Explicit Language, Radical Tone: Harold Pinter’s Obscene Words Speak Louder than Action Ibrahim Yerebakan This analysis provides a close reading that demonstrates that Pinter’s late work deserves a distinct approach and a new critical attention in terms of the obscene and provocative use of language. My analysis also looks into the new dramatic and poetic vocabulary in Pinter’s literary oeuvre and particularly those four-letter Anglo-Saxon words which the author himself asserts are ‘still very strong, they hit you in the stomach’. The study reveals that the obscenity in these late works is connected to the radicalisation of the writer, which became more and more intense towards the end of his career. The study concludes with an argument that obscene language has various functions: it is sometimes used as a means of oppression, sometimes as a weapon of resistance against authoritarian figures, sometimes as a protest, sometimes as a mere mockery and lampoon of the political elite. References will be made to his poems, “American Football”, “Democracy” and his dramatic works, Mountain Language, The New World Order and Celebration, where frequent and outright use of obscene expressions dominates much of the atmosphere. This is the first comprehensive study to correlate Pinter’s use of obscene language with his late dramatic and poetic works known to literary circles as the playwright of silence and pauses, and characterized by some drama critics as an author that “wallows in symbols and revels in obscurity” (Darlington 1958: 8), Harold Pinter changed significantly in the final decades of the twentieth century from the obscure to the explicit use of the language. Pinter turned to a “political activist” (Batty 2005: 79), a “militant pacifist” (Williams 2008: n.p.) towards the end of his life. With increasing frequency, he began to use a series of short, sharp and disturbing images and provocative and obscene words in his plays and poems as an expression of protest and anger at human rights violations on a global scale. It is evident that Pinter felt the pains of the world more intensely than ever be- AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 39 (2014) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Ibrahim Yerebakan 156 fore and ultimately put his political frustrations into his late works in a rather violent and explicit tone, which may not be to the taste of every reader. For instance, in one of his poems, titled “Modern Love” (2005), Pinter uses the word fuck more than ten times, thus sacrificing much humour and more aesthetics which abounds in his early work and reducing poetry or the ‘queen of the arts’, to a “barely articulate howl of disapproval” (Newey 2003: n.p.). A Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2005, celebrated and performed all over the world with notable frequency, Harold Pinter is a master technician in the use of language. With his disturbingly radical and shocking tone and blatantly grotesque images, Pinter continues to puzzle literary circles even after his death, turning him into one of the most controversial twentieth century dramatists. In Penelope Prentice’s words, “Harold Pinter continued to be both revered and derided by critics” (1994: lxx). On the one hand, Pinter’s art is compared to Ibsen, Tolstoy, Chekhov, even Shakespeare (Eyre 2008: n.p.), and he is considered to be the most influential playwright of the twentieth century whose “plays are more lasting and rewarding than Beckett’s precisely because he roots their power struggles in a superbly drawn social reality” (Hare 2005: n.p.). On the other hand, Pinter is “viciously attacked for the directness of his most recent plays and for his willingness to use his celebrity as one of the world’s great playwrights to voice his political views” (Luckhurst 2006: 369). As Billington (1996: 389) observes of the writer, “you cannot possibly sum up Harold Pinter in a nutshell: he is too complex, too elusive, too contradictory” Pinter’s artistic career reveals a radical departure and decisive shift from the elusive, silent writer of the 1960s and 1970s to the passionate polemicist of the 1980s and 1990s. In an article written on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Pinter was referred to as “an angry old man”, “the old bull” (Billington 2000: n.p.) However, Pinter’s fascination with cruelty, barbarity and hidden and exposed forms of violence was never absent in his early works, either. Although it is certainly true that recent decades have seen terrible bloodshed and injustice, it would be hard to surpass the decades of Pinter’s early life in the 1930s and 40s in terms of mass slaughter, mass deportations, and concentration camps by brutal dictatorships. As a Jew, growing up in the embattled East End of London, where Fascism and anti-Semitism were growing as well, seeing the photographs and the newsreels of the mass deportations and detention camps in the aftermath of the World War II, Pinter could hardly have remained impassive. It is interesting to note how the disturbing images he employed in one of his first published poems, “New Year in the Midlands” (1950), bear remarkable comparisons with those of his late poem, “American Football” (1993): “Watch/ How luminous hands/ Unpin the town’s genitals”. This angry tone also emerges in one of his letters to the director of the first production of The Birthday Party in 1958, where he comment- Explicit Language, Radical Tone 157 ed on the leading characters: “Goldberg and McCann? Dying, rotting, scabrous, the decayed spiders, the flower of our society. They know their way around. Our mentors. Our ancestry. Them. Fuck ‘em.” (2009: 22-3). No doubt, Pinter became more outspoken and more provocative in his portrayal of human rights abuses and political states of affairs in his late work - not to mention his interviews, personal and public statements he made on various occasions. His last poems, in particular, embody a fresh departure, which also suggests that the playwright’s final literary output became explicitly obscene in the face of equally obscene political acts of violence around the world, compared to his early metaphorical and ambiguous explorations of power games. In the final years of his career, Pinter almost abandoned writing plays and sacrificed his stagecraft for political and social causes. Due to his profound interest and involvement in human rights issues, Pinter was, on one occasion, designated as a human rights activist, “polemicist and humanist” (Macaulay 2008: n.p.). Certainly, this politicisation of the dramatist and his use of violent tone in the late work are connected with the enormous increase in human rights abuses, the systematic use of oppression and the suppression of civil liberties in the final decades of the twentieth century. Ultimately, Pinter expressed his concern about political issues more angrily and disturbingly than ever before, transforming the language of literature and creating a new vocabulary, which was more explicit, more direct and highly provocative. When the Western powers engaged in military operations in the Middle East in the early 1990s, Pinter spoke out on public platforms denouncing ‘neo-imperialism’, ‘war’, ‘murder’, ‘torture’ and ‘plunder’ carried out under the pretext of global responsibility. Especially in the aftermath of the Gulf war, Pinter confronted what he called one of the most serious global political issues, ‘American domination’. In a Degree Speech to the University of Florence, Italy in 2001, Pinter stated the following: Arrogant, indifferent, contemptuous of International Law, both dismissive and manipulative of the United Nations - this is now the most dangerous power the world has ever known - the authentic ‘rogue state’ - but a ‘rogue state’ of colossal military and economic might. And Europe - especially the United Kingdom - is both compliant and complicit... I believe this brutal and malignant world machine must be recognized for what it is and resisted” (Pinter Degree Speech to the University of Florence, 2001). Dismissing globalisation and free market expansion and attacking American imperial politics with derogatory words such as ‘crap’ and ‘bollocks’, Pinter became eventually “an odd sort of dissenter: less a Vaclav Havel or a Gunter Grass than a Victor Meldrew - a professional Mr Angry whose thermostat is supposedly calibrated between a steady simmer and a rolling boil of fury” (Riddell 1999: n.p.). Ibrahim Yerebakan 158 Pinter became a stronger and more vociferous anti-Western, anti- American and anti-British protester and dissenter in the wake of the second US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which he described in his Nobel Acceptance Speech as “a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law”. He repeatedly claimed that the invasion was a clear manifestation of ‘American hegemony’, ‘British complicity’ and the hypocrisy of the Western democracies. In his Nobel Speech, Pinter also further stressed that while Western democracies were claiming to bring peace, stability and freedom to the region, they were in fact endorsing an extreme form of barbarism: We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’. Along with vigorously criticising Anglo-American policies in the Third World in harsh terms, Pinter also castigated political leaders of the West in even harsher words. He called a former British Prime Minister “deluded idiot”, “mass murderer”, while downgrading a former president of the United States as “illegally elected”, “fake”, and comparing his administration to “Nazi Germany”, and blaming “other millions of totally deluded American people” for not resisting American imperialism (Chrisafis & Tilden 2003: n.p.). Pinter’s personal statements reveal that he felt the pains not only of Iraqi people, but also of those desperate individuals suffering in various deplorable hotspots of the world. They include Abu Ghraib prison, Guantanamo, the Darfur region in Africa, former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, Palestine, and Turkey, where he believed human rights violations systematically occurred, human dignity was lost and most blatant forms of barbarism were actually committed in the name of democracy, liberation and freedom. In his pursuit of revealing the truths in arts, in real life and in politics, Pinter, as Merritt noted in her analysis, “opposes war; exposes deceits catapulting thugs towards world hegemony and decries their violence” (Merritt in Gillen & Gale 2008: 141). It may well be that Pinter’s late literary output took a more obscene and violent turn as a result of his radical response to and deep concern about these harrowing atrocities and harsh realities of our violent world. With his political anger and global concerns dissolving into something dark yet grotesquely comic, Pinter seems to combine his verbal protest and political outrage with obscenity, thus unmasking atrocious, yet at the same time actual acts of violence in brutal and obscene terms and putting his frustration at the human rights violations into more violent words in his late works. Pinter’s political anger, for instance, found an obscene and brutal expression in “American Football: A Reflection upon the Gulf War”, an of- Explicit Language, Radical Tone 159 fensive, scatological poem, categorized by one critic as “one of Pinter’s best known poetic works” (Derbyshire, in Raby 2001: 233). Evoking views of the author on the involvement of the Western military powers in the Middle East, the poem is a harsh criticism and linguistic satire “through language that is deliberately violent, obscene, sexual and celebratory, the military triumphalism that followed the Gulf War” (Billington 1996: 329). Much of the profanity in the poem originates from the author’s outrage at the euphemisms through which the Gulf War was displayed on the Western media. The ‘embedded’ reporting and journalism during the military operations distorted people’s views of the Gulf war and belittled the deaths and killings of soldiers as well as civilians during the war. Technical and bureaucratic language, infused with neologisms such as ‘collateral damage’, ‘precision bombing’ and ‘surgical operations’, replaced realistic and factual reporting of what really happened in the Iraqi desert. In a way, this provocative language of the poem was a radical response to the oddities and discrepancies between what was really happening on the battle ground and how this reality was reported by the media, concealing the carnage from the Western public. Touching on these double standards of the Western democracies, Billington commented that this uncompromising poem was the product of Pinter’s “own obsession with the huge gap between language and fact” (Billington 1996: 329). In fact, these violent and shocking images and the explicitness of the language in the poem such as ‘We blew them into fucking shit’, ‘We blew their balls into shards of fucking dust’, define much of the poem’s territory; a world of brutality, insecurity and barbarity, a horrid landscape of twentieth century atrocity. Generating appallingly grotesque, dark comedy, these imageries also evoke powerful metaphors of human degradation, the symbols of catastrophe, confronting the reader with the real situation in the Gulf War, thus breaking down the distance imposed by geography and the indifference of the Western society to the devastating consequences of the war. Using such language of profanity can convey its terror both powerfully and provocatively. In Pinter’s mind, no other meaning of expressions or tools could be more effective and more haunting to display his immediate outrage at the Gulf War and to communicate the ultimate realities of war than using the language of scatology. Major British and American newspapers, including The Observer, The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Review of the Books, declined to publish “American Football” on the grounds of obscenity. Pinter was indeed censored by the mainstream press in the West. Frustrated and annoyed by this censorship, Pinter made his point, reiterating that the poem was obscene, but was referring to obscene facts; “This poem uses obscene words to describe obscene acts and obscene attitudes” (Pinter 2009: 224). Pinter also maintained that the offence resulting from the scatological language in print was nothing compared to the reality of the situation Ibrahim Yerebakan 160 and the sight of the broken and dismantled bodies of the retreating Iraqi soldiers, ‘suffocating in their own shit! ’, the actual reality of burning an untold number of soldiers and civilians alive. With these unsettling imageries, Pinter may have intended to captivate the imagination of his readers, strongly reminding them that a distinction has to be made between the obscene words in a poem, which are only words, and the actual scenes in the battlefield, which are extremely cruel and vicious. In a personal statement, Pinter also reiterated his conviction that burying a great number of civilian casualties with bulldozers was more terrifying and that committing these crimes was a more awful and more unforgivable act than disclosing in a poem in ugly words and ugly images what the Western tanks actually did in the desert (Pinter 2009: 223). By using the offensive words and polemical materials in “American Football”, Pinter reconnects the readers with the battle carnage as something real, but at the same time something painful, brutal, and very ugly. Thus, Pinter makes the readers feel complicit in the horror by bringing them into the centre of the action, enabling them to see and to recognise man’s inhumanity to man. These swear-words and ugly metaphors in the poem ironically provide a sharp contrast to the glamorised and jingoistic reporting of the allied ‘victory’ by the Western media which pretend that these brutalities did not exist or did not happen at all. With these contrasting situations, Pinter, in fact, breaks down all the geographical boundaries and the distance between Europe, the USA and the Middle East, exposing the indifferent attitudes of the West to actual events, hinting that such horrible events could happen anywhere in the world, in the East, in the West, as he once expressed in one of his interviews: they’re exactly the same as you and I. Just because, for example, they’re 3.000 miles away, a lot of people say, Oh well, ‘why don’t we look at England? ’ Well, we are looking at England. By which I mean, ‘Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’. (Ford 1989: 4) By using ‘we’ in the poem as the subject of all sentences except one, Pinter sharpens the sensibilities of the Western readers into the realization that there is no longer an automatic division between ‘them’, the dictators, morally bankrupt cruel tyrants in the Middle East, and ‘we’, the supposedly superior Western leaders, whom he identifies as ‘elected dictatorships’, the ‘war criminals’, the ‘murderers’. The frequent and deliberate use of the subject “we” also reinforces the notion that “we”, the most civilized Western societies, are no better than cruel dictatorships around the world. As Pinter stressed in an interview, “So when you say “Saddam Hussein - what a murderer”, so are we” (Paxman 2002: n.p.). Suddenly changing the subject of the sentences from ‘we’ to ‘I’ in the final line of the poem, Pinter seems to disconnect himself from its setting. With the first person voice, the author further dissociates himself from this obscene Explicit Language, Radical Tone 161 territory, which is not the environment he wants to inhabit. Despite the fact that “American Football” was published at the end of the first Gulf War, it could just easily be interpreted to signify the events unfolding in the aftermath of the second invasion of Iraq, which had similar catastrophic consequences. “Democracy” (2003) is another uncompromising anti-war poem, showing the moral hypocrisy and duplicity of the Western powers, a profound, explicit response to horrors of the second invasion of Iraq. This poem is an unequivocal combination of politics and obscenity, where ‘obscene acts of violence’ committed against the civilian population during the second invasion are exposed in most horrific, profane terms. With its strong language and angry tone, the poem in many respects is a quick reminder of the images portrayed in “American Football”, where swearwords are constantly used to describe the indescribable for which there are no more decent terms. Thus, beneath the surface of the strong and embarrassing language in this rather short poem, one gets the sense of the view of a country as a war and rape victim. The crude and direct use of the brutal images in the poem such as ‘fuck’ and ‘pricks’ connects the reader with the stronger and the darker images of a country as being raped on the one hand, and the superior, invincible, malignant powers as rapists on the other. Confronted with such brutal expressions as: ‘They’ll fuck everything in sight’ as a prediction, the readers are clearly hurt, disturbed and unsettled. This might also suggest that war, torture and rape will continue unabated around the world, in the Third World, whether under the oppression of a dictator or of Western powers. In fact, arbitrary cases of rape, sodomy, homicide, torture, inhuman treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad were confirmed and pornographically displayed in the media in the aftermath of the second invasion of Iraq. More to the point, such strong expressions in the poem as ‘The big pricks are out’, ‘Watch your back’ imply that there will be more sustained bombing and more misery, more degradation, more rape and more catastrophe. Such vocabulary of aversion and anger in the poem could be taken as the voice of the author, the voice of his passionate protest and indignation and a profound response to the horrors of the twentieth century. We all know such horrid images not only from the war in Iraq but also from World War I, World War II, the Bosnian War and, most recently, the Syrian Civil War. Pinter, better than most, knew of the power of these images used in the poem, some of which may be too graphic, too depressing and too disturbing for us to see, but the facts they represent did happen. Whereas in “American Football” fuck is used as an adjective or a noun, in “Democracy” this particular swear-word is used as a verb for the whole action of the poem. The word fuck here is used in order to expose an ugly action, to show the magnitude of human catastrophe, and to describe the immoral and obscene actions in the Middle East. This time, however, Pinter keeps further distance to the West by using they as the subject of Ibrahim Yerebakan 162 the poem rather than we, thus cutting himself off, mentally at least, from the very world of which he is part. The obscenity reflects the author’s responsibility as a citizen of the world to look beyond the jingoistic attitudes and rhetoric of the West and to examine the reality of the situation, the reality of the tortured, raped, brutalized, decapitated, disfigured bodies of soldiers as well as civilians who were actually blown up by cluster bombs into ‘shards of fucking dust’. In spite of this mood of pessimism and the obscenity of death and killing, one can also get an impression from the poems that war is hell and intolerable, but apparently must be accepted by people with common sense. Western military might seems irresistible, but must be resisted. Moving from poetry to Pinter’s late dramatic pieces, one can observe the similar diatribe, similar disturbing language, dreadful images and the frequent use of four-letter words. There is much obscenity and profanity in Mountain Language, where “language is the oppressors’ weapon of choice. The fascist captors speak in lies, scatology and double talk” (Rich 1989: n.p.): SERGEANT’S VOICE: Who is that fucking woman? What is that fucking woman doing here? Who let that fucking woman through that fucking door? (37) Using the ‘f’ words in the play does several things at the same time: through the menacing and offensive tone, these words evoke the immediate notion that language in this context is the most savage instrument and the torture equipment of these authoritarian figures. As Carey Perloff most perceptively observes, this is a manifestation of how language “can be manipulated and distorted to inflict violence on another person, […] how people can destroy each other through language” (Perloff, in Burkman & Gibbbs 1993: 15). Mountain Language is set inside the prison of an unspecified country, but certainly a totalitarian country, where linguistic oppression, linguistic fanaticism and torture are systematically practised upon the questioning, oppositional voices. With linguistic oppression at the core of the discussion of the play, Mountain Language can be characterised as one of Pinter’s most serious, explicit and blatant expressions of violence through the use of the obscene imageries, a short play “as relentless in its dissection of fanaticism and despair as Miller’s The Crucible” (Cohen 2008: n.p.). What is striking about the obscenity in this political play is that unlike any of Pinter’s other literary works, the ‘f’ word is used not only by men (which might be expected), but also by a woman, and actually as a verb. With Young Woman, apparently an intellectual, a political dissident and a staunch opponent of the military regime, Pinter explores a peculiar facet of linguistic suppression in the play. The strongest political messages of the play are conveyed to the audience through this Young Woman sarcas- Explicit Language, Radical Tone 163 tically in an obscene and explicit language. Singled out and branded by the state authorities as “fucking intellectual” (25), Young Woman is subjected to sexual harassment and verbal intimidation by the military officers, apparently the protectors and guarantors of the state. Further physical abuse of the military regime comes to surface when one of the officers places his hand on the bottom of Young Woman, and threatens her freedom and personality, thus reducing her to “a slab of meat” (Prentice 1994: 287) and a sex object through repeated obscene references to her sexuality: “Intellectual arses wobble the best” (25). It appears that her education, her intelligence, and her knowledge do not count for much in this military regime; oppositional voices are seen simply as “shithouses” (21), “a pile of shit” (31) by these elements of the state power. With these swear-words Pinter explores the fact that such ugly expressions and obscene language have become the language of the authorities. However, the irony is that although the representatives of this brutal regime are capable of applying heavy-handed physical power and physical violence to those “enemies of the State” (21), they use words, obscene language, bad language; they use their tongue, which proves to be more effective than using truncheon or any other means to crush the opponents of the state. Strangely enough, the ugliness of the language serves the purpose of these authoritarian figures better than resorting to physical violence in the process of silencing their opponents. Despite the fact that Young Woman is experiencing unendurable circumstances in Mountain Language, she dares to stand up to the authoritarian power structures. She protests the arbitrary change of the prison regulations and vigorously reacts to the news that she can only see her imprisoned husband and can get information about him from a bloke “who comes into the office every Tuesday week, except when it rains. He’s right on the top of his chosen subject. Give him a tinkle one of these days and he’ll see you all right. His name is Dokes. Joseph Dokes” (41). Angered and dismayed by these superficial remarks, Young Woman makes her strongest protest “by apparently adopting the mind-set of those in power” (Batty 2001, 109). Staring directly at her torturer’s eyes and hissing the sarcastic questions at him in the most pointed of ways, Young Woman uses equally the most horrific offensive four-letter words as a verb: YOUNG WOMAN Can I fuck him? If I fuck him, will everything be all right? ” (41) In her courageous act of articulating ‘f’ words and her resistance to and protest against authoritarian postures, Young Woman “seems to have reversed, if only for a moment, the valence of her subjection: now, she can act; she can create the possibility of her own happiness, which quite clearly includes the release of her husband” (Watt 2009: 51). In her tem- Ibrahim Yerebakan 164 porary defiance of authority by using the words of her torturers, Young Woman, nonetheless, cuts through the texture of the humiliation and verbal and physical abuse of the authoritarian power structures. In her articulation of anger with ‘f’ words, Young Woman dares to place herself as the subject rather than the object of the action. Of course, Young Woman is not really going to do what she articulates. However, in her utterance of four-letter words, she simply means that this is the only language that is comprehensible to those repressive state apparatuses; this is the only way of standing up to authoritarian power, which imposes linguistic oppression on its own citizens. In an interview, Pinter provides a sharp insight into the character of Young Woman when he traces the causes of her articulation of ‘f’ words: I think the Sergeant, who has a stick which he doesn’t have to use, uses the words instead in a way. He’s using it as an adjective and she uses it as a verb. My understanding of what she’s doing is that she’s saying “This is the only practical world to inhabit, is that what you are saying? That if I do this, if I fuck this man you say can help me, then everything will be all right, will it? ...It’s a very cruel, brutal world that she’s entered into and I think she’s having a very tough time, but she despises it so thoroughly that she’s able to use that language with no trouble at all (Ford 1989: 4). In her toughness and angry defiance of the representatives of the fascist regime in equally offensive and tough words, Young Woman becomes an immediate focus of the audience’s attention. Among Pinter’s women characters, Young Woman is singled out as the most courageous and admirable figure. We invest our faith in her because of her courageous act of defiance. Pinter, who normally rarely comments on his characters, stated the following: “She’s a dignified and intelligent woman... I admire her very much” (Ford 1989: 4). Making her strongest protest verbally, Young Woman demonstrates also that her body, her husband, her relatives, her loved ones can be crushed by the oppressive regime, incapacitated by innuendos, by verbal and physical insults, but her thoughts, her intellectual side, her spirit can never be crushed and can never be invaded even by such systematic brutalisation, constant harassments and intimidations, verbal and physical assaults. In this overtly political play, Pinter leaves the impression that, unlike in any other works, explicit language is used not only by the victimizers as a means of brutalization and intimidation, but also by the victim as a very effective means of defiance and resistance against the irresistible. However, the irony is that this act of defiance produces very few positive results on behalf of the oppressed. Like Pinter’s other political works, The New World Order contains many elements of obscenity and brutality, where obscene words are used to apply verbal torture on a nameless, silenced and blindfolded victim by omnipotent torturers, Des and Lionel. These sharp-suited figures of au- Explicit Language, Radical Tone 165 thority talk threateningly about what they are going to do with their victim, engaging in a discussion as to whether the victim is a “cunt” or a “prick”: LIONEL The level of ignorance that surrounds us. I mean, this prick here - DES You called him a cunt last time. LIONEL What? DES You called him a cunt last time. Now you call him a prick. How many times do I have to tell you? You’ve got to learn to define your terms and stick to them. You can’t call him a cunt in one breath and a prick in the next. (420- 421) As in Mountain Language, where prison officers reduce their victims to a scatological level by using most disparaging and offensive expressions, in The New World Order the torturers downgrade their victim to a bestial and sexual level with such ugly terms as “Motherfucker” or “Fuckpig”(420). They further engage in yet another reductive classification of the nameless victim as “a lecturer in fucking peasant theology” (419), thus ridiculing the belief systems of peasants. Once again, it emerges that obscene language is used here to a devastating effect, a very crude tool to oppress, to demolish the voice of the voiceless. Verbal assault of an intellectual by the authoritarian forces through cruel language is a grim reminder that “there is little room for dissent in the promised new world order” (Billington 1996: 328). It also reminds us of the fact that torture is not always carried out through physical violence but through the use of obscene language and cruel images. With The New World Order, Pinter engages his audience once again with a nameless intellectual who we understand has been crushed and traumatized into silence by an invincible but recognizable power structure. However, unlike Young Woman of Mountain Language, who is able to withstand the regime’s power, this blindfolded man is unable to resist even in words, let alone in action. The only action this man can take is to remain silent; he is denied both name and speech. Unable to resist the pressure, this man has to face up to these verbal as well as physical torrents of abuse. Yet, the strange irony is that even this relentless verbal intimidation and brutal attack by these sharp-suited interrogators in a language of revulsion, verbal abuse and verbal torture becomes meaningless in the face of no opposition at all or lack of any reciprocal communication even on the very superficial level between the victimised and the victimisers. Ibrahim Yerebakan 166 It appears that strong expressions and obscene images in both Mountain Language and The New World Order pack the double punch; they represent more than simple signs. Derogating and deprecating the oppressed, these obscene words also subtly denigrate the oppressors, reduce the limit of their vocabulary to clichés, and diminish their status to a sarcastic, ludicrous level. Through these ugly expressions, Pinter tries to reveal how torturers talk and use language and how they control language. The obscene language reflects the torturers’ minds, the torturers’ crudity of thinking and the banality of their vocabulary. These torturers say all sorts of horrendous things; make horrendous verbal insults through derogatory words, however almost all of them get away with these insults. The sexually brutal and bawdy language of Pinter’s torture plays “assimilates itself into comic dinner table talk in Celebration” (Prentice 2004: 65), where women characters call one another ‘fuckpigs’ and men call each other ‘cunts’. With Celebration, Pinter’s final full-length stage play, we move from the mysterious torture chamber of The New World Order and the totalitarian dungeon of Mountain Language into the most glamorous restaurant in London. As one of the characters in the play reveals, this is “the best and the most expensive fucking restaurant in the whole of Europe” where “up to the very highest fucking standards are maintained with the utmost rigour” (24). Instead of the torturers and the uniformed interrogators of the earlier plays, we have most extravagantly and most elegantly dressed diners, apparently members of the ruling elite maintaining their bizarre existence in complete isolation from the rest of the world. What is rather peculiar about these glittering aristocrats is that they describe themselves through violent language, attitudes and swearwords. Apparently they are drunkenly enjoying a ‘fabulous’ dinner with their spouses while celebrating “a fucking wedding anniversary” (25), to use their own terms. More to the point, they subtly describe themselves as strategy consultants keeping the peace worldwide without carrying guns, but in reality they are secretly and clandestinely directing the business of money-laundering, drugs trafficking and arms trade around the world. The external appearance of these aristocrats is, in fact, a deception which conceals the reality behind the camouflage of the luxury of an exquisite restaurant setting. With this play Pinter once again returns to exposing “nouveau riche, whose vulgar ways are not obscured by their copious wealth” (Grimes 2005: 128). As the play progresses, the superficial conversations of these elites about the delights of exotic foods, ‘gold plates’, ‘hot towels’, drinks and copulation turn the Pinteresque linguistic satire into a much darker comedy. The incompatibility between the debased language of the characters and the setting of the play, ‘the best restaurant’, “takes comedy to darker corners than it has gone before” (Prentice 2004: 67). The married couples, who are also brothers and sisters, are shouting at each other, using vulgar terms such as ‘whore’, ‘prick’, etc. and yelling at each other in the Explicit Language, Radical Tone 167 rudest manner: “Get out the bloody way! You silly old cunt” (70). Recognising the woman at the next table, Lambert, who introduces himself as a strategy consultant, but whose job involves violence and force, utters the following: “You see that girl at that table? I know her. I fucked her when she was eighteen” (50). Recalling her childhood, Prue, using the language of scatology, tells the story of how her sister “could make a better sauce than the one on that plate if she pissed into it” (21). These characters do not even remember their dinner orders. ‘What did I order? Lambert asks. ‘Osso Buco’, his wife answers, which is immediately associated with ‘arsehole’ by Matt. In its most unpleasant expressions and imageries and most evocatively sensual and ugliest tone, Celebration “also has a touch of the Greek, reminding one a bit of Aristophanes at his most politically and sexually outrageous” (Burkman, in Gillen & Gale 2002: 189). The contemptible language of this play also candidly reflects how violent and brutal twenty first century society has become. Ironically, there is no physical act of violence in the play; violence is very much through offensive, ugly, hideous words and expressions rather than through action. The great paradox about the use of swears-words in Celebration is that it is women characters that articulate most of these obscene expressions rather unambiguously and aggressively, let alone central male characters. The conversation, connecting these characters with each other only superficially, symbolizes their extreme viciousness and crudity. With this particular play, Pinter’s use of vulgar expressions and “scatological language explodes into the surrounding dialogue as a kind of mental violence portending the physical violence that is located just beyond the scenic limits of the physical action” (Gordon, in Gillen & Gale 2000: 69): JULIE All mothers-in-law are like that. They love their sons. They love their boys. They don’t want their sons to be fucked by other girls. Isn’t that right? PRUE Absolutely. All mothers want their sons to be fucked by themselves. JULIE By their mothers. PRUE All mothers LAMBERT All mothers want to be fucked by their mothers. MATT Or by themselves. PRUE No, you’ve got it the wrong way round. Ibrahim Yerebakan 168 LAMBERT How’s that? MATT All mothers want to be fucked by their sons. LAMBERT Now wait a minute MATT My point is LAMBERT No my point is - how old do you have to be? JULIE To be what? LAMBERT To be fucked by your mother MATT Any age, mate. Any age. (16-17) There is no other dramatic text where Pinter uses more explicit and vulgar language and where he deploys obscene words one after another with such a disturbing and alarming frequency. Commenting on the horror, vulgarity and viciousness of the tone and the language with which these ‘gilded aristocrats’ communicate with each other, Ronald Knowles proposes that “the subtitle of the play might well be Spending and Fucking” (Knowles, in Gillen & Gale 2000: 185). When viewed together, the abundance of swear-words throughout Celebration demonstrates the mental poverty and the spiritual emptiness that pervade the lives and the drunken behaviours of this unhappy and wealthy elite. Their dialogues are bitterly comic but also disturbingly offensive. Their appallingly vulgar manners and behaviours contradict glamorous clothes, gold-plated dinner tables and luxurious restaurant setting, which can be taken as “symptom and signifier of the reductive materialism of contemporary culture” (Gordon, in Gillen & Gale 2000: 66). It is obvious that with his frequent use of bad words in the play, Pinter lampoons bitterly and satirises unequivocally the degradation and dehumanisation of these foul-mouthed souls, privileged upper class elite in their own immoral, corrupt manners, in their own degraded language, in their depraved behaviours, and bad communication with each other. In other words, the bad language in this play looks like a slap in the face for those gleaming aristocrats, who seem to be completely disconnected with the rest of society and who are totally indifferent to the realities of life. In one form or another, Pinter confronted and protested twentieth century violence around the world with violent words, and responded to Explicit Language, Radical Tone 169 the appalling state of affairs, the horrific crimes around the world with equally appalling provocative and obscene language. Pinter deliberately used every single weapon including black humour, deadly irony alongside obscenity to launch the most offensive assaults on the obscenities of the abuse of power and the terrible landscape of the twentieth century. As Billington remarks, “it was as if Pinter himself had been physically recharged by the moral duty to express his innermost feelings” (Billington 2005: n.p.). Pinter is formulating his protest in words, in obscene imageries and obscene language, which he finds more powerful than any other medium. In many instances, words can be much stronger and much harder for people to digest than the action itself. Especially in theatre, the message conveyed to the audience directly through the use of bad language and violent images seems even stronger because they are articulated explicitly and unequivocally by the live characters in full view of the audience. Pinter’s language can be profane, obscene but it works ironically and grotesquely at a more significant and higher level. Obscene language in these texts has power to challenge authority and to condemn the abuse of power. Sometimes these obscene images can become the voice of protest against authority, and sometimes they become an instrument of self-defence as with Mountain Language, and sometimes a means of expressing the author’s anger at the obscenities of the terrors of the twentieth century. Undoubtedly these images have a major impact on the audience, pushing them to question their belief-systems and responsibilities to each other. Confronted with these brutal images, the audience is left with two options; they either look away or pay attention to them. Despite the fact that the explicit use of profane images can work better in the theatre in an attempt to sharpen and to awaken the senses of the audience to the terrors of the real world, Pinter turned to poetry towards the end of his career to express his passionate opposition to an increasingly frightening ‘new world order’. In this case, poetry might have sounded to him a preferred genre, a more convenient and better form of articulating his anger, his protest, and his political outrage. Evidently, Pinter put his angry feelings into his late poetry, using hyperbolic expressions more intuitively, more powerfully and more profoundly on a cognitive level than what the audience might get from other genres. Pinter may have seen that profane and obscene language in poetry and in drama had more evocative power in itself than any other means of expression, and these obscene images can sometimes be a cheap trick, sometimes offensive, sometimes bitterly humorous, sometimes compelling, yet much stronger, more touching and harder to face up to than the action itself. As Aleks Sierz notes, since “humans are language animals, words often seem to cause more offence than the action to which they refer. Taboo words such as ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ work because we give them a magic power, Ibrahim Yerebakan 170 which makes them more than simple signs that describe real-life event or thing” (Sierz 2000: 7). It is true that Pinter’s invective against human rights abuses, against war, the US and the UK foreign policy in the Third World, his harsh satire on the authoritarian power structures and the ruling elite may not be pleasurable. Pinter’s art is that violent expressions and swear-words are stripped of all sexual and erotic connotations. The references to the word ‘fuck’ and other sexual images as such function “as intensifying epithets in the weaponry of language and finally means almost nothing at all” (Prentice 1994: 289). These brutally crude images bring into our consciousness the dark, destructive forces in us all, awakening us to the grimmest and most destructive realities of our world. These words might be obscene, but with these brutally crude and obscene images, Pinter articulates his anger at the obscenities of power, obscenities of domination, obscenities of the destruction of a great many innocent people worldwide, obscenities of the Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisoners’ abuse. Pinter’s use of brutally crude language looks like “the hammering of a woodpecker’s beak against the trunk of a tree”, and “that language - hovering between idiocy and poetry, horror and comedy - was a profound response to the terrors of the 20 th century” (O’Toole 2008: n.p.). His is a language, deliberately aggressive, provocative and impossible to ignore or avoid. In spite of these violent images and the profanity of the language, Pinter’s art, his histrionic genius and his artistic creativity should not be demoted or downgraded simply to such an obscene level. Even the crude expressions are not devoid of humour, however unpleasant they taste. No matter how offensive these expressions may appear, they are bitterly humorous, one of the distinguishing qualities and artistic uniqueness of the author. Prentice suggests: Pinter’s bawdy language dramatizes and embraces human complexity through ambiguities that spill into the comically incongruous; ultimately, it explores the dangers that exist in unexamined assumptions and resultant actions. Revealed in that rarely acknowledged interface between opposite in the self, comedy lights that space where the erotic meets the destructive, desire butts up against revulsion, normalcy with nightmare, reality with the invented and the imagined (Prentice 2004: 66). Even in the language of notoriety Pinter is a writer with a complete mastery of vocabulary of disgust, “a public intellectual with unrivalled rhetorical gifts” (McCrum 2005: n.p.). As a theatre man Michael Colgan observed of him, “People see Harold as being curmudgeonly or rude, but you can’t be those things and write beautifully” (cit. in Addley 2008: n.p.). 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Sierz, Aleks (2000). In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber. Explicit Language, Radical Tone 173 Watt, Stephen (2009). “Things, Voices, Events: Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language as Testamental Text”. In: Modern Drama. Vol. 52, No. 1. 37-56. Williams, Ian (2010). “Pinter Bitter”. The Guardian, 26 Dec. 2008. [online]http: / / www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/ cifamerica/ 2008/ dec/ 2 6/ pinter-theatre (accessed 20 Dec. 2010). Ibrahim Yerebakan Department of English Language and Literature Recep Tayyip Erdogan University Turkey