By portraying Sarah and Richard in Lovers, Beth and Duff in Scenery, and Jerry, Emma and Robert in Betrayal, Pinter first pays attention to their complicated emotional and psychological worlds and tries to show the dual nature of human beings. Secondly, Pinter also showed the so-called popular social fashion of "extramarital affairs", which brought great impact and destruction to the existing family and marriage ethical order. At the same time, he also attaches great importance to showing the process of ethical conflict between rational will, free will and irrational will when marital infidelity occurs, and uses various artistic means such as "inner monologue" and "flashback" in his works such as Scenery, Silence and Betrayal.
Throughout harold pinter's creative career, family ethics has always been an important theme, from the first studio written by 1957 to the later play Back to Dust written by 1996. In these works, most of them focus on the "incompleteness" of family structure and the "disharmony" of ethical relations among family members. The works not only show the great impact and deep-seated influence of increasingly commercialized family ethics on the traditional western family structure and member relations; There is also a parent-child relationship, which shows the blood relationship between parents and children, but it is full of contradictions. This "close at hand, but hard to reach" affection is also a portrayal of the alienation between Pinter and his son Daniel in real life.
In addition, the story of children "escaping" from their parents in the works also reflects that the culture of "respecting parents" in western society tends to deconstruct, that is, the concept of children supporting their parents is becoming more and more diluted, and the lack of filial piety has become an obvious social problem.
Different from the creative ideas of "writing for oneself" or "writing for drama" in the 1960s and 1970s, Pinter redefined romantic love as love that can restore vitality, including the urgency of friendship and promoting justice through practical actions, and its creative ideas, creative contents and aesthetic orientation also changed significantly. These changes do not simply express his personal political position or ideological tendency, but the expression of ethical values has become the main purpose of his creation.
In Pinter's later creation, the change of artistic concept of "literature carries Tao" is actually a return to the ethical attribute of literature, which further shows that "the fundamental purpose of literature is not to provide entertainment for human beings, but to provide moral examples for human beings to understand society and life from an ethical perspective, to provide moral guidance for human material life and spiritual life, and to provide moral experience for human self-improvement".
Poetry creation is an important part of Pinter's whole artistic creation and ideological expression, and its position is not inferior to drama. Pinter's poetry creation has the same theme as his drama works of the same period, especially his later poems are full of rich ethical connotations, showing such qualities as cherishing life, strongly condemning the war that caused death, advocating justice, attacking power rule and advocating humanitarianism.
Through drama, poetry creation, political speeches and participation in political activities, Pinter entered another more real stage in his later years. He severely criticized all kinds of injustices that flooded the world, because "I am no longer silent when expressing my feelings". Pinter's later anti-war poems are concise, sharp and accurate, full of rich ethical connotations, which show his strong condemnation of the war that caused death, his respect for life and his demands for the dignity of the "dead".
Whether in the microscopic family scene, in the grand social and historical stage, in the humble individual life journey, or in the surging national migration, the individual and collective cultural psychology has always been full of resentment, blame, pain, anxiety, indifference or numbness. So how to reproduce the painful history that human beings have experienced? Stage presentation is undoubtedly one of the best ways. Compared with novels, poems and other literary genres, drama, as a manifestation of trauma, is more intuitive and appealing, and can more vividly shape various changeable images and plots. Forced repetitive action design, the reappearance of the injured scene, to vent the emotions that can not be expressed by conventional language.
In To Dust, Pinter creatively uses intertextuality, trauma narrative and other artistic means from the personal traumatic event of "the pain of losing his daughter", showing a broader and far-reaching ethical theme about genocide in history and other forms of tyranny in the world today, and reflecting Pinter's witness and memory of history and the real society after the Holocaust. The warning function contained in it is also self-evident: as long as war and tyranny exist, those who have passed away will inevitably be buried in the grave, which can only be the writer's own good wish. all
Pinter's drama creation can be roughly divided into three periods: early, middle and late. The early stage is absurd creation, and the middle stage is realistic and memorable drama, such as Lover. The works of these two periods have philosophical speculation. The political tendency of later creation is particularly obvious.
Pinter's early drama creation was influenced to some extent by the "Absurd Drama", especially by samuel beckett's creative thought. In these plays, the use of the image of "room" shows the theme of "threat" such as people's inner anxiety, inability to communicate with others, invaders everywhere and survival crisis in a small space. At the same time, Pinter also formed an indescribable and ambiguous mystery through the chaotic and illogical dialogue and the use of the specific atmosphere caused by the pause and silence that always appear in the dialogue. The perfect combination of these characteristics and his unique comedy techniques has formed the basic style of "threat comedy" and laid the foundation for the formation and development of "Pinter-style" drama.
The artistic features of Pinter's plays lie in:
1, comedy and danger * * * Life, comfort and fear coexist. Serious thinking about the meaning of life is revealed in the hilarity, and it is carried out through comedy-like dialogues and actions.
2. Multi-interpretation of language creates a peculiar world of drama stage for the audience: it fills the seemingly unreasonable sense of mystery and absurdity in daily life, and impacts the artistic aesthetics of modern audience who are bored by habit and numb by fatigue.
When Pinter created the situation, "vision is a two-level cycle process. On the one hand, playwrights must allow characters enough necessary opportunities to perform their own strange and invisible actions. On the other hand, characters must have an instinctive feeling for the rhythm and structure of drama. "
He believes that the writer's role is to grasp the subtle relationship between him and the characters. They highly respect each other and should not force the characters to say what they can't say. Writers can't guide the characters to the calculated position, but let them take on their own problems and give them just the necessary time to solve them. At the same time, Pinter thinks his characters are controllable. His role is only to choose and handle the actions of the characters. In fact, however, "Pinter has done a lot of work: from the composition of sentences to the overall structure of drama." On the one hand, arrange the actions of the characters, on the other hand, listen to their demands and follow the clues left by the characters themselves.
Therefore, by integrating the artistic abilities of drama, radio, film and television, Pinter achieved artistic expression in various ways, broke through the limitations of various arts and extended the boundaries of drama forms. He combines the characteristics of time art and space art, visual art and auditory art, reproduction art and performance art, plastic art and performance art, thus expanding the possibility of artistic integration and having stronger artistic appeal. Specifically, Pinter used the artistic techniques of film and radio to solve the limitations of stage play creation. In turn, the artistic techniques of drama and novel helped his films realize a unique space-time structure.
During the 1960 s, Pinter experienced continuous participation in film and television production, and some dramas were produced at the same time as shooting. Before 1965, Pinter's plays all got inspiration and skills from rehearsals, including going home. However, the scenery, silence, past, monologue, utopia and betrayal are all influenced by the experience of making movies and TV, so that his drama form is very close to the achievement of James Joyce and Virginia wolf in the novel: the inner monologue of the equivalent drama. It must be admitted that the interaction of various styles leads to the expansion of Pinter's formal boundaries, so audiences and critics often can't adapt to it, resulting in inexplicable viewing effects.
The artistic essential feature of Pinter's plays is the routine ceremony in daily life situations. Although Pinter's plays show obvious "conflict", this mode does not conform to the conflict of will mode expounded by Hegel and shown in the history of drama. Pinter-style conflict situation is a confrontation with the breaking point of will. In this situation, the confrontation between characters is not simply to destroy or solve problems, but a contest of aesthetic ideology, without right or wrong, without winning or losing. Various situational rituals in drama stipulate the internal control relationship between power and submission, and it is in this big situation that dramatic characters make various action choices, forming Pinter's unique drama form.
Most of Pinter's plays often present a typical Pinter-style scene: a room, two people, and these two people are having a quiet conversation. However, when outdoor people enter the residential field, especially after entering indoors, the situation inside the house begins to change subtly. Many times, people will play some games or some rituals indoors and outdoors.
These seemingly insignificant games, similar to hide-and-seek or a competitive war of words, often have unexpected final results, and the relationship between indoor and outdoor characters changes suddenly, so these games become the turning point of the fate of the characters in the play, and also indicate the different watershed of the fate of the characters before and after the game: life and death are very different from now on.
Creative attitude
In his later drama and poetry creation, he combined the collective historical and cultural trauma with the individual psychological trauma through intertextuality, trauma narration, parody and other literary strategies, expressed his reflection on the trauma caused by war, especially criticized the war and various autocratic behaviors that still exist in today's society in the post-Holocaust era, and wrote the contemporary crisis of historical trauma.
In his creation, Pinter has always maintained a writing attitude of seeking novelty and novelty and being brave in trying. His writing is always full of originality and new style, so his artistic expression far exceeds the well-known methods such as "silence" and "pause". He often constructs his own scripts through various channels and stage means, including movies, novels, poems and other expressions, showing his super control over the stage.
In different works, Pinter's means of expression are rarely the same, and various forms of drama contain the writer's profound thinking about society:
In Lover, "role jumping" is used to express the wantonness of free will in the Sphinx factor;
Scenery tells the emotional crisis of the estrangement between husband and wife on the stage with the narrative mode of "inner monologue".
In Betrayal, flashback reduces the extramarital affair in the play to two different ethical contexts, which shows that the reasons that lead to or inhibit the will conflict of extramarital affair are formed in different ethical contexts.
In Shanyu, he endowed "voice-over" and "silence" with rich ethical significance to show that the affection of the closest relatives is unstoppable;
In Moonlight, he juxtaposes three stage spaces, completely deconstructs the original balanced and stable stage space, and vividly shows the contradictory and alienated parent-child relationship between parents and children.
In "To Dust", he innovatively used various artistic means such as trauma narration and intertextuality, showing a broader and far-reaching ethical theme about genocide in history and various tyrannical behaviors in the world today, reflecting the witness and memory of artists like Pinter on historical trauma and his reflection on the real society after the "Holocaust".
language
The close-up of the product is the iceberg of dialogue. The characters in his plays are like distant icebergs floating in the cold ocean, and the communication between them is carried out at the bottom of the sea. In the unique Pinter atmosphere, the most expressive thing is silence, not language. What readers can learn about these people and things is always one-sided, but sometimes people seem to touch the truth in silence.
Human communication is actually an iceberg, and the small part of the iceberg that emerges from the water is the audio text. The huge volume floating below is the emotion and thought that you can't hear at ordinary times but have crystallized. To some extent, Pinter's language echoes the proverb "Speech is silver, silence is gold" or "More is told in silence than in voice". In this seemingly fragmented language structure, Pinter tries to show the contradictions, puzzles and coping strategies in human existence.
Pinter uses "extremely short sentences" and "interrupted words" to express an inner fear that cannot be spit out, uttered or dissolved, and uses repeated stillness, pause and silence to express the sense of threat in the air. In fact, behind the extremely short sentences is a rich "hidden language", which carries countless potential worlds that cannot be mediated by "communication". Thus, a non-verbal real world can only be felt by the audience, and an absurd question rises again at the end of the curtain.
In Pinter's hands, dramatic language replaces plot as an element to reveal the inner passion of characters, express conflicts and launch actions. Pause and silence become an integral part of dramatic action, which is often the climax of emotional conflict between characters.
Therefore, Pinter's language has strong drama and tension. However, on the surface, the dialogue between the characters in the play often seems to be an understatement, just like a torrent hidden under the calm surface of a river.