The Dynamics of Violence in Harold Pinter's Play- The Caretaker

Epiphany, 2015

Towards the end of 1960s there was a huge hippie movement which was marked as Turbulent Decade. In Britain the labor party gained power in 1964, in France the protests in 1968 forced President Charles de Gaulle to leave the country. For some people in Europe, May 1968 meant the end of traditional collective action and the beginning of a new era to be dominated mainly by different social movement emerging at that time throughout the world (Brinkley, 1997; Erlanger, 2008). Harold Pinter's The Caretaker (1960) and Martin Amis' Money: The Suicide Note (1984) are embedded with violence and mistreatement among the main characters. With an attempt to reflect social dimensions of the society of that time, both novels deal with violence between very close people who have family or very close friendship ties. The Cartaker is the play in which people are portrayed as living on the edge, and are ready to accept any possibility presented in order to fulfill their individual psychological needs. The Money is a novel about John Self, a film director, a man who makes deals, spends a lot of money, abuses alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography, and as a result he is portrayed as extremely violent. This paper attempts to analyze the question of violence that is presented and described in these two works. More importantly, this paper uses socio-psychological approaches and the historical context in analyzing violence in these two works. An analysis of absurd and satirist worlds presented by Pinter and Amis is especially valuable because of their relevance for describing and tackling present-day violence in our societies.

Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies: BELLS90 Proceedings. Volume 2, 2020

Although the danger and power of language form the basis of earlier plays by Harold Pinter, they are especially prominent in his dramatic sketch Precisely and overtly political trilogy that will be discussed -One for the Road, Mountain Language and Party Time. We will focus primarily on the author's task to reveal hidden verbal violence that governs individuals in those plays. Each play will be discussed separately suggesting general contexts within which various devices of verbal aggression can be implied. It will be shown that Pinter's characters use words as weapons, while it is ambiguous who the victim/victor is. Language becomes the medium through which characters become dominated and victimized and verbal violence the means of destroying man's individuality.

2018

Abstract. Introduction. The problem of political and mental disorder, which has been addressed to by many writers, – and the expressive figure of the British playwright, director and screenwriter, a poet Harold Pinter (1930-2008) is no exception. Apparently, his theatrical and acting performance has dwelled upon many issues, similarly significant to social and interpersonal spheres of life, since he stated that these may be diverse parts of similar mental activities. Methods. The complex descriptive analysis and historic cultural methods have been selected as the main tools to approach the issue under discussion. It also uses hermeneutic analysis and intertextual method in accessing the main Pinter’s style characteristics. Results and discussion. His writing blends violence, menace and terror, intimacy and authoritative oppression. The author build his own language of the highest metaphoricity up, arguing upon the concepts of gender and language, being and non-being, misogyny, total...

published in The Dhauli Review 2016 Link http://dhaulireview.com/newdhauli/showcontent.php?id=8&aid=131 Harold Pinter,Playwright, screenwriter, actor, theatre director, poet noted for his political polemics has shaped the vocabulary of modern drama. Not only in his plays but in his speeches the Nobel British Dramatist has been a serious critic of state brutalism irrespective of the national boundaries. His plays oscillate between two poles – the apex of power and the abyss of the torture. There are layers of meanings in his plays hinting at different levels of power play. The boredom of the torturer, the fun that he gets out of inflicting pain on the victim, the celebration of power by the man/men who run the country, the ignorance of the killer about the organization who hires him for a job all contribute to the making of "pinteresque " .

2018

This thesis aims to examine how far the political plays of Harold Pinter reflect the Arabic political situation, particularly in Syria and Egypt, by comparing them to several plays that have been written in these two countries after 1967. During the research, the comparative study examined the similarities and differences on a theoretical basis, and how each playwright dramatised the topic of political violence and aggression against oppressed individuals. It also focussed on what dramatic techniques have been used in the plays. The thesis also tries to shed light on how Arab theatre practitioners managed to adapt Pinter’s plays to overcome the cultural-specific elements and the foreignness of the text to bring the play closer to the understanding of the targeted audience.

Rock Pebbles, 2020

Critics have time and again deliberated upon the topic whether art and politics are inseparable. I am among the many who believe that it is inseparable as art mirrors life which is always embroiled in some controversy or the other. These controversies or complexities are the consequence of the political acts of not only the subjects of art but also the artist's own attempt to conform his readers to his own thought process. One such artist is Harold Pinter who not only participated in political debates, human rights rallies, antinuclear campaigns but also penned down through his plays and other works his political thoughts and vexation against social pathologies rampant all over the world. The present study is thus an attempt to fathom the political activism of Harold Pinter in a bid to understand better the pathology embedded in his plays directly political and thereby initiate measures to curb the universal injustice and exploitation committed against the weak, the poor, the marginalized and abjected groups.

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2013

The action of the play takes place in a junk-filled room of a tumbledo Hern, 1982:21). Inner guilt is a cry for, identity, security and existence. In The Caretaker, all these terms are defined by the relationship among Davies, Aston and Mick. The sense of guilt is underlined by the lack of identity positions and, to an extent, by their clinging reliance on physical objects. It is significant that we are not introduced to the characters by way of a formal exposition. This would imply that they are familiar and known from the beginning. The sense of guilt does not only bel Davies from the Paradise has uprooted him not only in the ontological aspect but also in the psychological respect. Davies himself is not an innocent victim but a victimizer too. He is a victim of a system, which gives him a name but forces him to use another. He combats injustice with inertia and self-righteousness. This article aims at analyzing the play, The Caretaker.

This research work focuses on the Absurdist elements which are present in Harold Pinter’s play named “The Caretaker” and relate those elements to the contemporary Pakistani scenario. As Absurdist plays have no restrictions of specific time, place and action. So its fluid boundary applies on any time. Now-a-days, Pakistani society has all absurd elements in it i.e. violence, aggression, tension, competition, power-gaining through politics, jealousy, hatred and anxiety, which are also present in “The Caretaker”. For this purpose, Qualitative research methodology is used in this research and “violence reflected through language” and “language reflected through psyche” are pointed out to show the similarities or relations between “The Caretaker” (1960) and Pakistani scenario (2014).

Harold Pinter (1930-2008) is one of the most prestigious British playwrights of the modern period. Pinter won Nobel Prize for literature in 2005 and his literary canon became the cornerstone of dramatic literature. Pinter, both as writer and political activist, has sought to put forth the question of use and abuse of power. Pinter's One for the Road, written in 1984, deals with a totalitarian state whose aim is to recondition its dissents. This play dramatizes the atrocities committed by the functionary of the state in the name of democracy, while Party Time, written in 1991, focuses on the role of public and their thoughtless attitudes towards state oppression. Party Time depicts the actions of the Establishment of a society which they mask the cruel and the wicked nature of state power. This paper aims to illustrate the spaces of torture, incarceration and authority which State's discourse promotes and dictates to specific values, codes and approaches in meaning-making to lead the victims towards desired socio-political spaces of authority, control and approval.

2017

This thesis offers a comprehensive critical examination of the intersections between Pinter’s political output – most notably his drama – and contemporary ethical thought. In order to so, I build on the recent few discussions of Pinter’s ethics by arguing that the ethical has always been a critical focus at every stage of Pinter’s work. In short, this study challenges both the earlier tendency that takes Pinter as an Absurdist and the late one that regards him as purely political. I shall then seek to explore the nexus between politics and ethics in various Pinter texts that deal explicitly or suggestively with the political. In order to so, I shall look at the question of alterity as that which structures the irreducible gap between ethics and politics in Pinter’s work. In particular, I approach the conception of otherness in Pinter in the double sense of the unknowable and that which always already inhabits the same. In either case, alterity, for Pinter, I argue, appears as a disr...