Hi all
I read Pinter's speech a couple of weeks ago (a friend of mine was
translating it and I couldn't resist asking for a preview, despite her
swearing on stacks of bibles not to pass it on...) I've read quite a lot of
his political addresses - in fact, published one in Masthead years ago - and
this struck me as particularly good, and hearteningly brave, and nuanced as
well, given Pinter's predilection for harsh statement. I suspect it might be
a playwright thing (Brecht's thing about "crude thinking"); or in any case,
the Pinter kind of playwright thing. George, I can't come at Pinter's
poems: I think his poetic is profound in plays like Ashes to Ashes and
Mountain Language, and disappointingly truncated in those blistering
political verses he serves up. I can't but think them a misuse of poetry, of
what poetry offers as its own specific freedom; poetry's political force may
in part be the tracing of fracture and wounding, in a profound sense, and
the refusal to smooth over or heal these things, but poetry's freedom -
which is part of that - for me lies in its radical uselessness. (More to
come when I work out what I mean...)
I too disagree with Pinter - or think he is being somewhat disingenuous -
about the distinction of truth between the writer and the citizen, or to be
more accurate, about the ambiguities that reside in art that must be
resisted in political life. There is a teasing something to be inferred
about language itself under all this that Pinter evades: why is one kind of
deception (art) "good" and others "bad"? Maybe it's as simple as Picasso's
"art is the lie that reveals the truth"; that the deceptions of art open out
reality in an infinity of ways, whereas the lies of politicians close it
down, narrow it to a single "truth" hammered into our brains from above. I
sometimes do think that the conflicts that are splitting our world at the
moment are between ideologies of simpleness and complexity, those who claim
the world is one reductive thing and those who claim it to be plural,
multiple, subtle and contradictory.
Anyway, that's probably enough from me -
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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