Stoppard, Knotting-into, etc.

[David Casseres]

Craig B. (Oh, *that* Craig) sez

>My point was what?

Not sure, but I'll chime in about Stoppard, thanx for the opportunity.  I 
think he's a genius, and I still love best the first thing of his that I 
ever read, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.  I thought of it when I 
recently saw Branagh's enormous, brilliant, stupid, wonderful, 
infuriating film of Hamlet.  One thing about that film is that if you put 
together the longest possible edition of the play, as Branagh did, you 
have an encyclopedic play.  All those characters talking and talking for 
four hours, by god they wind up talking about *everything* by the time 
they're done & mostly dead.  So there's that kind of similarity to an 
encyclopedic novel like Gravity's Rainbow, Don Quixote, Moby-Dick, etc.

So what about Stoppard?  Well at first I thought the trick of taking one 
thread out of Hamlet, turning it into a modern play, and then weaving 
Hamlet back into it was just that, a trick.  Turned out, though, it was a 
breathtakingly powerful thing to do, far beyond clever.

Like quite a few of Pynchon's formal maneuvers, e.g. (here it comes, 
relevance!) the whole Anubis sequence, where Slothrop passes from one 
world to another via an orgy that is the Dance of Death out of some 
medieval bas-relief, during which he commits, for the first time in the 
story, a strikingly sinful act that is also tinged with his first show of 
actual love.... The effectiveness of it all has a lot to do with its 
sheer complexity, its richness, a-and it's that better-than-a-trick trick 
of knotting-into, isn't it, just like that Stoppard knotting the the R&G 
thread back into itself, our time and Shakespeare's into each other -- 
Hamlet's entire talky encyclopedic universe, more things in Heaven and 
Earth, Horatio, into itself.  (That Horatio, though, he's the only one of 
those talkers left alive at the end, with what's left of his philosophy.)

So just sitting here I can't think of another writer who shows such 
mastery at knotting-into.  Barth does it a bit but his knots tend to be 
small, making swift transitions from one thing to another rather than 
presenting a knotted maze for wandering through.  Who else?


Cheers,
David