Harold Pinter

Guido Almansi, Simon Henderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000292138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias

First published in 1983, Harold Pinter is an original study into the work of one of Britain's foremost dramatists.

The book celebrates Pinter's elusiveness as a writer. It considers his position as a specifically contemporary writer of the post-modernist tradition, and explores his use of language as a sophisticated means of non-communication, acting as a smokescreen behind which his characters lie. The book presents the language games used by Pinter according to their strategic importance, beginning with his earlier works and suggesting a chronological progression. It also discusses Pinter's later developments, such as the screenplay for The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Harold Pinter is ideal for anyone with an interest in the work and literary techniques of contemporary writers and dramatists.

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1
INTRODUCTION

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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 our contemporary in a sense that many of his fellow writers in Britain — and the British theatre, in particular — are not. For him, as for the post-modernist world generally, it is language that provides the supreme obstacle. He is not part of that fatal tradition in English literature, going back to G. B. Shaw and the theatre of ideas, to D. H. Lawrence and the literature of feelings, according to which language is no problem - the supposed problems being intellection (the manipulation of ideas) and sincerity (the expression of feelings). 'Language is words. . . . It's bridges, so that you can get safely from one place to another': this is the claim in the first act of Arnold Wesker's Roots; and the belief in the conductive power of words - a belief somewhat remote from the main currents of modern European literary practice — permeates a great deal of contemporary English drama (not only the works of Wesker, but those of Osborne and Arden, of Mercer and Mortimer, of Bond and Shaffer). At the core of their shared belief lies an immoderate faith in a language of enlightenment, whereby words are used mimetically to throw light on the most obscure areas of life (as if Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations had been in vain, or had never superseded the Tractatus). Pinter, however, is aware that 'The more acute the experience the less articulate [is] its expression' (I, 11). 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. The words of his plays are intransigent and intransitive: they cannot be transferred to other levels of meaning, be they philosophical, ideological or allegorical. You can play all sorts of critical games with them, but it is a mistake, as we shall show, to consider them out of the context of their dramatic precincts. In Pinter words are not bridges: they are barbs to protect the wired enclosure of the self.

If we were to trace with the firm hand of a surveyor or an accountant the graph of Harold Pinter's progress, or regress, or dramatic itinerary, from the earliest works to the latest plays, a few trends would emerge: a progressive baring of the symbolic superstructure; new disguises of a violence that turns purely verbal or goes underground; monologues spreading, following perhaps some Beckettian suggestions; intensification of pauses and silences, which become the natural repositories of meaning. But the fundamental element, language, has hardly changed. From The Room (written in 1957) to Other Places (performed in 1982), Pinter has systematically forced his characters to use a perverse, deviant language specialized in concealing reality. He has remained in this respect a great ironist (again following the continental fashion: 'ironic' in the Romantic sense described by Heine and Kierkegaard, for whom God and Shakespeare were respectively the supreme ironists; not in the modern acceptation). Whatever Pinter says is never to be taken entirely seriously; for irony — that radical doubt about the very words that he uses to communicate — invariably accompanies his every statement. To miss the irony in the text is equivalent to missing the text itself. Irony creates the distance between 'Puzzling Pinter'¹ and ourselves, and demarcates a fine zone between the author and his characters, or between each of the mutually non-comprehending characters themselves. Being an honest writer, Pinter can only warn us that the material he is selling us (words) is made up of coins that ring false. Hence he is unreliable and conscientious about advertising his unreliability; honest in revealing his dishonesty. In twenty years of playwriting he has never stooped to use the degraded and ultimately treacherous language of honesty, sincerity or innocence, which has contaminated the British theatre for so long.

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 (as so often happens with writers who reach a strategic idiom only after a first juvenile production of freewheeling expressionism). His language was never chaste, but corrupt from birth. In his plays, even the virginal page protected by its candour is polluted, for the blanks convey a substructure of evil intentions and vile meanings. Pinter's idiom is essentially human because it is an idiom of lies and stratagems.² He has never compromised with the audience that comes to the theatre to be comforted, entertained, consoled, patronized, instructed, preached at and enlightened. He has only whispered dark words of warning (which makes his international success the more remarkable). He has always used words as incantations without letting us know to which religion his rituals belong.

Let us suppose, for a moment, that we intend to understand the playwright. There ought to be at least three basic avenues leading to the inner core of the works of a contemporary dramatist like Pinter: through the theatrical tradition, through the author's ideas or through character analysis. The first two are familiar enough from most contemporary critical writing, and the third is the faithful carthorse, a popular starting-point through the ages. Technique, ideas (or ideology, or philosophy), psychology: these are the three plausible approaches, helping us towards a better understanding of the modern dramatic text. One may have faith in the playwright's dramatic technique, and seek to connect his works with some modern theatrical movement (such as the Theatre of the Absurd); or one may rely on the clarity and soundness of his ideas, and eventually relate them to an ideological stance or philosophical mode of thinking (such as existentialism); or one may treat the plays psychologically, and depend on what the characters say, wish to say, ought to say or do not say, trusting the author's power to breathe life into his dramatis personae and create characters who are consonant with his own ideas.

Ordinarily, each of these approaches might seem eminently sensible. Yet, though recognizing the considerable achievements of these critical methods, we do not feel any special attraction towards them. We are not sure about their adequacy for any dramatist, but we are quite convinced that they are either unsuited or inadequate, as far as a study of Harold Pinter is concerned. We are starting this essay from a position of radical doubt about Pinter's innovatory technique in the theatre (he is actually, in our view, a very traditional dramatist); of great caution and even suspicion when faced with the intimation of a 'Pinteresque' idea (about the way his ideas are meant to percolate to the various layers of speech, infiltrating the dialogue of his plays; or about the connection between the 'ideas' of the plays and the 'ideology' of the author); of total mistrust with regard to the reliability of his characters and to the existence of an umbilical cord connecting playwright and characters. For us, and apparently also for Pinter, these avenues appear to lead nowhere, ending in a cul-de-sac, a closed system circuitry like the Bolsover Street maze (where you can only enter but never get out), so graphically described in No Man's Land (IV, 120).

The first avenue, the traditional cul-de-sac of compulsory avant-gardisme, presumes that, since modernism has been such a great leap forward over the barrier of naturalism, all successive movements should follow the same athletic model, thrusting themselves over more and more hurdles in order to keep abreast of each innovation. Now we are not denying that the moral and intellectual claims of avant-gardisme and stylistic progress (in spite of the pitfalls of the latter term) have certainly benefited vast areas of the contemporary theatrical scene; but with Pinter there is nothing particularly exciting to learn in terms of dramatic innovations or scenic experiments, as the author himself is more than willing to admit.³ His plays are conceived for an orthodox proscenium stage; they are conventionally based on speech and dialogue with only a marginal inference of physical action; they are written fully and intensely, their author seeming to abhor improvisation, 'happenings', or any kind of aleatory technique⁴ (in this sense Pinter is definitely not a post-modernist playwright). They are set, moreover, in well-defined social milieux, scrupulously avoiding all surrealistic temptations. Above all, they belong quite clearly to a line of perversely well-made plays. (Isn't it perverse to write a play à la Beckett as well made as a boulevard vaudeville or a Noel Coward farce? Yet this is what Pinter does.) What is new in Pinter lies not within the area of his dramatic technique; excellent though this is, it is hardly avant-garde.

The second cul-de-sac is the critic's habitual search for a meaning and a message: the two bonuses that both critics and spectators expect at the end of a theatrical experience. There are writers who have climbed the platform of fame with a locked attache case, secure in their knowledge that some critic will discover the number to open the ciphered lock and reveal the symbolic system of their works. With Pinter, however, as we have already suggested, no matter how fiercely you assault his plays, how thoroughly you shake out their dust with a carpet-beater, hoping to catch the fluttering mote of a meaning, the speck of dirt of a message, you get nothing except the few truisms we all knew before we started. Of course, we emerge from a Pinter play (after watching it or reading it or 'inspecting' it for critical analysis) with a firmer conviction that communication between human beings is difficult and often dangerous; that family ties are loose and often harmful; that social connections are untrustworthy and often deadly; that memory is unreliable and often treacherous; that others are always a mystery to us as we are to them (and as we are even to ourselves); that man is alone in this miserable world. Is that all? Is it worth reading Pinter if we know this beforehand? Critics who are satisfied with this lamentable booty after their message-hunting expeditions are no better than the traditional Macbeth reader who, in the words of Charles Marowitz, thinks that some of the greatest lines of poetry in the English language have been written in order to prove the mind-shattering truth that crime does not pay.⁵ No, the greatest treasure-trove in Pinter's plays is not to be found by rummaging among his ideas: the gold lies at the end of a different rainbow. To put it in the words of Teddy in The Homecoming: 'It's nothing to do with the question of intelligence. It's a way of being able to look at the world. It's a question of how far you can operate on things and not in things'(III, 77). Teddy is being phoney, of course; but this does not alter the fact that, in this particular case, he can teach us a lesson.

The third cul-de-sac is the search for motivations, for psychological or psychoanalytic causes, for some kind of intellectual or emotional rationale that could help us explain why these strange beings, the Pinterian heroes, behave as they do (a normal key for their abnormal behaviour). His characters, however, are most reluctant to submit to the clumsy probing of the critical explorers with their rough surgical instruments. Faced with a Pinter play, critics become disappointed speleologists who find out that there is no hole down which they can lower themselves to discover the mysteries of psychic abysses. In fact the basic premiss of their search is missing. Psychological criticism must always start from a tacit assumption: that the character has an autonomous existence, in either an emotional or an intellectual dimension. This character, conceived by the author as an entity, is filled by osmosis with the complex network of ideas and sensations of his author and is then transferred on to that ideal stage where Hamlet and Peter Pan, Helen of Troy and Humpty Dumpty, Oedipus and Charlie Brown, are all supposed to express the full life of their roles. It is self-knowledge that makes this possible. Within Hamlet, Hamlet knows who Hamlet is and what Hamlet is: that is, what tremendous afterthoughts or lurid under-thoughts lurk behind the awesome thoughts that he utters. The premiss is that at either a conscious or an unconscious level the author knows who his character is, and that this character himself, though fictitious, knows what he is; but the stage can offer only a token of his emotions, a sample of his ideas, a glimpse of his desires, a partial view of his complex psyche. The critic is thus the motive-monger who tries to join the dots and complete the picture, filling the gaps in the overall view, adding motivations to the character's actions, causes to his emotions, pretexts to his whims, reasons to his ideas, fuel to his passions. The critic acts as the author's humble accountant, striving to make sure that the columns of debit and credit are duly filled so that by the end of the play they will neatly match, satisfying the most severe of the playwright's moral and intellectual auditors. In our view this mopping-up operation never seems to work, either with the most uncomplicated and stereotyped characters, or with those bundles of contradictions that crowd the plays of the great masters (from Shakespeare onwards). It doesn't work with Ibsen, though at times this method might be suited to some minor Ibsenesque author such as George Bernard Shaw. Surely it is doomed to fail with the characters in Pinter's plays, who remain haunted by an uncertain identity, endowed with an ever-shifting memory, burdened with a past that behaves like a movable feast.

There is something particularly obtuse in motive-mongering about Pinter's characters, whose surface behaviour seems so often severed from the holy shrine of their inner being. They are superficial and unfathomable in their superficiality (to paraphrase Karl Kraus).⁶ It is futile to analyse these characters as if they had emerged, fully armed, from the brain of Harold Pinter like Athena from the head of Zeus. Bertrand Russell imagined our world as if it had been created one minute ago with a built-in memory of a distant past in all its inhabitants. The psychological critic pursues, though unironically, a similar view, as if the playwright, by typing the letters M—I—C—K on his typewriter, had endowed Mick with a full curriculum vitae. A genuine Pinterian character, however, would not be satisfied with just one c.v.: he would need two or three. Or, better still, none, if he could get away with it. Constitutionally, he aspires to be a voyageur sans bagages, a disturbing passenger of the present tense, travelling light, forgoing the roughage of memory and the ballast of unfulfilled desires. But he never succeeds.

Dispensing with this sort of soul-searching is, nevertheless, partly Utopian. Unfortunately we, the spectators, remain intelligent to a degree — intelligent in the etymological sense of choosing, collating - collecting together scraps of information, making ligaments between the inside and the outside, the literal and the metaphorical, the authorial voice and the spectatorial ear, the primary significance and the secondary suggestion. We are all kleptomaniacs, unable to leave the theatre without having first removed an ashtray and/or a message. It remains very difficult to dis-empathize, to dissociate from a character completely, shunning any pretence of ever understanding his predicament. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: we are aware that an ethical sympathy in a spectator is an unpardonable mannerism,⁷ but we cannot be asked to ignore the endemic diseases of Pinter's country: loneliness and despair; or the chronic ailments of specific characters, such as Stanley's cowardice in The Birthday Party, Davies's insecurity in The Caretaker, Max's sentimental deprivation in The Homecoming, Hirst's death-wish in No Man's Land. Yet we must control ourselves, check our sympathies, silence our inquisitive hearts. Above all, we must not pretend to dig deep. If we satisfy ourselves with what happens there and then, forgoing the time element that exists outside the text, then we will come to appreciate the role that strategy - rather than psychology plays in these characters' behaviour. And even more so in their respective opponents: Goldberg, Mick, Lenny, Spooner. For us, Pinter criticism has a better contribution to make — through our understanding of the strategic purpose of dialogue rather than through our involvement with the characters' emotional needs. We are not being dogmatic, nor are we issuing a critical manifesto of anti-psychologism. We are simply indicating the general direction that our inquiry is going to take.

The death of the author in post-modernist times⁸ has given rise to a corresponding birth of the reader. It is significant, then, that The Birthday Party — despite its initial failure — should, over the years, have become a commercial success, for this is a play which, more than any other on an English stage, heralded the triumphant emergence — or perhaps renaissance — of the reader-participant who contributes to the meaning of the text, and the belated exit of the passive reader, the reader-consumer. Pinter's plays, once labelled 'comedies of menace', are chiefly comedies of elusion, avoidance, withdrawal, mendacity and guile. Because his language is a language of escapist manoeuvring, which studiously avoids the commitment of a conflict or confrontation, it requires a specialized kind of reading, one that is alert to the mercurial wriggles of the protagonists. The audience must be on the lookout for the unexpected twist, the shameless contradiction, the dazzling non sequitur, which are smuggled into the territory of a slow and apparently dull conversation. Nothing is duller per se than a piece of Pinterian conversation: as in Chekhov, the excitement lies in the mental speculation it provokes, not in the dull text itself. It is like conceptual art, where the focus lies on our reaction to the object, not on the object itself. Both Pinter's plays and Pinter's characters boast the fact that they can never be trusted; it is thus fatal to approach them with an open mind, a curious eye, a naive heart. The conventional reader's honesty and integrity can be a handicap when dealing with a master of deception such as Pinter, who must be beaten at his own game. We must fight obscurity with obscurity, deception with deception, guile with guile.

One clue to reading the text is to recognize that all the plays are apparently given over to the singleminded preoccupations of strategy. The Pinterian hero, especially in the early plays, is often as inarticulate as a pig, stumbling pathetically over every second word, covering a pitifully narrow area of meaning with his utterances, blathering through his life. Yet he does not seem to w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General editors' preface
• A note on the texts
• Biographical note
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Games
• 3 Questioning games: the early plays
• 4 Hiding games: The Caretaker
• 5 Critical games: The Homecoming
• 6 Endgames: a period of transition
• 7 Memory games: Old Times, No Man's Land and Betrayal
• 8 Different ball games: The French Lieutenant's Woman and Other Places
• Notes
• Bibliography