Parody Play in Pinter

Parody Play in Pinter ELIN DIAMOND "Parody," Eric Bentley has said, "is more important to modern than to any previous school ofcomedy.'" Although Pinter's first critics felt his comic edge, no one before Andrew Kennedy (Six Dramatists in Search of a Language)' discussed his talents for parody. Perhaps early emphasis on Pinter's originality seemed inconsistent with a form that places a writer in direct communication with predecessors and peers. Perhaps Pinter's own insistence on the spontaneity of his creative process (" ... I write in a very high state of excitement and frustration. I follow what I see on the paper in front of me - one sentence after another"') precluded, or seemed to preclude, the idea of his using other literary and theatrical styles as targets. Pinter once declared: "I'm not interested in the general context of the theatre.". Yet Pinter the playwright was reared in the general context of the theatre. He wrote poetry while acting professionally in the companies of Anew McMaster and Sir Donald Wolfit. In 1954, under the stage narne of David Baron, he toured the provinces performing popular, often stale West End fare, turning out his first dran3a, The Room, between rehearsing for one play and performing another. Later, "I finished The Birthday Party while I was touring in some kind of farce, I don't remember the narne."5In an early conversation with Richard Findlater, Pinter suggested, "my experience as an actor has influenced my plays - it must have - though it's impossible for me to put my finger on it exactly."· Leslie Smith has put her finger on at least one direct influence,7 and Peter Davison has demonstrated links between music-hall rhythms and Pinter's dialogue.· According to Peter Hall, the much discussed living-room set in The Homecoming was inspired by the broad-aproned Aldwych, where the play began its London run.9 Thus Pinter's artistic life thrives in a dialectical tension between what he calls "the large public activity" of theatrical production (and this includes production for radio, television, and film) and the "completely private activity" of writing. W ELIN DIAMOND Just such a dialectic infonns parody - the tension between the public domain of literary and theatrical styles, and the playwright inevitably in contact with them. Although recent studies identify parody with comically skewed imitation of an author's style or of a particular work, they stress the historical moment of the parodist who ironically plays with and criticizes a tradition even as he establishes himself within it." Bentley's reference to parody as an influential school of comedy refers to Shaw's parodies of Scribe, "[his] way of calling attention to dangerous fallacies. "" The "Scribe ... counter-Scribe" in Shaw is the impulse to debunk a Scribean device by parodying it: ''The very fact that Shaw despised Scribe helps to explain the particular use he made of him." '3 In Harold Bloom's theory of poetry, "latecomer" poets make use of influential predecessors by necessarily misreading them "so as to clear imaginative space for themselves."'4 The Russian Formalist concept of" 'laying bare' " or using a device "without the motivation which traditionally accompanies it ... ,"15 is the cornerstone ofBertel Pedersen's study of parody in modem fiction; the parodist exposes "mockingly and playfully" the conventions of a genre in order to define and liberate his own creation. ,6 Kennedy (also in connection with Shaw) defines parody as the "mimesis of distorting mirrors,"'7 a concept echoed in Margaret Rose's densely theoretical work on metafictional parody: "parody does not attempt to mystify the difference between sign and signified, or to suggest an identity between itself and its object as in the mimetic art which parody has so often been used to criticise. ... " ,8 In other words, since parody is not a mirror of nature but a deliberately skewed imitation of another representation, it lays bare the convention of mimesis, exposing it as adevice. Stated or implied in these studies are four ideas relevant to parody in Pinter. First, the parodist belongs to the "endphase" of a tradition. Second, in response to that endphase he exposes and playfully recasts the conventions that inform it. Third, parodists frequently...