Montale’s Animals

Abstract

This essay seeks to reconcile an anachronism: a reading of the work of Eugenio Montale in the light of contemporary posthumanism. A series of crucial questions will be considered. Does Montale let animals just be themselves, employing their image with an indifference whereby they speak for and of themselves? Do Montale’s animals become props for questions concerning humanity that Montale could not otherwise iterate? If or when Montale employs nonhuman animals as verbal conduits, does he perform them a disservice, or does he paradoxically show his dependence on them? This essay acknowledges that Montale is, at times, guilty of a poetic use of nonhuman animals that does not encompass their individuality or dignity. But more important, it argues that Montale consistently interrogates his own misuse of animals as species rather than as individuals and, in the process, develops a sensibility comparable with that of contemporary scholars of animality. It is this poetic interrogation that keeps Montale’s oeuvre from falling into what John Simons terms “trivial anthropomorphism” (119) and allows the poet to move toward what Donna Haraway might call proper “engagement” with animality.