< previous page page_171 next page >

Page 171
life itself is comic. But if one could comprehend this principle, one would do nothing but give form to life, thereby repeating the error of which Art has always been guilty. For Pirandello, what is peculiar to the Humorist (and to the artist in general) is that he no longer knows where to stand. As he himself says, his uniqueness consists (145) in his own perplexity and irresolution of conscience: "Certainly the Humorist is far from being pleased with reality! If he were to like it a little, his own reflection would intervene at once in this pleasurable experience and spoil it" (146). But this Pirandellian definition could also be rendered as follows: "It is impossible for the Humorist to define life as Humor. If he were to define it as Humor his own reflection would intervene at once in this definition and spoil it!"
For reflection, Pirandello says, "insinuates itself everywhere, disarranging everything: every image, every feeling"so, why not also HumorHumor as the "sentiment of the opposite" (and as the ability to "comprehend," ''to laugh at one's own thought," and "to laugh at one's own suffering")? But first of all, what is life for Pirandello? I know that such a silly, naive, and romantic question, echoing perhaps the question asked by poor Jauffré Rudel in Carducci's poem, should not be posed. I must say that the fault is not mine, but Pirandello's, since he poses it in the course of his essay (not in his plays, to be sure, where he looks at someone else who is attempting to define life). At any rate, let us see why life seems to be constructed just so as to justify the approach afforded by Humor:
(1) reality is illusory; and we ourselves are different from what we should or should like to be;
(2) life in society exacts from us dissimulation and falsehood;
(3) society often forces us to act in ways that are contrary to our will (volition);
(4) if we are not conditioned by the forces of society, we certainly are by the forces of our unconscious, which defeat the presumption of our reason and logic;
(5) therefore, we do not have just one mind and one personality, but many;
(6) and this is so because life is a continuous flux; because the conceptual forms of our logic are but attempts to stop this flux at the decisive moment they do not hold but, rather, reveal themselves for what they truly aremere masks.

 
< previous page page_171 next page >