Varieties of consciousness in Pirandello's Henry IV
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2001 by Fairchild, Terry
Monsieur Berenger, the guileless hero of Eugene Ionesco's A Stroll in the Air, spies along the English waterside one afternoon a visitor from the anti-world. Unruffled by this unusual phenomenon, he considers the stranger's origins: "There's not just one Anti-World. There are several and ... they can all coexist in the same space" (47). Daughter Marthe realizes her father is accounting for "a multiple universe," a metaphysical concern that haunts the majority of Luigi Pirandello's plays as well, including Henry IV (Enrico IV). What differentiates Pirandello from Ionesco is that the earlier playwright locates his multiplicities not externally but internally-within human consciousness.
Aesthetic thought in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth had, by Pirandello's time, taken a curious turn. Breaking from the so-called......
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Approximate Pages: 15 (260 words per double-spaced page) |