The Pinter Problem by Austin E. QuigleyReview by: Arnold P. HinchliffeThe Modern Language Review, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Oct., 1977), pp. 933-935Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3724714 .

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The Pinter Problem. By AUSTIN E. QUIGLEY. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. I975. xx + 294 pp. ?7.90.

Professor Quigley's study of what he terms the Pinter problem has a bibliography on Pinter and his critics which runs to about ten pages and which is far from complete, possibly because it appears to end in I97I. The Theatre Quarterly biblio- graphy, published in 1975, which does not include this study, extends to thirty-six pages, suggesting that any new critical study of Pinter will have to contain striking new insights if it is to merit publication. Thus Baker and Tabachnik, two lecturers at the University of the Negev, Israel, produced an interesting work in 1973 because they considered the Jewish element embedded in Pinter's writings. Professor Austin E. Quigley's novelty is linguistics and he draws upon the work of such scholars as J. R. Firth, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and M. A. K. Halliday.

Of course it is impertinent to call linguistics a novelty. We have been aware of a language revolution since about I905; that there was a new theory of meaning which rests upon the central role of the linguistic in man and culture and that an examination of the meaning of literature should be an examination of the relevant grammar and functions of the language by which an artist experiences and demon- strates a view of reality. We are more and more compelled to ask whether linguistics has altered our understanding and experience of literature and, even more impor- tantly, whether literature itself has been influenced by these new theories of grammar. No less a scholar than George Steiner has warned us that if literary criticism and literary history are to be a serious enterprise rather than a solemn branch of journalism the question of the authority and range of pertinence which linguistics has for literary criticism must be faced. Although Pinter, in spite of his Jewishness, hardly seems to be one of Professor Steiner's 'extra-territorials' his language is clearly of the kind that justifies Professor Quigley in forcing the matter of linguistics upon us in the context of the plays.

In the opening chapter Professor Quigley outlines the first Pinter problem; namely that most of the accepted generalizations on Pinter were formulated in the first few years of his career and that a subsequent decade of criticism has done little to modify, much less advance upon those first statements. The basic problem, then is stagnation and stated thus it sounds a plausible one. But whereas Pinter as a dramatist must advance by writing new works that show a dramatic development, it may not be so inevitable that criticism should advance by writing new works about the old plays. May not the generalizations of the early years say as much or almost as much as is truthfully possible ? Professor Quigley believes not and mainly because the early criticism rests upon an outmoded and inadequate theory of meaning. His early chapters expose in some detail the current state of Pinter criticism; how, for example, the shift has taken place, from inexplicitness as a barrier to audience pleasure, to inexplicitness as a cause of audience pleasure, if not understanding. He also attacks the critical resort to a subtext insisting that if a subtext does exist it must be capable of linguistic specification. In short, critics, if they are to escape the trough in which Pinter critics have laboured for so long, will have to recognize that the Pinter problem is a linguistic one which is not capable of solution so long as the critic remains within that inadequate theory of meaning and fails to recognize what Wittgenstein called the plurality of language function.

Using an early biographical incident in Pinter's life Professor Quigley shows how language can be used to neutralize a threat and impose a context in which certain responses are promoted and the consequent relationships imposed. Language in Pinter's plays is, as most critics would agree, primarily a means of dictating and reinforcing relationships. The novelty in Pinter is not merely the creation of a highlyindividual style but the use of language which, according to Professor Quigley,

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934 Reviews

is 'unavailable to any critical analysis based in implicit appeals to the reference theory of meaning'.

From this point the relative absence of footnotes indicates that the new criticism is at work; it is, however, restricted to four plays. Professor Quigley points out that themes and relationships are developed through conversations or duologues, and that The Room is composed of six such units. He describes these six units in great detail and such description can hardly fail to be instructive; but such a nearly mathematical account must also be incomplete and possibly distorting. It can be reductive. Thus we read: 'To regard the Negro as a symbol of death, fate, age or whatever is also to go beyond the demands of the play. The play operates in the realm of variable character, uncertain fact, and unspecified fears. To label any of these is to change the play.'

Perhaps; but whose play? Can we insist that such a description of a text consti- tutes the play, and that any interpretation, even one so vague, must be the interpre- tation? When Rose's death is mentioned on page 109 such a reference does change the play since she only goes blind, but such a reference must also be an error. What Professor Quigley has produced is an elegant diagram, and a conclusion in which nothing is concluded.

The Caretaker consists, we are told, of fourteen units linked by the locale, the constant presence of Davies, and a series of recurrent motifs. What the play shows is how a third person entering a binary relationship (as the book calls it) sets up a situation which demands not only new relationships with the intruder but also an adjustment of the original relationship, which Jean-Paul Sartre as much as Wittgenstein has shown us. Again we have a detailed description of these units, an account that seems to imply that Pinter was writing another Tractatus rather than a play, and, what is more, that most serious form of drama, comedy. The Home- coming's fifteen units show how Pinter has moved from a two-plus-one relationship into larger groupings but the description, in spite of epigraphs from Wittgenstein and Marshall McLuhan, remains, surely, in the realm of a producer's notes, a quasi-scientific version of Stanislavski's specifics? Such models are necessarily static and reductive, though as aids to an actor or a set designer they do no harm. But they are no more than aids to a production. In his fourth example, Landscape, Professor Quigley's method seems more appropriate because that play is almost a dramatic poem in the sense that the action is primarily (but not wholly) linguistic.

What are the conclusions that emerge from this new treatment? The statement that Pinter alone, as opposed to Wesker, Osborne, Arden, and Beckett, has main- tained any dramatic momentum is not a statement anyone working in the theatre could readily accept. Pinter has written plays in 1967, I97I, and I975, which hardly suggests feverish activity. He has, of course, been otherwise engaged. The plays according to Professor Quigley are battles 'for the control of means by which personality is created in the social systems to which they belong' (p. 276) and although amusement along the way is conceded it is this linguistic battle which is crucial. These are hardly novel conclusions after so much detailed attention, and they coincide more or less with the cruder observations of critics bemused by such an inadequate theory of meaning. In short, these descriptions look like scientific accounts of how an experiment works, but because they are applied to plays they are really only one way of looking at the play. Producers have always felt that a text is little more than a scenario, and even if the theatre were to acknowledge the text as a fixed point it is still difficult to imagine a performance of No Man's Land which will be the same as the present one acted by Richardson and Gielgud in John Bury's stunning set. Or, for that matter, The Homecoming without Vivien Merchant, or The Caretaker without Donald Pleasance.

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Reviews Reviews 935 935 This is, of course, a general difficulty in writing about drama which by its very

nature is both a conjunction of many talents and ephemeral. Dr Leavis's admoni- tion that language in the full sense eludes the cognizance of any form of linguistic science is particularly relevant to drama. The desire and need to bring about an interaction between linguistics and literary criticism is both honest and urgent but drama seems the very last context for such a marriage. This book will be useful because it summarizes critical problems and exposes a set of responses to four plays, but how much more fruitful is Chapter 4 of Andrew Kennedy's Six Dramatists in Search of a Language (1975), which starts from the premise that theatre language is not narrowly linguistic. Theatre language is a great deal more than words, which is why a history of drama can never properly be written, least of all by someone who believes that linguistics is the way. A ARNOLD P. HINCHLIFFE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction: By LANDEG WHITE. London: Macmillan. I975. vi + 217 pp. ?6.95.

The merits as well as the weakness of Mr White's book are partly due to the fact that he insists in combining biographical details with critical comments. He is well informed on life in Trinidad and gives a clear picture of the environment in which Naipaul grew up as a boy: the melange of racial, religious, and political elements is accurately presented and is a help to the understanding of the subject matter of such novels as A House for Mr Biswas, The Mystic Masseur, The Mimic Men, and the documentary works: The Loss of El Dorado, The Middle Passage and An Area of Darkness.

Naipaul's progress as a writer from the time he was at grammar school in Trinidad to 1972, the year of the publication of journalistic pieces in The Overcrowded Barracoon, is treated as a quest for personal identity which results in the novelist's awareness of the necessity for social involvement. Mr White ends his book crypti- cally: '... .in the free state we all now inhabit the writer must keep alive that responsibility to other people which is the raw material of our humanity'. This, he suggests, is Naipaul's own insistence as a result of the novelist's experience so far. The quest for identity is related by Mr White to the usual topics: Naipaul's background, colonialism and the fading of empire, displacement of immigrants, rootlessness, and alienation. He shows how these are reflected in Naipaul's creative and documentary writings based on the Caribbean, Latin America, England, Africa, and India.

The antithesis of documentary and art is Mr White's basic theme, and he tries to make a case for his thesis that Naipaul's artistic sensibility is usually out of harmony with the demands of the form of the novel, without having given any explicit definition of what he calls the 'novel form'. Too much is made of a know- ledge of Naipaul's personal life as a requisite for understanding his creative work. It is evident that this Critical Introduction, in attempting both a valid judgement on the art of the novelist and an analysis of Naipaul's personal dilemmas, necessitates a continual shift of focus which blurs the critical vision.

The dialectic of involvement and detachment is certainly obvious in Naipaul's documentary pieces, but it is also the basis of his entire fiction. If the later novels and short stories give the impression of a more committed writer than the satirist of The Mystic Masseur this is due to the maturity of Naipaul as a novelist and his broadening sympathies as a man who has travelled much since he first set foot in England. Mr White over-emphasizes the colonial and neo-colonial material of Naipaul's writings at the expense of the underlying theme of the malaise of modern

This is, of course, a general difficulty in writing about drama which by its very nature is both a conjunction of many talents and ephemeral. Dr Leavis's admoni- tion that language in the full sense eludes the cognizance of any form of linguistic science is particularly relevant to drama. The desire and need to bring about an interaction between linguistics and literary criticism is both honest and urgent but drama seems the very last context for such a marriage. This book will be useful because it summarizes critical problems and exposes a set of responses to four plays, but how much more fruitful is Chapter 4 of Andrew Kennedy's Six Dramatists in Search of a Language (1975), which starts from the premise that theatre language is not narrowly linguistic. Theatre language is a great deal more than words, which is why a history of drama can never properly be written, least of all by someone who believes that linguistics is the way. A ARNOLD P. HINCHLIFFE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction: By LANDEG WHITE. London: Macmillan. I975. vi + 217 pp. ?6.95.

The merits as well as the weakness of Mr White's book are partly due to the fact that he insists in combining biographical details with critical comments. He is well informed on life in Trinidad and gives a clear picture of the environment in which Naipaul grew up as a boy: the melange of racial, religious, and political elements is accurately presented and is a help to the understanding of the subject matter of such novels as A House for Mr Biswas, The Mystic Masseur, The Mimic Men, and the documentary works: The Loss of El Dorado, The Middle Passage and An Area of Darkness.

Naipaul's progress as a writer from the time he was at grammar school in Trinidad to 1972, the year of the publication of journalistic pieces in The Overcrowded Barracoon, is treated as a quest for personal identity which results in the novelist's awareness of the necessity for social involvement. Mr White ends his book crypti- cally: '... .in the free state we all now inhabit the writer must keep alive that responsibility to other people which is the raw material of our humanity'. This, he suggests, is Naipaul's own insistence as a result of the novelist's experience so far. The quest for identity is related by Mr White to the usual topics: Naipaul's background, colonialism and the fading of empire, displacement of immigrants, rootlessness, and alienation. He shows how these are reflected in Naipaul's creative and documentary writings based on the Caribbean, Latin America, England, Africa, and India.

The antithesis of documentary and art is Mr White's basic theme, and he tries to make a case for his thesis that Naipaul's artistic sensibility is usually out of harmony with the demands of the form of the novel, without having given any explicit definition of what he calls the 'novel form'. Too much is made of a know- ledge of Naipaul's personal life as a requisite for understanding his creative work. It is evident that this Critical Introduction, in attempting both a valid judgement on the art of the novelist and an analysis of Naipaul's personal dilemmas, necessitates a continual shift of focus which blurs the critical vision.

The dialectic of involvement and detachment is certainly obvious in Naipaul's documentary pieces, but it is also the basis of his entire fiction. If the later novels and short stories give the impression of a more committed writer than the satirist of The Mystic Masseur this is due to the maturity of Naipaul as a novelist and his broadening sympathies as a man who has travelled much since he first set foot in England. Mr White over-emphasizes the colonial and neo-colonial material of Naipaul's writings at the expense of the underlying theme of the malaise of modern

This content downloaded from 91.213.220.163 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:13:51 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions