Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are starting
with the fact that it sounds like it was invented
by a novelist, but it's actually just a bizarre
geographic reality. It really does. It's one
of those things you couldn't make up. Exactly.
Picture the year 1867. We are in Sicily, just
outside the ancient city of Agrigento. There
is a specific suburb, a rough, craggy area, and
the locals have a name for it. They call it Caus.
Which, of course, translates directly to chaos.
Right. And I don't mean chaos in the metaphorical
sense of, you know, a messy bedroom. I mean the
primordial void. And it was right there in a
place explicitly named chaos that Luigi Pirandello
was born. It feels like the universe was engaging
in a bit of heavy handed literary foreshadowing,
doesn't it? It really does. Pirandello himself
was completely obsessed with this. He saw it
as his destiny. Oh, absolutely. He spent his
entire life obsessing over that coincidence.
He famously wrote, I am a child of chaos, not
metaphorically, but in reality. For him, it wasn't
just a funny anecdote about his birth certificate.
It was the fundamental truth of his existence.
He believed he was born into a formless, confused
reality and that everything human beings do.
Building societies, taking names, wearing clothes,
adopting roles is just a desperate attempt to
impose order on that original chaos. And that
struggle between the raw chaotic flux of life
and the rigid forms we try to trap it in. That's
the engine of everything we're discussing today,
isn't it? It is. It's the core tension in all
of his work. We're looking at a man who is. well,
arguably the most important Italian playwright
of the 20th century, a Nobel Prize winner, and
the guy who essentially invented the tragic farce.
He's the bridge. He is the bridge between the
19th and 20th centuries. He took the solid, reliable
storytelling of the Victorian era and just smashed
it into pieces to show us the anxiety and fragmentation
of the modern world. Yeah, that's a great way
to put it. I mean, if you've ever felt like you're
playing a role at work that is totally different
from who you are at home, or if you've ever questioned
whether you really know the people around you,
you are living in a Pirandellian world. You really
are. His ideas have seeped into the very fabric
of how we think about ourselves. We have a massive
stack of sources to get through today. We've
got his biographies, his letters, the critical
analysis of his plays, like six characters in
search of an author, and extensive historical
context on the unification of Italy and the rise
of fascism. A lot to unpack. A lot. And our mission
is pretty clear. We want to understand how a
wealthy... comfortable Sicilian sun transformed
into the master of disillusionment. We need to
unpack his philosophy on identity, this terrifying
idea that we don't actually exist as solid individuals.
And we need to navigate the very real, very messy
political life he led. Including the topic that
often gets, you know, glossed over in high school
literature classes, his membership in the fascist
party and his complicated relationship with Mussolini.
Which is a paradox wrapped in a reel. Yeah. But
before we get to the politics and the riots in
the theaters, let's go back to the map. You mentioned
the name Cass. I was digging into the etymology
in the notes, and it's actually quite grounded,
which I found funny. It comes from the Sicilian
dialect word causi. Right, which means trousers
or pants. Trousers. It seems less philosophical
when you put it that way. It does. It referred
to the shape of a ravine nearby that's split
in two, looking like a pair of legs or trousers.
But language is fluid, you know? Yeah. Cousy
sounded enough like the Greek cows. and given
the history of the area exactly given the intense
creek history of sicily i mean remember agrigento
was acragas a massive greek colony the association
just stuck it became chaos a much better story
it's a much better story and speaking of greek
roots pirandello's own name has a history there
His surname wasn't originally Pirandello. No.
The family traced its lineage back to the name
Parangelos. He was of Greek descent, and this
wasn't just trivia to him. In a 1934 interview,
specifically regarding his Nobel Prize, he highlighted
this. He felt a deep connection to classical
tragedy, to the ancient world that was literally
buried in the soil under his feet. He saw himself
as a Sicilian, yes, but specifically a Sicilian
with that tragic ancient Greek DNA. So we have
this boy. Born in chaos, with the weight of Greek
tragedy in his name, but his immediate reality
was very 19th century industrial. His father,
Stefano, wasn't a philosopher. Not at all. He
was a businessman in the sulfur trade. And from
what I read about the Sicilian sulfur industry
in the 1800s, this was not a gentle line of work.
It was brutal. Sulfur was known as the gold of
Sicily, but extracting it was hellish. We're
talking about deep, hot, dangerous mines often
worked by children, the Carusi, who were essentially
enslaved. Wow. And Stefano Pirandello was a leaseholder
of these mines. He was a big, robust, physically
imposing man who made a fortune in this rough
industry. And his mother, Caterina Ricci Grimito,
came from a very different background. Very different.
She was from the bourgeois professional class,
but there's a political thread that ties both
families together, and I think this is absolutely
crucial for the listener to understand. Okay.
Both the Pirandellos and the Ricci Grimittos
were fierce patriots. They were anti -bourbon.
They were pro -unification. So to understand
Pirandello's cynicism later in life, you have
to understand the idealism of his parents. This
was the era of the Risorgimento, the resurgence.
Exactly. For decades, Italy had been a collection
of fragmented states and foreign -controlled
territories. The Bourbons controlled the South.
The dream was a unified, democratic Italy. A
noble dream. A very noble dream. Stefano Pirandello
fought with Garibaldi. Caterina's family suffered
for the cause. Her father was a target of the
monarchy, and she was forced into exile in Malta
when she was just 13. 13. So they were true believers.
They thought that once the Red Shirts won and
Italy was one nation, it would be a utopia of
justice and liberty. Precisely. And then 1861
happened. Unification was achieved, and almost
immediately the Great Disappointment set in.
Let's drill down into that Great Disappointment,
because it feels like this is the moment the
seed of Pirandello's worldview was planted. What
exactly went wrong? Well, the reality of the
new Italy was starkly different from the romantic
dream. Instead of a brotherhood of free Italians,
the South felt like it had simply been conquered
by the North, by Piedmont. Right, it wasn't a
union, it was an acquisition. That's how it felt.
The new government was viewed as incredibly bureaucratic,
corrupt, and distant. Taxes went up. Conscription
was enforced. The poverty in Sicily didn't go
away. In some ways, it got worse. So Pirandello
grows up in a house full of people who sacrificed
everything for a great ideal only to watch that
ideal turn into a corrupt, paper -pushing nightmare.
That is the generational trauma. He watched his
parents, particularly his mother, become bitter.
The lesson he learned at the dinner table was
that big ideals are often illusions. He calls
this the sense of disproportion between ideals
and reality. And that's a phrase that comes up
again and again. It's key. If the greatest, most
noble cause of your parents' generation turned
out to be a lie, or at least a hollow disappointment,
How can you trust any truth with a capital T?
It creates a fundamental skepticism. And it wasn't
just the politics that were failing to live up
to the hype. The domestic situation in the Pirandello
household was also, let's call it complicated
and understating. The relationship between his
mother and father was a major source of tension.
It was incredibly fraught. Stefano, the father,
was a man of the minds, rough. authoritative,
and prone to what we might call extracurricular
activity. Right. Luigi discovered early on that
his father was having affairs. He did, and that
has to be devastating for a sensitive child.
You have this mother who is already politically
disillusioned, and now she's being betrayed in
her own home. It created a deep, permanent rift
between Luigi and his father, didn't it? It did.
He viewed his father as a source of brute force
and hypocrisy. But inevitably, this pushed him
closer to his mother. He developed a veneration
for her that bordered on the obsessive. She became
his saint. The long -suffering saint. Yes. And
I read about the novella he wrote, After She
Died, colloquy con i personaggi, conversations
with characters. It sounds almost ghost -like.
It is. He writes about trying to keep her spirit
alive, conversing with her. This dynamic. The
suffering saintly woman and the domineering,
unfaithful or simply incomprehensible husband
became a blueprint for his fiction. You see it
over and over again. So the family unit in Pirandello's
work is rarely a place of comfort. Never. It's
a trap. It's a place where people are forced
to wear masks to survive each other. OK, so we
have. The chaos of his birth, the great disappointment
of politics, and the betrayal of the father.
Young Luigi is a smart kid, obviously. He starts
writing early. He writes his first tragedy at
age 12. But his dad, being the practical sulfur
businessman, wants him to go to technical school.
Right. Stefano wanted a successor for the mines.
He don't want a poet. But Luigi managed to maneuver
his way into a classical education, finishing
high school in Palermo. And it's there that he
fell in love with his cousin, Lina. And this
wasn't just a puppy love situation, right? This
was serious. Oh, very serious. It was intense
enough that Lina's family demanded he stop his
studies and go work in the sulfur mines so he
could afford to marry her immediately. Wow. And
he did it. He did. And surprisingly, given his
hatred for his father's business, he actually
did it. In 1886, he spent time working in the
mines of... I think that period in the minds
is crucial context. Yeah. We think of Pirandello
as this high -minded philosopher. But he saw
the sweaty, dangerous reality of labor. He did.
He saw the carusi, the child laborers. He saw
the brutality. This experience informed works
like Ciala Scopri la Luna, Ciala Discovers the
Moon. It grounded his existentialism in dirt
and rock. Yeah. He knew that for many people,
life wasn't an abstract concept. It was a struggle
to breathe. But eventually, the marriage plans
with Lena were postponed and he returned to academia.
He went to the University of Rome in 1887. And
here we go with the great disappointment, part
two. He arrives in Rome, the eternal city. He's
probably expecting marble statues, heroes, the
glory of the Caesars, and the Risorgimento. And
he finds rain. Mud. A total letdown. There's
a specific quote about his arrival in Rome that
I think perfectly encapsulates his developing
personality. The desperate laugh. That's the
one. He said, That is the desperate laugh. Bookmark
that because it is the key to his entire artistic
philosophy. He realized in that moment, that
when reality is overwhelmingly disappointing,
when the tragedy is so absurd that tears aren't
enough, the only authentic reaction is to laugh.
But it's not a funny laugh. It's not ha -ha.
I know. It's a defensive reflex. It's a spasm.
It's the laugh of someone seeing the cosmic joke.
Rome wasn't grand. It was petty. He stayed with
an uncle who was a graying and exhausted functionary.
And this uncle had been a patriot, a fighter.
Exactly. And now he was just... pushing paper
in a dim office. Rome was a monument to decadence
and mediocrity for him. His time at the University
of Rome didn't end well either. He got into a
fight with a Latin professor. A very serious
dispute. It was significant enough that he was
effectively expelled or forced to leave. But
this turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
He transferred to the University of Bonn in Germany
to finish his doctorate. And this German period
seems like the missing link in understanding
his brain. He wasn't just soaking up Italian
culture. He was getting a heavy dose of German
philosophy. Absolutely. In Bonn, he was reading
the German romantics, Götze, Heine, Teek. He
was absorbing a different kind of thinking, one
that was deeply concerned with the nature of
the self, irony, and the grotesque. So it was
in Germany that he began to formulate his theories
on humorism. That's right. He was translating
Dutta. He was stepping outside the Sicilian mental
box and looking at his own culture from a distance.
So he gets his doctorate on the dialect of Agrigento,
ironically returning to his roots, and comes
back to Rome in the 1890s. He's in his 20s. He's
writing. He's mingling with the literary crowd
like Luigi Capuano. And the topic of marriage
comes up again. Yes. The affair with his cousin
Lina had fizzled out. In 1894, his father, Stefano,
stepped in to arrange a marriage. The bride was
Maria Antonietta Portilano. An arranged marriage.
This was essentially a business merger, wasn't
it? In many ways, yes. Antonietta was the daughter
of a business associate. She was a shy, withdrawn
girl raised in a very sheltered environment by
nuns. And she had a substantial dowry. A very
substantial dowry, which Stefano Pirandello invested
into his business. So Luigi marries her. They
settle in Rome. And for a while, on the surface,
it looks like the standard bourgeois life. They
have three kids, Stefano, Rosalia, and Fausto.
Luigi is teaching, writing essays, getting published.
It was a deceptive stability. There were cracks.
Antonietta didn't really understand his heart.
She wasn't an intellectual partner. But they
were comfortable, and then came 1903. The year
the floor fell out. A catastrophe. It sounds
like a plot twist that a writer would reject
for being too dramatic. A literal flood. A flood
in the sulfur mines of Aragona. And we have to
understand the financial mechanics here to see
why this was total ruin. Stefano Pirandello hadn't
just invested his own money. He had invested
Antonietta's entire dowry, her financial security,
her identity as a woman of status into those
mines. So the water rushes in, destroys the mines,
and the money vanishes. Instantly. The Pirandello
family went from wealthy to effectively bankrupt
overnight. But the loss of money was just the
trigger. The real explosion was psychological.
This is where we need to talk about Antoniana.
How does she take the news? She was the one who
opened the letter announcing the disaster. The
shock was so profound that it induced a physical
collapse. She was paralyzed for a time. And when
she emerged from that paralysis, her mental landscape
had completely shattered. And it wasn't just
depression or sadness. It manifested as a very
specific, aggressive paranoia. It was a monomania.
Pathological jealousy. She became convinced with
absolutely no evidence that Luigi was cheating
on her. She believed he was hiding wealth from
her, that he was conspiring against her. She
would scream. She would become physically violent.
Think about the irony here. Yeah. Luigi grew
up hating his father for being a cheater. He
prided himself on being a dedicated family man.
And now he is trapped in a house where he's being
accused day and night of the very sin he despises
most. It was a pressure cooker. A complete nightmare.
He was teaching extra classes to make ends meet,
writing furiously to sell stories, and then coming
home to a wife who might attack him or scream
at him for hours. He later admitted he contemplated
suicide during this period. He did. He looked
out the window and thought about ending it. But
he didn't. And this is the pivot point of his
life. Instead of killing himself, he wrote the
late Mattia Pascal. Which is famously a book
about a man who fakes his death. You can see
the wish fulfillment dripping off the page. It
is raw autobiography in the form of fantasy.
He sat by his wife's bedside, writing while she
slept or raved, and he imagined a character,
Matia Pascal, who is trapped in a miserable marriage
and a dead -end job. Right. Matia wins some money
at a casino, and on his way home, he finds out
that the authorities have found a body in a mill
race and identified it as him. Matia is officially
dead. And his reaction is joy. Pure joy. He thinks,
I'm free. I can go anywhere. I can be anyone.
He changes his name to Adriano Mice. He travels.
He tries to start over. But this is where Pirandello
pulls the rug out. Yeah. Because Matia or Adriano
realizes that being free is actually... A nightmare.
Exactly. He tries to fall in love, but he can't
marry because he has no papers. He is robbed,
but he can't go to the police because Adriano
Maez doesn't exist. He realizes that outside
of the mask of society, the name, the tax ID,
the marital status, a human being is a non -entity.
A ghost. He is a ghost floating through the world.
The freedom was an illusion. So what happens?
The freedom was a form of death. Mattia eventually
has to fake his own suicide as Adriana Mice,
and then he goes back to his old village. But
his wife has remarried, so he ends up living
in a library, visiting his own grave. He is the
late Mattia Pascal. He is neither alive nor dead.
This book, published in 1904. changed everything
for Pirandello. It was a massive hit. It was
an international success. It was translated into
German. It was acclaimed. It gave him the financial
footing to keep going. But philosophically, it
established his core theme, the mask. We complain
about the masks we wear, father, employee, citizen,
but without them, we dissolve. This brings us
to his theoretical masterpiece. In 1908, he publishes
the essay Lumerismo Humorism. And we need to
be really careful with this word because in English,
humor means jokes. Right. It means stand -up
comedy. That is not what Pirandello means. Not
at all. He makes a crucial distinction between
the comical and the humorous. Right. And it's
a brilliant distinction. Walk us through that.
Okay, the comical is the warning of the contrary.
The example he gives is an elderly lady who has
dyed her hair neon blonde, is wearing heavy makeup,
and is dressed in clothes meant for a teenager.
Okay. When you see her, you laugh. Why? Because
she is the opposite of what an old lady should
be. That immediate perception of the opposite
is the comic. It's the surface -level reaction.
She looks ridiculous. All right, but now Pirandello
says apply reflection. Think about why she is
doing that. Maybe she has a younger husband who
is losing interest in her. Maybe she spends her
nights weeping, terrified of being abandoned,
and she wears those clothes as a desperate, pathetic
attempt to hold on to love. And suddenly you
can't laugh anymore. Or if you do, the laugh
is bitter. That shift from the warning of the
contrary to the feeling of the contrary is humorism.
It's when you see the tragedy inside the comedy.
It's a mix of pity and amusement. It destroys
the ability to judge the character as a villain
or a hero. You just see a suffering human being
dealing with the absurdity of life. Exactly.
And this wasn't just an academic theory for him.
This was his daily life with Antonietta. Of course.
A neighbor hearing Antonietta scream might think
she was a monster. That's the comic or superficial
view. But Pirandello, living with her, saw the
humorous truth. She was a terrified woman whose
mind had broken under the weight of trauma. He
couldn't just hate her. He had to understand
the tragedy within her madness. This ability
to hold two opposing truths in his head at the
same time, she is my tormentor and she is a victim,
leads us to the concept that I think is most
relevant to us today. The concept of one, no
one, and 100 ,000. Uno, Nessuno, e 100 ,000.
It is the title of his last novel, and it's the
summary of his entire existence. The premise
of this book is so simple, it's maddening. The
protagonist, the Tangelo Mascarda, is standing
in front of a mirror, and his wife casually says,
you know, your nose tilts a little to the right.
Mascarda is stunned. He has looked at his face
every day for his entire life and he never noticed
his nose tilted. He realizes in that split second
that the Mascarda he knows, the one in his head,
is completely different from the Mascarda his
wife sees. And if his wife sees a different version
than his friends see another version and the
bank teller sees another, the list goes on. We
are one to ourselves. But we are 100 ,000 to
the people around us. Every person you meet constructs
a version of you in their mind. You are the nice
guy to one, the jerk to another, the competent
employee to a third. And because there are 100
,000 versions of you floating around, you are
ultimately no one. There is no solid, immutable
core. If you stripped away all the reflections,
all the relationships, all the perceptions, there
is nothing left but flux. Let's apply this to
the modern listener. I mean, think about social
media. You have your LinkedIn profile. That's
a mask. You have your Instagram, another mask.
You have the way you talk in a group chat with
your college friends versus the family WhatsApp
group. Pirandello is asking, if you deleted all
those accounts and you sat alone in a dark room,
who was there? And his answer is terrifying.
Nobody is there. Or rather, a constantly changing
stream of consciousness is there, but not a fixed
self. We are built by the gaze of others. This
philosophy was forged in the fire of his home
life. We have to talk about the progression of
Antonietta's illness. He kept her at home for
a long time. He did. For over 15 years. He refused
to institutionalize her. He believed it was his
duty. But the violence escalated. The paranoia
became dangerous for the children, especially
their daughter Lieta, who Antonieta targeted
aggressively. That's just awful. It was untenable.
Finally, in 1919, he makes the call. He places
her in a private clinic. Yes. It was supposed
to be temporary. He wrote letters saying he hoped
to bring her back, but she never left. She remained
there until her death in 1959. long after Pirandello
himself had died. But this proximity to madness,
living with it for decades, gave him a unique
perspective for the stage. In most plays before
this, a mad character was a plot device. They
were just crazy. Right, a caricature. But Pirandello
treats madness differently. How so? He treats
madness as a valid epistemological stance. Look
at his play, Henry IV. A man falls off a horse
during a costume party and hits his head. He
wakes up believing he is the Holy Roman Emperor,
Henry IV. He lives in a castle. He makes his
servants dress up in period clothing. 20 years.
Right. But the twist is that at a certain point,
he regains his sanity. He realizes he isn't the
emperor, but he looks at the sane world, a world
of treachery, aging and pain. And he decides,
no, thanks. He chooses to pretend to stay mad.
Yes. He chooses the mask of the emperor because
it is stable. It is safe in that role. Time has
stopped. Nothing can hurt him. So the madman
is actually the only one making a rational choice
to control his reality. Precisely. Pirandelle
is asking who is really crazy. The man who plays
one role perfectly forever or the same people
who lie, cheat, wear makeup to hide their age
and change their opinions every five minutes.
It's a profound question. And it brings us to
1921. The year Pirandello decided to break the
theater. Six characters in search of an author.
This is the big one. If Mattia Pascal was his
novelistic breakthrough, six characters was the
earthquake that shut Western drama. Let's set
the scene. It's the premiere at the Val Theater
in Rome. The audience is seated. They're expecting
a play. And what do they see? Nothing. The curtain
is up. The stage is bare. There is no set. A
group of actors walks out in their street rehearsal
clothes and they start chatting, warming up.
They're acting like they're about to rehearse
a Pirandello play. So the audience is already
confused. Did the show start? Is this a mistake?
Utter confusion. And then from the back of the
theater or a side entrance, six figures appear.
They are dressed in black, looking pale and intense.
These are the characters. A father, a mother,
a stepdaughter, a son, and two younger children.
And their claim is mind -bending. It really is.
They say, we are characters created by an author
who imagined us but then decided not to write
our story. We are unfinished. We need you to
act out our drama so we can exist. the theater
thinks they're lunatics. Of course. But the father
argues brilliantly that characters are more real
than living people. He says, a character has
truly a life of his own. He is always somebody.
But a man. A man may be nobody. Because Hamlet
is always Hamlet. He never changes. He never
disappoints you. A human being changes every
second. Exactly. So the play becomes a battle
between the characters who want their tragic
story told with absolute truth and the actors
who try to perform it but inevitably fake it.
The stepdaughter screams at the leading lady,
that's not how I laughed, you're doing it wrong.
It's metatheater. It's a play about the failure
of plays to capture reality. But the audience
at the premiere... They didn't appreciate the
philosophy. It was pandemonium. It wasn't just
booze. It was a riot. People were shouting, Manicomio!
Manicomio! Madhouse! Asylum! They felt insulted.
They thought Pirandello was mocking them. There
were fistfights in the stalls. Actual fistfights.
And I read that Pirandello and his daughter Lieta
had to escape through a side door to avoid being
physically attacked. People were throwing coins
at them. Wow. What a disaster. It was a disaster.
He went home devastated. But here's the vindication.
Mere months later, the play opened in Milan.
And it was a triumph. A total reversal. Then
London. Then New York. Then Paris. It swept the
world. Why the turnaround? Why did the rest of
the world get it when Rome didn't? I think the
timing was perfect. This is the 1920s, post -World
War I. The old world had collapsed. The old certainties
of religion, empire, and logic had been blown
apart by trench warfare. People were ready for
it. They were ready for a type of art that said,
reality is broken, truth is subjective. Pirandello
gave form to the anxiety of the modern age. Okay,
so by the mid -1920s, Pirandello is a global
superstar. He is touring the world. But now we
have to navigate the minefield. The fascist paradox.
This is the elephant in the room. And we have
to be precise here. In 1924, shortly after the
Mattiotti crisis, which was a political murder
that nearly brought down Mussolini's government.
A huge scandal. A huge scandal. Pirandello sends
a public telegram to Mussolini asking to join
the National Fascist Party. The timing is baffling.
Most intellectuals were fleeing the party or
keeping their heads down. Pirandello, the man
who questions everything, signs up right when
the regime is showing its most brutal face. Why?
I mean, what's the thing? Was it just opportunism?
He needed money for his theater company, the
Tetrodarts, right? That is the cynical interpretation.
And it's partially true. He needed state funding
to realize his dream of a national theater. Mussolini
gave him that funding. But I don't think we can
write it off purely as greed. There is a philosophical
angle. Remember the chaos and the great disappointment.
Pirandello despised the weak, corrupt democracy
of liberal Italy, the system that had failed
his parents. He might have seen fascism as a
force of will, a way to impose form on the chaos.
A strong hand to create order. Perhaps. He once
said, I am a fascist because I am Italian, as
if it were the only authentic choice. But at
the same time, he described himself as apolitical
and only a man in the world. That's the contradiction.
He joined the party, but he refused to behave
like a good party member. Not at all. The fascists
didn't trust him. The secret police, the OVRA,
kept a file on him. They spied on his mail. They
tracked his movements. There's the story about
the party card. Yes. In 1927, he apparently got
into an argument with a fascist official about
the censorship of art or theater management.
In a rage, he tore his party membership card
to pieces in front of the official. In 1927,
Italy, that could get you sent to internal exile
or worse. He was protected by his international
fame. Mussolini couldn't just disappear a Nobel
caliber author. But the relationship was cold.
Pirandello realized that the fascist order he
might have hoped for was just another mask, a
particularly ugly hollow mask. And then we have
the incident with the Nobel Prize medal. This
one really confuses people. In 1935, Italy invades
Ethiopia. The League of Nations imposes sanctions.
Mussolini asks Italians to donate their gold
to the state, the gold to the fatherland campaign.
And Pirandello donates his Nobel medal to be
melted down. That feels like a full endorsement
of the war. How do you square that circle? You
almost can't. It looks like a full endorsement.
But look at what he was writing at the same time.
He was working on The Giants of the Mountain.
In that play, a group of poetic actors is destroyed
by the servants of the giants. Industrial, powerful
brutes who care nothing for art. The Giants of
the Fascists. That is the standard reading. So
physically, he hands his gold to the regime.
Artistically, he writes a play about how the
regime murders art. It is the ultimate dissociation.
He was living one, no one, and 100 ,000 in his
own political life. Completely. He was wearing
the fascist badge, but the man underneath was
screaming in the opposite direction. It's a tragedy
in itself. He died before he could resolve it.
He did. He won the Nobel Prize in 1934. Guglielmo
Marconi nominated him. The committee cited his
bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic
art. But by 1936, he is dying. And his death.
Even his funeral arrangements were a final act
of rebellion against the fascists. This is my
favorite part of his story. It's so perfectly
him. Mussolini wanted a state funeral. He wanted
the pomp, the black shirts, the speeches, the
glory of a fascist hero passing away. And Pirandello
left a will that said essentially, over my dead
body. He wrote, and I quote, dead let me not
be clothed let me be naked as soon as possible
let a hearse of the lowest class that of the
poor transport me and let no one accompany me
neither relatives nor friends the hearse the
horse the driver and nothing more let me be naked
After a lifetime of analyzing masks, he wanted
to leave the world without one. Exactly. No uniform,
no medal, no suit, just the man. And he requested
cremation, which was shocking for Catholic Italy.
He wanted his ashes taken back to Sicily to Kaus.
But the journey of the ashes is a story in itself.
It didn't happen right away. No, it was a whole
saga. Because of the war, the ashes stayed in
a vase in Rome for years. Finally, in 1947, after
the war, they were transported to Sicily. But,
and this is very Pirandellian, the vase was too
big for... the crate they had you're kidding
i'm not the american pilot refused to take it
they had to pour his ashes into a simple cardboard
box to fly him home a cardboard box after all
that and then when they got to sicily they transferred
them into a greek vase but the local bishop refused
to bless a cremation urn It was a whole bureaucratic
farce. Finally, they buried the ashes under a
pine tree near his childhood home. Back to chaos.
Morphic circle. When we look at his legacy today,
it's everywhere. You mentioned the theater, the
absurd earlier. You literally cannot have Samuel
Beckett without Pirandello. Waiting for Godotu
guys, waiting for something that never comes,
debating their existence. That is Pirandello's
DNA. Harold Pinter, Edward Albee. They all stand
on his shoulders. The idea of language as a tool
to hide, not to reveal. The uncertainty of identity.
That's all him. And Jean -Paul Sartre. The French
existentialists. Oh, absolutely. Sartre's entire
concept of bad faith, the idea that we lie to
ourselves to avoid the terrifying responsibility
of freedom, is pure Pirandello. When Sartre says,
hell is other people, he is echoing Pirandello's
idea that other people are the ones who trap
us in false identities with their perceptions
of us. He really was the turning point. He took
the heavy, dusty furniture of 19th century realism
and he blew it up. He showed us that the truth
isn't an object you find. It's a story you tell.
And usually it's a story you tell to protect
yourself. So we've covered the chaos of his birth,
the betrayal of his ideals, the madness of his
wife, the invention of metatheater, and the paradox
of his politics. It is a life defined by the
refusal to accept easy answers. It is the triumph
of the desperate laugh. He looked into the void,
saw nothing, and decided to build art out of
it. I want to leave the listener with a thought
today. A little homework for the commute or the
gym. Think about one. No one and 100 ,000. Think
about the you that exists in your boss's mind.
The you in your partner's mind. The you in your
parent's mind. They are all different. They might
even be contradictory. And the you in your own
mind changes every time you learn something new
or forget something old. So the question is,
if you are a different person to everyone you
meet and a different person to yourself every
day, do you actually exist? Or... Are you just
a collection of reflections in other people's
eyes? And if you were alone on a desert island
with no mirrors, would you be anyone at all?
Deep stuff to chew on. Thanks for diving into
the chaos with us. A pleasure as always. We'll
catch you on the next deep dive.