The Late Mattia Pascal Read Online
1987 | Luigi Pirandello born on 28th June in Girgenti (Agrigento), Sicily |
1886 | Starts studying law at Palermo University. |
1887 | Enrols at Rome University. Writes somes plays, now lost. |
1889/91 | Publishes collection of poems, Mai Giocondo. Leaves Rome University and completes studies at Bonn University, where he writes more poetry. |
1892 | Returns to Rome and writes for various literary magazines. |
1894 | Marries Maria Antonietta Portulano (from whom has three children between 1895 and 1899). |
Publishes collection of short stories, Amori senza Amore. | |
1897 | Starts teaching Italian literature. |
1898 | One-act play published in “Ariel”, originally called L’Epilogo then retitled La Morsa. |
1901 | Publishes first novel, L’Esclusa. |
1902 | Publishes Il Turno. |
1903 | Father’s sulphur-mine destroyed in landslide and Pirandello loses all his own and his wife’s money. Wife is ill, both mentally and physically. Pirandello thinks of suicide. |
1904 | Publishes Il Fu Mattia Pascal and it achieves immediate success in Italy and abroad. Increases literary activity, writes for press, including Il Corriere della Sera, becomes a well-known literary figure. |
1910 | Two one-act plays, La Morsa and Lumié di Sicilia performed in Rome. |
Short stories, La Vita Nuda, published. | |
1911/17 | Increases literary activity still more: writes about fifty short stories, achieves success in theatre with Pensaci Giacomino! (1916). Meanwhile wife’s mental and physical health deteriorating. |
1917 | Writes Così è(se vi pare), Il Berretto a Sonagli, La Giara and Il Piacere dell ’Onesta. All are performed and can be described as the first truly characteristic ‘Piran- dellian’ works. |
1918/36 | More highly successful literary activity: Sei Personaggi in cerca d’Autore produced in 1921 in Italy and then in 1922 in London and New York. Enrico IV produced in 1922. Now internationally established as playwright. Travels widely; plays produced all over world. |
1934 | Receives Nobel prize for literature. |
1936 | Dies on 10th December. |
Introduction
Pirandello is best known as a playwright and it is amongst his plays that we find his finest and most characteristic work. However his writing career was launched in earnest by the success of the novel IL FU MATTIA PASCAL (THE LATE MATTIA PASCAL), published in 1904 and well-received both in Italy and other countries.
Pirandello was born in 1867 in Sicily into a reasonably prosperous middleclass family. He was always interested in writing and published some poetry in 1889, some short stories in 1894 and a first novel in 1901. However, it was only when he ran into severe financial difficulties that he really needed to make a living by writing. His father’s sulphur mine was flooded, making Pirandello bankrupt and at the same time his wife fell ill both mentally and physically. In 1903 Pirandello was considering suicide and it is against this background that THE LATE MATTIA PASCAL was written.
There are undoubtedly biographical elements in the novel: a formerly wealthy, middleclass landowner has suffered financial ruin and finds himself trapped in an unhappy marriage. He runs away from home for a brief respite but in his absence a body is discovered in the millrace in his village and identified as his corpse. Meanwhile he has acquired a substantial sum of money at the gambling tables in Monte Carlo and so decides to seize the gift of freedom handed to him by a benign Fate, renounce his old life and create a new identity for himself. This apparent liberty is initially exactly as he had hoped, but it soon becomes clear that exemption from the rules of society entails exclusion from the benefits of human society too. In his new identity the hero is no longer able to forge friendships, to fall in love, to defend his property or his honour. He has become a mere shadow of a man since man is a social creature and of necessity acquires a role and responsibilities within the society he inhabits.
Those who are familiar with Pirandello’s later and more celebrated work will notice some recurrent themes. Pirandello is often concerned with the struggle of the individual against the demands imposed on him by convention. He often debates the problem of identity and is convinced that no man is made up of a single personality but of several, any of which may dominate in a given situation. He often concerns himself with the moment when reality intrudes to destroy an individual’s illusion that he is living a worthwhile existence and makes him realise that he is merely going through the motions of living. All these ideas are expressed in this early novel: Mattia Pascal is a caricature of the unhappy petty bourgeois, trapped by convention, however unconventional his behaviour might have been initially. (His involvement in the pattern of relationships Romilda-Pomino, Oliva-Malagna, is a good example of unconventional, even amoral behaviour leading nevertheless inexorably to a traditional solution: obligatory marriage and acceptance of paternity.) In his moment of crisis he is sprung free by a twist of fate, is able to select any identity he likes and can explore what freedom is available to a man. Ironically, and here the Pirandellian vision is merciless, he is still a prisoner of social conventions and of his own former personality, and suffers even more restrictions since he has to contend with fear of discovery of his guilty secret. He is never able to escape from the demands of society nor those of his own conscience and it is some kind of moral sense that eventually makes him return to his old identity. However, he never quite reacquires his old status: he will always be “the late Mattia Pascal” and he does not reclaim his wife. This could be seen as a sort of victory since he has succeeded in stepping outside his old existence, but it is hardly freedom, nor a real escape, so this new title merely serves to emphasise the loss of identity he has suffered and he continues to bear the scar of his experience, the sad knowledge that total freedom is an illusion. The novel is permeated with this sense of disillusionment and there are many images (men as puppets or as shadows, Mattia contemplating his own grave, Paleari’s obsession with spiritualism) which remind us of the imminence of death and the transcience and unimportance of the individual man.
The message of the book is pessimistic but is unlikely to depress the reader because of the many humorous elements woven into the narrative. Pirandello himself distinguished between the humorous and the comic, stating that the comic arises from a perceived contradiction between reality and illusion, so the theme of the book would be comic in his own terms. There are touches of straightforward humour too in the depiction of characters such as the viperish widow Pescatore, the foolish and aristocratic characters encountered in Rome and on Mattia’s travels after his presumed death. Pirandello’s gifts for theatre emerges often too and lightens the tone of the book: he delights in dialogue and in set pieces that would lend themselves splendidly to a stage production, such as the physical battle across the bread dough between Aunt Scolastica and the widow Pescatore, the ludicrous sequence of séances in Rome (but which end with an apparently genuine manifestation) and Mattia’s sudden return home from the dead to a stunned and dismayed family, all scenes where drama and farce have equal force.
There are flaws in the novel, not necessarily the question of verisimilitude, an accusation which Pirandello was able to refute in later editions of the novel by citing a similar case that had occurred in reality: the most unsatisfying aspect is probably the lack of psychological depth in the main character.
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