Essay: Fabricated Fatalism in Pinter's Betrayal

  In his article Postmodernity, or Living with Ambivalence, Zygmunt Bauman characterizes Modernism as an era of certainty. In Modernity, Western civilization "was bent on dominating the rest of the world by dissolving its alterity" and conforming it to its own Western values. In this way, the difference was seemingly done away with, creating an all-encompassing universal truth. Modernity proposed one single mode in which to perceive and experience life. Along with difference, contingency was abolished, creating ostensible destiny, born of the sense that the fate of the individual is part of that universal truth. In Bauman's contemporary era, however, there came "the realization that … the hope [of destiny] will not come true and hence one needs to learn to live without the hope that supplied the meaning – the only meaning – to life." The postmodern subject, then, experiences "that state of discomfort and anxiety" from which the modern subject had been able to escape through immersion in the illusion of destiny. However, Bauman says, the postmodern subject can transform contingency to destiny by making a choice and living according to that choice. In this way, the subject creates his own fate, and the sense of confusion from the ambivalence of existence is allayed.

In Harold Pinter's 1978 play Betrayal, ambivalence prevails. The story is standard: Robert's wife Emma enters into an affair with Jerry, who is also married. Emma and Jerry are quite happy together in their adulterous relationship, but after several years the romance loses its charm and the two part ways. Emma and Robert divorce, while Jerry remains with his wife. The play contains nine scenes, which are arranged roughly in a reverse chronological order. Disorder and ambiguity pervade the play on the level of content and language, creating a simultaneous persistence of several conflicting truths. The reverse temporality of the Betrayal, while contributing to the disorientation in the play, also allows some order to emerge, endowing the action with a sense of predetermined fate.

As the play's title and plot indicate, the story is rife with betrayals. When Emma and Jerry first enter into a relationship, Robert is oblivious to the affair. After four years, Emma tells Robert of her affair with Jerry, but does not tell Jerry that Robert knows. Robert, who works with Jerry, does not let him know that he is aware of his wife's infidelity. Throughout the play, each of the characters has different information regarding the threesome; the spectator is required to process multiple versions of the complex relationship. In this way, there is a simultaneous existence of several realities, which manifests itself in anxiety in both the characters and the audience. While Emma, Robert, and Jerry struggle to gain an understanding of their own surroundings, keeping track of their various transgressions against one another, the spectator must hold in his mind these multiple truths. The "discomfort and anxiety" of postmodern existence ensue.

The language of Betrayal too contributes to the ambiguity present in the content of the play. There is frequent use of hypobole, which creates a discrepancy between the characters' feelings and the words they use to express it. For instance, after Robert has found a letter from Jerry to his wife Emma, the couple has the following exchange:

ROBERT: Was there any message for me, in his letter?

…

EMMA: No message. 

ROBERT: No message. Not even his love?

Silence

EMMA: We’re lovers.

ROBERT: Ah. Yes. I thought it might be something like that, something along those lines.

Another time, when Emma announces to Jerry that she is pregnant with her husband Robert's child, Jerry tells her "I am very happy for you" when he clearly is not. 

Perhaps most significant, however, is the last line of the first scene. Emma says: "It's all, all over".  These words may refer to Emma's relationship with Jerry, or to her relationship with Robert. More importantly, however, her words reflect the structure of the play. Indeed, due to the reverse chronology of the play, her words are technically the final words of the story: all subsequent scenes will portray events that happened prior to the time of the first scene. And, although Emma's relationships are at an end, the action of the play is just beginning. These words, along with the entire first scene in which the fates of all three characters are expounded, endow the remainder of the play with a sense of deterministic prophecy that is somewhat reminiscent of Greek tragedy. By revealing all, Pinter eliminates the sense of uncertainty and contingency in which the postmodern subject "is bound to live". "One makes something a destiny by embracing the fate" (Bauman) – Pinter creates the characters' fates, and so the spectator may experience some of that "universality, certainty and transparency" that was so soothing in Modernity, despite the chaotic confusion inherent in the play's language and content.

Image by Joshua Earle