Study Guide to The Homecoming and Other Works by Harold Pinter
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Study Guide to The Homecoming and Other Works by Harold Pinter

Intelligent Education

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eBook - ePub

Study Guide to The Homecoming and Other Works by Harold Pinter

Intelligent Education

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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Harold Pinter, receiver of the New York Critics' Antoinette Perry Award for Best Broadway Drama in 1967. Titles in this study guide include The Homecoming, The Comedies of Menace, The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter, A Slight Ache, The Caretaker, The Collection, The Lover, and other minor works. As an author of mid-twentieth-century drama, Pinter wrote about physical and psychological threats to the status quo in his stories, creating an atmosphere that simultaneously moves the plot forward and involves the audience in its implications. Moreover, his work portrayed themes discussing communication, domination, and an individual's psychological needs. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Pinter's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research

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Year
2020
ISBN
9781645421818
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INTRODUCTION TO HAROLD PINTER
When Harold Pinter began his career as a dramatist in 1957, writing The Room at the request of a friend, he was a little-known actor in a touring repertory company. Nine years later he had been critically acclaimed “the most original, disturbing, and arresting talent in theatrical London” by the London Sunday Times and called “the most consistently successful serious dramatist of his generation,” considered “not only the most inescapably haunting of our modern dramatists, but the most likely to survive as a permanent part of our dramatic literature,” by the English critic John Russell Taylor. Pinter’s dramas have received numerous awards, including the New York Critics’ Antoinette Perry Award for the Best Broadway Drama of 1967 for The Homecoming, and Pinter himself was awarded the Order of the British Empire on the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 1966.
FAMILY AND EARLY LIFE
Pinter was born on October 10, 1930 in the Hackney section of inelegant East London. The only son of a Jewish tailor (questionably of Portuguese ancestry), the future playwright grew up in a world filled with vivid tales of the treatment of Jews in Hitler’s Germany and literally had to fight his way home through gangs of young toughs during the post-war rise of neo-Nazism in England. The ever present aura of fear which he lived with became a basic element in his writing in later years.
SCHOOLING
Pinter won a scholarship to a local grammar school, Hackney Downs, where he was educated. His first experience with the theatre was seeing Sir Donald Wolfit in King Lear. In 1948 he entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but did not find it to his taste, so he faked a nervous breakdown and left the Academy. He also stood two trials as a conscientious objector for refusing to join the National Service, for which he was fined a total of thirty pounds, the sum being paid by his parents.
ACTING CAREER
In 1949 Pinter began an eight year career as a repertory actor, travelling throughout Britain under the stage name of David Baron. During this time he spent eighteen months in Ireland with Andrew McMaster’s touring company (fondly remembered in Pinter’s Mac) and married the excellent British actress Vivien Merchant (1956). The couple have one child, a son, Daniel.
OVERVIEW OF PINTER’S WORKS
Pinter’s plays compose a whole, each drama growing out of those which preceded it and leading into those which follow. A quick overview of his writing clearly shows his evolution as a dramatist from his earliest complete piece, The Room, which contains all of the elements to be found in his subsequent work, to The Homecoming, his latest major play and his best, in terms of both idea content and technique, as well as his most representative endeavor. Moreover, there is a discernible pattern which can be traced in Pinter’s dramas, as he moves from discussing menace per se in the early plays to examining the source of that menace in his later plays.
THE COMEDIES OF MENACE
The first three plays, The Room, The Birthday Party, and The Dumb Waiter, collectively titled “comedies of menace,” are essentially concerned with exposing the existence of personal menace in the world and charting the individuals destruction under the pressure of that menace. Problems in communication between individuals and the perception of reality (see the discussion of “verification” below) confront the characters in these early plays as they face omnipresent physical menace of undefined origin. One is reminded of the fear the author carried with him as a youth.
In The Room the menace merely exists, and the audience never finds out why - they are only presented with Rose’s terror. The Birthday Party implies that society might be the source of menace, but nevertheless it is the menace and its effect which are important, not its derivation. The Dumb Waiter rounds out the picture of menace when the menacers are shown to be as susceptible to menace as those they terrorize.
PLAYS IN TRANSITION
The next two plays, A Slight Ache and The Caretaker, mark a shift in Pinter’s emphasis as he begins to focus on the cause of menace rather than on the existence of menace itself. The actual shift involved is really quite simple. In A Slight Ache Pinter determines that the menace is not an external source which threatens a man and his wife, but an internal ingredient, based on the psychological needs of the individuals involved. In The Caretaker, Pinter’s tale of two brothers and a tramp, psychological need as a motivating force is related to the actions of the characters.
THE LATER PLAYS
The Collection, The Lover, and The Homecoming continue the pattern begun with A Slight Ache and The Caretaker, as the dramatist extends his study of the origin of menace in psychological needs and demonstrates the drastic extents to which people will go in trying to satisfy their needs.
THE MAJOR WORKS
Introduction
In order to understand The Homecoming it is useful to survey Pinter’s other works, for through them we can trace the thematic evolution which led to The Homecoming. The themes dramatist utilizes in this play are present from the very beginning (though they vary in the degree to which he has developed them from play to play).
Some reviewers, especially the early ones, have complained about the difficulty in understanding Pinter, but often the difficulty was a result of unfamiliarity with either the playwright’s ideas, or his mode of expression, or both. Once again it is sometimes helpful to review the earlier plays, since many of them treat the same subjects in a more obvious manner, and it is always easier to find something if we know what we are looking for and have seen it before.
From the opening lines of The Room to the final curtain of Pinter’s latest play, there are three concepts which to some degree lie behind each of the author’s dramas. These three interrelated concepts-menace, communication, and verification -create the basic meaning of every Pinter work from the outset and serve simultaneously as both subjects and techniques in those works. Thus it is imperative to understand how Pinter defines each of these terms and then how he utilizes these concepts in his writing.
Essentially, every Pinter play can be seen as dealing with the three fundamental concepts in the following circular pattern. Menace exists, a priori. Because of the existence of menace there is a need for individuals to communicate with one another in order to gain reassurance, but the menace interferes and communication breaks down; or the individuals involved refuse to communicate for fear of exposing themselves to further menace. Lack of communication, therefore, ironically creates further menace. Because of the existence of menace there is also a need to verify things, to determine reality in other words. Unfortunately, menace again interferes and verification is hindered. The breakdown of communications further frustrates efforts to verify, and once more, additional menace is the result-which in turn produces a need for more communication and more verification, which cannot be met, reenforcing the menace, etc., etc. Menace Seldom defined in Pinter, menace is a threat to the status quo. Whereas in the early plays the threat is physical, it becomes progressively more psychological in nature in the succeeding dramas.
Menace, of course, comprises the subject matter of all the plays to some extent, whether it is the study of Rose’s breakdown before the unknown horror represented by the basement in The Room, or Teddy’s refusal to become emotionally involved with other human beings in The Homecoming because he fears that he will be rejected.
As a technique, Pinter relies on creating a mood of menace which carries the plot forward while at the same time it involves the audience with the suggestion that they are just as vulnerable to the terror embodied on stage as the characters are. The mood is neither surrealistic nor unfamiliar to the audience, for as Pinter claims in a March 3, 1960 B.B.C. European Service interview: “This thing, of people arriving at the door [unannounced, bringing terror with them], has been happening in Europe in the last twenty years. Not only the last twenty years, the last two to three hundred.”
Communication
Pinter has specifically stated how and why he explores human failure in communications. In “Between the Lines,” an article he wrote for the London Sunday Times in 1962, he explains his understanding of the functions of language and paralanguage. Quite obviously, according to Pinter, language is used to communicate; but it is also, and just as importantly, used for non-communication. In expanding on this idea, Pinter notes that language “is a highly ambiguous commerce. So often, below the words spoken, is the thing known and unspoken.”
To the playwright’s mind this realization leads to an observation about the two sorts of silence which can occur in speech:
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. . . . It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smokescreen which keeps the other in its place. . . . One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
Obviously, of course, there can be silence when the characters (people) have nothing to say, but Pinter feels that more often silence, either the literal non-utterance of words or the “torrent of language,” is employed to keep from saying anything. Clearly this use of language can be considered what would be categorized in psychological terminology as a defense mechanism-a means by which the individual organism tries to protect itself (“an unconscious mental process . . . that enables the ego to reach compromise solutions to problems,” to use the words of Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary). The individual is not as likely to be attacked, at least not as likely to be successfully attacked, if he does not reveal his own weaknesses.
Equally clear to Pinter, the attempt to keep from saying anything is allied to his theory of verification (to be discussed immediately below):
There is another factor which I think has considerable bearing on the matter and that is the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place. ... If one can speak of the difficulty of knowing what took place yesterday one can I think treat the present in the same way. What’s happening now? We won’t know until tomorrow or six months’ time, and we won’t know then, we’ll have forgotten, or our imagination will have attributed quite false characteristics to today . . . We will all interpret a common experience quite differently, though we prefer to subscribe to the view that there’s a known ground. I think there’s a shared ground all right, but that it’s more like quicksand. Because “reality” is quite a firm word we tend to think, or to hope, that the state to which it refers is equally firm, settled and unequivocal. It doesn’t seem to be, and in my opinion it’s no worse or better for that.
It is difficult, if not impossible, under the circumstances Pinter describes, to talk about anything, since there seems to be no way to assess the meaning of anything. If, as the artist indicates in The Dwarfs for example, everybody is constantly changing, and changing to the extent that there is no such thing as a reference point because no one is recognizably the same person from one moment to the next, communication about oneself becomes impossible, let alone communication about things outside oneself.
Verification
The third tenet of Pinter’s dramatic philosophy is that of verification. Once again the author has spoken openly about what he believes. In a program note for the original London performance of The Room and The Dumb Waiter in March, 1960, the author commented:
The desire for verification is understandable but can...

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