© THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2005
Newspapers have the general permission to publish this text in any language after December 7, 2005 5:30 p.m. hour in Stockholm. The authorization of the Foundation is required for publication in periodicals or books otherwise than in summary. The copyright notice above must accompany publication of all or major parts of the text.
Harold Pinter - Nobel Lecture
Art, Truth & Politics
In 1958 I wrote the following:
"There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, between what is true and what is false. One thing is not necessarily true or false, it can be simultaneously 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 by them but as a citizen I can not. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is wrong?
Truth in drama is forever elusive. You'll never find out exactly, but the search for it is compulsive search is clearly what drives the effort. The search is your task. Most of the time you stumble upon the truth by accident in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realizing that you did. But the real truth is there has never, drama, one and only one truth to be discovered. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect, ignore each other, tease, are blind to each other. You sometimes feel that they have found the truth in your hand for a moment, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.
I am often asked how my plays come about. I do not know. Not more than I can sum up my plays, except to say this is what happened. That what they said. That's what they did.
Most plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is, often followed by the image closely. I'll give you two examples of aftershocks that came to my mind, quite unexpectedly, followed by an image, I myself followed.
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 a case like I did in the other no other indications.
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 one way or another I knew that the person to whom it is addressed damn scissors, as the one who posed the question elsewhere.
'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In either 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, nose in 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. What we ate for dinner just now, how it was called? You call it? Why do not you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honestly. You think you're cooking for a bunch of dogs. 1 "So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed reasonable to assume they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high esteem. Did this mean that there was no mother? I did not know. But as I told myself At the time, our beginnings never know what our ends.
"Bruns. 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? Then I see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in a different quality of light, their backs, brown hair.
It is a strange moment, when you create characters that did not exist previously. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it may take the form of an avalanche that nothing can stop it. The position of the author is an odd one. In a sense, the characters do not make them welcome. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live, they are impossible to define. You certainly can not dictate to them. To some extent you engage with them in a game-ending, playing cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have on the arm of flesh and blood beings with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made 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 your feet, you are the author, from one moment to another.
But as I said, the search for truth can never stop. It can not be adjourned, it can not be postponed. It must be faced, right there, right away.
Political theater has a completely different set of problems. The sermons are to be avoided at all price. Objectivity is essential. It must be allowed to breathe an air that belongs to them. The author can not confine and constrict them to satisfy the taste or disposition or prejudice that are his. He must be prepared to approach them from different angles, in very different perspectives, knowing neither brake nor limit, take them by surprise, perhaps, from time to time, while leaving them free to follow the path they please. It does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the reverse, which is its proper function.
In my play The Birthday Party I think I run courses of very different interpretation, leaving them to operate in a dense forest of possibility before to focus ultimately on an act of submission.
Mountain Language pretends does not operate openly. It remains brutal, short and ugly. The soldiers in the play do get some fun out of the situation. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need to laugh a bit to keep morale high. As has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Language the mountain takes only twenty minutes, but it could go on for hours and hours, tirelessly repeating the same pattern over and over again for hours and hours.
Ashes to Ashes, for its part, seems to take place underwater. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the surface waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or below 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 the others died, she must die too.
Political language, as used by politicians, never ventures on such land, as most politicians, according to the evidence we have, not interested in the truth but power and 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 everyone here knows, the argument advanced to justify 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. This was not true. We were told that Iraq had relations with Al Qaeda and had therefore shared responsibility for the atrocity of September 11, 2001 in New York. We were assured that was true. This was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured that was true. It was not true.
The truth is something entirely different. The truth is related to how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.
But before I come back this time, I consider the recent history, I mean the foreign policy of the United States since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to scrutiny, if limited, inevitably, by the time we have here.
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Europe East during the postwar period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
But I argue that the crimes committed by the United States during this same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all. I think the issue must be addressed and that the truth has an obvious relationship with the current state of the world. Although constrained, to some extent by the existence of the Soviet Union's actions in the world by the United States made it clear that they had concluded it had carte blanche to do what they wanted.
Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never been, in fact, the preferred method of America. Overall, it has preferred what she called "low intensity conflict." "Low intensity conflict", it means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them to a single coup.Cela means that you infect the heart the country, that you establish a malignant tumor and you watch the gangrene bloom. Once the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - it is the same - and your friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy is the won. Was a commonplace in U.S. foreign policy in the years to which I refer.
The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. If I decide to mention here is he convincingly shows how America sees its role in the world, both then and now.
I attended a meeting held at the U.S. Embassy in London in the late 80s.
The U.S. Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the government of Nicaragua. I was there as 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 U.S. body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, himself appointed ambassador thereafter). Father Metcalf said: "Sir, I am in charge of a parish in northern Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, health center, a cultural center. We lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, health center, the cultural center. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal. They behaved like savages. I beg of you, insist that the U.S. government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity. "
Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational man, responsible and very knowledgeable. 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 time of war, innocent people always suffer. There was a frozen silence. We watched with one eye fixed. He did not flinch.
Innocent people, indeed, always suffer. Finally someone
said: "But in our case" innocent people "were the victims of a gruesome atrocity funded by your government, one among many. If Congress provides more money to the Contras, other atrocities of this kind will take place. Is not this 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 do not agree that the facts as we have been presented support your assertions," he said.
As we were leaving the Embassy a U.S. aide told me he enjoyed my plays. I did not answer.
I must 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 has for over forty years supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.
The Sandinistas were not perfect. They had their share of arrogance and their political philosophy included a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilized. Their goal was to create a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty has been 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 literacy campaign quite remarkable brought down the illiteracy rate in the country to below 15%. Free education was introduced as well as free services health. Infant mortality has fallen by a third. Polio has been eradicated.
The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist-Leninist subversion. In the eyes of the U.S. government, Nicaragua gave a dangerous example. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the level of medical care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighboring countries would ask the same questions and do the same answers. There was of course the time, El Salvador, fierce resistance to the status quo.
I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. What the media, and certainly the British government, were generally held for accurate and fair comment. Yet there was no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of military brutality, systematic or official. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were even three priests in the Sandinista government, two Jesuits and a missionary of the Maryknoll Society. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had in 1954 brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of military dictatorships were followed.
In 1989, six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador by a battalion of the regiment trained at Fort Benning Alcatl, Georgia, USA. Archbishop Romero, this brave man, was murdered while celebrating mass. An estimated 75,000 people died. Why were these people killed? They were killed because they were convinced that a better life was possible and should happen. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to challenge the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, the only right they had acquired at birth.
The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took several years and last show considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of Nicaraguans. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. That was the end of free health and free education. Business has made a comeback. 'Democracy' had prevailed.
But this 'policy' was not limited in any way to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was endless. And it's as if it never happened.
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after 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 forgotten.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Have they taken place? And are they in all cases attributable to foreign policy U.S.? The answer is yes, they took place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you never know.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it was not happening. It did not matter. It was of no interest. The crimes committed by the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about. Let the justice in America: it has delivered around the world, a quite clinical manipulation of power while masquerading as a force acting in the universal good. A case of hypnosis brilliant, even witty, highly successful.
The United States, I tell you, is without doubt the greatest show on time. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be so, but it's also very clever. Like a salesman it is out on its own and the article he sells best is love of self. Guaranteed success. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words' the American people, "as in the sentence: "I told 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. "
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 do not need to think. Simply lie on your pillow. It may be that this cushion suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. Which of certainly not worth 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 from one end to another U.S. States.
The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. They no longer see the desirability for being reticent or even devious. They play cards on the table, without distinction. Quite simply, they do not care UN, international law or critical dissent, which they feel they have no power or relevance. And then they have their bleating little lamb that follows them around the end of a leash, Great Britain, pathetic and supine.
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 is also related to the responsibility that is ours in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years without legal representation or due process, theoretically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. Not only tolerated but hardly the so-called "international community" in fact any event. This criminal outrage is being committed right now by a country that professes to be "the leader of the free world." Is what we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What the media say? They wake up from time to time we lay a small item on page six. These men were relegated to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on strike euxfont hunger, they are force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and you are sent down into the throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. That said British Foreign Minister? Nothing. Said that British Prime Minister? Nothing. And why? Because the United States has said: to criticize our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or you're against us. So Blair shuts up.
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 public intervention aimed at strengthening military and economic control of America on the Middle East and masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to prove their merits - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
We brought the Iraqi people torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, humiliation and death and we call it 'bringing freedom and democracy in the Middle East. "
How many people you have to kill before you qualify under a mass murderer and 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 Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. It has not ratified the Court International Justice. So if an American soldier or, a fortiori, an American politician, was to find the dock Bush has warned he would send the Marines. But Tony Blair, himself, has ratified the Court and may be available for prosecution can communicate his address to the Court if they're interested. He lives at 10 Downing Street, London.
Death in this context is irrelevant. Bush and Blair are both very careful to put it aside. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by U.S. bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are negligible. Their death does not exist. Nothingness. They are not even recorded as being dead. "We do not count the bodies," said the American general Tommy Franks.
the early days of the invasion was a photo published in the pages of British newspapers, we see Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later we could find, inside pages, the story and photo of another little boy of four who had no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. It was the only survivor. " When do I get my arms? He asked. The story went out the window. Well yes, Tony Blair does not tighten against him, nor does it hugged 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 a sincere speech on television cameras.
The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, safe place. 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 excerpt from "I explain some things," a poem by Pablo Neruda:
And one morning all that was on fire,
one morning the bonfires leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings, and therefore this
was on fire, gunpowder from
,
and it was blood.
Bandits with planes, with the Moors, bandits with
rings and duchesses, bandits with
black monks to bless
fell from the sky to kill children,
through the streets and children's blood
flowed simply, 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
abominate
face you've seen the blood of Spain
rising to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives! Overall
of treason
see my dead house, look at broken Spain
:
but each appears a dead house burning metal
in lieu of flowers, but each gap
of Spain Spain emerges
,
but from every dead child a rifle emerged with eyes, but
of each crime bullets are born which will one day
place your
heart.
You ask why his poetry speaks
does not dream, leaves,
the great volcanoes of his native country?
Come see the blood in the streets,
come see the blood in the streets,
come see the blood in the streets! 2
Let me clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way trying to compare Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda because I have never read elsewhere in contemporary poetry such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.
I said earlier that the United States were now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. This is indeed the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as "full spectrum dominance" (a total domination on all fronts). The term is not mine, 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 in 132 countries worldwide, with the honorable exception of Sweden, of course. We do not know how they got there, but one thing is certain is that they are there.
The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. 2000 are on high alert, ready to be launched with a warning time of 15 minutes. They develop new systems of nuclear force, known as "bunker busters" (bunker busters). The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they? Osama Bin Laden? You? Me? Doe? China? Paris? Who knows? What we know is that this infantile insanity - the possession nuclear weapons and threaten to use it - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remember that the U.S. is on a permanent war footing and does not suggest in this matter no sign of relaxation.
Thousands if not millions, of people in the United States are full of shame and anger, visibly disgusted by the actions of their government, but the current state of things, they are not a coherent political force - not yet. That said, the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States are unlikely to diminish.
I know that President Bush has to write his speeches many extremely competent, but I'd like to volunteer for the position. I propose the following short address which he can make on the 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 more at ease with men.
"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 that Saddam did not. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We do not chop people's heads. We believe in freedom. God, too. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We administer compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. Him, yes. I am not a barbarian. Him, yes. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? That is my moral authority. Try not remember that. "
The life of a writer is a highly vulnerable, almost naked. No need to cry about it. The writer makes his choice, a choice that it sticks to the skin. But it is fair to say that you are exposed to the winds, some of them icy indeed. You work alone, isolated from everything. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have built and maintained your own protection and, it could be argued, you became a politician.
I talked about death quite often this soir.Je going to read one of my poems, entitled "Death."
Where did the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
The corpse was dead when he was found?
How was the dead body found?
Who was the corpse?
Who was the father or daughter or brother Or uncle
or sister or mother or son Of
body abandoned?
Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?
The corpse was naked or dressed for a journey?
What made this body, you declared dead?
The corpse, you declared dead?
well did you know the dead body?
How did you know that the body was dead?
Have you washed the corpse
Did you close both its eyes Did you bury
body
Have you abandoned
Did you kiss the corpse
When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimeter and the image changes. We're actually looking at an endless array of reflections sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, with a dogged determination, unswerving, define, as citizens, 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 we so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.
1. Harold Pinter: The Back. Translation Éric Kahane. Gallimard, 1969.
2. Pablo Neruda: "I explain some things," in Residence on Earth, III. Translation Guy Suares. Gallimard, 1972. Translation 
Séverine Magois
Séverine Magois 