Fascinating comment, that articulates the point of TFA better than TFA did.
I've always been highly articulate, and also frustrated by the limitations of spoken language. This is a common (maybe even the dominant?) theme in 20th century theatrical writing. People like Ibsen, Chekhov, Pinter, Genet, and Churchill all struggle with it in their own ways. People like Beckett and LePage and Sarah Kane ultimately kind of abandon language altogether.
Or, though poetry's not as much my field as theatre, you could go back to TS Eliot:
... Words strain,
Crack, and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
My own speculation, along your lines, is that it's because sound is transient, hearing imperfect, and memory fallible. Even apart from ambiguity, two people will never quite agree on what was said. (Most of my arguments with my wife begin this way!) Even court transcripts, intended to eliminate this limitation, don't capture non-verbal cues.
As someone who's been marinated in the written and spoken word for all my life, research like this is fascinating, and slightly creepy: will all of the ghosts in the machine be exorcised? If those are blown away, and the bare mechanism of language exposed, what comes next?
Comments
Fascinating comment, that articulates the point of TFA better than TFA did.
I've always been highly articulate, and also frustrated by the limitations of spoken language. This is a common (maybe even the dominant?) theme in 20th century theatrical writing. People like Ibsen, Chekhov, Pinter, Genet, and Churchill all struggle with it in their own ways. People like Beckett and LePage and Sarah Kane ultimately kind of abandon language altogether.
Or, though poetry's not as much my field as theatre, you could go back to TS Eliot:
... Words strain, Crack, and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.
My own speculation, along your lines, is that it's because sound is transient, hearing imperfect, and memory fallible. Even apart from ambiguity, two people will never quite agree on what was said. (Most of my arguments with my wife begin this way!) Even court transcripts, intended to eliminate this limitation, don't capture non-verbal cues.
As someone who's been marinated in the written and spoken word for all my life, research like this is fascinating, and slightly creepy: will all of the ghosts in the machine be exorcised? If those are blown away, and the bare mechanism of language exposed, what comes next?