PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES

As an opening statement to a study of Pinter it is difficult to think of anything more to the point than the recent remark by W. J. Free: "Harold Pinter's plays still puzzle audiences and critics after almost a dozen years of acquaintance with his work. In spite of a growing body of criticism, there are perhaps more unanswered questions about Pinter than about any other major contemporary playwright." Nothing that has subsequently appeared in print has mounted a serious challenge to that statement. Esslin's recent effort, The Peopled Wound, is undermined by the very praise of Time's review: "The Peopled Wound is valuable not because it makes some intuitive new leap of insight but because it gathers in one convenient place most of what has been said and thought about Pinter." It is precisely that "new leap of insight" that has evaded critics for more than a decade. Recognition of this problem and interest in its solution are registered in the ever-increasing volume of writing devoted to Pinter's work. At the same time his public reputation continues to grow, and anything he writes seems virtually guaranteed of a London run at the Aldwych (with the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company) and a subsequent transfer to Broadway. Indeed, it is by no means unusual to hear him spoken of as the most important playwright now alive. Such opinions stand precariously alongside those that continue to register critical uncertainty about even the most basic issues raised by his work. Arguments about the meanings of his plays, about his use of symbolism, the kinds of characters he creates, and the kinds of communication problems they confront seem not to be moving toward any visible points of convergence. The field is proliferating but not progressing.

A study of critical opinion on Pinter's work confirms that the issues currently in dispute are much the same as those raised in the first influential statements of the early 1960's. Short essays by Taylor in Anger and After (1962) and Esslin in The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) reflect parameters of opinion that seem to have received little modification in the years since then. A decade of subsequent research seems not to have materially challenged the status of these first impressions. A reading of Esslin's The Peopled Wound reveals little about Pinter's basic method that would be out of place in his earlier essay, and Taylor reuses, almost without alteration, a central statement on Pinter's language from his 1962 publication when writing another essay on Pinter in 1971. The latter is of particular importance since it is widely recognized that Pinter's peculiar use of language is a major stumbling block for criticism of his work. It may well be that a basic cause of Free's "unanswered questions/' and of the field's failure to progress, is a persistent attempt to find answers to the wrong kinds of questions. It would be fruitful therefore to consider the centrality of the issues so far established in Pinter criticism.

Early efforts to cope with this new phenomenon 011 the English stage were not unlike those directed toward any innovative writer — the primary problem seemed to be to decide whose work Pinter's most resembled. As Wardle, looking back on his own involvement in this struggle, amusingly describes it:

When Harold Pinter's characters first appeared in public in 1958, nobody knew who the father was — and Pinter certainly wasn't telling. For critics, more than for other people, this is an inconvenience. Before you can say anything with any confidence, you feel you have to get the ideological coordinates right. ... We all dug around and discovered Pinter liked Kafka, and Beckett, and American gangster films, and I, for one, came up with the phrase "comedy of menace" which explained nothing but at least supplied a comforting label.

These connections turned out to be of little help. After being dismissed as a lesser Kafka, a poorer Beckett, a pale imitation of Ionesco, and a less humorous N. F. Simpson, Pinter continued to be very successful at being Pinter. Taylor's 1962 publication took the position that Pinter simply could not be placed in the book's schematization of developments on the English stage, and Esslin placed him vaguely on the fringes of the Theatre of the Absurd among the "parallels and proselytes." Ten years later the problem remains in its original form. A host of comparative statements have linked Pinter with the work of Chekhov, James, Pirandello, Coward, Genet, O'Neill, Brecht, and many more without providing a framework that substantially illuminates his achievement or his individuality. Caine's recent attempt to describe the structure of The Dumb Waiter by viewing it in terms of a historical perspective on structure in a one-act play is characteristic of this approach. The end product is a series of links between diverse plays that are not governed by their centrality as major statements about the individual plays. In Pinter's case, however, the problem seems not to be simply one of misplaced zeal: the problem of generalizing about structure in Pinter's work is only one aspect of what seems to be a recurring difficulty. Whether attention is directed toward character, plot, structure, theme, or any other abstraction, one encounters the same uncertainty over where and how to generalize. Basic to this problem, of course, is an uncertain grasp of the particulars of the plays.

The arguments over the general and the particular in Pinter's work provide an instructive background to the other basic issues in the field: what often seems a conflict of opposing views turns out to be a misplaced contrast between views which cannot logically be opposed. Consider, for example, the discussions of Pinter's characters. In the early plays Pinter tended to deal with characters at the lower end of the social scale. Accusations of triviality have frequently been based on the "commonplace" quality of characters who engage in what seems like "a meticulously accurate transcription of ordinary speech." Donoghue, for example, remarks of the early work: "In these four plays there is not a single relationship for which an intelligent adult would give tuppence." On the other hand, it is obvious that a great many intelligent adults have continued to hand in their tuppences, and a great deal more, to watch these relationships in action. Clearly there is some quality in these characters which raises them above the commonplace. Inevitably, the solution has been sought, and is still sought, in symbolic interpretations. Mick and Aston in The Caretaker transcend their prosaic existence and tread the junk-cluttered stage as the Gods of the Old and New Testaments. Edward and Flora in A Slight Ache become a dying-year god and a fertility goddess, and Riley in The Room a messenger from the dead. More recently The Homecoming has been transformed into a variant of the parable of the prodigal son. Teddy fits neatly into the leading role, his butcher-father links nicely with the killing of the fatted calf, and Ruth's single comment on America suffices to install it as a biblical land of famine and plague. Such interpretations are always vulnerable to charges of extreme selectivity of evidence and do little to account for the element of the commonplace in the work. But the realism/symbolism argument has become institutionalized by the intervention of the author himself. Pinter repeatedly stresses in interviews that he never writes with any abstract ideas in mind, that the symbols discovered in his work are news to him, and, at a particularly emphatic moment, that he wouldn't know a symbol if he saw one.

The substance of Pinter's objection to symbol hunting is apparent in his comment: "When a character cannot be comfortably defined or understood in terms of the familiar, the tendency is to perch him on a symbolic shelf, out of harm's way. Once there, he can be talked about but need not be lived with. In this way, it is easy to put up a pretty efficient smoke-screen, on the part of the critics or the audience, against recognition, against an active and willing participation." But Pinter, in this interview and elsewhere, overstates his case by rejecting all symbolic interpretation in defending his work against bad symbolic interpretation. His reaction to Rattigan's comment that The Caretaker was about the God of the Old Testament, the God of the New Testament, and Humanity was to stress that on the contrary it was about a caretaker and two brothers. This emphasis on the literal as opposed to the symbolic is not a helpful contrast if it is regarded (as it has been) as a point against symbolic interpretation rather than a point against inaccurate symbolic interpretation. What is wrong with this interpretation is, in part, that which is wrong with many such symbolic readings: instead of explaining the function of the commonplace in the plays they simply ignore it. Instead of being assimilated, the ordinary is replaced by the unlikely.

This issue has been so thoroughly misconceived that writers who seek to generalize on Pinter's work by means of symbolic interpretation now feel called upon to justify their opposition to the author while others struggle to find a means of interpreting within the author's guidelines: "Pinter says his plays have no significance outside themselves, which means, I believe, that allegorizing them is a pointless intellectual stunt. The Dwarfs, then, should be read within its own premises, i.e. three Kafka-esque, Beckett-like characters probing their identity through intersubjective contact, impermanence, accident and flux." The difficulty of maintaining this approach is registered in McLaughlin's uncertain movement from asserting the sole significance of the particular in Pinter to invoking comparisons with Kafka and Beckett. The resort to such comparisons effectively undermines the position at issue. Pinter, in fact, when not engaged in a skirmish with symbol-hunters is at pains to defend himself against those who would turn his insistence on the particularity of his plays against him. It is the contention of some who concentrate on the predominance of the commonplace in his work that the plays have no generalizable significance at all. One such accusation came in a radio interview, and Pinter's response is instructive: "If I write something in which two people are facing each other over a table ... I'm talking about two people living socially, and if what takes place between them is a meaningful and accurate examination of them, then it's going to be relevant to you and to society. This relationship will be an image of other relationships, of social living, of living together [my emphasis]...." What is to be avoided, then, is not the use of symbols in making general statements about Pinter's work, but the tendency (certainly rife in Pinter criticism) to move too readily toward simplistic symbolic interpretations, which account for too little of the detail of the text. It is this erroneous procedure that has prompted Pinter's anger, and it is also this procedure that Cohn has in mind when she stresses that symbols in Pinter's work should be regarded as cumulative rather than instantaneous in their operation.

The problem of generalizing about Pinter's work is not, however, solved by legitimizing the accurate use of symbolic interpretation. The difficulty that has given rise to so many inaccurate symbolic interpretations remains. Here we confront the second major issue in Pinter criticism: the seeming lack of explicitness in his work. This formulation is, however, a more sophisticated second-stage of what was initially a fashionable means of criticizing his plays — they were simply too obscure to be viable in the theater. This was a central accusation in the reviews that cut short the first London production of Pinter's work, The Birthday Party, in 1958, and it lingers today in the less pejorative but equally ubiquitous remarks on the inexplicitness of many of the plays. Rather than being rejected because of that irksome obscurity, however, the plays are now frequently held to be successful because of that very same element. Brown remarks that "the audience is puzzled and therefore wishes to notice"; Marowitz describes Pinter's technique as one of "maximum tension through minimum information," and States would have it: "This, in my opinion, is the source of our consternation and fascination with Pinter — our quest for the lost superiority of knowing more than the characters who now know more than we do...."

There is some truth in all of these remarks, but their common tendency is to characterize the role of inexplicitness as that of a device for capturing the attention of the audience: its function in the theater seems not to grow from any central function in the play. Brown raises this issue indirectly by suggesting that such a device operates under the law of diminishing returns as "the audience, expecting to be puzzled, ceases to be truly puzzled." And if the inexplicitness were simply a theatrical device this would certainly be the case; seven years later, however, Pinter continues to be as inexplicit as ever and as successful as ever, and a better explanation is needed to account for the use of the inexplicit in his work. This becomes even more evident when one finds, here and there, a comment that the plays begin to suffer if Pinter adjusts the careful balance between the explicit and the inexplicit in his work. Parts of The Room and The Caretaker have been criticized for being overexplicit, and one critic has dismissed the whole of A Night Out on this point alone. Clearly the inexplicit plays a considerable role in Pinter's work, but equally clearly that role remains unspecified. Here again the field shows little sign of resolving an issue that has been discussed for as long as Pinter's work has been discussed.

With this rather major obstacle to be circumvented, it is not surprising to discover two major trends in thematic interpretations of Pinter's work: one directed toward the obscure elements and one directed away from them. As early as 1962 Pinter lamented the application of "that tired, grimy phrase: 'Failure of communication'" to his work, yet with the problem of obscurity in his work still unsolved this kind of interpretation persists. A recent book by Hollis contains the remarks: "Pinter employs language to describe the failure of language; lie details in forms abundant the poverty of man's communication; he assembles words to remind us that we live in the space between words. ... The effect of Pinter's language, then, is to note that the most important things are not being said...." The opposition viewpoint on this issue is by now just as well known. If failure of communication is regarded as central, the plays are reduced to repeating a cliché, and Pinter's recognized individuality is lost in a generalization that has been applied to many other contemporary writers. Also, Pinter has explicity denied such an attack on language, and Ionesco has made the telling point that "if he truly believed in incommunicability the profession of writer would be a curious choice."

The other major trend in thematic interpretations is hinted at in the final sentence quoted from Hollis above. Leaving aside the rather unusual structure of the sentence, the thrust of the remark is directed toward a textual division. In this formulation it is rather crudely put, but when it emerges, as elsewhere, as an appeal to a subtext, its widespread popularity as a solution to the problem of obscurity is apparent. A dichotomy between the surface of the plays and some deeper level of meaning is widely accepted in Pinter criticism. In 1960 Minogue suggested:

The terrible thing about the dialogue is that it has the authentic ring of the stop-gap. Behind it lies the awareness of another world of meanings, a plane on which defeats are being acknowledged, and where there is a fight for the right to exist. ... [my emphasis]

In 1961 Brine commented:

Underneath the web of clichés, repetitions, interjections, anecdotes, we can understand what the characters are feeling far more profoundly than if they had tried to put it into words themselves. [my emphasis]

By 1965, this division had multiplied:

Pinter's reliance on multiple and conflicting subtexts poses the main problem for understanding his dialogue, especially in reading the mere words of the printed text. [my emphasis]