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| Six Characters in Search of an Author General Questions | Group Questions | Criticism | Pictures | Links Terms to know Commedia Dell'arte: Style of Italian comedy, popular from the mid-16th to late-18th century, which spread throughout Europe. Professional players performed on street stages or at court functions. Plays were comic, often coarse, and crudely improvized on briefly outlined scenarios. Commedia produced several (now standard) masked characters: Harlequin (clown), Capitano (braggart soldier), Pantalone (deceived father or cuckolded husband), Colombina (maid) and Inamorato (lover). "commedia dell'arte." World Encyclopedia. Philip's, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 13 November 2010. Modernism: A general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant‐garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century, including Symbolism , Futurism , Expressionism , Imagism , Vorticism , Ultraismo, Dada , and Surrealism , along with the innovations of unaffiliated writers. Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th‐century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader: the conventions of realism , for instance, were abandoned by Franz Kafka and other novelists, and by expressionist drama, while several poets rejected traditional metres in favour of free verse . Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant‐garde disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronological development was upset by Joseph Conrad , Marcel Proust , and William Faulkner , while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the flow of characters' thoughts in their stream‐of‐consciousness styles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions . Luigi Pirandello and Bertolt Brecht opened up the theatre to new forms of abstraction in place of realist and naturalist representation. "modernism." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Ed. Chris Baldick. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 13 November 2010. Surrealism: European avant-garde movement which emphasized chance and automatism, along with irrational modes of cognition and creativity, in order to activate or represent a liberation of the self and culture from the restrictions of rationality. Surrealism began in Paris with a group of artists, poets, and theatre practitioners such as Artaud, Philippe Soupault, and Paul Éluard, led by André Breton (1896–1966) and Tristan Tzara (1896–1963). Tzara arrived in Paris in 1920 from Zurich where he had led the dada movement. Surrealism drew from a similar rejection of bourgeois norms, through Breton's interest in Freud, in particular The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), turned more towards liberatory change through the irrational. The first Manifesto of Surrealism was written by Breton in 1924, though Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) had coined the term ‘surrealism’ in the preface to The Breasts of Teiresias (written 1903, produced 1917). Apollinaire's text is deeply indebted to Jarry's Ubu roi (1896), following a comparable self-reflexive, satiric, and imagistic style. A verse drama, the play's characters and action are liquid with sudden transformations of subjects and illogical shifts in plot. Typical surrealist dramaturgy is exemplified in Cocteau's The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower (1921), a dialogue of clichés between two phonographs, and Artaud's The Jet of Blood (1925), a nightmarish scenario of lust and apocalypse. Theatre of the Absurd: name given by Martin Esslin, in a book of that title published in 1962, to the plays of a group of dramatists, among them Beckett and Ionesco and, in England, Pinter, whose work has in common the basic belief that man's life is essentially without meaning or purpose and that human beings cannot communicate. This led to the abandonment of dramatic form and coherent dialogue, the futility of existence being conveyed by illogical and meaningless speeches and ultimately by complete silence. The first, and perhaps most characteristic, play in this style was Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952), the most extreme—since it has no dialogue at all—his Breath (1969). The movement, which now seems to have passed its zenith, nevertheless made a profound and lasting impression on the theatre everywhere. "Absurd, Theatre of the." The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. Eds. Phyllis Hartnoll and Peter Found. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 13 November 2010. The times Written in 1921 -- i.e. a war text In a 1934 interview Pirandello declared that his was "a war theater," that "the war [World War I] had revealed the theater" to him: "When passions were let loose, I had my characters suffer those passions onstage." (Scribner's online) Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: as you tried to measure something, it moved away. Eienstein's theory of relativity: even time is relative.
Background on Play Commedia Dell'arte: Improvised comedy with a long pedigree. Usually consisted of stock characters and often involved players wearing masks. A later version of Six specifies that the characters wear masks
Questions to mull over as you interpret the story First How many plays are there here? Let's break them down. (at least two -- if not three counting the play itself)
Let's break down the different plots 1. The "character's" play Why did the Father send the Mother away? · What happened to the Mother during her "exile?" · When did the Father see his step-daughter? · Why did the Mother and her children return to the Father? 2. the "actor's" play · (what play are they staging?) Ironic? How · How does the manager feel about Pirandello? How can you tell? 3. Six Characters in Search of an Author
How are the actors hampered by tradition? How is the manager hampered by tradition? What does Pirandello attempt to show by this?
After group work · Reality TV -- is it real? How does Reality TV connect to the play? · On art v. reality: when you hold up a picture of yourself -- which do you think is the "real" you? How about when you listen to yourself on the answering machine? · Who is "real" in the play -- the family or the actors? Who "dies" at the end? · One more note: Pirandello developed a particular theory of comedy, articulated in L'umorismo (On Humor), a book-length essay he published in 1908, which connected laughter with deepfelt emotion. What he valued was the kind of humor of the sad faced clown which is laughter tinged with, at times, melancholy, and always, with feeling. Pirandello uses the example of a old woman who dresses as a young woman -- complete with heavy make up and trendy clothes (think Tammy Faye Baker in clothes by Tommy) -- described as "‘an old lady, her hair dyed, all sticky with some vile ointment, clumsily made-up and adorned in youthful finery." At first sight she induces scornful laughter, but when it becomes known why she is so inappropriately decked out—perhaps it is to hold the love of a much younger husband—the laughter gives way to a different feeling. This "feeling of the opposite" (sentimento del contrario), of why a thing is incongruous and therefore liable to elicit derision, which follows upon the "recognition of the opposite" (avvertimento del contrario), awareness of the fact that something is incongruous, is the spring of humorism." (Scribner online) How is this play "humorous" -- according to Pirandello?
5. How does the Father conjure Madame Pace? · How does Madame Pace fit into the structure of the play? · Is Madame Pace a "real" character? · Why isn't the play titled "Seven Characters in Search of an Author?" 2. What is the effect of having the company rehearsing a fictional Pirandello play named The Game As He Played It? 3. The Characters' story is a play within a play. What is the relationship between their story and the story of the company's rehearsal? What is the central action of Six Characters? The Characters' story? The attempt to make a play of their story? The debate between the Father and the Producer? 8. Is the Boy dead at the end of the play. What does it mean for a "character" to be dead? 9. Explore the basic equation of life and the theater in Six Characters in Search of an Author. How is life like the theater? How is it unlike it? One critic, contrasting realism with modernism, argues that "realism seeks to create the illusion of reality; Pirandello is bent on making illusion a compelling reality" (http://web.missouri.edu/~engbob/courses/370/sessions/20.html). Is this true? Why or why not? Are the characters more real than the actors? 1. Why is the father so upset with the word "illusion" (1758)? Note the Father's wording:
Father "a perfect illusion of reality" (1758)
What's significant about the wording? Oxymoronic? 2. How can a character be "somebody" and a "man" be "nobody" (1759)? 3. Which would Pirandello would say is superior, art or life? Prove your point. Do you agree with him? Why or why not? 4. In the preface to Six Pirandello writes that human anguish is based on "the deception of mutual understanding founded on the empty abstraction of words, the multiple personality of everyone corresponding to the possibility of being to be found in each of us, and finally the inherent tragic conflict between life, which is continually moving, and form, which fixes it, immutable" (qtd. in Scriber's). Whew! What's this got to do with the play? But on second thought (okay, okay, maybe third or fourth thought), this does connect with the play -- your job is to determine how (hint -- focus on "words"). 5. What does the following quote suggest about morality?
...the assumption that "I am I" and that "You are You" is one of the most fundamental which we make--because it seems self-evident to us, not only that the realities exist but also that they persist, so that the "I" of today and the "I " of yesterday are in some way continuous no matter what developments may occur. Upon this assumption all moral systems must rest, since obviously no one can be good or bad, guilty or innocent, unless he exists as some sort of continuous unity. (Krutch 78)
How then, does the play question contemporary views of morality?
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© 2010 David Bordelon
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