“It’s wanting to know…”: The Troubled Matter of Stoppard’s Arcadia
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2017
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Award
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eng
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Tri-College users only
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Abstract
Common readings of Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia take Hannah’s line “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter” as an unqualified affirmation of the quest for knowledge, even in the face of disorder and epistemic revolution. But a study of the objects in the play, drawing from Bill Brown’s thing theory and W. J. T. Mitchell’s account of the life of things in English Romanticism, casts doubt on this affirmation. It is true, as has been described, that the drama of Arcadia is rooted in a dynamic equilibrium between order and chaos, classicism and romanticism. Yet the scales have been tampered with: The play works within a romanticism that has been chastened by the removal of all suggestions of revolutionary deep time beyond the human scope. Although the characters are disturbed by catastrophic losses of culture, and by the deaths of individual people, they remain blissfully untroubled by the brevity of the entire span of human history and its insignificance among the frequent cataclysms of natural history. W. J. T. Mitchell identifies the emergence of this revolutionary temporality in the discovery of the fossil, which brings with it the haunt of species extinction. He places the fossil as a foundation to the Romantic Period and follows its influence through romantic historiography and such works as Frankenstein and Jurassic Park, in which dead material (literal fossils in the latter case) triggers a revolution by coming to life under human hands. Despite its obsession with objects and materials, Arcadia never explicitly ignites the fear of a similar revolution in the computing age that gives consciousness to matter. But by acknowledging the extent to which the play erases the indifferent violence of the natural world, as well as the drastic changes humans make to it, we can see a pervasive anxiety coursing beneath its surface. On the one hand, Arcadia forces us to contrast its idyllic timeless nature with the upheavals of the real natural world. On the other, it hints at what should be the terrifying prospect (at least for Hannah’s declaration) of Valentine’s computer, and machines like it, one day wanting to know.