McEvoy was wondering about Pinter, or perhaps wandering about Pinter.
Strictly, McEvoy was referring to Pinter (that is Harold Pinter, not his
brother!) which reminded me of Burton which reminded me of Grice.
McEvoy is making a contrast between Pinter and Beckett, which reminds me of St.
John’s, which reminds me of Grice. When tuttees accumulated up the steep stairs
that led to Grice’s room at St. John’s, the only one missing was the tutor –
“He is either at the “Bird and Baby” or the “Lamb and Flag,” a cognoscente
would implicate. Soon the don got the nickname, “Godot.” (Warnock, later
Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, later reminisced: “This must have been after the
play by Beckett opened in Paris.”)
But back to Pinter, Deirdre Burton wrote an essay on ‘implicature’ in English
theatre, quoting extensively from Pinter.
McEvoy provides an interesting hypothesis about the ‘formal register’, of,
shall we say, English -- since “The Industrial Revolution” and beyond – and
this is where Pinter gets into the picture – along with McEvoy’s beloved
Beckett:
McEvoy notes: “The formal 'language of business' (i.e. government, commerce,
the law) predominated in English written culture from the Industrial Revolution
onwards, in a way it did not in agricultural Ireland, and has left its imprint
on the English middle [if not upper – Speranza] classes: its forms and
constructions have come to predominate what is regarded as ‘good expression,’
for good and ill. It also impacts on English literature [or ‘Eng. Lit.’, for
short – Speranza], mostly negatively: it may help explain why Pinter is
second-rate a [playwright] compared to Beckett: it is not the just the
subject-matter, it is the way of using language to get at deeper levels where
Pinter falls short. But Pinter is clever enough to know he is comparatively (to
Beckett) second-rate, and to try to turn his [Griceian] limitations to
advantage, by playing on what goes unsaid in surface ‘formal’ language in a way
that plays to a gallery of the middle-class emotionally repressed.”
I like that! But then, “The boy I love is up in the gallery” is one of my
favourite music-hall ditties (parodied by the great English playwright Osborne
in “The Entertainer” – now a major film starring Laurence Olivier – as “The boy
I love is up in the lavatory/the boy I love is looking down on me…”)
Part of Beckett’s problem, as McEvoy implicates, is G. R. I. C. E. – this is
the Groupe de Recherche sur l’Inference et la Compréhension Élémentaire. I.e.,
as McEvoy notes: as a joke, Beckett wrote in French, and his implicatures
belong to this groupe, then, the G. R. I. C. E., as it is based in Paris.
But back to Pinter.
McEvoy’s use of ‘enough’ invites nice implicatures:
i. Pinter is clever enough to play on what goes unsaid.
“What goes unsaid” is of course Grice’s implicature – or Godot’s implicature –
as he was called. (Grice, that is). Grice thought he had coined ‘implicature’
back in Oxford in 1965 – of course it had been used by Sidonius in Latin --.
But in 1967, playing to the Harvard gallery, Grice used an interesting example:
ii. A: How is C getting on at his new job at the bank?
B: Oh, quite well, I think. He likes his colleagues, and he has not been to
prison -- yet.
‘What goes unsaid,’ to echo McEvoy, is, Grice (or Godot) argues, the Fregeian
proposition:
iii. C is potentially dishonest.
Or
iv. That bank is known for having particularly treacherous
employees.
(By conceptual analysis, an implicature, being ‘essentially a disjunct,’ is
‘indeterminate in nature’).
It would do to find some examples of implicatures in Pinter. Consider “The Dumb
Waiter”:
v.
A
Go and light it.
B
Light what?
B
The kettle.
A
You mean the gas.
A
Who does?
B
You do.
A
What do you mean, I mean the gas?
B
Well, that’s what you mean, don’t you? The gas.
A
If I say go and light the kettle I mean go and light the kettle.
B
How can you light a kettle?
A
It's a figure of speech! Light the kettle. It's a figure of speech!
B
I've never heard it.
A
Light the kettle! It's common usage!
And stuff.
Cheers,
Speranza
