Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author

A little less than half a century ago there appeared on stage in Rome one of the most brilliant pieces of deviltry in modern literature, Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. It created such a stir that in less than three years it was translated in many languages and performed all over Europe and in New York.1The sudden and unexpected appearance of live characters, who claimed to belong on the stage and could actually be seen and heard, was like a bombshell that blew out the last and weary residues of the old realistic drama. It took everybody by surprise—and confused, as it still does today, both audiences and critics. But the novelty of the invention is so stimulating, and its great inherent theatricality so skillfully handled, that the play seldom fails to provide even the most sophisticated audiences with a fresh, though not easily definable, type of cathartic experience.For these reasons, 1921 became a most decisive turning point in modern theatre. Professor Robert Brustein of Columbia University, one of the outstanding drama critics of the last decade, does not overstate Pirandello's position in contemporary literature when he says: Pirandello's influence on the drama of the 20th century is immeasurable. In his agony over the nature of existence, he anticipates Sartre and Camus; in his insights into the disintegration of personality and the isolation of man, he anticipates Samuel Beckett; in his unremitting war on language, theory, concepts, and the collective mind, he anticipates Eugène Ionesco; in his approach to the conflict of truth and illusion, he anticipates Eugene O'Neill (and later, Harold Pinter and Edward Albee); in his experiments with the theatre, he anticipates a host of experimental dramatists, including Thornton Wilder and Jack Gelber; in his use of the interplay between actors and characters, he anticipates Jean Anouilh; in his view of the tension between public mask and private face, he anticipates Jean Giraudoux; and in his concept of man as a role-playing animal, he anticipates Jean Genet. The extent of even this partial list of influences marks Pirandello as the most seminal dramatist of our time . . . 2Now who are these six characters and where do they come from? They appear on a stage where a company is about to begin rehearsals for a new play, Pirandello's Il giuoco delle parti. They interrupt, claiming that they are really six most interesting characters, side-tracked, however, in the sense that their original author first conceived them “ alive,” and then did not want or was no longer able materially to write them down in a work of art.3 They repeatedly assert that they are more real than the actors themselves, since, having been created, they now have a reality of their own, independent of their author. Consequently, they are now looking for a writer willing to put them into a book, and for a company of actors who will actualize and materialize their drama.This extremely explosive beginning sets off a most complex series of chain reactions, developing in all directions, all intricately woven in a spinning rhapsody of polemics, contrasts, misunderstandings, disquisitions, and heated feelings; a rhapsody ending in true agreement with Hegel's theory of the drama, that is, not ending at all. Here are some of the last words of the play: LA PRIMA ATTRICE (rientrando da destra, addolorata). [Commenting on the death of one of the characters]. Povero ragazzo! È morto! Oh che cosa!IL PRIMO ATTORE (rientrando da sinistra, ridendo). Ma che morto! Finzione! finzione! Non ci creda!ALTRI ATTORI DA DESTRA. Finzione? Realtà! realtà! È morto!ALTRI ATTORI DA AINISTRA. No! Finzione! Finzione!IL PADRE (levandosi e gridando tra loro). Ma che finzione! Realtà, realtà, signori! realtà!IL CAPOCOMICO (non potendone più). Finzione! realtà! Andate al diavolo tutti quanti! Luce! Luce! Luce! Ah! Non m'era mai capitata una cosa simile! Mi hanno fatto perdere una giornata!After being exposed to such an elaborate treatment, the listener or spectator cannot help feeling that he has just been taken for a most intriguing ride, and deposited exactly where he started out. The next thing that comes to mind is the concern—critical and methodological—that unless one's extremely cautious about it all, the very same excursion is bound to start all over again. Clearly, the play has several meanings, several layers of reality adding up to an unconcluded and unconcluding plurality. In spite of a seemingly philosophical surface, it does not try to preach any moral or philosophy, not excluding skepticism. A definition of the Six Characters, if it were at all possible, must take into account the fact that the play is, first and foremost, a highly sophisticated and artistic re-enactment of relativism-in-the-making. It is, therefore, amusing to see how many critics, lured by Pirandello's deceitful disorder, either plunge into it and drown, or somehow skirt about on a slippery edge—and in both cases, missing the point, that the play, like life itself, is a many-colored thing which refuses to be neatly pigeonholed.What is more remarkable still is the fact that Pirandello himself could not resist the temptation of playing his own game. Four years after the appearance of the Six Characters, he set out to give an exegesis of the comedy, in an essay that was almost simultaneously translated into English, French, and German, and then permanently attached to the play as a Preface.4 Although this essay provides us with some useful insights into Pirandello's art, it does not nearly explain the essence of the play.Coming from an author speaking of this own work, what a candid confession of critical inadequacy! Or is it rather a further and more shrewd experiment in organized confusion and ambiguity? Either way, it's hopeless.To understand the complex machinery of the Six Characters we must adopt a new critical perspective, a perspective that may enable us to face directly Pirandello's forma mentis, the inner generator of the energy and life of his art. A few questions concerning the so-called reality and autonomy of the characters may come in very handy at this point, to start us on our new itinerary.First of all, is it true that the characters are more real than the actors, as they claim to be throughout the play? At this point perhaps we should briefly clarify the meaning and function of the actors as Pirandello uses them in this play. Obviously, they represent here the people of flesh and blood, physical life. As such—though fictitious figures themselves, in so far as they were conceived by the playwright for the story line of his comedy—we tend to see them in terms of a non-mythical world, and accept them not merely as plausible symbols but as real and actual human beings.But in the case of Pirandello's characters, who are presented as neither the people conceived by the author for his play, nor as actors representing people, what shall we say about them? How can we describe or classify them? Again, is it true that these characters are more real than the actors?The answer to this question will vary according to the meaning we attribute to the adjective reale. If we take reale to refer to that which is “physical, having a body,” the answer is obviously negative. Here only the actors have physical substance, possess bodies, and are, therefore, real. If, on the other hand, we interpret reale in the philosophical sense of “pertinent to the res itself,” and therefore substantial and everlasting, then the answer is affirmative; the characters are more real than the actors.Now, this duplicity of reale is definitely no mere concidence. It is, on the contrary, cleverly used with ambivalent purpose, and becomes one of the main sources of ambiguity in the comedy. In fact, if we switch the question around and ask, “are the actors more real than the characters?,” we stumble on the same horns of the dilemma, but in reverse. We answer with an affirmative in the sense that the actors refer to people endowed with physical consistency; and we answer in the negative because people are changeable and perishable. It is an insoluble dichotomy, and one that can turn into a most perplexing predicament; so that many observers and readers become easy prey to Pirandello's mix-up, and instinctively pose the question, “but then what is more real than what?” In utter seriousness, they consequently start looking for an answer that does not exist, without realizing that the author is asking the very same moot question, but for artistic purposes. They then take for granted that the characters are the symbols of art, and conclude that, when Pirandello says that they are more real than the actors, he actually means that art is superior to life.Seen in the varied spectrum of meanings which the Six Characters in Search of an Author implies, this last interpretation is not an impossible one, provided it does not become too rigid and exclusive. As many writers have been fond of quoting, “life is brief and art is long.” Life has one kind of reality, a transient one—since man is mortal, but art has another kind, since it can outlast its creation, and achieve a permanence we call perennial.The main reason why it is difficult to wrap up the Six Characters in one sweeping generalization is that the characters themselves were not meant to be symbols. The actors, yes, may be taken to represent human nature with all its predicaments. But the characters were conceived, to use Pirandello's own definition of them, as realtà create,6 that is, as concepts stripped of all symbolizing vestment, as bare concepts and not personages symbolizing concepts. One may here indulge in a bit of sophistry and go so far as to say that they are indeed symbols, but symbols symbolizing lack of symbolism, nakedness. But we should rather stick with Ortega y Gasset's clear and articulate formulation, that “the traditional playwright expects us to take his personages for persons and their gestures for indications of a ‘human’ drama. Whereas here [in the Six Characters] our interest is aroused by some personages as such—that is, as ideas or pure patterns.”7A very important question now arises as to what happens to these concepts, once they have been created; how does the playwright handle them?Pirandello says that the creatures of his inspiration, once conceived, achieve a complete autonomy. We could agree with his pretense if we equate this alleged independence with its aesthetic value, that is, if we take the autonomy of the characters to mean their artistic liveliness and effectiveness. To be sure, clean-cut detachment between creator and creature is a Utopian mirage, one that has always attracted the naive idealist. Giving characters an independent kind of realism is an extremely refined device in literature, one we may say began with Cervantes, with whom Pirandello was quite familiar, and a device easily recognized in the work of many writers since.8 Here is, for instance, what some of them have said about it: “My notion always is that, when I have made people play out the play, it is, as it were, their business to do it and not mine.” (Dickens) “Often my characters astonish me by doing or saying things I had not expected—yes, they can sometimes turn my original scheme upside down, the devils!” (Ibsen) “There is always a regular army of people in my brain begging to be summoned forth, and only waiting for the word to be given” (Chekhov). Or take Turgenev, who once said that an author must cut the navel-string between himself and the offspring of his imagination.9But it is one thing to talk about creative theories and another to actualize them on the artistic plane. And no other writer has brought this technique into the open and made it serve so successfully, as both Unamuno in the novel and Pirandello in the theatre. To be sure, in both these two authors there is an epistemological and ontological preoccupation, in so far as the question “Who and what are the characters?” is another way of asking “Who and what am I?,” “Who and what are you?” etc. And, in both of them, the personages involved in their stories are involved in nothing more nor less than a stubborn and hopeless attempt to escape being dominated by their authors. Unamuno does not hesitate to confess in Niebla: “Y Yo soy el Dios de estos dos pobres diablos nivolescos.”10 As for the desperate lot of the Six Characters, one needs only to survey their existence briefly.It all started one day when Fantasy, the “maidservant” of Pirandello's art, inexplicably gave birth to six characters. It is not hard to accept this basic fact. These figures, however, have a very peculiar birth defect—one not readily seen. They are deprived of the consciousness of their true paternity: they know they are characters, they know they are rejected characters, they believe they were created and then deserted by some author, but they are completely unaware of the most crucial truth of all, namely, that their blood is truly Pirandellian. Once deprived of their identity, it is easy for the author to have them do whatever he likes. So he has them knock at his door and persistently beg him to write them down, in a play or novel. Not a chance. For a while, he argues he has to find a meaning for them, a meaning that would justify their artistic existence. Till finally, he has another spark of genius: Why not represent them just as they are, as rejected and unfinished: This may well be their meaning! So he grants them a fake passport, so to speak, and makes them believe that they are free to go and search for their promised land. So the six fools walk onto a stage, eager and desperate to achieve what they don't realize is unattainable, that is, what has a priori been decreed as such by their creator. On that stage, which the author has purposely chosen for them, because it is totally unprepared to receive them, they come to face with a most exasperating failure. But this is not all. Not by any means. Where is the author, while both actors and characters engage in a dialogue or cross purposes? Hiding and unseen, the author is watching all of them perform, and writing down his own play: The Six Characters in Search of an Author. It turns out that the poor stooges, while trying to enact their own suffering drama, have been used for a completely different purpose, one they do not and cannot suspect.Are we still to speak of “autonomy” of the characters? Indeed, if we insisted in doing so, we would not only yield to easy and idle labelling, but, what is more relevant, we would dangerously hinder our penetration and understanding of the tragic substratum of the play.To a large extent, the Pirandello touch here is romantic irony straight from the books of Heine, Tieck, Jean Paul Richter and F. Schlegel, to mention but a few of the German Romantics with whom Pirandello was well acquainted. To get closer to the truth, we should say that it is romantic irony highly tinged with Kleist's Marionettentheater. In Pirandello, however, the romantic view disintegrates through multiplicity, contradiction and ambiguity, as has happened with other writers in the same tradition. One of the first to attain a lucid perception of Pirandello's modernity was Yeats, who, grouping him together with Pound, and once said that they . . up the of by them with ideas or words that to into the mind by and even more that in them is of the . . . The turns work, however, is not only the of a of the in a modern but indeed what must be as the original of his mind, namely, the which him and of the and of human We said at the beginning that the or spectator an sense of and this feeling cannot be in terms of romantic irony irony may be by the author who first and then or his Whereas in Pirandello, once the has it open to further So that we have not only or but of of the extent and of this when he of the that turns itself, and it is that he did not elaborate on this essay to in what way the turns in and Pirandello, could to be a most in Here one can only how the creative of its becomes a to in Pirandello's in Pirandello's mind, the in the creative as a work of an and which is at the of Pirandello's art and of his theory of he became as a he had a very important essay an of his and of his on which he was to most of his attempt to Pirandello's should begin with an and of this It is to how large a of critics have to do so, either because they are unaware of its existence or because they have been by its which would to little more than other on a As a of fact, with the of only two the essay is to be translated into all the other languages in which Pirandello is to be well and has a meaning and for the view may have the most of on the is as a of and and far from To this Pirandello us a in an old with like a and At first makes people because does not as an old is of this of the At this point, however, Pirandello's to us that the old is of being but is willing to by that the of appearance will help the of a if comes to all then there is nothing to on the contrary, the becomes quite that of the contrary, has made me to the Here we the of Pirandello's forma the of the This is the essence of true do not accept reality as they question but cannot find a clear and they that may give life some and as it may is like a little who comes to them to so that we can see the in a of the was in We can it as far as his but in to realize what a and it we only at a few of his The very first work is a of in his which one of other out with like Il etc. And what about the play here the Six Characters in Search of an in beginning with the there is nothing that cannot be or It should perhaps be now what it is that Pirandello means in the he this drama as of tragic and and in a quite new and critics are attracted by the philosophical throughout his work and to the that the true nature of Pirandello is that of a On this they then to and his into a well and neatly could be more and all great Pirandello has the of a though not a completely original his is a on and not on and and not on and his is not from the of artistic Pirandello's and should not be as by They are, the of suffering and for lot in a of and of himself and of his art, Pirandello once live a looking is not to at in a while are for or while are for and and will And then he . . only a by the of that so far in the of real and of human suffering which this has in into his and

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