Deformation Of The "room"

Harold Pinter, as the third British playwright who won the Noble Prize forLiterature after George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett in2005, is the mostinfluential figure in the contemporary British theatre. As is common knowledge,Pinter‘s works can be roughly divided into three phases, namely, the Comedy ofMenace, the Memory Plays, and the Political Plays. The current domestic studies onHarold Pinter focus mainly on such early works as The Room, The Birthday Party, andThe Dumb Waiter. Discussions on his later works, which are rather rare, are usuallylinked with his early ones for the sake of the fact that the political themes of his laterworks are deemed as further development of the menace and injustice appeared in hisearly works, leaving his middle works, namely, the Memory Plays undealt with. As amatter of fact, there lies evident connection among his works of different phase sincethere is a line going throughout his oeuvre. One point that must be made clear is thatthe boundaries between the three categories are not clear-cut, rather, they are blurred byoverlapping and interpenetration.In view of this, this research aims to exhibit how the Memory Plays are connectedwith the Comedy of Menace and with his Political Plays by taking two narrativeelements–time and space–as the starting point in analysis. For the sake of analyticalconvenience, the Memory Plays are roughly classified into three categories, one withthe feature of time being spacialized, one has the characteristic of time politicalized,and mirrored relations of time and space.In the first category, Harold Pinter developed further the writing techniqueinnovated by Marcel Proust in his masterpiece A la Recherche du Temps Perdu(Remembrance of Things Past) and moved into a dramaturgy of stream ofconsciousness. In these plays, his dramatis persona battle for the room of each other‘smind instead of for the room of physical territory, which suggests the image of―room‖in his oeuvre is stretched from a physical space into the psychological sphere. Yetwithin the framework of family plays, the battle for―room‖is featured more by theimpossibility of communication and hopelessness of love.The second type falls into the traditional framework of a memory play whichknits past stories into the natural flow of current ones. When the current story carries onin a linear manner, tensions between now and past, between memories of differentcharacters work as the driving force. In the meantime, Pinter not merely encodes memory into the element―time‖, but enables it as a scale measuring human nature,while the theatrical space of such plays is as tangible as the rooms in his―Comedy ofMenace‖. Only this time, the dramatis personae wield their―memories‖either as aspear to force into the territory of the other, or use them as a shield to protectthemselves from being taken over. They fight for taking control of the mind of others.In such a transformed and extended―battle for territory‖, their―memories‖becomeweapons to serve this end.In the last category, the dramatis personae are suspended in both the story timeand space and in narrative time and space. Pinter began to shake off the influence of hisearly set pattern in the sense that not only the story time and space where the characterexists is as illusory as that in the Absurd Theatre, the narrative time and space is blurredand suspended too. In accordance to that, the psychological spheres of dramatispersonae are displaced and exchangeable as if in mirrors. Those who get lost with theiridentity are striving hard to locate or relocate themselves in time and space, strugglingon their path leading for an identity or a return to their own identity. In that sense, theirstruggle and effort taken for an identity is by no means different from that in Pinter‘searly plays.Under the superficial theme of feminism subject, the extended―battle forterritory‖, there secretly lies a theme of confrontation between individuals and anyorganization or society which has a nature of―room‖, a factor on the social and culturallevel that any fragile person might conflict vehemently with overwhelmingly powerfulsocial conventions. In exploring the subject of identity perplexity, people who get lostand therefore drifting in―other places‖under Pinter‘s pen overlap with those created byother playwrights of Pinter‘s age or in other works of his own, reflecting the strongsense of misplacement and isolation permeating in contemporary British society.Beneath it is the underlying social and cultural reason–the vulnerable unconscious egohas been all along conflicting with the mighty and formidable social forces. From whatstated above, the inner core at the social cultural level is never absent from his MemoryPlays. Pinter has been―updating‖his plays in terms of both dramaturgy and subjectmatters, one thing that he‘s never changed is that he never stops reflecting on the natureof the―room‖. Exploring the relations between an individual and the―room‖, the innerreality of the―power game‖between individuals within a―room‖is his interest thatruns throughout his artistic career.