Abstract
The Dwarfs has been noted as Pinter’s most difficult play largely because of Len’s incomprehensible speeches. This chapter attempts to “decipher” his dialogues with Mark and Pete against the context of a three-man friendship that has turned sour and has become unsustainable. All three figure themselves as “saviors” of their friendship, but Mark and Pete are so embroiled in their struggle for dominance that they fail to see their conflict as a key contributor to the deterioration of the friendship. Len’s speeches expose this through allegorical renderings of indirect warnings that sometimes appear as a kind of muted criticism of Mark and Pete. When it becomes apparent that the friendship can no longer be redeemed, Len breaks his silence to prevent irrevocable damage.
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Notes
Nietzsche’s “On Friendship” in Human, All Too Human (148–149).
Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (80).
A speech act, or an illocutionary act, is a linguistic operation whereby a verbal utterance is implicated as a part of its prescribed action/function. An example of a speech act can be seen when an officiant presiding over a marriage ceremony says: “I now declare you man and wife.” The officiant’s declaration announces the new marital status of the man and woman and legally binds them as husband and wife. In the case of Pinter’s plays, the idea of silence is normally regarded strictly a stage direction, and speech must, according to speech act theory, cease where “silence” is indicated. See John L. Austin’s How to Do Things With Words (1962).
The 1963 stage production was based on the 1960 radio play that was revised twice, once in 1961 and the other in 1968. Unless noted otherwise, all citations in this chapter are from the 1968 version of The Dwarfs. The story remains the same in all three versions, but their details vary. Most notably, there is an additional fourth character in the original novel, in which Len’s betrayal of Pete to Mark is assigned to Virginia, Pete’s girlfriend. Virginia shows up exclusively in the novel. Martin Esslin speculates that the lone female character is deleted from the play because Pinter wanted to avoid the cliché of the erotic triangle, and that Virginia’s presence is a distraction because it diminishes the significance of the disintegration process of the friendship (Peopled Wound 130). Pinter has not commented on this speculation, although a Sedgwickean take on the homosocial aspects of the novel and the play would no doubt provide promising insight into this piece of work. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s seminal study on homosociality in literature in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985). For a detailed discussion of the variations between the radio and stage versions, see Mary Jane Miller’s “Pinter as a Radio Dramatist,” and Scott Giantvalley’s “Toying with the Dwarfs.”
Pinter uses the same technique far more explicitly in two other early plays. In Tea Party (1963), Disson’s loss of his family, and possibly his sanity, to his brother-in-law, Willy, is underscored by two ping-pong games. In The Basement (1966), Law and Stott end their feud—to win Jane’s favor and the right to dominate contested space—through a brutal cricket game during which Law is physically battered.
Almansi and Henderson’s book is modeled after Eric Berne’s widely influential study on the roots of communicative game playing, Games People Play. Berne defines a game as “an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome... a game looks like a set of operations, but after the payoff it becomes apparent that these ‘operations’ were really maneuvers; not honest requests but moves in a game” (48–49). Berne’s definition is especially helpful in understanding how a friendship between three men has always been an outright power struggle between two, as the chess game suggests. Even if Pete and Mark did not plan their moves, all their previous actions directed at Len—their attempts at verification to compensate each other’s shortcomings and subsequent betrayal of each other to Len—forms the set of “complementary ulterior transactions” that lead them to their final showdown.
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© 2013 Jane Wong Yeang Chui
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Wong, J.Y.C. (2013). Implied Silence: Anatomizing Friendship and Betrayal in The Dwarfs. In: Affirming the Absurd in Harold Pinter. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343079_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343079_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
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