A Theatre of Language

Author(s): Jean Vannier and Leonard C. Pronko

Source: The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Spring, 1963), pp. 180-186
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1125093
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Theatre

of

Language

By JEAN

VANNIER

If we consider only the theatrical movement which felt Artaud's

influence during the period between the wars, or the "poetic"
theatre of the post-war period which is merely its continuation,
the problem of the language of the avant-garde seems to have
only a very limited interest. In the works which these movements
have produced, the originality of the language is more spectacular
than profound. Or more precisely, we might say that it lies more
in its nature than in its function.
The traditional dramatist, whose only end was to interest the
spectator by the analysis of passions and characters, used a language which was never disquieting or bewildering because it represented more or less-decorated only with certain literary attributes-the language of the public for whom it was written.
In the avant-garde we have just spoken of, theatrical language
changes to the same degree that the dramatist's attitude towards
his audience changes. It is no longer a question of his beguiling
the spectator by a realistic or amusing portrayal of the human
heart, but rather of provoking, of acting physically upon him by
disturbing his rapport with the world. Hence the promotion of
a new language, dense enough in its own right to transform the
spectator magically, to snatch him from his accustomed universe
and oblige him to enter the exaggerated world of the theatre.
Among the many disparate recent works which have been described as avant-garde, those of Vauthier, of Pichette or Weingarten, for example, all reveal a similar theatrical phenomenon:
the substitution of a fascinating and hence "poetic" language for
the transparent and commonly understood language of traditional theatre. This poetic language, however, does not resemble
in any way that of Claudel or Giraudoux; despite the bewildering
Printed by permissionof L'Arche,Paris.
180

JEAN VANNIER

181

effect their language may have upon the popular audiences, it remains clearly marked with the seal of "good literature." This is
not the case with authors we have mentioned; their poetry is close
to a shriek, conceived as the sonorous utterance of an organic
frenzy. It often tends to push words back to a sort of prelinguistic
state of expression. (Notably in Vauthier who has a decided predilection for a purely interjective kind of poetry.) Let us add too
that language, having become thus a vocal form of gesture, loses
at the same time its theatrical privileges: following the concepts
of Artaud for whom theatre is a total art, language becomes
part of an expressive vocabulary of gestures of which it is only
one element among many; an effective means for this theatre of
trance to expel literature from its midst. (Undoubtedly there are
many differences in the language of the authors I have cited, but
they are above all differences of style, which it is not my purpose
to study here.)
But if these avant-garde authors are bringing about a revolution
in the nature of language, they leave intact its function. This is
because for them, as for the representatives of tradition, the
theatrical event is not played out at the level of language itself.
And undoubtedly that event is no longer for them a thing whose
essence is psychological, but rather of a visceral or magic order. A
difference which leads them precisely to use a new language, and
to try to find, beyond words vilified by their rhetorical usage, a
kind of natural savage state of the word. But this language always
remains absorbed in its theatrical finality; it is never a literal language, capable of holding a meaning in itself and of existing before us as a dramatic reality. This is why these avant-garde authors, while they set up a new language which answers new needs,
do not effect any real revolution in the relationship between
theatre and its language.
This was the revolution which was to be promoted by another
current of the avant-garde, a current entirely characteristic of the
post-war period. This current which marks a clear rupture with
the theatrical influence of Artaud, is represented by the names
of Beckett, Adamov, and lonesco. These authors treat language,
which till now was only a means, as though it had become an
object capable of exhausting by itself the entire substance of the

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theatre. Their originality this time no longer lies in their choice

of a new language, but in their setting up a dramaturgy of human
relations at the level of language itself. Their originality appears
quite clearly if we compare this dramaturgy with that of the traditional theatre. In the latter, human relations are never verbal
relations, but "psychological" relationships which language only
translates. Undoubtedly these characters, in order to confront one
another and bring the plot to a head, must be able to communicate by means of a common language, but this communication of
men by words, postulated by the bourgeois theatre as a sine qua
non of drama, becomes in the new avant-garde, the very content
of the drama itself. The characters' language will therefore find
itself for the first time literally exposed upon the stage, promoted
to the dignity of a theatrical object, it becomes at the same time a
material for possible tragedy or mockery for the spectator. Thus
appears-a new and important figure of the avant-garde- a
theatre of language where man's words are held up to us as a
spectacle.
When language becomes the object of a theatrical problem,
nothing is any longer a matter of course: the doors are open to
a criticism of its value, and that is why the destruction of language is one of the major directions of this avant-garde current.
The drama of words will therefore be only a drama of absurdity,
and the theatre of language, by destroying its object, will become an anti-theatre: a dialectic whose consequences we can observe in the theatre of lonesco.
His work-it has often been noted-seems dominated by a
fundamental obsession, that of the commonplace. In this sense,
it is attacking a clearly defined language: a language made up of
cliches and ready-made formulas, which is that of an alienated
society, and is ours also insofar as we belong to that society and
insofar as the stupidity which it secretes, whatever our efforts to
free ourselves from it, contaminates all our daily behavior. Such
is the petty bourgeois language denounced by lonesco in most
of his plays. However diverse the methods he uses to make it
laughable' these methods all consist, in the final analysis, of creat1Sometimes commonplaces betray themselves
by their unexpected
proliferation (as in the beginning of The Bald Soprano)-sometimes
annul each other before our eyes by their very contradictions-yet

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183

ing a sort of pushing to the limit, whose purpose is never to take

away the sense from a pre-existing language, but to oblige it to
betray to us by itself its own absurdity. For after all there is
no more sense in the petty bourgeois expression which declares
that "he who steals an egg will steal an ox," than there is in the
one pronounced by one of the characters in The Bald Soprano:
"who sells an ox today, will have an egg tomorrow." The second
expression tends to take any excuse away from the first: since we
can no longer hear it without hearing the other, this hollow language reveals here its essence, which is precisely to "talk without
saying anything"-a loquacious formula for silence. And at the
same time as its esserrce, it shows us its social function: which
makes of the commonplace not only an inoffensive accident of
language, or a temporary phenomenon of resonant inanity, but
also the product of a class closed up within itself or else-as generally is the case in Ionesco-of a family unit absolutely impervious to history. To speak in commonplaces, in this sense, is to
accept a purely formal language where meanings are devoured by
signs; it is to become part of a community which can only found
its cohesion, like Jack's family where it is understood that everyone must like "hashed brown potatoes," upon formulas bereft
of meaning. Moving in a vacuum, cut off from all truth, petty
bourgeois language does "tell" us something all the same. It tells
us of the purely ritual recognition of a certain common servitude,
the submission to an Order which is defined only by its "passwords." By denouncing this language, Ionesco frees us from it.
But this criticism of an alienated language should not deceive
us regarding the intentions behind it. The ridiculing of petty
bourgeois language in lonesco is only the most obvious aspect
of a general disgust with words. His entire work bears witness
to the same purpose: that of reducing language to absurdity, by
considering it simply as sonorous matter, and by systematically
emptying that matter of meanings it is supposed to carry.2 Now,
other times, Ionesco stuffs them with erratic or ambiguous expressions
(as in Jack: "I've given birth to a monster")-and sometimes lonesco
uses a common technique of parodying a well-known phrase, by deformingit or invertingits terms.
2 In this sense, we must take seriously this passagefrom The Lesson
in which Ionesco, through the Professor'smouth, proposes a theoryobviously a parody-of language: "If you pronounce several sounds at

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Tulane Drama Review

if such an undertaking has value when it is dealing with a language of commonplaces (since commonplaces never present anything more than a mere semblance of meaning), it becomes
arbitrary when it is dealing with an authentic language, a language in which certain meanings are really attempting to be
formulated. Or rather, it only places us before the subjectivity
of a profound choice: that which consists of considering all language from the outside, taking a position of strangeness before
all human utterances. In effect, it is always possible to reduce any
language to its simple sonorous substratum; but this presupposes that one has refused to enter into it, to place oneself inside
of the thought which is trying to express itself. This is precisely
what lonesco does in his plays, and what he did in 1955 in The
Shepherd's Chameleon, where he ridicules a certain language
simply by petrifying it. Whenever one refuses to follow the movement of a thought which is attempting to express itself through
words, the words become foreign bodies, laughable objects, and
instead of a language which was alive because of the meanings
it was attempting to express, we have a sclerosed rhetoric which
is only its caricature. In order to accomplish this, it is enough to
transform the language into a thing, absurd as any thing is when
considered outside of its human context.
If one chooses this direction, language is no longer possible.
Ionesco knows this so well that in the same Shepherd's Chameleon,
his mockery of drama critics' language ends up by becoming
a mockery of his own language as author. We can now grasp
the meaning of his undertaking: whether he criticizes petty bourgeois language or that of the "doctors in theatreology," lonesco
never does so in the name of another language, but in the name
of Silence, pure and simple. And here there intervenes what we
might call a dialectical turn-about. Because silence is the truth of
his criticism of language, in the body of his plays Ionesco attempts
to impose its presence on us also. We leave here, then, the domain
of ridicule to enter into what Paulhan has called the "Kingdom of
Terror."
an acceleratedpace, they will automaticallygrab hold of each other,
constituting thus syllables, words, or if necessarysentences, that is to
say, more or less important groups, purely irrational assemblagesof
sounds,bereftof all meaning..."

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185

But how can we suggest this silence in a play where we must

work with words? In the first place, by the radical inability of
language to bring about any real human relationships. Ionesco's
effort consists in helping us to glimpse, upon the ruins of verbal communication, the tragic silence which is that of the solitude of his beings. In The Chairs, for example, he presents us
with a verbal situation which is carefully vitiated from the start:
two old people converse with guests who are non-existent, and
their words, because they are addressed to no one, literally destroy
themselves before our eyes.3 The fact is that language, by its nature, is made for others; to speak is to come out of oneself, to attempt a social relationship, to pass from subjectivity to a beginning of a human universe. If we set up an extreme situation
in which the relationship to others is purely imaginary, words are
immediately annihilated. What rises then upon their ruin, is the
inhuman kernel of silence which they have not been able to break.
But Ionesco goes further still. At the end of Jack the characters finally adopt a language in which there is only one word
by which to designate everything: the word "cat." After having
shown us language powerless to set up communication between
men, Ionesco shows us here a humanity which itself gives up even
trying to speak. It no longer wishes to accomplish the fundamentally human act of naming things, of distinguishing them by
pointing to them and giving them an identity.4 Without this act,
the world and things no longer exist, there is only the night of
an elemental universe in which all things are still undifferentiated. All Ionesco's theatre seems to open onto this night of silence.
In all of his plays, as a matter of fact, we find the same funda3The two heroes succeed in giving a semblance of reality to their
conversationonly by their mutual complicity. But even this fails: for
example when the Old Woman tells the Photographerof her son's
departure,while the Old Man explains to his "Belle" that they could
never have children. From the contradiction between this tale, which
lonesco wished to be moving, and its brutal denial, there is born an
instantaneousdestructionof language,whose dizzyingeffect I could feel
during the performance.
' The destructionof language in Ionesco easily takes the shape of a
terror exercising itself upon the individual identity of beings and objects. We know that one of his favorite techniques is to give the same
name to several characters,so that this name no longer is useful in
designating them. See, for example, Bobby Watson in The Bald
?nbrano. or the three Bartholomeus in The Shepherd's Chameleon.

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Tulane Drama Review

mental itinerary: taking his departure from the ridicule of a hollow language, he frees us from it only to close us up all the more
within the silence which this language concealed. Once the thin
crust of its meaning is broken through, this language reveals an
abyss into which lonesco plunges along with his characters. Such
an itinerary is illustrated perfectly by The Chairs, since in this
play human words, gone mad, give place at last to silence: the
reading, to an imaginary humanity, of a Message by an Orator
from whom we hear only "coughs, groans, the guttural sounds
of a mute." The last word for lonesco is precisely silence: that
silence which only a mute could "speak." The end of The Chairs
clearly reveals the will which animates all the destruction of language in lonesco's theatre: to close again the silence of the universe upon the absence of humanity.
But silence is also the absence of theatre: the theatre cannot
accomplish the destruction of language without destroying itself.
And undoubtedly lonesco's theatre, in a certain sense, takes its
life from its own death, a movement which gives it its strength.
But it can live only because it puts off that death till the very end.
Suspended between the life and the death of theatre, the antitheatre of lonesco is always fragile, because silence is its end
in both senses of the word: insofar as he realizes its essence on the
one hand, and on the other insofar as he suppresses it at the same
time. And that is why, in the final analysis, all theatre of terror
is a blind alley. It can truly accomplish itself only by denying
itself.
Translated by LEONARD C. PRONKO