The basis of the yogas—sometimes—shines in the West
The one thought of Pirandello is this: the I does not exist — if only because there exist countless Is, countless Is, all referring to the same person. There is no such thing as the I of me who am writing; something like “my I” does not exist, for there are so many “my I”s that to gather them into one would be impossible.
And indeed, the idea is quite simple—almost self-evident. Pirandello demonstrates, most vividly in Uno, nessuno e centomila (“One, No One and One Hundred Thousand”), that there is no such thing as a single Vitangelo Moscarda; rather, there exists a whole platoon of them. There is the Vitangelo Moscarda as seen by his little wife Dida, her “Gegè”; the Vitangelo Moscarda as regarded by the directors of the bank he inherited—an incompetent; the Vitangelo Moscarda the usurer, in the eyes of the townspeople of Richieri; and again the Vitangelo Moscarda as seen by Marco Di Dio, by the neighbor, by the greengrocer—by anyone at all.
This essential and existential reflection arises in the protagonist’s mind from a casual remark made by his wife. While Vitangelo Moscarda was lingering before the mirror because of a slight pain in his nose, she happened to say: “I thought you were checking which way it leans”. Startled, Moscarda realizes that his nose, though aquiline, does in fact bend a little to the right—and that he had never noticed it before. From this trivial discovery, he observes, “the thought fixed itself in my mind that I was not, for others, what until then I had imagined myself to be within me”; and he soon goes on to wonder: “If for others I was not what I had believed myself to be for me—then who was I?”. The predicament of the novel’s protagonist lies in the dawning realization that each of us exists, for those who stand before us, not as we believe ourselves to be in our own eyes, but only as we are interpreted—or, more precisely, as we are believed to be—by the other.
The next step Vitangelo Moscarda takes is the realization that reality is not one and monolithic, as people generally believe, but has as many facets as there are individuals who take part in it. “If there were, outside us—for you and for me—a lady Reality of mine and a lady Reality of yours, existing in themselves, identical and immutable. There is not. There is, in me and for me, a reality of mine: the one I give myself; and in you and for you, a reality of yours: the one you give yourself. These will never be the same, neither for you nor for me”. Carried away by these unsettling reflections, Vitangelo Moscarda decides to dismantle the many images that others have made of him—his wife’s, his friends’, his acquaintances’. He resolves to destroy all those countless Vitangelo Moscardas believed to exist, yet utterly unlike the one he feels himself to be. And so, to the scandal of the townspeople, he evicts from one of his houses a wretched man and his wife, only to grant them a new home; he quarrels bitterly with his wife and the bank directors, until he finally resolves to liquidate the business and, swept along by the course of events, ends his days as a simple guest of a hostel for the poor—founded with the very fortune he had donated to the Church. All these actions performed by the novel’s protagonist are repeatedly described by Vitangelo Moscarda himself as acts of “madness”, beginning with the moment he looked into the mirror and saw his first “madman’s smile” at the close of the book’s first part.
It is beyond doubt that Uno, nessuno e centomila may be read as a novel depicting the onset and unfolding of a temporary loss of reason, or even of a genuine mental disorder. Yet another interpretation of the work is possible. If one goes beyond the narrow confines of Western thought—which has always regarded the I, the ego, the psyche, the subjectivity, as one of its fixed points, if not the very center itself, for understanding reality—then a new perspective begins to appear. In the Eastern doctrines—as indeed in the esoteric sciences of the Western world—the very belief in the existence of the I is already an error, born of illusion, of Māyā, which holds human beings in ignorance. For Buddhism (whether Theravāda or Mahāyāna, according to the Sūtra, the Tantra, or the Dzogchen), for the Vedānta, for Kashmir Śaivism, and for all the currents of knowledge that have arisen in India, the first step on the path toward perfection is to recognize that one’s own I is a fiction—to rediscover one’s true nature: for the Hindu doctrines, the ātman, of the same substance as Brahman; for Buddhism, the non-self. Only when the overcoming of the I is directly experienced—and this is the primary aim of the various yoga—does one attain the fullness of life.
From such a perspective, the experiences of Vitangelo Moscarda—and indeed Pirandello’s entire thought—take on a new light. It is not, of course, a matter of suggesting that Pirandello had read the Eastern Tantra, but rather of observing that the psychic movement animating his works is not unlike the spirit of the Eastern and esoteric doctrines.
What Pirandello shows is that, from a purely empirical and relational point of view—social and familial alike—something like a stable and immutable I does not, in truth, exist. In this sense, his work may well be called tantric, for it leads the reader to perceive the illusion within which human beings have always lived. Of course, the parallel with esoteric doctrines goes no further, for Pirandello says only this: the I is an illusion. He never ventures into what the true nature of the person might be, nor into what reality itself may consist of—questions that esoteric texts examine in depth. Yet he succeeds in striking at the very heart of Western thought, loosening its most deeply rooted conviction. Pirandello, then, is by no means a nihilist, as he is so often—explicitly or implicitly—taken to be. He is not, because he never declares the vanity of human life; he merely points out that the firmest of all modern beliefs is an act of self-deception. What lies beyond—or rather, beneath—the I he never sought to investigate. Pirandello had, in truth, explored his own soul, as Heraclitus says in a famous fragment. He offers the reader a challenge—and if his vision seems disorienting, that is the surest sign that he has hit the mark.