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.
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 that 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.
This is an extract of the speech delivered by Harold Pinter via a
video recording on being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on
7 December 2005.
Feature: Art, truth and politics
Date posted: 12 Nov 2011Author: STC