Mithyl Banymandhub

There are novels, poems and plays we would never have read had they not been on the syllabus of the courses we were preparing for. And thus was it that for my Master’s degree I had to study Bertolt Brecht, Henrik Ibsen and Luigi Pirandello to mention some of the playwrights.

In the course of my research, I came to know that Luigi Pirandello “transformed both the form and the content of drama and his characters continue to fascinate and haunt audiences”. This was in 1974.

Back home after completing my studies at the University of Delhi, I have casually read whatever I could on him. With the passage of time I came to know more about him and his writings. His renown, however, rests upon his achievements as a playwright.

Privileged Youth

Luigi was born in Girgenti, Italy, on June 28, 1867, to Stefano and Caterina Pirandello. His older sister, Lina, and he grew up in a comfortable home for their father was the wealthy owner of a Sulphur mine. His father expected him to run the business eventually, but the sensitive and introspective son had other ideas. The child enjoyed listening to family stories about heroic struggles for political independence, as well as their servant’s ghost stories which helped him to develop his imagination and interest in literature.

During his privileged youth Pirandello became an avid reader. He began to question traditional customs and beliefs, and he learned to be self-assertive. He observed the masks of submission his mother adopted in response to his father’s adulterous affairs and his violent encounters with the Mafia. He also noted the preferential treatment he received from teachers and clerics as he was the son of a prominent figure. In reaction to such hypocrisy he renounced the Catholic church.

Classical Languages and Literature

Pirandello received a fine education. He attended the elementary school in Girgenti, and, in 1880, the high school in Palermo. There he wrote skits for classroom performances, and, at the age of sixteen, he began to write poetry. He studied classical languages and literature at the university of Palermo until he became engaged to an older cousin whom his father did not want him to marry. Therefore, Pirandello was sent to study at the university of Rome where he stayed from 1887 to 1889. Then he left for Bonn to prepare for his doctorate. While mastering German, translating Romantic – Verse, preparing two of his four collections of poetry for publication, and studying philology at Bonn University, Pirandello wrote his dissertation on the sounds and phonetic development of the Girgenti dialect. After receiving the degree of doctor in philosophy in 1891, he taught Italian at the University for one year and studied philosophy.

He broke his engagement upon his return to Italy and joined a writer’s colony near Rome. In January, 1894, he married Antoinette Portulano, the daughter of his father’s business associate. With a generous allowance the couple established its home in Rome. They had two sons and a daughter and enjoyed life, until their families lost fortune in 1903. A landslide and flood destroyed the Sulphur mine.

Discovery of Creative Freedom

The crisis provoked his wife’s nervous breakdown. She never recovered her sanity. She suffered from Paranoia and constantly accused her husband of infidelity. In discussing her tantrums with his biographer, Frederico Nardelli, Pirandello explained that his wife used her illness to control him.

In addition to running the household, rearing their children and teaching linguistics at the Instituto Superiore di Magistero (a teacher’s college for women), he wrote much during her illness. During that period of “imprisonment” he discovered creative freedom and produced some of his most original works: four of his seven novels, short stories, essays on literary criticism and theory and the first twelve, of his forty-four plays. Political events increased the couple’s stress as well, for both sons were drafted and fought in the war. After his daughter shot herself, Pirandello sent her to live with an aunt in Florence. In addition, after his wife tried to kill him, in 1918, he placed her in a sanatorium, where she soon died.

Because of the successful performances of his plays after World War I, Pirandello’s royalties increased. He left the teaching Job and devoted himself to his creative interests. With the exception of one novel, Uno, nessuno, centomila (1925, One, None and a Hundred Thousand,1933), which shows the dissolution of the personality and the incomplete project of offering one story for each day of the year Novelle per un ano (1922-1937; stories for one year, he focused his attention on the theatre. His support of the Fascist regime assured him success, and he enjoyed dictator Benito Mussolini’s enthusiastic reception of his plays. With a government grant the playwright founded a theatre company, the Teatro d’Arte di Roma. From 1925 to 1928, he produced both his own and foreign plays.

New Stage in his Career

Pirandello’s contact with foreign actors marked a new stage in his career. Between 1922 and 1933, he wrote seven plays for his leading lady Marta Abba. He starred with her in three of them. In 1925-26, he travelled with his troupe to introduce his plays to the major cities of Europe and South America. He was acclaimed as the new voice of the theatre. Pirandello became a member of the Italian Academy and was awarded France’s Legion of Honour in 1929. In 1934, he was awarded the Nobel prize in literature. He also received a contract to interpret the role of the Father in the American film version of Sei personaggi in cierca d’autore (1921, six characters in search of an Author, 1922).

He died of pneumonia in Rome on December 10, 1936 before it could be produced.

Pirandello was gifted with a penetrating, critical mind. While reflecting upon his life and works, he suggested to his biographer that the time and place of his birth- the Càvusu (Sicilian for “chaos”) district of Girgenti, during a cholera epidemic, which did not spare his father- inform the themes and styles of his work. Besides indicating an intimate relationship between his life and the vision of the world communicated in his writing, Pirandello articulated his love for the disparate that marks the unity of his works, from his first collection of poetry Mal giocondo (1889; painful mirth) to the seminal analysis of his nature of the comic in L’umorismo (1908; revised, 1920; Humour, partial translation 1966; complete translation, 1974) and his avant-garde plays.

In his dramas Pirandello juxtaposes contradictions, fuses past and present, and interweaves tragedy and comedy. Analysis of the factors that helped him to develop a new dramatic mode permits comprehension of the subtleties of irony, as well as appreciation for his spiritually isolated characters, intellectually demanding situations, and dynamic theatricalism. The Sicilian sun which awakens his characters’ passion, shines most brilliantly in his poetry, early fiction and folk comedies. Southern attitudes are present even in his later plays, however, where overtly lighthearted characters clash with the desperate.

In the 1890s Pirandello joined a literary circle that included the Sicilian writers Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga. Encouraged by them he wrote naturalistic fiction about life among the lower classes in Sicily and transformed some of the narratives into plays, Pirandello’s regional studies objectively paint a Sicilian landscape in which his characters, with primitive passion and irrational fears, are “overwhelmed by uncontrollable destiny”.

His ability to bracket concepts and to dissect ideas, coupled with his training in philology, allowed him to capture the rhythms and flavour of colloquial speech.

Pirandello’s pessimistic temperament and “anguished memories” of coping with the nervous breakdown and paranoia of his wife, who lived simultaneously on different planes of reality, helped him to develop attitudes about existence that he wished to dramatize. Within the intellectual framework of philosophy and psychology, he introduces dramatic embodiments of the inner world of the self, but he enlivens the stage with theatrical tricks.

Pirandello’s dramatic techniques show the importance of the popular Commedia dell’arte, in which masked stock characters followed a plot outline of a “crucial episode”. During the performance, each character improvised dialogue- with much buffoonery- corresponding to his or her persona and helped construct a play justifying the important scene.

He strove for similar vivacity in several plays, especially in Questa sera si recita a soggetto (1930; Tonight we improvise, 1932). A play-within-the-play, the action takes place in the aisles, as well as on the stage, where actors attempt to transform a story of a tragedy into a play. Disagreements about aesthetics frame the improvisation, which turns out to be a series of melodramatic tableaux.

Compassion
of the Audience

However, Pirandello’s renown rests upon his achievements as a playwright. With adroit stagecraft, he contrasts Art and Life. His “magic mirrors reflect illusions of appearance and reality, while his analysis of the structures of personality reveals that people wear masks to survive in society”. Humanity condemned to self-deception deserves the audience’s compassion.

His masterpieces, Six Characters in search of an Author and Henry IV, incorporate the main ideas of his immense literary production. They have an international audience and have influenced the authors of the Theatre of the Absurd, who consider him the creator of contemporary drama.

Bibliography

1. Gnarra, Irene, E. Luigi Pirandello. New York: Magill’s Survey of Literature, Marshal Cavendish Corporation, 1993.
2. Bentley, Eric. The Pirandello Commentaries. Evanston, 111: Northwestern University Press, 1986.
3. Büdel, Oscar. Pirandello. London: Bowers and Bowers, 1966.

4. Vittorini, Domenico. The Drama of Luigi Pirandello. New York: Russell, 1969.