shook the peninsula—from the author’s pessimistic viewpoint, painting a tableau of collective and personal failures, ranging from the betrayal of the Romantic ideals of the Italian struggle for unification to the fall of southern socialism, from moral and financial bankruptcy to madness and murder. Numerous characters weave in and out of a complex narrative of social and private ambitions, class conflict, personal corruption, doomed loves, and human loss. The old are responsible for the demise of patriotic and social ideals and for the state of current ills; the young are caught in the crystallized social structures that suffocate them. It is a bitter vision, without any moderating illusions. Individuals fall under forces greater than themselves in a world full of misfits and alienated souls. In this novel, individual turmoil flows uneasily into historical chaos. The failed illusions of Pirandello’s only historical novel are basically social—liberty, justice, equality, patriotism—but they evoke a similar defeat at the personal level. The novelist’s best-known and most appreciated works are told by narrators/protagonists who concurrently expose their inner selves and comment on the world about them: Mattia Pascal, Serafino Gubbio, and Vitangelo Moscarda.

The Late Mattia Pascal

In The Late Mattia Pascal, Pascal’s life story is quintessential Pirandello. After a happy and reckless childhood, Mattia is thrust into adulthood by his marriage to the lovely and pregnant Romilda, who comes to resent their poverty and becomes quite the shrew. Unhappily married, losing both his gentle mother and beloved baby, the hero runs off to Monte Carlo for a temporary reprieve. There he has some unusual encounters and wins a tidy sum at the casino. On the way back to Romilda (and his difficulties), Mattia reads about his own death, having been mistakenly recognized in the deformed body of a drowned suicide. This unexpected turn of events offers him a great opportunity to be free, or so he believes. Taking on a new identity, a new presence, and a new lifestyle, Mattia becomes Adriano Meis, wanderer. After a lengthy period of travel, Adriano decides to settle in Rome awhile, becoming one of the pensioners in the Paleari family. Gradually, inevitably, Meis involves himself in society and in the lives of others, particularly interested in the delicate and sensitive Adriana Paleari. It is through these relationships and because of a series of casual events, such as the theft of some money, that the new man realizes he has no valid identity, lacking any documents and thus, any legal right to exist. Without social credentials, Adriano Meis cannot marry, own a dog, file a police report. Without a past, without human ties, his life and freedom become meaningless. Having sought authenticity, Mattia Pascal has become a shadow man instead. In order to exist once more, Adriano fakes a suicide and returns home as Mattia, only to find his wife contentedly remarried with a baby. The only solution is to remain dead, legally nonexistent but at least equipped with a social identity. The sign of this existential absurdity is the narrator’s visits to the grave of the late Mattia Pascal.

Setting aside the naturalist emphasis on objective narration, Pirandello dives headlong into modernism. The Late Mattia Pascal is fictional autobiography and private confession, a work that is declaratively subjective. The novel is also a parable on people’s relationship to the social environment; it is, in some ways, an ironic and modernized version of the Prodigal Son returning to a bitter homecoming. Caught in the prison of tradition and conventions, Pascal is a victim. He is not yet aware that his social roles define him and compose his connection to the world of others. Such awareness comes through his alter ego, Adriano Meis. Having believed in his escape into freedom, the dual hero, Adriano/Mattia, must come face-to-face with the price of such presumed liberty: rootlessness and solitude. More important, he comes to the realization that liberty from oneself is impossible. Having become free of his past, he has become the spectator of life but can no longer be a participant. He is truly an outlaw, outside the law’s reach and also its security, excluded from all emotional fellowship and totally self-dependent and alone.

From an understandable impulse to escape, Mattia progresses to a meditative understanding of the absurdity of an anchorless existence, preferring subordination to the social ties and conventions that bind the individual but also define him. Pascal is one of Pirandello’s first self-conscious protagonists, a type defined within the text by Anselmo Paleari, Adriano’s philosophical landlord who has developed an ontological system called “lanternosophy” that speaks to modern man’s sad privilege of “seeing himself live,” which Paleari compares to a marionette, Orestes. Intent on his passionate thoughts of revenge (that is, “living”), Orestes suddenly perceives a rip in the paper sky of his puppet stage; action becomes contemplation. Aware of himself, Orestes stops, unable to act. He has been transformed into Hamlet, the embodiment of existential incongruity and psychological impotence. Modern man is this absurdly aware puppet of life.

Notwithstanding these themes of alienation and inescapability, the tone of The Late Mattia Pascal is not tragic, but humorous, as befits a narrator who has developed “a taste for laughing at all my misfortunes and at my every torment” and is well aware of “our infinite smallness.” Naturally, it is the ironic lightness proposed in Pirandello’s essay On Humour, with its emphasis on the incongruous. Much of the comedy in the novel is offered by the minor characters, for it is peopled with amusing, funny, and grotesque macchiette—character studies—that moderate the book’s serious elements. Even death is presented for its mystery, unpredictability, and absurdity in much of the plot: Mattia wins at Monte Carlo using his mother’s funeral money; it is the unknown suicide that allows him to become Adriano Meis, and it is a second suicide, planned and false, that permits him to resurrect Mattia; there is even Max, an obliging ghost, in attendance at Anselmo Paleari’s séances. The unknown and the unexpected rule this fictional universe, appropriately symbolized by the roulette game, godmother of Pascal’s transformation, wheel of fortune, goddess of chance. In his “Notice on the Scruples of Imagination” that accompanies this novel, Pirandello justifies the use of fantasy in its plot and in art in general, stating that there is no need to defend such absurdities “that have no need to appear probable, for they are true.”

Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator

Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator is a far less whimsical work. Set in the Roman world of silent filmmaking, its tale is unfolded in the pages of a diary or journal kept by Serafino Gubbio, cameraman by accident, as he observes and comments on what he sees. “Seeing” is Gubbio’s peculiar characteristic; his watching is really study, an attempt to glimpse in others what he lacks, namely, “the certainty that they understand what they’re doing” in the midst of their frenetic lives. Seeing is also part of his job: He is the eyes of his camera. Gubbio’s is the most modern of Pirandellian alienations: people at the service of machines, seeking to become machinelike themselves, that is, to acquire a similar imperturbability—having already determined they had no need of a soul. Gubbio allows himself to grow depersonalized as a protective measure against the pain of living, hoping to become as desensitized to his surroundings as the camera he holds. If Mattia Pascal tries for an impossible authenticity, Gubbio prefers to escape his humanity altogether, watching everything, including himself, from a distance.

One of the objects of his visual study is the actor Varia Nestoroff, a Russian femme fatale, whose shady past has also touched the cameraman’s former life. A young and gifted painter had loved her purely and completely; unable to bear his devotion, the woman proceeded to seduce his sister’s fiancé, Aldo Nuti. Gubbio had known the family of the painter well, and they had formed the one idyllic memory of his existence until it was destroyed by the foreign beauty. Nestoroff is tortured by her inner demons and the weight of her secret guilt. Gubbio soon notes that the woman’s acting is an externalization of her inner being: violent, dramatic, sensual, and overpowering.

For a brief period, the protagonist allows himself to be sucked into life. He feels compassion for Nestoroff, his landlord, a caged tiger, a vagabond musician, and the tormented Aldo Nuti, who also joins the film company. He also falls hopelessly in love with sweet little Luisetta, who, in turn, is equally and hopelessly fond of Nuti, who still loves the memory of his former lost fiancé and hates the woman who seduced him. The past swarms into Gubbio’s memory as well, filling him with nostalgic regret and pity for the tragic family he had loved. Nudged out of his impassiveness, Gubbio soon realizes the futility of his emotional expenditures. Thus, he returns behind the glass eye of his “black spider”: It is a desire for oblivion. In front of him, the imitation of life with all of its frantic manifestations—the film scenes—plays on as he mechanically turns the handle. Arcangelo Leone De Castris suggests that shooting pictures is a way of portraying one’s own absence from life, and it is to the state of nonbeing that Gubbio moves, distraught by his recently renewed connections to society and existence. The camera functions as a barrier between him and others. In this identity as a passive, mechanical spectator, Serafino Gubbio becomes totally enclosed in his “thing’s silence” in the final pages of his notebooks. Shooting the last scene of an important adventure film, the cameraman is caught in the tragedy of Aldo Nuti and Varia Nestoroff. Instead of killing the tiger, Nuti turns his gun on his former mistress and is then torn to pieces by the cat. The perfect machine, Gubbio obeys the call of the camera, automatically registering it all, glued to the handle, and shocked into muteness, forever a willing thing in its silence.

Somewhat experimental stylistically, Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator is, however, an inconsistent work, accused of actually being three novels in one by critic Umberto Bosco, who catalogs it as a story of the destructive mechanization of modern life, an idyll in the nostalgic recovery of Gubbio’s past memories, and a book about the early years of the cinema and its odd denizens. The novel is held together by the coexistence of all three threads in the single consciousness of its protagonist narrator.

One, None, and a Hundred Thousand

One, None, and a Hundred Thousand takes introspective narration one step further. The protagonist of The Late Mattia Pascal tells the story of his life factually and chronologically, interspersing it with personal commentaries and insights; Serafino Gubbio presents a diary, notebooks that recount the inner man as well as external episodes; Vitangelo Moscarda’s tale is the story of a spiritual journey. Pirandello was absorbed by One, None, and a Hundred Thousand, working on it for more than a decade. Its themes are not new but evoke those contained in his earlier books. If Mattia Pascal attempts a new identity and Serafino Gubbio chooses “thing”-hood, Vitangelo Moscarda opts for madness.

Moscarda is thrown into self-awareness and self-analysis by his nose or, more exactly, by his wife Dida’s banal remark on the tilt of his nose. Discovering that he is unfamiliar with his body, Moscarda quickly progresses to the realization that he is even more unfamiliar with his inner self. The next step in his road to insight is the perception that others do not know him as he knows himself but have their own images of him, which they firmly believe to be the true man. Like the Orestes/Hamlet puppet, Vitangelo Moscarda catches himself in the act of living, forcing him to contemplate his identity. At first it is the stranger reflected in a window or mirror that concerns him, but it soon becomes the stranger in himself that obsesses the young man. He analyzes his social roles, against which he quickly rebels, unwilling to be the idiotic “Gengè” his wife sees and loves, the “usurer” the town believes him to be, or any of a number of his other multiple selves. Moscarda makes a supreme effort to see himself from the outside, as others see him, as he cannot see himself, and soon intuits that the belief in a unified personality is a mirage. The novel’s title is exegetical: People believe in their wholeness but are actually numerous persons, chameleons who adapt to their changing environments and audience; being the object of so many differing views, there are a hundred thousand “I”s and actually no one self.

Aware of being the daily construction of himself and others, Moscarda is driven by his discovery, feeling imprisoned in his body, his name(s), his house, his reputation, his town, his roles, and his very historical situation. Desperate to be for others what he wishes to be for himself, he challenges “normal” behavior. For example, to prove he is not a usurer, he first evicts a poor tenant and then gives him an attractive new home, thus obtaining the collective appellation of “madman.” In a frenzy to take control of his own existence, Moscarda initially determines to stop the regular flow of his life by a series of abnormal acts that reflect his recognition of the relativity of all and challenge the world about him to reassess and redefine him as he himself has already done. Instead, the others react in disbelief, for they do not recognize “their” Vitangelo Moscarda(s). His wife leaves him, and his business managers view him as an idiot, particularly when he expresses a desire to give away all of his possessions because they do not come from “him” but rather are inherited. Lacking common (collective) sense, searching for self-determination free of all encumbrances, and frightfully aware of the innate solitude of every person—since no one can ever truly know another—Moscarda chooses spiritual liberation in the only way open to him: apart, one with nature, poor, and mad. Pirandello’s novel concludes on this paradoxical note also sounded by his first novel: to be someone, the (anti)hero must resolve to live as no one, dying and being reborn at every moment, “alive and whole, no longer in myself, but in every thing outside myself.”