Journal of Pragmatics 11 (1987) 533-547 North-Holland

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BOOK REVIEWS

Anne Betten, Sprachrealismus im deutschen Drama der siebziger Jahre. (Mono- graphien zur Sprachwissenschaft 14, ed. Rudolf Schiitzeichel.) Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1985. 412 pp.

“Es ist schwer nachzuweisen, ob ein Gesprgch . . . genauso spontan stattlinden kiinnte oder ob es so nur als Produkt sorgfiltigster kiinstlerischer Auswahl und Anordnung effekt- voller Stilmittel denkbar ist” (P. 97)

There was a first renaissance of the so-called folk-drama in German and Austrian literature in the late twenties, represented by writers such as Fleiljer and Horvath (comparable to the work of Bond, Pinter, and Wesker in English dramatic literature), followed by a second generation of very popular and successful authors, prominent representatives of which are W. Bauer and F.X. Kroetz. This is the reason why these two have been chosen for special and extensive discussion (6 plays by Bauer and 16 by Kroetz) by A. Betten in her study on linguistic realism in the German drama of the 70’s.

Accompanying the above-mentioned wave of a new kind of realistic drama, there arose - perhaps as a consequence of a general and overall interest in authentic language use - a new interest in spoken language in linguistics: corpora of authentic speech were being collected and analysed, not just in Freiburg.’ One of the main characteristics of dramatic works of this kind - beside their specitic subjects and location in the lower middle class and proletarian (kitchen sink) milieu - is the predominant use of what the authors and their critics regard as true-to-life duplicates of colloquial, even dialectal language variants (i.e. Austrian, or more precisely, the urban Graz variant in Bauer’s, and Bavarian, esp. the dialect of Munich and the Chiemsee area in Kroetz’ plays). Although the dialect that the authors use usually is not a local one, they nevertheless employ a whole gamut of very specific vernacular features, esp. such as exclusively belong to oral usage.

The central problem investigated in Betten’s copious study is in short this: To what extent is the literary imitation of everyday language in modern drama

r Betten, for some time affiliated to Steger’s institute (at the University of Freiburg), has done work on conversational analysis over a considerable period of time concentrating on pragmahn- guistics and discourse analysis, This now is the final and seasoned outcome of a tremendous amount of preliminary studies.

037%2166/87/$3.50 0 1987, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)

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a realistic representation of actual authentic speech (see chapter 7 for an extensive discussion of the concept of realism in the arts, esp. literature), and which are the adaptations or reductions inevitable for dramatic, i.e. creative elaboration.

The author’s aim of investigation is thus the same that Lessing described as far back as 1767 in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie: “Alle die kleinen Nachlassigkeiten (...) die dem Dichter so schwer zu finden waren, die er mit so vieler Uberlegung dahin und dorthin streute, urn den Dialog geschmeidig zu machen, und den Reden einen wahren Anschein der augenblicklichen Eingebung zu erteilen”, or as Betten herself expresses it: “Zu einer der Pramissen meiner Untersuchung gehiirt es (. . .) moderne Dramensprache stets zwischen den beiden Polen der heutigen Alltagssprache und der tradierten Btihnensprache(n) zu betrachten” (pp. 227f.).

Betten’s findings ~ for one thing - indicate that the degree of stylistic adaptation varies from one author to the other, and, in accordance with his or her artistic development within an author’s lifetime. But the main result of the study is this: there are some fundamental facts that prevent the dramatic author from presenting real spontaneous speech on the stage2 - even if the dramatist should have included (which they very rarely do) elements that have come to be regarded as exclusively performance-related, such as false starts, errors in articulation and lexical choice, self-correction, pauses etc. etc. First of all, it is impossible to stage everything that would probably have occurred in a genuine spontaneous speech event, i.e. authors would in any case have to make a choice from among elements they have observed and practiced themselves; on the other hand, whatever the elements selected (in order to characterise either the person speaking or the style of a whole speech community), these must undergo artistic processing, arrangement and adapta- tion. The selection as well as the degree and kind of adaptation would of course vary in the individual authors’ works. In addition to this, simulated dialogue is subject to conditions differing from those prevailing in everyday conversation: dramatic dialogue - being far removed from the randomness of everyday usage - is always instrumental for the author’s intentions towards characterisation (even for the purpose_ of carrying ideological messages of various kinds: cp. the increase in verbal activity and dexterity in Kroetz’ later plays): dramatic dialogue ‘happens’ according to a precalculated plan of the author’s The difference between premeditated, as compared to spontaneous, speech has many consequences, one of which is the fact that anything that belongs to the randomness of parole must naturally be excluded: there are no (unplanned) false starts, no errors or mistakes, there is not much simultaneous speaking, since all these things would impair comprehension on the part of the

2 Which is true even for the model-drama of the so-called ‘Sekundenstil’ in German naturalistic drama, Fundie Selicke by A. Holz and J. Schlaf.

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author’s real interlocutors, viz. the audience. Thus, the intrinsic impediment detrimental to the realistic ambition of any author and producer is this: the very impression of spontaneity of speech has to be planned (and rehearsed, for that matter) for its appearance on the stage. And last but not least, there is the expectation of the audience: dramatic dialogue is supposed to be understood by the recipient as part of a pattern of a dramatic process; even audiences trained to accept disappointments in their expectations of sense and sensibility, such as may be expected in modern drama (Ionesco, Beckett), would not expect dramatic dialogue to be entirely hampered by the random accidents and misfirings that are so typical for anything people do in their everyday (oral and small) talk. So that, since elements of spontaneous speech cannot just occur haphazardly, the authors employ them as means of characterisation which _ by its very nature - is likely to be a very carefully planned and deliberate enterprise.

Compared with spontaneous discourse (never to be repeated again), in dramatic dialogues the dram&is personae and their author know beforehand where the whole thing is heading, and the audience knows that they know (even in the case of the comedia dell’arte or any kind of Punch-and-Judy- happening).

Betten’s study is preceded by an extensive list of literature on the subject under consideration: oral language use and dramatic dialogue. Chapter 1 gives a survey of recent investigations into modern dramatic literature, which also serves to demonstrate how neighbouring fields of scientific work, such as linguistics, discourse analysis and stylistics, beside literary criticism, have influenced and been of assistance to each other. In this connection it is of some interest to note that it has been quite usual to exploit literary dialogues (even those from Carroll’s Alice-books!) in studies on conversation (e.g. Beaugrande and Dressler (1981)), probably because of their concise analytic transparency - whilst the problem of how real, i.e. similar to reality and comparable to authentic speech events, these dialogues actually are, has apparently escaped recognition as a problem in itself.

Chapter 2 is a case-study on plays by the Austrian author W. Bauer. Bauer’s dramatis personae belong to a quite specific milieu, viz. a group of artistically and existentially disillusioned well-to-do young people (escapists and ‘drop outs’ (p. 82)) of slightly more than average (grammar school) education (comparable to E. Waugh’s personage of the late 20’s, as depicted e.g. in Vile Bodies). These characters use a species of the urban Graz variant of Austrian German (one feels tempted to call it the cant of the academic proletariate) - something Bauer himself calls “ganz normale Umgangssprache” (p. 84),3 a

3 T. van Dach (1978: 93) calls it a sociolect whose degree of stylistic adaptation cannot possibly be assessed “ohne fundierte Kenntnisse des Grazer Dialektes”. What Betten (among other authors) calls ~ rather indiscriminately - a dialect, is oftentimes urban colloquial, sometimes downright slang. There is an erudite and enlightening sub-chapter (pp. 251 f.) on the relationship between

536 Book reviews

lingo which in itself (as the people using it know) lacks credibility and self- assuredness and more often than not provides demasking insights and effects.

Betten is not concerned with any phonological nuances of a regional variant, Graz or other (neither is Bauer), but rather with the much-discussed impression of casualness (1.4gPretP ‘Lockerheit’) in Bauer’s texts. Instead of phonology, it is rather syntactic and textual patterns - besides lexical stigmata - that are used to simulate oral usage. Yet, simulated conversational chaos (e.g. elliptic, incomplete syntactic chains as can be found in authentic speech) is still transparent and comprehensible when presented on the stage by Bauer. Again, the pervasive dilemma of the realistic dramatist’s ambition is the decision how to present undecidedness, how to plan and direct the unplanned, rationalize the irrational, i.e. performance.

There is a long-standing tradition of attempts to imitate spontaneous speech in dramatic dialogue, dating back (if not to Aristophanes) to Lessing’s early play Miss Sarah Sampson (not to forget his Minna), though there is of course no way of ascertaining the extent of authenticity preserved in these plays. A new, artificial speech code for literary purposes has been created over the years, more or less fictitious as to authenticity, though it uses the elements typical for everyday usage, albeit in a different distribution and in a premedita- ted way. True, for anybody who tries his hand at a history of speech, an investigation of the (oral) language usage as presented in dramatic literature (be it Plautus, or Nestroy) is the only chance and source one has. There are no data available for the colloquial usage of any language; the only ‘recordings’ are the texts of the dramatists and satirists.

In her third chapter the author gives a sampling survey of realistic plays dating as far back as the 18th century4 to demonstrate that the linguistic elements used on the stage to represent actual speech events have always only to a certain extent been imitations of everyday usage. To summarize Betten’s findings: characteristic elements of oral usage (dialectal and near-standard) have been en vogue as a stylistic device for more than 200 years of dramatic work, their vicinity to spontaneous, realistic usage varying from one author to

dialect, sociolect, and psycholect. It ought to be mentioned though, that the term ‘code’ is used by Betten in exactly the sense it has been understood and passed on by German linguists ever since, viz. meaning ‘speech code’ or ‘language variant’, and not in the Bernsteinian (rather Whortian) sense as I understand it, i.e. as a specific kind of (mental) apperception of reality and its subsequent reflection in semiotic, especially verbal behaviour and attitude. 4 Authors discussed in the investigation as presenting additional and complementary material comprise: Lessing, Lenz, Klinger, Biichner, Holz and Schlaf, Hauptmann, Kaiser, Raimund, Anzengruber, Nestroy, Thoma, Ruederer, Lautensack, Valentin, Brecht, Zuckmayer, and of course, because of their primary importance as models, especially for a writer like Kroetz: Fleisser and Horvath. Cf. also chapter 5 for further authors and their plays (work written between 1966 and 198 1): Sperr, Fassbinder; Turini, Slavik, Sommer; Korherr, Pellert, Henisch, Ernst, Mitterer, Graser. In addition to these a number of dramatists is interpreted who use local dialects and urban variants other than Austrian or Bavarian.

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the other. Interestingly enough the selection of these elements has remained practically the same for more than two centuries. (A play like Die S’oldaten by R.M. Lenz is rated as even more ‘modern’, i.e. near-authentic, by Betten than most of the dramatic work of our days.)

Whereas older plays concentrate on exceptional lexical items, and of course (since Herder and the Sturm-und-Drang-period) on affective language, syntacti- cal peculiarities are predominant in modern realistic drama. Here are a few of the many characteristics of impromptu speech, ‘sheer orality’ and casualness which Betten has gleaned from various plays: ellipsis, reductions on different levels, gambits, interjectional elements (affective language in general), idiomati- city, vulgarisms, inversion of the ‘normal’ word order, prolepsis, and repeti- tions, i.e. of an utterance by the speaker himself, or the uptake and completion of the partner’s statement by the interlocutor. Repetitions, of course, are not merely corrections of verbal mistakes: rather, they serve to secure communica- tive contact and comprehension, as has been demonstrated by recent linguistic research. The other function of repetitions just mentioned, i.e. as a means of correction in authentic speech, has obviously no place in literary, i.e. planned simulation of spontaneity.

Among specific lexical elements of both natural and dramatic speech, particles 5 deserve special attention because of their metacommunicative func- tions. Moreover, their frequency, so specific for Bauer’s plays, should be seen in connection with the mentality of the people depicted: their almost whimsical self-observing and self-commenting habits; the amount of metalinguistic and metacommunicative moves and comments is typical for these people.6 Whereas particles and their functions are the same in Bauer’s plays as in real dialogues (which can easily be demonstrated from authentic speech), Kroetz, by contrast, almost obstains from using particles at all.

On the whole, Bauer’s vocabulary is rather emotionalized and hyperbolic and - Betten does not mention this explicitly - slangy. Code-switching between (slangy) urban colloquial and well-nigh standard German is used in Bauer’s plays in connection with certain topics; it also expresses intimacy. Code- switching occurs in Kroetz’ plays as well, but here it serves quite a different function, namely to signalise the speaker’s uncertainty and self-consciousness concerning the use of the ‘educated’ vocabulary and phraseology, whereas with

5 There is one remark of Rath’s (1979: 121) referred to in Betten’s investigation (p. 108) worth mentioning in this connection: any part of an utterance can function as a particle. This means that this category is really one in statu nascendi: a marginal area perhaps and not too amenable to systematisation. Still, as to the target of Betten’s research, one must admit that as a matter of fact particles are language items typical and necessary for actual use whose relevancy for oral communication cannot easily be underestimated. (Betten does not give a distinction between interjections, particles, and forms of address.) 6 Of course, idiosyncratic elements are to be expected in any stretch of conversation, natural or literary, and it is obviously sometimes not too easy to distinguish idiolectal elements from those in common use, or typical for a certain group or subgroup of a speech community.

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Batter, standard language (as opposed to slang) is more or less a playful variation, ironic rather than ambitious.

Being especially conscious of their linguistic behaviour, Bauer’s characters tend to refer to it meta-communicatively far more than average speakers from other milieus presumably would.7 They have an exceptional mastership of their language - quite contrary to what is typical for and has frequently been noticed and remarked upon Horvath’s and Kroetz’ characters. This mastership might be one source of the most frequently commented on characteristic of Bauer’s dramatic language: its casualness; it is an outcome of the ease with which the people in his plays handle their language. The question which arises is whether this is typical for the Graz variant of Southern colloquial German - it might easily be something typical just for Bauer’s specific clique. According to Betten, Bauer’s language use is a playful and artistically adapted copy of Graz usage, which I from my knowledge of the variant can partly endorse.8 In any case it is a very deliberate (and reduced) selection of elements from natural conversational Graz speech, phonology not being necessarily exact; but this is, as both the author and his audiences agree, a negligible aspect. True-to-life imitation of the phonology of a regional variant on the stage would be nothing less than detrimental to comprehension.

The syntactic elements employed in Bauer’s plays correspond almost exactly to the patterns usually commented upon in textbooks of stylistics.

This is how Betten herself sums up the results of her study of Bauer’s dramatic language :

“Es bestitigt sich, dal3 das Prinzip von Bauers sehr natiirlich wirkender Dialogkomposition auf der geschickten und sensiblen konzentrierten Auswahl ebenso charakteristischer wie fiir die Biihne geeigneter Besonderheiten einer regionalen und milieuspezifischen Sprechsprache beruht - bei gleichzeitiger Reduktion (das heiBt bewuRter oder unbewuRter Nichtberiicksichtigung) einer Reihe anderer, nach Zahl und Art auf der Btihne eher verwirrender Merkmale: Diese Reduktion erst bringt die ‘Lockerheit’ als Stilprinzip voll zur Geltung.” (p. 142)

Chapter 3 deals with plays by F.X. Kroetz. The outstanding feature of the dramatis personae in Kroetz’ plays is their (alleged or real) deficient language competence, which on its part is a result of their social (proletarian) origin and upbringing. Their low social prestige and self-esteem is reflected in language use according to the all too well-known pattern (of Bernsteinian provenance)

7 Horvath’s characters talk about their language use metalinguistically and metacommunicatively, instead of talking about the problems themselves; but then this does not pertain to the problem of authenticity but is rather an idiolectal phenomenon. Horvath’s characters, as compared with the taciturnity of Kroetz’, are nothing short of verbose and chatty, although the expressions they use are not really ‘their own’ but consist of rather commonplace phrases and slogans, i.e. quotational language. 8 There is no direct and discreet evidence to support the apparently very common prejudice about Austrian speech behaviour: “eine gewisse habituelle Iassige Gesprdchigkeit (...) die dem osterreichischen Konversationston eigentiimlich ist” (p. 141).

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of elaborated vs. restricted code. Consequently, the catchword associated with Kroetz’ dramatic work has become linguistic deprivation (‘Sprachlosigkeit’). (Here I should like to add that this diagnosis is a verdict propagated by upper middle class readers, rather of the turn of mind of Bauer’s populace (‘mundart- fern’, Betten calls the latter (p. 252)). Suffice it to remark that Bauer’s characters use a specific urban language variant, whereas this is not, at least not to that extent true, for the people in Kroetz’ plays.)

Betten points out that Kroetz’ curtailed dialogues are really extremely concise, compared with the numerous metacommunicative deviations and corrolaries so characteristic of the people in Horvath’s plays, and especially the verbal hairsplitting the latter indulge in. Moreover, the people in Horvath’s plays are not aware of the inefficiency of their verbal endeavours and efforts, whereas in Kroetz’ plays people do not trust in language: they know the limits of their expressive means, and trust in what can be observed rather than in what can be said.

Elements of Bavarian dialect as found in Kroeti’ plays are described and treated in much detail (cf. the discussion of Suu as an invective (pp. 264f.)).g There is no such detailed dialectological description given for Bauer’s plays (see footnote 806 for a rather scanty list of literature on the subject, i.e. Austrian dialects and colloquial (urban) language variants).

Some readers might probably deplore that only after a rather academic and lengthy demonstration of what is to be considered as oral (and perhaps spontaneous) communication, the author undertakes a comparison between dramatic and everyday dialogues. This obviously is a weak part in Betten’s study; viz, exemplification from empirical data. Of course, compared with the actual speech event, even the precision of recordings like the ‘Botropper Protokolle’ is only approximate. After all, it is the absence of the non-verbal communicative actions from the transcription which (among other things) causes the difficulties the reader (!) is confronted with when trying to under- stand printed authentic speech. Authentic dialogues such as that given in the appendix between two female factory workers from Ulrichsberg in northern Austria (comparable to some of Kroetz’ dialogues) can - to my mind - not be used for a comparison with dialogues among members of thejeunesse do&e, as presented in Bauer’s plays.

Betten herself is doubtful about the comparability of dramatic dialogues as found in Bauer’s or Kroetz’ plays (not to mention the numerous other authors discussed by her) with actual recordings: she calls this enterprise ‘gefahrlich’ (p. 110).

Although we still cannot be sure whether the differences between the

9 That the preference for certain grammatical elements, e.g. conditional clauses (irrealis) is not a general characteristic of Bavarian but is symptomatic of the circumstances some of the people in Kroetz’ plays live under, should be rather obvious.

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language used in dramatic dialogue, such as in Bauer’s plays, compared with those of Kroetz, are a result of the different species of persons and milieus, or whether they are just the reflection of the authors’ different conceptions of what is typical for colloquial language use, Betten’s study is, in any case, a valuable step towards a description of the only phenomenon linguistics should be interested in and concerned with: actual communicative events and the verbal means used to tackle and handle a given situation.

The author starts her concluding discussion of the concept of realism in literature with an extensive overview of the jungle of labels and meanings: a chaos of conceptualisations, actually the result of a tendency within artistic realism (not being necessarily identical with the realistic description of any kind of reality (p. 348)) or more precisely, realistic methods in the artistic represen- tation of experiences in reality, towards mannerism (p. 346) which must consequently be replaced by new kinds of realism. Realistic elements as a stylistic device, not as an iconic depicting of reality, Betten discusses and exemplifies, basing herself on texts by B. Straufi and Th. Bernhard. StrauB’ version of realistic speech does not concentrate on (dialectal) lexis or syntactic peculiarities, but rather on the effect which prefabricated elements (e.g. the use of quotational language) exercises on the interlocutors and the ongoing dialogue. His concept and realisation of realistic speech is, as it were, an idiomatic, even stigmatized and stigmatizing one.

Chapter 7 rounds up once more what spontaneous, oral language use is all about in a very concise and competent resume. To put it in a nut shell: There are two opposed and related strategies of oral encoding: reduction vs. repeti- tion. Something that might be said has either thematic status and need only be hinted at, or it is visualized as new and not predictable. This fact, viz. the listener’s knowledge of reality and his/her imaginative engagement is probably the only motor and source of poetic interpretation and effect: The listener completes and supplements, even fulfills what the author has instigated and suggested.

The questions that remain are these: (a) What is it that separates (even realistic) literature from live speech reality, and (b) Which are the effects and consequences of domestication in the arts, of ‘literarization’ and ‘traditionaliza- tion’, i.e. conventionalization ona primarily surface-oriented level? Is it the selection of certain (distinctive) structures chosen to represent an otherwise intractably varified and random-ridden phenomenon, viz. authentic language use? Is realism in literature realism by proxy?

Karl Sornig Institut fur Sprachwissenschaft

Universitat Graz Mozartgasse 8

A-SO 10 Graz, Austria

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References

Beaugrande, R.A. de and W.U. Dressier, 1981. Introduction to text linguistics. London: Longman. Dach, T. van, 1978. Das moderne Volksstiick. Ziirich. (Unpublished dissertation.) Rath, R., 1979. Kommunikationspraxis. Giittingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Teun A. van Dijk, Prejudice in discourse. An analysis of ethnic prejudice in cognition and conversation. (Pragmatics and beyond, Vol. V: 3.) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984. X+ 170 pp. Hfl. 63,~-/$23.00

This book reports results from an interdisciplinary project, carried out at the University of Amsterdam, on the topic ‘Prejudice in conversations about minorities in the Netherlands’, whose aim was twofold: (1) to elaborate a cognitive model to represent ethnic attitudes in general and prejudice in particular, and (2) to do an analysis of how people talk about ethnic minority groups and how such talk expresses their underlying prejudices.

First of all, the author points out that, in the case of prejudice, attention must be paid to relations that are established between discourse, on the one hand, and cognitive (including also social) contexts of language use, on the other. This entails the need for a double theoretical reference: cognitive models of ethnic attitudes and communicative interaction sociology.

The spread of prejudice arises, to a great extent, from the mechanism of daily interaction, in informal conversation. With this in mind, the research is carried out using the method of non-direct interviews: answers are analyzed as indicators of cognitive representations of ethnic attitudes and, at the same time, as proofs for the existence of the strategies involved in expressing social beliefs. One important feature that immediately emerges from this research is the ‘strategic’ nature of conversations about minorities. Interviewees do not want to appear racist, but at the same time, they do want to express their negative opinions about minorities. These conflicting aims must be conciled strategically, both from a cognitive point of view and from an interactional one.

Van Dijk also includes in his study a historical survey of the most important stages of the research in this field, first of all of the research on prejudice carried out in social psychology in the last sixty years. This research is typically formulated in terms of stereotypes, viz. wrong beliefs and biased perceptions regarding other social groups. The main weakness of this work is that it almost points exclusively to individual mental mechanisms, whereas prejudice is essentially a form of social representation, shared by the members of a group.

This, too, is the conclusion that two important schools which have been active for the past ten years have come to in independent ways: the European school, developed under the influence of the late Henry Tajfel, and the