Tom Stoppard's Artist Descending A Staircase: Outdoing the 'Dada' Duchamp

1 COMPAKATIVE •rama Volume 20FaU 1986Number 3 Tom Stoppard's Artist Descending A Staircase: Outdoing the 'Dada' Duchamp Katherine E. Kelly The title of Tom Stoppard's 1972 radio mystery Artist Descending A Staircase openly declares its kinship with Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending A Staircase, the iconoclastic cause célèbre of the 1913 New York Armory Show. But the relationship is a little more than kin and less than kind, as might be expected of a playwright customarily given to parody, pastiche, and textual poaching of various kinds. 1 Stoppard's wry style of borrowing from the visual arts surfaced one year earlier when he stole the jokes if not the iconographie fire from surrealist Magritte in the ambiguously titled farce After Magritte. The "afterness" or secondariness of Stoppard's play refers, it has been argued, not only to the narrative ordering of events that places the Harris family's appearance on stage after their visit to a Magritte exhibit but also to the playwright's taking after the "perceptual hermeneutics" of Magritte, according to which, KATHERINE E. KELLY, Assistant Professor of English at Texas A & M University , teaches modern drama and Shakespeare and is working on a book on Tom Stoppard. 191 192Comparative Drama in a nutshell, the Harrises are at once the subject and object of a perceptual mirage.2 But Stoppard's affinity with the hijinks of some Dada and Surrealist artists (and I am here presupposing the widely accepted view that Duchamp was one of the innocent grandfathers of Dada) does not prevent him from ridiculing their assumptions about the nature of art and the merits of anti-art.3 Stoppard's sense of coming after Duchamp, I would argue, entails the dual obligation to outplay him at his own game, to outjoke his jokes, while flattering the art that preceded his. Stoppard argues metaphorically in this play for a return to a particular moment in the art historical past when he believes a wrong turn was taken. Like his second-string philosopher George Moore of Jumpers, who wants to turn British philosophy back forty years when it "went off the rails," the post-pop PreRaphaelite Sophie of this play would like to turn art back to Turner and Constable and to the Pre-Raphaelites' portraits of idealized beauty (also admired, incidentally, by Duchamp). Neither Moore nor Sophie, themselves vigorously parodied, speaks for implied playwright Stoppard. But they do dramatize one of the contradictions central to his plays: a conservative impulse to locate value in the past as this conflicts with a profound commitment to the ethics and aesthetics of the present. This contradiction may explain Stoppard's ambivalent attraction to the elusive Duchamp, whose own wish to supplant the "merely" visual painting called for by nineteenth-century realists earned him the name of a great experimenter. Stoppard's choice of the radio medium belies a playful spirit close to Duchamp's. A "blind" play about visual artists shares comic ground with a static portrait of a moving figure—purportedly a nude but iconographically a kind of elongated robot. Both artists are toying with the limits of perception and cognition in the technical language of art. The formal parallels between these two works are striking. Where the Nude treats in spatial terms the problem of suggesting motion in a static medium, Artist treats in temporal terms the problem of interpreting or assigning meaning to sounds in a transitory medium. Duchamp addresses the spatial problem with a narrative innovation —what he called an "elementary parallelism." Beginning with his portrait of 1911, Nude Descending A Staircase #1, he delineated twenty or so successive positions of the figure descending a spiral staircase. When he reworked this painting approximately one year later, producing Nude Decending A Staircase Katherine E. Kelly193 #2, he had filled out the canvas, thinned the paint, substituted linear for cylindrical shapes, and exaggerated the staggered effect of the single figure occupying many successive positions by the varying contrast of light and dark.4 In describing the effect of this parallelism on the viewer's experience of "reading" the work, Duchamp notes: "[The] movement is in the eye of the spectator, who incorporates it into the...