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Harold Pinter's the Dumb Waiter Revisited 109 放送大学研究年報 第25号（2007）109―116頁 Journal of The Open University of Japan, No. 25（2007）pp.109―116 The Silence of Abraham’s God : Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter Revisited Kazuyoshi OISHI 沈黙したアブラハムの神 ― ハロルド・ピンターの『給仕エレベーター』 大 石 和 欣1） Synopsis This essay explores a politico-religious meaning of silence in Harold Pinter’s play The Dumb Waiter. The play has an apparent structural similarity with the Biblical episode of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son. The silence of the authoritative power dominates throughout the play. Curiously, however, it ends in the tragic death of Gus, rather than in his liberation. In this sense, the play can rather be seen as a dramatic parallel to Bob Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, a parody of Abraham’s parable. In the post-WWII age, after holocausts and gruesome political cruelties, God in the Bible was replaced by an arbitrary, silent power which drove human existence into chaos and absurdity. Instead of imposing the pangs of conscience, the new authoritative presence commanded murders and human depravities relentlessly, yet with unfeeling silence. Absurdity in silence is more than tragic. This is the situation which Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter represents metaphorically. 要 旨 本論文は英国の劇作家ハロルド・ピンターの『給仕エレベーター』（The Dumb Waiter）におけ る「沈黙」がもつ政治的・宗教的意義について研究したものである。この劇は旧約聖書におけるア ブラハムの挿話と相関性を持っている。しかし、登場人物の一人ガスがもう一方のベンによって最 終的に生け贄にされてしまう点でむしろパロディーに近い悲劇となっている。その点でボブ・ディ ランの「ハイウェイ61再訪」（‘Highway 61 Revisited’）に登場する神に近い。ホロコーストを含め た第２次世界大戦の悲劇的歴史の後に訪れる神の沈黙の引喩でもある。「不条理」な沈黙がピンタ ーの『給仕エレベーター』を支配している。 God said, ‘you can do what you want, Abe, but The next time you see me comin’, you’d better run’. ‘Well’, Abe said, ‘where you want this killin’ done?’ God said, ‘do it on Highway 61’. Bob Dylan, ‘Highway 61 Revisted’.1 Enough questions, enough reasoning.... Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable.2 1） 放送大学准教授（「人間の探究」専攻）教授（「人間の探究」専攻） 110 大 石 和 欣 enough, if not so explicit as Bob Dylan’s song, to Ⅰ elucidate some important themes of the play. The two thugs, Ben and Gus, are brought by their mysterious I should like to start this essay on Pinter’s The employer to face series of trials in a basement room. Dumb Waiter with a comparison of two different An invisible overseer upstairs starts ordering meals, representations of Abraham. One is Kierkegaard’s drinks, and whatever they have not downstairs, by Abraham as an icon of existentialism, and the other is operating a kitchen lift, ‘the dumb waiter’. Just like Bob Dylan’s Abraham as a ruffian on the highway. Abraham, Ben tries his best to comply with such Kierkegaard acclaims Abraham as a noble hero in ridiculous demands from the invisible authorities. Fear and Trembling (1843). God placed Abraham in a Gus, however, remains unable to comprehend all this series of physical and spiritual trials which nonsense; and so he keeps questioning, complaining, culminated in the sacrifice of his only son, the object and defying the authorities. The play is a comic of his whole love and future expectation. Abraham tragedy which, after all the farce, ends in the death of faithfully obeyed even this last, most ruthless and disobedient Gus. With a brilliant stage trick, Pinter unreasonable command without challenging or surprises us by throwing Gus unexpectedly into the questioning God’s hidden, inscrutable design. For basement as a long-waited-for victim, and then Ben’s Kierkegaard, Abraham was a ‘man of resignation’ who finishing act is suspended in the midst of total reconciled his existence with the universe of infinity confusion and silence. There is not a voice of blessing by virtue of his stoic renunciation of all earthly desires to intervene his shooting. We are thereby left in a and anxieties: ‘he did not doubt, he did not look in state of perpetual questioning whether Ben in fact anguish to left or right, he did not challenge heaven pulls the trigger or not. The play, of course, cannot be with his prayers, he knew it was God the Almighty a moral lesson. The Dumb Waiter is not Abrham’s that tried him’.3 A sacrifice of his only son was not too God; he is the underworld authority, identical with hard, when he believed in God ‘on the strength of the Bob Dylan’s God on Highway 61, who controls human absurd’, in the goodness of God, whose supreme fates through his arbitrary and destructive power. power transcends human intelligence. Abraham’s This paper examines the polico-eschatological faith and obedience were duly rewarded by God’s implications of silence in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter. blessing. He heard the voice of an angel just at the The play represents a tragic situation of the post- moment of striking a knife at Isaac: ‘Do not raise your WWII period created by the silence of God on hand against the boy.... Now I know you are a Highway 61. godfearing man’ (Genesis, 22: 12). This Biblical parable ceased to work in the mid- Ⅱ twentieth century. Abraham’s God became a merciless commander of crimes and murders. This is As a playwright of Jewish background, Pinter is what Bob Dylan describes in ‘Highway 61 Revisted’ more sensitive than any other, to the cruel (1965). Abraham is expected to commit a homicide on consequences of the Second World War. He must the highway, just like a bandit. Obedience and faith in have felt what the death of Abraham’s God implies God’s incomprehensible authority has given way to politically and religiously in the post-WWII context. It disbelief, arbitrariness, and intimidation. The land of was the monstrous atrocities of the last two great Moriah is replaced by Highway 61, a locale of human wars, unprecedented in human history, that killed depravities where delinquents and outcasts all Abraham’s God and ruined the Kierkegaardian expunge their inner suffering and hatred by existential faith. People witnessed numerous human committing brutal violence. No one can believe any lives being sacrificed brutally to the causes which the longer that it is God the Almighty who commands authorities of each country extolled as just and their actions. The authorities in the modern age have absolute. Massacres and destruction were carried on no divine virtues: they are simply hard-hearted in ruthlessly through combats, air raids, holocausts and demanding the sacrifice of conscience with neither atomic bombs, and not a voice of an angel was to be beneficent purpose nor reward. And he only watches heard when millions of human beings were bleeding in bloodsheds with stony silence. the fields, writhing under rabbles, and dying in gas Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (1957) is a dramatic chambers. After the war, people were left representation of this degeneration of Abraham’s God, dumbfounded among the carcass of moral and with serious political implications. Its structural religious orders. They felt the absurdity of human similarity with Abraham’s sacrifice is apparent existence. This absurdity differs from what 沈黙したアブラハムの神 ― ハロルド・ピンターの『給仕エレベーター』 111 Kierkegaard meant by ‘the strength of the absurd’. No With the decease of Abraham’s God, intense, one could trust oneself to God’s incomprehensible unfeeling silence began to shroud the whole universe, transcendence any longer. Absurdity reverts to its with its dark shadow cast over the world of literature, original meaning, and modern human existence has too. There are two types of silence prevailing in the irretrievably gone ‘out of tune’ with the long- post-war literature: the silence of God, and the silence established social and spiritual orders. For Jewish of human language. The continual non-appearance people, the absurdity of human existence meant the and silence of Godot in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – death of Abraham’s God. Their unspeakable agonies a monumental piece of the Theatre of the Absurd – are expressed through the mouth of a visionary in Elie represents the first type of silence, the same kind of Wiesel’s play A Black Canopy, A Black Sky: absolute silence which dominates Wiesel’s play when Abraham’s God divorced Himself from the Universe. But this time, no angel of the Lord will And this silence leads to the secondary silence, the interfere to forbid the spilling of our blood. No negation of normal human communications, when the God will come out of this sacrifice.... I know, I old, established social and religious system collapses know... it’s all over: it’s all lost. The Merciful One with the death of God. Extreme fear and agony in the has divorced himself from His people, from His new state of helpless solitude remains unarticulated; world.4 there is no appropriate language of expression. George Steiner eloquently shows that the retreat from the The apocalyptic vision represents a tragedy in the real word is an increasing tendency of modern literature, context of human history. Nietzsche’s nihilism especially after the violence of the last war struck all proclaimed the death of God, but it contradicted itself mankind speechless.9 Deconstructionists’ obsessive by hoping for the emergence of Superman. The WWII interest in the unspoken or the unspeakable originates completely shuttered this last remaining optimism of largely in this sense of modern human absurdity.10 nihilism and left human existence helplessly to the With the death of Logos, we have lost the traditional control of the unknown, unpredictable, malignant order of language and the authoritative mode of power. communication. The Theatre of the Absurd stands in This post-WWII absurdity is precisely the dominant the dark, heavy silence.11 theme of what Martin Esslin named ‘the Theatre of The Dumb Waiter plays these two kinds of silence the Absurd’.
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