Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama : A Study of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard [1 ed.] 9781443862936, 9781443854085

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Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama

Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama: A Study of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard

By

Mufti Mudasir

Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama: A Study of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard By Mufti Mudasir This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Mufti Mudasir All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5408-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5408-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................. vii Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................ 7 Engaging with Reality: A Poetics of Postmodern Drama Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 35 Harold Pinter and Postmodernism: Power, Memory and Politics Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 65 Stoppard and Postmodernism: Parody, History and Ethics Conclusion .............................................................................................. 103 Bibliography ........................................................................................... 107 Index ....................................................................................................... 123

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to place on record my gratitude for the program Zukunftsphilologie at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, where I was a postdoctoral fellow in the academic year 2012/2013, for the ample time and facilities I had at my disposal to revise the present manuscript in addition to working on my main research project on Kashmir’s hagiographies. I owe immensely to my family for their love and support; to my father Mufti Mearajuddin Farooqi, mother Mahmooda Mufti, brother Mufti Muzamil Farooqi, wife Huma Galzie, and my very dear son Mufti Khaleed Farooqi. My colleagues in the Department of English, University of Kashmir, have been a constant source of encouragement for which I am thankful to them. Mufti Mudasir

INTRODUCTION Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard undoubtedly figure among the leading British dramatists of the last sixty years or so and both have been acknowledged among the most prominent playwrights of the contemporary theatre. John Fleming aptly remarks: Indeed, in virtually any list of premier British playwrights of the second half of the twentieth century, two names consistently appear: Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter. Their standing as the preeminent British playwrights of the last half century seems relatively secure.1

Pinter has intrigued critics for decades and a remarkable variety of critical responses to his plays testify to the richness of his dramatic output and his stature as a great playwright. Characterized by complexity, his plays defy easy explication and according to W J Free, “puzzle audiences and critics”, and, “in spite of a growing body of criticism, there are perhaps more unanswered questions about Pinter than about any other major contemporary playwright.”2 Surveying Pinter criticism, G C Behera identifies three broad approaches taken by Pinter scholars: the socio-psychological approach with its emphasis on the problem of failure in communication, the symbolic- allegorical approach with the emphasis on the ideas that are inherent in the plays, and the theatrical approach with its concern with stage effects.3

Despite these major attempts to classify and categorize his works, a realization among critics persists that traditional critical tools are inadequate for understanding Pinter; conventional approaches fail to offer satisfactory explanations of many essential features of his plays. Austin Quigley was the first critic to draw attention to the fact that Pinter’s plays demand a different approach. Rejecting the traditionally accepted socio1

John Fleming. Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order among Chaos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001, p. 251. 2 W J Free. “Treatment of Characters in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming.” South Atlantic Bulletin, xxxiv, November 1969, p. 1. 3 Guru Charan Behera. Reality and Illusion in the Plays of Harold Pinter. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 1998, pp. 11-2.

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psychological and symbolic-allegorical approaches, Quigley, in The Pinter Problem (1975), invokes the language philosophy of the later Wittgenstein to analyze Pinter’s plays. He exposes the limitations inherent in such approaches which assume that the primary function of language is referential. Positing an interrelational function of language, Quigley argues that Pinter’s characters use language primarily to negotiate relationships with each other. He persuades us to: look at Pinter’s language from exactly the same point of view that we should adopt in approaching all language use; we must begin with Wittgenstein’s suggestion that we: ‘Look at the sentence as an instrument, and its sense as its employment.’4

His in-depth study and analysis of such plays as The Room (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1965) and The Landscape (1968) centers on the use of language as a tool not of communication but of manipulation where characters are in full control of the linguistic resources at their disposal. Continuing with the line of inquiry that posits language at the center, Marc Silverstein in Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power (1993) asserts that Quigley’s entire focus is confined to “what Saussure calls parole, the individual speech-act, without sufficient attention to langue (language as a codified system) and its relation to parole.”5 According to Silverstein, Quigley fails to consider how the system of language forecloses all possibilities of situating the human subject outside the linguistic codes. He sees language as the prime agent through which power functions to constitute and situate the human subjects. His focus is on the process by which human subjectivity is created through an inexorable law of inscription by cultural codes. Varun Begley in his Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism (2005) challenges Andreas Huyssen’s idea of the “Great Divide” between modernism and postmodernism and argues that Pinter “blurs the adversarial simplicity of the “Great Divide” and complicates clear-cut distinctions between the modern and postmodern”.6 Begley’s main interest lies in reading Pinter from Adorno’s perspective on the problem of artistic autonomy and commitment. For him, it is with the memory plays that 4

Austin Quigley. The Pinter Problem. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, p. 46. 5 Mark Silverstein. Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power. London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1993, p. 18. 6 Varun Begley. Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005, p. 5.

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Pinter enters a postmodern terrain, a journey which culminates in his later political plays. Although Begley’s work has many insights to offer, he shows little interest in relating what he terms as Pinter’s postmodern turn, to theories of deconstruction, decentered subjectivity and Lyotardian dissensus, ideas which the present work has drawn on to approach Pinter. More significantly, the present work draws on the invaluable insights of Silverstein but also marks a departure from his basic thesis in some important respects. It argues that Silverstein’s thesis of the monolithic unassailability of power does not duly consider the deconstructive strategies by means of which Pinter thoroughly demystifies these cultural codes. It makes an attempt to show that, in a characteristically postmodern manner, Pinter’s plays both inscribe and contest these codes and ideologies, a strategy which makes them double-coded. It is true that Pinter does not posit any vantage point of critique or resistance outside of these ideologies, but what is equally important is to see how he contests them from within by exposing their constructed nature. It is this postmodern method of inscription and subversion from within that enables Pinter to expose the nexus between power and representation, and subjectivity and subjection. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that from a postmodern perspective, the memory plays of Pinter, so conspicuously absent from Silverstein’s exposition, are of immense importance because of their potential to serve as a powerful commentary on the idea of decentered subjectivity. Tom Stoppard too has been seen by most of the critics as a playwright obsessed with writing in a light, playful manner, often borrowing from previous dramatic texts to produce rather farcical plays.7 Although his plays conspicuously lack Pinter’s mysterious or enigmatic quality, yet these need to be analyzed from a postmodern perspective in order to demonstrate Stoppard’s stature as one of the leading contemporary dramatists. The present study, therefore, examines Stoppard’s concerns with history, ethics, and opinions on art and epistemology, to argue that his dominant modes of parody and other self-reflexive devices qualify him as a preeminent postmodern playwright. Although Stoppard’s overt use of these devices makes it easy to identify his postmodern concerns, it is noteworthy that critics have mostly interpreted his plays as examples of lightweight comic entertainments which deal with serious ideas in a more or less Wildean fashion. This is the reason that some critics have tended to use the term pastiche for his 7

Some of the critical studies which argue on these lines are Jim Hunter’s Tom Stoppard’s Plays (1982), Thomas Whitaker’s Tom Stoppard (1983) and Tim Brassel’s Tom Stoppard: An Assessment (1985).

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plays. Ira B Nadel and Michael Vanden Heuvel both prefer the term pastiche to describe Stoppard’s plays. Nadel, for example, remarks: Pastiche, for Stoppard, is the playful loose imitation of or borrowing from another text to formulate a new one. Whether he draws from or imitates Macbeth in Cahoot’s Macbeth, or Agatha Christie in The Real Inspector Hound, or borrows lines and themes from Strindberg’s Miss Julie and John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ in The Real Thing, the pastiche is a breezy strategy for creating the Stoppard style.8

Even Heuvel applies the Jamesonian model of pastiche to Travesties (1974), asserting that “the formal structure of Travesties is that of postmodern pastiche as it is defined by Jameson.”9 The argument presented in this book is that it is parody rather than pastiche that defines Stoppard’s work more satisfactorily.10 The focus, therefore, is to see Stoppard as a parodist who exploits the critical potential of parody to move beyond mere playfulness. Stoppard’s plays are, it is argued, fraught with political and ideological implications due to which they cannot be taken merely as light entertainments.11 The first chapter “Engaging with Reality: A Poetics of Postmodern Drama”, encapsulates the theoretical framework of the study and attempts to highlight the value of the theoretical model presented by Linda Hutcheon in her work on postmodernism to demonstrate its relevance for the study of postmodern drama. It is argued that Hutcheon’s model that she prefers to call “a poetics of postmodernism”, by articulating a significant parallel between the poststructuralist thought and postmodern artistic practice, provides a basis for formulating a poetics of postmodern drama. Her basic assertion that postmodernism is essentially doublecoded, an idea she borrows from Charles Jencks, has a very important advantage of seeing postmodern art and literature as capable of retaining a 8

Ira B Nadel. “Writing Tom Stoppard” in Journal of Modern Literature. 2004, Vol. 27, no.3, p. 23. 9 Michael Vanden Heuvel. “‘Is postmodernism?’ Stoppard among/against the postmoderns” in Katherine E. Kelly (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 220. 10 The difference between the two terms will be discussed in detail in the first chapter. 11 John Fleming is inclined to regard Stoppard as a modernist rather than a postmodernist, although he too admits that in one important sense, namely, Stoppard’s embracing of uncertainties instead of mourning the loss of meaning makes him more of a postmodernist than modernist. See Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order among Chaos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001, p. 256.

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critical stance towards contemporary reality in spite of its self-conscious complicity with it. It is argued that the main characteristics of postmodernism can be identified in the works of some of the well-known contemporary European and American dramatists and on the basis of these it is possible to formulate a poetics of postmodern drama. The theoretical model provided by Hutcheon, according to which postmodernism both inscribes and subverts the representational categories in art, is applied to drama to argue that postmodern drama employs the conventional dramatic categories of language, character and plot, only to subvert them from within. This argument is substantiated by an examination of some seminal critical works on postmodern drama in recent times by Jeanette Malkin, Deborah Geis, Nick Kaye and Philip Auslander. For exploring the characteristic features of postmodern drama, Brecht and Beckett, along with some later dramatists such as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Heiner Muller and Thomas Bernhard, have been discussed with reference to their treatment of language, human subject and reality. The second chapter “Harold Pinter and Postmodernism: Power, Memory and Politics”, examines Pinter’s plays using the concepts elucidated in the first chapter. Following Keith Peacock, these plays are divided into three categories which roughly, though not strictly, correspond to the three phases of Pinter’s dramatic career. In the first category, Pinter’s earlier plays are discussed with a special focus on the exposition of the ideological creation of subjectivity. The object is the study of power that operates through the dominant ideological codes to construct the human subject. The plays of the second category called memory plays are examined to reveal the idea of decentering of the subject and fluidity of the past, while in the third category the later plays, which treat issues like political subjugation and power abuse, are discussed in the light of the Lyotardian concepts of mini-narratives and dissensus. The third chapter “Stoppard and Postmodernism: Parody, History and Ethics”, analyzes the plays of Tom Stoppard, dividing them into three broad categories based on certain predominant structural and thematic concerns. In the first category, plays which employ overt self-reflexive devices such as parody and play-within-the-play are discussed. In the second category, plays based on history, a perennial postmodern concern, are analyzed to argue that Stoppard’s treatment of history offers striking parallels with “historiographic metafiction”. The third category, in which only two plays are analyzed, highlights Stoppard’s typical postmodern stance towards ethics.

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The conclusion, while largely summing up the important findings of the present work, reiterates the distinctive existence of postmodern drama despite its many overlappings with the modern avant-garde and absurdist traditions. It not only points out how both Pinter and Stoppard, despite their largely different styles and dramatic modes, are postmodernist, but also suggests their importance for any reformulation of a poetics of postmodern drama.

CHAPTER ONE ENGAGING WITH REALITY: A POETICS OF POSTMODERN DRAMA Many critics have rightly complained of a lack of critical studies on postmodern drama and scant theoretical attention it has received as compared to other literary genres. For some the phrase “postmodern drama” is little more than an empty signifier. Stephen Watt’s Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage (1998) illustrates this attitude by using a slash in the title between postmodern and drama to indicate that the relation between the two is at best oxymoronic. One of the main reasons for this is the notion that postmodernism implies a rejection of the mimetic status of drama and thus strikes at the very roots of representation through it. Watt announces the “failure of the term postmodern drama,”1 and is of the opinion that it is largely “an empty intellectual marker.”2 This, he believes, is due to the fact that “drama has been relegated to the role of the unwanted or unwashed, a bastard stepchild born in and supportive of a less enlightened social formation”.3 Given the problematic nature of the term “postmodern” itself, postmodern drama becomes for Watt “doubly problematic”. In addition to this, the fact that the phrase “postmodern drama” is usually used as “a weak term of periodization fraught with difficulties as a historical marker”, explains why there is a definite lack of interest in theorizing drama from a postmodern perspective.4 Moreover postmodernism, by challenging the ideas of a determinate dramatic text and theatrical space, challenges any attempt to conceive of “postmodern drama” itself. 1

Stephen Watt. Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998, p. 25. 2 ibid, p. 39. As Watt states “… when preceded by such adjectives as postmodern or post-modernist, drama is emptied of most of the features by which it has traditionally been recognized – dialogue, a discernible narrative, character, agon – thus potentially rendering the text so described as something of an “empty” or selfnullifying “marker”(17). 3 ibid, p. 6. 4 ibid, p. 19.

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In 1981, C W E Bigsby had remarked that the English theatrical scene of the late 1950s presented an anxiety that found expression in ontological and epistemological questions and reflected a condition where “the social order, character and language are shown in a state of disrepair.”5 Ten years later, in a somewhat similar vein, Ruby Cohn noted that since the 1950s, a departure from “the mimetic representation of contemporary middle class reality” is to be witnessed in the British theatre.6 The two elements she found most noticeable were “theatre in the theatre and split character.”7 Although both Bigsby and Cohn acknowledged that a shift had occurred in the contemporary drama, neither used the term postmodernism for explaining this shift. What follows here is an attempt to delineate a poetics of postmodern drama by examining the theory of postmodernism offered by Linda Hutcheon, one of the most outstanding theoreticians of postmodernism, and drawing on the insights of some perceptive critics such as Jeanette Malkin, Kerstin Schmidt and Deborah Geis. The focus will be to see how these changes in the contemporary drama can be examined in the light of Hutcheon’s model. The discussion should, however, start with an elucidation of her model and its justification for studying postmodern drama. A brief overview of some initial attempts at theorizing postmodern literature is, therefore, not out of place here. The much-debated problem whether postmodernism should be seen as a radical break from modernism or its continuation need not engage us here. According to Hutcheon, postmodern should be seen as both a continuation of and departure from modernism manifest in the shift in the foundational categories on which Western literature is premised, like the human subject, language and history. This shift has found a sustained expression in the literary practice of the past for many decades now. In 1987, John Johnston argued that postmodernism revolved round three broad categories: “literary/aesthetic post-modernism, historical (or cultural) postmodernism and theoretical postmodernism.”8 Out of these the most familiar version, according to Johnston, was the literary or aesthetic one “advanced by people like Patricia Waugh and Brian McHale in England, and Jerome Klinowitz and Ihab Hassan in the United States.”9 5

C W E Bigsby. “The Politics of Anxiety: Contemporary Socialist Theatre in England”. Modern Drama 24, 1981, p. 393. 6 Ruby Cohn. Retreats from Realism in Recent English Drama. London: Penguin Publications, 1991, p. 1. 7 ibid, p. 18. 8 John Johnston. “Postmodern Theory/ Postmodern Fiction”. CLIO 16:2. 1987 (Winter), p. 140. 9 ibid.

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Ihab Hassan, perhaps, was the first critic to recognize a need for a new term to classify the works that had appeared on the American literary scene in the 1950s. In his early writings, especially the essays of the 1960s like “The Dismemberment of Orpheus” (1963) and “The Literature of Silence” (1967), Hassan used the term modernism as a broad concept accommodating newer literary expressions under the category. He, however, soon felt the inadequacy of the term modern and was led to use the term postmodern for writers like de Sade, Hemingway, Kafka, Genet and Beckett. In his later writings, Hassan became increasingly interested in the significant shift in the contemporary European literature which called for a new critical terminology. At this point, in the late 1970s and 1980s, Hassan became aware of the importance of the French poststructuralist influence on postmodern thought and practice. Poststructuralism, Hassan realized, could no longer be kept out of the debate on postmodernism. Other writers too recognized this important factor and Allen Thiher’s Words in Reflection: Modern Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction (1984) offered chapters on Wittgenstein, Heidegger, de Saussure and Derrida, thus demonstrating the increasing acceptability of the poststructuralist relation with the fiction of postmodernism. In the following year Hilary Lawson wrote Reflexivity: The Postmodern Predicament (1985) focusing on Derrida’s significance for postmodernism. However, this recognition of the significance of poststructuralist theories for postmodern art, especially deconstruction, raised the important question of referentiality which led to the notion that postmodern art discredits all critical engagement with reality. Interpreting the selfreflexive tendencies in postmodern art as the negation of the world or reality was, however, largely because of a widespread misunderstanding of some of the central concepts of the poststructuralist thought. Perceptive critics, however, were quick to point out that the feature of self-reflexivity in postmodern art could not be interpreted as the negation of referentiality. In the early 1980s, John Barth labeled his self-reflexive short stories collected in his own Lost in the Funhouse as mainly late modernist, while they had been considered postmodernist by many critics. For Barth, a true postmodern writer like Italo Calvino, “keeps one foot always in the narrative past…and one foot in the structuralist present.”10 This recognition of the danger of relegating postmodern literature to the prisonhouse of language with no referential value was shared by some of the foremost theorists of postmodern literature who also undertook the 10 John Barth. “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction”. Atlantic Monthly. 1980, 245:1, p. 70.

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difficult task of delineating a poetics of postmodernism. Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987) made an attempt to formulate a distinctive poetics that could explain adequately the concerns of postmodern novels. The central tenet of McHale’s formulation of postmodernism is the identification of a shift from the epistemological questions characteristic of the modern period to the ontological questions. He writes: The dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological. That is, modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions such as those mentioned by Dick Higgins in my epigraph: “How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?” Other typical modernist question might be added: “what is there to be known? Who knows it? How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?”11

On this formulation, McHale includes novels as Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier which is featured by an unreliable narrator and Kafka’s The Trial which depicts an individual’s prosecution but significantly declines to offer any motive for the court’s actions. As against the modernist fiction, the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological: Postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like the ones Dick Higgins calls ‘Post cognition’: ‘which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” Other typical postmodernist questions bear either on the ontology of the literary text itself or on the ontology of the world it projects, for instance: “what is a world?: what kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?”12

McHale offers examples of Thomas Pynchon’s novels that foreground the idea of uncertainty in postmodernist fiction. The simultaneous existence of more than one worlds points to their constructed nature. The reader finds herself constantly beset with a situation where she has to ask herself whether the world she is reading about is anything except her own construction. McHale’s version of postmodernism offers to see it in terms of pluriform, polyphonic being and contests the extreme self-reflexivity of these works. Hans Bertens writes about McHale’s analysis in these terms: For McHale, postmodernist fiction negotiates the tension between selfreflexivity and representation by abandoning the modernist emphasis on epistemology – which leads inevitably towards reflexivity for an emphasis on ontology. Knowing loses its privileged position to pluriform, 11 12

Brian McHale. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Methuen, 1987, p. 9. ibid, p. 10.

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polyphonic being. The one world which the modernist sought to know is replaced by a plurality of autonomous worlds that can be described and the relations between which we can explore, but that can never be the objects of true knowledge.13

It is, however, Linda Hutcheon’s cogently argued work that appeared under the title A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction in 1988 which is of immense value for our purposes. The merit of Hutcheon’s theoretical model lies in her appropriation of the seminal ideas of the leading French poststructuralists such as Derrida, Foucault, Barthes and Lyotard on the one hand, and her demonstration of the fallacy inherent in the oft-repeated claim that postmodern self-reflexivity is a sign of its downright complicity with the dominant contemporary culture on the other. She exemplifies how postmodern literature retains a critical edge towards contemporary reality, a feature that makes her paradigm appealing even today. A remarkable feature of Hutcheon’s formulation of a postmodern poetics is her recognition that such a project has to be inductive in that it has to arrive at a poetics through the study of postmodern works, that is, the literary practice itself. Her critical project, therefore, has the value of recognizing and incorporating poststructuralist insights while maintaining that postmodern literary works retain a critical edge towards the contemporary social and political reality and hence cannot be dismissed as merely acquiescing in the dominant ideologies of the contemporary times. Hutcheon stresses the point that postmodernism is doubly-coded, one that is simultaneously selfreflexive and referential. She remarks that “postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts the very concepts it challenges.”14 She also takes issue with those writers who regard postmodern art as entirely self-reflexive and hence bereft of any representational value. For its detractors, liberal humanists and Marxists alike, postmodernism ends up as a dishonest refuge from reality, content with social and political quietism. Hutcheon tries to reveal the flaw in this argument by arguing that postmodernism can never be equated with aesthetic formalism. The following observation made by Bertens on Hutcheon’s model highlights the core value of her thesis: Hutcheon’s attractive (and immensely successful) model has the great advantage that it, in her own words, gives equal value to the self-reflexive 13

Hans Bertens. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 77. 14 Linda Hutcheon. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988, p. 3.

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Chapter One and historically grounded and can thus retain a political dimension (even if it simultaneously calls political commitments into question). Because of its refusal to surrender to sheer textuality, it can, with a certain amount of credibility, investigate the determining role of representations, discourses, and signifying practices. It can, in other words, address the matter of power.15

Hutcheon’s argument that postmodernism is both self-reflexive and historical was, however, anticipated by John Barth in “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodern Fiction” (1980), where he argued that postmodern writing should attempt to achieve a kind of synthesis between modernism and realism by avoiding both extreme self-reflexivity of the former and naïve illusionism of the latter. For Hutcheon, too, extreme selfreflexivity is a feature of the late modernist literature rather than of postmodernism: “Postmodern forms want to work toward a public discourse that would overtly eschew modernist aestheticism and hermeticism and its attendant political self-marginalization.”16 For her, “historiographic metafiction” is the representative postmodern art form, one that offers the model of self-reflexive representation. “Historiographic metafiction” both installs and subverts what it installs only to problematize our notions about history and its truth-value: In challenging the seamless quality of the history/fiction (or world/art) join implied by realist narrative, postmodern fiction does not disconnect itself from history or the world. It foregrounds and thus contests the conventionality and unacknowledged ideology of that assumption of seamlessness and asks its readers to question the process by which we represent ourselves and our world to ourselves and to become aware of the means by which we make sense of and construct order out of experience in our particular culture. We cannot avoid representation. We can try to avoid fixing our notion of it and assuming it to be transhistorical and transcultural. We can also study how representation legitimizes and privileges certain kinds of knowledge including certain kinds of historical knowledge.17

She also sums up the postmodern view of history in these terms:

15

Hans Bertens. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. New York: Routledge, 1995, p.78. 16 John Barth. “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction” in The Atlantic, 1980, 245:1, p. 65. 17 Linda Hutcheon. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988, p. 23.

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What the postmodern writing of both history and literature has taught us is that both history and fiction are discourses, that both constitute systems of signification by which we make sense of the past (“exertions of the shaping, ordering imagination”). In other words, the meaning and shape are not in the events, but in the systems which make those past ‘events’ into present historical ‘facts’. This is not a ‘dishonest refuge from truth’ but an acknowledgement of the meaning-making function of human constructs.18

Hutcheon emphasizes the double-codedness of postmodernism and its self-consciously contradictory nature to distinguish it from modernism. Postmodernism, she insists, “takes the form of self-conscious, selfcontradictory, self-undermining statement.”19 And one of the most successful strategies to create a contradictory stance on any statement is the use of parody. The use of parody in literature is old but the term has all long been taken to mean a ridiculing imitation of a previous work of art. Already, in her Theory of Parody (1985), Hutcheon had argued that the concept of parody needs to be freed from the constraint of the traditional definition. Parody, according to her, is a much more profound literary concept than is ordinarily understood. She states, “the kind of parody I wish to focus is an integrated structural modeling process of revisiting, replaying, inventing and trans-contextualizing previous work of art.”20 She regards parody as an apt postmodern form because of its potential to critique the traditional humanist ideas about art and its relation to reality. For her, the parodied text is not a target but a weapon, an idea that underscores the scope of parody as much broader than merely ridiculing some other work. It is a form of auto-referentiality fraught with ideological implications. While Hutcheon states that, “parody, often called ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or inter-textuality, is usually considered central to postmodernism, both by its detractors and its defenders,”21 she departs from the prevailing interpretation that postmodern parody is ultimately value-free and devoid of any critical potential. It is noteworthy that Frederic Jameson takes this view of postmodern parody, rejecting its critical stance towards reality and regarding it as a mere pastiche. Jameson identifies pastiche as a defining formal feature of postmodern aesthetics. 18

ibid, p. 89. Linda Hutcheon. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989, p. 51. 20 Linda Hutcheon. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms. London: Methuen, 1985, p. 11. 21 Linda Hutcheon. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989, p. 93. 19

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He sees two factors as crucial in the emergence of the “universal practice” in the contemporary literary practice whereby texts speak in the “dead” language and forms of the past. For him it is the notion of the “decentering” of the formerly sovereign or autonomous subject that necessitates the “imitation of dead styles”. Secondly, he links the emergence of pastiche to the absence of a linguistic norm. He grants parody a critical potential but finds it to have been displaced by pastiche in postmodern art: Parody finds itself without a vocation; it has lived, and that strange new thing pastiche slowly comes to take its place. Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blind parody, a statue with blind eyes.22

Jameson’s remarks reflect the well-known stance of Marxist critics who regard all forms of postmodern art as de-historicized, wallowing in the mire of self-referentiality; in brief, an art incapable of any meaningful intervention in reality. Responding to Jameson’s distinction between parody and pastiche, Terry Eagleton argues that although parody of a sort is not alien to postmodernism, it is deplorable that: what is parodied by postmodernist culture, with its dissolution of art into the prevailing forms of commodity production, is nothing less the revolutionary art of the twentieth century avant-garde. It is though postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of such revolutionary avant-gardism, one of whose major impulses, as Peter Burger has convincingly argued in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, was to dismantle the institutional autonomy of art, erase the frontiers between culture and political society and return aesthetic production to its humble, unprivileged place within social practices as a whole. In the commodified artifacts of postmodernism, the avant-gardist dream of an integration of art and society returns in monstrously caricatured form … Postmodernism, from this perspective, mimes the formal resolution of art and social life attempted by the avant-garde while remorselessly emptying it of its political content.23 22

Frederic Jameson. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso, 1991, pp. 17-8. 23 Terry Eagleton. “Capitalism, modernism and postmodernism” in New Left Review, 1985, 152, p. 60.

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Hutcheon deals with these arguments of the two leading Marxist critics by arguing that postmodern parody is thoroughly political, primarily because it serves to underline the political and ideological nature of all representations. She is critical of Eagleton who, according to her, fails to appreciate the critical edge of postmodernism while approving of the same in the modernist revolutionary avant-garde. In fact, postmodernism’s relation with modernism can be understood better by keeping in view that avant-garde is nearer to postmodernism than to modernism. What postmodernism challenges is modernism’s view of the autonomy of art and the individual human subject. Modernism sought in art an order which it failed to find in life and the great modernists attempted to flee from the chaos of history and discontinuities of the modern world into the formal world of art. T S Eliot believed that all disparate experiences are always forming new wholes in the mind of the poet. This inward turn, so characteristic of all great modernists, highlights their preoccupation with the inner world of human consciousness. The modernist assumption of aesthetic autonomy postulates a perspective from outside, an Archimedean viewpoint from where to respond to the modern world. This assumption stands radically challenged by postmodernism. Another feature that postmodern radically departs from is modernism’s uncritical acceptance of language as a neutral medium of communication. The historical avant-garde too aims to deconstruct the very ideology of art by relating it to social reality and cultural institutions. Unlike modernism, it is highly conscious of the political nature of all representations and seeks to interrogate the operations of the dominant cultural discourses. This explains the apparent tendency of disruption of all that is fixed by the avant-garde. These concerns of the avant-garde are obsessions with postmodernism. The subversive tendencies of postmodern art forms are indicative of the postmodern concern with challenging the conventional configurations of experience and perceptions. Postmodern art works to challenge the dominant cultural discourse while being quite aware that the challenge itself is contained within some discourse. This self-consciousness of postmodernism sets it apart from the avant-garde. Postmodernism is not avant-garde because of its provisional and selfconsciously contradictory character. While as the avant-garde is overtly oppositional to the tradition and places faith in the ability of art to change social reality rather directly, postmodernism neither desires any break with the past nor regards art as capable of effecting a social change, though, as Hutcheon maintains, questioning and problematizing may set up the conditions for possible change. Hutcheon’s argument on this point is based on the accepted stance of postmodernism, one which is derived from the

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Chapter One

works of Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault and the rest. Postmodernism opposes all attempts to regard representations as natural. By virtue of its relentless critique of the natural and neutral, it resists all efforts to naturalize what it regards to be ideological. Roland Barthes called this process which enables us to see the oftconcealed ideology of our notions of reality as dedoxification. The term doxa itself means something that is accepted as natural and dedoxification is the recognition of this supposed “natural” as ideological. Barthes’ main thrust as a critic was to denaturalize our assumptions of the human self and the “objective” world outside us. Hutcheon sees a similar potential in the postmodern parody as it helps us see the political and ideological nature of all human discourses. But while all the earlier forms and strategies of criticism posited a vantage point from which to approach the object, postmodern parody denies the possibility of any such view from outside. On the contrary, it foregrounds its complicity with the object of its critique and underscores the implicated nature of all viewpoints. Postmodernism, thus, is a complicitous critique of all social and political phenomena. Hutcheon suggests that postmodern parody is complicitous with the values it subverts. This subversion, nevertheless, takes the form of denaturalization: It seems reasonable to say that the postmodernism’s initial concern is to denaturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life, to point out that those entities we unthinkingly experience as ‘natural’ they might even include capitalism, patriarchy, liberal humanism are in fact ‘cultural’, made by us, not given to us.24

To see how postmodernism should be seen as simultaneously inscribing and contesting the concept of representation, let us turn to some of the implications of Derrida’s critical strategies for our understanding of history. In Derrida’s whole oeuvre, it is his ideas on textuality that have problematized the traditional notions about history and its truth-value. For Derrida, history is a text and a text itself is a configuration in which meaning is always produced by a process of signification that never reaches what he calls the “transcendental signified”. Nicholas Royle has rightly noted that “the implications of Derrida’s work for historiography are quite massive.”25 Derrida himself clarifies his position in these terms:

24

Linda Hutcheon. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989, p. 2. Nicholas Royle. After Derrida. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 18. 25

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What I call ‘text’ implies all the structures called ‘real’, ‘economic’, ‘historical’, ‘socio-institutional’, in short all possible referents. Another way of recalling once again that ‘there is nothing outside the text’. That does not mean that all referents are suspended, denied or enclosed in a book, as people have claimed, or have been naïve enough to believe and to have accused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent and all reality has the structure of a differential trace and that one cannot refer to this ‘real’ except in an interpretative experience. The latter neither yields meaning nor assumes it except in a movement of differential referring. That’s all.26

Royle explains the implications of deconstruction for historiography in these terms: To say that history is radically determined by writing, then, is to say that it is constituted by a general or unbounded logic of traces and remaindersgeneral and unbounded because these traces and remains, this work of remainders and remnants are themselves neither presences nor original: rather they too are constituted by traces and remains in turn.27

Hence, for Derrida textuality is the condition of history and textuality itself carries with it the condition of its own critique. Derrida argues that there can be no meaning inherent in the text without a context and context itself is unbounded. It is this state of being “unbounded” that generates a perpetual difference of meaning. Applying this idea to history, we see that history can never escape the condition of textuality whose production involves a process of constructing meaning in language. Rather than capturing something “given”, the very exercise of writing implies a process of selection, distribution, contextualization, combination and reconstruction, connecting and disconnecting and ultimately endowing the “seamless past” with certain meanings and not others. History, therefore, cannot lay claim to objective and neutral knowledge of the past, since everything that a historian relies on for her work of historiography, including herself, is a text. Historians, howsoever objective they might try to be, can never escape their condition of situatedness in the web of signification. There exists no Archimedean point from which to carry out a truly objective study of the past. There are only some events that find a place in the historical records and become “facts”. History itself is 26

Quoted in Simon Critchley. The Ethics of Deconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1922, p. 39. 27 Nicholas Royle. After Derrida. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 20.

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Chapter One

permeated by the institutional forces that work to promote certain favored versions to the exclusion of some others. In the past few decades, these ideas have received a new impetus in the works of the writers such as Hayden White, Richard Evans, Frank Ankersmit and Dominick LaCapra. Their studies, despite a stiff resistance offered by the traditional historians, have now found a firm foothold in academic circles and can no longer be dismissed as mere intellectual vandalism. The postmodernist position on history, therefore, contests all thought-systems which claim to derive their strength from history, Marxism being the central one. This calls for addressing the main charges brought against postmodernism by its detractors, mainly the Marxists and the liberal humanists. As mentioned above, it is argued by many that postmodernism upholds the negation of history and referentiality and is ultimately complicitous with the contemporary consumerism. These critics accuse postmodernism of a culpable escape into textuality at the cost of engagement with reality. It is argued that postmodernism is informed by the ideology of linguistic determinism that reduces all reality to linguistic codes. It is of utmost importance to understand that postmodernism’s contestation of the epistemological status of history does not imply a rejection of the past. Simon Critchley has shown that Derrida’s purpose is not to reduce the world of real objects, things and events into discourses, into mere texts, which means rejecting their existence altogether. Explaining Derrida’s concept of the text, he says that this idea does not: wish to turn the world into some vast library, nor does it wish to cut off reference to some ‘extra textual realm’. Deconstruction is not bibliophilia. Text qua text is glossed by Derrida as the entire ‘real-history-of-the-world’ and this is said in order to emphasize the fact that the word ‘text’ does not suspend reference ‘to history, to the world, to reality, to being and especially not to the other’. All the latter appear in an experience which is not an immediate experience of presence – the text or context is not present, but rather the experience of a network of differentially signifying traces which are constitutive of meaning. Experience or thought traces a ceaseless movement of interpretation within a limitless context.28

And Hutcheon very perceptively explains Derrida’s view on the subject of reference as follows:

28 Simon Critchley. The Ethics of Deconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1922, p. 39.

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Derrida’s denial of the transcendental signified is not a denial of reference or a denial of any access to extra-textual reality. However, it is meant to suggest that meaning can be derived only from within texts through deferral, through differance. This kind of poststructuralist thinking has obvious implications for historiography and historiographic metafiction. It radically questions the nature of the archive, the document, evidence. It separates the (meaning-granted) facts of history-writing from the brute events of past.29

The implications of the ideas discussed above are of central importance for the formulation of a poetics of postmodernism. Postmodern literary works foreground the ideological and political nature of all representations and radically question our assumptions of objectivity and neutrality. It is at this point that the issue of power and its role in representation becomes seminal to a poetics of postmodernism. We can see here how Foucault enters the picture of Hutcheon’s thesis. Foucault’s ideas on discourse and its overwhelmingly determining character of both the subjective self and objective knowledge should undoubtedly find a significant place in any attempt to delineate a poetics of postmodernism. Hutcheon very aptly states that “the relation of power to knowledge and to historical, social and ideological contexts is an obsession of postmodernism.”30 Language itself is inextricably bound with the ideological contexts and it is not possible to purge language of these contextual traces. Our prevalent cultural signification generates a field of power which is allpervading. In the words of Terry Eagleton: Discourses, sign-system and signifying practices of all kinds, from film and television to fiction and the languages of natural science, produce effects, shape forms of consciousness and unconsciousness, which are closely related to the maintenance or transformation of our existing systems of power.31

Power is a ubiquitous phenomenon, a process rather than a product that permeates cultural signification to its core. Postmodernism, especially deconstruction, has tried to unravel the hidden power relationships in the general tendency of binary opposition. Every binary, the argument goes, conceals a power relation that divides it into a hierarchy of the privileged and the under-privileged. Thus the seemingly innocuous binaries of 29

Linda Hutcheon. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Fiction, Theory. London: Routledge, 1988, p. 149. 30 ibid, p. 86. 31 Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1983, p. 210.

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Chapter One

male/female, white/black, western/eastern, are tied up with power relations. Postmodernism thus strikes at the very basis of this hierarchical division. From a perspective of a postmodern poetics, language and all forms of representation are politically inflected because there can be no escape from “situatedness” within some discourse. A postmodern artifact raises the question of ideology by revealing that every kind of representation in art is somebody’s representation. No author, artist or critic can avoid her imbrication in some ideologically-inflected narrative and can hence lay no claim to an apolitical representation. Reality does not exist except when represented through a text, spoken, visual or written, and all texts are discursive practices. Rather than positing the origin of a text in the personality of the author, postmodernism declares that the text originates within a field of enunciation. An aesthetic product, no matter how aesthetically pure and uncontaminated it is alleged to be, always exists within some field of enunciation, that is, a social, political, religious and cultural milieu, and is, therefore, inextricably bound to power relations. Hutcheon comments upon this idea in the following manner: Both postmodern art and theory work to reveal the complicity of discourse and power by re-emphasizing the enunciation: the act of saying is an inherently political act, at least when it is not seen as only a formal entity.32

The Foucauldian insights into the nature and operations of discourse are already visible here. Discourse, according to Foucault, operates by means of various procedures involving controls, constrains, permissibility, acceptability and rejection. It is over-arching in its character and enables the production, dissemination and reception of all forms of knowledge. As language comes to be seen as “a social practice”, an instrument as much for manipulation and control as for humanist self-expression, it also becomes clear that the linguistic is not separable from the extra-linguistic. No linguistic speech, written document or visual representation can exist without power somehow permeating its very core. Language is quite often an instrument of cultural power, a means of repression, of hiding rather than stating the truth and an instrument for manipulation. The term “political” occupies an important place in postmodernism as it comes to signify the discursive nature of all representations. As already illustrated, Foucault’s examination of power and its operations in the constitution of human subjectivity and discourse of knowledge are of 32

Linda Hutcheon. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988, p. 185.

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central concern to postmodernism. This calls for a revision of the term political and its usage. In postmodern art, politics becomes an inherent feature of all representation which it seeks to explore and reveal. Postmodern art problematizes the concept of neutral representation, the very basis of the realist tradition in art, by engaging with the political nature of representation. Art, postmodern works suggest, can never avoid implication with the discursive practices which are themselves built into politically inflected relationships. “All language,” as Hayden White has said, “is politically contaminated,”33 and postmodern art works to reveal the political status of all representations claiming neutrality. This concern of postmodern art finds expression in the tendency to depart from the mimetic tradition in arts. The assumptions of the realistic tradition, which are thoroughly challenged by postmodernism, give way to the increasing awareness of inescapable imbrications with the ideologies inherent in artistic representation. Language in postmodern literary artifacts is no longer used only referentially or emotively, but as a means to explore how it can be used for purposes different from its commonly accepted usage. In fact, postmodern theories illustrate the primacy of linguistic signs in constituting the human subject in the first place. Postmodern literature reflects this concern in its focus on the characters’ construction in and through linguistic discourse. This idea manifests itself through what is termed as the “decentered subject”, in which the human subject is presented as more or less a point of intersection of various discourses. Postmodern art draws attention to these ideas by foregrounding the question of power. For Hutcheon, power is one of the central themes of “historiographic metafiction’s” investigations of the relation of art to ideology. The novels that Hutcheon cites like William Kennedy’s Legs, Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby and Rushdie’s Shame, deal with the theme of ideological power inherent in cultural discourse. In the final analysis, postmodern literature serves to denaturalize the paradigm of power distribution in cultural and social institutions. Notions of authority, authenticity, sacredness, filiations, duty, punishment and others are derived from a web of complex power distribution. Ideas about legitimacy and illegitimacy rest upon it and postmodern works lay bare the structures embedded in power. While doing so, postmodern art inscribes and challenges power. A simultaneous inscription and contestation of power means revealing its permeation of all “natural” categories, thereby contesting it from within and, reinscribing it suggests its inescapable determining mode. 33

ibid, p. 193.

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Chapter One

It has been argued that Linda Hutcheon’s thesis of postmodern poetics focuses almost exclusively on a specific literary genre “historiographic metafiction” to the exclusion of other postmodern literary forms. Stephen Baker in his The Fiction of Postmodernity agrees with Hutcheon’s insights but is uneasy with what he calls “Hutcheon’s identification of postmodern fiction as “historiographic metafiction”.34 Such objections can be dealt with if we take into consideration the vital fact that for Hutcheon “historiographic metafiction” is the most apt postmodern form of art because it exemplifies the concerns of postmodernism and foregrounds its characteristic features. The same is true of parody. It is clear, however, that Hutcheon does not intend to reduce postmodernism to parody or “historiographic metafiction”. In fact, Hutcheon herself hints at other possible postmodern forms in her discussion of the avant-garde and Brecht’s theatre, both of which share many significant features with postmodernism. Hutcheon suggests a similarity between parody and Brecht’s aesthetic distance, both of which “involve both artist and audience in a participatory hermeneutic activity.”35 Both “historiographic meta-fiction” and Brecht’s Epic theatre “place the receiver in a paradoxical position, both inside and outside, participatory and critical.”36 Both challenge the concept of linearity, development and causality, and foreground the process of the human subject’s construction by the dominant cultural and social structures. And, ultimately, both are subversive in their critique of representation as complicitous with power structures. Having elucidated Hutcheon’s thesis and its merits, it will be worthwhile to consider its applicability to the study of drama. Postmodern drama can be best understood in the Hutcheonian terms as a simultaneous inscription and subversion of the basic dramatic categories of character, language and representation. What needs to be underlined is the doublecoded nature of postmodern drama whereby it rests on these categories, but questions the assumptions on which they have been traditionally based. Although postmodern drama attempts to lay bare and thus demystify the ideologies in which the whole dramatic apparatus including the playwright, character, language and the audience are situated, it suggests that the awareness of these ideologies itself constitutes an

34 Stephen Baker. The Fiction of Postmodernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 5. 35 Linda Hutcheon. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988, p. 220. 36 ibid, p. 220.

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ideology. It is this aspect of postmodern drama that makes it comparable to parody and “historiographic metafiction”. To examine how dramatic practice parallels some of the ideas discussed above, we will turn to some of the important American and European playwrights of the recent past who have, in similar ways, challenged the traditional dramatic conventions. Their innovations in exploiting theatrical apparatus serve to highlight the common concerns of the contemporary theatre and postmodern theory. It is, however, essential to trace these developments to the two foremost European dramatists, Brecht and Beckett. It is remarkable that Roland Barthes was the first critic to see a connection between poststructuralist ideas and Brecht’s theatre. In the 1955 article “La Revolution Brechtienne”, originally an editorial in Theatre Populare, Barthes summarizes the assumptions that Brecht’s Epic theatre challenged. These assumptions, Barthes believed, were rooted in the Western tradition and create a myth of naturalness in the place of constructedness. Barthes seems to have been highly impressed by Brecht’s critique of the notions of essentialism, especially in the notion of character. His critical analysis of how signification is naturalized owes its strength to his early recognition of Brecht’s strategies of disrupting the ideology of the theatre. Barthes’s theory of semiotics, with the explicit aim to deconstruct dominant ideologies by demonstrating the meaningconstructing activity of signs, came only after he observed how Brecht carried out a similar task in the theatre.37 As discussed above, Linda Hutcheon draws certain significant parallels between postmodernism and Brecht’s Epic theatre. Brecht’s challenge to the realist dramatic narrative based on linearity and to the human subject has had an enormous influence on the subsequent dramatists who perceived that he had marked an irreversible break with the realist tradition.38 Deborah Geis comments on the significance of Brecht for postmodern drama: Brecht’s theory often serves as a paradigm for the challenging or displacing these conventional strategies of representation. In Brecht’s “A37

See Michael Moriarty. Roland Barthes. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, pp. 46-7. It is, however, important to note that the Epic theatre and postmodern drama are essentially different despite their sharing some common features. Kerstin Schmidt observes: “The Epic Theater and postmodern drama also cover common ground in many respects. The Epic Theater shares with postmodern forms, for example, the reflection upon its own constituents and the attempt to unveil theatrical illusion. It cannot be subsumed under the label of postmodern drama, however, for it relies heavily on the fable and frequently aims at conveying a moral. It is thus its pronounced didacticism that is inimical to postmodern concerns” (33).

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Chapter One effect”, the ongoing refusal to permit audience empathy – or the concomitant distinctions between actor/character and story/history – allows for a constructive disengagement (or, more accurately, a historicized “reading”) of the speaking body and its signifiers.39

Postmodern drama presents the condition of the human subject as essentially decentered, an idea central to the poststructuralist theories. This decentering is suggested mainly in two ways: by revealing human subjectivity as an ideological construct being constantly reproduced by cultural and linguistic codes, or by showing it as fundamentally fragmented, without a core, a self or a recognizable past. Brecht is probably the first European playwright who wrote with a strong conviction against the notion of essentialism of the human subject. His Epic theatre situates the subject against a particular social and historical background to suggest how subjectivity is shaped by forces operating on it from outside.40 Hutcheon quotes two important remarks of Emile Benvensite on the relation between language and subjectivity: Language is the possibility of subjectivity because it always contains the linguistic forms appropriate to the expression of subjectivity, and discourse provokes the emergence of subjectivity because it consists of discrete instances.41

And further: “It is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of ‘ego’ in reality, in its reality.”42 The implications of these ideas are described by her as follows: If the speaking subject is constituted in and by language, s/he cannot be totally autonomous and in control of her or his subjectivity, for discourse is constrained by the rules of the language and open to multiple connotations of anonymous cultural codes.43

39

Deborah Geis. “Wordscapes of the Body: Performative Language as Gestus in Maria Irene Fornes’ Plays”. Theatre Journal 1990, vol. 42, no.3, p. 292. 40 Elizabeth Wright, in Postmodern Brecht: A Re-presentation (1988), has shown how Brecht’s theatre subverts our assumptions of stable identity by capturing the process through which subjectivity comes into being. 41 Quoted in Linda Hutcheon. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988, p. 168. 42 ibid, p. 168. 43 ibid. Derrida’s opinion on how he conceives of human subjectivity is worth quoting here: “I have never said that the subject should be dispensed with. Only

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The most important dramatist to radically challenge the traditional idea of human subjectivity in theatre, however, is Beckett. It is noteworthy that while Brecht contested essentialism of the subject by always historicizing and contextualizing his characters, Beckett achieved the same goal by reversing Brecht’s method. His characters, stripped of all remnants of the past are thoroughly decontextualized, as the plays themselves tend to take place in some spatial and temporal void. Malkin makes an important remark in this regard: … postmodern drama has no psychologically endowed characters who can act as the locus of recall. For postmodernism, individual recall is no longer the relevant paradigm, since the rooted, autonomous self, the subject-asconsciousness, is no longer available. When, as in Beckett’s late plays, recall appears to arise from a specific subject, that subject is him/herself fractured, “falling to bits”, and placed at a remove from the “remembering” voice(s). The link between an experiencing subject and articulated recall is severed, as is the faith in memory to capture truth, find origins, or heal.44

According to her, Beckett represents most forcefully the concept of fragmentation of the self: Hollowed out, lacking an ego or a core of human essence, these are not characters who develop in time and inspire audience identification … The fragmentation of experience and the dissolution of the unified self – basic topoi of postmodern thought – banish memory from the security of individual control, rendering it sourceless.45

Malkin’s basic thesis which she derives from her perception that postmodernism marks a foundational shift in the way memory operates, provides an important insight into how postmodern drama treats the concept of the subject’s relation with its past: Where once memory called up coherent, progressing narratives of experienced life, or at least unlocked the significance of hidden memory that it should be deconstructed. To deconstruct the subject does not mean to deny its existence […]. To acknowledge this does not mean, however, that the subject is what it says it is. The subject is not some meta-linguistic substance or identity, some pure cogito of self-presence; it is always inscribed in language. My work does not, therefore, destroy the subject; it simply tries to resituate it”.(qtd. in Kerstin Schmidt. The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005. p. 46) 44 Jeanette Malkin. Memory – Theatre and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999, p. 7. 45 ibid.

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Chapter One for the progressions of the present, this kind of enlightenment organization has broken down in postmodernism and given way to the nonnarrative reproduction of conflated, disrupted, repetitive, and moreover collectively retained and articulated fragments. This shift in the workings of memory is reflected in plays shaped through fragment, recurrence, and imagistic tumult.46

A somewhat similar thesis underlies Deborah Geis’s argument which focuses on the representation of monologue in postmodern drama to suggest decentering and multivocality: “Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of the decentered subject is the increasing precedence that monologue takes over dialogue in postmodern drama.”47 For her, monologue in postmodern drama does not emerge from a unified subject: “Monologue does not necessarily emerge from one coherent “voice” or “self”; the monologic texts, rather, are similarly fragmented and given multiple voices”.48 In fact, monologue can be seen as a medium through which the decentered subject dramatizes the fragmented condition of its memory. Installing fragmentation at a site where the subject usually assumes the sense of a unified self is a powerful method of suggesting its dispersal. Sam Shepard offers a prime example of this idea in a number of his plays such as Chicago (1965), Tooth of Crime (1972), Action (1976), Buried Child (1978) and Fool for Love (1982). For both Malkin and Geis, Shepard’s obsession with the theme of disintegration of the human subject is a feature of postmodernism. Malkin comments thus on Shepard’s concerns: His characters constantly transform, perform, speak in “voices.” Parallel actions and generic shiftings undermine any possibility of stability, even within a theatrical code. This postmodern rejection of essence and foundation of “metaconcepts,” or what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls “master narratives,” supplies the frame of Shepard’s imagistic plays.49

David Mamet’s drama shares some essential features with Shepard’s, and in the plays as American Buffalo (1976), A Life in the Theatre (1977) and Water Engine (1977), surface realism is constantly subverted by

46

ibid, p. 4. Deborah R. Geis. Postmodern Theatri[k]s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, p. 35. 48 ibid. 49 Jeanette Malkin. Memory –Theatre and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999, p. 117. 47

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undermining its assumptions about character and linear progress. Bigsby remarks that Mamet’s realism is: fully informed by absurdist assumptions about the pressures which offer to dissolve character, aware of the displacement of the subject, the deceptions of language and the cogency of entropy as image and fact.50

In Mamet’s plays there are unmistakable signs of pressures under which the characters seem to be losing their sense of a concrete self. Bigsby sums up the characteristics of Mamet’s characters in these terms: Unable to act, to commit themselves to the casualities of a moral existence, the characters allow their impulses to be deflected into language which must then carry the weight of their blunted aspirations.51

Language in postmodern drama assumes great significance because postmodern thought foregrounds the role of language in constructing both the epistemological discourses and the human subject. Language can never be a neutral medium for representation; it is rather always already inflected with power relations. In the words of Paul de Man: “No such thing as an unrhetorical, natural language exists that could be used as a point of reference; language is itself the result of purely rhetorical tricks and devices”.52 Postmodern drama inscribes language but subverts its neutral status by revealing its complicity with discursive practices of various types. Language is therefore shown to be a medium that can manipulate and hide the truth as much as it can express and reveal it. Moreover, postmodern drama demonstrates the condition of the human subjectivity as a function of linguistic codes, an idea expounded by theoreticians such as Emile Benvensite. Language as such is shown not to be merely reflective but constitutive of what is termed as reality. The linguistic codes, thoroughly social in their character, cannot be used merely as tools for expression. They are, instead, inflected with prior meanings and traces from usages in different contexts, and thus shape the subject’s perception of itself and reality. The use of dialogue borrowed from other texts, a remarkable feature of postmodern drama, simultaneously challenges the notions of the autonomy of the dramatic world inhabited by the characters and their consciousness as the origin of 50 C W E Bigsby. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 266. 51 ibid. 52 Paul de Man. “Nietzsche’s Theory of Rhetoric”. Symposium. Spring 1974, no. 28, p. 35.

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language. The characters, held within an unbounded signifying system, are often at the mercy of various codes which manipulate them after they have been internalized by them. Another feature of postmodern drama relating to language is its exploitation of the linguistic indeterminacies and semantic pluralities to the effect of destabilizing the link between the sign and the referent, the signifier and the signified. Here too, Beckett can be seen as a powerful representative of the idea. Andrew Kennedy has rightly observed in this context: Beckett, who used to read Mauthner’s Critique of Language aloud to Joyce, has woven a far reaching epistemological skepticism about all language into all his texts; and his dialogue is shot through with the pathos of man’s insuperable need to go on talking without end.53

Postmodern drama follows Beckett in dramatizing the Derridean notion of the infinite play of signifiers through a refusal of narrative closure, an idea which often finds expression in its tendency to embrace contradictions instead of resolving them. In some cases, this idea gets manifested through open-ended debates on epistemology, arts and ethics, all of which are shown to be inextricably bound with the problem of linguistic signification. The theatres of Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson offer apt illustrations of this kind of drama that uses language to disrupt the assumptions of linguistic signification. Foreman’s Ontological – Hysteric Theatre which he himself describes as: a form of concrete theatre in which the moment-to-moment resistance and impenetrability of the materials worked on stage are framed and reframed so that the spectator’s attention is redistributed and exhilaration slowly invades his consciousness as a result of the continuous presentation and representation of the atomic units of each experienced moment.54

This can be seen as an attempt to make the theatre viable in an age where communication of meaning has become increasingly difficult. Foreman’s manifestoes, which he used to corroborate his theatrical practice, offer a useful insight into the manner language operates in his theatre. Some of the important manifestoes read as: “Theatre in the past has used language 53

Andrew K Kennedy. Six Dramatists in Search of a Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 4. 54 Richard Foreman in Kate Davy (ed). Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestoes. New York, 1976, p. xiii.

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to build: What follows/ We use language not to destroy, but to undercut pinnings of there”.55 And furthermore: Dissonances, dissociation, discontinuity, dehumanization/ and GAPS remind one of what is true; that man is always shipwrecked/ That he will never WIN/(Which is different from saying that he cannot/ PLAY magnificently and joyously – in which/ case not-winning is hardly a case for sadness).56

Foreman argues that language should not be used primarily for its referential purposes because referentiality itself stands deeply problematized. His plays such as Hotel China (1972), Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation (1975) and Penguin Touquet (1981) are attempts to explore the possibilities of a theatre that is based on the recognition of an inherent semantic dissonance in language. A somewhat similar idea of language is presented in Robert Wilson’s theatre of images that refuses to engage with either the psychological concerns or the plot development. Instead, what is highlighted is the severance of language from its supposed origin, the human consciousness. His plays such as A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974-5) and Einstein on the Beach (1976) subvert language by, “hollowing it out, establishing a series of disjunctions between word and act, word and context, word and gesture.”57 Language as a part of the medium of the theatrical representation is used to pinpoint its problematical nature. Bigsby comments on Wilson’s use of language in these terms: The language is deployed in part as a kind of jazz scat or a form of mantra. He uses language against itself. On the one hand he relies on a certain associative power. He wishes to press his model of simultaneous experience into the realm of language while at the same time wanting to dis-assemble it.58

It is, however, to be noted that the aim of both Foreman and Wilson is to break free from language, an idea premised upon the faith in the human ability to capture a pre-linguistic essence. This idea, as has been discussed earlier, is radically contested by postmodernism. Nevertheless, both these playwrights have marked a significant point of intersection between 55

ibid, p. 66. ibid, p. 147. 57 C W E Bigsby. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 181. 58 ibid, p. 178. 56

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theatre and the recent poststructuralist theories. The question of language is thus central to postmodern drama even if certain practitioners are motivated by a desire to escape its determining influences. Postmodern drama does not abjure reference to reality in spite of its disruption of linguistic categories. This can be seen in the way in which the past is both inscribed and subverted. Like “historiographic metafiction”, postmodern drama revisits the past ironically. History assumes importance not because it reveals the past as it was, but because it enables us to perceive that our retrieval of it can never escape the conditions of textuality. The challenge of inscribing the past on the stage is met by postmodern drama by either projecting characters reminiscing about a collective or individual past, or by presenting different timeframes simultaneously or alternately on the stage. This calls for redefining the narrative in non-linear terms that alters the manner of conceptualizing time. In the words of Elizabeth Deeds Ermath: The best definition of postmodern narrative might be precisely that it resolutely does not operate according to any form of historical time, that is, representational time, and in many cases directly parodies or disputes that time and the generalizations it allows to form.59

By rejecting the notion of linearity of history, postmodern drama also rejects the related notion of progress. Malkin’s remarks in this regard are worth quoting: Ideologically, postmodernism differs from the modern in terms of the foundational concept of “progress”. Progress implies linear and causal increase through time, development, improvement, teleological faith. The virtues of progress and goal-oriented history – compromised beyond repair by this century’s ideological excesses – are rejected in postmodernism and replaced by concept stressing synchronicity, the simultaneous, repetitive, plural, and interactive.60

Malkin’s assertion that postmodernism stresses synchronicity should not be construed to suggest that it abjures any meaningful engagement with the past. In fact, as the chapter on Stoppard will illustrate, postmodern drama revisits the past precisely to disrupt the notion of linear progress underlying the assumptions of the Enlightenment Rationality. 59

Elizabeth Deeds Ermath. Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 43. 60 Jeanette Malkin. Memory – Theatre and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999, p. 10.

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Moreover, postmodern drama inscribes a relation with the present as much as with the past. All representations, whether belonging to the past or the present, are shown by it to be constitutive of reality. This means blurring the traditional distinctions between reality and its representation and hence, fact and fiction, an idea which is presented through the use of selfconscious theatrical devices such as the play-within-the-play. Malkin takes up Heiner Muller and Thomas Bernhard, the two German dramatists, to substantiate the argument that postmodern drama revisits history with irony in order to question its epistemological status. Muller’s Germania Death in Berlin (1971) and The Battle (1974), and Bernhard’s Eve of Retirement (1979) are examples where history is presented in the form of a collage and mixed freely with purely imaginative elements. In a scene of Germania, for example, a rather grotesque version of the battle of Stalingard is presented, where the real historical figures as Napoleon, Caesar, and the Nibelungs engage in farcical acts. In yet another scene, Frederick II appears as a vampire. This device of fiddling with history is a potent way of engaging with it ironically. Bernhard’s Eve of Retirement too treats history with complicitous irony, conflating the realms of the past and the present, while simultaneously presenting a proliferation of perspectives, fragmentation and radical indeterminacies. Malkin sums up the manner in which postmodern dramatists engage with history in these terms: Postmodernism involves an explicit (and always “loaded”) utilization and reflection of the past, confounded by memory, by a destabilized perspective, or by other deconstructive tactics. Bernhard, like other postmodern dramatists – Heiner Muller, Sam Shepard – depends on the audiences’ knowledge of the past, of how the past is usually imaged, in order to shock and draw irony through multiple, or conflated perspectives. These are often provocations which challenge the usual representation of that past, or of the present in its light.61

The above analysis serves to vindicate the assertion that postmodern drama, like other postmodern art forms, engages critically with reality. This is, however, done by simultaneously throwing its own representational status into question, confirming Hutcheon’s thesis that postmodernism is a paradoxical and self-contradictory enterprise. Kerstin Schmidt rightly argues that:

61

Jeanette R Malkin. “Pulling the Pants off History: Politics and Postmodernism in Thomas Bernhard’s Eve of Retirement”. Theatre Journal, 1995, vol. 47, no. 2, p. 106.

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Chapter One […] it is precisely postmodernist’s indeterminacy and playfulness that promotes the development of a decidedly political agenda in postmodern drama. It is particularly suited to unveiling dominant representational patterns and subverting existing hierarchies and discourses.62

A similar view is expressed by Philip Auslander in his analysis of postmodern performance which he sees as fraught with political implications for the contemporary postmodern commodification: Because postmodern political art must position itself within postmodern culture, it must use the same representational means as all other cultural expression yet remain permanently suspicious of them. If it is to critique those means by using them, it cannot claim that its use somehow possesses greater truth value than any other use.63

Nick Kaye also substantiates this point in his analysis of postmodern performance: The postmodern [drama] indicates a calling into question of the languages, styles and figures through which it is seen … … It follows that the postmodern in art is subversive and transgressive, that is occurs as a critical and skeptical stepping beyond bounds, a disruption that purposefully upsets the terms by which the “work of art” would constitute itself.64

Postmodern drama, to use Barthes’s terminology, dedoxifies our modes of thought and perception which provokes a rethinking of these modes. Recognition of this fact enables us to dispel the notion that postmodernism implies an infinite regress into textuality with no referential value. Hutcheon’s thesis can be seen to be endorsed by Auslander and Kaye who see postmodern performance as an art form with a deconstructive potential. Kaye remarks that, “performance may be thought of as a primary postmodern mode,”65 because it has the potential of “making

62

Kerstin Schmidt. The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005, p. 23. 63 Philip Auslander. Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 23. 64 Nick Kaye. Postmodernism and Performance. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1994, p. 19. 65 ibid, p. 12.

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visible [of] contingencies and instabilities” and can, therefore, be regarded as “a disruption of the move toward containment and stability.”66 It is this deconstructive impulse of postmodern drama that vindicates its value as a mode of critical engagement with the contemporary culture and politics. In the following chapters on Pinter and Stoppard an attempt will be made to examine their plays in the light of the discussion carried out here.

66

ibid, p. 23.

CHAPTER TWO HAROLD PINTER AND POSTMODERNISM: POWER, MEMORY AND POLITICS As illustrated in the introduction, Pinter’s plays have invited a wide variety of critical responses. From the time Martin Esslin presented Pinter as the foremost representative of the absurdist tradition in England, the playwright has been subjected to various analytical studies. After Austin Quigley’s seminal study which conclusively revealed the limitations of the traditional approaches, it is now generally accepted that Pinter’s plays defy the logic of critical approaches based on the realist assumptions. This is duly reflected in the works of those critics who have primarily focused on the use of language by Pinter. Richard Gilman’s remark that “in Pinter’s world, language is the play,”1 may be an overstatement but certain important studies including Almansi and Henderson’s Harold Pinter (1983) and Marc Silverstein’s Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power (1993) have focused on the analysis of language as a key to understanding Pinter. Although it is evident that the studies of Quigley, Almansi and Henderson, and Silverstein point towards the primacy of language in Pinter’s plays, none of them employs the critical paradigm of postmodernism as illustrated in the previous chapter. It is, therefore, worthwhile to undertake an analysis of Pinter’s plays to demonstrate the validity of applying postmodern critical tools to his drama. 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 perceptions of reality, is of central importance. In dealing with all these, he foregrounds the centrality of language as a basic dramatic device. There is an overt subversion of the conventional dramatic categories suggesting a challenge to the representational status of drama itself. In a characteristic postmodern manner, there is a simultaneous inscription and contestation of these conventions. Language, plot and character are employed, but only to lay bare their problematical status as categories of representation. A pertinent 1

Richard Gilman. “The Pinter Puzzle.” New York Times, 22 Jan. 1967, sec. 2, p. 1.

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example of this is provided by the futility of tracing the origin of Pinter’s characters and their motivation to action, on which the playwright has himself commented as follows: The desire for verification is understandable but cannot always be satisfied. There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true or what is false. The thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.2

He further elaborated the idea in these terms: [There is] the immense difficulty, if not impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened? If one can speak of the difficulty of knowing what in fact took place yesterday one can I think treat the present in the same way. What’s happening now? We won’t know until tomorrow or six month’s time, and we won’t know then, we’ll have forgotten or our imagination will have attributed quite false characteristics to today. A moment is sucked away and distorted, often even at the same time of its birth. We will interpret a common experience quite differently, though we prefer to subscribe to the view that there’s a shared, common ground, a known ground. I think there’s a shared common ground all right, but that it’s more like quicksand. Because ‘reality’ is quite a strong, firm word, we tend to think, or to hope, that the state to which it refers is equally firm, settled, and unequivocal. It doesn’t seem to be, and in my opinion it’s no worse or better for that.3

These remarks of Pinter provide valuable insights into his concerns as a playwright. Pinter is precisely interested in showing that our assumptions about reality are more problematical than we usually suppose and his plays explore the complexity informing various aspects of reality, self and language. The dramatic mode Pinter adopts challenges the assumptions of realism in the 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 obfuscate, coerce and manipulate. The characters, especially in the early plays, deliberately evade communication by resorting to different linguistic tactics like repeating the question asked, distorting its sense or playing a pun upon it. Pinter himself, while discrediting the application of the 2

Quoted in Martin Esslin. The Peopled Wound: The Plays of Harold Pinter. London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1970, p. 40. 3 Harold Pinter. “Between the Lines.” Sunday Times. London. 4 March 1962, p. 25.

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“failure of communication” thesis to his plays, remarked that, “I feel…that instead of any inability to communicate, there is a deliberate evasion of communication.”4 The dialogue between Ben and Gus in The Dumb Waiter is a dramatic elucidation of Pinter’s remark: Ben: If I say go and light the kettle I mean go and light the kettle. Gus: How can you light a kettle? Ben: It’s a figure of speech! Light the kettle. It’s a figure of speech! Gus: I’ve never heard it. Ben: Light the kettle! It’s common usage! Gus: I think you’ve got it wrong. Ben (menacing): What do you mean? Gus: They say put on the kettle. Ben (taut): Who says? They stare at each other, breathing hard. (Deliberately): I’ve never in all my life heard anyone say put on the kettle. Gus: I bet my mother used to say it. Ben: Your mother? When did you last see your mother? Gus: I don’t know, aboutBen: Well, What are you talking about your mother for? They stare. Gus, I’m not trying to be unreasonable. I’m just trying to point something out to you. Gus: Yes, butBen: Who’s the senior partner here, me or you? Gus: You. Ben: I’m only looking after your interests, Gus, you’ve got to learn, mate. Gus: Yes, but I’ve never heardBen (vehemently): Nobody says light the gas! What does the gas light? Gus: What does the gas-? Ben (grabbing him with two hands by the throat, at arm’s length): The Kettle, You Fool!5

Another such instance is the conversation between Mr. Kidd and Rose in The Room: Rose: What about your sister, Mr. Kidd? Mr. Kidd: What about her? Rose: Did she have any babies? 4

Quoted in Martin Esslin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1968, p. 274. 5 Harold Pinter. The Birthday Party and Other Plays. London: Metheun, 1960, p. 48.

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Chapter Two Mr. Kidd: Yes, she had a resemblance to my old mum, I think Taller, of course. Rose: When did she die then, your sister? Mr. Kidd: Yes, that’s right, it was after she died that I must have stopped counting … Rose: What did she die of? Mr. Kidd: Who? Rose: Your sister. Pause Mr. Kidd: I’ve made ends meet.6

The early plays which include The Room (1957), The Dumbwaiter (1960), The Birthday Party (1957), and The Caretaker (1959) illustrate how Pinter both inscribes and subverts the realist tradition in theatre. While they depict real life characters speaking natural language, the overwhelming mystery surrounding their origin and actions subverts realism. J R Taylor comments upon this feature in Pinter’s plays: The situations involved are always very simple and basic, the language which the characters use is an almost uncannily accurate reproduction of everyday speech (indeed, in this respect Pinter, far from being the least dramatist of his generation, is arguably the most realistic), and yet in these ordinary surroundings lurk mysterious terrors and uncertainties and by extension, the whole external world of everyday realities is thrown into question. Can we ever know the truth about anybody or anything? Is there any absolute truth to be known?7

But more importantly, it is through the treatment of the issue of power as it operates in social discourse to construct human subjectivity that these plays subvert realism. One of the pivotal assumptions of realism in art is that the human subject possesses an essence prior to and independent of the cultural and linguistic codes. Pinter’s plays radically contest this assumption by dramatizing the processes through which human subjectivity is constantly reproduced by various cultural and linguistic codes, thereby challenging the notion of an essential and transcendental self. This idea finds dramatic treatment in The Birthday Party in Stanley’s construction by the cultural codes which find expression through a rigorous investigation by Goldberg and McCann. Stanley betrays his past by means of certain reminiscences that indicate how he comes to see himself as an individual. Describing his concert as a pianist he says: 6

ibid, p. 103. John Russel Taylor. Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963, p. 287.

7

Harold Pinter and Postmodernism: Power, Memory and Politics

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I once gave a concert … Yes. It was a good one, too. They were all there that night. Every single one of them. It was a great success. Yes. A concert. At Lower Edmonton. I had a unique touch. Absolutely unique. They came up to me. They came up to me and said they were grateful.8

Stanley’s statement “they came up to me” underlines how he comes to identify himself as a subject within the field of the Other. Stanley’s attenuated sense of a concrete self becomes increasingly manifest as the play develops to a point where the initiative is taken over by the two intruders, Goldberg and McCann. The dialogue reveals Stanley’s subjection to the interrogation by the two and a gradual disintegration of his self. But more importantly, it also reveals how the linguistic codes perform the function of subject construction in the first place as the hapless victim of a verbal assault gives in to the dictates of outside forces: Goldberg: What makes you think you exist? McCann: You’re dead. Goldberg: You’re dead. You can’t live … You’re dead. You’re a plague gone bad. There’s no juice in you. You’re nothing but an odour. (62)

This passage illustrates Stanley’s virtual annihilation by the two intruders. In the third act of the play, however, we witness the power of discourses that write the human subject through a rigorous process of inscription: Goldberg: We’ll make a man of you. McCann: And a woman. Goldberg: You’ll be re-orientated. McCann: You’ll be rich. Goldberg: You’ll be adjusted. McCann: You’ll be our pride and joy. Goldberg: You’ll be a mensch. McCann: You’ll be a success. Goldberg: You’ll be integrated. McCann: You’ll give orders. Goldberg: You’ll make decisions. McCann: You’ll be a magnate. Goldberg: A statesman. McCann: You’ll own yatchs. Goldberg: Animals. McCann: Animals. (93-4)

8

Harold Pinter. The Birthday Party and Other Plays. London: Metheun, 1960, pp. 32-3. All the subsequent references to The Birthday Party are from this edition and are given in the parenthesis.

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The passage demonstrates the intimate relation of the subject with subjection and offers an illustration of how the human subject is inscribed and reinscribed by discourses that operate within intricate power structures. Stanley loses himself to the inscribing process carried out by Goldberg and McCann showing how the notion of a unified and autonomous self is an illusion. A similar process is at work in The Caretaker where the intense struggle for power is shown in a verbal twist when Mick enters the room and takes the entire initiative into his hands, dictating terms to Davies in order to establish control over him. Mick plays a linguistic game of coercion upon Davies, forcing him to repeat his answers thereby reinforcing his dominance over him: Mick: What’s your name? Davies: I don’t know you. I don’t know who you are. Pause Mick: Eh? Davies: Jenkins. Mick: Jenkins? Davies: Yes. Mick: Jen … Kins … What did you say your name was?. Davies: Jenkins. Mick: I beg your pardon? Davies: Jenkins. Pause Mick: Jen … kins.9

The verbal assault to which Davies is subjected by Mick disintegrates him further and he is reduced to the state of virtual annihilation. All attempts of Davies to evade, lie and prevaricate are shattered by the superior tactics employed by Mick whose persistence lays bare the inner vacuity of Davies. The false fronts of Davies are ruptured to reveal the absence lying within him. Mick finally has total control over Davies who now complies to be “written” by his dictates. Mick: … You’ve been in the services, haven’t you? Davies: The what? Mick: You been in the services. You can tell by your stance. Davies: oh … Yes. Spent half my life there, man. Overseas … like … serving … I was. Mick: In the colonies, weren’t you? 9 Harold Pinter. The Caretaker. London: Metheun, 1960, pp. 31-2. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition indicated in the parenthesis.

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Davies: I was over there. I was one of the first over there. (50-1)

In fact, Mick outplays Davies at every point, forestalling his attempts at evasion and self-defense: Mick: I can take nothing you say at face value. Every word you speak is open to any number of different interpretations, most of what you say is lies. You’re violent, you’re erratic, you’re just completely unpredictable. You’re nothing else but a wild animal, when you come down to it. You’re a barbarian. (73-4)

In an important sense, Mick’s statements are a commentary on the characters of most of the early plays of Pinter. Nothing that the characters say in these plays can be taken at face value. Pinter, almost at every stage, exposes the difficulty of maintaining whatever is said or done by them. This strategy not only challenges the realist assumptions of neutrality and objectivity of representation but also dislocates the linear narrative of the plays. It also hints at a persisting discrepancy in human relationships, constituting a tool to challenge the idea of representation in art. The realist assumptions of neutrality and objectivity of representation become difficult to maintain, for whatever is said or done is largely actuated by a desire to deceive, manipulate, control, dominate and conceal. Mick, Aston and Davies engage in a complex relationship but by the end of the third act neither any motivation nor any specific design in their actions is available to us. Instead, the dialogue itself is foregrounded to the level where it becomes possible to see the conflation of power and language. While The Birthday Party and The Caretaker both illustrate the process of the subject’s construction through anonymous cultural codes disguised as overt coercion, The Collection (1962) and The Homecoming (1965) offer a powerful dramatic exposition of the role of power in constructing the female subject in patriarchy. The Collection offers an exposition of the patriarchal power structures. While conversing with James, Bill generalizes about women in this way: “Every woman is bound to have an outburst of wild sensuality at one time or another. That’s the way I look at it, anyway. It’s part of their nature.”10 Bill’s remark points towards the underlying ideological underpinnings of the play as a whole. Patriarchy, which encapsulates the four characters’ view of themselves and reality, is the dominant discourse of the play. This becomes obvious in the play’s central quest: whether Stella has been a faithful wife or not? The ideological construction of the female 10

Harold Pinter. The Collection and The Lover. London: Metheun, 1963, p. 39.

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subject in the patriarchal discourse inevitably figures as offering extremely limited choices to women. The Collection, like The Homecoming, depicts how patriarchy creates the possibilities of representational apparatus by which the female subject is forced into the binarism of wife/whore. At the center of the play is the question whether Stella has been faithful to her husband or not? Patriarchy assigns the role of the faithful wife to the female and any transgression of this category by her leads her into the other category; that of the whore. The theme of sexual betrayal itself presupposes a cultural identity of the female where her desire has to be rigorously kept under surveillance to protect the interests of patriarchy. The female, constructed as wife by the patriarchal discourse, assumes this role as “natural”, oblivious that the discursive category of wifehood ensures the perpetuation of patriarchy by making her the reproductive agent of the husband. Bill’s statement that ascribes a “natural” transgressive character to female sexuality is an apt commentary on the process of naturalizing the fictional. The “truth” about women, so manifest in their desire, is their tendency to transgress the lawful boundaries and tread into the unlawful territory. This tendency threatens the patriarchal discourse from within, since it poses danger to the cultural construction of family which is the site of producing and reproducing the “normal” human subjects. In a characteristic postmodern manner, The Collection highlights the representation of the female subject, desire and body within the dominant patriarchal discourse and illustrates the fictional nature of the supposedly natural, thereby dedoxifying the inscription of femininity. Stella’s sexuality is foregrounded as a textual category that is constructed by James and Bill’s projection of their desires on her body. Linda Hutcheon, explaining the common concerns of postmodernism and feminism, writes: The body cannot escape representation and these days this means it cannot escape the feminist challenge to the patriarchal and masculinist underpinnings of the cultural practices that subtend those representations.11

It is, however, in the last scene of the play – in Stella’s response to James’s conclusion that she did not betray him with Bill but just talked to him in the lounge – that a potential site of resistance to patriarchy is hinted at. Stella looks at James, neither confirming, nor denying his belief. Stella’s silence exemplifies the postmodernist impulse of subverting the patriarchal hegemony by a refusal to comply with its imposition, while resisting being 11 Linda Hutcheon. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989, p. 138.

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drawn into a full-fledged feminist position by stopping short of an explicit denial of James’s belief. The Collection ends on a postmodern note of exposition of the patriarchal cultural codes without substituting them with equally ideological feminist ones. This idea finds a more elaborate and powerful treatment in The Homecoming which, however, does not portray the allegedly threatening and transgressive female sexuality tending to subvert patriarchy by sliding into whoredom, but opens out a possibility to see the inscription of female sexuality by the two discourses, namely, patriarchy and capitalism. The female in this play is compelled to transform herself into a commodity to ensure the financial stability of a family solely consisting of males and hence to ensure the perpetuation of both these hegemonic discourses. Before Ruth, Jessie, Max’s wife and the mother of his three children had performed the role of the archetypal female, playing wife and mother simultaneously, to produce and construct the ideologically positioned individuals in the family. Jessie, as Max tells Ruth, had been responsible for whatever their children had learnt: Max: … it was Jessie who taught boys everything they know. She taught them all the morality they know. I’m telling you. Every single bit of the moral code they live by was taught to them by their mother.12

The mother, thus, is shown to be the site and agent of constructing the subjects who have internalized the representations and discursive codes of the most acceptable and, by that definition, the most dominant ideological categories. The ideological function of the mother ensures the perpetuation of patriarchy so well dramatized through the roles of Lenny, Joey and Teddy. It is, however, through the character of Ruth that the play provides a perspective to analyze the role of power in representation. The representational practices that are embedded in the patriarchal configurations of power relations produce hierarchical division between the sexes. This is hinted at in a dialogue between Lenny and Ruth in which Lenny relates a long story about a lady whom he describes as a prostitute and who had made him a certain proposal. Lenny states that he might have considered the prostitute’s proposal seriously had she not been afflicted with a dangerous disease: Lenny: This lady had been searching for me for days. She had lost tracks of my whereabouts. However, the fact was she eventually caught up with me, 12

Harold Pinter. The Homecoming. London: Metheun, 1965, p. 61. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the parenthesis.

Chapter Two

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and when she caught up with me she made me this certain proposal. Well, this proposal wasn’t entirely out of order and normally I would have subscribed to it. I mean I would have subscribed to it in the normal course of events. The only trouble was she was falling apart with the pox. So I turned it down. (47)

When confronted by Ruth as to how he knew she was diseased, he answers: How did I know? Pause I decided she was. (47)

Lenny’s remark illustrates the idea of power that inheres in representation. The power to narrate, describe and represent the other, in this case the female subject, by the voices implicated in the dominant discourse is thus brought into focus. What remains normally concealed is the process that transforms mere representation into reality and Lenny’s remark may be seen as an exposition of this process. It is by focusing on how the family takes on Ruth that the ideological positioning of the female gender is made explicit by the play. The first reaction of Max on seeing Ruth is that of rejection compounded with anger, “who asked you to bring tarts in here?” (57). Despite Teddy’s insistence that Ruth is his wife, Max is dismissive of her and straightaway calls her a whore: I’ve never had a whore under this roof before. Ever since your mother died. My word of honour … Take that disease away from me. Get her away from me. (58)

Max’s remarks about his wife Jessie are suggestive of a virtual conflation of wife and whore in the patriarchal discourse, which also points towards an inherent contradiction in patriarchy. On the one hand, patriarchy itself depends upon a distinction between the two for the very idea of family and parenthood; even the notion of a centered and grounded human subject depends upon this distinction. On the other hand, however, the distinction is itself disrupted, if not entirely erased, by the patriarchy that inscribes it. As the play progresses, the family becomes less aggressive towards Ruth. Joey, Lenny and even Max, make advances towards Ruth which she does not repel. Her acquiescence in the role that the family wants her to perform as a source of entertainment for them is a significant moment in the play. The need to inscribe Ruth as a sex-object for the family is overtaken by the need to inscribe her as a professional whore who can “work” for the financial betterment of the family:

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Lenny: Eh, Dad. (Lenny walks forward.) I’ve got a better idea. Max: What? Lenny: There’s no need for us to go to all this expense. I know these women. Once they get started they ruin your budget. I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t I take her up with me to Greek street? Max: You mean put her on the game? Pause. We’ll put her on the game. That’s a stroke of genius, that’s a marvelous idea. (88)

Lenny even ropes in Teddy, asking him to get people from across the Atlantic to visit Ruth: Lenny: You could be our representative in the States. Max: Of course. We’re talking in international terms! By the time we’ve finished Pan-American’ll give us a discount. (90)

Having decided to put Ruth “on the game”, they put this proposal before her through Teddy: Teddy: Ruth … the family have invited you to stay for a little while longer. As a …as a kind of guest. If you like the idea I don’t mind. We can manage very easily at home … .until you come back. (94)

What follows from here on is an apt commentary on the inscription of the female subject as a fetishized commodity in a culture driven by capitalist consumerism. Ruth accepts the proposal to become a prostitute but wants certain things according to her choice. She demands a flat with three rooms and a bathroom and other kind of conveniences. Ruth’s commodification is carried out in this way: Lenny: We’d finance you, to begin with, and then, when you were established, you could pay us back, in installments. Ruth: Oh no, I wouldn’t agree to that. Lenny: Oh, why not? Ruth: You would have to regard your original outlay simply as a Capital investment. Lenny: I see, All right. (93)

The play ends when Max, the head of the family and the spokesman of patriarchy, collapses to the ground after a series of interrupted outbursts.

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Chapter Two Max (To Ruth): You’re going to have to work. You’ll have to take them on, you understand? Pause. Does she realize that? Pause. Lenny, do you think she understands … . He begins to stammer. What … what … what … we’re getting at? What … we’ve got in mind? Do you think she’s got it clear? Pause. I don’t think she’s got it clear. Pause. You understand what I mean? Listen I’ve got a funny idea she’ll do the dirty on us, you want to bet? She’ll use us, she’ll make use of us, I can tell you! I can smell it! You want to bet? Pause She won’t be … adaptable! He begins to groan, clutches his stick, falls on his knees by the side of her chair. (97)

Max’s collapsing to the ground, his doubt whether Ruth will comply with the already agreed terms and his apprehensions that she will turn tables on them have been interpreted by some critics as a final statement of Ruth’s dominance over Teddy’s family. It seems more plausible, however, to say that the ending projects a kind of ambiguity regarding Ruth’s resistant stance towards the family. Austin Quigley aptly points out that “for Ruth, the ending is of uncertain value,”13 and Elin Diamond declares that, “to say Ruth has won is to ignore the ambiguities that resonate in the last moments of the play.”14 Quigley and Diamond provide a basis for arguing that the play actually ends on a postmodern ambivalence. Ruth can be seen as an agency by which patriarchy has both inscribed and subverted itself. Like Stella’s silence at the end of The Collection, Ruth is given no final voice to permit a thoroughly feminist interpretation to the ending of the play. Instead, it illustrates what Linda Hutcheon describes as the typical postmodern stance of exposing and demystifying the representational categories of culture without, however, substituting one kind of representational apparatus with the other ones capable of escaping “constructedness” and thus existing outside an ideological framework. 13

Austin Quigley. The Pinter Problem. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, p. 225. 14 Elin Diamond. Pinter’s Comic Play. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985, p. 157.

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Any substitution of such kind, on the postmodernist view, would be to replace one ideology with another. The ambiguous ending of The Homecoming where patriarchy has been exposed but not replaced by any other ideological framework is typically postmodern in interrogating and demystifying systems that unify with an aim to power. With A Slight Ache (1961) and The Dwarfs (1963), Pinter shows the signs of writing plays that reach their culmination in the memory plays. Whereas The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Collection and The Homecoming offered a dramatic parallel to the idea of the subject’s ideological construction, A Slight Ache and The Dwarfs present situations in which the human subject has already internalized the elusive external menace and is struggling under the burden of a growing sense of its dissolution. This overwhelming sense of disintegration jeopardizes the foundational premise of the subject’s connection with the external reality. Its sense of reality is hence as flimsy and ruptured as its sense of the self. In A Slight Ache the presence of the silent match seller who never utters a word throughout the play provides an interesting twist to the play’s dramatic quality as the dialogue virtually changes into monologue when both Edward and Flora address him in their long speeches. Edward attributes different and contradictory actions to him as his very behavior is indescribable. “You’re laughing”, “You’re crying”, “You’re moving”. The central question echoed by Edward, “who are you?” illustrates the problem of fixing the identity of a character. Edward admits that he looked at the match seller from all angles and with all kinds of glasses but failed to arrive at any conclusion. It is not that the match seller changes himself to prevent Edward from “knowing” who he is; instead, his static condition on the stage suggests an omnipresent source of ambiguity. The character of the match seller also foregrounds the problematical nature of presence and absence. The very binarism of presence/absence is dramatically subverted through the match seller’s “present absence.” The play’s ending that shows the abrupt and unexplained change of roles between Edward and the match seller with the former turning blind and falling to the ground and the latter moving out with Flora, disrupts the audiences’ expectations used to the resolutions of the realist plays. Again, this dramatic device suggests a subversion of the narrative closure, pointing towards the dislocation of the spectacle by means of causal dislocation. The end does not naturally flow out from the middle as in the traditional realist theatre but breaks from it rather abruptly. The technique itself problematizes the epistemological foundations of realism in art. The Dwarfs carries further the concerns of the earlier plays, especially in its focus on the unresolved nature of questions surrounding identity and

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truth. Len appears in a series of monologues and is obsessed with imagining that there are dwarfs present in his yard. His fantasies are juxtaposed with the realistic details that Mark and Pete talk about. In fact, the play can be seen as consisting of a series of dialogues that are vaguely connected. The setting of the play switches forward and backward from Len to Mark’s house, thereby blurring a definite distinction between Len’s fantasies and reality. There is little point in attributing Len’s fantasies to some psychological disorder because the play eschews any suggestion of mental illness. Instead, it seems more plausible to see Len’s monologues exemplifying the problem of subjective perception. Len finds it difficult to have a fixed opinion of himself as he is aware of the flux in which he is inevitably situated: For me, you see, I don’t grow old. I change. I don’t die. I change again. I am not happy. I change. Nor unhappy. But when a big storm takes place I do not change. I become someone else, which means I change out of all recognition, I am transformed from the world in which I suffer the changes I suffer, I retreat utterly from the standpoint where I am subject to change, then with my iron mask on I wait for the storm to pass.15

From this, Len moves on to utter a long speech during his conversation with Mark on the impossibility of certitude about the supposed essence of the human self. Len’s speech is reminiscent of Beckett and Ionescoe’s characters stripped off of any sense of concrete individuality: The point is, who are you? Not why or how, not even what. I can see what, perhaps, clearly enough. But who are you?…who you are, or appear to be to me or appear to be to you, changes so quickly, so horrifyingly, I certainly can’t keep up with it and I’m damn sure you can’t either. But who you are I can’t even begin to recognize, and sometimes I recognize it so wholly, so forcibly, I can’t look, and how can I be certain of what I see? You have no number. Where am I to look, where am I to look, what is there to locate, so as to have some surety to have some rest from this whole bloody racket? You are the sum of so many reflections. How many reflections? Whose reflections? Is that what you consist of? What scum does the tide leave? What happens to the scum? When does it happen?16

The words “you are the sum of so many reflections” echoes the postmodern contestation of the notion of the ontological self. The notion is an illusion created by the subject’s situatedness in the field where the other exercises its power on it. 15 16

Harold Pinter A Slight Ache and Other Plays. London: Metheun, 1961, p. 112. ibid, p. 112.

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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pinter wrote some powerful plays that have been termed as memory plays. Whereas the earlier plays dramatized situations of menace, struggle for power and the dominance of hegemonic discourses, the memory plays reveal a growing interest in the issues such as individual’s past and decentered subjectivity. Instead of dialogues informed by menace and coercion, a recurring feature of the early plays, there is an increasing emphasis on monologue as the characters try to retrieve their past by means of attenuated and unreliable memories. This leads to a virtual abandoning of a communicative relation between the characters as they become obsessed with their respective pasts. Once within their own memories, the characters travel through time and space, struggling at every moment to find meanings and closures. Moreover, Pinter exploits the dramatic potential of pauses and silences to disrupt the linearity and point to the gaps inherent in the notion of origins, meanings and ends. In these memory plays which include Landscape (1968), Silence (1969), Old Times (1971), No Man’s Land (1975), Moonlight (1993) and Ashes to Ashes (1996) there are unmistakable signs of departure from the realist tradition in terms of plot and character. The slender plots comprise various scenes connected with each other by means of the shaky reminiscences of the characters. As the private realm of the characters is narrated and theatricalized through monologues, the mimetic illusion gets disrupted. These devices also challenge the notions of a unified and coherent self and the availability of the past in the present. Landscape opens with an important stage direction which suggests that no proper communication is taking place between Beth and Duff and that they are probably not even talking to each other: Duff refers normally to Beth, but does not appear to hear her voice. Beth never looks at Duff and does not appear to hear his voice. Both characters are relaxed, in no sense rigid.17

The play contains no onstage action; it does not even explore any static situation. Rather, the entire focus is on the process of constructing the past through a questionable memory exercise. The virtual abandoning of dialogue further narrows the play’s focus on the subjective recreation of the past. The play opens with Beth remembering being on a beach with her lover whose identity is left entirely unclear. Beth’s fractured narrative 17

Harold Pinter, Landscape and Silence. London: Metheun, 1969, p. 7. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the parenthesis.

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describes her past with which she is obsessed. Duff, on the other hand, seems to try to enter into a dialogue with her. His attempts, however, evoke no response from her: Duff: Do you remember the weather yesterday? That downfall? Beth: He felt my shadow. He looked up at me standing above him. Duff: I should have had some bread with me. I could have fed the birds. Beth: Sand on his arms. Duff: They were hopping about? Making a racket. Beth: I lay down by him, not touching. Duff: There wasn’t anyone else in the shelter. There was a man and a woman, under the trees, on the other side of the pond. I didn’t feel like getting wet. I stayed where I was. Pause Yes, I’ve forgotten something. The dog was with me. Beth: Did those women know me? I didn’t remember their faces. (10-1)

The two monologues appear like two parallel narratives with almost no interrelation. Even these narrative accounts betray their precarious and uncertain character as in the case of Beth who first talks of two women turning and staring at her on the beach, but then corrects herself; “two women looked at me, turned and stared. No. I was walking, they were still. I turned”(12). Later, she concludes that she was mistaken about the women and the beach was empty. Thus memory, the only means of link to the past, is shown to be attenuated. It cannot claim to offer an objective and true account, nor is its process of selection incontestable. In fact, the nature of the workings of memory and perception premised upon it is commented upon by Beth in these words: I remembered always, in drawing, the basic principles of shadow and light. Objects intercepting the light cast shadows. Shadow is deprivation of light. The shape of the shadow is determined by that of the object. But not always. Not always directly. Sometimes it is only indirectly affected by it. Sometimes the cause of the shadow cannot be found. (15)

The play thus offers no clue, in realistic terms, about the origin, motivation and action of characters. Its bare plot and decentered characters illustrate the postmodern challenge to realism. Silence shares with Landscape the techniques like the virtual abandoning of the plot, the precedence of monologue over dialogue, the fluid nature of the memory and disruption of linearity. The stage direction makes it clear that the three characters Ellen, Rumsey and Bates occupy three areas with a chair in each of them. Only on two occasions one of them rises and crosses over to another. Besides, the division of the stage

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into three areas offers three perspectives referring to three time-sets. The first time-set shows the characters’ reminiscences about the distant past when Ellen was a child and Rumsey a young man. The second time-set covers the time when Ellen had become a young woman and fallen in love with Rumsey. The third time-set refers to the present, when each of the characters is old and living an isolated and lonely existence. The dramatic technique employed by Pinter in this play allows him to present the whole play in the form of interior monologues. Esslin has aptly remarked that “the story is presented simultaneously from three different points of view and from two, perhaps three, different points in time.”18 Ellen’s remark, “Yes, I remember. But I’m never sure that what I remember is of today or of yesterday or of a long time ago”19, reflects the underlying theme of the play. All the three characters exhibit a curious relation with their respective pasts. They are stuck in it and abandon all attempts to break free from it, but their only relation to it is through their tenuous memories. While they seek to establish some kind of relationship with the past, their very attempts are frustrated because of the precarious nature of memory. Old Times involves three characters, Deeley, his wife Kate, and Kate’s friend Anna. The play opens with a dramatic device which shows all the three characters on the stage which is shrouded in dim light creating the impression of vague unreality. As the stage gradually brightens, Deeley and his wife Kate appear in the foreground talking about Anna who lurks rather mysteriously in the background. From the conversation between Deeley and Kate, it appears that Anna had been Kate’s room-mate and friend. Kate’s reminiscences about Anna and her relationship with her illustrate the idea of the past as it is constructed in the present. In the course of these reminiscences the precarious nature of memory and the elusive character of identity are constantly foregrounded as one description is soon followed by another which contradicts it. The progress of the narrative is disrupted by a sudden flashback in time as Anna comes to the foreground and joins the conversation. This technique allows showing the simultaneous presence of the past and present on the stage. Anna aptly comments on the process of recollecting the past: “there are things I remember which may never have happened but

18

Martin Esslin. The Peopled Wound: The Plays of Harold Pinter. London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1979, p. 182. 19 Harold Pinter. Landscape and Silence. London : Metheun, 1969, p. 45.

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as I recall them so they take place.”20 She continues to dominate the stage in spite of Kate’s occasional remarks that are aimed at presenting her version of what had happened in the past. Anna’s narrative of Kate’s past, which is self-confessedly a construction rather than a recollection, has a manipulative effect on Deeley who now confronts Kate with an equally constructed story of his acquaintance with Anna: Deeley: We’ve met before, you know, Anna and I. We had a scene together. She freaked out. She didn’t have any bread, so I bought her a drink. (68)

Deeley’s tale ends rather ambiguously suggesting the mingling of Kate and Anna’s identities: Deeley: … she thought she was you, said little … .May be she was you. May be it was you, having coffee with me saying little … . (69)

Deeley’s remark indicates the fluidity of the subjective perception as the certainty underlying the visual perception withers away. Old Times, by its unique use of the interpenetration of the old memories with the static present on the stage, offers a critique of the assumptions underlying the notion of a stable subjectivity. The play exploits the notion of time as it is perceived by the subjects who are situated within it. Traditionally, narrative has been intimately related to the linear flow of time, demonstrating the exercise of constructing meaning by means of a process that imposes categories of origin and resolution on an amorphous phenomenon. The memory plays in general, and Old Times in particular, demystify the supposed naturalness of this process by problematizing the relation of time with narrative. The flow of time expected to unravel the plot in the direction of resolution is obstructed to challenge the teleological underpinnings of linearity. Stephen Watt offers an insightful observation when he describes No Man’s Land in terms of “the primarily horizontal quality of its narrative as opposed to what may be termed the vertical, or latent, structure of plays like The Homecoming.”21 As against The Homecoming which, according to him, has a deep structure and in which historical truths are more or less validated, No Man’s Land is characterized by indeterminacy and antinarrative. We must, however, see how the play exploits concerns such 20

Harold Pinter. Old Times. London: Metheun, 1971, p. 32. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the parenthesis. 21 Stephen Watt. Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975, p. 93.

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as negotiating relationships while remaining within the overall design of a memory play. For this purpose it draws on the dialogic potential as well as the individual memories of the characters. The play explores a static condition focusing on two male characters, Hirst and Spooner, who narrate tales to each other. The apocryphal nature of these tales becomes evident instantly. The two 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.22

Spooner professes to have cut himself from the past for the present. “I am interested in where I am eternally present and active.” 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? … I looked upon once into my mother’s face. What I saw there was nothing less than pure malevolence I was fortunate to escape with my life. (26)

As against Spooner, Hirst recognizes that the past remains with him and he cannot escape it. It is, however, interesting to see how he moves from a conviction of knowing it very well to questioning its very existence: Hirst: My true friends look out at me from my album. I had my world. I have it. Don’t think now it’s gone I’ll choose to sneer at it, to cast doubt on it, to wonder if it properly existed. No. We’re talking of my youth, which can never leave me. No. It existed. It was solid, the people in it were solid, while … transformed by light, while being sensitive … to all the changing light. (45)

22

Harold Pinter. No Man’s Land. London: Metheun, 1975, p. 20. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the parenthesis.

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From this firm conviction about the past as “solid” to questioning its existence is indicative of the problem that Pinter’s characters find themselves beset with: Hirst: It’s gone. Did it exist? It’s gone. It never existed … what it…Bright men, through leaves … was. It was blending. I remember it. I’ve forgotten … The sounds stopped … There’s a gap in me. I can’t fill it. There’s a flood running through me … They’re blotting me out … I’m suffocating. It’s a muff. A muff, perfumed. Someone is doing me to death … She looked up … I remember nothing. I’m sitting in this room. (46)

The decentered subject suddenly becomes aware of the absence in him. His memory, the only source of connection with his past, is foundering and so is the notion of the stable identity premised upon it. Hirst’s perception of the past through a doubtful memory is reverberated in his equally shaky account of his dreams: I was dreaming of a waterfall. No, no, of a lake. Something is depressing me. What is it? It was the dream, yes. Waterfalls. No, no, a lake water. Drowning. Not me. Someone else. (43)

He continues: What was it? Shadows. Brightness, through leaves. Gamboling. In the bushes. Young lovers. A fall of water. It was my dream. The lake, who was drowning in my lake? (44)

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 a stasis. Spooner declares this condition to Hirst: You are in no man’s land which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent (95).

Moonlight (1993) and Ashes to Ashes (1996), although chronologically belonging to the later period, share with the memory plays the basic structural pattern as well as the thematic concerns like the fallibility of memory, dramatization of absence and untraceable past. By means of theatrical innovations, Moonlight presents a situation where the very question of representation becomes central to it. The stage is divided into three parts. Andy, a bed-ridden, dying man in his fifties, and his wife, Bel, who sits beside his bed, occupy one portion of the stage. The second

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portion is occupied by Jake and Fred, the two sons of Andy and Bel, who never cross over to see their dying father and the third portion is occupied by Bridget, the daughter of Andy and Bel, who is arrested in the past at age sixteen, and being alone on the stage, addresses the audience from her hazy memory. This theatrical device of dividing the stage into portions, two of which belong to the present while the third seems arrested in the past, creates a distancing affect that cuts at the roots of theatrical illusionism. Furthermore, the identity of Bridget remains in balance between life and death as she seems to be speaking from a death-like past, with her ethereal self residing in half-light. Bridget is cast in a shadow both through stage lighting and through her cryptic monologues. Although throughout the play she is represented as sixteen years old, in one scene, by means of a flashback, she is shown to be twelve years old. Bridget herself says, “I am hidden … .hidden but free. No one in the world can find me.”23 It may be assumed that Bridget is dead and speaking virtually from across the borderline, but Andy’s remarks to Bel that he should “tell Bridget not to be frightened” calls this assumption into question. Bridget herself remarks in a monologue that her: “task is to see that my parents sleep in peace and wake up rested … Because I know that when they look at me they see that I am all they have left of their life” (1). Fred and Jake remain entirely oblivious of their dying father. Andy’s question to Bel about their whereabouts further complicates the search for the conventional solutions: Andy: Where are the boys? Have you found them yet? Bell: I’m trying. Andy: You’ve been trying for weeks. And failing. It’s enough to make the cat laugh. (2)

Fred and Jake talk of their father in the past tense, as a modest man who “adhered strictly to the rule of law” (12). He is even remembered by means of contradictory labels as, “mountebank-a child-a shyster-a fool-or a villain” (17). Maria, Bel’s friend, enters to address Fred and Jake and delivers a long monologue. What stands out prominently from this speech is that although the stage directions suggest that she is speaking directly to the two brothers, she receives no response from them. Her reminiscences about the 23

Harold Pinter. Moonlight. London: Faber and Faber, 1993, p. 22. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the parenthesis.

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past revolve around her relationships with Bel, Andy and her husband Ralph. Her admiration for both Andy and Ralph suggests that she had affairs with both of them. Fred and Jake show no signs that they’re aware of her presence, ignoring her as they are ignoring Andy’s dying. The same kind of response is invited by Ralph when he enters and addresses them without invoking any reaction or interruption. This dramatic device raises serious questions on the reality status of Maria and Ralph. This is further hinted by their sudden and joint appearance before Andy and Bel. Although this time their presence does invoke response from the couple, Andy’s account that he, “bumped into Maria the other day, that day before I was stricken”, contradicts what Maria says; “It’s been ages. We don’t live up here anymore, of course” (18). Andy, for his part, denies having any past in a blatantly self-contradictory way: “I was a civil servant, I had no past. I remember no past. Nothing ever happened to me” (70). He concludes by asserting that “the past is a mist” (71). It could be contended that Maria and Ralph are conjured up by Andy as the stage directions are very vague about when they enter and where they are standing. The dying man is standing at the horizon of death and has the awful spectacle of an infinite nothingness staring at him. He tries to grapple with the idea of death by affirming some kind of meaning to the event of crossing the borders: Personally I don’t believe it’s going to be pitch black forever because if it’s pitch black forever what would have been the point of going through all these enervating charades in the first place. (46)

At the end of the play, Bridget, in her last interlude, provides a commentary in poetic terms on the transition from life to death. She describes a house: bathed in moonlight. The house, the glade, the lane, were all bathed in moonlight. But the inside of the house was dark and all the windows were dark … I stood there in the moonlight and waited for moon to go down. (71)

Moonlight underlines Pinter’s concerns of problematizing the audiences’ assumptions about meaning, closure, certainty and stable reference. The play has no fixed point, no linear narrative and no resolution. By disrupting the spatial and temporal logic of realism, it signals a clear departure from its conventions. The play provides no answers to questions like who are Fred and Jake? Why do they not come to their father’s deathbed? Why is Bridget on an uncertain territory between life and death, only in the past, and at age sixteen? But more

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importantly, by focusing on the dying Andy and probably already dead Bridget, the play highlights the problem of death as a narrative closure to human existence itself. There is a wish entertained by humans in general to see death as a natural culmination, a rounding-off and a closure to life. This wish itself rises from the desire for finding meaning to the phenomenon of existence. But death, despite this desire, holds neither fulfillment nor any kind of closure. Death does not, to use the dramatic jargon, resolve the plot of life. It leaves it open-ended. To be assured of some meaning, the dying Andy tries to invoke his past but is confronted with mere traces of memory, making him say “I have no past”, and “past is a mist”. Death is a point where even these traces are blotted out, it is the final absence, the final silence and the obliteration of the human subject. Like Moonlight, Ashes to Ashes deals with the psychological anguish brought about by an unidentifiable past. The dialogue between Rebecca and Devlin centers on the past of Rebecca which hints at a deep impact of some psychological trauma. The very situatedness of Rebecca against an ominous but hazy and ambiguous backdrop allows the play to bring together personal and collective aspects of a historical catastrophe. Rebecca tries to negotiate with a past whose traces continue to shape her although she does not recollect it clearly or even an identifiable manner. The play treats the issues of memory, existential horror, brutality and ultimate breakdown of unifying bonds such as love, worked out together into a dramatic construction. Rebecca begins her account of the past by telling Devlin about her former lover’s threatening advances that combined physical dominance with erotic desire. Rebecca’s narrative is too vague and obscure to warrant any finality. What she recalls, however, is that her lover, “Did work for a travel agency. He used to go to the local railway station and walk down the platform and tear all the babies from the arms of their screaming mothers.”24 The allusion to the railway station and tearing babies from their mothers’ arms is suggestive of the holocaust memories. It seems Rebecca could have been a victim of such atrocities. But when Devlin asks her: I inferred from this that you were talking about some kind of atrocity. Now let me ask you this. What authority do you think you yourself possess which would give you the right to discuss such an atrocity. (41)

24

Harold Pinter. Ashes to Ashes. London: Faber and Faber, 1996, p. 27. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the parenthesis.

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She coldly replies, “I have no such authority. Nothing has ever happened to me” (41). There follows an account of how she protected her baby when “they were taking babies away”, hiding her baby in her shawl. This account is contradicted by the statement that at another train station when she met a woman who asked “what happened to your baby?” she replied, “I don’t know of any baby” (81). For Rebecca, all that is left is a hazy remembrance of a haunting yet elusive past. As Keith Peacock has summed up: Rebecca’s reminiscence conveys a sense of desolation and, although she occupies the same physical space as Devlin and occasionally communicates with him, she appears to be isolated in her own guilt and grief. Her reference to the stolen child may mean that … she is plagued by barrenness. With Devlin unable to comprehend what she is saying, she is left only with the echo of her own voice.25

Rebecca’s resonant voice that echoes with a kind of monologic strain is suggestive of the characteristic features of the memory plays of Pinter. These plays illustrate a severance with the present for an ominous recollection of the past. The surface dialogue in whatever little degree it is dramatized, offers to be a strategy to delve into the past. The past, however, is available only in a fragmented and contradictory narrative form and has to be constructed from its traces. The very fluidity of this construction is suggested by the dream-like character of memories. The third phase of Pinter’s dramatic career, beginning from the late 1970s is characterized by a turn towards depicting situations emerging from political oppression and power abuse. These “overtly” political plays make a strong statement against the violation of human rights and dignity. To this category belong One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), Party Time (1991) and The New World Order (1993). It is obvious that Pinter is expressing his deep concern as well as a sense of horror over the mechanisms employed to subject human beings to persecution and torture. The plays offer themselves as potent vehicles for Pinter’s position on these matters and understandably lose a lot of ambiguity central to the earlier plays. This might seem to suggest that Pinter has moved away from what we have described as his persisting postmodern concerns in his plays, as these plays are neither concerned with epistemological skepticism nor 25 Keith Peacock. Harold Pinter and the New British Theatre. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997, p. 154.

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do they depict characters with unreliable memories and fragmented perceptions. Moreover, these plays, unlike the plays belonging to the earlier phases, do not contest the assumptions of realism in drama. In fact, both plot and characters serve as mere tools for exploring the theme of the abuse of power. Postmodernism, as discussed earlier, takes the issue of power as one of its primary objects of attention. However, instead of the traditional view, according to which power works in institutions and systems alone, postmodernism, drawing from Foucault, holds power to be ubiquitous and operating in all human discourses. In Umberto Eco’s words, postmodernism is, “the orientation of anyone who has learned the lesson of Foucault, i.e. that power is not something unitary that exists outside us.”26 Apparently, Pinter seems to have reverted to the traditional notion that power operates in and through institutional structures as his focus is on the ways the politically subjugated become the victims of power abuse. Furthermore, as against the Foucauldian concept, Pinter views power as a thoroughly negative thing wielded by the dominant to oppress the subservient. The view that in these political plays Pinter has moved beyond the concerns of postmodernism is put forth by Mireia Aragay. While acknowledging that “they do not dismiss the postmodernist encompassing of the whole range of ‘micropolitical’ power relations existing across the social network,”27 she nevertheless argues that these plays represent “a full-blown rejection of the postmodernist understanding of language, subjectivity and history.”28 The relevance of postmodernism for these plays, however, becomes evident on noting that Pinter’s focus is neither on the depiction of torture and other forms of oppression, nor on enlisting the audiences/readers’ sympathies for the oppressed, but on exposing how the dominant political groups always appeal to the notions such as morality, religion, consensus and democracy to legitimize themselves. A dramatic exposition of the selfjustifying and self-legitimating character of the totalizing narratives corresponds remarkably with Lyotard’s analysis that all grand narratives have traditionally thrived on the principle of exclusion, leaving out or 26

Quoted in Linda Hutcheon. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989, p. 3. 27 Mireia Aragay. “Pinter, politics and postmodernism (2)” in Peter Raby (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 252. 28 Mireia Aragay. “Pinter, politics and postmodernism (2)” in Peter Raby (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 252.

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suppressing the notions of difference, plurality and provisionality. Quigley endorses this view by explaining what precisely Pinter aimed at these plays: To try to persuade a theatre audience that it should in general be against physical torture, murder and rape seems somewhat gratuitous in spite of the prevalence of all three in the modern world. What interests Pinter, however, is exploring the modes of presupposition and self-justification that enable such things to be done in the name of or on behalf of citizens and governments who might publicly and even sincerely condemn them. What is dramatized is not the physical torture, murder and rape so frequently referred to in critical discussion, but the processes of selfjustification they promote and the differing consequences for the oppressors and the oppressed of their limited persuasiveness.29

Appealing to Lyotard’s disagreement with Habermas’s idea that the Enlightenment pursuit of social and political consensus is the goal of a democratic society, Quigley remarks: For Lyotard the great danger of the pursuit of consensus is that if too many people agree on too many things, disagreement becomes a sign of social abnormality, dissent becomes unpatriotic and difference becomes intolerable – precisely the scenario implied by Nicolas’s attempt to invoke social consensus in One for the Road.30

In One for the Road, Nicholas seeks justification for Victor’s torture by appealing to the notion of consensus: I have never been more moved, in the whole of my life, as when … the man who runs this country announced to the country: We are all patriots, we are as one, we all share a common heritage … (Pause) I feel a link, you see, a bond. I share a common wealth of interest. I am not alone … I am not alone.31

Victor’s dissent from the majority’s views earns him imprisonment and torture, while as Nicholas invokes all notions available to him to justify his act, “I run the place. God speaks through me” (36). A similar kind of spectacle is witnessed in The New World Order where it is democracy that 29

Austin Quigley. “Pinter, politics and postmodernism (1)” in Peter Raby (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 10. 30 ibid, p. 14. 31 Harold Pinter. One for the Road. London: Metheun, 1984, p. 13.

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is invoked to snuff out dissent. Lionel and Des, the two men torturing a blind-folded political dissent exchange their views: Lionel: I feel so pure. Des: Well, you’re right. You’ve a right to feel pure. You know why? Because you’re keeping the world clean for democracy.32

In Party Time, Pinter again underlines how self-justification and selflegitimization provide those in power a reassurance of their propriety. The spokesperson at the party is Dame Melissa, a woman of seventy, who extols the virtues of Terry’s club. She proclaims the superiority of the club to the tennis and swimming clubs of the past which had no moral grounds. As against other clubs, Terry’s maintains a firm faith in morality for it is “inspired and activated by a moral sense, a moral awareness, asset of moral values, which is, I have to say, unshakeable, rigorous, fundamental, constant.”33 Dame Melissa’s invocation of morality, a grand narrative which merely serves the interest of power, is a striking example of how legitimizing discourses are always appealed to by the dominant groups. Douglas, one of the power-brokers of war machinery, declares: We want peace and we’re going to get it. But we want that peace to be Cast iron. No leaks. No draughts. Cast iron. Tight as a drum. That’s the kind of peace we want and that’s the kind of peace we’re going to get. A cast iron peace.34

The kind of peace Douglas talks of here is achievable only when no form of dissent is tolerated. The exclusionary enterprise, the play suggests, is inextricably bound up with the exercise of power. In Mountain Language, Pinter dramatizes the theme of repression in terms of a totalitarian sanction against the use of a language. The language of the capital which is officially sanctioned is forced upon a people and they are forbidden to use their own language. The play is set in a prison on the day when women from the mountains have been permitted to meet their imprisoned husbands and sons. They are, however, forewarned categorically against using their own language, not because the officers don’t understand it, but because it doesn’t deserve to exist. The officer announces:

32

Harold Pinter. The New World Order. New York: Grove Press, 1993, p. 9. Harold Pinter. Party Time. London: Faber and Faber, 1991, p. 40. 34 ibid, p. 15. 33

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Chapter Two Now hear this. You are mountain people. You hear me? Your language is dead. It is forbidden. It is not permitted to speak your mountain language in this place. You cannot speak your language to your men. It is not permitted. Do you understand…it is outlawed. You may only speak the language of the capital. That is the only language permitted in this place. You will be badly punished if you attempt to speak your mountain language in this place. This is a military decree. It is the law. Your language is forbidden. It is dead.35

The officer trying to sound rather sympathetic but actually betraying the sense of absolute control over the mountain people, tells his sergeant, “These women, Sergeant, have as yet committed no crime” (23). The Sergeant, however, invokes the authority of religion to suggest that “crime” and sin are not mutually exclusive: “Sir! But you’re not saying they’re without sin?”(23). The officer agrees with his Sergeant ascribing sin to a woman particularly: “This one’s full of it. She bounces with it” (23). The spokesmen of the capital language force the mountain people into marginality by “representing” their language as already dead. The play ends on an ironic note when the state decree reversing its earlier ruling allows the mountain people to speak their language, but only after the mother of a prisoner has lost her power of speech: Prisoner: Mother, you can speak. (pause) Mother, I’m speaking to you. You see? We can speak. You can speak to me in our own language. (she is still) … ..I am speaking to you in your own language … It’s our language … (she does not respond), Mother? … Mother? (she does not respond. She sits still. The prisoner’s trembling grows. He falls from the chair on to his knees, begins to gasp and shake violently). (45-6)

Mountain Language is a dramatization of the conflict between the center and the margin where the margin, perceived as a threat to the hegemony of the center, is suppressed. A prominent feature of the political plays is that they illustrate an absolute ascendancy of the dominant power groups which successfully liquidate the potential resistance of the subservient groups or individuals. Moreover, the plays show no signs that the subservient groups or individuals can effectively mobilize themselves into any kind of oppositional stance. Perceiving this, critics such as Silverstein argue 35

Harold Pinter. Mountain Language. New York: Grove Press, 1986, p. 21. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the parenthesis.

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that Pinter’s refusal to explore oppositional politics in these plays offers a statement on his work as a whole. He remarks: .

Pinter’s plays offer a dystopian vision of the invincibility of regnant forms of cultural and political power … Pinter offers a dramatized “theory” of cultural power that conceptualizes that power as unalterable, not susceptible to fundamental change.36

Silverstein, hence, views these political plays as a final confirmation of his thesis that Pinter demonstrates a monolithic unassailability of dominant ideologies. Notwithstanding the formidable character of Silverstein’s argument, it could be contended that in a certain sense the question whether or not Pinter’s final vision is dystopian, is beside the point. This is because rather than focusing on the possibility or otherwise of oppositional politics, Pinter’s overriding preoccupation is to show how ideological positions claiming the status of truth can provide legitimacy to the repressive apparatus.37 Pinter is, therefore, clearly demystifying these totalizing narratives and offering a dramatic illustration of the insights of Lyotard and Laclau, both of whom posit a postmodern idea of politics. Laclau’s argument that “postmodernity does not imply a change in the values of Enlightenment modernity rather a particular weakening of their absolutist character” is also echoed by Lyotard: “Justice as a value is neither outmoded nor suspect. We must thus arrive at idea and practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus.”38 Justice and other such values, postmodernism contends, are still important but have to be salvaged from the subversion of the totalizing narratives. Pinter’s concerns in these plays can finally be understood in the light of the following remarks of Simon Malpas:

36

Marc Silverstein. Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power. London: Associated University Press, 1993, p. 152. 37 Stephen Watt illustrates this idea well and identifies the rhetoric of purity and misogyny as the two main discourses Pinter exposes in his “political” plays. He observes: “Whatever the regime, whatever brand the totalitarian state, Pinter shows us that misogyny and fear of postmodern contingency will most likely reside together.” Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998, p. 121. 38 Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (trans). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 66.

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Chapter Two The grand narratives are still invoked in order to impose their injunctions upon us. Most recently, the world has been given a choice: with no sense of irony, George W Bush announced that, in the war on terrorism, ‘you’re either for us or against us’-accept everything that is done by us in your name or join the terrorists. For the postmodernist, this is s false opposition, a totalizing opposition that should be resisted.39

The above analysis amply demonstrates that Pinter’s whole dramatic career, covering a period of almost four decades, can be seen as a persisting concern with the themes central to the poetics of postmodernism. The plays belonging to all three phases offer certain significant thematic and structural illustrations of how postmodernism lies at the center of Pinter’s drama. Marking a significant departure from the mimetic tradition of the realist theatre on the one hand, but avoiding entirely self-reflexive plays on the other, Pinter offers instances of a doubly-coded drama inscribing the dramatic conventions but challenging them from within. By dramatizing the permeation of power in the linguistic and cultural codes, Pinter demonstrates the ideological construction of both objective knowledge and the human subject. At the same time, revealing these processes which attend the formation of human subject and other discursive practices suggests a strategy of demystifying their supposed neutrality. These ideas are worked out more rigorously in the plays belonging to the earlier and the later periods, although a strain runs through the memory plays of the middle period as well. The memory plays, however, primarily dramatize the idea of the decentered human subject by illustrating the fragile and ruptured nature of private memory. Structurally, these plays inscribe the devices of repetition, conflation, overlap, disconnected stimuli and simultaneity. Presenting characters in a static mode, however, does not amount to a negation of the past. Instead, it is the inescapability of the past that is suggested through the inability of characters to break free from its clutches. The problem, nevertheless, lies in their incapacity to negotiate meaningfully with a past that haunts them and yet remains unavailable except through attempts of overt construction.

39

Simon Malpas. The Postmodern. London: Routledge, 2005, p. 132.

CHAPTER THREE STOPPARD AND POSTMODERNISM: PARODY, HISTORY AND ETHICS Tom Stoppard is probably the most prominent contemporary British playwright who has persistently engaged with concepts central to the poetics of postmodernism. He has written in a characteristically postmodern mode, employing structural devices of self-reflexive theatre such as parody, play-within-the-play, and metafictional characters. His plays foreground the problems inherent in theatrical representations, covering a cluster of concepts like the nature of objective knowledge, the human subject and the status of linguistic reference. Stoppard’s theatre marks a radical departure from the realist conventions in drama. His remarks on what he saw as the fallacy of naturalism illustrate this point: I think that sort of truth-telling writing is as big a lie as the deliberate fantasies I construct. It’s based on the fallacy of naturalism. There’s a direct line of descent which leads you down to the dregs of bad theatre, bad thinking and bad feeling.1

Instead, Stoppard pursues a line of inquiry that disrupts the traditional notions of representation in theatre through an eclectic use of devices that foreground the idea of the unfixity of viewpoints and relativity of all positions. The relativity of perception and knowledge, the constructed nature of historical accounts and ethical positions, and the indeterminacy of language are, broadly speaking, his major thematic concerns. Many of Stoppard’s plays seem exclusively focused on the shifting and conflicting viewpoints that finally relativize one another and suggest the impossibility of a vantage epistemological perspective. Stoppard himself offered a valuable insight into how his plays need to be approached: You get into trouble with my plays if you think that there’s a static viewpoint on events. There is no observer. There is no safe point around 1

Quoted in Kenneth Tynan. Show People: Profiles in Entertainment. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979, p. 64.

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Chapter Three which everything takes its proper place, so that you see things flat and see how they react to each other.2

The idea is elucidated more comprehensively by Stoppard as follows: I must make clear that, insofar as it’s possible for me to look at my work objectively at all, the element which I find most valuable is the one that other people are put off by, that is, that there is very often no single, clear statement in my plays. What there is, is a series of conflicting statements made by conflicting characters, and they tend to play a sort of infinite leapfrog. You know, an argument, a refutation, then a rebuttal of the refutation, then a counter-rebuttal, so that there is never any point in this intellectual leap-frog at which I feel that is the speech to stop it on, that is the last word.3

Stoppard’s confession that there is a sort of infinite leap-frog in his plays may well be construed as a serious limitation precluding him to engage seriously with political issues. This seems to be the underlying premise of critics who are inclined to use the term pastiche instead of parody for Stoppard’s plays. From the perspective of the present work, however, it will be argued that it is parody rather than pastiche that best explains the ideological undercurrents in Stoppard’s plays. Parody, unlike pastiche’s critical neutrality, retains a critical edge on issues of representation, an idea amply demonstrated by Stoppard. Parody allows Stoppard to contextualize and historicize which in turn exemplifies a critical engagement with the themes of perception and the knowledge of the past. It thus allows the playwright to question the validity of the single point of view, to problematize the distinction between reality and illusion, and to raise questions about language as a neutral medium of communication. His complex manipulation of the dramatic, linguistic and visual contexts and perspectives challenges the separation of fact and fiction, foregrounding a fluid interplay between the realms of the real and the fictional. By doing so, he is able to conflate the dramatic and metadramatic domains, thereby deconstructing the mechanisms of dramatic representation as well as the audience’s perceptions about it. Stoppard’s use of parody, therefore, is not politically disengaged, one that signals the death of representation, but one that, in agreement with Hutcheon’s insights, suggests the ultimate ideological implications of all representations. 2

Quoted in Ronald Hayman. Tom Stoppard. London: Heinemann, 1977, p. 141. Tom Stoppard. “Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas”. Theatre Quarterly, 4 (May-July 1974), p. 6. 3

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Although quite a few plays of Stoppard are fraught with dialogues borrowed from the already existing dramatic texts, parody is a prominent feature of plays such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), Travesties (1974), and Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979). And even in the plays in which Stoppard has not resorted to an overt use of parody, he has worked out the dramatic structure in a manner that achieves the purpose of parody. This can be seen in the plays like The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and The Real Thing (1982) which employ selfreflexive devices such as the play-within-the play, to underscore certain significant parodic themes. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead offers a brilliant theatrical spectacle drawing on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Stoppard has taken two minor characters out of their peripheral role in Hamlet and placed them at the center of his own. He combines the plot and dialogue of Hamlet with the dramatic mode and characterization of Waiting for Godot to achieve remarkable success in producing a postmodern performance. This is achieved by exploiting the potential of parody as a theatrical device to work at a cluster of concepts such as reality, identity, memory, destiny and death. In the case of Ros and Guil, the parodic use of Hamlet also serves to deconstruct the structural and ideological assumptions of the parodied text by implicitly questioning the framework that situates the privileged Hamlet at the center and his two “insignificant” friends as mere nonentities. Hamlet, the play suggests, is based on an unquestioned hierarchical assumption that acquiesces in sending the two ordinary men to their deaths on a whimsical spur of a prince. This allows for the subversion of the hierarchical power structures on which Hamlet, and arguably most of the conventional tragedies, are based. The play foregrounds a radical indeterminacy that permeates it at all levels and brings out the essential qualities of the text that exploits the structural elements of a classic text. This radical indeterminacy forms an inseparable feature of both the objective and subjective realms of the play and ultimately hints at the inherent unfixity and constantly shifting perspectives from which these objective and subjective realms can be approached. Ros and Guil immediately strikes us as an example of metadramatic literature which flaunts its own status as a dramatic construction by consciously borrowing from Hamlet. In fact, it offers a fine example of the theatrical parody’s ability to create a metadramatic perspective which can in turn enable the audience/readers to question the assumptions that govern their perceptions both in real life and theatre. This metadramatic

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perspective created by the play serves to undercut the very basis of theatrical representation. It unfolds an intricate interplay between the inner and the outer play, thus problematizing the referential status of theatre itself. This interplay of the two texts serves as a powerful commentary on the reality/fiction interplay which is further illustrated by the players rehearsing the dumb show they are ordered by Hamlet to perform and their interaction with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In the context of interaction with the players, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to negotiate their uncertainty about being “real” people as against the players who are fictional because they “perform” for an audience. They make desperate attempts to make sense of their “roles” in the given framework which they fail to comprehend. Faced with uncertainty, they vainly search for clues and connections that would provide some meaning and a sense of direction to their existence. The player who is content with acting out the role given to him advises them: Player: Uncertainty is the normal state. You’re nobody special. Guil: But for God’s sake. What are we supposed to do? Player: Relax. Respond. That’s what people do. You can’t go through life questioning your situation at every turn. Guil: But we don’t know what’s going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don’t know how to act. Player: Act natural.4

The word “act”, by its very equivocal nature, aptly describes the dilemma of Ros and Guil. Action refers simultaneously to “acting” in a performance and the usual human activity, an absence of which amounts to a virtual non-existence. In their attempt to ground themselves in some kind of certitude about what constitutes reality for them, both Guil and Ros betray a dual character of spectator/player. Guil’s prayer, “give us this day our daily mask” and Ros’s complaint “I feel like a spectator – an appalling business,” betray such duality. In the dumb show taken from Hamlet and performed by the tragedians, Ros and Guil are mere spectators watching the performance: “Guil (to Ros): …keep back – we’re spectators” (70). It is here that the fictional and the metafictional levels converge and provide a metadramatic perspective. This perspective, however, does not resolve the problem of implication of all points of view within a visual field. Instead, by effacing the distinction between the actor of a performance and the acting person, it calls into question the supposed boundary between 4

Tom Stoppard. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. New York: Grove Press, 1981, p. 47. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the parenthesis.

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reality and fiction. Guil tries hard to maintain that a sharp distinction does exist between the realms of illusion created by dramatic performance and reality. He scoffs at the utter artificiality of the tragedian’s acting death. When the Player says, “In our experience, most things end in death,” (49) Guil is provoked to stab the Player with his own dagger to demonstrate how the real death is different from a feigned one. The Player falls to the ground pretending to have died, but stands up again to show how he tricked Ros and Guil by feigning death. As Ros and Guil watch the dumb show, they are drawn into the moment when their identities as spectators converge with the two spies performing in the show. Stoppard uses the device of having them wear identical coats. Ros tries to resist identification with “his” spy while at the same time projecting the recognition onto him, “For a moment I thought – no, I don’t know you, do I ? ” (81). When the dumb show ends with the two spies lying dead onstage, a theatrical device blurs the distinction between the spies and the spectators. With the change of light, Ros and Guil are seen lying in the approximate positions last held by the dead spies. Here, Ros and Guil become identified with their roles in Hamlet. Katherine Kelly has aptly remarked: In the dumb show art mirrors art, demonstrating the theatre’s potential to place the spectators at the boundary, nudging them out of their customary viewing of their own actions.5

With Ros and Guil’s stepping into the plot of Hamlet, they encounter themselves as “agents” who have been employed by Claudius to ferret out the secret of Hamlet’s madness. The point of convergence between the outer and the inner play foils the attempts of the two courtiers to resist being implicated in the action of which they assume themselves to be objective viewers. Their utter failure to situate themselves outside the Hamlet text is presented in the third act where the episode that is only reported in Shakespeare’s text is dramatized, namely, the journey of Hamlet, Ros and Guil to England. Where, however, the play significantly departs from Hamlet is the accidental discovery of Ros and Guil that the king has actually sent them with a letter instructing the king of England to put Hamlet to death immediately. The two leave the contents of the letter unchanged, not because of any ill will towards Hamlet but because they are overwhelmed by the sense of their impotence. When, again, they

5 Katherine Kelly. Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at Play. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991, p. 79.

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discover that Hamlet has replaced his name with their own, they helplessly resign to their fate: Guil (quietly): Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current … . Ros: They had it in for us, didn’t they? Right from the beginning. Who’d have thought that we were so important? Guil: But why? Was it all for this? Who are we that so much should converge on our little deaths. (122)

The dissolution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, dramatized by showing their final disappearance, underlines their failure to assert their identities in the face of the forces which have sealed their fate. The play can be seen as an example of metadramatic text that ends in the annihilation of the human subject placing “absence” and “void” at a point where the audience are accustomed to see the resolution of the dramatic plot. Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth, an amalgam of two plays, provide another example of Stoppard’s exploitation of Shakespearean drama to the postmodern effect. The plays raise questions about language and its referential status and also suggest the manner in which the established canon, which is embedded in structures of dominance and power, can be subverted. While Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead decentralized the implicit hierarchical division by placing the two marginal Shakespearean characters at its center, Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth achieve decentralization by replacing the very medium of the Shakespearean plays with a new language – Dogg. Dogg, sharing with English all linguistic features except the semantic, subverts the referentiality of English and thereby all power structures of the Shakespearean texts. Stoppard uses parenthesis to explain the exact meaning of Dogg words in English. The following passage, a conversation between the characters of the play, exemplifies this: Abel: (Looking in his sandwiches.) Pelican crash. [Cream cheese.] (To Baker.) Even ran? [What have you got?] Baker: (Looking in his sandwiches) Hollyhocks. [Ham]. Abel: (To Charlie.) Even ran? [What have you got?] Charlie: (Looking in his sandwiches.) Mouseholes [Egg]

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Abel: (To Charlie.) Undertake sum pelican crash frankly sun mouse hole? [Swoop you one cream cheese for one egg?] Charlie: (with an amiable shrug.) Slab. [Okay.]6

The outer play contains an inner play, a shortened performance of Hamlet. The dramatic device of making Dogg the language of the frame play containing an inner play in English is a highly effective way of decentering. It is, however, in Cahoot’s Macbeth that the full implications of employing Dogg are discernable. The play begins with Shakespeare’s Macbeth being performed by a group of amateur actors in a private apartment. In this play the two worlds of “reality” and “fiction” interpenetrate thoroughly, blurring the distinction between the performance and the outer play. The performance play continues up to the point when instead of the porter in Macbeth, the Inspector arrives on the scene charging the players of carrying out clandestine activities not approved by the State. The performance, only now understood to be the inner play, comes to a halt with the Inspector’s intrusion. Inverting the scheme of The Real Inspectors Hound, where Birdboot and Moon lose their identities as real characters by stepping into the inner play, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth and Banquo step out of the fictional world into the “real” world of the frame play. They keep assuming double roles, moving frequently in and out of the inner play. The language of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is repeatedly decontextualized and recontextualized as when Macduff enters: Macduff: O horror, horror, horror! Confusion now hath made his masterpiece! Inspector: What’s your problem, sunshine? Don’t tell me you’ve a found a corpse. (58)

And again, in the dialogue between the Inspector and Banquo turned Cahoot: Cahoot: ‘Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glaims, all. As the weird sisters promised … .’ Inspector: Kindly leave my wife’s family out of this. Cahoot: ‘ … and I fear Thou playedst most foully for’t … .’ Inspector: Foul … .Fair … which is which? That’s two witches: one more and we can do the show right here. Cahoot: ‘ … yes it was said. It should not stand in thy posterity…’ (61) 6

Tom Stoppard. Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth. London: Faber and Faber, 1980, p. 20. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the parenthesis.

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With Easy’s entry into the play, Dogg enters Cahoot’s Macbeth, first mingling with English curiously and ultimately displacing it completely. By the end of the play all the characters have switched to Dogg and stopped using English, thus illustrating the idea of linguistic decentering. While in Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth, there is an overt use of the Shakespearean texts to illustrate the ideological implications of centrality and marginality, in The Real Thing and The Real Inspector Hound, the focus is on offering an illustration of the interpenetration of the realms of the real and the theatrical, thereby challenging the traditional distinction between actor and spectator, fiction and reality. This is done by the use of the play-within-the-play device, first introduced in Ros and Guil. The Real Thing is held within a structural framework working on the principle of doubling and duplicating the scenes and characters of the inner play in the outer play. With this device the concept of mimesis which posits that art imitates life is contested by reversing the relation between the two. It is “reality” that is shown to be imitating “art” as the scenes depicting real life duplicate those depicting the fictional world of the inner play named House of Cards. The play begins with a false front as it is only later that the audience learns about its being actually a part of the inner play written by Henry. This scene which reveals Max’s discovery of his wife’s infidelity is followed by his discovery of the same in the frame play. In fact, this element of duplication of scenes recurs throughout the play. As Anthony Jenkins rightly remarks: These interconnecting pictures dictate the structure of the entire play, so that we continually challenge the reality of one such picture in relation to another. Scene 3 takes place in a living-room, whose layout is somewhat similar to the stage-set. Max first appeared in. Now Annie, his ‘real’ wife, comes through the door to be confronted with the evidence of her deception with Henry.7

Max, Charlotte and Annie appear in the dual capacity of “real” as well as “fictional” characters and comment as real people on their role as artists and as artists on their role as real people. This device contests the established process of theatrical perception and, by analogy, of all epistemological perception, an idea expressed by Henry in response to Annie: There is, I suppose, a world of objects which’ve a certain form, like this coffee mug. I turn it, and it has no handle. I tilt it, and it has no cavity. But 7

Anthony Jenkins. The Theatre of Tom Stoppard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 161.

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there is something real here which is always a mug with a handle, I suppose. But politics, justice, patriotism – they aren’t even like coffee mugs. There’s nothing real there separate from our perception of them. So if you try to stick labels on them, ‘farce’, ‘fraud’, ‘condemned’, and try to change them as though there were something there to change, you’ll get frustrated and frustration will finally make you violent.8

Hersh Zeifman aptly remarks on this feature of the play: The Real Thing keeps circling endlessly back on itself … Dizzy from this series of comic ambushes of our perceptions and preconceptions, we thus find ourselves at the end invariably questioning, among a host of other ‘realities’, the precise nature of love-as Stoppard, of course, intended. Love speaks in many different tongues, with many different accents. Which of them, finally is ‘the real thing?9

The play-within-the-play device becomes even more prominent in The Real Inspector Hound which uses an ingenious stage-setting consisting in a third locale, besides the two for the audience and the playing area for the actors. This third locale is occupied by rows of seats facing the audience. The stage thus falls between the real audience and the row of seats where the fictive one is seated. This fictive audience comprises Moon and Birdboot, the two drama critics watching the play being staged before them for review. Their dialogue forms the frame-play where they comment upon the events of the inner play which is a classical whodunit parodying Agatha Christie’s typical murder mysteries. The two plays remain identifiably separate up to the point when Birdboot walks onto the stage to answer a phone call and suddenly finds himself in the role of Simon Gascoyne, a character whose murder is “scripted” in the stage play. Much like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the critics lose their own identities and assume new ones dictated by the already written script. Moon unsuccessfully tries to lure back Birdboot before himself getting entrapped in the stage play: Birdboot: No, Cynthia-now that I have found youCynthia: You’re ruthless-so strong-so cruelMoon: Have you taken leave of your mind? Cynthia: Stop, can’t you see you’re making a fool of yourself! Moon: She’s right. Birdboot (to Moon): You keep out of this.10 8

Tom Stoppard. The Real Thing. London: Faber and Faber, 1982, p. 53. Hersh Zeifman. “Comedy of Ambush: Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing.” Modern Drama, Vol. 26, 1983, p. 149. 10 Tom Stoppard. The Real Inspector Hound. New York: Grove Press, 1975, p. 47. 9

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The assumed roles of Moon and Birdboot radically destabilize their real identities. But more significantly, this interpenetration of the two realms of fiction and reality offers a challenge to the assumptions underlying spectatorship as it results in a virtual erasure of the divide between the real and the fictional. It is in this context that Mary Doll has remarked: “Stoppard has put to death the whole notion of what it is to be a spectator, since would-be spectators are transformed into agents, making us all agents in what we observe.”11 Doll’s remarks are equally illuminating for understanding After Magritte (1970) and Artist Descending a Staircase (1972), both of which take Rene Magritte’s paintings as models to present dramatized versions of visual representation in art. Like Magritte, whose paintings are known for disrupting the habitual modes of perception and artistic representation, Stoppard, in these plays, illustrates the complexity attending the perceptual process. In After Magritte this is done by playing upon the relationship between context and perspective. The bizarre spectacle that the first scene presents turns out to be pretty ordinary and without mystery. The details which are revealed bit by bit reverse the Magritte tradition which suggests the ultimately mysterious nature of things represented. The main focus of the play is on the different versions of a single event that the members of the Harris family present, having seen a mysterious figure on the street. As Harris claims, the figure was a blind, one-legged, white-bearded gentleman wearing stripped pyjamas, carrying a turtle under one arm, and brandishing a white stick. He is sure of the correctness of his description because he believes that he “saw him with his own eyes,” but so have other members of the family whose description contradicts that of Harris. Each member assumes their own version to be exclusively true but betray their condition of being a victim of their limited perspective. The most common and familiar things are presented in a manner to suggest that what is generally taken as reality is actually an agglomerate of appearances. The play also disrupts the epistemological subject-object distinction in a farcical manner by showing how Inspector Foot discovers that the criminal “object” he is trying to track down is nobody but himself. Kelly remarks that the characters in the play “prove to be entrapped by their interpretive logic, by a single view of a situation that fails to account for themselves as the seers.”12 Along with the visual disruption goes an

11

Mary A Doll. “Stoppard’s Theatre of Unknowing” in James Acheson (ed). British and Irish Drama since 1960. London: Macmillan Press, 1993, p. 120. 12 Katherine Kelly. Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at Play. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991, p. 90.

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equally destabilizing linguistic indeterminacy. Language becomes as difficult to tackle as a visual sign that bears multiple interpretations: Harris: The most – the very most – I am prepared to concede is that he may have been a sort of street Arab making off with his lute … . Thelma: His loot? Harris (expansively): Or his mandolin- Who’s to say?13

When Mother requests Inspector Foot to allow her to practice the tuba, he misinterprets it: Mother: Is it all right for me to practice? Foot: No, it is not all right! Ministry standards may be lax but we draw the line at Home Surgery to bring in the little luxuries of life. Mother: I only practice on the tuba. Foot: Tuba, femur, fibula-it takes more than a penchant for rubber gloves to get a license nowadays.14

While as After Magritte exploits a visual scene to illustrate the problem of perspective, Artist Descending a Staircase exploits the medium of sound for the same purpose. Martello and Beauchamp, investigating the circumstances of Donner’s mysterious death, interpret a series of sounds recorded on a tape and end up constructing an erroneous account of the incident. The tape which is played repeatedly is interpreted by them as follows: Donner dozing: an irregular droning noise. Careful footsteps approach: the effect is stealthy. A board creaks. This wakes Donner, i.e. the droning stops in mid-beat. The footsteps freeze. Donner’s voice, unalarmed: ‘Ah! There you are … . Two more quick steps, and then Thump! Donner cries out. Wood cracks as he falls through a balustrade. He falls heavily down the stairs, with a final sickening thump when he hits the bottom silence.15

The sequence of sounds suggests that Donner was killed by an assailant, soon after he awoke from a snoring sleep, whom he knew and addressed with “Ah! There you are … .” The actual sequence of events, it 13

Tom Stoppard. After Magritte. New York: Grove Press, 1975, p. 26. ibid, p. 33. 15 Tom Stoppard. Artist Descending a Staircase. New York: Grove Press, 1977, p. 75. 14

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transpires, is quite different from that inferred from the sounds. What sounded as snoring was a buzzing fly tracking whom Donner had fallen through a balustrade and died below. “Ah! There you are …” was addressed to the fly and not to any assailant. The whole confusion is, therefore, created by the difficulty in fixing the referents of words, one which is also echoed in the conversation between Martello and Beauchamp. Hersh Zeifman has described this confusion that results from the semantic plurality of words by means of a parenthetical commentary on the dialogue: Martello: I will stand by you, Beauchamp. We have been together a long time. Beauchamp: You may rely on me, Martello. I shall not cast the first stone [i.e, speaking figuratively: I shall not condemn you]. Martello: You have cast it, Beauchamp [i.e., speaking literally: You have murdered Donner], but I do not prejudge you. Beauchamp: My feelings precisely, but there seems to be some confusion in your mindMartello: My very thought. Turn off your machine, it seems to be disturbing your concentration – (TAPE ‘Ah’- and is switched off.) Beauchamp: There you are [meaning: I have turned it off] Martello: On the contrary, Beauchamp, there you are [meaning: that ‘Ah’ on the tape was Donner’s response to your arrival].16

Commenting upon the deeply problematic nature of the attempt to construct meaning from the medium of sound, Beauchamp remarks: Layer upon layer of what passes for silence, trapped from an empty roomno, trawled- no, like-no matter … there unheard sounds which are our silence stand as a metaphor a correspondence between the limits of hearing and the limits of all knowledge.17

Both After Magritte and Artist Descending a Staircase provide an illustration of Stoppard’s concern with the problems attending perception and knowledge. N C Schmitt’s comment in this regard is very apt: Stoppard’s larger structure of parallels and inversions calls attention to the problem of knowledge. A painting identified as that of a black railing in front of white snow might have been that of a white fence with the night 16

Hersh Zeifman. “Tomfoolery: Stoppard’s Theatrical Puns”. Yearbook of English Studies Vol. ix, 1991, p. 212. 17 Tom Stoppard. Artist Descending a Staircase. New York: Grove Press, 1977, p. 53.

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sky behind it, what is deemed as murder is likely to have been an accident, a sound identified as snoring is likely to have been a fly droning.18

History has remained an obsession with Stoppard. This is borne out by the fact that quite a few of his plays such as Travesties (1974), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997) and The Coast of Utopia (2002) are situated in the past and feature historical figures and events. Here too, Stoppard evinces a strong tendency to treat historical material in a manner that highlights the textual nature of history. These plays can be seen as providing a dramatic parallel to the ideas of the postmodern theorists of history like Foucault and Hayden White. They offer a striking parallel, in the dramatic mode, to Linda Hutcheon’s conceptualization of “historiographic metafiction” as a mode of writing that problematizes the referential status of history. One of the most prominent characteristics that these plays share with “historiographic metafiction” is that they freely mix historical and fictional elements, often situating historical figures in purely imaginative situations. This device calls attention to the inherent fictionality of history as a narrative. They also share with “historiographic metafiction” the idea of the human subject as a point of intersection of multiple and conflicting discourses and its ultimate situatedness within the epistemological field, thereby undermining the notion of a vantage perspective on history and the past. Travesties uses multiple devices like parody, false front, disrupted linearity and unreliable memory to explore some serious questions about art, history and political activism. The play brings together three men of historical significance, Lenin, Joyce, and Tzara, the founder of the Dadaist movement, together in a fictionalized meeting where each defends his position on art and its role in the society. It begins in the Zurich library with the three aforementioned characters and Gwendolen taken directly from Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. We soon discover, however, that everything unfolding on the stage is through the memory of Henry Carr and the first scene has been recapitulated by a now old Carr and is not an event taking place in the present. Carr, the narrator of the play, is himself split into the younger and older selves and the play moves back and forth in time as the younger Carr reminisces about the past events. Like the narrators of “historiographic metafiction”, Carr is both prejudiced and self-deluded and, possessed of a faulty memory, incapable of giving an objective account of events as they occurred during the First 18

Natalie Crohn Schmitt. “Window / Picture: L’assassin Menace and Artist Descending a Stair-case.” Twentieth Century Literature. 1999, Vol. 45, Issue 3, p. 385.

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World War. His recollection of these events is mingled with minor details about his personal life. Talking about the past he says: You forget that I was there, in the mind and blood of a foreign field, unmatched by anything in the whole history of human carnage. Ruined several pairs of trousers. Nobody who has not been in the trenches can have the faintest conception of the horror of it … . And so it went on … the sixteen ounce serge, the heavy worsteds, the silken flannel mixture … .until I was invalided out with a bullet through the calf of an irreplaceable lambs-wool dyed khaki in the yarn to my own specification.19

In a stage direction, Stoppard explains at the outset of the play that “the story (like a toy train perhaps) occasionally jumps the rails and has to be restarted at the point where it goes wild” (37). These occasional derailments are called time slips in the stage directions. Carr himself admits to his unreliable memory saying, “I digress. No apologies required, constant digression being the saving grace of senile reminiscence” (22). He frequently forgets some important details about the past events and persons as when recollecting Lenin’s role: In fact, I might have stopped the whole Bolshevik thing in its tracks, but – here’s the point. I was uncertain … .And don’t forget, he wasn’t Lenin then! I mean who was he? as it were. (81)

By making a demented Carr the epistemological center of the play, Stoppard problematizes the very assumptions of representation in the theatre. As a typical postmodern performance that challenges the notion of objective representation, Travesties uses decentering and disruption as a device situated in the narrator himself. Carr’s memory slips and contradicting recollections undercut his confidence in the absolutist position he takes about matters regarding art and revolution: Carr: I learned there things in Zurich. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary … . I forget the third thing. (99)

Travesties exploits the framework of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest to build the spectacle of parodic theatre by borrowing some witty 19

Tom Stoppard. Travesties. New York: Grove Press, 1975, p. 20. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the parenthesis.

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and exuberant dialogue as well as a few characters like Cecily, Gwendolen and Bennet from it. Here parody goes beyond Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to directly contest the notion of the ontological separation of theatre and non-theatrical discourses like history and politics. There is an unmistakable suggestion that history and various political philosophies based on it partake of certain theatrical and fictional elements such as point of view, material context, subjective preferences and the eventual textuality. History and all “emancipatory” political projects, it suggests, are permeated by a condition of constructedness. Joyce, Lenin, Tzara and the narrator Carr engage in arguments defending their respective viewpoints and attacking their rivals. Carr is a conventional absolutist who believes in patriotism and old values. He also believes in a logical causality and thinks that an artist’s duty is to “beautify existence”. Tzara, on the other hand, as a true Dadaist rejects all values and believes in an inherent absurdity of everything. He thinks that the duty of the artist is to expose the absurdity of causes and “jeer and bowl and belch at the delusion that infinite generations of real effects can be inferred from the gross expression of apparent cause”(37). Lenin, as a Marxist, rejects all views on the artist’s duty for an unrelenting stance that art and artist are tolerable only if they serve the cause of the materialist revolution. As against this, Joyce upholds “art for art’s sake” position. All these conflicting opinions remain unresolved as Stoppard privileges no one position over the other. Instead, he creates a witty collage of these conflicting opinions on art in a farcical manner, interplaying them with elements from Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, from chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses, and from Lenin’s writings. The title of the play is suggestive of how the styles of the work of each of the principal characters as well as their views including Joyce’s modernism, Lenin’s Marxist polemics and Tzara’s Dadaist opinions are travestied. This clever pastiche of borrowing from well-known modernist works foregrounds the indeterminacy which is a necessary condition of all narratives that can never escape the condition of their textuality. Stoppard’s theatrical ingenuity finds another expression in The Invention of Love which shares with Travesties the dramatic device of unfolding in the form of the reminiscence of a character. But whereas Travesties is held within the memory of a single character that alternates between his younger and the older self, Housman in The Invention of Love is literally divided into two selves, each role played by a different actor. The whole play unfolds as a dream of the dying A E Housman, the British poet and scholar. As Stoppard himself said about the play; “It’s not biographical. Things happen that never happened. The whole thing never

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happened – it all goes in Houseman’s head”20. The play foregrounds the idea of the divided self in the very first scene when Charon, the ferryman of Styx, is bewildered by the dead Housman: Charon: A poet and a scholar is what I was told. AEH: I think that must be me. Charon: Both of them? AEH: I’m afraid so Charon: It sounded like two different people. AEH: I know.21

Linearity is disrupted when the past and present collapse into each other in a future where divisions of time dissolve into nothingness. The spatial framework of the underworld allows the meeting of the older Housman with his younger self. A sense of the surreal informs the entire play as real Victorian poets and scholars are situated in a Greek mythological world. The plot negates any causal or linear progression as the past and the present mingle with each other and one is refracted through the other. At the heart of the play lies the idea of reconstructing lives not as coherent wholes but fragmented textualized events produced by selective and unreliable memories and manuscripts which have passed down to the present in conditions which leave open the question of their authenticity and which can yield divergent meanings. In a long speech Jowett dilates on the problems inherent in retrieving the past from ancient written texts: Housman: But isn’t it of use to establish what the ancient authors really wrote? Jowett: It would be on the whole desirable rather than undesirable and the job was pretty well done, where it could be done, by good scholars dead these hundred years and more. For the rest, certainty could only come from recovering the autograph. This morning I had cause to have typewritten an autograph letter I wrote to the father of a certain undergraduate. The copy as I received it asserted that the Master of Balliol had a solemn duty to stamp out unnatural mice. In other words, anyone with a secretary knows that what Catullus really wrote was already corrupt by the time it was copied twice, which was about the time of the first Roman invasion of Britain: and the earliest copy that has come down to us was written about 1,500 years after that. Think of all those secretaries! - corruption breeding corruption from papyrus to papyrus, and from the last disintegrating scrolls 20

Quoted in John Fleming Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order among Chaos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001, p. 227. 21 Tom Stoppard. The Invention of Love. London: Faber and Faber, 1997, p. 2.

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to the first new-fangled parchment books, with a thousand years of copying-out still to come, running the gauntlet of changing forms of script and spelling, and absence of punctuation - not to mention mildew and rats and fire and flood and Christian disapproval to the brink of extinction as what Catullus really wrote passed from scribe to scribe, this one drunk, that one sleepy, another without scruple, and of those sober, wide-awake and scrupulous, some ignorant of Latin and some, even worse, fancying themselves better Latinists than Catullus - until! - finally and at long last mangled and tattered like a dog that has fought its way home, there falls across the threshold of the Italian Renaissance the sole surviving witness to thirty generations of carelessness and stupidity: the Verona Codex of Catullus; which was almost immediately lost again, but not before being copied with one last opportunity for error. And there you have the foundation of the poems of Catullus as they went to the printer for the first time, in Venice 400 years ago. (24-5)

But, ironically, Jowett himself conveniently forgets how he creates a version of Classical history from a prejudiced moral bias of the Victorian sensibility. Historical/biographical facts are shown to be of little value without imaginative/artistic interventions. Wilde puts the idea as: Wilde: On the contrary, it’s only fact. Truth is quite another thing and is the work of the imagination. (93)

He goes on to explain this idea by describing how he invented his own love, much like all our actions of investing objects with meanings suitable to us. Wilde: The betrayal of oneself is lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. … but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had wrought, rapture and pain together, the ice that burns who clasps it. (95)

Earlier in the play, as AEH confronts his younger self, the past is reconstructed through a conversation. Although this device disrupts the linearity within which real events are held, this escape into Hades doesn’t mean an escape from the clutches of time, since the past nevertheless confronts AEH in the form of his younger self. Their conversation, centering on the issues such as classical education, the value of textual

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criticism and the power of poetry, reinscribes their implication in time. This reinscription of the ineluctable past becomes more forceful as more and more real characters including journalists like Labouchere, Harris and Stead, and critics and artists like Pater and Wilde come to create the world around the play. Here, the burning issues of the Victorian times, especially of art and morality occupy the interests of the characters showing that Oxford had become a battlefield for competing views. Although Housman finds himself amidst John Ruskin’s obsession with the Gothic, Walter Pater’s appreciation of the Renaissance and Benjamin Jowett’s advancement of the classical education, he is nevertheless drawn to the irresistible Moses Jackson, a young science graduate whom he loves “with a love that dare not speak its name.” Having repressed his passion in the real life, Housman spells out to Jackson: Housman: … Virtue! what happened to it? It had good run-centuries! - it was still virtue in Socrates to admire a beautiful youth, virtue to be beautiful and admired, it was still there, grubbier and a shadow of itself but still there, for my Roman poets who competed for women and boys as the fancy took them; virtue in Horace to shed tears of love over Ligurinus on the athletic field. Well, not any more, eh, Mo? Virtue is what women have to lose, the rest is vice. Pollard thinks I’m sweet on you, too, though he hardly knows he thinks it. Will you mind if I go to live somewhere but close by? Jackson: Why? Oh … Housman: We’ll still be friends, won’t we? Jackson: Oh! Housman: Did you not really know, even for a minute? Jackson: How could I know? You seem just, like … you know, normal. You’re not one of those aesthetic types or anything-(angrily) How could I know? (79-80)

Housman’s fading from the play at the end to be replaced by AEH allows the issue of homosexuality to be viewed from the perspective of the older man’s dispassionate self. As AEH and Oscar Wilde meet together to compare their life choices, we are faced with two different consequences of the same phenomenon. While the profane love led to Wilde’s breakdown and destitution, its repression in Housman led to his focusing entirely on poetry and scholarship. The past, including Wilde’s, revisited from the apparent vantage point of the present, remains within the framework of a dying man’s dream. The dramatic device does not, however, suggest a dreamy quality of all reality. Instead, it enables us to witness a subjective reconstruction of the past, blending “what was” with

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“what should have been”. This provides a commentary on the imaginative elements and fictional tools employed by biographical, auto-biographical and historical narratives. As AEH admits: AEH: You think there is an answer: the lost autograph copy of life’s meaning, which we might recover from the corruptions that have made it nonsense. But if there is no such copy, really and truly there is no answer. It’s all in the timing. (41)

The last speech, delivered by AEH before he too fades out, is addressed directly to the audience indicating the constructed nature of the dramatic performance: AEH: Oxford in the Golden Age! - the hairshirts versus the Aesthetes: the neo-Christians versus the neo-pagans: the study of classics for advancement in the fair of the world versus the study of classics for the advancement of classical studies - what emotional storms, and oh what a tiny teacup. You should have been here last night when I did Hades properly - Furies, Harpies, Gorgons, and the snake-haired Medusa, to say nothing of the Dog. But now I really do have to go. How lucky to find myself standing on this empty shore, with the indifferent waters at my feet. Fade out. (102)

The device of doubling a character, treated rather innovatively in The Invention of Love, finds a parallel in an earlier play Hapgood (1988), which exploits it to challenge the notion of a unified self even more radically. Hapgood can also be compared with Arcadia in its use of a recent scientific theory, quantum mechanics, to indicate the problems inherent in forcing the complex phenomenon of the human identity into a logical category. Lyotard, too, in The Postmodern Condition, elucidates the significance of quantum mechanics, the theory that Stoppard makes use of in Hapgood, for the postmodern condition which is characterized by the end of all grand narratives including those of science. He states: The modalization of the (quantum) scientist’s statement reflects the fact that the effective, singular statement (the token) that nature will produce is unpredictable. All that can be calculated is the probability that the statement will say one thing rather than another.22

22

Jean Francois Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (trans). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 57.

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For Lyotard, quantum mechanics and chaos theory are postmodern scientific theories par excellence, because they have replaced the Newtonian classical physics and with it the deterministic theories of the physical world. In Hapgood, the quantum theory serves as a theatrical metaphor for presenting a situation where a radical indeterminacy permeates all the levels of the play. This scientific analogy works to underline the inherent difficulties present in establishing the truth about the human identity and the external phenomenon. The epigraph to the play, chosen from a passage by the physicist Richard Feynman, amply demonstrates the point that the play is due to make: We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality it contains the only mystery…23

The play is based on the analogy between espionage and physics, and illustrates a duality operating in the world of humans parallel to an identical one operating in the physical world. By focusing on this duality, by virtue of which a thing or a person need not be either one or the other but can be both simultaneously, Hapgood deconstructs the categories of binarism. Kerner, who very often voices the postmodern ideas of duality and elusiveness of reality, replies to Blair: Blair: One likes to know what’s what. Kerner: Oh yes! Objective reality. Blair: I thought you chaps believed in that. Kerner: “You Chaps?” Oh Scientists. (Laughs) “You chaps!” Paul, objective reality is for Zoologists. “Ah, yes, definitely a giraffe.” But a double is not like a giraffe. A double agent is more like trick of light.24

Kerner suggests that all reality, including humans and other physical objects, exhibits a dual character, much similar to light that possesses the mutually exclusive properties of both wave and particle. He remarks: “Every time we don’t look we get wave pattern. Every time we look to see how we get wave pattern, we get particle pattern. The act of observing determines the reality” (12). And again:

23

Richard Feynman. The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Quantum Mechanics. Reading: Addison and Wesley, 1966, p. 1. 24 Tom Stoppard. Hapgood. London: Faber and Faber, 1988, p. 10. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the parenthesis.

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Somehow light is particle and wave. The experimenter makes the choice. You get what you interrogate for. And you want to know if I’m a wave or particle. I meet my Russian friend Georgi, and we exchange material. When the experiment is over, you have a result: I am a British Joe with a Russian source. But they also have a result: because I have given George enough information to keep him credible as a K G B control who is running me as a sleeper - which is what he thinks he is. (12)

The play presents three sets of twins, Hapgood and her pseudo twin Celia, Ridley and his twin brother, and the nameless Russian twins. In the realm of espionage this allows the secret agent to be present at two different places at the same time, hence frustrating all surveillance attempts. The play, however, exploits this situation to undermine all notions of stability and fixity. This instability and unfixity, visible in the realm of physics in the behavior of electrons, is demonstrated through a process of twining and doubling in the world of humans. As Kerner responds to Blair: You think everybody has no secret or one big secret, they are what they seem or the opposite. You look at me and think: Which is he? Plus or minus? If only you could figure it out like looking into me to find my root. And then you still wouldn’t know. We’re all doubles … The one who puts on the clothes in of the morning is the working majority, but at night – perhaps in the moment before unconsciousness – we meet our sleeper – the priest is visited by the doubter, the Marxist sees the civilizing force of the bourgeoisie, the captain of industry admits the justice of common ownership. (71-2)

The passage provides a commentary on the idea that the “ontological self” is an illusion and what is assumed to be a unified subjectivity is something that owes its existence to diverse and even conflicting roles that humans assume. Hapgood dramatizes this idea of an irreducible multiplicity lying at the center of the human self. It is science that provides a connecting link between Hapgood and Arcadia where Stoppard uses Chaos theory and the second law of thermodynamics to illustrate certain ideas such as the disruption of determinism and the textual nature of all epistemological accounts. The play brings together diverse concepts of science, biographical and geographical research to underline ideas like unfixity of perception, irregularity and intractable complexity of the world, and mankind’s inevitable march towards disintegration and doom. The play is alternately set in two different time frames which are kept separate in the beginning but merge with each other by the end. The present-day inhabitants of

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Sidley Park, Derbyshire are obsessed with investigating the events that occurred there in the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. Two scholars Bernard Nightingale and Hannah Jarvis, work to construct an account of the past history as well as the Derbyshire landscape. Bernard’s manner of deriving conclusions from the textual material he comes across suggests how history comes to be constructed by piecing different bits of information together and linking them on the basis of probability. Bernard’s research leads him to the conclusion that Byron had stayed at the Sidley Park, seduced the wife of Ezra Chater, a third-rate poet, and finally killed him in a duel. Arranging the textual bits like letters in what he supposes to be the most probable sequence, he creates a story about Byron: without question, Lord Byron, in the very season of his emergence as a literary figure, quit the country in a cloud of panic and mystery, and stayed abroad for two years at a time when continental travel was unusual and dangerous. If we seek his reason-do we need to look far?25

Bernard’s discoveries are however “proved” wrong by Hannah who shows to him that Chater died in Martinique in 1910. Confronted with this piece of evidence, Bernard retorts: “I have proved Byron was here and as far as I am concerned he wrote those lines as sure as he shot that hare. If only I hadn’t somehow … .made it all about killing Chater” (56). Arcadia exploits the time-frames of the past and present in a manner that suggests that human hopes can only be hinged on an uncertain future. Kerstin Schmidt’s observation on the treatment of time in postmodern drama sheds light on Stoppard’s device here: Postmodern drama furthermore aims at deconstructing time as a continuum and a linear progressive movement. Time is predominantly rendered as discontinuous and relative. The result is the production of new forms of presentation no longer based on progressive time concepts. The aesthetics of time in postmodern theater is grounded in an effort to present time itself, to exhibit time and trigger a metadramatic reflection on aspects of time.26

Using the theory of Chaos to undermine all certain knowledge of the origins, causes and connecting links, and hence all attempts to retrieve the 25

Tom Stoppard. Arcadia. London: Faber and Faber, 1993, p. 39. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the parenthesis. 26 Kirsten Schmidt. The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005, p. 76.

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past as it occurred, it points out to the inevitable future of the mankind. As Valentine explains the meaning of Chaos theory to Hannah: The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is … The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about-clouds-daffodils-waterfalls-and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery … The future is disorder … It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. (47-8)

The past obviously did exist, but has to be reconstructed by putting all available evidence together, meaning that the result can only be a narrative with a tentatively plausible status. All certainties seem to wither away in the face of confusion created by the proliferation of the material bearing on what to accept as true. The conflict between reason and imagination, represented by the conflict between Classicism and Romanticism, has proved inconclusive. Stoppard himself suggested that the contemporary age has witnessed a revolt against reason which is reminiscent of the Romantic revolt but, unlike it, offers no substitution: In any age, including the period around the year 1800, we had a kind of reaction against scientism by the poets of the time, so you find that Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge as young men are resisting the thinking of that time that science was rapidly finding out all the answers, and would solve all the mysteries. The sense, or illusion, that science is doing exactly that seems to accompany every age, and creates an opposing force.27

Arcadia presents the postmodern challenge to Enlightenment Rationality that once promised a perfect mastery over the natural phenomenon following its complete understanding. Chaos theory has, however, disrupted the underlying notions of the Enlightenment. The universe, the thermodynamics theory suggests, is inevitably heading towards an entropic dead end. As Valentine explains to Hannah, “heat goes to cold. It’s a one-way street … it’ll take a while but we’re all going to end up at room temperature”(78). Thomasina had understood the implications of the one way flow of heat more than a century before. Septimus, alarmed at this, had concluded, “So, we are all doomed!” and Thomasina had cheerfully replied, “yes”.

27 Tom Stoppard. “Plotting the course of a Playwright” in Paul Delaney (ed). Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 268.

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This inevitable entropic course that the world is bound to take is discussed in the last scene of the play where the past and the present merge: Septimus: So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold. Dear me. Valentine: The heat goes into the mix. (he gestures to indicate the air in the room, in the universe) Thomasina: Yes, we must hurry if we are going to dance. Valentine: And everything is mixing the same way, all the time, irreversibly. Septimus: Oh, we have time, I think. Valentine … till there’s no time left. That’s what time means. Septimus: When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning. We will be all alone, on an empty shore. Thomasina: Then we will dance. Is this a waltz? (93-4)

The ending of the play shows Hannah responding to Gus’s gesture asking her to dance: (After a moment’s hesitation, she gets up and they hold each other, keeping a decorous distance between them, and start to dance, rather awkwardly. Septimus and Thomasina continue to dance, fluently, to the piano). (97)

Caught between the uncertain and chaotic past and the inevitable entropic doom, the characters, in a typical post-absurdist and postmodernist manner, celebrate the moment at hand with a cheerful gesture of dance. Indian Ink (1995) again demonstrates Stoppard’s unflagging interest in investigating the problems involved in reconstructing the past. As the stage directions reveal, the play is set in two periods, 1930 (in India) and mid1980s (in England and India). The action moves freely between these time/ space frameworks and comprises three different plot lines. First, Flora Crewe’s stay in an imaginary Indian state Jummapur and her relationship with Nirad Das, the Indian painter who draws her portrait. Second, the conversation in the 1980s in England between Mrs. Swan, Flora’s sister, and Anish, Nirad’s son; and third, the activities of Pike, an American scholar who is researching into the life and poetry of Flora, collecting and editing her letters to write her biography. As there exists no stage demarcation between different time periods or places, temporal and spatial frameworks interpenetrate, indicating Stoppard’s continuing interest in the strategies begun with Travesties. Caught in this fluid movement of time and space are characters whose identities remain in flux. Sometimes they

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seem to be interacting with each other despite the time/space gulf dividing them, a device which is fully exploited at the end of the play. As in Arcadia, the past is made to appear as a construct from the present, whether it is Pike’s efforts to know about Flora’s activities in India or interpreting the well-known historical events in the Indian history. Dilip thus comments on the impossibility of knowing whether Flora and Das had any relationship, although there are indications that such a relationship did exist: DILIP: (Recovering) Well, we will never know. You are constructing an edifice of speculation on a smudge of paint on paper, which no longer exists. PIKE: It must exist – look how far I’ve come to find it. DILIP: Oh, very Indian! Well, so, there are two ways to proceed. First, you can go around Jummapur looking at every piece of paper you come to. Second, you can stand in one place and look at every piece of paper that comes to you. (61)

The play illustrates the postmodern idea of representation as constitutive of our sense of the real. Given the fact that the Indian history, politics and culture have been narrativized from different perspectives, it is impossible to retrieve an India as it was prior to those representations. The Indian and British characters interpret the past events in different ways, as, for example, the following conversation between Mrs. Swan and Anish reveals: ANISH: … In Jummapur we were ‘loyal’ as you would say, we had been loyal to the British right through the first War of Independence. MRS SWAN: The … ? What war was that? ANISH: The Rising of 1857. MRS SWAN: Oh, you mean the Mutiny. What did you call it? AISH: Dear Mrs Swan, Imperial history is merely … no, no – I promise you I didn’t come to give you a history lesson. MRS SWAN: You seem ill-equipped to do so. We were your Romans, you know. We might have been your Normans. ANISH: And did you expect us to be grateful?…We were the Romans! We were up to date when you found a third-world country! Even when you discovered India in the age of Shakespeare, we already had our Shakespeares. And our science – architecture – our literature and art, we had a culture older and more splendid, we were rich! After all, that’s why you came. (But he has misjudged). MRS SWAN: (Angrily) We made you a proper country! And when we left you fell straight into pieces like Humpty Dumpty! Look at the map! You should feel nothing but shame! (17)

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Anish, notwithstanding his strong feelings against the colonizers of his country, regards England as his home: ANISH: Oh – home! I didn’t mean I was a guest in England. England is my home now. I have spent half my life here. I married here. (18) The postcolonial subject is conscious of its fragmented identity, it is neither able to retrieve its pre-colonial self nor cast itself fully into the image of its master which it tries to emulate. The conversation between Pike and Dilip, his assistant is illuminating in this regard: PIKE: Why are you so crazy about English, Dilip? DILIP: I am not! PIKE: You love it! DILIP: Yes, I do. I love it. PIKE: Yes. You do. DILIP: (cheerfully) Yes, it’s a disaster for us! Fifty years of Independence and we are still hypnotized! Jackets and ties must be worn! English-model schools for the children of the elite, and the voice of Bush House is heard in the land. Gandhi would fast again, I think. Only, this time he’d die. It was not for this India, I think, that your friend Nirad Das and his friends held up their home-made banner at the Empire Day gymkhana. It was not for this that he threw his mango at the Resident’s car. What a pity, though, that all his revolutionary spirit went into his art and none into his art. (601)

Nirad Das, who is drawing Flora’s portrait, is chided by her for trying to be English rather than an Indian artist: FLORA: I said nothing about your painting, if you want to know, because I thought you’d be an Indian artist. DAS: An Indian artist? FLORA: Yes. You are an Indian artist, aren’t you? Stick up for yourself. Why do you like everything English?…You are enthralled. Chelsea, Bloomsbury, Oliver Twist, Goldflake cigarettes, Winsor and Newton … even painting in oils, that’s not Indian. You’re trying to paint me from my point of view instead of yours – what you think is my point of view. You deserve the bloody Empire! DAS: … the bloody Empire finished off Indian painting. (42-3)

The roots of the schizophrenic postcolonial subject lie in the colonial power structures which lured the natives into imitation without providing them the opportunity to embrace a fully-fledged Englishness and treating them as nothing more than instruments for their ends. The conversation between Flora and Durance, an English officer in charge of surveillance over the natives’ activities illustrates this:

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FLORA: Mr Das called you Captain. PIKE: Yes, I’m Army. Seconded, of course. There are two of us Juniors – political agents we call ourselves when we’re on tour round the States. Jummapur is not one of your twenty-one-gun salute states, you see – my Chief is in charge of half a dozen native states. FLORA: In charge? DURANCE: Oh yes. FLORA: Is he Army? No – how silly – DURANCE: He’s Indian Civil Service. The heaven-born. A Brahmin. FLORA: Not seriously? DURANCE: Yes, seriously. Oh no, not a Brahmin seriously. But it might come to that with I-zation. FLORA: … ? DURANCE: Indianization. It’s all over, you know. We have Indian officers in the Regiment now. My fellow Junior here is Indian, too, terribly nice chap – he’s ICS, passed the exam, did his year at Cambridge, learned polo and knives-and-forks, and here he is, a pukkah sahib in the Indian Civil Service. FLORA: Is he here? DURANCE: At the club? No, he can’t come into the Club. FLORA: Oh. (52)

The play, on the whole, seems neither reactionary or conservative, nor simply a critique of the British colonial enterprise in India. It offers a more complex picture of colonialism as an exploitative enterprise creating the conditions for the emergence of a modern Indian subjectivity. By laying bare the conflicting facets of this subjectivity it points at the persisting ambivalence at the heart of the postcolonial subject which can never escape the overarching power which brought it into existence in the first place. In The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy consisting of Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage, Stoppard rings a more serious tone than most of his earlier plays, examining the historical conditions that led to the birth of the modern Russian socialism. Whereas Travesties had placed Lenin, Joyce and Tzara in an entirely imaginative situation, the trilogy places some real historical figures as Alexander Herzen, Ivan Turgenev, Mikhail Bakunin and Vissarion Belinsky, against a background that bears close resemblance to the conditions prevalent in the nineteenth century Russia. Again, we witness a reversal of temporal framework as time moves backwards rather than forward in the trilogy. Like some of his other plays, Stoppard is interested in showing that how the past is remembered largely depends on the experiences of those who remember it, it is not fixed and objectively available, but always mediated through memories which have a great stake in remembering things one way rather than the other. The focus, however,

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is less on revealing the fictionality of historical narratives than exposing the socialist Utopian project as a grand narrative that ultimately led to a monolithic power structure without achieving the goal of social equality and liberty. The very basis of the socialist revolution was the theory of dialectical materialism propounded by Marx, according to which the determining forces in history are the economic conditions of the masses. Marx postulated a progressive movement of history in which the final stage of the society will be characterized by the abolition of all classes and the emergence of a truly communist society. In Salvage, Herzen dreams of Marx who predicts the future of the revolution: Every stage leads to a higher stage in the permanent conflict which is the march of history happily anticipating the final titanic struggle, the last turn of the great wheel of progress beneath which generations of toiling masses perished for the ultimate victory. And relishing the thought of the Neva lit by flames and running red, the coconut palms hung with corpses all along the shinning strand from Kronstadt to the Nevsky Prospekt … .28

But Herzen responds rather defiantly to the specter of Marx, challenging his theory of historical progress: History has no culmination. There is always as much in front as behind. There is no libretto. History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment and the gate keeper is chance. We shout into the mist for this one or that one to be opened for us, but through every gate there are a thousand more. We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us … .What kind of beast is it, this Ginger Cat with its insatiable appetite for human sacrifice? This Moloch who promises that everything will be beautiful after we’re dead? A distant end is not an end but a trap. (Salvage, 118)

Herzen’s rejection of Marx’s sweeping theories suggests that all theories of history that posit a rational or teleological progress to it are more likely to be superimpositions on a massive and rather amorphous phenomenon. History, entirely bereft of a design or purpose, seems more like an agglomeration of events where millions can be sacrificed without achieving any significantly better results for the mankind. That history is more like the weather in its unpredictability is observed by Georg Herwegh while explaining the failure of the 1848 revolution: 28

Tom Stoppard. Salvage: The Coast of Utopia, Part III (Salvage). London: Faber and Faber, 2002, p. 117. All subsequent references to the trilogy are given in parenthesis with the title of each play.

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We’ve had a terrible shock. We discovered that history has no respect for intellectuals. History is more like the weather. You never know what it’s going to do. (Shipwreck, 63)

It gets much worse, the trilogy suggests, when knowledge and truth are invoked to legitimize certain views capable of mobilizing masses into an activity that sets itself a specific goal which it ultimately fails to achieve. The plays offer a critique of the idea of utopia and its historical underpinnings in the nineteenth century Russia. The nineteenth century Russian socialists premised their future dream on a theoretical framework that was universalizing and totalizing in its claims. Throughout the trilogy, various characters debate philosophical questions, invoking German philosophers like Schelling, Kant, Fichte and Hegel, in order to find answers to the questions of the meaning and purpose of history. Their arguments reveal the complexity of the questions and undercut the very premise on which a simple, straightforward call for a revolution is based. Any overarching interpretation of history necessarily tends to suppress other perspectives on it and leads to social oppression. In the following remarks of Herzen, addressed to the Hegelian Bakunin, the ironic treatment of the Marxist harnessing of the Hegelian dialectics is unmistakable: You’ve got Hegel’s Dialectical Spirit of History upside down, so has he. People don’t storm the Bastille because history proceeds by zigzags. History zigzags because when people have enough, they storm the Bastille. When you turn him right way up, Hegel is the algebra of revolution. The Dialectical Spirit of History would be an extravagant redundancy even if one could imagine what sort of animal it was supposed to be … a gigantic ginger cat, for example … .We are not the plaything of an imaginative cosmic force, but of a Romanov with no imagination whatsoever, a mediocrity. (Voyage, 104)

The reference to Hegel’s dialectics upside down is an unmistakable parody of Marx’s famous statement that he has turned Hegel upside down, positing the historical/material forces as the primary factors of change instead of Hegel’s Absolute. But dialectics, believed to be the principle where contradictory elements are resolved into a synthesis that leads to a linear progression, may be no more than a myth. On the converse, The Coast of Utopia offers the theory of inevitable cyclical repetition of history as a more persuasive alternative. The idea is given a powerful expression in the words of Nataile Herzen:

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Her remarks, echoing Nietzsche’s views on history’s cyclical march, signal a counter view capable of contesting the fundamental assumption of a revolutionary project. Even the prophets of the revolution seem, at the end, persuaded that the dream of the earthly paradise can never be transformed into reality. While as Belinsky blurts out, “I am sick of Utopias. I’m tired of hearing about them”, the most emphatic statement comes from Herzen: The ancient dream of a perfect society of squarable circles, where conflict is cancelled out is an illusion, for there is no such society, that’s why it’s called Utopia. (Salvage, 118)

The utopia promised by Marxism ultimately proved to be a ghost, a hobgoblin as the following parody of the opening sentence of The Communist Manifesto by Turgenev in response to Marx’s query reveals: Marx: Do you think there’s something funny about ‘the ghost of Communism’? I don’t want it to sound as if Communism is dead. Turgenev: Let me see … (in ‘English’) ‘A ghost … a phantom is walking around Europe..’ (thoughtfully) ‘A spook … a spectre … ’ (jogged) ‘A spirit … a spirit is haunting Europe … ’ (taps the book, triumphantly satisfied) ‘A hobgoblin is stalking around Europe – the hobgoblin of Communism!’ (Shipwreck, 41)

The Coast of Utopia illustrates Stoppard’s recognition that men have failed to translate their conceptions about an ideal society into reality because the gap between the ideal and the real is unbridgeable. But more important than this is Stoppard’s suggestion that these grand emancipatory projects fail precisely because they tend to be grand, universalizing and totalizing. From here it is not difficult to see that the Lyotardian ideas of local and mini narratives offer better alternatives to the failed grand ones. Stoppard’s interest in ethical questions finds expression in two of his full-length plays, Jumpers (1972) and Professional Foul (1977), both of which illustrate the problems inherent in all ethical systems. Stoppard himself commented on his response to moral questions in the following terms: Writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I’m the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great

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moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Forever.29

This stance of the playwright is echoed by Mr. Moon’s following speech in his only novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon (1966): I take both parts, O’Hara, leapfrogging myself along the great moral issues, refuting myself and rebutting the refutation towards a truth that must be a compound of two opposite half-truths. And you never reach it because there is always something more to say.30

And again: I cannot commit myself to either side of a question…And I can’t even side with the balance of morality because I don’t know whether morality is an instinct or just an imposition.31

Like Travesties, Jumpers offers a dramatic illustration of conflicting perspectives brought together and left open-ended without privileging any one of them. The play is one of the best examples of Stoppard’s use of comic framework for dealing with serious questions about epistemology and ethics. It is a farcical treatment of some of the most debated issues in the philosophical circles including language, ethics and the verification of the truth. The title refers to a group of acrobats belonging to the philosophical school of Logical Positivists in a University department who have actually built up a human pyramid, thus suggesting a state of crisis in philosophy where it has merged with gymnastics. When Bones asks George, the main character of the play, who these acrobats are, he replies: Logical Positivists, mainly, with a linguist analyst or two, a couple of Benthamite utilitarians … . Lapsed Kantians and empiricists generally … .and of course the usual Behaviourists … .a mixture of the more philosophical members of the university gymnastics team and the more gymnastic members of the philosophy school.32

29 Quoted in Mel Gussow (ed). Conversations with Tom Stoppard. London: Nick Hern, 1995, p. 3. 30 Tom Stopard. Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon. London: Blond, 1966, p. 52. 31 ibid, p. 54. 32 Tom Stoppard. Jumpers. New York: Grove Press, 1972, pp. 50-1. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the parenthesis.

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George, whom the play presents as a lone voice upholding faith in God and absolute ethics, sets out to prove that relativism and skepticism are not only dangerous for the society but also have no sound philosophical foundations. His rival Archie, the Vice Chancellor of the University where George is a professor, is a thorough-going positivist who carries his convictions into his practical life by embracing opportunism. The play is an ironic exposition of all philosophical positions, especially logical positivism represented by Archie and irrationalist intuitionism represented by George. Archie and his followers land into ridiculous positions trying to translate their extreme positivism into practical affairs as when Clegthrope, the atheist Radical-Liberal, is appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury. Their political leanings towards radical liberalism are intertwined with a philosophical position that reduces all problems, not just of knowledge and ethics, to literal jokes. As Archie says, “No problem is insoluble given a big enough plastic bag” (40). As the play unfolds in the manner of a classic whodunit, after McFee, one of the acrobats is mysteriously shot dead, the incapacity of philosophical positions based on positivism to tackle the pressing problems of verifying incidents is brought out. The suspects of the murder include George, Dotty his wife and Archie, but the mystery of the real murder remains unsolved up to the end. Against Archie’s logical positivism, George’s firm conviction in values and God speaks of his faith in the unseen and irrational. Deriding rationality as the basis of all knowledge he tells Dotty: The national Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality! And so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover’s favors, or a home for stray dogs! You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of Soya beans!… (40)

George’s portrayal in the play indicates that the title Jumpers is a reference to him as much as it is a reference to Archie and other logical positivists, because his faith in the irrational is like a philosophical jump, a “leap into faith”. That the play reveals George as self-deluded is amply borne out by the farcical manner in which he and his philosophical experiments are presented. To “disprove” the assumptions of his philosophical rivals, George sets out to negate some of the classical paradoxes which he believes are invoked to demolish absolutism and certainty. He embarks upon an implausible attempt to disprove Zeno’s paradox of motion. Zeno’s argument that motion is illusory as it involves a logical contradiction consisting in an endless regress constitutes for

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George the skeptical argument in epistemological matters. He believes that by demonstrating practically that an arrow does reach its target he can explode the notion of illusion of motion. He derides it; “though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright” (28). Zeno’s concept of infinite regress is linked by George to those mathematicians and thinkers who deny the necessity of the concept of a beginning, and by implication the argument for a First Cause. As against their argument, George affirms: There is reason and there is cause and there is motion, each in infinite regress towards a moment of origin and a point of ultimate reference … the Necessary Being, the First Cause, the unmoved Mover!!! (24)

George takes up a bow and an arrow to shoot at a target, the arrow misses the target and kills Thumper, his pet rabbit, and when he recoils from the spectacle, he accidentally steps on and crushes to death his tortoise Pat. The comic disaster in which his experiments end up undercuts his unshakable conviction in intuitive certainties. The play progresses to illustrate the irony of George who, obsessed with making efforts to solve eternal mysteries of knowledge and ethics, is totally unaware of what is happening under his own roof, for it is very late in the play that he learns that Duncan McFee is dead and that he might have been killed, in all probability, by George’s own wife. Moreover, of all the characters in the play, George is the only one never to observe the visible corpse. The play subjects George’s philosophical seriousness to a farcical treatment by focusing on his failure to see things that are obvious and landing into ridiculous positions. The self-consistent logic that George espouses is shown to be inadequate to tackle the inherent contradictions of the world to which it is applied. George himself feels that language, the only tool at his disposal, often plays tricks upon him and defies his attempts to contain the philosophically meaningful statements: George: I had hoped to set British moral philosophy back forty years, which is roughly when it went off the rails, but unfortunately, though my convictions are intact and my ideas coherent, I can’t seem to find the words. Bones: Well, “Are God?” is the wrong for a start. George: Or rather, the words betray the thoughts they are supposed to express. Even the most generalized truth begins to look like special pleading as soon as you trap it in language. (46)

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George realizes how he is trapped in language, which by its relativity and arbitrariness creates a gap between the word and the concept. As he explains: How does one know what it is one believes when it’s so difficult to know what it is one knows. I don’t claim to know that God exists, I only claim that he does without my knowing it, and while I claim as much I do not claim to know as much; indeed I cannot know and God knows I cannot. (62)

Although George tries to point out the limitations of language: “language is an approximation of meaning and not a logical symbolism for it” (24) and, “language is a finite instrument crudely applied to infinity of ideas” (63), his main problem lies in being manipulated by the inherent indeterminacy of language. He unsuccessfully tries to pin down the referential pluralism of words as when attempting to show how meaning of the word “good” differs in different usages such as good bacon sandwich and the good Samaritan. This linguistic indeterminacy frustrates him as he sets out to write a paper for the symposium. He starts, stops, and starts again but flounders constantly, drifting helplessly in the current of his own words. However, George’s faith in altruism is undermined not so much by the linguistic indeterminacy as by the spectacle on the television which shows the two astronauts struggling to push each other out from the spaceship that can bring back only one of them from the moon. The struggle for survival hints at the blind spot in George’s theorizing without taking into account the modifying force of material conditions. George’s moral system is thus shown to be inadequate to deal with the complexity of the material world. A similar idea finds expression in Professional Foul which highlights a moral dilemma that remains unresolved up to the end. The complexity informing ethical questions and the vulnerability of all moral positions is dramatized by means of different views that clash with each other. The play centers mainly on the intellectual evolution of Anderson, a J S Mill professor of philosophy at Cambridge who is on a visit to Prague for reading a paper in a colloquium entitled “Ethical Foundations as Ethical Fictions”. Anderson believes that although ethical principles are fictions, they are absolutely necessary because they help maintain order and have thus a practical value. In contrast, McKendrick advances a belief that since moral principles have no theoretical basis, there is no reason to adopt them. McKendrick is, therefore, a counterpart of Archie in Jumpers. He challenges Anderson on the ground that the latter’s position involves self-

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contradiction: “There aren’t any principles in your sense. There are only a lot of principled people trying to behave as if there were.”33 McKendrick argues that absolute moral principles are an imposition on a complex phenomenon and are based on flawed logic: The mistake that people make is, they think a moral principle is indefinitely extendible, that it holds good for any situation, a straight line cutting across the graph of our actual situation. (78)

He illustrates his idea of the common mistake people commit by drawing two parallel lines, one representing morality and the other immorality: “Morality down there, running parallel to ‘immorality’ up here … and never the twain shall meet” (78). As against this, he puts forth his own argument: The two lines are on the same plane. They’re the edges of the same plane – it’s in three dimensions, you see – and if you twist the plane in a certain way, into what we call the catastrophe curve, you get a model of the sort of behaviour we find in the real world. (78)

As the play progresses, Anderson’s experiences with the reality of the Czech state oppression force him to alter his stance on morality. Beginning with a firm conviction that the citizens of a state are morally bound to respect the laws, since not doing so will result in breaking a social contract and result in political disorder, he comes to see the validity of the two mutually antithetical positions on ethics, namely that of Hollar and McKendrick. As a witness to the inhuman behavior that Hollar and his family are subjected to by the Czech authorities, he is forced to accept Hollar’s privileging of certain inalienable rights of the individual over and above the regulations and laws of the State. This modified stance on morality is witnessed in his acts of lying to and cheating the Czech police to avoid being nabbed. From the earlier position of ideal standards of behavior, he moves to proposing “a system of ethics which is the sum of individual acts of recognition of individual rights” (90). He rejects the state authority which, “seeks, in the name of the people, to impose its values on the very individuals who comprise the state” (91). Anderson, however, soon finds himself in another moral dilemma. The only way, he thinks, he can smuggle out Hollar’s thesis out of the Czech Republic and make possible that the world knows what is happening 33

Tom Stoppard. Professional Foul. New York: Grove Press, 1978, p. 78. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the parenthesis.

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inside the country is to put it secretly in McKendrick’s luggage. Doing this, however, means violating the moral principle of mutual trust. His dilemma is paralleled in an altogether different set of circumstances of a football game; how far is it moral to resort to a professional foul in a soccer game to avoid defeat? Broadbent, the English player, actually resorts to it and believes to have done nothing immoral. The rules of the game apparently allow a professional foul since within the context of the game it is tackled by imposing a penalty against the team or the player responsible for it. But since the question involves issues like personal integrity and sportsmanship, it is a moral question. Like Broadbent, though in a different context, Anderson breaches McKendrick’s trust by putting Hollar’s thesis into his bag, which further problematizes for him the issue of ethics. If moral interests can and should take precedence over moral principles as Anderson’s action suggests, the result will be political anarchy. Kant’s ethical system took its force from the principle of practicality. An absolute moral principle is, he argued, applicable in all circumstances without self-contradiction. Having seen the flaws in the Kantian position, Anderson seeks to outgrow it only to find himself in a more ambivalent position. The play ends on a note of declaration of the uncertainty attending moral questions: Mc Kendrick: It’s not quite playing the game, is it? Anderson: No, I suppose not. But they were very unlikely to search you. Mc Kendrick: That’s not the bloody point. Anderson: I thought it was. But you could be right. Ethics is a very complicated business. That’s why they have these congresses. (93)

The analysis of the plays undertaken here reveals that most of Stoppard’s plays explore the conflict of ideas relating to art, morality and truth, without, however, resolving them. Lyotard’s idea of the differend which is defined by him as, “a case of conflict between at least two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments,”34 provides an apt theoretical commentary on Stoppard’s theatrical enterprise. This analysis also enables us to see that these plays, in a characteristically postmodern manner, distance themselves from what has been termed as the modernist alienation and the resulting sense of loss and anxiety. Instead, Stoppard throughout maintains an attitude of playful affirmation, following the recognition that as humans we can have no 34

Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Differend. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, p. ix.

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absolute and universal basis for either knowledge or value, and that all our concepts about reality are finally our own constructions. A conspicuous lack of poignancy, so noticeable in Stoppard, is attributable to this playful affirmation. It elucidates what Derrida defined as the Nietzschean affirmation that stands for: The joyous affirmation of the play of the world and the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as the loss of center.35

35

Jacques Derrida. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in Writing and Difference. Alan Bass (trans). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 292.

CONCLUSION We have made an attempt to study the plays of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard in the light of a poetics of postmodernism. The focus has been to present postmodernism as a mode of relentless critique of all assumptions about reality, history, language, human subject and representation, and to explore the ways in which Pinter and Stoppard express these concerns. Whereas Pinter’s main concerns relate to issues such as power and the decentered subject, Stoppard treats theatrical representation, history and ethics in a typically postmodernist manner. However, both have consistently refused to align themselves with any specific political or social agenda without compromising their stand on a critical engagement with reality. We have also seen that postmodern drama has its roots in the Epic theatre of Brecht and the absurdist theatre of Beckett. Beckett’s drama, especially, provides an apt commentary on the postmodern condition where man is stripped completely of all anchors of meaning and purpose. In the theatre, the virtual obliteration of plot and character, a prominent feature in Beckett, has influenced postmodern drama significantly. Characters with fragmented memories and dialogues informed by absences have found acceptance with postmodern dramatists as Pinter. Postmodern drama, following Beckett, also opens up language and experience to plurality, dispersal and play, and suggests the acceptance of uncertainty in the face of contingent nature of knowledge. These parallels notwithstanding, postmodern drama cannot be equated entirely with Beckett’s absurdist theatre. This is noticeable, for example, in the way Pinter, despite his overwhelming indebtedness to Beckett, moves away from the typical absurdist mode in depicting characters who are more socially bounded and less metaphysically oriented than most of Beckett’s characters. Also, there is very little suggestion of Beckett’s theatrical symbolism as a statement on the general human condition in Pinter. Stoppard, on the other hand, exhibits an inclination towards celebration and playfulness, completely abjuring the characteristically Beckettian graveyard humor. The overwhelming metaphysical anguish of Beckett gives way to a light-hearted celebration of the immediate moment. This explains Stoppard’s adoption of a consistently comic mode of writing. In this sense Stoppard’s theatre offers itself as an example of post-absurdist

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drama which inscribes the absurdist condition of meaninglessness but offers a different response to this condition. Whereas Beckett’s final vision of man is tragic, Stoppard persistently stays away from the tragic mode. Again, unlike Beckett, Stoppard situates his characters in tangible contexts although these contexts are shown to be ridden by the condition of dispersal. Ros, Guil, Carr, Houseman, the characters of Arcadia and The Coast of Utopia, all represent aborted attempts of creating meaning from their immediate conditions, though this failure never results in an overriding metaphysical anguish as in the case of Beckett. Stoppard himself, while stating that Samuel Beckett “redefined the minima of theatre,” acknowledges Pinter’s influence on the development of drama: I think Pinter did something equally important and significant. He changed the ground rules. One thing plays had in common: you were supposed to believe what people said up there. . . . With a Pinter play, you can no longer make that assumption. . . . There are many different possible interpretations for [a] scene. All of them had been discounted until Pinter exploited the off centre possibilities.1

For his part, Stoppard has continued with his favorite theme of challenging all “grand narratives” which seek to erase all differences. As Jan, the Czech intellectual in his latest play Rock ‘n’ Roll (2006) notes soon after the Czech Velvet Revolution of 1989: … all systems are blood brothers. Changing one system for another is not what the Velvet Revolution was for. We’ve to begin again with the ordinary meaning of words. Giving new meaning to words is how systems lie to themselves, beginning with the word for themselves – socialism, democracy …2

This invocation of legitimating narratives by “systems” is strikingly reminiscent of Pinter’s critique of all unifying and self-legitimating systems in his later phase. Since the two dramatists have constantly engaged with postmodernist concerns, their works provide an impetus to explore the possibility of reformulating a poetics of postmodern drama. The significance of Pinter and Stoppard for a reformulation of poetics of postmodern drama can be gauged from the fact that both represent an appropriation of the idea of 1

Mel Gussow. Conversations with Stoppard. London: Nick Hern Books, London, 1995, p. 6-7. 2 Tom Stoppard. Rock ‘n’ Roll. London: Faber and Faber, 2006, p. 99.

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double-codedness in theatre. This can be seen in the manner in which both Pinter and Stoppard employ the traditional theatrical framework, but move into a postmodern direction by subverting the representational status of theatre from within through a rigorous interrogation of its conventions. Pinter’s obsession with non-referential modes of language use, power, and cultural codes operating at multiple levels, is as effective a way to disrupt these conventions as Stoppard’s recourse to various devices such as parody and radically shifting perspectives. It is pertinent to mention that Pinter comes very close to adopting Stoppard’s self-reflexive mode in some of his screenplays as The Last Tycoon (1977) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), both of which draw on the mechanics of filmmaking to underline the idea of reality as a subjective construct. The paradoxical nature of postmodern drama is visible in its inevitable reliance on the category of character to suggest the notion of the dispersal of the human subject. Here again, a crucial difference with Beckett’s later plays is noteworthy where the actual characters are replaced by certain incisive images, for example the two babbling lips in Not I. Despite their admission of Beckett’s influence, neither Pinter nor Stoppard resort to the theatrical strategies that dispense with the character altogether. Both inscribe the character but contest the assumptions of self-presence underlying its dramatic representation. Where Pinter tends to depict it as both the agent and effect of power, and also a potential site of resisting that power, Stoppard often inscribes it but hollows it out of all psychological essence. Stoppard, therefore, creates characters that are entirely subservient to the witty clash of opinions of which they are both agents and products. The study has also demonstrated the value of both the playwrights for understanding how language may be seen to operate in postmodern drama. Here too, a simultaneous inscription and subversion of language which implies undercutting its status as a neutral medium of communication emerges as a prominent feature of their plays. While making extensive use of silences in a number of plays, Pinter still installs language as a prime medium by which he creates his drama. Using language to undercut its assumed freedom from complicity with power is a provocative way of subverting it. This idea is presented in rather explicit terms in Mountain Language. Although the indeterminacy of the linguistic sign is an obsession with Stoppard and finds powerful expression in his plays like Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, After Magritte, Artist Descending a Staircase, Jumpers and Travesties, there is an equally strong tendency in him to reinscribe the linguistic sign. Unlike Beckett who showed an everincreasing tendency towards abjuring language, Stoppard celebrates the

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ineluctable condition of the linguistic sign. His treatment of ideas about perception, history and ethics offers a striking example of this. Finally, it has to be said that owing to the daunting multiformity and heterogeneity of postmodern theory and practice, any attempt to formulate a poetics of postmodern drama needs to be self-consciously provisional. It is the future trends in theory and practice that will provide a vantage perspective on the contemporary dramatic practices, including that of Pinter and Stoppard, and enable us to evaluate them in the light of newer critical insights. These trends may also indicate how postmodernism can outgrow what many see as a state of impasse and make way for new ideas which can lead to fresh perspectives on the problems of truth, meaning and value.

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INDEX A absurdism 6, 27, 35, 88 Adorno, Theodor 2 Ankersmit, Richard 18 After Magritte 74-6, 105 Aragay, Mireia 59 Arcadia 77, 83-7, 89, 104 Artist Descending a Staircase 74-6, 105 Ashes to Ashes 49, 54, 57 Auslander, Philip 5, 32 avant-garde 6, 14, 15, 22 B Baker, Stephen 22 Barth, John 9, 11, 12 Barthes, Roland 11, 16, 23, 32 Beckett, Samuel 5, 9, 23, 25, 28, 48, 67, 103-5 Begley, Varun 2, 3 Behera, Guru Charan 1 Bernhard, Thomas 5, 31 Bertens, Hans 10-1 Benvensite, Emile 24, 77 Bigsby, C W E 8, 27, 29 binarism 42, 47, 84 Birthday Party, The 38, 41, 47 Brecht, Bertolt 5, 22, 23-5, 103 C Calvino, Italo 9 Caretaker, The 2, 38, 40-1, 47 Chaos Theory 84-7 Christie, Agatha 4, 73 Coast of Utopia 77, 91-4 Collection, The 41-3, 46-7 Cohn, Ruby 8 Communist Manifesto, The 94 Critchley, Simon 18

D decentered subject 3, 21, 24, 26, 35, 49, 50, 54, 64, 103 decentering 5, 14, 24, 26, 71-2, 78 deconstruction 3, 9, 17-9 Derrida, Jacques 9, 11, 16-9, 101 dedoxification 16, 32, 42 de Man, Paul 27 de Sade, Marquis 9 de Saussure, Ferdinand 9 Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth 67, 70-2, 105 Doll, Mary 74 double-codedness 3-4, 13, 22, 105 doxa 16 Dumb Waiter, The 37 Dwarfs, The 47-8 E Eagleton, Terry 14-5, 19 Eco, Umberto 59 Elin, Diamond 46 Enlightenment 60, 63 Enlightenment Rationality 30, 87 Epic theatre 22-4, 103 Ermath, Elizabeth Deeds 30 Esslin, Martin 35, 51 Evans, Richard 18 F Feynman, Richard 84 Fichte, Johanne 93 Fleming, John 1 Ford, Ford Madox 10 Foreman, Richard 5, 28-9 Foucault, Michel 11, 16, 19-20, 59, 77 Foucauldian 20, 59 Free, W J 1 French Lieutenant’s Woman, The 105

124 G Geis, Deborah 5, 8, 23, 26 Genet, Jean 9 H Habermas, Jurgen 60 Hamlet 67-70 Hapgood 83-5 Hassan, Ihab 8-9 Hegel, Johanne 93 Heidegger, Martin 9 Hemingway, Ernest 9 Heuvel, Michael Vanden 4 historiographic metafiction 5, 12, 19, 21-3, 30, 77, 78 Homecoming, The 2, 41-3, 47, 52 humanism 11, 13, 16, 18, 20 Hutcheon, Linda 4-6, 8, 11-3, 15, 16, 18-24, 31-2, 42, 46, 66, 77 Huyssen, Andreas 2 I Importance of Being Earnest, The 77-9 Indian Ink 88-91 Invention of Love, The 77, 79, 83 Ionescoe, Eugene 48 J Jameson, Frederic 4, 13, 14 Jencks, Charles 4 Jenkins, Anthony 72 Johnston, John 8 Jumpers 94-6, 99, 105 K Kafka, Franz 9, 10 Kant, Immanuel 93, 100 Kaye, Nick 5, 32 Kelly, Katherine 69, 74 Kennedy, Andrew 28 Kennedy, William 21 Klinwitz, Jerome 8 L Laclau, Ernesto 63 Landscape, The 2, 49, 50 Last Tycoon, The 105 Lawson, Hilary 9 LaCapra, Dominick 18 liberal humanism 11, 16, 18

Index logical positivism 96 Lord Malquist and Mr Moon 95 Lyotard, Francois 11, 16, 26, 59, 60, 63, 83, 84, 94, 100 Lyotardian 3, 5 M Magritte, Rene 74 Malkin, Jeanette 5, 8, 25, 26, 30-1 Malpas, Simon 63 Mamet, David 5, 26-7 Marx, Karl 92-4 Marxism 18, 94 Marxist 11, 14, 15, 18, 79, 85, 93 McHale, Brian 8, 10 memory plays 2, 3, 5, 47, 49-54, 58, 64 modernism 2, 8, 9, 12, 15 monologue 26, 47-51, 55 Moonlight 49, 54-7 Morrison, Toni 21 Mountain Language 58, 61-2, 105 Muller, Heiner 5, 31 N Nadel, Ira 4 New World Order, The 58-60 Nietzsche, Friedrich 94, 101 No Man’s Land 49, 52-4 O Old Times 49, 52, 54 One for the Road 58-60 P parody 3, 5, 13-6, 22-3, 65-7, 73, 77, 79, 93-4, 105 Party Time 58, 61 pastiche 3, 4, 13-4, 66, 79 Peacock, Keith 5, 58 postmodernism a poetics of 4-6, 8, 10-1, 19, 20, 22, 64, 65, 103-4, 106 postmodern drama a poetics of 4-6, 8, 104, 106 poststructuralism 9 poststructuralist thought 4, 9, 11, 19, 23-4, 30 Professional Foul 94, 98-100 patriarchy 16, 41-7

Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama power 2-3, 5, 12, 19-22, 26-9, 35, 38-41, 43-4, 47-9, 53, 58-64, 67-70, 82, 90-2, 94, 103, 105 Pynchon, Thomas 10 Q quantum theory 83-4 Quigley, Austin 1-2, 35, 46, 60 R Real Inspector Hound, The 4, 67, 71-3 Rock ‘n’ Roll 104 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead 67-70, 73, 79 Room, The 2, 37-8 Royle, Nicholas 16-7 Rushdie, Salman 21 S Salvage 91-2, 94 Schelling, Friedrich 93 Shakespeare 67, 69, 70-2, 89 Shepard, Sam 5, 26, 31 Shipwreck 91, 93-4

125

Schmidt, Kerstin 8, 31, 86 Schmitt, Natalie Crohn 76 Silence 49-50 Silverstein, Marc 2, 3, 35, 62-3 Slight Ache, A 47 subjectivity 2, 3, 5, 20, 24-5, 27, 38, 49, 52, 59, 85, 91 T Taylor, John Russell 38 Travesties 4, 67, 77-9, 89, 91, 95, 105 W Waiting for Godot 67 Watt, Stephen 7, 52 Waugh, Patricia 8 White, Hayden 18, 21, 77 Wilde, Oscar 77, 79, 81-2 Wilson, Robert 5, 28-9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 2, 9 Z Zeifman, Hersh 73, 76 Zeno 96-7