The Dwarfs: A Study in Linguistic Dwarfism

The Dwarfs: A Study in Linguistic Dwarfism AUSTIN E. QUIGLEY • PINTER'S PLAYS HAVE PRESENTED a variety of problems to audiences, reviewers and critics over the years, but none of his plays has resisted elucidation as firmly as a short radio play written in the same year as The Caretaker. Even in its revised stage version, The Dwarfs has remained disconcertingly opaque. It is tempting to dismiss the playas a failed experiment, but the author's own comments on it suggest that this should not be done too readily. Pinter's confirmation of its value to him as a playwright is made in the same breath as that in which he accepts that it has not yet been successful in performance: I directed The Lover and The Dwarfs on the same bill at the Arts. The Lover didn't stand much of a chance because it was my decision, regretted by everyone - except me - to do The Dwarfs, which is apparently the most intractable, impossible piece of work. Apparently ninety-nine people out ofa hundred feel it's a waste of time, and the audience hated it. ... I should add that ... it had great value, great interest for me.... It does seem very confusing and obviously it can't be successful. But it was good for me to do.1 Majorities have been wrong before now, and so have authors, but it does. seem possible that the play might yet merit further attention. Pinter has certainly given it a great deal of his attention as he has twice revised the play, and it now exists in three different versions, Methuen, 1961, 1966, and 1968.2 The most obvious indication of the play's central concerns comes in a rather lengthy speech by Len towards the end of the play. A verbal skirmish between Len and Mark leads into an extended attempt by Len 413 414 AUSTIN E. QUIGLEY to get his problems out into the open. The speech begins with "The point is, who are you?" and goes on to raise not only problems of identity but also problems ofstability, ofreality, ofsanity and ofcommunication. Such issues recur frequently in Pinter's work, but rarely with the kind of explicitness that is evident here. Besides being helpful, however, the great danger ofthis explicitness is that it encourages one to end too readily one's search for this play's central concerns. In the face of such explicit comment it is all too easy to accept as conclusions what should only be regarded as starting points for an investigation of the play. Certainly The Dwarfs deals with problems of identity, reality, communication, etc., but so do a great many other plays. What is needed is a further stage of generalization which goes beyond Len's understanding of the problems he raises. The aim should be to establish with some accuracy the kinds of concerns that give these problems the kind of prominence that they achieve in the play. To begin the movement in this direction, it is useful to take a second look at Len's lengthy speech to Mark. Perhaps its most important lines are not those which point out the general nature of the problems Len faces, but those lines which indicate the kind of difficulty that he personally encounters in confronting those problems. One such comment comes two-thirds of the way through the speech. Len outlines the difficulty he experiences in trying to sort out the essential from the peripheral in the things that he observes, but he then goes on to a further problem. Even when he does manage to grasp the significance of something confronting him, he still feels powerless: I've seen what happens. But I can't speak when I see it. I can only point a finger. I can't even do that. Len's problem here seems twofold. Not only does he have difficulty in locating intelligible patterns in the world around him, he also finds difficulty in making a public manifestation of his private perceptions of the world. If Len is unable to speak about crucial things that he sees, one is forced to consider whether this is an indication ofhis...