Abstract
This paper examines Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language (1988) through the lens of cultural materialism as theorized by Raymond Williams. The play, inspired by the suppression of Turkey’s Kurdish population, dramatizes the consequences of being powerless to use one’s own language under a military decree. The paper analyzes how Pinter depicts two groups of culture — the suppressed mountaineers and the suppressors — and how language functions as a symbol of power. Through the play’s four scenes, Pinter demonstrates how linguistic suppression operates as both repressive and ideological coercion, and how the Elderly woman’s final silence can be read as either surrender or resistance.
Keywords: Harold Pinter, Mountain Language, cultural materialism, Raymond Williams, language, power, linguistic suppression, Theatre of the Absurd
Introduction
Raymond Henry Williams coined the term Cultural Materialism. He was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic whose writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature represent a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and arts. Williams argued that “empirical” work quite systematically transgressed the boundaries between elite and popular cultures (Williams 1977:49).
Pinter’s Mountain Language is his most overtly political play, inspired by his pity for Turkey’s Kurdish population. The story concerns Kurdish women visiting their husbands in prison, who are forbidden to speak their native mountain language during these visits. The play dramatizes overthrow in practice, not in theory.
Language as a Symbol of Power
Pinter’s language differs from that of various other dramatists. He draws on language as a method of power and as a spoken application of violence. Esslin (1963) portrays Pinter’s language as doing something new: “A true understanding of Pinter’s language must start from an examination of the function of language in stage dialogue generally, and indeed from considerations of the use of language in ordinary human intercourse itself.”
The symbol of power is represented by the society of the suppressor. The mountaineers are not allowed to speak their language inside the military decree. The Guard takes advantage to use the power of language against the mountaineer. As Gussow (1994) has shown, Pinter’s play is about “suppression of language and the loss of freedom of expression.”
Cultural Issues in the Play
Mountain Language is a play about linguistic suppression. Located in an unspecified prison of a capital, where speaking the mountain language is forbidden, this twenty-minute play shows two kinds of resistance through two female central characters. The Elderly woman, who comes to visit her convicted son, keeps getting abused for using mountain language. When a guard later says the rules have changed and she is allowed to speak her language, her silence becomes an ethic of struggle to the ironic notion of linguistic freedom. On the other hand, the Young woman Sara Johnson subverts the abusive signifier “fuck” by literalizing it.
Cultural Materialistic Perspectives
The cultural materialist approach reads the literary text to enable us to “recover” its histories — the context of exploitation from which it emerged. The verbal communication of the capital is forced on mountain people to persuade homogenization to help the state consolidate its authority. The repressive methods of imprisonment and torture are joined with ideological coercive methods of a one-state language formula.
When the prisoner asserts “I’ve got a wife and three kids” (31), the guard responds with violent reprisal to this shared identity, for he feels his differentness that can establish his identity and superiority is at stake. When the man in power sees a reflected version of himself in the eyes of the other, he feels insecure.
Conclusion
Mountain Language is perhaps the most concise, powerful and violent example of what materialist language is and can do — how language differentiates people and can make them mutually unintelligible. It has a very direct effect in its dramatization of the dilemma of people whose mother tongue is being suppressed. The play becomes a site for the contest and conflict between hegemony and resistance, both using homogenization and difference as strategies against each other.
Works Cited
- Esslin, M. The Theatre of the Absurd. London: Penguin Books, 1963.
- Dukore, B.F. Harold Pinter. London: Macmillan Press, 1988.
- Gussow, M. Conversation with Pinter. New York: Grove Press, 1994.
- Harris, M. Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. England: Altamira Press, 1927.
- Howard, J. “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies.” New Historicism and Renaissance Drama. Eds. Richard Dutton and Richard Wilson. London: Longman, 1992.
- Pinter, H. Mountain Language. London: Methuen, 1988.
- Prentice, P. The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic. Routledge: London, 2000.
- Raymond, W. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
- Wortham, S. Rethinking the University Leverage and Deconstruction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.
- Young, R. “The Politics of the Politics of Literary Theory.” Oxford Review, 1988.