from: Umberto Eco, "The Cult of the Imperfect," The Paris Review, October 28, 2019:
In order to transform a work into a cult object, you must be able to
take it to pieces, disassemble it, and unhinge it in such a way that
only parts of it are remembered, regardless of their original
relationship with the whole. In the case of a book, it is possible to
disassemble it, so to speak, physically, reducing it to a series of
excerpts. And so it happens that a book can give life to a cult
phenomenon even if it is a masterpiece, especially if it is a complex
masterpiece. Consider the Divine Comedy, which has given rise
to many trivia games, or Dante cryptography, where what matters for the
faithful is to recall certain memorable lines, without posing themselves
the problem of the poem as a whole. This means that even a masterpiece,
when it comes to haunt the collective memory, can be made ramshackle.
But in other cases it becomes a cult object because it is fundamentally,
radically ramshackle. This happens more easily with a film than a book.
To give rise to a cult, a film must already be inherently ramshackle,
shaky and disconnected in itself. A perfect film, given that we cannot
reread it as we please, from the point we prefer, as with a book,
remains imprinted in our memory as a whole, in the form of an idea or a
principal emotion; but only a ramshackle film survives in a disjointed
series of images and visual high points. It should show not one central
idea, but many. It should not reveal a coherent “philosophy of
composition,” but it should live on, and by virtue of, its magnificent
instability. And in fact the bombastic Rio Bravo is apparently a cult movie, while the perfect Stagecoach is not.
from: Umberto Eco, "The Cult of the Imperfect," The Paris Review, October 28, 2019:
According to Eliot, Hamlet is the result of an unsuccessful
fusion of several previous versions, so the bewildering ambiguity of the
main character is due to the difficulty the author had in putting
together several topoi. Hamlet is certainly a disturbing work
in which the psychology of the character strikes us as impossible to
grasp. Eliot tells us that the mystery of Hamlet is clarified
if, instead of considering the entire action of the drama as being due
to Shakespeare’s design, we see the tragedy as a sort of poorly made
patchwork of previous tragic material.
[...]
In several ways the play is puzzling, disquieting as none of the others is. Shakespeare left in unnecessary and incongruent scenes that ought to
have been spotted on even the hastiest revision. Then there are
unexplained scenes that would seem to derive from a reworking of Kyd’s
original play perhaps by Chapman. In conclusion, Hamlet is a
stratification of motifs that have not merged, and represents the
efforts of different authors, where each one put his hand to the work of
his predecessors. So, far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the
play is an artistic failure.
NB: In fact, what T.S. Eliot says about Hamlet in "Hamlet and His Problems" can be said virtually about any other Shakespeare play, as Hamlet is neither "more disquieting" nor less "ramshackled" and "unhinged" than almost any other of the Bard's plays, specifically his "great tragedies" (not excluding even the fairly brief and compact—possibly even severly cut—Macbeth).
