Urszenen: Dream Logic and Myth in the First Page of Leopardi’s Zibaldone

Abstract

This essay analyses the first three fragments of Leopardi’s Zibaldone — a brief description in prose, a poetic sketch, and a paraphrase from Avianus’s fable De nutrice et infanti — arguing that their implicit and subterranean connections stage a superimposition between ‘episodic’ and ‘semantic’ memories. By questioning traditionally established readings of the text, it asserts an inner relationship of the fable with the first two fragments, through which mythical reminiscences connected to Hecate resonate behind an apparently innocent nocturnal idyll. By comparing Leopardi’s text with Freud’s case of the ‘Wolf Man’, as well as with the ambiguities undergone by the notion of ‘primal scene’ (Urszene) in his intellectual development, the essay highlights the interweaving of both phylogenetic and ontogenetic spheres in Leopardi’s works, thus attempting an analysis of the relationship between rationalism and myth within post-Enlightenment modernity.