Pinter's A Slight Ache as Ritual

PINTER'S A SLIGHT ACHE AS RITUAL And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?1 THE DRAMA OF HAROLD PINTER EVOLVES in an atmosphere of mystery. While the surface of life is realistically detailed, the patterns that lie below the surface are as obscure as the motives of the characters, the pause, as prominent and suggestive as the dialogue. "The more acute the experience the less articulate its expression,"2 is the author's own defense of his technique, a technique that he uses to heighten the sense of mystery and of menace in A Slight Ache. Still, the audience experiencing Pinter's "comedy of menace" is not simply thrust into the world of a nameless terror and left there. Although Pinter is unwilling to explain the mysteries in his dramas and is impatient with critics who seek to pin down his meanings, a close examination of his plays reveals their careful structure and precise use of symbol. At the same time that his art reflects the mysterious universe as he perceives it, it also attempts to approach the mystery that it reflects. Critical response to the illusive and mysterious character of Pinter's drama has varied. Martin Esslin, who places him among the absurdists , ascribes the mysterious nature of his work to a poetic kind of realism. Unlike the social realists who often concentrate on the inessentials of life, Pinter touches a deeper vein of realism, as Esslin sees it, with his examination of that in life which is not easily verifiable . Pinter, he says, returns to such essentials in drama as "the suspense created by the elementary ingredients of pure, pre-literary theatre: a stage, two people, a door; a poetic image of an undefined fear and expectation."3 John Russell Taylor has also noted the poet in the realist and suggests that the naturalism of Pinter's words "are only the top line, supported by elusive and intricate harmonies, or appearing sometimes in counterpoint with another theme from earlier in the play."4 Indeed , the subtext of a Pinter play informs its naturalistic surface with its own profound logic, creating the surrealistic effect described by Charles Marowitz when he says that "A Pinter play is always an X-ray 1 William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming." 2 Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York, 1961), p. 206. 3 Esslin, p. 199. 4 Anger and After (Maryland. 1963), p. 315. 326 1968 PINTER'S A Slight Ache 327 touched up to suggest it is a snapshot, and its details reveal the desperate struggle of the organism to eject deadly bacteria."5 Marowitz sees this struggle in Pinter's drama progressing from a state of some openness in The Birthday Party to an underground realm in The Caretaker~ until in The Homecoming, he says, "one almost needs a seismograph to interpret the tremors as a ruthless suburban family battle for the female trophy brought back by the homecoming son."6 vVhile the depths which Pinter explores are too special according to Robert Brustein, at least in The Caretaker~ to be either significant or coherent,7 other writers have found in them the coherence and significance of parable and myth. Harold Clurman, for example, describes The Homecoming as "a parable of insensibility"8 while a writer for Time suggests that it is a play which operates in the realm of myth where "the dark primacy of what D. H. Lawrence called 'the blood consciousness' over the light of reason"9 is often proclaimed. Perhaps Pinter's approach to life's mysteries in A Slight Ache may best be understood in the light of Richard Y. Hathorn's suggestion that man may close the gap between himself and the mysterious universe only "mimetically, not actually"lO through ritual, myth, and art. Pinter avails himself of all three methods of imitation in his one-act play, attempting as the ancient Greek dramatists did to understand the mysteries of life by drawing upon the most primitive of rituals. By exploring the nature of the ritual that underlies the action of A Slight Ache and the particular way in which Pinter has used...