Harold Pinter and the Autistic Experience

There are long, sometimes startling pauses in the conversation. One party may relentlessly question the other player’s choice of words to the point of hostility. Phrases and banalities are repeated as if to divine their true meaning, to feel their full weight as they leave the tongue. The exchange of power is rooted in the exchange of dialogue. One person may be drawn into an exchange seemingly designed to make them feel awkward or strange, as if they can’t stop bungling the maxims everyone is supposed to have memorized. Things trail off into silence. It is impossible, past a certain point, to find the right words. 

Have I just described a typical scene in a Harold Pinter play, or an especially difficult moment of interaction for an autistic person? 

Pinter’s plays have been famously described as “comedies of menace.” The phrase was originally coined by David Campton as the subtitle of one of his own plays, but it stuck around as a pejorative for the confusion that characterizes Pinter’s early works: their infamous pauses, their discomfitingly elusive conversations, horrific events that go unexplained yet feel essential to what is happening on stage. I was surprised when I giggled at parts of The Birthday Party, even when my blood froze during the haunting final scene, and The Homecoming is gleefully, nastily funny. There is an engaging sense of humor at play here, as in the unsettling childishness of Mick and Aston, two grown brothers playing “keepaway” with a homeless man and his knapsack in Act Two of The Caretaker. Harold Pinter’s works are recognizable for defying expectation and structural conventions of theatrical effect, and as a playwright Pinter believed his craft could (should) not be boiled down to any formula.

But like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, David Cronenberg’s films, and Shirley Jackson’s novels, Pinter’s plays unconsciously capture the autistic perspective by dwelling so deeply in the uncertainties and trickeries of language that they inadvertently demonstrate the hostility neurodivergent people can experience in a neurotypical environment, and not just through the simultaneous detachment and intensity that dwells within his characters. There is a situational autism at work in these plays: cerebral, cold or artificial to someone who is only paying attention to the surfaces, but rooted in an urgent need to be understood. As an autistic writer, this especially clicked into place for me when the writer Ethan Warren suggested I read Pinter’s 1962 lecture “The echoing silence”. Written after the success of The Caretaker, in the piece Pinter describes one of the roots of his work as a language built out of our “elusive” need to not give away too much of ourselves: “A language, I repeat, where under what is said, another thing is being said.” 

A great deal of the popular understanding of autistic and neurodivergent experience centers on the gulf between spoken and written language, and the actual, sometimes layered, intent behind each word. According to an essay in Spectrum News, previous DSM editions both “under- and over-estimat[ed] the language abilities of people on the autism spectrum.” Many psychologists believed those who were diagnosed weren’t capable of speech at all. They also assumed autistics who were hyperverbal would have better social skills and an easier time communicating. However, recent research indicates that autistic minds function quite differently when it comes to pragmatics or “the social rules of language.” These rules, such as changing one’s wording to fit a given situation, being able to detect and interpret context clues, and sticking to a present topic, can be extremely difficult for autistic adults, let alone autistic children, to navigate everyday.

To a neurodivergent person, the average neurotypical largely uses language to obscure their greater feelings or desires, or to avoid necessary confrontation. Autistics are often called “blunt,” but maybe we’re just more honest than is normally expected or even tacitly allowed in “polite” society. I remember as a child hearing my mother and my aunts discuss how stressed out my grandmother became during family events. I told my grandmother about this shortly afterward, unwittingly embarrassing them. But I still didn’t quite understand why my mother, however kindly, asked me not to report these kinds of conversations to her. Didn’t my mother want my grandmother to feel better? I didn’t see why we couldn’t talk about it. 

In plays like The Caretaker and Betrayal, Pinter writes using what he calls “two silences”: “One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed.” Many Pinter characters, such as the self-righteous Davies in The Caretaker, use that torrent to justify their past actions, or to fill the room with something, anything, desperate to avoid the moment when “true silence falls,” when “we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness.” Pinter emphasizes that he doesn’t believe characters only speak in obscurities, writing that while fumbling for connection or the upper hand, they often reach a moment where they must say something they can never take back. Consider, for example, the pause that follows in The Homecoming, after Ruth tells Lenny, “If you take the glass… then I’ll take you.” But his early works tend to close with that moment of “true silence” descending upon the characters anyway, the moment when speech, that “constant stratagem to cover nakedness,” at last fails them.  

It is impossible not to see an overlap between Pinter’s treatment of language and the autistic clash with this “stratagem.” His plays confirm the idea in recent autism discourse that words are almost always used in neurotypical society as both a barrier and a weapon. They are what he calls “a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smokescreen” which often keeps the listener from the emotional “nakedness” that is too much for the speaker to openly bear. Meanwhile, autistics are often scolded or punished for saying what is on their minds, or telling the truth in the “wrong” context. We end up masking ourselves, avoiding confrontation, terrified of saying what we truly think and feel out loud. 

Power is typically at the center of these conversations. There is, of course, a “right” or “normal” way of doing things, and a “wrong” one, and neurodivergent people are typically not aligned with the former, which is supposed to be more productive and oriented toward social and economic success. Pinter’s plays are motivated by a need to understand the difficult, murky nature of power, and how easily it can change hands through the back and forth of a conversation. He is also fascinated by what are perceived as “normal” common social conventions. 

In The Homecoming, for instance, Teddy, a professor living in America, brings his wife, Ruth, to visit his family in England. Pinter’s work often begins with such a “normal” framing, only for the characters and events of the play to gradually reveal bizarre, uncomfortable violence behind familiar structures. A typical aspect of autistic life is frustration with hypocrisy and a disinterest in societal convention, and these characters similarly find some kind of change or break from the structures they once inhabited. The end of The Homecoming is a grotesque parody of a familial tableau, where Ruth has actively abandoned her children and husband but comes to an “arrangement” with Teddy’s family where she will be worshipped as a queen-cum-replacement mother-cum-sex-worker. This is in no way a common living situation, but the play’s absurd genius is in the lack of subjective voice about the grotesquerie on display. Like the climax of his other dramas, certain connections have been strengthened, others have been severed. The audience is left to consider on their own what, exactly, satisfies the definition of a home, or a “real” family. 

If the plays of Harold Pinter seem to draw from some distant autistic collective unconscious, then this speaks not just to the depths of Pinter’s imagination, but to the extent that the neurodivergent perspective can be a kind of remixing and reshaping of common human experiences and qualities: alienation, interiority, empathy, detachment, and passion. There is no universal experience of autism either. Some autistics use non-verbal communication, others can talk about a special interest for hours. But many of us have been through the same frustrations when it comes to language, truth, rules, and power. It’s as if neurotypical society requires every single member to wear an invisible, skin-tight mask in order to function. The magic trick of Pinter’s work, like the work of Alfred Jarry or the films of Stanley Kubrick, is in revealing that the mask is always present. All Pinter asks is that for the duration of his plays the viewer peel it back and decide, in the naked silence, what is really underneath.