American Football - Harold Pinter Context Flashcards
Explain the Context of the poem
o What Pinter is clearly doing in American Football is satirising, through language that is deliberately violent, obscene, sexual and celebratory, the military triumphalism that followed the Gulf War and, at the same time, counteracting the stage-managed euphemisms through which it was projected on television. […] Pinter’s poem, by its exaggerated tone of jingoistic, anally obsessed bravado, reminds us of the weasel-words used to describe the war on television and of the fact that the clean, pure conflict which the majority of the American people backed at the time was one that existed only in their imagination. Behind the poem lies a controlled rage: that it was rejected, even by those who sympathised with its sentiments, offers melancholy proof that hypocrisy is not confined to governments and politicians.
Explain the stylisation of the poem
• The poem is stylized as a mini-play representing an extremely frustrated American soldier who sometimes in the same breath combines exclamation of religious bliss (“Hallelullah” and/or gratitude to the Lord!), instrumental/technical orientation (“”It works”, “We did it”), and the forceful sadistic posture towards other human beings scapegoated into generic labels of being different from us (“them”, “their”, “they” as the opposite of “We”).
Explain the poem’s purpose
• Bush Jr. administration’s reasons for invading Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t find confirmation in facts, and this took from American soldiers the meaning of their heroic decision to invade other parts of the world – the absence of WMDs in Iraq was a fatal blow to the very soul of the young Americans who enlisted to serve in the Middle East. This, it seems, is the ultimate reason for such shockingly inflated numbers of suicide among the vets who returned back from the Gulf War. And this is the fundamental reason for the psychological and sometimes ethical degradation in those who serve and served in the Gulf War.
o That’s why the protagonist of Pinter’s poem talks the way he does – he doesn’t respect what he has to do, and primitive psychological defenses against the fact that you have to kill somebody without noble reason – primordial bravado, purely emotional hatred and nationalistic contempt for the Iraqis and Afghanis based on belief that “we are greater and smarter” and “they are weak and stupid” is the only “meaning” our soldiers are left with.
Explain the use of such impudent language in the poem
• The most troubling aspect of Pinter’s poem is exactly how natural and ritualistically easy the poem’s protagonist’s verbal expressiveness matches with the most extremist actions where anti-social behavior becomes a matter of debased physiology. Usually people try to ignore the seriousness of sadistically pornographic verbalizations – they cowardly hide in the caves of connotations (in the darkness of abstractions). “They suffocated in their own shit” – means to be suffocated in their own bodylines, in their own bodily being. That’s how easily the archaic – religious: super-human sensibility is combined with super-modern – technological disrespect for the bodily incarnation of human soul. “We blew the shit out of them” means “we liberated them from their bodies” – we blow their bodies out of their bodies: we disincarnate them – we make them “spiritual” and by this we make them more “noble”, more “sublime” (cleaned of their bodies). This is the shameful “metaphysical” echo of genocidal rage.
Explain the criticisms of Pinter in this poem
• It’s very important that Pinter emphasizes how traditional religious frame of reference naturally combines with destruction of life by technological means. From “Hallelullah!” and “Praise the Lord” the transition to “blowing shit up their ass” or “to blow balls into shards of fucking dust” is not already “natural” but it’s, somehow, “organic” and as such a proof that these soldiers have lost human souls to psychotic yearning for power and wealth of the creators of Gulf War, who stole from the soldiers their conscience, their hope and meaning of life without which we cannot live and many of us suffer from deprivation to the degree of committing suicide. In a sense, the character of the poem who wants reward for his war deeds in the form of a kiss from his wife or beloved is already suicidal – he is going too far in his cynical bravado, he will be broken by god in his transgression of universal existential norms of human life and decency. For these abused and traumatized people their murderous talk (Pinter showed us,) and, sometimes, their criminal actions, is the only (and the illusory) way out of the meaninglessness of their participation in meaningless wars which has nothing to do with defending of their country and its interests.
