Luigi Pirandello

 

THE LATE MATTIA PASCAL     

 

Mattia Pascal is a young Italian man. After his father's death, his family is ruined by the man who was supposed to help them, and Mattia finds himself in a miserable social condition. His wedding is not more happy : his mother-in-law, with whom he lives, hates him. After a strong row, Mattia leaves to MonteCarlo, where he wins a lot of money in a casino. On the train back, after 12 days, he learns on reading a newspaper that, in his villages, everybody thinks he is dead : a body unrecognizable has been found in his well.
He then decides to start a new life under the name of Adriano Meis.
After having travelled through the North of Italy and the South of Germany, he finally settles in Rome in a family pension. He falls in love with the daughter of the owner. But he still feels here the weight of man's loneliness and of social conventions. Furthermore, without a real civil status, he can neither marry nor work, nor even having real friendship for fear he might betray his secret. He is condemned to a social non-existence.

He goes back to his village, after several years. There, he finds his wife married to one of his friends, with a little daughter. There again, even if his identity is recognized, he is doomed to stay the late Mattia Pascal, officially dead. He  recongnizes it himself when he goes and put flowers on his own tomb.

In this book, published in 1904, there are all the themes of what is called pirandellism : the search for an identity (which is, most of the  time, only a mask that one must wear), the social pressure lived as suffocating and ordinary loneliness of men who cannot communicate. The style, as often with Pirandello, mixes drama and humour, and is voluntarily quite easy to read in order to make the novel accessible to everybody and not only to a well-educated elite.

What author will be able to say how and why a character was born in his fantasy? The mystery of artistic creation is the same as that of birth. A woman who loves may desire to become a mother; but the desire by itself, however intense, cannot suffice. One fine day she will find herself a mother without having any precise intimation when it began. In the same way an artist imbibes very many germs of life and can never say how and why, at a certain moment, one of these vital germs inserts itself into his fantasy, there to become a living creature on a plane of life superior to the changeable existence of every day.