Harold Pinter has listened to the labored pulse of his century, limned its temper, and perhaps more importantly, recreated its frightening silences. In a time which Tiutchev adumbrated as the "hour of wordless longing," Pinter serves us well by reminding us that we live in the space between words. (p. 1)

Dramatic irony emerges from the disparity between expectation and result…. But Pinter's irony goes beyond "dramatic" or "Sophoclean" irony; it is existential irony. Pinter's plays may be ironic at many levels but their most pervasive irony arises from our confrontation with the world we actually live in but do not recognize. We ascribe anonymity to the characters and situations of Pinter's drama precisely because they are too familiar, too disconcertingly close to where we live…. [The] audience is implicated in the irony of Pinter's work in a fashion which is not superficially apparent but which accounts for the discomfort heroes and heroines always feel at the moment of anagnorisis. Thus the deepest ironic intent of Pinter's work is to make strange that which is familiar and to make familiar that which is strange. (pp. 7-8)

But even though Pinter's plays often seem bizarre and rather mysterious, they are nevertheless overtly realistic in their mood and movements. His characters, for example, are clearly upper, middle, or working-class types although that is not to say that they are typological or allegorical. Even though the problems of any single character may be paradigmatic, they are also distinctly individual. Pinter's characters are not pasteboard figures demanding a one-to-one identification with some allegorical backdrop; rather, they are open and incomplete as all men are open and incomplete. The abyss over which they seem to teeter is surely the same abyss which Heidegger describes as "the openness of Being." Pinter does not dehumanize his characters as Beckett and Ionesco sometimes do; they remain "human, all-too-human." (pp. 8-9)

Pinter seems to be the only playwright to fuse the absurdist consciousness with overtly conventional realism to achieve a dramatically viable amalgam. In A Slight Ache, for example, the audience readily enters into the world of the play because it seems comfortably familiar. Soon they realize themselves caught as the wasp is caught in the marmalade and, having committed themselves, must wait upon the conclusion. Then the playwright has his audience from the outset and they must see the matter through. Thus the afternoon tea becomes a horrifying ritual of divestiture without ceasing to be an afternoon tea as well. (p. 9)

Pinter is an original and creative talent. It is true that he has imbibed the vapors of the "masters" [such as Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet], and it is true that they have informed his vision, but the vision was there in the beginning…. Pinter is not then an absurdist in the strictest sense although he seems to be doing many things that the absurdists are doing. There are points of influence perhaps, but Pinter's voice is distinct and individual. (pp. 9-10)

Pinter perceives similar problems of communication as Beckett but employs a different strategy of dramatization.

Pinter employs language to describe the failure of language; he details in forms abundant the poverty of man's communication; he assembles words to remind us that we live in the space between words…. The effect of Pinter's language, then, is to note that the most important things are not being said, that the dove that would descend to speak the procreative word still hovers amid the precincts of silence. (p. 13)

Language is obviously important in Pinter's effort to get himself across to us, but we must also recognize the many occasions when it is through silence that he communicates. There are many ways in which Pinter uses silence to articulate, but the first, and perhaps most common, is simply the pause. The pause occurs when the character has said what he has to say and is waiting for a response from the other side, or it occurs when he cannot find the words to say what he wants to say. In either case he has attempted to span the chasm that exists between him and those around him. He is caught up short; he has reached the limits of language and now waits in silence for something to happen.

There are other occasions in the plays of Pinter when the silence is hard to hear because there are so many sounds being made at the same time. (pp. 14-15)

This is the silence which emerges when the most important things are left unsaid. (p. 15)

Pinter's characters typically manifest the exhaustion of their capacities and of the forms by which they live. Although they may fill the air with words, the silence of these characters is the result of their having nothing to say. Ionesco has effectively parodied this cultural phenomenon by eliciting nonsense syllables from his characters. Pinter has tried to do the same thing the hard way, that is by using the normal speech of the characters to reveal the poverty, the emptiness of their lives. These are characters who finally exercise their power of speech but find themselves, like the orator in Ionesco's The Chairs, filling the air with gibberish to camouflage the fact that they have nothing important to say. (p. 16)

Pinter's gift has been to create dramatic representations of silence as a presence…. While there is much in Pinter which is of significance to the discerning observer of contemporary artistic expression, perhaps nothing is more important than Pinter's endeavor to forge a poetic out of the silence which surrounds us. (p. 17)

One of the central metaphors in Pinter is "the room." The room is suggestive of the encapsulated environment of modern man, but may also suggest something of his regressive aversion to the hostile world outside. (p. 19)

The Room conveys a drab lower-class environment without the implicit sentimentalism of social reformers. This is not to say that Pinter is insensitive to the condition of his characters but that their psychological peril is his focus rather than their social deprivation. Thus the social environment is supplanted by the psychological environment and the psychological environment is the product of the needs and weaknesses of those characters. (pp. 29-30)

As much as the barrenness of the room, the entry of Riley, the violence of Bert may contribute to the metaphoric atmosphere of the play, it is clear that language is the means through which Pinter articulates the nameless and says what one finds hard to say. Through his uncanny ear for the syntax and rhythms of common English speech, Pinter is able to reproduce the sundry kinds of silence which we often do not consciously hear. (p. 30)

The language of The Room and [of] other plays … is the standard speech of the working classes, a patois informed by the daily fare of sex and violence in News of the World and the "telly." Why then does Pinter's conventional transference of this speech to dirty little people in grubby little rooms seem so unconventional? What strikes us as strange in Pinter is often due to the failure of our memory. If, for example, we find ourselves overhearing a conversation on a subway, we expect that there will be numerous gaps or pauses, many sentences left hanging…. If one were to transfer such conversations to the stage that which we take for granted would suddenly seem strange. Such a playwright would hardly seem a realist until we chanced to recall that our everyday existence is charged with just such mystery. (pp. 30-1)

One of the ways in which Pinter permits silence to work upon our consciousness is to have the characters engage in seemingly insignificant but compulsively repetitive activities. At first these acts may seem slightly strange or slightly humorous; but as they continue, they become forms of expression for emotions too profound to utter. Stanley's beating of the drum ends the first act [of The Birthday Party] and the second act begins with McCann slowly and mechanically tearing a newspaper into equal strips. Both characters are channeling and expressing their fears and aggressions. (p. 35)

The systematic undercutting of … fact is characteristic not only of The Birthday Party but of the other works in the Pinter corpus. It is not that the characters are lying (though we do not know that they are not lying); it is simply that we can only see the truth over their shoulders…. As the separate testimonies to the "truth" accumulate in Pinter's plays, the "truth" becomes even more uncertain and the "facts" of the matter begin to call each other into question. (p. 36)

[For example, in The Birthday Party, we] never know for certain that Goldberg and McCann are killers; perhaps they are from an asylum and are trying to return a patient. We never know who Stanley is; it is likely that he is using an alias and perhaps even his musical career is part of his cover identity. The Birthday Party resists all allegory. Pinter has left too many loopholes for the one-to-one identification which allegory demands. To allegorize Pinter one must also assume the author to have a preconceived plan for the play. In the [Kenneth] Tynan interview on BBC, Pinter expressly declared that he did not. Rather he explained, the idea grew out of the concrete situation. The characters, in effect, make the idea of the play and not the reverse…. The Birthday Party, then, is not a tissue of systematic signification, the requirement of allegory, but an elaboration, an exfoliation of existential givens. (pp. 41-2)

Pinter possesses a heightened sense for the dramatic which one sometimes also finds in the Hitchcock film. Our attention is focused on the most mundane details even while we know that something more important is afoot. (p. 44)

The Dumb Waiter has a number of motifs in common with The Room and The Birthday Party. But most importantly, in all three someone sits anxiously within a room and regards each intrusion into that room as the externalization of a threat long felt but unsusceptible to complete articulation. For this reason the sundry silences of the three plays are perhaps more important to our understanding of those characters than whatever they may say overtly. (p. 49)

[Although it is as tempting in this play as in the others,] it is not necessary to allegorize The Dumb Waiter to feel the compelling power of Pinter's dramatization of men ignorant of their assignment. It is not necessary to identify the mysterious voice with the Deity to understand man's suspicion that there is a power that is not so much malevolent as detached and unconcerned about those dancing on the killing ground beneath. There seem finally two ways of responding to the absence of answers to a man's questions. He may continue his frustration by asking himself additional questions until he has pushed himself to the abyss. Or he can simply continue to play the game and hope he does not stumble along the way. Gus and Ben personify this central dilemma. (p. 50)

The limitation of set in The Dumb Waiter and the other plays of "the room" metaphor obviously goes beyond the need to pare costs, beyond any desire to heed the so-called classical unities. It is rather a strategy to compress a situation, to focus on its central tension as a means of making manifest the Angst-ridden isolation of the characters in those rooms. What one may wish to make of those characters in those situations becomes the problem. Those who avoid allegory have Pinter's blessing. (pp. 50-1)

Pinter's theatre is consequently given to psychological realism rather than to social realism. His preoccupation is with the isolated individual and not the machinations of mace or mitre or suffering masses. But he is, paradoxically, more the realist than the realists. He cuts his "slice of life" thinner and thereby makes it more nearly translucent. Though he may portray a mad society, the basic commitment of the realist is to reason—the reasoned analysis, the reasoned solution. Pinter has no necessary obligation to reason, for his province is the psyche where there are things unaccountable to ratiocinative man. (p. 52)

Previously in Pinter one never discovered what any character's personality really was. The characters were all too frightened to undertake any probing self-analysis. In A Slight Ache (1959) we see at last characters who discover the truth of their identities. (p. 53)

The process by which Pinter takes Edward from a cocky, self-assured author to a snivelling dog that cowers before a man who does not speak is as subtle as it is terrifying. Edward's monologues are in fact dialogues, not between himself and the visitor but between himself and himself. He is engaged in questioning himself, and he finds that the answers are destructive. In the dialectic of examination, he discovers the synthesis, the final term, is emptiness. (p. 58)

Other themes which Pinter dramatized in A Slight Ache [in addition to this central theme of vacancy] include the psychological stratagems of projection and reaction formation, and the theme of blindness. (p. 59)

All of these themes have exercised Pinter's imagination [in other plays,] but they converge most successfully in A Slight Ache. (p. 60)

Pinter returns repeatedly to several themes which, expressed in problematic terms, seem central to the articulation of his vision. The problem of verification, for example, remains crucial to all of his plays…. The problem of identity recurs as well…. These themes are merged in some of Pinter's later plays as a struggle for possession. The struggle is to find and possess the truth, or as Kierkegaard might say, to stand in absolute relationship to it. But the struggle is also to find and possess the real person, the embodiment of the truth. The Caretaker merges these themes and is perhaps Pinter's masterpiece thus far. (p. 70)

[The] themes which preoccupy Pinter—the room as a haven from the threatening world outside, the search for the truth, the quest for identity, and the struggle for possession—attain their most engaging synthesis in The Caretaker. Night School and The Collection [which explore similar themes] thus serve as five-finger exercises for what most observers agree to be Pinter's greatest achievement….

The three careworn characters of The Caretaker are at various junctures along the circuitous path of this quest for identity. (p. 77)

Davies seems rootless, without a history or stable identity. His isolation is conveyed by his evasive answers to the questions. All identifying details seem lost and one wonders if Davies has ever known where he came from. The halting phrases, the confused pauses betray his fragmented consciousness. Davies has lost his way. He cannot retrace his steps or begin anew. (pp. 81-2)

Even the most banal aspects of existence seem fraught with serious implications for Davies because he is trying desperately to learn the game so that he can play it too. At every turn, however, he is defeated by language. Language is either too much for him or not enough for him; it either bewilders him or tells him the obvious. Either way he does not communicate to others nor understand fully what they are saying to him.

Because of the confusion about his own identity, about his "standing" in the world, Davies does not trust language at all. He cannot bring himself to say what he wants to say and so stammers around the subject. (p. 84)

Act two represents the fulcrum of the play. It is the occasion in which the triangular relationship begins to take shape and in which Davies begins to try to play the game. (pp. 86-7)

Each of the characters of The Caretaker nurses a private illusion…. Each wants to make his way in the world. While Aston and Mick are important to the story, it is clear that Davies is the central character. (pp. 89-90)

Davies is more buffoon than tragic hero, yet there are aspects of his character that approximate the classical hamartia. His "flaw" is to miscalculate, to misread the silent communion between brother and brother. (p. 90)

The apartment of The Caretaker may be seen as an expanded version of "the room." This time, however, the intruder is not the threat but the one threatened. (p. 91)

Again the vehicle through which the values of the play are made manifest is language. (p. 92)

Pinter has tried to do the most difficult of things, to talk about whatever it is we cannot talk about and for his effort, he is told that he lacks thematic content. Pinter gives voice to the silences, somethings poets have tried to do since Orpheus, and he is told that there is no lyricism in the proletarian paeans of Davies, Mick, and Aston.

The difficult trick which Pinter tries to turn in The Caretaker is to show the way in which the language succeeds in revealing most profoundly by seeming to fail…. It is in the "edging around" that the real conflicts of the play emerge. (p. 93)

There are other ways in which Pinter communicates by seeming not to communicate. The recurrent references to the Buddha statuette provide one example. The real symbols of the play, the shoes, the shed, et. al. are so mundane that one naturally expects the Buddha to function symbolically as well; but it does not. One could see it as the ordered center of a disordered universe but that takes us nowhere…. The point behind all of these non-symbols is that the symbols, the referents, the guidelines are not functioning. Davies wants to make his way in the world, to make the "right connections"; and he seeks the deeper explanation behind the phenomenal appearances, but there is none. (pp. 93-4)

It is in the sundry recitals of silence, then, that Pinter's recurrent themes are integrated and articulated. (p. 94)

It is easy to feel out of one's depth with the plays of Pinter. One always faces the question "what is this about?" or "what is he doing?"… When Pinter's drama is at its best, it is true that the audience may wish to evaluate what is going on; but their involvement is not so much rational as non-rational. Insofar as the nameless anxieties that haunt the characters are validly, that is to say dramatically, rendered, the observer is drawn into the same circle of anxiety. We are not all itinerant caretakers, of course; but we are all, in our own way, care-taken wanderers. If we rationalize while watching Pinter's plays, it is more likely that we are trying to hypostatize into categories the encircling metaphors of the play, to beat off their seductive gestures with our reasoned principles. (pp. 94-5)

Pinter's two act play The Homecoming (1965), reveals an assured craftsman who knows what he wants to do and is doing it. For many The Homecoming is not as satisfying a play as The Caretaker, but there is little doubt that The Homecoming is a rich fusion of the previous themes of the search for a secure home, the poverty of the self, and the struggle for possession. (p. 96)

Critic John Warner has argued that The Homecoming is a dramatization of the plight of contemporary man in the time of the eclipsed gods and their sorry substitutes, Science and Rationalism. Consciously or unconsciously, then, the characters of the play represent their fellows in a search for psychic wholeness. (p. 108)

The issue of morality has often been raised in connection with The Homecoming. At the superficial level, The Homecoming is a shocking play, an affront even to the morality of those who live in a morally fluid age. But the characters of The Homecoming are no more concerned with moral issues than a dog is self-conscious about his relationship to a fire hydrant. That is not to dismiss the characters as being merely animals. Rather they are dramatizations of a region of the human consciousness which lies below volition and is amoral in character…. They, like those who went before and like those who shall follow, are about the business of coming home, the return to the proximity of the source. (p. 110)

The Homecoming suggests the possibility that [Pinter's] silences are widening and are extending themselves toward the expression of compelling human archetypes. For all their refusal to leave "this world," Pinter's characters nevertheless strain for something beyond. The transcendental motive need not take its grounding in a specifically theological, philosophical, or cultural pattern to be authentic. Lenny tells us in The Homecoming that neither the known nor the unknown merits our reverence. But the silence which ensues from such a confession need not necessarily be arid. Neither is it necessary to conclude that to arrive home is to have completed one's venture. If the Pinter corpus can develop beyond The Homecoming, if the ensuing forms continue to be "original," if the silences continue to be procreative, then he will have demonstrated that "the way home is the way forward." (p. 111)

The silences of the last plays [Silence and Landscape] differ only in degree, not in kind from the silence which surrounded Rose, the Birthday Boy, and Davies. Throughout the corpus, characters try and ostensibly fail in their efforts to fling linguistic bridges across the abyss. But the abyss widens or deepens and the ballistic potential of their language is again outdistanced. Thus, the silence deepens…. While the early characters moved in a generally realistic environment, however strange and unreal that environment often seemed, the last characters do not move about very much at all. Their isolation is intensified, literalized; their movements and gestures toward each other are mechanical and rigid. Their discourse is more fragmentary than before. They begin somewhere near where Davies ended. Their conversation proceeds at different levels and rarely is there a point of intersection. Each seems caught in the prison of himself, in the strictures of an unrelieved past, and blessed (or cursed) with only a partial insight into the nature of his condition. (pp. 112-13)

As Pinter follows the direction of his vision, as he moves ever toward the OM, he runs the risk of replacing drama with apotheosis, of trading the stage for the temple. (p. 113)

For all the static qualities of Landscape and Silence, however, there is movement still. Bodies are turgid and comparatively immobile, but spirits yet move through deepening shades of silence. For all their truncation, for all their visions and memories manqué, these characters … are embarked. They cannot go home again; they cannot see what they are heading toward; they are, however, irretrievably embarked. If they may not then go with the protective word, they must journey with broken words through regions of silence. For all the chaos and discordancy of their silences and ours, a poetic of the highest order emerges, a dramaturgy become thaumaturgy. (p. 121)

Pinter's concern is not with the "struggling proletariate" of the social realists or even with an abstract notion of "man," but rather with the concrete experience of being human. His characters are found neither at the barricades nor behind the threatened panoplies of power. They are lonely, frightened individuals who have returned to the privacy of their rooms to have a think. They are kings and counselors without their regalia. They are all, under the skin, shivering creatures who fear the silences around them…. There is, finally, no hortative moral to draw from Pinter's plays, no deontological road map to guide us though his work does remind us that the dream we dream is communal. (pp. 122-23)

Perhaps Pinter's greatest contribution is to rediscover the wordless quality of our language, to recover what Rilke called the "language where languages end."

Pinter's particular achievement has been to sustain linguistically the sort of tensions which seem to drive his characters from within. The fragmentary sentence, the phrase left hanging, the awkward pause, become outer manifestations of the inner anxiety, the deeper uncertainty. The discordant clash of language in, say, The Caretaker, is indicative of the discord that arises not only between character and character but within each of the characters. The fumbling efforts at conversation which ensue indicate the desperate need the characters have to make themselves known. (p. 123)

Many of Pinter's characters, on the contrary, go to some length to evade being known by others…. [This] evasion arises out of the character's fear that if he reveals himself, if he comes clean, he will be at the mercy of those who know him. (pp. 123-24)

The subtle beauty of Pinter's quotidian language arises from its capacity to tell us more about the characters who use that language than they are capable of telling us themselves. Like all lyric poets, Pinter's first obligation is to the how of communication and not to the what. If such mundane language seems mysterious and terror-ridden, it is only because the lives of men who use a worn-out language are mysterious and terror-ridden. The realist usually sets out to employ the language of common men and succeeds in reproducing only what he thinks is the language of common men. Paradoxically, Pinter's success in attuning our ear to the everyday modes of discourse makes it possible for us to recover the strangeness, the mystery inherent in common human experience. (pp. 124-25)

The kind of hearing necessary to experience Pinter's drama fully is not a simple matter, for Pinter's language is not the rhetoric of direction but the rhetoric of association. One word can, like a pebble in a pond, send out an infinite number of circles. One word may not only lead to another but will more often stir some forgotten experience of pain or pleasure; however, that which ensues is not more language but more silence. (p. 127)

James R. Hollis, in his Harold Pinter: The Poetics of Silence (copyright © 1970 by Southern Illinois University Press; reprinted by permission of Southern Illinois University Press), Southern Illinois University Press, 1970.