 |
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
News
|
||
|
News |
Dateline: 8th December, 2005
Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture was broadcast in the UK on the evening of Wednesday 7th December. The full transcript can be found on the Nobel Prize site. Here we summarise his main points. He began by quoting something he worte in 1958:
As a writer, he says, he still stands by that, but as a citizen "I must ask: What is true? What is false?" Truth in drama, however is "forever elusive". It can never be found but the search for it is "compulsive". There is no such thing as truth in drama: there are many, whihc "challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other." He is often asked how his plays are created. " I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did." The starting point comes as a single line, word or image. Then, as the characters develop, so does the play. He instanced both The Homecoming and Old Times and followed their development.
Language in art is "a highly ambiguous transaction". In political theatre, however, there are other problems. "Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential." The writer must give them freedom and not try to constrict them in any way. And it doesn't he said, always work! Indeed, political satire must follow a completely different, almost opposite set of rules, for that is its function. But for politicians, language is not used in the same way: "since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power."
This leads him on to talking about the lies about weapons of mass destruction which led to the Iraq War and then to "how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it." He is scathing in his attack, comparing the US crimes to those of the Soviet Union and that its policies made it clear that it considers "it had carte blanche to do what it liked." He goes into great detail about the US intervention in Nicaragua and the driving out of the democratically elected Sandinistas:
He went on to refer to US support for right wing military dictatorships in Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Chile. The US, he said, is "brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless" but also very clever. He analyses the use of the words 'the American people' by successive US presidents, saying that "language is actually employed to keep thought at bay." Coming up to the present, he says that a "totally illegitimate structure (Guantanamo Bay) is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention," and the whole "bandit act" of the Iraqi War, which he describes as state terrorism, has "brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and (we) call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'." He suggests that Bush and Blair should be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice, but, as the US has not ratified that court, "if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines." He ends with a warning:
All quotations from the lecture are © THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2005 Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
|
|
|
|
