Paradoxa legis. Pirandello e la giustizia (in)civile nelle «Novelle per un anno»

Abstract

In some of Pirandello’s short stories there is an irremediable conflict between right and laws. If the former represents the world of nature, the absolute spontaneity of passions and moods linked to furor, as well as the universe of the peasant countryside, the latter is the expression of an urban civilization, based on order and objective facts. However we find that elements such as the crime of honor, adultery, social redemption, the right to work, relating to the cultural identity of the characters, clash with the boureacracy of the courts and the absurdity of official laws, which rather reflect bourgeois hierarchies and power circles that are difficut to dismantle. In investigating all this, the author, although he starts from forms and figures of the classical myth (including the Orestea of Aeschylus and Oedipus king of Sophocles), provocatively unmasks modern society full of rethoric and iniquity. The result of a chaotic and disintegrating world.