New World Order of Postmodernism in the Plays of Harold Pinter: Pause at Play

By Saumya Rajan

The book reconnoiters the New World Order of Postmodernism in five plays The Room (1957), The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1965) and Celebration (2000) of Harold Pinter. With culturally structured, incomprehensibly manipulated, dual and fragmented characters, Harold Pinter analyses the ambiguities of political system. It is perhaps the System that forcibly drags Stanley to a world of systems in The Birthday Party. The situation of Ruth in The Homecoming clearly indicates the inevitable grip of this System. The last play Celebration overtly ridicules the very political system we approve of wherein the strategy consultants and the corporate people define the organized mechanism of this SYSTEM!

The internalization of power which the power structures of societies and politics possess, appears largely in his plays, providing postmodernism its duality. Pinter offers us a true picture of our postmodernist culture an apocalyptic world at the edge of civilization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Jul 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543702262

Saumya Rajan

Being a DPhil in English Literature from the University of Allahabad, trained in Incorporating Gender Concerns in Public Policy from the Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi, India and certified in Global Diplomacy from the University of London & SOAS, University of London, Saumya Rajanis an author of Common Shadows, Guerilla Ignition, USA and has been widely published in the British Council Sampad UK, Estrade, Solstice Initiative, Ireland, The Poetic Lounge, USA etc. She works with the Government of India and specializes in 20thCentury English literature and English print and MOOC material development.

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Copyright © 2018 by Saumya Rajan.

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter 1   Abridgement

Chapter 2   A Prologue to Postmodernism

Chapter 3   Congestion of The Room

Chapter 4   The Birthday Party Celebrations

Chapter 5   Plight of The Caretaker

Chapter 6   Welcome The Homecoming

Chapter 7   Celebration of the End

Chapter 8   Epilogue

A Select Bibliography

Dedicated

to

my lifeline- parents

Genuine thanks are due to Prof. Craig N. Owens (College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English, Drake University, Des Moines I.A., & Secretary, The International Harold Pinter Society, USA) and Prof. Judith Roof (Department of English, Rice University & Vice-President, The International Harold Pinter Society, USA) for their invaluable suggestions and intermittent support during the writing of this work.

Foreword

In this astute presentation of five plays by Harold Pinter, Saumya Rajan demonstrates the ways Pinter’s plays engage, enact, and adapt contemporaneous notions of postmodernity. Tracing several postmodern tropes through Pinter’s The Room (1957), The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1965), and Celebration (2000), Rajan shows both the ways these plays evince the development of postmodern tropes in Pinter’s work and the extent to which postmodern ideas occupy the core of Pinter’s dramatic method.

Focusing on the ways various characters accept, push against, feel they have escaped, and remain inevitably bound within what Rajan calls, the System, the study’s analyses envision the plays as establishing a postmodern diegesis where in fact there is no escape from forces larger than oneself or even from the dangers of really knowing what is going on. Noting the plays’ deployments of modes of fragmentation, pauses, silence, and willed, perpetuated ignorance of the larger forces of greed and self-interest at play in the world, Rajan’s analyses of these key texts establish their engagement not only with the ontological conditions of contemporary existence, but also with the ways such forces shatter, alienate, and manipulate average denizens of modern London.

Noting as well the ways Pinter’s plays, though terse and economical, also layer multiple texts and subtexts as a method by which the implicit power relations of the plays emerge, Rajan’s study traces these sub-texts as they collude to produce the menacing threat that often accompanies and characterizes these plays. At the same time, these layers enact the complexity of a postmodern weltanschauung that seems to provide a distracting cover for characters’ processes of denial, delusions of freedom, perceptive fears, and suppressions of thought.

All of these dramatic processes, Rajan observes, illustrate the ways Pinter’s plays mark and shift theatrical practice from the ‘Pataphysics and absurdism of the 1950s to the more politically attentive practices of later twentieth-century theatre. Implicit in this is not only an evolution from more contractually-based relations between characters as well as between the stage and audience, but also a theatrical method that deploys the break-down in these relations as well as the ensuing personal and cultural dissolutions as a means to enact postmodern culture itself.

In large, Rajan asserts, Pinter’s plays, as illustrated by these well-chosen five, not only re-inscribe theatre in distinctly postmodern terms, but also expose and comment upon the postmodern aspects that undergird post-world war two visions of Great Britain: the dissolution of what Jean-François Lyotard calls legitimating metanarratives in favor of fragmented mini-narratives, the constant flux of layers of perception, explanation, and excuse, the silence that bares the loss of even the idea of individual empowerment, and finally the naked truth of this new postmodern vision that emerges in Pinter’s plays’ deft re-arrangement of the traditions of theatre. By considering the ways and means by which these five plays perform a postmodern existence, Rajan’s study itself performs an apt and insightful vision of Pinter’s work.

Judith Roof

Rice University

USA

Chapter - I

Abridgement

Harold Pinter, born in 1930 at 19 Thistlewaite Road in Hackney, North London, son of Jack and Frances Pinter is a renowned English playwright, actor, poet, director, political thinker activist and screenwriter. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005.

This book explores postmodernist aspects in five plays of Harold Pinter. The five plays are: The Room (1957), The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1965) and Celebration (2000). In this opening note, I would like to state the reasons of why I have chosen these five plays. The reasons are:

(a) Right from the first play The Room, Pinter asserted minute postmodernist contents in miniature, the elements of which were beyond the understanding of an ordinary man. This was a one-act play with its frigid, menacing and vexed local situation, intermixed with witty dialogue, ambiguity, pauses, silences, blackout, menace and irony; an idea that developed in his first full-length play The Birthday Party. So, an analysis of The Room is felt necessary in order to know what is at the roots of his fully developed dramas.

(b) The Birthday Party that did not get recognition in the beginning was highly acclaimed by Harold Hobson, one of the celebrated critics of the twentieth century. This play in its three acts unfolds our postmodern existence and explores how the structures of ‘System’ bind an individual. Goldberg and McCann; the emissaries of this ‘System’ drag and abduct Stanley from his own isolated world created in Meg’s boarding house to the unavoidable world of ‘Systems’. Here, Pinter is a postmodernist with a difference. Hence, this is an important play to discuss.

(c) The Caretaker picked here after The Birthday Party was his first commercial success. It is a play that explores the situation of an impoverished old man Davies and two brothers. The play exhibits their strife to come to terms with their fragmented situations and selves in this self-contesting contemporary culture. Therefore, this play required a study.

(d) The Homecoming with its unconventional plot shocked everybody. The play depicts an unconventional female-Ruth- who subjugates the all-male dominance. Ruth erases all endeavours of males to classify her boundaries.

The feminist assertion in this play exhibits postmodernism’s ambiguous nature in a different way where Ruth in the process of asserting herself appears to be entrapped in the dominant super structure of the society. Ruth is the one who gets power in her hands. What she thought she has freely chosen was actually imposed upon her. At this point, I stand by Mireia Aragay’s side, who believes that she is merely an object in the men’s homosocial traffic, ‘inside’ rather than ‘outside’¹. The Homecoming exhibits both strengths and the shortcomings of the postmodernist conceptualization of the political². Hence, a proper study of this play was needed to expose the postmodernist duality, which Pinter recorded regarding this culture.

(e) Celebration, the last play of Pinter registered the New World Orders’ postmodernist politics and social ambience. The play typified the attitude of postmodernist human beings, who despite their lives’ fragmentation enjoy and celebrate.

Yes, they know, they are in the middle of life’s mystery, but they also know that life is a name of continuation, and in this way, the show must go on. Pinter overtly satirizes the contemporary political and social ambience through the depiction of the peaceful strategy consultants, the wives who offer kisses in charities, the plump young secretary, the banker who exploits secretaries, the maitresse de hotel who understands no difference between sex and food, the restaurateur who jibs at nothing and the Waiter who sees himself in the middle of life’s mystery and continually satisfies himself with frequent nostalgic interjections.

The plays of Pinter reflect his politics in various ways. For him, political theatre now is very important as it deals with the real world. His plays are not political observations but are violent living things³. To a large extent, I believe that his plays are out and out political from the very beginning. His plays analyze the ambiguities of political systems. It was perhaps the ‘System’ that forcibly dragged Stanley to a world of systems in The Birthday Party. Ruth’s situation in The Homecoming clearly indicates this System’s inevitable grip. The last play Celebration overtly ridicules the very political system we approve. The strategy consultants and the corporate people in Celebration define the System’s organized mechanism. John Pilger very rightly says that he is a writer with a voice⁴.

The Nobel Lecture of Pinter states his political stand very outrightly. In his lecture, he criticizes the U.S. foreign policy’s low intensity conflict⁵ and full spectrum dominance⁶, via which control is exercised on weaker nations. Pinter also mocks the British government’s involvement with the American strategies of dominance. These policies kick the United Nation’s international law and peace like anything. The American strategy makers spread worldwide violence in the name of democracy. Pinter states:

The crimes of United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless . . . has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.⁷ The power that is exercised upon all of us, to a great level remains passively negative. The politicians believe in the maintenance of power and nothing else. George W. Bush can say to the world what Pinter believes he can say:

I am not barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. . . . I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it.⁸

The same is the case with the so-called peaceful strategy consultants who in Celebration proudly assert that they don’t carry guns. In his dramas, the real and the unreal coexist. The plays of Pinter are always politically engaged in a subtle way. His plays are almost allegories, of human condition⁹ that aim to find the reality of our existences. These plays attempt to re-establish what is so nearly lost to us - the lost dignity of man¹⁰. The internalization of power that the power structures of societies and politics possess appears largely in his plays. This is what, provides postmodernism its duality. We see a gradual development of Pinter in terms of postmodernism in these five plays that grows from The Room and The Birthday Party develops in The Caretaker and The Homecoming and then projects the New World Order’s complex political and social notes of warning and dualism in the last play Celebration.

Pinter in his early plays seemed to be very indirect in making his political comments if compared to the later plays where, he is overt and confident. But whether to talk of early or later plays there is a same recognition of what is at stake in speaking out directly, speaking indirectly or refusing to speak.¹¹ The characters are not rounded characters. They are the negotiable ones. They are unreliable, self-concerned and culturally- structured. The characters exhibit the present culture of late capitalism. The plays of Pinter elucidate life’s mystery and strong postmodernist clashes. The characters through their language, try to acquire verbal and territorial dominance. They all hide their real selves in order to assert their manipulated selves. Stylistically, these plays are marked by dramatic pauses, silences, three dots, black outs, strategic timings, manipulative ambiguities, menace and irony.

The plays of Pinter possess postmodernist hyperreal sensations¹² that are always there in the characters’ verbal and non-verbal workings. Pinter provides double focus on personal and political aspects of powers relations throughout his life¹³. Through this, he generates a language which adjusts differences and contractual commitments. As a postmodern thinker, he lays bare, the actual position of our culture. In this course of action, he tries to stabilize and reorder things at least for a while.

The very second chapter introduces postmodernism, briefly in which I have tried to put postmodernist theories of Jean Francois Lyotard, Ihab Hassan, Fredric Jameson, Brian Mc Hale, Christopher Butler, Simon Malpas and few more together and relate it to Pinter, otherwise the book would never have been completed. The Pinter Review, Borderlands e-Journal, Sociology, Superfluities and many scholarly readings, have contributed to this study.

I am aware of my shortcomings and inadequacies that remain inescapable while discussing this vast corpus of Postmodernism and Pinter. At the end, whatever faults remain in this small study

Chapter - II

A Prologue to Postmodernism

Postmodernism with its emphasis on style and means of representation is often read and analyzed as a successor to modernism and a reservoir of literary and cultural movements that emerged across Europe and North America during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Within postmodernism itself we can notice various strands with raised heads. Being a cultural theory it attaches itself with every area and aspect of this culture.

The term postmodernism has abruptly and overtly rejected all attempts of its confinement within a specific line. All endeavours that have tried to define it have resulted in infinite debate. I will discuss various key thinkers such as Jean Francois Lyotard, Ihab Hassan, Jean Baudrillard, Jurgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon and others who contributed their key ideas to postmodernism. Their key ideas and contradictions will atleast provide a provisional understanding of this fluid cultural theory. With these key ideas, I will draw this theory’s connection with various fields and areas such as art, architecture, politics, identity and many more to know its all-pervasive impact. This will also make some concepts of literary postmodernism clear at some level as literature reflects the changes in society. Although, any attempt to encompass this cultural theory is bound to fail, as it remains in a constant state of flux, till date. This chapter simply provides, a glimpse of provisional understanding, regarding this vague cultural theory.

Before coming to key thinkers, I will trace the lineage of postmodernism by reviewing the processes of literary theories and line of thoughts that define the outcome of postmodernism.

Modernism is a literary theory in which traditional forms of art, literature, faith, and everyday life were discarded as it encouraged the re-examination of everything with the goal of replacing the old with the new.

Postmodernism, which is related to the term-modernism, suggests something ‘after’ modernism as it has post attached to it. The discourse of the post sometimes gives us an apocalyptic sense of the passing of the old and the upcoming of the new. Postmodernism, without a universally accepted short and simple definition is sometimes called anti-modernism. It is also sometimes seen as the continuation of the features of modernism. Modernism brought down much of the structure of the previous age. Here few lines by Peter Barry are worth quoting. In Modernism:

. . .melody and harmony were put aside in music; direct pictorial representations were avoided in painting in favour of degrees of abstraction . . . the overall result of these shifts is to produce a literature which seems dedicated to experimentation.¹⁴

Modernism emerged due to one of the historical factors i.e. the First World War. The start of the modern technology gradually changed the perception of Europeans toward their authorities and made them question the ‘establishment’.

Modernity is also called the Modern project, the Modernist project or simply the Enlightenment, which is normally used to refer to the eighteenth century in Europe, particularly France. Ihab Hassan himself suggested that there are three forms of artistic change in the last hundred years: avant-garde, high modernism and postmodernism. It is really important to note here what Austin Quigley in his essay, Pinter, politics and postmodernism opined. Quigley extended Hassan’s argument and said that all three voices can be found in any one author or in the work of a decade, but what is different, is the representation ratio of these voices that has changed gradually from the dominance of avant-garde modernism, through the dominance of high modernism, to the dominance of postmodernism.

In this chapter, I don’t intend to dwell at length on the theory of modernism. The avant-garde modernism- the most radical one- out rightly rejected the status quo and increased a sense of struggle, complexity with a demand for replacing anything that existed. On the other hand high modernism with voices of Eliot, Yeats, Pound and many more were more concerned with imparting the new than with refuting the old.

Along with events like War, were the discoveries of science and other disciplines which overturned the old beliefs and conventions. Freud’s theory of the unconscious disclosed a new world to us, a new perception of the self. Jung’s ‘collective unconsciousness’ suggested that human beings across cultural and racial barriers share a common memory. Modernism was a reaction against the normal perceived world-view of the time. But gradually it began to be felt that modernism itself had certain limitations and it still relied on some elemental concepts