Uno, nessuno e centomila- Luigi Pirandello (1924)

I read one of Pirandello’s novels earlier this year (Il fu Mattia Pascal- The Late Mattia Pascal) and it was one of the greatest stories I’ve heard, so I was really excited to read another of his novels, which would be translated One, noone and one hundred thousand. What does the title refer to?

The book starts off with the protagonist, Vitangelo Moscarda, looking at his nose in the mirror since he noticed that it was sore when he touched it in a certain area. His wife asks him if he is checking out the way his nose leans to the right, which was something he had never even noticed. But this observation that his wife sees something in him that he had never noticed, leads him to this thought that he, Moscarda, is a different person to himself and to each person that knows him.  

The title refers to the Hundred Thousand people that see Moscarda and can make a judgment about who he is, but inevitably they are reflecting themselves back in that One Moscarda, which really is Noone, because that Moscarda that they believe they know, doesn’t really exist.

Wanting to find the real Moscarda, he decides the only way to do this would be to get outside himself as a neutral observer. He does this through a series of actions that defy their expectations of him, and to which they attribute craziness. He must be going nuts to act in such a way.

The novel is broken into 8 ‘books’, and the first three and a half are much more the inner dialog Moscarda has in processing his thoughts and what he considers doing as a response to free himself from his dilemma. That first half of the book is much more difficult to process. The second half is more narrative, and is a little easier to read.

In its fundamental assessment, I have a hard time buying his breakdown. Pirandello starts at everyone’s (including your own) impression of you being an illusion, because it isn’t complete, to the conclusion that no one really knows you and therefore their knowledge is wrong. Uh, no. The fact that you see yourself differently than others is so banal it doesn’t really merit much discussion. Even the fact that we don’t really know ourselves is nothing to agonize over.  

The biggest conflation, in my opinion, is moving from the fact that we can’t completely know ourselves, to the conclusion that we can’t know ourselves at all. No….. that’s not true. You learn about anything in life progressively and there is no reason to distrust your perceptions. Thought experiments to “prove” otherwise are interesting, but it always feels like conflation and sophistry to me.

The fact that the book spends so much time on it is grade-A navel-gazing. In fact, I really struggle with caring about what Moscarda thinks. There are some interesting observations about perceptions: is what people call “crazy”, really craziness? Or is it their failed attempts to make sense of actions?

Also, his desire to get back to his essential person outside of the other influences seems silly. We are social beings and those interactions form integral parts of who we are. Trying to strip those away so we can get back to some essence is going to be counterproductive since what we are is a sum of the byproducts of those interactions. Maybe Moscarda would disagree, but that’s where I disagree with him, so there!

I couldn’t help thinking of the old saying: When you’re young you care about what others think of you. When you get older, you stop caring what they think of you. When you get older still, you realize they were never thinking of you at all.  

Moscarda is still in stage 1.