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Silver prints of "photographs" may be ordered at additional charge by writing the Order Department, giving the catalog number, title, author and specific pages you wish reproduced. University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 A Xerox Education Company 72-23,087 BEN-ZVI, Linda, 1939- THE DEVALUATION OF LANGUAGE IN AVANT-GARDE DRAMA. The University of Oklahoma, Ph.D., 1972 Language and Literature, modem University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE THE DEVALUATION OF LANGUAGE IN AVANT-GARDE DRAMA A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY LINDA BEN-ZVI Norman, Oklahoma 1972 THE DEVALUATION OF LANGUAGE IN AVANT-GARDE DRAMA APPROVED BY - DISSERTATION COMMITTEE PLEASE NOTE: Some pages may have indiSt inet print. Filmed as received. University Microfilms, A X erox Education Company ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the members of my committee for their time and interest. Particular thanks go to Drs. Victor Elconin and Ray Male for the help and assistance they have given me throughout my academic career at the University of Oklahoma. I could not have completed this study without the patient guidance and cooperation of Dr. Brue Granger. As both my teacher and advisor he has aided me enormously in my studies. My special thanks are reserved for three people: my mother-in-law Rivka Ben-Zvi, whose time and help gave me the freedom to pursue my studies: my husband Samuel, whose faith in me was so important: and my daughter Oriella, who taught me the essential lesson of this study--that the most important communication is truly nonverbal. Ill TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................... iii PREFACE ............................................ V CHAPTER ONE: THE DECLINE OF W O R D S ............... 1 CHAPTER TWO: THE LANGUAGE OF SILENCE ............. 28 I. Eugene Ionesco: Silence as Babble .... j6 II. Samuel Beckett: Silence as Anguish . $6 III. Harold Pinter: Silence as Communication . 84 CHAPTER THREE: THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY .......... 113 I. Eugene Ionesco: The Poetry of Space . 125 II. Samuel Beckett: The Poetry of Motion . 152 III. Harold Pinter: The Poetry of Imagery . 188 CHAPTER FOUR: A NONVERBAL THEATRE ............. 225 I. Happenings....................... 239 II. Theatre Ensembles ....................... 244 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................... 2Ô9 IV PREFACE In an age of ironies one of the best concerns the number of words being written about the devaluation and dissolution of language. Never before in history have words been used to say so much about the inability to say anything. The very proliferation of words decrying lan­ guage indicates the predicament in which contemporary man finds himself. He understands that words no longer express his tlioughts. Enervated by extended misuse, they have ceased to function as c ommunic at i ve agents. Yet man has no other means at his disposal to express this realization than words themselves. Samuel Beckett, perhaps better than any other writer today, has touched on this irony. Clov in Endgame speaks the frustration of all men when he says, "1 use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.’’^ George Steiner, whose books Language and Silenc e and Extraterritorial have studied the failure of language, explains the two alternatives stated by Clov. "To a writer who feels that the condition of language is in question ^Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 44. VI . two essent ial coursi s are available: lie may seek to render his own idiom representative of the general crisis, to convey through it the precariousness and vulnerability of the communicative act ; or he may choose the suicidal 2 rhetoric of silence.” Two men--Mallarme and Rimbaud--have become contem­ porary symbols of the alternatives open to the artist. The former attempted to forge a personalistic idiom divorced from the confines of denotatively charged meaning. The latter, despairing of the possibility of ever purifying language, lapsed into silence. The two positions, immer­ sion in words and retreat from words, are not as far apart as might be imagined. To the degree that a personalistic language borders on incomprehensibility it moves perilously close to silence as well. The contemporary artist who would challenge language finds himself occupying a narrow space bordered on either side by silence. Contemporary drama, in its desire to transcend the limitations of words, has experimented with both silence and revolutionary forms of expression exclusive of words. Whereas poetry and the novel cannot reject language totally and still exist, the drama has recourse to communicative agents outside the verbal matrix. A poem without words is a blank piece of paper; a play without words may be a moving 2 George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York Atheneum, I967), pp. 49-50. VI i viable work of art. This i 'lea that plays need not be yoked to words, that they have unique languages of their own with which to commun:t ate, was expressed by Antonin Artaud: He believed that, the theatre was not limited to a language of words. Dialogue--a thing written and spoken--does not belong specifically to the stage, it belongs to books. I say that the stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be fil]ed, and to be given its own concrete language to speak. I say that this concrete language intended for the senses and independent of speech, has first to satisfy the senses , that there is a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language, and that this concrete physical language to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language.3 This notion that drama could have its own language, no longer totally dependent on words, lies at the heart of the movement known as Theatre of the Absurd. I use the term Theatre of the Absurd throughout this study, recognizing, however, that the term is a misleading generic label. Ionesco, Beckett, and Pinter are unique playwrights, and the attempt to categorize them under any umbrella term, no matter how wide it is, is dishonest. Martin Esslin, in light of the widespread and uncritical acceptance of his classification, felt compelled in an essay entitled "Theatre of the Absurd Revisited," to say. 3 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Doub1e , trans, Mary Caroline Richards {New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 37. viii "It is a basic mistake to assume that, all the works that somehow come under this label are the .same, or even very similar, and it is nonsense to try to attach a value 4 judgment to the whole category." What he does indicate, and what I have taken to be the most important function of the term, justifying its use, is not its implied existen­ tial position but rather an inherent attitude toward language. Ionesco emphasizes the verbal basis of Absurdist Theatre. "What is sometimes labeled the absurd," he noted, "is only the denunciation of the ridiculous nature of a language which is empty of substance, made up of cliches and slogans . Esslin agrees that the most lasting effect of the movement will not be its articulation of a metaphysical position, but rather the dramatic form this articulation takes. "What is far more important to the concept of the Theatre of the Absurd is the form in which this sense of bewilderment and mystery expresses itself: the devalua­ tion and even downright dissolution of language, the disintegration of plot, characterization, and final solu­ tion which had hitherto been the hallmark of drama, and the substitution of new elements of form— concrete stage imagery, repetition or intensification, a whole new stage 4 Martin Esslin, "The Theatre of the Absurd Revisited," Reflect ions (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 19^1), p. l80. ^Eugène Ionesco, "The Avant-Garde Theatre," Tulane Drama Review, 5, No. 3 (December, I960), p. 48. IX language."^ Experimentation with new forms of language divorced from denotative words has been the most important contribution of the Theatre of the Absurd.