Di Anna Tieppo.
Pirandello teaches us that being ourselves would imply accepting the burden of confrontation, debating, facing conflicts and experiencing their damage, questioning one’s own ideas with the danger that they may be demolished. From this it follows that man finds it easier and less risky to hide his face behind a mask, to live on the margins of mediocrity, without openly embracing any position.
A World of Masks: Pirandello
and Contemporary Times
«Outside the law and outside those peculiarities, happy or sad as they may be, for which we are ourselves, dear Mr. Pascal, it is not possible to live. […] Mattia Pascal: I have not at all returned either to the law or to my peculiarities. My wife is Pomino’s wife, and I really couldn’t say that I am myself.».
Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal, Milan, Mondadori, 2009, p. 233.
Thus concludes The Late Mattia Pascal (1904), Luigi Pirandello’s famous novel, a mirror of an era marked by moral, psychological, and existential crisis that highlights human paradoxes, polemicizes and ironizes the system of social conventions within which the individual, then as now, is forced to live. Mattia Pascal, just like Vitangelo Moscarda from One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (1926), gets lost in the sad and absurd game of masks, assumes different identities in different situations, lives parallel lives, only to ultimately experience the bitterness of defeat: the impossibility of fully and radically understanding himself and those around him.
On closer inspection, Pirandello’s novels reflect what happens to contemporary man, who is often reluctant to show himself as he truly is, rarely clear and pure in his relationships with others. Today as then, humanity frequently lives a high degree of falsehood, devising convoluted stratagems to achieve results, relying on fictitious attitudes that may hide true interests. The honest man comes last, perceived as ‘the defeated’ since he struggles more to reach his destination; better then to wear a mask tailored for the situation that can make the path easier and less troubled!
This also happens in interpersonal relationships: Pirandello teaches us that being ourselves would imply accepting the weight of confrontation, debating, facing conflicts and experiencing their damage, questioning our own ideas with the risk that they might be demolished. From this follows that man finds it easier and less risky to hide his face behind a mask, to live on the margins of mediocrity, without openly embracing any position. Those who do not show themselves avoid the risk of losing, since they appear untouchable on every front. Those who do not take risks cannot establish authentic bonds with others, but at the same time can rest on the feathers of everyday calm.
Hence the debate that arises from the author’s novels, the crisis that affects the characters, their being ‘misfits’, always searching for themselves, imprisoned in forms and situations they do not feel peculiar to themselves. In fact, current reality does not always offer a rosier vision: forced and thrown into a changing and exponentially fast world, man finds himself subjecting himself and others to continuous reevaluation, showing himself differently in various contexts only to then ask at the end of the day: “Who am I? Which of the infinite figurations of myself? And how do others see me?”
Consider also only the circumstances that every person experiences in daily life: from work experience to the relationship with a partner to friendships; is one always oneself or does one break down, ‘shatter’ into a different individuality, into one, a hundred, a thousand masks in front of each of them? Indeed, society itself requires this ‘fossilization’ into different entities which partly are responsible for the death of the individual. In official situations it is necessary to display the appropriate formality; with acquaintances one wears masks that highlight character strengths; with one’s partner one strives to show the best side, and so on.
We live in a world where masks seem almost necessary to face situations, in a reality where the extreme fragility of relationships does not easily allow the knowledge of those around us, and likewise of ourselves. We delude ourselves into fully understanding who is in front of us until a chance event inevitably causes the collapse of the house of cards we had built. Nothing remains but to gather the shards of the house and start a new construction.
But what then remains to man if he cannot fully know himself and the world? What way out is presented to him in a reality made of appearances and illusions?
The admission and acceptance of changes in oneself and others, the awareness that “a reality was not given to us and there isn’t […] a forever, but one that is continuous and infinitely mutable,” as Pirandello would say, and the attempt to be, as much as possible, more sincere with one’s own self and with those in front of us.
In short, it is time to abandon masks and try to show the nakedness of one’s own face.
Anna Tieppo
January 4, 2017
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