Six (Billion) Characters in Search of an Author

Luigi Pirandello was a noted Italian author and dramatist. In 1921 he wrote what would become one of the most famous plays of the 20th century: “Six Characters in Search of an Author” (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore), a radically experimental comedy (?) , a landmark of modernist drama that foreshadowed the theater of the absurd. 

Briefly: as a company of Actors are rehearsing a play (one of Pirandello’s!), they are interrupted by a small group of people who come upon the stage and make the bizarre claim that they are Characters who were left unrealized when an artist couldn’t  complete their story. They are searching for an Author to give them an existence. They propose that the Director (of the play in rehearsal) do this, after they show him and the Actors who they are by playing it out on the stage. The Characters insist that they are more “real” than the actors who will portray them. The Father, the main Character, explains that he and the others want to achieve their full life by completing the story that now only exists in fragments in the author's brain. The Director reluctantly agrees to their request.

 

Pirandello said  that  the characters came to him as if alive and stayed in his presence “each with his secret torment and all bound together by the one common origin and mutual entanglement of their affairs....Born alive, they wished to live." And further, "I wanted to present six characters seeking an author. Their play has not managed to get presented--precisely because the author whom they seek is missing.... In these six, then, I have accepted the ‘being’ without the reason for being...."

If this sounds like it has metaphysical overtones, it certainly does. If God created the world, then He is the Author and we are the Characters. (Or are we the Actors?)  We are born alive, but wish to live – to find authentic life. We confront being in search of a reason for being, but for much of our lives we seem only to be acting, playing a part.  This seems to skirt both religion and existential philosophy. For if God is dead, as Nietzsche and other existentialists proclaim, then what of our search for an Author?  

But this is not just, or even basically, a metaphysical play; it has much to do with the theater, with illusion and reality.  It has, grandly, to do with the multiple dimensions of actors as actors, actors as the people they “really” are away from the theater, with the characters the actors portray as they enact the drama, with those characters who live independent of the actors and may be played by altogether different actors. It has to do with the Director (ah – who he?) and, finally, certainly, with the Author. And yet ultimately, it has to do with all of us, with the great human drama. I am reminded of C.S. Lewis trying to illustrate the gulf between creator and that which is created. He compared it to the author of a book vs. the world and the characters in the book.

At one time not long ago when I was writing this, the population of the world was frequently given as six billion in round terms. Naturally it has changed and is changing every day; maybe it’s seven billion or more now. What of it ? – These  are modest numbers compared to the total number of people who have ever lived on earth, which is roughly guessed at by some as 100-110 billion. (This number is fine with me, but the matter of estimating it I find fascinating. In addition to assumptions about rates of population increase and factors like pandemics and ice ages, there are many wonderful questions that arise. Who and when were the first people, and how many of them were there? Does hominid equal homo? Naturally we can’t count the australopithecines but what about Neanderthal? Etc.)  But in order to stay with Pirandello let’s go with the number six billion. 

So here we are: six billion characters in search of an author.Think about it. No,don't just think about it - read the play, or better, go see a performance. (Wait, have all our analyses omitted the rôle of the audience?)