The Absurdity of Dread: Pinter's The Dumb Waiter

The Absurdity of Dread: Pinter's The DUlnb Waiter CHARLES A. CARPENTER • The Dumb Waiter wields an unrelenting humor and horror. ... [The play] evokes simultaneously the laughter of contemptuous recognition and a shiver of dread. As within ourselves, on the one hand open abysses of bottomless inanity, on the other loom the fearful crags of an irrational, implacable cruelty. The Dumb Waiter brilliaritly fulfils Ionesco's postulate in completely fusing tragedy with the most hilarious farce.... [Even] the desultory discussions of trivial news in the evening paper are utterly true, wildly comic, and terrifying in their absurdity. Comically but ominously, black is the dominant color of the crockery - a suitable color for those whose job is murder. When Gus describes their job, there are resonances of Kafka behind Beckett.... [Ben and Gus] exercise their confusions and inadequacies like other Music Hall comics who, were we to take them seriously, become almost unbearably poignant and darkly absurd. IT HAS GOTTEN SO THAT NO ONE CAN SPEAK OF ABSURDITY any more without forcing the corners of his mouth to stay down. The last of the critics quoted above, for instance, takes Ben and Gus very seriously indeed. Since Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, since the recent canonization of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre, above all since The Bald Soprano and Waiting for Godot, the classical adage that one must not treat serious things lightly has almost developed a contemporary equivalent, one must not treat light things lightly. Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter is an excellent case in point. Because it is another early play by the author of The Room, The Birthday Party, and A Slight Ache, it has been persistently labeled a "comedy of 279 280 CHARLES A. CARPENTER menace," with the accent on "menace." Actually it is a mock-melodramatic farce. Because its action consists of a waiting game in which two seedy characters kill time, the play has been likened in metaphysical "resonance" as well as in basic pattern to Waiting for Godot. But its relation to Godot is closer to parody (of an amiable sort): BEN. You'll have to wait. GUS. What for? BEN. For Wilson. GUS. He might not come. He might just send a message.... BEN. Well, you'll have to do without it, won't you? GUS. Blimey. What will Gus have to do without? His cup of tea. The fact is that some of our best analysts of contemporary theatre Martin Esslin, Bernard Dukore, Ruby Cohn - and most of the Pinter specialists - Lois Gordon, James Hollis, Katherine Burkman - have responded to The Dumb Waiter as if they felt a solemn obligation to discover that Pinter had transmuted the base metal of silliness into the gold of "terrifying" Absurdity. Certainly they have shunned the off chance that he might have cooked up an hour's worth of sheer, rich fun. In so dOing, they have drastically misunderstood the play. The blinders caused by their preconceptions of profundity have led them to misread clear-cut stage directions, to overlook giveaway lines of dialogue, to miscalculate obvious indicators of tone - in general to resist perceiving the depths (or heights) of frivolity that the play achieves. Consider a few especially revealing examples. A third of the way through the one-act, Ben and Gus argue vehemently over a trifling figure of speech. Gus dares to find fault with his senior partner's use of "light the kettle," and Ben reacts as if a major rebellion had ensued. Various critics make hay out of this exchange by examining it subtextually, psychoanalytically, mythically, or just plain naturalistically; but not a single one points out that almost immediately before Gus objects to Ben's illogical usage, he himself says "light the kettle" ("I can light the kettle now"). Note how an eye-winking alertness to this fact conditions one's responses to Ben in the following dialogue: BEN. Go and light it. GUS. Light what? BEN. The kettle. GUS. You mean the gas. BEN. Who does? GUs. You do. BEN- [his eyes narrowing]. What do you mean, I mean the gas? GUS. Well, that's what you mean, don't you? The gas. BEN. [powerfully]. If I say go and light...