At the Astillero III. The Late Mattia Pascal

Sotavento: “There is a mechanism in which each person is, purposely, the marionette of himself, as I said before; and then at the end, comes the kick that knocks the whole theatre apart.” I can’t stop seeing the novel in these terms. I mean, some authors are eloquent about their work. Others aren’t. But Pirandello is definitely among the former.   

Babor: His philosophical background tempts most of his critics into looking for a key such as that. To be sure, you have used an obvious one. But then we have the "little hole torn in the paper sky,” too. Or “the little lantern.” Perhaps even the "curse on Copernicus.” There are many keys. Let us remember, however, that he is ultimately an artist.              

Estribor: He believed that the critic must discover the set of complex laws which govern the work. He spoke of a science that leads the spontaneous action of the artist. So, there you have it: Pirandello is somewhat in line with New Criticism and the like. I wouldn’t discount the method of keys, then. Just substitute “law” for “key.”     

Sotavento: I wouldn’t go so far as to imply the whole oeuvre can fit the marionette image, but it fits Mattia Pascal. He starts as an idler given the conditions of his inheritance, then the kick: he becomes a husband and father. Then another kick: he becomes Adriano Meis, the nomad and self-inventor. And one last kick: he becomes a ghost. Every single kick demands a change of wardrobe, an improvisation of values. Pascal is not the idler, is not the husband, is not the father, is not Adriano, is not the ghost. What is he? The author of his disgrace. The author of the book that recounts this disgrace. You can generalize from here. It’s a fertile philosophy of life, even if pessimistic.    

Babor: I’ll try with Copernicus. “Copernicus, my dear Don Eligio, Copernicus has ruined humanity forever.” We have become conscious of our insignificance and thus lost a wholesome illusion. In Pascal (what an adequate name!), we have a sample of mankind struggling to blind itself to this fact so as to regain preeminence—an impossibility. The novel as record of repeated failures to transcend meaninglessness. The novel as effort to become amnesiacs. What do you think? Doesn’t it become clearer how Pirandello aligns with modernism? Still, I am betraying the work as art.              

Estribor: You are betraying the search for laws. For instance, this Copernicus matter. It is attributed to Pascal in conversation with Don Eligio. He despairs because there seems to be no reason of weight to write his story. Then he finds an excuse when Don Eligio states how easily humanity is distracted. What I see here is some playfulness with the technique of framing. I don’t doubt Pirandello’s attempt to offer some kind of vision—you must write about something. But that is subordinate to the art object. As to the marionette, well, we find it in an addendum where Pirandello takes on his critics. An underlining of artifice. Roth loved this particular self-referentiality.    

Sotavento: The laws?            

Estribor: Okay, I’ll call them the law of framing and the law of self-referentiality. Whatever. This novel has a lot to do with them.    

Sotavento: You know, I just can’t ditch the importance of ideas here. Maybe elsewhere, maybe with Roth! But with Pirandello?            

Babor: I suppose it depends on how you view the role of ideas.    

Sotavento: You said it yourself: he has a background in philosophy. They are embodied in Lenzi: “In the conscience, as I see it, there is an essential—oh yes, essential—relationship between myself, who am thinking, and the other beings, of whom I think. And therefore the conscience isn't a self-sufficient absolute—do I make myself clear?”; in Paleari: “Nature has had to evolve—am I right?—this matter to reach the form and the substance of that fifth step, to create this animal that steals and kills and lies, but is also capable of writing the Divine Comedy or of making sacrifices, Signor Meis, as my mother and your mother did. Does it then, all of a sudden, return to zero? Is that logical?”; in Mattia himself: “Our spirits have their own private way of understanding one another, of becoming intimate, while our external persons are still trapped in the commerce of ordinary words, in the slavery of social rules.” Pirandello is careful to allow the vehicles a high degree of idiosyncrasy, yes, but there is a special intensity to the reflections that leaves the vehicles behind. Perhaps this is the novel as dialectic outburst. I don’t know. It’s just that the ideas seem to me to be the characters, really.     

Babor: That would be a fine description of Kierkegaard’s method. Ideas flow within him with such violence that he feels compelled to follow their course work after work. He is obsessive about extracting consequences. And sure, logic helps, but it is insufficient. To Kierkegaard, ideas require an abstract sort of dramatization. “The Musical Erotic” is superb in this sense.    

Estribor: Okay. I’m waiting for some turn here.      

Babor: What I am trying to grasp is the boundary play of Kierkegaard’s philosophical approach. It remains philosophy to the end. One cannot say the same of Pirandello. There is no ardor of speculative abandonment. Ideas are firmly grounded in character, in slanted minds. That is the peculiar limitation of the artist when he uses ideas. Limitation and privilege, I should say. All limitations bring about some privilege.             

Sotavento: I’ve only read Diary of a Seducer. And, whew, that’s what I would call ideas firmly grounded in a slanted mind! Anyway, it’s certainly more conventional than anything I’ve read by Pirandello.         

Babor: It is a piece that is difficult to appreciate in isolation. But it is not conventional. The seducer’s ideas are everything: other characters glimmer in passing descriptions, acknowledged out of duty. By the end, one knows little of Johannes as a man—he is a concatenation of intellectual contortions.      

Estribor: And that is philosophy?     

Babor: Yes, more so in its wider context. To return to Pirandello, he is aware of his privilege. Signor Anselmo Paleari is a theosophist. But we are not subjected to an exposition of theosophical doctrine. What we see is theosophy in the face of old age. We see theosophy apprehended through distinct living conditions.           

Estribor: Right. Philosophy, science, and religion concoct ideas, then art serves them up. Is that it?  

Sotavento: That specifically isn’t too out there. I mean, Spinoza and Goethe, Rousseau and Shelley, Mill and Eliot, Bergson and Proust, Aquinas and Joyce.   

Estribor: I fear those examples only obscure the point. One of you is saying that worldviews are put to the test within the work. The other, that worldviews suffuse the elaboration of the work, that they provide a sort of ambience. At least this is what I gather from your examples.

Babor: “Put to the test.” Hmmm. No, that assumes the artist is interested in the truth-value of the worldview. Unamuno has a couple of verses that seem to me more appropriate: “I will defend even the absurd, illusory / belief that gives life.” The artist extracts as much life as possible from the theoretical flights of mankind; that is, grounds them in contingency. I do not want to be misunderstood: the interest is not in the ideas. The interest is in their concrete, time-bound relation to certain motives, actions, etc.    

Sotavento: I feel you’re agreeing with me, and I’m trying to find out why you would deny it.

Estribor: He is not. You said ideas were the true characters, no?    

Sotavento: Sure, sure, but they become the characters. I think that a novelist can take a worldview, a theory, and add to it through the idiosyncrasies of a character.        

Babor: They add to it in a special way. I suppose I am resisting agreement because you seek to generalize precisely where I refuse to do so. Let us concentrate on Paleari: “In every age, men usually come to some agreement on the opinions that give light and color to those big lanterns, our opinions on abstract terms like Truth, Virtue, Beauty, Honor, and what have you.” Here he offers us a philosophy of history, more or less. You would argue, I imagine, that there is something to it. Perhaps Pirandello arrived at it after some reflection and, exhausted at the prospect of writing a treatise, decided to sketch the salient points and attribute them to one of his characters. And you may be right, this may all have happened. But Pirandello, as an artist, had to make many other choices between conception and execution. Who will say this? Why will he say it? How is he related to the rest of the characters? Where will this take place? As choices accumulate, artists understand that their form of theorizing requires an ecosystem: outside, everything withers into philosophy, science, and religion. Paleari’s philosophy of history is thrilling and odd, unexpected and somewhat moving, while Pirandello’s would simply be naïve.           

Sotavento: I’ll go along. Why do they build this ecosystem?         

Babor: Ah, yes, the difficult question. Why? It seems to me to be a form of contact with the world. We are situated in a particular time and in a particular space, and art offers the medium for this viewpoint to take root.             

Estribor: Art as individual vision. I expected a greater differentiation from religion, philosophy, and science.

Babor: Art is not apologetic about its “view from somewhere.”    

Sotavento: Some artists would disagree.      

Babor: As Reyes put it, “Much as I have sought for impersonalism, I have not found it, certainly not in the novel—even less in the novels of Flaubert, lyrical and overly sentimental.”   

Estribor: He should have sought harder: bad art is rich in impersonalism.  

Sotavento: Okay, okay. So Pirandello achieves an utterly particular view, then what?            

Babor: If you feel compelled to pry the source for a metaphysics or the inspiration for a psychological hypothesis from it, that is up to you. But that is not quite part of the achievement. It is incidental. The achievement is a surplus of aesthetic consciousness.             

Sotavento: A surplus of beauty, in other words.       

Babor: That is inexact. Aesthetic consciousness refers to the exercise of our imaginative faculties—the discipline of possibility, in other words.      

Estribor: Unlike religion, philosophy, and science, huh? Famously unimaginative.             

Babor: I am not one to talk of purity. There are moments in a philosophical or scientific theory when art irrupts. Religious doctrine is even more susceptible.       

Estribor: And moments when science irrupts in art?           

Babor: Yes, of course.           

Sotavento: You’ve ditched the whole life-giving aspect.    

Babor: Possibility is life-giving in a fundamental way.       

Barlovento: Nietzsche’s “shaping power.”               

Babor: There is some of that in what I’m saying. I’ve overdone the life-giving angle, I know.

Alisia: I’d be interested in hearing more about the discipline of possibility. I sense some affinity with Adorno: “The identification carried out by the subject was ideally not that of making the artwork like himself, but rather that of making himself like the artwork.” And in case that sounds too much like Schopenhauer, he also said that “something in reality rebuffs rational knowledge.”  

Babor: Oh, now Adorno. I’m glad you emphasized “the discipline,” and not “the exercise.” That was a charitable move. How does Pirandello’s viewpoint take root through The Late Mattia Pascal? He constructs Mattia Pascal as a disenchanted romantic who learns compulsively that every attempt at freedom hides a new set of constraints. What are the attempts? He tries seduction like Valmont, and the result is an unforeseen marriage that ties him to respectability. He gambles like Raphael de Valentin, and with his newfound fortune becomes a wanderer after news of his death—only to land in a modest room where he will be prey to various schemes. He returns from the dead like Odysseus, and life has gone on without him far too rapidly, which leads to the writing of his memoirs. Seduction, gambling, and trickery, supreme realms of freedom for most, increasingly chain Pascal to his own non-identity, to his own absolute dependence on circumstance. Writing is the last horizon where he finally, begrudgingly (let’s not forget he hates books), acquires a semblance of freedom through a wider perspective. What do we have grounded in contingency? Theories of self-actualization. In this ecosystem, Pirandello releases the comforts of bourgeois fantasy and tracks their demise. Art survives—scathed.      

Sotavento: Which seems to support your own view of art. Curious, huh?             

Babor: That can happen when your character is a writer. You tend to reflect on the process.

Sotavento: No, but really. I used the marionette image. Fine. I talked about a philosophy of life. Fine. Is this self-actualization thing all that different? What happened to your usual view on the relevance of language?          

Babor: There is only so much I can do here, in conversation. Your interpretation and those that depend on a key passage suffer from an outside-in method. In a virtuoso act of interpretation, I could use a throwaway comment by Papiano as a key to the text: “You’re right, you’re in a fury—I can see: blood isn’t water, after all. Well, all you have to do is ask two royal army officers; they can’t refuse to represent a gentleman like yourself in a question of honor.”           

Sotavento: Let me stop you right there and remind you of Mimesis.          

Babor: Auerbach has other concerns. He would never think of using the world-mouth episode in Gargantua and Pantagruel to understand the work as a whole. He is interested, rather, in the culturally determined techniques of representation. His method of dissecting representative passages is quite suited to his purpose—wonderfully inspired.            

Sotavento: That method reveals the efflorescence of connotation. The efflorescence of ideas when we deal with literature!  

Babor: I aim for immanence. If one maps the strains of language, if one traces its sinuosities, the fissure within the form emerges. There is the added advantage of treating the work as a process that unfolds.

 Alisia: An aim that seems harmonious with impressionistic appraisals.            

Babor: I do not think one should be wary of impressionism in our response to literature.         

Estribor: I am wary of your complete disregard of L’umorismo. You try to play fair with Pirandello as an artist yet keep silent on his poetics.     

Barlovento: Now you believe that what artists have to say about their work is relevant?          

Estribor: Two conditions must be met: the commentary remains external to the art and still it attempts to approach it. I will concede that in this regard, Henry James is exemplary. His Prefaces illuminate the complications of intention.           

Babor: Eco believes that the “essay itself must be viewed as another—or perhaps the very first—of Pirandello’s ‘humorous’ plays.” That is, L’umorismo is a different artwork. We have no concrete reason to privilege it. Although there is a fascinating confession within it: “I do not want to leave, nor should I leave, the realm of pure fantasy.”         

Estribor: You are being unserious. This is the sort of exaggeration that obfuscates our understanding of art.   

Babor: Insisting on compartmentation is unserious!           

Sotavento: I wouldn’t dream of considering Auden’s prose on a level with his poetry. He himself didn’t, in fact.      

Babor: I would. You can notice the continuity in his “Shorts,” in “Symmetries and Asymmetries.” It is unfortunate that we take for granted that you can “pause” what you are, that you can “pause” an ideal. This is the artist and this is the critic. Hmmm. Is it not evident that the critic who lives in the artist is saturated with the memory, the experience, of artistic creation?        

Estribor: Eliot and Coetzee put in good performances.       

Babor: They certainly do. And that is only because their art shares characteristics with literary criticism. Lawrence and Melville, on the other hand, are no good, and so are very illustrative cases against compartmentation. Their reviews are scandalously digressive and inexact. Or think of Baroja and Unamuno.              

Estribor: Is this exclusive to artists?  

Babor: No, I do not think it is.          

Estribor: A vital disagreement. I choose to see a human being as something more than a vocation or calling or any of that.  

Barlovento: Is that so?          

Estribor: Don’t get me wrong. I know there are boundaries. But if I am a novelist and then I write some poetry, does it make sense to say that I am a novelist-poet rather than a poet? I was a novelist as I wrote my novel and a poet as I wrote my poetry. And in the interim, I was an observer and so on. I am what I do as I do it. When I do nothing, I am nothing, which is necessary at times. Will this be the nature of your interventions today? Pirandello is an attractive challenge to your sensibility: “I was alone now, and no one on earth could be more alone than I, with every tie dissolved, every obligation removed, free, new, completely my own master, without the burden of my past, and with the future before me, which I could shape as I pleased.”      

Barlovento: He is too one-sided to be a challenge.   

Alisia: We would do well to assail the work. Many of its assumptions are questionable, to say the least.                       

Barlovento: The deflationary tone is tiresome. He is so accustomed to it, so comfortable in its afferent rhythm, that when he turns to love or yearning, he immediately veers into melodrama. Oliva, Romilda, Adriana: equally insubstantial.             

Sotavento: That’s deliberate.            

Barlovento: Hardly. Mattia Pascal changes register as he documents their impact on his life. The changes are of an abstract nature. Yet he is fairly successful when it comes to Paleari, Papiano, and Caporale: he knows the recesses of contempt and has the language to express them.          

Alisia: And there we have a marked boundary for individualism. As we insist on exploring ourselves without significant reference to the other, we become dissatisfied with the accrual of alienated identity-fragments. As we insist on capturing a nucleus that transcends the social, we realize an absence. The language of individualism is always already a language of withdrawal, of retreat.          

Sotavento: It may be a boundary for individualism, but not for art. This very dissatisfaction has given us great works of art. Besides, is individualism to blame? Isn’t individualism the fort that holds out against homogeneity? The language of individualism is a language of resistance.    

Alisia: You could argue that at one point an exacerbated individualism was effective in art. Perhaps with the rise of industrialism. But it has outstayed its welcome. “New modes of realization are needed, corresponding to the new capabilities of society.”               

Sotavento: How can you say that? Forget Pirandello for a second. Woolf, Pessoa, Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence, Proust?     

Alisia: Contentious names here. Some are a cul-de-sac. Some point in other directions. There is an immense tension in their work that Pirandello’s lacks. He found that to succumb and be conscious of it is enough. We must confess to a satiety with the dissection of an isolated interiority. Or if you wish, I will drop the plural: I am satiated.   

Estribor: “The works of greatest altitude are a creation of decadent times.” Artists have not proved equal to the vast linguistic and psychological detritus this epoch has to offer. It is all out there. The problem is not individualism. The problem is technical inertia.           

Alisia: Matter molds technique. In the ever-expanding presence of disembodied voices, conflicting and congruent, individualism and its attendant modes of representation are slight. Individualism simply instigates the artist to make his own voice more distinctive—either through slang or a quick consult of the DSM.                   

Sotavento: That’s always been the case. Searching for a distinctive voice, I mean.            

Alisia: Not at all.                  

Estribor: Are you suggesting greater attention to the narrative impulse? Your sort of complaint usually ends with a plea for plot.            

Alisia: No. One can never go back. Look, I am not a writer. Not that sort of writer, anyway. But our social life demands aesthetic repositioning. Art has grown too comfortable with disembodiment.    

Sotavento: Plot, character . . . What else?    

Barlovento: Ambient.           

Babor: A result of both.        

Barlovento: I’d call that mood, which is easier to achieve. The ambient requires a saturation of relations.            

Sotavento: That’s the solution to disembodiment? Plot, character, and setting. That’s what you mean, no?             

Barlovento: No. It is more abstract and underlies all three. A radical instance occurs to me in the novelist’s siege of a biography or in a poet’s siege of a scientific monograph.   

Sotavento: Tom Jones? The Botanic Garden?                      

Barlovento: No, no. The novel that passes for a biography is different. So is the scientific monograph that is in the end a poem. That is the reason I said “siege.” Novelist and poet should feel out of place. And they should preserve all that is untamable, intensify the artificial limits. The biography and the monograph will hold their form yet brim with a foreign sensibility. 

Sotavento: But how does this solve the problem of disembodiment?        

Barlovento: The reigning forms, those that are recalcitrant to art, will reveal their pliability and cease to conceal themselves as carriers of unadulterated truth. Our sense of disembodiment arises with them—variegated attempts at reduction, at flattening, for that is what unadulterated truth amounts to.        

Sotavento: This ambient thing is very obscure to me.         

Barlovento: You have the “ecosystem”; that is, plot, characters, and setting. All three owe their peculiar way of existing to shifting relationships between language and culture. There one finds the ambient. It is weak where language aligns with the culture in a conciliatory manner, since it will reflect what is proper to its situation. Lewis’s novels, for example, with their self-conscious respect for the trade of commercial writing: plot, characters, and setting are defined once and for all, neatly. Ambient is strong where language antagonizes the culture, where it reappropriates it in order to birth the hereafter. Think of Burroughs and Kerouac and Miller.               

Alisia: Or Joyce and medieval philosophy according to Eco, Joyce and the inventory according to Kenner.             

Barlovento: Time will dynamize their ecosystems.             

Alisia: Your concept is interesting, yet I feel we’ve strayed. Is there a more bombastic individualist than Miller?     

Barlovento: He is better at being that than Pirandello. His expansiveness curved language, revealed openings.            

Alisia: To what? Expansiveness of the ego won’t do. Art must leave this spurious center. Spurious, at least, for the moment.     

Estribor: We will arrive at nothing by jumping between art and literature so violently.            

Barlovento: You’re the one who believes in the unity of the arts. Each art stands for the rest, as I recall.    

Estribor: I have sinned, of course. My objection remains.              

Sotavento: Returning to literature . . . I think Pirandello tried to leave that center. He didn’t succeed. Well, Beckett didn’t succeed either. Succeeding is not in the cards. When you write, when you read, there’s nothing but that spurious center.            

Alisia: When you read, when you write. Yes, of course. I read, I write. But that, too, is changing. The intermediaries that build upon the spurious center are losing their grip. The pharaonic cohort that leeches upon the need to feel there is a center dwindles. Perhaps this is a time for rhapsodists. From now on, we read, we write. And let these two activities stand for our struggles.