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Home , Precisely (sketch), The Basement (play), The Caretaker

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Kurt7KH%DVHPHQW Tetzeli v. Rosador

Modern Drama, Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 1971, pp. 195-204 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press DOI: 10.1353/mdr.1971.0046

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdr/summary/v014/14.2.tetzeli-v-rosador.html

Access provided by Emory University Libraries (2 Jul 2014 15:46 GMT) PINTER'S DRAMA1~IC METHOD: KULLUS, 'THE EXAMiNATION,

IN 1949 PINTER WROTE A DRAMATIC DIALOGUE, Kullus,1 which seems to have served as a scenario for his television play The Basement, first presented by B.B.C. Television on February 20, 1967. Like Kullus the short story The Examination, published along with and in 1963,2 shows Pinter's dramatic techniques and methods in statu nascendi and allows insights into the use of his basic theme, which, as I shall attempt to show, is the conflict of dominance and subservience, the battle for positions. Furthermore, there is an evident connection between all three works: a connection which is not limited only to the emphasis on a few but important props, like a door, a window, a stool, the fire in the grate, but includes also the identity of names, the general progress of the story, and the relations of the dramatis personae who are occupied with an unmotivated and relent­ less power struggle. It appears, therefore, necessary to examine all three works together. Two people, sitting, standing or lying in a room, Pinter once described as his basic dramatic situation. In The Examination there is no outside threat as in the early plays. Two persons, Kullus and the first-person narrator, inhabit this room and are analysed in their mutual relation. itself denotes the nature and the reason for the conflict. The constant shift from KulIus's room to that of the first-person narrator's and back again indicates that the room is the objective correlative of the state of the examination, of the position of the interrogator: "Yet I was naturally dominant, by virtue of my own­ ing the room." (p. 89) The habitat, the home, more or leSS guarantees the uppermost position, the power to dominate-a striking analogy to animal behaviour, as it has been brilliantly analysed in Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression. Pinter himself, asked by Lawrence Bensky about the reason for the scences of violence in his plays, has described the use of this theme in The Examination: That short story dealt very explicitly with two people in one room having a battle of an unspecified nature, in which the ques-

1 , Poems (London, 1968); includes Kullus, pp. 22-24. 2 The Collection and The Lover (London, 1964); includes The Examination, pp. 85-92. 195 196 MODERN DRAMA September

tion was one of who was dominant at what point and how they were going to be dominant and what tools they would use to achieve dominance and how they would try to undermine the other person's dominance. A threat is constantly there: it's got to do with this question of being in the uppermost position, or attempting to be.... I wouldn't call this violence so much as a battle for positions, it's a very common, everyday thing.3

The means the characters employ to undermine the opponent's posi­ tion, to reverse the situation, I shall examine later. Here it is im­ portant to note that the room is not only the circumscribed acting area, providing the aesthetic rules, not only the correlative of who is dominant but also, as the scene is shifted from one person's habitation to the other's, the externalization of the ironic reversal of parts. Yet the process which leads to this shift, this reversal, is always substantial­ ly the same. This means that Pint.er's dramatic aim is not, here or elsewhere, bound to character analysis, to the drawing of individuals, clearly defined by their personal idiosyncracies, their social status or milieu. With a tacit defiance of realistic motivation a basic and typi­ cal human process, the battle for positions, is delineated. In the earlier dramatic dialogue, Kullus, this battle had been fought out by the members of an eternal triangle, including therewith the powers and forces of sexual attraction and repulsion: Kullus and the girl move into the first-person narrator's room, then all three into Kullus's room, and finally, while Kullus is expelled, into the girl's room. Yet in this early work Pinter is more concerned with the problems of com­ munication, estrangement, and change, alluding only here and there to the basic conflict. As the initial situation does not recur, the'!, is driven out as well or, at least, his expulsion appears threateningly im­ minent. Pinter makes this clear by contrasting the result of Kullus's relation with the girl with the outcome of the '1's' hopes: She went to him. They climbed into my bed. I placed a coat over the lamp, and watched the ceiling hustle to the floor. (p. 22)

This is contrasted with the end of the dialogue: -What has happened to you? said the girl. You have changed. The ceiling hustled to the floor. -You have not shifted the coat from the lamp, I said. (p. 24)

3 Writers at Work. The Paris Review Interviews. Third Series. Introduced by Alfred Kazin (London, 1968), p. 359. 1971 PINTER'S DRAMATIC lVIETHOD 197

The move from one room to the next becomes irreversible. The persons are left as the victims of change, subjected to loneliness and their own though solitary room. In contrast, The Basement~ enlarging motives and using the eternal triangle once more, illustrates Pinter's shift in emphasis to the question of dominance and the battle for posi­ tions. Interior and exterior scenes constantly alternate, as do and day, darkness and light, cold and warmth, winter and summer. An attempt is made here to fuse the techniques used in presenting the room in Kullus and The Examination. Though the furniture varies and represents four different and distinct styles, it is still the same room. The initial and the final situation are identical, save for the reversal of parts. Progress and, simultaneously, the exemplary same­ ness of the conflict are illustrated visually by the room. Yet the room. serves still another function: it is not only the objective correlative of the conflict, but also one of its objects, as the one fundamental means of preserving one's safety, one's dominance, and, in the last analysis, as the sine qua non of the desire to define one's existence. I shall argue later on that this delineation of the room in The Basement does not prove to be entirely successful. All three works, therefore, point to one of Pinter's basic dramatic premises: the people in them do not act according to fully drawn emo­ tional or intellectual traits of character; neither are they determined by a clearly defined historical or contemporary milieu. What lends their action power, energy, and relevance is the basic situation, ex­ ternalized in the room, and their relation to each other. This situation reveals its nature as an experiment, as an inexorable test "at the edge of living" (Pinter), bringing to the surface the inhabitants' relentless struggle and their desire to dominate, to survive. Furthermore, the most important means the dramatist and his per­ sons employ to reverse an existing order of domination and subservi­ ence are interestingly analogous in all the three pieces: (1) the use of the door, (2) the adaptation of the intruder to the room and its furni­ ture, and (3) the lapse into as an instrument to circumvent the owner's privileged position. An examination of these devices may also throw some light on Pinter's other plays, in which their use oc­ curs time and again, but in a much shortened and, therefore, less noticeable way. (1) The door fulfills different functions for the people, according to the position they occupy in Pinter's enigmatic world: To the owner of the room it acts as a threat, a danger to his claim for a circum­ scribed place to lord over, to the intruder it is both the passageway from a non-defined existence into a sense of being and a shelter from 198 MODERN DRAMA September

the place of power struggle. The Examination states this quite exten­ sively: When the door opened. When Kullus, unattended, entered, and the interim ended. I turned from all light in the window, to pay him due regard and welcome. Whereupon without reserve or hesi­ tation, he moved from the door as from shelter, and stood in the light from the window. So I watched the entrance become vacant, which had been his shelter. And observed the man I had wel­ comed, he having crossed my bor~er. (p. 89)

In Kullus and in The Basement~ too, this entrance of an outsider (or outsiders) serves as the initial spark to set off the action. The full de­ scriptions of curtains and windows underline the tension between the interior and the exterior. Yet nowhere in Pinter's plays are there­ as in Beckett's Endgame~ for instance-indications that the interior stands for the internal, the exterior for the external world. The ex­ terior, peopled with mysterious figures like the blind Negro in The Room, Goldberg and McCann in The Birthday Party~ the mute matchseller in ~ simply acts as an undefined reality, emitting threats and then ceasing to fulfill any function: And the door had closed and was absent, and of no moment. Im­ minent upon opening and welcoming it had possessed moment. Now only one area was to witness activity and to suffer procedure, and that only was necessary and valid. For the door was closed and so closed. (p. 89)

The excessive switching fronl scene to scene, from interior to ex­ terior and back again in The Basement seems to dispense with the validity of this argument. The rigorous balance of scenes taking place in the room and scenes somewhere outside it certainly does provide the spectator with a good opportunity of having a close look at an outside world. (That the play was written for television accounts for the technical side of the problem, but not for the dramatic function of the exterior scenes.) On the other hand, the door is only used twice as a link between the two realms: once in the beginning to admit Stott and his girlfriend] ane, and then at the end after the reversal of parts to admit Law, with] ane still waiting outside. It seems ,very likely that omitting the link of the door in between, omitting therewith a further threat to the relation of the three people, Pinter is again dramatising the various problems of behaviour that arise in this eternal triangle. Both the room and the outside, then, serve as the testing ground, as the battle-field, to which-by way of the antitheses of summer and winter, day and night, light and darkness-is added a mythical dimen­ sion, rather similar to the ill-fated attempt Arnold Wesker has under- 1971 PINTER'S DRAMATIC METHOD 199 taken in his Four Seasons. The move from interior to exterior does not illuminate a reality different from the reality Pinter has drawn in Kullus or The Examination. The exterior is not the land inhabited by the blind Negro, Goldberg and McCann, the mute matchseller or the voices of ; it is an abstract plane, imposed upon the 'interior' one, stressing the typical and all-embracing nature of the conflict. And yet this function of the exterior scenes as basically identi­ cal with the interior ones and providing an inclusive testing ground, is bought at a dear price: Not only does it remove the claustrophobic atmosphere-already melodramatically realized in Pinter's first play­ the shudder and metaphysical fright of the spectator, it seems also to point to allegorical meanings, to which Pinter has always strongly (and rightly) objected. The very looseness of the relation of the scenes to seasonal alterations must (and I fear will) provoke critics to apply the golden bough as The Key to the work's meaning- and C. S. Lewis's witty strictures on the anthropological approach will again go unheeded. If A Slight Ache can be interpreted as a ritual,4 without jumping at the splendid opportunity of, using Flora's name for critical speculations and departures, The Basement will fulfill the wildest anthropological or Jungian hopes. Certainly the antitheses, men­ tioned above, imply and evoke associations of a mythical or cosmic order. Yet I contend that· these associations are merely gratuitously grafted onto the basic conflict-the power struggle, augmented by sexual motives-and that, as they are not integrated and woven into the fabric of the play, they do not give shape or add meaning to it. Briefly then, I contend that the play is an interesting failure. (~ too, suggests an archetypal pattern, the diminution of paternal authority through the ascendance of sexual dominance; this pattern, however, is thoroughly motivated in the constellation of the people, and in the movement of the plot.)

(2) In K ullus the taking over of the intruding and occupying forces is swift. It starts quite typically with Kullus questioning the use of one of the properties, the grate. The statement reveals the authority of the owner as questionable and hollow: This can on no account be named a fire. It is merely another aspect of light and shade in this room. It is not committed to its ordained activity. (p. 22)

The crack in the order of things, be it ever so slight, provides the intruder with the opportunity to reverse the conventional and t:t;adi-

4 Katherine H. Burkman, "Pinter's A Slight Ache as 'Ritual," Modern Drama, XI (1968), pp. 326-335. 200 MODERN DRAMA September tiona I status: He takes possession of the bed-like the room an emblem of safe existence (d. )-and the ousted owner is seen against the background of the grate, equally 'not committed to (his) ordained activity': "1 shifted my stool and sat by the flame in the grate." (p. 22) The taking over, however, is not complete. The second 'act' shows Kullus's room and a different kind of human behaviour. The battle for positions is now demonstrated on the sexual plane. For our purpose it is important to note that the issues connected with the room are again taken up in the use of the properties. Questioning the right application of one of them may throw the owner off his guard, its wrong use may lead to his subjection.

Even more pointedly, in The Examination7 it is the properties which mark the temporary state reached in the conflict of dominance and subservience. This story, depicting Kullus and the first-person narrator once again, expounds Pinter's fundamental theme in a thor­ oughly programmatic way. The room is furnished with a blackboard and a stool. Recurring objects, here again, are a door, a window, and a fireless grate. Their careful arrangement is the basis of the owner's superiority: To be confronted with the especial properties of my abode, bear­ ing the seal and arrangement of their tenant, allowed only for recognition on the part of my visitor, and through recognition to acknowledgement and through acknowledgement to apprecia­ tion, and through appreciation to subservience. (pp. 89£.)

Furthermore the owner removes the one object which might give Kullus a hold in these surroundings: Prior to his arrival, I had omitted to establish one property in the room, which I knew to be familiar to him, and so liable to bring him ease. And never once did he remark the absence of a flame in the grate. (pp. 90£.) The process which enables Kullus here to retain his grasp over sur­ roundings and owner is in this piece rather one of silence and speech, the properties denoting its state. But the flaw in the proprietor'S rea­ soning attributes to the properties a role which supersedes their func­ tion as an impressive objective correlative. For Kullus refuses to pass from recognition to acknowledgement, to appreciation, to subservi­ ence. He eludes the process by remaining indifferent to his surround­ ings, abolishing therewith the common ground necessary to any ex­ amination. He recognizes neither familiar nor unfamiliar objects:

... I emphasized the presence of the stool, indeed, placed it for him, but as he never once remarked this presence, I concluded his concern did not embrace it. (p. 91) 1971 PINTER'S DRAMATIC METHOD 201

The battle-field in The Examination does not favour one of the com­ batants as much as in most of Pinter's plays; man is neither accommo­ dated nor unaccommodated; he is rather moving in a no man's land in which reality can only be imposed by a subjective sleight of hand. By simply rearranging the objects of reality the examinee becomes the examiner: And when Kullus remarked the absence of a flame in the gate (sic), I was bound to acknowledge this. And when he remarked the presence of the stool, I was equally bound. And when he removed the blackboard, I offered no criticism. And when he closed the curtains I did not object. For we were now in Kullus's room. (p. 92)

The emphasis on the cyclic movement of the story lends further weight to its typicality, leaving the battle for positions without motives, yet stressing its inevitability as the basic human predicament in Pin­ ter's world. Clinging to the objects of reality, like Davies in ~ makes man liable to dependence upon them and thus to subjection. Questioning their use, or simple indifference to them can enable man to handle them as a means to undermine the opponent's position. In The Basemen t the initial scene of K ullus is repeated at some length. It includes, again, the questioning of the aptness of the furnishing-the light, in this case (p. 62)-, the adaptation of the in­ truder to the room-switching off all the lights except one, later on taking down the pictures (p. 65)-and the expulsion of the owner from his own bed. But like the problematical shift of scenes, the shift of properties from an ordinary bachelor's haunt to modern Scandinavian furniture then to a kind of palazzo setting and finally to a void and bare scenery (let alone the outside sceneries of cave, field, etc.) seems to express a more profound significance than the action warrants. While the latter moves from an initial, lonely 'harmony' through in­ trusion, a stage of intrigue to overt battle (pp. 75ft) and the reversal of parts, the all-tao-rapid switches from one scenery to another do not allow the spectator (nor the reader) to view these movements as necessarily connected, nor the scenery itself as the correlative of the action. The various styles ?f furniture provide a constant source of bewilderment, fanciful or show-businesslike in themselves, but not supporting the action or meaning of the play. The obvious interpreta­ tion that the style of the furniture changes, corresponding to the person in the dominant position, unfortunately does not bear close inspection. A single example may suffice: While it is still Stott who is in the superior position-Jane is sitting on his knees, Law is being 202 MODERN DRAMA September

ordered about-the initial situation is briefly shown again. (pp. 70 ff.) The only conclusion which seems possible to draw is that Pinter wants to make clear that nothing has changed in between-which makes either this scene or the whole action so far completely nonsensical.

(3) One of the most striking devices Pinter employs, the pause and the silence, features very prominently in The Examination (as in most of the plays), but is only implicitly used in K ullus. There, KulIus's expulsion is anticipated by the girl's dialogue with the "I," deliberately excluding him. (p. 23) The unwillingness (not impossibility) of Pin­ ter's people to communicate has frequently been commented upon. Less frequently has it been noticed that the deliberate exclusion from conversation is a means Pinter's dramatis personae employ to unsettle the balance of power, to lure the excluded party into bargaining for an active participation, so giving away some of his power. In K ullus only the exclusion of the dominant person and the subsequent altera­ tion in the relationship of the three people is shown-owing to the scenario-like character of the dialogue. It is The Examination which again almost programmatically demonstrates the nature of Pinter's silences. In contrast to 's world, the silences do not constitute a dramatic realization of Ie neant~ making it, as it were, audible, but are a subtler means than speech to reverse the existing order: ... if Kullus fell silent, he did not cease to partICIpate in our examination. Never, at any time, had I reason to doubt his active participation, through word and through silence, between interval and interval. . . (p. 87) . . It is the examiner's hard task to allot the time for intervals during the whole inquisitorial session, against which the examinee can retali­ ate by keeping silent within the examination. And during this silence the examiner can slowly be excluded from penetrating into the exam- , . inee's thoughts: "Dependent on the intensity of his silence I could suspect and conclude, but where his silence was too deep for echo, I could neither suspect nor conclude." (p. 89) The examiner, bound to fulfill his inquisitorial duty, can now in turn only adapt himself to the examinee's silences, and by this adaptation the course of conduct is no longer determined by him. The effect of Kullus's silences is thus described: ... I remained isolated, and outside his silence, and thus of negli­ gible influence. And so I took the only course open to me, and terminated the intervals arbitrarily, cutting short the proposed 1971 PINTER'S DRAMATIC METHOD 203

duration, when I could no longer follow him, and was no longer his dominant. For where the intervals had been my imposition, they had now become his imposition. (p. 91)

It may be noticed in passing that the raison d' etre for the examina­ tion is never given. Yet this type of human relationship is surely one of the most revealing concomitants of the battle for positions. There is no play in Pinter's oeuvre in which an inquisitorial scene does not occupy a central place. Pinter's people stand only a remote chance of achieving the uppermost place if they are able to adapt freely to any given situation, unmolested by a determining past and not pinned down to a fixed standard of behaviour by an extracted confession during an examination. Play-acting is the figures' natural mode of exitsence-which seems rather to diminish the importance of the much discussed problems of mystification, illusion, and reality. Kullus's handling of silence, moreover, can provide an insight into the desperate urge the people in Pinter's plays feel to keep on talking, be the subject never so trivial. If power is wielded by forcing somebody to speak, by worming oneself into the examinee's thoughts, by pro­ jecting upon the opponent some pattern of behaviour-d. Mick in The Caretaker: "You remind me of my uncle's brother" (p. 33)-this process can only be carried out by speaking oneself. "The danger of knowing, and of being known"5 is not to be avoided by staying silent which might perpetuate the status quo~ but runs counter either to the impulse for power or that of subjection. Unwillingness and necessity to speak define the problem of communication. It is in the use of dialogue-or rather in the priority of mime and gesture over the spoken word-that The Basement nlerits fullest at­ tention. Although the devices outlined above, the inquisitorial scene (pp. 63£.), the exclusion of one of the members of the triangle from participating in the conversation (p. 66), the lapse into silence (p. 62), can be equally well discerned in this play, it is from the mute scenes that the play derives most of its (limited) power. Jane's simple avoidance of Stott's touch (p. 71) demonstrates that their close rela­ tion is severed; the long duel with broken milk bottles, with Jane preparing coffee, fully acts out the nature and the object of the con­ flict. The slow decrease in the number of spoken words up to the open and mute battle is skillfully handled. ~Iime and gesture do not, as speech frequently does, intentionally hide the figures' purpose. It is in these mute scenes that the moment of truth, to which the play

5 Writers at Work, p. 360. 204 MODERN DRAMA September has laboriously been heading, is revealed and is frozen-here and else­ where-in the form of tableau. Not hampered by the power of words and the desire to hide their thoughts and intentions, the people in Pinter's world act silently, according to their real wishes. To conclude: The battle for positions, the themes of dominance and subservience constitute and formulate the fundamental conflict in Kullus} The Examination} and The Basement} and, as I have indicated, in most of Pinter's other plays. The room provides both the objective correlative of this battle and one of the objects of the inhabitants' struggle. While the properties naturally partake of the room's function as an objective correlative, they are also used-along with the lapse into silence-as a means to undermine the opponent's position. The door serves the triple function of passageway, shelter, and threat. It is the longing for being in the uppermost position which acts as the primary impulse in the figures' mutual relations, blossoming into scenes of duel, battle, violence, where mime and gesture take first im­ portance over the intentional evasion of speech.

KURT TETZELI v. ROSADOR