Even ideas traverse an identical path, as entire quotations are transferred from genre to genre. For Pirandello, narrative is the raison d'être behind dramatic production. Although from his adolescent years the theater and its magical atmosphere entranced him, for most of his life he considered the play an insignificant literary genre, insofar as it betrays its creator. According to Pirandello, the writer is the maker of the literary text, which must remain as it was conceived and written--eternally unchanged. For this reason, he preferred narrative.
Pirandello began his writing career at the turn of the century, a time of philosophical and scientific breakthroughs. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Henri Louis Bergson had helped dismantle the Aristotelian and Hegelian trust in reason, fixed truths, and stable systems, while Sigmund Freud had opened the door to the unconscious and Albert Einstein was close to unleashing his theory of relativity. As Mattia Pascal in Pirandello's Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904; translated as The Late Mattia Pascal, 1923) paradoxically remarks, the unveiling of man's anthropocentric fallacy destroyed his illusion of being the center of the universe and brought about his misery. The collapse of anthropocentric ways of thinking arguably brought about the end of the traditional novel and affirmed its essential impossibility no less for Pirandello than for James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Robert Musil.
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