Absurdism and Existentialism

1. Absurdism and Existentialism HUM 2052: Civilization II Spring 2013 Dr. Perdigao April 1-5, 2013

2. Framing the Absurd: Pirandello • 1867—Born in Girgenti (now Agrigento, Sicily) • 1880s—University of Rome, then University of Bonn, doctorate in romance philology (1891) • 1894—Married AntoniettaPortulano, her insanity, paranoia—death in 1918 • 1890s—translated Goethe’s Roman Elegies, wrote ElegieRenae, two books of poetry—shifted to plays after short stories and novel • 1915—sixteen plays produced in six years • Mussolini supported to create National Art Theatre in Rome (but failed); self-proclaimed fascist (joined party in 1923) • 1934—Nobel Prize for Literature • 1936—published collection of forty-three plays as Naked Masks (“grotesque theatre”); dies in the same year • Three stages: folk comedies, philosophical works, mythic plays written under fascist rule • Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) comprised during the second period • A metaplay that turns to itself, to deconstruct its own making

3. An Absurdist Legacy • “Pirandellism”—as “many truths as there are points of view” (1736) • Emphases shared with Existentialism: “difficulty of achieving a sense of identity, the impossibility of authentic communication between people, and the overlapping frontiers of appearance and reality”—as “crises in self-knowledge” (1736) • “real” actors putting on “real” play, stalled by fictional characters who want to act out their real lives, or have them played by real actors • Set against tradition of the “well-made play” in the nineteenth century, switches to the Russian fabulist tradition— “baring the device” • “‘real’ life changes from moment to moment, exhibiting a fluidity that renders difficult and perhaps impossible any single formulation of either character or situation” (1736).

6. Absurd Postmodernisms • Like Freud, belief in unconscious personality beneath “everyday awareness”: “Successive layers of personality, conflicts among the various parts, and the simultaneous existence of multiple perspectives shape an identity that is never fixed but always fluid and changing. This identity escapes the grasp of onlookers and subject alike, and expresses a basic incongruity in human existence that challenges the most earnest attempts to create a unified self” (1737). • “somebody” versus “nobody”—masking identities; “naked mask” • Wearing of semi-masks to distinguish the six characters • Father: remorse; Stepdaughter: revenge; Son: scorn; Mother: sorrow • Self-reflexive; play within a play; metaplay; metatheatre • The Rules of the Game rehearsed • SanchoPanza, Prospero (1746)

7. Frame-breaking • 1921, performed in 1923 in Paris, Russian director Pitoëff, stage with stairs extending, breaking the “fourth wall”; characters dressed in black; Madame Pace in red silk dress; actors in light-colored clothes (1739) • Changes with productions; 1988—set in New York, Madame Pace as a pimp • Molly Hite describes postmodernist fiction in the following terms: “To break narrative frames by allowing one ontological level of the plot to intrude on another ontological level is to introduce radical instability into a work of fiction. Inasmuch as this kind of frame-breaking is one of the most important features of postmodern writing, it aligns the postmodern novel with a kind of radical undecidability, a suspicion that the question ‘What’s the real story here?’ cannot be answered in any satisfying way—satisfying, that is, in terms of the sorts of expectations bred by realist and modernist fiction” (703). • Father: “The play is in us: we are the play” (1746). • Leading Actress: “and we’re the audience” (1749). • Son: “Yes . . . literature, literature” (1752). • Father: “The drama begins now: and it’s new and complex” (1752).

8. Postmodernist Play • PRODUCER: “What do you expect me to do if nobody writes good plays any more and we’re reduced to putting on plays by Pirandello? And if you can understand them you must be very clever. He writes them on purpose so nobody enjoys them, neither actors nor critics nor audience.” (1743) • Play with Pirandello’s work, offering critique of its own form, like Cervantes commenting on his writing of Don Quixote. • STEPDAUGHTER: “Believe me, sir, we really are six of the most fascinating characters. But we’ve been neglected.” (1746) • Footnote that Pirandello originally conceived these characters as part of a novel he was writing but then abandoned. This becomes the subtext—their “half-realized personalities” (1746)

9. Half-Realizations • SON: “But haven’t you realised yet that you’ll never be able to do this play? There’s nothing inside of us inside you and you actors are only looking at us from the outside. Do you think we could go on living with a mirror held up in front of us that didn’t only freeze our reflections for ever, but froze us in a reflection that laughed back at us with an expression that we didn’t even recognise as our own?” (1778) • Play between interior and exterior world, the function of the play, art as reality. Mirror held up to world reflected in art=realism. Here surrealist fantasy and play. • OTHER ACTORS FROM THE RIGHT: “Make-believe? It’s real! Real! He’s dead!” • OTHER ACTORS FROM THE LEFT: “No, he isn’t. He’s pretending! It’s all make-believe!” (1780)

10. Schrödinger’s Cat http://www.philosophersguild.com http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/science/6dff/ http://icanhascheezburger.com/?s=schrodinger