De-Provincializing Liolà: Pirandello, Futurism, and the Dialectics of Revision in Gramsci’s Cultural Writings

Abstract

This essay demonstrates how, in his Sicilian play Liolà, Luigi Pirandello reaches beyond the geographical and dialectal provenance of his chosen literary form. Pirandello’s de-provincializing intent unfolds against the cultural milieu of Italy’s bourgeois theater, with its standard morality stories and cosmopolitan ideas ungrounded in a national or regional identity. Antonio Gramsci read Pirandello as contributing to the de-provincialization of Italian culture, a description that Gramsci also applied positively to early Futurism as well as in anticipation of the national-popular culture. Pirandello’s thinking joins in with such progressive undertakings by illuminating provincialism as a national problem despite its being displaced onto the rural—especially the Southern—regions. Within Pirandello’s dialectic of the regional and the national (and even beyond), the paganism of Magna Grecia in Liolà emerges as a key example of how the play sublates, as opposed to merely negates, its Sicilianness. As a tradition that predates—and thus supersedes—the Roman Empire, this Southern tradition doubly serves as counterpoint to the long-standing cosmopolitan hegemony of Italy, giving voice once again to how the play gains its broader appeal through its situatedness.