Faculty Profile: Enrico Vettore
Recent Scholarship
While rereading Luigi Pirandello’s One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand in preparation for a graduate seminar, I noticed that the title of a chapter and a phrase in the text bore an uncanny resemblance to a Japanese term used to describe a Buddhist novice monk.
My long-standing interest for––and study of––Zen Buddhism and Zen philosophy was piqued. I wondered whether I could link the protagonist’s final choice to abandon everything and live in the countryside, being one with nature and all sentient beings to the concept of nirvana, a state that Zen claims we can attain in the here and now. The answer is: almost. While he does not attain nirvana, he has clearly moved in that direction.
My exploration of Pirandello’s novel uncovered many examples of Zen imagery and concepts, that I weaved together to explain that the author’s attitude towards life shares much with Zen as an anti-philosophy and practice. The novel’s protagonist seems to have taken a path that progressively moves away from an over intellectual and rational approach towards an anti-intellectual practice that subverts our concepts of time, space, and self. This point of arrival helps eliminate mental constructions, rejects dualism, and allows the novel’s main character to live more authentically, perceive things as they are, and understand the fundamental unity of all beings.
This interpretation tries to shift the accepted perspective of previous critics who spoke of Pirandello’s characters as raisonneurs, who reflect and do not act, or of Pirandello’s irrational vitalism, imaginative poetic solution to the problem of identity, or of his turning his back to consciousness. I claim that Pirandello’s solution in One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand is a practical one, that the main character’s intellectual activity is followed by action that brings about a significant outcome, and that consciousness is not abandoned, but expanded.
This research started as a desire to find a possible connection between Pirandello and Zen, but its outcome has not been purely academic: it has inspired me to resume the practice of zazen, or sitting meditation.
—Enrico Vettore
“Approximation to Nirvana: From Intellectual Speculation to Zen Practice in Luigi Pirandello’s Uno, nessuno e centomila.” Pirandello Society of America Journal, vol. XXIX, 2017.
