The history of Italian socialism has been closely intertwined with the material universe of the printed word. After the crushing of the Paris Commune, the first proponents of Marx’s thought were often typographers in the most peripheral towns of the peninsula, engaged in producing semi-clandestine editions of The Communist Manifesto. Accustomed to the discipline and drudgery of manual labour, they read books and could handle complex ideas, and were thus a sort of bridge between the world of the proletariat and that of the intelligentsia, between praxis and abstract thought. In the late 1890s, the Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola addressed one of his most eloquent political speeches to a branch of Socialist Party compositors in Rome. In the 1930s, before becoming one of the most celebrated writers of his generation and, for a while, a pci sympathizer, the Sicilian Elio Vittorini worked as a newspaper proofreader in Florence. His English—he became a great translator—was gleaned from books supplied by a colleague who had been to America, which is why he never learned the correct pronunciation; when he finally met Hemingway, his literary model, Vittorini had to resign himself to communicating by means of skimpy written notes. In the next generation, a proofreader for La Nuova Italia, a small Florentine publishing house, would emerge as one of the great Marxist theorists of the later 20th century: Sebastiano Timpanaro.
It is not easy to summarize Timpanaro’s contribution. Born in 1923, in Parma—his father was a physicist, his mother a historian of Ancient Greek science; both were socialists—he grew up in Pisa under the shadow of fascism and studied classical philology under the renowned Giorgio Pasquali at the University of Florence. Timpanaro himself emerged as an outstanding philologist, dedicated to reconstituting Ancient Greek and Roman texts from the flawed and fragmentary copies that survived. Yet rather than follow the usual course of producing a new critical edition of, say, Virgil, he devoted himself to the minutiae of ‘punctual research’, tackling particularly knotty problems of textual corruption, combined with pathbreaking studies of the history and theory of philology. Due to a severe form of agoraphobia, however, this world-class scholar never held a university position but—after a youthful stint teaching Italian history to vocational students—earned his living as a proof corrector. (This was not mere drudgery; La Nuova Italia published important journals like the liberal-socialist Il Ponte, and its catalogue was especially strong in philosophy and classical studies, with books by Ernst Bloch, Dewey, Vincenzo Di Benedetto, Heidegger, Heller, Hyppolite, Lukács, among many others, and, in 1968, the first Italian translation of Marx’s Grundrisse.) At the same time, Timpanaro was a committed militant of the left, ‘posting fliers, participating in meetings and river-length discussions’ as he wrote to a friend, first in the radical wing of the Italian Socialist Party, which he joined after the Liberation, and then the more militant psiup and its successors; yet he was resolutely opposed to left voluntarism and at odds with most of the radical enthusiasms of his day.
Timpanaro made his name as an international scholar with The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method (1963), which overturned the history of classical studies by excavating the work of the Renaissance and Enlightenment precursors to Karl Lachmann (1793–1851), hitherto regarded as modern philology’s founding father. But his interventions ranged far beyond his specialist field. On Materialism (1970) was an impassioned defence of Marxist materialism against idealistic infiltrations, from Hegel to Croce—and his nefarious liberal-idealist influence on Gramsci—to structuralism and psychoanalysis; this was not the sort of book one would expect from a Virgil scholar. The Freudian Slip (1974), a spirited assault on one of the main tenets of psychoanalysis, might seem even further from a philologist’s typical interests. In this period, the 1970s and 80s, Timpanaro was also an important contributor to nlr, where his critique of Freud was discussed by Charles Rycroft, Jacqueline Rose, Juliet Mitchell and Peter Wollen, while Raymond Williams engaged with On Materialism’s conceptions of history and nature.
Timpanaro doubted there could be a way to bring all his research fields and methodologies together, in particular the philologist’s attention to detail and the philosopher’s eye for the big picture. Yet this is just what Tom Geue, a young Australian classicist, has set out to do in Major Corrections, an ambitious intellectual biography that draws on intensive study of Timpanaro’s papers at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa—including over 10,000 letters to colleagues, friends and comrades—to provide a cohesive well-rounded portrait of this distinctive figure. As Geue disarmingly explains, he was originally attracted to Timpanaro by the obvious synergy of their interests—‘both of us trained in classical philology, both with ties and sympathies to the radical left’—after being introduced to The Freudian Slip by his undergraduate classics supervisor at the University of Sydney. But the more he read of Timpanaro’s work, the more he came to appreciate what a dim view the Italian would have taken of his own contributions to the study of Latin literature, infused as they were by an intellectual tradition basking in ‘the long afterglow of poststructuralism’, not least at Cambridge, where Geue studied for his doctoral thesis on Juvenal’s satires: ‘If the subject of this book had been able to appoint his intellectual synthesizer and exegete, one thing is for sure: he would not have chosen me.’
Nevertheless, Major Corrections is motivated by a warm theoretical interest in Timpanaro’s thought, sensitive to its distinctive combination of philological punctiliousness, radical commitment and historical sweep. Geue’s framing hypothesis is that Timpanaro’s philological formation not only supplied a set of literary-historical techniques that could be applied to broader cultural and political planes, but also informed a life-long social and intellectual worldview: upholding the principles of fidelity to the truth, attention to gainsayers and retrospective justice for thinkers overlooked and ignored; the Ancients, Timpanaro used to say, have a right to be understood. Major Corrections unwinds as a demonstration, testing and nuancing this thesis by reviewing, one by one, the many areas in which Timpanaro left an important mark. The order is more or less chronological, yet in fact proceeds thematically. After an introductory section on family and politics, Geue maps out the field of classical philology in which Timpanaro was formed. He supplies an admirably lucid reconstruction of the major theoretical debates that have animated it, an indispensable backdrop for understanding Timpanaro’s personal evolution as well as his more technical contributions. Major Corrections traces the history of philology back to the endeavours of Hellenistic scholars in the 3rd century bc who set about codifying and correcting the often poor-quality copies of classical texts that had come down to them, initiating the techniques of recension—collating the surviving transcripts of a given work—and emendation: identifying the errors of earlier copiers and hazarding corrections.
As Geue shows, Timpanaro was highly sensitive to the fragile, perishable nature of these materials, always conscious of the enormous quantity of ‘lost works’ that had vanished for good and the corresponding value of whatever had survived. His undergraduate thesis with Pasquali at Florence was a study of Ennius, the first major Roman poet, whose work comes down to us solely in the form of quotations by later writers. (An immense amount of scholarship went into Timpanaro’s claim that Ennius’s reference to ‘the tears of Homer’, cited by Lucretius in On the Nature of the Universe, should be understood as tears of joy, rather than pain and grief.) His horror of bold re-writers of classical texts—especially the imperial English, from Richard Bentley to A. E. Housman, who claimed the licence of their personal poetic inspiration—was matched by his immense respect for the detailed work of earlier toilers in the field, from the forgotten scholars of late antiquity who had sought to preserve the truest possible version of Virgil’s Aeneid. Collected in his Contributi di filogia (1978) and Nuovi contributi di filogia (1994), Timpanaro’s works of ‘punctual exegesis’ on such key interpretive problems as Virgil’s ut vidi ut perii, in the Eighth Eclogue—the twelve-year-old’s first swoon into love—or the etymology of ilicet, provide for Geue ‘a masterclass’ of scholarly restitution.
Timpanaro was no less sceptical of the blanket philological classifications introduced by Lachmann’s ‘stemmatic’ method, from the 1830s, and hardened into scientistic dogma by Paul Maas’s Textkritik (1927). This involved reconstructing the known copies of a given text as a ‘family tree’, with the ur-text at the top, embodying the assumption that earlier was always better. This method tended to occlude the ‘indirect legacy’ of survival through quotation in lateral texts and commentaries, which Timpanaro came to value highly in his work on Virgil; it privileged a priori categories over the case-by-case approach that he had learned from Pasquali, which involved evaluating all possible forms of evidence. But the canonization of Lachmann by Maas and others also established a narrative of invention and ownership for the Humboldt professor, eliminating from the picture the earlier philologists on whose labours Lachmann had built. One of Timpanaro’s main motives in The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, Geue argues, was the desire to right that historical injustice.