From a small town in Sicily called (prophetically?) Chaos, there emerged one of the comic geniuses of modern European drama. Luigi Pirandello was always ahead of his time, scandalizing hoi polloi with ultra-Modernist experiments in structure, narrative, and staging. The grandfather...
[more]From a small town in Sicily called (prophetically?) Chaos, there emerged one of the comic geniuses of modern European drama. Luigi Pirandello was always ahead of his time, scandalizing hoi polloi with ultra-Modernist experiments in structure, narrative, and staging. The grandfather of the absurd '- Ionesco and Beckett took many a cue from him -- he was preoccupied with the instability of identity, with questioning the reality of existence, and with reevaluating bourgeois morality. For Pirandello, values were as shifting and arbitrary as the social roles each of us plays.
The son of a sulfur merchant who arranged his marriage to the local sulfur heiress, Pirandello was supported for many years in a life of leisure. He studied philology at Palermo, Rome, and Bonn, in the meantime writing poetry, short stories, and novels.
Then natural disaster intervened. In 1903, the mine that supplied his income was closed by a landslide. Pirandello turned to teaching to scrape by. The downturn in his fortunes had a more drastic effect on his wife, who developed severe paranoia and was eventually committed to a sanatorium. Her fate was the catalyst for Pirandello's interest in psychology and the instability of personal identity. Through research into the subconscious, he became convinced that the rational mind is nothing but a mask covering a shifting mass of desires.
Pirandello became enthralled with the theater, sometimes completing a full-length play in as little as a week. The 50-plus dramas he composed over his lifetime revolve around a series of interrelated concepts. Humans, he observed, are obsessed with finding permanence in a universe that is constantly in flux and where, accordingly, all "truths" are unknowable. The basis of the human condition, therefore, is our need to deceive ourselves with a stable reality, which we periodically discover to be false and illusory. However artificial, this illusory reality can completely (and comically) control us.
In Pirandello's masterwork, 'Six Characters in Search of an Author' (1921), fictional characters interrupt a rehearsal and beg the actors to play their lives out, so they may take on fully incarnate existences. But when the actors try to help the characters, they find they can only portray wooden stereotypes. Doomed to remain within the limits of their script, the characters exist at the whim of an invisible though omnipresent author. The play was greeted by near riots, as its multi-leveled exploration of reality and identity outraged its baffled audience. In his next work for the stage, 'Henry IV' (1922), Pirandello's protagonist chooses madness as an escape from the uncertainty and instability of the real world.
By 1925 Pirandello's fame was such that Mussolini helped him found his own company, the Teatro d'Arte in Rome. Until its dissolution three years later under financial strain, the company toured the world, ensuring Pirandello's international reputation. Pirandello continued to travel on his own, and in 1934 collected the Nobel Prize for Literature. By this time, his prescient notions of the relativity of truth and values were no longer shocking; they had come to dominate the collective modern weltanschauung.
[show less]
