Naked Masks [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION A generation ago there was, notoriously, a literature of ideas. Most of it, like most literature of all movements, was bad; and fashion, which elevates the bad to the level of the good, subsequently turns its back on bad and good alike. Only if there is a body of readers interested in merit as such can anything like justice be done. Such readers will rescue the better literature of ideas from beneath the fashionable ideas about it. Even authors like Ibsen and Shaw, who are by no means unread, need rescuing from ideas about their ideas. How much the more so Pirandello, who is suffering fashionable rejection without ever having had—outside Italy—widespread fashionable acceptance. I have met persons who rejected him because of his "tiresome ideas" without being able to give me even their own version of what these ideas are. Pirandello needs rescuing from the very lack of ideas about his ideas. It is true that all too much of Pirandello, and Pirandello criticism, remains untranslated. The untranslated essay L'Umorismo ("Humor") contains all his principal ideas (especially its Second Part). The untranslated later plays are especially full of theory. The untranslated essays of Adriano Tilgher (especially "II Teatro di Luigi Pirandello" in Studi sul Teatro Contemporaneo) are the standard exposition from the point of view of the famous ideas. However, I submit that the ideas offer no real difficulty.