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

3.3. If we want to move on to the opposite end of a scale that accounts
for every aspect of the expressible in literature, we must consider the
extreme of clarity, that is to say, the perfect match between words and
things, the end of a spectrum which is de facto una ainable, just like
its opposite. In this case the generating factor is eventfulness, namely
the drive to represent the ‘event’s completeness,’ having caught an as-
pect of life that constitutes a turn in the space-time continuum, but
above all a phenomenon worth recording for posterity because it has
somehow touched the existence of a human being in their environ-
ment. The tendency is to show that ‘something has happened,’ and
this narrative micro-event becomes a sense nucleus which deserves to
be narrated in the clearest possible manner, namely by coining words
to refer to it, as well as stylistic features to capture it effectively, in in-
creasing degrees of complexity.
On storytelling as a primum - even a founding one - of the indi-
vidual self, numerous scholars and intellectuals have offered different
interpretations, and in some cases also criticism which deserves a en-
24
tion. If nowadays we take for granted this human capability, it is only
because its long tradition makes us perceive as natural a biological-
cultural development which has in fact been acquired and then hand-
ed down. As a ma er of fact, an infant, who is soon able to segment
micro-phenomena, is not immediately able to perceive the scope of an
event, nor its potential developments; this is something s/he gradually
learns to recognize thanks to the combination of very different types
of competence. The very notion of ‘event’ is highly stratified and
25
takes on very different connotations depending on the relevant sphere
of action (physical, philosophical, neuro-phenomenological etc.). Let
us try to develop the argument further.

1996), and Richard R. Buxton, ed., From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Devel-
opment of Greek Thought (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
24 See at least Marie-Laure Ryan, “Narratology and Cognitive Science. A
Problematic Relation,” Style 44, no. 4 (2010): 469-95.
25 See at least Paul L. Nunez, Brain, Mind, and the Structure of Reality (Oxford-
New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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