Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello: The Man Who Broke the Fourth Wall

In 1903 a sulphur mine in Sicily flooded, and a comfortable professor of philology in Rome lost everything — his father's fortune, his own money, and his wife's dowry in a single stroke. Antonietta Pirandello never recovered. She descended into jealousy and delusion, and in 1919 was committed to an asylum, where she remained until her death in 1959. Her husband spent the next thirty years writing plays and novels about the same question, over and over: how can anyone know who another person actually is, or who they are themselves? The Nobel Prize in 1934 honoured the answer he built — "his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art."

Girgenti, Bonn, and a Dissertation on Dialect

Pirandello was born on 28 June 1867 in Girgenti — now Agrigento — in Sicily, to Stefano Pirandello, a prosperous sulphur merchant, and his wife Caterina. He worked for a time in the family's sulphur extraction business, which is the sort of detail that later looks like foreshadowing.

His education was thoroughly academic: the University of Palermo from 1886 to 1887, Rome from 1887 to 1889, then Bonn from 1889 to 1891, where he took a doctorate in Romance philology with a dissertation on the dialect of his native town. In 1894 he married Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of a business associate; they had three children and settled in Rome. From 1897 to 1922 he was professor of aesthetics and stylistics at the Real Istituto di Magistero Femminile, the women's teacher-training institute in Rome.

The Novels, and a Man Who Chooses to Vanish

Before the theatre made him famous, Pirandello was a novelist and an obsessive writer of short fiction. *Il fu Mattia Pascal* — *The Late Mattia Pascal* — appeared in 1904, one year after the flood, and its title alone — the late Mattia Pascal, a man spoken of as dead while still narrating — announces the preoccupation that would organise everything after it. *I vecchi e i giovani* followed in 1913, *Si gira* in 1916, and *Uno, nessuno e centomila* — *One, No One and One Hundred Thousand* — in 1926.

The short stories were a lifelong project of extraordinary scale. He conceived *Novelle per un anno* as a story for every day of the year; the Swedish Academy, presenting his prize, marvelled that the collection ran to 365 tales, more than Boccaccio had managed in the *Decameron*. It was still being published in volumes between 1922 and 1937.

Naked Masks

The plays, gathered from 1918 to 1935 under the collective title *Maschere nude* — Naked Masks — are what changed world theatre.

*Così è (se vi pare)* (1918) is, in the Academy's description, a parable in which the truth simply remains unknowable — the audience leaves without the fact. *Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore* (1921) brought six unfinished fictional characters onto a working stage in search of the author who had abandoned them: the device Britannica calls theatre within the theatre, and which the Academy named the true drama of poetic creation. *Enrico IV* (1922) set identity against time.

The Academy located his central preoccupation precisely: the illusory nature of the personality, of the "I". Everything follows from that. If the self is fragmented, subjective and dependent on how others perceive it, then the stage — a place where people watch other people pretending — is not a metaphor for the problem. It is the problem, in its natural habitat.

In 1924 he co-founded the Teatro d'Arte di Roma with state backing and directed it himself; the company toured internationally before financial trouble closed it in 1928.

The Compromise

That state backing has a name attached. Pirandello joined the Fascist Party in 1924, in the aftermath of the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti — precisely the moment when many Italians were moving the other way — and pledged his "humble obedience" to Mussolini, who financed his theatre company. He later put distance between himself and the regime, living in Berlin and Paris from 1928 to 1933. But after the Nobel he donated his prize medal to the fascist government to support its campaign in Ethiopia.

He died in Rome on 10 December 1936. In accordance with his wishes his ashes were taken back to Sicily, where they rest inside a great rock beneath a solitary pine.

Why Luigi Is Called a Genius

The specific achievement is structural, and it is one of the very few genuine formal inventions in the history of drama. Pirandello worked out that the philosophical problem he cared about — that the self is not stable, that truth is relative to the observer — could not be argued in dialogue without becoming a lecture. So he built it into the machinery of the stage itself: characters who know they are characters, plays that interrupt themselves, a frame that collapses into its own contents. Once *Six Characters* existed, the fourth wall was optional, and everything from Brecht's alienation devices to modern metafiction had a working precedent.

The Swedish Academy identified the rare part exactly. His gift, Per Hallström said, was "his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre" — and he achieved it not by theorising but by working from images taken from life that had passed through a filter of ideas. Plenty of writers have had relativist ideas about identity. Pirandello is the one who made them playable, funny and unbearable in front of a paying audience.

The counter-case is serious and has two parts. The first is political: he joined the Fascist Party at its most indefensible moment, took Mussolini's money for his theatre, and handed over his Nobel medal to fund the invasion of Ethiopia. A body of work devoted to the impossibility of fixed truth was produced by a man who made a very fixed and very bad political choice, and the later self-exile to Berlin and Paris does not erase it. The second is artistic: the plays can be schematic. The same paradox is restated across decades, and where the device is exposed the characters can feel like positions in an argument rather than people. His range was narrow; what saves him is that the narrow thing he found was new.

Legacy

Modern theatre still runs on Pirandello's discovery. Any play that acknowledges its own audience, any film about making a film, any novel that turns to look at its author is working inside a space he opened in 1921. He took a private catastrophe — a flooded mine, a ruined fortune, a wife who no longer recognised the man she was married to — and converted it into the century's most durable question about identity. The rock in Agrigento holds the ashes. The device is still in use everywhere else.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1934
• Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre
• Notable work: L'Esclusa
• Notable work: The Turn
• Notable work: Ma non è una cosa seria
• Notable work: One, No one and One Hundred Thousand