Through A Prism Darkly

While teaching in Castiglion Fiorentino, I had one class that I called, “A Portrait of the Student in Exile,” for at some level, studying abroad can be seen as a sort of exile if you will. Exile can be imposed from the society, or self-imposed as James Joyce famously and infamously declared his freedom from Ireland as an exile who was escaping the nets of Irish paralysis in society with silence, cunning, and exile. The result was that Joyce ended up writing about Ireland even more than many of his compatriots who had chosen to stay.

One of the books that we read in the class was Luigi Pirandello’s One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, Nessuno e Centomila.) In the first-person narrative, he goes into a spiraling self-analysis of “who he is” and the results are rather unsettling at times. Hermann Hesse wrote in Steppenwolf that “Man is an Onion.” Thinking of the various layers of the peel that surround the hidden “Ego,” we try to peel them away, seeking to find out what is at the center. Ultimately, the center is empty, or at least it appears that way. Is a negative space ever really empty? That is the No One of the title.

With Pirandello, the layering also goes the opposite way as is suggested by the title. It is the age-old philosophical question between the One and the Many that flourished in Ancient Greece with proponents of Unity such as Parmenides, whose fragments include “Hen to Pan,” or “All is One,” on the one hand, and Aristotle on the other who began the system of taxonomy for all intents and purposes, going about from identifying characteristics that distinguish rather than unite. The character realizes that everyone in his life has constructed a different person in his or her mind about who he is, and none of them correspond. The Hundred Thousand.

Pirandello’s book, however, struck a deep chord with the students who were experiencing being in a new culture, many of them for the first time. I had told them that they would have a hard time going back home for a variety of reasons. Most of them would probably meet resistance, skepticism, and even hostility if they went on too long about how great Italy was. A common reaction to this from those who have not experienced such a new angle in life is “What’s so great about Italy? Why do you hate America!” Which are two very different things. You can love Italy, but also still love America, though this seems to be lost on many.

Another problem one has after living abroad is the inability to actually describe the events that have happened abroad. I know that many times I have just not talked about my experiences because they sound so trivial when I try to relate them, whereas when they happened, they were so visceral and alive. Seeing the looks on others faces when I start explaining, I realize that I will never be able to truly express the dynamics of the experience, and for that matter, it is mine alone.

With Pirandello, the narrator’s analysis follows a similar line of thinking in that he says that we are multiple people, all at once, though which one is our “true” self, because they can be quite contradictory. Who are we when we are with our parents, our children, our friends, our lovers, our spouses, with strangers, or alone? Each one of these identities is quite different and can at times be completely at odds with each other as well. So, who are we? Pirandello’s conclusion is rather bleak in that the ultimate result of this is that most people will never really “know” each other, and likewise, the vast majority of us will never even “know ourselves.”

I have experienced this disconnect many times in my life, though I know that I am not unique in this, but the book did resonate quite deeply with my own situation. Though it could easily, and erroneously, be said that I have “created” these disconnects, it does not matter if we travel or sit at home all our lives, we will still be different people when in the company or absence of other people. The person that I am in India, is not the person that I am in Italy, or Belgium, or America, but at the same time it is. The person that I am with my mother, my daughter, friends and loved ones, strangers, and alone are all completely different, yet, with the core of a “self” in there at some level.

I know that returning to Belgium in a month will be a challenge, as well as when I travel to the US next spring, for I have added yet more complexity to the person that I am with myself and/or with others. However, this is not a fear that I have, but rather a blessing that makes life so much more enriching and fascinating for me. Regardless of the miscommunications that I have had in life with some people who refuse to acknowledge the “multiple me’s” as a result of my “self-imposed exiles”, I would not change these experiences for the world. They make me who I am.