Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T21:12:49.165Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Pirandello and the Nature of Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2022

Hubert C. Heffner
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The students and critics of Pirandello are almost unanimous in their assertions that a chief, if not the chief, contribution of his dramatic works lies in his reevaluation of the nature of man and his reassessment of conceptions of reality. Joseph Wood Krutch, for example, in his Messenger Lectures delivered at Cornell University in October of 1952 and later published under the title “Modernism” in the Modern Drama,: places Pirandello among the chief four or five modern dramatists and among the foremost contributors to modernism chiefly because his plays are centrally concerned with the “dissolution of the ego” and hence sets Pirandello centrally in that main stream of modern thought about the nature of man represented likewise by the novels of Proust and James Joyce, among others.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tulane Drama Review , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , June 1957 , pp. 23 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © 1957 The Tulane Drama Review

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

A lecture delivered at Carleton College, 29 November, 1956.

References

Footnotes

1 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, cl953.Google Scholar) Krutch's book is, as he himself indicates in his “Foreword,” an argument to a thesis. He is concerned with defining “modernism” by exploring and exposing an aspect, the nihilism or denying spirit, which characterizes it most specifically in the author's opinion. In a sense these lectures are a continuation of Krutch's earlier The Modern Temper, first published in 1929 by Harcourt, Brace and CompanyGoogle Scholar, and recently reissued in their paper-back “Harvest Books” series. Since Krutch is propounding only one specific interpretation of “Modernism” in his discussion of modern playwrights, it is not surprising that other aspects, sometimes contradictory aspects, of their works should not appear in his discussion.

2 P. 77. Krutch's argument that Pirandello represents in drama ”… the denial that the persistent and more or less consistent character or personality which we attribute to each individual human being, and especially to ourselves, exists at all” must not be construed as Pirandello's total contribution to the depiction of the nature of man. That this “dissolution of the ego” is to be found in many Pirandello plays is unquestionable; yet what a paradox Pirandello, who delights in paradoxes, made of this! Take as an example the play to be produced, Six Characters in Search of An Author, of which this lecture is a kind of prologue. In that play seven, not six, characters of their own volition come upon a stage and insist upon acting out their life stories. There is in all drama no more complete exhibition of the centrality of ego as will. If by ego is meant (1) the consciousness of one's self as an entity, (2) “the self-assertive and self-preserving tendency, as distinguished from the libido, and (3) volition or will as the highest manifestation of ego, how could a dramatist more forcefully and more powerfully demonstrate the supremacy and persistence of ego than by having characters, so to speak, generate themselves? In this play the seven characters quite independently of the author who originally conceived them, bring themselves into being and argue with “living” human beings not in the context of their original lives nor in the context of their original organic actions. They are capable of conducting an argument and getting the better of that argument about matters for which they were not initially conceived. In this play, then, Pirandello is presenting an argument for the persistence of personality which Krutch in his concentration upon the “dissolution of the ego” overlooks or rather does not find pertinent to the thesis which he is expounding. It must, therefore, be inferred that Pirandello's contributions to a conception of the nature of man goes beyond the nihilism represented in this one aspect of his characterization.

3 What is here said of character and characterization is taken from a chapter of an extended study, “Character in Drama,” upon which I have been engaged for a number of years. Some parts of that work have been issued to former students in mimeographed form.

4 The six categories of character traits enumerated in the following discussion are hierarchical. In the construction of character they have a matter-form relationship; hence they have a material and a formal causal relation. They correspond roughly to the six parts (plot, character, thought, diction, music, spectacle) of a play as a whole but only roughly. For example, the biological and the physical traits are rendered in spectacle; attitude, emotion, and deliberation require diction and thought; decision is rendered in action.

5 In the extended study, “Character in Drama,” I have collected and analyzed a far wider range of physical traits, as well as traits belonging to other categories. In this discussion I am concerned with a distinction between personality and character and have therefore limited the illustration of characterization to the briefest possible summary. The distinction between character as a made thing and personality in a living human being is necessary to understand what Pirandello was attempting to do in his characterizations and to clarify his contributions to a conception of man.

6 Dr. Willard Welsh in his unpublished doctoral dissertation on the characterization of the protagonist in serious American drama from approximately 1870 to 1920, presented at Stanford University, has shown that even in depicting serious characters American dramatists have relied chiefly on traits that belong to the biological, physical, and attitude or bent categories; that such deliberation as does occur in these plays tends usually to be merely expedient deliberation; and that truly moral deliberation and choice are largely absent. It is not surprising, therefore, that the majority of these plays tend towards melodrama in form.

7 A more extended, though still concise, summary of the use of the term personality may be found in Allport, Gordon W., Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Henry Holt and Company, cl937)Google Scholar. See also Trendelenburg, Adolf, Contributions to The History of The Word Persona (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1910)Google Scholar; Briggs, Alfred E., The Concept of Personality (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1935)Google Scholar, primarily concerned with the term in the legal sense; Linton, Ralph, The Cultural Background of Personality (New York: Appletion-Century-Crofts, Inc., cl945)Google Scholar, an anthropological interpretation; Kluckhorn, Clyde and Murray, Henry A. , Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948)Google Scholar. There is, of course, a very extensive literature in the fields of psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology dealing with personality. So far as I am aware no previous attempt has been made to differentiate clearly between character and personality. Most literary studies tacitly assume the terms to be synonymous, thereby introducing a considerable confusion into the discussion of character. In the case of Shakespearean criticism this confusion has been noted by Levin L. Schücking and E. E. Stoll in their various studies.

8 See Linton, Ralph, The Cultural Background of PersonalityGoogle Scholar, for a fuller analysis of the roles which a culture and a society impose upon an individual.

9 For an admirable setting forth in English of the naturalistic theory of drama see John Galsworthy, “Some Platitudes concerning The Drama,” published in his The Inn of Tranquility and Other Essays.

10 I am under considerable indebtedness to Vittorini's excellent study, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1935.