Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, The Mountain Giants (Oxford World's Classics) (2 page)

It is to this inevitable tension between life and form, between the absurdity of what we are and the illusion of what we think we are, that humourism directs our attention. Humourism is not a question of subject matter but of a particular kind of perception which Pirandello calls
sentimento del contrario
, ‘the feeling of the opposite’ or perhaps ‘feeling
for
the opposite’. It begins with the awareness of some incongruity (
avvertimento del contrario
) as when we see an old lady striving and failing to appear young (
SP
, p. 127). If the experience remains at that level, it will give rise to the comic and nothing more. But the true humourist subjects it to a dispassionate reflection which ‘penetrates everywhere and dismantles everything: every image of feeling, every ideal fiction, every appearance of reality, every illusion’ (
SP
, p. 146). This goes beyond a derisive satisfaction at the stripping away of illusions. In the case of the old lady, for example, an understanding of the reasons why she has gone to such lengths might lead to compassion rather than laughter. Hence the
sentimento del contrario
, unlike the initial
avvertimento del contrario
, is the fruit of reflection—a distinction that, to some extent, recalls Schiller’s
On Naive and Sentimental Poetry
(1796), where ‘sentimental’ implies a reaction to the gap between the real and the ideal that is self-conscious and meditated as opposed to ‘naive’ and instinctive.

It is important to recognize that the ‘feeling for the opposite’ does not simply replace one response with another. The humourist, now revealed as a compassionate ironist, remains conscious of the comic aspect of experience and this generates an uncertainty or instability that is reflected, Pirandello believes, in the literary forms that humourism takes, ‘disorderly, interrupted, interspersed with constant digressions’, deconstructing rather than constructing, seeking contrast and contradiction where other works of art aim for synthesis and coherence (
SP
, p. 133). As a prime example of the humourist text, Pirandello cites Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
, but his own
Six Characters
, which he himself describes as ‘stormy and disordered … constantly interrupted, sidetracked, contradicted’ (
PSC
, p. 195), would fit the bill just as well. Life, for the humourist, resists the
constraints of genre; it is neither a novel nor a drama. And if Sterne’s narrator undermines the fiction of coherent identity by parodying and disrupting the conventions of narrative, Pirandello does the same through his recognition and subversion of the conventions of theatrical representation.

Impressive and eloquent though
Humourism
often is, it may be doubted whether Pirandello’s ideas would have attracted serious attention for very long without the powerful advocacy of the philosophercritic Adriano Tilgher in his chapter on the dramatist in
Studies in Contemporary Theatre
(1923). Tilgher does more than follow the lead of
Humourism
in seeing the tension between life and form as central to Pirandello’s thought; he seizes on the paradox of a reasoning process that undermines reason to present Pirandello’s art as the most powerful literary extension of a crisis in modern thought:

Pirandello’s art is not only chronologically but also ideally contemporary with the great idealist revolution that took place in Italy and Europe at the beginning of this century. It carries over into art the anti-intellectual, anti-rationalist, anti-logic current that permeates the whole of modern philosophy and is now culminating in Relativism. Pirandello’s art is anti-rationalist not because it denies or ignores thought to the total benefit of feeling, passion, and affections, but rather because it installs thought at the very centre of the world as a living power struggling with the living and rebellious powers of Life.
⁵

Pirandello was initially flattered by the major role thus assigned to him, but he later resented the critic’s not implausible claim to have influenced some of the plays that followed
Six Characters
and
Henry IV
. More justifiably, he came to regard the Tilgher formula as reductionist and insisted that his works offer images of life which assume universal significance rather than concepts that express themselves through images. Tilgher’s account of Pirandello is, no doubt, unduly dry and schematic and he has been reproached for neglecting the comic verve that so often leavens the dramatist’s so-called ‘cerebralism’. He has, however, the great merit of showing that Pirandello’s vision tends inevitably towards the theatre which embodies and enhances the form–life duality by the very fact that it subjects a fixed text to the vagaries and hazards of performance.

‘[N]othing in this play exists as given and preconceived: everything is in the making, … everything is an unforeseen experiment’ says Pirandello (
PSC
, p. 194).
Six Characters in Search of an Author
bears the subtitle ‘a play in the making’; it is often described as ‘a play within a play’, and it would be equally appropriate to speak of ‘a rehearsal within a rehearsal’. The audience finds the Director and the Actors apparently assembled to rehearse one of Pirandello’s most successful earlier plays,
The Rules of the Game
(1918), whose Italian title,
Il giuoco delle parti
(more accurately translated as
The Game of Roles
or
Role-Playing
) reminds us that the innate theatricality of life is no new concern of the author. But whereas
The Rules of the Game
conformed to the scenic conventions of naturalist theatre—the familiar setting in a bourgeois salon and the invisible ‘fourth wall’ dividing audience from actors—
Six Characters
gives us a bare stage where the presence of Director and Stage Manager and the absence of props prevent any willing suspension of disbelief. Thus Pirandello subtly announces a thematic continuity combined with a revolutionary innovation in stagecraft.

The rehearsal of
The Rules of the Game
is interrupted by the arrival of the Six Characters who, having been refused by a novelist, seek to impose their drama on the Director. There is, of course, nothing very original in the conceit of fictional characters seeming to take on a life independent of an author’s will, but
Six Characters
, in a typical Pirandellian move, turns the conventional scheme on its head—not an author who creates characters so alive that they escape from his control, but rather uncreated characters who need the fiat of an author in order to be given life. The idea seems to have occupied Pirandello for at least ten years. The short stories
The Tragedy of a Character
(1911,
NA
i. 816–24) and
Conversations with Characters
(1915,
NA
iii. 1138–54) already present characters who attempt to impose themselves upon the author, and a fragmentary sketch from roughly the same period gives us the Father’s visit to Madame Pace’s establishment, and mentions the Stepdaughter, the Mother, and the Son (
SP
, pp. 1256–8). By July 1917, in a letter to his son Stefano, we find Pirandello invoking

A strange sad thing, so sad:
Six Characters in Search of an Author: A Novel in the Making
. Perhaps you can see it: six characters caught up in a terrible
drama who follow me everywhere because they want to be put into a novel; an obsession; and I don’t want to hear of it and I tell them that it’s useless … and they show me their wounds and I drive them away.
⁶

The process that led from initial rejection by the novelist to a partial realization by the dramatist is discussed in the 1925 Preface, written four years after the first performance of the play. He has no interest, he explains, in the portrayal of characters unless they are ‘imbued, so to say, with a distinct sense of life from which they acquire a universal significance’ (
PSC
, p. 187), and he could find no such significance in the haunting image of the Six Characters. But nor can he start out from an idea and expect it to evolve into an image; to do so would be to yield to the kind of symbolism he detests ‘in which the representation loses all spontaneous movement to become a mechanism, an allegory’ (
PSC
, p. 187). The only solution is to begin with the image and then find an appropriate artistic form in which it will be tested to see what significance, if any, it holds. The phrasing of the letter to Stefano is revealing: Pirandello may speak of a novel, but the terms ‘drama’ and ‘tragedy’ already anticipate the theatre. It is only when their struggle for realization has been transferred from the novelist’s study to the stage, when they have contended with the Director, the Actors, and all the conventions of performance, just as they contended with him, that the Six Characters will reveal their ‘universal significance’: ‘the same pangs that I myself have suffered … the illusion of mutual understanding, irremediably based on the empty abstraction of words; the multiple personality of every individual according to all the possibilities of being to be found within each one of us; and finally the inherent tragic conflict between life which is ever-moving, ever-changing, and form which fixes it, immutable’ (
PSC
, p. 189).

We can now see the profound sense of the play’s rejection of naturalist theatre and the nineteenth-century conventions of theatrical illusion. By showing us what purports to be a rehearsal rather than a performance Pirandello stresses the creative process rather than the created work, and he does so because the drama that matters to him is not primarily the one that the Six Characters see as their own, but the drama of his own unceasing struggle for artistic expression. The Six Characters in search of an author turn out to be aspects of the
Author in search of himself, and the stage becomes a visual metaphor for the artist’s mind. What Pirandello says of the surreal appearance of Madame Pace can be applied to the whole play: ‘I mean that, instead of the stage, I have shown them my own mind in the act of creation under the appearance of that very stage’ (
PSC
, p. 194).

The drama of the Six Characters themselves seems designed to rival Ibsen’s
Ghosts
as a melodramatic naturalist taboo-breaker involving an adultery favoured by a compliant husband, illegitimate children, prostitution, a potential semi-incest, death by drowning, and suicide. But it remains, to a considerable degree, a drama frustrated or denied. One central character (the Son) refuses to take part, another (the Mother) insists on an episode (her reunion with the Son) which cannot take place. The whole story is only made available through the conflicting narratives of the Father and the Stepdaughter, as if the plot could never quite break free of its roots in an unwritten novel. Moreover, the two crucial scenes that are acted out—the episode in Madame Pace’s back room and the deaths of the two younger children—are deprived of their proper emotional impact by the incessant discussion as to how they should be staged. At a superficial level, therefore, we might speak of a fictional world, that of the Six Characters, being undermined by constant interventions from the real world, that of the Director and his company. In his stage directions (considerably revised in the light of Pitoëff’s production), Pirandello emphasizes the gap between the two worlds, insisting that the distinction between Characters and Actors be reinforced by all means, including lighting and grouping. All this, however, should be seen as a deliberately provocative way of foregrounding precisely the kind of hard-and-fast oppositions that
Six Characters
ultimately works to blur, disturb, and challenge. However we choose to define the polarities that govern the play—reality and illusion, truth and fiction, life and art, or, in Tilgherian terms, life and form—we shall find it impossible to align them consistently with the two groups on stage, and it is hardly surprising that directors of the play have often found it difficult to establish appropriately different acting styles for the Actors and the Characters. In his stage directions Pirandello goes so far as to suggest that the Characters should wear light masks indicative of dominant emotions such as remorse, revenge, and scorn, a device that seems dangerously close to the allegorical approach that he rejects and that would surely lead us to expect a highly stylized or
artificial manner. But when Actors and Characters alternate to perform the scene, it seems that quite the opposite happens. It is the Actors whose tone and gestures appear too polished to be real while the Characters insist on taking verisimilitude so far that a crucial exchange between Madame Pace and the Stepdaughter is spoken in an inaudible whisper, to the great annoyance of the Actors. Each group has to trespass on the other’s territory in order to fulfil its ambition. The real Actors have a professional interest in occupying the world of fiction; the fictional Characters need to test their truth against the real world. The Characters, we are told in the stage directions, are ‘created realities,
changeless constructs of the imagination, and therefore more real and substantial than the Actors with their natural mutability
’ (
SC
, p. 7). But those ‘created realities’ can only exist if the author, in whose imagination they have been ‘born alive’, consents to grant them the illusory life of art: as the Father puts it, ‘What for you is an illusion that has to be created is for us, on the contrary, our only reality’ (
SC
, p. 48). The paradox, of course, is that the life of art, precisely because it involves pinning characters down in a fixed immutable form, becomes a kind of death. Living human beings, however, are condemned to another sort of death or, to be more accurate, non-existence, in that their sheer mutability, their chronic lack of coherence, denies them any substantial identity.

If we [the Characters] have no reality beyond the illusion, then maybe you also shouldn’t count too much on your own reality, this reality which you breathe and touch in yourself today, because—like yesterday’s—inevitably, it must reveal itself as illusion tomorrow. (
SC
, p. 50)