Harold Pinter, Fascism, and Outrage: Aesthetic and Moral Implications
Dennis Eugene Russell
Bloomsbury Publishing New York
ISBN: 9781666943948 (hardback)
ISBN: 9781666943955 (ePDF)
ISBN: 9781666943962 (ebook)
200 pages
Review author: Trevor R. Griffiths
Dennis Eugene Russell’s book is a significant study of Pinter’s later works that draws on a wide range of other works to provide an overall perspective on the nature of his achievement in some of his less well-known and studied works. After an introduction, ‘The Joke is Over’, Russell devotes a chapter each to various plays or sketches: ‘Party Time: The Rhetoric of Class Domination’ is followed by ‘One for the Road: A Brutal Series of Facts’ , ‘The New World Order: Moral Implications of Spectator Witnessing’, ‘Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes: Aesthetic Shifts Amidst the Carnage’, ‘The Pres and an Officer, Precisely’, and ‘Press Conference: Sketches of Nuclear and Authoritarian Dread’ and a conclusion ‘An Anti-Theatre of Immediacy, Transparency, and Audience Endurance’
So, Russell’s analysis of Pinter’s late works deals with five plays from 1984 to 1996 and three additional sketches (two of which were staged in 1983 and one of which is of unknown date). According to Russell these are ‘overt uncompromising no holds barred indictments of fascistic political systems’. On page 4 he talks about the silencing of ideas and physical actions that are ‘antithetical to working democracy or civilised society’. In the introduction he summarises his argument in many ways, drawing on an eclectic range of different aspects of methodology from a stimulating range of disciplines. The range of his references is very wide: he draws on many theorists and many analyses, and he has much to say that is of great value.
However, ultimately the work suffers in its approach to the creation of an argument because of an over reliance on what seems to me to be a critical approach that depends very heavily on a method of juxtaposition of viewpoints. Where one might expect the different theoretical positions to build up into a coherent analysis of his own, the author seems instead to draw mainly on those particular figures in order to say something that does not transcend its sources or build arguments. Juxtaposition of Pinter’s works with works that may be responses to them, analogues with them or may partially occupy similar territory has great value in contextualising those works. But ultimately this study somehow lacks a final punch to enable us to say clearly that a particular analysis strengthens our understanding of precisely what Pinter is trying to say and how and why it does so. This is unfortunate because the experts are well chosen and their insights can be illuminating; yet we end up with something which is more like the ingredients that could make a really telling analysis of Pinter’s later practice, so that we end up with a recipe rather than a fully baked cake.
Presumably, the book was largely written between the two presidential terms of Donald Trump, and it suffers from not being in a position to contextualise many of Pinter’s own analyses of various political strategies in terms of the increasing number of manifestations of Trumpian rhetorical and propaganda ploys. These would certainly repay a close analysis along Russell’s lines and would confirm the relevance and importance of both Pinter’s works and Russell’s critique.
