AUSTIN QUIGLEYPinter, politics and

AUSTIN QUIGLEY
Pinter, politics and postmodernism (1)
Pinter’s plays have fascinated many people over the years for many reasons,
not the least of which is their capacity to resist large-scale generalisation. The
emphasis in the plays on complex and diverse local detail makes it very
difficult to argue that the plays as a group exemplify the large general truths
of any existing theory about the nature of society, personality, culture,
spirituality, anthropology, history or anything else of similar scope. This is
not to say that insights into the plays cannot be derived from all these sources.
Indeed they can, as several astute Pinter critics have demonstrated. The
trouble is that these various perspectives serve best as ways into the texture
of the plays rather than as summations of the implications of that texture, and
if excessively relied upon, they begin to obscure what they seek to clarify.
Stoppard uses an illuminating phrase to characterise the baffling experiences
of the leading characters in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
when he describes them as constantly being intrigued without ever quite being
enlightened.1 That sense of being fascinated by something we do not fully
understand is, as Van Laan has argued, an irreducible aspect of the experience
of Pinter’s plays, and we have, I think, over the years come to recognise that
the role of the critic is to increase the sense of enlightenment without diminishing
the sense of intrigue.2 To insist on defending the intrigue against any
enlightenment is, of course, to reduce all experience of a play to the first
experience, to insist on each play’s inviolable particularity and thus effectively
to abandon the task of criticism. To insist upon full enlightenment is to erase
the sense of intrigue, to allow the critical perspective to supplant the play, and
thus effectively to undermine the play’s capacity to function as a Pinter play.
What we appear to need from criticism is the kind of enlightenment that
clarifies and enhances the subtlety of the intrigue rather than the kind that, in
explaining the nature of the intrigue, explains it away.
These issues are not without their significance for the work of any playwright,
but there is something about Pinter plays that makes the balance
between intrigue and enlightenment particularly difficult for criticism to get
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right. And Pinter’s intermittent forays into the realm of political commentary
have served to make it even more difficult.3 Should we adopt the political
guidance he sometimes offers us and announce that we have finally found the
enlightening larger picture of which all the plays’ complexities are simply
constituent parts, or should we be defending his early plays against their
author’s belated desire to convert them into illustrations of political oppression
and abuse of authority?
Before we surrender to the urge to reinvent phrases like ‘the personal is the
political’, we should remember that response to such slogans in the past has
included lengthy arguments about the meaning of the terms ‘personal’ and
‘political’. But just as important is the often overlooked issue of the meaning
of the word ‘is’. Do we mean it in the sense that 2 + 2 is 4, a sense of total
equivalence, or do we mean it in the sense of Pinter is tall, i.e. he is among
other things tall? Is all of the personal political, most of it, or just some of it?
As far as Pinter’s plays are concerned, it is important to note that even as he
begins to argue in the 1980s that many of his earlier plays were, indeed,
political, he exempts from this claim Landscape, Silence, Old Times and
Betrayal.
4 And if whole plays can be exempted from the claim that the
personal is the political, it would follow that whatever the political component
of the other plays, they are not necessarily only or even centrally political.
Leaving to one side Pinter’s comments on these matters, it is well to remind
ourselves of the way in which literary theory, in one of its rare enlightened
phases, used to draw attention to the dangers of excessive explanatory claims.
One discipline or mode of enquiry after another was able to make foundational
claims on the basis of the argument that its material and concerns had a
bearing on almost every aspect of our lives. Thus it could be claimed that
everything is a matter of history, or that everything is a matter of economics,
or that everything is a matter of psychology, or that everything is a matter of
language and so on. The recognition that these claims can be made with equal
conviction and justification by a variety of equally convinced groups should
temper the enthusiasm for currently competing claims that everything is a
matter of politics, or of power, or of gender, or of race, or of culture, or of the
postmodern era, or of any other factor that helps constitute the multifaceted
complexity of our lives.
Though such enthusiasm should be tempered, it should not, of course, be
eradicated because all of these fram