Modernism at war: pirandello and the crisis of (German) cultural identity.

Subialka, Michael

Critics have elaborated several different conceptual approaches which they use to divide and categorize the multiple strands of modernist writing in the Italian context. Despite their differences, however, these approaches have also tended to result in similar alignments or groupings of modernist figures, distinguishing between the political avant-gardes like the Futurists and the seminal Italian modernists of introspection, Italo Svevo and Luigi Pirandello. While some critics have focused on the strong political and nationalist elements that seem to set the Futurists apart, others have focused on the specific sense of pessimistic crisis and how Svevo and Pirandello respond by elaborating a correspondingly pessimistic worldview. But the conclusion in both cases has been a confirmation of the same basic division of the Italian modernist scene. My contention here is that a reexamination of Pirandello's literary engagement with World War I complicates this general picture, revealing key ways in which Pirandello is in closer continuity with the nationalist elements of modernism than has sometimes been acknowledged.

In Pirandello's war stories, a crisis of cultural identity brings strong elements of nationalism into contact with the pessimistic worldview for which the writer is known. At the same time, this nationalism is situated in a discourse of transnational cultural identity, linking it to Risorgimento philosophical thought, while, in terms of Pirandello's family history, it connects to a personal commitment to a unified Italy free from foreign rule. I argue that by drawing these nationalist elements together with his humoristic outlook, Pirandello integrates his pessimistic worldview with a simultaneous commitment to an ethics of interpersonal compassion and a desire for spiritual renewal at a national level. This attitude sets him apart from his modernist contemporaries.

1. Italian Modernism between Traditionalism and Nationalism

In order to understand how Pirandello's war stories help us to gain new insight into the relationship among the conflicting impulses at work in Italian modernism, one must first clarify the conceptual models that articulate those impulses. Two critical approaches have focused on different impulses in the modernist imagination, but both result in similar ways of grouping the most prominent figures of Italian modernism. One approach is offered by Luca Somigli, who makes use of Emilio Gentile's notion of "modernist nationalism" to articulate the distinction between avant-garde artists like the Futurists and writers like Svevo and Pirandello: the Futurists (and other avant-garde groups, like the writers for La voce) are engaged in a project of political renovation with nationalist aims (8283); in contrast, Svevo and Pirandello focus on the dissolution of the subject and its connection to the world, culminating in a "universe empty of meaning" (86). In this view, the optimistic or positive project of the modernist nationalists contrasts with the metaphysical and psychological pessimism of Svevo and Pirandello. (1)

This grouping thus coincides with the interpretative "line" drawn by Renato Barilli, who maintained that Svevo and Pirandello (in contrast to Carlo Emilio Gadda) mark the high point of Italian modernism because they achieve the best "balance between tradition and innovation [...]" (6; my translation). But, as this characterization suggests, Barilli's focus is less on the role of an optimistic nationalist project than on the question of how modernism relates its radical innovation to the tradition coming before it. This difference puts Barilli's framework in dialogue with the position charted by Robert Dombroski, who has suggested in his comparison of Svevo and Pirandello to Gadda that we must focus on how these writers view the function of their writing in the context of the modern crisis that gives rise to it. He argues that for both Svevo and Pirandello a seemingly nihilistic vision of the modern world is actually overcome through the subject's literary reflection (the autobiographical impulse): "[their] novels illustrate in different ways how art can revive a world deadened by modernization and how the reified subject can regain its lost humanity through the artful reconstruction or management of reality's negative aspects" (2003, 102). In this sense, it is not their pessimism that unifies Svevo and Pirandello but rather their attempt to use innovative new forms of writing to regain something that is lost in the modern world.

I suggest that Barilli and Dombroski offer an approach to Italian modernism that aligns with a key concept developed by Frank Kermode (though neither of them dialogues with the scholar of English modernism directly). I have in mind Kermode's distinction between traditionalist and anti-traditionalist modernists. (2) In his view, both are unified by a deep sense of ongoing crisis that is articulated in apocalyptic terms (103). However, for the traditionalist modernists, including Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Joyce (104)--and, I would add, following Pericles Lewis (2007, 166), Svevo--this crisis unfolds in continuity with the lost past. In contrast, for the anti-traditionalists, the perpetual renovation of the world uproots the modern moment from all historical continuities, leading to a perpetual novelty built out of crisis. This impulse toward total novelty sets them apart from the traditionalists, who articulate a deep sense of rupture and loss, going so far as to deconstruct traditional forms of representation to express that modern crisis, but for whom this sense of loss is grounded in a desire for some form of order.

Thus, just as Somigli has shown how the notion of modernist nationalism can help us understand the different ways in which various Italian writers compare with one another, I contend that Kermode's notion of modernist traditionalism can likewise help us to understand a key element uniting various interpretations of Italian modernism--like those articulated by Barilli and Dombroski. In the former case, the strong impulse of a nationalist political project suggests a separation between the active, optimistic movement of a group like the Futurists, on the one hand, and the much more introspective and pessimistic view of writers like Svevo and Pirandello. In the latter view, the distinction is not one of optimism and pessimism but rather focuses on the response to crisis and the ways in which that response attempts to reestablish some form of order or to balance the radical innovation of modernist form with the desire for meaning--a desire typical of more traditional forms.

Both of these conceptual approaches to modernism are integral to my reading of Pirandello's short stories from the period of World War I. He mixes elements of a pessimistic, almost apocalyptic, view with a nationalist outlook; at the same time, his commitment to an ethics of compassion reveals a sense in which this pessimism is not as total as we might think--his universe is not, perhaps, completely empty of meaning. In fact, in "Berecche e la guerra" (1915) ["Berecche and the War"] and "Colloquii coi personaggi" (1915) ["Conversations with Characters"], Pirandello affirms the interventionist aspirations of his young contemporaries, like the Futurists. At the same time, he envisions the war as an inescapable rupture of Italy's links with German culture, creating an identity crisis that is nevertheless productive precisely insofar as it is required in order to construct a more robust Italian cultural identity. Yet his affirmation of interventionism coincides with a humorous poetics that relativizes historical conflicts and ironizes commitments to political and practical aims. What emerges is thus a deeply ambivalent modernist imagination, which spans from these short stories to Pirandello's broader corpus--torn between the traditionalist's aspirations to achieve authentic forms of identity, the nationalist's aspiration for cultural renewal, and a humorous compassion that sees these aspirations as both meaningful (serious) and futile (laughable). (3)

2. Cultural Identity Crisis: German Philosophy and the Extents of Nationalism "Berecche e la guerra" is an ideal place to start if we want to account for how Pirandello's poetics of humorous compassion combines a moderate form of modernist nationalism with strong elements of modernist traditionalism. The 1934 publication of the story was preceded by an authorial note that explicitly thematizes those elements. It highlights the importance of humor in combining patriotism with the crisis of personal and cultural identity brought by the war:

Raccolgo in questo XIV volume delle mie Novelle per un anno il racconto in otto capitoli Berecche e la guerra, scritto nei mesi che precedettero la nostra entrata nella guerra mondiale. Vi e rispecchiato il caso a cui assistetti, con maraviglia in principio e quasi con riso, poi con compassione, d'un uomo di studio educato, come tanti allora, alla tedesca, specialmente nelle discipline storiche e filologiche. La Germania, durante il lungo periodo dell'alleanza, era diventata per questi tali, non solo spiritualmente ma anche sentimentalmente, nell'intimita della loro vita, la patria ideale. Nella imminenza del nostro intervento contro di essa, promosso dalla parte piu viva e sana del popolo italiano e poi seguito da tutta intera la Nazione, costoro si trovarono percio come sperduti; e, costretti alla fine dalla forza stessa degli eventi a riaccogliere in se la vera patria, patirono un dramma che mi parve, sotto quest'aspetto, degno d'essere rappresentato.

(Novelle per un anno, III, 572)

I'm placing Berecche and the War, a story in eight chapters written in the months preceding our entry into the World War, with this XIVth volume of my collected Stories for a Year. It reflects the case I witnessed, with astonishment to begin with and almost laughingly, then with compassion, of a studious man educated like so many others at that time in the German fashion, and especially in the disciplines of history and philology. During the long period of our alliance Germany had, for such people, become not just spiritually but also in their thoughts and feelings, as an intimate part of their lives, their ideal native land. As our intervention against her, called for by the most vital and sound part of the Italian people and then accepted by the whole nation, became imminent, they therefore felt, as it were, lost; and, compelled in the end by the very force of events to take back their true native land to themselves, they suffered a crisis which, from this aspect, seemed to me to be worthy of representation.

(Dashwood 25)

While the story itself was elaborated in several phases over a period that seems to have stretched between 1914 and 1917 (Dashwood 3), the fictional setting places the entire narrative in the days of Italy's neutrality after the initial outbreak of war --before the decision in favor of intervention, which finally occurred in the spring of 1915. Pirandello evidently uses this setting as an opportunity to focus on a moment of upheaval and crisis. Throughout the story, a general cultural crisis is enacted through the "case" that the author claims to have witnessed; the psychological disintegration of the protagonist, Berecche, thus stands in for the experience of a whole class of people and becomes indicative of the broader national crisis. These cultural elites, who were formed "in the German fashion," adopting the rigorous methods of German history and philology (like Pirandello himself, who received his doctorate in Romance philology from Bonn), find themselves displaced. The vitality and health of the interventionists have uprooted these studious young men from their "ideal native land," creating a feeling of loss and confusion as they search for a way to "take back their true native land to themselves." The crisis of personal and national identity is clearly directed toward finding new foundations for a meaningful identity.

The plot of the story weaves these themes of national and personal identity crisis together in a humorous way. Divided into eight short chapters, the story traces the transformations in the protagonist's attitude toward his ideal homeland after Italy's declaration of neutrality following the German invasion of Belgium; this news shatters him psychologically, strains his personal relationships, and splits his family into factions as his son and future son-in-law advocate for intervention against Austria-Hungary and Germany. This fracturing leads Berecche to revise some of his opinions, gradually admitting not only the faults of Germany's bellicose actions but also his willingness to fight alongside his son. After his son, Faustino, leaves home to volunteer in France, the story ends with Berecche brashly determining that he will teach himself to ride horseback so that he can fight by Faustino's side. But the old man does not know how to ride, and he falls off in a comical catastrophe that lands him in the hospital, temporarily blind--a condition he thus shares with his youngest daughter, Margheritina, who was born blind. The inner breakdown of Berecche's preconceived notions about Germany, his blustering struggles with his family and friends, and his own fervor and incompetence, all create a sympathetic caricature of a man who belongs to another era and who struggles to adapt to the shift in alliances and the call to national solidarity that accompany the outbreak of the Great War.

By situating his story in terms of the categories of his theory of humor, Pirandello connects this "case" to his broader poetics in ways that resonate with his two most important modernist novels, the earlier Il fu Mattia Pascal [The Late Mattia Pascal] (1904) and his film novel, written contemporaneously with "Berecche," Si gira ... [Shoot!] (1916, republished with revisions under the new title Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore [The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator] in 1925). (4) By the time Pirandello collected "Berecche" in 1934, this poetics was also manifest in his revolutionary theatrical pieces, like Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore [Six Characters in Search of an Author] (1921, revised and republished in 1925). In these works, traditional narrative and theatrical forms are fragmented or deconstructed in ways that reflect a broader crisis of representation. (5) This is what Manuela Gieri has analyzed as Pirandello's effort to establish a modern "counter-tradition" (295), which is nevertheless to be situated in historical continuity with earlier breaks with tradition, specifically Baudelaire's response to modernity (297-303). Likewise, in "Berecche," jumps in the setting, a loose movement in and out of characters' subjective perspectives through techniques such as free-indirect discourse, and moments of discontinuous or confusing reflection all participate in that same impulse toward formal innovation. The specific wartime crisis relating to the German cultural elements of Italian national identity is thus connected integrally to Pirandello's modernist poetics.

In "Berecche," there appears to be a conflict between the nationalist rejection of German culture and the affirmation of an Italian cultural identity, on the one hand, and the broader modernist project that deconstructs notions of stable identity, on the other. My argument is that in order to make sense of this conflict, we will have to develop a clearer account of the precise nature of nationalism within the story. As Julie Dashwood has convincingly argued, the identity crisis in "Berecche" involves a rejection of the German cultural tradition that puts special weight on the German "method" of thought. She conceives this method as belonging to positivist philosophy and philology as well as to the Hegelian picture of world history as a progressive development of spirit (Geist) (1). This German "method" is perhaps epitomized by a passage where Berecche re-evaluates the lessons taught by his German professors of Romance philology; there, the rigorous method that has come to dominate his life (III.579 [33]) is associated with "alcune affermazioni tedesche, che offendevano in lui non soltanto la logica ma anche, in fondo in fondo, il suo sentimento latino" (III.586) ["some German assertions which not only offended his sense of logic but also, in his heart of hearts, his latin sentiment" (38)].

But the nature of the Italian nationalism in this "Latin sentiment" needs to be qualified in terms of Berecche's subsequent reflections, which also will challenge our assumption that his crisis leads him to reject German philosophy. In fact, Berecche immediately goes on to laud a group of earlier German thinkers, from before the existence of a nation called Germany: "Goethe, Schiller, e prima Lessing, e poi Kant, Hegel ... Ah, quand'era piccola, quando ancora non era, la Germania, questi giganti! E ora, gigante, ecco qua, s'e buttata, pancia a terra, con le mani afferrate sotto il petto e un gomito qua, sul Belgio e in Francia, l'altro la su la Russia in Polonia" (III.586-87) ["Goethe, Schiller, and first Lessing and then Kant, Hegel ... Oh all these giants, when Germany was small, when she was not yet Germany! And now she is a giant, and has flung herself belly down on the ground, hands clasped under her chest, with one elbow here, on Belgium and in France and the other there, on Russia and in Poland" (39)]. In opposition to the small-minded brutality of his contemporaries' German nationalism, Berecche sees in classical and romantic German thought a literary and philosophical perspective that transcends national boundaries.

Berecche's outlook here draws on a notion of national pride, his "latin sentiment," that is evidently meant to be consistent with a broader poetic and philosophic spirit--one which, notably, directly includes Hegel. For this reason I suggest that we should consider Pirandello's war story as being situated in a Risorgimento tradition of viewing Italian culture in similarly transnational terms. That tradition was perhaps expounded most forcefully by a key Risorgimento philosopher, Bertrando Spaventa (brother of Silvio, the Neapolitan political revolutionary). Spaventa argued against close-minded nationalism, insisting that the new Italy must be an iteration in a larger, collective process of world history where the spiritual life of nations coincides:

[...] nel mondo moderno, all'opposto dell'antico, la vita di ciascuna nazione si muove come all'aperto insieme con quella delle altre; ciascuna e non solo se stessa, ma anche l'altra; anzi non e veramente se stessa, che in questa relazione e intima unita colle altre. [...] Cosi la nazionalita non ha piu lo stesso significato di prima. Non apparisce piu come qualcosa che e dato naturalmente e immediatamente e diro quasi ciecamente da un inesorabile destino; ma come un prodotto assolutamente spirituale, come il posto che ciascun popolo piglia da se, per sua propria e conscia energia, nello splendido banchetto della nuova vita.

(9-10)

[...] in the modern world, in contrast to the ancient world, the lives of all nations move together, unconcealed. Each nation is not only itself but also the other. Indeed, it is not really itself except insofar as it is related to and intimately unified with the others. [...] As such, the meaning of nationality is altered. It no longer appears as something that is given naturally and immediately (I will even say blindly) by an inexorable destiny, but rather as an absolutely spiritual product. It is the place that each people occupies on its own--through its own conscious energy--at the splendid banquet of new life.

(49)

For him, as for his contemporary Francesco De Sanctis (whom Pirandello studied closely), Hegelian philosophy became a key element to help ground the revolutionary aspirations of Risorgimento patriotism (Rubini 11, Hoffmeister 65, Piccone 99). They saw a continuity running from the Italian Renaissance and the philosophy of Giambattista Vico through to Hegel and the Risorgimento; this continuity corresponded to the close relation between Italian and European culture and thought in an ideal new world order where all free peoples were related. (6)

Reading "Berecche" in continuity with this Risorgimento tradition reveals a key sense in which the traditionalism of Pirandello's modernist stance coincides with a notion of modernist nationalism. It is worth looking at Emilio Gentile's definition of that concept more carefully here:

What distinguished this nationalism, what made it modernist, was its intention to reconcile intellectual culture, or spiritualismo (spiritualism)--understood here generically as the primacy of culture, ideas, and feelings--with mass industrial society, an intention that aimed at opposing and avoiding the negative effects brought in the wake of modernity, such as materialism, skepticism, hedonistic egoism, egalitarian conformism, etc.--all that modernist nationalism identified with the rationalist and individualistic tradition of the Enlightenment. Toward that end modernist nationalism argued the necessity of accompanying the industrial revolution and modernization with a "revolution of the mind" in order to form the sensibility, the character, the conscience of a new Italian who could comprehend and confront the challenges of modern life, who could firmly adhere to the superiority of the mental forces that would assure unity and collective identity to the nation in the face of the development of material and technological forces.

(60)

Unlike the Futurists (or other avant-garde nationalists), Pirandello does not embrace technological modernity and industrialization as the tools to forge a new Italian nation. As critics have pointed out in relation to his key modernist texts, such as the novel he first published during the Great War, Si gira ..., Pirandello's stance is directly opposed to the mechanization of human life, which is captured in the recurrent metaphor of the film camera as a great black spider devouring the actors' vitality. (7) It is in this sense that Pirandello fits with what Kermode has identified as traditionalist modernism, referring to how some modernists' revolutionary and new poetic forms are nevertheless complementary to the past (112), which they view as a "source of order" (115).

Yet, even if Pirandello is opposed to technological modernity, his vision of nationalism fits with key aspects of Gentile's definition, particularly with the sense that modern "materialism, skepticism, hedonistic egoism, egalitarian conformism, etc." need to be overcome with spiritualism in Italian intellectual culture. (8) Strikingly, this intellectual culture is rooted in non-Italian sources, following on the Risorgimento tradition of conceiving the modern spirit in a transnational scope. As such, we might say that the way in which Pirandello's text exhibits nationalism is itself colored by a form of traditionalism, one that understands the unity of the nation in less restricted ethnic terms than the definitions of thinkers such as the Futurists.

3. A Family Affair: Risorgimento Struggle as an Intergenerational Task The link to the Risorgimento and the notion of a transnational Italian identity is not simply a matter of philosophy. In "Berecche," as well as in "Colloquii coi personaggi," Pirandello articulates a highly personal vision of patriotic sentiment that is rooted in family ties. This vision explicitly links those patriotic ideals to the tradition of the Risorgimento, grounding Pirandello's nationalism in the idea of an incomplete task left for the "sons" by their forefathers--and, in "Colloquii," left by their foremothers, as well. (9) At the same time, it exhibits further links to the transnational conception of Italy as coming into its own not as an isolated unit but in community with other modern nations.

In a central moment of "Berecche," the protagonist and his family discover a letter left by his son, Faustino, who has gone off to join the French in their fight against the Germans. As the letter makes clear, his aim is not specifically to support the French but rather to take action, to show that Italy's young sons will not sit idly as the world around them is at war (III.613-14). The letter is long and sentimental, over-developing an extended metaphor where Italy is depicted as a maidservant thrust from one master to another, lost and in search of her rightful place. As the tearful response of the whole family (until then bitterly divided against itself) reveals, the letter also appeals to the patriotic sentiments of Pirandello ' s readers. We are no doubt meant to agree with their family friend, Mr. Fongi, whose statement ends the chapter: "Nobilissimo ... nobilissimo ..." (III.614) ["So noble ... so very noble" (60)].

The letter's call to action and its insistence on the valor and strength of young Italian men certainly resonate with aspects of the Futurists' modernist nationalism. Likewise, Pirandello's own comments in the author's note align with that project, focusing on the health and vitality of the interventionist cause; these youths pushing for change are "[la] parte piu viva e sana del popolo italiano" (III.572) ["the most vital and sound [healthy] part of the Italian people" (25)]. Indeed, the Futurists themselves would seem to be included among those who are praised in this passage. Yet the ideal depicted in Faustino's letter also speaks directly to the incomplete task of the Risorgimento and to the idea that the new generation must fight to finish that revolution, to break Italy free of her subservience to the Austrian Empire. In this sense, the connection to the Futurists' modernist nationalism is only partial; there are other ideas at work in the kind of patriotic identity that Pirandello has in mind.

In fact, Italy's task in the Great War is linked explicitly to Pirandello's family history and a notion of intergenerational struggle, as we see in "Colloquii coi personaggi," a short story in two parts, both published in the Giornale di Sicilia in 1915, while the first part was collected together with "Berecche e la guerra" in 1919. This story envisions an intergenerational connection not only to the Risorgimento but to the revolts of 1848 against the Bourbon monarchy. (10) After the announcement of Italian intervention, the narrator/protagonist/author, Pirandello, is worried to the point of being unable to write, presumably because his (actual, autobiographical) son, Stefano, will depart shortly to fight on the front lines (III.1143). (11) In the second half of this story, which Pirandello never republished during his life, the author receives a visit from his recently deceased mother, who comes bearing advice to help him in his time of worry and distress. She couches her lessons in a beautiful sequence of memories of her own parents and their patriotic resistance to the foreign occupation of Sicily (III. 1147-51). Her son, she explains, will have to endure and suffer, for it was he who wanted this war, even though he knew it would be his son who would have to fight in it. Here, the family metaphor from "Berecche"--Italy with her sons--is made into an autobiographical call to complete the revolutionary task of his forefathers' struggles against foreign rule.

The patriotic project of this form of nationalism is leagues away from the Futurists' theorization of Italian supremacy or their insistence on bloodletting as a form of national purification. (12) It is much closer to what the historian David Gilmour has recently described as an ongoing militarism that emerged from the unification movement and dominated the agendas of the Piedmont kings (263-64). In this reading, the eagerness for intervention, as well as the fervor for colonial projects in Africa, represents the continuation of a policy and mentality of militarism set in motion by a unification that proceeded militarily and over a short time span rather than as a gradual process of cultural cohesion (266-67). Yet in Pirandello's stories this effort to achieve cultural cohesion is decidedly not an effort to establish a self-sufficient, separate notion of the Italian people. Completing the process of emancipating "Italian" regions from the rule of foreigners (previously the Bourbons, now the Austrians) does not entail the kind of radical notion of Italian superiority that distinguishes other avant-garde writers and their version of modernist nationalism.

4. Distance vs. Immersion: Pirandello's Compassionate Modernism

Just as Pirandello's stories reconceive nationalism, shifting from rigidity and delineated self-sufficiency to a version of national identity rooted in a more open notion of the nation's spiritual progress, so too do they shift the notion of personal identity. From the collapse of a solipsistic notion of the self-contained subject emerges an impulse toward connection, an effort to understand, and a compassion for shared suffering. This shift is written into the particular mode of humorous double-vision that Pirandello deploys in his writing, and it is most visible in the contrast between two modes of mitigating the suffering of the war. While the stance of "philosophical" reason pushes characters toward an ideal of distanced detachment, a more compassionate alternative pulls them toward immersing themselves in the lives of others.

The humor in "Berecche e la guerra" goes beyond the obvious ways in which the protagonist is made comical, the ways in which his efforts to construct his own identity continually fail. In Pirandello's famous essay L'umorismo [On Humor] (1908) he defines his poetics by describing humor as a special type of mirror in which we see, all at once, two types of reflections of the same root image (126-27 [113]). That is, we simultaneously perceive the way in which something is ridiculous and laughable and also the inner reason for which it is serious and pathetic (in the non-pejorative sense of that term, as moving our pathos). The most famous image that he uses to develop that notion of humor is one of an old woman done up with so much makeup that she looks like an exotic parrot. The immediate reaction is laughter: she is not fooling anyone, and she looks positively ridiculous. But, at the same time, in humorous reflection we perceive a pathetic inner image of this woman, we understand her beneath that surface image and see how she is struggling to keep herself looking young. (Pirandello posits the possibility that she has a younger husband whose love she is desperately trying to keep alive.) This pathetic image is described as pushing the initial, surface reflection not simply further but deeper (127 [113]). Humorous reflection operates at both levels simultaneously. Berecche's blustering "reasoning," his brash certainty that reading an old book about riding horses would be enough to make him an advanced rider, and the scenes of family turmoil at home, all result in laughter; but, as Pirandello has pointed out in his author's note, this laughter is followed by a sense of "compassione" (III.572) ["compassion" (25)].

Humorous compassion involves moving from a distanced (surface) vision to a deeper insight into a character's psyche; likewise, Pirandello's depiction of the Great War utilizes both perspectives to highlight the ways in which the individual copes with the mass scale of suffering. While it is true that the story's humor involves an escape into detached and distant vision, what critics have described in general as a Pirandellian "philosophy of distance" (Guarna 13), I contend that the efficacy of this distancing effect is challenged by the narrative. The philosophy of distance alone results in a kind of solipsistic vision of the hunkered-down subject whose only defense against modernity is retreat into a philosophical stance of detachment. Pirandello's writing could thus seem to depict a universe empty of meaning, as Somigli has characterized it, putting it on par with the solipsistic selfanalysis of Svevo's Zeno. But that, it turns out, is only half of the story.

The philosophy of distance is an approach to life articulated by numerous Pirandellian characters, particularly in the series of meta-fictional short stories that culminates in "Colloquii coi personaggi." In these stories, male raisonneur characters adopt methods of extracting themselves from suffering by relativizing the importance of their experiences in the present. This approach is achieved through a combination of historical and spatial reductions--zooming out to make the present look historically insignificant (a mere blip in an endless flow of time) or spatially miniscule (a mere speck of dust on a speck of dust in the infinite void of space). The inventor of the phrase, "the philosophy of distance," is a character from "La tragedia di un personaggio" ["A Character's Tragedy"] (1911), Dr. Fileno, who has written a book of that name where he describes his method as looking through a reversed telescope and proudly touts the method's achievement of making him numb to the pain of his daughter's death. Similarly, in the first half of "Colloquii coi personaggi," an unnamed male raisonneur character advises Pirandello to detach himself from his stress over his son, Stefano, on the front lines and his concern over the patriotic justification of the war. He insists that the historical account of the war will change over time, that what seems just and necessary in one moment can seem unjust or not worth the effort in another, and that these struggles and their ideals are not what matter in life (In.1142). According to this view, the pressing commitments of today recede in the distance of time.

Likewise, in "Berecche" the protagonist repeatedly makes use of a distancing effect to allay his worries and calm his nerves. As his inner confusion and turmoil deepens, this method becomes more necessary, but also less convincing. One of the most interesting of these instances is a moment right after his son, Faustino, has returned from an interventionist demonstration where he was arrested. Berecche reflects on his daughter Margherita's inner faith and devotion, which he sees as something enviable and solid in contrast to his own flailing attempts to grasp onto the light of reason (III.593 [45]). It is in this context that Berecche suddenly retreats from the pain of his life, and the impossibility of resting peacefully in either his little light of reason or a childlike faith. He turns instead to a distanced view of the earth relative to the vast expanses of space: "La vede per gli spazii senza fine, come forse nessuna o appena forse qualcuna di quelle stelle la puo vedere, questa piccola Terra che va e va, senza un fine che si sappia, per quegli spazii di cui non si sa la fine" (III.595) ["He sees this little planet Earth in endless space, as perhaps none or maybe just one of those stars can see it, going on and on, for no known purpose, in that space whose end is unknown" (46)]. What follows is a very long reflection on the perspective that an intelligent being out in the stars would have on this little grain of sand and the supposedly important cares of its infinitesimal inhabitants. Following on that, Berecche contextualizes the experience of this moment relative to the historical time of all human events, seeing the present recede to a point. Human suffering, the deeply important moment we live through, will all be reduced to a speck; our lived experience might seem fundamental now, but it will fade in historical time and vanish in the distance of celestial spaces. (13)

But the philosophy of distance espoused by these raisonneur characters should not be confused with Pirandello's own outlook, for his perspective is, as we have said, double. In fact, in "La tragedia di un personaggio," the narrator explicitly rebukes Dr. Fileno for his failure to consistently apply his reverse telescope to his own life (I.824). In "Colloquii," the narrative goes a step further, implicitly contrasting the unnamed male character's perspective of distance against the very different perspective of a second, much more concrete character, the ghostly apparition of Pirandello's own, recently deceased mother. As we have already seen, his mother situates the suffering and struggle of World War I in the context of an intergenerational engagement in the many battles to forge an independent Italian identity. But unlike the cosmic view that relativizes the present struggle by positioning it as a blip in an overwhelmingly large historical panorama, here the connection to the past grounds the Great War as part of a continuous effort to which the author's community and family have been committed. Far from stripping the present struggle of its force, this perspective gives it even more significance precisely by reaffirming the conjunction of its social and deeply personal dimensions. (14)

That connection to the personal sphere is indicative of the other side of Pirandellian humor, its immersive impulse. In "Colloquii" this impulse emerges in the mother figure's insistence that one must use the senses to immerse oneself in the life of others. (15) Her final words, carried on the wind through Pirandello's garden, offer a clear alternative to the distanced, philosophical approach: "Guarda le cose anche con gli occhi di quelli che non le vedono piu! Ne avrai un rammarico, figlio, che te le rendera piu sacre e piu belle" (111.1153) ["Look at things also with the eyes of those who no longer see them! From this a sorrow will come, son, that will render them more sacred and more beautiful" (104)]. This immersive alternative to the distanced escape of the male character results in an ethos of compassion that, interestingly, is still a form of escape from the overwhelming suffering of the present. But instead of escaping by rendering the present meaningless (by rendering it laughable in its vanity), the immersive view offers a form of redemption for the suffering of the present in an appeal to the shared care that the narrator feels for those he loves. It is their way of seeing the world, colored by their own, personal, histories of struggle, that render the world more beautiful and also more sacred. (16)

This combination of the personal and the sacred in an immersive alternative to philosophical distance is likewise the closing note in "Berecche e la guerra." While Berecche's riding accident reveals his sudden patriotism to be laughable, it also opens him to a new experience of shared suffering. Instead of fighting in the war alongside his son, Faustino, he is plunged into the darkness of temporary blindness; but in this way he comes to a new understanding of his youngest daughter's experience of life. Moreover, his shared experience of her darkness becomes a metaphor that allows Berecche to overcome his philosophical distance, not by discarding the insights of his historical relativism but precisely by uniting those insights with a more immersed, compassionate view:

Forse non sa neppure Margheritina che li dirimpetto c'e un villino con una Madonnina a uno spigolo e un lampadino rosso acceso. Che e il mondo per lei? ecco, ora egli puo intenderlo bene. Bujo. Questo bujo. Tutto puo cambiare, fuori, diventare un altro, il mondo; un popolo sparire; ordinarsi altrimenti un intero continente; passare, anche vicina, una guerra, abbattere, distruggere ... Che importa? Bujo. Questo bujo. Per Margheritina, sempre questo bujo. E se domani, la in Francia, Faustino sara ucciso? Oh, allora anche per lui, senza piu quella benda, con gli occhi di nuovo aperti alla vista del mondo, sara tutto bujo, sempre, cosi, anche per lui; ma forse peggio, perche condannato a vederla ancora la vita, questa atrocissima vita degli uomini.

Torna a stringersi forte al petto la sua cechina sempre chiusa nel suo silenzio nero; mormora:

--E di questo, figliuola mia, di tutto questo, siano rese grazie alla Germania!

(III.621-22)

Perhaps Margheritina doesn't even know that opposite there's a little house with a little Madonna at one corner and a little red lamp burning. What does the world mean to her? Well, now he can well understand. Darkness. This darkness. Everything outside can change; the world can become something other; a people disappear; a whole continent be redrawn; a war pass close by, to overthrow and destroy ... What does it matter? Darkness. This darkness. For Margheritina, always this darkness. And if Faustino is killed, tomorrow, there in France? Oh, then, for him as well, even without that bandage, with his eyes open again to see the world, everything will be darkness, always, like this, for him as well; but perhaps worse because he will still be condemned to see life, this atrocious life of men.

He again hugs his little blind daughter, forever enclosed in her dark silence, to his chest; he murmurs:

"And for this, my little girl, for all this let thanks be given to Germany!"

(65-66)

Elements of Berecche's distanced perspective are present here: he sees the war as something foreign, invisible; its outcome can change, whole peoples could be destroyed, but in the darkness it makes no difference. However, in contrast to his earlier perspective, where that distance was a result of projecting himself outward into the stars to look down at the world, here it is achieved through a touching moment of unprecedented closeness with his child. What he understands well is that the same world seen through other eyes can be radically different; the things that seem so important, the things that obsess his reasoning and define his identity, can also be invisible, matters of indifference.

While that does not change the atrocity of war, it does change Berecche's priorities. He knows that what really matters for him is his son, Faustino; the world is not destined to remain dark, unless his son never comes home. Likewise, he can now say out loud to his daughter that Germany, far from the "ideal fatherland," is in fact to blame. What we witness in this scene is thus Berecche shifting from his identification with German culture--but not to a notion of Italian identity instead. What replaces his affective tie to Germany are the human relationships most important to his life. The ability to see through his daughter's eyes completes the disintegration of his former sense of identity by transferring his care from an abstract ideal to the people with whom he shares his life, and in whose suffering he also shares. (17)

5. Conclusion: Vulgarity and Spiritual Renewal

It is in light of this ethics of compassion that we should understand Pirandello's perspective on the war. The philosophical view of war's vanity does not nullify the motives that push nations to war. Though from a distance those motives might look different--reduced in significance, or cast in a more suspicious light by different historical circumstances and perspective--from within the lived experience of an individual or a nation, those motives still matter. In Berecche's case (as in Pirandello ' s), they matter for deeply personal reasons; they are motives rooted in care for loved ones and dedication to the historical task handed down by one's ancestors.

So what, then, should we make of the ironic final line that Berecche utters about the Germans? It is clear that he has flipped about-face and come to blame them for the war. But what is particularly relevant for us is the reasoning behind that blame. As Berecche expresses it earlier while he watches Faustino sleep in his bed, after he comes home late from a demonstration where he had been detained, all of the carnage and destruction being wrought is purposeless. Here he does not mean it in terms of the distanced, cosmic perspective, but rather in a very material sense: "No: questa non e una grande guerra; sara un macello grande; una grande guerra non e perche nessuna grande idealita la muove e la sostiene. Questa e guerra di mercato [...]" (III.598) ["No: this is not a great war; it'll be a great slaughter; but it isn't a great war because it isn't based on and sustained by any great ideals. This is a war about economic interests [...]" (48)]. The war is, on top of its inherent destructiveness, vulgar. Unlike the "noble" sentiments of his son, rooted in the Risorgimento ideals of a free Italy, Germany's attack is purely pragmatic, moved by materialism. We may be led to think, once again, of Emilio Gentile's definition of modernist nationalism as a movement seeking to reverse the nihilistic tendencies of modernity's culture of materialism. The spiritual cause of Italian freedom is raised in contradistinction to that impulse.

But unlike the more fervent Italian nationalists, Pirandello does not hesitate to turn that same accusation against Italy, as well. Thus in his final play, I giganti della montagna [The Mountain Giants] (1937), Pirandello scripts what is often read as a caricature of the Fascist party's cultural failures, their blindness and deafness to the communication of higher truth in artistic form. (18) Likewise, in other works his view is decidedly opposed to the tendencies of modern mechanization, in the film industry but also more broadly, which are seen to strip life of its vitality and reduce action to a commodity, a function of base materialism. (19) Fusing the spiritual impulse of modernist nationalism with the modernist traditionalist's sense of crisis as a loss of and yearning for past forms of order, Pirandello also draws from a deep sense of compassion that colors those modernist impulses in unusual ways.

As such we can say that Pirandello aligns with neither the Futurists nor Svevo. While his work is colored by aspects of modernist nationalism, he never embraces the more radical Futurist notions that coincide with their optimism their vision of war as a cleanser, a bloodbath to purify the nation. But the association of Pirandello's outlook with Svevo does not take into account the important differences in how their pessimism is expressed. This difference is encapsulated in the ending to Svevo's most famous novel, written in the wake of the Great War, La coscienza di Zeno [Zeno's Conscience] (1923). There, the narrator concludes his self-analysis by withdrawing to the cosmic level in a way that is reminiscent of Pirandello's philosophy of distance. But what he envisions is a future where the world's contagion, humanity, is wiped clean by humanity's own destructive impulses:

Forse traverso una catastrofe inaudita prodotta dagli ordigni ritorneremo alla salute. Quando i gas velenosi non basteranno piu, un uomo fatto come tutti gli altri, nel segreto di una stanza di questo mondo, inventera un esplosivo incomparabile, in confronto al quale gli esplosivi attualmente esistenti saranno considerati quali innocui giocattoli. Ed un altro uomo fatto anche lui come tutti gli altri, ma degli altri un po' piu ammalato, rubera tale esplosivo e s'arrampichera al centro della terra per porlo nel punto ove il suo effetto potra essere il massimo. Ci sara un'esplosione enorme che nessuno udra e la terra ritornata alla forma di nebulosa errera nei cieli priva di parassiti e di malattie.

(442)

(Perhaps, through an unheard-of catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. When poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness.)

(436-37)

Svevo's pessimistically comical explosion highlights a vision of human evolution as self-annihilating, speaking to the nihilistic pessimism often attributed to the modernist writer, and the related yearning for a return to order, even if that return here is figured as an apocalyptic end to humanity itself. In contrast, as we have seen, Pirandello's distanced vision of the world encompasses elements of war's destruction and human life's insignificance--a distanced vision, however, that is also brought back to earth, so to speak, by his commitment to an interpersonal ethical stance rooted in compassion. Pirandello's nationalism is different from the Futurists'. His traditionalism is different from Svevo's. In his combination of the two elements, Pirandello charts a modernist course that moves between the extreme points of an artificial optimism and a nihilistic pessimism. (20)

It would be interesting to examine the implications of Pirandello's view of the war for the way in which we understand the relationship between Pirandello's modernism and the high aestheticism of a decadent like D'Annunzio. (21) There is little doubt that key aspects of Pirandello's stance reflect those of his oftantagonist. Likewise, it would be fruitful to examine how the unique aspects of Pirandello's modernism place him in relation to German thinkers at the time, such as Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger. For the former, war emerged as a necessary experience in the constitution of a people from a phenomenological perspective; for the latter, as is well known, the ethics of care becomes a dominant aspect of his existentialist system. (22) The intersection of these modes of thought bears striking resemblance to aspects of Pirandello's conception of war and his response to it on an experimental level.

Though pursuing those connections falls outside the scope of my discussion here, it nevertheless seems fitting to conclude with a gesture outward--to link Pirandello's ideas to those developing and circulating in the German cultural sphere. For, as I hope to have made clear, his Italian nationalism is rooted in a longstanding tradition of openness to European thought in general and to German idealism and existentialism in particular. But more than that, it seems telling that in the wake of World War I, when Pirandello more fully embraced his careerdefining focus on the stage, it was frequently Germany that provided both inspiration and an understanding reception. If Berecche's cultural identification with German method could not withstand the crisis of war, that is not to say that Germany could not emerge as a preferable locus of cultural refinement again. (23) We could thus think of Pirandello's humor in conjunction with a characterization that the Austrian philosopher, Edmund Husserl, made in a letter to his student, Arnold Metzger, in the wake of the Great War:

[...] my writings, just as yours, are born out of need, out of an immense psychological need, out of a complete collapse in which the only hope is an entirely new life, a desperate, unyielding resolution to begin from the beginning and to go forth in radical honesty, come what may.

(360)

We might likewise think that Pirandello's willingness to tolerate ambivalence, his eagerness for multiple perspectives, and his compassionate humor reveal both a flexibility and a practical interest in reconstituting the shattered subject in a new light. His unmasking may reveal emptiness, but it also provides the grounds for a kind of honesty that allows him, and us, to carry forward. In this sense, his modernist deconstruction of the subject and its world is not, finally, a negative project.

St Hugh's College, University of Oxford

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(1) This reading shows how modernists like Svevo and Pirandello relate to what Harrison characterizes as a moment of "nihilistic idealism" across Europe in the years before World War I (8).

(2) Key elements of Poggioli's influential Theory of the Avant-Garde align with Kermode's picture of the anti-traditionalist elements of modernism. For Poggioli, the avant-garde is both an historical movement (associated with figures like Marinetti) and a spirit of futurity in aesthetic production, which he links to romanticism.

(3) In this sense my analysis of Pirandello agrees with the need, expressed by Somigli and Moroni, to develop a broader notion of modernism in the Italian context in order to account for its multifaceted nature (5).

(4) De Castris has argued that these novels should both be thought of as experimental, with Si gira ... (Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore) being the most advanced stage of Pirandello's formal innovations (124). For Dombroski, Pirandello's modernism reaches its novelistic maturity in Il fu Mattia Pascal (2003, 92).

(5) The connection between Pirandello's experimental forms, in narrative and theater, and modernism has been discussed by numerous critics. From the decay of modern Rome (Luperini 17, 25) to the disruption of linear narrative form (Gardair 53-55) to the link between Pirandello's theater and avant-garde procedures of deconstructing theatrical tradition (Verdone 50, Livio), the bibliography on this topic is expansive.

(6) Pirandello's contemporary, and sometimes antagonist, Benedetto Croce, likewise envisioned a continuity between the Renaissance, Risorgimento, and early-20th-century Italian culture; he believed that the Risorgimento represents the reawakening of the rational and religious spirit of the Renaissance (16). As Rubini has argued, this stance participates in a broad trend in Italian idealism, from Spaventa through Giovanni Gentile, of attempting to link Italian thought with the currents of European thought (18).

(7) This metaphor has been the subject of expansive critical attention. Here it is enough to mention in passing the most recent study to focus on this novel, which takes its title from that metaphor: Michael Syrimis's The Great Black Spider on its Knock-Kneed Tripod: Reflections of Cinema in Early Twentieth-Century Italy.

(8) The connection to spiritualism runs deep throughout Pirandello's corpus. One facet that has been much discussed is his recurring interest in the spiritualist school of Theosophy (Ragusa 22-30, Illiano 78, Costanzo). However, as Thomas notes, we should not rush to think that Pirandello was himself a Theosophist (77).

(9) It is essential to note the importance of the women patriots in this story, as their role is indicative of the changes in family structure and notions of national civic participation brought by the Risorgimento experience. As d'Amelia has shown, these shifting gender roles include an expanded significance for a woman's role as mother (as opposed to being a wife first and mother second), which gives rise to a whole discourse on motherhood with far-reaching implications for Italian modernity in the 20th century (115-16). The key role of the mother and her feminine perspective in "Colloquii" indicates a clear overlap with this discourse (Subialka 81-84). I am grateful to Ursula Fanning for reminding me of the relevance of d'Amelia's work to this particular topic.

(10) That intergenerational story was traced at great length in Pirandello's 1913 novel, I vecchi e i giovani [The Old and the Young], but it is made even more explicitly autobiographical in "Colloquii."

(11) "Colloquii coi personaggi" is also printed in volume 111 of Novelle per un anno and so is likewise cited parenthetically in the same form as quotations from "Berecche."

(12) Marinetti describes the regenerative power of bellicose bloodletting in many places. One succinct statement comes in a chapter of Democrazia futurista (1919) entitled "Il cittadino eroico, l'abolizione delle polizie e le scuole di coraggio" [translated from an earlier appearance of the text, as a speech to the Chamber of Labor in Naples on June 26, 1910, as "The Necessity and Beauty of Violence"]. There, he writes: "Quanto all'elogio della guerra, non costituisce certo, come si e preteso, una contradizione coi nostri ideali, ne implica un regresso verso le epoche barbare. A chi ci rivolge accuse simili, noi rispondiamo che alte questioni di salute e di igiene morale dovevano necessariamente esser risolte appunto per mezzo della guerra, prima di qualsiasi altra.--La vita della nazione non e forse simile a quella dell'individuo che combatte le infezioni e le pletore mediante la doccia o il salasso? Anche i popoli, affermiamo noi, devono seguire una costante igiene di eroismo, e concedersi gloriose docce di sangue! [...] / Noi crediamo che soltanto l'amore del pericolo e l'eroismo, possano purificare e rigenerare la nostra razza" (445-46, emphasis in original) ["As far as praising war is concerned, it certainly does not represent--as some have claimed--a contradiction in our ideals, nor does it imply any regression to a barbaric age. To anyone who makes that sort of accusation against us, our response is that important questions of health and of moral health ought, of necessity, to be resolved precisely by having recourse to war, in preference to all other solutions. Is not the life of the nation rather like that of the individual, who fights against infection and high blood pressure by means of the shower and the bloodletting? Peoples too, in our view, have to follow a constant, healthy regime of heroism, and indulge themselves with glorious bloodbaths! [...] / We believe that only a love of danger and heroism can purify and regenerate our nation" (61-62)].

(13) The same perspective is applied in the prototypically humorous Pirandellian work, his first modernist novel, Il fu Mattia Pascal, where the second preface, which he labels "philosophical," paints the same basic picture as a way of describing the decentered condition of humanity after the Copernican revolution (Tutti i romanzi I, 323-24). These articulations of human finitude and their pessimistic outlook for culture are clearly tied to the tradition of cultural pessimism that Dienstag has identified with the figure of Leopardi, as well as with the metaphysical outlook in philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (55). Guarna's analysis of the link between Pirandello and Leopardi makes much use of the instance of Copernicus as a figure of humorous reflection (59-62).

(14) Dashwood even asserts that Berecche is not a philosophical thinker at all, saying his effort to create a stable identity revolves around managing his social spaces and personal relationships (13-14). While I would not go this far, it is at least clear that characterizations like Guarna's, which treat the philosophical stance of distanced vision as the central facet of Pirandello's poetics/aesthetics (13, 19), surely exclude something essential, and more essentially human.

(15) The immersion of oneself into the perspective of another is especially fundamental to the poetics of Pirandello's mature theatrical work (Caponi-Doherty 76; Ferrucci 8). But a similar focus also emerges earlier, in the short stories and in his novels (Subialka 87). Caesar has argued that his interest in the actress's immersive multiplicity also corresponds to a problematic gender dynamic in Pirandello's outlook (245-47), though Bini suggests that this relationship is more complicated and, indeed, points to how the feminine, and specifically Marta Abba, Pirandello's lead actress and "muse," becomes a key locus of resistance to the masculine logic that Pirandello's views problematize (86).

(16) The idea that an immersion in life can render the world more sacred or charge it with some special value and meaning recurs in key places across Pirandello's corpus. The most obvious example may be the final scene of Pirandello's last novel, Uno, nessuno e centomila [One, No One, and A Hundred Thousand] (1926), which sees the protagonist give up his claim to stable identity in favor of a vitalistic, mystical embrace of the external world (Tutti i romanzi II, 902). Van den Bossche argues that this novel, together with an example such as Si gira ... as well as other modernist texts such as Svevo 's La coscienza di Zeno, exhibits the way in which vitalist philosophies inform the modernist impulse, which he relates to the emphasis modernism places on the unreliable narrator (248).

(17) In this sense I am in firm agreement with Mariani's assessment that "Pirandello's whole concept of umorismo affirms, in fact, that his art springs from a matrix that is deeply ethical, not merely preoccupied with questions of form" (12). De Castris also analyzes Si gira ... with an eye to the tension between compassion and "dramatic" objectivity (135).

(18) In an appendix that Marta Abba wrote to accompany the unfinished play in Pirandello's Maschere nude [NakedMasks], she describes his vision for the finale as a demonstration that the gold and power of the Giants is meaningless when confronted with the power of the actors' fantasy, their world of art (II.1371-2). Some critics such as Sciacca have seen the play's denunciation of political power as accidental--one manifestation of Pirandello's overarching unmasking of the vanity of human life (15-16). But as I have argued here, such views overstate the degree to which Pirandello's worldview corresponds to the most negative moments of his humorous double vision.

(19) As Dombroski has articulated it, Pirandello's negative view of modernity is rooted in a typically modernist outlook on the "impoverishment of human existence" wrought by cultural materialism (1992, 23).

(20) The characterization of Futurist optimism as "artificial" comes from Marinetti's own writings and has been analyzed in detail by Poggi, who focuses on how it is manufactured to coincide with Futurist political commitments (267-68) but also argues that this optimism "never fully repressed its negative counterpart" (xi). Marinetti's opposition to pessimism in all its forms is repeated throughout his writings. In an essay on "L'uomo moltiplicato e il Regno della macchina" ["Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine"] (published as part of Guerra sola igiene del mondo in 1915), for example, he asserts: "Il nostro franco ottimismo si oppone cosi, nettamente, al pessimismo di Schopenhauer, di quel filosofo amaro che tante volte ci porse il seducente revolver della filosofia per uccidere in noi la profonda nausea dell'Amore coll'A maiuscolo" (301) ["This frank optimism of ours is thus diametrically opposed to the pessimism of Schopenhauer, that bitter philosopher who so often proffered the tantalizing revolver of philosophy to kill off, in ourselves, the deepseated sickness of Love with a capital L" (88)].

(21) As Lewis has shown, D'Annunzio's position is deeply tied to a mode of modernism interested in actualizing a project of cultural renewal (2000, 210-11); likewise, Mirabile argues that D'Annunzio's work bridges our concepts of decadentism and modernism (19). The link Gieri describes between Pirandello and Baudelaire similarly could be used to explore how the aestheticism of decadence and the aestheticism of modernism relate.

(22) Scheler and Heidegger were both prominent German philosophers, though the former's fame has not weathered the test of time quite as well as the latter's. Both responded against the tradition of Kantian idealism, though in different modes. The contemporary philosopher Hans Blumenberg links them in his analysis of the concept of care (and Heidegger's use of the myth of Care crossing a river to build humans out of clay), focusing on their visions of war and the struggle against metaphysical despair (145-57). There is rich ground here for comparison with Pirandello.

(23) Here, of course, it is important to keep in mind that Pirandello did not live to see WWII. Pirandello's ongoing attachment to Germany, and rich German reception, has been discussed by multiple scholars (see Budel and De Michele). Pirandello's "exile" to Germany in response to disappointment with Mussolini is considered by daVinci Nichols and O'Keefe Bazzoni (61).