The Pinter Ethic

The Erotic Aesthetic

Penelope Prentice

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135575977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The only comprehensive guide to the plays of one of the world's greatest yet most puzzling contemporary dramatists, The Pinter Ethic penetrates the mystery of Harold Pinter's work with compelling and authoritative insights that locate and disclose the primal power of his drama in his characters' powerplay for dominance. With remarkable clarity, Penelope Prentice's close reading of Pinter's work untangles the multiple ambiguities, complex conflicts and contradictory actions which continue to baffle, bewilder, and confound critics and audiences. She reveals that Pinter's plays reflect not a vision of postmodern hopelessness in a world threatening to self-destruct, but provoke unguessed choice and action that enlarge the concept of love and link it to justice. Offering a definitive analysis of Pinter's work--from his early poetry, fiction, interviews, essays and novel The Dwarfs to his most recent play Celebration --Prentice demonstrates why Pinter's work can only be communicated through drama where attitude and intention may count for little, but where action is all.

PART ONE
The Early Work: Power as a Private Affair

Introduction: Pinter’s Achievement—Form and Innovation

What Yeats, Pound, and Eliot did for poetry in the early twentieth century, Harold Pinter later did for drama. He transformed it in ways that have yet to be fully articulated. He leveled easy distinctions between villain and victim, redefining each by rerouting our focus to include understanding, even compassion for both, and in doing so established a basis for an ethic where both bear responsibility. He sounded the realistic speech of ordinary people in spare dialogue rendered poetic and stamped it indelibly his own. His dialogue and its menace, more than any other aspect of his work, have attracted the label “Pinteresque,” suggestive of “Kafkaesque,” and his work is distinguished by being more deeply disturbing and unnerving than almost any other contemporary playwright’s. Yet his plays are simultaneously counterbalanced with that special delight of a high comic wit and a consistently resonant subtext. What is happening on several levels beneath the surface of the text is often more important than what is occurring on the surface. But Pinter remains a master of holding audience attention on level one.

Pinter’s innovations do not stop there. He eliminated the “Who-asked-you’s,” that contrivance of drama whereby two characters enter at the start of a play to supply answers to questions the audience has not asked about an off-stage character or an anticipated or past event. In dispensing with unnecessary exposition, Pinter’s work creates both a seductive mystery and an elliptically concise structure, tighter yet more complex than that of almost any other dramatist. Like any master he trusts his audiences to understand his text and subtext without road signs.

Equally important Pinter has challenged, extended, even changed the structure of contemporary drama on three levels—at the surface, and below: both laterally and vertically. On the surface his plays such as Old Times, where Anna is both present and not present at the opening, Betrayal, begun at the end of a love story, and his filmscript for The French Lieutenant’s Woman, intersticing a nineteenth-century cinema love story with the contemporary love affair between the two actors playing the lovers in the film within the film, are just a few works which have inventively stretched the surface structure in ways that contribute new forms to contemporary drama and film not merely for form’s sake, but to raise profound questions about the nature of time, memory, and perhaps most important, the nature of love.

On two deeper levels, laterally and vertically, Pinter’s plays, expressed through a fractal geometry, have also contributed a highly organic dramatic depth structure.

Pinter’s dominant/subservient conflict which embeds his signature on every breath and beat provides the actuating impulse and basis for all ethical choice in his plays. That conflict, conveyed through the fractal geometry, operates laterally from the smallest element to the play as a whole and vertically from the private to the global levels. The resulting organic structure directly challenges any view of human powerlessness.

Fractal geometry offers a simple, elegant metaphor to describe the tightly organic form which consistently structures Pinter’s work from the earliest to the most recent. Organically, fractal geometry might be compared to the way DNA, encoded in every cell, manifests itself on the structures we can see of a living organism. The term “fractal,” coined in 1975 by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot during his investigations of irregularity and chaos, was devised to describe his conclusion that the degree of irregularity remains constant over different scales; in chaos theory the degree of irregularity a snail might trace following the coastline of England would be the same a geographer might record in mapping it. More simply, fractal geometry exhibits an analogy to crystalline form, where the shape of the invisible crystal at the molecular level bears a shape identical to the macroscopic crystal form we actually see. Fractal geometry’s theory that the degree of irregularity remains constant across scale, elsewhere defined as “self-same over scale,” (Gleick, 98) provides an analog that nicely describes Pinter’s unique lateral and vertical structuring of conflict that provides the essential force in his work.

Laterally, in Pinter’s plays the central conflict for power, inscribed on all elements from the smallest to the largest, is the “self-same” conflict which drives his work across scale to propel each beat, each scene, each act, through the arc of the play as a whole. The lateral structure reveals how a character’s smallest choice and its consequences may have resounding but identical consequences within the larger arc of the whole play’s action.

Vertically, the same dominant/subservient conflict in Pinter’s work serves as the constant which crosses the three levels in which we all live: the private level of self, family, friends and lovers which provides the foundation for all else; the public level of community where we work and play; and finally the global level of world affairs, which in return impinges on all our lives. The vertical structure dramatizes how human choice and action on the private level may have public, even global, repercussions.

Through his multidimensional fractal geometry, Pinter’s plays create a four-dimensional world with a depth and resonance seldom if ever achieved elsewhere with such economy. Chaos theory’s concept of fractals provides a construct that illuminates how the organic structure in Pinter’s work weds the ethic to the aesthetic keeping the ethic in the conflict alive before the audience at all times.

Chaos theory unlocked yet other surprises suggestive for appreciation of Pinter’s work. The logarithms in the fractal geometry used to map the irregularities in chaos theory to measure the onset of turbulence or irregularity in chaos were applied across wildly divergent disciplines: from that point when, for example, cigarette smoke smoothly ascending from a cigarette in an ashtray or water steadily dripping from a faucet becomes irregular, to irregularities in weather patterns, the stock market, the human heart beat, schizophrenic behavior and the occurrence of rime icing on an airplane wing. What once appeared to be chaotic now appears to have a previously unsuspected underlying order, and one great contribution of chaos theory was the discovery of order in chaos: both within a single entity under observation and among disparate entities and systems. Taken together both conclusions (that the degree of irregularity remains the same across scale and the discovery of chaos theory’s application to disparate systems) open access to a fresh perspective in appreciating the ethical implications of the vertical structure of Pinter’s work and its suggestive application to life.

From Pinter’s earliest to his most recent work, the choices characters make that promote destruction privately—from Gus in The Room, to Stanley in The Birthday Party, and more obviously to Jimmy in Party Time, the nameless blindfolded victim in The New World Order and the father and sons in Moonlight—resonate at all levels with repercussions which allow us to see ethical connections between the private and global spheres.¹ The choices Pinter’s characters exhibit are recognizably our own, and chaos theory’s ability to apply fractal geometry to widely divergent systems and disciplines provocatively connects Pinter’s insights into the source and consequences of conflict to ethical implications in life.

What Pinter does with form is remarkable in dramatizing how the final destruction of an individual character is fractally contained in the ongoing dynamic of each momentary and minute conflict in a struggle to achieve respect, love and power. Yet Pinter repeatedly dramatizes how attempts to dominate another inevitably destroy relationships on the private level, organizations on the public level, and governments at the global level. In his most recent work the fractal geometry finally links power and justice with love.

Both the destroyed and destroyer, in all but several most recent plays, bear responsibility for the destruction and the downfall of relationships, revealing at all levels what cannot work and why. Yet through the implications of the fractal geometry Pinter’s work also suggests what might work. His plays simultaneously value the old virtues of love and friendship and promote courage and justice, while they call for and celebrate change in both the definitions of love and justice and in the actions necessary to implement them.

Finally, however, no simple analog can adequately describe how Pinter’s organic integrity extends to include life itself. The range of his organic unity encompasses the pulses in life, a heart that is time, in harmony with the subsurface, subcommunication beat of our existence—our anxieties and fears, not only the fear but the passion and delight. For almost anyone watching plays generally, even the most realistic plays, it is nearly impossible not to be aware at some moment that what is being observed is theatre. To watch Pinter’s work seems to be to watch life itself. Because even the surface action of his work taps into the same sources of action as life, there appears to be no intruding artifice.²

Pinter has done much more than this brief sketch indicates. Any analysis of a single attribute of Pinter’s work is limiting, distorting and may falsify; it may ignore a salient aspect of his work, such as the resonant subtext which also distinguishes Pinter as a dramatist, or it may overlook the often hilarious comedy, or, capturing the wit, neglect the terror beneath, which almost always informs the best comedy. But, because Pinter’s work is so organic in both structure and theme, a deep understanding of almost any essential aspect of his work may take an audience or reader everywhere—to an appreciation of all other significant elements.

A balanced appreciation of Pinter’s achievement and the ethic that bonds his work at center requires comprehension of his values, voice and vision. The Pinter Ethic describes the values fused through voice and action that form the aesthetic which conveys Harold Pinter’s vision.

Pinter’s most extraordinary contribution is his vision. A vision encompasses the totality of a writer’s work, conveying a view of human nature that reflects the cause of human action and subsequent interaction with the world; specifically defined, a vision addresses the question: What actuates human beings? More directly, What motivates characters to act? Are characters driven by selfish ambitions or inspired by ameliorist desires for the welfare of others and the self? Or by both? In drama and in fiction characters may be impelled to act from duty or desire, from exhaustion or despair, from necessity, a preordained fate or even gratuitously from whimsy, without any design but a wayward response to chance. What vision of human action does Pinter reflect?

Pinter’s characters are consistently driven by a desire for love and respect, which ultimately transforms into a struggle for survival. They attempt to maintain a position in the world to gain respect and love through power over others.

The love that drives action in Pinter’s work aligns with the classic definitions of love and friendship defined by Aristotle as a relationship between equals in beauty, strength and wisdom but is most often defined by its absence—as unachievable in dominant/ subservient relations. His work also strains against mere courtly, nineteenth-century, twentieth-century and Hollywood notions of romantic love as not going far enough.³

Pinter’s plays recognize love as a force in destruction whenever the attempt to gain love and respect, used to maintain a relationship, is manifested in the struggle for dominance. That struggle projects itself as the self-same cause for violence and destruction of relationships at all levels. Yet his plays also celebrate love as a driving force toward justice.

What sets Pinter’s work apart from that of almost any other twentieth-century dramatist is that at the center his ethic is wedded to his aesthetic. Aesthetically the struggle for dominance functions as both primary theme and dramatic technique.

Thematically, that struggle provides the axial center which drives all else in the play: themes of sight and blindness, mystery, time, space and reality as well as his special use of comedy. Technically the struggle rivets audience attention throughout. Techniques range from verbal skirmishes to brutal violence and death.

Deeply embedded in the very techniques and themes which create the beauty and power that enthrall are the values and the action raising the questions which ultimately define the ethic: What does it mean to be a good person?

If the first virtue of the virtuous person is to survive (else how can one help others?), then the struggle to assert oneself is absolutely necessary to promote any other virtue. But Pinter’s vision, which reflects a hierarchical, dominator society developed over centuries in Britain, as in Japan, explores the inherent destructive force in that struggle. Hierarchy, maintained so long as most subscribe to it, insured that many people living on a tiny and now crowded island could continue to get along. While some thinkers believe hierarchy is inevitable in all primates, others contend, as Pinter’s work dramatizes, that time has run out on that system and that by its very binary structure it is programmed to self destruct.

Thus the terrible paradox at the core of Pinter’s work dramatizes how the very impulse to survive, when unchecked and driven by a quest for dominance that equates identity with position, may be the very impulse which may destroy all.

What values and action define the ethic in Pinter’s work?

The ethic in Pinter’s plays defines itself, as it must in drama, by action. It is expressed through the values and action held up for audience admiration as best promoting life and welfare of both the characters and audience. Pinter’s recent work, dramatizing increasing concern for action informed by courage, love and justice (which recognizes and respects the welfare of the individual), focuses on those qualities necessary for human survival. But rather than offering exemplars of those life-promoting qualities, which serious post-Renaissance drama and literature rarely does, Pinter’s work often defines those qualities by negation, by showing what action is not ethical and why it does not work.

Key to understanding Pinter’s ethic in his over thirty plays and sketches and most of his sixteen screenplays is the theme of dominant/subservient relationships—one character’s struggle to assert dominance over another. Characters battle for position on the implicit assumption that maintaining or gaining an advantage is required to gain the love and respect of others and to preserve one’s own sense of self-worth, superiority and, ultimately, identit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• General Editor’s Note
• Preface
• The Pinter Ethic: Overview
• Harold Pinter: Biography
• Introduction to the Second Edition: “Fought Against Savage and Pitiless Odds”
• Part One: The Early Work: Power As a Private Affair
• Part Two: The Liminal Plays of the Middle Period
• Part Three: “This Is the End My Friend”: The Lovedeath Apocalyptic Vision Revised: Love, Justice and Power Reclaimed