Pirandello and the Waiting Stage of the Absurd (With Some

Observations on a New "Critical Language")

Anne Paolucci

Modern Drama, Volume 23, Number 2, Summer 1980, pp. 102-111 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

DOI: [Link]

For additional information about this article

[Link]

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 Pirandello and the Waiting Stage of the
Absurd (With Some Observations on a
New "Critical Language")
ANNE PAOLUCCI

In his Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus defines the feeling that in our time has
replaced the security of a "world that can be explained by reasoning, however
faulty," as the result of "the divorce between man and his life, the actor and his
setting. " Lifted from his familiar moorings, "man feels a stranger. His is an
irremediable exile .... " This existential condition is what "truly constitutes the
feeling of Absurdity.'" Almost four decades have gone by since Camus wrote
these words; literature has exploded many myths and has found new fertile
ground since his time; and it is hardly surprising that French playwrights should
have proved the most consistent in exploring what Camus had recognized as the
prevailing mood of our century. Theater of the Absurd owes a great deal to
Camus~ but the man who restructured the modern stage for a corrosive scrutiny
of a world in which we are no longer at home and who provided the sustained
dramatic energy for the task was Pirandello. It was Pirandello who first shifted
the dramatic sights to the fragmented internal world of self, forging a new
language for the purpose, a new stage. Without him, Theater of the Absurd
might not have corne into being; certainly it would have taken a very different
direction. His influence on Sartre, Beckett, raneseD, Pinter, Albee, Wilder,
Gelber, Anouilh, Giraudoux, O'Neill, and Camus himself makes him without a
doubt "the most seminal dramatist of our time ."2
Whatever the extent of his existential commitment (certainly not as obvious
as Beckett's or as strident as !onesco's), Pirandello effected profound organic
changes in the theater, changes that divorced the actor from the conventional
stage and prepared him for the dramatic dialectic which was to become the
insistent burden of the contemporary theater. Pirandello dramatized the very act
of creation, reminding us that it is not an easy birth.
How did he do it?
First: he restored to the stage its central importancc as the empty potency of
the dramatic experience. He saw the stage as something to be shaped anew with
each new play, like a poem that creates its special language, its unique
 Pirandello and the Absurd 103

configuration , as it evolves. With this vision of the function of the stage,

Pirandello restored to theater the old magic of "two boards and a passion." The
commitment was not explicit at the outset; but by 1921 , with Six Characters in
Search of an Author, a new theater in fact had been perfected. And , in
retrospect, we can see clear indications of what is to corne as early as Liaid
(1916), in which Pirandello sweeps away with a bold reversal of moral polar-
ities the conventions of a threadbare system of fossilized social responsibility
and unexamined religious absolutes. The rigorous definitions of his own Sici-
lian society are already transfonned in that early masterpiece into an implicit
question that takes us to the threshold of an existential experience. Against a
familiar background we witness a transvaluation of values, a destructive com-
mentaty on a society which stifles individual life. The result is not social
commentary, however, but a stripping of conventional masks down to a
vulnerable core. What we have is the beginning of that dissolution of character
which is the signet mark of Pirandello's dramatic art. Within five years,
Pirandello gives us his fullest statement of the conversion of the stage for that
purpcse in his "theater plays"; shifting relationships, juxtaposition of roles and
masks, the rich dialectic which destroys the unexamined life and prepares us for
internal conversion through the will, come together in a totally new but already
perfected dramatic medium.
The "theater plays" are a drastic departure from all that has come before. In
them the audience itself becomes a "mask ," a dramatis persona in the making .
All three reach down into the darkness beyond the footlights , expanding and
contracting and giving back like a distorted mirror in each case shifting
reflections from unfamiliar angles. In these plays the audience becomes an actor
outside his role, just as the theater itself is the symbol of the empty potency of
the stage. In this characteristic movement from potency to act, Pirandello
destroys the opposition between the "reality" of life and the "illusion" of the
stage; each becomes , in tum, the image and the reflection of the other in a
continuous spiraling toward identity.
Which takes us to a second point : the content of the Pirandellian theater is a
process, and that process is the dissolution of character on stage. And, as a
corollary: both this content and the restructured stage come into being together,
as one organic whole.
Pirandello recognized in the spiraling toward definition the energizing con-
tent for his restructured stage, the core of the dramatic experience. In insisting
on the traumatic dissolution of character as the central dramatic event, he forces
all of us into an actor-audience role, on and off stage. We are drawn into the
confrontation with self - that moment in all of us (and in all of us as potential or
real audience) when we see our external image and recognize the dichotomy
that results in the positing of that image. Alone , in front of a mirror, Laudisi in
Right You Are! dramatizes that moment of separation in the dialectic of
personality. And Pirandello keeps recalling that separation to the very end of
the play. Laudisi remains a "split" personality , a constant tenn; he is, through-
104

out, the corrosive skeptic who destroys the illusion of reality (and serves in that
sense a very positive function) but never overcomes that skeptical moment (and
in that sense is the middle term of negation in the dramatic assertion of will) . He
is not (as some have insisted) Pirandello's own spokesman for an absolute
philosophy of moral and epistemological relativity. For Laudisi, as for most of
the others in the play, the veiled woman is nothing more than an "abortive" fact;
only Panza and Signora Frola are able to accept her, to will her into a
paradoxical but not contradictory identity. We can begin to grasp Laudisi' s true
function as a dramatic catalyst and Pirandello 's dramatic idiom as an
oscillation between extremes when we look closely at the "theater plays."
In Six Characters ill Search olan Author, Pirandello gives us his first explicit
cue as to the function of the "mask" in his theater and the kinds of adjustments
we as audience, as potential "masks," must make to function actively in the
dramatic exchange. From this moment on, the audience will never again be
excused from contributing to the process of disintegrated/reconstituted self.
Through a sequence that is at first simple awareness or consciousness (corre-
sponding to the recognition of an external unexamined reality), then self-
awareness or self-consciousness (the setting up of the essential dichotomy,
distance between subject and object, between external mask and internal self) ,
and finally the resolution of that oscillation in the willful assertion of the
reconstituted personality , Pirandello dramatizes the creation of identity on
stage. We zigzag to the center of being and move through paradoxes into what is
not organic personality but its fragmented moments of existence. The Pirandel-
lian dialectic is not a simple opposition leading to statement but a kaleidoscopic
suggestion of purpose and consistency. The Pirandellian protagonist is a
stratification of attitudes, emotions , states of being, often contradictory inten-
tions, not a consistent whole . Between his appearance on stage and his retreat
from it, he himself, his fellow protagonists on stage, and - most important - the
activated audience must all unlearn what was taken for granted and trace the
internal pattern in that external fragmented mosaic .
Characteristically, these plays - like so many others in the Pirandellian
repertory - end abruptly; the protagonists rush off into the darkness, into
oblivion, into the hostile world from which they have (for a brief moment)
sought refuge. Endings do not correspond to recognizable resolutions in Piran-
della's plays. In the "theater plays," action comes to a standstill as the stage
business is intenupted in each case and spills over into a larger dimension . The
characters who invade the Pirandellian stage also invade (by implicit extension
if not directly) the theater itself and our own individual consciousness, the stage
in us all, where we reject rote-like acceptance and take on our indi vidual
Socratic roles.
The Pirandellian audience ingeneral, but particularly the potential or actual
audience of the "theater plays," may best be described as the first moment of
psychological awareness analogous to the posited external reality which is the
point of departure for so many of the Pirandellian plays and protagonists. No
 Pirandello and the Absurd 105

one, on or off stage, is spared the trauma of definition. In Six Characters, where
the setting includes the empty theater waiting for the perfected stage to bring it
to life, the actors-in-rehearsal are also the potential audience waiting to be
absorbed into the dramatic event. They fail; the dramatic creation is stillborn.
The actors outside their parts, like the audience not yet present in the physical
theater (but very much present, needless to say, in the dramatization of all
this!), strive vainly for definition; the intruders with their "real-life drama"
remain splendidly isolated, unable to translate their vital life into artistic terms,
into a script, into a "finished" drama. The latter cannot be contained on any
stage; just as the actors-in-rehearsal - from the opposite side - are over-
whelmed by the stage. Six Characters is marvelously instructive in its insis-
tence on the unresolved dramatic equation. Through the actors-in-rehearsal, the
potential of the empty theater begins to emerge .
Each ill His Own Way - the second of the "theater plays" - carries the
unresolved contradiction of Six Characters into a second, more complex phase .
The physical stage itself becomes a double image, a superimposition: actors
perform before an audience , other actors intenupt the intermissions (part of the
script, of course) to enact moments of the "real-life drama" which inspired the
"stage play." A third set of actors, the "critics," create a drama of their own with
widely divergent opinions about the play (obviously Pirandello's ironic revenge
against the real critics who would not accept his new theater or could not explain
it) . These three distinct actions - the inner play (furthest removed in Pirandel-
lo's telescoping technique), the seemingly arbitrary moments of the "real-life
drama," and the drama of the critics (a whole new set of contradictions) -
stretch the dramatic event into the real theater, into the contemporary audience.
As in Six Characters, the focu s keeps shifting; but here the complications are
greater. Therejs an inner and outer audience, actors imitating life (but never
reaching the end of their "play"), actors providing the "real-life" ending (which
is never seen on the inner stage), critics commenting on both the inner and outer
actions, the insistence on underscoring unfinished dramatic business by having
the stage-actors refuse to finish the inner play and having the "real-life" actors
finally come together, reverse their decisions, and rush off together into the
night. In its intriguing parallels and intersecting lines of action, Each in His
OWIl Way is as exciting as Eisenstein's film superimpositions. 3 Once again we
have an open-ended play, a difficult dramatic birth. Life and art come together
in kaleidoscopic configurations; there are no simple recognizable patterns.
In the third of the "theater plays" - Tonight We Improvise - we have the
closest approximation to what might be called the "perfect" performance. This
play, like the other two which preceded it, is still abortive, open-ended, a series
of fragmented impressions; it too proves too large for the formal stage; but
something new has been introduced. The "stage" audience and the audience in
the actual theater are the same; the "stage" play and the "real-life" drama are
superimposed on the one stage; and, for a moment, the inner and outer play
come into sharp focus.
106 ANNE PAOLUCCI

As in the other two plays, the stage action keeps dissolving before our eyes.
Dramatic formalities are shattered again and again as actors move in and out of
their roles, as they force the audience to take sides in their quarrels , as they
"block" them into contradictory postures. The spectators are taken in by the
dispute in the wings between the actors and the "director"; they accept the delay
and wait patiently for the play to begin; they are jolted out of the dramatic
illusion when the actors rush to the aid of their leading lady, who has collapsed;
they assume a conspiratorial role as the actors appeal to them and explain, at the
end, that all they really need is the script, never mind the director!
For a brief moment, Mommina - the leading lady of the stage play -
succeeds in doing what the stage-actors in Six Characters and Each ill His Own
Way had tried to do: she is transformed into her mask, becomes her role, and
overcomes the dichotomy between the "illusion" of acting and the "reality" of
life. It is the only moment of its kind in all three "theater plays," the one Hawless
superimposition, the one sharply focused idelllity. Mommina's part calls for her
to die from frustration and despair; the actress playing the part actually faints ;
her fellow actors, in consternation, rush to her side. Their amazement and
confusion become the amazement and confusion of the theater audience as
well. For, by this time, Pirandello has conditioned us to the demands of
role-playing; the stage-actors moving into and out of their formal play have
forced us to assume a variety of masks ourselves.
The "theater plays" are a progressive sequence which contains , already
perfected , most of the characteristics we have come to associate with Theater of
the Absurd: the telescoping of time, which brings together psychologically
related moments and discards the notion of linear or causal relationship; the
splintering of character into attitudes, refracted images , contradictory inten-
tions; the dissolution of the traditional mask into voices that are projections of
the single lyric voice of the dramatist himself;4 the transformation of language
into an irritant (not yet Ionesco's intentional cacophony of verbal deadwood or
Beckett's reductio ad absurdum of philosophic discourse) ; the insistence on an
open-ended structure (it will become static in Ionesco, circular in Beckett); the
shattering of uncritical assertion and belief; the erosion of all that is external
through an inexorable dialectic - all the dramatic pyrotechnics that have proved
efficacious in jolting us out of our complacency. Having found his stride and
commitment in these three plays, Pirandello will continue to explore the
journey into the interior as both artistic definition and the personal dialectic of
freedom. We are all masks . The journey into the self is more than theater.
And in acknowledging the expanding and contracting stage, the unfinished
dramatic business in each of these plays (all are, in a sense, "rehearsals"), the
audience must finally accept this inescapable conclusion: the imitatioll of life on
stage, in art, is not imperfect but impossible.
In his later plays, Pirandello abandons the dichotomy between life and art and
sets up new correspondences in which the stage is the moment of conversion in
us all and the drama consists of the struggle of the soul to free itself from the
 Pirandello and the Absurd 107

formal postures and masks imposed on it from outside. Two exceptions are
worth noting: The Mountain Giants (the last ofPirandello' s three "myth" plays,
written at the very end of his life), where the high purpose of art is shattered
against the demands of a technological society that will not be distracted from
its single purpose; and Enrico IV, the first of many plays in which the drama of
identity is seen at close range in the immediacy of familiar human situations,
but also the culminating statement or dramatic paradox of the function of the
stage and the mask, as explored in the "theater plays." Any discussion of
Pirandello' s "theater plays" must include Enrico IV - the most "Absurd" of all
his plays and (therefore, perhaps) the most suggestive.
The scaffolding of the "theater plays" disappears with Enrico IV; the inner
stage has become a living historical fiction, the script of which is still being
"revised" and "rewritten." At the other end of the time spectrum , we have a
play-within-a-play, a contemporary version (also in costume) of the earlier
fiction, put forward by the visitors who come on the scene ostensibly to "cure"
the mad emperor. Both of these fictions fail (as fictions always do in Pirandel-
10). The emperor is not really mad, he is certainly not an emperor, and the
visitors in their eleventh-century costumes are from a recent past. Both these
fictions are open-ended and serve to "frame" the total action. Henry's retreat
into the past, at the end of the play, is dictated by external events provoked by
the visitors; but it is also a conscious and deliberate decision by a man who has
put his private fiction to an inexorable test, the demands of life.
Henry fe-creates the past in his own image. But the visitors who burst into his
restructured world (like the intruders in Six Characters) have ideas of their own.
They have devised their own historical fiction on a stage which is an ingenious
visual superimposition of paintings, living statues in period costume, young
and old in identical dress, private intentions masked under historical "roles."
Their play is meant to shock the "mad emperor" back to sanity , after twenty
years. It succeeds only in provoking a tragic confrontation and a violent
conclusion . Henry quickly takes over again as the pretenders are unmasked. He
is not only the writer, director, protagonist , and producer of his own eleventh-
century drama; in him the six characters have found their author.
In its paradoxical complexities, this play has much in common with Theater
of the Absurd and, also, with Shakespeare's Hamlet (in my opinion, the first
dramatic expression of the Absurd). In traditional critical terms, both Hamlet
and Enrico IV (to restrict ourselves to these two for a moment) are "artistic
failures";' and perhaps in this light we can begin to appreciate the vital truth in
Eliot's notorious judgment about Hamlet. Pirandello' s theater of disintegrating
personality, of dialectical inversions, of intentionally misleading motives - like
Shakespeare's Hamlet - takes us to the threshold of non-art . The rest is not
exactly silence; and Shakespeare may well have been ahead of himself in
attempting to "express the inexpressibly horrible." Hamlet may be the first
"hero" of the Absurd, and the play itself the first effort to "communicate the
incommunicable ...6 All of this becomes even more intriguing when we consider
lOS ANNE PAOLUCCI

how recent criticism of the Absurd has gravitated toward the Hegelian dialectic
in the effon to explain "an transcending itself." The best modern critics have
insisted, in fact, that objective correlatives no longer work for Theater of the
Absurd and a new critical terminology and point of view are necessary. Critical
statement has been discarded in the effon to grasp that theater as process and
the mask of the Absurd as a surrealistic transparency.
How does one react to Pirandello's "mad emperor," to Hamlet's mask of
madness, to the manic-depressive extremes of Beckett's Estragon and Vladi-
mir, to Albee's Agnes who talks of floating off into madness in A Delicate
Balance, etc., etc.? How must one approach a dramatic action in which nothing
happens but everything changes? Can we speak of actors in the usual sense of
the word? Well, of course; they are actors, but they keep bumping into us,
forcing us to make decisions with them, for them. And in those circumstances,
what son of characters emerge? Are they really identifiable, or are they sounds,
masks, roles searching for the ideal critic?
Hamlet, his own insightful critic, anticipates what Manin Esslin will say of
Beckett, who "has very nearly made a play out of silence.'" What are words
words words when the Socratic cenainty inside us eludes expression? The ghost
of the murdered king in Hamlet is, like Polan ius and Hamlet himself, full of
words - the most vocal ghost in all the Shakespearean repenory - but he is also
the least convincing character in Shakespeare's masterpiece: Hamlet refuses to
take action on his terms. Here as in so many plays of Pirandello, Beckett,
Albee, Ionesco, and others, words themselves are a mask, a deceiving posture.
What is said does not correspond to an emotional correlative .
I have explored elsewhere the parallels between Shakespeare's Hamlet and
Pirandello's Enrico Iv" (and those correspondences deserve to be examined in
detail); here, by way of conclusion, I would like to consider briefly the kind of
critical language that can help in our appreciation of Theater of the Absurd.
Most critics of the contemporary theater recognize the need for a new critical
vocabulary , a new approach, but the only example of a consistent application of
new principles is Vivian Mercier's Beckett/Beckett. In his preface to the book,
Mercier recalls the response of the audience at a symposium which followed a
performance of Waitingfor Godot. Someone asked: "Isn't Waitingfor Godot a
son of Rorschach ... test?" The speaker, we are told, was "clapped and cheered
by most of those present, who clearly felt ... that most interpretations of that
play - indeed of Samuel Beckett's work as a whole - reveal more about the
psyche of the people who offer them than about the work itself or the psyche of
its author."9 Well , yes. Every work of an expands as the reader's interests
expand. But something else is at work here. Is it just the psyche of the audience
or the critic? Pirandello, we have seen, always tries to get his audience to
respond in a profoundly personal way - but that response is not meant to be a
purely arbitrary reaction. The Rorschach test is the mirror image in us all, the
moment of abstract atomistic response. How do we tum that mirror image into
an infinite reflection ("one, no one, a hundred thousand") and find the hean-
beat of the play?
 Pirandello and the Absurd 109

Mercier suggests that Beckett's success can be traced back to his decision to
isolate himself in an unfamiliar environment, to break away from his past - as
he did in 1945, when he committed himself to "the total immersion in self, the
descent into the core of the eddy"'O - a Pirandellian joumey into the interior, of
the kind that Erich Heller describes in his Hegelian analysis of modem art and
literature. II Mercier quotes a passage from Beckett' s work on Joyce in which
the commitment is clearly set down: "With Joyce the difference is that Joyce
was a superb manipulator of malerial - perhaps the greates!. He was making
words do the absolute maximum of work. There isn't a syllable that's
superfluous. The kind of work I do is one in which I'm not master of my
material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. He' s tending toward
omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I'm working with impotence,
ignorance . I don ' t think impotence has been exploited in the pas!."" Or, as
Pirandello tells us: we must lay down the very road on which we walk - every
stone along the way. The critic as well as the artist. On or off stage, each of us
must find definition .
But how does one reach for definition when all our values and our vocabulary
have to be put to a test? How does one shape art out of chaos and find the proper
terms to explain the experience?
Mercier sees the answer in the dialectic. The structure of his book
Beckett/Beckett reminds us of David H. Hesla's observation that "the shape of
Beckett's art is the shape of dialectic" - a synthesis of the positive and negative,
the comic and the "pathetic," the yes and the no ... . optimism and pessimism,
hope and despair, comedy and tragedy are counterbalanced by one another:
none of them is allowed to become an Absolute. The very chapter headings are
set up as paradoxes: "[reland/The World," "Artist/Philosopher," "Gentlemarti
Tramp," "ClassicismiAbsurdism," "Ear/Eye," and so on. Beckett criticism,
says Mercier. is "somewhat aware of each dialectic ," but it tends to "emphasize
one of the poles to the almost total negation of the other."'3 What Mercier
succeeds in doing is to revitali ze (unconsciously perhaps) the Hegelian notion
of the transcendence of art and the fully- sensitized soul (schOne Seele) as the
most effective critical approach to the Absurd. "Beckett's anti-heroes do not
aspire, so they can never fail. Much of the mirthless laughter they elicit from us
springs precisely from this lack of aspiration: they expect so little from life , and
yet their minimal expectations are frustrated. "'4 In their impotence they
threaten to lapse into silence. And, by extension, the playwright himself (and
others writing in the Absurd idiom) seems to be gravitating toward artistic
oblivion. But, as Mercier reminds us, so long as this kind of playwright
continues to write, he will not "in this life at least ... reach either silence or
nothingness." What we have (and Beckett is an excellent example) is "a
dialectic ... between silence and garrulity. " " And , like all dialectical rever-
sals, the two things are intimately related ; in their relationship they emerge as
both distinct and identical. The "garrulity" of Beckett' s "anti-heroes," like that
of Hamlet and so many of the Pirandellian protagonists , creates a void ; it is the
other side of silence . One ofthe best examples of this tendency toward silence is
110 ANNE PAOLUCCI

Edward Albee' s Quotations From Chairman Mao, where the people on stage
indulge in private monologues, addressing not so much the audience as their
own integral image waiting for illumination. Pirandello's open-ended argu-
ments on stage -like Beckett' s "garrulity" - are often a purging of language.
Martin Esslin was among the first to recognize in the Absurd "a gradual
devaluation of language ... a poetry that is to emerge from the concrete and
objectified images of the stage itself." Language "still plays an important part
... but what happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words
spoken by the characters.",6 Mercier's study of Beckett 's dramatic art is the
first consistent effort to probe the dialectic of the Absurd in critical terms . It
reminds us, among other things, that to look for "objective correlatives" in a
writer whose work is not so much repeated themes (in that sense what he has to
offer is very old indeed) as "fundamental sounds" - Beckett's own phrase- ' 7 is
to miss what is characteristically Absurd . And what has been said of Beckett
applies to other playwrights of the Absurd , all of whom work within an ironic
medium, definition by exclusion , superimpositions that will not be pinned
down to explicit statement. The following description of Beckett's dramatic
language could just as well be applied to Pirandello , for example:

... that of a man talking to himself, in the first place the author. and in the second place
each individual member of the audience; and this "outer" language between the stage and
audience extends also to the "inner" language of the stage itself, where the characters too
are men or women talking to themselves. Beckett tells himself a story in the form of a
play. each member of the audience tells himself the story in the form of Beckett's play.
and within the play the characters tell themselves stories. What is on the stage is not only
the occasion for the content of the dialogue with the audience, it is also a metaphor, an
image of the dialogue between the author and himself as audience, between the member
of the audience and himself as author. J 8

The Pirandellian world is precisely such an expanding experience. The concen-

tric , ever-widening areas of correspondences Mercier defines for Beckett are
also those of Pirandello 's "theater plays" and Enrico IV, where for the first time
the stage becomes our own consciousness of the Absurd drama in all of us . '9

NOTES

1 Albert Camus, Le Mylhe de Sisyphe (Paris, (942) , p. 18; cited by Martin Esslin, The
Theatre oj Ihe Absurd (New York , t 961), p. xix .
2 Robert Brustein , The Thealre aJRevolt (Boston, (964), pp . 316-317. See also,
Anne Paolucci, Pirandello' s Theater: The Recovery a/the Modern Stage/or
DramalicA rl (Carbondale,lll., 1974), pp. 5- 6.
3 For an excellent discussion of "Dialectical Fonn" and Eisenstein's fascination with
dialectical superimposition, see Anne C. Bolgan, What the Thunder Really Said
(Montreal, 1973), Chapter 3 (pp. 55- 72).
4 Gottfried Benn. the great Expressionist poet-critic of Gerrnany (whose Probleme der
Lyrik was quite possibly the source forT .S. Eliot's classic essay "The Three Voices
 Pirandello and the Absurd III

of Poetry") observed that the " three voices" in mode rn literature have all been
absorbed into the one voice: the lyri c voice. In this light, his innuence on Joyce.
Pound, Eliot , elc .• becomes especially interesting. For the connection between
Benn' s discussion and Hegel' s di scuss ion of Romantic (M odem) art. seeA. Paoluc-
ci, " Introduction/B enn , Pound, and Eliot: The Monol ogue Art of German Expres-
sionis m and Angl o-American M oderni sm ," German Expressionism. Special Editor.
Victor Lange , Volume 9. Review a/National Literatures (annual volume 1979; New
York , 1979), pp . 10-24·
5 T .S . Eliot, " Hamlet ," in Selecled£ssQys 191 7- 1932 (New York, 1932), p. 123.
6 Ibid. , p. 122 .
7Martin Esslin. "Samuel Beckett' s Poems," in Beckettat6o (London. 1967 ). p. 77.
8See Paolucci , Pirandello's Theater, pp . 89- 101.
9Vivian Mercier , B eckettlBeckett (New York , 1977). p. vii.
10 Ibid., p . 5·
I rEric h Heller, Th e Artist's Journey into the Interior (New York , 1965). See espec ial-
Iy his ingenious discussion about Eliot's comments about Hamlet (e.g., "l It suffices ]
in all its strange wrong-headedness, to prove thi s poet's great critical intelligence. It
reads as ifT .S . Eliot had studied Hegel' s theory of the difference between Class ical
and Romantic art ... and then decided both to profit from it and to ignore it. " (p . 130);
and, "Clearly, T .S . Eliot knew what he was saying when he judged Hamlet an
artistic failure because the hero's emotion exceeded hi s concrete situation orthe
'objective correlative. ' It is the more surprising thai Eliot j udged as he judged; for
what he condemned is the occasion itself of Romantic art, including his ow n ....
Perhaps he did not mean it. Mean what? It is the persistent and most troublesome
question of the Romantic mind . For having lost its world. it can never do what it
means ; and what it means cannot be done. "( p. 136): and sti ll later, " Where T .S .
Eliot diagnoses the ' a rtistic failure' of the play . there lies in truth its achieveme nt.
Shakespeare, favored by his age .. . , succeeded with Hamlet where Goethe ... had to
fail with Torquato Tasso : in creating, paradoxically speaking, the 'objcctivecor-
relative' for a subjectivity Romantically deprived of any adequate 'objective
correlative '''(p.139)·
12 Mercier , p . 8.
13 Cited by Mercier , p . II.
14 Ibid., pp. 12-13.
15 Ibid., p. IS .
16 Esslin, p . xxi.
I? Mercier,p . 18 .
,S John Fletcher and J ohn Sparling, Beckett: A 51l1dy of His Plays (London , 1972) , pp.
37- 3S.
19 A slightly different original version of this paper was read to the Pirandello Society at
the convention of the Modem Language Association of America , San Franci sco .
Dece mber2S, 1979.