Luigi Pirandello and the Mad King of Trumpistan

 

Luigi Pirandello, 1867-1936

Over the years, Curmie has called upon his knowledge of dramatic literature on several occasions to address topics that aren’t really about dramatic literature.  He may be forgetting something, but there are plenty of examples, not including references to novels, philosophical essays, films, television shows, songs, paintings, or other such works… or, of course, essays about censorship of plays or similar phenomena.

There’s a list of Curmie’s linkages of dramatic literature to contemporary events at the bottom of this essay.  Feel free to browse or ignore as you wish, Gentle Reader.

There are actually two plays that come to mind in terms of what Curmie wants to discuss here.  One is Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says No!, in which the central character is injured during a historical re-enactment and wakes up believing that he really is the Irish hero Robert Emmet.  Curmie is going to concentrate, however, on Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV (Enrico IV).  It’s better known and came a little earlier: the short story on which it is based was published in 1915; the dramatic version was first produced in 1922, seven years before Johnston’s play.  It’s also a little closer to the point Curmie wants to make.  Henry IV is probably second on the list of Pirandello’s most significant plays: definitely behind Six Characters in Search of an Author, and probably a little ahead of Right You Are! (If You Think You Are). 

Curmie knows the latter two plays a little better, having directed them both, but has taught Henry IV a couple of times when the anthology he was using chose that rather than Six Characters as its representative Pirandello work.  The three plays all illustrate what Pirandello called “juxtaposed planes of reality.”  That is, rather than showing a single, distorted view of the world as occurs in, say, expressionism, Pirandello presents the reader/spectator with different perspectives which logically cannot be simultaneously true, but seem to be so.

In Six Characters, figures from an unfinished play interrupt a rehearsal looking for a playwright to finish their stories.  As such, they are simultaneously real and unreal, physically present and completely imaginary.  Consider that an audience seeing the play is watching actors playing actors playing characters from a different play altogether, and you’ll get an idea of the kind of philosophical gamesmanship in which Pirandello indulged.

In Right You Are!, and man (Signor Ponza) and his mother-in-law (Signora Frola) both declare the other to be insane.  According to him, she became distraught at the death of her daughter, and the only way to calm her was to pretend that his second wife was actually his first.  She, on the other hand, asserts that her daughter was in an asylum, not dead, but Ponza became convinced of her death, so Signora Ponza humored her husband’s delusions and married him again.  At the end of the play, Signora Ponza appears, declares herself to be Signora Frola’s daughter, Signor Ponza’s second wife, and for herself, “nobody” and “who you want me to be.”  It is truly a play in which you can’t tell the players without the proverbial scorecard, but that’s the point: truth is ambiguous, contradictory, and ultimately unknowable, as the raisonneur Laudisi laughingly points out in the play’s closing speech: “You have the truth! But are you satisfied?”

The title character in Henry IV had fallen off a horse several years ago, again in an enactment, and now believes himself to be Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor of the late 11^th century and into the early 12^th.  His colleagues set up an elaborate plan to maintain his fantasy, complete with period sets and costumes.  There are subplots aplenty: a new arrival who researched the wrong Henry IV (the French king who reigned about 500 years after the emperor Henry believes himself to be), a little unrequited love, an attempt to shock Henry back into reality, and so on. 

But the signature event is Henry’s revelation in Act II that he had come to his senses years earlier but chose to keep up the pretense of madness.  By the end of Act III, however, he appears to have reclaimed his madness, grabbing the sword from one of his counselors and stabbing (fatally, we presume) his present-day rival.  He then lapses back into his illusory world as the final curtain falls.  Or does he?

And now we start talking about the US in 2025.  A pedestrian (at best), paranoid, narcissist becomes convinced that he is the king of all he surveys.  A collection of sycophants and enablers cheerfully support his delusions (until he inevitably turns on them, of course).  He is an authoritarian monarch who seems to have little grasp on reality, makes decisions based on petty jealousies, and shows little regard for anyone but himself (or, from time to time, those very much like him).

The incoherent babble he spews, the obvious lies, the puerile strutting: do they mean he is delirious, or are they part of a strategy to test the extent of his associates’ willingness to dance puppet-like to his every whim?  Claiming he’s reduced prices by 1500% is the stuff of lunacy, but his followers, many of whom know better, and the same folks who loudly decried President Biden’s (less frequent and less egregious) lapses, are content to pass that off as “exaggeration.”  N.B., Curmie completely understands that literally everyone makes mistakes like this occasionally—Barack Obama didn’t really think there were 57 states—but normal, sane, people don’t do this with this level of regularity, and they sure as hell don’t double down on their absurd claims.  It is one of the signature characteristics of the Mad King of Trumpistan that he never admits that he made a mistake, even that he misspoke.

Is he as unhinged as he appears to be?  Is he lying, or does he really believe the nonsense he belches forth?  The real cause for concern is that we don’t know for sure.  Curmie has suggested before that intelligence and shrewdness are different things, and whereas this particular despot-wannabe has always been short on the former, he is more than amply supplied with the latter.  It boggles that mind that anyone this obviously self-serving, obviously mendacious, and obviously ignorant could draw a single vote from a reasonably sensible citizen, let alone get elected… but here we are.

Is it time to invoke the 25^th Amendment?  Well, that will never happen, as the entire Republican party has proven itself invertebrate, and SCOTUS is pretty well implicated, too.  Are the antics of the likes of Gavin Newsom unprofessional and distasteful, or are they the only hope of saving a tattered but still breathing democracy?  Curmie fears that the answer is “yes.”  Pirandello would certainly understand that seemingly contradictory ideas can co-exist.  He might even write a play about it.

Oh, wait.  He did.

Previous entries linking dramatic literature with contemporary events:

· W.B. Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen in a piece on the Catholic Church’s excommunication of a nun/hospital administrator who signed off on an abortion to save the life of the mother (the fetus would have died, anyway, by the way).

· Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida to discuss yet another example of the anti-intellectuality of the Texas Board of Education.

· Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle in thinking about a standoff between Minnesota’s Democratic governor and Republican legislature.

· Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People to comment on multiple sexual assault allegations against jocks at the University of Montana.

· Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit to talk about a case in which the idiot repo guys stripped the wrong house and the homeowner wanted appropriate compensation.

·  John Lyly’s Gallathea and Phillida and Alexander and Campaspe in a piece about the debate over student loan forgiveness.

·  Aeschylus’s Oresteia, especially the Eumenides, to comment on President Biden’s pro-active pardon of his son, after promising he wouldn’t do so.

·  Shakespeare’s As You Like It (and some traditional Asian forms) in an indictment of Iowa’s heinous anti-drag proposal.  (Good news: the bill was ultimately defeated.)

·  Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros to call attention to the craven insidiousness of the GOP’s decision to declare that there were no “calendar days” remaining in the 119^th Congress.

· Euripides’ Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia in Aulis to discuss President Trump’s unfettered narcissism, mendacity, and duplicity… and the unlikelihood of a solution that doesn’t involve direct action.