[Especially] when dealing with a play as multileveled and enigmatic—a few might even say, and not without some justification, as obscure—as Harold Pinter's No Man's Land (1975), no single interpretation of the work can be exhaustive. Even contradictory readings are to be expected, but I hope instead to offer one that complements and extends the many illuminating critical comments that the play has already generated. There has been, for example, no dearth of suggestions as to the meaning of the title—almost always a key to puzzling out a Pinter play…. Pinter's text invites us to go even further [than previous interpretations of the title] and supports our equating "no man's land" with Death. Thus the work might profitably be seen as a summoning-by-death play, in which case it shares certain similarities with the pattern, though not with the philosophy, of the medieval moralities.

But what does it mean "to die" or to "be dead" in Pinter? What, more precisely, is the nature of death, or of man's condition when he is dead? Some enlightenment on this question can be gained by returning to Pinter's "memory plays" (like Landscape and Old Times) that immediately preceded No Man's Land; from these, we can infer that death means, at its most basic level, that man's mind is finally frozen, is fixed forever. And it is here, in its fixity, that death intersects with art. (pp. 197-98)

[For Pinter's characters, in order for the past to exist, it] must first be remembered, yet in the very process of doing the remembering, the characters can alter or modify the past at will, or even recreate it totally anew to fit their present needs; Pinter himself has suggested that the past is what one remembers, imagines he remembers, convinces himself he remembers, or pretends to remember. Memory can thus become a creative activity, and the remembrance a work of art. It is in that sense that we are all artists. If present memory takes priority over past reality, this means, then, that there is no objective truth, that everything is potentially true…. Death means a cessation of this power to control the past by modifying it at will; no longer can all times and events, both real and fictive, be simultaneously present in the mind, but only one image will be fixed there permanently. No Man's Land opens with the words, "As it is?"…; the final words could just as easily read: "And ever shall be." (pp. 198-99)

There exist … several details in the text indicating that Spooner is to be seen as a figure of Death come to call for Hirst. He has evidently been a brief visitor, one who fulfills his role with dispatch, in other people's lives before Hirst's; he refers to himself as someone whose essence is "fixed, concrete" …—which would seem to delineate him from the normal human condition of becoming—and yet whose sudden appearance ordinarily causes the welcome mat to be rolled up. (p. 199)

If change is the essence of life, fixity is the property of art. In a drama about two poets, we might expect Pinter to use a poem as the art object. But instead, just as Pirandello, whom Pinter is philosophically close to here, often used a portrait as a stage symbol in his plays, he employs the photograph, the art form whose ideal is an absolutely faithful representation of reality…. Hirst talks about the subjects of a photograph as "fixed, imprisoned"; these "ghosts," nevertheless, still possess the ability to spark a response from the living, and only this remembrance and recognition in the mind of the living secures for them a present existence…. For the art work can be ever alive and unfinished, in that the emotional impact it makes on each viewer, and the response and reinterpretation it calls forth each time it is experienced, make it ever new, ever changing.

And yet, from a different perspective, the work of art is permanently frozen, an unchanging, eternal present. Although comfort and security can be gained from such a condition of stasis, where everything is settled, determined, ordered logically and coherently, where nothing is left open to chance or indeterminacy, for Pinter—as well as for Pirandello, who seems to be his dramatic mentor in this regard—life, with its flux and infinite variability, with its "becomingness," is still preferable to art, just as life is preferable to death. So Pinter's discipleship of Pirandello embraces more than simply the illusion/reality games or the motif of the relativity of truth that Pinter develops in such works as The Lover, Landscape, "Night," and Old Times; it includes also the larger issue of art vs. life that Pirandello explored in such dramas as Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV. This quality of fluidity, "becomingness," makes memory coterminous with life in Pinter's plays and, by inversion, equates a memory forever fixed with death, which accurately describes Hirst's condition at the play's end, as he relinquishes control over memory and finally recognizes that in death memory will no longer serve as an active, creative power.

Without understanding the ramifications of his words, Hirst remarks in the closing moments of the play, "Let us change the subject. For the last time" … and then asks, "Is the subject winter?"… The ritual cycle of the seasons and the hours has … symbolically come to a halt, frozen at the point of darkness and death. And as desperately as Hirst might attempt to regain control and remember the "sounds of birds" from his youth … and, by remembering them, live, finally he must submit: "But I am mistaken. There is nothing there."… The power of summoning up the past has departed, and the omnipresent Pinter room, that might well have been an image of Hirst's mind, becomes a tomb. Life, without the faculty of memory, turns to death, and death, for Pinter, is a void…. [To] reach the comfortable, because unalterable, condition of death, which in its fixity is analogous to art, [Hirst] has had to sacrifice the limitless power of memory which, for Pinter, makes life itself the supreme work of art…. (pp. 202-04)

[In No Man's Land], and in the dramas immediately preceding it, Pinter illuminates the processes by which the mind can control time, showing how memory, either faithful to fact or a creative fabrication, can make and remake the past in the present and the future—until, with death, the mind must relinquish its control over time. When memory ceases, man truly resides in "no man's land." (p. 204)