THE NARRATION IN THE TOME OF THE ANTROPOCENE

THE NARRATION IN THE  TIME OF THE ANTROPOCENE 

Ecological footprint

If something distinguishes humans as a species, this something, I think, is our ability to experience the world through stories. A narrative is a social and educational practice that has always responded to multiple and complex functions: “remember” the sharing of collective experiences, from learning to pure entertainment. A vision that coincides in considering “nature” what is free from the contamination of human beings, who live in a completely different territory, that of “culture”.

Everything that is not human is therefore relegated to another sphere, an entity that is better observed from a certain distance. This distinction was in a sense productive for the arts, and especially for the narrative, our reading habits were formed there. Novels in which the human protagonists are in struggle with nature and on the other side scenarios of immeasurable power precisely for the fact of being pure and uncontaminated, free of any human trace.

But no contemporary writer can imagine that such landscapes still exist, return to those places we will be faced with a permafrost melting, declining animal population, withdrawal of ice, irregular snowfalls, rising temperatures and so on. Once introduced these strident expressions has the same effect of an invasive species in an uncontaminated ecosystem inevitably tearing the poetic fabric of the language that once allowed to evoke these unique scenarios.

In the age of the Antropocene it became impossible to maintain the fiction of a clear separation between what is natural and what is cultural: the two things today are inextricably intertwined. In a similar situation what can be the role of Homo Fictus, an animal that tells stories in a kind of sandbox game? From suffocating social narratives of marriage crises and a competitive race to personal fulfilment, we must (we inhabitants of the late Antropocene, just as our ancestors had) imagine, trespass and find something beyond the absolutism of the paradigm in force (be it liberalism, capitalism, consumerism, speciesism, scientism or any other type of -ism) so that a collapse does not occur.

I leave to Italo Calvino the way to give word, or something that comes very close, even to the wind, to rivers and rocks, or to whom and what human language does not have.

“Some might argue that the more the work tends to the multiplication of the possible, the further away from that uniqueness that is the self of the writer, the inner sincerity, the discovery of his own truth. On the contrary, I answer, who are we, who are each of us if not a combination of experiences, training, readings, imagination? But perhaps the question that is most important to me to give is another: maybe it was possible a work conceived outside the self, a work that would allow us to leave the limited perspective of an individual self, not only to get into other me similar to ours but to make speak what has no word, the bird that rests on the eaves, the tree in spring and the tree in autumn, the stone cement, the plastic…”

Pietro Panza