The Carnival Motif in Pirandello's Drama

The Carnival Motif in Pirandello's Drama lANA O ' KEEFE BAZZONI How many sad things do those famous carnival songs say to those who know how to read into them! (PirandeIlo, "L'umorismo," Part I) Carnival as we now know it is a brief, merry respite from the ordinary. Celebration and splendor are its primary ingredients, along with impersonation , surprise, sensuality, and confusion. But carnival has its origins in ancient "calendrical'" ceremonies and celebrations, important rituals which attempted to appease the unknown forces by which life was ruled, rituals characterized by elements of violence and terror as well as resurgence and renewal. The Roman Saturnalia, for example, invoked the golden age in "feasting, revelry and a mad pursuit of pleasure," in which servants and master shared food and drink, might exchange roles in an inversion of the norm, and a mock king ruled as a benign, but temporary, authority.2 The golden side of the festival was shadowed by the culmination of the feast when after his brief and merry reign, the mock king was sacrificed, a scapegoat for the collective sins of the community who might act to assure a good harvest. This type of vegetation ritual has been documented in widely varying cultures all over the world.3 Bakhtin's work on medieval carnival takes this dual face as one of the principal characteristics of carnival. As a feast of time, "becoming, change, renewal," carnival symbols are "filled ... with the sense of gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities" and carnival laughter is ambivalent as it both "asserts and denies," "buries and revives."4 The pattern of carnival produces a special atmosphere, mood, and tone. The celebrants' sense of the double business to which the rite is bound gives them a self-conscious awareness that helps both to assimilate and to objectify the carnival experience. Participants are enactors and spectators simultaneously. They both desire and fear the outcome they can recognize as inevitable, and The Carnival Motif in Pirandello 415 they can laugh simultaneously in triumph and derision both at themselves and at one another, at the whole of human experience, in fact. Several elements are characteristic of these types of ritual celebrations: I) they take place during a special time of year, a special period, a crisis period, often between seasons; 2) there is a special area set aside in which the event takes place; 3) usual rules are suspended and new ones prevail for a time; 4) some participants wear disguises, including masks; 5) some participants are featured in special roles in enactment rituals; 6) these enactments may involve a central figure, frequently a mock king, in either real or simulated sacrifice; 7) symbolic objects may be used. This mixture of special place and time, comic and tragic patterns, elements of disguise, doubling, inversion, and displacement function in the shadow of that sacrificial death from which new life will emerge. This examination of the origins of carnival and its various characteristic elements is a necessary prelude to the discussion of the stages of carnival as a motif in Pirandello's drama. In the remarks which follow,I will attempt briefly (and selectively) to document my conviction of the importance of the carnevalesque as thematic and structural factors in that drama.' For the purposes of discussion, I will treat the carnival motif as it appears in three different aspects, correspondent with three different groupings of the plays which show a progressive deepening of the carnevalesque spirit. Chronologically , these groups reflect the rustic, urban, and theatrical focus as Pirandello moves from early dramas set in Sicilian villages to provincial and city locales and eventually to the plays set in the theatre. Because I believe that the application of the carnival metaphor will become increasingly obvious as the discussion progresses, and because a fuller treatment is not possible here, I will examine only the first two groups of plays in any detail and will treat only one play at any length. In La giara, La patente, II berretlo a sonagli. Pellsaci, Giacomillo! and Liold, the life force is celebrated with essentially comic characters who are able to invert the usual social order through tricks and pretense, to emerge as...