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 si?*? 6^7100 I II 1 1 1 1 II Mfcr L2 DATE DUE MK ^ ._ APR* 2 1989 NOV 3 1 AUG 1 1) 1991 UbU 1994 I SEPT 1996" -.- 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