there_is_no_the_in_the_pastoral | |
File Size: | 51 kb |
File Type: | there is no 'the' in the pastoral |
There is No "The" in The Pastoral
Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia (199X) and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Of Experience are among the more interesting selections on the AQA’s A2 (Lit. B) Pastoral list. Both texts challenge the more familiar conceptions of the pastoral genre; or, rather, they remind us that fixing the definite article (“the”) in front of “pastoral” is of relatively little help or sense. This claim alone should not cause any great surprise: fragmentation, localism, and particularisation have been the weft and warp of literary criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century: often, critics begin with a received notion of an overarching “–ism” and proceed to show, argue, persuade that what we thought of as single, total, coherent is actually a collection of numerous, overlapping “–isms.”
Some good examples of this are Rivkin and Ryan’s introduction to feminism, in their Literary Theory: An Anthology, as well as the work of Peter Nicholls and Tim Armstrong on modernism. In their useful overview of feminist theory, Rivkin and Ryan write “If the student of literature in the early 1970s was moved to ask why is there not a feminist criticism, the student of literature in the late 1990s might well be moved to shift the emphasis and ask but why is there not a feminist criticism?” Note the shift in emphasis from “feminist” to “a.” The point is rhetorical, of course; what Rivkin and Ryan notice here is that now feminism, in a generalized sense, is on the cultural map, we would do well to acknowledge its various permutations and numerous conflicts. (Donna Haraway, in her earlier work, traced numerous divisions and fault lines in the history of feminism, and sought to offer a general model of feminism that accounted for, and celebrated, women’s differences.) Nicholls’s landmark text, Modernisms, has variety and plurality built into its very title. His project, then, was precisely to offer a sense of the multi-faceted nature of this thing we call “modernism.” Armstrong’s most recent work, notionally called “Micrcomodernisms,” has a similar intention, but, in addition, he aims to compose a picture of modernisms in which it is not Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf who are at the centre. For him, then, “modernism” is not only a network of pathways, but a network of pathways many of which have yet to be trodden.
Back to pastoral – well, almost. It appears on the AQA syllabus as one route through their Texts and Genres unit. The first point to raise, then, concerns this notion of “genre.” It is a knotty concept, and often unhelpful in the critical arena, for we cannot be sure just what genres are. We cannot be sure, because we are not quite sure what the basic ingredients of any given genre are. Now, to call into question the utility of this concept is not to criticize the AQA, per se; no one, myself included, is about to drop the term from their vocabulary. But as I have suggested elsewhere (here and here), formal definition of any literary genre is difficult, if not impossible, because there are no set, basic criteria which texts must satisfy in order to gain “entry” to a genre; nor consistent, self-same foundations on which all member texts of a genre must stand. We don’t even agree on whether “genre” refers to subdivisions of a larger form (science fiction, romance, crime fiction as subdivisions of “the” novel, for example), or just the relatively large, overarching forms themselves – novels, poetry, drama, and so on. If this basic claim satisfies you, then I suggest you skip the next, brief paragraph; if you need further explanation or convincing on the matter of genre, then, dear reader, read on.
In brief, the reason that there are no basic, set, consistent criteria for “entry” into, or inclusion in, a genre is that genres are not ready made totalities which continuously accrue more and more texts to themselves. Genres are not clubs with exclusive membership rules, and yet an infinite capacity to receive members. Genres – and here I follow the logics of Derrida and Moretti – are nothing more nor less than the network of texts that make up their genres. So, every text that contributes to a genre also changes that genre’s contours slightly. Not only this, but it’s quite possible, even likely, that a text will contribute to, or alter, more than one genre. “Tradition” might be a more useful term; it seems to me to suggest more clearly the notion and possibility of influence (Milton’s and Swedenborg’s influences on Blake, for example), without tricking one into saying that so-and-so and so-and-so are “part of the same genre.”
Back to pastoral in actuality, then. The foregoing comments illustrate at a general level what is also true of “the” pastoral: there is no “the” pastoral there. Or anywhere in conceptual, literary space and time... and space-time. The first thing to remember is that “the” pastoral is a retrospective and retroactive construction of literary critics; a sort of complicated dot-to-dot drawing that looks rather good, but the dots of which were numbered by the drawer as they went. (This is not to do down literary criticism or literary history, but just to draw attention to the nature of the practices.) The second thing to remember is that most significant critics and scholars of “the” pastoral have actually been incredibly sensitive to the fact that what we are talking about is not a single genre but, as with any so-called “genre,” a set of interlaced traditions and tendencies. William Empson’s great work on the subject is called Some Versions of Pastoral; Leo Marx, in his The Machine in the Garden, picks up on Empson and makes it very clear that what he is offering are further versions; and Terry Gifford’s survey of pastoral is also highly attuned to the plurality of “the” tradition.
What does all this mean for students studying the pastoral? Well, for a start it means that when you address a Section B question in the exam, you have, potentially, a good deal of scope to address and critique the terms of the question. As we know, the examiners like to offer “Pastoral is always....” type statements as starting points here. This is quite deliberate; it is inviting reasoned and considered criticism of the statement, and a demonstration of your more nuanced understanding of “the” pastoral. Of course, you’re not going to set out stall in as much detail as I have here. And you must be sure to answer the question you choose (do not make the mistake of implying that the question is not worth the answering, and going on to answer one of your own choosing). But you can afford in your first paragraph to develop a thesis in response to the question. If you can do this with passing reference not only to your literary textsery, but also some different conceptions of the pastoral, then you should be awarded marks for both AOs 3 and 4.
Below are some very brief notes on conceptions of the pastoral. They are not even close to the full picture, but they may offer a reasonable starting point of, indeed, some helpful revision pointers. Note: There's a mistake on the last slide - where double plots are mentioned, it's drawing on Empson's work; I stupidly left his name off the header!
Some good examples of this are Rivkin and Ryan’s introduction to feminism, in their Literary Theory: An Anthology, as well as the work of Peter Nicholls and Tim Armstrong on modernism. In their useful overview of feminist theory, Rivkin and Ryan write “If the student of literature in the early 1970s was moved to ask why is there not a feminist criticism, the student of literature in the late 1990s might well be moved to shift the emphasis and ask but why is there not a feminist criticism?” Note the shift in emphasis from “feminist” to “a.” The point is rhetorical, of course; what Rivkin and Ryan notice here is that now feminism, in a generalized sense, is on the cultural map, we would do well to acknowledge its various permutations and numerous conflicts. (Donna Haraway, in her earlier work, traced numerous divisions and fault lines in the history of feminism, and sought to offer a general model of feminism that accounted for, and celebrated, women’s differences.) Nicholls’s landmark text, Modernisms, has variety and plurality built into its very title. His project, then, was precisely to offer a sense of the multi-faceted nature of this thing we call “modernism.” Armstrong’s most recent work, notionally called “Micrcomodernisms,” has a similar intention, but, in addition, he aims to compose a picture of modernisms in which it is not Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf who are at the centre. For him, then, “modernism” is not only a network of pathways, but a network of pathways many of which have yet to be trodden.
Back to pastoral – well, almost. It appears on the AQA syllabus as one route through their Texts and Genres unit. The first point to raise, then, concerns this notion of “genre.” It is a knotty concept, and often unhelpful in the critical arena, for we cannot be sure just what genres are. We cannot be sure, because we are not quite sure what the basic ingredients of any given genre are. Now, to call into question the utility of this concept is not to criticize the AQA, per se; no one, myself included, is about to drop the term from their vocabulary. But as I have suggested elsewhere (here and here), formal definition of any literary genre is difficult, if not impossible, because there are no set, basic criteria which texts must satisfy in order to gain “entry” to a genre; nor consistent, self-same foundations on which all member texts of a genre must stand. We don’t even agree on whether “genre” refers to subdivisions of a larger form (science fiction, romance, crime fiction as subdivisions of “the” novel, for example), or just the relatively large, overarching forms themselves – novels, poetry, drama, and so on. If this basic claim satisfies you, then I suggest you skip the next, brief paragraph; if you need further explanation or convincing on the matter of genre, then, dear reader, read on.
In brief, the reason that there are no basic, set, consistent criteria for “entry” into, or inclusion in, a genre is that genres are not ready made totalities which continuously accrue more and more texts to themselves. Genres are not clubs with exclusive membership rules, and yet an infinite capacity to receive members. Genres – and here I follow the logics of Derrida and Moretti – are nothing more nor less than the network of texts that make up their genres. So, every text that contributes to a genre also changes that genre’s contours slightly. Not only this, but it’s quite possible, even likely, that a text will contribute to, or alter, more than one genre. “Tradition” might be a more useful term; it seems to me to suggest more clearly the notion and possibility of influence (Milton’s and Swedenborg’s influences on Blake, for example), without tricking one into saying that so-and-so and so-and-so are “part of the same genre.”
Back to pastoral in actuality, then. The foregoing comments illustrate at a general level what is also true of “the” pastoral: there is no “the” pastoral there. Or anywhere in conceptual, literary space and time... and space-time. The first thing to remember is that “the” pastoral is a retrospective and retroactive construction of literary critics; a sort of complicated dot-to-dot drawing that looks rather good, but the dots of which were numbered by the drawer as they went. (This is not to do down literary criticism or literary history, but just to draw attention to the nature of the practices.) The second thing to remember is that most significant critics and scholars of “the” pastoral have actually been incredibly sensitive to the fact that what we are talking about is not a single genre but, as with any so-called “genre,” a set of interlaced traditions and tendencies. William Empson’s great work on the subject is called Some Versions of Pastoral; Leo Marx, in his The Machine in the Garden, picks up on Empson and makes it very clear that what he is offering are further versions; and Terry Gifford’s survey of pastoral is also highly attuned to the plurality of “the” tradition.
What does all this mean for students studying the pastoral? Well, for a start it means that when you address a Section B question in the exam, you have, potentially, a good deal of scope to address and critique the terms of the question. As we know, the examiners like to offer “Pastoral is always....” type statements as starting points here. This is quite deliberate; it is inviting reasoned and considered criticism of the statement, and a demonstration of your more nuanced understanding of “the” pastoral. Of course, you’re not going to set out stall in as much detail as I have here. And you must be sure to answer the question you choose (do not make the mistake of implying that the question is not worth the answering, and going on to answer one of your own choosing). But you can afford in your first paragraph to develop a thesis in response to the question. If you can do this with passing reference not only to your literary textsery, but also some different conceptions of the pastoral, then you should be awarded marks for both AOs 3 and 4.
Below are some very brief notes on conceptions of the pastoral. They are not even close to the full picture, but they may offer a reasonable starting point of, indeed, some helpful revision pointers. Note: There's a mistake on the last slide - where double plots are mentioned, it's drawing on Empson's work; I stupidly left his name off the header!
stoppard_and_pastoral | |
File Size: | 216 kb |
File Type: | stoppard and pastoral |
Arcadia, Pastoral, and Our Worlds of Perception
My last thoughts on the pastoral began with the claim that Stoppard and Blake are particularly interesting additions to the AQA’s Pastoral list, in large part because both writers offer some interesting and productive challenges when it comes to “fitting” them to better-known formulations of “the” pastoral. From thereon in, however, all mention of Stoppard and Blake fell away, as it seemed helpful to question the very notion of “genre” itself, and of “the” pastoral (both as a genre and as a genre [note the shift in emphasis here]). By now, then, consideration of Stoppard and Blake is almost certainly overdue.
Stoppard first, then. But, to continue my habit of deferral, Stoppard by way – in a first, brief instance – of Edgar Allen Poe.
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
This is Poe’s 1829 “Sonnet – To Science.” And just how is personified Science cast in these verses? As a despoiler of creativity, a saboteur of poetry and the poets, a wrecker of dreams. Why? Because, of course, science reduces Life, in all its rich mystery, to mute rules, laws, and (later) algorithms; it reduces the “summer dream” to “dull realit[y].” I say “of course,” because it is a view that many of the Romantics – prior to and contemporaneous with Poe; and including Blake – held. And it is a view, too, that has persisted in arts criticism and scholarship, particularly the field of literature, for some time. Equally, though, there have been and are voices that challenge what is sometimes presented as a “natural” opposition between the arts/humanities and the “hard” sciences.* A number of these voices belong to critics and theorists, whose work, though deeply interesting and innovative, will often have a relatively narrow readership. But Stoppard’s Arcadia is a popular text, by a popular writer, that also dissents from crude, binary opposition of the arts and sciences.
Terry Gifford counts Arcadia as an “anti-pastoral” text. (Incidentally, he casts Blake as anti-pastoral, too.) And it is not hard to see why. The so-called “anti-pastoral” might be identified wherever “typically” pastoral settings are the stage or canvas for a negotiation of something other than the rustic/rural/bucolic/Arcadian/Edenic as spiritual haven, versus the city and all the ills of modernity to which it is home. So Arcadia might well be called “anti-pastoral” to the extent that it challenges what Leo Marx has called the “popular and sentimental” kind of pastoralism, the tendency to celebrate a vaguely conceived “return to nature and ‘more natural’ way of living.” (But “more natural” than... well, what?) However, to identify a text as “anti-pastoral” in the context of a study of pastoral is a neat critics’ trick, for if a text were genuinely and thoroughly anti-pastoral, there would be little for one to write about it in terms of pastoralism: the truly anti-pastoral text could surely be accounted for by checking the “No” boxes on an extended tick list of pastoral criteria.
Except, of course, that no such definitive criteria could ever be drawn up (if the arguments of the previous essay have been accepted).
These strange and baggy things we call “genres” may not be very clearly defined, but, because of this, they also have a potentially infinite capacity for expansion and accommodation of new texts. This means that texts that are supposedly “anti-pastoral” (or anti- whatever genre happens to be the object of study) in any sort of interesting way must maintain some sort of productive link to the “parent” genre. Which is a rather circuitous way of suggesting that if a text is interestingly anti-genre, it is almost certainly still part of a tradition – a little like a scion self-consciously railing against her or his family (for a familiar example, think Eric and Sheila by the end of An Inspector Calls).
It might be better, then, to think of the ways in which Arcadia is supra-pastoral or, perhaps, meta-pastoral. Certainly, it seems at so many points to be invoking and satirizing the very idea of the pastoral: Stoppard’s title, Arcadia, echoes that by which Sidney’s famous romance, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, is better known; but by dropping the definite article (“the”),** it is as if Stoppard wishes also to isolate for examination the very notion of arcadia itself. Certainly, the setting of the play is geographically and spatially isolated. An old stately home amid expansive gardens, Sidley Park is every inch the stereotypical Renaissance pastoral setting, cut off, it seems, from its urban environs. Or at least we the audience suppose that it is, in large part because Stoppard’s characters speak as if it is – there is talk of a world beyond the study (the current condition, both in 1809 and “the present,” of the grounds, for example), as well as of neighbouring families and estates beyond Sidley itself; but these we never see. For the play never leave the confines of the study.
Thus, Stoppard’s staging and stagecraft is fine fodder for the hungry critic: the hallmark pastoral trope of an Arcadian – later Edenic – setting is often cast as a utopian space. But etymologically, “utopia” carries a sense both of “good place” and “no place.”*** Sidley beyond the study, then, is very much a utopian setting for Stoppard’s audiences: it is described glowingly; it is a model of “pastoral perfection” and “geometrical” order for Lady Croom, but also of the meticulously choreographed, “picturesque” disorder favoured by the “modern,” Romantic landscaper, Noakes. For Hannah Jarvis, Sidley is the site on which a geo-philosophical battle of sorts – between Enlightenment rationalism and “Romantic sham,” between “thought” and mere “feeling” – has been played out.**** But, for Stoppard’s audience, Sidley is also nowhere, a point of constant but unknowable reference beyond the limits of the study, itself a space in which the objectification and commodification of knowledge is made manifest (that is, the audience and characters are bounded by books, themselves objects of bound knowledge). As if to support a point raised in the previous article, that the landscape and horizon, as it were, of the play is comprised of books and manuscripts serves to remind us that such idealized, utopian vistas as “the” pastoral often serves up are cultural-artistic constructions – a point rammed home by the various ironic comparisons of “Culpability” Noakes to Capability Brown and Salvator Rosa, as well as the nod to Humphry Repton’s “Red Books. Sidley Park, whether sculpted as a Lady Croom or a Noakes would have it, is a canvas to be painted, a page to be inscribed; it is something written and endlessly re-written into existence in palimpsestic fashion. And for the audience, it remains, to use a rather Blakean term, a somewhat vaporous place. It reminds us, perhaps, that so often when we mourn for a “lost” Golden Age, we mourn for a lost composition that never was, and perhaps never will be, quite written in full.
One way, then, in which Arcadia might better be seen as meta- rather than anti-pastoral, is in its invocation of the often competing values of Enlightenment, Romantic, and pastoral thinking, and in Stoppard’s apparent ambivalence as to which of these is “right.” This refusal to pronounce clearly and definitively upon an outlook, attitude, or philosophy is part and parcel of the irony that pervades the play. As Empson notes in Some Versions of Pastoral, the thing about irony is that most critics worth their salt can agree as to where and when Irony bears it teeth, but not on precisely what, nor how hard, Irony bites. Here, the quality, or practice, of irony and the “genre” of satire are closely linked: in both cases – and this is a point that the critic Michael Seidel makes regarding satire specifically – the writer/speaker has to closely reconstruct the thing she wishes to mock in order to mock it. So ironists and the satirists are always, to some extent, complicit in the very thing, quality, or system they hold up to scrutiny, and it will not always be clear whether either or neither viewpoint A or B is the author’s own.
This nicely describes, I think, the philosophical, intellectual, and aesthetic work Stoppard does in Arcadia: none of the discourses on which he draws are wholeheartedly endorsed nor dismissed; rather – to employ a rather crude but perhaps apt turn of phrase – they are all part of a rich intellectual mulch, out of which Arcadia as a whole is grown – the stronger, if the more convoluted.
But we began with science – so what of that in the play, and its bearing on whether we see the text as pastoral, anti-pastoral, or meta-pastoral? The standoff between the arts and the sciences – what the scientist and novelist C.P. Snow called “the two cultures” – is clearly represented in the play; the brazen apologist for poetry, over and above science, is Bernard, who repudiates any claim science might make on altering, widening, or “expanding” what we might loosely call out “inner” lives. He quotes Byron, insisting that he “can expand [his] universe without you” meaning science in toto, and, more narrowly, Valentine and “his” chaos mathematics. Of course, Bernard is not suggesting that poetry does the same job as science, only better. Rather, he is exploiting the semantic ambiguity of the idiom “expand you/one’s horizons,” which could suggest an increase in the sort of fact-based know-how that often gets touted as “knowledge” per se (and is closely associated with the sciences and scientific procedure), but also an expansion of the vocabulary we have to talk about our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and so on. Hence his bold claim, “[i]f knowledge isn’t self-knowledge, it isn’t doing much, mate.” But Bernard’s commitment to self-knowledge, to the poetic and aesthetic expansion of one’s “inner” horizons, is, in the last analysis questionable, just as Hannah’s fidelity to Enlightenment rationalism, which finds its spatial equivalent in Euclidean geometrical order, and her distrust of “sentimentality” turn out ultimately to be rather romantic.
Hannah’s romanticism is encapsulated no more succinctly than when she characterizes geometry as “sublime,” and in her emphatic (Stoppard italicizes his script here) and clichéd insistence that “[s]omewhere there will be something” proving her hermit theory true. Her theory rests on nothing more nor less than feeling. Bernard’s avowed romanticism, by contrast, is less about genuine “self-knowledge” than it is about self-aggrandisement. His cynical, but not ironic, deference to academic practice and the “Byron Society”; his indifference to “everything which doesn’t fit his theory” (Hannah), coupled with his conviction that his Byron/Chater paper is “probably the most sensational literary discovery of the century”; and his utter dismay, when his theory finally unravels, at being “fucked by a dahlia.” All these instances point to the fact that so-called self-knowledge is, for Bernard, not an end itself, but a commodity, potential capital, a means to another end: namely, success in his rarefied academic field. When Bernard asks repeatedly, “Am I fucked?”, the emphasis, despite what we are perhaps conditioned to notice, is less on the expletive, more on the self-absorbed “I.”
But what makes Bernard’s attack on science in general and Valentine in particular the more brutal is that he appears to suggest that what science does is dull and boring, because entirely detached from our day-to-day experiences and perceptions. Bernard really does seem to echo Poe’s sentiment in “Sonnet – to Science”: on this view, poetry can “expand” our horizons because in and through it, we might perceive the world anew. (Incidentally, this is exactly the sort of horizon-expanding view of poetry and literature that the philosopher Richard Rorty held. Great literature, he argued, furnishes us with new metaphors, which reconstruct our relationship with the world. Literature, he suggests, does everything that philosophy does, and then some, but without the terminological baggage.) On the other hand, says Bernard in harmony with Poe, science contracts our horizons, brings them closer to us; it reduces the world, and makes it a smaller place.
This, then, is the view that Bernard seems to represent and espouse. And it is relatively easy to fit this to certain formulations of the pastoral. Bernard’s rejection of science might be mapped rather neatly to Leo Marx’s notion of “the machine in the garden,” for example. But where Marx looks to specific examples of technological disruptions of the “natural” retreat – the steam-train’s shriek, for example, that shatters the peace of Hawthorne’s and Thoreau’s sylvan isolation – it is as if Bernard thinks at a higher level of abstraction: he rejects the technological threat represented by scientific discourse generally, and counters it with Romanticism generally (which is central to the more recent permutations of pastoralism).
But as we have discussed, it is hard to know, based on the text alone, where Stoppard himself stands on such matters, for there are other characters who present viewpoints alternative to Bernard’s, and do so just as convincingly as he does his. In many ways, Bernard is the perfect foil for Thomasina.
First, Thomasina’s name. It is hard not to think that here Stoppard nods to the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas. Bernard is the mouthpiece for a fairly crude sort of binarism – the choice, with him, is science or poetry – which is another familiar structuring device in much of what passes as pastoral literature (town or country; technology or “nature”). In Thomasina, by contrast, science and poetry, faith and reason are tightly and elegantly interlaced; and it is the articulation of faith and reason that makes Thomasina something of an intuitive Thomist (someone who follows/studies the teachings of Thomas Aquinas).
In Thomasina, then, no conflict between faith and reason, art and science. Indeed, that Thomasina’s story-arc is in 1809 serves as a timely reminder that for her there is as yet no strict distinction between the scientist and the philosopher, and perhaps even between them and the theologian. In 1809, the modern scientist – and certainly the modern physicist - has not quite been born. So it is a little tendentious of Hannah to claim that Septimus, as a student of “natural philosophy” was “a scientist [...] as much as anything”: the pronouncement betrays Hannah’s own bias (to scientific rationalism); a philosopher might just as rightfully claim that Septimus had been a philosopher as much as anything. The distinction, for either Septimus or Thomasina, would carry little meaning.
Contra Bernard and Poe, then, science in Thomasina’s world is perhaps better thought of, not as a set of practices, subject areas, and procedures, but as a generalized term: science, for Thomasina, is more like scientia – knowledge, or know-how, in the broadest possible sense. Similarly, poetry – derived from poesy, itself derivative of the Greek poiesis (to make) – can be thought of as creative making in the broadest terms, rather than as some discrete area of literary expertise. If we accept this, then we can say that in Thomasina, science and poetry, knowledge and creativity, scientia and poiesis come together, and are indiscernible.
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty distinguished perception as a mode of being that was stripped of the clutter of received wisdom; perception, in his work, is something like an immediate, holistic, and bodily experiencing of the world. Thomasina, we could say, perceives the world in Merleau-Ponty’s “strong” sense; she intuits things for which she does not yet have the language, because there is no language available: her manner of being in the world, and the fine-grained textures of her perceptions, will later be described in terms of entropy (where Thomasina has only the mundane beauty of jam in the rice-pudding) and fractal geometry (brandishing the natural and infinite complexity of an apple-leaf, Thomasina declaims that, “armed” with Euclidean geometry, “God could only make a cabinet”).
Following in the fashion of the mathematician Fermat, Thomasina leaves as her legacy the declaration, written in the margins of her notebook, that she has “found a truly wonderful method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone.” The marginality of Thomasina’s message nicely symbolizes a familiar, perhaps even hackneyed, characterization of the creative genius as liminal, working at the boundaries of sense/nonsense, meaningfulness/meaninglessness; even part of/apart from the society of which one is supposedly a member. It is in the margins and interstices (in-between places) that Blakean Poetic Genius reveals itself.^ And just so, it seems, is the case of Thomasina.
But here we get, I think, to the crux of Arcadia’s “pastoral-ness” (or not), and the place that scientific discourse has in the play. It is a familiar enough trope of the pastoral to see rustic settings cast as the symbolic ground of retreat/return, and/or a rejection of modernity, “progress,” “civilization.” Less familiar, I’d like to suggest, is what Stoppard offers us through Thomasina.
Which is?
Precisely that which Bernard proposes as supremely important: self-knowledge. Or rather, an interrogation of self-knowledge and one’s own perception of one’s self-knowledge, played out through Thomasina’s continuously refined sense of her relationship with the natural world. To say that Thomasina intuits those everyday phenomena that will later be expressed in terms of entropy; to say that she intuits the fractal geometry necessary to codify an apple leaf, in detail far beyond that of Euclid’s geometry (which is sufficient only, in Thomasina’s words, “to describe the shapes of manufacture”) – to say all this is to say that Thomasina perceives the world otherwise than is the norm. That she formulates her “wonderful method” is indication that she is acutely aware of her own, “marginal” style of perception. Thomasina’s story is a powerful argument against Bernard. There is nothing intrinsically true about Bernard’s claim that poetry expands worlds, while science diminishes them. Arguably, Thomasina’s enquiries bring her closer to her own perceptions of the world, and therefore closer not to the world per se, but to her world. It is possible that Thomasina leaves Bernard – if you’ll pardon the pun – looking decidedly Poe-faced.
If pastoral is easily enough cast as the literature of landscape – literature that “represents” the landscape – then Arcadia is both a dramatic and highly literary work that interrogates our modes, not of merely representing, but of creating and recreating, writing and rewriting our horizons, the bounds of our perceived worlds. In this sense, if Arcadia is to some extent writing about the writing of the natural world, then it is indeed meta-pastoral, rather than anti-pastoral.
To be able to choose, and to do so, the manner and style of our recreations, tells us something about ourselves, Stoppard seems to suggest. But he won’t trespass to tell us what it tells; just that it tells us something. Nothing seems to point to this better than Hannah’s words to Valentine, in scene VII:
It’s all trivial – your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. [Note here the sense in which each of us the centre-point of a world: not “the Byron,” or just “Byron”; “Bernard’s Byron.”] Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels is you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.
It’s possible to read this passage as nothing more than resigned nihilism. But it’s equally possible to read it as nihilistic jouissance: as a moment that accepts, with joy, that in a post-Einstein and post-Heisenberg universe,^^ there are few if any absolute certainties, but myriad styles and manners of interpretation. What sets Hannah and Thomasina apart is that, in a fit of youthful and creative pique, Thomasina believes she has found the way to carve nature at the joints – that is, to understand and represent nature as it “really” is; to force it to “give up its numerical secrets.” Hannah, by contrast, has by play’s end come to see fractal geometry, chaos theory, literary history and biography, et al as just so many narrative styles and stances among others. Hannah’s “sentimental” nihilism is one which seems to sanction and champion individual creativity. It encourages us to expand our perceptual horizons.
Time to wrap all this up, then. Science may not necessarily carve nature at the joints, as the philosophers say, any more than does poetry. But the “Coverly Set,” which tips the wink to the “Mandelbrot Set,” does allow for a more lapidary etching and rendering of the world we daily experience. It allows us not a picture of the apple leaf as it “really” is in itself; rather, it affords us a little perceptual high-definition when it comes to the veins of an apple-leaf, or the scalloped edge of a bluebell’s petals. Science and poetry – scientia and poiesis – need not be at loggerheads. (Indeed, as James Gleick points out, Mitchell Feigenbaum, one of the central “authors” of chaos mathematics, drew inspiration for his work from Dutch oil paintings of landscapes, particularly of the simultaneous order and chaos of the sea.) For if we accept Hannah’s words to Valentine, or if we view Thomasina with greater approval than we do Bernard, then it might become a little easier to accept that to create is to know; and to know, create.
Endnotes
* For example,C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures; Tim Armstrong’s Modernism, Technology, and the Body, and Modernism. [Warning: The rest of this endnote is a little “involved”: read for general interest’s sake only. Equally, feel free to ignore entirely!] From the side of science, things don’t always seem so stark. This might be because science writers are happy to draw on the arts to illustrate and/or generally titivate their narratives. Some science writers are also not averse to speculating as to, say, the evolutionary or sociobiological roots of such nebulous a thing as “creativity.” Some – for example, Richard Dawkins - will then go on to suggest something along the lines of this: if there is a genetic basis for all human behaviours and capacities, then genes are somehow prior to these capacities. If this is so, then, ipso facto, genetics (the study of genes) is somehow more fundamental than, say, philosophical, historical, literary enquiry. Genetics, that is, would be the foundational study, as far as all knowledge goes, because, says this argument, all human behaviours must have a genetic basis. The mere presence of such a line of argument might go some way to explaining the wariness of some of the culture-brokers when it comes to science. The weakness with the line of argument I’ve just described, though, is that is confuses the area of study with the object of study: there is no real logic to the argument that says just because genes themselves “came first” so too must genetics (the study of genes). What happens in such claims is that two different versions of “come first” – “come first” in terms of sequence; “come first” in terms of importance - are being used at once (one could say they are being used zeugmatically). But just because 1 comes before 2, does not make 1 more important than 2.
** Sidney’s work is sometimes referred to as Arcadia, sometimes The Arcadia. In fact, two standard versions are generally referred to – The Old Arcadia and The New Arcadia. The latter is the more complicated in structure and plot.
*** Eutopia suggests an ideal, good, or true place, and is thus closer to the everyday, superficial sense of our current utopia. However, orthographically, utopia is more directly derived from the combination of ou and topos – no place.
**** The metaphor of a geo-philosophy here has been stolen pretty shamelessly from Deleuze and Guattari, and their What Is Philosophy? (not a textbook introduction to the named subject, despite the sounds of the title). But their idea has not been applied with any great concern for conceptual detail or rigour.
^ The “common” person or people is, notes Empson, often the subject of pastoral literature. However, he claims, the writer – or, at least, the writer of any literary “worth” – can never be fully a part of the common people who is or are her subject, because to be an artist is, virtually by definition, to be uncommon. Perhaps this seems a rather patrician view of “The Artist”: “all artists are special, more special perhaps than me; certainly that you!” Or, perhaps it is merely a statement of cliché, if not of fact: “All artists are weirdoes!”
^^ Einstein’s relativity kicked one strut out from under physical certainty and foundationalism. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle kicked out another.
Works Cited
Armstrong, T. Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: CUP, 1998.
---. Modernism. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.
Blake, W. “All Religions Are One/There Is No Natural Religion [1788].” Blake’s Poetry and Designs.
2nd Ed. Eds. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant. New York: Norton, 2008. 3-7
Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Birchill and Hugh Tomlinson.
London: Verso, 1994.
Empson, W. Some Versions of Pastoral. 2nd Ed. London: Chatto & Windus, 1950.
Gifford, T. Pastoral. London: Routledge, 1999.
Gleick, J. Chaos: Making a New Science. London: Penguin, 1989.
Marx, L. The Machine In the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: OUP,
1967.
Merleau-Ponty, M. The World of Perception. Oxford: Routledge, 2004.
Poe, E. A. “Sonnet – To Science.” Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Laura Otis.
Oxford: OUP, 2002. 3.
Rorty, R. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: CUP, 1989.
Seidel, M. Satiric Inheritance: From Rabelais to Sterne. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: CUP, 1998.
Stoppard, T. Arcadia. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.
My last thoughts on the pastoral began with the claim that Stoppard and Blake are particularly interesting additions to the AQA’s Pastoral list, in large part because both writers offer some interesting and productive challenges when it comes to “fitting” them to better-known formulations of “the” pastoral. From thereon in, however, all mention of Stoppard and Blake fell away, as it seemed helpful to question the very notion of “genre” itself, and of “the” pastoral (both as a genre and as a genre [note the shift in emphasis here]). By now, then, consideration of Stoppard and Blake is almost certainly overdue.
Stoppard first, then. But, to continue my habit of deferral, Stoppard by way – in a first, brief instance – of Edgar Allen Poe.
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
This is Poe’s 1829 “Sonnet – To Science.” And just how is personified Science cast in these verses? As a despoiler of creativity, a saboteur of poetry and the poets, a wrecker of dreams. Why? Because, of course, science reduces Life, in all its rich mystery, to mute rules, laws, and (later) algorithms; it reduces the “summer dream” to “dull realit[y].” I say “of course,” because it is a view that many of the Romantics – prior to and contemporaneous with Poe; and including Blake – held. And it is a view, too, that has persisted in arts criticism and scholarship, particularly the field of literature, for some time. Equally, though, there have been and are voices that challenge what is sometimes presented as a “natural” opposition between the arts/humanities and the “hard” sciences.* A number of these voices belong to critics and theorists, whose work, though deeply interesting and innovative, will often have a relatively narrow readership. But Stoppard’s Arcadia is a popular text, by a popular writer, that also dissents from crude, binary opposition of the arts and sciences.
Terry Gifford counts Arcadia as an “anti-pastoral” text. (Incidentally, he casts Blake as anti-pastoral, too.) And it is not hard to see why. The so-called “anti-pastoral” might be identified wherever “typically” pastoral settings are the stage or canvas for a negotiation of something other than the rustic/rural/bucolic/Arcadian/Edenic as spiritual haven, versus the city and all the ills of modernity to which it is home. So Arcadia might well be called “anti-pastoral” to the extent that it challenges what Leo Marx has called the “popular and sentimental” kind of pastoralism, the tendency to celebrate a vaguely conceived “return to nature and ‘more natural’ way of living.” (But “more natural” than... well, what?) However, to identify a text as “anti-pastoral” in the context of a study of pastoral is a neat critics’ trick, for if a text were genuinely and thoroughly anti-pastoral, there would be little for one to write about it in terms of pastoralism: the truly anti-pastoral text could surely be accounted for by checking the “No” boxes on an extended tick list of pastoral criteria.
Except, of course, that no such definitive criteria could ever be drawn up (if the arguments of the previous essay have been accepted).
These strange and baggy things we call “genres” may not be very clearly defined, but, because of this, they also have a potentially infinite capacity for expansion and accommodation of new texts. This means that texts that are supposedly “anti-pastoral” (or anti- whatever genre happens to be the object of study) in any sort of interesting way must maintain some sort of productive link to the “parent” genre. Which is a rather circuitous way of suggesting that if a text is interestingly anti-genre, it is almost certainly still part of a tradition – a little like a scion self-consciously railing against her or his family (for a familiar example, think Eric and Sheila by the end of An Inspector Calls).
It might be better, then, to think of the ways in which Arcadia is supra-pastoral or, perhaps, meta-pastoral. Certainly, it seems at so many points to be invoking and satirizing the very idea of the pastoral: Stoppard’s title, Arcadia, echoes that by which Sidney’s famous romance, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, is better known; but by dropping the definite article (“the”),** it is as if Stoppard wishes also to isolate for examination the very notion of arcadia itself. Certainly, the setting of the play is geographically and spatially isolated. An old stately home amid expansive gardens, Sidley Park is every inch the stereotypical Renaissance pastoral setting, cut off, it seems, from its urban environs. Or at least we the audience suppose that it is, in large part because Stoppard’s characters speak as if it is – there is talk of a world beyond the study (the current condition, both in 1809 and “the present,” of the grounds, for example), as well as of neighbouring families and estates beyond Sidley itself; but these we never see. For the play never leave the confines of the study.
Thus, Stoppard’s staging and stagecraft is fine fodder for the hungry critic: the hallmark pastoral trope of an Arcadian – later Edenic – setting is often cast as a utopian space. But etymologically, “utopia” carries a sense both of “good place” and “no place.”*** Sidley beyond the study, then, is very much a utopian setting for Stoppard’s audiences: it is described glowingly; it is a model of “pastoral perfection” and “geometrical” order for Lady Croom, but also of the meticulously choreographed, “picturesque” disorder favoured by the “modern,” Romantic landscaper, Noakes. For Hannah Jarvis, Sidley is the site on which a geo-philosophical battle of sorts – between Enlightenment rationalism and “Romantic sham,” between “thought” and mere “feeling” – has been played out.**** But, for Stoppard’s audience, Sidley is also nowhere, a point of constant but unknowable reference beyond the limits of the study, itself a space in which the objectification and commodification of knowledge is made manifest (that is, the audience and characters are bounded by books, themselves objects of bound knowledge). As if to support a point raised in the previous article, that the landscape and horizon, as it were, of the play is comprised of books and manuscripts serves to remind us that such idealized, utopian vistas as “the” pastoral often serves up are cultural-artistic constructions – a point rammed home by the various ironic comparisons of “Culpability” Noakes to Capability Brown and Salvator Rosa, as well as the nod to Humphry Repton’s “Red Books. Sidley Park, whether sculpted as a Lady Croom or a Noakes would have it, is a canvas to be painted, a page to be inscribed; it is something written and endlessly re-written into existence in palimpsestic fashion. And for the audience, it remains, to use a rather Blakean term, a somewhat vaporous place. It reminds us, perhaps, that so often when we mourn for a “lost” Golden Age, we mourn for a lost composition that never was, and perhaps never will be, quite written in full.
One way, then, in which Arcadia might better be seen as meta- rather than anti-pastoral, is in its invocation of the often competing values of Enlightenment, Romantic, and pastoral thinking, and in Stoppard’s apparent ambivalence as to which of these is “right.” This refusal to pronounce clearly and definitively upon an outlook, attitude, or philosophy is part and parcel of the irony that pervades the play. As Empson notes in Some Versions of Pastoral, the thing about irony is that most critics worth their salt can agree as to where and when Irony bears it teeth, but not on precisely what, nor how hard, Irony bites. Here, the quality, or practice, of irony and the “genre” of satire are closely linked: in both cases – and this is a point that the critic Michael Seidel makes regarding satire specifically – the writer/speaker has to closely reconstruct the thing she wishes to mock in order to mock it. So ironists and the satirists are always, to some extent, complicit in the very thing, quality, or system they hold up to scrutiny, and it will not always be clear whether either or neither viewpoint A or B is the author’s own.
This nicely describes, I think, the philosophical, intellectual, and aesthetic work Stoppard does in Arcadia: none of the discourses on which he draws are wholeheartedly endorsed nor dismissed; rather – to employ a rather crude but perhaps apt turn of phrase – they are all part of a rich intellectual mulch, out of which Arcadia as a whole is grown – the stronger, if the more convoluted.
But we began with science – so what of that in the play, and its bearing on whether we see the text as pastoral, anti-pastoral, or meta-pastoral? The standoff between the arts and the sciences – what the scientist and novelist C.P. Snow called “the two cultures” – is clearly represented in the play; the brazen apologist for poetry, over and above science, is Bernard, who repudiates any claim science might make on altering, widening, or “expanding” what we might loosely call out “inner” lives. He quotes Byron, insisting that he “can expand [his] universe without you” meaning science in toto, and, more narrowly, Valentine and “his” chaos mathematics. Of course, Bernard is not suggesting that poetry does the same job as science, only better. Rather, he is exploiting the semantic ambiguity of the idiom “expand you/one’s horizons,” which could suggest an increase in the sort of fact-based know-how that often gets touted as “knowledge” per se (and is closely associated with the sciences and scientific procedure), but also an expansion of the vocabulary we have to talk about our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and so on. Hence his bold claim, “[i]f knowledge isn’t self-knowledge, it isn’t doing much, mate.” But Bernard’s commitment to self-knowledge, to the poetic and aesthetic expansion of one’s “inner” horizons, is, in the last analysis questionable, just as Hannah’s fidelity to Enlightenment rationalism, which finds its spatial equivalent in Euclidean geometrical order, and her distrust of “sentimentality” turn out ultimately to be rather romantic.
Hannah’s romanticism is encapsulated no more succinctly than when she characterizes geometry as “sublime,” and in her emphatic (Stoppard italicizes his script here) and clichéd insistence that “[s]omewhere there will be something” proving her hermit theory true. Her theory rests on nothing more nor less than feeling. Bernard’s avowed romanticism, by contrast, is less about genuine “self-knowledge” than it is about self-aggrandisement. His cynical, but not ironic, deference to academic practice and the “Byron Society”; his indifference to “everything which doesn’t fit his theory” (Hannah), coupled with his conviction that his Byron/Chater paper is “probably the most sensational literary discovery of the century”; and his utter dismay, when his theory finally unravels, at being “fucked by a dahlia.” All these instances point to the fact that so-called self-knowledge is, for Bernard, not an end itself, but a commodity, potential capital, a means to another end: namely, success in his rarefied academic field. When Bernard asks repeatedly, “Am I fucked?”, the emphasis, despite what we are perhaps conditioned to notice, is less on the expletive, more on the self-absorbed “I.”
But what makes Bernard’s attack on science in general and Valentine in particular the more brutal is that he appears to suggest that what science does is dull and boring, because entirely detached from our day-to-day experiences and perceptions. Bernard really does seem to echo Poe’s sentiment in “Sonnet – to Science”: on this view, poetry can “expand” our horizons because in and through it, we might perceive the world anew. (Incidentally, this is exactly the sort of horizon-expanding view of poetry and literature that the philosopher Richard Rorty held. Great literature, he argued, furnishes us with new metaphors, which reconstruct our relationship with the world. Literature, he suggests, does everything that philosophy does, and then some, but without the terminological baggage.) On the other hand, says Bernard in harmony with Poe, science contracts our horizons, brings them closer to us; it reduces the world, and makes it a smaller place.
This, then, is the view that Bernard seems to represent and espouse. And it is relatively easy to fit this to certain formulations of the pastoral. Bernard’s rejection of science might be mapped rather neatly to Leo Marx’s notion of “the machine in the garden,” for example. But where Marx looks to specific examples of technological disruptions of the “natural” retreat – the steam-train’s shriek, for example, that shatters the peace of Hawthorne’s and Thoreau’s sylvan isolation – it is as if Bernard thinks at a higher level of abstraction: he rejects the technological threat represented by scientific discourse generally, and counters it with Romanticism generally (which is central to the more recent permutations of pastoralism).
But as we have discussed, it is hard to know, based on the text alone, where Stoppard himself stands on such matters, for there are other characters who present viewpoints alternative to Bernard’s, and do so just as convincingly as he does his. In many ways, Bernard is the perfect foil for Thomasina.
First, Thomasina’s name. It is hard not to think that here Stoppard nods to the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas. Bernard is the mouthpiece for a fairly crude sort of binarism – the choice, with him, is science or poetry – which is another familiar structuring device in much of what passes as pastoral literature (town or country; technology or “nature”). In Thomasina, by contrast, science and poetry, faith and reason are tightly and elegantly interlaced; and it is the articulation of faith and reason that makes Thomasina something of an intuitive Thomist (someone who follows/studies the teachings of Thomas Aquinas).
In Thomasina, then, no conflict between faith and reason, art and science. Indeed, that Thomasina’s story-arc is in 1809 serves as a timely reminder that for her there is as yet no strict distinction between the scientist and the philosopher, and perhaps even between them and the theologian. In 1809, the modern scientist – and certainly the modern physicist - has not quite been born. So it is a little tendentious of Hannah to claim that Septimus, as a student of “natural philosophy” was “a scientist [...] as much as anything”: the pronouncement betrays Hannah’s own bias (to scientific rationalism); a philosopher might just as rightfully claim that Septimus had been a philosopher as much as anything. The distinction, for either Septimus or Thomasina, would carry little meaning.
Contra Bernard and Poe, then, science in Thomasina’s world is perhaps better thought of, not as a set of practices, subject areas, and procedures, but as a generalized term: science, for Thomasina, is more like scientia – knowledge, or know-how, in the broadest possible sense. Similarly, poetry – derived from poesy, itself derivative of the Greek poiesis (to make) – can be thought of as creative making in the broadest terms, rather than as some discrete area of literary expertise. If we accept this, then we can say that in Thomasina, science and poetry, knowledge and creativity, scientia and poiesis come together, and are indiscernible.
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty distinguished perception as a mode of being that was stripped of the clutter of received wisdom; perception, in his work, is something like an immediate, holistic, and bodily experiencing of the world. Thomasina, we could say, perceives the world in Merleau-Ponty’s “strong” sense; she intuits things for which she does not yet have the language, because there is no language available: her manner of being in the world, and the fine-grained textures of her perceptions, will later be described in terms of entropy (where Thomasina has only the mundane beauty of jam in the rice-pudding) and fractal geometry (brandishing the natural and infinite complexity of an apple-leaf, Thomasina declaims that, “armed” with Euclidean geometry, “God could only make a cabinet”).
Following in the fashion of the mathematician Fermat, Thomasina leaves as her legacy the declaration, written in the margins of her notebook, that she has “found a truly wonderful method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone.” The marginality of Thomasina’s message nicely symbolizes a familiar, perhaps even hackneyed, characterization of the creative genius as liminal, working at the boundaries of sense/nonsense, meaningfulness/meaninglessness; even part of/apart from the society of which one is supposedly a member. It is in the margins and interstices (in-between places) that Blakean Poetic Genius reveals itself.^ And just so, it seems, is the case of Thomasina.
But here we get, I think, to the crux of Arcadia’s “pastoral-ness” (or not), and the place that scientific discourse has in the play. It is a familiar enough trope of the pastoral to see rustic settings cast as the symbolic ground of retreat/return, and/or a rejection of modernity, “progress,” “civilization.” Less familiar, I’d like to suggest, is what Stoppard offers us through Thomasina.
Which is?
Precisely that which Bernard proposes as supremely important: self-knowledge. Or rather, an interrogation of self-knowledge and one’s own perception of one’s self-knowledge, played out through Thomasina’s continuously refined sense of her relationship with the natural world. To say that Thomasina intuits those everyday phenomena that will later be expressed in terms of entropy; to say that she intuits the fractal geometry necessary to codify an apple leaf, in detail far beyond that of Euclid’s geometry (which is sufficient only, in Thomasina’s words, “to describe the shapes of manufacture”) – to say all this is to say that Thomasina perceives the world otherwise than is the norm. That she formulates her “wonderful method” is indication that she is acutely aware of her own, “marginal” style of perception. Thomasina’s story is a powerful argument against Bernard. There is nothing intrinsically true about Bernard’s claim that poetry expands worlds, while science diminishes them. Arguably, Thomasina’s enquiries bring her closer to her own perceptions of the world, and therefore closer not to the world per se, but to her world. It is possible that Thomasina leaves Bernard – if you’ll pardon the pun – looking decidedly Poe-faced.
If pastoral is easily enough cast as the literature of landscape – literature that “represents” the landscape – then Arcadia is both a dramatic and highly literary work that interrogates our modes, not of merely representing, but of creating and recreating, writing and rewriting our horizons, the bounds of our perceived worlds. In this sense, if Arcadia is to some extent writing about the writing of the natural world, then it is indeed meta-pastoral, rather than anti-pastoral.
To be able to choose, and to do so, the manner and style of our recreations, tells us something about ourselves, Stoppard seems to suggest. But he won’t trespass to tell us what it tells; just that it tells us something. Nothing seems to point to this better than Hannah’s words to Valentine, in scene VII:
It’s all trivial – your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. [Note here the sense in which each of us the centre-point of a world: not “the Byron,” or just “Byron”; “Bernard’s Byron.”] Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels is you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.
It’s possible to read this passage as nothing more than resigned nihilism. But it’s equally possible to read it as nihilistic jouissance: as a moment that accepts, with joy, that in a post-Einstein and post-Heisenberg universe,^^ there are few if any absolute certainties, but myriad styles and manners of interpretation. What sets Hannah and Thomasina apart is that, in a fit of youthful and creative pique, Thomasina believes she has found the way to carve nature at the joints – that is, to understand and represent nature as it “really” is; to force it to “give up its numerical secrets.” Hannah, by contrast, has by play’s end come to see fractal geometry, chaos theory, literary history and biography, et al as just so many narrative styles and stances among others. Hannah’s “sentimental” nihilism is one which seems to sanction and champion individual creativity. It encourages us to expand our perceptual horizons.
Time to wrap all this up, then. Science may not necessarily carve nature at the joints, as the philosophers say, any more than does poetry. But the “Coverly Set,” which tips the wink to the “Mandelbrot Set,” does allow for a more lapidary etching and rendering of the world we daily experience. It allows us not a picture of the apple leaf as it “really” is in itself; rather, it affords us a little perceptual high-definition when it comes to the veins of an apple-leaf, or the scalloped edge of a bluebell’s petals. Science and poetry – scientia and poiesis – need not be at loggerheads. (Indeed, as James Gleick points out, Mitchell Feigenbaum, one of the central “authors” of chaos mathematics, drew inspiration for his work from Dutch oil paintings of landscapes, particularly of the simultaneous order and chaos of the sea.) For if we accept Hannah’s words to Valentine, or if we view Thomasina with greater approval than we do Bernard, then it might become a little easier to accept that to create is to know; and to know, create.
Endnotes
* For example,C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures; Tim Armstrong’s Modernism, Technology, and the Body, and Modernism. [Warning: The rest of this endnote is a little “involved”: read for general interest’s sake only. Equally, feel free to ignore entirely!] From the side of science, things don’t always seem so stark. This might be because science writers are happy to draw on the arts to illustrate and/or generally titivate their narratives. Some science writers are also not averse to speculating as to, say, the evolutionary or sociobiological roots of such nebulous a thing as “creativity.” Some – for example, Richard Dawkins - will then go on to suggest something along the lines of this: if there is a genetic basis for all human behaviours and capacities, then genes are somehow prior to these capacities. If this is so, then, ipso facto, genetics (the study of genes) is somehow more fundamental than, say, philosophical, historical, literary enquiry. Genetics, that is, would be the foundational study, as far as all knowledge goes, because, says this argument, all human behaviours must have a genetic basis. The mere presence of such a line of argument might go some way to explaining the wariness of some of the culture-brokers when it comes to science. The weakness with the line of argument I’ve just described, though, is that is confuses the area of study with the object of study: there is no real logic to the argument that says just because genes themselves “came first” so too must genetics (the study of genes). What happens in such claims is that two different versions of “come first” – “come first” in terms of sequence; “come first” in terms of importance - are being used at once (one could say they are being used zeugmatically). But just because 1 comes before 2, does not make 1 more important than 2.
** Sidney’s work is sometimes referred to as Arcadia, sometimes The Arcadia. In fact, two standard versions are generally referred to – The Old Arcadia and The New Arcadia. The latter is the more complicated in structure and plot.
*** Eutopia suggests an ideal, good, or true place, and is thus closer to the everyday, superficial sense of our current utopia. However, orthographically, utopia is more directly derived from the combination of ou and topos – no place.
**** The metaphor of a geo-philosophy here has been stolen pretty shamelessly from Deleuze and Guattari, and their What Is Philosophy? (not a textbook introduction to the named subject, despite the sounds of the title). But their idea has not been applied with any great concern for conceptual detail or rigour.
^ The “common” person or people is, notes Empson, often the subject of pastoral literature. However, he claims, the writer – or, at least, the writer of any literary “worth” – can never be fully a part of the common people who is or are her subject, because to be an artist is, virtually by definition, to be uncommon. Perhaps this seems a rather patrician view of “The Artist”: “all artists are special, more special perhaps than me; certainly that you!” Or, perhaps it is merely a statement of cliché, if not of fact: “All artists are weirdoes!”
^^ Einstein’s relativity kicked one strut out from under physical certainty and foundationalism. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle kicked out another.
Works Cited
Armstrong, T. Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: CUP, 1998.
---. Modernism. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.
Blake, W. “All Religions Are One/There Is No Natural Religion [1788].” Blake’s Poetry and Designs.
2nd Ed. Eds. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant. New York: Norton, 2008. 3-7
Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Birchill and Hugh Tomlinson.
London: Verso, 1994.
Empson, W. Some Versions of Pastoral. 2nd Ed. London: Chatto & Windus, 1950.
Gifford, T. Pastoral. London: Routledge, 1999.
Gleick, J. Chaos: Making a New Science. London: Penguin, 1989.
Marx, L. The Machine In the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: OUP,
1967.
Merleau-Ponty, M. The World of Perception. Oxford: Routledge, 2004.
Poe, E. A. “Sonnet – To Science.” Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Laura Otis.
Oxford: OUP, 2002. 3.
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