Pirandello's Sei Personaggi and Expressive Form

Abstract

Pirandello's Sei Personaggi and Expressive Form Jerome Mazzaro Comparisons between Luigi Pirandello's Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921, 1925) and Greek tragedy are common, with Sei personaggi representing "modern" or "contemporary" tragedy, and, indeed, it would seem that the drama's world-view resembles that described by Rachel Bespaloff and George Dimock for Homeric epic upon which many of the Greek tragedies are based. Bespaloff's view of the Homeric gods as the cause of everything that happens and as taking no responsibility and the epic heroes as taking "total responsibility even for that which they have not caused" is certainly applicable to Pirandello's "characters" who, in trying to survive in a world not of their creation, take responsibility for those drives that make possible their survival.1 However, in so doing, rather than take on the world-view and values of a Zeuscentered cosmos, they take on the values of a world ruled by a Prime Mover who, in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, is dead and whose accredited dogmas in science and religion are, as David Hubert and Matthew Arnold indicate, under assault. The shift from a vertical to a horizontal perspective, which in Renaissance humanism had prompted changes in design and unity and made possible modern tragedy, was again calling for revision. As Erich Auerbach notes of the earlier shift, the lessened significance of "the complex of [man's] Fall, of Christ's birth and passion, and of the Last Judgment" permitted artists to treat more "varied phenomena" and to conceive of a world which was "everywhere interdependent, so that every chord of human destiny arouse[d] a multitude of voices to parallel and contrary motion." They did so in works that had "a specific human action as [their] center" and "derivefd their] unity from that center," tending either inductively to set up multiple actions to mirror parallel or opposing motions or deductively "to accept antiquity as an absolute model" by which contemporary action might be controlled, ordered, and 503 504Comparative Drama given a shape and a significance.2 With the world-view of individual, inwardly initiated selftransformation (costruirsi) in a spiritually evolving or transforming universe, Pirandello's characters are, as Dimock indicates of Odysseus, forced to accept the inflicting and suffering of pain (odyssasthai) as the price of change and their complete realizations . Christianity, which had provided an external means of accepting and absolving pain, no longer did so. Nor, as Pirandello seems to suggest through the Manager, did the fixed conventions of art. Art may illuminate and console, but it does not absolve, it imprisons. In Enrico TV (1922), which followed Sei personaggi but preceded it in final form, the protagonist at the close of the opening act asks for release from Pope Gregory VII (religion), and throughout the drama the doctor unsuccessfully proffers psychiatry (science) as a method of release. At the drama's close, the protagonist's choice of killing his perceived enemy sends him into a fixed world of madness suggestive of art because of his own invention but in its complete subjectivity assuredly not one of absolution. If one interprets the departure of the Stepdaughter at the end of Sei personaggi as the exit of Nemesis, the Goddess of Righteous Anger, and consequently the end of suffering for the Father, the Mother, and the Son who stand fixed on stage, one might argue for a similar kind of absolution attributable to art in the undoing of the "great experiment" generated by the Father's questing intellect, but to do so would be to ignore Hesiod's warning that only when men have become completely wicked will Nemesis leave the wide-wayed earth for the company of gods (Work and Days, 1 1 .195-200) as well as Pirandello's caution that it is not possible for the characters "to believe that the sole reason for . . . living should lie in a torment that seems . . . unjust and inexplicable." Like Frola and Ponza in Cosí è (se vi pare) (Right You Are [If You Think So]) (1917), they want to believe in the attainment of a kind of charity.3 The "absolutes" of Sei...

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