Reading the Audience’s Joint Pretence: Language of the Capital in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter and Mountain Language

Abstract

Harold Pinter’s early plays foreground the characters’ immediate languages which mirror nothing but the contingent situation. They seem to be empty and absurd. His late plays describe a particular response to a particular situation in which there are political victims. This paper interprets the empty absurdity of The Dumb Waiter through the hindsight of his late political play, Mountain Language. It will suggest a way of symptomatic reading that signifies the audience’s structure of reference and attitude, and help the students to fill in absurd drama and to reflect their habitual perceptions. Pinter mirrors the audience dramatizing their joint pretence. The first problematic reference comes from his first novel and drama The Dwarfs: the joint pretence between the perceiver and the perceived, that makes up our habitual perceptions. The second is the crucial hegemonic operation of the language of the capital in Mountain Language. The third synthesizes the above two questions: the audiences’s habitual reference and attitude to the hegemonic double bind between assimilation and discrimination of the language of the capital that reproduces political victims. Gus in The Dumb Waiter questions something common but wrong. He plays the role as the double: the executioner and the executed. The play casts the audience who do not question why something wrong becomes common. The audience are invited to play the double: the executioner and the executed.