In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Dumb Waiter: Pinter's Play with the Audience THOMAS F. VAN LAAN Published commentary on The Dumb Waiter is for the most part rather unsatisfactory. Instead of analyzing the playas Pinter wrote it, most commentators rely on distortions and fabrications - or, at best, conclusions based on guesswork - to concoct a new play of their own making. The discrepancy is most apparent in the commentators' accounts of how the play ends. In the playas Pinter wrote it, after Gus has gone out the door on the leftto get a glass of water, he says - Ben hears through the speaking tube that the victim they have been waiting for "has arrived and will be coming in straight way. The normal method to be employed.'" Ben calls Gus, gets ready while the toilet flushes off left, calls Gus again, and then the play closes with the following stage direction: The door right opens sharply. BEN turns, his revolver levelled at the door. GUS stumbles in. He is stripped ofhis jacket, wais/coat, tie. holster and revolver. He stops, body stooping, his arms at his sides. He raises his head and looks at BEN . A long silence. They stare at each other. Curtain (p. 121 ) Thus Pinter. For most of the commentators, however, the play ends with the revelation that Gus is the next victim and that he is to be killed by Ben because he has begun to ask too many questions rather than, like Ben, continuing blindly to obey the orders of the organization employing them.2 There is no explicit warrant in the play for such notions, and in forming them the commentators are engaging in a process that has become widespread in the discussion of drama since the advent of Beckett. This process, which I call "filling in," is especially characteristic of commentary on Pinter - on all of his The Dumb Waiter: Pinter and the Audience 495 plays, not just The Dumb Waiter-and evidently results from the attemptto read in traditional ways a drama that has in many respects broken with traditional fonn. In traditional drama, the close of a play coincides with the tennination of a clear-cut narrative sequence, complete with beginning, middle, and end, and culminating in an event nonnally of sufficient magnitude and finality to merit the label "catastrophe." This narrative sequence is, moreover, provided by the dramatist and presented to the spectators; they do not need to employ their interpretive powers to apprehend it and can therefore reserve these powers for apprehending its meaning and significance. The close of The Dumb Waiter does not confonn to the traditional mold - there is no shot, or refusal to shoot, nor is there even any explicit indication that shooting or not shooting is at all relevant - but the commentators assume that it is meant to do so, and therefore they "fill in" what the dramatist has supposedly neglected to record except through implication. Failing to find a clear-cut narrative sequence of the sort their theatrical experience has led them to expect, they draw on their interpretive powers, not to discern meaning and significance, but to invent the missing element. They create a narrative sequence by responding imaginatively to whatever clues they can find in the text - and also, one must add, by relying heavily on the familiar patterns of melodrama. This process is a highly questionable one. Even ifwe suppose that "filling in" is a legitimate activity and that the particular "filling in" provided for The Dumb Waiter has validity, the fact still remains that in making us determine its action before we can detennine the meaning of that action, The Dumb Waiter differs from almost every play preceding it (and most of those coming after), and to ignore this difference is to discount a definite part of our experience and an indicator of its meaning. There is, moreover, no convincing reason to suppose that "filling in" does have legitimacy; indeed, as far as The Dumb Waiter is concerned, the evidence points in the other direction. This evidence is provided by the sequence of three occasions during which Ben calls attention to an item in his newspap"r, and he and Gus then subject it...

pdf

Share