Rutter Eugenio Montale: The Poetry oftheLater Years. By Eanna 6 Ceallachain. Oxford: Legenda. 2001. xi+i99pp. ?29.50. ISBN 1-900755-45-9. How and to what extent does Montale's later poetry reveal important shifts in the poet's ideological perspectives? This is a guiding question in Eanna O Ceallachain's study, which is organized around dominant themes and poetic characters to be found in Montale's post-Bufera collections, Satura, Diario del 'yi e del 'j2, and Quaderno di quattro anni. In order to arrive at an answer, the book's author makes use of a combination of critical tools, including Romano Luperini's allegorical reading of Montale's verse and Angelo Marchese's semiological analyses of spatial indicators in the poetry, which in turn owe much to Lotman's structuralist investigations into spatial concepts. According to O Ceallachain, Montale is simultaneously engaged with and detached from historical reality; his most typical poetic alter ego as developed in the later col? lections is an isolated figure, removed from cultural, social, and historical events, yet deeply aware that he is none the less personally and culturally implicated in the world he 'aristocratically' disdains. A brief consideration of Montale's political stance, from the immediate post-war period, when he enthusiastically promoted his liberal ideals, to the 1950s and early 1960s, when he realized that the 'American' model of mass industrialization and consumerism had firmlytaken hold and cancelled any hopes of a traditional liberalism, paints the portrait of an increasingly disillusioned artist for whom the only hope for both culture and society is in individualistic and essentially isolationist integrity. This retreat from public engagement reflects what the critic Umberto Carpi argued in his 1971 book, Montale dopo ilfascismo (Padua: Liviana): the poet is 'ideologically static' and, in fact, both during and after Fascism he was guided by his 'elitist, bourgeois liberalism' that never really evolved into a political stance in keeping with the changing times (p. 6). What is missing from this analysis, however, is, in my view, some consideration of Montale's self-declared and virtually innate psychological (and perhaps metaphysical) sense of isolation and disjunction from the external world or 'reality', which is evident 480 Reviews from his earliest writings and revealed in many ways throughout his poetry and prose writing. His belief in the individual (as contrasted with the collectivity) and in the solitarynature ofartistic creation and the building ofculture is not only,perhaps not even, the result of an ideologically coherent and politically well-thought-out 'programme', but can be seen as credence of another order, which finds its roots in a combination of character, acquired convictions, and environment...