Harold Pinter's Betrayal: Sign-Making / Sign-Breaking

Harold Pinter's Betrayal: Sign-Making / Sign-Breaking Robert Clyman Whether one can call Harold Pinter's work avant-garde in 1991 is debatable. However, his plays do fit Una Chaudhuri's definition as a "message that foregrounds its code," attempting to "both use and deny the old language of theatre" (78). An analysis of his Betrayal may demonstrate how he leads us to the brink of meaning and then proceeds to deconstruct that meaning. Early critics of Pinter, such as Bernard Dukore, "recognized that despite their surface naturalism, his plays had links to the then-new Theatre of the Absurd" (4). But while Eugene Ionesco's goal was to strip dramatic action of "the accidental characteristics of the characters" in order to create "abstract conflict" (413), analogous to symbolist Adolphe Appia's appeal for actors to "throw off the accident of human personality" (295), Pinter's stingy use of details has always had a different semiotic aim. Pinter can afford to be so sparing in his characterizations precisely because he relies upon our reference to what Umberto Eco calls our "socialized knowledge " (111) to fill in the blanks. In fact, one of our major points of reference is a socialized knowledge of more realistic plays. In Betrayal, the three characters —Jerry, Emma and Robert—are stylized variations on characters we already know from the more densely coded genre of realism. For example, we know little about their work, except that Jerry is a literary agent and Robert a publisher. We also know that they were once editors of a poetry journal. Since writers are always writing about the dilemmas of writers, Pinter can reliably count on our having seen such plays, with their fairly predictable array of problems to be resolved. Thus, these few facts are all we need to guess that we are seeing a play about men with literary ambitions who have betrayed their ideals. Similarly, Emma, as a woman of intelligence but without work through which to channel it, is coded as someone prone to infidelity. 165 166 Robert Clyman Umberto Eco's example of the drunk is useful here in showing how an object becomes a semiotic device. Robert and Jerry, in Eco's terms, are "derealized " (110), so that they might stand for a particular class, i.e., of people with artistic aspirations who betray them. In a sense, all art is synecdoche with a little representing a lot. Minimalist, stylized writing simply allows smaller signifiers to bond with complex signifieds. Although the burden upon a given signifier is greater, Pinter's skillful reference to our socialized knowledge prevents the signifier from being strained beyond its capacity. Pinter could add more details like the optional red nose of Eco's drunk. However, while such details would be "useful" (112) in establishing the drunk as a sign, Pinter avoids overloading his signifiers. Rightly, he senses that too cumbersome a signifier would unnecessarily limit what is being signified. Eco's drunk, after all, has the problem that "in order to be accepted as a sign, he has tobe accepted as real" (111). He is shown or "ostended" to the crowd but does not vividly exist apart from his sign function. Pinter's characters already enjoy the attribution of a certain "real-ness," since they are contextualized on stage as having actual, ongoing lives. As a result, they easily function as signs in spite of obvious stylization because that very stylization points to an inferred , underlying realness. Pinter's references to socialized knowledge are only a means toward an end. His goal lies in arousing generic expectations, so that he can systematically subvert them. "If one is always bound by one's perspective," Chaudhuri contends, "one can at least deliberately reverse perspectives as often as possible." (41) His use of economy is only one example. If we expect the familiar ground of realism, we will anticipate a plethora of signs that are relatively simple to decode. These signs will appear with sufficient redundancy that we need not even be vigilant in our attention to them. Greater compression creates moments of sharper perception, although this by itself does not define Pinter's style. Striving for a very different...