Structural Elements in Harold Pinter' S Drama. and Film Scripts a Stl

Abstract: Structural Elements in Harold Pinter' s Drama. and Film Scripts

A stl"'..tctural exarni nation of Harold Pinter' s drama. and two film scripts -

The Servant and Accident. Attempts at psychological interpretations of

Pinter's drama have produced inadequate resultsj producing zeugmatic surface situations, Pinter has·developed a technique which invites the audience to discover but frustrates a holistic vision. The relationships between language and silence, characters and objects , examined in his drama, have found greater possibilities in the medium of film.

Eleanor Gale Beattie U.A. Thesis DepaJ."'b.ent of English StructurGl Elements in Pinter's Drana a~d Fil~ Scripts. STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS IN HAROLD PINTER 1 S DRAMA AND FILM SCRIPTS

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research by Eleanor Gale Beattie.

In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English.

McGill University, April, 1970..

o Eleanor Gale Beattie 1970 Table of Contents

I. The structure of Harold Pinter's Drama.

II. A structural Examination of The Servant.

III. A Structural Examination of Accident. :;y.~

Art forms are increasingly belng used in a probing

and experimental fashion; to dèfine theatre or cinema is to deny that possibility. However, in orderto approach the topic, l will deal in terms of expectatlons arislng from the experlence of each. Harold Pinter's theatrical

work has caused a great deal of c~itical confuslon, posslbly because critlcs have approached lt ln terms of theme rather than structure. And because the structure of Pinter's theatrical work has been translated successfully lnto cinematic terms, thls thesis wll1 examine the relationship between them in the hope of discovering somethlng more about Plnter's work ~.; ~ and possibly, the relationship of drama to fllm. The necessity in drama to see things as 'whole', as contained, ls related to the physlcal aspects of theatre, the square or the circle whlch contains that hollstlc vision. In theatre there ls one continuous space in whlch the actors are lnvolved; the audience ls an extension of that space, physically fixed as they are, responding to a world whlch hasbeen ccntemplated and enclosed. The patterning of drama depends upon this physlcally stable relationshlp of these two bodies - the actors and the audience - and on the largely rational and fixed concept of man which has evolved from it. Traditionally, the audlence ls ln a posltlon of 'know- - 2 -

ing'; that is, the audience is aligned with the author in an ironical point of view by standing outside the action. And although the package may contain a surprise or two, the very fact that it is a package presents a structure which is de~ined and understoai. As the characters move through the play, the audience is in a knowledgeable position, judging ~ them according to a conceptual image of man. Pinter has summed it up in this way. "the audience holds the paper. The play fills in the blanks. Everybody's happy." 1 The conception of the wholeness of things encourages a moral world view. In the search for a meaning to existence, drama has relied on the story line, and inherent in the nar~ative structure is a concept of causation, of logical motivation. But morel a story cannot be told until the events are over or until the story-teller has constructed events to bring about a completion of thought. This demands a certain perspective, a kind of tempered objectivity. The drama supplies the story, the characters and the enclosed area; the audience accepts these logically related forms as a mode of reality and comes away from the theatre with verifiable interpretations. And if they do not, the critics will. although 'knowing' motivations or being in agreement about them is hardly our experience in life, we demand, in drama, - :3 -

not only thè source of actions but that those actions be verified as weIl. Pinter has said that

apart from any other consideration, we are faced with the immense di~~iculty, i~ not the impossibility, of veri~ying the past. l don't mean merely years ago, but yester day, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened? If one can speak of the-diffi culty of knowing what in fact took place yeaterday, one can l think treat the pre sent in the same way. What' s happening now? We won't know until tomorrow or in six months time, and we won't know then, we'll have forgotton, or our imagination will have attributed quite false charac- - teristics to tOday. A- moment is sucked away and distorted, often even at the time ofits birth. We will aIl interpret a common experience qulte differently, though we prefer to subscribe to the view that there's a shared common ground, a known ground. l think there' s a shared common ground aIl right, but that it's more like a quicksand. Because "reality" is quite a strong firm word, we tend to th1nk, or to hope, that the state to which it refers is equaliy firm, settled and unequivocal. It doesn't seem to be, and in my opinion, it's no worse or better for that. 2 Pinter has said elsewhere that he hates the 'becauses' of drame, but they are inherent in traditional theatrical forms and perbaps in our cultural-linguist1c pattern as well.:3 The present-past-future categories of our language, for instance, can have the effect of distancing emotions from the action; as Susan Sonntag has said " ••• the presence of words makes the spectator into a critic",4 that quality. as - 4 -

Teddy in The Homecoming puts it, of operating "on things and not in things." Teddy is the intellectual who has come home to the lmmedlacles of experlencer he wants to cool and structure the situation by surrounding it w1th wordsl

~ou wouldn't understand my works. You woul~ n't have the faintest idea of what they were about. You wouldn't appreciate the points of reference. You're way behind. AlI of you. There's no point in my sending you my works. You'd be lost. Its nothing to do w1th the question of intelligence. It's a way of being able to look at the world. It's a question of how far you can operate on things and not in things. l mean it's a question of your capacity to ally the two, to relate the two, to balance the two. To see, to be able to seet l'm the one who can see. That's why l can write my critical works. Might do you good ••• have a look at them ••• see how certain people can view ••• things ••• how certain people can maintain ••• intellec tuaI equilibrium. Intellectual equilibrium. You 're just objects. You just •••move about. l can observe i t • l can see what you do" It's the same as l do. But you're lost in it. You won't get me being ••• I won't be lost in it. 5 Nor have the so-called absurdist playwrights escaped from the conceptual pattern structured by language. Walter Kerr has pointed out that Samuel Beckett, for instance " ••• builds a play as a Platonist ••• Lucky is seen as

essential slave, Pozzo as essential master." 6 And in spite of the staged desolation of Waiting for Godot, the characters do hopefully anticipate a future and are aware of the past - - 5 -

for they have been and are still waiting for Godot. vfuile they have not the satisfaction of Immediate grat1fi cation, they are soothed by the1r belief that the un1verse is ult1mately ordered, an order outs1de of their control but one which affects them profoundly. Beckett's play demands a trad1t10nal Interpretation for the absence of Godot gives him the same emphas1s as his presence. It is a familiar concept turned upside-down, but, nevertheless, the same concept a Those who talk of the absurd in general terms can only do so by ascribing the absurdity of the world to an absent, repudiated or buried God - somethlng which is both hollow rhetoric and a contradiction in terms, as far as the notion of God is concerned. The sIum dweller, the poor, the starving and the disease-ridden outcasts of the world do not blame their suffer ing and alienated state on the absurd, but on the society to whiC.h they belong, that is to say, on other men who màke or unmake the absurd as weIl as inhumanlty and injustice. The world is what men make it. 7 There has been a great deal of confusion about the absurdist school of drame and its reIat10nship to existentia- lism. If we take Mart1n Essl1n's definit10n of absurdl the "sense of metaphysical anquish at the absurdity of the human condition~ and na sense of the senselessness of l1fe, of the Inevitable devaluation of Ideals, pur1ty, and purpose ••• ",8 then Pinter can in no sense, be labelled an absurdist playwright; there is in his plays, no sense of a world gone sour - 6 - or devalued. Although hls characters may often be alone and anxlous - even fearful at times - they represent nothing except themselves and live wlthout philosophizing aboQt their relationshlp to the uni verse. Plnter, as hls characters, has no morals ln tOWt l have usually begun a play ln quite a slmple manner; found a couple of characters ln a particular context, thrown them together and listened to what they said, keeplng my nose to the ground. The context has always been, for me, concrete and particular, and the characters concrete also. l've never started a play from any klnd of abstract idea or the ory and never envisaged my own characters as messengers of death, doom, heaven or the milky way or, in otherwords, as allegorical representations of any particular force, whatever that may mean. When a character cannot be comfortably defined or understood in terms of ~tbe famlllar, the tendency Ls to perch him on a symbollc shelf, out of harm's way. Once there, he can be talked about but need not be 11ved with. In this way, it ls easy to put up a pretty efflcient smoke screen, on the part of the cri tics, or the audience, agalnst recognition, against an actlve and willing partlcipation. We don't carry labels on our chests, and even though they are continually fixed to us by others, they convince nObody. 9

It is this concrete and partlcula~ quallty in Pinter's work which sets him outside of the abstraction of the absurdlst tradition. There is nothing which ls either absurd or not absurd; everything just ls, and Pinter deals with the immediacies of his characters'lives; "I want to present living people to the audi ence, worthy of thelr interest primarily because they are, they 10' eXlst, not because of any moral the author may draw from them." , Nor do l thlnk, ln spite of Walter Kerr's excellent discussion on the topic, Pinter can be termed an existentlalist playwright. - 7 -

Such philosophical labelling is contrary to the spirit of Pinter's work and moveSt once again, outside rather than into it. One is tempted, as has happened with the absurdist schoolt to criticize the work so that it will fit the conception; the result, inevitably, is distortion. But there is a prevailing mood related to the existentialist position which has not left Pinter untouched. Generally speak- 1ng, the pattern created by thls mood 1s aphilosophical, non systemat1z1ng and capable of change accordlng to the immed1ad1es of exper1ence. Lent 1n Plnter's The Dwarf@, m1strusting a conceptual framework for 1dentify1ng, can f1nd no constant relation- sh1p between a series of imagesl The p01nt ls, who are you? Not why or how, not even what. l can see what, perhaps, clearly enough. But who are you? It's no use say1ng you know who you are Just because you tell me you can fit your part1cular key into a particu lar slot, which will only rece1ve your partlcular key because that's not foolproof and certainly not conclu sive. Just because you're 1nclined to make these statements of fa1th has nothlng to do with me. It's not my bus1ness. Occasionally l be11eve l perceive a 11ttle of what you are b~ that's pure acc1dent. Pure acc1dent on both our parts, the perce1ved and the perce1ver. It's nothing like an acc1dent, 1t's deli berate, 1t's a j01nt pretence. We depend on these accidents, on these contrived accidents, to continue. It's not 1mpo~tant then that it's a consp1racy or hallu cination. What you are, or appear to be to me, or appear to be to you, changes so qUickly, so horrify- 1ngly, l certa1nly can't keep up w1th 1t and l'm damn sure you can't either, But who you are l can't even beg1n to recognize, and sometimes l recognize it so wholly, so forc1bly, l can't look, and how can l be ce~tain of what l see? You have no number. Where am l to look, where am l to look, what 1s there to locate, so as to have some surety, to have some rest trom this whole bloody racket? You're the sum of so many reflections. How many reflect10ns? - 8 -

Whose reflect1ons? Is that what you cons1st of? What ssum does the t1de leave? What happens to the scüm? When does 1t happen? l've seen what happens. But I can't speak when I see 1t. I can only point a finger. I can't even do that. The scum 1s broken and sucked back. I don't see where 1t goes. I don't see when, what do I see, what have I seen? What have I seen, the scum or the essence? What about it?11 Sartre in Nausea expressed the awareness of this pattern. I looked anxiously around me; the present, nothlng but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mlrror and me. The true nature of the present revealed ltself. lt was what exists, and all that was not present did not existe The past dld not exlst. Not at aIl. Not ln things, not even in my thoughts. It is true that I rea- 11zed a long t1me ago that mlnds had escaped me. But untl1 then I belleved it had simply gone out of my range. For me the past was only a pensloning off. lt w~s another way of ex1sting, a state of vacation and lnactlon; each event, when lt had played its part, put ltself po11tely into a box and became an honorary event; we have so much dlffi cultY lmagining nothingness. Now I know these things are entlrely what they apnear to be and behind them ••• there is nothing.12 In L'Etre et le Neant, Sartre parallels Plnter's 'scum' w1th hls viscous substance. Iris Murdoch, comment1ng on the fascl- nation of the viscous says that It serves as an image of consciousness, of the very form of our approprl'ation of the world. The meta phOTS which compare the mind to gluey manifesta tions of the sensible are not mere figures of adult fancy, they represent categories which we have used form earliest childhood. Sticky substances alarm and fascinate us, and we enjoy discoverlng and filllng cavlties, not orlginally for the reasons the Freudians offer, but because we grasp thag~ as even more general categories of be1ng. the consclousness that seeks to ri se freely toward completeness and stabl11ty ls continually sucked back lnto its past and the messy stuff of its moment-to-moment experi ence. 13 - 9 -

In current art, 'minimalism' concentrates on the object as :. it exists in the work, impeding patterns ~t thought which attempt a verification or justification of its existence in a rational system. Frank Stella, a New York painter, gives an idea of the premise of bis work which sounds remarkably similar to Robbe Grillet's description of the 'new novel', l always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting-the humanistic values that they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, the y always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas.· My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an objecte Any painting is an object and anyone who gets involved enough in this finally has to face up to the objectness of whatever it is that he's doing. He is making a thing. AlI that should be taken for granted. If·:tlle painting were lean enough, accurate enough, or right enough, you would Just be able to look at it. AlI l want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all lever get out of them, is the f~ct that you can see the whole idea without any confusion •••• What you see is what you see. 14 Art as an experimental exercise suggests that the artist ls no longer standing behind his work in the traditional way; that is, he pushes his work forward to exist on its own. And although he is its creator, the work has not been fused with his set of values. Pinter holds a great deal in common with this approach to art. " ••• there's no direct symbolic significance to anything at aIl that l've ever written, and l would like to say that it's the characters themselves who must grow ••• the author does~'t stand in the centre of the stage and tell the audience what to think about ~his characters." 15 Pinter has indicated Stella's own insight into the c~anged relationship between the artist and - 10 - his work. The characters in Pinter's drama, much like Stella's objects, have appropriated the central ground for their existence, the ground traditionally held by the artista Gi ven characters who possess a:;:omentum of their mm, my job is not to impose upon them, not to subject them to a false articulation, by which l mean-for cing a character to speak where he could not speak, making him speak in a way he could not speak, of making him speak of what he could never speak. The relatio~~ip between author and chara~rs should be a highly respectful one, _both ways. And if it's possible to talk of gaining a kind of freedom from Ttlriting, it doesn't come by leading one's characters into fixed and calculated postures, but by allowing them to carry their own can, by giving them a legiti mate elbowroom. This can be extremely painful. It's much easier, much less painful, not to let them live. l'd like to make quite clear at the same time that l don't regard my own characters as uncontro lIed, or anarchie. They're note The function of selection and arrangement is mine. l do aIl the donkeywork, in fact, and l think l can say l pay meticulous attention to the shape of things, from the shape of a sentence to the overall structure of the play. This shaping, to put is mildly, is of the first importance. But l think a double thing happens. You arrange and you listen, following the clues you leave for yourself, through the characters. And somethmes a balance is found, where image can freely engender image and where at the same time you are able to keep your sights on the place where the characters ~ silent and in hiding. It is ~n the silence that they are most evident to me. 1 The contemporary structures in art (and film has profoundly affected this structure) has had its effect on theatre. If the old theatrical concepts do not work any more, you can, as Beckett has done, turn them up side down and look at them that l'Tay for a while; or you can calI it 'living' or 'guerilla' theatre and create, with a gathering of people, a roman circus. But Pinter has done somethi~~ in theatre which the artists have done in - 11 -

painting and sculpture; that is, he has played upon our expectations and created an absolutely new and participational experience. Consumersare without doubt more flexible about art than theatre; constant innovation has become not only acceptable but, paradoxically, traditional. l refer, once again, to the experience of art because the attempts at understanding its sinuousity can assist in apprehending Pinter's work. Brian O'Doherty, in h1s article "Minus Plato" discusses the expectation, prevalent not only in the consumption of cars but also in art, that is,

obsolescence cycles. but remarks that the forms which shou~d have become obsolete are remarkably healthy, maintained " ••• by certain;.:ti •• new attitudes." Th1s high survfval quotient, 1f one can calI it that, is due l think to an acute estimation of those forces that destroy and d1scredit new artistic ideas, and the development of a way of coping with these forces. Thus the artists seem to have made a careful study of recent obsolescence cycles, have confronted what has become the illusion of avant-gardism, ~~ve develcp ed a sort of intellectual connoisseurship of non-commi.t ment. They have made a d1agnosis oft the current soc1al situat10n through which a piece of art is manipulated via the prejudices and indifferences, the expectations • and non-expectations of the audience. this includes taking into account the habits of museums and collec tors and tickling the hipper-than-thou mass media to pass on the context of ideas in which the new work is seen. It was inev1table that the artist would learn to deal with the so-called "corrupt10ns" that surround the work of art and use them for 1ts survival. The capacity to adapt 1s, after aIl, the criterion of sur vival. 17

The consc1ous man~pulation of the 'tradition' of obsolesence by New York artists, wh1le ambiguous, is precise in its pattern ing, be1ng the dialectic of synchrony and diachrony which Levi- Strauss, the French anthropolog1st, has investigated. In spi te - 12 -

of the movement of time which destroys the atemporal pattern of relationships, the attempt in cultures, according to Levi-Strauss, has always been to use the rag-ends preserved from the old struc ture to form another synchronic pattern; he has termed this patch work "bricolage" and his explanation of the bricoleur who prac tices this art, is as followsl His first practical step is retrospective. He has to turn back to an already existent set made up of tools and materials, to consider or reconsider what lt contains and, flnally and above aIl, to engage ln a sort of dialogue with it and, before chooslng between them, to index the possible answers which the whole set can offer to his problem. He interro gates aIl the heterogeneous objects of which his treasury ls composed to discover what each of them could 'signlfy' and so contrlbute to the deflnition of a set whlch has yet to materlallze but which will ultimately differ from the instrumental set only in the lnternal dlsposltion of its parts. A partlcular cube of oak could be a wedge to make up for the in adequate length of a plank of pine or it could be a pedestal - which would allow the grain and pollsh of the old wood to show to advantage. In one case lt will serve as extension, in the other as material. But the possiblllties always remain limlted by the particular history of each piece and by those of its features whlch are already determined by the use for which it was originally intended or the modiflcations it has undergone for other purposes. The elements which the -bricoleur" collects and uses are 'pre constrained' 11ke the constitutive unlts of myth, the possible comblnations of whlch are restrlcted by the fact that they are drawn from the language where they already possess a sense which sets a limlt on thelr freedom of manoeuvre. And the decision as to put in each place also depends on the possibility of put;ting a different element there instead, so that each cholce which is made will involve a complete reorganization of the structure, which will never be the same as one vaguely imagined nor as some other which might have been preferred to it.1B

The effect produced by s~ping tradltional signs and symbols lnto a new structure or bricolage is curious; but perhaps, more curious - 13 - still is the attempt to use the old structures in a changed and actual situation - the effect being to postulate a question for which there is no answer. This, it appears, is what Beckett has done in his drama; by using traditional structures, albeit inverted, he has continued to ask questions which were at one time, but no longer are, answerable. Bert States in his article, "The Shock of Non-Recognition", suggests that theatre has "used up" forms of radical experience; l would go a step further and say that the process of having exhausted certain theatrical forms is closely connected to the awareness of their irrelevance, at least within their traditional patterning. Whether or not Pinter actually set out to accomplish this, he has succeeded in preserving some inherited dramatic forms by structuring them 1nto a coherent pattern, a pattern wh1ch falls somewhere between our experience of life and our expectat10ns in theatrea ••• one of the ways 1n which the power of expectation would seem to operate on the dramatic art1st is in adjusting his field of vision between "what has ~een done," to put it s1mply, and "what is lëft of do," or, if you prefer, between the images of other artists (in and out of h1s med1um) and the suggestions the y carry for further expansion. Since v10lence is the natural content of all "serious" drama, it seems reasonable to assume that violence (to personify it) goes a progress through the available poss1bilities in a constant struggle to recapture its power of fasci nation; one of the ways it appears to do th1s, as l trust the history of drama will show, is to take dar1ng permissions w1th its i~~erited conceptions of itself, to become by turns more part1cular, more in ward, more subtle, more "free", more "immoral," more "real," more indifferent, more sophisticated, more paradoxical (a standard device for eluding discovery); to parody itselt, to offer as much sensation as the - 14 -

trafflc will bear, and so on, untll it is flnally performlng with only a slde glance at Nature her self, the reallty observed belng mainly the already formulated realities of the traditlon to which lt belongs. Fldelity to experlence, moral qualm, truth, these are lndeed perpetuated, but ln the terms of the medi~. 19 While ln agreement with states that Plnter's use of dramatlc images only relate lnternally, l would maintain that they do have a slgnlficance outside of the medlum; that ls, the experlmental structure of thelr internaI relatlonshlps conflrms the prevalent concept of life as experlmentl l do so hate the becauses of drama. Who are we to say that this happens because that happened, that one thing ls the consequence of another? How do we know? What reason have we to suppose that llfe is so neat and tldy? The most we know for sure ls that the thlngs which have happened have happened in a certain order. any connections we think we see, or choose to make, are pure guesswork. Life is much more mysterious than plays make it out to be. And it is thls mystery whlch fasclnates mel what happens between the words, what happens when no words are spoken.20 Plnter does not present a drama more reassuring than life - a work which Simplifies complexities and amblguities. Rather, he ls recreatlng those complexities within a theatrical form; he ls glving us an answer in his structure for which there ls no ultl mate question. The attempts to find an answer by asking the "right" questlons have been frustratlng for Plnter's crltics; to ask a question requires that the questloner has some idea of the response, that he presupposes a structure in which hls question wll1 not become non-senslcal. But the traditlonal questions asked by Plnter's crltics can never be completely lrrelevant, - 15 -

for Pinter has used bits and pieces of traditional themes and symbols which encourage such questions; he then supplies insuffi cient, often contradictory and non--verifiable evidence which make the questions miscarry. Each patch or unit of a collage carries with it the meaning of its prior function; the investi- gation of that meaning will not logically lead us to the next patch which formerly was part of another conceptual whole. Never- theless, the viewer cannot help but relate to the patch according to its orthodox association and, of course, he is meant to, for it 1s the unrealized expectation which produces the effect. The kind of zeugma which the Dadists produced by making a a fur-lined teacup refers to one's prior knowledge of both fur and teacupsl ••• the result defeats or contradicts the funct10n for which a teacup was formed, and in which it is classed. What it is is no longer what it does. The same was true of the upside-down urinal, a favorite at Dada exhibits and usually placed over the entrance, of the spiked flatiron, and of limp watches (the inverse of mechanical precision.) 21 The zeugmatic use of one object which refers to two different concepts is strikingly illustrated by Eisenstein's experielace. Peter Wollen in his study, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, re counts "hoN Eisenstein was delighted to find at Mont-Saint-Michel two postcards in which the same model posed at Ste. Therese de Lisieur-and, heavily made-uj), in the arms of a sailor." 22

The question nO ..1 arises of how can a collage or z-eugma in art or bricolage in a cUlture (made up of bits and pieces as they are) be understood as a unit; and there is no doubt that the crea- tion of such forms is an attempt to see thlngs as whole. Nor - 16 - has the attempt failed. The images of the overlapping of semaI and religious passion often used by Eisenstein, has now beeome a familiar unit. In a sense, it has become obsolete for the gap which once assembled the fragments is gone, the result being, in T.E. Hulme's terminology, prosea- " ••• the museum where the dead metaphors of the poet are preserveda" 23 In prose as in algebra concrete things are embodled in signs or countere which are moved about according to rules, without being visualized at aIl in the process.. There are in prose certain type situations and arrangements of words, which move as automatically into certain other arrangements as dO functions in algebra. One only changes the X's and Y's back into physical things at the end of the process. Poetry, in one aspect at any rate, may be considered as an effort to avo1d this characteristic of prose. It- is not a counter la~uage, but a visual cond&.~te one. It is a'compro~se for a language of intuition .which would hand over sensations bodily. It always endea vours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent Y9U gliding through an abstract process. It chooses fresh epithets:and fresh metaphors, not so much because they are new, and we are tir.ed of the old, but because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become abstract counters. 24 One of· the sources of zeugmatic persuasion is the tangible and hence familiar quality of the individual units. The bits and pieces used by the Dadists were commonplace objects, familiar and concrete ground from which to move into abstraction; and the move ment be in that direction-from the concrete to the abstract - in order for the zeugma to be effective. ~fr.dle we can conceptually accept religious and sexual ecstacy as a whole unit, the discovery of the combination in a particulàr person is unexpected; hence Eisenstein's delight. Nevertheless, the tendency is to search - 17 - through our experience to f'ind an explanation f'or the zeugma; in this part1cular case, of' course, it was that a prof'essional medel had posed f'or two d1f'f'erent pictures and the zeugma was, in f'act, created by Eisenste1n. In drama, however. the zeugmat1c situa- tien is presented w1thin a closed universe which must necessarily supply the rationale. Pinter's drama is extraordinary and extraordinarily perplex ing in that the created zeugmas are impossible to verify within the dramatic structure. This is not to say that the y can be veri- f'ied outside its f'orm but one must, l think, see the structure as a process, a process which is understood by accepting tha~ the events taking place on the stage are of a continuous piece. Per- haps 'understood' is not the pre~se word; one does not necessarily understand the events of' one's own lif'e but accepts them, nevertheless as the only known reality. Any interpretation or analysis which, in the end, does not check out with the facts will not make one's lif'e, but the interpretation of it implausible. The point is that in spite of' the critical f'rustration which his drama produces, Pinter of'fers an immediate and vital set of situa- tiens which cannot be denied. Ruth, in The Homecoming does return to her husband's home with him; she does roll on the couch ~~th her brother-in-Iaw and decides to stay (with the sugges tion that she will whore) when Ted returns to America and their three children. When Ruth and Ted first arrive speak1ng of the1r missed children, we see Ruth as a wife and mother; later, - 18 - ft when Ruth is accused by her father-in-Iaw of being a whore, the V impression is of a ngood" woman who has walked into a mad-house. It then becomes difficult, on the lnterpretlve level to account

for her subsequent declslon to stay with Ted's famlly and her

lnt~macies wlth hls brothers. As States says, the play bas been

nspun outward from an invlslble centre of comp~iclty wh~ch clearly beckons the interpreter to try his band at supplying objective correlatives. n On one hand therefore, we explain the play as a study in psychic ambiguity. Under the banal sur face a massive Oedipal syndrome (like the part of the iceberg you can't see) bumpa lts way to grisly fulfilIment. Or, beneath Freud lurks Jung and the archetypal. the father-sons ncontestn the "fertility riten on the sofa, the Earth Mother nsacriflce,n the tribal sharing of her body (a Sparagmos for sure), the cyclical "return,n and so on. 25 And one cannot assuredly say that the play is not about any of these things - 1 t ls, to a point, for part of the zeugmatlc effec.t ts. to remind one of aIl the possibilities inherent in the indlvldu al unlts whlch leads one to attempt an lnterpretatlon of the com- blned unlt. But as States goes on to say, the interpretations are not what the play is ultlmately about, nthey come much closer to being by-products." 26 The failure to find verifiable interpretations for Ruth's double role, for Teddy's seeming acceptance of his wife's lnfi- dellty leads the lnterpreter back to the collage as presented; that ls the only known reality. Walter Kerr has understood the importance and value of the surface events in Plnter's work. - 19 -

The play is only an event, not a logical demons tration; the event must spe~, illogically but persuasively, for itself. The play persuades by existing, and in no other way. If it failed to persuade in this way, no theory - however correct, however contemporary - could save it. 27 Pinter has been called "a poet of the surface;" 28 this gets it exactly. Pinter weaves an intricate sU7face pattern that encourages us to look behind it. But we go back at our own risk and failing to find the sources of the patterning, we stand amazed once again at the surface. It is a texture which is immediate and visual, offering past and future only in the possibilities which the unexpected images engender; this is why the- st.ructUJte of Pinter's plays must be seen as a process. Ruth, a wife and mother of three boys has the possibility of becoming a whore and/or the mother of three grown men. Hugh Nelson in his article "Kith and Kin" has said that '''the home coming, ~ 'the birthday party'

is an event that occurs in the play a Teddy comes home. But the truer of the 'homecomings' is Ruth's. She comes home to herself, to aIl her possibilities as a woman. n 29 Identity is not some thing given in the play~ structure; rather, the structure is the process of discovering identity. And perhaps this discovery is not just on the audience's part; lt would seem that Pinter and the characters themselves are discovering the possibilities. For instance, Ruth's acceptance of her father-in-Iaw's offer to stay and whore may simply be based on the proportionally greater scope which she has there for identity mUltiplication. While Edward, in A Slight Ache searches for the matchseller's identity, not only the matchseller's but Edward's identity as weIl - 20 - change in the process. Edward' s attempt which is met by a os OJ.1l..t e silence.. _le~ds him into self-examination and reminiscences, surely an attempt to secure a shifting classification. But the shift takes place within the very examination, for the memories, used to verify the present, move further and further away fro:m i t as memories generate memories. Furthermore, perhaps the only way of understanding another's identity is to become the other; Edward's anxiety to apprehend the matchseller propels him into the matchsel~er's role. So Gus, in The Dumb Waiter, who is concerned about the feelings of former victims becomes himself the victim. There is an interesting movement of identLfication in one of Pin ter's television plays, Night School; while Sally claims to be a school teacher, Walter finds a photograph which identifies her as a night club hostess. Later, when she has disappeared from his life and he has abandoned the probe, Walter finds another photograph which identifies her as a school teacher surrounded by a volleyball team. The search does not lead to the solution but it does make the ambigu1ty more precise; at the beginning of the play, there was the picture and a gixl; at the end, there are two photographs, surface images only, the demand for verification having led to the destruction of a possible relationship for Walter. Pinter has spoken of his characters as autonomous, and although he does the "donkey work," he is, like the audience, in a position of watchingthGc~c;wrs live out their immediate situa tionsa " ••• I don't know what kind of characters my plays will - 21 - have until they ••• well, untll they ~. Untl1 they indlcate to me what they are. l don't conceptuallze in any way. Once l've got the clues l folloN them - that's my job, really, to follow the clues."30 Tradltionally in theatre, the lronlc polnt of view was shared by the author with the audience; but ln Pinter's drama, the audience has been left out of this 'knowing' posltion, struggl- ing to lnterpret the events without the author's help. Though Pinter's stance is exterior, it is not one taken in order to com- prehend; rather, the distancing enables Pinter to embrace aIl the contradictions which his characters present. There are at least twenty-four possible aspects of any single statement, depending on where you're stan ding at the tlme or on what weather's like. A cate gorical statement l flnd will never stay where it is and be finite. lt ~dll lmmediately be subject to modification by the other twenty-three possibilities of it. No statement l make, therefore should be in terpreted as final and definitive. One or two of them may sound final and definitive, the y may even be almost final and definltive, but l won't regard them as such tomorxow, and l wouldn't like you to do so today. 31 Bert states bas s8.id that this " ••• is the source of our conster- natlon and fascination with Pinter - our quest for the lost supe riority of knowing more than the characters who now know more than we do, the very reverse of the familiar "dramatic" irony in which we know but they don't." 32

Llke Fra~~enstein's monster, Pinter's characters have taken control of their universe, forcing thelr creator to follow them around. The characters are not interested in 'explaining' themselves to the audience; nor, do l think, have they set out to - 22 - confuse us - they are not d1abo11cal 1n that way, at least. They offer thelr l1ves as they l1ve them - the lmmed1ate, the vlsual - and le~ the overall analysls to us. Speaklng of The Blrthday Party, Walter Kerr has developed thls p01nta The pr1ncipa.l.s in this struggle - stanley, G'ol.dberg'·, MaCann - ex1st. Because they exlst, they act. They do not act out of pr10r definltlonJ they are on the way ta d1scover1ng themselves but they have not yet done so. The1r gestures §re not d1ctated by consclous roles, by a shared nature, bV g1ven melo dramat1c or metaphys1cal postu1a.tes. They are: a"E1.Ve-.; and free to do whatever they wll1 do, but the1r actlv1ty 1s a prob1ng process, not a dlsclos1ng one. They are find1ng out what they are by what they do, and by what ls done to them. There ls no master-plan; there 1s only an exper1mental testlng, 33 The movement of the drama for the aUd1ence, for the characters and, 1t woul4 appear, for P1nter h1mself 1s dependant upon the Poss1billtles 1n life and the 1nterpretatlons of 1t. Theatre wh1ch offers a concept of what man 1s, necessar1ly 1ncludes a moral 1mage of the un1verse; but when the only pro ferred reallty of an art1st's un1verse 1s v1sual and 1mmed1ate, 1t 1s quest10nable whether it can contain moral judgements. The s1ngle ahd absolute p01nt of view of communal agreement, the con- cern of much o~ Western drama, has been g1ven over by P1nter to fragmented unitsl to people who have widely d1vergent judgements, to memor1es wh1ch negate memor1es, to 1nterpretat10ns which are rendered impotent by situat10ns offering wider possibilities. Pinter bas said that he objects to the stage being used • • ••• as a subst1tute for the soap box, where the author des1res to make a d1rect statement at all costs, and forces h1s characters 1nto f1xed and art1f1c1al - 23 -

~.-..i"., postures 1n order to achieve th1s. This 1s hardly fair on the characters. l don't cere for the didact1c or mora11st1c theatre. 34 The hero1c search for truth 1s reduced to a scrap1ng for ver1f1ca tion; aIl that can be anticipated from the layers of poss1b1lities 1s statist1cal probabil1ty, not a concept of "r1ght" and "wrong". One cri tic, comment1ng on Pinter's The Lover and John Osborne's Under Plain Cover made the astute observation that while " •••Mr. Osborne is a moralist who must give rein to his indignation, Mr Pinter 1s an analyst and styliste Mr. Osborne rails at life, Mr. Pinter notes 1ts patterns and arranges it." 35 The past, in some form, is constantly impinging on present events. Max, in The Homecoming, sets up a zeugmatic situation

by recalling his dead wife, Jessica, f~rst as "a woman at home with a w111 of 1ron, a heart of gold and a mind" and later as "a slutbitch of a w1fe': Sam recalls J ess1ca, "a charm1ng woman", 1n gentle

and 1dyll1c sequences; later~ he collapses on the floor hav1ng blurted out that "MacGregor had Jess1e 1n the back of my cab as l drove them along." The memor1es wh1ch push and pull at one another draw the audience even closer to the 1mmediate events, to the actual and v1sual situat1on; mistrusting the past 1n any form, the aud1ence cl1ngs to the present. When P1nter introduces a fore1gn and mysterious element 1nto the present context of the drama as he did in The Room, the result 1s fa1lure. The negro who comes into Rose's room and calls her SaI 1s surely a dev1ce to

push the p1a.y forward but one which offers an unrea11stic menace - 24 -

from the past ~ïd excludes the aud1ence 1n 1ts lack of lnt1macy and fam1liarity; Pinter has s1nce sa1d that 1f he were wrlting the play now, he would bring the negro in, slt hlm down and have Rose ~1ve h1m a cup of tea. S1mpller and more believable are these pasts which grow out of the present in the form of me- mor1es and deslres. In the intruslon of the negro, Pinter can be accused of symbollc abstract1on. Taylor has said, ln reference to The Room that ••• the hand is not yet entirely sure and the mystifi cations are often too calculated, too heavily under- 11ned. The suppression of motives, for example, whlch in later plays comes to seem lnevltable, bevause no one, not even the man who acts, can know preclsely what impels him to act, here often looks merely an arbitrary devlce; it 1s not that the mot1~s are un knowable but s1mply t~t the author will not perm1t us to know them. 36 l have sald that Pinter's characters are in no way dlabol1- cal nor do l th1nk thatthey are playlng elaborate games meant to confuse. They are, in the end, operating on the same shiftlng sand as the audience in their search for stabllity. Even those characters who are menac1ng at one point are victimized by the structure of 11fe which offers no absolute security - even the secur1ty that they wll1 maintain the1r dominance. D1pplng lnto memorles, attempt1ng to piece together fragments which do not cohere, they have, 1n splte of their violence and cruelty, our sympathy. Max, in The Homecom1ng, pragmat1c and overbear1ng, ends up whimpering at Ruth's feet, express1ng the fear that " ••• she'll do dirty on us, you want to bet? She'll use us, she'll make use - 25 -

of us •••• " Gus, in The Dumb Waiter, anxious and mournful about his victims is a victim of his own anxiety. So too in The Care- taker, Davies, a garrulous demanding old man becomes an object of compassion as he searches for authority. It is interesting to look forward at this point to one of Pinter's film scripts, ~ Servant; while in Robin Maugham's novel, Barrett, the servant, is the epitome of evilness and Tony his victim, Pinter makes him sympathetica ••• it i8 difficult to determine whether Barrett's pleading is not sincere, for like Davies, outside his patron's house he is hopelessly adrift, and this desperate insecuritl can spark pitiable fear and sincere contrition. 37 The intimacy between the characters and the audience which grows out of a common perception of life is necessarily amoral. Pinter, in reference to his unpublished play, The Hothouse, speaks of the imposs1b11ity of combining moral abstractions with living charactersa The characters were so purely cardboard. l was intentionally - for the only time, l think - try ing to make a p01nt, an exp11c1t point, that these were nasty people and Id1sapproved of them. And therefore they didn't beg1n to live. Whereas in other plays of mine every s1ngle character, even a basta~ like Goldberg 1n The Birthdsy Party, l cere for. To sympath1ze with a character who at f1rst elic1ts aversion has an arresting effect. Who 1s the v1ct1m, who the v1ctimizer? When we th1nk we know, the tables have turned. This 1s a major source of P1nter's humour - a dark humour in wh1ch the comic and - 26 - the tragic have merged, the intimacy with life constantly subver- ting moral distancing. Pinter has aaid that he is rarely consc1- ously writing humor, "but somet1mes l flnd myself laugh1ng at some partlcular point whlch has suddenly struck me as belng funny. l agree that more often than not the speech only seems to be funny - the man ln questlon ls actually flghtlng a battle for hls llfe." 39 The zeugmatlc effect whlch ls set up by conflictlng motives, memories and lnterpretatlons frequently patterns ltself lnto vlo- lence as the characters struggle for authorlty. But more often, the confuslon and amblgulty which results from these lnterlocking layers separate the characters both physlcally and llngulstlcally, givlng them rnom and tlme to shlft th~ough the posslbilltles and explore their posltions which are constantly belng changed by present events. Llke the characters, we can depend only on the present; challenglng ln lts perforated complexity, it draws us lnto the pattern. This ls Plnter's lnvltatlon to dlscovery, both for the characters and the audience - an lnvolvement more demandlng and substantial than that which generally passes as audience par- ticipatlon. Hugh Nelson has spoken about the physlcal aspects of silence. Pinter has stated that he beglns hls plays with a vision of certaln physlcal relatlonshlps between people ln a room. sitting, standlng, lylng, knee llng. A careful lookat his final curtaln will reveal a significantly altered physlcal relation ship which makes a statement beyond the power of words. Other indlvidual movements allow us to chart stages in the development agaln by purely physical means. 40 - 27 -

Because P1nter does not g1ve us exp11c1t mot1vational information, we are forced to refer to h1s patterning; as P1nter has sa1d, for him fI ••• everything has to do wlth shape, structure and overall unity." 41 Although the charting of phys1cal relationships can suggest psycholog1cal motivations, the inferences are speculat1ve. L1ke a ser1es of kale1doscop1c 1mages, phys1cal patterning g1ves few clues to the reasoning beh1nd the arrangements~ the result 1s twofold. the aud1ence is 1nvited to move into the areas left between the positionings and relate them in any possible way. This, of course, gives a great deal of interpretive freedom, the possibilities originating from individual experiences; the other result is that characters and objects are merged within a common pattern, destroying the dependance of objects on characters. One flnds that often an object becomes as important as any one of the characters; fer instance, in ~he Dumbwaiter, the inanlmate object for which the p~y is titled, contains the central authority. The autonomy and often aggressiveness of objects is peculiar to Pinter's theatre. One reason for this has already been suggested - that they form, along with the characters, the visual pattern which is the only source of interpretation. An extension of this idea is one which Walter Kerr has realized. Objects observed in a Pinter play tend to generate something like awe. They may be ~tterly commonplace, they usually are; yet they seem uncommon here because they have not been absorbed 1nto a pattern that explains them away as mere tools of a narrative or as looming symbols of conceptual value. Sometimes these objects acquire such sel~importance as to seem ominous, though 28 -

that is not thelr lnitlal functlon in a Plnter play. If we feel faintly st~led to see how solld a cup ls, or ho. shaped, we feel so - ln the beginnlng - only because we are used to 19noring the solldlty and ~peof cups ln our absent-mlnded 11ves. Normally we thlnk of a cup as a..means to an end, as an indifferent utl1ity making a passlng contribution to another, much more identlfiable purpose. onr tea, our pleasure, our life-roles as wlfe, h~sba.nd, host. Thinking of a cup ln thls way, we render 1 t more or less invlsible. In effect, we make it absent. B7 suppresslng the past and future of the cup, by re~using to name lts orlgin or lts destiny, Pinter increases its presence. It catches, and for the moment wholly occupies our eye.42 Although Plnter has stated hls belief that ambigUity is the core of our living~ he has tried to suppress that which arises from the 11mltatl~ns of theatre. In speaking of the relatlonship between the staged and fl1med versions of The Caretaker, Plnter has expressed his appreciation for .the abl1lty of fllm to clear up unlntentional amblgultyl ••• the thing about the play ls that a certaln ••• body of people consider that as i t was all. in a particular room on the stage. that lt was taklng place in a 11mbo, in a vacuum and there wasn't any world ()utslde. Now l alwsys felt ••• I had. no oppor tunity in the 11mitatlon of the stage to state this ••• there ls a world outslde; l felt that should be taken for granted •••• for some odd reason they wanted god, the devil and ••• materla1ism and •••msnkind and God and Christ you know as ••• as these characters •••• then it got ••• taken out of its natural. place which was a room in a house in a street in a town in the world, so l was very glad of the opportunity to go outslde and Just show that people did come in, when they came ln the door that had come ln from the street you know and also there was a garden when ln the play the man said ••• Aston the eIder brother sald ••• ·all that wood under the tarpaulln in the yard· when given there to build ~~s shed, there was wood under a tarpaulln. 43 - 29 -

The dramatist, 1imited by the enc10sed stage area and the static pbysical relationship between the characters and the audience, cànnot make use of close-ups in the way ln which the fl1mmaker can. Pinter, in an interview with Bensky has discussed the

frustration arislng from these physlca1 l~tationsJ ••• the theatre's much the Bost difficu1t kind of wri ting for me, the most naked klnd, you 're so entire1y restricted •••• What is so different about the stage 1s that you're just there, stuck - there are your characters stuck on the stage, you've got to live with them and deal with them. l'm not a very inventive wri ter in the sense rot"using the techn1cal devices other p1aywrights do - look at Brechët l can't use the stage the way he does, l Just haven't got that ~ of lmagination, so l find myself stuck with these characters who are either sitting or standing, and they've either got to walk put of a door, or come in t~ough a door, and that's about all they can do.

Bensky then goes on to say that Plnter's characters can also ~, and Pihter adds, "or keep si1ent.- As a poet, Pinter bas been able to overcome the physical restrictions of theatre and create a kind of c1ose-up with his patterning of speech. Plnter's speech patterns eut through the language grid which distances experience by abstractlon. The re1ationship between 1anguage and si1ence ia comparab1e to that visua1 pattern wh1ch exists with Pinter's ch~~cters and objects. Furthermore, the relationship between these two sets assists in releasing

each other's possibi1ities. As our language ls patterned 1inear- ly, so the expectation about dramatic characters ls that they have a past which has a direct relatlonship to their present - JO - and future. But to juxtapose thls ordered llnearallty With sllence and objects (whose role, as a character ln Beckett's

Molloy sald 1s "to restore sllence") ls to create, as Plnter does, a zeugmatlc and partlclpatlonal experlence. Lenny and

Ruth's exchange ln The Homecomlpg ls a case ln pOlnt.45 Lenny moves verbally from the ashtray to the glass sl.ply because they are next to one another. LiNNY •.••••• Excuse me, shall l take thls ashtray out of your way? RUTH. lt's not ln my way. LENNY. lt seems to be ln the way of your glass. The glass was about to fall. Or the ashtray. l 'm rather worrled about the Qarpet. lt' not me, lt's my father. He's obsessed w1th order and clarlty. He doesn't like mess. So, as l don't bel1eve you're smoking at the moment, l'm sure you won't object lf l move the ashtray. (He does so.) And now perhaps l'Ll relleve you of your glass. Ruth's attempt to retaln control of the object leads lnto Lenny's own sense or ldent1ty whlch evolves around the retentlon of his name.

RUTE. l haven't quite flnlshed. LENNY. You've consumed qulte enough, ln my oplnion. RUTH. Not ln mlne, Leonard Pause LENNY. Don't call ~e that~ please. RUTH. Wby net? LENNY. That's the name my mother gave me. Pause. Just glve me the glass. RUTH. No. Both the glass and the name are arbltrary cholces, although one mlght be led to belleve that there ls some depth to Lenny's - 31 -

~ ~ reactlon; the words 'mother' and 'name' are heavy with lmpllca- tlons. This ls much like Pope's zeugmatlc wit in Rape of the ~I "or stain her honour, or her new brocade." 46 states refers to thls as Plnter's obsession with "polnts of reference, means, st71e, what can be made out of what 1s passing at any partlcular moment." 47 Ruth gains full control over the glass by her use of lt; she equates Lenny's posslble tak1ng of the glass with her dominan..lI!:' ce over himl "If you take the glass ••• I'll take you." The use of the ward 'take' here to refer ta both the glass and to Lenny produces an equatlon which emphaslzes the object, that ls, ln 1ts sllence, the glass comes to have a discursive functlon. Plnter uses this method ln a later scene in whlch Teddy eats Lenny's eheese roll. While Lenny equates this wlth Teddy's lack of honour and goodw111, the incldent ls set agalnst Lenny' s sexual relatlonshlp with Teddy's wife. The glass takes on a further

amblgulty as it beeomes a tOC];1;S . for a shared relatlonshlpa She picks up the glass and llfts lt towards him. RUTH. Have a sip. Go on. Have a slp from my glass. He is still. Slt on my lape Take a long cool slp. She pats her lape Pause. She stands, moves to hlm with the glass. Put your head back and open your mouth. LENNY. Take that glass a-way fram me. RUTH. Lle on the floor. Go on. l'll pour lt down your throat. LENNY. What are you dolng, making me some klnd of proposal? She laughs shortly, drains the glass. RUTH. Oh, l was thirsty. She s~les at him, puts the glass down, goes lnto the hall and up the stalrs. - ,32 -

LENNY. What wasthat supposed to be? Some klnd of proposal? And lt ls not the relatlonship which frlghtens Lenny, but the object 1tself whlch holds poss1bl11tles that he can't put hls f1nger on. The earl1er suggest10n that Ruth 'take' him ls ans wered ln some klnd of log1cal way wh1ch only needs a verbal twist to break down 1ts objectlon. Plnter has sald that there are two sllences. One when no word ls spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language ls belng employed. This speech ls speak1ng of a language locked beneath 1t. That ls 1ts cont1nua! reference. The speech ve hear ls an 1ndlcatlon of that whlch we don~t hear. It ls a necessary avo1dance, a violent, sly, angulshed or mock1ng smoke screen wh1ch keeps the other ln lts place. When true sllence falls we are st1ll left w1th echo but are nearer nakedness. One wa:y of looking at speech ls to say that lt ls a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.48 The sllence of contlnuaI talklng ls not a fallure of communica tlonr on the contrary, for while lt ls an attempt at evadlng commu nicat1on, lt manages to transmlt a my.rlad of posslbll1t1es. In effect, the sllence produced by evaslon, llke that of objects, enhances the orlg1nal sltuatlon by drawing out layers of lnter pret1ve posslb1l1tles. Plnter's work ln clnema (ln part1cular, that wh1ch has been done wlth Joseph Losey) ls an extens10n of those structures whleh he has lnvestlgated ln hls drama. The flUid1ty and flex1- bll1t, of the camera has, to a large degree, freed Plnter from the unintentlonal amblgUi ty of language, while glving a marvel- - 33 -

.. lous and. prec1se tool by which to 1nvest1gateîthe amb1gu1ty of objects and s1lence. In h1s dralIllli' the sntch of dominat1on takes place 1n s1lence. In A Sl1sht Ache, the matchseller comes to hold the author1ty because he rebains the source of pb1gu1ty. At the end of The "Collect1on, James who has tr1ed to ver1~ Stella's relat1onsh1p with B1ll, 1s left with another quest1on, -that's the truth, 1sn't it?8 as Stella faces him 1n s1lence. Ruth in The Homecomipg, Ben in The Dumbwai ter and. espe- clally the dumbwa1ter 1n the latter play, al1 hold the author1ty of s1lence. P1nter's capac1ty to 1nvolve the aud1ence 1n h1s zeugmat1c structures 1n drama has been 1ncreased 1n his f1lm work by the 1ntroduct1on of another object t~ which the aud1ence 1s attached, that 1s, the camera. Its abil1ty to move 1nto and create silence becomes a dominate factor 1n both The Servant and Acc1dênt. - :34 -

In Plnter's early plays, The Room, The Blrthdal Party and The Dumb Walter, the effects are produced by the suppresslon of evidencea who is the negro who calls Rose, Sal?; what: are the organizatlons behlnd Goldberg and McCann, Ben and Gus? The critlcal fallure to find an adequate Interpretation of these plays ls placed on Pinter's doorstep, the belief being that If he had glven us all the facts, motlvatlon would be clear. It ls only ln hls later plays that one dlscovers that the past ln any form cannot account for the present J. however, 1 t ls ln the early plays that one can see the structure of his work most clearly. In The Room, the statlc, almost claustrophobie quallty of Rose's room ls threatened by a usurper from the past, the negro who calls Rose to come home. And although the intruder appears to be dlsruptlve force, closer analysis flnds that the dlsruptlon Is asslsted by the audlence whlch demands to know Rose's real name and how many floors there are ln the house. The destruc- tlve force whlch comes ln the form of the negro Is, in fact, the comblnatlon of memorles and deslres ~ch do not harmonize and the expectatlon of the audlence whlch assumes that behlnd the contradictlons of the past (whlch presents itself in many forms) is a single. unifylng truth. And although thls ls not so (as understood by Plnter's later plays), it ls understandable thatthe au41ence should think so, not only fram the emphasis placed ~n the negative amount of informatlon, but also because of-the un- ....rirriéd

- 35 - famil1ar1ty of the 1nformat1on carr1ers. AS11ght Ache is a much more successful play 1n this regard, Pinter br1ngs the matchseller into the present tense of the play and 1n th1s way, one 1s less 11kely to see him as a symbol of anyone's past or doom; his effect on Flora and Edward ls of a catalyst whose sllent presence produces a situat1on, though strange, ±s strange in its fami11arity rather than its fore1gnness. Wr1 tten c::1ginally as a rad10 play, 1t could be argued that the wordless ehar3cter of the matchseller in A S11sht Ache need not ex1st at all except in the m1nds of the couple, the situat10n being produced solely by their own memories, fantasies and fears. In Pinter's later plays, there 1s less and less a re11ance on a past wh1ch is 1mposed from the outs1de although Aston's lobotomy in The Caretaker produoes a r1g1dly def1ned past as heavy-handed in 1ts ce~a1nty as the negro is in h1s myster1ousness. The movement 1n P1nter' s work appears to boe away from those situations and motivations which come fram outside the Immediate events, and wh1ch encourage symbolic Interpretations.

The movement is toward fami11ar and ord~y situat10ns wh1ch can only be explained or understood with1n the partieular and Lmmediate interaction of the characters; this does not mean that motiva tions are any eas1er to verify but it does stimulate the conviction that there 1s an 1nterpretation to be found only in the events as given. And if a verifiable Interpretation -'." > .~ .. - 36 -

.. ~:' (). cannot be found, the crltlc ls not led outslde of, but closer lnto the events as presented - lnto the lmmedlate, the visual and the partlcular. In drawing attentlon tothe immedlacles of the sltuatlon (this belng asslsted by the z.eugmatlc style which demands adherence to the surface) and ln dea1lng with the past only as lt presents ltself as memories and deslres, Plnter has challenged the concept of a holistlc vls10n ln theatre. In lts stead, he has lnvolved hls aUdlence, hls characters and, lt would appear, himself, ln the process of dlacovery. And becœ.use the medlum of fllm allows for the acceptance of events simply because they exlst and not because thay are interpretable, l would argue that Plnter's work has moved a structure whlch ls baslcally clnematlc. In examln1ng three of Plnter's fl1m scrlpts - The Compart

~ (whlch was shot as a televislon drama. The Basement), ~ Servant, and Accldent - one flnds a structural slmllarlty whlch will asslst ln deflnlng the clnematlc posslbl11tles of hls work. There ls in each scrlpt a movement whlch demands a contlnuation after the completlon of the presented events, a e~~tlnuatlon which ls as dlverse in lts posslbl1ltles as the forme~ movement but slmllar in the sense that lt too wl11 lead to a further con- tlnuatlon. The three women ln the scripts are the plvots around whleh the structures are 'bUl1t; Jane ln The Compartment, Amla ln

Accldent and Vera ln The Servant are used essentla1ly as objects - 37 - whose presence creates a silence in whlch the posslb1l1tles of events. memor1es '. :and deslj:~s csn be explored. This 1s not to say that the cbaracters of these women are not bel1evable as humans - they are, but the1r posltlons as catylsts withln the structures force them to take thelr color1ngs from the surrounding events. We have become famil1ar with Pinter's use of the silence of objects in theatre, but often the authorlty of the objects (such as the dumbwaiter) is lessened by the suspic10n of manipulation; this in turn creates a mystery about the objects whlch often leads outslde the action of the play.

In his f1lm scripts, P1nter has been able to con~entrate on the silence of objects and people as objects to a greater and more flexible degree by the very abillty of the camera to close in and move around. In part, the effect 1s to make lndist1n- guishable the difference between ~ate and 1nan1mate things and to give to the object an authorlty and even an aggresslveness which begins and ends ln itself, needing no reference to motiva- tlon or concepts of human behavlour. The mystery wh1ch ls created by the objects (animate or inanlmate) in Plnter's scrlpts is that which develops from famillarity by looking long and intlmately at an object wh1ch comes to hold the a.m.blgu1.ty of the surrounding events. The lntroductlon of the female in The Compartment 18 a case in point. After the two men make thelr greetlngs and become settled wlth drlnks, stott, the vis1tor, remarks as an - 38 -

afterthought, "Oh, by the ~, l've got a friend outside. Can she come in?" Rer sm1ling sllence throughout the play ls un-

changed by the raging battle. for dominance, which takes place between the men; and although Jane does not take an actlve part: ln the sense that she concerna herself with the outcome, her presence provides the necessary landscape on which the actlon takes place. As Law and stott replace one another in the ascen- dant posltion, Jane moves toward the stronger area, without dls- cusslon, without outward Signa of inner tenslons. Rer aggresslve-

ness ls not of posl tlve but of neg~ti ve value; rather than supporili:: .. ting one man to become or remain dominant, she reactivates a situatlon whlch has become static. Slmulatlng a lyrical memor.y, she whispers to Law

Why don't you tell him to go? We had such a lovely home. We had such a cozy home. It was so WarIn. Tell hlm to go. It' s your place. Then we could be happy again~ Llke we used to. Like ve used to. In our first blush of love. Then we could be happy again, like we used to. Vie could be happy again. Llke we used to. 4 9 As the men face each other with broken bottles, Jane sllently prepares coffee, a tacit acceptance that the sltuation will once agaln become settled before" the next proded confrontation. The camera work in thls pbysical battle is of alternate shots

of Law and stott, separated by shots of Jane i.n the k1 tchen. This is a visual expression of the powerful ga.p of silence which she provldes, a gap which makes not only the events possible but also the possibilitles of events.

'.J,_'.' ."~ - 39 --

The end o~ The Campartment slgnals the beglnn1ng o~ a varlatlon on the comp1eted events; as stott slts readlng by the

~lre ln the apartment, Law knocks on the door as Jane crouehes by the wall. The dlalogue of greetlngs ls the same w1 th the names reversed, ~urther evidence that Plnter ls dea11ng wlth a process o~ coplng wlth lmmedlate experlence rather than concep tua11z1ng about experlence which has been lntegrated into a single vision. Pinter's 1ack o~ a 'wor1d view" - a phi10sophi- cal and moral concept - must be understood in terms o~ what he ls dolng rather than wbat he tal1s to do; what he is dolng ls l.eadlng his audience lnto paths of pOSSible lnterpretatlons and this demands that he ~e speclfle and immediate experlences; this necessarll.y means that the wor1d outslde those experiences (not to speak o~ the world wi thln) must be left unstr~èd. So that Rose ln The Roam doesn't know how many floors the house has (never havlng been outside the room) and Mr. Kidd. the landlord. doesn't know because he hasn't counted them recent1y; understanding to any smal.l degree demands a constant contact with the sltuatlon. Even then, however, the relatlonshlp ls tenable for memories obscure present clarlty and truth is constant1y belng obscured by the relativeness of posltion. This point can be clari~led in a discussion of Plnter's ~11m script The Servant.

Robln Maugham' s short ât:027 ',trœir: Wli1~:Ptatér:.~ 'talœn his narrative ls largely psychologica1 in lts approach. The events are seen through the eyes o~ Rlchard Merton, an army buddy of Tony, an approach which insures a single and morallstlc polnto - 40 - of" view. In bis need for aff"ection and his weakness f"or com- fort, Tony is gradua11y and irretrlevably debauched by the supreme evl1ness of his manservant, Hugo Barrett. If the novel must be seen as dealing with the relationship of master and ser~ vant (and this theme ls reinforced Dy Merton's own dlfflcultles with hls loquacious servant, Krs. Toms), Pinter has enlarged and amp11fied the theme by dispensing with the single point of view represented by the narrator 1n th~story. By closing in on the

Tony-Bàrrett relatlonship and by examin1ng not orily their rela tionship to one another ~a1so the1r relationship to the objects which surround them, Pinter bas developed a complexand enigmatic script from a rather simple story. The theme of victlm and vlctim1:er ls developed once agaln ln this work of Pinter' s; this tlme, howeveJ:", 1 t ls developed much more ln relatlonship to objects:because of the abillty of the camera to focus on objects and move around them ln many diff"e- rent levels and angles. The actlon of" the f"llm concentrates around a stalrcase, a beautlfully visual background for a relationship whlch ls constantly changlng and. highly irregular in that change. Losey's pre-designer, Richard MacDonald, has said of the set that The whole ldea of The Servant was ta bu11d the house as a sort of" circular idea, wlth~·~Circular movements enclosed lnside the house, you know, round that staircase. Round and down lnto the basement, round and up lnto the bedrooms, so that lt lnvolved the whole 11f"e of" the place. There was the same c1rcular idea with the doors - 41 -

of the ~tchen so that you could shoot all ways for entrles and exits and. get them out and up. l think this linklng ide~ gave you a very good sense of the house, of where everythlng was. After that the idea was to get thls old house, then to see lt refurbished and properly furnished, and then to close ln on ltself untl1 all the windows were shut and gradually all the curtains were draw:l and no one went out, unt11 1t all, you know, became pract1cally unbearable and overdressed. 50 Within this enclosed space, without reference to the world outside, a world whlch might bave judged with a moral cr1terlon, is a prison which can only be understood by lntimate lnvolvement. And this is what the camera doesi taking us 1nside the house and involving us in the fragmented points of view, we leave behind our moral judgements, possibly, in part, because we are too busy trying to find a secure foothold on shifting possibilitles. But perhaps there is another reason as well, for as the camera

becomes intimate with both Tony and Barrett, we begin to lose the initial distinction of mas ter and servant; as they inhabit the space and move about the same objects, they become two cha

racters equal in their determinat~on to use that background as a battlef1eld for dominance. With the intense use of objects (in particular' the stair case and later the introduction of the girl as object), the changing relationship of Tony and Barrett becomes understandàb.fe lesB and less in terms of motivations; this is not to suggest that motivations are not behind the action but rather that the use of objects obscures the possibility of knowing the motiva- :'\... 1;1 - 42 -

tlons. The silence of the objects adds layer on layer of possible motlvations so that the audience ls forced to closely watch the surface action, chartlng the physical movements which indicate the unseen layers beneath. This speaks of a mysterious qua1ity which is really distinct from the surface evilness

which we might attribute to Barrett; this ls a ~tery in which Barrett· is certainly involved but one which also includes Tony,

Véra, Susan to a less degree, but certainly the ~Iount\Sets and all of the minor characters. Nor ls this a mystery which is set out by mysterlous characters or situations; on the contrary, it ... ls a mystery which grows out of an approach to ordinary and Simple things • Pinter has talked about this approach in the following • ~ way, using as his reference Resnais' film, Last Year at Marienbad, a film which was set in a virtually foreign landscapel ••• 1t seems to me that Marienbad works very well in its own terms, on the level of fantasy. But there ls another way of doing it, and one l personally would find more interestlng to explore. In a real, recognisable Paris, an ordinary, reasonably attractive woman sits at a cafe table, wearlng what *he would be wearlng, eatlng and drlnklng what she would be eating and dr1nk1ng. An equally ordlnary, everyday sort of man comes up to her. aExcuse me, don't lIoU remember, we met las$ year at Marienbad?a aMarienbad? Imposs1- ble - l was never in Marienbad last year ••• • and she gets up, walks out to an ordinary, bellevable street and gets into a real taxi ••• and so on. Wouldn't that be just as strange and mysterlous and frighten1ng as the way the film does it? Perhaps more so, because of the very ordinariness of the surroundings and apparent nor mality of the characters. 51 Nevertheless, one must be aware that certain elements of thls mysterious quality arise from the concentration on the pre- '- 43 -

sent events rather th~ supply1ng explanatory b.ekground mater1al. Joseph Losey, the d1rector o~ The Servant, had en- couraged Pinter to add two such scenesl one was a scene between Bàrrett and h1s landlady 1n wh1ch a shady past 1s suggested and a sexual scene be~een the two is visualized; the second was one 1n wh1ch Tony and Susan meet ~or the ~1rst t1me. This scene, which takes place 1n a pub and 1ater, an e1egant restaurant, makes exp11cit Tony's weakness o~ character, his grandiose schemes o~ empire building in which he envisages himsel~ clearing the jungle and sett1ing thousands o~ peasants in planned cities. l was told in conversation with Mr. Losey that Pinter opposed these scenes on the ground that they detracted ~rom the concentration which was beins built. Losey, a~ter having shot them, excluded them ~rom the ~in1shed ~1lm because o~ its extended

1ength; he now ~ee1s, like Pinter, that the scenes would have d1~~used the sharp and 1mmed1ate ~ocus. Since both P1nter and Losey have made a defin1te and con sc10us move away from background motivat1ons and concentrated instead on visual 1mmed1acies, we can, perhaps, come c10ser to understandlng The Servant by charting the pbyslca1 movements of the characters in relationship to the central object, the stalrcase. The opening movement of the ~i1m to Barpett's entrance from the street into a house with no recognizab1e character. As Barrett moves up the outslde steps and through the -44- open door, he ls surrounded by the sllence of an empty house whose only feature~ at this polnt, 1s a c1rcular sta1rcase. The 1nit1al contact between Barrett and Tony takes place on the ground floor as Barrett stands over Tony's 1nert body; the pos1- tion ls 1mmed1ately cbanged as Tony leads·the way up the stalrcase lnto a room whlch contalns two chalrs. The c1rcularlty of the stalrcase and the shlft1ng physlcal levels ls repeated ln the room as Barrett ls asked to slt 1n a chalr which ls ln the centre. The scr1pt calls for Tony, while speaklllg, ~ move about the room, -almost clrcl1ng the seated flgure.- The pull of authorlty as both men attempt to wrlte thelr slgnatures on the sllent and empty space evolves, once again, around the staircasea Looklng from top of stairs down lnto eapty hall. VOlCES ascend from k1tchen. 12. BARRETT Very good ldea, s1r. They appear ln hall, look up the stalrs. BABRETT What about the land1ng, slr? TONY White. They beg1n to walk up the sta1rs.S2 13. lnt. F1rst Landlpg. Day Tony and Barrett come up the stalrs. TONY Perhaps a l1ttle blue and here and there ••• but l th1nk the overall colour should be white. - 45 -

BARRETT Mandarin red and fus chia is a very chic combination this year, sir. TONY Not overall, surely?

'SABBETT No, no, no. Not overa1l. TONY Just a wall. BABRETT Yes, just a wall, sir ••• here and there.

Howev~r, once the house has been decorated and filled with obje cts, the action of the film begins to be enclosed in rooms away from the staircase; the suggestion here ls that the battle for domlnance has come to rest for the time being and is only reac- tlvated with the introduction of Susan, Tony's fiancée. In our introductlon to Susan, Pinter calls for a "h1gh shot of sports car slowing to haIt. Tony and Sue get out, go up steps;a (24) once aga1n, as wlth Barrett's entrance, the move up the steps means a readjustment of everythlng in the house. Un11ke Barrett' §. move lnto empty space,-Susan i8 forced to negot1ate her movements around objects and relat10nshlps wh1ch have become fixed to a large degree. The structure as 1t exists lso1ates her and in her attempt to find stability, she introduces objects into the house to whlch she can relate and moves exist1ng objects into self-ident1fying positions. The sta1rcase comes into play again as Susan struggles to create a space in which she can move; as Barrett stands at the foot of the sta1rs, Susan looks - 46 - down at him whl1e collectlng the flowers whlch Barrett had re- moved from Tony's slckroom. Though not visuallzed, one ls consclous that Barrett's almost lmmedlate entrance lnto the room has been prefaced by hls move up the stalrcase, a physlcal levell- lng of Susan and Barrett's posltions. As Barrett plcks up

Susan's glft of flowers to remove them once agaln from th~ room, Susan defends her posltion. "Put that vase down" but her con- trolls .,'ealt and needs the support of Tony, one of the orlginal archltects of the enclosure. "Put it down, Barrett." Although a victory for Susan seems to have been won (as Barrett goes out the door and down the stalrs as the abject was put down) , Susan too, must go down the s~aircase and waiting for her there is Barrett who opens the door and ushers her out, away from the objects and any real control over them. The introduction by Barrett of a new object lnto the house ls one whlch has far more endurance than Susan's fadlng flowers; as well, lt is one whlch Tony has had no part in ln1tlating as he did wlth the lntroduction of colours and furniture. The motif of the stalrcase is used with Vera's arrlval, as Tony and Susan dlne at a restaurant, Barrett and Vera move qUickly, up and down city steps, closer s-~ urgently toward the culmlnatlon of the journey, the climb up the sts.ircase ta her room at the top of the landlng. One of the most l11Lteresting aspects of thls scene is the way ln whlch lt has been juxtaposed wlth the Susan - Tony actlvltYJ away from the house and the statlc quallty of the - 47 -

objects within it, it would seem as if Susan could formulate a more equal approach in her relatlonsh1p with Tony. The camera'helps to bear out this possib1lity as it shoots comple tely on the level (as opposed to the up and down movement in

the Barrett-Vera shots). But Pinter's dialogue ~ells a completely different story; wh1le the lovers quarrel about Barrett's dominance in the house which superflclally loses lts lntens1ty as they laugh and make plans for the future~ surrounding f1gures and the1r conversations build the static and claustrophobie atmosphere from which the lovers seem to have escaped. The three couples which Pinter introduces into the restau rant scene are physically nondescript; as part of the pass1ng scene, the characters hold our attention because we do not and can not know thelr past. The camera moves in and around Susan and Tony, p1:ck1ng up scraps of conversation by strangers which can have no logical relat10nship to one another or to the lover's quarrel; but like the objects in the house, the couples in the restaurant are structured into a web of relat10nsl poss1bilities which. in turn, increase the ambiguity of the Tony-Barrett rela tionship. One of Pinter's sketches is of an older woman in conversation vith a younger one 1 Older Womanl What did she say to you? Younger Womana Nothing. Older Womana Oh yes she did. She said somethlng to you. Younger Womanl She didn't. She didn't really. - 48 -

Older Woman. She dld. l saw her mouth move ••• she whlspered somethlng to you, dldn't she? What was lt' What dld she whlsper to you? Younger Womana She dldn't wh1sper anythlng to me. She dldn't whisper anythlng. 53 The conversatlon ls menacing in ltself as the older woman seeks to gain domlnance over the younger woman, but thls menace ls increased by our speculatlon of the events that lead up to the scene. is this couple a mother and daughter caught in an end- less domestlc scene, or two lesbians who are reenacting Freu- dian patterns of anger and jealousy? Who ls the "sheH which dominants the conversation? What is the relatlonship between the "shen and the two women? As the camera moves back to Tony and Susan, we see the two woman once again in the background, ~.: ~ looklng ordlnary and unmysterlous. A second sketch lnvolves a glrl and a man and two snatches of conversatlon which have no defln1te past but ones whlch release a myrlad of possibll1tles ln thelr detail, Glrl. He's a wonderful wit. Man. Terrlbly funny. Glrl. Terribly. Man. Cheers. Deb. Cheers •••• I'm dying to see hlm agaln. l haven't seen hlm for ages. Man. You won't for some time. Deb. Oh - why? Man. He's ln prison.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Latera Girla They were gorgeous - absolutely gorgeous. Man. Were they really? Girl. Divine darling, but l simply couldn't get them on. Man. A~~.~ - 49 -

The th1rd couple on wh1ch the camera concentrates 1s that or a b1shop and a curate. 1ntent on the1r drinking and one another, the two men 1so1ate themselves, contrad1cting the badge of "off1ce wh1ch they wear. The introduct1on of these three couples who surround Tony and Susan are related v1sually to the new-formed couple, Barrett and Vera; as the couples 1n the restaurant they have no known past and the1r relationsh1p ls amblguous. In part, the ambigu1ty grows out of the juxtaposed scenes, the cur10us treatment of the three couples transferr1ng 1tself to the Barrett Vera relat10nshipi as weIl, the s11ence between them acknowledges ambigu1ty. John Lahr has wr1tten 1n a discuss10n of s11ence, that ••• s11ence 1s not rad1o's -dead t1me" , but an act1ve force, a breathtak1ng artlst1c cho1ce wh1ch allows aud1ence (and actor) to rorego systematlc meaning for total 1mmersion in the 11ving and unpredlctable present. In these moments, consc1ousness f1l1s the vo1d w1th 1ts own complex assoc1ations. There is not one meaning but hundredsJ there ia a form, but the s11ence g1ves a sense of randomness to the event.55 The s11ence of Vera's arrival scene assumes its value rrom the grav1ty of the language wh1ch surrounds it, 1n th1s case 1t 16 the conversation between To~ and Susan as Susan attempts to make contact with Tony. Rer partial awarness that Ahe is still subjected to the 11nes of force even outs1de the house 1s 1m-

p11ed in her hes1tat1on of speech and made exp11c1t by the roving camera with1n the restaurant. - 50 -

65. Soho Restaurant. SUE Just don't 11ke him. TONY You don't know hlm. (pause) Imean, surely you can take my word for the fact that he's ••• SUE Don't trust hlm TONY Why? SUE l don't know. Pause. TONY You're maklng hlm so bloody lmportant. l mean, lt seems to me you'7e got hlm absurdly out of proportion. SUE Yes ••• perhaps ••• and laterl SUE ~ Look ••• why don't you Just tell h1m to go? ) TONY You must be made (pause) You Just don't care about my - wbat it amounts to is that it's my judgment you're crltlcising. It's not only ridiculous, lt's bloody hurtful. (pause) l'm sorry. l'm a fool. SUE You are. TONY We11 ••• l mean ••• SUE Look ••• l'm stupld. TONY No ••• we11 ••• 1 wouldn 't •••

To the ~ausal observer, this conversation would have much ln common wlth the other overheard conversations which, of course, also surround the s11ent arrlval. What Susan does not know - 51 - but which the camera makes clear is that the vague oppression is being increased by Vera's presence. With the introduction of Vera into the house, Pinter makes use of the possibility of the camera to intimately explore objects and to juxtapose them with the silence of Vera. When Tony returns to the house after bis lunch, Barrett calls to Vera in order to introduce her to Tony but the actual meeting is not presented. Thé following four scenes which include Tony,

Barrett and Vera are wo~ess as the three handle and exchange objects - trays, flowers and cigarettes - a qui-e~ readjustment as Vera is admitted lnto the closed circle. This ls in direct- contrast to the laJ:'gely verbal rejection of Susan as she. attemp ted to bring objects into her area of influence. Now with the concentration on objects and parts of Vera's body seen in and around those objects, the suggestion is that they, in thelr aggre ... :: ssive silence, are squeezlng out language and, of course, Susan who must verbalize. As the camera closes in on the relationship of objects to the inhabitants, the effect is to invalidate the master-servant relationsh1p; property has become common and this is reinforced by V.era and Barrett's use of Tony's bathroom, cologne and Iater, his bed. The common sexuel use by Tony and Barrett of Vera totally levels the positions of the two men and places Vera in the role of an object ~ong objects. Pinter's ability to suggest motivations through the chang ing shapes of silence can be seen in a series of scenes which - .52 - begin in a low key and develop into a crescendo of exc! t.emei."nt The f1rst of these scenes deals·w1th Tony and Susan's dy1ng relat1onship. Guests'l:m the country house of Lord and Lady Mountset, the couple 1s surrounded' by the s1lence of the fal11ng sno. and huge objects wlthln the house, heavy with the welght of the past. The scene Was shot w1 th a wide-angle lens, glving an expanse of space wh1ch contrasts sharply with the lncreaslng narrowness of Tony's house; howe~er, the room 1s no less claus- trophobic for lt beCDmes f111ed with words - bor1ng words wh1ch are eked out laborlously for the sake of soc1ab1l1tya 84. LADY MOUNTSET That's where the ponchos are, of course, on the plalns. SUE Ponchos? LORD f.!OUN'I'$ET South American cowboys SUE Are they called ponchos? LORD MOUNTSET They were ln my day SUE Aren't ponchos the th1ngs they wear? You know, wlth a sllt in the middle for the head to go thro~h. LORD MOUNTSET What do you mean? SUE Hanging down ••• 1n front and behind ••• the cowboy. L.WY MOUNTSET They're called cloaks, dear. Earlier in the conversation, the Mountsets were commenting on Tony's jungle-clearlng development, a project which ls as 1so lated ln its irrelevancy as the objects in the Mountset's house and. T~ny!.s relationship wit·h Susan. . . The 1nt1mate way in which objects are handled both by the characters and the - .53 - camera in the Tony-Barrett household binds charaeters together. In this seenè, the camera is distanced and relatively static as it records objects too large to be handled; further, chabacters who would superfically be accepted as couples are isolated by the physical space between them, the cumbersome objects which eannot be intimately shared and the denseness of languag.e, tushed out to deny any real contact.

Thê~ staircase as an interval which connects two areas has, in its use, become an extended metaphor for the #rowing bond between the master and the servant. The seduction scene between Tony and Vera recalls the staircase throughout and gives

.:-.; to that image a significance which it did not formerly have, not only does the camera-' catch glimpses of the staircase through the open door of the kitchen, but reminds u~ of its stepped fo~m by the venetian blind behind Tony's figure. By these images, the staircase seems to have moved into the kitchen and evokes the physical and social space between Tony and Vera. When the tap begins to drip, the sounds lmitate those vlsual steps and create a movement in space, a movement that represents not only

Tony and Vera's lnciplent physical contact, but the final levell- ing of Tony and Barrett's positlons as weIl. Before there is any actual physical movement, the sound of the dripping water, lncreasing ln intensity and tempo, anticipates and even seems to be controlling the characters' actions. This impression is lncreased as the ticking of a clock, even more urgent ln lts rhythm takes over after Tony has turned ~he tap off. The - S4 - seduction becomes not so much one of Teny's or Vera's but of both by the shape of the silence. The initial shape, dlctated by the staircase, has become tyrannical in its ability to mul- tiply its image. Its former role of being used by the characters to bridge a gap has now been expanded; 1 t has taken on an aggressive and dynamic quality by being translated Into sounds which permeate the silence and set the pace for aIl actlv1ty. This dynamic quallty is reflected in the other objects whj.ch surround the eharacters; catehing the growing exeitement of the rhythm, the saueepans, crockery and stove glisten as the eamera cireles Vera. Pinter ealls for the last image of the two figures to be seen 'distorted in shintng saucepans;' the image is exactly right, the suggestion being that any indepen- dance claimed by the characters has now been completely eonsumed by the objects which fill the house. By placing the seduction in the kitchen and having Tony handle and be surrounded by objects which ~ormerly were Barrett's demain, Pinter has made the identity of Barrett and Tony visually expli'cit. With the sharing of objects culminating in the common po- ssession of Vera, stretched out on the ta~le like bits and pieces of food as the camera examines parts of her body, Barrett and Tony are evenly matched. The return of Barrett who finds only a heap of chewed bones on the table, marks the beginning of a geme in which the players have no prior status. The camera now - ss - concentrates on the staircase whlch becomes the visual focus for scoring Tony and Barrett's successful dominance over objects, especially Vera. Vera moves up and down the staircase, leaving Barrett in her bed at the top of the stairs and join1ng Tony in the library below. The camera watches the staircase traffic, often stopping short of entering rooms: in which the characters relate to one anotherl 108. FIRST LANDING. DAY Vera knocks on Tony's door. VERA Can l have your tray, sir? TONY'S VOICE Yes. Come in. She goes in. CAMERA stays on closed door. 109. HALL. DAY. Barrett comes from kitchen to alcove under the stairs. 110. FIRST LANDING. DAY. Vera slips out of Tony's door, flushed, and goes downstairs carrying the tray. 111. HALL. DAY. Vera comes downstairs, puts tray down on hall table and looks at berself in mirror. SUddenly Barrett's hands reach for her and he pulls her back out of sight. A sharp gasp from her, a grating 'Aaaaahh' from him. A phone can be heard ringing off stage. We stay on empty hall for several beats. The effect of having the visuel image of the staircase in place of the actual events la to focus all the possibilities of the unseen and the unknown onto this spacial objecte As an image which has come to represent not only.the bond between the cha racters and objects but also the relatlveness of the space between them, the staircase holds within its form the ability to - 56 - prec1sely express the complex1ty of the exper1ence. Tony's d1scovery of Barrett 's 1nt1mate re.lat1onsh1p with Vera 1s shot with vo1ces over as the camera focuses on the sta1r- casel 126. VERA'S VOleE Oh come on, for Chr1st's sake, put 1t down. BARRETT'S VOleE l Ive on1y had one purf. VERA'S VOleE Oh come in, put it down. BARRETT'S VOleE l'm worn out, what's the matter with you? VERA'S VOleE l know someone who wouldn't say no. BABRETT'S VOleE H1m? He'dbe on the floor. Bedcf.eak. Rustle. BARRETT'S VOleE Let me f1nish this fagl You're just a ruddy machine. VERA,'S VOlCE l can't help it.

As Tony stands half-way up the staircase, Barrett comes to the top of the landing, his tower1ng shadow f1l1ing the hall. The exlt of Vera and Barrett 1s trlumphant as they nolslly shout and laugh, bang drawers and clatter cases down the stairs. Though the movement ls downward, they are very much in 8Ontrol of the stalrcase as Tony and Susan conceal themselves 1n a room below, prlsoners of the object-fllled enclosure. When Tony suggests to Susan that she share bis bed, the awareness that 1=, llke all the objects ln the house, 1s common property pushes her into the street once agaln. With the absence of one of the partners, the old structure - 57 - of the geme breaks down, objects wh1ch had been moved about by the players now extend themselves chaot1cally 1nto gaps left by the miss1ng Barrett. The camera explores the accumulated d1s- order - letters wh1ch p1le up at the foot of the sta1rs, heaps of garbage overflow1ng from waste cans. The suggested odours from putr1d objects permeate the house. Tony endlessly wenders up and down the sta1rs, a pr1soner whose only rel1ef 1s 1n move ment; but the cell becomes narrower and narrower as objects f1ll the rooms vith memor1es that can not beswallowed and smells that can not be breathed. In a pub meet1ng, Barrett begs to be taken back 1nto Tony's house and moans that he too 1s a pr1soner of a staircase over which he nas no control. 141. • •• look ••• give me another chance, go on, air, l was so happy there with you, it was l1ke bl1ss, we can turn over the page, I 'm w1 th an old lady in Paultons Square, r1ngs the bell aIl day long, running up and down them sta1rs, I 'm skin and bone, l've ttéceived you, l've played you false I know that, but 1t ••• was she who was to blame, 1t was her, she done us both, 1f you feel you can open your heart. s1r. give me another chance. The return of Barrett 1nto the house marks an 1ntense 1ntimacy both with the characters and the objects. Barrett and Tony are Bever seen outs1de the house and no one else enters as t~e 1ncreasing disorder of the objects bu1ld a wall around them and hold both in a claustrophob1c grip. Tony's old architec- tural schemes have now been reduced to small crossword puzz1es and arguments that threaten to split the couple, evolve around tea sta1ns on the rugI - 58 -

TONY There's tea dregs on the carpett BARRETT Where? TONY Well, l d1dn't put them there. Tony holds a damp rag to Barrett's face. TONY Rere you are. Use 1t. BABRETT Don't do that to me. TONY Clear 1t up. B:ARRE~.r Not my fault, them tea dregs. TONY You f1lthy bastard. BABRETT A1l r1ght, l'm leav1ng. Barrett gets out of bed. The1r voËes clash ana': . r1se. TONY That's what l want - BARRETT You talk to me l1ke that - TONY Leave th1s house alone - BABRETT That's all the thanks - TONY Go on, get down and. wipe 1t up~' Barrett goes out. Th1s clos1ng-1n on the 1nt1mate phys1cal aspects of the1r rela t10nship opens up a set of psycholog1cal possiblllt1es whlch were not present before. Solely dependant on one another 1n

the1r prlson, they play o~t a ser1es of relat10nships ln the1r attempts to dom1nate the env1ronment. Reenact1ng a husband and wife relat1onsh1p, Barrett complalns to Tony. 144. You don't expect me to cope with all th1s

"'",,~. muck and s11me all day long, all your lea- if - 59 -

vings all over the place, without a maid, do you? l need a maid to give me a helping band. l 'm not used to working in such squà.lor. Look what l've got on my bands a1.l the time - yout l -can't expect to get any work done. As soon as l get the Hoover worklng you're stra1ght up lt. You're ln everybody's way. and l.ater. You want to get out and do a job of work lnstead of moplng around here all. day. Rere l am, scrim ping and scraping ,getting worse and worse. l can hardly make ends meet. You're no bloody help. Do you know that butter's gone up tuppence a pound? Later, like loyers after a dispute, they slt tete-a-tete,~ 'A exchang- ing soft words of reconc1liatlon. The homosexual impllcat'ions are reinforced as Tony and Bàrrett share a meal, recalllng other male lntlmacles in a male society, the army. _ The possibilities of the relationship which the conversations suggest are supported by the visuel movements. Away from the disorder of the rooms, Tony and Barrett play games wh1ch focus on the stalrcase; that whi.ch was formerly a way of br1d.ging a gap between areas of differlng status has now become a way of test1ng minute changes 1n thelr positions. The shrunken area of mov~ment is not dictated by the moral framework of the world outside, their past relationship of master and servant, nor by the niceties of social behaviour; l1ke two chlldren, they play a game of dom1nance and subserv1ence whose rules evolve onl.y out of the immediacies of the sett1ng and situat10n. 154. TONY l can't do it any more. l have to bend all the time. BABRETT What about me? l'm ln the 1nferior posltion. l'm play1ng uphill. - 60 -

TONY l need a dr1nk. BARRETT That's the whole po1nt about the game, the bend1ng. You're as fat as a p1g, you need a b1t of exerclse. TONY Service' He smashes the ball past Barrett. Fourteen-ten. BABRETT That wasn't fair, l wasn't ready. TONY l said service, d1dn't 1? BARRETT (p1cking up ball) l'm not having that point counted. TONY What do you mean? That was a perfectly fair po1nt' What about the other night? You d1d about s1x of them llke that. BARRETT There's no need to take advantage of the fact that you're in the best position. You should be able to play accordlng to the rules. TONY My dear Barrett, you're Just a l1ttle upset because you're los1ng the game. Barrett Oh, take lt~ He throws the ball bard at Tony who catches i t. While the characters appear to be struggllng with one another for dominance, the staircase develops into the most dom1nate

element. Though Tony and Barrett have a cho1ce of mov1ng or rema1ning st1ll, they must, 1f they move, go e1ther up or down and 1n these movements also clrcle one another. The game, then, has three rather than two partic1pants in that the stalrcase d1ctates the form and l1m1t of the1r phys1cal relationship. L1ke the saucepans which reflected the embrace of"Tony and Vera,

the sta1rcase holds ~he pos1t1ons of the characters for a moment - 61 - only before another shift takes place. And of course, the positions which are atta1ned by the cha~acters are always rela tlve to one anotheF.' and to the clrcularlty of the sta1rcase. As in Plnter's drama, the growing authorlty of the object gradu ally replaces the dominance held by the characters.

Though the only posslble unifled po~~t ?~ ~ew. which the audience could have ls that whlch is recorded by the camera, the camera ln these scenes makes use of its ability to constantly d1splace lts held viewpoint. Whlle the stalrcase plays agame with the characters, the camera fulfills that same function by playing with, the audience. It does not statically watch the game (as the audience must do in theatre)" but moves as well, clrcllng with the spiral stalrcase and the characters as they displace one another ln dominant positlons. In short, one ls never sure whether it is the characters, the camera or the staircase which is in motion or perhaps, a combination of two or three of these elements. Amblguity, a result of thls multlpllclty of vlewpolnts demands a constant readjustment on the part of the audience, an exercise which holds the attention on the constantly shifting present.

This ls a perfect extension of Pinter's theatrical art1st~ into cinematic terms; the situat10ns invite the audience to dis eover possible lnterpretatlons of relatlonshlps and the camera lncreases thatl9Bs1bl1ity by not allowing the audience any sta- - 62 -

bi11ty. 2he camera moves us Into the centre of the actlon whlch changes as we move. In this relativeness of position, vlctlm and victimizer do not exist, et least, not for long; one rep1aces the other and both are finally replaced by the aggressiveness of the objects. Holding a prominent place.is the camera and, by extension, the audience; in its search for a stable point

of View, the audlence ls to some degree responsib1e for the out~ cc.e of the struggle. Joseph Losey, in commenting on The Servant, has spoken of his experience of discovery. On this picture more than any other which l have made, l found out where l wa~ going in the process of going there. At the commencement of shooting l was sti11 not aware of what the stylistic solution would be. l had no similar experlence before. By the time the film was fini shed everyth1ng had fully crystallised. 56

~~.' - 63 -

In Resnais t rilm, Last Year at Marienbad which deaJ.s w1 th the past in terms or the present tense, original memorles are const~tly being usurped by images or other recollections. These rragmented and complex memory images result in a conviction that the present a.lways obscures and distorts the past, making it impossible to be known. While Pinter would obviously agree with the conclusion, a seriptwrlter and director have a choice or either settlng out to d1stort and conf'use or attempting to make the lnherent aBbiguity or memory as lucid as possible. Pinter and Losey have chosen the latter approach ror thelr second rilm, Accident.

Repeatedly in his stage plays, Pinter has used ~emory jux taposed w1th present events as a way or drawing out audlence lnterpretatlons. Orten these memorles are ldylllc, claBhing sharply with the 1mmediate harshness. Describlng hls relationship wlth his dead nre, Max ln The Homecomipg reca11s lt poetlca.11y, ••• I sald to her, Jessie, I think our ship ls golng to come home, l'm going to buy you a dress ln pale corded blue s11k, heavily encrusted in pearls, and ror casual wear, a palr or pantaloons in l1lac rlowered ta:rreta. Then I gave her a drop of cherry brandy. I remember the boys came down, ln their pyjamas, aIl their hair shinlng, thelr faces pink, 1t was before they started shaving, and they knelt down at our feet, Jessie's and mine. I tell you, 1t was like Chr1stmas. 57 Later Max af'fixes this memory to the statement that he had " ••• three bastard sons, e slutb1tch of a wife ••• " Obviously we are not getting any closer to an objective p1cture or Jessie nor to a past which will logically account for present events. What - 64 -

has been created here is a ~luld structure, 1ayered and textured by a seeming past (ln the form of memorles) but, ln fact, the whole structure @~ists in the present tense only. The fluldlty of the structure results trom the quallty of memory which ls ab1e to insinuate itself between and into the present without any necessary connectlon to lt; at the seme time, however, lt becomes part of that present though qualltative1y dlfferent. Ruth 11lustrates the created pattern ln terms of physlcal move- mentI •••• Look at me. I ••• move my leg. That's 811 lt is. But l wear ••• underwear ••• which moves with me ••• lt ••• captures your attentlon. Perhaps you misinterpret. The actlon ls s~ple. It's â leg ••• moving. My lips move. Why don' t you restrlct: ••• your observatlons to that? Perhaps the fact that they move ls more slgniflcant ••• than the words which come through them ••• 58 There ls another quality evolving from memory which Plnter has developed in his drame - that of silence. In Landscape, Pinter's most recent p1ay. two characters, Beth and Duff, sit at a long kitchen tab1e and singly recollect. Al. though separated only by a few yards, they do notappear to hear one another nor do the memories of each have much in common exeept ln the recollection of a few objects. The sounds of their words fi11 the sllence of the room but another and more profound si1ence has been created; thls ls the silence of memory - silent because it ls private and unverifled, nelther shared no~ contradicted.

And though thelr indivldual memorles separate Durf and Beth as:"' they are physically separated by the tab1e, there 18, for the - 65 - audience, a mingling of words and memory patterns as well as a common physical env~nment wh1ch the two characters share.

~aking separate landscapes in their minds, they sbare a pbysical and immediate lands cape from which they have mentally withd.rawn and of which they are oblivious. This is the are~ of silence created by memory, the only area in which the audience can ope rate in its attempt to 1ntegrate two sets of memories. The 1dyllic qual1ty of memory found in Pinter's work has the effect of simplifl!ying a complex·situation or relationsh1p, l suggest that those s1tuations are basically complexbecause they deal with areas customarily linked with great emotion and confl1ct. For instance, Maxis memory of h1s father ls unusually simple, part1cularly in consideration of the complex relationsh1p he has with hls own sonsl

Our father? l remember h1m. UDn't worry. y~u k1d yourselt. He used to come over to me and look down at me. My old man d1d. He 1 d bend right over me, then he'd pick me up. l was only that big. Then he 1 d dandle me. G1 ve me the bottle. W1pe me clean. G1ve me a smile. Pat me on the bum. Pass me around, pess me from hand to band. Toss me up in the a1r. Catch me com1ng down. l remember my father. 59 Purthermore, th1s simplificat10n takes the form of11sting a series of visual moments rather than an analysis of motivations. Lermy's recollectl'on of an ep1sode wlth an old lady and the mangle she wanted moved, ends with a boy.lsh exuberance which interacts with the darker tone of physical Violencel So there l was, doing a b1t of shoulders on with the mangle, rlsking a rup~e, and th1s - 66 -

old lady Just standing there, waVing me on. not even li~t1ng a little ~inger to give me a help1ng hand. So ~ter a few minutes l sa1~ to her, now look here, why don't you st~~ th1s 1ron mangle up your arse? Anyway, l sa1d, the~~re out o~ date, you want to get a spin drier. l bad a good. m1nd. to give her a workover there and then, but as l was ~ee11ng jubilant vith the snow-clearing l Just gave her a short-arm jab to the belly and jumped on a bus outs1de. 60

The zeugmatic ef~ect set up by contrast1ng tonalities encourage~ interpretations wh1ch go beyond this simple phys1cal chart1ng. The function of memory in Pinter's drama has been developed in cinematic terms ln Accident. The source o~ P1nter's scr1pt, Nicholas Mosley's novel Accident is narrated ln a stream-

0~-consc10usness style tram Stephen JerVis' p01nt o~ View, the recollections of past events be1ng coherent and un1~1ed. P1nter had at ~irst trled to ~ind a d1rect ~llm equlvalent to the ~ree association style o~ the novel.

l tried a ~t that wey, but lt just wouldn't work - anyway, l couldn't do lt. You see, suppose a charac ter ia walk1ng down a lane •••• You could easily note down a stream o~ thought which might be pertectly accurate and be11evable, and then translate it 1nto a series o~ imagesl road, ~ield, hedge, grass, corn, wheat, ear, her ear on the pillow, tumbled hair, love, love years ago... But when one' s mind wanders and asso ciates th1ngs in this w@Y its per~ectly unsel~consclous. Do exactly the same on ~ilm and the result ls precious, sel~-consc10us, over-elaborate - you're using absurdly complex means to eonvey somethlng very simple. 61

Rather than a proli~erat1on of images in the Resna1s style,

Pinter has chosen ta look • ••• closer and closer, harder and harder at things that are there be~ore you." 82 To this end, - 67 -

he has s1mpl1f1ed the events of the novel, leav1ng out back ground 1nformat1on and concentrat1ng 1nstead on the phys1cal surface images of charaeters and objects.

Within Stephen's m~ory, objects are carefully noted,

examined and re-examined as though, in P1nter's words " ••• 1f you look at them bard enough they w1l1 g1ve up the1r secrets." 63 lmaginat1vely, the beds 1n Stephen's house have felt the we1ght of lovers, the rock1ng horse in the hall has seen night move ments but they rema1n s1lent; Stephen watches them, touches them as 1f attempting to fill gaps 1n h1s own 1nformation" But

the objects of the house are not the only ones wh1ch hold kno~ ledge in the1r s1lence; the camera as weIl seems to have memo- r1es which are not necessarily shared with Stephen. Moreover, the camera has the abillty to chart Stephen's .emory 1n 1ts flex1b1lity and fluid1ty as weIl as holding those qualities to

chart its 1JWn. We are made aware of the camera's autonomy from the open1ng shots; 1n the silence of night, the camera stands

outs1de Stephen's house watching and expectant. As the sound of the crash f11ls the ailent air, the camera tracks forward, stead1ly, quietly. unt11 Stephen 1n response to the sound, comes running. Throughout the f1lm we ~e made conscious of the separat10n between Stephen and the camera; now, , as Stephen runs to the scene of the accident, the camera 1s not on h1m but

"jolt1ng down the lane" o~ its own, glimpsing through 1ts eye the wind1ng dark lane, fields through the hedge, a pale moon - 68 -

and the qUick moving head of a white horse. Together at the

accident, Stephen and the camera witness the destruction and W1ll1am's face. But then the camera moves away from Stephen to invest1gate on its own; going underneath the fallen side of the car it registers a romantic image of two faces., transfigured by the sparkle of splintered glass. The car accident, though prior to Stephen's memory does not appear to be prior to the camera's. the lprical 1mages which it catches suggest that all this has happened before and is con- ta1ned within the memory of the camera. As Stephen moves'into his own memory patterns following the accident, the camera sets out to record them, but at points along the way lapse's into 1ts own reveries or suggests that Stephen has not looked closely enough at a scene or has missed a memory altogether. So, in a

sense, Stephen's memory can be considered as only part of~ story, for the camera holds a separa.te position from which 1t recalls.

Since the camera ~s charting Stephen's memory, they are obviously

in ag~eement much of the time but areas of conf11ct or question seem to existe The camera's movement away from Stephen at certain points

------~1~n~ha1~s~mory hardly creates a c~nf11ct~mory patterns but

r~ther a strange and uneasy silence, an area into which the audi ence moves in exploration, paralleling the explorative movements of the oamera and Stephen's memory. Nor does the camera's move ment have the effect of proliferation images. rather than open- - 69 - ing out to possibilities, the style of the film is to close in, . producing possibilities through silence and intense watchfulness.

Anna. and Stephen's walk through the woods (shortly after Anna's rejection of William's invitation) is remembered in terms of ~ighly romantic imagery, the sounds of nature and their words enhancing rather than breaking the silence. 64 178. A Copse. LONG SEOT. They appear, through fading light, through trees, into copse. Shafts of dying sun still bounce off the wood. Silence. Sound of their feet on the brush. Birds. Creaks in undergrowth. Anna stops, holds the branch of a tree. Silence. Sounds. 179. STEPHEN Mind. There's a spider's web.

Anna lOOŒ:.!S.t him. ANNA It won't h~me. She walks slowly away. He follows. 180. A.STlLE. The stile looks down upon a valley. They stand at the stile. 181. Their bands, close but not touching, on the stile. Silence. 182. He looks at her. They stand, silent. He looking at her. She gazing at the view. She turns, looks at him. - 70 -

ANNA Shall we go back ûow? STEPHEN Yes. As Stephen and Anna move away from the stile, the camera remains, lingering for some twenty or thirty seconds on the lands cape be- reft of its lovers. ls the camera mourning the lost opportunlty, if not in the actual experience then in its recollection? Or

perhaps the camera is suggesting that the action was not ,jj.zl;;.~.fact, completed in quite that way, that Stephen's memory has manipulated the past to suppress, possibly, Anna's rejectlon. No matter what the speculations, the point made by the camera's continulng look is that memory is ambiguous and does not need the possibilities spelled out in order to make the point; the gap which has been created by the silent immobility of the camera invites the audience .to discover. An earlier scene in which William, Charley and Stephen play a fierce game of tennis with and possibly for Anna, Rosalind, pregnant, sits in a chair by the side, watching. Caught up in the excitement of the game, the camera rushes back and forth with the players and the baIl, recording the shouts of laughter and the physical movement. As if suddenly recollecting or possibly as a way of reminding Stephen of his relationship outside the game

or even in sympathy wi th Rosalind t the camera abruptly turns away from the action and in a long shot across the tennis court, concentrates on Rosalind's empty chair. Even after Stephen's memory has been completed and the car - 71 - accident ls once agaln a present reallty, the camera continues to perform a memory functlon. Chartlng the phys1cal movements whlch may have led to the consummatlon of Stephen and Anna's relatlonshlp, the camera leQves them as they stand by the bed in the dim 11ght. At dawn, the camera ls wander1ng aim.1essly around outslde the house, recalllng. ln present lmages, former memorles. 338. Garden. Dawn. Fa1nt grey llght on the grass, growing. CAMERA looks up at the back of the house. The curtaln on the window ls thrown back. STEBHEN 100ks out, withdraws. The CAMERA moves round the slde of the house. Blrd sounds. CAMERA passes odd balls, a broken tennis racket, etc. It reaches the ----- _____ - front of the house. Footsteps on gravel. STEPHEN walking to h1s car. The ramb11ng camera whlch desolately plcks out broken objects ls ln sharp contrast to lts deflnlte movements and romant1c 1ma- g1ngs of the night before. In the midst of the violence, the camera had dlscovered oeautlful and fantastlc 1mages of falling whlte feathers and of moon11ght transformlng broken glass lnto poetlc shapes. The poetry ls gone ln the pale ~~ as the camera, perhaps frustr~ted ln lts romantlcism or betrayed by Stephen, perpares to take lts leave. As the e~holng sound of the car droews closer at the end of the fllm, the camer~ "slowly moves back - 72 - to long shot outside the gate" and comes to resta 378. Sound of the car skidding. A sudden screech, grind, smash and splintering. CAMERA withdraws down the drive to the gate. The house still, in the sunlight. Silence.

Sound of ignition, t~cking. Though Stephen 18 forced to once again recall the incidents prior to the accident (and now, of course, the accident as well) the camera appears to be indicating that this time Stephen must do it on his own. For the most part, however, it would seem as if Stephen and the camera share a common memory, in particular their memory of

Anna. It is in the treatment of the girl that memory is explored for its silent quality. Anna is remembered by Stephen not for what she said or did but for her appearance and her physical relationship to himself, Charley and William, and to the surrounding objects. Anna'a silence has built up, in part, by her wordless- ness; we do not hear her speak until a third through the script and even then, her words are sparse. But in between two scenes with Anna is one in which Stephen, at home, chats with Rosalind and plays with his children. It is the ordinary, busy existance of everyday life, coherent in its familiarity and regularity, fi lled with familiarfaces and objects; the scene ls shot with a wide- - 73 -

angle lens, encompass1ng the whole bustl1ng area - Stephen has nO.need to examine someth1ng which he knows so welle In contrast to this domest1e seene are two surround1ng close-up shots of Anna's face, st1ll and unfam1liar 1n 1ts rare beauty, f1ll1hg the screen as Stephen's volee pushes into the created silence. For Stephen, Anna's presence has the effect of emptying the surrou-

ndings and mak1:ng ~ dominant centre: of that à.1lence; thus the

fam1liar1ty of h1s house dtsappears after Anna has been 1n 1t. Stephen stares 1ntently at the objects wh1ch fill the hall, at

~e beds and even at his own face 1n the m1rror. Dur1ng Alma' s f1rst vis1t to h1s house, Stephen recalls confus1ng identlt1es and

th1nks that Anna 1s 1n the bed wh1ch he has shared for . :the last ten years with Rosallnd. In the attempt to become famillar with the sllent Anna,

Stephen looks long and bard at her and she, by her pass1vity, offers herself to the exam1nat1on. Recalling the languld after- noon on the punt, Stephen's memory with the camera's help moves 1nt1mately over and around Anna's outstretched body attemptlng to relate parts of it to h1s own. While the exerc"ise of char- t1ng phys1cal relat1onsh1ps does not produce any real famil1ar1ty or underatand1ng beyond that phys1cal surface, 1t does have the effect of drawing the viewer 1nto part1cipatory act1on. L1ke Charley's primer for writing a novel whlch comes in the form of descr1b1ng what everyone 1s dOing, the 1nnocence of descr1pt1ve , facts can be proded and expanded to reverberate with poss1b111tiesl - 74 -

158. CHARLEY Descrlbe what we're aIl dolng. WILLIAM looks about the garden. WILLIAM Rosallnd's lylng down. Stephen's weedlng the garden. Anna. , s making a dalsy chaln. We're having thls conversatlon. CHARLEY Good. But then you could go further. Rosalli:ld ls pregnant. Stephen' s having an affalr with a girl at Oxford. He's reached the age when he can't keep his nands off girls at Oxford. WILLIAM What? CHARLEY But he'feels guilty, of course. So he makes up a story.

The closing-inœ,1hlsbeautifully strange and fraglle girl by the camera and the three men impresses the viewer that she ls a victim of aggression. Sitting at Stephen's feet, kneeling

on the lawn as Stephen and Wllli~ look down at her, Anna seems liable to crushing. But the strength of her sllence becomes the environment wlthln which the men are forced to move and interact. AS George Steiner has noted, Nothing destroys us more surely than the silence of another h~an belng. Rence Lear's lnsensate fury agalnst Borde11a, or marka' s 1ns1ght that several have survived the song of the Slrens, but none the1r sllence. 65

When Stephen returns ~o find Anna and Charley ln his home, Anna stands silently dom1nate at the top of the staircase as Stephen, l1ke a gullty child, expla1ns his absence. Later he and Charley angrily discuss her relationshlp wlth Wllllam, but Anna, though

present, offers no lnformation. ~he collision of the men moves » from ~he verbal into the physical as Stephen and William wrestle - 75 - viciously over the baIl in a geme or scrub. Though Alma i s not physically present, the silence or the room (broken only by the grunting or the men) and the object over which Stephen and William seek dominance mark her pervasive authority. William's mangled face in the geme and rinally in the car crash signify Stephen's dominance over William, but ultimately, he too is a victim of the silence which impelled them into the struggle. The resulting destruction cannot be dea1tw1th in moral terms; there is no necessary or casuel relationship between events - it is an accident. When an area has been created, man has a choi.ce of moving and, in moving, is bound to collide. The structure of Pinter's work is one of notlng this movement - the spaces between people and objects which movement creates, as weIl as the resulting collisions •. Walter Kerr's insight into The Birthday Party can be applied to Accidenta One man sets one foot into space to see what it does. Another does the s~e thing at the seme time. The two meet and the meeting may be dis astrous for one or the other or both. One thrust root may prove stronger than another thrust root. Each root will contend ror the space with the equipment i t actua1ly has, will struggle for what seems power but is actually defin1tion. The encounter will end in some way or other. But it has not been a planned encounter, and it will not have an erfect-from-cause ending. Only the encounter is recorded, in its suddenness, in its blindness, in its mystery. Yes, the encounter has a result. But the result is a fact, not an explanation or an interpretation. 66 In his use or the whore image, Pinter has' pointed to the fluidity of personality. Ruth, in The Homecoming, ror instance, - 76 - moves from her husband to her brothers-ln-law, fulfl11lng thelr demands ln a complexity of roles. As weIl as the obvlous sexual

c~nnotatlons, the lmage bas wider lmplicatl~s related to the structure of Pinter's work. Walter Kerr has sald that the whore " ••• by defin1tion, lacks defin1tionl" •• •L- sheJ ••• performs no slngle soclal role, she ls what each new man nshes to make of her. She is aval1able to experience, and she ls an aval1able experience. She ls eternally "between tra~s,· she is known ln pass ing and a$ somethlng passing. In fact, she ls slmply unknown. 67 In Accident, the image ls brought up by Charley who demes that Anna is a whoreJ the image sticks. Anna acts as a catalyst for dreams and desires, but 11ke them, satisfies the need for a moment only bef ore moving away. ~er movement, as V.era's in The Servant, forces the men to readjust their held positions and struggle with one another for a secure stance; ln short, everyone becomes 11fe's whore because no one stands stl11 long enough to be deflned. Rather than attempting to deflne, Pinter has chosen to chart the detal1 of that movement, and ln dolng so, has moved lnto a space-art; people, objects and events are related by proxl- mlty rather than causation. The past becomes useless as'a way of acc·ounting for anything; there ls only the present ln whlch the spaces vary. In learning to dlstrust memory in Pinter' s work as a way into the past, the audience comes to acaept it as another way of deali~~ with the present. As the present shifts, displacing hold positions, flUid memory moves in to make up for

lost ground and extend the posslbl1ities of the present. - 77 -

~ ta! Memory becomes a way of seeing rather than the content of any specifie past. and in this approach, the camera is a precise and subtle tool in its ability to record, define and participate in space. Stephen's memory has a narrative movement, for his effort is designed to enclose and relate fragments of events, desires and judgements; the camera, on the other band. recalls in terms of space - an amoral, atemporal and non-causal stance. The zeugmatic quality, created largely by the audience's demands for verification in Pinter's drama, 1s amplified in his films by the camera's poss1- bi11t1es. The c11che use of the f1lm med1um in the Francesca sequence - the blurred images and the voice-over techniques -

creates a romantic tone while no~ its art1ficial quality. In the silent memory of this scene (which recalls Anna's silence), Stephen has set up a causal relationship between his dominance

over Francesca and his possible domi~~ce over Anna. But in. spite of Stephen's romantic exercise, the camera records, in an immediate and phys1cal manner, their separation on the bed. The recording of this space is in brutal contrast to Stephen's roman tic yearnings, acted out with Francesca but ant1c1pated with Anna. The camera's recording quality ant1e1pates the separation of Stephen and Anna s1mply because the link between these two ep1so- des has already been made by Stephen. In its use, the camera becomes a tool for def1ning as weIl as recording space. As the camera moves in order to def1ne space, 1t increasingly - 78 - becomes a participant in the relationship of objects and characters; in short, 1t relaeses further poss1bilities of 1nterpreta tion. This has been examined in the earlier discussion on ~ Servant. Pinter's dramatic structure has been extended in filmic terms; his exploration of silence in wh1ch meaning is free to pro11ferate bas been related to the camera's exploration of space. Their 1nteraction enhances Pinter's 1nv1tat1on to d1scovery •

. . FOOTNOTES

1. Harold Pinter, ttWriting for the Theatre," Evergreen Review, Vo1.8, No.33 (1964), p.81.

2. lli,g., p.81 E.g., George Steiner, "The Language Animal," Encounter, VoL33, No.2 (1969), pp.7-24 and Benjamin L. Whorf, Language z Thought and Reality (Cambridge, 1956). . 4. Susan Sontag, "Going to the Movies: Godard," Partisan Review, Vo1.35, No.2 (1968), p.312. 5. Harold Pinter, The Homecoming (London, 1965), pp. 61-62. 6. Walter Kerr, Harold Pinter (New York, 1967), p.7. 7. J.D. Chiari, Landma:rks of Contemporary Drama. (Lonô,Qn, 1965), p.12. 8. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York, 1961), p.XIX. 9. Harold Pinter, WWriting for the Theatre," p.SO

10•. John Russell Taylor, Anger and After (Middlesex, 1962), p.296.

11. The Collection The

12. Jean-Paul sartre and Lloyd Alexander, trans., Nausea (London, 1962), p.130. Iris Murdoch, Sartre (London, 1961), p.12.

Bruce Glaser, "Questions to Stella and Judd," Minimal Art: A Critical Anthologr, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York, 1968), pp.~57-8. 15. Hew Wheldon, "Monitor B.B.C. Interview with Harold Pinter," quoted in Kay Dick, "Mr. Pinter and the Fea.rful Matter," The Texas QuarterlY, Vol.4, No. 3-4 (1961), p.264.

16. Harold P;-nter, "Writing for the Theatre, Il p.82.

17. Bêian 0' Doherty, "Minus Plato," Minimal Art: A Critical Anthologr, p.252. 18. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1962), p.19. 19. Bert o. states, "Pinter's Homeco~: The Shock of Nonrecognition," The Hudson Review, Vo1.21, No.3 (1~, pp.484-485.

20. John Russell Taylor, "Accident, Il Sight and Sound, Vo1.35, No.4 (1966), p.184. '

21. Geoffrey Wagner, On the Wisdom of Words (New Jersey, 1968), pp. 299-300.

22. ::".J?eter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London, 1968), p.36.

23. T.E. Hulme and Herbert Read, ed., Speculations (London, 1924), p.152.

24. Ibid., p.135.

25. States, p.476.

26. Ibi-<:l!, "p.476,;; Zl. Kerr, p.37. 28. Kelly Morris, rtThe Homecoming," Tulane DraIna Review, Vo1.2, No.2 (1966), p.185.

29. Hugh Nelson, IIThe Homecoming: Kith and Kin, If Modern British Dramatists, ed. John Russell Brown (New Jersey, 1968), p.149.

30. Lawrence M. Bensky, "Harold Pinter: An Interview, n The Paris Review, Vol. 10, No.39 (1966), p.24.

31. Harold Pinter, "Writing for the Theatre, If p.SO.

32. States, p.478.

33. Kerr, p.25.

34. Harry Thompson, "Harold Pinter Replies, JI New Theatre lwf.agazine, Vo1.2, No.2 (1961), p~9.

35. Anonymous revieLin The Financia1 Times, (n. d.) quoted in Arnold P. Hinchcliffe, ~Old Pinter (New York, 1967), p.124.

36. Taylor, Anger and Atter, p. 288. 37. John Pest,-. "Pinter's Usurpers," Drama Survey, Vo1.6, No.7 (1967), p.63. 1

38. Bensky, p.29.

39.

-' ~ 40. Hugh Nelson, p.150. 41. Bensky, p. 37. 42. Kerr, pp. 11-12. 43. Harold Pinter, B.B.C. transcript, "New Comment," quoted in Hinchcliffe, p. 99. 44. Bensky, p. 20. 45. Pinter, The Homecoming, pp. 33-34.

46. Alexander Pope and William K. Wimsatt, Jr., ed., "The Rape of the Lock," Selected Poetpy and Prose (New York, 1951), Canto II, 1. 107. 47. States, p. 475. 48. Pinter, ''Writing for the Theatre," p. 82. 49. Harold Pinter, The Lover. Tea Party, The Basement: Two Plays and a Film Script (New York, 1967), p. 105. 50. Roger Hudson, "An Interview with Richard MacDonald," Sight and Sound, Winter (1964-65), reprinted in a publication of the National Film Theatre (ottawa), Canadian Film Archi-,res, Spring, 1968. 51. Taylor, "Accident," pp. 183-184. 52. Harold Pinter, The Servant: A Screenplay, (unpub.), London, 1963. A1l quotes from The Servant (eJÇcept noso 53 and 54) will be indicated by scene number within thesis boqy. 53. Harold Pinter, The Servant, quoted in Hinchcliffe, pp. 132-133.

54. ~., p. 132.

55. John Lahr, "The Language of Silence," Evergreen Revi.ew, Vo1.13, No. 64 (1969), p.55. 56. Jacques Brunius, "Joseph Losey and the Servant," Film 38, p. 30. 57. Pinter, The Homecoming, p. 46.

58. ~., pp. 52-53. 59. Ibid., p. 19.

60. ~., p. 33.

) 61. Taylor, "Accident, Il p. 183. 62. ~., p. 183. 63. Ibid., p. 184. 64. Harold Pinter, Accident: A Screenplay (unpub.)(London, 1966), Al1 quotes from Accident will be indicated by scene number within thesis body. 65. Steiner, p. 9. 66. Kerr, p. 25. 67. Ibid., p. 36. BIBLIOOR..I\PHY

Primary Sources:

Maugham, Robin. The Servant. New York, 1949.

Mosley, Nicholas. Accident. New York, 1965.

Pinter, Harold. Accident: A Screenplay (unpub.) London, 1966.

Pinter, Harold. The Birthda.y Party. London, 1960.

Pinter, Harold. The Caretaker. London, 1960.

Pinter, Harold. The Homecoming. London, 1965.

Pinter, Harold. The Lover, Tea Parly, The Basement: Two Plays and ~ Fj]m Script. New York, 1967.

Pinter, Harold. ~ ~ and The Dumb Waiter. London, 1960.

Pinter, Harold. ~ Servant: ! Screenplay' (unpub•. ) London, 1963.

Pinter, Harold. Three P1ays: A Slight Ache, The Collection, ~ Dwarfs. New York, 1962.

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Battcock, Gregor.y, ed. Minjmal Art: ! Critical Anthology. New York, 1968.

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Brunius, Jacques. "Joseph Losey and The Servant," Film, 38, Z7-30.

Bryden, Ronald. ItPinter," Observer, Februar.y 19 (1967), 11.

Cbiari, J. D. Landmarks of Contemporar;y Drama. London, 1965.

Chiaromonte, Nicola. ItAntonin Artaud, Il Encounter, Vol. 29, No.2 (1967), 44-50.

Clurman, Harold. The Naked Image. New York, 1958. Dick, Kay. 1IMr. Pinter and the Fearful Matter, n The Texas Quarter],y, Vol. 4, No. 3-4 (1961), 257-265.

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Hudson, Roger. nAn Interview with Richard MacDonald, n Sifht and Sound, Winter (1964-65), reprinted in National Film Theatre ottawa), Canadian Film Archives, Spring (1968), no page numbers.

Hulm.e, Thomas E., and Herbert Read, ed. Soeculations. London, 1924.

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Pope, Alexander and William K. Wimsatt, Jr., ed. Se1ected Poetry and Prose. New York, 1951. Sartre, Jean Paul and Lloyd Alexander, transe Nausea. London, 1962.

Sontag, Susan. "Film and Theatre, ft Tulane DraIna Review, Fall (1966), 24-37.

Sontag, Susan. "Going to the Movies~Godard, Il Partisan Review, Vo1.35, No.2 (1968), 290-313. states, Bert O. "Pinter1s Homecoming: The Shock of Nonrecognition," The Hudson Review, Vo1.21, No.3 (1968), 474-486.

Steiner~ George. "The l.a.noauage Animal," Encounter, Vol.33, No.2 (1969), 7-24. Taylor, John Russell. "Accident," Sight and Sound, Vol.35, No.4 (1966), 179-184. Taylor, John Russell. Anger and After. Middlesex, 1962.

Thompson, Harr,y. "Harold Pinter Replies," New Theatre Magazine, Vo1.2, No.2 (1961), 8-10.

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