Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

160
Tom Stoppard
coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for
an unremembered past . . . Two: time has stopped dead, and a
single experience of one coin being spun once has been repeated
ninety times . . . (He fl ips a coin, looks at it, tosses it to ROS.) On
the whole, doubtful. Th ree: divine intervention, that is to say,
a good turn from above concerning him, cf. children of Israel,
or retribution from above concerning me, cf. Lot’s wife. Four:
a spectacular vindication of the principle that each individual
coin spun individually (he spins one) is as likely to come down
heads as tails and therefore should cause no surprise that each
individual time it does. (16)
Here and throughout the play, we are left with the unmistakable
impression that someone—or something—is making Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern the butt of a grand cosmic and/or literary joke, that
some trickster is causing the coins to fall so as not to comport with
the laws of probability.
In the fi rst few scenes that follow, we quickly discover that R &
G is carefully constructed with Shakespeare’s Hamlet as its template,
but rather than making Prince Hamlet the focus of the play, Stoppard
zeroes in on two minor characters instead, Rosencrantz (ROS) and
Guildenstern (GUIL). Th e play tracks their travels to Castle Elsinore,
where they have been summoned to assist Claudius and Gertrude
in diagnosing Hamlet’s despondency. Another key diff erence is that
whenever Hamlet shifts away from ROS and GUIL, Stoppard maintains
them as his focus; it is also worth noting that at these moments
the two characters fl ounder and wander aimlessly, apparently not
knowing what to do in the absence of a script.
In order to tease out the potential for reading a trickster motif at
work in R & G, I turn to Paul Radin, who, after Jung himself, provides
what is perhaps the most infl uential theorization of the trickster in
literature.
Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer,
giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always
duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he
is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which
he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil yet he is
responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social,