If you're anything like me, then you begrudgingly opened your copy of Eight Modern Plays a few days ago to read some oddly-titled play you had been assigned- "Six Characters in Search of an Author." Fortunately, right from the beginning I knew this play was a little different than anything I had read before. As soon as the Characters stepped into the action of play, it made me curious as to what would happen next; and what I read did not disappoint me.
Overall, I see 'SCSA' as fundamentally different that many other plays (which often seem to mock reality with their caricatures of characters and drawn-out plots). But what I really enjoyed, in essence, about Pirandello's play is the concept of illusion versus reality and that the static, one-sided Characters were juxtaposed next to the 'unreal' Actors. Of course, we know that each Character symbolized one emotion throughout the play and proved himself or herself incapable of expressing something different than that which they would normally express. As the play tells us, the Father is locked in a state of remorse, the Mother has grief, the Stepdaughter is vindictive, and the Son has disdain for his family and stepfamily. And then there is the issue of the non-speaking mysterious Boy and Girl characters. These Characters help to demonstrate that what is real to us is an illusion. Everything is constantly changing: it is one of the most basic yet complex parts of our world. For the Characters, however, reality does exist and is self-explanatory: nothing about them ever changes. The Hayakawa principle that the "universe is in a perpetual state of flux" does not hold true for them; the opposite is true because every aspect of their existence has been laid out by their author. They are obligated to follow what the author has written: they simply cannot have 'free will' like any being of our reality is entitled to.
I had my doubts, though. For how could a character, just a figment of one author's imagination, be truer than any existing being? A revelation dawned on me as the Father pointed out that "'...it's [reality] fixed- like this- this is it! -forever. It's terrible, this unchanging reality...'" (248). What we may see as physically tangible does not exist in the traditional view: it is not static like the world of the characters; it is always changing.
How does everyone else feel about the play? Do you agree with what Pirandello says? What about the characters? Do you think the Girl and the Boy are really dead, or were they never alive?
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2 comments:
"When a character is born, he instantly acquires a being so independent-even from his creator-that it's easy to see him in a great many situations that the author never even thought of. He can even take on, sometimes, a meaning that the author never dreamed of giving him"(249).
Above all other things in the play, this is the quote that really stuck with me. An author gives a character certain traits and features, but no author could possibly imagine the meaning of a particular character for his or her readers. In the play, this is represented in a dramatic sense. Normally, a character has only intensional meaning, but in the play each character has an extensional meaning, too. This play changed the way I thought about how a character exists both for its creator and for the reader.
Hey, it's Erin. What Brendan said made me think of something Mr. Lazarow said today, that once you say or write something, the words are no longer yours - they are up for interpretation. I think that's true of anything we create. For example, that whole idea of "utopia" someone must have created but then you have people like Hitler and Stalin who interpret utopia their own way. It's true though - what you mean when you say something isn't always what people interpret it to be. This happened a lot in my creative writing class. You can pick up so many things (imagery, consonance, the way words make you feel) but the person who wrote whatever it is you're talking about never conciously put that down.
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