The Breakdown of Language and its Consequences in Literature
Above: the original production of Waiting For Godot - Paris 1953
Language enables humans to have agency and to make sense of their surroundings. Certain texts have disrupted this structure in different ways, which has resulted in a new perception of the human condition. In my selection of texts, this breakdown of language brings up themes of stunted agency, the idea of existentialism, and a sense of perpetually oppressive unfamiliar surroundings.
In the medium of theater, language and the act of listening are both major sources of power for the characters while onstage. When these themes are especially prominent, the play’s script starts by acknowledging an adherence to language. It then addresses the problems language presents when the characters obsess over it. In these texts, the effects of language are heightened when the scenes are set in an oppressive environment. Because the characters are in some way unable to escape their environment and the company they keep, their situation becomes self-perpetuating and at times torturous.
In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the main characters experience ongoing restlessness in their act of waiting, which affects their attempts at verbal and nonverbal communication. Their inability to remember important details of their recent interactions also prevents them from breaching any new ground in their act of waiting. Because their senses are at a disadvantage, they are unable to use language to serve any consistent intentions of theirs. Their sense of belonging is displaced and they feel they have no agency. Consequently, they cannot escape no matter how hard they try, though there are no physical chains holding them back—only mental ones.
Complex language is humankind’s most underappreciated blessing, and its fundamental purpose is to elevate one’s will beyond basic survival needs. Through their attempts at fully functioning language, Vladimir and Estragon find that language not only sabotages itself, but has no purpose to serve, even if it had the capacity to do so, which it doesn’t, for them at least. This paradox gives them an unlikely self-awareness of their status as quasi-beings in a purgatorial no-man’s land.
Their problematic existence is addressed in the following passage: “ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? VLADIMIR: [impatiently] Yes yes, we’re magicians. But let us persevere in what we have resolved, before we forget.” (Beckett, 59) This passage conveys their continual realization that they have made very little progress, at most, in even moving toward some semblance of a purpose. Still, Vladimir reminds his companion to keep searching, while granted, there are very real setbacks to their existence.
It must be said that they do acknowledge the necessity of existing, while they are unable to attain it. Vladimir does this by referencing universality in the following passage:
Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? [Estragon says nothing.] It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflexion, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come— (Beckett, 70)
In this rant, Vladimir expresses the full range of his affectation, which is not to say his full range of emotion. His ability to affect a certain passion is combined with his madness. Rather, this is the result of Vladimir being out of touch with his existence long after his sensory skills were impaired. The most he can do in his state of waiting is reach this kind of epiphany about helping one’s congener, as one of another species might, to find a source of purpose. Because he knows he cannot change the status of his own existence, maybe he can add something to his species’ collective existence.
The query to find some type of purpose is at least genuine for fleeting moments during this monologue from Vladimir, but it is ultimately undone by the play’s complications in language and sensory ability. This state of madness and unsteady self-awareness is the default state in Beckett’s play. Part of the reason people appreciate works of fiction or theater is the ability to authentically show the human tendency for residual signs of madness, and this is what causes conflict in a story. However, by making madness the base point, or, paradoxically, the norm, for Beckett’s world, there is no recourse to reach a point of conflict. Rather than as in a traditional narrative, considering the question, “What makes these characters snap?”, two questions now emerge: “How expansive or amorphous is this place of waiting?”, and, “How real or consuming is their struggle with madness?”
In The Tempest, there is no single reason that the characters are trapped on Prospero’s island. Prospero’s magic and power over the storm is the foremost oppressor of the characters, but it affects the characters mainly in the way they feel trapped. The real test of survival becomes tolerating one another’s company for an extended period of time. While Ariel has a higher status than Caliban, being protected by Prospero, his is intensely affected by Prospero’s power. Their competitive need to find have agency in the confined space of the island, framed by Prospero’s obsessiveness, is shown in the following piece of dialogue:
PROSPERO: My brave spirit! / Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil / Would not infect his reason?
ARIEL: Not a soul / But felt a fever of the mad and played / Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners / Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel, / Then all afire with me; the King’s son Ferdinand, / With hair upstaring (then like reeds, not hair), / Was the first man that leapt, cried “Hell is empty, / And all the devils are here!” (Shakespeare
The conflict here in The Tempest parallels Vladimir’s and Estragon’s shapeless but oppressive space of waiting. Those affected by Prospero’s relentless will, including himself, realize the weaknesses the storm gives them. However, unlike Vladimir and Estragon, Prospero and Ariel are almost able to control reality, which actually helps them reach a more whole understanding of their surroundings. This seems to help them fit in with their surroundings as well. The phrase “Hell is empty / And all the devils are here!” shows Ariel being candid about Prospero’s domineering nature, and the storm he has created.
A parallel can be drawn between Caliban, Prospero’s abject slave, and Pozzo’s slave, named Lucky, in Waiting for Godot. Both attempt to prove their worth separate from their master’s will, through their use of language. The proof of their worth is not necessarily granted by supporting characters. Instead, Caliban and Lucky wish to escape from their environment and have a new experience of reality—anything to contrast their inferior status as slaves. Both in part due to the oppressiveness of their environments, Lucky fails, while Caliban is successful, showing well versed eloquence at times.
At one point during Waiting for Godot, Pozzo commands Lucky to think, as a form of entertainment. Lucky’s performance disturbs Vladimir and Estragon, as it appears Lucky is genuinely trying to prove something in his character, something that goes against his nature as a subservient being. Pozzo’s makes his command partly by removing Lucky’s hat from his head, which incites a lengthy outpouring of words. This action of removing the hat symbolizes some switch to activate Lucky and give him agency. The test is whether or not the hat will activate something the audience deems as real agency, or, at least some jester-like source of entertainment. Their reaction can be read in the following passage in the stage directions: “[Vladimir and Estragon protest violently. Pozzo jumps up, pulls on the rope. General outcry. Lucky pulls on the rope, staggers, shouts his text. All three throw themselves on Lucky who struggles and shouts his text.]” (Beckett, 35) The monologue is all garbled nonsense, but Lucky has the strong intention to defy their commands for him to stop. Any singular intention behind one's words is enough to set these characters off. While they are all oppressed in some way just by being confined in this place together, Pozzo is a personification of an oppressive external force. This scene serves to remind Vladimir and Estragon that their existence is, unfortunately, in vain just like Lucky’s is, although they are more self-aware than he is, at least superficially.
Caliban’s role in The Tempest is far more self-aware and commanding of the audience’s engagement than we see of Lucky during his monologue, although he is still an abhorred and physically deformed slave under Prospero’s control. In the following monologue from Caliban he addresses the savagery that he perceives as his oppressor’s daily operation:
CALIBAN: All the infections that the sun sucks up / From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him / By inchmeal a disease! / [A noise of thunder heard] His spirits hear me / And yet I needs must curse. But they’ll nor pinch, / Fright me with urchin-shows, pitch me i' th' mire, / Nor lead me like a firebrand in the dark / Out of my way, unless he bid 'em. But / For every trifle are they set upon me, / Sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me, / And after bite me, then like hedgehogs which / Lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount / Their pricks at my footfall. Sometime am I / All wound with adders who with cloven tongues / Do hiss me into madness.
While Caliban’s physical appearance and his fixed status as a slave precede his influence as a character in the play, he is able to achieve this elusive place of self-awareness by following a clear intention with language. Whereas Lucky powers through his monologue in search of something intangible, tragically ignorant of how oppressed he is, Caliban articulates how he is being oppressed psychologically and physically through manual labor. In both cases the oppressed characters inevitably spiral into madness, but the settings for both affect the characters’ trajectories. In Waiting for Godot, Lucky’s state is clearly a result of his environment, while Pozzo is essentially a prop to ensure that Lucky has no agency. Lucky is essentially just a less socially adjusted version of Vladimir, Estragon, or his master Pozzo: he has a sense of serious displacement in his environment, and any semblance of a purpose or personal distinction is nonexistent, as far as we can tell.
The Tempest has a much more ambiguous portrait of an oppressed character than that of Waiting for Godot. For all of his acknowledgment of his constant state of maltreatment, his words never evoke self-pity, but rather, an intense hatred for his master. With this resolute attitude, the audience might expect an action later on to support this extreme level of hate which seemingly cannot be expressed fully through words alone. Caliban understands how the obstacles set in front of him by his world play off each other, and the hierarchy he has to climb to have some influence on people that are not at all like him. There is the ever-present pressure from Prospero’s magic to begin with, which he can snap on at a moment’s notice. There is also the need for correct use of the English language, which is far from his native language, and only recently taught to him by Prospero and Miranda.
The struggle to achieve intentional and effective communication is also very present in Olaudah Equiano’s memoir Interesting Narrative. Equiano is shipped from his native land in Africa and enslaved in the American South, with no knowledge of the English language. This disadvantage, coupled with societal displacement and total loss of his native culture, cripples Equiano’s agency and sense of belonging in a foreign land. Like Caliban, Equiano is stripped of his native language, any familiar community, and completely without a sense of belonging, as a result. Before he successfully learns the English language, we see that there are serious consequences for not speaking or understanding English, which can affect a person’s survival in a very real way. The first evidence of this is the white slave master’s punishment of whipping African slaves for minor things, such as their refusal to eat. This happens to Equiano at one point during his journey across the Atlantic by boat. (Equiano 56) If he had some handle on the English language, he could communicate some rational explanation that might improve his well-being on the ship.
Later on in the narrative, Equiano considers the purpose of books, and he explains that his first thought was that they themselves are used for communication. Because he has acquired a close rapport with Jacob, he can ask him what the book are for. But had he not acquired an affinity with white people, and in turn learned their language, not only would he be completely oppressed by his environment no matter whose company he ended up in, but he would be set back severely by the most ordinary aspects of modern life.
Similar to Equiano’s initial response to books, in Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon have a strange connection to everyday objects that surround them while they wait. The hat is a recurring motif in connection with their search for agency. Considering the effect the hat has on Lucky, when Vladimir and Estragon swap hats repeatedly, in a sense this is their half-hearted attempt to trigger some form of agency in themselves. (Beckett 62) Perhaps, like jumpstarting a car, if they devote enough time to this act of swapping hats, either they will feed off one another’s energy to find some agency for themselves, or simply the momentum gained from swapping hats enough will pay off in the end. At least this may be their intention. Oddly enough, they are almost robotic in their affect during this scene, saying nothing but carrying out Beckett’s staging faithfully, waiting for something to have an effect on their sloth.
There is also at least one instance in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative memoir of a misguided response to objects in one’s surroundings. The most raw and transparent example of this is when Equiano is slowly trying to adjust to life under the rule of an American slave owner, with no knowledge whatsoever of the English language.
Soon after I had a fan put into my hand, to fan the gentleman while he slept; and so I did indeed with great fear. While he was fast asleep I indulged myself a great deal in looking about the room, which to me appeared very fine and curious. The first object that engaged my attention was a watch which hung on the chimney, and was going. I was quite surprised at the noise it made, and was afraid it would tell the gentleman any thing I might do amiss: and when I immediately after observes a picture hanging in the room, which appeared constantly to look at me, I was still more affrighted, having never seen such things as these before. At one time I thought it might be some way the whites had to keep their great men when they died, and offer them libations as we used to do our friendly spirits. In this state of anxiety I remained till my master awoke, when I was dismissed out of the room, to my no small satisfaction and relief, for I thought that these people were all made of wonders. (Equiano 62)
In the above passage, Equiano’s naïve state in his master’s room shows him acutely disadvantaged. While his master is the active oppressor in this setting, Equiano is at a point where all the odds are against him and even the foreignness of his room is a source of shock and awe. This is the result of being transplanted from one culture, which is technologically unsophisticated, yet culturally rich, into one that is technologically superior. This state of fear and paralysis could affect many in Equiano’s position extremely badly. If the transition could not go so smoothly, white men affected by racism would see the result and would interpret the fear as inherent to an African person’s character.
Nearly all of these texts can be placed linearly in relation to how language is a complication to the narrative. This is to say that for each of these texts, the story takes place before, during or after, some form of breakdown of language.
Equiano’s Interesting Narrative starts when language is already deeply problematic for the protagonist. Although in the beginning, during the exposition of the story of his youth in Africa, he has complete freedom and agency in his community, all of this is under the pretence that he will promptly lose everything, and he is furthest from his objective of surviving when he is initially placed under the wing of his first master in the state of Virginia. In The Tempest, Caliban has finally adjusted to the problem of language, and feels tremendous pressure to exercise his agency through speech, so he can offset the reality of being a slave to Prospero’s will.
In Waiting for Godot, the entire narrative takes place during a suspended breakdown of language. The result is an overarching madness for all the characters: we have no aspect of accepted normalcy for us to compare the five cast members to. In Lois Gordon’s essay “Reading Godot,” Gordon writes, of the concept of madness:
It is not a qualitatively different state from sanity, but rather the condition in which the ubiquitous forces of unreason break the fragile veneer of realism and burst into consciousness and bizarre, dereistic behavior. In sanity, these forces warp the façade, but reason manages to hold, except in dreams, slips of the tongue, and socially acceptable, overtly coherent, and often transparently rationalized forms of instinctual expression, like war and neurosis. (Gordon 3)
In Beckett’s play, waiting, or the act of anxiety, is explored as a place, rather than a state of being. The spare, indistinct setting marked only by a country road and a tree, is Beckett’s physical manifestation of the state of madness. While many writers effectively explore madness on the fringes with realism shown at least as some kind of reference point, Beckett creates an entire world separate from the familiar laws of civilization.
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