The Cratylus, The Birthday Party, and the language of Adam

Let me begin this very scattered (apologies!) post, on the Pinter I saw last night, the Plato I read last month, and the Adamic discourse that is everywhere in the seventeenth century, by quickly summarizing the Cratylus.

The dialogue begins with Socrates intervening in an argument between Hermogenes and Cratylus about whether names are conventional (Hermogenes' position) or natural (Cratylus' position). In response, Socrates puts forth a theory of words as tools, used to differentiate things in the world according to forms. He concludes that there must have been, in some distant era, original craftsmen who made words, and traces of that origin can still be seen, although language has been corrupted over time. Words, according to Socrates, are meant to be descriptive of their nature, of the things they refer to, and are therefore made from smaller words, which are themselves made from mimetic phonemes. In examining these phonemes, it becomes clear to the participants in the dialogue that the original namers favored a theory of the world as flux, not form, and associated positive qualities with motion. The first namers, then, were basically mistaken in their theory of reality (accd. to Plato). So: language is a coherent system, instituted by some original makers but substantially corrupted, mimetic down to the level of phonemes, only--wrong. I summarize at such length because it 1. is awesome and 2. offers an interesting analog to the theory of Adamic speech as it appears in the English seventeeth century.

There is a great deal of variation in what is meant by the language of Adam in the seventeenth century, but I think that it typically posits, like Plato, a humanly instituted, mimetic but corrupted (Babel, gentiles) language. The difference, of course, is that Adam's basic perception of reality was correct, unlike that of Plato's original makers. And unlike Plato's makers, Adam is a single individual--an important fact for seventeenth century radical protestants, since for them this theory is, I would argue, conceived against the role of religious institutions as legitimating meaning--primarily Catholicism, but also, most distantly, Judaism. In the first half of the sixteenth century, Thomas More had argued, in his debates with the Protestant St. German and Tyndale, that the church necessarily preceded the Bible, since the Bible could only have been sanctioned as the word of God by an already existing institution. This is precisely the difficulty that the idea of Adamic speech avoids by tracing meaning, finally, to an individual namer, and locating his authority in the perfection of his reason.

To come, now, to Pinter, who is after all the catalyst of this discussion: last night I saw, for the first time, The Birthday Party. It is a remarkable play, brilliant in a number of ways, but it left me extremely uneasy--and not merely because it was trying to do so. If you haven't seen this play, it takes place in a decaying seaside boarding house somewhere in England, run by a middle-aged woman of questionable sanity and her husband. They have one guest, who has been staying for a year, a helpless, depressive, relatively young man. We learn early on that two men have been inquiring about staying for the night; when they do eventually arrive, it is clear that they have come for some sinister purpose relating to the boarding house's sole guest. It is all terrifying language games and the decay of meaning from here on out, leading to a final contest between the guest and the men, under the thinnest tissue of English joviality. What these men are manipulating is, I think, Britishness and a system of meaning peculiarly associated with it, only its original significance is lost, and the element of force undergirding any system of meaning is laid bare. So far, all right--the play has often been compared to The Trial, not ineptly, and Pinter, in his later statements about it, says vague things about the role of the individual in resisting conformity or something like that. But! I have omitted, dear readers, a most striking fact: the two men are an Irish Catholic--McCann--and a Jew--Goldberg, and they frequently use terms and phrases associated with their respective religions. That, I'm sure you'll agree, changes everything--in fact, it brings us right back to the Catholic Menace and the seventeenth century, the fear that the closed conspiratorial, systems of Judaism and the Catholic Church inevitably make meaning an echo chamber for their own orthodoxies, inevitably impose it by means of a threat. Given the simple Englishness of the rest of the characters in the play, when McCann and Goldberg--really, primarily Goldberg--recycle anglicisms, it comes across as part frightening appropriation, part cruel parody. This, I would argue, is precisely the submerged thesis of the English adherents of Adamic speech; it is a startlingly regressive position for a play written in the 50s. This is not, so far as I am aware, the typical interpretation of this play. Yet it seemed to me quite necessary, and so I would be very curious to know, if you have seen or read it, what you think. It is probably not the best idea to trust a single viewing, since every performance is an interpretation, and possibly an idiosyncratic one.