Laudisi's Laughter and the Social Dimension of Right You Are (If You Think So)

Abstract

CRITICISM HAS MORE OR LESS AGREED that Pirandello's intention in writing Right You Are (If You Think So) was to illustrate his conviction that truth does not exist absolutely, but merely as a product of the individual mind. From here it became a question of whether the play was successful as drama and to what extent the thesis may be said to either enhance or diminish the work's emotional content. Is Right You Are a "sensitive" and "provoking" expression of Pirandello's philosophy? Or is it nothing more than — as Gramsci would have it — "a superficial fact of literature: a pure and simple mechanical aggregate of words"? (A VANTI!, Oct. 5, 1917) Contemporary criticism has rescued the play from a type of discussion based on whether Pirandello did or did not succeed in dramatizing his relativist Weltanschauung by shifting the perspective from the work's philosophical content to its social bearings and the existential turmoil of its main characters; that is, from Laudisi's arid reasoning about the relativity of truth to the sufferings of the Ponza-Frola group. Eric Bentley, for example, views the play as a social satire, Pirandello's aim being to demonstrate how the "idle curiosity" and "nosiness" of the townspeople is detrimental to the sufferers' struggle for life in its inner essence and private depths. And Robert Brustein goes a step further, describing the work as a "drama of social revolt." According to him, "the play is a protest against [he quotes Bentley] the 'scandalmonger, the prying reporter, and the amateur psychoanalyst' and [he himself adds] the sob sister, the candid cameraman, and the Congressional investigator — those who recklessly probe the secrets of others.”

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