L'eternità in una goccia d'acqua. Il tempo magico di negromanti e narratori: dalla novellistica medievale a Borges

This paper investigates the narrative motif of ‘fallacious’ or fantastical time across various stories, spanning from the Medieval novelistic tradition—such as tale XXI from Novellino, exemplum XI from Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor, and Michele Scotus’ novella in Il Paradiso degli Alberti by Giovanni da Prato—to modern interpretations by Dostoevsky and Borges. This motif emphasizes the interaction, influenced by translations of the Aristotelian corpus and Arabic astronomical and astrological texts in 13th-century Al-Andalus, between two opposing views on the relationship between eternity and finite, created time: the Islamic perspective, as seen also in Mahomet’s miraj tradition, and the Christian view. The narratological analysis seeks to track the development of narrative techniques and devices that depict extratemporal experiences within teleological and strictly causal plots, often akin to syllogisms. The study delves into a seemingly minor mytheme: the halted fall of a water droplet. In the end, these narratives enrich the investigative archaeology into the origins of fantastic literature and its distinctive temporality, situated at the crossroads of the incomparable durations of eternity and human destiny.