Six Characters in Search of an Author (Part 2)
Horizontal Plot (Part 1)
When I sent out notifications on Tuesday about the previous article (there will be one more after this), I mentioned that the ramifications I’d discovered sort of gave me the creeps. It wasn’t that there might be a “Level 5”—after all, that’s just a stand-in name for God, and the invisible audience could be any aspect of the spirit world (e.g., angels, animistic spirits, or whatever). Since I personally have leanings toward spiritual ideas, and find the “disenchantment” of the world in what philosopher Charles Taylor called the “immanent frame” of the Enlightenment imaginatively poverty-stricken, that aspect of the “vertical plot” doesn’t bother me. No, it’s more specific. It’s that in both Level 3 and Level 4, there are scripts that have been written by a playwright that are impossible to escape.
At times in Pirandello’s play, several of the Level 2 characters—the Son in particular—refuse to play their role and try to escape the play, but no matter how much they wish to leave, they find they have no choice but to perform the actions that have been written for them. The same would be true of the members of Level 3, who are required to play the actions Pirandello has provided for them. In other words, Pirandello’s universe is deterministic, an orientation that, whether in it’s Calvinistic form or in its positivistic version, denies free will and human agency. So if I am tempted to assent to Pirandello’s metaphysical universe, I also have to assent to being a character in a play that has already been written by a Level 5 playwright the actions of which I have no choice but to follow. There are many who accept that with ease—I am less willing. Regardless, those seem to be the stakes raised by the play.
In addition, there is a discussion in the vertical plot of whether the characters are more “real” than the actors and directors. The human beings of Level 3 are constantly in flux, and will one day die, the Father argues, and so they are less real than the Level 2 and Level 1 characters because they are eternal and unchanging. This, of course, is mitigated by the fact that the actors and the director are also characters in a play of their own, a play written by Pirandello, and as such are also unchanging and eternally recurring. Implicitly, there is a suggestion of Frederich Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Recurrence, which in turn has ramifications for us in Level 4. In other words, Pirandello suggests humans are beings without agency who have been abandoned by their creators and are stuck in an eternal loop. So yeah, I’m creeped out!
And while this may seem the stuff of late night, alcohol-soaked undergrad dorm conversations, well, that might be less because the questions are bogus than that the demands of our everyday life forces an unreflective “practicality” on us that stops us from considering issues of metaphysics at all.
And maybe that is one of the functions art might serve: to remind us of larger questions that inform our sense of who we are and what we do in the world.
Horizontal Plot
The other half of the play—the “play within a play,” the story carried by the characters—is often dismissed by critics and spectators alike as irrelevant, a soap opera story that is merely a vehicle for philosophizing on the nature of reality. I would simply point out that Pirandello is a Nobel Prize-winning playwright, and so out of respect for the work we ought to assume that, if it is part of the play, it is there for a reason, and it is up to us to figure it out. Simply dismissing it is not an option.
I think there are two extremely important and powerful elements of the horizontal plot, elements that are quite relevant to today’s world—indeed, they may be more important now than they were in 1921. One is about the nature of narrative and thus about the nature of history; the other is directly connected to the vertical plot. In this article, I’ll focus on the former, and will start with a quick plot summary.
The Plot
BACKSTORY: The Father and the Mother were once married to each other. She was a humble country girl, and he married her, he says, because of her “humility.” At some point, the Father hired a secretary, a man who was devoted to the Father, and who also seemed to understand the Mother in every way. “Oh, there wasn’t the slightest suspicion of anything wrong,” the Father avers. “He was a good man. A humble man…Just like her…They were incapable…both of them…not only of doing evil…but even of thinking it!” Nevertheless, the Mother and the Secretary became very close until, the Father says, “I couldn’t say a single word to either of them without their immediately exchanging an understanding look…Without the one’s immediately trying to catch the other’s eye…For advice on how to take what I had said…So that I shouldn’t get into a bad temper.”
Eventually, he’d had enough, and fired the Secretary. But his wife, who had recently given birth to their son, became so forlorn that she could barely function. The Father decided that his wife wasn’t strong enough to raise the baby, so he sent him away to be raised by a wet-nurse in the country where “in contact with Nature, he might grow up strong and healthy.” It was, he says, a “whim.” Predictably, his wife, deprived of her son and her friend the Secretary, grew even more depressed. Eventually the Father couldn’t take it anymore, and he took action.
The Father sent her off, “provided with everything,” he insists, to make a life with the Secretary, “so that she might be free of me,” doing it, he says, “more for her sake than my own.” Forced together, the Mother and the Secretary built a life together and had three children together. Meanwhile, the Son came home from the country, but with no emotional connection to the father and not knowing what became of his mother. The Father couldn’t find a way to connect, and the Son grew up without much attention. The Father, alone except for his alienated son, developed “a real need…a very real need…to believe that [his wife] was happy” in her new life “which had come into being as a result of what I had done.” He continues: “I watched the new little family that grew up around her with incredible tenderness,” to the point that he would hang around outside of the school at the end of the day in order to see the Stepdaughter come out. “He used to follow me down the street,” the Stepdaughter recounts. “He would smile at me and when I reached home he’d wave to me…like this. I would look at him rather provocatively, opening my eyes wide. I didn’t know who he might be. I told my mother about him, and she knew at once who it must be.” He started to bring her presents including, significantly, a hat. Eventually, the Secretary became aware of the Father’s stalking behavior, and understandably moved the family to another town, after which the Father loses track of them.
Time passed, and the Secretary died. As a result, the family fell into poverty. Eventually, the Mother returned the family to the town where the Father lived, but did not inform him. Desperate to support her family, the Mother sought work from a “high-class” dressmaker, Madame Pace, who hired her not because of the Mother’s sewing skills, but because she has an eye on her daughter. The Mother would stay up all night sewing, and when the Stepdaughter took Madame Pace the completed work, Madame Pace would “point out to me how the material had been ruined by giving it to my mother to sew,” and she’d demand that the Stepdaughter pay for it. Eventually, Pace suggests that the Stepdaughter could cover the money by becoming a prostitute in her upstairs brothel. With the family on the brink of starvation and homelessness, the Stepdaughter assents. As you might have guessed, one of Madame Pace’s long-time customers, is the Father. Once again, Madame Pace tells the Stepdaughter that her mother’s work is poor, and suggests that there is an “old senor” who wishes to “amuse himself” with her. She assents, and when they meet they do not recognize each after all these years. At the last moment—or not, depending on who you believe—the mother bursts in and stops the proceedings.
You can see why it might be possible to dismiss all this as a melodramatic soap opera. There is more that happens: the Mother and her family eventually comes back to live with the Father with all the drama that involves—the Son’s resentment and shame, the Stepdaughter’s taking over the house, and eventually the drowning of the Little Girl and the suicide of the Boy—but the details are unimportant for this part of the story.
What is important is the scene at the brothel, the one that both the Father and the Stepdaughter are anxious to play. The Father wants to explain his actions (a man has needs of the flesh, and he can’t be held responsible for what is, after all, a small moment in an otherwise blameworthy life, and after all nothing really happened between him and the Stepdaughter), and the Stepdaughter wants to reveal his responsibility for her shame (she was forced into prostitution due to the poverty that resulted from his actions, and don’t even try to pretend that nothing happened between us you lecherous stalker). And therein lie the first important aspect of the horizontal plot: who will be believed, and whose story will be told in performance?
The Stakes
In Act Two, after the Father and the Director spend the intermission conferring, they attempt to stage the scene in the brothel. Despite their protests, the Director won’t allow the Characters to perform their own story themselves, but instead gives their roles to members of the theater company. The scenario is explained to them one moment at a time (the actors’ performances cause the Father and Stepdaughter great hilarity) until they get to the moment of truth when the Father and Stepdaughter are brought together. The Stepdaughter is dressed all in black, in mourning for her father, who died a few months previously. The first hint that there may be trouble comes in a mumbled exchange between the Director and the Leading Man (playing the Father), who agree that the scene will “have to be treated rather lightly” and “put over slickly.”
The scene begins with the Father deciding whether this girl will be acceptable. He makes sure this won’t be the first time, that she’s done it before and “more than once.” Hiding her “restrained disgust” by looking down at the floor, she says that she has. The Father, a bit puzzled that she isn’t more used to it by now, offers to take off the black hat she is wearing. She says she’ll take it off herself, but he insists and hangs it up for her, and then offers to buy her one of Madame Pace’s hats for her, which he says would be more attractive (this is how prostitutes were paid—the client bought an expensive hat and gave it to the girl, who later would give it back to the hatmaker for a portion of the payment). She says she couldn’t wear it, and points out that she is in mourning. The Father immediately expresses his condolences, but the Stepdaughter, fearing that he will go away and she won’t make the money she needs to help the family, says “Please don’t give another thought to what I said! I, too, you understand…I really must forget that I am dressed like this.”
At this point, the Director stops the scene to make some edits. “When you say, ‘Please, don’t give another thought to what I said! I, too, you understand…” The Director turns to the Father, “You come in at once with, ‘I understand! I understand! and immediately ask…why [she’s] in mourning.”
The Stepdaughter explodes at this departure from reality.
“Oh, no! That’s not it at all!” she angrily asserts. “When I told him that I mustn’t think about my being in mourning, do you know what his answer was? ‘Well, then, let’s take this little frock off at once, shall we?’”
Now it’s the Director’s turn to explode, appalled by her lack of propriety. “That would be wonderful! Wonderful! That would bring the house down!” “But it’s the truth,” the Stepdaughter retorts, to which the Director responds, “But what’s truth got to do with it? Acting’s what we’re here for ! Truth’s all very fine…But only up to a point.” When the Stepdaughter demands to know what he plans to do instead, he condescendingly puts her off saying “You’ll see! Leave everything to me.”
But she sees the writing on the wall. “No, I won’t!” she storms.
“What you’d like to do, no doubt, is to concoct a romantic, sentimental little affair out of my disgust, out of all the reasons, each more cruel, each viler than the other, why I am this sort of woman, why I am what I am! An affair with him! He asks me why I am in mourning and I reply with tears in my eyes that my father died only two months ago. No! No! He must say what he said then, ‘Well, then, let’s take this little frock off at once, shall we?’ And I…my heart still grieving for my father’s death…I went behind there…Do you understand?…There, behind that screen! And then, my fingers trembling with shame and disgust, I took off my frock, undid my brassiere…”
This is too much for the Director, “For God’s sake! What on earth are you saying, girl?” And the Stepdaughter cries out, “The truth! The truth!” To which the Director responds, in a chilling retort, “Yes, it probably is the truth! I’m not denying it! And I understand…I fully appreciate all your horror: But you must realize that we simply can’t put this kind of thing on the stage.” The sexual behavior would be too blatant, too real. In a long speech he explains why not only would they be shut down if they did this, but it would totally throw the play out of balance by giving her too much attention. Theater is about balance! He ends by warning her that these changes are in her best interest, too, because all this “fury…exasperation, and disgust” makes a “bad impression” on the audience because—wait for it— “You yourself have confessed that you’d had other men there at Madame Pace’s before him…And more than once!” In other words, he dismisses her trauma by saying, “Well, I mean, come on—you’re a hooker, right? What’s with all the phony moral outrage and emotional baggage?”
It’s a shocking moment that shows how men in authority regularly cover over the squalid truth of their actions and of society’s own injustice by erasing the pain and trauma of the victims and replacing it with a light, romantic comedy that allows them to feel less guilty. It happens all the time. Think of movies like, say, Pretty Woman or Night Shift, in which prostitution is portrayed almost romantically and without a shred of recognition concerning the reality often associated with sex work. Think of how many victims of sexual abuse are accused of having brought their abuse upon themselves because, after all, the way they dressed or acted.
The Stepdaughter knows not only this, but also what is at stake in the conversion of her story into “art.” She says, gravely and resolutely, “At the moment we are here, unknown as yet by the public. Tomorrow you will present us as you wish…Making up your play in your own way.” In other words, once the story is told, once the choices are made, once the words are spoken one way and not another, this will become their truth as far as the public is concerned. A mere edit, a slight change of emphasis, will entirely change the story. For the Director, it is simply a “business decision” about what will sell; for the Stepdaughter, it is her reality that will vanish forever. She insists on playing the scene once as it really happened, performed by her and the Father, so that at least the actors and director know the truth. When they do so, the Director is blown away, and declares “We’ve got something in that first act…That’s absolutely wonderful.” End of Act Two.
As with the vertical plot, the horizontal plot implies something deeper than the story itself. Pirandello shows us the profound responsibility that the storyteller, whether playwright, scriptwriter, novelist, biographer, or journalist, has to reality, to truth. And it suggests that those who would censor books or performances because the truth they describe is “innapropriate” or will “upset” the feelings of those who read it are betraying our society and trivializing art’s purpose. We are shown the perfidy of the claim that such actions are “just a business decision,” or that they are “just following the rules,” or “it won’t sell unless we jazz it up a bit.” Pirandello shows us that what seems a melodramatic soap opera contains a powerful moral truth if treated with the gravity it deserves.
In Part 3, the final part of this journey through Six Characters in Search of an Author, I will describe how the creative act that brings different realities into existence can be destructive when enacted within one’s own sphere.