Does school life Does school life seem like a seem like a

never ending never ending cycle?cycle?

Are you Are you struggling struggling to stay on to stay on

top of top of things?things?

Are you shouldering the Are you shouldering the expectations of the expectations of the

Establishment?Establishment?

We have come a full cycle.We have come a full cycle.

Resistance is futile.

One last look at

The Birthday PartyThe Birthday Party

Reviewing themes in context of the

ending

“Here form is content, content is form … His writing is not about something;

it is that something itself.”

Discuss this quotation in relation to Pinter’s use of style & language in The Birthday Party.

Format of this lectureFormat of this lecture

i. Conceptual clarification

ii. Application of concept• Dramatic structure

• Dramatic tradition

• Games

• Use of Language

Traditional Traditional StructureStructure

That is to say…

Beginnings• Drama captures only a moment in time• Beginnings of drama are based on the

assumption that events have happened prior to this moment

• Dramatist pieces together setting, characterization, mood/atmosphere, conflicts (Physical, psychological, cosmic, verbal) in order to establish the action on stage

Problem of the Ending

• The whole drama is ending and beginning at once, a beginning/ending which must always presuppose something outside of itself, something anterior (happening before) or ulterior (occurring later), in order either to begin or to end, in order to begin ending.

Denouement (day-noo-mon)Denouement (day-noo-mon)• French and means literally “untying” • The final outcome or unraveling of

the main dramatic complications in a play

• Final scene in which any necessary clarifications are made

• Explanation or outcome of a drama that reveals all the secrets and misunderstandings connected to the plot

Endings

• Traditionally to provide resolutions to the questions raised in the climax

• Who did it? What happens after? What is the moral of the story?

• But the ending is also, or yet another, moment in time.

• Partial resolution: Continues with the inherent conflicts raised in the beginning

Unsatisfactory Ending

• Key questions of the play remain unanswered—What happens to Stanley?

• No catharsis for the pity and fear aroused

TBP’s Unsatisfactory Ending

• The play has worked its effect on us, but Pinter has not given us an explanation. Because words are inadequate mediums of communication.

• We want an explanation of what we have experienced, to exorcise our uneasiness through words.

• But the experience of the play is too complex for simple explanations.

• Even within the play, the characters are unable—or unwilling—to verbalize what is behind the emotional phenomena.

• Social Commentary: The gloom and despair found in the Absurd theatre is indicative of the irrational and futile pursuits of the present day societies and states.

• We must create our own explanations.• The audience experiences the absurd ideas and

absurd activities of persons who do not know how to come out of the abyss of anxiety.

• Pinter has maintained that even if the absurdities of life are opposed in thought if not in action, the individual has still a chance to free himself from the contradictions which effect his personal and social life.

“The ending and the surmises the reader or viewer supplies to round out the ending-has continued to haunt anyone whom The Birthday Party has put under its distinctive spell.”

• The involved reader or spectator is likely to extrapolate and supply some ending, or endings.

• Since whatever particulars he supplies are the work of his imagination, they are likely to be especially vivid and moving.

Another PerspectiveAnother Perspective• The recognition that there is no simple

explanation • The moment we realize that we may have to live

without any final truths the situation changes;

• We readjust ourselves• Therefore in the last resort

happier and better adjusted people

Structure & Setting/AtmosphereStructure & Setting/Atmosphere• Cyclical structure: Ending of Act III mirrors the

beginning of the play– Meg and Petey waiting for Stanley to come down

• Rigid, neat pattern, but empty & void of life• GB & MC have brought peace and order

• In the most ironic fashion, depriving the world of any vitality of life.

• Ending becomes an endless process of vacuous waiting (Absurdism)

Clarifying ExistentialismClarifying Existentialism• Human beings moving from the nothingness

from which they came to the nothingness in which they will end

• For existentialists, society has overvalued rationality and technology at the expense of losing consciousness of a fundamental sense of ‘authentic’ being

• When that happens, individuals live in a world that has no more than an absurd, superficial meaning

• Consequently, existentialism stresses introspection OR a defiant engagement with the world as means of redemption.

Clarifying AbsurdismClarifying Absurdism• Sense that human beings, cut off from their

roots, live in meaningless isolation in an alien universe

• Theatre of the Absurd: Conceived in perplexity and spiritual anguish

• Abandons usual/rational devices and uses non-realist form

• No story but a pattern of images presenting people as bewildered creatures in incomprehensible universe

Another perspective of ThemesAnother perspective of Themes

• Game and disorderGame and disorder

• Security and menace

• Pattern and shapelessness

• Identity and anonymity

• Familiar and strange

• Friendship and loneliness

Critical Perspective 1Critical Perspective 1

• Roger Caillois: ilinx, mimicry, (primitive societies) agon, alea (civilized societies)

• Pinter’s primitive characters favour imitative or ritualistic games (mimicry)

• Allows characters to step outside the limitations of their lives by merging into the surroundings.– Stanley: Pretend manager– Meg: Girly dancing– GB: Ritualistic youth

2. Language Games2. Language Games

• In Pinter’s plays, all the games involve language

• Language as a kind of game

• Like games, language has its own rules which allow communication

Simulating speechSimulating speech

• Characters distance themselves through simulating speech

• Threats/Flatteries are simply moves

• Words convey no meaning but merely intention

• No currency beyond the game

“Subtext” + “Power-play”

Different forms of gamesDifferent forms of games• Games of

conversation – as an evasion of

hostility

• Games of politeness – to smile away the

barbarity of their lives

• Games of concern – to avoid the

awareness one’s self-seeking interest

• Games of love – as a defense against

hatred of indifference

• Games of sincerity – to dispel the feeling

that the word has no meaning whatever

3. Competitive Games3. Competitive Games

• Strategic battle for positions in the struggle for dominance and subservience

• Characters are not carriers of thoughts but embodiments of instinctual drive

“Power-play”

Breakdown of the GameBreakdown of the Game• Cards are played very close to

characters’ chests, so the reader/spectator is never in a position to understand what is really going on.

Absurdity• Only at times of extreme pressure,

when a character breaks down – Mask drops – Game momentarily halted

Why?Why?

• Eric Berne: People play games to avoid the horrors of true intimacy

“Society frowns upon candidness, except in privacy; good sense knows that it can always be abused; and the Child fears it because of the unmasking it involves.”

MimicryMimicry

• Act 1: Language of hide and seek

• Ritualistic/habitual interaction

• Overtones of the parent-child relationship, without true intimacy

• Foreshadows Goldberg and McCann’s seeking and hunting down of Stanley

House RulesHouse Rules“Play up, play up, and play the game.”“Play up, play up, and play the game.”

• Act 1: Stanley breaks the rules of the game– Deliberately mis-interpreting Meg’s words

• Act 2: Sullenly not responding to conversation – Ignoring McCann

• Act 3: Failure to articulate– Warrants a trip to Monty

Games as struggle for dominanceGames as struggle for dominance

• Sinister undertones of games

GB: You hurt me, Webber. You’re playing a dirty game. (Act 2)

• GB’s games with Lulu – But by Act 3, it is obvious that it is Lulu

who has been ‘played with’ – Victim of GB’s games– Lulu evades more games with GB

• Petey’s game of chess

Language GamesLanguage Games

• Meg Boles is reduced, once again to a mere cipher

• Lives composed of platitudes and stale cliches– “I was the belle of the ball.”

• Avoid coming to terms with reality & the truth of the emptiness of their existence and identity

Use of LanguageUse of Language

• 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 don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

~ Harold Pinter, 1962

Meg. Oh, what a shame. It’s hot out. What are you doing?

Petey. Reading.

Meg. Is it good?

Petey. All right.

Meg. Where’s Stan?

Friendship & LonelinessFriendship & Loneliness• Conveyed through the use of silences and

non sequiter– An inference which does not follow from the

preceding premise

• Characters talk around rather than at or to one another

• Mirroring normal speech / thought patterns

• Reinforces alienation and isolation

Meg. Wasn’t it a lovely party last night?…Meg. Oh.Pause.It was a lovely party. I haven’t laughed so much for years. We had dancing and singing. And games. You should have been there.

Naturalistic Dialogue & Naturalistic Dialogue & AlienationAlienation• Naturalistic rhythm of the characters’ dialogue• Tittle-tattle of quotidian verbiage• Exploit the gap between the mundane chatter

and the alienation of the individual that lies beyond the talk

• Examining what is left unsaid• Meg tries to hang on to the illusion that

everything is still as it was, that the disastrous party was not a disaster but the success she had hoped for it.

Naturalistic DialogueNaturalistic Dialogue• ‘Anger’ or frustration when reading/watching the

play • Realizing that these conversations, so

depressingly banal, so heart-rendingly trivial, are at the core of daily life of every household.

• Excessiveness of the banality of normality projects the extravagance of madness and absurdity.

• Feeling of revulsion for the utter emptiness of speech, painful in its vacuity

Meg. I was the belle of the ball.

Oh yes. They all said I was.

Oh, it’s true. I was.

Pause.

I know I was.

RepetitionRepetition

• Existential chat

• Talking about nothing in order to make sure that you exist

• Playing futile word games for the serious purpose of having one’s own existence confirmed by the sound of a reciprocal voice, by the mere sequence of a mutual exchange

Language—Repetition Language—Repetition 8 different ways Pinter uses repetition:1. Means of conveying dramatic information2. Characters struggling to find a word3. Enjoyment with the sound of a word4. Form of hysteria5. Process of absorbing a fact6. To show preoccupation with an idea/

assertion 7. Lack of emotions8. Lying

They exit.

Silence. PETEY stands. The front door slams. Sound of a car starting. Sound of a car going away. Silence. Petey slowly goes to the table….

Silence (vs pause)

• Fluttering strips of newspapers

• Dramatic effect

• Act 1: Alienating effect of newspapers’ trivia on readers

• Newspaper as one of the most effective barriers to communication devised by man

• Fragments of conversation amplifies the echoes of psychical/mental space

ConclusionConclusion1. Meaningless, irrational universe through choice

of setting – repetitive day

2. Breakdown of relationships + Isolation of characters: seen through failure of language

3. Lack of purpose and meaningful universe reflected in plot structure: absence of logical sequence / devt of plot & lack of resolution