Policy of Truth

There are many pitfalls to working theory into a play: the play could be too subtle and lose its intended message, or the play could be too heavy handed and lose its audience. Either way, a dramatist runs the risk of compromising the entertainment value of his work in order to pursue his artistic and theoretical values. Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author is an anomaly. It is a play dripping with theory, yet it remains entertaining despite, or because of, this fact. Pirandello creates a play that violently moves theater and theory in a new direction. In 1921, when the world was just being introduced to Modernism, Pirandello experiments with Post-Modernism and Deconstruction. The major theme being explored throughout Six Characters is the nature of truth and representation in art. In other words, Six Characters asks the question, what makes a character, and what makes person? The answer that it offers up is that the two are not mutually exclusive.

Six Characters predates Baudrillard’s definition of the simulacrum, yet putting aside this anachronistic disparity, we find that Six Characters is a prime example of Baudrillard’s theory. Within Pirandello’s play he blurs the line between reality and representation. Pirandello has Characters confronting characters, or to put it another way, Characters confronting reality as portrayed by actors. Baudrillard’s theory states that, “Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent…” (Baudrillard, 166-184), so by this logic, Pirandello’s Characters (signs) and living people (real) are one and the same.

Pirandello asserts that Characters are more real than the people they represent. In Act Two, the Father confronts the Director on the advantages of being a fixed character as opposed to being a living person, “[a] character truly has a life of his own, marked by his own characteristics, because of which he is always ‘someone’. On the other hand…a man in general, can be ‘nobody’” (55). Returning to Baudrillard’s definition of a simulacrum, we find that a character is capable of becoming more real than that which it represents. For Pirandello’s Characters, the path to becoming more real than their models forces them to confront the nature of truth in life and art.

The Characters maintain that their truth must be heard, yet their truth is fiction. It is here that Pirandello exerts most of his theoretical energy. Each Character asserts that their story is in fact their truth, more so than that of the other characters. This is because the Characters represent and embody living people. By representing a living person, and by being fixed to a series of events, the Characters become “living people more alive than those who breathe and wear clothes: less real, perhaps, but more true!” (12).

According to Six Characters, the truth being represented by characters is contingent upon immortality. In order for characters to “live eternally…they [must have] the good fortune to find a fertile matrix, a fantasy that [knows] how to raise and nourish them” (14). In this way, the fertile matrix, the author, creates a character that represents reality. Once that character is created, it embodies the multitude and complexities found in living people, but it embodies them all at once. A living person comes and goes through these multitudes and complexities of emotions, never permanently settling into one; the character does not exist in flux, it is static. Truth, it would seem, is in permanence.

Pirandello’s theory runs deeper than the truth of a character; it also tackles the truth of acting. Again we return to the simulacrum as described by Baudrillard. The simulacrum is not the instant reflection of life, but rather a result of that reflection becoming so distorted and perverted that it becomes its own reality. The acting of a character is the representation of represented life. As the Director explains to the Father, “you cannot exist as your real self! Here it is the actor that represents you” (36). A character represents truth, an actor represents a character, and so it becomes that an actor is truth. This happens because an actor “[gives] body and form, voice and gesture” (35), to a character, bringing that character to life. Six Characters is a heavy-handed and convoluted play. It puts forth more theory than plot, and more philosophy than story. Yet, it remains entertaining and engaging. Six Characters seeks to unnerve its audience and have them question the very base of their reality. This, for the most part, is done in a playful manner. Existence and consequentiality are not thrown askew; rather it is our definitions of the difference between real and fiction that is questioned. Ultimately, Pirandello argues that art creates reality, because art is the representation of reality.

Baudrillard, Jean. Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings. ed. Mark Poster. Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988, pp.166-184. http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html