Fluent Essays

Please write a post with a minimum of 250 words responding to some or all of the following questions: What effect do you think it create for the author and character to be able to interact?What effect do you think it creates for the author to reject the characters?What levels of reality does the play create or use? Where is the audience?Why doesnt Pirandello want the Characters to seem real (think of the use of masks, light effects, strange movements, etc.)?What do we make of all the philosophizing by the Father?What is the role of the Director? day_12___pirandellos_fantasy.pptx day_13___six_characters_in_search_of_an_author__1_.pptx Unformatted Attachment Preview Literature of Fantasy and the Supernatural Professor Michael Subialka Tuesday, May 12, 2020 Lecture 12 Luigi Pirandello – Fantasy’s Characters “Characters” (1906), “A Character’s Tragedy” (1911), “Conversations with Characters” (1915), and the “Preface” to Six Characters in Search of an Author (1925) Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) • Important Italian modernist author of plays, novels, short stories, and essays • Born in Agrigento, Sicily, educated in Rome and Bonn, Germany, and lived in Rome • • Traveled and lived internationally in Germany, France, the US, and South America) Married with three children, his wife Antonietta was diagnosed with severe mental illness and eventually committed to institutional care • Won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 “for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art” – transformative figure in modern drama • Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, 1921/1925) is his most famous play, but dozens of others from 1910-1936 What Is a Character? • Pirandello’s meta-fictional short stories about characters: • “Characters” (“Personaggi”), 1906 • “The Tragedy of a Character” (“La tragedia di un personaggio”), 1911 • “Interviews with Characters” (“Colloquii coi personaggi”), 1915 • All lead up to his most famous play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, which premiered in 1921 at the Teatro Valle in Rome to disastrous reception • He then added a “Preface” to Six Characters and made changes to the play for a new version that premiered in 1925 • I’ll summarize the three short stories here, but before I do, here’s a question to keep in mind: • What similarities do you notice among the three stories? And how are they, in turn, similar t0 (or different from) Six Characters? What Is a Character? “Personaggi” (1906) This is the first of Pirandello’s works on the meta-literary process of his creative imagination and the composition of stories. In this short story, Pirandello first introduces the notion of the “receiving hours” and “audience” for his characters, launching into a long disquisition where he warns his characters that they shouldn’t want his help, and then depicting his relation to Fantasy, the little servant who brings in all of the characters who already have their figure, their personality, the stories that they want to tell. After he rejects a little boy, his mom, an old man and his three daughters (all of whom begin to tell stories by introducing a suspense-drawing “hook”), the narrator turns to a more upstanding-looking one. This man, Leandro Scoto presents himself as wanting to be a doctor, but he is carrying Leadbeater’s theosophical book, from which he quotes and then offers what Pirandello/the narrator terms a “theosophical-aesthetic dissertation” on how the mind creates through imagination via the mind’s spiritual aura. The version of the character we get here exhibits key elements of the personaggio: he is ushered in by Fantasy; he desires to be given a form so that he can live in it; he understands how fictional existence is “truer” than actual (“real”) existence. What Is a Character? “La tragedia di un personaggio” (1911) This story replicates key ideas and themes from “Personaggi,” but Pirandello liked it better and reused it, which he did not do with his earlier story. It centers on Pirandello (the author who grants audience to prospective characters) interacting with a character who another author has already written about, Dottor Fileno, who is dissatisfied with the way he has been depicted in the other author’s work and wants Pirandello to make him into the main character of his own story. Dottor Fileno has invented a new technique, the “reversed telescope,” which allows the viewer to take distance from the troubles and difficulties of everyday life by looking at the present as if from far away (a reverse of a real telescope which makes distant things closer and more real). The author rejects the character, however, telling him he will not make him into a protagonist. The story ends with the author mocking the character, who seems to take himself too seriously; he suggests that Doctor Fileno should look at himself and his own desires and disappointments (being rejected by the author) through the lens of the reversed telescope so that instead of being sad he can laugh. What Is a Character? “Colloquii coi personaggi” (1915) Written during World War I, this story plays on the same theme in different and more autobiographical ways. Pirandello is obsessed with the news about the war, which has broken out in Europe and which Italy has not yet entered (remaining neutral in the first year). He has suspended audiences with characters and doesn’t want to be disturbed, but an insistent character shows up nonetheless. He asks Pirandello what is going on in the world that has him so upset, and when Pirandello describes the Great War, the character is unfazed. He points out that all of history is defined by sadness and struggle (tears) and joy (a smile) and that these come and go, transitory. Only fiction, he argues, endures. Art is more real than the changing world outside us. In the second half of the story, Pirandello encounters a new character who he speaks with: his own mother, who has recently passed away. She narrates her own childhood to him, describing how her family was exiled in Malta after a failed revolution against the reigning Bourbon monarchy in Sicily. Pirandello cries, saying that without his mother he feels he has lost a part of himself because he no longer lives in her mind. She consoles him by saying that he should see the world through the eyes of others, which will make him experience their grief but also find the world more sacred and beautiful. What Is a Character? • So, what is a “character”? • They pre-exist their encounters with the author • They already have a life (described in some metaphors as a “living seed” or “germ”) of their own that can be cultivated by the author and given form • They desire to live “eternally” as artistic creations • They can move “outside” of the works and roles in which they were first written • What effect do you think it creates for the author and character to be able to interact? • What effect do you think it creates for the author to “reject” the characters (within a story written by an actual author who is thus actually writing about the “rejected” character)? What Is Fantasy? • Fantasy as a fictional character: Though it seems like she just arrived, my clever little maid, who always acts like she’s new to the job, has been in service to my art for many years. Her name is Fantasy. She’s mischievous and sarcastic and likes to dress in black, but there’s no doubt that she’s often eccentric, and no one can believe that she does everything seriously and routinely. She sticks her hand in her pocket, pulls out and puts on her head a fool’s cap, red as a cockscomb, with bells, and off she goes. Here today. There tomorrow. And she enjoys bringing me – as fodder for stories, novels and plays – the most discontented people in the world. They are men, women and children involved in strange situations from which they can find no way out – thwarted in their plans, cheated in their hopes – and real thorns in my side. Well then, this little servant of mine, Fantasy, several years ago now, on an ill-fated whim, brought home to me an entire family – I have no idea where or how she dug them up. In her opinion, I could create a magnificent novel with them. - Luigi Pirandello, “Preface to Six Characters,” trans. Martha Witt and Mary Ann Frese Witt (New York: Italica, 2013), 17. What Is Fantasy? • Fantasy as an aesthetic function: • Reading that passage on Fantasy less as a description of a character and more as a metaphor for an aesthetic category, we arrive at something like Pirandello’s picture of artistic creation in his theoretical essays, like “On Humor” (1908) • Life plants living seeds into the mind of the creative writer • The mind operates through fantasy, the faculty of the imagination, to nurture those seeds so that they grow and develop the full form that was already contained in their essence, their DNA (organic metaphor for artistic creation) • Fantasy doesn’t invent ex nihilo but reworks/develops • The characters that Fantasy “digs up” have their own “ideal reality” – the metaphor implies different levels of reality • Artistic form grants eternal life by fixing the image of something, freezing life into a statue of itself • Fantasy in this view is the creative force that discovers and brings to the surface, allowing the artist to shape Critical Reading Questions: • How does this view of artistic creation and the role of fantasy/imagination appear or function in the play? • How do we see the theme of the “incomplete” work (like the “refused/rejected” characters in his short stories)? Why do we think Pirandello is choosing to present his works in this way? • What levels of reality does the play create or use? What is the effect of this? • What is the relationship between fantasy and the actual (primary) world? Literature of Fantasy and the Supernatural Professor Michael Subialka Thursday, May 14, 2020 Lecture 13 Luigi Pirandello – Breaking (through) Reality Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921/1925) Six Characters in Search of an Author • Pirandello’s most famous play • First version from 1921 • Premiered in Rome at the Teatro Valle, May 9, 1921 • Scandalous reception, Pirandello was booed off and left out the back • Went on to be performed in Milan, Paris, Berlin, London to much more positive receptions • Innovations from French and German directors helped Pirandello reconceive what was possible, rewriting • Second version from 1925 • Changed dialogue, cutting from Father and adding to Stepdaughter • Added new stage notes for directors/actors, making Characters into shadows on the wall, wearing masks, etc. • Added “Preface” explaining the setup of the play • The play became the most performed and internationally acclaimed of his works Questions to Consider: • What are the different “levels” of reality in the play? What are the different “frames” in which we see stories/characters? • How does staging the interaction between a fictional reality (a secondary world) and actual reality (the primary world) change the dynamic already developed in Pirandello’s short stories? • Why doesn’t Pirandello want the Characters to seem real (masks, light effects, strange movements, unnatural or unreal aspects – Madame Pace, for instance)? Uncanny Metatheatrical Moments: • The opening of the play – the unset stage, the “troupe” of actors, and the appearance of the Characters • The Actors and the Characters – mirrors, doubles, estrangement • Madame Pace appears – stage magic and fictional realities • The final catastrophe – a drowning, a gunshot, and one last laugh • Shadows on the wall – the haunted stage? (dream, nightmare, fantasy) Fantasy in the Flesh? • In his book Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford University Press, 2004), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht argues that the material presence of artistic production goes beyond meaning, creating a sense of tangible, real experience that we interact with and that we feel, which exceeds conceptual content expressed in words • Could we argue that Pirandello’s play is an effort to make fantasy real – material, tangible, actual – not by creating a self-contained world but rather by puncturing the “boundaries” delimiting our own world? • If so, what do we make of all the philosophizing by the Father? And what is the role of the Director? Adapting Six Characters for the Screen Metatheater as Metafilm Stages of Adaptation - The Prologue (Prologo): précis written in 1926, only published in 1941 by Cinema with an article by Giancarlo Beria on Pirandello and the Surrealists (Pirandello and Film, Nina da Vinci Nichols and Jana O’Keefe Bazzoni (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 57) - The Scenario (Film-Novelle: Sechs Personen suchen einen Autor): new, more thorough outline for adaptation, written with Adolf Lantz, published in 1930, and circulated in Berlin film community, but no resulting collaborations; published together with “Preface” to the play (Pirandello and Film, 95 and 143) - The Treatment: written in New York’s Waldorf Astoria with Saul Colin (English translator and secretary) for Max Reinhardt’s direction (following success of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1935, Warner Bros.) “Warner Brothers accepted the Treatment in its rough state sometime near the end of 1935 or the beginning of 1936. Pirandello completed his work during the summer of 1936 in New York. In October he reports on a concluded agreement with Warner Brothers to a journalist in Berlin, where he was attending an international conference of playwrights and composers. Conclusion: Hal Wallis of Warner had edged Thalberg and MGM out of the field. The official signing of the Warner Brothers contract was scheduled for January 1937. Pirandello dies in Rome on December 10. The rest is ‘if only’s’.” (Pirandello and Film, 122) - The Prologue - Shift toward gothic aesthetic - Addition of Author character - Redistribution of lines from Father to Stepdaughter, for Marta Abba - Spectral/imaginary presence of Characters in Author’s mind, following short stories - The Scenario (Film-Novelle) - Continues gothic aesthetic, emphasis on light effects to underline spectral reality; adds new mirror effects to create juxtaposition of “real” and “imagined” stories - Father and Director eliminated, entirely replaced by Author - Spectral phantoms again, Beethoven is one of the spirits to appear to the Author - Daughter watches play of Six Characters that the Author writes to exorcize these phantoms, goes mad as her escort morphs into her Mother’s first husband - The Treatment - More powerful, Godlike Author figure (shaping both art and life) - Removal of the spirits/phantoms, move toward increased realism in film aesthetic - Juxtaposition of two stories via materialization of Characters in Author’s gothic chairs - Increased focus on the ethical problem of artistic creation and shaping of lives Unrealized Images of Imagination ... 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