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Characters in Search of an Author
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Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, got a rude reception when it premiered in Rome in 1921. There were chants of “manicomio!,” or “madhouse!” from the audience. The playwright was forced to flee the theater by a side entrance to escape an angry crowd. In retrospect, it’s not hard to understand why. The play opens with actors rehearsing another of Pirandello’s plays, The Rules of the Game, when they are interrupted by the six characters of the show’s title. Thereafter, every theatrical rule of the game is upended. The six characters — all members of one dysfunctional family — claim to be refugees from an unfinished play. They demand that the director stage their play and help them to find a resolution. Just who were these “characters,” and how were they different from the actors playing characters in the play within a play? And how were each different from the real-life actors playing both?
Six Characters in Search of an Author is generally taken as an exploration of reality and illusion. But it occurs to me its basic premise might also describe the dilemma faced by spiritual seekers. In a 1925 preface to his play, Pirandello wrote that the six characters are motivated by the pursuit of “universal meaning,” which they eventually find in their own struggles. The meaning they seek would normally be supplied by the playwright, but he has abandoned them. Similarly, spiritual seekers pursue fulfillment from a God who is largely absent, leaving them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
In the creation myths of the Abrahamic religions, humankind starts out by hobnobbing with God in the Garden of Eden. Then they get booted from paradise after they succumb to Satan’s blandishments by tasting the forbidden fruit. The irony is that these creatures who are made in God’s image are persuaded to disobey him with the thought that eating the fruit will make them like God. All of their spiritual pursuits thereafter are aimed at undoing the damage so they can once again be like him.
In theatrical terms, we might say spiritual seekers hope to find the right words and actions to lead them to a desired denouement. But they embark on this foolhardy pursuit without a script. There are, of course, no lack of sacred texts, of prayers and prostrations, that promise to do the trick. But the most insightful among those seeking some sort of transcendence recognize that in the absence of a script, the best they can do is to improvise. They may even recognize that improvisation is the whole point.
When I was in college long ago, my roommate Danny and I visited some girls at Brandeis University. We got a chance to hear a talk by the spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti, who was by then already in his 70s. While still a boy in India, Krishnamurti had been identified by leaders of the Theosophical Society as the next incarnation of Christ. They founded a religious organization called the Order of the Star and anointed him as its leader. Following a spiritual crisis brought on by the untimely death of his younger brother, Krishnamurti turned away from the whole idea of organized belief, religious authority and spiritual masters, himself included. He disbanded the Order of the Star and told his followers that if they wanted to find enlightenment, they should look to themselves. “I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect,” Krishnamurti told his followers. “Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path.”
“When a character is born,” Pirandello wrote, “he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.” That being the case, what need have they for an author? And what need have spiritual seekers for a guide or guru?
In the biblical creation story, the creatures made in God’s image are given dominion, or lordship, over creation. But one consequence of their expulsion from paradise is they have lost any sense of who they are and what they were created to be. Like the characters in Pirandello’s play, they stumble about searching for an absent Creator, not realizing they have been writing their own lines all along. Instead of acting as if they are characters in someone else’s play, they need to realize they are starring in their own.
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