I'm going to have to take the minority view, apparently, when I suggest
that Pinter's poetry and political essays are just as much a part of
Pinter's body of work as the plays, demonstrably and identifiably so. A
reader needs only look at an early play like "The Dumb Waiter" (1957)
and compare the rhythm, imagery and versification of its dialogue to
poems like "American Football" and "Death"; only look at the cruelty of
Goldberg and McCann in "The Birthday Party" (1957) and compare it to the
cruelty of Bush and Blair as characterized in the Nobel speech
yesterday. The poems stand a closer look.
There's a sense in which Pinter's being disingenuous when he makes the
separation between "writer" and "citizen"; I think he may be doing so as
a modest defense of his early, seemingly more personal and hermetic
plays. In any case, it's true that the perspective of any citizen as he
or she, say, reads a newspaper, is a different perspective than that of
a poet when he or she sits down in front of a blank piece of paper.
These perspectives inform each other, however, as they must, emerging
from the same pair of eyes, from the same mind, from the same heart.
Some critic (it may have been Pinter himself) once described his plays
as contemplating "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet"; these same
weasels, Pinter appears to be saying, have now gained occupancy of the
White House and 10 Downing Street. This realization, perhaps, is what
changed his heart and his pen after 1980, when Reagan and Thatcher came
to power.
A good summation, by the way, in today's UK Guardian from Michael
Billington. Billington closes with:
"One columnist predicted, before the event, that we were due for a
Pinter rant. But this was not a rant in the sense of a bombastic
declaration. This was a man delivering an attack on American foreign
policy, and Britain's subscription to it, with a controlled anger and a
deadly irony. And, paradoxically, it reminded us why Pinter is such a
formidable dramatist. He used every weapon in his theatrical technique
to reinforce his message. And, by the end, it was as if Pinter himself
had been physically recharged by the moral duty to express his innermost
feelings."
Whole thing here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1662115,00.html
Best wishes, and oddly recharged myself after listening to this speech,
George
Dominic Fox wrote:
> I wouldn't agree that the "writer" and "citizen" occupy two separate
> ontological realms. And in any case I think he has them the wrong way
> round. Art makes truths that are *less* complex than reality. What he
> is doing in standing up for what he thinks is right is producing a
> truth. Most people would recognise that his denunciations of Bush and
> Blair are simplifications of reality, rhetorical triangulations. They
> may allow a truth to be grasped, but they are art-works as much as
> they are acts of citizenship. There isn't that much of a difference
> between the acceptance speech and the poems. There is quite a
> difference, and it is a difference in terms of art, between both and
> the plays.
>
> Dominic
>
>
>
--
George Hunka
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http://www.ghunka.com
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