Tuesday, 22 November 2016

“The Birthday Party”, a play without Beginning, Ending though Complete

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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