Pirandello

we are going to be looking at a movement in literature Luigi Pirandello is one of the originators of it which really transcends the bounds of what earlier had been considered literature think about a typical nineteenth-century novel it tells a story right it tells a story there are certain characters maybe lots of things happen if you're reading a Thomas Hardy novel or a Charles Dickens novel lots of things happen that can be shown externally if you're reading a Jane Austen novel or an Emily Bronte novel and so on a lot of what happens happens sort of on the inside with the characters realizing things and talking and thinking about things and so forth but in any case there's a story here being old they're identifiable characters you understand who they are what they want you see a series of events unfold there's a plot that's more or less a conventional plot and you sort of know how to recognize that as a novel for example and something similar takes place on the stage when there's a play in nineteenth-century their characters they interact as if they tell a story and there's a certain pattern of what you expect to happen Pirandello upsets all of those things he says at one point however one of his characters says dramas actions are action and not confounded philosophy and yet there's a huge amount of confounded philosophy in this works there's a lot of absurdity and so it needs to playwrights like Eugene ionesco for example a French absurdist authors who writes a play called the Bald Soprano we're ridiculous things happen all the time and a variety of literary movements later that we'll look at in the artist as well as literature where things are just straight people cannot recognize what's going on as a play or as another here is Pirandello actually working with an actor and an actress trying to get them to understand what's going on in one of his plays that took more work than usual because his plays are so unusual he was appropriately enough born in chaos Sicily and he ended up winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 he wasn't enormous ly influential playwright somebody who really took people's conceptions of what plays were what literature was and turned them on their heads and made them realize that they had must you can't find a conception you can go far beyond the bounds that were typical in the 19th century his most influential play appeared at nineteen twenty one six characters in search of an author it was the same year as big concise in fact Thomas it proves a riot in Rome he was put on in Rome Bain couldn't recognize it as a play they didn't know what that was they ride it it did something like the way that audiences for the first performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring rioted it was like what this is a play you're insulting us and start blowing things up the actors but then it moved to Milan and it was a great success there and so within a very short time people all over the world knew about Pirandello I didn't have time to insert them here but I've got newspaper articles from all sorts of newspapers from 1921 that are discussing the trench house discussing six characters in search of an author and so it was a sort of immediate worldwide sensation now why well it really is very dramatic it's the kind of thing that takes place with the manager and the actors there on the stage looking like they're preparing to put on a play and so it's as if from the very beginning the play takes you behind the scenes here's the manager they're looking at the script they're talking and then the actors million and they're sort of discussing things as if the play is about to begin and somehow you the audience have been shown what's going on behind the scenes before the play begins and then these characters wander in and anyway it gets increasingly strange what are some scenes before we look at that play in particular what are some broad themes to look for in Pirandello one of them is disappointment keep in mind he's writing at the end of the first world war there's a sense that the culture has let him down that society has let him and really everybody down so there's this theme of disappointment of discouragement of disillusionment of a sense that the social structures that had been there before really were revealed to be bankable hence a secondly the bankruptcy of social norms patterns of society and for that matter of literature that existed before he now thinks we've seen beneath the surface yeah ah good good good good yeah but their warring 20s are something we're going to talk about soon the United States in 1921 was on the verge of a tremendously prosperous period and an exciting period in the arts and in literature and music as well but it was also somebody that's most famous for really the automobile for economic growth for productivity for mass production in general making a wide array of products available to people and the same thing was going to take place in Europe now something I haven't talked about yet but I really need to talk about at the end of first world war of the First World War there was really economic devastation throughout the world and in particular in the United States and in Europe in Europe the reasons are obvious right a huge amount had been destroyed by the war it's maybe less obvious what was going on in the United States but as we'll see there was tremendous turmoil 1919-1920 those were incredibly difficult years government spending had kept the economy going at a very high rate during the war but as soon as the war ended all of that stopped and tax rates were very high the income tax went from an initial rate of 7% on the top earners to 77 percent and so that was just within six years and so there was a tremendous recession at the end of the first world war here and in Europe for a variety of different reasons in 1921 both Europe and the United States were just starting to pull out of that recession so the prosperity was soon to come but it wasn't there yet and as he's writing the play if it's published in produce in 1921 it's probably written during 1919 and 1920 when actually conditions were terrible all throughout the developed world and right now they were about to change and so you might see a different attitude emerging by the end of the 20s where but the idea was really you pursue the absurd because it's fun doing an exciting thing not out of a sense of disappointment disillusionment but at this stage that's really still just slightly in the future just around the corner but it's not quite visible yet indeed by the end of the twenties we will see a different attitude where there's a kind of playfulness but it's not so much discouragement in this appointment but a question of hey people have opened their eyes the fact that you can do all these new things new things in music new things in the arts and literature in philosophy and so people start excitedly doing those new things not really because oh the First World War of showing me everything I believed it was alive but because it's like this is cool this is new stuff right things don't have to make sense you can go in and you can have a play where the dialogue is ridiculous but it's funny and just think of the new comic possibilities right you you've thought of yourself as a comic author you want to write things that are funny in a play well there are certain things you can do and then somebody shows you how to make a totally new kind of joke and it's like awesome we can do this now yeah let's do this so within a few years you're absolutely right a lot of things that look like this were being done more out of a spirit of playful excitement than a feeling of disillusionment but in this play as we'll see the truth that emerges isn't one of playful exuberance it's one of something too horrible to look I would talk about it and indeed there's a sort of hopeless emptiness that Pirandello writes about here we peel back the masks that hide the true nature of reality and we either see something horrible or we see something else it turns out that beneath these social norms these ordinary patterns of life these are very literary forms you peel things back and look at what's really going on either it's nothing or it turns out something terrible there's another consistent theme which is that reality is irrational what was the rationale for the first world war was there it was stupid it was stupid right and a certain sense it's like yeah what are we fighting for in fact that was a hat yeah I'm throwing my age here Country Joe and the fish in the Vietnam War had this album that started with a song where they you know sort of went what are we fighting for don't ask me I don't give a damn thanks Bob is Vietnam well you might think the same thing about the first world war people came back from the war and they said well what did we accomplish what was that war all about even during it what are we fighting for and it really wasn't very clear at one point I think I mentioned during Christmas there was a lull in the fighting and the British and French soldiers met the German soldiers in the middle of no man land no no man's land had a big Christmas banquet the commanding officers were furious but they were some like what are we fighting for I don't know why I'm trying to kill you guys you know why you're trying to kill us right it's just like this thing we're doing and we've been told you to do that and so hey let's celebrate Christmas Merry Christmas to you all and then we'll go back to kill you so this is not right but it didn't make any sense and people look at the war and they said this doesn't make any sense reality is irrational it's not as if there was some clear reason for all of this ah we are going to war because this end of this end it's even know they told people things like this increasingly as the war went on morale felt they had to say that Germans are evil they want to come to England and spear babies with their bayonets and they show closer to having the Germans do this and so on really come on I mean Germans the war was not being fought because Germany thought suddenly thought bayonetting babies it's what we do and so really it wasn't like that there was this overall sense look morality morality well yes reality doesn't make any sense there is really no order to it and indeed one of his themes is contradictory and in some deep sense it's unknowable we get glimpses what's underlying nature but we turn away we can't face it for very long in fact he goes further and says really there's no such thing as objectivity there isn't even predictability in the world could anybody have predicted the First World War no nobody was expecting that okay it was the kind of thing that happened it was a cataclysm that no one thought would occur even when the war broke out they thought oh we'll go off to war we'll fight - you know somebody will win will go home there was no sense that it was going to be a bloody conflict it would last for years and cost millions of lives what makes Pirandello unusual I think among these authors is that he turns his attention to the self and he begins to think well if all of that's true about reality what is true about me what is true about us what is the self he ends up saying there really isn't any clear identity now it's a hard question in general if I say who are you or if I say what is it to be human that's a hard question to answer and not just human in general but be that very human being you are that's really hard right I can ask what's essential to being a human being and we can answer in terms of rational activity or in terms of making and producing or filling the blank with your favorite theory of what it is to be human but now if I say well fine but what makes me me what is the essence of Dan Boneh Mac right I don't want to just ask what it is to be human what gives me an identity what is it to be me all of a sudden we don't really know how to answer you right I mean what is it to be you what's essential to being you what gives you the identity you have I mean they're dumb answers right you can just say well hey it's my I'm driving license number nine seven - right I mean identity theft we mean things like that right we don't mean somebody stole what somebody else is walking around there now Dan bottom that's like no they took all my memories really steal your identity in that deeper sense but what is that identity what is it that makes me mean he says well there really isn't one okay that question doesn't really have an answer and in fact he says and here they're echoes of Freud the conscious mind is really a kind of mass for better a set of mass we can struggle over this well mysterious multiplicity I put it here this swirling mass of stuff that's going on underneath that we really can't at least can't move that for very long unlike Freud who says I have a theory and I can tell you exactly but the nature of your subconscious mind is head Pirandello says no you can't you have no idea what's really going on underneath there is this mess going on at the subconscious level it's very important what we really cannot have a theory of it it's really in the end of intelligible he sees the self as highly plastic adapting to circumstance so who are you really well think about the way you behave let's say in a class like this then think about the way you behave when you're hanging out with friends now think about the way you behave when your will say with your parents those are kind of different aren't they I mean how many of you would be happy to have your parents come along to class with you or happy that your parents come along to I don't know hang out with your friends on a Saturday night probably most of you would think and I feel uncomfortable about that right and there might be practical reasons like yeah they saw what happened in the frat house they wouldn't let me but but really I have in mind why why is that awkward because you're playing a sort of different social role you're in one role as son or daughter right when you're with your parents you're in another role as student when you're here and then on Saturday night with your friends you're in a role of friend and those are different roles you take on slightly different attitudes slightly different behavior patterns you're playing a different role there's a slightly different you and now think about that with just different friends just zoom in right to the friendship relation do you act exactly the same way you know how to who you're around no matter which friend it is do you ever notice differences I mean some of you might say no I know some people who say come back to the same way toward everybody I have a friend who has met sometimes with Bill Gates and Bill Gates a secretary as told him listen you're like the only person who Jay is just you when you're in front of Bill Gates you don't turn into a different person everybody else is coming and he's just kinda like hey that's okay so some people have that ability but other people really how they are depends on you know who they're with and which friend are we I mean I know I'm much Whittier with certain friends that I am with others with some friends I'm telling jokes all the time we're constantly giggling with other friends it's very serious right well with other friends it's mostly complaining oh can you believe and it's like what happens there is really well we we find some plan which to interact right and we interact on that plane but that's only part of me and so you might say I'm playing a slightly different role there with one friend I'm the witty guy who's constantly making clever quips so at least I think they're clever and he seems to that's why we're friends maybe everybody else speaks the ridiculous but with other people you know it's a different role anyway that's Pirandello's point if we ask who are we really his answer in a certain sense is well there's no answer right we're just that we're this mess with that person that mess with that person all of them have something to do I mean there's some reason why we choose those masks and choose hey all those people and so on but nevertheless there is nothing deep under underneath this that we can at least understand so he says really we take a bunch of different perspectives on the world in ourselves it keeps changing and so much of what we think about ourselves is really a question of illusion here is how he himself described for a critic his own place I think that life is a very sad piece of befooling because we haven't ourselves without being able to know why we're for whets the need to deceive ourselves constantly by creating a reality one for each and never the same for all which from time to time is discovered to be vain and illusory my art is full of bitter compassion for all those who deceive themselves but this compassion cannot fail to be followed by the ferocious terrific destiny which condemns man to discussion Pirandello is maybe the first author to sound this theme but it becomes a common theme throughout the 20th century that life is in some sense illusion that we cannot bear to look at the reality underneath but we've got to deceive ourselves self-deception is just some bytes it's actually essential to life now why why would anyone think that we have to deceive ourselves the traditional slogan is know thyself right self-deception is bad it's some kind of vice or some kind of intellectual failing maybe but it's certainly something to be avoided if you can peer analysis no self-deception yes for one point of view is ridiculous absolutely necessary what are we trying to hide from ourselves yeah good there is one thing we're trying to hide from ourselves we espouse certain moral standards we believe certain things we say these are our ideals we don't live up to them and so can we admit that well it's interesting that actually on the traditional religious view the first step is admitting that right in fact John Calvin and the Institute's for the Christian religion I think is actually giving you a 12-step program the original 12-step program first thing you do is admit you're a sinner right admit about failure but why is that a step of a program well because the claim is that's really hard most of us don't want to do that and in fact I suspect most people don't like the thought but they don't live up even to their own ideals let alone some other person's ideals for them so that's a hard thing to face and it's not just maybe that you do things that you don't think are morally maybe you fail to live up to your own ideals in other ways like what you're not morally the person you'd like to be but are there other ways in which you're not the person you'd like to be yeah academically yeah you're all too aware of the fact that who you never actually did that reading or you know that you totally guessed on that problem and managed to get it right or that that essay you wrote was really just off the top of the head you didn't know what's going on and luckily you through it enough complicated words that the professor gave you an a fine you realize that was total crap and so on and so forth right there might be things that are moral other things where you know gosh I got five of the skin of my teeth that was really I I pulled the wool over their eyes I tricked them I didn't really know what's going on or other ways in which you might feel to live up to your one your own standards in some respects athletically yeah you might think the Texas you get older there's more of this you have a certain body image you think of yourself is still looking the way well whatever you thought the best you ever looked was somehow mentally that's your picture of yourself and so you might look down and say yeah I'm this middle-aged guy or maybe pick past middle-aged guy but somehow internally you feel like you're still 25 okay and that kind of thing happens to people um you realize you know you're not really what you'd like to be or maybe you know you'd like to be an athlete and you realize yeah this is what I think I ought to look like and this is what I ought to be able to do but you really don't I recently hired a personal trainer precisely you've been feeling this way I think I need help but anyway what else are there other respects in which you feel like yeah there's this thing that I'm supposed to be in a failing I'm down here good romance romantic yeah or human relationships in general right you'd like to think yes look I've got lots of friends I've come boyfriend or girlfriend things are going great but then you stop and think we'll wait a minute how many people really terrible here's a terrible thought imagine that you're killed tomorrow okay you're in a horrible accident or actually when I was a grad student I saw a student get hit by a car I went I was on a very urban campus two of the main streets in the city pass by the light turned red this kid was crossing from actually the building where I was before the library car didn't see the red light student just flew up 20 feet in the air we're coming down totally Huff stop I was never able to find out what happened actually the news media had no reports about this it's like that's student just clean like a ping-pong ball I mean that couldn't have been good but suppose that happens to you who's actually gonna care how many people come to your funeral it's a gloomy thought but suppose it now maybe you think min hundreds thousands of people I'll have to have it in stadium right maybe but thank you sir thank you well mom and dad then you start thinking oh crap you know make us popular as I think I am or you start thinking about those relationships you say well we're so close and everything and then you realize oh yeah I haven't really talked to him since like we graduated high school but but still we're best buddies anyway as your life goes on there's more and more of that we're like yeah that person is a really good friend even though I haven't seen it in 20 years or blah blah blah and so anyway you can start doubting all of that and think maybe I'm not really the friend or the husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend that I really thought I was well in any case he thinks that for a variety of reasons we really have to hide our true nature for ourselves there is a kind of two level theory going on here in carrillo there is the image of myself that I projection that's there when I'm interacting with other people playing a certain social role and so my conscious mind is something like a set of masks somewhere I had talked to Professor masks or the father mask or the whatever mask in my life as I'm interacting with various people and so that we can understand those are appearances though those are the appearances of myself that I projected the world what's underneath that an intolerable subconscious reality there is a reality to the self underneath that but we really can't understand but is intolerable in the sense that we can't look at for very long if we really start thinking about it eternally we can't face it now whether that's really because it's so horrible but or whether it's because it's something in our nature that just makes us back away from it I'm not sure in Pirandello isn't sure I'm like Freud he doesn't have a theory he isn't doing to say oh it's because they did as these deep dark sexual desires no he says I don't know what it's then that's the point nobody knows what it is we can't bear to look at it for very long there is no meaning given because we're constructing the masts and says and we can't understand whatever's really underneath them we are the ones who are the authors of our own reality so we're gonna see in the play at a certain point the characters say to the manager you've got to be the author this is what even me an author I've never done that before and they say yes you do it every day we all do it and that's the point really we're are the authors of our own realities we construct those masts we construct the story of our lives and we give them me but sometimes and here he is different from Freud as well sometimes the master slips and we have to confront the truth this is something that later authors the existentialist referred to as confronting the absurd and the absurd becomes an important theme in Pirandello there are times when the masks slip when we're playing the social role and then all of a sudden something goes wrong I think I told you about my friend who was teaching a platonic dialogue on the day there was a shooter on campus and it was a dialogue about why one should not fear death the Phaedo where Socrates is saying there's no reason to fear that and then the announcement comes over there's a shooter on campus everybody stayed in rooms and locked the doors professor Geist shouts okay professor the expert in ancient Greek philosophy Socrates is telling you there is no reason to fear death wait somebody's with a gun the best slips and all of a sudden he starts playing in different social role well anyway we could bear to confront these things but only up to a point okay only up to a point some we can look when the mass slips we see the reality my friend can realize the absurdity of act is action until close friends okay but it's not the kind of that one can look at for very long but oneself it's different let's take a look at the plate here is fit one set of actors who have performed this right at the beginning the leading man says to the manager excuse me but must I absolutely wear cooks cap the manager is annoyed I imagine so it says severity points to the book the script of the play the leading man says but it's ridiculous so the manager comes something rate ridiculous ridiculous is it my fault friends once said this thing more good comedies that were reduced to pretty awful Pirandello's works where nobody ever stands anything where the other plays the fool of us notice Pirandello is true this has a name in literature now it's sort of erasing the fourth wall basically the idea is Pirandello's talking about himself in the plate right the characters are talking about Pirandello say yeah pull off this Pirandello play what a waste of time doesn't make any sense like everything else appearance ellos nobody understands anything they also plays the fool of us all well anyway the actors scream the manager goes the leading man and says yes sir you put on the cooks captain feed eggs do you suppose that with all the same beating business you're on an ordinary stage get that off your head you represent the shell of the eggs you're beating well the actors laugh okay in common among themselves and you represents the shell of the eggs you're beating if you have last year's version really the only difference because I put in photographs like that this year haha but now what is going on what do you mean you represent the shell of the eggs in her appearance exactly we've been talking about those masks well the shell of the egg is right this thing constructed to hide the goo inside it and to keep it contained so that is what you are you are really just the shell around this goo inside this this stuff that is unbearable to look at and so in this case yeah that's that's all you really are you want to know what your real essence is it's a bunch of fragments really of shells a bunch of masks you wear to try to hide be an intolerable reality underneath well that's all what you told but I mean you get the idea it doesn't have any particular cause here's another image you are the puppet of yourself silence and listen to my explanation please says the manager since of the leading man the empty form of reason without the fullness of instinct which is blind you stand for reason your wife is instant it's a mixing up in the parts according to which you who act your own part to come up and put it yourself do you understand feeding man says I'm hanged if I do the matter you said what needed why let's get on with it as sure to be a glorious failure anyway now what on earth is going on here the empty form of Reason without the fullness of instinct which is blind there's a famous quotation from caught this in the background here at one point in the critique of Pure Reason Todd says concepts without what they calls them intuitions without terse Epps without information from the senses are empty but perhaps without concepts are blind so he's really saying wolf the intellect without actual experience of the world it's just empty we have concepts we can apply them to anything we can't do anything with it but information about the world apart for any concepts that actually allow us to categorize things that can mess up by them it's just blind right give me information about the state of Texas if somebody just downloads let's say some database and all of a sudden I just have this mass of numbers let's say what on earth is that I don't know what those numbers are I know what they represent what is this it's not until somebody gives me concepts and says oh wait this is census data so if you look in this columns that is actually the census tract and look in this column that is actually a personal identification number and then look at this one this is actually an income level this is how many then I could say ah okay now I know what I'm thinking about this but if you just say yetiz Texas the following an array of numbers but I don't know what to do it so Kant's point it's just we need concepts we need the intellect but we also need real experience in the world the apparent dimensions turn around a little bit a reason is on the one side the intellect concepts it's on yes and it's empty but without what here he doesn't say experience of the world perception or something like that instead he says instant which is blood instant and then later he says oh actually oh wait don't ever that's but he says salute leading man at one point look you represent reason your wife represents in sync or emotion and so he's concerned here not with a relationship between the intellect and perception or experience with of the world but instead the relationship between the intellect and emotion or instinct now he seems to be saying intellect without emotion or instinct is just empty but on the other hand instinct is really blind without the intellect so it takes both now you who act your own part become the puppet of yourself what does that mean yes you write your own story right if your you're the author of your own life then exactly you are are you really the roles you play no but you are the one who's playing so it's as if every in every role you're really a bit of a puppet on the other hand you're the one in charge of puppet - you're the one adopting those masks you're the one putting on that mask or then taking it off and wearing that mask and so on so really you're something of a puppet or at least the appearance right is something of this eggshell a mask it's something that is like a puppet but on the other hand it's not like you're being controlled by anyone else you are the puppet master of yourself well these characters then come in right they wander in and the manager doesn't know who these people are they're not actors in the play so he tells them to go away he says we oblige me by going away we have a time to had people and the father mellifluous Lisa Oh sir you know well life is full infant absurd which strangely enough do not even need to appear plausible since they are true infinite absurd yes oh good the randomness of life that's right things not making sense right things appearing random give me an example of some things that seem good yes first world war but only the whole thing but actually tons of occurrences within it would have seemed random right you're sitting there in the trench you live guy next to you gets hit by more shelled honest what sense does that make why right there's no reason and so in wartime that happens all the time these terrible things happen but seemingly randomly seemingly without any pattern why does this person live in that person die why does that city get Bob and this one not and so on and so forth so yes huge amount of randomness we noticed it more and more time because it's a matter of life and death and not just oh whatever I mean ordinarily we don't die when these random things happen but in a war when they happen people often top so there are things that make us confront the absurd like adoring I'm sorry but now what are things like that where we confront the absurd where we actually think yes gosh there is an absurdity here it doesn't even have to see plausible since it's actually true there are things that boggle us that shake us out of our ordinary playing the role and suddenly we are forced to confront the fact that we're just playing a role I mentioned one my friend sort of lead from the classroom as an instance of this book what are other things that suddenly make you confront the fact that you're ordinarily your ordinary existence sir Camus was later gonna talk about this he'll refer to these as absurd walls things that just you smack up into in life and make you realize that what you had been taking for granted is something of a construct of yourself yeah problems you made for yourself yeah like what uh yes right yeah you stay up all night sight for one test and you realize oh I have another one to write there could be that kind of thing where reality forces you to face something that you weren't quite prepared to face yeah Texas weather yes yes right you wake up one day it's still summer even though it's October the next day it's like 53 degrees or something what's this once in November my mother was visiting Texas for the first time I took her sailing on Lake Travis it was a beautiful day it was 85 degrees all of a sudden in the middle of Lake Travis's were sailing the boat the wind shifts these clouds roll in and something it's 48 degrees and very very windy right and so before this the photographs apply and they die sooner sleep oh that was my first confrontation with this sort of total craziness the Texas weather but yes all of a sudden you you think things are gonna go one way right and then something disrupts that dramatically and forces you to change plan you've confront the absurd no the manager says what the devil is he talking the public says I seem to reverse the ordinary process may well be considered a bad news they secrete credible situations in order that they may appear true but for me to observe that is this be madness it's the soul wrestle detriment of your profession show the actors written complex but what is he saying he's saying you think I'm crazy but I'm talking about these appearances that aren't true your actors that's your job right to take these things that are true and making them seem true that's what acting is so now you can maybe see why the play has the structure it does the point is we're all actors we're all acting our own parts or really a bunch of different parts different for every circumstance we're in I'm right now playing my professor old okay but then I know and I have to say part there that I act a different part here and so on and I am well in some sense just the collection of those different parts but on the other hand I'm also something underlying them that plays no there is there's a book that I've sometimes thought I would like to have you read in this course I've never had the courage to actually require it because it's weird but it's a very influential book early in the 20th century much of it was written actually in the 1880s but it wasn't published until 1911 it's called the philosophy of as if it was written by a German philosopher Hans binder and basically made all sorts of realms and says we speak as if this makes sense as if these things are true but actually if you look carefully at them you realize they don't make any sense at all they're filled with contradictions and it's really just an imaginary realm the side of this that things are just a human construction and not a very stable human construction is what you find contradictions he says protecting space and time you might think hey if anything's real in space and it's time things happen in time and things are arrayed in space and they happen in space he says what a space made up of points okay what's a point well it's a location in space that has no dimensions right it has no height no width depth this is so I mean are there other regions of space but I have no depth no height say hey I built myself a house Oh tell me about it how big is it oh it has no square footage you know tall ceilings oh no actually the height of the walls is zero uh well why does it zero uh you know how far back does go in the lot Siro how big it's a lot it's off Oh 0u I think wait that's not a house that's not a lot you didn't do anything right and he says that's what geometry is all about right these points but actually if you think about them they are like they don't have any size at all they're so small but like fear of zero size it's a contradiction now maybe that's a contradiction it maybe it's not but that's the way fire goes through everything you think you think that this is real that's real this is real nonsense and he says everything contains contradictions so I think Pirandello actually is somewhat influenced by this take any field of human endeavor that you might think represents reality and it turns out to be efficient how can you tell because ultimately if you think about it it contains contradictions and that's what vigor has just been saying basically everything we speak of as if it's a certain way but actually none of it ultimately makes any sense it always contains contradictions so it's merely in appearance anyway the manager says start profession teach you one worthy of madman babe well it seemed that proved that which isn't true without any need for a job isn't work this is that your mission I want to give life to fantastic characters on the stage well of course the point becomes that's our mission to to give life to these characters that are the rules that we ourselves play so here is here are some scenes from this actually be produced here with the characters who come in and what to tell their story and it's a very disturbing story ultimately the father one day each of us when he appears before his fellows is clothed in a certain demon but every man knows what unconfessed will things pass within the secrecy of his own heart one gives way to the temptation only to rise from it again afterwards with the great eagerness to reestablish once dignity is it then we're a tombstone this is a great one shame and the monuments a high everybody's in the same some folks have the courage to say certain things that's all now this sounds very much like Freud really there are certain unconfessed well things that go on in the heart but for Freud he thinks he knows what they offer he has a theory of them Pirandello makes no such presumption says look are they all visiting tour that nature does anybody happy I don't know really the point is there are certain things we aren't willing to say to anybody else we aren't even willing to say to ourselves the stepdaughter who you find out has been sexually abused says all here to have the courage to do them though the publicist yes but in secret therefore you want more courage to say these let a man but speak these things out and folks at once label innocent but it isn't true he's like all the others better indeed because he isn't afraid to reveal with the light of intelligence the real the red shame of human bestiality close their eyes to his mom to see so people do some horrible and I'm confessing things too but there's at least a virtue in recognizing and be willing to admit but yeah you aren't really entirely as you appear to be that there's something more and something terrible underneath that no the stepdaughter finds all of this contemptible she says oh all these intellectual complications make me sick disgust me all this philosophy uncovers the feasting man and then cease to save him excuse him I can't still sir what a man seeks to simplify life be steely throwing aside every realm of humanity every chase desperation of your pure feeling all since I D ality duties modesty shame then nothing is more revolting and nauseous than a certain kind of remorse crocodile steals tears that's what it is so she basically says all your big friend because you can confess that there are none confess all things in your part well boohoo now the father says that drama lies and all all in this in the conscience that is one of them we believe this conscience to be a single thing but it's many side if there's one for this person and another for that diverse consciousness now it sounds like you're like he's being a bit of irrelevance but I don't think that's really the Box the point is that with every role I play there's a set of values there's a set of standards there's a conscience that makes me want to live up to the standards of that rule and so there are really many of these maybe each of us has one maybe each mask goes along with one so yes thousand good pictures of masks since last year that's especially good because that one's willing that's the one that's up that I'm ring right now right but it's just one of many and each one goes along with a certain set of standards how much do you care about that really well qua teacher I care a lot about quantum annealing or this other thing I don't know no but how much does it really matter and so there are things that well go along with certain rules you play you craft a conscience for yourself by adopting a certain set of standards connected to those maths those rules you plan but that's it in the end yourself is fragmented Hume had the idea that really the self doesn't have any independent existence it's really just a collection of thoughts feelings perceptions well Pirandello says it's more than that it's not just a chaos of all the things going on in the mind it's more organized than that we have this illusion of being one person for all of having a personality that's unique in all our acts but it isn't true here by the way is a serious the Virgin's from Freud he says it isn't true we perceived this went tragically perhaps in something we do we are as it were suspended caught up in the air on a kind of book one of these absurd walls in other words then we perceived that all of us was not in that act and then would be able to produce injustice alone that one deep think about people in history were famous for one thing one thing like who who somebody you know like one thing Rosa Parks good she wouldn't give up her seat on the bus right that's the one thing everybody knows about Rosa Parks is her whole life summed up in that one act well Peron Ellis is looking something she did it might be in this case our heroic favorite being a very important thing but there's a lot more to the person okay than just them right and so we have this tendency to some ourselves up some other people up in their water of small collection of things but that's not the whole person isn't really in that act think of other people who are like Amelia Earhart yes blue are playing got lost some group of the Pacific that's kind of the one thing she's known Gabriela Princip started the world war by shooting the Archdemon the Archduke gun shops okay in music their one-hit wonders right the Archies sugar sugar or the baja man who let the dogs out I stood up right good enough for that one thing that's it now does it it's been a bold life to be something in that just uh lumen that one will know and so really there are these things people do we tend to take them as symbolic of who the person is but all that's in a sense unfair there is no one thing we are there is no such thing as the personality there's just this fragmentation not all of us is in any one of those acts and so in the end we're left in a situation of mortal desolation where really you might say we all have to be the author of our own selves

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

Views: 11,102

Rating: 4.9523811 out of 5

Keywords: Luigi Pirandello (Author)

Id: 7LPs4_HgUeQ

Length: 46min 24sec (2784 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2013