The two codes certainly could be taken as a class allegory, 
with the localized authenticity of ethnic cuisine set against the brand 
names of mass-produced junk food.This Imaginary order, in Lacan's terminology, inaugurates an 
experience of the other simultaneously marked by aggression and 
desire/identification -- "a kind of situational experience of otherness 
as pure relationship, as struggle, violence, and antagonism, in which 
the child can occupy either term indifferently, or indeed, as in 
transitivism, both at once" (Jameson 1982, 356).Tellingly, as the play opens, Ben is immersed in a newspaper -
- an axis of separation but also desire -- and Gus rather desperately 
(and childishly) wants to disrupt Ben's "adult" (i.e., privatized and 
individualistic) immersion. The newspaper thus marks the emergence 
of the Lacanian Symbolic order: the order of language and Law, 
society and reality, authority, deferral, and punishment. The Symbolic 
is the regime of the Other (as distinct from the dyadic other), a regime 
initiated by the Father -- a figure more important as a symbol or 
representation than as an actual person. Within this situation of alienation and deferral, the Imaginary 
register retains considerable power for the subject, wishing away as it 
does the estrangements of the Symbolic and returning the dilemma of 
the other to more manageable, dyadic terms. One function of ideology is to soften or 
personalize the social order, to convey to the subject an imaginary 
(false) sense of a relation between like-minded entities, in which one's 
anxieties and grievances are assuaged by a society that appears as "a 
'subject' which 'addresses' me personally" (Eagleton 1983, 172).In the larger context of the play, 
however, both codes display dismaying mimetic innocence, a 
confident "pointing" toward known frames of reference. We begin to 
perceive the outlines of a referential code that runs intermittently 
through much of Pinter. In contrast to the use of referential detail in 
naturalism/realism, however, the specificity here feels gratuitous and 
unearned. The transcribed details of naturalism/realism presuppose a 
sense of organic totality, an interconnected, metonymic world with 
binding, meaningful relations between characters and their 
environments, in which one might perceive something fundamental of 
a person's identity from a pocket-watch or piece of furniture. Of course, totality and interconnection are ideological effects 
rather than facts of nature, and Pinter's use of the referential code lays 
bare some of the political implications of the realist enterprise. It is a 
commonplace that bourgeois realism is a "closed" style, one that 
works to naturalize a particular hegemonic version of reality.Realism entails symbolicviolence against reality; it guarantees the authenticity of the elements 
it holds out as exemplary by coercing peripheral reality into 
meaningless background silence, or at most the low obedient murmur 
of "we are the real." In Pinter's work, the referent returns as a 
categorical problem, which appears in symbolic recalcitrance and 
unknowability. These symbolisms are reminders of the non-identity of 
sign and world, of the gap between ideological systems and the 
realities they encode and conceal. Utopia, then, is less a wish for a better reality than a wish for 
any stable reality at all. From writers like Barthes, Jameson, and Dyer, 
we know that the typical function of ideology in popular culture is not 
to silence social contradictions, but rather to speak about them, albeit 
in ways that naturalize existing realities, redirect radical energies, and 
otherwise benefit the social order. From the standpoint of the social 
order, however, this process may entail "playing with fire," in Dyer's 
phrase (279).History, one might say, is always elsewhere, and, if we look 
for its signs in The Dumb Waiter, we might begin by thinking of the 
unfulfilled desire implicit in Ben's remark about the newspaper, "It's 
down here in black and white" (114). Black-and-whiteness is an 
Imaginary, ideological overlay on the vanishing Real; it symbolizes a 
desire that the newspaper make good its promise of unifying reality, of 
providing a stable frame of reference that could somehow 
meaningfully correlate the old man run over by the lorry and the cat 
killed outside the toolshed. Yet actual History is intimated only indirectly, through 
ciphers and lacunae, and in this light, the play points us toward the 
opaque incongruousness of the dumb waiter itself. Given its 
anachronistic overtones, and its comparative meaninglessness in thesocial world of 1960s, I think the dumb waiter marks a limit of 
historical desire, that is, desire to narrate the status of one's work and 
activity in relation to a larger community and in relation to historical 
time. The dumb waiter, however, is something like historicism minus 
the human activity that gives substance to history: it is history as pure 
abstraction, as reification. It marks a historical desire that can realize 
itself only in terms of a relic of bygone class structure; yet here 
historical imagination can no longer "fill" the structure with human 
content, but can only envisage history as pure apparatus, as emblem or 
signifier.Fittingly, the "actual" Authority/Father never appears in the 
play, but the sense of a social world governed by Law progressively 
permeates and infects the Gus/Ben dyad, beginning with their 
disagreements over the newspaper, which functions as a token and 
instrument of the social order. Here we should recall that the Lacanian 
model is tripartite -- Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. For Lacan, the 
Real seems to mean an arena outside signification, an order of pure 
immediacy known perhaps only in infancy, but an order that in some 
way continues to determine and orient experience, even though it can 
only be apprehended in mediated forms. For the subject, the Real 
persists as a promise or unreachable horizon, an end or destination 
outside language and desire, in which the compulsory deferrals of the 
Symbolic might finally be made good. With characteristic bravado, Jameson concludes that the 
Lacanian Real "is simply History itself" (1982, 384), which suggests a 
convergence between the textual model outlined above and the 
psychoanalytic model outlined here.Through a variety of institutions, practices, and representations, the 
subject is endlessly invited to take his or her place, as if at a cozy 
dinner party where one is always "expected" (see Althusser 163). Utopia, then, is a register of this sort of ideological operation, 
in which one's alienation is compensated by an imaginary, generally 
regressive return to situations of comparative fullness and plenitude. In these terms, I would say that the fundamental utopian drive in The
Dumb Waiter resides in the relationship between Gus and Ben. Across 
moments of comradeship, impatience, resentment, and aggression, 
Gus and Ben display the immediacy of "pure relationship," in which 
the borders of self and other are fluid and permeable.Realism partly enacts such formal coercion through a 
particular way of using details.I'd
never have guessed (121).