Pinter's Nobel speech condemns U.S. policy
Last Updated: Wednesday, December 7, 2005 | 6:45 PM ET
CBC Arts
Pinter, 75, who has been battling cancer for years, was forbidden by doctors from going to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize. Instead he delivered his address through a video recording, in which he was seated in a wheelchair with his legs under a red blanket.
- RELATED STORY: Pinter hospitalized days before Nobel Prize ceremony
In a speech peppered with the potent silences that are often called "Pinteresque," he accused the U.S. and its ally Britain of trading in death and employing "language to keep thought at bay."
Harold Pinter makes a speech broadcast from England to Swedish spectators and media at the Swedish Royal Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, Dec. 7, 2005. (AP photo)
His lecture, entitled Art, Truth and Politics, emphasized the importance of truth in art before decrying its perceived absence in politics.
In a voice that was sometimes hoarse with illness, he said politicians feel it is "essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives."
President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair came in for the harshest criticism, but Pinter expanded the criticism to "the majority of politicians" who weave "a vast tapestry of lies" to keep themselves in power.
Pinter said that since the Second World War, history has been littered with examples of Washington exercising "a clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good."
The war in Iraq was just the latest example, he said, also citing the U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua and U.S. intervention in Greece, Indonesia, Guatemala, Haiti and Chile, among many examples.
"Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. But you wouldn't know it. It never happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. There was no interest," he said.
He concluded by calling for an "unflinching, unswerving and fierce intellectual determination as citizens to define the real truth of our lives and our societies.
"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."
Even while discussing his plays, he made digs at the U.S., saying of his own use of humour that "torturers become easily bored; they need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up."
Pinter gave insight into the genesis of his plays, saying the first seed was often a single line like the opening of The Homecoming: "What have you done with the scissors?"
The next stage of his creative process is to imagine characters, at first called A, B and C, who would later become people with names, made of "flesh and blood," he said.
Pinter's publisher will be in Stockholm Saturday to collect his prize, valued at 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million).
