"Truth in Drama"

Truth in Drama | Dr. Radmila Nastic on Pinter

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Dr. Radmila Nastic, Professor of Philology and Arts, Serbia, gave a talk on “Truth in Drama” to our students, today, from 10.45 am to 1.30 pm.

Excerpts from her talk - 

Nobel laureate Harold Pinter is one of the greatest modern dramatists, who “cleaned the gutters of the English language, so that it ever afterwards flowed more easily and more cleanly”. 

His Nobel Prize acceptance speech titled, “Art, Truth & Politics” was in a way, a manifesto for his literary career. He says - 

There are no hard distinctions 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.

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. 

But move a millimetre and the image changes. 

We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. 

But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. 

It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man,” observes Pinter.

Then, Dr.Nastic moved on to truth in Shakespeare, by citing from his four tragedies.

The famous dictum of William Shakespeare, wherein Polonius tell Laertes, 

“Above all to thine own self be true” – can be taken as a leitmotif for all of William Shakespeare’s plays.

Hamlet has been called the consciousness of the western world, and one of the world’s advanced drama, a genius of western consciousness. 

Hamlet’s tryst with the ghost reinforces his difficulty in finding truth. He is someone who is constantly searching for truth in humanity and in himself, and in so doing, he is trying to be honest with himself. 

He has three choices in front of him. To do nothing, and to suffer silently, or to commit suicide, or to do something. 

He chooses not to be a coward. In Act V Scene II, we find that he becomes fully aware of the consequences of his own choice. 

Thence he says: “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come – the readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is’t to leave betimes, let be.”

Othello is yet another noble character – a noble Moor to be precise. Iago completely succeeds in poisoning the mind of Othello. Without learning the truth, he strangulates Desdemona in her bed. Truth comes to him after strangling her. Just before he stabs himself in the guts, he says thus -

Soft you: a word or two before you go.

I have done the state some service, and they know’t… Of one that loved not wisely but too well…

PS: The PG & Research Department of English wishes to thank Prof. Cherian Kurien (Retd. Faculty, Dept of English) for giving us the opportunity to meet up with Dr.Nastic. Thank you Sir.

To be contd…