Blind-Man’s Buff: The Visual Language and the Visual Subject in Pinter’s The Birthday Party and The Room

Abstract

Harold Pinter’s plays are visual; on the one hand, visual elements such as lighting and objects are used as a part of the visual language and on the other hand, the human subject is presented to be a seeing thing, in contrast to a thinking thing (cogito) as René Descartes asserted. Closely linked to vision and the visual, the problem of identity is placed at the center of Pinter’s drama. In analyzing The Birthday Party, I focus on Meg’s question “Why has the light gone out?” and examine the ways in which Pinter visually communicates to the audience his view on the relation between vision and identity. In this play, the status of Stanley’s identity is expressed through the status of his glasses. Stanley’s glasses repeatedly become a point of attack from Goldberg and McCann, and the two men finally break them. The point when the glasses are broken also coincide with the time when the stage becomes completely dark, with no light outside. Pinter thus expresses Stanley’s loss of stable identity through the breaking of glasses and the putting out of all lights on stage. In this sense, Meg’s question can be answered that the sudden blackout indicates the complete shattering of Stanley’s identity. In The Room, Rose is placed in a room which is in a building whose status and details she does not know about. Her situation of being in a lighted spot surrounded by darkness and her inability to know the situation are similar to the mechanism of Bendam’s Panopticon. Michel Foucault pointed out that power is based upon the objectification of the individual, accompanied by a complete detachment between the subject in the tower and object in the individual cell. When Rose is visited by Riley, the encounter between the two symbolizes the moment of self-perception, Riley being Rose’s the other side. The breaking of the distance between the two and the subsequent self-perception lead to Rose’s blindness and Riley’s death. The ending of the play points toward the close link between vision and identity. In Pinter’s works, thus vision and identity are two sides of a coin and vision is the essence of the human subject.