Keeping the other in its place: Language and self-fashioning in selected plays of Harold Pinter.

摘要

This dissertation explores how language functions in Pinter's plays, and the relationship of that function to the plays' vision of subjectivity. Dramatizing language's irreducible otherness, and demonstrating that the "self" emerging from such a language must necessarily be relational and contingent, these plays trace the production of the subject--a being produced by a language that determines its desires, values and identity. These works give vivid dramatic expression to Anthony Wilden's observation that the Other--the linguistic field coextensive with a particular cultural order--"is the only place from which it is possible to say 'I am who I am' thinspace". When Pinter's characters declare their identity, they announce their subjection to the Other; their dependence for a sense of "self" upon the subject positions they inhabit, positions articulated through the linguistic codes central to the organization of the cultural order to which they belong. These codes determine not only the "individual" identities of Pinter's characters, but, also "appropriate" ethnic and gender identities. For Pinter, these codes thus constitute the primary site of a culture's ideological work.; By introducing questions of subject position and ideology into my discussion, I show how the ontological concerns of the plays merge with a kind of "political" focus ignored by the bulk of Pinter criticism, which attempts to deal with his oeuvre as a form of absurdist drama. It is my contention that these plays do not concern themselves with the fate of the individual (a category Pinter rejects) lost in a meaningless void, but with the vicissitudes of subjectivity, i.e., the experience of living within ideological, linguistic and social structures. Pinter's exploration of subjectivity raises the following question, upon which I focus: Is the subject always subject-ed to a linguistic and cultural order over which it exercises no control, or is there room for agency, for a self-fashioning act that allows for resistance to ideological pressure?