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speculation, but for now it is enough to emphasize that I read these

scenes as more of a critique of the nature of textual representation than

the critique of a speculating audience. It is not so much that an

audience misunderstands the play, but that texts cannot be read

precisely. Attempts to read precisely emphasize the errors intrinsic to

such an effort. The Dumb Waiter has multiple meanings that cannot

be reduced to a single idea or message.
Despite the desire to determine an absolute meaning from a

text (whether the text in question is Ben’s newspapers, or The Dumb

Waiter as a dramatic text), texts resist being interpreted so precisely.

Texts always seem to evade determinate foreclosure. Read

metatheatrically, The Dumb Waiter critiques the way we understand

dramatic texts, and perhaps in a wider context the way we understand

narrative and performance. It emphasizes the way readers and

audience members alike foreclose narrative. This foreclosure may be

used in the service of either an ambiguous or rigid interpretation. The

point is both interpretations require a precise relationship to narrative.

The narrative must provide an impossibly exact interpretation.In terms of The Dumb Waiter, recognizing the compulsion to

“fill in” becomes a means to stake out Pinter’s place in modern drama.

Van Laan sees filling in as a relatively new phenomena:

”commentators are engaging in a process that has become widespread

in the discussion of drama since the advent of Beckett” (118), and he

goes on to argue that Pinter’s play “deviates so strikingly from the

traditional [dramatic] model that his relationship to us becomes a

central element of the drama” (122).
This recognition of the divergence between Pinter’s drama

and traditional drama revolves around the audience’s trust in the

playwright. In traditional drama, the audience trusts the playwright,

and, thus the play unfolds without the audience being forced to take

the playwright into the equation. Rhetorically, when Van Laan needs

to understand Pinter in terms of exactitude -- or, more precisely, when

he wants to emphasize the exactitude of the play’s ambiguous ending -

• the play is understood as a text. When he outlines the insubstantial
  
  relationship between Pinter’s play and the audience, then the play is
  
  described in terms of performance by using such terms as “spectator
  
  response” (122). Van Laan outlines an idealized dramatic dichotomy
  
  to The Dumb Waiter: text is exact and fosters meaning, while the
  
  performative utterance perpetuates a self-referential ambiguity.
  
  It would be one thing if the compulsion to “fill in” was
  
  restricted to Pinter and other so-called absurdist playwrights, but Van
  
  Laan’s claims are far too modest. This is a phenomena that stretches
  
  at least as far back as modern drama itself.4 In his exuberance for The
  Dumb Waiter, Van Laan sees Pinter’s play as too much of a radical
  
  departure from its dramatic antecedents.
  
  For example, in just one well known and decidedly non-
  absurdist example of “filling in,” G. B. Shaw includes a prose
  
  epilogue to the published form of Pygmalion:
  5
  This sequel to the play
  
  describes what will happen next to the characters. Shaw decides to
  
  “fill in” his own play because he has become alarmed at how the
  
  audience and theatrical productions themselves have “filled in” the
  
  drama.
  In a clear example of disciplining those who “fill in,” Shaw
  
  describes as “unbearable” the way that “people in all directions have
  
  assumed, for no other reason than that she [Eliza Doolittle] became
  
  the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it”
  
  (282). Shaw believes he has written a play -- he has created a text--that represents an exact and precise meaning. In the aftermath of the
  play’s performance, Shaw sees how audiences have filled in the play
  
  by imagining a marriage between Eliza and Higgins. Shaw returns to
  
  the text since the audience has deformed the play. He must create a
  
  postscript as paratext in an effort to make the imprecise text more
  
  exact. Much like Van Laan, Shaw tries to imagine a text so precise its
  
  meaning becomes transparent -- a text protected from interpretive
  
  ambiguity.6
  With this being said, I agree that critical efforts to “fill in”
  
  associated with The Dumb Waiter are different from Shaw’s
  
  recognition of and attempt to protect his play from an audience’s
  
  imaginative construction. As Van Laan notes, Pinter’s play certainly
  
  seems self-aware and perhaps even encourages filling in, as the
  
  compulsion to do so enters the play’s content. However, Pinter leaves
  
  the disciplining to Shaw. The Dumb Waiter does not reach its almost
  
  violent tableau because Ben and Gus “fill in,” but on the contrary, the
  
  tableau emerges as the culmination of a quite opposite effect.
  
  The play concludes with Ben and Gus exhibiting a Shavian
  
  compulsion to read texts precisely. Like Shaw’s efforts to give
  
  Pygmalion a precise meaning, Ben and Gus wish to believe that texts
  
  have one exact meaning. In addition to parodying “filling in,” the
  
  hitmen and The Dumb Waiter as a play confront the inherent difficulty
  
  in understanding texts determinately.

3. Grappling with Imprecision
   
   In The Dumb Waiter, newspapers provide evidence of an exterior
   
   world beyond the confines of the room where Ben and Gus languish,
   
   and elucidate the interpersonal connections which dictate the rules of
   
   such a world. Or, at least this is the role newspapers should serve.
   
   However, more often than not, all Ben’s paper reveals to Ben and Gus
   
   is the mysteriousness of the world. Without a complete explanation
   
   for why a man crawled under a lorry, the story of the man getting run-
   over, which begins the play, becomes “unbelievable” and “incredible”
   
   if not incomprehensible to the two hitmen. Yet, if anything is
   
   incomprehensible to the theatrical audience, it is the very fact that the
   
   seemingly fact-based newspaper story is incomprehensible to Ben and
   
   Gus.After moving to another story, Ben and Gus find textual
   
   representation even more unsatisfactory. Just because words are
   
   printed on a page does not mean the printed words represent an
   
   authentic action that has occurred exterior to the room. The
   
   newspaper does not represent transparently. Rather than revealing
   
   absolute truths and representing an objective unmediated view of the
   
   world, the newspaper’s textual signifiers require human mediation.
   Ben and Gus must grapple with and interpret the text to be
   
   satisfied with how and what the text represents:
   BEN: It’s a fact. What about that, eh? A child of eight
   killing a cat!
   
   GUS: How did he do it?
   
   BEN: It was a girl.
   
   GUS:. How did she do it?
   
   BEN: She –
   
   He picks up paper and studies it.
   
   It doesn’t say.
   
   GUS: Why not?
   
   BEN: Wait a minute. It just says -- Her brother, aged eleven,
   
   viewed the incident from the toolshed.
   
   GUS: Go on!
   
   BEN: That’s bloody ridiculous.
   
   Pause.
   GUS: I bet he did it.
   
   BEN: Who?
   
   GUS: The brother.
   
   BEN: I think you’re right.
   
   Pause.
   (Slamming down the paper.) What about that, eh? A kid of
   eleven killing a cat and blaming it on his little sister of eight!
   
   (116)
   
   For Ben and Gus, both stories have intrinsic gaps -- questions
   
   that remain unanswered. These gaps in textual representation suggest
   
   that no matter how precise a text, there is always room for more
   
   precision. It is not enough to know that an old man crawls under a
   
   lorry and is run over, it must be known “who advised him to do a
   
   thing like that” (114)? It is not enough to know that a child of eight
   
   killed a cat, it must be known how she killed it. Ben and Gus’s
   
   discussion highlights the text for what it fails to represent instead of
   
   what it successfully represents. Since there are questions that must
   
   remain frustratingly unanswered, textual representation is ultimatelyunderstood by the characters as incomplete and unsatisfying. The
   
   stories Ben reads Gus are evidence of a distance between the acts that
   
   occur in the exterior world and the text that narrates such acts.
   
   These gaps are textual signs that the newspaper can never
   
   represent fully, but they also provide opportunities for interpretation.
   
   Ben and Gus’s interpretive scheme equates their remaining questions
   
   as evidence of a textual mis-representation. Not knowing who advises
   
   crawling under the lorry or the “how” of cat murder covers the entire
   
   text with an air of inauthenticity. Gaps corrupt the entire text and
   
   make the facts “incredible,” and “ridiculous.” Since representational
   
   gaps make the legitimacy of the text suspect, Ben and Gus feel
   
   justified in correcting the text by substituting information that will
   
   allow a satisfying degree of narrative closure. If the gap is big enough,
   
   Ben and Gus can interpret the world to mirror their own understanding
   
   of it. Such a mental exercise allows the hitmen’s interpretation of the
   
   textual representation of exterior actions to become synonymous with
   the actions themselves.
   Gus assumes it is a boy who kills the cat. Upon hearing the
   
   newspaper account that it was in fact a girl who committed the violent
   
   act, the newspaper story no longer matches Gus’s understanding of the
   
   world. However, the newspaper contains a plethora of signifying
   
   possibilities. As part of its unappealing representational economy, the
   
   newspaper gives an indeterminate gap where Gus can reinterpret the
   
   story.
   The newspaper offers both a seemingly clear and complete
   
   representation of events: the girl killed the cat and her brother
   
   witnessed the event, and provides Gus the opportunity to forge an
   
   alternate representation that disrupts the printed and privileged
   
   narrative: her brother witnesses the event, so he may be more
   
   perpetrator than witness. The newspaper may be wrong, but in its mis-
   representation there is a trace of the authentic. As textual detective,
   
   Gus can separate the mis-representation from the presumed authentic
   
   representation, and use such information to better understand the
   
   world.
   Clearly, Gus wants to believe the murderer is a boy. Even
   
   before he finds out who kills the cat, he uses a masculine pronoun to
   
   refer to the perpetrator. Since Gus wants the killer to be male, he
   
   envisions a scenario that matches his desire. For Van Laan, such aninterpretation of the newspaper story is a deformation akin to the way
   
   critics interpret Pinter’s play:
   
   Pinter is using Ben and Gus to mirror his audience. In this
   episode he creates a burlesque version of the commentators, a
   
   built-in before-the-fact put-down of their similar act of “filling
   
   in” in order to make a presented situation conform to the
   
   sense of reality the viewer has brought to it. (120)
   
   Gus is not the only one “filling in” the facts of the scene or
   
   giving the scene a sense of completion in order to confirm his own
   
   expectations. It is also “filling in” when we assume that the textual
   
   representation outlined in a newspaper is unassailable evidence of
   
   what occurs in the world. A newspaper is a sign system, and not a
   
   referent. The newspaper is not a presented situation, but, in the logic
   
   of the play, the newspaper is a representation of a presented situation.
   
   While the newspaper’s characterization of the cat’s death may
   
   seem to be a more likely scenario than Gus’s gender bias, to label
   
   Gus’s position false is to continue “filling in.” Just because Gus is
   
   biased and a newspaper that is never proven to be inaccurate is
   
   traditionally understood to be true does not mean Gus is wrong. Since
   
   the event that both Gus and the newspaper try to explain is kept firmly
   
   out of the audience’s view, both interpretations are just representations
   
   of an exterior action. Either is a possible explanation for the dead cat.
   
   The play offers interpretations, not authentic answers.
   
   Ben and Gus are given the choice of recognizing that the text
   
   possesses an independent veracity that represents obscurely and fails
   
   to lead to satisfaction, or engage in the satisfying act of interpretation,
   
   molding the text till it fits their desires. Unsurprisingly, they choose
   
   the latter. By privileging their own satisfaction, Ben and Gus take
   
   authenticity out of the equation (or perhaps they become the personal
   
   arbitrators of authenticity), and in so doing demonstrate that the
   
   newspaper scene is a conflict of representational systems. The signs
   
   are accepted on their own merit without regard to the likelihood of
   
   signifier bonding to referent.
   
   I would like to think that I am not so totally humorless and
   
   logicless as not to recognize the silliness of Ben and Gus privileging
   
   their “filling in” over the “filling in” of the newspaper, and that Van
   
   Laan’s insight that this “filling in” parodies a strand of criticism that
   would develop around the play is an apt one. However, if we read thenewspaper scene as a parody of critical “filling in,” there is another
   
   critical strand that is parodied later in the play. As the dumb waiter
   
   delivers its written food orders to Ben and Gus, the hitmen must
   
   confront the impossibility of fulfilling the desire for textual exactitude.
   
   Their “real world” actions are doomed to perpetually fall short of the
   
   requests outlined in the notes delivered via the dumb waiter. There is
   
   a great world of difference between the “Macaroni Pastitsio” and
   
   “Ormitha Macarounada” the note demands and the material “Three
   
   McVitie and Price! One Lyons Red Label! One Smith’s Crisps! One
   
   Eccles Cake! [and] One Fruit and Nut!” that Ben and Gus send in
   
   response.
   Certainly, this is also a moment of “filling in” as Ben and Gus
   
   try to deform precise textual representations by substituting alternative
   
   objects in place of those that were requested. However, it also a
   
   moment of recognition when their understanding of “filling in” has
   
   changed. Anything less than exactly fulfilling the dictates of the
   
   textual orders becomes inappropriate as Ben finally suggest that
   
   “We’d better tell them. [ . . . ] That we can’t do it, we haven’t got it”
   
   (138). The precise dictates of textual representation cannot be
   
   performed and “filling in” cannot disguise this fact. Efforts to “fill in”
   
   merely outline the unacceptable nature of “filling in,” and establish
   
   the very concept of textual representational exactitude as illusory.8
   Since Ben and Gus have been unable to understand precise
   
   textual representation as anything but illusory -- since they must “fill
   
   in” perceived gaps in the papers, and since the written requests of the
   
   dumb waiter must remain hopelessly out of reach, the hitmen turn to
   
   the vocal utterance. There is the hope that speech will provide the
   
   exactitude that the text lacks. First, Ben and Gus try to speak with
   
   whoever is running the dumb waiter. Seemingly they want to believe
   
   that speech will bridge the gap between what the notes demand and
   
   what they can provide. Second, when Ben offers Gus instructions,
   
   Ben does not give the instructions the same as he always had. Ben
   
   forgets to ask Gus to take his gun out. Some critics in support of
   
   “filling in” suggest that this is the moment where Ben reveals Gus is
   
   the victim. However, such an interpretation is again forced to
   
   confront language that fails to represent precisely, for even if Gus
   
   does not have his gun, Ben’s instructions outline that Gus is behind
   
   the door and that a “bloke comes in” (143).Understanding the concluding tableau precisely seems to
   
   require the understanding that so much of the language that leads up to
   
   the tableau fails to represent precisely. So, while Ben and Gus’s
   
   “filling in” of the papers is a parody of a critical strand, Ben and Gus’s
   
   hopeless desire to have language represent precisely is a parody of the
   
   opposing critical strand. Ben and Gus’s need to fulfill orders exactly,
   
   and the way such a compulsion leads them further and further down a
   
   dangerous path, is analogous to the critical compulsion to focus on the
   
   exact manner the concluding tableau represents.
   If The Dumb Waiter parodies textual exactitude as well as
   
   “filling in,” where does that leave criticism of Pinter’s play as we
   
   approach a half-century since its stage debut? Ben and Gus take turns
   
   embracing both critical activities, and believing that both offer
   
   meaning and satisfaction. I am not insisting that every critic must
   
   engage in both activities since such a balance would be difficult if not
   
   impossible to maintain. Reflecting on his efforts to fulfill the textual
   
   representations delivered by the dumb waiter, Gus wonders: “Why did
   you send him up all that stuff? (Thoughtfully.) Why did I send it up?”
   
   (141).
   Perhaps the “I” and the “you” of dramatic criticism and the
   
   plethora of interpretive possibilities that are evoked have much to say
   
   about how a play means. There cannot be a uniform meaning for
   
   Pinter’s play any more then there can be a homogenous audience. The
   Dumb Waiter’s self-conscious and contradictory parodies of narrative
   
   representation and interpretive method may be capable of forcing an
   
   audience to acknowledge the impossibility of an unitary interpretive
   
   schematic. This self-awareness equips Pinter’s play to call attention
   
   to the “filling in” / exactitude fulcrum over which so much drama
   
   seems to balance. Perhaps The Dumb Waiter, and the critical conflicts
   
   which surround it, can help illustrate how neither alternative
   
   adequately illustrates Pinter’s play and its proliferating meanings.
   Lance Norman, Michigan State University
   
   Notes
   1 Viewed in its ritual context some contemporary drama has overcome this difficulty
   
   by ending the play with it beginning again. See Eugène Ionesco’s The Lesson (1958)
   
   and Arrabal’s The Architect and Emperor of Assyria (1969) for representativeexamples. Arrabal’s play successfully emphasizes the ephemeral nature of ritual roles
   
   as the play begins again (concludes?) with the Architect having become the Emperor,
   
   and the Emperor the Architect.
   
   2 Susan Hollis Merritt addresses Van Laan’s critical strategy, and provides in-depth
   
   analysis of the debate between Van Laan, Austin Quigley, and Charles Carpenter in
   
   Modern Drama, on what she calls “critically ‘inescapable’ certainties” (see chapter 4
   
   of Pinter in Play). 3 In his insightful Fields of Play in Modern Drama, Thomas R. Whitaker recognizes
   
   the paradox that dramatic performance frequently enacts the antithesis to its content.
   
   In his discussion of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days Whitaker asserts that, despite
   
   Winnie’s isolation, the play is ultimately a communal act: “Happy Days invites us to
   
   share the void that Winnie must endure, her head full of cries, to share our morally
   
   dubious relation to the void and the cries, and to share the plenitude we find in the
   
   dramatic medium itself. And finally it invites us to celebrate the strange fact that we
   
   can do so” (22). While this seems intuitively true to my understanding of Beckett and
   
   drama itself, the dual strands of criticism for The Dumb Waiter caution against a
   
   universal spectating “us.”
   4 I believe that “filling in” stretches back much farther, but for the purpose of this
   
   essay, I restrict my discussion to modern drama.
   
   5 While a late-Victorian audience would fail to look at Shavian drama as traditional,
   
   next to the drama of Pinter, Shaw reads as decidedly traditional.
   
   6 The postscript was not Shaw’s last attempt to protect Pygmalion from filling in. In
   
   1941, he would return to the play itself and rewrite the ending. I would suggest that
   
   this has everything to do with the desire for textual exactitude.
   7 This statement requires an understanding of a universal spectating affect of the very
   
   kind I try to deconstruct above. It suggests that the very fact some critics understand
   
   the play as a murder and some critics do not precludes any unitary interpretation as
   
   legitimate. Such a statement also reinforces an Absurdist / traditional drama dialectic
   
   similar to the one Van Laan’s vision of “filling in” constructs. Of course Ibsen’s Dr.
   
   Stockmann and Rosmer [from Enemy of the People (1882) and Rosmersholm (1886)
   respectively] learned not to believe what you read in the papers, and Ionesco’s Mr.
   
   and Mrs. Smith’s debate over whether when the doorbell rings it means there is
   
   always someone at the door or never anyone at the door in The Bald Soprano (1950),
   an example that humorously demonstrates the slippery nature of evidence. Perhaps
   
   audience members familiar with any of these plays might not find Ben and Gus’s
   
   suspicion of what is “down here in black and white” mystifying (130).
   
   8 Of course, part of what Ben and Gus are forced to come to grips with is the essence
   
   of theatricality. The hitmen are forced to recognize the gap between textual signifiers
   
   and phenomenological objects