Luigi Pirandello

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Introduction to Short Stories

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SOURCE: Introduction to Short Stories by Luigi Pirandello, translated by Lily Duplaix, Simon and Schuster, 1959, pp. vii-xiv.

[In the following excerpt from an essay written in 1958 as an introduction to the collection Short Stories, Keene perceives Pirandello's stories to be about the human condition.]

Before Pirandello ever wrote a play, he wrote poetry and short stories. The form his thoughts took at their grandest and most expressive—as in Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV—was clearly foreshadowed in the dramatic juxtapositions which characterize his stories, and the tone of the plays at their best has the thin, pure echo of poetry. Thus to know and not merely to skim the works of this uniquely thoughtful dramatist a reader should have access to a fair cross-section of the short stories.

Easier said than done, for Pirandello wrote over three hundred and sixty-five short stories (he once told French critic Benjamin Crémieux that there was "a fair choice of extras for Leap Year"). Collections have been made and will continue to be made since the opera omnia remains untranslated. This book gives an organically sound, perceptive choice and, while not pretending to offer any final distillation, includes stories representative of Pirandello's major themes.

"Obsession" is not too strong a word to describe Pirandello's concern with the nature of reality. But if this, the dominant theme in all his work, is obsessive, it is the kind of obsession a suspended prism exerts on the curious eye of the beholder: the sides turn without the viewer's intervention and the surfaces reflect sun or shade, refract this or that sudden gleam of light in inexhaustible kaleidoscopy. Pirandello was the viewer; the prism was man's nature, his identity, turning apparently at will its many facets toward the beholder. But was the prism truly moving "at will"? Remember that it was suspended. Just so does the individual move before the author in apparent freedom, yet conditioned by who knows what cord that suspends him in his particular situation, his appointed place. Pirandello never sought to alter the movements of his prisms: there is no finger smudge on the clear planes, for the characters are never pushed or prodded by the author's nudge. Their motivation lies in the nature of das Ding an sich. Thus they turn and sway of their own momentum, yet within limits prescribed by their particular unalterable situation.

And by what casual interaction do the beams of light intertwine as two or more suspended prisms move in relation to each other! How transitory this tangled, indistinguishable light! From which prism comes the dominant glow? Who is to say which is the "perfect," the "right" reflection? What is the "truth" of this strange interplay?

Understanding and accepting this view of the relationship between author and subject, the reader at once sees clearly why Pirandello never overtly expresses compassion in either stories or plays. Can the viewer in all conscience feel compassion for the prism? By extension, this explains too why the writer never tells reader or audience which side he wishes taken. How can you choose one side when man is, by his very nature, multiform, no less different to different individuals than to his different selves?

Yet human nature craves certainty, and certainty implies choice. Thus we see exposed the root conflict of the human drama in these two antithetical and indeed mutually exclusive "truths": the prismatic nature of man and his devouring need for certainty. Am I what my wife sees, what my child "knows" is me, what my associate rubs elbows with daily, what my priest hears at Confession, what I understand me to be as I keep my journal by night? What manner of creature am I and of how many faces? Does my beloved know if even I cannot know which of these faces is the "right," the "true"—and to which of these is he or she, in fact, the beloved? (This question of identity is treated par excellence in Right You Are . . . and is most theatrically plausible in As You Desire Me.)

Certain conclusions inevitably result from Pirandello's preoccupation with the nature of man, chief among them that the human being is nearly always uncomfortable in time and place but that, given his "suspension cord," there is little if anything he can do about it. These two unwelcome conditions of place and time are interwoven to form the background against which the character is pinioned. In the short masterpiece "The Soft Touch of Grass," Pirandello takes a bereaved and lonely man presumably in his early sixties and observes him in circumstances that twist a casual action into a gesture of apparent lewdness. The supposed intent is less stunning for the reader than is the appalled man's realization of what, by an accident of time and place, the young girl thinks he is up to. Wickedness in the eye of the beholder has seldom been more nakedly portrayed nor has an aging individual's plight seemed more poignantly unbearable.

"Cinci" goes to the other end of the chronological scale. Here Pirandello portrays a boy in early adolescence whose loneliness, natural at that age, is compounded by the wretched circumstances in which he and his mother live. Just as a young caged lion may pause before his bars and, for kicks, send up a frightening roar into the faces of his gaping, apprehensive oglers, so Cinci goes into the little church opposite the hospital and unleashes the frightening thunderclap of his dropped books. Having petrified the old people, he sees "no further need [sic] to gall the patience of those poor scandalized worshipers" and wanders on his way just as the young lion resumes his pacing. But the bars are still there.

Some measure of peace, a peace so restless that it can be broken at the slightest intrusion, settles on Cinci at the top of the hill where he lounges against a wall. He is not a violent boy, a lover of violence for its own sake, and this is made clear by his stifled cry of protest when the farm lad kills the lizard. He is not so much animated by pity as affronted by the wantonness of the gesture which does not even permit the boys to indulge human curiosity about the creature's darting looks and antics. The fight which this act unleashes and the controlled fear it awakens in Cinci give the silent struggle there in the white moonlight on the newly harrowed field a classic simplicity and terror. Cinci kills almost inadvertently; he fights for his life instinctively, kills, and frees himself as if it were happening to someone else. He "awakens" from the act as from a dream and leisurely resumes his return to loneliness, having tasted in that instant's action the bitterness of death—a recognition he will carry with him all his days. In that moment of truth he has passed from adolescence to manhood and there is no going back, although he has wilfully obliterated from his consciousness the events which precipitated the change.

"The Rose" takes the theme of human frustration to still another level. Signora Lucietta, the young widow, is caught like a fly in amber in the alien town where she has gone to earn her living. The elements in this story which bring it to the verge of tragedy are not of the spectacular, easily recognizable kind but are of an infinitely subtle, almost evanescent nature. Lucietta senses all that she is foregoing in turning down the one man who might have rescued her from perpetual exile in the narrow provincial world and who might have brought her, through his intelligence, to some sort of spiritual and emotional maturity. That her "suspension cord" forces her to complete the gesture which closes the escape hatch forever is as inevitable as the news of the fall of kings in Greek tragedy. Lucietta's true widowhood begins then.

Pirandello shared Thoreau's view that nearly all of us "lead lives of quiet desperation" and, again like Thoreau, he found that the epitome of man's self-torture was most often achieved in cities. There everything seems to conspire to thwart man's reaching for the sun and light, for warmth, and the simple relief of unsuspicious communion both with others and with nature. The cliché that man is nowhere more alone than in a crowd has, when examined in single instances of desperate isolation, elements in it which range from the grotesque to the terrifying.

Although from different social strata, Signor Bareggi in "Escape" and the grandfather in "The Footwarmer" know equally well the bleak, cheerless streets of the Roman periphery at night. Though the news vendor would never seek physical escape as does Bareggi, the old man's withdrawal into the womb of warmth and silence that is his kiosk is as complete an immolation as is Bareggi's inevitable destruction in the mad chase that spells his deliverance. Not only is the situation in "Escape" magnificently ludicrous, but the key character is never allowed to become so. The power of the story lies in the fact that Bareggi's life is indeed so unbearable that we tacitly agree to his own estimate of it, and find his choice of a Pegasus perfectly in keeping with the hideous monotony, the bleak vulgarity of his round of days. His escape is no less grand for being accomplished in a milk wagon. And the very coherence of the solution precludes in both writer and reader any trace of pity or sentimentality.

In all his work, including the ironic and humorous, Pirandello underscores the inevitability of this human frustration—human discomfort and discontent with place or time or both. The human drama implies frustration, thanks to the irreconcilable dichotomy we talked of earlier, and, since Pirandello recognizes it as endemic to life itself, he pulls it from the shadows and places it where it belongs. This is no backwater, the author asserts repeatedly, but an essential part of the main stream: no man can pursue his life and be ignorant of it.

The Sicilian tales have a place of their own in Pirandello's work, for in them physical atmosphere is more an integral part of the story than props and background are otherwise allowed to be. In "Fumes" and "A Mere Formality" we feel at all times the threatening presence of the sulphur mines, the acrid stench of the burning stuff and the peculiar devastation its extraction from the earth wreaks not only on the land but on the lives of those who seek to exploit that land. We may see the mines only from a distance, hear of the rigors of plant management in an office adjacent to a bank, but the crude, uneven struggle of man against nature is as present as if it were played out an arm's length away. Gabriele's ruin in "A Mere Formality" has been brought about by the unwise assumption that he could step into his father's shoes and acquire, by will power and dedication alone, sufficient expertise to wrest a living from the pits for himself, his family, his employees. He is in pitched battle with the natural forces of his native island, and Nature, with blind unconcern for the affairs of men, has slapped him down. We see him on the verge of disaster, brought to this pass by the apparent vengefulness of a world which has refused to yield up its secrets to one who has never truly become a part of it. Gabriele is one of a series of protagonists in the author's many Sicilian tales and plays who hate the métier they must perform yet who, for reasons of middle-class solidarity and family duty, tempt fate by allowing themselves to be maneuvered into a family profession. Pirandello felt that this was a particularly frequent exploitation in Sicilian middle and upper bourgeois life. Sons who were sent to the mainland, to the Universities of Naples, Rome, Bologna, Milan—even as far afield as Paris or Bonn, where he himself went—risked returning strangers to their homeland, deracinated, unfit to consider confidently living out their lives there and yet unable, because of the matrix of Sicilian society, to cut the cord entirely.

Yet another aspect of the difficulty of being Sicilian is exposed in "Bombolo." This story of knight-errantry on behalf of the downtrodden peasant proves its perennial validity if one remembers the late highwayman, Giuliano, who, like Bombolo, took from the rich to give to the poor. A Sicilian by birth, Bombolo returns to his native island after successful years presumably as an illicit trader in the Levant. Disquieted and eventually goaded to action by the terrible inequities he sees all about him, Bombolo decides to bring "justice" at least to his own area. The tale reveals conclusions Pirandello must have found hard to swallow: the man who seeks to bring relief to the peasants is fighting a losing game, and the reasons why he can't win lie within the distorted nature of the peasants themselves. The Why of this distortion is self-evident, nor has the recent creation of a World Bank altered its immediate relevance.

The sharp contrast between the intelligence of some of Pirandello's female characters and the roles society allows them to occupy is reminiscent of Ibsen. Nowhere is this closeness more apparent than in "The Rose." Signora Lucietta trying vainly to rally her strength sufficiently to compete for a living in the world of men finds that, though she may win employment and even respect, she is inevitably defeated on the social plane. This is Nora in more contemporary situations—but underlying such situations is the great, timeless question: has she, Lucietta, any more right than Nora or Williams' Blanche, for that matter, to her own complex identity?

Pirandello presents us with a somewhat similar case in the slighter story, "The Umbrella." Ostensibly, this tender little story tells of a young widow and her two small daughters, of her inability to buy a full complement of winter clothes for both children, and of the elder girl's yearning to possess the single new umbrella the mother can afford. But behind this thin veil of tear-jerking plot—complicated by the child's believable death—lies the writer's perpetual probing into the emotional motivation of human behavior: the mother is brusque with the elder child because she senses that it is this child, with her brooding, speculative glance, who will prevent her remarriage. The young widow is desperately lonely, insecure. In every sense, she admits the frustration the presence of Dinuccia causes her; she even admits that she yearns for her "not to die, God forbid," but simply not to have been born. Her consequent guilt at the child's coincidental death can only be imagined, for Pirandello will not trim his sails to a particular readership: the mother never reappears after she sends the maid for the doctor.... [This story] is important, for it shows the range of Pirandello's appeal. Even the superficially trite situational story has its flashes of depth and perception, the same glow which so totally illumines the greater work. As many writers eke out an insufficient income by popularizing certain themes they treat more profoundly in their major productions, so Pirandello popularizes—and pinpoints—in this little story the theme of woman's fate. That this theme preoccupied him all his life is given monumental proof in one of his key works, "Such Is Life."

Frustration, encroaching age, perpetual loneliness, misunderstanding, death—la condition humaine—are, then, the recurrent subjects. The forms range, as we know, from the wildly, hilariously burlesque through the ironic, the gently satiric, the quasidocumentary, to the dramatic and, in the classic sense, tragic. Details, too, run like cues for action through the gamut of the stories. There are cricket sounds at night, the play of moonlight on steel, the great sound of silence (which Leopardi caught so well), the pointlessness, the hopelessness, of hope. Over all, there is man's boundless inhumanity to man.

Is there, then, no end to man-inflicted, self-inflicted pain? There is, the author believes, but it lies in no faith, in no "right," in no assurance from within; it lies in patience, tolerance, maturity and compromise. "The Wreath" is ... [a rare example] of Pirandello's personal formula for a fit survival. In it the husband wins grandeur and purity in his wife's eyes by acting above, beyond the formulas of the day, by dropping all the recommendations society would have given him and by acting, indeed, like a clement and loving god.

But a god's love—even if our gods are made in our own best image—is impersonal, benign—above all, unpossessive. And there it is, Pirandello's answer, arrived at with infinite greatness of spirit, infinite patient scrutiny of the poor whirling prisms with their irrevocably separate identities, their apparently autonomous gyrations. To the earlier question "Can one feel compassion for a prism?" the author would answer, "Yes, and even love, for strife-torn, strife-inflicting life is bearable only if love—not possessiveness—rule."

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