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The main topics
of humour in Pirandello’s works:
In all the most
important Pirandello’s works, emerges the tragic side of
life, one of the typical literary topics of the early 20th
century. It is an uncertain and doubtful period
throughout Europe, shocked by wars and by the labour
movements, in which men start to lose their trust in
science and the bourgeoisie ideals dramatically fall
down. These men have lost also their identity, and their
lives are full of tragedy and sadness; but Pirandello
dresses that sorrow with a strange humour that always
characterizes his artistic production. Even if the
Sicilian writer has the premise to be just a man who
writes and doesn’t want to be a philosopher, he
eventually creates a sort of science of human existence.
In a passage of
The Late Mattia Pascal -a novel considered the
first important work in which Pirandello starts to
delineate such a science - the protagonist pretends he
is dead to start a new life, in which will not have
fortune and he will put some flowers on his own tomb.
This scene shows a man that digs himself –it is comic
and dramatic at the same time- like all the men that dig
their lives, with their attitudes and the monotony of
their days, making their existences dead. The true
tragedy of men is the smile that everyone has, when
appears someone considered funny, stupid, characterized
by the events that have marked his life: when we realize
that he is a man like us, and our lives can be seen like
his one by someone else , the smile becomes bitterness.
Pirandello writes
that there’s a changeable feeling in every man, and not
a steady awareness of life: the tree, on the contrary,
lives without knowing of its existence, and considers
the rain and the snow like himself without being aware
of his peculiarity. But men don’t have that “sad
fortune”, they feel the flow known as life in their
bodies, and consider what they feel in themselves as the
truth.
Humour is the
highest kind of art that men can make, because it is the
only one that can highlight in the best way the
absurdity of life. This thought can be also be compared
to the Hegel’s one, that considered the art a way to
spotlight the essence of human’s life –for the Polish
philosopher music was the best type of art - .
Influence of
the other authors on Pirandello’s literature:
Reading the most
important works by our Sicilian writer, we can
immediately perceive the influence of other authors.
Pirandello was sure that humour must be studied as a
scientific issue, as the positivistic culture of the
late 18th century had suggested. The best way
to circumscribe it is to use Psychology. But this
individualistic conception of man is more similar to the
conception of the 20th century than to the 19th
century’s one.
Pirandello had the
purpose to divide humour from irony. To do that, he had
to analyze two important poems of chivalry: The
furious Orlando by Ariosto and Don Quijote by
Cervantes.
The first one is,
for Pirandello, the best ironic poem, in which Ariosto
describes a vanished world, and all the poem is centred
on the thin tread that divides the truth from the
illusion. Instead, Don Quijote, lets us laugh for
the powerlessness of that man in front of his illusions
- he can’t accept the true world - but lets also us
think that we have renounced to find our dreams in a
world in which they can’t be found. In the Essay
about Humour (1908), Pirandello wrote that
“humour negates the comicality , goes over it thanks to
comicality itself, penetrates in its opposite and takes
so much of its feeling, that destroys it with the
representation of its opposite”.
He started to
devote himself to the novel while, in Italy, some
writers were still concerned with the most important
issues of Verism. We must remember that this kind of
literature comes from Positivism, and especially from
authors as Zola and the De Goncourt brothers. Pirandello
empties out the main features of Verism: in his novels
the narrator comments the story, and lets see his ideas,
erases a lot of landscape descriptions and uses a lot of
monologues, above all in his theatre works. In
Pirandello’s works the characters are never overpowered
by passions, the humorist doesn’t have to lose the
control of the story, and the reader will have a sort of
compassion for the protagonists of the novels. Moreover
he negates the objectivity concept of the reality, the
new interpretation is not static and the writers is not
forced to follow the scientific way to describe the
human’s attitudes. Pirandello goes over the “barrier
of naturalism” - how Barilli said - and in his new
conception of the reality will be followed by Svevo and
Gadda.
In the Essay
about Humour and in his philosophy of life, typical
of this Sicilian writer, the influence of Bergson and
Simmel is evident even for what humour is concerned.
The Essay
about Humour:
This really
famous essay by Pirandello is considerate as a sort of
balance of what he wrote until 1908, in which he describes humour and what
differentiates it from comicality. Comicality is based
on the awareness of the to the reality, of a behaviour
and of a lifestyle: it is a “premonition of the
opposite” . Instead, humour, consists in a stronger
kind of awareness: starts with the end of a cognition
that will let us understand another truth. He uses, in
that essay, the example of an old woman that can let
smile for her look - she fakes to be younger than her
old age – and, after the first smiles, starts the
thought about what can be her life: she can fake that
just to catch her husband’s love. So, after the
premonition of the opposite – that is the comic - we
reflects and then we have a “feeling of the
opposite”: in it consists humour. We can understand
from these smiles that they are characteristic of
human’s nature and this attitude leads the men to live a
bitter existence.
When Pirandello
has to treat the description of the humorist, he writes
that every feeling that emerges in himself immediately
is halved in two opposite feelings; the humorist is a
man that can not live a feeling without having, in his
soul the opposite of it that calls him to do the
contrary, and even if he wants to covers up that
opposite feeling, because he does not have the courage
to let see that part of himself, he appears as
ridiculous and not serious - “he is at the same time
a violin and a double bass” - .
by Riccardo Frattolillo
and Francesco Colelli
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