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Begley, Varun. Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism. Toronto, Buffalo & London: University of Toronto Press, 2005. x + 207 pp. £35.00/$55.00. ISBN 0–8020–3887–5, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 44, Issue 1, January 2008, Page 89, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm126
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Extract
The author of this densely written book seeks to do two things: to place Pinter as an artist midway along the line that joins late modernism to early post-modernism, and to show that his plays “collectively traverse the Great Divide […] between modernism and […] popular entertainment” (p. 4). Both tasks need to be clarified: the capitalised Great Divide only makes sense if one has already read Andreas Huyssen's After the Great Divide, and Begley thinks that Pinter's popularity is a problematic feature which threatens to compromise the integrity of his commitment to modernism. Pinter is divided from others and divided against himself because he is at one and the same time “modern and postmodern, asocial and committed, culturally high and low” (p. 6). But does Pinter's embracing these opposites really make him as odd as Begley suggests? That one could also quite plausibly argue the reverse is Begley's less than reassuring response to this obvious question, a response that exemplifies this book's fundamental inconclusiveness.
