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finable flux of events, traditional Art rigidifies it (crystallizes it) in fixed and topical forms. In this, it falls into the same error perpetrated by logic in its attempt to provide rational explanations for something that is irrational and opposed to any form that rigidifies it once and for all.
"Art," Pirandello says, here obviously referring to Art-before-himself, "usually abstracts and synthesizes, capturing and representing the peculiar and characteristic essence of objects as well as of human beings." If Art truly operated like this, it would be clearly destined to become Rhetoric and therefore, again and again, a codified system of rules. On the other hand, how does Humor operate? Humor, whichfelix culpais now taken to be Art cum- and post-Pirandello, breaks the rules; it looks at things in an unexpected way, lifting the mask of Logic and Types, and revealing beneath the mask the contradictions and multiplicity of life.
If for Coleridge Art implied a "suspension of disbelief," we could say that, for Pirandello, Humorwhich is for him all the new and true art in generalimplies the "suspension of the suspension of disbelief." Humor, then, eliminates the trust brought about by the suspension of disbelief and introduces a new doubt: Art is a continuous exercise in "disbelief''; it puts into question all existing codes, and therefore Life and the World; it says to us, "Look, the Emperor has no clothes."
But this is precisely a definition of Art, not of Humor. It is the definition of art which is being given by the poetics of our age: Art as ambiguity (from Empson to Jakobson); Art as synonymous with the information it provides (and therefore, as a wedge against all those systems of "polite" norm that are already codified by conventions); Art as a wedge against the established laws of language; Art as the disruption of all systems of expectationjust as it breaks them up, reflecting at the same time on why it does soand therefore an Art that provides, not only the comic effect caused by the ensuing disorder, but also a critical reflection on the reasons behind the disorder that is being introduced.
Pirandello's definition of Humor is, for him, the true and only definition of Art. We may ask, What is left then in this definition of the common notion we have of "Humor"? At this point the essay becomes a treatise on metaphysical and / or existentialist philosophy. And with this we have reached our third and last point.
4. The Essay as the Grotesque Drama of an Impossible Definition
In principle, the only way we could speak of life would be in terms of Humor, for being as it is the constant disruption of the expected order,

 
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