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

Abstract

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, Ionesco, Pinter, Albee, Wilder, Gelber, Anouilh, Giraudoux, O'Neill, and Camus himself makes him without a doubt "the most seminal dramatist of our time."