Verso la «grana incostruibile»: "Da Dietro il paesaggio a Pasque" di Stefano Agosti

This study is devoted to the analysis of Stefano Agosti’s second essay on Andrea Zanzotto’s poetry. Published in 1973 as the introduction to a key anthology of Zanzotto’s poems, Poesie (1951-1973), and later re-named Da Dietro il paesaggio a Pasque, this groundbreaking essay represents a milestone both in Agosti’s interpretation of Zanzotto’s work and in the later reception of the poet’s entire corpus. Da Dietro il paesaggio a Pasque is grounded in a phenomenological-stylistic approach, greatly indebted to Gianfranco Contini’s critical method. In particular, I identify several similarities between Agosti’s text and Contini’s Dagli Ossi alle Occasioni, published in 1938 as a review of the upcoming Le occasioni by Eugenio Montale. Indeed, Agosti shares with Contini an inclination to describe a poetic corpus as a conic section, a curve which is teleologically oriented towards a peak of maturity. In my paper I carry out a close reading of Agosti’s introduction, with a view to disclosing his methodological assumptions and argumentative strategies, such as the frequent adoption of a conjunctive logic, in which the opposites melt without losing their character. This analysis shows that Agosti was heavily affected by Lacanian, structuralist and deconstructionist theories. In addition, I highlight some similarities between the depiction of Zanzotto’s poetry as provided in the essay and Agosti’s own ideas about the essence of poetic language. Lastly, I compare Da Dietro il paesaggio a Pasque with the 1970 essay Dérivable et indérivable, written by the French philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux and inspired by a vexed question in Mathematics. Zanzotto told Agosti privately that he had read Goux’s essay in «Critique», and had been greatly impressed by it. Following this exchange, Agosti relied on Goux’s theories in his interpretation of Zanzotto’s most experimental poetry: poems from La Beltà and Pasque, indeed, are comparable to the “continuous nowhere differentiable functions”, the mathematical entities which triggered Goux’s broad confutation of linear thought. In those curves, in fact, any point is at the same time separated from and connected to the next. From a textual viewpoint, thus, Zanzotto truly destroys conventional cohesion, and replaces it with new rules, often based on phonetic and syntactical repetitions