Page 119 - Costellazioni 5

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

and the language that must be able to express it. In different languages,
the way to communicate an event can be very different; for example it
can be syncretic or discrete, declaratory or narrativized, but there exists
a shared zero-degree position, which we can regard as a ma er of ‘uni-
versal’ content, or at least anthropologically foundational. Literature
starts off from this original material but then aims to make it ‘true,’ to
secure the relationship between words and things through stylization:
if one were to simply say “the King is dead,” then one would remain
firmly in the domain of communication. But if one were to read that,
like a bull, “Gilgamesh is dead and never again will he stand up,” the
text, thanks to its stylized rhythmic isochrony, the anaphoric paral-
lelism and the use of a simile, is asking the reader to believe in the truth
of this statement, which is comparable to an inescapable and phenom-
enal truth: a dead bull can no longer rise; while I may not know who
Gilgamesh is, I am expected to believe that he too is dead and can no
28
longer rise. The completeness of the event, that is to say the sense nu-
cleus identified and to be conveyed, is chiefly achieved through styl-
ization rather than merely by enunciation; and formalization increases
its effectiveness in a racting and thus in sharing.

4. A brief conclusion and a work program

Obscurity and eventfulness thus constitute two limits and at the same
time two generators of the expressible in literary works. It is impossi-
ble to list all the forms in which these potentialities present themselves,
because historically they vary, especially in relation to the scientific
knowledge of the world available at a given time. For example, al-
though there were harbingers and precursors, it was only with the
symbolists and the avant-gardes that the range of obscurity forms was
substantially widened in all the arts. Since the beginnings of Roman-
ticism, this broadening took place in the wake of a huge expansion of
rationalistic ‘certainties’ provided by the Enlightenment. As for event-

28 For a stylistic analysis, see George, The Babylonian Epic, vol. 1, 431 ff.

118