The Missing Virtue of Humanity
Mahmood Hadadi
In the years following the Second World War, a form of visual poetry emerged in German literature. This poetic style sought to merge literature with the visual arts, using the arrangement of words on the page to create images rather than merely describe them. In some poems, meaning is conveyed through absence: a blank space replaces words. In others, the words themselves form the image of a bridge, a wall, or another object.
A similar idea appears in Masnavi-ye Ma’navi, where Rumi repeatedly employs the metaphors of the bridge and the wall. In one well-known passage, he suggests that even two Turks who speak the same language may remain strangers to one another. Language alone, therefore, cannot guarantee understanding; it may become another barrier separating human beings. What truly enables communication is sympathy and mutual understanding rather than shared vocabulary.
A similar concern lies at the heart of Two and a Half Clowns. From the opening dialogue, it becomes clear that the central issue is not simply language itself, but the futility of language when it fails to communicate meaning. The inability of language to function as a genuine medium of understanding isolates people from one another, despite their constant conversations, encounters, and attempts to make sense of the world around them.
This raises a deeper question: what is it that has made these individuals strangers to one another? What invisible force prevents them from connecting, despite all their efforts to communicate? From a more humanistic perspective, what is the missing element that keeps them from empathy?
One story in the play illustrates this perfectly. An elderly man visits his young neighbour, who is seriously ill. Rather than offering comfort, he unintentionally deepens the young man’s suffering. The old man’s deafness and the young man’s illness become metaphors for a more profound failure of understanding. Neither is truly capable of hearing the other.
The characters speak constantly, and dialogue occupies much of the script. Yet the essential element that gives communication meaning is absent. That missing quality is so significant that its absence becomes almost tangible, filling the empty space of the play. The characters seem suspended in a void, drifting aimlessly like polo balls struck across an open field, without any fixed point of reference.
The play ultimately invites us to ask what is comic and what is tragic about this world. As language gradually reveals its limitations, it also becomes increasingly recognizable as a metaphor for contemporary human existence. At that point, the comedy gives way to something far more unsettling: the realization that our greatest obstacle is not the lack of words, but the absence of genuine understanding between people.