In a book on D. H. Lawrence entitled Portrait of a Genius, But..., Richard Aldington describes how that phrase inevitably came up when people argued the merits of Lawrence, often, says Aldington, with more emphasis on the "but" than on the "genius" (Aldington, p. vii). That kind of qualified compliment seems apropos to a discussion of Luigi Pirandello (1847-1936), playwright, novelist, poet, short story writer, philosopher, academician, political man, and Nobel Laureate. For despite his being so prolific as a writer, and his Nobel Prize Award notwithstanding, the mention of Pirandello continues to elicit a "Luigi who?" reaction. If there is a ring of familiarity, it tends to occur in recognition of his most popular play, Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Of course, one can speculate as to the possible reasons for Pirandello's relative obscurity (experimental, ambiguous, didactic, repetitive, difficult drama to perform, etc.). Instead, some biographical and philosophical glimpses might whet some literary appetites.

Pirandello was born in 1847 of a well-to-do mine owner in Sicily. He was educated in the classical tradition and became a Professor of Italian Literature in Rome. He came to dislike his academic position and academia in general. Soon after he accepted his teaching position, he was jilted by his fiance, and his father promptly arranged a marriage for him with another woman. After bearing him two sons and a daughter, his wife's health began to fail, her nerves shattered, and she lapsed into insanity. For fourteen years she tormented her husband with fits of bitter jealousy until in 1918, she died. Meanwhile, he overtly, but cautiously, became a supporter of Fascism and the Mussolini regime. This was to change later. The period of 1918 to 1934 (the Nobel Prize Award) was one of the greatest productivity. Pirandello died in 1936 in an austere apartment in Rome. A portion of his will read:

                "The lowest class of funeral carriage, the one for the poor. Naked.
                And let no one accompany me, neither relatives nor friends.
                The carriage, the horse, the driver, that's all.

                Burn me. And let my body...be dispersed, because I want nothing, not even
                my ashes, to be left of me" (Herman, p. 91).

No form, no body, no religion, no politics (cremation as anti-Catholic, no black shirt symbol of Fascism)--only the art was to remain. He had turned into a revolutionary--psychologically against all conventional ideas of behavior (Freud, 1856-1939); politically against totalitarianism; artistically against realism and conventional art.

                Pirandello poses four questions in the body of his work:

                1. What is the self?

                2. What is the goal of the self?

                3. What must the self be willing to undergo in order to live?

                4. What is the responsibility of the artist in dealing with "creations?"

He presents these in a style and attitude which has come to be known as "pirandellismo."

The first factor in "pirandellismo" is that truth is dichotomous. There is the truth which actually exists and the truth which is a personal one. It Is, If You Think It Is declares the title of one of the major works, implying that the individual can create a truth which has, at least momentarily, the same constancy as actual truth. Thus, a dream, a fantasy, a memory are as real to a person who intensely lives them as is the world of "things." Because of this dichotomy, people have what Pirandello calls "multiplicity of personality." Just as there is no fixed truth there can be no fixed person. A person can be understood only from a total perspective. The Father in Six Characters in Search of an Author, says,

                "So we have this illusion of being one person for all, of having a personality that
                is unique in all our acts. But it isn't true. It Isn't true. We perceive this
                when, tragically, perhaps, in something we do, we are, as it were, suspended,
                caught up in the air on a kind of hook. Then we perceive that all of us was not
                in that act, and that it would be an atrocious injustice to judge us by that action
                alone as if all our existence were summed up in that action" (Bentley, p. 230).

To be summed up in that action creates the pain of identity. There is, then, no absolute theory of reality (Kernan, pp. 101-104). People discover finally that there is a two-fold nature of reality--the inner and the outer--both changing--so persons find themselves caught in the chasm between Life, which is fluid and changing, and Form, which is immutable (Pacifici, pp. 213-214).

A second core feature in Pirandello's works is the concept of "costruirsi." He coined the term to mean the process through which a person constructs himself/herself. As people expand the boundary and scope of life through experience and knowledge, they fall prey to artificiality outwardly and hide fears and shame inwardly. Because people don't live in isolation, because they are social beings, as they interact with others, they want to appear decent and heroic and so hide themselves behind masks (Vittorini, pp. 89-94 and 157-159). In its simplest form, this is encountered daily--the pained thought behind the smile, the real message behind the surface words, etc. The problem arises, says Pirandello, when we deceive ourselves with this mask, when we begin believing that which we've constructed because we don't want to, or can't, face the painful situation in which we were caught. So we continue to force the mask on ourselves, knowing we shouldn't, but preferring that facade because it is more tolerable than having to face what we really are. "Everyone tidies up his mask as best he can--that is, the exterior mask. But inside, there is still that other, which often does not agree with the exterior one," he says. Domenico Vittorini concludes:

                "As long as we endure in the tension of exaltation, we are not conscious of
                the extreme lack of sincerity in us, but, if we should happen
                to look into a mirror and see ourselves in it, we immediately realize the
                unbearable ugliness of our deception. Seeing ourselves live suspended
                in the revolting image of our falseness destroys our exaltation, and we
                appear in all the pity of our betrayed humanity" (Vittorini, p.159).

Ultimately, it is a construct of deception--an oxymoron, truth in lies.

This leads to a third aspect of Pirandello: his seeming pessimism. "Our reality doesn't change; it can't change," says the Father in Six Characters in Search of an Author. "It can't be other than what it is because it's already fixed forever. It's terrible" (Bentley, p. 266). For all the pessimism, there is also a view which is inherently positive. We are so saturated with life that we have the potential to improvise in order to face life and fight back. We have a driving need to search for our identity, especially as we find ourselves trapped in a context foreign to our inner being. Sergio Pacifici stated that there is a basic positivity to Pirandello,

                "In the not-too-distant future man will learn to have the courage and strength
                to face life stripped of his masks, naked, and will learn to respect,
                understand, and love not just himself but his fellow men. Only then, after
                much anguish and pain, will he begin to live humanly and see that his
                traumatic experience has not been in vain: life, in spite of its
                thorns, can be a source of joy. Had Pirandello lived, he might well have
                agreed with Sartre that life begins on the other side of despair'" (Pacifici, p. 216).

All the foregoing helps set the stage for answers to the universal questions:

                1. What is the self?

                It is not a fixed personal identity. It is, at times, actuality; at times, it is non-actuality.
                Its essence is as fluid as the external and internal forces which change it moment by
                moment, day by day. Pirandello suggests the same principle of the French philosopher
                Pascal: There is no person who differs from another more than he differs from himself.

                The only "Self" is a "Relative Self." Pirandello's characters try futilely to explain
                who they are to others while those same others interpret according to their
                individualism.

                A literature scholar at St. John's University in New York notes that with
                Six Characters (1921), Pirandello explored a new theme: the interior
                search for identity and how that leads to liberating a person from the constraints
                of the environment. She points out that his novel The Late Mattia Pascal
                (1904) is his early expression of a view of people trapped by hostile forces, but
                overcoming that condition through a gradually evolving sense of identity and
                consciousness of freedom.

                2. What is the goal of the self?

                The goal is to be ACTUAL, to spring from non-existence, to struggle out of and break
                free from the claustrophobic, womb-like interiors of confined essence. Pirandello
                refers to this latter as the "fecundating matrix.") The goal is to achieve humanity,
                painful as that may be, by searching for whatever will give meaning.

                3. What must the self be willing to undergo in order to live?

                a. The self must be willing to EXPERIENCE A STRIPPING AWAY OF MASKS.
                The self must become naked rather than protected and non-actual.

                b. The self must seek out the context determined by his/her needs and wants.

                c. The self must be willing to undergo the sweeping away which will most likely
                take place when the LOGICAL FICTION HE HAS CREATED FOR
                HIMSELF/HERSELF BREAKS DOWN.

                d. The self must be willing to undergo the agony of the search rather than to remain
                fetus-like.

                e. Ultimately, the self must accept that the mid-wife and the grave-digger
                may be one and the same.

                4. What is the responsibility of the artist in dealing with "creations"?

                a. To give his creations being--to saturate them with life.

                b. To give them reason for being.

Pirandello only does the first. To give them a reason for being would "fix" them for eternity. So, as a writer, he creates six characters, he saturates them with life, but he stops there. The only alternative is for these six characters to go in search of an author.

Pirandello states in the preface to his play that he turned his characters loose and stood unemotionally aside:

                "Every creature of fantasy and art, in order to exist, must have his drama, that
                is, a drama in which he may be a character and for which he
                is a character. This drama is the character's vital function, necessary
                for his existence. In these six, I have accepted the being without the
                reason for being." (Bentley, p. 368.)

Pirandello fulfilled his responsibility as a CREATOR; however, he rejected the role of author. He accepted the characters into his fantasy, and he rejected their drama; THUS, THEY ARE IN SEARCH OF ANOTHER AUTHOR. Traditionally, play conveys characters; here, CHARACTERS CONVEY THE PLAY. Pirandello described this succinctly, "Everyone's soul needs to have a little territory of its own."

This topic about a Nobel Laureate dramatist was introduced with a reference to D.H. Lawrence. Perhaps it is fitting to conclude with a quotation from Lawrence and one about the essence of drama.

                "What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison,
                not his own isolate salvation of his soul. Man wants his physical
                fulfillment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the
                flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. Whatever the unborn
                and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive and in
                the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent
                here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours only for a time. We ought to
                dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh and part of the living
                incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sum as my eye is part of me. That I am part
                of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the
                sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race; my soul is an organic part of
                the great human soul" (Aldington, p. vii).

And, lastly, the introduction to Sydney Michael's play Dylan about Dylan Thomas reminds us of the essence of theatre (Michaels, Preface).

                "In the dark of the theatre we remember ourselves. And we know we are not average
                Madison men and that Avenue shall not sell us that we are. In the inner space of the
                theatre our blood turns red. Our nerves signal us again ... directly across the
                ocean of the orchestra pit straight to the pit of our stomachs with the pitiless speed
                of feeling which, if not faster, is more revealing than light.

                In the bell and siren of the theatre, the dormant half of the brain wakes up, speaks up,
                saying, "Who the hell can identify with ordinary men?" For none of us is ordinary to
                ourselves. And it is to ourselves that we awaken in the morning of the theatre.
                Nobody is Joe Doakes, but everybody is Hamlet--prince,insane, with murders to commit,
                with trap-door graves of Ophelia loves to leap into, and wit and poetry on the tongue's
                apt tip. And everybody is Falstaff, gross drunk, thief, liar, scoundrel, lead-weight
                clown, tipable but up-popable, whose wing-bag blarney has a quotable beauty. All men
                want to turn a flower girl into a princess. And all women, once having been turned, want
                to turn about and tell the teacher off. And both may relish having the mind of Shaw to do
                it with.

                In the free country of the theatre our private selves are as differing pearls that
                yet hang integrated on a one strand, the force that through us runs and tethers
                us up together, be it called Heart or Soul or God or Being, but that enables
                us to seat ourselves all facing one way and pray for miracles; and if the miracle
                is tears, out come a thousand handkerchiefs and dab two thousand eyes; and if the
                miracle is laughter, up goes the general roar; and if the miracle is terror, we
                all have our hearts in our throats at once, and we share the fear, and the courage
                to face the fear, just as we do when our President takes a life or death stand in our
                name and we spill over with pride and are shoveled full of the fuel of love, and we
                are never more solidly alive or crisply human. For weeks after the fire-ice event,
                we stride in boots, and our lives have meaning; we are newborn, and the air seems
                cleaner for we have identified with an action which is just and courageous, and beautiful
                to us for those reasons. The theatre is not one speck a thing less than that.
                We have as good a need, genuine as a gene, to partake of that sweet resurrecting
                occasion that nourishes us, in the survival kit of the theatre, as good a need as a
                bum has for his nightcap, a child for making shadows on the wall, or men and women
                for the love and respect of one another.

                In the weightless crater of the theatre: that is where Hamlet's palace is, and
                Lear's asylum moor, and the town square of Thebes. There grows the cherry orchard.
                And there stands the butternut tree. And over it flies a wild duck. And a seagull.
                And a bluebird. That's where desire lies to which the streetcar ran. And
                Willy Loman's Brooklyn with its skeleton house and encroaching apartments. And that's
                where the bus stop is and the girl who lives upstairs of the summer bachelor. And the
                French planter and the Navy nurse are raising their Polynesian children there.

                And that's where we live. In the reality of the theatre. Not in the fiction of
                society. But where we can identify. Where we are extraordinary. Where we speak like
                angels, feel like saints, and act like heroes. Where life is as romantic and true as
                the telescopes tell us. Where we remember ourselves. In the passionate, compassionate,
                tall, large, deep, bright, dark of the theatre."

Aldington, Richard. D.H. Lawrence: Portrait of a Genius, But... (New York: Collier Books, 1950).

Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 1991.

Herman, William. "Pirandello and Possibility," Tulane Drama Review, X, (Spring, 1966).

Kernan, Alvin B. "Truth and Dramatic Mode in the Modern Theatre," Modern Drama (September, 1958).

Michaels, Sydney. Dylan, A Play in Two Acts. New York: Samuel French, 1964.

Pacifici, Sergio. A Guide to Contemporary Italian Theatre (New York: World Publishing, 1962).

Pirarandello, Luigi. "Six Characters in Search of an Author," in Naked Masks, Eric Bentley, ed., New York: E. P. Dutton, 1952.

Vittorini, Domenico. The Drama of Luigi Pirandello (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935).