Sicilian Themes and the Restructured Stage: The Dialectic of Fiction and Drama in the Work of Luigi Pirandello

Sicilian Themes and the Restructured Stage: The Dialectic of Fiction and Drama III the Work of Luigi Pirandello ANNE PAOLUCCI When, in 1923, at the age of 56, Luigi Pirandello won European acclaim with the Pitoeff production 'of Six Characters ill Search of an Author (the same play that had been booed and had caused a riot at its premiere in Rome two years earlier), the Italian writer had already published six of his seven novels, several scattered volumes of short stories, and four volumes of poetry. His reputation as a writer of fiction was already established when he turned to drama; and although he never gave up writing novels and short stories (and was to convert many of these into plays in the years that followed), Pirandello had clearly shifted his sights and direction by 1923. For the rest of his life his artistic priorities were to be focused on theater. It was in 1916 that Pirandello finally awoke to his potential as a dramatist with the recognition he received in Italy for two plays written in Sicilian dialect - Pensaci, Giacomino! (Think it Over, Giacomino!) and the genial Liola - both written for the renowned Sicilian actor Angelo Musco. These early plays reflect the " verismo" of his already mature fiction; later plays and short stories will continue to depict in a variety of ways the realism made popular in Italy at the time by other Sicilian writers like Giovanni Verga and Antonio Fogazzaro - a deep-rooted interest in the closed society of southern Italy, where rigorous conventions cannot be subverted without risking one's life and loved ones, where all is subordinated to "real" values (property, land, dowries) which shape the life of the community and all those in it, where women cannot break out of a "no exit" situation without dishonoring themselves and their families, where marriage is an economic necessity first and foremost. For Pirandello, the oppressive poverty and inescapable destinies of the poor, the bonds that trap the rich, the silent suffering of women who must succumb to the dictates of the external values that will insure their pitiful existence, the ostracized rebels who cannot escape their fate even away from the source of their troubles - the entire spectrum of Sicilian attitudes Pirandello: The Dialectic of Fiction and Drama 139 and values is depicted in all its aspects and always with awe and compassion for the frailty of the human condition. Even in the " theater" plays that made him an international avant-garde sensation as a playwright, Pirandello insists on a core narrative of intense existential confrontations: women trapped by their passion and driven to destruction by their unfulfilled ambitions and guilt; exiled and ostracized women who carry their jealousies and resentments into more cosmopolitan settings without succeeding in divesting themselves of those emotions or their consequences; men and women driven to death by the irreversible, inescapable events dictated by a closed society which haunts them even far from home. In depicting the erosion of the soul within the Sicilian setting which he loved and felt oppressed by, Pirandello displayed - both in fiction and drama - the kind of genial combination of "strong local colour" and " unconscious universality" which (according to T.S. Eliot) is the mark of greatness in literature.' Pirandello's fiction and much of his drama are rooted in this paradox. As a playwright, however, Pirandello soon hit on a. new and powerful theme, perhaps the inevitable result of focusing on the barren lives of people living in a barren place, where nature itself is hostile and the individual a victim without reprieve. His earliest plays as well as his novels and short stories examined the effect of such an existence in the most detailed way; but by 1921, with Six Characters, he turned with even greater fascination to exploring personaliry in its conscious and deliberate effort to come to tenns with the environment. We see in Six Characters a new obsession translated powerfully into a stage language itself new and overwhelming. The Sicilian story is there, still, but only as a motive for examining the experience outside itself, outside its local habitation, against the conventions and prejudices of another kind of life and commitment...