Download Friday 1 June. - Stanford University

Week 9: Friday 1 June. ARCADIA AS A DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE TEKKIES
& THE FUZZIES
THE LECTURE, EXPANDED FOR THE CLASS WEBSITE BY THE PROFESSOR
ON THE MORNING OF 2 JUNE, AS A PRESENT TO BE DISCOVERED BY THOSE
WITH ENOUGH CURIOSITY!
This file contains 1) The outline (in small font), that was unsuccessfully projected during
the Friday class on 1 June 2001; and 2) the professor’s expanded version of the lecture
text: a Regency bow in the direction of the students.
OUTLINE
I. INTRODUCTION: ARCADIA IS A WORK OF POST-MODERNIST FAITH
What makes the play “post-modern”?
A. Language games.
Linguistic structures are fundamentally multiple and unstable, and incapable of formulating absolutes. No “fundamentalist”
reading of a text can survive critical scrutiny; the text will always be found to “speak otherwise,” eluding a definitive interpretation.
You can “make” a text say anything you like: eg, Septimus’s defensive joke: carnal embrace = throwing your arms around a haunch of
venison.
Q. Where can “Faith” come in then?
A. What we receive from the past embodies the human struggle for meaning, a legacy susceptible to re-working in the
present. Eg., in the play the phrase “carnal embrace” covers everything from “a perpendicular poke in a gazebo” [7] to “we must
hurry if we are going to dance” [94]
B. The value placed on method that yields systematic knowledge in the arts and sciences: the grasp of discourse as discourse
[“Faith”? All knowledge is made by situated human beings with multiple motives—conscious and unconscious; the truths
they make can, however, be tested in dialogue]
C. The value placed on irreverent curiosity and an attitude of anticipation: thematized in the play, and embodied in the play
The value placed on Eros
The value placed on Beauty
II. THE “TRUTHS” ELICITED IN THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE FUZZIES & THE TEKKIES
Hannah: “Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter.” [75]
A. The playwright and the mathematician: Tom Stoppard with Robert Osserman, UC Berkeley, 19 February 1999
B. Inside Arcadia:
Valentine addresses the question of authorship [tekkiefuzzy: 18-19, 60]
Chloe gets Chaos theory right, working from the perspective of Eros [74-5]
Hannah figures out that the “mad hermit” was Sebastian, completing Thomasina’s proof
Thomasina glimpses the limits of Newtonian physics [“is God a Newtonian?”] after thinking about stirring jam into rice
pudding [4-5], and invents fractal geometry [43-5] –what becomes in the course of the play Valentine’s “Coverley set” [76-77] –after
questioning whether there could be a formula for a bluebell
III. THE TWO INTERLOCKING “ENDINGS” OF THE PLAY: IN PRAISE OF LOVE AND WORK.
The Eros of romance; the Eros of exchange between pupil and tutor
We, the audience, are meant to supply the motto: et in Arcadia ego: Even in Arcadia there am I : the tragic intrusion of death into the
paradise of newly awakening sexual love. But the play is saying: phooey to death. And that is the message of all literature. Phooey to
death. A great line on which to end.
I. INTRODUCTION: ARCADIA IS A WORK OF POST-MODERNIST FAITH
What makes the play “post-modern”?
A. Language games.
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Linguistic structures are fundamentally multiple and unstable, and incapable of
formulating absolutes. No “fundamentalist” reading of a text can survive critical scrutiny;
the text will always be found to “speak otherwise,” eluding a definitive interpretation.
You can “make” a text say anything you like: eg, Septimus’s defensive joke: carnal
embrace = throwing your arms around a haunch of venison.
“Faith”? What we receive from the past embodies the human struggle for
meaning, a legacy susceptible to re-working in the present. Eg., in the play “carnal
embrace” = everything from “a poke in the garden” to “we must hurry if we are going to
dance” 94
What we learned from the opening scene on this subject (these notes an expansion of
my Wednesday lecture)
1. Utilizing the LATIN LANGUAGE as a medium of wordplay
a) Latin is a so-called “dead” language that is culturally revived/preserved,
and that conducts the cultural ideal of “Arcadia” into the present. --What is the
cultural ideal of Arcadia?
--A Greek myth preserved in the Latin language
--An idealized garden—like Milton’s Eden— as a utopian setting for human life
conceived as being conducted “naturally,” which is to say, in a way that corrects
the hypocrisies and false values of social life as conducted in the milieu of the
work. But human beings do not live in gardens. They live in houses and retreat
to gardens or contemplate gardens. That is why they design gardens. So
“Arcadia” is the name of a cultural ideal that is hatched indoors: in the “great
house” called Sidley Park. ALL OF THE ACTION TAKE PLACE INDOORS.
That is where Thomasina asks her question.
--Also, I think Stoppard is introducing here the argument for a traditional
humanistic education. The past inheres in the present. The idea of Arcadia is
available to continual revision—has a kind of permanence human importance that
survives all translations and all ironies.
2. Septimus’s answer:
1. Septimus wittily translates Thomasina’s question: introduces the feature of
linguistic play in the play.
--Characteristic Stoppard: a play as a vehicle for the play of language itself –its
surprising, pleasurable multiplicity of meanings. Establishes that this play will be driven
by word-play. The dialogue immediately sets in motion the play of double-entendres
that is a signature of post-modern style. Language structures are fundamentally
ambiguous: everything is capable of meaning something else. Moreover, there is no
“unifying mentality” in the play—we are on our own with the question of where does the
moral center lie—in which characters and actions. (That is the wonderful nature of the
genre of the drama—contrast to novel, poem, and memoir). .But this play will also
thematize the instability of language: it will show that the past is undecidable because
signification always exceeds intention. We do not know and cannot know the contexts in
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which the written inscriptions we received from the past were composed. The sense we
make of them is necessarily being made in the present. So Septimus takes a line from
Caesar’s writings on the Gallic wars to pull intellectual rank on Thomasina and distract
her from her real question.
3. Word-play is also used to characterizes class relations in the play.
a) Note that ‘carnal embrace’ is the euphemism used by the butler (who got it
from the groom) to the cook— who got it from etc etc etc-- and we are led to assume that
when the language moves from the stable to the house it undergoes a certain
displacement from rude to polite language
b) We also get to see Septimus engaging in word-play in order to negotiate
advantage for his own position, WHICH IS SIGNFIED BY HIS (Latin) name: Seventh
son, one who is pretty far down in the family queue of male entitlement
p. 6: Septimus in a moment of diplomatic embarrassment will describe the event
to Mrs. Chater’s husband in plain speech, “I made love to your wife in the
gazebo”
p. 7: under pressure, his rhetoric literally grows florid: “Mrs. Chater is charming
and spirited, with a pleasing voice and a dainty step, she is the epitome of all the
qualities society applauds in her sex—and yet her chief renown is for a readiness
that keeps her in a state of tropical humidity as would grow orchids in her drawers
in January.”
p. 7: When her husband says “I will not listen to this! Will you fight or not?” S.
puts it another way: “ “Not! There are no more than two or three poets of the first
rank now living, and I will not shoot one of them dead over a perpendicular poke
in a gazebo…”
p. 72, S to Lady Croom: turns the episode into a compliment: “My lady, I was
alone with my thoughts in the gazebo when Mrs. Chater ran me to ground, and I
being in such a passion, in an agony of desire, I thought in my madness that the
Chater with her skirts over her head would give me the momentary illusion of the
happiness to which I dared not put a face.”
Class relations are important in the play because they are among the unstable features of
the social world, a world continually being transformed by pressures from history,
including the pressure of ideas.
c.)Septimus’s answer also establishes the hierarchical position of Septimus as a
tutor in the family, the gatekeeper of meanings suitable for the younger person. So it
opens the theme of relations between generations vis-à-vis knowledge. As the play
proceeds we learn that Thomasina is a mathematical genius but her relationship to her
elders requires tact, pretended ignorance. At the end of this scene, as we saw, Thomasina
chastises Septimus for his willingness to misinform her.
II. THE “TRUTHS” ELICITED IN THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE FUZZIES &
THE TEKKIES
Hannah: “Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that
makes us matter.” [75]
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VIDEO: The playwright and the mathematician: Tom Stoppard with Robert Osserman,
UC Berkeley, 19 February 1999
This exchange introduces llustrate point the outline sumamry of “post-modern
faith”: ANOTHER ASPECT OF POST-MODERN FAITH is the value placed on
method that yields systematic knowledge in the arts and sciences: the grasp of discourse
as discourse; and C. The value placed on irreverent curiosity and an attitude of
anticipation: thematized in the play, and embodied in the play
To summarize: Arcadia is a work of literature that thematizes a couple of ideas that have
achieved cultural importance since the end of World War II, that is, during the historical
era that is labeled “postmodern.” Those ideas are:
1) knowledge itself is unstable-- an idea given exposition vis-a-vis the discourse
of mathematics in the scene we watched on tape: in the years since WWII, the
Newtonian world view—that nature is susceptible to total prediction through the
discovery of universal laws—has given way to Chaos theory: that nature is
fundamentally unpredictable in a way that can be theorized. “A door has cracked
open in human understanding ,” as Valentine says, that changes the way we
conceive of nature. So: Knowledge itself is unstable: that’s postmodern idea #1.
2) Idea #2 is a corollary: the languages in which knowledge are discoursespecific. Mathematics is the most abstract language human beings have devised;
but most knowledge is transmitted in the so called “common language” of speech
and writing, which is fundamentally and fatefully ambiguous: that’s postmodern
idea #2, theorized in the philosophical enterprise of deconstruction, which is a
method of uncovering the undecidability factor in any semantic construction.
3) Postmodern idea #3: knowledge is thoroughly imbued with the social
conditions in which it is generated and transmitted. That’s the idea I want to
pursue today by looking at the opening and the ending of the play, and the
charming, deep question, “What is carnal embrace?”
Hence one of the roles of Thomasina in the play is to represent the engagement of the
mind with the embodiedness of knowledge. Caro, carnis: feminine; the flesh is the
feminine part of the human being.
Thomasina’s question in scene 1 has opened the theme of the role of bodies in the
play: All thinking is incarnate.
--Thomasina is the elder child, the 13-year old daughter, in an aristocratic family
(which is why Septimus calls her ‘my lady’). She is receiving instruction suitable for a
lady in an enlightened family—a little of this and a little of that, including Latin,
mathematics & drawing—we note that her brother has been sent to Eton, while
Thomasina is tutored at home. Thomasina’s destiny, according to her mother, is a
suitable marriage. Lady Croom herself imposes her views on people—she doesn’t need
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anything but her aristocratic station to be judged correct in all she says. So knowledge is
a wittily dealt with as a class issue and also as a gender issue in the play
--Thomasina asks a question: the question is a pathway to connection between
human minds and human bodies: the instinct that brings us together. Thomasin’s
curiosity is the medium of the attachment of her inborn genius to the external world, and
is the necessary condition for knowledge. We recall that Freud theorized that the quest
for knowledge begins with the child’s curiosity about the sexual practices of the elders;
Stoppard poises Thomasina on the brink of transformation from curious child to sexually
mature adult— an attractive human condition which the play exploits without
condescension I think. It appears that Stoppard loves Thomasina as a human type.
--Two other ways that carnality is thematized in the play:
--Lord Byron’s body as a trope: an irresistible object of desire --in his
own day, the man who embodies sexual attraction as the vehicle for the
promulgation of new ideas (the vehicle of Romanticism); and in ours—Bernard
seeks an affiliation with Byron’s phallic glory as an intellectual property with
high commercial value
--the bodies of dead animals recorded in the game book, in which the
head of the family records the quantities of game shot on his property,
which –like Lord Byron’s body--later becomes valuable data for research
SO: the play’s central themes are set in motion here: of the instability of knowledge, and
of the necessary location of knowledge in the body of human beings driven by aggression
and sex. Thus is the style established in these opening lines : the play will wittily deploy
the instabilities of language to create effects both of comedy and an irony that gradually
deepens into a tragedy in the past that is recuperated in the rpesence by a renewal of the
cycle of transmission between the generations: another dyad of tutor/pupil forms in the
play’s last scene. Let’s watch this happen by looking closely at the end:
III. THE TWO INTERLOCKING “ENDINGS” OF THE PLAY: IN PRAISE OF
LOVE AND WORK.
The Eros of romance; the Eros of exchange between pupil and tutor [pp. 92-end]
A. Returns to the chord struck at the end of scene one, p. 13: Dialogue between
Septimus and Thomasina regarding the game book.
Septimus [wittily returns to Lady Croom’s translation of the Latin motto et
in Arcadia ego] : “A calendar of slaughter, ‘Even in Arcadia, there am I!’
Thomasina: Oh, phooey to death… Are you in love with my mother,
Septimus?
Septimus: You must not be cleverer than your elders. It is not polite. …
Thomasina: …Does carnal embrace addle the brain?
Septimus: Invariably. Thank you. That is enough education for today.
B. The climax of the play ( pp. 92ff). In these pages:
1) Time past and time present interpenetrate: but for the audience alone. What
we see and hear comes together only in our perspective, which the characters do not
share.
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2) We are permitted to watch the present making a true inference about the
past: Valentine and Hannah in 1996 are examining the same papers as Septimus in 1812,
in which it is established that Thomasina, age 16, proposes that the “heat equation” has
done away with the Newtonian universe
3) We are also permitted to watch Thomasina’s sexual awakening, the coming
together of her prodigal (that is to say, extravagant, even monstrous) mathematical genius
with her femininity. The time that has passed since she was 14 has decreased the
distance between herself and Septimus. He is only 24; she is nearly 17—as the Beatles
used to sing, “She was just 17, you know what I mean, and before too long I fell in love
with her…”
3) We are given the enactment of the achingly beautiful trope of waltzing, with
which Stoppard brings the play to closure.
Waltzing =
a) a foreign influence like the mathematical ideas that cross the English
Channel to destroy the Newtonian universe)—which the English find
“obscene” and
which is forbidden to all but the aristocrats like Lady Croom
b) an art form that has to be taken in by the body as well as the
mind; and whose enactment is a socially permitted carnal embrace
c) the result of waltzing is of course an exchange of heat: they kiss
the waltzing is done by the light of a candle: so their sexual desire
is accompanied –for us-- by the premonition of Thomasina’s death,
because we know that she will take this very candle upstairs with
her that night, and die in a terrible fire
--so we, the audience, are meant to supply the motto: et in Arcadia ego: Even in Arcadia
there am I : the tragic intrusion of death into the paradise of newly awakening sexual
love. But the play is saying: phooey to death. And that is the message of all literature.
Phooey to death. A great line on which to end.
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