Theatre at the Limit: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Theatre at the Limit: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead JOHN M. PERLETIE The last act of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenste", Are Dead presents its audience with an exceptionally peculiar incident which has, to my knowledge, elicited no comment from critics of the play.' Yet the text repeats the incident, presenting it not once but twice, and not merely as a simpJe repetition but as a repetition with a difference, taking the fonn of a chiastic inversion. On a ship bearing Hamlet to England, Rosencrantz and Guildenstem 's efforts to decipher their role in the play's events and the implications of this trip for their future degenerate into ' another inscrutable dead end. Exasperated and depressed, Rosencrantz finally professes himself unable to believe in England: GUlL (leaping up) What a shambles! We're just not getting anywhere. ROS (mournfully) Not even England. Idon't believe in it anyway. GUlL What? ROS England. GUlL Just aconspiracy of cartographers, you mean? ROS I mean Idon't believe it! (Calmer) I have no image. I try to picture us arriving. a little harbour perhaps ... roads ... inhabitants to point the way ... horses on the road ... riding for aday or a fortnight and then apalace and the English king . ... That would be the logical kind of thing.... But my mind remains ablank. No. We're slipping off the map. (pp. 107- 108)2 Rosencrantz is the apostate here, whereas Guildenstem attempts to shore up the faith. The forms of their different approaches to the question are important. For Guildenstem, England is real or credible, and defensibly so, as long as it is an abstraction, an idea, susceptible to the cartographer's symbolic representation. In contrast, when Rosencrantz attempts to realize the abstraction, to imagine the reality of England, he finds himself incapable of doing so. And this is not 660 JOHN M. PERLETTE for Rosencrantz a matter of choice, some merely petulant refusal to believe. He is, as he explains, incapable of believing in his destination. Shortly thereafter, we encounter the chiastic repetition; Guildenstern is now presented as the anxious nonbeliever with Rosencrantz attempting to reassure him: ROS ... We'll be all right. I suppose we just go on. GUlL Go where? ROS To England. GUlL England! That's a dead end. I never believed in it anyway. ROS All we've got to do is make OUf report and that'll be that. Surely. GUlL I don't believe it - a shore, a harbour, say - and we get off and we stop someone and say - Whcre's the king? - And he says, Oh, you follow that road there and take the first left and - (Furiously), I don't believe any of it! ROS It doesn't sound very plausible. (p. 121) Guildenstem precisely reiterates Rosencrantz's inability to imagine the reality of England. But more profound implications are triggered by Guildenstem's menacingly loaded remark "England! That's a dead end," because both ofthese moments in the play are marked by explicit discussions of death. Immediately after Rosencrantz has explained his inability to imagine England, the following exchange occurs: ROS We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man? GUlL Don't give up, we can't be long now. ROS We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? GUlL No, no, no.... Death is ... not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. (p. J08) We can see in Rosencrantz's question, and Guildenstem's answer, the same kind of stmggle to realize an abstraction that was present in Rosencrantz's futile effort to imagine England. In the second instance, Guildenstern's protestations of disbelief in England are immediately preceded by his remarking: "We've travelled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation" (p. 121). And shortly thereafter he returns to this theme: GUlL But why? Was it all for this? Who are we that so much should converge on our little deaths? (In anguish to the PLA YER) Who are we? PLAYER You are Rosencrantz and...