What emerges is a humoristic perspective, which perhaps allows for a kind of comfort by enabling us to evade our hardships in a provisional way. By fictionalizing the instability of human existence and the overwhelming forces of destiny, the author shows his readers how we are prompted to develop a personal strategy of self-preservation in life. “Tap Tap” belongs to a group of stories written before 1910 in which Pirandello reworks motifs of unexpected suffering into a literary trope. The author’s compassion is evident in his detailed descriptions, as is his determination to explore the human struggle to accept the twists of fate and endure the hardships of life.
The story demonstrates that Pirandello was not just well-versed in the neuropsychiatric environment of his time (of which he had personal experience on account of his wife’s psychological condition), but also keenly attentive to how those who suffer from illnesses of both body and mind are altered, and how those who are not affected respond to their transformed state.
If Beniamino Lenzi must deal with a dragging foot and Cristoforo Golisch with the aphasia that made him speak German and forget Italian, the common ground for the two friends is their ability to unconsciously come to terms with the illness that upset their lives. As in other short stories including “The Fly” (“La mosca,” 1904) and “Death Is Upon Him” (“La morte addosso,” 1908), as well as plays like Think It Over, Giacomino! ( Pensaci, Giacomino!, 1916), illness here takes the form of an impairing stroke, which affects two friends in different ways and times. These reflections fit into the broader tendency in Pirandello’s work to examine existential crises and the ways in which human beings adapt and transform, even against their own intentions or stated beliefs and desires. Originally published in the literary journal Il Marzocco in 1906, “Tap Tap” (“La toccatina”) was then collected into the volume Naked Life ( La vita nuda Milan: Treves, 1910), which was later made into the second Collection of Stories for a Year ( Novelle per un anno), Naked Life ( La vita nuda), in the Bemporad edition (Florence, 1922).Įxploring one of the most recurrent themes in Stories for a Year, “Tap Tap” addresses the unpredictability of life by exploring the paradoxical aspects of disease and how it affects individual behavior and emotions. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, 2022. “Tap Tap” (“La toccatina”) Translated by Marella Feltrin-Morris
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