LUIGI PIRANDELLO
In 1933, three years before his death, Luigi Pirandello completed an autobiographical play entitled When One Is Somebody (Quando si è qualcuno). The unnamed hero of the work, whose speeches are preceded only by three asterisks, is an aging writer of great prominence who finds himself imprisoned in a role defined by his public: “I must not move from a certain concept, every detail of which they have decided upon. There I am motionless, forever!” Chafing against the restrictions of his fame, he takes on a “mask of youth,” escaping into temporary freedom by writing lyrics under the pseudonym of a young, unknown poet. For a while, the subterfuge is successful: the new poet is hailed as a “living voice.” But the ruse is finally discovered, and the hero must return to his unpleasant public duties — being stared at, lionized, and applauded by uncomprehending admirers. Urged by a sympathetic friend to commit some spontaneous, even outrageous act in order to prove that he is still alive, the hero finds he cannot budge. Only when one is nobody, he learns, can one exist in time; when one is somebody, one is petrified, immobile, dead. In the midst of making a commemorative speech on his fiftieth birthday, he begins to turn into a statue of himself, while his spoken words are engraved on the facade of a house behind him.
The play is flawed by traces of vanity and self-pity, but its final image is a stunning consummation of Pirandello’s views about the individual’s relationship to his life, and the artist’s relationship to his art — two subjects which are really the same subject, and which continue to obsess him throughout his career. Pirandello knows that he is alive and changing, but, against his will, he has hardened into the stiff postures of the stereotyped public man, while his words, though formed in the mind of a living being, are etched in marble as soon as they are uttered. To accept a definition — to become a somebody — is to be frozen in time, just as art, the defined world of the artist, rigidifies in its prison of form. The typical Pirandellian drama is a drama of frustration which has at its core an irreconcilable conflict between time and timelessness or life and form; and whether the author is reflecting on human identity or (his other major subject) the identity of art, the terms of the conflict remain essentially the same.
Typical in this sense, When One Is Somebody is unusual in another: Pirandello very rarely wrote autobiographical plays. Yet, he is one of the most subjective dramatists in the modern theatre, and certainly the most self-conscious. Pirandello is a peculiarity of the theatre of revolt — an imperious messianic artist who writes compassionate existential plays. In him, the Romantic ego is strong, though usually sublimated. When the mood strikes him, he can be as personally vain and pompous as his hated rival D’Annunzio: “The only thing I have been able to do,” he writes to Marta Abba, “is to think beautiful and lofty things.” About an inferior quasi-religious drama, Lazarus, he boasts that it “would put the modern conscience at peace on the religious question,” and about the unfinished Mountain Giants, he crows: “The triumph of the imagination! The triumph of poetry, and at the same time the tragedy of poetry forced to exist in the midst of the brutal, modern world.”1
Pirandello, furthermore, often complains about being misunderstood and unappreciated, though he was heaped with honors in his lifetime. When Lazarus is unfavorably reviewed, he declares that Italy will “have to live down the shame of having misunderstood” his plays “and of having treated me unjustly.” Deciding to open Tonight We Improvise in Germany, he remarks, “I have become a stranger to my own country and . . . I shall therefore have to win another home for my art.” But when the opening is the occasion of a riot: “Everywhere I am pursued by hatred.” Finally, he takes refuge in a bitter, self-pitying misanthropy: “Mankind does not deserve anything, stubborn as it is in its constantly growing stupidity, in its brutal quarrelsomeness. Time is against me; mankind adverse.” In the mouth of Ibsen, such sentiments could be noble and courageous; in the mouth of Pirandello, they sound merely egotistical.
But it is rare when such personal egotism informs his work. As a dramatist, Pirandello is a stern, uncompromising ironist, but his plays are full of pity for the fate of suffering mankind. It is true that the only playwright mentioned in Pirandello’s theatre is Pirandello himself (his name is occasionally on the tongues of his characters). But the references are always ironic, and he always resists the temptation to glorify himself, like D’Annunzio, through the agency of superhuman heroes. Pirandello’s messianic impulse, on the other hand, is channeled into a personal philosophical vision. If not present as a character, the author is always present as a hovering reflective intelligence — commenting, expostulating, conceptualizing. In this, he reminds us of Shaw, and he certainly fits Shaw’s definition of the “artist-philosopher.” Pirandello, in fact, provides his own definition of the type in the preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author. There he distinguishes between what he calls “historical writers,” those who “narrate a particular affair, lively or sad, simply for the pleasure of narrating it,” and what he calls “philosophical writers,” those who “feel a more profound spiritual need on whose account they admit only figures, affairs, landscapes which have been soaked, so to speak, in a particular sense of life and acquire from it a universal value.” He adds, “I have the misfortune to belong to these last.”
Pirandello’s philosophy, however, is quite different than Shaw’s, since it is pessimistic in the extreme, and based on the conviction that the problems of life are insoluble. Because of this conviction, Pirandello sees no possibility of salvation through social or community life. In fact, he is vigorously opposed to all forms of social engineering, and extremely contemptuous of Utopian ideals and idealists (he satirizes them, rather clumsily, in The New Colony). Pirandello, furthermore, considers the social use of art to be a betrayal of art: “One must choose between the objectives of art and those of propaganda,” he says in a speech before the Italian Academy. “When art becomes the instrument of definite action and of practical utility, it is condemned and sacrificed.” This would seem to put Pirandello at opposite poles from Shaw; but in one sense, they are very much alike. Both create plays in which plot and character are largely subordinate to theme; and both lean towards tendentious argumentation in enunciating their ideas. Indeed, Pirandello’s weakness for ideas lays him open to the charge that his plays are too cerebral. This charge he does not deny, but he denies that cerebral plays have to be undramatic: “One of the novelties I have given to the modern drama,” he declares, with characteristic bravado, “consists in converting the intellect into passion.” After Ibsen and (if we define “passion” loosely) Shaw, this is hardly a novelty. But Pirandello is certainly the first to convert abstract thought into passion — to formulate an expository philosophy in theatrical terms.
It must be conceded, however, that these terms are not always very satisfactory. Pirandello is exceedingly interested in the idea of form, but rather indifferent to form itself. One tends to think of him as an experimental dramatist, but only his theatre trilogy can be called a formal breakthrough. The rest of his forty-four plays are relatively conventional in their use of dramatic materials. As a twentieth-century Italian dramatist, Pirandello had three possible traditions to tap: the verismo of Giovanni Verga, the rhetorical Romanticism of D’Annunzio, and the bourgeois drama of the French boulevard. Though Pirandello tried to dissociate himself from Verga’s Naturalism and D’Annunzio’s bombast, both influenced his work; but the greatest influence on his dramatic writing is that of the French pièce bien faite. After writing a series of Sicilian folk plays whch have a peasant earthiness reminiscent of Synge and Lorca, Pirandello devotes himself largely to dramas of the urban middle class. And unlike most of the dramatists in the theatre of revolt, who manage to transform mundane reality into poetic images through symbolic action, character, or atmosphere, Pirandello — despite occasional assaults on the fourth wall — generally keeps us confined amidst the ugly paraphernalia of the cluttered drawing room. Pirandello is not an artist who really develops; as an Italian critic observed, his drama is a single play in a hundred acts.2 Not until the end of his life, when it is already too late, does he begin to explore the possibilities of poetic myths, in flawed works like Lazarus, The New Colony, and The Mountain Giants.
As for his dramatic structure, it is extremely conventional, when not downright haphazard. Almost all of his plays are crammed into three acts, “whether they fit or not.” Whenever the action flags, Pirandello contrives a new entrance or a new revelation; and each curtain comes down on a not always credible crisis. In the act of converting intellect into passion, Pirandello often tears the passion to tatters. His plots are bursting with operatic feelings and melodramatic climaxes in an exaggerated Sicilian vein. Hyperbolic expressions of grief, rage, and jealousy alternate with murders, suicides, and mortal accidents; wronged wives, maddened husbands, and bestial lovers foment adultery, incest, illegitimacy, plots, and duels. At times, his monologues turn into arias, and would be more appropriate set to Verdi’s music.
The characters, furthermore, seem to lose psychological depth as they gain philosophical eloquence — occasionally, their identity is wholly swallowed up in the author’s ideas. Pirandello is even more loquacious than Shaw, and has, therefore, less resistance to the raisonneur. Shaw is able to preserve aesthetic distance from a character like John Tanner, but Laudisi in It Is So! (If You Think So) and Diego Cinci in Each in His Own Way are hardly detached from their author at all. Shaw’s drama is a drama of ideas, in which the ideas change from play to play, and the author can support two positions at the same time. Pirandello’s drama is a drama of ideas based on a single underlying concept, consistent throughout his career and enjoying the author’s wholehearted endorsement. Still, the basic Pirandellian concept is itself dialectical, and subject to endless combinations and permutations. The terms of the dialectic may not change, but the author’s point of attack alternates from play to play, from thesis to antithesis, depending on the situation being considered.
The basic Pirandellian concept is borrowed from Bergson, and, briefly stated, it is this. Life (or reality or time) is fluid, mobile, evanescent, and indeterminate. It lies beyond the reach of reason, and is reflected only through spontaneous action, or instinct. Yet man, endowed with reason, cannot live instinctually like the beasts, nor can he accept an existence which constantly changes. In consequence, he uses reason to fix life through ordering definitions. Since life is indefinable, such concepts are illusions. Man is occasionally aware of the illusionary nature of his concepts; but to be human is to desire form; anything formless fills man with dread and uncertainty. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality” — T. S. Eliot’s perception in Burnt Norton (and Murder in the Cathedral) is the spine of Pirandello’s philosophy.
The way humankind evades reality is by stopping time, for, as Eliot goes on to say, “To be conscious is not to be in time.” Through the exercise of consciousness, or reason, man temporarily achieves the timeless. Existence is chaotic, irrational, in flux; man essentializes for the sake of order and form. To quote Eliot once more, “Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” For Pirandello’s characters, too, there is only the dance, and so each one labors to find his still point in the turning world.
The drama Pirandello distills from this concept is usually described through reference to the face and the mask — a conflict he borrowed from the teatro del grotesco. The authors who constitute the grotesque movement — Chiarelli, Martini, Antonelli — use this conflict as the basis for bizarre situations, presented in a ludicrous way. The face represents the suffering individual in all his complexity; the mask reflects external forms and social laws. The individual yields to instinct, but he is also ruled by the demands of a rigid code, and the conflict pulls him in opposite directions. This seems like a modern version of the heroic conflict of love and honor, except that, in the teatro del grotesco, the central character tries to accommodate both demands at the same time. He is, as a result, not heroic but absurd — and the effect of the play is neither tragic nor comic but grotesque. In Luigi Chiarelli’s The Mask and the Face (La maschera ed il volto, 1916), for example, a passionate Italian announces in public that he will kill his wife if she is unfaithful to him. When he finds her in the arms of another, he is reluctant to exact vengeance, so he exiles her, pretends she has been killed, and goes to trial for her murder. The mask of honor and the face of love have both been preserved. But in order to achieve this, the Italian has had to turn actor, playing his role to the limits of his endurance.
Pirandello takes over this antinomy intact, and proceeds to work manifold variations on it, both social and existential. For in his work, the mask of appearances is shaped both by the self and others. The others constitute the social world, a world which owes its existence to the false assumption that its members adhere to narrow definitions. Man, like life, may be unknowable, and the human soul, like time, may be in constant flight, but society demands certainty, and tries to imprison man in its fictitious concepts. To Pirandello, all social institutions and systems of thought — religion, law, government, science, morality, philosophy, sociology, even language itself — are means by which society creates masks, trying to catch the elusive face of man and fix it with a classification. “Basically,” writes Pirandello, “I have constantly attempted to show that nothing offends life so much as reducing it to a hollow concept.” Concepts are the death of spontaneity, he explains in his essay, Umorismo (1908), and reason is inadequate before the mysterious quality of existence. The human mystery remains beyond human comprehension; and those who would pluck it out will come away baffled and in tears.
On the other hand, the mind of man, being stuffed with concepts, has no defense against these social definitions. Because he is uncertain of his identity, he accepts the identity given him by others — sometimes willingly, like the heroine of As You Desire Me, sometimes reluctantly, like the hero of When One Is Somebody. Looking for the elusive self, he sees it reflected in the eyes of others, and takes the reflection for the original. This acceptance of a superimposed identity is one side of Pirandello’s teatro dello specchio (theatre of the looking glass) — aptly named, since the image of the mirror occurs in almost every one of his plays. Laudisi, for example, examining his image in a glass, asks: “What are you for other people? What are you in their eyes? An image, dear sir, just an image in the glass! They’re all carrying just such a phantom around inside themselves, and here they are racking their brains about the phantoms in other people. . . .” Knowledge, facts, opinions, all are phantasms, and even conscience is “nothing but other people inside you.” As Diego Cinci puts it, in Each in His Own Way: “We have of each other reciprocally, and each has of himself, knowledge of some small, insignificant certainty of today, which is not the certainty it was yesterday, and will not be the certainty of tomorrow.” In this sliding world, the human personality dissolves and changes, and like the hero of Pirandello’s novel, The Late Mattia Pascal, who awoke one morning holding on to this one positive fact, the only thing you can be certain of is your name.
These are the social implications of Pirandello’s treatment of masks. The author — always identifying with the suffering individual in opposition to the collective mind — is in revolt against the social world, and all its theoretical, conceptual, institutional extensions. As he said in an interview with Domenico Vittorini: “Society is necessarily formal, and in this sense I am antisocial, but only in the sense that I am opposed to social hypocrisies and conventions. My art teaches each individual to accept his lot with candor and humility, and with full consciousness of the imperfections that are inherent in it.” The stoical sound of this qualification, however, suggests that Pirandello’s social revolt has existential roots. Indeed it has because, in Pirandello’s view, the adoption of the mask is the inevitable consequence of being human. If the mask is sometimes imposed on the face by the external world, it is more often the construct of internal demands. Hamlet says, “I know not seems” — but Pirandello’s characters know almost nothing else.
For whether they know it or not, they are all devoted to appearances, as a defense against the agony of the changing personality. “Continually I hide my face from myself,” says a character in Each in His Own Way, “so ashamed am I at seeing myself change.” The shame is increased by time, for old age etches change, irremediably, on the human features. “Age,” observes a character in Diana and Tuda, “which is time reduced to human dimensions — time when it is painful — and we are made of flesh.” Or, as the aging writer in When One Is Somebody complains, “You don’t know what an atrocious thing happens to an old man, to see himself all of a sudden in a mirror, when the sorrow of seeing himself is greater than the astonishment of no longer remembering. You don’t know the obscene shame of feeling a young and hotblooded heart within an old body.” The body is form, but form which changes under the hungry eye of the cormorant, time. To stop time, to achieve stasis, to locate the still point, Pirandello’s characters put on their masks, hoping to hide their shameful faces by playing a role.
This is what Pirandello means by costruirsi, building yourself up. Man begins as nothing definite, and becomes a costruzione, creating himself according to predetermined patterns or roles. Thus, he plays family roles (husband, wife, father, mother), religious roles (saint, blasphemer, priest, atheist), psychological roles (madman, neurotic, normal man), and social roles (mayor, citizen, socialist, revolutionary). No matter how well these roles are played, however, none of them reveals the face of the actor. They are disguises, designed to give purpose and form to a meaningless existence — masks in an infinite comedy of illusion. The true self is revealed only in a moment of blind instinct, which has the power to break down all codes and concepts.3 But even then, the self is on the point of changing. Thus, Pirandello refuses to idealize the personality in the manner of the messianic rebels; for him, personality remains a fictional construct. Instead, he concentrates on the disintegration of personality in a scene of bondage and frustration — existential revolt in the ironic mode. Pirandellian man has freedom, but his freedom is unbearable; it beckons him towards the waste and void. Though he sometimes plunges into reality through spontaneous, instinctual action, he more often takes refuge from reality in a beneficial illusion. “The greater the struggle for life,” as Pirandello phrases it in Umorismo, “the greater the need for mutual deceit.”
The histrionic implications of this are tremendous — the Pirandellian hero is an actor, a character in disguise. But Pirandello broadens these implications even further. For if his hero is an actor, he is also a critic who cruelly judges his own performance. “Yes I laugh sometimes,” says Leone Gala in The Rules of the Game, “as I watch myself playing this self-imposed role. . . .” In Elizabethan drama, the disguised character is anxious to protect his disguise from others; in Pirandello, he is also anxious to protect it from himself. Yet, reason, which created the mask, exposes its illusionary nature. In the teatro dello specchio, the reflecting mirror is not only the eye of the world but the inner eye as well:
When a man lives [writes Pirandello], he lives and does not see himself. Well, put a mirror before him and make him see himself in the act of living. Either he is astonished at his own appearance, or else he turns away his eyes so as not to see himself, or else in disgust he spits at his image, or, again, clenches his fist to break it. In a word, there arises a crisis, and that crisis is my theatre.
In another place, he adds: “If we present ourselves to others as artificial constructions in relation to what we really are, it is logical that upon looking at ourselves in a mirror we see our falseness reflected there, made galling and unbearable by its fixity.” It is for this reason that a character like Baldovino, in The Pleasures of Honesty, experiences “an unspeakable nausea for the self that I am compelled to build up and display in the relations I must assume with my fellow men.” If Pirandello’s characters want to be fixed, they also want to move.
The conflict between appearance and reality, or Art and Nature, has been a traditional subject of Western literature since its beginnings, with Anglo-Saxon writers generally supporting reality and Latin writers generally supporting appearances. The blunt, plain-spoken man, who will not hide his true feelings, is a crucial figure in a certain strain of English drama and satire, while French, Spanish, and Italian literature is often more tolerant of the courteous man, who knows how to moderate his temper and disguise his desires. When the Italian Iago goes into disguise, he assumes the appearance of a gruff, honest soldier; when Molière’s “misanthrope” enters English drama, he becomes Wycherly’s “plaindealer.” In Pirandello’s drama, on the other hand, the conflict between Art and Nature is translated into a conflict between life and form, while appearances become illusions; but with him, the conflict becomes a real dialectic. Pirandello evokes sympathy for the man who tries to hide from reality and sympathy for the man who tries to plunge back into it. Life and form — reality and illusion — are opposed, but they are the twin poles of human existence.
Pirandello is similarly ambivalent about the faculty of reason. His philosophy, founded as it is on the belief that real knowledge is unattainable, is profoundly anti-intellectual; yet, it is through the intellect that he reaches his conclusions. Such paradoxes proliferate in Pirandello’s drama. Reason is both man’s consolation and his curse; it creates a false identity which it can also destroy; it applies the masks to the face, and then rips them off. Under the cold eye of reason, the human ego expands and contracts; the costruzione is erected, and then demolished. The disguised character in Pirandello is a creature of appearances, whose intellect has created his illusion, but he also has the capacity, through the agency of intellect, to penetrate to a deeper reality. He escapes from life into form, and from form into life. Or, put into the metaphor of the theatre, the improvising actor struts and frets his hour on the stage before the ruthless critic sends him back to his dressing-room mirror, weeping over the inauthenticity of his performance.
This probably sounds impossibly abstruse, an exercise in epistemology rather than drama, but the wonder is the number of effective situations Pirandello is able to create out of such reflections. For Pirandello’s concept always takes the form of conflict, and conflict remains the heart of his drama. These conflicts take an internal and external form, depending on which aspect of Pirandello’s revolt is in the ascendant. As an existential rebel, Pirandello explores the roles men play in order to escape from life — revolt turns inward against the elusiveness of human existence. As a social rebel, he attacks the busy-bodies, gossips, and scandalmongers who think they can understand the unknowable mystery of man — revolt turns outwards against the intruding social world. The two levels of Pirandello’s revolt generally run parallel in each of his plays; and, as a result, his drama has a “spatial design,” in Eric Bentley’s words, which consists of “a center of suffering within a periphery of busybodies — the pattern of the Sicilian village.”
Extending this description a little further, let us call those in the outer circle alazōnes (impostors or buffoons) and those in the center eirones (self-deprecators) —terms by which I mean to suggest the affinities of Pirandello’s characters with the stock masks of Aristophanic comedy and the commedia dell’arte.4 In traditional comedy, as Northrup Frye tells us, the alazōn is typified as “the miles gloriosus and the learned crank or obsessed philosopher.” In Pirandello’s drama, the alazōn is an agent of organized society, and is usually identified with one of its institutions — science, bureaucracy, or the state. He is sometimes a doctor, sometimes a petty official, sometimes a magistrate, sometimes a policeman — always a pretender, whose pretense lies in thinking himself a wise man when he is really a fool. The eiron, on the other hand, is a suffering individual who has hidden some private secret under a mask of appearances. Sometimes, he is unaware he is wearing a mask, in which case he is merely a pathetic sufferer — a pharmakos, or scapegoat. More often, he is a man of superior wisdom, because, like Socrates (the original eiron), he knows he knows nothing. Hounded and tormented by his persecutors, the buffoonish alazōnes, he replies with the dry mock: ironic laughter is his only weapon. As Diego Cinci puts it, in Each in His Own Way: “I laugh because I have reasoned my heart dry. . . . I laugh in my own way, and my ridicule falls upon myself sooner than on anyone else!” He is thus ironic in the original Greek sense of dissimulation — of ignorance purposely affected.
The clash between the two groups occurs when the alazōnes try to peel off the masks of the eirones — an action which has both tragic and comic consequences. On the one hand, this impertinent invasion of another’s privacy may be dangerous, since the eiron’s illusion is necessary to his life; on the other, the attempt to discover another’s secret self is ludicrously impossible, since the face beneath the mask cannot be known. The comic action, then, proceeds along the social level of the play where the alazōnes are frustrated in their curiosity, their state changing from knowledge to ignorance, from smug complacency to stupefied bafflement. The tragic action proceeds along the existential level of the play where the eirones are dragged under a painfully blinding spotlight which causes them terrible discomfort and suffering. As for the author, his literary endeavors identify him as an alazōn, since by writing about the eirones, he is meddling in their private affairs.5 But his tone is that of an eiron, since, in his sympathetic identification with the sufferers, he expresses ironic contempt for the social busybodies.
One of the most famous, if not the most artful, of the plays in this mode is It Is So! (If You Think So) — Cosi è (se vi pare) — which Pirandello wrote in 1917. Here the leader of the alazōnes is Commendatore Agazzi, a small-town bureaucrat, who is supported in his buffoonery by members of his and another family, by the Prefect, and by the Police Commissioner. The sufferers are their neighbors: Signor Ponza, his wife, and his mother-in-law, Signora Frola. The unusual behavior of this family has been arousing curiosity. Why is Signora Frola never permitted to visit with her own daughter? The neighbors are particularly incensed, because they have also been refused admittance to Ponza’s house, even though Ponza is Agazzi’s subordinate.
As the play proceeds, and Ponza and Signora Frola are cross-examined about their behavior, the mystery thickens. Ponza maintains that he has barred his mother-in-law from his door in order to protect her peace of mind. According to his testimony, her daughter has died in an earthquake and Ponza had married a second time; but when Signora Frola became deranged and refused to believe these facts, Ponza humored her by letting her think her daughter was still alive. Signora Frola, on the other hand, maintains that it is Ponza who is mad. He has convinced himself that his first wife is dead and, to humor him, she let him marry her daughter twice. To compound the confusion, each witness is aware of the other’s version of the events, but compassionately labors to preserve the other’s illusion.
Meanwhile the Agazzi family and their allies are busy trying to get to the bottom of things. Representing themselves as “pilgrims athirst for truth,” they are really “a pack of gossips” — prying into secrets, ferreting out facts, forcing painful confrontations. Only Agazzi’s brother-in-law, Lamberto Laudisi, disapproves of this meddling in the lives of others. The Ponza family is a pharmakos group — passive, victimized, unaware — so Laudisi becomes their spokesman; he is the eiron of the play, and it is on his derisive laughter that each curtain falls. To Laudisi, the truth is something perpetually out of reach, while reality is a movable feast which each man samples from his own table. As the buffoons proceed with their interrogations and investigations, turning up documents and official papers, yet continuing to be baffled, Laudisi affirms that facts contribute nothing to the matter, since they leave things just as ambiguous as before. “Oh, I grant you,” he concedes, “if you could get a death certificate or a marriage certificate or something of the kind, you might be able to satisfy that stupid curiosity of yours. Unfortunately, you can’t get it. And the result is that you are in the extraordinary fix of having before you, on the one hand, a world of fancy, and on the other, a world of reality, and you, for the life of you, are not able to distinguish one from the other.”
Finally, the only person who can explain the mystery — Signora Ponza — is brought in to testify. She is “dressed in deep mourning . . . her face concealed with a thick, black impenetrable veil.” The veil is her mask — but the veil remains down, the mask continues to conceal the face. For Signora Ponza thereupon announces that she is the daughter of Signora Frola, and also the second wife of Signor Ponza. She has become a construction, built up by the demands of others: “I am she whom you believe me to be” — and in herself, “I am nothing.” Externally imposed, the mask changes according to the eye of the beholder, while the face remains an imponderable mystery.
As Eric Bentley observes, there is nothing in the play to suggest that there is not a correct version of the story. Rather, the play is a protest against the “scandalmonger, the prying reporter, and the amateur psychoanalyst” — and we might add, the sob sister, the candid cameraman, and the Congressional investigator — those who recklessly probe the secrets of others. In It Is So!, these secrets can only be protected through concealment. “There is a misfortune here, as you see, which must stay hidden,” remarks Signora Ponza, “otherwise, the remedy which our compassion has found cannot avail.” Professor Bentley concludes from this that Pirandello does believe in the existence of objective truth. This may be — but he will show again and again, in later plays, how this truth cannot be grasped by the inquiring mind, since it is in a continual state of flux and varies with each individual. This existential complaint is only suggested in It Is So!, then buried under a barrage of social satire. Instead of developing the deeper implications of his philosophy, Pirandello exercises the animus of his social revolt; and the tragedy which threatens is averted at the end. Their right to privacy affirmed, their secret still hidden from the gossips and the busybodies, the pharmakoi depart into darkness, while the alazōnes stand lost in amazement, whipped by the savage laughter of the eiron.
It Is So! (If You Think So) is a fairly conventional exercise in the mode of the grotesque. As an expression of social revolt, it has its power and relevance, but the split between the pharmakoi and the eiron — between the sufferers and their spokesman — shows that Pirandello has not yet perfected his structure. Furthermore, the prominence of Laudisi, the raisonneur, suggests that, at this early point, Pirandello is less interested in dramatizing his themes than in stating them flatly. In Henry IV (Enrico IV, 1922), however, Pirandello dispenses with the raisonneur entirely, embodying his ideas in a brilliant theatrical metaphor, and concentrating not so much on the social world of the dumbfounded buffoons as on the existential world of the chief sufferer. And now this world is wonderfully rich and varied. The central character of the play is both pharmakos and eiron, both a living person and an articulate personification, both the mechanism of the action and the source of the ideas. In Henry’s character, Pirandello’s reflections on the conflict between life and form, on the elusiveness of identity, and on man’s revolt against time, achieve their consummation in a powerfully eerie manner. Henry is the culmination of Pirandello’s concept of the mask and the face, as well as embodying Pirandello’s notions (developed more elaborately in his theatre plays) about the timeless world of art. In trying to fix his changing life in significant form, Henry emerges as Actor, Artist, and Madman, and, besides this, possesses an extraordinary intellect, reflecting on all three.
The structure of the play, a structure that is to become basic to Pirandello’s work, consists of an “historical” story within a “philosophical” framework. The historical line is this: Henry IV (as he is called throughout the play) is an Italian nobleman on whom life has played a cruel trick. Twenty years before, indulging his taste for playacting, he had appeared in a pageant, costumed as the medieval Holy Roman Emperor who had been excommunicated by Gregory VII and forced to walk barefoot to Canossa to do penance. His horse had stumbled — pricked from behind, as we later learn, by his rival, Tito Belcredi — and Henry had fallen, hitting his head on a rock. Henry awoke with the delusion that he actually was Henry IV; the pageant had become his reality. “I shall never forget that scene,” recalls his former mistress, Donna Matilda, “all our masked faces hideous and gazing at him, at that terrible mask of his face, which was no longer a mask, but madness, madness personified!” The mask had usurped the face; the actor had turned madman, losing all distance from his role. When this delirium persisted, Henry’s nephew, Charles di Nolli, hired men to play his retainers and counsellors. For the next twenty years, they performed their supporting roles in a drama which Henry, the chief actor, had unwittingly substituted for his life.
For only twelve of those twenty years, however, was Henry really mad; after that, his consciousness returned. But he regained his sanity with the terrible realization that he had been cheated of his youth. He had slept away his life in a long dream, and now he had awakened, gray inside and out, about to “arrive, hungry as a wolf, at a banquet which had already been cleared away.” His hunger persisting, unappeased, he determined to revenge himself on time by refusing to return to time. He would play his role again, maintain his mask, and live his madness “with the most lucid consciousness.” This consciousness is likened to a mirror which he always keeps before him, invisible to everybody else. The actor had turned madman; now the madman would turn actor, in revolt against existence itself.
Henry managed to escape from time by entering history, which is frozen time. He followed the outlines of a plot already written, foreordained, predetermined, seeking — like Yeats in “Sailing to Byzantium” — a corridor into the world of eternity. Yeats’s answer to the agonizing flux of life is to contemplate a golden bird upon a golden bough, in a legendary country where time is suspended; Henry finds consolation for his melancholy and despair by constructing himself into a historical figure, fixed and immutable. By remaining Henry IV at the age of twenty-six, “everything determined, everything settled,” Henry never suffers the horrors of age. He is held as firmly in an eternal moment as that youthful portrait of himself in costume, which hangs in the throne room beside a portrait of the young Donna Matilda. And now, as he enacts a masquerade, yet remains outside the masquerade — possessing the weird clarity of his lucid madness — Henry moves through life with the supreme confidence of one who knows what came before — and what comes after. Chance, accident, happenstance, the tricks of time, afflict him no more. Freely suspending his freedom of action, he has moved from time into timelessness, into that still point where the dance proceeds.
Henry’s narrative is woven skillfully in the play, and its threads are unraveled through the plucking and pulling of another group of Pirandellian busybodies. Playing alazōnes to Henry’s eiron are a number of interested parties who have come to observe this “madman” in the hope of curing him: Donna Matilda, his old mistress; Tito Belcredi, her present lover; Charles di Nolli, Henry’s nephew; Frida, Matilda’s beautiful daughter; and an alienist named Doctor Dionysius Genoni. These characters are subjected to Henry’s, and Pirandello’s, scorn, but the alienist is a special object of satire. A “learned crank” with total confidence in his curative powers, Genoni is a jargon-ridden quack — a caricature of a professional man — il dottore from the commedia dell’arte. To him, Henry is merely a case — a conceptual object rather than a complex human being. But, as always in Pirandello, this kind of labeling becomes an insult to the human soul: “Words, words which anyone can interpret in his own manner!” cries Henry. “That’s the way public opinion is formed! And it’s a bad look out for a man who finds himself labeled one day with one of these words which everyone repeats: for example ‘madman,’ or ‘imbecile.’ ”
Having so labeled Henry, Genoni suggests that he and the others enter his madness for the purpose of observing him more closely. Since Henry “pays more attention to the dress than to the person,” they put on period costumes, assuming a madness of clothes. Each pretends to be some figure in the life of the historical Henry: a Benedictine monk (Belcredi), the Abbot of Cluny (Genoni), and the Duchess Adelaide, mother of Henry’s Queen (Matilda). During the audience which follows, Matilda and Belcredi suspect that Henry has recognized them; and indeed he has; but he continues to play his role to perfection. “Madness has made a superb actor of him,” Di Nolli has observed, but none of them is aware how brilliant Henry’s performance actually is. For Henry is not only playing Henry IV; he is also playing the elderly Henry IV playing the young Henry of the portrait, from which he begs to be freed. His hair dyed, his cheeks roughed, Henry enacts a masquerade within a masquerade. The masks proliferate in defense against the changing shape of life:
A woman wants to be a man . . . an old man would be young again [says Henry to his visitors]. . . . We’re all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves. However, Monsignor, while you keep your self in order, holding on with both hands to your holy habit, there slips down from your sleeves, there peels off from you like . . . like a serpent . . . something you don’t notice: life, Monsignor! Has it never happened to you, my Lady, to find a different self in yourself? Have you always been the same?
Shifting skillfully from one self to another, speaking ambiguously about real and imagined conspiracies, Henry confuses the interlopers, and turns the mirror back on them: “Buffoons, buffoons!” he spits, contemptuously. “One can play any tune on them!” For while the alazōnes are observing the eiron, the eiron is observing the alazōnes, and with a much more highly trained eye. “And you,” he says to his Valets, “are amazed that I tear off their ridiculous masks now, just as if it wasn’t I who made them mask themselves to satisfy this taste of mine for playing the madman!” The eiron’s superiority is clearly established. The alazōnes are acting out Henry’s masquerade, lacking the wit to create their own; and Henry’s advantage over them is his knowledge that life itself is mad, that the so-called sane live their madness “without knowing it or seeing it.” Thus, Pirandello reverses accepted notions of sanity and madness with a paradox taken from the heart of his philosophy. To live in a world where nothing is stable and man grows old is lunacy itself, while Henry’s “conscious madness” is the highest form of wisdom: “This is my life!” cries Henry. “Quite a different thing from your life! Your life, the life in which you have grown old. . . .”
When the alazōnes attempt to bring Henry back into their world from his refuge in history, their meddling, as usual, issues in painful consequences. The Doctor, comparing Henry to a watch that has stopped at a certain hour, prepares to get the mechanism going again through a “violent trick.” He will dress up Frida, who bears an uncanny resemblance to her mother as a young woman, in the costume of the portrait, and place her moving, speaking figure in the frame. Belcredi warns that the shock of pulling Henry across an abyss of eight hundred years might prove so strong that “you’ll have to pick him up in pieces with a basket!” But Genoni, his implacable confidence unruffled, proceeds with his dangerous plan.
At the beginning of the last act, the throne room has been darkened, and the actors are in place: the living figures of Frida and Charles di Nolli have been substituted for the portraits of Matilda and Henry. When Henry enters the room, and Frida calls to him softly in the darkness, the shock is so great that Henry almost faints. The alienist thinks himself vindicated, since Henry is “cured.” But Henry quickly reveals that he has been “cured” for eight years, and that this “violent trick” was a foolish and reckless blunder: “Do you know, Doctor, that for a moment you ran the risk of making me mad again? By God, to make the portraits speak. . . .” Henry, meditating a terrible revenge, tells his visitors about his decision to play the madman in order to abdicate from life, “that continuous, everlasting masquerade, of which we are the involuntary puppets, when, without knowing it, we mask ourselves with that which we appear to be. . . .”
But life draws him back again, against his will, in the form of uncontrollable instinct. In Frida, he finds his old love, Matilda, still young and fresh. Time has destroyed, but time, too, has miraculously resurrected what it destroyed. His passion returning, he finds all the treacheries and betrayals of the last twenty years have vanished in an instant. “Oh miracle of miracles! Prodigy of prodigies! The dream alive in you! More than alive in you! It was an image that wavered there and they’ve made you come to life!” Matilda is old and decayed, but Frida is the realization of the timeless dream. Losing control of himself for the first time, Henry goes to take Frida in his arms, “laughing like a madman.” The violent trick proves violent indeed, and the conclusion is melodramatic. Belcredi intervenes, shouting that Henry is not mad, and Henry runs him through the body with a sword. When the alazōnes flee in panic, and Belcredi expires off stage, Henry is left alone with his retainers to meditate on the “life of the masquerade which has driven him to crime.” Forced back into the role of madman by this act, he is locked in it now. The mask has obliterated the face. The mantle of Henry IV has become a shirt of Nessus. Drawing his Valets around him for protection, he realizes that history has become his prison, and he is now lost for all eternity in its cunning passages: “here we are . . . together . . . forever!”
Henry IV is unquestionably Pirandello’s masterpiece, a complex artwork in which the themes arise naturally from the action — neither discursive nor superfluous, yet, at the same time, eloquently and coherently stated. In the figure of Henry, moreover, Pirandello has found his perfect eiron-pharmakos, one who acts and suffers, murders and creates, and one who can enunciate the author’s ideas about the need for privacy from interfering busybodies, the vanity of learning, and the way man takes refuge from a harsh reality in beneficial illusions. In Henry, too, Pirandello has dramatized the dreadful loneliness of human beings, encased in shells of steel, never able to know or communicate with another. Pirandello’s Henry, like Brecht’s Shlink in In the Jungle of Cities, watches the hungry generations stare coldly into each other’s eyes:
I would never wish you to think, as I have done [he tells his retainers], on this horrible thing which really drives one mad; that if you were beside another and looking into his eyes — as I one day looked into somebody’s eyes — you might as well be a beggar before a door never to be opened to you; for he who does enter there will never be you, but someone unknown to you, within his different and impenetrable world. . . .
This “misery which is not only his, but everybody’s,” as the author describes it in a stage direction, is Pirandello’s finest expression of his rage against existence, the source both of his philosophy and his drama. And in Henry IV, Pirandello has finally converted intellect into genuine passion, making his existential rebellion the occasion for a rewarding and absorbing play.
Henry IV is also significant for the hints it throws out about Pirandello’s view of art — views which form the basis for another important group of his plays. For while Henry suggests certain characteristics of the actor and the artist, a good many of Pirandello’s characters actually are actors and artists, reflecting self-consciously on the implications of their roles. Pirandello’s attention is fixed not on the act but rather on the process of the act, as analyzed by the one who commits it. In his more conventional plays, Pirandello imagines men watching themselves live. In his more experimental drama, Pirandello imagines performers watching themselves perform and artists watching themselves create — the mirror remains the central prop of his theatre. Actually, Pirandello’s views of art are an extension of his concept of the face and the mask. When man becomes a costruzione, placing a mask over his changing features, he stands in the same relationship to his new identity as the artist does to his art — for art is the artist’s costruzione, the form he imposes on chaotic life. The construction, in each case, is built up by the human demand for order.
In each case, too, Pirandello’s attitudes towards the product are split. Like the mask, the work of art is both a limiting and a liberating creation. Art is superior to life, because it has purpose, meaning, and organization — the illusion is deeper than the reality. But art is inferior to life because it can never capture the transitory, formless quality of existence. The work of art is thus a beneficial illusion, an ordered fiction — more harmonious than life, yet still a lie. When Pirandello finds the temporal world unbearable, he takes refuge in the timeless world of art; but when he finds the fixity of art unbearable, he longs to break out into spontaneous life. The author, in consequence, alternates between aestheticism and realism, between nostalgia for permanence and desire for change; and this peculiar ambivalence is never resolved in his work.6 But Pirandello continues to build his drama not on the affirmation of concepts but rather on the conflict between them — “the inherent tragic conflict,” as he phrases it in the preface to Six Characters, “between life (which is always moving and changing) and form (which fixes it, immutable).”
Here we can clearly see the existential consequences of Pirandello’s sublimated messianic revolt. For the conflict between life and form is really a conflict between life and death. Pirandello’s demand for form is literally a death wish, since, as he tells us, whatever is fixed in form is really dead; like his philosophy, his art is a negation of life. On the other hand, his discontent with art stems from an affirmation of life, since he wants to capture the elusive quality of existence. Only one artist was ever able to create living things, and that was God; and “God alone,” as he says in Lazarus, “can recall the dead to life.” The messianic impulse in Pirandello makes him long to be a god, and create a work of art that lives; but the existential recoil fills him with depair over the impossibility of divine creation.
Thus, the agony of the artist in Pirandello’s drama is that, for all his ingenuity, he cannot really create life — to make an artistic form is to deaden and kill. In Diana and Tuda, for example, the older sculptor, Giuncano, has destroyed all his statues because, as he grew old and changed, they remained perpetually the same. He urges his younger colleague, Sirio Dossi, to undertake a statue of his young and marvelously beautiful model, Tuda, “the way she is now! When she’s quivering with life, in perpetual change from moment to moment!” But Sirio argues that art is not the same as life. He is transforming Tuda, a nobody, into somebody, a statue — “that one there. . . . That’s the function of art.” But the melancholy Giuncano feels compelled to add, “And of death too! Death will make statues of both of us when we lie stiff and cold in our beds or in the ground.” Death, indeed, makes a statue of the aging writer in When One Is Somebody, who is petrified before our eyes, his words hardening into marble — the artwork, like the “somebody,” is a thing of stone.
When Pirandello’s messianism is the ascendant, however, he argues the opposite point — that the artist’s work is superior to God’s, because art, unlike man, is immortal: “All that lives, by the fact of living, has a form and by the same token must die — except the work of art which lives forever in so far as it is form.” Pirandello is playing with semantics, since he has already identified the rigidity of form with the rigidity of death; but he is trying to apostrophize his function, and claim a sanctity for artists. In a more modest mood, however, he will simply suggest that artists are superior to ordinary people because they understand themselves better; they, too, are eirones. In Trovarsi (To Find Oneself), for example, another kind of artist — this time an actress — looking for her essential personality, discovers it lies in her art. An actress lives before her mirror, and accepts the various reflections which are thrown back. In the theatrical masks that she wears before an audience her true identity is found: “It is true only that one must create oneself, create! And only then does one find oneself.” In short, the artist is superior because he knows he uses masks. And the very act of creation — like Henry’s recreation of history — becomes a lofty, noble act of rebellion.
The contradictions multiply, and so do the Pirandellian paradoxes; only the basic conflict remains constant. Life and form are irretrievably at odds, and man suffers from his failure to reconcile them. Pirandello’s desire to reconcile them explains, I think, his attraction to the theatre, because of all the literary forms, only theatrical art combines the spontaneous and accidental with the ordered and predetermined. In the interplay between actors, audience, and script, life and form merge. The living nature of theatrical art is further exemplified by its immediacy. The novel, with its “he saids” and “she saids” — speeches already spoken — is a tale of past time; the drama takes place in the present, with nothing separating the speaker from the speech. If anything written is fixed and dead, and literary characters are like the figures in Yeats’s Purgatory — doomed to eternal repetition of their torments7 — then anything staged is subject to accident, whim, and change, the actor insuring that it will always be new.
In Pirandello’s view, in fact, dramatic characters are not alive at all until they have been bodied forth by actors; the action waits to burst into life, and passion to receive its cue. “We want to live,” says the Father to the actors in Six Characters, “only for a moment . . . in you.” Because the actor is only impersonating the character (i.e., wearing his mask), the theatre performance cannot help but travesty the author’s written conception; and much of the comedy in Six Characters is based on the disparity between the reality of Pirandello’s six and the artificiality of the performers. Still, if the actor distorts his role, he is nevertheless essential to it — only he can make it live. This passion for life in art explains Pirandello’s fondness for the idea of improvisation. In contrast with the author’s writing, the actor’s improvisation is vital, immediate, and spontaneous. And theatre, theoretically, reaches its ideal consummation when it springs, unprepared, from the imagination of the performer.
Thus, in Tonight We Improvise, the director, Hinkfuss, is pleased to announce that he has eliminated the author entirely: “In the theatre, the work of the writer no longer exists.” Borrowing from Pirandello only a brief and sketchy scenario, his actors will improvise their parts in the tradition of the commedia dell’arte, substituting for the old stock masks the masks of their own creation. Hinkfuss, a three-foot tyrant with a huge head of hair, is a caricature of the overbearing Reinhardtian regisseur; but he also functions as a Pirandellian raisonneur in outlining the author’s theories. Repeating Pirandello’s obsessive conviction that “a finished work of art is fixed forever in immutable form,” and that, on the other hand, “life must both move and be still,” Hinkfuss goes on to declare that “only on this condition, Ladies and Gentlemen, can that which art has fixed in the immutability of form be brought to life, and turn, and move — on the condition that this form have again its movement from us who are alive.” And this essentializes the difference between the theatre and all other forms of literary creation: “Art it is indeed — but life as well. Creation it is indeed — but not enduring creation. A thing of the moment. A miracle. A statue that moves.”
On the basis of this theory, the living actors proceed to improvise a drama, pulling in and out of character, commenting on their roles, expressing dissatisfaction with the director (“No one directs life”) — until finally they are caught up entirely in their parts and play them to an unexpected conclusion. In the theatre, anything can happen, and the pattern of art is disturbed by the accidents of life. Thus, in Each in His Own Way, the play is not even completed, because among the spectators are the real-life counterparts of the characters on the stage; and angered by being represented in this commedia a chiave, they attack the author and the actors, and bring the curtain down. For Pirandello, plot and character are now totally subordinated to the theatrical process itself, for that process is life itself. The theory is courageous — but Pirandello is not courageous enough to put it into practice. In Pirandello’s theatre, the playwright still exists. The “improvisations” of the actors are all composed beforehand, and the spectators are planted, their lines written too. Only through the disappearance of the author can the conflict between life and art be resolved, but Pirandello is unable to relinquish control over his work. Still dominated by his messianic obsession to create an organic art — changing from moment to moment, yet still formed by the hand of man — Pirandello refuses to complete his godlike function by withdrawing from the scene.
In his frustration over forming a statue that moves, Giuncano destroyed his art; Pirandello, frustrated but undaunted, continues to create, and the result is his “trilogy of the theatre in the theatre.” Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, 1921), Each in His Own Way (Ciascuno a suo modo, 1924), and Tonight We Improvise (Questa sera si recita a soggetto, 1930) were all written at different stages of the author’s career, but all are unified by a common purpose. Probing the complex relationships between the stage, the work of art, and reality itself, Pirandello attempts, in these plays, to forge out of the old theatrical artifacts a living theatre, destroying the traditional conventions of the stage by crossing the boundaries which separate art from life. In these plays, the illusions of the realistic theatre — where actors pretend to be real people, canvas and lumber pass for actual locations, and forged events are designed to seem real — no longer apply. Now the stage is a stage, actors are actors, and even the audience, formerly silent and half invisible in its willing suspension of disbelief, has been drawn into the action and implicated in the theatrical proceedings. As for the fourth wall, this fiction has been destroyed entirely — nothing separates the spectator from the stage except space, and even this space occasionally evaporates when the actors enter the audience, and the spectators come on stage. Having disintegrated reality in his more conventional plays, Pirandello is now disintegrating stage reality. Having scourged the peeping and prying of the social community, he is now attacking the community’s peek-hole pastime, the theatre. For Pirandello, the fourth wall, designed for the entertainment of Peeping Toms, is an avenue that must be blocked.
Pirandello’s experimental plays proceed logically from his theory. He had always been dissatisfied with the mere representation of reality on the stage, a function he assigned, with some condescension, to “historical writers.” Since reality was a dense and perhaps impenetrable forest, Aristotelian mimesis, or imitation, seemed to him futile and presumptuous. How could anyone presume to know, much less to recreate, the unknowable? It was better to be a “philosophical writer,” affirming a personal sense of reality and soaking the work of art in a “particular sense of life.” This sounds Platonic; and indeed, Pirandello rejects representational art for Platonic reasons. Since reality lies not in material objects but in the Idea, such art can only be an imitation of an imitation, two degrees removed. Pirandello’s apprehension of the shadows in the cave, however, is intensely subjective. As he said in an interview with Domenico Vittorini: “In imitating a preceding model, one denies one’s own identity and remains of necessity behind the pattern. The best is to affirm one’s own sentiments, one’s own life.” Pirandello’s desire to affirm his personal identity, to come out from behind the pattern, is not compatible with his desire to let the pattern create itself in the autonomous shape of life. But he is too subjective, too Romantic, too messianic a writer to relax his control over events and let them happen.
We have already seen how this compels him to write out the improvisations of the actors. For the same reason, Pirandello is unable to dispense with stage illusion, despite his angry attacks on it. The actors in the theatre trilogy are no longer pretending to be characters, but they are pretending to be actors — actors created in the imagination of Pirandello. And though the stage is now strictly a stage, it is still, to some extent, an illusionistic stage. In Six Characters, for example, the action takes place during a rehearsal in an empty theatre, but the rehearsal is really a performance, the “empty theatre” filled with paying spectators. Actually, whatever spontaneity occurs in these theatre plays is carefully planned by the author. As is often the case in these matters, Pirandello has destroyed one convention — and substituted another.
This convention is borrowed, probably unwittingly, from the Elizabethan theatre, for Pirandello’s experimental drama is constructed on the pattern of the play-within-the-play. The inner action is “historical,” the outer action, “philosophical,” but both are products of the author’s imagination. Pirandello was tending towards this structure in his more conventional drama: Henry’s masquerade, for example, is a play-within-a-play. But now he tries to create the illusion that the outer action is improvised by actors, directors, and spectators, while only the inner action is an anecdote composed in advance. Pirandello goes further than any of his predecessors in breaking down the barriers between the inner and the outer plays; but he uses the convention for the same purpose as the Elizabethans — for commentary, criticism, and extradramatic remarks. Thus, Pirandello has not destroyed illusions; he has merely multiplied illusions. Contemptuous of imitation, he is unable to do without it. In his experimental drama, theory and practice fail to merge; idea and action fail to cohere. Unlike his companions in the theatre of revolt, Pirandello is never able to decide just to what extent he should enter his own work. Torn between messianic and existential demands, his Romantic ego is split wide open by its own contradictions.
Still, Pirandello’s attacks on the deceptions of conventional realism and the narcotized stupor of the passive spectator had a revolutionary influence on the experimental theatre which followed. And if he does not ever solve the problem of life and form, he does open up a totally new side of it in each of his three plays. Six Characters examines the conflict between fictional characters and the actors who play their roles; Each in His Own Way, the conflict between stage characters and actual characters on whom they are based; and Tonight We Improvise, the conflict between actors who want to live their parts and the director who is always interrupting them. In each case, Pirandello preserves the pattern of the play within the play, preserving, besides, his earlier pattern of suffering eirones or pharmakoi surrounded by meddling alazōnes. In Each in His Own Way, the relationships are consistent with his past work. The real characters (pharmakoi) are mortified by their stage counterparts (alazōnes), who, by assuming their masks, are dragging their painful secrets into light.8 In the accompanying two plays, however, the relationships are reversed — there the suffering characters are eager to have their secrets exposed, and the alazōnes are an obstacle to this end. Thus, in Six Characters, the six (eirones-pharmakoi) try to persuade the actors and their manager (alazōnes) to publicize their fictional private lives; and in Tonight We Improvise, the actors (eirones) are finally forced to throw the director (alazōn) out of the theatre in order to expose the inner souls of their characters (pharmakoi). In the theatre trilogy, the conflict between the eirones, pharmakoi, and alazōnes no longer serves to make a social point, but rather to illustrate the different levels of reality which the stage encloses.
The initial play in the trilogy, Six Characters in Search of an Author, is also the most effective, since its intricate structure permits an elaborate system of ideas to coexist with a striking theatricality. Like the other two plays, this famous work is constructed of a “philosophical” outer action around an “historical” inner action, but while the total play is unified, the play-within-the-play is incomplete — Six Characters is subtitled “A Comedy in the Making.” As Pirandello informs us in his preface, he had sketched out six members of a family as subjects for a “magnificent novel,” but no longer capable of telling a straightforward “historical” tale in a narrative vein, he decided to abandon them. The six, however, refused to accept their fate: “Born alive, they wished to live.” And now they have appeared independent of the author’s will — some dressed in mourning, all bathed in an eerie, luminescent light — to a group of actors and their manager who are rehearsing, in an empty theatre, Pirandello’s Rules of the Game. Fragmented and incomplete — part alive in the world of fiction and part still in the womb of Pirandello’s conception — they seek another author to complete them. And for this purpose, they offer themselves to the Manager and his cast. What follows is designed to have the quality of an impromptu performance — a play without acts or scenes in which intermissions are provided apparently at random, once when the Manager withdraws to confer with the characters, once when the curtain falls by mistake.
The relationships between the fictional characters and the living actors become exceedingly complex; and the conflict of the play, as Francis Fergusson has perceived, proceeds on several planes of discourse. On the one hand, the characters create friction with the theatre people who first disbelieve their story, then find it too squalid for the stage, and finally travesty it in the act of imitation. On the other hand, the characters struggle among themselves, for they detest each other, and are bound together in mutual hatred. As the drama of the characters is interrupted by the comedy of the actors, and the two parallel conflicts begin to grate, the tragi-comic alternations create an atmosphere of the grotesque. The characters, furthermore, quarrel among themselves over the details of their story. And the first act is almost entirely taken up with trying to determine the vague outlines of this “historical” narrative.
For the author has only completed two scenes of the drama: one in Madame Pace’s dress shop, the other in the Father’s garden. The rest, conceived but never written down, is therefore open to interpretation by the characters. In brief, the written scenes are form (fixed and immutable), while the unwritten background material is life (fluid and changing). Together, these elements constitute the “book,” both form and life, which are the constituents of the characters themselves, and can only be learned from them. Here, in Pirandello’s mind, is a statue that moves; his fictional creations have developed an existence of their own. Except for the Mother, who is unaware she is a “character,” and the Boy and the Child, both of whom are mute, the characters possess a reflective life beyond the form their author gave them. In typical Pirandellian manner, they both suffer and think about their suffering; they both perform and see themselves performing, as in a mirror. Immobilized in written roles, caught up in an action which is “renewed, alive, and present, always!” they are also cursed with hindsight and, therefore, know exactly what form their purgatory will take.
The most reflective of the six is the Father, who, indeed, acts as Pirandello’s philosophical raisonneur. It is his function in the first act to narrate “historical” past events — to provide, in other words, the exposition. Reconstructed from the Father’s narrative and the Stepdaughter’s angry emendations, the story goes like this. The Father had married beneath him — to a humble, ignorant woman by whom he had the Son. Her simplicity attracted him at first, but soon she began to bore him. And when he noticed that his secretary was in love with her and she seemed to respond, he sent them off together — prodded, he says, by the “Demon of Experiment,” an urge to transcend ordinary moral conventions. The Father understands that this is only a phrase, a consoling illusion by which he disguised his real motive, and the Stepdaughter has no use for the Father’s rationalizing which “uncovers the beast in man and then seeks to save him, excuse him.” But whatever the motive, the Father forced the Mother to abandon her two-year-old Son and, deprived of maternal warmth, the Son grew up loveless, supercilious, disdainful.
When the Mother bore to her lover three illegitimate children — the Stepdaughter, the Boy, and the Child — the Father began to take an interest in this family, and visited their city to observe the Stepdaughter as a child. Years went by, and the Father lost sight of them; unknown to him, they returned to his city. When her lover died, leaving the Mother destitute, she desperately cast around for work, finally finding a place as a seamstress in Madame Pace’s dress shop. Madame Pace, secretly a brothel madam, employed the Mother because of her interest in the Stepdaughter, whom she wished to add to her stable. Without the Mother’s knowledge, she succeeded. And when the Father comes to visit the brothel, he is unwittingly introduced to his own Stepdaughter. With a scream, the Mother interrupts their lovemaking “just in time” (according to the Father) or “almost in time” (according to the Stepdaughter); and this is one of the two scenes to be played. The second scene occurs after the Father has brought the Mother’s family into his house, against the wishes of his Son. The Mother is agonized by the Son’s disdain; the Stepdaughter is contemptuous of the Father’s guilt; the Boy is humiliated at becoming an object of charity. These feelings produce a crisis, and the scene is to conclude with “the death of the little girl, the tragedy of the boy, and the flight of the elder daughter.” Neither of these scenes, however, is performed in the first act; they are merely outlined; and the act concludes with the Manager determined to turn this story into a play.
The second act is devoted to the scene in Madame Pace’s dress shop, which is performed by the characters involved, and then by the actors who take their parts. For the actors, who “play at being serious,” the performance is a game, but for the characters, who are in deadly earnest, it is a compulsion: their drama is their lives. Thus, while the Father and the Stepdaughter want to play the scene, the one to expunge his guilt and remorse, the other to shame the Father, the Mother adamantly refuses to play it, in order to protect their privacy and hide their disgrace. But none of them really has a choice — the scene is already determined. When the Manager puts together some makeshift scenery, and a seventh character, Madame Pace, materializes, “attracted by the very articles of her trade” and whispering instructions to the Stepdaughter, the Father and the Stepdaughter thereupon proceed to reenact the origin of their shame and torment.
It is this scene which is altered, censored, and parodied by the actors in a manner which reverberates with Pirandello’s shrill animus against the stage. The function of the actors, according to the Father, is to lend their shapes “to living beings more alive than those who breathe and wear clothes: being less real perhaps, but truer!” But although these “living beings” cannot breathe without the theatre, the theatre makes them even less real than they are, and much less true. “Truth up to a certain point, but no further,” cries the Manager, when confronted with a scene too violent and strong. He is concerned over the sensibilities of the critics and the audience: the limitations of the theatre are those of a society which will not face an unpleasant reality. The vanity of the star performer, the expediency of the designer, the commercial-mindedness of the director, the timidity of the spectator — all throw a vast shadow between the author’s intention and the theatre’s execution, a shadow which lengthens in the artificiality of the theatrical occasion.
Still, it is not just that the theatre scants its possibilities; in a deeper sense, it is incapable of realizing the author’s vision or capturing the feel of reality. Madam Pace’s whispers are inaudible, because “these aren’t matters which can be shouted at the top of one’s voice” — private conversations are none of the spectator’s business. Similarly, the actor is unable to penetrate the secret heart of a character, because it is as elusive as a human being’s identity. And dialogue is an added block to understanding:
But don’t you see that the whole trouble lies here. In words, words [cries the Father]. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never do.
Like Henry IV, each man stands like a beggar before the locked door of others, and words make the lock secure. Both unwilling and unable to overcome this obstacle, the Manager transforms the sordid, semi-incestuous happening in the dress shop into a romantic and sentimental love scene between the Leading Man and the Leading Lady. And it is at this point that the Father understands how the author came to abandon them — in a fit of disgust over the conventional theatre.
Still, if the second act embodies Pirandello’s satire on the stage, the third act embodies his conviction that theatrical art is more “real” than life. The Father has already accused the Manager of trying to destroy “in the name of a vulgar, commonplace sense of truth, this reality which comes to birth attracted and formed by the magic of the stage itself.” Now he proceeds to show how the reality of the characters is not only deeper than that of actors, but also deeper than that of living persons. As the Father tells the skeptical Manager, a character in fiction knows who he is; he possesses a “life of his own”; his world is fixed — and for these reasons, he is “somebody.” But a human being — the Manager, for example — “may very well be ‘nobody.’ ”
Our reality doesn’t change! It can’t change! It can’t be other than what it is, because it is fixed forever. It’s terrible. Ours is an immutable reality which should make you shudder when you approach us if you are really conscious of the fact that your reality is a mere transitory and fleeting illusion, taking this form today and that tomorrow, according to your conditions, according to your will, your sentiments, which in turn are controlled by an intellect that shows them to you today in one manner and tomorrow . . . who knows how? . . . Illusions of reality represented in this fatuous comedy of life that never ends. . . .
The arguments are by now familiar and it is difficult not to share some of the Manager’s impatience with the Father’s perpetual, and rather windy, “philosophizing.” But the cerebrations of the character have been carefully motivated, and it is the Father himself who justifies them: “For man never reasons so much or becomes so introspective as when he suffers; since he is anxious to get at the cause of his sufferings, to learn who produced them, and whether it is just or unjust that he should have to bear them.” The Father’s sufferings have, Hamlet-like, intensified his introspective tendencies, just as the historical line of the play has intensified its philosophical ramifications. The staple of the argument tends towards verbosity, but it opens the play out of the theatre, and into the theatre of existence itself.
Six Characters concludes in a burst of melodrama, which leaves its various paradoxes unresolved. The garden setting has been arranged, after a fashion, and now the less verbal characters must play their parts. The Mother has overcome her reluctance to perform in order to be near her Son, but the Son refuses absolutely to participate. Horrified with shame, and tortured at having to “live in front of a mirror which not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace,” he claims to be an “unrealized character” in an unfinished drama and, identifying with the will of the author in this, refuses to play his part. And yet, as before, the play inexorably proceeds. While the Boy watches in horror, the Child falls into the fountain and drowns, whereupon the Boy draws a revolver and shoots himself. According to the scenario, this is the cue for the Stepdaughter to flee, leaving the original family — Father, Mother, Son — united in “mortal desolation,” though still strangers to one another.
But the suicide has created pandemonium in the theatre. The Boy is lying lifeless on the ground. Is he really dead, or is the suicide merely pretence? “Reality, sir, reality,” insists the Father, as the actors carry the Boy’s body off the stage. Bewildered by this crosspatch of apparent realities and real appearances, the Manager can only throw up his hands in disgust, and on this note of dissonance and irresolution, the curtain falls. The ending of the play, however, suggests another reason why Pirandello left the “historical” action unfinished: it is too operatic to be convincing. But by enclosing this action within the frame of the theatre, he has created a probing philosophical drama about the artifice of the stage, the artifice of art, and the artifice of reality in generally suspenseful and exciting rhythms.
Pirandello’s most original achievement in his experimental plays, then, is the dramatization of the very act of creation. If he has not made a statue that moves, he has made a statue which is the living signature of the artist, being both his product and his process. The concept of the face and the mask has become the basis for a totally new relationship between the artist and his work. Thus, Pirandello completes that process of Romantic internalizing begun by Ibsen and Strindberg. Ibsen, for all his idealization of personality, still believed in an external reality available to all, and so did Chekhov, Brecht, and Shaw. Strindberg had more doubts about this reality, but believed it could be partially perceived by the inspired poet and seer. For Pirandello, however, objective reality has become virtually inaccessible, and all one can be sure of is the illusion-making faculty of the subjective mind. After Pirandello, no dramatist has been able to write with quite the same certainty as before. In Pirandello’s plays, the messianic impulse spends itself, before it even fully develops, in doubts, uncertainties, and confusions.
The playwrights who follow Pirandello are frequently better artists, but none would have been the same without him: Pirandello’s influence on the drama of the twentieth century is immeasurable. In his agony over the nature of existence, he anticipates Sartre and Camus; in his insights into the disintegration of personality and the isolation of man, he anticipates Samuel Beckett; in his unremitting war on language, theory, concepts, and the collective mind, he anticipates Eugene Ionesco; in his approach to the conflict of truth and illusion, he anticipates Eugene O’Neill (and later, Harold Pinter and Edward Albee); in his experiments with the theatre, he anticipates a host of experimental dramatists, including Thornton Wilder and Jack Gelber; in his use of the interplay between actors and characters, he anticipates Jean Anouilh; in his view of the tension between public mask and private face, he anticipates Jean Giraudoux; and in his concept of man as a role-playing animal, he anticipates Jean Genet. The extent of even this partial list of influences marks Pirandello as the most seminal dramatist of our time; and it may be that he will ultimately be remembered more as a great theoretician than as a great practitioner. Still, he has left some extraordinary plays, which continue to live with the same urgency as when they were first written. And the melancholy of his existential revolt still sounds its elegiac music. “A man,” he wrote about himself, “I have tried to tell something to other men, without any ambition except perhaps that of revenging myself for having been born.”
1 To remarks like these, one is tempted to reply with Nietzsche’s admonitory words: “Life is hard to bear: but do not affect to be so delicate!”
2 Pirandello is very much aware of such strictures, and signals his awareness through his plays. In his theatre trilogy, for example, the characters comment frequently on the author’s limitations, particularly his obscurity and his thematic single-mindedness. As a spectator in Each in His Own Way remarks about Pirandello: “Why is he always harping on this illusion and reality string?”
3 Since Pirandello believed so firmly in the power of the sexual instinct, he was compared — by an adoring disciple, Domenico Vittorini — to his rival D’Annunzio. Pirandello’s reply is instructive: “No, no. D’Annunzio is immoral in order to proclaim the glory of instinct. I present this individual case to add another proof of the tragedy of being human. D’Annunzio is exultant over evil; I grieve over it.” Or, in the terminology of revolt, D’Annunzio is messianic, Pirandello is existential.
4 F. L. Cornford was the first to apply these terms to Aristophanes in his book The Origins of Attic Comedy; Northrup Frye, in The Anatomy of Criticism, applies them to literature as a whole. Pirandello, who was familiar with the stock masks of traditional comedy, uses them, I think, in a much more conscious way than other Western writers.
5 Pirandello suggests this role for himself in Each in His Own Way — a commedia a chiave, or comedy with a key. This play, which is based on living personages, is interrupted in the middle by some of the figures being represented on the stage; and it is rumored that they have slapped Pirandello’s face in the lobby. “It’s a disgrace,” one of them cries. “Two people pilloried in public! The private affairs of two people exposed to public ridicule!” In this roman à clef, therefore, Pirandello clearly assigns himself the function of the meddling alazōn.
6 Pirandello’s frantic desire for form may account for his attraction to Fascism (he had his Nobel prize melted down for use in Mussolini’s Abyssinian campaign!). Like all authoritarian ideologies, Fascism represents a rigid order, providing certainty and definition. Still, considering Pirandello’s accompanying desire for flux, and his distaste for propagandistic art, I cannot believe his political position was very serious.
7 Pirandello observes, in the preface to Six Characters, how literary characters are forced to repeat their actions forever, always as if for the first time: “Hence, always, as we open the book, we shall find Francesca alive and confessing to Dante her sweet sin, and if we turn to the passage a hundred thousand times in succession, a hundred thousand times in succession Francesca will speak her words, never repeating them mechanically, but saying them with such living passion that Dante every time will turn faint.” In Yeats’s play, the dead live out their purgatory by continually reenacting their fates, though conscious now of the consequences of their deeds.
8 The pattern of this particular play is extremely complicated, because there are pharmakoi in the inner as well as the outer action. In the play-within-the-play, Delia Moreno and Michele Rocca are being probed and analyzed by the other characters, and suffer from it. In the action which takes place in the lobby, Signora Moreno and Baron Nuti — on whom the fictional characters are based — feel that they are being travestied on the stage, and suffer from it. In the ironic conclusion, however, the real characters find themselves behaving towards each other in precisely the same way as their stage counterparts, and are horrified at seeing themselves reflected in an accurate mirror.