In preparation for Pinter's "Betrayal"

Although Pinter's Betrayal is still about two months away from being read, I thought I would post this interesting analysis of how the "Pinter pause" can work in theatrical performance. Robert Clyman, in his 1991 essay "Harold Pinter's Betrayal: Sign-Making / Sign-Breaking" notes the following.

Pinter's pauses have achieved almost legendary fame. In a discussion of "semiotic economy," as reducing simultaneity of signs and thereby allowing a single one to "achieve its full significative potential without any disturbance," Chaudhuri has described these pauses as "zero signs" or the "absence of any signs." (23)

I disagree with this analysis. Pinter's pauses never semiotically stand alone but, rather, are annexed by the speeches immediately preceding and following them. The result is a new unit of meaning whose greater significative power, to use a hackneyed expression, is greater than the sum of its parts. When Emma says, "It's nice to think back. Isn't it?" and Jerry replies, "Absolutely" before pausing, the pause seems to be looking doubtfully back at "absolutely." (13)

Beyond that, the pause signifies a question about the honesty of their entire relationship and, even beyond that, undermines our belief in the usefulness of language as a signifier of internal states. When Emma then changes the subject, we are reminded that the pause belongs to both characters. In that sense, the pause is like a free-floating electron shared by two ions, each of which needs the additional charge to complete it as an atom.

How the pauses are played will determine how adeptly a given production subverts the reliability of language. Too calculating a pause before "absolutely" goes beyond introducing doubt and actively implies a repudiation of the thing just said. Such a choice insures a laugh, as bald duplicity generally does. The more interesting choice is one in which doubt is truly felt, with a genuine desire to remember in tension with an equally strong desire to forget.

Just to define a few terms in the above quote: "semiotics" is the study of signs and sign systems. Generally speaking, the field of semiotics breaks a given sign down into two constituent parts: its signifier, which is the material sign itself, and the thing that it signifies, which is what it tells you to do.

Consider a stop sign. Its signifier is a red octagon with the word "stop" written inside of it. The thing that sign signifies is to put your foot on the brake and stop your car. In semiotics, every single sign works in this way: there is a material thing that conveys meaning, and the meaning that thing conveys.