Pirandello. A genius of the twentieth century

By Giovanni Fighera. 

Great playwright, novelist, and short story writer, the Agrigentino Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century, a man of letters and, at the same time, a philosopher. He seems to embody Leopardi’s words in the Zibaldone: “The true poet is also a philosopher, and the true philosopher is also a poet.

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Pirandello. A genius of the twentieth century

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Index
1 – The prophet of the disorientation of contemporary man
2 – The comic, humor, and the compassionate gaze upon reality
3 – Where does art come from? From the observation of reality
4 – The late Mattia Pascal, or the drama of the man in anticipation
5 – Mattia Pascal and the “lanterns” of the disoriented man
6 – Serafino’s crank against the “master” machines
7 – Vitangelo’s Odyssey, in search of the lost self
8 – We are all characters in search of an author
9 – Thus the utopia of a perfect world dies in violence
10 – Only charity can heal the wounds of the self
11 – The drama of unlived life and love
12 – The train has whistled; reality finally reveals itself
13 – Ciàula’s moon: the wonder of rediscovered reality
14 – When life is hell: the case of the jinx
15 – What does man need to regain the lost unity?

1 – The prophet of the disorientation of contemporary man

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), a great playwright, novelist, and storyteller from Agrigento, is one of the biggest geniuses of the twentieth century, a literary figure and, at the same time, a philosopher. In him, one finds an embodiment of Leopardi’s words in the Zibaldone: “The true poet is also a philosopher and the true philosopher is also a poet.” It may not be a coincidence that Pirandello’s debut is poetic, although the author would later neglect that path to focus on prose and theater, where his greatest creative vein emerges.

The genius of an author is capable of grasping the culture of his time through signs that his contemporaries cannot perceive. This is why Pirandello’s works were not understood in the early decades in which they circulated. Years later, it becomes clear how they described the loss of direction for contemporary man, or, in the words of Hans Sedlmayr, the loss of center, meaning the disappearance of the centrality of the self.

With these words, at just twenty-three years old, Pirandello addressed his sister Lina on October 31, 1886: “We are like the poor spiders, who to live need to weave their thin web in a corner; we are like the poor snails who to live need to carry their fragile shell on their backs, or like poor mollusks who all want their shell at the bottom of the sea. We are spiders, snails, and mollusks of a nobler race – let it pass – we wouldn’t want a spider web, a shell, a conch – let it pass – but a small world, yes, and to live in it and to live off it. An ideal, a feeling, a habit, an occupation – that’s the small world, that’s the shell of this big snail or man – as they call him. Without this, life is impossible.”

Less than twenty years later, in The Late Mattia Pascal, the Sicilian writer dramatically prophesies the cultural climate that Cardinal Ratzinger would later describe in 2005 during the Missa pro eligendo Romano Pontefice as the “dictatorship of relativism.” Pirandello entrusts the words of Anselmo Paleari with his most interesting reflections on contemporaneity. The loquacious philosophy enthusiast uses the image of the lantern to represent the concept of worldview and life. In certain historical epochs, these individual lanterns, characterized by different colors, assume the same color: “In every age, in fact, a certain agreement of feelings is usually established among men, which gives light and color to those lanterns that are the abstract terms: Truth, Virtue, Beauty, Honor, and what have you… And does it not seem to you that the lantern of Pagan Virtue was red, for example? […] There have been certain gusts in history that suddenly extinguished all those lanterns.” This is precisely what has happened in contemporary times, where everyone walks in the dark with their lantern and no longer knows whom to turn to. Today, with all the lanterns of the past extinguished, contemporary society witnesses the lighting of a new cultural lantern of relativism. No longer certainties to look towards, but a single certainty: that there are no truths.

Thus, still in The Late Mattia Pascal, Pirandello reflects on the difference between the ancient man and the modern man: “If, at the climactic moment, just when the puppet representing Orestes is about to avenge his father’s death on Egisthus and his mother, a tear were to appear in the paper sky of the puppet theater, what would happen? […] Orestes would be astonished by that hole in the sky. […] Orestes would still feel the impulses of revenge, he would want to follow them with eager passion, but his eyes, at that moment, would go there, to that tear, from whence all sorts of evil influences would penetrate into the scene, and he would feel his arms fall. In short, Orestes would become Hamlet.” The ancient hero, Orestes, who acts with stubbornness and decisiveness, is replaced by Hamlet, a man caught in doubt about reality and the evidence of things, inert and unable to act.

Still, much of Pirandello’s work documents that culture which gradually, already at the beginning of the last century, became dominant and which has lost the method, i.e., the right path, to reach the truth. If the Moon represents truth, it is as if modern man has lost the means to reach the Moon. The novel His Wife particularly underscores this cognitive incapacity of modern man. A woman is cast aside by her husband for being accused of infidelity when she is, in fact, innocent. At this point, the presumed guilty party takes refuge in the home of the man suspected of being her lover. Between the two, a sentimental relationship truly develops. The husband, however, upon recognizing the woman’s innocence, welcomes her back home just as she has actually committed the guilt. For the reader, the objectivity of reality is clear. It is the characters in the play who, like puppets on stage, appear limited and unable to grasp it. Thus, reality will present itself differently depending on the point of view from which the scene is observed. Reality will be like a mirror, shattered into hundreds of pieces: the viewer standing before it will see different, partial, and grotesquely distorted reflected images. We ourselves appear different depending on the observer before us and the point of observation in which they find themselves.

For this reason, the genius’s production, instead of being understood, has often been reduced to formulas and labels. Pirandello has always vehemently opposed those who simplified his work by reducing it to the few concepts and key words that mostly appear in school anthologies and essays about him. Literary criticism has reduced his works to a system and a welthanschauung (worldview) and has simplified the magmatic and voluminous novelty of his texts into reductive definitions like “Pirandellism” and “relativism.” In reality, Pirandello has always sought in his work the truth about man and, particularly, in the trilogy of myth written between 1928 and 1936 (the year of his death), attempted to trace truth in the social-political, artistic, and religious realms: The New Colony, Lazarus, and The Giants of the Mountain.

We are struck by the article from December 15, 1931, in which Pirandello writes:

“(My) work finds both the judgment of critics and the expectations of the public already prejudiced, due to all those abstract and extravagant conceptions about reality and fiction, about the value of personality […] which are nothing but the crystallized distortions of two or three of my plays, those two or three that arrived first in Paris, right at the moment when my name took flight: this name which, for the height of misfortune, is no longer even my name, but has become the root of the word ‘Pirandellism.’”

Ironically, the one who has fought for life against fiction, for the substance beyond the name, has been reduced to a name. His thought, which highlighted the impossibility of ordering the chaotic magma of existence, has become the system of “Pirandellism.” He has himself become an emblem of relativism, as if he were an interpreter, custodian, and chorus leader rather than a skilled demystifier and a powerful, as well as brilliant, prophet and forerunner of certain rampant cultural trends. For this reason, Pirandello rebells and cries “Down with Pirandellism!” He writes further in the above-mentioned article:

“Allow me to say that none of my works, all born outside of thesis and philosophical apriorism, are afflicted by Pirandellism. They were modestly conceived and composed by a writer named Pirandello who, at the moment he was writing, could not even remotely imagine the misadventure that awaited him and could not foresee that these works were destined to be cataloged under a unique label, under an immutable formula, of a rigid and definitive nature. In the name of my entire work,… I rebel against my fame and against Pirandellism and I go so far as to declare that I am willing to renounce my name, in order to regain the freedom of my imagination as a writer.”

Pirandello, however, warns us: “Perhaps no one is more unknown than a famous writer!” And how does fame arise? “It is born the day when, we don’t know how or why, the name of a writer detaches itself from his works, grows wings, and takes flight. The name!… The works are much more serious: they do not fly, but walk on foot, on their own, with their weight and their value, taking slow steps.” Thus, while Pirandello’s name is in Paris and has traveled around the world, his literary works “continue to walk their path, with heavy steps, and have naturally fallen behind.”

2 – The comic, humor, and the compassionate gaze upon reality

What perspective does Pirandello have on man? With what eyes does he view reality and his peers? In 1908, Pirandello delves into the issue of man’s existential situation in an essay that, besides being a poetic text and literary manifesto of the author, is a profound existential book. We are talking about “L’umorismo” (Humor). According to the writer, the human condition is always out of tune, as if man were never in his rightful place and, frightened by the fear of emptiness and the consequent vertigo, seeks a form, even though he is always formless. In fact, man moves from one thought to another, from one ideal to the next, unable to remain faithful to an intention that is thought out but immediately afterward denied and betrayed. Man is a pure flow of forms and thoughts.

“Life is a continuous flow that we try to stop, to fix into stable and determined forms, inside and outside of us, because we are already fixed forms, forms that move among others that are immobile, yet can follow the flow of life until […] it ceases. The forms we seek to stop and fix within ourselves for this continuous flow are concepts, they are ideals we wish to remain consistent with, all the fictions we create for ourselves, the conditions, the status we tend to establish […]. But within ourselves, in what we call the soul, which is the life within us, the flow continues, […] composing a consciousness for us, building a personality. In certain stormy moments, engulfed by the flow, all our fictitious forms collapse miserably.”

Ancient art invented the granite hero, whole and faithful to his great ideals. However, ordinary observation of reality leads man to realize the inconsistency of such a vision of man. The ancient hero does not exist in reality. We all cling to ideals that we then betray five minutes later. It is absurd to think of a coherence of the self, that is, an intimate connection between action and ideal: the term coherence aptly designates this utopian presumption—at least according to Pirandello—of making action follow thought, of making intent match concrete project.

In moments of silence, when one is alone and not distracted by things and noises, man perceives this unease of living and finding oneself, miserable and insubstantial, in front of the abyss of mystery. He understands the deception of masks, of attitudes adopted to hide the discomfort of living, and grasps his own precariousness and almost nullity.

“In certain moments of inner silence, when our soul sheds all habitual fictions, and our eyes become sharper and more penetrating, we see ourselves in life, and life in itself, almost in a dry, unsettling nakedness; we feel assaulted by a strange impression, as if, in a flash, a reality different from what we normally perceive clarifies itself to us, […]. At that moment, the structure of daily existence, almost suspended in the void of our inner silence, appears to us devoid of meaning, devoid of purpose, […]. The inner void expands, crosses the limits of our body, becomes a void around us, a strange void, like a pause of time and life, as if our inner silence deepened into the abysses of mystery […]. It was a moment; but the impression of it lingers long within us, like a vertigo, contrasting with the stability, though so vain, of things: ambitious or miserable appearances.”

Thus, all of us have a tragicomic consistency, meaning that our self at certain moments appears strongly comical and could elicit laughter from those watching us or a benevolent smile from the more magnanimous.

This is the famous distinction between comic and humorous that Pirandello explains with the equally famous image of an eighty-year-old woman, all made up, dressed in the latest fashion, and wearing stiletto heels. At first glance, anyone confronted with such an image would burst out laughing, sensing the absurdity of the situation. The comic is precisely this “warning of the contrary,” that is, the recognition that a situation is the opposite of what we would expect, a recognition that prompts a hearty, uncontrollable, and undoubtedly disrespectful laugh. However, at the moment when we reflect on the reasons that led that woman to reduce herself this way, and think of her desire to appear younger, to still please her husband, our laughter transforms into a smile that embraces and understands the profound reasons of the other, namely humor or the “sensation of the contrary.” We are all comic or humorous at particular moments in our existence, meaning we are out of place, inadequate, ridiculous: demigods who put themselves on a pedestal in front of others, only to plunge into the mud as soon as solitude allows us to drop the unbearable role.

The humorous gradient has the gift of liberating from form, or rather of embracing it, showing how it is not a definitive mark of the self and does not irreparably imprison it. Appearing in a certain way has a reason for being in the history and life of the person, which is far more complex than it seems.

Humor understands the profound reasons behind the discomfort of the self. However, man is not always capable of looking at others with the respect typical of humor. More often than not, the self is defined and encased by observers in a form and a way of being. Let’s think of many characters presented in “Novelle per un anno” (Tales for a Year), for example, Andrea Chiarchiaro from “La patente” (The License) (1911). Everyone considers him as a jinx to be avoided, to the point where he loses both the web of social relations and the possibility of working. Then the poor man decides to sue two fellow villagers who treated him as such.Bitterly, the narrator comments: “That trial was truly unjust: unjust because it included a ruthless injustice against which a poor man was desperately trying to rebel without any chance of escape. In that trial, there was a victim who could not hold anyone accountable. He wanted to take it out on two, right there, in that trial, on the first two who crossed his path, and—indeed, gentlemen—justice was supposed to go against him […] thereby fiercely reaffirming the injustice of which that poor man was a victim.” In fact, the malevolent perspective of his fellow citizens has encased him in a form, reducing his human complexity to a single aspect that becomes the defining trait of the entire character.

3 – Where does art come from? From the observation of reality

In 1908, in addition to the essay “L’umorismo” (Humor), Pirandello also wrote “Arte e scienza” (Art and Science). There, on one hand, the writer contests those attitudes that tend to reduce art to a discipline dependent on and subordinate to external factors, while on the other hand, he opposes those reductive considerations according to which art “has been narrowed, especially through the work of Benedetto Croce, to a single issue, to a single perspective, which, failing to embrace the entire complex artistic phenomenon, […] stumbles into continuous contradictions.” The one issue Pirandello alludes to is intuition.

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) identifies true art solely with pure intuition. He believes that art exists on a first level, that of intuition, while science occupies a second level, that of concepts. Pirandello writes:

“Croce […] posits two forms or activities of the spirit: one theoretical, divided into intuitive and intellectual, and one practical. With the theoretical form, he says, man understands things; with the practical form, he changes them: with the first, he appropriates the universe; with the second, he creates it.” For Croce, art is knowledge “at the first moment of intuition,” is a theoretical activity that prescinds from practical activity, is devoid of “feeling” and “will”. In Croce’s aesthetic world, the equation: intuition-expression reigns […]. The aesthetic activity is considered by Croce to be completely independent.” Thus, according to Croce, only certain episodes of “La Divina Commedia” (The Divine Comedy) can be considered “poetry” (that is, art), while much of the masterpiece (especially in the “Paradiso” or Paradise), particularly when it too heavily includes moral and religious content, is catalogable as “literature.”

We certainly align with Pirandello when he asserts that reason is certainly not secondary in the artistic realization. Art, therefore, arises from a wide-open window onto reality, with the effective power that reason provides, understood as an opening to reality that duly considers all factors. We wonder, then, how art can truly disregard it and how it can arise solely from one of the human faculties, be it imagination, feeling, or intuition.

However, we must clarify that it is not reason that produces beauty but, on the contrary, it is beauty that moves reason. Beauty exists in reality and spurs man to reproduce it in the artwork; it does not exist beforehand in the artist’s mind except insofar as he has first imprinted it in his mind by observing it in the world.

Manzoni states in the dialogue “Dell’invenzione” (On Invention) that the artist never invents anything. “Inventing,” in fact, comes from the Latin verb “invenire,” which means “to find,” “to encounter.” The artist is as if he finds in creation the footprints of the Creator. Therefore, there is always a very close relationship between art and reality.

Pirandello seems to agree with him, as well as with other great geniuses of the past, such as Dante and Shakespeare, according to whom art always springs from a careful observation of reality. In the novel “Il fu Mattia Pascal” (The Late Mattia Pascal), it is stated:

“Nothing is invented […] that does not have some root, more or less deep, in reality; and even the strangest things can be true; indeed, no fantasy can conceive certain madnesses, certain improbable adventures that break out and explode from the tumultuous bosom of life.”

Certainly, this does not mean that art must necessarily be verisimilar. A few years after the publication of “Il fu Mattia Pascal” (1904), Pirandello appended a postscript dated 1921 entitled “Warning to the Scruples of Fantasy,” in which he responds to those who have accused the bizarre story recounted in the novel of being unrealistic:

“Life, with all its shameless absurdities, big and small, of which it is blissfully full, has the invaluable privilege of being able to do without that stupid verisimilitude to which art believes it is its duty to obey. The absurdities of life do not need to seem verisimilar because they are true. On the contrary, those of art, to seem true, must appear verisimilar. And so, if they are verisimilar, they are no longer absurdities. A case of life may be absurd; a work of art, if it is a work of art, cannot be. It follows that to accuse a work of art of absurdity and improbability, in the name of life, is nonsense. In the name of art, yes; in the name of life, no.”

As further evidence of this, Pirandello references a newspaper article published in “Il corriere della Sera” on March 27, 1920, which recounts a story remarkably similar to that of “Il fu Mattia Pascal“: “the presumed suicide in a canal; the corpse extracted and recognized by the wife and by whom will later be her second husband; the return of the false dead man and even the homage to his own grave.” Life shows contempt for all verisimilitude. Therefore, we should not demand verisimilitude from art and fantasy.

4 – The late Mattia Pascal, or the drama of the man in anticipation

A highly prolific author, Pirandello has left us a vast body of work, from seven novels to novellas (241 published in fifteen volumes during his lifetime and another fifteen published posthumously), from the poems of his youth to his theater (as many as 43 works collected in “Maschere nude”). The material in which the writer deepens his thoughts on poetics, theater, and life is also extensive, consisting of essays, newspaper articles, and transcriptions of his public speeches. After touching upon Pirandello’s reflections in “L’umorismo” and “Arte e scienza,” in the coming weeks we will dedicate ourselves to presenting the novels: L’esclusa (The Excluded), Il turno (The Turn), Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal), Suo marito (Her Husband), I vecchi e i giovani (The Old and the Young), Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Operator), and Uno, nessuno e centomila (One, None, and One Hundred Thousand),

We will start with the most important novel, “The late Mattia Pascal,” published in a magazine in 1904 during a very particular moment in the writer’s life, the year following the severe financial distress suffered by Pirandello’s father’s company, which resulted in the irreparable psychological trauma of his wife, Antonietta Portulano. Already shadowy and gloomy in character, the woman would begin to show signs of instability (paranoias, severe jealousy attacks, etc.). These were crucial years for the subsequent developments of culture: Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams” was published in 1900, and Einstein presented his special theory of relativity in 1905 (the annus mirabilis). In these same years, Pirandello anticipates the advent of a new cultural paradigm in the 20th century, which Cardinal Ratzinger would later refer to as the “dictatorship of cultural relativism” in 2005 during the “Missa pro romano Pontefice eligendo.” In an expressionistic and paradigmatic manner, Mattia Pascal represents the tragicomic, or humorous, existential condition of every man. For this reason, in 1908, Pirandello dedicated the essay “L’umorismo” to the good soul of the protagonist of the novel.

Here is a summary of the strange story. Tired of the monotonous life he leads between the dusty library and domestic prison, the protagonist leaves Miragno, an imaginary village in Liguria. He goes to Monte Carlo to gamble at the casino and wins a substantial sum of money. While on his way back home, already on the train, he is stunned by a news item he reads in the newspaper: his wife and mother-in-law recognized him in the corpse of a drowned man. Anger and irritation quickly give way to the hope of being able to start a new life. Free, no longer tied by bonds, with a consciousness re-made “virgin and transparent,” taking on the name Adriano Meis, he soon realizes the tyranny of that wandering, solitary, and mute freedom, the “painful sense of precariousness that keeps the soul of the traveler suspended,” which prevents him from loving the bed he sleeps in. He always feels “a stranger to life.” After a few months, Adriano finally decides to settle in Rome, where he rents a room. His days are marked by conversations with the talkative Anselmo Paleari, the landlord and a philosophy enthusiast, and by his friendship with his daughter Adriana, a quiet and religious young woman.

Adriano Meis becomes increasingly aware of the insubstantiality of his freedom, to the point that he writes in his memoirs: “My freedom, which at first seemed limitless to me, […] could have been called solitude and boredom, and […] condemned me to a terrible pain: that of the company of myself; I had then approached others; but what good was my intention to be careful not to reconnect, even weakly, the severed threads? They had reconnected themselves.” Adriano Meis was able to maintain the illusion of living as long as he remained closed in on himself and watched others live. However, when he tries to approach life, he realizes that he is like a dead man who cannot even declare his love. Now that he loves Adriana, he realizes that even if he is dead in the registry, he cannot free himself from his wife. Legally, he does not exist. Not only can he not love, but he cannot even report a theft he has suffered. For this reason, he feels “worse than dead” because “the dead no longer have to die,” while he is “still alive for death and dead for life.”

An shadow that has a heart but cannot love, has money, but anyone can steal it. His life is entirely imbued with lies, to the point that he feels suffocated “by nausea, by anger, by hatred” for himself. Thus, he contemplates escaping that house and remaining alone, “further away than ever from men,” due to “fear of falling back into the snares of life.” Adriano has a first suicidal impulse, but then, in an internal rebellion, as if rekindling his hatred towards his wife Romilda and mother-in-law, he reacts and decides to take revenge by returning to Miragno and revealing that he is not dead. Now, while planning his return, he becomes aware of the deception and the illusion of being able to flee from his past and asks himself: “How had I deluded myself that a trunk severed from its roots could live? […] I had considered myself happy […] with the leaden cloak of lies on me […]. Now I would have my wife on me again […] and that mother-in-law […], but had I not had them on me even when dead?”

Upon returning to the village, at first no one recognizes him except for the parish priest, Don Eligio. The bitter discovery of his wife’s second marriage to his childhood friend Pomino and the birth of a child persuades him not to reclaim his lost place within civil society. From now on, on Don Eligio’s advice, he will write his story in a sort of private memoir and will occasionally go to his grave to bring flowers, revealing to anyone he meets that he is the “late Mattia Pascal.”

In this bizarre story, Mattia Pascal has become “another man, yes, but on the condition of doing nothing. And what kind of man? A shadow of a man.” The theme of the shadow is taken from the “Wonderful Story of Peter Schlemihl” by Adalbert von Chamisso (1814), in which the German writer tells of a character who sold his shadow to the devil in exchange for wealth. Similarly, Pirandello tells the story of a man who thought he could abandon his employee and petty bourgeois “shadow.” The outcome of the two stories is, to some extent, similar: solitude and anguish. The novel features several figures that represent a possible alter ego of Mattia Pascal: the middle-aged man who really commits suicide in Monte Carlo after losing at gambling; Adriano Meis, free from social bonds and coercion, but non-existent in the registry; Anselmo Paleari, a Hamlet in bourgeois clothing, a true philosopher entrusted with presenting the most interesting cultural and aesthetic questions of the entire work; and the beloved Adriana, who possesses the faith that Adriano lacks. These characters represent, in a sense, the flow of forms and thought, the ideal aspirations of Mattia Pascal. He would like to be a philosopher, detached from life, but life always ends up involving him. He would like to have Adriana’s faith, but he treats the holy water font as an ashtray. He contemplates a real suicide in Rome but is only pushed to return to Miragno by his hatred for his mother-in-law.

What is the “heart of the story,” what fruit can be gleaned from it? Don Eligio replies: “In the meantime, this, […] that outside the law and beyond those particulars, happy or sad as they may be, for which we are we, […] it is not possible to live.” Mattia Pascal, however, responds that he has not returned “either to the law or to the particulars,” he has no wife and now does not really know who he is. The philosopher Benedetto Croce sees in the words spoken by the parish priest the very thought of Pirandello. Perhaps, instead, it is precisely in Mattia’s words that the truest position of Pirandello before man must be recognized: a question awaiting an answer, the very question that drove Mattia Pascal to travel, to seek to remake a life, less torn and divided. In the “Warning to the Scruples of Fantasy,” when he speaks of man, the author refers to the “game of roles,” to “what we would like to be or should be,” to “what others think we are,” while in reality “what we are, we do not even know, to a certain extent, not even ourselves.”

Next time, we will explore some moments from the novel that truly foreshadow the culture that would prevail in the 20th century. The existence of the soul will also be a topic of discussion. In short, we will uncover an unpublished “Il fu Mattia Pascal,” the lesser-known one, far removed from the clichés and stereotypes with which Pirandello’s works have often been labeled.

5 – Mattia Pascal and the “lanterns” of the disoriented man

In “The late Mattia Pascal,” there are multiple reflections on man, on his difference from beasts, on the existence of the soul, on the distinction between antiquity and modernity, and on the advent of relativism in the contemporary cultural climate.

Assuming the new identity of Adriano Meis, Mattia Pascal has rented a room from Anselmo Paleari. In an interesting monologue, the loquacious Paleari proclaims: “Nature has labored for thousands, thousands and thousands of centuries to ascend these five steps, from the worm to man; it had to evolve, it’s true? This matter had to reach, as form and as substance, this fifth step, to become this beast that steals, this beast that kills, this lying beast, but is also capable of writing the ‘Divine Comedy’ […] and of sacrificing herself as did his mother and my mother; and all of a sudden, poof, it goes back to zero? Is there logic in that? But my nose, my foot will turn back into a worm, not my soul, for heaven’s sake!”

It is important to note that Adriano Meis finds objections to the discourse, which Anselmo Paleari promptly refutes. Adriano indeed questions where the soul is when a man falls, hits his head, and becomes an idiot. Anselmo replies: “Would you like to prove with this that as the body weakens, so does the soul, thus demonstrating that the extinction of one implies the extinction of the other? But pardon me! Imagine the opposite case: of extremely exhausted bodies in which the powerful light of the soul still shines: Giacomo Leopardi! And many old folks, like His Holiness Leo XIII! […] But imagine a piano and a player: at a certain point, while playing, the piano goes out of tune; one key no longer strikes; two or three strings break; well, I challenge you! With an instrument so reduced, the player, no matter how good he is, will necessarily play badly. And if the piano then goes silent, does the player no longer exist either?”

Paleari’s arguments are more persuasive than those of Meis: “Wouldn’t it mean anything to you that all of humanity, all of it, since we’ve known it, has always had the aspiration for another life, beyond? This is a fact, this, a fact, real proof.” Anselmo Paleari here interprets the religiosity of every age: “I feel that it cannot end like this!” He then attacks those who distinguish humanity from the single man, claiming that the former will continue to survive while the individual perishes: “It’s different for the individual, they say; it’s different for humanity. The individual dies, species continues its evolution. A great way to reason, this! […] As if humanity weren’t me, weren’t you, and, one by one, all of us. And don’t we each have the same feeling, which would be the most absurd and horrendous thing, if everything consisted right here, in this miserable breath that is our earthly life: fifty, sixty years of boredom, of misery, of toil: why? For nothing! For humanity?”

In Chapter XII, Pirandello then focuses on the doubt that characterizes contemporary man, on the loss of the ultimate horizon of transcendence, on the difference between modernity and antiquity. Once again, Anselmo Paleari describes the drama of modernity with a theatrical image:

“The tragedy of Orestes in a puppet theater! […] Yes! According to Sophocles, says the poster. It will be Electra. Now listen to the bizarre thought that comes to my mind! If, at the climactic moment, just when the puppet representing Orestes is about to avenge his father’s death over Aegisthus and his mother, there was a tear in the paper sky of the theater, what would happen? You tell me.

• I wouldn’t know, I replied, shrugging.
• But it’s very easy, Mr. Meis! Orestes would be perplexed by that hole in the sky. […] Orestes would still feel the impulses of vengeance, he would want to follow them with eager passion, but his eyes, at that moment, would go to that tear, through which all sorts of evil influences would penetrate into the scene, and he would feel his arms fall. Orestes, in short, would become Hamlet. The entire difference, Mr. Meis, between ancient tragedy and modern tragedy consists in this, believe me: in a hole in the paper sky.”

In Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet does not know whether the ghost that has appeared to him near the castle, revealed to be his father’s ghost, is real or not. He must verify it, suspend all his life, inhibit his emotional ties (his friendship with Laertes, the love he feels for Ophelia), interrupt his studies (his university philosophy course in Germany), and give up his future (the succession to the throne of Denmark). Doubt paralyzes him, prevents him from acting, from living, renders him inert, apathetic; nothing is truly worth it anymore.

More than representing Pirandello’s conception of life, Anselmo Paleari synthesizes in his thought modernity and its epistemological approach when he even doubts the ontological limit par excellence: death. It too, he suggests, might be a product of our perception, of our lantern that goes out. Thus, Paleari discusses: “And if all this darkness, this enormous mystery, in which philosophers initially vainly speculated, and which now, while renouncing the inquiry into it, science does not exclude, were in the end just another deception, a deception of our mind, a fantasy that does not color us? If we finally persuaded ourselves that all this mystery does not exist outside of us, but only within us, and necessarily, due to the famous privilege of the feeling we have of life, of the lantern, that is, of which I have been speaking so far? If death, in short, that scares us so much, didn’t exist and was merely the extinguishing breath in us of this lantern, the unfortunate feeling we have of it, painful, fearful, because limited, defined by this circle of fictitious shadow, beyond the small realm of the scant light that we, poor lost fireflies, project around ourselves […]. The limit is illusory, relative to our small light, to our individuality: in the reality of nature it does not exist.”

Pirandello certainly does not intend to build a philosophical system based on relativism, nor to demonstrate that reality does not exist. Rather, he aims to reveal the difficulty of man in capturing reality and, therefore, the truth. Thus, in Chapter XIII, the writer prophesies the advent of relativism. Anselmo Paleari is telling the astonished Adriano about his vision of modernity through images borrowed from the world of theater: “To us men […], being born, has befallen a dismal privilege: that of feeling ourselves live, with the beautiful illusion that results: to take as a reality outside of us this internal feeling of life, mutable and various, according to times, circumstances, and fortune. And this feeling of life […] was just like a lantern that each of us carries within himself lit; a lantern that makes us see lost on the earth, and makes us see evil and good; a lantern that projects all around us a more or less wide circle of light.”

The image of the lantern is used to represent one’s worldview and vision of life. According to Pirandello, in some historical periods, these individual lanterns, characterized by different colors, instead take on the same color. Anselmo Paleari indeed asserts: “It seems to me […] that in certain ages of history, as in certain seasons of individual life, one could determine the predominance of a given color, eh? In every age, in fact, there tends to be established among men a certain accord of sentiments that gives light and color to those lanterns which are the abstract terms: Truth, Virtue, Beauty, Honor, and what do I know… And doesn’t it seem to you that, for example, the lantern of Pagan Virtue was red? […] The light of a common idea is fueled by collective feeling; if this feeling, however, splinters, the lantern of the abstract term remains standing, but the flame of the idea flickers within it and quivers and chokes, as happens in all periods called transitional. There are also rare in history fierce winds that suddenly extinguish all those lanterns.”

At this point, the little lanterns move in the darkness, collide, and regress amidst great confusion. All the lanterns are extinguished, and men no longer know to whom to turn. This is the description of modernity: no longer a common lantern that allows us to enter into the real, illuminating it with a collective light, but rather many small lights that wander like fireflies in the summer countryside, too small to provide a clear and unambiguous vision of reality.

6 – Serafino’s crank against the “master” machines

In 1930, Pirandello traveled to Hollywood for the filming of the movie based on his play “As You Want Me.” The Sicilian genius’s interest in the seventh art had long been alive. However, his approach to technology and machines is problematic and critical. The intellectual understands that technology and machines sometimes do not facilitate communication but complicate it, creating filters or barriers instead. A lover of cinema, the Sicilian writer perceives the dangers of the image, which can become an additional separation between us and the reality we see. For this reason, Pirandello dedicates an entire work to technological innovation and the world of machines that breaks into human lives.

Published in 1916 and 1917 under the title “Si gira,” the novel appears in its definitive edition in 1925 as “The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Operator.” Composed of seven notebooks divided into chapters, the text takes on a diary-like form. Misunderstood and undervalued by contemporary audiences and critics, the work is rediscovered only later, from the 1970s onward, when its prophetic value begins to be recognized.

As a cinematographic camera operator, Serafino Gubbio records his reflections in a sort of diary, condemning himself to be “a hand that turns the crank.” “Man, who once, a poet, deified and adored his feelings, has thrown feelings aside, which are not only useless but also harmful, […] he has begun to manufacture iron and steel for his new deities and has become their servant and slave. Long live the machine that mechanizes life!”

All of man’s ingenuity has been put to the service of creating those “monsters” (in the etymological sense of the term, meaning “wonders or surprising things”) that were supposed to be our tools, only to end up becoming our masters. Dramatically, when the self is absent, the stupidity of the machine triumphs. Serafino Gubbio notes: “It is inevitably the triumph of stupidity, after so much ingenuity and study spent on the creation of these monsters, which were supposed to remain tools but have instead become, by force, our masters. The machine is made to act, to move; it needs to swallow our soul, to devour our life. And how do you expect the machines to return our soul and life, in multiplied and continuous production?”

The protagonist’s name is quite significant. On one hand, “Serafino” evokes angels and the spiritual nature of beings that are pure spirit devoid of body; on the other hand, “Gubbio” is clearly a Franciscan place. Could the name allude to the verses from Dante taken from Canto XI of the Paradiso dedicated to Saint Francis: “The one was entirely seraphic in ardor”? Perhaps Pirandello wanted to emphasize the entirely spiritual dimension of the character, as if he lived solely by thought and spirit, already detached from corporeality and physicality, inclined only to cerebralism.

Serafino Gubbio reflects on the world of the Cosmograph film studio, a mirror of the contemporary landscape, dominated by rivalries and ambition, where increasingly traditional values find no hospitality, but the thirst for profit triumphs. On the altar of the idol of gain and career, creativity, ingenuity, friendship, and true and authentic communication are sacrificed.

One day, the protagonist is filming a scene from the movie “The Woman and the Tiger” inside the cage of the ferocious beast. In love with the Russian actress Nestoroff and unrequited, actor Aldo Nuti is supposed to shoot the feline to save the woman. Everything is planned according to the script. But Nuti denies the script and, in an act of revenge for the unreciprocated love, kills the woman instead of the tiger, which then mauls him. Impassively, as a slave to the camera, Serafino will record the entire scene without intervening and, struck by aphasia, will forever renounce life, love, communication, and revealing his inner self. Film and life ultimately coincide. Life has been fed to the machine. That gruesome scene, torn from life and immortalized in cinema, will evoke morbid curiosity from the audience and will achieve extraordinary box office returns.

Once again, Pirandello’s genius has prophesied future scenarios in the world of cinema and television: a reality that becomes fiction or reality TV, where everything appears natural only on the surface, but in reality, everything is manipulated according to a script. The man turned automaton stages himself, pretending not to pretend, in Machiavelli’s terms, “dissimulando.” Serafino Gubbio will conclude his notebooks by writing: “I want to remain this way. This is the time; this is life; and in the sense that I give to my profession, I want to continue like this—alone, mute, and impassive—being the operator. Is the scene ready?

—Attention, rolling…”

Serafino represents the hyperbolic amplification of the difficulties of authentic communication that characterize human beings. The loss of words is, in a certain sense, the risk that a man runs who increasingly uses means of communication that do not have the same warmth as the living word. When man forgets that these tools are only useful means of communication in certain circumstances, he transforms them into his own voice. The integrity of communication is lost, which relies on glances, gestures, tones of voice, affection, and only the message, or rather, the presumed end of the message remains. Thus, what becomes important is not so much the intensity and depth of communication, but its speed and frequency. Perhaps this makes some communicative scenarios of the third millennium more easily understandable.

Existence appears increasingly frantic and inhuman, to the point that Serafino asks, “Does this noisy and vertiginous mechanism of life, which becomes more complicated and accelerates day by day, not reduce humanity to such a state of madness that it will soon burst forth frantically to disrupt and destroy everything? Perhaps, in the end, that would be a gain after all. “Not for anything else, let us note: to make a point and start again for once.” The palingenesis that will touch the world, prophesied in “The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio“, resonates with the final page of “Zeno’s Conscience“, the Italo Svevo novel that circulated in those same years, which concludes with the prophecy of a bespectacled man who will build a dangerous weapon that will then be placed by someone more insane at the center of the Earth: an explosion will lead to the annihilation of all forms of life and all diseases.

7 – Vitangelo’s Odyssey, in search of the lost self

Pirandello’s short stories are the source of many theatrical texts and even novels. This is the case with “One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand,” which derives from the novella “Stefano Giogli, One and Two,” dating back to 1909. The birth is lengthy, as the novel is published first in installments in a magazine between 1925 and 1926 and then in book form in 1926. It will be Pirandello’s last work.

The protagonist, Vitangelo Moscarda, nicknamed Gengé, is in search of his true identity, much like Mattia Pascal. His certainties are shaken by his wife’s comments about his nose (“But yes, dear. Look at it closely: it tilts to the right”), and he is disturbed by the fact that he has never noticed a flaw that has been right in front of him every day. Thus begins the inner confession delivered in the first person by Vitangelo: “I was twenty-eight years old and had always considered my nose, if not beautiful, at least decent, like all the other parts of my body […]. The sudden and unexpected discovery of that flaw, therefore, irritated me like an undeserved punishment. Perhaps my wife saw much deeper than I did in that irritation of mine and immediately added that if I rested in the certainty of being flawless, I should rid myself of that delusion, because, just as my nose tilted to the right, so too did my eyebrows appear over my eyes like two circumflex accents […], my ears were poorly attached, one protruding more than the other; and other flaws…”. In short, a man can look at himself in the mirror thousands of times without truly observing himself.

Then, Vitangelo imagines that there might be great discrepancies between how others perceive many aspects of him, perhaps less visible ones. There are as many Vitangelos as there are people with whom he interacts. Each has their own point of view and a different vision of his being. He will later confess: “The idea that others saw in me someone whom they alone could know by looking at me from the outside with eyes that were not my own and that gave me an appearance destined to always remain foreign to me, […] this idea no longer gave me rest.” His unity is like a disassembly into a hundred thousand parts, as many as there are myriad visions that others have of him. If each person sees reality “in their own way,” it becomes impossible to truly communicate among people. Thus, they exist in an existential condition of solitude.

After the shock of such a revelation, Vitangelo intends to change those points of view that do not correspond to his own. He realizes that others see him as a usurer and an egoist; thus, to prove the inconsistency of this judgment, he evicts Marco di Dio, a needy person who lives in one of his properties, actually to offer him a larger one. However, the rumors circulating about him are that he is an insensitive loan shark. The shouts of “usurer” turn into “madman!” at the fact that Vitangelo has indeed given one of his apartments to Marco di Dio. In short, the protagonist not only cannot rid himself of the old forms, but he also assumes other forms that are unexpected and, above all, undesirable. Even his relatives consider him mad to the point that his wife initiates legal action to have him declared unfit.

Only a friend of his wife’s named Anna Rosa maintains a relationship with him. One day, when Vitangelo meets her, her purse falls, revealing a revolver she has hidden. A gunshot goes off, hitting her in the foot. Rumors spread that Gengé is in love with Anna Rosa and that “the incident of that shot in the Badìa” is attributed to sentimental causes. His wife gathers all the evidence and testimonies to have him declared unfit. Fascinated by his mental musings and reasoning, Anna Rosa shoots him in the chest. Why? The protagonist will write, confessing his misadventures as in a diary: “The reasons she later gave in her defense must indeed be true: that she was driven to kill me by a sudden instinctive horror of the act to which she felt drawn by the strange charm of everything I had said to her in those days.” Declared unfit and distanced from his wife, Vitangelo will end up in the old age home he himself had founded with his donations.

The outcome of this process of destruction of the many forms and masks adopted by the character is not the discovery of self but the annihilation of one’s own ego. Thus, the character concludes his story in the last chapter of the novel: “No name. No memory today of yesterday’s name; of today’s name, tomorrow’s. If the name is the thing; if a name is in us the concept of every thing placed outside of us; and without a name there is no concept, […] well, let that which I carried among men be inscribed by each as a tombstone inscription on the forehead of that image with which I appeared to them, and let it be left in peace so that it is no longer spoken of. It is nothing but this, a tombstone inscription, a name. It suits the dead. To those who have concluded. I am alive and do not conclude. Life does not conclude. And it knows nothing of names; life. This tree, the trembling breath of new leaves. I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow a book or wind […]. I quickly turn my eyes so as not to see anything stay still in its appearance and die. Only thus can I live, now. To be reborn moment by moment. To prevent thought from starting to work in me again, and within me remaking the void of vain constructions.”

In order to live, or rather to survive, Vitangelo must annihilate his self-awareness, eliminate every form, in search of a substance beyond form, without a name, without work, without home, and without any relationship with others.

In the last chapters of the novel, the consideration that “living” and “knowing” are irreconcilable opposing forms dominates. To know, one must freeze into a form, but life knows nothing of forms, of names. Vitangelo thus expresses his reflection to his interlocutor: “You must pause life for a moment within yourself to see yourself. Like in front of a camera. You pose. And posing is like becoming a statue for a moment. Life moves continuously and can never truly see itself.”

On the one hand, however, the self does not coincide with form; on the other hand, it cannot disregard relationships, because the self is discovered in relation. Our person comes to know itself in action, at work, living, not in reflection.

8 – We are all characters in search of an author

The vein of Pirandello perhaps finds its most expressive form in his theatrical works. It can be said, with good reason, that most of his narrative production (short stories and novels) is conceived in a scenic manner. His purely theatrical production will culminate in the collection “Maschere nude,” which gathers forty-three works. Different from the D’Annunzian contemporary theater characterized by the seductive use of words, Pirandello’s works stage Hamlet-like figures in bourgeois clothing who philosophize about life, ask questions, seek a truth, and often find themselves in a state of checkmate. The writer from Agrigento also attempts to blend audience and stage by abolishing the fourth wall and the curtain, thus involving the spectators within the scenic fiction.

From a young age, Pirandello wrote theatrical dramas, but international notoriety came late with the staging of “Six Characters in Search of an Author” in 1921.

When the drama “Six Characters in Search of an Author” is staged, it is not understood. If we were to rediscover reviews and possible interpretations of the work in the following decades, we would mostly encounter readings from a meta-theatrical perspective, using the distinction between person and character, discussing the critique of bourgeois theater, and reflecting on the incomunication between human beings. In the preface to the 1925 edition, Pirandello writes: “I wanted to represent six characters who are searching for an author. The drama cannot represent itself precisely because the author they are seeking is missing; instead, it represents the comedy of their vain attempt, with all the tragic elements stemming from the fact that these six characters have been rejected.”

Six characters (the father, the mother, the stepdaughter, the son, the young boy, and the little girl) present themselves to the troupe leader, demanding that their drama be represented. Their story has, in fact, been written but not performed. The author abandoned them after creating them. The father exclaims: “The author who created us, alive, did not want, or could not physically, bring us into the world of art. And it was a real crime […] because whoever has the fortune to be born a living character can even laugh at death. They do not die anymore!” Later, addressing the troupe leader who wants the script, he insists: “The drama is in us; we are it; and we are impatient to perform it, just as the passion urges us from within!” The man has an urgent need for life, he does not just want to exist, but wants to live, deeply and dramatically, with enthusiasm.

Because of their insistence, the troupe leader first interrupts the ongoing performance, then requests the strange new company to provide directions to the actors regarding their drama’s representation. After expressing annoyance at the failure of the performance to correspond to their story, the characters demand and obtain the right to perform themselves, or rather to live. On stage, the six characters enact their story. We discover that a man (the father) married a woman (the mother), generating a son. Over time, however, love between the two spouses diminishes. In love with her husband’s secretary, the mother leaves the family to form a union with her new lover. From this relationship, three children are born (the stepdaughter, the young boy, and the little girl). After several years, the secretary dies. Left alone with the burden of supporting the children, the mother returns to her first husband’s town without telling him anything. The eldest daughter (the stepdaughter) starts working in Madama Pace’s atelier on her mother’s suggestion. There, she soon finds herself working as a prostitute to make ends meet. One day, however, her mother’s first husband appears as a client. Incest is only averted at the last moment. At this point, perhaps driven by remorse or the desire to make amends somehow to the family, the father welcomes his ex-wife and the three illegitimate children into his home. However, a surreal atmosphere of profound discomfort arises in the house. The coexistence is, in fact, a constant reminder of the two family dramas. The stepdaughter, the young boy, and the little girl have lost their father (the secretary) but cannot see the new male figure as a fatherly character. Tragedy is looming. One day, the young boy, after finding his little sister drowned in a tub, shoots himself and dies. The audience thinks it is merely a theatrical fiction, but it is not. The tragedy has truly unfolded.

Beyond the multiple interpretations that have been made of the text, it seems that the most effective key to understanding is the prophetic one. Pirandello’s genius had sensed in the early decades of the twentieth century the loss of the paternal figure in contemporary culture and described its tragic consequences. In the conclusion of the drama, Pirandello anticipates the abyss and the self-destructive instinct that attract contemporary man.

Internal signals appear throughout the work that allow us to understand who the author the characters are searching for is. The story told is, in fact, that of an absent father and characters who cannot live because they have been abandoned by their “author.” Pirandello addresses one of the most dramatic losses of contemporary times. The anathema that weighs on contemporary man is heavy. Humanity without a father (tradition, roots, origin, God) loses its identity and becomes disoriented. Thus, it risks self-destruction. Without a father, the little girl and the boy commit suicide. Today’s youth (not all, fortunately) often seek sleep and distraction, and in the worst-case scenario, annihilation and self-destruction in the form of apparent or concealed suicides (drugs, alcohol, reckless driving, etc.). Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people. The leading cause of mortality is road accidents, which often arise from a desire for risk, transgression, and annihilation. Road accidents are frequently a disguised suicide. Today, without a father, young people lose their vital energy, appear apathetic, increasingly inept, and incapable of facing the challenges of reality.

What is the author we all need for our existence to transform into life? What allows us to live, fulfill ourselves, and realize our potential? The father/author we all need can also be interpreted as the teacher or even God; He is whom we seek.

9 – Thus the utopia of a perfect world dies in violence

In the play La nuova colonia, Pirandello paradigmatically recounts the disastrous consequences of the socio-political utopia of building, from scratch, a “good and just” world. This theatrical text belongs to the “trilogy of myth”, The New Colony, Lazarus, and The Giants of the Mountain (Lazzaro, La nuova colonia, I giganti della montagna), three works in which the playwright, in the latter years of his life (from 1928 to 1936), seeks to identify certain truths and establish reference points in social, religious, and artistic realms.

Some marginalized individuals, eager to escape the unjust system of society—where oppression, exploitation, subordination, power, and selfishness dominate personal relationships—decide to move to a deserted volcanic island. They believe that, through a palingenesis, starting from the origin and away from civilization and progress, in a state of primitive nature, it is possible to build an equitable and perfect world.

The leader of these men is Currao. Beside him is La Spera, a prostitute who has rediscovered her dignity and femininity through motherhood. They all depart with the desire for a new life and a brotherhood they did not find in their city of origin. We read this dialogue:

“Papìa: … I’m in too! I also thirst for a new life! …

Currao: Let’s stop with the fighting! …

Quanterba: We’re all going to the island!

Fillico and thirty-one others: To the island! To the island! …

Osso di Seppia: Either to the bottom or resurrected! …

The hedgehog (ironically): All brothers! – Come on! Come on! …

La Spera: I’m going to get my child.

Ciminudù: No, what are you doing? Don’t you have a wet nurse?

La Spera: Do you want me to leave him here? I’m taking him with me!”

It is from a good desire that the adventure of these desperate men begins, who have only known misery and despair in life. At the same time, the germ of destruction is already present from the very beginning, from the moment they depart, as the protagonists embark with an idea in mind that is oblivious to the reality of the facts, to the true nature of man, to his capacity for evil, and to the depths of horror and destruction of which man is capable. When man forgets his nature, even the most noble intentions can turn into violence and the abyss of death to impose that good order of which man alone is incapable. Here is embodied that forgotten social utopia, which ignores that evil does not come from outside, from society, but from within, that is, from the heart of man.

These are words that, moreover, the great school of humanity that is the Gospel has already taught us: “Don’t you see that whatever goes into someone from outside cannot defile them, since it doesn’t enter their heart but their stomach, and then goes out of the body?… For it is from within, out of the heart of a man, that evil intentions come: sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person” (Mark 7:18-22).

After a short time, everything returns to how it was before. Some want to impose themselves by force. Others want to get rich by stealing or pillaging among the ruins. Some quickly realize that nothing has changed on the island in the new world, while others still delude themselves into thinking that elsewhere, on this earth, man’s soul can be different, immune from evil. This is the case of La Spera, who seems to be the redeemed one par excellence from the new beginning, and who is often presented in a statuary manner, resembling a sculptural group of a woman with a child—essentially a new Eve, therefore, a Madonna.

The intentions of control and power are cloaked in good intentions and presented under the false name of charity. It is the emblem of a man who wants to appear good to others, who no longer ponders the problem of happiness but desires to lead, to be the chief, the moralizer.

These marginalized individuals, who had left to escape the law, now find themselves under the arbitrariness of each other or subjected to the “power of the strongest.” After a while, other men arrive on the island, bringing with them many women. The scene is very emblematic and allusive. The arrival of so many women will mark a change in how the island’s inhabitants relate to La Spera, redeemed by her journey and motherhood. Initially treated with respect, almost as a symbol of new life and a new course, she is now regarded as the woman of all. The figure thus recalls the original sin, the original transgression, and not coincidentally, as if to underline the acquired awareness of the impossibility of a new Eden! We should pay attention to this scene:

“Osso di Seppia: You guessed it, clever one, by bringing us the women!

Burrania: As soon as we saw them on the boats!

Crocco: Ah, I knew it! – But persuading them—fathers, brothers, and husbands— to bring them (addressing Papìa) wasn’t easy, you know? It’s because I painted this island for everyone as the earthly paradise.

Osso di Seppia: – yes, after the original sin! -”

The regained Eden appears for what it truly is, the Paradise that has been lost forever. New systems of power are imposed, a new order has been established. Even in the new world, evil cannot be uprooted. The remission of sins is, indeed, a great miracle and not within man’s capability.

In the encounter with Padron Nocio, Currao accuses him of bringing all the vices of the city to the island, along with women and money (“The good, Padron Nocio, is hard to achieve; the evil is too easy”). The aim of a general refoundation of society can degenerate into unspeakable violence. Symbolically, the island risks even sinking under the songs, dances, and revelry of the newcomers. Outside of metaphor, humanity, forgetting the original sin and being unrealistic, is at risk of self-destruction.

The third and final act opens with the preparations for a great feast: it seems like the biblical scenario preceding the universal flood. Celebrations are being prepared for the celebration of false weddings. La Spera is despised and rejected as at the beginning of the play. Some sailors conspire among themselves, intending to return to land, because on the island “there is neither God nor law.” The new world, the social utopia, reveals itself for what it truly is: a place removed from reality, hell on earth. It is the world created by man who has eliminated God and has made himself both guide and leader and God Himself (“Outside the world, they say! And that’s true! I feel like I’m in hell.”).

In the end, Currao abandons La Spera and is accused of wanting to become the master of everything. A procession with false brides takes place, amid music and dances, in which no one can enjoy the fun that was expected. At the instigation of others, La Spera accuses Currao of wanting to kill Dorò. The play concludes with violent final disputes that are engulfed by the earthquake that swallows the island. Only a rock rises from the sea on which La Spera and her son find salvation.

La nuova colonia serves as a paradigm for the ideologies that have plagued the last century, and more broadly, for all ideologies that sought to design a response to the human problem not from a realistic perspective on human nature, but from an idea, from a system constructed on paper.

10 – Only charity can heal the wounds of the self

In a theatrical text from 1928, largely unknown to most, titled Lazzaro (Lazarus), Pirandello explores the theme of Christ/charity, that “love which understands and can find the right balance between order and anarchy, between form and life,” that love which can resolve human conflict and fragmentation and finally restore unity to the self.

The protagonist of the drama is Diego Spina, who has raised his children with a rigid moralistic education, more concerned with the afterlife than this one. His son Lucio, already at six years old, finds himself in a seminary to become a priest. Disagreeing with this educational approach, his wife Sara leaves her husband and from her new relationship with the farmhand Arcadipane has two more children. The action intensifies when Lucio returns home after years in the seminary because he has decided not to follow the path imposed by his father, who, in the meantime, wants to build a hospice on his estate, right where his ex-wife lives with her new partner. Diego’s decision will evidently lead to the expulsion of Sara and Arcadipane. When Diego learns of his son Lucio’s choice, he throws himself under a car and dies.

After two doctors confirm his death, Diego returns to life. However, this fact makes him lose his faith because he does not remember anything about the afterlife, which for him is a sign that there is no other life.

Lucio, on the other hand, sees the event as the intervention of God, regains his faith, and decides to return to the seminary. He confides to his little sister Lia: “There is, there must be! […] To give wings back to those who have lost their feet to walk on Earth […]. Now I truly understand and feel the word of Christ: Charity. Because men cannot always stand alone, God himself wants on Earth His house that promises true life beyond […]. Now I feel worthy again to don the garment for the divine sacrifice of Christ and for the faith of others.” Charity comes from this awareness of the cry and the division that reside in the human heart and the grace (absolute gift) that is Christ for our lives. No longer grasping any reasons for anything, Diego feels he can commit any action (his words echo those of Dostoevsky: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted!”) and thus seeks to take revenge on Arcadipane by shooting him. But he only wounds him slightly. Now Lucio will be God’s instrument to restore faith to his father. He will explain that God may not allow the man who returns to life to remember what there is in the afterlife. He diverts him from a rationalistic logic that would demand to judge and fully understand God’s paths with our reason and guides him to a deeper vision in faith by saying: “You had closed your eyes to life thinking you had to see the other side. That was your punishment. Now you must live life and let others live it too […]. If now I accept this evil of yours and feel it, I feel it as good, as good for me, that is God, see.”

The father then asks Lucio what he should do. “Live in God through the works you will do. Get up and walk in life,” his son replies. Lucio will also encourage his little sister Lia, who is paralyzed, to stand up again. To everyone’s surprise, she begins to walk again. A man can always rise again only by virtue of a presence. Lucio, Diego, Lia, and all those who witnessed these events have been touched by the total charity of Being. Charity is the law of reality and, at the same time, the deep law of the human heart. For this reason, man finds fulfillment in adhering to this profound law of Being, because the law of the heart coincides with the law of the real. That love, which has often been presented to us in a moralistic form, as a categorical imperative, belongs instead to ontology. Love is not an external imposition to which one must conform. Man is called to verify through his own experience this deep fulfillment, this correspondence between the heart and the law of reality. Without this verification, love will always be perceived as an optional that one must respect just to be good. Love/charity is not an alternative; without charity, nothing matters.

Christ/charity is the Presence that knows how to restore unity to the fragmented human person, divided and consumed by countless worries and driven by multiple interests that do not satisfy our desire for happiness and love. This was understood by Luigi Pirandello, a brilliant interpreter of that contemporary era in which the relativism of cultural, ethical, and aesthetic nature has led to the emergence of a man who sees himself divided, as if standing before a broken mirror shattered into hundreds of pieces.

11 – The drama of unlived life and love

Enrico IV (Henry IV) is one of Pirandello’s most significant dramas, alongside Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, both written in 1921. The play was first performed on February 24, 1922, at the Teatro Manzoni in Milan, receiving immediate acclaim from critics. Renato Simoni, writing after the premiere, noted, “The report… is very joyful: an audience that is sometimes surprised, sometimes curious, sometimes moved and uplifted, and after two or three scenes, completely won over. There was in all the spectators the awareness that they were witnessing a work that could be loved or not, but that, in any case, had an unusual value, a closed power, sometimes obscure, sometimes only flickering, often clarifying itself with an audacious originality yet terribly reasonable.”

This drama is not simple but rather brilliant, immediately striking for the originality of its situation, surprises, twists, and suspense, where appearance and reality intertwine in a way that does not reveal to the audience until the end what the true truth is. Translated into several languages, it quickly gained success across Europe and the world, even attracting the interest of the emerging art of cinema, leading to a film adaptation in 1926.

In a letter from 1921, Pirandello explains the backstory that underlies the protagonist’s presumed madness: “About twenty years ago, some young gentlemen and ladies of the aristocracy thought of putting on a ‘costumed parade’ in a patrician villa for their amusement during carnival time: each of these gentlemen chose a historical character, a king or prince, to portray alongside his lady, a queen or princess, on a horse adorned according to the customs of the time. One of these gentlemen chose the character of Henry IV; and to represent him as best as possible, he underwent the torment of an intense, meticulous study that had obsessed him for about a month.” At the carnival, Henry IV appeared with his fiancée, who was impersonating Matilda of Canossa. After falling from a spirited horse due to the interference of Belcredi, his rival in love, he hit his head, lost consciousness, and awoke convinced that he truly was the famous Emperor. The relatives then supported the ruse, even hiring servants and pages to populate that villa transformed into a court. Meanwhile, life continued for everyone else. The fiancée Matilda, having become involved with Belcredi, had a daughter named Frida.

Thus, we understand why twenty years later the protagonist of the play still appears on stage dressed in the costumes of Henry IV, the Emperor of Germany who humiliated himself before Pope Gregory VII at Canossa in 1077. One day, the court is visited by his nephew Carlo di Nolli, Belcredi, Matilda, Frida, and a doctor, who plan to induce a shock in Henry IV that might restore his sanity. The supposed madman has, in reality, already regained his senses eight years prior but has chosen to play a part, to pretend. The audience learns of this only in the second act when Henry IV is conversing with the pages and reveals this to them. After years of madness, he has, therefore, regained consciousness, realizing that for everyone else life has gone on, while he has crystallized in a static, lifeless form. This is the plan to provoke a shock in Henry IV. They want him to believe that the ghost of Matilda of Canossa materializes from the portrait, embodied by Frida, who looks exactly like Henry IV’s beloved from twenty years ago. Henry IV first confesses his recovery, then labels his visitors as mad for their plan, and finally pierces his rival in love, Belcredi. At this point, to escape from his prison, he chooses to play a part for the rest of his life, that of the madman.

The work is complex and lends itself to multiple interpretations. While we could overlook the metatheatrical hermeneutic reading, I would particularly like to focus on the typically Pirandellian similarity between life and theater. The protagonist embodies the emblem of a man who does not truly live but rather plays a part. The attempt to eliminate the rival Belcredi on Henry IV’s part documents the desire to annihilate someone who represents the possibility of a life well-lived, almost suggesting that it is impossible to truly live. Theater coincides with life; there is no real difference between life and theater, precisely because it is impossible for man to genuinely participate in the full flow of life. We all witness a spectaculum, participating perhaps even as protagonists, yet without truly being autonomous in our decisions, which we mainly endure like the protagonist of the drama, who finds himself in a form without having been able to love the woman he wished to marry. Henry IV “does not kill a rival in a jealousy contest, but his own degraded double, the figure of that other possibility which is a life enjoyed at the cost of unbearable decay” (E. Gioanola).

Life flees, time passes, and when man becomes aware of it, he discovers aging and death. “Strong as death is love,” says the Song of Songs, but for Henry IV, love is denied, and for this reason, he fears life. Only the experience of forgiveness and mercy, only the loving gaze of someone who embraces us can awaken in us the enthusiasm for life and the wonder at the gift of reality. Yet, no one, in twenty years, has had the courage to tell Henry IV the truth; all have acquiesced and facilitated in him the crystallization of form, and for so many years, they have almost feared that he might discover the truth, culminating in the final act that leads to the tragic conclusion. For this reason, Henry IV is the most tragic character in Pirandello’s works, one who has always sought a noble and ideal place and form, aspiring to belong to a grand, imperial story, only to convince himself for many years that he had found it, until he finally comes to realize that it is all merely an illusion, a fiction.

One might find themselves discovering, in the end, that they have never truly lived. Henry IV cries out to Belcredi, just moments before wounding him: “I (the hair) have made it gray here, I, as Henry IV, you understand? And I hadn’t even noticed! I realized it one day all by myself, all of a sudden, reopening my eyes, and it was a fright, because I immediately understood that not only my hair, but everything must have turned gray like this, and everything had crumbled, all finished: and that I would arrive with a hunger like a wolf at a banquet that had already been fully cleared away.”

12 – The train has whistled; reality finally reveals itself

Pirandello wrote short stories throughout his life, publishing a total of fifteen volumes, each containing fifteen stories, which were later compiled into two volumes titled “Short Stories for a Year,” (Novelle per un anno) published posthumously in 1937, of course revised and corrected, with an appendix of twenty-five unpublished stories. Pirandello’s overall project was meant to include twenty-four books of fifteen stories each to cover all the days of the year.

The short stories constitute a workshop in which the writer works with raw material that will later be ready to be used in other contexts (theatrical or novelistic). As an example, we can mention that wonderful story “La signora Frola and Mr. Ponza, Her Son-in-Law,” which would later become the play “So It Is (If You Think So).” (Così è (se vi pare))

Often, the brief nature of the short story lends itself to depicting a particular case in life and a character. The protagonist is sometimes subjected to a formal paroxysm, so to speak, crucified to a form, which is the viewpoint of the people around him outside of which he cannot live. His destiny is to accept this form if he wants to belong to the community and exist within the human consortium, even if this does not mean living, i.e., finding his own space and true dimension. This will be the case, as we shall see, of Andrea Chiarcaro, the protagonist of the story “The License,” who is deformed in a caricatured and grotesque manner as a jinx who will appear before the judge to request certification of those qualities that everyone recognizes and attributes to him.

At other times, hope appears in the stories that a man can find in reality the way to begin living again and discover his true identity. This is the case in “The train has whistled“(Il treno ha fischiato) and “Ciàula Discovers the Moon.” (Ciàula scopre la luna)

Reality exists; it is a fact that predates us. Reality provokes us, inspires us, compels us, suggesting a Mystery that lies beyond the sensible and visible. It fascinates us with its beauty, provided that we look at it with amazement and wonder, even when we are immersed in problems and carry heavy burdens. Sometimes, however, we forget that reality exists, we no longer marvel at it, and then monotony and daily difficulties crush us. This is what happens to us, as it happened to Belluca, the protagonist of the Pirandellian short story “The Train Whistled.”

The narrative begins in medias res. At the end of a workday, the employee Belluca appears to be going mad. When the boss asks him about the work done during the day, Belluca replies that “the train has whistled.” The whole office cannot help but laugh at the strange behavior of the employee. This is the comedy, that uncontrollable and irreverent laughter in the face of what we perceive as contrary to what we would expect (“admonition of the contrary,” as Pirandello calls it in the essay “Humor” (L’umorismo)). The narrator, however, notes that for those who knew Belluca well, that attitude was the most natural possible: “I had never seen a man live like Belluca. I was his neighbor, and not I alone, but all the other tenants of the building wondered with me how that man could survive under such living conditions.” Upon returning home from the office, Belluca had to care for three blind women: his wife, his mother-in-law, and his sister-in-law, who all wanted to be served. To feed all those mouths, after dinner, he would get more work for the evening.

For this reason, there was really nothing to laugh at regarding Belluca’s reaction in the office. “Absorbed in the continuous torment of that wretched existence […] without a moment of respite […] he had forgotten for years and years […] that the world existed.” One day, lying on the sofa, he heard the train whistle “and had run with his thoughts behind that train […]. There was a world outside of all his torments; there was the world, so, so far away, to which that train was heading,… Florence, Bologna, Turin, Venice, […]. The world had closed off to him, in the torment of his home, […]. Now, at that very moment he was suffering here, there were the lonely snowy mountains lifting their azure fronts to the night sky… Yes, yes, he saw them, he saw them, he saw them so… there were the oceans… the forests…”. Now that something has happened in his life, Belluca begins to look at reality again and will not go back. He will be aware that the cramped circumstance in which we live does not define our person. There is a surprising and beautiful reality, much larger around us from which we can draw the energy and enthusiasm to restart and face everyday life. We are reminded of the words that Pope John Paul II addressed to artists in 1999, explaining that beauty will always infuse that amazement and transmit that enthusiasm that will allow us to rise again and restart. Again addressing artists in 2009, Benedict XVI writes that “hope is the true daughter of beauty.” This is what happens to Belluca, who henceforth, after apologizing to his boss and resuming his previous work, will never forget the surprising reality that exists near and far from him.

Now the reader looks at the protagonist with a new feeling, with a benevolent smile that embraces the humanity and limitations of others, attempting to understand their struggles, their oddities, their reasons for behavior that is distant from expectations.

This is the feeling of the contrary, namely humor. Among all the gradations of the comic (irony, satire, grotesque, sarcasm, parody, formal paroxysm, …) humor is the most benevolent, the most moved and compassionate, the most inspired by that loving embrace of reality that looks at everything and judges everything with a view that does not erase or censor anything.

Humor takes into account all factors of reality, recognizing the limits of situations and people. It compares all of reality with the ideal and, while sensing the confines of reality, continues to love it. The humorist, according to Pirandello, sees “the world, if not exactly naked, at least in its shirt: in the shirt, the king.” It is this profound understanding of reality that perceives the fragmentation of the contemporary self that can open up to the question of Someone who can heal the wound of humanity.

13 – Ciàula’s moon: the wonder of rediscovered reality

“Ciàula Discovers the Moon.” (Ciàula scopre la luna) is one of the most beautiful short stories by Pirandello. The protagonist of this story makes the same discovery about the beauty of reality that Belluca, the character from “The train has whistled” (Il treno ha fischiato) also made.

Forced to work in the mine for countless hours, Ciàula had felt fear of the darkness of night since he was a child. He was nicknamed Ciàula for the call of the crow “cràh! Cràh!” that he imitated perfectly. He, who was skinny and almost skeletal, wore a shirt and a long, wide vest, the only clothing he had. He often worked at night, “down there, it was always night anyway.” For his master, uncle Scarda, if it wasn’t for the fatigue and sleep, it wouldn’t have made any difference to work all day.

Ciàula moved “blind and secure” in the “guts of the mountain” as if he were “inside his maternal womb.” He was not afraid of the darkness of the mine. “Instead, he was afraid of the empty darkness of the night” because he didn’t know it. “Every evening, after work, he returned to the village with uncle Scarda; and there, as soon as he finished stuffing himself with the remains of the soup, he would throw himself to sleep on the straw sack on the ground, like a dog; and in vain the boys, those seven orphaned nephews of his master, would poke him to keep him awake and laugh at his foolishness; he would immediately fall into a leaden sleep, from which, every morning, at dawn, a familiar foot would rouse him. The fear he had of the night’s darkness came from that time when uncle Scarda’s son, who had been his master, had his belly and chest torn open by the explosion of the mine, and uncle Scarda himself had been struck in the eye.” He had then broken his “little terracotta lamp,” and when he had gone out into the dark night without his light, he had felt such great fear that he began to run “as if someone were chasing him.”

One day, having returned to the surface after exhausting labor, “he stood… astonished. The load fell from his shoulders. He lifted his arms a little; opened his black hands in that silvery brightness. Great, calm, like in a cool, luminous ocean of silence, the Moon stood before him. Yes, he knew, he knew what it was; but like so many things that one knows, which have never been given any importance. And what could it matter to Ciàula that the Moon was in the sky? Now, just then, having emerged from the belly of the earth at night, he discovered it. Ecstatic, he fell seated on his load, in front of the hole. There it was, there it was, there it was, the Moon… There was the Moon! The Moon! And Ciàula began to cry, unknowingly, without wanting to, from the great comfort, from the great sweetness he felt in having discovered it, there, as it rose in the sky, the Moon, with its wide veil of light, oblivious of the mountains, the plains, the valleys it illuminated, oblivious of him, who no longer felt afraid, nor tired, in the night now full of his wonder.”

The discovery of the Moon is the revelation of a presence that is bigger than us and that exists regardless of our awareness. One can live without recognizing the beauty that surrounds us, without being moved by wonder. Now Ciàula realizes that no fatigue, no limit, no circumstance defines and crushes us. When one is filled with wonder, even fatigue is no longer felt.

The greatest surprise for an adult observing a child in front of reality is watching them pause, amazed, full of questions and curiosity. Everything is new for them, surprising and interesting, and it brings a smile to their face. A child wants to name the things they encounter just as Adam named the beasts, thus establishing his sovereignty over them.

The attitude of wonder that is characteristic of children represents the impulse of a person who enters the adventure of reality with curiosity to know it. This wonder is precisely the attitude from which philosophy is born. The fascination that reality awakens becomes the means that attracts and captivates the child so much that it stirs in them questions like: “What is this object? What is it called? What is it for?” Knowledge occurs through the creation of a bond with the encountered object, up to the desire to understand its purpose and utility. Without this wonder, everything becomes useless and insignificant. For this reason, it can be rightly stated that only wonder knows.

This ability to be surprised is the attitude of youth that can remain in the heart, even as age advances. Youth is, in fact, a dimension of the spirit, an attitude of the heart, not a demographic fact. There are hearts that live full of questions and anticipation, and others that, at just twenty years old, no longer expect anything.

14 – When life is hell: the case of the jinx

As is clear in the short story “The Train Whistled,” the humorous gradient has the gift of liberating from form, or rather of embracing it by showing how it is not a definitive expression of the self, nor does it imprison it irreparably. Appearing in a certain way has a reason for being in the history and life of the person, which is far more complex than it appears. Humor knows how to understand the deep reasons behind the discomfort of the self. However, not always is a person capable of looking at others with the respect typical of humor. More often than not, the self is defined and confined by those who observe it in a certain form and manner of being. Let’s think of many characters presented in “Novels for a Year,” such as Rosario Chiarchiaro from “The License” (1911).

Judge D’Andrea could no longer sleep at night; he would gaze at the stars and think. He, who had to have certainties during the day, realized at night that the only secure foundation he could start from was knowing that he had no truths. He thought at night to be punctual in his judgments, but his reflections were completely contrary to those of the day. And this was a paradox for someone like him who had to issue sentences and establish where the truth lay. “He was not yet old; he could have been only forty; but it would take extremely strange and almost implausible things, monstrous intertwining of races, mysterious labors of centuries to arrive at any approximate explanation of that human product called Judge D’Andrea.”

For several weeks he had been contemplating an unjust trial involving Rosario Chiarchiaro. “That trial was truly unjust: unjust because it included a merciless injustice against which a poor man was desperately trying to rebel without any chance of escape. There was in that trial a victim who could not blame anyone. He had wanted to take it out on two people in that trial, the first two who had come his way, and, indeed, justice had to deny him, wrong, wrong, wrong, without remission, thus ferociously reaffirming the injustice of which that poor man was a victim.” Judge D’Andrea could not speak with anyone about the Chiarchiaro case, for as soon as he mentioned that name he was immediately told to be quiet and the interlocutor would look for something to touch or some other charm, believing that even just that name brought bad luck. Now everyone would ward off evil when Chiarchiaro passed by, because he was, or at least everyone believed him to be, a jinx. His fame was universally known, and everyone, but truly everyone, could testify to it. Well, one day, weary of the attitude of the entire citizenry that had crucified him to a form, Chiarchiaro rebelled and sued the first two citizens who had warded off evil at his passing.

In order not to create a spectacle in front of the whole town, Judge D’Andrea decided to summon Chiarchiaro. The poor man presented himself before him with a “face of a jinx, which was a wonder to see. He had let a bristly, bushy beard grow over his hollow yellow cheeks; he sported a pair of thick bone-rimmed glasses that gave him the appearance of a barn owl; and he had put on a shiny, worn suit that sagged everywhere.” Chiarchiaro had decided to take on the form that all his fellow citizens had attributed to him, but the judge, surprised, reproached him and scolded him for this display. Then, Chiarchiaro threatened to use his jinxing powers to convince him. The judge also showed that he, deep down, shared the conviction held by the entire town. Chiarchiaro not only withdrew his lawsuit against the two who had denigrated him, but he even demanded that he be issued a jinxing license.

When the judge asked him for the reason, he replied: “I’ll put it as a title on my business cards. Your Honor, they have murdered me. I was working. They made me get kicked out of my clerical job, claiming that with me there, no one came to make debts and pledges; they threw me out into the street, with a paralyzed wife for three years and two unmarried daughters, of whom no one will ever want to know, because they are my daughters; we live on the assistance sent to us from Naples by my son, who has a family as well, four children, and cannot maintain this sacrifice for us for long. Your Honor, all I have left is to make a living as a jinx! I have dressed like this, with these glasses, this suit; I have let my beard grow; and now I’m waiting for the license to enter the field!” From then on, he would be paid not to cast the evil eye on others, to stay away from shops, factories, so the townsfolk could remain healthy. Everyone would pay him the health tax.

Once again, Pirandello’s genius tells a paradoxical, incredible, exaggerated story to describe the conventions of many human relationships rooted not in a desire to truly know one another, but in conventions, stereotypes, clichés, and slander. In relationships, man often starts from prejudices, forgetting to meet the other person. The attitude of a surprised question, however, is typical of a person who is interested in the real, that is, fully engaged in life. Wonder does not make us pause at the immediate image but urges us to go beyond appearances, to grasp, so to speak, the essence, meaning, reason, and origin of what we see and what happens. Thus, the act of knowledge becomes a movement and a tension towards the Mystery that is grasped in reality and that one desires to know. When reality is observed with wonder, it is perceived as a sign and, in a certain way, as the way of truth, a road to truth. The amazed gaze captures a deep unity in reality, a Mystery that unites everything. Reality is symbolic; an inner beauty traverses the world.

The miracle is this surprise of the evidence of meaning and significance, which occurs in a moment, fleetingly. Only an attentive and open gaze can grasp it. The moment after, when reality may return to its previous monotony and dullness, is the memory of the miracle perceived and recognized that reopens the desire for it to happen again as it once did. However, when wonder and amazement give way to skepticism, cynicism, and sadness, a form of violence can take precedence in human relations that is often not physical but is made up of words, gestures, and glances. Every time we look at those we encounter without sensing the Mystery hidden within them and reduce them to our thoughts and judgments, we commit an unheard-of violence, much like that of the entire population towards Chiarchiaro.

15 – What does man need to regain the lost unity?

In all his work, Pirandello seeks to shed light on the drama of contemporary man—fragmented, uncertain, in search of an Ideal that can restore his “lost unity.” It is precisely during the years when Freud revolutionizes psychology, Einstein introduces relativity, and Picasso incorporates the space-time dimension into painting, initiating analytic cubism, that the great genius of Pirandello describes man’s “loss of center” (Hans Sedlmayr), the advent of cultural relativism, and the affirmation of homo technologicus. An author who understands contemporary culture so well that he anticipates and captures its developments is not, of course, appreciated by his contemporaneous readers and intellectuals. For this reason, his work has often been reduced and classified into rigid and simplistic cages.

Throughout this journey, I hope it has been sufficiently demonstrated how Pirandello’s works are permeated by the question of what it means to be human, where one can find authenticity, and in what way one can truly live rather than merely exist. In simple terms, the issue is how a person can find their destiny, how the “nomen” can genuinely materialize the “omen” (which means “prophecy, omen, destiny”). What can free us from that initial letter “N” of the “nomen” so that one might find their fulfillment?

Some characters embark on the path of seeking a freedom that is ex lege, outside familial, work-related, and social constraints.

Thus, having rid himself of his name, Mattia Pascal transforms into Adriano Meis, convinced that he can be the architect of his fate. He soon realizes that his freedom, which initially seemed limitless, can be called loneliness and boredom, condemning him to “a terrible punishment: that of the company” of himself. He reaches this conclusion: “How had I deluded myself to think a trunk severed from its roots could live? I had considered myself happy with the leaden cloak of falsehood upon me.”

Vitangelo Moscarda, on the other hand, after renouncing everything—work, family, possessions—arrives at a form of annihilation of the self, a reduction to pure spirit that identifies itself at times with an aspect of nature while renouncing any form.

Serafino Gubbio, having become homo technologicus who communicates through the lens of the camera, ultimately reduces himself to aphasia and total incommunicability.

These are just a few examples of characters who fail in the endeavor to truly become protagonists of their own existence. What, then, can truly reignite humanity, allowing the self to live fully rather than simply exist like mollusks, butterflies, or spiders?

Here then, in Pirandello’s vast production, traces of an answer appear.

The man, lulled by the daily hustle, asleep to the burdens and divertissement in which he lives, needs something to happen that will awaken his self, his thirst for happiness. We understand this from the wonderful stories “The Train Whistled” and “Ciàula Discovers the Moon.” Man is like a child, discovering reality only at the moment when he looks at it with wonder and amazement.

And just like a child, each of us needs a father, an author to point out a navigable path. It is the author that the six characters seek.

Furthermore, in the trilogy of myth, written between 1928 and 1936 (the year of the playwright’s death), Pirandello attempts to trace the truth in the socio-political realm, in the artistic and in the religious: “The New Colony,” “Lazarus,” and “The Giants of the Mountain.” A careful re-reading of the entire trilogy is advisable. In “Lazarus,” we read that it is necessary to “give wings back” to those who “lack the feet to walk on earth” (hope); we must “live in God the works we perform” (offering), and seek the “hundredfold down here before eternity” (happiness and salvation).

What can heal the discord, the tearing, and the drama that man experiences? We hear Pirandello directly in the surprising interview he gives to Carlo Cavicchioli in 1936: “Christ is charity, love. Only from love that understands and knows how to maintain the right balance between order and anarchy, between form and life, is the conflict resolved.” In the same interview, Pirandello expresses pleasure that his work has never been deemed heretical by the church: “I am also pleased that no religious authority has found anything to condemn. […] ‘Civiltà Cattolica’ has discussed it thoroughly […] and agrees on its perfect orthodoxy […] Perfect orthodoxy as a position of problems. And such problems only require a Christian solution.” Pirandello also indicates where the answer to the human problem is most present in his work: “In ‘Lazarus,’ I give the clearest answer to the fundamental discord of my theater.”

Giovanni Fighera

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