by
IRA NADEL
Department of English
University of British Columbia
“SEX AND LITERATURE. LITERATURE
AND SEX.... like two marbles rolling
around a pudding basin. One of them
is always sex.” (63). Hannah
Jarvis's dismissive attitude colors
Tom Stoppard's comic view of literature
in Arcadia with
irony. From Septimus's opening
definition of carnal embrace — “the
practice of throwing one's arms around
a side of beef” (1) — to
Lady Croom's anxiety that the sexually
charged Byron
might leave her estate unfulfilled,
Arcadia links
the sexual with the poetical. Science
and landscape gardening
may vie for our interest but it is
the sexual undertow of literature
which pulls us overwhelmingly into
the deeper and often comic depths
of desire.
Reputation, the only currency
of value for poets and critics,
jousts in importance with carnal
knowledge
in the play. Challenged to a duel
by the poet, Ezra Chater, for making
love to his wife, Septimus responds
by flattering
the second-rate poet as one of
the best in the world and declaring
that
he would hardly shoot him “over
a perpendicular poke in a gazebo
with a woman whose reputation could
not be adequately defended with a
platoon of musketry deployed by rota” (7).
Chater relishes the compliment and
forgets the insult. Bernard, in his
weak defense of his scathing review
of Hannah's book on Caroline Lamb,
similarly reverts to sexual innuendo,
while Hannah, in reporting on the
poor reception of her work, vividly
describes how the “Byron gang
unzipped their flies and patronized
all over it.” (22). Her reference
to the poet reaffirms his importance
as the essence of literature and
licentiousness, his supposed bisexuality
adding zest to an already spicy mix.
His affair in 1812 with Lady Caroline
Lamb, partly discussed by Hannah,
lends further importance
to Byron whose reasons for leaving
England in 1809 remains a mystery
at the heart of the work.
But if
literature and the impetus to
write in Arcadia finds itself entangled
with sex — the title of Chater's
book is The
Couch of Eros — the
purpose of literature remains quite
different according
to Stoppard. It is as if language
pulls in one direction (sexual) and
function in another (instruction).
But literature per
se has a higher
goal which Bernard, in his enthusiastic
offense against science, makes clear: “a
great poet is always timely. . .
. There is no rush for Isaac Newton” (61).
He reinforces his attack by announcing, “I
can't think of anything more trivial
than the speed of light” (63).
But the justification of literature
finds expression in ways other than
Bernard's posturing. Throughout the
play, Stoppard documents its survival
through the exposure of scholarship's
pretensions, frequently more fiction
than fact. By contrast, literature
lasts. Poetry, often misread if not
misunderstood, nevertheless contains
truths. |
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But
in Arcadia, even authorship is not
guaranteed. The
Castle of Otranto by
Horace Walpole was “written by
whomsoever I say it was, otherwise
what is the point of being a guest
or having one,” Lady Croom, mistress
of Sidely Park proclaims and few dispute
her. Who wrote what is often at stake
in the play with confusions and disguises
rampant (Bernard hides from Hannah
his authorship of a nasty review; Septimus
hides from history his authorship of
the journals of the Sidley Park Hermit)
but not the integrity of literature.
In
the play Stoppard also deflates the
unparalleled vanity of authors. They
all want to be acknowledged — if
not by other writers then at least
by TV commentators. But reputations
sometimes turn to smoke. Septimus,
for example, delights in the burning
of an unread letter by Byron, exclaiming “now
there's a thing — a letter from
Byron never to be read by a living
soul.” Bernard's theory that
Byron left England because he killed
Chater in a duel collapses when it
is discovered that Chater died by a
monkey's bite in Martinique in 1810.
And we realize that Hannah's idea that
the Sidley Hermit will be the “peg
for the nervous breakdown of the Romantic
Imagination” (25) is wrong because
we know that the Hermit is the grief-stricken
Septimus, reacting to the firey death
of Thomasina. Over-determination is
a critical vice which Stoppard relentlessly
satirizes. Literary critics and writers
in Arcadia alternate between vaunting
ambition and extreme misreadings. But
in a world where everyone is an author,
without regard for talent, this is
not uncommon.
For Stoppard, the literary bug is
not confined to Arcadia. Writers appear
in many of his works including the
playwright Henry in The
Real Thing,
the poet Flora Crewe in Indian
Ink and A.E. Housman and Oscar Wilde in The
Invention of Love. But Arcadia is Stoppard's most author-filled text,
although he does not so much parody
authorship as question its authority
and highlight its confusions. We want
literature to matter. It does, not
so much in terms of texts but in their
impact which we see from the first
is as much sexual as it is moral and
emotional.
Late in the play, Hannah tells Valentine
that “it's wanting to know that
makes us matter. Otherwise we're going
out the way we came in” (75).
For Stoppard, it is wanting to write
that matters, something we all undertake
with varying success. But a sexual
undercurrent is inescapable, not only
in literature but in the universe.
As Chloe explains to Valentine, the
Oxford science student, sex was “the
attraction Newton left out.” The
only flaw in Newton's world is that
people fancy other people “who
aren't supposed to be in that part
of the plan” (73-4). In Arcadia,
the sex has been left in but through
it literature flourishes, characters
sparkle and audiences delight in the
verbal excitement of the play.
Ira Nadel is the author of Double
Act, A Life of Tom Stoppard (2002). |
