«Ignorante come un pollo d’India». Pirandello, la battaglia dei libri e l’anatomia dell’umorismo

In Arte e scienza and L’umorismo (1908), Luigi Pirandello systematizes his discomfort with the critical methods of his time. Pirandello distorts the essayistic device from the inside, playing the man alone against all: in the double role of philologist and writer, he transforms his pages into a court where the other scholars are converted into characters (Alessandro D’Ancona, Benedetto Croce, Giorgio Arcoleo....). This dramatization of the argumentative space, along with the strong intrusion of authorial subjectivity, unbalances the presumed two academic treatises towards an alternative genre tradition. In this article I will suggest a possible typological genealogy, from Montaigne’s Essais to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books. In particular, by connecting the First Part of L’umorismo to the vein of anatomies, I will try to show how the melancholy-humorous instance played a modelling function towards the essay form used by Pirandello.