Towards A Poetics of Postmodern Drama

Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama
Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama:

A Study of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard
By
Mufti Mudasir
Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama: A Study of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard
By Mufti Mudasir
This book first published 2014
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2014 by Mufti Mudasir
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-4438-5408-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5408-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements .................................................................................. vii
Introduction ................................................................................................ 1
Chapter One ................................................................................................ 7

Engaging with Reality: A Poetics of Postmodern Drama
Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 35

Harold Pinter and Postmodernism: Power, Memory and Politics
Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 65

Stoppard and Postmodernism: Parody, History and Ethics
Conclusion .............................................................................................. 103
Bibliography ........................................................................................... 107
Index ....................................................................................................... 123

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to place on record my gratitude for the program

Zukunftsphilologie at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, where I
was a postdoctoral fellow in the academic year 2012/2013, for the ample
time and facilities I had at my disposal to revise the present manuscript in
addition to working on my main research project on Kashmir’s
hagiographies. I owe immensely to my family for their love and support;
to my father Mufti Mearajuddin Farooqi, mother Mahmooda Mufti,
brother Mufti Muzamil Farooqi, wife Huma Galzie, and my very dear son
Mufti Khaleed Farooqi. My colleagues in the Department of English,
University of Kashmir, have been a constant source of encouragement for
which I am thankful to them.
Mufti Mudasir
INTRODUCTION
Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard undoubtedly figure among the leading
British dramatists of the last sixty years or so and both have been
acknowledged among the most prominent playwrights of the
contemporary theatre. John Fleming aptly remarks:
Indeed, in virtually any list of premier British playwrights of the second

half of the twentieth century, two names consistently appear: Tom Stoppard
and Harold Pinter. Their standing as the preeminent British playwrights of
the last half century seems relatively secure.1
Pinter has intrigued critics for decades and a remarkable variety of critical
responses to his plays testify to the richness of his dramatic output and his
stature as a great playwright. Characterized by complexity, his plays defy
easy explication and according to W J Free, “puzzle audiences and critics”,
and, “in spite of a growing body of criticism, there are perhaps more
unanswered questions about Pinter than about any other major
contemporary playwright.”2 Surveying Pinter criticism, G C Behera
identifies three broad approaches taken by Pinter scholars:
the socio-psychological approach with its emphasis on the problem of

failure in communication, the symbolic- allegorical approach with the
emphasis on the ideas that are inherent in the plays, and the theatrical
approach with its concern with stage effects.3
Despite these major attempts to classify and categorize his works, a

realization among critics persists that traditional critical tools are
inadequate for understanding Pinter; conventional approaches fail to offer
satisfactory explanations of many essential features of his plays. Austin
Quigley was the first critic to draw attention to the fact that Pinter’s plays
demand a different approach. Rejecting the traditionally accepted socio-
1
John Fleming. Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order among Chaos. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2001, p. 251.
2
W J Free. “Treatment of Characters in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming.” South
Atlantic Bulletin, xxxiv, November 1969, p. 1.
3
Guru Charan Behera. Reality and Illusion in the Plays of Harold Pinter. New
Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 1998, pp. 11-2.
2 Introduction
psychological and symbolic-allegorical approaches, Quigley, in The Pinter

Problem (1975), invokes the language philosophy of the later Wittgenstein
to analyze Pinter’s plays. He exposes the limitations inherent in such
approaches which assume that the primary function of language is
referential. Positing an interrelational function of language, Quigley argues
that Pinter’s characters use language primarily to negotiate relationships
with each other. He persuades us to:
look at Pinter’s language from exactly the same point of view that we
should adopt in approaching all language use; we must begin with
Wittgenstein’s suggestion that we: ‘Look at the sentence as an instrument,
and its sense as its employment.’4
His in-depth study and analysis of such plays as The Room (1957), The
Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1965) and The Landscape (1968)
centers on the use of language as a tool not of communication but of
manipulation where characters are in full control of the linguistic resources
at their disposal.
Continuing with the line of inquiry that posits language at the center,
Marc Silverstein in Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power
(1993) asserts that Quigley’s entire focus is confined to “what Saussure
calls parole, the individual speech-act, without sufficient attention to
langue (language as a codified system) and its relation to parole.”5
According to Silverstein, Quigley fails to consider how the system of
language forecloses all possibilities of situating the human subject outside
the linguistic codes. He sees language as the prime agent through which
power functions to constitute and situate the human subjects. His focus is
on the process by which human subjectivity is created through an
inexorable law of inscription by cultural codes.
Varun Begley in his Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism
(2005) challenges Andreas Huyssen’s idea of the “Great Divide” between
modernism and postmodernism and argues that Pinter “blurs the
adversarial simplicity of the “Great Divide” and complicates clear-cut
distinctions between the modern and postmodern”.6 Begley’s main interest
lies in reading Pinter from Adorno’s perspective on the problem of artistic
autonomy and commitment. For him, it is with the memory plays that
4
Austin Quigley. The Pinter Problem. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975,
p. 46.
5
Mark Silverstein. Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power. London
and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1993, p. 18.
6
Varun Begley. Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2005, p. 5.
Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama 3
Pinter enters a postmodern terrain, a journey which culminates in his later

political plays. Although Begley’s work has many insights to offer, he
shows little interest in relating what he terms as Pinter’s postmodern turn,
to theories of deconstruction, decentered subjectivity and Lyotardian
dissensus, ideas which the present work has drawn on to approach Pinter.
More significantly, the present work draws on the invaluable insights
of Silverstein but also marks a departure from his basic thesis in some
important respects. It argues that Silverstein’s thesis of the monolithic
unassailability of power does not duly consider the deconstructive
strategies by means of which Pinter thoroughly demystifies these cultural
codes. It makes an attempt to show that, in a characteristically postmodern
manner, Pinter’s plays both inscribe and contest these codes and
ideologies, a strategy which makes them double-coded. It is true that
Pinter does not posit any vantage point of critique or resistance outside of
these ideologies, but what is equally important is to see how he contests
them from within by exposing their constructed nature. It is this
postmodern method of inscription and subversion from within that enables
Pinter to expose the nexus between power and representation, and
subjectivity and subjection. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that
from a postmodern perspective, the memory plays of Pinter, so
conspicuously absent from Silverstein’s exposition, are of immense
importance because of their potential to serve as a powerful commentary
on the idea of decentered subjectivity.
Tom Stoppard too has been seen by most of the critics as a playwright
obsessed with writing in a light, playful manner, often borrowing from
previous dramatic texts to produce rather farcical plays.7 Although his
plays conspicuously lack Pinter’s mysterious or enigmatic quality, yet
these need to be analyzed from a postmodern perspective in order to
demonstrate Stoppard’s stature as one of the leading contemporary
dramatists. The present study, therefore, examines Stoppard’s concerns
with history, ethics, and opinions on art and epistemology, to argue that his
dominant modes of parody and other self-reflexive devices qualify him as
a preeminent postmodern playwright.
Although Stoppard’s overt use of these devices makes it easy to
identify his postmodern concerns, it is noteworthy that critics have mostly
interpreted his plays as examples of lightweight comic entertainments
which deal with serious ideas in a more or less Wildean fashion. This is
the reason that some critics have tended to use the term pastiche for his
7
Some of the critical studies which argue on these lines are Jim Hunter’s Tom
Stoppard’s Plays (1982), Thomas Whitaker’s Tom Stoppard (1983) and Tim
Brassel’s Tom Stoppard: An Assessment (1985).
4 Introduction
plays. Ira B Nadel and Michael Vanden Heuvel both prefer the term
pastiche to describe Stoppard’s plays. Nadel, for example, remarks:
Pastiche, for Stoppard, is the playful loose imitation of or borrowing from

another text to formulate a new one. Whether he draws from or imitates
Macbeth in Cahoot’s Macbeth, or Agatha Christie in The Real Inspector
Hound, or borrows lines and themes from Strindberg’s Miss Julie and John
Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ in The Real Thing, the pastiche is a breezy
strategy for creating the Stoppard style.8
Even Heuvel applies the Jamesonian model of pastiche to Travesties

(1974), asserting that “the formal structure of Travesties is that of
postmodern pastiche as it is defined by Jameson.”9 The argument
presented in this book is that it is parody rather than pastiche that defines
Stoppard’s work more satisfactorily.10 The focus, therefore, is to see
Stoppard as a parodist who exploits the critical potential of parody to
move beyond mere playfulness. Stoppard’s plays are, it is argued, fraught
with political and ideological implications due to which they cannot be
taken merely as light entertainments.11
The first chapter “Engaging with Reality: A Poetics of Postmodern
Drama”, encapsulates the theoretical framework of the study and attempts
to highlight the value of the theoretical model presented by Linda
Hutcheon in her work on postmodernism to demonstrate its relevance for
the study of postmodern drama. It is argued that Hutcheon’s model that
she prefers to call “a poetics of postmodernism”, by articulating a
significant parallel between the poststructuralist thought and postmodern
artistic practice, provides a basis for formulating a poetics of postmodern
drama. Her basic assertion that postmodernism is essentially double-
coded, an idea she borrows from Charles Jencks, has a very important
advantage of seeing postmodern art and literature as capable of retaining a
8
Ira B Nadel. “Writing Tom Stoppard” in Journal of Modern Literature. 2004, Vol.
27, no.3, p. 23.
9
Michael Vanden Heuvel. “‘Is postmodernism?’ Stoppard among/against the
postmoderns” in Katherine E. Kelly (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Tom
Stoppard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 220.
10
The difference between the two terms will be discussed in detail in the first
chapter.
11
John Fleming is inclined to regard Stoppard as a modernist rather than a
postmodernist, although he too admits that in one important sense, namely,
Stoppard’s embracing of uncertainties instead of mourning the loss of meaning
makes him more of a postmodernist than modernist. See Stoppard’s Theatre:
Finding Order among Chaos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001, p. 256.
critical stance towards contemporary reality in spite of its self-conscious

complicity with it.
It is argued that the main characteristics of postmodernism can be
identified in the works of some of the well-known contemporary European
and American dramatists and on the basis of these it is possible to
formulate a poetics of postmodern drama. The theoretical model provided
by Hutcheon, according to which postmodernism both inscribes and
subverts the representational categories in art, is applied to drama to argue
that postmodern drama employs the conventional dramatic categories of
language, character and plot, only to subvert them from within. This
argument is substantiated by an examination of some seminal critical
works on postmodern drama in recent times by Jeanette Malkin, Deborah
Geis, Nick Kaye and Philip Auslander. For exploring the characteristic
features of postmodern drama, Brecht and Beckett, along with some later
dramatists such as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Robert Wilson, Richard
Foreman, Heiner Muller and Thomas Bernhard, have been discussed with
reference to their treatment of language, human subject and reality.
The second chapter “Harold Pinter and Postmodernism: Power,
Memory and Politics”, examines Pinter’s plays using the concepts
elucidated in the first chapter. Following Keith Peacock, these plays are
divided into three categories which roughly, though not strictly,
correspond to the three phases of Pinter’s dramatic career. In the first
category, Pinter’s earlier plays are discussed with a special focus on the
exposition of the ideological creation of subjectivity. The object is the
study of power that operates through the dominant ideological codes to
construct the human subject. The plays of the second category called
memory plays are examined to reveal the idea of decentering of the subject
and fluidity of the past, while in the third category the later plays, which
treat issues like political subjugation and power abuse, are discussed in the
light of the Lyotardian concepts of mini-narratives and dissensus.
The third chapter “Stoppard and Postmodernism: Parody, History and
Ethics”, analyzes the plays of Tom Stoppard, dividing them into three
broad categories based on certain predominant structural and thematic
concerns. In the first category, plays which employ overt self-reflexive
devices such as parody and play-within-the-play are discussed. In the
second category, plays based on history, a perennial postmodern concern,
are analyzed to argue that Stoppard’s treatment of history offers striking
parallels with “historiographic metafiction”. The third category, in which
only two plays are analyzed, highlights Stoppard’s typical postmodern
stance towards ethics.
6 Introduction
The conclusion, while largely summing up the important findings of

the present work, reiterates the distinctive existence of postmodern drama
despite its many overlappings with the modern avant-garde and absurdist
traditions. It not only points out how both Pinter and Stoppard, despite
their largely different styles and dramatic modes, are postmodernist, but
also suggests their importance for any reformulation of a poetics of
postmodern drama.
CHAPTER ONE
ENGAGING WITH REALITY:

A POETICS OF POSTMODERN DRAMA
Many critics have rightly complained of a lack of critical studies on

postmodern drama and scant theoretical attention it has received as
compared to other literary genres. For some the phrase “postmodern
drama” is little more than an empty signifier. Stephen Watt’s
Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage (1998) illustrates
this attitude by using a slash in the title between postmodern and drama to
indicate that the relation between the two is at best oxymoronic. One of the
main reasons for this is the notion that postmodernism implies a rejection
of the mimetic status of drama and thus strikes at the very roots of
representation through it. Watt announces the “failure of the term
postmodern drama,”1 and is of the opinion that it is largely “an empty
intellectual marker.”2 This, he believes, is due to the fact that “drama has
been relegated to the role of the unwanted or unwashed, a bastard
stepchild born in and supportive of a less enlightened social formation”.3
Given the problematic nature of the term “postmodern” itself, postmodern
drama becomes for Watt “doubly problematic”. In addition to this, the fact
that the phrase “postmodern drama” is usually used as “a weak term of
periodization fraught with difficulties as a historical marker”, explains
why there is a definite lack of interest in theorizing drama from a
postmodern perspective.4 Moreover postmodernism, by challenging the
ideas of a determinate dramatic text and theatrical space, challenges any
attempt to conceive of “postmodern drama” itself.
1
Stephen Watt. Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1998, p. 25.
2
ibid, p. 39. As Watt states “… when preceded by such adjectives as postmodern
or post-modernist, drama is emptied of most of the features by which it has
traditionally been recognized – dialogue, a discernible narrative, character, agon –
thus potentially rendering the text so described as something of an “empty” or self-
nullifying “marker”(17).
3
ibid, p. 6.
4
ibid, p. 19.
8 Chapter One
In 1981, C W E Bigsby had remarked that the English theatrical scene

of the late 1950s presented an anxiety that found expression in ontological
and epistemological questions and reflected a condition where “the social
order, character and language are shown in a state of disrepair.”5 Ten years
later, in a somewhat similar vein, Ruby Cohn noted that since the 1950s, a
departure from “the mimetic representation of contemporary middle class
reality” is to be witnessed in the British theatre.6 The two elements she
found most noticeable were “theatre in the theatre and split character.”7
Although both Bigsby and Cohn acknowledged that a shift had occurred in
the contemporary drama, neither used the term postmodernism for
explaining this shift. What follows here is an attempt to delineate a poetics
of postmodern drama by examining the theory of postmodernism offered
by Linda Hutcheon, one of the most outstanding theoreticians of
postmodernism, and drawing on the insights of some perceptive critics
such as Jeanette Malkin, Kerstin Schmidt and Deborah Geis. The focus
will be to see how these changes in the contemporary drama can be
examined in the light of Hutcheon’s model. The discussion should,
however, start with an elucidation of her model and its justification for
studying postmodern drama. A brief overview of some initial attempts at
theorizing postmodern literature is, therefore, not out of place here.
The much-debated problem whether postmodernism should be seen as
a radical break from modernism or its continuation need not engage us
here. According to Hutcheon, postmodern should be seen as both a
continuation of and departure from modernism manifest in the shift in the
foundational categories on which Western literature is premised, like the
human subject, language and history. This shift has found a sustained
expression in the literary practice of the past for many decades now. In
1987, John Johnston argued that postmodernism revolved round three
broad categories: “literary/aesthetic post-modernism, historical (or
cultural) postmodernism and theoretical postmodernism.”8 Out of these the
most familiar version, according to Johnston, was the literary or aesthetic
one “advanced by people like Patricia Waugh and Brian McHale in
England, and Jerome Klinowitz and Ihab Hassan in the United States.”9
5
C W E Bigsby. “The Politics of Anxiety: Contemporary Socialist Theatre in
England”. Modern Drama 24, 1981, p. 393.
6
Ruby Cohn. Retreats from Realism in Recent English Drama. London: Penguin
Publications, 1991, p. 1.
7
ibid, p. 18.
8
John Johnston. “Postmodern Theory/ Postmodern Fiction”. CLIO 16:2. 1987
(Winter), p. 140.
9
ibid.
Engaging with Reality: A Poetics of Postmodern Drama 9
Ihab Hassan, perhaps, was the first critic to recognize a need for a new
term to classify the works that had appeared on the American literary
scene in the 1950s. In his early writings, especially the essays of the 1960s
like “The Dismemberment of Orpheus” (1963) and “The Literature of
Silence” (1967), Hassan used the term modernism as a broad concept
accommodating newer literary expressions under the category. He,
however, soon felt the inadequacy of the term modern and was led to use
the term postmodern for writers like de Sade, Hemingway, Kafka, Genet
and Beckett. In his later writings, Hassan became increasingly interested in
the significant shift in the contemporary European literature which called
for a new critical terminology. At this point, in the late 1970s and 1980s,
Hassan became aware of the importance of the French poststructuralist
influence on postmodern thought and practice. Poststructuralism, Hassan
realized, could no longer be kept out of the debate on postmodernism.
Other writers too recognized this important factor and Allen Thiher’s
Words in Reflection: Modern Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction
(1984) offered chapters on Wittgenstein, Heidegger, de Saussure and
Derrida, thus demonstrating the increasing acceptability of the
poststructuralist relation with the fiction of postmodernism. In the
following year Hilary Lawson wrote Reflexivity: The Postmodern
Predicament (1985) focusing on Derrida’s significance for post-
modernism.
However, this recognition of the significance of poststructuralist
theories for postmodern art, especially deconstruction, raised the important
question of referentiality which led to the notion that postmodern art
discredits all critical engagement with reality. Interpreting the self-
reflexive tendencies in postmodern art as the negation of the world or
reality was, however, largely because of a widespread misunderstanding of
some of the central concepts of the poststructuralist thought. Perceptive
critics, however, were quick to point out that the feature of self-reflexivity
in postmodern art could not be interpreted as the negation of referentiality.
In the early 1980s, John Barth labeled his self-reflexive short stories
collected in his own Lost in the Funhouse as mainly late modernist, while
they had been considered postmodernist by many critics. For Barth, a true
postmodern writer like Italo Calvino, “keeps one foot always in the
narrative past…and one foot in the structuralist present.”10 This
recognition of the danger of relegating postmodern literature to the prison-
house of language with no referential value was shared by some of the
foremost theorists of postmodern literature who also undertook the
10
John Barth. “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction”. Atlantic
Monthly. 1980, 245:1, p. 70.
10 Chapter One
difficult task of delineating a poetics of postmodernism. Brian McHale’s

Postmodernist Fiction (1987) made an attempt to formulate a distinctive
poetics that could explain adequately the concerns of postmodern novels.
The central tenet of McHale’s formulation of postmodernism is the
identification of a shift from the epistemological questions characteristic
of the modern period to the ontological questions. He writes:
The dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological. That is, modernist

fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions such as
those mentioned by Dick Higgins in my epigraph: “How can I interpret this
world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?” Other typical modernist
question might be added: “what is there to be known? Who knows it? How
do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?”11
On this formulation, McHale includes novels as Ford Madox Ford’s

The Good Soldier which is featured by an unreliable narrator and Kafka’s
The Trial which depicts an individual’s prosecution but significantly
declines to offer any motive for the court’s actions. As against the
modernist fiction, the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological:
Postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground

questions like the ones Dick Higgins calls ‘Post cognition’: ‘which world
is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” Other
typical postmodernist questions bear either on the ontology of the literary
text itself or on the ontology of the world it projects, for instance: “what is
a world?: what kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how
do they differ?”12
McHale offers examples of Thomas Pynchon’s novels that foreground the

idea of uncertainty in postmodernist fiction. The simultaneous existence of
more than one worlds points to their constructed nature. The reader finds
herself constantly beset with a situation where she has to ask herself
whether the world she is reading about is anything except her own
construction. McHale’s version of postmodernism offers to see it in terms
of pluriform, polyphonic being and contests the extreme self-reflexivity of
these works. Hans Bertens writes about McHale’s analysis in these terms:
For McHale, postmodernist fiction negotiates the tension between self-

reflexivity and representation by abandoning the modernist emphasis on
epistemology – which leads inevitably towards reflexivity for an emphasis
on ontology. Knowing loses its privileged position to pluriform,
11
Brian McHale. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Methuen, 1987, p. 9.
12
ibid, p. 10.
polyphonic being. The one world which the modernist sought to know is
replaced by a plurality of autonomous worlds that can be described and the
relations between which we can explore, but that can never be the objects
of true knowledge.13
It is, however, Linda Hutcheon’s cogently argued work that appeared

under the title A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction in
1988 which is of immense value for our purposes. The merit of
Hutcheon’s theoretical model lies in her appropriation of the seminal ideas
of the leading French poststructuralists such as Derrida, Foucault, Barthes
and Lyotard on the one hand, and her demonstration of the fallacy inherent
in the oft-repeated claim that postmodern self-reflexivity is a sign of its
downright complicity with the dominant contemporary culture on the
other. She exemplifies how postmodern literature retains a critical edge
towards contemporary reality, a feature that makes her paradigm appealing
even today. A remarkable feature of Hutcheon’s formulation of a
postmodern poetics is her recognition that such a project has to be
inductive in that it has to arrive at a poetics through the study of
postmodern works, that is, the literary practice itself.
Her critical project, therefore, has the value of recognizing and
incorporating poststructuralist insights while maintaining that postmodern
literary works retain a critical edge towards the contemporary social and
political reality and hence cannot be dismissed as merely acquiescing in
the dominant ideologies of the contemporary times. Hutcheon stresses the
point that postmodernism is doubly-coded, one that is simultaneously self-
reflexive and referential. She remarks that “postmodernism is a
contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then
subverts the very concepts it challenges.”14 She also takes issue with those
writers who regard postmodern art as entirely self-reflexive and hence
bereft of any representational value. For its detractors, liberal humanists
and Marxists alike, postmodernism ends up as a dishonest refuge from
reality, content with social and political quietism. Hutcheon tries to reveal
the flaw in this argument by arguing that postmodernism can never be
equated with aesthetic formalism. The following observation made by
Bertens on Hutcheon’s model highlights the core value of her thesis:
Hutcheon’s attractive (and immensely successful) model has the great

advantage that it, in her own words, gives equal value to the self-reflexive
13
Hans Bertens. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. New York: Routledge,
1995, p. 77.
14
Linda Hutcheon. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London:
Routledge, 1988, p. 3.
12 Chapter One
and historically grounded and can thus retain a political dimension (even if
it simultaneously calls political commitments into question). Because of its
refusal to surrender to sheer textuality, it can, with a certain amount of
credibility, investigate the determining role of representations, discourses,
and signifying practices. It can, in other words, address the matter of
power.15
Hutcheon’s argument that postmodernism is both self-reflexive and

historical was, however, anticipated by John Barth in “The Literature of
Replenishment: Postmodern Fiction” (1980), where he argued that
postmodern writing should attempt to achieve a kind of synthesis between
modernism and realism by avoiding both extreme self-reflexivity of the
former and naïve illusionism of the latter. For Hutcheon, too, extreme self-
reflexivity is a feature of the late modernist literature rather than of
postmodernism: “Postmodern forms want to work toward a public
discourse that would overtly eschew modernist aestheticism and
hermeticism and its attendant political self-marginalization.”16 For her,
“historiographic metafiction” is the representative postmodern art form,
one that offers the model of self-reflexive representation. “Historiographic
metafiction” both installs and subverts what it installs only to problematize
our notions about history and its truth-value:
In challenging the seamless quality of the history/fiction (or world/art) join

implied by realist narrative, postmodern fiction does not disconnect itself
from history or the world. It foregrounds and thus contests the
conventionality and unacknowledged ideology of that assumption of
seamlessness and asks its readers to question the process by which we
represent ourselves and our world to ourselves and to become aware of the
means by which we make sense of and construct order out of experience in
our particular culture. We cannot avoid representation. We can try to avoid
fixing our notion of it and assuming it to be transhistorical and
transcultural. We can also study how representation legitimizes and
privileges certain kinds of knowledge including certain kinds of historical
knowledge.17
She also sums up the postmodern view of history in these terms:
15
Hans Bertens. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. New York: Routledge,
1995, p.78.
16
John Barth. “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction” in The
Atlantic, 1980, 245:1, p. 65.
17
Linda Hutcheon. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction.
London: Routledge, 1988, p. 23.
What the postmodern writing of both history and literature has taught us is
that both history and fiction are discourses, that both constitute systems of
signification by which we make sense of the past (“exertions of the
shaping, ordering imagination”). In other words, the meaning and shape
are not in the events, but in the systems which make those past ‘events’
into present historical ‘facts’. This is not a ‘dishonest refuge from truth’ but
an acknowledgement of the meaning-making function of human
constructs.18
Hutcheon emphasizes the double-codedness of postmodernism and its

self-consciously contradictory nature to distinguish it from modernism.
Postmodernism, she insists, “takes the form of self-conscious, self-
contradictory, self-undermining statement.”19 And one of the most
successful strategies to create a contradictory stance on any statement is
the use of parody. The use of parody in literature is old but the term has all
long been taken to mean a ridiculing imitation of a previous work of art.
Already, in her Theory of Parody (1985), Hutcheon had argued that the
concept of parody needs to be freed from the constraint of the traditional
definition. Parody, according to her, is a much more profound literary
concept than is ordinarily understood. She states, “the kind of parody I
wish to focus is an integrated structural modeling process of revisiting,
replaying, inventing and trans-contextualizing previous work of art.”20
She regards parody as an apt postmodern form because of its potential
to critique the traditional humanist ideas about art and its relation to
reality. For her, the parodied text is not a target but a weapon, an idea that
underscores the scope of parody as much broader than merely ridiculing
some other work. It is a form of auto-referentiality fraught with ideological
implications. While Hutcheon states that, “parody, often called ironic
quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or inter-textuality, is usually considered
central to postmodernism, both by its detractors and its defenders,”21 she
departs from the prevailing interpretation that postmodern parody is
ultimately value-free and devoid of any critical potential. It is noteworthy
that Frederic Jameson takes this view of postmodern parody, rejecting its
critical stance towards reality and regarding it as a mere pastiche. Jameson
identifies pastiche as a defining formal feature of postmodern aesthetics.
18
ibid, p. 89.
19
Linda Hutcheon. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989, p.
51.
20
Linda Hutcheon. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art
Forms. London: Methuen, 1985, p. 11.
21
93.
14 Chapter One
He sees two factors as crucial in the emergence of the “universal practice”

in the contemporary literary practice whereby texts speak in the “dead”
language and forms of the past. For him it is the notion of the
“decentering” of the formerly sovereign or autonomous subject that
necessitates the “imitation of dead styles”. Secondly, he links the
emergence of pastiche to the absence of a linguistic norm. He grants
parody a critical potential but finds it to have been displaced by pastiche in
postmodern art:
Parody finds itself without a vocation; it has lived, and that strange new
thing pastiche slowly comes to take its place. Pastiche is, like parody, the
imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral
practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives,
amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction
that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some
healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blind parody, a
statue with blind eyes.22
Jameson’s remarks reflect the well-known stance of Marxist critics

who regard all forms of postmodern art as de-historicized, wallowing in
the mire of self-referentiality; in brief, an art incapable of any meaningful
intervention in reality. Responding to Jameson’s distinction between
parody and pastiche, Terry Eagleton argues that although parody of a sort
is not alien to postmodernism, it is deplorable that:
what is parodied by postmodernist culture, with its dissolution of art into

the prevailing forms of commodity production, is nothing less the
revolutionary art of the twentieth century avant-garde. It is though
postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of such
revolutionary avant-gardism, one of whose major impulses, as Peter Burger
has convincingly argued in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, was to
dismantle the institutional autonomy of art, erase the frontiers between
culture and political society and return aesthetic production to its humble,
unprivileged place within social practices as a whole. In the commodified
artifacts of postmodernism, the avant-gardist dream of an integration of art
and society returns in monstrously caricatured form … Postmodernism,
from this perspective, mimes the formal resolution of art and social life
attempted by the avant-garde while remorselessly emptying it of its
political content.23
22
Frederic Jameson. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
London and New York: Verso, 1991, pp. 17-8.
23
Terry Eagleton. “Capitalism, modernism and postmodernism” in New Left
Review, 1985, 152, p. 60.
Hutcheon deals with these arguments of the two leading Marxist critics
by arguing that postmodern parody is thoroughly political, primarily
because it serves to underline the political and ideological nature of all
representations. She is critical of Eagleton who, according to her, fails to
appreciate the critical edge of postmodernism while approving of the same
in the modernist revolutionary avant-garde. In fact, postmodernism’s
relation with modernism can be understood better by keeping in view that
avant-garde is nearer to postmodernism than to modernism. What
postmodernism challenges is modernism’s view of the autonomy of art and
the individual human subject. Modernism sought in art an order which it
failed to find in life and the great modernists attempted to flee from the
chaos of history and discontinuities of the modern world into the formal
world of art. T S Eliot believed that all disparate experiences are always
forming new wholes in the mind of the poet. This inward turn, so
characteristic of all great modernists, highlights their preoccupation with
the inner world of human consciousness. The modernist assumption of
aesthetic autonomy postulates a perspective from outside, an Archimedean
viewpoint from where to respond to the modern world. This assumption
stands radically challenged by postmodernism. Another feature that
postmodern radically departs from is modernism’s uncritical acceptance of
language as a neutral medium of communication.
The historical avant-garde too aims to deconstruct the very ideology of
art by relating it to social reality and cultural institutions. Unlike
modernism, it is highly conscious of the political nature of all
representations and seeks to interrogate the operations of the dominant
cultural discourses. This explains the apparent tendency of disruption of
all that is fixed by the avant-garde. These concerns of the avant-garde are
obsessions with postmodernism. The subversive tendencies of postmodern
art forms are indicative of the postmodern concern with challenging the
conventional configurations of experience and perceptions. Postmodern art
works to challenge the dominant cultural discourse while being quite
aware that the challenge itself is contained within some discourse. This
self-consciousness of postmodernism sets it apart from the avant-garde.
Postmodernism is not avant-garde because of its provisional and self-
consciously contradictory character. While as the avant-garde is overtly
oppositional to the tradition and places faith in the ability of art to change
social reality rather directly, postmodernism neither desires any break with
the past nor regards art as capable of effecting a social change, though, as
Hutcheon maintains, questioning and problematizing may set up the
conditions for possible change. Hutcheon’s argument on this point is based
on the accepted stance of postmodernism, one which is derived from the
16 Chapter One
works of Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault and the rest. Postmodernism opposes

all attempts to regard representations as natural. By virtue of its relentless
critique of the natural and neutral, it resists all efforts to naturalize what it
regards to be ideological.
Roland Barthes called this process which enables us to see the oft-
concealed ideology of our notions of reality as dedoxification. The term
doxa itself means something that is accepted as natural and dedoxification
is the recognition of this supposed “natural” as ideological. Barthes’ main
thrust as a critic was to denaturalize our assumptions of the human self and
the “objective” world outside us. Hutcheon sees a similar potential in the
postmodern parody as it helps us see the political and ideological nature of
all human discourses. But while all the earlier forms and strategies of
criticism posited a vantage point from which to approach the object,
postmodern parody denies the possibility of any such view from outside.
On the contrary, it foregrounds its complicity with the object of its critique
and underscores the implicated nature of all viewpoints. Postmodernism,
thus, is a complicitous critique of all social and political phenomena.
Hutcheon suggests that postmodern parody is complicitous with the values
it subverts. This subversion, nevertheless, takes the form of
denaturalization:
It seems reasonable to say that the postmodernism’s initial concern is to

denaturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life, to point out
that those entities we unthinkingly experience as ‘natural’ they might even
include capitalism, patriarchy, liberal humanism are in fact ‘cultural’, made
by us, not given to us.24
To see how postmodernism should be seen as simultaneously

inscribing and contesting the concept of representation, let us turn to some
of the implications of Derrida’s critical strategies for our understanding of
history. In Derrida’s whole oeuvre, it is his ideas on textuality that have
problematized the traditional notions about history and its truth-value. For
Derrida, history is a text and a text itself is a configuration in which
meaning is always produced by a process of signification that never
reaches what he calls the “transcendental signified”. Nicholas Royle has
rightly noted that “the implications of Derrida’s work for historiography
are quite massive.”25 Derrida himself clarifies his position in these terms:
24
Linda Hutcheon. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989, p. 2.
25
Nicholas Royle. After Derrida. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995,
p. 18.
What I call ‘text’ implies all the structures called ‘real’, ‘economic’,
‘historical’, ‘socio-institutional’, in short all possible referents. Another
way of recalling once again that ‘there is nothing outside the text’. That
does not mean that all referents are suspended, denied or enclosed in a
book, as people have claimed, or have been naïve enough to believe and to
have accused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent and all
reality has the structure of a differential trace and that one cannot refer to
this ‘real’ except in an interpretative experience. The latter neither yields
meaning nor assumes it except in a movement of differential referring.
That’s all.26
Royle explains the implications of deconstruction for historiography in

these terms:
To say that history is radically determined by writing, then, is to say that it

is constituted by a general or unbounded logic of traces and remainders-
general and unbounded because these traces and remains, this work of
remainders and remnants are themselves neither presences nor original:
rather they too are constituted by traces and remains in turn.27
Hence, for Derrida textuality is the condition of history and textuality

itself carries with it the condition of its own critique. Derrida argues that
there can be no meaning inherent in the text without a context and context
itself is unbounded. It is this state of being “unbounded” that generates a
perpetual difference of meaning. Applying this idea to history, we see that
history can never escape the condition of textuality whose production
involves a process of constructing meaning in language. Rather than
capturing something “given”, the very exercise of writing implies a
process of selection, distribution, contextualization, combination and
reconstruction, connecting and disconnecting and ultimately endowing the
“seamless past” with certain meanings and not others. History, therefore,
cannot lay claim to objective and neutral knowledge of the past, since
everything that a historian relies on for her work of historiography,
including herself, is a text. Historians, howsoever objective they might try
to be, can never escape their condition of situatedness in the web of
signification. There exists no Archimedean point from which to carry out a
truly objective study of the past. There are only some events that find a
place in the historical records and become “facts”. History itself is
26
Quoted in Simon Critchley. The Ethics of Deconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1922, p. 39.
27
Nicholas Royle. After Derrida. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995,
p. 20.
18 Chapter One
permeated by the institutional forces that work to promote certain favored

versions to the exclusion of some others.
In the past few decades, these ideas have received a new impetus in the
works of the writers such as Hayden White, Richard Evans, Frank
Ankersmit and Dominick LaCapra. Their studies, despite a stiff resistance
offered by the traditional historians, have now found a firm foothold in
academic circles and can no longer be dismissed as mere intellectual
vandalism. The postmodernist position on history, therefore, contests all
thought-systems which claim to derive their strength from history,
Marxism being the central one. This calls for addressing the main charges
brought against postmodernism by its detractors, mainly the Marxists and
the liberal humanists. As mentioned above, it is argued by many that
postmodernism upholds the negation of history and referentiality and is
ultimately complicitous with the contemporary consumerism. These critics
accuse postmodernism of a culpable escape into textuality at the cost of
engagement with reality. It is argued that postmodernism is informed by
the ideology of linguistic determinism that reduces all reality to linguistic
codes.
It is of utmost importance to understand that postmodernism’s
contestation of the epistemological status of history does not imply a
rejection of the past. Simon Critchley has shown that Derrida’s purpose is
not to reduce the world of real objects, things and events into discourses,
into mere texts, which means rejecting their existence altogether.
Explaining Derrida’s concept of the text, he says that this idea does not:
wish to turn the world into some vast library, nor does it wish to cut off
reference to some ‘extra textual realm’. Deconstruction is not bibliophilia.
Text qua text is glossed by Derrida as the entire ‘real-history-of-the-world’
and this is said in order to emphasize the fact that the word ‘text’ does not
suspend reference ‘to history, to the world, to reality, to being and
especially not to the other’. All the latter appear in an experience which is
not an immediate experience of presence – the text or context is not
present, but rather the experience of a network of differentially signifying
traces which are constitutive of meaning. Experience or thought traces a
ceaseless movement of interpretation within a limitless context.28
And Hutcheon very perceptively explains Derrida’s view on the subject

of reference as follows:
28
Simon Critchley. The Ethics of Deconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1922, p. 39.
Derrida’s denial of the transcendental signified is not a denial of reference

or a denial of any access to extra-textual reality. However, it is meant to
suggest that meaning can be derived only from within texts through
deferral, through differance. This kind of poststructuralist thinking has
obvious implications for historiography and historiographic metafiction. It
radically questions the nature of the archive, the document, evidence. It
separates the (meaning-granted) facts of history-writing from the brute
events of past.29
The implications of the ideas discussed above are of central importance

for the formulation of a poetics of postmodernism. Postmodern literary
works foreground the ideological and political nature of all representations
and radically question our assumptions of objectivity and neutrality. It is at
this point that the issue of power and its role in representation becomes
seminal to a poetics of postmodernism. We can see here how Foucault
enters the picture of Hutcheon’s thesis. Foucault’s ideas on discourse and
its overwhelmingly determining character of both the subjective self and
objective knowledge should undoubtedly find a significant place in any
attempt to delineate a poetics of postmodernism. Hutcheon very aptly
states that “the relation of power to knowledge and to historical, social and
ideological contexts is an obsession of postmodernism.”30
Language itself is inextricably bound with the ideological contexts and
it is not possible to purge language of these contextual traces. Our
prevalent cultural signification generates a field of power which is all-
pervading. In the words of Terry Eagleton:
Discourses, sign-system and signifying practices of all kinds, from film

and television to fiction and the languages of natural science, produce
effects, shape forms of consciousness and unconsciousness, which are
closely related to the maintenance or transformation of our existing
systems of power.31
Power is a ubiquitous phenomenon, a process rather than a product that

permeates cultural signification to its core. Postmodernism, especially
deconstruction, has tried to unravel the hidden power relationships in the
general tendency of binary opposition. Every binary, the argument goes,
conceals a power relation that divides it into a hierarchy of the privileged
and the under-privileged. Thus the seemingly innocuous binaries of
29
Linda Hutcheon. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Fiction, Theory. London:
30
ibid, p. 86.
31
Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1983, p. 210.
20 Chapter One
male/female, white/black, western/eastern, are tied up with power

relations. Postmodernism thus strikes at the very basis of this hierarchical
division.
From a perspective of a postmodern poetics, language and all forms of
representation are politically inflected because there can be no escape from
“situatedness” within some discourse. A postmodern artifact raises the
question of ideology by revealing that every kind of representation in art is
somebody’s representation. No author, artist or critic can avoid her
imbrication in some ideologically-inflected narrative and can hence lay no
claim to an apolitical representation. Reality does not exist except when
represented through a text, spoken, visual or written, and all texts are
discursive practices. Rather than positing the origin of a text in the
personality of the author, postmodernism declares that the text originates
within a field of enunciation. An aesthetic product, no matter how
aesthetically pure and uncontaminated it is alleged to be, always exists
within some field of enunciation, that is, a social, political, religious and
cultural milieu, and is, therefore, inextricably bound to power relations.
Hutcheon comments upon this idea in the following manner:
Both postmodern art and theory work to reveal the complicity of discourse
and power by re-emphasizing the enunciation: the act of saying is an
inherently political act, at least when it is not seen as only a formal entity.32
The Foucauldian insights into the nature and operations of discourse

are already visible here. Discourse, according to Foucault, operates by
means of various procedures involving controls, constrains, permissibility,
acceptability and rejection. It is over-arching in its character and enables
the production, dissemination and reception of all forms of knowledge. As
language comes to be seen as “a social practice”, an instrument as much
for manipulation and control as for humanist self-expression, it also
becomes clear that the linguistic is not separable from the extra-linguistic.
No linguistic speech, written document or visual representation can exist
without power somehow permeating its very core. Language is quite often
an instrument of cultural power, a means of repression, of hiding rather
than stating the truth and an instrument for manipulation.
The term “political” occupies an important place in postmodernism as
it comes to signify the discursive nature of all representations. As already
illustrated, Foucault’s examination of power and its operations in the
constitution of human subjectivity and discourse of knowledge are of
32
central concern to postmodernism. This calls for a revision of the term

political and its usage. In postmodern art, politics becomes an inherent
feature of all representation which it seeks to explore and reveal.
Postmodern art problematizes the concept of neutral representation, the
very basis of the realist tradition in art, by engaging with the political
nature of representation. Art, postmodern works suggest, can never avoid
implication with the discursive practices which are themselves built into
politically inflected relationships. “All language,” as Hayden White has
said, “is politically contaminated,”33 and postmodern art works to reveal
the political status of all representations claiming neutrality. This concern
of postmodern art finds expression in the tendency to depart from the
mimetic tradition in arts. The assumptions of the realistic tradition, which
are thoroughly challenged by postmodernism, give way to the increasing
awareness of inescapable imbrications with the ideologies inherent in
artistic representation. Language in postmodern literary artifacts is no
longer used only referentially or emotively, but as a means to explore how
it can be used for purposes different from its commonly accepted usage. In
fact, postmodern theories illustrate the primacy of linguistic signs in
constituting the human subject in the first place. Postmodern literature
reflects this concern in its focus on the characters’ construction in and
through linguistic discourse. This idea manifests itself through what is
termed as the “decentered subject”, in which the human subject is
presented as more or less a point of intersection of various discourses.
Postmodern art draws attention to these ideas by foregrounding the
question of power. For Hutcheon, power is one of the central themes of
“historiographic metafiction’s” investigations of the relation of art to
ideology. The novels that Hutcheon cites like William Kennedy’s Legs,
Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby and Rushdie’s Shame, deal with the theme of
ideological power inherent in cultural discourse. In the final analysis,
postmodern literature serves to denaturalize the paradigm of power
distribution in cultural and social institutions. Notions of authority,
authenticity, sacredness, filiations, duty, punishment and others are derived
from a web of complex power distribution. Ideas about legitimacy and
illegitimacy rest upon it and postmodern works lay bare the structures
embedded in power. While doing so, postmodern art inscribes and
challenges power. A simultaneous inscription and contestation of power
means revealing its permeation of all “natural” categories, thereby
contesting it from within and, reinscribing it suggests its inescapable
determining mode.
33
ibid, p. 193.
22 Chapter One
It has been argued that Linda Hutcheon’s thesis of postmodern poetics

focuses almost exclusively on a specific literary genre “historiographic
metafiction” to the exclusion of other postmodern literary forms. Stephen
Baker in his The Fiction of Postmodernity agrees with Hutcheon’s insights
but is uneasy with what he calls “Hutcheon’s identification of postmodern
fiction as “historiographic metafiction”.34 Such objections can be dealt
with if we take into consideration the vital fact that for Hutcheon
“historiographic metafiction” is the most apt postmodern form of art
because it exemplifies the concerns of postmodernism and foregrounds its
characteristic features. The same is true of parody. It is clear, however, that
Hutcheon does not intend to reduce postmodernism to parody or
“historiographic metafiction”. In fact, Hutcheon herself hints at other
possible postmodern forms in her discussion of the avant-garde and
Brecht’s theatre, both of which share many significant features with
postmodernism. Hutcheon suggests a similarity between parody and
Brecht’s aesthetic distance, both of which “involve both artist and
audience in a participatory hermeneutic activity.”35 Both “historiographic
meta-fiction” and Brecht’s Epic theatre “place the receiver in a paradoxical
position, both inside and outside, participatory and critical.”36 Both
challenge the concept of linearity, development and causality, and
foreground the process of the human subject’s construction by the
dominant cultural and social structures. And, ultimately, both are
subversive in their critique of representation as complicitous with power
structures.
Having elucidated Hutcheon’s thesis and its merits, it will be
worthwhile to consider its applicability to the study of drama. Postmodern
drama can be best understood in the Hutcheonian terms as a simultaneous
inscription and subversion of the basic dramatic categories of character,
language and representation. What needs to be underlined is the double-
coded nature of postmodern drama whereby it rests on these categories,
but questions the assumptions on which they have been traditionally
based. Although postmodern drama attempts to lay bare and thus
demystify the ideologies in which the whole dramatic apparatus including
the playwright, character, language and the audience are situated, it
suggests that the awareness of these ideologies itself constitutes an
34
Stephen Baker. The Fiction of Postmodernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2000, p. 5.
35
36
ibid, p. 220.
ideology. It is this aspect of postmodern drama that makes it comparable to

parody and “historiographic metafiction”.
To examine how dramatic practice parallels some of the ideas
discussed above, we will turn to some of the important American and
European playwrights of the recent past who have, in similar ways,
challenged the traditional dramatic conventions. Their innovations in
exploiting theatrical apparatus serve to highlight the common concerns of
the contemporary theatre and postmodern theory. It is, however, essential
to trace these developments to the two foremost European dramatists,
Brecht and Beckett. It is remarkable that Roland Barthes was the first
critic to see a connection between poststructuralist ideas and Brecht’s
theatre. In the 1955 article “La Revolution Brechtienne”, originally an
editorial in Theatre Populare, Barthes summarizes the assumptions that
Brecht’s Epic theatre challenged. These assumptions, Barthes believed,
were rooted in the Western tradition and create a myth of naturalness in the
place of constructedness. Barthes seems to have been highly impressed by
Brecht’s critique of the notions of essentialism, especially in the notion of
character. His critical analysis of how signification is naturalized owes its
strength to his early recognition of Brecht’s strategies of disrupting the
ideology of the theatre. Barthes’s theory of semiotics, with the explicit aim
to deconstruct dominant ideologies by demonstrating the meaning-
constructing activity of signs, came only after he observed how Brecht
carried out a similar task in the theatre.37
As discussed above, Linda Hutcheon draws certain significant parallels
between postmodernism and Brecht’s Epic theatre. Brecht’s challenge to
the realist dramatic narrative based on linearity and to the human subject
has had an enormous influence on the subsequent dramatists who
perceived that he had marked an irreversible break with the realist
tradition.38 Deborah Geis comments on the significance of Brecht for
postmodern drama:
Brecht’s theory often serves as a paradigm for the challenging or

displacing these conventional strategies of representation. In Brecht’s “A-
37
See Michael Moriarty. Roland Barthes. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, pp. 46-7.
38
It is, however, important to note that the Epic theatre and postmodern drama are
essentially different despite their sharing some common features. Kerstin Schmidt
observes: “The Epic Theater and postmodern drama also cover common ground in
many respects. The Epic Theater shares with postmodern forms, for example, the
reflection upon its own constituents and the attempt to unveil theatrical illusion. It
cannot be subsumed under the label of postmodern drama, however, for it relies
heavily on the fable and frequently aims at conveying a moral. It is thus its
pronounced didacticism that is inimical to postmodern concerns” (33).
24 Chapter One
effect”, the ongoing refusal to permit audience empathy – or the

concomitant distinctions between actor/character and story/history – allows
for a constructive disengagement (or, more accurately, a historicized
“reading”) of the speaking body and its signifiers.39
Postmodern drama presents the condition of the human subject as

essentially decentered, an idea central to the poststructuralist theories. This
decentering is suggested mainly in two ways: by revealing human
subjectivity as an ideological construct being constantly reproduced by
cultural and linguistic codes, or by showing it as fundamentally
fragmented, without a core, a self or a recognizable past. Brecht is
probably the first European playwright who wrote with a strong conviction
against the notion of essentialism of the human subject. His Epic theatre
situates the subject against a particular social and historical background to
suggest how subjectivity is shaped by forces operating on it from
outside.40 Hutcheon quotes two important remarks of Emile Benvensite on
the relation between language and subjectivity:
Language is the possibility of subjectivity because it always contains the

linguistic forms appropriate to the expression of subjectivity, and discourse
provokes the emergence of subjectivity because it consists of discrete
instances.41
And further: “It is in and through language that man constitutes himself as
a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of ‘ego’ in
reality, in its reality.”42 The implications of these ideas are described by her
as follows:
If the speaking subject is constituted in and by language, s/he cannot be

totally autonomous and in control of her or his subjectivity, for discourse is
constrained by the rules of the language and open to multiple connotations
of anonymous cultural codes.43
39
Deborah Geis. “Wordscapes of the Body: Performative Language as Gestus in
Maria Irene Fornes’ Plays”. Theatre Journal 1990, vol. 42, no.3, p. 292.
40
Elizabeth Wright, in Postmodern Brecht: A Re-presentation (1988), has shown
how Brecht’s theatre subverts our assumptions of stable identity by capturing the
process through which subjectivity comes into being.
41
Quoted in Linda Hutcheon. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory,
Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988, p. 168.
42
ibid, p. 168.
43
ibid. Derrida’s opinion on how he conceives of human subjectivity is worth
quoting here: “I have never said that the subject should be dispensed with. Only
The most important dramatist to radically challenge the traditional idea

of human subjectivity in theatre, however, is Beckett. It is noteworthy that
while Brecht contested essentialism of the subject by always historicizing
and contextualizing his characters, Beckett achieved the same goal by
reversing Brecht’s method. His characters, stripped of all remnants of the
past are thoroughly decontextualized, as the plays themselves tend to take
place in some spatial and temporal void. Malkin makes an important
remark in this regard:
… postmodern drama has no psychologically endowed characters who can

act as the locus of recall. For postmodernism, individual recall is no longer
the relevant paradigm, since the rooted, autonomous self, the subject-as-
consciousness, is no longer available. When, as in Beckett’s late plays,
recall appears to arise from a specific subject, that subject is him/herself
fractured, “falling to bits”, and placed at a remove from the “remembering”
voice(s). The link between an experiencing subject and articulated recall is
severed, as is the faith in memory to capture truth, find origins, or heal.44
According to her, Beckett represents most forcefully the concept of

fragmentation of the self:
Hollowed out, lacking an ego or a core of human essence, these are not
characters who develop in time and inspire audience identification … The
fragmentation of experience and the dissolution of the unified self – basic
topoi of postmodern thought – banish memory from the security of
individual control, rendering it sourceless.45
Malkin’s basic thesis which she derives from her perception that
postmodernism marks a foundational shift in the way memory operates,
provides an important insight into how postmodern drama treats the
concept of the subject’s relation with its past:
Where once memory called up coherent, progressing narratives of

experienced life, or at least unlocked the significance of hidden memory
that it should be deconstructed. To deconstruct the subject does not mean to deny
its existence […]. To acknowledge this does not mean, however, that the subject is
what it says it is. The subject is not some meta-linguistic substance or identity,
some pure cogito of self-presence; it is always inscribed in language. My work
does not, therefore, destroy the subject; it simply tries to resituate it”.(qtd. in
Kerstin Schmidt. The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American
Drama. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005. p. 46)
44
Jeanette Malkin. Memory – Theatre and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor:
45
ibid.
26 Chapter One
for the progressions of the present, this kind of enlightenment organization

has broken down in postmodernism and given way to the nonnarrative
reproduction of conflated, disrupted, repetitive, and moreover collectively
retained and articulated fragments. This shift in the workings of memory is
reflected in plays shaped through fragment, recurrence, and imagistic
tumult.46
A somewhat similar thesis underlies Deborah Geis’s argument which

focuses on the representation of monologue in postmodern drama to
suggest decentering and multivocality: “Perhaps the ultimate manifestation
of the decentered subject is the increasing precedence that monologue
takes over dialogue in postmodern drama.”47 For her, monologue in
postmodern drama does not emerge from a unified subject: “Monologue
does not necessarily emerge from one coherent “voice” or “self”; the
monologic texts, rather, are similarly fragmented and given multiple
voices”.48 In fact, monologue can be seen as a medium through which the
decentered subject dramatizes the fragmented condition of its memory.
Installing fragmentation at a site where the subject usually assumes the
sense of a unified self is a powerful method of suggesting its dispersal.
Sam Shepard offers a prime example of this idea in a number of his
plays such as Chicago (1965), Tooth of Crime (1972), Action (1976),
Buried Child (1978) and Fool for Love (1982). For both Malkin and Geis,
Shepard’s obsession with the theme of disintegration of the human subject
is a feature of postmodernism. Malkin comments thus on Shepard’s
concerns:
His characters constantly transform, perform, speak in “voices.” Parallel

actions and generic shiftings undermine any possibility of stability, even
within a theatrical code. This postmodern rejection of essence and
foundation of “metaconcepts,” or what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls “master
narratives,” supplies the frame of Shepard’s imagistic plays.49
David Mamet’s drama shares some essential features with Shepard’s,

and in the plays as American Buffalo (1976), A Life in the Theatre (1977)
and Water Engine (1977), surface realism is constantly subverted by
46
ibid, p. 4.
47
Deborah R. Geis. Postmodern Theatri[k]s: Monologue in Contemporary
American Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, p. 35.
48
ibid.
49
Jeanette Malkin. Memory –Theatre and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor:
undermining its assumptions about character and linear progress. Bigsby

remarks that Mamet’s realism is:
fully informed by absurdist assumptions about the pressures which offer to

dissolve character, aware of the displacement of the subject, the deceptions
of language and the cogency of entropy as image and fact.50
In Mamet’s plays there are unmistakable signs of pressures under which

the characters seem to be losing their sense of a concrete self. Bigsby sums
up the characteristics of Mamet’s characters in these terms:
Unable to act, to commit themselves to the casualities of a moral existence,

the characters allow their impulses to be deflected into language which
must then carry the weight of their blunted aspirations.51
Language in postmodern drama assumes great significance because

postmodern thought foregrounds the role of language in constructing both
the epistemological discourses and the human subject. Language can never
be a neutral medium for representation; it is rather always already
inflected with power relations. In the words of Paul de Man: “No such
thing as an unrhetorical, natural language exists that could be used as a
point of reference; language is itself the result of purely rhetorical tricks
and devices”.52 Postmodern drama inscribes language but subverts its
neutral status by revealing its complicity with discursive practices of
various types. Language is therefore shown to be a medium that can
manipulate and hide the truth as much as it can express and reveal it.
Moreover, postmodern drama demonstrates the condition of the human
subjectivity as a function of linguistic codes, an idea expounded by
theoreticians such as Emile Benvensite. Language as such is shown not to
be merely reflective but constitutive of what is termed as reality. The
linguistic codes, thoroughly social in their character, cannot be used
merely as tools for expression. They are, instead, inflected with prior
meanings and traces from usages in different contexts, and thus shape the
subject’s perception of itself and reality. The use of dialogue borrowed
from other texts, a remarkable feature of postmodern drama,
simultaneously challenges the notions of the autonomy of the dramatic
world inhabited by the characters and their consciousness as the origin of
50
C W E Bigsby. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama 3.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 266.
51
ibid.
52
Paul de Man. “Nietzsche’s Theory of Rhetoric”. Symposium. Spring 1974, no.
28, p. 35.
28 Chapter One
language. The characters, held within an unbounded signifying system, are

often at the mercy of various codes which manipulate them after they have
been internalized by them.
Another feature of postmodern drama relating to language is its
exploitation of the linguistic indeterminacies and semantic pluralities to
the effect of destabilizing the link between the sign and the referent, the
signifier and the signified. Here too, Beckett can be seen as a powerful
representative of the idea. Andrew Kennedy has rightly observed in this
context:
Beckett, who used to read Mauthner’s Critique of Language aloud to

Joyce, has woven a far reaching epistemological skepticism about all
language into all his texts; and his dialogue is shot through with the pathos
of man’s insuperable need to go on talking without end.53
Postmodern drama follows Beckett in dramatizing the Derridean notion of

the infinite play of signifiers through a refusal of narrative closure, an idea
which often finds expression in its tendency to embrace contradictions
instead of resolving them. In some cases, this idea gets manifested through
open-ended debates on epistemology, arts and ethics, all of which are
shown to be inextricably bound with the problem of linguistic
signification.
The theatres of Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson offer apt
illustrations of this kind of drama that uses language to disrupt the
assumptions of linguistic signification. Foreman’s Ontological – Hysteric
Theatre which he himself describes as:
a form of concrete theatre in which the moment-to-moment resistance and

impenetrability of the materials worked on stage are framed and reframed
so that the spectator’s attention is redistributed and exhilaration slowly
invades his consciousness as a result of the continuous presentation and re-
presentation of the atomic units of each experienced moment.54
This can be seen as an attempt to make the theatre viable in an age where
communication of meaning has become increasingly difficult. Foreman’s
manifestoes, which he used to corroborate his theatrical practice, offer a
useful insight into the manner language operates in his theatre. Some of
the important manifestoes read as: “Theatre in the past has used language
53
Andrew K Kennedy. Six Dramatists in Search of a Language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 4.
54
Richard Foreman in Kate Davy (ed). Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestoes.
New York, 1976, p. xiii.
to build: What follows/ We use language not to destroy, but to undercut

pinnings of there”.55 And furthermore:
Dissonances, dissociation, discontinuity, dehumanization/ and GAPS

remind one of what is true; that man is always shipwrecked/ That he will
never WIN/(Which is different from saying that he cannot/ PLAY
magnificently and joyously – in which/ case not-winning is hardly a case
for sadness).56
Foreman argues that language should not be used primarily for its
referential purposes because referentiality itself stands deeply
problematized. His plays such as Hotel China (1972), Pandering to the
Masses: A Misrepresentation (1975) and Penguin Touquet (1981) are
attempts to explore the possibilities of a theatre that is based on the
recognition of an inherent semantic dissonance in language.
A somewhat similar idea of language is presented in Robert Wilson’s
theatre of images that refuses to engage with either the psychological
concerns or the plot development. Instead, what is highlighted is the
severance of language from its supposed origin, the human consciousness.
His plays such as A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974-5) and Einstein on the
Beach (1976) subvert language by, “hollowing it out, establishing a series
of disjunctions between word and act, word and context, word and
gesture.”57 Language as a part of the medium of the theatrical
representation is used to pinpoint its problematical nature. Bigsby
comments on Wilson’s use of language in these terms:
The language is deployed in part as a kind of jazz scat or a form of mantra.

He uses language against itself. On the one hand he relies on a certain
associative power. He wishes to press his model of simultaneous
experience into the realm of language while at the same time wanting to
dis-assemble it.58
It is, however, to be noted that the aim of both Foreman and Wilson is to
break free from language, an idea premised upon the faith in the human
ability to capture a pre-linguistic essence. This idea, as has been discussed
earlier, is radically contested by postmodernism. Nevertheless, both these
playwrights have marked a significant point of intersection between
55
ibid, p. 66.
56
ibid, p. 147.
57
C W E Bigsby. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama 3.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 181.
58
ibid, p. 178.
30 Chapter One
theatre and the recent poststructuralist theories. The question of language

is thus central to postmodern drama even if certain practitioners are
motivated by a desire to escape its determining influences.
Postmodern drama does not abjure reference to reality in spite of its
disruption of linguistic categories. This can be seen in the way in which
the past is both inscribed and subverted. Like “historiographic
metafiction”, postmodern drama revisits the past ironically. History
assumes importance not because it reveals the past as it was, but because it
enables us to perceive that our retrieval of it can never escape the
conditions of textuality. The challenge of inscribing the past on the stage is
met by postmodern drama by either projecting characters reminiscing
about a collective or individual past, or by presenting different time-
frames simultaneously or alternately on the stage. This calls for redefining
the narrative in non-linear terms that alters the manner of conceptualizing
time. In the words of Elizabeth Deeds Ermath:
The best definition of postmodern narrative might be precisely that it

resolutely does not operate according to any form of historical time, that is,
representational time, and in many cases directly parodies or disputes that
time and the generalizations it allows to form.59
By rejecting the notion of linearity of history, postmodern drama also

rejects the related notion of progress. Malkin’s remarks in this regard are
worth quoting:
Ideologically, postmodernism differs from the modern in terms of the

foundational concept of “progress”. Progress implies linear and causal
increase through time, development, improvement, teleological faith. The
virtues of progress and goal-oriented history – compromised beyond repair
by this century’s ideological excesses – are rejected in postmodernism and
replaced by concept stressing synchronicity, the simultaneous, repetitive,
plural, and interactive.60
Malkin’s assertion that postmodernism stresses synchronicity should

not be construed to suggest that it abjures any meaningful engagement
with the past. In fact, as the chapter on Stoppard will illustrate,
postmodern drama revisits the past precisely to disrupt the notion of linear
progress underlying the assumptions of the Enlightenment Rationality.
59
Elizabeth Deeds Ermath. Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of
Representational Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 43.
60
Jeanette Malkin. Memory – Theatre and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor:
Moreover, postmodern drama inscribes a relation with the present as much

as with the past. All representations, whether belonging to the past or the
present, are shown by it to be constitutive of reality. This means blurring
the traditional distinctions between reality and its representation and
hence, fact and fiction, an idea which is presented through the use of self-
conscious theatrical devices such as the play-within-the-play.
Malkin takes up Heiner Muller and Thomas Bernhard, the two German
dramatists, to substantiate the argument that postmodern drama revisits
history with irony in order to question its epistemological status. Muller’s
Germania Death in Berlin (1971) and The Battle (1974), and Bernhard’s
Eve of Retirement (1979) are examples where history is presented in the
form of a collage and mixed freely with purely imaginative elements. In a
scene of Germania, for example, a rather grotesque version of the battle of
Stalingard is presented, where the real historical figures as Napoleon,
Caesar, and the Nibelungs engage in farcical acts. In yet another scene,
Frederick II appears as a vampire. This device of fiddling with history is a
potent way of engaging with it ironically. Bernhard’s Eve of Retirement
too treats history with complicitous irony, conflating the realms of the past
and the present, while simultaneously presenting a proliferation of
perspectives, fragmentation and radical indeterminacies. Malkin sums up
the manner in which postmodern dramatists engage with history in these
terms:
Postmodernism involves an explicit (and always “loaded”) utilization and

reflection of the past, confounded by memory, by a destabilized
perspective, or by other deconstructive tactics. Bernhard, like other
postmodern dramatists – Heiner Muller, Sam Shepard – depends on the
audiences’ knowledge of the past, of how the past is usually imaged, in
order to shock and draw irony through multiple, or conflated perspectives.
These are often provocations which challenge the usual representation of
that past, or of the present in its light.61
The above analysis serves to vindicate the assertion that postmodern

drama, like other postmodern art forms, engages critically with reality.
This is, however, done by simultaneously throwing its own
representational status into question, confirming Hutcheon’s thesis that
postmodernism is a paradoxical and self-contradictory enterprise. Kerstin
Schmidt rightly argues that:
61
Jeanette R Malkin. “Pulling the Pants off History: Politics and Postmodernism in
Thomas Bernhard’s Eve of Retirement”. Theatre Journal, 1995, vol. 47, no. 2, p.
106.
32 Chapter One
[…] it is precisely postmodernist’s indeterminacy and playfulness that

promotes the development of a decidedly political agenda in postmodern
drama. It is particularly suited to unveiling dominant representational
patterns and subverting existing hierarchies and discourses.62
A similar view is expressed by Philip Auslander in his analysis of

postmodern performance which he sees as fraught with political
implications for the contemporary postmodern commodification:
Because postmodern political art must position itself within postmodern

culture, it must use the same representational means as all other cultural
expression yet remain permanently suspicious of them. If it is to critique
those means by using them, it cannot claim that its use somehow possesses
greater truth value than any other use.63
Nick Kaye also substantiates this point in his analysis of postmodern

performance:
The postmodern [drama] indicates a calling into question of the languages,

styles and figures through which it is seen … … It follows that the
postmodern in art is subversive and transgressive, that is occurs as a
critical and skeptical stepping beyond bounds, a disruption that
purposefully upsets the terms by which the “work of art” would constitute
itself.64
Postmodern drama, to use Barthes’s terminology, dedoxifies our modes of

thought and perception which provokes a rethinking of these modes.
Recognition of this fact enables us to dispel the notion that postmodernism
implies an infinite regress into textuality with no referential value.
Hutcheon’s thesis can be seen to be endorsed by Auslander and Kaye who
see postmodern performance as an art form with a deconstructive
potential. Kaye remarks that, “performance may be thought of as a
primary postmodern mode,”65 because it has the potential of “making
62
Kerstin Schmidt. The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American
Drama. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005, p. 23.
63
Philip Auslander. Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural
Politics in Contemporary American Performance. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1994, p. 23.
64
Nick Kaye. Postmodernism and Performance. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
1994, p. 19.
65
ibid, p. 12.
visible [of] contingencies and instabilities” and can, therefore, be regarded

as “a disruption of the move toward containment and stability.”66
It is this deconstructive impulse of postmodern drama that vindicates
its value as a mode of critical engagement with the contemporary culture
and politics. In the following chapters on Pinter and Stoppard an attempt
will be made to examine their plays in the light of the discussion carried
out here.
66
ibid, p. 23.
CHAPTER TWO
HAROLD PINTER AND POSTMODERNISM:

POWER, MEMORY AND POLITICS
As illustrated in the introduction, Pinter’s plays have invited a wide

variety of critical responses. From the time Martin Esslin presented Pinter
as the foremost representative of the absurdist tradition in England, the
playwright has been subjected to various analytical studies. After Austin
Quigley’s seminal study which conclusively revealed the limitations of the
traditional approaches, it is now generally accepted that Pinter’s plays defy
the logic of critical approaches based on the realist assumptions. This is
duly reflected in the works of those critics who have primarily focused on
the use of language by Pinter. Richard Gilman’s remark that “in Pinter’s
world, language is the play,”1 may be an overstatement but certain
important studies including Almansi and Henderson’s Harold Pinter
(1983) and Marc Silverstein’s Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural
Power (1993) have focused on the analysis of language as a key to
understanding Pinter. Although it is evident that the studies of Quigley,
Almansi and Henderson, and Silverstein point towards the primacy of
language in Pinter’s plays, none of them employs the critical paradigm of
postmodernism as illustrated in the previous chapter. It is, therefore,
worthwhile to undertake an analysis of Pinter’s plays to demonstrate the
validity of applying postmodern critical tools to his drama.
From a postmodern point of view, Pinter’s obsession with the cultural
construction of the human subject, the inevitably decentered nature of the
self, and the role of power in constructing perceptions of reality, is of
central importance. In dealing with all these, he foregrounds the centrality
of language as a basic dramatic device. There is an overt subversion of the
conventional dramatic categories suggesting a challenge to the
representational status of drama itself. In a characteristic postmodern
manner, there is a simultaneous inscription and contestation of these
conventions. Language, plot and character are employed, but only to lay
bare their problematical status as categories of representation. A pertinent
1
Richard Gilman. “The Pinter Puzzle.” New York Times, 22 Jan. 1967, sec. 2, p. 1.
36 Chapter Two
example of this is provided by the futility of tracing the origin of Pinter’s

characters and their motivation to action, on which the playwright has
himself commented as follows:
The desire for verification is understandable but cannot always be satisfied.

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor
between what is true or what is false. The thing is not necessarily either
true or false; it can be both true and false.2
He further elaborated the idea in these terms:
[There is] the immense difficulty, if not impossibility, of verifying the past.
I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took
place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened? If one can
speak of the difficulty of knowing what in fact took place yesterday one
can I think treat the present in the same way. What’s happening now? We
won’t know until tomorrow or six month’s time, and we won’t know then,
we’ll have forgotten or our imagination will have attributed quite false
characteristics to today. A moment is sucked away and distorted, often even
at the same time of its birth. We will interpret a common experience quite
differently, though we prefer to subscribe to the view that there’s a shared,
common ground, a known ground. I think there’s a shared common ground
all right, but that it’s more like quicksand. Because ‘reality’ is quite a
strong, firm word, we tend to think, or to hope, that the state to which it
refers is equally firm, settled, and unequivocal. It doesn’t seem to be, and
in my opinion it’s no worse or better for that.3
These remarks of Pinter provide valuable insights into his concerns as

a playwright. Pinter is precisely interested in showing that our assumptions
about reality are more problematical than we usually suppose and his plays
explore the complexity informing various aspects of reality, self and
language. The dramatic mode Pinter adopts challenges the assumptions of
realism in the theatre by subverting its premises of plot, character and
language. One of the prominent features, for example, is the way in which
characters often use language, not to communicate, but to obfuscate,
coerce and manipulate. The characters, especially in the early plays,
deliberately evade communication by resorting to different linguistic
tactics like repeating the question asked, distorting its sense or playing a
pun upon it. Pinter himself, while discrediting the application of the
2
Quoted in Martin Esslin. The Peopled Wound: The Plays of Harold Pinter.
London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1970, p. 40.
3
Harold Pinter. “Between the Lines.” Sunday Times. London. 4 March 1962, p.
25.
Harold Pinter and Postmodernism: Power, Memory and Politics 37
“failure of communication” thesis to his plays, remarked that, “I feel…that

instead of any inability to communicate, there is a deliberate evasion of
communication.”4 The dialogue between Ben and Gus in The Dumb
Waiter is a dramatic elucidation of Pinter’s remark:
Ben: If I say go and light the kettle I mean go and light the kettle.
Gus: How can you light a kettle?
Ben: It’s a figure of speech! Light the kettle. It’s a figure of speech!
Gus: I’ve never heard it.
Ben: Light the kettle! It’s common usage!
Gus: I think you’ve got it wrong.
Ben (menacing): What do you mean?
Gus: They say put on the kettle.
Ben (taut): Who says?
They stare at each other, breathing hard. (Deliberately): I’ve never in all
my life heard anyone say put on the kettle.
Gus: I bet my mother used to say it.
Ben: Your mother? When did you last see your mother?
Gus: I don’t know, about-
Ben: Well, What are you talking about your mother for?
They stare. Gus, I’m not trying to be unreasonable.
I’m just trying to point something out to you.
Gus: Yes, but-
Ben: Who’s the senior partner here, me or you?
Gus: You.
Ben: I’m only looking after your interests,
Gus, you’ve got to learn, mate.
Gus: Yes, but I’ve never heard-
Ben (vehemently): Nobody says light the gas!
What does the gas light?
Gus: What does the gas-?
Ben (grabbing him with two hands by the throat, at arm’s length):
The Kettle, You Fool!5
Another such instance is the conversation between Mr. Kidd and Rose in
The Room:
Rose: What about your sister, Mr. Kidd?

Mr. Kidd: What about her?
Rose: Did she have any babies?
4
Quoted in Martin Esslin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Penguin Books, 1968, p. 274.
5
Harold Pinter. The Birthday Party and Other Plays. London: Metheun, 1960, p.
48.
38 Chapter Two
Mr. Kidd: Yes, she had a resemblance to my old mum, I think Taller, of
course.
Rose: When did she die then, your sister?
Mr. Kidd: Yes, that’s right, it was after she died that I must have stopped
counting …
Rose: What did she die of?
Mr. Kidd: Who?
Rose: Your sister.
Pause
Mr. Kidd: I’ve made ends meet.6
The early plays which include The Room (1957), The Dumbwaiter
(1960), The Birthday Party (1957), and The Caretaker (1959) illustrate
how Pinter both inscribes and subverts the realist tradition in theatre.
While they depict real life characters speaking natural language, the
overwhelming mystery surrounding their origin and actions subverts
realism. J R Taylor comments upon this feature in Pinter’s plays:
The situations involved are always very simple and basic, the language
which the characters use is an almost uncannily accurate reproduction of
everyday speech (indeed, in this respect Pinter, far from being the least
dramatist of his generation, is arguably the most realistic), and yet in these
ordinary surroundings lurk mysterious terrors and uncertainties and by
extension, the whole external world of everyday realities is thrown into
question. Can we ever know the truth about anybody or anything? Is there
any absolute truth to be known?7
But more importantly, it is through the treatment of the issue of power

as it operates in social discourse to construct human subjectivity that these
plays subvert realism. One of the pivotal assumptions of realism in art is
that the human subject possesses an essence prior to and independent of
the cultural and linguistic codes. Pinter’s plays radically contest this
assumption by dramatizing the processes through which human
subjectivity is constantly reproduced by various cultural and linguistic
codes, thereby challenging the notion of an essential and transcendental
self. This idea finds dramatic treatment in The Birthday Party in Stanley’s
construction by the cultural codes which find expression through a
rigorous investigation by Goldberg and McCann. Stanley betrays his past
by means of certain reminiscences that indicate how he comes to see
himself as an individual. Describing his concert as a pianist he says:
6
ibid, p. 103.
7
John Russel Taylor. Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963, p. 287.
I once gave a concert … Yes. It was a good one, too. They were all there
that night. Every single one of them. It was a great success. Yes. A concert.
At Lower Edmonton. I had a unique touch. Absolutely unique. They came
up to me. They came up to me and said they were grateful.8
Stanley’s statement “they came up to me” underlines how he comes to

identify himself as a subject within the field of the Other. Stanley’s
attenuated sense of a concrete self becomes increasingly manifest as the
play develops to a point where the initiative is taken over by the two
intruders, Goldberg and McCann. The dialogue reveals Stanley’s
subjection to the interrogation by the two and a gradual disintegration of
his self. But more importantly, it also reveals how the linguistic codes
perform the function of subject construction in the first place as the
hapless victim of a verbal assault gives in to the dictates of outside forces:
Goldberg: What makes you think you exist?

McCann: You’re dead.
Goldberg: You’re dead. You can’t live … You’re dead. You’re a plague
gone bad. There’s no juice in you. You’re nothing but an odour. (62)
This passage illustrates Stanley’s virtual annihilation by the two intruders.

In the third act of the play, however, we witness the power of discourses
that write the human subject through a rigorous process of inscription:
Goldberg: We’ll make a man of you.

McCann: And a woman.
Goldberg: You’ll be re-orientated.
McCann: You’ll be rich.
Goldberg: You’ll be adjusted.
McCann: You’ll be our pride and joy.
Goldberg: You’ll be a mensch.
McCann: You’ll be a success.
Goldberg: You’ll be integrated.
McCann: You’ll give orders.
Goldberg: You’ll make decisions.
McCann: You’ll be a magnate.
Goldberg: A statesman.
McCann: You’ll own yatchs.
Goldberg: Animals.
McCann: Animals. (93-4)
8
Harold Pinter. The Birthday Party and Other Plays. London: Metheun, 1960, pp.
32-3. All the subsequent references to The Birthday Party are from this edition and
are given in the parenthesis.
40 Chapter Two
The passage demonstrates the intimate relation of the subject with

subjection and offers an illustration of how the human subject is inscribed
and reinscribed by discourses that operate within intricate power
structures. Stanley loses himself to the inscribing process carried out by
Goldberg and McCann showing how the notion of a unified and
autonomous self is an illusion.
A similar process is at work in The Caretaker where the intense
struggle for power is shown in a verbal twist when Mick enters the room
and takes the entire initiative into his hands, dictating terms to Davies in
order to establish control over him. Mick plays a linguistic game of
coercion upon Davies, forcing him to repeat his answers thereby
reinforcing his dominance over him:
Mick: What’s your name?

Davies: I don’t know you. I don’t know who you are.
Pause
Mick: Eh?
Davies: Jenkins.
Mick: Jenkins?
Davies: Yes.
Mick: Jen … Kins … What did you say your name was?.
Davies: Jenkins.
Mick: I beg your pardon?
Davies: Jenkins.
Pause
Mick: Jen … kins.9
The verbal assault to which Davies is subjected by Mick disintegrates him

further and he is reduced to the state of virtual annihilation. All attempts of
Davies to evade, lie and prevaricate are shattered by the superior tactics
employed by Mick whose persistence lays bare the inner vacuity of
Davies. The false fronts of Davies are ruptured to reveal the absence lying
within him. Mick finally has total control over Davies who now complies
to be “written” by his dictates.
Mick: … You’ve been in the services, haven’t you?

Davies: The what?
Mick: You been in the services. You can tell by your stance.
Davies: oh … Yes. Spent half my life there, man.
Overseas … like … serving … I was.
Mick: In the colonies, weren’t you?
9
Harold Pinter. The Caretaker. London: Metheun, 1960, pp. 31-2. All subsequent
references to the play are from the same edition indicated in the parenthesis.
Davies: I was over there. I was one of the first over there. (50-1)
In fact, Mick outplays Davies at every point, forestalling his attempts at

evasion and self-defense:
Mick: I can take nothing you say at face value. Every word you speak is
open to any number of different interpretations, most of what you say is
lies. You’re violent, you’re erratic, you’re just completely unpredictable.
You’re nothing else but a wild animal, when you come down to it. You’re a
barbarian. (73-4)
In an important sense, Mick’s statements are a commentary on the

characters of most of the early plays of Pinter. Nothing that the characters
say in these plays can be taken at face value. Pinter, almost at every stage,
exposes the difficulty of maintaining whatever is said or done by them.
This strategy not only challenges the realist assumptions of neutrality and
objectivity of representation but also dislocates the linear narrative of the
plays. It also hints at a persisting discrepancy in human relationships,
constituting a tool to challenge the idea of representation in art. The realist
assumptions of neutrality and objectivity of representation become
difficult to maintain, for whatever is said or done is largely actuated by a
desire to deceive, manipulate, control, dominate and conceal. Mick, Aston
and Davies engage in a complex relationship but by the end of the third act
neither any motivation nor any specific design in their actions is available
to us. Instead, the dialogue itself is foregrounded to the level where it
becomes possible to see the conflation of power and language.
While The Birthday Party and The Caretaker both illustrate the process
of the subject’s construction through anonymous cultural codes disguised
as overt coercion, The Collection (1962) and The Homecoming (1965)
offer a powerful dramatic exposition of the role of power in constructing
the female subject in patriarchy. The Collection offers an exposition of the
patriarchal power structures. While conversing with James, Bill
generalizes about women in this way: “Every woman is bound to have an
outburst of wild sensuality at one time or another. That’s the way I look at
it, anyway. It’s part of their nature.”10 Bill’s remark points towards the
underlying ideological underpinnings of the play as a whole. Patriarchy,
which encapsulates the four characters’ view of themselves and reality, is
the dominant discourse of the play.
This becomes obvious in the play’s central quest: whether Stella has
been a faithful wife or not? The ideological construction of the female
10
Harold Pinter. The Collection and The Lover. London: Metheun, 1963, p. 39.
42 Chapter Two
subject in the patriarchal discourse inevitably figures as offering extremely

limited choices to women. The Collection, like The Homecoming, depicts
how patriarchy creates the possibilities of representational apparatus by
which the female subject is forced into the binarism of wife/whore.
At the center of the play is the question whether Stella has been faithful
to her husband or not? Patriarchy assigns the role of the faithful wife to the
female and any transgression of this category by her leads her into the
other category; that of the whore. The theme of sexual betrayal itself
presupposes a cultural identity of the female where her desire has to be
rigorously kept under surveillance to protect the interests of patriarchy.
The female, constructed as wife by the patriarchal discourse, assumes this
role as “natural”, oblivious that the discursive category of wifehood
ensures the perpetuation of patriarchy by making her the reproductive
agent of the husband.
Bill’s statement that ascribes a “natural” transgressive character to
female sexuality is an apt commentary on the process of naturalizing the
fictional. The “truth” about women, so manifest in their desire, is their
tendency to transgress the lawful boundaries and tread into the unlawful
territory. This tendency threatens the patriarchal discourse from within,
since it poses danger to the cultural construction of family which is the site
of producing and reproducing the “normal” human subjects.
In a characteristic postmodern manner, The Collection highlights the
representation of the female subject, desire and body within the dominant
patriarchal discourse and illustrates the fictional nature of the supposedly
natural, thereby dedoxifying the inscription of femininity. Stella’s sexuality
is foregrounded as a textual category that is constructed by James and
Bill’s projection of their desires on her body. Linda Hutcheon, explaining
the common concerns of postmodernism and feminism, writes:
The body cannot escape representation and these days this means it cannot
escape the feminist challenge to the patriarchal and masculinist
underpinnings of the cultural practices that subtend those representations.11
It is, however, in the last scene of the play – in Stella’s response to James’s
conclusion that she did not betray him with Bill but just talked to him in
the lounge – that a potential site of resistance to patriarchy is hinted at.
Stella looks at James, neither confirming, nor denying his belief. Stella’s
silence exemplifies the postmodernist impulse of subverting the patriarchal
hegemony by a refusal to comply with its imposition, while resisting being
11
138.
drawn into a full-fledged feminist position by stopping short of an explicit

denial of James’s belief. The Collection ends on a postmodern note of
exposition of the patriarchal cultural codes without substituting them with
equally ideological feminist ones.
This idea finds a more elaborate and powerful treatment in The
Homecoming which, however, does not portray the allegedly threatening
and transgressive female sexuality tending to subvert patriarchy by sliding
into whoredom, but opens out a possibility to see the inscription of female
sexuality by the two discourses, namely, patriarchy and capitalism. The
female in this play is compelled to transform herself into a commodity to
ensure the financial stability of a family solely consisting of males and
hence to ensure the perpetuation of both these hegemonic discourses.
Before Ruth, Jessie, Max’s wife and the mother of his three children
had performed the role of the archetypal female, playing wife and mother
simultaneously, to produce and construct the ideologically positioned
individuals in the family. Jessie, as Max tells Ruth, had been responsible
for whatever their children had learnt:
Max: … it was Jessie who taught boys everything they know. She taught
them all the morality they know. I’m telling you. Every single bit of the
moral code they live by was taught to them by their mother.12
The mother, thus, is shown to be the site and agent of constructing the
subjects who have internalized the representations and discursive codes of
the most acceptable and, by that definition, the most dominant ideological
categories. The ideological function of the mother ensures the perpetuation
of patriarchy so well dramatized through the roles of Lenny, Joey and
Teddy. It is, however, through the character of Ruth that the play provides
a perspective to analyze the role of power in representation. The
representational practices that are embedded in the patriarchal
configurations of power relations produce hierarchical division between
the sexes. This is hinted at in a dialogue between Lenny and Ruth in which
Lenny relates a long story about a lady whom he describes as a prostitute
and who had made him a certain proposal. Lenny states that he might have
considered the prostitute’s proposal seriously had she not been afflicted
with a dangerous disease:
Lenny: This lady had been searching for me for days. She had lost tracks of
my whereabouts. However, the fact was she eventually caught up with me,
12
Harold Pinter. The Homecoming. London: Metheun, 1965, p. 61. All subsequent
references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the
parenthesis.
44 Chapter Two
and when she caught up with me she made me this certain proposal. Well,
this proposal wasn’t entirely out of order and normally I would have
subscribed to it. I mean I would have subscribed to it in the normal course
of events. The only trouble was she was falling apart with the pox. So I
turned it down. (47)
When confronted by Ruth as to how he knew she was diseased, he

answers:
How did I know?

Pause
I decided she was. (47)
Lenny’s remark illustrates the idea of power that inheres in

representation. The power to narrate, describe and represent the other, in
this case the female subject, by the voices implicated in the dominant
discourse is thus brought into focus. What remains normally concealed is
the process that transforms mere representation into reality and Lenny’s
remark may be seen as an exposition of this process. It is by focusing on
how the family takes on Ruth that the ideological positioning of the female
gender is made explicit by the play. The first reaction of Max on seeing
Ruth is that of rejection compounded with anger, “who asked you to bring
tarts in here?” (57). Despite Teddy’s insistence that Ruth is his wife, Max
is dismissive of her and straightaway calls her a whore:
I’ve never had a whore under this roof before. Ever since your mother
died. My word of honour … Take that disease away from me. Get her
away from me. (58)
Max’s remarks about his wife Jessie are suggestive of a virtual conflation
of wife and whore in the patriarchal discourse, which also points towards
an inherent contradiction in patriarchy. On the one hand, patriarchy itself
depends upon a distinction between the two for the very idea of family and
parenthood; even the notion of a centered and grounded human subject
depends upon this distinction. On the other hand, however, the distinction
is itself disrupted, if not entirely erased, by the patriarchy that inscribes it.
As the play progresses, the family becomes less aggressive towards
Ruth. Joey, Lenny and even Max, make advances towards Ruth which she
does not repel. Her acquiescence in the role that the family wants her to
perform as a source of entertainment for them is a significant moment in
the play. The need to inscribe Ruth as a sex-object for the family is
overtaken by the need to inscribe her as a professional whore who can
“work” for the financial betterment of the family:
Lenny: Eh, Dad.

(Lenny walks forward.)
I’ve got a better idea.
Max: What?
Lenny: There’s no need for us to go to all this expense. I know these
women. Once they get started they ruin your budget. I’ve got a better idea.
Why don’t I take her up with me to Greek street?
Max: You mean put her on the game?
Pause.
We’ll put her on the game. That’s a stroke of genius, that’s a marvelous
idea. (88)
Lenny even ropes in Teddy, asking him to get people from across the
Atlantic to visit Ruth:
Lenny: You could be our representative in the States.

Max: Of course. We’re talking in international terms!
By the time we’ve finished Pan-American’ll give us a
discount. (90)
Having decided to put Ruth “on the game”, they put this proposal before
her through Teddy:
Teddy: Ruth … the family have invited you to stay for a little while longer.
As a …as a kind of guest. If you like the idea I don’t mind. We can manage
very easily at home … .until you come back. (94)
What follows from here on is an apt commentary on the inscription of the

female subject as a fetishized commodity in a culture driven by capitalist
consumerism. Ruth accepts the proposal to become a prostitute but wants
certain things according to her choice. She demands a flat with three
rooms and a bathroom and other kind of conveniences. Ruth’s
commodification is carried out in this way:
Lenny: We’d finance you, to begin with, and then, when you were
established, you could pay us back, in installments.
Ruth: Oh no, I wouldn’t agree to that.
Lenny: Oh, why not?
Ruth: You would have to regard your original outlay simply as a Capital
investment.
Lenny: I see, All right. (93)
The play ends when Max, the head of the family and the spokesman of
patriarchy, collapses to the ground after a series of interrupted outbursts.
46 Chapter Two
Max (To Ruth): You’re going to have to work. You’ll have to take them on,
you understand?
Pause.
Does she realize that?
Pause.
Lenny, do you think she understands … .
He begins to stammer.
What … what … what … we’re getting at? What … we’ve got in mind?
Do you think she’s got it clear?
Pause.
I don’t think she’s got it clear.
Pause.
You understand what I mean? Listen I’ve got a funny idea she’ll do the
dirty on us, you want to bet? She’ll use us, she’ll make use of us, I can tell
you! I can smell it! You want to bet?
Pause
She won’t be … adaptable!
He begins to groan, clutches his stick, falls on his knees by the side of her
chair. (97)
Max’s collapsing to the ground, his doubt whether Ruth will comply
with the already agreed terms and his apprehensions that she will turn
tables on them have been interpreted by some critics as a final statement of
Ruth’s dominance over Teddy’s family. It seems more plausible, however,
to say that the ending projects a kind of ambiguity regarding Ruth’s
resistant stance towards the family. Austin Quigley aptly points out that
“for Ruth, the ending is of uncertain value,”13 and Elin Diamond declares
that, “to say Ruth has won is to ignore the ambiguities that resonate in the
last moments of the play.”14 Quigley and Diamond provide a basis for
arguing that the play actually ends on a postmodern ambivalence. Ruth can
be seen as an agency by which patriarchy has both inscribed and subverted
itself.
Like Stella’s silence at the end of The Collection, Ruth is given no final
voice to permit a thoroughly feminist interpretation to the ending of the
play. Instead, it illustrates what Linda Hutcheon describes as the typical
postmodern stance of exposing and demystifying the representational
categories of culture without, however, substituting one kind of
representational apparatus with the other ones capable of escaping
“constructedness” and thus existing outside an ideological framework.
13
Austin Quigley. The Pinter Problem. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1975, p. 225.
14
Elin Diamond. Pinter’s Comic Play. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press,
1985, p. 157.
Any substitution of such kind, on the postmodernist view, would be to

replace one ideology with another. The ambiguous ending of The
Homecoming where patriarchy has been exposed but not replaced by any
other ideological framework is typically postmodern in interrogating and
demystifying systems that unify with an aim to power.
With A Slight Ache (1961) and The Dwarfs (1963), Pinter shows the
signs of writing plays that reach their culmination in the memory plays.
Whereas The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Collection and The
Homecoming offered a dramatic parallel to the idea of the subject’s
ideological construction, A Slight Ache and The Dwarfs present situations
in which the human subject has already internalized the elusive external
menace and is struggling under the burden of a growing sense of its
dissolution. This overwhelming sense of disintegration jeopardizes the
foundational premise of the subject’s connection with the external reality.
Its sense of reality is hence as flimsy and ruptured as its sense of the self.
In A Slight Ache the presence of the silent match seller who never
utters a word throughout the play provides an interesting twist to the play’s
dramatic quality as the dialogue virtually changes into monologue when
both Edward and Flora address him in their long speeches. Edward
attributes different and contradictory actions to him as his very behavior is
indescribable. “You’re laughing”, “You’re crying”, “You’re moving”. The
central question echoed by Edward, “who are you?” illustrates the problem
of fixing the identity of a character. Edward admits that he looked at the
match seller from all angles and with all kinds of glasses but failed to
arrive at any conclusion. It is not that the match seller changes himself to
prevent Edward from “knowing” who he is; instead, his static condition on
the stage suggests an omnipresent source of ambiguity. The character of
the match seller also foregrounds the problematical nature of presence and
absence. The very binarism of presence/absence is dramatically subverted
through the match seller’s “present absence.”
The play’s ending that shows the abrupt and unexplained change of
roles between Edward and the match seller with the former turning blind
and falling to the ground and the latter moving out with Flora, disrupts the
audiences’ expectations used to the resolutions of the realist plays. Again,
this dramatic device suggests a subversion of the narrative closure,
pointing towards the dislocation of the spectacle by means of causal
dislocation. The end does not naturally flow out from the middle as in the
traditional realist theatre but breaks from it rather abruptly. The technique
itself problematizes the epistemological foundations of realism in art.
The Dwarfs carries further the concerns of the earlier plays, especially
in its focus on the unresolved nature of questions surrounding identity and
48 Chapter Two
truth. Len appears in a series of monologues and is obsessed with

imagining that there are dwarfs present in his yard. His fantasies are
juxtaposed with the realistic details that Mark and Pete talk about. In fact,
the play can be seen as consisting of a series of dialogues that are vaguely
connected. The setting of the play switches forward and backward from
Len to Mark’s house, thereby blurring a definite distinction between Len’s
fantasies and reality. There is little point in attributing Len’s fantasies to
some psychological disorder because the play eschews any suggestion of
mental illness. Instead, it seems more plausible to see Len’s monologues
exemplifying the problem of subjective perception. Len finds it difficult to
have a fixed opinion of himself as he is aware of the flux in which he is
inevitably situated:
For me, you see, I don’t grow old. I change. I don’t die. I change again. I
am not happy. I change. Nor unhappy. But when a big storm takes place I
do not change. I become someone else, which means I change out of all
recognition, I am transformed from the world in which I suffer the changes
I suffer, I retreat utterly from the standpoint where I am subject to change,
then with my iron mask on I wait for the storm to pass.15
From this, Len moves on to utter a long speech during his conversation
with Mark on the impossibility of certitude about the supposed essence of
the human self. Len’s speech is reminiscent of Beckett and Ionescoe’s
characters stripped off of any sense of concrete individuality:
The point is, who are you? Not why or how, not even what. I can see what,
perhaps, clearly enough. But who are you?…who you are, or appear to be
to me or appear to be to you, changes so quickly, so horrifyingly, I
certainly can’t keep up with it and I’m damn sure you can’t either. But who
you are I can’t even begin to recognize, and sometimes I recognize it so
wholly, so forcibly, I can’t look, and how can I be certain of what I see?
You have no number. Where am I to look, where am I to look, what is there
to locate, so as to have some surety to have some rest from this whole
bloody racket? You are the sum of so many reflections. How many
reflections? Whose reflections? Is that what you consist of? What scum
does the tide leave? What happens to the scum? When does it happen?16
The words “you are the sum of so many reflections” echoes the
postmodern contestation of the notion of the ontological self. The notion is
an illusion created by the subject’s situatedness in the field where the other
exercises its power on it.
15
Harold Pinter A Slight Ache and Other Plays. London: Metheun, 1961, p. 112.
16
ibid, p. 112.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pinter wrote some powerful plays
that have been termed as memory plays. Whereas the earlier plays
dramatized situations of menace, struggle for power and the dominance of
hegemonic discourses, the memory plays reveal a growing interest in the
issues such as individual’s past and decentered subjectivity. Instead of
dialogues informed by menace and coercion, a recurring feature of the
early plays, there is an increasing emphasis on monologue as the
characters try to retrieve their past by means of attenuated and unreliable
memories. This leads to a virtual abandoning of a communicative relation
between the characters as they become obsessed with their respective
pasts. Once within their own memories, the characters travel through time
and space, struggling at every moment to find meanings and closures.
Moreover, Pinter exploits the dramatic potential of pauses and silences to
disrupt the linearity and point to the gaps inherent in the notion of origins,
meanings and ends.
In these memory plays which include Landscape (1968), Silence
(1969), Old Times (1971), No Man’s Land (1975), Moonlight (1993) and
Ashes to Ashes (1996) there are unmistakable signs of departure from the
realist tradition in terms of plot and character. The slender plots comprise
various scenes connected with each other by means of the shaky
reminiscences of the characters. As the private realm of the characters is
narrated and theatricalized through monologues, the mimetic illusion gets
disrupted. These devices also challenge the notions of a unified and
coherent self and the availability of the past in the present.
Landscape opens with an important stage direction which suggests that
no proper communication is taking place between Beth and Duff and that
they are probably not even talking to each other:
Duff refers normally to Beth, but does not appear to hear her voice. Beth
never looks at Duff and does not appear to hear his voice. Both characters
are relaxed, in no sense rigid.17
The play contains no onstage action; it does not even explore any static
situation. Rather, the entire focus is on the process of constructing the past
through a questionable memory exercise. The virtual abandoning of
dialogue further narrows the play’s focus on the subjective recreation of
the past. The play opens with Beth remembering being on a beach with her
lover whose identity is left entirely unclear. Beth’s fractured narrative
17
Harold Pinter, Landscape and Silence. London: Metheun, 1969, p. 7. All
subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are indicated in the
parenthesis.
50 Chapter Two
describes her past with which she is obsessed. Duff, on the other hand,
seems to try to enter into a dialogue with her. His attempts, however,
evoke no response from her:
Duff: Do you remember the weather yesterday? That downfall?

Beth: He felt my shadow. He looked up at me standing above him.
Duff: I should have had some bread with me. I could have fed the birds.
Beth: Sand on his arms.
Duff: They were hopping about? Making a racket.
Beth: I lay down by him, not touching.
Duff: There wasn’t anyone else in the shelter. There was a man and a
woman, under the trees, on the other side of the pond. I didn’t feel like
getting wet. I stayed where I was.
Pause
Yes, I’ve forgotten something. The dog was with me.
Beth: Did those women know me? I didn’t remember their faces. (10-1)
The two monologues appear like two parallel narratives with almost no
interrelation. Even these narrative accounts betray their precarious and
uncertain character as in the case of Beth who first talks of two women
turning and staring at her on the beach, but then corrects herself; “two
women looked at me, turned and stared. No. I was walking, they were still.
I turned”(12). Later, she concludes that she was mistaken about the women
and the beach was empty. Thus memory, the only means of link to the past,
is shown to be attenuated. It cannot claim to offer an objective and true
account, nor is its process of selection incontestable. In fact, the nature of
the workings of memory and perception premised upon it is commented
upon by Beth in these words:
I remembered always, in drawing, the basic principles of shadow and light.

Objects intercepting the light cast shadows. Shadow is deprivation of light.
The shape of the shadow is determined by that of the object. But not
always. Not always directly. Sometimes it is only indirectly affected by it.
Sometimes the cause of the shadow cannot be found. (15)
The play thus offers no clue, in realistic terms, about the origin, motivation
and action of characters. Its bare plot and decentered characters illustrate
the postmodern challenge to realism.
Silence shares with Landscape the techniques like the virtual
abandoning of the plot, the precedence of monologue over dialogue, the
fluid nature of the memory and disruption of linearity. The stage direction
makes it clear that the three characters Ellen, Rumsey and Bates occupy
three areas with a chair in each of them. Only on two occasions one of
them rises and crosses over to another. Besides, the division of the stage
into three areas offers three perspectives referring to three time-sets. The
first time-set shows the characters’ reminiscences about the distant past
when Ellen was a child and Rumsey a young man. The second time-set
covers the time when Ellen had become a young woman and fallen in love
with Rumsey. The third time-set refers to the present, when each of the
characters is old and living an isolated and lonely existence.
The dramatic technique employed by Pinter in this play allows him to
present the whole play in the form of interior monologues. Esslin has aptly
remarked that “the story is presented simultaneously from three different
points of view and from two, perhaps three, different points in time.”18
Ellen’s remark, “Yes, I remember. But I’m never sure that what I
remember is of today or of yesterday or of a long time ago”19, reflects the
underlying theme of the play. All the three characters exhibit a curious
relation with their respective pasts. They are stuck in it and abandon all
attempts to break free from it, but their only relation to it is through their
tenuous memories. While they seek to establish some kind of relationship
with the past, their very attempts are frustrated because of the precarious
nature of memory.
Old Times involves three characters, Deeley, his wife Kate, and Kate’s
friend Anna. The play opens with a dramatic device which shows all the
three characters on the stage which is shrouded in dim light creating the
impression of vague unreality. As the stage gradually brightens, Deeley
and his wife Kate appear in the foreground talking about Anna who lurks
rather mysteriously in the background. From the conversation between
Deeley and Kate, it appears that Anna had been Kate’s room-mate and
friend. Kate’s reminiscences about Anna and her relationship with her
illustrate the idea of the past as it is constructed in the present. In the
course of these reminiscences the precarious nature of memory and the
elusive character of identity are constantly foregrounded as one
description is soon followed by another which contradicts it.
The progress of the narrative is disrupted by a sudden flashback in time
as Anna comes to the foreground and joins the conversation. This
technique allows showing the simultaneous presence of the past and
present on the stage. Anna aptly comments on the process of recollecting
the past: “there are things I remember which may never have happened but
18
Martin Esslin. The Peopled Wound: The Plays of Harold Pinter. London:
Methuen & Co Ltd, 1979, p. 182.
19
Harold Pinter. Landscape and Silence. London : Metheun, 1969, p. 45.
52 Chapter Two
as I recall them so they take place.”20 She continues to dominate the stage
in spite of Kate’s occasional remarks that are aimed at presenting her
version of what had happened in the past. Anna’s narrative of Kate’s past,
which is self-confessedly a construction rather than a recollection, has a
manipulative effect on Deeley who now confronts Kate with an equally
constructed story of his acquaintance with Anna:
Deeley: We’ve met before, you know, Anna and I. We had a scene together.
She freaked out. She didn’t have any bread, so I bought her a drink. (68)
Deeley’s tale ends rather ambiguously suggesting the mingling of Kate and
Anna’s identities:
Deeley: … she thought she was you, said little … .May be she was you.
May be it was you, having coffee with me saying little … . (69)
Deeley’s remark indicates the fluidity of the subjective perception as the

certainty underlying the visual perception withers away.
Old Times, by its unique use of the interpenetration of the old
memories with the static present on the stage, offers a critique of the
assumptions underlying the notion of a stable subjectivity. The play
exploits the notion of time as it is perceived by the subjects who are
situated within it. Traditionally, narrative has been intimately related to the
linear flow of time, demonstrating the exercise of constructing meaning by
means of a process that imposes categories of origin and resolution on an
amorphous phenomenon. The memory plays in general, and Old Times in
particular, demystify the supposed naturalness of this process by
problematizing the relation of time with narrative. The flow of time
expected to unravel the plot in the direction of resolution is obstructed to
challenge the teleological underpinnings of linearity.
Stephen Watt offers an insightful observation when he describes No
Man’s Land in terms of “the primarily horizontal quality of its narrative as
opposed to what may be termed the vertical, or latent, structure of plays
like The Homecoming.”21 As against The Homecoming which, according
to him, has a deep structure and in which historical truths are more or less
validated, No Man’s Land is characterized by indeterminacy and
antinarrative. We must, however, see how the play exploits concerns such
20
Harold Pinter. Old Times. London: Metheun, 1971, p. 32. All subsequent
parenthesis.
21
Stephen Watt. Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975, p. 93.
as negotiating relationships while remaining within the overall design of a

memory play. For this purpose it draws on the dialogic potential as well as
the individual memories of the characters. The play explores a static
condition focusing on two male characters, Hirst and Spooner, who narrate
tales to each other. The apocryphal nature of these tales becomes evident
instantly. The two appear to be men of letters attempting to discover their
identities as poets. The dialogue between the two covers topics like
language, the nature of experience, virtue and love. But what remains
prominent throughout their conversation is the problem of perception of
what constitutes reality, especially the past, and how to negotiate with it.
Spooner alludes to it in this way:
Experience is a paltry thing. Everyone has it and will tell his tale of it. I
leave experience to psychological interpreters … .I myself can do any
graph of experience you wish.22
Spooner professes to have cut himself from the past for the present. “I
am interested in where I am eternally present and active.” But he
undercuts his own assertion by saying that “the present is truly
unscrupulous.” What follows in the play can be seen as revealing the irony
in Spooner’s assertion that he is “free” from the past since all he does is
narrate to Hirst his past and its power to shape him:
Spooner: I have never been loved. From this I derive my strength. Have?
Ever? Been loved? … I looked upon once into my mother’s face. What I
saw there was nothing less than pure malevolence I was fortunate to escape
with my life. (26)
As against Spooner, Hirst recognizes that the past remains with him and he
cannot escape it. It is, however, interesting to see how he moves from a
conviction of knowing it very well to questioning its very existence:
Hirst: My true friends look out at me from my album. I had my world. I

have it. Don’t think now it’s gone I’ll choose to sneer at it, to cast doubt on
it, to wonder if it properly existed. No. We’re talking of my youth, which
can never leave me. No. It existed. It was solid, the people in it were solid,
while … transformed by light, while being sensitive … to all the changing
light. (45)
22
Harold Pinter. No Man’s Land. London: Metheun, 1975, p. 20. All subsequent
parenthesis.
54 Chapter Two
From this firm conviction about the past as “solid” to questioning its
existence is indicative of the problem that Pinter’s characters find
themselves beset with:
Hirst: It’s gone. Did it exist? It’s gone. It never existed … what it…Bright
men, through leaves … was. It was blending. I remember it. I’ve forgotten
… The sounds stopped … There’s a gap in me. I can’t fill it. There’s a
flood running through me … They’re blotting me out … I’m suffocating.
It’s a muff. A muff, perfumed. Someone is doing me to death … She
looked up … I remember nothing. I’m sitting in this room. (46)
The decentered subject suddenly becomes aware of the absence in him.

His memory, the only source of connection with his past, is foundering and
so is the notion of the stable identity premised upon it. Hirst’s perception
of the past through a doubtful memory is reverberated in his equally shaky
account of his dreams:
I was dreaming of a waterfall. No, no, of a lake.

Something is depressing me. What is it? It was the dream, yes. Waterfalls.
No, no, a lake water. Drowning. Not me. Someone else. (43)
He continues:
What was it? Shadows. Brightness, through leaves. Gamboling. In the

bushes. Young lovers. A fall of water. It was my dream. The lake, who was
drowning in my lake? (44)
The virtual commingling of memory, dream and the real world in the
play offers an example of how the distinct boundaries of the real and the
fantastic, and the actual and the dreamy are blurred. In fact, apart from
this, the play’s ending suggests a kind of arresting of movement of time
into a stasis. Spooner declares this condition to Hirst:
You are in no man’s land which never moves, which never changes, which
never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent (95).
Moonlight (1993) and Ashes to Ashes (1996), although chronologically

belonging to the later period, share with the memory plays the basic
structural pattern as well as the thematic concerns like the fallibility of
memory, dramatization of absence and untraceable past. By means of
theatrical innovations, Moonlight presents a situation where the very
question of representation becomes central to it. The stage is divided into
three parts. Andy, a bed-ridden, dying man in his fifties, and his wife, Bel,
who sits beside his bed, occupy one portion of the stage. The second
portion is occupied by Jake and Fred, the two sons of Andy and Bel, who
never cross over to see their dying father and the third portion is occupied
by Bridget, the daughter of Andy and Bel, who is arrested in the past at
age sixteen, and being alone on the stage, addresses the audience from her
hazy memory. This theatrical device of dividing the stage into portions,
two of which belong to the present while the third seems arrested in the
past, creates a distancing affect that cuts at the roots of theatrical
illusionism. Furthermore, the identity of Bridget remains in balance
between life and death as she seems to be speaking from a death-like past,
with her ethereal self residing in half-light. Bridget is cast in a shadow
both through stage lighting and through her cryptic monologues. Although
throughout the play she is represented as sixteen years old, in one scene,
by means of a flashback, she is shown to be twelve years old. Bridget
herself says, “I am hidden … .hidden but free. No one in the world can
find me.”23
It may be assumed that Bridget is dead and speaking virtually from
across the borderline, but Andy’s remarks to Bel that he should “tell
Bridget not to be frightened” calls this assumption into question. Bridget
herself remarks in a monologue that her: “task is to see that my parents
sleep in peace and wake up rested … Because I know that when they look
at me they see that I am all they have left of their life” (1). Fred and Jake
remain entirely oblivious of their dying father. Andy’s question to Bel
about their whereabouts further complicates the search for the
conventional solutions:
Andy: Where are the boys? Have you found them yet?
Bell: I’m trying.
Andy: You’ve been trying for weeks. And failing. It’s enough to make the
cat laugh. (2)
Fred and Jake talk of their father in the past tense, as a modest man who
“adhered strictly to the rule of law” (12). He is even remembered by
means of contradictory labels as, “mountebank-a child-a shyster-a fool-or
a villain” (17).
Maria, Bel’s friend, enters to address Fred and Jake and delivers a long
monologue. What stands out prominently from this speech is that although
the stage directions suggest that she is speaking directly to the two
brothers, she receives no response from them. Her reminiscences about the
23
Harold Pinter. Moonlight. London: Faber and Faber, 1993, p. 22. All subsequent
parenthesis.
56 Chapter Two
past revolve around her relationships with Bel, Andy and her husband
Ralph. Her admiration for both Andy and Ralph suggests that she had
affairs with both of them. Fred and Jake show no signs that they’re aware
of her presence, ignoring her as they are ignoring Andy’s dying. The same
kind of response is invited by Ralph when he enters and addresses them
without invoking any reaction or interruption. This dramatic device raises
serious questions on the reality status of Maria and Ralph. This is further
hinted by their sudden and joint appearance before Andy and Bel.
Although this time their presence does invoke response from the couple,
Andy’s account that he, “bumped into Maria the other day, that day before
I was stricken”, contradicts what Maria says; “It’s been ages. We don’t live
up here anymore, of course” (18). Andy, for his part, denies having any
past in a blatantly self-contradictory way: “I was a civil servant, I had no
past. I remember no past. Nothing ever happened to me” (70). He
concludes by asserting that “the past is a mist” (71).
It could be contended that Maria and Ralph are conjured up by Andy as
the stage directions are very vague about when they enter and where they
are standing. The dying man is standing at the horizon of death and has the
awful spectacle of an infinite nothingness staring at him. He tries to
grapple with the idea of death by affirming some kind of meaning to the
event of crossing the borders:
Personally I don’t believe it’s going to be pitch black forever because if it’s
pitch black forever what would have been the point of going through all
these enervating charades in the first place. (46)
At the end of the play, Bridget, in her last interlude, provides a

commentary in poetic terms on the transition from life to death. She
describes a house:
bathed in moonlight. The house, the glade, the lane, were all bathed in
moonlight. But the inside of the house was dark and all the windows were
dark … I stood there in the moonlight and waited for moon to go down.
(71)
Moonlight underlines Pinter’s concerns of problematizing the

audiences’ assumptions about meaning, closure, certainty and stable
reference. The play has no fixed point, no linear narrative and no
resolution. By disrupting the spatial and temporal logic of realism, it
signals a clear departure from its conventions. The play provides no
answers to questions like who are Fred and Jake? Why do they not come
to their father’s deathbed? Why is Bridget on an uncertain territory
between life and death, only in the past, and at age sixteen? But more
importantly, by focusing on the dying Andy and probably already dead

Bridget, the play highlights the problem of death as a narrative closure to
human existence itself. There is a wish entertained by humans in general
to see death as a natural culmination, a rounding-off and a closure to life.
This wish itself rises from the desire for finding meaning to the
phenomenon of existence. But death, despite this desire, holds neither
fulfillment nor any kind of closure. Death does not, to use the dramatic
jargon, resolve the plot of life. It leaves it open-ended. To be assured of
some meaning, the dying Andy tries to invoke his past but is confronted
with mere traces of memory, making him say “I have no past”, and “past is
a mist”. Death is a point where even these traces are blotted out, it is the
final absence, the final silence and the obliteration of the human subject.
Like Moonlight, Ashes to Ashes deals with the psychological anguish
brought about by an unidentifiable past. The dialogue between Rebecca
and Devlin centers on the past of Rebecca which hints at a deep impact of
some psychological trauma. The very situatedness of Rebecca against an
ominous but hazy and ambiguous backdrop allows the play to bring
together personal and collective aspects of a historical catastrophe.
Rebecca tries to negotiate with a past whose traces continue to shape her
although she does not recollect it clearly or even an identifiable manner.
The play treats the issues of memory, existential horror, brutality and
ultimate breakdown of unifying bonds such as love, worked out together
into a dramatic construction.
Rebecca begins her account of the past by telling Devlin about her
former lover’s threatening advances that combined physical dominance
with erotic desire. Rebecca’s narrative is too vague and obscure to warrant
any finality. What she recalls, however, is that her lover, “Did work for a
travel agency. He used to go to the local railway station and walk down the
platform and tear all the babies from the arms of their screaming
mothers.”24 The allusion to the railway station and tearing babies from
their mothers’ arms is suggestive of the holocaust memories. It seems
Rebecca could have been a victim of such atrocities. But when Devlin asks
her:
I inferred from this that you were talking about some kind of atrocity. Now
let me ask you this. What authority do you think you yourself possess
which would give you the right to discuss such an atrocity. (41)
24
Harold Pinter. Ashes to Ashes. London: Faber and Faber, 1996, p. 27. All
parenthesis.
58 Chapter Two
She coldly replies, “I have no such authority. Nothing has ever happened
to me” (41).
There follows an account of how she protected her baby when “they
were taking babies away”, hiding her baby in her shawl. This account is
contradicted by the statement that at another train station when she met a
woman who asked “what happened to your baby?” she replied, “I don’t
know of any baby” (81). For Rebecca, all that is left is a hazy
remembrance of a haunting yet elusive past. As Keith Peacock has
summed up:
Rebecca’s reminiscence conveys a sense of desolation and, although she

occupies the same physical space as Devlin and occasionally
communicates with him, she appears to be isolated in her own guilt and
grief. Her reference to the stolen child may mean that … she is plagued by
barrenness. With Devlin unable to comprehend what she is saying, she is
left only with the echo of her own voice.25
Rebecca’s resonant voice that echoes with a kind of monologic strain is

suggestive of the characteristic features of the memory plays of Pinter.
These plays illustrate a severance with the present for an ominous
recollection of the past. The surface dialogue in whatever little degree it is
dramatized, offers to be a strategy to delve into the past. The past,
however, is available only in a fragmented and contradictory narrative
form and has to be constructed from its traces. The very fluidity of this
construction is suggested by the dream-like character of memories.
The third phase of Pinter’s dramatic career, beginning from the late
1970s is characterized by a turn towards depicting situations emerging
from political oppression and power abuse. These “overtly” political plays
make a strong statement against the violation of human rights and dignity.
To this category belong One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language
(1988), Party Time (1991) and The New World Order (1993). It is obvious
that Pinter is expressing his deep concern as well as a sense of horror over
the mechanisms employed to subject human beings to persecution and
torture.
The plays offer themselves as potent vehicles for Pinter’s position on
these matters and understandably lose a lot of ambiguity central to the
earlier plays. This might seem to suggest that Pinter has moved away from
what we have described as his persisting postmodern concerns in his plays,
as these plays are neither concerned with epistemological skepticism nor
25
Keith Peacock. Harold Pinter and the New British Theatre. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1997, p. 154.
do they depict characters with unreliable memories and fragmented

perceptions. Moreover, these plays, unlike the plays belonging to the
earlier phases, do not contest the assumptions of realism in drama. In fact,
both plot and characters serve as mere tools for exploring the theme of the
abuse of power.
Postmodernism, as discussed earlier, takes the issue of power as one of
its primary objects of attention. However, instead of the traditional view,
according to which power works in institutions and systems alone,
postmodernism, drawing from Foucault, holds power to be ubiquitous and
operating in all human discourses. In Umberto Eco’s words,
postmodernism is, “the orientation of anyone who has learned the lesson
of Foucault, i.e. that power is not something unitary that exists outside
us.”26 Apparently, Pinter seems to have reverted to the traditional notion
that power operates in and through institutional structures as his focus is
on the ways the politically subjugated become the victims of power abuse.
Furthermore, as against the Foucauldian concept, Pinter views power as a
thoroughly negative thing wielded by the dominant to oppress the
subservient. The view that in these political plays Pinter has moved
beyond the concerns of postmodernism is put forth by Mireia Aragay.
While acknowledging that “they do not dismiss the postmodernist
encompassing of the whole range of ‘micropolitical’ power relations
existing across the social network,”27 she nevertheless argues that these
plays represent “a full-blown rejection of the postmodernist understanding
of language, subjectivity and history.”28
The relevance of postmodernism for these plays, however, becomes
evident on noting that Pinter’s focus is neither on the depiction of torture
and other forms of oppression, nor on enlisting the audiences/readers’
sympathies for the oppressed, but on exposing how the dominant political
groups always appeal to the notions such as morality, religion, consensus
and democracy to legitimize themselves. A dramatic exposition of the self-
justifying and self-legitimating character of the totalizing narratives
corresponds remarkably with Lyotard’s analysis that all grand narratives
have traditionally thrived on the principle of exclusion, leaving out or
26
Quoted in Linda Hutcheon. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge,
1989, p. 3.
27
Mireia Aragay. “Pinter, politics and postmodernism (2)” in Peter Raby (ed). The
Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001, p. 252.
28
Mireia Aragay. “Pinter, politics and postmodernism (2)” in Peter Raby (ed). The
2001, p. 252.
60 Chapter Two
suppressing the notions of difference, plurality and provisionality. Quigley

endorses this view by explaining what precisely Pinter aimed at these
plays:
To try to persuade a theatre audience that it should in general be against

physical torture, murder and rape seems somewhat gratuitous in spite of
the prevalence of all three in the modern world. What interests Pinter,
however, is exploring the modes of presupposition and self-justification
that enable such things to be done in the name of or on behalf of citizens
and governments who might publicly and even sincerely condemn them.
What is dramatized is not the physical torture, murder and rape so
frequently referred to in critical discussion, but the processes of self-
justification they promote and the differing consequences for the
oppressors and the oppressed of their limited persuasiveness.29
Appealing to Lyotard’s disagreement with Habermas’s idea that the

Enlightenment pursuit of social and political consensus is the goal of a
democratic society, Quigley remarks:
For Lyotard the great danger of the pursuit of consensus is that if too many
people agree on too many things, disagreement becomes a sign of social
abnormality, dissent becomes unpatriotic and difference becomes
intolerable – precisely the scenario implied by Nicolas’s attempt to invoke
social consensus in One for the Road.30
In One for the Road, Nicholas seeks justification for Victor’s torture by
appealing to the notion of consensus:
I have never been more moved, in the whole of my life, as when … the
man who runs this country announced to the country: We are all patriots,
we are as one, we all share a common heritage … (Pause)
I feel a link, you see, a bond. I share a common wealth of interest. I am not
alone … I am not alone.31
Victor’s dissent from the majority’s views earns him imprisonment and
torture, while as Nicholas invokes all notions available to him to justify his
act, “I run the place. God speaks through me” (36). A similar kind of
spectacle is witnessed in The New World Order where it is democracy that
29
Austin Quigley. “Pinter, politics and postmodernism (1)” in Peter Raby (ed). The
2001, p. 10.
30
ibid, p. 14.
31
Harold Pinter. One for the Road. London: Metheun, 1984, p. 13.
is invoked to snuff out dissent. Lionel and Des, the two men torturing a
blind-folded political dissent exchange their views:
Lionel: I feel so pure.

Des: Well, you’re right. You’ve a right to feel pure. You know why?
Because you’re keeping the world clean for democracy.32
In Party Time, Pinter again underlines how self-justification and self-

legitimization provide those in power a reassurance of their propriety. The
spokesperson at the party is Dame Melissa, a woman of seventy, who
extols the virtues of Terry’s club. She proclaims the superiority of the club
to the tennis and swimming clubs of the past which had no moral grounds.
As against other clubs, Terry’s maintains a firm faith in morality for it is
“inspired and activated by a moral sense, a moral awareness, asset of
moral values, which is, I have to say, unshakeable, rigorous, fundamental,
constant.”33 Dame Melissa’s invocation of morality, a grand narrative
which merely serves the interest of power, is a striking example of how
legitimizing discourses are always appealed to by the dominant groups.
Douglas, one of the power-brokers of war machinery, declares:
We want peace and we’re going to get it. But we want that peace to be Cast
iron. No leaks. No draughts. Cast iron. Tight as a drum. That’s the kind of
peace we want and that’s the kind of peace we’re going to get. A cast iron
peace.34
The kind of peace Douglas talks of here is achievable only when no form
of dissent is tolerated. The exclusionary enterprise, the play suggests, is
inextricably bound up with the exercise of power.
In Mountain Language, Pinter dramatizes the theme of repression in
terms of a totalitarian sanction against the use of a language. The language
of the capital which is officially sanctioned is forced upon a people and
they are forbidden to use their own language. The play is set in a prison on
the day when women from the mountains have been permitted to meet
their imprisoned husbands and sons. They are, however, forewarned
categorically against using their own language, not because the officers
don’t understand it, but because it doesn’t deserve to exist. The officer
announces:
32
Harold Pinter. The New World Order. New York: Grove Press, 1993, p. 9.
33
Harold Pinter. Party Time. London: Faber and Faber, 1991, p. 40.
34
ibid, p. 15.
62 Chapter Two
Now hear this. You are mountain people. You hear me? Your language is
dead. It is forbidden. It is not permitted to speak your mountain language
in this place. You cannot speak your language to your men. It is not
permitted. Do you understand…it is outlawed. You may only speak the
language of the capital. That is the only language permitted in this place.
You will be badly punished if you attempt to speak your mountain
language in this place. This is a military decree. It is the law. Your
language is forbidden. It is dead.35
The officer trying to sound rather sympathetic but actually betraying

the sense of absolute control over the mountain people, tells his sergeant,
“These women, Sergeant, have as yet committed no crime” (23). The
Sergeant, however, invokes the authority of religion to suggest that
“crime” and sin are not mutually exclusive: “Sir! But you’re not saying
they’re without sin?”(23). The officer agrees with his Sergeant ascribing
sin to a woman particularly: “This one’s full of it. She bounces with it”
(23). The spokesmen of the capital language force the mountain people
into marginality by “representing” their language as already dead. The
play ends on an ironic note when the state decree reversing its earlier
ruling allows the mountain people to speak their language, but only after
the mother of a prisoner has lost her power of speech:
Prisoner: Mother, you can speak. (pause) Mother, I’m speaking to you. You
see? We can speak. You can speak to me in our own language. (she is still)
… ..I am speaking to you in your own language … It’s our language …
(she does not respond), Mother? … Mother?
(she does not respond. She sits still. The prisoner’s trembling grows. He
falls from the chair on to his knees, begins to gasp and shake violently).
(45-6)
Mountain Language is a dramatization of the conflict between the

center and the margin where the margin, perceived as a threat to the
hegemony of the center, is suppressed.
A prominent feature of the political plays is that they illustrate an
absolute ascendancy of the dominant power groups which successfully
liquidate the potential resistance of the subservient groups or
individuals. Moreover, the plays show no signs that the subservient
groups or individuals can effectively mobilize themselves into any kind
of oppositional stance. Perceiving this, critics such as Silverstein argue
35
Harold Pinter. Mountain Language. New York: Grove Press, 1986, p. 21. All
parenthesis.
that Pinter’s refusal to explore oppositional politics in these plays

offers a statement on his work as a whole. He remarks:
.
Pinter’s plays offer a dystopian vision of the invincibility of regnant forms

of cultural and political power … Pinter offers a dramatized “theory” of
cultural power that conceptualizes that power as unalterable, not
susceptible to fundamental change.36
Silverstein, hence, views these political plays as a final confirmation of his

thesis that Pinter demonstrates a monolithic unassailability of dominant
ideologies.
Notwithstanding the formidable character of Silverstein’s argument, it
could be contended that in a certain sense the question whether or not
Pinter’s final vision is dystopian, is beside the point. This is because rather
than focusing on the possibility or otherwise of oppositional politics,
Pinter’s overriding preoccupation is to show how ideological positions
claiming the status of truth can provide legitimacy to the repressive
apparatus.37 Pinter is, therefore, clearly demystifying these totalizing
narratives and offering a dramatic illustration of the insights of Lyotard
and Laclau, both of whom posit a postmodern idea of politics. Laclau’s
argument that “postmodernity does not imply a change in the values of
Enlightenment modernity rather a particular weakening of their absolutist
character” is also echoed by Lyotard: “Justice as a value is neither
outmoded nor suspect. We must thus arrive at idea and practice of justice
that is not linked to that of consensus.”38 Justice and other such values,
postmodernism contends, are still important but have to be salvaged from
the subversion of the totalizing narratives. Pinter’s concerns in these plays
can finally be understood in the light of the following remarks of Simon
Malpas:
36
Marc Silverstein. Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power. London:
Associated University Press, 1993, p. 152.
37
Stephen Watt illustrates this idea well and identifies the rhetoric of purity and
misogyny as the two main discourses Pinter exposes in his “political” plays. He
observes: “Whatever the regime, whatever brand the totalitarian state, Pinter shows
us that misogyny and fear of postmodern contingency will most likely reside
together.” Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage. Ann Arbor:
38
Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (trans). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 66.
64 Chapter Two
The grand narratives are still invoked in order to impose their injunctions
upon us. Most recently, the world has been given a choice: with no sense of
irony, George W Bush announced that, in the war on terrorism, ‘you’re
either for us or against us’-accept everything that is done by us in your
name or join the terrorists. For the postmodernist, this is s false opposition,
a totalizing opposition that should be resisted.39
The above analysis amply demonstrates that Pinter’s whole dramatic

career, covering a period of almost four decades, can be seen as a
persisting concern with the themes central to the poetics of
postmodernism. The plays belonging to all three phases offer certain
significant thematic and structural illustrations of how postmodernism lies
at the center of Pinter’s drama. Marking a significant departure from the
mimetic tradition of the realist theatre on the one hand, but avoiding
entirely self-reflexive plays on the other, Pinter offers instances of a
doubly-coded drama inscribing the dramatic conventions but challenging
them from within. By dramatizing the permeation of power in the
linguistic and cultural codes, Pinter demonstrates the ideological
construction of both objective knowledge and the human subject. At the
same time, revealing these processes which attend the formation of human
subject and other discursive practices suggests a strategy of demystifying
their supposed neutrality. These ideas are worked out more rigorously in
the plays belonging to the earlier and the later periods, although a strain
runs through the memory plays of the middle period as well.
The memory plays, however, primarily dramatize the idea of the
decentered human subject by illustrating the fragile and ruptured nature of
private memory. Structurally, these plays inscribe the devices of repetition,
conflation, overlap, disconnected stimuli and simultaneity. Presenting
characters in a static mode, however, does not amount to a negation of the
past. Instead, it is the inescapability of the past that is suggested through
the inability of characters to break free from its clutches. The problem,
nevertheless, lies in their incapacity to negotiate meaningfully with a past
that haunts them and yet remains unavailable except through attempts of
overt construction.
39
Simon Malpas. The Postmodern. London: Routledge, 2005, p. 132.
CHAPTER THREE
STOPPARD AND POSTMODERNISM:

PARODY, HISTORY AND ETHICS
Tom Stoppard is probably the most prominent contemporary British

playwright who has persistently engaged with concepts central to the
poetics of postmodernism. He has written in a characteristically
postmodern mode, employing structural devices of self-reflexive theatre
such as parody, play-within-the-play, and metafictional characters. His
plays foreground the problems inherent in theatrical representations,
covering a cluster of concepts like the nature of objective knowledge, the
human subject and the status of linguistic reference. Stoppard’s theatre
marks a radical departure from the realist conventions in drama. His
remarks on what he saw as the fallacy of naturalism illustrate this point:
I think that sort of truth-telling writing is as big a lie as the deliberate

fantasies I construct. It’s based on the fallacy of naturalism. There’s a
direct line of descent which leads you down to the dregs of bad theatre, bad
thinking and bad feeling.1
Instead, Stoppard pursues a line of inquiry that disrupts the traditional

notions of representation in theatre through an eclectic use of devices that
foreground the idea of the unfixity of viewpoints and relativity of all
positions. The relativity of perception and knowledge, the constructed
nature of historical accounts and ethical positions, and the indeterminacy
of language are, broadly speaking, his major thematic concerns. Many of
Stoppard’s plays seem exclusively focused on the shifting and conflicting
viewpoints that finally relativize one another and suggest the impossibility
of a vantage epistemological perspective. Stoppard himself offered a
valuable insight into how his plays need to be approached:
You get into trouble with my plays if you think that there’s a static
viewpoint on events. There is no observer. There is no safe point around
1
Quoted in Kenneth Tynan. Show People: Profiles in Entertainment. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1979, p. 64.
66 Chapter Three
which everything takes its proper place, so that you see things flat and see
how they react to each other.2
The idea is elucidated more comprehensively by Stoppard as follows:
I must make clear that, insofar as it’s possible for me to look at my work
objectively at all, the element which I find most valuable is the one that
other people are put off by, that is, that there is very often no single, clear
statement in my plays. What there is, is a series of conflicting statements
made by conflicting characters, and they tend to play a sort of infinite leap-
frog. You know, an argument, a refutation, then a rebuttal of the refutation,
then a counter-rebuttal, so that there is never any point in this intellectual
leap-frog at which I feel that is the speech to stop it on, that is the last
word.3
Stoppard’s confession that there is a sort of infinite leap-frog in his

plays may well be construed as a serious limitation precluding him to
engage seriously with political issues. This seems to be the underlying
premise of critics who are inclined to use the term pastiche instead of
parody for Stoppard’s plays. From the perspective of the present work,
however, it will be argued that it is parody rather than pastiche that best
explains the ideological undercurrents in Stoppard’s plays. Parody, unlike
pastiche’s critical neutrality, retains a critical edge on issues of
representation, an idea amply demonstrated by Stoppard.
Parody allows Stoppard to contextualize and historicize which in turn
exemplifies a critical engagement with the themes of perception and the
knowledge of the past. It thus allows the playwright to question the
validity of the single point of view, to problematize the distinction between
reality and illusion, and to raise questions about language as a neutral
medium of communication. His complex manipulation of the dramatic,
linguistic and visual contexts and perspectives challenges the separation of
fact and fiction, foregrounding a fluid interplay between the realms of the
real and the fictional. By doing so, he is able to conflate the dramatic and
metadramatic domains, thereby deconstructing the mechanisms of
dramatic representation as well as the audience’s perceptions about it.
Stoppard’s use of parody, therefore, is not politically disengaged, one that
signals the death of representation, but one that, in agreement with
Hutcheon’s insights, suggests the ultimate ideological implications of all
representations.
2
Quoted in Ronald Hayman. Tom Stoppard. London: Heinemann, 1977, p. 141.
3
Tom Stoppard. “Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas”.
Theatre Quarterly, 4 (May-July 1974), p. 6.
Stoppard and Postmodernism: Parody, History and Ethics 67
Although quite a few plays of Stoppard are fraught with dialogues

borrowed from the already existing dramatic texts, parody is a prominent
feature of plays such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966),
Travesties (1974), and Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979). And
even in the plays in which Stoppard has not resorted to an overt use of
parody, he has worked out the dramatic structure in a manner that achieves
the purpose of parody. This can be seen in the plays like The Real
Inspector Hound (1968) and The Real Thing (1982) which employ self-
reflexive devices such as the play-within-the play, to underscore certain
significant parodic themes.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead offers a brilliant theatrical
spectacle drawing on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot. Stoppard has taken two minor characters out of their peripheral
role in Hamlet and placed them at the center of his own. He combines the
plot and dialogue of Hamlet with the dramatic mode and characterization
of Waiting for Godot to achieve remarkable success in producing a
postmodern performance. This is achieved by exploiting the potential of
parody as a theatrical device to work at a cluster of concepts such as
reality, identity, memory, destiny and death.
In the case of Ros and Guil, the parodic use of Hamlet also serves to
deconstruct the structural and ideological assumptions of the parodied text
by implicitly questioning the framework that situates the privileged
Hamlet at the center and his two “insignificant” friends as mere non-
entities. Hamlet, the play suggests, is based on an unquestioned
hierarchical assumption that acquiesces in sending the two ordinary men to
their deaths on a whimsical spur of a prince. This allows for the subversion
of the hierarchical power structures on which Hamlet, and arguably most
of the conventional tragedies, are based.
The play foregrounds a radical indeterminacy that permeates it at all
levels and brings out the essential qualities of the text that exploits the
structural elements of a classic text. This radical indeterminacy forms an
inseparable feature of both the objective and subjective realms of the play
and ultimately hints at the inherent unfixity and constantly shifting
perspectives from which these objective and subjective realms can be
approached.
Ros and Guil immediately strikes us as an example of metadramatic
literature which flaunts its own status as a dramatic construction by
consciously borrowing from Hamlet. In fact, it offers a fine example of the
theatrical parody’s ability to create a metadramatic perspective which can
in turn enable the audience/readers to question the assumptions that govern
their perceptions both in real life and theatre. This metadramatic
68 Chapter Three
perspective created by the play serves to undercut the very basis of

theatrical representation. It unfolds an intricate interplay between the inner
and the outer play, thus problematizing the referential status of theatre
itself. This interplay of the two texts serves as a powerful commentary on
the reality/fiction interplay which is further illustrated by the players
rehearsing the dumb show they are ordered by Hamlet to perform and their
interaction with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In the context of
interaction with the players, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to negotiate
their uncertainty about being “real” people as against the players who are
fictional because they “perform” for an audience. They make desperate
attempts to make sense of their “roles” in the given framework which they
fail to comprehend. Faced with uncertainty, they vainly search for clues
and connections that would provide some meaning and a sense of direction
to their existence. The player who is content with acting out the role given
to him advises them:
Player: Uncertainty is the normal state. You’re nobody special.

Guil: But for God’s sake. What are we supposed to do?
Player: Relax. Respond. That’s what people do. You can’t go through life
questioning your situation at every turn.
Guil: But we don’t know what’s going on, or what to do with ourselves.
We don’t know how to act.
Player: Act natural.4
The word “act”, by its very equivocal nature, aptly describes the dilemma
of Ros and Guil. Action refers simultaneously to “acting” in a performance
and the usual human activity, an absence of which amounts to a virtual
non-existence. In their attempt to ground themselves in some kind of
certitude about what constitutes reality for them, both Guil and Ros betray
a dual character of spectator/player. Guil’s prayer, “give us this day our
daily mask” and Ros’s complaint “I feel like a spectator – an appalling
business,” betray such duality. In the dumb show taken from Hamlet and
performed by the tragedians, Ros and Guil are mere spectators watching
the performance: “Guil (to Ros): …keep back – we’re spectators” (70). It
is here that the fictional and the metafictional levels converge and provide
a metadramatic perspective. This perspective, however, does not resolve
the problem of implication of all points of view within a visual field.
Instead, by effacing the distinction between the actor of a performance and
the acting person, it calls into question the supposed boundary between
4
Tom Stoppard. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. New York: Grove Press,
1981, p. 47. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are
indicated in the parenthesis.
reality and fiction. Guil tries hard to maintain that a sharp distinction does
exist between the realms of illusion created by dramatic performance and
reality. He scoffs at the utter artificiality of the tragedian’s acting death.
When the Player says, “In our experience, most things end in death,” (49)
Guil is provoked to stab the Player with his own dagger to demonstrate
how the real death is different from a feigned one. The Player falls to the
ground pretending to have died, but stands up again to show how he
tricked Ros and Guil by feigning death.
As Ros and Guil watch the dumb show, they are drawn into the
moment when their identities as spectators converge with the two spies
performing in the show. Stoppard uses the device of having them wear
identical coats. Ros tries to resist identification with “his” spy while at the
same time projecting the recognition onto him, “For a moment I thought –
no, I don’t know you, do I ? ” (81). When the dumb show ends with the
two spies lying dead onstage, a theatrical device blurs the distinction
between the spies and the spectators. With the change of light, Ros and
Guil are seen lying in the approximate positions last held by the dead
spies. Here, Ros and Guil become identified with their roles in Hamlet.
Katherine Kelly has aptly remarked:
In the dumb show art mirrors art, demonstrating the theatre’s potential to
place the spectators at the boundary, nudging them out of their customary
viewing of their own actions.5
With Ros and Guil’s stepping into the plot of Hamlet, they encounter
themselves as “agents” who have been employed by Claudius to ferret out
the secret of Hamlet’s madness. The point of convergence between the
outer and the inner play foils the attempts of the two courtiers to resist
being implicated in the action of which they assume themselves to be
objective viewers. Their utter failure to situate themselves outside the
Hamlet text is presented in the third act where the episode that is only
reported in Shakespeare’s text is dramatized, namely, the journey of
Hamlet, Ros and Guil to England. Where, however, the play significantly
departs from Hamlet is the accidental discovery of Ros and Guil that the
king has actually sent them with a letter instructing the king of England to
put Hamlet to death immediately. The two leave the contents of the letter
unchanged, not because of any ill will towards Hamlet but because they
are overwhelmed by the sense of their impotence. When, again, they
5
Katherine Kelly. Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at
Play. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991, p. 79.
70 Chapter Three
discover that Hamlet has replaced his name with their own, they helplessly
resign to their fate:
Guil (quietly): Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move,
of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained
within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and
current … .
Ros: They had it in for us, didn’t they? Right from the beginning. Who’d
have thought that we were so important?
Guil: But why? Was it all for this? Who are we that so much should
converge on our little deaths. (122)
The dissolution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, dramatized by showing

their final disappearance, underlines their failure to assert their identities in
the face of the forces which have sealed their fate. The play can be seen as
an example of metadramatic text that ends in the annihilation of the human
subject placing “absence” and “void” at a point where the audience are
accustomed to see the resolution of the dramatic plot.
Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth, an amalgam of two plays,
provide another example of Stoppard’s exploitation of Shakespearean
drama to the postmodern effect. The plays raise questions about language
and its referential status and also suggest the manner in which the
established canon, which is embedded in structures of dominance and
power, can be subverted. While Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
decentralized the implicit hierarchical division by placing the two
marginal Shakespearean characters at its center, Dogg’s Hamlet and
Cahoot’s Macbeth achieve decentralization by replacing the very medium
of the Shakespearean plays with a new language – Dogg. Dogg, sharing
with English all linguistic features except the semantic, subverts the
referentiality of English and thereby all power structures of the
Shakespearean texts. Stoppard uses parenthesis to explain the exact
meaning of Dogg words in English. The following passage, a conversation
between the characters of the play, exemplifies this:
Abel: (Looking in his sandwiches.) Pelican crash.

[Cream cheese.] (To Baker.) Even ran?
[What have you got?]
Baker: (Looking in his sandwiches) Hollyhocks.
[Ham].
Abel: (To Charlie.) Even ran? [What have you got?]
Charlie: (Looking in his sandwiches.) Mouseholes [Egg]
Abel: (To Charlie.) Undertake sum pelican crash frankly sun mouse hole?
[Swoop you one cream cheese for one egg?]
Charlie: (with an amiable shrug.) Slab. [Okay.]6
The outer play contains an inner play, a shortened performance of Hamlet.

The dramatic device of making Dogg the language of the frame play
containing an inner play in English is a highly effective way of
decentering. It is, however, in Cahoot’s Macbeth that the full implications
of employing Dogg are discernable. The play begins with Shakespeare’s
Macbeth being performed by a group of amateur actors in a private
apartment. In this play the two worlds of “reality” and “fiction”
interpenetrate thoroughly, blurring the distinction between the
performance and the outer play. The performance play continues up to the
point when instead of the porter in Macbeth, the Inspector arrives on the
scene charging the players of carrying out clandestine activities not
approved by the State. The performance, only now understood to be the
inner play, comes to a halt with the Inspector’s intrusion. Inverting the
scheme of The Real Inspectors Hound, where Birdboot and Moon lose
their identities as real characters by stepping into the inner play, Macbeth,
Lady Macbeth and Banquo step out of the fictional world into the “real”
world of the frame play. They keep assuming double roles, moving
frequently in and out of the inner play. The language of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth is repeatedly decontextualized and recontextualized as when
Macduff enters:
Macduff: O horror, horror, horror!

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!
Inspector: What’s your problem, sunshine? Don’t tell me you’ve a found a
corpse. (58)
And again, in the dialogue between the Inspector and Banquo turned
Cahoot:
Cahoot: ‘Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glaims, all. As the weird sisters
promised … .’
Inspector: Kindly leave my wife’s family out of this.
Cahoot: ‘ … and I fear Thou playedst most foully for’t … .’
Inspector: Foul … .Fair … which is which? That’s two witches: one more
and we can do the show right here.
Cahoot: ‘ … yes it was said. It should not stand in thy posterity…’ (61)
6
Tom Stoppard. Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth. London: Faber and Faber,
1980, p. 20. All subsequent references to the play are from the same edition and are
indicated in the parenthesis.
72 Chapter Three
With Easy’s entry into the play, Dogg enters Cahoot’s Macbeth, first
mingling with English curiously and ultimately displacing it completely.
By the end of the play all the characters have switched to Dogg and
stopped using English, thus illustrating the idea of linguistic decentering.
While in Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth, there is an overt use of
the Shakespearean texts to illustrate the ideological implications of
centrality and marginality, in The Real Thing and The Real Inspector
Hound, the focus is on offering an illustration of the interpenetration of the
realms of the real and the theatrical, thereby challenging the traditional
distinction between actor and spectator, fiction and reality. This is done by
the use of the play-within-the-play device, first introduced in Ros and
Guil. The Real Thing is held within a structural framework working on the
principle of doubling and duplicating the scenes and characters of the
inner play in the outer play. With this device the concept of mimesis which
posits that art imitates life is contested by reversing the relation between
the two. It is “reality” that is shown to be imitating “art” as the scenes
depicting real life duplicate those depicting the fictional world of the inner
play named House of Cards.
The play begins with a false front as it is only later that the audience
learns about its being actually a part of the inner play written by Henry.
This scene which reveals Max’s discovery of his wife’s infidelity is
followed by his discovery of the same in the frame play. In fact, this
element of duplication of scenes recurs throughout the play. As Anthony
Jenkins rightly remarks:
These interconnecting pictures dictate the structure of the entire play, so that
we continually challenge the reality of one such picture in relation to another.
Scene 3 takes place in a living-room, whose layout is somewhat similar to the
stage-set. Max first appeared in. Now Annie, his ‘real’ wife, comes through the
door to be confronted with the evidence of her deception with Henry.7
Max, Charlotte and Annie appear in the dual capacity of “real” as well as
“fictional” characters and comment as real people on their role as artists
and as artists on their role as real people. This device contests the
established process of theatrical perception and, by analogy, of all
epistemological perception, an idea expressed by Henry in response to
Annie:
There is, I suppose, a world of objects which’ve a certain form, like this
coffee mug. I turn it, and it has no handle. I tilt it, and it has no cavity. But
7
Anthony Jenkins. The Theatre of Tom Stoppard. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987, p. 161.
there is something real here which is always a mug with a handle, I

suppose. But politics, justice, patriotism – they aren’t even like coffee
mugs. There’s nothing real there separate from our perception of them. So
if you try to stick labels on them, ‘farce’, ‘fraud’, ‘condemned’, and try to
change them as though there were something there to change, you’ll get
frustrated and frustration will finally make you violent.8
Hersh Zeifman aptly remarks on this feature of the play:

The Real Thing keeps circling endlessly back on itself … Dizzy from this
series of comic ambushes of our perceptions and preconceptions, we thus
find ourselves at the end invariably questioning, among a host of other
‘realities’, the precise nature of love-as Stoppard, of course, intended. Love
speaks in many different tongues, with many different accents. Which of
them, finally is ‘the real thing?9
The play-within-the-play device becomes even more prominent in The

Real Inspector Hound which uses an ingenious stage-setting consisting in
a third locale, besides the two for the audience and the playing area for the
actors. This third locale is occupied by rows of seats facing the audience.
The stage thus falls between the real audience and the row of seats where
the fictive one is seated. This fictive audience comprises Moon and
Birdboot, the two drama critics watching the play being staged before
them for review. Their dialogue forms the frame-play where they comment
upon the events of the inner play which is a classical whodunit parodying
Agatha Christie’s typical murder mysteries. The two plays remain
identifiably separate up to the point when Birdboot walks onto the stage to
answer a phone call and suddenly finds himself in the role of Simon
Gascoyne, a character whose murder is “scripted” in the stage play. Much
like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the critics lose their own identities and
assume new ones dictated by the already written script. Moon
unsuccessfully tries to lure back Birdboot before himself getting entrapped
in the stage play:
Birdboot: No, Cynthia-now that I have found you-
Cynthia: You’re ruthless-so strong-so cruel-
Moon: Have you taken leave of your mind?
Cynthia: Stop, can’t you see you’re making a fool of yourself!
Moon: She’s right.
Birdboot (to Moon): You keep out of this.10
8
Tom Stoppard. The Real Thing. London: Faber and Faber, 1982, p. 53.
9
Hersh Zeifman. “Comedy of Ambush: Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing.” Modern
Drama, Vol. 26, 1983, p. 149.
10
Tom Stoppard. The Real Inspector Hound. New York: Grove Press, 1975, p. 47.
74 Chapter Three
The assumed roles of Moon and Birdboot radically destabilize their real
identities. But more significantly, this interpenetration of the two realms of
fiction and reality offers a challenge to the assumptions underlying
spectatorship as it results in a virtual erasure of the divide between the real
and the fictional. It is in this context that Mary Doll has remarked:
“Stoppard has put to death the whole notion of what it is to be a spectator,
since would-be spectators are transformed into agents, making us all
agents in what we observe.”11
Doll’s remarks are equally illuminating for understanding After
Magritte (1970) and Artist Descending a Staircase (1972), both of which
take Rene Magritte’s paintings as models to present dramatized versions of
visual representation in art. Like Magritte, whose paintings are known for
disrupting the habitual modes of perception and artistic representation,
Stoppard, in these plays, illustrates the complexity attending the perceptual
process. In After Magritte this is done by playing upon the relationship
between context and perspective. The bizarre spectacle that the first scene
presents turns out to be pretty ordinary and without mystery. The details
which are revealed bit by bit reverse the Magritte tradition which suggests
the ultimately mysterious nature of things represented. The main focus of
the play is on the different versions of a single event that the members of
the Harris family present, having seen a mysterious figure on the street. As
Harris claims, the figure was a blind, one-legged, white-bearded
gentleman wearing stripped pyjamas, carrying a turtle under one arm, and
brandishing a white stick. He is sure of the correctness of his description
because he believes that he “saw him with his own eyes,” but so have
other members of the family whose description contradicts that of Harris.
Each member assumes their own version to be exclusively true but betray
their condition of being a victim of their limited perspective. The most
common and familiar things are presented in a manner to suggest that what
is generally taken as reality is actually an agglomerate of appearances.
The play also disrupts the epistemological subject-object distinction in
a farcical manner by showing how Inspector Foot discovers that the
criminal “object” he is trying to track down is nobody but himself. Kelly
remarks that the characters in the play “prove to be entrapped by their
interpretive logic, by a single view of a situation that fails to account for
themselves as the seers.”12 Along with the visual disruption goes an
11
Mary A Doll. “Stoppard’s Theatre of Unknowing” in James Acheson (ed).
British and Irish Drama since 1960. London: Macmillan Press, 1993, p. 120.
12
Katherine Kelly. Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at
Play. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991, p. 90.
equally destabilizing linguistic indeterminacy. Language becomes as

difficult to tackle as a visual sign that bears multiple interpretations:
Harris: The most – the very most – I am prepared to concede is that he may
have been a sort of street Arab making off with his lute … .
Thelma: His loot?
Harris (expansively): Or his mandolin- Who’s to say?13
When Mother requests Inspector Foot to allow her to practice the tuba, he
misinterprets it:
Mother: Is it all right for me to practice?

Foot: No, it is not all right! Ministry standards may be lax but we draw the
line at Home Surgery to bring in the little luxuries of life.
Mother: I only practice on the tuba.
Foot: Tuba, femur, fibula-it takes more than a penchant for rubber gloves to
get a license nowadays.14
While as After Magritte exploits a visual scene to illustrate the problem

of perspective, Artist Descending a Staircase exploits the medium of
sound for the same purpose. Martello and Beauchamp, investigating the
circumstances of Donner’s mysterious death, interpret a series of sounds
recorded on a tape and end up constructing an erroneous account of the
incident. The tape which is played repeatedly is interpreted by them as
follows:
Donner dozing: an irregular droning noise.

Careful footsteps approach: the effect is stealthy. A board creaks.
This wakes Donner, i.e. the droning stops in mid-beat.
The footsteps freeze.
Donner’s voice, unalarmed: ‘Ah! There you are … .
Two more quick steps, and then Thump!
Donner cries out.
Wood cracks as he falls through a balustrade.
He falls heavily down the stairs, with a final sickening thump when he hits
the bottom silence.15
The sequence of sounds suggests that Donner was killed by an

assailant, soon after he awoke from a snoring sleep, whom he knew and
addressed with “Ah! There you are … .” The actual sequence of events, it
13
Tom Stoppard. After Magritte. New York: Grove Press, 1975, p. 26.
14
ibid, p. 33.
15
Tom Stoppard. Artist Descending a Staircase. New York: Grove Press, 1977, p.
75.
76 Chapter Three
transpires, is quite different from that inferred from the sounds. What
sounded as snoring was a buzzing fly tracking whom Donner had fallen
through a balustrade and died below. “Ah! There you are …” was
addressed to the fly and not to any assailant. The whole confusion is,
therefore, created by the difficulty in fixing the referents of words, one
which is also echoed in the conversation between Martello and
Beauchamp. Hersh Zeifman has described this confusion that results from
the semantic plurality of words by means of a parenthetical commentary
on the dialogue:
Martello: I will stand by you, Beauchamp. We have been together a long

time.
Beauchamp: You may rely on me, Martello. I shall not cast the first stone
[i.e, speaking figuratively: I shall not condemn you].
Martello: You have cast it, Beauchamp [i.e., speaking literally: You have
murdered Donner], but I do not prejudge you.
Beauchamp: My feelings precisely, but there seems to be some confusion
in your mind-
Martello: My very thought. Turn off your machine, it seems to be
disturbing your concentration –
(TAPE ‘Ah’- and is switched off.)
Beauchamp: There you are [meaning: I have turned it off]
Martello: On the contrary, Beauchamp, there you are [meaning: that ‘Ah’
on the tape was Donner’s response to your arrival].16
Commenting upon the deeply problematic nature of the attempt to

construct meaning from the medium of sound, Beauchamp remarks:
Layer upon layer of what passes for silence, trapped from an empty room-
no, trawled- no, like-no matter … there unheard sounds which are our
silence stand as a metaphor a correspondence between the limits of hearing
and the limits of all knowledge.17
Both After Magritte and Artist Descending a Staircase provide an

illustration of Stoppard’s concern with the problems attending perception
and knowledge. N C Schmitt’s comment in this regard is very apt:
Stoppard’s larger structure of parallels and inversions calls attention to the

problem of knowledge. A painting identified as that of a black railing in
front of white snow might have been that of a white fence with the night
16
Hersh Zeifman. “Tomfoolery: Stoppard’s Theatrical Puns”. Yearbook of English
Studies Vol. ix, 1991, p. 212.
17
Tom Stoppard. Artist Descending a Staircase. New York: Grove Press, 1977, p.
53.
sky behind it, what is deemed as murder is likely to have been an accident,
a sound identified as snoring is likely to have been a fly droning.18
History has remained an obsession with Stoppard. This is borne out by

the fact that quite a few of his plays such as Travesties (1974), Arcadia
(1993), The Invention of Love (1997) and The Coast of Utopia (2002) are
situated in the past and feature historical figures and events. Here too,
Stoppard evinces a strong tendency to treat historical material in a manner
that highlights the textual nature of history. These plays can be seen as
providing a dramatic parallel to the ideas of the postmodern theorists of
history like Foucault and Hayden White. They offer a striking parallel, in
the dramatic mode, to Linda Hutcheon’s conceptualization of
“historiographic metafiction” as a mode of writing that problematizes the
referential status of history. One of the most prominent characteristics that
these plays share with “historiographic metafiction” is that they freely mix
historical and fictional elements, often situating historical figures in purely
imaginative situations. This device calls attention to the inherent
fictionality of history as a narrative. They also share with “historiographic
metafiction” the idea of the human subject as a point of intersection of
multiple and conflicting discourses and its ultimate situatedness within the
epistemological field, thereby undermining the notion of a vantage
perspective on history and the past.
Travesties uses multiple devices like parody, false front, disrupted
linearity and unreliable memory to explore some serious questions about
art, history and political activism. The play brings together three men of
historical significance, Lenin, Joyce, and Tzara, the founder of the Dadaist
movement, together in a fictionalized meeting where each defends his
position on art and its role in the society. It begins in the Zurich library
with the three aforementioned characters and Gwendolen taken directly
from Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. We soon discover,
however, that everything unfolding on the stage is through the memory of
Henry Carr and the first scene has been recapitulated by a now old Carr
and is not an event taking place in the present. Carr, the narrator of the
play, is himself split into the younger and older selves and the play moves
back and forth in time as the younger Carr reminisces about the past
events. Like the narrators of “historiographic metafiction”, Carr is both
prejudiced and self-deluded and, possessed of a faulty memory, incapable
of giving an objective account of events as they occurred during the First
18
Natalie Crohn Schmitt. “Window / Picture: L’assassin Menace and Artist
Descending a Stair-case.” Twentieth Century Literature. 1999, Vol. 45, Issue 3, p.
385.
78 Chapter Three
World War. His recollection of these events is mingled with minor details
about his personal life. Talking about the past he says:
You forget that I was there, in the mind and blood of a foreign field,
unmatched by anything in the whole history of human carnage. Ruined
several pairs of trousers. Nobody who has not been in the trenches can
have the faintest conception of the horror of it … . And so it went on … the
sixteen ounce serge, the heavy worsteds, the silken flannel mixture …
.until I was invalided out with a bullet through the calf of an irreplaceable
lambs-wool dyed khaki in the yarn to my own specification.19
In a stage direction, Stoppard explains at the outset of the play that “the
story (like a toy train perhaps) occasionally jumps the rails and has to be
restarted at the point where it goes wild” (37). These occasional
derailments are called time slips in the stage directions. Carr himself
admits to his unreliable memory saying, “I digress. No apologies required,
constant digression being the saving grace of senile reminiscence” (22).
He frequently forgets some important details about the past events and
persons as when recollecting Lenin’s role:
In fact, I might have stopped the whole Bolshevik thing in its tracks, but –
here’s the point. I was uncertain … .And don’t forget, he wasn’t Lenin
then! I mean who was he? as it were. (81)
By making a demented Carr the epistemological center of the play,

Stoppard problematizes the very assumptions of representation in the
theatre. As a typical postmodern performance that challenges the notion of
objective representation, Travesties uses decentering and disruption as a
device situated in the narrator himself. Carr’s memory slips and
contradicting recollections undercut his confidence in the absolutist
position he takes about matters regarding art and revolution:
Carr: I learned there things in Zurich. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re
either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be
an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as
well be a revolutionary … .
I forget the third thing. (99)
Travesties exploits the framework of Wilde’s The Importance of Being

Earnest to build the spectacle of parodic theatre by borrowing some witty
19
Tom Stoppard. Travesties. New York: Grove Press, 1975, p. 20. All subsequent
parenthesis.
and exuberant dialogue as well as a few characters like Cecily, Gwendolen

and Bennet from it. Here parody goes beyond Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead to directly contest the notion of the ontological
separation of theatre and non-theatrical discourses like history and politics.
There is an unmistakable suggestion that history and various political
philosophies based on it partake of certain theatrical and fictional elements
such as point of view, material context, subjective preferences and the
eventual textuality. History and all “emancipatory” political projects, it
suggests, are permeated by a condition of constructedness.
Joyce, Lenin, Tzara and the narrator Carr engage in arguments
defending their respective viewpoints and attacking their rivals. Carr is a
conventional absolutist who believes in patriotism and old values. He also
believes in a logical causality and thinks that an artist’s duty is to “beautify
existence”. Tzara, on the other hand, as a true Dadaist rejects all values
and believes in an inherent absurdity of everything. He thinks that the duty
of the artist is to expose the absurdity of causes and “jeer and bowl and
belch at the delusion that infinite generations of real effects can be inferred
from the gross expression of apparent cause”(37).
Lenin, as a Marxist, rejects all views on the artist’s duty for an
unrelenting stance that art and artist are tolerable only if they serve the
cause of the materialist revolution. As against this, Joyce upholds “art for
art’s sake” position. All these conflicting opinions remain unresolved as
Stoppard privileges no one position over the other. Instead, he creates a
witty collage of these conflicting opinions on art in a farcical manner,
interplaying them with elements from Wilde’s The Importance of Being
Earnest, from chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses, and from Lenin’s writings. The
title of the play is suggestive of how the styles of the work of each of the
principal characters as well as their views including Joyce’s modernism,
Lenin’s Marxist polemics and Tzara’s Dadaist opinions are travestied. This
clever pastiche of borrowing from well-known modernist works
foregrounds the indeterminacy which is a necessary condition of all
narratives that can never escape the condition of their textuality.
Stoppard’s theatrical ingenuity finds another expression in The
Invention of Love which shares with Travesties the dramatic device of
unfolding in the form of the reminiscence of a character. But whereas
Travesties is held within the memory of a single character that alternates
between his younger and the older self, Housman in The Invention of Love
is literally divided into two selves, each role played by a different actor.
The whole play unfolds as a dream of the dying A E Housman, the British
poet and scholar. As Stoppard himself said about the play; “It’s not
biographical. Things happen that never happened. The whole thing never
80 Chapter Three
happened – it all goes in Houseman’s head”20. The play foregrounds the

idea of the divided self in the very first scene when Charon, the ferryman
of Styx, is bewildered by the dead Housman:
Charon: A poet and a scholar is what I was told.

AEH: I think that must be me.
Charon: Both of them?
AEH: I’m afraid so
Charon: It sounded like two different people.
AEH: I know.21
Linearity is disrupted when the past and present collapse into each
other in a future where divisions of time dissolve into nothingness. The
spatial framework of the underworld allows the meeting of the older
Housman with his younger self. A sense of the surreal informs the entire
play as real Victorian poets and scholars are situated in a Greek
mythological world. The plot negates any causal or linear progression as
the past and the present mingle with each other and one is refracted
through the other. At the heart of the play lies the idea of reconstructing
lives not as coherent wholes but fragmented textualized events produced
by selective and unreliable memories and manuscripts which have passed
down to the present in conditions which leave open the question of their
authenticity and which can yield divergent meanings. In a long speech
Jowett dilates on the problems inherent in retrieving the past from ancient
written texts:
Housman: But isn’t it of use to establish what the ancient authors really
wrote?
Jowett: It would be on the whole desirable rather than undesirable and the
job was pretty well done, where it could be done, by good scholars dead
these hundred years and more. For the rest, certainty could only come from
recovering the autograph. This morning I had cause to have typewritten an
autograph letter I wrote to the father of a certain undergraduate. The copy
as I received it asserted that the Master of Balliol had a solemn duty to
stamp out unnatural mice. In other words, anyone with a secretary knows
that what Catullus really wrote was already corrupt by the time it was
copied twice, which was about the time of the first Roman invasion of
Britain: and the earliest copy that has come down to us was written about
1,500 years after that. Think of all those secretaries! - corruption breeding
corruption from papyrus to papyrus, and from the last disintegrating scrolls
20
Quoted in John Fleming Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order among Chaos.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001, p. 227.
21
Tom Stoppard. The Invention of Love. London: Faber and Faber, 1997, p. 2.
to the first new-fangled parchment books, with a thousand years of

copying-out still to come, running the gauntlet of changing forms of script
and spelling, and absence of punctuation - not to mention mildew and rats
and fire and flood and Christian disapproval to the brink of extinction as
what Catullus really wrote passed from scribe to scribe, this one drunk, that
one sleepy, another without scruple, and of those sober, wide-awake and
scrupulous, some ignorant of Latin and some, even worse, fancying
themselves better Latinists than Catullus - until! - finally and at long last -
mangled and tattered like a dog that has fought its way home, there falls
across the threshold of the Italian Renaissance the sole surviving witness to
thirty generations of carelessness and stupidity: the Verona Codex of
Catullus; which was almost immediately lost again, but not before being
copied with one last opportunity for error. And there you have the
foundation of the poems of Catullus as they went to the printer for the first
time, in Venice 400 years ago. (24-5)
But, ironically, Jowett himself conveniently forgets how he creates a

version of Classical history from a prejudiced moral bias of the Victorian
sensibility. Historical/biographical facts are shown to be of little value
without imaginative/artistic interventions. Wilde puts the idea as:
Wilde: On the contrary, it’s only fact. Truth is quite another thing and is the
work of the imagination. (93)
He goes on to explain this idea by describing how he invented his own

love, much like all our actions of investing objects with meanings suitable
to us.
Wilde: The betrayal of oneself is lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of

me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these
are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him,
he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me
with joy, he is the only one who understands me. … but before Plato could
describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love
anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my
poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what
we had wrought, rapture and pain together, the ice that burns who clasps it.
(95)
Earlier in the play, as AEH confronts his younger self, the past is
reconstructed through a conversation. Although this device disrupts the
linearity within which real events are held, this escape into Hades doesn’t
mean an escape from the clutches of time, since the past nevertheless
confronts AEH in the form of his younger self. Their conversation,
centering on the issues such as classical education, the value of textual
82 Chapter Three
criticism and the power of poetry, reinscribes their implication in time.

This reinscription of the ineluctable past becomes more forceful as more
and more real characters including journalists like Labouchere, Harris and
Stead, and critics and artists like Pater and Wilde come to create the world
around the play. Here, the burning issues of the Victorian times, especially
of art and morality occupy the interests of the characters showing that
Oxford had become a battlefield for competing views.
Although Housman finds himself amidst John Ruskin’s obsession with
the Gothic, Walter Pater’s appreciation of the Renaissance and Benjamin
Jowett’s advancement of the classical education, he is nevertheless drawn
to the irresistible Moses Jackson, a young science graduate whom he loves
“with a love that dare not speak its name.” Having repressed his passion in
the real life, Housman spells out to Jackson:
Housman: … Virtue! what happened to it? It had good run-centuries! - it

was still virtue in Socrates to admire a beautiful youth, virtue to be
beautiful and admired, it was still there, grubbier and a shadow of itself but
still there, for my Roman poets who competed for women and boys as the
fancy took them; virtue in Horace to shed tears of love over Ligurinus on
the athletic field. Well, not any more, eh, Mo? Virtue is what women have
to lose, the rest is vice. Pollard thinks I’m sweet on you, too, though he
hardly knows he thinks it. Will you mind if I go to live somewhere but
close by?
Jackson: Why?
Oh …
Housman: We’ll still be friends, won’t we?
Jackson: Oh!
Housman: Did you not really know, even for a minute?
Jackson: How could I know? You seem just, like … you know, normal.
You’re not one of those aesthetic types or anything-(angrily) How could I
know? (79-80)
Housman’s fading from the play at the end to be replaced by AEH

allows the issue of homosexuality to be viewed from the perspective of the
older man’s dispassionate self. As AEH and Oscar Wilde meet together to
compare their life choices, we are faced with two different consequences
of the same phenomenon. While the profane love led to Wilde’s
breakdown and destitution, its repression in Housman led to his focusing
entirely on poetry and scholarship. The past, including Wilde’s, revisited
from the apparent vantage point of the present, remains within the
framework of a dying man’s dream. The dramatic device does not,
however, suggest a dreamy quality of all reality. Instead, it enables us to
witness a subjective reconstruction of the past, blending “what was” with
“what should have been”. This provides a commentary on the imaginative

elements and fictional tools employed by biographical, auto-biographical
and historical narratives. As AEH admits:
AEH: You think there is an answer: the lost autograph copy of life’s
meaning, which we might recover from the corruptions that have made it
nonsense. But if there is no such copy, really and truly there is no answer.
It’s all in the timing. (41)
The last speech, delivered by AEH before he too fades out, is addressed
directly to the audience indicating the constructed nature of the dramatic
performance:
AEH: Oxford in the Golden Age! - the hairshirts versus the Aesthetes: the
neo-Christians versus the neo-pagans: the study of classics for
advancement in the fair of the world versus the study of classics for the
advancement of classical studies - what emotional storms, and oh what a
tiny teacup. You should have been here last night when I did Hades
properly - Furies, Harpies, Gorgons, and the snake-haired Medusa, to say
nothing of the Dog. But now I really do have to go. How lucky to find
myself standing on this empty shore, with the indifferent waters at my feet.
Fade out. (102)
The device of doubling a character, treated rather innovatively in The

Invention of Love, finds a parallel in an earlier play Hapgood (1988),
which exploits it to challenge the notion of a unified self even more
radically. Hapgood can also be compared with Arcadia in its use of a
recent scientific theory, quantum mechanics, to indicate the problems
inherent in forcing the complex phenomenon of the human identity into a
logical category. Lyotard, too, in The Postmodern Condition, elucidates
the significance of quantum mechanics, the theory that Stoppard makes
use of in Hapgood, for the postmodern condition which is characterized by
the end of all grand narratives including those of science. He states:
The modalization of the (quantum) scientist’s statement reflects the fact

that the effective, singular statement (the token) that nature will produce is
unpredictable. All that can be calculated is the probability that the
statement will say one thing rather than another.22
22
Jean Francois Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (trans). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 57.
84 Chapter Three
For Lyotard, quantum mechanics and chaos theory are postmodern

scientific theories par excellence, because they have replaced the
Newtonian classical physics and with it the deterministic theories of the
physical world. In Hapgood, the quantum theory serves as a theatrical
metaphor for presenting a situation where a radical indeterminacy
permeates all the levels of the play. This scientific analogy works to
underline the inherent difficulties present in establishing the truth about
the human identity and the external phenomenon. The epigraph to the play,
chosen from a passage by the physicist Richard Feynman, amply
demonstrates the point that the play is due to make:
We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely

impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of
quantum mechanics. In reality it contains the only mystery…23
The play is based on the analogy between espionage and physics, and
illustrates a duality operating in the world of humans parallel to an
identical one operating in the physical world. By focusing on this duality,
by virtue of which a thing or a person need not be either one or the other
but can be both simultaneously, Hapgood deconstructs the categories of
binarism. Kerner, who very often voices the postmodern ideas of duality
and elusiveness of reality, replies to Blair:
Blair: One likes to know what’s what.

Kerner: Oh yes! Objective reality.
Blair: I thought you chaps believed in that.
Kerner: “You Chaps?” Oh Scientists. (Laughs) “You chaps!” Paul,
objective reality is for Zoologists. “Ah, yes, definitely a giraffe.” But a
double is not like a giraffe. A double agent is more like trick of light.24
Kerner suggests that all reality, including humans and other physical
objects, exhibits a dual character, much similar to light that possesses the
mutually exclusive properties of both wave and particle. He remarks:
“Every time we don’t look we get wave pattern. Every time we look to see
how we get wave pattern, we get particle pattern. The act of observing
determines the reality” (12). And again:
23
Richard Feynman. The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Quantum Mechanics.
Reading: Addison and Wesley, 1966, p. 1.
24
Tom Stoppard. Hapgood. London: Faber and Faber, 1988, p. 10. All subsequent
parenthesis.
Somehow light is particle and wave. The experimenter makes the choice.
You get what you interrogate for. And you want to know if I’m a wave or
particle. I meet my Russian friend Georgi, and we exchange material.
When the experiment is over, you have a result: I am a British Joe with a
Russian source. But they also have a result: because I have given George
enough information to keep him credible as a K G B control who is
running me as a sleeper - which is what he thinks he is. (12)
The play presents three sets of twins, Hapgood and her pseudo twin
Celia, Ridley and his twin brother, and the nameless Russian twins. In the
realm of espionage this allows the secret agent to be present at two
different places at the same time, hence frustrating all surveillance
attempts. The play, however, exploits this situation to undermine all
notions of stability and fixity. This instability and unfixity, visible in the
realm of physics in the behavior of electrons, is demonstrated through a
process of twining and doubling in the world of humans. As Kerner
responds to Blair:
You think everybody has no secret or one big secret, they are what they
seem or the opposite. You look at me and think: Which is he? Plus or
minus? If only you could figure it out like looking into me to find my root.
And then you still wouldn’t know. We’re all doubles … The one who puts
on the clothes in of the morning is the working majority, but at night –
perhaps in the moment before unconsciousness – we meet our sleeper – the
priest is visited by the doubter, the Marxist sees the civilizing force of the
bourgeoisie, the captain of industry admits the justice of common
ownership. (71-2)
The passage provides a commentary on the idea that the “ontological self”
is an illusion and what is assumed to be a unified subjectivity is something
that owes its existence to diverse and even conflicting roles that humans
assume. Hapgood dramatizes this idea of an irreducible multiplicity lying
at the center of the human self.
It is science that provides a connecting link between Hapgood and
Arcadia where Stoppard uses Chaos theory and the second law of
thermodynamics to illustrate certain ideas such as the disruption of
determinism and the textual nature of all epistemological accounts. The
play brings together diverse concepts of science, biographical and
geographical research to underline ideas like unfixity of perception,
irregularity and intractable complexity of the world, and mankind’s
inevitable march towards disintegration and doom. The play is alternately
set in two different time frames which are kept separate in the beginning
but merge with each other by the end. The present-day inhabitants of
86 Chapter Three
Sidley Park, Derbyshire are obsessed with investigating the events that
occurred there in the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. Two
scholars Bernard Nightingale and Hannah Jarvis, work to construct an
account of the past history as well as the Derbyshire landscape. Bernard’s
manner of deriving conclusions from the textual material he comes across
suggests how history comes to be constructed by piecing different bits of
information together and linking them on the basis of probability.
Bernard’s research leads him to the conclusion that Byron had stayed at
the Sidley Park, seduced the wife of Ezra Chater, a third-rate poet, and
finally killed him in a duel. Arranging the textual bits like letters in what
he supposes to be the most probable sequence, he creates a story about
Byron:
without question, Lord Byron, in the very season of his emergence as a

literary figure, quit the country in a cloud of panic and mystery, and stayed
abroad for two years at a time when continental travel was unusual and
dangerous. If we seek his reason-do we need to look far?25
Bernard’s discoveries are however “proved” wrong by Hannah who shows

to him that Chater died in Martinique in 1910. Confronted with this piece
of evidence, Bernard retorts: “I have proved Byron was here and as far as I
am concerned he wrote those lines as sure as he shot that hare. If only I
hadn’t somehow … .made it all about killing Chater” (56).
Arcadia exploits the time-frames of the past and present in a manner
that suggests that human hopes can only be hinged on an uncertain future.
Kerstin Schmidt’s observation on the treatment of time in postmodern
drama sheds light on Stoppard’s device here:
Postmodern drama furthermore aims at deconstructing time as a continuum

and a linear progressive movement. Time is predominantly rendered as
discontinuous and relative. The result is the production of new forms of
presentation no longer based on progressive time concepts. The aesthetics
of time in postmodern theater is grounded in an effort to present time itself,
to exhibit time and trigger a metadramatic reflection on aspects of time.26
Using the theory of Chaos to undermine all certain knowledge of the

origins, causes and connecting links, and hence all attempts to retrieve the
25
Tom Stoppard. Arcadia. London: Faber and Faber, 1993, p. 39. All subsequent
parenthesis.
26
Kirsten Schmidt. The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American
Drama. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005, p. 76.
past as it occurred, it points out to the inevitable future of the mankind. As

Valentine explains the meaning of Chaos theory to Hannah:
The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make

everything the way it is … The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the
things people write poetry about-clouds-daffodils-waterfalls-and what
happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of
mystery … The future is disorder … It’s the best possible time to be alive,
when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. (47-8)
The past obviously did exist, but has to be reconstructed by putting all
available evidence together, meaning that the result can only be a narrative
with a tentatively plausible status. All certainties seem to wither away in
the face of confusion created by the proliferation of the material bearing
on what to accept as true. The conflict between reason and imagination,
represented by the conflict between Classicism and Romanticism, has
proved inconclusive. Stoppard himself suggested that the contemporary
age has witnessed a revolt against reason which is reminiscent of the
Romantic revolt but, unlike it, offers no substitution:
In any age, including the period around the year 1800, we had a kind of
reaction against scientism by the poets of the time, so you find that Blake
and Wordsworth and Coleridge as young men are resisting the thinking of
that time that science was rapidly finding out all the answers, and would
solve all the mysteries. The sense, or illusion, that science is doing exactly
that seems to accompany every age, and creates an opposing force.27
Arcadia presents the postmodern challenge to Enlightenment

Rationality that once promised a perfect mastery over the natural
phenomenon following its complete understanding. Chaos theory has,
however, disrupted the underlying notions of the Enlightenment. The
universe, the thermodynamics theory suggests, is inevitably heading
towards an entropic dead end. As Valentine explains to Hannah, “heat goes
to cold. It’s a one-way street … it’ll take a while but we’re all going to end
up at room temperature”(78). Thomasina had understood the implications
of the one way flow of heat more than a century before. Septimus, alarmed
at this, had concluded, “So, we are all doomed!” and Thomasina had
cheerfully replied, “yes”.
27
Tom Stoppard. “Plotting the course of a Playwright” in Paul Delaney (ed). Tom
Stoppard in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 268.
88 Chapter Three
This inevitable entropic course that the world is bound to take is

discussed in the last scene of the play where the past and the present
merge:
Septimus: So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow

cold. Dear me.
Valentine: The heat goes into the mix.
(he gestures to indicate the air in the room, in the universe)
Thomasina: Yes, we must hurry if we are going to dance.
Valentine: And everything is mixing the same way, all the time,
irreversibly.
Septimus: Oh, we have time, I think.
Valentine … till there’s no time left. That’s what time means.
Septimus: When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning.
We will be all alone, on an empty shore.
Thomasina: Then we will dance. Is this a waltz? (93-4)
The ending of the play shows Hannah responding to Gus’s gesture asking
her to dance:
(After a moment’s hesitation, she gets up and they hold each other, keeping
a decorous distance between them, and start to dance, rather awkwardly.
Septimus and Thomasina continue to dance, fluently, to the piano). (97)
Caught between the uncertain and chaotic past and the inevitable
entropic doom, the characters, in a typical post-absurdist and
postmodernist manner, celebrate the moment at hand with a cheerful
gesture of dance.
Indian Ink (1995) again demonstrates Stoppard’s unflagging interest in
investigating the problems involved in reconstructing the past. As the stage
directions reveal, the play is set in two periods, 1930 (in India) and mid-
1980s (in England and India). The action moves freely between these time/
space frameworks and comprises three different plot lines. First, Flora
Crewe’s stay in an imaginary Indian state Jummapur and her relationship
with Nirad Das, the Indian painter who draws her portrait. Second, the
conversation in the 1980s in England between Mrs. Swan, Flora’s sister,
and Anish, Nirad’s son; and third, the activities of Pike, an American
scholar who is researching into the life and poetry of Flora, collecting and
editing her letters to write her biography. As there exists no stage
demarcation between different time periods or places, temporal and spatial
frameworks interpenetrate, indicating Stoppard’s continuing interest in the
strategies begun with Travesties. Caught in this fluid movement of time
and space are characters whose identities remain in flux. Sometimes they
seem to be interacting with each other despite the time/space gulf dividing
them, a device which is fully exploited at the end of the play.
As in Arcadia, the past is made to appear as a construct from the
present, whether it is Pike’s efforts to know about Flora’s activities in
India or interpreting the well-known historical events in the Indian history.
Dilip thus comments on the impossibility of knowing whether Flora and
Das had any relationship, although there are indications that such a
relationship did exist:
DILIP: (Recovering) Well, we will never know. You are constructing an

edifice of speculation on a smudge of paint on paper, which no longer
exists.
PIKE: It must exist – look how far I’ve come to find it.
DILIP: Oh, very Indian! Well, so, there are two ways to proceed. First, you
can go around Jummapur looking at every piece of paper you come to.
Second, you can stand in one place and look at every piece of paper that
comes to you. (61)
The play illustrates the postmodern idea of representation as constitutive

of our sense of the real. Given the fact that the Indian history, politics and
culture have been narrativized from different perspectives, it is impossible
to retrieve an India as it was prior to those representations. The Indian and
British characters interpret the past events in different ways, as, for
example, the following conversation between Mrs. Swan and Anish
reveals:
ANISH: … In Jummapur we were ‘loyal’ as you would say, we had been

loyal to the British right through the first War of Independence.
MRS SWAN: The … ? What war was that?
ANISH: The Rising of 1857.
MRS SWAN: Oh, you mean the Mutiny. What did you call it?
AISH: Dear Mrs Swan, Imperial history is merely … no, no – I promise
you I didn’t come to give you a history lesson.
MRS SWAN: You seem ill-equipped to do so. We were your Romans, you
know. We might have been your Normans.
ANISH: And did you expect us to be grateful?…We were the Romans! We
were up to date when you found a third-world country! Even when you
discovered India in the age of Shakespeare, we already had our
Shakespeares. And our science – architecture – our literature and art, we
had a culture older and more splendid, we were rich! After all, that’s why
you came. (But he has misjudged).
MRS SWAN: (Angrily) We made you a proper country! And when we left
you fell straight into pieces like Humpty Dumpty! Look at the map! You
should feel nothing but shame! (17)
90 Chapter Three
Anish, notwithstanding his strong feelings against the colonizers of his

country, regards England as his home:
ANISH: Oh – home! I didn’t mean I was a guest in England. England is

my home now. I have spent half my life here. I married here. (18)
The postcolonial subject is conscious of its fragmented identity, it is neither
able to retrieve its pre-colonial self nor cast itself fully into the image of its
master which it tries to emulate. The conversation between Pike and Dilip,
his assistant is illuminating in this regard:
PIKE: Why are you so crazy about English, Dilip?
DILIP: I am not!
PIKE: You love it!
DILIP: Yes, I do. I love it.
PIKE: Yes. You do.
DILIP: (cheerfully) Yes, it’s a disaster for us! Fifty years of Independence
and we are still hypnotized! Jackets and ties must be worn! English-model
schools for the children of the elite, and the voice of Bush House is heard
in the land. Gandhi would fast again, I think. Only, this time he’d die. It
was not for this India, I think, that your friend Nirad Das and his friends
held up their home-made banner at the Empire Day gymkhana. It was not
for this that he threw his mango at the Resident’s car. What a pity, though,
that all his revolutionary spirit went into his art and none into his art. (60-
1)
Nirad Das, who is drawing Flora’s portrait, is chided by her for trying to
be English rather than an Indian artist:
FLORA: I said nothing about your painting, if you want to know, because I
thought you’d be an Indian artist.
DAS: An Indian artist?
FLORA: Yes. You are an Indian artist, aren’t you? Stick up for yourself.
Why do you like everything English?…You are enthralled. Chelsea,
Bloomsbury, Oliver Twist, Goldflake cigarettes, Winsor and Newton …
even painting in oils, that’s not Indian. You’re trying to paint me from my
point of view instead of yours – what you think is my point of view. You
deserve the bloody Empire!
DAS: … the bloody Empire finished off Indian painting. (42-3)
The roots of the schizophrenic postcolonial subject lie in the colonial

power structures which lured the natives into imitation without providing
them the opportunity to embrace a fully-fledged Englishness and treating
them as nothing more than instruments for their ends. The conversation
between Flora and Durance, an English officer in charge of surveillance
over the natives’ activities illustrates this:
FLORA: Mr Das called you Captain.

PIKE: Yes, I’m Army. Seconded, of course. There are two of us Juniors –
political agents we call ourselves when we’re on tour round the States.
Jummapur is not one of your twenty-one-gun salute states, you see – my
Chief is in charge of half a dozen native states.
FLORA: In charge?
DURANCE: Oh yes.
FLORA: Is he Army? No – how silly –
DURANCE: He’s Indian Civil Service. The heaven-born. A Brahmin.
FLORA: Not seriously?
DURANCE: Yes, seriously. Oh no, not a Brahmin seriously. But it might
come to that with I-zation.
FLORA: … ?
DURANCE: Indianization. It’s all over, you know. We have Indian officers
in the Regiment now. My fellow Junior here is Indian, too, terribly nice
chap – he’s ICS, passed the exam, did his year at Cambridge, learned polo
and knives-and-forks, and here he is, a pukkah sahib in the Indian Civil
Service.
FLORA: Is he here?
DURANCE: At the club? No, he can’t come into the Club.
FLORA: Oh. (52)
The play, on the whole, seems neither reactionary or conservative, nor

simply a critique of the British colonial enterprise in India. It offers a more
complex picture of colonialism as an exploitative enterprise creating the
conditions for the emergence of a modern Indian subjectivity. By laying
bare the conflicting facets of this subjectivity it points at the persisting
ambivalence at the heart of the postcolonial subject which can never
escape the overarching power which brought it into existence in the first
place.
In The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy consisting of Voyage, Shipwreck and
Salvage, Stoppard rings a more serious tone than most of his earlier plays,
examining the historical conditions that led to the birth of the modern
Russian socialism. Whereas Travesties had placed Lenin, Joyce and Tzara
in an entirely imaginative situation, the trilogy places some real historical
figures as Alexander Herzen, Ivan Turgenev, Mikhail Bakunin and
Vissarion Belinsky, against a background that bears close resemblance to
the conditions prevalent in the nineteenth century Russia. Again, we
witness a reversal of temporal framework as time moves backwards rather
than forward in the trilogy. Like some of his other plays, Stoppard is
interested in showing that how the past is remembered largely depends on
the experiences of those who remember it, it is not fixed and objectively
available, but always mediated through memories which have a great stake
in remembering things one way rather than the other. The focus, however,
92 Chapter Three
is less on revealing the fictionality of historical narratives than exposing

the socialist Utopian project as a grand narrative that ultimately led to a
monolithic power structure without achieving the goal of social equality
and liberty.
The very basis of the socialist revolution was the theory of dialectical
materialism propounded by Marx, according to which the determining
forces in history are the economic conditions of the masses. Marx
postulated a progressive movement of history in which the final stage of
the society will be characterized by the abolition of all classes and the
emergence of a truly communist society. In Salvage, Herzen dreams of
Marx who predicts the future of the revolution:
Every stage leads to a higher stage in the permanent conflict which is the
march of history happily anticipating the final titanic struggle, the last turn
of the great wheel of progress beneath which generations of toiling masses
perished for the ultimate victory. And relishing the thought of the Neva lit
by flames and running red, the coconut palms hung with corpses all along
the shinning strand from Kronstadt to the Nevsky Prospekt … .28
But Herzen responds rather defiantly to the specter of Marx, challenging

his theory of historical progress:
History has no culmination. There is always as much in front as behind.

There is no libretto. History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment
and the gate keeper is chance. We shout into the mist for this one or that
one to be opened for us, but through every gate there are a thousand more.
We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us …
.What kind of beast is it, this Ginger Cat with its insatiable appetite for
human sacrifice? This Moloch who promises that everything will be
beautiful after we’re dead? A distant end is not an end but a trap. (Salvage,
118)
Herzen’s rejection of Marx’s sweeping theories suggests that all

theories of history that posit a rational or teleological progress to it are
more likely to be superimpositions on a massive and rather amorphous
phenomenon. History, entirely bereft of a design or purpose, seems more
like an agglomeration of events where millions can be sacrificed without
achieving any significantly better results for the mankind. That history is
more like the weather in its unpredictability is observed by Georg
Herwegh while explaining the failure of the 1848 revolution:
28
Tom Stoppard. Salvage: The Coast of Utopia, Part III (Salvage). London: Faber
and Faber, 2002, p. 117. All subsequent references to the trilogy are given in
parenthesis with the title of each play.
We’ve had a terrible shock. We discovered that history has no respect for
intellectuals. History is more like the weather. You never know what it’s
going to do. (Shipwreck, 63)
It gets much worse, the trilogy suggests, when knowledge and truth are
invoked to legitimize certain views capable of mobilizing masses into an
activity that sets itself a specific goal which it ultimately fails to achieve.
The plays offer a critique of the idea of utopia and its historical
underpinnings in the nineteenth century Russia. The nineteenth century
Russian socialists premised their future dream on a theoretical framework
that was universalizing and totalizing in its claims. Throughout the trilogy,
various characters debate philosophical questions, invoking German
philosophers like Schelling, Kant, Fichte and Hegel, in order to find
answers to the questions of the meaning and purpose of history. Their
arguments reveal the complexity of the questions and undercut the very
premise on which a simple, straightforward call for a revolution is based.
Any overarching interpretation of history necessarily tends to suppress
other perspectives on it and leads to social oppression. In the following
remarks of Herzen, addressed to the Hegelian Bakunin, the ironic
treatment of the Marxist harnessing of the Hegelian dialectics is
unmistakable:
You’ve got Hegel’s Dialectical Spirit of History upside down, so has he.
People don’t storm the Bastille because history proceeds by zigzags.
History zigzags because when people have enough, they storm the Bastille.
When you turn him right way up, Hegel is the algebra of revolution. The
Dialectical Spirit of History would be an extravagant redundancy even if
one could imagine what sort of animal it was supposed to be … a gigantic
ginger cat, for example … .We are not the plaything of an imaginative
cosmic force, but of a Romanov with no imagination whatsoever, a
mediocrity. (Voyage, 104)
The reference to Hegel’s dialectics upside down is an unmistakable

parody of Marx’s famous statement that he has turned Hegel upside down,
positing the historical/material forces as the primary factors of change
instead of Hegel’s Absolute. But dialectics, believed to be the principle
where contradictory elements are resolved into a synthesis that leads to a
linear progression, may be no more than a myth. On the converse, The
Coast of Utopia offers the theory of inevitable cyclical repetition of
history as a more persuasive alternative. The idea is given a powerful
expression in the words of Nataile Herzen:
94 Chapter Three
Don’t you ever have the feeling that while real time goes galloping down
the road in all directions, there are certain moments … situations … which
keep having their turn again? (Shipwreck, 4)
Her remarks, echoing Nietzsche’s views on history’s cyclical march, signal

a counter view capable of contesting the fundamental assumption of a
revolutionary project. Even the prophets of the revolution seem, at the end,
persuaded that the dream of the earthly paradise can never be transformed
into reality. While as Belinsky blurts out, “I am sick of Utopias. I’m tired
of hearing about them”, the most emphatic statement comes from Herzen:
The ancient dream of a perfect society of squarable circles, where conflict

is cancelled out is an illusion, for there is no such society, that’s why it’s
called Utopia. (Salvage, 118)
The utopia promised by Marxism ultimately proved to be a ghost, a

hobgoblin as the following parody of the opening sentence of The
Communist Manifesto by Turgenev in response to Marx’s query reveals:
Marx: Do you think there’s something funny about ‘the ghost of

Communism’? I don’t want it to sound as if Communism is dead.
Turgenev: Let me see … (in ‘English’) ‘A ghost … a phantom is walking
around Europe..’ (thoughtfully) ‘A spook … a spectre … ’ (jogged) ‘A
spirit … a spirit is haunting Europe … ’ (taps the book, triumphantly
satisfied) ‘A hobgoblin is stalking around Europe – the hobgoblin of
Communism!’ (Shipwreck, 41)
The Coast of Utopia illustrates Stoppard’s recognition that men have

failed to translate their conceptions about an ideal society into reality
because the gap between the ideal and the real is unbridgeable. But more
important than this is Stoppard’s suggestion that these grand emancipatory
projects fail precisely because they tend to be grand, universalizing and
totalizing. From here it is not difficult to see that the Lyotardian ideas of
local and mini narratives offer better alternatives to the failed grand ones.
Stoppard’s interest in ethical questions finds expression in two of his
full-length plays, Jumpers (1972) and Professional Foul (1977), both of
which illustrate the problems inherent in all ethical systems. Stoppard
himself commented on his response to moral questions in the following
terms:
Writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I’m

the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great
moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the
refutation. Forever.29
This stance of the playwright is echoed by Mr. Moon’s following speech in

his only novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon (1966):
I take both parts, O’Hara, leapfrogging myself along the great moral issues,
refuting myself and rebutting the refutation towards a truth that must be a
compound of two opposite half-truths. And you never reach it because
there is always something more to say.30
And again:
I cannot commit myself to either side of a question…And I can’t even side

with the balance of morality because I don’t know whether morality is an
instinct or just an imposition.31
Like Travesties, Jumpers offers a dramatic illustration of conflicting

perspectives brought together and left open-ended without privileging any
one of them. The play is one of the best examples of Stoppard’s use of
comic framework for dealing with serious questions about epistemology
and ethics. It is a farcical treatment of some of the most debated issues in
the philosophical circles including language, ethics and the verification of
the truth. The title refers to a group of acrobats belonging to the
philosophical school of Logical Positivists in a University department who
have actually built up a human pyramid, thus suggesting a state of crisis in
philosophy where it has merged with gymnastics. When Bones asks
George, the main character of the play, who these acrobats are, he replies:
Logical Positivists, mainly, with a linguist analyst or two, a couple of

Benthamite utilitarians … . Lapsed Kantians and empiricists generally …
.and of course the usual Behaviourists … .a mixture of the more
philosophical members of the university gymnastics team and the more
gymnastic members of the philosophy school.32
29
Quoted in Mel Gussow (ed). Conversations with Tom Stoppard. London: Nick
Hern, 1995, p. 3.
30
Tom Stopard. Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon. London: Blond, 1966, p. 52.
31
ibid, p. 54.
32
Tom Stoppard. Jumpers. New York: Grove Press, 1972, pp. 50-1. All subsequent
parenthesis.
96 Chapter Three
George, whom the play presents as a lone voice upholding faith in God
and absolute ethics, sets out to prove that relativism and skepticism are not
only dangerous for the society but also have no sound philosophical
foundations. His rival Archie, the Vice Chancellor of the University where
George is a professor, is a thorough-going positivist who carries his
convictions into his practical life by embracing opportunism. The play is
an ironic exposition of all philosophical positions, especially logical
positivism represented by Archie and irrationalist intuitionism represented
by George.
Archie and his followers land into ridiculous positions trying to
translate their extreme positivism into practical affairs as when
Clegthrope, the atheist Radical-Liberal, is appointed as Archbishop of
Canterbury. Their political leanings towards radical liberalism are
intertwined with a philosophical position that reduces all problems, not
just of knowledge and ethics, to literal jokes. As Archie says, “No problem
is insoluble given a big enough plastic bag” (40). As the play unfolds in
the manner of a classic whodunit, after McFee, one of the acrobats is
mysteriously shot dead, the incapacity of philosophical positions based on
positivism to tackle the pressing problems of verifying incidents is brought
out. The suspects of the murder include George, Dotty his wife and Archie,
but the mystery of the real murder remains unsolved up to the end.
Against Archie’s logical positivism, George’s firm conviction in values
and God speaks of his faith in the unseen and irrational. Deriding
rationality as the basis of all knowledge he tells Dotty:
The national Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a

monument to irrationality! And so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover’s
favors, or a home for stray dogs! You stupid woman, if rationality were the
criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic
field of Soya beans!… (40)
George’s portrayal in the play indicates that the title Jumpers is a

reference to him as much as it is a reference to Archie and other logical
positivists, because his faith in the irrational is like a philosophical jump, a
“leap into faith”. That the play reveals George as self-deluded is amply
borne out by the farcical manner in which he and his philosophical
experiments are presented. To “disprove” the assumptions of his
philosophical rivals, George sets out to negate some of the classical
paradoxes which he believes are invoked to demolish absolutism and
certainty. He embarks upon an implausible attempt to disprove Zeno’s
paradox of motion. Zeno’s argument that motion is illusory as it involves a
logical contradiction consisting in an endless regress constitutes for
George the skeptical argument in epistemological matters. He believes that

by demonstrating practically that an arrow does reach its target he can
explode the notion of illusion of motion. He derides it; “though an arrow is
always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian
died of fright” (28).
Zeno’s concept of infinite regress is linked by George to those
mathematicians and thinkers who deny the necessity of the concept of a
beginning, and by implication the argument for a First Cause. As against
their argument, George affirms:
There is reason and there is cause and there is motion, each in infinite
regress towards a moment of origin and a point of ultimate reference … the
Necessary Being, the First Cause, the unmoved Mover!!! (24)
George takes up a bow and an arrow to shoot at a target, the arrow misses
the target and kills Thumper, his pet rabbit, and when he recoils from the
spectacle, he accidentally steps on and crushes to death his tortoise Pat.
The comic disaster in which his experiments end up undercuts his
unshakable conviction in intuitive certainties. The play progresses to
illustrate the irony of George who, obsessed with making efforts to solve
eternal mysteries of knowledge and ethics, is totally unaware of what is
happening under his own roof, for it is very late in the play that he learns
that Duncan McFee is dead and that he might have been killed, in all
probability, by George’s own wife. Moreover, of all the characters in the
play, George is the only one never to observe the visible corpse.
The play subjects George’s philosophical seriousness to a farcical
treatment by focusing on his failure to see things that are obvious and
landing into ridiculous positions. The self-consistent logic that George
espouses is shown to be inadequate to tackle the inherent contradictions of
the world to which it is applied. George himself feels that language, the
only tool at his disposal, often plays tricks upon him and defies his
attempts to contain the philosophically meaningful statements:
George: I had hoped to set British moral philosophy back forty years,
which is roughly when it went off the rails, but unfortunately, though my
convictions are intact and my ideas coherent, I can’t seem to find the
words.
Bones: Well, “Are God?” is the wrong for a start.
George: Or rather, the words betray the thoughts they are supposed to
express. Even the most generalized truth begins to look like special
pleading as soon as you trap it in language. (46)
98 Chapter Three
George realizes how he is trapped in language, which by its relativity and

arbitrariness creates a gap between the word and the concept. As he
explains:
How does one know what it is one believes when it’s so difficult to know
what it is one knows. I don’t claim to know that God exists, I only claim
that he does without my knowing it, and while I claim as much I do not
claim to know as much; indeed I cannot know and God knows I cannot.
(62)
Although George tries to point out the limitations of language:

“language is an approximation of meaning and not a logical symbolism for
it” (24) and, “language is a finite instrument crudely applied to infinity of
ideas” (63), his main problem lies in being manipulated by the inherent
indeterminacy of language. He unsuccessfully tries to pin down the
referential pluralism of words as when attempting to show how meaning
of the word “good” differs in different usages such as good bacon
sandwich and the good Samaritan. This linguistic indeterminacy frustrates
him as he sets out to write a paper for the symposium. He starts, stops, and
starts again but flounders constantly, drifting helplessly in the current of
his own words.
However, George’s faith in altruism is undermined not so much by the
linguistic indeterminacy as by the spectacle on the television which shows
the two astronauts struggling to push each other out from the spaceship
that can bring back only one of them from the moon. The struggle for
survival hints at the blind spot in George’s theorizing without taking into
account the modifying force of material conditions. George’s moral system
is thus shown to be inadequate to deal with the complexity of the material
world.
A similar idea finds expression in Professional Foul which highlights a
moral dilemma that remains unresolved up to the end. The complexity
informing ethical questions and the vulnerability of all moral positions is
dramatized by means of different views that clash with each other. The
play centers mainly on the intellectual evolution of Anderson, a J S Mill
professor of philosophy at Cambridge who is on a visit to Prague for
reading a paper in a colloquium entitled “Ethical Foundations as Ethical
Fictions”. Anderson believes that although ethical principles are fictions,
they are absolutely necessary because they help maintain order and have
thus a practical value. In contrast, McKendrick advances a belief that since
moral principles have no theoretical basis, there is no reason to adopt
them. McKendrick is, therefore, a counterpart of Archie in Jumpers. He
challenges Anderson on the ground that the latter’s position involves self-
contradiction: “There aren’t any principles in your sense. There are only a
lot of principled people trying to behave as if there were.”33 McKendrick
argues that absolute moral principles are an imposition on a complex
phenomenon and are based on flawed logic:
The mistake that people make is, they think a moral principle is
indefinitely extendible, that it holds good for any situation, a straight line
cutting across the graph of our actual situation. (78)
He illustrates his idea of the common mistake people commit by drawing

two parallel lines, one representing morality and the other immorality:
“Morality down there, running parallel to ‘immorality’ up here … and
never the twain shall meet” (78). As against this, he puts forth his own
argument:
The two lines are on the same plane. They’re the edges of the same plane –
it’s in three dimensions, you see – and if you twist the plane in a certain
way, into what we call the catastrophe curve, you get a model of the sort of
behaviour we find in the real world. (78)
As the play progresses, Anderson’s experiences with the reality of the

Czech state oppression force him to alter his stance on morality. Beginning
with a firm conviction that the citizens of a state are morally bound to
respect the laws, since not doing so will result in breaking a social contract
and result in political disorder, he comes to see the validity of the two
mutually antithetical positions on ethics, namely that of Hollar and
McKendrick. As a witness to the inhuman behavior that Hollar and his
family are subjected to by the Czech authorities, he is forced to accept
Hollar’s privileging of certain inalienable rights of the individual over and
above the regulations and laws of the State. This modified stance on
morality is witnessed in his acts of lying to and cheating the Czech police
to avoid being nabbed. From the earlier position of ideal standards of
behavior, he moves to proposing “a system of ethics which is the sum of
individual acts of recognition of individual rights” (90).
He rejects the state authority which, “seeks, in the name of the people,
to impose its values on the very individuals who comprise the state” (91).
Anderson, however, soon finds himself in another moral dilemma. The
only way, he thinks, he can smuggle out Hollar’s thesis out of the Czech
Republic and make possible that the world knows what is happening
33
Tom Stoppard. Professional Foul. New York: Grove Press, 1978, p. 78. All
parenthesis.
100 Chapter Three
inside the country is to put it secretly in McKendrick’s luggage. Doing

this, however, means violating the moral principle of mutual trust. His
dilemma is paralleled in an altogether different set of circumstances of a
football game; how far is it moral to resort to a professional foul in a
soccer game to avoid defeat? Broadbent, the English player, actually
resorts to it and believes to have done nothing immoral. The rules of the
game apparently allow a professional foul since within the context of the
game it is tackled by imposing a penalty against the team or the player
responsible for it. But since the question involves issues like personal
integrity and sportsmanship, it is a moral question.
Like Broadbent, though in a different context, Anderson breaches
McKendrick’s trust by putting Hollar’s thesis into his bag, which further
problematizes for him the issue of ethics. If moral interests can and should
take precedence over moral principles as Anderson’s action suggests, the
result will be political anarchy. Kant’s ethical system took its force from
the principle of practicality. An absolute moral principle is, he argued,
applicable in all circumstances without self-contradiction. Having seen the
flaws in the Kantian position, Anderson seeks to outgrow it only to find
himself in a more ambivalent position. The play ends on a note of
declaration of the uncertainty attending moral questions:
Mc Kendrick: It’s not quite playing the game, is it?

Anderson: No, I suppose not. But they were very unlikely to search you.
Mc Kendrick: That’s not the bloody point.
Anderson: I thought it was. But you could be right. Ethics is a very
complicated business. That’s why they have these congresses. (93)
The analysis of the plays undertaken here reveals that most of

Stoppard’s plays explore the conflict of ideas relating to art, morality and
truth, without, however, resolving them. Lyotard’s idea of the differend
which is defined by him as, “a case of conflict between at least two parties,
that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable
to both arguments,”34 provides an apt theoretical commentary on
Stoppard’s theatrical enterprise.
This analysis also enables us to see that these plays, in a
characteristically postmodern manner, distance themselves from what has
been termed as the modernist alienation and the resulting sense of loss and
anxiety. Instead, Stoppard throughout maintains an attitude of playful
affirmation, following the recognition that as humans we can have no
34
Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Differend. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988, p. ix.
absolute and universal basis for either knowledge or value, and that all our
concepts about reality are finally our own constructions. A conspicuous
lack of poignancy, so noticeable in Stoppard, is attributable to this playful
affirmation. It elucidates what Derrida defined as the Nietzschean
affirmation that stands for:
The joyous affirmation of the play of the world and the innocence of
becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth,
and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This
affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as the loss of
center.35
35
Jacques Derrida. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences” in Writing and Difference. Alan Bass (trans). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978, p. 292.
CONCLUSION
We have made an attempt to study the plays of Harold Pinter and Tom
Stoppard in the light of a poetics of postmodernism. The focus has been to
present postmodernism as a mode of relentless critique of all assumptions
about reality, history, language, human subject and representation, and to
explore the ways in which Pinter and Stoppard express these concerns.
Whereas Pinter’s main concerns relate to issues such as power and the
decentered subject, Stoppard treats theatrical representation, history and
ethics in a typically postmodernist manner. However, both have
consistently refused to align themselves with any specific political or
social agenda without compromising their stand on a critical engagement
with reality.
We have also seen that postmodern drama has its roots in the Epic
theatre of Brecht and the absurdist theatre of Beckett. Beckett’s drama,
especially, provides an apt commentary on the postmodern condition
where man is stripped completely of all anchors of meaning and purpose.
In the theatre, the virtual obliteration of plot and character, a prominent
feature in Beckett, has influenced postmodern drama significantly.
Characters with fragmented memories and dialogues informed by absences
have found acceptance with postmodern dramatists as Pinter. Postmodern
drama, following Beckett, also opens up language and experience to
plurality, dispersal and play, and suggests the acceptance of uncertainty in
the face of contingent nature of knowledge. These parallels
notwithstanding, postmodern drama cannot be equated entirely with
Beckett’s absurdist theatre. This is noticeable, for example, in the way
Pinter, despite his overwhelming indebtedness to Beckett, moves away
from the typical absurdist mode in depicting characters who are more
socially bounded and less metaphysically oriented than most of Beckett’s
characters. Also, there is very little suggestion of Beckett’s theatrical
symbolism as a statement on the general human condition in Pinter.
Stoppard, on the other hand, exhibits an inclination towards celebration
and playfulness, completely abjuring the characteristically Beckettian
graveyard humor. The overwhelming metaphysical anguish of Beckett
gives way to a light-hearted celebration of the immediate moment. This
explains Stoppard’s adoption of a consistently comic mode of writing. In
this sense Stoppard’s theatre offers itself as an example of post-absurdist
104 Conclusion
drama which inscribes the absurdist condition of meaninglessness but

offers a different response to this condition. Whereas Beckett’s final vision
of man is tragic, Stoppard persistently stays away from the tragic mode.
Again, unlike Beckett, Stoppard situates his characters in tangible contexts
although these contexts are shown to be ridden by the condition of
dispersal. Ros, Guil, Carr, Houseman, the characters of Arcadia and The
Coast of Utopia, all represent aborted attempts of creating meaning from
their immediate conditions, though this failure never results in an
overriding metaphysical anguish as in the case of Beckett.
Stoppard himself, while stating that Samuel Beckett “redefined the
minima of theatre,” acknowledges Pinter’s influence on the development
of drama:
I think Pinter did something equally important and significant. He changed

the ground rules. One thing plays had in common: you were supposed to
believe what people said up there. . . . With a Pinter play, you can no longer
make that assumption. . . . There are many different possible interpretations
for [a] scene. All of them had been discounted until Pinter exploited the off
centre possibilities.1
For his part, Stoppard has continued with his favorite theme of challenging
all “grand narratives” which seek to erase all differences. As Jan, the
Czech intellectual in his latest play Rock ‘n’ Roll (2006) notes soon after
the Czech Velvet Revolution of 1989:
… all systems are blood brothers. Changing one system for another is not
what the Velvet Revolution was for. We’ve to begin again with the ordinary
meaning of words. Giving new meaning to words is how systems lie to
themselves, beginning with the word for themselves – socialism,
democracy …2
This invocation of legitimating narratives by “systems” is strikingly

reminiscent of Pinter’s critique of all unifying and self-legitimating
systems in his later phase.
Since the two dramatists have constantly engaged with postmodernist
concerns, their works provide an impetus to explore the possibility of
reformulating a poetics of postmodern drama. The significance of Pinter
and Stoppard for a reformulation of poetics of postmodern drama can be
gauged from the fact that both represent an appropriation of the idea of
1
Mel Gussow. Conversations with Stoppard. London: Nick Hern Books, London,
1995, p. 6-7.
2
Tom Stoppard. Rock ‘n’ Roll. London: Faber and Faber, 2006, p. 99.
double-codedness in theatre. This can be seen in the manner in which both

Pinter and Stoppard employ the traditional theatrical framework, but move
into a postmodern direction by subverting the representational status of
theatre from within through a rigorous interrogation of its conventions.
Pinter’s obsession with non-referential modes of language use, power, and
cultural codes operating at multiple levels, is as effective a way to disrupt
these conventions as Stoppard’s recourse to various devices such as parody
and radically shifting perspectives. It is pertinent to mention that Pinter
comes very close to adopting Stoppard’s self-reflexive mode in some of
his screenplays as The Last Tycoon (1977) and The French Lieutenant’s
Woman (1981), both of which draw on the mechanics of filmmaking to
underline the idea of reality as a subjective construct.
The paradoxical nature of postmodern drama is visible in its inevitable
reliance on the category of character to suggest the notion of the dispersal
of the human subject. Here again, a crucial difference with Beckett’s later
plays is noteworthy where the actual characters are replaced by certain
incisive images, for example the two babbling lips in Not I. Despite their
admission of Beckett’s influence, neither Pinter nor Stoppard resort to the
theatrical strategies that dispense with the character altogether. Both
inscribe the character but contest the assumptions of self-presence
underlying its dramatic representation. Where Pinter tends to depict it as
both the agent and effect of power, and also a potential site of resisting that
power, Stoppard often inscribes it but hollows it out of all psychological
essence. Stoppard, therefore, creates characters that are entirely
subservient to the witty clash of opinions of which they are both agents
and products.
The study has also demonstrated the value of both the playwrights for
understanding how language may be seen to operate in postmodern drama.
Here too, a simultaneous inscription and subversion of language which
implies undercutting its status as a neutral medium of communication
emerges as a prominent feature of their plays. While making extensive use
of silences in a number of plays, Pinter still installs language as a prime
medium by which he creates his drama. Using language to undercut its
assumed freedom from complicity with power is a provocative way of
subverting it. This idea is presented in rather explicit terms in Mountain
Language. Although the indeterminacy of the linguistic sign is an
obsession with Stoppard and finds powerful expression in his plays like
Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, After Magritte, Artist Descending a
Staircase, Jumpers and Travesties, there is an equally strong tendency in
him to reinscribe the linguistic sign. Unlike Beckett who showed an ever-
increasing tendency towards abjuring language, Stoppard celebrates the
106 Conclusion
ineluctable condition of the linguistic sign. His treatment of ideas about

perception, history and ethics offers a striking example of this.
Finally, it has to be said that owing to the daunting multiformity and
heterogeneity of postmodern theory and practice, any attempt to formulate
a poetics of postmodern drama needs to be self-consciously provisional. It
is the future trends in theory and practice that will provide a vantage
perspective on the contemporary dramatic practices, including that of
Pinter and Stoppard, and enable us to evaluate them in the light of newer
critical insights. These trends may also indicate how postmodernism can
outgrow what many see as a state of impasse and make way for new ideas
which can lead to fresh perspectives on the problems of truth, meaning and
value.
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INDEX
A D
absurdism 6, 27, 35, 88 decentered subject 3, 21, 24, 26, 35,
Adorno, Theodor 2 49, 50, 54, 64, 103
Ankersmit, Richard 18 decentering 5, 14, 24, 26, 71-2, 78
After Magritte 74-6, 105 deconstruction 3, 9, 17-9
Aragay, Mireia 59 Derrida, Jacques 9, 11, 16-9, 101
Arcadia 77, 83-7, 89, 104 dedoxification 16, 32, 42
Artist Descending a Staircase 74-6, de Man, Paul 27
105 de Sade, Marquis 9
Ashes to Ashes 49, 54, 57 de Saussure, Ferdinand 9
Auslander, Philip 5, 32 Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s
avant-garde 6, 14, 15, 22 Macbeth 67, 70-2, 105
B Doll, Mary 74
Baker, Stephen 22 double-codedness 3-4, 13, 22, 105
Barth, John 9, 11, 12 doxa 16
Barthes, Roland 11, 16, 23, 32 Dumb Waiter, The 37
Beckett, Samuel 5, 9, 23, 25, 28, 48, Dwarfs, The 47-8
67, 103-5 E
Begley, Varun 2, 3 Eagleton, Terry 14-5, 19
Behera, Guru Charan 1 Eco, Umberto 59
Bernhard, Thomas 5, 31 Elin, Diamond 46
Bertens, Hans 10-1 Enlightenment 60, 63
Benvensite, Emile 24, 77 Enlightenment Rationality 30, 87
Bigsby, C W E 8, 27, 29 Epic theatre 22-4, 103
binarism 42, 47, 84 Ermath, Elizabeth Deeds 30
Birthday Party, The 38, 41, 47 Esslin, Martin 35, 51
Brecht, Bertolt 5, 22, 23-5, 103 Evans, Richard 18
C F
Calvino, Italo 9 Feynman, Richard 84
Caretaker, The 2, 38, 40-1, 47 Fichte, Johanne 93
Chaos Theory 84-7 Fleming, John 1
Christie, Agatha 4, 73 Ford, Ford Madox 10
Coast of Utopia 77, 91-4 Foreman, Richard 5, 28-9
Collection, The 41-3, 46-7 Foucault, Michel 11, 16, 19-20, 59,
Cohn, Ruby 8 77
Communist Manifesto, The 94 Foucauldian 20, 59
Critchley, Simon 18 Free, W J 1
French Lieutenant’s Woman, The
105
124 Index
G logical positivism 96
Geis, Deborah 5, 8, 23, 26 Lord Malquist and Mr Moon 95
Genet, Jean 9 Lyotard, Francois 11, 16, 26, 59, 60,
H 63, 83, 84, 94, 100
Habermas, Jurgen 60 Lyotardian 3, 5
Hamlet 67-70 M
Hapgood 83-5 Magritte, Rene 74
Hassan, Ihab 8-9 Malkin, Jeanette 5, 8, 25, 26, 30-1
Hegel, Johanne 93 Malpas, Simon 63
Heidegger, Martin 9 Mamet, David 5, 26-7
Hemingway, Ernest 9 Marx, Karl 92-4
Heuvel, Michael Vanden 4 Marxism 18, 94
historiographic metafiction 5, 12, Marxist 11, 14, 15, 18, 79, 85, 93
19, 21-3, 30, 77, 78 McHale, Brian 8, 10
Homecoming, The 2, 41-3, 47, 52 memory plays 2, 3, 5, 47, 49-54, 58,
humanism 11, 13, 16, 18, 20 64
Hutcheon, Linda 4-6, 8, 11-3, 15, modernism 2, 8, 9, 12, 15
16, 18-24, 31-2, 42, 46, 66, 77 monologue 26, 47-51, 55
Huyssen, Andreas 2 Moonlight 49, 54-7
I Morrison, Toni 21
Importance of Being Earnest, The Mountain Language 58, 61-2, 105
77-9 Muller, Heiner 5, 31
Indian Ink 88-91 N
Invention of Love, The 77, 79, 83 Nadel, Ira 4
Ionescoe, Eugene 48 New World Order, The 58-60
J Nietzsche, Friedrich 94, 101
Jameson, Frederic 4, 13, 14 No Man’s Land 49, 52-4
Jencks, Charles 4 O
Jenkins, Anthony 72 Old Times 49, 52, 54
Johnston, John 8 One for the Road 58-60
Jumpers 94-6, 99, 105 P
K parody 3, 5, 13-6, 22-3, 65-7, 73,
Kafka, Franz 9, 10 77, 79, 93-4, 105
Kant, Immanuel 93, 100 Party Time 58, 61
Kaye, Nick 5, 32 pastiche 3, 4, 13-4, 66, 79
Kelly, Katherine 69, 74 Peacock, Keith 5, 58
Kennedy, Andrew 28 postmodernism
Kennedy, William 21 a poetics of 4-6, 8, 10-1, 19, 20,
Klinwitz, Jerome 8 22, 64, 65, 103-4, 106
L postmodern drama
Laclau, Ernesto 63 a poetics of 4-6, 8, 104, 106
Landscape, The 2, 49, 50 poststructuralism 9
Last Tycoon, The 105 poststructuralist thought 4, 9, 11, 19,
Lawson, Hilary 9 23-4, 30
LaCapra, Dominick 18 Professional Foul 94, 98-100
liberal humanism 11, 16, 18 patriarchy 16, 41-7
power 2-3, 5, 12, 19-22, 26-9, 35, Schmidt, Kerstin 8, 31, 86

38-41, 43-4, 47-9, 53, 58-64, Schmitt, Natalie Crohn 76
67-70, 82, 90-2, 94, 103, 105 Silence 49-50
Pynchon, Thomas 10 Silverstein, Marc 2, 3, 35, 62-3
Q Slight Ache, A 47
quantum theory 83-4 subjectivity 2, 3, 5, 20, 24-5, 27, 38,
Quigley, Austin 1-2, 35, 46, 60 49, 52, 59, 85, 91
R T
Real Inspector Hound, The 4, 67, Taylor, John Russell 38
71-3 Travesties 4, 67, 77-9, 89, 91, 95,
Rock ‘n’ Roll 104 105
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are W
Dead 67-70, 73, 79 Waiting for Godot 67
Room, The 2, 37-8 Watt, Stephen 7, 52
Royle, Nicholas 16-7 Waugh, Patricia 8
Rushdie, Salman 21 White, Hayden 18, 21, 77
S Wilde, Oscar 77, 79, 81-2
Salvage 91-2, 94 Wilson, Robert 5, 28-9
Schelling, Friedrich 93 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 2, 9
Shakespeare 67, 69, 70-2, 89 Z
Shepard, Sam 5, 26, 31 Zeifman, Hersh 73, 76
Shipwreck 91, 93-4 Zeno 96-7

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Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama

Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama:

This book first published 2014

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2014 by Mufti Mudasir

ISBN (10): 1-4438-5408-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5408-5

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. vii

Chapter One ................................................................................................ 7

Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 35

Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 65

Conclusion .............................................................................................. 103

Bibliography ........................................................................................... 107

Index ....................................................................................................... 123

I wish to place on record my gratitude for the program

Indeed, in virtually any list of premier British playwrights of the second

the socio-psychological approach with its emphasis on the problem of

Despite these major attempts to classify and categorize his works, a

psychological and symbolic-allegorical approaches, Quigley, in The Pinter

Pinter enters a postmodern terrain, a journey which culminates in his later

Pastiche, for Stoppard, is the playful loose imitation of or borrowing from

Even Heuvel applies the Jamesonian model of pastiche to Travesties

critical stance towards contemporary reality in spite of its self-conscious

The conclusion, while largely summing up the important findings of

ENGAGING WITH REALITY:

Many critics have rightly complained of a lack of critical studies on

In 1981, C W E Bigsby had remarked that the English theatrical scene

difficult task of delineating a poetics of postmodernism. Brian McHale’s

The dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological. That is, modernist

On this formulation, McHale includes novels as Ford Madox Ford’s

Postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground

McHale offers examples of Thomas Pynchon’s novels that foreground the

For McHale, postmodernist fiction negotiates the tension between self-

It is, however, Linda Hutcheon’s cogently argued work that appeared

Hutcheon’s attractive (and immensely successful) model has the great

Hutcheon’s argument that postmodernism is both self-reflexive and

In challenging the seamless quality of the history/fiction (or world/art) join

She also sums up the postmodern view of history in these terms:

Hutcheon emphasizes the double-codedness of postmodernism and its

He sees two factors as crucial in the emergence of the “universal practice”

Jameson’s remarks reflect the well-known stance of Marxist critics

what is parodied by postmodernist culture, with its dissolution of art into

works of Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault and the rest. Postmodernism opposes

It seems reasonable to say that the postmodernism’s initial concern is to

To see how postmodernism should be seen as simultaneously

Royle explains the implications of deconstruction for historiography in

To say that history is radically determined by writing, then, is to say that it

Hence, for Derrida textuality is the condition of history and textuality

permeated by the institutional forces that work to promote certain favored

And Hutcheon very perceptively explains Derrida’s view on the subject

Derrida’s denial of the transcendental signified is not a denial of reference

The implications of the ideas discussed above are of central importance

Discourses, sign-system and signifying practices of all kinds, from film

Power is a ubiquitous phenomenon, a process rather than a product that

male/female, white/black, western/eastern, are tied up with power

The Foucauldian insights into the nature and operations of discourse

central concern to postmodernism. This calls for a revision of the term