The Hypostatic Union of Multimodality and Pragmatics: Exploring the Auditory Mode in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Radio Plays The Man Born to Be King

Abstract

The Man Born to Be King is a cycle of 12 radio plays, based on the biblical gospel narratives, written by Dorothy Sayers and first produced by the BBC in 1941-2. The present study examines the multimodal and pragmatic features of the 1975 production, focusing on characterisation and the auditory construction of overlapping, interconnected meanings and implicatures. The plays, written for serial radio production, employ verbal and auditory semiotic modes to present the character of Jesus as a captivating, extraordinarily human and divine presence throughout the plays. The disciples, the Pharisees, and historical figures such as Pontius Pilate, King Herod, and others come to life through the dialogues. Suprasegmental auditory features such as prosody, together with audio effects, music, diatopic, diastratic, and diaphasic variation, are employed to communicate on both intra- and extra-diegetic levels (between characters and with the hearer). The current study, therefore, aims to combine core concepts in pragmatic and stylistics, such as Conversation Analysis (Sacks et al. 1974) and interactional storytelling (Bowles 2010; Norrick 2000, 2007) with studies in multimodality, both foundational (Kress and van Leeuwen [1996], 2020) and focused on the auditory mode (Chion 2016; van Leeuwen 1999) to examine the interplay of the verbal and auditory modes in this, hitherto understudied, cycle of radio plays. Pragmatic and stylistic features of the auditory mode are analysed through an integrative multimodal stylistic approach. Results of this exploratory, qualitative study point to a sort of “hypostatic union” or symbiosis between the semiotic modes in their construction of the human and the divine.