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ALBERTO CASADEI, Poetry and Fiction: A Necessary, Historically Verifiable, Combination

Much of the activities pertaining to the cognitive unconscious appear
to control the interaction of a human being with its environment: the
continuous outcomes of phylogenesis, procedural memories as well
as ontogenetic acquisitions become part of a set unmonitored by con-
sciousness. This dimension involves the vital Streben, the Goethian
18
“strain,” namely the drive to research, to investigate the world and
the self, the tension in acquiring all that is useful for survival. Howev-
er, as far as it is currently possible to claim, this dimension escapes the
asymmetrical logic and perhaps even the simple rational utilitarian-
ism, because in fact, for the continuation of life, any experience is in
principle useful, the joys and traumas, real desires and the altered ones
in dreams, etc. It is therefore not possible, at least for now, to organise
and arrange the cognitive unconscious in a neat fashion, although it
is likely that some of its manifestations match those traumatic ones
studied by Freud, or that some of its premises can be referred back to
biological archetypes, comparable with those suggested by Jung; and
of course the relationship with language, Lacan’s lalangue that ‘para-
sites’ consciousness, and reinterprets Saussure’s la langue, could also
be investigated (possibly without the vacuous esotericisms of the La-
canians). What is certain is that the cognitive unconscious interacts
with every aspect of individual corporeality, including the drive to
those manifestations of an artistic nature, without necessarily to have
to postulate a specific pathology.
For a long time, art largely aspired to master external reality,
which meant that it performed a mimetic function, manifesting itself
in different stylization modes that were, however, of a similar nature:
between the Lascaux artists, the Greek painters capable of painting
grapes that could deceive birds, and Italian or European Renaissance
portrait painters, there is a certain air of family resemblance. But there
was another artistic mode, which on the other hand considered exter-
nal reality only one part of the human Umwelt, and therefore adopted
symbolic expressions, which were at times quite obscure, and at other

18 For the concept of Streben, see Bruno Bauch, Goethe und die Philosophie
(Tübingen: Möhr, 1928), 30 ff.

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