Hence the oxymoron Pirandello chose as a title for his collected plays: Naked Masks (Maschere nude).

Philosophy and Poetics

As if it were not enough to be an inheritor of the theatre of the grotesque and a precursor of the theatre of the absurd, Pirandello has also been likened to Shaw and claimed for ‘the theatre of ideas’ on the grounds that many of his characters (Laudisi is a major example) spend a great deal of time in what sounds like ratiocination. Moreover, some of his plays, on a first reading, do seem designed to demonstrate a philosophical point, be it the inevitability of role-playing, the multiplicity of identity, the relativity of truth, or the impossibility of real knowledge of the self or the world. Benedetto Croce, Italy’s preeminent philosopher in the first half of the twentieth century, notoriously dismissed Pirandello’s work as an awkward hybrid between art and philosophy,3 but this is hardly surprising if we consider the contrast between Croce’s own neo-idealism and the dramatist’s radical pessimism, rooted in the work of Schopenhauer and his French disciple Gabriel Séailles. And even if Pirandello’s ideas are no more than the common intellectual currency of his age, we still need to see how they relate to his poetics. In this context the crucial document that has served as a starting point for most later discussions of the issue is Pirandello’s own lengthy essay Humourism (L’umorismo, 1908, revised 1920).

The only available English translation of L’umorismo is entitled On Humor which is unfortunate if it suggests some theory of the comic along the lines of such near-contemporary discussions as Bergson’s Laughter (1900) and Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). There are, no doubt, points of contact with both these texts, but ‘humourism’, as John Barnes reminds us,4 is no laughing matter and the immediate sources of Pirandello’s thought are to be found in such less-known works as Alfred Binet’s The Alterations of Personality (1892) and Giovanni Marchesini’s The Fictions of the Soul (1905). The first part of Humourism is a fairly academic account of writers who have been described as ‘humourists’; it is only in the second part of the book that Pirandello gets down to discussing what ‘humourism’ actually is, with a verve and an intensity that leave us in little doubt that he is defining his own poetics. At the heart of ‘humourism’ lies the bleak vision that had already been roughly outlined four years earlier in The Late Mattia Pascal. Pirandello follows Bergson is seeing life as a continuous flux, evanescent and ever-changing, which we seek in vain to halt by imposing on it the ‘stable and determinate forms’ constructed by the intellect. These are the concepts, ideologies, and ideals, the ‘fictions’ that give us a deceptive consciousness of ourselves, the illusion of some coherence in our lives. Thus life and form are at odds. At times inevitably the forms into which we try to channel our lives will be overthrown by our unruly passions and we shall be plunged back into the chaotic flux; but the alternative is a subjection to forms whose rigidity means death (SP, p. 151).

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.