Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism (review)

Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism testifies to the resurgence of an interest in historiography within recent scholarship on post-World War II British drama. The book sets out to rethink the significance of the "central arc" of Harold Pinter's career, "the period between 1958 and 1991" (6). Chapter one, "The Politics of Negation," is devoted to the "early masterworks" (56): The Birthday Party (1958), The Caretaker (1960), and The Homecoming (1965). Chapter two, "The Modernist as Populist," turns to Pinter's engagement with popular modes and media in The Dumb Waiter (1960), A Slight Ache (1959), and Betrayal (1978). Chapter three, "Towards the Postmodern," focuses on the memory plays and on Pinter's turn to political drama in the 1980s. These core discussions are bracketed by the examination of Moonlight (1993) that rounds off the introduction and the analysis of Ashes to Ashes (1996) that serves as a coda to the last chapter.

Begley's historiographic thesis hinges on the notion of Pinter's liminality. Pinter's career as a playwright, he claims, straddles and thus complicates, both aesthetically and politically, Andreas Huyssen's Great Divide "between modernism and its historical 'others': popular entertainment, politically committed art, technological mass culture," and hence the late modern/postmodern distinction (4). Basically, however, from 1958 to 1991 - the latter year that of Party Time and The New World Order - Pinter is a late modernist (6); after that, "a new, postmodern stage of his career" begins, signalled by his "two postmodern plays," Moonlight and Ashes to Ashes (31). Begley's particular interest lies mainly in the much-debated question of the politics of Pinter's plays. This is the focus of chapters one and three, where he proposes a new perspective on the question by framing the aesthetics/politics nexus in Pinter's work in terms of T.W. Adorno's contribution to the modernist debate about artistic autonomy and commitment. Adorno appears to be making somewhat of a comeback in the field of modern and contemporary British theatre studies, with his championing of the negative aesthetics of autonomous or atelic art - the kind of art that most successfully articulates dissidence and resistance by, paradoxically, "rigorously refusing society's reality principle" through formal estrangement and alienation (14). Begley seizes upon Beckett, rather than Brecht or Sartre, as the key to Pinter's "high modernist works" (18), particularly the full-length The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, the memory plays, and the 1980s "anti-authoritarian cycle" (175).

As a starting point, this approach is fresh, provocative, and exciting. It yields some thought-provoking insights, as in the case of the comparative analysis of the politics and aesthetics of Pinter's memory plays - specifically Old Times (1971) and No Man's Land (1975) - and of the politicized British theatre of playwrights such as Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, and David Hare in the 1970s (135-61). This discussion, part of which appeared in Modern Drama in 2002, is stimulating and nuanced, arguing that "[i]n both the memory plays and socialist drama, committed and autonomous impulses circulate and combine in uneasy syntheses" (143). Furthermore, Begley claims repeatedly that a fundamental characteristic of Pinter's modernist work, based as it is on an aesthetic of difficult forms, is its "systematic resistance to meaning-making" (10), its intransigence "when confronted with generalizations" (4). This central argument dovetails with Begley's professed attitude to the "lively conversation" that constitutes Pinter studies (4), which "collectively display[s] a healthy distrust of semantic reduction and fixity" (26) and where the point of a new contribution "is not to invalidate earlier interpretations but to examine the hermeneutic crisis surrounding Pinter" (9).

It is unfortunate that the potential of such an approach should be compromised by Begley's frequently breaking faith with his own principles. The immanent critical method he adopts, drawn from Adorno, "moves from the particular to the general rather than the other way around" (25). But the conclusions thus reached often seem...