The Catastrophic ‘Modernity’ and the ‘Uncivilized’ Civilization in Luigi Pirandello and Luigi Antonelli

During the twentieth century many theorists discussed the ruinous effects of modernity on individuals. Freud, Marx, Weber, Adorno, Horkeimer and Marcuse talked about the high cost of modern civilization because it entailed the loss of a sense of a universal meaning, alienation from others, from nature, and from the self, which lead to the “disenchantment of the world.” Freud developed the idea of a loss of meaning, of estrangement, and focused on the pains and discontents of modern individuals. In 1990, Bryan Turner returned to the concept of malaise brought by modernity, and in his Theories of Modernity and Post-Modernity he argues:

Modernization brings with it the erosion of meaning, the endless conflict of polytheistic values, and the threat of iron cage of bureaucracy. Rationalization makes the world orderly and reliable, but it cannot make the world meaningful

(Turner 6)

Considering this scenario, this paper depicts the creation and consequent destruction of two social Utopias designed to replace modern civilization and focuses on the effects of modernity filtered through two plays written in the second decade of the twentieth century: Luigi Pirandello’s La Nuova Colonia¹ (1926) and Luigi Antonelli’s L’Isola delle Scimmie² (1922). Even if the authors don’t explicitly refer to this specific historical and cultural climate, I argue that the choices of some characters represent a desperate response to finding a tolerable way of living in a senseless world. Both plays depict an alternative utopian reality where it is possible to live separated from modern society.

Nevertheless, these “perfect” substitute worlds crumble because modernity channeled through the bourgeois mentality is an epidemic disease that corrupts man and penetrates deviously into the human conscience and becomes an integral part of the common frame of mind, as Luis Althusser explains in his book Lenin and Philosophy (1970) and Max Weber describes in his books The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946).

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argues that the decline of religion, the growth of capitalism, the excessive bureaucracy in society, and the socialization of science impose a cognitive and instrumental rationalism against a magical-sacramental one offered by religious groups. All these changes, Weber says, lead to the birth of modernity and to its “disenchantment of the world,” the “loss of a unified sense of the cosmos,” leading to a moral and cultural crisis which manifests itself in the so-called “polytheism of values” at the end of the nineteenth century.

The following extract, taken from From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946), summarizes the crucial motivations that lead to the disenchantment of the world caused by modernity:

Science has created a cosmos of natural causality and has seemed unable to answer with certainty the question of its own ultimate presuppositions. Nevertheless science, in the name of “intellectual integrity,” has come forward with the claim of representing the only possible form of a reasoned view of the world … something has adhered to this cultural value which was bound to depreciate it with still greater finality, namely, senselessness … all “culture” appears as man’s emancipation from the organically prescribed cycle of natural life. For this reason culture’s every step forward seems condemned to lead to an ever more devastating senselessness. The advancement of cultural values, however, seems to become a senseless hustle in the service of worthless, moreover self-contradictory, and mutually antagonistic ends.

(Weber 55–57).

Precisely this “devastating senselessness” is experienced by the characters of Luigi Pirandello’s La Nuova Colonia and will persuade them to escape from their empty and useless reality to find a better and more fulfilling one. Flora Bassanese, in her book Understanding Pirandello, defines the play as “the hopeful construction and cataclysmic destruction of a modern utopian ideal.” (Bassanese 122)

The “prologue” of the play shows us a cross-section of a corrupted society in the modern world: a squalid tavern where a prostitute, La Spera, is convincing a group of outlaws to leave their town and sordid lives...