Harold Pinter : Poetics of Silence

170 Pages·1970·20.946 MB·English

by  James R. Hollis, Harry T. Moore

crosscurrents / modern critique:
HAROLD PINTER
The Poetics of Silence
James Hoi
R. lis
Preface by Harry T. Moore
This is the first full-length book on Harold Pinter
to go beyond an introductory study and to deal
with his significance for the contemporary
experience
Though well known in his native England and in Europe,
Harold Pinter remains relatively obscure in America. In
Harold Pinter: The Poetics of Silence James HoiIis
spotlights this original and creative playwright who, as
he phrases it, "has listened to the labored pulse of his
century, limned its temper, and perhaps more impor-
tantly recreated its frightening silence."
The primary focus of this volume—one which every
student of Pinter must confront—is his relationship to
and utilization of language. Believing that the most
important things are not being said but that individuals
communicate only too well by the very failure of
language, Pinter makes his impact by silence—by the
silence when no word is spoken, by the silence when a
torrent of words conceals the meaning beneath it, by the
silence which becomes almost a presence in itself. Thus,
as Hollis puts it, Pinter forges a new poetic, a poetic of
Initially, Hollis weighs the use of metaphor as a mode
of expression for the artist who seeks to span the gulf
between man and the receding tide of meaning. He
examines one of the central metaphors in Pinter—the
room. It is an open-ended metaphor but nevertheless
suggestive of the encapsulated and Angst-ridden environ-
ment of modern man and of his regressive aversion to
the hostile world without.
Dealing with Pinter's principal works from his first
play The Room (1957) to his most recent Silence
(1969), Hollis investigates with remarkable clarity the
increasing intensity of man's anxious search for himself
and for the meaning back of the silence. In each one of
the three early plays considered in the first chapter, The
Room, The Birthday Party, and The Dumb Waiter,
someone sits anxiously within a room and regards each
intrusion into that room as an externalization of a threat
long felt but not easily articulated. The pauses, the
sentences left hanging, the half gestures enduethe room
with a mystery and a sense of foreboding which reveal
the anxieties and go far beyond the limitations of
language.
In the chapter "The Poverty of Self," Hollis continues
to explore Pinter's psychological realism, his treatment
of the themes of exchange of identities and of existential
"blindness" which converge forcefully in A Slight Ache
and The Lover. Here the narrow room has opened to,
line
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822 Hollis, James R 1930-
Pinter Harold Pinter; the poetics of silence byi James R. Hoi-
r
lis. Pref. by Harry T. Moore. Carbondale, Southern Illi-
nois University Press [1970]
xii, 143 p. 22 cm. (Crosscurrents/modern critiques) 4.95
Bibliography: p. 137-140.
I, Title
1. Pinter, Harold, 1930-
EG 6/71
PR60CG.1 53ZGT8 ?22'.9'14 77-86186
MARC
ISBN0-S093-O4G0-3
Library of Congress 70 (4|

Crosscurrents/ modern critiques
Harry T. Moore, General Editor
HAROLD PINTER
The Poetics of Silence
James R. Hollis
PREFACE BY
Harry T. Moore
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Carbondale and EdwardsviUe
FEFFER & SIMONS, INC.
London and Amsterdam
^^AIJTn pyfUJC IBRARV
©
Copyright 1970, by Southern Illinois University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Andor Braun
ISBN 0—8093-0450—3
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number yy-86186
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction xi
Prologue 1
1 The Room as Metaphor 18
The Room, The Birthday Party, The Dumb
Waiter
2 The Poverty of Self 52
A Slight Ache, The Lover
3 The Struggle for Possession 70
The Collection, The Caretaker
4 The Homecoming 96
5 The Rest Is Silence 112
Silence, Landscape
Afterword: The Poetics of Silence 122
Notes 131
Selected Bibliography 137
Index 141