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Example research essay topic: Harold Pinter The Menacing Silences In Truth - 3,612 words

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... rt's 'night out', thereby, is well within an endless series of interlocked rooms, each bigger & yet smaller than the other! In The Lover (1962), the iconic social differences between the married wife & the elegant whore, between the socially accepted husband & the widely denied external lover, all turn blurred. They all become the same again to mock at traditionally accepted universal truths as they subvert radically at the face of a linguistic & textual identically. Pinter's most stage-successful play The Homecoming (1967), for which he also won The Drama Critics' Circle Award on Broadway, is a part of an evident movement in Pinter that of trying to make his plays much more directly truthful & responsive, socially. Max is a dyspeptic old father with three sons & a dead wife & as Teddy returns home with his wife Ruth, he is like an outsider who creates a discord in the synchronized stagnancy of the Max-household.

Ruth becomes a mystically plausible figure of sexual extensity- a mother to the sons, a wife to Max, coming back years after death, as it were. Teddy goes back to the American university, where he teaches Philosophy, with Ruth staying back as a strumpet, as a veritable source of income for the financially enfeebled family. Pinter de-ionizes the 'mother' & the 'strumpet', in an outburst of an 'id' that disowns any restraint of any kind of 'super-ego'. In this very bold exploration of the truth or the truths of sexual drives which break their patriarchal pre-suppositions, Pinter, however obliquely, does place the theme of 'menace' from its early psychological & philosophical realm to an overcharged social context as the woman takes over -- Ruth replacing Max in the all-coveted centre-chair of the patriarchal monarch, with all the three male figures subdued under her dominance. Pinter shows his faculty as a deceptive poet in plays like, Landscape (1968), Silence (1969) or Night (1969). Pinter, in these plays goes into the Freudian psyche only to explore a widely multi-linear & thereby curiously ambivalent world of human memory.

He renders an essentially de-constructive discourse of time, not seeing time objectively, but capturing an acute sense of its lethal passage, from within the human mind. Like Hamm & Clov in Samuel Beckett's famous play Endgame (1958), or Vladimir & Estragon in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Pinter's characters are lost in the 'vertical time' of Zeno. They are caught in the in-between waste land that separates Past from Future. They can neither get back to their past, nor can they escalate to their future, being incapable of any mobility whatsoever.

The time, within one individual never becomes the time within another. It is this ever-changing 'montages' of time, different in different persons that takes Pinter on the border-line of that quest for 'dramatic truth', only to discover its misleading multiplicity, as Jean Genet was to call it (truth), just a word exclusively, nothing else perhaps! Pinter once wrote a little poem on the cricketer Len Hutton: -"I saw Len Hutton in his prime/Another time/Another time. " In these so-called 'memory plays', we do get a good deal of that 'prime', but the 'prime' is ironies at the same time because it belongs to 'another time'- one other time & not the time, which grows in & on us perpetually. Landscape reads perfectly like a Freudian dream & Pinter uses some of the dream symbols prescribed by Freud such as dresses for nudity etc.

The play is about the relationship between the middle-aged couple, Beth & Duff as the two sit in the kitchen of a large country house. They talk about their interaction, which has now become a thing of the past. Why is Beth so withdrawn? Is it just because of Duff's adulteries of youth? Alternatively Beth may have herself been the lover of their employer in that country-house -- Mr. States, who is dead now.

The play, offers us with the discord between two minds in the present because of a third & that too in & of the past! It is an index of a peculiarly undefined & enigmatic conjugal relationship, created & uncreated at the same time. And the void is, as always, crafted by time & its agent -- the dumb forgetfulness of death. Silence is a play where the playwright really seems to be dead! The play revolves around Ellen, a young girl & two middle aged men -- Rumsey & Bates. The stage is divided into three principal areas with one chair in each & the three begin by talking to themselves.

But soon their self-talks turn into interactions. After espousing distinctly separate vistas of memory, they try to conjoin them in a triangular experience. But the experience is never de-fragmented & leads to its anarchic climax where the three stories are confused. They are confused because of the very intention to integrate them in a single whole. Dialogues turn into monologues and it all recedes into the darkest of silences. In this silence there is no need to communicate & yet there is one.

Perhaps only to judge the silence in its true self, words are needed, a 'linguistic other' is needed. But those words only exist to rehabilitate the eternal silence at the core of human existence. Beckett had said in Molloy, To restore silence is the voice of objects. A true Beckettian at heart, Harold Pinter throughout his drama seems to be a man on a mission to restore that eternal human silence. Ellen's lines stay back with us ... Is it me?

Am I silent or speaking? How can I know? Can I know such things? No-one has ever told me. I need to be told things... I must find a person to tell me these things. " In Night, for once, unlike his usual particularity, Pinter, quite consciously creates a universal figure of the two sexes in the 'man' & the 'woman' who talk about their past loves, their selves undergoing radical changes in course of the temporal flux.

It is again all about a discordant evocation of two pasts, logically meant to be one, but is not so in reality. In A Kind of Alaska (1982), which is inspired by Oliver Sacks's Awakenings (1973), Pinter represents the 1916 - 1917 epidemic named Encephalitis Lethargic a resulting in delirium, mania, trances, coma, sleep, insomnia etc. The subject again gives Pinter a scope to examine the sub-merged world of the human unconscious & explore the veracity of human memory. Deborah, waking up after twenty-nine long years is confronted with Pauline, supposedly her sister & Pauline's husband Hornby. She hardly remembers her past & all the recollections, leading to her identity are imposingly proposed by Hornby & the proposals involve a great deal of self-importance as well as a patriarchal oriented erotic overtone. Deborah can only know from 'others', her own 'truth', that of time past, which carries her 'self' in it.

Pinter again journeys towards a lost & dislocated 'truth' of Deborah's existence. Unfortunately, whatever revived is strongly manipulated by the power-dynamics, mastered by Pauline & Hornby. Deborah can only stare at the fragments of an imposition al fabric of 'truth', where she is not left with the choice to verify them-"You say I have been asleep. You say I am now awake.

You say I have not awoken from the dead. You say I was not dreaming then & I am not dreaming now. You say I have always been alive & am alive now. You say I am a woman. " The oft-used Pinteresque motif of a birthday-celebration crops up. Deborah submits to the narratives of Hornby & Pauline, apparently being content with the way her 'self' has been depicted by the two & seems to find her niche at the end-'I think I have the matter in proportion. (Pause) Thank you. ' Pinter's end-note here seems to be one of an uncharacteristically unique reconciliation. But who knows, this all-good note of deterministic acceptance may carry a sinister under-taste of self-mockery; a self-mockery where the seeming conformity towards the 'projected truth' is distinctly denied!

With Old Times (1971), the lyrical cris-crosses of memory start to peep in. The play carries through a complex dilemma between the subjective & the objective. Is Anna really present outside the window or is she merely a fantastic emanation of Dealer & Kate as they talk about her supposed arrival? This is a play that starts to deal with the ambiguity of memory & all its preserved sense-impressions. This motif reaches a kind of fruition in the trampish figure of Spooner in No Man's Land (1975) as on a drunken night, he enters the house of Hirst, much like Davies in The Caretaker.

But what follows makes very clear, the drift in Pinter's perceptive responses. No Man's Land takes us back into a past of awe & glory, a past that differs individually- Spooner & Hirst keep on disagreeing as the vastly different pasts coalesce into a future, or just a 'walking shadow' of it as it turns out to be a cul-de-sac, a no-man's land between the verbal & the non-verbal, between life & death. It is a lifeless existence & yet devoid of death like Hamm's or Clov's in Beckett's Endgame (1957), but certainly lacking the note of Beckettian dejection or rather supplementing it with a subversively witty realization & acceptance of the condition. Largely inspired by James Joyce's only play Exiles, Betrayal begins with the couple, Emma & Robert, on the brink of separation & recedes from time present (1977) to time past (1968) through to its end. A serious statement on the urban sexual manners, the play captures a wonderfully open web of human relationships.

Robert & jerry are best of friends. Jerry has been the best man in Robert's marriage & he has had a steady affair with Robert's wife Emma from that time & that too very much in the sanction of Robert, as the final scene mystically recollects. There is a hint of the homo-erotic in the relationship between Robert & Jerry & Jerry's relationship with Emma is seen by Robert as a means to take their friendship to its peculiar fruition, thereby trying to keep Jerry at hand, always. Robert, however, has had affairs with other women as well, for which the marriage is currently on the rocks. Jerry has his own family, while his references to the children of Emma & Robert still contain a curious psycho-sexual innuendo. Pinter mocks at the title, as it were, by naturalizing all sorts of traditionally perceived deviations from the societal norm of relationships.

It hardly turns out to be a betrayal as his characters go far beyond the yardstick of a collective social morality. The family voices re-unite more powerfully in Moonlight (1993) where Pinter sketches a strange malady of the mind as we see a gripping vision of a fractured family, awaiting the death of its ruling patriarch (Andy), with the two sons caring a fig for the demise. It is a death like many other deaths, like all other deaths! Here ends it all & what survives is the dimmed 'moonlight', like the sound of the footsteps in Beckett's Footfalls (1976). The play culminates in the hazy world of a personal memory, which seems to be potent enough to become yet another future for yet another time as Bridget keeps on waiting -- -"I stood there in the moonlight and waited for the moon to go down. " Party Time, performed in 1991 for the first time deserves a mention separately.

The play is another great evidence of the diverse strands of Pinter's genius. It is a sarcastic rehash of Restoration Comedy of Manners, chiefly recalling Congreve's crisp & smart wit & repartee & Wycherley's cynical vision of humanity. A gala party is taking place within a metropolitan elite club, with the outer world in utter dismay. The party, therefore, belongs to a particularly self-centred aloofness to an annihilated mankind in a banal world-order. While Beckett in Endgame showed a similarly destroyed & soulless exterior of the world, his 'interior' was also 'supped full of horrors. But, Pinter, in this play, draws the 'interior' in an antithetical image of enjoyment & carousal, though the images of the void outside intermittently invade into the private space of the 'party', only to connect it with the gutted infinitude outside.

At the end of the play, as the party comes to a close & the people disperse, Jimmy, a young man, absent thus-far, comes out of the light to stand at the doorway. Jimmy's speech indicates a trying desperation for a poignantly real communication- a socially provoking & critically concrete 'meaning', which is deferred all the while. Jimmy seems to be lost in a silent darkness. It fills his mouth & he can only 'suck' it, in a maze of incomprehensible 'impressions' that do not lead to self-sufficient 'ideas'. So, for a change, Pinter turns the perspective inside out by shifting it from his recurrently used image of the 'room' to the 'other rooms outside'.

Jimmy becomes a representative voice of that other. But, his 'truth' remains 'menaced' nevertheless, despite an articulation or perhaps just because of the articulation itself! Once after seeing an initial production of The Birthday Party, in the theatre, a woman wrote to Pinter: -"Dear Sir, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your play The Birthday Party. These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are the two men? 2. Where did Stanley come from? 3.

Were they all supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your play. " Pinter's reply was: - "Dear Madam, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your letter. These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are you? 2. Where do you come from? 3. Are you supposed to be normal?

You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your letter. " Pinter, in rephrasing the question in the context of an answer, again probably implied the inventiveness of truth & also the problem and yet the compulsion of taking his characters (Stanley, Goldberg, Maccan) as photographic truths of a perceptible outer reality. Pinter, quite deliberately, breaks away from the Ibsenite mould of dramatic dialogue, where the characters always speak about great issues, socio-political & economic matters. Pinter keeps his dialogues rather naturalistic. Whether it is Dumb Waiter or The Birthday Party, for that matter, his characters hardly discuss such grave & important matters. Food seems to be a recurrent talking point with Pinter's characters. In The Birthday Party, the conjugal relationship between Meg & Petey has been portrayed (& critiqued at the same time) almost exclusively by the means of such references to food- prepared & served.

Pinter's characters fumble; remain silent, sometimes even incomplete, in terms of sense. His language, thronged with those silences, pauses& three dots () moves accordingly, stilted & impeded in search of the truth of the language. All through the Pinter-canon, we find excommunication & equivocation. Language is political but more diplomatic are his pauses & silences. Language is not just a medium for Pinter.

He uses it as a theme, not with the mythical effect of Samuel Beckett, but in the domain of his own familiarized contextualism. Pinter's projected human being is a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. Margaret Atwood links Pinter's use of silence with the figure of Abraham in Kierkegaards essays & establishes it as the primary text in what is called Pinteresque today. Atwood says Abraham is ordered by God to cut his only sons throat.

In the face of this cruel and unnatural request, Abraham does not protest. Neither does he agree. He is silent. But it is a huge surprise with a haunting echo.

One of these echoes is Pinter -- - the silences of Pinter. Reverberating silences. Pinteresque. In One For The Road (1984), Pinter depicted an evidently political scenario representative of an absolutist state with Nicholas, interrogating Victor, who is the defeated captive. We come across an exclusively verbal side of 'menace' in its political topicality. It is not that the questions asked by Nicholas to Victor are not answered because of the pressure over Victor.

Those questions are causally & linguistically unanswerable e. g. Nicholas asks Gila (Victor's wife) repeatedly, why she had met Victor at a place for the first time? The play may not stand out as an artwork of complete appeal, but it certainly depicts the dramatists inherent skepticism about language, a minimalist inclination as even Beckett had imbibed from Fritz Mauthner.

In his 1988 -play, The Mountain Language, Pinter again works out a linguistic equation, interlaced with political connotations of dictatorial power & authority. He talks about a mountain dialect, being forbidden to the mountain woman who comes to see his son, imprisoned in a jail in the capital. We see how language becomes a tool of colonial oppression. Pinter concludes with a brilliant twist, implying a vast dynamic of linguistic politics, within which, even an allowance to speak the mountain language, at the end, comes as a pre-destined protocol, imposed by the big brothers of the system.

But, then again, if one starts to categorize him, Pinter shows again in Ashes to Ashes, how non-topical and non-immediate he can be, in a fundamentally political play about the Nazi horrors in the 2 nd World War. He uses the echoes of Rebeca's words in her final speech to evoke a substitution of the man (Devlin) she was talking to thus-far. The brilliant use of this device becomes more relevant because the man is also a sort of echo from Rebeca's past, turning out to be that vaguely defined lover & strangulation whom Rebeca's words had been referring to from the beginning. The child is taken away from her to be killed mercilessly & she also disowns the fact that she ever had a child!

Is this abnormal maternal response a satire, an authentic shock-reaction or 'menace' or a way to put an end, put an end to childbirth, put an end to Beckett's vision of the 'accursed progenitor' altogether. We see a 'menace' in the outer-world in Ashes to Ashes, but again unlike the chiefly objectified Rhinoceritis in Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros (1958), the 'menace' in Pinter is conveyed through very lyrical nuances e. g. the comparison between a godless universe & a Brazil-England encounter without a single soul in the stadium.

In this supposed relegation of god to a mere spectator ial presence, lies the 'menace' of things falling apart. Pinter's 'dramatic ules', to use the Beckettian term, namely Precisely (1983) & The New World Order (1991) are also replete with polemical overtones of victimization. Pinter observed, in course of his Nobel lecture: - When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimeter and the image changes.

We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror- for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. Pinter certainly shows us no single accurate reflection of truth but an abruptly modulating vista of relative and disorganized truths. But does he succeed in breaking the mirror itself, which is supposed to put an end to all reflected images & focus the real object, the ultimate truth itself?

Even if he does so, the truth would only stare at the audacity of the seeker; it would not be any appreciative glance. And the stare would perhaps negate the attainment. So can we really say that the menacing cross-passage comes to its destination with the smashing of the mirror? Or does the breaking of the mirror symbolize the end of the world the Judgment Day. And it all ushers into a new world of Nohow On, to use the phrase of Samuel Beckett. Our task is cut out.

As Pinter says, The search is your task. Is it not becoming a universal symbolization? Pinter would disagree. So let us keep our fingers crossed as Pinter's narrative quips in a tone of marvelous aesthetic egotism in The Homecoming (1967) -- - You wouldnt understand my works. You wouldnt have the faintest idea of what they were about. I do not know if the 'faintest idea' is gathered from this one; one about Pinter.

If not, it is certainly for the better & most importantly to his own liking. Let us read Pinter all over again, enjoy the man all over again, without caring for 'idea' or 'ideation' for that matter. After all as he says that he does not write for anything external, but only for himself. Let us read him only for ourselves likewise. Pinter, at this point of time, is suffering from severe throat-cancer & one does not know, how soon the time of the final 'betrayal' would come. He may not live on, but he will certainly 'die on' (to use Beckett's phrase again) in our worlds of memory which he hardly believes in its linear simplistic topography.

Let us end this discussion with one of Pinter's own poems -- - a poem, which I feel, would certainly stimulate him till his last breath in the quest for a menacing truth: - I know the place It is true Everything we do Corrects the space Between death and me And you. Harold Pinter


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