Comedy and Paradox in Pirandello's Plays (An Hegelian Perspective)

Comedy and Paradox in Pirandello's Plays (An Hegelian Perspective) ANNE PAOLUCCI TH E TEMPTATION WILL always be strong, for those of us analyzing any aspect of Pirandellian comedy, to begin with an examination- or at least a brief assessment- of the playwright's well-known little book L'Umorismo, On Humor.' I have not wholly resisted that temptation, but I have tried to on two grounds. First, Pirandello's exposition in that book has been carefully examined and evaluated by such experts as Professor Dante della Terza, whose incisive essay "On Pirandello's Humorism'" has proved invaluable to most of us interested in the subject, and Professor Antonio lIliano, whose translation of L 'Umorismo (with Daniel Testa) supplies indispensable notes as well as a fine introduction. My second reason for resisting the temptation of using L 'Umorismo as my own critical base in this paper is, I suppose, my own senlimenlO del conlrario. That feeling- as Professor Della Terza interprets Pirandelio 's use of the term-is a sort of categorical imperative. It indicates, Della Terza very acutely observes, "the presence of a subjective 'feeling ' that somewhere in the stratified world of our affections there is an emotional explosion that shakes our privileged heritage of sentiments, refusing to accept them as the only ones which really 'are.'" I experience that sort of explosion when I read L 'Umorismo, or Croce's criticism of it, or the debate over Tilgher's influence on Pirandelio , or Pirandello's responses. Pirandello the literary critic and aesthetician becomes for me, then, simply another character in another Pirandellian play. The experience makes it impossible for me to read 32 1 322 ANNE PAOLUCCI Pirandello's discussion of humor as if I thought he were trying simply to be a critical philosopher. What is revealed there is the genius of the comic playwright. The plays have yet to be written; but when they are finally written, it is humor, the feeling of the opposite, as distinguished from mere perception of the opposite, that will constantly be applied in the best of them. The object of its application is not to form some substantive thing before us that we can then view at leisure, but rather to dissolve what we have before us and show that there is really nothing there-except the imaginative will of the artist functioning as an irresistible dissolvent. "Pirandello's definition of humorism" (Della Terza writes) "indicates a dilemma at the core of his aesthetic convictions." His "feeling" of the opposite is not a feeling, not a sentiment at all, "since its activity is overwhelmingly criticaL analytical, and rational. By trying to give another name to a cognitive activity Pirandelio, instead of making his dilemma inconspicuous, as he would have liked, ends up by giving the limelight, unwittingly but revealingly, to an all-encompassing and proliferating imagery suggested by the intrusive concept of reflection.'" Read as a revelation of Pirandello's developing dramatic attitude, the essay is surely invaluable. But we simply must not mistake it for an empirically based theory of his own dramaturgical achievement. In that respect I think his essay on the history of the Italian theater is much more illuminating; and I shall have occasion to cite it later. The essay on humor, with its sharp distinction of the comic from the humorous, makes it difficult moreover to relate its meaning to the main content of aesthetic theory which, at least as it relates to drama, does not insist on such a distinction. Comedy, from Aristophanes to Shakespeare and beyond, down to Pirandello himself, of course, has been the chief medium of expression for humor in Pirandello's sense. Neither etymology nor usage justifies insistence on a distinction that assigns the use of "comic" to mere "perception of the opposite." Where I have tried, in what follows, to relate my discussion to the main current of aesthetic theory, I have turned for clarification more often than not to Hegel's usage, which, insofar as it is supported by an organically integrative system of thought, avoids the pitfalls of mere trial and error. I was struck recently by the closing paragraph of a book on Humor in Pascal...