Pinter's Nobel Prize acceptance speech

[Denis Salter]

It makes no sense, as some have done, to criticize Harold Pinter's Nobel acceptance speech for being "anti-American" and for being marked by deliberate factual errors, by deprecating his achievement as a playwright, partly on the grounds that he has not written any "great works" of late.  The speech is not, at base, anti-American; rather, it is a pointed and telling argument against American imperialistic aggression and against other nations, Pinter's own included, that sedulously ape these practices.  He is at pains to point out that there are many Americans who are opposed to this foreign policy. If he has made factual errors or manipulated facts to suit his argument, it is incumbent on those who are making these charges to point out exactly where he has done so. The question of whether he has recently written any "great plays" is moot, and is nonetheless beside the point.  Pinter received the Nobel Prize for Literature, for his extraordinary range over a lifetime as a brilliant, innovative, influential, and morally-centred writer in many genres and forms, including not only plays but film scripts, poetry-he therefore includes one of his own poems in the acceptance speech--and indeed prose.  His acceptance speech is an integral and exemplary part of these works and treats many of the salient themes that have preoccupied him throughout his career: in particular, the uses and abuses of power, individually, socially, politically, ideologically, and collectively, wherever they have occurred, now occur, and are likely to occur in the future. His speech is in keeping with the spirit of those of many previous Nobel Prize Winners for Literature, as it seeks to demonstrate that the writer is an impassioned witness of and for our times, and is obligated, as is everyone, to pay attention to what is actually happening in our world, in our history. He is not preaching to the choir, for as he says at one point, "Sermonising has to be avoided at all costs."  As he puts it in the penultimate paragraph, "I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define to the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory."  The question, as with many Nobel speeches, is whether we can live up to the idealism which he articulates with such clear and deeply-felt conviction.  Professor David Mayer tells us that the speech, delivered in a London studio because Pinter "is too ill to travel to Stockholm . . . was staged as a John of Gaunt scene . . . echoing that scene with its prescience and analysis." Thus, through the voice of the solitary ailing writer, the voices of an entire nation are enabled to speak to the entire world.



--Denis Salter.


__________________________________________________________


"The sea is history."--Derek Walcott
_______________________________________________

"That's what hybrids were invented for: survival in changing ecologies."--Lisa Doolittle

__________________________________________________________________ 

""To celebrate this award, and the work it recognizes of those around the world, let me recall the words of Gandhi: My life is my message. Also, plant a tree."  Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize for Peace.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Denis Salter
Professor of Theatre
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke St. West
Montréal, QC
H3A 2T6
Tel (514) 398 6550
Regular Fax (514) 398 8146
Computer Fax (309) 294 0444
denis.salter at mcgill.ca
d.salter at videotron.ca
__________________
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://artsservices.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/candrama/attachments/20051208/7b398d88/attachment.html>