Harold Pinter: An Annotated Bibliography ed. by Steven H. Gale (review)

Reviews wherein they often construe life as an empty, meaningless, caricatured puppet play? Beyond any social or political reforms, these dramatists aim at the spectator and his habits. The plays evidently intend to inspire horror and helplessness in their audiences - audiences which have lost their belief in a stable natural order and a rationalist world-view. Wolfgang Kayser saw correctly that the representation of the grotesque in art has the dual function of, first, making us suspect evil and dark forces behind our world, and, second, being "an attempt to subdue the demonic aspects of the world." These plays try to overcome the identification which establishes itself between spectators and actors in the traditional theatre. Encouraging an hypnotic relationship between spectator and play, the traditional theatre had in effect continued our everyday lives where we are so subjected to the fascination of familiar reality that we are incapable of modifying or even of seeing the arbitrariness of the everyday. The new theatre, by enacting monstrosities, enables us to escape the entrapments of our ordinariness; it imposes on us a depaysement and distancing which endow us with a freer vision of ourselves and of things. Marshall McLuhan's pronouncements on modem art hold a further key and justification for the strange destruction we witness today in the theatre: "We are entering the new age of education that is programmed for discovery rather than instruction .... Art as anti-environment becomes more than ever a means of training perception and judgement." The theatre presents a different challenge to the spectator who is not supposed anymore to enjoy what he sees, who is no longer encouraged in his habitual perceptions and needs. Confronted with perceptions which do not coincide with our own experiences, we become more observant and begin anew to experience the world. Experiences in art which agree with .our expectations are not really experiences for us. Monsters show us above all the limitations of our matter-of-fact conceptions. LILIANE WELCH. MOUNT ALLISON UNIVERSITY STEVEN H. GALE, ed. HaroLd Pinter: AnAnnotatedBibliography. Boston: G.K. Hall 1978. Pp. ix, 244. HaroLd Pinter: An Annotated Bibliography, published as part of G.K. Hall's new Reference Publication in Literature series, under the general editorship of Ronald Gottesman, is the most comprehensive bibliography on Harold Pinter to date. An important contribution to what Gale calls "a strong segment ofcareful, reasoned scholarship [that) has grown up about Pinter's writing" (p. xii), it gathers into one volume 2048 items pertaining to Pinter: an almost complete listing of the playwright's varied writings, production and film reviews of his works, interviews, and other criticism and scholarship. Gale's most recent bibliography is an updated and much enlarged version of "Harold Pinter: An Annotated Bibliography 1957-1971," BuLLetill of Bibliography, 29, NO.2 88 Reviews ([972),43-56, which was an outgrowth of his Ph.D. dissertation, "Thematic Change in the Stage Plays of Harold Pinter, [957- 1967" (University of Southern California, (970). This study has been elaborated and extended in Butler's Going Up: ACritical Analysis ofHarold Pinter's Work (Duke University Press, 1977) to cover through No Man's Land; its bibliography also updates the [972 publication. Though its coverage is occasionally spotty, this G.K. Hall bibliography is to be recommended for its clear organization and the general usefulness of its introduction, annotations, index and appendices. In his introduction, Gale attempts to define Pinter's thematic and stylistic evolution and the trends in Pinter criticism and scholarship, as well as to present the organization and principles of the bibliography. This is a lot to take on in seven pages. The explanation of the organization of the bibliography is clear. The evaluative comments on writings about Pinter could be more fully developed , however. Gale emphasizes more his own analysis of Pinter's "thematic and stylistic evolution" than the evolution of Pinter criticism and scholarship on this subject. The bibliography is structured into two main sections. The first section lists "Works by Harold Pinter" and is divided into the following subsections: "Plays"; "Film Scripts"; "Shorter Writings" (including "Essays, Prose, and Speeches," "Poetry," "Short Stories," "Correspondence"); "Miscellaneous"; "Juvenilia"; "Collaborations"; "Miscellaneous Interviews with Pinter"; and "Translations of Pinter's...