This year, though, the Nobel Foundation managed to pull quite a pleasant surprise. They announced last week that Harold Pinter is the 2005 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Among the generation of Internet-bred movie and literature critics, not too many people know Harold Pinter or the influence of his work on modern drama. I think his body of work is simply too complicated for popularity. Furthermore, he wrote plays, and playwrights are perhaps the easiest to forget among the different kinds of writers. Plays are meant to be staged, and staged plays, especially when mounted to great acclaim, sometimes overshadow whoever wrote them (which I’d have described as sad, but the stage being the end of each idea in theater, I digress). Pinter himself describes his role as playwright with a hint of detachment. "What I write has no obligation to anything other than to itself," he had declared as a young playwright. "My responsibility is not to audiences, critics, producers, directors, actors or to my fellow men in general, but to the play at hand, simply."
To commemorate Pinter’s inclusion in the elite list of laureates, I initially planned to create a top 10 list of favorite plays. After some contemplation, though, I decided it would ultimately appear mundane. The range of his dramatic experimentation is so vast that his plays end up being incomparable, even to each other. (A critic had once called his drama "surreal-realism," where action is devoid of any theatricality, and spectacle is replaced by a grim representation of motives and sexual politics. I completely agree.) Subjected to contemporary standards, in fact, not a few people might still see his work as too forward looking. His drama is filled with awkward dialogue, mysterious silences and illogical expectations. It is magical, simply. He certainly was careful of being "pray for the old bugs of apprehension and expectation."
If I were to pick favorites by the number of times I’ve read a work, however, then The Homecoming would end up topping the list. In the play, an estranged son comes home from America after years of being incommunicado, now with a doctorate in philosophy and a beautiful wife. His family is a carnival of brutes, and his wife is a loose woman. By the end of the play, forgiveness appears impossible and his wife is doing everyone in the family. In front of him!
Yes, The Homecoming is misogynistic; it is also extremely cruel and emotionally misaligned. It’s even political, if you’d want it to be. But the reason why I like it is because it dissed philosophers, or the educated philosopher. I’ve always regarded this to be Pinter’s ars poetica – true philosophy is arrived, never explained. If it is explained, it gets lots, and is eventually destroyed. Even in his speeches Pinter is wary of pontification. As with any man of genius, though, what appears to be gibberish ends up overflowing with profundity.
My second most read Pinter play is The Birthday Party. It’s Pinter’s very first major play, made at about the same time as his one-act classics The Room and the immensely popular The Dumb Waiter. He had time and again recalled how this play failed when first produced. It was generally seen as "strange," which was, even then I take it, a rather dangerous label for artists. If you were labeled strange you’d either be ignored by the public or adored only by the chichi and intellectual elite. In the case of the strange The Birthday Party, it was generally ignored by the public and panned by critics, save for one famous dramatist who actually saw the potential it had.
Exploring a subject that is relatively simpler, but not less dark, The Birthday Party already displayed the distinct marks of Pinter’s later work. In the play, Stanley appears to be hiding in a boarding house nobody ever goes to. When two mysterious guests arrive, and everyone suddenly decides it’s his birthday, he spirals down realm of insanity, ultimately burying whatever secret he’s keeping. More than The Room and The Dumb Waiter, I think The Birthday Party best explores Pinter’s perchance for constantly distorting the present to muddle the past, making the experience of watching characters unravel their pangs less organized and, in such a unique way, more meaningful. "A moment is sucked away and distorted, even at the time of its birth" he explained in a speech. In the same lecture he alluded to his disdain for "labels on our chests," which "convince nobody."
Indeed, drama’s prescription of comprehensibility lulled many a contemporary playwright’s power of making characters achieve truthful perfection onstage. Pinter broke that convention. With the initial failure of The Birthday Party, one could probably say that he paid for it. A few years afterwards, though, Pinter came out with The Caretaker. The play, about a waif crashing with two strange brothers, displays Pintereque tension at its most intense and affecting form. This time around people took notice.
The success of The Caretaker was followed by a better-received restaging of The Birthday Party and a stream of other accomplished plays. Pinter had, by this time, become a moderately bankable playwright, although never as well known internationally as some of his more publicized contemporaries like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. However, each of his new work for the stage (and later for film) pushed the envelope in terms of craft, taking drama and theater to exciting and unexplored worlds. With the exception perhaps of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter can easily be seen as the most influential of twentieth century playwrights.
Betrayal marked a complete turnaround, literally, in the conventional linearity of plot. A tragic love affair told in reverse, it looked at the beginning of tragedy as the climax of a long sad story. Years later, the styled would be mirrored by movies like Memento and Peppermint Candy, to much lesser dramatic effect. No Man’s Land, which juxtaposes logic and illogic with a delicious tinge, challenged drama’s realm of meaning.
The more notable of his later plays introduced Pinter’s turn into more overt activism, although he did claim in his website that nearly all his plays were political to begin with. One For The Road is a dangerously propagandistic exploration of power, much like his early The Dumb Waiter, only less subtle this time, and more biting. The New World Order tackles the horror of torture and intimidation – subjects that appear doubly vile in the world of Pinter’s many pauses and minimalist dialogue. Party Time, one of his most playful works, satirizes the elite’s blindness to social tensions. These three works, at least for me, best represents Pinter’s contribution to political theatre.
Pinter unofficially resigned from writing plays several years ago (largely for health reasons) and devoted his time to political advocacy instead. (He remains, to this day, a harsh critic of English and US foreign policy.) Looking at his lifetime’s work, the most convenient observation would be that his plays are defined by the same ambiguous and highly compelling sense of cruelty. Not the type driven by blood, but that fueled by intent and instinct. His is a dramatic universe where, at least the way I see it now, people reiterate at the slightest provocation. At the same time, entire kingdoms crumble at the mention of a single word. The human being is frail, but not without any capacity to be nihilistic.
But that’s me talking, and I’m normally bad at describing things. Pinter is best read. He himself didn’t wish to muddle his work’s importance by definition. On more than a few occasions, he described each play as a failure, which led to the next failure, which in turn became "a different kind of failure." I guess it was this excitement to outdo his own work that gave Pinter a hint of freshness with every new play. His theatre is simply an amorphous realm.
Upon accepting the David Cohen Literature Prize for a lifetime of achievements, Pinter confesses that if "the relish, challenge and excitement in the language and through that language to character isn’t there, then nothing’s there and nothing can exist." He may have lost the relish, challenge and excitement, but even so his drama has yet to loose its teeth.