Using a fictional story to illustrate a scientific statement is effective and all, but Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia uses scientific concepts for more than purely demonstrative purposes. The scientific content of the play is not merely a literary tactic, but rather portrays the genuine tension between the purposes of science and art. The two realms have traditionally served as consolations to the variability and monotony of the world by way of inducing certainty and fantasy, respectively. But as we oscillate between the past and the present, these seemingly polarized consolations seem to reverse, and ultimately mediate each other. Similar to the way accumulation of entropy increases chaos until it is silently maximized, the play’s gathering of scientific and fictive information seems only to complicate perennial questions, unto a final state of rhythmic dissolution.
Hannah, Bernard, and Valentine are looking back into the past, trying to reimagine or recreate what has happened before—art may be seen as an escape to a different sort of world, as is indicated by their romantically historical dress for the eventual dance. Thomasina and Septimus, however, use present conditions to scientifically aim toward the construction of a determinate future. The activity of scientific projection toward the future is met with the literary task of understanding the past, and the two framed vignettes effectively yearn toward each other for the entirety of the play. This tension between past and present is the same sort as the tension between what is or has been determined, and what is created as time goes on: a story. Valentine expresses the phenomenon to Hannah: “The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is” (51). In Arcadia, scientific striving to predict the future is confronted with the more literary truth of an indiscernible fate.
As the play continues, and various objects accumulate on the centered table, there is a sort of reversal in the respective trustworthiness of science and fiction. Rather than the truth being further clarified by the passage of time and the progress of science, understanding becomes more muddled; “The future is disorder” (52). With the understanding and incorporation of thermodynamic laws, the scientific attempt to reduce uncertainty begins to fall apart. The orderliness of a determined universe—one that can seamlessly be reversed and returned to its original condition—seems to no longer be an option. Science now points to the unknown, while narrative structure can be predicted by precedent, at least to the extent of a predicated beginning, middle, and end. While science now shows that certain things can not necessarily be predicted or reversed, here we are able to excuse ourselves from the binds of scientific reality in order to portray a creative narrative, a sort of dynamic competition, or rather, a play.
While science once seemed to hold steady our understanding of nature, it later shows definitively that indeterminacy is a fact of life. Literature and fiction must take on its role of softening the uncertainty of reality. In the end, once all information is accumulated, the stories finally merge; the play’s final scene shows past and present events occurring simultaneously in the same space. We see the ultimate demonstration of the confusion that constitutes the play— seemingly contradictory anachronisms abound, while an ordered pair dances as one, in perfect rhythmic time.
