WHAT else would you have called him other than the dramatist of many pauses — those enigmatic, pregnant and at times sinister pauses his actors affected on the stage — that left you wondering, hours after the curtain had come down, how you had ever heard such silence.
In his work, the mystery of our human being is inseparable from the conviction that we are precarious creatures inhabiting a world where forces of unreason and contradiction have dark governance.
That was the power of Harold Pinter, a playwright whose originality was so compelling that it has brought into the lexicon the term Pinteresque, to describe an atmosphere of expectation, where real characters speak “unrealistically,” or inconsequentially, as people actually do in everyday life. He evoked that atmosphere of dread simply by having his stage protagonists engage in conversational repetitiveness and seeming irrationality, served up as objects of interest in and by themselves.
Pinter, now 75, who has been the doyen of the British theater since his first play, “The Room” was performed in London in 1957, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature last Thursday, one of the few writers for the English speaking stage ever to be so honored. He joins such pivotal figures of the 20th century theater as the Irishman Samuel Beckett and the American Eugene O’Neill as laureates of the literary world’s most precious prize.
In its announcement, the Swedish Academy said it was recognizing a dramatist “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under the everyday prattle, and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.”
To be sure, that was precisely what attracted me to his work, starting in the late 1960s as a student in Australia (having dropped out of college for several years, I returned to academic life as, shall we say, a “mature student”). I had gone to see “The Dumb Waiter” (1957), “The Caretaker” (1959) and “The Homecoming” (1964) at different Melbourne theaters, and I was instantly hooked, struck by their ironic power, their subtle capacity at being able not so much to communicate as to bring the whole question of human communication into doubt. I was equally entranced by the playwright’s skepticism about language itself, as if he were asking whether anything can ever be defined that is stated in words. We play with words, he seemed to be saying, and words play with us.
I would have left it at that if I had not also become interested in the relationship between Pinter the man and Pinter the artist — how, in other words, Pinter’s cultural history and identity, as a progressive, working class Jewish writer (his father was a tailor) affected his political preferences, social judgments and artistic choices.
I do not agree with some critics who claim that Pinter’s marriage to Lady Antonia Fraser (a biographer in her own right) triggered a change in his perspective as he was assimilated, through her, into the wealthy cosmopolitan English upperclass, thus distancing him form his experiences as a Jewish working class lad, for Pinter continued to be, as we used to say in those days, relevant.
Take “Precisely,” a dramatic sketch that Pinter read before an audience at New York University upon accepting the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in Arts and Letters in 1984 (an event I attended, though sitting on the steps because all auditorium seats had been occupied) that satirized nuclear war bureaucracy, much in the manner that Stanley Kubric had done in his film “Dr. Strangelove.” The same year, his play “One for the Road,” that dramatized political torture, was produced. And in 1988, “Mountain Language” tackled the issue of institutionalized abuses of prisoners, censorship and the curtailment of individual freedoms. (To this day, Pinter remains an opponent of the war in Iraq and a supporter of Palestinian independence.)
My interest in Pinter and Pinter’s work has been deep and intimate all these years. How could a diaspora Palestinian, who grew up in Australia, has lived in the United States for the last 35 years, and continues to daily confront otherness in his life, not gravitate toward the work of a playwright who has initiated, in his enigmatic literary effusions, a new aesthetic medium, a new syntax of expression, an uncompromisingly irrational and dissonant ideal of who we, the outsiders, are in dramatized representations resonant with psychological boldness and complexity?
I hate to indulge here in some kind of wanton psychoanalytic exercise, but I see in the repressed ambivalence and anguish of Pinter’s stage characters a projection of his Jewishness as it denies itself in an alien, perhaps hostile (read, Gentile) world. Is it not possible that these characters’ ambivalences about their identities are a reflection of Pinter’s need to protect himself from self-disclosure? Can the exile, the outsider, inhabiting a world of otherness, pursue self-interest and still be harmoniously united with another?
Fine, you can give me here — and it would be apropos were you to do so — one of those Pinteresque pauses and say that, just as I am suggesting that Pinter, the alienated Jewish playwright, has projected his suppressed motivations on his stage characters, I am in like manner projecting here my own Palestinian fears and anxieties, in my own life in exile, on Pinter.
Whatever! The bottom line is that no man is mutually exclusive from the culture that gave him birth.
Look at it anyway you wish: Pinter, in his work, affords us a glimpse into that irrational no-man’s land where characters address themselves not in riddles, as in Brecht, Ibsen, Miller and Albee, but in repetitions, but with each repetition bringing with it a new pitch of meaning.
And before you denigrate repetition in this context, consider that late Umm Kalthoum, the legendary Arab folk singer, who, whenever she gave a concert, often managed to keep virtually the entire adult population of the Arab world up all night listening to it on the radio.
Umm Kalthoum would repeat the same lyric ( a simple lyric like, say, “I ache so to be with my loved one”) over and over again, a dozen times or more, but by changing the modulation in her voice, in order to enhance the musical phrase, she would give a different interpretation to each rendition each time. And her audience, enraptured, never failed to see there a mapping of the geography of their devasted soul.
In a tribute to Pinter on last Friday’s front page of the New York Times, the paper’s theater critic Ben Brantley wrote that Pinter’s “work gets under our skins more than that of any other living playwright (for) the power of his dialogue is in the accumulation of often simple words and phrases that seem to change color and form as they are repeated.”
That is the mark of great art: That it can get under our skins and change the way we see and hear the world.
Attend a Pinter play and I assure you that you will agree with me that the Swedish Academy chose the right artist to present its Nobel Prize for literature to.
