Breaking an inclination to silence, here - to say that makes a minority
of at least two, George. This was kicking against the pricks with an
unconquered flame. One can get too prissy about "art".
Martin
George Hunka wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>>
>
>
--
M.J.Walker - no blog - no webpage - no idea
Nous ne faisons que nous entregloser. - Montaigne
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