The Absurdity of Dread:
Pinter's The Dumb 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 brilliantly 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 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 Satrte, above all since The Bald Soprano and Waiting for Godot, the classical adage(속담,격언) 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 menace," with 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, Kahterine Burkaman -- 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 gave drastically misunderstood the play. The blinders caused by their preconceptions of profundity have led them to misread clear-cut stage direction, to overlook givaway 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 the kettle, I mean go and light the kettle.
GUS. How can you light a kettle?
[Italics in dialogue added.]
Any critic who detects portentous reverberations here has simply overreacted in the same ludicrous way that Ben has. When the gunman later calms down and twice uses the phrase"for Christ's sake" (once after telling Gus to put on the kettle), the play seems to beckon the profundity-monger to don motley from head to toe. In the same vein, after the men have received orders on the dumbwaiter of a series of esoteric dishes, among them Ormitha Macarounada, Ben asks Gus -- and the wide-eared critics: "Do you know what it takes to made an Ormitha Macaroundada?" Gus admits he does not, and Ben replies: "An Ormitha -- ! Buck up your idea, will you?" His remonstrance is well taken; we might indeed have missed the "myth" in Ormitha, not to speak of the "nada" in Macarounada. But the tidiest example occurs when Gus and Ben rehearse what they will do after their victim arrives. Told by Ben that they will act exactly as before even if the victim is a girl, Gus "rises, and shivers." Angst? No ; just nature calling. Gus excuses himself, enters the w.c., and in a second we hear the toilet chain pulled. The terrible anxiety that some commentators attribute to the softned criminal is obviously presented with jocular satire. Here again it is impossible to turn a knee-slapper into the "darkly absurd" without saririzing oneself.
In fact, contrary to a distinguished critic's view that The Dumb Waiter is one of the few plays which truly embody existentialist absurdity, this is one of the few brands that the play lacks. Instead of reflecting the arbitrary, alogical meaninglessness of the Camjus-Satrte universe in the manner of Waiting for Godot, the play establishes its own singular world: a nutty, unlifelike, non-analogical world of farce. The action begins with Gus shaking one shoe and finding a flattened matchbox in it, then shaking the other and pulling gout a flattened cigarette packet. The faint parallel to the opening scene of Godot is not a "bedfellow allusion" but, if anything, a light note of parody. Also typical of farce, mechanical objects suspend nature's laws and follow theirs. The toilet, for instance, refuses to flush when its chain is pulled, but decides to flush on its own seven or eight minutes late (Ben's notion -- accepted by Gus and a critic or two -- that it has a "deficient ballcock" only accentuates that farcial quality of its behavior).
Furthermore, instead of exhibiting characters who respond to the absurd universe by meanifesting dread -- using the term, after Heidegger, to mean a generalized sense of hysteria prompted by the mere chaotic nature of things -- the play offers two alternately dour and queasy thugs who are put-up-jobs for mock melodrama. The most conspicuous mechanism in the play, the dumbwaiter, operates in farcical terms to mock their melodramatic cast of mind. Gus and Ben hear "a loud clatter and racket in the bulge of wall between the beds . . . They grab their revolvers, jump up and face the wall. The noise comes to a stop. Silence. They look at each other. Ben gestures sharply toward the wall. Gus approaches the wall slowly. He bangs it with his revolver. It is hollow. Ben moves to the head of his bed, his revolver cocked." When the dumbwaiter suddenly goes up -- and even when it returns -- Ben points his gun at it. The self-propelled dumbwaiter (in effect acting alone) rumbles demandingly down and lurches impatiently up, pausing to invent more and more extravagant orders for food, and chuckling to itself all the time. It does not evoke "dread." The raucous object, at worst the instrument of some practical joker, is incapable of arousing genuine menace or terror, and Ben's response to it is far too laughably incongruous. Existentialist dread and angst are out of the picture. Still, some critics have put immense stress on Gus's soul-tormented questions about his role in the ontological scheme of things. "It was that girl made me start to think, " he himself notes. What were these ill-fated thoughts? "She wasn't much to look at, I know, but still . . . . What a mess. Honest, I can't remember a mess like that one. They don't seem to hold together like men, women. A looser texture, like. Didn't she spread, eh? . . . Who clears up after we've gone?" His questions mushroom from(unwitting) sick humor such as this to cute critic-baiting:
GUS [thickly]. Who is it upstairs?
Gus finally does reach the point where he believes that the unidentified agency "upstairs" must be responsible for everything odd about his normally predictable life. But he does so by committing, to a farcical degree, the error of hasty generalization. In this he resembles some of the play's critics. The autocratic Wilson -- not a vague, malignant Godot but a distinct person who often does come -- has in Gus's eyes started to act like the death machine in Kafka's penal colony, writing cryptic notes and turning against his cohorts. Gus complains about the windowless, damp quarters and remarks, "He doesn't seem to bother much about our comfort these days. Previously he had credited Wilson with providing nice crockery, and equally "dumb" non sequitur. When the envelope with matches in it slides fortuitously under the door but the gas meter runs out so that Gus cannot light the kettle after all, he steps out of the bathroom "deep in thought" and asks tensely, "Why did he send us matches if he knew there was no gas?" In a moment he has concluded that Wilson not only owns the building they are in but has been tormenting them by means of the gas meter, the dumbwaiter, and even tormenting them by means of the gas meter, the dumbwaiter, and even perhaps the toilet. "What's he doing it for? We've been through our tests, haven't we? . . .We've always done our job. What's he doing all this for? What's the idea? What's he playing these games for?" His partner has already hit the nail on the head with his irked rejoinder, "What's one thing to do with another?" Precisely. Though it would be ridiculous to grant Ben much intellectual acumen, here he echoes one of Harold Pinter's many warnings to critics: "The most we know for sure is that the things which have happened have happened in a certain order: any connections we think we see, or choose to make, are pure guesswork." In a farce that chides the kind of "black peril" mentality which finds absurdist conspiracies everywhere (even in the black-and-white crockery), Ben's statement becomes one of the few things in the play that can be taken seriously.
The astounding finale certainly cannot be. It absolutely defies critical gravity. The most drastic result of critics having donned somber-colored glasses when tackling The Dumb Waiter is that they have failed to see or refused to acknowledge the utterly loony, playful nature of its ending. Most appropriately, this ending is both the crescendo of the mock melodrama and the denouement of Gus's farcical war against the imaginary nemesis upstairs. His defeat is just as tragically inevitable as his reasoning.
The springboards for the finale are the freethinking mechanisms, the toilet and the dumbwaiter. Near the beginning of the play, Gus had used the toilet and called attention to its orneriness. After he and Ben go over their routine, he uses it again. It does not flush (as we shall see) until it can contribute a guffaw to the startling climax. Meanwhile the dumbwaiter, which has not come down for a long time, makes its crowning appearance. Because the men have found the speaking tube, the box is no longer needed to carry messages; but on this occasion it has a special purpose: to scold Gus fact to face. He has just reached a peak of whining invective against the person "playing games" with him. The dumbwaiter descends -- its clatter abetted for the first time by a shrill whistle from the tube -- and its grotesque mouth yields a note that shouts "scampi!" at Gus. (When he reads the word aloud it would seem much more like "scamp" -- with Sontag vibrations of bellows what critics have taken to be a resounding cry of metaphysical despair: "WE'VE GOT NOTHING LEFT! NOTHING!" Actually (again, as we shall see), the clanking mouthpiece of high authority has struck home in a very non-metaphysical way: Gus has been thoroughly intimidated by a box, a whistle, and a badgering word.
The ensuing curtain scene would be sheer situation comedy if it were not so improbable as to be skewed into farce. Ben, all business, rises and adjusts his revolver. Gus, furtively hedging, also rises -- and heads for the bathroom. "Where are you going?" asks Ben in disbelief (as well he might); for a glass of water, Gus claims. Enough time passes for Ben to brush his suit and shoes (later, to be fully prepared to shoot somebody, he also combs his hair); then he receives word through the speaking tube that the victim will appear shortly. A few critics, lapsing into Gus's type of reasoning, have gathered that the conspirator upstairs intended Gus to be the victim and, somehow, was capable of spiriting him out of the basement, not through the door to the passage on stage right, but through the bathroom-kitchen area -- in this windowless underground apartment -- behind the door on stage left. The same malefactor evidently chose to dumfound his still-acceptable hired gun, since he did not tell Ben he would have to kill his long-term sidekick. Moreover, he must have wanted to mislead Ben, since he asked him if "they" were ready for action )we hear the reply, "Sure we're ready"), and then to stun him by having Gus pop in the door opposite the one he entered a moment ago. Why lure Gus out of the room in the first place? Interpretation aside, what happens is this:
[Ben] takes out a comb and combs his hair, adjusts his jacket to diminish the bulge of the revolver. The lavatory flushes off left.
(Forgetting its bad habits.) Ben goes quickly to the door... [and calls Gus]
The door right opens sharply. Ben turns, his revolver
levelled at the door.
Gus stumbles in.
He is stripped of his jacket, waistcoat, tie, holster
and revolver.
He stops, body stooping, his arms at his sider.
He raises his head and looks at Ben.
A long silence.
They stare at each other.
Curtain
The search for rational explanations of this sequence should prove as vain and inapposite as the search for symbolic or analogical ones. Any feasible hypothesis would have to be fraught with improbability. Pinter might very well l have conceived of Gus -- like Lou Costello faced with an ominous robot -- sneaking out of the kitchen through a hatchway to flee his oppressor, getting caught, and being sent back to his superior for chastisement. Or he may have meant us to visualize secret peepholes, revolving wall panels, and other gimmicks of haunted-house farce, which would clash amusingly with the satirized claptrap of homicide melodrama. (The dumbwaiter has already approximated this effect.) I suspect, however, that Pinter worked out an almost totally elusive finale, so that in order to account for it at all we must lunge desperately at some such picture as Gus tunneling through the ground in an unfortunate semicircle (leaving his bulky coat and gun behind) and ducking into the handiest subway entrance, which turns out to be the fateful passage to Ben's room.
The truth is that we are granted little time or inclination to develop a cause-effect sense of the moment. It is, after all, a surprise ending. Ben's cosmetic ritual after hearing from the boss sidetracks us into a chuckling caricature of Bogart melodrama. When he responds instantly to the delayed-action toilet -- faking us, for a second, into a wry image of Gus zipping up his pants -- we have been "set up" to react to the sudden appearance of Gus at the door far across the stage with the same bewilderment that Ben and Gus must feel. But we will also react with head-shaking relish -- to be exact, with that delightfully appalled bemusement at the flagrant frivolity of the artist's contrivance which we used to term "absurd." Sad to note, many critics have responded to this sequence with a deaf ear and, assuming that fearful crags of an implacable cruelty must loom here as elsewhere in the play, have posited that Ben will dutifully riddle Gus after the curtain falls. The text says, "A long silence. They stare at each other." I my self prefer the text. Its closing note is the summit of mock melodrama, capping a deliciously incredible surprise which has meted out farcical-poetic justice to paranoiac Gus and his fellow believers in a Savage God who can, finally, be called upon to account for the impossible, even when it occurs in a farce. Like the whole play, the last hovering image roguishly exposes the absurdity of dread.
But these day I suppose we have to say something else -- perhaps the asininity of funk.
(Modern Drama Vol. XVI Dec., 1973 No.3 & No.4, p. 279.)