Abstract
<p>In the late 1960s and early 1970s, with his memory plays Harold Pinter staged his own aesthetic revolution by breaking out of the traps represented by the Comedies of Menace. Pinter, as Noël Coward said, is a genuine original and a superb craftsman. In <em>Old Times</em>, he drastically breaks our traditional understanding of “time” and “memory”, endowing memory with a special quality. It becomes a net which can be weaved randomly. From the perspective of spatial theory, the paper aims at analyzing the temporal characteristics and spatial characteristics of <em>Old Times </em>and exploring the inner world of modern people. It comes to a conclusion that characters create the past story according to their psychological or tactical needs of the moment; in other words, memory is the means of psychological domination. The play also intends to reveal something universal: the sense of crisis and loneliness. Deeley and Anna trap themselves in power struggle because they see each other as a threat to their relationship with Kate. So it suggests that each man is an island.</p>
Highlights
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, with his memory plays Harold Pinter staged his own aesthetic revolution by breaking out of the traps represented by the Comedies of Menace
From the perspective of spatial theory, the paper aims at analyzing the temporal characteristics and spatial characteristics of Old Times and exploring the inner world of modern people
It comes to a conclusion that characters create the past story according to their psychological or tactical needs of the moment; in other words, memory is the means of psychological domination
Summary
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, with his memory plays Harold Pinter staged his own aesthetic revolution by breaking out of the traps represented by the Comedies of Menace. As Anna says in the play, “There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. The prototype of Pinter’s earlier plays, such as The Caretaker, The Homecoming, with characters fighting for territory has been transformed into the fierce fight for emotion and mind in Old Times. Joseph Frank is the first person to study spatial theory solemnly, with his writing Spatial Form in Modern Literature as the origin of literature study turn. He created a dynamic concept “spatial form”, which refers to a kind of symbolic and metaphorical expression of sequence arrangement and plot relations of text. The following discussion will focus on an analysis of the temporal characteristics and spatial characteristics of Old Times and explore the inner world of modern people
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