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|b In Landscape (1968) Pinter escapes the limits of the room comedies, and shifts from physical places and situations to the infinite ample potentialities of a different dramatic form, particularly, the temporal form. Such a temporal form is typically exemplified by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Both Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Pinter in Landscape are similarly interested in the temporal technique in writing. But while Orwell is concerned in his temporal technique with the shape of the future in relation to man; Pinter, unlike Orwell, uses the temporal technique to throw light on the past time of his characters.
While Orwell, on the one hand, presents social predictions about man’s modem human technological predicament; Pinter, on the other hand, compared to Orwell, presents competitive poetic recollections or remembrances of the characters’ past time. Whereas, it is Orwell’s human concern with man’s future, on the one hand, that prompts him to try to free man’s individuality from the menace of futuristic tyrannical totalitarian abuses of technology; it is Pinter’s artistic concern, compared to Orwell’s, on the other hand, but rather with the question of time, and memory, which motivates Pinter, to attempt to free man’s consciousness from the haunting menace and obsessing burden of the ever-existing past as absorbing, and conditioning the present time.
According to Pinter, things that are actually happening are not only of the greatest importance, but have the most crucial bearing on man’s life. Orwell and Pinter are similarly concerned with man’s psychological predicament. But while Orwell’s temporal technique focuses on the futuristic human predicament of man; Pinter’s obsession with the present emotional marital predicament of man, urges him to use in Landscape the temporal technique to present, unlike Orwell, an exploration of memory, time, the past, all are conveyed in a series 01 emotive poetic reminiscences.
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