Arcadian Gestures in an Irreversible World: Stoppard, Serres, and Panofsky

I

What is true in physics sometimes holds for intellectual history—at least metaphorically. Tides, for instance, are reversible in both realms. Thus, while it seemed in the 1990s and early naughts that the historicist tide in literary criticism and theory would never ebb, that it has should not completely surprise. To invent the historicist, diachronic model of historiography, Giambattista Vico, in his New Science (1725, 1730, 1744), had to be able to think synchronically to imagine how different ages could generate different ways of seeing and describing the world. In this sense, historicism may be said to embrace the reversibility intrinsic to the act of reinhabiting past contexts. Such an imaginative stance partially explains, for example, why James Joyce avidly read Vico when writing Finnegans Wake, that great epic of fluvial reversibility, whose closing and opening read: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. … A way a lone a last a loved a long the" (Joyce 1976, 3, 628). Conversely, in decrying "the illusion of historicism" and eyeing quasi-objects—or socially "fabricated," but immanently "real" entities that afford meanings chiefly for the synchronic, hybrid relations they can generate—the historian of science and Actor-Network theorist Bruno Latour heralds, in We Have Never Been Modern, a different kind of periodisation, one that refutes the "order" envisioned by "modernizing progress" (Latour 1993, 55, 73). For "this beautiful order is disturbed once the quasi-objects are seen as mixing up different periods, ontologies, or genres. Then a historical period will give the impression of a great hotchpotch. Instead of a fine laminary flow, we will most often get a turbulent flow of whirlpools and rapids. Time becomes reversible instead of irreversible" (Latour 1993, 73).

This paradoxical embrace of reversibility, a stance running counter to postclassical physics, assumes dramatic form when it is explored and critiqued in the theatrical space created by Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. Stoppard's 1993 play wittily stages the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates the inevitable entropy of all physical systems, even as it performs other mathematical, physical, and literary modes that would provisionally forestall entropy. Arcadia, this essay contends, is at once an entropic and negentropic creature. It translates, that is, a set of scientific ideas into literary form with palpably comic and subtly tragic results. It animates irreversibility and reversibility in ways that create remarkable effects and affects. Thus, even as one of the play's chief protagonists laments the entropic destruction caused by human folly and desire, or simply, "that you cannot stir things apart" (Stoppard 1993, 5), she, along with other characters, proceeds in the course of the play to intuit how entropic "noise" (62) might generate patterns of great recursive beauty. To better grasp this dynamic, then, I will first turn to Michel Serres's interpretations of thermodynamics and how translation (traduction) involves ways of thinking, writing, and reading that can, if not reverse, at least briefly disrupt the ineluctable flow of time and causality. Such translation invites a redrawing of the boundaries between science and literature, between past and present, art and nature, and, I would argue, what Erwin Panofsky calls documents and monuments. More particularly, that Panofsky interprets Nicolas Poussin's two seventeenth-century paintings titled Et in Arcadia ego as exemplifying the dynamics of intermedial translation can help us grasp the feedback loop produced by entropic documents and negentropic monuments, and so, too, the flows, reversible and irreversible, performed in Stoppard's Arcadia. Stoppard plots shrinking islands of negentropy in a sea of entropy—a metaphor, we'll see, he uncannily shares with Serres. Indeed, that Stoppard also has the second, more famous of Poussin's Arcadia paintings in mind and that Serres and Rudolf Arnheim invoke Poussin when trying to make sense of entropy are other reasons to see them all as translating the same problem—albeit in different modes.

II

Noting how most contemporary French thinkers insist on epistemological ruptures, Latour finds one notable exception...