An Overview: Language in Drama Before Mediatisation

This section presents some typical features of language use in dramatic theatre tradition, based on the representation of the world as a coherent, meaningful totality. Language, like other elements in traditional dramatic plays, serves to reflect the world as a whole and individualised through particular characters’ speech, making a congruous relationship between language and character, and portraying characters as the source of language and meaning. Language constitutes a definitive point of origin and of reference generally based on a linear signification process that structures meaning through a coherent relationship between the representation and that which is represented. Foreign language use in dramatic plays is generally through foreign phrases incorporated clearly and coherently into the language and content of the play to enhance the dramatic illusion and not to undermine it.

These aspects of language in dramatic plays, however, do not necessarily mean that language in theatre has always been linear, unified, and unidirectional with definitive meaning, or that language use has never been problematic. Shakespeare shifts registers from the prosaic to the poetic, where poetic language does not just refer to the speaking character or represent a realistic, communicative language. It is obvious that people tend not to deliver long poetic monologues in day--‐to--‐day life. Language here is not transparent, not simply a medium for communication or a tool to generate a perfect representation of reality in the theatre. Another significant example of inconsequential use of language in the dramatic tradition may be found in Anton Chekhov’s plays where characters often talk past, rather than to each other as if they do not hear one another; sometimes they do not directly say what they mean.

Nevertheless, the representational role of language has been central in dramatic theatre. The use of language as a means to create a life--‐like representation of the world can be seen in the naturalist dramas of Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov and George Bernard Shaw where language is part of the realistic characterisation that corresponds to the dialects and sociolects that existed and illustrated the society of the period. Shaw’s concern with class--‐division in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century caused him to formulate a language that reflected the social landscape and concerns of the working classes. In plays such as Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1894) and Pygmalion (1912), Shaw used working class discourse, with its phonetic oddities and particular vocabulary to reflect the historical--‐social reality. Similar to Shaw’s use of sociolect, John Millington Synge employed the Anglo--‐Irish dialect of the Irish peasantry in the late nineteenth century to reinforce his figurative portrayal of rural life and issues of the time.

Language in drama can also be a poetic medium, a décor to render theatrical work expressive and even virtuosic. For instance, Greek dramatists were interested in well--‐made speeches and revelled in oratory, and Renaissance monologues use poetic, metaphorical and colourful language. Such language use focuses mainly on the aesthetic aspects of language and its role of imparting and elaborating on points of the narrative. It does not necessarily disrupt dramatic representation since language is used within the limits of its interpretative role in dramatic theatre. In some dramatic works, poetic language becomes commonplace and thus works hand in hand with representational dramaturgy rather than challenging the dramatic illusion. In the Elizabethan theatre, as Keir Elam argues, poetry is so embedded in the dramatic tradition that ‘[a] very austere use of language, might, indeed, have been far more conspicuous than the staple rhetoric.’18 Hence, language as a poetic tool in the dramatic tradition, more often than not, functions in line with the representational agenda.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rise of relativistic perspectives on socially and culturally--‐entrenched beliefs and normative truths made certainty, or the idea of absolute truth, problematic. Karl Marx’s social relativism19 interrogated the socio--‐cultural, economic and political dominance of the ruling classes over the lower classes; Friedrich W. Nietzsche20dealt with moral relativism, and Albert Einstein focussed on physical relativism. Ferdinand de Saussure,21 in turn, put forward the idea of linguistic relativism – arguing that there is no

18 Keir Elam, ‘Language in Theater’, A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, 6 (1977), 139--‐61, (pp. 151).

19 For further information, see Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Washington: Regnery Pub., 2000). (First published between 1867 --‐1894). Also, see Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (First published in 1848).

20 For further information, see: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, trans. by M. Clark and A. J. Swensen (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Pub. Inc., 1998). (First published in 1887).

single, ultimate meaning, but a multiplicity of meanings for any given signifier. The dissolution of certainties continued into the twentieth century, particularly in light of socio--‐cultural changes, and advances in the media and technology.

Various playwrights22 have problematised the limitations of language in dramatic theatre in relation to their critical concerns with the changing social landscape and the representational nature of the dramatic theatre. Of these, two of the most prominent and influential playwrights are Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht, whose works and theories have had a major impact on twentieth and twenty--‐first century playwrights such as Heiner Müller, Harold Pinter, Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill, Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek and so forth. Although Beckett’s use of language is fundamentally different from Brecht’s, both propose inventive formal perspectives on language fostered in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in response to an increasingly mediatised culture. Beckett’s and Brecht’s approaches to language use in plays and theatre questioned the limitations of language in existing dramatic contexts and furthered previous alternative language uses that did not conform to such limitations.23 Their use of language, albeit in different ways, took issue with the use of language as an apparently transparent medium and tool for perfecting the dramatic illusion.

Beckett, writing for the theatre in the wake of the traumatic experience of the Second World War, felt language as a meaningful and logical entity in dramatic contexts failed to effectively communicate and make sense of the realities of the post--‐war world. Beckett argued language in this sense was ‘a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask.’24 Beckett aimed to ‘find a means of decomposing and moving beyond language’,25 namely, beyond traditional language use and forms to represent the nothingness that people experience to reconnect to the real when belief in truth was shaken. The core of Beckett’s approach to language use is based on his deliberate estrangement of language, in ‘the creation of words against the wreck

22 Some of the most prominent of these playwrights are Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller and Harold Pinter. There are, of course, numerous others.

23 Since Ancient Greek drama there have been examples of language use in drama and theatre that do not treat language merely as a neutral vessel of meaning or communication. For example, in some Greek drama, Shakespeare’s and Chekhov’s plays language was not the realistic, everyday language but a poetic, inconsequential and allegorical one. Beckett and Brecht furthered such examples not merely by proposing new alternatives to realistic, representational language, but also by problematising it to expand the possibilities of drama and theatre, and their critical perspective on the socio--‐cultural conditions.

24 Samuel Beckett qtd. in Steven Connor Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text (Aurora, USA: Basil Blackwell, 2007), p. 19.

of words’.26 He moved language away from everyday speech, from its syntactic, logical form towards a minimal, form, an ‘internal and abstract purity that never was.’27 Beckett’s characters experience linguistic alienation, a sense of the unreliability of language and instability of meaning due to their sense of alienation in the world they live in, while being, at the same time, bound to language as their mode of expression. Their language is asyntactical; realistic dialogue and traditional grammatical structures with logical links are destabilised. Beckett’s experiments with language move from the fully embodied form of language by specific characters in Waiting for Godot to nameless speakers in Act Without Words II, and to a completely anonymous language with shattered syntax and fractured grammar in his later plays Not I, Ohio Impromptu or Rockaby. Language does not serve ‘as a vehicle for direct communication [between characters] or as a screen through which one can see darkly the psychic movements of a character.’28 It is not a tool that generates and transmits a meaningful and recognisable picture of the world. Instead, it is a critical tool to expose language itself to present the world as ‘an unending universe where time and space are circular, as opposed to the linearity of classical language, perspective, and spatiotemporal concepts.’29

Brecht, whose theatrical approach is based on the Verfremdungseffekt, on the negation of the commonplace to increase critical consciousness about social matters, used language as a device to make the familiar strange, show the world in a different way, reveal the circumstances hidden behind the apparently self--‐evident. Brecht used language as a tool for expanding the possibilities of theatre for social criticism. He destabilised the kinds of language used in most dramatic contexts by integrating unusual language conventions, using quotation devices to distinguish actors from characters, addressing the audience directly and separating scenes by songs, written titles or newspaper--‐style headlines.30 Brecht’s language is the everyday language of common people in structured dialogue form. However, Brecht’s realistic language was not to create a form of perfection of the dramatic illusion but a socially realistic context to continually foreground the artifice of the fictional world, the workings of the imagined, theatrical world. Brecht stripped language of ‘its self--‐evident, familiar, obvious quality and create[d] a sense of astonishment and curiosity about [it].’31 This form of language use exists in

26 Andrew Kennedy, Six Dramatists in Search of a Language: Studies in Dramatic Language (London: Cambridge UP, 1975), p. 135.

27 Kennedy, Six Dramatists in Search of a Language, p. 135.

28 Michael Worton, ‘Waiting for Godot and Endgame: theatre as text’ in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. by John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), pp. 67--‐87, (p. 68).

29 Jane Alison Hale, The Broken Window: Beckett’s Dramatic Perspective (Indiana, USA: Purdue Research Foundation, 1987), p. 157.

30 Yvonne Banning, ‘Language in the Theatre: Mediating Realities in an Audience’, South African Theatre Journal, 4: 1 (1990), 12--‐37, (pp. 25--‐6).

31 Peter Brooker, ‘Key words in Brecht’s theory and practice of theatre’ in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, ed. by Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), pp. 185--‐ 201,(p. 191).

most of his plays such as The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Life of Galileo,32 highlights the artifice of theatre and defamiliarises onstage action, and consequently increases the audience’s consciousness not only of the artifice of the theatrical event they were watching, but also of their place and role in a concrete social narrative. The language in Brecht’s works can therefore be considered a meditation on social issues, a means to generate heightened social awareness and critically show the need for change.

Beckett’s non--‐linear, fragmented, less referential use of language and Brecht’s approach to language as a means to create critical awareness in the audience paved the way for further innovative and critical approaches to language in the twenty--‐first century drama and theatre. The following sections elaborate these techniques and investigate how the restructuring of language works and what its dramaturgical, perceptual and performative implications are.

3. The Impact of Direct Mediatisation of Language on the Dramaturgy of Language