By 1960 a multitude of new realities arose, presenting “modernism” with a daunting series of challenges. These “new realities” called into question Euro-American postwar dominance of the world stage. The Cold War and subsequent collapse of communism in 1989; the rapid ascendency of China, India, Brazil, and other nations as cultural and economic powers; the Vietnam War circa 1964–1974; the spread of AIDS from 1980 to the present; a swiftly changing global and technological landscape; financial bubbles and fiscal free falls; and the emergence of social justice for minorities, women, the poor, and other oppressed peoples (and its reactionary antitheses), created a new “modernism” unlike anything before. The rise of communication by way of computer and the Internet linked the world in ways never previously experienced. We became more intimate and knowledgeable of each other at a pace and speed previously unimaginable. Our abilities to communicate transformed into action, as the barriers between people dismantled. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, and other works, Jürgen Habermas posits the theory of “communicative action,” whereby he describes a “binding force of intersubjective understanding and reciprocal recognition.” The rational potential for cross-border contact and intersubjective understanding, particularly through technology, informed the possibility of communicating “into dimensions of historical time, social space, and body-centered experiences.”3 Yet, despite this formidable communicative apparatus facilitating openness and availability, the idea of “strangers” – the notion that we hardly communicate despite technology – inspires the 40-year period under investigation. Dramatists illuminate the vivid paradox that the more we communicate the less we understand each other, and our technical capacity to extend our communicative reach ironically diminishes empathy. We are “strangers” – as reflected in the quotes beginning this chapter – in ways we have never thought imaginable.
Comparing Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter illustrates several concerns of this book: how a break between modern drama prior to 1960 (modern drama taken up in Volume I) and post-1960 (postmodern) drama took hold; how a continuance of prior modernism prevailed and evolved during the last 40 years of the twentieth century; and how the relationship of, and differences between, postmodernism and modernism are reciprocal as well as antithetical. As a consequence, there are two modernisms at work here: the continuance of previous modernist ideas and a rebellious “postmodern” drama. Relations between the two ideas are complicated, containing mutuality and antagonism. The genesis of a historical phenomenon is always a challenging topic; one can find forerunners in the near and even distant past. The dramatic dialogues by Williams and Pinter quoted above exemplify thus a “pseudo-split”: both lines of dialogue arrive similarly at the end of their respective plays and both raise the specter of “stranger-ness.” Yet each playwright undertakes separate intentions in their usage of the term “stranger.”
In Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche arrives at her sister Stella’s New Orleans apartment only to find herself unwelcomed by her belligerent and territorially protective brother-in-law Stanley. Throughout the play Stanley and Blanche compete for Stella’s attention and support. Blanche is disappointed in her sister, expecting more refinement and education from Stella’s spouse. Stanley is frustrated as well, his feelings exacerbated by Blanche’s intrusive (indeed, threatening) presence and her alcoholism (she consumes his liquor liberally). The conflict between them over the “soul” of Stella amplifies throughout the play, leading to Stanley’s “final solution” to her presence by raping her. When she fails to convince her sister and neighbors of Stanley’s savagery, Blanche, already frail, succumbs to a nervous breakdown and is dispatched to a sanatorium. Her remark, “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers,” is directed to the empathetic psychiatrist who offers his arm to Blanche in lieu of a straitjacket. The statement is poetical as well as political, noting that without family, community, or government intervention via social services, Blanche and other overly sensitive and “useless appendages” – people physically or psychologically challenged and incapable of surviving on their own – are left to depend on “strangers” for charity and kindness.
Williams, like many prototypical pre-1960 modernists, cleaves to the determining defiance of bourgeois values and attacks middle-class security as false paradigms of harmony. Williams scorns capitalism, inculpating its rapacious greed and insensitivity to the helpless (Blanche, for instance, or Laura in Williams’s The Glass Menagerie). Furthermore, the ability to clarify his critique of society depends largely on the exchange between Blanche and the doctor; between them and the audience reside a mutual understanding or Habermasian “communicative action.” Blanche’s “speech-act” is immediately understood by the Psychiatrist; he removes the straitjacket and extends his arm in a gesture of empathy. Blanche has “always” depended on strangers for survival, for random acts of “kindness,” relying on communal reciprocity and communicative action that echoes Habermasian social theory.
Habermas builds his concept of communicative action on the linguistic “speech-act” theory of J.L. Austin, who asserts a distinction between “performative” and “constative” sentences. Performative “speech-act” utterances, Austin contends, are words or communications that perform “an action” (saying “I do” at a wedding, for instance, transforms the bride–groom relationship), resulting in reciprocal, mutually understood change (we therefore “do things” with words); constative utterances report facts but hardly change reality.4 Blanche’s words “change” the dynamic of her relationship with the Psychiatrist, making her text a “communicative action.” Habermas stresses five facets of speech-act–communicative action theory in order for a rational exchange of ideas to occur – and each facet is germane to the final episode in Streetcar:
When Blanche says “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers” audiences understand not merely the empathy involved, but its communicative action: Blanche’s words “performatively” change the relationship between herself and the Psychiatrist, creating comprehension, validity, rationality, shared values, agreed-upon trust, empathy, and mutual understanding between characters as well as audiences. There is a moral imperative imbedded in the phrase: the consequences of warehousing Blanche to the impersonal institutionalization of a psychiatric ward are not merely social, they are emotional, political, and psychological as well. The play’s aesthetic and moral foundation depends on critiquing alienation and disenfranchisement – that is, her abandonment – while supporting mutuality, trust, and communal bonds. Blanche’s performative relationship with the Psychiatrist forges expressive outrage against a “system” that abandons the helpless while simultaneously defends the empathy between mutually understanding communicators, emphasizing the core of Tennessee Williams’s socialist politics.
For Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, nothing in language is certain and certainly nothing changes. Moral and political issues move through the slipstream of porous, ambiguous, and primarily “ironic” contingencies. Morality is a choice rather than an imperative; if circumstances change, morality changes too. There is no agreed-upon trust, nor immutable morality, but instead a fungible and nimble set of circumstances and relationships requiring moral relativism and interpretation – or, to quote Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertion that has echoed throughout postmodernism: “There are no facts, only interpretations.”6 Not only are characters in Pinter’s play ethical free agents and interpreters of meaning, but language barely communicates; words are exchanged, but understanding is obtuse. Like A Streetcar Named Desire, in The Homecoming a family member (Teddy with his wife, Ruth), returns to the fold. Teddy’s relationship to Ruth is based ...
