Loredana Denis TotolanX5535073-PHAROLD PINTERThe aim of the following essay is to prove that the work of the British play writer Harold Pinter could be framed within the theatrical movement called realistic, because it meets all the requirements that have become convention by other authors. Moreover it also tries to delve into the term of absurd and the definition which the dictionary gives for this word which led to the creation of prejudice among the public, who thought this represented on stage would be meaningless. It was necessary to seek other sources that offered a less simplistic definition, and more in line with our hypothesis, that is, to demonstrate the degree of reality and daily life that offers the theater of the absurd.Furthermore the essay also is concerned with Pinters characters, comparing them with those of Beckett, as though the characters appeared on stage until the premieres of these authors have only been able to represent an external facet of the individual. The idea of the crisis that the modern character has fallen into is unnatural because it was wished to characterize it in a painfully realistic way is defended.Born in 1930, in London, Harold Pinter is one of the play writers that has created more controversy among critics and theater audiences. This controversy is due to his plays that, from the beginning, have broken the rules established by the classical and the naturalistic theater. He was considered an innovative author throughout his life. This title may also be equated to one of his predecessor, Samuel Beckett, who also revolutionized the theater scene. Although already at the end of the nineteenth century the critic Ferdinand Brunetire predicted the need for demise of strict rules and conventions to which the dramatic genre was based[footnoteRef:1]. But until the publication of Becketts Waiting for Godot, in 1953, Brunetires idea was not applied to English theater. [1: "The law of drama": "[...]I leave the dramatist complete freedom in development. That is where I depart from the old school of criticism that believed in the mysterious power of the `Rules in their inspiring virtues; and consequently we see the critics of the old school struggling and striving, exercising all their ingenuity to invent additional rules [...]. But the truth is that there are no rules in that sense; there will never be. There are only conventions which are necessarily variable, since their only object is to fulfil the essential aim of the dramatic work, and the means of accomplishing this vary with the piece, the time and the man. " Brandt, G.W., (ed.), Modern Theories of Drama. A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre, 1840-1990, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998, p.20.]

Thus, almost sixty years after, Beckett and Pinter will begin the difficult task of innovating, not only in the use of the units but also in how to deal with everyday issues and drawing a reality which complicates the lives of human beings as being based on absurd clichs and contradictions posed by the society to the individual who must deal with them every day. This is also the opinion of Peter Hall in Directing the lays of Harold Pinter when he talks about the difficulty of directing the authors plays: His director must celebrate the ambiguity by charting and then hiding the strong emotions. He must trust the audience to understand, even when they are dealing with contradictions. And above all, he must take his actors as precise as the singers of Mozart.. Yet the precision must paradoxically also be a means of expressing their own particularity. `The opposite is also true, said Marx (Groucho not Karl). And this true of directing Pinter. It is not easy; but it is not easy to direct any great dramatist who deals with the contradictions of living.[footnoteRef:2] [2: Hall, P., Directing the plays of Harold Pinter. Raby, P., The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 154.]

Many of the critics chose to frame the plays of Pinter in the current theater of the absurd and comparing him to Beckett. Whereupon prejudices among the public are created, which looked at them like something dark and hard to understand when, in fact, they were faced with their own daily lives. In this also resembles his predecessor, as Becketts plays were regarded as sleazy and lacking action. Maybe all this controversy is because the term Absurd, used by critics and applied to theater, has led to confusion from the beginning, because instead of clarifying that this is a stream that describes everything that is absurd in our daily lives, it has made people believe that is a ridiculous and pointless work which no one will be able to understand.

Later, in 1968, critics as well-known as John Russell Brown began to say that Pinter and the new play writers have been attributed too many adjectives, which only served to keep the fashion critics, besides of creating prejudice as it had been said a few lines above: "The new plays have been given all sorts of labels `kitchen -sink drama was one of the first; neo-realist; drama of non-communication; absurd drama; comedy of menace; dark comedy, drama of cruelty. But no cap has fitted more than a year or two, none has been big enough for more than two heads; and often the caps seem more suitable for the journalists who invent them than for the dramatist on whom they are thrust. Perhaps the first thing to say about the new dramatists is that they keep the critics on the run".[footnoteRef:3] [3: Brown, J. R., Modern British Dramatists, Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1968, p. 2.]

However, other important critics as Louis Gordon, in 1970, tried to continue with the tradition of the labels and said that Pinter was an uprooted naturalist:

"What is of crucial importance is that Pinter is neither an existentialist nor an absurdist, for he never portrays the existential dilemma wherein the man seeks an order in an order less universe. Pinter is simply, if a label is necessary, a ruthless realist. His characters face so much disorder in the universe as disorder in themselves. They try constantly to structure their lives, but unaware that their actions and behavior revolve around deeper sources than conscious ones, they are constantly confronted by chaos. But again, this is a disorder of the self, not the universe."[footnoteRef:4] [4: Gordon, L., Stratagems to Uncover Nakedness (The Dramas of H. Pinter), University of Missouri Press,Columbia, 1970, p. 10-11.]

Therefore Pinter may fit into the traditional realism current while he can also be considered an author of the tradition of the absurd. However, if we include him in both a current or the other one, he will always be different from the other authors belonging to it, precisely because he mingles traits of each other in his works.

"For Pinter there is no contradiction between the desire for realism and the basic absurdity of the situations that inspire him. Like Ionesco he regards life in its absurdity as basically funny- up to a point".[footnoteRef:5] [5: Esslin, M., The Theatre of the Absurd, London, Pelican Books, 3ed.: 1980, p. 242.]

Now, after having studied and analyzed the works of Pinter and his speeches devoted to playwriting, we conclude they are all about our everyday life, always from the point of view of the individual. Pinter tries to stage more personal situations such as in The Room or The Birthday Party, in which there are some threatening characters trying to snatch the home and peace of mind of the protagonists, who are afraid to lose their identity, their social environment and their properties. This was a common sentiment among the British society during the World War II.

Pinter draws the characters in an impartial way that only he can. We can meet on stage those people we see every day and who live events which are not always attractive or end happily, or sometimes maybe do not even have an end; people who cannot always make fluid sentences because they lose their memories sometimes; people who make the audience laugh in the most unexpected way, for example by highlighting the absurd aspect of the language that is full of set phrases losing sense, or being in situations presented by their social status that had never previously lived in scene. Pinter also gives prominence to the marginal figures, and therefore it flips one of the conventional principles.

"A character on stage who can present no convincing argument or information as to his past experience, his present behavior or his aspirations, nor give a comprehensive analysis of his motives is as legitimate and as worthy of attention as one, who alarmingly, can do all these things. The more acute the experience the less articulate its expression."[footnoteRef:6] [6: Pinter, H., Writing for the theatre, cit., p. ix.]

According to Pinter, the more a character insists on accurately telling a past experience the harder it is to express, as happened to Ellen in Silence or to Stan in The Birthday Party. On the other hand, if a character has to represent a vice or a virtue it ceases to be free and real and it becomes and archetype similar to the earlier theatrical trends. As we enter the dramatic type, we observe the same difficulty to represent a reality near the viewer, only this time it will be due to the lack of biographical and psychological features explicit in the text. Regarding biographical data, Pinter provides us with the age and the sex of the characters, but we cannot count on an (at least) reliable history on the origin of the characters: "Mick: You got two names. What about the rest? Eh? Now come on, why did you tell me all this dirt about you being an interior decorator?[footnoteRef:7] And in regard to psychological traits, we must discover them by ourselves: "Between my lack of biographical data about them and the ambiguity of what they say lies a territory which is not only worthy of exploration but which it is compulsory to explore."[footnoteRef:8] Only in the case of Aston in The Caretaker, Pinter discloses the psychological background of this character who was interned in a kind of psychiatric hospital. Thus we see that the types, classifications and other conventional approaches, whose goal is to assign labels to dramas in all their aspects and between them the character is not exempt, they suffer a crisis when authors like Pinter appear. [7: Pinter, The Caretaker, Plays Two, F&F, Londres, 1991, p. 71.] [8: Pinter, H., Writing for the theatre, cit., p.xii.]

In order to demonstrate that the situations and the characters do not go far from the everyday, the summary of the arguments of a Beckett and Pinter play are presented: 1- Waiting for Godot: two people outside waiting for a third. Meanwhile they try to solve their existential doubts but when they see that it is impossible they entertain themselves by playing. 2- The Birthday Party: a young man who has escaped from an organization and found refuge in another place, but he is found and taken in captivity again.

In the first one, although represented by Vladimir and Stragon, everyone has experienced how waiting can become tedious, and while we wait, a thousand existential questions come to our minds and we combine them with the simplest activities. In the second one, although we have not been victims of brainwashing by any organization as seems to have happened to Stan, we have found ourselves helpless when to say no to something or someone because they have managed to convince us through talking. Therefore despite the different readings each can do the possibility of the viewer to identify with the characters is undeniable. One of the problems that the spectators have with the Theatre of the Absurd is that they are not always willing to be represented in all of their facets, especially those who could become mere copies of our daily lives. For example, no one knows if we will become human waste like Nagg and Nell (Becketts Endgame) who are old and useless and that is the reason why their sons have put them into cans, or we may even become irrelevant because we let ourselves be dominated by what other tell us, as it happens to Stan in The Birthday Party. Moreover we also find out why some viewers struggle to identify with the characters of the authors of the absurd and Pinter, and that is that each of us has our own way to see ourselves, which is often not true, and when we witness the reality on stage we tend to ignore it with the excuse that we do not understand. Furthermore, since the problems addressed by the absurdity of the characters are of specific individuals, they will not always conclude with ours but we believe that they match those of any person around us. When we talk about person we mean the individual that is not representative of any ideology or social group; because only then the theater can venture into the depths of our condition, showing the individual in his intimacy, face to face with himself.

As we have seen Beckett and Pinters plays can represent people in a realistic way, but if we take a step further and we will intersperse two works written by the same authors with their plots and characters to show that if they represent humanity as it is, they could also become part of one another. The plays that are going to be used as an example are Waiting for Godot and A Slight Ache, since they share a character who says nothing, like is the case of the latter, or even does not appear, as in the former but yet, that invisible or mute character is the main reason for the conflict in the drama of two other characters. The common character is represented by Pinters matches seller who is waiting in the same way that Vladimir and Estragon are waiting outdoors. Besides, the disheveled appearance of the seller reminds us of these two. Flora and Edward could be Godot for the seller because if Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot to change something in their lives, the sellers life will change as a result of entering in the couples house. Although we could also change the roles as follows: the seller could be both Vladimir and Estragon who are tired of talking and finding no answer they have remained silent. Or, another example, the seller could be the Godot of Flora and Edward, becoming the character who brings them out of their routine.

Waiting for Godot has also been compared to The Caretaker due to its lack of plot and action. The fluidity of the characters is explained by Ronald Knowles as follows: "Language, character, and being are here aspects of each other made manifest in speech and silence. Character is no longer the clearly perceived entity underlying clarity of articulation the objectification of a social and moral entelechy but something amorphous and contingent[footnoteRef:9] [9: "The Caretaker." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 16 June 2014. Web. 18 June 2014.]

However, the individual that we recognize in Pinters characters is in a continuous struggle against everyday habits. Then, there will be characters that seem psychopaths or maniacs, for example Bert and his violent attitude towards Ridely at the end of The Room , the family members in The Homecoming who also do not show a stable moral attitude and socially accepted, Albert in A Night Out who is violent with a prostitute, or Nicholas in One for the Road who is a pervert oppressor in his attitude towards the family of Victor. Due to this struggle the character show themselves as aberrant, as in the named occasions, when all they are looking for is something to be dominant in. As Penelope Prentice says in her book The Pinter Ethic, where throughout the text, the author analyzes the cases of Pinters characters when they do not act ethically according to social conventions and yet those are features of most people in our daily lives.

"[...] `all that power of a torturer, and the quest for respect and love which when coupled with insecurity and lack of self-knowledge, leads to a struggle for dominance while robbing the self of the knowledge that such struggle can only self -destruct. Pinter does not dramatize the ravings of the aberrant psychopath, but the actions of fairly ordinary human beings embodying attitudes and actions most human share."[footnoteRef:10] [10: Prentice, P., The Pinter Ethic, New York and London, Garland, 1994, p. 368-369.]

We cannot but ask ourselves, what do the characters mentioned above want to dominate? Because Pinter gives the viewers complete freedom to make their own conclusions: "A categorical statement, I find, will never stay where it is and be finite. It will immediately be subject to modification by the other twenty-three possibilities of it. No statement I make, therefore, should be interpreted as final and definitive. One or two may sound final and definitive, but I wont regard them as such tomorrow, and I wouldnt like you to do so today."[footnoteRef:11] [11: Pinter, "Writing for the theatre", op. cit., p.vii]

The following answers are suggested: 1- Bert wanted to dominate at home in The Room, as the husband who had always been for Rose, with their daily routines: he went to work, having his food prepared by her who was also happy with her lifestyle in the room. So Bert could not let a stranger disturb their peace.

2- Max, in The Homecoming, is the most remarkable in the thirst for dominance: "Dont you talk to me like that. Im warning you." He says this to Lenny in the first act. And at the end of the play he says: "She wont... be adaptable!" He just wants to have a woman at home to replace the feminine figure of his dead wife.

3- Albert, in A Night Out, shows his violent side, which he carried in secret, because of being subjected to his mother and not being able to dominate at home. 4- Nicholas, in One for the Road, begins to show his dominant position with the following words at the beginning of the play: "Hello! Good morning. How are you? Lets not beat about the bush. Anything but that. Daccord? Youre a civilised man, So am I. Sit down." He also emphasizes the idea of a civilized man just to realize later that he is not civilized at all because he is oppressing families due to political issues: "[...] I believe - the man who runs this country announced to the country: We are all patriots, we are as one, we all share a common heritage. Except you, apparently."

Thus, through asking questions about the characters of Pinter and taking advantage of the freedom that the author gives us to interpret the meaning of his works and creatures, we were able to confirm two of our hypotheses. The first one about the daily lives of the characters and the second about the descendants of the Pinters characters from previous authors like Beckett. In conclusion, the name of theater of the absurd has only led to create a series of prejudices, which have been fueled by criticism from the moment that certain works of Beckett were plotted. Such prejudices were later moved to the works of Pinter, because Pinters plays had also these unconventional and realistic elements. After trying to frame Pinter in one of the movements that were in vogue when he began producing in the sixties, we have come to the same conclusion as some of the critics who have cited, that is, conventions that have fossilized the minds of the viewers, not realizing that what is now conventional no longer is in the future. Another conclusion that has been reached is that Pinters characters may appear abstract, due to failure in obtaining a clear data of the characters mind, just like Beckett. But the public's identification with these characters is possible depending upon the concept of man that we have, because we have to interpret the character individually. Finally, another conclusion is that the minds of the viewers have open when receiving the works of these authors.BIBLIOGRAPHY: Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot: Tragicomedy in 2 Acts. New York: Grove, 1954. Print. Brandt, G.W., (ed.), Modern Theories of Drama. A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre, 1840-1990, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998, p.20. Brown, J. R., Modern British Dramatists, Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1968, p. 2.

D. Peacock, Keith. Harold Pinter and the New British Theater. London: Greenwood, 1997. Print.

Esslin, M., The Theatre of the Absurd, London, Pelican Books, 3ed.: 1980, p. 242.

Gordon, L., Stratagems to Uncover Nakedness (The Dramas of H. Pinter), University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1970, p. 10-11.

Hall, P., Directing the plays of Harold Pinter. Raby, P., The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 154.

Hinchliffe, Arnold P. Harold Pinter. New York: Twayne, 1967. Print. Jane Wong Yeang Chui.Remembrance of Things Past and Present: Chronological Time and Cognitive Sensibilities in Harold Pinter's Silence and The Proust Screenplay. The Modern Language Review Vol. 107, No. 4 (October 2012) (pp. 1033-1046) Pinter, Harold. The Caretaker. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1963. Print. Pinter, Harold. Plays Harold Pinter. London: Eyre Methuen, 1976. Print. Prentice, P., The Pinter Ethic, New York and London, Garland, 1994, p. 368-369. "The Caretaker." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 16 June 2014. Web. 18 June 2014.

Pgina 11 de 11