The beyond anger: Osborne's Wrestle with language and meaning

When a character i n 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 1 944 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 con­ cerns are more philosophical and further-reaching. If T.S. Eliot in the 1 940s complained of "the intolerable wrestle I With words and meanings, " the generation of British writers in the '50s felt the dislocation even more keenly. As Osborne describes himself circa 1 948 in his autobiography: "Existential­ ism 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 epis­ temology and dismantling them beyond recovery. Rebellion against language was part of the Zeitgeist.