The chapter focuses on a controversial element of Pirandello’s life and career, namely, his relationship to Italian Fascism and its head of government, Benito Mussolini. Taking Pirandello’s outspoken and loyal adhesion to the Fascist government as a matter of historical fact and arguing that true “faith” in its ethos and professional opportunism on Pirandello’s part were not mutually exclusive, the essay focuses on the personal, cultural, and professional reasons for Pirandello’s membership in the party and then moves on to discuss how contemporaries viewed the author’s work in relation to Fascism’s ideological precepts. Because he was so famous, regime intellectuals were keen to claim Pirandello as their own, but whether they read his work as compatible with their world view had much to do with its philosophical bent, as interpreted through the formulations of Adriano Tilgher. If they perceived Pirandello as nihilistic, they tended to doubt his Fascism, but if they read his work as celebrating the victory of life over form, they judged it as representative of the spirit of the so-called new era.

In his essay On Humor, Pirandello effectively places himself in the tradition of Cervantes, who engaged modern problematic subjectivity, not with the tragic relativism of his contemporary Hamlet but with a nimble comic irony that learns to live within the condition. Some three centuries later, growing dissatisfied with the realist tradition Cervantes had helped to found, a number of early twentieth-century European writers, largely influenced by Nietzsche, including James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Mann, turned to myth not only as a literary form but also as a form of life. In their work, the poetic imagination seeks to become mythopoeic and thereby affirm the mythic basis of human culture. In three late plays – Lazarus, The New Colony, and the unfinished The Mountain Giants – Pirandello also turned to mythic motifs, but these works are not attempts at mythopoeic creation so much as they are political and moral allegories using mythic themes.