SOURCE: "Pirandello in Retrospect," in Italian Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter, 1958, pp. 19-47.

[Poggioli was an Italian-born American critic and translator. Much of his critical writing is concerned with Russian literature, including The Poets of Russia: 1890-1930 (1960), which is one of the most important examinations of that literary era. In the following excerpt, Poggioli discusses the Italian author Giovanni Verga as the literary progenitor of Pirandello. ]

During the period between the end of the last century and the first World War, two great Italian novelists, and one of them undoubtedly the greatest, were islanders: the Sicilian, Giovanni Verga, and Grazia Deledda from Sardinia. While the best known authors of their generation were striving, often in vain, to approximate universality either by withdrawing from life entirely or by offering their readers refined and frequently false quintessences of life, Verga and Deledda achieved universality almost without conscious effort, by turning toward what to others seemed too humble and restricted a form of existence.

Those who wished to ape Europe or Paris succeeded in being merely provincial. But these two writers, each of whom had no thought but for his own island, amply asserted his full right to enter into the temple of Weltliteratur. They had encompassed universal values by stressing their own regionalism. In evangelical terms, we may say that they entered heaven along the straight and narrow path.

Of the two binomials Deledda-Sardinia and Verga-Sicily, the second is of greater interest to us now, not on account of Verga's superiority, but because Pirandello, with whom we are concerned, stems from Verga and Sicily.

D. H. Lawrence helps us to clarify the origins of Pirandello who is Verga's spiritual son and a Sicilian too, for Lawrence knew both Sicily, where he lived for a while, and Verga's writings. He decided to translate Verga and published two volumes of the Italian's short stories in English, as well as the great novel Mastro Don Gesualdo. For this last work Lawrence wrote an introduction which remained unpublished until after his death. In it we see that Lawrence was still under the influence of the great Russians, and he used the impression created by that contact to make us understand, by contrast, the Sicilian soul and the art of Verga.

.. . In Mastro Don Gesualdo you have the very antithesis of what you get in The Brothers Karamazov. Anything more un-Russian than Verga it would be hard to imagine, save Homer. Yet Verga has the same sort of pity as the Russians. And, with the Russians, he is a realist. He won't have heroes, nor appeals to gods above or below. The Sicilians of today are supposed to be the nearest thing to the classic Greek that is left to us; that is, they are the nearest descendants on the earth.

In order further to emphasize the relationship between Verga and Pirandello delineated above, I shall quote the testimonial of the French critic, Benjamin Crémieux, who once stated that "Pirandello's humoristic subject begins where the naturalistic subject of Verga ends." Actually, it is in Pirandello's social and moral experience rather than in his art that Crémieux's statement is true, for Pirandello's Sicilians are no longer ancient Greeks, but modern men. They no longer belong to the generations which could recall the rule of the Bourbons, as did the characters of l Malavoglia', they are citizens of the Kingdom of Italy. They are no longer peasants or shepherds or men from distant farms, but the inhabitants of villages or small provincial towns. In short, from Verga's pastoral world we are taken to the world of the petit bourgeois, from the shepherd's crook and the nomadic life to the pen and the table of sedentary people, whether they dwell in Palermo, the island's metropolis, or in Rome, the capital.

Verga's shepherds and Pirandello's petit bourgeois represent the artistic synthesis of two contrasting generations, or more accurately, the historical and social evolution of Sicily during the last sixty years. In part, Pirandello's task consisted in pointing up the psychological changes brought about by the transition from country to province, from the simple, almost feudal relationship between citizen and State. Pirandello traces the course from a life of innocent ignorance to that of a sad awareness. In other words, the playwright aimed at showing that the Sicilians felt rising within them those terrible diseases designated by Lawrence as "intellect" and "soul."

Though Verga's Sicilians were, indeed, deprived of a consciously developed intellect, we must admit that they too possessed a soul of sorts. Thus we cannot push the critical game of paradox to its logical conclusion. Verga's heroes, immersed in the flow of events, are idyllic spirits, epic and tragic at times, but without drama, without history. Unlike Pirandello's description of his own heroes, their souls do not watch themselves live, but are simply souls that live. Pirandello's heroes, too, will let themselves be swept along by the current, but they are directed not by the laws of nature but by those of society, conscious that their time is no longer reckoned by the agricultural calendar of the seasons, but by the bureaucratic timetable of a daily servitude.

Something similar to the phenomenon that had taken place among the Sicilians of Verga's generation, transforming them into the Sicilians of Pirandello's, took place also among the inhabitants of another island, Corsica. As soon as it became a part of the French nation, this island gave its most adventurous sons to the administration of France and her Empire. From a pastoral idyll, praised even by Rousseau who at one time cherished a dream of becoming the Moses of the Corsican people, its inhabitants had turned to a life of action. Since Buonaparte, every Corsican leaves the island, not with a dream, but with a Napoleonic program.

Sicily fulfilled a more useful, though less brilliant, role. After sending her strongest sons to America, she detailed the remaining share of her human crop to the administration of the Italian nation, but, unlike Corsica in its relation to France, Sicily has given Italy great writers and remarkable philosophers, as well as statesmen.

Sicilian emigration to America and the continent had, for a long time, the same effect on the social life of the island that the steady pursuit of a new frontier toward the Far West had had in the history of the United States. But finally, the Sicilians too found their California, and not at the extreme border, but at the very heart of their island. Unmerciful Nature suddenly proved that even volcanoes and geological catastrophes may be in some way useful. It revealed to the islanders their own volcanic and phosphorescent gold, sulphur. The Sicilians knew they owned sulphur, but had never realized that it could be turned into gold. The beginnings of a primitive industry had already been noted by Verga who, after the Malavoglia, gave us Mastro Don Gesualdo. At that time the self-made men of the new industry began to appear in Sicily. In fact, the two men who were to become Pirandello's father and fatherin-law were among the owners of sulphur mines.

This social evolution is artistically evidenced in a synthetic way, and not by analysis, in Pirandello's early works. We shall point to those evidences, not as to simple historical documentation, but as to indications of the real nature of Pirandello's art, too often regarded as abstraction or cerebral fancy. Aside from the literary experience terminating with Verga, Pirandello's starting point was also, I repeat, a new social and moral experience that Verga had barely discerned. Crémieux wisely warns the readers and critics to remember this "realistic, experimental and unideological basis of the art and thought of Pirandello."

In one of Verga's short stories, "La Roba" ("Property") the author describes the vast tracts of land owned by Don Mazzaró, an illiterate peasant, who has become rich through toil and sacrifice. Wherever one went, one learned that the surrounding land belonged to Don Mazzaró. Verga remarks, with epic humour: "It seemed that Don Mazzaró was spread out as wide as the surface of the earth, and that we were walking on his belly." Don Mazzaró, in grabbing as much land as possible, was not motivated by covetousness or avarice, but by the impulse which moves others to the conquest of love or power. His pride of acquisition was of such purity that he submerged his own identity in the object conquered: "After all, he did not care for money; he said it was not real property and as soon as he had accumulated a certain sum, he bought land. He wanted to own as much land as the king and be even better off than the king, who can neither sell it nor call it his own." Mazzaró's feeling for property is that of a primitive man, part patriarch, part pioneer. The fact that he does not consider money as wealth shows that he still belonged to that social pre-history when the conception of homo oeconomicus had still to be evolved.

Let us consider now one of Pirandello's short stories which he later developed into a one-act play of the same name, "La Giara" ("The Jar"). The hero, Don Lollo, could be Don Mazzaró's brother. He too loves the land and, like Don Mazzaró, oversees the peasants who are lazy and negligent in their work. He treats them badly, punishes them whether or not it is warranted. One day, Don Lollo buys a large jar which is to hold the surplus oil expected from a bumper crop of olives. The jar is enormous, and Don Lollo is so proud and jealous of it that he forbids anyone to touch it for fear that it might be broken. Suddenly some peasants discover that the jar is cracked. At first, Don Lollo is infuriated, but then he becomes resigned to having it repaired by Don Zima, who is expert at this kind of work. Don Zima has invented a magic putty which, according to him, will make the jar as good as new, with no trace of a crack. But Don Lollo insists that he repair it the old way by stapling the parts together with wire. Protesting, Don Zima obeys. He climbs into the jar to mend it from within and when he wants to get out, he realizes that the neck of the jar is too narrow for his shoulders. At the sight of Don Zima, imprisoned in the jar much as Jonah was in the whale, Don Lollo is once more infuriated. He feels that this is an entirely new situation, an "interesting case," to use legal jargon. Rather than set Don Zima free, he sends for a lawyer.

The lawyer advises Don Lollo to free Don Zima, in other words, to break the jar again; otherwise, Lollo will be guilty, by definition of law, of sequestration of person. Don Lollo concurs, but points out that it is Don Zima's own fault that he has been caught inside the jar. The lawyer's judgment is worthy of Solomon; he decrees that Don Lollo is to break the jar and Don Zima is to pay for it. Don Zima objects that the jar is worthless, first, because he found it broken, and secondly, because Don Lollo insisted that it be repaired in his own way. The lawyer then decides that Don Lollo must break the jar and Don Zima pay a third of its value. Don Lollo gives in, but Don Zima refuses to pay and prefers to remain in the jar until Don Lollo changes his mind. Don Lollo goes off in a fury, but Don Zima gaily sends for some wine and settles down to joking with the peasants dancing about his prison. Don Lollo, finally seeing that they are making fun of him, rushes down in a rage and kicks the jar to pieces amid the laughter of the peasants and a bellow of triumph from Don Zima.

What is the difference between the worlds of Don Mazzaró and Don Lollo? Don Mazzaró conceives of property as a relationship between men and things, a struggle between man and nature. Don Lollo, instead, regards it as a relationship between men and society, a contest between man and man, a right that can be conferred or removed by law. He conceives of the law, not as an expression of justice, but as the sanction or denial of a privilege. He plays the law against the law to maintain or to defend a privilege, to enforce the subordination or even the humiliation of a rival, of a competitor, in other words, of a peer. Don Zima, in order to oppose Don Lollo's legalism, falls back on obstructionism and crawls into the jar, like a snail into its shell. From this haven, he proves to his adversary that the law may be a blunted weapon, a useless instrument. In literary terms, we may say that we have passed from the epic, austere world of Verga into an ironic, dramatic world; or, in sociological terms, from a primitive, patriarchal society, into the world of bourgeois civilization. We have passed from an old feudalism which maintained itself by the law of violence to a new feudalism which defends itself by the violence of the law. And at least sometimes the law is defeated and broken into as many pieces as the fragments of the jar.

Pirandello describes this world with a malicious smile which lurks, like Don Zima, at the very bottom of the jar. From there the author smiles unnoticed at Don Zima, but mostly at Don Lollo and the lawyer. On closer observation, however, Pirandello's position is revealed as not too different from that of the lawyer, who listens to the argument rather indifferently. That indifference is a sceptical reflection on the law of which he is the representative and interpreter. Pirandello, in his turn, smiles because he realizes that men always act like puppets, whether they be moved by the strings of instinctive passion or by those of the indirect and repressed emotions which burgeon beyond the pale of the law.

The true discovery in the short story "The Jar" is that law is not a rule which tends to discipline and check the strife between men but is, of itself, a new instrument for strife. Pirandello took the legal and social battle symbolized by the Sicilian Don Lollo as a point of departure and from that battle he later evolved the eternal dissent, not between man and man, but in the very soul of man with man himself. Thus a new dissension was revealed, of which the author was to give us further proofs in deeper and richer personalities.

From Verga's final position, which was a return toward the simple, Pirandello moved in the opposite direction toward the heterogeneous and complex. Although his goal was different, Pirandello's itinerary coincided, in direction at least, with that of so many men from his island who abandoned the white houses of the Sicilian countryside for the uniform gray beehives of the capital. In this hostile world, Pirandello's Sicilians defend themselves with dialectics, as did those of Verga with a knife.

The really important word is dialectic. Contrary to what his father probably wished him to do, Pirandello did not choose a law career, a career considered by simple minds both useful and dignified, like the army or the priesthood. He chose, instead, to follow the road of literature and culture, not as a journalist or amateur, but seriously, as a philologist and a scholar. He went from the University of Rome to that of Bonn in Germany, where he graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy with highest honors. In his final dissertation, Pirandello had reconciled the love of his island with the love of science in a work of scholarly research on the systematic and historical phonetics of the dialect of Girgenti, his province. In Germany, he continued to write poetry and began to read the classics of philosophy. Perhaps it was at that time that the shadows of abstract ideas and the romantic seeds of modern thought began to take shape in his southern soul.

Although written much later, a true synthesis a posteriori, "The Jar" appears to us today a symbol of his awakening consciousness. Between his experiences of the period and his new studies, there was the same transition, we might say, that there is between legal and pragmatic dialectics and pure oratory. Yet Pirandello, the student of philosophy, as well as Pirandello the artist, was always to retain a little of the wrangling dialectic of Don Lollo. That scepticism which was later to form the basis of his logic was to lead that same logic to the most abstract and general conclusions. But the force which had first started that scepticism in motion will always be the force that the heroes of the master, Verga, left as inheritance in the souls of the Sicilians portrayed by his disciple, Pirandello. That force is the instinctive suspicion felt by every simple soul when faced with official justice and its instruments, that is to say, the police, courts, judges, and official documents, and the suspicion felt toward that very justice which is, in the final analysis, governmental authority.

The shadow of law and government power is present in Verga's stories too, but it remains in the background. In most of Verga's tales, the predominant passion is not desire for possession, but for love. If the instinct for possession finds in man's law or in nature's catastrophe its own sentence (earthquakes, landslides, floods like the one which was to inundate the sulphur mine of Pirandello's father and to destroy his wealth), then too the violent and volcanic instinct of love carries in itself its own implicit punishment, jealousy. However, in almost every instance, the instinct for possession as well as that of love, is dominated and checked, despite its strong compulsion, by a supreme law, a noble and unyielding moral code, the code of honor. The Malavoglia family does not suffer and work in order to get rich, but in order to pay back its debts, to win back public esteem. In "Cavalleria Rusticana" the rustic duel is fought to erase with blood the wound inflicted on honor. Everybody knows the subject of "Cavalleria Rusticana." It is one of Verga's many short stories, which, according to Lawrence are, "one after the other, stories of cruel killings .. . it seems almost too much, too crude, too violent, too much a question of mere brutes." As a matter of fact, the judgment is unjust. Turiddu is not a brute; nor is Alfio. Both are men of sensitive and even honorable nature. Turiddu knows he is wrong and would even let himself be killed, he says, "but for the thought of his old mother . . ." When Alfio discovers that Turiddu is his wife's lover, he challenges him to a duel without harsh words and with an extreme moderation of gesture. Turiddu accepts the challenge, thoughtfully, almost silently, with only a nod and a half-phrase. Their instinctive and primitive self-mastery acquires a character of epic spontaneity and dignity when compared to the sophisticated elegance of a "gentleman" in an affair of honor. And they tread, not with the heavy step of a peasant or a carter, but softly, like shadows, to their death or to inflict death for love and honor.

The same eternal theme of adultery and jealousy is the theme of Pirandello's comedy Il berretto a sonagli (Cap and Bells), and of the short story from which it grew. But here we see enormous changes at the very outset and in every detail. In Verga's tale the villagers witness, in a respectful and stern silence, the scandal and drama unfolding before their eyes. Blood and sin are matters too grave to be the subject of much conversation, but the crux of Pirandello's plot is gossip. It is through slander that Beatrice, the wife of Mr. Fiorica, learns that her husband is carrying on an intrigue with the wife of one of his clerks, a humble book-keeper, Ciampa. During the latter's absence, arranged by Beatrice herself, she has his house raided by the police and the lovers are caught, but not precisely in a compromising situation. Ciampa returns just in time to witness the outburst of scandal. Poor Ciampa had known that his wife had been unfaithful to him for years but he had always pretended to be unaware of it and by this feigned ignorance, which made him the object of universal pity, he had provided himself with a mask of respectability. Once the scandal becomes public knowledge and everyone is aware that his wife's unfaithfulness can no longer be unknown to him, Ciampa finds himself cornered and faced with two alternatives: the primitive law of honor and vengeance, or the supine acceptance of the accomplished fact and the consequent dishonor. Unlike Compar Alfio, Ciampa hesitates before bloodshed, but his extreme awareness of society prevents him from choosing the second alternative.

Then, in a moment of brilliant lucidity, he decides to exploit Beatrice's jealousy which, though justified, is so morbid and exaggerated that it carries her to the verge of insanity. With this to work on, he convinces the wretched heroes of the petty scandal that the only solution lies in establishing Beatrice's insanity and in asserting that, in her insanity, she has taken for fact something that was but a figment of her imagination. With devilish ability, carried by suggestion and logic to the very verge of absurdity, Ciampa succeeds in convincing everybody that Beatrice is mad and that she must be sent to an asylum. Thus, instead of Ciampa being forced to wear the mask of dishonor, it is Beatrice who is forced to wear on her head the cap and bells of folly.