Narratività, narrazione, narrazioni: giustizia come 'apertura'

The essay explores the links between human instinctive fondness for stories, formative value of narratives, pro-social potentialities of ‘narrative imagination’ and ‘narrativity’ as a quality of the human being, which is strictly related to human dignity. After a brief definition of the exact meaning that will be assigned to some relevant concepts (such as ‘narrative’, ‘literary quality’, ‘narrative coherence’ and ‘realism’) in the setting of a ‘Law and Literature’ discourse on narrative, a first section of the paper deals with narrative as a powerful tool for transmitting social experiences and social information through emotive, more than intellective, involvement, and, as such, able to convey different and other-than-oneself perspectives to the reader/watcher/listener. This relates to the ethical potentialities of ‘narrative imagination’, a quality relevant also to lawmakers, judges and law practitioners (as well as to citizens at large) in legal systems which aim at respecting and promoting human rights and basic principles of liberal democracy. Actually, as discussed in part two, the acknowledgment of the ‘narrative nature’ of the human being appears strictly related to the recognition of dignity as ‘the’ human specificity and the foundation of all basic human rights, especially when considered in its meaning of intrinsic and unalienable ‘opening to change’ of each and every person, no matter which their previous choices. A consideration particularly relevant to a criminal law perspective, when compared to recurrent drives for stigmatization, exclusion and dehumanization of offenders and ‘enemies’. Finally, the relationship between narrative and ‘truth’ (or lack of it) is briefly explored, in order to discuss the need, in a truly democratic system, for people to be also granted some spaces for ‘staying in the shadow’, i.e. not only a right to privacy, but even, to some extent, freedom to pretend or lie, as a further way to respect human nature and human dignity.