A Case of Identity: The Source of Pirandello's As You Desire Me

A Case of Identity: The Source of Pirandello's As You Desire Me JOHN B. REY • LUIGI PIRANDELLO'S PREOCCUPATION WITH THE CONCEPT OF PERSONALITY is well known. The recurrent themes of his plays are his belief that we are not one person, but many; that life often plays us the cruel trick of forcing upon us a mask which others believe is us while behind the mask the real person tries to emerge; that life and art are inalterably opposed, in that life is movement, change, while art is fixation, eternity. Life is constant change. There is a perpetual struggle between this dynamic and the effort of the personality to anchor, to "fix" itself into some eternal form in which it can say: "Look! this is what (or who) I am!" while a mocking life-stream sways with "No! that is what you were; now you are this; in a little while you will be that." Costruirsi is a favorite Pirandellian verb. It means to construct one's own personality oneself, from nothing. All his heroes are busy with the construction of a personality which they hope would be the same for all others and for all circumstances. Pirandello was, indeed, the fore-runner of the Existentialists. "Recently asked who was the most timely modern dramatist, the author of Le Diable et Ie Bon Dieu answered: 'It is most certainly Pirandello.' ,,1 In Pirandello and the French Theatre, Thomas Bishop has amply given evidence of Pirandello's influence on the most advanced French dramatists.2 In a sense, Pirandello was also one of the first to proclaim the theory of the Absurd. In his Six Characters, the Father exclaims: "You know that life is full of infjnite absurdities which have no need whatsoever of appearing true because they are true." Bishop says that "the absurd is the bond between Camus and Pirandello,,,3 and the French critic Francis Jeanson compares Camus' Caligula to Pirandello's Enrico IV.4 However, more often than is thought, Pirandello went to real life for his material, on the correct belief that no writer could invent situations or create characters more fantastic, more preposterous or eccentric than those found in everyday life. 433 434 JOHN B. REY In the late 1920s Pirandello found in newspaper headlines a drama more Pirandellian than any he could ever have invented, a drama of the human personality so complex, so catastrophic, so absurd that it was readymade for his pen. The celebrated Bruneri-Canella Case became As You Desire Me. On February 6, 1927 Milan's Carriere della Sera published the photograph of a bearded man with staring, vacant eyes, and asked its readers: "Who knows this man?" Enclosed within the walls of a mental institution and numbered 44170, the man seemed afflicted with amnesia and could furnish no details as to his identity. He was recognized by no one until Giulia Canella appeared, who was certain that he was her husband, Professor Giulio Canella, who was wounded in the head on the Macedonian front and taken prisoner January 16, 1916. From that date there had been no sign of him. Signora Canella took this unknown man home with her. Many, including her two children, former students of the Professor of Classics, and fellow-soldiers, hastened to confirm the lady's identification of the man as her husband. Then the Police Commissioner of Turin received an anonymous letter asserting that this Professor Giulio Canella was an impostor, and was in reality Mario Bruneri, a petty thief sought by the police for having escaped jail. Again the Unknown was taken into custody and put under various examinations, the results of which were mostly inconclusive. The Unknown continued to be (or pretended to be?) affected by memory loss. He could "recall" almost nothing of his past, anything which could certify his identity. He could read no Latin; he could read no note of music, although the professor was an accomplished pianist. The most damaging "evidence" was that the Unknown's finger-prints matched, according to the police, those of Bruneri. All the while Signora Canella insisted the man was her husband and wanted him released in her custody. In the...