Three Major Symbols in Four Plays by Pirandello

Abstract

ONLY THE MOST INNOCENT or the most corrupt of Pirandello Critics would take at its face value the playwright's assertion, "I hate symbolic art," for Pirandello is a consistent and fertile user of symbols. More, he has the capacity to deploy them in the modes of compelling allegory, not least in those dramas which he has himself described as myths, Lazarus, The. New Colony and The Giants of the Mountain. The truth is, of course, that Pirandello had no patience with the confidence tricksters of literature—D'Annunzio (with good reason) he found repellent—whose gold brick of symbolic ornamentation has no reference to meaning and is in no way derived from substance. He was aware that almost all symbolic art which claims to be such is evasion, so that his whole career as a writer became an insistent declaration of our need to recognise what seems to be (the nearest we ever come to what is). By confronting the apparent law of an unchanging mutability, by acquiescing in the rule of paradox, and by discerning the tragedy inherent in his orgasmic hunger for ideal form, man gropes forward to an apperception of that conflict which (in defensive terror) he calls his identity. The conflict is a vision of being-and-unbeing, flux eroding and abolishing what we construct (ourselves, others, our beliefs, even the fallacy of communication), and the dignity implicit in the humiliation of our nakedness.