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The Living Room / Philosophy / The mills of justice, and Truth
Latest Post: February 7, 2010 at 5:19 PM
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Edna Stern says: (Follow this user)
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The mills of justice, and The Truth:

In his short story “The Truth” Pirandello writes about justice in the eye of the peasant Tararà, who compares it to the imposing new mill just built in his village, with its new and complicated machinery. He mistrusts the new mill. Everyone was bringing their grain there and no one could assure him that the flour he got was from his own.

In the story we got one true fact : Tararà murdered his wife. The question being who is responsible, and that’s where The Truth becomes subjective. Depending on the way Tararà’s version is presented, the punishment will vary, and I didn’t quite get at the end if the punishment was too hard or too easy on him in the eye of the writer who writes:
“Thanks to this truth, so candidly confessed, Tararà was condemned to thirteen years of prison.”
(originially: “E in grazia della verità, così candidamente confessionata, Tararà fu condannato a tredici anni di reclusione.”)

You say your version of the truth, but when it gets mixed with other truths, what comes out at the end? What flour will come out of the mills of justice?

Books Discussed

Nouvelles pour une anné, novelle per un anno, tome 1 (édition bilingue français/italien)
by Luigi Pirandello
Tales of Madness: A Selection from Luigi Pirandello's Short Stories for a Year
by Luigi Pirandello
Novelle Per Un Anno (in two volumes)
by Luigi Pirandello


 

September 17, 2009 at 5:30 AM

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:
Edna Stern in "Should Roman Polanski have been arrested?" (Cinema room)
Amy Silberman in "What is truth? / What is truth?" (The Living Room)
Amy Silberman says: (Follow this user)
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It is a beautiful metaphor. At least Pirandello sees some connection between truth and justice.

Everyone comes to a trial with their own truth and a decision comes out of it, but can we reconstitute what truths brought about this decision? It is similar with all truths in life. We have all that data, some we trust more and some we trust less, and from all that data we need to make a decision, or a story of what happens. This is how all science is done. Art seems to me to come to always question our stories and how we constitute them. Always making us doubt our story. Doubt how we piece together data to a coherent picture and show us there is always a different picture in the background.

We know from history, from documentaries, that people were condemned while innocent, but we need art to explain this to us. We know scientific beliefs change, but we still believe in them. I wonder why?

 

February 7, 2010 at 5:19 PM
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