Pirandello's Wheelbarrow: A Revenge on Imagology

Abstract

A Revenge on ImagologyCarlo Michelstaedter was already considered one of the brightest minds of his generation by the time he was twenty three.This was also the year he completed his tesi di laurea, and after having submitted it, retumed home and took his own life.Ten years earlier Nietzsche died.The one and only time Pirandello mentioned Michelstaedter-as Daniela Bini points out-was in an interview for Quadrivio only a month before his own death; he referred to him as an example of those unhappy thinkers who 'wanted to make forni and substance coincide absolutely and in every instance and were overwhelmed.'With this statement Pirandello recognized an affinity on a basic philosophical point: the contradictoriness of life whose essence is flux but that must be fixed if it is somehow to be grasped.It must give itself a form.This form, however, is death; it stops the life that it tries to define.Pirandello shares this belief with Michelstaedter, but considers the pursuit of such coincidence (of 'forni and substance') totally inane, insofar as it has only two possible conclusions: suicide, as in the case of Michelstaedter ... or madness, as in the

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.