SOURCE: "A Remark on Silence and Listening," in Oral Tradition, Vol. 2, No. 1, January, 1987, pp. 288-95.

In the following excerpt, Valesio closely examines the short story "Canta l'epistola."

One of the least known among the many short stories that Luigi Pirandello published in literary magazines around the turn of the century and started issuing in book-length collections from 1901 on is the one titled "Canta l'Epistola" ("He-who-intones-the-Epistle"), a phrase which is the nickname of the defrocked seminarian who is the hero of the little story.

Tommasino, who because of his change of heart has become an object of scorn and ridicule for his father and for the other inhabitants of his village, leads a chaste and solitary life, a life for which the term "contemplation" could be used—with the specification, however, that Tommasino's experience is not a systematically religious one (he has left organized faith), but an asystematic way...