HAROLD PINTER (1930 2008) The Caretaker

I. Introduction

The play was first presented at the Arts Theatre, London, 27 th April 1960, and published the same year meeting a massive appraisal of public and critics alike. It even won the Evening Standard award for the best play of the 1960. As the majority of plays belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd, it presents a slice of life and the characters feelings in this particular moment not accepting any generalistic interpretation or typifying. The Caretaker, as The Dumb Waiter, or The Birthday Party, deals mainly with the breakdown in communication and in human relationships, with the presentation of the struggle for belongingness and the fight over territory. The Caretaker is a classical work for the presentation of Pinters typical issues and dramatic strategies. The play merely wants to present a drama in itself, the characters living in a present outside any other dimension of time and in a space which seems cut from any other outer spatial dimension. Although one could feel the background of the contemporary, primarily metropolitan, British society (see for example the theme of racial prejudice and the signalling of a dehumanised world heavy with economic animosity 1), his play is by no means a play committed to the social, but concentrates rather on the human interaction within the setting of the room. In this respect, the play seems to bear the mark of late modernism and early postmodernism in that it promotes the local and the individual, concentrates on his feelings and passions rather than on a realistic view of the whole society. The discarding of the structures of plot is not however complete, as in the case of Becketts plays. One of the characteristic elements of Pinters plays (as part of the Theatre of the Absurd) is that despite its absurdly comical elements (of setting, situations, and dialogue) the play passes beyond the notes of zany comedy bearing more of the elements of black humour and making the reader give a bitter smile at being presented so straightforwardly with the feeling of loss and confusion in his life arising mainly from the distance between reality and fantasy. It could not be otherwise in the context of fear, horror and mystery created through the violence of speech or long inexplicable, ominous moments of silence. This last device was one of Pinters close preoccupations as the playwright showed large interest in theorizing upon silence. This is how he describes it:
There are two silences one when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we dont hear when true silence falls

Begley, Varun (2005): Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism, University of Toronto Press, p. 48.

we are still left with the echo but are near nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
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Thus, Pinters plays seem always to have a subtext which involves the study of another type of language which lies beyond words or a type of psyche of the characters which is discovered at the same time both by the audience and by the characters themselves, or, even more subtly and intricately, the play might involve a study of the way in which characters interrelate and of the true extent of a relation.

II.

Identity through relationships

Even if Pinter said that I dont think of themes when Im writing 3 we can observe that the general themes of the play help the reader/ spectator discover some of the most important dimensions of human relationships, the way in which people complete and protect each other, or, on the contrary, the way in which they fight for dominance. Among the themes of Pinters The Caretaker we can identify: truth, lies, reality vs. fantasy (disguised behind mental disturbance), the struggle for power/ domination/ control through manipulation, intrusion, menace, violence the play is as an odd mixture of accounts or promises all made on the false grounds of winning the interlocutors favours or of manipulating him into complying with ones requests and desires; restlessness Davies is a traveller; Mick claims that he is always on the move; and Aston wanders around picking up items of junk. says Keith Peacock in his study on Pinter. 4 Deception and the twisting of reality act at a double level of manipulating the other and deluding oneself. Davies wants to manipulate either Aston or Mick into believing his stories and into accepting him but only manages to delude himself into believing that he had a great past and great possibilities of being reinstated into a respectable position and status by retrieving his papers from Sidcup. His going under a false name is one of the most direct strategies of hiding his real self from the others and from himself. The play also presents mans jostling for a position, a theme which is also put in relation to his desperate need to clutch to a goal so as to protect himself or fight against a permanent nameless menace: Davies wants to go to Sidcup and get his papers in an attempt to retrieve his lost identity, Aston wants to build a shed thus finding more of the protection he yearns for, Mick wants to convert the house into a penthouse, so as to better outline his feeling of belongingness, prove his skills to himself and probably extend his protection onto his brother.

Harold Pinter on http://www.anotheramerica.org/harold_pinter's_war.htm. Naismith, Bill (2000): Harold Pinter A Faber Critical Guide, Faber and Faber, p. 90. 4 Peacock, Keith (1997): Harold Pinter and the New British Theatre, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut London, p. 76.
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Mans struggle to define his own identity is rendered through the idea of permanent search of something (Daviess papers and name; Astons understanding of his past). James R. Hollis makes of this theme the basic philosophy of the play:
The three careworn characters of The Caretaker are at various junctures along the circuitous path of this quest for identity. The status they seek is then to achieve some standing (Dastehen, Dasein,), some high station, some stature to be reckoned with, some understanding of the mysteries of their existence.
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One central and symbolic gesture of the play is clearly an attempt to give an outline at least to a characters material identity Davies is being offered a pair of shoes 6 which he first refuses and then yearns for or even pleads for. His fussiness on the mater is bitterly comic but it succeeds in revealing his inability to accept and share which are the two basic requirements in a relationship. Through this radical process of circumlocution7, Davis proves in fact his inability of engaging on an answer-revealing journey. Another theme is that of the family relationships viewed in a somewhat nostalgic, permanent presence that never fades away from its affection despite the hardships between members of the family. The origins of such a topic have been identified by critics in Pinters real life and his acquaintance of two brothers who brought a tramp to stay with them for a period of time. The playwright is said to have even spoken with him occasionally because of the identification brought by the similar financial state the two were in. At the same time, the play was interpreted even as a metaphor for the relationships between father and son. Micks protective behaviour seems to support such an interpretation and Astons strange use of the past tense when describing their time in their mothers apartment (he was younger than me, p. 57, as if he were not younger anymore but as if he had assumed some kind of more mature authority over him) follows the same line of a patriarchal recognition.

III.

Identity through setting

Beyond the larger appearance of a deterritorialized existence of his characters living at the extreme edge (through a large frame of the edge of London can be identified), stage setting in Harold Pinters plays seems to render photographically the realistic aspect of the room, a space through which characters are defined in an universe of security and privacy and which concentrates and renders who is in control in the play. The stage becomes the territorial space in
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Hollis, James R. (1970): Harold Pinter: The Poetics of Silence, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, p. 77. 6 This motif could function at communicating more levels, meanings according to the idiom in which the noun is explained: to wear fitting shoes would imply to feel at ease/ peace with ones existence; to fill ones shoes = to take ones place; in anothers shoes = in anothers position the last two expressions explaining Daviess position as an intruder in the lives of the bothers and a violator of their territory. 7 Hollis, James R., op. cit., p. 80.

which characters try to dominate and take, or keep, possession. 8 It is the most naturally domestic frame in which characters act unhindered by any conventions and start having the most common, familiar conversations in a shielded environment. The only appearance of disequilibrium comes from the intrusion in the sanctum-territory of a foreign element (a human intruder) which comes to fight for this territory so as acquire himself a notion of belongingness. The ordinariness of the setting is the one which makes the tiniest impression of intrusion so violently felt. This fight over territory has often been regarded as a subtext 9 pervading the subsidiary meanings of the play. The setting, acting most of the time as a trap, communicates important issues about the characters inhabiting it the room in which the entire play develops is one crowded with all sorts of junk (paint buckets, boxes, screws, vases, a kitchen sink, a step-ladder, a lawn-mower, a shopping-trolley, suitcases, a rolled-up carpet, a pile of newspapers, a Buddha statue on top of the gas stove, a blow-lamp, a wooden chair, a clothes horse, planks of wood, a very old electric toaster, a bucket hanging from the ceiling used to catch water from a leaking roof) while the way out a window is covered with a sack. The metaphorical meanings of such an agglomeration with objects are on the one hand, meant to suggest an outer disorder that triggers an inner disorder of the characters, and on the other hand, the accumulation of all these items implies that not only the objects are useless but the inhabitants of the space as well. The feeling of uselessness/ purposelessness/ pointlessness is suggested by the characters ineffectual work (see especially Aston permanently mending something) or use of these objects or by Astons presence as a dreamer, a collector of fragments that he is always attempting in vain to assemble. 10 There may even be seen a similitude between these bits and fragments collected in his room and the bits of fragments from his past he tries to pick out and put in order (see his speech at the end of act II). This oppressive object-world11 also signals the appearance of a world of commodities in which the human soul gets estranged or even lost. Such a world is menacing of the anima and Pinter wants to condemn and negate precisely such an aspect of the commodity culture by bringing its absurdities on stage. The discarded, broken appliances, creating a veritable junkshop of modernity12 are a direct rendering of the playwrights refutation of the capitalistic commodity world. The hyper-modern devices and human professions (caretaker, interior decorator) are all defective and cannot fulfil their functions. It is obvious that no work gets done, no object is fixed which leads to the idea of the play presenting a pastiche of labour, a crisis in human production and self-production that inability to regenerate ones identity.
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Naismith, Bill, op. cit., p. 4. Idem, p. 6. 10 Burkman, Katherine (1971): The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter: Its Basis in Ritual, Ohio State University Press, p. 78. 11 Begley, Varun, op. cit., p. 50. 12 Idem, p. 52.

The breaking down of the equilibrium and the appearance of disorder in the life of the two brothers Mick and Aston begins when a third party (as in more of Pinters plays) comes to disturb the precarious balance. One feature of such a setting is the creation of an intimate space which is almost all the time under the threat of an outer agent, a threat which comes to take into possession ones private territory and evict, at least psychologically if not physically, the rightful owners. The room, used extensively in Pinters creation as a metaphor, acts in The Caretaker as a protective universe and outliner of the brothers identity: though not much of a home, it is still a labyrinthine barrier against intruders like Davies who want to violate the space, divide and conquer. Though at times as confused as Davies, the brothers survive through the relationship they manage to develop in this space in which the tramp can never integrate himself. The re-establishing of the stereotyped order can only be achieved between the brothers (as manifestations of different aspects of the psyche) by the eviction of the intruder tramp (as an expression of an exacerbated id). Thus, the space they inhabit finds the initial balance and density of items human or nonhuman. But this state of disorder and confusion is not only physically created the characters are forgetful or omissive of their past and thus they are ignorant or biased and selective in their memories and in their motivations. In this regard, the exploitation of the setting brings new devices such as light and darkness. Pinter masters this technique wonderfully with the purpose of making the reader/ spectator understand better the focus of the play in a particular moment:
During Astons speech the room grows darker. By the close of the speech only Aston can be seen clearly. Davies and all the other objects are in the shadow. The fade-down of the light must be as gradual, as protracted and as unobtrusive as possible. (Act II, p. 54)

The exploitation of light in such a manner is meant to make the reader/ spectator plunge into the world of the character/ actor and observe the importance of such a monologue as well as really witness a type of discourse which is meant to draw attention towards the characters remembering and oscillation between past and present. It is as if the refocusing of the light on stage reduces or utterly obliterates the present perspective (both spatial and temporal) and makes us plunge together with Astons in the past of remembering.

IV.

Identity between speech and silence

Language signals one of the major themes of the play, that is breakdown in communication or, in other words non-exchange of information. This is brought mainly by the characters personal insecurity which makes characters resort to devious evasions or linguistic strategies which would make the interlocutor more puzzled in his attempt of finding out about or understanding the partner of dialogue. By stripping language of reflective or conceptual thought (reason for which many have accused him of lacking thematic content), Pinter manages to reach a

type of musicality that foregrounds the way in which language succeeds in revealing most profoundly by seeming to fail. The devices achieving such strategies of using language as self-protection include: broken sentences, non sequiturs, language games, repetitions, pauses with no apparent reason, refusal to listen to the other. That is why, we can easily observe that dialogue is invariably sparse, interspersed with pauses and pauses and silences, and broken up with a lengthy set speech. 13 Not only fragmented dialogue, but also hesitantly progressive monologue is one of Pinters trademarks. Each character is assigned with long set-speeches their monologues are imaginative (Micks), emotional (Daviess) or autobiographical (Astons) effusions, fragmented outpourings whose force comes from the driving rhythm and intensity of feeling of the speaker. Strategies of attack or defence, attempts of self-discovery or understanding, notes of hesitation or self-assertion permeate the discourse and help the reader/ spectator observe the characters struggle for selfexploration. But speeches sometimes serve simply as a tool to render the varied possibilities and aspects of language and not necessarily to paint a realistic aspect from the characters lives. As strange as this may, it part of the technique of the theatre of the absurd and Pinter himself seems to have testified to such a device:
The one thing that people have missed is that it isnt necessary to conclude that everything that Aston says about his experiences in the mental is true.
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Behind the smokescreen of Astons speech there seems to be hiding just another verbal posturing of language, different from those of Mick and Davies. The manner in which language was materialized in inconsequential dialogue or obsessional monologue is what constituted Pinters original contribution to the Theatre of the Absurd. The characters disjointed speech (made up of colloquial vocabulary and oddly ambivalent conversation punctuated by one of Pinters trademarks moments of silence) also contributes to the amplification of a state of confusion, alienation and loss. The characters dialogue apparently humorous because of the nonsense that pervades it and the non-sequitur with which it is sprinkled aims, in fact, at proving the struggle in which the characters are engaged: more often than not the speech only seems to be funny the man in question is actually fighting a battle for his life.15 At the same time, the moments of silence, the pauses in ones speech (see especially Astons monologue at the end of act II) give rise to ambivalent interpretations regarding the nature of the hesitation in speech or prove once more the ambivalence of language. This type of inconsequential language, marked on the printed page by three dots, or by the stage directions
13 14

Naismith, Bill, p. 10 Pinter quted in Diamond, Elin, op. cit., p. 75. 15 Harold Pinter quoted in Hollis, James R., op. cit., p. 83.

Pause or Silence, is only meant to challenge the reader into searching for an unspoken meaning hidden behind it. Harold Pinter himself explains that:
The pause is a pause because of what has happened in the minds and gust of the characters. They spring out of the text. Theyre not formal conveniences or stresses but part of the body of the action. And a silence equally means that something has happened to create the impossibility of anyone speaking for a certain amount of time until they can recover from whatever happened before the silence.
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Another aspect of the characters speech is the manner in which they support the comic of the play (the play was labelled by some a comedy of menace) or rather the manner in which they mark the passage from comedy to tragedy. Bernard Frank Dukore, in his study Where Laughter Stops: Pinters Tragicomedy, makes an analysis of the way in which the end of the play brings a reversed tragic situation than that comic at the beginning:
The play begins with Aston bringing Davies into the room, it ends with his refusal to permit him to stay. The play's first words are, Sit down. At the end, Aston asks Davies to leave. In the first few pages, Davies talks of his having been rejected by others, a contrast to Astons acceptance of him. At the end, he talks of Astons having accepted him earlier, in contrast to his present rejection of him. At the start, Aston offers Davies tobacco, which he takes for his pipe. At the end, Davies returns for my pipe, but Aston offers him nothing. Whereas in the first spoken scene Aston offers to help Davies, in the last scene Davies offers to help Aston, who refuses his assistance. At the plays start, as Aston fiddles with the plug of an electric toaster in an effort to fix it, Davies talks of himself and says nothing of his hosts activities. In the final scene, Aston fiddles with what Davies pointedly calls the same plug, but this time Davies encourages him and Aston ignores the old mans statements. Whereas Aston first listens to Davies, who ignores him much of the time, Aston largely ignores Davies in the final scene. In the early part of the play, all of Daviess stories, which are comic, concern his rejection or eviction: his employer fired him, a monk told him to leave, and despite his assertion that he rejected his wife it was he rather than she who left their home. At the end, when the brothers reject and evict him, their actions, which are not comic, deny the exclusiveness of the comedy that is based on rejection and eviction. Much of the humor of the early part of the play derives from a grubby, crotchety old mans excessive preoccupation with himself, his mumblings and complaints, his real or feigned self-esteem, his unresponsiveness to one who treats him kindly, and the contrast between what he says (Ive had dinner with the best) and how he looks (virtually the worst). By the end of the play, comedy no longer derives from these same characteristics, and far from insisting he is clean, Davies begs for confirmation that he is (You didnt mean that, did you, about me stinking, did you?), but he does not receive it. At first, an old wreck's assertions of dignity prompt laughter, but finally, laughter leaves in the face of a pathetic, dirty old man who has lost what little he had. The essential characteristics of the old man remain, but not the comedy once associated with them.
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17

Pinter, Harold in Gussow, M., (1994): Conversations with Pinter, Nick Hern Books, London, apud Naismith, Bill, op. cit., pp. 1213. 17 Dukore, Bernard Frank (1976): Where Laughter Stops: Pinters Tragicomedy, University of Missouri Press, pp. 26 27.

We assist a reversal of the positions of the participants, an upturned, distorted mirroring technique, a change of status from victimizer into victimised, from bully into beggar, from rejecter into rejected, from refuser into refused, from ignorer into ignored, from evictor into evicted, or, as Elin Diamond introduces him18, from prowler to prey (the alazon19 suffering the punishment of the eiron as confusedly as Aston may embody him) clearly marking a shift from security to insecurity. The end of act II, with Aston self-absorbed monologue, explicitly signals through the stage directions the beginning of Daviss exclusion and the passage from the comic aspect under which the tramps had been presented to the tragic of Astons past life. Pinter himself seems to have admitted to such a construction of the play saying that the pattern of the play as a whole is funny up to a point. Beyond that point it ceases to be funny. 20 Martin Esslin, more or less exaggeratedly, compares Daviess eviction from the flat to Adams banishment from paradise:
After Davies has been shown in all his abject unreliability, clearly undeserving of the charity offered to him by the brothers, his ejection from the dingy room that could have become his world assumes almost the cosmic proportions of Adams expulsion from Paradise.
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Another more subtle device of communicating through not in fact communicating appears in Pinters use of what could be called empty symbols, symbols that do not connect to anything. Beyond the commonness of such symbols as the shoes (as portrayers of dispossession and homelessness), the electric toaster (as a dehumanized presence of Astons electroshocked body and mind) or the shed (as unattainable goal of protection and recognition of ones creative act), the audience/ reader is tempted to try to analyse the meaning of such symbols as the Buddha or the leak in the ceiling, but they do not lead to anything, they are emptied (as the bucket used to make up for the leak is) and render the same inability to directly communicate some aspects of life, directing us towards the more intricate aspects of character relationship. Synthesising the functions of silence and pause in Pinters drama we identify the following meanings: * refusal to answer the interlocutor as a protest against the invasion of privacy or as self-defence against attacks; * the hesitation brought by the pain of remembering ones past; * the incoherence or inconsistency in speech caused by the inability to find the proper words so as to explain ones actions;

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Diamond, Elin (1985): Pinters Comic Play, Bucknell University Press, p. 71. Alazon and Eiron in Greek comedy opposed characters; the former (also called stock character or braggadocio) represents the braggart, thiking himself greater than he is and functioning as a humorous blocker between hero and heroine; the latter, apparently less intelligent than he really is, manages however to bring down his opponent. 20 Quoted in Dukore, Bernard Frank, op. cit., p. 30. 21 Esslin, Martin (1977): op. cit., p. 279.

* the amazement at the revelation in front of some words (see Astons hesitation at the discovery of his I); * the double sidedness or arbitrariness of language. Pinters most innocuous pieces of dialogue or his moments of silence are only meant to send us to another dimension of meaning and understanding, thus reaching another type of communication. As he himself says:
I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone elses life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.
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V.

Conclusions

The Theatre of the Absurd brought on the page and on the stage a new type of writing which both discarded and revalued traditional theatre. The Caretaker was regarded as a battleground of styles23 as it used rather traditional techniques of drama, but also made plays emerge as new worlds in which new, surprising figures appeared. They are not articulate in speech anymore and yet their discourse has a unique comprehensible articulation. The original, realistic, daringly naturalistic presentation of the mid-century urban man24 and the interplay of relationships made of the play a worthy representation of the state of the nation and of the individual, taking a snapshot at their identities and their treatment of a new type of catalyst. Harold Pinters realistic depiction of characters relationships especially through their gestures, their interaction on the stage and their use of language is what made of him a staple figure of the Theatre of the Absurd. The bringing on the stage of slices of real life, the characters struggle for the true meaning of their existence, the reconstruction of original London speech as well as the creation of another type of language which exists beyond words are major issues which give form and identity to the new type of drama of the late 50s and early 60s. The identification of the new type of idiosyncrasies of the individual and the way they are rendered linguistically gave birth to a new type of discourse which functions at more levels showing the arbitrariness of language or the inability to communicate, the gap between the temporal registers of remembering and the way in which language functions at the passage between past and present.

22 23

Pinter, Harold (1998): Various Voices, Faber and Faber, London apud Naismith, Bill, op. cit., p. 12. Kerr, Walter, Harold Pinter, New York & London, Columbia University Press, 1967, p. 38. 24 Naismith, Bill, op. cit., p. 125.