By Mattia Cavadini.
Pirandello is infinite. In both good and bad ways. Infinite, in the literal sense: that is, it never ends. Not only because of the plots of his novels, which are consistently auroral, incessantly digressive, built on continuous fantastic leaps, narrative flashes, humorous and ironic reversals, abyssal cerebralities, minutiae and detailed subtleties.
Infinite Pirandello
The Relevance of the Sicilian Writer
Pirandello is infinite. In both good and bad ways. Infinite, in the literal sense: that is, it never ends. Not only because of the plots of his novels, which are consistently auroral, incessantly digressive, built on continuous fantastic leaps, narrative flashes, humorous and ironic reversals, abyssal cerebralities, minutiae and detailed subtleties. But also for the meanings that surface from his works, which are also countless and unconfined, although all referable to the sphere of the self, the sphere that another great writer (who also lived between the 19th and 20th centuries) defined as a single multitude. The self is not monolithic, but rather multiple, made up of infinite masks, facets. The self is One, no one, and a hundred thousand. And this is because (thanks to the tools of fantasy, imagination, and humor) it can continuously escape from reality and from itself: solutions for survival, alienation, duplications, transference, … Moreover, Pirandello is infinite also for the reactions he provokes in the reader, often enthusiastic in adolescence (when the construction of identity finds in the Sicilian writer’s books a shattered mirror that reflects a splintered image of the self, raising questions and recognitions), critical and hesitant in adulthood (not only because of the inevitable impatience towards the often cerebral narrative machinery, but also due to the presence of conceptual obscurities, such as a certain metaphysical bafflement, easy psychological interpretations, and here and there the echoes of an ideological adherence to fascism), serene, admiring, and compassionate in maturity, when, in knowing oneself more completely, the reader finds himself in Pirandello, having experienced the fragility of the self, its duplicity, its infinity. In short, as Leonardo Sciascia [1] said, at a certain point in life, one finds Pirandello; in knowing ourselves, we recognize him.
[1] Leonardo Sciascia (1921 – 1989), an Italian writer, novelist, essayist, playwright, and politician.
To recognize him, however, one must make a bonfire of all the ostentatious stage decorations displayed by the Sicilian writer: the Mephistophelean lace, the photos in front of the mirror, the academic cap, the thousand masks, the Versilia with Marta Abba, the travels in Europe, the celebrations, and the grand performance in Stockholm on the occasion of the Nobel Prize … Once this great bonfire is made, Pirandello appears to us for what he truly was, beyond his countless masks. Not the dandy, not the fascist, not the academic steeped in his German studies, but the Sicilian professor who lived for years beside an unbalanced wife, who locked himself in the furnace of writing from which he drew numerous stories, staging ambivalent characters, both victims and executioners, persecutors and martyrs. A writer who lived on his own skin the despair (by sharing without disgust the madness of his wife, without abandoning her), the depression (for having lost everything: the father’s sulfur mines destroyed by a landslide, the family fortune, his wife’s dowry), the pessimism (for the decline of the ideals of the Belle Époque, the crisis of the bourgeois family, the crumbling of the will to power, the birth of class conflict). A writer who, like his Mattia Pascal, looked at his own shadow with the desire to trample it, exclaiming: the shadow of a dead man, that’s my life.
Knowing all this, not only because one has read the biography of the Sicilian writer but also because one has understood what life is, Pirandello returns, in maturity, to pay us a visit. Here lies the reason for Pirandello’s success. Because then, behind the infinite stories, the plays, and the short stories, one no longer sees a cerebral game, an accumulation of quibbles and verbosity, but recognizes the desperate attempt to save reason through literary creation. The alternation of pity and sarcasm, the use of humor and irony to avoid existential abysses, the idea that only imagination can save from the abyss of vanitas vanitatum: all these survival strategies enacted by Pirandello’s characters (up to the threshold of the absurd) actually embody the same expedients Pirandello sought to enact in his Torture chamber, to avoid succumbing to his wife’s madness while also trying to provide a future for his children and family unexpectedly confronted with necessity.
The treatise on humor, rather than resembling Bergson’s essay (humor as social subversion, role reversal, inversion of values), seems to be a first formulation of the theory of the absurd: a comic mask to wear to hide (first and foremost from oneself) one’s own despair. This has been Pirandello’s humor. This has been his furious need to write. Bound to his wife’s madness, faced with the collapse of ideals and unexpected economic difficulties, the Sicilian writer poured all of himself into his work. A splintered work in which he sought (like many of his characters) to offer himself other possibilities of existence. This has been his humor: to show through writing the inconsistency of the real in the face of the infinite reality that fantasy and imagination can devise.
Mattia Cavadini
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