ABSTRACT
Gramsci’s notes on Pirandello in the Prison Notebooks suggest that Pirandello was not exactly one of Gramsci’s privileged subjects of inquiry. He had not intended, as was the case with Manzoni, to dedicate part of his well-planned research programme to this Italian modernist playwright. Yet the Pirandello notes follow precisely the same organizational pattern as Gramsci’s critical practice when applied in his treatment of Manzoni: Pirandello is viewed in relation to a set of wider issues, such that the discourse does not centre on or privilege information concerning Pirandello the playwright, but rather makes reference to a wide range of associated historical, social and cultural issues.’ Gramsci’s practice, which I have previously called his ‘relational pragmatics’, looks in connection with Pirandello something like this: production aspects of the Pirandellian plays are related to the predominant mode of theatrical production at the time, engaged in maintaining the preferred melodramatic taste of the period; the reception of Pirandello’s plays by Catholic critics, who rejected his predilection for a pagan naturalism or for a fragmented subject; Pirandello’s values and norms in relation to Catholicism; futurism with its techniques and aspirations in relation to Pirandello’s cultural values; futurism and Pirandello in their relation to early twentieth-century Italian culture; Pirandello’s philosophical assumptions, his modernity, his ‘dialectic’ in relation to popular culture; and so forth. What differentiates these notes from Gramsci’s earlier Turin reviews of Pirandello plays is first and foremost Gramsci’s new and much more benevolent attitude towards Pirandello. In the Turin years, Gramsci showed some enthusiasm for the explosively
negative logic informing Pirandello’s conceptual framework, the modern problematization of the concept of truth, which Pirandello seemed to introduce into his plays both on the level of form and content, yet Gramsci’s language is distinctly critical of Pirandello on the whole.2 In the Pirandellian play as well as in the theatre of the grotesque Gramsci had disliked the psychological one-dimensionality of the characters, their non-motivated psychological flatness, characters that are simple constructions without deep inner intuitions and feelings. As figures devoid of passion, motivation and will, they are deprived of those qualities which are necessary for struggle and confrontation, which alone enable the unravelling ofdramatic motion and action. The aesthetic norms Gramsci lived by as a critic in Turin were, in spite of his marked interest in modem philosophical problems, essentially those of the traditional drama. That Pirandello calls into question received notions of reason, truth and meaning is to his credit, yet Gramsci would have preferred such content in a welldesigned Aristotelian character. And he would have preferred the possibility of adjusting the Pirandellian play to some aspects of traditional idealist and perhaps Crocean aesthetic, where the presence of an intrinsic poeticity and not political or ideological rhetoricity defined the authentic work of art. In his prison notes on Pirandello Gramsci has undoubtedly moved further though not totally away from received aesthetics with its content/form problematic. While he as ever finds attractive Pirandello’s problematization of received norms of seeing, he now shows greater appreciation for the innovative ways in which this problematization is enacted. In short, he has discovered some aspects of the complexity of Pirandello’s theatrical apparatus. This leads him to what I would like to call a ‘Benjaminian’ understanding of the function of Pirandello, as author, as producer, and to a ‘Brechtian’ understanding of the dialectics obtaining between audience, staging, acting, directing and producing. It also leads him to a greater though still limited recognition of the radicality of these theatrical practices, of the negative dialectic, that is, inscribed in Pirandello’s art.
