2 - Tragedies of Isolation and Belonging

Summary

BRIDGING THE SILENCES

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

The first words of L. P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between, adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter in 1969, this statement seems a fitting frontispiece to much of Pinter's writing between 1967 and 1982.

Artistically inclined against voice-overs in film, Pinter resolved to reduce the first-person narrative of that novel by constructing an accumulation of remembrances where visual and aural materials from past and present merged. In this way, he managed effectively to portray the novel's concerns with how the emotions and experiences of the past can form one's present-day experience. He had admired the work since its appearance in 1953 and had considered a screen adaptation of it for some years (a first attempt had been made in 1964), it is tempting to infer that its themes represented a significant component of a new creative impetus for Pinter, one that drew him into contemplating the force of memory as an ineluctable constituent of our daily emotional being. It was an impetus that was stimulated and was further impassioned by such activities as his directing James Joyce's Exiles at the Mermaid Theatre in 1970 – a play about the ethical and social evolution away from the moral codes of the past – and his ambitious screen adaptation in 1972 of Marcel Proust's À la Recherche du temps perdu, an epic statement about the past's relationship with the present. Having thoroughly pursued menace and the potential violences of interpersonal relationships, peaking in 1964 with the domestic, sexual, social and psychological tensions generated within The Homecoming, Pinter had found a new voice with which to craft new formalistic structures and shed fresh dramatic light on some of his key concerns. By articulating theatrically the impenetrability of the past and the inconsistencies of memory, he found he could continue to explore the complex nature of domesticity and the multiple dilemmas that abound in male/female relationships. To do this involved combining potent visual motifs (both seen on-stage and evoked verbally) with the auditory qualities of a lyricism paced by scaffolds of pauses and silences.