Pinter’s The Homecoming: Displacing and Repeating Ibsen

Pinter’s The Homecoming: Displacing and Repeating Ibsen Thomas Postlewait Henrik Ibsen: “A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society. . . . Notes for A Doll’s House Teddy (to Ruth): “They’re my family. They’re not orgres.” Harold Pinter, The Homecoming I What is a home? In drama it is often not a safe place to visit or return to. The homecoming theme, which is so central to the history of drama, reveals that the home is haunted by past crimes, usually concerning sexual matters and the misuse of power. Oresteia, Oedipus the King, Hamlet, Ghosts—here is the main line of the dramatic tradition. In this homecoming story two themes are brought together: (1) the sexual definition of woman as either good wife and abiding mother or adulterer and unworthy mother and (2) the struggle of sons against fathers, of young men against false father figures, of children against parents. The corruption of the blood ties these two themes to­ gether. Pollution, contamination, disease—metaphors of sickness run through these plays. In modem plays as different from one another as The Ghost Sonata, Mourning Becomes Electro, A Streetcar Named Desire, and even Six Characters in Search of an Author the themes of sexual intrigue, sexual guilt, family ghosts, corrupted power, and revenge are brought together by the homecoming situation. The past makes its claims on the present. It takes its revenge. In a sense the revenge play since the Oresteia has been the primary dramatic action, going through many variations. Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming is within this tradition, but 195 196 Comparative Drama from an ironic perspective. Almost all of the aspects of the homecoming story are present in some form: the double identity of woman, a son’s return home, a ghostly presence hovering over the action, the false power of a father figure, the imagery of blood and pollution, the violation of sexual taboos, confusion or controversy over conception, family violence, breakdown of moral codes, revenge of or against the mother, and the call or impulse for vengeance. The central action of this play, even though suffused with Pinter’s ironic tone, is directly within this primal story of drama. The conflict thus operates at two levels: (1) between the characters as they struggle with one another within this Ur-text; and (2) between the tradition of the dra­ matic action, as we know it, and the reworking of it that Pinter presents. Pinter uses comic irony to displace the tradition and key images and motifs to condense the tradition, thus setting up for us an interpretative function of reading these displace­ ments and condensations in the manner of metaphors and metonymies. We have to read the action both for its double perspective (that of the play itself and that of the tradition it plays against) and for its two tones (serious and comic). By reformulating the homecoming story, its structure and its basic conflicts, by means of comic turns and displaced motifs, Pinter provides us with an up-ended Oresteia, a comic Hamlet. And yet, while a distant and ironic echo of the major tra­ gedies by the Greek dramatists and by Shakespeare can be heard in Pinter’s play, such distance makes his ironic engagement with the tradition often inexplicit and sometimes cryptic. He empties the traditional action of its normal moral register, so that the reversals and recognitions seem more profane than profound, more predatory than philosophic. Unlike Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or Friedrich Durrenmatt’s PlayStrindberg or Brecht’svarious reworkings of plays by earlier playwrights, Pinter’s use of the tradition is quite disguised. Just as his characters transform their identities in order to snare, feign, circumvent, mock, and delude, so he teases us with sug­ gestions of the past without giving certain connections. The causal lines are masked. Plays such as the Oresteia stand behind Pinter’s play, but not in any direct way. Pinter is not specifically reworking the Oresteia as Brecht reworks Antigone or Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. It remains a general heritage, comprehensive yet oblique (like his Jewishness), not an exclusive or...