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

164
Tom Stoppard
from the play’s characters to its creators instead. GUIL seems to
understand this point during one particularly confounding stretch
after a surprising blackout:
GUIL: Th ey’re waiting to see what we’re going to do.
ROS: Good old east.
GUIL: As soon as we make our move they’ll come pouring
in from every side, shouting obscure instructions, confusing
us with ridiculous remarks, messing us about from here to
breakfast and getting our names wrong. (85)
GUIL’s use of the word “they” turns out to be one of the more astute
observations GUIL has made about who controls his fate. For it is not
Hamlet or Claudius or even Th e Player but, simply, “they,” or, rather,
those people working behind the scenes to make sure productions
such as Hamlet or R & G come off the way they are supposed to; it is
the always and unseen production team, which, Th e Player reminds us,
is particularly susceptible to the interfering hand of what “is written”:
Player: Th ere’s a design at work in all art—surely you know
that? Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and
logical conclusion. . . . We aim at the point where everyone who
is marked for death dies.
GUIL: Marked?. . . . Who decides?
PLAYER: (Switching off his smile) Decides? It is written.
Guildenstern comes even closer to understanding his fate as he describes
what it is like to be on a boat: “We can move, of course, change direction,
rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one
that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current” (122).
And so as we become more familiar with ROS’s and GUIL’s
plight—and come to more fully consider the various agents that might
be standing in for Trickster—Radin’s description becomes all the more
revealing, as does an equally compelling understanding of Trickster
provided by Lewis Hyde:
Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and
ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and
paradox. Th at trickster is a boundary-crosser is the standard