Six Characters in Search of an Author and the Battle of the Lexis

Six Characters in Search ofan Author and the Battle of the Lexis MARY ANN FRESE WITT The six characters that have given their author worldwide fame as a playwright were, from evidence of earlier sketches, originally destined for a novel, or at least in search of an author of narrative. I In one of these we witness a Dr. Fileno, a character abandoned by his author, pleading with the novelist narrator to take him into his work and thus allow him to live eternally. "Tell me, who was Sancho Panza? Tell me, who was Don Abbondio? And yet they live eternally because, living seeds, they had the good fortune to find a fruitful womb, a fantasy which knew how to raise and nourish them, so that they might live throughout all eternity!'" Thus Dr. Fileno defines the conditions of living as a personaggio to the narrator. Shortly after the entrance of the six characters in the play, the father repeats these same words to the director. The metaphor, inevitably suggesting to the modern reader recent advances in medical science with Cervantes and Manzoni pictured as male surrogate mothers offering their wombs to embryos somehow formed elsewhere, is a curious one. Yet this would seem to define Pirandello's concept of the personaggio: an embryonic, yet apparently fully-formed creature in search of a maternal space called "author" or "imagination". Ifthe six characters are in search of such a surrogate mother, why have they sought out a decidedly unimaginative director - no author, he - and his vain group of players? Have they, like Dr. Fileno, been turned down by a novelist? In his preface, Pirandello indicates that he is the metaphorical mother of the characters, and that dramatic characters, as opposed to narrative ones, appearto have cut a kind of umbilical cord ("as if completely detached from every narrative support,,)3 and are thus ready to live on their own, on stage. And yet the search for an "author" betrays an uncertainty regarding this independence. But it is in fact only the Father, self-proclaimed spokesman for the group, who insists on the need of an author. Although the characters as a group act as antagonists to the players, they Six Characters and the Battle of the Lexis 397 speak not with a unified voice but through a continuing agon between the Father and the Stepdaugher, or more accurately through a narration by the Father interrupted, commented on, and contradicted by the Stepdaughter: an antiphony of text and metatext. An exception among Pirandello's female characters, the Stepdaughter plays the role of umorista, glossing the Father's moral earnestness with her strident laughter. The struggle between them is not only a battle between the masks ofrevenge and remorse, as Pirandello indicates in the initial didascalia, but primarily a debate over the nature, the order, and the interpretation of events - in other words, how to tell the story that must be told. Peter Szondi has described as an "epic frame" the characters' interaction with the actors and director, and as "dramatic" the scenes represented from their past. The "epic" part ofthe play is ofcourse concerned with the impossibility of making this particular drama, or more broadly with the impasse of naturalistic drama in general.4 It seems more accurate, however, in the wake of Genette's refinements on the question, to speak of a conflict between narrative (or "diegetic") and mimetic modes rather than between epic and dramatic genres throughout Six Characters. The idea of a mode of representation as opposed to a literary genre is traced by Genette back to Plato's use of lexis in the course of his discussion of the expUlsion of poets in the third book of the Republic.>In the diegetic mode the poet speaks in his own name; in the mimetic mode he speaks "disguised" as various characters. Whereas Plato and Aristotle and centuries of theoreticians after them recognize that the epic may be "mixed," making use of both diegesis and mimesis, showing and telling, the drama would seem to be composed of "pure" mimesis, eliminating the mediation of writer or narrator and taking place in a succession of present moments as opposed to the diegetic...