Abstract

This paper is about a story in which men and animals meet, in the deep of the wilderness, where nature is resisting culture. Although they, men and animals, do not share a language, or anything else that could be regarded as a system of conventional signs, nevertheless they communicate, revealing to us an idea of “community,” and subsequently of “culture,” that goes far beyond the common distinction between nature and culture.It is of course fiction, but sometimes fiction, especially great fiction, represents a perfect laboratory which allows us to study not what or how things “are” but what they mean, to better understand the reason why things are what they are to us and how languages work to turn these things into what they are to us, whether we are men or animals.