Tom Stoppard

The Absurd

Refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek the inherent meaning in life and the human inability to find any. It doesn't mean impossible in a logical sense, but instead humanly impossible. As in humans are not capable of what they want to find. The universe and the mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but the Absurd rises by the contridictory nature of the two existing at the same time.

Arcadia

- Begins in 1809 and jumps throughout time to the present day - 1993

- Shows a visual shift from the Age of Enlightenment to the Romantic Period throughout the changing of the scenery, the actions of the characters, and the shifting of the time throughout the play itself

Romantic Period
- Picturesque
- Gothic - gloomy, haunting, irregular, overgrown, ruins, trying to appear old, chaos
- Replacing the neat, organized, orderly gardens

     - pretty, bright, open, controlled, science

     - represents reason/rationality
     - this is 'nature as god intended'
- Romantic is ruled by emotion and intuition

Characters
- Which character represents which philosophies?

• Bernard - Romantic, melodramatic
• Valentine - Enlightenment, mathematician, studying grouse
• Hannah - Enlightenment, fact oriented
• Thomasina - switches - Enlightenment/Romantic
• Septimus - Enlightenment, education, intellect

- Do the characters change throughout the play?
- Significance of Mrs. Chater's constant cheating?
- Bernard/ Lord Byron parallel

Time
- Tortoises, two of them
     - Pattern, or are they merely interchangable?
- The table is the same in past and present times
     - Defies the laws of time
     - Show chaos theory
- Is everything random or is all related?
- Is it supposed to be rational or chaotic?

Newton's Laws of Motion
- Continuity (stasis)
- Deterministic
     - Everything is predetermined
- Grouse are unpredictable and chaotic

2nd Law of Thermodynamics
- Different temperatures will come to an equilibrium
- Heat will disipate and the temperature will reach stasis
- Entropy (disorder) always increases
- No perpetual machine of energy, increases random
- Death and decay
     - Finite universe

Septimus's explanation of why one shouldn't worry about library of Alexandria
     - "You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. 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. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be writeen again in another lasnguage. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria we would be at a loss for the corkscrew?" (2779).
- Someone will rewrite it - will be renewed
     - e.g. Newton's Laws

Chaos Theory
- At individual level things look chaotic and random
- On mega and micro level things can be explained
     - It's the inbetween that is hard to explain