Essay on Pirandello’s thought: the dialectical relationship between life and form, the mask and the poetics of humour.
Luigi Pirandello ‘s thought is based on the dialectical relationship between life and form . Life, although continually mobile, tends to sink into a form in which it remains a prisoner and from which it tries to escape to assume new forms without ever finding peace. From the relationship between life and form derives psychological relativism, which develops, so to speak, in two directions: in a horizontal sense and concerns the relationship of the individual with others and in a vertical sense that concerns the relationship of the individual with himself.
Inserted into a certain context or society, we assign ourselves a mask , forcing us to move according to well-defined patterns that we accept either out of laziness or convenience without ever having the courage to reject them, even when they contrast with our nature.
Under the mask our spirit trembles for its continuous mutability, but we hold back both to avoid clashing with the prejudices of society and for our own tranquility because in the changing and enigmatic world in which we live, that fixed Form or mask of ours is the only fixed point to which we desperately cling to avoid being overwhelmed by the storm. But sometimes it happens that the instinctive soul that is in us explodes violently, in contrast with the moral soul, blowing up our modesty and inhibitions.
Then the mask breaks and we are like a violin out of tune, that is, out of tune like an actor who starts playing a part on stage that was not assigned to him in the script. But even in this case we have no reason to rejoice because once we have left the old mask the sense of freedom we feel is short-lived because the new way of living imprisons us in another form, different from the first, but equally suffocating and then we might as well enter the old form: a return that however proves impossible due to the continuous change of reality.
According to Pirandello, when man discovers the contrast between form and life, he can react in three ways: the passive reaction, the ironic-humorous reaction and the dramatic one. The passive reaction is that of the weak who resign themselves to the mask that imprisons them, incapable of rebelling or disappointed after the experience of a new mask, it is the reaction of ” Mattia Pascal ” in the last part of the novel. Those who resign themselves feel the pain of seeing themselves live as if their actions were detached from themselves and belonged to another person and therefore experience that painful sense of a fracture between the life they would like to live and the one they are forced to live.
Then there is the ironic-humorous reaction of those who do not resign themselves to the mask and since they cannot free themselves from it, they play the role game, but with an ironic, polemical, aggressive, humorous attitude in the Pirandellian sense ( The Driving License ). The third point, the dramatic reaction of those who, overwhelmed by exasperation, neither resign themselves nor manage to smile at life; then they close themselves in a desperate solitude that leads them either to suicide or madness ( One, No One, One Hundred Thousand ; Henry IV ).
Man’s discomfort does not derive only from the clash with society, but also from the continuous rebellion of his spirit that does not allow him to know himself well, nor to crystallize between the relationship of life and form in a defined personality. Precisely because of his continuous becoming, man is at the same time one, no one, a hundred thousand: he is one because he is what he believes himself to be from time to time, he is no one because given his continuous change he is incapable of fixing himself in a personality, nor does he recognize himself in the form that others attribute to him; finally, he is a hundred thousand because each of those who approach him sees him in his own way and he assumes as many forms or appearances as are those that are attributed to him.
PIRANDELLO: THOUGHTS ON HUMOUR
Humor is the feeling of the opposite that arises from the combined action of two different but complementary forces. The two forces are the feeling that creates the situations of life and the reason that intervenes and analyzes them by breaking them down into their constituent elements that reveal their mechanisms. To explain the complementarity of the two forces that generate humor, Pirandello uses two images: first he says that reason is like a surface of frozen water into which the feeling dives and fades, the sizzling of the water represents the laughter that the humorist arouses; or, Pirandello says again, reason is like a little devil that has the purpose of tearing the veils that envelop reality to penetrate it deeply and dismantle the mechanisms that every case of life is made of.
