"What Is Carnal Embrace?": Learning to Converse in Stoppard's Arcadia

"What Is Carnal Embrace?" Learning to Converse in Stoppard's Arcadial LISA STERNLIEB AND NANCY SELLECK Is Tom Stoppard too clever, too erudite, and too much of a show-off? Students who have puzzled their way through his discussions of chaos theory, fractal geometry, and the second law of thermodynamics in his play Arcadia may stumble again during the following exchange: Tf rOMASINA Solio il1sessa ... ill igne ... sealed on a throne ... in the fire ... and also on a ship ... sedehat regina ... sat the ljueen .... I... 1 SEPTIMUS I ••• 1Let me see if I can attempt a free translation for you. 1••• 1'The barge she sal in, like a burnished throne ... burned on the water ... the- somethingthe poop was beaten gold' I... ] THOMASINA 1... 1Cheat! SEPTIMUS 1••• 1 • - the winds were lovesick with them ... ' TIlOMASINA Cheal' (35, 39) Stoppard assumes a good deal from his audience here - that we will recognize the English poetry as Shakespeare's, that we will get the joke of Septimus' plagiarizing Shakespeare as Shakespeare plagiarized Plutarch. We may be templed to dismiss Stoppard as too obscure and his playas too much of an inside joke. But several scenes later, Stoppard serves up a parallel exchange, in which he makes no assumptions about his audience's cultural literacy. While Thomasina knows not to credit Septimus with Antony and Cleoparra, here Valentine is more than willing to grant Hannah the authorship of Byron's "Darkness": HANNAH " had a dream which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless. and pathless. and the icy earth Learning 10 Converse in Stopp.ud-s .-\1 u ldill Swung blind and blackening in (he moonless air. VALENTINE Your own'! IMNNAH Byron. (79) Here Stoppard does all our work for us. But rather than applauding his sudden generosity and sensitivity, we, like Thomasina in the earlier scene, may feel cheated by the later one. This terse, three-word discussion is a faint, barely recognizable echo of the heated dialogue that sustained itself over three pages of scene three. Conversation in Arcadia operates always on the model of Noakes's steam engine: "You get nothing if you give nothing" (75). The fiery exchanges between Thomasina and Septimus are fueled by their common language and culture. Hannah and Valentine labor to achieve the same momentum , but, without this shared frame of reference, they must work harder lesl their conversation cool down. One of Arcadia's most trenchant ironies is that, in the nineteenth century, a thirteen-year-old and her lutor were better equipped to converse than two adult academics in the twentieth. What is at stake for Stoppard, then, in the Latin translation scene transcends verbal and intellectual gymnastics. If we as readers or audience membersare left out in the cold, ifwe are not part ofthe conversation, then we are still fully appreciating his play's preoccupation with universal heat loss. In an ancient Egypt remembered by Shakespeare, Cleopatra's barge "burned on the water." In adistant future imagined by Byron, "the icy earth Iwill swing I blind and blackening in the moonless air." In Arcadia, the past is on fire; the future isfrozen. Thomasina 's discovery of the second law of thennodynamics isreflected by thechoice ofliterary allusions and the very quality ofthe play's conversation. Yet Arcadia simultaneously i1Iustrates and works to counteract this inevitable cooling process. The play movingly speaks to the necessity of holding onto a shared cultural and verbal heritage. It would appear that Valentine's love for Hannah will remain unrequited as long as he cannot speak her language . In Septimus' formulation "Iw le shed as we pick up 1...1and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.I ... 1ITlhere is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it"(38). But in Stoppard's larger vision, we cannot afford simply to shed and to pick up; we must carry something with us on the rr arch that enables us to converse with the dead, the living, and the unborn: we must hold onto the canon. Like the scientists tracing the period~ doublings and bifurcations of chaos, Stoppard experiences...