The Transition from Domestic Sphere to International Sphere in Pinter’s Political Play: Ashes to Ashes

Introduction

Harold Pinter has almost always been associated with the theatrical movement ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, which is a kind of post-war playwriting, and the term was coined by the theatre critic Martin Esslin; however, Pinter refused to be given any distinctive label. Nevertheless, many critics and scholars regarded him as an inheritor of the tradition developed by Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and others. Pinter adopted the same stance with regard to politics. Although he stated that he was indifferent to political issues and distant from politics, and though he refused any given label, his dramatic output (early, middle, and late stages) is marked as “slightly” political in his earlier plays and “overtly” political in his late plays. Until the 1980s, his own statements almost always foregrounded his distaste for politics throughout his playwriting. The tradition of post-war political theatre in Britain that embraced socialism as its political vision did not appeal to Harold Pinter because he did not have partisan viewpoints. Political playwrights such as John Arden and Edward Bond considered Pinter insufficiently clear, rational, and informative in his political theatre (Billington 333-4). This is because Pinter unquestionably showed little interest in class consciousness and identity politics, unlike other playwrights involved in post-war British playwriting. Pinter’s transition to political plays occurred at a time when other contemporary playwrights were losing pre-eminence on the British stage.

It is possible to claim that all the socio-political and cultural events the playwright experienced in his youth and adulthood influenced his writing style. In particular, the turbulent politics of the 1980s had a great impact on the spatiality of Pinter’s texts, significantly enlarging and globalising the power politics in his plays. Therefore, the aim of this study is to highlight how local, narrow, and limited spaces turn into enlarged, international spaces in his late plays. In addition to this, the powerholders in his plays become international from his early to his late-period plays. In this sense, the concepts of space and power will be examined scrupulously in order to reveal that Pinter’s slightly political plays of the 1950s pertaining to local power-space relations evolved into overtly political plays after the 1980s pertaining to international power-space relations.

Pinter’s overtly political plays coincided with the waning of these playwrights: John Arden, Arnold Wesker, Edward Bond, David Mercer, David Hare, Howard Brenton, Howard Barker, David Edgar, and Caryl Churchill (Peacock 33). This tradition of radical theatre came to an end by the time of Pinter’s conversion to overtly political plays. The work of writers such as John Arden, Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker had effectively been marginalized or self-marginalized in terms of the established British theatre, while characteristically Pinteresque features such as a concentration on personal anxiety, a disbelief in the existence of political solutions, a distrust of language, and a scepticism about the possibility of historical change had permeated the playwriting of authors such as David Hare, Howard Brenton, and David Edgar (Grimes 1-3).

Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, a London borough in the East End, in 1930. Pinter’s birth coincided with the rise of the anti-Semitic movement in Europe, which influenced the western part of London. Pinter’s birthplace was mainly inhabited by a Jewish population, and upon the outbreak of World War II, Pinter had to be evacuated with others. He was able to return to London only in 1944. Pinter painfully recalls his return to London, as the very first thing he saw was a flying bomb; sometimes, when he opened the front door, he found the garden in ashes, and they had to evacuate constantly. Living in this environment affected Pinter’s conception of the class system present in Britain, as well as educating him as to where Jewish people fit into that system (Mskhaladze 390).

Pinter’s life, even as a young boy, was shaped by his heritage. Martin Esslin describes the East End of London, where Pinter grew up, as a “political battlefield” (Esslin 32). With the outbreak of World War II, Pinter was evacuated from the city. He did not return to London until he was fourteen. Mel Gussow’s interview with Pinter, “A Conversation (Pause) with Pinter”, discusses Pinter’s youth. Pinter claims that he remembers very little about his childhood: “If you ask me to tell my childhood stories, I would find it almost impossible” (Gussow 29). Pinter’s lack of memory of his youth suggests that he tried to repress a past that was too hard to forget. He claims: “I can’t remember so much, but it is not actually forgotten. It exists because it has not simply gone. I carry it with me. If you really remember everything you would blow up. You can’t carry the burden.” (29) Pinter’s reflections suggest that his need to forget his childhood led him to withhold the trauma he survived, only to have it manifest itself in his plays.

The themes that recur in his plays distinctly reflect his Jewish background. Pinter recognises that his fascination with “dominance and subservience” has become a common theme in his plays (Gale 18). The roles of the victim and the aggressor begin to emerge from Pinter’s fascination with ‘dominance and subservience,’ suggesting that the themes in Pinter’s work are associated with one particular aspect of Pinter's life: his Jewish heritage. Steven H. Gale discusses Pinter’s themes, suggesting that they are all ultimately related. He makes reference to Bernard Dukore, who describes Pinter’s writing as “a picture of contemporary man beaten down by the social forces around him, based on man’s failure to communicate with other men” (Dukore 17). The idea suggested by Dukore that Pinter’s plays reflect a type of social oppression can be traced back to Pinter’s experiences in his youth.

His childhood fears, deeply rooted in his psyche, had a great impact on his career as a playwright. He always remained a Jewish child who had experienced World War II and was shattered and scared. His childhood memories are a leitmotif throughout Pinter’s career (Mskhaladze 390).

When Pinter began his playwriting career in 1957, however, one idea was foremost in his mind as a major theme: fear. As a young Jew living through the early days of World War II, he had gone to bed afraid that he might be awakened in the night by a knock at the door and that he and his parents would be taken forcibly from their home by unknown assailants, a vivid image drawn from the tales of Hitler’s Germany (Gale 18). Pinter himself stated in interviews that he could hardly bring back his childhood memories and was unable to recall any stories whatsoever. Pinter’s poor memory or the absence of his childhood memories implies an unconscious will to suppress his past and escape from it. He would rather forget that kind of past than remember it.

In Miriam Gross’s interview, “Pinter on Pinter,” Pinter discusses his suspicion of political structures and governments and the way that governments manipulate people for their own gain. His political point of view comes from his strong feelings about war. He states, “I felt very strongly about the war. And still do, if you see what I mean. After all, I wasn’t a child by the time it ended; though I was when it began” (Gross 39). Pinter’s reflections on war reveal that perhaps he has buried his childhood memories only because they were too painful or difficult to live with. This repression is important to consider when analysing Pinter’s work, especially since he was a victim of anti-Semitism. Pinter’s childhood, the most formative period of a person’s life, has a strong influence on his playwriting. It is important to reiterate that many of the defining qualities of Pinter’s plays are a result of the world that he grew up in. Pinter’s experience as a member of the Jewish minority influenced his use of menace in his plays. Pinter uses language not only as a tool for creating menace, but also as a tool for survival. Pinter’s plays are influenced by events and moments from his past, whether or not they are consciously recognisable. For example, his plays are noted for their use of silence and cryptic small talk. Pinter's major plays are usually set in a single room, whose occupants are threatened by forces or people whose precise intentions neither the characters nor the audience can define. Often these characters are engaged in a struggle for survival or control. It is arguable that Pinter’s plays depict his lifelong awareness of discrimination against a minority group, all due to his own victimisation as a Jewish person.

Susan Hollis Merritt notes Pinter’s Jewishness in her article “Major Critics, Strategies, and Trends in Pinter Criticism.” She states that Pinter’s “repressed wishes and fears are extrapolated from characters’ dramatized ones; his repressed ambivalence and anguish about his own Jewishness in an alien, hostile world motivates tensions and ambiguities characterizing human relationships with others in his plays” (Merritt 314).

His early plays represent a subconscious characterisation of the Holocaust. More importantly, the plays act as a political commentary on the way that power corrupts people. Pinter, if not aware during the war, would have learned after the fall of the Nazi Regime that over two-thirds of the nine million Jewish people who lived in Europe in 1933 were dead by 1945. Although Britain was never occupied by the Nazi Regime during World War II, there was a strong anti-Semitic attitude prevalent in London, an attitude that forced British Jews to live in fear as well. Pinter’s experience growing up in a political minefield would later manifest itself in his work, both creatively and politically (Halwas 7).

Pinter’s Jewish origin, his painful war experiences, and childhood memories played a significant role in his future political life too. He got engaged in world political events from an early age. Pinter despised Cold War policy which he officially demonstrated by the refusal of military service. He also joined apartheid movement as he shuddered against the deeds of Americans committed in Vietnam. He visited Turkey together with Arthur Miller where he witnessed an abundant number of Human Rights violations which he later publicly condemned. He also supported anti-Thatcher group who were against policies carried out by Ms. Thatcher. Pinter condemned the foreign policy of America and Britain after World War II. People did not feel safe anymore in the world they dwelt, especially after World War II. People had not forgotten holocaust horrors and their life was not secured from human evil and malice. The main causes for this cruelty were the heads of the states who did not exercise any credibility among citizens and as a result of their wrong policies more and more people were under threat. This feeling of threat was further intensified during Cold War tensions between western and eastern blocs. The world was before the threat of a Nuclear War. Naturally, within the bound of this status quo, Pinter’s characters rush to rooms and spaces to keep away from hostile environment existing outside. Pinter’s early plays are discreetly political. Pinter hides those political messages so delicately that on the surface it is difficult to label them as political plays. Thus during 1950-60s Pinter was never considered a political playwright. It is true that Pinter started writing plays in 1957 but the first play which is considered an overtly political was written after three decades in the 1980s. When Pinter started writing political plays, they were met by skepticism from the society. To begin with, public disapproved Pinter’s decision to diverge from his traditional plays. They were doubtful about his political commitment and artistic autonomy. They believed it is not a playwright’s obligation to write about politics. The public became uninterested in Pinter’s play they thought it included political messages. However, what they did not realize was that Pinter’s politics here did not imply making political statements praising any party politics but what he intended was to portray those malicious intents of political systems aimed at suppressing and demeaning humans. In this case, Pinter will question and cast doubt on the truth of the accepted norm of society (Mskhaladze 391).

In domestic and international politics, Britain went through significant changes; for instance, India’s declaration of independence in 1947 blemished Britain’s national strength and international reputation. Furthermore, as Peacock explains, “Chinese involvement in the Korean War of 1951 and Russia's blockading of Berlin in 1947 and its invasion of Hungary in 1956 inspired fear of Communist expansionism. Finally, most threatening of all was the adoption of the atomic bomb by both East and West. By 1956, Britain was socially and politically very different from what it had been in 1939” (7). With all these events taken into consideration, control and surveillance became the central issues in maintaining a stable economy and creating a working welfare state in the political arena. Michel Foucault's discussion of the birth of the prison and Jeremy Bentham's design of the Panopticon will be correlated with the social conditions in terms of domestic and international affairs during the post-War years in Britain.

Another reason for Pinter’s political turn is that the attacks he was subjected to in the public press, which were especially strong at the height of Thatcherite Britain, and the criticism he received from his scholarly admirers were both entirely predictable. Pinter was exposed to personal and critical censure from reviewers and critics due to his public image as a politically engaged author.

The critiques of postmodern theorists have forced a crisis in locating and approaching the substance of politics. As Frederic Jameson has written, the cultural realm has explosively merged with the social, so that now, the political, as a category, is dispersed throughout culture, art, philosophy, and lifestyles, rather than being traditionally found in the realms of governmental and political institutions and power relationships (48). This public level of power forms the basic thematic material of Pinter’s political theatre (Grimes 3-5).

The Cold War and early post-Cold War era in which Pinter turned to politics is an ironic moment given the current status of politics, of the prospects for historical change, and even of the very notion of history. Power is always a defining element of human relationships. The indifference of others allows power and cruelty to function. Conflicts become battles for the survival of identity and self, and struggles over protected, protective spaces and rooms are ever present. Victimisation, hierarchy, terror, the ostracisation of individuals, and interrogations which are so close to torture have intensely recurred in Pinter’s dramatic output since its beginnings, and they are prominent in plays not at first thought political, such as The Room, The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter. (Grimes 6-7)

Pinter’s works have travelled through time and space. While his characters were portrayed as room dwellers who secured themselves against any danger or harm in his earlier plays in the late 1950s, his characters in the 1980s moved from the domestic sphere into the public sphere. This domestic sphere in which post-war-stricken and especially Holocaust victims take shelter in order to ensure their safety is the epitome of the enclosed spaces depicted by Pinter. Pinter’s “rooms” represent an escape from threat, menace, or any hazardous attack because the horror outside threatens their lives. The menace outside is dreadful, and those who hold power are those who inflict violence. These threatening interveners in the earlier plays turn into oppressive governors in his late plays. This domestic sphere turns into a universally oppressive space filled with violence, rape, death, and surveillance. In his late plays, the dramatised space has been widened both literally and figuratively. The image of the “room” is superseded by global cities and foreign countries as the locus of oppression and the centre of political power. His late stage goes beyond the world of the theatre and becomes a sharply political scene in the 1980s.

Discussion

One of Harold Pinter’s overtly political plays, Ashes to Ashes (1996), reflects violence, political oppression, and cruelty through the character of Rebecca. Her memories particularly resonate with the Holocaust, and her dreamlike visions and the inhumane treatment towards her show her excessive and compulsive concern. The play occurs in the past, and it shows how it constructs reality in the present. However, Rebecca’s precarious memory distorts reality and instead provides the audience with versions of different realities. This unreliability in her memory calls into question her claims regarding the atrocities narrated in the play. Ashes to Ashes emphasizes the brutality, violence, torture and oppression observed throughout world history, which haunts the conscience of humanity as reflected in the character of Rebecca. In this sense, the play seems to be evocative of the Holocaust as it creates the same sense of responsibility for human suffering in the past and warns the audience about the possibility of acts of oppression and violence taking place in their own countries that seem to be far away from the atrocities performed in the play. She narrates those visions to a man named Devlin, who plays the multiple roles of her husband and/or lover, therapist, and torturer:

REBECCA I walked out into the frozen city. Even the mud was frozen. And the snow was a funny colour. It wasn’t white. Well, it was white but there were other colours in it. It was as if there were veins running through it. And it wasn’t smooth, as snow is, as snow should be. It was bumpy. And when I got to the railway station I saw the train. Other people were there.

Pause.

And my best friend, the man I had given my heart to, the man I knew was the man for me the moment we met, my dear, my most precious companion, I watched him walk down the platform and tear all the babies from the arms of their screaming mothers.

Silence. Ashes to Ashes in Pinter: Plays 4, pp. 395-433

It can be acknowledged that there is an echo of Auschwitz in the image of the ‘railway station’ and the ‘tear[ing]’ of ‘the babies from the arms of their screaming mothers’. However, by having a woman driven insane evoke these scenes, Pinter seems to suggest that Rebecca cannot express her suffering and that her speech indicates sheer irrationality and meaninglessness. Crucial in this connection is Devlin’s insistence on interrogating Rebecca:

Now let me say this. A little while ago you made … shall we say … you made a somewhat oblique reference to your bloke … your lover? … and babies and mothers, et cetera. And platforms. 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? Ashes to Ashes in Pinter: Plays 4, pp. 413

Pinter here presents a sexist discourse on suffering – a gendered discourse of response that counters the affective-feminine response of Rebecca. (Irigaray, p. xii.) Devlin subjects Rebecca to a kind of inquiry: ‘I’m compelled to ask you questions. There are so many things I don’t know. I know nothing … about any of this. Nothing. I’m in the dark. I need light’. (Ashes to Ashes in Pinter: Plays 4, pp. 399) It is important to note that the masculine, or hyper-masculine, character of Devlin’s interrogation entails not only a desire to master Rebecca’s mind but also to conquer her body:

DEVLIN goes to her. He stands over her and looks down at her.

He clenches his fist and holds it in front of her face. He puts his left hand behind her neck and grips it. He brings her head towards his fist. His fist touches her mouth. (Ashes to Ashes in Pinter: Plays 4, pp. 428)

Pinter, who tends to create the image of a safe room, has eliminated the safe environment with violence and menace in this play. Devlin’s physical aggression is here highlighted by Rebecca’s pervious body, as suggested by her being not only sexually penetrated – ‘So your legs were opening?’– but also psychically penetrated. (Ashes to Ashes in Pinter: Plays 4, pp. 397) She completely loses her sense of self as she identifies with one of the mothers in her visions who was forced to give away her baby:

REBECCA I took my baby and wrapped it in my shawl ECHO my shawl

REBECCA And I made it into a bundle

ECHO a bundle

[…]

REBECCA But the baby cried out

ECHO cried out

REBECCA And the man called me back

ECHO called me back

REBECCA And he said what do you have there

ECHO have there

REBECCA He stretched out his hand for the bundle

ECHO for the bundle

REBECCA And I gave him the bundle

ECHO the bundle REBECCA And that’s the last time I held the bundle

ECHO the bundle

Silence. Ashes to Ashes in Pinter: Plays 4, pp. 429

By narrating this haunting vision of infantile loss in the first person, Rebecca does not so much appear to bear witness to loss as to experience it. Moreover, Pinter seems to explore feminine subjectivity as an alternative to the masculine subjectivity that so dominates the world he represents, the world of political reality. What can be observed in this feminine subjectivity is insecurity and uncertainty.

Conclusion

In Ashes to Ashes, Pinter goes beyond time and space; not limited to England, he also reveals the occupation of citizens of Jewish origin living in European lands, and the spiritual and psychological movements of the people of that period of brutality experienced in the 1945s. In addition, Pinter, who has generally transitioned to the public sphere in his political plays, has moved away from the domestic sphere and begun to focus on global themes in an international space. The Holocaust, which had an impact on people through the effects of the Second World War, induced delirium and delusions in people, and Pinter portrays these effects through pauses in his plays and memories that cannot be distinguished as real or illusory.

References