Posted by: Iain Fisher
« on: August 12, 2008, 01:45:24 PM »A good 18 page analysis, mainly looking at A Slight Ache and comparing it with the Bacchae.
www.ohiostatepress.org/Books/Complete%20PDFs/Burkman%20Dramatic/04.pdf
"...Edward, hidden behind his newspaper during the couple's ritual interchange, reveals himself as ridiculously out of touch with his wife and his surroundings.
…
Superficially, the scene is merely amusing as it captures the small talk of people who are enacting a breakfast ritual. On one level the couple indulges in the 'cross-talk" that Pinter believes people so often make in a "deliberate evasion of communication," but on another level the conversation displays a particular kind of withdrawal on Edward's part. When Flora insists that Edward knows perfectly well what grows in his garden and Edward insists that he does not, he is revealing very early in the play the nature of his blindness, the source of the "slight ache'' in his eyes. Edward is out of touch with things that grow, with the examples of fertility in his own garden. He is out of touch too with Flora, whose name reflects the garden over which she presides as a kind of goddess. Thus Edward, in his comic way, is from the first a candidate for the role of the year god who must die, the old king of ancient ritual who represents the dying winter season and must be sacrificed to make way for the new..."
www.ohiostatepress.org/Books/Complete%20PDFs/Burkman%20Dramatic/04.pdf
"...Edward, hidden behind his newspaper during the couple's ritual interchange, reveals himself as ridiculously out of touch with his wife and his surroundings.
…
Superficially, the scene is merely amusing as it captures the small talk of people who are enacting a breakfast ritual. On one level the couple indulges in the 'cross-talk" that Pinter believes people so often make in a "deliberate evasion of communication," but on another level the conversation displays a particular kind of withdrawal on Edward's part. When Flora insists that Edward knows perfectly well what grows in his garden and Edward insists that he does not, he is revealing very early in the play the nature of his blindness, the source of the "slight ache'' in his eyes. Edward is out of touch with things that grow, with the examples of fertility in his own garden. He is out of touch too with Flora, whose name reflects the garden over which she presides as a kind of goddess. Thus Edward, in his comic way, is from the first a candidate for the role of the year god who must die, the old king of ancient ritual who represents the dying winter season and must be sacrificed to make way for the new..."