Description: This study presents a distinctly new interpretation of key works by Luigi Pirandello and Alberto Moravia that dramatizes the identity crisis of the individual, a theme that figures so prominently in twentieth-century literature. Previous criticism considered these narratives solely within a European context and assumed that the protagonists failed to resolve their dilemmas. As the present study reveals, however, an alternative approach is warranted by evidence that Pirandello and Moravia were familiar with fundamental tenets of Buddhism, the first philosophy to advocate the deconstruction of personal identity. Combining a lucid explanation of Buddhist doctrine with Western sources, Dr. Stella demonstrates that by «losing their identity,» characters such as Mattia Pascal end not in defeat, as is commonly supposed, but in victory over existential suffering and discontent.
Several chapters of the book were available on presently nonexistent metta.lk but perhaps you can get them in some archives. These articles were with translated quotes, while the book is scholarly, and it assumes that reder knows Italian, and since there are plenty of quotes there, without knowing Itilian it is rather difficult read.
Apart that you can check out single articles, by Nanavira Thera, here Kafka is discussed:
About Kafka’s Trial, as I remarked on an earlier occasion, it seems to me that the crime with which K. is charged is that of existing, and that this is why the charge is never made explicit. Everybody exists, and it would be ridiculous to charge one man with this crime and not the next man as well. But not everybody feels guilty of existing; and even those who do are not always clear about what it is precisely that they feel guilty of, since they see that the rest of mankind, who also exist, go through life in a state of blissful innocence. The criminal charge of existing cannot be brought home to those who are satisfied of their innocence (since judicial censure is worse than futile unless the accused recognizes his guilt), and also it cannot be brought home to those who recognize their guilt but who are not satisfied that it is of existing that they are guilty (since judicial censure fails of its intended effect if the accused, though aware of guilt, believes that the charge against him has been wrongly framed). To secure a conviction, then, the charge must be one simply of guilt; and so, in fact, it is in The Trial.
Kafka is an ethical, not an aesthetic, writer. There is no conclusion to his books. The Castle was actually unfinished, but what ending could there be to it? And there is some doubt about the proper order of the chapters in The Trial—it does not really seem to matter very much in which order you read them, since the book as a whole does not get you anywhere. (An uncharitable reader might disagree, and say that it throws fresh light on the Judiciary.) In this it is faithful to life as we actually experience it. There is no ‘happy ending’ or ‘tragic ending’ or ‘comic ending’ to life, only a ‘dead ending’—and then we start again.
We suffer, because we refuse to be reconciled with this lamentable fact; and even though we may say that life is meaningless we continue to think and act as if it had a meaning. Kafka’s heroes (or hero, ‘K.’—himself and not himself) obstinately persist in making efforts that they understand perfectly well are quite pointless—and this with the most natural air in the world. And, after all, what else can one do? Notice, in The Trial, how the notion of guilt is taken for granted. K. does not question the fact that he is guilty, even though he does not know of what he is guilty—he makes no attempt to discover the charge against him, but only to arrange for his defence. For both Kierkegaard and Heidegger, guilt is fundamental in human existence. (And it is only the Buddha who tells us the charge against us—avijjā.)
Sometimes he quotes Camus, like in note on Nibbana:
. Camus, Le Mythhe de Sisyphe, Gallimard, Paris 1942, pp. 34-5. (‘Of whom and of what in fact can I say “I know about that!” This heart in me, I can experience it and I conclude that it exists. This world, I can touch it and I conclude again that it exists. All my knowledge stops there, and the rest is construction. For if I try to grasp this self of which I am assured, if I try to define it and to sum it up, it is no more than a liquid that flows between my fingers. I can depict one by one all the faces that it can assume; all those given it, too, by this education, this origin, this boldness or these silences, this grandeur or this vileness. But one cannot add up faces. This same heart which is mine will ever remain for me undefinable. Between the certainty that I have of my existence and the content that I strive to give to this assurance, the gap will never be filled. Always shall I be a stranger to myself. …Here, again, are trees and I know their roughness, water and I experience its savour. This scent of grass and of stars, night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes,—how shall I deny this world whose power and forces I experience? Yet all the science of this earth will give me nothing that can assure me that this world is mine.’) A more lucid account by a puthujjana of his own predicament could scarcely be desired. This situation cannot be transcended so long as what appears to be one’s ‘self’ is accepted at its face value: ‘this self of which I am assured’, ‘this same heart which is mine’. The paradox (Marcel would speak of a mystery: a problem that encroaches on its own data)—the paradox, attā hi attano n’atthi (‘(His) very self is not (his) self’s.’ (More freely: ‘He himself is not his own.’)) (Dhammapada v,3 <Dh.62>), must be resolved. This necessarily rather chromatic passage, which does not lend itself kindly to translation (though one is provided), makes the overtone of despair clearly audible. Needless perhaps to say, this despair marks the extreme limit of the puthujjana’s thought, where it recoils impotently upon itself—and not by any means his normal attitude towards the routine business of living from day to day.
Generally the main idea of reading an intelligent writers is that they are able to describe puthujjana’s condition, which is useful, so for example Tolstoy’s The Death Of Ivan Ilyich. Or Joyce:
at the time I read it—when I was about twenty—I had already suspected (from my reading of Huxley and others) that there is no point in life, but this was still all rather abstract and theoretical. But Ulysses gets down to details, and I found I recognized myself, mutatis mutandis, in the futile occupations that fill the days of Joyce’s characters. And so I came to understand that all our actions, from the most deliberate to the most thoughtless, and without exception, are determined by present pleasure and present pain. Even what we pompously call our ‘duty’ is included in this law—if we do our duty, that is only because we should feel uncomfortable if we neglected it, and we seek to avoid discomfort. Even the wise man, who renounces a present pleasure for the sake of a greater pleasure in the future, obeys this law—he enjoys the presentpleasure of knowing (or believing) that he is providing for his future pleasure, whereas the foolish man, preferring the present pleasure to his future pleasure, is perpetually gnawed with apprehension about his future. And when I had understood this, the Buddha’s statement, Pubbe cāham bhikkhave etarahi ca dukkhañ c’eva paññāpemi dukkhassa ca nirodham (‘Both now and formerly, monks, it is just suffering that I make known and the ceasing of suffering’) (M. 22: i,140), came to seem (when eventually I heard it) the most obvious thing in the world—‘What else’ I exclaimed ‘could the Buddha possibly teach?’
Nanavira Thera
There are also such writers like Pessoa, Cioran or Porchia but not sure whether someone has written about their connection with Dhamma, at least in English.
For example small selection from Cioran:
Everything is good which brings me closer to Buddha.
*
In the Dhammapada, it is suggested that, in order to achieve deliverance, we must be rid of the double yoke of Good and Evil. That Good itself should be one of our fetters we are too spiritually retarded to be able to admit.
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Having opened an anthology of religious texts, I came straight off upon this remark of the Buddha: “No object is worth being desired.” I closed the book at once, for after that, what else is there to read?
*
Buddhism calls anger, “corruption of the mind,” manicheism “root of the tree of death.” I know this, but what good does it do me to know?
*
“Truth remains hidden to the man filled with desire and hatred” (Buddha)…. Which is to say, to every man alive.
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Going to India because of the Vedanta or Buddhism is about the same as going to France because of Jansenism.
Moreover the latter is more recent, since it vanished only three centuries ago.
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Are we to execrate our age—or all ages?
Do we think of Buddha withdrawing from the world on account of his contemporaries?
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When, after a series of questions about desire, disgust, and serenity, Buddha was asked: “What is the goal, the final meaning of nirvana?” he did not answer. He smiled.
There has been a great deal of commentary on that smile, instead of seeing it as a normal reaction to a pointless question. It is what we do when confronted by a child’s why. We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question. Children admit no limits to anything; they always want to see beyond, to see what there is afterward. But there is no afterward. Nirvana is a limit, the limit It is Iteration, supreme impasse….
*
That I can still desire proves that I lack an exact perception of reality, that I am distracted, that I am a thousand miles from the Truth. “Man,” we read in the Dhammapada, “is prey to desire only because he does not see things as they are.”
*
Nirvana has been compared to a mirror that no longer reflects any object. To a mirror, then, forever pure, forever unemployed.
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Visit a hospital, and in five minutes you become a Buddhist, or become one again if you have left off being such a thing.
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If I had been born a Buddhist, I should have remained one; born a Christian, I ceased being one in early youth when, much more so than today, I would have abounded in the sense of Goethe’s blasphemy when he wrote — the very year of his death — to Zelter, “The Cross is the most hideous image on this earth.”
*
I ponder C., for whom drinking coffee was the sole reason to exist. One day when I was eloquently vaunting Buddhism to him, he replied, “Well, yes, nirvana, all right, but not without coffee.” We all have some mania or other that keeps us from unconditionally accepting supreme happiness.
*
A victim of crucial preoccupations, I had taken to my bed in the middle of the afternoon, an ideal position from which to ponder a nirvana without remainder, without the slightest trace of an ego, that obstacle to deliverance, to the state of non-thought. A sentiment of blessed extinction initially, then a blessed extinction without sentiment. I believed myself on the threshold of the final stage; it was only its parody, only the swerve into torpor, into the abyss of … a nap.
*
Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.
