In the Native State/Indian Ink: Footnoting the Footnotes on Empire

In the Native State/Indian Ink: Footnoting the Footnotes on Empire LA UR IE KAPLA N yes, think of a woman in a house of net that strains the oxygen out of the air thickening the night to Indian ink orthink if you prefer- - Flora Crewel In T972, Tom Stoppard was the first contributor to a series of essays focusing "on the interplay, if any, between 'Doers and Thinkers. "" In his article, ST oppard, the quintessential Doer, defends the art of the play against the "pointless analysis" of Thinkers who inhabit "academic circles." Damning with no praise at all the "academic preoccupation with the creative work of other people" (emphasis added), Stoppard defines the separate spheres relegated to playwrights (that is, creative artists who work for a living) and professors . "the vast oracular Lego set of Lit Cot with its chairs and lectureships, its colloquia and symposia, its presses, reprints, offprints, monographs, reviews, footnotes and fireside chats...." For Stoppard. "writing-aboutwriting " is merely the "pjfttzzz," not the Coke, "not the real thing," and he aims his satirical barbs at the cabal of professors who "continually acknowledge each other with endorsements or rebukes" and at the purveyors of "footnotes " and "monographs" who seek reflected fame. "[T]he habit of making undeniable but gratuitous connexions is the measles of critical diseases," Stoppard assens.2 Surprisingly, Stoppard waited until T 99 Tto skewer in a creative work those purveyors of footnotes and monographs. [n his brilliantly poetic radio drama In the Native State, Stoppard creates a "voice-over" pompous "Thinker" who provides nearly useless connections and, occasionally, misleading "notes" for his Selected Letters of Flora Crewe, and therefore for the "text" of the play. Pike - "age not crucial (thirty-five to fifty-five), educated American, Southern Modern Drama, 41 (1998) 337 LAURIE KAPLAN accent") - "sound{sJ rather like Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind" (NS 28). Asserting professorial authority every time he speaks, Pike is a flat character representing Lit Crit at its most fatuously oracular. He appears in only four of the nineteen scenes and has approximately twenty speeches, many of which are one-line interruptions to infonn listeners that, for example, "The Queen's Elm" is "A public house in the Fulham area of Chelsea" (NS 3I), or that "all Sikhs are named Singh (however, not all people named Singh are Sikhs)" (NS 63). His tone is smarmy; his insights correspond perfectly to the academic "pffrrzzz" Stoppard detests. The comic potential of the character of the professor obviously tweaked the playwright's imagination, for recently two of his major characters have been Thinkers suffering from the "critical disease" of delving for facts and discussing the private lives of Doers. In Arcadia, which opened at the Lyttelton Theatre in April 1993, Stoppard's Bernard Nightingale, a "grovelling" English academic, lets on that his goal is to produce "a monograph for the Journal of English Studies," but in reality he is seeking Byronic "fame.'" Pike and Nightingale spend their academic careers "let[ting] the brats sort it out for themselves " (A 2) and making the gratuitous, self-referential connections Stoppard deplores. They personify that Lego set of Lit Crit Stoppard had his satirical eye on for at least twenty years. When Nightingale asserts, "To rehabilitate a forgotten writer, 1suppose you could say that's the main reason for an English don" (A 20-2 1), and when Pike says that "God made poets and novelists, so the rest of us can get published" (/I 4), Stoppard's own preoccupation shines through the texts. In April 1991, Stoppard was already considering a stage or film version of In the Native State, and the characterization of Pike posed a problem for him: "if only I could figure out what to do with Pike [in the context of a film]! I don't want to leave him out because he adds a dimension of spurious reality. Sometimes I think Pike should tum into captions which just stutter across the screen."5 As Stoppard revised In the Native Stare into Indian Ink, he promoted the American Assistant Professor Pike from pure voice into fully realized academic presence, and it is Pike's quest for the dctails...