"All These Bits and Pieces": Fragmentation and Choice in Pinter's Plays

"All These Bits and Pieces": Fragmentation and Choice in Pinter's Plays FRANCIS GILLEN • THE PRESENTATION OF HIS THREE MOST RECENT PLAYS, Landscape, Silence and Old Times, has frequently been regarded as the point where Pinter's drama took a new turn. Each of these plays, dealing with spots of time which form no coherent whole, emphasizes both the fragmentation of the world in which Pinter's characters exist and the anguish of that fragmentation . Yet a brief survey of the majority of Pinter's earlier plays shows that his characters have always been fragmented beings caught between a world of fact which does not satisfy them and a world ofmeaning which eludes them. In The Room Rose's matter-of-fact existence in her secure room is threatened by a message which neither she nor the audience can comprehend; in The Dumb Waiter mysterious and impossible demands whose source is never known are passed down through a dumb waiter to two hired killers; in The Birthday Party Stanley is abducted for reasons which neither he nor his captors understand. Disson in The Tea Party is hopelessly trapped between the physical world of his bidets and the incomprehensibly cultured world of his new wife, Diana. At the end of The Homecoming Teddy, who possesses intellectual traditions of which the others "wouldn't have the faintest idea,"l abandons his wife to a life of prostitution so that he may return to his abstract theorizing. Each of these plays, then, presents either a relatively secure world threatened by the unknown, or a world of fact which cannot merge with the world of meaning. Lenny, in The Homecoming, probably best expresses the dilemma of the majority of Pinter's characters when he asks: "apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?"2 Ifsuch a briefoverview points then to a continuity of theme, the early plays may well shed light on some of the obscurities of the later plays and 477 478 FRANCIS GILLEN help us to see all of Pinter's work in a clearer perspective. Since it is obviously impossible in a briefpaper to deal with all the early plays, what I propose is to investigate this important theme of fragmentation in the most successful of the earlier plays, The Caretaker, and to show how that theme reaches its full extension in Landscape, Silence and Old Times. The essential conflict in Pinter's The Caretaker lies in the choice which the tramp Davies must make between two brothers, Aston and Mick, who both offer him, on different terms, the job of caretaker. Fired from his earlier job because of a dispute, Davies at first leans towards the kindly but simple-minded Aston, who invites him to share his room and provides him with money and clothing. Learning, however, that Aston had once been in a mental asylum, and driven by his own need to feel superior to someone, Davies shifts his allegiance to the fast-talking, worldly and seemingly successful brother, Mick, denounces his former benefactor, and seeks to drive him from the house. Only after totally alienating the kindly Aston does Davies learn that Mick has apparently never been serious about the offer. His attempts at reconciliation with Aston are futile and the tramp must leave. Martin Esslin's reading of the playas largely a "re-enactment of Adam's expulsion from Paradise" in which Davies, because of his pride, loses the only home available to him, is valuable in its analysis of Davies' character but fails to see that life with Aston would have been intolerable .3 James R. Hollis remedies the one-sidedness of Esslin's view by suggesting that both brothers are playing an elaborate game with Davies and that Davies' "'flaw' is to miscalculate, to misread the silent communion between brother and brother."4 Yet the assumption that Aston is capable of such an intellectual game does not accord with what is shown of Aston's character. Rather, Davies represents contemporary man who has lost his identity, his papers. In his meeting with Aston and Mick he is confronted with two incomplete pictures ofhimself and so with a choice that must be, in...