The Pragmatics of Dialogue in the Theatre of St.I. Witkiewicz

The Pragmatics of Dialogue in the Theatre of St.l. Witkiewicz WLADIMIR KRYSINSKI I St.I. Witkiewicz's endeavour stems from a desire to remake theatre entirely in order to give it a radically new structure, that of "Pure Form," following the incentive of concrete music and abstract painting. Interpreting dialogue in a pragmatic perspective raises the question of communication between a metenunciator, Witkiewicz, theoretician and practitioner of theatre, and a commentator, an analyst, or ultimately a spectator or reader of his theatre; the latter cannot gain full access to Witkiewicz's dramatic text without knowing the author's theory of Pure Form. Consequently, the problem of communication is the reader's and/or spectator's cognizance of a series of what I would call epistemological presuppositions. These stru"cture the interdetermination of syntax, and the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of this theatre, allowing one to grasp the specific functions dialogue occupies in it. The theory of Pure Form developed by Witkiewicz is complex, situated at various levels of his philosophical and theoretical discourse as well as his dramatic and novelistic texts. This theory does not adhere to the Co-operation Principle in the way Grice understands it, that is, an interaction of four main factors: I) Quality, 2) Quantity, 3) Relation, and 4) Manner. As Teun A. van Dijk points out with reason in his interpretation of the functionality of the Co-operation Principle in literature: "... in literature, we seem to witness very clear violations of all these principles."1 Van Dijk thus poses the problem of "the reduction of the primary role of semantic information"2 in introducing the concept of "irrelevant" information and supermaximal encoding of information . However, Van Dijk's observations are, on the whole, limited to the text itself. What happens with Witkiewicz is a constant projection ofthe metatext on the text, or to put it another way, an alimentation of the text by the metatext.3 Dialogue in Witkiewicz's Theatre 65 The problem of the pragmatics of dialogue must therefore be placed in the constraining perspective of his metatheory, which is simultaneously a metadiscourse on mimetic and psychological theatre, and a constituting of semiotic structures appropriate to the conveyance of "Pure Form" in theatre. Witkiewicz organizes his metatheory as a depreciation of theatrical mimesis at all levels: that of reality; that of verisimilar coherent and logical action; and that ofthe psychology ofthe characters, traditionally conceived to be a factor of coherence in the organization of the action and the composition of the dramatic text. Curiously, Witkiewicz assigns a particularly important function to dialogue, and with all the visual and auditory elements ofhis theatre, situates it in the perspective of Pure Form. In order to attribute the qualities of Pure Form to dialogue, it is therefore necessary to adhere totally to the perspective of the possible world envisaged by Witkiewicz as Pure Form in theatre. One may thus postulate the following structure: TW ~ DF ~ RL + PSC + AC DF ~ RL + PSC + AC There exists a set TW (the theatre of Witkiewicz) to which a metoperator DF (deformation) belongs, and DF transforms reality (RL), the psychology of the characters (PSC) and action (AC). The metoperator DF, introduced by Witkiewicz, acts as a deformatory function, along with other operators among which one must count dialogue. The latter thus belongs to the set of the metoperator DF, and in tum transforms RL, PSC and AC. One may therefore conclude that the possible world ofPure Formexists only where a metoperator DF transforms the sets RL, PSC and AC, and where the operator DL (dialogue), belonging to the set of the metoperator DF, in tum transforms the sets RL, PSC and AC. It is self-evident that the quantification of this possible world should be envisaged within the ideological framework ofthe possible world of Pure Form, the term "ideology" taken in Quine's sense, that is, as "the range ofseverally expressible ideas" and as an attitude implying"the idea of an idea."4 Considered in this perspective, the figuration of the possible world of Pure Form in theatre calls upon an interpretation of dialogue as a system of deformations. Its pragmatics may be described by giving a certain number of...