Six Characters in Search of an Author (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Surrealism

Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author was a watershed in the history of drama because its form and content were so revolutionary. And to some extent Pirandello’s play relates to a more systematic artistic revolution in the 1920s — Surrealism. As C.W.E. Bigsby has said, Surrealism “is essentially concerned with liberating the imagination and with expanding the definition of reality.”

The Surrealists insisted that by freeing the mind from the limiting controls of rationality, logic, consciousness, or aesthetic conventions, an artist could reach a higher reality that would include the fantastic and the marvelous — qualities that had generally been considered antithetical to realism. Coined by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and championed by French poet Andre Breton, the term was described in Breton’s famous 1924 Manifesto on Surrealism as a resolution of two states of mind — dream and reality. Joined together, these two states of mind made a sort of absolute or sur-reality. When the movement made inroads in England, an attempt was made to substitute the phrase “superreality” but the alternate terminology never caught on.

Earlier movements like Cubism and Dada had prepared the way for the liberating spirit of Surrealism, and the general result of this liberation was a challenge to the dominance of the realistic movement, which had its roots in the 19th century and which still survives today as a very powerful standard in the popular arts. But the “avant-garde,” of which Pirandello is now taken to be an important part, has always distrusted excessively powerful traditions and has continually sought to enlarge the scope of artistic possibilities.

In his book Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature, art historian Wylie Sypher observed what he called a “cubist drama” in Six Characters in Search of an Author, claiming that “Pirandello ‘destroys’ drama much as the cubists destroyed conventional things. He will not accept as authentic ‘real’ people or the cliche of the theatre any more than the cubist accepts as authentic the ‘real’ object [or] the cliche of deep perspective.” A more thorough discussion of Pirandello’s affinity with the Surrealist movement comes from Anna Balakian, who recognized that “an affinity has often been seen between the theatre of Pirandello and the surrealist mode because both adhere to such notions as the ‘absurd,’ the unconventional, the iconoclastic, and the shocking to stir the receivers of the created work.” But in examining closely the elements of the surrealist manifestos and Pirandello’s plays, Balakian concluded that “Pirandello and the surrealists shared a moment in the history of the arts but followed parallel rather than converging paths in their spectacular irreverence for the traditional.”

Italian Fascism

In 1921, as Six Characters in Search of an Author was creating an international celebrity of Pirandello, the Italian statesman Benito Mussolini was consolidating his power and rising toward the position he would hold through World War II as the fascist leader of Italy. An Italian nationalist, revolutionary, and socialist from his early years, Mussolini founded his own fascist party in 1919. Italy was suffering social upheaval as a result of World War I and Mussolini capitalized on the situation to raise support for armed fascist squads that attacked Mussolini’s political opponents and killed hundreds of people. On May 15, 1921, five days after Six Characters in Search of an Author premiered in Rome, Mussolini and 35 other Fascists were elected to the Italian parliament and began their struggle for power from within the governmental structure. Already known to his followers as il duce (the leader), Mussolini organized squads of armed men at a Fascists’ convention in Naples in October of 1922 and began his famous “march on Rome.” Taking over the Italian government from his position as Prime Minister, Mussolini gradually consolidated his power and became virtual dictator by January of 1925.

Pirandello’s connection with Mussolini and Italian Fascism is a complex and controversial part of Pirandello’s life that is still being debated today. The connection with his art is roundabout but equally complex and controversial. In October of 1922, as Mussolini and his Blackshirts were marching on Rome, Pirandello’s second masterpiece, Henry IV, was consolidating his rise to international recognition. Then, on June 10, 1924, Mussolini’s men murdered a leading Socialist member of the Italian parliament named Giacomo Matteotti, arousing considerable public uneasiness and controversy. In September of 1924, Pirandello, now an international celebrity and an Italian literary hero, demonstrated his support of Mussolini by giving the fascist newspaper, L ‘Impero, a copy of a letter to Mussolini asking to join the Fascist party. Scholars still debate Pirandello’s motives and the sincerity of his political commitment to Fascism, but the most significant ramification for the history of drama is that in the same year Pirandello and a group of his colleagues founded the Italian Arts Theatre company and Mussolini’s political power helped Pirandello gain financial support for a theatre based in Rome. The company’s first production was in May in Milan. As the company flourished Pirandello met actress Marta Abba, for whom most of his later plays were written, and his troupe began touring extensively throughout Italy, Europe, and North and South America. Thus, it was indirectly through Pirandello’s involvement with Italian Fascism that his plays became so thoroughly disseminated around the world. Pirandello’s theatre company collapsed in 1928 because of financial problems, but by that time his international reputation and dramatic impact were well-established.

Compare & Contrast

• 1921: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States from 1933 to 1945, contracts the poliomyelitis that will cripple him for life and confine him to a wheelchair or require him to wear heavy braces to walk. Since the appearance of robust vitality was necessary for the presidential image, the reality of Roosevelt’s paralysis was downplayed by the media and went largely ignored or undiscovered by the American public. Roosevelt became the only U.S. President to be re-elected three times.
  Today: Starting with the presidencies of Lyndon Baines Johnson and (especially) Richard Nixon, the media have become increasingly dedicated to examining the appearance of presidents and other political figures. However, Roosevelt’s disability still remains a largely ignored part of his presidency. In 1997, a memorial statue of Roosevelt in Washington, D.C., created some controversy when — rather than obviously placing him in a wheelchair — the statue portrayed him as seated in an office chair with casters and with a large cloak draped over his legs that essentially obscured his disability.
• 1921: Eight baseball players from the 1919 Chicago White Sox major league baseball team go to trial in June on charges of accepting bribes from gamblers to purposely lose the World Series against Cincinnati in 1919. Indicted in 1920, their trial in June and July of 1921 ended in an acquittal, but the presiding judge for the grand jury, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, had become the first Commissioner of major league baseball in 1921 and banned the players from baseball for life in spite of the court’s verdict.
  Today: These eight members of the “Black Sox,” including the great Shoeless Joe Jackson, are still considered ineligible for induction into baseball’s Hall of Fame, the truth of their criminality having been decided by Judge Landis rather than by the process of the legal system. In what is perhaps a similarly contested process of judgment, the 7th Commissioner of major league baseball, A. Bartlett Giamatti, banned Cincinnati’s Pete Rose from a place in the Hall of Fame in 1989, despite Rose’s all-time major league record 4,256 hits, because Rose was accused of illegally betting on baseball games.
• 1921: The futuristic drama of social satire, R. U.R., (Rossum’s Universal Robots), by Czechoslovakian playwright Karel Capek, opens in Prague. The robots are manufactured men and women who work without complaining. They are so difficult to distinguish from real people that one character decided the robots were capable of developing a soul. When robots around the world revolt against their masters, humanity is almost destroyed. The robots had finally begun to act precisely like human beings.
  Today: Though R.U.R. is not widely produced today, the term and concept it essentially created — “robot” — has now become an established part of our vocabulary and thought. The word “robot” was a translation from the Czech word for “forced labor” and while Rossum’s robots were manufactured from artificial flesh and blood, Fritz Lang’s popular 1926 film, Metropolis, used the term to describe a creature made of metal and that more mechanical concept of robot is what survives today. Today’s widespread industrial use of robotics and the controversies over genetic engineering have perhaps given a new immediacy to Capek’s drama.