Page 120 - Costellazioni 5

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

fulness, if one takes it to mean the tension that underlies the need to
fully grasp a sense nucleus, this has extended, over time, well beyond
the physical reality, and now includes inner phenomena, such as the
unconscious etc.: from this perspective we can interpret the tendency,
typical of many great writers (Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, etc.) to
create words and phrases, as the need to express what was not encod-
ed in existing vocabulary, which, after the Romantic turn, became a
tendency towards expressionism or inter-lingual mixing to re-create
events. However, it is not only a question of studying the linguistic
aspects; rather, it is a ma er of be er recognizing the biological and
anthropological implications. It can be noted that, in theory, obscurity
and eventfulness, on the basis of our discussion so far, should not be
limited to poetry and narrative respectively, although it is true that,
historically, the former has been the macro-genre in which obscurisme
has generally found its home, while the la er provided the most suit-
able medium to relate events, in a nuclear form first and then aggre-
gated in increasingly complex ways.
It is, however, crucial that the style in which an unusual mean-
ing is created and made open to interpretation be recognisable; alter-
natively it is the importance of an event to be shared that has to be em-
phasized. From the simplest rhetorical devices to the most exquisite
manneristic refinements, literature has typically focused on enhancing
or clustering sense nuclei to be conveyed, in order to continue to at-
tract a ention and interpretation when the style in use had became
too obvious. It will be a ma er of future research to identify specific
biological or cognitive gradation, and to explain it historically. 29

29 For a first analysis, see Casadei, Biologia, especially chapters 2 and 3, espe-
cially 71-8 and 109-14. I would like to sincerely thank Monica Boria for the
translation of this essay, and Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski for her careful
review.

119