Harold Pinter—Some Credits and Debits

HAROLD PINTER-SOME CREDITS AND DEBITS IF HAROLD PINTER REPRESENTS THE PEAK of the post-war English drama, then that drama is not good enough. Good as he is, he nevertheless lacks that quality of greatness we so ardently desire in great plays that move us deeply. And in the phrase, "great plays that move us deeply," I have probably betrayed my own shortcomings in my response to Pinter as well as what in my opinion are his deficiencies. There can be no doubt that Pinter is the most accomplished dramatist writing in English for the Theater of the Absurd. His nearest rival is Edward Albee, who, like Pinter, can write a play with beautifully ambiguous overtones of meaning-The Sandbox) for instance -and who is very skillful in his use of the vernacular, but sometimes, unlike Pinter, lets the words flow on in a flood. Pinter, as a playwright of the absurd, invariably prefers the tense, symbolic manner of Samuel Beckett. The tight economy of his writing emphasizes the tension in the situations of his plays. A large part of his accomplishment is his ability to persuade us that he is presenting a life-like situation in traditionally realistic terms; that is, until we are jolted into an awareness of utter absurdity. Isolated elements in his plays are intensely realistic; the combination of elements is utterly absurd. Besides Beckett, Pinter's kinship is to Kafka and Brecht. Many of Pinter's people live in a Kafka-land existing somewhere between modern everyday reality and modern everyday absurdity. Sometimes, however, the two merge until they become the same thing. The plight of Joseph K- in The Trial is essentially no different, except in circumstances and degree, from that of Stanley Webber in The Birthday Party. Each hero, or anti-hero, epitomizes the plight of the individual in conflict with modern society, the latter being an oppressive and sinister force bent on destroying the individual. Joseph K-'s existence is threatened by men seemingly the representatives of the law; Stanley'S, by men seemingly members of the underground. In each instance, the ambiguous force represents an oppressive force within modern society. In Joseph K-'s case, it is the totalitarian state; in Stanley'S, it may be, as some have suggested, the JudaeoChristian tradition in its modern form.1 1 Ruby Cohn, "The World of Harold Pinter," Tulane Drama Review, VI (March, 1962), 63. 165 166 MODERN DRAMA September The claim of kinship to Brecht may not seem at first a valid one. Pinter, of course, does not write the epic drama in the Brechtean manner. His kinship to Brecht is not in form but in the effect sought and achieved-what Brecht calls the A-effect, or alienation. It is difficult to imagine the spectator making an emotional identification with a Pinter hero as he would with Hamlet or Shaw's Joan of Arc. Like Brecht, Pinter seeks to alienate, or distance, his character from the spectator in order that the spectator will become involved rationally in what is happening on the stage. There is no emotional purgation when Stanley is led off at the end of the play by Goldberg and McCann; instead, there is desire for inquiry into the forces that have made Stanley's situation possible. From a slightly different point of view, Stanley is so far dehumanized and represents modern dehumanization of the individual to such a degree that we are no more emotionally involved with him than we are with one of Rossum's Universal Robots. At this point, rational inquiry is needed. Pinter, like Brecht, has a didactic purpose while seeking to entertain. Pinter, like Brecht, does not fulfill the Aristotelean dictum of emotional purgation. His plays are not tragedies, but comedies. But the Pinter comedy is a "comedy of menace," in many respects a modern counterpart of tragedy, or, as some would maintain, as near as the modern playwright ,can approach tragedy with his anti-hero caught in the toils of sinister social forces. Is Pinter not good enough because he wants the A-effect rather than identification of spectator with character? The spiritual isolation of the individual in the midst of an...