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"What Have I Seen, the Scum or the Essence?" Symbolic Fallout in Pinter's Birthday Party CHARLESA.CARPENTER • A play, once written, is something that can be approached only on its own terms - an organism that can be explored and opened up, but which can no more be tampered with or "explained" than can any other product of nature. Pinter, quoted by Kenneth Tynanl Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. Didi in Beckett's Waiting [or Godot IN ACT II OF HAROLD PINTER'S THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, Stanley Webber comes face to face with the two men whose arrival at the Boles' rooming house he had anticipated with so much dread. When he first confronts the chief intruder's bullyboy, McCann, he finds the surly Irishman seated at a table carefully tearing a sheet of newspaper into five equal strips. During the muted sparring match that follows, Webber twice picks up a strip of the paper and McCann menacingly tells him (using the same words both times), "Mind that." Obviously, mind it we must; symbolically or otherwise , it's got to have a point. However, the next time McCann tears up a sheet his boss, Goldberg, notices him and comments authoritatively: "Why do you do that all the time? It's childish, it's pointless. It's without a solitary point." Just as obviously, we have been conned. Or have we? Is Pinter really playing underhanded games with us perhaps anti-symbolic games? He is, after all, the playwright who has insisted again and again that he visualizes a concrete, particular dramatic context, one that is not even conceptual, much less symbolic; one in which the events, characters, and stage props simply exist.2 He has said, "I think 389 390 CHARLESA.CARPENTER there will be overtones in any work which has any kind of dimension at all ... but there's no direct symbolic significance to anything at all that I've ever written."3 In fact, "I wouldn't know a symbol if I saw one."4 Nevertheless, the case of McCann's "pointless" behavior with the newspapers cannot be dismissed simply because of Pinter's vexed disclaimers or his built-in debunker. He might not know a symbol if he saw one. In any event, the full range ofstage business involving the papers gives them potentialities for meaning ofthe sort that can only be called symbolic. The beginnings of the first and third acts take place in the morning of consecutive days and include so many repetitions that a kind of treadmill effect arises. On each occasion, old Mr. Boles enters with a newspaper and reads it while his wife Meg prattles on. The process is unmistakably a ritual as regular as the daily paper itself - which, though its function is to record fluctuating reality, paradoxically fosters an illusion of stable order in a world of ceaseless change, and even supplies a brief escape from the urgent facticity of one's personal life. (As Didi remarks, "Habit is a great deadener.") The third time Petey Boles opens a newspaper it is late in Act III, just after he has been humiliated trying to keep Stanley away from his oppressors. "Broken" by his failure, he seeks distraction and solace in the old grooves, the fixed routines. But when he opens his most reliable escape hatch, the paper, five strips of an inside sheet flutter to the floor. Moreover, they remain on stage, mockingly radiating the destructive power of Goldberg and McCann, as Meg comes in to find out where Stanley is. Petey answers by ignominiously studying the front page of the paper. What Pinter gives us here is a small theatrical bombshell with a poetic byproduct, symbolic fallout. During Petey's non-striking and McCann's striking activity with the newspapers, a tiny packet of symbolic nuances is accumulated through the subtle metaphoric fabric of gesture and diction. When the curve of this sub-sub-plot reaches its apex, theatrical fireworks go off, the packet is blown open, and the nuances stream out. Some of them fall into a pattern, the recognition of which adds...

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