Sensory Landscapes in Harold Pinter: A Study in Ecocriticism and Symbolist Aesthetics

Abstract

The apparatus is vigorous. The scope broad. The argument provocative. Readers will find here a solid review of Pinter criticism blended with an insistent nudge to look at Pinter in new ways. That insistent nudge leads to an “in-depth study that relates Pinter's dramatic images and sensory landscapes to Symbolist theatre and theory” (11). Interdisciplinary in approach, Corrêa's work blends such concepts as micropolitics, synthesia, and sensory scapes.In addition to a very helpful introduction and conclusion, the book divides into five substantial chapters: “Landscape Theory,” “Pinter's Dramatic Landscapes,” “Space Becomes Air,” “Apocalyptic Landscapes,” and “Unsustainable Homescapes.” In each chapter, the author closely analyzes several Pinter dramas. Further, she relies on a wide body of scholarship as she joins the conversation. Ample and discursive footnotes carry her arguments beyond her already dense prose. She includes a list of Pinter's dramas to include the year of first performance, a handy reference. The wide-ranging, thorough bibliography is subdivided into useful categories.Dispensing with Martin Esslin's frequently misapplied categorizations, the author moves Pinter's plays from Absurdist to Symbolist. She argues that our decades-old insistence on viewing plays as scripts rather than texts has led us astray. By focusing on performance rather than drama, Corrêa asserts, scholars have missed Pinter's rich imagery and evocative space. For example, when Corrêa applies landscape theory to Pinter's written works, rather than to a given production, she's attempting to activate “new areas for the critical imagination” (329). She views nature as text, not context. Characters are environmental and therefore able to be read ecologically. Current criticism that stresses performance, almost to the exclusion of all else, ignores the function of environment within a playtext. In a perhaps unintentional echo of Chaplin's Modern Times, Corrêa highlights deadening external environments that thwart and harm internal ones. Pinter's plays, in this view, warn of the lethal effects of losing our connection with the natural world.When she turns to the Symbolist legacy, Corrêa's approach is far from monolithic. With The Room, A Slight Ache, The Caretaker, The Basement, No Man's Land, and A Kind of Alaska as a backdrop, she explores, among other topics, the monodramatic space of the stage; stasis; the double; ghostscapes and deathscapes. She builds layer upon layer of analysis into her examination of the texts. Since the “Symbolist aesthetic view is also a theoretical perspective,” Corrêa argues for an interactive process of image production between the beholder and the object” (326).Of particular interest is the idea that space, expressive and prominent, lives in and around us. We co-create our environments. Our energies emanate in our space and that same space produces a material effect on our bodies and spirits.Throughout, the author insists that we've missed key features of Pinter's plays. More than once she suggests our focus on performance, on script, can mislead. She argues, as a case in point, that Pinter's plays have always been political. He did not turn to the body politic only in the last third of his career, as others suggest. She “reveals the presence of political concerns throughout his oeuvre, thereby indicating a previously undetected consistency of his approach.” (15)This book offers some starting points for a new look at Pinter's drama. An idea here, a concept there, when parsed and held up to the light, offer an intriguing opening into the plays.