Tales of Madness

Tales Of Madness

A Selection from Luigi Pirandello's

Short Stories for a Year

Translated from the Italian

and with an Introduction

by Giovanni R. Bussino

 

Dante University Press, Boston

© Copyright 1984

By Dante University of America Press

ISBN 0-937832-26-x

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Tales of madness.

I. Title.
PQ4835.I7T3 1984 853'912 84-3147

ISBN 0-937832-26x (hard back) ISBN 9780937832264 (2009, paperback)

 

E-Book Edition ISBN 9780937832844

With permission from the Amministrazione Pirandello.

 

 

www. danteunversity. Org

Dante University Press

PO Box 812158 Wellesley MA 02482

Come uno specchio che per se non vede,

e in cui se stesso ciascheduno mira.


 

(Like a mirror which itself is blind,

but in which each of us himseJf does find.)


 

Luigi Pirandello

(from an autographed portrait, c. 1925)

CONTENTS

Introduction

Who Did It?

If

When I Was Crazy

The Shrine

Pitagora's Misfortune

Set Fire to the Straw

A Horse in the Moon

Fear of Being Happy

In the Whirlpool

The Reality of the Dream

The Train Whistled

Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza,

Her Son-in-Law

The Wheelbarrow

Escape

Puberty

Victory of the Ants

Chronology

About the Author

 

Dedicated to

 

Andrew Terzano

(Foundation)

To my family and friends

Introduction

Madness, howsoever defined, has captured the imagination of man since time immemorial. Accordingly, many writers throughout the centuries have translated the interest, fascination, and concern aroused by this enigmatic condition into impelling, sometimes haunting works of art.

Among such writers, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is almost unrivaled for the sheer volume of works inspired by this subject, as well as for the diversity of his approaches to it. A versatile author, he developed the theme in a number of his plays, novels, and short stories. He also touched upon it in several of his critical essays and poems.

The present volume embraces 16 of Pirandello's short stories — all inspired to some extent by the theme of madness. Since the author wrote approximately 245 stories, many of which deal with madness, our selection, arranged chronologically according to the date of composition, is obviously intended as a representative, not an exhaustive sampling of such works. Some of these tales have never before appeared in English, and those that have, are dispersed in periodicals, anthologies, and sundry collections not always available to the average reader.

There are no simple formulas by which to grasp the significance of madness in the author's short stories or, for that matter, in his other works, because madness in Pirandello is an ambiguous, multi-faceted theme which defies clear-cut categorization. It is particularly elusive because in many of his works the traditional dichotomy madness/sanity is greatly blurred and occasionally the meanings of its constituents are paradoxically reversed. Moreover, it is sometimes almost inextricably bound to one or more of Pirandello's other major themes, e.g., unrequited love, jealousy, encroaching age, and death. Nevertheless, the following observations, for the most part derived from a comprehensive reading of the author's collected works, should at least prove helpful in understanding the general parameters of the subject.

Throughout his vast opus Pirandello projected various mental conditions as madness, ranging from the most lucid psychological anomaly to the most serious form of dementia. Although his artistic vision at times transcends the more rigorous views of psychiatry — Pirandello was primarily interested in madness as a metaphor of man's existential state — he treated the problem of irrationality with uncanny knowledge and astonishing insights, thereby revealing his profound understanding of the human psyche and its intricate mechanisms.

Some of the ideas he used in dealing with madness, such as those regarding the disintegration of personality, he borrowed from pre-Freudian psychologists (Janet, Binet, Marchesini, etc.). Presumably he also drew inspiration from his literary predecessors, especially from the German Romantics and the Italian Verists whose works abound with episodes or scenes of madness. In the main, however, his art reflects his own personal observations.

The long and stormy relationship he had with his mad wife, Antonietta, no doubt played a significant role in shaping many of his ideas concerning madness. The sad story, amply reported by the author's biographers, and often mentioned by his critics, bears repeating here, if only in brief. After suffering nervous breakdowns in 1889 and in 1903, Antonietta began to show symptoms of an acute form of jealousy which eventually was diagnosed as "paranoid schizophrenia." As the years passed, Pirandello tried desperately to understand his wife's illness, and even to justify her strange way of reasoning. He also attempted to have her cured by the best psychiatrists available in Italy at that time. All his efforts, however, proved fruitless. Finally, in 1919, because of her increasingly violent behavior, he was forced to have her committed to an asylum for disturbed women. Although paranoia as such is a "conscious" insanity, the poor woman's mind deteriorated progressively during the years of her confinement, dashing all hopes for her eventual recovery. She remained a patient in the institution until her death in 1959.

Like most writers, Pirandello depicted true madness — that is, insanity — as an abhorrent condition, obviously because it causes anguish and sometimes even brings death to its victims. But he also viewed it as an enviable state of mind inasmuch as it can provide an escape from an oppressive reality supported by common logic. Indeed, he even considered the mad in a sense to be superior to the sane because, according to a principle he adopted from the philosopher Henri Bergson, life is intrinsically fluid and formless and hence the mad, who are illogical or who employ a whimsical sort of logic, are closer to life.

The attitudes and behavior of those Pirandellian characters who ape the mad in an effort to elude wretched forms of existence are certainly more comprehensible when viewed in the light of this principle. Among these pseudo-insane heroes, the following figure prominently: Belluca in the short story ll treno ha fischiato... (The Train Whistled...J, who forgets his tribulations by traveling in his imagination to distant places; the unnamed protagonist in the short story La carriola (The Wheelbarrow), who finds relief from his burdensome life by secretly performing an absurd, gratuitous act; and Bareggi in the short story Fuga (Escape), who seeks liberation from his miseries by impulsively fleeing into the countryside on a milkman's cart.

Characters such as these suffer from what might be called "metaphysical" madness — certainly the most distinctive, and by far the most common form of derangement to be found in Pirandello's writings. Tantamount to alienation, this malady, which periodically afflicted the author himself, can be defined as "the painful awareness of life's apparent absurdity, coupled with the belief that life's problems are basically unsolvable." The many characters portrayed as having this sickness of the soul, appear as extremely lucid, but frustrated, creatures, trapped as they are between the demands and desires of their egos and the rules and whims of an incomprehensible, cruel reality. These characters are prone to reason excessively and, instead of simply living, see themselves in the act of living.

Pirandello knew that this sort of madness is not in itself a clinical illness, but he realized, as is evident in several of his works, that it can have pathological implications and may even degenerate into true insanity.