17 - Pinter, politics and postmodernism (2)

Summary

“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 . . . Language, under these conditions, is a highly ambiguous business. Do the structures of language and the structures of reality (by which I mean what actually happens) move along parallel lines? Does reality essentially remain outside language, separate, obdurate, alien, not susceptible to description? Is an accurate and vital correspondence between what is and our perception of it impossible? Or is it that we are obliged to use language only in order to obscure and distort reality - to distort what is, to distort what happens - because we fear it? We are encouraged to be cowards. We can't face the dead. But we must face the dead because they die in our name.” / Since the mid-1980s, the appearance of the full-length plays One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), Party Time (1991) and Ashes to Ashes (1996), as well as the sketches Precisely (1983) and The New World Order (1991), has led critics of Pinter's work to speculate as to whether they embody a fresh departure by which the playwright's oeuvre has become openly, ostensibly political as opposed to his earlier, more metaphorical explorations of power games, or whether, on the contrary, it has been political through and through from the very start. Each position is grounded on a different conception of the 'political', a discrepancy that may be clarified in the light of the ongoing controversy regarding the vexed question of postmodernism's political import. Indeed, the two epigraphs at the head of this chapter, taken from Pinter's non-dramatic writings, highlight a preoccupation central both to the playwright's work and to the debate about postmodernism: how language, and hence individuals, are bound up with reality, and whether it is possible to speak of reality at all or only of 'versions' of it. In an attempt to discriminate between two distinct treatments of that overriding preoccupation within Pinter's work, this chapter looks at The Homecoming (1965) and Ashes to Ashes (1996) through the lens of postmodernist culture, its contributions and its discontents.