"All These Bits and Pieces": Fragmentation and Choice in Pinter's Plays

Abstract

THE PRESENTATION OF HIS THREE MOST RECENT PLAYS, Landscape, Silence and Old Times, has frequently been regarded as the point where Pinter's drama took a new turn. Each of these plays, dealing with spots of time which form no coherent whole, emphasizes both the fragmentation of the world in which Pinter's characters exist and the anguish of that fragmentation. Yet a brief survey of the majority of Pinter's earlier plays shows that his characters have always been fragmented beings caught between a world of fact which does not satisfy them and a world of meaning which eludes them. In The Room Rose's matter-of-fact existence in her secure room is threatened by a message which neither she nor the audience can comprehend; in The Dumb Waiter mysterious and impossible demands whose source is never known are passed down through a dumb waiter to two hired killers; in The Birthday Party Stanley is abducted for reasons which neither he nor his captors understand. Disson in The Tea Party is hopelessly trapped between the physical world of his bidets and the incomprehensibly cultured world of his new wife, Diana. At the end of The Homecoming Teddy, who possesses intellectual traditions of which the others "wouldn't have the faintest idea," abandons his wife to a life of prostitution so that he may return to his abstract theorizing. Each of these plays, then, presents either a relatively secure world threatened by the unknown, or a world of fact which cannot merge with the world of meaning. Lenny, in The Homecoming, probably best expresses the dilemma of the majority of Pinter's characters when he asks: "apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?"