Mark Moran

Prof. Martin Puchner

Drama, Theatre, Theory

December 11, 2000

Language & Theatre

The past fifty years have witnessed an explosion of new theories in linguistics which have challenged our most fundamental ideas about how language works, what purpose it serves, and what it can be used for.  These new ideas first emerged in the 1950s through the pioneering work of philosophers such as Noam Chomsky and John Austin, who both radically changed how we think about and study language, though each in very different ways.  Chomsky’s research has focused primarily on how we learn language and what this tells us about the ways we think, whereas Austin concentrated on the different types of statements a speaker can make and how they can affect the listener or environment.  In both areas of linguistics, the theatre has been the dominant venue for exploring these new ideas and for introducing them to the public.  This is primarily because spoken language is the defining feature of theatre, more so than any other art or entertainment form.  A few interesting examples of modern plays that grapple with some of these concepts are Peter Handke’s Kaspar (1967) and, especially, Caryl Churchill’s two Blue Heart plays(1997).

In its simplest form, a play is nothing more than lines of dialogue spoken by one or more characters.  A script can lack stage direction and description but it must have dialogue; otherwise, it is arguably not a play but a pantomime sequence or some other type of performance art.  Incidentally, many of our most famous plays, such as the works of Shakespeare and Marlowe, have been handed down to us essentially as just dialogue, since elaborate directions and descriptions were either never written or not considered important enough to transcribe when the plays were printed.  Because of this, all other aspects, such as staging, gestures, costumes, and actions, are generally left to the discretion of the director or actors, while it is very uncommon for a production to alter the original dialogue. 

A play is also different from other dramatic or narrative forms such as novels or films because of its unique reliance on dialogue.  As inherently visual media, film and television try to minimize the ratio of dialogue to action, which is evidenced by the tiny column allotted to dialogue in a standard film or TV script.  At the other end of the spectrum, novels usually strive to maximize interiority and depth of character, providing psychological insight through detailed descriptions of the setting or thoughts of the character.  But having an audience watch a live actor speaking onstage, either by himself or to other actors, most closely mimics the experience of human communication, since in our everyday interactions with people our only insight into what they are thinking is what we see them say and do.  The stage is thus the ideal forum to explore the complexities and subtleties of speech, such as how we create and perceive sincerity, pretense, or even deliberate misunderstanding.  (An exception to this dialogue/stage relationship is the “closet drama,” which falls somewhere in between a novel and a play;  however, since there are no live speakers or listeners, this is not considered theatre here.)

In 1957, Noam Chomsky started a revolution in language and cognitive science with the publication of his book Syntactic Structures,[1] which put forth the idea that language is something innate to humans which they acquire instinctively, much the way a dog digs or a bird sings a specific song..  As his most famous disciple Steven Pinker writes, as recently as “the 1950s, the social sciences were dominated by behaviorism… Mental terms like ‘know’ and ‘think’ were branded unscientific, ‘mind’ and ‘innate’ were dirty words… [But today,] the community of scientists studying the questions he raised numbers in the thousands.  Chomsky is currently among the ten most-cited writers in all of the humanities (beating out Hegel and Cicero and trailing only Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, the Bible, Aristotle, Plato, and Freud) and the only living member of the top ten.” [2]

Chomsky’s theory suggests that children are pre-wired to start learning a primary language right after they’re born and possibly even earlier.  The neurological implication of his theory is that that the brain is malleable and that it is adapted to perform certain tasks, including language acquisition, only during specific periods in a person’s life.  An extension of this is Chomsky’s assertion that humans do not think in language, but rather think in a universal mental language or mentalese, which gets translated into a normal spoken language only when necessary (such as when we are speaking or preparing to write something).  This notion directly contradicts the idea, referred to as the Whorf hypothesis, that language shapes and determines the range of thought available to the people who use it.  According to online sources, Benjamin Whorf, an American linguist and anthropologist working in the 1920s-1940s, “maintained that the structure of a language tends to condition the ways in which a speaker of that language thinks.  Hence, the structures of different languages lead the speakers of those languages to view the world in different ways. This hypothesis was originally put forward in the eighteenth century by the German scholars Johann Gottfried von Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt.”[3]  Essentially, Whorf believed that people cannot conceive of an idea they do not have a word for, and conversely that having many words for something reflects their more subtle understanding of it.  An example of this is the popular myth that Eskimos have over 100 different words for snow, presumably because of their profound familiarity with it.  Of course, even if the Eskimo language did have many more words for snow than most others (which it doesn’t), that would still not support the idea that they think in that language.

Chomsky’s concept of mentalese proposes that people can ponder complex thoughts such as liberty or equality in the same way we feel hungry or sad, which clearly does not require words.  The fact that people often remember the gist of something they have read or heard rather than the actual words used provides evidence for this theory, especially when they hear it in one language yet remember it in another.  Chomsky’s theory is further supported by the all-too-familiar experience of thinking or feeling something that cannot be exactly expressed in words, presumably because there is no English word or phrase that adequately captures a certain thought.  Caryl Churchill’s recent play Blue Kettle explores similar issues of how spoken language breaks down and people either cannot effectively communicate with each other, or alternatively, how some learn to communicate so directly or efficiently that they develop a shorthand for their mentalese and can bypass natural language.

Both Blue Kettle and its companion play Heart’s Desire explore the way an audience learns language and builds identification through repetition.  In Heart’s Desire, a brief dramatic moment gets acted over and over again with each successive iteration going a little bit further or adding a small variation to the previous version.  As we see more of the scene unfold, we learn more of the subtext that underlies the lines we’ve already heard.  When they repeat again, they are now more dramatic or humorous because the audience has this additional information.  The success of this play is based on the fact that when people speak we don’t usually say everything we mean, and what people say is often only a cover for they are actually thinking.  This is especially true of people in dramatic situations or in conflict with each other, which is frequently the case for characters in a play.  Heart’s Desire is engaging and funny because of its intelligent examination of subtext, the added layer of complexity that makes drama interesting because it challenges the listener to guess the true thoughts or feelings of the character.  According to Chomsky’s ideas, subtext is a fundamental quality of human communication because something is lost, either intentionally or not, whenever we convert our mental thoughts into natural language.

Another interesting way Churchill experiments with language in Heart’s Desire is that at a certain point she begins to have the characters speak in abbreviations when they reset to the beginning of the scene.  This keeps the play moving quickly and from becoming tedious, since we have heard these early lines so many times before.  These abbreviations, though highly unnatural, also examine how much information can be conveyed with very little dialogue.  In the first such experiment, the characters say only the first few words of each of their lines up until they reach the last line the audience is familiar with.  After two ‘normal’ iterations, the characters do a version in which they only say the last words of each line, which is funny and slightly harder to follow, but still surprisingly comprehensible.  This works because we remember the earlier sentences and also because the final words of most of her sentences, and perhaps of most English sentences, are unique enough that alone they easily signify or convey the entire sentence.  This is also an extreme use of subtext since the characters are now saying almost nothing yet we know the drama is still taking place since they still “mark gestures and positions”[4] to correspond with all the earlier iterations.  For the play’s final repetitions, Churchill returns to full sentences and instead experiments with how quickly we can process familiar information by having the characters recite the lines as rapidly as possible, with the direction “precision matters, intelligibility doesn’t.”[5]

Blue Kettle carries the idea of language shorthand even further.  The premise or main device of the play is that all of the characters insert the words ‘blue’ and ‘kettle’ into their dialogue at seemingly random points.  Sometimes the word replaces one that would normally go there and other times it is just added to an otherwise complete sentence.  This starts in the second scene, when Derek says: “You don’t have to blue anything up” and a bit later Mrs. Oliver says: “that’s not like … having the kettle of seeing your son or not.”  Both of these uses force the listener to guess what words are being replaced.  (Incidentally, having to guess in real-time is one of the reasons staged plays differ in linguistic function from closet dramas.)  Derek then says: “So blue didn’t anyone let you know?”[6] in which ‘blue’ is apparently an unnecessary addition.  Using ‘blue’ and ‘kettle’ becomes more and more common as the play progresses and it becomes harder to figure out what words they might be replacing.  Finally, in the last scene, Derek and Mrs. Plant no longer even use the whole words anymore but instead say ‘bl’ or ‘ket’ and then just ‘b’ ‘l’ ‘k’ and ‘t’.  This culminates in the completely incomprehensible final exchange: “Mrs. Plant: T b k k k k l / Derek: B. K.”[7]

What is remarkable however is not that the final few exchanges are incomprehensible but that the rest of the play is understandable, despite these inserted words which seem like nonsense.  This is partly because language is full of grammatical redundancies and extra information.  In normal speech, we can often glean the meaning of something even when the message is fragmented or corrupt.  This ability follows from Chomsky’s idea of Universal Grammar, which suggests that “sentences can make no sense but still be recognized as grammatical.”  His famous example, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” he contrived “to show that syntax and sense can be independent of each other.”[8]  Of course, this idea had been demonstrated long before Chomsky by famous masters of nonsense such as Edward Lear, Mark Twain, and Lewis Carroll.

Nevertheless, in Blue Kettle we are prevented from ever learning the special language of the characters.  There is no discernible pattern as to how ‘blue’ and ‘kettle’ are inserted or what English words they are replacing.  Blue Kettle thus demonstrates how language can also be used to exclude or isolate people, in this case the audience, since we are the only ones who don’t understand what is being communicated.

The ultimate example of how a lack of language isolates people is the life of Kaspar Hauser (1812?-1833), a rare individual who entered society as an adult without ever having learned a language.  As explained by Chomsky’s small window of opportunity to acquire a primary language, Kaspar and other foundling children never really learn to speak or understand language in any normal way.  Helen Keller, who was both deaf and blind, explained this solitude best when she said that being deaf was worse than being blind because blindness isolates you from things, but deafness isolates you from people.[9]  Peter Handke’s play Kaspar explores the difficulty of relating to a foreign language, especially when the very concept of language is foreign.  Interestingly, Handkedoes not focus on Kaspar’s inability to relate to people, since he is essentially the only character in the play.  Instead, Handke chooses to explore the power of language to control, both in terms of an individual using language to order his environment and of society using it as an instrument of socialization and conformity.

The power of language has been considered and debated for many centuries, although one of the most interesting recent developments was best put forth by philosopher John Austin, who established a distinction between constative and performative expressions in a series of lectures at Oxford and Harvard from 1952-1955, collected in the book How To Do Things With Words.[10]  A constative sentence, according to Austin, is a descriptive or historical statement which can be uttered without changing the world, whereas a performative sentence is one which actually effects an action, such as entering into a contract, getting married, placing a bet, and so forth.  In traditional philosophy, all sentences are considered constative and performative statements are not studied.  Austin proposes reversing this because “the more we consider a statement not as a sentence (or proposition) but as an act of speech (out of which the others are logical constructions) the more we are studying the whole thing as an act.”[11]  Furthermore, he also explains that any sentence can become a performative statement simply by adding a phrase such as “I promise” or “I’m saying” before it.  This is important because it eliminates the distinction between saying and doing, which has particular ramifications for the theatre, where every statement is performative yet not sincere.  (Because of the fuzziness of pretend statements or ones made for jest or drama, Austin avoided discussing the classification of stage dialogue.)

The power of language is taken to an oppressive level in Peter Handke’s play Kaspar, which probably borrows from Nietzsche’s theory that language is not created in order to mirror or describe the world but rather to control it.[12]  As one critic explains, this play “depicts the foundling Kaspar Hauser as a near-speechless innocent destroyed by society's attempts to impose on him its language and its own rational values.”[13]  The character of Kaspar initially has no language skills and thus no control over his environment.  He begins the play with the one sentence: “I want to be a person like somebody else once was.”  (This sentence is a variation on the historical Kaspar’s only initial sentence: “I want to be a rider like my father once was.”[14])  Dramatically it is loaded with meaning, since Kaspar wants to learn to harness language so that he will be a normal person.  But for him the sentence is initially useless and “he utters the sentence [such] that it is obvious that he has no concept of what it means.”[15] 

The play deliberately exaggerates the power of language by having Kaspar be completely inept at navigating his world before he learns to speak.  As anthropologist Douglas Candland describes, the real Kaspar “did not know how to use his fingers, his gait was that of an infant learning to walk, he walked by placing both the ball and heel of the foot down at the same time… [However,] the physician who examined him reported an abnormality of the bone structure of the knee” which was surely the cause of his lack of coordination.[16]  In the play, Kaspar gradually learns to control his environment by being indoctrinated into language.  Like the oppressive televisions in Orwell’s 1984, invisible language prompters encourage Kaspar to speak by speaking at him “without undertones or overtones…  They do not speak to make sense but to show that they are playing at speaking.”[17]  He deconstructs his one sentence into its vowel sounds until he is eventually able to understand its components and use them to learn a real language.  Only by doing so does Kaspar become conscious, learning to think abstractly and be aware of his own past. 

Ironically, Handke is so interested in the power of language that he endorses the old Whorfian hypothesis that language shapes culture and determines a person’s options.  But this is not surprising since Chomsky and Austin have very different ideas about the potential of language, and modern playwrights are free to pick and choose which linguistic issues to explore.  Whereas Austin emphasizes the ability of language to do things by speaking, Chomsky argues we need language only to communicate, not to think.  One could even call Chomsky’s rebuttal to Whorf How To Do Things Without Words.  Handke’s and Churchill’s plays show how alive and controversial various linguistic theories are, and how theatre is at the forefront in exploring, challenging, and developing new ideas about how and why we communicate.

Works Cited

Austin, J.L.  How To Do Things With Words. ed. J.O. Urmson, Marina Sbisà. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1962.

 

Churchill, Caryl.  Blue Heart.  New York: Theater Communications Group 1997.

 

Chomsky, Noam.  Syntactic Structures.  The Hague: Mouton 1957.

 

Encyclopedia Britannica Online.  http://www.britannica.com 
Articles: Whorf, Benjamin Lee. and Handke, Peter

 

Feral Children – Kaspar Hauser.  Douglas Candland.
http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/monkey/ihe/linguistics/LECTURE4/4kaspar.htm

Goldstein, Bruce.  Sensation & Perception (5^th Ed.) Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole 1999.

 

Handke, Peter.  KASPAR and Other Plays.  trans. Michael Roloff.  New York:
Hill & Wang 1969.

 

Jutta’s Kaspar Hauser Website.
http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/me/notes/kaspar-hauser.html

 

Nietzsche, Friedrich.  Philosophy and Truth.  ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale. 
New Jersey: Humanities Press. (from Course Reader)

 

Pinker, Steven.  The Language Instinct.  New York: William Morrow 1994.