600
PARTISAN REVIEW
stage, as we all must mull over (though in secret) the moments when
our nature and destiny are defined.
I have explained that Chekhov in his way also to some degree
transcended the limits of modern realism: by selecting only those
moments of his characters' lives, to show onstage, when they are
most detached from the literal facts and the stultifying rationaliza–
tions of the daily struggle. But in Chekhov these moments are suf–
fered in abstraction from thought and purpose, and so his imag.e of
human action may seem
too
pathetic. He lacks both Ibsen's powerful
moral-intellectual will, and Shaw's fitness-in-the-void. But Pirandello,
by means of his fiction of unwritten characters, can show the human
creature both as suffering and as wilfully endeavoring to impose
his rationalization. This fiction of fictive characters enables him to
play
over
his catastrophes; and it was this resource which the realistic
stage denied to Ibsen. When
his
Mrs. Alving, in
Ghosts,
suddenly sees
Oswald's infatuation with Regina as a
return
of her husband's infatu–
tion with Regina's mother, she gets the passionate but disinterested
intuition which is the material of art, and is rewarded with the poetic
vision that "we are
all
ghosts." But her final catastr@phe-Oswald's
collapse-strikes her for the first time only, and so remains, when
the curtain falls, undigested, sensational. Pirandello's inspiration is to
stop the action with Mrs. Alving's scream, and to play it over, in the
actual light of the stage, the imagined lamp-and dawn-light of Mrs.
Alving's parlor, and the metaphysical light of her, and our need for
some
form and meaning.
Pirandello is at pains to explain, in his preface, that his play
transcends not only modern realism, but also the various romantic
genres with which some critics had confused it. The characters may
be romantic, he says, but the play is not. The Daughter, for instance,
when she takes the stage with her song, her deep feeling, and her
abandoned charm, would like to seduce us into her own world of
passion, as "the old magician Wagner" does in
Tristan.
But the scene
is the stage itself, not her inner world; and her action meets perforce
the actions of other characters who claim the stage. Pirandello might
also have said, with equal correctness, that his play transcends the
Shavian irony, and at the same time realizes the farce of rationalizing
with a depth and a consistency beyond that of Shaw. The Father, for
instance, has a taste for the paradoxical platform, the unresolved
