Il volo del tempo Strategie satiresche e tecnica allegorica in alcuni episodi dei Paralipomeni

The essay proposes a reading of some excerpts of the Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia, one of Leopardi’s few eminently diegetic works, in which he experiments with rhetorical and figural solutions that dramatise arguments from the philosophy of nature, such as the critique of anthropocentrism and its nihilistic outcome. The poem presents a remarkable – and worthy of analysis – treatment of the supernatural, of the fantastic. In the anabasis, the space-time journey of Leccafondi and Dedalo, and in the catabasis, Leccafondi’s descent ad inferos, the anguish over the peripherality of the human in the flux of eras is figuratively exteriorize. The anabasis is paradoxically represented through the result of the technical progress, which would soon become the emblem of man’s dominion over nature: flight. The representation of catabasis, on the other hand, is manipulated through comical devices, as well as the supernatural. The mythologema of Hades is saturated with a multitude of zoomorphic actors who seem to annul, in the unanimous caducity of bodies, the vacuity of historical conflicts, even if these conflicts are partly reminiscent of the Neapolitan uprisings of the 1820s and 1830s.