Luigi Pirandello

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The Near Tragic

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SOURCE: "The Near Tragic," in The Commonweal Vol. LXXI, No. 1, October 2, 1959, pp. 28-9.

[In the following review of Short Stories, Seldin identifies qualities that distinguish Pirandello's successful short fiction from his weaker stories. ]

Most volumes of short stories involve for the reviewer a built-in hazard in that space forbids the particular comment and justice the general. However, these twenty-two stories [in Short Stories by Pirandello] mitigate the difficulty because Pirandello's preoccupation in them, as in his plays and novels, is remarkably constant. Human experience, as he saw it, is at best ironic, at worst not quite tragic, but rather frustrating. For men, who need to communicate, are unheard, misunderstood or, when grasped a little too well, made vulnerable to those who wish them ill.

The stories gain their force from the fact that the anguish their characters endure comes through human acts, willed acts proceeding from motives not fully understood and leading to consequences not entirely foreseen. Pirandello's people, then, are fully men and women, not mechanisms subject to drives nor pawns in the clutches of the doomsters. This is true even of the Sicilian stories in which environment, the impoverished land pockmarked and contaminated by sulphur mines, plays a significant role. In "Fumes," for instance, Don Mattia destroys the green hill he loves to benefit the mines he hates, but he is driven to the act not by an inexorable nature but through the malice of an enemy who, having injured him once, can justify himself only by injuring again.

The short story, though, is a limiting form, particularly for an author whose concern is just this sort of probing into what men make of the human condition. Thus, none of these stories has to me the impact of The Outcast, one of the best of his novels, or of the famous Six Characters in Search of an Author. The best of them are the longer ones, those which approach novella, for in them Pirandello has time not only to establish character—which he does with finesse even in the shorter pieces—but also to prepare adequately for his ironic insight.

A few of the shorter pieces, such as "Cinci" or "Escape," which focus on only one character are virtuoso achievements, so brilliantly do they marshal mood and event to achieve their bitter moments of truth. And those lighter in mood, like "Watch and Ward," an ironic anecdote, or "Who Pays the Piper . . . ," a "folk" tale, are wryly successful. However, some of the more serious ones too short to permit the pathetic or the ironic to make itself felt gradually end by being only sentimental. Or worse, they end falsely, invoking an irony not validly present. In "A Mere Formality" a sick man's stratagem to deny his innocent wife her equally innocent lover after his own death seems to me to be inadequate to its end. And Lucietta, the appealing young widow in "The Rose," in spite of her naive frivolity and her neighbors' malicious willingness to take advantage of it, could possibly come through happily, marry the man who loves her instead of being consigned to perpetual matelessness through an incident essentially trivial. We suffer an inundation of authentic agony and ought not also have to endure insistence upon anguish where it need not be.

But on the whole the stories are rich in justified emotion, in moments of acute sympathy for the plight especially of women and, most tenderly, of the old. And Pirandello's pervasive awareness of the absurd shows itself most effectively in his serious pieces where incidents which out of context would be Mack Sennet comedy serve to intensify rather than to mitigate the tragic.

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