Essays About The Dumb Waiter - Moodle USP: E

Introductionxiiiand controversial elements. As such, the essays engage the previoushistory of Pinter criticism surrounding The Dumb Waiter, as well asevolving theoretical, cultural and political contexts for the play.Given its place in the British dramatic canon, The DumbWaiter is regularly encountered by students as a literary as well as adramatic text. Accordingly, several of the essays included hereanalyze the play within a comparative disciplinary context, that is,from both a literary and theatrical perspective, making the book ofequal significance to those encountering Pinter within the context ofEnglish Studies, drama, and performance. Another of the book’sstrengths lies in its accessibility. Pinter is not an easy dramatist in anysense of the word, yet each essay shares a commitment to exploring ahost of challenging subjects in a language that is reader-friendly butnever reductive. Thus, the book should prove of interest and value toa wide range of readers, from undergraduates to postgraduates andspecialist researchers.The order of the chapters follows a thematic trajectory. One ofthe enduring questions about the play refers to categorization. Thefirst two essays by Naoko Yagi and Radmila Nasti explore TheDumb Waiter within the context of genre studies, exploring why it hasbeen received as an example of Absurdist drama. Yagi offers a majorreformulation of The Dumb Waiter’s relation to naturalism andrealism by discussing Ben and Gus’ room within the framework of theAnglo-European novel and Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope.Nasti , in contrast, emphasizes the play’s metaphorical elements,analyzing the symbolic features of Ben and Gus’ situation.Another issue that has intrigued critics relates tocategorization, but involves a further emphasis on periodization withinPinter’s oeuvre. Employing a focus on the descriptive phrase“comedy of menace.,” Basil Chiasson takes on the question of whatconnects Pinter’s many and diverse creative outputs. In contrast,David Pattie draws upon Chiasson’s reconsideration of the play as a“comedy of menace,” and in particular the point he makes about TheDumb Waiter’s visceral impact upon the spectator, in order to locatethe play and its meanings within Bakhtin’s concept of theCarnivalesque.Catherine Rees and Michael Patterson address Pinter in termsof “popular” versus “high culture,” using Varun Begley’s recentprovocative book Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism as abenchmark for interrogating the relation of The Dumb Waiter to

xivMary Brewermodernist and postmodernist impulses. Jonathan Shandell considersthe question of political and personal victimization, addressing howthe play constructs and interrogates the category of the “other.”Penelope Prentice picks up Shandell’s theme of “self” and “other” butbroadens the discussion to an analysis of how Pinter’s biographyimpacts on his creative work, and she addresses The Dumb Waiterwithin the context of Pinter’s human rights activism. As someone whohas known and worked closely with Pinter for many years, Prentice’sessay offers an unusual, personal insight into the beliefs andexperiences that underlie Pinter’s artistic production and this play inparticular.The essays by Varun Begley and Juliet Rufford revisit thepolitics of The Dumb Waiter. Begley addresses the play within thecontext of critical theoretical debates among key New Left writers, aswell as using Lacanian psychoanalysis to open the text. Via GiorgioAgamben’s theories of juridico-political orders, Rufford offers acompelling thesis about the politics of space, demonstrating therelevance of Agamben’s notion of “states of exception” to the politicsof Pinter’s play. My contribution and that of Lance Norman reengage the critical debate about how Pinter chooses to end the play.Norman considers the play’s ambiguities within the larger question ofwhether any regime of representation may signify precisely, while myanalysis discusses The Dumb Waiter in terms of narrative anddiscourse theory, centering on Bakhtin’s theory of dialogics.Finally, Marc E. Shaw and Anne Luyat analyze the idea of thePinteresque, a shorthand description for Pinter’s work that oftenseems to say both everything and nothing much about a play. Shawand Luyat evaluate in depth some of the ideas that critics have in mindwhen they use this term to describe a play, either by Pinter or others.Luyat’s essay illuminates how qualities deemed Pinteresque have aliterary history that pre-dates Pinter, with elements of the Pinteresquefound in the work of writers as diverse as T.S. Eliot and ErnestHemingway. Shaw takes the debate in another direction bydemonstrating the range of Pinter’s influence, revealing elements ofthe Pinteresque in the work of contemporary playwrights such asPatrick Marber and Mark Ravenhill.Shaw’s essay is particularly apposite at the present time, asshortly before the publication of this book, Pinter died on December24, 2008, and his continued “absent presence” in contemporary theaterby virtue of his influence upon current and future playwrights may

Introductionxvgain increasing importance in how we understand Pinter’s own plays.As The Times’ obituary stated, Pinter, “arguably the most importantand original playwright” of the twentieth century, holds a unique placeamong contemporary dramatists, for “[f]ew, if any, have so lastinglyand profoundly influenced fellow playwrights -- not just in Britain butalso beyond (1, 2).The essays in this collection offer a small tribute to Pinter’sdramatic legacy. As the person who has been privileged to facilitatethe rich dialogue among the contributors featured here, what I hopewill emerge from this book is a flow of fresh insights into andquestions about one of the seminal texts of modern British theater, andthat the dialogue here engendered will spur future revivals of TheDumb Waiter.Mary F. Brewer, Loughborough UniversityAcknowledgments: I am indebted to Michael J. Meyer for the opportunity to serve aseditor of this collection, for his astute critical observations on the work, and for hisgeneral support. Esther Roth at Rodopi provided invaluable technical assistance inpreparing the manuscript for publication, and I am grateful to Daniel Grigsby forgranting permission to reproduce his artwork on the cover.Notes1For a history of its production, see tm. (Consulted 18 August2008).2BibliographyBentley, Eric. “Preface” in What is Theater. London: Methuen, 1969.(ix-xvi)Harold Pinter: The Times’ obituaries/article5397295.ece (consulted 7 January 2009)

A Realist-Naturalist Pinter RevisitedNaoko Yagi1. IntroductionIn an interview in 1966, when Harold Pinter described himself as “nota very inventive writer;” he had Brechtian “technical devices” inmind, stating, “I can’t use the stage the way he [Brecht] does.”Moreover, Pinter admitted in a rather self-deprecating manner thatsuch “devices” hardly featured in his work since he lacked “that kindof imagination” (1966, 20). We might put it differently today: thepower of Pinter’s imagination lay, as it still does, in what we wouldcall the “room.” While imagination of this kind cannot but be obviousto any readers of Pinter’s plays from The Room to Celebration, it oftenseems, in Pinter criticism, that discussion of a Pinteresque room stopsshort of going beyond the confines of mise en scène, by which I meanhere simply the room as being specified in a play-text and/or as athree-dimensional structure on the stage. If we choose to put Pinter’s“room” in a larger context of Anglo-European literature, what we findis a striking parallel between the manner in which Pinter takesadvantage of the vast potential of a “room” on stage and how theconcept of “room” is defined, developed, and manipulated in therealist and naturalist novel. In this respect, The Dumb Waiter provesone of the most pertinent of all Pinter’s plays, in whose stagedirections “rooms” are specified fairly clearly, including wordsdescribing furniture and props.Mainly for its hard-to-ignore spookiness and untidiness, theroom in The Dumb Waiter is visibly “naturalistic;” on the other hand,it retains a kind of “realist” temperance, or even elegance, whichcomes primarily from the quasi-symmetrical arrangement of the bedsand the doors with the “dumb waiter” as a centerpiece. Visual aspects,of course, are only part of the story; more importantly, the room in TheDumb Waiter functions so that it allows the characters Ben and Gus totalk and behave as if they are, albeit in a rather contrived sense of theterm, descended from characters of the realist and naturalist novel.This essay examines ways in which Ben and Gus may be regarded as

2Naoko Yagisuch figures. The discussion will center on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notionof “chronotope,” which has much to do with his theory of literarygenre, and the way chronotope explains the “room” as we see it inPinter’s Dumb Waiter. Granted that chronotope, according to Bakhtin,is essentially a means of our reading and analyzing novels,1 theargument that follows will draw upon such comments on his theory asSue Vice’s contention that the term “[chronotope] can be used toanalyse local effects in a text, such as the asylum in Jane Eyre; it canbe used to discuss a whole genre, such as film noir” (207-08). Ifchronotope helps a film scholar in her/his critique of a cinematicgenre, it should be just as viable for us to turn to chronotope as weread a Pinter play and consider its generic underpinning.Since The Dumb Waiter premiered in 1960, a quick look at theTheater of the Absurd may be in order. Critics and scholars in the1960s writing about the then newly-minted plays by Pinter referred tothe Theater of the Absurd “with great frequency” (King 247), whichnevertheless was far from a cut-and-dried phase in the critical trend.Virtually in competition for the best variation on the theme by MartinEsslin, every critic and scholar concerned had her or his own versionof the Absurd in mind. Moreover, already during the 1960s, Esslinstarted revising his initial definition of the Theater of the Absurd,which Pinter critics and scholars promptly took up for yet furtheranalysis.2 By the late 1960s, the discussion had become as much abouthow Pinter’s plays questioned the validity of critics/scholars’ desire todefine the Absurd as about how his plays epitomized whatever acritic/scholar believed was the Absurd.Despite Arnold P. Hinchliffe’s recognition, as early as 1967,that for Pinter “the plays are their own justification” (37), many criticsand scholars eagerly measured their analyses of Pinter’s plays againstwhat someone had already called the Absurd, and this certainlypushed Pinter criticism forward. Of particular relevance to thediscussion of The Dumb Waiter is a passage in Katherine H.Burkman’s comprehensive review of Esslin and the Theater of theAbsurd:The point is that Pinter’s characters lead him continually to thevery rhythmic structures which have informed great dramaticworks since drama’s origin in primitive ritual. Rather thanfocusing on lack of communication, Pinter concerns himself withthe way people fail to avoid that communication from which theywish to run. While other absurdist writers often allow theircharacters to succeed in avoiding communication, Pinter’s

A Realist-Naturalist Pinter3dramatic world is one of action in the old Aristotelian sense of theword. (8)If Burkman’s conclusion still holds, then a closer analysis of herpremise is required, an examination which will affirm that Aristotelian“action” is intrinsic to a Pinter play like The Dumb Waiter.2. Birmingham“In the literary artistic chronotope,” writes Bakhtin, “spatial andtemporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concretewhole” (1981, 84). We might attempt an analysis of The Dumb Waiternot by plunging into the “room” first and then starting to think aboutit, but by gradually zooming in for a more careful look at the functionof the “room.” As Michael Billington puts it, The Dumb Waiter is “akind of Godot in Birmingham” (89). If, for the sake of argument, wesimply take the Pinter play as a post-Waiting for Godot piece, whatindeed makes it possible that Ben and Gus find themselves inBirmingham, a city which, in the strongly London-oriented geographyof the Pinter canon, would easily be regarded as an anomaly andtherefore some kind of marker?Before trying to answer the question, we should rememberthat the place-name Birmingham does not always appear in the samemode in published texts of the play. The Samuel French edition of TheDumb Waiter, for example, refers to Birmingham in the stagedirections (1), whereas in the Faber edition of the play, it is not untilBen utters the place-name in one of his lines that we are informed ofhis and Gus’s “room” being located in Birmingham (121). In the latterversion, we can either trust what the characters say at face value orinterpret their mentioning the place-name as yet another of the factorsthat contribute to the here-and-nowhere ambience that permeates theplay; our speculation is doubly “enhanced” by Gus’s reaction to Benrevealing their alleged whereabouts:GUS. What town are we in? I’ve forgotten.BEN. I’ve told you. Birmingham.GUS. Go on!He looks with interest about the room.That’s in the Midlands. The second biggest city in Great Britain.I’d never have guessed. (121)

4Naoko YagiWhile we may or may not be ready to take the place-name as part ofthe “Absurdist” aspect of The Dumb Waiter, the fact remains that, solong as it is mentioned by the characters, “Birmingham” persists inone way or another in our interpretation of the play.Then, why does it have to be Birmingham? In “[t]he pettybourgeois provincial town with its stagnant life,” which proves “a verywidespread setting for nineteenth-century novels (both before andafter Flaubert),” everything comes in what Bakhtin calls “cyclical”patterns (1981, 247); time in the provincial town, being “viscous andsticky” and only “drag[ging] itself slowly through space,” will not“serve as the primary time of the novel” (1981, 248). When we startpaying attention to “Birmingham” in The Dumb Waiter, what the cityof Birmingham was like in the real world of the late 1950s is not muchof an issue; rather, it is the stereotypical image of a city “in theMidlands,” as quickly pointed out by Gus, that does the trick for theplay. We take it that Ben and Gus are in Birmingham onlytemporarily; still, the kind of routine that the characters are stuck withand the place-name Birmingham seem to complement each other.3 Putdifferently, while “Birmingham” in The Dumb Waiter may indeedemanate what Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson call “a certainchronotopic aura” (374), it would be more precise for us to say thatthe aura of Birmingham is highly conspicuous by its very absencefrom the play:A particular sort of event, or a particular sort of place that usuallyserves as the locale for such an event, acquires a certainchronotopic aura, which is in fact the “echo of the generic whole”in which the given event typically appears. [. . .] When theseevents or locales are used in other genres, they may “remember”their past and carry the aura of the earlier genre into the new one;indeed, they may be incorporated for this very reason. (Morsonand Emerson 374)The paradox is crucial since it concerns what Bakhtin calls the“ancillary” (1981, 248) nature of the provincial town. Ben and Gustalk about Tottenham, where they may or may not have been, whichindicates that the pull of the London area should not be ignored eitherby the characters themselves or by the reader/audience. In discussingPinteresque “topography,” Peter Raby draws our attention to Pinter’stheatrical work and its “power to have resonance for other places andcultures” (63); for example, “London contains the controlling imagesin The Birthday Party” precisely because the play is set not in London

A Realist-Naturalist Pinter5but in one of the “accessible seaside towns” (63-4). We certainlydetect resonance of that kind in The Dumb Waiter. The difference isthat the narrative structure of this particular play has less to do withany topographical “center,” in this case London, than with somethingthat for Ben and Gus is palpably and yet inexplicably ubiquitous. Theabove-mentioned routine is totally and irrevocably broken at the endof the play, which, to come back to Bakhtin, we may interpret as aproof of that “something” having followed a “noncyclical temporal[sequence]” (1981, 248). “Birmingham” in the Pinter play will alwayshave been “ancillary,” whether for the benefit or the demise of Gusand Ben.3. The Bed-Sitting RoomWritten in the same period and with only two speaking characters in it,A Slight Ache is often paired with The Dumb Waiter in Pintercriticism, which in fact betrays a curiously semiotic differencebetween the two plays. We might remember that A Slight Ache firstcame into being as a piece for radio, a medium which encourages thelistener to exercise her or his power of imagination;4 the sets for thestage version of the play include a “suggested” garden of Flora andEdward’s house with an unseen gate (153), indicating subtly butunmistakably a world beyond the immediate environment that ispresented to the audience. By contrast, the “basement room” (113) inThe Dumb Waiter precludes any possibility for a view and, thus,underlines the kind of self-sufficiency which, for better or worse, awalled-in space has to offer:GUS: [. . .] I wouldn’t mind if you had a window, you could seewhat it looked like outside.BEN: What do you want a window for?GUS: Well, I like to have a bit of a view, Ben. It whiles away thetime. (117-18)Furthermore, unlike in A Slight Ache, in which different partsof the house are assembled together in a single space “with aminimum of scenery and props” (153), we find that in The DumbWaiter the room is simply a room: the walls are reliably solidthroughout the play and so are the doors, one to the kitchen and thelavatory and the other opening onto the passage; the contrast exists inthe fact that, while tables and chairs will come and go in A SlightAche, the two beds in The Dumb Waiter are as solid as the walls and

6Naoko Yagithe doors. If we regard the layout of the house in A Slight Ache asbeing overtly theatrical, its counterpart in The Dumb Waiter can bedescribed as being quaintly novelistic for its detailed and life-scalespecifications. The play even goes so far as to have Gus mention ameter for the gas, when in fact the meter is invisible to the audience;in a similar vein, Gus spots a photograph of a cricket team on one ofthe walls, which, in a production, will possibly be too small for theaudience to see and recognize.As he describes the “space of parlors and salons (in the broadsense of the word)” in the works of novelists such as Stendhal andBalzac, Bakhtin states that “[f]rom a narrative and compositional pointof view, this is the place where encounters occur (no longeremphasizing their specifically random nature as did meetings ‘on theroad’ or ‘in an alien world’)” (1981, 246). For characters created

in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter Lance Norman 173 “Mixed feelings about words:” Language, politics and the ethics of inter-subjectivity in The Dumb Waiter Mary F. Brewer 189 Unpacking the Pinteresque in The Dumb Waiter and Beyond Marc E. Shaw 211 The First Last Look in the Shadows: Pinter and the Pinteresque Anne Luyat 231 Essay Abstracts 247