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 suggests that the very fact some critics understand  
the play as a murder and some critics do not precludes any unitary interpretation as  
legitimate.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.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 Eugene 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).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)?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).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.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.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. 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. 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?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.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.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.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.3.