Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to re: This is why it's on Flame.

The simple idea.
Mary Anne — (archived)

Frankly, I don't think Hemingway holds a candle to Camus, either. I don't like Hemingway. He says nothing to me. That doesn't mean he didn't earn the prize the year he won it.

Art is not objective. You can't give people a certain number of points based on true-false questions, and then award prizes based on who got the highest score.

Art focuses attention, and it achieves noteworthiness by both focusing attention on old themes using new methods, and by finding new topics that illuminate old themes. There are no new themes. Human love, joy, fear, anger and hate are pretty much as they were millennia ago. What we have achieved in the West is one thing: self-consciousness, the ability to compartmentalize and walk outside the self. Cf. Hamlet.

Pinter has focused attention on old themes using new methods as a playwright. He is no Shakespeare, and I don't think he's the equal of Eugene O'Neill either. But he may be a dark version of Oliver Goldsmith, who brought a different class of people to the stage in comedies of manners and is still remembered for a couple of them which were apparently whispered to him by a muse in a moment when inspiration took him beyond himself.

Pinter doesn't do comedy, but his plays too give representation to modern working-class people in a way that, like Goldsmith, causes people to stop and think, and excites both praise and scorn among his contemporaries. His work is consequential, even though it's not universally praised. Whether he is great will be measured by people not yet born, and certainly after both you and I are dead.

I have no doubt that you have seen lesser works of art. So have I. Please be reminded that the works that eventually found their way into the Louvre include some that were called trash by their contemporaries.

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