HAROLD PİNTER’İN ESTETİĞİNİN YARATILIŞI: EL YAZMALARINDAN MÜSVETTELERE AYIŞIĞI VE KÜLLER KÜLLERE OYUNLARI

Abstract

Martin Esslin emphasizes that ‘‘instead of being in suspense as to what will happen next, the spectators are, in the Theatre of the Absurd, put into suspense as to what the play may mean. This suspense continues even after the curtain has come down’’ (1960, p. 14). In accordance with Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdung effects, alienating the audience from the characters and urging him/her to think, question and respond to the events or the dialogues taking place on stage, Pinter’s plays — with all the obscurity and uncertainty the characters are caught in — endow their audiences with more than enough tools to become subjects in the meaning-making process of his plays. No matter whether Pinter’s works are categorized as modernist through his transformation of the audience into subjects or just like more recently categorized as postmodernist in the works of Austin Quigley and Mireia Aragay (2009), what enables Pinter to be categorized as both is the obscurity of the language that he uses, and particularly in case of postmodernism, just like Fredric Jameson’s assertion of the “breakdown in the signifying chain” (1984, p.71), the broken correlation between the signified and signifiers in the dialogues that Pinter uses, creates the effect of ambiguity in his works. Pinter, in parallel to these definitions, states that ‘‘If I’m being explicit, I’m failing’’ (qtd in Knowles, 2009, p. 75). Considering how important the creation of ambiguity and uncertainty in Pinter’s plays is, this essay focuses on the creation process of the Theatre of the Absurd in Pinter’s Moonlight and Ashes to Ashes by examining the handwritten and type scripted manuscripts available in the Harold Pinter Archive at the British Library (UK).