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

tual referents. Obscurity, on the other hand, postulates the existence of
a reality which is ‘other’, unknowable or only partially knowable
through the usual linguistic means, but is instead tangible (i.e., repro-
ducible) precisely because of the hermeneutic effort imposed by the sev-
erance with any shared and rational symbolic link. This can lead to a
communication vacuum, such as that practiced mostly (but not only)
21
by the various forms of surrealism in the twentieth century. After all,
from a cognitive point of view, obscurity is a potential generator of mean-
ing, because the cancellation of a rationalized and linguistically well-
defined reality may lead to the emergence of infinite possible worlds,
and divergent cognitive processes that render the philosophical equa-
tion reality = rationality = truth completely unfounded.
For the time being, we can at any rate assert that obscurity, on a
biological-cognitive level, corresponds to the expression of an often
unconscious intense activity which still involves the Streben towards
reality, but without it being reducible to rationally encoded events
which can be scientifically ascertained. This explains, in particular, the
resurfacing of those aspects linked to self-preservation, fear manage-
ment, and control over potentially fatal risks, which can never be re-
duced to the mere known, because they recur in different forms and
with completely unknown characteristics. Literary obscurity can derive
22
from magical-religious rituals, but it always shifts the boundaries be-
tween the known and the unknown, and those boundaries are stable
only on the basis of social and cultural conventions in place among a
certain human community. When those conventions are rejected, the
human beings and their environment revert, as in various Greek clas-
sics, to deinòn, something mysterious and terrible: literary obscurity
(not to mention the artistic variations) is an essential component for
research on the founding nuclei of reality, which are intercepted
through the cognitive unconscious and not through rationality. 23

21 See Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson, eds., Surrealism: Key
Concepts (London-New York: Routledge, 2016), 131-42.
22 For a historical survey of this transformation, see Casadei, Biologia, 53-6.
23 On these issues, see Walter Burkert, Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology
in Early Religions (Cambridge, Massachussets: Harvard University Press,

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