Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello, (b. June
28, 1867, Agrigento, Sicily, Italy—d. Dec. 10, 1936, Rome),
Italian playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, winner
of the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. With his invention
of the “theatre within the theatre” in the play Sei
personaggi in cerca d’autore (1921; Six Characters in Search
of an Author), he became an important innovator in modern
drama.
Pirandello was the son of a
sulfur merchant who wanted him to enter commerce.
Pirandello, however, was not interested in business; he
wanted to study. He first went to Palermo, the capital of
Sicily, and, in 1887, to the University of Rome. After a
quarrel with the professor of classics there, he went in
1888 to the University of Bonn, Ger., where in 1891 he
gained his doctorate in philology for a thesis on the
dialect of Agrigento.
In 1894 his father arranged
his marriage to Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of a
business associate, a wealthy sulfur merchant. This marriage
gave him financial independence, allowing him to live in
Rome and to write. He had already published an early volume
of verse, Mal giocondo (1889), which paid tribute to the
poetic fashions set by Giosuè Carducci. This was followed by
other volumes of verse, including Pasqua di Gea (1891;
dedicated to Jenny Schulz-Lander, the love he had left
behind in Bonn) and a translation of J.W. von Goethe’s Roman
Elegies (1896; Elegie romane). But his first significant
works were short stories, which at first he contributed to
periodicals without payment.
In 1903 a landslide shut
down the sulfur mine in which his wife’s and his father’s
capital was invested. Suddenly poor, Pirandello was forced
to earn his living not only by writing but also by teaching
Italian at a teacher’s college in Rome. As a further result
of the financial disaster, his wife developed a persecution
mania, which manifested itself in a frenzied jealousy of her
husband. His torment ended only with her removal to a
sanatorium in 1919 (she died in 1959). It was this bitter
experience that finally determined the theme of his most
characteristic work, already perceptible in his early short
stories—the exploration of the tightly closed world of the
forever changeable human personality.
Pirandello’s early
narrative style stems from the verismo (“realism”) of two
Italian novelists of the late 19th century—Luigi Capuana and
Giovanni Verga. The titles of Pirandello’s early collections
of short stories—Amori senza amore (1894; “Loves Without
Love”) and Beffe della morte e della vita (1902–03; “The
Jests of Life and Death”)—suggest the wry nature of his
realism that is seen also in his first novels: L’esclusa
(1901; The Outcast) and Il turno (1902; Eng. trans. The
Merry-Go-Round of Love). Success came with his third novel,
often acclaimed as his best, Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904; The
Late Mattia Pascal). Although the theme is not typically “Pirandellian,”
since the obstacles confronting its hero result from
external circumstances, it already shows the acute
psychological observation that was later to be directed
toward the exploration of his characters’ subconscious.
Pirandello’s understanding
of psychology was sharpened by reading such works as Les
altérations de la personnalité (1892), by the French
experimental psychologist Alfred Binet; and traces of its
influence can be seen in the long essay L’umorismo (1908; On
Humor), in which he examines the principles of his art.
Common to both books is the theory of the subconscious
personality, which postulates that what a person knows, or
thinks he knows, is the least part of what he is. Pirandello
had begun to focus his writing on the themes of psychology
even before he knew of the work of Sigmund Freud, the
founder of psychoanalysis. The psychological themes used by
Pirandello found their most complete expression in the
volumes of short stories La trappola (1915; “The Trap”) and
E domani, lunedì . . . (1917; “And Tomorrow, Monday . . .
”), and in such individual stories as “Una voce,” “Pena di
vivere così,” and “Con altri occhi.”
Meanwhile, he had been
writing other novels, notably I vecchi e i giovani (1913;
The Old and The Young) and Uno, nessuno e centomila
(1925–26; One, None, and a Hundred Thousand). Both are more
typical than Il fu Mattia Pascal. The first, a historical
novel reflecting the Sicily of the end of the 19th century
and the general bitterness at the loss of the ideals of the
Risorgimento (the movement that led to the unification of
Italy), suffers from Pirandello’s tendency to “discompose”
rather than to “compose” (to use his own terms, in
L’umorismo), so that individual episodes stand out at the
expense of the work as a whole. Uno, nessuno e centomila,
however, is at once the most original and the most typical
of his novels. It is a surrealistic description of the
consequences of the hero’s discovery that his wife (and
others) see him with quite different eyes than he does
himself. Its exploration of the reality of personality is of
a type better known from his plays.
Pirandello wrote over 50
plays. He had first turned to the theatre in 1898 with
L’epilogo, but the accidents that prevented its production
until 1910 (when it was retitled La morsa) kept him from
other than sporadic attempts at drama until the success of
Così è (se vi pare) in 1917. This delay may have been
fortunate for the development of his dramatic powers.
L’epilogo does not greatly differ from other drama of its
period, but Così è (se vi pare) began the series of plays
that were to make him world famous in the 1920s. Its title
can be translated as Right You Are (If You Think You Are). A
demonstration, in dramatic terms, of the relativity of
truth, and a rejection of the idea of any objective reality
not at the mercy of individual vision, it anticipates
Pirandello’s two great plays, Six Characters in Search of an
Author (1921) and Enrico IV (1922; Henry IV). Six Characters
is the most arresting presentation of the typical
Pirandellian contrast between art, which is unchanging, and
life, which is an inconstant flux. Characters that have been
rejected by their author materialize on stage, throbbing
with a more intense vitality than the real actors, who,
inevitably, distort their drama as they attempt its
presentation. And in Henry IV the theme is madness, which
lies just under the skin of ordinary life and is, perhaps,
superior to ordinary life in its construction of a
satisfying reality. The play finds dramatic strength in its
hero’s choice of retirement into unreality in preference to
life in the uncertain world.
The production of Six
Characters in Paris in 1923 made Pirandello widely known,
and his work became one of the central influences on the
French theatre. French drama from the existentialistic
pessimism of Jean Anouilh and Jean-Paul Sartre to the
absurdist comedy of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett is
tinged with “Pirandellianism.” His influence can also be
detected in the drama of other countries, even in the
religious verse dramas of T.S. Eliot.
In 1920 Pirandello said of
his own art:
I think that life is a very
sad piece of buffoonery; because we have in ourselves,
without being able to know why, wherefore or whence, the
need to deceive ourselves constantly by creating a reality
(one for each and never the same for all), which from time
to time is discovered to be vain and illusory . . . My art
is full of bitter compassion for all those who deceive
themselves; but this compassion cannot fail to be followed
by the ferocious derision of destiny which condemns man to
deception.
This despairing outlook
attained its most vigorous expression in Pirandello’s plays,
which were criticized at first for being too “cerebral” but
later recognized for their underlying sensitivity and
compassion. The plays’ main themes are the necessity and the
vanity of illusion, and the multifarious appearances, all of
them unreal, of what is presumed to be the truth. A human
being is not what he thinks he is, but instead is “one, no
one and a hundred thousand,” according to his appearance to
this person or that, which is always different from the
image of himself in his own mind. Pirandello’s plays reflect
the verismo of Capuana and Verga in dealing mostly with
people in modest circumstances, such as clerks, teachers,
and lodging-house keepers, but from whose vicissitudes he
draws conclusions of general human significance.
The universal acclaim that
followed Six Characters and Henry IV sent Pirandello touring
the world (1925–27) with his own company, the Teatro d’Arte
in Rome. It also emboldened him to disfigure some of his
later plays (e.g., Ciascuno a suo modo [1924]) by calling
attention to himself, just as in some of the later short
stories it is the surrealistic and fantastic elements that
are accentuated.
After the dissolution,
because of financial losses, of the Teatro d’Arte in 1928,
Pirandello spent his remaining years in frequent and
extensive travel. In his will he requested that there should
be no public ceremony marking his death—only “a hearse of
the poor, the horse and the coachman.”
John Humphreys
Whitfield
