SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR
Luigi Pirandello
Context
A
brilliant playwright who practiced what is regarded as a precursor of
Absurdism, Luigi Pirandello was born in Girgenti (now Agrigento), Sicily in
1867 to a wealthy family of sulfur miners. During the 1880s, he attended the
University of Rome and then the University of Bonn, earning his doctorate in
Roman philology in 1891. In 1894 he married Antonietta Portulano, the daughter
of a sulfur merchant, in what appears to have been a business deal between
their respective families. From 1904 onward, Portulano suffered severe bouts of
hysteria and other mental illness that weighed heavily on their household,
Pirandello ultimately institutionalizing her in 1919 upon the capture of both
their sons in a World War I military campaign.
Pirandello
began writing while at university and returned to Rome in the late 1890s to
pursue a career as an author. After a flood ruined his family's sulfur mines,
Pirandello began to support himself by teaching rhetoric and then Italian
Literature at various local colleges. During this time, he translated Goethe's Roman
Elegies, wrote hisElegie Renae, two books of poetry, and a volume of
short stories entitled Amore Senz' Amore (1894). Pirandello's
first novel, L'esclusa, appeared in 1901; Il Fu Matta
Pascal, his first major success, followed in 1904. Though Pirandello had
begun writing plays in the 1880s, he initially considered drama an impoverished
medium in comparison with the novel. He would only come to the theater in 1915,
ferociously producing sixteen plays in six years. Pirandello became so
prominent on the Italian dramatic scene that he would later win Mussolini's
support to lead an ultimately failed campaign to establish a National Art
Theater in Rome. Much to the dismay of his present readers, Pirandello was an
ardent fascist who joined the party in 1923. Though he harbored a somewhat
idiosyncratic and not entirely uncritical relationship to the government,
Pirandello remains remembered for his blunt declarations of allegiance to the
party and his extravagant displays of support, most famously, "I am a
Fascist because I am an Italian." The most oft-cited example of the latter
is the donation of his personal gold, including his 1934 Nobel Prize medal, for
the Italian campaign into Ethiopia.
Eric
Bentley, perhaps Pirandello's most canonical critic in Anglo-American dramatic
studies, divides the playwright's career into three major phases: the early
period of Sicilian folk comedies, Pirandello's philosophical works, and that of
the mythic plays written under fascist rule. It is for the works of the second
period, those often considered progenitors of the absurdist theater, that
Pirandello is remembered today. Apart from the famous Six Characters in
Search of an Author (1921), notable examples include Right You
Are If You Think You Are (1917), a tale of a mysterious woman who
could be either one of two different people, and Henry IV (1922),
the story of a madman who believes he is a German Emperor from the
eleventh-century. To accommodate his madness, his sister keeps him in a
medieval castle surrounded by actors playing the role of his courtiers.
Premiering
to great controversy in Rome, Six Characters in Search of an Author recounts
the fate of a family of characters left unrealized by their author. Desperate
to come to life, the characters interrupt the rehearsal of another Pirandello
play and demand that the director and cast stage their story. Pirandello
retrospectively grouped this surreal tale in a trilogy of "the theater in
the theater," along with Each His Own Way (1924) and Tonight
We Improvise (1930). Taking the theater itself as its setting and
subject, this trilogy drew upon the relations between all the major players of
the dramatic spectacle—directors, actors, characters, spectators, and
critics—to "present every possible conflict." As such a deeply self-
referential or meta-theatrical work, Six Characters is also a
key exercise in what Pirandello termed il teatro dello specchio or
"the mirror theater," a play that turns a mirror onto the theater
itself. As critic Anne Paolucci notes, the result then is not a reflection but
a shattering, Pirandello generating his works through the fracturing of the
dramatic spectacle itself.
Plot
Overview
The
audience faces an empty stage. The company enters from the back and gets ready
for a rehearsal of Pirandello's Mixing it Up. The Manager
enters and calls for the second act. The Leading Man asks if he must absolutely
wear a cook's cap. The Manager jumps up in rage.
The Six
Characters enter from the rear. A "tenuous light" surrounds them—the
"faint breath of their fantastic reality." With embarrassment, the
Father explains to the angry Manager that they are in search of an author. When
the Manager replies that he has no time for madmen, Father rejoins that he must
know life is full of absurdities that do not need to appear plausible since
they are true. To reverse this process is the madness of acting: that is, "to
create credible situations, in order that they may appear true."
Father
explains that as their author unjustly denied them stage-life and its
immortality, they bring their drama to the company. The seductive Step-Daughter
begins its elaboration: after what took place between her and Father, she
cannot remain in society, and she cannot bear to witness her widowed Mother's
anguish for her legitimate Son. Confused, the Manager asks for the situation
and wonders how a Mother can be a widow if the Father is alive. The
Step-Daughter explains that the Mother's lover—her, the Child, and Boy's
father—died two months ago. Father proper once had a clerk who befriended
Mother. Seeing the "mute appeal" in their eyes, he sent her off with
him and took her Son. As soon as the clerk died, the family fell into poverty
and, unbeknownst to Father, returned to town. Step-Daughter became a prostitute
for Madame Pace. The "eternal moment" of their drama shows the
Step-Daughter surprising Father as her unsuspecting client. Father then
gestures to the Son, whose cruel aloofness is the hinge of the action. The
Mother will re-enter the house with the outside family. Because the son will
make her family feel foreign to the household, the Child will die, the Boy will
meet tragedy, and Step- Daughter will flee.
The
Manager takes interest. He gives the Actors a twenty-minute break and retires
with the Characters to his office. After twenty minutes, the stage bell rings.
The Step-Daughter emerges from the office with the Child and Boy. She laments
the Child's death in the fountain and angrily forces Boy to show his revolver.
If she had been in his place, she would have killed Father and Son, not
herself.
Everyone
returns to the stage, and the Manager orders the set prepared for rehearsal.
Confused, Father wonders why the Characters themselves should not go before the
public. The Manager scoffs that actors act. The Manager suddenly notices that
Pace is missing. Father asks the Actresses to hang their hats and mantles on
the set's clothes pegs. Lured by the articles of her trade, Pace appears from
the rear. The Leading Lady denounces this "vulgar trick." Father
wonders why the actors are so anxious to destroy the "magic of the
stage" in the name of a "commonplace sense of truth." Pace's
scene with Step-Daughter begins before Father finishes. When the actors urge
them to speak more loudly, Step-Daughter replies that they cannot discuss such
matters loudly—Father might overhear. Pace comes forward, saying, "Yes
indeed sir, I no wanta take advantage of her." The actors erupt in
laughter. The Manager finds the comic relief of her accent magnificent. Father
cautiously greets the young prostitute and gallantly offers her a new hat.
Step-Daughter protests that she cannot wear one as she is in mourning. The
Manager interrupts, and calls the Leading Man and Lady to play the same scene.
Father protests, and Step-Daughter bursts out laughing. The Manager complains
that he never could rehearse with the author present.
He
instructs the Father to continue. When Step-Daughter speaks of her grief, he
must reply "'I understand.'" Step-Daughter interrupts: Father
actually asked her to remove her frock. She refuses to let them compose a
"romantic sentimental scene" out of her disgrace. Acknowledging that
tomorrow the actors will do as they wish, Step-Daughter offers them the scene
as it truly was. Father's "eternal moment" is the nucleus of the
first act. The Manager approves and notes that the curtain will then fall. To
his annoyance, the Machinist lets the curtain down in earnest.
The
curtain rises, revealing new scenery: a drop, a few trees, and the portion of a
fountain basin. The Step-Daughter tells the exasperated Manager that the entire
action cannot take place in the garden. The Manager protests that they cannot change
scenes three or four times in an act. The Leading Lady remarks that it makes
the illusion easier. Father bristles at the word "illusion." Pausing,
he approaches the Manager asks if he can tell him who he really is. A character
can always pose this question to a man as he is always somebody while a man
might be nobody. If man thinks of all his past illusions that now do not even
seem to exist, perhaps his present reality is not fated to become an illusion
tomorrow. The character is more real as his reality is immutable. The Manager
commands Father to stop his philosophizing. He is but imitating the manner of
an author he heartily detests.
The
Manager prepares the scene. Step-Daughter leads Child to the fountain.
"Both at the same time" the Manager commands. The Second Lady Lead
and Juvenile Lead approach and study Mother and Son. The Son objects that it is
impossible to live before a mirror that not only "freezes us with the
image of ourselves, but throws out likeness back at us with a horrible grimace."
He also protests that there was no scene between he and Mother. When Mother
went to his room to speak with him, he simply went into the garden. He then saw
the drowning Child in the fountain, and the Boy standing stock still like a
madman, watching her. A shot rings out from behind the trees where the Boy is
hidden. Some cry that the Boy is dead; others that it is only "make
believe" and "pretence." "Pretence? Reality?" the
Manager cries in frustration. "To hell with it all. Never in my life has
such a thing happened to me. I've lost a whole day over these people, a whole
day!"
Analysis
of Major Characters
The Father
The Father is a "fattish"
man in his fifties with thin, reddish hair, a thick moustache, and piercing,
blue oval eyes. He is "alternatively mellifluous and violent." Along
with the Step-Daughter, he is the Character who most fervently insists on the
staging of the Characters' drama. In some sense, he figures as the drama's
progenitor, having produced the situation of the step- household, a situation
that culminates in an inadvertent sexual encounter with his Step-Daughter.
Though the Father ostensibly seeks remorse, Pirandello intimates a number of
times that a "deal" has perhaps been struck between the Father and
Manager, the play's two authorial figures. Thus the Son and Step- Daughter warn
against reading the play according to his word alone. As the Manager laments,
the Father is the play's philosopher, continually stepping out of his role to
sermonize about ideas of the inner workings of the Characters' drama and the
relations between the Characters and Actors. His excessive tendency for
preaching would mark him as a roughly drawn character and as a double for the
author. In particular, the Father insists on the "reality" of the
Characters, a reality he poses over and against that of the company. Unlike the
"nobody" Actors, the Characters are "real somebodies"
because their reality—the reality of both their drama and role—remains fixed
and independent of the vagaries of time. This reality has little to do with the
plausibility nor the codes of the "actable." Thus, both he and the
Step-Daughter relate the sense of estrangement in seeing their reality rendered
by the Actors.
The Step-Daughter
Dashing, impudent, and beautiful,
the Step-Daughter also seeks the realization of the Characters' drama. Her
"reality" as a Character is a fixed, grimacing mask of vengeance. She
seeks stage-life to revenge herself on the Father and she appears in two
principle forms that define a certain fantasy of woman. As noted above, she and
the Father are the major players in their drama's traumatic scene: the
inadvertent sexual encounter that precipitates the encounter between the
original and surrogate families in the back of Madame Pace's shop. Exploited
despite her mourning for her father, the Step-Daughter appears here as victim.
At the same time, on-stage she appears seductive, exhibitionistic, and
dangerously cruel.
As she tells the Manager, the
Father's perversity is responsible for hers. Her perversity emerges in
particular with her obsession with the spectacle of the Characters' drama.
Whereas the Father offers their play as a more "cerebral drama,"
tracing its players' motivations, its overarching structures, and its narrative
trajectories, she will conjure its scenes in speech, calling for its trappings
forth on the stage. Many of these props concern the visual: the mirror, the
window, and the screen. The Step-Daughter also functions as object of this
spectacle. Though dressed, like the other members of her immediate family, in
mourning for their own father, she wears her clothes with "great
elegance." For example, she brashly erupts into a cabaret-style
performance of "Prenez garde à Tchou-Tchin-Tchou": her display would
lure the company into their drama's realization. More explicitly does the
Step-Daughter reveal her obsession with her self-image in her memory of the
author. As she tells the company, she strove most to seduce him from the
shadows about his writing table. In her vision of this seduction, she
progressively exiles the other Characters from the room, ultimately leaving her
alone to illuminate the darkness. With the Characters' drama, the Step-Daughter
would become a star. For her, the drama's stage-life would realize her
self-image above all.
The Mother
Dressed in modest black and a thick
widow's veil, the Mother appears crushed by an "intolerable weight of
shame and abasement." Her face is "wax-like," and her eyes
always downcast. She bears the anguish of the Characters' drama, serving as its
horrified spectator. She is the consummate figure of grief, mourning the
Characters' inexorable fate. As Pirandello notes in his preface to the play,
the Mother would incarnate nature without mind in her suffering—she suffers the
torture of what has befallen the family without cognizing it as the Father
does. In this respect, she is not even a woman, she first and foremost a mother
in anguish. Caught, like the other Characters, in the unchanging and inexorable
reality of both her drama and role. She laments that she suffers her torture at
every moment; her lot as mourner is fixed for eternity. The two mute children,
accessories of sorts, underline her function as an image of grief. Particularly
agonizing to her is the aloofness of her estranged Son, whom she will approach
to no avail throughout the play.
The Son
A tall, severe man of twenty-two,
the Son appears contemptuous, supercilious, and humiliated by his fellow
Characters. Having been grown up in the country, he is estranged from his
family and, in his aloofness, will cause the elimination of the stepchildren
within the Characters' drama. Ironically then will he ultimately appear as
witness to the two younger children's demise. His role as a character lies in
his ashamed refusal to participate in the household and the Characters'
spectacle, a spectacle to which he nevertheless remains bound. More
specifically, he appears to be structurally tied within the Character's drama
to the Step-Daughter, whose look of scorn and exhibitionism fixes him in his
guilt, shame, and reserve. In his aversion to spectacle, he in particular
attacks the Actors who would imitate them. For him, the Actor-as-mirror, in its
necessary inability to reflect the Character as he sees himself, freezes the
Character's self-image and renders it grotesque. The Son also protests to the
Manager that he remains an unrealized character, perhaps one that even stands
for the will of the author in objecting to their drama's staging. As the Father
counters, however, his unrealized nature is his own situation in both the
Characters' drama and its attempted rehearsal on-stage; his aloofness within
the drama makes him the drama's very hinge. The Son's position as an unrealized
character appears most clearly in the scene he would refuse to play with his
Mother in Act III, a scene that is actually a non-scene. The Mother enters his
bedroom, and the Son, in his aversion to scenes, flees to the garden to witness
his step-siblings' deaths.
Themes,
Motifs, and Symbols
Themes
The
Theater of the Theater
As noted in the Context, Pirandello retrospectively
grouped Six
Characters in
a trilogy of the "theater of the theater." These works generate their
drama out of the theater's elements—in this case, through the conflict between
actors, manager and characters, and the missing author. For Pirandello, the
theater is itself theatrical—that is, it is itself implicated in the forms and
dynamics of the stage. Beginning with a supposed daytime rehearsal, Six Characters puts the theater and
its processes themselves on stage. Put otherwise, the play is an allegory for
the theater. Thus it presents characters dubbed the Second Leading Lady and Property
Man and it hinges on multiple frames of (self)-reference, staging the staging
of a play within the play. Akin to a hall of mirrors, this device, the mise-en- abîme, is common to plays
that would reflect on the properties of their own medium. Self-referentiality
attains heights here. The play's act divisions, for example, mirror those of
the Characters' drama, a number of scenes show the Actors playing the doubles
of the audience, and onward. Crucial to this project is a dismantling of the
conventions of the "well-made" play that would render the play's
workings visible to the spectator. Six
Characters often
appears improvisational, sketch-like, what the Manager calls a "glorious
failure." Note the aborted rehearsal, rejected and incompletely drawn characters,
hastily assembled sets, and onward. To anticipate the Father's confession, one
could describe Pirandello as perhaps subject to the "Demon of
Experiment."
The Character's Reality
Throughout the play, the Father insists on the reality of
the Characters, a reality that, as the stage notes indicates, inheres in their
forms and expressions. The Father offers his most explicit meditation on the
Character's reality in Act II. Here he bristles at the Actors' use of the word
illusion as it relies on its vulgar opposition to reality. He approaches the
Manager in a sort of face-off to challenge this opposition, one that underpins
his identity. Convinced of his self-identity, the Manager readily responds that
he is himself. The Father believes otherwise. While the Character's reality is
real, the Actors' is not; while the Character is somebody, man is nobody. Man
is nobody because he is subject to time: his reality is fleeting, always ready
to reveal itself as illusion, whereas the Character's reality remains fixed for
eternity. Put otherwise, time enables an opposition between reality and
illusion for man. Over time, man comes to identify realities as illusion,
whereas the Character exists in the timeless reality of art.
The Eternal Moment
The Father and Step-Daughter sell the Manager on their
drama with the scene around which it crystallizes: the inadvertent sexual
encounter between them in the back room of Madame Pace's shop. In Act I, the
spectator receives it in exposition, the Father offering an existentialist
interpretation of its nature. For him, its tragedy inheres in man's belief in
his unitary being. He only perceives this once caught in an act, so to speak,
that determines him entirely. Judged by another, he appears to himself in
alienated form, suspended in a reality that he should have known. The
Step-Daughter should not have seen the Father in Pace's room and he should not
have become real to her. The Father's suspension as pervert simultaneously
fixes him as a Character. Similarly, the other Characters remain bound to this
"eternal moment." This scene, for example, impels the Step-Daughter
to vengeance and condemn the Mother an eternal grief. The Mother figures as
witness to this obscene exchange, releasing its anguish in her final,
culminating wail. Eternally posed before this scene, the Mother can only live
"every minute of her torture."
The Author-Function
In the rehearsal of another of Pirandello's plays within
this one, the figure of Pirandello immediately appears as the maddening native
playwright who "plays the fool" with everyone. Such fantasies of
authorship are intrinsic to the literary work. The author is not only that
which the characters search for; but as Pirandello laments in his preface to
the play, the spectator as well. "What does the author intend?"
wonders the audience. Though absent, the author haunts the stage. He will not
assume body like the characters but become a function or mask that circulates
among the players. Though in the preface Pirandello describes authorship
through metaphors of divine and even the Immaculate Conception, speaking of
"miracles," and "divine births," such identifications are
covered over within the play. There the Father decidedly appears as the
author's double.
The Act Divisions
Above we noted the multiple frames of reference at work
in the play. As the Father's speech on the fatuous comedy of human existence
suggests, these frames would implicate the spectator's reality as well. This gesture
of implication becomes especially clear in Pirandello's act divisions. The
conclusion of Act I, for example, would have the so-called reality of the
spectacle invade that of the audience just as the Characters have appeared
among the living Actors. Here the Manager agrees the experiment, and the
Characters retire to his office. Thus they break the frame, leaving the
audience with the actors who had come to serve as the Characters' audience.
Their chatter, in which they jeer at the Manager's authorial pretentious,
complain that this breaking of theatrical convention will reduce them to the
level of the improvisers, and would add an additional sense of reality to the
scene. The breaking of the frame and staging of a scene within the audience
would ratify what we saw as real. The real-time pause—delimiting both the
interruption of the action and the intermission—similarly attempts to fold
stage reality into that of the audience's.
Symbols
In the play's preface, Pirandello confesses an aversion
to the use of symbol in the theater. If we take the term loosely, however, we
can identify a number of symbolic structures and objects in the play. First, as
noted above, the play itself is symbolic of, or more accurately, an allegory
for, the theater itself. Second, some of Six
Characters's readers have suggested the symbolic properties of the
Characters themselves. Critic Diane Thompson, for example, believes that the
play echoes the Italian tradition of the commedia
del 'arte, in
which the mask designates the character's eternal quality in opposition to the
transient "naked face" of the actors. The mask would give the
impression of figures fixed forever in its own fundamental emotion: that is,
Remorse for the Father, Revenge for the Stepdaughter, Scorn for the Son, Sorrow
for the Mother.
We might also look toward certain objects in the play as
bearing symbolic properties. For example, the mirror, screen, and window that
the Step-Daughter calls for in the staging of the Pace scene indicate her
obsession with spectacle and, more specifically, her self-image as that
spectacle's object. The vein she recalls in her sexual encounter with the
Father incarnates the disgusting excessiveness of the scene, excess that the
Manager would keep off-stage at all costs. Pirandello also makes use of a
numbers regarding the relation between reason and sentiment. Memorably, the
Manager points to the Leading Man's egg- shells in Mixing It Up!as
symbolizing psychology of empty reason without its counterpart. Similarly, the
Father imagines a fact as an "empty sack" unless filled without these
two qualities.
Important Quotations Explained
A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character
has really a life of his own, marked with his especial characteristics; for
which reason he is always "somebody." But a man—I'm not speaking of
you now—may very well be "nobody."
The
Father makes this playful comment to the Manager in Act II. Note the mellifluous
courtesy of his speech: this rhetorical ploy is typical of the speech he
addresses to the company or at his moments of relative reserve. Throughout the
play, the Father insists on the reality of the Characters, a reality that, as
the stage notes indicates, inheres in their forms and expressions. Here he
bristles at the Actors' use of the word illusion as it relies on its vulgar
opposition to reality. He approaches the Manager in a sort of face-off to
challenge this opposition, one that underpins his identity. Convinced of his
self-identity, the Manager readily responds that he is himself. The Father
believes otherwise. While the Character's reality is real, the Actors' reality
is not real. While the Character is somebody, man is nobody. Man is nobody because
he is subject to time: his reality is fleeting and always ready to reveal
itself as illusion, whereas the Character's reality remains fixed for eternity
as art—what the Actors would call mere illusion. Put otherwise, time enables an
opposition between reality and illusion for man. Over time, man comes to
identify realities as illusion, whereas the Character exists in the timeless
reality of art.
Oh, if you would only go away, go away and leave us alone—mother here
with that son of hers—I with that Child—that Boy there always alone—and then I
alone, alone in those shadows!
The
Step-Daughter makes this exclamation toward the end of Act III in her vision of
the author. In her memory, the author sits at his writing table as the
Characters haunt him from the shadows, hovering in the twilight between life
and unreality. The Step-Daughter especially appears to him in all her seductive
charm, attempting to lure him to grant her life. She appears consumed with her
own image lost. Thus she progressively casts the Characters from the author's
side, making a sudden movement "as if in the vision she has of herself
illuminating those shadows she wanted to seize hold of herself." In
entering the reality of the stage, the Step-Daughter would become self-identical
and certainly dispense with the alienating figure of the actress. The Step-
Daughter's narcissism appears explicitly in the act previous. There she
furiously insists on the primacy of her part. As the Manager complains, the
Step-Daughter would break the "neat little framework" of an organized
cast, a cast with its primary and secondary figures that stays closely within
the limits of the actable.
we have this illusion of being one person for all, of having a
personality that is unique in all our acts. But it isn't true. We perceive this
when, tragically perhaps, in something we do, we are as it were, suspended,
caught up in the air on a kind of hook. We perceive that all of us was not in
that act, and that it would be an atrocious injustice to judge us by that action
alone, as if all our existence were summed up in that one deed.
Once
again stepping from his role to sermonize, the Father muses on the act that
defines him as Character in Act I. This act comes from the scene around which
it crystallizes: the inadvertent sexual encounter between them in the back room
of Madame Pace's shop that precipitates the encounter and ruin of the two
families. Here spectator receives it in exposition, and the Father offers an
existentialist interpretation of its nature. For him, its tragedy inheres in
man's belief in his unitary being. He only perceives this once caught in an
act, so to speak, that determines him entirely. Judged by another, he appears
to himself in alienated form, suspended in a reality that he should have known.
The Step-Daughter should not have seen the Father in Pace's room; he should not
have become real to her. The Father's suspension as pervert simultaneously
fixes him as a Character.
Yes, but haven't you perceived that it isn't possible to live in front
of a mirror which not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws
our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace?
Mortified by the staging of the family's drama, the Son makes this
protest to the Manager toward the end of Act III. It is particularly
significant as Pirandello is known as the progenitor of the "mirror
theater," a theater that concerns itself with the confrontation of the
figures on the near and far side of the mirror relation. In the case ofSix
Characters, these figures are the Actor and Character. The Son charts
two effects of the mirror-relation between Actor and Character. Both spring
from the inability of the Actor as mirror to reflect the Character as it would
see itself, its inability to return the Character's proper self-image.
In the
second and more straightforward complaint, the image of the subject imitated in
the other renders that likeness grotesque. In the first, vaguely reminiscent of
the Medusa, the fascinating image of the Actor would freeze the Character it
reflects. Put otherwise, the animation of the image requires the petrifaction
of the body; the life of the persona or mask is the death of the person. The
animation of the Character in the place of the Actor, an animation that takes
place through imitation, is the Character's defacement. This meditation on the
petrifying effect of the mirror, one that kills the Character by fixing him,
perhaps reads in tension with the Father's comments on the Character's life and
reality. According to the Father, both inhere precisely in the fixity of its
image. Unlike transitory man, the mask is real and alive insofar as it cannot
change. The Character's drama and role are fixed for all time. Perhaps the
difference inheres in the process of alienation. The frozen image is fatal when
reflected in the Actor because the places the self-image in the place of the
other.
She isn't a woman, she is a mother.
The
Father introduces the Mother to the company with this qualification in Act I.
It would define the Mother's reality and define what she is as a Character. She
is the consummate figure of grief, mourning the Characters' inexorable fate,
bearing, its anguish, and serving as its horrified spectator. In this respect,
she is not even a woman, but she is first and foremost a mother in anguish.
Pirandello elaborates this fantasy of maternal suffering further in his preface
to the play. There the Mother is posed against the philosophizing Father,
incarnating nature without mind in her suffering—she suffers the torture of
what has befallen the family without thinking about it as the Father does.
Caught, like the other Characters, in the unchanging and inexorable reality of
both her drama and role, she laments that she suffers her torture at every
moment. Her lot as mourner is fixed for eternity.
Key Facts
FULL TITLE · Six
Characters in Search of an Author (Sei Personaggi in Cerca D'autore)
AUTHOR · Luigi
Pirandello TYPE
OF WORK · Drama GENRE · Comedy LANGUAGE · Italian
TIME AND PLACE
WRITTEN · Rome, 1920 DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION · 1922;
first production in Rome, 1921PUBLISHER · Mondadori NARRATOR · None
POINT OF VIEW · Not
applicable TONE · Tragic-comic
TENSE · The
play unfolds in the time of the present SETTING (TIME) · Daytime SETTING (PLACE) · The
stage of a theatre PROTAGONISTS · The Father, the Step-Daughter MAJOR CONFLICT · Six
Characters interrupt the daytime rehearsal of Pirandello's play. Abandoned by
their author, they seek a new one to put on their drama. To the Actors chagrin,
they convince the theater company's Manager and attempt to stage their
unwritten play RISING
ACTION · The play does not adhere to a conventional model
of rising action, climax, and falling action, but the rising action is possibly
the harried, messy, and frantic rehearsal of the Characters' drama.CLIMAX · Pirandello
offers the two ostensible climaxes of the Characters' drama in botched form:
the sexual encounter between the Father and Step-Daughter in the back room of
Madame Pace's shop at the end of Act II and the death of the Child and Boy at
the end of Act III.FALLING ACTION · In the former case, the Manager
moves to the footlights to appraise the spectacle, oblivious to its pathos; in
the second, a confused melée ensues, and the Manager renounces the experiment
in frustration.THEMES · The
theater of the theater; the Character's reality; the Eternal Moment MOTIFS · The
mirror; the author-function; the act divisions SYMBOLS · The Characters
themselves, the Step-Daughter's vein, the trappings of Madame Pace's shop, the
egg-shells, the Father's sack
FORESHADOWING · In
selling their drama to the Manager, the Father and Step-Daughter give away its
plot from the outset. Otherwise, most of the play remains unpredictable,
subject to what the Father calls the "Demon of Experiment."
Study
Questions and Essay Topics
What is the significance of the inclusion of the "play within the
play" at the beginning of Six Characters?
Six Characters is an exercise in
what Pirandello calls the "theater of the theater"—that is theater
that generates its drama out of the theater's elements, in this case, through
the conflict between actors, manager and characters, and the missing author.
For Pirandello, the theater is itself theatrical. That is, it is itself
implicated in the forms and dynamics of the stage. This self-referential structure,
that of a play about the play, is paralleled by another in the opening scene:
the rehearsal of a play within a play. Both these plays belong to Pirandello.
The inclusion of Mixing
It Up and,
later, a double of Pirandello himself, is self-indulgent. As Stanley Cavell
notes, the work that would reflect on its own medium often interposes the
figure of its author instead. Thus, in the rehearsal of Mixing,Pirandello
soon appears as the maddening native playwright who "plays the fool"
with everyone. Such fantasies of authorship are intrinsic to the literary work.
The author is not only that which the characters search for, but, as Pirandello
laments in his preface to the play, the spectator as well. "What does the
author intend?" wonders the audience. "Who is this master who plays
the fool with me?" Though absent, the author haunts the stage. He will not
assume body like the characters but become a function or mask that circulates
among the players.
The aborted excerpt of Mixing It Up also provides an
allegory of sorts for Six
Characters. As
the Manager confusedly advises the Leading Man, the play is a "mixing up
of the parts, according to which you who act your own part become the puppet of
yourself." When he asks the actor if he understands, he replies: "I'm
hanged if I do." Put otherwise, the actor who dons the mask becomes its
hanged puppet. The actor's joke marks the presence of death in acting: in some
sense, the animation of the persona involves the death of the person; the Character
as somebody implies that the Actor is nobody. This brief exchange prefigures
the advent of the Characters, who usurp the actors in terms of their life and
reality.
What is the significance of Madame Pace's mysterious birth in Act II?
Can one describe it, as the Leading Lady does, as a "vulgar trick?"
The strangest action of Act II is
undoubtedly the birth of Madame Pace through the medium of the coats and hats
that the Father borrows from the company's actresses. Her conjuring immediately
provokes protests from the company. An adherent to the standards of
plausibility discussed earlier, the Leading Lady denounces the conjuring as a
"vulgar trick": it breaks the verisimilitude of theatrical illusion.
Even worse, such an expedient device betrays a weakness in playwriting. For the
Father, however, this trick is an exercise in the magic that defines the stage.
In a work concerned with reflecting on its own medium, Pace's birth evokes the
mythic origins of theater—that of rite, ritual, and ceremony, the coats and mantles
on show serving as the scene's talismans. As with the Characters, theater would
enable crossings from the other world. Equipped with a pair of shears and
"puffy oxygenated hair," Pace is almost a comic Fate.
In a "specious argument"
from Act III, the Father declares that while a Character is always somebody,
man may be nobody. Explain this argument.
Throughout the play, the Father
insists on the reality of the Characters, a reality that, as the stage notes
indicates, inheres in their forms and expressions. The Father offers his most
explicit meditation on the Character's reality in Act II. Here he bristles at
the Actors' use of the word "illusion" as it relies on its vulgar
opposition to reality. He approaches the Manager in a sort of face-off to challenge
this opposition, one that underpins his identity. He wonders whether the
Manager can tell him who he is. Convinced of his self- identity, the Manager
readily responds that he is himself. The Father believes otherwise. While the
Character's reality is real, the Actors' is not; while the Character is
somebody, man is nobody. Man is nobody because he is subject to time: his
reality is fleeting, always ready to reveal itself as illusion, whereas the
Character's reality remains fixed for eternity. Put otherwise, time enables an
opposition between reality and illusion for man. Over time, man comes to
identify erstwhile realities as illusion, whereas the Character exists in the
timeless reality of art.
