Class Notes 3-2

Class Notes  

12/13/10 – 01/07/11

Lecture on Stoppard

Dramatic Horizons of Significance

• "Horizon of significance" is a world ordered by certain normative understandings which, even if they are not ours, enable us to understand what is going on as a coherent and accessible vision.

• The horizon of significance comes to us through what the characters believe and how the story establishes for us a sense of moral meaning.

Theatre of the Absurd

• It has become, in a word, absurd, without logic and without the comfortable reminders of a logical structure: a confidence about time and space and memory.

• It has no reliable meaning. Often, it is featureless.

• This, however, is not the only important criterion of this literary style. The other essential component is that the protagonists' attempts to deal with the world also register as absurd.

• Existential action will not bring us happiness; it will, however, confer human dignity upon us. The Theatre of the Absurd takes from us that dignity.

• Most of the major attention in Absurdist Theatre focuses upon how the protagonists try to cope.

• The emphasis on verbal humor is one of the major attractions of Absurdist Theatre. To acknowledge that these plays are often very funny does not mean that we should miss the desperation underneath the humor.

The Prufrock Connection

• Connection between Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Stoppard's play: reliance on romantic irony throughout

• Romantic irony: the procedure by which apparently significant gestures or assertions or decisions are made only immediately to collapse. (A great deal of the humour in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead emerges from this technique.)

• At the end of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the persona acknowledges that he is, in effect, already dead to all intents and purposes. And in a sense we might, considering the title of Stoppard's play, say much the same about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern throughout the course of the action. In the world in which they inhabit, there doesn't seem to be a very firm line drawn between life and death; the latter is merely an exit, casual, unexciting, as insignificant as the details of the lives they live (far less dramatic than death in a fictional performance).

• In a very real sense, Vladimir, Estragon, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Prufrock are all extreme examples of what Nietzsche calls the "last men," the living dead, as inauthentic and non-human as it is possible to get.

A Reservation: The Question of Friendship

• Stoppard's play contains at least one very important element missing in Waiting for Godot and in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": friendship between the two protagonists

• Vladimir and Estragon have been together a long time, and yet they do not seem to express any particular friendship for each other. They need each other and are petrified at the thought of being alone. So their relationship is based upon a deep individual anxiety rather than upon anything expressing a positive value, such as friendship.

• Prufrock gives us no indication that he has any friends.

• With Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, however, the emphasis is different (certainly in the film this is brought out). There is a sense of comradeship about them, a genuine affection and closeness (which is occasionally physical).

• Beyond this point, there is also a sense that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have more of a specific identity than, say, Vladimir and Estragon. They are Elizabethans, with a certain amount of money. So there is something of a historical identity, and the similarity between them and the people they encounter suggests something like a common cultural basis. In Beckett's play, by contrast, the characters have names which suggest that they have nothing in common (Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, Lucky, the Boy), and their clothes tell us very little about their specific origins, least of all that they share some common historical or cultural milieu.