Meaning, Intention and Miscommunication: A Study of Albert Camus’ Misunderstanding

Abstract

Meaning is central to the study of both communication and miscommunication. Exploiting linguistic resources in negotiating meaning is not adequate; speaker’s intention forms a crucial part in this process. Misunderstanding arises when the hearer does not understand or interpret the speaker’s utterances in its intended meaning. Both the speaker and the hearer are not in a position to control the communicative situation. In Camus’s play the misunderstanding, the speaker provides input that is false, may be sometimes a deliberate distortion and the hearer would not know because of mistaken assumption.

This paper is an attempt to study miscommunication which it considers to be a fact of life. The paper benefits from some insights on the subject from Grice (Cooperative behavior in interaction – Violation of Maxims-Implicature), Austin-Searle’s indirect speech-act and C.David Mortensen’s Confusion, distortion and disruption). From the point of view of this paper, Language is most widely used as a medium of human communication but by no means is the most efficient because of its ambiguity and vagueness. Hemingway claimed that an author does not have to explicitly reveal the explicit meaning. To Beckett, Language is most efficiently used if it is being misused. Same is in line both with Freud’s ‘Ice-berg’ theory’, suggesting that most invisible part of discourse is below the surface and Chomsky’s ideas of Deep structure’

The paper tries to capture Man’s desire to find meaning in his existence. Albert Camus’ reflects on the absurd condition of human life and struggles to find meaning and purpose in a meaningless world.

The paper is organized into two parts.

 (i) Attempts to conceptualize the various hypotheses of Meaning-Intention and Miscommunication.

(ii) to study human condition in not a very friendly world as articulated by Albert Camus’s play Misunderstanding.

Here is a conversational situation where are party knew the identity of the others. Jan has come to see his mother and sister after a lapse of twenty years, but he did not reveal his identity. Sister Martha and their mother hoodwink the tourists, drug and kill them, loot their valuables. He was mistaken for a visitor.

Jan’s passport could have revealed his identity but Martha, so obsessed with the act of murder that she said, “What would happen if every condemned man insisted on confiding all his heartaches to the hangman”. To Martha, her brother was looking for the right words to reveal his intention but before then he died. It is this view of human situation that emerges constitutes the context for our discussion of miscommunication