[In the following essay, Galef analyzes the role of language and communication in Osborne's plays.]

When a character in an Osborne play tries to communicate to the audience that he cannot communicate—and this happens fairly regularly—it is generally assumed that he is on the wrong side of the cultural divide. The British Mass Education Act of 1944 produced an entire generation of graduates too educated for the working classes, yet not aristocratic enough for the upper crust: the Jimmy Porters, Jim Dixons, and Charles Lumleys of this era. But as Angela Hague has pointed out in “The Angry Young Novel” (209), not every voice from that era fits the stereotype, and many of the concerns are more philosophical and further-reaching. If T. S. Eliot in the 1940s complained of “the intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings,” the generation of British writers in the '50s felt the dislocation even more keenly. As Osborne describes himself circa 1948 in his autobiography: “Existentialism was the macro-biotic food of the day and Mickey Wall and I were ‘into’ the impenetrable brown rice of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Jaspers and, of course, Sartre” (171). Wittgenstein and Beckett were also publishing some of their most important work, taking the categories of semantics and epistemology and dismantling them beyond recovery. Rebellion against language was part of the Zeitgeist.

The arc of Wittgenstein's own career suggests a rebellious turn. Having taken the limits of language as far as they would go in the Tractatus, he ended on a note of silence and began to regroup in what would eventually result in his Philosophical Investigations. In the Tractatus, he states, “The limits of my language mean the limit of my world” (149). But as Allen Thiher has noted in his work on Beckett and Wittgenstein, “Much of modern language theory is concerned with setting the bounds of the sayable,” while many postmodern writers such as Beckett are simultaneously exploring and denying those bounds (80). Osborne, with his protagonists continually trying to say what they mean, closely fits this pattern.

In the Investigations and work published posthumously, Wittgenstein posits three steps in the unraveling of language. The first involves recognizing the arbitrariness of ordinary meaning: “When we say: ‘Every word in language signifies something’ we have so far said nothing whatever …” (Invest. 7). The second is questioning whether one can share meaning with others, in Wittgenstein's arguments about private language and experience: “The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses his own exemplar, but that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else” (95). The third and final step is wondering whether even one's own meanings can remain consistent to oneself: “Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word ‘pain’ meant—so that he constantly called different things by that name—but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of ‘pain’—in short he uses it as we all do” (95). While some of Osborne's characters remain occupied with the first step of deconstructing meaning, the majority are painfully involved in trying to communicate the meaning of their experience, and a rare few break through to the final uncertainty of meaning in themselves. The plays, as Georg Henrik von Wright said of Wittgenstein's writings, are a “Form der Batruchtung” (216).¹

So many of the situations in Osborne's plays reflect a semantic gap. The opening of Look Back in Anger, significantly, shows a jungle of newspapers and weeklies, a cover of ostensible meaning, hiding two characters. For Jimmy Porter, the senseless conflation of meaning in society has become a point of contention. As he remarks of what he is reading, “Different books—same reviews,” and the clergyman's address he looks at next amounts to “Dumdidumdidumdidum” (10, 13). Concomitantly, words in themselves become objects of curiosity, such as pusillanimous: “one of those words I've never been quite sure of, but always thought I knew” (21).

Spurning conventional meaning, Jimmy is naturally prey to worries about communicating. Helena's father, Colonel Redfern, oddly sympathetic, remarks, “As for Jimmy, he just speaks a different language from any of us” (64). Or, as Alison earlier says to Jimmy about his acquaintance Webster: “I thought you said he was the only person who spoke your language”—with an unintentional pun on the Webster of lexicography. Jimmy's reply, “So he is. Different dialect but same language” (18), does not conceal the real gap between them, and he eventually admits that Webster does not get along with him. In fact, Jimmy speaks in what Wittgenstein termed private language: “The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language” (Invest. 88-89). The alienation effect, in other words, is far more than a cultural phenomenon; it is intrinsic to the individual.

Osborne has said that he does not consider himself a social critic. He maintains that his primary concern is “how people relate to each other and to themselves” (Wager 84, 75)—which in Osborne's work means how they fail to relate. Peculiarly Wittgensteinian or, to coin a term, Osbornean, is the extension of noncommunication back into the individual: a whole that finds it doesn't agree even with itself. On the simplest level, this is simply a contrariety of parts, as with Jimmy's “disconcerting mixture” of personality traits (10). But the disjunctions go deeper, part of a real epistemological fissure. As Cliff says of Jimmy: “Don't think he knows himself half the time” (78). Critics have for so long seen Jimmy as a creature of intense conviction that this uncertainty may come as a surprise.² The unsureness again reflects a universal rather than idiosyncratic tendency, as Wittgenstein proposes in a paradigm that has become famous: every time one feels a certain sensation, one jots down an “E” to record it, but how can one ever be sure that one “E” is the same as another? (Invest. 92-93).

The struggle with the self can be maddening. No wonder Jimmy questions whether he or Alison is crazy, exclaiming, “Is it me, standing here like an hysterical girl, hardly able to get my words out?” (59).³ This is not just impotent rage but also a difficulty in thinking univocally. As Wittgenstein remarks wistfully, “I never more than half succeed in expressing what I want to express” (Culture 18). Intention and expectation are also problematic in their attempts to connect thought and reality (see Zettel 10-12). The problem is inextricably bound up with the unreliable self. Similarly, when Jimmy tells Helena that he may write a book about his suffering “Written in flames a mile high,” he claims, “It's all here” and slaps his forehead (54). The wrestle with meaning, to put something into words, begins—and sometimes dies—in the mind.⁴

In his study of Osborne, Simon Trussler has noted that Jimmy is neither adjusted to his era nor a spokesman for it (11). The angry young voice rants against language while using the selfsame tool of expression to do so. This is Beckett's territory, as Thiher has observed: the postmodern protest against a self limited by language, a voice that ironically affirms what it speaks against (90). Though one should take care not to conflate Osborne and his protagonist, Jimmy's concerns about language seem as much the playwright's as the Unnamable echoes Beckett's frustrations. Curiously, there is no solution suggested, no program for relief. As von Wright described Wittgenstein, his attitude toward language was fighting but not reformist (208), and this description seems to fit Osborne as well.

The plays immediately following Look Back in Anger continue this theme passim, specifically the impossibility of shared meaning. In The Entertainer, Archie Rice and his family are astride a generational divide, but the rift at times seems more universal, tracing the limits of what one can know about others' experience. One of Wittgenstein's most noted examples is that of a person suffering from a toothache—how can it be compared to the sensation of someone else's toothache? (Lectures 17). Similarly, as Archie claims, he can connect with no other's experience “Simply because we're not like anybody who ever lived” (54). Of his daughter Jean's mother, he says, “I was in love with her, whatever that may mean. I don't know” (70). Jean herself is a good deal more vocal on the subject, having just broken up with her boyfriend Graham:

You know, I hadn't realized—it just hadn't occurred to me that you could love somebody, that you could want them twenty-four hours of the day and then suddenly find that you're neither of you even living in the same world. I don't understand that. I just don't understand that. I wish I could understand that. It's frightening.

(29)

One simply (or complexly) cannot know what another is feeling: we live in a world where such presumed connection has been proven to be an illusion. Osborne is all too aware of this, writing in his notebook for 1955: “He suffers the realization: that there is no real communication with those we love most” (Better Class 272). In a more general vein, Archie tells Jean, “My dear, nobody can tell you what they mean” (51).

If these problems in meaning were simply Osborne's perception of post-World War II England, his history plays should preclude these concerns. But semantic slippage and faulty communication are, for Osborne, part of the human condition, and so the past is simply a paradigm for the present and the future. In Luther, for example, Martin Luther lives along the same isolating continuum as Jimmy Porter. He begins with the same questioning of accepted vocabulary and ritual, in this era specifically religious. Quibbling with Brother Weinand over confession, he continually nudges: “What do you mean?” “How do you know?” “Tell me what you meant” (26). His precarious state of mind stems partly from trying to pin down the interpretation of a verse from Proverbs: “It's the single words that trouble me” (27). He is approaching apodictic doubt. As Wittgenstein writes: “If you are not certain of any fact, you cannot be certain of the meaning of your words either” (Certainty 17).

Cardinal Cajetan says that Martin's sermons imply “a man struggling for certainty, struggling insanely like a man in a fit, an animal trapped to the bone with doubt” (73). But, as one individual cannot exactly interpret another's experience, Cajetan has misconstrued Martin's doctrinal doubt as spiritual doubt. Martin's quarrel is not so much with the Word as with words.⁵ He tells Vicar General Staupitz: “only you could live your life” (58). Unable to communicate his experience, Martin turns inward and there finds his own instability. As he says to Staupitz later, “They're trying to turn me into a fixed star, father, but I'm a shifting planet” (99). This is akin to the most unsettling prospect of Wittgenstein's tenets taken to its logical conclusion: that man is an unstable amalgam. Martin begins with the statement “I am alone. I am alone and against myself” (20). By the end of the play, despite his doctrinal victories, he has mostly confirmed this status.

In A Subject of Scandal and Concern, Osborne shifts from sixteenth-century Germany to nineteenth-century England. Concerning the last man in England to be jailed for blasphemy, in 1842, the play is naturally concerned with the slippery implications of words and their consequences. The protagonist, Holyoake, attacked ceaselessly for his beliefs when the quibble is really about the words he said, finally answers the magistrate: “I don't know, sir. I did not know before and I do not know now. But I do think that I am alone in this matter and will remain so” (24). The protest is similar to that of Osborne's Martin Luther: both have questioned established meaning only to find that the questioning does not simply stop there.

Is the zetetic enterprise fulfilling? It leads inevitably to disquieting conclusions. It is even somewhat teleological, since the search for meaningful distinctions eventually distinguishes oneself in a meaningful way, not shared by others. As Katharine J. Worth notes in “The Angry Young Men”: “Imaginative suffering is a profoundly solitary experience” (Taylor 105). In Osborne's A Patriot for Me, Alfred Redl's alienation eventually leads him to become a double agent and sexual adventurer extraordinaire. But as the Countess Sophia presciently tells him, “You'll always be alone” (60). Speaking more ex cathedra, Osborne himself has broadened this statement to apply to everyone, including as the audience: “The inexorable process of fragmentation is inimical to all public assumptions or indeed ultimately to anything shared at all. A theatre audience is no longer linked by anything but the climate of disassociation in which it tries to live out its baffled lives” (“Thesis” 20). This is partly a legacy from modernist alienation—T. S. Eliot's Waste Land fragments—intensified by postmodern currents washing even those shards away.

All of these concerns come to a head in what is perhaps Osborne's most tortured play, Inadmissible Evidence. In making the main character, Bill Maitland, a solicitor, Osborne has shifted significantly from those who question the law to those who oversee it on a daily basis. But as a philandering lawyer who handles adultery cases, Bill has sadly, ironically, become involved in the very situations he prosecutes. As his private experience subsumes his professional public life, he becomes a character whose semantic and epistemological distinctions are caving in on him.

From the outset, Bill has the dimensions of a Beckettian figure, down to the rambling “can't go on” diction of the unnamable: “Still, I'm pretty strong. I must be. Otherwise, I couldn't take it. That is, if I can take it. I can't, I'm sorry, I can't find my pills” (14). Meaning has begun to disintegrate on a double level, since the lexis of words is related to the lex of law. When the judge in the opening dream scene questions the use of the word objects, Bill answers, “I think that's what I meant to be saying” (11). He tells the judge twice, “I seem to have lost my drift” (17, 18). As semantic clarity eludes him, so do thought and reality itself. He complains continually that he wishes he could see more clearly (11, 93, 115). Again and again, he confesses, “I don't know” (44, 46, 93). On the phone with his wife, he claims: “I don't know yet. … I simply don't know. … I don't know now. …” (43). These statements do not show ignorance or elusiveness so much as an epistemological slippage.⁶

At the center of Bill's misery is the Wittgensteinian realization that he cannot share what is happening to him any more than he can share the headaches that now plague him. All that he experiences is, in effect, inadmissible evidence. “If you knew me, if you knew me …” (15), he tells the judge in his dream. If the judge functions as a superego, a common oneiric metaphor, then Bill does not even know himself: the third Wittgensteinian disjunction. His chief clerk Hudson offers the consolation, “Well, we all have our different methods, as I say. Different ways of looking at things” (26). As a descriptive statement of affairs, this may be more isolating than comforting. In any event, just as Martin Luther and Archie Rice with both pride and pain claim the uniqueness of their lives, Bill tells Hudson, “I don't want to live anyone's life, not anyone's” (31).

As the play progresses, Bill moves toward what Wittgenstein terms “disintegration of the sense” (Invest. 175). Since Bill cannot be sure of which words have what emotional affects, he does not properly feel; since he does not recall much, he cannot correlate his experiences with others' or even his own. In such a situation, chance comments acquire an echolalic resonance. He complains repeatedly that he seems to retain very little (18, 40-41, 92). When his mistress Liz jokingly calls him catatonic, Bill explains to his secretary Joy, “That's her way of saying I don't seem to be able to hold on, on to, to anything” (109). Throughout the play, the stage directions themselves collude with the blurring of memory, meaning, and acquired fact; and the isolation that accompanies it: Osborne mentions “the ambiguity of reality” (63) and “a feeling of doubt as to whether there is anyone to speak to at all” (59).

In such a blurred situation, references meant for the law segue into a deeper philosophical absence of rule. Trying to procure a witness, Bill claims, “All we want is one reliable person” (75). He even counsels a client to plead guilty because, as he says, “It has the advantage of certainty” (97). But there is no way out from this descent into solipsism because meaning is hermetic and words are arbitrary. Like Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the play ends where it has begun, with a repetition that precludes action: “I think I'll stay here. … I think I'll just stay here. … Goodbye” (115). The final word may be taken as the close of a phone conversation or a valediction.

In his later plays of the '60s, Osborne continues writing about these kinds of breakdowns, but with a different slant and lessened intensity. This is partly because he is now analyzing groups of individuals rather than focusing on the etiology of one mind thinking. The Hotel in Amsterdam, for instance, is not so taken up with the slide into semantic confusion as it is preoccupied with the private experience of emotions. The action is nonetheless mostly conversation among the three couples staying together at the hotel, with the scriptwriter Laurie as the Wittgensteinian self-reflexive type that questions the very questions he sets up. Ruminating on the wordage he manufactures out of chaos for his boss, K.L., he wonders whether it can be any good. “Should it not be, I ask myself? What do I ask myself, perhaps I shouldn't be rhetorical and clutter conversations with what-do-I-ask-myselfs?” (275). There is a shifting ground below what Laurie says, to the point where he gives accounts “with two versions to every story, one tragic and one comic, the tragic one always being comic and the comic one always tragic” (298). As it happens, this apposition neatly describes the situation among the six characters onstage and the one offstage. While the three couples are on holiday in Amsterdam in an escape from the magnate K.L., K.L., back in London, commits suicide. The relationship is somewhat like that of Beckett's underlings discussing Godot, or the sextet in Woolf's The Waves describing the absent Percival, but with a heavy degree of scorn.

As the character whose daily business is with words, Laurie should be surest of what he means, but there can be no such precision without accurate recollection. Like Osborne's earlier forgetful character Bill Maitland, he is enmeshed in a series of shifting affections: Margaret, his second wife; his new romantic interest, Gus's wife Annie; and the memory of his first wife. When Laurie and Annie talk about his previous marriage, the exchange shows the blurring of experience through repetition of relationships:

LAURIE
I don't think she likes me.
ANNIE
Why not?
LAURIE
I imagine I wasn't very kind to her.
ANNIE
Weren't you?
LAURIE
I don't know. I wish I could really remember. I try to. I hope not. But I'm sure I was.

(305)

The unreliability of semantic meaning has escalated to the complexities of human relationships, though the two remain connected through a solipsism that is a part of the human condition. After Laurie apologizes for bad-mouthing his pregnant wife Margaret, Dan the artist says, “Not your fault,” and Gus the film editor adds, “Not anybody's fault” (301). Unreliable recall steps in for Laurie's capper to the exchange: “As Beaudelaire [sic] said: can't remember now” (301). By the end of the play, when Dan wonders out loud if they'll ever come there again, Laurie answers: “I shouldn't think so. But I expect we might go somewhere else …” (311). The suggested shift in locale does little to mask the inevitable sameness and repetition, the source of both confusion and acedia.

This is not the first time Osborne has used a writer as a main character; in his early collaboration with Anthony Creighton, Epitaph for George Dillon, the protagonist is a budding playwright who calls the truth a caricature and gets as his comeuppance a caricature of an existence. But Osborne's protagonists seem to age along with him, and, in The Hotel in Amsterdam, the writer figure has become entangled and embittered. By the time of West of Suez, the writer is an older man named Wyatt Gillman, a patriarch more resigned to his fate.⁷ At the island villa of one of his four daughters, he is a cross between Prospero and Lear.

Significantly, much of the responsibility for any dialogue questioning semantics and epistemology has passed on to the younger generation, Wyatt's daughter Frederica and her pathologist husband Edward. Frederica banters with Edward in an almost Beckettian sequence, discarding semantic alternatives:

FREDERICA
Don't spar with me.
EDWARD
I wouldn't dream of it. I haven't the equipment.
FREDERICA
You haven't.
EDWARD
Or inclination.
FREDERICA
Or energy.
EDWARD
Or stamina.
FREDERICA
Or interest.
EDWARD
That either.

(11)

The two complete each other verbally as well as in personality: Osborne's probing of individual meaning has led to what individuals mean to each other. The philosophical problem of slippage in meaning has infected personal relations.

As in The Hotel in Amsterdam, talk is action, but of an evasive sort. “All art is organized evasion” as Osborne writes in “They Call It Cricket” (Declaration 69). What Edward and Frederica do is feint back and forth. When Edward starts off, “We can't be,” Frederica finishes, “Responsible for others” (14). On a surface level, she is simply being flip, but the words also suggest a minor paradox: Frederica is obviously taking responsibility for Edward's intended meaning, though the way she has completed his sentence suggests that no one can do this. In fact, as Edward states a moment later, “If I am unhappy, it is my own responsibility” (14). When Edward changes tack and tries to persuade Frederica that she produces effects in others “As if you were them. Or me,” she replies, “I'm afraid I don't understand that. And I shouldn't think you can” (19). Here is Wittgenstein's language and sensation argument personalized: no one can appreciate another's pain; no one can put him or herself in another's place. The argument is incontrovertible, and Edward is forced to agree: “No. Sometimes I don't feel I can understand a word of anything anyone says to me. As if they were as unclear as I am …” (19). The problem has reverted to the crux of language again.

Wyatt, the presumed master of language, is a nostalgist at heart. When Mrs. James, the interviewer from the local paper, asks him whether he believes words have any meaning, value, or validity, he replies, “I still cling pathetically to the old bardic belief that ‘words alone are certain good’” (61). But as Edward notes, “Those who make an ethic out of truthfulness do not incline to rhetoric” (10). Perhaps this is why Jed, an outraged American tourist, shouts at Wyatt, “—words, yes I mean words, even what I'm saying to you now, is going to be the first to go” (69). Wyatt the solipsist has retreated to an island, but his verbal edifice cannot defend him. In the end, Wyatt is shot by the anticolonial islanders, who have no use for his language.

In her essay “Verdict on Osborne,” Mary McCarthy notes: “Reiteration is the basic mode of the Osborne harangue, and repetition is the basic plot of the Osborne plays” (17). Osborne's repetition is in fact part of his message: that the same situations recur with dismal frequency because of universal states of affairs. Still, one cannot pound this sort of drum too long without growing sick of the same noise or else slightly deaf. Osborne's plays in the early '70s are mostly repetitions, amplifications of the earlier works.

In Very Like a Whale, whose title suggests the isolated perceptions of a Hamlet, Jock and Lady Mellor pursue the by now familiar conundrum of meaning, experience, and isolation. When Lady Mellor concludes a discussion of money with “If you know what I mean,” Jock replies, “No. I don't. I don't think you do. I think I know what perhaps you ought to mean.” She answers, “Complicated … I feel so alone …,” and Jock concludes, “One always does” (13). This is ground covered by Frederica and Edward in West of Suez, along with other couples in other Osborne plays. To some extent, it is the sheer audacity of presuming to know what another means that sets off Osborne's characters. When a lady journalist interviewing Jock happens to say, “You know what I mean,” Jock is savage: “I don't know what you mean. I don't know you for a start and I know less and less what anybody means” (16). This is retreatism without a sufficient struggle, and Jock's death and its aftermath reflect this fact. As his father watches the televised account of Jock's death, he responds about as much as the dog beside him.

A Sense of Detachment goes beyond even the attempt to make sense. Its aim seems to be to impose chaos on order, as the character simply listed as “Chap” declares (19). Osborne's earlier borrowings from Beckett are acknowledged yet derided with a chorus that includes the line, “Old Uncle Sammy Beckett and all” (25). The references to Arnold Wesker, David Storey, Edward Albee, and Edna O'Brien are equally gratuitous. Perhaps the most telling reference comes from the Interrupter, who mentions the Theatre Workshop and its improvisational experiments in the late '50s: “Joan Littlewood did this years ago” (28). The painful project of making sense is haplessly divided among a polyglot multitude. As the character called Girl says, “We are not language. We are lingua. … Oh yes: we talk. We have words, rather …” (58). The sense of detachment alluded to in the title is entirely deserved. Admittedly, some of the impatience with public meaning follows Osborne's political career from liberal to conservative, along with such contemporaries as Kingsley Amis and John Wain. The counter-argument Amis advances, with some validity, is that they haven't changed at all; society has (207-10).

The last play worth mentioning here is The End of Me Old Cigar because it suggests a specific qualification of the mind-language problem. As the two characters Len and Isobel lie fully clothed together on the bed, he says of his sex, “We are uncertain, undefined, perhaps unnecessary …” (42) and “I mean a chap must be utterly chaotic inside?” (48). Here is the muddle of meaning narrowed to the gender gap. In one way or another, Osborne has used this theme since Alison and Jimmy, who, for all his ranting, is surprisingly incommunicative at times. Perhaps for this reason the journalist Stella Shrift in The End of Me Old Cigar says of men, “They like the language of concealment. Not us” (25). This suggests an etiology that ought to be pursued further. Unfortunately, Osborne's misogyny undercuts most of the lines, so that the most one can say here is that Osborne, despite himself, occasionally registers a truly provocative observation instead of a merely provoking one.

There is, in fact, a quotation from Wittgenstein by Isobel in the second act (48): a translation of the famous last line from the Tractatus, “Whereof one cannot speak, / Thereof one must be silent.” A comic response to Len's complaints about impotence, it nonetheless functions in much the same way as so many other of Osborne's shrugs over language and the inability to share experience. Impotence can apply to far more than just sexual expression. Whether this suggests a collective plan of action is another matter. Even if there exist hundreds of Lens—or Jimmy Porters—each is uniquely problematic, with a way of meaning that is no one else's. The most significant comment in this connection comes from Len, who says to Isobel, “The thing is to use your language and not someone else's” (49). The sense of this suggests a parallel with Sartre's existentialism, wherein the courageous gesture in the face of meaninglessness is to continue to mean something to oneself. Perseverance itself, on one's own terms, is a triumph of sorts.

More than twenty years ago, Osborne stated, “I have a great allegiance to words,” while all too aware of the “verbal breakdown” around him (“Osborne” interview 21). In other words, his view is Beckettian: language is a defective means of communication but the best we have. The difference between Beckett and Osborne is that Osborne's plays are more social documents, tied to a given era, but the underlying philosophies are akin. For Osborne, epistemology is a solitary pursuit. As the Narrator in A Subject for Scandal and Concern notes: “If it is meaning you are looking for, then you must start collecting for yourself” (46). In the end, Osborne's crippled heroes emerge with a pyrrhic victory, convictions that are bitter because they cannot be shared. Or, as Wittgenstein notes late in his career: “I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own” (Certainty 71).

Notes

1. This deconstruction of meaning as an end in itself is amplified at far greater length by Harry Staten in Wittgenstein and Derrida.

2. See, for example, the traditional responses in John Russell Taylors's John Osborne: “Look Back in Anger,” A Casebook. Herbert Goldstone's Coping with Vulnerability: The Achievement of John Osborne is more to the point regarding ineffability, but deals mostly with emotional barriers.

3. Significantly, the women often suffer the effects. While Jimmy is noisily wrestling with meaning, Alison and Helena cry out the identical line: “I can't think!” (11, 91).

4. As Osborne writes of Tennessee Williams's work: “These are plays about failure. That is what makes human beings interesting” (“Sex and Failure” 317).

5. It is worth noting that Wittgenstein did not at all deny spirituality. He did believe in something numinous, whose ineffability neatly fit in with his own philosophy. “Only the supernatural can express the Supernatural” (Culture 3).

6. Despite the sheer repetition of words in Bill's speeches, one must take into account a subtle Wittgensteinian point, that repetition is never the same as the first time, if only because it is in relation to what has come before it. (See Invest. 86.)

7. Osborne again uses a writer, the dying Jocelyn Broome, as the main character in The Gift of Friendship. The moribund progression seems to stop here.

Works Cited

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———. The End of Me Old Cigar and Jill and Jack. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.

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