From the nose to the mustache: One, None and One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello and The Mustache by Emmanuel Carrère: a dialogue

Abstract

One of the most evident indexes of modernity is the one which the essayist and Italian poet Enrico Testa points out as a “fracture of the sense of continuity”. For the expert, the destruction of self and a subversion of the traditional logic of narrating, lie at the basis of the last novel of Pirandello (TESTA, 2009). Indeed, perhaps no other author has, like Luigi Pirandello, represented in his broad artistic production, the crisis of the subject, a divided nature of modern man. As expected, the wide range of work and influences of the great author reverberated far beyond the Sicilian circumscription, leaving marks and traces in many modern and contemporary fictionists and playwrights. In fact, according to Maurício Santana Dias (2008, p.12), “[…] the discomfort of the fictional environment created by Pirandello is not far from certain situations imagined by Camus, Beckett or, more recently, Thomas Bernhard”. By means of a comparative bias, privileging the intertext as “category of interpretation” (RIFFATERRE apud SAMOYAULT, 2008, p.25), the present study aims to propose a dialogue between One, no one and a hundred thousand (PIRANDELLO, 2001) of the eminent sicilian author and the tale The mustache written by the contemporary french Writer Emmanuel Carrère.