Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
July 2007
Notes on The Homecoming
MAX: I'll tell you what you've got to do. What you've got to do is you've got to learn how to defend yourself, and you've got to learn how to attack. That's your only trouble as a boxer. You don't know how to defend yourself, and you don't know how to attack. (Pause.) Once you've mastered those arts you can go straight to the top. (Pause.)
JOEY: I've got a pretty good idea ... of how to do that.
Of course, Joey is the only member of the family in Harold Pinter's 1965 play The Homecoming who doesn't know how to do that; this youngest brother, inarticulate and impotent, can be felled by a single punch of a man more than twice his age. But he is, of all these characters, the most tortured victim, and at the end of the play it is he who receives the affectionate, healing caresses of Ruth in the tableau, the Pieta, that closes the play. Max begs for a kiss from a woman whom, in his objectification of her, he has placed at an impossible distance from his own violent and acidulous spirit; curiously sexless businessman Lenny stands at a convenient remove; truthteller Sam, ignored and irrelevant, is incapacitated; and finally, the self-aware Teddy is back off to America, alone, to take over as patriarch (as womanless as his own family's) his own house of three sons, in all likelihood to perpetuate contemporary sexual hegemony on distant shores.
What has changed in Pinter's perspective since 1965 is a greater compassion for the Joeys of the world; he has also found an articulateness in the condition of the political victim, a greater imaginative freedom which he continued to open out in the plays that followed The Homecoming from Landscape on through Old Times and finally Ashes to Ashes and Moonlight (there is a sense that this is, in fact, Joey's play, in his silences a greater truth than the wordgames that the family plays with each other); but a greater recognition, too, of the way this hegemony and ideology works in the larger world. His social spirit also becomes more incisive, sexual power politics written much more broadly in contemporary culture. He turns from sexual oppression to social oppression (though these oppressions are profoundly related). It is also no surprise that his technique has become simpler, more essentialist: his exteriors are simple walls; his interiors simple desks and tables, sometimes only two chairs. In part, the experience of The Homecoming confirms what Michael Billington wrote about Pinter in April:
In Britain one question is constantly asked about Pinter: are his late, overtly political plays as rich and fascinating as earlier, acknowledged masterpieces like The Caretaker and The Homecoming? In the end, it's a parochial question. The more you travel, the more you realise the universal resonance of Pinter's studies of political oppression. I've never forgotten seeing One for the Road in Barcelona, where an audience that had collective memories of Franco-ist fascism responded to this study of state cruelty with an intensity I've never witnessed in Britain. ...
... [Watching] the brave and brilliant actors from Belarus, I was reminded of how isolated we are in Britain. We fuss about nice aesthetic distinctions. One distinguished speaker, actually American, said in Leeds that Pinter's late political plays are "timely" rather than "timeless". But I wonder. As long as there is injustice, cruelty and oppression, I believe Pinter's later works will not merely survive. They will possibly even outlast the linguistic virtuosity of some of the early plays. That, for me, was the priceless lesson of Leeds: that politics gives drama a purchase on posterity.
In watching the fine 1973 Peter Hall film of the play last night, I discovered once again the timelessness of this early Pinter play (it came only seven years after his 1958 debut The Room); its poeticism and lyricism, its nightmare quality, its acidulous sexuality and cry of terror moving the drama from a North London house to a Strindbergesque dreamscape within its first two scenes. In the next few days I hope to offer a few more disconnected notes on the play, in anticipation of a rumored Broadway revival to be directed by Daniel Sullivan. There is a sense that Pinter's latest work renders his early plays, in retrospect, even more multidimensional than they seemed at first.
A Glass of Water
The ritual of The Homecoming is the ritual of a possessory cultural dynamic – that of the family – perpetuating itself. In leaving Europe for America, Teddy and Ruth attempt to break the cycle, to pretend that they can escape the symbolic structures that shape sex roles. These structures are rehearsed through metaphor, through linguistic symbol-making.
Each family, each relationship, exists within a realm of metaphor: father and son, husband and wife, brother and sister; the past, too, is shaped by metaphor, even a past which may not have ever existed. In their initial meeting, Lenny tells Ruth, who has just been to Venice, "I've always had a feeling that if I'd been a soldier in the last war – say in the Italian campaign – I'd probably have found myself in Venice." In the penultimate scene of the play, the illusory bond between Teddy and Ruth is irrevocably broken when she tells him, "If I'd been a nurse in the Italian campaign I would have been there before," re-establishing in their own relationship the inescapable symbolic world of metaphor that Lenny introduces during that prior scene. (The moment is among the most elegant and sublime of the play.) The homecoming is Ruth's as much as it is Teddy's; the ritual of homecoming is also that of a self facing its own genetic corruption.
Ruth and Lenny speak the same language, that of images of innocence corrupted from beneath by the truth that lies just below the surface. In fact, the entire family, with the exception of Joey, lives within this imagined sphere. But they are profoundly aware of this life of imagination; it is rich enough to absorb even the truth of corruption. When Sam bursts out with "MacGregor had Jessie in the back of my cab as I drove them along," his exclamation has no meaning because it tells nobody in the room anything they didn't already know. The linguistic wonder of the play is in its rush of double-edged images, of its unending play of linguistic signs and signifiers. Lenny's "high executive in a worldwide group of aeronautical engineers" is immediately, despite this seeming achievement, undermined ("Yes, I know the kind of man you're talking about," is his vague insinuation); Ruth's admission that she was "a model for the body. A photographic model for the body ... before I had ... all my children" is as close as she comes to an admission of her former occupation. But it is, for this family, more than close enough.
Philosopher Teddy protests that, in contrast to the rest of his family, he is somehow outside of this metaphorical sphere. Laying claim to "intellectual equilibrium," he insists, "You're just objects. You just ... move about. I can observe it. I can see what you do. It's the same as I do. But you're lost in it. You won't get me being ... I won't be lost in it." But he, like Ruth, is simultaneously inside and outside of this symbolic world; and he and Ruth, and Lenny, are self-conscious citizens of that world. (And they are postmodern businessmen and businesswomen as well, the crudity of their machinations concealed under a polished veneer of polite speech – so, perhaps, one step beyond the four-letter vocabularies of Max and Sam, the generation that is dying out. I personally like to think that among the vicious, crude but wealthy partygoers of Pinter's 2000 play Celebration are Teddy and Ruth's three sons.) And in that world of slippery symbols they will remain, until they heed their creator's warning. As Pinter said in his Nobel speech:
When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
It is this – this smashing of the mirror – that, because so heavily indebted to that mirror for their sense of self, this family will forever find impossible.
Ruth's Legs; Nicolas' Fingers
Of late Harold Pinter has taken to directing his own work (and so many playwrights come to this: Samuel Beckett, Howard Barker, Irene Fornes, etc.). Pinter is in this later part of his career a complete theatre practitioner -- actor, director, writer -- and this only confirms the status of his work as an individual consciousness to be explored theatrically. Shakespeare a complete theatre practitioner; the writer, in taking on the director's mantle, learns the poetics of space
Pinter writes physical gesture as well as linguistic gesture; in directing and acting, he continues to serve the embodied word.
Ruth in The Homecoming (1965):
You've forgotten something. Look at me. I ... move my leg. That's all it is. But I wear ... underwear ... which moves with me ... it ... captures your attention. Perhaps you misinterpret. The action is simple. It's a leg ... moving. My lips move. Why don't you restrict ... your observations to that? Perhaps the fact that they move is more significant ... than the words which come through them. You must bear that ... possibility ... in mind. (Pause.) I was born quite near here. (Pause.) Then ... six years ago, I went to America. (Pause.) It's all rock. And sand. It stretches ... so far ... everywhere you look. And there's lots of insects there. (Pause.) And there's lots of insects there. (Silence.)
Nicolas in One for the Road (1984) completes the ideological intent of the seemingly innocent gesture that suggests transgression:
What do you think this is? It's my finger. And this is my little finger. I wave my big finger in front of your eyes. Like this. And now I do the same with my little finger. I can also use both ... at the same time. Like this. I can do absolutely anything I like. Do you think I'm mad? My mother did. (He laughs.) Do you think waving fingers in front of people's eyes is silly? I can see your point. You're a man of the highest intelligence. But would you take the same view if it was my boot – or my penis? Why am I so obsessed with eyes? Am I obsessed with eyes? Possibly. Not my eyes. Other people's eyes. The eyes of people who are brought to me here. They're so vulnerable. The soul shines through them. Are you a religious man? I am. Which side do you think God is on? I'm going to have a drink.
The director does not direct gesture; the word itself operates from within the dialogue to complete the gestured expression as sign. In this theatre, is the director, imposing authoritarian meaning to a scene (see for this Beckett's Catastrophe), seeing his role fade to insignificance?
Decisions
RUTH: How did you know she was diseased?
LENNY: How did I know? (Pause.) I decided she was.
The family of The Homecoming, having determined the way the world works, lives within its own agonising confines. They themselves set the limits of those confines, acting from within their own illusions. The performer is asked to make decisions about these actions; but on what basis, from what motives within these characters, do they proceed to do so?
What is true or false is not determinable from the text itself. Every decision is the wrong decision, because any decision is based on the values of unknown variables. The performer is forced to demonstrate a range of possibilities rather than inhabit a single perspective: what's more, to demonstrate the very unknowability of motive. "Lenny, do you think she understands ... what ... what ... what ... we're getting at? What ... we've got in mind? Do you think she's got it clear? I don't think she's got it clear," Max stammers at the end of the play, denying Ruth's awareness, exhibiting a rupture of his own consciousness (for he's certainly been clear enough since her entrance). Ultimately, for these characters, solipsistic illusion is unsustainable; instead, they must surrender, as Teddy does, to the dynamic of possession.
This had been inherent in Pinter's work since The Birthday Party, and in his "last" play, Celebration, the possessors are literally material possessors, the upper-class partygoers; the collective consciousness of the serving class has been forcibly reduced, by those possessors, to a mass jumble of celebrity, manufactured image and uncertain memory, the Waiter spouting lucid nonsense, a Lucky's monologue for the technological age. Deeply funny, deeply comic, of course; if nothing else, Pinter's characters, like Pinter himself, know the value of a joke. But it is a joke swallowed in darkness, a laugh from within the black void that haunts Pinter's people – prostitutes, pimps, victims and torturers alike – even as they skate upon the frozen surface that divides signifier from signified, dream from consciousness, remorseless body from the self-bound soul.
