Becketts Comic Silence in the Plays of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard

Wham, bam, thank you Sam.

Tom Stoppards Jumpers


The enigmatic silences in Samuel Becketts plays, like their descendants, the forceful
Pinter pauses, have undergone much interpretation. Scholars, directors, actors, and audiences
puzzle over the question of what these masterful minimalists say when they say nothing.
Becketts silences draw us into a void beyond linguistic expression. Harold Pinters pauses
express the characters struggles to obtain or to hold on to power. By contrast, the silences in
the plays of Tom Stoppard have received little critical attention. This is not really surprising,
given that this playwrights fame rests upon his verbal excesses, rather than upon any
tendency to restrain them. Yet Stoppards much explored Beckett legacy extends beyond a
shared penchant for bawdy humor, puns, and dizzying non sequitur. While both Becketts
and Pinters silences, and the uncomfortable laughter that often accompanies them, express
these playwrights pessimism, (1) Stoppards silences help to construct the more optimistic
world view expressed in his plays.
Samuel Becketts plays produce laughter when the silences extend far beyond the
audiences comfort zone. The opening of Endgame, for example, shows Clov alone,
exploring his barren environment. Becketts stage directions note Clovs brief laughs as he
climbs his ladder, looks out the window, uncovers the ashbins, and prepares for another
meaningless day. Clovs laughter expresses grim confirmation that nothing has changed since
yesterday. His laughter also raises mysteries. The audience asks themselves what Clov sees
out the window and what or who lurks beneath the sheets and the bloodstained handkerchief.
As we witness Clovs laughter, it begins to bring us into his world. Ruby Cohn notes
Becketts laughter is a mask for, not a release from, despair (297). Becketts silences draw
us into a place we dont want to go, yet feel we belong, and we respond to this recognition
with uncomfortable laughter.
Martin Esslin and others tell us that Becketts plays have freed contemporary
playwrights from the limits of nineteenth-century realism. (2) Characters are no longer
defined by careful exposition or clear motivation. Instead, fragmented dialogue raises more
questions than it answers. Sets look unfamiliar, more like minimalist nightmares than inviting
parlors. Finally, plots abandon conflicts neatly resolved in favor of meandering randomness.
A loss of faith in the efficacy of language permeates Becketts plays and, in part, defines the
Theater of the Absurd. Alice Benston shows how Becketts silences contribute to this sense
of the disintegration of language. In Becketts non-linear world, one speech does not
motivate the next (Benston 115). Sometimes, this takes the form of comic non-sequitur:
Hamm: Why dont you kill me?
Clov: I dont know the combination to the cupboard.
(Pause)
Hamm: Go and get two bicycle tires. (Endgame 8)
One may speculate that, perhaps, Clov could find something that he might use to kill Hamm,
if he did have the combination to the cupboard. Similarly, Hamms reference to bicycle tires
might recall Clovs unfulfilled desire for a bicycle; nonetheless, one cannot grasp an
absolutely logical thread to follow here. The audience laughs, not so much because of the
characters lack of traditional motivation as out of the recognition of the absurdity of their
expecting logical motivation to prove readily apparent in human behavior.
Thus, Becketts comedy leads to a subtle, yet complex self-reflexive theater. Some of
the plays loudest laughs come from the acknowledgement of the shared frustration of
audience and character. For Benston, Becketts characters struggle in the silence to face the
challenge of the need to speak (116). Clov wallows in despair as he admits that the seeds he
has planted will never grow. He moans Theyll never sprout! (Endgame 13). A pause
follows until Hamm observes, bluntly, This is not much fun (Endgame 13). This
understatement is followed by another pause that slowly fills with laughter as the audience
recognizes the self-reflexive edge in Hamms complaint. Here, Hamm has nearly broken the
fourth wall, and the pause allows this to sink in. Beckett takes this device a bit further,
directly acknowledging the audience, when Clov turns his telescope out and looks at them:
Clov: I see . . . a multitude . . . in transports . . . of joy.
(Pause)
Thats what I call a magnifier.
(He lowers his telescope, turns toward Hamm.)
Well? Dont we laugh? (Endgame 79)
Once again, Beckett emphasizes the self-reflexive moment. The audience does not remain
outside the line of fire of Clovs sarcasm, and his use of we here implicitly includes
everyone in the theater. Becketts pauses contribute as much to the humor in Endgame as do
his use of non-sequitur, ironic understatement, or exaggeration. This effect comes down to
more than simple comedic timing. As Benston explores in detail, silence in Becketts plays
can be filled with either pathos or laughter (Benston 115). Traditional comic timing tends to
distance the observer from the alienated target. (3) Becketts comedy in these examples
thrives instead on identification with the hopelessly alienated subjects of Becketts existential
nightmare.
If Becketts comic silences lead to identification with figures trying to locate
themselves in a wasteland, then the comic silences in Harold Pinters plays lead to a different
kind of identification. Pinters sets look like ordinary run-down residences, leading the
audience to expect a conventional domestic drama, yet the action and dialogue resist all
attempts at naturalization. Nowhere can this discrepancy between sets and language be better
demonstrated than in The Homecoming, where uneasy laughter arises from the unexpected
outcomes of the struggles for power between the characters (Innes 281, Benston 124). Pinter
establishes the pecking order in The Homecomings all male family group throughout Act I.
In verbal struggles for dominance, Max, the patriarch, has defeated both his brother, Sam and
his youngest son, Joey. Then Max himself, in turn, faces defeat by his older son, Lenny. At
this point the long lost oldest son, Teddy, arrives with his seemingly demure wife, Ruth, and
leaves her alone to encounter the sinister Lenny in the dimly lit living room. After having
seen Lenny thoroughly trounce Max, audiences expect to see Ruth intimidated by Lenny. On
the contrary, Lennys spontaneous narrative describing his bullying and contemplation of the
murder of a certain lady seems to intrigue Ruth. She asks Lenny a question, which disarms
him; he regroups, and after a brief pause, launches another campaign of intimidation. Pinter
repeats this pattern three times, and Lenny struggles to make each subsequent tale more
menacing (The Homecoming 46-9). Ruth remains nonplussed, and Lenny makes a more
aggressive move when he says he will take away her glass (The Homecoming 49). Ruths
calm questions demonstrate that, inexplicably, she understands the ongoing game of
intimidation that constitutes his family dynamic, and she does not intend to allow him to take
this particular trick. (4)

The audience perceives the family game and Ruths victory as
well, even though none of this information has been communicated directly through
language. Pinters drama, like Becketts, initiates us into a world that we dont particularly
want to enter, yet once we find ourselves there, we laugh at the uncanny sense of recognition.
As the audience and Lenny himself realize that Ruth cannot be bullied, we laugh at
Lennys amazement when Ruth challenges him in the ambiguous glass of water scene:
Lenny: Just give me the glass.
Ruth: No
(Pause)
Lenny: Ill take it, then.
Ruth: If you take the glass . . . Ill take you.
(Pause)
Lenny: How about me taking the glass without you taking me?
Ruth: Why dont I just take you?
(Pause)
Lenny: Youre joking. (The Homecoming 50)
Audiences laugh as the tension builds during these pauses. We dont laugh at anything we
would normally view as a joke, however. In spite of Lennys accusation, Ruth clearly is not
joking. Ruth takes quite seriously her refusal to be cowed by Lenny, and nothing about this
scene resembles any kind of traditional joke. Rather than presenting a taboo impulse couched
in acceptable terms and released in a cathartic punch line, in accordance with Freuds
analysis of the function of a joke, (5) the taking referred to here is overt. Although the
scene reaches its peak without ever clarifying exactly what this taking consists of, we
know that it involves power. As the scene continues, Ruth shifts Lenny from the offensive to
the defensive posture. When she invites him to drink from her glass as he sits in her lap or
lies on the floor, she infantilizes him. She leaves, and the mystified and agitated Lenny
shouts after her What was that supposed to be? Some kind of proposal? (51). After Ruths
departure, another silence follows, and Max, Lennys father, enters from upstairs in his
nightcap, like Wee Willie Winkie, demanding an explanation for the racket. Lennys
response, I was thinking aloud (51) elicits another laugh because he is at once absurd and
oddly accurate in his play with notions of silence made eloquent. The thinking aloud of this
family has become a noisy, shared, dynamic event, never explained, yet instinctively and
expertly mastered (or mistressed) by Ruth, and then by the audience.
Pinters plays, like Becketts, imply skepticism about the power of language to
express reality (Brown 23). Many of Pinters critics explore the role of silence in the
menacing tone of his plays, but suggest that Pinters silences signal not so much a failure of
language as a refusal to use language to communicate (see Esslin 238-9 and Benston 116
17). Ruth and Lenny, like all of the characters in The Homecoming, do indeed evade direct
communication. Furthermore, Pinters script defies all attempts to explicate it by theorizing
about the family history. The silences in The Homecoming relate to the self-conscious
construction of character (Benston 119). Characters in The Homecoming create fantasy lives
for themselves and others because, in spite of the fact that they are living in a house rather
than a barren wasteland, their assumptions about the world closely resemble those of
Becketts characters: there is no true identity, history, or meaning, but only that which they
construct for themselves.
Tom Stoppards plays may seem at first to have little place in this discussion. Yet
Stoppard, in spite of his verbal showiness and well-known love of language, also plays with
words and silence, and, like Beckett, sometimes says more with his silences than with all his
clever dialogue. Michael Hinden asserts that Stoppards entire career has been an effort to
absorb and work through Beckett (After Beckett 404). The closing line of Stoppards
Jumpers, Wham, bam, thank you Sam, suggests an irreverent nod to Beckett, with a hint of
dismissal. George Moore, the plays philosophy professor protagonist, struggles with the
possibility of certainty, the existence of God, and other existential concepts. The plays final
speech reverses the emphasis of Becketts plays (Innes 326). Moores belief in God, in spite
of compelling evidence to the contrary, challenges existentialism with a paradoxically firm
assertion: There are many things I know which are not verifiable but nobody can tell me I
dont know them (76). This dubious, yet oddly persuasive position persists throughout
Stoppards work. Later in Jumpers, Archie, a dandy who is also the lover of Georges wife,
the eponymous Dotty, gives a speech that parodies Waiting for Godot. Archie comforts
George as he grieves the untimely demise of Thumper, his beloved pet rabbit. Do not
despair says Archie Many are happy much of the time; more eat than starve, more are
healthy than sick . . . (87). Thus begins a lengthy litany that amounts to looking at the glass
as half full. Further analysis of Stoppards other plays, however, reveals a somewhat more
complex response to existential questions.
Stoppards earliest play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, shows Becketts
influence the most directly. The play turns Hamlet inside out, revealing the familiar story
from the point of view of two minor characters. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern find
themselves hanging around between scenes in a barren space that may be the wings of a
theater, but strongly suggests the wasteland of Waiting for Godot. However, while
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern resemble Vladimir and Estragon, Stoppard has given them
something Vladimir and Estragon lack, namely, a context. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
possess only the vague traces of a past that they can scarcely remember. Because they are a
part of Hamlet, however, the audience knows more than they themselves do about how they
fit into the events around them. We also know that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
doomed, so while their deaths lack meaning for them, these deaths become vibrantly infused
with meaning for the audience. Stoppard forces us to see the tragedy in the absurd deaths of
two flunkies, and transforms them into tragic heroes.
In this play, more than any of his others, Stoppard makes significant use of silences.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern alert us to the importance of silence by frequently calling
attention to its presence, and sometimes to its absence. Not even a pause? wonders
Guildenstern, hoping for an acknowledgement of the strangeness of their situation (14). In
the opening scene, pauses, heavy with portent, punctuate the endless-run-of-heads coin toss,
placing the play outside the laws of probability. When Hamlet delivers his most famous
soliloquy in silence, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern look on, debating whether to corner him
and demand an explanation for the puzzling events they have witnessed. The silence reveals
how Stoppard takes the play beyond Godot. Here, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern consider
whether or not to take matters into their own hands. Although the pauses taken by
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, like those of Vladimir and Estragon, often indicate confusion,
a joke fallen flat, or overwhelming inertia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern consider resisting
the fate to which Vladimir and Estragon resign themselves. Sadly (and comically) they
ultimately choose not to resist it, but Stoppard suggests that they could have chosen
differently.
This suggestion begins at the beginning of the play by establishing a reality that may
differ fundamentally from the one inhabited by Vladimir and Estragon. In search of an
explanation for the coins coming up heads eighty-nine times, Guildenstern, the more curious
of the two, explores four possibilities: that he has somehow willed it, that time has
stopped dead, divine intervention, or, the last possibility, a spectacular vindication of
the principle that each individual coin spun individually is as likely to come down heads as
tails and should cause no surprise each individual time it does (16). Guildenstern dismisses
the second proposed explanation (that time has stopped dead) as on the whole, doubtful
(16), and Innes argues that this dismissal amounts to a rejection of a Beckettian scenario, as
all the other possible explanations express non-existential views (330). Indeed,
Guildensterns third alternative suggests the possibility of God, and the first suggests the
power of individual choice. These possibilities continue to emerge throughout the play and
steer the play outside a strictly existential worldview.
The possibility of individual choice arises as Stoppard parodies the scenes in
Endgame where Becketts characters use direct address. Rosencrantz shouts Fire at the
audience, who sit in expectant silence until Rosencrantz explains that hes demonstrating
the misuse of free speech, to prove it exists (60). Rosencrantz looks contemptuously at the
audience through a long pause as they sort this out, then says in disgust Not a move. They
should burn to death in their seats (60). Another silence follows as the audience processes
the characters freedom to shout at them, and their own failure to respond to what was,
fortunately, a false alarm. This scene compares to Clovs direct address in Endgame
discussed earlier, although Rosencrantzs approach constitutes more of an assault.
Guildenstern, after a long look into the audience, suggests that he and Alfred, the actor,
might simply leave together and create dramatic precedent (32). At this moment,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern acknowledge wider possibilities. While Clov draws us into his
bleak world on the stage, Guildenstern considers abandoning that world in the faint hope of
finding something better. Later, after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern read the letter which
tells them of their fate, Guildenstern equates death with silence when he argues with the
Player. He tells the Player But no one gets up after death there is no applause -- there is
only silence . . . (123). As soon as Guildenstern finishes, the Player performs a convincing
death, and then leaps up; his point being that phony deaths are the kind people do believe in.
Guildenstern again insists upon the reality and the finality of death, but Stoppards signature
ambushes have left us uncertain. The end of the play leaves us contemplating the pairs fate
as a mystery, rather than a trap. Guildenstern asserts in his closing line, There must have
been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said no. But somehow we missed
it (125) and Rosencrantz adds, Well, well know better next time (126). Does this amount
to vacuous cheerfulness, or a more forceful note of optimism? While Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, like Didi and Gogo, talk about leaving but never actually do so, Stoppard
leaves us with the suspicion that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern certainly could have left. In
Waiting for Godot, as in Endgame, there is clearly nowhere else to go. Through his use of
comic self-reflexive techniques, silences among them, Stoppard leaves us asking whether our
choices do count for something, and whether death will turn out to be yet another false alarm
(6).
Stoppards more recent play, Arcadia, considered by many to be his best to date,
takes up these same concerns. Two English academics study letters and journals in order to
learn about the seventeenth-century inhabitants of an English country house. The action
bounces back and forth between the present and the past, so that the audience can witness the
seventeenth-century events, as well as the twentieth-century academics who conduct research
in hopes of piecing these events together. Like George Moore in Jumpers, both Bernard
Nightingale and Hannah Jarvis experience flashes of certainty before they have any evidence
to support their theories. While Bernards theory turns out to be completely off the mark,
Hannahs comes much closer to matching the events in the lives of the seventeenth-century
characters as we know them to have occurred. This plotline reflects Arcadias overarching
theme of the resilience of knowledge. In the seventeenth century, Septimus speech to his
brilliant pupil Thomasina also addresses this theme. Septimus reassures Thomasina, who
feels devastated upon learning about the plays and poems lost in the burning of the library at
Alexandria (38). Septimus tells Thomasina to think of the surviving work, a reworking of the
think of the glass as half full moment at the end of Jumpers. Here, Arcadia picks up where
both Jumpers and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead leave off. Septimus speech hints
at the survival of something beyond knowledge:
Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides,
my lady. You should no more grieve for the rest than from a buckle lost from
your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old.
We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms,
and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very
long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside
the march so nothing can be lost to it. (38)
Valentine, a member of the later generation of Thomasinas family, and like her, a
mathematician, confirms both Thomasinas prophetic mathematical speculations about heat
degradation and iterated algorithms, and, indirectly, Septimus more metaphysical
observations about the recovery of knowledge. Valentine finishes with his computer what
Thomasina began with her pencil by extending her equations and confirming her theory.
When Valentine explains heat degradation to Hannah, just as Thomasina has explained it to
Septimus, both Hannah and Septimus realize the implication that the universe will eventually
cool down to a Beckettian wasteland. Echoing Rosencrantzs faith in the next time,
however, Valentine adds But if this is how it started, perhaps its how the next one will
come (78).
Stoppard uses silences in Arcadia to mark the shifts between the past and the present,
and one character mysteriously inhabits both times and links them. Gus, the mute genius of
the twentieth-century Coverley family, and Augustus, Thomasinas younger brother in the
seventeenth century, seem at first to be two distinct characters, in spite of the fact that they
are played by the same actor, a young teenage boy. When Gus appears on stage dressed in a
seventeenth-century costume, because the twentieth-century family has been planning a
fancy dress ball, the distinction between the two becomes blurred. Gus and Augustus
conveniently wear the same costume throughout the plays final scenes, the only times that
Augustus appears on stage. While this device serves to create the kind of double take in
which Stoppard delights, it also serves to deepen Arcadias sense of mystery. Gus silently
presents Hannah with the drawing of Septimus done by Thomasina, which confirms her most
important theory. Gus may have found the drawing in the family library, but in a previous
scene, Septimus himself has given the drawing to Augustus. The device approaches breaking
the frame of the play, and Stoppard teases us with the possibility of some magical connection
between the past and present. Septimuss line as he comes to understand Thomasinas theory
expresses the existential view When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the
meaning, we will be alone on an empty shore but Thomasina counters Then we will dance
(94). Thomasina, like George Moore and Hannah, intuits a deep order to things, and
Valentines iterated algorithms offer a mathematical demonstration of this: In an ocean of
ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing (76).
In the last scene of Arcadia, as Hannah and Gus (or is it Augustus?) join Thomasina
and Septimus in their waltz, they orbit one another unseen. Stoppards silence gives his final
word. We know that Thomasina will die in a fire, yet this moment hints at a further
persistence of life. Traditionally comedy ends with a wedding dance celebrating a life-
affirming fertility; Stoppards waltz promises instead an immortality of ideas. Meaning and
possibility hover around us, and we comprehend this meaning in fragments, much like
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to comprehend the meaning of Hamlet. Though most
critics stress the pessimism and bleakness of Becketts view, Harold Hobson says in a well-
known review of Endgame that the play leaves the discerning viewer with a profound and
sullen and paradoxical joy (15). The silence at the end of Arcadia finds magic in the midst
of loss, and expresses this paradoxical joy, Stoppards legacy from Beckett. The plays of
both Pinter and Stoppard incorporate Becketts silences to bring this paradoxical joy to
their audiences.


Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. New York: Grove P, 1958.

---. Waiting for Godot. York: Grove P, 1954.

Benston, Alice. Chekhov, Beckett, Pinter: The Strain Upon the Silence. Pinter at Sixty.

Bloomington: IUP, 1993, 116-24.

Bergson, Henri. Laughter. Excerpted in Comedy: Meaning and Form. Robert W. Corrigan,

Ed. New York: Harper, 1981, 328-32.

Brown, John Russell. Words and Silence: The Birthday Party. Harold Pinter. Harold

Bloom, Ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1987, 23.

Cahn, Victor. Beyond Absurdity. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 1979.

Cohn, Ruby, Ed. Casebook on Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove P, 1967.

Esslin, Martin. Language and Silence. Harold Pinter. Harold Bloom, Ed. New York:

Chelsea House, 1987, 139-63.

Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and the Comic. Excerpted in Comedy: Meaning and Form. Robert

W. Corrigan, Ed. New York: Harper, 1981, 167-73.

Hinden, Michael, After Beckett: The Plays of Pinter, Stoppard, and Beckett. Contemporary

Literature 27:3 (1986): 400-408.

--- . Jumpers: Stoppard and the Theater of Exhaustion. Twentieth Century Literature 27:1

(1981): 1-15.

Hobson, Harold. Review of Fin de partie and Acte sans paroles. Sunday Times (Apr 7, 1957)

15. Rpt in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. Lawrence Graver and Raymond

Federman, eds. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, 161-4.

Innes, Christopher. Modern British Drama 1890-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Kelly, Katharine E. Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at Play.

Ann Arbor: U of MI P, 1991.

Pinter, Harold. The Homecoming. Harold Pinter Complete Works: Three. New York: Grove

Press, 1978.


Sammels, Neil. The Early Stage Plays. The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard.

Katherine E. Kelly, Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 104-19.

Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.

--- . Jumpers. New York: Grove P, 1972.

---. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. New York: Grove P, 1967.


Notes
1. See Christopher Innes Modern British Drama 1890-1990, p. 279 for a discussion of the fundamental
pessimism which Pinter shares with Beckett.
2.See in particular Ruby Cohns Casebook on Waiting for Godot and Innes, p. 427.
3. Henri Bergsons classic definition of the comic as an instance of something mechanical encrusted upon
something living portrays the comic experience as one of being distanced from the comic target. Here I refer to
Bergsons Laughter, excerpted in Corrigan, p. 331.
4. Indeed, if, as seems to be the case in this family, scoring a victory consists of provoking ones opponent to a
state of emotional arousal, then Ruth never loses one of these mini-battles throughout the course of the play.
5. Freud describes the function and the anatomy of jokes in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,
excerpted in Corrigan.
6. For further discussion of the influence of Waiting for Godot on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and
the ways in which Stoppards play differs from Becketts, see Sammels pp.107-8, Cahn, pp. 36-42, and Kelly
pp. 74-81.