Harold Pinter y The Birthday Party: el discurso de la incomunicación

Abstract

Drama is usually described as a recreation of life out of life. When an audience attends a performance, they expect a reflection on their lives, feelings and problems. Dramatic discourse used on the stage commonly resembles, at least in modem plays, colloquial speech in daily use. But what happens when an author deliberately changes this familiar language into an aggressive instrument that blurs the necessary interaction between his characters and between himself and his audience? The result is a concealing of thoughts and feelings and the generation of isolation and absence of solidarity. Pinter is an author in this guise. He likes to use dramatic dialogues with the paradoxical intention of creating a lack of understanding and uneasiness among the public who read or see his plays. We believe that most Pinter's works can be approached from a pragmatic and discourse analysis perspective. We can, then, study the different layers of communication or the adequacy of his speech to the four Gricean maxims. This kind of analysis provides the critic with a powerful insight into the literary and linguistic clues of those authors who, like Pinter in his play The Birthday Party, consider dramatic discourse as a subversive and provocative art.