In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

296 CODES
sought to express it" (Malraux, 35). [see Action vs. Impotence] From an
American perspective, a distant and unresolved relation between individual
and society can become an object of awe-in the sense of both
admiration and disapproval. This ambiguity permeates a description of
Parisian academic life by the students of Stanford University: "As for
college life at the University of Paris, there is none in the American sense
of the term. There is no campus ... There is no college spirit, no athletic
teams, no intercollegiate debating, not even a college newspaper ... The
University of Paris is not 'collegiate.' It has no paternalistic restrictions
or campus traditions. Only for the individual student of real ability and
ambition is it a place of study" (1926 Quad). Once the fear of solitude
is overcome, however, extreme individual isolation can turn into an
unambiguous object of desire. The idea of "being detached from all
human relationships" makes Fridolin, the protagonist of Arthur
Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (Dream Story) feel both uneasy and liberated:
"Although this idea made him shudder a bit, it also reassured him, for
it seemed to free him from all responsibility, and to loosen all bonds of
human relationship" (Schnitzler, 31). Luigi Pirandello's novel Uno, nessuno
e centomila (One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand) is a
highly sophisticated-and radical-exercise in this type of reflection.
Disillusionment with society launches the protagonist into a career of
willful alienation. He has discovered that, instead of consisting of a
single public persona, his identity is different for each of his friends and
relatives (hence the title of the book). Thus, he wants not only to distance
himself from society, but also to repress the self-observation that gives
him an agonizing feeling of fragmentation. He wants to shed his familiar
self. "So I wanted to be alone. Without myself. I mean without that me
that I already knew, or thought I knew. Alone with a certain stranger,
whom I already obscurely felt I would be unable to get rid of and who
was myself: the stranger inseparable from myself" (Pirandello, 15). The
ultimate alienation from society-and the most subtle form of revenge
against it-is achieved toward the end of Pirandello's novel, when the
hero can claim that he has methodically given up and destroyed all the
structures and habits (including property and language) that normally
make an individual a member of a community: "Not only completely
alienated from myself and from everything I call mine, but with a horror
of remaining anyone at all, possessing anything at all. No longer wanting
anything, I knew that I could not speak" (225).