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CHAPTER : 3

SOCIAL DEVIANCE, ROLE AND IDENTITY IN THE CARETAKER. THE DWARFS. NIGHT SCHOOL. A NIGHT OUT. THE LOVER. TEA PARTY. AND THE HOMECOMING.

As we have seen in the last chapter, one-upmanship, deft alteration of self definitions, quick reversals, contingent decisions and expediency dictate the action of several Pinter plays. Such situations arise because characters are called upon to confront circumstances that threaten their subjective definitions of reality so that they are forced, inevitably, to seek re-adjustments within a social context defined by social control, stratification and conflict. Since socialisation always takes place in the context of a specific social structure, the micro-sociological interactions within the world of these plays explicate the macro-realities of their environment.

According to Berger and Luckmann, as the individual gains in self- consciousness and probes his identity, there could be conflicting definitions of reality, because in contemporary life multiple versions of reality are socially available, depending on the social status and consequent location of the individual.^ These diverse constructions of reality could lead to a rupture between the individual's visible conduct in society and his invisible self-identification as someone quite different. As seen in the last chapter, the individual can affirm his identity or change it only with the active participation of "significant others" as well as the "not so important others" from his past and present life. Thus, meaning, awareness and knowledge within the Pinterian world, are socially constructed on an ongoing basis, and this necessitates, for both readers and characters, an interactive presence and alertness in order 141

to understand these processes of socialisation and re-socialisation, and to re-define the contingent and shifting reality.

In the plays under consideration in this chapter, the emerging definitions and counter-definitions of reality point towards the possibility of "alternate realities"^ - which are usually substitutes for the official mainstream reality. Berger and Luckmann explain that all men, once socialised, are potential "traitors to themselves." The problem of such "treason" is complicated because a different "Self" may be portrayed at different moments. In the group of plays analysed in this chapter, various problems arise because the characters are frequently "alternating" into newer realities. These are problems associated with multiple identities and multiple voices and newer discourse types.

Thus the (context and milieu^n the plays discussed in this chapter privilegd^the exploration and understanding of social being as a visibly intense dialectic between subjective and objective reality. Among the plays discussed. The Dwarfs explores this dialectical relationship at its most intense and fundamental level by juxtaposing versions of reality that are completely irreconcilable. Len, the main character of the play, finds it extremely distressful to accept and adapt to the rapidity of change in a commercial milieu, failing altogether to piece together his fragmented reality. In some of the other plays analysed here, the characters evolve differently, and as we shall see, learn to accept the inevitability of rupture between subjective needs and objective reality.

Berger and Luckmann have analysed society, or social reality, as a dialectical process between subjective and objective reality, the "final" perspective from the point of view of such an understanding remains tentative and shifting. If we view the movement of Pinterian drama as an 142

increasingly intense struggle between subjective and objective definitions of Self, the plays of this section will, as I will show, emerge as a movement towards the assertion of Self and a greater flexibility (as compared to the plays of the last chapter) to adapt, change and manipulate the situations they are thrown into.

In the last chapter the failure of the characters to cope with transformations and events outside their common sphere of reality was perceived as a failure of knowledge and awareness, especially awareness of the social other. According to Berger and Luckmann, such a failure of knowledge arises because during "socialisation" the symmetry between objective and subjective reality can never be complete. Socialisation is dependant upon the social distribution of knowledge and no individual can know the entire social reality of his world or segment at a given point of time. This leads to a situation of uncertainty and unverifiability which is so vividly present in Pinterian drama. A further problem is that there are elements of subjective reality that exist apart from any known social truth and subjective biography can never become fully social. The individual is thus "both inside and outside society." The course of closing the gap between objective and subjective reality is a constant struggle and is "produced and reproduced" in actuality. This means that the relationship between the individual and the objective social world is "like an ongoing balancing act." Successful socialisation can be defined as the attempt to close the gap between objective and subjective reality as well as identity. Conversely, "unsuccessful socialisation" is the asymmetry between objective and subjective reality.^

There are various problems associated with unsuccessful socialisaiton, all of which provide an understanding of the plays discussed in this 143

chapter. One of the problems is the possibility of a "fierce individualism" which could lead to deviant or alternate definitions of Self and reality. Sociologically speaking, this condition could be defined as a choice between discrepant realities and identities, leading to an identity crisis and a questioning of the status quo. Berger and Luckmann show that even the successfully socialised individual can question his social being by reflecting about those of his fellow beings who are rebels. He, on encountering these hidden selves - the traitors to social convention - will himself establish new patterns of alternate behaviour for himself and live between discrepant worlds. The individualist, for example, is a social type who has "the potential to migrate between a number of available worlds and who has deliberately and awarely constructed a self out of the material provided by a number of identities.'"* The range of a character often depends upon the number of roles he can play at one given time.

This state of being is all too obvious in The Caretaker.^ Here, all the characters are in the process of locating themselves in a world of changing relationships and hard economic options. The world is ruthlessly alien to the individual who cannot decode its social structure and expediencies. Knowledge of the social equations prevalent in such a world seem inextricably tied up with racial, economic and social hierarchies that stratify and coerce the individual who has insufficient knowledge and understanding of his environment. Thus, successful socialisation is here a question of constantly performing "cool alterations," which means that the individual internalises new realities and alternate perspectives only superficially, without much conviction, and instead of making them his reality he simply adopts this reality for a specific purpose. In so far as this involves the performance of certain roles, he retains a subjective detachment vis-a-vis the roles, or in other 144

NArards, he merely puts them on, opting for them in a manipulative manner.®

The social distribution of knowledge and within this, the power equations of access to this knowledge, along with the resultant relationships (domination relationships), is the key to the world of The Caretaker. The individual who can perform a plurality of roles and appropriate the corresponding discourses to authenticate that identity, will be the most powerfully positioned within such a contingent, social reality. Within such a categorisation there is a hierarchy of individuals, among whom the most successful is Mick, and the least successful Aston, who, ironically, is also the most intense and sincere character in the play; he is also highly intuitive in his perception of relationships and motives. His assessment of Davies' needs, of his own failings, of his mother's selfishness and of his brother's moods, is in contrast to Mick and Davies' miscalculations, quite prescient in nature. Mick, in contrast, has socially derived knowledge based on broad cultural norms which, he has never really questioned. For him, socially objectivated knowledge is easy to internalise, as so many facts that can be used to advantage. His social location could be understood from the perspective of, "a tradition of sharp London lads on the make, from under-privileged or working-class backgrounds, who acquire material possessions and social-mobility through their native wit and their ability to recognise and to play the rules of the system, picking up their jargon, their attitudes and their affectations from the radio, television, the popular press and the middle-class professions whose world impinges on theirs - the law, the police, property investments, insurance."^

The other two characters of the play, that is, Davies and Aston, are characterised by their attempts to approximate to this paradigm of 145

successful entrepreneurship, but fail to fit the bill. This is because these characters are completely immobilised by their traumatic pasts and so feel naturally threatened by the social system and its institutions. This system is primarily composed of social structures and institutions like family, class, community and power. Social interaction, the most basic sociological component of all groups and relationships, is another structure that characterises human society. Davies and Aston have lost their faith in all these processes so that they are wary of all roles which involve a stratified and overtly defined existence. It would not be wrong to say that both Aston and Davies have been victims of institutional callousness and betrayal; and yet, significantly enough, they do not shut themselves to the social idea of cultivating human relationships. This state of affairs is worth stressing as this play, like all other plays in this chapter, derives its fundamental dramatic force not from any idea, philosophy, or ideology, but simply from the complex and subtle human interactions and relationships, especially experiences with the culturally or socially-different Other.

The first act opens with Davies complaining that the "aliens" - Greeks, Poles, Blacks - "the lot of them," have persecuted him, forcing him to work for them in the most degrading manner, not even letting him have his legitimate break between the long hours of work. Davies' sense of native pride is expressed in terms of his total contempt for the man with whom he has had a scuffle: "the filthy skate, I've had dinner with the best." Pinterian drama, as here, packs the most telling truths into the most ordinary situations of everyday life in the contemporary world.

The emerging discourse then, translates itself through the common prejudices and common knowledge of common men, bringing together social attitudes, perspectives and ironies into the most inane and 146 inarticulate of remarks. This remark is the beginning of a discourse, cumulatively meaningful, on the conflicts inherent in contemporary stratified, pluralistic societies. All the plays in this chapter are, as I will show, explorations of the divided Self - a Self, which is in search of stability within the complexity of a pluralistic environment - where values, norms, relationships and attitudes are defined from moment to moment, depending on the social location of the perceiving individual and his immediate situation. Discourse here, is composed not merely of verbal articulated meanings, but also of positional, tacit and understated meanings. For instance, Davies can construct social reality only from his position of dependence, poverty, indignity and helplessness. He cannot, try as he might, accept the social stratification-patterns of a highly pluralistic society, especially as he retains notions that seem outdated and useless within the stark realities of economic survival.

Relationship or position is never static or even final within this play. Davies, though down and under, attempts, albeit ineffectually, to retrieve lost ground and position by somehow degrading an Other by treachery and manipulation; or even by gratification and humility - always, in the ultimate analysis, depending on strategy rather than on justice and fair play. In his social conduct Davies can only act out of a sense of indignation even when the situation does not warrant it. He imitates the main player, Aston, but fails, as he cannot move easily between "discrepant worlds" and shifting realities.

In order to understand the situation from the point of view of domination patterns and social stratification within the play, it is necessary to assess the subtle changes that take place in the discourse patterns. This in turn will indicate whether or not reality-definitions constitute action and change within the play. It would be pertinent to recollect that 147 imposing one's own reality-definitions on the Other is part and parcel of the discourse of characters in the plays of the second chapter also; it is an attempt moreover to effect changes in one's own social location and status-position. In this context one should see the plays in the present chapter as even more intense struggles for social change in the individuals' everyday lives. These plays are part of the continuous and cumulative social discourse in the plays, which partly becomes transparent through the whole process of social interaction, the active interpretation of this by the participants, and the dialectic of change and reconstruction that results from these processes of interaction.

The resulting dialectic is composed of an interplay between the characters' knowledge of the typical representations of their particular social world (in terms of beliefs, conventions, values, common assumptions and so on), and their own imperfect, tentative or confused expression of it. Sometimes, the discourse even turns philosophical, with the characters probing the nature of social reality itself, over and above personal experience. The gap here, between subjective and objective reality, is not merely a point of disturbance. It also enables the critical questioning of social conventions in a radical way and is the means of social change and de-institutionalisation of social roles.

In the social structure of The Caretaker. Davies, as well as the two brothers have a definite social status defined by stratifications of class, knowledge, education and profession. Each character has a subjectively defined role as well as a socially allotted image to which he tries to approximate. The Blacks and other immigrants are also dramatically active agents in this social hierarchy. Davies is white, Anglo-Saxon and obsessed with his own claim to being well-bred, well- mannered, and clean. Moreover, he is aware of his rights, and as he 148

puts it, he deserves more consideration because he's "an old man" who's had dinner with the best:

I've eaten my dinner off the best plates. But I'm not young any more. I remember the days I was as handy as any of them. They didn't take any liberties with me. But I haven't been so well lately. I've had a few attacks ...

who was this git to come up and give me orders? We got the same standing. He's not my boss. He's nothing superior to me. ASTON. What was he, a Greek? DAVIES. Not him, he was a Scotch. He was a Scotchman. (ASTON goes back to his bed with the toaster and starts to unscrew the plug. DAVIES follows him). You got an eye of him, did you? ASTON. Yes. DAVIES. I told him what to do with his bucket. Didn't I? You heard. Look here, I said, I'm an old man, where I was brought up we had some idea how to talk to old people with proper respect, we was brought up with the right ideas, if I had a few years off me I'd ... I'd break you in half. That was after the guvnor give me the bullet. Making too much commotion, he says. Commotion, me! Look here, I said to him, I got my rights. I told him that. I might have been on the road but nobody's got more rights than I have. Let's have a bit of fair play, I said. Anyway, he gave me the bullet. {He sits in the chair). That's the sort of place. Pause. 149

If you hadn't come out and stopped that Scotch git I'd be inside the hospital now I'd have cracked my head on that pavement if he'd have landed. I'll get him ... (9-11)

According to Davies, he is dismissed by his manager for standing up for his rights and for asserting his dignity. Even though Davies' testimony isn't entirely reliable, and his story may be concocted, nevertheless, it is an occasion for Davies to express his sense of outrage and indignation. Introducing a concept of rights and duties into an area where the norm is commercial success at any cost (which includes violation of the basic humane conditions of labour), is, from the point of view of Davies, an essential act which he desperately needs. In order to find at least some degree of congruence between the socially objectivated world and his subjective reality (which he constructs on the basis of his racial and cultural status). But from the point of view of the group that employs him as a cleaner - the most menial job available - it is probably preposterous. Moreover, Davies has absolutely and thoroughly mixed up the social conventions which require him as the cleaner to be servile and cringing, or in the least, agreeable in the presence of his superiors. It is both amusing and ironic that he asserts his rights in a place where he is not even allowed to sit down :

DAVIES. Ten minutes off for a tea-break in the middle of the night in that place and I couldn't find a seat, not one. All them Greeks had it, Poles, Greeks, Blacks, the lot of them, all them aliens had it. And they had me working there ... they had me working. (8)

Here a group of the minority communities has become a dominant group, while the White Anglo-Saxon is in a position of vulnerability 150

among them. The co-ordinates are further complicated because in addition to the racial conflicts there are class distinctions and cultural differences as well; no relationship is unilaterally situated in this discourse of stratification. Here, the position accorded to Davies is complicated by his notion of rights, much like Ben's in The Dumb Waiter and Stanley's in The Birthday Party, whose appeals are to common human decency and justice within a social convention of institutional dictatorship. The constraints that ensure a break-down in communication between Davies and his employer, as also between him and the other racial groups, are, socially operative in individual interactions but invisible otherwise.

According to Norman Fairclough, power relationships are usually implicit in the socio-cultural conventions and rituals that govern most face-to-face encounters, especially unequal encounters in terms of class, race, institutional hierarchy, or any other social grouping or interest.^ The social conventions of behaviour, discourse and most other social practices, are governed by relations of power. If there is a shift in power-relations through conflict and struggle, there is, usually, a corresponding transformation in the order of discourse also. The power in discourse is not, however, always apparent. It may be hidden in the sub-text of the discourse, and at other times the characters who make use of certain conventions in discourse may not be fully aware of the deeper implications of using these.

Power in discourse is visible through an interaction where "powerful participants" are involved in "controlling and constraining the contributions of the non-powerful participants." Such constraints control and prescribe norms of behaviour and the content of a subordinate's reactions. Thus, the social relations people enter into in discourse and 151

the reciprocal positions they occupy within the exchange, are determined by the social expectations embedded in these personal interactions. There are limits within prescribed relationships and these inevitably impose restraints on the type of discourse that can be used by a subordinate; and though this defines social responsibilities for the powerful participants also, yet they can break the codes of social propriety, decency and concern because of their advantageous social location.^

Davies' linguistic, cultural, and racial background as well as his class relationships put him in conflict with those he is forced to interact with. The local dominance of a particular cultural group controls the encounter that destroys Davies' faith in the system of which he is a part of. His insistence on his rights, is, a result of his cultural difference from "them," the "whole lot of them." Within the complex dialectic of relationships, Davies, though economically impoverished, and thus subordinate to "them aliens," is, because of this, acutely aware of his social superiority in terms of cultural norms and mannerisms. When he complains of biased attitudes he is not necessarily perverse. Indeed, the whole point about Davies is his pathetic lack of social awareness and inability to understand trends and changes like Aston does; he lives and breathes the air of a different world, and relates to a society that is firmly in the past.

In a way, Davies is a victim of v\(tiat Fairclough describes as "the myth of free speech"^" in a democratic society, namely that any one is free to say what he likes. And because of this mistaken belief, he is constantly protesting against the violation of his personal dignity and identity. This is his way of empowering himself vis-a-vis the others in his group. He is the insider who resents being defeated by the outsiders and other 152 marginal existents like Aston who have been declared sick by society. Thus, Davies' problem is that he lives in a highly pluralistic and urban environment, which is in a process of constant change, while he, as an individual, has not been able to internalise these changes. He keeps looking back, using a discourse of rights and duties, of traditional good breeding and propriety. Davies has a sense of outrage because he thinks his universe of discourse is quintessentially and appropriately English, while the world inhabited by "them" is a profanation of the sterling qualities of English culture. As Berger and Luckmann explain, "competing definitions of reality can be conceptually and socially segregated as appropriate to strangers, and ipso facto as irrelevant to oneself" and thus it is even possible to have fairly friendly relations with these "strangers." The problem, however, arises "whenever the strangeness is broken through and the deviant universe appears as a possible habitat for one's own people."^^ The "aliens" here are aggressively imposing their own standards of stratification and cultural understanding upon Davies, who challenges and in his own way defies their rights as employers and social equals. Berger and Luckmann's Social construction of Realitv shows that.

It is important to bear in mind that modern societies are pluralistic. This means that they have a shared core universe taken for granted and different partial universes coexisting in a state of mutual accommodation ... the pluralistic situation changes not only the social position of traditional definitions of reality but also the way in which these are held in the consciousness of individuals. The Pluralistic situation goes with conditions of rapid social change, indeed Pluralism itself is an accelerating factor precisely because it helps to undermine the change-resistant efficacy of the traditional 153

definitions of reality. Pluralism encourages both scepticism and innovation and is thus inherently subversive of the taken- for-granted reality of the traditional status-quo. One can readily sympathize with the experts in the traditional definitions of reality when they think back nostalgically to the times when these definitions had a monopoly in the field.^^

Davies is both victim and victimiser; both oppressor and oppressed. He certainly looks pathetic in his inability to adjust to the social and other changes in his environment. He is terrified of the gas pipes and lives in mortal fear of all electronic devices, whatever these might be. His definitions of social reality and his assessments of society are constructed within a framework of suspicion, fear and anger as he lives a life of deprivation, social injustice and alienation. Living space, employment and even institutionalised charity, are all out of his reach, partly because he has to compete with "aliens." He cannot legitimise such an existence and so implicitly endorses the past which may have been governed by fewer cross-cultural encounters and fears. Davies is a marginally located individual, not only because he is a tramp who is alienated from an emergent pluralistic society, but also because he is old and sick ("I've had attacks"). He is, in this sense, the perennial outsider (like Aston who has a natural affinity with him as a fellow reject of society). Davies needs others like himself to objectivate (make real) his definitions of reality, and so he tries to build up an understanding with Aston in order to fortify his stand against society. As Berger and Luckmann explain, "all socially meaningful definitions of reality must be objectivated by social processes ... all legitimations are human products; [and] their existence has its base in the lives of concrete individuals, and has no empirical status apart from their lives."^^ 154

Davies is just one of many marginal existents within the world of the play. The play is teeming with life - a life that gains visibility through the discourse of characters; Davies' discourse frame of social inequality; Mick's of opportunism; Aston's of the discarded outsider - all these further glossed by the overall frame of social plurality and change, locate and circumscribe the characters, at the same time defining their relationships with each other. Thus the power-relationships in the play are all definitions of the social situation of marginal groups striving for both survival and change. The play is, in this sense, a dialectic, a process rather than a finished product. The lives that evolve in the course of the play keep on evolving till the end of the play. Simon Trussler notes that "it is refreshing to find the element of free-will in The Caretaker. Night School and The Dwarfs, not only as a possibility hovering in the background but as an active ingredient of the plays. In each of them, choices are confronted, and decisions, for better or for worse, are made. Most critics seem to have taken it for granted that Aston's mind is made up, and the weight of evidence certainly points that way. But as it stands, the play nevertheless ends inconclusively; and it is important that it should do so. All the decisions have yet to be taken." It is true, as Simon Trussler perceives, that the play captures a sense of drifting, both in the movements of the characters and in their changing relationships; and as Trussler adds, this play inaugurates "a period of Pinter's writing, in which shifting power-relationships in a struggle for dominance give shape to the action of the plays."^''

The best way to understand this contest is through the discoursal manipulations of the characters as this constitutes the main action of the play. As understood by Fairclough in Language and Power, power is itself a process of struggle, as elusive as is human identity and social role in a highly pluralistic and industrialised world: 155

There are no permanent positions of power and power in discourse or behind discourse is not a permanent and undisputed attribute of any one person or social grouping. On the contrary, those who hold power at a particular moment have to constantly reassert their power and those who do not hold power are always liable to make a bid for power. This is true whether one is talking at the level of the particular situation or in terms of a social situation, or in terms of a social institution, or in terms of a whole society: power at all these levels is won, exercised, sustained, and lost in the course of social struggle. This struggle may be overt or discreetly hidden beneath the surface of discourse.^^

Davies' sense of indignation is highest when he talks of the rudeness that he has to put up with at the hands of the lowest strata of English society, the working-class immigrant:

DAVIES. ... and I couldn't find a seat, not one. All them Greeks had it Poles, Greeks, Blacks, the lot of them, all them aliens had it. And they had me working there ... they had me working ... ASTON sits on the bed, takes out a tobacco tin and papers, and begins to roll himself a cigarette. DAVIES watches him. All them Blacks had it. Blacks, Greeks, Poles, the lot of them, that's what, doing me out of a seat, treating me like dirt. When he came at me tonight I told him. Pause ASTON. Take a seat. (8) 156

The positioning of Aston's offer to Davies is significant because not only does he offer Davies what the "aliens" have denied him, he also offers him the security of a job, kindness and understanding. Though Aston is intuitively aware of Davies's attempts to construct his past and present in keeping with his own inflated sense of pride, yet he never tries to call Davies's bluff till such time as Davies begins to run him down as a human being. However, Davies cannot be judged merely by his aggressive and ungrateful stand towards Aston, as he too is used as a scapegoat by Mick, and decides to take the bait because of the offer of a better job by him. Mick tries to destroy Davies' integrity when he is in a vulnerable position. Exploitation of the tramp's social and economic vulnerability, whether it is by Mick or the coloured immigrants, is basically an ongoing struggle where the winner is empowered only temporarily, and the contest continues with bids for power by various means and strategies. Davies makes a desperate bid to win some ground either by his gestures of defiance or by his adoption of a tough exterior even when unequally matched. Thus the play's struggles are primarily focused around Davies, the Caretaker of the title.

Stanley Eveling has suggested that Pinter's drama brings "the sub-plot people, marginal existents, centre-stage," creating a drama out of an odd assortment of characters vA^o traditionally speaking, would not find any place in mainstream drama:

In the present century, with the pace of change and upward mobility increasing, for whatever reason there have been severe changes in cast-list persons; tramps, lunatics, sexual deviants, figures of oddity and menace have trooped into the theatre and onto its stage. So here ... the favoured twentieth- century plot associated with this subversive genre, a parable 157

of accepted or rejected change, has been the intruder or disruptive and inscrutable stranger arriving into a set piece, traditionally organised situation and threatening to overturn it;^

Characters such as Davies or Aston could be thought of as "outsiders" within the conventionally accepted norms of society. These individuals have been failures in a pluralistic, capitalistic society and this is probably the reason why they come together as victims who want to maintain and validate reality within a sub-universe of their own. However, they do not succeed in providing this option because Mick destroys their camaraderie even before it is consolidated. Theirs is a counter-definition of the societal reality, which they cannot accept as they are in its terms, already outcasts and rejects.

The struggle for power in this play is not just between the societally defined, marginal and dominant groups but also between the marginal existents themselves. Among the three characters involved, Davies appears to be an opportunist and Mick smart enough to put up Aston and Davies against each other. Thus, it is Aston who appears in some ways the upholder of the values of friendship and basic humanity. Placing a recluse at the centre of the play, means, as Eveling suggests, that there is a de-centring wherein reality is defined from the perspective and point of view of a character who is down and out rather than from the point of view of a successful entrepreneur like Mick. Aston's view of the world is evident from his tragic awareness of betrayal by his own mother and the loss of faith in human relations. He needs a confidant, a friend who like him is a misfit for mainstream society. He rescues Davies when he is being attacked because his natural affinity is with the persecuted and helpless. Though 158 rehabilitated, presumably by his brother, he still lives on edge. Davies, too, is old, has had "attacks" and is disillusioned with the social attitudes of welfare agencies, employers, fellow-workers and most of all with the loss of his rights as a citizen and worker. In a way Davies' acute awareness of his own tastes, refinements and rights invests his character with vividness and vivacity, sometimes compelling us to mitigate his faults and contradictions. He is pretentious, amusing, and pathetic:

DAVIES. I mean you don't share the toilet with them Blacks, do you? ASTON. They live next door. DAVIES. They don't come in? ASTON puts a drawer against the wall. Because, you know... I mean . . . fair's fair. . .

ASTON. How are you off for money? DAVIES. {taking the coins). Thank you, thank you, good luck. I just happen to find myself a bit short. You see, I got nothing for all the week's work I did last week. That's the position, that's what it is. Pause. ASTON. I went into a pub the other day. Ordered a Guinness. They gave it to me in a thick mug. I only like it out of a thin glass. I had a few sips but I couldn't finish it. ASTON picks up a screwdriver and plug from the bed and begins to poke the plug. (18-19)

It is significant that Aston does not comment or in any way acknowledge Davies' remarks about the "Blacks"; nor does he show any 159 interest in the impressions he tries to create about his good breeding and taste. But he is deeply concerned and intuitively aware about the real issues that affect Davies. For instance, he offers Davies money because he is aware of his condition and in the second act he actually buys him clothes and a bag because he guesses that though Davies constantly speaks of having left behind his things in his work place, there probably isn't anything at all worth looking for over there. He also offers Davies a job straightaway, without asking him too many questions about his "papers" or even his plans because he understands both his helplessness and his need to delude others in order to build up a respectable image of himself. In some ways Davies is like him, because just as Aston cannot bring himself to put up the shed for his workshop, in the same way Davies too, cannot reach the destinations that might sort out his life. It is ironic however, that Davies soon shifts his loyalties, confiding in Mick and actually complaining against Aston who has, in the first place, offered him friendship and hospitality.

It is also significant that while Aston offers Davies the job of Caretaker without asking for any references, Mick wants references to "satisfy his solicitor" and while Aston understands Davies for what he is, Mick begins to construct his personality as he would like it to be. Davies, in his imposed construction, is an ex-army man - a man who has "served in the colonies" and who will not allow anyone to "mess around." It is not at all clear to what extent Mick really means what he is saying, but Davies eagerly absorbs this new image, rising to the occasion by criticising Aston as he imagines, to please Mick :

DAVIES: He got no feelings! Pause. See, what I need is a clock! I need a clock to tell the time! 160

How can I tell the time without a clock? I can't do it! I said to him, I said, look here, what about getting a clock, so's I can tell what time it is? I mean ...

DAVIES sits in the chair. He wakes me up! He wakes me up in the middle of the night! Tells me I'm making noises! I tell you I've half a mind to give him a mouthful one of these days.

You're right, it's essential. I get up in the morning, I'm worn out! I got business to see to. I got to move myself, I got to sort myself out, I got to get fixed up. But when I wake up in the morning, I ain't got energy in me. And on top of that I ain't got no clock. MICK. Yes. DAVIES. {standing, moving). He goes out, I don't know Where's he go, he never tells me. We used to have a bit of a chat, not any more. I never see him, he goes out, he comes in late, next thing I know he's shoving me about in the middle of the night.

Pause {Bending, close to MICK.) No, what you want to do, you want to speak to him, see? I got... I got that worked out. You want to tell him that we got ideas for this place, we could build it up, we could get it started. You see, I could decorate it for you, I could give you a hand in doing it... between us. (62-63) 161

Though implicitly, this dramatic-discourse shows the post-modernist awareness that those who come into positions of power are only temporarily so, as relationships here are protean and in the process of constant re-adjustment. Davies, incensed that Aston accuses him of making noises in his sleep, makes an attempt to dislodge him from the house and to persuade his brother to employ him instead to renovate the place. But what Davies does not estimate is that though Mick is a trader and though he constantly speaks of his business interests, he has deep affection for his brother. The relationship between Mick and Aston seems to be one of the few relationships within the plays that moves beyond considerations of selfishness and profit-motives. From being Mick's adviser, and Aston's friend, Davies soon loses his foothold and influence when in a fit of anger he tells Mick that his brother is "nutty" and that "he should go back where he come from." He betrays Aston, turning on him, and taunting him about his ordeal at the mental hospital. Mick rejects the old man as a man full of contradictions. But little does he realise that without his lies and apart from his several compulsive selves, Davies can have no existence. Mick's description of Davies' shifting consciousness, that is, his "unpredictability" is an assessment that ironically fits Mick's own character also:

MICK: What a strange man you are. Aren't you? You're really strange. Ever since you came into this house there's been nothing but trouble. Honest. I can take nothing you say at face value. Every word you speak is open to any number of different interpretations. Most of what you say is lies. You're violent, you're erratic, you're just completely unpredictable. You're nothing else but a wild animal, when you come down to it. ... (73-74) 162

Towards the end of the play, Davies is even more of a supplicant than he was at the beginning. Having found a shelter he is lost at the prospect of losing it so suddenly. His realisation that he has betrayed Aston is genuine but so also is his attempt to cover up his fitful groaning in the night:

DAVIES: I just come back for my pipe. ASTON. Oh yes. DAVIES. I got out and ... halfway down I ... I suddenly ...

Listen. ... Pause You didn't mean that, did you, about me stinking, did you? Pause Did you? You been a good friend to me. You took me in. You took me in, you didn't ask me no questions, you give me a bed, you been a mate to me. Listen. I been thinking, why I made all them noises, it was because of the draught, see,...

I'd look after the place for you, I'd keep an eye on it for you, like, not for the other... not for. . . for your brother, you see, not for him, for you, I'll be your man, you say the word, just say the word ... (75-76)

It is primahly through the discourse of deprivation, necessity and need that the struggle for and against manipulation evolves in the course of the play. Discourse here, often turns into a site for contests of power. However, sometimes this will to power is hidden beneath the controlled and deceptive surface of discourse. For instance, Davies' opening conversation with Aston is already a sort of testing ground for what later 163

emerges as a virtual battle for gaining control of each other's positions of bargaining by manipulative use of the opponent's personal impediments and weaknesses in order to undermine and ultimately to destroy his credibility and control. Davies' strategy of assessing the other's ability to hold his ground is always a prelude to gaining material advantage over the other in the other's territory. His cautious yet determined endeavour to size up Aston's situation, is typically tangential and "rear-guard" in its style. He elicits information because knowledge of situations and strategies is crucially tied up with the acquisition of power in the world of the Pinter play:

DAVIES. Anyway I am obliged to you letting me ... letting me have a bit of rest, like ... for a few minutes. {He looks about.) This your room? ASTON. Yes. DAVIES. You got a good bit of stuff here. ASTON. Yes. DAVIES. Must be worth a few bob, this ... put it all together. Pause. There's enough of it. ASTON. There's a good bit of it all right. DAVIES. You sleep here do you? ASTON. Yes. DAVIES. What in that? ASTON. Yes. DAVIES. Yes, well, you'd be well out of the draught there. ASTON. You don't get much wind.

DAVIES. Gets very draughty. ASTON. Ah. 164

DAVIES. I'm very sensitive to it. ASTON. Are you? DAVIES. Always have been. Pause. You got any more rooms then have you?

I was lucky you came into that caff. I might have been done by that Scotch git. Been left for dead more than once. Pause. I noticed that there was someone was living in the house next door. ASTON. What? DAVIES. {gesturing). I noticed ... ASTON. Yes, There's people living all along the road. DAVIES. Yes, I noticed the curtains pulled down there next door as we came along. ASTON. They're neighbours. Pause. DAVIES. This your house then, is it? Pause. ASTON. I'm in charge. DAVIES. You the landlord are you?

(DAVIES stands and moves about.) Well you've got some knick-knacks here all right, I'll say that. I don't like a bare room. (ASTON joins DAVIES upstage centre). I'll tell you what, mate, you haven't got a spare pair of shoes? ASTON. Shoes? ASTON moves downstage right. (11-12) 165

Though Davies is in a position of dependency, he is quite curious to find out where his host stands in the social scale. His inquiries into the material standing of Aston as well as his ability to have himself invited as a guest into the family are winning streaks achieved with considerable skill. His endeavour to build up a spurious dignity for himself through rigid self-control in asking and accepting is laudable. This is an unalloyed native resource that is unspoilt by sophistication. Requests, in Davies' discourse^ of incessant questioning.take the form of oblique, incidental afterthoughts rather than direct requests. This is Davies' strategy for guarding and maintaining his self-esteem and social image. He also uses the ploy of interspersing requests with praise and shared cultural biases and unifiers ("Blacks? Eh?"; If you hadn't come..."). Combined with this are Davies' questions as to the ownership of the house, his very considered, understated and qualified approval of the room, the neighbourhood and the bed - all pointers of his abilities as bargainer, talker and actor. But inspite of all this, it is interesting that Aston, endowed as he is with intuitive knowledge, is not entirely taken in by the old man. Davies' attempts to verify Aston's credentials by literally interrogating him, point to diverse strains in his role as the innocent old timer intent on standing up to his rights. Davies feels the strain of these opposing pulls as he falters between his many lives: crusader, old man, charming male, social derelict, beggar and gentleman.

Davies lives his life as a gap between subjective and objective reality. He can cultivate a defence against the "stigmatic" identity assigned to him by his society as he is not the only outsider in the company of Aston. He builds up a subjective reality within which he is a proper Englishman, well-mannered, and well bred; He has his papers, his social security and some things in Sidcup which he will fetch as soon as 166

he can manage. But he is also imprisoned in the objective reality of his society although that reality is not acceptable to him. In the eyes of society he is an unemployed tramp who lives on charity and is ill-treated even by the monks who run a charitable institution. The Blacks who insult him are even more unconcerned about his profile as an individual, treating him as a tramp is usually treated by the social welfare state of capitalistic society. As Berger and Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality explain,

Such an individual will be unsuccessfully socialised, that is, there will be a high degree of asymmetry between the socially defined reality in which he is de-facto caught, as in an alien world, and his own subjective reality, which reflects the world only very poorly. The asymmetry will, however, have no cumulative structural consequences because it lacks a social base within which it could crystallize into a counter- world, with its own institutionalised cluster of counter- identities. The unsuccessfully socialised individual himself is socially predefined as a profiled type - the cripple, the bastard, the idiot, and so on.^^

In Pinter's plays there are several marginal characters like Davies and Aston, characters who exist outside of mainstream reality. These characters have been rejected by society and are therefore forced to ask the question "Who am I ?." At a given point of time, several conflicting answers are available because they define themselves according to the circumstances they are in. Both Aston and Davies struggle to survive by constructing roles and images of themselves. Aston can see himself as an interior decorator who will achieve his dream of putting up a shed and of renovating his brother's property. But 167 he also knows that he is considered to be abnormal by society and therefore has to avoid mixing with those who have branded him as an outcaste. Davies is also caught up between his subjective and objective realities, between conflicting selves and identities. Ironically, his official identity is suspect as he does not have his papers:

DAVIES. A man I know has got them. Left them with him. You see? They prove who I am! I can't move without them papers. They tell you who I am. You see! I'm stuck without them. ASTON. Why's that? DAVIES. You see, what it is, you see, I changed my name! Years ago. I been going around under an assumed name! That's not my real name. ASTON. What name you been going under? DAVIES. Jenkins. Bernard Jenkins. That's my name. That's the name I'm known, anyway. But it's no good me going on with that name I got no rights. I got an insurance card here. (he takes a card from his pocket) Under the name of Jenkins. See? Bernard Jenkins. Look. It's got four stamps on it. Four of them. But I can't go along with these. That's not my real name, they'd find out, they'd have me in the nick. Four stamps. I haven't paid out pennies. I've paid out pounds. I've paid out pounds, not pennies. There's been other stamps, plenty, but they haven't put them on, the nigs, I never had enough time to go into it. ASTON. They should have stamped your card. DAVIES. It would have done no good! I'd have got nothing anyway, that's not my real name. If I take the card along I go in the nick. ASTON. What's your real name then? 168

DAVIES. Davies. Mac Davies. That was before I changed my name. Pause. ASTON. It looks as though you want to sort all that out. DAVIES. If only I could get down to Sidcup! I've been waiting for the weather to break. He's got my papers, this man I left them with, it's got it all down there, I could prove everything. ASTON. How long's he had them? DAVIES. What? ASTON. How long's he had them? DAVIES. Oh, must be. ... It was in the war ... must be ... About near on fifteen year ago. ( 20-21)

Davies's memory fails him each time he has to recollect his past biography. It is pathetic that he needs official records and papers to prove to the world his worth as a human being. His existence without these is precarious and frustrating. However, in his estimate of himself the most important fact is that he is white not black. And, this perhaps, is what sees him through his most difficult moments of despair and humiliation. The Blacks who have appropriated all that should have rightfully come to him in the scarcity-ridden working-class environment, are in his view the beginning and end of his troubles. The very real threat and claustrophobia which Davies experiences by the presence of these Blacks is portrayed somewhat comically through his obsessive references to them even at the most inappropriate moments; as when he insinuates that his fitful jabbering in the night which disturbs Aston's sleep is actually the blacks making noises across the wall of the flat. His idea that the cafe in Wembley needs a man like him because "they want an Englishman to pour their tea" does not meet with the expected enthusiasm from Aston, who has experienced the brutality of his own 169 mother and is far less naive than Davies in confusing institutional coercion and stratification with racial prejudices and cultural difference.

In a sense, Davies cannot reconcile his exaggerated sense of being white and superior with his actual location within a society of callous, cruel and impersonal relationships. It is surely not Davies's fault that he cannot appreciate Aston's friendship when he finds it; Davies continues to play by the instincts that he has developed in a highly competitive and aggressive environment. His views are neither good nor bad; they are simply the outcome of being victimised time and again through violence, discrimination and studied dehumanisation. Davies' remarks regarding the Blacks sums up his location within his own society.^® The severely falsifying moment for his re-construction of his own past to make it fit in with his present image comes when Aston makes him acknowledge that he is no Englishman; he is in fact a lesser mortal because he is probably born Welsh and not the true-blue Englishman he pretends to be.

The reason why Aston forces Davies to acknowledge and accept contradictory views about himself is because there is a subtle struggle going on between them even before Mick arrives to intensify it. Aston interacts with Davies as he can conveniently flaunt his own credentials before a man who is dependent upon his good will for his very survival. Aston, then, is truly socialised into the world of reality as he uses Davies to internalise the Other's opinions, views and onslaughts. Aston moves into the sphere of the Other in his dealings with Davies. There is a range of emotions and complex feelings involved in this relationship which is further complicated by Mick's entry into the bilateral relation of power. Aston's sudden revelation of his own personality is instructive: 170

ASTON. A jig saw? Well, it comes from the same family as the fret-saw. But it's an appliance, you see. You have to fix it to a portable drill. DAVIES. Ah, that's right. They're very handy. ASTON. They are, yes. Pause. You know, I was sitting in a cafe the other day. I happened to be sitting at the same table as this woman. Well, we started to ... we started to pick up a bit of conversation. I don't know ... about her holiday, it was, where she'd been down to the south coast. I can't remember where though. Anyway, we were just sitting there, having this bit of conversation... then suddenly she put her hand over to mine ... and she said, how would you like me to have a look at your body? DAVIES. Get out of it. Pause. ASTON. Yes. To come out with it just like that, in the middle of this conversation. Struck me as a bit odd. DAVIES. They've said the same thing to me. ASTON. Have they? DAVIES. Women? There's many a time they've come up to me and asked me more or less the same question. (24-25)

Aston's story is aimed at impressing Davies. He wants to prove that he is appealing to the opposite sex but Davies, not to be outdone, insists that such a thing has happened to him also - not once, but time and again. In fact, Davies' statement "they've said the same thing to me" Is amusing because it is exactly on cue and is an airy, boastful response to a typical male fantasy. As in every other sequence of conversation, however, Aston is alert enough to recover lost ground by asking Davies 171 a deliberately difficult and embarrassing question about his past to put him in his place. It is easy to upset Davies' sense of being superior, white and English by probing his antecedents of birth and upbringing.

ASTON. Where were you born then? DAVIES. {darkly). What do you mean? ASTON. Where were you born? DAVIES. I was ... uh ... oh, it's a bit hard, like, to set your mind back ... see what I mean ... going back ... a good way ... lose a bit of track, like ... you know... (25)

Towards the end of the first act, there is heightened tension as the third character enters the scene. The positioning of Davies vis-a-vis Mick is immediately that of victim, to begin with. Caught red-handed, examining the junk in the room, Davies is thrown down to the floor violently, while Mick sits himself in a chair surveying the scene. As he begins to interrogate Davies in the second act, his manner and attitude is calculated to bully him into submission. He accuses Davies of lying about the circumstances in which Aston brought him to the house, begins a quick-fire catalogue of all the business offers he can make to him, and all the while that he practices his sales-tactics on the poor tramp, Davies crouches on the floor begging for his trousers which Mick has confiscated as a prelude to his terrorising tactics. This scene is reminiscent of Edward's long conversation with the Matchseller in A Slight Ache, where the monologue is only heard by the Matchseller without a single response. The long lecture is the theoretician's definition of the good life which the poor beggar does not understand at all. Several Pinter-characters are great actors and improvisers playing stylishly, bragging, talking like ventriloquists, literally unleashing themselves upon unsuspecting victims - who become forced listeners, 172

often learning enough to repeat the performance with a variation upon the subject under review. Mick's formality after he has thoroughly frightened Davies is characteristically and quintessentially Pinterian in its tone:

MICK. I'm awfully glad. It's awfully nice to meet you. Pause. What did you say your name was? ... (31)

The discourse frame of formal, polite speech is most inappropriate here. Moreover, Davies who has been asked to identify himself several times and asked the very same questions about the night before an equal number of times, is surely not in the right position to appreciate this expression of overt formality. The whole situation turns facetious and a drama unfolds which is repeated time and again, so that certain domination-relationships begin to emerge through the manipulatory tactics used by the characters to either defend or attack :

MICK. Jen ...kins. A drip sounds in the bucket. DAVIES. Looks up. You remind me of my uncle's brother. He was always on the move, that man. Never without his passport. Had an eye for the girls. Very much your build. Bit of an athlete long-jump specialist. He had a habit of demonstrating different run-ups in the drawing room round about Christmas time.

My mother called him Sid too. It was a funny business. Your splitting image he was. Married a Chinaman and went to Jamaica. 173

Pause I hope you slept well last night. (31)

This is the second time Mick is interrogating Davies about the night before after throwing him off-guard by his strangely amiable behaviour. The remark about "sleeping well," though inoffensive and commonplace, begins to sound almost ominous and disagreeable for being repeated at short intervals. Davies' reply is, unlike Mick's diplomatic overtures, completely true to his exasperation at the moment, as he crouches angrily on the floor, fearful and confused:

DAVIES. Listen! I don't know who you are! MICK. What bed you slept in? DAVIES, Now look here - MICK. Eh? DAVIES. That one. MICK. Not the other one? DAVIES. No. MICK. Choosy. Pause. How do you like my room? DAVIES. Your room? MICK. Yes. DAVIES. This ain't your room. I don't know who you are. I ain't never seen you before.

MICK. Did you sleep here last night? DAVIES. Yes. MICK. Sleep well? DAVIES. Yes! 174

MICK. What's your name? Davies. {shifting, about to /•/se).Now look here!

MICK, {continuing at great pace). How'd you sleep? DAVIES. I slept - MICK. Sleep well? DAVIES. Now look - MICK. What bed? DAVIES. That - MICK. Not the other? DAVIES. No! MICK. Choosy. Pause. {Again amiable.) What sort of sleep did you have in that bed? DAVIES. {banging on the floor). All right! MICK. You weren't uncomfortable? DAVIES. {groaning). All right!

MICK. You a foreigner? DAVIES. No. MICK. Bom and bred in the British Isles? DAVIES. I was!

MICK. You intending to settle down here? DAVIES. Give me my trousers then. MICK. You settling down for a long stay? DAVIES. Give me my bloody trousers! MICK. Why, where are you going? DAVIES. Give me and I'm going, I'm going to Sidcup! 175

MICK flicks the trousers in DAVIES' face several times. DAVIES retreats. Pause. (33-34)

Mick is deliberately difficult and callous in his behaviour towards Davies. After he sequentially repeats his questions to Davies, he hardly waits for an answer, preempting his reactions by proceeding according to his own flow of thought, leaving hardly any space for Davies in what is supposed to be an interaction. The discourse allows Davies only a subordinate position, with hardly any slot in a menacing sequence, till such time as Davies asserts himself beyond the allotted role :

MICK. You know, you remind me of a bloke I bumped into once, just the other side of the guildford by-pass — DAVIES. I was brought here! Pause. MICK. Pardon? DAVIES. I was brought here! I was brought here! MICK. Brought here? Who brought you here? DAVIES. Man who lives here ... he .... Pause. MICK. Fibber. DAVIES. I was brought here, last night... met him in a caff... I was working... I got the bullet ... I was working there ... bloke saved me from a punch up, brought me here, brought me right here. Pause. MICK. I'm afraid you're a born fibber, en't you? You're speaking to the owner. This is my room. You're standing in my house. (34) 176

There is an overt and marked struggle for supremacy through discoursal rights which allows individuals the right to defend themselves during a face-to-face encounter. As Norman Fairclough puts it, there are definite "discoursal rights and obligations."^® Davies, though a tramp, tries his best to assert himself, express his opinions, and face up to Mick even though he is on edge. While Mick operates through tactics of sudden withdrawal and unexpected violence - a sort of verbal guerrilla warfare - Davies constantly looks for chinks in the other's armour through which he can make dents. For example, later in the play, when Aston tells Davies about his ordeal in a mental asylum, Davies uses this knowledge to get even with him. Davies' violation of the trust placed in him through an intimate face-to-face encounter, is reprehensible, but socially determined by the environment in which he has to survive. Similarly, Aston's caring nature could possibly be attributed to the consideration he receives from Mick, even though he does not help his brother much in fulfilling his ambitious business plans. Mick, of course, is true to his teasing, shrewd personality, each time he manages to terrorise the unsuspecting Davies out of his wits.

Socially speaking, the outcaste, though declared sick and therefore marginal, is responsible enough to rescue the old Davies; he is prompt in rehabilitating him without any hope of personal gain and is surely not a liability to society. However, he is afraid to mix freely with the people at the cafe for instance, because he fears he might be seen as different and branded. His sense of fear keeps him very much a private man, though, significantly enough, his need for human interaction and friendship remains. The interaction of Aston with his society is a process of rejection, renewal and then rejection again. The co-ordinates in this complex relationship are the social collectivity, which declares him sick; his mother, who ratifies this; his brother, who is both 177 understanding and coercive, and Davies, who Mick thinks is Aston's friend but who once again treats Aston, as he would society's marginal, minority figures such as the Blacks, Greeks, Poles - all "them aliens" in general. The progress of both Aston and Davies towards friendship, and mutual concern at the beginning of the play is once again reversed into a sort of regression as they come into conflict with each other after Davies has received some kind of an assurance of livelihood from Mick. Davies is both an opportunist and a victim, having learnt survival but not subtlety.

Mick is the only character who can be the perfect social actor as he speaks his way through various roles without floundering in intent, purpose or ideas. The roles played in the play are mostly defined by the social actor's ability to articulate the appropriate social concepts through his commonplace knowledge as well as specialised knowledge of the socio-political reality around him. Davies, for instance, is obsessed with racial difference and prejudice; he also knows that he can draw some advantage from the rhetoric of political and social rights; he is old, English and White. Each of these social determinants should entitle him to concessions socially and politically. But then, he is also poor and hopelessly self-opinionated to benefit from his friendship with Aston, who offers him a new social status. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, internalisation of objective reality or confirmation of subjective identity can best be effected through an extended inter-subjective existence. In this regard Aston, also on the threshold of a new social existence, has discovered himself and brought home a friend upon whom he can build his human trust:

Once I get that shed up outside ... I'll be able to give a bit more thought to the flat, ... I can work with my hands, you see. 178

That's one thing I can do. I never knew I could. But I can do all sorts of things now, with my hands. You know, manual things. When I get the shed up out there ... I'll have a workshop, you see (40)

The play thus incorporates possibility and contingency - both existential truths - as the essential elements of an evolving social self. Relationships - personal and institutional - determine the extent to which the individual will evolve and learn newer ways of social survival. This constitutes the true dialectic of society and individual change. The discourse frame changes rapidly during the course of the play indicating not just individual preferences but also the fact that the range of this play includes the variety and complexity of contemporary reality. Davies is the confused old man who is excited by the jargon of absolute truth and absolute loyalty to colour and race. He is excited by the mere notion of being a stickler for one's English rights; he is equally obsessed with the idea that it is not enough to be just; one should actually defend one's own sense of justice against the vulgarisation of human life and dignity. However, this might be, Davies cannot use the discourse of civil liberty very authentically, as he is neither educated nor committed to any humanistic or political ideology except that of narrow personal gain. Thus, his use of the discourse frame of civil rights and violations is highly pretentious and even amusing. This situation constitutes a critique of the way socially popular ideas about race, culture and political rights filter down to the uninitiated and uneducated, turning into vicious maxims like Davies' formula, expressed as "fair is fair" and Mick's use of legal, commercial, or trade jargon without much concern for its appropriateness in the interaction involved. 179

The sudden changes in Mick's discourse of salesmanship probably confound Davies, just like the flamboyant rhetoric of an actor can transfix an audience. The deftness of ear that Mick has for the nuances of sales promotion talk is best understood as his ability to play roles mostly for the purpose of self-gratification. As Berger and Luckmann have shown,

Both self and other can be apprehended as performers of objective, generally known actions, which are recurrent and repeatable by any actor of the appropriate type. This has very important consequences for self-experience. ... in this way both acting self and acting others are apprehended not as unique individuals but as types. By definition these types are interchangeable. ... It can readily be seen that the construction of role-typologies is a necessary correlate of the institutionalisation of conduct. Institutions are embodied in individual experience by means of roles. The roles objectified linguistically, are an essential ingredient of the objectively available world of any society. By playing roles, the individual participates in a social world. By internalising these roles, the same world becomes subjectively real to him.^°

It is quite probable that Mick has learnt to play the smart, about-town salesman and professional, but his role is still more a matter of flaunting his fine acquisition of knowledge rather than a fully internalised style of living:

MICK. You're stinking the place out. You're an old robber, there's no getting away from it. You're an old skate. You don't belong in a nice place like this. You're an old barbarian. 180

Honest. You got no business wandering about in an unfurnished flat 1 could charge seven quid a week for this if I wanted to. Get a taker tomorrow. Three hundred and fifty a year exclusive. No argument. I mean, if that sort of money's in your range don't be afraid to say so. Here you are. Furniture and fittings, I'll take four hundred or the nearest offer. Rateable value ninety quid for the annum. You can reckon water heating and lighting at close on fifty. That'll cost you eight hundred and ninety if you're all that keen. Say the word and I'll have my solicitors draft you out a contract. Otherwise I've got the van outside, I can run you to the police station in five minutes, have you in for trespassing, loitering with intent, daylight robbery, filching, thieving and stinking the place out. What do you say? Unless you are keen on a straight forward purchase. Of course, I'll get my brother to decorate it up for you first. I've got a brother who's number one decorator. On the other hand, if you prefer to approach it in the long-term way I know an insurance firm in Westham'll be pleased to handle the deal for you. No strings attached, open and above board, untarnished record; twenty percent interest, fifty per cent deposit; down payments back payments, family allowances, bonus schemes remission of term for good behaviour, six months lease, yearly examination of the relevant archives, tea laid on, disposal of shares, benefit extension, compensation on cessation, comprehensive indemnity against Riot, Civil commotion, labour disturbances, storm, tempest, Thunderbolt, Larceny or cattle all subject to a daily check and double check. Of course we'd need a signed declaration from your personal medical attendant as assurance that you 181

possess the requisite fitness to carry the can, won't we? Who do you bank with? Pause. Who do you bank with? (35-36)

The inappropriateness and sheer stupidity of this long, impressive and glib performance turns all the more pathetic as the silence after its delivery is broken rather unceremoniously by the leaking roof above them and the presence of Aston in their midst:

S/7er7ce. A drip sounds in the bucket. They all look up. Silence. You still got the leak. ASTON. Yes. Pause. It's coming from the roof. MICK. From the roof eh? ASTON. Yes. Pause. I'll have to tar it over. (37)

In contrast to Davies' tough alley talk and his home-spun cockney, Aston's speech consists of plain-talk with hardly any stylised mannerisms or pretensions. This is so because Aston is totally disillusioned with the social typifications of language and the rather meaningless discourse that these create. He is slow and unsure as he articulates his plain views and intentions. Language by virtue of its fixed patterns is institutionalised and can exert tyranny over those who cannot use it to their advantage and this is evident when Aston tries 182

unsuccessfully to recollect the medical terminology that pronounced him abnormal. He is quite upset because he has never understood the rationale and motive of those who committed him to the psychiatric treatment. Medical discourse shrouds disease in its highly obscure jargon and only promotes the common man's sense of awe, fear, and confusion at being condemned by a higher knowledge; or a legitimation he has no access to. This is another trait that Davies shares with Aston, though he is not as painfully aware of it as Aston is. Davies too, is unable to get under the skin of his own social condemnation, partly because of his inability to both access and articulate through his halting discourse the knowledge about means and ends in a pluralistic, commercialised environment.

The Dwarfs ^^ is another play which dramatises the conflict between subjective and objective definitions of Self. Any subjective identity can turn socially alive only through a dialectic of the Other. What passes for knowledge or reality in society has constantly to be re-affirmed through the Other. The Other can be understood in everyday life through various social experiences. As shown earlier, the most important and authentic experience of Otherness takes place in the face-to-face experience. In The Dwarfs. Len tries to reaffirm his sense of reality through such an interaction with Mark and Pete, who dismiss him as sick and mentally disturbed. As Berger and Luckmann point out in the Social Construction of Reality, one way of understanding subjective knowledge and verifying it is through the Other:

The Other becomes real to me in the fullest sense of the word only when I meet him face-to face. Indeed it may be argued that the other in the face-to- face situation is more real to me than I myself. Of course I know myself better than 183

I can ever know him. My subjectivity is accessible to me in a way his can never be no matter how close our relationship, ... but this better knowledge of myself requires reflection. The Other however is ... ongoingly available to me. This availability is continuous and pre-reflective. On the other hand what I am is not so available. To make it available requires that I stop, arrest the continuous spontaneity of my experience, and deliberately turn my attention back upon myself. What is more such reflection about myself is typically occasioned by the attitude toward me that the other exhibits. It is typically a mirror response to attitudes of the Other.^^

One of the most distressing things for Len in The Dwarfs is the fact that everything around him is subject to constant change. He suffers from the angst of trying to cope with the basic, contingent nature of reality around him. Within this rapidly contingent environment he constructs himself as static, a point of reference for the movement around him. In order to confirm and verify his own sense of reality, he constantly tries to cast all activity into a pattern or arrest the continuity of his own experiences by reflecting upon himself. Consequently, what The Dwarfs dramatises is a phenomenology^^ of everyday reality. Len can affirm his subjective sense of reality by understanding his environment and by naming the things around him in "objective language":

There is my table. That is a table. There is my chair. There is my table. That is a bowl of fruit. ... This is my fixture. There is no web. Perhaps a morning will arrive If a morning arrives it will not destroy my fixture, nor my luxury. ... I have my compartment. I am wedged ... Here is my arrangement and 184

my kingdom. There are no voices. They make no hole in my side. (96)

Len lives in a "reduced"^" world where nothing is taken for granted. He needs reality-accentuation techniques, because his world seems to be falling apart. He achieves this by a laboured process of describing the common structures of everyday reality ("that is a table, there is my chair..."), and by re-assessing his relations with his significant others. He tells Mark, "Look at your face in the mirror. Look. It's a farce." He thinks Mark is "a snake in my house" and both of them are "bastards" y&\o have made "a hole in [his] side." He begins "thinking thoughts" about Pete which he has "never thought before," and Mark is described as a "spider" who lies in wait with "his web." Finally he comes to the point of his troubles, revealing that he is passing through an identity crisis mainly because he suffers an anxiety about his relationship with Pete and Mark, his significant others, especially because they seem to him to present different guises and selves without any "foolproof or "conclusive" evidence of being what they profess they are:

LEN: Do you know what the point is? Do you know what it is? MARK: No. LEN: The point is, who are you? Not why or how, not even what. I can see what, perhaps, clearly enough. But who are you? ... Occasionally I believe I perceive a little of what you are but that's pure accident. Pure accident on both our parts, the perceived and the perceiver. It's nothing like an accident, it's deliberate, it's a joint pretence. We depend on these accidents, on these contrived accidents, to continue. It's not important then, that it's conspiracy or hallucination. What you 185

are, or appear to be to me, or appear to be to you, changes so quickly, so horrifyingly, I certainly can't keep up with it and I'm damn sure you can't either. But who you are I can't even begin to recognise, and sometimes I recognise it so wholly, so forcibly, I can't look, and how can I be certain of what I see? ... You're the sum of so many reflections. How many reflections? Whose reflections? Is that what you consist of ? ... Pete thinks you you're a fool, but that doesn't matter, you're still both of you standing behind my curtains, moving my curtains in my room. He may be your Black Knight, you may be his Black Knight, but I'm cursed with the two of you, with two Black Knights, that's friendship, that's this that I know. That's what I know. MARK: Pete thinks I'm a fool? [Pause] Pete . . . Pete thinks that I'm a fool? (111-13)

The observations that Len makes about the impossibility of attaining a fixed permanent identity, the plurality of the self, the transience of human relationships and the rapidity of change, are significant, as these statements read like a thematic summary of the complex relationships of the plays discussed in this chapter. It is interesting to note that Mark is quite deeply affected by what Len thinks is Pete's opinion of him, which shows that he too is vulnerable and concerned about the issues that Len is so sensitive about. Len's quest for meaning and understanding is actually an attempt to verify his subjective notions against the so called objective truths. He re-examines the meaning of phrases, of obvious taken-for-granted truths, and every other proposition that normally one takes for granted. "This is a funny looking apple," he says, and has severe problems with an ordinary "toasting fork" and mirror. He "can't see the mirror," he claims, but can "see the other side." Repeating 186

Stock expressions is certainly a part of this exercise which makes even routine matters look like truths that could have more than one perspective or strangely enough, no truth at all. For instance, he wonders at the meaning of a phrase like, "There's a time and place for everything," or the feelings of an actor who walks on stage. The phrases "what a cut" or "what a piece of cloth," totally mesmehse him, and the question of whether or not there is a God has to be re-affirmed through the other:

LEN: Do you believe in God? MARK: What? LEN: Do you believe in God? MARK: What? LEN: Do you believe in God? MARK: Who? LEN: God. MARK: God? LEN: Do you believe in God? MARK: Do I believe in God? LEN: Yes. MARK: Would you say that again? (111)

Reflecting on one's identity and role is not usual. Most of the time role- playing and identity-building processes are unreflected, unplanned, and almost automatic. However, whenever there is a crisis in the individual's life he begins to question, reflect and possibly even de-construct his situation, role and identity. But at the same time, as Berger and Luckmann submit, even the most abstract thought has a social base and there is a psychological need for the thinker to affirm his thinking, to test it through an other: 187

In other words, the self is a reflected entity, reflecting the attitudes first taken by significant others towards it; the individual becomes what he is addressed as by his significant others. This is not a one-sided, mechanistic process. It entails a dialectic between identification by others and self- identification, between objectively assigned and subjectively appropriated identity. The dialectic which is present each moment the individual identifies witti his significant others, is, as it were, the particularisation in individual life of the general dialectic of society.^^

To begin with, Len, as seen above, de-constructs all common knowledge, as this represents the socially objectivated body of valid truths generally accepted by society as reality. Any radical deviance from this objective, institutional order appears as "a departure from reality". Len's inquiry into the set of obvious and generally accepted truths classifies him as a deviant, suffering from "mental disease," much in the way as Aston had been designated as sick by his own mother. As Berger and Luckmann understand it,

... deviance from the institutionally programmed courses of action becomes likely once the institutions have become realities divorced from their original relevance in the concrete social processes from which they arose. Since all institutions claim priority over the individual, independently of the subjective meaning he may attach to any particular situation, the institutional definitions of situations are always protected by various social groups and societies over individual temptations at redefinition. ... The more, on the level of meaning compliance with institutional meanings is 188

taken for granted, the more possible alternatives to the institutional programmes will recede, and the more predictable and controlled conduct will be.^^

An individual such as Len, though psychologically overwhelmed by the demands of life and hypersensitive about his relationships, is nevertheless quite alive in the context of re-evaluating the so-called objective truths. Like the situations in Pinter's plays, nothing at all is verifiable and certain in Len's life. The more Len reflects back upon his relevance structures, (his job, his beliefs, his friends, his intellect and understanding) he is so much more aware of his need for "significant others" who will affirm his role, identity and deviance from the naive truth. Berger and Luckmann have analysed this tendency as an important part of individual identity and selfhood:

As the individual reflects about the successive moments of his experience he tries to fit their meanings into a consistent biographical framework. This tendency increases as the individual shares with others his meanings and their biographical integration. It is possible that this tendency to integrate meanings is based on a psychological need.^^

Len tries desperately to impose logic on the well-known and commonplace routines of everyday life because he has lost his faith in his social environment. It is significant that Len's loss of faith deepens as his relations with Pete and Mark, the significant others of his life, deteriorate. Len re-examines not only the assumption that the social world is a consistent whole, but also the social processes and the taken-for-granted knowledge, that makes this social world a tangible reality. Every common assumption, maxim, saying or turn of phrase is 189 re-examined till it begins to look strange and takes on new complications. The nausea associated with words is also experienced by him, just as it is by Pinter himself:

MARK. What do you think of the cloth? LEN. What a piece of cloth. What a piece of cloth. What a piece of cloth. What a piece of cloth. MARK. You like the cloth? LEN. WHAT A PIECE OF CLOTH! MARK. What do you think of the cut? LEN. What do I think of the cut? What a cut! The cut? The cut? What a cut! I've never seen such a cut! [He sits and groans] MARK, [combing his hair and sitting]: Do you know where I've just been? LEN. Where? MARK. Earl's Court. LEN. Uuuuhh! What were you doing there? That's beside the point. MARK. What's the matter with Earl's Court? LEN. It's a mortuary without a corpse. [Pause] There's a time and place for everything ... MARK. You're right there. LEN. What do you mean by that? MARK. There's a time and place for everything. LEN. You're right there. [Puts glasses on, rises to Mark.] Who have you been with? actors and actresses? What's it like when you act? Does it please you? Does it please anyone else? 190

MARK: What's wrong with acting? LEN. It's a time-honoured profession-it's time-honoured. [Pause] But what does it do? Does it please you when you walk onto a stage and everybody looks up and watches you? Maybe they don't want to watch you at all. Maybe they'd prefer to watch someone else. Have you ever asked them? [Mark chuckles] you should follow my example and take up mathematics. [Showing him open book] Look! All last night I was working at mechanics and determinants. There's nothing like a bit of calculus to cheer you up. Pause MARK. I'll think about it. (97-98)

Len studies mathematics because he does not want to lose his sense of proportion even as he tears apart every construct and assumption of everyday reality. He is basically experiencing the nausea of looking at the fundamental, coercive fact that every structure in the world around him is relative to his own changing perspectives. Movement and change can disturb even stable, permanent structures so that every place, moment, person and objective can look different each time the individual attempts to describe it. Len begins the difficult task of ordering his own experience, occasionally stepping back from his self- reflection to confirm the subjective apprehension of reality through the Other. It is most important to see that Len is not entirely disoriented to begin with, as comparison with his other companion shows. Mark too, is much like Len to begin with. He also is in the habit of analysing common truths as though they constituted new, first-hand experiences. Both of them try to understand phenomena and motives in terms of their own relationships and those of society in general. If followed carefully, their concerns begin to look plausible and even justifiable. The fundamental 191

problem is that nothing at all is taken for granted by the young men in their ceaseless quest for explication and elucidation; their penchant for thinking and discussing almost any and every proposition, is in line with the sociological understanding that,

the integration of institutional actions and activities (everyday typifications, roles, rituals and meanings) is not present in social processes per se but comes about in a derivative fashion when individuals perform institutionalised actions within the context of their biography. This biography is a reflected-upon whole in which the discrete actions are thought of not as isolated events, but as related parts in a subjectively meaningful universe whose meanings are not specific to the individual but socially articulated and shared. Only by way of this detour of socially shared universes of meaning do v/e arrive at the need for institutional integration. [Thus] in analysing any social phenomena the integration of an institutional order can be understood only in terms of the 'knowledge' that its members have of it.^®

The knowledge that Len has in The Dwarfs, is being constantly analysed and put to test through a conversation with a fellow human- being, so that this may in turn enable him to re-asses and re-affirm the particular area of social conduct or social phenomena that he is de­ constructing. This does not involve any complicated theoretical systems of thought or concepts, but as seen in Len's conversation with Mark, merely a "phenomenological" examination of what generally passes for "knowledge" in a society. The drift of Len's questioning clearly shows that he is confused about his social location, and consequently his role and identity. But Pete is also disturbed about the same issues, only less 192

SO, as is evident from the narration of his dream in which people appear faceless and he wonders at his own state and status. He is also aware that Mark is "just playing a game" and that he must think up an "efficient idea" in order to survive in a world of "city guttersnipes." Mark too is suffering from some amount of tension about his relationship with his companions and this is clear in his confrontation with Pete towards the end of the play:

MARK: All right. Why do you knock on my door? PETE : What are you talking about? MARK: Why? PETE: I call to see you MARK: What do you want with me? Why come and see me? PETE: Why? MARK: You're playing a double game. You've been playing a double game. You've been using me. You've been leading me up the garden. PETE: Mind how you go MARK: You've been wasting my time. For years. PETE: Don't push me boy. MARK: You think I'm a fool. (116)

Though the play records the crises that all three companions are experiencing in terms of personal relationships and loss of faith in each other, Len's crisis appears to be the greatest, as he is the questioning individual, bordering on philosophical hysteria. It is quite clear that he finds it difficult to accept at face value even those social processes that are taken for granted. Common routines can also be coercive for thinking individuals and deviants for whom any kind of institutionalised conduct is oppressive. Language and social conduct are also control 193 systems through which the individual experiences the pressure of institutional realities and their hypocrisy. In Len's case, Mark and Pete turn into coercion and control agencies as they try to manipulate him according to their own versions of reality and role-specific knowledge. This is a problem because each brings to bear a particular perspective upon common, shared knowledge. Mark is probably an actor and Pete is a businessman. These are specialised areas of operation and there is a disagreement and mutual conflict between these various universes of knowledge and meaning. There is an ideological divide between the three friends and an intense, fierce individuality that makes their social interaction conflictual and intense rather than merely forma! and mannered. The problem partly lies in the fact that there is hardly any consistency in the kind of knowledge that they use in order to validate their constructions of reality.

Len begins to lose his sense of that boundary which separates the social from the non-social. According to Luckmann, social reality is composed of human affairs, and there are taken-for-granted divisions in reality between the social and non-social. But this division begins to become blurred in cases where the world is not fully or properly internalised or among lonely individuals or where the plausibility structure that supports the world view is weakened for some reason.^^ Len peoples his world with dwarfs because he cannot relate to the two fellow-beings who for him are significant agents of the social Other.

One plausible reason why this happens is because Len is not adequately employed. There is a hint in the play that lack of a suitable vocation has left a lacuna in Len's life. Len's insistence that he is stable because he does not "change," is a clue to his confusion. He has the illusion of being gainfully employed when in fact he is not. He cannot be 194

a complete adult because he does not have a satisfying professional life - a life in keeping with his mental abilities. Pete's suggestion that he take up a steady job, is a recognition of the malaise Len is suffering from. Pete, who is more concerned about Len than Mark is, and is much like Len himself, probably hits the nail on the head when he advises Len to "get a steady job." His advice to Len also reveals that Len has hardly any social support apart from his two friends. Pete does not, at this stage find Len too difficult to handle. He is not irredeemably distracted and the conversation between them takes cognisance of the fact that Len needs to cultivate more initiative and drive in order to make himself a gainfully employed individual:

PETE: You want to watch your step. You know that? You're going from bad to worse. Why don't you pull yourself together eh? Get a steady job. Cultivate a bit of go and guts for a change. Make yourself useful, mate ... listen to your friends, mate. Who else have you got? (109)

Len's inability to accept and internalise the more distressful contradictions of the rat-race is what drives him deeper and deeper into loneliness and loss of identity. Len's idea of work is full of cynicism and a misnomer for professional satisfaction. He cannot understand that modern existence is professional existence. The lacunae in his life which the "professional and hard-working" dwarfs come to fill up is partly there because of his own incapacity for serious work:

LEN: Sleep? Don't make me laugh. All I do is sleep. PETE: What about work? How's work? LEN: Paddington. It's a big railway station. An oven. It's an oven. Still, bad air is better than no air. It's best on night shift. 195

The trains come in, I give a bloke half a dollar, he does my job, I curl up in the corner and read the timetables. But they tell me I might make a first class porter. I've been told I've got the makings of a first class porter. (95)

It is quite inappropriate that Len should be taking up only manual labour more particularly as a profession. His interest in mathematics and his intensely analytical mind suggest that he is under-employed. There is evidence in the play that work, professionalism, efficiency and success are at the centre, not only of Len's problems, but of the other characters' as well. One clue to this is the long monologue of Pete as he sits down with Mark for a drink:

PETE: Thinking got me into this and thinking's got to get me out. You know what I want? An efficient idea. One that will work. Something I can pin my money on. An each way bet. Nothing's guaranteed, I know that. But I'm willing to gamble. I gambled when I went to work in the city. I want to fight them on their own ground, not moan about them from a distance. I did it and I'm still living. But I've had my fill of these guttersnipes - all that scavenging scum! ... I'm wasting away down there. The time has come to act. I'm after something truly workable, something deserving of the proper and active and voluntary application of my own powers. I'll find it... the trouble is, you've got be quite sure of what you mean by ... (105)

Len's entry into the world of the dwarfs is only a continuation of his particular obsessions in his everyday life of work, profit, relationships etc. The dwarfs play games just like Mark and Pete, are treacherous yet 196

independent, efficient, hard-working and professional. Mark, when he tries to elicit a confession from Len, is accused by him of using the strategies of business ethics and all the unhealthy practices that go with it. This outburst proves that these issues are uppermost in Len's mind. Pete cannot hold his own in the commercial circuit, nor can Len: however while Mark and Pete can at least handle each other but Len cannot do even that:

LEN: You're trying to buy and sell me. You think I'm a ventriloquist's dummy. You've got me pinned to the wall before I open my mouth. You've got a tab on me, you're buying me out of home and house you're a calculating bastard. ... Both of you bastards have made a hole in my side. I can't plug it. [Pause] I've lost a kingdom. I suppose you're taking good care of things. I've got my treasure too. It's in my corner. Everything's in my corner. Everything's from the corner's point of view. (107)

Perspective and point of view are important themes of Len's discourse of change. In Len's mind there is a definite connection between the mobility ethos of his world and the condition of suspicion, instability, decay and degeneration. He appears to have taken failure to heart so that he begins to look for possible rivals in Pete and Mark. The sense of total claustrophobia and insecurity faced by Len is typical of all Pinterian characters as they sit within their private spaces. Every human being needs a corner of his own; Len has his niche too but even within this private sanctuary there is little peace as the voracious nature of the macro reality intrudes into the micro reality of this haven : LEN: I don't hold the whip. I'm a labouring man. I do thl corner's will. I slave my guts out. One thought at one time, that I'd escaped it, but it never dies, it's never dead. I feed it, it's well fed. Things that at one time to me seem to me of value I have no resource but to give it to eat and what was of value turns into pus. I can hide nothing I can't lay anything aside. ... nothing can be saved it waits. It eats, it's voracious, you're in it, PETE'S in it, you're all in my corner. There must be somewhere else! (107)

That Len does realise the insecurity of his position, is clear from his reiteration of the facts of the variability and relativity of life as well as the inevitability of change. This shows that he is not able to take the rapidly changing environment into his stride. Like The Caretaker, this play also dramatises the effects of a rapidly changing, industrialised society on the individual who is not a part of the upwardly mobile class of professionals and businessmen. Len is the alienated individual in an upwardly mobile, capitalistic society where social definitions depend upon success and profitable enterprise. In a way, all the three characters of this play are reified individuals who are hypersensitive about their own perspectives, but hardly have sympathy for another's. For instance, at one time or other both Pete and Mark are guilty of callousness toward their friend, who in turn is a failure, as he places a heavy premium on friendship within a cynical, practical, business-like, social reality. In the dialectic between individual and environment, the intellectual apprehends the stereotyped role as reprehensible and constricting in terms of subjective needs and personal identity. Luckmann's description of the individual who chooses to opt out of an oppressive system of success and rapid change is interesting as an aid 198

to understanding the paranoia of a character like Len. In an essay entitled, "Social Mobility and Personal Identity," Luckmann writes.

What is emerging ... is an interesting combination of three factors - weak to almost non-ex/sfenf class-consciousness; increasing and at the same time, increasingly ambivalent status-consciousness, and increasing mobility ohentation. ... This combination constitutes a general problem for the sociology of modern societies. ... the looseness of class- structure contributes to a relative uncertainty of status at least in the middle strata. ... The identity of an individual is a social construct as much as an individual creation; in fact it emerges in the dialectics between the two. ... It should be obvious then, that the degree of status consistency and status certainty will be an important factor in the shaping of identity. If status is relatively uncertain and relatively inconsistent, conditions are created that are unfavourable for the consistency and stability of the self. There is, therefore, a causal connection between the looseness of the class- structure, status uncertainty, and low status-consistency, on the one hand, and tenuous identity on the other hand. ... Those who do not succeed in realising their mobility aspirations in the objective social structure tend to totally withdraw from society. Total withdrawal is most graphically represented by mental illness and the psychotic denial of social reality. Total withdrawal psychotic or quasi-psychotic, may lead either to involuntary incarceration or to self- confinement in a hgidly isolated sub-culture.^ 199

Len is always vague about his aspirations. This is apparent whenever he is discussing profession, social status, vocation, the meaning of social success and commitment in his typical, cynical manner. He has vague ideas about being "a first class porter"; and speaks of becoming "a gentleman's gentleman," while Pete advises him that what he needs is "a steady job." Pete also advises him to cultivate the "elasticity" to accept his own changing deviations from a stereotyped role. All these are suggestive of the fact that Len is probably suffering from the undefined status syndrome mentioned by Luckmann above and is not strong enough to cope with the loss of identity this entails. He can study mathematics, analyse and argue the difference between concept and practice, between role and reality, between pretence and actuality, between hypocrisy and sincerity, between language and meaninglessness. But, he cannot catch up with the mobility ethos of the world.

Len's basic fear arises from what the existentialists describe as the angst of a future projecting consciousness - a consciousness which is always "to be." Man is constantly becoming, constantly emerging within the dialectic of Self and environment. Len has to find stability In a world where friendship, identity, vocation, relationships and even concepts are constantly changing. Len has to adjust with the Other and keep pace with the industrious, professional world around him. He can cope with neither because like a host of other characters in the plays of Pinter, he too, instead of getting on with the business of living in a highly competitive and impersonal world, is more interested in constant questioning, and in deconstructing conventional social facts and realities. 200

All this results in an "alternate" discourse, a private sub-world, and elusive dreams. But the stark social reality seeps into this symbolic enclave, because even his symbolic friends - the dwarfs - remind Len of his failure. They are "industrious" and thorough professionals working efficiently and diligently to transform raw materials into finished products. Like the dwarfs of the fairy tale. The Elves and The Shoemaker, these dwarfs are supposed to transform Len's life completely. The difference of course is that this legend leaves behind industrial waste and the constant threat of change and transience.

Perhaps the best way to read this complicated play is to pay attention to Len's obsession with, and anxiety about change. His first as well as his last monologue is mainly concerned with the rapidity of change all around him: "This is a journey and an ambush. This is the centre of the cold, a halt to the journey and an ambush ... This room moves. This room is moving. It has moved ... perhaps a morning will arrive. A morning arrives. It will not destroy my fixture, nor my luxury."^^ In his last speech, similarly, there is an intense awareness of the impossibility of leading a socially inert and stable existence in a world of buy and sell, of industry, professionalism and efficiency. These are the constraints that make a centered and stable existence decentered and mobile. The old world of "sunshine," "flower," "shrub," and "green lawns" exists only in Len's memory - "It's insupportable. I'm left in the lurch ... this change. All about me change,"^^ is Len's anguished cry - the bemoaning of an individual overwhelmed by the demands of life.

Change and transformation, even sudden change along with unpredictability, is the bane of life in the Pinterian social world. The characters who can cope with this contingent world manage to re- socialise themselves by re-inventing their pasts to fall in line with their 201

presents. Lies, fabrications, imaginative constructions of the Self are all strategies to create plausibility structures and to internalise their fast changing realities. Putting on an identity to fulfill social roles for either gain or self-protection are important survival techniques in The Dwarfs also. The difference is that Len does not lie, instead he becomes ruthlessly honest, so that the re-examination of masks, values, and motives occupies him completely. New definitions of reality are in the process of emerging through the fragmented insights of Len, Mark and Pete. An example of such insight appears early in the play:

MARK: Do you know where I've just been? LEN: Where? MARK: Earl's court. LEN: Uuuuhh! What were you doing there? That's besides the point. MARK: What's the matter with Earl's Court? LEN: It's a mortuary without a corpse, [pause] There's a time and place for everything ... MARK: You're right there. [Puts glasses on, rises to Mark]. Who have you been with? Actors and actresses? What's it like when you act? Does it please you? Does it please anyone else? MARK: What's wrong with acting? LEN: It's a time-honoured profession \pause] What does it do? Does it please you when you walk onto a stage and everybody looks up and watches you? ... have you ever asked them? [MARK chuckles] You should follow my example and take up mathematics [showing him open book] Look! All last night I was working at mechanics and determinants. There's nothing like a bit of calculus to cheer you up. 202

Pause. (98)

Len's project of understanding uses a counter-discourse that moves from the active to the passive agent in social discourse and focuses upon the audience rather than the actor, showing his perceptive bent of mind. Len's is, clearly, a discourse of ceaseless questioning rather than of statement and acceptance. Within this, the social conventions of polite small talk, genial chatting and formality, all break down and Len begins to move against the rules of social gamesmanship. His companions are not merely friends but intruders also; they "make a hole in his side" while he is not looking and then proceed to stab him in the back.

Besides the conventional discourse of social civility which Len deconstructs in his quest for truth, he also explores at length the meaning of the commonplaces of time, place and proportion. "There's a time and place for every thing," is a statement that he deconstructs through his discourse of self-analysis.

He links this with that sense of proportion which every individual must keep even if society is full of various excesses and extravagances. Thus, he is acutely aware of outrageous disproportion between the public and phvate role. This gap between playing a typified social role and actually believing in it, is well understood by Pete who asks Len to accept the schism between image and reality as the appropriate value system for life. Len breaks down, as many other individuals do, within the depersonalised and hypocritical relations of contemporary society. The rupture between social role-playing and one's core-identity is inevitable in the complexity of a highly pluralistic and fragmented society, where public and private roles often conflict with each other. 203

This ambiguity upsets Len because he cannot accept the fact that social role is merely an image to approximate to in a fast-changing, success-oriented environment. The faces that Len meets are masks rather than genuine individuals. Identities are constantly evolving and as Pete tells Len, contemporary society requires a balance and discrimination:

PETE: The apprehension of experience must obviously be dependent upon discrimination if it's to be considered valuable. That's what you lack. You've got no idea how to preserve a distance between what you smell and what you think about it. You haven't got the faculty for making a simple distinction between one thing and another. ... You knock around with Mark too much he can't do you any good. I know how to handle him. But I don't think he's your sort. ... Sometimes I think he's just playing a game. But what game? I like him all right when you come down to it. We're old pals. But you look at him and what do you see? An attitude. Has it substance or is it barren? Sometimes I think it's as barren as a bombed site ... I'll tell you a dream I had last night. ... I saw everyone's faces peeling. ... The skin was dropping off like lumps of cat's meat. ...Then I thought Christ, what's my face like?... (101)

At the end of his very plausible explanation for Len's disturbance, Pete narrates a story, a parable of contemporary living. The "faces" in Pete's vision are melting, losing all shape and identity, prompting him to wonder what his own "face" is like. This sensitivity and horror at the thought of dis-identification certainly makes Pete, as he suggests, like Len, of "his sort," because he tries hard to look for meaning beneath 204

the social ritual, fagade and image - perhaps realising, like Len, that the gap between appearance (the role, the social exterior) and reality (actual identity) is difficult to determine in the complex dialectic of role and identity, of subjective and objective reality. However, while Pete assures Len that Mark is too smart for him, Mark similarly asserts that Pete is the one who is to be watched carefully. The natural consequence of this is that Len begins to mistrust and fear both of them as they constitute Len's "significant others". Mark's indictment of Pete is a manoeuvre to destabilise Len, just as Pete's comments on the unreliability of Mark are calculated to control Len in yet another way. These statements are surely detrimental to the already eroding faith of Len in the principle of sociability and other social institutions and values.

Because of Len's confusions and insecurities, perspective and point of view emerge as the two important themes in a discourse of reflection and analysis. In Len's mind there is a definite connection between the mobility ethos of his world and the condition of suspicion, instability, decay and degeneration. He appears to have taken failure to heart so that he begins to look for possible rivals in Pete and Mark. The sense of total claustrophobia and insecurity faced by Len is typical of Aston, Rose and fedw^rd also, other Pinterian characters who exist within confined, private spaces. Every human being needs a corner of his own; Len has his niche too but even within this private sanctuary there is little peace as the voracious nature of the macro reality intrudes into the micro reality of this haven:

LEN: ... One thought at one time, that I'd escaped it, but it never dies, it's never dead. I feed it, it's well fed. Things that at one time to me seem to me of value I have no 205

resource but to give it to eat and what was of value turns into pus. I can hide nothing I can't lay anything aside. ... nothing can be saved it waits ... it eats, it's voracious, you're in it, PETE'S in it, you're all in my corner. There must be somewhere else! (107)

Austin Quigley in his essay, "The Dwarfs: A Study in Linguistic Dwarfism," writes that "the concept of arrested growth applies to all the characters in this play and not just to those in Len's imaginary world. The dwarfs of his 'inner world' are limited in their growth by an excessive emphasis on community, and a consequent suppression of individuality. The dwarfs are always referred as a group, and never individualised. On the other hand, Pete and Mark are characterised by an excessive emphasis on individuality and a total subordination of community relations to the role of reinforcing desired self-concepts. This effectively limits the range of potential relationships and consequently the range of individuality available ... Len who needs a sense of community on the one hand and a sense of individuality on the other, oscillates back and forth between what he perceives as two different worlds but what we now perceive as importantly related choices. "^^

The play ends with Len unable to resolve his dilemma - lamenting the loss of the dwarfs on the one hand, and "the socially prescribed world of Mark and Pete" on the other. His problem in the words of Quigley is "grappling with the process of reconciling [himself] to ... a world organised and categorised by others." Len, in the ultimate analysis, tries, but fails to go beyond the boundaries of social convention and though the play mediates itself mainly through the convoluted discourses of Len, Mark and Pete, the main issue in the play is still the 206 conflict between subjective and objective definitions of reality. In the words of Quigley, "what others have dealt with in the realm of social macrocosms Pinter deals with in the realm of particular social microcosms."^''

Discourse here, not only gives visibility to the vicissitudes of social relation, it also provides an insight into the consciousness of Mark, Pete and especially Len. Usage of a particular discourse is indicative of the endorsement of a certain attitude or standpoint. Len, for instance, embarks on the themes of change, of persecution and of analysis, suggesting thereby that these are connected; all these themes can be recovered from his various discourses. The stance of questioning and analysis lead, invariably, to deviant individuals who tend to "reify" their own existence as they move away from commonly accepted norms and practices, but on the positive side such "reification"^^ and deviance is also a precondition for the questioning and re-definition of reality.

The social behaviour of the Pinterian individual is commonly embedded within several types of discourses that by their sheer multiplicity provide the individual an opportunity for either conditional compliance or even resistance. Deviance from the institutionally "programmed" courses of action occurs within The Dwarfs because each of the three individuals here finds it difficult to accept the failure and consequent cynicism that each experiences within the social processes of life. Pete is keen on getting back at society by becoming a material success story, by defying the existing patterns and by evolving new ones, whereas Len does not take any social conduct for granted, as conventions, words, and language itself turn sterile and meaningless for him. He is constantly looking for alternatives to the institutional programming of daily life, but is unsuccessful as he is soon declared 207

sick by friends, and in his condition of isolation turns his reality into a symbolic, reified, subjective condition of existence. This means that for him social reality is a burden to carry, a reality that appears as a highly coercive necessity in which he cannot exercise much choice. The imaginary dwarfs seem to dictate and order his existence, so that he plays a role without exercising much choice and responsibility.

Before this final degeneration, Len is segregated but still tries to fit the successive moments of his experience into a consistent biographical framework and tries to include both Mark and Pete within this scheme - no matter howsoever negatively - as agents of unhealthy competition and scheming adversaries, but social compatriots nevertheless. What Len does not understand and accept is the fact that Pete and Mark constantly question the social structures within which they live and so their conduct cannot be either predictable or controlled. As Berger and Luckmann tell us, the logic of institutional behaviour does not lie in the institutions but in the human processes that impose the quality of logic upon these through a conscious reflection and acceptance of them. Len's reflective consciousness does not superimpose the required quality of logic upon language, conventional actions or relationships. Instead, he finds his social world to be malfunctioning at every step, meaningless and inappropriate for his individual needs and too coercive and restrictive in its fixed routines and processes. He finds the laws of society, that is human interaction, reciprocity and cooperation, as well as the laws of work, profit, economics and dependence, to be hostile and unacceptable. Len's actions constitute a radical deviance from the institutional order and consequently this is thought of as a departure from reality. 208

This play focuses on the individual's fantasies and his mal-adjustments due to the pressures of contemporary life. Forced to find his haven within the home, as he cannot succeed in efficiency and professionalism, Len feels hemmed in, claustrophobic and threatened by inanimate objects as much as he does by human beings. As he becomes mentally upset, he keeps himself from further distraction and disintegration by reflecting upon his own perception of reality, the objects of perception and the relativity of all perspectives. He also reflects upon the surreal quality of a world where language and concept js^ deconstructed and questioned, and makes a through re-examination of the scores of ritual actions and habituated procedures that are taken for granted.

In the next play, that is. Night School,^ there is a broadening of the cumulative Pinterian discourse on social role and identity. In both The Lover and Niaht School, Pinter gives us social pictures of the contemporary world which are in keeping with the "contradictory and complex ways in which western man constructs role and identity, "^^ as the individuals here are open to diverse influences and pressures not experienced by the characters in the earlier plays. The vast dichotomy between the public and private sphere is, as will be seen, quite marked in these plays as it was in The Caretaker. Almost all the characters in Night School experience the power and coercive effect of socially defined roles, but they also use these roles to present manipulated impressions of themselves to the world. Thus there is a complex dialectic between individual, role, and society. Night School plays out this dialectic through the marginal lives of marginal characters who nevertheless, form sub-worlds of their own within which they enact their roles. Walter, a petty criminal cannot think of any other existence apart from theft but whenever necessary he switches roles to project himself 209 in a different role. His first attempt is at playing the role of a highly defiant and daring gunman. The small-time cheat enlists himself into the big league by constructing himself as such in the presence of Sally, a young night-club hostess who has hired a room from Walter's aunts. Sally in turn has also constructed an "honest" image of herself by informing the two elderly aunts that she is a teacher by profession and attends night school in order to learn foreign languages.

Walter returns from prison and finds himself dislocated as his private space, his room, has been let out to a lady. Walter, wants his own room back at any rate and reckons that he will get it back by befriending or even marrying Sally. Thus, the play is a record of the conflict that ensues for the possession of a private space through a violation of each other's closely guarded private lives and personal roles. Simon Trussler has rightly assessed the tone of the play by differentiating its social manoeuvres from other plays of the same period. He feels that, "after the total inability of Edward in A Slight Ache or of Albert in A Night Out to alter their fates by a single spiritual inch, it is refreshing to find the element of free-will in The Caretaker. Night School and The Dwarfs, as not only a possibility hovering in the background, but an active ingredient of the plays. In each of them choices are confronted, and decisions, for better or worse, are made."^

Changes and choices are made possible as the characters move in and out of roles with efficacy and smartness. This happens because the characters sometimes aspire towards roles based on fantasies and popular images, which real life cannot fulfil. This leads to a desire for change. If The Caretaker is about domination, control and conflict in terms of race, class and social mobility. Night School is about sexism and stereotyped roles like those of the macho male or the beautiful. 210

feminine vwjman. There is a distinctly male discourse that constructs male fantasies and at times the entire action of the play is motivated by such aspirations and fantasies.

Most of these fail to turn to reality because Sally who is the central figure of the play, refuses to play the game of role-taking in subservience to male dominance. Not only Sally's manoeuvres, but the entire play revolves around the theme of social roles and their power in controlling human lives. Each of the characters constructs the Self and its peculiar discourse strategies in accordance with the desire to fulfil emotional and material needs associated with a particular role. The two maiden aunts try to retrieve their longing for beauty, fashion and youth by vicariously identifying with Sally and her "feminity"; Solto and Walter on the other hand, want to exploit this "feminity" because they interpret it as a sign of vulnerability and dependence. They want to use the girl's status to enhance their own and to add excitement and glamour to their sagging lives. It is never clear what exactly is the truth about Sally's professional life. She probably is both a teacher and a night club worker. Though there is a distinct male discourse in the play, it is also comically inefffectual, undercut as it is by a counter-discourse at the sub-textual level. This counter-discourse challenges the roles and images of male supremacy as also the authenticity of conventional presumptions and social stances. Birch, in The Language of Drama. has shown that roles are often determined by those who are in the dominant position and that there are usually fixed perceptions of role- performance within a particular culture :

The socialisation of roles tends to fix perceptions about the performance of roles. ... there are for most people fixed perceptions about most social roles which lead to value 211

judgements being made about the appropriateness of discourse in certain contexts. Textual and intertextual knowledge can deconstruct and change expected roles.^^

In Night School, there is at work a process of deconstruction that exposes the inadequacy of certain roles and attitudes, thus creating a site for alternate definitions and attitudinal change. Consciously or unconsciously the two aunts as well as Sally expose the inadequacies of male discourse by successfully manipulating and exposing Walter who promotes a self-image of the benign highway man. The aunts exploit Walter's weakness for self-aggrandisement by hinting to him that Sally has shown interest in him. They pretend to be impressed by Solto's explicitly male discourse of bragging and exaggeration, and even encourage his vanity. But even as they show good hospitality to Solto, their attentions are riveted upon practical matters, for instance, the possibility of securing a loan from him for their nephew. Similarly, Sally allows and even encourages a false, swaggering Walter to lie about himself by feeding his vanity, but she withdraws her support the moment he begins to violate her private roles and her private life. The gaps between image and reality are in this play powerful and sad reminders of the complexity of contemporary social life - dominated as it is by the desire to cultivate success oriented images of the affluent life. But for their false sense of pride, sham respectability and false images of themselves, Sally and Walter would have made a perfect match.

In this context Erving Goffman's analysis of social masks is instructive, pointing to the sort of relationship that develops between Walter and Sally. According to Goffman, individuals in social interaction not only present themselves to each other, they also attempt to "manage" the image they present. There is a process of impression management at 212 work, much in the way that actors manipulate gestures to create an impression in a particular scene. Social behaviour, therefore, can be compared to theatrical drama, and Goffmanian analysis shows that individuals take roles, communicate and manage their social acts with deliberation and direction. The capacity to purposefully take a role is a skill that involves a variety of complex processes, much like the actor's skills on stage. It is entirely appropriate that a sociologist like Goffman employs terms such as "audience," "identity," "performer," "performance," "mask," and other theatrical references in order to provide his insightful account of the Self in everyday life. The concepts of drama most accurately demonstrate how actors (i.e. men in everyday social life) validate self-conceptions, how they justify their actions through gestures of interaction, creating a silent and powerful dialogue which can manipulate different social situations and adjust to them.^

Peter Berger has shown that roles carry with them certain actions, emotions and attitudes, that "man plays dramatic parts in the vast extended play of society and that, sociologically speaking, he becomes the mask that he must wear." The person can then be perceived as "a repertoire of roles, each role carrying with it a certain identity growing out of the role." Thus, the "range of an individual person could be measured by the number of roles he is capable of playing" and "the person's biography in such circumstances begins to appear as a sequence of stage performances which demand that the actor be what he is playing."

Such a sociological view of personality challenges the continuity of the Self which, in moving from one situation to another becomes a process, continuously created and re-created in each social situation. The Self is "not one single, permanent entity but an infinite regression of selves." 213

Sociologically then, if one wants to discover who an individual really is in this "kaleidoscope of roles and identities," one can only do so by "describing the situations in which he is one thing and those in which he is another." The problem in such a process is that an individual becomes so habituated and addicted to certain identities that even when his social situation changes, he has difficulty keeping up with the expectations of the new role and it's social context."^

In Night School, Sally has to affect femininity, gentility, charm and innocence as well as the attributes imposed upon her as the hostess of a night club. These are opposing and therefore difficult roles to play. She has already achieved considerable success in impressing the two elderly women (Walter's aunts) when Walter arrives on the scene. He Is not taken in by her appearance and tries to penetrate her various masks, so that she is put under immense strain and has to exercise caution to keep herself from his constant gaze; for as Berger says, to "manage the various masquerades, the individual has to resort to complicated manoeuvres to make sure that one role remains segregated from the other.""^ Her role as the hardworking, sincere teacher is endangered by a suspicion on the part of Walter that she is probably a sort of dignified prostitute in a night club. Solto also violates her rights as an individual, as he attempts to take advantage of his knowledge about her double life. Solto, who manages to locate her in the night club, defines her merely as an entertainer on whom almost everybody has a right. When Solto and Walter begin to probe Sally's professional and private life it becomes difficult for her to manage her several roles. Role segregation is certainly possible in contemporary urban society, being the norm rather than the exception. As Berger puts it, the danger is "that people with contradictory images of oneself may suddenly bump into each other and endanger one's whole stage 214

management." There are also internal pressures, possibly based on psychological needs to perceive oneself as a totality. Sally breaks down because she cannot reconcile her self-image with her several social images. As Berger says, "even the contemporary urban masquerader who plays irreconcilable roles in different areas of life, may feel internal tensions though he can successfully control external ones by carefully segregating his several mises-en-scene from each other.""^

It is important to realise that while social reality is often understood as an "externality," or an objective social truth, it is at the same time a "subjectivity." In other words, it is made up of individual intentions, tentative interpretations and personal meanings which introduce the individual actor's point of view and construction into any social situation. But even so, what eventually happens may be very different from what these actors meant or intended. Inspite of such complexity however, the subjective dimension has to be taken into consideration for an adequate sociological understanding of any social situation.'*'' In Night School. meaning and situation is complicated by the various positions that individuals find themselves in and the personal interests of each of them. The aunts unwittingly, perhaps, are responsible for getting Walter to try a friendship with Sally by suggesting to him that Sally is not at all perturbed by the idea that he has been to jail. She has shown interest in him precisely because he is different is the implication of their statement to Walter, who then begins to promote his identity as a high-class killer rather than a petty low class conman. Sally, promoting her straight image to society probably gets carried away with it to the extent that she is unwilling to give it up. Solto, right from the start, pictures himself as a man of status and wealth who is constantly hounded by the taxman to declare his assets. When he meets Sally he speaks of his seaside resort and an affluent life-style. When Walter wants to borrow money 215

however, he is an old man, retired and leading a strictly austere existence. Like Walter, he also has a swashbuckling hero's image for the two old aunts who are told of his popularity with women in the past and present. He constantly needs recognition by others but makes out that he is an institution by himself. In the play there are dialectical pulls - while the individuals are vulnerable enough to want social and mutual recognition from their "significant others" of their social circle - they also attempt to change and transform the social definitions that society has fostered. For instance, prison is re-defined and so is cheating. The first is not a place of torture for Walter, it is almost his second home where he is "treated wonderfully." Solto, also familiar with the prisoner's world, is matter of fact when he suggests that Walter has a right to apply for monetary aid, and adds that this should be possible because has been there, for so long:

MILLY: {stacking plates). Why don't you lend Wally a few pound, Mr. Solto? SOLTO: Me? ANNIE: Yes, why don't you? MILLY: You could help to set him up. SOLTO: Why don't you go to the Prisoner's Help Society. They'll give you a loan. I mean, you've done two stretches, you must have a few good references. ( 95)

The prison, here, does not sound as coercive an institution as does the mental asylum in Aston's account in The Caretaker: nor is there much of trauma and stigma attached to it; in fact, the discourse of characters here, is composed of references to the "nick" as a normal social fact, rather than as a symbol of deviance. Aston, a victim of institutionalisation, does not frequent public places for fear of being 216

labelled, whereas Walter is hardly \A«Drned about social stigma and would like to go straight only because he has no talent for theft and forgery. Similarly, crime, theft and even murder are according to the aunts' attitudes and also Solto's, quite acceptable so long as the execution is perfect and one does not get caught. Though Solto, Walter, Sally and Tully would, from the point of view of mainstream social life, be located on the fringes of society, yet there is nothing in the play (as there is in The Dwarfs and The Caretaker) to suggest that the characters are anything but well-adjusted to the idea of prison, crime and criminals. There is no sense of persecution in Walter, only regret for being unsuccessful:

WALTER: Well, I'm back now, eh? MILLY: How did they treat you this time? WALTER: Very well. MILLY: When you going back. WALTER: I'm not going back. MILLY: You ought to be ashamed of yourself spending half your life in the prison. Where do you think that's going to get you? WALTER: Half my life? What do you mean? Twice, that's all. ANNIE: What about Borstal? WALTER: That dosen't count. MILLY: I wouldn't mind if you ever had a bit of luck, but what happens? Every time you move yourself they take you inside. WALTER: I've finished with all that anyway. MILLY: Listen, I've told you before, if you're not clever in that way you should try something else, you should open a little business ... (83) 217

In other words, being a crook, is like any other business except that Walter is not proficient enough. The issue is simply the problem of earning enough money to live decently, and the world of Walter, Solto, and the aunts is marked by a discourse that gives primacy to money and survival rather than to conventional moral norms. The "nick" here, is simply a way of life.

It is possible for men, says Berger, alone or in groups to construct their own worlds and on this basis to detach themselves from the world into which they were socialised.'*^ According to both Walter and Solto, the true villains are officials such as the taxmen, who try to fleece Solto and deprive people of their hard earned money. Solto prides himself on having "killed a man with his own hands" and Walter can dream of being a dangerous killer though he is only a small time cheat. Within the sub-world of crime, theft and swindle, the hero is the cold-blooded murderer who can break the law with impunity. Solto, who wants to get his pension even though his "scrap business" does well, is clever enough to "work the system" to his own advantage; whereas Walter cannot even legitimately get money from the Prisoners' Help Society. Moreover, he loses even Sally to Solto as he is not clever enough to guard himself against deceit and hypocrisy.

Solto can subvert any system because he is totally ruthless and inconsiderate in the matter of gaining a winning point even if it is against a friend like Walter. Men like Solto manage better that Water to manipulate and subvert the sometimes tyrannical demands of society. As Berger shows, characters such as Solto are the social Machiavellis and are ever ready to take on newer roles to look respectable and gain status through self-images of greatness - a greatness that has eluded them through life: 218

The ingenuity human beings are capable of in circumventing and subverting even the most elaborate control system is a refreshing antidote to sociologistic depression. It is as relief from social determinism that we would explain the sympathy that we frequently feel for the swindler, the imposter, or the charlatan. These figures symbolize a social machiavellianism that understands society thoroughly and then, untrammeled by illusions finds a way of manipulating society for its own ends. ... in watching the swindler take on various roles of respectable society we are pushed towards the uncomfortable impression that those who hold those roles legitimately may have attained their status by procedures not so drastically different from the ones employed by him. (155)

The bamboozling, and one-upmanship that go on in this play are important characteristics that define the social reality of the world of the play. It also leads to a realisation that society, that is contemporary society, is "a swindle to begin with and in one way or another we are all impostors." Each of the characters in Night School is wary of the other. If mistrust is a way of life in the contemporary v\ADrld, these characters are especially aware of this dimension of human reality.

Each character is constantly entering into new universes of discourse, regardless of whether or not his compatriots understand him. In the present play the two aunts alternate between the discourse of domesticity and that of business, profit and opportunism. The transitions from one world of discourse into another frame are abrupt and business like. When Solto is invited for tea the aunts pretend admiration for his stories and his macho images of himself. But there is a perceptive and abrupt change in their tones when he refuses their request for a loan to 219

Walter. Similarly, the girls who work for the night club have their own way of mounting a kind of counter-discourse that dismisses the presumptions of male-supremacy though they have allowed it to proliferate as part of their professional technique.

Night School is, as has been pointed out, typically Pinterian in its tone. In this regard, one can see that the conflict fundamentally, begins and ends with Walter's room. The characters alternate between diverse identities, and images of male superiority, but through all this there is a steady male-bias for male domination and male-power. Thus, this play adds to the cumulative Pinterian discourse on domination and control, a discourse that highlights the constricting structures of social life. However, there are lines of development here that are not present in the plays of the last chapter. Here, for instance, the various nuances of role-playing become a means of survival, and a sort of emotional need that can be used to maintain both personal dignity and social respectability. A concept evolved in sociological discourse is helpful in understanding this:

By role-distance is meant the playing of a role tongue-in- cheek without really meaning it and with ulterior purpose. ... Every strongly coercive situation will produce this phenomenon ... The Negro domestic plays the role of self- depreciating clown and the enlisted man that of spick and span military fanatic, both with hind thoughts that are diametrically contrary to the mythology within which their roles have a meaning they inwardly reject. As Goffman points out, this kind of duplicity is the only way by which human dignity can be maintained within the self-awareness of people in such situations. But Goffman's concept could be 220

appointed more widely to all cases where a role is played deliberately without inner identification, in other words, where the actor has established an inner distance between his consciousness and his role-playing."®

All the characters in Night Out play roles in order to misinform those from whom they stand to benefit, even though internally, there is little or no commitment to anything that is said in response to a situation. The aunts, for instance, play up to Solto their landlord, only till they can make him a request for money. After his refusal to comply they, as well as he, change the discourse strategy in order to do some tough talking:

MILLY: Have another piece of Swiss roll, Mr. Solto. ANNIE: I bet you some woman could have made you a good wife. SOLTO: If I wanted to get married, I could clinch it tomorrow - like that! But I'm like Wally; I'm a lone wolf. WALTER: How's the scrap business, Mr. Solto? SOLTO: Ssshh! That's the same question the tax inspector asked me, ... Why don't you fill out your income tax returns? Why don't you fill out the forms we sent you? I said I got no income tax to declare that's why. You're the only man in the district who won't fill out his forms, he says, you want to go to prison? ... ANNIE: A good wife wouldn't have done you no harm. She'd fill out your forms-for you. SOLTO: That's what I'm afraid of MILLY: Have a custard tart, Mr. Solto. ANNIE: He's still got a good appetite. SOLTO: I've been saving it up since I last came here. 221

WALTER: So you don't know about the lodger SOLTO: Lodger? WALTER: Yes, we've got a lodger now. MILLY: She's a school teacher. SOLTO: A school teacher eh? Hmm. Where does she sleep? On the put you up? WALTER: My aunts gave her my room. SOLTO: The first lady who seduced me in Australia - she kicked her own husband out and gave me his room MILLY: {stacking plates). Why don't you lend Wally a few pound, Mr. Solto? SOLTO: Me? ANNIE: Yes, why don't you? (94)

Solto's refusal to help Walter radically alters expectations and breaks the sociability to a great extent. As Berger says, "the world of sociability is a precarious and artificial creation that can be shattered at any moment by someone who refuses to play the game. Sociability is "a special case of 'playing society' more consciously fictitious but yet of one piece with a much larger social fabric that one can also play with."""^ That the aunts can be tough and outspoken is obvious. The change in tone and attitude also exposes the extent of play-acting that has gone into the socialising and bargaining with Solto. But neither the aunts nor Solto are bound by etiquette where money is involved:

WALTER: You wouldn't miss two hundred quid. SOLTO: Two hundred here, three fifty five there - what do you think I am, a bank manager? MILLY: You can't take it with you Mr. Solto. 222

WALTER: He wants to be the richest man in the cemetery ANNIE: It won't do you much good where you're going, Mr. Solto. SOLTO: Who's going anywhere? MILLY: Come on, Annabel. ANNIE: There's one rock cake left, Mr. Solto. SOLTO: I'll tell you what, Annie. Keep the rock cake. MILLY: Annabel. (96)

Walter, who thinks "of going straight" needs money and more than that, his room; and his privacy in order to settle down to some planning for his future. Solto refuses to lend him money; and he also cheats him when Walter seeks his assistance for the second problem. Not only does he not help, he even betrays the trust that Walter has placed in him by giving him false information and thereafter by trying to woo Sally for himself. This is the very strategy that also ensures Solto's success and Walter's failure within the sub-world of cheats and criminals. Sally's entry into this inner circle where deception is the norm, cannot but create a re-definition of existing relationships. Within this circle of crooks and criminals the schoolteacher is an outsider and is looked upon with suspicion. Neither Solto, nor Walter really believe, therefore, that there is a school teacher - a vastly different and straight individual in their midst and Walter immediately looks upon her with suspicion. Meanwhile, Sally herself is undergoing a considerable amount of strain in locating herself socially within and without the sub-world of Walter and Solto. She finally rejects both Solto and Walter who have tried to unmask her multiple worlds ; her multiple identities and voices.

This play successfully portrays the dialectical tension between the various roles and identities that individuals construct and re-construct 223

as they cope with differences of values, norms and expectations. Sally is the outsider vA\o enters a private space to alter and re-create the social situation for all the players within a sub-world of unconventional social norm and definition. As Solto says, the photo, that is the image of the girl, only precipitates the crises of identity that all the characters already face because of their unfulfilled aspirations and false images:

WALTER: A girl... I want to find. SOLTO: Who is she? WALTER: That's what I want to find out. SOLTO: We were just talking about forging, about your room, about the school teacher. What's this got to do with it? (97)

There is a major departure here from the world of practical good sense, a shift that Solto cannot rationalise. Annie and Milly are also caught up in what they imagine is a genuine attraction between Walter and Sally. Each character is transformed in the course of his/her association with Sally and significantly, each of them tries to benefit from the relationship. The aunts need the rent and are flattered by having a socially superior individual in their midst. Walter, fired by the idea of her having accepted his prison term, is eager to further enhance his criminal status in her eyes by constructing a new image for himself. Solto, who has not lost anything and does not therefore need to recover anything from the girl, is nevertheless habitually inclined to possess anything that could belong to Walter - a criminal who is after all his inferior in cleverness and crime. Sally becomes a valuable commodity because she probably does attend night school, is graceful, well- dressed, knows foreign languages and has a claim to some degree of education. In this sense, she is certainly different from the general run of humanity in the seedy and corrupt world of prison, crime and 224 illegality. She is also more considerate, trusting and generous in drawing up a bargain:

WALTER: I wanted to say ... I was a bit rude yesterday. I wanted to apologise. SALLY: You weren't rude. WALTER: It'll just take a bit of getting used to, that's all, you having my room. SALLY: Well, look, I've been thinking ... perhaps we could share the room in - a kind of way. WALTER: Share it? SALLY: I mean, you could use it when I'm not there, or something. WALTER: I don't know about that. (100)

It is interesting to see how a Pinter-character manages to liberate himself considerably from the defining systems of society by mental constructions which can sometimes be powerful enough to form alternate identities, as is obvious in The Dwarfs. It is not at all certain that Sally is not what she proposes she is. Partly, the exercise of constructing herself as the homely and intelligent girl with refined tastes has been possible for her as the aunts at least, do believe in her. As sociologists tell us, an individual often becomes what he sets himself up as. In the case of Sally there is no certain evidence to prove that she is not what she says she is. At the very least, she could be trying to approximate to her fantasy images of self, but Walter interferes with this process of role-taking and renewal because he cannot hold on to his own dream image. Consequently his renewed strategy for winning over Sally is to expose her ambiguous status in order to re-assure himself and convince her that he is her equal. This process though 225

unsuccessful, is nevertheless invigorating for Walter. It does bring out the best in him and till the moment Sally rejects his proposal, he Is a new man - hopeful, ingratiating and refined. Though he does not intend to, he begins to cultivate empathy and regard for Sally actually believing that she can reform his life. Roles, however imaginary or inauthentic they may be, are certainly liberating in the sense that they break the tedium and ennui of everyday reality to bring momentary relief and comfort to the player; these roles are also the means of revievwng and negotiating the gap between objective and subjective reality in the life of the individual. Walter is "a gunman" in the company of Sally and as he sits down in his own cosy room to share a drink with Sally he can look at himself in a perspective that takes into account his past, present and future if only for a brief period. The characters have small comforts but do not fail to make a comforting ritual out of the small pleasures of life. Tea, breakfast and social drinking are important rituals in the Pinterian world as they are in the ordinary life of ordinary people. Here, these rituals turn into symbolic overtures, constituting a significant discourse of friendship and intimacy. The initiation of such a discourse takes place with the aunts' suggestive hints and innuendoes as they prepare Walter to accept a shattering proposition. Social reality here, as in the micro- interactionist tradition of sociology, is the interaction of individuals who are constantly externalising past identities or internalising newer ones. These are strategies to fulfil their desires for change and renewal. Walter comes home from prison looking for "peace, quiet, and privacy" and is rightly perturbed at finding his unpretentious desires shattered:

ANNIE: Wally, You'll like her. WALTER: She's sleeping in my room. MILLY: What's the matter with the put-u-up? You can have the put-u-up in here. 226

WALTER: The put-u-up? She's sleeping in my bed. ANNIE: She's bought a lovely coverlet, she's put it on. WALTER: A coverlet? I could go out now, I could pick up a coverlet as good as hers. What are you talking about coverlets for? MILLY: Walter, don't shout at your aunt, she's deaf. WALTER: I can't believe it. I come home after nine months in a dungeon ... ANNIE: The money's been a great help

WALTER: Listen you don't understand. This is my home. I live here. I've lived in that room for years. (86)

Walter associates his room with his entire life, and the meaning of his reality is substantially dependent upon his home, his room and the bed that keeps him anchored to the idea of something special; something intensely private. Walter begins to feel dislocated within his own territory. His room, his bed, his belongings, his privacy and his entire existence intruded upon by a complete stranger - a stranger who does not even belong to his world but professes learning and academic credentials. Clearly, this is a major crisis in Walter's already troubled existence. Walter can cope with the situation only by adopting a strategy for re-claiming the room by owning the girl who occupies it:

WALTER: What does she do, for a living? MILLY: She teaches at a school. WALTER: A school teacher! In my room. Pause. ANNIE: Wally, you'll like her. WALTER: She's sleeping in my room! 227

WALTER: ... I'll tell you one thing about the bed she's sleeping in. ANNIE: What's the matter with it? WALTER: There's nothing the matter with it. It's mine, that's all -1 bought it. (87)

What depresses and annoys Walter is the fact that he has been cheated out of something that legitimately belongs to him. This de- possession is seen by him as a sort of defeat at the hands of his aunts; moreover, it is a situation in which the girl is an accomplice. The aunts can only save their skin by suggesting to Walter that he will "like her." Their construction of the school teacher is, therefore, comically odd as they focus more on her physical rather than intellectual qualities. She's "lovely", has "beauty cream" on her dressing table, "is never out of the bath," and "it's a pleasure to smell her." The logic the aunts use is based upon their construction of Sally as desirable, fashionable, and attractive as a woman; this should, they think, reconcile Walter to the fact that she has taken away his room and his bed. In fact, they even seem to imply that Walter should be the stereotyped charming male and feel privileged to give up his belongings to such a woman. They soon explicitly suggest that Sally has shown interest in Walter:

WALTER: Does she know where I have been? ANNIE: Oh, yes. WALTER: You told her I've been in the nick? ANNIE: Oh, we told her, yes. WALTER: Did you tell her why? MILLY: Oh, no. Oh no, we didn't tell her why. 228

ANNIE: Oh, no, we didn't discuss that... But I mean it didn't worry her, did it, Milly? I mean she was very interested. Oh, she was terribly interested. WALTER: {slowly). She was, was she? ANNIE: Yes. WALTER stands abruptly slamming the table. (89)

When Walter decides to work along the lines suggested to him by his aunts he does so on the assumption that Sally is the sort of bold girl who does not mind the company of a man who has been behind the bars. Walter thus begins to treat Sally as a woman who is to be taken more or less for granted. It is, of course, by no means established that the aunts are constructing Sally as she actually is. They use popular images from mass-media to depict her as purely sensuous, well dressed, fashionable and "up-to - date." The imagery they use to describe her is within a discourse frame of sensuality and female charm, much like the sexist discourse used in advertising:

ANNIE: Lovely perfumes she puts on. MILLY: Yes, I'll say that. It's a pleasure to smell her. WALTER: Is it? ANNIE: There's nothing wrong with a bit of perfume. MILLY: We're not narrow-minded over a bit of perfume. ANNIE: She's up to date, that's all. (89)

Within this advertisement discourse is the suggestion that there is in fact an excess, a sort of open and exaggerated sexuality about the girl and that is her main recommendation in a world peopled by crooks and gangsters. It is this construction of Sally that Walter tries to extend when he interacts with her. However, she does not live up to his 229 expectations and there is a gap between role-expectation and role- fulfillment. Sally adopts a complete reversal of the role imposed upon her in order to counter her own earlier performance of stereotyped reactions and rituals.

Rituals, according to Goffman, are important social-markers. Social class and social behaviour are often indicated through the rituals that people perform.'^ One of the important ways in which Pinterian drama unconsciously shows an awareness of the importance of such sociological insight is by investing every play with rituals - social, sexual, erotic, psychological, political, and cultural - within which social reality is embedded. When Walter interacts with Sally, he does so by first offering her a drink, the acceptance of which leads him to open up with her regarding his intentions and gradually she reciprocates by pouring his drink for him and by accepting his overt signals of intimacy.

It sometimes appears that Pinterian discourse is v^olly sexist with a bias against women. However, it is also equally true that the male discourse which is prominently a part of Pinterian discourse is deconstructed time and again to show how presumptuous, false and preposterous it is. In other words, discourse in Pinterian drama, critically comments upon itself, or, is self reflexive, and evolving. This is a situation very much in evidence in Night School. The institutionally determined role of night-club hostess or fashionable glamour girl that is imposed upon Sally is really a comment upon those who construct her as such. The aunts have a point to prove. Along with the distinction of being broad-minded they also need to prove their own sense and sensibility in being appreciative of beauty, fashion, class and refinement. Their construction of quintessential femininity is quite ridiculous as they add to it their own images of vicarious pleasure and 230 suppressed desire. Similarly, Solto imagines himself as frontiersman, pioneer, swashbuckling hero and tough guy all rolled into one. He is a compulsive braggart, and thinks that he is totally irresistible to women.

The central interaction of this play, between Walter and Sally, takes place in the disputed private space of Walter's room. Walter's initiative to invite himself into Sally's room in order to perform a ritual of initiation is a typical Pinterian moment, but moves much faster than other scenes of this nature. There is little doubt here as to the intentions of the players and therefore the climax comes sooner than expected. There is a striking resemblance here, between the "fronts" put on by the aunts in order to flatter Solto their landlord, and the "front" adopted by Sally in accepting Walter who exposes himself by becoming successively more and more ridiculous and inauthentic by the sheer tallness of his claims. Another important correlate, purely from the point of view of role- playing, identity and deconstructed counter-discourse, is Sally's construction of her Self as an "Other," an innocent who will not conform to the stereotype that Walter or the night-world of entertainment have imposed upon her. A struggle ensues, which can best be described as a struggle for the freedom to adopt changing roles and perspectives without an infringement of privacy. The social mask is both social necessity and freedom in the anonymous world of urban, capitalistic society. It is also the main theme and problem of the plays in this section. As Goffman shows, this is a problem of social interaction, role and identity:

At every moment of our lives [we] are performing an institutionally determined role of some description. When those moments involve interaction with other people then those performances are more publicly ritualized than others, 231

like the roles and fronts we may adopt in a church service, a job-interview, an expensive restaurant, a theatre. ... 'Front' is a term developed by Goffman to describe that part of performance which 'regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance.' We all have a changing number of socially determined fronts which we learn to recognize, manipulate and negotiate with. There is, for each of us, an institutionally determined lexicon of routines and fronts which are socially understood ... "^

The front that Sally adopts while working is quite different from the one she uses when outside her workplace. In fact she adopts different roles with different people, as is clear from her relationship with Tully, her female friends, Walter, Solto and the guests who visit the night club she works for. However, it is clear that when Sally is interacting with a friend outside her working hours, she does not want to play the role of night­ club hostess. She may not, as she makes clear, make her institutional stereotyped role the basis of her subjective life. The oppressive determination of roles by the other members of the play is poison to Sally who is looking for change and genuine relationship. Walter knows, or so he thinks, how a night-club dancer should behave and he expects Sally to conform to this role. She is supposed to enjoy the company of "deviant" characters like gunmen and demonstrate a passion for alcohol and male company; besides, bigamy should not shock her at all. It is interesting that Walter constructs himself exactly in the manner that Sally constructs herself. Sally may earn her livelihood by dancing in a night club, but she has an image of herself as the scholar hungry for knowledge. Similarly Walter imagines himself a librarian, a curator of rare manuscripts. Sally likes classical music and prefers a "quiet life" in 232 preference to meeting people. Walter is "the gentle gunman" who is given a "personal send-off by the governor" when he leaves the prison. The entire process of ritual socialisation between Sally and Walter is really a sort of attempt to size up each other; it is not only a get-together but also a testing ground for both. Walter's discourse of self- aggrandisement turns into a hilarious idiom of far-fetched lies, the tone and sweep of which is like cartoon-chatter or adolescent day-dreaming. Both sustain each other's fantasies but like Richard in The Lover, it is Walter who breaks the rules of the social game as he attempts to forcibly bring down Sally's social mask by degrading her. He begins to treat her as he would a hired prostitute. But Sally deals him a fitting reply when she leaves both him and the room in search of individual respect and freedom. Walter breaks the codes of civility right from the start by extending curiosity beyond sociable limits; the drinking ritual moreover is only a prelude to Walter's act of parading Sally as a prostitute and is really an attempt to prove a point, that is, Sally's ability to sustain drinks inspite of her denial:

WALTER: Where do you go? SALLY: Oh, night school. I'm studying languages. Then I usually go on with a girl-friend of mine a history teacher, to listen to some music. WALTER: What kind of music? SALLY: Mozart, Brahms. That kind of stuff. WALTER: Oh, all that kind of stuff. SALLY: Yes. Pause. WALTER. Well, it's cosy in here. Have another one. SALLY: Oh, I ... WALTER: {pouring), Just one. 233

SALLY: Thanks. Cheers. Pause. SALLY: Oh, I ... WALTER: (pouring) just one. Pause WALTER: I've never been in this room with a lady before. SALLY: Oh. WALTER: The boys used to come here, though. This is where we used to plan our armed robberies. SALLY: Really? WALTER: My aunts never told you why I've been inside, have they? SALLY: No. WALTER: Well, what it is, you see. I'm a gunman. SALLY: Oh. WALTER: Ever met a gunman before? SALLY: I don't think so. WALTER: It's not a bad life, all things considered. Plenty of time off. ... You're not frightened of me now you know I'm a gunman are you? SALLY: No, I think you're charming. WALTER: Oh, you're right there. That's why I got on so well in prison, you see. Charm. You know what I was doing in there? I was running the prison library. I was the best librarian they ever had. The day I left the Governor gave me a personal send-off. Saw me all the way to the gate. He told me business in the library had shot up out of all recognition since I'd been in charge. SALLY: What a wonderful compliment. 234

WALTER: {pouring more drink). He told me that if I'd consider giving up armed robbery he'd recommend me for a job in the British Museum. Looking after rare manuscripts. You know, writing my opinion of them. SALLY. I should think that's quite a skilled job. (100-01)

When Walter has established his own reputation by images of wish- fulfillment and attributes he imagines will attract a woman towards him, he begins to insinuate and suggest to Sally that she should let down her reserve. His proposal of marriage to her is strangely alienating as he cannot, try as he might, move beyond his suspicious and limited understanding of Sally:

WALTER: My aunties think you are marvellous. I think they've got us in mind for the marriage stakes. SALLY: What? WALTER: Yes, they think they've found me a wife. SALLY: How funny. WALTER: They've roped you in to take part in a wedding. They've forgotten one thing though. SALLY: What's that? WALTER. I'm married. As a matter of fact, I'm married to three women. I'm a triple bigamist. Do you believe me?

WALTER: {pouring). Top it up. Come on. SALLY: To our eyes. WALTER: I thought you didn't drink. You can knock it back all right. Keep in practice in school, I suppose. In the milk break. Keeps you in trim for netball or at 235

that night school eh? I bet you enjoy yourself there. Come on. Tell me what you get up to at that night school. (103-05)

What Walter does is to propose to Sally ritualistically - a ritual that he performs in his own inimitable manner. The other rituals like the drinking binge, improvising upon a story as Sally responds to it, and finally the sudden imposition upon her - asking her to perform with her body - these are the rituals of all woman-man relationships in the Pinterian play. What is different, however, is the direct assault on Sally's understandably public role-playing. The masks that both Walter and Sally wear are legitimate as far as contemporary existence is concerned; Sally does not insist on disturbing this order of life; she does not seek to mix public with private life, nor does she impose upon Walter's privacy. She is the "high-class doll" who has come all the way "from finishing school" and can carry on with the "nice clientele," the "business executives" and the "high-class" people who frequent the night club. An important code of the club is the strictly formal performance, the role-playing that cannot be extended beyond its premises for purely professional reasons. Walter, confused about his own attitude towards Sally, suddenly shifts his relationship from personal to impersonal when, towards the end of his meeting with her he begins to treat her like a night-club worker rather than as a friend. But even this interaction is further degraded because he does not adhere to the formality he is expected to exercise. Instead, he attempts to treat her like a common prostitute, compelling her thereby to snap the tenuous bond between them. Walter fails because he violates the rituals that "permeate every aspect of our social encounters" the "interaction ritual" that Walter fails in is different for "every occasion and every class." This ritual leads to stratification, between different people 236

and different situations. Randall Collins in Three Sociological Traditions explains that,

... the most clearly formulated of these rituals of everyday life are what we call politeness or good manners. In these we are presenting little idealizations of our self and other people. 'How are you' is not meant literally; It is a symbolic formulae, showing that one accords the other person sufficient status to be treated as an individual. Every such ritual and there are many, both gives some deference to the other person and claims status for oneself by showing that one is a person who knows how to carry out the 'proper' formalities. Whole conversations can be ritualistic in this sense as when two people at a cocktail party exchange information about their jobs or hometowns or the weather which is of interest to vj\either of them as information; nevertheless the exchange can be completely satisfactory to both of them if it negotiates a ritual between two people who are sufficiently enamoured of each other's status. At the same time Goffman sees that people don't give up their self-interest just because they are participating in rituals. Interaction rituals are weapons that people can use to score points: to make the right contacts, to embarrass or put down rivals, to assert one's social superiority. ... in everyday encounters the ritual creates the self.^

That Sally sees her interactions as performances and rituals is clear from the fact that she does not tell any of her clients her real name. She tells Solto that her name is Katina and is totally contemptuous of the client who presumes that his rendezvous at the night club can be 237

converted into a continuing relationship. She resents the intrusions of Cyril the owner, and contemplates getting even vA\h him in the future. For the manager too, she reserves venom, anger and abuse because he constantly tries to overstep his limits. Sally, it is clear is highly independent, assertive and opinionated:

BARBARA: I thought you said he attracted you. SALLY: Oh, he did to start of, that's a)). I thought he v^asn't bad. But you know he came from Australia. He'd got a lot of Australian habits they didn't go down very well with me. MANAGER: Come on, come on, I don't want to tell you again ... {to SALLY) Cyril wants you at his table. SALLY: I'll cut his ears off one of these days ... (108)

The roles that individuals play can often turn oppressive, as these are determined by the dominating forces surrounding them. Individuals, for instance, caught up in situations or institutions where stratification is total, are often not free to choose their own subjectivity or identity. These individuals are often forced to assume positions according to those who are in positions of control. The larger, more dominant social and institutional force in society, always decides and determines the identity that will be imposed upon the weaker sections of society. According to Birch, "the socialization of roles tends to fix perceptions about the performance of roles"; and value judgements are often made about the role and its appropriate discourse."^^

In this play the aunts predetermine to a great extent the interaction between Walter and Sally because they fix a role for Sally along with the role-expectations long before the actual meeting takes place. Though the aunts do not really have a chance of directly imposing their 238 set images upon Sally, they do infuse Walter \A/ith some of their ideas; however, the most glaringly objectionable imposition comes from the battery of self-styled macho-males of the play. Walter's entire interaction with Sally is, partly, a challenge: he has his suspicions and he must succeed at proving them. He is convinced that she is a night­ club worker and he is determined to discover her true self - though from the point of view of Sally that is only one of her many selves, many lives. From the point where Sally begins to pour her own drinks and his, without much persuasion, Walter begins to turn aggressively and insolently abrasive in his behaviour towards her. Walter can only think of her personality through the stereotypes he probably knows about, and fix Sally's identity according to that expectation, all the while forcing her to conform to his pre-conceived expectations. However, Sally by defying all expectations manages to free herself and thereby start a process of change, the full development of which goes beyond the confines of the play's ending. If the value and meaning of "drama praxis" emerges from "social interaction" and a change in the "oppressive determination" of roles in society,^^ then this play is a positive step in that direction.

Another play that takes off on the assumptions of the interaction ritual and role-performance is A Night Out.^^ where the central scene is enacted at a party that turns into a charade of hypocrisy, cruelty and violence. The group of party-goers are all employees of a business house and are stratified and divided according to the power-interests of the senior executive. This man is the type of all winners in a vicious rat- race; he can humiliate his adversary, play vicious political games, create an unlevel playing field, and literally destroy his adversaries professionally and emotionally. He evolves a strategy of controls by which he defines a fixed role for every employee. There is an implicit 239 endorsement of deceit and aggressiveness within the organisation as the owner is himself a corrupt old man, bereft of all ethical considerations. The corporate creed is a sort of facile cosmetic bonhomie and institutional camaraderie which is forcibly prescribed for all employees, regardless of personal choices.

On the dance-floor, within the social circle and through the football team, the employees are ranked and fixed within a network of relationships all of which totally overlook individual needs and differences. This results in claustrophobia and imprisonment for the individual who seeks independent thinking and privacy. This show­ casing of sham equality and fraternity by the management cannot but fail with individuals like Albert who are reticent, shy and withdrawn. It is understandable that Albert, the main character of the play, soon loses his job; every society and social group chooses the men it needs for furthering its institutional norms and fundamental ethos while it rejects the non-conformists.^ This play carries control, domination and loss of freedom to the very limits of human forbearance in order to ensure commercial success through a "survival of the fittest." Albert, the young man, who is already shattered by family tyranny is torn to pieces by his inability to adapt to conditions in the work place. Albert's inability to perform society's ritualistic actions and fulfill false expectations leaves him totally dejected and defeated. Consequently, he begins to experience a sense of loss and alienation. He does, however, deviate from his own predictability when he wreaks violence upon a prostitute whom he is visiting. A return to the safety of his restrictive home environment is, however, a necessity as he has already lost his job and has little choice. But it is obvious that even as the play closes, he stands on the thresh hold of radical change and renewal. 240

In order to overcome coercion, the individual often uses distance, detachment, and deception in playing his public role. This helps him/her to survive the ordeal of social routines and obligations. This is also a means of retaining one's dignity and convictions, because the social actor/individual can establish an inner distance between his consciousness and his role-playing. The "sociological perspective" which looks beneath the official truth and typical patterns of behaviour is evident in the portrayal of such role playing. These social roles depart from the normal pattern of behaviour in everyday life because normally roles are played "without much reflection, as immediate and automatic responses to the expectations of the situation." Such role-playing is different from the performance of taken-for-granted routines which are played out through the "typifications" of daily routines and knowledge. This kind of living necessitates the wearing of a mask so that one's actual identity is always hidden from the public view. ^^

As noted above, every social structure selects those persons that it needs for its functioning and if suitable persons are not available they can actually be manufactured through a re-socialisation of individuals.^ In A Night Out the social structure presented is typically the impersonal social structure of the contemporary rat-race, of business, profit, and of de-personalised relationships. Within this world personal and professional roles are completely segregated so that the individual has to stage-manage his various identities, keeping one hidden when the other is in action. Those who might strive to deliberately draw attention to the divergence of roles can seriously disrupt the fine balance of role- segregation in contemporary life.^*^ Albert is defeated by his adversary precisely because he has not been able to keep his personal life away from the social gaze. He is labeled as a "mother's boy" by his colleagues and this image seriously compromises his authority and 241

Status within his official organisation. As Berger explains, "a man may be an emperor at work and a serf at home" but the trick lies in being able to keep the two roles segregated and the two personalities apart.^° Albert is actually rejected by the system as he is a bad actor and even a worse stage-manager. The Gidneys and Ryans, the Homes and the Barrows survive not only due to their viciousness and opportunism respectively, but also because of their abilities to keep these traits under cover while they operate in the social arena. Albert, who is withdrawn and individualistic, cannot conform to the highly impersonal and inauthentic public role that he must enact in the on-going "get- together" of society. His role is dictated by the typified roles of sociability and stereotyped social responses that form a kind of official code which does not take into account personal choices and feelings.

As seen in the last play, the Pinterian world ruthlessly demands that each and every character juggle with roles in the social performances of life. For Albert, interaction seems hardly possible without reflecting seriously on the public mask or role. Peter Berger, commenting on the phenomenon of multiselves in contemporary urban society, writes that too much self-reflection or reflexivity can "damage the dexterity of the social actor to assume divergent roles" under changing social situations and it could completely paralyse and destroy the individual. Self- reflection intervenes in the process of role-playing because existential identity is often in conflict with the social definitions of Self. Albert^ f habitually turns towards self-examination, guilt and remorse whenever! he cannot fulfill the other's expectations. He loses out in the struggle for domination because, to begin with, he only defends himself while others are on the offensive. He uses this strategy with his mother and with his colleagues but fails to make them see reason. He does partly regain his sense of containment and self-possession once he has a will-to-power 242

and is on the offensive. Initially, Albert is bullied by his colleagues because he cannot adjust to the carnival of society ; and because he cannot wear his public mask effectively, but he does discover eventually that only deceit and aggression can make him invincible.

Besides underlining the gap between appearance and reality, between role and identity, this play is also one of the most distressing personal encounters between man and woman or between one individual and another. The inevitable connection in mature, adult life between institutional conformity and personal choice or between vocation and identity is an important development within the group of plays discussed in chapter three.

A Night Out plays out the process by which the symptoms of social malaise and social hypocrisy interfere with individual integrity and personal choice. The world of personal gain, business enterprise and social mobility, along with its social fall-out, is examined through the coterie lives of young business executives who carry this world-view within their consciousness. Berger and Luckmann tell us that the analysis of roles in individual life can provide an insight into the relationship between his macroscopic universe and the ways by which this 'macro' reality becomes subjectively real to individuals within a small social group.^^ In a A Night out the emerging pattern of roles point to the necessity of segregation of roles as well as to the strategy of role-distance in the lives of the characters. But the play remains an incomplete picture, where the characters are still moving towards greater self-awareness and maturity as the play ends. The social structure is made up of several individuals in search of greater mobility and new definitions of Self. The dialectic between individual, 243

socialisation, and social structure is quite apparent in the world of the play- Each role carries with it the initiation into a certain area of knowledge, which cannot be attained without the relevant experience. Albert's entry into the world of intrigue and cut-throat competition make this world subjectively and intriguingly real for him. This objective, external universe of meaning is internalised by Albert even as he rebels against the conformity and passive acceptance of family and organisational tyranny. The public and private spheres are equally coercive in this play and the action of the play consists of Albert's efforts to effectively de- institutionalise at least one of these - the private sphere of his life by deviating from the coercive programme set out for him by his mother. He succeeds considerably in eroding her authority and in undermining her self-construct as the house-wife/mother/matriarch/authoritarian elder - the repository of custom and tradition. He does this as he gains in knowledge (through his encounters with his mother, a prostitute and the vicious young girls of his organisation) of the seductive/archetypal power of emotional blackmail that is used by women. He manages to expose and resist the seductive, oedipal power of the woman and whether he changes his life or not, he is, when the play ends, certainly more alert and knowledgeable than before.

The shifting roles and identities that Albert is forced to accommodate are pointers to the fact that the Self is just a process of change and development, never static or fully composed. This play is a strong indictment of the institutional tyranny and impersonality in contemporary society. What happens to Albert is a symptom of what Thomas Luckmann in his book Life-World and Social Realities has described as the "iron cage" of contemporary professional life. In this context the play 244

presents illuminating images of institutionalisation and its consequences for the Individual psyche. Thus Thomas Luckmann, in his essay entitled "On the Rationality of institutions in Modern Life" asks, "Is our present institutional order an iron cage which endorses all our future? " He clues us to his own question with the statement that "there is an essential dialectic in the relationship between man and institution." He describes this interdependence in the truism that "men make institutions, institutions make men and men need institutions." Luckmann's study shows that today, institutional order directly effects much of the social interaction of our everyday lives. However, a major area of this institutional domain has become disengaged from the "biographical context of meaning," which context was traditionally taken into account in all social interactions. Luckmann notes that "the norms within the institutional domain are such that the relationship of the individual to the social order is often of no consequence." As the institutional roles in contemporary life become more and more "anonymous" and "specialised," the gap between objective reality and subjective meaning becomes v^/ider and wider. As Luckmann puts it, "The compound meaning of work and of occupation is institutionally defined but subjectively found wanting." This leads to social- psychological problems for the individual but since this does not affect the functioning of macro realities like economic and political institutions, therefore, there is never much questioning about the way in which these institutions are justified and legitimated. In an analysis that reads like a commentary on a work like A Night Out. Luckmann explains that "continued if not increasing performance control by the great institutions is a fact of modern life. Another is a rift between the great institutions and the individual and his social forms of life ... [and] the segmentation of the institutional order permitted an enlargement of interstitial areas in the social structure. In these areas something like a 'private-social' 245

sphere developed. ... The 'freedom' of the individual in this 'private- social' sphere provides the basis for the somewhat illusory sense of autonomy which characterises the typical person in modern society."^

In A Night out Albert's life is ruined by professional rivalry and unhealthy competition between him and Gidney. Though it is never really clear as to why Gidney is malevolent towards Albert, one probable reason is that there are cultural and behavioural differences between the two. Albert's non-conformity to the common social norms understood by Gidney precipitates the simmering hatred between the two when they meet at a farewell dinner of a colleague. Albert does not feel the need to knock around with the girls, to exchange pleasantries with the boss, and is generally less of a socialite than the other young people. Gidney interprets Albert as a withdrawn personality, as someone who is breaking the typical social norms and male rituals of social mixing by keeping away from the young girls of the office. Gidney decides to enforce allegiance to the creed by inciting two flirtatious women to unleash themselves on the unsuspecting Albert. Everyone else, including the owner of the firm - a tottering old man - conforms to the rituals of socialising by using the party as a ground for catching pretty girls in sweet talk, and ineffective banter. The derision of society and the persecution of those who opt out of typified responses is quite clear in the persecution of Albert by Gidney. Accused of having touched the girls during the blackout, Albert is completely shattered and breaks out of his shell by physically assaulting Gidney who then maligns his reputation before the entire gathering. The old man, the real culprit, sits unmoved by the injustice of the situation.

In such a situation, the area of the "private-social sphere" is the only means of freedom in the individual's life. This sphere provides the basis 246

for the somewhat illusory sense of autonomy which is available in modern society. However, in the case of Albert, the central character of the play, there is no freedom even within this private sphere because he is relentlessly regimented and tormented by his mother, so that the home, the private sphere, also becomes institutionalised, much like the office within which hierarchical structures compel him to annihilate his personal identity.

Seely, who recognises the claims of friendship, introduces a new correlate into the institutional functioning of professional life but this is not acceptable because this loyalty goes against the absolute loyalty demanded by the institution. As Luckmann shows us, there is a rift, a rupture between individual existence and institutionalisation in today's industrial urban society because "the social order of modern industrial society is split up into categories like a social system, a cultural system, and a personality system" as the result of a complex historical process. Culture too is further differentiated into a variety of "cultural styles" and "repertoires" which are "class-based regional subcultures," subjectively very important but socially rather weak. In such a configuration, the family occupies only an ambiguous place and is often not a full-fledged social form of life. It is "more of a community of sentiment and personality" and it is so closely related with the important public institutions that it is no longer exclusively a "phenomenon of the private- social sphere." According to Luckmann this relationship has led to several problems in the personality of individuals and to the formation of a social structure "that seems to be irrational."^^

Since identity is "socially bestowed, socially sustained and socially transformed," the irrationality of the social order effects the socialisation of roles which are a fundamental part of adult life, and 247 which concern both the institutional and private sphere. Since these two spheres are segmented, to a great extent roles are split and irreconciliable. Berger and Luckmann have shown that the self-concept of a person depends upon "the significant others" in his life. These are the closest and most intimately known to the individual in childhood, and later the "generalised others" are supposed to confirm that the roles learnt earlier are relevant to society as a whole.^^ In A Night Out Albert is brought up to believe only in his mother and finds that he cannot re-confirm her narrow principles within the social circle of friends and colleagues. He has to internalise new realities, break with the past, and re-invent his identity to suit the circumstances he is in. The problems of maladjustment in the life of Albert point to a conflict between his past and present. He has to find a new plausibility structure for a new life-style that takes into account the insensitivity of his mother and indeed women in general. Seeing himself as others do is a traumatic experience that forces him into action and change. In this context, the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley speaks of the power of social-recognition by describing the Self as a reflection in a looking glass. In other words, "identity is not something given, but is bestowed in acts of social recognition" and a person often acts to fulfill the image that society has given him.^^

Albert, in A Night Out, tries hard to reflect himself as normal but cannot do so because public opinion has already constructed him as "a mother's boy"' who cannot relate to other adults especially of the opposite sex because he is repressed and asocial. The mother is a perennial nag eager to deprive Albert of his independence so that she may rule his life. She forces him to surrender to her in the name of sacrifice and duty towards her and his dead father. Like the other women in the play the mother is selfish and self-centred, incapable of 248

appreciating his adult needs and desires. She brings failure and resentment into his life by burdening him with unnecessary accusations and endless demands. The portrayal of women in this play is categorically one-sided and there seems to be a deep seated bias against women as the extent of female cruelty and insensitivity depicted here is degrading in the extreme.

The play directly shows the difficult process of transformation and change in an individual's life. Albert has to literally forget his past in order to re-socialise himself into adult, professional life. Integration into a standard undifferentiated behaviour that allows for little individuality is quite a difficult situation for Albert. He is expected to play the roles assigned to him by others and the extent to which the roles are sought to be defined is distressful for him. Albert begins to disintegrate into sheer despair and depression as he is labeled and constructed as irresponsible, dishonest and treacherous. He is publicly denounced and stripped of his credibility in a vicious attack both direct and indirect.

Randall Collins, commenting on Erving Goffmann's study of the "social ritual," writes that social rituals are often "weapons upholding and negotiating the class structure.^ They not only create the self, but they rank selves into different classes." In this play Gidney uses social rituals to project himself as friendly and sociable while Albert, measured against the same patterns of behaviour, is pronounced as offensive, ill- bred and irresponsible. Stratifications of class and culture are significant in understanding the social images of the play. For instance, both through the portrait of the prostitute as well as in the life of Albert's mother, there appears to be a typically bourgeois sense of sham respectability and an over-insistence on the symbols of status (furniture, carpets clothes, etc.). This, combined with a sense of self-defeating 249

social mannerisms and attitudes, leads to a vulnerability which can be exploited by the competitive, upwardly-mobile group who believes in ends not means. In the opening scene of the play Albert's mother, living by tradition, faith, old fashioned beliefs and values, lives in the past, refusing to adapt herself to the professional and adult life of her son. She constantly resists change by appealing to Albert's regard for the dead father and grandmother. Family values, duty towards elders, austerity, thrift and good housekeeping together with hard work and social recognition - are the staples of her old-fashioned discourse of bourgeois morality, of bourgeois suspicion and guilt. This clearly throws Albert out of gear, as within his circle of professional friends he becomes a square inspite of his professional qualifications, uprightness and sincerity. The struggle Albert has to go through in order to step out of his stupor into an assertive frame of mind may be understood as a transition from the world of primary socialisation into a new world of secondary meanings, and experiences. Berger and Luckmann expain that,

... Some of the crises that occur after primary socialisation are indeed caused by the recognition that the world of one's parents is not the only world there is, but has a very specific social location, perhaps even one with a pejorative connotation. ®^

It takes many shocks for Albert to realise that the institutional world is an exact opposite of what his mother's understanding has presumed it to be and that the norms he has internalised in his home are certainly counter-productive in the institutional world. The mother persists in thinking that. 250

They've got a bit of respect at the firm, that's why we sent you there, to start off your career, they wouldn't let you carry on like that at one of their functions. Mr. King would have his eye on you. I don't know where you've been. Well, if you don't want to lead a clean life it's your lookout, if you want to go mucking about with all sorts of bits of girls ... (233)

It is ironically apparent that Albert's mother is totally behind the times and quite ignorant about the anonymity and impersonality, indeed, viciousness of institutional rivalry and politics. Her discourse of middle- class morality is not only stifling, it is also highly presumptuous and ignorant in tone. Albert, it seems, has been socialised into a reality that exists in some remote past, a reality that sounds like Davies' world of discourse which imagines an ideal welfare state which gives citizens civic rights, insurance benefits, a right to employment, and exclusive advantages for being white, well-bred and English. The cultural differences between Albert and Gidney arise because of the different socio-cultural worlds they inhabit. Perhaps, Albert in his first job, and his first professional crisis has difficulty in adopting the "role-distance" that institutional functioning requires. However, recognition is actually well within his range when the play ends, Albert is already "alternating" into a new identity, as is clear from his treatment of the prostitute who picks him up after he has walked out of his mother's house. Albert's socialisation into middle-class "values" destroys Albert's sense of individuality and independence. In the opening scene the situation focussed is an illustration of this sociological truth. Albert's mother forces upon him the allegation that he is messing around with girls whereas the fact is that she has left him with neither time, leisure, nor inclination to have a private life of his own apart from his home-life with her. 251

In the next important scene of the play even a worse allegation of the same nature is leveled against him by some of his colleagues, this time in public, in order to ruin his social status and credibility in the work­ place. As a result Albert's social image is so much altered and ruined that he cannot reconcile it with his self-image, which is also deteriorating because of his mother's lack of faith in him. Significantly, all the pain and seething revolt that constructs Albert's world view is, to begin with, formed at home through the destructive possessiveness and domination of his mother:

MOTHER: You're dressing up tonight aren't you? Dressing up, cleaning your shoes, anyone would think you were going to the Ritz. ALBERT: I'm not going to the Ritz. MOTHER: [suspiciously]: What do you mean, you're not going to the Ritz? ALBERT: What do you mean? MOTHER: The way you said you're not going to the Ritz it sounded like you were going somewhere else. ALBERT: [wearily]. I am. MOTHER: [shocked surprise]: You're going out? ALBERT: You know I'm going out I told you this morning. Look, Where's my tie? I've got to have my tie. I'm late already. Come on. Mum, where'd you put it? MOTHER: What about your dinner? ALBERT: [searching]: Look ... I told you ... I haven't got the, ... wait a minute ... ah, here it is. MOTHER: You can't wear that tie. I haven't pressed it. ALBERT: You have. Look at it. Of course you have. It's beautifully pressed. It's fine. 252

He ties the tie. MOTHER: Where are you going? ALBERT: Mum, I've told you, honestly three times. Honestly, I've told you three times I had to go out tonight. MOTHER: No, You didn't. ALBERT exclaims and knots the tie. I thought you were joking ALBERT: I'm not going ... I'm just going to Mr. King's. I've told you. You don't believe me. MOTHER: You're going to Mr. King's? ALBERT: Mr. Ryan's leaving. You know Ryan. He's leaving the firm. He's been there years. So Mr. King's giving a sort of party for him at his house ... well, not exactly a party, not a party, just a few ... you know ... anyway, we're all invited. I've got to go. Everyone else is going. I've got to go. I don't want to go, but I've got to. MOTHER: [bewildered, sitting]: Well, I don't know ... ALBERT: [with his arm around her]: I won't be late. I don't want to go. I'd much rather stay with you. MOTHER: Would you? ALBERT: You know I would. Who wants to go to Mr. King's party? MOTHER. We were going to have our game of cards. ALBERT: Well, we can't have our game of cards. MOTHER: Put the bulb in grandma's room, Albert. ALBERT: I've told you I'm not going down to the cellar in my white shirt...

MOTHER: Your father would turn in his grave if he heard you raise your voice to me. You're all I've got, Albert. I want you 253

to remember that. I haven't got any body else I want you ... I want you to bear that in mind. ALBERT: I'm sorry ... I raised my voice. He goes to the door, [mumbling] I've got to go. MOTHER: [following]: Albert! ALBERT: What? MOTHER: I want to ask you a question. ALBERT: What MOTHER: Are you leading a clean life? ALBERT: A clean life? MOTHER: You're not leading an unclean life are you? ALBERT: What are you talking about? MOTHER: You're not messing around with girls are you? You're not going to go messing about with girls tonight? ALBERT: Don't be so ridiculous. MOTHER: Answer me, Albert. I'm your mother. ALBERT: I don't know any girls. MOTHER: If you're going to the firm's party, there'll be girls there, won't there? Girls from the office? ALBERT: I don't like them, any of them. MOTHER: You promise? ALBERT: Promise what? MOTHER: That... that you won't upset your father. ALBERT: My father? How can I upset my father? You're always talking of upsetting people who are dead! MOTHER: Oh, Albert, you don't know how you hurt me, you don't know the hurtful way you've got, speaking of your poor father like that. ALBERT: But he is dead. 254

MOTHER: He's not! He's living! [Touching her breast] In here! And in his house. [ Pause] ALBERT: Look mum, I won't be late ... and I won't... (203-06)

Clearly, there is a struggle going on between Albert and his mother, a struggle that on one level Is a personal battle between a possessive Tiother for the ownership of her son and the son's equally strong attempt to ward off, though discreetly, the constraints of belonging 3xclusively to the mother and the family. On another level, however, ;here is also an appeal by the mother to the laws of social convention and to the accepted relationship between mother and son. This 9xpectation requires him to act according to the role allotted to the Tiale child in the absence of his father - the role namely, of acting as lis mother's protector and provider. In this typical, social role (as it is •epeatedly spelt out by the mother), the peculiarly personal needs of adulthood seem to have no place at all. The family tradition is upheld :ime and again ("your father will be displeased") each time Albert tries to •e-assert his individuality. It is important to observe that from the Deginning Albert tries to assert his position and to resist the mother's attempts at destroying his individuality. While his attempt is to accommodate his mother even as he fights her control, her attempt is to jse fresh strategies each time in order to exercise her rights. She lets nany evasions pass her, only to get back with renewed vigour :hereafter.

Her world of discourse is limited by parameters of typified roles and attitudes while Albert's is an evolving discourse of painful self- jiscovery. Later, in act three, when he has begun to see through the * 255'

fagade of female vulnerability and charm, he enters into another world of discourse marked by abuse and mockery. Within this frame of reference the interaction between him and the Other - in this case the woman - is one of male superiority and brute strength. His predominantly male discourse is now characterised by verbal and non­ verbal gesture of power and aggression and her discourse is a catalogue of complaints and self-pity. Fundamentally, she uses the familial discourse of piety and possession to control Albert and to define her own existence, her reality, and she refuses to look beyond it to the emergent situation of her son. She has defined her life vis-a-vis her son's in a way that she is always the aggrieved party in any impending problem or situation. The point she underscores perpetually, through her highly self-centred discourse of self-pity and selfishness is her own discomfort, her loneliness, her sense of pride, her loss of faith, her public image, her dead husband's feelings, her own inability to accept any kind of change, as well as herovm inconvenience.

The son's existence seems to be justified only by the extent of its utility towards the mother's well-being, upkeep and life. Albert can live but only so that he may enhance and extend the past into the present. He has to uphold his father's name, put on display his respectability, his upbringing, and uprightness. The perfectly stifling bourgeois narrowness allows him little freedom to choose, and hardly a chance for future change. If his profession requires him to move into a broader social space he can do so only by aggressive gestures and signals of violent disagreement with his present. His passage into adulthood proper is thus wrought with pain and conflict. In this context, Berger in Invitation to Socioloav speaks of the "rites of passage" in every culture which mark the various stages of human life, social and emotional.^ In the case of Albert these rites include the acquisition albeit painfully, of 256 the knowledge that deceit, lies and selfishness rather than sincerity and consideration are the hallmarks of social relationships - even the most intimate ones - like that between mother and son.

It is not quite right to believe, as some critics do, that Albert makes only half-hearted gestures towards change and renewal.^^ The important fact is that he tries and does succeed in braking the mould as it were by altering and defying the rigid rituals of his class. He opts out of each one of the domestic rituals that his mother seeks to replay when he is leaving the house; he even replaces ritual with self-assertive gesture and brazenness that radically alters his position as a passive pawn in his mother's life. The only protagonist in the Pinterian world not to display fantasies of domination towards women, Albert ends up nevertheless, as a violent woman-hater (and justifiably so) as he moves towards self-realisation. In the emergent process of self-consciousness that Albert goes through there is constant change and flux in his self leading to the possibility of change in his life and therefore in his environment. The central scene of the play (the official party hosted by his organisation), referred to at the beginning of this analysis, is in this sense, a watershed in the consciousness of Albert. It is the most significant scene in the play and is instrumental in intensifying Albert's depression which has been brought on in the first place, by his poor performance in the firm's football match. Gidney, a colleague, and the captain of the team, has been blaming Albert for his poor performance, even though his poor management of the team is actually responsible for the defeat. He has not allowed Albert to play in his usual position and for the same reason he has upset the entire "formation" that the team have been used to. Gidney is perceived by Albert's friends as a mean, scheming colleague with a bias against Albert and he emerges as even more devious during the firm's get-together. He is, by turns. 257 evasive, teasingly grave, deceptively polite, and treacherously clever in destroying the composure of others. He is, temperamentally, quite well adjusted to the bureaucratic and hierarchical structure of the firm and so has the same expectation from his subordinates too. The institution is coercive, hiding control beneath deceptively stereotyped slogans like "we play together, we work together." The party is, like all social gatherings marked by its formality, as well as by its studied informality, which does not however, disguise the power struggle, the capital interests and the sheer hypocrisy that lies beneath such patterned behaviour. The individual-self and the social-self cannot co-mingle here, but the patriarch of the firm who appears benignly to be presiding over the celebration, breaks social codes with impunity. He covertly takes liberties with his young hostesses while the toast is being raised, but no one suspects him, because he is the proverbial insider who stands at the centre of power. The scapegoat is, most conveniently, Albert - the social outsider - who happens to be standing near the old man at the time.

The physical blow that Albert deals to Gidney on being falsely accused, is an important gesture and a turning point in the play. Like the other two gestures in the play - namely his manhandling of the prostitute and the violent scene with his mother - this too is a demonstration of his stature and identity as a distinct individual. With these gestures Albert registers his protest fully and as a result, grows in stature as a self- respecting individual. This gesture of protest, though non-verbal differentiates his evolving self-expression, giving his communication, his discourse of brooding silence, a distinctive quality of reciprocal violence. This is necessary to pave a path for himself within a collectivity that lets only the powerful and the deceitful occupy the right to hold ground. For instance, Gidney who can control and manipulate 258 positions on the playing field and within the social arena, does so by exploiting the social differences between people and by exploiting gender and cultural differences as well. He has an eerie insight into the social-psychology of female aggressiveness and ego which he uses successfully to legitimise hdicule against Albert. Albert, being an unsophisticated, innocent player within the institutionalised environment is in a vulnerable position, in relation especially, to the two young ladies who appear to suffer from a fear of rejection and a consequent loss of self-esteem. This becomes a powerful incentive towards aggression and puts the two girls on the offensive against Albert. They impose upon his privacy and violate his freedom to be different from the others, forcing him thereby to defend his integrity as an individual. Albert, like Aston and Len, stands outside the mainstream but is constantly coerced into an acceptance of typical pre-defined behaviour and attitudes. Even the prostitute in act three frames him according to fixed conceptions of the type of man she always meets. She is pretentious and hypocritical like the gathering at the firm informing Albert that she prefers "well bred" people with "class," and "delicacy." When she fails to elicit the usual responses and is frightened into silence by him, he informs her that she has picked up the "wrong man." Thereafter, in a manner reminiscent of Mick and Davies he makes her crouch, while he stands, and in a symbolic act he makes her "keep her big mouth closed" and "cover her face" while he puts his thoughts together. Thus Albert's discourse of assertion and aggressive contempt is a complete reversal of the role-expectancy that he has had to follow and fulfil.

Sexual harassment is persistently present in several of the plays discussed so far, finally becoming the main theme and action of the play. Mountain Language. Sexual abuse in the plays of Pinter can 259 range from mild flirtation to indecent gesture, to violent outburst and unfair betrayal. In A Night Out. Pinter has used this theme as a critical comment on the social organisation of urban society and Albert the victim of sexual harassment is thoroughly discredited as a result of such persecution. This play is so dense with meaning that it is difficult to grasp the full perspective through a single theme, character or action. But an important clue to an understanding of the play is present in the shifting discourse frames of the play. While Albert uses a discourse of pleading and consideration to begin with, later on in the play he uses a distinctly aggressive discourse of abuse and cynicism. Discourses of friendship and sympathy are counterpointed by discourses of suspicion and intrigue. While the mother is characterised by her discourse of familialism and authority, Gidney is associated with the discourse of social hypocrisy, deciet and revenge.

This play plunges into action right at the beginning unlike the usual Pinter play which generally evolves slowly and takes time to move into action. This play begins to take shape immediately through the interactional process set up early in the opening scene when Albert, though apprehensive of Gidney and in spite of his mother's objections to being left alone, decides to attend the official party. He is a resilient social player battling against persecution, biased feelings and fear in order to make his life work. His forcing himself to play the guest at a gathering that represents the worst side of the institutional order is strongly a point in his favour. As an individual endeavouring to belong, in spite of rejection and unfair play, he is quite admirable. Various kinds of discourse emerge through the manoeuvres of social interaction, and personal difference. Every move and gesture is oriented towards a specific intention, and is indeed a mapping process to trap another or to extricate the Self from the mould of social norm and social pretense. 260

This is a dramatisation of what has been described as "significant gestures in interaction or a "concomitant social reality of a perpetual interlacing of individual behaviours."^

Social structures can exist through time because of their formulated, clear-cut expectations. In today's society mass media can replicate the stereotypical, conventional images of dominant ideology and culture, so that these become available to thousands. Besides this development, divergent definitions of the Self and a far more private and de- institutionalised private sphere of individual activity is now allowing more and more sub-worlds to emerge, legitimised by esoteric tastes and habits.^® This is the kind of world that is depicted in The_Loyer''° through the strange interactions of Richard and Sarah who live in the seclusion of a luxurious, urban home. The anonymity of urban city life is depicted through a private "sub-world" within which the two experiment with alternate identities and roles but crumble ultimately under the strain of traditional roles and role- expectancy.

Though the ultimate wish-fulfillment for Western man in today's culture is the acquisition of power, status and affluence and since the images of mass-media generally portray sex-fantasies as accompaniments of power and affluence, today's affluent culture turns towards sexual fantasies for pleasure amusement and change. In several Pinter-plays the fantasising of man-woman relationships, by both male and female characters recur in ironic contexts through the discourse of the characters. Whether the characters are working-class, middle-class or, upper middle class, each has his/her version of sexual discourse replete with erotic images of seduction, perverted relationships, romantic infatuations or sentimental yearnings. Many of these fantasised images express adolescent longings and unreal 261

expectations. In The Lover the characters enact sexual fantasies through a variety of roles, but the interaction though merely playful to begin with, turns meaningful later, leading to change and re-definition of reality.

When the play opens, Richard, the husband, leaves the house for work as Sarah wearing "a demure dress" sees him off as his wife. However, uppermost in his mind is her image, not her real self. He is also preoccupied with his own role as lover - in which form he will take off when he returns from work.

RICHARD, {amiably). Is your lover coming today? SARAH. Mmnn. RICHARD. What time? SARAH. Three. RICHARD. Will you be going out... or staying in? SARAH. Oh ... I think we'll stay in. (49)

As though this is not strange enough, Richard also asks her to "have a pleasant afternoon" with her lover. In the evening when he returns, he exchanges trivial details about the afternoon eliciting information about her meeting with her lover. He sits down comfortably to have a drink and has a "cold supper" aftenA/ards as Sarah has not had time to cook. These manoeuvres turn into routines which each of them recognises and responds to by improvising on the expected line, the rehearsed situation. But even as the enactment of the strange situation begins to turn incredibly predictable within the given framework, Richard declares and proclaims his rights as a husband, correspondingly changing his predominantly sexual discourse to a familial discourse of rights, duties and responsibilities. He turns his back upon his mistress, reminding the 262 wife of her abrogation of motherhood and fidelity. He promptly proceeds to introduce the concepts of guilt and duty into the unfolding situation ("Does it ever occur to you that while you're spending the afternoon being unfaithful to me I'm sitting at a desk going through balance sheets and graphs?); and he further complicates the relationship by calling his mistress (that is, Sarah) a "whore." This is a serious development if we interpret the various stances and roles of Sarah and Richard as attempts to explore and test their relationship and their innermost thoughts:

RICHARD. But I haven't got a mistress. I'm very well acquainted with a whore, but I haven't got a mistress. There's a world of difference. SARAH. A whore? RICHARD, {taking an olive). Yes. Just a common or garden slut. Not worth talking about. Handy between trains, nothing more.

SARAH. Sounds utterly sterile. RICHARD. No. Pause SARAH. I must admit I never expected you to admit it so readily RICHARD. Oh, why not? You've never put it to me so bluntly before, have you? Frankness at all costs. Essential to a healthy marriage. Don't you agree? SARAH. Of course. RICHARD. You agree. 263

SARAH. But quite honestly. I can't really believe she's just... what you say. RICHARD. Why not? SARAH. It's just not possible. You have such taste. You care so much for grace and elegance in women. RICHARD. And wit. SARAH. And wit, yes. RICHARD. Wit, yes. Terhbly important, wit, for a man. SARAH. Is she witty? RICHARD, (laughing). These terms just don't apply. You can't sensibly inquire whether a whore is witty. It's of no significance whether she is or she isn't. She's simply a whore, a functionary who either pleases or displeases. SARAH. And she pleases you? RICHARD. Today she is pleasing. Tomorrow ... ? One can't say. He moves towards the bedroom door taking off his jacket SARAH. I must say I find your attitude towards women rather alarming. (55-57)

Not only does Sarah discover the gender bias her husband has, more distressingly, she also discovers his attitude towards her in her role as his mistress. Richard is self-centred too, as he thinks of pleasure only from his own point of view. While the woman is an object ("a functionary who either pleases or displeases") he is the main player who will dictate terms. Sarah is concerned that Richard's affair "possesses so little dignity" and his lack of "sensibility" comes to her as a shock. The most intriguing question, namely the reason for Richard's enactment of illicit relationships outside his marriage, is never answered at all. It is not 264

clear who among the two first begins this charade and why. Both blame each other for making the first move but whatever the motive was, they both seem to be adept at the game and fully reconciled to living without responsibility. Both probe each other's "role-taking" to find out more about various aspects of their relationship and Sarah concludes that "things are beautifully balanced." The wife is not jealous of the "whore" and the husband tolerates the wife's "lover" because the "lover," he is informed, has respect for him and recognises his conjugal rights.

The next day Richard comes home as Max and the two enact a scene by the parkside (though within the safety of their home) where Sarah waits for her husband while Max tries physically to assault her. The next moment Max turns into the "park- keeper" who happens to be passing by and saves Sarah from the intruder. When she sits down with her saviour she makes passes at him and he resists. But after a while at his suggestion they enter his cabin and he traps her, apparently against her wishes. Almost instantaneously he metamorphoses into a lover and he addresses her as Mary:

MAX. Where's your husband? Pause. SARAH. My husband? You know where he is MAX. Where? SARAH. He's at work. MAX. Poor fellow. Working away, all day. Pause I wonder what he's like

SARAH. You've got very little in common. 265

MAX. Have we? He's certainly very accommodating. I mean, he knows perfectly well about these afternoons of ours, doesn't he? MAX. He's known for years. Slight pause Why does he put up with it? SARAH. Why are you suddenly talking about him? I mean what's the point of it? It isn't a subject you normally elaborate on. MAX. Why does he put up with it? SARAH. Oh, shut up. MAX. I asked you a question. Pause SARAH. He doesn't mind. MAX. Doesn't he? Slight pause Well, I'm beginning to mind. Pause. SARAH. What did you say. MAX. I'm beginning to mind. Slight pause It's got to stop. It can't go on. SARAH. Are you serious? Silence. MAX. It can't go on. SARAH. You're joking. MAX. No, I'm not. (69)

The intrusion of seriousness and reason into the endless transactions between Sarah and Richard is something that she is not prepared for. In 266 fact, she is annoyed, upset and then downright indignant that Richard should abandon the game without any plausible motives. Richard, reiterating the theme of the hardworking husband and the deceptive, carefree wife, now adds another dimension, that of responsibility. Sarah tries to retrieve the situation but Richard is relentless in his assertion of the husband's role. Not only does his tone become increasingly aggressive, he also reveals his true self. He is an opportunist, a bully and his main agenda is to establish his superiority over woman and wife. In the last analysis, he turns abusive, as he shatters the images which have been so meticulously nurtured till now. It is clear that Sarah will have an inferior status as wife and she prefers therefore to live as mistress. It is also probable that the games have started in the first place because there is something missing in the relationship, perhaps a lack of interest in the mundane, true selves which they try to run away from. Richard thinks of his own convenience; when he is satiated with play acting it is time to wind up. He wants, in other words, to have his cake and eat it too. While he allows Sarah the liberty to suspend her responsibilities for the moment, he also reminds her of her other role which he thinks should be available in case he wants to recall it. Sarah loses out on everything, while he stands to gain either way:

SARAH. He's happy for me. He appreciates the way I am. He understands. MAX. Perhaps I should meet him and have a word with him. SARAH. Are you drunk? MAX. Perhaps I should do that. After all, he's a man, like me. We're both men. You're just a bloody woman. She slams the table 267

SARAH. Stop it! What's the matter with you? What's happened to you? {Quietly) Please, please, stop it, what are you doing, playing a game? MAX. A game? I don't play games. SARAH. Don't you? You do. Oh, you do. You do. Usually I like them. MAX. I've played my last game. SARAH. Why? Slight pause. MAX. The children. (71)

Sarah, unwilling to negotiate the truth, pretends that Richard is playing yet another game when in fact he is reverting to reality. Both Sarah and Richard have removed their masks and stand before each other in their true selves; Richard is unpredictable but firm in asserting his designated role - that of husband, Sarah is only a woman and he decides that he should let her know how he evaluates her. Richard has, successively, revealed all his prejudices, biases and intentions. She is a whore, is irresponsible as wife and mother, is a "bloody woman" and in the end, she is unattractive and "too bony." This, in Sarah's view, is really the last straw as her entire relationship has been based on the assumption that she is attractive enough to be his mistress - a woman whom he desires to the extent of giving up his wife for her. This last revelation therefore, comes as a complete shock to Sarah and nothing that he can do or say subsequently can obliterate the impact of the words from her consciousness, and Richard too is obsessed with the image as he uses it once again when he decides that he will forbid her lover from entering his house. Though the end of the play shows Sarah and Richard playing their trivial games once more, it is amply clear that the situation has changed irrevocably after Richard's somber reminders 268

Of the fact that the game is played only for his pleasure and that therefore it can be stopped as and when he likes. Richard uses a discourse of male authority and conjugal rights to show Sarah her place in the scenario. Sarah on the other hand, uses a highly rarefied romantic-erotic discourse of illicit passion and desire. Richard, though the lover, emphasises rights, duties, responsibilities and expectations. His is a discourse of domination and abuse which is used to establish a hierarchy within the plurality of roles they play. He never lets the lines of demarcation disappear even at the height of his fantasies. After a day spent in "sifting matters of high finance" in the city, Richard comes home to find there is no dinner waiting for him because Sarah finds the idea of cooking dinner "fatiguing":

RICHARD. That's rather unfortunate. I'm hungry. Slight pause You hardly expect me to embark on dinner after a day spent sifting matters of high finance in the City. She laughs. One could even suggest you were falling down on wifely duties. SARAH. Oh dear. RICHARD. I must say I rather expected this would happen sooner or later. Pause SARAH. How's your whore? RICHARD. Splendid. SARAH. Fatter or thinner? RICHARD. She gets thinner everyday. SARAH. That must displease you. RICHARD. Not at all 269

I'm fond of thin ladies. SARAH. I thought the contrary. RICHARD. Really? Why would you have thought that? Pause Of course, your failure to have dinner on the.table is quite consistent with the life you've been leading for some time, isn't it? SARAH. Is it? RICHARD. Entirely. Slight Pause. Perhaps I'm being unkind. Am I being unkind?

Yes, I am. In the traffic jam on the bridge just now you see, I came to a decision. Pause. SARAH. Oh? What? RICHARD. That it has to stop. SARAH. What? RICHARD. Your debauchery. Pause. Your life of depravity. Your path of illegitimate lust. (76-77)

Sarah, not oriented ever into thinking of her life in these terms, is completely incredulous. She can only appeal to Richard's ten-year long relationship with her. He refuses however to consider the appeal at all. In a moment of self-reflection all she can say is, "understanding is so rare, so dear." The Lover is indeed a play about understanding, self- reflection and self-consciousness. 270

From the perspective of interactionist sociology, the process of change that takes place in the relationship of Sarah and Richard is a direct consequence of their exploration of their own identity through the symbolic acts and through "role-taking." According to George Herbert Mead, one of the main proponents of symbolic interactionism, a perspective focussing on the nature of interaction at the individual level, "physical gestures" (like Sarah's banging on the table, Richard's raising of his voice, his playing on the Bongo drum, Sarah's hissing, retreat, and Richard's advance) are "preparatory social acts," that is, outflows of energy that sluice off the nervous excitement or reinforce and prepare indirectly for the action to take place." Similarly, role-taking is the capacity of the individual to take the role of an Other. For instance, Richard can adopt the role of Sarah's lover, an identity which he later denounces and describes in terms of an intruder into his domestic life. In terms of this perspective of symbolic interactionism, "societies are composed of interacting individuals who not only react but perceive, interpret, act and create." The individual, from this point of view, is a dynamic and changing actor, always in the process of becoming and never fully formed.''^ George Herbert Mead's understanding of human interaction as a relationship between mind, self and society, takes into consideration the imaginative capacity of the mind to imagine and rehearse meanings and actions before actually performing them and before actually choosing a particular course of action. The individual has a mind and a self both of which are formed and come to maturity through social interactions and experiences. Thus, the entire process of interaction is rife with meanings constructed by human ingenuity. The meanings we share with others, our definition of the social world and our perception of and response to reality emerge in the process of interaction.''^ 271

In The Lover, there is a unique interaction, which, besides being real, is also symbolic in nature. This means that there is a significant process of meaning and interpretation which evolves through the actions and reactions of the two individuals and of the several more individuals whose roles they adopt and enact. Within the group of plays under discussion in chapter three The Lover stands as a kind of "interpretation" for several plays which come before and after it, by showing that personal or subjective worlds can never exist for long without a comparison with objectively defined roles and sanctions. It throws light on the burden of "self-consciousness" and its relation to "social- consciousness"^^ within the plays. The Lover in this sense is an important and landmark play that can explore the limits of subjective reality and its relation to the primary socialisation of individuals. Just like Walter in Night School cannot act out of tune with the world he has internalised for so long, and so offends Sally, similarly, Richard too reverts to his fundamental understanding and knowledge of life even though he has been evading this reality for several years.

Both characters here, make "social gestures" that are important in understanding the relationship between Self and society in the entire group of plays in this section. In a sort of encapsulated form this play enacts a "dance" that adequately portrays the "looking-glass self ^^ and the fundamental dialectic that makes up this Self. This includes our perception and imagination of how we look to others, how we imagine others' judgement of our appearance and our personal feelings about that judgement. Consequently, as "mind and self negotiate the parameters and operational rules of social discourse," there is possibility of change. This important element of change within the dialectically complex manoeuvres of The Lover has not been 272 emphasised enough. This discourse of social change is available to the reader/audience as the dialectic of mind/imagination, Self and society.

The Lover in this sense is a process of knowing. This process of knowing is the valuable component of this ineraction. This is a dynamic process of re-interpretation and re-definition, of human behaviour." As Martin Esslin says "the ambivalence of our social selves, the coexistence in all of us of the primeval, amoral, instinct-dominated sensual being on the one hand, and the tamed, regulated social conformist on the other, is one of the dominant themes of Pinter's writing."'^^ In fact, another way of putting this would be to see the entire development of Pinterian drama as a sort of increasing self- consciousness about the need to use the struggle between social-self and personal self as the beginning for change or at least the consciousness of a need for change. The different social spheres that the various roles of the play belong to, are perspectives that demonstrate the range of human consciousness. The entry of Richard and Sarah into these spheres shows the power that typified roles have over most people's consciousness. The identity that Richard finally discovers is probably complex and still only in process, as the play closes; but he has defined that area which suits his self-interest best.

As Bernard Dukore has shown, fundamentally Richard and Sarah explore their own consciousness as well as their relationships in "a power struggle that tests the resilience and imagination of both, and this provides them with the knowledge that an individual must acquire before being circumscribed by social obligation, social responsibility and social role."'^® As seen in A Night Out social rituals can stratify and divide individuals in terms of their cultural and class differences. In this play the entire facade is, according to John Orr in Tragicomedy and 273

Contemporary Culture, a ritual peculiar to the class Sarah and Richard belong to;

Their struggle for power as equals in the conspiracy of transfer revolves around two things, the initial advantage of the transgressing male and the power to wound in the defamation of the absent other. While the wife calls her 'lover' a 'lover' the husband calls his 'mistress' a whore echoing the sexual double-standard of adultery which inheres in their class-culture ... Pinter here plays ironically on the marital construction of reality. ... the couple erect their fantasies of transgression out of a sense of middle-class confidence, feeling they have the power and space to pursue their games of ecstasy without cost to themselves, to authorise such games is no doubt a gamble. But it also is a manifestation of self-confidence, a belief in their powers of cultural control.''''

The popular social images used by Sarah and Richard are to them familiar but not entirely understood by them even as they seek to realise their marital and upwardly mobile status through an enactment of these images. They consciously use icons of social behaviour to enhance status and re-define identity-affirming characteristics. Richard, for instance, plays the games he does, because he wants to assure himself that he can afford both mistress and wife. His profession, obviously, independent and affluent enough to allow him more than just white collar flexibility. While Ruth in The Homecoming can be only a straigf forward prostitute as she lives with a bunch of working-class men and a pimp, Sarah is free to while away her time in dressing up for various exciting episodes, while the husband and Lover also plays truant from 274 work; but at least Richard has an office to attend to, and Sarah has a vocation as mother and wife. Usually, Pinterian characters are never defined to this extent, their revelation beginning and ending with their purposeful encounters rather than the entire gamut of life. In the group of plays discussed in this chapter however, professional life and work is also a part of the encounter of individuals. A good understanding of social life is present in this group of plays, in an all-encompassing attempt to explore the very limits of social and cultural space within class barriers. Even more important in terms of the cumulative discourses of self and other is the attempt to relate the human mind, the social self, and the structures of society, as these three elements conspire in the initiation and fostering of social interaction. Within this dialectic the ability to use and interpret social gestures greatly facilitates the synthesis of mind. Self, and society. This is exactly what Sarah and Richard set out to do when they interact through social gesture and define their social acts as a gesture of liberation from an old-fashioned conventional uni-imaged Self towards greater flexibility and experimentation with newer images and roles. Sarah has a multi- imaged Self as she has found the social and private space to legitimate all new experiences.

John Orr describes The Lover as the "sharing of the other with the other" and understands the play as a gloss on the "same and the different."^^ Such a description is an acknov^edgement of the sophistication and complexity of the discourse of characters in this play. There is a serious attempt in this play to define contemporary existence in terms of ex-centricity, ambiguity, multivalence and difference. The play is reminiscent of Jean Genet's The Balcony. The emotional need for playing more than one role, and that too a role not allotted or sanctioned by society within a particular social location, has been 275 recognised and understood by both these plays. While Genet's play deals with the transforming power of the role per se upon the human psyche, this play deals with the eroticism of sexual roles and the perversely ambiguous mixing of sexual with familial discourse, as happens in The Homecoming also.

According to Orr, there is a sub-text in The Lover that "prevents the sexual discourse" from serving as a "facile and explicit explanation" for the behaviour of the married couple. What then is the explanation for their role-playing? Partly, of course, (as mentioned earlier) it is a dialectic that helps the couple to find true identity, not only existential but also social. This is also a symptom of urban, middle-class perversion resulting from the need to discover more social space and greater means for self-expression. In sociological terms, and more precisely in terms of the social-psychology of human interaction, a fine clue to what happens in the play is what the sociologist Mead describes as "imaginative rehearsal." This illustrates that though limited by closure and "bourgeois containment" and other constraints peculiar to the social situation, the human mind at least continues to be a compulsive process of invention and intellectual activity. The rehearsal consists of the ability, the impulse, on the part of the conventional or alternating individual to think about what he will do before he actually does it, and to consider alternative forms of action before making a choice of action. This occurs,

... through the capacity of individuals to take the role of the other, or simply' role-taking' ... significant gestures as meaning - conveying symbols rely upon 'an arousal in the individual himself of the response which he is calling out in the individual, a taking of the role of the other, a tendency to 276

act as the other person acts ... One of Mead's most notable contributions to the study of human relationships was his comprehension of self-consciousness, its genesis and its sociality. ...The self's essence is its reflective self- awareness, and with this essential capacity, an individual can be both an object 'me' and a subject T to himself. This dual capacity is the essence of being social. ... the self for Mead was not simply a bag of social attitudes picked up in the environment. He used such concepts as 'self-image', 'self- concept,' 'taking the role of the other' and 'significant others' to explain the creative balance which exists between individual and society. His suggestion that through development of a mature self-consciousness, the individual becomes both an object and a subject to himself is a profound insight.''^

In the plays discussed so far a significant part of the discourse of characters is the discourse of Self where the character appears to be addressing an Other but in actuality is really reflecting back upon the Self. This is evident because the roles adapted at such reflective moments are hardly transparent to the person addressed. The discourse is more like an account of the consciousness for the explicit purpose of unburdening or even dressing up the Self in self-fulfilling ways. Examples of this kind include Mick's interaction with Davies in The Caretaker, and Edward's with the Matchseller in A Slight Ache or Richard's with Sarah in The Lover. The "self is made up of the "I" and the "me" of the personal and the social self. While the characters use the discourse of Self, they also move inevitably towards realisation of otherness and conflict. The Lover plays out such a conflict while negotiating the boundaries of subjective self and objective reality. 277

Though the struggle between these two realities is present in all the plays discussed till now, in the plays of the third chapter it becomes very much more pronounced, being clearly visible through the agency of different roles and selves. In The Lover, the entire play is taken over by the urgent need of Sarah and Richard to balance subjective instinct with objective understanding and objective reality. But this is the crux of the matter, and probably the most difficult thing to do. As Mead explains,

... Self-consciousness and social-consciousness are co­ extensive. ... the self is something which has a development, it is not initially there at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity, develops in the given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that process. Self- consciousness develops and emerges in three evolutionary stages. First is the stage of imitative acts, second is the play stage and the third is the game stage. ... the third and final stage that which Mead calls the game stage ... when the child has developed the capacity to 'take the role of the others', not just of one another and not just of one role, but he is able to assume the attitudes of several people comprising his social group all at one time. ... he can enter into human interaction because he can 'imagine' the role of others.^

Richard as Max, as the lover, or as a husband is both subject and object to himself, that is, he can begin to judge himself as an other man would. Sarah too can gain an insight into her own behaviour in a particular situation by looking at herself in a new role. In this rather complicated manoeuvre, there are various degrees of understanding 278 and consciousness of Self. Though this is not obvious and clearly visible, it is certainly true that Richard and Sarah emerge into greater self-awareness as well as intersubjective awareness during the course of their role-playing or role-taking. Their reflective consciousness looks at various ways of social sanction, until they lose themselves in the range of choices and the extent of freedom that contemporary society has to offer to rebellious and deviant individuals.

Sarah and Richard look for new self-images and self-conceptions because the act of seeking for alternatives is itself a way of discovering their hidden selves and of moving away from the official role towards greater freedom, towards various deviant definitions and towards a multiplicity of selves. They also step into roles as they go along, taking their cue partly from each other's conceptions of themselves and partly from the flip side to their own actual roles in society. The form of communication they adopt with each other is a discourse of Otherness, exciting because it is strange, breaking known codes and barriers, to reach towards the unpredictable in etiquette and social gesture. The Lover is a play that constitutes a constant evolution towards enhanced self-consciousness through self-reflexivity and social consciousness of Otherness.

In the next two plays, that is. The Homecomino"^ and Tea Partv"^ the characters pursue change relentlessly and often distort social roles with defiance to explicitly re-define their lives. The discourse of characters is externalised, and blatantly assertive in its unorthodoxy and definace of social norms and social control. The discursive conflict-resolutions of The Lover or Nioht School are left far behind, as the drama played out is shamelessly demonstrative and singularly bold in its disregard for boundaries, whether social or cultural. There is absolutely no fear here, 279

of falling between the social fences that they seek to jump. The Homecoming is really a homecoming for the social attitudes that are partially defined through the earlier plays. This play gathers up, as it were, the discourse of characters through a rich inter-textual self- reflexivity that echoes and re-echoes the main concerns of the Pinterian canon as a whole. At the beginning of this chapter it was stated that unsuccessful socialisation or the inability to internalise the contingent, changing reality leads to a rupture or imbalance between subjective and objective reality. In the two plays under consideration here, there is a narrowing of the imbalance between subjective and objective reality as the characters make transitions with dexterity and an air of defiance, often flouting social norms. The entire struggle takes place entirely in the open battle-ground between characters who have differences in cultural backgrounds and social location. The sexual dialectic of The Homecoming is confusing and shocking and the play can, and does, disorient most readers. Ruth, the protagonist of the play, for instance, is more at home with the cultural illiterates like Sam, Lenny and Joey rather than with Teddy, the professor and philosopher who Pinter believed was the "villain" of the play, and in the words of Peter Hall, director of the play, "the biggest bastard of the lot."^ John Orr also comments on the segregation of the characters on class lines:

... The Homecoming as return to origin has another overlapping dimension. It is a return to class origins. The play contains a sharp dissection of class power but does not clearly fit into any single class milieu. It is poised uneasily on the edge of the working class metropolis, divided between the academic couple with children who have moved up and about and the kin who have stayed behind. It walks the wire, taut and poised, a supreme balancing act.^ 280

The play starts as many other Pinter plays do, quietly, unobtrusively with an irrelevant question and an unresponsive situation; the relationships and situations within the all-male household become quite clear as various encounters throw up different kinds of understanding and disagreements between the inhabitants of the house. Fundamentally, the patriarch of the family demands respect, love and obedience - controversial values in a household where the elders compete vAih the sons to attract sexual favours from the daughter-in- law. She, in turn is quite willing, provided it suits her convenience. The play thus deconstructs all conventional ties, values, emotions, interpretations and responses ruthlessly, vaguely hinting that where living is difficult, only the fittest will survive.

According to Orr, The Homecomina remains Pinter's most powerful play because it ends on a note of unexpected transformation, neither restoring the status quo nor destroying it in a predictable way. This is mostly due to Ruth, who can "be" any of the things she wants to be. The "role she creates for herself is to enact roles."^^ She may have replaced Jessie but she has also scrambled the roles of kinship into total confusion. The father-in law, the husband and the two brothers - all desire her and yet she has out-manoeuvred them all. While meaningful social change is an important component of all the plays discussed in chapter three, it is more radically so in this play.

The complete alteration of ordinary, everyday, reality and the relationships associated with such reality is the main reason of shock in the play. Explicitly, it is the sexual politics of the play that works against social conventions introducing in its place an atmosphere of unpredictability and role-reversals as the abiding principles of the play. Ruth, the main player, takes pleasure in destroying the typified role of 281 the mother, woman and wife. She moves away from the stereotype towards deviant definitions which challenge the bold manoeuvres of the all-male household, leading to a contest for power especially sexual power through commercial transaction and mutual benefit.

The interesting development in this play is that marginal existents - like Lenny (a pimp), Sam and Max - all of whom live by deviant definitions, form a sub-group with a definite affinity among themselves and even a neighbourhood to grow roots in. Ruth has, as she says, memories of this neighbourhood and is perfectly at home among the butcher, chauffeur and pimp. The odd man out over here is Teddy, who has re- socialised himself successfully into the life of the American university where he lives. Ruth though a mother of two children has remained an outsider, unable to internalise the social life at the American university campus where she has lived with Teddy.

Ruth's self-definitions are marked by a will to power achieved through self-control and self-judgement. For instance, she is erotic, but cool; passive yet alert; co-operative though calculatingly so; matriarchal and sensual, victorious yet circumscribed - finally an image of total self- possession but probably incomplete and unfulfilled as an individual, living as she has been with a man who has no roots, few choices and no convictions. For Ruth, a return to the neighbourhood she once knew also means fraternising with the likes of Sam, Joey and Lenny, who gratefully acknowledge her presence through the strange sharing they enter into after the boasting and bombast of male rivalry. In turn, she accepts the invitation they extend to her by staying on, while Teddy decides to leave. 282

Ruth literally makes the world of the play go round as she can judge and respond with alacrity. She has a will and control which ultimately put her in an advantageous position vis-a-vis the others who are all fighting loosing battles because of their inability to play their games and roles with cool detachment. Suppression of feelings and the ability to scatter an opponents energies by prevarication, oblique behaviour and plain unrecognition of status, value or physical presence can ultimately demoralise and enrage the opponent. Violent outbursts can ensure only momentary success, whereas strategy can define a v^nner. These co-ordinates of role-playing are obvious as soon as the play opens.

In the first act, the relationship between father and son is a pattern of behaviour that is repeated time and again, being replicated in all other relationships throughout the play. In the opening scene, when Max asserts his authority, the discourse is stereotypically a patriarchal discourse demanding respect, obedience, and attention. When his expectations are belied there is disapproval and vociferous protest. Any violation of the superficial familial discourse and the transgression of filial rights and obligations is strongly resisted by Max, the father and becomes an occasion for a showdown between father and sons - a showdown that soon looks like an ineffectual ritual for registering protest. The signals right from the beginning of the play are in favour of violation, aggression, and an unveiled cynicism for conventional values, norms and mannerisms. The all-male household is comfortable, however, having defined its own acts of survival - economic, social and cultural. The primary group, namely the father, the mother, and the uncle are the legitimising agents and make up the plausibility structures that enable the next generation to carry out without regret or constraint the unlawful transactions that the previous generation has already 283

institutionalised for them. The most striking feature of the three brothers is their ability to seize opportunities without any considerations whatever for propriety, legitimacy, custom and convention. This is a world of aggressive individualism; a Goffmanian scenario where collusion rather than co-operation is the norm. Surprisingly enough, Max the lecherous old father, is both violator and seeker of rights and is in this sense reminiscent of the old father of O'Neill's Desire Under The Elms. The opening scene establishes the pattern for the odd mix of desires and devotions among the kith and kin of the play:

Evening. LENNY is sitting on the sofa with a newspaper, a pencil in his hand. He wears a dark suit. He makes occasional marks on the back page. MAX comes in, from the direction of the kitchen. He goes to sideboard, opens top drawer, rummages in it, closes it, He wears an old cardigan and a cap, and carries a stick. He walks downstage, stands, looks about the room. MAX. What have you done with the scissors? Pause. Did you hear me? I want to cut something out of the paper. LENNY. I'm reading the paper. MAX. Not that paper. I haven't even read that paper. I'm talking about last Sunday's paper. I was just having a look at it in the kitchen. Pause. Do you hear what I'm saying? I'm talking to you! Where's the scissors? LENNY, {looking up, quietly). Why don't you shut up, you daft prat? 284

MAX lifts his stick and points it at him. MAX. Don't you talk to me like that. I'm warning you. He sits in large armchair. There's an advertisement in the paper about flannel vests. Cut price. Navy surplus. I could do with a few of them. Pause. I think I'll have a fag. Give me a fag. Pause. I just asked you to give me a cigarette. Pause. Look what I'm lumbered with. He takes a crumpled cigarette from his pocket. I'm getting old, my word of honour. He lights it. You think I wasn't a tear away? 1 could have taken care of you, twice over I'm still strong. You ask your Uncle Sam what I was. But at the same time I always had a kind heart. Always. Pause. I used to knock about with a man called MacGregor. I called him Mac. You remember Mac? Eh? Pause. Huhh! We were two of the worst hated men in the West end of London. I tell you, I still got the scars. We'd walk into a place, the whole room'd stand up, they'd make way to let us pass. You never heard such silence. Mind you, he was a big man, he was over six foot tall. His family were all MacGregors, they came all the way from Aberdeen, but he was the only one they called Mac. Pause. 285

He was very fond of your mother, Mac was. Very fond. He always had a good word for her. Pause. Mind you, she wasn't a bad woman. Even though it made me sick to look at her rotten stinking face, she wasn't such a bad bitch. I gave her the best bleeding years of my life, anyway. LENNY. Plug it, will you, you stupid sod, I'm trying to read the paper. MAX. Listen! I'll chop your spine off, you talk to me like that! You understand? Talking to your lousy filthy father like that!

LENNY. I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Pause. Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs. MAX. If you don't like it get out. LENNY. I'm going out. I'm going to buy myself a proper dinner. MAX. Well, get out! What are you waiting for? LENNY looks at him. LENNY. What did you say? MAX. I said shove off out of it, that's what I said. LENNY. You'll go before me. Dad, if you talk to me in that tone of voice MAX. Will I, you bitch? MAX grips his stick. LENNY. Oh, Daddy, your'e not going to use your stick on me, are you? Eh? Don't use your stick on me Daddy. No, please. It wasn't my fault, it was one of the others. I haven't done 286

anything wrong. Dad, honest. Don't clout me with that stick, Dad. Silence. MAX sits tiunched. LENNY reads the paper. SAM comes in the front door He wears a chauffeur's uniform. He hangs his hat on a hook in the hall and comes into the room. He goes to a chair, sits in it and sighs. Hullo, Uncle Sam. (7-11)

Max sits hunched after the altercation, exhausted and probably contemplative, while Lenny puts the aggression behind him to welcome his uncle. The almost instantaneous shift in frames and discourses is indicative of the fact that the characters regularly traverse such diverse grounds and emotions. Role-playing complete with voice modulations and mime is especially evident in this play. Most Pinter plays come alive due to a variety of voices and tones within the course of even a few lines. Besides, improvisation, fabrication of circumstance and occasion for "doing as one likes," is another feature that carries through the "actionless" drama of Pinter. As is often the case in life, the really active and significant moments are few and far between; for the most part life is lived out in repetitious routines that do not really constitute a happening. In the drama of Pinter these routines are given a new turn as the characters struggle for and contemplate change; often the change is tantamount to a small revolution in the individual's life. Pinter highlights these moments by indicating a change in the type of discourse and consequent relationship. In the present play there is plenty of action in comparison with other plays. This play is certainly very quick in its changing situations. It has a fast-fonA/ard track which, when it ends, leaves one quite uneasy and shaken. 287

In the first section quoted above, the certain tension between father and son erupts because the old man constantly seeks attention and appreciation; he is unwilling to let the next generation perform the traditional Freudian kill in order to grow into manhood and maturity. He casts his shadow over them ensuring that heredity will dictate life and repeat history. His discourse is self-directed and vain. It is a discourse of self-assertion, of preposterousness, aggression and self-revelation. Through this characteristic discourse Max appears to be unreasonable and needlessly piqued by the temerity of his son. Lenny responds with total contempt, and when Max has lost the teasing game by losing his temper and showing his frustration, Lenny decides to call a truce by changing an insulting, ribald, swearing discourse into one of baby talk and endearment, taking the old man back to a position of seething withdrawal. This change of discourse frame further changes to one of pleasant sociability on the uncle's entry. Even in the most violent of situations, effective discoursal strategies can bring the desired change though temporarily. In fact, this is one of the very important devices of the play. At crucially important junctures in a relationship, negotiation or struggle, the character often tries to either extricate himself or to diffuse the situation in order to deceive and detract his opponent from imminent danger so that the final blow may be sharper and more unnerving. On the other hand, the potential victim can shift his position and hold status quo by talking his way through. At such moments the movement of the play and the turn of events is unpredictable, depending on the degree of ingenuity and role-playing involved in the discourse of characters.

Unpredictability, arising out of fluctuating relationships is a special feature of The Homecoming and Tea Party, plays that radically suggest that dass-ohgins can interfere with the stability of upwardly mobile individuals. Ruth can begin to evolve a satisfying role and identity for 288 herself only when she returns to the neighbourhood where she spent her early life. Similarly, Disson can find solace in his relationship with Wendy because presumably they both belong to the same social class even though Disson is up and coming economically. Though Ruth is a mother of three children and lives a comfortable life with Teddy on an American campus, she is plainly dissatisfied with what she describes as the sterility of intellectual life with Teddy who is a professor of philosophy. The play discusses the philosopher's definition of reality, when Lenny, Teddy's brother, begins to talk of perception, perspective and personal versus objective definitions of reality. For Teddy his own family - where the father a butcher, the uncle a taxi-driver and the brother a pimp, are radically opposed to any intellectual or theoretical approach to reality - is a good example of a sensual existence ("You're in things, not out of them"). While Ruth mocks at his critical approach to reality ("has your family read your critical essays?"). Lenny, and Joey his younger brother, completely defeat his aspirations, if any, as they succeed in emotionally aligning themselves with Ruth, who they propose, should remain behind with the all-male family while Teddy packs to return "home" to America.

The most blatantly matter-of-fact arrangement is, however, that Ruth herself will service the father and the brothers. She has them all on their knees begging for her favours, while she decides to be a "tease" who will not go "the whole hog" unless they conduct themselves according to her explicit instructions. Simon Trussler, quite predictably shocked by the openly physical scenes of aggression, seduction and illicit relationship, condemns the overtures of the play by comparing it with pornography: 289

... but The Homecoming is his only work by which I have felt myself actually soiled and diminished. If a work is pornographic because it toys with the most easily manipulated human emotions - those of sex and (more especially) violence - without pausing to relate cause and effect then The Homecoming can even be said to fall into such a category....°^

It is indeed true that The Homecoming is more blatantly shocking than the plays that precede it, yet it is by no means completely different in its discourse of characters. Davies, Aston, Richard, Walter and Solto also imagine themselves in strange encounters and use a sexual discourse of vulgar innuendo and-perversion, but in this play Ruth seems to be a willing partner though it is not at all clear whether or not she will actually live up to the expectations of the men around her. There is, as has been stated, less visible conflict within the characters' apprehension of reality, because almost all the characters express their subjective responses without a mask, feeling no compulsion whatever to hide identities and roles that they want to slip into. There is little attempt to be sociable or to live up to social moralities alien to their psyches. The only character who is ambiguous is Teddy, who seems to accept the general verdict without much protest. Teddy has probably internalised the world of intellectuality so that the gap between him and his family appears as a highly offensive silence on his part, a silence that makes him look like the villain of the play. The contrast between his world of ideas and the explicitly sensual existence of the family leaves little common ground for negotiation and dialogue.

These two worlds of discourse are completely alien to each other. Sam, Max, Lenny and Joey live on the edge of the underworld, and are 290

real kith and kin to Ruth who has been a "model for the body" and is therefore vastly at home with this group. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the play is not that Teddy decides to leave without much fuss, but that the whole process of seduction is candied on before his very eyes without any attempt at all to assuage his feelings or to recognise his rights. Just like Richard re-visits objective social reality after ten long years of subjective play-acting, in the same way Ruth re-traverses another path after living up to her allotted social pretense on an American campus. There is complete discrepancy here between subjective need and objective role. Ruth's secondary socialisation into the world of mother, wife and prosperous middle-class security irks her as her primary socialisaton into the English neighbourhood of disreputable characters is too strong to let any reality grow on her. Ruth's significant others are, then, Teddy's family, and her class- compatriots rather than the alien others on an American campus.

Tea Party is yet another play that connects identity and Self with class origins and roots. Disson, the owner of a fast-growing firm manufacturing plumbing goods, is at odds with his newly wedded upper- class wife and brother-in-law but more at home with his secretary Wendy, who can ease his loneliness because he experiences a sort of social affinity with her. Like Teddy in The Homecomina. Disson too is a stranger to his own family, and soon feels rejected by his two sons (according to Martin Esslin, because of their public school upbringing), who show more affinity for their "uncle" Willy and are influenced by him, rather than by their own father. In their mannerisms, interests and views, their step-mother's brother is their role-model and they mix more easily with him. They also align themselves more strongly with their new step-mother, Disson's wife, leading to a feeling of insecurity on the part of Disson. This play, as also The Homecoming, gains from 291

intertextuality, because the connection between personal and professional life is strongly indicated in both the plays. This connection between failure in personal and professional life also gains in meaning from the echoes of the earlier plays discussed in this chapter.

Social structures such as family and class are actually nothing but demonstrations of specific interactions among individuals. And it is only through such sociability that macro structures in society can exist. It is interesting, therefore, to explore Disson's relationships and attitudes because it is through these that the entire dynamics of social dependence begins to unravel. Though Disson is a self-made man and a highly successful businessman, he realises fully the principle of interdependence and mutual need in the web of human relationships around him. Like Edward in A Slight Ache and the violent but vulnerable characters of The Homecoming. Disson is emotionally quite weak. His dependence upon human interaction makes him liable to exploitation by those he is close to.

This is probably the reason why the first decision he takes after his marriage is to align his wife's brother to himself through business ties. While ohentating his brother-in-law, Willy as a business partner he attempts to articulate his position vis-a-vis others. He articulates the ideology through which he maintains the fragile balance between centre and periphery, between authority and sociability, between work and responsibility:

Now, dependence isn't a word I would use lightly, but I will use it and I don't regard it as a weakness. To understand the meaning of the term dependence is to understand that one's powers are limited and that to live with others is not only 292

sensible but the only way work can be done and diligently achieved. Nothing is more sterile or lamentable than the man content to live with himself. I've always made it my business to be on the most direct possible terms with the members of my staff and the body of my business associates. And by my example opinions are declared freely, without shame or deception. It seems to me essential that we cultivate the ability to operate lucidly upon our problems and therefore be in a position to solve them ... I don't play about at the periphery of matters I go right to the centre ... If you make a plum pudding what do you do with it? You don't shove it up on a shelf. You stick a knife into it and eat it. Everything has a function. In other words, if we're to work together we must appreciate that interdependence is the key word, that it's your job to understand me and mine to understand you. (19)

Though Disson speaks with the assurance of a successful man and though he has a vision and an agenda, he soon flounders because ironically, he carries severe doubts and complexes within his consciousness and is plagued by uncertainties that finally ensure his complete collapse both physically and mentally. On his honeymoon Disson needs to be reassured by his wife like a child and this desire to be constantly acknowledged and accepted is repeatedly articulated by Disson probably because in the ultimate assessment he finds himself more and more isolated within his own household as well as in his office:

DISSON. Have you ever been happier? With any other man? DIANA. Never. Pause. 293

DISSON. I make you happy, don't I? Happier than you've ever been ... with any other man. DIANA. Yes. You do. Pause Yes. Silence. (16)

While Disson plays highly juvenile and bizarre games with his secretary Wendy (reminiscent of The Birthday Party), his entire web of relationships is falling apart. Ironically, Wendy, his two sons, his wife and Willy begin to relate more intimately to each other than to him. Disson is suspicious and possessive because he is insecure while his wife is poised and self-assured. She solves problems through her tact and assured confidence unlike Disson who turns violent whenever a problem arises. For instance, she approaches the problem of Disson's growing intimacy with his secretary by communicating more purposefully with Wendy. Instead of reacting to Disson's attentions to her, she includes the young girl in her family circle, thereby isolating Disson who begins to lose his confidence, his health and consequently his business acumen.

Though the play's struggles are played out tactfully and guardedly, these are intense and meaningful. Disson cannot adjust deftly to the changes taking place in his personal life, while his wife, sons and brother-in-law do so cleverly and without much effort. Willy, for instance, facilitates the entry of his sister into Disson's closed official interior and Diana manages to build a rapport with the sons and the secretary - insiders whom Disson expects to be loyal to him rather than to her. The overt signs of the struggle as well as Disson's psychological weakness are dramatically and skillfully conveyed through a discourse 294

that uses commonplace settings and casual encounters, ordinary remarks and habitual gestures, as interaction and technique. The silence and evasion of the family circle in Disson's presence, exchange of meaningful glances between the boys, scenes of intimacy between step-mother, sons and uncle - these are the silent discourses of a well- knit group that isolate Disson completely through several encounters.

One such occasion is Disson's tennis game with his brother-in-law Willy. The sons, Tom and John, posted as referees and observers, perform a choral function providing an insight into the family re­ groupings which have isolated Disson, leaving him more and more lonely. During the rally the boys cheer their uncle rather than their own father, and finally Disson, under psychological strain, emerges a loser, a man without either supporters or the comfort of victory behind him. Disson's steady deterioration is a result of his inability to accept the presence of another centre of power as his wife and brother-in-law establish links within his domestic and work environment. This theme of adjustment is also portrayed through Disson's inability to adjust his physical vision and his perspective, leading to a blindness that is purely psychological, as the doctor cannot detect any defects in his eyes.

The dialectic between individual and society is complex because whatever is learnt in experience has to be internalised constantly. While old realities need to be modified to fall in line with one's evolving present, one's subjective emotions, feelings and intentions have to be objectified through one's discourse in everyday life, through common relationships and interactions. Though Disson can theorise about the need for understanding the principles of mutual dependence and integrity he cannot in effect, put them into practice. Disson's discourse 295

of business acumen and efficiency does not mean anything to the significant others who surround him. Soon he begins to adopt a discourse of suspicion and vulnerability which further alienates him and ends in complete silence. The sons are probably smarter in social interaction in their own way even though they are not as experienced as he is. They are sincere and poised as they relate to their uncle and step mother with the assurance of well-adjusted individuals. Diana's familial discourse is also marked by sincerity and complete transparency posing a contrast to Disson's forced and halting interactions:

DIANA. Do you miss your mother? JOHN. We didn't know her very well. We were very young when she died. DIANA. Your father has looked after you and brought you up very well. JOHN. Oh, thank you. He'll be pleased to hear that. DIANA. I've told him. JOHN. What did he say? DIANA. He was pleased I thought so. You mean a great deal to him. JOHN. Children seem to mean a great deal to their parents, I've noticed. Though I've often wondered what 'a great deal' means. TOM. I've often wondered what 'mean' means. DIANA. Aren't you proud of your father's achievements? JOHN. We are. I should say we are Pause. DIANA. And now that your father has married again ... has the change in your life affected you very much? JOHN. What change? 296

DIANA. Living with me. JOHN. Ah. Well, I think there definitely is an adjustment to be made. Wouldn't you say that Tom? DIANA. Of course there is. But would you say it's an easy adjustment to make or difficult? JOHN. Well, it really all depends on how good you are at making adjustments, We're very good at making adjustments, aren't we, Tom? The front door slams. DIANA and THE TWINS look down at their books. DISSON comes in. They all look up, smile. DilSSON. Hullo. They all smile genially at him DISSON looks quickly from one to the other (21)

The scene quoted above clearly shows that Disson is now the "outsider" inside his own home. His wife and children put up a polite impersonal "front" to receive him into the house though behind his back they discuss intimate matters quite freely. Disson senses this distance and artificiality in their relations with him and becomes more and more dependent upon Wendy his secretary for emotional support. But Disson is himself partly responsible for this state of affairs. He insists on segregating his professional and personal life to the extent that his wife who wants to help him at the work place is offended by his strange secrecy and irrational moods. Though Disson speaks of transparency in interpersonal relationships he is hardly forthcoming in his commitments to his wife and his partner Willy.

The struggle is out in the open after a while and Diana has an upper hand because she has Wendy too on her side. Wendy, while inviting 297

Disson's attentions, also ensures that she is establishing a relationship with the second line of management that threatens to take over the business interests and assets of Disson. Like the other plays of this chapter, professional and private life, public and personal identity are interactive and intimately connected. Diana introduces this topic at the dinner table and makes suggestive remarks that finally unnerve Disson, just as they are intended to. Disson loses out in the fierce struggle that is hardly visible except through a deliberately exaggerated and suggestive discourse made up of innuendo and ironic reversal:

WILLY. Oh, she's of inestimable value to the firm, wouldn't you say Robert? DISSON. Oh yes. DIANA. I mean for someone who's not ... actually ... part of us ... I mean, an outsider ... to give such devotion and willingness to the job, as she does ... well, it's remarkable. We were very lucky to find her. DISSON. I found her actually. WILLY. You found me too old boy, DIANA, (laughing). And me. Pause. She's of course so completely trustworthy, and so very persuasive, on the telephone. I've heard her once or twice when the door's been open ... once or twice. WILLY. Oh, splendid girl all round. DISSON. She's not so bloody marvellous. Pause. They look at him She's all right, she's all right but she's not so bloody marvellous. (27) 298

Though Diana and Willy are adept at driving home their point about Wendy, they are smart enough to do so in a disarming manner, which puts Disson in a tight spot. In the world of the Pinter-play, loss of self- control always leads to failure in the ensuing struggle, while nonchalance and detachment leads to certain victory. Disson is already on a weak wicket when he exhibits vehemence and irritation to deny a charge. Soon Disson is caught in his own logic and cornered to the extent that he cannot extricate himself without losing face:

DIANA. Well, perhaps not quite as accomplished as I am, no. Do you think I'm a good private secretary, Willy? WILLY. First rate. Pause. They eat and drink. DISSON. I don't think it's a good idea for you to work. DIANA. Me? Why not? I love it. DISSON. I never see you. If you were at home I could take the occasional afternoon off... to see you. As it is 1 never see you. In day-time. DIANA. You mean I'm so near and yet so far? Pause. DISSON. Yes. DIANA. Would you prefer me to your secretary? DISSON. No, no, of course not. That wouldn't work at all. Pause WILLY. But we do all meet at lunch-time. We meet in the evening. DISSON looks at him. DIANA. But I like working. You wouldn't want me to work for someone else, would you, somewhere else? 299

DISSON. I certainly wouldn't. You know what Wendy told me, don't' you? DIANA. What? DISSON. She told me her last employer was always touching her WILLY. No? DISSON. Always. Touching her. DIANA. Her body, you mean? DISSON. What else? Pause. DIANA. Well, if we're to take it that that's the general practice I think it's safer to stay in the family, don't you? Mind you they might not want to touch me in the way they wanted to touch her. Pause But Robert, you must understand that I not only want to be your wife but also your employee. I'm not embarrassing you, am I Willy? WILLY. No, of course you're not. DIANA. Because by being your employee I can help to further your interests, our interests. That's what I want to do. And so does Willy don't you? (28-29)

Diana and Willy try their best to expose Disson's relationship with Wendy and to substitute her, but Disson resists because he can relate to Wendy the way he cannot with his own folks at home. When Willy "borrows" Wendy for five minutes because his own secretary is unwell, there is a crisis which is resolved just short of a violent altercation because Disson peeps through the keyhole while Diana, Willy and Wendy laugh and talk together. It is clear that Disson's relationship with 300

his wife is distant, formal and lukewarm; but valuable only because she is an asset to his emerging upper-class status. He tells Wendy that he is lonely and just before his first wedding anniversary he begins to have blackouts which are probably symptomatic of his growing sense of loss and weakness, as also his inability to establish a satisfying relationship with his wife. Disson's meeting with his friend and eye-specialist is significant because it takes him back to the moment of his wedding and the failure of his "best man" to make a speech in his honour. Willy who takes over the task actually speaks only about his own family and his sister's talents instead of introducing the groom. Willy's speech gives the impression that the groom's "good luck" in having won her over is probably his only recommendation. Willy promotes his sister and she in turn promotes his interests. While Disson cannot win him over to his side even with the position he gives him in his business organisation, Diana, on the other hand, manages to win over Disson's sons as well as Wendy to her side, persuading her to accompany the family during their holiday in Spain. Disson in his loneliness can appeal for help either to Disley his old friend or to Wendy. This state of affairs is more a result of Disson's own fears and doubts rather than the attitude of others towards him. When Disson tells Disley that he is quite happy, he does so in a manner that proves exactly the opposite of what he says. His discourse of irony and betrayal exposes his mental state, and takes him deeper into his own shell, preventing a wider social interaction:

DISSON. Look. Listen, You're my oldest friend. You were going to be the best man at my wedding DISLEY. That's right. DISSON. You wrote a wonderful speech in my honour. DISLEY. Yes DISSON. But you were ill. You had to opt out 301

DISLEY. That's right. Pause DISSON. Help me. Pause. DISLEY. Who made the speech? Your brother-in-law wasn't it? DISSON. I don't want you to think I'm not a happy man. (39)

Disson has to socialise himself into a rapidly changing environment as well as the upwardly-mobile class structure that he is moving into as a result of his business successes. His past begins to look dim within this changing scenario and the entire social scene appears as a stage where the infinite roles to be played determine success or failure. A man without a past, without roots and without friends is a man who does not have the necessary plausibility structures to affirm his definition of truth and reality. When Disson is drunk and sitting down with his family circle, this is what emerges, leading to another altercation which dies down as Willy steps in to assuage Disson's feelings:

DISSON'S house. Sitting-room. Evening. DISSON. Tell me about the place where you were born. Where you played at being brother and sister. WILLY. We didn't have to play at being brother and sister. We were brother and sister. DIANA. Stop drinking. DISSON. Drinking? You call this drinking? This? i used to down eleven or nine pints a night! Eleven or nine pints! Every night of the stinking week! Me and the boys! The boys and me! I'd break any man's hand for ... for playing me false. 302

That was before I became a skilled craftsman. That was before ... He falls silent, sits. WILLY. Sunderly was beautiful. DISSON. I know. WILLY. And now it's gone, for ever. DISSON. I never got there. DISSON stands, goes to get a drink. He turns from drinks table. What are you whispering about ? Do you think I don't hear? Think I don't see? I've got my memories, too long before this. (39-40)

This scene, as well as the scene of Disson's anniversary in Tea Party, are occasions that highlight Disson's consciousness and his point of view, connecting the style of his discourse of blame and dissatisfaction to his state of mind. It becomes clear that Disson is increasingly suspicious of the people who are closest to him. He argues with his wife when he is drunk, accusing her of marrying him for an ulterior purpose without any love or admiration for his intrinsic qualities. She denies the charge, only to elicit further accusations from Disson. Willy is more successful in dealing with him and can somehow calm him down, but Diana fails completely. Disson opts out of a holiday with his family, mainly because he is alienated from his wife who cannot give him the excessive attention he craves and which Wendy is willing to give him as she can play games with him just like Lulu does with Stanley in The Birthday Partv. Like Meg and Lulu, Wendy too is an undignified, almost mindless woman who encourages Disson to treat her like an object of fun and pleasure because she enjoys playing all the petty games that he devises. Her utility in the office is limited but she becomes a valuable 303 commodity because Diana tries to win her over to her side in a struggle for supremacy. In the last scene of the play it is by no means clear whether or not Disson is going to recover from his mental trauma and adjust to the increasing social responsibilities and obligations of his life.

Like in The Birthdav Partv. the central scene of this play is also a social get-together, an occasion that is fraught with cultural significance in the world of the Pinter-play. Rituals of social etiquette are part of the cumulative Pinterian discourse on role and identity. These are moments of sociability and role playing that provide deep insights into the social stratifications and conflicts of the characters. In this play the actual tea party brings all the simmering hostilities to a focus. Disson sits with a bandage around his eyes so that the sounds and movements of the party can only be felt by him and interpreted according to his pre­ conceived notions about the people who are gathered around him. The scene provides perspectives that together suggest the principle of interdependence spelt out by Disson at the beginning of the play. Each group of characters is in some subtle way connected to the other through his/her relationship with Disson. The segregation of the sexes according to attitudes, interests and compatibility is quite obvious here. The two ladies who can speak of expensive holidays and luxurious life­ styles and related matters of interest expose their vanity through a discourse of pointless chatter and deliberate ostentation. Diana, Mrs Disley and Wendy discuss sun-tan lotions while Disson sits alone weighed down by his own silent discourse of fear, doubt, isolation and loneliness. His identity, dependent as it is upon the significant others of his life - wife, children and intimate friends - begins to disintegrate and crumble. His consciousness plays out the drama of conspiracy and social hypocrisy silently and intensely till he collapses from his chair. The old parents sit quietly, siighty over-awed by the gathering but 304

unable to communicate intimately with anyone. The two young boys relate to their uncle Willy, their discourse being dominated by a male- camaraderie cemented together by the concepts of contest, sport and victory. While Willy is fully integrated within the social circle, Disson's mental discourse of conspiracy and fear can construct the relationship between Willy, Diana and Wendy as one of incest and illegitimate sexual sharing. He envisions Willy with the two women on either side, his arms around them and obviously in sexual intimacy with both. This is quite in keeping with Disson's suggestion earlier in the play that Willy and Diana are only "playing at brother and sister." The hypocrisy of his own role-playing with Wendy and his altered role within the home leads Disson to imagine the worst about other people too. There is a distinct suggestion in the play that Diana and Willy have an incestuous relationship, as Diana is careful to apologise to Willy when she discusses intimate matters with her husband and Disson's outburst suggests this quite clearly:

DIANA, (standing). Robert. Pause. Come to bed. DISSON. You can say that, in front of him? DIANA. Please. DISSON. In front of him? He goes to her Why did you marry me? DIANA. I admired you. You were so positive. DISSON. You loved me. DIANA. You were kind. DISSON. You loved me for that? 305

DIANA. I found you admirable in your dignity of mind, your surety of purpose, your will, the strength your achievements had given you - DISSON. And you adored me for it? WILLY, (to DISSON) can I have a phvate word with you? DISSON. You adored me for it? Pause. DIANA. You know I did WILLY. Can I have a private word with, you old chap? {To DIANA) Please. DIANA goes out of the room. (41)

Though Disson is upset with both Diana and Willy, he decides to patch up with him but not with Diana. In The Lover Richard speaks of meeting his wife's lover because as he puts it, "we are both men, whereas you are just a bloody woman." Disson upholds male camaraderie too, even in his weakest moments. The play proceeds through ritual agreements between Willy and Disson while the relationship each has with Diana or Wendy is outside of this mutual understanding. Disson makes Willy his equal by offering him a full share in his business and by giving him responsibilities within the firm - responsibilities that he is unwilling to give to Diana even though she is eager to share in the process of running the firm. When the play begins, Disson talks down to Willy as an employer whereas when the play ends he treats him as an equal partner probably because he realises that a shift in power, a devolution of authority is imminent. Disson, at the end of the play is completely mute - a far cry from the man who initiates Willy into the business ethic of his company at the beginning of the play. Like Edward or Stanley, the silence of Disson is an indication that his powers both physical and otherwise have been completely destroyed with self-doubt and loss of 306

faith in his own abilities. In A Slight Ache Edward tells the silent Matchseller about his humble past and his position at the time he married Flora because these memories are somehow dominating his consciousness. Disson also goes back to his recent as well as more remote past repeatedly in order to reassure himself. In the ultimate assessment of Self a certain integration between past and present is necessary as this gives the individual a sense of continuity and well- being.

The play provides striking contrasts between Disson's complacent self- regard at the beginning of the play and his deterioration at the end. The play is explicitly concerned with the problems of adjustment in one's social relationships and the role- of Self, mind and consciousness in determining the nature of this interaction. The entire play is a dramatisation of what Disson tells Willy at the beginning of the play: that he conceives of his own role within the determinants of a social dynamic that takes into consideration Self, consciousness. Otherness and society - categories that Mead speaks of as constituting the shifting relationships of social interdependence.®^ The play shov^ that the process of evolution is complex and unpredictable in spite of the individual's attempts at maintaining a balance between his life, his consciousness and the Other. Disson's prescription for life sounds ironic in view of the disaster that overtakes him. The words so menacingly categorical provide a fine comment on what life can never be. Disson does not like "fuzziness" which in reality is the very attribute that defines life's uncertainties:

DISSON. I think I should explain to you the sort of man I am. I'm a thorough man. I like things to be done and done well. I don't like dithering. I don't like indulgence. I don't like self- 307

doubt. I don't like fuzziness. I like clarity. Clear intention. Precise execution. Black or white? ... But I've no patience with conceit and self-regard. A man's job is to assess his powers coolly and correctly and equally the powers of others. Having done this, he can proceed to establish a balanced and reasonable relationship his fellows. In my view, living is a matter of active and willing participation. So is work ... (19)

Disson, at the end of the play, can assess neither his own powers nor those of others. He is completely consumed by "self-doubt" and self- pity. The play ends with Disson in a position of weakness vis-a-vis Willy and Diana. They patronise him and he is dependent upon their goodwill. Positions of power shift radically in this play as they do in several other plays discussed in this chapter. Plot and development of the action is replaced here by status positions and changing relationships based upon the power equations of the play. Tea Partv thus incorporates a complex dialectic that defies easy formulation as it continues to evolve beyond the confines of the play.

The plays of this chapter examine man-woman relationships through different situations, but even here the main theme is the gap between subjective fantasy and objective reality. At the beginning of the play, Disson, like the family of Pinterian males, possesses a superiority complex and is stirred by the idea of carrying on a liaison with Wendy, even though he is soon to be married. But It would be quite injudicious to imagine that Pinterian males from Davies in The Caretaker to Richard in The Lover are mere uncritical portraits of male ideology, set up only to demolish the idea of gender equality. On the contrary, these male-sexists are mercilessly exposed through a parodic deconstruction of their sleazy, overbearing discourse. 308

In A Night Out and Niaht School, the emerging pattern of roles point to the necessity of segregation of roles as well as to the strategy of role- distance in the lives of the characters. However the plays remain incomplete pictures of characters who are still moving towards greater self-awareness and maturity as the plays close. The social structure is made up of several individuals in search of greater mobility and new definitions of Self.

The complex dialectic between individual and social structure is quite apparent in these plays. Walter, inspite of his good intentions, reverts to his "home truths" as his socialisation into the seedy world of criminality has a hold upon his consciousness and he judges Sally from a radically abnormal point of view within which everyone is suspect. Sally, attempting to move away from the night world of club life, fails as Walter refuses to give her a chance. Disson and Ruth are also bound to their pasts, their memories. In the overall perspective provided by these plays it appears that the gap between subjective and objective definitions of Self can never be bridged.

The subjective reality is revealed through the nature of the particular discourse that a character evolves and the changing discourse-frames are pointers to the changing relationships and encounters. A good example of this is Lenny's first meeting with Ruth in The Homecoming:

LENNY. Good evening. RUTH. Morning, I think. LENNY. You're right there. Pause My name's Lenny. What's yours? RUTH. Ruth. 309

LENNY. Eh listen, I wonder if you can advise me. I've been having a bit of rough time with this clock. The tick's been keeping me up. ...

He goes to the sideboard, pours from a jug into a glass, takes the glass to RUTH. Here you are. I bet you could do with this. RUTH. What is this? LENNY. Water. She takes it, sips, places the glass by a small table by her chair LENNY watches her Isn't it funny? I've got my pyjamas on and you're fully dressed. ...

He goes to the sideboard and pours another glass of water Mind if I have one? Yes, it's funny seeing my old brother again after all these years ...

... You know, I've always had a feeling that if I'd been a soldier in the last war ... I'd probably have found myself in Venice. ... Do you mind if I hold your hand? RUTH. Why? LENNY. Just a touch. He stands and goes to her Just a tickle. RUTH. Why? He looks down at her LENNY. I'll tell you why. 310

Slight pause. One night, not long ago, one night do\A/n by the docks, I was standing alone under an arch, ... (27-30)

Lenny's story is intended to frighten Ruth into submission but ultimately it is Ruth who calls the shots. The frequently changing discourse frames are in keeping with the pace of action in this play.

On the whole, the plays discussed in this chapter point to an assertion of the Self through a questioning of social norms and values. This leads to a de-institutionalisation of roles and to possibilities of new definitions of role and identity. In the dialectic of Self and Other, these plays demonstrate the resourcefulness of the individual and in terms of development, they move towards a greater mobility of the social actor. 311

Notes

^ Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Harmondsworth, Middlesex : Penguin, 1966) 189-90.

^ See note 47 to Chapter 2.

^ Social Construction of Reality 153-56.

^Ibid. 189-90.

^ Harold Pinter, The Caretaker Rey. 2nd ed. (London : Methuen,1962). All references to the above play are from this edition.

^ Social Construction of Reality 191 -92.

'^ Patricia Hern, "Commentary" to The Caretaker 17.

^ Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (London : Longman, 1989) 39-40. Also see, Randall Collins, Three Sociological Traditions (Oxford: Oxford Uniyersity Press, 1985) 157. Collins explains that social rituals are "weapons upholding and renegotiating the class structure. They not only create the self, but they rank selves into different social classes."

^ Language and Power 46-47.

^° Ibid. 63.

^^ Social Construction of Reality 140.

''Ibid. 142.

''Ibid. 145.

'"* Simon Trussler, The Plays of Harold Pinter: An Assessment (London: Victor Gollancz, 1973) 74-78.

'^ Language and Power 68.

'® Stanley Eveling, "Pinter's Stagecraft : Meeting people is Wrong" Harold Pinter: You Never Heard Such Silence ed. Alan Bold (London: Vision Press, 1985) 74-77. 312

17 Social Construction of Reality 185

18 Davies treats the Blacks just like the rest of society treats him. In Act One he narrates to Aston how shabbily he is treated by a monk in Lutton, when he goes to a monastery which gives away shoes in charity.

^^ Language and Power 69.

^° Social Contruction of Reality 45.

^^ Harold Pinter, "The Dwarfs" Plays : Two (London: Methuen,1986). Ail references to the play are from this rpt. edition.

22 Social Construction of Reality 45.

23 See M. Francis Abraham, Modern Sociological Theory : An Introduction (Delhi : Oxford ,1982) 247-65. The most notable works in this tradition are Edmund Husserl's philosophical treatise, Ideas: Introduction to Pure Phenomenoloov (1913) and Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World. It is generally believed that the kind of sociology which Schutz laid a foundation for is best practiced by Berger and Luckmann, the sociologists of knowledge. Abraham writes, "... the task of phenomenological clarification is always one of continuous criticism and re-examination. Husserl believed that a real and objective world exists, but because it is known only through subjective human consciousness, it is a socially constructed reality when it is interpreted. Phenomenology is considered a radical philosophical position which questions the empirical foundations of sociology as well as 'challenges the possibility of objective scientific knowledge, uninfluenced by the subjective consciousness of the investigator.'" Also see, Gordon Marshall ed., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Sociology 389-90. The phenomenological perspective assumes that "our experience of the world, including everything from our perception of objects through our knowledge of mathematical formulae, is constituted in and by consciousness. To trace this process of constitution, we have to disregard what we know about the world, and address the question of how, or by what processes, that knowledge comes into being. This strategy is known as bracketing or phenomenological reduction."

^^ See note 23 above. 313

25 Social Construction of Reality 152.

'^ Ibid. 80.

''Ibid. 81.

28 Ibid. 85.

'^ Thomas Luckmann, Life-World and Social Realities (London : Heinemann, 1983)52.

^ Life-World and Social Realities 112-14.

^^ The Dwarfs 96.

^'Ibid. 117.

^^ Austin Quigley, "The Dwarfs: A Study in Linguistic Dwarfism" Modern Drama 17 (Dec 1974)420.

'''Ibid. 421.

'^ Social Construction of Reality 106-08. "Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly supra human terms. Another way of saying this is that reification is the apprehension of the products of human activity as /f they were something other than human products. ... Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world, and, further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to consciousness. The reified world is by definition, a dehumanised world."

^ Harold Pinter, "Night School" Tea Party and other plays (London: ACTAC, 1970). All references are to this rpt. edition.

''' Ian Parker, Discourse Dynamics 47.

^ Trussier, The Plays of Harold Pinter 47.

'® Dayid Birch, The language of Drama : Critical Theory and Practice (London: Macmillan Education, 1991) 111. 314

^ Modem Sociological Theory 238-39.

^^ Invitation to Sociology 123-24.

'"Ibid. 125.

^^Ibid. 126.

^ Ibid. 46.

^'Ibid. 154.

"•^Ibid. 156-57.

'•^Ibid. 160.

48 Three Sociological Traditions 156-57.

"^ Quoted by Birch, The Language of Drama 108.

^ Three Sociological Traditions 156-57.

^^ The language of Drama 111.

^' Ibid. 19.

^^ Harold Pinter, "A Night Out" Plays : One (London: Methuen, 1976). All references to the play are from this edition.

54 Invitation to Sociology 128.

^^ Ibid. 51 and 157.

^ Invitation to Socioloav 128.

^'Ibid. 126.

^ Ibid. 125.

^^ Social Construction of Reality 96.

^ Life-World and Social Realities 82-83. 315

^' Ibid. 184-85.

^^ Social Construction of Reality 151-57.

^^ See Invitation to Sociology 116-17.

^ Three Sociolooicai Traditions 157.

65 Social Construction of Reality 161.

66 Invitation to Sociology 71.

^^ Bernard F. Dukore, Harold Pinter (London : Macmillan, 1982) 48-49, observes that Albert makes an "impotent gesture" when he throws a clock at his mother. He also returns back home only after one night out.

^ This is a description of the micro-interactionist approach in sociology, an approach, in other words, that takes social interaction as its basis. See Abraham, Modern Sociological Theory 233.

^^ Life-World and Social Realities 182-84.

^° Harold Pinter, "The Lover" The Collection and The Lover (London: ACTAC,1985). All references to the play are from this rpt. edition.

^^ See Modern Sociological Theory 220-24.

^^ Ibid. 232-35.

" The social self according to Mead, is "a dynamic and changing relationship between the T and the 'me' of every individual. The self is both an T that is the spontaneous self with impulsive tendencies, and the 'me' the disciplined organised part of the self which has internalised the demands of society." Thus there is both self-consciousness and social consciousness within the balanced, mature self. See Modern Sociological Theory 223-25.

^'^ Charles Horton Cooley, one of the thinkers of the school of social interactionism believed that all social institutions are mental creations of individuals and are sustained by human habits of mind. His fundamental observation was that "the self arises and emerges from one's perception of one's self as reflected in the perception of others. It is generated in and verified by the mind-one's own mind and the mind of others." Thus, 316

he spoke of the "social mind" and the "individual mind." See Modern Sociological 212-13.

^^ Martin Esslin, Pinter: The Playwright (London: Methuen, 1970) 140.

^^ Dukore, Harold Pinter 66-68.

^'' John Orr, Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture : Play and Performance from Beckett to Shepard. (Edinburgh : Edinburgh University, 1991) 219.

'"' Ibid. 88.

^^ Three Sociological Traditions 223.

^ Ibid. 224.

^^ Harold Pinter, The Homecoming (London : Eyre Methuen, 1980). All references to the pay are from this rpt. edition.

82 Harold Pinter, "Tea Party" Tea Party and other plavs (London : ACTAC, 1970). All references to the play are from this rpt. edition.

^^ Quoted by Dukore, Harold Pinter 77.

84 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture 97.

*'lbid. 103.

^ Trussler. Harold Pinter 134.

^^ George Herbert Mead in Mind, Self and Society (1934), published after his death, pointed out that "each individual has multiple selves. We have different relationships to different people and are one thing to one person and another thing to someone else. There are different selves for different kinds of social relationships and some parts of the self that exist only subjectively in relationship to oneself. The self is a point of view and the individual experiences himself not by direct observation, but only indirectly from the standpoint of others." See Three Sociological Traditions 194-95.