Epistemology and Ethics in Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul

Epistemology and Ethics in Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul Richard J. Buhr In his television play Professional Foul Tom Stoppard achieves one of his most satisfying marriages of comedy and ideas. Although much ado has been made about the new, politi­ cized Tom Stoppard of Professional Foul, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, and Cahoot’s Macbeth, Stoppard’s unions of farce and philosophy have usually been played against back­ grounds of political intrigue and theory in such plays as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, and Travesties. The structure of Professional Foul is similar to the structure of these earlier plays in that the issues of Prague politics provide a background for the philosophy colloquium which occupies the foreground; moreover, the play’s theme continues to reflect Stoppard’s earlier priorities and illustrates his previous assertion that “all political acts must be judged in moral terms.”l Much more than a forum for Czechoslovakian dissident politics, Pro­ fessional Foul is a culmination and clarification of the episte­ mological and ethical issues that have always dominated Stop­ pard’s important work. By using the moral crisis of a philosophy professor to explore the nature of categorical and hypothetical imperatives, Stoppard presents the problems encountered when man attempts to develop absolute moral principles in his desire to order knowledge and experience. Professor Anderson—like such earlier Stoppard characters as Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Lenin—allows his obsession with order to lead him to a disregard of human suffering and freedom. Through his exper­ ience with Prague politics, however, Anderson learns that the secure order provided by absolute moral principles must be sacrificed when the principles conflict with human rights and emotions. 320 Richard J. Buhr 321 Prague under the Gustav Husak regime provides a typical setting for a Stoppard play. Husak’s Prague is, according to Stoppard, a world full of paranoia and “totalitarian double­ think.’^ It shares the same chaotic complexities as Hamlet’s Denmark, Jumpers’s radical-liberal Britain, and Travesties’s, World War I Europe. Confronted with this chaotic and absurd world, the typical Stoppard character rather futilely seeks to make sense out of it or to escape it. Summoned to a world of political intrigue and epistemological uncertainties, Rosencrantz and Guildenstem desperately desire order and knowledge, yet they increasingly fear that they may simply be abandoned and “set loose to find [their] own way”; within a “rad-lib” world of relative truths, George Moore of Jumpers is obsessed and over­ whelmed by the central question of modem philosophy, “How does one know what it is one believes when it’s so difficult to know what it is one knows”; and in the midst of the “carnage” and “graveyard stench” of the First World War, Stoppard’s characters in Travesties have escaped to the “ostentatious punctuality of [Switzerland’s] public clocks.”3 The world of Stoppard’s plays is the familiar world of post-modem literature, a world in which instability and uncertainty have been height­ ened by a tradition of philosophic skepticism that has continued to diminish man’s epistemological base. Unlike most of Stoppard’s other characters, Anderson of Professional Foul seems to have ordered this world to his own satisfaction. At the beginning of the play he lacks the anxiety and schizophrenia of most of Stoppard’s characters. Anderson has fabricated a moral order out of the contemporary chaos with a system of principles based on ethical fictions, and he masters human relationships and embarrassments with “wit and paradox. Verbal felicity” (50). There appears to be truth in Bill McKendrick’s evaluation that Anderson is an illustration of a “higher civilization alive and well in the older universities” (50). Through his reliance on an ethical code, Anderson seems to have constructed an old-world order out of the modem uncertainty. Anderson’s peace, nevertheless, is soon to be upset, and the core of the instability is even disclosed on the plane to Prague in the first scene. Anderson reveals the familiar neurosis of the Stoppard character as he glances uneasily out of the plane’s window. Anderson’s wit and charm are not quite defense 322 Comparative Drama enough against the tenuous realities of modern aerodynamics. Like...