Modern Mind

reflection, of craftsmanship as well as art, owing as much to the rewards of a good education as the disguised urges of the unconscious. Much later in the century, Eliot would publish considerably fiercer views about the role of culture, particularly ‘high’ culture in all our lives, and in less poetic terms. In turn, he himself would be accused of snobbery and worse. He was ultimately, like so many writers and artists ofhis day, concerned with ‘degeneration’ in cultural if not in individual or biological terms.
    Frederick May, the critic and translator, has suggested that Luigi Pirandello ’s highly innovative play
Six Characters in Search of an Author
is a dramatic analogue of
The Waste Land:
‘Each is a high poetic record of the disillusionment and spiritual desolation of its time, instinct with compassion and poignant with the sense of loss … each has become in its own sphere at once the statement and the symbol of its age.’ 19
    Born in Caos, near Girgenti (the modern Agrigento) in Sicily in 1867, in the middle of a cholera epidemic, Pirandello studied literature in Palermo, Rome and Bonn. He began publishing plays in 1889, but success did not arrive fully until 1921, by which time his wife had entered a nursing home for the insane. His two plays that will be considered here,
Six Characters in Search of an Author
(1921), and
Henry IV
(1922), are united in being concerned with the impossibility of describing, or even conceiving, reality. ‘He dramatises the subconscious.’ In the earlier title, six characters invade the rehearsal of a play, a play Pirandello had himself written a few years earlier, insisting that they are not actors, nor yet people, but characters who need an ‘author’ to arrange the story that is within them. As with Wittgenstein, Einstein, and Freud, Pirandello is drawing attention to the way words break down in describing reality. What is the difference – and the overlap – between character and personality, and can we ever hope to pin them down in art? Just as Eliot was trying to produce a new form of poetry, Pirandello was creating a new form of drama, where theatre itself comes under the spotlight as a form of truth-telling. The characters in his plays know the limits to their understanding, that truth is relative, and that their problem, like ours, is to realise themselves.
    Six Characters
created a scandal when it was first performed, in Rome, but a year later received a rapturous reception in Paris.
Henry IV
had a much better reception in Italy when it was premiered in Milan, and after that Pirandello’s reputation was made. As did Eliot’s, his wife descended into madness and Pirandello later formed a relationship with the Italian actress Marta Abba. 20 Unlike Eliot, whose art was forged despite his personal circumstances, Pirandello several times used madness as a dramatic device. 21
Henry IV
tells the story of a man who, twenty years before, had fallen from his horse during a masquerade in which he was dressed as the German emperor Henry IV, and was knocked unconscious when he hit his head on the paving. In preparation for the masquerade, the man had read widely about the emperor and, on coming to, believed he was in fact Henry IV. To accommodate his illness his wealthy sister has placed him in a mediaeval castle surrounded by actors dressed as eleventh-century courtiers who enable him to live exactly as Henry IV did, though they move in and out of their roles, confusingly and at times hilariously (without warning, a costumed actor will suddenly light up a cigarette). Into this scene are introduced old friends, including Donna Matilda, still beautiful, her daughter Frida, and a doctor. Here Pirandello’s mischief is at its highest, for we can never be sure whether Henry is still mad, or only playing a part.Like the fool in earlier forms of theatre, Henry asks his fellow characters penetrating questions: ‘Do you remember always being the same?’ Therefore, we never quite know whether Henry is a tragic figure, and aware that he is. This would make him moving – and also sane. It would also make all the others in the play either fools or mad, or possibly both. But if Henry is fully sane, does it make sense for him to live on as he does? Everyone in the play, though real enough, is also desperate, living a lie.
    The real tragedy occurs when the doctor, in order to ‘treat’ Henry by facing him with a shocking reality, provokes him into murder. In
Henry IV
no