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Laudisi's Laughter and the Social Dimension of Right You Are (If You Think So) ROBERT S. DOMBROSKI • CRITICISM HAS MORE OR LESS AGREED that Pirandello's intention in writing Right You Are (If You Think So) was to illustrate his conviction that truth does not exist absolutely, but merely as a product of the individual mind. From here it became a question of whether the play was successful as drama and to what extent the thesis may be said to either enhance or diminish the work's emotional content. Is Right You Are a "sensitive" and "provoking" expression of Pirandello's philosophy? Or is it nothing more than - as Gramsci would have it - "a superficial fact of literature: a pure and simple mechanical aggregate of words"? (A VANTIl, Oct. 5, 1917) Contemporary criticism has rescued the play from a type of discussion based on whether Pirandello did or did not succeed in dramatizing his relativist Weltanschauung by shifting the perspective from the work's philosophical content to its social bearings and the existential turmoil of its main characters; that is, from Laudisi's arid reasoning about the relativity of truth to the sufferings of the Ponza-Frola group. Eric Bentley, for example, views the playas a social satire, Pirandello's aim being to demonstrate how the "idle curiosity" and "nosiness" of the townspeople is detrimental to the sufferers' struggle for life in its inner essence and private depths. 1 And Robert Brustein goes a step further, describing the work as a "drama of social revolt." According to him, "the play is a protest against [he quotes Bentley] the 'scandalmonger, the prying reporter, and the amateur psychoanalyst' and [he himself adds] the sob sister, the candid cameraman, and the Congressional investigator - those who recklessly probe the secrets of others.,,2 For Bentley and Brustein, therefore, the drama consists in the play's emotional content, that is, in Signora Frola's and Signor Ponza's struggle for survival against the onslaught of the townspeople's destructive curiosity. 337 338 ROBERT &DOMBROSKI Although convincing in many ways and certainly supported by the characters' awareness of conflict, interpretations of this sort do not take sufficiently into account the function of the "intellectual" frame in which the drama develops: they focus on the dramatic or dialectical process as if this process were free from the imposing presence of Laudisi and thus ignore the importance of the relationship between structural elements in determining the play's total meaning. Those readers to whom Right You Are appeared as too intellectually contrived had good reasons on which to base their assumptions. For it is clear that the conflict between the townspeople and the Ponza-Frola group is a dramatic actualization of Laudisi's relativist convictions. From the standpoint of the play's thematic organisation Right You Are appears unequivocally as a dramma a tesi. It begins simply with man's natural desire to know the things around him (the townspeople's wanting to understand the reasons for the Ponza-Frola group's strange living arrangement). It concludes with the discovery that things have not an absolute, but a relational existence (the meaning of Signora Ponza's final words "10 sono colei che mi si crede"). The play develops in a way that the thesis is proved in each of the acts and in the final act it becomes impossible to disprove. From the standpoint of action, the reader follows a circular schema whereby he sees the townspeople move from a state of unsatisfied curiosity through several intense moments of expectation and disillusionment back to that same state; while thematically he proceeds from the lack of knowledge through a series of demonstrations to the awareness that truth beyond appearance is unattainable. In addition to Laudisi and Signora Ponza, who express their relativist beliefs directly to the townspeople, Signora Frola and Signor Ponza illustrate perfectly Pirandello's thesis: they both tell equally convincing stories and each is aware of the role the other is playing. At the same time, however, the play's emotional nucleus does consist in the struggle of the Ponza-Frola group to preserve their illusions, although we may Sincerely wonder if this theme could not...

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