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I am sympathetic to Van Laan’s overall point that the play Pinter gives us is all that can be interpreted, and dramatic analysis needs to be restricted to the text, and not what a critic assumes will happen.

However, when Van Laan goes on to argue “that with one hand Pinter beckons us to speculate while with the other he disciplines us for so doing” (122), I cannot help but be a little uncomfortable with such a rigid interpretation to a playful drama. Like his characterization of Pinter, Van Laan becomes the disciplinarian by framing the Burkman and Gordon strand of Dumb Waiter criticism, which engages in speculation, as more akin to distortion than critical analysis.

Ironically, it is here that Van Laan seems to approach an analytical strategy close to the one he critiques (see also Merritt).

From my perspective, one of the virtues of emphasizing the compulsion to “fill in” Pinter’s play is that it clarifies the core indeterminacy at the heart of The Dumb Waiter’s closing tableau.

Almost paradoxically, the concluding tableau of The Dumb Waiter only becomes indeterminate by refusing to understand the play as an indeterminate representation. The words on the page which are the concluding stage directions must represent clearly and precisely to foreclose the play from an audience who wants to read it as a very unambiguous murder. If, as Van Laan suggests, ritual critics and those who refer to Gus as dead are deformers of the play, and are disciplined by the play through Ben and Gus’s parodying such a compulsion to speculate, then the play has a clear and rigid structure.

To understand the conclusion as clearly indeterminate is to understand the play as clearly determinate.

In essence, the Van Laan and the Burkman approaches to The Dumb Waiter differ over the representational content of the play, but agree on representation as process. Both critics understand the play as transparent dramatic representation. For Burkman, this transparency allows the audience to see the inevitable ritual, and for Van Laan this transparency creates indeterminacy by disciplining a speculating audience.

However, the mere presence of both views -- not as isolated approaches - but as trends in critical analysis of the play suggest that The Dumb Waiter does not transparently represent. Rather than indicting those who “fill in” as deformers of the play, perhaps the time

has come to accept that The Dumb Waiter encourages audiences to both “fill in,” and to accept the conclusion as a self-contained performative act. Perhaps filling in is not something the play disciplines against, but is as intrinsic to representation as the self-contained performative act. To accept both sides as essential to the play’s dramatic representation may sacrifice some of the indeterminacy that is the representational content of The Dumb Waiter’s final tableau, but understanding the play as a double representational process emphasizes that it is indeterminate and not just a rigid representation of indeterminism.³

If we imagine that Pinter’s play encourages speculation as a prelude to disciplining the speculators, we surround Pinter with an almost Shavian didactic legitimacy. Pinter as disciplinarian evokes a Pinterian drama that establishes a correct interpretation and a mistaken one. The mistaken interpretation works akin to a trick question leading an audience down the wrong path of speculation before revealing the true meaning of the play.

Van Laan focuses on the scenes where Ben reads the newspaper to Gus as examples of how Pinter becomes a dominatrix (my term not Van Laan’s). I will discuss the newspaper scenes below in order to question these moments as a critique of audience 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.