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Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize in Literature Inaugural Lecture
December 2005
"The majority of politicians, on the evidence available
to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance
of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people
remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the
truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast
tapestry of lies, upon which we feed" (Harold Pinter).
Harold Pinter's lecture in December 2005 offered a diagnosis of Washington's malaise and a prescription. It is posted here today, November 4, 2008, to celebrate Barack Hussein Obama's success in winning the White House, a day in which despair gave way to hope; to the promise that a dawn of truth and justice could very well be on the horizon.
In 1958 I wrote the following:
'There are no hard distinctions
between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and
what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can
be both true and false.'
I believe that these assertions still
make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through
art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a
citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?
Truth in drama
is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is
compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search
is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the
dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which
seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have
done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as
one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths
challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other,
ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes
you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips
through your fingers and is lost.
I have often been asked how my
plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except
to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what
they did.
Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or
an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I
shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue
into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.
The plays are
The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What
have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'
In each case I had no further information.
In
the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and
was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had
probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed
didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either,
for that matter.
'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's
hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each
case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened
visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.
In
the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and
ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a
racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was
his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time
later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max),
'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something.
The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it?
Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're
cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me
reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly
the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did
this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told
myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.
'Dark.' A
large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a
woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?'
the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at
the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of
light, her back to them, her hair dark.
It's a strange moment,
the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no
existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory,
although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's
position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the
characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with,
they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To
a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse,
blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have
people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an
individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you
are unable to change, manipulate or distort.
So language in art
remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a
frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.
But
as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be
adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on
the spot.
Political theatre presents an entirely different set of
problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is
essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The
author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or
disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a
variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives,
take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give
them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work.
And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in
fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.
In
my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to
operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focusing on an
act of subjugation.
Mountain Language pretends to no such range
of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in
the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that
torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their
spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu
Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it
could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern
repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.
Ashes
to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under
water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves,
dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody
there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows,
reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape,
a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.
But as they died, she must die too.
Political
language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this
territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available
to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance
of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people
remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the
truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast
tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
As every single person here
knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam
Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass
destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about
appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true.
We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared
responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We
were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that
Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true.
It was not true.
The truth is something entirely different. The
truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the
world and how it chooses to embody it.
But before I come back to
the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean
United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I
believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least
some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow
here.
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and
throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic
brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of
independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
But
my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only
been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone
acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this
must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where
the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the
existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout
the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to
do what it liked.
Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never
in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred
what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity
conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you
dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the
heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch
the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to
death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the
great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera
and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US
foreign policy in the years to which I refer.
The tragedy of
Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a
potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then
and now.
I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.
The
United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money
to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was
a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most
important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The
leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the
ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am
in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built
a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A
few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed
everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They
raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal
manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government
withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'
Raymond
Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly
sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He
listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said,
'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.'
There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.
Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.
Finally
somebody said: 'But in this case "innocent people" were the victims of
a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If
Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind
will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore
guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens
of a sovereign state?'
Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,' he said.
As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.
I
should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following
statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding
Fathers.'
The United States supported the brutal Somoza
dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led
by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking
popular revolution.
The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They
possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy
contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were
intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a
stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished.
Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back
from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two
thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign
reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free
education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality
was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.
The United States
denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the
view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If
Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic
justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and
education and achieve social unity and national self respect,
neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same
things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status
quo in El Salvador.
I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies'
which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a
'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and
certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But
there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista
government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of
systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever
murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the
government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian
dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The
United States had brought down the democratically elected government of
Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been
victims of successive military dictatorships.
Six of the most
distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the
Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of
the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That
extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying
mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed?
They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and
should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as
communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo,
the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression,
which had been their birthright.
The United States finally
brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and
considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000
dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were
exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into
the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business
returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.
But this
'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was
conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it
never happened.
The United States supported and in many cases
engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after
the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay,
Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El
Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted
upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds
of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they
take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign
policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable
to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.
It never
happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't
happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the
United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but
very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to
America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power
worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a
brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
I put
to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the
road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is
also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most
saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American
presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in
the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to
defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people
to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of
the American people.'
It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is
actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American
people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't
need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be
suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very
comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people
living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women
imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.
The
United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no
longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its
cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give
a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent,
which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own
bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and
supine Great Britain.
What has happened to our moral sensibility?
Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term
very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not
only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the
acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of
people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal
representation or due process, technically detained forever. This
totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva
Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's
called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being
committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the
free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What
does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item
on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which
indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike,
being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these
force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck
up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture.
What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What
has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not?
Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in
Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or
against us. So Blair shuts up.
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit
act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt
for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary
military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross
manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended
to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle
East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having
failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of
military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands
and thousands of innocent people.
We have brought torture,
cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder,
misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing
freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.
How many people do you
have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and
a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have
thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before
the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever.
He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice.
Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds
himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines.
But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for
prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're
interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.
Death in
this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away
on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American
bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are
of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not
even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the
American general Tommy Franks.
Early in the invasion there was a
photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony
Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said
the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an
inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had
been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my
arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't
holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor
the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt
and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.
The
2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their
graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The
mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the
dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.
Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things':
And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.
Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.
And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets! *
Let
me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no
way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda
because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful
visceral description of the bombing of civilians.
I have said
earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its
cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is
now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is
theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and
space and all attendant resources.
The United States now occupies
702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with
the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how
they got there but they are there all right.
The United States
possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand
are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes
warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker
busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their
own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama
bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know
is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of
nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political
philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a
permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.
Many
thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are
demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's
actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force -
yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing
daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.
I know that
President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would
like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short
address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave,
hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling,
sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.
'God
is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is
bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one.
He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads
off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the
democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a
compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and
compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a
dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are.
I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral
authority. And don't you forget it.'
A writer's life is a highly
vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that.
The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say
that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are
out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection -
unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own
protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.
I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called 'Death'.
Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?
Who was the dead body?
Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?
Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?
Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?
What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?
Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body
When
we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate.
But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at
a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to
smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the
truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds
which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual
determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and
our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is
in fact mandatory.
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.
* Extract from "I'm Explaining a Few
Things" translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected
Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of
The Random House Group Limited.
© The Nobel Foundation 2005 |
