/lit/ - Literature

>>12576360
>pagliacci doest have a clear character or relation to the memetic metastructure
Pagliacci epitomizes the psychotic, yet conscious, reaction to the acceleration of the chaotic in the world that in the last decade increasingly started to permeate the everyday life of single individuals. "What happens in the world" eerily materializes in the private, once safe, spaces of our very own homes. No walls are thick enough to prevent this ghostly invader, that irreversibly distorts the very bare geometry on which we built our value systems. Images of people being graphically beheaded are processed with the same banality of a fitness device's infomercial.
The pagliacci is the embodiment of a voluntary surrender to the madness, the hope of floating on it rather being devoured and consumed by it.
Nothing rational can be expected from the pagliacci, and he comes with all the disturbing imagery attached to the figure of the circus clown, that to the modern man is more close to that of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy rather than a foolish entertainer.
The pagliacci is one of the modern man's last stands: the absurdity to be willing to turn oneself into a full blown psychopath, in order to escape the horror and as the last resort for self preservation.
The impossibility to actually accomplish such transformation brings to the pagliacci: he "hurts" people with his jokes, but with the goal of amuse them (and, probably, viceversa). Faced to the contemporary hostility of the external world, he hides his repulsion to necessary violence in the absurd, the grotesque, in a dissociative state of amusement. He laughs when he has to cuts throats, in order to be able to do so.