Things, Voices, Events: Harold Pinter's Mountain Language as Testamental Text

Abstract

Critical conversation about the work of Samuel Beckett has been immeasurably enriched by the meditations of such thinkers as Alain Badiou and Pascale Casanova, both of whom – for very different reasons – have elevated Beckett's Worstward Ho (1983) to the status of “testamental” or “recapitulatory” text: that is, a text that, in Badiou's phrasing, serves to “take stock of the whole of Samuel Beckett's intellectual enterprise.” This essay on Harold Pinter endeavours to make a similar claim for his short 1988 play Mountain Language. In particular, and through the unique theoretical interventions of Badiou, Bill Brown, and Cary Wolfe, “Things, Voices, Events: Harold Pinter's Mountain Language as Testamental Text” delineates the myriad strategies of repressive forces in their ongoing project of domination. These prominently include the priority of the voice, the activation of material “things” as psychical weapons, and frequent recourse to a discourse of species to elide boundaries between the human and the animal, all of which provide a means to re-read the canon of Pinter's work.