Staging Aphasia: Jean-Claude Van Itallie's The Traveller

Abstract

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is largely devoted to the problem of how language, the tool by which humans orient themselves to their physical and social environments, organizes knowledge. In short, language differentiates humans from animals and is the predominant factor in distinguishing what constitutes culture. Wittgenstein investigated cultural acquisition, i.e., how we become linguistically competent or how language is possible. Wittgenstein's theoretical assumptions gain further significance when examined in conjunction with Benjamin Whorf s research into how language shapes culture. One viable method of studying cultural acquisition through the development of language skills is to examine how adult aphasics reacquire their cognitive skills after brain damage has caused severe language deficit. This relationship between language and cultural acquisition is well illustrated in American playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie's 1987 drama, The Traveller, a partly fictitious account of director Joseph Chaikin's aphasic condition. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein explored the notion of how a sequence of words can have meaning that will be understood. Wittgenstein and the logical positivists believed thoughts are made perceptible to the senses through a proposition of language. Wittgenstein viewed sentences as logical pictures of reality. He wrote that humanity " . . . possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is—just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced." But how are sentences learned? Wittgenstein found that there is a relationship between empirical objects and the signs for them. A child learns language through example and practice of using signs in an ordinary way. Signs, however, have meaning only in the context of a proposition, a model of reality as we imagine it. In short, propositions form the basis of language—thought expressed in perceptible signs. Benjamin Whorf applied Wittgenstein's tenets to linguistic anthropology, the study of language in various societies. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Whorf