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

reflection—a distinction that, to some extent, recalls Schiller’s
On Naive and Sentimental Poetry
(1796), where ‘sentimental’ implies a reaction to the gap between the real and the ideal that is self-conscious and meditated as opposed to ‘naive’ and instinctive.
    It is important to recognize that the ‘feeling for the opposite’ does not simply replace one response with another. The humourist, now revealed as a compassionate ironist, remains conscious of the comic aspect of experience and this generates an uncertainty or instability that is reflected, Pirandello believes, in the literary forms that humourism takes, ‘disorderly, interrupted, interspersed with constant digressions’, deconstructing rather than constructing, seeking contrast and contradiction where other works of art aim for synthesis and coherence (
SP
, p. 133). As a prime example of the humourist text, Pirandello cites Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
, but his own
Six Characters
, which he himself describes as ‘stormy and disordered … constantly interrupted, sidetracked, contradicted’ (
PSC
, p. 195), would fit the bill just as well. Life, for the humourist, resists theconstraints of genre; it is neither a novel nor a drama. And if Sterne’s narrator undermines the fiction of coherent identity by parodying and disrupting the conventions of narrative, Pirandello does the same through his recognition and subversion of the conventions of theatrical representation.
    Impressive and eloquent though
Humourism
often is, it may be doubted whether Pirandello’s ideas would have attracted serious attention for very long without the powerful advocacy of the philosophercritic Adriano Tilgher in his chapter on the dramatist in
Studies in Contemporary Theatre
(1923). Tilgher does more than follow the lead of
Humourism
in seeing the tension between life and form as central to Pirandello’s thought; he seizes on the paradox of a reasoning process that undermines reason to present Pirandello’s art as the most powerful literary extension of a crisis in modern thought:
    Pirandello’s art is not only chronologically but also ideally contemporary with the great idealist revolution that took place in Italy and Europe at the beginning of this century. It carries over into art the anti-intellectual, anti-rationalist, anti-logic current that permeates the whole of modern philosophy and is now culminating in Relativism. Pirandello’s art is anti-rationalist not because it denies or ignores thought to the total benefit of feeling, passion, and affections, but rather because it installs thought at the very centre of the world as a living power struggling with the living and rebellious powers of Life. 5
    Pirandello was initially flattered by the major role thus assigned to him, but he later resented the critic’s not implausible claim to have influenced some of the plays that followed
Six Characters
and
Henry IV
. More justifiably, he came to regard the Tilgher formula as reductionist and insisted that his works offer images of life which assume universal significance rather than concepts that express themselves through images. Tilgher’s account of Pirandello is, no doubt, unduly dry and schematic and he has been reproached for neglecting the comic verve that so often leavens the dramatist’s so-called ‘cerebralism’. He has, however, the great merit of showing that Pirandello’s vision tends inevitably towards the theatre which embodies and enhances the form–life duality by the very fact that it subjects a fixed text to the vagaries and hazards of performance.
Six Characters in Search of an Author
    ‘[N]othing in this play exists as given and preconceived: everything is in the making, … everything is an unforeseen experiment’ says Pirandello (
PSC
, p. 194).
Six Characters in Search of an Author
bears the subtitle ‘a play in the making’; it is often described as ‘a play within a play’, and it would be equally appropriate to speak of ‘a