"Encounters"

In a wartime station waiting-room a man and a woman, each married and leading a mediocre but quiet middle-class existence, meet by chance, fall in love, then leave each other for ever. This is the plot of David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945), a legendary film built entirely on the atmosphere and emotions of an accidental meeting. A minor masterpiece of the cinema, it offers an apt introduction to the theme of the third edition of Synapsis: "Incontri/Encounters".

The interpersonal encounter has always played an essential role in Western culture, both as an anthropological and as a literary phenomenon. A crucial moment in our knowledge of others and of our selves, it took on quasi magic or divine connotations (especially in the world before letters, telephones, faxes and e-mail). The course of an individual's life depends entirely on planned or fortuitous encounters: with an oracle or a divinity, with friends or mentors, with the loved-one, with patterns of perfection or with "bad company". The encounter is thus related to the journey (the real journey in quest of others, the inner journey in search of the self) and to dialogue, that minimal yet most intricate form of confrontation with the other-be it the Socratic dialogue or the interaction between psycho-analyst and patient.

Ever since its inception our literary culture has recognised the fundamental importance of the encounter. The Old Testament portrays the course of human history through a series of epiphanies in which the divinity encounters man, defining the latter's rights and delimiting his desires: a god appears to the chosen, reveals his laws, and marks out the destiny of his people and humanity at large. The Odyssey depicts Ulysses' voyage towards Ithaca as a sequence of dramatic encounters or clashes with men and gods, thereby generating the paradigm of the adventure in all its forms: the adventure of Chivalry as choice and as destiny; the haphazard and chaotic adventures of picaro and vagabond; and, of course, the adventure of the folk-tale, whose nucleus is the encounter of the hero with helpers and opponents, beings endowed with extraordinary powers who assist or hinder him in overcoming his trials and satisfying his desires.
The epistemic significance of the encounter is crucial to the structure of Dante's Commedia. The protagonist's journey towards self-knowledge is marked by a succession of emblematic encounters which enable him to shake off error and attain to the contemplation of truth. By the same token, the characters Dante meets are given a unique opportunity to express themselves and make known their innermost selves. It is during this period that lyrical poetry begins to map the semantic universe of the love-encounter. With the dolce stil novo and in some of Dante's own poems ("Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare" among others), the love-encounter becomes a micro-genre in its own right: the first meeting, the moment of falling in love, the encounter as spiritual communion with the woman loved; the lover's anticipation of the encounter, his nostalgic recollection of it; his plea for an encounter, his failure to obtain one.

As will be clear even from this rapid sketch, the theme of the encounter undergoes transformations according to the historical period and the literary genres in which it appears. And of course it takes on further new shapes in the visual arts and in the theatre and cinema. It is not just the material components of encounters (places, rituals, circumstances) that vary but also their textual functions and axiological implications. If the encounter plays a leading role in Romance (the vehicle of love and adventure by definition), its space seems to shrink drastically in the Novel, where love and adventures are often no longer part of the "fictional reality" but figments of the characters' imagination-whether the adventurous encounters of a Don Quixote or the amorous ones of a Madame Bovary. At the same time, the ever-increasing difficulty that individuals have in identifying with the community deprives the encounter of its heuristic and cognitive value, making any kind of personal development impossible. Both the inner journey and the real journey in quest of role-models or mentors lose their raison d'être. More and more, encounters turn into missed encounters (like that immortalised in Baudelaire's sonnet "A une passante") or impossible ones: people wait in vain before an insuperable threshold, or search vainly for an interlocutor who can supply information or explanations. Solitude, incommunicability, the anonymity of mass civilisation, all these call in question the very possibility of encounters, forcing writers to demystify or relativise the very concept.
On the one hand this can lead to the abstraction and rarefaction of some of Italo Calvino's short-stories, in which an encounter is reduced to a mere logical-mathematical hypothesis with which to test the diffraction of time and space ("Ti con zero", "L'inseguimento", "Il guidatore notturno"). On the other hand it can lead to the uncanniness typical of many post-modern texts. The most random, insignificant encounters place the individual at the mercy of mysterious powers: a secret postal company (the “Tristero system”) that has modified the course of history on various occasions (in Thomas Pyncheon's The Crying of Lot 49 ) or a powerful terrorist network that operates on a global scale (in Don De Lillo's Mao II ), to give just two examples. The extraordinary success of the serial killer in both fiction and films has similar roots. Picking his victims at random from people he happens to meet, he no longer acts out of rational and recognisable motives like criminals of the old school. Similarly, the "alien" no longer takes the shape of an immediately visible and identifiable enemy but of an ordinary man who, encountered by chance, suddenly threatens our existence.

Given the multifaceted nature of this topic, we might contemplate sketching a typology of encounters: love-encounters (falling in love, parting, illicit affairs), encounters between friends; "exemplary" encounters; encounters and clashes-incontri e scontri- between knights and paladins, mockers and mocked, cozeners and gulls; and, of course, imaginary encounters between real historical figures (of which there is a rich literary tradition), and possible but missed encounters. Similarly, we can identify some of the structural elements common to all encounters however differently they manifest themselves as a result of literary fashions and historical circumstances.
First of all, the setting. Encounters tend to occur in particular kinds of places, according to the literary genre in which they appear: the castle and the forest in the romances of chivalry; the tavern in the novel of adventure; the drawing room, the playhouse, the boulevard, the station in 19th-century literature; the motel, the discothèque, the supermarket, the motorway in the postmodern novel.
Secondly, the emotional and ritual components: the exchange of glances between the protagonists; their weighing up of each other; their particular mode of greeting, challenging or taking-leave; the emotional or cognitive implications of the meeting.
Finally, the structural role of the encounter: encounters can further the plot or they can constitute pauses in the narration and enable the author to introduce new characters; and they can take on a meta-narrative function and act as vehicles for reflection and evaluation.

The topic, then, is a rich one and still relatively unexplored. It can be approached and analysed from many different angles. To mention just a few: we can investigate the anthropological and psychological roots of interpersonal encounters or trace the historical evolution of their specific configurations; we can construct a typology of encounters or focus on the diversity of their manifestations in different genres and artistic forms (fiction, poetry, theatre, painting, cinema).
In an international political situation that has dramatically foregrounded the collective dimension of incontro e scontro-between religions, peoples and nations-it may seem reductive to focus our attention on the more intimate, interpersonal aspect of encounters. Nevertheless we feel that precisely by reflecting on this mode of encounter we may come to see the more complex conflicts

 

• A balance