Ethics, Politics, and Alterity in Selected Plays and Other Works by Harold
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LANCASTER UNIVERSITY Ethics, Politics, and Alterity in Selected Plays and Other Works by Harold Pinter Ghadeer Alhasan (BA, MA) Submitted for the award of a PhD in English Literature September, 2017 This thesis is my own work and has not been submitted in substantially the same form for the award of a higher degree elsewhere. Abstract This thesis offers a comprehensive critical examination of the intersections between Pinter’s political output – most notably his drama – and contemporary ethical thought. In order to so, I build on the recent few discussions of Pinter’s ethics by arguing that the ethical has always been a critical focus at every stage of Pinter’s work. In short, this study challenges both the earlier tendency that takes Pinter as an Absurdist and the late one that regards him as purely political. I shall then seek to explore the nexus between politics and ethics in various Pinter texts that deal explicitly or suggestively with the political. In order to so, I shall look at the question of alterity as that which structures the irreducible gap between ethics and politics in Pinter’s work. In particular, I approach the conception of otherness in Pinter in the double sense of the unknowable and that which always already inhabits the same. In either case, alterity, for Pinter, I argue, appears as a disruptive force, displacing the inclination towards hegemony, totality and sameness. In short, Pinter, I argue, does not offer a prescriptive treatise on how to overcome the ethical-political opposition; however, his plays, I would argue, glance towards a different configuration of the political, one that is grounded in an ethical responsiveness or openness towards the other. Comparatively speaking, the academic field of drama and theatre studies has been a latecomer to the growing interest in ethics that was mainly triggered by an increasing interest in the work of Levinas during the last two decades of the twentieth century. It is not until the late 2000s that a turn to ethics became manifest in theatre studies. And it is particularly this turn towards ethics within drama studies, in general, and the contemporary British stage, in particular, that sets the context for my current investigation of Pinter’s ethics. Contents Acknowledgments iii INTRODUCTION Facing the Other 1 Dramatizing the Face 5 Ethical (Re)Turn 11 Pinter and Levinas 15 Post-War Political Theatre 18 Parables of Alterity 25 Summary 30 CHAPTER 1 Identity: The Birthday Party 33 Musical Metamorphosis 38 Unfit for Life 51 Purim 63 CHAPT ER 2 Dwelling: The Caretaker 71 The ‘Room’: Performing the Uncanny 73 ‘Hostipitality’ 84 Fraternity and the Patriarch 95 The Scapegoat 104 CHAPTER 3 Waiting: The Dumb Waiter 117 Bad Faith 118 The Other 132 Law 139 Law 151 The Gift of Death 161 CHAPTER 4 Late Pinter: Theatre of Precarity 164 Rogues 166 The ‘Ungrievable’ 178 Framing the Frame 193 Useful Precarity 204 CONCLUSION Pinter and ‘the Third’ 217 The Ethico-Political 219 Hospitality 224 Bibliography 234 Acknowledgment I wish to acknowledge the University of Jordan for funding the period of my PhD study in Lancaster during which I was able to produce this thesis. My deepest gratitude goes to my remarkable supervisor, Professor John Schad, without whom this project would have never been possible. I particularly thank him for his relentless encouragement, rigorous reading and expert editing of my work, and most of all for being always available whenever I needed guidance and support. I also thank him and his kind wife, Katie Schad, for having welcomed me warmly into their home. I am also very grateful to Professor Arthur Bradley for the extremely insightful suggestions he made on my thesis, which, in particular, served as inspiration for my conclusion. I also thank him and his wife, Dr Abir Hamdar, for their hospitality, especially in my first year of the PhD. I must also thank Dr Tony Pinkney and Dr Jo Carruthers for their provocative and enriching comments on my work, as well as Joel Evans for having read my introduction and offered brilliant feedback. A very special thanks goes to Professor Keith Hanley, who has been supportive, generous, and accommodating in every possible way. I also wish to express my utmost appreciation for the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster for making me feel so embraced and for involving me in their academic events. I especially have in mind Dr Mark Knight, Dr Lindsey Moore, Dr Andrew Tate, Professor Catherine Spooner, and Dr Liz Oakley-Brown. I must not forget to thank all the administrative staff for their friendliness and utmost cooperation. I am deeply indebted to my friends and former colleagues at Lancaster for their wonderful friendship, enthusiastic conversations, and emotional support: Arezoo Adibeik, Hiba Ghanem, Ahmad Qabha, Rachel White, Maria Christou, Nour Dakkak, and Muren Zhang. Thank you all. The last thanks go to my most cherished parents and beloved siblings, Hasan, Abeer, and Hadeel. I can never thank you enough for your love and tenacity which kept me motivated all along the line. Finally, I dedicate this thesis to the memory of the late Professor Rula Qawas, who facilitated the administration of my study grant. 1 INTRODUCTION Facing the Other In the past three decades, Harold Pinter scholarship has shifted its attention to the political turn in Pinter’s career, when he became more expressly engaged with the field of politics. In his last twenty-five years, Pinter increasingly focused his essays, speeches, interviews and literary readings on issues such as the first Gulf War, the NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, and the West’s incursions in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq. This interest in politics clearly fed into his later dramatic oeuvre. For example, in an interview with Nicolas Hern, Pinter confesses that his writing of One for the Road (1984) was prompted by two very particular political concerns: ‘One’, he declares, ‘is the fact of torture, of official torture, subscribed to by so many governments. And the other is the whole nuclear situation’.1 Martin Esslin identifies this play, along with Mountain Language (1988) and the dramatic sketch Precisely (1983), as the blueprint for Pinter’s later theatre – ‘[S]ince 1982’, Esslin writes, ‘his work has become entirely political, devoted to attacks on dictators who torture their subjects and civil servants who are unperturbed by the menace of a nuclear holocaust’.2 Esslin, indeed, goes on to revisit Pinter’s earlier theatre in the light of his later political output, arguing that ‘much of his earlier work was, if not on the surface, at least subtextually political’.3 Esslin is not, of course, the only critic to argue this – many having argued that the early plays explore the oppression of the individual by forces of totalitarianism, masquerading as, say, ‘the organization’ in The Dumb Waiter (1957) and The Birthday Party (1957), a ‘rest 1 Harold Pinter, ‘A Play and its Politics: A Conversation between Harold Pinter and Nicholas Hern’, in One for the Road (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 7-24 (p. 12). 2 Martin Esslin, ‘Harold Pinter’s Theatre of Cruelty’, in Pinter at Sixty, ed. by Katherine Burkman and John Kundert-Gibbs (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 27-36 (p.27). 3 Ibid., p. 28. 2 home’ in The Hothouse (1958), or the ‘hospital’ in The Caretaker (1959).4 As John Stokes argues, ‘Pinter’s early visions of local totalitarianism spoke directly to a constituency that, like himself, was steeped in Orwell and Kafka and the anti-fascist plays of Sartre and John Whiting’.5 And many critics trace this recurring theme in Pinter’s work to his growing up in the era of Fascism – as Francesca Coppa puts it: It is certainly tempting to read Pinter’s early plays bleakly, as narratives of sudden, hostile isolation. After all, Pinter’s background as a British Jew, growing up in the 1940s under the spectre of fascism and nazism [sic], certainly encourages such a reading. […] The largest, summarizable plot of The Birthday Party, ‘two men arrive unexpectedly and take a third man away’, is hardly ‘abstract’ or ‘absurd’ or ‘mysterious’ […] [This] plotline […] was being played out as the most utter realism throughout Europe during Pinter’s childhood and teens.6 While many critics read the classic scene of intrusion in Pinter’s early plays as some form of state-led invasion, others, like Charles Grimes, find in this intrusion a call for individual political responsibility. Grimes identifies ‘the plot’ of many of these works as ‘that of an individual who existed in a purely private sense, supposedly insulated from the larger social world, suddenly confronted with broad social and political forces, and thus called to political awareness and responsibility’.7 While Grimes’s reading accounts for the notion of political responsibility in Pinter’s early plays, it tends to represent this responsibility in polarized terms. Standing before and/ or 4 Harold Pinter, The Dumb Waiter, in Harold Pinter: Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 113-149 (p. 131); The Birthday Party, in Ibid, pp. 2-81 (p. 42); The Hothouse, in Ibid., pp. 189-328 (p. 214); and The Caretaker, in Harold Pinter: Plays 2 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 5-76 (p. 53). 5 John Stokes, ‘Pinter and the 1950s’, in The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter, ed. by Peter Raby, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 28-43 (p. 31). 6 Francesca Coppa, ‘The Sacred Joke: Comedy and Politics in Pinter’s Early Plays’, in Ibid., pp. 44-56 (pp.49- 50). 7 Charles Grimes, Harold Pinter’s Politics: A Silence Beyond Echo (Madison: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 2005), p.