Pirandello's Mirror

PIRANDELLO'S MIRROR IN A TIME WHEN GREAT QUESTIONS HAD TO BE ASKED in the drama, Pirandello seemed to be ready to ask the right ones, brilliantly. He was the proper child of a questioning age, nourished on two great revolutionary movements: a revolt of the arts against all conventional forms that obscured experience, and a parallel revolution in psychology that stripped away conventional ideas of behavior to get at the nuclear process. Pirandello seemed ideally to combine the means of the new art with the probe of the new psychology, in that exploration of the self that has always been one of the chief provinces of drama. Unlike contemporaries following the same paths who were pasting the insights of Freud and Jung upon their drama, he seemed to have made his own many secrets of the psyche: he understood, with the first psychoanalysts and Gestaltists, that each man perceives life in a context determined by his needs and wants, that men seldom break out of this narrow personal world in which, instead of "seeing," they project on the screen of life the meanings they want to find there. So his drama asked the crucial questions: What is the self, if indeed there is one? What is its morality? Its conscience? Its goal? What is the responsibility of the artist who deals with it, of his audience? Two things matter here: how well did Pirandello put the questions ? How did he answer them? On the first count, he deserves very high marks, for the daring and scope of his dramatic visions. Out of the very conditions of felt life discovered by the psychologists --the dilemma of mutually exclusive contexts, the defense mechanisms of projection, of self-deception, of regression-he made his major plot devices. The dissolution of dramatic personality begun by Strindberg is extended: Pirandello dramatizes the absurdity of identity. If he admits an ego, it is usually only to show its transience under the centrifugal and centripetal forces of experience. Diego, the raissoneur of Each in His Own Way, speaks explicitly the playwright's brilliant, terrible insights into the mind, with its burden of shames, and guilts, its petty thoughts, its imagined crimes, its unspeakable desires, the numberless little ins of man's many souls that are "rejected and buried in the depths of our being, and from which thoughts and actions are born-actions and thoughts which we refuse to recognize, but which, when we are forced to it, we 331 332 MODERN DRAMA February adopt or legitimize. . with appropriate adaptations, reserves, and cautions." The mind-the self-is a restlessness: All our ideas, in short, change in the restless turmoil we call life. We think we catch a glimpse of the situation. But ... impressions change from hour to hour: A word is often sufficient or even just the manner in which it is said-to change our minds completelyI And then besides, quite without our knowledge , images of hundreds and hundreds of things are flitting through our minds, suddenly causing our tempers to vary in the strangest wayl In all his best self-questioning plays, Pirandello's characters find that the firm selves they believe they own are in fact made up of evanescent hopes, impulses, wishes, fears, social pressures, the instincts of the animal inheritance. They are driven deeper: Pirandello tried to make them express-explicitly, in his Six Characters- "as their own living passion and torment the passion and torment which for so many years have been the pangs of my spirit: the deceit of mutual understanding irremediably founded on the empty abstraction of words, the multiple personality of everyone corresponding to the possibilities of being found in each of us, and finally the inherent tragic conflict between life (which is always moving and changing) and form (which fixes it, immovable)." Hence his characters usually wander as in a hall of mirrors, thinking they look for reality, while, in fact, they desperately try to find safe illusions-"ideals"-to live by. When, for a moment, they seem "real" to an audience, their non-realism is often suddenly declared: they turn out to be in a play-within-a-play, as in Each in His...