The Homecoming

Storytelling conventions usually elevate causality to a central role in drama (something E. M. Forster, for example, elaborates on in his 1927 Aspects of the Novel). Forster argues that drama is more convincing when plot points follow on from each other causally rather than chronologically. Characters want something clearly defined, and stories show us how these desires beget each new episode in their journeys. Pinter, however, refrains from this kind of storytelling. His characters’ behavior can oscillate so wildly that what they want or why they are behaving the way that they are can be difficult to understand—for instance, why Max swings from violence to sugary affection, why Teddy is not concerned about his wife sleeping with his brothers, or why Ruth does not run a mile when Lenny tells her he is violent towards women.

There are numerous possible reasons for this. One is that Pinter deliberately wants to challenge this storytelling convention. What reads as literary “realism” is not in itself reality but an ensemble of conventions, such as logical plots, that culture regards as similar enough to reality to call “realism.” Pinter takes a different approach. He sees reality as far less rigidly or logically organized. For him, drama arises less via the neat escalation of a character’s desires than from the very cadences of our communication with each other. His characters might say anything next, and in Pinter’s world, this is a virtue rather than a shortcoming.

Pinter conveys this via his penchant for the unsaid. Much as his staging is blown open and interpretive, so his text is full of holes through which subtext can flow into his work. So prevalent is the use of silence in his work that critics refer to “Pinter Pauses” and even assign them a sort of hierarchy. These range from an ellipsis (“…”), to the stage direction “Pause,” to the full blown “Silence” (Daniels, Nicholas Ephram Ryan. “What are Pinter Pauses? And Other Pinteresque Devices.” London Theatre Direct, 18 Feb. 2021); each offers a different degree of uncertainty or deliberation in characters’ speech or differently shades the pregnancy of a stillness or silence on the stage. The unspoken can also manifest itself in the way characters avoid answering each other or ignore what another has said (for example, Max begging Ruth, Lenny, and Joey for affection and for answers as they stand resolute and silent over him). It is as if Pinter is inviting the reader or viewer to search these spaces for the meaning and motivation other writers place closer to the surface. While it can make The Homecoming elusive at times, Pinter’s use of the unspoken invites us in to interpret the forces, both internal and external, that might be driving the characters’ behavior.