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| Luigi Pirandello, 1867-1936 |
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 11th century and into the
early 12th. 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 25th 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 119th 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.
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