Fearful Symmetries: Pirandello’s Tiger and the Resistance to Metaphor

Abstract

This chapter explores the exorbitant potential of animals to disrupt the representational frameworks into which they are placed, as exemplified by Luigi Pirandello’s 1915 novel Si gira! (Shoot!), which revolves around the on-screen killing of a tiger for a big-budget colonial adventure movie. This tiger serves as the focal point for Pirandello’s examination of the antinomies of reality and artifice, and yet the specific place and function of animality for his poetics has so far gone largely unnoticed. In this chapter I read Pirandello’s tiger in relation to Akira Lippit’s claim that “animals resist metaphorization.” This resistance, arising from an irreducible discrepancy between the material and the semiotic—what the animal is and what the animal means—is, I argue, a central feature of zoopoetics.