Friday, November 04, 2005
Pinter Redux
Via Max Goss at Right Reason, I bring to you a link in which Roger Kimball expands on some of his thoughts, posted here by Matthew, regarding the recent Nobel Prize for Literature. Here is the lead paragraph:
And from the last paragraph:
In interest of full disclosure, I have not read Pinter yet, but I intend to. I'd like to see what all the hype is about. It doesn't give me oodles of hope for the experience, though, when a man whose taste I greatly admire finds him middling at best, and long ago at that. But I shall hereby pledge to try to suspend my own judgment till I've had a chance to check 'im out.
Quoth Harold Pinter: “I have no idea why they gave me the award.” The award, of course, was the Nobel Prize for … well, supposedly for literature. In the case of Harold Pinter, however, literature had nothing do with the prize. How could it? By our reckoning, Pinter has done nothing notable in that direction since The Caretaker (1959). Even at his early best (The Birthday Party, say, or The Dumb Waiter, both 1957), Pinter’s was always a small and highly derivative literary gift—more of a handout, really. Indeed, we would suggest that his talent was not so much literary as histrionic, one of literature’s degeneracies. What Pinter dispensed was a certain tone—an atmospherics of menace, borrowed largely from Samuel Beckett. It’s chief effect, when you first encountered it, was to make semi-articulate dissatisfaction seem like existential profundity.
And from the last paragraph:
Many people reacted to the Swedish Academy’s latest flirtation with absurdity by quoting the English wit who, writing about Harold Pinter’s plays, observed that Pinter was “a man of few words, most of them silly.”
In interest of full disclosure, I have not read Pinter yet, but I intend to. I'd like to see what all the hype is about. It doesn't give me oodles of hope for the experience, though, when a man whose taste I greatly admire finds him middling at best, and long ago at that. But I shall hereby pledge to try to suspend my own judgment till I've had a chance to check 'im out.
