Non si sa come, ovvero il passaggio all'atto come corto circuito della narrazione

The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which Luigi Pirandello depicts crime, its origins and its meanings. To this end, a Pirandello’s drama, “Non si sa come”, composed by the author in the summer of 1934, is analysed, describing the path that can lead, via the fall of self-narrative competence, to destroy himself and / or the other. Count Romeo Daddi, although in love with his wife Bice, has betrayed her with Geneva, his friend and childhood companion Giorgio Vanzi’s wife. Such behaviour, which Pirandello defines as innocent, because it has not been consciously desired by the protagonists, recalls to the Count another transgression, a crime, defined by himself as innocent as the former: the killing of a young boy for a trivial reason. The following idea that his wife Bice, such as Geneva, can unwittingly betray or have betrayed him with Nicholas Respi, another family friend, and the torment that goes with it, in the growing frenzy of his words, leads all to a tragic end: the killing of Romeo by Giorgio. This story, from the point of view of criminological narratology, becomes an explanatory model of impulsive crimes, since the genesis and dynamics of criminal behavior described remand to a primordial mode of psychic functioning, expressed also in selfcentered, narcissistic narratives, strictly associated with the acting-out. In such primitive communicative dimension, the dialectics between reason and emotion, and the inter-subjective constitution of the “other” get lost: in the end, it all boils down to a total chaos of emotions, in which it is always destructivity that prevails. Key words: acting-out, impulsive crime, Pirandello, narratology, fall of self-narrative