“Dualism is the word”: Wave/Particle Functions in Banville and Stoppard

Jean-François Lyotard’s famous claim that the actions and movements of quantum particles cannot be accommodated by a classical narrative structure established a firm association between postmodernism and the “new science.” Quantum theory heralded a conceptual change in the contemporary worldview, promising “new possibilities of order … post-modern little narratives which break up and disrupt the deterministic wheel of those grand narratives of scientific modernity” (Waugh, Harvest 195). Thus the uncertainty “that haunts the interior of the quantum realm” becomes “part of the general and radical skepticism of what has been called postmodernism” (Coale 3).¹

Yet critics have noted that British literature “has resisted the more exuberant textual playfulness” of literary postmodernism (Waugh, “Postmodern Fiction” 68). While metafiction has been a constant in the British and Irish literary scene, this is consistent with what Patricia Waugh identifies as a “‘weaker’ form of postmodernism” (“Postmodern Fiction” 75). Some have even suggested that, far from embracing the “stronger” form of postmodernism that, since Lyotard, is frequently associated with quantum theory or the new science, in Britain the literary culture seemed “determined to go back to a time before modernism had reared its ugly head” (Gasiorek 192).

The works of two contemporary authors, John Banville and Tom Stoppard, problematize both our understanding of British and Irish postmodernism and the easy link between postmodernism and quantum theory. Both authors have demonstrated an acute interest in those scientific theories that, according to Waugh, were the hallmark of the 1980s (“Science and Fiction” 61). Both have been placed—though with varying degree of determinacy—in the avant-garde of British and Irish postmodernism. While Banville’s science tetralogy has been referred to as an attempt to “chart the development of modern science in the form and content of the postmodern novel,” his work has also been called a “composite of some of the more quasi-religious or hermetic strands of historical modernism” (D’hoker, “What Then Would Life Be” 49; Kenny 14). Critics are equally split over Stoppard’s postmodernist leanings: while some see him continuing his “significant contributions to the articulation of the social, cultural, and political condition of postmodernity,” others see his plays reflecting “fairly conservative, high-modernist notions regarding contemporary politics, culture, and aesthetics” (Emilsson 144; qtd. in Vanden Heuvel 214). I argue here that—far from bringing these authors to an uncomplicated postmodern aesthetic—their representations of quantum physics force them to reconsider the divide between fact and fiction, reality and representation.

Though both authors would return to the new science, their first published engagements came with a single concept—the dual nature of light—in the initial installment of Banville’s “science” tetralogy, Doctor Copernicus (1976), and in Stoppard’s first “science” play, Hapgood (1988).² Nineteenth-century physics had firmly established the wave-like character of light: this was evident in Thomas Young’s experiments, Michael Faraday’s research into connections between electricity and magnetism, and, finally, in J. C. Maxwell’s theories of the electromagnetic field, which worked the same way as Young’s light waves (Polkinghorne 2). However, the beginning of the twentieth century brought attention to the contrary evidence: light, if “interrogated in a particle-like way gave particle behavior and if interrogated in a wave-like way gave wave behavior” (Polkinghorne 7). This paradox lies at the heart of quantum mechanics and at the center of these two works. Less interested in quantum theory as an explanation of the physical world, both authors engage with it in order to explore concepts central to postmodernism such as identity, representation, and the (im)possibility of knowing. Indeed, Hapgood and Doctor Copernicus are particularly suitable for comparison since their compositional histories, which are amply recorded in the extant archives, reveal striking similarities. This evidence shows both authors struggling with the complex conceptual framework of quantum physics alongside the competing desire for resolution and certainty.

This need for resolution runs counter to the central impulses of postmodernism: Steven Connor characterizes modernism as “heroically making sense of flux and chaos,” whereas postmodernism “began to think that the very flux that modernists...