Linguae &: Rivista di Lingue e Culture Moderne (Jul 2017)
On the Threshold: Time and the Speaking Subject in Harold Pinter’s Silence
Abstract
The article investigates Harold Pinter’s play Silence from a linguistic and phenomenological point of view. Silence is probably one of the least studied – though one of the most difficult and compelling – of Pinter’s plays. The author identifies the broken syntax and the combination of utterances and silences as indicators of time and space shifts. She claims that the patchwork which appears from the structure of the play depicts the loss of logic, and that the abandonment of chronological time in linguistic terms conveys the subjective, circular, and illogical element of the human experience of time. Characters’ bodies and utterances materialize both their own past recollections and their present experiences. The present work may be useful to theatre scholars as an example of drama as a portrayal of philosophical and linguistic theories about time and discourse.
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