Harold Pinter—a political playwright? - Critical Essay
HAROLD Pinter's career as a playwright is highly distinguished by anyone's reckoning. Many critics have no reservations in calling him 'our greatest living playwright'. But few would argue that it is on a handful of stage plays, from The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, and The Homecoming in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to Old Times, No Man's Land, and Betrayal in the 1970s, that his reputation rests.
In recent times, Pinter's celebrity has depended more on his politics than on his plays. The master of the dramatic pause now seems more of a rebel without a pause, taking almost every Essay Topics opportunity to make moral pronouncements on current affairs. A scathing critic of US foreign policy and British Government support for it, he was prominent in the popular campaign against the recent Iraq war, even penning a poem in the lead-up to the conflict: 'Here they go again/The Yanks in their armoured parade/Chanting their ballads of joy/As they gallop across the big world/Praising America's God ...'
In an earlier letter to the New York Review of Books in 1994, Pinter differentiated US foreign policy from the mass murder inspired by Hitler, Stalin and Mao only on the grounds of its moral hypocrisy: 'The great difference between the ruthless Essay Topics foreign policy of the US and other equally ruthless policies is that US propaganda is infinitely cleverer and the Western media wonderfully compliant'.
Indeed, Pinter has made it clear that his many attacks on US and British foreign policy is not on ideological, but purely on moral grounds. In an interview with theatre critic Michael Billington in 1993, for instance, he differentiated himself from the apolitical by explaining: 'There is a kind of blandness which I simply don't understand, a resignation perhaps to certain states of affairs which I personally find infinitely painful and intolerable.'
Pinter's new role as moral chorus in the wings of the political stage Essay Topics has coincided with something of a drought in his playwriting. Not only have his plays been few and far between over the last twenty years, they have also been short and invariably politically-inspired, more agitation than art. Pinter has also been prepared to re-interpret his greatest stage plays in political terms, as an incipient expression of his moral condemnation of injustice. This reclamation has had its most comprehensive expression in his collaboration with Michael Billington on the latter's 1996 book The Life and Work of Harold Pinter.
Mr Billington's own commitment to political drama is evident throughout the book, his 'belief that British theatre should engage, wherever Essay Topics possible, with momentous public events'. Perhaps it is hardly surprising, therefore, that his method in writing the book is to set out to prove that Pinter has always, in one way or another, been a political playwright.
Thus, with The Birthday Party (1958), for instance, Mr Billington tells us that 'the power of the play resides precisely in the way Pinter takes stock ingredients of popular drama and invests them with political resonance. At its very simplest, the play shows an obstinately reclusive hero being obliged to conform to the external pressures of conventional society'. This is in spite of the fact that Pinter is quoted in Essay Topics the book as saying that the play shows how religious forces ruin our lives. Pinter is also quoted from a 1960 interview: 'In contemporary drama so often we have a villain society and the hero the individual. And a lot of people have said that about The Birthday Party. Well, it isn't like that ... there's no question of hero and villain.'
Nevertheless, throughout the rest of Mr Billington's book, The Birthday Party is constantly characterised as 'a political play', as is Pinter's next play, The Caretaker (1960), 'a deeply political play', according to Mr Billington, 'in that its basic image of life is one of ceaseless Essay Topics struggle'.
This new interpretation of Harold Pinter's oeuvre as essentially political, at least in spirit if not always in practice, has been enthusiastically taken up by many critics and academics and seems to be approaching what might be termed the accepted view.
But, however hard Harold Pinter or his apologists might now characterise his early plays as political, the evidence of the time contradicts this view. In an interview published in 1961 as 'Writing for Myself', for instance, Pinter could not have made himself plainer: 'I don't write with an audience in mind. I just write ... If you've got something you want to say to the world, Essay Topics then you'd be worried that only a few thousand people might see your play. Therefore you'd do something else. You'd become a religious teacher, or a politician perhaps ... No, I'm not committed as a writer, in the usual sense of the term, either religiously or politically. And I'm not conscious of any social function. I don't see any placards on myself, and I don't carry any banners. Ultimately, I distrust definitive labels.'
Just in case anyone failed to appreciate this apolitical point of view, Pinter clarified it even further the following year, summing up the 'warnings, sermons, admonitions, ideological exhortations, moral judgements', indulged in by playwrights, Essay Topics in and out of their plays, in one phrase: 'I'm telling you!'
His stated response to this attitude is: 'Beware of the writer who puts forward his concern for you to embrace, who leaves you in no doubt of his worthiness, his usefulness, his altruism, who declares that his heart is in the right place, and ensures that it can be seen in full view, a pulsating mass where his characters ought to be. What is presented, so much of the time, as a body of active and positive thought is in fact a body lost in a prison of empty definition and cliche. Ideas endlessly repeated Essay Topics and permutated become platitudinous, trite, meaningless.'
Again, in an interview in 1969, he said: 'I'm not interested in ideology. You can't expect this to be in any way a just world. I have no expectation of the world getting better in any way.'
The most compelling evidence of the apolitical nature of Harold Pinter's great stage plays, however, is in the plays themselves. There can hardly be a better way to protect Pinter's art from any belated afterthoughts, therefore, than through an attempt to lay down some markers for an interpretation of his most universally performed play and the one generally considered as quintessential Pinter. This is, of Essay Topics course, The Caretaker, the work which made its author famous.
That The Caretaker has proved such an abiding classic is highly appropriate. For Pinter's central theme in the play is one which is so common that it characterises practically every religious and non-religious creed of recent centuries, one which is as fundamental to Christianity as it is to Communism, to Buddhism as it is to Democracy. Yet it is a theme which has rarely, if ever, received serious treatment in the theatre. This makes the play unique.
What, then, is Pinter writing about in The Caretaker? Considering Pinter's current position and the climate of political correctness in which Essay Topics people are 'named and shamed' for 'anti-social behaviour', the theme of the play could not be more opportune. For while, on one level, the caretaker referred to in the title is in the dictionary sense of one who takes on the care of a property, on a more significant level, the word refers to one who takes care of another human being, one who is 'caring' or altruistically inclined, i.e., one who acts in the interest of others.
In The Caretaker, then, Pinter presents us with a dramatic exploration of altruism. This theme, moreover, is worked out in different ways according to the play's three characters: Aston, Essay Topics Davies, and Mick. The plot of The Caretaker could not, on the surface, be simpler. Aston, a mentally-fragile recluse living in a junk-filled attic, brings home Davies, an exploitative old tramp, and invites him to stay. The house is owned by Aston's younger brother, Mick, a builder, who, in an echo of Aston's philanthropy towards the down-and-out, lets his sibling stay there.
Mick's is the most obvious type of altruism dealt with in the play, that of family responsibility. 'If you got an older brother, you want to push him on, you want to see him make his way', as he tells Davies. It is this possessive Essay Topics attitude towards his brother that leads Mick to resent Aston's relationship with Davies and to work towards severing it by winning the tramp over to his side through pretended altruism and turning him against Aston in the process. This opens Aston's eyes to the fact that he has been acting under an illusion in his own charitable concerns. At this point, Davies tries desperately to save the situation by adopting an altruistic mantle himself. 'You been a good friend to me', he tells Aston. 'You took me in ... you give me a bed ... But listen. I'm with you ...'
This is the second expression of Essay Topics altruism dealt with in The Caretaker, the pretence of caring about another's self-interest in order to disarm them and gain an advantage. And, again, just as Aston's altruism towards Davies is echoed by Mick's towards Aston, so is Davies's pretended care for Aston an echo of Mick's previously pretended care for Davies. But it is too late. Aston has seen the light. Davies's plea falls on deaf ears, underlining the significance of Mick's last word to his brother as he leaves the house: 'Look ...'
So what does Aston see? What does he see that leads him to turn his back on his former protege and look Essay Topics instead out of the window, a favourite Pinter image for the apprehension of reality, of the way things are as opposed to the way we would like them to be? Harold Pinter's great stage plays are fundamentally concerned with the search for truth and the ultimate reality it reveals. From this perspective, there are only two philosophical poles to human experience: on the one hand, truth and the reality it reveals, on the other, its contrary, a self-interested desire for power and the illusions which arise from that desire.
With Pinter, however, the plays tend to focus on what happens when there is a less-than-wholehearted commitment to Essay Topics truth. As such, there is always a character in each play who expresses the insecure or lapsed truth-seeker. In The Caretaker, that character is Aston. Aston's allegiance to truth is expressed most manifestly in a lengthy monologue: 'I used to get the feeling I could see things ... very clearly ... everything ... was so clear ... everything used ... everything used to get very quiet ... everything got very quiet ... all this ... quiet ... and ... this clear sight ... it was ... but maybe I was wrong.' When we first meet him in the play, however, Aston has already abandoned his tentative Essay Topics commitment to truth and is searching for a substitute to fill the resulting void. That substitute is altruism. That this is an attempted replacement for his former allegiance is demonstrated through Pinter's use of imagery in the play, particularly that related to Buddhism and Christianity.
Throughout history, there have always been two contrary elements in many of the major religions of the world. One is based on duality, on the perception of an inevitable separation between man and God or, not to be too theological, between man and reality. This duality underlies established religion. The other is based on the possibility of a direct approach to reality Essay Topics through the inspiration of truth and is usually called 'mysticism'. In established religion, the dynamic of a movement towards some ultimate reality through truth is replaced by an approach to it by being moral or 'good', i.e. by being caring or charitable towards others.
The point that Aston is moving away from truth and towards altruism is made through the image of the Buddha he keeps in his room and the Oriental screen with which he intends to break up a room in the house into two parts, creating a separation or duality in the process. For if, in the mystical tradition, Buddhism relates to the contemplation Essay Topics of truth through a retreat from the loud diversions of worldly illusions, bringing 'quiet ... and clear sight', in the established religion it relates to duality and its concern with altruism. This is even more obvious through the Christian imagery used in the play, for instance when Davies says to Aston at the climactic confrontation between the two: 'Christ, you say that to me!'--'that', in this instance, referring to a distinctly uncharitable remark, hence the exclamation mark intended to underline the contradiction.
The point that the mystical tradition is essentially different from a concern with altruism, however, is best exemplified in the play by the tramp's hilarious Essay Topics story to Aston about his visit to a monastery in search of a pair of free shoes. For mysticism is most often associated in both East and West with monasteries. The upshot of the story is that the monks first tell him to 'Piss off' and then dismiss him like 'a dog'.
It is important to realise, however, that Pinter is not dealing with altruism purely in a religious sense in The Caretaker. Aston, for instance, shows no interest in conventional religion in the play. The point is not to associate altruism with religion or otherwise but to relate it to reality and thereby dispel the illusion Essay Topics that it is somehow 'metaphysical' or superior to 'mere' self-interest.
In the first instance, Pinter does this through couching Aston's charitable invitation to Davies to stay in the room in terms of: 'Would you like to sleep here?' According to Pinter's adopted image system, where dreams are synonymous with sleep, this amounts to an invitation to Davies to share his dreams or illusions. Thus, when Davies is found out and pretends to adopt Aston's altruism, he says: 'Christ, we'll change beds!'
The Caretaker, however, is a play and not a philosophical dissertation. As such, Pinter is at pains to demonstrate, rather than suggest, that altruism is not a Essay Topics different kind of activity to self-interest, but simply a different expression of the same thing. He reveals the motives of his characters through their actions. Where Aston is concerned, Pinter shows that his altruism arises from a desire to fulfil his vision of himself as a carpenter, which was Christ's worldly occupation, and one which Aston believes will give him a physical purpose in life, 'Working with ... good wood', as he puts it, as the flip side to his so-called metaphysical purpose in life.
This vision is centred on his building a shed in the badly overgrown back garden, the image of an abandoned Garden of Essay Topics Eden, as the first step to 'doing up the upper part of the house' for Mick. Anyone who has seen the play, however, will know that Aston is obviously living under an illusion with regard to his talents as a handyman. Much of the humour of the play is based on his incompetence in this respect. Lacking confidence in his vision, then, he 'charitably' invites Davies, who is even more lost than he is himself, to be his caretaker, i.e. superficially, to look after the house, but, figuratively, to bolster or 'care for' his perception of himself as a carpenter, in short, to share his illusion Essay Topics in order to make it 'real'. This is echoed by Mick's cynical offer to Davies to be his caretaker. That Davies knows on some subliminal level what Aston's offer really amounts to is revealed when he faces expulsion from the room and tells him: 'I'll give you a hand to put up your shed ... I'm with you ... We'll do it together!'
Similarly, Mick's supposed care for Aston is revealed as being fundamentally self-interested. For this, too, is about Mick's need to bolster his vision of himself as man of means: 'I'm a tradesman', as he tells Davies. 'I've got my own van'. As such, he Essay Topics can afford to be charitable towards Aston who, in return, supports Mick's view of himself: 'He's got his own van', as he tells Davies. This dynamic between the two brothers is expressed in the battle between them over the bag of clothes Aston offers Davies and which Mick grabs. A tug of war develops as first Mick and then Aston and then Davies each claims the bag. It is only when Aston gives the bag to Mick that Davies receives it. This establishes Mick's position of power, not only over Davies, but also over Aston. This is underlined by the stage direction: Mick looks at Aston.
All Essay Topics the expressions of altruism in the play, then, whether as family responsibility, as adopted philosophy or theology, or as political tactic are shown as amounting to nothing more than self-interest. In a word, all are false. In the event, Aston accepts that his attempt to substitute altruism for truth has failed when he expels Davies after the tramp transfers his allegiance to Mick. Similarly, Mick, too, accepts that his 'care' for his brother has failed. Symbolically smashing the Buddha in his frustration, he tells Davies: 'Anyone would think this house was all I got to worry about ... I'm not worried about this house ... My Essay Topics brother can worry about it ... I thought I was doing him a favour, letting him live here. He's got his own ideas. Let him have them. I'm going to chuck it in.'
But if Aston and Mick both have their altruistic illusions shattered, it is truth which is ultimately the winner, the truth that altruism and self-interest amount to the same thing when they are seen for what they are. Moreover, we know what Aston has seen when Mick says to him: 'Look ...', not just by his banishing Davies, but also by his last words in the play, given in final explanation of that banishment: Essay Topics 'You make too much noise'. This recalls the 'quiet and clear sight' Aston has now recovered, at least to the extent of freeing him from the illusion of altruism as a substitute for truth.
Significantly, Pinter suggests that this liberty is precisely what Aston needs to enable him to fulfil himself creatively, as his gradual disillusionment from his charitable concerns is shown to coincide with a new-found determination to get his shed up. Similarly, Mick's disillusionment with his supposed altruism towards Aston frees him from his own possessiveness towards him, allowing Aston to have 'his own ideas'. Even Davies might have learned something through the process of Essay Topics disillusionment as the last lines of the play show that he might, just might, be willing to abandon the false identity he tells us he has assumed and reclaim the 'papers' in Sidcup that prove his real identity.
The one mystery in the play is the 'faint smile' that Mick and Aston exchange after Mick's machinations over Davies have reached their goal. Does this tell us that blood is thicker than water or that they are now brothers in truth? In the context of the play, it seems clear that it is the latter. Perhaps there is a lesson there for all of us: that the only Essay Topics genuine altruism is in the sharing of the truth that leads to reality.
|
