Mixed feelings about words:" Language, politics
and the ethics of inter-subjectivity in The Dumb Waiter
Mary F. Brewer
To be means to communicate dialogically. When the dialogue is finished,
all is finished. Therefore, the dialogue, in essence, cannot and must not
come to an end.
1
M.M. Bakhtin
1. Introduction
In his article, "Anti-Ritual, Critical Domestication and
Representational Precision in Pinter's The Dumb Waiter," Lance
Norman argues that the critical tendency to "complete" Pinter's play is
actually encouraged by The Dumb Waiter's structure and action: on a
meta-theatrical level, the play foregrounds and critiques the way we
read dramatic narratives. Norman's essay is in part a response to
Thomas Van Laan's assertion that critics of the play have frequently
engaged in a process of "filling in what the dramatist has neglected to
record" (494-95).
Building upon Van Laan, R.A. Buck identifies how
traditionalist critical discussions of the "The Dumb Waiter fail to
emphasize the power of the linguistic ambiguity in the last lines of the
play" (45), thereby distorting its meaning. Norman, in contrast,
suggests that there is something built into the structure of Pinter's
dramatic narrative that necessitates an engagement with the ambiguity
of language; that is, The Dumb Waiter compels the reader/spectator to
reflect critically on the ambiguous nature of language and
communication, which, in a sense, disallows the “neglect” of which
Buck speaks. What I find intriguing about Norman's essay is how it
reveals the play as being partly about what narrative discourse is and
gestures toward the psycho-social processes by which meanings are
created through inter-subjectiv