THE LATE MATTIA PASCAL - 1904
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
Shall we say that the theatre of
Pirandello is a higher and more
perfect expression of his peculiar
art than his tales or his novels?
That has been said. And a certain
body of fact is there to support
such a contention. It is
Pirandello's drama that has won him
world-wide recognition, whereas his
prose work, though for thirty years
it has held him in a high position
in Italian letters, remained
national in circulation and even in
Italy was the delight of an elect
few. Many of his comedies, besides,
are reworkings of his short stories;
as though he himself regarded the
latter as incomplete expressions of
the vision they contained. In the
third place, one might say that
since the novelty of Pirandello's
art consists rather in his method of
dissecting life than in his judgment
of life, his geometrical,
symmetrical, theorematic situations
are more vivid in the clashing
dialogue of people on a stage than
in the less animated form of prose
narrative. These considerations do
not all apply, however, to "The Late
Mattia Pascal."
That we have a first class drama in
this novel is evident from the fact
that Pirandello himself used the
amusing situation in the first part
of the story as the theme of one of
his Sicilian comedies: "Liolā"; and
in a more important sense the book
as a whole is to be counted among
the sources that have inspired the "new"
theatre in Italy. Chiarelli's "The
Mask and the Face" was a play that "made
a school"; and that school, the "grotesque,"
may be thought of as an offspring of
"The Late Mattia Pascal." The novel,
also, falls naturally into a special
place in the repertory of
Pirandello's more characteristic
themes. It is a variation of the
situation in "Henry IV"--where the
mask, the fiction, is first offered
by circumstances, then deliberately
assumed, to be violently torn off in
the case of Mattia Pascal, to be
retained and utilized in the case of
"Henry IV."
But "The Late Mattia Pascal" has
this advantage over the Pirandello
play: that whereas the latter, from
the conditions of stage production,
must show a situation cut out from
life and given an almost artificial
independence of its own, the novel
presents the whole picture. It has
leisure to demonstrate how the
fiction grows out of life, how, if
it be deliberately assumed, any one
would, naturally and logically, have
so assumed it. And it shows,
besides, some of the effects of the
fiction on character: if Adriano
Meis cannot escape wholly from
Mattia Pascal, neither can Mattia
Pascal escape wholly from Adriano
Meis. The novel, in a word,
possesses intrinsically that
humanity, that humanness, which the
Pirandello play more often suggests
than contains. It is curious to
note, however, that if "The Late
Mattia Pascal," despite the fact
that it was written twenty years
ago, has entered into the patrimony
of the "new" (the post-war)
literature of Italy, that
rejuvenation (rejuvenation rather
than revival) has been due not to
Pirandello's dramatic successes but
to other influences. When we say "D'Annunzianism,"
the term conveys a note of
disparagement to D'Annunzio that is
not intended. The disparagement is
aimed at the imitators of an art,
which, in its own time, was new and
which in its own domain was original.
Nevertheless religions are rarely
destroyed without some attacks upon
the idols that symbolize them, and
without the erection of new idols in
the places of the old. Pirandello (along
with Verga who did not live to enjoy
it, along with Oriani, along with
Manzoni--real revivals, these last
two) has profited by the reaction
against the literature of "bravura";
and of his works the one that has
gained most is "The Late Mattia
Pascal."
Top
of page
These young Italians are doing many
interesting things in many fields!
They are asking their rulers to
govern, their priests to pray, their
teachers to teach, their workmen to
work, and their writers--to say
something. The new vogue of "The
Late Mattia Pascal" rests on the
fact that it says something, and
says something in such a way that
the novel remains interesting
because of what it says, and not
only because of the way it says it.
"The Late Mattia Pascal" is a
compact, carefully developed novel,
with two good stretches of
story-telling, each equipped with a
psychological preparation worked out
to the last detail. It has a big
idea, exemplified in characters
skilfully chosen and consistently
evolved on the background of their
particular environment. It is a
work accordingly universal in its
bearing, but specific in the milieu
it describes.
One or two things in this milieu may
seem exotic to an American. The
self-expressiveness, on occasion, of
Marianna Dondi-Pescatore might
appear overdrawn to some of
us--though it is not. We have to
remember, again, that there is no
divorce in Italy; that therefore
Mattia Pascal cannot be free of
Romilda Pescatore; that, therefore,
Adriano Meis cannot marry Adriana
Paleari. We have to remember,
finally, that life in over-populated
Europe is based on the defensive
principle; that a man is guilty
until proved innocent; that unless
his papers are in order, unless he
can tell who he is, where he came
from, and why he came from there, he
cannot find employment, transact
business, or establish social
connections of any important kind.
Some critics may not agree with
Pirandello in his attitude toward
the episode--that trick, for which
he is sometimes accused, of laughing
at his audiences--arousing interest
in situations out of which nothing
comes. The criticism of such devices,
if criticism there be, is, however,
that they show excess, rather than
lack, of technique. How many
producers, for example, have not
suggested an "ending" to "Right You
Are" ("Cosi e se vi pare")--only an
afterthought revealing that no
ending is the most powerful ending
of them all!
The reserve and simplicity of
Pirandello's language--a language "de-regionalized"
and slightly colored with a flat and
unpretentious classicism--are of no
great consolation to a translator.
Pirandello ought to be clever when
he isn't; and the fact that he isn't
gives a tartness, a sharpness, a
chuckle to the mood of his sentence
before which, I confess, I throw up
my hands. This man, Pascal, is
always smiling at himself, however
benevolently he smiles at other
people. Adriano Meis, perhaps, is
more plain and matter of fact. I
note the detail simply to point out
that there is a slight
differentiation in manner in the two
parts of the book--the career of
Adriano Meis being enclosed, as it
were, by the jest of Mattia Pascal
and the outcome of that jest.
I have suppressed a few
paragraphs--details of Mattia
Pascal's education in poetry;
characterizations, at Monte Carlo,
of people not otherwise figuring in
the story; the analysis of the style
of Lodoletta's obituary. I have
adapted one or two scenes where a
pun compelled a detour; I have given,
for special reasons, a new ending to
the episode of the wedding ring.
Otherwise the rendering should be
fairly exact, though not by any
means literal.
I have taken over with some liberty
the unsyntactical "free"
sentence--so characteristically
Italian, since the syntax is
supplied by the "acting"--by gesture
and facial expression. This free
sentence is, however, a native
property of our own language, though
I don't know how many generations of
grammarians have tried to rob us of
it.
Arthur Livingston
Top of page
