Beckettian Elements in Pinter's Nobel Lecture

Michael Billington's report on Harold Pinter's Nobel lecture begins by noting the Beckettian aspects of Pinter's powerful performance, particularly the way Pinter appeared to literally embody the deteriorating subject found in so many of Beckett's texts. The figure of Pinter, confined to a wheelchair, legs draped with a blanket, juxtaposed with an image of himself as a younger, healthier man, reminded Billington of Hamm from Beckett's Endgame.

As Ira and I watched pre-recorded lecture (broadcast in prime time on Swedish television), we remarked on the Beckettian aura surrounding the entire event as well. We were thinking primarily of Pinter's dramatic pauses and his effective use of silence and ironic understatement to punctuate a gripping speech that made its polemical points in a measured manner. But Billington is right, I think, to find physical parallels with Beckett. The lecture, for instance, was filmed in a hospital where Pinter has been staying due to leg pains, which remind one of the suffering endured by the protagonists of Molloy. This is not, of course, to suggest that Pinter's mind has suffered the sort of deterioration that afflicts Moran and Molloy.

I wish Pinter's Nobel lecture had taken place a week earlier so I could have screened it for students in my class, who had to write their final papers on Beckettian elements in one of the postmodern novels we read.