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.

Six Characters in Search of an Author

‘[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.