Year: 1982
Type: article
Abstract: Pirandello and the enigma of non-sense When an idea is set to words, its identity varies and differentiates something is either added or subtracted from the original.Every time we seek to incarnate our ideas, we exercise an act of transla- tionitself an original act which runs the risk of committing the original sin of betraying its purpose.The noted Italian dictum "traduttore-traditore" sits as witness to the fact.To set to words the Idea is to translate it, and to translate it is to risk betraying it, an act of tra-dire (to say in between) the original Word.The way we read Ovid's Metamorphoses, as a fable of constant translation, of ironic and tragic change of constant identity into new forms, parallels a reading of any text.As an essential codified form, Art, like religion and law, reaches a point where it overcompensates, it becomes aggressive and appropriative.Ironically enough, Art then displaces its original intention and betrays its very purpose.When this occurs, man reflects and discovers that his very consciousness of the contradiction indicates that Art has assumed a conceptual mode of behavior, and as such, its original impulse to discipline and give form to change now collides with its demand to control and imprison reality.Caught in the contradiction, man is soon forced to explicate and can only do so by resorting to so-called absurd, paradoxical formulations, such as reformulating Art as that mode of expression that defines itself in terms of what it is not.What constitutes the artistic element in modern Art is the discovery and enactment of its impossibility to be faithful to its original intent, for Art has in its own blood the seed to betray itself every time it expresses itself.The artistic crisis that invents the so-called "modern" man is the crisis of the word and its inability to make sense.When man does speak, he is poignantly aware of the word's nonsense and its own limitationsas Kierkegaard had already declared when he states: "But what is this unknown something with which Reason collides when inspired by its paradoxical passion?" (Philosophical Fragments, p. 49)
Source: Quaderni d italianistica
Author: Alfonso Procaccini
Language: English
Subfield: General Arts and Humanities
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2201653529