Literature, Life, and Modernity

What philosophy knows as the mind-body problem is also and perhaps more deeply a problem in our practical, cultural lives and in the self-images that are woven through them. It is hard to avoid thinking of ourselves as “free subjectivities,” capable of choice and responsiveness to reasons, who stand “over against” a physical nature in which objects are composed and events occur according to laws that make no reference to choices or reasons. But this makes it difficult to see how choice and responsiveness to reasons can be expressed within a “mere” nature that somehow “houses” our lives and practices. How, if at all, is free life according to reason and within the framework of the natural world possible? We shall scarcely be able to make progress on this question until we confront the cultural practices that embody and shape our images of nature and of ourselves.

John Dewey makes the practical, cultural dimensions of the mind-body problem wonderfully clear in a long passage from Art as Experience:

We inherit much from the cultures of the past. The influence of Greek science and philosophy, of Roman law, of religion having a Jewish source, upon our present institutions, beliefs and ways of thinking and feeling is too familiar to need more than mention. Into the operation of these factors two forces have been injected that are distinctly late in origin and that constitute the “modern” in the present epoch. These two forces are natural science and its application in industry and commerce through machinery and the use of non-human modes of energy….

Science has brought with it a radically novel conception of physical nature and of our relation to it. This new conception stands as yet side by side with the conception of the world and man that is a heritage from the past, especially from that Christian tradition through which the typically European social imagination has been formed. The things of the physical world and the moral realm have fallen apart, while the Greek tradition and that of the medieval age held them in intimate union—although a union accomplished by different means in the two periods. The opposition that now exists between the spiritual and ideal elements of our historic heritage and the structure of physical nature that is disclosed by science, is the ultimate source of the dualisms formulated by philosophy since Descartes and Locke. These formulations in turn reflect a conflict that is everywhere active in modern civilization. From one point of view the problem of recovering an organic place for art in civilization is like the problem of reorganizing our heritage from the past and the insights of our present knowledge into a coherent and integrated imaginative union.

The problem is so acute and widely influential that any solution that can be proposed is an anticipation that can at best be realized only by the course of events…. It is true that physical science strips its objects of the qualities that give the objects and scenes of ordinary experience all their poignancy and preciousness, leaving the world, as far as the scientific rendering of it is concerned, without the traits that have always constituted its immediate value. But the world of ordinary experience in which art operates, remains just what it was.¹

According to this passage, there is, on the one hand, stuff or material itself indifferent to us and our aspirations, disenchanted (in Weber’s famous phrase), and with its motions having no natural ends or purposes. This is the “radically novel conception of physical nature” that Dewey has in mind. At the very least, and metaphysics and epistemology to one side, it has served us well in many respects to think of nature in this way. Once we so conceive of nature, and then further carry out the appropriate investigations of the lawlike but nonpurposive behaviors of mere material things, then we can, sometimes, manipulate those things in order to satisfy desires, needs, and interests that we experience ourselves as just having. The modern scientific understanding of material nature lays the cognitive groundwork for practices and systems of, for example, medicine, transportation, communication, and industrial production that it would be difficult and undesirable to abandon.

And there is, on the other hand, us, we with our purposes—purposes that seem, in light of the disenchantment of things, ineluctably subjective, inner matters of groundless preference alone. If we should happen to be able to make use of material things to satisfy our preferences, great—and likewise great if two or more people should happen to have overlapping preferences. Finally, just as a matter of political compromise to avoid violence that threatens to inhibit all preference satisfaction, it is very often best not to enforce preferences: let individuals with their preferences be who they are and let them trade with one another in free markets as they wish. For most of us, at least in the developed worlds, life without modern technologies and modern market systems of production and exchange would be both unthinkable and undesirable.

Yet, as Dewey suggests, this picture, however ineluctably built into our culture, of an inner, subjective mental life, with only subjective purposes, facing off against an outer, material, objective but meaningless nature is also not an entirely happy one. For one thing, this picture affords no basis for objective assessment of pursuits of subjective interest, that is, no basis for appeals to justice or fairness that might constrain rapacious or exploitative behavior. It may be that a free market works efficiently to maximize preference satisfaction among traders with relatively equal holdings and stocks of information but different preferences, and there is therefore good reason at least sometimes to think of free markets as fair. But if imbalances in holdings, power, or information grow too great, or military might intervenes, or free riding is possible, then this institutional arrangement is likely to prove unstable. Then the guns or lawsuits start. And what then? If there are only individuals who are competing with one another for the material resources to satisfy subjective desires, then it is likely in the end to be guns rather than lawsuits. Lawsuits and court verdicts may be construed as themselves covert forms of violence. Family life and citizenship are all too likely to decay into what Hegel calls “particularity by itself, given free rein in every direction to satisfy its needs, accidental caprices, and subjective desires, [so that it] destroys itself and its substantive concept in this process of gratification.”² Anarchy, both social and personal, is loosed upon the world. Plato predicts explicitly that this will happen in a pluralist, subjective democracy that lacks any metaphysically founded conception of justice.³ There seems no longer to be any metaphysical standard for checking on what we do, and without one we seem likely to do just about anything, including a lot of fighting. Underlying this fighting, there is at least the risk that no one will really believe in the worth of a way of life. My preferences may seem to me to be just given and not to be of any worth to me or to anyone else. Why should I care about anything, I may worry? Subjective anomie, or what is generally now called depression, threatens us, and it is more or less endemic in modern industrial societies. And yet it would, again, be both difficult and undesirable to give up the benefits of modern science and its culture in order to revert to a more closed, traditionalist, metaphysically or religiously circumscribed way of life.

How, then, might we best think of ourselves and our place in nature so that we might both accept the benefits of modern science and democratic culture and yet avoid or at least curb their harms? This question has been raised for us by thinkers as various as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Dewey, and John Paul II, albeit that they each have quite different answers in view.

One particularly interesting suggestion for thinking about this problem comes from the eminent literary critic Northrop Frye.⁴ The suggestion arises out of a very broad sketch Frye offers of the history of Western thought and language. According to Frye, there are three successive historical stages of basic styles of thought and language. The first stage is the metaphorical-mythological stage, as people tell stories simultaneously about what we now call physical events and about the meanings of things. Science and religion, natural cosmology and creation theory, historical reporting and primeval storytelling are all not yet sharply distinguished from one another. One sees the dawn or the spring as the coming of a beneficent divine presence, or one sees a storm as the divine wrath of the sea itself, understood as both a physical something and a personality. Frye identifies this stage of thought and culture with pastoral and nomadic life generally and with roughly Homeric Greece and the early Hebrew tradition in particular.

The metaphorical-mythological stage is then superseded by a metonymic-intellectual stage. Allegory becomes a dominant form, as signs are taken to indicate a deeper order of reality in relation to which our ordinary experience is only a surface. Access to this reality is claimed by educated elites, who consequently lay further claim to the administration of daily life and general culture. Justifications for how things are to be done are propounded by these elites, on the basis of their expert knowledge of the deeper and fuller reality. According to Frye, one can see something of this stage of thought and language as early as the pre-Platonic Protagorean tradition in Greece. It figures in Plato’s dialogues, and then in Christianity, which Nietzsche famously described as Platonism for the masses. In Christianity from at least the Augustinian period onward, the liturgies and sacraments are administered by expert priests, and the regulation of daily life is referred to the reality described in the Bible, read aright in Latin by an educated minority. Late-medieval Everyman plays participate in this form of language and thought, as the ordinary person’s life is seen as an allegory of the sufferings and possibilities of resurrection that were disclosed by Jesus and that inform the lives of all of us.

In the early modern period, progressively from roughly 1550 or 1600 and into the present, this metonymic-intellectual system is succeeded by a demotic-scientific-manipulative system. Modern scientific knowledge is available to anyone who takes the trouble to educate himself. As Descartes once remarked, “There are many things to do in life, and [a good man] has to direct that life in such a manner that the greater part of it shall remain to him for the performance of good actions, which his own reason ought to teach him, even supposing that he were to receive his lessons from it alone.”⁵ The very idea that there are many things to do in life—including at least discoveries to be made and technological devices to ameliorate our material situation to be invented—as opposed to one central thing that is to be done, namely living according to the will of God, is itself revolutionary. The further idea that we can use our reason to figure out how to do the many things we might do is equally far-reaching. As these ideas are worked out in modern scientific culture, enormous benefits accrue, while at the same time our modern political and moral lives become pluralized and, potentially, evacuated of meaning, in being no longer referred to a larger reality that is either metaphorically or metonymically accessible.

Like Kant and Hegel and Dewey, Frye, while accepting the benefits of modern scientific and technological culture, worries about this. He worries in particular that there is nothing any longer to hold us together within the terms of a common project. Without the ability to discern either metaphorically or metonymically possibilities and necessities of personal and cultural development that are latent within a larger reality itself, chaos threatens. We may fall into “the subordination of everything creative to the expediencies and superstitions of authority … [or we may] fly apart into a chaos of mutually unintelligible elites, of which those nearest the center of society would soon take control. So atavistic a regression, in the present stage of technological development, might well wipe the human race off the planet.”⁶ This passage is perhaps somewhat purple and apocalyptic, but the problem is clear. What, if anything, can any longer bring us together under a shared sense of common, objective possibilities of life and value? The old dispensations are dead, and for good reason, but a life lived without any objective dispensations threatens to be bleak, chaotic, and violent, or perhaps nasty, brutish, and short. The constructed institutions of the democratic state and the free market may, once again, intervene to moderate the problem. Social order and open trading are by no means insignificant institutional goods. But what is to prevent free riding and the domination of state and market institutions by the powerful?

This sense of a need for a new dispensation is the central point de départ for romantic thought and writing and for the thought of Kant, as he seeks to found a critical and constructive philosophy that avoids both traditionalist but baseless dogmatism and skeptical nomadism in life and in thought. Frye’s own response to this need, building on Blake and on Blake’s reading of the Bible, is to suggest that we can and should learn from the great poets and from the Bible to uncover and reactivate the myth of all mythologies: the tentative availability of a reconciled, pastoral, resurrected life. The idea is that we can, as it were, bypass the metonymic-intellectual stage of thought and regain contact with the metaphorical-mythological stage that remains present as a dim, underlying stratum of our lives. This is, Frye suggests, exactly what great poets and the writers of the great sacred texts, preeminently the Bible, do. Donald Marshall has elegantly summarized this strategy of recovery as it was pursued by Wordsworth:

In Wordsworth the synthetic, creative, and sympathetic power of imagination, nourished on a popular tradition of ballad and romance with roots in the great poetry pre-dating the Enlightenment, asserted itself against an instrumentalist reason, which in poetry took the form of a masquerade in the form of conscious and merely willed classicism. Wordsworth found the true source of imagination: in nature and particularly in the poet’s experience of nature during childhood, when he was most open to its varied and spirited influence. The language in which this recollected experience was transformed into the guide of later life and feeling derived from the ordinary language of men, particularly rural men, whose lives preserved the great rhythms of pastoral and agricultural life, recorded in and mediated by the Bible, anonymous folk poetry, and related literary forms.⁷

In The Romantic Legacy, Charles Larmore has similarly argued that the romantic imagination functions to express and recover senses of community and of belonging to place, though he aptly notes also a contending sense of romantic irony, as the poet simultaneously feels apart from others in the possession of distinctive education and creative power.⁸

This romantic sense of a recovery through imagination of a suppressed stratum of thought, language, and experience, so that we might once again feel ourselves to have a common situation and objective purposiveness, is a wonderful idea. But, as the careers and receptions of Blake and Wordsworth show, it will not be so easy to carry it out in a way that significantly influences public life. Those who pursue this strategy are all too likely to be dismissed as dreamers or balkanized as objects of mostly private, merely religioaesthetic reverence and reverie, at least in relation to serious questions of social policy that require fully worked out schemes for institutions. Can imagination, poetry, myth, and metaphor make high cognitive claims on us? On many or most of us? And what institutions will then serve? As Hegel noted in criticizing romanticism,⁹ a sense of subjective inwardness informs a good deal of romantic writing, as poets despite their best intentions for social effect withdraw into rehearsals of the progress of their own imaginations, as in Wordsworth ever withdrawing from work on The Recluse to write The Prelude instead. The thought that romantics withdraw from the world in order to find solace in nature has informed much of the reception of romanticism, in the sense in which Jerome McGann has criticized romanticism—that is, the dominant teaching of romantic poetry within departments of literature up until, say, 1980—for its subjectively cultic character. (McGann distinguishes between institutionalized romanticism and a tougher, stranger, more self-critical romantic writing.)¹⁰ When one then further takes into account a sense, inherited from Freud, of the anarchistic pressures placed by our sexual lives on both individual development and imaginative production, then the prospects for cultural restoration via romantic imagining grow even bleaker. And then there are the categories that are reinforced every day by an increasingly global commodity culture: subjective preference, taste, and want, which stand against objective production costs and processes. How is imaginative art to make a public claim on us in the midst of the domination of social life by these categories of thought and experience?

The address to our cultural situation that is offered us by romantic imagining has considerable pertinence and power. Given, however, the evident difficulties that attach to carrying out a romantic renovation of culture, it is worthwhile considering what other possibilities of general address to our cultural circumstances are on the books. Three further stances, each significantly different from romanticism, can be usefully distinguished.

The first is “Relaxed Naturalism” or “Just Coping” or, to give it a proper name, Humeanism, alluding to Hume’s remark that we should acknowledge “the whimsical condition of mankind, who must act and reason and believe; though they are not able, by their most diligent enquiry, to satisfy themselves concerning the foundation of these operations, or to remove the objections, which may be raised against them.”¹¹ One might, that is, think that there are properly or realistically no such things as an objective plight or an objective destiny to be recovered. There are, rather, just many people who want many different things, in a situation in which material resources for satisfying wants are simply moderately scarce but not altogether lacking. This is perhaps generally the situation in the North Atlantic democracies. Richard Rorty had the habit of claiming that these democracies offer us, as a merely contingent possibility that we have somehow invented or stumbled upon, a comparatively good enough way of life. Talk of achieving our destiny is to be rejected as pretty much amounting to the nostalgia of the priests. This Rortian view has considerable currency, at least for public life, against the more religious visions of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. Assignments and enforcements of human rights can be defended as matters of pragmatic compromise, given the practical necessities of at least some social cooperation. In Quine’s elegant phrase, morality becomes a matter of “birch rod and sugar plum.”¹² That is, there are certain behaviors that we more or less decide to reward and to punish, because rewarding and punishing these behaviors works well enough to keep us going and to enable us to satisfy some of our wants. We can drop all talk of renovation, destiny, and objective purpose. In political life, elbow room or negative liberty is good enough. Privately, a bit of Millian experimentalism in lifestyles is not really a bad thing. This is, perhaps, the dominant view of life in northern Europe and the “Blue States” of the United States nowadays. It is unlikely that it will pass away any time soon, and it is not at all clear that its passing would be desirable. It offers us a fair amount of independence from authoritarian comprehensive enforcements of social visions. This view urges us and even enables us one by one, or affinity group by affinity group, or as citizens who share at least some bits of history, just to do the best we can. There is at least a hint of this view in even John Dewey, alongside the strains of moral and cultural perfectionism in his work.

The difficulty of this view, already suggested, is that it leaves public life open to manipulation by powerful elites. It encourages free riding and an insidiously creeping social chaos and decline, as Plato and MacIntyre have argued. It makes it difficult to believe in one’s way of life, so that social anomie and depression threaten. It has trouble figuring out what to do in real crisis situations, where there are not many relevant experiences and not many rules of thumb on which to draw.

The second view is Cartesianism. The cognitive and technological benefits of the Cartesian conception of disenchanted, material nature are manifest. But in addition to these cognitive and technological benefits, there is also an attractive moral, spiritual stance associated with this conception of nature and with the relation of mind to it. As Charles Taylor notes, Descartes furthers an

ethic of rational control that find[s] its sources in a sense of dignity and self-esteem [by] transpos[ing] inward something of the spirit of the honour ethic…. Strength, firmness, resolution, control, these are the crucial qualities, a subset of the warrior-aristocratic virtues, but now internalized. They are not deployed in great deeds of military valor in public space, but rather in the inner domination of passion by thought…. Descartes constantly enjoins efficacious action for what we want [so that we may become “masters and possessors of nature”], alongside detachment from the outcome.¹³

My third maxim was always to try especially to conquer myself rather than fortune, to change my desires rather than the order of the world; and generally to become accustomed to believing that there is nothing that is utterly within our power, except for our thoughts, so that, after having done our best regarding things external to us, everything that fails to bring us success, from our point of view, is absolutely impossible.¹⁴

But satisfaction in correct thinking is virtually infinite. Thus Descartes argues that if we learn to follow correctly the proper principles for scientific investigation, then we can comport ourselves both with pride in our cognitive achievements and with humility, in acknowledgment of the limits of our finite understanding. Pride where knowledge and, sometimes, consequent technology are achievable, coupled with stoicism about our limits, leading to ataraxia or blessedness, is an available stance that has genuine charms. Descartes himself writes that we may, if we take up this stance, “rival the gods in their happiness” and experience “intense satisfaction” than which there is nothing “sweeter or more innocent … in this life.”¹⁵

It would be folly to underestimate either the practical-technological or the moral-spiritual benefits of this stance. But it too faces problems. This stance does not point to any practices or styles of expressive action in politics, family life, or interpersonal relations generally. It is expressed directly only in cognitive practice, leaving everything else either to be ignored, to be coped with as a matter of convenience, or to be sorted out via the practical, ultimately market-structured adjustment of preferences. There is no distinctive worth or dignity attaching to any particular mode of interpersonal, familial, social, or political life. Thus Descartes remarks that, apart from the practice of natural science, “the most useful course of action was to rule myself in accordance with those with whom I had to live,”¹⁶ whether Persians, Chinese, or Frenchman. This policy kept Descartes free from the Inquisition, and it supports considerable broad-minded tolerance of what are ultimately the follies of one or another human group in interpersonal matters, where no well-founded rules are available. But it does not support the achievement of intimacy. It is hard to see how Descartes could tell the difference between getting along with a wife and getting along with the Chinese. It is, therefore, no accident that he never married, and the philosophical problem of other minds that arises in his work is itself perhaps a reflection of a pervasive sense of alienation from other human beings.

The third stance is Byronism. Byron’s own literary and theoretical writings are less interesting systematically than those of any of Blakean-Wordsworthian romanticism, Humeanism, or Cartesianism. But there can nonetheless be little doubt that Byron both summed up and stands for a certain cultural stance, the stance that Bertrand Russell called Byronism as “Titanic cosmic self-assertion,”¹⁷ especially in matters sexual. Byron’s own (let us call it) passionate and exuberant personal life expresses this stance, at least in part. And there has always been a well-motivated temptation to identify Byron with certain of his characters. Childe Harold, for example, is introduced to us as follows, in terms that seem to apply as well to Byron himself.

Whileome in Albion’s isle there dwelt a youth,

Who ne in virtue’s ways did take delight;

But spend his days in riot most uncouth,

And vexed with mirth the drowsy ear of Night.

Ah, me! in sooth he was a shameless wight,

Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;

Few earthly things found favor in his sight

Save concubines and carnal companie,

And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.¹⁸

The reasons for taking up a stance of passionate self-assertion, if reasons are in view, is that it is better to feel something, and in particular to feel one’s own powers of command, than to feel nothing at all, albeit that the rate or variety or artistic imaginativeness of conquest may have to be increased in order to get the same effect in feeling, addiction being what it is. This is the stance that we can also see in Don Giovanni and in the seducer Johannes of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. This is largely the popular conception of romanticism. As one fairly simple commentary for students puts it, “In essence, Romanticism was, for a time, the triumph of feeling over thinking, the head over the heart.”²⁰ Romanticism so construed or, better, Byronism, does help to remind us of the felt character of our own inner lives. We can, and often do, feel intensely, without much prior reasoning or policy formation but nonetheless with a kind of imaginative involvement, blending anticipation, recollection, and fantasy, in a manner not present in the lives of other creatures. The power thus to feel with imaginative involvement is one, it seems, that we wish not to repudiate, even if we could. We give it free rein in adolescence, perhaps, or on Halloween, or for Carnival, or for Las Vegas weekends. The liability, of course, is that it is hard to see how to build a stable life out of the cultivation of the pursuit of this kind of intensity of feeling, as Faust is brought in the end to realize.

So we have these three stances—Humeanism, Cartesianism, and Byronism, against which I have posed a more genuine romanticism, associated with Blake and Wordsworth. All three of these stances are lived—Cartesianism for science and planning, Humeanism for buying and selling and for semistable social relations, Byronism for holidays. When they are thus lived together, in uneasy pragmatic compromise with each other, then what we have is the pragmatic liberalism that Gary Gutting has eloquently defended.²¹ This pragmatic compromise solution has a good claim to being our form of life, at least in the more or less well-off North Atlantic democracies and in the Blue States: naturalist rejection of comprehensive religious enforcements, Cartesianism for science, and Byronism on the side, all adopted because they seem to be what works best, pragmatically, in their particular spheres.

The question, then, is how stable this pragmatic compromise is. Or does it rather suffer from the liabilities of each stance taken individually, plus the added problem that each stance places pressure on the others? For example, Cartesianism may point toward the management of culture by so-called technical experts, rather than compromise, thus undermining democracy. Or Humeanism may undermine commitment to science as a vocation. Or Byronism may threaten to undermine just about anything. Just who are we, and where are we going?

In this situation, we might conjecture that the Wordsworthian romanticism first sketched offers us something of a middle way, since it accepts elements of Cartesianism, Humeanism, and Byronism but, unlike pragmatism, thinks of maintaining this acceptance as a continuing task. The characteristic Wordsworthian romantic writer—Wordsworth—unlike the Byronic romantic writer, is a continual scrutinizer of the terms of our current mixed settlement. Wordsworth is worried about the rise of a modern scientific culture in which a sense of value and meaning is lost. But, like Hume, he is unwilling, at least in his major writings, to accept comprehensive political enforcements of religious stances. He is too much of an individualist for that. He has a Byronic sense of the power and importance of his own imagination and his imaginative responses to events, but he seeks also to keep his imagination apt to the persons and events he encounters, where the marker of accuracy is that others can be brought to share in his imaginative responses, thus confirming them. Thus his poetic imagination courts not only excess and poetic glory but also depth of common response to common predicaments and possibilities of life. In the Prelude, he undertakes to “speak / A lasting inspiration,”²² as he retraces his own fostering “alike by beauty and by fear.”²³ The point of this rehearsal is not simply the particularities of his own life but further that within these particularities one can “trace / Our Being’s earthly progress,”²⁴ thus showing, as it were, the universal, or what is possible and valuable for us all, in the particular, that is, in the details of growing up in the Lake District, studying (or mostly partying) at Cambridge, traveling in France, and so on. The moral of this rehearsal is that “these objects”—that is, the beautiful and the sublime—should “everlastingly affect the mind.”²⁵ The experience of the sublime awakens in us a felt sense of our own rational and expressive powers and dignity, so that we do not settle for Humean coping or trying to get what we already take ourselves to want, but instead seek to deploy and express our human powers originally. The experience of the beautiful connects us to the common, so that both Byronic excessiveness and Cartesian alienation are avoided. Throughout these rehearsals, Wordsworth continually questions his own progress in writing and avoids conclusive dogmatism. He wonders whether his tracing of his progress is really as exemplary as he hopes and whether his audience will receive him or repudiate him—indeed, whether his audience exists at all. Since the poet has “the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed,”²⁶ it may not. In rehearsing his own history, Wordsworth has trouble finding the plot and its moral. We have in the Prelude, he writes to Coleridge, “Turned and returned with intricate delay.”²⁷ Yet the very ongoing effort to find the plot and to establish the importance of the experiences of both the sublime and the beautiful is itself the self-modifying way to balance Humeanism, Cartesianism, and Byronism against one another. This Wordsworthian practice of seeking expressive power in connection with the common is always crossed with self-questioning rather than dominated by a preformulated plan or conclusion. Engaging in this practice is what the best artists and literary writers, in particular situations, do.

One consequence of this conception of the seriousness of Wordsworthian romanticism is that there is no great romantic drama. The reason for this is that Wordsworthian romanticism lingers in the activity of accepting and working through conflicting commitments, as it accepts the attractiveness within consciousness of all of Humeanism, Cartesianism, and Byronism. It seeks to bring these stances into fuller and more coherent communication with one another within consciousness, so that more human, more expressive action can be achieved. It is no accident that Harold Bloom once described romantic poetry as the internalization of quest romance.²⁸ The action of romantic drama is internal to consciousness itself. But this internalization of action then cuts against the possibility of presenting important dramatic conflicts between different characters, if these characters are themselves to be complex enough to participate in the movement of romantic consciousness. The only real candidates for great romantic dramas are Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies, so far as one finds confrontation between emergent, modern individualism and valuable, stable commitments to be central to them. But these dramas work so magnificently precisely because the claims on the individual of an existing external culture of honor, religion, nation, or clan as they stand are taken seriously against modern individualism, even if individualism turns out to be an irrepudiable force. Once its irrepudiability is fully accepted, then the drama is internalized, as individuals must sort out ever anew their standing conflicting commitments. (Hamlet is poised on the edge of accepting this irrepudiability, without yet being crassly individualistic.) Modern and modernist lyric and the modern novel can survive and flourish because they are able to focus on the interior life of protagonists in a way that modern drama, with its rejection of the artificiality of the extended soliloquy, cannot. The drama of modern life is largely that of individuals coming to terms—or, increasingly, bleakly failing to come to terms, as in Beckett—within their own consciousness or within restricted spheres of conversation, with how they are to stand in relation to the conflicting attractive possibilities afforded by, or latent within, a culture.

But what if one were to undertake to write a drama about the fact that modern life offers no ready way to blend naturalness (either Byronic-spontaneous or Humean-customary) with originality (either Cartesian-intellectual or Byronic-spontaneous)? (Beckett rejects ready blending, but by reducing his characters to the barely discursively percipient and his cultures to completely desiccated routines. He thus undervalues complexity, energy, and adaptive responsiveness in both individuals and cultures.) Could one show Byronic types, Cartesian types, and Humean types somehow in interaction with one another, as types, while also intimating that these types represent aspects of us all, in our own divided commitments? What work could such a showing do? Could it point toward any kind of fuller acknowledgment of our complexities?

These are the questions that Tom Stoppard takes up in Arcadia. Stoppard accepts the structural necessity for drama of presenting conflict between characters, and he also rejects the extended Shakespearean soliloquy. We see his characters doing what they do, but we do not hear or overhear them in their internal movements of mind as they are pulled now toward Humeanism, now toward Cartesianism, now toward Byronism. Stoppard also refuses the great marriage plot, as in Jane Austen, within which plot two characters work out the possibility of a good enough life together, as they find their commitments and talents complemented in each other.

The action in Arcadia takes place, instead, in a kind of public space that we witness from a privileged standpoint, able to watch without being ourselves watched. Stoppard’s method of dramatic construction is juxtaposition. The characters are largely types, with Thomasina as a Cartesian figure (with a bit of Byronism struggling to get out); Septimus as a Byronic figure (overlaid with the surface Cartesianism of a Cambridge education); Hannah as a cooler mixture of Cartesian scholarship with modern Humean, tolerant whimsy at the follies of mankind; and Valentine as a contemporary Cartesian. Other characters are even closer to pure types in a way that makes for farce, as they are dominated by particular varieties of ambition and vanity. They think of themselves as something they are not: Bernard takes himself to be a scholar; Ezra takes himself to be a poet. The remaining characters are largely incidental to the action taking place between the principal, more rounded four (Thomasina, Septimus, Hannah, and Valentine) and the two figures of farce (Ezra and Bernard). Stoppard sets his characters as types within a space that we can witness, and he waits to see what happens. To some extent, his method of juxtaposition deliberately shirks the internal development of character and the working through of conflicting commitments in favor of the charms of farce.

Stoppard himself is quite aware of how his dramatic method of the juxtaposition of types works. As he remarked in an interview, “I don’t think Arcadia says very much about these two sides of the human personality or temperament [that is, the Cartesian and the Byronic]…. And yet it’s firing all around the target, making a pattern around the target.”²⁹ He reports that his favorite line in modern English drama is “I’m a man of no convictions—at least I think I am,” from Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist.³⁰ He observes that he “writes plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself.”³¹ He describes his objective as “to perform a marriage between a play of ideas and a farce…. [This objective] represents two sides of my own personality, which can be described as seriousness compromised by my frivolity, or … frivolity redeemed by my seriousness.”³² “Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight,”³³ he remarks in his own voice, quoting his character Henry from The Real Thing. What all these remarks indicate is a shying—perhaps as a result of the necessities of dramatic presentation, perhaps from overwhelming shyness expressed as wit, perhaps because of the sheer complexities of modern life—from working through, from thinking. Juxtaposition, pattern, contradiction, equilibrium—these trump internalization and the working through of thoughts, ideas, attitudes, and emotions.

And yet, as J. L. Austin once wrote, “there’s the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back.”³⁴ When Arcadia opened in 1993 in London and in 1995 in New York, it was widely (though not without exception)³⁵ praised as a breakthrough in character development and emotional expressiveness and as a move, in particular, beyond the consistently arch and dryly intellectual quality of his earlier work.³⁶ As Tim Appelo put the point in his review in The Nation, “Unlike the spy-jive mac-guffins he juggles in Hapgood, the mystery addressed in Arcadia is one to which Stoppard is fully emotionally committed.”³⁷ There is something to this point, and it has mostly to do with the concluding scene, where the two worlds—those of 1809 and of the present—as it were overlap. Here is where, at last, we see not farce and wordplay and juxtaposition but development in character, consciousness, and relationship. First Thomasina and Septimus, and then Hannah and Gus, waltz. These parallel waltzes have the feel of a dream. They are surprising—especially so in that, like dreams, they contravene time in occurring together. This gives them the feel of being somehow mythical or eternally recurring, something that ever haunts us. The waltzing together of these pairs, across time, has the fuguelike feeling of something half occurrent and half remembered.

The absence of dialogue during this waltzing is prepared by Valentine’s earlier remark that he’s given up on his analysis of the rise and fall of the grouse population on the Coverly estate because there’s “Too much noise. There’s just too much bloody noise.”³⁸ (Too many unpredictable external factors induce deviations in the population that prevent any natural pattern from being evident.) This remark alerts us that we may, at least sometimes, find sense in silence rather than in speech. In this final waltzing, and in the overlapping of the two time periods, we find “patterns making themselves out of nothing.”³⁹ We are left with a sense that the problems of human subjects struggling to express their emotional and intellectual subjectivities fully, originally, and with each other within settings of thermodynamically decaying nature and stale culture persist, making us above all interesting animals. But despite their persistence, a significant response to these problems may be, for a time, possible. Thomasina remarks to Septimus, “there is another geometry which I am engaged in discovering by trial and error.”⁴⁰ Stoppard’s juxtapositions work similarly, allowing a geometry or a set of shapes of human life, intelligence, and desire to show themselves.

The dreamlike, fuguelike feeling of the final waltzing is further reinforced by the fact that it is these pairs of characters who waltz, in particular by the fact that these waltzes are for each of them a kind of breakthrough. Septimus acknowledges Thomasina’s just-about-adult sexuality, which has now come to expression along with her intelligence. In doing so, he further acknowledges his own depth of attraction to her as a person, to her embodied intelligence, thus overcoming his earlier libertinism in favor of something more like love. Hannah acknowledges Gus’s pain and neediness and intelligence in his silence, thus lending depth of responsiveness to her own typical professional scholarly scrupulousness. Although she has earlier stuck to detachment, insisting to Chloe that “I don’t want a dancing partner, least of all Mr. Nightingale. I don’t dance,”⁴¹ she too is now able to dance, a bit awkwardly, when the right partner comes along at the right time. In inviting her to dance, Gus acknowledges her intelligence and passion together, in taking her as fit for dancing, thus acknowledging, too, that words and feelings can coexist in a single character: depth of feeling need not always engender muteness, and cleverness need not always suppress feeling. It is as though the two parts of the soul—analytical intelligence and depth of feeling, Cartesianism and Byronism—have at last been put together, at least for a moment, according to the logic of a dream, across time, and surrounded by music rather than parsed out in words. Is this final scene, blending disjoint times and moving to music, without words, an escape from actuality into form or a registering of human need and possibility? It is inescapable to ask this question, but it is not clear that it is necessary to answer it one way or the other.

According to this scene and the logic that prepares it, the Wordsworthian practice of bringing the parts of the soul together, in pursuit of expressive fluency in thought and feeling and action, in relation to others and to what is common, both informs and haunts human life. But the work of this practice remains always in part unfinished. As Hannah remarks, “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter…. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.”⁴² We will remain interesting animals, in pursuit of fullness of fluency and at-homeness as subjects that we will never quite achieve. The dancing of these pairs—their real physical movement and intimacy, yet somehow outside historical time and “for us” as observing audience—offers a clarifying catharsis of what is possible for us. But, in Marcuse’s words, “the reconciliation which the catharsis offers also preserves the irreconcileable.”⁴³ The space of dramatic art is not joined to the space we occupy as viewers and then as agents. The marking of this magical, dramatic space where some provisional reconciliation takes place as outside of time and as other to us testifies to what Adorno called our continuing “suffering in an existence alien to the subject”; the dancing that these pairs are able to achieve as human agents testifies “to love for it as well.”⁴⁴ We both recognize ourselves in these characters and remain aware of their occupying a space of art that we can, would, and yet cannot occupy wholly in daily life. Arcadia itself closes with this dancing and so is silent—bleakly, pregnantly, undecidably—about the rest of life.

Serious writing must find some way to show that moments, perhaps even ones of considerable scope and duration, of good enough fluency and at-homeness are possible, if it is not to reduce us to ignorant and empty sites of mere coping with life. Yet it must also accept that such moments do not last forever, especially in light of modern complexities of desire and social life, and that there is no formula for either achieving or sustaining them. It must accept a constitutive incompleteness—accept, that is, its own failure to track the achievement of any final happiness, if it is to be faithful to the lack of final happiness in human life. It must somehow avoid denying human finitude and temporality in complacent dogmatism while also succeeding in showing sometime achievements of expressive, embodied intelligence and the satisfaction of desire, as in dancing. This astonishing concluding scene in Arcadia manages to blend skepticism and acknowledgment of finitude with the presentation of apt, fluent feeling and of gratitude for life. “In the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”⁴⁵