Awarding this year's Nobel Prize in literature to British playwright Harold Pinter is giving the recipient an opportunity to mount a stage of enormous proportions, and his acceptance speech in Stockholm next month may be the most provocative, fiery and influential address ever given on this august occasion.
In recent years, Pinter has been an outspoken critic of American (and British) foreign policy, and it is far from unlikely that he will use the Nobel podium to great dramatic effect, denouncing what he sees, in the Bush administration, as a perversion of ethics, faith and social democracy.
I was intrigued to read an article about Pinter's political views in the International Herald Tribune (Oct. 29-30). In that article James Traub, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, lambastes Pinter for "politics so extreme that they're almost impossible to parody." He claims that in the United States, at least, "it is hard to think of anyone save Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal who would not choke on Pinter's bile" -- further pointing out that, in Europe, views such as Pinter's are more common among the "anti-American left."