Harold Pinter's No Man's Land and Betrayal: a Postmodern Perspective

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.

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