"Pinteresque"

"Pinteresque" • "That word! Those damn words and that word Pinteresque particularly," Harold Pinter retorted in his often-reprinted Paris Review interview with Lawrence M. Bensky in 1966. "I don't know what they're bloody well talking about." Increasingly since then, the continued development of Pinter's career has foiled - and to some extent silenced - those critics determined to pin down and classify the common denominator of his achievement. This special issue of Modern Drama, at the peril of adding to the long list of twenty-odd books and uncounted articles on Harold Pinter, is devoted entirely to critical studies of his work. It attempts to bring together a provocative sampling of current scholarship which, no longer comfortable with simplifications like "Pinteresque," tries to explore and debate the complexities and techniques of Pinter's dramaturgy. No editorial attempt has been made to impose either an artificial critical consensus or a "coverage" of the entire Pinter canon, though the majority of his stage plays as well as his work for radio and film are touched upon. Predictably perhaps, the articles that follow (as well as many of the unpublished submissions) cluster about two major plays in particular, The Homecoming and Old Times. Characteristic, too, is a healthy critical preoccupation in these essays with the formal aspects of Pinter's work, relating directly to the playwright's own frequently overlooked reminder in the Bensky interview that "shape, structure, and overall unity" are "everything" to him. Specifically, the ramifications of one such formal aspect - that of language and speech (what Pinter, of course, once called a "constant stratagem to cover nakedness") - are the concern of several of these studies. Reading them one is reminded that the structural implications of 361 362 "PINTERESQUE" linguistic patterns are fundamental to Pinter's plays, in which the basic battle for positions so often manifests itself as a struggle for linguistic dominance. For over fifteen years, moreover, Pinter himself has been reminding us of one more related thing: not to take everything his characters say at face value. As an admittedly backhanded but particularly pungent and felicitous illustration ofthis warning and ofan entire attitude toward language, a speech from Pinter's latest work, entitled monologue and lavishly printed by Covent Garden Press in 1973, seems especially appropriate: I'm way past mythologies, left them all behind, cocoa, sleep, Beethoven, cats, rain, black girls, bosom pals, literature, custard. You'll say I've been talking about nothing else all night, but can't you see, you bloody fool, that I can afford to do it, can't you appreciate the irony? Even if you're too dim to catch the irony in the words themselves, the words I have chosen myself, quite scrupulously, and with intent, you can't miss the irony in the tone of voice! The help and editorial advice of Professor Ruby Cohn has been most valuable in preparing this special issue. FREDERICK J. MARKER Editor ...