贵阳海洋馆门票价格:Silence：True Communication

Canadian Social Science Vol.3 No.4 August 2007
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Silence：True Communication
SILENCE, VRAIE COMMUNICATION
Xiao Qi1 Wang Zexiang2
Abstract: This paper examines the issue of communication in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter.
The main characters Gus and Ben are simple characters and their means of communication are the
central theme in this play. It shows that even though the two characters interact and talk and discuss,
they don’t really communicate. The essence of the difference between just talking and really
communicating is analyzed.
Key words: Silence, communication
Résumé: L’article présent examine le problème de communication dans Le Serveur muet de
Harold Pinter. Les personnages principaux Gus et Ben sont des figures simples, et leur sens de
communication est le thème central de cette pièce. L’article montre que, bien que les deux
personnages s’interagirent, parlent et discutent, ils ne communiquent pas véritablement. L’essence
de la différence entre la conversation et la communication est analysée.
Mots-Clés: silence, communication
1 School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong Normal University, China.
2 Teaching Research and Management Center, Hubei Milkyway Information Technology Institute, China.
*Received 25 January 2007 ; accepted 4 April 2007
Harold Pinter, English dramatist, was born in 1930, in Hackney in London’s East End. He is the son of an
English tailor of Eastern European Jewish ancestry, and studied at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
and Central School of Speech and Drama. One of the most important English playwrights of the last half of
the 20th century and the most influential of his generation, Pinter writes what have been called
“comedies of menace.” Using apparently commonplace characters and settings, he invests his plays with an
atmosphere of fear, horror, and mystery. The peculiar tension he creates often derives as much from the long
silences between speeches as from the often curt, ambiguous, yet vividly vernacular speeches themselves.
His austere language is extremely distinctive, as is the ominous unease it provokes, and he is one of the few
writers to have an adjective—Pinteresque—named for him. His plays frequently concern struggles for power in
which the issues are obscure and the reasons for defeat and victory undefined. He has won many prestigious
honors, the crowning of which was the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature. Pinter began his theatrical career as an actor, touring with provincial repertory companies. He has continued
to act throughout his career, working on stage, in films,and on radio and television. His first produced effort as
a playwright, a one-act drama entitled The Room (1957),
was followed such plays as The Birthday Party (1957,
film 1967), The Dumb Waiter (1957), A Slight Ache
(1958), and The Dwarfs (1960). Pinter adapted several
of these and later plays for film. The Caretaker (1959,
film 1963) was his first great commercial and critical
success and was followed by numerous plays, including
The Collection (1961), The Homecoming (1964, film
1969), Landscape (1967), Old Times (1970), No Man’s
Land (1974), Betrayal (1978, film 1981), A Kind of
Alaska (1982), One for the Road (1984), Mountain
Language (1988), Moonlight (1993), Ashes to Ashes
(1996), Celebration (1999), and Remembrance of
Things Past (2000). By and large, Pinter’s later dramas,
often more overtly political than his previous works,
have been greeted with less critical acclaim than his
earlier plays.
The Dumb Waiter is one of Pinter’s masterpiece, in
which a dumb waiter, the small lift used to transport
meals and dirty crockery between floors in restaurants,
is at the centre of Harold Pinter’s tense two-hander. Set
in an anonymous basement in Birmingham, two
assassins await their instructions and as tension turns
towards dark farce, the dumb waiter drones into action
delivering ever more exotic culinary requests and,
eventually, the go-ahead to proceed with the kill with a
twist.
Pinter’s work is heavily influenced by Samuel
Beckett, who used silence-filled pauses for a
revolutionary theatrical effect. Pinter has spoken of
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speech as a stratagem designed to cover the nakedness
of silence, and these aims are often evident in the
dialogue of Gus and Ben. Ben’s most prominent
response to Gus’s constant questions about the nature of
their jobs is silence. Lurking underneath this silence is
always the threat of violence, the anticipation of
something deathly—the play ends as Ben trains his gun
on Gus in silence.
In Pinter’s plays, the exchange of words between
characters is only the most superficial level of
communication, while the gestures accompanying
verbal exchanges, pauses hesitations and, most
essentially, silences form the second level of
communication. Pinter commented once on silence, or
the so-called subtextual meaning in his plays:
There are two silences. One when no word is spoken.
The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being
employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked
beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech
we hear is an indication of that we don’t hear. It is a
necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or
mocking smoke-screen which keeps the other in its place.
When true silences falls se are still left with echo but are
never nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say
it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
Concerning the interactions between the two
characters Ben and Gus in The Dumb Waiter, their
communicating mainly falls into four types, and in the
following examples drawn from The Dumb Waiter, how
true communication can be only achieved through
silences is rather self-evident. The setting of the play is a
basement with two beds, a serving hatch, a kitchen and
bathroom to the left, and another passage to the right. At
the very beginning of the play, in silence, Ben reads a
newspaper on his bed while Gus ties his shoelaces on
his bed. Gus finishes and walks to the kitchen door, then
stops and shakes his foot. Ben watches as Gus takes a
flattened matchbox out of his shoe. After he and Ben
exchange a glance, Gus puts it in his pocket. From his
other shoe, he takes out a flattened cigarette carton.
They exchange another look, and Gus puts the carton in
his pocket before he leaves for the bathroom. There’s a
sound of the toilet chain being pulled without it flushing,
and Gus returns. Silence is permeated in the room. Both
of them have something to do except talking with each
other, from which one can hardly imagine the
relationship between them： they are actually partners.
Ben keeps reading the damned newspaper, while Gus
does trivial and meaningless things repetitively. Their
eyes meet twice but that doesn’t lead to interactions
breaking the state of silence. With silence—the stage
direction—appearing three times, it is obvious that
Either Ben of Gus wants to talk to each other, let alone
to say communicate with each other. Silence is the way
they protect themselves. The more they express
themselves, the more they are exposed to the other, the
more dangerous they might feel about themselves.
Comparing to both assassins keeping their mouth
shut, most of the times, either of them remains muted, at
the same time the other might raise some topic and thus
creating an atmosphere of communicating. See the
conversation between Ben and Gus below.
Gus：I want to ask you something.
Ben：What are you doing out there?
Gus：Well, I was just—
Ben：What about the tea?
Gus：I’m just going to make it.
Ben：Well, go on. Make it.
Gus：Yes, I will. [He sits in a chair. Ruminatively. ]
He’s laid on some very nice crockery this time, I’ll say
that. It’s sort of striped. There’s a white stripe. [Ben
reads]
It’s very nice. I’ll say that. [Ben turns the page.]
Gus wants to ask Ben something, in response, Ben
raised another topic questioning what Gus is on earth
doing. Thus Gus immediately moves on to where Ben
leads their conversation to. Ben demands Gus to make
the tea While Gus gives an positive answer, he still sits
in the chair appreciating the crockery. Both Ben and
Gus, especially Ben, avoid real communication with
each other. Towards Gus’ questions, Ben either avoid
answering the question straightforwardly by changing
another topic, or just keep silence as if Ben were not in
existence.
In the third type, Ben and Gus just quarrel with each
about trivial things. For example, Ben and Gus debate
the phrase “light the kettle”; Gus feels one should say
the “gas,” since that is what is being lit, or “put on the
kettle,” a phrase his mother used. Ben will have none of
this, and challenges Gus to remember the last time he
saw his mother (he can’t remember). After further
arguments about the phrase, in which Ben reminds Gus
that he’s the senior partner, Ben chokes Gus and
screams “THE KETTLE, YOU FOOL!” It is the
culmination of their debate over the phrase “Light the
kettle.” More important than the actual debate is the
way Ben’s language gradually becomes more menacing
as he insults and intimidates Gus, challenging him to
remember when he last saw his mother and calling
attention to his own seniority. The act of choking
physically cuts off Gus’s ability to speak, making Ben
doubly powerful, as his voice grows in power and Gus’s
diminishes. Ben may also harbor some resentment
about Gus’s lower- class phrase, and perhaps his
hostility springs forth from this. Ben later expresses
delight when the more sophisticated man upstairs uses
the phrase, “Light the kettle,” just as he does.
Towards the end of the play, Gus’ repetition of
Ben’s instructions can illustrate the last type of their
communicating. Ben, quietly and with fatigue, gives
Gus the instructions for the job, instructions that Gus
repeats out loud. Ben instructs Gus to stand behind a
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door, but to not answer a knock on the door. He must
shut the door behind the man who comes in without
exposing himself (Gus), allowing the man to see and
approach Ben. When Ben takes out his gun they will
have cornered the man. At this point, Gus reminds Ben
that so far he hasn’t taken his own gun out, but Ben then
includes that Gus should have taken his gun out when he
closed the door. Moreover, Ben states, the man—or
girl—will look at them in silence.
Ben：If there’s a knock on the door you don’t answer
it.
Gus: If there’s a knock on the door I don’t answer it.
This exchange occurs near the end of the play, in
Part four. Ben states a series of instructions to Gus (who
repeats each line) as to how they will carry out their job,
which ends with their cornering the target with their
guns, be it a male or female victim. Pinter directs the
actors playing Ben and Gus to deliver their lines with a
mechanical detachment, and the effect is that the ghastly
deed of murder becomes drained of human emotion and
sympathy. Gus is merely an echo, and the echo is much
like silence, reinforcing Gus’s status as a human “dumb
waiter,” manipulated and without any voice of his own.
“Silence”: the stage direction that often speaks far
more clearly than words ever could. The characters in
Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter are bound by this
direction throughout the work, locked in a pantomimic
parody of our own world. Pinter’s dialogue, the stage
directions and the world created within the play must
follow this golden rule; however, silence is only one
course within the larger meal. By examining the text,
reading critical works, and studying Pinter’s words
himself we find that the meal we have trouble
swallowing is listed on the menu as “communication”;
true communication is often something too difficult to
even attempt. By “true communication” it is meant the
ability to get another person to understand your ideas in
their purest form; a notion that, after studying The
Dumb Waiter, is increasingly in decay.
Pinter, now 75, who has been the doyen of the
British theater since his first play—“The Room” was
performed in London in 1957— is awarded this year’s
Nobel Prize for literature, one of the few writers for the
English speaking stage ever to be so honored. He joins
such pivotal figures of the 20th century theatre as the
Irishman Samuel Beckett and the American Eugene
O’Neill as laureates of the literary world’s most
precious prize.
What else would you have called him other than the
dramatist of many pauses — those enigmatic, pregnant
and at times sinister pauses his actors affected on the
stage — that left you wondering, hours after the curtain
had come down, how you had ever heard such silence.
In his work, the mystery of our human being is
inseparable from the conviction that we are precarious
creatures inhabiting a world where forces of unreason
and contradiction have dark governance.
That was the power of Harold Pinter, a playwright
whose originality was so compelling that it has brought
into the lexicon the term Pinteresque, to describe an
atmosphere of expectation, where real characters speak
“unrealistically,” or inconsequentially, as people
actually do in everyday life. He evoked that atmosphere
of dread simply by having his stage protagonists engage
in conversational repetitiveness and seeming
irrationality, served up as objects of interest in and by
themselves.
REFERENCES
Wakeman, J.. World Authors (1950—1970) [M]; New York The H. W. Wilson Company, 1975.
Pinter, Harold. The Caretaker & The Dmnb Waiter:Two Plays by Harold Pinter. NY: Grove Press, 1961.
Hayman, Ronald. British Theatre Since 1975. Oxford：Oxford University Press, 1979.
梅曉娟. 荒誕的真實──哈樂德·品特《送菜升降機》會話分析. 安徽師範大學學報（人文社會科學版）, 2004
年7 月.
方柏林. 哈樂德·品特的語言劇. 山東外語教學, 1976, 4.
THE AUTHORS
Xiao Qi, English Department, School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong Normal University, Wuhan, Hubei, 430079,
P.R. China.
Wang Zexiang, 3D Design Team, Teaching Research and Management Center, Hubei Milkyway Information
Technology Institute, Wuhan, Hubei, 430079, P.R. China.