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292 Chapter 7. PIRANDELLO : Henry IV After Synge, Pirandello's Work Marks a Quantum Leap in Terms of the Philosophy of Man and H

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292 Chapter 7. PIRANDELLO : Henry IV After Synge, Pirandello's Work Marks a Quantum Leap in Terms of the Philosophy of Man and H 292 Chapter 7. PIRANDELLO : Henry IV After Synge, Pirandello's work marks a quantum leap in terms of the philosophy of man and his masks. Where there is suggestion in The Playboy that Christy becomes the role he acts, in Pirandello's plays there is conviction that man is indeed the role(s) that he plays. There is no way of delving beneath the role to find the nature of the "reality" of the face. Attempts to do so, in plays like Henry IV (1922) end in confusion and bewilderment. The twentieth century came into being with a legacy of "honest doubt", near-despair and, above all, an over-riding desire to discover the nature of man. The scientific investigations of Darwin had successfully proved that man, far from being the crowning glory of Creation, merely represented one phase in an evolutionary process. Lyell's geological investigations proved irrefutably that the earth existed aeons before man did, denying the Biblical theory of the six days of creation. The Laws of Thermo-dynamics, stipulating that energy is convertible but indestructible, rendered the office of an Energiser, or God, to run the universe, redundant. The concept of man as a known constant factor collapsed as he came to be seen as a continuously changing, developing being whose origins had only lately come to light. Besides, Freud's research showed that man's overtly seen conscious being forms only a fraction of his entire personality. While man seemed to have gained a scientifically verifiable history, he had lost his distinct features. Just as Kant had spoken of the limitations of each person's perceptions and the individual's ability to apprehend only a limited and subjective reality, so too did Freud believe that each individual conceived his own separate reality, that reality to each individual would be a different entity, thus making it difficult to judge what is normal and what abnormal. Corroboration of this view is found in two such diverse persons as F.H. Bradley with his Idealistic belief in 293 the subjective apprehension of reality and Einstein who implies (in his Theory of Relativity) in different terms a similar thesis - that all things are relative, that truth is subjective and comparative rather than absolute. It is said, in fact, that Einstein went up to Pirandello after a performance of one of his plays and said, "We are kindred souls".' Anthony Caputi's study of Pirandello and the Crisis of Modern Consciousness uses quotations from his letters to his sister Rosalina and various other writings to show how Pirandello was constantly dealing with the sense of a world out of control or, at least, very nearly so. He had come to the conclusion that the world itself has no reality unless we ourselves confer it. The world is in a state of continuous flux and, within that flux, each puny individual seeks to create some sort of sense of coherence "by naming, abstracting, fixing or seeming to fix, devising tricks and illusions that give the appearance of coherence". Though he was aware of the limited effectiveness of these measures, still he realized that they were required by the human race if they hoped to impose a degree of shape and substance upon the flux. His perception of relativity extended to judgment, morals, institutions, sensation - all human experience. In fact, the relativity of all standards and norms in our world is responsible for much of the confusion of modern intellectual life, Pirandello believed.^ Joseph Wood Krutch speaks of the loss of the concept of the inviolable individual identity - the sense of a definite "I" - in the modern age. Pirandello's characters, as the plays and fiction show, could be "one, none, or a hundred thousand". Even when man tries, faithfully and sincerely but inevitably in vain, to be true to himself, that self is in the process of acquiring a new face. 1 Richard Gihnan, "Pirandello", Luigi Pirandello, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1989) 40. 2 Anthony Caputi, Pirandello and the Crisis of Modem Consciousness (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988) 84 - 85. 294 Pirandello obsessed over this situation all his life and his body of creative work is the living monument to his musings.^ Dramatists like Luigi Chiarelli, with a mature consciousness of man's multiplicity, adopted the Freudian idiom and used the mask and the face as emblems of the external reality of man and his private self in plays like The Mask and the Face (1914). Pirandello was impressed by the revolt against the drama of romance by the Teatro del Grottesco'* and he was to go on to make the grotesque his special domain. Chiarelli and his followers ripped the mask off the false ideals of the old drama and showed the reality of the sort of life it endorsed. The Mask and the Face deals with the ridiculous extent to which the protagonist, Paolo, goes in order to both safeguard his honour and the life of a loved one. He finds himself trapped by the mask he himself has chosen to adopt as his face. Having boasted that he would kill his wife if he ever found her to be unfaithful to him, he feels bound to act according to a sense of his own much vaunted honour when he does actually discover her infidelity. However, he finds himself unable to actually hurt Savina because he finds he still loves her. Finally he devises a plan by which he secretly sends her out of town and pretends to have killed her in a rage. Thus he manages to preserve both the face and the mask, as it were. He would rather stand trial and be convicted for a murder he has not committed than publicly lose face. Indoctrinated with the same values as Paolo had espoused, the judge who tries him acquits him. However, in the sort of twist that was to become associated with Pirandello's style later, Savina returns to her husband and appears veiled at what is supposed to be her own funeral. When she is 3 Joseph Wood Krutch, "Modernism" in Modem Drama: A Definition and an Estimate (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1953) 77. "^ The term grottesco was first used by Victor Hugo to describe drama in which tragedy and comedy were combined. 295 recognized by her lover, the entire game played by Paolo comes to light. Allowed to go free when he was believed to be a murderer, Paolo is now perceived as guilty of contempt of court and would be sentenced by the court. Ironically, Paolo and Savina are forced to flee the country because of Paolo's innocence. The fascinating interplay of the mask and the real face of Paolo makes this a memorable revelation of the fact that, in society, reality counts for nothing beside illusion. Both Paolo's realization that he had not recognized his true self when he made his first rash boast and the utter tyranny of the social codes that dictates his conduct are the stuff of very powerful drama. Inspired by Chiarelli but carrying the contradictions between the mask and the face to an even greater level of complexity, Pirandello wrote prolifically of men so involved in role playing that their core of being is lost forever beneath the debris of their roles. When Leone Gala (probably Pirandello's most analytical and self- conscious character) in The Rules of the Game (1919) speaks of the "defence" of "the Nothing that lies inside yourself by masking the self and playing roles, an ominous note is sounded. Leone has achieved "this nothingness" after effort.^ He is certainly a man seemingly drained of all emotions; has he lost his sense of self? What is the nature of this something at the core that he calls nothingness? If it is worth defending, it is certainly not nothing. It might, however, be unnamable. The indefinable (and perhaps unknowable) ultimate core of being is what he protects by playing the part of the easygoing, eternally acquiescing gentleman. That the heart of one's selfhood should be unknowable is itself hardly a heartening premise to build upon. But Leone shows a grim resolution in his astute game playing 5 Luigi Pirandello, The Rules of the Game, trans. Robert Rietty, ed. E. Martin Browne (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1959) 25. This edition is used throughout this chapter and in subsequent references page numbers are given in parentheses. 296 that belies the notion that he has lost his selfhood. He is certainly very self-aware and demonstrates that he knows Silia, his estranged wife, better than she knows herself. If Erving Goffman, contemporary social psychologist, views man's behaviour as the stuff of theatre and describes it in the terms of theatre^, Pirandello too echoes the concept of life as drama and uses its terminology.^ His characters are like actors playing roles on the stage of their lives. Despondent over this destiny of man, he has his characters enact what becomes their individual "tragic epiphany^^. The plays of Pirandello, with their single obsessive theme of the multiplicity of man's identity, mark a watershed where drama dealing with role playing is concerned. If the proviso scene in The Way of the World marked a great progress or affirmation as far as endorsement of role playing in life goes, then the body of work left behind by Pirandello is a monument to the inevitability of play acting in the life of every human being. However, this inevitability is definitely a tragic one in his eyes. Man is doomed to never really know his true self, never be able to isolate his unique selfhood.
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