"I idealisk riktning." So stated Alfred Nobel's 1896 will as the determining criterion for the Nobel prize for literature. As so often happens, however, the intent of the dead remains a mystery. "In an idealisk direction." Idealisk, problematically, means either "ideal" or "idealist" (themselves not the clearest of terms), depending on the context. "Ideal" suggests an emphasis on an author's quality, an assessment of the words themselves for whatever stylistic, thematic, or other merit they might possess. The latter "—ist" suggests a practice, a movement, a goal—not what the words are, but what they are meant to do. Words with an agenda. Not surprisingly, "-isk" as "-ist" flirts heavily with politics, and when the prize committee favors this latter interpretation, politically vocal authors win. Perhaps more puzzling is the fact that the committee would dispense at all with the former interpretation, since "ideal" is certainly more typical of literary prizes and arguably less partisan. Are we afraid of defining what "good" literature is, let alone "best" literature? "Loudest" literature, by comparison, proves a far simpler task. More so than practically any living playwright, the 2005 laureate Harold Pinter deserved to win the ultimate accolade for what he produced, a dazzling array of dramas already canonical throughout the world. More likely, however, Pinter won because his flavor of political "idealism" resonated with Nobel decision makers. Right choice, wrong reason. Or, more aptly, right idea, wrong idealisk.

Idealisk—adj., Swedish, "ideal," as in "the best," "peerless," "without compare," or "unsurpassed."

"Comedy of menace," a phrase coined a half-century ago by critic Irving Wardle, has since become ubiquitously applied to Pinter's work. These days, discussion of the Pinteresque fixates on its "menace," though his plays sparkle with brilliant comedy. From his very first play The Room (1957), Pinter could hinge the best laughs of a scene on a single word, a "mot in juste" powerful enough to topple supposed reality. By Pinter's most recent stage play, Celebration (1999), the comedy is more loudly farcical and (off-)colorful—perhaps in response to a new generation's taste, perhaps the inevitable rub-off of Hollywood projects, or perhaps the mark of his increasing iconoclasm onstage and off. There's the astonishing four-part riff on the line "All mothers want to be fucked by their sons," or the way "You don't have to speak English to enjoy good food" becomes "You don't have to speak English to enjoy sex," and its inevitable response, "I've known one or two Belgian people for example who love sex and they don't speak a word of English. The same applies to Hungarians." The childishness of the characters' logical absurdities combined with the "adult" material of that logic is choreographed as delicately as Pinter's earlier one-liners but with symphonic proportions.

Such comedy relies heavily on precision in timing, on the right thing being said at the right time. Pinter's great insight into horror, comedy's obverse, is its reliance on the universality of time. The nightmare scenarios of early plays like The Room, The Birthday Party, and A Slight Ache build on archetypes, even clichés, that tap into age-old collective human phobia. The Room offers a more sophisticated rendering of the monster lurking in every child's basement. One deliciously creepy scene of The Birthday Party plays on our fear of the dark, and its villains' intrusion on domestic security recasts a theme as old as literature. The fear of the usurping or overpowering alter-ego—think Dorian Grey, much of Poe, even some of Ovid's Metamorphoses —creates the final horror of A Slight Ache. Later in Pinter's playwriting career, the "monsters" become more solidly rooted in our reality—the Holocaust that haunts Ashes to Ashes, or the cultural suppression at the heart of Mountain Language. Yet even in these works, the specters refuse containment in space and time. They occupy the uncertain and ever-shifting dimension of history left unspoken or half-forgotten. Because Pinter's bogeymen can so easily trace their genealogy to shadows, the words they utter have the effect of earthquakes. A lion's roar shocks no one, but a single word from someone so barely real holds unbearable menace.

Pinter's nuanced understanding of the possibilities of spoken performance over the written word becomes most evident in his adaptations of others' fiction for the stage and screen. His screenplay of The French Lieutenant's Woman, for example, retains all the gaming and metanarrative of John Fowles' simultaneous homage and mockery of the Victorian novel. But where Fowles' stunts of multiple narrators and even multiple endings remain largely on the level of the text, Pinter gives the wit a pulse: his Woman adds two characters, Anna and Mike, actors preparing to play their Victorian counterparts in a film-within-a-film.

Even more daring is the screenplay Pinter co-wrote for Marcel Proust's behemoth Remembrance of Things Past. Apart from the tired movie voice-over or the archaic Greek chorus, film and theater have found few techniques to mimic the omnipresent narrator embedded in any book—a narrator particularly integral to Proust's work. Rather than accepting the vanished narrator as a necessary handicap, Pinter exploits the absence as an opportunity for greater subtlety. At one point, the screenplay reproduces a scene in which a married couple invites a friend to join them in Venice the following spring. He declines, informing them that he is dying and will almost certainly be dead long before the trip. The couple, about to leave for a dinner party, suddenly begins bickering about whether the wife should wear black or red shoes with her red dress. In the novel, the scene almost inarguably critiques the pair as callous and shallow social-climbers. Acted, however, the exchange is far more ambiguous—without a mediating narrator to explain how much performance is the actor's and how much the character's, the absurd juxtaposition of death and shoes could equally depict the pathos of our meager defenses against grief.

Idealisk—adj., Swedish, "idealist;" pursuing or guided by ideals, by the conception of absolute perfection.

To interpret idealisk as something closer to "idealist," of course, makes all such aesthetic considerations practically moot. An "idealist direction" makes how or even what a writer writes secondary to the massive and nebulous why. "Idealist" as an adjective is about as adverbial as they come. It describes the invisible authorial force propelling words along towards utopia, drawing readers and critics along Pied Piper-fashion. "Idealist" evaluates the ends of the artistic journey, not the means.

Even under the assumption that a writer's professed motives match his or her actual ones, the lauding of idealist behavior necessarily raises the question of whose ideal. In other words, politics rule. The Nobel committee comes under perpetual fire for the alleged politicization of the awards process, typically for being "too left-wing." The 2004 winner, Elfriede Jelinek, was denounced as a "militant left-wing feminist" in an imbroglio that culminated in the resignation of one committee member. Critics also cite statistics: in the past ten years, half the literature prize winners are or were actives members of communist parties. While 2001 winner V.S. Naipaul falls firmly right-of-center and 2003's J.M. Coetzee largely confines his activism to animal rights, Pinter's politics find ample company in the laureate line-up.

Pinter, a self-described socialist, is best known in politics for his denunciations of Bush, Blair, and the war in Iraq. At a 2003 reading of his collection of poems "War," Pinter called the Prime Minister "a deluded idiot" and "a mass murderer" for aiding Bush's military agenda. His criticism of Bush broadened to include all Americans for allowing the administration, "a bloodthirsty wild animal," to govern. When taken to task for the bestial comparison, Pinter fired back, "All I can say is: take a look at Donald Rumsfeld's face and the case is made."

In his half-century career, Pinter's political outspokenness comes as a fairly recent development. Yet its roots, a mistrust of power and a horrified fascination with violence, are obvious as far back as we can trace Pinter's biography. A conscientious objector since his school days, he cites early childhood experiences as a Jew and a Londoner in World War II as formative of his adamant anti-war stance. Still, his early and middle works lack overtly political material, and in a 1971 interview Pinter was still saying, "Politics just don't interest me." By the end of the decade, however, the facts spoke otherwise. Appalled at American anti-communist involvement in Central and South America, Pinter traveled to the region and published a steady stream of articles on the subject. American policy, he said, amounted to "kiss my arse or I'll kick your head in."

Though the Americas, particularly Cuba, received the bulk of Pinter's political attentions, his interests roamed east as well: South Africa, Vietnam, and East Timor all gave "cause for despair," while in China, by contrast, "there exists a kind of purity and a kind of social solidarity and unity that most countries simply don't possess." More recently, Pinter helped spearhead the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader and convicted war criminal. He has also championed Kurdish human and political rights and condemned their violent repression in Turkey and across the Middle East. As his plays expanded from the tight interiors and enclosed microcosms of his early work, his political ideology found a natural presence on stage. Mountain Language (1988) dealt implicitly but unmistakably with Kurds in Turkey, while Press Conference (2003) parodied British and American jingoism as an unnamed government calls abduction and rape "an educational process."

Pinter criticized numerous grave injustices that will forever shame the last quarter century of world history. However, his prescience and heroism as a political and artistic "man of ideas" is to my mind irreparably marred by the blind spots, inconsistencies, and crude rhetoric that litter his statements throughout the years. His admiration of Chinese "solidarity," for example, came at the height of the Cultural Revolution, which particularly victimized artists, writers, and intellectuals deemed subversive or disturbing of the peace. How would the writer of The Birthday Party—iconoclastic and unsettling, to say the least—have fared in such a climate? He takes Bush to task for the prisoner atrocities of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib by American soldiers and officers, but largely exonerates Milosevic for genocidal atrocities in Kosovo, arguing that subordinates were to blame.

It may seem beside the point to criticize a political philosophy for word choice. But as a career wordsmith whose meteoric success sprung from his keen ear for human speech, Pinter deserves to be held to the most rigorous code of linguistic accuracy, fairness, and discernment. Here again Pinter has failed. He lowers the level of debate with sweeping generalities—"Bullying is a time-honored American tradition" for which "there is only one comparison: Nazi Germany"—and acerbic but ultimately unproductive name-calling—Blair is a "poodle" and his country a "whipped dog," Bush a "monster."

One quiet tragedy of Pinter's verbal assault on his political adversaries has been his own art. Apart from the aforementioned four-page "Press Conference," Pinter has not written a play in five years, with no plans to do so while politics supersede his other concerns. His return to "poetry" undermines his earlier achievements by linking him to such literary mediocrities as his 2003 poem "Democracy":

There's no escape.
The big pricks are out.
They'll fuck everything in sight.
Watch your back.

At first glance, "Democracy" may seem wholly irreconcilable with masterpieces of nuance and originality like The Homecoming and Betrayal. Yet maybe the plays' idiosyncratic genius and the poem's rough-hewn melodrama derive from the same quirk of the intellect: a predisposition toward the minuscule, which at best leads to virtuosity and at worst to myopia. Pinter's natural scale, as the plays attest, is room-sized. Characters' histories are life-size, if that; their battles fought and decided sentence by sentence, even word by word. When such a finely tuned consciousness attempts to shift scale from room to nation, lifetime to epoch, and actor's line to party line, little wonder that some of the wit and insight gets lost in the process. Like an owl in daylight, Pinter possesses such acute and specific powers of perception that he flounders in a vastly different environment.

Granted, the Nobel Prize is awarded for an author's entire body of work, and word-for-word Pinter's excellent drama far outweighs the shoddy invectives. The peculiar timing of the prize, however, five years after the most recent play, suggests that Pinter's more recent statements and "art" earned him the attention, and eventually the approval, of the committee. For the sake of the prize, the man, and literary and dramatic enthusiasts everywhere, I wish Pinter had won years ago. An artist of genius would have received a well-deserved accolade, a company of literary greats would have been graced with a worthy peer, and the man, his fans, and posterity would have less cause to wonder what had been rewarded, vitriolic speechifying or creative genius. But then maybe I'm just being idealisk.