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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. 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.
Moreover, realism’s reliance on illusionism is generally understood to
disguise the fact that every representation, however ostensibly neutral,
smuggles in an ideological perspective, a way of seeing. This closet
authoritarianism is further detectable in realism’s preoccupation with
“truth” and disclosure, its distrust of ambiguity and alternative
possibilities, and the teleological subordination of subject-matter to
the end of narrative closure.
Realism partly enacts such formal coercion through a
particular way of using details. In his essay “The Reality Effect,”
Barthes argues that in realistic fiction there exists a species of
otherwise gratuitous details whose function is to say no more and no
less than “we are the real” (234). Paradoxically, such details are able
to fulfill this function in direct proportion to their narrative
irrelevance. A detail must conspicuously be shorn of any sense of
motivation, of having a meaningful function, if it is to assume its other“meaning,” which is to signify the utter contingency, the brute
factuality of reality itself. (His example is a barometer on a piano in
Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart.”) Such details signify, in other words, but
in an unusual way. The ambition of the reality effect is to transform
the tripartite structure of the sign -- signifier/signified/referent -- such
that the signified is suppressed and the signifier is felt to be purely co-
extensive with the referent.
Hence, one standard function of referential specificity is to
produce reality-effects that tacitly proclaim the existence of reality,
making the world appear mythic, natural, and immutable, rather than
historical and susceptible to change. Considered in this way, the
referential code typically constitutes a sort of glue that binds the
depicted social order into an unalterable monolith. One thing exists, so
everything else does as well, and it is pointless to contest the society
for which the detail is a token. Moreover, realism would have us
believe that details are fundamentally interchangeable. What realism
wants is a sense of a “very specific real situation” without the
unruliness that is part and parcel of what specificity means. Realism
does not want specificity, but specificity-ness.
At one level, the bizarre and apparently gratuitous food
references in The Dumb Waiter would seem to create the aura of
dense, unchangeable factuality for which realism strives. At the same
time, these references are like a gazetteer without the map; missing are
the images of totality, the holistic systems, the ideological edifices that
realism builds on the ground of specificity. As Gus pithily puts it:
“What town are we in? I’ve forgotten.” When Ben says Birmingham,
Gus responds with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy:
That’s in the Midlands. Second biggest city in Great Britain. I’d
never have guessed (121).
Typically, geographic facts function like reality-effects; their
microscopic incontestability serves to naturalize the world order. But
in The Dumb Waiter, local facts refuse to serve their ideological
function -- if crisps must answer for bamboo shoots, how sure can we
be about Birmingham?
In The Dumb Waiter, the background awakens and moves to
the center, as the types of details that realism asks to be compliant and
quiescent -- crockery, toilet, burner, bed sheets, matches, dumb waiter
-- become sites of consternation and alarm. 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). In order to manage discontent, discontent must first be
aroused, and, since the symbolization of social problems incarnates a
wish that such problems could be resolved, it becomes imperative that
such imaginary solutions accord with the existing order; that is, the
social order must be seen as capable of resolving the very problems it
creates. In Jameson’s words, this model of aesthetic production
“allows us to think repression and wish-fulfillment together within the
unity of a single mechanism,” one that “strategically arouses fantasy
content within careful symbolic containment structures which defuse
it” (2000, 138).
In The Dumb Waiter, football initially might seem to accord
with Dyer’s well-known categorization of utopian problem-solving
(277-8). Against the dreariness, tedium, and exhaustion of labor,
football provides energetic, intense experience: “Talk about drama,”
as Gus says of a remembered Villa match (121). In a world of unseen
manipulation and paranoia, football offers stark, legible conflict and
unambiguous resolution -- in a word, transparency. And perhaps most
significantly, in a society of fragmentation and atomization, football
affords temporary membership in a passionate collective and, thus, an
experience of community. (Note that these imaginary solutions flow
from the leisure-branch of the same society that created the problems,
and depend on prettified forms of aggressiveness, integration, and
ego-dissolution.)
In a different sort of play, Gus and Ben might affectionately
recall a shared football experience, and football might conform to theutopian model previously described. Here, however, utopia is
overwritten by referential crisis, such that Gus and Ben cannot agree
whether they were at the same cup tie; whether the match was settled
by a “disputed penalty;” whether the penalty was correct or involved
“acting;” whether the Villa play an aggressive style; and who the Villa
were playing (21). Gus persists in his desire to see another football
match as utopian compensation for the upcoming job -- asserting “I’ve
always been an ardent football fan” (122) -- but the two cannot settle
on a field where the home team is actually playing, leading to Ben’s
melancholy summation: “Away. They’re all playing away” (123).
Via the vanishing referent, utopia and the Real begin to
merge. The Real is always elsewhere, and utopia is the unrealizable
desire to be present at events that are always “playing away.” There is,
however, another utopian pathway that I want briefly to consider, one
that will lead us back to the problem of the Real from the inside-out,
as it were, from the standpoint of subjectivity. Brecht once remarked
that the “smallest social unit is not the single person but two people”
(197), and I would suggest that amid the ideologies of labor and
alienation, a certain utopianism survives in the rudimentary impulse
toward social relation. In this context, we can think about the two-
character form of The Dumb Waiter as providing a bare-bones
schematic rendering of sociality itself.
Indeed, one need not look beyond the opening and closing
tableaus to sense a fixation on the basic patterns and parameters of
social life, and it is useful in this context to turn to another Jameson
essay, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1977), in which he
endeavors to rethink Lacanian psychoanalysis in Marxist terms. The
framing structure of the play is the social dyad, a pattern whose
psychoanalytic foundation is the mother-child relation. The problem
of self and other dates from the highly charged first experiences in
which the child begins to take itself as an object -- Lacan’s mirror
stage -- and to understand the parental body as an “other,” a period in
which the boundaries between self and other are still relatively fluid
but where a dyadic/binary logic (inside/outside, etc.) predominates.
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. The basic pattern of relation is
  henceforth triadic or triangular -- the Oedipal model -- rather than
  dyadic, but the triangularity of the Other is not limited to actual
  “third” persons, but rather flows from the compulsory deferrals,
  mediations, and absences that separate desire from its dyadic object
  and whose fundamental mode is simply language itself.
  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. In this context, in his
  famous essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1971),
  Louis Althusser suggests that ideology is a representation of an
  “imaginary relationship” of the subject to his or her real conditions
  (155); that is, the social order is the more effectively able to produce
  and integrate the subject if the subject experiences that order as a
  binary other -- an interlocutor or intimate -- rather than an abstract
  Symbolic network. 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).
  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. Against themenacing abstractness of the dumb waiter’s imperatives, Gus and Ben
  engage in a comparatively free flow of libidinal energies, and this, I
  would suggest, constitutes a powerful fantasy of sociality, a partial
  utopian (i.e., ideological) solution to the condition of alienated labor
  discussed above.
  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. The function of the work of art is
  the ideological (Imaginary) management of anxieties about the social
  (Symbolic) order, and symbolization/management of the subject’s
  radical disconnection from those global processes of time and
  historical change (the Real), which are textually unrepresentable and
  can be figured only as limitation, absence, or negation.
  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.
  One can see how the crisis of the referent, with which we
  began, becomes an urgent political matter for the left-wing critics I
  have been discussing. Taken in a certain direction, the theoretical
  discourse of this crisis can be conjoined with political quietism;
  Eagleton links post-structuralism in particular with the melancholy
  aftermath of 1968: “Unable to break the structures of state power,
  post-structuralism found it possible instead to subvert the structures of
  language” (1983, 142). Against this tendency, the theoretical models
  outlined here are attempts to foreground social desire as the raw
  material of aesthetic production, and to show the complex ideological
  stratagems that enforce alienation from history, as well as testify to the
  persistence of historical desire. Against this backdrop, I want to end
  by opening a new question, one that has to do with the medium of
  theater. The various literary models discussed here necessarily bypass
  the theater's special way of symbolizing and deploying the Real --
  namely by physical bodies and objects. As we see in the newspaper,
  foodstuffs, and the dumb waiter itself, Pinter’s play lends the problem
  of the referent a particular urgency through its fixation on objects.
  It is telling, in this regard, that so many of the key items --
  toilet, kettle, burner, lorry, cat, etc. -- remain offstage, while onstage
  items, such as the newspaper and the dumb waiter, are in various ways
  signs of the inaccessibility or retreat of the historical Real. At the
  same time, Bert O. States has suggested that the theater physically
  displays the object-world in an estranging manner, by removing
  objects from the utilitarian sphere and entering them into an aesthetic
  arena. States argues that one of the social functions of drama is to
  “digest” a rapidly changing objective world by allowing audiences to
  re-perceive it in the theater’s intentional aesthetic space. He writes:
  “theater ingests the world of objects and signs only to bring images tolife. In the image, a defamiliarized and desymbolized object is
  ‘uplifted to the view’” (37).
  In these terms, a key visible token of the Real is Ben’s
  revolver, which plays such an important role in the closing tableau. I
  think that one final ideology put in play by The Dumb Waiter is
  simply the ideology of ending, of closure, which is central to the
  ideological project of realism discussed earlier. Prop though it
  certainly is, Ben’s revolver is a reminder that History, however
  cognitively remote, is accessible to all of us as aging, disease, hunger,
  deprivation, violence, and pain. It is of course a task of ideology to
  manage anxieties about the body as a site where History impresses
  itself in direct ways, and the iconography of gangsters and killers -- as
  part of the cultural ideology of violence -- has its own functions in this
  regard. Such forms typically, indeed obsessively, deploy the Real of
  bodily violence, but manage anxieties about such violence via
  aesthetic strategies such as spectacle, eroticization, and closure. At a
  minimum, The Dumb Waiter refuses such conventional resolution,
  and leaves the referent -- the bullet, say -- suspended as a broken
  promise, an open problem. This is a long distance from the evident
  politics of later Pinter works such as One for the Road or Mountain
  Language, but as an ideological production, The Dumb Waiter has
  much to say about the political and aesthetic crises of its period.
  Varun Begley, College of William and Mary
  Bibliography
  Primary Texts
  Pinter, Harold. The Dumb Waiter in Harold Pinter: Plays One. [1960]
  London: Faber and Faber, 1996.
  Secondary Texts
  Adorno, T.W. “On Popular Music” in A Critical and Cultural Theory
  Reader. eds Antony Easthope and Kate McGowan. Toronto
  and Buffalo: Toronto, 1997. (211-223)Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in
  Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader.