temporarily erected platform next door looked in through the
window to see a man sitting at his desk rolling his eyes and
gesticulating wildly, all the while talking to himself. Thinking
him insane, or possibly possessed by the devil, they gathered
around and watched until, the period of writing over, an embar-
rassed Pirandello became aware for the first time of the audi-
ence so close to hand.

What these vignettes reveal is that Pirandello's propensity for
acting is not reserved for his theatre alone, nor is it the case that
he only acts out parts that have first been written down. The two
episodes described by Arnaldo Frateili refer to different stages
in the creative process: in the first Pirandello is reading aloud
from his manuscript and so he is acting out a part that is already
written. What is interesting here is that he is translating into
performance a monologue that is not destined to be a play, but
a novel. In the second episode the builders are watching an
earlier stage in the creative process, where the author is at work
writing, bringing into existence new characters. What such de-
scriptions reveal to us is that Pirandello wrote from within the
character, he did not adopt a position outside his creation, and
so intense was the relationship between author and character
that it brought down the barriers between the written and the
spoken word. Once a literary character is embodied, he ex-
presses himself in speech. Speech implies presence. To the
onlooker Pirandello appears, consciously or otherwise, to be
acting, while the process of creative composition is played out in
gestures and in words. Characters speak aloud through his
voice, and their presence is registered in the involuntary move-
ments of his face and body. It is, in the words of the builders
peering in through the window, as if he were 'possessed', as
though the writer has become the medium through which the
character can materialize and find expression. The primacy of
the fictional character is the touchstone of all Pirandello's
creative and theoretical writings--what has its origins in un-
conscious processes becomes a theoretically sophisticated
philosophy of literature. What for Frateili was essentially a psy-
chological trait, part of the singularity of the man, becomes for
Pirandello the motivating force behind his fictions and his
literary aesthetics.

Born in 1867 in a hamlet called Caos, in a remote corner

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