Instructor: Walter Metz

Lecture: "Luigi Pirandello and the Poetics of Modernist Theatre"

Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922) represents a very different sort of modernism than that offered by Bertolt Brecht.  Brecht couples his radical aesthetic practices to a critique of the material circumstances of people’s lives. That is, as a Marxist, Brecht wants the Epic Theatre to cause people to work for social change after being activated by his plays. Pirandello has no such political aims, yet his plays are as aesthetically modernist as any of Brecht’s.

Six Characters in Search of an Author is a perfect play for documenting Pirandello’s aesthetic modernism. His play features a direct conflict between Reality and Illusion, a conflict which calls direct attention to the aesthetic mechanisms of theatre. If the classical theatre was about making the audience forget they were watching a play, to draw them into a pleasurable (whether comedically pleasant or tragically cathartic) narrative universe, Pirandello’s modernist theatre is meant to shock us out of this complacency. Six Characters works by having an impossible conflict between the characters and the actors who play them. The play ends ambiguously, with the children characters dying, and the manager and other out in the "real" world wondering if this was all a play or really happened.

An Intertextual Analysis of Six Characters in Search of an Author

The way in which the modernism of Six Characters has become commonplace in our own cultural moment allows for an analysis of the transition between Modernism and Post-Modernism. That is, we live in a culture where we see the kinds of aesthetic aggressiveness that was revolutionary in Pirandello’s play on a day to day basis. The question arises as to how we travelled from a moment when Six Characters could seen as revolutionary to a world where it now seems hackneyed and dull. The "post" in post-modernism attempts to describe this journey.  However, no critics seem able to agree on what exactly post-modernism means in relationship to modernism.  Here are some attempts.

Four Definitions of Post-modernism’s Relationship to Modernism

1. Some critics envision modernism as a time of great political reformation of bourgeois culture. These critics tend to associate modernism’s narrative practices as coherent parody. For example, James Joyce’s modernist novel, Ulysses (1922), is a full-blown parody of Homer’s The Odyssey, transplanting Odysseus into a character wandering around Dublin drinking. Thus, Joyce’s political project of making fun of Irish masculinity is achieved through a coherent parody of The Odyssey. On the other hand, these critics associate post-modernism with incoherent pastiche, a process of squishing a number of random references into one text. The Simpsons performs this sort of pastiche all of the time, as in the episode where Bart buys a comic book. At one moment, the show is gutting out the conservative politics of The Wonder Years, while at another moment, the conservative critique of man’s greed from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is being directly re-activated.

2. Other critics focus on the aesthetic and narrative practices of modernism and post-modernism to make distinctions between these textual modes. In this type of criticism, modernism is seen to be self-reflexive (Six Characters’ play within a play, commenting upon the instability of the illusory nature of theatre) while post-modernism goes far beyond self-reflexivity toward hyperconsciousness. Hyperconsciousness refers to a practice that is self-reflexive, but transcends the limits of self-reflexivity by having characters know about production circumstances, reception possibilities, potential meanings of the texts being referred to. For example, the moment when Joan Plowright introduces her students to Hamlet via her husband's (Laurence Olivier's) film in The Last Action Hero can be seen to be hyperconscious because the film is making a joke about how far Plowright has fallen, from appearing as Gertrude in Olivier’s Hamlet to now being a very minor character in a mindless, Hollywood action film starrring the very un-Olivier-like Arnold Schwartznegger.

3. Some critics believe a post-modern text is one which can be seen to be working both classically and in a modernist vein. That is, a film like The Last Action Hero can be enjoyed just on a pure visceral, action-film level. As such, it has a rigid classical nature: easily-followed plot, rigid three-act structure, unambiguous ending. On the other hand, the film can be seen to be working as an intellectual engagement with the potential meanings of Hamlet in contemporary culture, as in the Plowright scene discussed above. If you don’t get the Plowright reference, the film still works as a classical enjoyment, but if you do, it opens up areas of ambiguous interpretation that make the film more intellectually stimulating.

4. Implicit in these above three definitions of post-modernism is the disagreement that critics have as to what a post-modern text actually looks like. In broad outline, some critics, who believe modernism was a great development which allowed political critique of bourgeois culture, then post-modernism represents a disappointing cheapening of that potential. On the other hand, critics that find modernism (like Pirandello’s) to be elitist and stultifying, tend to find post-modernism a great way to return the political nature of modernism to the realm of everyday life, in forms that most people can engage with. So, a theatre critic praising Brecht’s political modernism might find The Last Action Hero a useless piece of trash, while another theatre critic bristling against Pirandello’s elitism might find The Purple Rose of Cairo as a meaningful engagement with the power of cinema to soothe our fears of lonliness and isolation.

Now that I’ve set up the potential frameworks for understanding post-modernism, we can examine the types of films that have used the modernist, Pirandellian techniques prominent in Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Almost immediately after the first production of the play, there were films using the Pirandello gimmick of having the real world collapse into the fictional one. For a modernist text, this is the heart of its aesthetic strategy, the so-called "breaking of the hermetically-sealed diegesis" between the fictional and "real" world.  But these early films did not maintain the rupturous use of these devices as Pirandello had.

CLIP #1: Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924): Buster falls asleep and enters the film

CLIP #2: Sherlock Jr.: Ending

CLIP #3: Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, 1952): Ending

In various ways, these films remain classical. That is, they work to contain what is radical in Six Characters. By ending ambiguously, so that we don’t see any possible solution to the Reality vs. Illusion conflict, Pirandello’s play refuses to contain the disruption created by his gimmick. In Sherlock Jr., the gimmick is contained by the fact that it was all a dream. In Duck Amuck, the gimmick is contained by having Daffy’s tormentor not be a real animator, but only his common diegetic nemesis, Bugs Bunny.  However, there is something ultimately not containable about Duck Amuck--the frame stopping and the two Daffy Ducks talking to one another was not just a dream--which is why the critic J. Hoberman calls the film an example of "vulgar modernism." If post-modernism is defined as what happens to modernism when it becomes commodified, that is entered into a popular, commercial apparatus, then Duck Amuck could be considered the beginnings of a post-modern textual form.

The two full-blown post-modern films under study here today are:

CLIP #4: The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985): Tom walks off of the screen

CLIP #5: The Last Action Hero (John McTiernan, 1992):Slater confronts Schwartznegger

These films are made at a moment when the modernist gimmicks so new to Pirandello have now become commonplace, through MTV, through commercials, and through all of the other devices of post-modern culture. Yet I think both The Purple Rose of Cairo and The Last Action Hero represent useful texts for defending post-modernism. They engage with their material in complicated ways, making us do work to figure out what their implications might be.  Purple Rose causes us to reflect upon why the cinema is so important for making us feel better about our crummy lives. The Last Action Hero reflects upon what Shakespeare should mean in a culture dominated by action movies. The very different status of each film’s post-modernism--Purple Rose is a Woody Allen art film while Last Action Hero is a big budget Hollywood blockbuster--reveals the breadth of what we mean when we talk about post-modern cinema.

So, what does this all have to do with the Theatre, the purported object of study in this class? For one thing, since the theatre is not a mass-mediated form (at least it wasn’t prior to Andrew Lloyd Webber, Titanic: The Musical, or The Lion King as a Broadway show), the question of what post-modern theatre might mean offers a different site of post-modern analysis than Hollywood films. There are post-modern plays, however. In addition to the mega-commercial theatre mentioned above, we could cite Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), which, using defintion #3 of Post-modernism offered above, would certainly fit the tradition. That is, Stoppard’s play both works classically by referencing the coherent plot of Hamlet, while at the same time, offering R. and G. as Brechtian, modernist characters alienated from the rest of their world. The first act of the play reads very much like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as R. and G. have a fundamentally absurd conversation about why the coin they’ve been flipping always comes up heads.   Yet, the play's gimmick of telling R. and G.'s story of being off-stage during Hamlet offers a coherent to the story that Waiting for Godot as a full-blown modernist play does not have.

The corrolary idea to the theatre’s non-popular status is that, unlike film or television, where it is hard to imagine a modernism not contaminated by the commercial imperatives associated with post-modernism, the theatre as an elitist form can still allow such an uncontaminated modernism. This is why I wanted to conclude the course with an engagement with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Here is a play funded not by popularity but instead by the National Endowment for the Arts. The play is resolutely modernist, drawing directly from Brechtian traditions (having two actions occur on stage simultaneously, and thus causing us to draw intellectual connections between them), and offering a resolutely anti-homophobic political message.

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This page was last updated on June 16, 2001

Questions or Comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send an e-mail to:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman