Noise

 

Valentine: There’s more noise with grouse.

Hannah: Noise?

Valentine: Distortions. Interference. Real data is messy...It’s all very, very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it’s playing your song, but unfortunately it’s out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk - I mean, the noise! Impossible!

Arcadia, Act 1, Scene 4

 

In this brief conversation about game birds, Valentine Coverly, biologist and son of the Earl of Croom, unknowingly describes the overarching obstacle faced by the characters in Arcadia. In the quest to unlock mysteries of the past, it is nearly impossible to know anything with absolute certainty. Even with presence of evidence, it is the discarded pieces, the intangibles, the details lost to time and caprice - in other words, the noise - that keeps the absolute truth just out of reach.

 

Nowhere is this more evident than in Bernard’s quest to link Byron to the death of Ezra Chater. Armed with certain “facts” - Chater’s notes challenging someone to a duel for insulting his poetry and sleeping with his wife; that Byron was at Sidley Park at the time the challenge for a duel was issued; that Byron knew the tutor at Sidley Park - Bernard constructs his idea of what happened. His downfall is that he remains, sometimes willfully and sometimes involuntarily, ignorant of the noise surrounding the situation. Bernard’s blissful ignorance is fully on display in his lecture notes and discussion with Hannah, Valentine and Chloe:

 

Bernard: ‘It is the third document, the challenge itself, that convinces. Chater “as a man and a poet”, points the finger at his “slanderer in the press”.  Neither as a man nor a poet did Ezra Chater cut such a figures as to be habitually slandered or even mentioned in the press. It is surely indisputable that the slander was the review of “The Maid of Turkey” in the Piccadilly Recreation. Did Septimus Hodge have any connection with the London periodicals? No. Did Byron. Yes! He had reviewed Wordsworth two years earlier, he was to review Spencer two years later. And do we have any clue as to Byron’s opinion of Chater the poet? Yes! Who but Byron could have written the four lines pencilled into Lady Croom’s copy of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’-

Hannah: Almost anybody.

Bernard: Darling_

Hannah: Don’t call me darling.

Bernard: Dickhead, then, is it likely that the man Chater calls his friend Septimus Hodge is the same man who screwed his wife and kicked the shit out of his last book?

Hannah: Put it like that almost certain.

Arcadia, Act 2, Scene 5

 

Of course, what the audience knows, or will soon learn, is that the truth runs counter to all that which Bernard believes. But can we blame him for his folly? How is he to know that through calculated misdirection and flattery. Septimus did get Chater to right the inscription in “The Couch of Eros” after Septimus “screwed his wife and kicked the shit out of his last book”? Or that Septimus Hodge did have a connection to the Piccadilly Recreation through an older brother? Even when Bernard is on the right track, it’s more because of chance than truth. The evidence that places Byron at Sidley Park during the Chater affair, the note in the game book about his bagging a hare, is a mistake according to Augustus, who claims the hare was actually his.

 

In Bernard, Stoppard gives us a warning - the devil is in the details, particularly when it comes to deciphering the past. In his passion for fame and fortune, Bernard loses sight of the fact that it is a fool’s errand to try to reconstruct history to tell the story we want it to tell. He willingly blocks his ears to the noise surrounding the circumstances, only to eventually be undone by it.

 

Valentine is similarly undone by noise, although in a different way than Bernard. Rather than tuning it out like Bernard, Valentine succumbs to it, giving up on his grouse research when he is unable to parse out enough solid information to work with. While the implications of Valentine’s capitulation aren’t fully explored, Hannah gives us the closest thing we get to an indictment: “It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in...If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final” (Act 2, Scene 7). In other words, even if Valentine is never able to turn is real data into a tidy equation, there is value in the act of trying.

 

Hannah, meanwhile, is the counter to both Bernard and Valentine, the one who shows that if you listen closely enough, history will tell you a story all its own. While Hannah’s cool (some might say ice-cold) intellect and lack of passion is viewed as a defect by some characters, as a researcher that detachment is a strength. Hannah is the one who is able to listen through the noise, not ignoring it but not getting distracted by it either, and find some truth - that after Thomasina’s death, Septimus Hodge became the Sidley Park hermit. This is despite the red herrings thrown in her path, such as the drawing of the hermit in Noakes’ garden book, pencilled in by Thomasina before the hermitage even existed. Where Hannah’s philosophy deviates from Bernard’s is that she waits to see the picture created by the evidence, rather than trying to form the evidence into the picture she wants to see. As she says in Act 2, Scene 7, when Bernard wishes her luck in her research into the Sidley Park hermit, “Actually, I’ve got a good idea who he was, but I can’t prove it.” Hannah’s patience is rewarded with the appearance of the sketch, “Septimus holding Plautus,” which confirms her theory. Her ability to tune out the noise and focus on the facts makes her one of the few characters in Arcadia to get what she wants.

 

Other references to the unknowability of the past are sprinkled throughout the play. Thomasina’s dismissal of Fermat’s note in the margins of the Arithmetica about it being “a joke to make you all mad” (Act 1, Scene 1) sums up the mystery of the proof - no one knows for sure if Fermat had found the proof or just had a mischievous sense of humor. And we’ll likely never know, but that didn’t mean people should stop looking. Even the burning of the library at Alexandria, a topic of conversation between Septimus and Thomasina, is a metaphor for the mysteries of the past. With the passage of time and conflicting accounts, the exact circumstances of the library’s destruction remain up for debate.

 

Lost and found

 

Septimus: We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.

Arcadia, Act 1, Scene 3

 

The idea that nothing is lost that can never be found is central to the story of Arcadia. As the action jumps back and forth between time periods, objects, ideas and events are discarded and re-discovered, forgotten and remembered. Sometimes the elements are put back together to create a complete picture, as in Hannah’s discovery that Septimus was the Sidley Park hermit, or that Thomasina stumbled upon iterated algorithms years before other mathematicians. In other cases, such as Bernard’s quest to link Byron to Ezra Chater’s death or the search for the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem, there are too many missing pieces to recreate the full story. However, the presumption can be that eventually, in some way, shape or form, those missing pieces will turn up. (And indeed, they do - mathematician Andrew Wiles wrote the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1994, a year after Arcadia was published).

 

But why does knowledge work this way? The answer, perhaps, lies in Valentine’s explanation of iterated algorithms to Hannah:

 

Valentine: If you knew the algorithm and fed it back say ten thousand times, each time there’d be a dot somewhere on the screen. You’d never know where to expect the next dot. But gradually you’d start to see this shape. because every dot will be inside the shape of this leaf.

Arcadia, Act 1, Scene 4

 

If the universe is the leaf and human knowledge is the dots, then it is as Septimus says - there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. A “dot” - an idea, a tool, a conversation - may be temporarily erased from the graph, or perhaps doesn’t exist yet, but if it is part of this plane, it can, and will, be found.

 

This idea is at the heart of Arcadia. The play itself is a fractal, looping around and feeding into itself; each action, each line of dialogue, each piece of information fills in a spot on the plane to create its own unique, complex whole. Indeed, there are too many individual pieces that move backward and forward in time to list here (see "Backwards and Forwards - Tracking Ideas and Objects in Arcadia for a complete analysis), but one such example describes the concept elegantly - Ezra Chater the poet versus Ezra Chater the botanist:

 

Act 1, Scene 2:   When Bernard first describes his theory about the Byron-Chater duel to Hannah, he tells her that the only other Chater in the British Library database is a botanist who described a dwarf dahlia in Martinique, and died there after being bitten by a monkey (p. 26).

 

Act 2, Scene 6:   Lady Croom tells Septimus that the Chaters, along with Captain Brice, are making for the West Indies, where Chater will act as a botanist while Mrs. Chater and Captain Brice carry on an affair (p. 75).

 

Act 2, Scene 7:   As Hannah reads through Lady Croom’s garden books in the present, she finds a passage that describes the dwarf dahlia discovered by Ezra Chater and sent by Captain Brice after Chaters death. Meanwhile, in 1812, Lady Croom admires the dwarf dahlia on display in the schoolroom, explaining that Mr. Chater was bitten by a monkey and died, and that Mrs. Chater married Captain Brice (p. 87). Hannah informs Bernard of her discovery, that the poet Ezra Chater was the same person as the botanist Ezra Chater who discovered the dwarf dahlia, meaning he was not killed by Byron in a duel at Sidley Park, thus disproving Bernard’s theory (p. 93).

 

Order versus disorder

 

Chloe: That’s what I think. The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it’s trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that part of the plan.

Arcadia, Act 2, Scene 7

 

Like most humans, the characters in Arcadia are trying to understand the world and their place in it. Regardless of their time period, they are struggling to make sense of a world that seems to exist only to thwart logic (a young woman burns to death in her bedroom; a man unapologetically sleeps with another man’s wife; a scholar’s theory is undone by a tropical flower).

 

In Act 1, Scene 1, Thomasina theorizes that, based on Newton’s law of motion, a formula could be written to predict the future. The validity of her theory of a deterministic universe is supported in Act 2, Scene 7, when Valentine mentions that someone in the 1820s - ten years after Thomasina - put forth the same idea. One of the trouble with this idea, as Thomasina and Valentine point out, is that a mechanism large enough to run the formula doesn’t exist.

 

The other trouble, as pointed out by Chloe (and proven by the other characters) is that the deterministic universe does not account for free will. Human behavior does no act according to any formula. For proof, one could look at the revolving door of couplings at Sidley Park, both in the past and present: Septimus and Mrs. Chater, Mrs. Chater and Byron, Byron and Lady Croom, Lady Croom and Septimus, Bernard and Chloe, Gus and Hannah, etc. These are not the pairings that would be determined for these individuals - Lady Croom and Mrs. Chater already have husbands, for starters. Class differences between Septimus, Hannah and Bernard and the aristocratic Coverly family should also preclude romantic entanglements. Yet as Lady Croom so elegantly says in Act 2, Scene 6, “It is a defect of God’s humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”

 

These attractions keep the world diverging from its ordered path. Science would have the future plotted, determined, solved, but human nature, free will, individual desires prevent it from being so. This struggle to find order in a chaotic world creates the underlying tension in Arcadia.

 

Stoppard uses a variety of metaphors to explore this paradox of order and disorder. One such metaphor is the juxtaposition of science and art. Science (in this case math and physics) seeks to define the world in absolute terms using logic and reasoning. Art (in this case poetry) probes the heart, trying to unknot the messy tangle of human emotions and passions in its search for truth.

 

The argument about which discipline is superior in Act 2, Scene 5 between Bernard and Valentine sums up the debate well. To Valentine, the biologist, scientific progress is what is most important. The ability to find answers by putting numbers into a computer plotting diagrams, analyzing hard date - this is the way to find order in the world, according to Valentine. It’s easy to see that he is Thomasina’s descendent. She too seeks to understand and define the world in scientific terms, to find an equation for nature, to discover the patterns in the chaos.

 

On the other hand, Bernard argues that the mysteries of our world cannot be defined through numbers and equations. Poetry, which celebrates the disorder caused by human passion while seeking to understand it, is a far better way to explain the universe to the romantic spirits in Arcadia - Bernard, Chloe, Septimus, Lady Croom, Mrs. Chater, Byron - who believe that following one’s heart or gut (or other anatomy) is of utmost importance, regardless of the disorder it might cause. As Bernard says in Act 2, Scene 5, “If knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing ‘When Father Painted the Parlour’? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you.”

 

The transformation of the Sidley Park landscape is another symbol of the contest between order and disorder. At the start of the play in 1809, Sidley Park is designed as a traditional English garden in the Classical style, reflecting the rational, intellectual values prized during the Age of Enlightenment:

 

Lady Croom: The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage. The rill is a serpentine ribbon unwound from the lake peaceably contained by meadows on which the right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged - in short it is nature as God intended, and I can say with the painter, ‘Et in Arcadia ego!” ‘Here I am in Arcadia,’ Thomasina.

Arcadia, Act 1, Scene 1

 

However, that ordered universe is about to be disrupted locally by landskip architect Richard Noakes with his picturesque designs, and universally by the introduction of Romanticism into the collective consciousness. The transformation at Sidley Park is described thusly:

 

Lady Croom: Here is the Park as it appears to us now, and here as it might be when Mr. Noakes has done with it. Where there is a familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman’s garden here is an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was neither spring nor a stone I could not throw the length of a cricket pitch. My hyacinth dell is become a haunt for hobgoblins, my Chinese bridge, which I am assured is superior to the one at Kew, and for all I know at Peking, is usurped by a fallen obelisk overgrown with briars-

Arcadia, Act 1, Scene 1

 

It is, as Hannah describes in Act 1, Scene 2, a perfect metaphor: “The decline from thinking to feeling.”

 

Which is better? Stoppard leaves that question up to the audience, embedding cautions in his characters. The “romantic” characters - Septimus, Byron, Bernard, Chloe - find themselves in various scrapes due to their temperamental, passionate proclivities (some worse than others) which may have been avoided with a dose of patience and moderation. However, the characters solely guided by reason and scientific inquiry don’t always come out ahead either. Hannah’s and Valentine’s lack of emotions create a stalemate between them, and in their own work. Hannah’s journey to push through her intellect and access some of her emotions, which she finally seems able to do when she accepts Gus’s invitation to dance, is the main character arc of the play.

 

If anything, Stoppard seems to be promoting this kind of balance. The other characters who achieve their goals, Lady Croom and Thomasina, are the ones who possess both an appreciation for logic and order, and a passionate spirit. Lady Croom may fight to keep Sidley Park’s landscape in accordance with Classical ideals, but her shifting affections indicate a romantic at heart. Same with Thomasina. She is a brilliant intellectual with a zealous heart. Though her gifts are never given the chance to fully blossom, we see that as she gets her waltzing lesson from Septimus, they serve her well while she can use them.

 

Time

 

Thomasina: When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making read rails like the picture of a meteor in my

astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink, just as before. Do you think this is odd?

Septimus: No.

Thomasina: Well, I do. You cannot stir things apart.

Arcadia, Act 1, Scene 1

 

Early in Arcadia, Thomasina Coverly, the precocious young aristocratic lady, makes this observation about her daily dessert. The full impact of this musing is not understood until the end of the play when Thomasina draws her diagram of heat exchange, revealing that slowly, imperceptibly, the universe’s heat is dissipating, and time is running out.

 

That Thomasina is the one to make this discovery on the eve of her seventeenth birthday is one of the crueler ironies in Arcadia, for the audience knows that it is her time that is about to run out; though we do not see it, we know from Hannah’s comments earlier in Act 2, Scene 7, that Thomasina will be dead before the night is over, burned to death in a fire possibly caused by the candlestick she carries.

 

The universe may be growing colder, but much is consumed by fire in Arcadia, not just Thomasina and her brilliant mind. Septimus burns letters that he wrote to Lady Croom and Thomasina, as well as a letter from Byron which could have possibly saved Bernard from his misguided theory in the present day. After his own death, Septimus’s proofs, which he labored over in an effort to define Thomasina’s diagram, were taken from the hermitage and burned. The burning of the library at Alexandria, and all the knowledge contained therein, is a topic of discussion among Thomasina and Septimus. And the heat of passion threatens to consume nearly every character at one point or another.

 

Arcadia mocks time too, in the way that it shifts back and forth between 1809 and the present day, blurring the lines by using the same set and props, and eventually disregarding them altogether by having inhabitants of both time periods occupying the same space. One time period is superimposed on another, much like the “before” and “after” drawings of Sidley Park in Mr. Noakes’ sketchbook. What’s remarkable about that moment in Act 2, Scene 7, as two couples separated by roughly two hundred years, is not how different they are, but how similar. Whether it is the Regency era or the modern day, simple truths remain - people fall in love, and want to be loved. People seek answers about the world around them; sometimes their theories are right and sometimes they are wrong. Time is irrelevant; the human experience is much the same.

 

All of this, of course, in service as a metaphor for a universe that is constantly giving up more heat than it can produce, that will eventually collapse in on itself:

 

Valentine: But with heat - friction - a ball breaking a window-

Hannah: Yes.

Valentine: It won’t work backwards.

Hannah: Who thought it did?

Valentine: She saw why. You can put back the bits of glass but you can’t

collect up the heat of the smash. It’s gone.

Septimus: So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold.

Dear me.

Valentine: The heat goes into the mix.

(He gestures to indicate the air in the room, in the universe.)

Thomasina: Yes. we must hurry if we are going to dance.

Valentine: And everything is mixing the same way, all the time, irreversibly...

Septimus: Oh, we have time, I think.

Valentine: ...till there is no time left. That’s what time means.

Arcadia, Act. 2, Scene 7

 

 

With such a grim outlook, how is it possible to conceivably call Arcadia anything but a tragedy? And yet, the play does not seem all that tragic. Indeed, it remains rather hopeful. But why?

 

Perhaps it is as Hannah says, “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter.” That as long as human beings are on a quest for knowledge and understanding, that is enough. Perhaps Septimus holds the key, that even if the world burns and discoveries are lost, they can one day be recovered, rewritten. Or maybe Valentine, in his enthusiasm over science is correct, that hope should remain because the best time to be alive is when everything you thought you knew was wrong. Or could Bernard have the answer, that the premium should be placed on self-knowledge?

 

Or is it Thomasina, the genius of the place, who understands best? After all, it is she who says, “Yes, we must hurry if we are going to dance.” In other words, a warning and encouragement - life is short, time is fleeting, so if we are going to enjoy it, we must forget our worries about the future and the past and dance now, while we can.