Six Characters in
Search of an Author
B
orn in Sicily in 1867, Luigi Pirandello was
the son of a prosperous sulfur merchant.
The successful merchant initially sent his
son to study commerce at the local technical in-
stitute, but Pirandello later transferred to an aca-
demic secondary school, where he distinguished
himself in oratory and literature. As a young man,
he studied at the universities of Palermo, Rome,
and Bonn, receiving a degree in Romance philol-
ogy in 1891. He went on to launch a literary ca-
reer, publishing the collection of poems Painful
Joy (Mai giocondo) in 1889 and his first novel, The
Outcast (Uesclusa\ in 1893. In 1894 Pirandello
married Maria Antonietta Portulano, daughter of
his father's business partner; the couple settled
in Rome and had three children. Pirandello con-
tinued to write, publishing his first play, If Not
So, or Other People's Reason (Se non cosi, o La ra-
gione degli altri), in 1896. He began to achieve
critical success in 1904 with the publication of
his second novel, The Late Mattia Pascal (11 fu
Mattia Pascal). That same year, however, Piran-
dello suffered financial disaster when a flood de-
stroyed his family's sulfur mines; his wife
suffered a nervous breakdown, a result at least
in part of the financial disaster, from which she
never fully recovered. She later had to be com-
mitted to an asylum. The pressure of Pirandello's
personal and business woes resulted in a period
of intense creativity between 1915 and 1922,
during which he produced some of the works for
which he is now most famous, such as the dra-
mas Henry IV (Enrico IV) and Six Characters in
Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d'au-
I T A L I A N L I T E R A T U R E
by
Luigi Pirandello
THE LITERARY WORK
A comic pfay set in a theater during an un~
specified time; first performed and published
in Italian (as Sei persanagg! in cerca d'autom)
in 1921; translated into English m 1922,
SYNOPSIS
Six fictional characters seeking to have their
story put on the stage interrupt a director and
a group of actors rehearsing a play*
tore). The latter premiered in 1921, startled its
audiences with its unique handling of the themes
of theatrical illusion and reality, and won Piran-
dello both notoriety and acclaim. To this day, Six
Characters in Search of an Author is considered a
watershed in modern drama. The following year,
the success of Pirandello's Henry IV consolidated
his reputation as one of Italy's foremost play-
wrights; he would go on to win global acclaim
when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature
in 1934.
Events in History at the
Time of the Play
Italy and the First World War. After Worl
War I broke out in 1914, Italy initially declared
itself neutral. As the conflict continued, however,
many influential Italians began to regret their
country's neutrality and to wish that Italy had the
A N D I T S T I M E S 409

Six Characters
in Search of
an Author
chance to acquire prestige and territory in the
war. In 1915 the prime minister, Antonio Salan-
dra, acting without the knowledge of the Italian
parliament (which still favored neutrality),
signed the secret Treaty of London, pledging to
enter the war on the side of England and France,
against Italy's former allies Austria and Germany.
Presented with this fait accompli, parliament had
no choice but to go along with this plan.
Entering the war in May 1915, Italy was un-
prepared for the conflict in several respects. Like
the other participating nations, Italy underesti-
mated the duration of the war, believing that it
would end quickly. During the next three and a
half years some 5 million Italians—many of them
peasants from the poor South—were conscripted
into the army; more than 600,000 were killed in
the fighting at the Alpine foothills of Friuli and
Trentino (Duggan, p. 191). Newly unified only
in 1861, Italy had nationalists who believed the
country incomplete until certain other areas were
attached to it—Trentino, for example, then un-
der Austrian control, had a population that was
97 percent Italian (Hamilton, p. 6). In the first
month of the war, an invasion of Austria wa
launched, with most of the combat occurring
along the River Isonzo and the Carso sector,
which seriously inhibited the strategic plans of
Italy's commanding officer Luigi Cadorna. Ulti-
mately, some 200,000 Italian lives were lost in
attacks designed to break through Austrian lines
I 410 W O R L D L I T E R A T U R E A N D
(Killinger, p. 137). To make matters worse, Aus-
trian forces broke through Italian lines to seize
the plains around Venice. Although Italian troops
retaliated by capturing Gorizia, their advance was
halted, with neither side gaining an advantage.
In October 1917 Italian troops faced their most
humiliating defeat yet at Caporetto, where a com-
bined German and Austrian force drove them into
a panicked retreat. The following year, however,
Italian troops drove the Austrians back across the
River Piave, capturing the village of Vittorio
Veneto and much of the Trentino. A month later,
Italy, along with its allies, accepted an armistice
with Germany and the crumbling Austrian Em-
pire. Optimistic, Italy hoped that its recent victory
at Vittorio Veneto would be rewarded with a hand-
some territorial gain in the postwar negotiations;
its disappointment in this matter contributed to
the rise of Fascism in a now politically unstable
and economically devastated country.
The rise of Fascism in Italy. The years follow-
ing the First World War were difficult for Italy.
The conflict had left more than half a million Ital-
ians dead and perhaps another half million in-
jured, captured, or missing (Killinger, p. 139).
The nation struggled with a devastated economy
and an unstable government. Several republican
administrations had collapsed during the war
years, leaving political chaos in their wake and
causing many to question the viability of the lib-
eral state. Also, as noted, Italy was severely dis-
appointed at the Paris Peace Conference in April
1919, when it did not receive the hoped-for ter-
ritorial rewards. In the end, Italy was granted
Trent, the South Tyrol, and Istria but denied Dal-
matia and the port city of Fiume. Led by the
prime minister Vittorio Emmanuele Orlando, the
Italian delegation walked out of the conference
in disgust. Nationalist newspapers and politi-
cians declared that the war was "a mutilated vic-
tory" for Italy, in that it gained so much less than
anticipated. Hostility towards the government in-
creased after Francesco Saverio Nitti replaced Or-
lando as prime minister in June 1919 and
adopted a conciliatory approach toward the Al-
lies, for which he was branded "Cagoia" (vile
coward) by the poet and political agitator
Gabriele D'Annunzio (see The Child of Pleasure,
also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times).
In September 1919 D'Annunzio staged a
grandiose ploy of his own, marching into Fiume
with several thousand followers, mainly students,
veterans, and fervent nationalists. During his oc-
cupation of the city, D'Annunzio proclaimed
himself its governor in absence of a sovereign
I T S T I M E S ^ V O L U M E 7
or other ruling body. He also proposed a march
on Rome, and suggested the use of several
symbols—including black shirts, later adopted
by the Fascists—to denote their new movement.
The former prime minister, Giovanni Giolitti, re-
turned to power in June 1920 and managed to
oust D'Annunzio from Fiume six months later by
calling in the navy. Nonetheless, many were to
consider D'Annunzio's campaign a "dress re-
hearsal" for the Fascist regime—spearheaded by
Benito Mussolini—that would seize control of
the Italian government in the 1920s.
Shortly before, in March 1919, Benito Mus-
solini, once a Socialist Party member who advo-
cated class revolution, formed the new Fascio di
Cambattimento (Fighting Groups), including So-
cialists, Futurists, syndacalists, and arditi (special
forces). The original Fascist platform was some-
what left-wing in its politics and economics, hav-
ing been designed to appeal to middle-class
loyalties as well as attract Italian workers to a na-
tionalist-socialist agenda. But in the 1920s the
platform became increasingly conservative, in re-
sponse to the perceived threat of a Bolshevik-style
revolution. The Fascists organized themselves into
squads and began conducting violent attacks
against the Socialists and their institutions, in-
cluding Socialist Party offices, labor organizations,
newspapers, and peasant leagues. Although these
attacks cost a large share of the victims their lives,
the police—many of whom sympathized with the
Fascists—repeatedly ignored the violence. More
right-wing extremists joined Mussolini's group,
which, by late 1921, was a quarter million strong.
Matters came to a head in the following year.
Having gained the support of the military, and
received 19 percent of the vote in the 1921 na-
tional elections, Mussolini organized a march on
Rome, during which Fascist operatives were sup-
posed to seize control of rail lines and strategic
public buildings, converge upon the capital, and
drive the current government from power. The
maneuver was successfully carried out on Octo-
ber 28, 1922, without firing a single shot. Ac-
ceding to demands of the "black shirts," the king
invited Mussolini to form a government. For the
next two decades Mussolini ruled Italy as prime
minister and authoritarian dictator.
Given Pirandello's rejection of conservative
forms in fiction and drama, his open support for
the Fascist Party, which he joined in 1924, might
seem puzzling at first. However, one should re-
member that as both a movement and an ideol-
ogy Italian Fascism was far from straightforwardly
conservative. In fact, Fascism presented and con-
ITALIAN LITERATURE AND ITS TIMES 411 I
tinued to propose itself as a cultural revolution
that subscribed to the same anti-naturalist teach- Six Characters
ings that nourished Pirandello's writing. It should
in Search of
therefore not be surprising that Mussolini re-
ferred to Pirandello more than any other writer an Author
in interviews with the journalist Emil Ludwig in
1932, or that Mussolini had the government sub-
sidize a theater—the Teatro d'Arte—run by the
playwright. Conversely, literary scholar Renate
Matthaei argues that Pirandello was perhaps less
in sympathy with the Fascists' political intentions
than he was both desirous of radical social change
and a sense of group identification. Whatever his
motives, Pirandello expressed, in a series of in-
terviews, his unreserved loyalty for Mussolini and
the new government, even advocating such anti-
democratic policies as the abolition of freedom of
the press and the dissolution of parliament.
Italian drama in the 1920s. During the early
decades of the twentieth century, the theater in
Italy was undergoing a radical transformation. In
the late 1800s naturalistic dramas (like those of
Henrik Ibsen and Gerhart Hauptman), sentimen-
tal melodramas (like the plays of the younger
Alexandre Dumas), and elaborate spectacles had
dominated the stage, and they continued to be
performed in the early 1900s. However, another
generation of Italian dramatists was emerging to
give theater a bold new voice—many were influ-
enced by the commedia dell'arte, a tradition of
masked improvisational comedy that originated in
Tuscany during the sixteenth century, then spread
throughout Europe, enjoying popular appeal into
the early eighteenth century. Commedia ddl'arte
featured ensemble acting, stock characters like
Harlequin (a trickster) and Pantalone (a foolish
old man), and stock situations, such as romantic
triangles featuring young lovers, wily servants, and
tyrannical fathers. The repertoire ranged from
comedy and farce to parody and political satire,
with the use of masks and the improvisation of
stock situations remaining constant.
Up to the 1920s Italian playwrights such as
Luigi Chiarelli, Luigi Antonelli, Rosso di San Sec-
ondo, and Enrico Cavacchioli regularly com-
posed plays that parodied the conventions of the
old-style sentimental theater. Chiarelli describes
how the conservative and the experimental co-
existed in the Italian theater of 1914:
At that time it was impossible to go to the
theater without encountering languishing,
talkative descendants of [such characters as]
Marguerite Gautier, or Rose Bernd, or lazy camp
followers of Oswald or Cyrano. The public shed
sentimental tears and left the theater depressed.
411
 But the next evening it met again in large
numbers to applaud a spicy little sketch such
Six Characters
as Le pillote d'Ercole, in order to restore its moral
in Search of and social balance.
an Author (Chiarelli in Matthaei, pp. 21-22)
Perhaps the most startling theatrical innovation
was the grottesco (grotesque) movement. Even
more than the parodies, this movement set itself
in opposition to the naturalistic and sentimental
dramas, which tended to focus on such aspects
VERISMO: THE ITALIAN NATURALISM
B etween the 1970s and 1890s, vemmo, the Italian coun-
terpart to French naturalism, dominated much of Italian lit-
erature. Vertsmo called for an impersonal style, language
appropriate to the chosen subject, a detailed study of modern
Italy from its lowest to highest classes, and a scientific repro-
duction of the soda!, economic, and geographical aspects of
the chosen environment, Unlike French natural ism, however,
vetfemo chose to emphasize stylistic over scientific aspects in
literary works; vensmo also concerned itself with provincial
rather than urban fife; and its political ideology was conserv-
ative rather than democratic. Although ver/smo was most
prevalent in the Italian novel, it influenced other genres as well,
including the drama, By the start of the twentieth century, the-
ater audiences in Italy had become accustomed to naturalis-
tic, ''slice of life* dramas, whether ''home^grown'' or imported
from France> Even during the 1920s the conservative Italian
theater balked at more experimental plays, including those of
Pirandello, himself a former practitioner of ver/smo* in Six Char-
acters in Search of an Authorf during a rehearsal of the play
within the play (The Rules of the Game), Pirandello has the di-
rector complain, "What can I do if France can't produce any
good theatre and we are reduced to putting on Pirandello plays
which you have to be lucky to understand and which are writ-
ten in a way never to please either critics or actors or public*
(Six Characters in Search of an Author* p* 8),
of bourgeois life as money, love, and family. The
grottesco playwrights, who became more vocal
during the years of the First World War (1914-
18), wished to free Italian theater from the con-
strictions of naturalism and open it up to
"dreamscapes, parables, mystery, burlesque farce,
visions, and fantasy" (Bassanese, p. 45). They also
added satiric or absurd twists to stock situations
I 412 W O R L D L I T E R A T U R E AND
and characters found in popular sentimental dra-
mas, such as adulterous lovers, crimes of passion,
business and family scandals, suicides, wastrel
sons who fall into profligacy, and beautiful
daughters who sacrifice their virtue to preserve
their families. Luigi Chiarelli skewed several of
those well-worn devices in his play The Mask and
the Face (La Maschera y il Volto, 1914), in which
a husband solemnly vows to his friends that he
would kill his wife if she were guilty of adultery.
When he discovers his wife's infidelity, he finds
out he cannot carry out his vow and decides to
send her away rather than kill her. He must then
resort to ridiculous extremes to make it appear
that he fulfilled his vendetta. The play becomes
still more farcical when the "dead" wife returns
from exile, desiring reconciliation, and the re-
united spouses must flee the country in secret to
escape the consequences of his charade. Signifi-
cantly, The Mask and the Face was well received
in Italy and abroad, suggesting that some theater
audiences were ready for a new kind of drama.
Pirandello's own involvement with the theater
dates back to the 1880s. As a student in Palermo,
he had composed various plays in an experi-
mental vein, including Birds in the Sky (Gli uccelli
dell'alto, 1886) and Rehearsing the Play (Provando
la commedia, 1887). During the 1890s, however,
difficulties in staging his play Epilogue (L'epilogo,
1898; retitled The Vise—La Morsa—in 1908)
soured Pirandello on the theater and he concen-
trated on fiction for a time, although he did not
give up writing plays. The Vise and Sicilian Limes
were both staged in 1910, but only a half-dozen
years later, with the 1916 production of Think It
Over, Giacomino (Pensaci, Giacomino) for the Si-
cilian dialect theater, would Pirandello become
firmly established as a successful playwright.
While Pirandello's early plays show naturalist
influences, especially in their evocation of Sicil-
ian daily life, his work became increasingly in-
novative and experimental as he entered his
second decade as a dramatist. During the war
years, he discovered common artistic ground
with the grottesco playwrights, especially their
mingling of the comic with the tragic and their
challenge to the sentimental theater of the bour-
geois. The Rules of the Game (ll giuoco delle parti,
1918)—one of Pirandello's first plays written af-
ter the war—undercuts the potentially tragic el-
ements of a failed marriage, a romantic triangle,
and a duel by juxtaposing them against ironic
scenes of the emotionally cold protagonist dis-
cussing philosophy and preparing his meals. In
Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello
ITS T I M E S <^ V O L U M E 7
mounted a more direct attack upon the old-
fashioned drama that had held sway in the Ital-
ian theater. In one scene, the stepdaughter
accuses the director of wishing to soften the sor-
did reality of her incestuous near-encounter with
the father into "a nice little messy sentimental ro-
mantic scene" to satisfy theatrical conventions
(Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author,
p. 48). The play is likewise considered a critique
of naturalism in the theater, the mechanical re-
production of reality rather than the reality itself.
The Play in Focus
Plot summary. While preparing to rehearse The
Rules of the Game, a Pirandello play, a director
and his troupe of actors are startled by the in-
terruption of six fictional characters:
A 50-year-old man
A woman in widow's weeds
A beautiful 18-year-old girl
A 22-year-old man
A 14-year-old boy
A 4-year-old girl
The six characters announce that they are search-
ing for an author to put their drama on the stage.
Initially annoyed by their intrusion, the director
eventually becomes interested enough to listen
to the characters' story.
Although the characters have different inter-
pretations of the events, the basic story emerges
thus. Years ago, the older man and woman had
married, and she had borne him a son, but the
father, who had intellectual pretensions, soon be-
came bored with his simple wife. Seeking to rid
himself of her, he encouraged a love affair be-
tween his wife and his secretary, whose disposi-
tion more readily suited hers, then turned the
pair out of the house. The legitimate son was sent
away to the country to be reared among peas-
ants. Oddly enough, however, after all this was
accomplished, the father found himself lonely.
He had been keeping track of his cast-off wife,
who started a new family with her lover, bearing
him three children. Of these three, the estranged
husband took a special interest in the eldest
daughter. He would follow her when she went
to school and offer her little presents. On hear-
ing of this, the mother became alarmed, dis-
trusting her estranged husband's motives. Soon
after, her new family secretly moved to another
town, and the father lost all contact with them.
More years passed, the secretary died, and the
mother and her children returned to their former
town. Unbeknownst to her mother, to support
I T A L I A N L I T E R A T U R E
their destitute family, the eldest daughter went to
work as a prostitute for Madam Pace, a dress- Six Characters
maker who was also a procuress. One day the fa-
in Search of
ther visited the establishment of Madam Pace in
search of sexual satisfaction and was introduced
an Author
to the young girl, whom he failed to recognize.
The mother interrupted their impending liaison
with the revelation that the young prostitute was
the father's own stepdaughter. On learning of his
wife's poverty, the father permitted her to return
to their home with all her children. The resulting
domestic situation proves wretched, however: the
legitimate son is cold and aloof towards his
mother, who tries desperately to win his affec-
tion; the neglected younger children eventually
come to grief; and the elder stepdaughter runs
away in the wake of a family tragedy, leaving the
original trio (the father, mother, and son) intact
but emotionally isolated from one another.
Now seeing the dramatic potential in the char-
acters' story, the director decides he will try to
adapt it to the stage. He calls for a short break
and summons the six characters to talk with him
privately in his office; the astonished actors spec-
ulate about this strange new development as they
go offstage.
On their return to the stage, the director and
the father immediately clash when the latter in-
sists that no formal script is needed for their play
and that he and the other characters will enact
their own designated roles rather than relegate
them to the actors. The stepdaughter echoes the
father's demands, and the director decides to hu-
mor them for the moment since they are only re-
hearsing. He begins to question the father and
stepdaughter about their encounter in Madame
Pace's shop, then wonders who should play the
dressmaker in that scene. The father assures the
director that he need not worry about that detail
and quickly borrows some hats and wraps from
the actors to set up a quick facsimile of the dress
shop. To everyone's amazement, Madame Pace
suddenly appears, as though conjured by magic;
outraged by the sight, the mother, who has been
silent until now, berates the dressmaker and tears
off her wig. Madame Pace refuses to play her part
in the mother's presence and exits.
The father and stepdaughter proceed with the
scene. As he tries to seduce her with soft words,
the mother watches and suffers during this reen-
actment of a painful incident she has already en-
dured. The director eventually halts the action and
insists that the leading actors in his own company
now play the scene. The brazen stepdaughter
laughs at the leading lady's performance, and the
A N D I T S T I M E S 413 I
 father raises similar objections to the leading man's
Six Characters interpretation of his role. Both insist that they want
to enact their own drama. Again the characters re-
in Search of
place the actors, and the scene continues up to
an Author the point where the father suggests the step-
daughter undress and the mother enters and pulls
her daughter away from her estranged husband.
As the characters—especially the mother—relive
the anguish and humiliation of that moment, the
director declares with satisfaction that they have
a promising ending for the play's first act.
As preparations for the second scene begin,
the director, the father, and the stepdaughter ar-
gue about the sets, which should include a gar-
den and the interior of a house. The father also
becomes embroiled in another argument with the
actors on the nature of illusion versus reality.
When the director mockingly suggests that the
six fictional characters are more real than the
flesh-and-blood actors, he is shocked when the
father confirms that suggestion. The actors' real-
ity changes from day to day, unlike that of the
characters: "Immutable reality—it should make
you shudder to be near us!" (Sbc Characters in
Search of an Author, p. 56). Moreover, the father
continues, "When a character is born, he imme-
diately assumes so much independence even
from his own author, that he can be imagined by
everybody in a number of other situations in
which the author never thought of putting him,
and sometimes he even acquires a meaning the
author never dreamed of giving him!" (Six Char-
acters in Search of an Author, p. 56). The father
then reveals that he and his companions were the
creations of an author who decided not to use
them in his works, after all. The stepdaughter
wistfully remembers how she, especially, tried to
persuade the author to continue their story:
I tried to tempt him many times while he was
at his desk feeling melancholy around twilight
or when he would abandon himself to his
armchair, unable to decide whether or not to
turn on the lights, allowing the shadows to
invade the room, shadows that were swarming
with our presence, coming to tempt him. . . .
Ah, my life! What scenes, what scenes we
proposed to him!
(Six Characters in Search of an Author, p. 57)
Impatient with all this talk, the director demands
a return to the action of the play.
The second act starts and the director places
the two youngest children in the garden, as the
characters suggest. Meanwhile, he tries to arrange
a scene in the house between the mother and the
legitimate son. Displeased, the son asks to be left
I 414 WORLD LITERATURE AND ITS TIMES «^> VOLUME 7
out of this scene, complains that he did not con-
sent to have his story told, and refuses to partic-
ipate in the drama. When the father tries to force
him to play his part, the son upbraids him for
wanting to flaunt the family's shame before the
world and again refuses to become involved. Un-
der questioning from the director, however, the
son reluctantly reveals that he and his mother
never had a conversation in the house. Instead,
still pursued by her, he went for a walk in the
garden and discovered, to his horror, that the lit-
tle girl had drowned in the pool. Rushing to pull
her out, the son saw the younger boy staring
crazily at his dead sister. As the characters react
to this tragedy, a shot rings out from behind the
bushes: the boy has killed himself with a revolver.
Pandemonium erupts in the theater, as the
two children are carried offstage to the loud
lamentations of the mother. The director asks if
the boy was wounded; the actors argue among
themselves whether the child is really dead or
whether the whole business was make-believe.
The father asserts that everything that happened
was real. Losing his patience and his temper, the
director washes his hands of the play and the
characters, complaining that he has wasted a
whole day on them. In the complicated stage di-
rections that follow this pronouncement, the ac-
tors disappear, the three members of the original
family reappear on stage, and the stepdaughter
runs out of the theatre, laughing raucously.
Plays within plays. The dramatic structure of 5ix
Characters in Search of an Author remains one of
its more compelling aspects. As numerous critics
have pointed out, there are actually three dramas
taking place on the stage: the interrupted rehearsal
of Pirandello's II giuoco delle parti (The Rules of the
Game), a family drama that the six characters wish
to see performed in its stead, and the frame play
about the fictional sextet invading the theater and
arguing with the director and troupe. All three
components work together to provide a forum for
Pirandello's own views of life and art.
First performed in Rome in 1918, The Rules
of the Game depicts the ironic outcome of a tri-
angle between Leone Gala, whose only passions
are food and reason; Leone's estranged, volatile
wife, Silia; and Guido Venanzi, Silia's long-term
lover and Leone's erstwhile friend. Bitterly re-
senting her husband's cold detachment, Silia tries
to destroy him by involving him in a quarrel with
one of the city's deadliest duelists to defend her
honor. Gala turns the tables on his wife and her
lover by agreeing to the duel, then refusing to
fight, which leaves Venanzi (as his second and
as Silia's virtual husband) to take up the chal-
lenge instead. Ultimately, Venanzi dies at the
hand of his more skilled opponent as Gala calmly
sits down to breakfast. While the performance of
The Rules of the Game in Six Characters in Search
of an Author never reaches this point, stopping
before the duel, the inclusion of the first play
in the second is nonetheless significant. The
first play itself deals with role-playing; the di-
rector explains as much to the leading man while
describing the opening scene in which Leone
Gala beats eggs and discusses Henri Bergson's
philosophy, which holds that reality is an ever-
changing, vital impulse whose nature cannot be
adequately known by reason.
Yes, sir, put [the chefs hat] on and beat the
eggs. Do you think that this egg-beating
business is simply that? If so, you're in trouble.
You have to represent the shell of those eggs
you are beating! Yes sir, the shell: that is to say,
the empty form of reason, and your wife is
instinct in a game of assigned roles, according
to which you, who play your own role,
purposely become the puppet of yourself.
(Six Characters in Search of an Author, p. 9)
Although not quoted in Six Characters in Search
of an Author, Gala's initial speech in The Rules of
the Game contains these important sentiments:
All that in our reality is fluid, living, mobile,
dark, yes, I admit it, it escapes reason. . . . How
it escapes reason, however, I cannot quite see,
from the very fact that Signor Bergson can say
it. How does he manage to say it? What makes
him say it, if not reason? And so, it seems to
me, it does not escape reason.
(Pirandello in Bloom, p. 131)
One of the major conflicts in Six Characters in
Search of an Author is the fluidity of life versus
the fixity of reason, or rather, form.
That conflict takes on renewed urgency when
the acting troupe attempts to adapt the six char-
acters' turgid family drama for the stage. The
characters, especially the father and stepdaugh-
ter, resist the imposition of artificial form (the
scripted performances of the actors) upon the
sordid family drama (deliberately reminiscent of
the sentimental melodramas of the previous cen-
tury) that is their entire existence. The father ex-
plains to the troupe, "What for you is an illusion
that must be created, is for us, instead, our only
reality" (Six Characters in Search of an Author,
p. 54). And because their very being is invested
in the unfinished drama, the more fully realized
of the six characters experience real distress when
they observe the actors playing their assigned
I T A L I A N L I T E R A T U R E
roles. This, in turn, generates a series of argu-
ments between characters and actors regarding Six Characters
the nature of reality, the limits of art, and the
in Search of
ability of fictional characters to exist indepen-
dently of their creator. Although the director of
an Author
the troupe regards these discussions as an irri-
tating distraction from his attempt to stage the
characters' family drama, they are in fact the meat
of Pirandello's play: the tenets of his theatrical
theory delivered through the speeches of his six
characters.
Throughout his career, Pirandello voiced am-
biguity about the theater as a mode of artistic ex-
pression. In an 1899 article, "Spoken Action"
("L'azione parlata"), Pirandello wrote that de-
scriptive narrative devices should be abolished
on the stage and replaced by the characters' own
dialogue and expressions, composed when the
author has wholly immersed himself in his cre-
ation. According to this article, it is not the drama
that makes the characters but the characters that
make the drama. Two 1908 essays by Pirandello—
"On Humor" ("L'umorismo") and "Illustrators,
Authors, and Translators" ("Illustratori, attori e
traduttori")—discuss, respectively, the humorist
writer's practices of unmasking his characters,
stripping away their illusions, and tackling the
specific difficulties in transferring the writer's
work to the stage. In the latter essay, especially,
Pirandello expresses his reservations about the
stage as a medium. From the outset, he contends,
the writer and the actor are at cross-purposes;
the former develops characters from a vast array
of possibilities in his imagination, while the lat-
ter gives the characters material substance but
cannot encompass everything a writer envisions
with regard to those characters. The physical re-
alization of the writer's imaginings is thus always
incomplete and imperfect, although, at best, not
displeasing. Pirandello also dismisses the actor's
fitness to judge a play's quality: "The actor doesn't
know how to recognize artistic merits in a play
because he is only looking for a good part, and
if he finds it the play is good and if not, it is bad"
(Pirandello in Bloom, p. 50).
Even in 1922, with Six Characters in Search of
An Author enjoying worldwide success, Pirandello
continued to express his discomfort over the re-
hearsal and performance process, remarking in an
interview: "When I've written a play, when it's
finished, alive or dead, as it is, from my hands,
when my part in the creation is finished, then the
actors cut, fix, criticize. . . . If you were to be at
the rehearsals of one of my works, you'd realize
that for me it's tortuous" (Pirandello in Bloom,
A N D I T S T I M E S 415 I
 pp. 51-52). That very conflict unfolds in Piran-
Six Characters dello's play, as the characters fight to preserve
their story's sordid truth over the director's fran-
in Search of
tic protests that "all this cannot be done on stage"
an Author (Six Characters in Search of an Author, p. 49).
Pirandello's philosophy regarding the theater
was intensely personal; among his Italian con-
temporaries, he was, in some respects, one of a
kind. Although other grottesco playwrights min-
gled genres of tragedy, comedy, farce, and satire
to produce similar results in their own works,
none appeared to have explored the conflict be-
tween the nature of reality and the limits of art.
SIX CHARACTERS FROM THE PAGE TO THE STAGE
H aving originally created his six characters for a novel,
which he abandoned unfinished, Pirandello later de-
scribed in a 1925 preface to his play how the characters "went
on living on their own, choosing certain moments of the day
to reappear before me in the solitude of my study and com-
ing—now one, now the other, now two together—to tempt me"
into finishing their story (Pirandello in Cole, p. 206), Finally,
the playwright came up with an entirely different solution:
"Why not/' I said to myself, ''present this highly strange fact of
an author who refuses to tet some of his characters five though
they have been bom in his fantasy, and the fact that these char-
acter^ having by now life m their veins, do not resign them*
selves to remaining excluded from the world of art? They are
detached from me; live on their own, have acquired voice and
movement - , , And so tet them go where dramatic characters
do go to have life: on a stage. And let us see what will happen/
(Pirandello m Cote, p, 207)
Pirandello's models in that area were in fact not
dramatic, but philosophical; he relied especially
upon the writings of Henri Bergson, the French
philosopher. Yet if Pirandello had no peer within
his own country, writers from other nations were
turning out bold, innovative works at the same
time. In Germany, a movement known as ex-
pressionism began just before the First World
War (1914-18), reaching its zenith between 1910
and 1925. Expressionist writers and artists
mounted a radical revolt against a tradition of re-
alism; most of them exaggerated or distorted as-
pects of the outside world in their works and
portrayed the individual as standing alone and
afraid in an industrial society that was itself
|416 W O R L D L I T E R A T U R E AND
slowly disintegrating into chaos. For some crit-
ics, Pirandello's exploration of such themes as so-
cial alienation and emotional isolation prompts
comparison with the expressionists, artists such
as the painters Emil Nolde and Franz Marc and
the writers Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht. Mean-
while, experimental movements of a similar na-
ture began in Great Britain and America during
the first two decades after World War I, which
are often referred to as the modern period. Again,
many intellectuals rejected traditional forms and
subjects and began to experiment with new
modes in art and literature. Poets like T. S. Eliot
and Ezra Pound introduced innovative styles and
verse forms, while the novelists James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf attempted comparable feats in
prose. Whatever their nationality or medium of
expression, the concern for all these artists was,
in Ezra Pound's famous phrase, to "make it new."
Sources and literary context. Pirandello's in-
spiration for some aspects of Six Characters in
Search of an Author was partly autobiographical.
The subplot of the father's forbidden attraction
to his stepdaughter, for example, stemmed from
a painful incident in the playwright's personal
life. In 1917 Pirandello's wife, Antonietta—the
victim of an irreversible nervous breakdown sev-
eral years before—accused him of committing in-
cest with their daughter, Lietta. Although the
accusation was groundless, Lietta was horrified
by her mother's venom and fled her parents'
house, refusing to return. Two years later, An-
tonietta was committed to an asylum.
More significantly, Pirandello was at this time
planning a novel centering on the tragedy en-
acted by the six characters. In 1917 he wrote to
one of his sons:
Six Characters in Search of an Author; a novel to
be written. Perhaps you understand. Six
characters, taken up in a terrible drama, who
come up close to me, to be composed in a novel,
an obsession, and I don't want to know about
it, and I say to them that it is useless and they
don't matter to me, and that nothing any longer
matters to me; and they who show me all of
their wounds, I chase them away.
(Pirandello, p. xii)
Ultimately Pirandello reworked this projected
novel into a play and cast himself as the unnamed
author who had abandoned the characters he cre-
ated. They were thus compelled to seek out
someone else to realize their drama.
Along with his own experiences and writings,
a variety of literary and dramatic materials
shaped Pirandello's composition of drama. In the
ITS T I M E S <^ V O L U M E 7
early years of his career, he immersed himself in
philosophical, historical, literary, cultural, and
even psychological studies. Several French
thinkers proved especially influential; Alfred Bi-
net, in The Alterations of Personality (Les Alter-
ations de la Personnalite, 1892), introduced
Pirandello to issues of consciousness and psy-
chological relativism, a philosophy contesting the
belief that all humans share a similar or poten-
tially similar psychological reality. The writings
of French philosopher Henri Bergson con-
tributed to Pirandello's concept of "the fluidity,
essential evanescence, and changeability of life
and emotion" (Bassanese, p. 8). Dramatically, as
noted, Pirandello owed a debt to the grottesco
movement and the commedia delVarte, the con-
ventions of which can be detected in Pirandello's
suggested stage directions for Six Characters in
Search of an Author. He recommends, for exam-
ple, that each of the six appear wearing masks
denoting his or her particular emotional state,
such as grief, remorse, and revenge.
While Pirandello described Six Characters in
Search of an Author as a "comedy," the play has
been associated not only with the theater of the
grotesque but also with absurdism, which holds
that the human condition is fundamentally sense-
less. The play has likewise been associated with
humorism, a movement developed by Pirandello
himself, which mingles elements of comedy and
tragedy to produce a simultaneous awareness of
both aspects of the human condition. That this
play was dismissive of sentimental and naturalis-
tic forms of theater has already been established.
Pirandello was similarly dismissive of symbolism
and allegory, writing in a 1925 preface to Six Char-
acters in Search of an Author: "I hate symbolic art
in which the presentation loses all spontaneous
movement in order to become a machine . . . made
for the demonstration of some moral truth. Spir-
itual need . . . cannot be satisfied . . . by such al-
legorical symbolism" (Pirandello in Cole, p. 206).
Reception. Six Characters in Search of an Author
premiered in Rome on May 10, 1921, and caused
immediate controversy. Not knowing how to re-
act to the play's theatrical innovations, many
members of the audience began to heckle the per-
formance, whistling their derision and crying out
"manicomio" (madhouse) and "buffone" (buf-
foon). Pirandello's supporters in the theater took
exception to this so quarrels and even fights broke
out on the spot. When Pirandello himself ap-
peared onstage at the end of the play, he too was
heckled. Later, a hostile crowd accosted the play-
wright while he was exiting the theater with his
I T A L I A N L I T E R A T U R E
daughter and threw insults and coins at him as he
got into a taxi. The general pandemonium caused Six Characters
by the play erupted into the streets surrounding
in Search of
the theater and lasted well into the night.
Four months later, Pirandello's play received an Author
a very different reception from audiences in Mi-
lan. By that time the text of Six Characters in Search
of an Author had been published and critics had
had the opportunity to read it. This time, the au-
dience listened "in religious silence" throughout
the performance and the play was accounted a
STAGING PIRANDEUQ
S
ince its premiere in 1921, Six Characters In Search of an Au-
thor has been performed many times, and in different coun-
tries. Directors have chosen to interpret and stage Pirandello's
play In a variety of ways* One famous early production was held
at the Th^Stre des Champs-6lys£e$ in 1923; the director, Georges
Pitoeff had the six characters flooded with a green light and low-
ered to the stage in an old scenery elevator for their grand en-
trance. Amazingly, the lift jammed just before reaching the
boards and the characters had to climb down, one by one, onto
the stage* Even without that unscripted bit of drama, the Pitoeff
production proved to be a sensation with Parisian audiences.
Another critically tauded production took place in Berlin, Ger-
many, in 1924; Max Retnhardt, the director, chose to focus upon
the tragic elements of the play. He also placed the figure of the
director at the forefront; for example, the director kept his back
to the audience at all times, while the six characters acted out
their drama before htm as if they were part of his particular vi-
sion. By contrast, Pirandello chose to de-emphasize the direc-
tor and the acting troupe when he mounted his own production
of the play—also held in Berlin—in 1925; in keeping with the
title of the play, he concentrated upon the six characters instead/
especially the father and stepdaughter. German audiences were
taken aback by the openness and terseness of the Teatro d'Arte's
production, not to mention its more comic tone; ironically, some
German critics even dismissed Pirandello's staging as "primitive*
and less profound than Reinhardfs had teen {Matthaei, p, 95),
triumph (Giudice, p. 117). Indeed, Six Characters
in Search of an Author went on to be a great suc-
cess; between 1922 and 1927 it was performed
not only in every major city in Europe but also
in New York, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo.
—Pamela S. Loy
A N D I T S T I M E S 417 I
 For More Information
Six Characters Bassanese, Flora A. Understanding Luigi Pirandello. Co-
in Search of lumbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
an Author Bentley, Eric. The Pirandello Commentaries. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1986.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Luigi Pi-
randello. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.
Cole, Toby, ed. Playwrights on Playwriting. New
York: Hill & Wang, 1960.
DiGaetani, John Louis, ed. A Companion to Piran-
dello Studies. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Duggan, Christopher. A Concise History of Italy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Giudice, Gaspare. Pirandello: A Biography. London:
Oxford University Press, 1975.
Hainsworth, Peter, and David Robey, eds. The Ox-
|418 W O R L D L I T E R A T U R E AND
ford Companion to Italian Literature. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2002.
Hamilton, Alastair. The Appeal of Fascism. New
York: Macmillan, 1971.
Killinger, Charles L. The History of Italy. Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Marker, Frederick J., and Christopher Innes. Mod-
ernism in European Drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Pi-
randello, Beckett. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1998.
Matthaei, Renate. Luigi Pirandello. New York: Fred-
erick Ungar, 1973.
Pirandello, Luigi. Six Characters in Search of an Au-
thor and Other Plays. Trans. Mark Musa. London:
Penguin, 1995.
Starkie, Walter. Luigi Pirandello. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1965.
ITS T I M E S <^ V O L U M E 7