One for the Road, Mountain Language and the Impasse of Politics

Abstract

One for the Road, Mountain Language and the Impasse of Politics MARC SILVERSTEIN Onefor the Road (1984) and Moulltain Language (1988), Harold Pinter's most recent works for the theatre, represent the dramatist's most overtly political work to date. Dramatizing and directly confronting the audience with the oppressive and authoritarian operations of state power, these dramas have been greeted by reviewers as signalling a shift in Pinter's writing from what Martin Esslin terms " the highly private world ofhis [earlier] plays'" to a concern with charting the more public terrain of the political arena. It would be extremely reductionistic, however, to base a judgment of what constitutes political art solely on a consideration of manifest content. Examining Pinter's dramatic oeuvre from The Room (1957) through Mountain Language, we discover less an emphasis on that "highly private world" that Esslin posits as the defining characteristic of the "Theatre of the Absurd" than a focus on the mechanisms of domination and marginalization, the social construction of gender and sexuality, and the ideological status of such "state apparatus" as the family a focus, in other words, on fundamentally political issues. To phrase this last point somewhat differently: at the center of Pinter's work lies a concern with the nature, operation and structures ofpower that inform the cultural order. Certainly, we may not initially sense anything startlingly new in the claim that Pinter'S plays revolve around questions of power - Burkman, Esslin, Gabbard, Gale, and Quigley are only some of the critics who have directed attention to the battles for power that form the nucleus of Pinter's dramatic action. What has not received sufficient attention, however, is the political dimension of these battles, a dimension arising from how Pinter conceptualizes power rather than a quality that inheres in power itself. To perceive the political resonance of such battles for position. we must recognize that we cannot divorce these battles from the cultural space in which they are fought; that we are not dealing with contests for personal power (a phrase that, as I will argue, has no meaning within Pinter's dramatic universe); that the (1991) 34 MODERN DRAMA 422 One for the Road and Mountain Language 423 integrity of the cultural order itself becomes the stakes in the power games and struggles for authority Pinter dramatizes. To elucidate these claims and identify the precise nature of Pinter's political vision, I want first to tum briefly to his two earliest and most " absurdist" plays before discussing how this vision informs the analysis ofstate power in Onefor the Road and Mountain Longuage. The Room was the first of Pinter's plays to receive the designation " comedy of menace," and critics ofthe play generally agree that this sense of menace finds its locus in the enigmatic figure of Riley. As a Negro who bears an Irish name, Riley embodies two levels of otherness and cultural marginality. At the same time, however, arriving at Rose's flat to call her home, speaking quite literally in the narne-of-the-Father, he occupies the subject position ofwhat Lacan terms the (symbolic) father, the privileged site ofthe Word-as-Law within the cultural order. What is perhaps most significant about how Pinter depicts Riley is the lack of perceived tension or contradiction between his ethnic otherness and the position of cultural centrality from which he speaks. Indeed, if Pinter's stage directions did not repeatedly refer to him as "the Negro," the play would contain no textual indication of his "otherness," since the dialogue never directly refers to it. If the play renders Riley's ethnicity virtually invisible, we may well ask why Pinter does identify him as a Negro. I would argue that one answer to this question lies precisely in his invisibility. The power that speaks through Riley erases cultural difference through an inexorable logic ofthe same, allowing difference to (mis)recognize itself by identifying with an image of cultural centrality. Rather than resort to marginalization or repression to neutralize the threat of otherness, the cultural power for which Riley serves as " mouthpiece'" (re)creates the other in the image of its values, allowing the otherto speak its Janguage, desire its desires...