β€œBeyond the Real”: for a Metaphysics of the Fantastic

That of narration was born as a profoundly sacred practice: in narrating and narrating the world, man continually recreates and re-establishes it, since β€œhe no longer lives in a purely physical universe, but in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art and religion are part of this universe, they are the threads that make up the symbolic fabric, the tangled web of human experience ". The narration thus soon becomes the key to the innumerable doors of the Mystery, to a relationship between different yet authentically real dimensions.


di Claudia Stanghellini
cover: Marco Sabbatani ("Beyond the real", GoG Edizioni, Rome 2020)

Lately we hear often about Homo Economicus e Homo Consume, almost never of homo narrator. Yet, according to the well-known paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, this would be the most suitable formula to express the anthropological structure of the human being. Even the historian Yuval Noah Harari is of this opinion and identifies in linguistic development unique which characterized the evolution of Sapiens between 70.000 to 30.000 years ago (Cognitive Revolution) the discriminating factor that allowed this species to prevail over all the others then existing [1]:

Β«Every animal knows how to communicate […] only Sapiens are able to talk about whole categories of things they have never seen, touched or smelled. Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Previously many animals and many human species were able to say: β€œLook out! A lion!". Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say: "The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe" Β»

In these few lines, Harari has the merit of providing us with another interesting suggestion, namely that the narrative character of our anthropological structure is intertwined with the religious one. In fact, that of narration was born as a profoundly sacred practice - or sense, if we want to draw on a milieu with a more contemporary taste. At the very moment of his birth, every human being, without exception, is clothed in the tradition that preceded him and he discovers he is part of a community and its collective narrative. In narrating and narrating the world, he continually recreates and re-establishes it, since Β«he no longer lives in a purely physical universe, but in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art and religion are part of this universe, they are the threads that make up the symbolic fabric, the tangled web of human experience " [2].

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Sascha Schneider, "The Astral Man", 1906

The narration thus soon becomes the key to the innumerable doors of the Mystery, to a relationship between different dimensions and yet authentically Really. This is the richness of the human being: the inability to be satisfied with the frayed shreds of the material and a constant longing for the heights, towards that celestial vault that whispers secrets; the dance of language that widens the lungs of thought, of Logos, and gives life to the myth: the story that becomes a sacred rite and rite, through which notions and beliefs take color and the otherness - powerful and dark - of Nature is humanized and mediates the relationship with the Transcendent.

How distant can these concepts sound if measured against the secularization of modernity? If measured in a world, the western one, in which the thrill of wonderful has it flattened itself on the sleight of hand of technological innovation? He writes Paul ricoeur [3]:

Β«Oblivion of hierophanies, oblivion of the Signs of the Sacred, loss of man himself as belonging to the Sacred. This oblivion, we know, is the counterpart of the grandiose task of feeding men, of satisfying needs, subjugating nature through a planetary technique. It is the obscure recognition of this oblivion that pushes us and incites us to restore integral language [...] We are therefore not animated by the regret of the sunken Atlantides, but by the hope of recreating the language. Β»

And animated precisely by this hope, there have been men in the last century who have not feared to head for the remote regions on the borders of the Real, crossing inaccessible and mysterious waters, in order to give life again to a language with which the Myth could finally return to express themselves. Brave captains like Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Clark Ashton Smith, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and Gustav Meyrink, which rightfully find citizenship in the volume Beyond the Real, edited by Lorenzo Pennacchi and published by GOG edizioni.

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Alessandro Sicioldr, β€œLunar Idolsβ€œ, 2019

In a historical moment in which the myth, in its sacredness, it has been usurped by the many fragmented myths that dot our media and advertising galaxies; in which the great founding narratives have given way to the ideologies of progress and technology; where successful entrepreneurs and corporations have taken the place of heroes and founding fathers, this fantastic 900th century literary portrait gallery is a real breath of fresh air and is as outdated as the work of the characters it they live. This can be understood very well through the careful examination conducted by Adriano Monti Buzzetti in his afterword to the text, which traces the history of modern fantastic fiction, framing it punctually from the historical point of view.

With the advent of the Scientific Revolution, man progressively sees the Fall of some of the great Western myths: the planet Earth loses its centrality and is relegated to the peripheries of the universe; the search for truth from an epistemological enterprise sees itself downgraded to intellectual ambitions; the head of the monarchy by divine right, guarantor of order and social peace, falls under the merciless ax of revolutions; and with the discovery of the unconscious man finds himself no longer master even at his home. In this way, the modern man experiences Zeno's paradox in spite of himself like a hellish punishment: the closer he comes to revealing the secrets of Nature, the more this escapes him by making fun of him and revealing his microscopic misery.

In the face of the collapse of the great narratives, there were two possibilities of reaction: the relaunch for a grandiose re-foundation or the defeatist renunciation of any type of (transcendent) metaphysics. Man's impotence in the face of spatial infinity and temporal eternity lead him to move in the direction of an impoverishment of reality tout court. For the first time in history, a clear and imperative dividing line is drawn between what should be real and what is assumed not to be. This means that from that moment on, for all those who do not want to submit to such an arbitrary metaphysical imperative, it is necessary to strive for an overcoming of reality itself, rather than a return to one's origins. [4]:

Β«[…] The general investigation of the absolute receded, while those particular ones on the single empirically verifiable problems advanced boldly on the stage of knowledge. All this just as, for a happy speculative paradox, the irrepressible aspiration to go beyond the Pillars of Hercules of a precoded objectivity [...] was resurrecting in the bed of a new awareness [...] the lost universe of legends changes definitively address: [...] place of the mind and heart to be sought precisely "beyond" that Real that has ousted it Β»

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Nikolaos Gyzis, β€œBehold the Celestial Bridegroom Cometh,” 1895

But those who do not seek that Beyond deny it with violence and without appeal, pouring out their energies in a desperate attempt to control and dominate those few fragments of monolithic certainty that they hardly keep in their tight palms: it is the illusion of power conferred. from the technique. With the manipulation and, sometimes, the subversion of the order of Nature, his sacredness is violated and casually thrown between the white and aseptic walls of any laboratory, with the air impregnated with disinfectants and latex. We are under the illusion of having annihilated the Mystery between test tubes and syringes, but the truth is that with its sloppy denial we lose that necessary relationship with the Elsewhere that is inherent in the anthropological DNA of the human being; and in an attempt to exorcise everything that cannot be screened by the objectivity of positivism and the scientific method, humanity has prepared itself for an encounter with even more terrible monsters [5]:

"Poet of the post-Copernican world, mythographer of atoms and molecules, Howard Phillips Lovecraft he was among the few who managed to face the abyss opened by the dissolution of reality brought about by modernity. Perhaps the reason for his success lies precisely here, it was said, which seems not to diminish with the passing of the decades, waiting for the Great Cthulhu to return to claim the part of him, when the stars are finally aligned. Β»

Lovecraft's Great Cthulhu, presented to us by the skilled pen of Andrea Scarabelli, it is none other than the disowned panic Mystery which presents itself to modern man without his knowledge of the language to relate to it. It is the shadow of the irrational that rises behind the scientist light, ready to overwhelm and devour him. Without mediation with the dark forces of the Universe, the modern scientist who denies them, is faced with the worst of nightmares: the sheer terror of the mighty unknown, whose existence he would never have suspected and which stands beyond any vain attempt to control; a terror that he himself is guilty of unleashing whenever, through ignorance of the Sacred, he awakens Cthulhu and approaches, with his actions, the end of the known world.

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This bitter and lucid awareness also cuts through the tales of Clark ashton smith, friend and correspondent of Lovecraft, of which Francis La Manno highlights the strongly decadent spirit [6]:

Β«The arrogant man who falls into the hybris and wants to place himself in open conflict with Fate will only succumb miserably. Obviously, this makes Malygris fall into the category of the decadent hero who: β€œhe has neither actual possession nor the land, even if he deludes himself to draw roots first from any other discoveries; nor of heaven, even if he pinned his spirit seer on it. He finds something of the primeval matter, feeling or representing himself brute in the power of instinctive forces; and likewise he believes or pretends to be able to pass through to the superior species, of the angel, to assume divine substance and prerogative " Β»

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Louise Janin, β€œAtlantis, or the Coronation of Water and Fire”, 1951

A tragic end without appeal for the technocratic vanity of modern man? Not for J. R. R. Tolkien, which sinks its mythopoeic vision into the fertile soil of a profound Catholicism [7]:

β€œEven in the worst place in the world, one can continue to hope, because in the beginning things were created good, evil only contaminated them. The mission of Frodo and his companions is an expedition in which politics, aesthetics and ecology meet, where beauty and good coincide Β»

In Tolkenian arboreal eschatology, the living force of creation is a continuous source of renewal and protagonist, in the role of the Ent, in the fight against that gray death machine that is Isengard. Nature, as it well explains Lorenzo Pennacchi, is therefore not man's enemy, but his ally, provided that he directs his ethical compass in the direction of a holistic ecological harmony, abandoning the cold logic of control and oppression.

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From here on, Beyond the Real continues with the meticulous and thorough investigation of Marco Maculotti, which analyzes the mythopoiesis of horror in Arthur Machen, while Robert Cecchetti immerses us in the deeply dreamlike gazes of Gustav Meyrink, in constant dialogue with esoteric authors of the caliber of Jung and GuΓ©non.

OVER_COP_DEF

In conclusion, between disclosure and strictly scientific study, Beyond the Real is presented as an extremely balanced text in form, but daring in content, in which still little known, yet extraordinary figures, of the caliber of Smith, Machen and Meyrink find their place alongside those greats who have already obtained their due recognition . A happy alliance, also testified by the rich correspondence exchanges between some of these authors, widely valued here and which makes Beyond the Real, despite the different authorial personality of the collaborators who participated in its realization, a strongly unitary work with a choral spirit. Particularly appreciable, from the point of view of the method, is the choice of favoring continuous dialogue with the authors treated, in a narrative dialectic that is anything but self-referential. Ultimately, one of the great merits of this book is continually taking a step backwards, the tireless invitation to the reader to travel into the worlds of those "demiurges of the Imaginary", to put it mildly Jacques Bergier, which claim, as with any literary work, that they want to speak for themselves.

Plurality in style, univocity in intent: a return to what lies Beyond the Real, not as a delusion or aesthetic hallucination, but as a rational need to re-establish an Aristotelian conception of being (to on) which is said in many ways, that it extends its arms to the great excluded from modern univocalism, relegated to the ultimate peripheries of thought [8]:

Β« Perhaps you think this is all an absurd oddity. Well, it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what it meant to lift the veil. They called him see the god Pan. Β»

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Gustave Moreau, "Pan" (detail of "Jupiter and Semele", 1895

Note:

[1] YN Harari, Sapiens. From animals to gods, Bompiani, Milan 2019, pp. 31 ff.

[2] E. Cassirer, Essay on man. Introduction to a philosophy of culture, Mimesis Edizioni, Milan 2011, p. 47.

[3] P. Ricoeur, The symbol gives one to think, Morcelliana, Brescia 2018, pp. 8 ff.

[4] Adriano Monti Buzzetti Beyond the Real: Fantastic literature between magic and modernity, pp. 191 ff.

[5] Andrea Scarabelli, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Argonaut from Elsewhere, P. 43.

[6] Francis La Manno, Clark Ashton Smith and decadence, P. 65.

[7] Lorenzo Pennacchi, JRR Tolkien's ecological vision, P. 96.

[8] Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan in Marco Maculotti, The Fair Ones, Atavism and 'Protoplasmic Regression': Arthur Machen's Panic Mythopoiesis, P. 121.


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