Narragonia: the Search for Subjective Paradise in the Work of Sebastian Brandt
Narragonia: the Search for Subjective Paradise in the Work of Sebastian Brandt

Summary/Abstract: Under the thin ideological crust of the danger of wandering, of distancing oneself from Christian ethics, which determined the overly simplistic classification of the work as satire, lies a profound discourse of self-discovery, in an unexplored space, caught between two shores: an old, abandoned one, and a new, still undefined one. The flight from physical suffering, its exile in a space of exclusion seems to have become the source of a new utopia: a ship moving, on the waters of the Rhine, towards an illusory space-Narragonia. In Foucaultian exegesis, the source of inspiration is the Ship of the Argonauts3, although at the end of the poem, the Ship of Fools seems much closer to Charon's Boat. But Brandt's Ship seems to have had a real existence: foreigners and madmen expelled from cities were entrusted to the boatmen, on a pilgrimage that is difficult to relate to the search for reason. The exiled madman, entrusted to the sailors, left to his fate, is part of a semi-mythical geography, in which navigation is associated with the Great Crossing, with uncertainty. The man on the edge (horos anthropos) is the prisoner of a pointless crossing, without a stable reference system. The irrational is associated with water and wandering.The image of the madman and madness, the main topic of this paper, can be analyzed and understood starting from the need for autonomy devoid of responsibility, from free will substituted by the servant of the arbitrariness, from the necessity of self-perimeterization in a subjective paradise, devoid of innocence.

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