The Aesthetics of Refusal: Pinter among the Radicals

The Aesthetics of Refusal: Pinter among the Radicals VARUN BEGLEY If is nor the office of arr to spotlight a/rernatives, bur to resist hy irs form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads. - T.W. Adorno, "Comminnent" 180 As the modernity of modem drama recedes, historiography plays an increasingly central role in the discipline. The lexicon of postfeminism, postcolonialism , and postmodemism suggests that the ideological sands have shifted. The "modem condition" is no longer self-evident; the old structures of feeling, to borrow Raymond Williams's phrase, are no longer felt in the same way. The political contexts of modern drama are especially prone to erasure. Links between artistic practice and social commitment in many ways define the modern theatre, yet radical works often survive as purely aesthetic artifacts. Poised near the endpoint of the modern canon, Harold Pinter's career provides an exemplary nexus for dramatic historiography. Aesthetically, his works span modem and postmodem modes of cultural production. On the one hand, Pinter is arguably the last of the modern dramatists - a late practitioner of literary absurdism, in Martin Esslin's influential account. At the same time, Pinter has actively written for television and film, depreciating his literary status while immersing himself in commercial culture. Politically, Pinter's career bridges two rival camps within modernism. In the 1980s, after decades of professed apathy, Pinter unexpectedly began to write overtly political plays and to reinvent his public persona as a quasi-Leftist public intellectual. Unhappily, this biographical shift has encouraged the facile equation of authorial intention and political art. Because the anti-authoritarian plays of 1984- 1991 - One for the Road (1984), Moulltain Language (1988), Party Time (1991), and The New World Order (1991) - are set in Modern Drama, 45A (Winter 2002) 628 Pinter among the Radicals repressive (though unspecified) states, they invite naive readings of political content. The substance of the plays and the new public persona conspire to produce a narrative of political awakening: Pinter went from disinterest to involvement in a variety of fashionable left-wing causes, and began writing about torture and repression. This narrative cements the notion that Pinter's earlier work is somehow apolitical, superficially resolving a problem that should instead be emphasized. For example, many have noted essential similarities between the anti-authoritarian cycle and Pinter's earlier works, and the ambiguous locations of the later plays further complicate any attempt to treat them simply as political realism. A full accounting of Pinter's politics must resist the temptation of clear-cut categories and periods. and instead take a synoptic view of his entire career in its various hIstorical contexts. Indeed, from the standpoint of historiography, the fusion of conflicting impulses seems onc of the most novel and valuable features of Pinter's work. More specifically. his polarized, discontinuous oeuvre serves as a coda to the politics of the modem theatre. In microcosm, Pinter's career demonstrates both autonomous and committed tendencies, to borrow terms from the vocabulary of modernism. These two tendencies, central to debates about political art after the publication of lean-Paul Sartre's What is Literatllre? in t947, can be summarized as follows. The committed work of al1 is conceived as a social intervention, an act that seeks to shatter the reactionary aura of culture by emphasizing art's materiality, its productive force. The committed work takes a position, not only in relation to social reality, but within it. Such works are telic, in T.W. Adorno's account - oriented toward the "end" of the public sphere, directed toward the purpose of social transformation. The autonomous or "atelic" ("Commitment" t79) tendency suggests that the work which succumbs to ideological debate becomes a part of the culture it sought to criticize. In his 1958 exchange with Kenneth Tynan, for example, Eugene Ionesco argued that "[aln ideological play can be no more than the vulgarization of an ideology" (qtd. in Brandt 210). Committed art is invariably reductive, politically and aesthetically degraded: "Bad politics becomes bad art, and viceversa ," as Adorno writes ("Commitment" t87). The utopian potential of art lies in its distance from the world, its uselessness. As Adorno suggests above, art...