Harold Pinter's Politics: A Silence Beyond EchoCharles Grimes
Book Reviews
This is the first monograph to explore the expression of political belief in Pinter’s creative output. In the first of seven chapters Grimes considers Pinter’s relationship to “the tradition of political theater,” and in the remaining chapters he explores the early plays (The Birthday Party, The Dumbo Waiter, and The Hothouse); Pinter’s relationship to the “(new) Right” (as revealed in Precisely, One for the Road, and Mountain Language); the “permanence of power” (Party Time, Celebration, Press Conference, The New World Order); Pinter and film (The Comfort of Strangers and Victory); Pinter and fascism (Reunion, Taking Sides, The Trojan War Will Not Take Place); and “morality and politics after the Holocaust” (Ashes to Ashes). Grimes’s prose is refreshingly free of obscure terminology, and he concerns himself with relatively neglected areas of Pinter’s productivity—interviews, directing activity and film scripts—and makes interesting use of archival material. The book’s shortcomings? It ignores the short play Monologue, and it gives short shrift to The Homecoming, the poetry, and Pinter’s ethnic background and love of cricket. These complaints aside, and whether or not one agrees with Pinter’s politics, this is an important book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. Since the late eighties, Pinter's politics have taken center stage in Pinter studies and in London newspapers. Despite his prestige as a playwright, his political views are not as well documented by the US press. Such an oversight could be the result of Pinter's anti-American stance, the US’s isolationism, illiteracy, or apathy, but it also reflects a fundamental difference between the US and the rest of the civilized world in terms of the relationship between art and politics. To put it bluntly, simply, and with a bit of bias thrown in for good measure, tile US tends to view its artists as unruly children who are tolerated while they occupy their assigned playpens, but they are ridiculed, dismissed, or ignored once they begin to speak, quoting Teddy from The Homecoming, outside their “providence.” Charles Grimes's book is one scholar1y attempt to blur the artificially imposed boundaries between American art and politics. He examines not only the strategies of oppression in Pinter's plays, strategies that isolate and marginalize individuals, as the US does to its artists and dissidents, but he also argues that Pinter's political theatre is ultimately pessimistic: the revolutionaries are all silenced, and "their opponents" are "articulate, ruthless, and impregnable" (32). Grimes, for example, finds his subtitle from a 1964 Pinter comment that bears repeating: "When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness." Grimes suggests that Pinter's political dramas illustrate a "silence beyond echo," a silence "purer and more absolute—more real" than the silence prior to the echo (217). For postmodernists, of course, any "real" or "pure" theory, ideology, or sound sends up the red flags, but in the case of Grimes's argument, which addresses the postmodernist agenda nicely, this perception of silence is appropriate. The specific works he examines, for example, are, with some exceptions, some of the darker dramas, those that highlight fascism and oppression: The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter, The Hothouse, Precisely, One for the Road, Mountain Lane, Celebration, PressConference, New World Order, The Comfort of Strangers, Victory, Reunion, Pinter's direction of Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides, Pinter's direction of Jean Giraudoux’s The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, and Ashes to Ashes. As Grimes notes, in all these works, the oppositional voice is silenced, thereby reflecting the tremendous power of the oppressors, as well as the ineffectiveness of the opposition. Grimes, of course, addresses the fact that Pinter continues to write, speak, direct, and act. Referencing Beckett's "I can't go on, I must go on" as well as the work of Kenneth Burke, Grimes illustrates that while Pinter's works do not present optimistic outcomes, they serve as examples for political action. Political resistance may make no change, but the alternative, to do nothing, is immoral. As Grimes succinctly summarizes Pinter's vision, "ethics must exist without any assumption of efficacy" (49). The book is an important and well-researched one, one that addresses many issues regarding Pinter's politics, life, and theatre. If, for example, readers are unfamiliar with the Albigensenist heresy, mentioned by McCann in The Birthday Party, Grimes has done the homework. Overall, his argument is compelling, particularly in the light of the plays he has chosen to discuss in this volume. It is, however, difficult to forget Pinter's most successful revolutionary at this juncture, Ruth of The Homecoming. Despite the male attempts to silence and marginalize her, she speaks, ironically reminding them that silence may have more power than words: my "lips move. . . Perhaps the fact that they move is more significant . . . than the words which come through them." Like many of the characters in his political plays, Pinter continues to speak out against oppression, but he has also, to some extent like Ruth, decided to be silent by his discontinuation of playwriting, which may create, to use Grimes's image, a silence beyond echo that speaks for all. Ann C. Hall, Ohio Dominican University, The Pinter Review Read more about this title To see a full description of this book, search our online database
W. Baker, Northern Illinois University
Choice, April 2006
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