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Example research essay topic: Harold Pinter The Menacing Silences In Truth - 3,554 words

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Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realizing that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art.

There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost. -- - Harold Pinter: Art, Truth & Politics (The Nobel Lecture) Drama comes to different people in different ways, but in Harold Pinter's case, its homecoming was something astonishingly unique & queer. Pinter was composing poetry & had never written a play when he went through an experience. No, no midsummer nights dream, but one of a very concrete commonplace character.

As Pinter himself recounted once in an interview that he had entered into three different rooms at three different points of time with the insiders, not really expecting his entry & had found three different reactions from the inmates the first time, one of the two sitting persons had stood up, on the second occasion, both had stood up & in the third case, both had remained seated. Pinter said that it was this impression, which he could not express in terms of poetry & thereby composed his first three plays- The Room (1957), The Birthday Party (1957) & The Caretaker (1957), one after the other. The striking thing about this experience is its exploration of three composite probabilities, creating a single truth. That is precisely Pinter's journey-his perception of a singularity that is so infinitely pluralistic from within & yet impresses as a single thread. Pyrrho, a 6 th century Greek philosopher had said "We are born to quest after truth; to possess it belongs to a greater power." Harold Pinter is a seeker, an adventurous traveller, engaged in the quest for that ever-elusive 'greater power'. And even if he fails, he certainly does 'fail better', to use the Beckettian phrase.

From the very outset, thus, his is a journey towards a truth or truths of some sort through the disparately peculiar human conducts, but importantly in a very definite and particular context -- - definite figures in a particular room, which go on to become in Pinter's plays, a suffocating & claustrophobic embryo of human existence. But the interesting point is that Pinter always denies this take-off where the particular meets the universal, an aspect of art which others take as a major acknowledgement of their artistry. Pinter's insistence on not interpreting his characters as epitomizing universal perspectives & positions & on not decoding the situations of his plays as opening links to a timeless understanding of the problematic of life, thereby makes this search for truth, rather paradoxical. Pinter's search is thereby a search for a specific truth in a specific human condition and whether it opens up the magic casements to the universal, metaphysical & eternal truth, he does not know. It is this disjunction that leads to a relentless whirlpool of conflicting truths in his plays. Pinter's interface with the dialectical dynamics of menace at the gateway to dramatic truth carries a wonderful mingling of tradition & individual talent.

On the one hand, he is very much to be seen as a product of his times with the horrid nightmares of the two world wars, transmuting the world into a heap of broken images & Nietzsche declaring the god to be dead. At the same time, Pinter does not explore directly that particular world-view in abstraction. Unlike Samuel Beckett & perhaps a little like Edward Albee, Pinter prefers a non- discursive idiom & vein with figures that are strictly particular, concrete & contextualized. Samuel Beckett, in almost all his plays, initiated the plot on a specific & contextual plane of realism & modulated them draft after draft till the last produced a form of non-mimetic abstraction. Beckett wanted to create an enormously self-reflexive pattern which could hold the chaos of external reality. Pinter's plays are like the very first drafts of his mentors play-scripts.

Pinter is not a John Osborne, not any Arnold Wesker either. Unlike the anger of Osborne and the propagandism of Wesker, Pinter chooses his own way of portraying reality. His aesthetics certainly takes a queue from the likes of Eliot, Joyce & Beckett, but he creates his own vein, nevertheless. Though he has been staunchly categorized as an absurdist, I would call him a modernist problematizer, a realist & a highly political playwright whose dramaturgy combines a Beckettian avant-garde & a Dario Fo-like zest for hardcore political theatre.

His vision certainly incorporates the bizarre human situations in a fragmented universe, but one gets the feeling that quite consciously he stays away from the Ionescoical brand of objectified absurdity. He opts for a more Beckettian form of it where absurdity becomes a personal expression that does not demand any universal acknowledgement. In a world of ill-timing, where memories start to fade out, Pinter's theatre, much like Jean Genets, takes up a strictly mimetic art-form, examining both the private & the private expressions of politics. While in his early menace plays, Pinter treats politics as a sub-text, it surfaces & manifests itself as the primary content in his later works like The Mountain Language & One For The Road.

As the title of his Nobel lecture suggests, his drama is a triplet of art, truth & politics, where the three components are inseparable in a latent room. Pinter treats politics as a definite power-play everywhere. It is there in human relationships, in religion, in human psychology, in the sexual conduct of human beings, everywhere. In 1957, David Campton coined the term 'Comedies of Menace' as the subtitle of his collection of plays-The Lunatic View.

In 1958, Irving Wardle applied it to Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party (1957). Since then, comedy of menace has become a typical way of designating Pinter-texts in general. But, to me, menace is not just a thematic phenomenon in Pinter's plays but rather a procedural phenomenon. It is the perplexingly dialectic landscapes of menace that is bound to entrance & victimize a seeker of truth.

It is not located in any specific character, neither in particular situations, but all over human predicament & yet Pinter would surely deny this generalization. In The Room (1957), we are already introduced to the prevalent image-gallery of Harold Pinter -- -- a smooth personal space brimming with comfort & content & yet, pregnant with the lurking forces of petrification, soon to invade it. Rose & Bert inhabit a pleasant enough room in an urban apartment, continuously referring to the shabby 'other' room down there. Someone lives there but who? They do not know. They do not even want to know very eagerly.

But this all-happy dream is soon threatened by the entry of two visitors from outside- Mr. & Mrs. Sanders, looking for a room in the apartment. They have been told by the undefined figure in the 'other' room below that Rose & Bert's room is empty & thereby can be taken by them. In the melodramatic climax of the play, Rose encounters the dark tenant- a blind Negro who has supposedly come as a harbinger of Rose's father to take her back home & had been waiting for Bert to leave the room for a while, at least.

The cruel killing of the Negro by Bert & Rose's turning blind ironically at the end are a little hurried, however. Riely, the Negro, is the racial 'other' but not unequivocally the instrument of 'menace' as even he has to face the retaliative physical 'menace' from Bert, while Riely's 'menace' is successful, as well, as Rose is blinded soon after the murder. In Dumb Waiter (1957), Pinter comes back to this inverted & collateral discourse of 'menace' 'in' and 'out' of a 'room'. Gus & Ben, the two killers, awaiting their victims in a narrow room, dictated by the presence (or absence) of some alien upland-instructors, turn mutually 'menacing' for each other, at the end.

The instructors at the top communicate through a huge rambling pipe that, in course of the play, almost becomes a modern variation of the Delphic oracle. Gus & Ben are 'waiters' both because they 'wait' & also as they act as 'waiters', sending food to the people at the dark upper-floor through a huge & complicated 'liver " machine. The two awaiting oppressors get separated at the end; one, maturing into a victimizer & the other, reduced to just a victim. Their contra-positioning with the great dictators upstairs, thus, operates as an interaction of two truths, which are not mutually exclusive but rather inclusive & therefore menacingly open-ended. In The Birthday Party (1957), Pinter presents to us, the ineffectually casual and oblivious Stanley, living as a tenant under the care of Meg & Petey. Stanley is motiveless & stagnant, looking for his real identity & the disparately lost melodies, within the bounded four walls of that house.

But, still one feels that he has somehow managed to cling on to the immediate reality, for the time being. It is a very limited & meager truth he has somehow got hold of. But, sardonically enough, the house is on the list& Goldberg & Maccan arrive abruptly as intrusions of an inexorable destiny, a fatal universality to celebrate Stanley's tentative birthday & eventually only to menace him with dreams of external establishment & an exposure into the vastly varying outer reality. These dreams thus hold their counter-textual nightmares in themselves that rip Stanley, even off his language -- -"Uh get... uh-get... eee hhh-gagCaahh cash... ." Stanley's manipulation of a roomful of truth is thereby counter pointed, challenged & teased by a world, full of elusive truths that Goldberg & Maccan represent.

And resultant, the truth of the moment really slips out & is lost forever Stanleys specs are broken & his drum, affected. As he is taken away by Goldberg & Maccan, Petey says-"Stan, don't let them tell you what to do!" . Stanley's individual immunity system collapses under paradigmatic impositions of the world outside. The play, therefore taps a veritably political sub-text that explores the pro-establishment forces of social co modification that ruin the creative recluse of the individual. Pinter's vision of a sadistic police-state is also signified in Goldberg & Maccan. Pinter may deny the representation, but here, it is this representation, that clarifies his vision of truth or truths, for that matter.

The 1981 BBC-play Family Voices seems to be a post-script of The Birthday Party. The play, written in a unique epistolary form, is a dialogue between Voice 1, a son who has gone away from Voices 2 & 3 who are his parents. The son now inhabits a strange apartment with quite uncanny shadows, impressing him as his 'other' or rather 'real' family. He decides not to come back even as the mother informs her illness & the demise of his father.

Towards the end, the dead fathers voice invades as Voice- 3, writing from the 'glassy grave'. The mother warns that she would unveil the son, working as a male-prostitute. He is all of a sudden coming back to his family. The play ends on a note of typically Pinteresque ambivalence, with the voice of the father saying-"I have so much to say to you.

But I am quite dead. What I have to say to you will never be said. " I think we can examine the three voices as Stanley, Petey & Meg. Petey had said at the end of The Birthday Party -"Stan, don't let them tell you what to do! Here Voice- 1 had let them do just that.

Pinter uses the radio-medium brilliantly to create an extremely elliptical texture where very little communication is possible. Thus the Voices remain within the respective enclosures of their own experiences, with very few interceptions. 'Dialogues' are often reduced to 'monologues', but not even absolutely unheard 'soliloquies', & perhaps it is in this 'faintness' of communication, that Pinter looks for the truth of a 'real language', which remains an eldorado. The Caretaker (1957) is yet another play, which justifies what Pinter wrote in 1958: - There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. The promises of Aston & Mick, made to Davies, turn out to be an exemplification of this transfiguration of truth into falsity and vice versa. They withdraw their promises of making Davies the caretaker, at the end, only to menace him disastrously.

The designation of caretaker remains, an elusive & illusory promise only made & not realized kind of general truth that is only anticipated & not comprehended ultimately. But Daviess menacing quest for that truth does not die down. It continues as he waits for the weather to break so that he can go to Sidcup in order to fetch papers that would prove his real identity, yet another of those unattainable universal truths. Aston keeps on trying to build a shed, on his own, in the garden premises. It is another instance of a compromise with contextually limited truth, far away from the ones in the remote horizons of the universe. A menace of exploitation had indeed fallen upon him when he had perhaps undergone that universal voyage towards the truth of the world, as revealed through his long speech in Act ii Sc ii -- - I should have been dead.

I should have died The dreadful experience had turned him perennially to stringently contextual truths. And that to Pinter is perhaps the inevitable human destiny. Pinter wrote a short story called Tea Party in 1963 & when asked to write a play for the European Broadcasting Union, he made a play out of it. The play, also called Tea Party, is a sort of extension of the 'menace' theme we have seen in The Birthday Party.

Disson, a successful business-man starts to lose his pre-dominance over the state of matters with his marriage to Diana & the appointment of his new secretary Wendy -- hardly causes for his decline of power. His blurring eyesight is not a self-sufficient objective phenomenon, but rather an index to his existential crisis -- a growing inability to interpret experience. In the climactic tea party, held to celebrate his marriage-anniversary, Disson's alienation is masterfully sub-textual ised by Pinter without a single dialogue on his part or any other external comment. His failing eyes, his 'point of view' just keeps on staring at the various groups flocked together, doing various things, which, he is not a part of!

It is this hurled non-involvement that makes him 'menaced' at the end. Menace becomes a set of truths, one may ignore, but certainly cannot deny. In the typical Ionescoical mode of role-reversals and inventions in power-equations, Pinter comes up with another gripping discourse of 'menace' in A Slight Ache (1958), where it is all splendidly pleasant in the lovely nursery until & unless the mysterious match-seller appears at the gate to stay there for months without selling a single match-box to anyone! The match-seller, throughout the play, does not have a single dialogue, but acts as the dominant tool to de-centralize the patriarch (Edward) in the garden-house as he is brought in & interrogated by the husband & the wife. The match-seller is incorporated within the course of things with the father-like veneration & attention that he gets from the woman (Flora) in the house & the play ends with the obvious hourly-burly of the domestic power-equation as the match-seller goes in with the woman, leaving the husband rather non-passed with the sodden match-tray lying by his side. Does this imply a permanence of 'menace' or the husband does stand in with a chance of a comeback, loitering, lingering, lurking, alluring & eventually menacing the original match-seller as the second of his kind?

The same pattern of a 'marginal' force dislodging the centre & thus reducing it to an illusion of self-importance, recurs in The Basement (1967), where this de-centralizing 'menace' acquires a more distinctly sexual character. Throughout the play, Pinter dabbles with the antithesis between the 'interior' & the 'exterior'. Stott, the long-parted friend of the owner (Law) of the basement-room, comes in, all of a sudden, with his conspicuous friend Jane. The two hatch a plot against Law to throw him out with the woman playing the typical role of erotic manipulator. Law, thus, at the end of the play, stands only at the 'exterior', trying to enter into the ever-deluding 'interior' of existence. But interestingly enough, Pinter curves out a very different treatment of this 'menace' theme in Victoria Station (1982).

The play is about a routed controller having only driver- 274 to do a job that of going to Victoria Station to fetch someone from there. They never see each other in course of the action. Driver- 274 does not know the way to Victoria station & has a passenger in the 'dark park' beside. Yet he insists that he is the only person who can be entrusted. Others have all deserted the controller.

The play concludes with the controller, deciding to go and meet the driver in the car below his office, forgetting all about the reception-assignment in Victoria station. Pinter resolves the plot uniquely, with a break of the hierarchy. Here the 'controller', initially seeming to be a punitive instructor, is led to a dark & painful self-examination. And at the end, it is the controller who seems to be oblivious & 'menaced', not tragically like Stanley, but with a peculiar comicality. Is it indicative of a role-reversal between the controller & the 'driver'? But the ambiguity remains in the possibility of the controller, coming down only to persecute & punish the driver.

In all these plays, Pinter is working out his power-dialectic which revolves around a conflict between central & marginal forces. In his world, centre & margin keep replacing each other. This mutual substitution, however, does not end unilaterally as there is always a chance of the dislodged centre bouncing back. Pinter believes in the old proverb-Power corrupts & absolute power corrupts absolutely.

In its dynamism, Pinter's political paradigm always averts chances of absolutism. His truth is not static, but an ever-moving series of images that keep turning inside out. In Hothouse (written in 1958, but performed for the first time in 1980), the truth of the sane world is turned inside out as the madhouse proves to be truer, while in The Night School (1960), the 'unreal' truth of a woman (Sally), who goes to a night-school to study various languages, penetrates into the real truth of a woman who works in a night-club. In The Dwarfs (1960), the process that leads to a clear explication of that universal cognition turns out to be a process of self-affectation with the infective dwarfs menacing the operator himself as Len says-"The point is who are you? Not why or how, not even what... You are the sum of so many of reflections.

How many reflections? Whose reflections? Is that you consist of?" 1961 sees the production of A Night Out, a play that deals with the so very subjectivism 'truth' of a mother-son relationship in Mrs Stokes & Albert. Pinter's journey towards that all-desired 'existential liberation' is essayed through Albert, his frustrated hero, living with a set of 'dead' people. His father & grandmother are literally dead while Mrs Stokes is metaphorically dead in a nagging persistence of obsession & disbelief, about Albert. Though, Pinter's protagonist, for a change, is out in the night & away from the terrifying constriction of spaceless rooms, the space still keeps on crippling as he becomes part of another room of a party-celebration & gets charged with false allegations of a sexual assault.

He has to return to his mother's room, only to get out again, & again only to enter into yet another room, this time that of a seeming prostitute. But the icons turn all the more blurred as the prostitute's words reinforce the image of a struggling mother, rearing her daughter with great pain. As she turns out to be just an extension of Mrs Stokes's monotonously meandered syntax, Albert feels the 'menace' & starts exercising a violent power-equation with her. When he comes back to his mother at the end of the play, not much seems to have changed. Mrs. Stokes's dead words keep flowing, may be with a restoration of faith in Albert, but still emanating the same maddening silence from him.

The mother & the whore prove to be the same, the inside & the outside, same again. The play leaves Albert on the threshold of an exit-door that is reduced to a sad entrance into another pitiably shortening human-space. Albe...


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