LUIGI PIRANDELLO (1867-1936) is an Italian writer, author of over forty plays, short-stories, and novels; as a writer, he enjoyed going from novels to plays, but he never went from plays to novels. Pirandello’s drama is based on a pessimistic philosophy: that of spiritual chaos. He was born in a small city called Caos, in Girgenti (Sicily, Southern Italy), and he loved to joke about it, saying that he was born in ‘chaos’. Whether this inspired him, I do not know; but I can also joke and speculate about it.
His parents, Stefano and Caterina, participated in the Italian Risorgimento—the process of Italy’s reunification in the 19th century that, unfortunately, did not bring the expected development of Southern Italy. The young Luigi attends the high school in Palermo and, then, he attends, in parallel, the Literature and the Law Schools. Following a conflict with one of his professors, Luigi goes to Bonn and graduates literature studies in Germany. In 1894, he marries Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of his father’s business partner; and they have three children (one daughter and two sons). In 1903, the family business crashes, and, following this crash, his mother died and his wife had a shock that led to severe psychic problems and hospitalization in a specialized center when the children were still very young: the oldest, 8 years old, and the youngest, 4 years old. To support his family, Luigi Pirandello teaches Italian and German, and he writes. Later, he created the Teatro d’Arte—a theater company to stage his plays. One actress working for Teatro d’Arte is Marta Abba, with whom he has a long and discrete relationship. Luigi Pirandello died in December 1936, in Rome, leaving unfinished the play I Giganti della Montagna (The Giants of the Mountains). By testament, he asked to have his body wrapped in a white cloth, cremated, and the ashes to be built in a stone in Girgenti (nowadays, Agrigento). His theater expresses the pessimistic philosophy of life through two major themes. The first theme is that people cannot know each other and they remain strangers. This idea is emphasized in Vestire gli ignudi (To Clothe the Naked) in which the character Ersilia is living a drama that the writer Ludovico Nota is only trying to imagine so that he can write about it, while the journalist Alfredo Cantavalle wrote about it giving it the tone he thought appropriate. Furthermore, in Six Characters in Search of an Author, the Father complains about the actors interpreting the characters’ feelings. He thinks that there is a difference between “the way they interpret and the way I feel inside of me”. The second theme is that of a mask - like appearance that people create and get used to. In Vestire gli ignudi (To Clothe the Naked), Ersilia points out this idea: “And this is because each of us, each of us wants to make a good impression.” In Henry IV, this idea of the mask is applied and the entire play is built on it, but he also clearly pointed it out: without realizing it, we disguise ourselves in what we think we are and we do not see our person from beneath the clothes we are so used to wear in public. Therefore, Pirandello’s point is that although the authentic individual differs from the social one, the latter may reach the point of dominating the original, confusing him, and creating a chaos in which the self believes that his social version is the authentic one. Pirandello’s dramatic conflict is always between life and art, understood as ‘shape’—a conflict in which art wins. The way this conflict is presented and the way Pirandello suggests that art wins is fabulous. For example, in Six Characters in Search of an Author, six characters come on stage, while some actors are rehearsing, in search of a writer to write their story—fabulous idea, isn’t it? It looks like they have a plan: after the writer writes their story, the characters search for actors to give them life (“Isn’t your job to give life to some fictive characters?”) but the moment a director and some actors interpret the text to be staged, they interpret the material to which they give shape: “body and face, voice and gestures…”. “Life must obey two opposing necessities that don’t allow it either to exit in a fixed form or a continuous movement. If life were in a continuous movement, it couldn’t have a shape of her own. If it had this shape, it couldn’t move. But life needs a shape to move. (…) An artwork survives only because we [directors and actors] take it out of its fixed shape, and melt this shape in ourselves, making it to become a vital movement. Therefore, we give it life; and it changes in time and with each of us; so, it’s not one life, but several lives…” (…) But who told you that life must be art? Yes, life must obey those two necessities you’re talking about and that’s why it’s not art as art isn’t life precisely because it succeeds in liberating itself from these two opposing necessities…” (…) In a certain sense, art revenges life because art’s life is a true creation when it doesn’t find any other purpose but in itself after being liberated of time limits, hazards, and obstacles”. However, sometimes, and for a short while, Pirandello gives the impression that life wins against art. So is the case in To Clothe the Naked in which Ersilia poisoned herself, but life didn’t let her go, forcing her to live and to tell her drama so that the novelist can give it a written shape. Nowadays, all plays or an overwhelming majority of plays by Pirandello are translated into English—and not only into English. The most known plays are Liolà (1916), So It Is–If You Think So (1917), The Pleasure of Honesty (1917), The Rules of the Game (1918), Man, Beast and Virtue (1919), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Henry IV (1922), The Imbecile (1922), To Clothe the Naked (1922), The Man with the Flower in His Mouth (1923), The Life I Gave You (1923), Each in His Own Way (1924), The Friend o the Wives (1926), Diana and Tuda (1927), Either of One or of None (1929), Tonight We Improvise (1930), and many other plays. In 1934, Luigi Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. For this Writing Blog, I will review the following plays by Luigi Pirandello (in the order of their year of publication): Liolà (1916), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Henry IV (1922), To Clothe the Naked (1922), Tonight We Improvise (1930). LIOLÀ Liolà is a play in one act, settled in Sicily, somewhere, in September. The play presents the daily life of the inhabitants of a village in Sicily where Uncle Simeone (60 years old) has a young wife, Mita, an orphan and poor girl raised by Liolà’s mother who could not keep her any longer and arranged for her to marry a rich man like Simeone who was interested in having an heir. But although married for four years, Mita was not expecting any children and relatives were discussing the way his fortune would be divided. Liolà (Nico Schillaci), instead, is the opposite of Simeone. He was raising three children from the previous three women he left pregnant; and, now, a fourth woman was pregnant—Tuzza. A good father to his children and an honorable man, Liolà proposed to Tuzza, who did not want to marry him because she had something else in mind: Tuzza and her mother wanted Uncle Simeone to recognize the child, which he did. But, in the end, Mita got pregnant, too… after a discussion with Liolà. Pirandello painted in words the atmosphere in Agrigento through the way people think and talk about each other in a village and how they know everything about everybody in the village. He also used music to complete the image. Like in ancient plays, Pirandello used a choir to sing songs, but his choir is made of peasants such as Liolà and other women. In terms of figures of speech, Pirandello used mainly one and used it generously—proverbs: one hand washes the other, he who searches will find; he who doesn’t give up will win; he who’s late for other reasons, but his fault, isn’t guilty. However, there is one comparison that is suggestive and that encapsulates the entire story of the play: “like an Easter oven that could feed an entire village.” SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR– A COMEDY IN THE MAKING In the play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, six characters (a father, 50; mother; stepdaughter, 18; son, 22; a boy of 14 years old and a little girl) come to the theater while a director and a group of actors were rehearsing for a play in search of an author. Although the director is busy with his play about Reason (interpreted by the husband) and Instinct (interpreted by the wife) he gets captivated by the drama of these characters. “THE FATHER. It is in us! (The actors laugh). The drama is in us, and we are the drama. We are impatient to play it. Our inner passion drives us on to this.” Their story is a story in a play, but still secondary. The main story is the drama of the characters that are caught between their lives and the fiction of the dramatic interpretation of their lives. However, following two stories in one play may look ‘chaotic’—but it is only the illusion of chaos. In reality, Pirandello points to the mystery of the artistic creation that ‘repeats the mystery of natural creation’ and uses two stories in one play to emphasize, on one side, a conflict between characters and people: “THE FATHER (with dignity, but not offended). A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character has really a life of his own, marked with his special characteristics; for which reason he is always "somebody." But a man—I'm not speaking of you now—may very well be "nobody." On the other side, it emphasizes the conflict between characters and actors: “THE SON. Yes, but haven't you yet perceived that it isn't possible 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?” Pirandello does not suggest anything between the lines, but the confusion between the reality of the characters and the actor’s fiction is expressed in the lines of the play. Overall, it results in a comedy. A brilliant comedy! HENRY IV The play Henry IV is a tragedy in three acts settled in a solitary villa in Italy in our own times where some youngsters (Lolo, Franco, Nono, and Fino), dressed like in 11th century Germany, repeat for a play, at the request of the young marquis Charles di Nolli. The story of the play starts with two large paintings representing Henry IV and the Marquioness Mathilde Spina at a carnival. Fino (Bertholdo) was already rehearsing for two weeks without knowing which King Henry he was interpreting and that is because there was a Henry IV in the history of many countries: England, France, Portugal, Spain, etc. It was about Henry IV of Germany, who opposed Pope Gregory VII. In Act I, the characters assume the roles they play, and they play, but most of the story unfolds in Act II. In Act III, we learn that after the carnival, Henry IV fell from his horse and for twelve years he lost his mind. The tragedy is that a character from Nolli’s house, Belcredi, gets wounded by Henry IV; and the play ends with Henry IV, Lolo, Franco, and Nono terrified by the murderous outcome of living in his fiction. The play is about the mask the social individuals wear that confuses the self by making it believe that the social version is the authentic one and points to the tragedy such confusion may lead to. “We must pardon them. This dress (plucking his dress) which is for me the evident, involuntary caricature of that other continuous, everlasting masquerade, of which we are the involuntary puppets (indicates Belcredi) when, without knowing it, we mask ourselves with that which we appear to be ... ah, that dress of theirs, this masquerade of theirs, of course, we must forgive it them, since they do not yet see it is identical with themselves.” Furthermore, the play is about the madman's perception of the self; about the way others perceive the madman; and about the reasons why some people have an interest in declaring somebody a mad person. “We must take into account the peculiar psychology of madmen; which, you must know, enables us to be certain that they observe things and can, for instance, easily detect people who are disguised; can in fact recognize the disguise and yet believe in it; just as children do, for whom disguise is both play and reality.” “Don't you think is rather hard for a man to keep quiet, when he knows that there is a fellow going about trying to persuade everybody that he is as he sees him, than to fix him in other people's opinion as a "madman"—according to him? Now I am talking seriously!” “Do you know what it means to find yourselves face to face with a madman—with one who shakes the foundations of all you have built up in yourselves, your logic, the logic of all your constructions? Madmen, lucky folk! construct without logic, or rather with a logic that flies like a feather. Voluble! Voluble! Today like this and tomorrow—who knows? You say: "This cannot be"; but for them everything can be. You say: "This isn't true!" And why? Because it doesn't seem true to you, or you, or you ... (indicates the three of them in succession) ... and to a hundred thousand others! One must see what seems true to these hundred thousand others who are not supposed to be mad! What a magnificent spectacle they afford, when they reason! What flowers of logic they scatter!” “It's convenient for everybody to insist that certain people are mad, so they can be shut up. Do you know why? Because it's impossible to hear them speak!” TO CLOTHE THE NAKED The play To Clothe the Naked is a play in three acts settled in Rome in our times, meaning in 1922. The novelist Ludovico Nota had a rented room at the property of Mrs. Onoria. One day, he brought home an unknown young lady of about 25 years old to whom he wanted to offer his place while he was temporarily moving out. The young lady is Ersilia Drei. Her drama was on the pages of a newspaper thanks to the efforts of the journalist Alfredo Cantavalle. She was just released from the hospital after a suicide attempt and had nowhere to go. To tell Ersilia’s story, Pirandello used the retrospective method of unfolding Ersilia’s drama from the present to the very beginning of it. According to the retrospective method first promoted by Henrik Ibsen (Wild Duck, Ghosts, etc.), when the entire past is revealed, the action stops, and the tragic remains: “Go! You, go to your wife; you, go to your fiancée; go, and tell them that this dead couldn’t get dressed.” This play is about the conflict between the reality of life and the shape of the art. Life is an inspiration for a writer who can imagine the unfolding of his novel from the moment he researches for his writing; in this case, from the moment he reads in the newspaper articles about Ersilia. On the other hand, Ersilia who is a real person, who lost her child, who lost even her clothes, who lost any hope, wants to live in Ludovico Nota’s art as a character but as a happy one (“it was about me living in the fiction of your art”.). “A novel, my dear, either it’s written or it’s lived.” (Ludovico Nota) Luigi Pirandello uses lots of elements of naturalism, like in Ibsens’ plays. For example, while the characters are talking, an accident takes place under their windows and the man dies ‘smashed like a frog.’ Franco Laspiga is a lieutenant tied to Ersilia’s past and part of her drama ‘left the sea but shipwrecked here, in the swamp of the regular life.’ Furthermore, consul Grotti, with whom Ersilia had an affair discovered by his wife in the most dramatic way tells Ersilia that when she presented her story to the newspaper it was like she threw a stone in a paddle, making noise, and splashing with water and mud all those involved in the story. Mrs. Onoria speaks with full empathy: “My God, it’s like in the streets when you see a doggy in the middle of a pack of big dogs and you wonder why the kinder the doggy, the more big dogs jump on him to bite him and to rip him off”. This is a rhetorical question, to which each of us has an answer. The writer is a fine observer of life and the relationship between people and somebody like Luigi Pirandello could not miss a fine artistic comparison between people and animals. TONIGHT WE IMPROVISE The play Tonight We Improvise resembles the play Six Characters in Search of an Author from the point of view of the artistic chaos that Pirandello intentionally creates. This play starts with an introduction that announces a play without the name of the author, an unusual show with improvised dialog in which everybody takes part—a kind of theater jazz. After an improvised dialog between the director, Doctor Hinkfuss, and the audience on the difference between life and art, written art and staged art, the role of the writer and that of the stage director, Doctor Hinkfuss tells the audience about the structure of the play—original, isn’t? The action takes place in the heart of Sicily, where the passions are strong and they first smolder before they take the shape of violence—where “the wildest form of violence is jealousy”: “The story presents one of these cases of jealousy, the most terrible case of all because it’s irreparable: retrospective jealousy”. The characters are the family La Croce (in English, ‘the cross’). Like in Sis Characters in Search of an Author, this play intertwines two stories in one play: one story presents the story of the family, and the other story focuses on the conflict between life and art. In the end, the actors agree to play the roles of the family. The play concludes that life and art are in a kind of vicious circle in which the characters need the actors, and the actors need a writer to write the roles they learn by heart and play. Only Doctor Hinkfuss does not agree: he thinks that the author is not necessary, but only the written lines that he transforms in a staged art that has many different lives because each director gives his interpretation of the same written piece. Doctor Hinkfuss has a preference to stage Luigi Pirandello’s plays because he is a writer who understands when his work as a writer ends and when the work of the director starts. Pirandello’s self-irony is present is several of his plays where he inserted it magnificently. In the Six Characters in Search of an Author, “Is it my fault if France won't send us any more good comedies, and we are reduced to putting on Pirandello's works, where nobody understands anything, and where the author plays the fool with us all? (The actors grin. The Manager goes to Leading Man and shouts).” In To Clothe the Naked, Ersilia wants to be a character in a book but not like a previous book that Ludovico Nota wrote and she did not like. But Nota tells her that the book she refers to was written by Pirandello, not by him. Pirandello describes also the audience’s reaction when it hears his name as the author of the plays—and they are all reactions of disapproval. It would not be the first time a playwright complains that his message or his plays are misunderstood but compared to G.B. Shaw, for example, who was more vehement about his critics’ malicious comments for not even having understood the play, Luigi Pirandello is ironic. To be misunderstood or not understood at all seems to be a significant part of a playwright’s portrait. Each playwright reacts to it in their own way because the playwright is a character, too, a real one, “marked with his special characteristics” who always tries to make art out of “the swamp of the regular life”. When he does not always succeed, the audience forgives him, as Doctor Hinkfuss says. But the words of the critics are like the big dogs biting and ripping off the kind doggy that tries to make art from the muddy life. In other arts, such as the cinema, not all such ‘doggies’ get an Oscar. However, in literature, some ‘doggies’ get the Nobel Prize. Luigi Pirandello’s plays target both a specialized audience in reading theater and a less specialized one. Reading plays with two stories in one (Six Characters in Search of an Author and Tonight We Improvise), sometimes, may look and sound complex; it may confuse and leave the reader with a wrong impression about Pirandello and the artistic chaos that it is only a dramatic illusion—in essence, it is pure art.
0 Comments
|
AUTHOR
|