Pirandello's thoughts about Art and Style
so i happened across this book: "Pirandello's One Act Plays" in a book store in the west village today (the book store was incredible, but that is a different note all together) and the owner of the store was great, we talked for a while about who Pirandello was and what he did, which was really interesting (but that too is for another note) and when he opened the book he said there wasn't a price in it, so he would give it to me for FREE. so i start reading the forward by William Murray and he included in his forward a few excerpts from Pirandello's journals, and i was almost in tears at the profoundness of what he said, so i thought i would share just a tid-bit with you:
"...the various styles with which he became identified: realistic melodrama, ironic comedy, philosophical discourse, the play of illusion and reality involving the participation of the audience, the use of fantasy and dream to reveal the truth behind seemingly simple, even humdrum surface situation. About the question of style itslef, Priandello wrote: 'Style can be defined as the form of one's talent. For each talent a different style; but by talent I mean that interior virtue of spirit by which a man discoveres for himself what he has not learned from others. A talent without individualality is not a real talent. And style means individuality, one's own way of thinking, feeling, expressin. In short, a person has style who has things of his own to say and knows how to say them in his own way, with a completely personal attitude and manner that does not necessarily have to be beautifu.' "
this means that at the core of an actor is some one who is true to themselves, and therin lies the key: being our selves, generously, shapes our talent and makes it our own, thus that is our "style" as Pirandello would call it. but wait it gets better:
"Pirandello considered himself first and last an artist and he had strong ideas about what art was and what it was not. Among his papers was found the following revealing fragment: 'The realists limit art to the pure and simple imitation of nature. They make not pretense at saying anything; they wish to portray exactly what nature is. It follows that the masterpiece of masterpieces will be the image reflected by a mirror. But why repeat in a human and lesser voice what nature says in her powerful one? Can one perhaps succeed in taking from nature the sun, its warmth, the perpetual mobility of its succesive aspects? To copy nature is impossible. Yes, one should study her and follow her, considering her as the greatest and most prolific teacher. Art is nature itself, but proceeding along its own lines in the human spirit. Andit is from this resemblence that the artist's love of nature derives: he recognizes himself in her, and in contact with her he assumes consciousness of his own talent.In contrast to the realists, who have resolved to say nothing, there are those who want to say too much: philosophers, preachers, priests of the Idea. Before creating a picture, a poem, a melodrama, they write the commentary on it. And when the work is finished we are confronted by a sphinz, an enigma. Certain music called Wagnerian, certain dramas, certain novels or collections of verse of the the so-called symbolistic school, certain pictures or rebuses without perspective, without color, aridly outlined, unfortunatly provide us with painful examples of this. Art has nothing in common with this pedantic, obscure, and pretentious symbolism. Art does not derive from an abstract idea. But does this mean that thought has noghting to do with art? This is what the so-called aesthetes claim who say that the artist must in no way concern himself with the essence because the form is all. What does it matter what the artist expresses, if the expression is rich and powerful, the sounds, the lines, the colors joyfully beguile the senses and surprise the imagination by the fancy of their harmonious play? The aesthetes set themselves apart from the symbolists and the naturalists; they desire the cold representation of unalterable beauty, artifice for its own sake, for the pleasure of executing it. They distingusih the form from the idea and value only the former, without realizing that to seperate these two terms - form and idea - is to suppress art, which consists in essence of the compenetration of these two terms. The idea has no value in art until it acquires feeling, until, in entire possession of the spirit, it becomes a desire strong enough to arouse the images capable of endowing it with a living expression. Art, in short, is life, not a reasoning process. Now, all the founders of a system condem the artist to reason instead of to live. The realists make an artisan of him, the idealists a philosopher, the aesthetes and the partisans of art, fot art's sake, a kind of juggler who should divert his neighbor with words, sounds, lines, and colors in bizarre interplay, like so many little globes of colored glass. In each case we have the substitution of thought for nature. Instead of allowing the work to mature spontaneously in the spirit, they compose it externally by summing up various elements whose affinity they can study. Instead of abandoning themselves to the free movement of life, they assemble, they graft, they knowledgeably combine dead limbs in order to compose a living body. Art is the living idea, the idea that, in becoming the center of the interior life, creates the body of images in which it clothes itself. The idea is nothing without the form, but what is form without the idea, if the idea is what creates it? No formulas, then, for art. Whoever desires to create beauty by a formula deludes himself. Beauty can derive from anything except premeditated reasoning. Sinc, about all, the artist must be moved, out of his being moved the work of art will be born.' "
i think that speaks for itself. so there you have it... how amazing is that?
much love
adam
