Harold Pinter's Progress from Modernism toPostmodernism With Special Emphasis on Three Selected Plays: The Room, Betrayal, One For The Road

Introduction:

     Harold Pinter (b.Oct.10, 1930, London - d. Dec.24, 2008, London) was the most influential, provocative, and poetic dramatist of his generation.Occupying parallel careers as a poet, actor, director, screenwriter, and political activist, he was well-known as the most important postwar British playwright. Pinter’s writing career spanned over 50 years; in 2005, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Pinter was continuously innovative in his use of the theatrical form, while his works remained remarkably consistent in its ethical and epistemological concerns. Moreover, he was best remembered by his ability to create dramatic poetry out of everyday speech, which was considered as his greatest contribution to modern drama.

     The greatest power of most of Pinter’s plays originates from the truth of a character’s feeling that always lies in the unspoken words or in what is known as “Pinter’s pauses”. His plays are noted for their use of understatement to convey the substance of a character’s thought which often exists in several layers beneath, and contradicts, his speech. For Pinter, the drama is not inherent in the speech of the characters existed on the stage but rather in the unknown world in the invisible end of most of his plays. Since there is always, in Pinter’s plays, a speech beneath the surface speech, a feeling beneath the surface feeling, a thought beneath the surface thought, a character beneath the surface character, a drama beneath the surface drama, and a world beneath the surface world.

     As a controversial playwright, any attempt to place Pinter under the rubric of modernism or postmodernism is doomed to failure, as most of his plays include certain features of both movements. Like modernists, Pinter uses stage language and appears to present a typical human drama, but he, like postmodernists, is much more interested in staging the unspoken. Also, like modernists, his plays illustrate the power of language, but like postmodernists, Pinter stresses the unreliability of language throughout his plays. On the one hand, the topics of Pinter’s plays deal with the modernist principle of negation; on the other hand, his plays deal with the aesthetics of postmodernism. Hence, it can be said that Pinter achieved an international renown because of his significant and original contributions to the development of the aesthetics of drama from modernism to  postmodernism.

     The main aim of this research is to highlight the progress of Pinter's dramatic writing from the modernist features, which were familiar with the audience at that time, to the postmodern principles in order to portray the dilemma of the contemporary man. Through his innovative Pinteresque technique, Pinter reveal the typical postmodern human predicament in his dramas. Strikly speaking, Pinter proceedded from the modernist tradition of the early Twentieth century to a postmodernist mode, necessitated by his pseudo-realistic handling in the 1960s.

     The selected plays represent the three stages of Pinter's progress as a dramatist. Many critics divide Pinter’s career into three periods: his early plays were called “comedies of menace”, his middle plays were obsessed with memory, and his later plays which dealt with overtly political themes. However, drawing an iron curtain for the works of a multidimensional dramatist like Pinter whose plays encompass different modes of writing is almost impossible. The Room represents the comedy of menace, Betrayal is a memory play, One for the Road introduces an explicit political theme.

     On the other hand, the three selected plays, serving the main aim of this research, are ideal examples for the progress of Printer's dramatic writing from the aesthetics of modernism to the main principles of postmodernism. Those notable plays highlight how Pinter employs the modernist elements to serve his presentation of the postmodern human life. Hence, those selected masterpieces elaborate the unique Pinteresque approach that contributes to the progress of drama from modernism to postmodernism.       

The Early Pinter:

       In contrast to the typical feature of the British theatre which considered that the playwright’s primary task is to provide neat resolutions to moral problems, Pinter’s early plays utilized the comedy of menace in an attempt to refuse the typical generic conventions of comedy and tragedy. This can clarify the great hostility of Pinter’s early plays.

According to Susan Hollis Merritt, it is Irving Wardle who “first applies this label [comedy of menace] to Pinter’s work” (225). Focusing on Pinter’s first masterpiece The Birthday Party (Written in 1957 and Produced in 1958), Wardle describes Pinter as “a writer dogged by one image – the womb”. For Wardle, such type of “comedy enables the committed agents and victims of destruction to come on and off duty; to joke about the situation while oiling a revolver; to display absurd or endearing features behind their masks of implacable resolution”. In Pinter’s early plays, menace stands for destiny, that destiny “handled in this way – not as an austere exercise in classicism, but as an incurable disease which one forgets about most of the time and whose lethal reminders may take the form of a joke – is an apt dramatic motif for an age of conditioned behavior in which orthodox man is a willing collaborator in his own destruction” (Wardle, “Comedy of Menace”, 33).

     Acknowledging the great influence of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka, particularly on his early works, Pinter’s early plays begins with an apparently innocent situation which gradually becomes threatening by some entity or person outside the situation itself so it looks absurd since the characters behaves in an inexplicable ways whether by the audience or even by one another. Although paying an apparent attention to the description of the accurate details of the working-class settings in his first two decades plays, Pinter’s main purpose in his early plays is to comment on the absurdity of human life and on the alienation of postmodern man which seem obvious in his inability to achieve communication with his human fellows. Although focusing on two of the major trends of modernism, that are realism and naturalism, Pinter aims at emphasizing their failure in the postmodern world because of the impossibility of communication.

Middle Stage:

     While the first phase of Pinter’s career includes his early plays like The Room (1957), The Birthday Party (1958),  The Dumb Waiter (1960), The Caretaker (1960), and The Homecoming (1964), his middle stage that is called “memory plays” includes Landscape (1968), Silence (1969), Night (1969), Old Times (1970), No Man’s Land (1975), and Betrayal (1978). All such plays of his middle phase share one central concern that is, memory. Pinter created an innovative structure for those plays which utilizes a unique dramaturgy that focuses on the past in the present.

     In contrast to the setting of his early plays which mostly take place in closed private rooms, the middle plays often take place in the public space of a pub. His middle plays represent the world-creating properties of memory, two or three characters recall remembrances or recollections about their shared past. This can indicate an engagement in a complex mode of self-presentation where emotions and expedients intersect, moment by moment, to exert control over the present. In this phase of his career, Pinter narrows in on two essential questions that determine how we experience our lives: what we remember about the past and what we know about the present. Moreover, through the conflicting memories of his characters, Pinter represents different versions of the same story without giving any clue to his audience about the true one. For Pinter, it is terribly difficult to define the past since imagination can be truth. Hence, those plays do not only confuse the past with the present, but also confuse truth with imagination. Hence, those plays highlight the postmodern principle of the multiplicity of truth.

     There is no doubt that Pinter’s playwriting introduced an implacable imagination which changed the landscape of the British theatre. It is of significance importance to note that Pinter’s depiction of his characters usually begins with the modernist notion of a stable authentic identity and a secure essentialized self. However, the sequential events of the plays prove that maintaining a sense of a secure identity is impossible, which is a typical postmodernist feature. While beginning his painting of his major characters by constructing a modern coherent subject, Pinter ends with a postmodern hybrid identity. Hence, his works emphasizes how the modernist clear and detailed images of the characters have been developed into the postmodernist fragmented images of the multiple perspectives of the same characters. By the same token, Pinter, in his memory plays, uses one of the major trends of modernism, that is expressionism, whose typical trait is to present the world from a solely subjective perspective while concluding with multiple presentations of the world, so the futility of meaning which is a typical postmodernist principle.

A Postmodern Pinter: 

     In the later stage of his career, Pinter’s plays became more overtly political since they tend to act as a critique of oppression, torture, and abuse of human rights. Many critics share the point of view that most of Pinter’s plays often allude to the Holocaust that occurred during the Nazi Regime of World War II. In his later political plays, all the themes that recur explicitly reflect his Jewish heritage. Broadly speaking, Pinter is fighting for the victim, for the minority, and for the abused. Steven H. Gale depicts Pinter’s plays as reflecting “a picture of contemporary man beaten down by the social forces around him, based on man’s failure to communicate with other men”(17). Such depiction highlights a type of social oppression that can be traced back to Pinter’s Jewish background.

     Overwhelming by the terrifying experience of war, Pinter’s strong political point of view arouses from his deep feeling about the war. Pinter states, “I felt very strongly about the war. And still do, if you see what I mean. After all, I wasn’t a child by the time it ended; though I was when it began”(Gross, 39).As a victim of Anti-Semitism, Pinter recalls a scene of his childhood experience, “I was evacuated – at the age of nine – and that left a deep mark on me, as I think it did on all children who were evacuated. To be suddenly scooped out of one’s home and to find oneself hundreds of miles away – as I did, in Cornwall – was very strange” (Esslin, Pinter at Sixty, 38). In spite of the fact that the war has been ended, the everlasting experience of fear continually haunting Pinter. As Gale asserts that “when Pinter began his playwriting career in 1957, however, one idea was foremost in his mind as a major theme: fear” (Emphasis is mine, Gale, 18). For instance, important thematic element that recurs in many of Pinter’s plays is the knock at the door which is a reminiscent of the fear and powerlessness felt by the Jewish communities in Europe during the Nazi Regime. Another example, most of Pinter plays are shaped by living in the shadow of the Holocaust as they subconsciously represent the same conflict while masking it within everyday situations.

Political Pinter:

     While dealing with “the intricacies of domestic power” in the first two phases of his career as a playwright, Pinter’s “more secure private life enabled him to turn his attention to power-games in the wider public arena”. This took place after his second marriage with Antonia Fraser who “undoubtedly helped to sharpen and intensify his fascination with politics”. According to Michael Billington, the authorized bibliographer of Harold Pinter, “it was only in the mid-1980s that [Pinter] started to express his strong feelings about torture, human rights and the double-standards of the Western democracies in dramatic form” (“Harold Pinter”, The Guardian, 7). One For The Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), New World Order (1991), Party Time (1991), Moonlight (1993), Ashes to Ashes (1996), and Celebration (1999) share, more or less, the same political views.

     Moreover, “Pinter in his later years also lost no opportunity, either in the press, on television or in public meeting, to attack what he saw as the cynicism and the double standards of the Western democracies and, in particular, the brutal pragmatism of US foreign policy” (Ibid, 8). The climax of his political attack against oppression can be seen in his speech after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. As the title of the speech suggests “Art, Truth & Politics”, Pinter focuses on the process of searching for truth that lies between art and politics.

     In spite of the fact that truth is the ultimate aim of any work of art, Pinter asserts that “Truth in drama is forever elusive” as “the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in the dramatic art. There are many”. For Pinter, “the search for truth” in art is a continuous process as it “can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed.” That is due to the fact that “language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction”. On the other hand, truth in politics must be avoided at all cost, as “objectivity is essential”. However, Pinter concludes his speech by claiming that the search for truth behind the political power is “a crucial obligation” in order to restore “the dignity of man”. Pinter is enthusiastically dared to say that “the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road” so “language is actually employed to keep thought at bay”. Since the most sovereign country of the world, the United States’ “political philosophy contains a number of contradictory elements”(1-10), Pinter emphasizes that:

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of [the artist’s] territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.(3)

     Whether concerned with the state abuse of power or with the micro-politics of human relations that form the key motif in all of his works, the majority of Pinter’s plays anatomize the brute reality and the language of power, so there is no real contradiction between his early – apparently apolitical – plays and the more explicit political plays of the later stage of his career. Beginning every play – just like a typical modern dramatist – with an attempt to search for the truth, Pinter ends with the postmodernist principle of the multiplicity of truth. Moreover, the interweaving of some forms of popular culture with the modernist motifs that reflect that his admiration of Kafka and Beckett produces a suspenseful drama of interrogation, evasion, and silence that exposes a crisis of subjectivity at the core of the human identity. However, his works illustrate one of the most important postmodern trends which is that all types of communication are ambiguous and subject to multiple ways of interpretation.

Pinter's Use of Language: 

     The cornerstone of Pinter’s creativity is his innovative use of language: in spite of illustrating the power of language, which is an essential modernist feature, he continuously stresses its unreliability that refers to the postmodern concept of indeterminacy of language. Pinter’s experimentation with language is primarily modern as his work is indebted to a naturalist/realist tradition in that his dialogues are often so close to everyday speech, however, he developed his use of language to include some postmodern elements in form and function. On the surface level of his works, Pinter, like modernists, uses stage language that seems to depict a typical human drama, but he is actually much more interested in staging the unspoken that reveals deeper psychological and philosophical dimensions in his characters. In this sense he must be belonged to the postmodern movement whose major characteristic is skepticism in language. Deeply influenced, from his first play to his most recent one, by the uncertainty of the modern fast-changing world as well as by the insecurity resulted from his Jewish background experience, Pinter stresses the existence of postmodern skepticism in language, meaning, and communication in real life.

     A great example of the inventiveness of his language is “Pinter’s Pause” which established Pinter as one of the most renowned dramatists of the Twentieth Century to the point that his name entered the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: “Pinteresque”. It is defined by the Online OED as “Pinter’s plays are typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses”. “Pinter’s Pauses” are important ingredients in making his drama difficult to be categorized. Also, it is a crucial technique in Pinter’s plays that conveys the notions of alienation, absurdity, and the illusive nature of meaning in postmodern real life. Pinter wants to represent a real extract of life in his plays with all its confusing language and indefinite meaning. Moreover, Pinter’s works are characterized by its modernist principle of the systematic resistance to meaning-making which emphasizes his postmodern distrust in semantic fixity. As a natural consequence, Pinter left the whole space of interpretation to his audience which stresses the postmodern principle of the multiplicity of interpretation.

     Unlike traditional plays where everything was explained by the characters or the author, in Pinter’s plays, speech is completed with pauses, trailing off into endless thoughts.The dialogues of Pinter’s plays seems inconsequential since beneath the forth of conversation lies a deep well of psychological needs and neurosis. The depiction of his characters depends mainly on internalization as deeply inside them there are great volcanic emotions which have been unexpressed. Influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett, Pinter utilizes the strategy of engaging the audience into the events of his plays in order to be active participants in their interpretations to break the obvious illusion of the fourth wall in the theatre. Like modernists, Pinter begins with using language as a strategy to build human relationships as his characters are talking to maintain human contact in order to keep themselves going on. However, Pinter, like postmodernists whose general philosophical implication is that language is unreliable, meaning is slippery, existence is absurd, and truth is not absolute, ends with showing that language is a strategy to destroy human relationships that is shown in his confused dialogues, ambiguous meaning, inconsequential communication, and endless interpretations.

Pinter's Postmodern Themes:

     In general, there are two postmodern persistent themes that run through all of Pinter’s work which deeply connect all of them: the first is the lack of distinction between real and unreal, true and false. He realized such theme from the beginning of his career as a playwright and asserted it in the opening lines of his Nobel Prize speech:

In 1958 I wrote the following:

‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: what is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realizing that you have done so.But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in the dramatic art. There are many. These truth challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost. (1)