Alienatio mentis, Humor, Contemplation. Luigi Pirandello and the Poetics of Disinterest

With the novel Si gira... (1916), later revised as Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (1925), Luigi Pirandello wrote a fundamental chapter of twentieth-century Italian literature on alienation. Nevertheless, Serafino’s alienation also assumes a positive value: it mimics the contemplative activity of the artist, who empties his conscience to let the characters who inhabit it speak. In fact, since the Middle Ages, alienation and contemplation have gone hand in hand, under the sign of that melancholy which also represents the starting point of Pirandello’s essay L’umorismo (1908). This article aims to reconsider Si gira… in the light of the moral theory of Alfred Fouillée, an important source of Pirandello that has only recently been brought to light. In his essay on the Fondemens psychologiques et métaphysiques de l’idée morale (1889), the French philosopher postulated the necessity of placing human relationships on the plane of disinterest, in order to welcome others into us by seeing them as they see themselves, feeling them as they feel themselves, willing them as they will themselves. This well-known refrain belongs to Fouillée and was adopted by Pirandello as an aesthetic principle, to the point of suggesting to him a particular form of alienation: not passive, but receptive and reactive; not estranged, but capable of grasping, through the tools of art, the profound truths of human existence.