Six Characters: Pirandello's Last Tape

SIX CHARACTERS:PIRANDELLO'S LAST TAPE 1 THERE CAN BE LITTLE DOUBT that Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of An Author owes its continued hold on our imagination-and its power as theatre-to the successful fusion of two orders of experience : the pain of role-playing in any life, and the painful limitations of dramatic art, particularly the crisis of post-Ibsen naturalism. The way Pirandello achieves this fusion is familiar enough and can be restated as follows. The imagined but prematurely abandoned 'characters,' who come to claim performance on the stage, feel themselves caught in the false fixity of a few moments of action; so they hope to be shown, to be re-created in the precise sense, through a different and compensating fixity: the Grecian urn perfectedness of art. But the completion and rehearsal of an unfinished play is not at all like the Grecian urn; on the contrary, it brings back the flux of life and inchoate creation, and the characters have to suffer again an awareness that exceeds their role. In effect, they react to this openness by wanting to choose the kind of play that suits them. And the two most articulate characters-the Father and the Stepmother-are torn by a desire for seemingly conflicting types of play: they want absolute fidelity to every naturalistic detail (the yellow plush of Madame Pace's sofa) while also wanting to go beyond this reduced play to express their essential inwardness: they want to be chorus, and they want to mean more than their fixed actions and words. To put it another way, Six Characters embodies not only the paradox of art against life, fixity, and happening. It also presents the tension between a play of abundant verbal expression and one that is reduced to a photographic fragment. In what follows I want to examine this tension-in terms of form, action and language. And it is language, what the play can tell us about the crisis of dramatic speech, that will be my main concern; I believe it is a theme that has received little attention so far. 2 Before taking a closer look at the text, I should like to recall that Pirandello, with all his theatrical inventiveness, was a literary dramatist in several senses. Like Shaw and Beckett, in their different ways, 1 2 MODERN DRAMA May he was a prolific writer outside the theatre; and when he turned to drama he not only insisted on the importance of the 'book,' the text, but he was caught, like many of the moderns, in the intolerable wrestle with words. It seems to have been a case of a rich prose writer needing to count every dramatic coin, a touch of late-nineteenthcentury verboseness struggling to find its own economy. And it is revealing to see, from a characteristically wordy definition in an early essay on drama, that the economy he admired was that of Ibsenwhat he called azione parlata: it is necessary for the dramatist to find the word that shall be the action itself spoken, the living word that can move, the immediate expression, connatural with the act ...1 Now it is clear that in Six Characters we find something like a parody of this wonderful economy where word and situation are one. What we have instead is a split between these two, the words are incommensurable , there are too many or too few, they sprout in luxuriance or else wither away. All this is carefully controlled by Pirandello and the tension in the dialogue follows from the open form around the closed scene.2 Nevertheless, the classic proportions of modern realism are disrupted. We grasp this most directly through the grotesque disproportion of the lines given to the father inside the fixed situationThe Scene-and what I shall call the open situation outside it. In his Scene the Father is tied to a mumbling minimal utterance, as in reenacting the high-class brothel meeting with the Stepdaughter: Then ... well ... it shouldn't any longer be so ... May I take off your hat?3 Contrast with this any of the Father's prolix set speeches in the open :situation-instances of soul...