ABSTRACT
Like many of his contemporaries on the continent, Harold Pinter is a writer who refuses to broadcast a message to the world. He is an author without authority, a communicator in the paradoxical position of having nothing to say. He is concerned with manipulating not a language of enlightenment but a language of obfuscation; not a language of social progress but a language of existential survival; not a language of communal faith but a language of divisive strategy. Pinter, unlike so many other playwrights, did not have to wait for his own technical maturity as a dramatist before he acquired the language of deceit and meretriciousness. Pinter's idiom is essentially human because it is an idiom of lies and stratagems. His characters are most reluctant to submit to the clumsy probing of the critical explorers with their rough surgical instruments.
