“I have mixed feelings about words myself.”
From “Writing for the Theatre,” a speech Harold Pinter, winner of the Nobel prize for Literature, gave at the National Student Drama Festival at Bristol in 1962:
If I were to state any moral precept it might be: Beware of the writer who puts forward his concern for you to embrace, who leaves you in no doubt of his worthiness, his usefulness, his altruism, who declares that his heart is in the right place, and ensures that it can seen in full view, a pulsating mass where characters ought to be. What is presented, so much of the time, as a body of active and positive thought is in fact a body lost in a prison of empty definition and cliché.
This kind of writer clearly trusts words absolutely. I have mixed feelings about words myself. Moving among them, sorting them out, watching them appear on the page, from this I derive considerable pleasure. But at the same time I have another strong feeling about words which amounts to nothing less than nausea. Such a weight of words confronts us day in, day out, words spoken in a context such as this, words written by me and by others, the bulk of it a stale dead terminology; ideas endlessly repeated and permutated become platitudinous, trite, meaningless. Given this nausea, it’s very easy to be overcome by it and step back into paralysis. I imagine most writers know something of this kind of paralysis. But if it is possible to confront this nausea, to follow it to its hilt, to move through it and out of it, then it is possible to say that something has occurred, that something has even been achieved.
Language, under these conditions, is a highly ambiguous business. So often, below the word spoken, is the thing known and unspoken. My characters tell me so much and no more, with reference to their experience, their aspirations, their motives, their history. Between my lack of biographical data about them and the ambiguity of what they say lies a territory which is not only worthy of exploration but which it is compulsory to explore. You and I, the characters which grow on a page, most of the time we’re inexpressive, giving little away, unreliable, elusive, evasive, obstructive, unwilling. But it’s out of these attributes that a language arises. A language, I repeat, where under what is said, another thing is being said.
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From The Birthday Party:
PETEY. There’s a new show coming to the Palace.
MEG. On the pier?
PETEY. No. The Palace, in the town.
MEG. Stanley could have been in it, if it was on the pier.
PETEY. This is a straight show.
MEG. What do you mean?
PETEY. No dancing or singing.
MEG. What do they do then?
PETEY. They just talk.Pause.
MEG. Oh.
Photo: Dirk Bogarde and James Fox in Joseph Losey’s The Servant, screenplay by Harold Pinter.