Moral Perspective in Pirandello

MORAL PERSPECTIVE IN PIRANDELLO PIRANDELLO IS FIRST RESPONDED TO in terms of his experimentalism, the pirandellismo which has made his name in the modem theater the counterpart of Joyce'ain modem fiction, or of Yeats's in modem poetry. We do not normally and easily associate him with Ibsen or Shaw, theatrical innovators also, if not so daring or so philosophical in their innovations as Pirandello. We study Ibsen and Shaw in terms of their social import, the meaning first of all of their content. Yet Pirandello's experimentalism gains its force only through his substance, the fabric of plot, theme, character; his manipulation of the conventional dramatic structure reinforces, is often identical with, his subject matter. How Pirandello says what he has to say is a good part of what he says. What Pirandello has to say is, finally, why he is worth considering at all. in other than a purely historical and technical way. Pirandello is not simply engaged in writing an endless essay on the tensions between art and reality. It is true that these tensions are of the essence of his "fantastic" plays, the ones based on some distortion of natural events (Six Characters, It Is So! (If You Think So), Mountain Giants), as well as of the "naturalistic" ones, in which there is no such distortion (LioUt, Henry IV, Each In His Own Way, The New Colony, When Someone is Somebody). These tensions occupy Pirandello all the time, and it is obvious that in a general, philosophical way he is awed by the power of the opposition between art and reality, by the almost nuclear force binding the two. No matter how complicated a particular human situation becomes in his plays, at some point someone stops to remark on this tension. The Father in Six Characters, in the midst of defining and recreating his sticky domestic complication, assures the Director that he, the Father, as a character, is more "real" because of being fixed and unchanging, frozen in a moment of his career, than the Director who, being real, must constantly be changing from moment to moment, in a constant flux. Laudisi closes each act of It Is So! (If You Think So) with his braying laugh deriding the effort to grasp truth. But this unrelenting insistence on the art-reality opposition is subordinate to moral matters and has final meaning. in the context of highly particularized human situations. It Is So! (If You Think So) illustrates the point. It is tempting to 368 1964 MORAL PERSPECTIVE IN PIRANDELLO 369 take this playas simply another little treatise in dramatic form on the nature of truth, on the difficulty of ever ascertaining it precisely. We have Laudisi's snickering refrain on truth, and of course the long discussions that precede and follow the several revelations of the plot, which are concerned with "truth," the question of who is really the mad one, Signora Frola, or her son-in-law, Signor Ponza. And, indeed, the examination of the question of truth is charming, especially brilliant, and lively, because it is so carefully embedded in the specific human arrangements of the drama. We are quite convinced , even if the people on the stage are not, of the slippery nature of truth: its relativity, its dependence on perspective, its detachment from mere fact (in the discussion about the documents, for example), and its final, impossible ambiguity (in Signora Ponza's declaration that she is both the daughter of Signora Frola and the second wife of Signor Ponza). Even more, we get a hint of one of Pirandello's major themes here: the unfixed state of truth in relation to the dramatic manipulation of it. For it is plain that both Signora Frola and Signor Ponza try to make a particular truth for the other. The "truths" they act out, while mutually exclusive, become the truths they live by; the truths become valid as the result of a conscious, controlled falsification. Yet to take the playas only a treatise on truth is to fall into the same shortsighted and shallow intellectuality of the mob on the stage which is so intent on discovering the "truth." As the characters get involved...