The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic explores the ways in which Harold Pinter’s plays revise the vision, the masternarrative by which his characters and we, as audience, live. A comprehensive analysis of his work, including his most recent play Moonlight and recently published early novel, The Dwarfs, this book is indispensable in showing how Pinter’s vision illuminates the methods by which drama engages an audience and by which he redefines love and justice. The present volume not only tracks Pinter’s dramatic insights into causes of human violence, suffering, and destruction but also traces the development of the ethic through the core vision that dramatizes those life-engendering attitudes, values and actions required for survival. This insightful reading of Pinter’s plays and screenplays engages the reader as the author demystifies what has previously puzzled Pinter scholars and critics: the uses of mystery and the multiple ambiguities. An analysis of the mystery and surface conflicts convey the core vision and show how that vision reawakens consciousness of love’s knowledge—the knowledge (of self and the work) and actions required not only to survive but to thrive: transforming the vision into an erotic ethic.
This book ultimately links private love to public and global justice. In the 1980s, responding to global brutalities—human torture and warfare—and campaigning on behalf of human freedom, Pinter asked whether any writer could change the way we see the world or act in it. In 1993 he answered that question with the delightful and disturbing Moonlight. By removing the hero/heroine (and destructor) from the stage/page to the audience, this play assumes and evokes greater agency, empowering the audience by dramatizing the daily life-and-death choices that we all bear. The final Moonlight chapter, thus, earns Penelope Prentice’s closing line summarizing the play as an “act of love.” The book returns us to Pinter’s work with deepened appreciation of love and justice, and, equally, returns us to life with renewed appreciation of the choices and responsibility we all possess in creating just life. As general editor I have watched
The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic grow from a text intended primarily for scholars, critics, audiences, theater professionals, and writers into a book intended for the general reader and observer of contemporary life.
Penelope Prentice, an award-winning poet and playwright, is also an established Pinter scholar, author of Harold Pinter: Life, Work and Criticism, (York Press) with Pinter criticism appearing in Drama and Discussion, in Twentieth Century Literature and The Pinter Review. She has had productions of over a dozen of her twenty plays in New York City, Buffalo, and elsewhere, including Collector of Beautiful Men, Thriller, and the off-off Broadway Transformational Country Dances. Recipient of a MacDowell fellowship and an Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship for playwriting, she helped head the original planning of the first International Women Playwrights’ Conference and serves on the board of the International Women Playwrights’ Center. A Professor of English at D’Youville College in Buffalo, New York and currently President of the New York College English Association, she gives readings and writing workshops around this country and Canada and is completing two new plays, City of No Illusions and Ex.
Her contribution to Garland’s Studies in Modern Drama series attests to the variety and complexity of Pinter’s work and is helpful as a volume that reassesses crucial aspects of his achievement.
Kimball King