Yeats e Pinter.

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Data:	30.06.2000
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YEATS
A VISION:
Yeats made great use of imagery and symbols which are so personal and unusual that they often become obscure. This book contains theories which were “ revealed” to him by supernatural beings through his wife’s extra-sensory faculties. A Vision is a semi astrological “system”. Yeats builds up his theory of “the Great Wheel of the Lunar Phases”.
According to this theory, each man is governed by 4 faculties: the Will, the Mask, the Creative Mind and the Body of Fate. The prevalence of one or the other of the 4 faculties results in a certain type of human personality, or in a different moments in the life of a single personality.
These “types” are positioned in a sort of closed circle corresponding to the orbit of the Moon.
Yeats seens history as formed by a series of opposite cycles, each cycle lasting about 2000 years. Each age is the opposite of the previous one: an age of rule and authority will be followed by an age of anarchy and violence. Each cycle has a circular develpment, like a gyre , which gradually ascends, reaches a climax, and then descends, is destroyed and is soon replaced by the following cycle. ( This theory is graphically represented by a cone penetrating another cone )
The Gyre combines a rotating movement with a forward one. These movements represent the flow of a life cycle toward its end and the beginning of a new cycle. The gyre symbolizes the course of both mankind and history.
YEATS AND BLAKE
The other great source is Blake. From B., Y learnt the use of symbols. Like B. he believed that the outer objective world around us is only a projection of an ideal inner subjective reality ( influence of Platonism)
Y. had written an essay on Magic, where we find the theory of a Great Mind containing a Great Memory. This collective Memory is the seat of all universal myths. His view of poetry as a prophetic vision, which leads to an understanding of the invisible essence which the symbol expresses externally.
SYMBOLISM
- the gyre: the Great Year, One Cycle
- the rose: beauty, Ireland, Maud Gonne’s face
- the stone: eternity
- birds: the soul of man, youth
- the sea: the unknown
THE FOUR PHASES
His works are centred around the same theme (man and time) and they all use recurrent symbols and immages. His poems ere contionally grouped into 4 phases.
- In the first one ( about 1900) he wrote under the influence of the pre-Raphaelites and their dreamy idealism;
- In the second phase his language became realistic, using realistic themes;
- In the third phase he was absorbed by speculation on the occult. He composed many “metaphysical” poems: his language was precise and his style was masterfull
- In the fourth phase he returned to simplicity without elaborate symbolism. He look at the world with serenity, accepting the life.

PINTER
WORKS:
- The Room: ( one Act) about a middle aged woman living in a room and afraid that it may be taken away from her by some mysterious intruders.
- The Birthday Party: ( three Acts), on an unemployed pianist who, during a party for his pretended birthday, is questioned by 2 mysterious men and finally abducted by them.
- The Dumb Waiter: 2 killers are sent by mysterious organization to a basement room to kill someone that they do not know and who, in the end, turn up to be one of the 2.
- The Caretaker: about 2 brothers and an old man who happens to be temporarily a guest in their room and his finally thrown out.
- The Homecoming: a couple, back from America, after a long absence, meet with the hostility of the family, but a way out is found when Ruth accepts her brother- in -law’s invitation to stay.
THEMES
Pinter’s plays belong essentially to the Theatre of the Absurd and his most important predecessors are Kafka and Beckett. Like theme he re-proposes recurrent themes in his works:
- The menace: there is always something threatening in Pinter’s plays, especially in the early ones which, for this reason, have also been called “ Comedies of menace”. The Nature of this menace is vague and can be identified with:
. haunting past memories;
. distressing news from outside;
. mysterious calls or knocking on the door;
. the threat of racial persecutions and intolerance;
. doubts;
. the threat of an impending cosmic disaster;
. an immediate menace physical violence.
The menace in Pinter’s place is connected with the alienation that seems to mark the modern world.
- The room : this theme is common to at least 8 of Pinter’s place, despite P. himself’ s claim not to be a symbolist dramatist, it may actually work as a symbol. Always provided with an opening towards the outside, through which the menacing something can intrude the room may in turn symbolize.
. a refuge;
. a safe haven;
. a sort of motherly womb protecting from the outer world;
. a status symbol;
. a sort of property;
. a kind of prison;
- The intruder : intrusion may actually take place either physically ( in the persons of unexpected strangers, relatives, friends or potential enemies), or metaphorically ( in the form of hallucinations, memories, possessive attitudes, etc) in both cases disturbing real or pretended tranquillity.
- False identity : some of Pinter’s characters often produce false names or have more than one name.
- Blindness:
. end of a relationship;
. fear of life;
. fear of sexuality;
. failure of any sort
. death
- Mistrust in family ties;
- Mistrust in human relationships: there is no room for true friendship or love, because they are marred by suspicion, fear and violence
- Failure to recollect the past;
- Inability to communicate : Pinter’s characters in ordinary conversation are incapable of achieving it , since they do not share the same level of intelligence, or they are so stupid that communication is virtually impossible anyway.
- Solitude: ( in comune con Beckett)
- Deception and elusiveness ;
- Reality and Unreality: this theme is more frequent. He says that there is no hard distinction between what is real and what is unreal
In conclusion we can say that at the centre of Pinter’s plays is the existential meaninglessness of life.
One of his abilities is his skill in reproducing the surface of life, its insignificant and repetitive events.
His work is very English in its use of understatement, employing the conventional cliches of everyday speech.
LANGUAGE AND STYLE
Despite Beckett’s influence, which is evident in such devices as repetitions, banalities and inconsistencies.
He never destroys the normal syntactic structure of the sentences, but manages, all the same, to attain ambiguity through the evasiveness of the character’s answers, the imprecision of their memories.
His dialogues borrow from everyday life a realistic language., made up of trivial remarks, syntactic mistakes and repetitions, but also of allusive hints, jokes and meaningless details.
Important and revealing are the pauses and the long silence intersersed throughout the plays. “ There are 2 silences: One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is employed”.