Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, The Mountain Giants (Oxford World's Classics) Read Free

what sounds like ratiocination. Moreover, some of his plays, on a first reading, do seem designed to demonstrate a philosophical point, be it the inevitability of role-playing, the multiplicity of identity, the relativity of truth, or the impossibility of real knowledge of the self or the world. Benedetto Croce, Italy’s preeminent philosopher in the first half of the twentieth century, notoriously dismissed Pirandello’s work as an awkward hybrid between art and philosophy, 3 but this is hardly surprising if we consider the contrast between Croce’s own neo-idealism and the dramatist’s radical pessimism, rooted in the work of Schopenhauer and his French disciple Gabriel Séailles. And even if Pirandello’s ideas are no more than the common intellectual currency of his age, we still need to see how they relate to his poetics. In this context the crucial document that has served as a starting point for most later discussions of the issue is Pirandello’s own lengthy essay
Humourism
(
L’umorismo
, 1908, revised 1920).
    The only available English translation of
L’umorismo
is entitled
On Humor
which is unfortunate if it suggests some theory of the comic along the lines of such near-contemporary discussions as Bergson’s
Laughter
(1900) and Freud’s
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
(1905). There are, no doubt, points of contact with both these texts, but ‘humourism’, as John Barnes reminds us, 4 is no laughing matter and the immediate sources of Pirandello’s thought are to be found in such less-known works as Alfred Binet’s
The Alterations of Personality
(1892) and Giovanni Marchesini’s
The Fictions of the Soul
(1905). The first part of
Humourism
is a fairly academic account of writers who have been described as ‘humourists’; it is only in the second part of the book that Pirandello gets down to discussing what ‘humourism’ actually is, with a verve and an intensity that leave us in little doubt that he is defining his own poetics. At the heart of ‘humourism’ lies the bleak vision that had already been roughly outlined four years earlier in
The Late Mattia Pascal
. Pirandello follows Bergson is seeing life as a continuous flux, evanescent and ever-changing, which we seek in vain to halt by imposing on it the ‘stable and determinate forms’ constructed by the intellect. These are the concepts, ideologies, and ideals, the ‘fictions’ that give us a deceptive consciousness of ourselves,the illusion of some coherence in our lives. Thus life and form are at odds. At times inevitably the forms into which we try to channel our lives will be overthrown by our unruly passions and we shall be plunged back into the chaotic flux; but the alternative is a subjection to forms whose rigidity means death (
SP
, p. 151).
    It is to this inevitable tension between life and form, between the absurdity of what we are and the illusion of what we think we are, that humourism directs our attention. Humourism is not a question of subject matter but of a particular kind of perception which Pirandello calls
sentimento del contrario
, ‘the feeling of the opposite’ or perhaps ‘feeling
for
the opposite’. It begins with the awareness of some incongruity (
avvertimento del contrario
) as when we see an old lady striving and failing to appear young (
SP
, p. 127). If the experience remains at that level, it will give rise to the comic and nothing more. But the true humourist subjects it to a dispassionate reflection which ‘penetrates everywhere and dismantles everything: every image of feeling, every ideal fiction, every appearance of reality, every illusion’ (
SP
, p. 146). This goes beyond a derisive satisfaction at the stripping away of illusions. In the case of the old lady, for example, an understanding of the reasons why she has gone to such lengths might lead to compassion rather than laughter. Hence the
sentimento del contrario
, unlike the initial
avvertimento del contrario
, is the fruit of