REFERENTIALITY IN HAROLD PINTER’S PLAYS
REFERENTIALITY IN HAROLD PINTER’S PLAYS

Summary/Abstract: Harold Pinter’s plays delineate a self-conscious aesthetic world which performs a double function, both incorporating the post-1950s reality and negating it. Although the setting entails naturalist expectations, although the characters seem to belong to conventional middle-class comedy, Harold Pinter’s dramatic world departs from the growing politicization of British theatre and goes beyond the social realist drama. While still embedded in the contemporary historical and cultural context of its production, the plays disable conventional-meaning making, deconstructing hierarchical boundaries and distinctions. The dramatic text becomes a subversive commentary on conventional dramatic structure and on conventional cultural structures or codes. Since objects and individuals are estranged from the concrete social and historical conditions of their existence, since it is impossible to confer any meaning to things or people, the loss of referential world is traumatically felt and leads to a regressive movement into silence, into subjective memory and into a perverse, voyeuristic effort of submitting the others to a permanently objectifying and neutralizing gaze. Individuals are socially positioned and culturally encoded only in the discursive field of the Other, in a world of violent consumerism and ontological estrangement. Similarly, the conventional dramatic structure becomes inappropriate for dismantling the overdetermined cultural representations of identity and language and Harold Pinter’s plays transmute and destabilize dramatic familiar tropes.

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