Pirandello's Preface to "Six Characters"

Our August discussion was on Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author."

Bust of Pirandello in Palermo.

Pirandello published a preface to his play in 1925, a few years after it was first produced.  I read the following excerpt at the end of our meeting, because I thought it shed light on where he was coming from:

To me it was never enough to present a man or a woman and what is special and characteristic about them simply for the the pleasure of presenting them; to narrate a particular affair, lively or sad, simply for the pleasure of narrating it; to describe a landscape simply for the pleasure of describing it.

There are some writers (and not a few) who do feel this pleasure and, satisfied, ask no more.  They are, to speak more precisely, historical writers.

But there are others who, beyond such pleasure, feel a more profound spiritual need on whose account they admit only figures, affairs, landscapes which have been soaked, so to speak, in a particular sense of life, and acquire from it a universal value.  These are, more precisely, philosophical writers.

I have the misfortune to belong to the last.*

*As translated by Eric Bentley