THE ADVENTURES OF ODRADEK. NATURE, CIVILIZATION, SWEEPING

Abstract

To live in the presently disfigured landscape – where nature is but a fragment of an ancient beauty and richness – means entering the era of allegory tout court, within which human existence is forced to dwell in a lunar landscape remindful of those described by P.K. Dick, locus of rotting refuse, where everything is swiftly reduced to “kipple” and “gubble”.  Yet, even though a mere fragment, an allegory of its former self, nature still retains a historical dimension: that dimension of time to which the social universe – turned into an obtuse self-perpetuating myth – has given up in the name of the “always identical and always new” and of the irrevocability of a particular historico-contigent outcome. Yet, even a disfigured nature can be the source of a concrete utopia of reintegration, by virtue of its historical dimension. In other words, both the wastes of nature and the dreams of salvation are not exempt from an otherwise unsuspected mutual solidarity: being interconnected, they push imagination in remote and long forgotten lands where a happiness dwells whose name – now unsayable in history – is the regained Eden.