In his Preface to the 1925 version of Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello revealed that the six Characters at the heart of the play were his own creations, and that he was the author who abandoned them more than a decade earlier after failing to place them in an adequate story. But they took on a life of their own and began to haunt him while he worked on other projects. This process showed him that his creations were not entirely his own: rather, his characters became independent beings that lived in his imagination and gradually forced him to write out their “drama.” The drama he creates is, in fact, the story of this whole process, played out on stage. As the Characters seek their author and struggle for control (authorship) of the narrative they are piecing together with the Actors and Manager, the audience or reader learns that authorship is not about an otherworldly, ingenious process of creating something out of nothing. According to Pirandello, works of art and their meanings spring not from a single, directed consciousness but from a collaborative and often conflicted process of cobbling together stories and meaning.
The conflict over authorship in this play is fundamentally an argument about who controls the meaning of a text, and the Characters’ frustrations and attempts to get revenge on their author demonstrate how they gained their own consciousness and became independent of him. The Father announces that the Characters were “born of an author’s fantasy” but “denied life by him.” And yet they take life on their own and insist on staging their drama—that is, becoming the authors of their own destiny, controlling the meaning of their existence. The Son’s doubt shows that the Characters’ authorial impulses extend beyond seeking the life they were denied and challenges the other Characters’ assumption that Characters must fully express themselves: the Son refuses to act, and instead declares that he wants to “stand in for the will of our author” by grinding the drama to a halt and refusing to turn the family’s horrific story into a spectacle. The others’ desire for drama overpowers his reluctance, however, and the final tragedy plays itself out without ever turning into the clean theatrical ending the Manager desires. As the Characters repeatedly try to demonstrate their personalities and recount their experiences, the Manager has to shut them down over and over because they threaten to throw the rehearsal (and his future play) out of balance. From the beginning, even before the Characters’ arrival, the Manager is aware of his predicament: referencing the other Pirandello play that his troupe is supposedly rehearsing, he declares that “the author plays the fool with us all.”
While the Characters and Manager attempt to take over the role of the author, their efforts inevitably fail, much like the author’s initial attempt to control and put an end to his Characters. In the end, although the drama the Manager imagines fails to materialize and the curtain falls after an abrupt and unexplained tragedy, the play complicates straightforward notions of unitary authorship. Instead, it argues that authorship—the creation of a narrative and determination of its meaning—is a contested and collaborative process.
The Characters explicitly ask the Manager to be their author: he is the most obvious author-figure in the play because he directs how the Characters divulge their drama and how the action unfolds throughout the play, for instance by literally calling for the “curtain” that ends the Second Act. In fact, he does not mean to lower the curtain, but the Mechanist misinterprets him and does so, which suggests that the Manager’s power over the play does not mean the play always obeys him—he is an author but without complete authorial control. The Step-Daughter and Father complicate this by also seeking to become authors: the Step-Daughter wants to control the stage decorations to make them as realistic as possible and the Father wants to determine the true philosophical meaning of events. Indeed, the other Characters accuse the Father of colluding backstage with the Manager to twist the story to his favor. Everyone ignores the Father’s philosophical speeches, however, and the Manager refuses to heed the Step-Daughter’s calls for detailed changes to the scenery because it is simply impossible given the constraints of the theater. In contrast to the messiness of the Characters’ reality, the Manager’s job is to make reality suitable for the theater, to “combine and group up all of the facts in one simultaneous, close-knit, action.” Of course, Pirandello inverts this traditional rule: whereas “authors, as a rule, hide the labor of their creations” (according to the Father), in this play Pirandello foregrounds it.
Beyond merely raising the question of what a character really is and how they relate to the author who creates but then loses control over them, Pirandello’s play shows that authorship is actually a complex process out of which a work emerges with no clear or singular impetus. In a sense, the Manager and Father are both reflections of Pirandello: the former of his attempts to create meaning as an author, and the latter of his own doubts about his existence and decisions. Characters are all reflections of and yet independent of an author; as the Manager puts it, the author is “never satisfied!” no matter how well their characters (and actors) play their parts. If there is any agent behind the process of creation, in which an author molds and consults with their own characters, it is the “Demon of Experiment”—the diabolically productive conflict among Characters each trying to express their truth, Actors who must interpret them, and the Manager who must keep them in balance and move the story forward. In a way, the entire play is a writer or dramatist’s internal monologue as they work out the tensions between the whims of their characters and the necessity to create a coherent work.
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Authorship and Meaning Quotes in Six Characters in Search of an Author
Ridiculous? Ridiculous? Is it my fault if France won’t send us any more good comedies, and we are reduced to putting on Pirandello’s works, where nobody understands anything, and where the author plays the fool with us all?
“The empty form of reason without the fullness of instinct, which is blind.”—You stand for reason, your wife is instinct. It’s a mixing up of the parts, according to which you who act your own part become the puppet of yourself. Do you understand?
The FATHER (coming forward a little, followed by the others who seem embarrassed). As a manner of fact… we have come here in search of an author…
The MANAGER (half angry, half amazed). An author? What author?
The FATHER. Any author, sir.
The MANAGER. But there’s no author here.
No, excuse me, I meant it for you, sir, who were crying out that you had no time to lose with madmen, while no one better than yourself knows that nature uses the instrument of human fantasy in order to pursue her high creative purpose.
The author who created us alive no longer wished, or was no longer able, materially to put us into a work of art. And this was a real crime, sir; because he who has had the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. He cannot die. The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die. And to live for ever, it does not need to have extraordinary gifts or to be able to work wonders. Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Don Abbondio? Yet they live eternally because—live germs as they were—they had the fortune to find a fecundating matrix, a fantasy which could raise and nourish them: make them live for ever!
And they want to put it on the stage! If there was at least a reason for it! He thinks he has got at the meaning of it all. Just as if each one of us in every circumstance of life couldn’t find his own explanation of it! (Pauses.) He complains he was discovered in a place where he ought not to have been seen, in a moment of his life which ought to have remained hidden and kept out of the reach of that convention which he has to maintain for other people. And what about my case? Haven’t I had to reveal what no son ought ever to reveal: how father and mother live and are man and wife for themselves quite apart from that idea of father and mother which we give them?
Excuse me, all of you! Why are you so anxious to destroy in the name of a vulgar, commonplace sense of truth, this reality which comes to birth attracted and formed by the magic of the stage itself, which has indeed more right to live here than you, since it is much truer than you—if you don’t mind my saying so? Which is the actress among you who is to play Madame Pace? Well, here is Madame Pace herself. And you will allow, I fancy, that the actress who acts her will be less true than this woman here, who is herself in person. You see my daughter recognized her and went over to her at once. Now you’re going to witness the scene!
I never could stand rehearsing with the author present. He’s never satisfied!
Acting is our business here. Truth up to a certain point, but no further.
On the stage you can’t have a character becoming too prominent and overshadowing all the others. The thing is to pack them all into a neat little framework and then act what is actable. I am aware of the fact that everyone has his own interior life which he wants very much to put forward. But the difficulty lies in this fact: to set out just so much as is necessary for the stage, taking the other characters into consideration, and at the same time hint at the unrevealed interior life of each. I am willing to admit, my dear young lady, that from your point of view it would be a fine idea if each character couldtell the public all his troubles in a nice monologue or a regular one hour lecture (good humoredly). You must restrain yourself, my dear, and in our own interest, too; because this fury of yours, this exaggerated disgust you show, may make a bad impression, you know. After you have confessed to me that there were others before him at Madame Pace’s and more than once…
The illusion! For Heaven’s sake, don’t say illusion. Please don’t use that word, which is particularly painful for us.
The FATHER. Can you tell me who you are?
The MANAGER (perplexed, half smiling). What? Who am I? I am myself.
The FATHER. And if I were to tell you that that isn’t true, because you are I…?
If you think of all those illusions that mean nothing to you now, of all those things which don’t even seem to you to exist any more, while once they were for you, don’t you feel that—I won’t say these boards—but the very earth under your feet is sinking away from you when you reflect that in the same way this you as you feel it today—all this present reality of yours—is fated to seem a mere illusion to you tomorrow?
Authors, as a rule, hide the labour of their creations. When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him; and he has to will them the way they will themselves—for there’s trouble if he doesn’t. When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.
