Pinteresque world

My first exposure to Harold Pinter was when I was at the University. I had never heard of him before that – I hadn’t really studied literature at the graduation level, just started it with my MA, and hence a writer like Pinter was surely unheard of. For a first-timer like me with little or no exposure to literature, Pinter was really hard to understand. He had to grow onto you, and grow he did. The more I read his works, the more I began to understand and appreciate the “Pinteresque” world that he spawned in his plays. One of the most overwhelming moods in his plays is that of silence – a silence that speaks a thousand words. Reading Pinter’s plays made me realize how much can be said without having to say anything at all. Yet another theme that runs through most of his plays is that of memory and the havoc a recollection, often of an imaginary world when everything was just right and secure, plays on one’s everyday lives. There is a definite power of the past over the present in his plays, sometimes to the point of the days gone by influencing the present. As Anna points out in Old Times (1970), “There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.” Take the complex play, No Man’s Land (1975), in which one witnesses an extraordinary encounter between a wealthy immured writer, Hirst, who seems tormented and crippled by the past and a Bohemian butterfly, Spooner, who has no fixed identity but who simply re-invents himself as he goes along. In more ways than one Pinter uses memory not as a dramatic device but as a key to understanding the unfathomable mystery of human existence.

Yes, I am glad he is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. I haven’t read Pinter again in a real long time. And this news brought back many memories of a long forgotten world and made me reflect on my world today. Well, didn’t I say, Pinter does just that.