Inside the end. Distance and knowledge in Ian McEwan and Tiago Rodrigues
Abstract
The essay analyzes the play La Distance by Tiago Rodrigues and the novel What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (both 2025), set in dystopian future scenarios of a post-apocalyptic nature. They converge in reflecting on memory, oblivion and knowledge, whitin a socio-cultural context characterized by disintegration. Rodrigues uses theatrical language to represent intergenerational and interplanetary distance, through the figure of a father who remained on Earth and a daughter who emigrated to Mars; McEwan instead narrates the search for a lost poem in an England devastated by the consequences of climate collapse. Both authors stage the intrinsic fragility of knowledge and its function of resistance, proposing a post-catastrophic humanism focused on the care, memory and survival of language. The works suggest that knowledge should not be conceived as a dominion, but as a gesture of accompaniment and witness, a means of remaining in the world, even in the face of the imminence of the end.
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References
Ghosh, Amitav, La grande cecità. Il cambiamento climatico e l’impensabile, Vicenza, Neri Pozza, 2017.
Haraway, Donna J., Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, Duke University Press, 2016.
Latour, Bruno, Face à Gaïa. Huit conférences sur le Nouveau Régime Climatique, Paris, La Découverte, 2015.
McEwan, Ian, Quello che possiamo sapere, trad. it. di S. Basso, Torino, Einaudi, 2025 (What We Can Know, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2025).
Rodrigues, Tiago, La Distance, traduit du portogais par T. Resendes, Besançon, Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2025.
Copyright (c) 2025 Francesco de Cristofaro
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