Understanding Harold Pinter (review)

104 SHOFAR Summer 1997 Vol. 15, No.4 Understanding Harold Pinter, by Ronald Knowles. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. 232 pp. $29.95. The work of Harold Pinter is noted for being reductively analyzed, with inordinate attention inevitably focusing on the Pinter (pause). Ronald Knowles, in his comprehensive and perceptive Understanding Harold Pinter, refuses to simplify and instead offers an expansive and compelling look at the man, his work, and his continuing and expanding awareness of self and self in relationship with society. Beginning with an overview of the playwright's career and following with an outline of the periods characterizing Pinter's work, Knowles provides the reader with a concise framework from which to assimilate the complexjoumey of Harold Pinter's artistic development. The chronological structure of the book and the depth of insight Knowles provides enable the reader to place each work in the historical context of a given time and the personal context ofthe author's life. Knowles continually references relevant perspectives to prepare the reader to grapple with the levels and dissonant interplay of communication that exists within Pinter's anything-but-mundane interchanges . His early work, catalogued in "Plays, 1957-60 (I)," was often met with formulaic analyses from the press. Each ofthese works, as Knowles points out, was unique. From the historicism of The Room, to the stychomythic serio-comic banter of The Dumbwaiter , A Slight Ache's parody ofhighbrow culture, and A Night Out's commentary on class pressures, we see, within different contexts, the opposing dialectic that characterizes Pinter's work. This confrontation of opposites sustains an intolerable tension, as Knowles points out, in The Birthday Party. Imparting the term "engendered image"-an event or influential experience from the writer's life that helped to shape a specific work-Knowles shares a seedy circumstance from Pinter's life which "engendered" a work that tested the boundaries of genre, jockeying between terrifying realism and dance-hall comedy. With one of numerous meaningful quotes, Knowles captures Pinter's early point of view: "the old categories of comedy and tragedy and farce are irrelevant" (p. 59). In "Plays, 1957-60 (II)," Knowles places The Caretaker among "Pinter's greatest achievements," illuminating a work of powerful subtlety where ineffable frustration characterizes the sibling relationship. Knowles, who has a penchant for applying interview quotes from later in Pinter's life to earlier works, sums up the MickiAston relationship with the following: "What I'm interested in is emotion which is contained, and felt very, very deeply ... perhaps it is ultimately inexpressible" (p. 58). Though the other plays ofthis period were not altogether successful in and of themselves, Knowles draws our attention to the complex polarities that were developing and essentialized in works as diverse as Revue Sketches and The Dwarfs. In "Television Plays and Screenplays of the 1960s" and the later "Screenplays Book Reviews 105 1971-93," Knowles follows Pinter's development within the motion picture form. The medium of film allows Pinter to c:xercise through adaptation dominant themes of verification, sexual betrayal, and power struggle. Dialogue and exposition from these periods, however, is not nearly as engaging as it is in the plays and, at times, is a struggle to decipher, as in the following sequence from The Lover: "Why does he put up with itT' (168), "Max" asks, a question taking an unprecedented direction as Sarah points out, but "Max" protests further that he can't go on deceiving his wife! For a moment Sarah begins losing the situation-"I wish you'd stop this rubbish, anyway.... You're doing" your best to ruin the whole afternoon" (170)--and attempts to recover old ground, but "Max" insists, "I've played my last game" (171), and rejects Sarah as "too bony" (172) (84). There are other instances, as in this description from Pinter's unproduced screenplay Victory, where Knowles stunningly describes the essence of a menacing trio of characters, reminiscent ofGoldberg, McCann, and Stanley. "As characters, they are like a cross between Dickens and the early Brecht, as filmed by John Huston" (p. 166). Despite the occasional descriptive excess, Knowles' account serves a vital function in linking each of the works to the...