Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Réka Cristian: Edward Albee's Castings

Delicate Balance with their cheating in marriage after the death of Tobias's son, Teddy). Their encounter in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is less visible, but, in essence, it corresponds in its form to the explicit one of Jerry's and Peter's communication in The Zoo Story (the lack of Peter's male child). The motor or the (sub)plot of the drama, the child as the blindspot, reads its equivalent from an Albee drama into the other one by the same playwright. The embodiment of Albee's characters starts with the process of their naming. Albee's characters gain corporeality and dramatic texture through the names they bear. The boundaries of the sayable, as Ludwig Wittgenstein points out in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, are achieved by drawing a limit to the expression of thoughts, since if Q something is not delimited (id est is not named), it does not exist . The names are pictures of the person/character and "what the picture represents is its sense"

9. They depict the state of things and tell about the properties of the body included in the name or in Wittgenstein's words "the proposition shows how things stand, if it is true, and it says, that they do so stand"

1

0. Names, therefore are condensed thoughts and essences of the bearers, that is, "everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly"

1'. The generalizing names (Mommy, Daddy, Grandma, He, She, The Nurse, The Doctor, A, B, C, The Young Man, The Musician) in the cast of Albee's plays denote the function and relations that are established among the characters. They stand for descriptions for a given type of characters, of a class, or system of particulars. Other names Albee employs in his dramas (such as Martha, George, Nick, Honey, Tobias, Claire, Julia, Jerry, Peter) refer to a specific person. The explicit names (full names) are, with rare exception, eliminated in some of Albee's dramas from the language and, therefore what remains is in many dramas the substitution of the person with its 8 "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent". Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus (with an introduction by Bertrand Rüssel), (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981 [1922]), § 7. 9 Ibid., § 2.221. 1

0 Ibid,. § 4.022. " The statement is followed by "everything that can be said can be said clearly". Ibid., § 4. 1 16. 139