Unlike Barthes, Tom Stoppard has never claimed not to be intellectual. In fact, he's even more intellectual, not to mention witty, than Shaw, a playwright to whom, notwithstanding political differences, he's often compared. Nor has Stoppard ever prioritized originality. In fact, he'd even have us recognize his dependence on—not to mention mastery of—an impressive number of impressive precursors, including Shaw."I have this feeling that I could have written most other people's plays and most other people could have written mine," he once claimed, "because I know how it's done and they know how it's done" (quoted in Gussow, 21). Like Barthes, however, Stoppard has described his protocols of writing. In a 1988 interview, we first learn he has an almost Barthesian relation to writing instruments: "I write with a fountain pen; you can't scribble with a typewriter" (quoted in Guppy, 185).We then learn both where he does his work and when: I have a very nice long room, which used to be the stable. It has a desk and lots of paper, etc. But most of my plays are written on the kitchen table at night, when everybody has gone to bed and I feel completely at peace. During the day, somehow I don't get much done; although I have a secretary who answers the phone, I always want to know who it is, and I generally get distracted. (191-92) (You'll recall that Bishop did some of her best work "standing up in the kitchen in the middle of the night" [quoted in Millier, 544] and that most writers abandon studies too organized, too dis-organized, or simply too familiar to work in.) The secretary also takes dictation, transcribing plays. In an interview conducted the following year, we learn about another distraction—one Stoppard finds nonetheless helpful: Suddenly he strides over to the stereo in the corner [of the living room]; a moment later, John Lennon is singing "Mother," the song in which he indulges in a lot of primal screaming at the end. "I just wanted to tell you this," Stoppard says, rather sweetly. "I tend to write each play to one record." And then, noticing my face, "Oh! I knew you'd be interested." "Yes, we journalists like that sort of thing," I say. "How does it work?" "Yes, well, I just kept playing this while I was writing Jumpers. It has nothing to do with the play, of course, but I always find it an extraordinarily moving track. For Hapgood, I listened to two or three tracks of Graceland—you know, Paul Simon—interminably, for three or four months. And with Rosencrantz [and Guildenstern Are Dead] there were two Bob Dylan tracks, 'Like a Rolling Stone' and 'Subterranean Homesick Blues,' which is a lyric I've admired ever since. I adore it. It's one of those moments that gets to me better than even reading." "You play this stuff while you work?" I ask. "Well, in a way it stops me working. I stop and I go through the dialogue with this music on, and then I realize that it's just self-indulgence and turn it off. Work is really what one should do, isn't it?" And he clicks off the stereo and stands silently by the fireplace for a moment, as if pondering that daunting truth. (Schiff, 213-14, emphasis original) As with Barthes, the descriptions make sense. It makes sense that a playwright would be more comfortable working in a relatively public space than in a relatively private one. (Stoppard also admits to addressing an ideal spectator, "someone more sharpwitted and attentive than the average theatergoer" [quoted in Guppy, 186]. I have a similar audience in mind.) It makes sense that he needs to read dialogue aloud. It makes sense that he finds emotional music inspirational, although I can't reconcile the image of Stoppard in that otherwise peaceful kitchen after everyone has gone to bed with an image of him blaring Lennon there. Unless of course it's an enormous home, or he wears headphones. You may be wondering what that kitchen table looks like. Given Stoppard's classicism, I imagine it as orderly. I also imagine it as having a secret compartment. Stoppard, an autodidact who feels his self-instruction has always lagged behind his writing, once confessed that all his time "is spent concealing what I don't know" (quoted in Schiff, 214). (I do recognize the Socratic irony of this witticism. I also recognize that all such confessions should be viewed critically. For Paul de Man, they're basically exculpatory. For Foucault, they're illusory. For Barthes, the sincerity they supposedly require is "merely a second-degree image-repertoire" ["Deliberation," 360]. For Salinger's Buddy, no confession has ever been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride, and so the thing to listen for with a public confessor is what he's not confessing to.) But I must confess I don't know—and, more to the point, have failed to discover—what that table looks like. Nor do I care, because what concerns me now is how Stoppard dramatizes this kind of furniture. The tables in his stage plays tend to assemble objects that indicate the knowledge certain characters strive to obtain—knowledge often pertaining to literary figures and to poets in particular. As such, they both resemble and correspond to the stage itself. The tables also correspond to dramatic irony, with characters either oblivious of the objects or simply mistaken as to their significance. Think of Edgar Allan Poe's "purloined letter," then Marie Bonaparte's, and then Lacan's. Before turning to the plays, however, it's important to know a couple of things. Stoppard believes in dramatic irony, but not for everyone. He does tend to write plays "about people who don't know very much about what's going on" and to like it "when the audience is ahead of the character" (quoted in Gussow, 4, 121). But he loves it when only a portion of the audience is—as do I. The sharper portion, that is: those of you who catch the literary allusions and aren't necessarily positioned in the most expensive, least elevated seats. Stoppard also believes in absolute truth, but not for anyone. He doesn't share Nietzsche's conception of truth as both subjective and relative. (Not that relativists can't imagine tabletops his way: Foucault, for example, describes the epistemological field as "a homogeneous and neutral space in which things could be placed so as to display at the same time the continuous order of their identities or differences as well as the semantic field of their denomination" [xviii].) Nor does Stoppard share Barthes's—and Wilde's—conception of truth as both unconventional and incommunicable. Nor, notwithstanding his dialectical turn of mind, does he locate truth in between opposing positions. Simply put, Stoppard is more Socratic than Aristotelian, which is why he associates the awareness of absolute truth, or omniscience, with what he calls "a ceiling view of a situation" (quoted in Gussow, 3). This, of course, resembles the "superior vantage point" from which Bishop conducts aerial reconnaissance in "12 O'Clock News," but without the verbal irony or misrecognition. ("Quite ordered, seen from above," observes the suicide in Albert's Bridge—a radio play I won't discuss [Stoppard, Plays, 2:78].) He associates such a vantage point, moreover, with what Barthes calls "God's position" (Michelet, 22). Stoppard, of course, is fully cognizant of the difference—as well as the tension—between godlike omniscience and dramatic irony. Audience members may know more than characters do, but they don't know everything there is to know. (Not even Stoppard knows everything: It took him forever to learn the identities of the dead bodies in The Real Inspector Hound and Jumpers.) They may overlook the stage from those relatively inexpensive seats—just as working writers overlook their desktops at more or less the same angle, although I'm not sure Stoppard is aware of the correspondence—but they don't really enjoy what Barthes calls a perpendicular "overview." (Overlook, that is, in the sense of gaze down upon, not fail to see.) Like Michelet, we merely approximate God's position. |