An Introduction to Luigi Pirandello

⏱ Tempo di lettura: 10 min

By Ciro Sorrentino — Luigi Pirandello stands as one of the most lucid interpreters of the crisis of modern man, calling certainties, identity and established values into question. His work springs from a profound existential unease and from a critical vision capable of exposing the contradictions of reality. This introduction outlines the core of his poetics and the meaning of his artistic revolution.

▶ Pirandello in English

An Introduction to Luigi Pirandello

From Letteratour

Original Italian version: Una introduzione a Luigi Pirandello

Living in a historical and cultural period marked by the crisis of nineteenth-century values and the collapse of scientific and rational certainties, Pirandello developed a highly personal, critical and humorous reflection on human reality. His work expresses an urgent need to represent existential unease and the painful disillusionment that had profoundly unsettled the conventions of post-Risorgimento bourgeois society.

Through an intelligent and dispassionate literary activity, expressed above all in his fiction and drama, Pirandello bears direct and deeply felt witness to the malaise of his time and conducts a relentless inquiry into the confusion and inconsolable isolation in which the individual finds himself.

The privileged object of this inquiry is the intimate and authentic dimension of consciousness, concealed beneath the disturbing anguish of modern man, caught in the inexorable grip of a life that reveals itself to be treacherous and mutable.

His awareness of the collapse of an entire system of values is clearly expressed in the 1893 essay Art and Consciousness Today (Arte e coscienza d’oggi), where Pirandello denounces a general state of uncertainty: the “old norms” have collapsed, while the new ones have “not yet arisen or become firmly established”; abstract terms have lost their value because the shared understanding that once made them intelligible has disappeared, and “no one can any longer establish a firm and unshakable point”.

The relativity that permeates every aspect of the modern age inevitably transforms life into an intricate and contradictory reality. Man is forced back upon himself, oppressed by unresolved personal conflicts and social uncertainties.

The revealed disharmony of life and history, together with the incoherence and instability of objective time, becomes for Pirandello the outward and now visible manifestation of an equally profound inner drama: that of the individual who, left alone with the fragments of his consciousness, vainly attempts to fix himself within a unified, organic and coherent form.

Pirandello’s reflection, serious and incisive, uncovers the tragic nothingness concealed behind the sometimes comic appearance of events. It dwells on the inconsistencies and painful disharmonies of reality, which ultimately cast the individual into a state of persistent and painful unrest.

It is therefore natural that Pirandello — firmly convinced that making literature merely “as a game of the spirit” seems strangely futile — should listen to the lament of humanity and write in order to expose the irreconcilable conflict between being and appearing, and the desolation and abandonment into which everyday life sinks.

Within this critical and literary vision, dialectic — often pushed to extremes — and paradox, as an expression of the contradictions inherent in events, become the forms of knowledge and communication most suited to investigating reality and revealing the profound and painful dramas of so many human beings tormented by the impossible desire to escape “the pain of living like this”.

Pirandello’s style is therefore intensely personal. His ability to break reality apart and deform it, together with his inclination towards irony and expressionism, brings him close to the European avant-garde and to its widespread determination to reveal, through art, the moral collapse and deep psychological contradictions of the individual.

The existential and metaphysical direction of Pirandello’s inquiry places him close, in important respects, to Kafka, Camus and Sartre, as well as to later playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd such as Beckett and Ionesco. This affinity can be recognised in the bitter dialectic of the Sicilian writer, in his disturbing exploration of inner reality, in his sense of existential anguish, and in the irrationality and contradiction of events that produce the depersonalisation and alienation of modern man.

These are the recognisable signs of an unusual literary correspondence which, beyond particular philosophical similarities or artistic concerns, appears above all as a natural convergence upon universal questions, independently perceived and expressed in different ways by great thinkers and writers.

Pirandello’s individual, driven by an unsatisfied and impossible desire to communicate and to be understood, is not so different from the characters who inhabit the great works of twentieth-century European literature. The same pathos emerges when, impelled by unconscious forces, he discovers “perceptions, reasonings, states of consciousness that truly lie beyond the relative limits of our normal and conscious existence”. Here lies the passage from the farce of “living” to the drama of “seeing oneself live”.

“Whoever has understood the game can no longer deceive himself; but whoever can no longer deceive himself can no longer find either pleasure or enjoyment in life.” He therefore chooses to become a naked mask, painfully aware of the duplicity of human behaviour.

Yet the intimate pain and unspeakable torment are entirely his when, faced with the collapse of every spatial relationship and temporal connection, he can only arrive at the recognition of an irresolvable epistemological and psychological relativism, of the fundamental impossibility of true communication between human beings, and of the conviction that reality is reduced to a temporary projection of the self.

Nevertheless, he reacts against despair. Fleeing the senseless “trap” of everyday existence, he takes refuge, through a wholly singular choice, in the dialectical and dramatic dimension of thought. He speaks of life with the detached yet sorrowful irony of the essayist who, placing himself outside historical time, observes human affairs with lucid and impartial logic.

This is the painful story of the human being whom Pirandello, through the refracting lens of humour, perceives in the anomalous and bizarre aspects of life, revealing at once what is ridiculous and what is pitiful in them. And this is the artistic process through which the rational and polemical language of an innumerable series of characters reveals an underlying lyrical tension, variously expressed in a lacerating cry of denunciation and in the rebellion of consciousness.

This poetic vision animates the pages of The Late Mattia Pascal. Through the dismantling of traditional narrative structures and a critique of the determinism of modern philosophy, Pirandello overturns the apparently orderly and formal course of human existence in order to make room for the deeper impulses of being and for the individual’s protest against the artificial masks and social conventions that inevitably generate alienation and bewilderment.

The reaction against the grip of a bleak existence, arising spontaneously from the deep and instinctive need to possess a stable sense of self, becomes a desperate attempt to construct a different life, opposed to the deceptions of social existence and to the predetermined forms which, by preventing the individual from defining himself freely within reality, create an infinite sense of existential emptiness.

Mattia Pascal rebels against the abyss of nothingness and against the anguishing condition of psychological and moral absence that suspends consciousness in a terrifying and unbearable boredom. Seeking to give meaning to his life, he assumes a new identity: Adriano Meis.

He then discovers a new vitality and spontaneity in his thoughts, yet at the same time realises that he has become a “foreigner” to life. Lacking any recognised social identity, he is unable to give free expression to his feelings or to fulfil his dream of feeling alive within a truer and more authentic reality.

On closer examination, the double absence of identity embodied by Mattia Pascal and his alter ego Adriano Meis becomes an absence of freedom and humanity. It reveals the cruelty of a society in which, “outside the law” and outside the apparently legitimate established order “by which we are ourselves”, it is simply “not possible to live”.

Consequently, the apparently peaceful conclusion of the story, in which the terrible truth discovered by Mattia is fully revealed, does not represent the individual’s resignation or surrender to the intricate conventions through which human relationships are reduced to commodities. Rather, it is a painful denunciation of the impossibility of recognising oneself within a reality deprived of meaning by the very rules of social institutions.

His peculiar return to society therefore represents an ultimate attempt to locate himself within an actual human and social space. The temporary suspension of meaning with which the story appears to end becomes instead the symbol of a rebirth: a reconciliation with the truth of one’s own condition that offers the only possible alternative to the conformity imposed by an obsolete social system.

The opposition so far expressed in the conflict between the individual and the artificial mask expands in the story of Vitangelo Moscarda. It becomes first an inner conflict, then an inability to communicate with others, and finally the rejection of a social reality that appears increasingly disjointed, divided and fragmented.

Once again, and with even greater intensity, Pirandello’s individual rebels against unbearable and lifeless forms concealed beneath convention. Moscarda strives to perform an irrational and apparently senseless act, the only act capable of destroying that “regularity of experience” which fixes him in the identity of Vitangelo Moscarda.

At the end of his audacious experience, he finds himself alone with his consciousness. In order to preserve its sovereignty, he takes refuge in the untouched realm of nature, the only realm not yet violated by human presumption.

This is the poetic essence of the man without a mask who, finally freed from the historical artifices of a contrived logic of social convenience, reaches a further and more radical expression in the complete estrangement of Serafino Gubbio and in his tragic awareness of the impossibility of living within a social reality that, on the existential level, has been entirely distorted and invalidated by the myths of nineteenth-century realism and the new historicism.

Serafino reaches the ultimate recognition of an irreconcilable conflict with reality. His is a uniquely tragic disposition which, unlike the partial solutions still linked to the need somehow to belong to the history of the world, prevents him from continuing, as Mattia and Vitangelo do, to search for a dimension in which he might establish a stable identity.

Serafino no longer feels the need to imagine himself within any form. Without “world, time, or anything… outside everything, absent from himself”, and now unable to express himself, he embraces the immutable silence of his “little machine”, impassively recording on film the impossibility of achieving a stable form of being and the pain inherent in existence.

Serafino knows that no linear and positive measure can be established, no intelligible rule capable of giving reality a definitive meaning. Retracing the stages of man’s attempt to know himself and the world, he reveals the chilling truth of instability and the devastating, inconsolable solitude of the human being.

Ciro Sorrentino

▶ Pirandello in English

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