What Does Pirandello Mean?

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 50, 21 May 1927, Page 21 (Supplement)

What Does Pirandello Mean?

James Agate Suggests His “Little Joke” The meaning of the plays of Pirandello has been a subject of much discussion. If the meaning of a play —reven a repertory play—needs to be argued about, its right to be staged is doubtful. Symbolism and allegory are all very well if they can be conveyed to the audience without elaborate explanation —as Barrie, for instance, conveys them —but tortuous meanings do not improve a play even for professed highbrows. On the philosophy of Pirandello, as it appears to an onlooker, the London critic, James Agate, writes: What, in a few words is this philosophy? Briefly, it is that people as we know them are really unknowable ghosts wrapped in a disguise called reality, acting a fiction. But this is only our old friend, the bee of Relativity. What else is there in the author’s bonnet? Well, there is his complete pessimism. There is no Beneficent Power. There is no message for humanity. since, according to the latest of Pirandello’s apologists. “Man is a fallen god thrown down into the mud and applying his reason to cold and diabolical wickedness.’’ But these are to Pirandello comparatively small matters. What is important is that there is no Reason.

Shaw destroys illusion that we may perceive the rational; Pirandello, reversing this, conceives rationality as an illusion, and would force us into acceptance of the irrational. With respect 1 submit that this is bunkum. And even if Pirandello the thinker is right, it follows that Pirandello the playwright must be wrong. A theatre erected on such a philosophy can only bq brain-sickly. The cleverer the cerebration, and it is not denied that the cleverness is diabolical, the more it will hurt mankind. Better no theatre at all than mind-torture and Pirandellian ecstacy. Better, in short, a fool’s paradise than a philosopher’s hell.

But perhaps this is to take our author too seriously. Perhaps it is all his “little joke.” One of Pirandello’s best-known plays is “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” which has been done in America. Another is “The Man W itli a Flower in His Mouth.**