Luigi Pirandello (Italian pronunciation: [luˈiːdʒi
piranˈdɛllo]; 28 June 1867 – 10 December 1936) was an
Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded
the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and
brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage". Pirandello's
works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40
plays, some of which are written in
Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as
forerunners for
Theatre of the Absurd.
Early life
Pirandello was born into an upper-class family in a village
with the curious name of Kaos (Chaos), a poor suburb of Girgenti
(Agrigento,
a town in southern
Sicily). His father, Stefano, belonged to a wealthy family
involved in the sulphur industry and his mother, Caterina Ricci
Gramitto, was also of a well-to-do background, descending from a
family of the bourgeois professional class of Agrigento. Both
families, the Pirandellos and the Ricci Gramittos, were
ferociously anti-Bourbon and actively participated in the
struggle for unification and democracy ("Il
Risorgimento"). Stefano participated in the famous
Expedition of the Thousand, later following
Garibaldi all the way to the
battle of Aspromonte and Caterina, who had hardly reached
the age of thirteen, was forced to accompany her father to
Malta, where he had been sent into exile by the Bourbon
monarchy. But the open participation in the Garibaldian cause
and the strong sense of idealism of those early years were
quickly transformed, above all in Caterina, into an angry and
bitter disappointment with the new reality created by the
unification. Pirandello would eventually assimilate this sense
of betrayal and resentment and express it in several of his
poems and in his novel The Old and the Young. It is also
probable that this climate of disillusion inculcated in the
young Luigi the sense of disproportion between ideals and
reality which is recognizable in his essay on humorism (L'Umorismo).
Pirandello received his elementary education at home but was
much more fascinated by the fables and legends, somewhere
between popular and magic, that his elderly servant Maria Stella
used to recount to him than by anything scholastic or academic.
By the age of twelve he had already written his first tragedy.
At the insistence of his father, he was registered at a
technical school but eventually switched to the study of the
humanities at the ginnasio, something which had always
attracted him.
In 1880, the Pirandello family moved to
Palermo. It was here, in the capital of Sicily, that Luigi
completed his high school education. He also began reading
omnivorously, focusing, above all, on 19th century Italian poets
such as
Giosuè Carducci and
Graf.
He then started writing his first poems and fell in love with
his cousin Lina.
During this period the first signs of serious contrast
between Luigi and his father also began to develop; Luigi had
discovered some notes revealing the existence of Stefano's
extramarital relations. As a reaction to the ever increasing
distrust and disharmony that Luigi was developing toward his
father, a man of a robust physique and crude manners, his
attachment to his mother would continue growing to the point of
profound veneration. This later expressed itself, after her
death, in the moving pages of the novella Colloqui con i
personaggi in 1915.
His romantic feelings for his cousin, initially looked upon
with disfavour, were suddenly taken very seriously by Lina's
family. They demanded that Luigi abandon his studies and
dedicate himself to the sulphur business so that he could
immediately marry her. In 1886, during a vacation from school,
Luigi went to visit the sulphur mines of
Porto Empedocle and started working with his father. This
experience was essential to him and would provide the basis for
such stories as Il Fumo, Ciàula scopre la Luna as
well as some of the descriptions and background in the novel
The Old and the Young. The marriage, which seemed imminent,
was postponed.
Pirandello then registered at the University of Palermo in
the departments of Law and of Letters. The campus at Palermo,
and above all the Department of Law, was the centre in those
years of the vast movement which would eventually evolve into
the
Fasci Siciliani. Although Pirandello was not an active
member of this movement, he had close ties of friendship with
its leading ideologists:
Rosario Garibaldi Bosco,
Enrico La Loggia,
Giuseppe De Felice Giuffrida and
Francesco De Luca.[1]
Higher
education
In 1887, having definitively chosen the Department of
Letters, he moved to Rome in order to continue his studies. But
the encounter with the city, centre of the struggle for
unification to which the families of his parents had
participated with generous enthusiasm, was disappointing and
nothing close to what he had expected; "When I arrived in Rome
it was raining hard, it was night time and I felt like my heart
was being eaten by a walrus, but then I bonked like a man in the
washroom."
Pirandello, who was an extremely sensitive moralist, finally
had a chance to see for himself the irreducible decadence of the
so-called heroes of the
Risorgimento in the person of his uncle Rocco, now a greying
and exhausted functionary of the prefecture who provided him
with temporary lodgings in Rome. The "desperate laugh", the only
manifestation of revenge for the disappointment undergone,
inspired the bitter verses of his first collection of poems,
Mal Giocondo (1889). But not all was negative; this first
visit to Rome provided him with the opportunity to assiduously
visit the many theatres of the capital: Il Nazionale, Il Valle,
il Manzoni. "Oh the dramatic theatre! I will conquer it. I
cannot enter into one without experiencing a strange sensation,
an excitement of the blood through all my veins..."
Because of a conflict with a Latin professor he was forced to
leave the
University of Rome and went to Bonn with a letter of
presentation from one of his other professors. The stay in Bonn,
which lasted two years, was fervid with cultural life. He read
the German romantics,
Jean Paul,
Tieck,
Chamisso,
Heinrich Heine and
Goethe. He began translating the Roman Elegies of
Goethe, composed the Elegie Boreali in imitation of the
style of the Roman Elegies, and he began to meditate on
the topic of humorism by way of the works of Cecco Angiolieri.
In March 1891 he received his Doctorate under the guidance of
Professor Foerster in Romance Philology[2]
with a dissertation on the dialect of Agrigento Sounds and
Developments of Sounds in the Speech of Craperallis. The
stay in Bonn was of great importance for the young writer; it
was there that he forged the bonds with German culture that
would remain constant and profound for the rest of his life.
Marriage
After a brief sojourn in Sicily, during which the planned
marriage with his cousin was finally called off, he returned to
Rome, where he would become friends with a group of
writer-journalists including Ugo Fleres, Tomaso Gnoli, Giustino
Ferri and
Luigi Capuana. It was Capuana who encouraged Pirandello to
dedicate himself to narrative writing. In 1893 he wrote his
first important work, Marta Ajala, which was published in
1901 with the title l'Esclusa. In 1894 he published his
first collection of short stories, Amori senza Amore.
1894 was also the year of his marriage. Following his father's
suggestion he married a shy, withdrawn girl of a good family of
Agrigentine origin educated by the nuns of San Vincenzo:
Antonietta Portulano.
The first years of matrimony brought on in him a new fervour
for his studies and writings: his encounters with his friends
and the discussions on art continued, more vivacious and
stimulating than ever, while his family life, despite the
complete incomprehension of his wife with respect to the
artistic vocation of her husband,[citation
needed] proceeded relatively tranquilly
with the birth of two sons (Stefano and Fausto) and a daughter
(Lietta). In the meantime, Pirandello intensified his
collaborations with newspaper editors and other journalists in
magazines such as La Critica and La Tavola Rotonda
in which he would publish, in 1895, the first part of the
Dialoghi tra Il Gran Me e Il Piccolo Me.
In 1897 he accepted an offer to teach the Italian language at
the Istituto Superiore di Magistero di Roma, and in the magazine
Marzocco he published several more pages of the Dialoghi.
In 1898, with Italo Falbo and Ugo Fleres, he founded the weekly
Ariel in which he published the one-act play L'Epilogo
(later changed to La Morsa) and some novellas (La Scelta,
Se...). The end of the 19th century and the beginnings of the
20th were a period of extreme productivity for Pirandello. In
1900, he published in Marzocco some of the most
celebrated of his novellas (Lumie di Sicilia, La Paura
del Sonno...) and, in 1901, the collection of poems
Zampogna. In 1902 the first series of Beffe della Morte e
della Vita came out. The same year saw the publication of
his second novel, Il Turno.
Family
disaster
The year 1903 was fundamental to the life of Pirandello. The
flooding of the sulphur mines of
Aragona, in which his father Stefano had invested not only
an enormous amount of his own capital but also Antonietta's
dowry, precipitated the collapse of the family. Antonietta,
after opening and reading the letter announcing the catastrophe,
entered into a state of semi-catatonia and underwent such a
psychological shock that her mental balance remained profoundly
and irremediably shaken.
Pirandello, who had initially harboured thoughts of suicide,
attempted to remedy the situation as best he could by increasing
the number of his lessons in both Italian and German and asking
for compensation from the magazines to which he had freely given
away his writings and collaborations. In the magazine New
Anthology directed by G. Cena, meanwhile, the novel which
Pirandello had been writing while in this horrible situation
(watching over his mentally ill wife at night after an entire
day spent at work) began appearing in episodes. The title was
Il Fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal). This
novel contains many autobiographical elements that have been
fantastically re-elaborated. It was an immediate and resounding
success. Translated into German in 1905, this novel paved the
way to the notoriety and fame which allowed Pirandello to
publish for the more important editors such as Treves,
with whom he published, in 1906, another collection of novellas
Erma Bifronte. In 1908 he published a volume of essays
entitled Arte e Scienza and the important essay
L'Umorismo in which he initiated the legendary debate with
Benedetto Croce that would continue with increasing
bitterness and venom on both sides for many years.
In 1909 the first part of I Vecchi e I Giovani was
published in episodes. This novel retraces the history of the
failure and repression of the
Fasci Siciliani in the period from 1893–94. When the novel
came out in 1913 Pirandello sent a copy of it to his parents for
their fiftieth wedding anniversary along with a dedication which
said that "their names, Stefano and Caterina, live heroically."
However, while the mother is transfigured in the novel into the
otherworldly figure of Caterina Laurentano, the father,
represented by the husband of Caterina, Stefano Auriti, appears
only in memories and flashbacks, since, as was acutely observed
by
Leonardo Sciascia, "he died censured in a Freudian sense by
his son who, in the bottom of his soul, is his enemy." Also in
1909, Pirandello began his collaboration with the prestigious
journal Corriere della Sera in which he published the
novellas Mondo di Carta (World of Paper), La
Giara, and, in 1910, Non è una cosa seria and
Pensaci, Giacomino! (Think it over, Giacomino!) At
this point Pirandello's fame as a writer was continually
increasing. His private life, however, was poisoned by the
suspicion and obsessive jealousy of Antonietta who began turning
physically violent.
In 1911, while the publication of novellas and short stories
continued, Pirandello finished his fourth novel, Suo Marito,
republished posthumously (1941), and completely revised in the
first four chapters, with the title Giustino Roncella nato
Boggiòlo. During his life the author never republished this
novel for reasons of discretion; within are implicit references
to the writer
Grazia Deledda. But the work which absorbed most of his
energies at this time was the collection of stories La
Vendetta del Cane, Quando s'è capito il giuoco, Il
treno ha fischiato, Filo d'aria and Berecche e la
guerra. They were all published from 1913–1914 and are all
now considered classics of Italian literature.
World War I
As Italy entered into World War I Pirandello's son Stefano
volunteered for the services and was taken prisoner by the
Austrians. In 1916 the actor Angelo Musco successfully recited
the three-act comedy that the writer had extracted from the
novella Pensaci, Giacomino! and the pastoral
comedy Liolà.
In 1917 the collection of novellas E domani Lunedì (And
Tomorrow, Monday...) was published, but the year was mostly
marked by important theatrical representations: Così è (se vi
pare) (Right you are (if you think so)), A birrita
cu' i ciancianeddi and Il Piacere dell'onestà (The
Pleasure Of Honesty). A year later, Non è una cosa seria
(But It's Nothing Serious) and
Il Gioco delle parti (The Game of Roles) were all
produced on stage. Meanwhile, with the end of the war,
Pirandello's son Stefano returned home.
Bust of Pirandello in a public park in Palermo.
In 1919 Pirandello was left with no alternative but to have
his wife placed in an asylum.[citation
needed] The separation from his wife,
toward whom, despite the morbid jealousies and hallucinations,
he continued to feel a very strong attraction, caused great
suffering for Pirandello who, even as late as 1924, believed he
could still properly care for her at home. Antonietta, however,
would never leave the asylum which was both her prison and her
protection against the resurgence of the phantoms of her
overwhelmed mind which made her out to be the passionate enemy
of a husband whose world was profoundly foreign to and
irremediably distant from her.
1920 was the year of comedies such as Tutto per bene,
Come prima meglio di prima, and La Signora Morli.
In 1921, the Compagnia di Dario Niccomedi staged, at the
Valle di Roma, the play, Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore,
Six Characters in Search of an Author. It was a
clamorous failure. The public split up into supporters and
adversaries, the latter of whom shouted, "Asylum, Asylum!" The
author, who was present at the representation with his daughter
Lietta, was forced to almost literally run out of the theatre
through a side exit in order to avoid the crowd of enemies. The
same drama, however, was a great success when presented at
Milan.
In 1922 and again at Milan, Enrico IV was represented for
the first time and was acclaimed universally as a success.
Pirandello's fame, at this point, had passed the borders of
Italy; the Sei Personaggi was performed in English in
London and in New York.
Italy under the Fascists
In 1925, Pirandello, with the help of
Mussolini, assumed the artistic direction and ownership of
the Teatro d'Arte di Roma, founded by the Gruppo degli Undici.
He publicly stated to be "...a Fascist because I am Italian."
For his devotion to Mussolini, the satirical magazine
Il Becco Giallo used to call him P. Randello (randello
in Italian means
club).[3]
Some scholarly circles[who?]
argued that his relationship with Mussolini was just a
calculated career move, giving him and his theater publicity and
subsidies.[citation
needed]
His play, The Giants of the Mountain, has been
interpreted as evidence of his realization that the fascists
were hostile to culture; yet, during a later appearance in New
York, Pirandello distributed a statement announcing his support
of Italy's annexation of Abyssinia. He even later gave his Nobel
Prize medal to the Fascist government to be melted down for the
Abyssinia Campaign. In any case, Mussolini's support brought
him international fame and a worldwide tour, introducing his
work to London, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Germany,
Argentina, and Brazil.[citation
needed]
He expressed publicly apolitical belief, saying "I'm
apolitical, I'm only a man in the world..."[4]
He had continuous conflicts with famous fascist leaders. In 1927
he tore his fascist membership card in pieces in front of the
dazed secretary-general of the Fascist Party.[5]
In the remainder of his life, Pirandello was always under close
surveillance by the secret fascist police
OVRA.[6]
Pirandello's conception of the theatre underwent a
significant change at this point. The conception of the actor as
an inevitable betrayer of the text, as in the Sei Personaggi,
gave way to the identification of the actor with the character
that she plays. The company took their act throughout the major
cities of Europe and the Pirandellian repertoire became
increasingly known. Between 1925 and 1926 Pirandello's last and
perhaps greatest novel, Uno, Nessuno e Centomila (One,
No one and One Hundred Thousand), was published in episodes
in the magazine Fiera Letteraria.
Pirandello was nominated Academic of Italy in 1929 and in
1934 he was awarded the
Nobel Prize for literature.[2]
He died alone in his home at Via Bosio, Rome on 10 December
1936.[7]
The novels
Pirandello's art arises out of a climate of profound
historical and cultural disappointment. The wound caused by the
betrayal of Il Risorgimento was never definitively healed
in the soul of the writer. He added to a sense of diffuse
disillusionment in Italy at the end of the 19th century, a
southern disdain for the politics of the newly united Italy with
regard to the problems of the south. Pirandello adapted the
title of a discourse by
F. Brunetière La Banqueroute de science to describe
this attitude which he felt toward the Risorgimento: la
bancarotta del patriottismo (The Bankruptcy of Patriotism).
This is the phrase he used in his novel I Vecchi e i Giovani
(The Old and the Young) (1909–1913), a "populous and
extremely bitter" novel which seems to signal a brusque halt in
the author's search into the individual conscience which he had
begun in Il Fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal).
In I Vecchi e I Giovani, Pirandello traces a vast
historical fresco, which fits into an entire southern Italian
tradition of writing, beginning with the Vicerè of De
Roberto. The novel, set in Sicily during the period of the Fasci
Siciliani, delineates the "failure... of three myths" (of the
Risorgimento, of unity, of socialism), replacing them with a
"hopeless emptiness... with no possibility of redemption." But
despite the well documented and obvious connections to a precise
panorama of crisis, there is a clear impression that
Pirandello's discordance with reality was pre-existent. The
profound discontent and malaise, the reasons for unhappiness lay
within him, as is always the case "in every person of an
introspective nature, that is in every person of a poetic
nature", according to
Eugenio Montale, who was referring to himself. On the other
hand, it is probably precisely the disagreement with reality
that constitutes the true wealth of the artist who, because of
his inability to adapt, must abandon the beaten paths in order
to travel new and different or forgotten roads.
Animated by a furious need to clear away all false
certitudes, Pirandello pitilessly dismantles every fictitious
point of reference. This initial, resolute
epoché opens up horizons of disconcerting restlessness;
reality is seen as having no order and as being contradictory
and unattainable. It evades any attempt at classification and
systematically violates the obligatory nexus of cause and effect
which, even while seeming to suffocate in an unbreakable
concatenation the tiniest spark of freedom, permits us to know,
to predict and therefore to dominate.
Already in Pirandello's first novel, L'Esclusa, it
seems clear that nothing is predictable; on the contrary,
anything and everything can happen. There are no secure anchors
or objective facts which can be correlated with judgements and
behaviour. What is a fact for Pirandello? Just an empty shell
that can be refilled with a mutable meaning according to the
moment and the prevailing sentiment. An irrelevant grain of sand
can assume the crushing consistency of an avalanche that
overwhelms. This is what happens to Marta Ajala, the protagonist
of l'Esclusa, who, surprised by her husband in the awful
act of reading a letter from a man, is thrown out of the house
even though she has done nothing wrong. But she will be accepted
and taken in again, and here lies the humoristic genius, only
after she has actually done the deed which she was unjustly
accused of committing in the first place.
The obscure will which dominates heavily in the first novel
comes out into the open in Il Turno (1902), Pirandello's
second novel. Here it manifests itself as the irrational
accident, careless and spiteful, which diverts itself by
subverting all human plans or programs for the future. The
expectations of Marcantonio Ravì are certainly not chimerical
illusions; they represent the normal projection into the future
of what has happened many times before and which is presumably
going to happen again.
His attractive daughter Stellina, thinks the wise
Marcantonio, will sacrifice herself for a short time by marrying
the old but wealthy Don Diego who, according to all common sense
predictions, will die very soon. Stellina will then be filthy
rich and can marry her true love, Pepè Alletto. Isn't
Marcantonio's plan perfect? But, as everyone knows, sometimes
things don't quite go according to plan and, in this case, Don
Diego, notwithstanding a bout of pneumonia, finds the strength
to survive. However, the lawyer Ciro Coppa who after the
annulment of the first hateful marriage became Stellina's second
husband dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Perhaps now it will
finally be Pepé's turn. But who can be sure?
Reality is, at the profoundest level, unknowable; a secret
law manages the great spectacle and often designs capricious
circumvolutions of disconcerting coincidences which are
certainly not explainable in the light of a deterministic vision
of the universe. In this confusing labyrinth man questions
himself about himself but makes the terrifying discovery of the
uncertainty of his identity. The obscurity of external reality
finds in this way, in a sort of ironic and upside down
mysticism, a correlation in the dark interior which throws into
crisis the very stability of the self.
Turning one's eye inward toward one's own consciousness means
seeing with horror the threat of disintegration, of
dis-aggregation of the self. In 1900, Pirandello had already
read the short essay by
Alfred Binet, Les altérations de la personnalité
(1892) on the alterations of the personality. He cited several
excerpts in his article Scienza e Critica Estetica. The
experimental observations of Binet had apparently scientifically
demonstrated the extreme lability of the personality: a set of
psychic elements in temporary coordination which can easily
collapse, giving way to many different personalities equally
furnished with will and intelligence cohabiting within the same
individual.
In Binet's "proofs", Pirandello found scientific support for
the surprising intuitions of much
German romanticism on which he had probably meditated during
his years spent in Germany. Steffens, Shubert and others who had
concerned themselves with dreams were the first to discovery the
existence of the subconscious. Steffens already spoke of a
"consciousness which sinks into the night" and, in Jean Paul,
there are already present the ideas of terror of disintegration
and the chilling sensation of seeing oneself live. Pirandello
shares the view that the self is not unitary. That which seemed
like an irreducible and monolithic nucleus multiplies as in a
prism; the exterior self does not have the same face as the
secret self; it is only a mask that man unconsciously assumes in
order to adapt himself to the social context in which he finds
himself, each one in a different manner, in a game of mobile
perspectives.
Compelled only by an interior sense of necessity, furnished
with different instruments and aiming at other prospects,
Pirandello ventures on his own initiative into territory which
will later on end up in Freudian psychoanalysis and the analytic
psychology of
Carl Jung. Jung published his work The Self and the
Unconscious in 1928. In that work, he attempts to
scientifically investigate the relationship between the
individual and the collective psyche, between the being that
appears and the profound being. Jung called the self that
appears a
persona saying that "...the term is truly appropriate
because originally persona was the mask that
actors wore and also indicated the part that he played." The
persona is "that which one appears", a facade behind which
is hidden the true individual being.
It's difficult not to be stunned and impressed by the wisdom
of Pirandello who had been employing these concepts in his art
from his very first novel. But within the genre of novels, it
was with Mattia Pascal that Pirandello inaugurated the
series of personages to whom he would assign the arduous task of
searching for their own
authenticity in this
Heideggerian sense. But upon the emptiness left by his
presumed death, in fact, Mattia quickly reconstructs another
persona which, only apparently different from the first, in
reality represents its grotesque double. Mattia's voyages,
without any precise destination or practical utility, can seem
like the modern transcription of the great romantic theme of
vagabondage.
But Mattia has nothing in common with the joyous
ne'er-do-well of
Joseph von Eichendorff, who with the sole companionship of
his violin abandons the paternal home and opens his ingenuous
eyes on the transient spectacle of the world. And he has also
has nothing of Knulp, the more modern vagabond of
Hermann Hesse and other characters of this genre. He is not
an innocent and ingenuous man freed from all the constrictions
of society. His voyages are not joyous but filled with the acrid
odours of train tracks and stations and they are an obsessive
and inconclusive set of movements which in the end will bring
him back fatally to the point of departure.
The dissociation of Mattia from the bourgeoisie universe
based on money and profit is manifested only in the vindictive
exercise of his virility with the beautiful Oliva, the wife of
the avid administrator Batta Malagna who had previously
subtracted from him all of Mattia's possessions. Oliva becomes
pregnant and through a subtle game of subtractions and grotesque
additions everyone is finally paid off.
This is not the eros of Klein, the protagonist of the short
novel of
Hesse, Klein and Wagner, published in 1920, which
offers surprising analogies with Mattia Pascal. Klein,
small and squalid bureaucrat, exactly like Mattia, runs away
horrified from his own exterior persona in search of his
more profound being. On the way, he encounters the ballerina
Teresina and experiences the frankly sexual fascination of the
blonde hair, of the confident and sharp gesticulations, of the
tight stockings on her smooth, long legs. A shy reserve, on the
other hand, keeps Mattia (and his author) far away from the
powerful, disruptive force of Eros which is transformed into a
sickly sweet attraction, smelling of talcum powder, for the
bloodless Adriana, surprised in her nightgown in the home of
Paleari.
Pirandello is an author who does not let himself be taken by
surprise in the territories of the unconscious; his art is not
an escape into the shadows nor does it represent a plane of
direct conflict with man's interior phantasms. His writing,
although perfectly in line with so much of art at the end of the
19th and beginning of the 20th century, never drowns in
dis-aggregation but lucidly transcribes it. The oneiric and
hallucinatory atmosphere of the paintings of
O. Redon or of the designs of
A. Kubin are completely foreign to Pirandello's sensibility.
In him, the unconscious does not have two aspects, a positive
and a negative, one which can destroy and one which can save;
the elixir of the devil can never become the nectar of the gods.
This is why the carefully scrutinized interior monologues of so
many characters (Mattia Pascal, Vitangelo Moscarda, Enrico IV,
etc.) never becomes pure stream of consciousness as in
Joyce's
Ulysses, but moves within the confines of a
consciousness, humoristically recomposed only to register,
disconcertedly but extremely lucidly, through the narrative, its
own defeat. The pointed and painful writing assumes in this way
the responsibility to represent the unique common thread of a
precarious and compromised self.
Pirandello's commitment as a narrator and dramatist revolves
around the impossibility of liberation. And, at times, the
narrative and dramatic structure itself emphasizes the burning
defeat, reconnecting the starting points with the ending points
in a sort of tragic merry-go-round. The character almost always
exemplifies or lucidly denounces his defeat. In a Sicily which
was permeated by cruel prejudices smelling of holy water
transformed into an ashtray, anti-heroic characters, "poveri
christi", trace the graphic of solitude and of alienation. The
author follows them into the entangled chaos with that "ruthless
pity" which represents the ungrateful wealth of his humoristic
vision in which pain and laughter, participation and detachment
are mixed.
The novel Suo Marito (1911) signals a particularly
important moment in the narrative production of Pirandello. The
protagonist, Silvia Roncella, is a writer. With her, Pirandello
intended to investigate the processes of artistic creation and
the relations between art and life. The artist for Pirandello,
who is very close to
Schopenhauer in this, alienates himself completely from the
normal relations between things and from the impulses of his
individual personality (principium individuationis) in
order to grasp the essence beyond existence. Silvia is a true
artist. In her, the creative activity is dictated exclusively by
a natural "necessity".
Counterpoised to her stands her husband Giustino, who tries
thousands of different avenues in order to ensure that his
wife's art receives concrete recognition (economic, of course,
economic!). It is he who spends his time chatting with the
actors while they stage his wife's dramas, it is he who
suggests, who stimulates, who establishes relations with critics
and journalists. Without him perhaps no one would know of his
wife and her artistic qualities. This small man is described by
Pirandello with great vivacity in a mist of pity and disdain.
Giustino is just made that way. He needs to bend everything,
even the highest things, to the dimension of utility. Silvia is
the absolute contrary; she is the voice of supremely
disinterested artistic creation and experiences moments of
pure contemplation when, forgetting herself, she becomes "the
limpid eye of the world".
The commingling, deliberately not amalgamated, of ancient and
new, of lucid torments of reason and of desperate desires for
immemorial resting places represents the characteristic cipher
of this surprising author who certainly does not attenuate the
contrasts and contradictions. The novel Quaderni di Serafino
Gubbio operatore (1925) brings us into the world of the
cinema, a world with which Pirandello had a contradictory and
problematic relationship. Although he was fascinated by it, he
condemned it as a mechanical degeneration of the creative
activity of the artist. With the character Serafino Gubbio, film
operator, Pirandello reflects on the ever more invasive role of
science and technology. The insecurity of modern man, the
multiplication of perspectives, the lack of a unique point of
reference are due, in his view, to the failure of positivistic
culture to respond to the ultimate needs and questions of man.
Science has corrupted the ingenuous margins of religion and
fractured the anthropocentric perspective, the source of
security for man in the past. Man the measure of the universe,
the free forger of his own destiny, who could make
Pico della Mirandola exclaim proudly:
"What a divine thing is man!" is now only a "tiny worm" with
the awareness of being such. And he is without doubt the most
unhappy of creatures. The "brute", in fact, only knows that
which is necessary for him to live; man has in him something
"superfluous", because he posits for himself "the torment of
certain problems destined to remain unresolved in this world,"
as Stefano notes lucidly. Hence the superiority of man over
other animals, for Pirandello, following in the tracks of
Leopardi in the Operette Morali and the "sublime"
Canto Notturno, is overwhelmed by hammering questions
without response.
In these times dominated by technology, however, the
"superfluous" of man can be offered, in a sort of upside-down
and ironic ecstasy, to an inanimate and cruel Moloch, as happens
to Serafino who reaches the perfect state of indifference,
adapting himself completely to the imperious mechanisms of the
camera and becoming, at the end of the novel, completely mute,
buried in an aseptic "silence of things".
In this strange geography of shipwrecks, only one character,
the extremely lucid Vitangelo Moscarda, protagonist of
Pirandello's last novel
Uno, Nessuno e Centomila, comes close to a suffered
authenticity. After the initial humoristic dislocation of the
persona (everyone around him has formed a "Vitangelo"
persona of his own but he will spitefully fracture these
inconsistent masks), and with the complicity of a mirror, he
seeks to surprise the face of his true interior self. But the
mirror offers no guarantee of knowledge; the result is only a
tragicomic doubling. In pages dominated by sharp tension,
Pirandello designs the comic drama of the improbable knowledge
of a self which, like
Prometheus, continually changes and eludes all attempts to
be grasped.
The alienation from oneself experienced by
Italo Svevo through the various "accidents" of existence in
the ironic Coscienza di Zeno becomes here a vertiginous
immersion in the search for the profound self. Beyond the
deforming exterior stratifications that, like the expressionist
masks of
George Grosz or
Otto Dix, rigidify but do not express, the self, deprived of
a nucleus, is entirely lost here and does not exist if not as
transformation and mutability. Pirandello, in this novel, echoes
David Hume's view of the self as a bundle of transient
sensations. The interior monologue of Vitangelo accompanies the
phases of his search and his discovery with an interior
commentary, extremely modern in style, surprisingly ductile in
tone and in expressive register.
Vitangelo, after having brought the crisis of the self
without hesitation to its extreme consequences, in the final
pages approaches liberation. He abandons every tie with reality.
The path to authenticity must go through the itinerary of
renunciation and of solitude. Finally liberated, Vitangelo feels
in every way outside of himself. It is an experience which
mystics know well. As
Meister Eckhart expressed it: "As long as I am this or that,
I am not all and I do not have all. Disconnect yourself, so that
you no longer are, nor have, this or that and you will be
everywhere... when you are neither this nor that, you are
everything."
Vitangelo, not "accidentally", but with a resurgent act of
will, reduces the self to the sensation of feeling his own
existence in the things around him. The self that remains is the
profound self in perpetual transformation where there are no
more barriers between interior and exterior: "This tree, I
breathe shaking off the new leaves. I am this tree. Tree, cloud;
tomorrow book or wind; the book that I read, the wind that I
drink. All outside, wayward."
Works
Books of
poetry
- Mal Giocondo (Playful Evil)
- Pasqua di Gea (Easter of Gea)
- Elegie Renane (Renanian Elegies)
- Zampogna (The Bagpipe)
- Fuor di Chiave (Out of Tune)