In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

PINTER'S DIALOGUE: THE PLAY ON WORDS U In the beginning was the Word ..." John I: 1 WORDS ONCE HAD ENORMOUS POWER" a power contained within themselves as spirit, apart from their meaning. The white magician'S command, "I forbid thee, Lucifer, to enter within this circle," for instance, was believed to awe the Devil himself into obedience and prompt action.1 Over the centuries, and especially since the invention of movable type, words have lost their evocative and spiritual power. ~'Get it in writing" usurped the place of a man's sacred oath. Ossified in print, then disseminated by electronics, language seems to have become more denotative than connotative. In our wordy century, the playwright's response to this devaluation in power of one of his basic tools has been generally twofold. One, he is concerned with visual elements of production-bizarre business, audience participation, symbolic sets and costumes, use of color and pure sound (as opposed to dialogue) and mixed media; two, he has experimented with language itself. There has been a concentration on the non-communicative aspects of language. Influential writers such as Jarry, Strindberg, Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter broke the constraint of the necessity for meaningful dialogue and created the evocative chaos of the meaningless, the bizarre, and the illogical. This breakthrough has, paradoxically, begun to return power to speech. In the works of Harold Pinter, experiments with language are particularly marked and particularly successful. He has consistently relied upon language devices for his effects rather than ritualistic, visual devices characteristic of the Theatre of the Absurd of which he must be considered a part.2 UArt . . . is an act of renewal." Herbert Reads In The Birthday Party, an early Pinter play, a scene occurs which illustrates the playwright's use of stichomythia and nonsense as evocation . A cross-examination of the ersatz concert pianist hero, Stanley, 1 Sayed Indires Shah, The Secret Lore of Magic: Books of the Sorcerers (New York, 1958), p. 274 2 See Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York, 1961), pp. 198-217. S Herbert Read, "Surrealism and the Romantic Principle," in Criticism, The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment, ed. by Mark Schorer and others (New York, 1948), p. 116 418 1971 PINTER'S DIALOGUE 419 by two strangers, McCann and Goldberg, is skillfully built into a catechism which has great evocative power, so great that Stanley is ritualistically "killed" by the words. MCCANN. What about Drogheda? GOLDBERG. Your bite is dead. Only your pong is left. MCCANN. You betray our land. GOLDBERG. You betray our breed. MCCANN. Who are you, Weber? GOLDBERG. What makes you think you exist? MCCANN. You're dead. GOLDBERG. You're dead. You can't live, you can't think, you can't love. You're dead. You're a plague gone bad. There's no juice in you. You're nothing but an odour!4 Stanley responds to this with physical violence, but his only words are ".Uuuuuhhh." Then he asks, "May I have my glasses?" That is the last intelligible sentence he speaks, although the play continues through another act and a half. Stanley is pushed, by these words, to the point where he can no longer retort, no longer even accomplish the superficial symbols (language ) of civilization, cannot function in even a meaningless way, and so he ceases to function. The words stun, boggle, and finally destroy him. This scene is similar to that in Ionesco's The Lesson~ where . the Pupil's response "toothache," is her only defense against the aggressive, brutal evocation of her teacher. Stanley's brain-washing is terrifying. Language is distorted into non-language. The words have denotative meaning, but not in the scene's context. Not only is Stanley'S mind raped, but the audience feels the mental violence, too; yet in the rhythm and the nonsense pattern poetry is evoked.5 In The Homecoming~ Pinter's best and most recent full-length play, his devices are more subtle. The stichomythic exchange is still used, but his style has deepened and developed and his use of language is more varied. UWhat concerns me most is shape and structure." Pinter6 The Homecoming is structured by its...

pdf

Share