Name:
Miss. Jayati Rudresh-Kumar Thakar
Roll.
No: 30
Year:
Batch 2015-1017
M.A.
Semester: 3
Paper
no. 9 Modernist Literature.
Email.Id:
jjayti.thakar94@gmail.com
Unit:
4
Assignment
topic: “The
Birthday Party”, a play without Beginning,
Ending though Complete
Submitted to: Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of
English, Maharaja
Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University, Bhavnagar,
Gujarat, India
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About Pinter:
Harold
Pinter was born on 10 October, 1930 in Hackney, a working class neighbourhood
in East End. Pinter’s family was originally Portuguese (Jew) whose name was
Anglicized from ‘da Pinta’, when they arrived in England. Harold spent his
first nine years living in the East End of London. His family undergone with
financial insecurities, this is how Pinter has himself described the
environment in which he spent his childhood.
Historically,
the 1930s were a time of economic depression and this turn, led to political
and racial unrest. Obviously, life could not always have been easy for a Jewish
boy in London East End, in the 1930s. “I got into quite a few fights down there”,
says Pinter, who adds, “There was a good deal of violence there in those days.”
Pinter’s
first professional Shakespearean role was broad cast on 9th of
February 1951 by BBC. The play was Henry-8 and in this play Pinter played the
role of Abregavenny. Pinter then entered the Central School of Speech and Drama
as an acting student. Then during his acting years he began to write not only
plays but poetry and fiction, withal short- stories.
His
famous works:
One-
Act Plays like,
1) The
Room (1957)
2) The
Dumb Waiter
3) A
kind of Alaska (1982)
Three
Full-Length Plays like,
1) The
Caretaker (1960)
2) The
Home Coming (1995)
3) No
Man’s Land (1975)
About the play ‘The Birthday Party’
It
is true without any doubt that the play, The
Birthday Party has tension as a permanent part of its action. It consists
of the tension of any hunting story. As well it has an almost conventional
structure of having clear-cut beginning, middle and an end.
The Distinction between ‘Story’ and ‘Plot’:
In
his lectures on Aspects of the novel, E. M. Foster tells us that one of the
characteristics of a story is that, its beginning and end are the arbitrary.
This brings into focus Aristotle’s insistence that a plot must have a
beginning. The plot is something that the poet makes; but as for the story, it
is immaterial whether he makes it or not. And because the poet makes his plot,
its beginning is as much of his making as anything else about it.
Aristotle’s
famous statement that ‘a tragedy must have a beginning, middle and an end’, is
thus related to his whole view of the scope of the poet as a ‘maker’. The
beginning and end are matters within the poet’s control, and on his
determination of them depends the bounds of the unity which is the essential
characteristics of all work of art, and of a plot as distinct from a story.
What’s
a Beginning?
There
are two points about beginnings; (a) A beginning is that which is not, itself
necessarily after anything else.
The
emphasis here is on the ‘necessarily’, upon the logic of connection. There is
no pretence that in order to define this beginning the poet may not have to
refer to matters supposed to have happened earlier in the ‘story’. A present
situation involves its cause, and it is a great point of dramatic technique to
determine how the knowledge of such antecedents is to be conveyed without
weakening the carelessness and novelty of the beginnings, and the essential
unity of the development of the initial situation. King Oedipus provides a fine
example of solving this problem, as of much else. The play begins with the
plague in Thebes, and the need to release the city from the plague by the
discovery and punishment of the guilty man. The play’s process is the process
of discovery: its end, the punishment. Sophocles makes his starting point the
moment of despair in the Thebes and their King’s brave determination to deal
with it. The initial situation (the plague, the mourning and the royalty) is
given immediately in dramatic terms. Thereafter, each step which Oedipus
himself provides the occasion for revealing some part of the antecedent
knowledge which is necessary to the process of the discovery. And none of this
information is needed for the grasping of the initial situation.
In
different periods, and with different dramatists, conventions have differed
about the method of ‘exposition’. One will find them discussed in a lively way
in Mr. F. L. Lucas’s Hogarth Lecture, Tragedy: the Ghost in Hamlet, Prospero’s
long expositions of the past to Caliban and Miranda are among his examples. There
is no doubt that many of them are clumsy; the classical French use of the
confident seems to us sometimes even clumsier still. The c common Greek
practice was to use an expository soliloquy in the prologue spoken by a major
character, or a minor character. In connection with this matter of the
exposition of events antecedent to the beginning of the play, I must say
something about the Greek use of traditional stories. There is famous often
–quoted and vulgar passage about this in Dryden’s essay of Dramatic Poesy.
(b)
The second point about beginning is the obvious one that a Greek tragedy
normally ‘started later’ so to speak, than, say, a Shakespearean Tragedy. Here
again Dryden’s lively way of putting it comes aptly to hand:
“The Ancients... set the audience, as it
were, at the post where the race is to be concluded; and saving them the
tedious expectation of seeing the poet set out and writes the beginning of the
course, you behold him. Not till his in sight of the goal, and just upon you.
The two men referred to by Petey in Act-1, Scene-1
The
opening of ‘The Birthday Party’ introduces Meg and Petey and provides a slight
build-up for the entrance of Stanley. Petey also tells Meg about the two men who
have approached him on the beach and wanted to know if there was any
accommodation available for theme in the boarding house to stay for couple of
nights, but when Petey told theme that he did not know wither or not the
accommodation available, they promised to come down to the boarding house for
the inquiry of the facts.
Meg tells Stanley about the two men and he is frightened,
in Act-1, Scene-2
In
Act-1, Scene-2, the audience sees the reaction of the news about two men,
convey to him by Meg at the breakfast table. He is frightened and unnerved and
in this state of panic, he first refuses to believe that the two men exists,
and then says that they will not come. Stanley then falls into despondent
state, but to recover himself tells Meg that he has been offered job as a
pianist on a- round- the- world tour and as if to retaliate for her story of two men, he
frightens Meg by telling her that two men will be coming for her that day with
a wheelbarrow in their van. At the climax of this tale, there is the knock on
the door, but it is only Lulu, a young girl who is Meg’s next door neighbour.
A Post- Modernist Play
The
death of the author in post- modernist times has given rise to corresponding birth
of the reader. It is significant, then, that The Birthday Party despite its
initial failure, should over the years, how become a commercial success, for
this is a play which, more than any other on and English stage, heralded the
triumphant emergence- or perhaps renaissance- of the reader- participant who
contributes to the meaning of the text, and the belated exit of the passive
reader, the reader consumer. Pinter’s plays, one’s labelled ‘Comedies of
Menace’, are chiefly comedy of illusion, avoidance, withdrawal, mendacity and
guile. Because his language is a language of escapist manoeuvring, which
studiously avoids the commitment of a conflict or confrontation, it requires,
therefore, a specialise kind of reading, one which is attentive to the mercurial
wriggles of the protagonist. The audience must be on the lookout for the
unexpected twist, the shameless contradiction, the dazzling deduction.
Abrupt Ending of the play
The
accusation against the play that it has no ending, or rather that is no
conclusive ending is needless to defend. As a post- modernist play ‘The
Birthday Party’ is quite alright. In this play the ending is seldom conclusive
and the beginnings seldom crystal clear as in post- modernist play used to be.
The play need the participation of an active reader or audience such as might
mentally or visually fill up the blanks. That the play leaves the readers in a
state of uncertainty and bewilderment is true to an extent. Certain question
definitely remain unanswered; for instance, the play is silent about the fate of Stanley during the
night after the party is over and so also is the text silent as to how and why
Stanley suffers a nervous breakdown. The audience also has not been given any
clue to the fearful and uncertain state of Goldberg and McCann. There are
number of such questions that remain unanswered and continue to haunt the
audience and provoke them to think again and again about them.
Reader’s Guesswork is
Participation
To
answer all the questions, left unanswered by the text, it is necessary that the
audience or the reader should fill them up by dint of their own guesswork which
is the real participation that a post- modernist play so urgently needs. So the
reader can guess that during the night after the party was over Stanley might
have win subjected not only to verbal attacks but to physical assaults as well.
As regards McCann and Goldberg’s feeling insecure, it is clear that this cannot
presumably be due to the plight of Stanley or due to the torture they
themselves inflicted on him, but because of Goldberg’s deflowering of Lulu,
though the play seems to suggest otherwise. Similarly, there is left unanswered
the ambiguity and confusion about Monty. Well, an active reader can presume
that Monty might be the big gun in the organization in which Goldberg and
McCann are serving.
Although a ‘Complete Play’
Thus,
we can dare say that ‘The Birthday Party’ is a complete play, having a
beginning, middle and an end, just like those in Greek tragedies. If there
remains anything in it, it is because the play belongs the post- modernist
time, where bewilderment or inconclusiveness is a characteristic feature and
requires reader participation to conjecture, to presume and to guess them. (Pinter)
Works Cited
Pinter, Harold. "The
Birthday Party." R.N.Sharma. The Birthday Party. Narain's Series,
n.d. 1, 2, 4, 218, 219, 220, 221.
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