Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter,
hear subterranean in the text
voices that declare: 'It's winter:
there is nothing coming next.'
Kafka, who was far less facile,
speaks in quite a different style,
understanding that the castle
is where that nothing stands on trial.
Finlan O'Toole, drama critic of the New York Daily News and The Irish Times, reviews the work of Harold Pinter ('Our Own Jacobean, ' The New York Review, October 7,1999) . He compares his obscurantist tendencies with those of Samuel Beckett, adding that nothing seems more obvious now that the fierce political sensibility that drives much of the work of both men. In 1982, Beckett wrote Catastrophe in response to the persecution of Václav Havel while it is now clear that Pinter's first play, The Birthday Party, was a deeply political play about the Holocaust and the experience of persecution. O'Toole writes:
In his plays, the unstated subtext doesn't support the explicit statements that are on the surface; it attacks them. It doesn't add to their meaning, but drains away the meaning they seem to have...The spoken words have the flat, impenetrable feel of an Andy Warhol picture, the sense of a surface unsupported by any volume, because the images and emotions that ought to give them depth exist on a completely different plane. They are outside the room and have to stay outside, for if they became explicit they would lose their force....And in Pinter, there is often a silence even when people are speaking.
9/26/99
gershon hepner
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/beckett-pinter-kafka/
