Pirandello. A genius of the twentieth century

⏱ Tempo di lettura: 68 min

By Giovanni Fighera — Luigi Pirandello is one of the great interpreters of the crisis of modern man. In his novels, his theatre and his celebrated essay on humour, the Sicilian writer explores the loss of identity and the conflict between life and form, anticipating many of the anxieties that would define twentieth-century culture.

▶ Pirandello in English

Pirandello: A Genius of the Twentieth Century

Novels, theatre and humour in the crisis of modern man

From La ragione del cuore

Original Italian version: Pirandello un genio del Novecento

Index

1 – The Prophet of the Disorientation of Contemporary Man
2 – The Comic, Humour 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 a Man in Search of Himself
5 – Mattia Pascal and the “Lanterns” of 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 – How 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 Becomes Hell: The Case of the Jinx
15 – What Does Man Need to Recover His Lost Unity?

 

1 – The Prophet of the Disorientation of Contemporary Man

Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936), the great playwright, novelist and short-story writer from Agrigento, is one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century: a man of letters and, at the same time, a philosopher. In him, Leopardi’s words in the Zibaldone seem to come to life: “The true poet is also a philosopher, and the true philosopher is also a poet.” It may therefore be no coincidence that Pirandello made his debut as a poet, although he would later set poetry aside in order to devote himself to prose and theatre, where his greatest creative power emerged.

The genius of an author lies in his ability to grasp the culture of his own age through signs that his contemporaries are unable to perceive. This is why Pirandello’s works could not be fully understood during the first decades in which they circulated. With the distance of time, it becomes clear how powerfully they described the loss of direction experienced by modern man or, in Hans Sedlmayr’s words, the “loss of the centre”: the disappearance of the centrality of the self.

At the age of just twenty-three, Pirandello wrote to his sister Lina on 31 October 1886:

“We are like poor spiders, which in order to live need to weave their thin web in some corner; we are like poor snails, which in order to live need to carry their fragile shell on their backs; or like poor molluscs, which all want their shell at the bottom of the sea. We are spiders, snails and molluscs of a nobler race — so be it — and perhaps we would not want a spider’s web, a shell or a conch — so be it — but a little world, yes, in which to live and upon which to live. An ideal, a feeling, a habit, an occupation — that is the little world, that is the shell of this great snail called man. Without it, life is impossible.”

Less than twenty years later, in The Late Mattia Pascal, the Sicilian writer dramatically anticipates the cultural climate that Cardinal Ratzinger would describe in 2005, during the Missa pro eligendo Romano Pontifice, as the “dictatorship of relativism”. Pirandello entrusts some of his most interesting reflections on contemporary life to Anselmo Paleari. The talkative amateur philosopher uses the image of the lantern to represent a worldview and a conception of life.

In certain historical periods, these individual lanterns, each with its own colour, come to share a common colour:

“In every age, in fact, a certain agreement of feelings is usually established among men, giving light and colour to those great lanterns that are the abstract terms: Truth, Virtue, Beauty, Honour, and so on… And does it not seem to you, for example, that the great lantern of Pagan Virtue was red? […] Nor are those gusts of wind rare in history that suddenly extinguish all those lanterns.”

This, according to Fighera’s reading of Pirandello, is precisely what has happened in the contemporary age, when everyone walks through the darkness carrying his own little lantern and no longer knows where to turn. Once the great lanterns of the past have been extinguished, contemporary society witnesses the lighting of a new cultural lantern: relativism. There are no longer certainties towards which to look, but a single certainty: that there are no truths.

Again in The Late Mattia Pascal, Pirandello reflects on the difference between ancient and modern man:

“If, at the climactic moment, just when the puppet representing Orestes is about to avenge his father’s death upon Aegisthus and his mother, a tear were to appear in the paper sky of the puppet theatre, what would happen? […] Orestes would be bewildered by that hole in the sky. […] He would still feel the impulse for revenge and would want to follow it with passionate eagerness, but his eyes would suddenly turn towards that tear, through which all kinds of disturbing influences would enter the scene, and his arms would fall. Orestes, in short, would become Hamlet.”

The ancient hero Orestes, who acts with determination and resolve, gives way to Hamlet, the man seized by doubt about reality and the evidence of things, paralysed and incapable of action.

Much of Pirandello’s work documents the culture that gradually became dominant from the beginning of the twentieth century: a culture that has lost the method, the right path, for reaching truth. If the Moon represents truth, it is as though modern man has lost the means of reaching the Moon.

The novel Her Husband is particularly effective in illustrating this difficulty of knowledge. A woman is rejected by her husband because she is accused of infidelity, although she is innocent. The supposedly guilty woman then takes refuge in the home of the man suspected of being her lover, and a genuine relationship develops between them. Her husband, having meanwhile recognised her innocence, welcomes her back precisely when she has actually committed the offence.

For the reader, the objective course of events is clear. It is the characters who, like puppets upon a stage, appear limited and unable to grasp it. Reality therefore appears different according to the point of view from which the scene is observed. It resembles a mirror shattered into hundreds of fragments: whoever stands before it sees different, partial and grotesquely distorted reflections. We ourselves appear different according to the person observing us and the position from which we are observed.

For this reason, instead of being understood in all its richness, Pirandello’s work has often been reduced to formulas and labels. Pirandello vigorously opposed those who simplified his writings by reducing them to the handful of concepts and keywords most frequently found in school anthologies and critical essays.

Criticism transformed his work into a system and a Weltanschauung, reducing the vast and fluid novelty of his texts to restrictive definitions such as “Pirandellism” and “relativism”. In reality, Pirandello continually sought the truth about man and, in particular, in the trilogy of myths written between 1928 and 1936, the year of his death, he attempted to trace truth in the social-political, artistic and religious spheres: The New Colony, Lazarus and The Giants of the Mountain.

Particularly striking is an article dated 15 December 1931 in which Pirandello writes:

“My work finds both the judgement of critics and the expectations of the public already prejudiced by all those abstract and extravagant conceptions about reality and fiction, about the value of personality […] which are nothing but crystallised distortions of two or three of my plays, those two or three that first reached Paris, precisely at the moment when my name took flight: this name which, as the ultimate misfortune, is no longer even my name, but has become the root of the word ‘Pirandellism’.”

Ironically, the writer who fought for life against fiction, for substance beyond the name, has himself been reduced to a name. His thought, which emphasised the impossibility of imposing order upon the chaotic magma of existence, has become the system of “Pirandellism”. He himself has been made an emblem of relativism, as though he were its interpreter and defender rather than a skilful demystifier and a powerful, brilliant prophet of cultural tendencies that were rapidly spreading.

For this reason Pirandello rebels and cries: “Down with Pirandellism!” In the same article he continues:

“Allow me to say that none of my works, all born outside any thesis or philosophical apriorism, suffers from Pirandellism. They were modestly conceived and composed by a writer named Pirandello who, while writing them, could not remotely imagine the misadventure awaiting him, nor foresee that these works were destined to be catalogued under a single label, an immutable, rigid and definitive formula. 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 nevertheless warns us: “Perhaps no one is more unknown than a famous writer!” And how is fame born?

“It is born on the day when, no one knows how or why, the name of a writer detaches itself from his works, grows wings and takes flight. The name!… Works are much more serious: they do not fly; they walk on foot, on their own, with their weight and their value, slowly.”

Thus, while Pirandello’s name has reached Paris and travelled throughout the world, his literary works “continue along their path, with heavy steps, and have naturally fallen behind”.

 

2 – The Comic, Humour and the Compassionate Gaze upon Reality

What view does Pirandello have of man? With what eyes does he look at reality and at his fellow human beings?

In 1908, Pirandello examined the existential condition of man in an essay that is at once a work of poetics, a literary manifesto and a profound meditation on existence: L’umorismo (On Humour).

According to Pirandello, the human condition is always somehow out of tune, as though man were never quite in his proper place. Frightened by emptiness and by the vertigo that follows from it, he seeks a form even though he is continually formless. He moves from one thought to another and from one ideal to the next, unable to remain faithful to an intention that is conceived only to be immediately denied or betrayed. Man is a continuous flow of forms and thoughts.

“Life is a continuous flow that we try to stop and fix in stable and determinate forms, within and outside ourselves, because we ourselves are already fixed forms, forms moving among other forms that are immobile, although they may follow the flow of life until […] it ceases. The forms in which we try to stop and fix this continuous flow within ourselves are concepts, ideals with which we would like to remain consistent, all the fictions we create for ourselves, the conditions and states in which we try to establish ourselves […]. But within us, in what we call the soul, which is the life within us, the flow continues […] composing a consciousness and constructing a personality for us. In certain stormy moments, swept along by the current, all our fictitious forms collapse miserably.”

Ancient art invented the granite hero, whole and faithful to his great ideals. Yet the simple observation of reality leads us to recognise the inconsistency of such a conception of man. The ancient hero does not exist in everyday reality. We all cling to ideals that we may betray five minutes later.

It is therefore absurd, according to Pirandello, to imagine an absolute coherence of the self, an intimate correspondence between action and ideal. The very word “coherence” aptly expresses this utopian aspiration to make action follow thought and concrete behaviour correspond perfectly to intention.

In moments of silence, when we are alone and no longer distracted by objects and noise, we perceive the unease of living and discover ourselves miserable and insubstantial before the abyss of mystery. We understand the deception of masks and attitudes adopted to conceal the discomfort of existence, and we become aware of our own precariousness and near-nullity.

“In certain moments of inner silence, when our soul strips itself of all habitual fictions and our eyes become sharper and more penetrating, we see ourselves in life, and life itself, almost in a bare and disturbing nakedness. We are seized by a strange impression, as though in a flash a reality different from that which we normally perceive were suddenly revealed to us […]. At that moment the structure of daily existence, almost suspended in the void of our inner silence, appears devoid of meaning and purpose […]. The inner void expands, crosses the boundaries of our body and becomes a void around us, a strange emptiness, like a pause in time and life, as though our inner silence were plunging into the abysses of mystery […]. It lasts only a moment, but the impression remains within us for a long time, like vertigo, contrasting with the stability — however vain — of things: ambitious or miserable appearances.”

All of us therefore possess a tragicomic dimension: at certain moments the self appears intensely comic and may provoke laughter in those who observe us, or a benevolent smile in those capable of greater understanding.

This is the famous distinction between the comic and humour that Pirandello explains through the equally famous image of an old woman, heavily made up and dressed like a young girl.

At first sight, the image provokes laughter because we immediately perceive the contradiction. This is the comic, the “perception of the opposite”: recognising that a situation contradicts what we would normally expect, producing an immediate and often irreverent laugh.

But once we begin to reflect upon the reasons that have led the woman to dress in that way — perhaps her desire to appear younger and still please her husband — our laughter changes into a smile that embraces and understands the deeper reasons of the other person. This is humour, the “feeling of the opposite”.

At particular moments in our lives we are all comic or humorous: out of place, inadequate, ridiculous, like demigods who place themselves upon a pedestal before others only to fall into the mud as soon as solitude allows us to abandon the exhausting role we have assumed.

Humour has the gift of freeing a person from form or, more precisely, of embracing that form while showing that it is not a definitive expression of the self and cannot imprison it forever. The way a person appears has reasons rooted in his history and life, which are always far more complex than appearances suggest.

Humour understands the deeper reasons behind the discomfort of the self. Yet we are not always capable of looking at others with the respect characteristic of humour. Far more often, the individual is defined and imprisoned by observers within a fixed form and manner of being.

Consider the many characters in Novelle per un anno, for example Andrea Chiarchiaro in La patente (The License, 1911). Everyone regards him as a jinx to be avoided, to such an extent that he loses both his social relationships and the possibility of working. The unfortunate man eventually decides to sue two fellow townsmen who have treated him in this way.

The narrator bitterly observes:

“That trial was truly unjust: unjust because it contained a merciless injustice against which a poor man was desperately trying to rebel, without any possibility of escape. In that trial there was a victim who could hold no one responsible. He had tried to take it out on two people, the first two who happened to cross his path, and yet — gentlemen — justice itself was bound to rule against him […] thereby fiercely reaffirming the injustice of which that poor man was the victim.”

The malicious gaze of his fellow citizens has imprisoned him in a form, reducing the complexity of a human being to a single characteristic that comes to define the entire person.

 

3 – Where Does Art Come From? From the Observation of Reality

In 1908, in addition to L’umorismo, Pirandello published Arte e scienza (Art and Science). In this essay, on the one hand, he challenges theories that reduce art to a discipline dependent upon and subordinate to external factors; on the other, he opposes reductive interpretations according to which art has been narrowed, particularly by Benedetto Croce, to a single problem and a single point of view incapable of embracing the complexity of the artistic phenomenon.

The central concept to which Pirandello refers is intuition.

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) identifies genuine art with pure intuition. Art belongs to a first level, that of intuition, whereas 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 former he appropriates the universe, with the latter he creates it.”

For Croce, art is knowledge “in the first moment of intuition”; it is a theoretical activity independent of practical activity and detached from “feeling” and “will”. In Croce’s aesthetics, the equation intuition-expression prevails and aesthetic activity is considered wholly autonomous.

Thus, according to this conception, only certain episodes of Dante’s Divine Comedy can properly be called “poetry”, whereas much of the work — especially parts of the Paradiso containing more explicitly moral or religious material — would belong instead to “literature”.

Fighera sides with Pirandello in affirming that reason is certainly not secondary in artistic creation. Art arises from a window opened wide upon reality, aided by reason understood as an openness to reality that takes all its factors into account. How, then, could art truly disregard reason or arise from only one human faculty, whether imagination, feeling or intuition?

It must nevertheless be made clear that reason does not produce beauty. On the contrary, beauty moves reason. Beauty exists in reality and urges man to reproduce it in the work of art. It does not exist beforehand in the artist’s mind except insofar as the artist has first impressed it upon his mind through the observation of the world.

Manzoni writes in the dialogue Dell’invenzione (On Invention) that the artist never really invents anything. The word “invent”, after all, derives from the Latin invenire, meaning “to find” or “to encounter”. The artist seems to discover in creation the footprints of the Creator. There is therefore always an intimate relationship between art and reality.

Pirandello appears to agree with this view and with other great writers of the past, such as Dante and Shakespeare, for whom art springs from an attentive observation of reality.

In The Late Mattia Pascal we read:

“Nothing is invented […] that does not have some root, however deep, in reality; and even the strangest things may be true. Indeed, no fantasy could imagine certain follies, certain improbable adventures that burst forth from the tumultuous heart of life.”

This does not mean, however, that art must always be plausible. Some years after the publication of The Late Mattia Pascal in 1904, Pirandello added a postscript dated 1921, Warning on the Scruples of Fantasy, in response to those who had accused the bizarre story told in the novel of being unrealistic:

“Life, with all its shameless absurdities, great and small, of which it is blissfully full, has the invaluable privilege of being able to dispense with that foolish plausibility which art believes it must obey. The absurdities of life do not need to seem plausible because they are true. Those of art, on the contrary, must seem plausible in order to appear true. And when they are plausible, they are no longer absurd. A case in 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, Pirandello refers to a newspaper report published in the Corriere della Sera on 27 March 1920 recounting a story remarkably similar to that of The Late Mattia Pascal: a supposed suicide in a canal, a body recovered and identified by the wife and the man who would later become her second husband, the return of the supposedly dead man and even his visit to his own grave.

Life cares nothing for plausibility. We should therefore not demand from art and imagination a plausibility that life itself continually violates.

 

4 – The Late Mattia Pascal, or the Drama of a Man in Search of Himself

An extraordinarily prolific author, Pirandello left a vast body of work: seven novels, hundreds of short stories, the poetry of his youth and forty-three plays collected under the title Maschere nude. Equally extensive are his writings on poetics, theatre and life, including essays, newspaper articles and transcriptions of public speeches.

After considering Pirandello’s reflections in L’umorismo and Arte e scienza, attention turns to the novels: L’esclusa (The Outcast), 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, Cinematograph Operator) and Uno, nessuno e centomila (One, No One and One Hundred Thousand).

We begin with The Late Mattia Pascal, published in serial form in 1904 during a particularly difficult period in Pirandello’s life. The previous year his father’s business had suffered a severe financial collapse, with devastating consequences for the writer’s family life and for the psychological condition of his wife, Antonietta Portulano.

These were also decisive years for the development of twentieth-century culture: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams had appeared in 1900 and Einstein presented his special theory of relativity in 1905, his annus mirabilis.

During these same years Pirandello anticipates, in Fighera’s interpretation, the emergence of a new cultural paradigm, later described by Cardinal Ratzinger as a “dictatorship of relativism”. In an expressionistic and paradigmatic way, Mattia Pascal embodies the tragicomic — or humorous — existential condition of every human being. It is no coincidence that in 1908 Pirandello dedicated L’umorismo to the “good soul” of the protagonist of his novel.

The story is deliberately strange. Tired of the monotonous existence he leads between a dusty library and an oppressive domestic life, Mattia leaves Miragno, an imaginary Ligurian village. He travels to Monte Carlo, gambles at the casino and wins a considerable sum of money.

On the train home he is stunned by a newspaper report: his wife and mother-in-law have identified him as the corpse of a drowned man.

Anger and irritation quickly give way to the hope of beginning an entirely new life. Free of all previous ties, with a consciousness made “virgin and transparent” again, he assumes the name Adriano Meis. Yet he soon discovers the tyranny of a wandering, solitary and silent freedom, the “painful sense of precariousness that keeps the traveller’s soul suspended” and prevents him even from becoming attached to the bed in which he sleeps. He continually feels “a stranger to life”.

After several months Adriano decides to settle in Rome, where he rents a room. His days are marked by conversations with Anselmo Paleari, his talkative landlord and amateur philosopher, and by his growing affection for Paleari’s daughter Adriana, a gentle and religious young woman.

Adriano Meis becomes increasingly aware of the emptiness of his freedom:

“My freedom, which at first had seemed limitless to me […] could have been called solitude and boredom, and […] condemned me to a terrible punishment: the company of myself. I had therefore drawn near to others; but what use had it been to take every precaution not to reconnect, even weakly, the severed threads? They had reconnected themselves.”

Adriano can maintain the illusion of living only while he remains closed within himself and watches others live. The moment he tries to approach life, he discovers that he is like a dead man who cannot even declare his love.

Now that he loves Adriana, he realises that although he is officially dead, he is not free from his former wife. Legally he does not exist. He cannot marry, and he cannot even report a theft committed against him. He feels “worse than dead”, because “the dead no longer have to die”, whereas he is “still alive for death and dead for life”.

He is a shadow with a heart but unable to love, a man with money that anyone can steal. His entire existence is steeped in falsehood, until he feels suffocated by “disgust, anger and hatred” for himself.

He considers fleeing the house and withdrawing “farther than ever from men”, for fear of falling once more into “the snares of life”. A first suicidal impulse gives way to rebellion. His old hatred for his wife Romilda and his mother-in-law is rekindled, and he decides to take revenge by returning to Miragno and revealing that he is still alive.

While planning his return he finally recognises the deception of believing that he could escape his past:

“How could I have deluded myself into believing that a trunk cut away from its roots could continue to live? […] I had thought myself happy […] beneath the leaden cloak of falsehood […]. Now I would have my wife upon me again […] and that mother-in-law […], but had I not had them upon me even while I was dead?”

Back in his village, no one initially recognises him except the parish priest, Don Eligio. The painful discovery that his wife has remarried his childhood friend Pomino and has had a child persuades him not to reclaim his former place in civil society.

Following Don Eligio’s advice, he writes his story as a private memoir and from time to time visits his own grave, bringing flowers and telling anyone he encounters that he is “the late Mattia Pascal”.

In this strange story Mattia Pascal has become “another man, yes, but on condition that he does nothing. And what kind of man? The shadow of a man.”

The motif of the shadow recalls Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl’s Remarkable Story (1814), whose protagonist sells his shadow to the devil in exchange for wealth. Pirandello similarly tells the story of a man who believes he can cast off his modest bourgeois “shadow”. The outcome is comparable: solitude and anguish.

Several figures in the novel may be seen as possible alter egos of Mattia Pascal: the middle-aged gambler who truly commits suicide at Monte Carlo; Adriano Meis, free of social ties but legally nonexistent; Anselmo Paleari, a bourgeois Hamlet and amateur philosopher entrusted with many of the novel’s most important cultural and aesthetic reflections; and Adriana, who possesses the faith that Mattia lacks.

What, then, is the “heart of the story”? Don Eligio replies that outside the law and outside those particular circumstances, happy or unhappy, through which we are who we are, “it is not possible to live”.

Mattia, however, objects that he has returned neither to the law nor to those circumstances. He has no wife and no longer truly knows who he is.

Benedetto Croce identified Pirandello’s position with Don Eligio’s words. Perhaps, however, the deeper Pirandellian position is found precisely in Mattia’s response: a question still awaiting an answer, the same question that drove him to leave and attempt to construct a less divided existence.

In the Warning on the Scruples of Fantasy, Pirandello speaks of the “game of roles”, of “what we would like or ought to be”, and of “what others think we are”, whereas “what we are, we ourselves do not even know, up to a certain point”.

 

5 – Mattia Pascal and the “Lanterns” of Disoriented Man

The Late Mattia Pascal contains many reflections on man, on the difference between human beings and animals, on the existence of the soul, on the distinction between antiquity and modernity and on the arrival of relativism in contemporary culture.

Having assumed the identity of Adriano Meis, Mattia rents a room from Anselmo Paleari. In one of his characteristic monologues, the talkative Paleari declares that nature has laboured for thousands upon thousands of centuries to rise from the worm to man. Matter has reached this extraordinary point where it becomes a creature capable both of stealing and killing and of writing the Divine Comedy or sacrificing itself for another human being. Can all this simply return to nothing?

Adriano raises objections, which Paleari promptly counters. He asks where the soul is when a man falls, strikes his head and loses his mental faculties. Paleari replies with the image of a piano and its player: if the instrument becomes damaged and can no longer produce music properly, does that prove that the player himself has ceased to exist?

For Paleari, humanity’s persistent aspiration towards a life beyond death is itself significant. He rejects the idea that the individual may perish while “humanity” continues its evolution, because humanity is made up precisely of individual persons.

In Chapter XII Pirandello turns to the doubt that characterises modern man, to the loss of the ultimate horizon of transcendence and to the difference between antiquity and modernity. Once again, Paleari describes modern drama through a theatrical image:

“The tragedy of Orestes in a puppet theatre! […] Suppose that, at the climactic moment, just when the puppet representing Orestes is about to avenge his father’s death upon Aegisthus and his mother, a tear appeared in the paper sky of the theatre. What would happen?”

• “I wouldn’t know,” I replied, shrugging.
• “But it is very simple, Mr Meis! Orestes would be bewildered by that hole in the sky. […] He would still feel the impulses of revenge and want to follow them passionately, but his eyes would turn towards that tear, through which every kind of disturbing influence would enter the scene, and his arms would fall. Orestes, in short, would become Hamlet. The entire difference between ancient and modern tragedy lies in this, believe me: in a hole in the paper sky.”

In Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet is unable simply to act upon what appears before him. Doubt paralyses him, prevents him from acting and living, and renders him increasingly inert.

More than expressing Pirandello’s own philosophy directly, Anselmo Paleari embodies modernity and its epistemological uncertainty. He even raises doubts about the ultimate ontological boundary: death itself. Perhaps, he suggests, death too is connected with our perception, with the extinguishing of our individual lantern.

Pirandello does not intend to construct a philosophical system of relativism or to demonstrate that reality does not exist. Rather, he exposes the difficulty modern man experiences in grasping reality and therefore truth.

In Chapter XIII, Paleari explains his conception of the “lantern”:

“To us human beings […] there has fallen, at birth, a sad privilege: that of feeling ourselves live, with the beautiful illusion that results from it — that of taking this inner feeling of life, mutable and various according to times, circumstances and fortune, for a reality outside ourselves. And this feeling of life […] is like a lantern which each of us carries lit within himself, a lantern that makes us see ourselves lost upon the earth, that makes us see good and evil, and casts around us a more or less wide circle of light.”

The lantern represents one’s worldview and conception of life. In certain historical periods the many individual lanterns, though different, are illuminated by a common cultural light:

“In every age there tends to be established among men a certain agreement of feelings which gives light and colour to those great lanterns that are the abstract terms: Truth, Virtue, Beauty, Honour, and so on. […] The light of a common idea is nourished by collective feeling; but when that feeling breaks apart, the great lantern of the abstract term remains standing while the flame of the idea flickers within it, trembles and chokes, as happens in all periods called transitional. Nor are there lacking in history those violent winds that suddenly extinguish all those lanterns.”

Then the little individual lanterns wander through the darkness, collide with one another and move in confusion. This is Fighera’s image of modernity: no longer a common light through which reality can be approached, but many tiny lights wandering like fireflies, too weak to provide a clear and shared vision of the world.

 

6 – Serafino’s Crank against the “Master” Machines

In 1930 Pirandello travelled to Hollywood in connection with the cinema adaptation of his play As You Desire Me. The Sicilian writer had long been interested in the seventh art. His attitude towards technology and machines, however, was deeply problematic and critical.

He understood that technology and machines do not always facilitate communication; sometimes they complicate it by creating filters and barriers. Although fascinated by cinema, Pirandello perceived the danger inherent in the image, which may become yet another screen separating us from the reality we observe.

For this reason he devoted an entire novel to technological innovation and to the world of machines invading human life.

First published in 1916–1917 under the title Si gira…, the novel appeared in its definitive form in 1925 as Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator). Composed of seven notebooks divided into chapters, the work takes the form of a diary.

Misunderstood and undervalued by contemporary readers and critics, it was rediscovered much later, particularly from the 1970s onwards, when its prophetic qualities began to be recognised.

A cinematograph operator, Serafino Gubbio records his reflections in a kind of diary, reducing himself to “a hand that turns the crank”.

“Man, who once, as a poet, deified and worshipped his feelings, has cast feelings aside as not only useless but harmful […] and has begun to manufacture iron and steel for his new divinities, becoming their servant and slave. Long live the machine that mechanises life!”

Human ingenuity has been placed at the service of creating those “monsters” — in the etymological sense of marvels or extraordinary things — that were meant to remain our instruments but have instead become our masters.

Serafino observes:

“It is inevitably the triumph of stupidity, after so much ingenuity and study spent on creating these monsters which were supposed to remain instruments but have instead, by force, become our masters. The machine is made to act and move; it needs to swallow our soul and devour our life. And how do you expect machines to give back our soul and our life in multiplied and continuous production?”

The protagonist’s name itself is significant. “Serafino” evokes the seraphim and therefore spiritual beings; “Gubbio” recalls the Franciscan world. The name may even suggest Dante’s description of Saint Francis in Canto XI of the Paradiso, “all seraphic in ardour”. Perhaps Pirandello wished to emphasise the intensely spiritual dimension of a character who seems to live almost entirely in thought, detached from physical existence and increasingly confined to cerebral observation.

Serafino reflects upon life inside the Cosmograph film studio, a mirror of the contemporary world dominated by rivalry and ambition. Traditional values find less and less space, while the thirst for profit triumphs. Creativity, intelligence, friendship and authentic communication are sacrificed upon the altar of gain and career.

One day Serafino is filming a scene from The Woman and the Tiger inside the cage of the ferocious animal. The actor Aldo Nuti, hopelessly in love with the Russian actress Nestoroff, is supposed to shoot the tiger in order to save her.

Everything is arranged according to the script. But Nuti breaks the script: in revenge for his unrequited love, he shoots the woman instead of the tiger, which then attacks and kills him.

Serafino, enslaved to the camera, continues filming impassively and without intervening. Struck afterwards by aphasia, he renounces speech, love, communication and the expression of his inner life. Cinema and life finally coincide. Life itself has been fed to the machine.

The horrifying scene, torn directly from life and preserved on film, arouses morbid curiosity and becomes an enormous commercial success.

Once again, Pirandello seems to anticipate later developments in cinema and television: reality transformed into spectacle, a reality that appears spontaneous but is continually mediated and manipulated.

The human being becomes an automaton and stages himself while pretending not to be acting. Serafino concludes:

“I want to remain like this. This is the time; this is life; and with the meaning I give to my profession, I want to continue like this — alone, mute and impassive — as an operator. Is the scene ready? Attention. We’re rolling…”

Serafino represents an extreme amplification of the difficulty of authentic human communication. The loss of speech becomes, in a sense, the danger faced by a man who increasingly relies upon means of communication that cannot reproduce the warmth of the living word.

When human beings forget that these tools are merely means useful in particular circumstances, they risk allowing the tools themselves to become their voice. The fullness of communication — made of glances, gestures, tone, affection and presence — disappears, leaving only the transmitted message.

What matters then is no longer the intensity or depth of communication but its speed and frequency. From this perspective, Pirandello’s novel seems remarkably capable of illuminating certain communicative conditions of the third millennium.

Existence becomes increasingly frantic and inhuman. Serafino asks whether the noisy and dizzying mechanism of life, becoming more complicated and accelerated every day, may finally drive humanity into such madness that it will erupt and destroy everything.

The palingenesis imagined in The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio recalls the famous final page of Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, written in the same cultural period, where the destruction of the world becomes the grotesque consequence of technological progress placed in the hands of man.

 

7 – Vitangelo’s Odyssey in Search of the Lost Self

Pirandello’s short stories often provide the original material for his plays and even for his novels. This is also the case with One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, which has connections with the earlier novella Stefano Giogli, One and Two, dating from 1909.

The genesis of the novel was long. It was first published in instalments between 1925 and 1926 and then appeared in book form in 1926. It would be Pirandello’s final novel.

The protagonist, Vitangelo Moscarda, nicknamed Gengé, searches for his true identity much as Mattia Pascal had done.

His certainties are shattered by a casual remark from his wife concerning his nose: “But yes, dear. Look carefully: it tilts to the right.” He is deeply disturbed by the discovery that he has never noticed a defect that has been before his eyes every day.

Thus begins Vitangelo’s first-person confession:

“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 defect therefore irritated me like an undeserved punishment. Perhaps my wife saw far deeper into that irritation than I did and immediately added that if I rested in the certainty of having no defects, I should rid myself of that illusion, because just as my nose tilted to the right, my eyebrows too seemed above my eyes like two circumflex accents […], my ears were badly attached, one sticking out more than the other; and other defects…”

A person may look into a mirror thousands of times without ever truly seeing himself.

Vitangelo then begins to imagine that there may be equally large discrepancies between his own perception and the way others see less visible aspects of his personality.

There are as many Vitangelos as there are people with whom he comes into contact. Each person has a different point of view and therefore a different image of him.

He later confesses:

“The thought that others saw in me someone whom they alone could know, looking at me from outside with eyes that were not mine and giving me an appearance destined always to remain foreign to me […] this thought gave me no rest.”

His apparent unity is shattered into a hundred thousand pieces, as many as the images that other people form of him. If everyone sees reality “in his own way”, genuine communication between human beings becomes almost impossible, and each individual is condemned to existential solitude.

After the shock of this discovery, Vitangelo attempts to alter the images of himself that others hold and that do not correspond to his own perception.

He discovers, for example, that he is regarded as a usurer and an egoist. To demonstrate that this judgement is false, he evicts Marco di Dio, a poor tenant living in one of his properties, only so that he can give him a better house.

Yet the rumours circulating through the town merely strengthen the image of Moscarda as a heartless moneylender. When people discover that he has actually given Marco di Dio a house, the cries of “usurer!” are simply replaced by “madman!”.

Vitangelo therefore fails not only to destroy the old forms imposed upon him but also finds new, unexpected and unwanted forms immediately taking their place. Even his relatives come to consider him insane, and his wife begins legal proceedings to have him declared incapable of managing his affairs.

Only Anna Rosa, a friend of his wife, continues to maintain a relationship with him. One day, while Vitangelo is with her, a revolver falls from her handbag and accidentally fires, wounding her in the foot.

Rumours spread that Gengé is in love with Anna Rosa and that the incident involving the gun at the Badìa has sentimental causes. His wife collects evidence and testimony to support the case for declaring him legally incompetent.

Anna Rosa, fascinated and at the same time disturbed by Vitangelo’s reasoning, eventually shoots him in the chest.

The protagonist later reflects upon her explanation:

“The reasons she later gave in her defence must indeed have been true: that she had been driven to kill me by a sudden instinctive horror of the act towards which she felt drawn by the strange fascination of everything I had said to her during those days.”

Declared incompetent and separated from his wife, Vitangelo finally ends up in the hospice that he himself had helped to establish through his donations.

The result of his attempt to destroy the many forms and masks imposed upon him is not the discovery of a true self but the annihilation of the ego itself.

At the end of the novel he declares:

“No name. No memory today of yesterday’s name, nor tomorrow of today’s. If the name is the thing; if a name is within us the concept of every thing placed outside us; and without a name there is no concept […] then let each person write upon the forehead of that image in which I appeared to him the name I once carried among men, like an epitaph, and let it be left there in peace and spoken of no more. A name is nothing but this: an epitaph. It suits the dead. Those who have concluded. I am alive and I 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 book or wind […]. I turn my eyes quickly so as not to see anything remain fixed in its appearance and die. Only in this way can I live now. Being reborn moment by moment.”

In order to live — or perhaps merely to survive — Vitangelo must annihilate his self-consciousness, eliminate every form and seek a substance beyond form: without a name, without work, without a home and ultimately without stable relationships with others.

In the final chapters of the novel the opposition between “living” and “knowing” becomes increasingly dominant. To know oneself, one must stop life and freeze oneself into a form; yet life itself knows nothing of forms or names.

Vitangelo explains:

“You must stop life for a moment within yourself in order to see yourself. As before a camera. You pose. And posing is like becoming a statue for a moment. Life moves continually and can never really see itself.”

On the one hand, the self does not coincide with a fixed form; on the other, it cannot exist independently of relationships, because the person discovers himself precisely through relationship. We come to know ourselves in action, at work and in life, rather than through abstract reflection alone.

 

8 – We Are All Characters in Search of an Author

Pirandello’s creative genius perhaps finds its most complete expression in the theatre. Much of his fiction — both short stories and novels — can itself be described as profoundly theatrical in conception.

His dramatic work would culminate in the collection Maschere nude, comprising forty-three plays.

Unlike the contemporary theatre of D’Annunzio, characterised by a seductive and highly literary use of language, Pirandello places upon the stage Hamlet-like figures dressed as bourgeois men and women. They philosophise about life, ask questions, search for truth and frequently find themselves trapped in a state of existential checkmate.

Pirandello also attempts to break down the barrier between auditorium and stage by abolishing the traditional fourth wall and, at times, the curtain itself, drawing the spectators into the theatrical fiction.

Pirandello had written for the theatre from an early age, but international fame arrived relatively late, with the first production of Six Characters in Search of an Author in 1921.

When the play was first performed it was not understood. In the decades that followed, interpretations often emphasised its metatheatrical dimension, the distinction between person and character, its critique of bourgeois theatre and the impossibility of communication between human beings.

In the preface to the 1925 edition, Pirandello explains:

“I wanted to represent six characters in search of an author. The drama cannot be represented precisely because the author they seek is absent; instead, the comedy of their vain attempt is represented, with all the tragic elements arising from the fact that these six characters have been rejected.”

Six Characters — the Father, the Mother, the Stepdaughter, the Son, the Boy and the Little Girl — appear before a theatrical company and demand that their drama be performed.

Their story has in some sense already been created, but it has never been brought fully into the world of art. The author abandoned them after giving them life.

The Father exclaims that the author who created them alive “did not wish, or was materially unable, to bring us into the world of art”, and that this was a genuine crime, because a living character, once born, can even laugh at death: characters do not die.

Later, addressing the Director who asks for a script, he insists:

“The drama is in us; we are the drama; and we are impatient to perform it, just as the passion within us urges us on!”

The Characters possess an urgent need for life. They do not merely want to exist: they want to live their drama fully.

Because of their insistence, the Director first interrupts the rehearsal already under way and then asks the strange newcomers to explain their story to the actors.

The Characters become increasingly irritated because the actors’ representation fails to correspond to the reality they have lived. Eventually they claim the right to perform their drama themselves — or rather, to live it again.

On stage their story unfolds. The Father married the Mother and they had a Son. Over time, however, the relationship between husband and wife deteriorated. The Mother fell in love with the Father’s secretary and left with him.

From this second relationship three children were born: the Stepdaughter, the Boy and the Little Girl. After the secretary’s death, the Mother was left alone and responsible for supporting her children.

The Stepdaughter eventually found work in Madame Pace’s establishment and was forced into prostitution. One day, the Father arrived there as a client. Incest was prevented only at the last possible moment, when the Mother recognised what was happening.

Moved perhaps by remorse and by a desire to repair the damage, the Father took the Mother and her three children into his own home.

But a deeply uncomfortable and almost surreal atmosphere developed. Their shared life became a continual reminder of the family’s two tragedies. The Stepdaughter, the Boy and the Little Girl had lost their own father and could not recognise the Mother’s first husband as a true father.

Tragedy followed. The Little Girl drowned in a pool, while the Boy shot himself. The theatrical company initially believed the events to be part of the performance, but the Characters insisted upon their terrible reality.

Among the many possible interpretations of the play, Fighera emphasises what he calls its prophetic dimension. Pirandello, he argues, perceived during the first decades of the twentieth century the weakening or disappearance of the paternal figure within modern culture and explored the tragic consequences of that loss.

Throughout the play there are clues that allow the absent “author” sought by the Characters to be read symbolically. Their story is also the story of an absent father, of beings who cannot fully live because they have been abandoned by the one who gave them existence.

Humanity without a father — understood as tradition, roots, origin or God — risks losing its identity and becoming disoriented.

What, then, is the author whom we all need in order for existence to become life? What enables us to fulfil ourselves and realise our possibilities? The father-author may also be understood as a teacher or, at the deepest level of Fighera’s interpretation, as God: the presence for whom human beings continue to search.

 

9 – How the Utopia of a Perfect World Dies in Violence

In La nuova colonia (The New Colony), Pirandello presents in paradigmatic form the disastrous consequences of the social and political utopia of constructing a “good and just” world from nothing.

The play belongs to the “trilogy of myths”: The New Colony, Lazarus and The Giants of the Mountain. In these works, written during the final period of his life, Pirandello seeks points of reference and truth within the social-political, religious and artistic spheres.

A group of marginalised people, eager to escape an unjust society dominated by oppression, exploitation, subordination, power and selfishness, decide to move to a deserted volcanic island.

They believe that by beginning again from the origins, far from civilisation and progress and within a primitive state of nature, they will be able to create a fair and perfect society.

Their leader is Currao. Beside him is La Spera, a prostitute who has rediscovered her dignity and femininity through motherhood.

They all depart in search of a new life and of a fraternity they could not find in the society they have left behind.

Papìa: “I’m coming too! I too thirst for a new life!”

Currao: “No more fighting!”

Quanterba: “We’re all going to the island!”

Fillico and the others: “To the island! To the island!”

La Spera: “I’m going to get my child.”

The adventure begins from a good desire. These desperate people have known little other than misery and despair.

Yet the seed of destruction is already present at the moment of departure, because the protagonists embark with an idea that fails to take account of the reality of human nature, of the human capacity for evil and of the depths of violence and destruction of which human beings are capable.

When man forgets his own nature, even the noblest intentions may turn into violence in the attempt to impose an order that human beings alone are unable to guarantee.

Fighera connects this theme with the Gospel teaching that evil does not merely come from outside, from society, but also from within the human heart.

Before long everything begins to repeat itself. Some attempt to impose themselves by force. Others seek wealth by stealing or plundering the ruins. Some understand that nothing has truly changed on the island, while others continue to imagine that human nature can somehow become different merely by changing the external circumstances.

La Spera appears at first as the emblem of redemption through the new beginning and through motherhood. She is often presented almost as a sculptural figure of mother and child: a new Eve and, symbolically, a Madonna.

Yet ambitions for control and power gradually disguise themselves as good intentions and even assume the false name of charity.

The marginalised people who fled from the law now find themselves subject to one another’s arbitrary power or to the “law of the strongest”.

After some time other men arrive upon the island, bringing many women. Their arrival profoundly changes the attitude of the inhabitants towards La Spera. Initially treated with respect as a symbol of new life, she is soon again regarded according to her past.

The recovered Eden reveals itself as the Paradise that has been lost forever. New structures of power emerge and a new social order is imposed. Evil cannot simply be uprooted by changing external institutions.

Currao accuses Padron Nocio of bringing to the island all the vices of the city, together with women and money:

“Good, Padron Nocio, is difficult to achieve; evil is far too easy.”

The project of completely refounding society thus risks degenerating into terrible violence.

The third and final act opens with preparations for a great celebration, in an atmosphere reminiscent of the biblical world before the Flood. False marriages are to be celebrated. La Spera is once again despised and rejected.

Some sailors plot to return to the mainland, declaring that on the island “there is neither God nor law”.

The new world and the social utopia finally reveal themselves as what they have become: a place detached from reality, a hell upon earth.

At the end Currao abandons La Spera and is accused of wanting to become master of everything. Violence explodes and an earthquake engulfs the island. Only a rock remains above the sea, upon which La Spera and her child survive.

The New Colony thus becomes, in Fighera’s reading, a paradigm of the ideologies that afflicted the twentieth century and, more broadly, of every ideology that attempts to solve the human problem not through a realistic understanding of human nature but through an abstract system designed on paper.

 

10 – Only Charity Can Heal the Wounds of the Self

In the relatively little-known 1928 play Lazzaro (Lazarus), Pirandello explores the theme of Christ and charity: that love which “understands and knows how to find the right balance between order and anarchy, between form and life”, and which may resolve human conflict and fragmentation and restore unity to the self.

The protagonist is Diego Spina, who has raised his children according to a rigid and moralistic conception of religion, more concerned with the afterlife than with earthly existence.

His son Lucio is sent to a seminary at the age of six in order to become a priest. Disagreeing with this education, Diego’s wife Sara leaves her husband and begins a new life with the farm worker Arcadipane, with whom she has two more children.

The dramatic action intensifies when Lucio returns home after years in the seminary because he has decided not to follow the vocation imposed upon him by his father.

Diego, meanwhile, intends to build a hospice on his property, precisely where Sara is living with her new partner. The decision would effectively drive Sara and Arcadipane away.

When Diego learns of Lucio’s decision to abandon the priesthood, he throws himself in front of a car and dies.

After two doctors have certified his death, Diego unexpectedly returns to life. Paradoxically, however, this apparent miracle destroys his faith: he remembers nothing of any afterlife and concludes that there must therefore be no other life.

Lucio interprets the same event in the opposite way. He sees in it the intervention of God, recovers his faith and decides to return to the seminary.

He tells his little sister Lia:

“There is, there must be! […] To give wings back to those who no longer have feet with which to walk upon the earth […]. Now I truly understand and feel Christ’s word: Charity. Because men cannot always stand alone, God Himself wants His house upon earth, promising the true life beyond […]. Now I once again feel worthy of wearing the garment for the divine sacrifice of Christ and for the faith of others.”

Charity arises from the recognition of the cry and division within the human heart and from grace understood as an absolute gift.

Diego, having lost every reason for restraint, feels that he may now commit any act and attempts to take revenge upon Arcadipane by shooting him, although he only wounds him.

Lucio becomes the instrument through which his father begins to recover faith. He leads Diego beyond a purely rationalistic demand to understand and judge every mystery and towards a different relationship with life.

Lucio finally tells his father:

“Live in God through the works you perform. Rise and walk in life.”

Lucio also encourages his paralysed sister Lia to rise. To everyone’s amazement, she begins to walk again.

For Fighera, a human being can always rise again because of a presence. Lucio, Diego and Lia have encountered what he describes as the total charity of Being.

Charity is both the law of reality and the profound law of the human heart. Love is therefore not merely an external moral command to which the individual must submit. It is something to be verified within human experience as a correspondence between the deepest desire of the heart and the nature of reality.

Without this verification, love will always appear as an optional obligation undertaken simply in order to be “good”. But love or charity is not an optional addition to life: without charity, nothing has meaning.

Christ-charity is, in this interpretation, the Presence capable of restoring unity to the fragmented human person, divided and consumed by countless worries and driven by desires that fail to satisfy the fundamental longing for happiness and love.

Fighera sees Pirandello as a brilliant interpreter of the modern age in which cultural, ethical and aesthetic relativism produces a divided human being who perceives himself as though reflected in a broken mirror shattered into hundreds of fragments.

 

11 – The Drama of Unlived Life and Love

Henry IV is one of Pirandello’s most important plays, together with Six Characters in Search of an Author. Both belong to the extraordinary theatrical period that began in 1921.

Henry IV was first performed at the Teatro Manzoni in Milan on 24 February 1922 and immediately attracted critical attention.

The play is complex but extraordinarily effective, striking the spectator with the originality of its situation, its surprises and reversals, and the continual interweaving of appearance and reality. Until the end, the audience cannot be entirely certain where truth lies.

Translated into numerous languages, it quickly achieved success throughout Europe and beyond, and soon attracted the attention of the new art of cinema.

In a letter written in 1921, Pirandello explained the event that lies behind the protagonist’s supposed madness.

Some twenty years earlier, a group of aristocratic young men and women had organised a costumed procession during Carnival in a noble villa. Each participant chose a historical figure to represent.

One young man selected the German emperor Henry IV and immersed himself so completely in the study of the historical character that the role became an obsession.

During the procession he appeared alongside the woman he loved, dressed as Matilda of Canossa. After falling from his horse because of the intervention of Belcredi, his rival in love, he struck his head, lost consciousness and awoke convinced that he really was the medieval emperor.

His relatives accepted the illusion and even employed servants and pages to populate the villa, which was transformed into a medieval court.

Life meanwhile continued for everyone else. Matilda became Belcredi’s companion and had a daughter, Frida.

Twenty years later the protagonist still appears dressed as Henry IV, the emperor who famously stood before Pope Gregory VII at Canossa in 1077.

One day the strange court receives a visit from Carlo di Nolli, Belcredi, Matilda, Frida and a doctor, who hope to provoke a shock that might restore Henry’s sanity.

But the supposed madman has in fact recovered his reason eight years earlier and has consciously chosen to continue playing the part.

The audience discovers this only in the second act, when Henry speaks privately to his attendants and reveals the truth.

After years of madness he had recovered consciousness only to realise that life had moved on for everyone else while he had remained frozen within a static and lifeless form.

The visitors plan to shock him by making him believe that Matilda of Canossa has stepped out of her portrait, represented by Frida, who closely resembles Matilda as she looked twenty years earlier.

Henry first reveals that he is sane, then accuses his visitors themselves of madness for the elaborate deception they have constructed. Finally, in a moment of violence, he wounds Belcredi mortally.

After the killing, he has no way back. To escape responsibility and preserve the only position left to him, he must remain Henry IV forever and once again assume the role of the madman.

The play lends itself to many interpretations. Fighera focuses particularly on the typically Pirandellian relationship between life and theatre.

The protagonist represents a man who does not truly live but continually plays a part. His attack upon Belcredi becomes the attempt to destroy the man who embodies the life that he himself might have lived.

Theatre and life become almost indistinguishable, because the individual can never participate completely and spontaneously in the pure flow of life. Human beings continually find themselves acting within forms, roles and circumstances that they have not entirely chosen.

Life escapes, time passes, and when a person finally becomes aware of it, he discovers age and death.

For Henry, love has remained unlived, and precisely for this reason life itself becomes frightening.

No one, during the long years of his madness, has had the courage to confront him with the truth. Everyone has collaborated in maintaining his crystallised form.

Henry IV is therefore one of Pirandello’s most tragic characters: a man who sought a noble and ideal role within a great imperial history, believed for years that he had found it, and finally discovered that it was all fiction.

He may ultimately realise that he has never truly lived.

Shortly before striking Belcredi, Henry cries:

“I made this hair turn grey here, I, as Henry IV, do you understand? And I had not even noticed it! I realised it one day, all by myself, suddenly opening my eyes again, and it terrified me, because I immediately understood that not only my hair but everything must have turned grey in the same way, everything crumbled, everything finished; and that I would arrive with the hunger of a wolf at a banquet that had already been completely cleared away.”

 

12 – The Train Has Whistled: Reality Finally Reveals Itself

Pirandello wrote short stories throughout his life. They became the great laboratory of his narrative and dramatic imagination and were eventually gathered under the general title Novelle per un anno (Short Stories for a Year).

The original project envisioned twenty-four volumes of fifteen stories each, corresponding symbolically to the days of the year.

The short stories often function as a workshop in which the writer develops characters and situations later transformed into plays or novels.

One example is Mrs Frola and Mr Ponza, Her Son-in-Law, which later became the play Right You Are (If You Think So).

The brevity of the short-story form is particularly suited to presenting an individual case or character.

At times a protagonist becomes almost grotesquely fixed within a form imposed by the people around him, a form outside which he cannot exist socially.

This will be the fate of Chiarchiaro, the protagonist of The License, reduced by society to the caricature of a jinx and ultimately compelled to request official recognition of the very identity forced upon him.

At other times, however, Pirandello’s stories contain the hope that reality itself may offer a person the possibility of beginning to live again and rediscovering a deeper identity.

This is what happens in The Train Has Whistled and Ciàula Discovers the Moon.

Reality exists before us. It provokes and challenges us, suggesting a mystery beyond what is immediately visible. Its beauty can awaken wonder, provided that we are still capable of looking at it with amazement even when surrounded by problems and burdens.

Sometimes, however, we forget that reality exists. Wonder disappears and the monotony and difficulties of everyday existence crush us.

This is precisely what happens to Belluca, the protagonist of The Train Has Whistled.

The story begins in medias res. At the end of a working day, the clerk Belluca appears to have gone mad. When his superior asks him about the day’s work, Belluca keeps repeating that “the train has whistled”.

His colleagues cannot help laughing at his bizarre behaviour.

This is the comic: the immediate and irreverent laugh produced by what Pirandello calls the “perception of the opposite”.

But the narrator points out that for anyone who truly knew Belluca’s life, his reaction would have seemed entirely understandable.

After leaving the office each evening, Belluca returned to a house where he had to care for three blind women: his wife, his mother-in-law and his sister-in-law. In order to support the household, he had to undertake additional work after dinner.

There was therefore nothing genuinely amusing about his apparent breakdown.

Absorbed for years in the unrelenting torment of that existence and without a moment’s respite, he had forgotten that the world existed.

Then one night, lying exhausted upon a sofa, he heard a train whistle.

His imagination suddenly followed the train beyond his prison. There was an entire world outside his suffering: Florence, Bologna, Turin, Venice; snowy mountains rising beneath the night sky, oceans, forests and distant places.

The whistle restores to him the awareness of reality.

Belluca will return to work and to his ordinary duties, but he will never again forget that the narrow circumstances in which he lives do not exhaust the whole of existence.

A surprising and beautiful world surrounds him, near and far, and from this rediscovered reality he can draw the energy needed to face everyday life again.

The reader now looks at Belluca with a different feeling: not with ridicule but with a benevolent smile that embraces the limitations and humanity of another person and attempts to understand the reasons behind behaviour that initially seemed absurd.

This is the “feeling of the opposite”: humour.

Among the many forms of the comic — irony, satire, grotesque, sarcasm, parody — humour is for Pirandello the most compassionate. It arises from a gaze capable of seeing every element of reality without erasing its contradictions.

Humour recognises the limitations of situations and people, compares reality with an ideal and, while perceiving those limitations, continues to look upon reality with compassion.

This profound awareness of the fragmentation of the modern self may itself open onto the question of whether there is Someone capable of healing the human wound.

 

13 – Ciàula’s Moon: The Wonder of Rediscovered Reality

Ciàula Discovers the Moon is one of Pirandello’s most beautiful short stories. Its protagonist experiences a discovery of reality comparable to Belluca’s awakening in The Train Has Whistled.

Forced to work for endless hours in a sulphur mine, Ciàula has feared the darkness of the night since childhood.

His nickname comes from the cry of the crow, “cràh! cràh!”, which he is able to imitate perfectly.

Thin and almost skeletal, dressed only in a shirt and a long loose waistcoat, Ciàula often works through the night. Down in the mine, after all, “it was always night”.

He moves “blind and secure” through the “bowels of the mountain”, almost as though inside a maternal womb. He is not frightened by the darkness underground.

What terrifies him is the empty darkness of the open night, because it is unknown to him.

His fear dates back to the explosion in the mine that killed the son of his master, Uncle Scarda, and injured Scarda himself. On that occasion Ciàula had broken his little terracotta lamp and found himself emerging into the night without a light, terrified as though someone were pursuing him.

One evening, after an exhausting climb from the mine, he reaches the surface and suddenly stops in astonishment.

“The load fell from his shoulders. He raised his arms slightly and opened his black hands in that silvery brightness. Great and calm, like a cool, luminous ocean of silence, the Moon stood before him. Yes, he knew, he knew what it was, as one knows so many things to which one has never given any importance. And what could it matter to Ciàula that the Moon was in the sky? But now, at that very moment, emerging at night from the belly of the earth, he discovered it. Ecstatic, he sank down upon his load before the opening. There it was, there it was, there it was, the Moon… there was the Moon! The Moon! And Ciàula began to cry, without knowing it, without wishing to, from the immense comfort and sweetness he felt in having discovered it there, as it rose through the sky, the Moon, with its broad veil of light […] while he no longer felt afraid or tired, in the night now filled with his wonder.”

The discovery of the Moon becomes the revelation of a presence greater than ourselves, existing independently of whether we notice it.

A person may live without recognising the beauty surrounding him and without ever being moved by wonder.

Ciàula suddenly discovers that no fatigue, limitation or circumstance can completely define or crush him. In the moment of wonder even his exhaustion disappears.

One of the greatest surprises for an adult observing a child is seeing how the child stops before reality in amazement, full of questions and curiosity.

Everything is new, surprising and interesting. The child wants to name the things he encounters, just as Adam names the creatures in the biblical account.

This capacity for wonder represents the fundamental attitude of a person entering the adventure of reality with the desire to know it.

Wonder is also traditionally the attitude from which philosophy is born. The fascination awakened by reality draws the child towards the object and produces questions: What is it? What is it called? What is it for?

Knowledge begins by establishing a relationship with what has been encountered and develops into the desire to understand its meaning and purpose.

Without wonder, everything may become useless and insignificant. In this sense, only wonder truly knows.

The ability to remain surprised is also a form of youth that can survive the passing of years. Youth is not merely a demographic condition but a dimension of the spirit and an attitude of the heart.

Some hearts remain full of questions and expectation even in old age; others, at twenty, no longer expect anything from life.

 

14 – When Life Becomes Hell: The Case of the Jinx

As already seen in The Train Has Whistled, humour has the power to loosen the grip of form — or rather, to embrace the form while showing that it is not a definitive expression of the self and cannot imprison a person irreparably.

A particular appearance or behaviour has reasons rooted in a person’s history and life, which are always more complex than what can be seen from outside.

Humour understands the deeper reasons behind the unease of the self.

Yet human beings are not always capable of looking upon one another with this kind of respect. More often, the individual is defined and confined by other people within a single form and way of being.

This happens to Rosario Chiarchiaro, the protagonist of The License.

Judge D’Andrea has difficulty sleeping at night. He looks at the stars and thinks.

By day his profession requires certainty: he must judge cases and decide where truth lies. At night, however, his reflections undermine those certainties, and he becomes aware of how difficult it is to possess absolute truth.

For several weeks he has been troubled by an unjust case involving Rosario Chiarchiaro.

The trial is unjust precisely because it contains within it a merciless injustice against which a poor man is trying desperately to rebel without any possibility of escape.

Everyone in town believes Chiarchiaro to be a jinx.

The belief is so widespread that the mere mention of his name causes people to perform superstitious gestures or search for some object believed to protect them from bad luck.

One day, exhausted by the attitude of an entire community that has nailed him to a fixed form, Chiarchiaro rebels and sues two citizens who openly made gestures against the evil eye when he passed them.

Judge D’Andrea, wishing to avoid turning the case into a public spectacle, summons Chiarchiaro privately.

The man arrives dressed deliberately as the perfect stereotype of a jinx:

“He had grown a bristly, bushy beard over his hollow yellow cheeks; he wore a pair of thick bone-rimmed spectacles that gave him the appearance of an owl; and he had put on a shiny, worn suit that hung loosely from him everywhere.”

Chiarchiaro has consciously assumed the form that all his fellow citizens have imposed upon him.

The judge is shocked and rebukes him for his appearance. But Chiarchiaro has decided not merely to withdraw his complaint: he now wants the judge to give him an official licence certifying that he is a jinx.

He explains why:

“I’ll put it as a title on my business cards. Your Honour, they have murdered me. I used to work. They had me thrown out of my clerk’s job, claiming that with me there no one came to take out loans or pawn anything. They threw me into the street, with a wife paralysed for three years and two unmarried daughters whom no one will ever want because they are my daughters […]. Your Honour, I have nothing left except to make a living as a jinx! I have dressed like this, with these spectacles and this suit; I have grown this beard; and now I am waiting for the licence so that I can enter the profession!”

He will be paid not to bring bad luck to others, paid to stay away from shops, factories and businesses. He will transform the social prejudice that has destroyed him into the only profession society now permits him to practise.

Once again Pirandello tells a paradoxical and exaggerated story in order to expose the conventions governing many human relationships.

Instead of arising from a genuine desire to know another person, relationships are frequently constructed upon conventions, stereotypes, clichés and slander.

People often begin with prejudice and forget to encounter the other person as a reality still to be discovered.

Wonder, by contrast, is the attitude of a person genuinely interested in reality. It does not stop at the immediate image but urges us to move beyond appearances towards the meaning, reason and origin of what we see.

Knowledge therefore becomes a movement towards the mystery perceived within reality.

When reality is observed with wonder, it becomes a sign and, in a certain sense, a path towards truth. The amazed gaze perceives a deeper unity within reality.

The miracle is precisely this sudden perception of meaning, occurring perhaps only for an instant.

Only an attentive and open gaze can receive it.

When wonder and amazement give way instead to scepticism, cynicism and sadness, a form of violence may dominate human relationships. It need not be physical violence: it can be made of words, gestures and glances.

Whenever we reduce another human being entirely to our own judgement and refuse to perceive the mystery within him, we commit a form of violence similar to that inflicted by the entire community upon Chiarchiaro.

 

15 – What Does Man Need to Recover His Lost Unity?

Throughout his work Pirandello attempts to illuminate the drama of modern man: fragmented, uncertain and searching for an Ideal capable of restoring his “lost unity”.

During the same period in which Freud was transforming psychology, Einstein was introducing relativity and Picasso was revolutionising painting through Cubism, Pirandello described what Hans Sedlmayr would call the “loss of the centre”, the growth of cultural relativism and the emergence of homo technologicus.

An author capable of understanding contemporary culture so deeply that he anticipates some of its later developments is not necessarily understood by his contemporaries. Pirandello’s work was therefore frequently reduced to rigid and simplifying formulas.

Throughout this journey, one question has continually emerged from his works: what does it mean to be human? Where can authenticity be found? How can a person truly live rather than merely exist?

In simpler terms: how can a human being discover his destiny?

Some Pirandellian characters seek freedom ex lege, outside family, work and social bonds.

Mattia Pascal, after abandoning his name, becomes Adriano Meis, convinced that he can construct his own destiny. Yet he soon discovers that the freedom which initially seemed limitless may equally well be called solitude and boredom and that it condemns him to the terrible punishment of his own company.

He finally recognises the impossibility of living like a trunk severed from its roots.

Vitangelo Moscarda, after renouncing work, family and possessions, reaches instead a form of annihilation of the self: he seeks to become pure life without name or stable form.

Serafino Gubbio, transformed into a kind of homo technologicus who communicates through the camera lens, ends in aphasia and almost total inability to communicate.

These are only a few examples of characters who fail in their attempt to become fully the protagonists of their own existence.

What, then, can awaken the human person and allow the self to live fully rather than merely exist like the spiders, snails and molluscs of Pirandello’s youthful letter?

Within Pirandello’s vast body of work, traces of an answer begin to appear.

The human being, lulled by the routine of daily life and distracted by burdens and divertissement, needs something to happen that awakens the self and its thirst for happiness.

We see this in The Train Has Whistled and Ciàula Discovers the Moon.

Like a child, man rediscovers reality when he learns to look upon it with wonder and amazement.

And like a child, each of us needs a father, an author capable of pointing out a path that can be travelled. This is also the author sought by the Six Characters.

Furthermore, in the trilogy of myths written between 1928 and 1936 — The New Colony, Lazarus and The Giants of the Mountain — Pirandello seeks points of truth in the social-political, religious and artistic spheres.

For Fighera, a careful rereading of the trilogy is therefore essential. In Lazarus, in particular, we encounter the need to “give wings back” to those who no longer have “feet with which to walk upon the earth”: hope; the invitation to live one’s actions in God: offering; and the search for fulfilment and salvation within human existence.

What can heal the discord, fragmentation and drama experienced by man?

Fighera finds a striking answer in an interview given by Pirandello 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, can the conflict be resolved.”

In the same interview, Pirandello also expresses satisfaction that religious authorities had not regarded his work as heretical, and he points to Lazarus as the work in which he offers his clearest response to the fundamental conflict explored by his theatre.

Giovanni Fighera

▶ Pirandello in English

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