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Art, Truth & Politics
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Art, Truth and Politics (also published as "Art, Truth & Politics") is the controversial Nobel Lecture delivered on video by the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature Harold Pinter to an audience projected on three large screens at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm and simultaneously transmitted on Channel Four in the UK on the evening of 7 December 2005. The 46-minute television transmission was introduced by friend and fellow playwright David Hare.
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Art, Truth and Politics (also published as "Art, Truth & Politics") is the controversial Nobel Lecture delivered on video by the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature Harold Pinter to an audience projected on three large screens at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm and simultaneously transmitted on Channel Four in the UK on the evening of 7 December 2005. The 46-minute television transmission was introduced by friend and fellow playwright David Hare. Subsequently, the full text and streaming video formats were posted for the public on the Nobel Prize and Swedish Academy official websites. Pinter's Nobel Lecture has been the source of much debate. A privately-printed limited edition, Art, Truth and Politics: The Nobel Lecture, is published by Faber and Faber (16 March 2006). It is also published in The Essential Pinter by Grove Press (10 Oct. 2006) and in the "Appendix" of Harold Pinter, the revised and enlarged edition of Pinter's official authorized biography by Michael Billington (2007). Many print and online periodicals also published the full text of Pinter's Nobel Lecture, including Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), in May 2006, with permission from the Nobel Foundation.
DVD and VHS video recordings of Pinter's Nobel Lecture (without Hare's introduction) are produced and distributed by Illuminations.
Art, Truth and Politics: The Nobel Lecture
In his highly-controversial Nobel Lecture Art, Truth and Politics, speaking with obvious difficulty while seated in a wheelchair, Pinter distinguishes between the search for truth in art and the avoidance of truth in politics (5–10).
He describes his own artistic process of creating The Homecoming and Old Times, following an initial line or word or image, calling "the author's position" an "odd one" as, experiencing the "strange moment … of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence," he must "play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek" during which "the search for the truth … has to be faced, right there, on the spot." Distinguishing among his plays The Birthday Party, Mountain Language, and Ashes to Ashes, he segues into his transitions from "the search for truth" in art and "the entirely different set of problems" facing the artist in "Political theatre" to the avoidance of seeking "truth" in "power politics" (5–9).
He asserts: Charging the United States with having "supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War," leading to "hundreds of thousands of deaths," Pinter asks: "Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy?" Then he answers his own question: "The answer is yes, they did take place, and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it" (9–10).
Revisiting arguments from his political essays and speeches of the past decade, Pinter reiterates:
In imagery recalling his description of "speech" as "a constant stratagem to cover nakedness", Pinter adds:
Toward the end of the lecture, after reading two poems referring to "blood in the streets", "deaths", "dead bodies", and "death" by fellow Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda ("I'm Explaining a Few Things") and himself ("Death"), in a whimsically-humble gesture, Pinter offers to "volunteer" for the "job" of "speech writer" for President George W. Bush, penning a ruthless message of fierce aggression masquerading as moral struggle of good versus evil yet finally proffering the "authority" of his (Bush's) "fist" (17–22). Pinter demands prosecution of Tony Blair in the International Criminal Court, while pointing out, with irony, that he would do the same for Bush had he not refused to "ratify" that Court (18). Pinter concludes his Nobel Lecture with a call for "unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies" as "a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all," one which he regards as "in fact mandatory," for, he warns, "If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man" (23–24).
Critical response
In an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education on 11 November 2005, entitled "Pinter's Plays, Pinter's Politics," Middlebury College English professor Jay Parini observes that "In the weeks that have passed since Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize in Literature, there has been incessant chatter on both sides of the Atlantic, some of it unflattering," as "from the right, in particular, the American reaction to the Pinter award has been one of outrage," whereas "the reaction to the award from Pinter's peers––Michael Frayn, David Hare, Tom Stoppard, and others––has been uniformly positive"; in response to naysayers, Parini concludes: "it may be true this time around that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to the right man for the right reasons. Few writers in our time have demonstrated such a passionate concern for victims of oppression, whether in the family's living room or in the torturer's faraway bunker, as Harold Pinter. And few dramatists have been so vastly influential, transforming our basic sense of what happens when we enter a theater."
In response to his videotaped Nobel Lecture broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK, heated critical debate about Pinter spiked in the public media and spread throughout the blogosphere. Such criticism of Pinter encompassed thousands of commentaries and focused mostly on his political activism, particularly his purported "anti-Americanism" and his generally-"leftist" views. Billington observes that "the reactions to Pinter's Nobel Prize and Lecture" were "fascinating" and "overwhelmingly positive," though he thinks "it is worth picking out the few negative ones" as examples. He observes, "The most startling fact was that Pinter's Nobel Lecture on 7 December was totally ignored by the BBC," adding: "You would have thought that a living British dramatist's views on his art and global politics might have been of passing interest to a public service broadcaster"; yet "There was ... no reference to the speech on any of BBC TV's news bulletins that night or indeed on its current affairs programme, Newsnight" (Harold Pinter 424). While "in the press, there was also a handful of attacks on both the award and the Lecture," Billington dispatches criticisms by three of them: "the normally sensible Johan Hari," who "dismissed the Lecture in advance [of its broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK] as a 'rant' and falsely claimed that Pinter would have refused to resist Hitler"; "in fact," Billington says, Pinter "has repeatedly said that, had he been of age, he would have accepted conscription in World War II" (424–25). "More predictably, Christopher Hitchens was wheeled out to dismiss Pinter as 'a bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long' ", and, finally, Billington cites Scottish historian Niall Ferguson's "attack" on the Lecture in The Daily Telegraph, quoting in part Ferguson's statement that in his Nobel Lecture Pinter " 'pretend[s] that [US] crimes were equivalent to those of its Communist opponents ...' "––a distortion according to both Billington and Pinter: "he never made any comparison in his speech between atrocities committed by the Soviet Union and China and those of America"; " 'All I ever said,' [Pinter] retorts, 'is that Soviet atrocities were comprehensively documented but that American actions weren't. I didn't go into comparisons as to who killed more people as if it were a contest. Ferguson distorted the whole bloody thing' " (Qtd. in Billington, Harold Pinter 425). Billington also points out that the Harold Pinter Archive in the British Library contains "two large boxes containing the thousands of letters Pinter received from friends, colleagues, public eminences and total strangers applauding both the prize and his political stance" (425). The "Harold Pinter Community" Forum hosted on HaroldPinter.org, Pinter's official Website, illustrates further critical debate among its participants about Pinter's politics.
Bibliography
See also
External links
- . © Illuminations, 2006.
- at Faber and Faber (Pinter's publisher in the UK).
- in The Essential Pinter, published by Grove Press (Pinter's publisher in the U.S.).
- in Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) 121.3 (2006): 811–18.
- for Harold Pinter at nobelprize.org.
- The Official Website of the International Playwright Harold Pinter.
- , Introduced by David Hare, More 4, UK, 7 Dec. 2005. Google video. ("49:35 - Nov 16, 2008").
- Video (46 mins.) and "The Lecture in Text Format" in the original English and in French, Swedish, and German translations at nobelprize.org.
- . © Illuminations, 2005. RealPlayer Video (46 mins.).
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