Truth in drama is forever elusive Essay Example For Students

Truth in drama is forever elusive Essay Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realizing that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost. Harold Pinter: Art, Truth Politics The Nobel Lecture Drama comes to different people in different ways, but in Harold Pinters case, its homecoming was something astonishingly unique queer. Pinter was composing poetry had never written a play when he went through an experience. No, no midsummer nights dream, but one of a very concrete commonplace character. As Pinter himself recounted once in an interview that he had entered into three different rooms at three different points of time with the insiders, not really expecting his entry had found three different reactions from the inmatesà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬ the first time, one of the two sitting persons had stood up, on the second occasion, both had stood up in the third case, both had remained seated. Pinter said that it was this impression, which he could not express in terms of poetry thereby composed his first three plays- The Room 1957, The Birthday Party 1957 The Caretaker 1957, one after the other. The striking thing about this experience is its exploration of three composite probabilities, creating a single truth. That is precisely Pinters journey-his perception of a singularity that is so infinitely pluralistic from within yet impresses as a single thread. Pyrrho, a 6th century Greek philosopher had said We are born to quest after truth; to possess it belongs to a greater power. Harold Pinter is a seeker, an adventurous traveller, engaged in the quest for that ever-elusive quot;greater powerquot;. And even if he fails, he certainly does quot;fail betterquot;, to use the Beckettian phrase. From the very outset, thus, his is a journey towards a truth or truths of some sort through the disparately peculiar human conducts, but importantly in a very definite and particular context definite figures in a particular room, which go on to become in Pinters plays, a suffocating claustrophobic embryo of human existence. But the interesting point is that Pinter always denies this take-off where the particular meets the universal, an aspect of art which others take as a major acknowledgement of their artistry. Pinters insistence on not interpreting his characters as epitomizing universal perspectives positions on not decoding the situations of his plays as opening links to a timeless understanding of the problematic of life, thereby makes this search for truth, rather paradoxical. Pinters search is thereby a search for a specific truth in a specific human condition and whether it opens up the magic casements to the universal, metaphysical eternal truth, he does not know. It is this disjunction that leads to a relentless whirlpool of conflicting truths in his plays. Pinters interface with the dialectical dynamics of menace at the gateway to dramatic truth carries a wonderful mingling of tradition individual talent. On the one hand, he is very much to be seen as a product of his times with the horrid nightmares of the two world wars, transmuting the world into a heap of broken images Nietzsche declaring the god to be dead. At the same time, Pinter does not explore directly that particular world-view in abstraction. Unlike Samuel Beckett perhaps a little like Edward Albee, Pinter prefers a non- discursive idiom vein with figures that are strictly particular, concrete contextualized. Samuel Beckett, in almost all his plays, initiated the plot on a specific contextual plane of realism modulated them draft after draft till the last produced a form of non-mimetic abstraction. Beckett wanted to create an enormously self-reflexive pattern which could hold the chaos of external reality. Pinters plays are like the very first drafts of his mentors play-scripts. Pinter is not a John Osborne, not any Arnold Wesker either. Unlike the anger of Osborne and the propagandism of Wesker, Pinter chooses his own way of portraying reality. His aesthetics certainly takes a queue from the likes of Eliot, Joyce Beckett, but he creates his own vein, nevertheless. Though he has been staunchly categorized as an absurdist, I would call him a modernist problematizer, a realist a highly political playwright whose dramaturgy combines a Beckettian avant-garde a Dario Fo-like zest for hardcore political theatre. His vision certainly incorporates the bizarre human situations in a fragmented universe, but one gets the feeling that quite consciously he stays away from the Ionescoical brand of objectified absurdity. He opts for a more Beckettian form of it where absurdity becomes a personal expression that does not demand any universal acknowledgement. In a world of ill-timing, where memories start to fade out, Pinters theatre, much like Jean Genets, takes up a strictly mimetic art-form, examining both the private the private expressions of politics. While in his early menace plays, Pinter treats politics as a sub-text, it surfaces manifests itself as the primary content in his later works like The Mountain Language One For The Road . As the title of his Nobel lecture suggests, his drama is a triplet of art, truth politics, where the three components are inseparable in a latent room. Pinter treats politics as a definite power-play everywhere. It is there in human relationships, in religion, in human psychology, in the sexual conduct of human beings, everywhere. In 1957, David Campton coined the term quot;Comedies of Menacequot; as the subtitle of his collection of plays-The Lunatic View. In 1958, Irving Wardle applied it to Harold Pinterquot;s The Birthday Party 1957. Since then, comedy of menace has become a typical way of designating Pinter-texts in general. But, to me, menace is not just a thematic phenomenon in Pinters plays but rather a procedural phenomenon. It is the perplexingly dialectic landscapes of menace that is bound to entrance victimize a seeker of truth. It is not located in any specific character, neither in particular situations, but all over human predicament yet Pinter would surely deny this generalization. In The Room 1957, we are already introduced to the prevalent image-gallery of Harold Pinter - a smooth personal space brimming with comfort content yet, pregnant with the lurking forces of petrification, soon to invade it. Rose Bert inhabit a pleasant enough room in an urban apartment, continuously referring to the shabby quot;otherquot; room down there. Someone lives there but who? They do not know. They do not even want to know very eagerly. But this all-happy dream is soon threatened by the entry of two visitors from outside- Mr. Mrs. Sanders, looking for a room in the apartment. They have been told by the undefined figure in the quot;otherquot; room below that Rose Bertquot;s room is empty thereby can be taken by them. In the melodramatic climax of the play, Rose encounters the dark tenant- a blind Negro who has supposedly come as a harbinger of Rosequot;s father to take her back home had been waiting for Bert to leave the room for a while, at least. The cruel killing of the Negro by Bert Rosequot;s turning blind ironically at the end are a little hurried, however. Riely, the Negro, is the racial quot;otherquot; but not unequivocally the instrument of quot;menacequot; as even he has to face the retaliative physical quot;menacequot; from Bert, while Rielyquot;s quot;menacequot; is successful ,as well, as Rose is blinded soon after the murder. In Dumb Waiter 1957, Pinter comes back to this inverted collateral discourse of quot;menacequot; quot;inquot; and quot;outquot; of a quot;roomquot;. Gus Ben, the two killers, awaiting their victims in a narrow room, dictated by the presence or absence of some alien upland-instructors, turn mutually quot;menacingquot; for each other, at the end. The insructors at the top communicate through a huge rambling pipe that, in course of the play, almost becomes a modern variation of the Delphic oracle. Gus Ben are quot;waitersquot; both because they quot;waitquot; also as they act as quot;waitersquot;, sending food to the people at the dark upper-floor through a huge complicated quot;liverquot;machine. The two awaiting oppressors get separated at the end; one, maturing into a victimizer the other, reduced to just a victim. Their contra-positioning with the great dictators upstairs, thus, operates as an interaction of two truths, which are not mutually exclusive but rather inclusive therefore menacingly open-ended. In The Birthday Party 1957, Pinter presents to us, the ineffectually casual and oblivious Stanley, living as a tenant under the care of Meg Petey. Stanley is motiveless stagnant, looking for his real identity the disparately lost melodies, within the bounded four walls of that house. But, still one feels that he has somehow managed to cling on to the immediate reality, for the time being. It is a very limited meager truth he has somehow got hold of. But, sardonically enough, the house is on the list Goldberg Maccan arrive abruptly as intrusions of an inexorable destiny, a fatal universality to celebrate Stanleys tentative birthday eventually only to menace him with dreams of external establishment an exposure into the vastly varying outer reality. These dreams thus hold their counter-textual nightmares in themselves that rip Stanley, even off his languageUh gug uh-gug eeehhh-gagà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Caahhà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ caahh . Stanleys manipulation of a roomful of truth is thereby counter pointed, challenged teased by a world, full of elusive truths that Goldberg Maccan represent. And resultantly, the truth of the moment really slips out is lost foreverà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬ Stanleys specs are broken his drum, affected. As he is taken away by Goldberg Maccan, Petey says-Stan, donquot;t let them tell you what to do! . Stanleyquot;s individual immunity system collapses under paradigmatic impositions of the world outside. The play, therefore taps a veritably political sub-text that explores the pro-establishment forces of social comodification that ruin the creative recluse of the individual. Pinters vision of a sadistic police-state is also signified in Goldberg Maccan. Pinter may deny the representation, but here, it is this representation, that clarifies his vision of truth or truths, for that matter. The 1981 BBC-play Family Voices seems to be a post-script of The Birthday Party. The play, written in a unique epistolary form, is a dialogue between Voice 1, a son who has gone away from Voices 2 3 who are his parents. The son now inhabits a strange apartment with quite uncanny shadows, impressing him as his quot;otherquot; or rather quot;realquot; family. He decides not to come back even as the mother informs her illness the demise of his father. Towards the end, the dead fathers voice invades as Voice-3, writing from the quot;glassy gravequot;. The mother warns that she would unveil the son, working as a male-prostitute. He is all of a sudden coming back to his family. The play ends on a note of typically Pinteresque ambivalence, with the voice of the father saying-I have so much to say to you. But I am quite dead. What I have to say to you will never be said. I think we can examine the three voices as Stanley, Petey Meg. Petey had said at the end of The Birthday Party -Stan, donquot;t let them tell you what to do! Here Voice-1 had let them do just that. Pinter uses the radio-medium brilliantly to create an extremely elliptical texture where very little communication is possible. Thus the Voices remain within the respective enclosures of their own experiences, with very few interceptions. quot;Dialoguesquot; are often reduced to quot;monologuesquot;, but not even absolutely unheard quot;soliloquiesquot;, perhaps it is in this quot;faintnessquot; of communication, that Pinter looks for the truth of a quot;real languagequot;, which remains an eldorado. The Caretaker 1957 is yet another play, which justifies what Pinter wrote in 1958:- There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. The promises of Aston Mick, made to Davies, turn out to be an exemplification of this transfiguration of truth into falsity and vice versa. They withdraw their promises of making Davies the caretaker, at the end, only to menace him disastrously. The designation of caretaker remains, an elusive illusory promise only made not realizedà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬ a kind of general truth that is only anticipated not comprehended ultimately. But Daviess menacing quest for that truth does not die down. It continues as he waits for the weather to break so that he can go to Sidcup in order to fetch papers that would prove his real identity, yet another of those unattainable universal truths. Aston keeps on trying to build a shed, on his own, in the garden premises. It is another instance of a compromise with contextually limited truth, far away from the ones in the remote horizons of the universe. A menace of exploitation had indeed fallen upon him when he had perhaps undergone that universal voyage towards the truth of the world, as revealed through his long speech in Act ii Sc ii I should have been dead. I should have diedà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ The dreadful experience had turned him perennially to stringently contextual truths. And that to Pinter is perhaps the inevitable human destiny. Pinter wrote a short story called Tea Party in 1963 when asked to write a play for the European Broadcasting Union, he made a play out of it. The play, also called Tea Party, is a sort of extension of the quot;menacequot; theme we have seen in The Birthday Party. Disson, a successful business-man starts to lose his pre-dominance over the state of matters with his marriage to Diana the appointment of his new secretary Wendyhardly causes for his decline of power. Romeo Juliet EssayDeborah submits to the narratives of Hornby Pauline, apparently being content with the way her quot;selfquot; has been depicted by the two seems to find her niche at the end-quot;I think I have the matter in proportion. Pause Thank you. quot; Pinterquot;s end-note here seems to be one of an uncharacteristically unique reconciliation. But who knows, this all-good note of deterministic acceptance may carry a sinister under-taste of self-mockery; a self-mockery where the seeming conformity towards the quot;projected truthquot; is distinctly denied! With Old Times 1971, the lyrical cris-crosses of memory start to peep in. The play carries through a complex dilemma between the subjective the objective. Is Anna really present outside the window or is she merely a fantastic emanation of Deeley Kate as they talk about her supposed arrival? This is a play that starts to deal with the ambiguity of memory all its preserved sense-impressions. This motif reaches a kind of fruition in the trampish figure of Spooner in No Manquot;s Land 1975 as on a drunken night, he enters the house of Hirst, much like Davies in The Caretaker. But what follows makes very clear, the drift in Pinterquot;s perceptive responses. No Manquot;s Land takes us back into a past of awe glory, a past that differs individually- Spooner Hirst keep on disagreeing as the vastly different pasts coalesce into a future, or just a quot;walking shadowquot; of it as it turns out to be a cul-de-sac, a no-manquot;s land between the verbal the non-verbal, between life death. It is a lifeless existence yet devoid of death like Hammquot;s or Clovquot;s in Beckettquot;s Endgame 1957, but certainly lacking the note of Beckettian dejection or rather supplementing it with a subversively witty realization acceptance of the condition. Largely inspired by James Joycequot;s only play Exiles, Betrayal begins with the couple, Emma Robert, on the brink of separation recedes from time present 1977 to time past 1968 through to its end. A serious statement on the urban sexual manners, the play captures a wonderfully open web of human relationships. Robert jerry are best of friends. Jerry has been the best man in Robertquot;s marriage he has had a steady affair with Robertquot;s wife Emma from that time that too very much in the sanction of Robert, as the final scene mystically recollects. There is a hint of the homo-erotic in the relationship between Robert Jerry Jerryquot;s relationship with Emma is seen by Robert as a means to take their friendship to its peculiar fruition , thereby trying to keep Jerry at hand, always. Robert, however, has had affairs with other women as well, for which the marriage is currently on the rocks. Jerry has his own family, while his references to the children of Emma Robert still contain a curious psycho-sexual innuendo. Pinter mocks at the title, as it were, by naturalizing all sorts of traditionally perceived deviations from the societal norm of relationships. It hardly turns out to be a betrayal as his characters go far beyond the yardstick of a collective social morality. The family voices re-unite more powerfully in Moonlight 1993 where Pinter sketches a strange malady of the mind as we see a gripping vision of a fractured family, awaiting the death of its ruling patriarch Andy, with the two sons caring a fig for the demise. It is a death like many other deaths, like all other deaths! Here ends it all what survives is the dimmed quot;moonlightquot;, like the sound of the footsteps in Beckettquot;s Footfalls 1976. The play culminates in the hazy world of a personal memory, which seems to be potent enough to become yet another future for yet another time as Bridget keeps on waiting I stood there in the moonlight and waited for the moon to go down. Party Time, performed in 1991 for the first time deserves a mention separately. The play is another great evidence of the diverse strands of Pinterquot;s genius. It is a sarcastic rehash of Restoration Comedy of Manners, chiefly recalling Congrevequot;s crisp smart wit repartee Wycherleyquot;s cynical vision of humanity. A gala party is taking place within a metropolitan elite club, with the outer world in utter dismay. The party, therefore, belongs to a particularly self-centred aloofness to an annihilated mankind in a banal world-order. While Beckett in Endgame showed a similarly destroyed soulless exterior of the world, his quot;interiorquot; was also quot;supped full of horrors. But, Pinter, in this play, draws the quot;interiorquot; in an antithetical image of enjoyment carousal, though the images of the void outside intermittently invade into the private space of the quot;partyquot;, only to connect it with the gutted infinitude outside. At the end of the play, as the party comes to a close the people disperse, Jimmy, a young man, absent thus-far, comes out of the light to stand at the doorway. Jimmyquot;s speech indicates a trying desperation for a poignantly real communication- a socially provoking critically concrete quot;meaningquot;, which is deferred all the while. Jimy seems to be lost in a silent darkness. It fills his mouth he can only quot;suckquot; it, in a maze of incomprehensible quot;impressionsquot; that do not lead to self-sufficient quot;ideasquot;. So, for a change, Pinter turns the perspective inside out by shifting it from his recurrently used image of the quot;roomquot; to the quot;other rooms outsidequot;. Jimmy becomes a representative voice of that other. But, his quot;truthquot; remains quot;menacedquot; nevertheless, despite an articulation or perhaps just because of the articulation itself! Once after seeing an initial production of The Birthday Party, in the theatre, a woman wrote to Pinter:-Dear Sir, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your play The Birthday Party. These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are the two men? 2. Where did Stanley come from? 3. Were they all supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your play. Pinterquot;s reply was: Dear Madam, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your letter. These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are you? 2. Where do you come from? 3. Are you supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your letter. Pinter, in rephrasing the question in the context of an answer, again probably implied the inversiveness of truth also the problem and yet the compulsion of taking his characters Stanley, Goldberg, Maccan as photographic truths of a perceptible outer reality. Pinter, quite deliberately, breaks away from the Ibsenite mould of dramatic dialogue, where the characters always speak about great issues, socio-political economic matters. Pinter keeps his dialogues rather naturalistic. Whether it is Dumb Waiter or The Birthday Party, for that matter, his characters hardly discuss such grave important matters. Food seems to be a recurrent talking point with Pinters characters. In The Birthday Party , the conjugal relationship between Meg Petey has been portrayed critiqued at the same time almost exclusively by the means of such references to food- prepared served. Pinters characters fumble; remain silent, sometimes even incomplete, in terms of sense. His language, thronged with those silences, pauses three dots à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ moves accordingly, stilted impeded in search of the truth of the language. All through the Pinter-canon, we find excommunication equivocation. Language is political but more diplomatic are his pauses silences. Language is not just a medium for Pinter. He uses it as a theme, not with the mythical effect of Samuel Beckett, but in the domain of his own familiarized contextualism. Pinters projected human being is a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. Margaret Atwood links Pinters use of silence with the figure of Abraham in Kierkegaards essays establishes it as the primary text in what is called Pinteresque today. Atwood says Abraham is ordered by God to cut his only sons throat. In the face of this cruel and unnatural request, Abraham does not protest. Neither does he agree. He is silent. But it is a huge surprise with a haunting echo. One of these echoes is Pinter the silences of Pinter. Reverberating silences. Pinteresque. In One For The Road 1984, Pinter depicted an evidently political scenario representative of an absolutist state with Nicholas, interrogating Victor, who is the defeated captive. We come across an exclusively verbal side of quot;menacequot; in its political topicality. It is not that the questions asked by Nicholas to Victor are not answered because of the pressure over Victor. Those questions are causally linguistically unanswerable e. g. Nicholas asks Gila Victorquot;s wife repeatedly, why she had met Victor at a place for the first time? The play may not stand out as an artwork of complete appeal, but it certainly depicts the dramatists inherent skepticism about language, a minimalist inclination as even Beckett had imbibed from Fritz Mauthner. In his 1988-play, The Mountain Language, Pinter again works out a linguistic equation, interlaced with political connotations of dictatorial power authority. He talks about a mountain dialect, being forbidden to the mountain woman who comes to see his son, imprisoned in a jail in the capital. We see how language becomes a tool of colonial oppression. Pinter concludes with a brilliant twist, implying a vast dynamic of linguistic politics, within which, even an allowance to speak the mountain language, at the end, comes as a pre-destined protocol, imposed by the big brothers of the system. But, then again, if one starts to categorize him, Pinter shows again in Ashes to Ashes , how non-topical and non-immediate he can be, in a fundamentally political play about the Nazi horrors in the 2nd World War. He uses the echoes of Rebecaquot;s words in her final speech to evoke a substitution of the man Devlin she was talking to thus-far. The brilliant use of this device becomes more relevant because the man is also a sort of echo from Rebecaquot;s past, turning out to be that vaguely defined lover strangulator whom Rebecaquot;s words had been referring to from the beginning. The child is taken away from her to be killed mercilessly she also disowns the fact that she ever had a child! Is this abnormal maternal response a satire, an authentic shock-reaction or quot;menacequot; or a way to put an end, put an end to childbirth, put an end to Beckettquot;s vision of the quot;accursed progenitorquot; altogether. We see a quot;menacequot; in the outer-world in Ashes to Ashes ,but again unlike the chiefly objectified Rhinoceritis in Eugene Ionescoquot;s Rhinoceros 1958, the quot;menacequot; in Pinter is conveyed through very lyrical nuances e. g. he comparison between a godless universe a Brazil-England encounter without a single soul in the stadium. In this supposed relegation of god to a mere spectatorial presence, lies the quot;menacequot; of things falling apart. Pinters quot;dramaticulesquot;, to use the Beckettian term, namely Precisely 1983 The New World Order 1991 are also replete with polemical overtones of victimization. Pinter observed, in course of his Nobel lecture: When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimeter and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror- for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. Pinter certainly shows us no single accurate reflection of truth but an abruptly modulating vista of relative and disorganized truths. But does he succeed in breaking the mirror itself, which is supposed to put an end to all reflected images focus the real object, the ultimate truth itself? Even if he does so, the truth would only stare at the audacity of the seeker; it would not be any appreciative glance. And the stare would perhaps negate the attainment. So can we really say that the menacing cross-passage comes to its destination with the smashing of the mirror? Or does the breaking of the mirror symbolize the end of the worldà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬ the Judgment Day. And it all ushers into a new world of Nohow On, to use the phrase of Samuel Beckett. Our task is cut out. As Pinter says, The search is your task. Is it not becoming a universal symbolization? Pinter would disagree. So let us keep our fingers crossed as Pinters narrative quips in a tone of marvelous aesthetic egotism in The Homecoming 1967 You wouldnt understand my works. You wouldnt have the faintest idea of what they were about. I do not know if the quot;faintest ideaquot; is gathered from this one; one about Pinter. If not, it is certainly for the better most importantly to his own liking. Let us read Pinter all over again, enjoy the man all over again, without caring for quot;ideaquot; or quot;ideationquot; for that matter. After all as he says that he does not write for anything external, but only for himself. Let us read him only for ourselves likewise. Pinter, at this point of time, is suffering from severe throat-cancer one does not know, how soon the time of the final quot;betrayalquot; would come. He may not live on, but he will certainly quot;die onquot;to use Beckettquot;s phrase again in our worlds of memory which he hardly believes in its linear simplistic topography. Let us end this discussion with one of Pinterquot;s own poems a poem, which I feel, would certainly stimulate him till his last breath in the quest for a menacing truth :- I know the place It is true Everything we do Corrects the space Between death and me And you. Harold Pinter