Profile
The playwright as a dissenter
SACHIDANANDA MOHANTY
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The Nobel laureate's dramatic genius rivals his concern for the world around him.
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Writer and activist: Pinter outside his home after getting the news of his Nobel. Photo: AP
I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.
Harold Pinter, The Guardian, August 3, 2001.
IN the fall of 1977, reading English literature at Golden Threshold, Sarojini Naidu's former home in Hyderabad, was a heady experience. The Emergency had been lifted; there was freedom in the air and we had celebrity poets like Shiv K. Kumar, Meena Alexander and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra as our teachers. While many texts vied for our attention, what stood out the most was "The Home Coming" by Harold Pinter, this year's Nobel Prize winner in literature.
Harold Pinter's drama came to us, (and even now does to most), as a radical challenge to the notion of the "well made play": "The Home Coming" shocked us by the casual manner in which sex and prostitution were discussed within the context of an English working class family in the industrial areas of London.
Continuing appeal
Over the years, I have taught Pinter to a generation of students. Today, thanks to a wider exposure to global culture, the shock element is much less, but Pinter's appeal remains unabated. "The Home Coming" continues to serve as a metaphor of human desires and aspirations, a projection of archetypal fears and wishes.
In 1997, I had the privilege to talk to Harold Pinter at Cambridge. I found him passionate and charismatic. He spoke with firmness about his drama and about cultural and ideological issues. He exhibited a ready wit and a fine sense of humour. He was surprised to learn that he was so popular in India. I asked him about the reception of his plays in different parts of the world. Pinter replied that his plays always carried a resonance peculiar to the land in which they were performed. They greatly appealed to audiences behind the Iron Curtain and dictatorships of all kinds. Although they are usually classified as "the theatre of the absurd", Pinter's plays were eminently suited to political readings.
Born on October 10, 1930 in East London, playwright, director, actor, poet and political activist, Harold Pinter has written 29 plays, including "The Birthday Party", "The Caretaker", and "The Home Coming", 29 screen plays including "The Servant", "The Go-Between", and "The French Lieutenant's Woman". He has directed 27 theatre productions including James Joyce's "Exiles", seven plays by Simon Gray and many of his own plays including his latest, "Celebration". He has won several distinctions including The Shakespeare Prize (Hamburg), The European Prize for Literature (Vienna) The Pirandello Prize (Palermo), The David Cohen British Literature Prize, The Lawrence Olivier Award and Moliere D'Honour for a lifetime achievement. In 1999, he was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.
Pinters' parents were English-Jewish and "very supportive" of his writing. He surmises that his grandparents came from "a mysterious area which some call Odessa and others call Hungary". His sustained interest in violence could be traced to his confrontation of anti-Semitic gangs in East London and his experience of the Blitz during the aerial bombardment of London during World War II.
Peer support
Pinter's second play, "The Birthday Party", produced in 1958 at the Lyric, Hammersmith, was ridiculed by contemporary critics as "an absolute load of rubbish". Early responses came as dampers while he received unexpected support from fellow playwrights like Samuel Beckett, whose novels and plays he read and deeply admired.
From "The Birthday Party" to "Celebration" and "Ashes to Ashes", Pinter's plays in their settings have mounted the social ladder from the East End to swanky London restaurants. But in nearly all his plays, "there is the particular menace of stripped down language and pregnant pauses". The expressions "Pinteresque" or "Pinterland" effectively sum up his plays as comedies of menace. A sense of fear and threat of the unknown are conjured up with a dexterous use of language and word play. Conversations often come as short monologues, as existential adjustments suggesting, perhaps, that there is a need to define our private self before engaging with the outer world.
One may see here the influence of Martin Heidegger, and relate to man's basic awareness of the threat of self-annihilation. In Pinter, this threat does not come in abstract terms; it is concrete and palpable. Speaking of the arrival of the two persons at the door in "Birthday Party" as an emblem of fear, Pinter says: "This thing of people arriving at the door has been happening in Europe in the last 20 years, the last two to two hundred."
Thus, mystery, uncertainty and poetic ambiguity are the defining characteristics of Pinter's plays. He has been accused of deliberate mystification. More likely, his plays attempt to suggest "impressions of a structure, patterns of a situation and a movement, a metaphor". There is always a dialectic, a tension between delight in word play or love of language vis-à-vis the inarticulateness of the characters. Similarly, silences or pauses have a crucial role in the plays as sub-texts indicative of a failure in human communications. Thus, much of the laughter or comedy come as a façade or a smoke screen to the deeper angst or neurosis. Pinter shares affinities with Ionesco and "the stylised naturalness" of American playwright Edward Albee. Nevertheless, his plays are absolutely original.
While Pinter the playwright may extol existential ambiguity and incertitude, Pinter the activist and dissenter has no such anxiety. He recalls: "In 1958, I wrote 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 or false. I believe that these assertions still make sense and still apply to the explorations 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?"
As a citizen, Pinter has been unrelenting in his criticism of the hegemonic West and the imposition of the American economic and financial system over the rest of the world with the help of military might. He has demanded that Blair, Clinton and Bush be tried as war criminals. He has hailed Noam Chomsky and Arthur Miller as the conscience of the American people. He has sought apology from British liberal papers like The Independent and The Guardian for suppressing truth and falsifying his utterances. He has vowed that he "won't be silenced".
Strong convictions
Neither age, nor the cancer that he recently suffered from, nor his celebrity status the world over, have mellowed Harold Pinter, to make him give up his oppositions to the war in Iraq or his critique of the cruelty caused by Western military interventions.
What can redeem the Pinteresque world of violence and horror? He does see a ray of hope at the end of the tunnel. There is also the love of poetry and the love of cricket. While some of his plays demand three drafts, he says his poems require about 13! The poems too seem to be redolent of the world of shadowy fear, as seen, for instance, in the 1983 poem called "Ghost":
I felt soft fingers at my throat.
It seemed someone was strangling me
It did not smile, it did not week.
Its eyes were wide and white as skin.
In a world increasingly marked by intellectual surrender to the tyranny of State power, Harold Pinter's life and art demonstrate the resilience of artistic integrity, and the role of the playwright as a public intellectual.
Sachidananda Mohanty is Professor of English at the University of Hyderabad.
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