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PINTER'S DRAMA1~IC METHOD: KULLUS, 'THE EXAMiNATION, THE BASEMENT IN 1949 PINTER WROTE A DRAMATIC DIALOGUE, Kullus,1 which seems to have served as a scenario for his television play The Basement, first presented by B.B.C. Television on February 20, 1967. Like Kullus the short story The Examination, published along with The Collection and The Lover in 1963,2 shows Pinter's dramatic techniques and methods in statu nascendi and allows insights into the use of his basic theme, which, as I shall attempt to show, is the conflict of dominance and subservience, the battle for positions. Furthermore, there is an evident connection between all three works: a connection which is not limited only to the emphasis on a few but important props, like a door, a window, a stool, the fire in the grate, but includes also the identity of names, the general progress of the story, and the relations of the dramatis personae who are occupied with an unmotivated and relentless power struggle. It appears, therefore, necessary to examine all three works together. Two people, sitting, standing or lying in a room, Pinter once described as his basic dramatic situation. In The Examination there is no outside threat as in the early plays. Two persons, Kullus and the first-person narrator, inhabit this room and are analysed in their mutual relation. The room itself denotes the nature and the reason for the conflict. The constant shift from KulIus's room to that of the first-person narrator's and back again indicates that the room is the objective correlative of the state of the examination, of the position of the interrogator: "Yet I was naturally dominant, by virtue of my owning the room." (p. 89) The habitat, the home, more or leSS guarantees the uppermost position, the power to dominate-a striking analogy to animal behaviour, as it has been brilliantly analysed in Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression. Pinter himself, asked by Lawrence Bensky about the reason for the scences of violence in his plays, has precisely described the use of this theme in The Examination: That short story dealt very explicitly with two people in one room having a battle of an unspecified nature, in which the ques1 Harold Pinter, Poems (London, 1968); includes Kullus, pp. 22-24. 2 The Collection and The Lover (London, 1964); includes The Examination, pp. 85-92. 195 196 MODERN DRAMA September tion was one of who was dominant at what point and how they were going to be dominant and what tools they would use to achieve dominance and how they would try to undermine the other person's dominance. A threat is constantly there: it's got to do with this question of being in the uppermost position, or attempting to be.... I wouldn't call this violence so much as a battle for positions, it's a very common, everyday thing.3 The means the characters employ to undermine the opponent's position , to reverse the situation, I shall examine later. Here it is important to note that the room is not only the circumscribed acting area, providing the aesthetic rules, not only the correlative of who is dominant but also, as the scene is shifted from one person's habitation to the other's, the externalization of the ironic reversal of parts. Yet the process which leads to this shift, this reversal, is always substantially the same. This means that Pint.er's dramatic aim is not, here or elsewhere, bound to character analysis, to the drawing of individuals, clearly defined by their personal idiosyncracies, their social status or milieu. With a tacit defiance of realistic motivation a basic and typical human process, the battle for positions, is delineated. In the earlier dramatic dialogue, Kullus, this battle had been fought out by the members of an eternal triangle, including therewith the powers and forces of sexual attraction and repulsion: Kullus and the girl move into the first-person narrator's room, then all three into Kullus's room, and finally, while Kullus is expelled, into the girl's room. Yet in this early work Pinter is more concerned with the problems of communication , estrangement, and...

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