Pinter’s The Room: Staging the Flip Side of Despair

From the title and the beginning stage description – “A room in a large house” – our attention is being wilfully drawn to a piece of something, to a part of a bigger whole, to a small room, surrounded by many other rooms, on a floor, among multiple floors, in a house, surrounded by countless other houses, to a restricted interior, surrounded by a vast exterior . . . In order to be recognizable as a piece, reference must be made to the whole, an unescapable condition that simultaneously constitutes and challenges the ontological status of the parts.At the same time, the universe is contained in this one room which serves as kitchen, bedroom, dining room and salon. In order to preserve this unity, this inner core of self-sufficient refuge, its impermeability becomes imperative. The room is what isolates itself from that which it strives to be: an integral whole. This paradoxical tension provides the play’smomentum.

While offering a close-reading of The Room, I would like to draw special attention to its particularly comic components, inorder to demonstrate its bond to post-war theater’s recognitionof comedy’s dark potential. Despite a significant amount of commentary on this play, scholars have mostly overlooked how Pinter’s use of comedy informs a non-tragic vision of existence. To the contrary, the laughter provoked at regular intervals has been critically subsumed into a sub-tragic category commonly referred to as “the absurd.” Yet a careful examination of the way laughter functions here as well as a reassessment of the presuppositions behind the comic vision canshow how post-war theater had broken with the fundamental claims of tragedy in a counter-intuitive turn towards a decidedly darker terrain. The attempt is not to impose hermeneutical clarity on the very resistance of the play to interpretation, but to illuminate the precise ways in which this resistance is paradoxically articulated and, by so doing, reclaim the absurd as a properly comic category.

I will demonstrate my central premise that post-war comedy depicts the impossible in order to stage its impossible possibility by examining the comic methods that Pinter most

typically employs in his drama. They can be grouped into two rough categories: 1) the inversion of the abstract with the concrete accompanied by the exposure of their conjunction and 2) the use of exaggeration and intensification, often embodied in the presence of a surplus that disturbs the halves of a binary opposition (sometimes also portrayed negatively as the absence of the amount needed to complete the whole). By way of inversion, exposure, exaggeration and surplus, Pinter puts intoplay a comprehensive comic mechanism that indirectly subverts (and sometimes, even parodies) tragic interpretations.

The underlying structure of The Room immediately reflects thesecomic methods. As will prove typical of Pinter’s drama, The Room reduces theatrical elements down to their least common denominator. In a minimalist way, tension is achieved through nothing more than the simple fact that a room has a door. This approach is an intentional – even an ideological – one for Pinter. According to him, the real problems of existence correspond to the most basic of human needs: the need to find meaning in the face of death, the need to connect with another person, the need to be able to sit quietly in a room alone. In other words, the shortest path to the abstract universal is through the concrete instance of a particular situation. However, this, in itself, is not necessarily comical. The comedy is provided by the disclosure of their conjunction: the door.

The room Pinter offers as the scene for the play thus resonateson multiple levels: in addition to serving as a physical refugewhich provides the possibility for the body to survive, it is an inner consciousness, a chance for love and happiness, a referent for meaning and coherence. Following classic comic structure, Pinter inverts the universal and the concrete, placing unidentified characters in a situation in which their very existential angst seemingly depends upon crude material means. Resonating with Hegel’s claim that comedy is the moment when the highest becomes the lowest, allowing the lowest to rise to the highest, Pinter performs the trick or gag of showing depth by means of surface. The truly comic force of theplay, however, comes from the deliberate exposure of the point

of junction between the highest and the lowest, or the abstractand the concrete. Ironically, the more earnestly the operative mechanism uniting the two is revealed, the more improbable their connection appears, until the utter impossibility of their exchangeability is achieved. Any subsequent bumping up ofthe one against the other is then understood as fantastical or absurd.

The play starts out with a scene of domestic warmth: bacon and eggs being served by a bustling and motherly wife, pleasant chatter in a seemingly friendly environment, with the promise of hot cocoa and a warm fire to come. Little by little, however, the depth starts bubbling up through the proliferationof surface. Rose’s bustling and mothering become excessive and somewhat disturbing and the chattering strangely circular and one-sided. After a while, it becomes noticeable that Rose’s constant prattling, never once interrupted by Bert, is paralleled by her constant restlessness, in contrast to Bert, who doesn’t move from his chair at the table. In between every other line, the stage directions have her buttering the bread, adjusting the curtains and pouring tea. Even when she sits, shesits in a rocking chair and rocks. Her incessant rattling on and physical agitation communicate restless anxiety, all the more highlighted by her chipper attempts to reassure whoever islistening about the warmth and happiness of her situation.

ROSE – If they ever ask you, Bert, I’m quite happy where Iam. We’re quiet, we’re all right. You’re happy up here. (103)

And so it is only in retrospect and through the excessive display of warmth and happiness that the spectator locates cause for concern in the opening lines and initial stage disposition. We become aware of the “too much” amid the minimalist decor; we begin to feel uneasy precisely because of Rose’s assurances that one is warm and safe and happy in the room.

Although it may not be noticed at first, from the start, in counter-part harmony to the spatial elements, language plays a complementary role, designed to portray absence by means of

proliferation. An excess of words counteracts communication, ascontained in the very first stage direction: “BERT is at the table, wearing a cap, a magazine propped in front of him.” This barrier of printed words that Bert uses to isolate himself even further into the scene, as a mini living space in the distance between his two arms, wherein words can be an effective way to retreat into silence, illustrates the irony. In the same way, the barrage of words that Rose throws at him unrelentingly for the next 5 pages of script also serves to isolate Bert into his ownenclosure. Incongruously, Rose’s verbal attempts to connect arewhat form the barrier of words between them, as is cleverly indicated in the beginning of the scene with Bert’s propped-up magazine. Bert’s silence becomes downright deafening when Mr Kidd enters and holds a conversation with Bert in which Mr Kiddand Rose are the only participants.

Language is frequently used against itself in the play, building a case against a possibility merely to accept its impossible occurrence immediately following the declaration to the contrary. For example, Rose blurts out a blanket refusal ofthe suggestion that Riley could possibly have a message for her, even going to the lengths of feigning offense and giving out offense over such a preposterous suggestion, only to inquire about the message two beats later:

RILEY – I have a message for you.ROSE – You’ve got what? How could you have a message for me, Mister Riley, when I don’t know you and nobody knows I’m here and I don’t know anybody anyway. You think I’m aneasy touch, don’t you? Well, why don’t you give it up as abad job? Get off out of it. I’ve had enough of this. You’re not only a nut, you’re a blind nut and you can get out the way you came.Pause.What message? Who have you got a message from? Who? (124)

It is this principal and primary emphasis on the impossible that allows the comedy to become visible. And thus Rose’s comicpragmatism constantly keeps into perspective the starker alternatives: the basement and the outside. Her attempts to achieve comfort and reassurance do so by focalizing on the

worst-case scenario. Language games undergird this comedy, as meaning is invoked by the absence of an opposing meaning (i.e. it is because we are not in the basement or not on the outside that we are happy, that we have a chance). It is precisely thisstaging of the dark side that forms the comic mechanism. Comedymakes sense of things, not by creating the possibility of meaning, but by revealing the lack of meaninglessness. It is, at its heart, a negative movement made up of denial and subversion rather than affirmation.

While Pinter’s script is often interpreted as a ploy for revealing the inherent emptiness of language, this again missesthe comic strategy at work. Most studies that examine the way language behaves in comic dialogue conclude that comedy exposesthe mechanical emptiness of rote formulas and repetitive phrases as proof of the impossibility of meaningful communication. Unmasking the nonsense of sense is thus often heralded as comedy’s singular contribution to literary articulations of human experience. As Alenka Zupančič points out, however, the nonsense component of language patterns behaves more often than not as a midwife in the act of sense creation. To reduce comedy to the revelation, recognition and/or rejection of our missed attempts at communicating is to ignore the vibrant excesses of wit involved in puns, slips and other forms of word play. In sum, there is a life force, a vitality, an abundance of spirit within language’s very mechanical automatism. Comedy uses this surplus dead material in language to show how spirit can be “produced by mere words” (119). More precisely, it is the failure of language to fail that results in jokes or comic dialog. Comedy uses misunderstandings to achieve miracles of meaning.

When something like this happens, we don’t laugh simply tomark and “correct” a linguistic fault or deficiency, we laugh at the “miraculous” occurrence of the surplus-sense that was produced from that very failure or nonsense. We don’t laugh because spirit or thought failed to be expressed, or didn’t get through correctly, we laugh because a thought or spirit did emerge, materialize “out of nothing” (but words). (Zupančič, 119)

Pinter plays with the surplus-sense in multiple ways throughoutall his plays. He literally manages to construct the entire play out of mindless chit-chat. The more semantically vacuous the exchange, the richer it turns out to be symbolically. On the most primary level, one of his favourite techniques is to repeat a word with the addition or subtraction of an adjective that causes it to reverse in meaning. One example can be found in Rose’s use of the word “chance.” She uses it in declaring their good fortune of being in the room –

ROSE – This is a good room. You’ve got a chance in a placelike this . . . you can come home, you’re all right. And I’m here. You stand a chance. (105)

And yet when she uses the same word with more emphasis, it indicates impending doom for the neighbours in the basement room:

ROSE – I don’t know how they live down there. It’s asking for trouble . . . Whoever it is, they’re taking a big chance. Maybe they’re foreigners. (101, 103)

In typical Pinter fashion, excess reverses the sense of the words. While “a chance” has positive connotations, “a big chance” means just the opposite. This surplus factor is absolutely essential to comedy. Almost all theories agree that any genre negotiates the terms between two oppositions (mind/body, thought/feeling, existence/essence, signifier/signified, etc.), as does philosophy and art in general. What is particular about comedy’s negotiation of the terms, however, is that it does not merely oppose or juxtapose opposites; comedy shows how the two are impossibly incrusted onto each other.

In The Room, Pinter goes to great lengths to construct a binarycomprehension of experience, only to orchestrate its elaborate unravelling by focusing on its points of conjunction. The constant interplay between presence and absence, the inside andthe outside, occupancy and vacancy, life and death is pervasive, informing nearly every line of the script. This division is not, in itself, necessarily comic, but Pinter immediately situates it in a comic perspective by having the

abstract and the concrete switch places in the very opening lines.

ROSE – Here you are. This’ll keep the cold out. (101)

Although one does not notice right away, the play’s opening remark only secondarily refers to the plate of food, while in fact being meant at face value. The “where” of “being” accumulates urgency throughout the piece, with one’s room and one’s identity or existence being referred to almost interchangeably. Repeatedly, being inside “the room” confers ontological stability. Rose reiterates a version of her openingline, “Here you are,” only moments later:

ROSE – No, this room’s all right for me. I mean, you know where you are. (102)

By affirming his current location, Rose attempts to animate Bert, while referring to the opposite possibility (with the suggestive word associations “out in the cold” or “out cold”). As though to emphasize the point in a particularly ominous way,she adds,

ROSE – It’s very cold out, I can tell you. It’s murder. (101)

The outside is now posed as threatening in an ultimate way. Being is on the inside, while outside is where one is not. The outside functions as a kind of antechamber to death, icy and cold, where it is not yet completely dark but always growing darker, even though Rose appears to be serving breakfast.

ROSE – It’ll be dark in a minute as well, soon . . . It gets dark now . . . Be coming on for dark. (103 – 104)

MR KIDD – It’ll be dark soon too. But not for a good whileyet. (110)

One does not simply expire outdoors of old age or the elements;the outside corresponds to the violent annihilation of being. The horrors of calculated murder (as many have commented may refer to the Holocaust) are countermanded by a plate of carbohydrates. The repetition of the words “cold” and “out” are

juxtaposed with the consumption or “intake” of “hot” food and beverages.

Nevertheless, despite her attempts to fill up Bert’s and the room’s insides with warmth, the inside and the outside can be felt respectively by one another. The outside can be felt on the inside:

ROSE – That’s right. You eat that. You’ll need it. You canfeel it in here. Still, the room keeps warm . . . (101)

Just as one’s insides can be felt on the outside:

ROSE – If you want to go out you might as well have something inside you. Because you’ll feel it when you get out. (101)

The curiously reversible reassurance of feeling one’s insides in the outside and the outside in one’s insides is the compromise Rose comes to in facing the prospect of Bert’s goingout. Sometimes human warmth is indistinguishable from bacon rashers. The comedy at work confirms the stark landscape – a soulless stretch of murderous elements1 – while adamantly serving up a plate of defying warmth. Our sole defence against the raging winds of annihilation is the human prerogative to turn the tables on our perspective and brave the void literallywith our guts.

Whereas comedy is typically understood as more down-to-earth than other art forms, with its lower-class characters and the attention it gives to baser bodily functions, the persistent indestructibility it embodies is perplexing unless, Zupančič explains, it is understood “that in comedy, the abstract and the concrete have switched places at the very outset” (29). Andthe trick comedy plays on us is this: by allowing for only the basest and oftentimes even vile means of defence against the murderous hostility in which we find ourselves, comedy actuallyshowcases human resiliency and resistance. It does this by

1 Adding to her description of the outside as “murder,” Rose also observes the stark landscape to be soulless:

ROSE – Just now I looked out of the window. It was enough for me. There wasn’t a soul about. Can you hear the wind? (101)

lauding, not our greatness, but our flaws. It is human frailty and failure that characterize our stubborn resistance to concrete reality, our refusal to recognize the impossibility ofmeaning and accept defeat. It celebrates what, in another genre, would be paraded as our folly.

Comedy’s paradoxically subversive treatment of binary constructions thus neither undoes their relation nor reconcilestheir respective parts into a comprehensive whole. By exposing their conjunction, comedy reveals the impossible occurrence of a surplus, designating something more (or less) that results from the attempt to reconcile two parts into a clean equation: “In short, when in comedy some (imaginary) Oneness or Unity splits in two, the sum of these parts never again amounts to the inaugural One; there is a surplus that emerges in this split, and constantly disturbs the One” (Zupančič 185).

Within the first few minutes of The Room, the binary that Rose constructs between the inside and the outside begins to burst at the seams with the surplus of the ontologically ambiguous adjoining basement. As first, it seems as though Rose merely means that the basement does an inferior job of keeping out thecold:

ROSE – You can feel it in here. Still, the room keeps warm. It’s better than the basement, anyway. (101)

Yet rather rapidly, the basement takes on murderous aspects as well:

ROSE – It’s good you were here, I can tell you. It’s good you weren’t down there, in the basement. That’s no joke . . . Those walls would have finished you off. (103)

Little by little, it becomes clear that Rose’s anxiety to stay in the room and her agitation over the imminent possibility of Bert’s going out is paralleled by a particular obsession with the basement, a scantily-clad metaphor for the underworld. In the basement, it is always dark, there is only room for one, and movement is restricted like in a coffin, with “the ceiling right on top of you” (105). When it is revealed that someone isdown in the basement, it turns out to be someone who remains silent and who “just lies there, that’s all, waiting” (120).

The joke lies in the impossibility of being able to separate our meanings into two logically isolated identities (A = not A). Even the seemingly solid description on which the play is premised – A room in a large house – is comically reversed by Mrs Sands when she calls the house “roomy”:

MRS SANDS – It’s a nice house, isn’t it? Roomy. (115)

Once the binary of death/life, inside/outside has been mitigated by the underworld in the basement, the entire house grows more and more abstract, gradually losing its structural integrity and all clarity as to its inhabitants. When the landlord comes in, instead of providing perspective on the current state of things, basic architectures of thought, communication, and relations as well as the building itself start to slide away. Pinter takes care to have the landlord literally point out that he can no longer apply mathematical certainty – counting – even to something as concrete as the house:

ROSE – How many floors you got in this house?MR KIDD – Floors. (He laughs.) Ah, we had a good few of them

in the old days.ROSE – How many have you got now?MR KIDD – Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t count them now. . . Oh, I used to count them, once. . . That was whenmy sister was alive. But I lost track a bit, after she died. She’s been dead some time now, my sister . . .ROSE – When did she die then, your sister?MR KIDD – Yes, that’s right, it was after she died that I must have stopped counting . . .ROSE – What did she die of?MR KIDD – Who?ROSE – Your sister.Pause.MR KIDD – I’ve made ends meet . . .ROSE [to BERT] – . . . I don’t believe he had a sister,

ever. (108 – 110)

What really happened, even on the level of basic familial and structural design, is repeatedly and increasingly thrown into

doubt as the play progresses. For example, when Rose opens the door and finds a couple of strangers on her doorstep, Mrs Sandsinitially declares and then repeats that she and Mr Sands had been walking up the stairs from the basement:

MRS SANDS – So sorry. We didn’t mean to be standing here, like. Didn’t mean to give you a fright. We’ve just come upthe stairs . . . We were just going up the stairs. (111)

However, shortly afterwards, even this basic indication gets cast into doubt:

MRS SANDS – Anyway, we got out then and we came up and we went to the top of the house. I don’t know whether it was the top. There was a door locked on the stairs, so there might have been another floor, but we didn’t see anyone, and it was dark, and we were just coming down again when you opened the door.ROSE – You said you were going up.MRS SANDS – What?ROSE – You said you were going up before.MRS SANDS – No, we were coming down.ROSE – You didn’t say that before.MRS SANDS – We’d been up.MR SANDS – We’d been up. We were coming down. (117-118)

The architectural and perceptive ambiguity of the house is compounded by the growing confusion as to the possible occupants of the house, and each of Rose’s questions leads to conflicting responses. Interpretations have been made of The Room as a reference to Jews in hiding, with each floor and room a possible refuge or menace, and constant fear of the outside rendering any sort of stability precarious. This interpretation could help explain the landlord’s reticence to admit to lodging a helper, strangely slipping to the plural in mid-conversation.

ROSE – Don’t you have a help?MR KIDD – Eh?

ROSE – I thought you had a woman to help.MR KIDD – I haven’t got any woman.ROSE – I thought you had one when we first came.MR KIDD – No women here.ROSE – Maybe I was thinking of somewhere else.MR KIDD – Plenty of women round the corner. Not here

though. (106)

In line with this interpretation, referring to a situation in which survival and location were indeed fatally related, Rose’sanxiety over the necessity of having refuge in the room appear more than understandable. Although Mr Kidd replies to Rose’s query, “You full at the moment, Mr Kidd?” that the house is “Packed out” (109), a couple arrives soon afterwards looking for lodging and the woman repeats a line Rose had used earlier:“It’s murder out” (111), clearly indicating that exposure leadsto death.

The comedy occurs when the house’s capacity to provide refuge is thrown into doubt by Rose’s discovery that the supposed vacancy on the premises refers to her own room, number seven. Her attempts to gain reassurance on this account are denied by the landlord, who parrots her questions with idiotic incomprehension. Their exchange quickly degenerates into a Kafkaesque round-about in the dark where even the identity of the person supposedly in authority dissolves into thin air.

ROSE – Mr Kidd, what did they mean about this room?MR KIDD – What room?ROSE – Is this room vacant?MR KIDD – Vacant?ROSE – They were looking for the landlord.MR KIDD – Who were?ROSE – Listen, Mr Kidd, you are the landlord, aren’t you? There isn’t any other landlord?MR KIDD – What? What’s that got to do with it? I don’t know what you’re talking about. (119)

The shift or reversibility at this moment is when a potentiallytragic situation becomes comic. The binary between “home” and

“homeless” starts to crack open, and a third (im)possibility arises that the room Rose calls her own, where she is happy andhas a chance, is actually empty or “vacant.” This is reinforcedlater by Riley’s message implying that Rose is not home at all but in fact very far from home. Even the dramatic difference that Rose tries to impose between the inside of her room and the terrifying world outside is swept aside by Mr and Mrs Sands, who find it darker inside than out:

ROSE – What’s it like out?MRS SANDS – It’s very dark out.MR SANDS – No darker than in.MRS SANDS – He’s right there.MR SANDS – It’s darker in than out, for my money. (113)

The comparison of darkness and light continues until Mr Sands even goes so far as to claim having seen an actual source of light outside – a star in the sky. This affirmation, however, is treated as preposterous by Mrs Sands who curiously retorts:

MRS SANDS – Go home.MR SANDS – What do you mean?MRS SANDS – You didn’t see a star.MR SANDS – Why not?MRS SANDS – Because I’m telling you. I’m telling you you

didn’t see a star. (114)

As the question of the agency of perception lingers, the play lends itself to psychological or psychoanalytic interpretations. The indefinable floors and unknown rooms and passages of the house recall the unconscious, while the emerging of repressed elements from the basement indicate multiple layers of meaning. A further sinister twist appears when it is suggested not only that Rose is not “home” and the room vacant, but that, by her own admission, Rose cannot go home and furthermore, that Rose is not “Rose” but someone else.Faced with such a collapse of signifiers, the ensuing blindness(i.e. loss of identity) and brutal act of violence against the messenger have already been detached from any possible system of causality.

Long before Rose’s identity is questioned, identities have beencrumbling down throughout the play, especially in regards to the supposed landlord, the one who should be able to confirm vacancy or occupancy, but who admits to having “lost track a bit” (109). In similar fashion to Rose’s reaction to Riley’s name, Mr Sands can only deny the accuracy of a name without theability to clearly recall the name of the person in question:

ROSE – What were you looking for?MRS SANDS – The man who runs the house.MR SANDS – The landlord. We’re trying to get hold of the

landlord.MRS SANDS – What’s his name, Toddy?ROSE – His name’s Mr Kidd.MRS SANDS – Kidd, Was that the name, Toddy?MR SANDS – Kidd? No, that’s not it.ROSE – Mr Kidd. That’s his name.MR SANDS – Well, that’s not the bloke we’re looking for. ROSE – Well, you must be looking for someone else. PauseMR SANDS – I suppose we must be. (111)

This surplus “someone else” turns out to be a lot closer to home than Rose imagines. When Rose mentions her husband’s name,Mr Sands reacts in recognition:

MRS SANDS – Why don’t you sit down, Mrs – ROSE – Hudd. No thanks.MR SANDS – What did you say?ROSE – When?MR SANDS – What did you say the name was?ROSE – Mr Hudd.MR SANDS – That’s it. You’re the wife of the bloke you

mentioned then?MRS SANDS – No, she isn’t. That was Mr Kidd.MR SANDS – Was it? I thought it was Hudd.MR SANDS – No, it was Kidd. Wasn’t it, Mrs Hudd?ROSE – That’s right. The landlord.MRS SANDS – No, not the landlord. The other man.ROSE – Well, that’s his name. He’s the landlord.MR SANDS – Who?

ROSE – Mr Kidd.Pause.MR SANDS – Is he?MRS SANDS – Maybe there are two landlords. (112-113)

Even Mrs Sands, who gives the impression of understanding who is who at the beginning of the exchange, curiously introduces another man into the discussion, ending with the suggestion of plural landlords. All this uncertainty as to who the landlord is finally results in uncertainty as to where he lives, recalling Rose’s earlier verbal efforts to ground identity in aspecific interior:

MR SANDS – He lives here, does he?ROSE – Of course he lives here.MR SANDS – And you say he’s the landlord, is he?ROSE – Of course he is.MR SANDS – Well, say I wanted to get hold of him, where

would I find him?ROSE – Well – I’m not sure.MR SANDS – He lives here, does he?ROSE – Yes, but I don’t know – MR SANDS – You don’t know exactly where he hangs out?ROSE – No, not exactly.MR SANDS – But he does live here, doesn’t he?Pause.MRS SANDS – This is a very big house, Toddy.MR SANDS – Yes, I know it is. But Mrs Hudd seems to know

Mr Kidd very well.ROSE – No, I wouldn’t say that. As a matter of fact, I

don’t know him at all. (115)

This denial, the very one that Rose will repeat regarding Riley, yet whose name she will insist is not Riley, creates a strange echo of plural identities and double denials. The terror of the play nonetheless remains on a very material level, with the concrete elements providing a source of anxietyevery bit as disturbing as the more abstract identities of the characters. Take, for example, the comic prop par excellence, the chair.

As the material stability begins to slip, even the original location/identity of Rose’s own chair is questioned by the landlord, who “could swear blind” as to his remembrance one minute, only to declare “I wouldn’t take an oath on it though” (107) only a few lines further down, conspicuously throwing doubt onto all positions or perceived supports. Yet Rose reactswith comic pragmatism, offering, “Take a seat, Mr Kidd” (107). This one line epitomizes the comic situation of pulling the chair out from under someone while always being able to count on the other person’s willingness to sit down regardless of foreseeable results. The chair may not belong to the room, it may not exist, our lives may be bereft of meaning, but we stilltake our seats.

All this excessive attention to the furniture and the bodily positions that correspond to them operates on several levels simultaneously. On the most immediate level, it reverses the epistemological hierarchy by placing the immediate focus on themere stage props and only secondarily on the corporality of thecharacters. Never, in a tragedy, would the protagonist be serving bacon and eggs in the opening scene, or would so much attention be given to whether or not a character is deciding tosit. As Bergson famously remarked, “This is just why the tragicpoet is so careful to avoid anything calculated to attract attention to the material side of his heroes. No sooner does anxiety about the body manifest itself than the intrusion of a comic element is to be feared. On this account, the hero in a tragedy does not eat or drink or warm himself. He does not evensit down any more than can be helped . . . Napoleon, who was a psychologist when he wished to be so, had noticed that the transition from tragedy to comedy is effected simply by sittingdown” (On Laughter). The dilemma of whether or not to take a seat is again staged in the person of Mr Sands, who declines tosit despite his wife’s badgering insistence:

ROSE – Come over by the fire, Mr. Sands.MR SANDS – No, it’s all right. I’ll just stretch my legs.MRS SANDS – Why? You haven’t been sitting down.MR SANDS – What about it?MRS SANDS – Well, why don’t you sit down?

MR SANDS – Why should I?MRS SANDS – You must be cold.MR SANDS – I’m not.MRS SANDS – You must be. Bring a chair over and sit down.MR SANDS – I’m all right standing up, thanks.MRS SANDS – You don’t look one thing or the other standing

up.MR SANDS – I’m quite all right, Clarissa. (112)

Several moments later, Mr Sand perches on the table, only to beimmediately challenged by Mrs Sands:

MRS SANDS – You’re sitting down!MR SANDS (jumping up) – Who is?MRS SANDS – You were.MR SANDS – Don’t be silly. I perched.MRS SANDS – I saw you sit down.MR SANDS – You did not see me sit down because I did not sit bloody well down. I perched!MRS SANDS – Do you think I can’t perceive when someone’s

sitting down? (116)

Above and beyond the usual comic leverage provided by the use of the chair, Pinter maintains the metaphor all the way to the end. The encounter between Rose and Riley begins with:

ROSE – You just touched a chair. Why don’t you sit in it? (122)

Riley’s inability to remain seated proves suggestively fatal inthe end as Bert ejects Riley from his seat by lifting the chairwith his foot slowly until Riley falls out onto the floor.

The reversal of the abstract and the concrete becomes even moreobtrusive in the awkward non-sequitur of sex. As Hegel has remarked, the conjunction of the high and the low are nowhere more profoundly expressed than when nature “combines the organ of its highest fulfilment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination” (Phenomenology of Spirit). Sexual enjoyment is a surplus to nature’s reproductive processes. Comedy’s particular interest in sex dates back to antiquity. The phallusand the sex drive are indeed conjunctive components that cause us to exceed our identities in numerous ways. Unsurprisingly

then, there are strange but comical analogies between sexualityand motor vehicles in The Room. In order to draw attention to the inherently strange nature of the sexual act, Pinter chose amore obvious surplus object than the compulsively normalized relations of a heterosexual couple and found in Bert’s van an appropriate vehicle for his technique (pun intended). The van symbolizes the sexual component of Bert and Rose’s relationship. Pinter is not so much introducing an abnormal element as pushing sexual norms to their breaking point. Zupančič could just as well be analysing this very play when she writes:

Comedy is not a deviation from the norm, or its reversal, but its radicalization; it is a procedure that carries the(human) norm itself to its extreme point; it produces and displays the constitutive excess and extremity of the normitself. The human norm is a fundamental dislocation of enjoyment, its potential objectification, detachability, independence, mobility (as fixation in another place). Strong, distinctive comic characters are always two thingsat the same time: they are the ones who enjoy (their symptom – whatever it is), and it is precisely because of this that they are also radically exposed, since whatever they enjoy is lying out there, for everyone to come acrossand stumble against. (194-195)

Since sexuality is usually suggested indirectly, Pinter goes a step further back, provocatively evoking sexual behaviour by use of a conspicuous smoke screen. This is made obvious by the use of sentences wherein the words “driver” and “how to drive” stand out as euphemisms that replace the euphemisms “lover” and“how to make love.” Rose deliberately strokes Bert’s male ego by referring to his driving in a particularly suggestive way.

ROSE – I told him you hadn’t been too grand, but I said, still, he’s a marvellous driver. I wouldn’t mind what time, where, nothing, Bert. You know how to drive. I told him. (104)

This analogy is reinforced by Mr Kidd when he stops by and talks about Mr Hudd’s van using the personal pronoun “she” and commenting on the sounds Mr Hudd makes with his van:

MR KIDD – I was just looking at your van. She’s a very nice little van, that. I notice you wrap her up well for the cold. I don’t blame you. Yes, I was hearing you go off, when was it, the other morning, yes. Very smooth. I can tell a good gear-change. (107)

If any doubt remains as to Pinter’s intentions, they are erasedwhen Bert (Mr Hudd) finally speaks and describes his driving experience, punctuated by Rose’s rhythmic yeses:

BERT – I had a good bowl down there. Pause. I drove her down, hard . . .

ROSE – Yes.BERT – Then I drove her back, hard . . .ROSE – Yes.BERT – But I drove her. Pause. I sped her. Pause. I caned her along. She was good. Then I got back. I could see the road all right. There were no cars. One there was. He wouldn’t move. I bumped him. I got my road. I had all my way. There again and back. They shoved out of it. I kept on the straight. There was no mixing it. Not with her. Shewas good. She went with me. She don’t mix it with me. I use my hand. Like that. I get hold of her. I go where I go. She took me there. She brought me back. Pause. I got back all right. (125-126)

The contrast between Rose’s repeated attempts to ground Bert inDa-sein – “Here you are” – and Bert’s self-proclaimed “I go where I go” indicates the basic instability of existence which is, by default, sexual. Immediately after this speech, Bert “bumps” Riley out of his seat and kicks him into oblivion just like the car he bumped out of his way on the road, almost as a prolongation of his earlier sexual violence. Our sexuality exposes us, leaves us lying out there, to be stumbled or struckagainst, as can be seen in the exchange between Rose and Riley as well.

The association of sexuality with mobility (vehicles and transportation) stands in opposition here to Rose’s desire to remain in the room. Bert seemingly goes outside only for the purposes of driving, and the simultaneous situation of venturing into the murderous outdoors in the cold and the dark in order to engage in unbridled mobility infers the sexual act with a reckless regard for security and selfhood. The hand thatholds his little van steady is the same that strikes down the Negro.

Riley’s message for Rose to leave her room and “come home” is accompanied by touching:

RILEY – Now I touch you.ROSE – Don’t touch me.RILEY – Sal.ROSE – I can’t.RILEY – I want you to come home. (124)

When Rose appears to succumb to Riley’s offer, she says she never leaves the room in a way that suggests that she equally never “humps,” punctuated by Riley’s pulsating responsiveness.

ROSE – I’ve been here.RILEY – Yes.ROSE – Long.RILEY – Yes.ROSE – The day is a hump. I never go out.RILEY – No.ROSE – I’ve been here.RILEY – Come home now, Sal. (125)

The suggestive juxtaposition of deep-seated questions of identity and origin with what may just as well be a scene between a former prostitute and her pimp’s messenger are once again, a clearly comic attempt at revealing the points of conjunction between our lofty aspirations and our baser desires.

Pinter’s The Room comes closer to parodying tragedy than to creating it, most notably by the decidedly untragic possible death at the end, from which no meaning can be found or lesson learned, upending tragedy’s premise articulated by Umberto Eco

“that sometimes, in order to prove something, you have to die” (Foucault’s Pendulum). Likewise, the blindness in the play, a classical component of tragedy, is strangely subverted by repeated suggestions that blindness enhances one’s perception. For example, the first thing Riley does upon arriving in the room is to look around, strange behaviour indeed for a blind man:

He looks about the room.

ROSE – What are you looking at? You’re blind, aren’t you? So what are you looking at? (122)

Soon afterwards, Riley remarks, “This is a large room” (123), as though he truly is capable of visual observation. He continues,

RILEY – I want to see you.

ROSE – Well you can’t see me, can you? You’re a blind man.An old, poor blind man. Aren’t you? Can’t see a dickeybird. (123)

The use of the word “dickeybird” is downright peculiar, as dickeybirds are above all associated with sound rather than sight. The popular Cockney expression “not a dickey-bird” indicates the absence of sound but also can mean the absence ofwritten communication.2 Moreover, Rose accuses Riley of being “deaf and dumb and blind” (123), whereas in the play, he plays the role of the knowing and seeing messenger. The apparent lossof one’s faculties in the play is shown to be accompanied by superior insight, to which Rose finally acquiesces:

RILEY – I waited to see you.ROSE – Yes.RILEY – Now I see you.ROSE – Yes. (125)

The question of knowing or seeing another person is treated, inclassic Pinter fashion, in reverse. It is Rose’s affirmation that she certainly does not know Riley that precisely indicatesthe opposite.

2 i.e. “I wrote him last month but haven’t heard a dickey-bird back.”

ROSE – See him? I beg your pardon, Mr Kidd. I don’t know him. Why should I see him?MR KIDD – You won’t see him?ROSE – Do you expect me to see someone I don’t know? With my husband not here too?MR KIDD – But he knows you, Mrs Hudd, he knows you.ROSE – How could he, Mr Kidd, when I don’t know him?MR KIDD – You must know him . . . Please see him. Why

don’t you see him?ROSE – I don’t know him.MR KIDD – You never can tell. You might know him.ROSE – I don’t know him.MR KIDD (rising) – I don’t know what’ll happen if you don’t

see him.ROSE – I’ve told you I don’t know this man! (120-121)

The thrice-repeated denial at the end, recalling Peter’s denialof Christ, foreshadows the ominous ending of the character Riley. The ridiculousness of the negative certainty – that Rosedoes not know an unidentified someone – leads us to believe that her denial is a false one. This is further confirmed (or exacerbated) by her affirmation that Riley’s true name is not Riley:

RILEY – My name is Riley.ROSE – I don’t care if it’s – What? That’s not your name.

That’s not your name. (122)

Rose, still trying to consider herself unseen and unknown by Riley, belies her cover by asking:

ROSE – What did you mean by dragging my name into it, and my husband’s name? How did you know what our name was?” (123)

This is not the question one would ask a complete stranger. Instead, Rose seems to be wondering how her alias was discovered. This is confirmed shortly after when Riley calls her by another name:

RILEY – Come home, Sal.Pause.ROSE – What did you call me?

RILEY – Come home, Sal.ROSE – Don’t call me that.RILEY – Come, now.ROSE – Don’t call me that. (124)

Tellingly, Rose does not protest the name itself but only its use. Instead of saying, “That’s not my name,” Rose simply says,“Don’t call me that.”

As Rose has been desperately repeating throughout the play, thequestion of being or identity is closely related to spatiality.Here-you-are. Immediately after Rose orders Riley not to call her Sal, he replies, “So now you’re here,” clearly linking her change or name or identity with her change of abode (124). Whenshe finally admits to being seen “now” by Riley, Rose’s location (and thus former identity) slip to the past-tense:

RILEY – Now I see you.ROSE – Yes.RILEY – Sal.ROSE – Not that.RILEY – So, now. Pause. So, now.ROSE – I’ve been here . . . I’ve been here. (125)

Riley knows Rose’s other name; He acknowledges an alternative reality. Deaf, dumb and blind, he calls upon her to leave the room. To go outside. To be exposed. Rose and Riley make contact: “She touches his eyes, the back of his head and his temples with her hands” (125).

Abruptly, Bert comes in from the dark and the cold and relays the account of his contact with his motor vehicle. The account is splattered with sexual violence, involving caning, bumping and shoving. Afterwards, he looks long and hard at Riley and comes up with his own name for him – “Lice!” (126). The brief and one-sided act of violence that ensues is followed by silence and then by Rose’s loss of sight:

ROSE – Can’t see. I can’t see. I can’t see. (126)

In the ultimate outcome, Rose is seen, named and known by a manshe never named, denied knowing, and, in the end, cannot see. While many have noted Pinter’s unconcealed invitation to

associate black, disabled, Irish Riley with the other – as a minority and an outsider, most scholars agree that Pinter purposefully excludes the possibility of a comprehensive interpretation of the play itself.

While not pretending to have personally discovered a hermeneutical key that unlocks Pinter’s intentional ambiguity, I do believe The Room provides ample evidence to encourage a re-evaluation of the basic claims of post-war European drama towhich this play belongs. Considering the post-World-War-II context of this play and the numerous elements which suggest interpretation by association with the Holocaust, I reiterate my initial proposition that post-war playwrights were faced with the reality of an impossibility that even tragedy could not subsume. The sheer proliferation of death, if nothing else,prevents the Holocaust from entering a category that could be associated with beauty and truth. As Pinter’s language unfailingly reminds us, excess or overuse reverses meaning. Themultiplication of those yawning common graves and their masses of corpses reverses the dominating philosophical premise that humanity progresses towards truth through suffering. Tragedy cannot survive on a massive scale. Tragedy addresses universal suffering through the trials and tribulations of the particular; it cannot provide meaning for mindless suffering ofthat magnitude.

However, and practically for the first time, a genuine space opened up for the staging of an alternative to tragedy’s all-encompassing gaze. In a double movement, comedy deliberately fabricates an ostensibly fictional interpretation of reality, only for the fabrication to be shown as “true” at the end. Comedy showcases the impossible precisely in order to contradict itself by demonstrating the superior reality of suchwild fabrications.3 It displaces meaning and authority from an objective, universal standpoint and shows how private experience and mere imagination have the power to call into

3 Here, Robert Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful serves as an excellent example. The young boy’s declaration at the end – “it’s all true!” – illustrates thereality and triumph of human warmth in the midst of humanity’s darkest moment.

being the inexistent.4 Whereas tragedy holds that suffering must entail the possibility of meaning (whether this meaning bestows human dignity or spiritual redemption), comedy’s approach advocates for meaning’s impossible impossibility, mostparticularly in the face of suffering. If any response can be given to the horrors of the Holocaust, it is that we continue to live and yes, even to write poetry. But the tone of the poemhas changed. The meaningful words have been replaced by laughter.

In a very minimalist way, Pinter stages how the need for a room, for comfort and warmth, for a chair in which to sit, can contain in itself the whole of human drama. The absence of these things, either from their ontological impossibility or due to the destruction of human violence does nothing to resolve our insatiable, illogical need. Nonetheless, from our theater seats in the dark, we laugh in recognition of what Pinter presents as reflecting at least as much faith as folly. The ultimate outcome of The Room depicts the loss of seat and sight – the two principal characteristics of the seated spectators. Blindness in the theater – the place of seeing – puts the joke on us and causes us to question our need for sight. The very power of the play (and its commercial success) suggests that this need is in itself enough, even if it is never satisfied. This is the comedy. A simple room already contains all the horror of existence, just as our propensity tosit down upends our speculation about the universe and its impossible meaning. Between the door and our seats lies the entire gamut of life’s experiences. Post-war comedy showcases despair in order to show a small corner of its reverse side: the side on which most of us live, inside-out and outside-in, absurd edges and all.

4 As Badiou would say, it’s a little bit like falling in love.