H a n d i q u e 1
Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Betrayal: A Postmodern Perspective
A Synopsis Submitted to
Lovely Professional University
In partial fulfillment for the degree of
M.Phil. in English
Submitted by: Miss Akanshya Handique Supervised by: Dr. Ajoy Batta
Reg.no. 11719477 Associate Professor and Head
(Department of English, School
Of Arts and Language)
H a n d i q u e 2
H a n d i q u e 3
The present research project studies Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land (1975) and Betrayal
(1978) through the perspective of Postmodernism using selective postmodern features given by
Frederic Jameson. The paper is mainly to demonstrate the selective techniques used byPinter in his plays to show power relations between characters, use ofmemory, deception, dishonesty, economical dialogue, the loss of their identity. Khorshid Mostoufia in the thesis “Manipulative language and loss of identity in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party: A pragmatic study” discusses the identity crisis that the characters undergoes. Hongwei Chen in the thesis “No
Man’s Land: a Variation on Harold Pinter’s Theme of “Menace”” discusses the early plays of
Pinter as characteristics of comedy of menace. Yuan Yu in the paper “A Study of Power Relation in Pinter’s Plays from Foucault’s Power View” describes the power struggle of the characters through the perspective of Foucault’s power politics.H. Aliakbari in the thesis namely “Harold
Pinter: The Absurdist-Existentialist Playwright” discusses Pinter as an absurdist and existentialist dramatist. Paulami Dasgupta in her paper “Concept of Time in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal” talks about the non-chronological narrative used by Pinter. All of these research scholars talked about the different aspects regarding Pinter and his plays but none of them discussed No Man’s Land and Betrayal through the perspective of postmodernism specially using the postmodern features as given by Frederic Jameson. It is, therefore, worthwhile to undertake an analysis of Pinter’s plays to demonstrate the validity of applying postmodern critical tools to his dramas. From a postmodern point of view, Pinter’s obsession with the cultural construction of the human subject, the inevitably decentered nature of the self, and the role of power in constructing various discourses, is of central importance. In dealing with all these, he foregrounds the centrality of language as the basic dramatic device. Language, plot and character are employed but only to lay bare their problematical status as categories of representation. Life is a struggle for survival in H a n d i q u e 4
Pinter’s world. The quest of the characters is then for survival; what we have at the end of a play is a realignment of forces to ensure this possibility of survival. The plays No Man’s Landand
Betrayal are done in flashbacks, depending on memory and what happened in the past. The plays discourse on the “civilized” trappings of personal infidelity. Harold Pinter’s plays shows modern sexual games that men and women play by betraying each other with casual composure, as if they were discussing a love match at a tennis game instead of the love game in their lives.For all the pairing, the explicit sense is one of isolation. These people are so enclosed in their own selfish desires that they seem always to speak past each other. Lies upon lies are uttered with a dry economy of language and lack of emotion. In most of his works, Pinter makes an exploration of memory; what is real and what is imaginary fuse together in his plays. Also Pinter has always made his characters use the gaps in their memory to their advantage. His works very often show his preoccupation with the elusive nature of human memory. This study intends to provide a new interpretation of two plays through an analysis drawn from postmodern theory.
No Man’s Land
Among Harold Pinter's plays, No Man's Land (1975) has a special position. It is one of the representative works in the second period of Pinter’s dramatic writing in the 1970s. After No
Man's Land, Pinter’s creative efforts began to shift to screenplays and plays on the political motifs.No Man's Land focuses on its language, its use of symbolism, its exploration of the themes of identity and that of the inevitability of the future of death in life. No Man's Land is clearly Pinter’s first masterpiece. There are only four characters in this work: the reserved house owner, Hirst (a poet and a literary critic), the tramp, Spooner, and two servants, Foster (who also claims himself as a poet) and Briggs. Spooner, who suffers much of the bitterness of snares in life and is desperate to find a peaceful shelter of “room”, Hirst, a successful poet is trapped. H a n d i q u e 5
Significantly, simple as it seems to be in plot structure, No Man's Land is one of the most difficult plays written by Pinter because of its profundity and ambiguity in meaning caused by his special use of memory.
HIRST: What was he drinking?
SPOONER: Pernod.
Pause
I was impressed, more or less at that point, by an intuition that he possessed a
measure of serenity the like of which I had neverencountered.
HIRST: What did he say?
SPOONER stares at him.
SPOONER: You expect me to remember what he said?
HIRST: No (Pinter, No Man’s Land 331).
In a characteristic postmodern manner, there is a simultaneous writing and contestation of these conventions. Language, plot and character are employed but only to lay bare their problematical status as categories of representation The dramatic mode Pinter adopts challenges the assumptions of realism in theatre by subverting its premises of plot, character and language.
One of the prominent features, for example, is the way in which characters often use language, not to communicate, but to complicate, intimidate and manipulate. H a n d i q u e 6
SPOONER: What a remarkably pleasantroom. I feel at peace here.Safe from all
danger. But please don’t be alarmed. I shan’t stay long. I never stay long with
others… Fortunately, the danger is remote.
Pause
I speak to you with this startling candour because you are clearly a reticent man,
which appeals, and because you are a stranger to me, and because you are clearly
kindness itself.
Pause(Pinter, No Man’s Land 323).
No Man’s Land exploits concerns like negotiatingrelationships while remaining within the overall design of a memory play. For this purpose it draws upon the dialogic potential as well as the individual memories of the characters. The two major characters appear to be men of letters attempting to discover their identities as poets. The dialogue between the two covers topics like language, the nature of experience, virtue and love. But what remains prominent throughout their conversation is the problem of perception of what constitutes reality, especially the past, and how to negotiate with it. Spooner alludes to it in this way:
Experience is a paltry thing. Everyone has it and will tell his tale of it. I leave
experience to psychological interpreters....I myself can do any graph of
experience you wish, to suit your taste or mine…I am interested in where I am
eternally present and active (Pinter, No Man’s Land 326). H a n d i q u e 7
But he undercuts his own assertion by saying that “the present is truly unscrupulous.” What follows in the play can be seen as revealing the irony in Spooner’s assertion that he is ‘free’ from the past since all he does is narrate to Hirst his past and its power to shape him:
Spooner: I have never been loved. From this I derive my strength have? Ever?
Been loved?
HIRST: Oh, I don’t suppose so.
SPOONER: I looked upon once into mymother’s face. What I saw there was
nothing less than pure malevolence (Pinter, No Man’s Land332).
The virtual commingling of memory, dream and the real world in the play offers an example of how the distinct boundaries of the real and the fantastic and the actual and the dreamy are blurred. In fact, apart from this, the play’s ending suggests a kind of arresting of movement of time into motionlessness as Spooner declares: “You are in no man’s land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever,icy and silent?” (Pinter, No Man’s Land399).
Betrayal
Betrayal was written in 1978. It is critically regarded as one of Pinter’s major dramatic works. It features his characteristically economical dialogue, characters' hidden emotions and veiled motivations, and their self-absorbed competitive one-upmanship, face-saving, dishonesty, and (self-) deceptions. With titles such as "Two years earlier" and "One year earlier," nine sequences are shown in reverse chronological order with Emma and Jerry meeting for the first time at the conclusion.Regarded as one of his masterpieces, Betrayal is a study of human H a n d i q u e 8 relationships and human behaviour. Though the emphasis is on the memory and the importance of the past in a person’s life, the play’s reverse order of sequences brings an added quotient to it.
This article strives to study the concept of time and relationships as used by Pinter in the play.
The researcher has made a new-historicist study of the theme of human relationships and how its form changes with the change of time in the article.
The play takes one of the most familiar of dramatic situations an adulterous love affair and uses it as a means of examining the vast and complicated permutations that such a betrayal can have among spouses, lovers, and friends.Betrayal all center on loves past and present, where when memory pressures to invalidate past well-being it may demolish present happiness to the characters. In these plays, we see that characters oppose about their memories, disagree with themselves, remembering events one way and then forgetting it ever happened; memory becomes a weapon. The past plays a very energetic role in the relationships of the characters as well as the action of the present situation. As in the other of Pinter’s Memory plays, memory is a weapon used by the characters to gain control and dominate their opponent’s characters. In this play the character’s preferences to control can demolish relationships on various levels: the characters’ personal world, the world of the audience, and the world beyond the audience.
Betrayal is a richly textured drama that exposes social pretenses and unmitigated emotions that draws us into the same complex world we all inherit and makes us believe simultaneously in the endurance and transience of relationships and in the ecstasy and pain of intimacy. In Betrayal the backward movement, dramatic not narrative, is toward disillusion; the audience, having witnessed the end of the affair and its aftermath, understands how transitory are the lovers‟ feelings towards each other during the early time of the affair.” The forward movement, more intermittent, is toward such revelations as how the husband deals with his H a n d i q u e 9 friend after he has discovered his wife’s infidelity with him.The playwright plays variations on the theme of deception. Jerry decides, for instance, that Robert, whom he has been cuckolding for years, is not a true friend. Who knew exactly what and when did they know it?
JERRY: Why didn’t she tell me?
ROBERT: Well, I’m not her, old boy.
JERRY: Why didn’t you tell me?
Pause
ROBERT: Tell you what?
JERRY: That you knew. You bastard (Pinter, Betrayal32).
The characters are of an elite world of high culture, but they are all miserable, and not one of them is happy for any stretch of time.Betrayal lies in the coldness of the three betrayers who react to the multiple betrayals with hidden emotions and self-absorbed and self-deception.
These folks are simply too ‘civil’ toward one another.On the surface, the conversations seem concise, minimalist, a series of trivial near-non sequiturs. But the real drama is roiling underneath: layers of deception and multiple levels of disloyalty.
JERRY: I was best man at your wedding. I saw you in white. I watched you glide
by in white.
EMMA: I wasn’t in white.
JERRY: You know what should have happened? H a n d i q u e 10
EMMA: What?
JERRY: I should have had you, in your white, before the wedding. I should have
blackened you, in your white wedding dress, blackened you in your bridal dress,
before ushering you into your wedding, as your best man (Pinter, Betrayal 114).
Emma, who appears to love them both, is essentially a possession between the men as they play out their competitive power game. Scenes of the affair between Emma and Jerry alternate with those of the two male friends meeting. The betrayal poisons these two best friends against each other. Everyone ends up feeling betrayed. Emma is betrayed when she learns her husband has also had affairs. Jerry feels betrayed when he learns Emma told her husband, his best buddy and business partner, about their affair.
EMMA:You know what I found out ... last night? He's betrayed me for years.
He's had... other women for years.
JERRY: No? Good Lord.
Pause.
But we betrayed him for years.
EMMA: And he betrayed me for years.
JERRY: Well I never knew that.
EMMA: Nor did I (Pinter, Betrayal 18).
Harold Pinter was born on 10 October 1930 in London, son of a Jewish dressmaker.
Growing up, Pinter was met with the expressions of anti-Semitism, and has indicated its H a n d i q u e 11 importance for his becoming a dramatist. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated from London at the age of nine, returning when twelve. He has said that the experience of wartime bombing has never lost its hold on him. Back in London, he attended
Hackney Grammar School where he played Macbeth and Romeo among other characters in productions directed by Joseph Brearley. This prompted him to choose a career in acting. In
1948 he was accepted at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1950, he published his first poems. In 1951 he was accepted at the Central School of Speech and Drama. That same year, he won a place in Anew McMaster's famous Irish repertory company, renowned for its performances of Shakespeare. Pinter toured again between 1954 and 1957, using the stage name of David Baron. Between 1956 and 1980 he was married to actor Vivien Merchant. In 1980 he married the author and historian Lady Antonia Fraser.
Pinter made his playwriting debut in 1957 with The Room, presented in Bristol. Other early plays were The Birthday Party (1957), at first a fiasco of legendary dimensions but later one of his most performed plays, and The Dumb Waiter (1957). His conclusive breakthrough came with The Caretaker (1959), followed by The Homecoming (1964) and other plays.Harold
Pinter is generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the
20th century. That he occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama:
"Pinteresque".Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and presence crumbles. With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution. Pinter's drama was first perceived as a variation of absurd theatre, but has later more aptly been characterized as "comedy of menace". H a n d i q u e 12
It is said of Harold Pinter that following an initial period of psychological realism he proceeded to a second, more lyrical phase with plays such as Landscape (1967) and Silence
(1968) and finally to a third, political phase with One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language
(1988), The New World Order (1991) and other plays. But this division into periods seems oversimplified and ignores some of his strongest writing, such as No Man's Land (1974) and
Ashes to Ashes (1996). In fact, the continuity in his work is remarkable, and his political themes can be seen as a development of the early Pinter's analyzing of threat and injustice.Since 1973,
Pinter has won recognition as a fighter for human rights, alongside his writing. He has often taken stands seen as controversial. Pinter has also written radio plays and screenplays for film and television. Among his best-known screenplays are those for The Servant (1963), The
Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981, based on the John Fowles novel). Pinter has also made a pioneering contribution as a director.
Characteristics of Pinter's work
Pinteresque
Harold Pinter occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama.
It is a modern dramatic technique. The OED defines it as "of or relating to the British playwright,
Harold Pinter, or his works". The Swedish Academy defines characteristics of the Pinteresque in greater detail:
Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable
dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and presence crumbles. With a
minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of H a n d i q u e 13
interlocution. Pinter's drama was first perceived as a variation of absurd theatre, but
has later more aptly been characterized as 'comedy of menace', a genre... In a typical
Pinter play, we meet people defending themselves against intrusion or their own
impulses by entrenching themselves in a reduced and controlled existence. Another
principal theme is the volatility and elusiveness of the past(Web).
Two silences
The "Pinter Silence"
EMMA: What day?
JERRY: When I threw her up. It was in your kitchen.
EMMA: It was in your kitchen.
Silence (Pinter, Betrayal 13).
This is an example among the most-commonly cited of Pinter's comments on his own work about two kinds of silence, including his objections to "that tired, grimy phrase 'failure of communication'," as defined in his speech to the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol in
1962, incorporated in his published version of the speech entitled "Writing for the Theatre":
There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a
torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language
locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an
indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly,
anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true
silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of H a n d i q u e 14
looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness
(Web).
Pinter's dramas have been labeled as 'absurd', 'mysterious', 'enigmatic', ‘complex’. There has been a constant tendency to reduce the idea of the 'Pinteresque' to language when Pinter is preoccupied with the tensions between reality and the world of the imagination. He has, actually and accurately, used theatre as a 'critical act' to denote the abstracted realities, and he has applied his language to embody his world-view concerning the contemporary capitalist world. Pinter has journeyed from the room to the outside world, from the private to the public social space, and has identified an inescapable sense of pessimism and alienation, and investigated a world of atrocities. There are cities and landscapes beyond Pinter's rooms, cities peopled by wandering, displaced figures surveying the self-estranged city that is modem consciousness, and landscapes where his people retreatinto the private realms of memory and fantasy.
The "Pinter Pause"
One of the "two silences"–when Pinter's stage directions indicate pause and silence when his characters are not speaking at all–has become a "trademark" of Pinter's dialogue called the
"Pinter pause": "During the 1960s, Pinter became famous and notorious for his trademark: 'The
Pinter pause' " . A pause in Pinter is as important as a line.
ROBERT: Speak.
JERRY: Yes.
Pause.
ROBBERT: You look quite rough. H a n d i q u e 15
Pause.
What’s the trouble?
Pause (Pinter, Betrayal 26).
Postmodernism
Postmodernism describes a broad movement that developed in the mid-to late 20the century in the arts, philosophy, criticism and architecture. Postmodernism is defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, rejection to grand narratives, including objective notions of reason, absolute truth and objective reality. It is characterized by tendencies to epistemological, moral relativism, pluralism, irreverence and self-preferentiality. Postmodernism claims that knowledge and truth are products of social, historical or political discourses or interpretations.
Postmodern literature is characterized by reliance on narrative technique such as fragmentation, paradox and the unrealistic narrator. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, tends to resist definition or classification as a “movement”. It is a response against dogmatic following of Enlightenment thinking and Modernist approaches to literature. It deals in reader-response and deconstructionist approaches and the subversions of implicit contract between author, text and reader.
Frederic Jameson born April 14, 1934 is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He has published a wide range of works analyzing literary and cultural texts and developing his own neo-Marxist theoretical position. In addition, Jameson has produced a large number of texts criticizing opposing theoretical positions. A prolific writer, he has assimilated an astonishing number of theoretical discourses into his project and has intervened in many H a n d i q u e 16 contemporary debates while analyzing a diversity of cultural texts, ranging from the novel to video, from architecture to postmodernism.In his first published book Jameson analyzed the literary theory and production of Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961) was influenced by Jameson's teacher Erich Auerbach and by the Stylistics associated with Leo
Spitzer, focusing on Sartre's style, narrative structures, values, and vision of the world. After intense study of Marxian literary theory in the 1960s, when he was influenced by the New Left and antiwar movement, Jameson published Marxism and Form, which introduced a tradition of dialectical neo-Marxist literary theory to the English-speaking world (1970). The Political
Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). He has also published several volumes of essays. Two other books, Signatures of the Visible (1991) and The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992) collect studies of film and visual culture, while The Cultural Turn (1998) presents Selected Writings on the postmodern, 1983-1998 Studies of Theodor W. Adorno, Late Marxism (1990) and Brecht and
Method (2000) continue his intensive work in Marxist theory and aesthetics.
Jamesonstudies on postmodernism are a logical consequence of his theoretical project.
He presented his first analysis of the defining features of postmodern culture in an essay
Postmodernism and Consumer Society (a 1982 lecture), published in Hal Foster's collection The
Anti-Aesthetic (1983). Eventually, he synthesized and elaborated his emerging analysis in the article Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which more systematically interprets postmodernism in terms of the Marxian theory of capitalism and as a new "cultural dominant".Within his analysis, Jameson situates postmodern culture in the framework of a theory of stages of society--based on a neo-Marxian model of stages of capitalist development-- and argues that postmodernism is part of a new stage of capitalism. Every theory of H a n d i q u e 17 postmodernism, he claims contains an implicit periodization of history and an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today. Following Ernest
Mandel's periodization in his book Late Capitalism (1975), Jameson claims that "there have been three fundamental moments in capitalism, each one marking a dialectical expansion over the previous stage. These are market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational, capital.
According to Frederic Jameson postmodernism encompasses ideas such as crisis, dystopian worldview, radical break, etc. He questions whether postmodernism implies any fundamental change or break from the high-modernist stylistic innovation.His best known book
Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984) analyses the features of postmodernism.According toJameson, postmodernism is a cultural dominant. To situate postmodernism historically is to define it as far more than a "style" or a "moment."
Postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process. Hence the features like fragmentation of the past, the loss of meaning,the schizophrenic self and its society, depthlessness,pastiche are discussed in the paper.
Literature Review
Hongwei Chen in the thesis “No Man’s Land: a Variation on Harold Pinter’s Theme of
“Menace”” discusses the play being one of the representative works in the second phase of
Pinter’s writing in the 1970s, No Man's Land is more an extension of than a departure from his early comedies of menace. To a certain degree, the central motif of the play is still a variation on the theme of territory fight explored in such plays as The Caretaker. What makes his play unique is that the major conflict is no longer a fight for the “room" in the sense of existential H a n d i q u e 18 significance, but for a much more private “territory” of the innermost soul embodied by the past and memory.
PaulamiDasgupta in her article “Concept of Time in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal” discusses how Pinter makes an exploration of memory between what is real and what is imaginary and how they are fuse together in his plays. Also Pinter has always made his characters use the gaps in their memory to their advantage. His works very often show his preoccupation with the elusive nature of human memory.
Lyn Gardner of “The Guardian” said that there are many different kinds of betrayal in
Harold Pinter’s play. One of them was the very act of writing about a relationship, inspired by
Pinter’s own affair with Joan Bakewell while she was married to the TV producer Michael
Bakewell, an advocate of Pinter’s early plays.
Charles Spencer for “The Telegraph” named Betrayal as the greatest, and the most moving, of all Pinter’s plays. He says one doesn’t leave the theatre trying to solve a mystery inside an enigma. Nor does Betrayal feature the hectoring Left-wing a ligit-prop of Pinter’s later work.
Michael Billingtonof “The guardian” says that the beauty of Pinter’s play is that it is open to many interpretations. On the surface, it looks simple enough. And it is the same with No
Man’sLand as well.Harold Pinter’s new play, No Man’s Land, is about precisely what its title suggests: the sense of being caught in some mysterious limbo between life and death, between a world of brute reality and one of fluid uncertainty.
KhorshidMostoufia in the thesis “Manipulative language and loss of identity in Harold
Pinter’s The Birthday Party: A pragmatic study” reports a pragmatic study of characters' H a n d i q u e 19 conversation in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party to reveal how the use of manipulative language can result in destructive ends. The thesis discusses the power relations between characters and the loss of their identity as a result of excessive verbal attacks on the face ofthose without power. (1)What impoliteness strategies are used by primary characters to assert their power over the weakest character to attack his face? (2) What counter strategies are used by primary characters either to offend their addressees or defend them? (3) Which aspects of primary characters, specifically Stanley’s face and sociality rights have been affected, leading to the destruction of his identity due to impolite behaviors?
Yuan Yu in the paper “A Study of Power Relation in Pinter’s Plays from Foucault’s
Power View” discusses Pinter’s characteristic of the language, which are always the focus of the critics. Pinter has added a new brand of colors to the English stage dialogue and this is attested by the frequent use of terms like “Pinteresque language” or “Pinterese” in current dramatic criticism. The paper reviews Foucault’s reflections on power and analyzes the power relations of the characters in The Birthday Party, pointing out that they all possess desire for power. By doing this, it discusses the relation between power and truth, and concludes that power exists everywhere and knowledge is but the outcome of power struggle.
H. Aliakbariin the thesis namely “Harold Pinter: The Absurdist-Existentialist Playwright” introduces Pinter as an early practitioner of the Theater of the Absurd as well as an existentialist.
In his plays The Dumb Waiter, The Roomand Birthday Party absurd is presented in its different aspects and faced by different characters. Sometimes this absurdity is funny but the dramatist's aim is to get into reality. Another aspect of Pinter's plays is existentialism. His Pinteresque characters show his multi-dimensional way of looking at life. H a n d i q u e 20
Dr. AnshuPandey in her article “Harold Pinter’s Old Times: A Memory Play” discusses the power of the past and memory in his plays. His famous plays Old Times, No Man's Land and
Betrayal all center on loves past and present, where when memory pressures to invalidate past well-being it may demolish present happiness to the characters. In these plays, we see that characters oppose abouttheir memories, disagree with themselves, remembering events one way and then forgetting it ever happened; memory becomes a weapon. The past plays a very energetic role in the relationships of the characters as well as the action of the present situation.
As in the other of Pinter’s Memory plays, memory is a weapon used by Old Times’ characters to gain control and dominate their opponent’s characters. In this play the character’s preferences to control can demolish relationships on various levels: the characters’ personal world, the world of the audience, and the world beyond the audience.
Research Methodology
This is a text-based study, aiming to provide a new interpretation of the selected texts of Pinter.
To get the desired outcome of the research Postmodernism theory will be used specially dealing with the postmodern features as given by the philosopher and theorist Frederic Jameson.Also
MLA 7th edition instruction will be followed thoroughly. The study will be done with the help of both the primary and the secondary sources available in the library of the university and also with the help of online sources and with the instruction and guidance provided by the supervisor.
Objectives
To try and understand Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Betrayal from the post modernistic
viewpoints.
To draw relevance between the selected plays and the modern society. H a n d i q u e 21
To review the selected techniques Pinter used to present the themes explored by
postmodernists.
Scope of the study
Pinter’s works are full of awkward pauses, ambiguous or confusing language and
circuitous or endlessly wandering plots.
Why does he use these? What is he trying to convey?
His techniques present the unreliability of language.
His dialogues, signs and even the pauses can be interpreted in various different ways
because of puns, irony and the general subjectivity of perception.
To uncover the significance of the themes he is suggesting and the use of his techniques
and the relevance to the modern man and the society is what the study is going to explore.
H a n d i q u e 22
Works Cited
Ana Fernández-Caparrós “Postmodern American Drama: An Introduction”, Universitàdegli
Studi di Bergamo, 4-8 Maggio 2012.
Dasgupta, Paulami. Concept of Time in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. Diss. Assam University,
October 2013. Web.
Pandey, Anshu. “Harold Pinter’s Old Times: A Memory Play”. The Criterion: An International
Journal in EnglishVol. II. Issue. IV.ISSN-0976-8165 (December 2011): 1-6. Web.
Esslin, Martin. Pinter: A Study of His Plays. London: Eyre Methuen, 1977. Print.
Harold Pinter: Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth & Politics". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB
2013.Web. 23 Jun 2013. 2005/pinter-lecture-e.html> Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or,The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. Print. Mostoufi, Khorshid. Manipulative language and loss of identity in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party: A pragmatic study. Diss. University Sains Malaysia. 2014. Web Pinter, Harold. Harold Pinter: Plays Three, 3rd ed; London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1997. Print. Pinter, Harold. Harold Pinter: Plays Four, 3rd ed; London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2011. Print. H a n d i q u e 23 Sakellaridis, Elizabeth. Pinter’s Female Portraits: A Study of Female Portraits inthe Plays of Harold Pinter, London: Macmillan Press, 1988. Print.