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Pinter's Four Dimensional House: The Homecoming VERA M. JIJI • IN THE HOMECOMING, AS VARIOUS CRITICS HAVE NOTED, Pinter dramatizes the ancient archaic rite of the sacrifice of the ritual king and the mating of the fertility goddess with the new conqueror.1 Since this rite corresponds roughly to the infantile desires of the Oediphal phase (in which the young child fantasizes that he is the new conqueror who can possess his mother after killing his father) the play can also be seen as the enactment of the Oedipus myth.2 But what gives this play its unique quality is that Pinter has dared not only to base his characters' motives and actions on unconscious processes, but he has also dared to put on stage the very language and thought processes of the unconscious (insofar as it can be said to have a language and thought process of its own). At the same time, Pinter places these startlingly primitive and alogical manifestations in the context of the trivial social rituals of modern lower-middle class life. Since the very definition of ritual implies a repetitious pattern of codified behavior, and the audience is reasonably familiar with the modern rituals employed in the play, it brings its own expectations ofhow the coded rituals should go into the theater. These expectations are consistently engaged by the play's adherence to their forms, while they are as consistently violated by the characters' behavior. The result is that the play seems very funny, while our subconscious awareness of the appropriateness of its seeming madness to our primordial unconscious processes is very satisfying. As Ionesco put it in describing his work, "the cohesive unity that grants formal structure to emotions in their primitive state satisfies an inner need and does not answer the logic of some structural order imposed from without; not submission to some predetermined action, but the exteriorization of one's psychic dynamism."3 How radical 433 434 VERA M. 1111 this method really is may be seen by the resistance of some critics to recognizing its operation. Thus Bert O. States objects to any interpretation of the play's mythic elements, saying "It is simply hard to see what they prove, other than that Pinter deals in some pretty raw urges." Yet he speaks, in the same essay, of the play's "double vision of the real and the super-real, the lurking fatality and inexplicable tyranny, the mysterious inspecificity and yet utter relevance ofeverything."4 It is precisely Pinter's use of the language and thought processes of primary process and its aptness to all three related factors: our collective inheritance,5 our infantile fantasies and memories, and our subconscious present-day responses which accounts for the power and oddly satisfying quality of the play. The Homecoming seems "super-real" because its characters are archetypal figures; the' "lurking fatality" comes from our recognition of the inevitability of the sacrificial rite; the "tyranny" of the primal father, Max, is a giver of primitive patriarchal family organization and the utter helplessness of infancy; the "mysterious inspecificity" is no different in our dreams. The "utter relevance of everything" arises from its rigorous adherence to the alogical but historically (that is, for each individual raised in Western society) determined experience upon which the play is constructed: "psychic dynamism" or, to use the technical term under which it has been studied, primary process. Primary process thinking, although it is a theoretical construct, is familiar to all of us in our dreams, when we return to the omnipotent desires and narcissism of early childhood. It lacks Aristotlean logic and a sense of cause and effect, both of which were acquired in later years. It is obsessed by concrete metaphors, since abstractions were unknown to us in early childhood. (Even athree year old is confused by the idea that Mommy can be anyone other than his Mommy, a White House any other than the white one in which he lives, etc.) It concerns itself greatly with biological matters, and has no real way of measuring due proportion of emotion. It is an all or nothing way of feeling, like a baby's, either totally blissful or totally enraged...

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