By Ciro Sorrentino.
Pirandello’s style is, therefore, a very personal one that, in the ability to break down and deform, in the propensity for irony and expressionism, brings him closer to the European avant-garde and to the widespread intention to reveal in the forms of art the moral ruin and the profound psychological contradictions of the individual.
An Introduction to Luigi Pirandello
Living in a historical-cultural period marked by the crisis of 19th-century values and the end of scientific-rational certainties, Pirandello developed a personal critical-humorous reflection on human reality, manifesting the urgent need to represent the existential unease and the consequent painful disillusionment, which, definitively, have upset the customs of post-Risorgimento bourgeois society.
Through an intelligent and dispassionate literary activity, expressed above all in his work as a narrator and playwright, the writer provides a heartfelt and direct testimony of contemporary malaise, and conducts a persistent inquiry into the state of confusion and inconsolable isolation in which the individual finds himself. The privileged object of analysis becomes the intimate and authentic dimension of consciousness, placed under the unsettling anguish of modern man, caught in the inexorable grip of life which is revealed to him as insidious and changeable.
The awareness of the failure of an entire universe of values is rigorously explained in the essay “Art and Conscience of Today” of 1893, where the general irresolution is denounced because “the old norms have collapsed” and “the new ones have not yet arisen or are well established”, when by now “the abstract terms have lost their value, lacking the common understanding, which made them comprehensible”, “no one can manage to establish a fixed and unshakable point”. The relativity that pervades all aspects of the modern era inevitably transforms life into a complex and contradictory reality, and forces man to fall back on himself, to feel anguished by the incurable personal conflicts and social uncertainties. The discovered disharmony of life and history, the inconsistency and inconsistency of objective time, are, therefore, for Pirandello, the external signs, now visible, that reflect an identical and profound drama, that of the subject who, left alone with the fragments of his consciousness, tries in vain to fix himself in a unitary, organic and compact form.
Pirandello’s reflection, serious and pungent, after revealing the tragic nothingness, disguised by the sometimes funny image of events, focuses on the inconsistencies and painful disharmonies of reality, which, ultimately, project man into a pressing and painful restlessness. And it is natural that Pirandello – fully convinced that “to do literature, for the sake of the spirit, is a strangely vain thing” – listens to the lament of man and writes to denounce the indissoluble conflict between being and appearing, the desolation and the state of abandonment in which daily life sinks. In this critical-literary conviction, the dialectic, often exasperated, and the paradox, as an expression of the antinomy of events, are inserted as the cognitive procedures and the most congenial communicative expedients to investigate reality and reveal the deep and painful dramas of so many creatures tormented by the impossible need to escape “the pain of living like this”.
Pirandello’s is, therefore, a very personal style which, in the ability to decompose and deform, in the propensity for irony and expressionism, brings him closer to the European avant-garde and the widespread intention to reveal in the forms of art the moral ruin and the deep psychological contradictions of the individual. The evident existential and metaphysical direction of Pirandello’s research is close to the positions of Kafka, Camus, Sartre and the playwrights of the theater of the absurd (Beckett, Ionesco) and is recognizable in the bitter dialectic of the Agrigento writer for the disturbing investigation of inner reality, for the anguish of existence, for the illogicality and contradictoriness of events that cause the depersonalization and alienation of modern man. These are the recognizable signs of a singular literary correlation, which, in addition to some speculative analogies and artistic commitment, is discovered rather as a natural convergence and autonomous adherence to universal values, spontaneously recognized and expressed in different ways by the genius of the great thinkers.
The Pirandellian man, pressed by an unsatisfied and impossible desire to communicate and be understood, is not very different from the characters that give life to the great literary works of the most famous European writers of the 20th century and the same pathos lives when, driven by unconscious forces, he discovers “perceptions, reasoning, states of consciousness that are truly beyond the relative limits of our normal and conscious existence”: here is marked the passage from the farce of “living” to the drama of “seeing oneself live”. “Whoever has understood the game can no longer deceive himself; but whoever can no longer deceive himself, can no longer take any taste or pleasure in life”, indeed he chooses to be a naked mask painfully aware of the duplicity of human behavior.
But all his own is the intimate pain and the unspeakable torment, when, faced with the fall of every spatial relation and temporal connection, he can only arrive at the observation of a cognitive and psychological relativism without solution, at the substantial incommunicability between men, at the conviction that reality is reduced to a temporary projection of our ego. Yet he reacts to the discouragement, and fleeing the senseless “trap” of daily living, takes refuge, with a completely singular choice, in the dialectical and dramatic dimension of his reasoning and speaks of life with the detached and painful irony of the essayist, who, placing himself outside of historical time, observes human events with impartial and lucid logic.
This is the painful story of the man who, through the flexing lens of humor, Pirandello sees in the anomalous and bizarre aspects of life, revealing its laughable and pitiful sensations; and this is the artistic exercise that, in the reasoning and polemical language of an innumerable series of characters, betrays a lyrical tension, variously signified in the lacerating cry of denunciation and condemnation of conscience.
And such poetic thought animates the pages of the novel “The Late Mattia Pascal”, in which Pirandello, through the decomposition of traditional narrative modules and the critique of the determinism of modern philosophy, upsets the all apparent and formal order of human history to give space to the deep reasons and emotional impulses of being, to the protest of the person against the artifices of masks and social conventions, which inevitably generate alienation and bewilderment.
The reaction to the grip of a squalid existence, arising spontaneously from the deep and instinctive need to consist, is a desperate effort to build a different life compared to the mystifications of civil life, to the pre-established forms that, precluding the possibility of determining oneself in reality, fuel an infinite sense of existential void. To the abyss of nothingness and the anguishing dimension of a disconcerting psychological and moral absence, which suspend consciousness in a frightening and unbearable boredom, Mattia Pascal rebels and, trying to give meaning to his life, chooses a new identity, that of Adriano Meis.
He is surprised, then, in the vivacity and spontaneity of his thoughts, but, at the same time, he discovers himself to be a “foreigner” of life, because the lack of a social status prevents him from giving space to his feelings and realizing the dream of feeling alive in a truer and more authentic reality. Upon closer analysis, the dual absence of identity, signified in the life of Mattia Pascal and his alter ego Adriano Meis, is an absence of liberality and humanity, the perfidy of a society for which “outside the law” and its apparent and pretended order, “for which we are us”, that is, indefinite and unconscious forms, “it is not possible to live”.
Consequently, the apparent and almost peaceful conclusion of the story, in which the terrible and monstrous truth discovered by Mattia is absolutely significant, is not resignation and surrender of the subject to the complicated and intricate customs, in which the commodification of human relationships is irremediably consumed, but it is a suffered denunciation of the impossibility to recognize oneself in a reality emptied of meaning by the same rules of social institutions. His particular return to society is, therefore, constituted as the extreme attempt to identify himself in an effective space; and the temporary suspension of meaning, in which the story seems to be interrupted, rather rises to a symbol of a rebirth of man who, in fact, in the undoubted reconciliation with the truth of his essence, is the only possible alternative to the massification of an obsolete system.
The antinomy, so far signified in the contrast between man and the artificial mask, expands in the story of Vitangelo Moscarda, becoming first inner dissension, then impossibility to communicate with his fellow men, finally, negation of an increasingly disjointed, divided, fragmented social reality. Once again, and with extreme recrudescence, the Pirandellian man rebels against the unbearable and dead forms, ambiguously disguised by customs, and with greater intensity strives to implement an irrational and senseless gesture, the only one that can annihilate that “regularity of experiences”, which identifies him as Vitangelo Moscarda. At the end of his audacious experience, he finds himself alone with his consciousness and to guarantee its sovereignty, he takes refuge in the integral domain of nature, the only one not yet violated by human presumption.
This is the poetic substance of the man without a mask who, definitively free from the historical artifices of an artificial logic of convenience, concludes in the total estrangement of Serafino Gubbio, in the tragic awareness of the impossibility of living in a social reality that, on the existential level, is entirely distorted and invalidated by the myths of 19th-century realism and the new historicism.
His is the extreme observation of the irremediable contrast with reality, and only his is the tragic disposition that, compared to the partial choices, still assimilated to the need to belong in some way to the history of the world, prevents him from continuing, like Mattia and Vitangelo, in the search for a dimension in which to consist. Serafino no longer feels the need to imagine any form, and, without “neither world, nor time, nor anything… outside of everything, absent from himself”, now unable to express himself, adheres to the immutable silence of his “little machine”, to impassively fix, on the film, the insolubility to be and the pain of living. Serafino is aware that it is not possible to establish a linear and positive measure, an intelligible rule to find a meaning to reality and, retracing the cognitive stages of man, shows the chilling and terrible truth of inconsistency, the devastating and inconsolable solitude of man.
Ciro Sorrentino
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