Huh? Pinter doesn't just say "these things never happened" - he is being 
heavily ironic about those "endless official denials" k-punk mentions.
"The Lacanian" - what? Ah, that major French psycho-dramatist who wrote 
"the truest poetry is the most feigning", the touchstone, if one may put 
it like that, of modern thought, including Pinter's dramas. Good thing 
we're no longer shackled to lockjawed oldies like Wm Sh. in these 
progressive intellectual times. But no glaring fissures, please. (GULP)
mj
Dominic Fox wrote:

>k-punk's take (http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007016.html)
>is quite close to my own here:
>
>"What troubles me about Pinter's recent, well-discussed Nobel address
>is what usually troubles me about Chomsky: surely he is telling us
>nothing that we don't already know. The problem is not the denial of
>facts - who, after Guantanamo, 'extraordinary rendition' and Abu
>Ghraib, cannot be unaware that America engages in torture? - but
>denial in that other sense: a disavowal of practical and libidinal
>complicity in those facts. It is not that, as Pinter says, 'these
>things never happened'; these things, whilst the subject of endless
>official denials, are well-known to have happened, which is worse.
>Pinter's address, after all, was a kind of answer to the question 'is
>a politics of truth still thinkable?' What was most noticeable about
>the lecture was the glaring fissure between the first and the second
>half; the first half, which corresponded to the 'writer's truth' that
>'there are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is
>unreal', the second to the 'citizen's truth', which demands a firm
>demarcation between real and unreal, the true and the false. What was
>disappointingly absent from Pinter's lecture - but thankfully is
>present in his drama - was the Lacanian thesis that truth can only
>appear as a fiction. A shame, surely, if the political role of
>literature is reduced to offering brute (and brutalized) tracings of
>the empirical."
>
>  
>

-- 
M.J.Walker - no blog - no webpage - no idea

Nous ne faisons que nous entregloser. - Montaigne