Blog 5: response to February 22nd

Posted on February 22, 2007

Stoppard's lines are often very funny, but many (whether funny or not) have special meaning when viewed from the end of the play. Here's one exchange (p. 66):

Guil: You're obviously a man who knows his way around.
Player: I've been here before.
Guil: We're still finding our feet.
Player: I should concentrate on not losing your heads.
Guil: Do you speak from knowledge.
Player: Precedent.
Guil: You've been here before.
Player: And I know which way the wind is blowing.

To the extent the whole play is understood as characters who exist within a play (one already written ... perhaps by Shakespeare, perhaps by Stoppard, perhaps by the passive voice: "it is written" ... is that fate?) it is difficult to see the story as achieving the "logical and human end" that Katharine Anne Porter speaks of: it may be logical but how can it be human if the human "characters" are really just "characters in a play"? Of course, that is part of what surrealism is (this is NOT a realistic work). More to the point, the condition of characters who only toward the end fully realize that they are characters in a play they cannot escape--a play which ends with the almost bland announcement of their deaths (off stage, only barely registering in the blood bath that ends Hamlet) is clearly meant as some kind of image, symbol, or metaphor for real--tragic--experience. The notion that our lives are like inhabiting a play that has already been written (by someone or something else: the gods, fate, destiny) and about which we really know nothing except that we will / must die (though for reasons we cannot explain) becomes a means of representing an “existential” condition (see the handout). And while one might think that a story playing out to its logical conclusion follows the basic parameters of Aristotelian thought (the choices of the characters govern the action, and those choices, within the story, are freely made), keep in mind that this way of telling story is a bit of an illusion or artist's trick: what a reader or audience experiences as characters' freedom and moral choice is FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF CHARACTERS no choice at all; characters simply do what they are written to do. The logical plausibility of what a character does only seems like a generalized form of “probability”; but what happens "must" happen because an author has written in one way and not another.

There's another way in which the representation of action as though it were a play serves as a metaphor of an existential condition: the sense of abandonment in the world (no gods even to punish us). Look at the Player's speech on p. 64: "We pledge our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade, that someone would be watching..... [But at the end of our play,] no one came forward. No one shouted at us. The silence was unbreakable, it imposed itself upon us." That "silence"--which seems to be Stoppard's adaptation of Hamlet's last line ("The rest is silence")--becomes a marker of an existence that, while without any real freedom (Stoppard is not quite like Sartre in his existentialism), yet has no connection to some higher force or power ... and death cannot reveal such a force or power even in judgment against us. So the "silence" comes up again at the end when Guildenstern says: "I'm talking about death--and you've [the Players] never experienced that.... Because even as you die you know that you will come back in a different hat. But no one gets up after death--there is no applause--there is only silence" (p. 123).

These two passages suggest contradictory things: that the players' experience is akin to the experience of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and by extension like ALL human experience) vs. the notion that, in this play at least, the players experience things differently (as a chorus, as the gods, as fate, as simply what "is"). For the most part, the play shows the players as different, inhabiting a different sort of reality (while admitting that all reality in the play is surreal). But the players only "function," if we can use that term, is to inhabit the eternal now of the play's performance: they never do anything but perform Hamlet, even though they seem to be able to come and go as they please. But because all they do is perform the same play forever, they know exactly what happens (and so can speak of knowing things by "precedent"). They embody necessity as a sort of tragic condition, nothing akin to the "logical necessity" Aristotle imagines in the great plot. Now, necessity is the experience of limit and not the experience of moral freedom (Aristotle had equated the logical necessity of plot with the plausibility of character so as to represent a condition of human freedom). For Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, by contrast, necessity means they "must" die (indeed, they are already, or always already, dead). There is no freedom here.

Peter Szondi saw this lack of freedom in Greek tragedies like Oedipus Rex, but Stoppard doesn't single out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: they must die as all people must die. For Szondi, the truly tragic is a sort of punishment meted out on those humans who strive for divine knowledge (through the oracles), and the gap between the human realm and the divine realm is what tragedy marks or laments. But, as I noted, it isn't clear that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are being punished by some supernatural force; they just fall into what "happens." Rosencrantz says, "They had it in for us, didn't they? Right from the beginning." But it's not clear who "they" refers to. Guildenstern--always the smart one--is closer to the truth in lamenting that they simply have no explanation; in this play, the deafening "silence" is that the gods don't speak even in punishment. There simply is no one to explain. The players might represent the Greek chorus, but they have no special knowledge. They can tell R & G that "it is written," but they have no idea who wrote it or why.

Finally, like Nietzsche, Stoppard seems to be suggesting that tragedy is about coming to terms with existence itself. For Nietzsche, existence includes death, destruction, suffering, but there's a glory and a grandeur to existence--it is a work of a creator-god-artist and, in tragic spectacle, we somehow participate in the Primal Oneness (a force that necessitates, even causes, our destruction, but which is astonishing and wonderful nonetheless). The cosmos might be horrible and absurd, but we can exult in it by facing up to its power and mystery. As I noted in class today, Nietzsche believes that even the gods suffer, and if we suffer then we too are godlike. And he believes that Greek tragedy had the courage to face that reality. The existentialist Stoppard, however, while not simply showing his characters resigned to their doom, doesn't posit a primal oneness that can make sense of it all. So we don't celebrate in wonder, though we might show good humor in response to our irrevocable condition (and the comic element of this play might be said to celebrate the absurdity of our condition; we are doomed to death and doomed not to know why we must die, but at least we can make jokes on our way to the gallows). Stoppard's characters experience fate without gods, not even the destroyer god of the Birth of Tragedy. (We mght say that Nietzsche shows a path to existentialism without going all the way there.) In Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stand in for the human condition, for us. Like them, we don't know why we are here and there's no one who can answer our questions. We cannot get off the boat, and, ultimately, we won't be able to choose NOT to deliver the letter to our executioner. As Rosencrantz bemoans--but humorously (and humor may be all we can salvage from this chilling and amazing play)--"Who'd have thought we were so important?" (p. 122). Who indeed?