DIAGRAMA DE PARETO

A useful place to begin an examination of the visceral in The Dumb Waiter is with the work of one of the key theorists of the grotesque body. In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin locates Rabelais’

work in a long-standing tradition of popular performance: the myriad inversions and parodies that comprised the practice of Carnival in the middle ages. The various practices grouped together in Carnival (the parody of coronations and wedding ceremonies, mock fights where food substitutes for weapons, elaborate mock rituals in which the power of religion is mocked) share, for Bakhtin, a common dynamic.

They all invert the normal hierarchical structures of society; those who normally rule are dethroned, and those who are ruled are given power -- at least for the duration of the carnival.

This inversion, for Bakhtin, is closely tied to the idea of physical over-indulgence. Carnival’s great enemy is Lent: a season which emphasizes the denial of the body’s appetites, and the mortification of desire. In contrast, Carnival is the season when those appetites are celebrated, and when, as the quote above indicates, the denatured asceticism of Lent is countered by what Bakhtin terms the

“grotesque body,” which is “[…] a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed: it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world […] (317).” It is the peculiar triumph of Carnival that it places this version of the body above all others. The religion of the time regarded the body as the disposable envelope that housed the soul; in Carnival, the body is liberated, to indulge itself in those simple basic needs that are denied to it (or, at least, frowned upon) for the rest of the year.

For Bakhtin, this liberation can be thought of as a levelling down:

…[D]ebasement is the fundamental artistic principle of grotesque realism; all that is sacred and exalted is rethought on the level of the material bodily stratum or else combined and mixed with its images.

We spoke of the grotesque swing, which brings together heaven and

earth. But the accent is placed not on the upward movement but on the descent. (370-1)

During Carnival, then, heaven is brought down to the level of the earth; the spiritual is subordinated to the physical. The social implications are clear. For most of the year, the poor are supposed to practice self-denial as a religious duty. The indulgences of Carnival are a way not only of indulging in a small period of socially-sanctioned license. They are also a way of destroying, if only symbolically, an oppressive social order, of denying the power of the socio-religious monsters (in Pinter’s phrase) whose power is otherwise incontestable.

Bakhtin’s theories of Carnival and the grotesque have been contested, even by those otherwise supportive of his work.¹ These critiques are, it has to be admitted, fair; Bakhtin does give too much weight in his work on Rabelais to the purely liberating aspects of the Carnivalesque, and he does not pay enough attention to the fact that Carnival is a transitory, licensed phenomenon, granting freedoms that can be revoked at the end of the festival. However, these arguments rather miss the point; they ignore the fact that Bakhtin’s theories of the Carnivalesque were, at least in part, a coded intervention in the political debates of his time. Bakhtin was arrested and imprisoned by the Communist authorities; for him, the idea of freedoms that could be revoked had a painful relevance, as Pechey points out: “[…] It doesn’t require much perspicacity to read the supersession of carnivalesque counterculture in a new official culture described in Rabelais and His World as an allegory of the betrayal of the revolution […] (20).

Behind the liberation promised by Carnival, therefore, there is its opposite: the re-imposition of Lenten control over the minds, the bodies, the appetites and the desires of the people. Carnival, in Rabelais and his World, is presented in its most utopian aspect, because, in Russia at the time, the victory of the forces of Lent (manifested, in official ideology at least, as self-denial and Stakhanovite physical endeavor in the service of the Revolution)² was so complete.

However, judging by the evidence of The Dumb Waiter, the last thing that can be said of the person, or people, at the other end of the waiter, is that they are in any way self-denying: if anything, quite the opposite. The food requests go from the relatively quotidian [two braised steak and chips; two sago puddings; two teas without

sugar”(131) to the exotic (macaroni pastitio, ormitha macarounada, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts and chicken, Char Siu and bean sprouts (136, 138)]. As noted above, these demands soon exhaust the meager resources of the two hit-men, but even when they communicate this to the unseen diners upstairs, the demands do not stop. In fact, not only is more food requested, but the food that has been sent is dismissed as sub-standard:

BEN: ([…] grabs the tube and puts it in his mouth:

(Speaking with great deference.) Good evening. I’m sorry to -- bother you, but we just thought we’d better let you know that we haven’t got anything left. We sent up all we had. There’s no more food down here.

(He brings the tube slowly to his ear.)

What?…No, all we had we sent up…Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that…The Eccles cake was stale…The chocolate was melted…The milk was sour.

GUS: What about the crisps?

BEN: (listening) The biscuits were mouldy…(139-40)

I have quoted this section at length because, for me, it is one of the key moments of the play. Those placed above Ben and Gus consume every scrap of nourishment they can provide; then, at the play’s end, they order the hit-men to consume each other -- beginning with Gus, the substandard offering.

Something Carnivalesque is undoubtedly happening. The requests for food obey the kind of hyperbolic, excessive logic that Bakhtin ascribes to Carnival practices and structures; Gus and Ben are unwillingly dragged into a parodic representation of an everyday activity, and there is no sense that the controlling organizations within the world of the play have any interest in the spiritual, rather than the physical. What we seem to have, in this play, is an inverted Carnival, in which the key indicators of the carnivalesque are still in place, but all the real and implied benefits of Carnival flow up, rather than down.

The answer to the question this raises -- to whom do these benefits flow -- is implied in The Dumb Waiter; the same mechanism which conveys impossible demands to the hit men also delivers the final instructions which lead to Gus’ death. It is, however, answered -- and answered fully -- in the plays that Pinter comes to write in the 80s and 90s, plays in which the Carnivalesque operations of the powerful are memorably anatomized.³