HAROLD PINTER

HAROLD PINTER

Existential problems like absurdity, power, domination, fear, lack of communication are reflected in Harold Pinter`s plays, a new theatre of the Absurd. His works, cryptic and original, have been described as comedies of menace. In a typical Pinter work, the characters attempt to communica 636e44g te as they react to an invasion of their narrow lives. Pinter`s dialogue reflects the difficulties inherent in verbal communication and explores the layers of meaning produced by pauses and silence.

Harold Pinter was born at Hackney, East London, in 1930, and believed that their family was of Jewish origin since the name Pinter occurred among Hungarian Jews. Pinter`s first poems were published as written by Harold Pinter - a name of Spanish origin, Sephardic Jews. Pinter`s memories about his childhood are connected with a "working-class area" with Victorian houses and a soap factory " with a terrible smell".

Pinter started as an actor; his interest in dramatic art determined him to apply for a grant to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but he went there for two terms only, then he left. Although he did not see too much of war, at eighteen he refused to go into the army and declared himself a conscientious objector.

His literary beginning took place in Poetry London in 1950 with two poems signed by Harold Pint. He excelled as a playwright starting with his first play The Room which was very successful and impressed Harold Habson, a drama critic of the Sunday Times, who wrote about it. The same year he wrote two further plays: The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter. However Pinter`s next play The Caretaker, performed in 1960, succeeded in annihilating the previous bad commentaries, it proclaimed Pinter one of the best playwrights of the time, comparable to Beckett.

Pinter as well as Beckett is a representative of the Theatre of the Absurd in spite of the surface naturalism of their plays. Actually Pinter`s plays are always related to Beckett`s and Ionesco`s. Some critics consider these playwrights and also Kafka as influences since Pinter himself admits that he likes Beckett and Kafka very much, but he reads Ionesco after he has already written his first plays. Unlike Beckett and Kafka who create a world where dream intersects reality, where both coexist, Pinter "remains on the firm ground of everyday reality".

Unexpectedly real, Pinter`s work is woven around his experience, it is the embodiment of something ordinary, a real situation closely observed which allows him to point out certain elements of setting and language. In his earlier plays sinks and food are obsessively present. Despite this, Esslin does not consider Pinter a naturalistic playwright but paradoxically he emphasises the mystery and the ambiguity of Pinter`s work: The firt deviation from the realistically constructed play lies in the element of uncertainty about the motivation of the characters, their backgrounds, their very identity.

The ambiguity of the characters lies in the lack of biographical information, we do not know the names of the characters. For instance, in The Caretaker the old man is called Davies, but also Jenkins. Pinter claims that his characters are similar to us "inexpressive, giving little way, unrealible, elusive, evasive, obstructive, unwilling" but they are a key to the dramatist`s method because they increase the dramatic tension.

The atmosphere of uncertainty, ambiguity, mystery is the outcome of man`s existential fear, with Pinter menace is outside but it also lurks inside every character suggesting a phychological approach.

Pinter started as a poet and he is concerned with words and with the relation between author and words. Sound, meaning and rhythm merge with his pleasure of writing. But words can make him feel sickness and disgust because of their dead terminology, repetitiveness which lead them towards meaninglessness, a kind of paralysis.

The Caretaker is a play which allows a comparison with Beckett`s Waiting for Godot as Peter Griffth states: the reader can compare "the absence of a stable social milieu; the characters` havy reliance upon the exercise of memory, coupled with considerable problems in achieving this feat; the absence of women; even, at a perhaps trivial level, the recurrent difficulty in matching feet to appropriate footwear".

The structure of the play is a result of Pinter`s interest in symmetry; it contains three acts and three characters. The two brothers are different but they complete each other: Aston is a good person who cares about other human beings in need and tries to help them but he is slow and clumsy; Mick seems to be a successful businessman who bought an old house for his brother. The third character, Davies, is the intruder who comes in Aston`s house and because of his behaviour he has to leave his temporary home and job.

The problem of identity appears in this play, too: Davies states that his name is not Davies but Jenkins, yet he returns to Davies: "Mac Davies. That was before I changed me name". The confusion created by the two names and the character`s oscillation between them show the reader a person who oscillates between the two brothers: Aston who helped him and Mick who seems superior. Davies, a homeless wanderer, tries his shortcomings exploited by Mick who finally succeeds in making him show his real face. Davies is unable to resists "the satisfaction of glorying in his superiority over the ex-inmate of an asylum " , he also intends to play one brother off against the other.

The paly was received as a simple one; its obscurity is connected with dialogue, the relation between question and answer, the relation between characters.

While Aston`s gesture can be interpreted as a search of a father, Mick`s rejection of the father figure is an archetype of the conflict between gererations, between the sons and the father. Mick`s reaction in the end of the play is violent and ironical and leaves no possibility of return for the old man: " Ever since you came into this house there has been nothing but trouble. Honest. I can take nothing you say at face value. Every word you speak is open to any number of different interpretations. Most of what you say is lies. You`re violent, you`re erratic, you`re just completely unpredictable. You`re nothing else but a wild animal, when you come down to it. You`re a barbarian. And to put the old tin lid on it, you stink from arse-hole to breakfast time."

Aston and Mick are similar to Estragon and Vladimir: one of them is a poetic nature while the other is rational. They can also be seen as different sides of the same personality, idea sustained by Pinter`s statement that " every character an author brings to life can be regarded as an emanation of one aspect of his personality". Aston is a very sensitive person with a vivid imagination, therefore an artistic personality which had to be adjust to reality ( through electric shock treatment ). Mick who is more anchored in reality tries to protect him.

The Caretaker is considered a tragic-comedy according to Pinter`s statement: "As far as I`m concerned, The Caretaker is funny, up to a point. Beyond that point it ceases to be funny, and it was because of that point that I wrote it" ( The Sunday Times, London, 14 August 1960 ). In spite of some readers` reactions ( in favour of a "laughable farce" ) the comic and the tragic are interwoven and this makes of it an open play.

III. Assignment questions:

- Comment on the main critical ideas of "Tradition and Individual Talent" And "The Music of Poetry" by T.S. Eliot.

- Comment on the broad background of "The Waste Land" By T.S. Eliot.

- Comment on the main themes, motifs and symbols from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land".

- The idea of history in Yeats' "Leda and the Swan".

- Reconciling opposites in Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium".

- Christian legend used in non- Christian aims in D. Thomas' poetry.

- The impressionistic technique in J. Conrad's "Lord Jim".

- Main symbols of time and fragmentariness in Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse"/ "Jacob's Room".

- Stream of consciousness technique in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by J. Joyce combined with epiphany and the aesthetic doctrine.

- Elements of the absurd theatre in S. Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" and "Happy Days".

Note: The form of the exam will be a written paper and an oral examination.

IV. Selected Bibliography:

1. *** The Norton Anthology, Fifth Edition, vol. 2, New York, 1986.

2. *** The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol. II, Oxford University Press,

New York, 1972.

3. Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel, Secker & Warburg, London, 1993.

4. Felicia, Burdescu. 20^th Century British Literature, Tipografia Universitatii din

Craiova, 2003.

5. Ford, Boris (ed.), The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. The Present, vol.8,

Penguin Book, the second edition, 1990.

6. Frazer, George. Creanga de Aur, Minerva, Bucharest, 1980.

7. Rosenthal, M. L. The Modern Poets, Oxford University Press, London, 1969.

8. Sanders, Andrew. The Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press,

Oxford, 1994.

9. Stevenson, Randall. Modernist Fiction, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, 1992.

10. Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism : 1750 - 1950, Jonathan Cape,

London, 1986.