Books like The Caretaker

It’s funny, you know. As soon as a play is called something like The Caretaker you just know that the person who gets the job of caretaker, who is referred to throughout as the caretaker, won’t be able to take care of anyone, not even himself. You know that he will be the one who is taken care of and he will be incapable of acknowledging the care he is receiving. And so it proves. This, of course, is called irony.I would like to say this is a funny play – but it isn’t, even though I did smile quite a few times. There is an underlying nastiness and aggression to the play that is all too masculine and all too disturbing. And Pinter has an unfailing eye for cognitive dissonance and for the lies we tell ourselves so as to reduce the torments of this dissonance. He has ways of holding a mirror up to ourselves, well, if we are brave enough to look, brave enough to see beyond what is actually being shown. For instance, how we believe that if we just did that one thing right before us then everything would work out. It would all work out if we could just do it in exactly the right way and on exactly the right day. Except, well, the problem is that there is no right day. Deep down we know that there is no chance we will ever do that one thing. No matter how simple that thing seems, no matter how we ‘believe’ doing it would fix everything. We will never actually do it. And why? Well, because having that one simple thing always looming as a possibility before us is the only thing that offers us any hope at all. What if we go down to get our papers or go to see the man about the job he is keeping especially for us or head off to the church where they were going to give us a brand new pair of shoes and it turns out, after all our efforts in getting there, that they tell us, after looking us up and down with a gaze that's impossible to misinterpret, to piss off? What then? No, it is better never to go. Better to be always just about to go. That way the hope is still alive. Is it better to be Tantalus or Prometheus? Is it better to have what you desire always within sight and always just out of reach? Or is it better to have snatched at the prize, to have known the victory of holding it in your hands, only to be caught and given your punishment of eternal torture that spans out forever without a shred of hope. For surely, Tantalus’s punishment only works as punishment if he retains some hope – just as Prometheus’s is premised on his being beyond salvation. The Gods find punishments appropriate to our own self knowledge.Aston is the person most obviously in need of care in this play – although, I do understand that everyone is in clear need of care here. This is a play of the lost and trapped. All the same, Aston is the only character to really offer any care to anyone else – and everyone else, even his own mother, lets him down in ways that are beyond belief, even when it would seem just as easy to provided him with care as to deny it him.And this is a play about the fear of difference. Of the need to belong by proving that there are others who belong even less than you do. Is it any wonder Davies spends his time in mortal fear of the blacks? Is it any surprise that he cuts off his nose to spite his face? This is, in so many ways, an absurdist play – but sometimes the absurd is the easiest way to highlight certain terrible truths about what it means to be human.