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

times similar to oneiric compositions: for example, you can find this
blending in the famous episode of the fight between Gilgamesh and
19
the Bull of Heaven. This is the realm of the sacred and religious scrip-
tures, of the hermeneutics of signs, oracular aphorisms etc., which
often blend with other art forms. Instances are provided by votive
paintings, the great Egyptian art, or the pre-Socratic religious and
philosophical poetry, and others. In both cases it is not necessary to
presume the existence of conditions of a psychoanalytic nature: the
Streben resulting from the cognitive unconscious veers towards either
an “evenemental” (i.e., “event-based”) or a fantastic interpretation of the
world. In the la er case, the unconscious continues to seek a meaning
that is compatible with the many inner signs perceived by the self
through dreams as well as free association of ideas, derived from jus-
tified or unjustified fears, phobias, etc.

3.2. We have thus entered the territory pertaining to obscurity, by which
we mean the inability to come to an agreed paraphrase of a literary text,
although, of course, obscurity is theoretically to be found in any type of
text. Historically, this phenomenon has come to the fore quite early on,
20
at least since Plato’s Ion, and generally, obscurity is taken to signal an
event that requires an extra effort of interpretation, one that is greater
than standard accepted practices in a given environment: obscurity has
been included among the potential suitable to generate specific a rac-
tion and a ention, which are cognitively important to increase knowl-
edge. However, this perspective appears insufficient. In effect, obscurity
concerns not only the form of expression but also the substance of the
content, because it tends to reduce or completely erase the usual refer-
entiality. In other words, obscurity alters the communication loop based
on the semiotic-semantic relationship between language and reality; this
relationship takes for granted (while of course it is not) that the la er
constitutes an una ainable limit and that we can only speak of concep-

19 Old Babylonian Version, 49.
20 For a general overview see Päivi Mehtonen, ed., Illuminating Darkness. Ap-
proaches to Obscurity and Nothingness in Literature (Helsinki: Finnish Academy
of Science and Le ers, 2007).

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