13 Informing (About) the Actual World

13 Informing (about) the Actual World “Mathematics does not take pictures of the world, it’s only a way of making sense. Twins, waves, black holes – we make bets on what makes best sense” (Hapgood 571), says Kerner of Stoppard’s 1988 spy thriller Hapgood , when explaining how the quantum mechanics theory helped him understand the plot of their espionage game. Hapgood, Stoppard’s first “science play” (the other being Arcadia) was his attempt to put scientific issues on the stage. There are various ways in which science may enter the stage.44 In Hapgood, there are at least three different applications of science, in particular the use of scientists as characters, the inclusion of scientific explications into the dramatic text, and a structural make-up which follows the quantum mechanics theory in a metaphoric way. To describe the last influence briefly, the play’s characters act as electrons, according to the theory’s explanations of the behaviour of light, they follow, in particular, the “comple- mentarity principle” known from quantum physics. It is the first two applications that concern the topic of this book the most, however, as they combine some of the features of employing the new messenger. An inclusion of scientists, as in Hapgood, is on the one hand, an opportunity for the playwright to set his play in an appealing environment and give his characters motivation connected to it, such as a struggle for a discovery or specific ways of solving even more specific problems, such as the popularity of television series from scientific environment shows; on the other hand, it works as a signal that science becomes a constitutive element of the plot construction, as in the case of A.C. Doyle’s deductive genius Sherlock Holmes, whose specific methods, for example, serve as the structuring propeller of his stories. Scientists and similar characters (such as philosophers in The Coast of Utopia, as it will be shown below) qualify for new messengers in several ways. Their occupation grants them a certain social status, which goes together with their legitimate access to knowledge from their field and also gives them the ability to report about results of their work to others. 44) I dealt with the issue of science in the works of Stoppard, Frayn and David Auburn in my Master’s dis- sertation Science on Stage: Scientific Issues in Contemporary Anglo-American Playwriting, Master’s diss., Brno: Masaryk U, 2004. Print. 111 new_messenger_2013_text.indd 111 14.11.2013 12:39:36 13 Informing (about) the Actual World Stepping out of their primary role as dramatic characters with a name is guaranteed. In other words, they are accepted by the audience as the messengers of news from the field of science. The other aspect goes hand in hand with the first, and it involves motivation for the switch of the mode of communication. Scientists are expected to and excused to from breaking free from the ties of the dramatic dialogue when they switch to reporting. Although the genre of their reports may be labelled as explications, lectures, or even classroom lessons, information is delivered and the referential function is the dominant mode of their communication in the moments when they report. This point calls for a generalization, as it presents the last, but by no means least, category of the new messenger’s function covered in this book, in addition to pushing the action forward and acting as political agents. There are such uses of the new messenger, and scientists are among the most prominent types of characters in this respect, in the works of Frayn and Stoppard in particular, that report from outside the frame of action of the stage about facts or events that represent knowledge from the actual world. Moreover, this knowledge, in order to meet the requirement of the genre of a report, is presumably unknown to the audience. In other words, new messengers become teaching agents. In these cases they inform others about facts or events from the actual world. This concept is problematic as it poses the question of the relationship between the world of fiction and the actual world. What is the connection? How do these two influence one another? What becomes of an actual world phenomenon when it is included in the fictional world? In the theoretical chapter on the history of the structural poetic tradition I grounded my overview on Lubomír Doležel’s work Occidental Poetics. His views seem also helpful when addressing crucial issues such as these. It is reasonable for a better understanding of a piece of literary art to consider all its components parts of the fictional world; for example, “historical” figures do not take part in historical nov- els, it is their fictional counterparts who carry their names and borrow some of their properties. This position is well developed in Doležel’s Heterocosmica. Let us then assume that the same holds for a scientific theory. It bears the same name and it shares some of its properties (such as definitions, explanatory power, and so on). However, as part of a fictional world, it operates primarily within this world, that is to say, it is a fictional counterpart. How does a “fictional” theory apply to the actual world? Such a question is out of the scope and aims of this work, so allow me to make a working assumption about this issue. The attempted answer lies in the fact that this is where the pragmatic aspect comes onto the scene. Theatre (and let me repeat that I understand each dramatic text as incomplete, as it is necessarily a step towards completion in a performance) is a live medium based on communicating content between the stage and the audience. In this communication, which is essential for theatre, messages including explications of scientific theories are delivered to the audience who understand the concept that it is a part of a fictional world, however, who then relate them to their actual lives and the world they live in. Without the possibility of teaching the audience about the world they live in, visiting theatres would make no sense. 112 new_messenger_2013_text.indd 112 14.11.2013 12:39:36 13 Informing (about) the Actual World Hapgood by Tom Stoppard Tom Stoppard’s play about espionage primarily focuses on the character of Hapgood, who is referred to by other British spies such as the “mother”, and her career in the secret service and as a mother of a little boy Joe. The plot revolves around the development of a secret weapon at the time of the Cold War ending. One of the spies is Kerner, a Russian double agent. Kerner is a scientist working at CERN, developing a missile based on anti-matter. He is a scientist in the field of quantum mechanics. He is able to solve the paradox of twin spies when he applies his knowledge about physics to the impossible behaviour of the other spies, who function more as an application of some of the quantum mechanical theories rather than human beings. Having one character in two spots at the same time seems as a logical slip, until Kerner makes it clear that the one character is in fact two. To explain this paradox, as it seems, Kerner lectures about several principles of quantum mechanics, thus clarifying the confusion. The play was not a success, in fact it was one of Stoppard’s least successful plays. “The London production of Hapgood was Stoppard’s first relative failure […], its international success was much more limited than his previous major plays” (Fleming 176). Yet Stop- pard attributed this to the spy plot rather than to the fact that the play is a metaphoric application of quantum mechanical principles. Scientist Kerner becomes a new messenger with a teaching role in two aspects in this play. Firstly, he presents certain principles of quantum mechanics, which serve as explanations of some of the plot complications, as well as the play’s dual structure, reflect- ing the dual quality of light: “The play’s structure also engages the theme of duality, as nearly every one of the twelve scenes has a double” (Fleming181). Most characters have their twins (doubles), too. Kerner explains behaviour of light particles based on their duality nature in the form of a lecture in physics to Hapgood: Kerner: […] An electron can be here or there at the same moment. You can choose. It can go from here to there without going in between; it can pass through two doors at the same time, or from one door to another by a path which is there for all to see, until someone looks, and then the act of looking has made it take a different path. […] It de- feats surveillance because when you know what it is doing you can’t be certain where it is, and when you know where it is you can’t be certain what it’s doing: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle […] (Hapgood 544) This speech is, in its form, a lecture in physics. On the referential level, it speaks about the behaviour of sub-atomic particles, thus mediating the theoretical knowledge of the principles of quantum mechanics to Hapgood and the audience. In this sense, Kerner appears as a teaching agent, whose role is to transfer knowledge and he is doing so in a form of a report. On the other hand, this report is not without impact on the development of the play’s plot. It serves to explain the counter-intuitive behaviour of the Russian spies, the Ridley twins: “Clearly, part of the appeal of incorporating scientific theory into theatre is the 113 new_messenger_2013_text.indd 113 14.11.2013 12:39:36 13 Informing (about) the Actual World sheer technical challenge.

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