Pirandello: Absurdism in Six Characters in Search of an Author
First coined by Martin Esslin in 1961, Theatre of Absurd goes way back to the 1920’s when avant-garde experimental works started to emerge. Though, it reached its peak in 50’s France as a reaction to WW2. People were so deranged because of the endless wars that they started to question God and their reason for being on Earth.
This post-war trauma resulted in the existential philosophy called as existentialism. Existentialists tried to understand the cruelty of the meaningless of life and tried to expose the crisis that it caused in the human beings. Absurdist playwrights like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who were influenced by existentialists, started to embrace the disorder in the world and make something out of it.
Luigi Pirandello, the author of Six Authors in Search of an Author, did not only follow his fellow absurdist playwrights’ existentialist ideas but also introduced the method of play-within-a-play to the Theatre of Absurd. Thus, his contributions to the short-lived theatrical movement made him a pioneer and allowed him to display his complex and controversial ideas in his plays. Six Authors in Search of an Author is the epitome of an absurdist play as it, first, overwhelms the reader with its chaotic nature and then, dives into presenting existentialist themes like the concept of self and reality versus illusion.
The play starts off with six people interrupting a theatre rehearsal, saying that they’re six characters in search of an author. The director of the play, annoyed but intrigued, lets them explain why they’re there. The Father, the Mother, Step-Daughter, Son, Boy and Child are the characters that need an author to tell their tragic story. Their story goes like this: the Father and the Mother separate after having their Son and the Mother has three other kids from another man. When the man dies, The Mother and her family goes broke so the Step-Daughter has to work in a brothel to look after the family. One of her clients happens to be the Father and before anything happens, the Mother walks in on them and tells Step-Daughter that her client is her ex-husband. After this reveal, the Mother along with her three children re-enter the family of her ex-husband and Son. Their story ends with the Child drowning, Boy shooting himself and Step-Daughter fleeing. The Manager takes interest in their story and orders the set to be arranged for its rehearsal after a 20 minutes break.
Without giving a second thought, the audience understands that this is an absurd play as the characters are off-beat and their story is hard to keep up. The reason why the audience struggles to fully grasp the play is because the Theatre of Absurd has features like anti-character and anti-language that creates a chaotic atmosphere. The characters are designed to make the audience feel uneasy and confused. They are out of harmony and never give the audience a background story to comprehend their personality. Their role goes as far as the story goes and it is left to the audience to judge their character. They never make it easy though, they talk continuously and repetitively which creates a disorder in the play. Pirandello uses these devices to create a chaotic atmosphere so he can show how over the edge you have to be to be incomprehensible. His characters and story makes no sense because they hold a mirror to life’s meaningless and the audience represents individuals who still try to take a meaning out of it for the sake of their survival.
From that point, the play starts to challenge its own characters and the audience for their comprehension of self. People develop their personalities through the life choices they make and this process does not stop until they’re dead, thus, complete. So, if we’re in an endless circle of changing ourselves, how can one event determine whether we’re good or bad? Pirandello shows this paradox through the relationship between the Father and Step-Daughter as each has their own different versions of what happened in one event.
The Father claims that he had no idea who Step-Daughter was before the Mother revealed them the truth, and the Step-Daughter refuses to believe his story as she insists on his incestuous obsession with her. The Father does not deny that in a weak moment of his, he got involved in a scene like that but he wants to prove that this cannot define his personality because his persona is constantly changing just like everybody else. To make people think, he asks the Manager “The FATHER. Do you really know who you are” (Pirandello 98)? which immediately alarms the Manager about his own self. The Father does not stop asking existential questions until the Manager yields and agrees with his notion: “The MANAGER. But everyone knows [his identity] can change. It is always changing, the same as anyone else’s” (Pirandello 101). It is not easy for people to take a step back and try to see themselves without the labels they put on themselves but Pirandello, through the Father and the Manager, succeeds in making the audience realize that they are not the same person they were yesterday and that characterizing themselves is as irrational as it is to judge someone based on one event.
Another existentialist issue Pirandello tackles is reality versus illusion. When the Actors call the Characters’ revival of their own story an illusion, the Father snaps and refuses their choice of words to be used for their drama. It’s because the Characters have no life outside of their story and the Actors are watching their version of reality. And the Father claims that it is, in fact, the Actors who will create an illusion by imitating the Characters’ story. He also argues that the Actors’ portrayal of them will never truly capture the Characters’ essence. Essence is what someone defines themselves with and without existence, no one can have an essence. Thus, existence comes before essence. But in the Characters’ reality, they are something before they exist. Even though their story is unwritten, they’ve been thought out by some other author and given an essence before their existence. So, it is debatable whether an Actor with no essence can tell the story of a Character who has one.
While the Father and the Manager get in a heated yet funny argument about this, the Child drowns and the Boy kills himself. Even their reaction to this moment shows how different they are from each other as the Manager sees it as a pretense and a joke while it is the Characters’ real tragedy and they honestly mourn for them. The audience, while this is happening on stage, gets confused too because they know they’re watching actors who pretend to be both Characters and Actors but they cant point out to what is real or illusion. And what is ironic is that whether they choose to believe the Characters or the Actors and the Manager, they will still be taking illusion as granted. Leaving the audience compelled, Pirandello defies the concept of both reality and illusion as he shows that nothing our eyes witness is the truth.
Six Characters in Search of an Author ends the exact way it started: an author refusing to write the Characters’ story. The ultimate failure presented in this play shows how much Pirandello agrees with Camus’ existentialist essay The Myth of Sisyphus. No matter what people do, they’ll never reach to an explanation about this world that will satisfy them. Through themes like chaotic nature, the concept of self and reality vs. illusion debate, Pirandello shows his audience that this world itself is absurd in every way and his plays are just a mere reflection of its absurdness.
