Three Major Symbols in Four Plays by Pirandello

THREE MAJOR SYMBOLS IN FOUR PLAYS BY PIRANDELLO ONLY THE MOST INNOCENT or the most corrupt of Pirandello Critics would take at its face value the playwright's assertion, "I hate symbolic art,"l for Pirandello is a consistent and fertile user of symbols. More, he has the capacity to deploy them in the modes of compelling allegory, not least in those dramas which he has himself described as myths, Lazarus, The. New Colony and The Giants of the Mountain .2 The truth is, of course, that Pirandello had no patience with the confidence tricksters of literature-D'Annunzio (with good reason ) he found repellentS-whose gold brick of symbolic ornamentation has no reference to meaning and is in no way derived from substance . He was aware that almost all symbolic art which claims to be such is evasion, so that his whole career as a writer became an insistent declaration of our need to recognise what seems to be (the nearest we ever come to what is). By confronting the apparent law of an unchanging mutability, by acquiescing in the rule of paradox, and by discerning the tragedy inherent in his orgasmic hunger for ideal form, man gropes forward to an apperception of that conflict which (in defensive terror) he calls his identity. The conflict is a vision of being-and-unbeing, flux eroding and abolishing what we construct (ourselves, others, our beliefs, even the fallacy of communication ), and the dignity implicit in the humiliation of our nakedness. However we pretend, this is an unsophisticated view of life. It is the representation of our abiding unease; it would be impertinent and aesthetically inept to attempt to recreate it with the traditional artifacts of symbolism. Pirandello saw that a symbol must evoke, that its chain of authority must be unambiguous, and that it must convincingly partake of the general nature of the work in which it appears. (It is surely significant that Madame Pace, who is an evoked character,4 should, as her "naturalistic" self and as a symbol of ex1 In the preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author. 2 Religious, social and artistic, in that order. S Cf. his onslaught on D'Annunzio in "Eleanora [sic] Duse: Actress Supreme," Century Magazine, Vol. CVIII, June, 1924, pp. 244-251. 4 Created by an atmosphere built up from the apparatus of her professions and the urgent needs of the plot, which cannot progress without her. How deftly (by taking advantage of an imposed rudimentary structure) does Pirandello con378 1964 PIRANDELLO 379 plosive complexity, be the hinge of the play, for, like her, it has had to come into being.) Again, however intricate it may be, a symbol must, to meet Pirandello's demands, move from a simple acceptance; it will fail if it is "hard" or technical-worse, it will alienate your audience who will, with justice, suspect you of hiding behind words, either because you're a knave or because you're a fool. It is important, too, that it should sympathise with the audience's desire for a picture, a shaped image, even to the extent of appearing to deny Pirandello's correct assertion of the unreality of such clear-cut delineations. Indeed , his accuracy as an artist owes much to the exercise of this compassion, itself an index to the iteration of the human which characterises his opera. By convincing his auditor that he is at one with him, Pirandello is able to bring him into the argument with life, and finally to leave him at the point where he wills his own discussion forward. A true comprehension of his own experience makes him dispute the validity of the picture, so freeing him to receive Pirandello's criticism of it, and so, a fortiori, to modulate freely into the drama he is portraying. Pirandello uses symbols as exact but unlimiting devices, to inflect the interplay of incident and narrative. In essence, most of his symbols are either the outward and visible sign of an inner discovery (the "event" of Pirandellian theatre) or the trigger to such an alertness and enrichment. I should like here to concentrate on three of Pirandello's major symbols, and to...