Disegni contro la morte. Per una fenomenologia del desiderio nella narrativa metamoderna

The essay explores the interaction between a semiotic push forward (an-ticipation) and a semiotic push backward (retrospection) active both in coding and in decoding the narrative text. The narrator builds the story as a function of an ending the more desirable the longer deferred and the fuller able to resolve the story. The reader goes through the story desiring to know how it ends and imagining it resolved on the basis of the ending he/she is able to suppose thanks to the text and his/her encyclopedia. This double push calls on the joint desire to run to the end and to stand in the middle, to conclude and repeat, to release and relate, which according to Peter Brooks can be clarified using to the Freudian theory of drives. The ambiva-lence of the experience of the narrator and reader is clear: on the one hand he/she wishes to appropriate the story, striving to achieve the construction of meanings in ever greater unity, totalizing his/her experiences in time and grasping past, present and future in more and more significant forms, on the other hand he/she wants to get rid of the story, reaching the moment of full realization (and total exhaustion) of the production of meaning, because the meaning is defined only at the end and the narrative desire is basically a desire of the end. Desire of construction and desire of dissolution are the two sides of the two-faced Janus inhabited by the narrator and reader: the propulsive push to (re)build the diegetic world and his/her own existence within it coexists with the dissolutive push to reach the extreme limit of that world and to let it go, ending even his/her own existence within it.