Why Tales won...or didn't.

THENDYWAMPS: The Game.

It was just that wasn't it? A game. But for as long as I can remember all the games I've played have had a goal and usually that goal is to win. Sure, the teams got excited when we came up with a clever and inventive new rule to add to the list, but the whole idea of making up your own rules along way has never been worked into Clue, Sorry, Apples to Apples, Uno, yes, even the game of Life. I suppose maybe Milton & Bradley never read Rozencrantz and Guildenstern. The point being, there is no point. No goal. No meaning. No winning. And most assuredly, NO rules. Just as Guildenstern has been trying to convince himself there is meaning throughout the play by deconstructing and comforting himself with fate, each of us could go on to deconstruct the game and comfort ourselves with the idea that we won. The truth is, we all won. But we all just as easily lost. Mrs. Kirk was not a judge or the banker, because in a postmodern world there is no control. In a postmodern game their are no rules. I won, my team won, not because we had more points (because we didn't-we lost-besides points don't really exist in this THENDYWAMPS game, if we are truly playing by the rules of postmodernism). We did not win because we came up with more clever rules, because those don't really matter either. We won because if we each individually decide we won, we do. We can choose our truth for ourselves and my truth is: we won. That may be the only rule to all this: once you decide, it's truth. You only get frustrated when you ask, why?
We are all players in this game of Life.

"We are actors..."

Player: We're actors...We pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade, that someone would be watching. And then, gradually, no one was. We were caught, high and dry. It was not until the murderer's long soliloquy that we were able to look around; frozen as we were in profile, our eyes searched you out, first confidently, then hesitantly, then desperately as each patch of turf, each log, each exposed corner in every direction proved uninhabited, and all the while the murderous King addressed the horizon with his dreary interminable guilt. (64)

The player is turning out to be one of my favorite characters. He appeared comical and easygoing at first, but the more his part is revealed in the play the more eerie and mysterious his character becomes. He has an omniscience about him and that gives him both an advantage over Rozencrantz and Guildenstern but also a hopelessness about the text in which he is stuck.

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Guil: Where are you going?

Player: I can come and go as I please.

Guil: You're evidently 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. (66)

Wow. I got goosebumps the first time I read that scene. What marvelous metafiction! I love that Stoppard references the quote from Hamlet on the direction of the wind.

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Player: Why?

Guil: Ah (To Ros.) Why?

Ros: Exactly.

Guil: Exactly what?

Ros: Exactly why.

Guil: Exactly why what?

Ros: What?

Guil: Why?

Ros: Why what, exactly?

Guil: Why is he mad?!

Ros: I don't know! (68)

Stoppard is definately employing the "W" of THENDYWAMPS: Word play and Word killing. That's what makes this scene so hilarious. Rozencrantz continue to go along with it, still playing the game. Where as, Guildenstern is still searching for answers, meaning, control. The Postmodern aspect of this whole scene is cued with Rosencrantz exclaiming "I don't know!" There are no answers. There is no meaning. And we will never know.