Pirandello and the Waiting Stage of the Absurd (With Some Observations on a New "Critical Language")

Pirandello and the Waiting Stage of the Absurd (With Some Observations on a New "Critical Language") ANNE PAOLUCCI In his Myth ofSisyphus, Albert Camus defines the feeling that in our time has replaced the security of a "world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty," as the result of "the divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting. " Lifted from his familiar moorings, "man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile...." This existential condition is what "truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.'" Almost four decades have gone by since Camus wrote these words; literature has exploded many myths and has found new fertile ground since his time; and it is hardly surprising that French playwrights should have proved the most consistent in exploring what Camus had recognized as the prevailing mood of our century. Theater of the Absurd owes a great deal to Camus~ but the man who restructured the modern stage for a corrosive scrutiny of a world in which we are no longer at home and who provided the sustained dramatic energy for the task was Pirandello. It was Pirandello who first shifted the dramatic sights to the fragmented internal world of self, forging a new language for the purpose, a new stage. Without him, Theater of the Absurd might not have corne into being; certainly it would have taken a very different direction. His influence on Sartre, Beckett, raneseD, Pinter, Albee, Wilder, Gelber, Anouilh, Giraudoux, O'Neill, and Camus himselfmakes him without a doubt "the most seminal dramatist of our time."2 Whatever the extent of his existential commitment (certainly not as obvious as Beckett's or as strident as !onesco's), Pirandello effected profound organic changes in the theater, changes that divorced the actor from the conventional stage and prepared him for the dramatic dialectic which was to become the insistent burden ofthe contemporary theater. Pirandello dramatized the very act of creation, reminding us that it is not an easy birth. How did he do it? First: he restored to the stage its central importancc as the empty potency of the dramatic experience. He saw the stage as something to be shaped anew with each new play, like a poem that creates its special language, its unique Pirandello and the Absurd 103 configuration, as it evolves. With this vision of the function of the stage, Pirandello restored to theater the old magic of "two boards and a passion." The commitment was not explicit at the outset; but by 1921 , with Six Characters in Search of an Author, a new theater in fact had been perfected. And, in retrospect, we can see clear indications of what is to corne as early as Liaid (1916), in which Pirandello sweeps away with a bold reversal of moral polarities the conventions of a threadbare system of fossilized social responsibility and unexamined religious absolutes. The rigorous definitions of his own Sicilian society are already transfonned in that early masterpiece into an implicit question that takes us to the threshold of an existential experience. Against a familiar background we witness a transvaluation of values, a destructive commentaty on a society which stifles individual life. The result is not social commentary, however, but a stripping of conventional masks down to a vulnerable core. What we have is the beginning of that dissolution of character which is the signet mark of Pirandello's dramatic art. Within five years, Pirandello gives us his fullest statement of the conversion of the stage for that purpcse in his "theater plays"; shifting relationships, juxtaposition of roles and masks, the rich dialectic which destroys the unexamined life and prepares us for internal conversion through the will, come together in a totally new but already perfected dramatic medium. The "theater plays" are a drastic departure from all that has come before. In them the audience itself becomes a"mask," a dramatis persona in the making. All three reach down into the darkness beyond the footlights, expanding and contracting and giving back like a distorted mirror in each case shifting reflections from unfamiliar angles. In these plays the audience becomes an actor outside his role, just as the theater itself is the symbol of the empty...