Page 15 - Costellazioni 5

HANNAH CHAPELLE WOJCIEHOWSKI, VITTORIO GALLESE, Introduction

finitude by creating the parallel world of narrative fiction. In the ‘vir-
tual’ world of the tale, we can offset our inadequacy and keep at bay
the anxiety that comes to us through a ‘proxy’ life, such as the one of-
fered by the literary characters with which we identify from time to
time when reading a novel.
According to Cometa, the ability to integrate ideas and con-
cepts belonging to different cognitive domains, the ability to ‘read
the other’s mind,’ and finally to empathize with others constitute the
three most promising research lines that shed light on the origin of
our propensity to tell stories. The strict boundary between the sci-
ences of the spirit and the sciences of nature, writes Cometa, has char-
acterized for centuries the critical and philosophical discussions of
art and literature. Poets, however, have never believed in this divi-
sion. The world we live in, our ecological niche, is predominantly a
bio-poetic niche, inconceivable without the stories that are the basis of
myth, rites, in one word, the basis of the culture that distinguishes
us. We need to hear and then create stories, because — simply put —
if there were no stories, we would not know how to exist; we would
not have consciousness of ourselves. It is no coincidence that the first
years of our lives are largely unknown to us, lost in the fog of the
oblivion resulting from the lack of words needed to translate the
many small stories that characterize our first steps into the world of
life. As the eminent American writer, poet and essayist Siri Hustvedt
had noted, “Writing fiction is like remembering what never hap-
pened.” 8

Fi ingly, we open our special issue of Costellazioni with an essay by
Siri Hustvedt. Wri en in a reflective and lyrical prose style reminiscent
of the essays of Michel de Montaigne, Hustvedt’s “Pace, Space, and
the Other in the Making of Fiction” tackles one of the most perplexing
and intriguing features of human culture — namely, the drive to tell

8 Siri Hustvedt, “Yonder,” in A Plea for Eros (New York: Picador, 2006), 1-44:
p. 41.

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