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Pinter and the Drama of Hospitality

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2005, 18(3), pp.243-
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

YONGJAE HAN 1

1인제대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the ways in which Derrida's idea of hospitality reads into Pinter's Caretaker, a play that dramatizes the paradoxical relationship between the host and the guest. I argue that the two writers, despite all the differences in their practice of writing, demonstrate a similar pattern of thought on hospitality. For Derrida, hospitality takes place only in its aporetic structure; the pure fulfillment of hospitality is always deterred and deferred. It cannot be said that there exists hospitality in its absolute sense, especially as one's welcoming of (an)other is always already conditional. He makes a clear distinction between pure hospitality and legal hospitality. The former is something that we necessarily call for as the condition of possibilities of the latter; hospitality is always to come. Like Derrida in Of Hospitality, Pinter brings to the foreground the paradoxical law of hospitality as a principle object of inquiry in the play. By comparing and contrasting Aston and Mick in their respective welcoming of Davies, Pinter dramatically illuminates how and why the practice of hospitality involves, contrary to its proposed aim, legal terms. The playwright shows, in other words, the possibilities and impossibilities of hospitality at the same time.

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