Harold Pinter: Critical Approaches ed. by Steven H. Gale, and: Harold Pinter: The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming. A Casebook ed. by Michael Scott (review)

Book Reviews 459 of Anaud and situates The Slave as the pivotal point in Jones's canon, marking the fIrst of his theatre of cruelty plays. JonesiBaraka's later plays are less influential in transforming stage reality because of his movement towards Marxist-Leninism. believes Sanders, who sees his work as being furthered by Ed Bullins, who, already assuming ablack stage reality and black audience, tests the revolutionary mentality and rhetoric. Departing from Baraka, he shows his characters misusing freedom rather than being in bondage. With ghetto language and black music, the narrowing of the distance between actors and audience, and other innovations, Bullins's black stage reality generates values out of his characters' experience and portrays a world which "pursues self-understanding on its own terms, in its own language, and by its own standards" (p. 228). In attempting to show the range of these writers' works, Sanders often leaves little space for analysis in depth. As her approach is primarily a literary one, it is only with the later writers, when textuaUty demands it, that she gives much consideration to actual productions. This works against Richardson and Edmonds. Insufficient attention is paid to features such as Richardson'S use of the group protagonist and Edmonds's use of black actors and white gangster stereotypes in Gangsters over Harlem. Sanders's need to show black writers demystifying black stereotypes means that she . relies on a notion of an essentialist or experiential self predicated on colour rather than culture or (after Fanon) on state of consciousness and believes that the appeal of the universal - she doesn't considerthat everything is culture·bound - is strongest when the particular is most perfectly realized. Sanders's critique recognizes the forces historically arraigned against blacks but, almost in an act ofclosure, sees Baraka and Bullins as having overcome these so that we now have a lateral development of diversity rather than a continuation of the linear progression she has outlined. It is a pity for her argument, given the relative paucity of criticism on black theatre as against prose, that she focuses so little on directors, actors, venues and production. Her book is nevertheless a useful contribution to the study of black American theatre and is particularly good on aspects of Baraka and Bullins. TIM YOUNGS. TREN'T POLYTECHNIC, NOTTINGHAM STEVEN H. GALE, ed. Harold Pinter: Critical Approaches. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 1986. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses 1986. pp. 232. $28.50. MICHAEL SCOTT, ed. Harold Pinter: The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming. A Casebook. London: Macmillan 1986. Pp. 208. 20.00; 6.95 (PB). Evaluating Gale's col1ection of sixteen new essays on Pinter by "many of the leading contemporary drama scholars in America and Britain" solely on the basis of the table of Book Reviews contents, a reviewer "suggested that ... all ofthese Pinter scholars must surely have said everything that they could say about Pinter's canon and therefore would only repeat themselves" (pp. 13-14). "To the contrary," Gale responds, "whereas seven of the authors included have written books on Pinter (and three have authored more than one book on the subject), there are a couple ofpromising young scholars included who have publisbed little or nothing on Pinter previously. Moreover. the authors of all of the articles included have, in fact, built upon their own and others' scholarship. Thus, the critics herein included expaitd on what they have already said, or explore entirely new areas, or go into more detail about a specific topic than they have heretofore" (p. 14). These claims (and a later argument for publishing yet "another volume ... on an author who is himself still publishing new works every other year or so") may be justified, but the insistence that these essays also "reflect the gamut of critical approaches to Pinter's writing that has evolved over the past quarter century" is misleading, since many such approaches are notrepresented by tbeseessays. Forexample, there are no post-Freudian psychoanalytic, socia-linguistic, semiotic, or other "poststructuralist" perspectives offered, though critics have successfully applied these viewpoints to Pinter's work too. In addition to the "Preface," "Acknowledgments," and very brief"lntroductioo" (pp. 17-21), this...