2023-03-18-arcadia.md

layout	title	date	description	tags	categories	citation	featured	bibliography
distill	How the structure of Arcadia Resembles a Fractal	2023-03-18 09:00:00 -0700		clit&sci	literature	true	true	2023-02-19-maxwell-demon.bib

Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia has a remarkable feature of its temporal structure intertwining the past and the present in the same space. It challenges the conventional time sequence of narration and also employs its unique stage settings, as described elaborately at the start of Scene Two (Stoppard 19), that “both periods must share the state of the room, without the additions and subtractions.” These characteristics contribute to the play’s overall structure as a composition of both resemblances and variances which can be related to the mathematical concept of fractals. In this paper, we will explore how the fractal structure is manifested and what’s the intention behind this design.

The discussion on how the relationship between science and nature first shows up in Scene 1, when Thomasina questioned if God is a Newtonian and how the formula must exist for all the future of every atom. Her tutor, Septimus, raised the defects of the argument by mentioning free will, God’s will, and sin but was eventually persuaded by Thomasina (Stoppard 10). This discussion was interrupted by Charter and later brought up in Scene 3 that “nature is written in numbers” (Stoppard 41). Thomasina’s dubiety on

why all the equations can only describe the shapes of manufacture leads her to a beginning theory about chaotic shapes in nature. Her attempt to plot the leaf and deduce its equation was later identified by Hannah and Valentine as an iterated algorithm to plot in a way that “each graph is a small section of the previous one, blown up” (Stoppard 48). This is a fractal that exhibits self-similarity on increasingly smaller scales. (Gouyet) This way of modeling the irregularities of nature is interpreted by Valentine as plotting a picture of turbulence: “growth—change—creation” (Stoppard 51). We need fractals because “the future is disorder” (Stoppard 52). This direct reference to fractals introduces a scientific context to the play which connects the early nineteenth century and the present day when both discuss the applications of fractals, one is for plotting a leaf and the other is to calculate the grouse numbers. It also reveals the point of view of Stoppard on fractals and hence is helpful for us to relate the play’s fractal structure to grander themes.

Now with the concepts of fractals elucidated, we can look into the places where the structure of fractals manifests throughout the play. Apart from the fractals theory itself recurring throughout the play, the storylines of two different time periods also reflect the idea that patterns can repeat at different scales, creating complex and unpredictable systems like a fractal. For example, in Scene 2, Bernard asserted that the poet Charter was killed in a duel with Lord Byron, which is refuted by our knowledge that Charter didn’t manage to have a duel with Septimus and further detailed in the following scene when we go back in time that Charter succeeded in challenging Septimus to a duel. This magnification of details on the same subject is the exact feature of a fractal. The same is

in Scene 5, in which Bernard was connecting Byron with the critic of Charter’s work and the note that suggested an affair with Mrs. Charter found in Byron’s possession of Charter’s book (Stoppard 59) with his made-up “lost but ineradicable letter” written by Byron to Septimus (Stoppard 61), the complexity of the notes and letters that the present day characters used as evidence was later revealed in Scene 6, and so is the myth of Charter’s death. There was indeed a burned, lost letter written by Byron to Septimus that was “never to be read by a living soul” (Stoppard 75) and Byron was also found out to have an affair with Mrs. Charter (Stoppard 72). But, Charter’s death is unrelated to Lord Byron as his identity as the botanist who died from a monkey bite was revealed. The recurring elements in both the present’s deduction and the past’s truth form a sense of certainty out of disorder coupled with the unpredictability of what already happened and is counted as history. The complex patterns that construct the chaos and confusion of information resemble the complexity in a fractal.

What really pushes the play to a climax is in Scene 7, where both time periods coexist on the stage, showing the interwoven structure visually to the audience. The switch back and forth in time becomes faster and faster and reaches its maxima when Lady Croom and Chloe, two characters in two different timelines, were entering and exiting the room at the same time looking for a missing person, leading to the “unendurable noise” and chaos (Stoppard 86-87). The end of the play shows three couples on the stage at the same time — Thomasina and Septimus, Chloe and Bernard, and Hannah and Gus — again contributing to the self-similarity feature of different scales. This final scene’s coexistence of different time periods visually displays Stoppard’s theory of underlying

orders in unpredictable randomness by creating a sense of chaos while maintaining patterns in characters and settings. The fractal’s expanding symmetry at various scales (Gouyet) is hence manifested in such a way.

The intention behind this structure may be referred back to the concepts of fractals. Since fractals are mathematical models to simulate “how nature creates itself” (Stoppard 51), attempting to mathematically regulate and explain future randomness. This overall structure of a fractal relates to the sense of incompleteness of truth and history as more details with similar patterns would emerge and challenge the view of the previous more distant scale. Fractals also give rise to a sense of repetition and interconnectedness that unite the two time periods in all ways. With the constant noise and confusion in plots and characters, we see characters probing for different answers with the inevitable loss and errors of information, but as Hannah said “it’s wanting to know that makes us matter” (Stoppard 80), the effort to understand what’s assured to be unpredictable is what fractals are created for— the determinism in disorder. Hence, Arcadia offers an optimistic view on our doomed fate (Stoppard 69) to be cold to death (Stoppard 82) that studying our history still helps us to figure out complex patterns out of increasing chaos and this inquiry of knowing that embraces uncertainties is what sustains us to create a given scaled window of order and meanings.