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woman. This eventuality, which is contrary to my expectations, concerns not only this woman but also me and my own future. The comic situation of others is a mirror for the possibility of a comic situation involving me. Reflection has shown to my imagination the opposite of its momentary illusion. |
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Humor II: Something comic is happening, but I give up my own detachment and superiority as I try to understand the feeling of the person who appears comical (I understand the old woman; I understand Don Quixote, who is not a madman but the victim of a delusion so respectable that I myself could believe in it). |
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Humor III: I find myself in a tragic situation. I am a betrayed husband, a desperate father, a man with a flower in his mouth. I try to see myself as if I were somebody else. I "estrange myself." I see myself as an actor who plays my role. I use reflection as a mirror, reality as a mirror of reflection, the mirror of a mirror mirroring the mirror of another mirror. On the one hand, I am involved in this situation and therefore, although seeing it as comical, I consider it with Humor. On the other hand, I am not involved in it, and in a certain sense I become alien to it and superior. On this account I can describe it as if it were comical. |
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In his essay Pirandello does not explicitly present this third definition of Humor, perhaps because he has lost sight of its potential for Humor. As far as this playing with mirrors is concerned, Pirandello ends by defining Art in generaland Liferather than defining Humor; and he defines least of all his own Humor. |
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In the first part of his essay, Pirandello presents Humorseen in the popular, mock poetry of traditional literary themesas a tool to be used against the canons of Rhetoric. In the traditional view that weighed heavily on Italian literature, Rhetoric was a code, a system of rules. How does Humor function with respect to traditional forms? Through an operation of disentanglement, disruption, and disconnection, it creates new forms out of the themes and materials of the old, traditional ones. |
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In the second part of the essay, however, the same distinction is no longer used in relation to Rhetoric and Humor, but in relation to old and new Art. What is the essential characteristic of traditional Art? Pirandello asks. In its attempt to mold Life, which is an elusive, unde- |
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