Hidden Order in the "Stoppard Set": Chaos

Theory in the Content and Structure of

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia
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SUSANNE VEES -GULANI

In his play Arcadia, published and first perfonned in 1993, Tom Stoppard
explores a variety of ideas and themes along different time lines, ranging from
hi story and chaos theory to gardening and sex. Despite this range, the play does
not strike the audience as a clutter of unconnected parts. Rather, Stoppard suc-
ceeds in unifying the play with an all-inclusive structure. The principles and
ideas of chaos theory, which fonn one of the central topics of the content, are
also applied in the organization of the playas a whole - a point largely
neglected by critics to date. Just as chaos theory attempts to offer a more uni-
ve rsal approach to the way our world is arranged, Stoppard strives to explain
his characters' behavior and thoughts as aspects of an "orderl y disorder,"
which they, however, cannot fully perceive. By covering occurrences at three
different moments of history on the stage, the past (1809 and 18 12) and the
present (1993), Stoppard offers the audience a scenario impossible outside the
imagi nary world: the exact description of events happening nearly 200 years
apart. The interrelation of the past and the present together with the possibili-
ties of interpreting or predicting either one thus fann the central immediate
concerns of the play. Using chaos theory in both content and structure, Stop-
pard also goes beyond these issues and touches on universal questions about
the organization and evolution of OUf world and OUT place and role within it.

CHAOS THEORY

Many people see chaos theory, which is also called nonlinear dynamics, as
this century 's third major advancement in the physical sciences after the the-
ory of relativity and quantum mechanics.' Chaos theory has thus become a
fas hionable topic not only among scientists of different disciplines, but lately
also among the general public. This widespread popularity can be traced back
to several publications about nonlinear dynamics that are specifically aimed at

Modem Drama, 42 (Fall 1999) 4"

 412 SUSANNE VEES-GULA NI

the layperson. Largely filtered through these popular channels, chaos theory
has now also entered literature.' Thus James Gleick's bestseller Chaos: Mak-
ing a New Science came to be Stoppard's major source for his treatment of
chaos theory in Arcadia. 3 However, Stoppard has long displayed an interest in
the scientific development of our age in his plays. As Richard Hornby points
out, "Stoppard's interest in mathematical quirks goes back to the first scene of
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his first play ... [andl [mlost of Stoppard's subsequent works touch on some
mathematical or scientific enigmas.'" Still , Arcadia is the first of his plays
where science takes on a truly "cent[rall" role. 5 .
Chaos theory focuses on nonlinear systems and their characteristic behav-
iOT. The findings suggest that these systems have a large influence on the
(dis)order of our world and their study can thus offer new explanations of the
organization of the universe we live in. The mathematics of non-linear
dynamics have found application in a wide array of research areas, such as the
understanding of weather patterns, of turbulent flow, and of population
growth patterns. It is important to avoid being misled by the tenn "chaos the-
ory" when it is used interchangeably with nonlinear dynamics. In this specific
sense, "chaos" does not reflect the everyday understanding of the word, which
is equated with "randomness." On the contrary, in nonlinear dynamics. pro-
cesses that can be labeled "chaotic" are not random (even if they might appear
so to the onlooker). As David Peak and Michael Frame point out, "Chaos is
irregular output from a deterministic source. The future of a chaotic behavior
is completely determined by its past. Chaos is not chance or randomness.,,6
Unfortunately, many people, occasionally including Gleick, carelessly make
the mistake of equating the everyday sense of the word with its specific scien-
tific meaning.? Weak understanding of such concepts can lead to glaring
errors that are more serious than simply the loose use of tenninology to
describe phenomena.
A widely known application of chaos theory is in the production of the
beautiful fractal images that grace the covers of most books on the subject.
Fractal images are self-similar graphics that come about by reiterating certain
algorithms thousands of times. An "iteration," in this context, is the repetition
of a computation using the mathematical rules specified by the algorithm. The
large number of repetitions required for the creation of these images also
exemplifies the importance of the modem computer in the study of chaos the-
ory.8 Gleick stresses how, through iteration, an equation becomes a process
and is thus dynamic.9 The important feature of these images is their self-simi-
larity at different scales. This means that when small parts of the image are
blown up, they start to resemble tbe whole graph. A well-known example of a
fractal image is the Mandelbrot set, which has many classic self-similar
areas.'o Fractal images have been used to describe the physical world as well.
Even though natural objects in our world are not made up of exact smaller and
smaller copies of themselves, fractals offer a better model for some natural
 Chaos Theory in Stoppard's Arcadia

structures than do traditional mathematics. This is because "statisticalfly] the

pieces look the same on the average" so that they can be called "natural frac-
tals."" Fractals have been used to describe physical shapes and a variety of
phenomena, including the branching bronchial tree in lungs, various segments
of rivers and coastlines, and dendritic diffusion limited structures within sand-
stone, among others.12
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Chaos theory is also often connected with the idea of "sensitive dependence
on initial condition[s]," actually a phenomenon well known to mathematicians
since the end of the nineteenth century. ' 3 This term refers to the fact that in
systems that "are composed of many [different parts] acting collectively,"'4
small changes in one of those pieces can later have large effects. Thus, in cha-
otic systems, which are characterized by constant change because of their
interplay with their surroundings, it becomes increasingly impossible to pre-
dict their development. According to Peak and Frame, "[w]hat makes chaos
confounding is the way measurement uncertainties ex pand. If you are dealin g
with a chaotic system and you start with an incompletely specified initial
state, that initial uncertainty grows rapidly and makes exact prediction in the
long term impossible."'s
A consequence of sensitive dependence on initial conditions is the irrevers-
ibility of chaotic systems. Thus speculation becomes impossible not only
about the future of the system, but also about its past. Even though the outpu t
of a system is determined by its input, it is impossible to recon struct thi s input
exactly. In "[a] nonlinear relationship between past and present ... the past ...
[remain s] ambiguous.",6 However, some stati stical lon g -term prediction is
possible even for chaotic systems. This is true because of the phenomenon of
the "strange altractor." The laller is based on the fact that the outcomes of a
chaotic system are limited in their range. The growth of uncertainty is co un-
teracted by "an underlying attractor trying to tame the error growth."" As
Gleick points o ut, a strange attractor's loops are "nonperiodic," . "infinitely
deep, never quite joining, never intersecting.,,18 Thus chaotic systems are at
the same time infinite and finite: the attractor's loops take an infinite number
of paths, yet the attractor only covers a finite-dimensional space.' 9
The previous passages point to the fact ·that chaos cannot be separated from
order. Indeed, when mapping the onset and course of the chaotic behavior of a
sys tem, one can observe how continuous bifurcation doubling leads to a
period of completely chaotic activity. "Continuous bifurcation doubling"
refers to the repeatedly "branching" plots of possible outcomes of an iteration
that in books about chaos are often shown to lead to apparent randomness. 2o
However, again and again one notices the occurrence of pocke ts of order, di s-
playing a bifurcation pattern, showing that the chaotic behavior is actually
''filled with order."" Since the bifurcation patterns that are observed are the
same as the one that led to chaos at the outset, only on many different length
scales, the bifurcation diagram can be compared to a fracta!' ''
 SUSANNE VEES-GULANI

C HAO S THEORY I N THE CONTENT OF ARCADIA

Stoppard explicates chaos theory to his audience through the voice of Valen-
tine, a mathematician and chaos researcher, in the passag.e s set in 1993. 23
Through Valentine's explanations, Stoppard provides the audience with the
tools for understanding the incredible event happening in the scenes of the
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past: the development of chaos theory by a young girl, Thomasina Coverly.

The setting of the play, a schoolroom in Sidley Park, a large country house,
also stresses the focus on learning, discovery, and progress. However, Stop-
pard surrounds this central theme of scientific discussion about c haos theory
with a number of other topics and ideas. The play begins with a scene from
1809 that introduces most of these central themes. Apart from sc ience, it dis-
cusses sex, literature, and the garden. The most importan t characters in J 809
are Lady Thomasina, the daughter of the house, and her tutor, Septimus
Hodge. The first scene already reveals Thomasina's scientific curiosity. She
asks her tutor,

When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round
making red trails like the picrure of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you
stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not
notice and continues to tum pink just as before. Do you think this is odd? [ ... ]
[... ] You cannOI st ir things apart. (4-5, intervening dialogue omilled)

Thomasina is thu s thinking about the irreversibility of processes as well as th e

movement toward s larger and larger disorder, which is formulated in the sec-
ond law of thermodynamics. Also, the example shows how Thomasina tries to
find explanations for what happens aro und her, quite in the spirit of chaos the-
ory as it is described by Valentine in a later scene. With chaos theory, he tells
Hannah, one can get closer to "[tJhe ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives,
the things people write poetry about - clouds - daffodils - waterfalls - and
what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in -these things are full
of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks" (48).'4
Thomasina's curiosity does not stop with rice pudding. She realizes the dis-
crepancy between the traditional geometrical forms and natural objects, since
this geometry acts "as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles"
(37). She sets out to find equations that would lead to natural shapes, and three
years later (18 [ 2) is still involved in this process: "Oh, pooh to Hobbes!
Mountains are not pyram ids and trees are not cones. God must love gunnery
and architecture if Euclid is his only geometry. There is another geometry
which I am engaged in discovering by trial and error" (84).25 Here Stoppard
has Thomasina quote Benoit Mandelbrot, who stresses in The Fractal Geome-
try of Nature that, as Gleick describes it, "[cJlouds are not spheres ... . Moun-
tains are not cones. Lightning does not travel in a straight line .,,26
 Chaos Theory in Stoppard 's Arcadia 415

Thomasina, however, is limiled by the time in which she lives. There is

simply 'not enough room or time for her to extend on her "rabbit equation"
(77-78), which is actually composed of iterations of an algorithm." Valen-
tine, nearly 200 years later, uses Thomasina's notes to finish her fractal image
by iterating it with the help of a computer (76). Still, Thomasina understands
exactly what she is working on. Looking at her equation, she realizes that
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order can arise out of disorder:

SEPTIMUS It will go to infinity or zero, or nonsense.

THOMASINA No, if you set apart the minus roots they square back to sense. (78)

Thomasina connects this discovery to the understanding of entropy .that she

has gained from thinking about Mr. Noakes's steam engine (87, 93). How-
ever, it is Valentine who interprets Thomasina's thoughts for the audience.
The order within the chaos that Thomasina has observed in her rabbit equation
constitutes some hope against the constant move towards disorder. Even
though he sees this world still as "doomed," Valentine tells us that "if this is
how it started, perhaps it's how the next one will come" (78).
Past and present thus complement each other in the discussion of chaos the-
ory. Stoppard shows how the different points of time come closer and closer
together through the study of chaos. At first Thomasina's and Valentine's
projects are introduced independently in separate scenes. Valentine's work on
population growth is not immediately identified as research in chaos, but
seems quite obscure and inaccessible: "he's doing grouse. [... ] Not actual
grouse. Computer grouse" (23, intervening dialogue omitted)." Then, with
the discovery of Thomasina's notebooks in 1993, it becomes clear that both
are working on the same subject. Valentine states in his conversation with
Hannah: "Actually I'm doing it from the other end. She started with an equa-
tion and turned it into a graph. I've got a graph - real data [the game books on
grouse] - and I'm trying to find the equation which would give you the graph
if you used it the way she's used hers. Iterated it" (45). Finally, Thomasina's
iterated algorithm finds its way to Valentine's computer screen. The play
establishes even more paralle ls between past and present around the theme of
chaos theory. However, they are disclosed only to the audience, remaining
hidden to the characters in the play. For example, in scene three, Thomasina
picks up an apple leaf, telling Septimus; "I will plot this leaf and deduce its
equation" (37). In scene four, Hannah "picks up an apple leaf [is it the same?]
from the table" and asks Valentine: "So you couldn't make a picture of this
leaf by iterating a whatsit [algorithm]?" (47). Other similarities are more
humorous. When Valentine first dismisses Thomasina's equations as
"[d]oodling," he compares her to "[a monkey at] a piano" (47). Ironically, the
audience knows that Valentine is unknowingly quite right about Thomasina's
piano skills (41 ), but is certainly wrong about her math abilities! In the last
 SUSANNE VEES-GULAN I

scene, Stoppard completely deletes the boundaries of the two time spheres and
both past and present appear on the stage together. Here, the two times have
come so close together that their conversations and actions complement each
other. For example when they study Thomasina's diagram:

[( ... ] SEPTIMUS and VALENTINE study the diagram doubled by time.)

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VALENTINE It 's heal.

HANNAH Are you tight, Val?
VALENTINE It's a diagram of heat exchange.
SEPTIMUS So, we are all doomed!
THOMASINA(Cltwiul/y) Yes.
VALENTINE Like a steam engi"ne, you see -
(HANNAHfllls Septimus' s glass/rom the same decanter. and sips/rom it.) (93)

These striking similarities of the treatment of chaos theory in the scenes

of the past and those of the present are comparable to the self-similar struc-
tures of fractal images. As in natural fractals , self-similarity does not imply
exact equality, but rather a sim ilari ty of structure on different scales. In fact,
it can be observed in fractal sets such as the Mandelbrot set that "no part of
the set exactly resembles any other part, at any magnification."' 9 "Chaos
theory" as a topi c in the play seems to function as a stran ge attractor in the
structures of both Arcadia and time itself. Stoppard uses this ordering prin-
ciple to constrain th e direction of development over time of the occurrences
at Sidley Park. The content circulates around the topic, yet, just as with a
strange attractor, it never repealS itself exactly nor does it ever truly cross
itself "because once a system returns to a state it has been in before, it
thereafter must follow the same path. " 30 Especially at the end of the play,
when in a powerful image two different couples of two different times waltz
together through the same room, the audience is allowed to see how close
the paths of an amactor can get to crossing, but still be always only nearl y
the same.

C HAO S TH EOR Y IN THE ST R UCTURE OF ARCA DIA

Apart from the topic of chaos theory, the play displays many other fractals
that together form its structure. Each of them could be seen as a strange aUrac-
tor around which the content evolves. The play opens with the theme of sex
("Septi mus, what is carnal embrace'!" [I]), which runs through the play. In a
humorous twist, Stoppard even has Valentine's sister Chloe define an alterna-
ti ve world order structured around sex that defeats New ton' s determinism:

it's all because of sex. [ ... ]

The universe is detenninistic all right, just like Newton said, 1 mean it' s trying to
 Chaos Theory in Stoppard '.s Arcadia

be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to
be in that part of the plan. (73. intervening dialogue omilted)

In Arcadia, sex is in fact responsible for many different (unexpected) develop-

ments in the plot. It thus functions as a strange attractor to which the plot
returns again and again, resembling a self-similar fractal structure. For exam-
ple, Thomasina tells us about Lady Croom and Lord Byron:
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Marna is in love with Lord Byron. [... ]

[... ] Lord Byron was reading to her from his satire and mama was laughing with
her head in her best position. (36, intervening dialogue omitted)

Similarly, in the present, Valentine remarks: "My mother is in a flutter about

Bernard, and he's no fool. He gave her a first edition of Horace Walpole, and
now she 's lent him her bicycle" (51)." Also, both Byron and Bernard have to
flee Sidley Park upon being discovered with other women (Mrs. Chater and
Chloe) by a Lady Croom.
Apart from exemplifying the change in methods of courtship from the nine-
teenth century to the twentieth, these scenes al so point to another strange
attractor of the play, literature. The past is the time of literary production and
it is the poet who attracts by reciting the verses he has created. The modern
world, however, is the age of analysis and thus the critic dominates." In mod-
em times, it is not the content of the work, but rather the book as a document
that is valued. Like Byron, who reads to Lady Croom, Bernard also reads his
work to an audience. However. it is a critical essay on Byron , and not litera-
ture itself, that he has produced. Ironically, though, this essay is actually more
fiction than scholarship. Because of its poor quality, Bernard 's writing can
also be compared to Chater's (unsuccessful) attempt at poetry in 18og. The
theme of literature is thus repeated in a self-similar manner and is an attractor
in the play.
The garden is yet another strange attractor in Arcadia. In both past and
present it is always shown as being under construction. In the past, the
reconstructing of the garden exemplifies a time of change. This new garden
of Sidley Park, which is designed in "the modern style" (10), is a symbol of
the change from one period to another, namely from the Enlightenment to
Rom anticism. The notion of the Romantic garden is an attempt to end the
artificial creation of a paradisal "picture," which consists of a design right
down to the number of sheep grazing in the meadows and reflects "nature as
God intended" (t 2). In contrast, the park Mr. Noakes is planning is "irregu-
lar" and adheres to "the [... ] principles of the picturesque style" (12). He thus
tries to include an element of wildness and unpredictability in his notion of
the garden. It is a variability that can be observed in nature itself.3 3 StiJI,
there is order in the chaos because the set-up of the park depends on the ini-
 SUSANNE VEE$-GULANl

tial conditions Mr. Noakes implements for this irregularity. This makes him,
in Thomasina's words, a true "Emperor of Irregularity" (85). In chaos the-
ory, a similar process of creation can be observed when an algorithm is cho-
sen and then iterated many thousand times, finally leading to a fractal
picture.
The changes occurrin g in the garden resemble those that Valentine
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attributes to the discovery of chaos theory: " A door like this has cracked open
five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It 's the best possible time to
be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong" (48). With
the discovery that chaos theory can serve as a model for natural processes.
similar to the reconstructed garden, the period of change our time today repre·
sents points back to the changes happening at this point in the past. The trans-
formation of the classical "refinement of an Englishman' s garden" (12) inte
the picturesque style of im perfecti on parallels the mathematical developmeOi
that has taken place in the twentieth century :

When your Thomasina was doing malhs it had been the same maths for a couple
of thousand years. Classical. And for a century after Thomasina. Then maths left
the real world behind , just like modern art really. Nature was classical, maths was
suddenly Picassos. But now nature is hav~ng the Jasllaugh. The freaky stuff is turn-
ing out to be the mathematics of the natural world. (44- 45)

Thomasina's discovery of chaos theory is thus not completely accidental

sin ce it is at ti mes of change th at reali zati ons of this kind are poss ibl e. How
ever, Stoppard sho ws as well that it cannot be predicted whether and hoy
these insights come about, and what their influence will be on the future. 34
Stoppard's idea of the garden as one of the structural principles of the pla~
may actually have its origin in Gleick's Chaos. Gleick himself draws parallel
between changes in garden architecture and the view of nature and develop
menrs in mathemati cs:

Appreciati ng the harmonious struclUre of any architec ture is one thing; admiring the
wi ldness of nature is quite another. In terms of aesthetic values, the new mathematics
of fractal geometry brought hard science in tune wi th the peculiarly modem feeling
for untamed, uncivil ized, undomesticated nature. At one lime rain forests, deserts,
bush, and badlands represented al l that society was striving to subdue. If people wante(
aesthetic satisfaction from vegetation, they looked at gardens. As John Fowles put it,
writing of eighteenth-century England: "The period had no sympathy with unregulate(
or primordial nature ... seeing it only as something to be tamed, classified, utilised,
exploited." By the end of the twentieth century , the culture had changed, and now sci·
ence was changing with it. J5

It seems safe to suggest that Gleick not only provided a strong inspiration;
 Chaos Theory in Stoppard's Arcadia 419

source for Arcadia 's concern with chaos theory but also influenced other areas
of content and structure.
Apart from the si mil arities oriented around strange auractors, Stoppard
adds many more connections between the past and the present. Together they
res ult in a close-knit net of relation s brought on the stage in Arcadia which
then , despite covering three different time spheres, still appears as a unit.
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These paralle ls on different scales include such simple things as the appear-
ance of a tortoise in both past and present, but also more complicated ones like
the relationship between the hermi t and Gus. Both are s uspected of either
"genius" or madness and appear as outcasts to the world they live in .J6 As the
audience, however, we know that Thomasina is the true genius of Sidley Park.
The appearance of Gus' namesake Augustus, Thomasina's brother, who looks
just like him (96), further complicates the relalionship. In setting up such a
structure, Stoppard fo llows anoth er principle of chaos theo ry. Gleick stresses
how sets studied in chaos theory "[commingle) compl exity and simpli ci ty.""
Arcadia adheres to thi s combination as well. Since the play circulates around
similar themes and topics in all three time spheres. it is characterized by sim -
plicity. However, the se lf-similarity of the structure is never really an exact
repetition . but reveals endless possibilities of transfonnations and changes
which lead to the incredible complexity of the play. Stop pard thus seems to
have created a true and original fractal image, a structure that co uld be called a
"Stoppard set."

THE PREDI CTA BILITY OF THE PA S T AND THE F UTU RE

In combination with th e theme of chaos theory, Stoppard also addresses the

question of predictability. This "predictability" refers not only to futu re occ ur-
rences, but also to th e possibility of reconstruct in g histori cal events. In 1809
and 18 12 , Sidley Park seems to be looking to wards the future. Thomasina is
discovering new theori es and the garden is changed according to new fash-
ions. In 1993, however, Sidley Park again hosts a diverse gro up of people, but
now most are concerned with the past in one way or the other. Lady Croom
cond ucts archaeological studies in the garden and the family also plans a vi l-
lage celebration in which everyone dresses up in historic cos tumes. Valentine
uses historic data on grouse in his studies on population growth. His position
as representative of scientific scholarship is comrasted by both guests of Sid-
ley Park, Hannah Jarvi s and Bernard Nightingale, who represent literary
study. Their projects are concerned with the romantic period. with Hannah
studying the hi story of the garden at Sidley Park and Bernard being interested
in Lord Byron 's Sidley Park connection. Juxtaposing the study of hi story and
Ihe enactm ent of actual past happenings, Stoppard vividl y illustrates the prob-
lems encountered in attempting to understand and reconstruct historical
events.
 420 SUSANNE VEES-GULANI

In chaotic systems, as pointed out before, the output is detenninistic in the

sense that it completely depends on the conditions set up at the beginning of
the system. The problem is that these initial conditions of nonlinear systems
can never be reconstructed entirely. Peak and Frame clearly illustrate this
problem in a graph:3 8
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linear non-linear

present ----- -- -- ... present --- ---~-------------------

unique past multiple possible pasts

The graph shows how the output of a chaotic system, the present state one
looks at, could have developed from not just one, but several possible past
states. Thus an exact understanding of the past is unlikely. A similar situation
can be observed in Arcadia. Stoppard emphasizes how the infonnation avail-
able in the present can only partly reconstruct the past and often does not suc-
ceed in discovering the initial conditions at all. One difficulty is the sensitive
dependence on initial conditions, which translates in Arcadia to the occur-
rence of small events that have large effects on the future. Lord Byron's
claiming of Augustus's hare (79), for example, leads to his entry into the game
book, which confirms that he actually spent some time at Sidley Park. This is
misinterpreted by Bernard to support his mistaken conclusion that Byron shot
Chater, a poet who resided there at the time. Thus the propagation of uncer-
tainties after the initial incident leads to a false understanding of the past.
Another small incident completely destroys Bernard's theories and will possi -
bly harm his career. One year after Byron's stay at Sidley Park, a pseudo-
botanist called Chater actually managed to discover and describe the dahlia
which was later imported into England. A note by Lady Croom reveals the
botanist and poet Chalcr to be onc and the same person, leaving Bernard
"[f)ucked by a dahlia" (88) since it destroys his theory of Byron having shot
Chater at Sidley Park.
At the same time, Stoppard points out how unreliable even supposedly fac-
tual sources are. Thomasina is simply playing when she draws a hermit into
Noakes's picture book's hermitage, which at that point has not been built yet.
The later fact of Septimus actually becoming a hermit finally leads Hannah to
 Chaos Theory in Stoppard's Arcadia 42 1

conclude, fal sely, that this hermit must have been "[d]rawn in by a later hand"
(25). Similarly, the entry about Lord Byron in the game book does indeed
prove that he was at Sidley Park, but not necessarily that he actually shot a
hare, as the audience knows from Augustus' remark!,9 Stoppard thus empha-
sizes a new way of portraying history. He stresses that historian s' claim to
objectivity because of history's factuality is questionable, a standpoint in
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accordance with that of many scholars concerned wi th the role of historical

discourse. In Th e Writing of History, for example, Michel de Certeau points .
out how "the past is the fiction of the present," since the view of history
depends very heav il y on both the modem tools used to interpret it and one's
personal interests in the subject matter. 40
Stoppard not only shows how unreliable so-called facts can be, but also
humorously illustrates through Bernard how personal interests can influence
one's view of history. Motivated by personal fame and opposing both a scien-
tific methodology and world-view ("I can 't think of anything more trivial than
the speed of light. Quarks, quasars - bi g bangs, black holes - who gives a
shit?" [61]), Bernard relies on his (wrong) "[g]ut instinct"to interpret the evi-
dence he has collected and to fill the gaps that the evidence poses. He defines
this instinct as "[t]he certainty for which there is no back-reference. Because
time is reversed. Tack, tick goes the universe and then recovers itself, but it
was enough, you were in there and you bloody know" (50). However, the sec-
ond law of thennodynamics c1 yarly states that lime moves only forward, or, in
Thomasina's words, thai things that once were mi xed together cannot be
"stir[red] apart" (5). Bernard 's wrong predictions about the past exemplify the
problematic nature of his approach.
Although Bernard is an exaggerated example, intuition is not dismissed
completely. The play also shows that relying only on what appear to be facts
is impossible and can be unreliable. Thus Hannah, who tries to back up every-
thing by proof, is still also using her intuition. And even though, as Anne Bar-
ton points out, "[n]either Hannah nor Nightingale gets everything right, ...
Hannah comes far closer to the truth than her ri val:"41

HANNAH { ... 1The hermit was born in the same year as Septimus Hodge.
VALENTINE Did Bernard bite you in the leg?
HANNAH Don 't you see? [ ... ] The Age of Enl ighlenment banished into the Romantic
wilderness! The geniu s of Sidley Park living on in a hennit's hut!
VALENTINE You don't know that.
HANNAH Oh , but I do. I do. Somewhere there wi ll be something .. . if only I can
find it. (66)

When one understands the course of the world as organized according to the
principles of chaos theory, the mi xture of intuition and hi storical evidence as
an approach to the past becomes possible and acceptable. Intuition can be cor-
 422 SUSANNE VEES-G U LANI

reet because of the self-s imilar structure that connects the past with the
present. Even though nothing ever repeats itself in exactly the same manner,
the play shows how situations and themes can resemble each other at two
different points of the structure. Thus the universe never goes backward,
but at all points of time includes clues about its past states. Intuition, then, is a
useful tool for understanding when it is based on the evidence available. Stop-
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pard, however, never fails to make clear that prediction, no matler which tech-
nique is applied, will always be fragmentary and cannot be guaranteed to be
flawless.
This lesson also holds true for the audience. Since it sees excerpts of both
past and present on the stage, and thus recognizes the many errors in the pre-
dictions of others, it may feel that it resides in the powerful position of being
an authority on both historical and present events. As John Lahr points out,
"We become cosmic detectives, outside time, solving the riddle of hi story
from the clues and connections that we see but the characters, who are caught
in tim e, do not. "42 However, this position must necessarily reveal itself as an
illusion (if not a joke on the spectators by Stoppard). Although the audience
knows more than the people on the stage, their knowledge is still limited. For
example, in th e scenes of both 1993 and 1809 an apple is on the stage. At the
e nd of scene two, Gus "offers {an] apple to HANNAH." At the beginning of
scene three, which is set in [809. Stoppard remarks in the stage directions:
HThere is also Gn apple on the tahle now, the same apple from all appear-
ances" (34-35). A little later the audience sees Septimus picking up the apple
from the table, slicing and eating (35), according to David Guaspari, "an apple
picked 'earlier' in the twentieth century," Guaspari then interprets this inci -
dent as a "sly wink at [the conventional rules .of time and cause]."4J But is this
really the same apple? It appears that way, as Stoppard stresses in his stage
directions. In reality, however, the author simply shows excerpts from the dif-
ferent time periods and not a continuous story. Consequently, the spectators
do not truly know what happened before the passage from 1809 that Stoppard
presents to them on the stage. The apple could have been brought in by a ser-
vant, by Septimus himself, or even by Thomasina. Thus the play in fact obeys
natural laws. At moments like thi s, one can realize the limited access to the
past and the future not only on, but also off stage; however, only if one recog-
nizes one's own fragmentary knowledge of the initial conditions that led up to
the scenes viewed. Again it is made abundantly clear that we live in a world
where the utmost simplicity can nevertheless become too complex for us fully
to comprehend or control.

CONCLUSIONS

When Arcadia hit the stage in 1993, it was a highly successful play that
thrilled audiences and most critics alike both in Great Britain 44 and, a little
 Chaos Theory in Stoppard's Arcadia 423

later, in America. Indeed, Stoppard 's Arcadia has an immediate charm that,
together with its humor, necessarily appeals to the spectator. Already on this
level, the play can be compared to fractal images whose pictures fascinate
people all around the globe. The appeal of the play, like that of these images,
does not get lost as one penetrates the subject deeper and deeper. On the con-
trary. the more one thinks about Arcadia. the more levels and messages one
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discovers. The famous Mandelbrot set at first strikes one as simple, but actu-
ally never stops revealing new and surprising patterns the closer one looks;
Stoppard has created a set of words and content that appeals by the same com-
bination of complexity and simplicity. The author succeeds in creating a bond
between content and structure that gives the playa special sense of unity even
though it actually covers events that happen nearly 200 years apart. Although
Stoppard mainly relies on Gleick as his source for chaos theory, which leads
to a somewhat one-sided view of nonlinear dynamics. the skillful manner in
which he includes these scientific ideas in the play is fascinating.
Since chaos theo ry is one of the central concerns of the characters in Arca-
dia and the structural principle of the content, Stoppard actually explains the
play's structure through its own content. At the same time, the structural orga-
nization reflects back on the content itself, revealing how it ronns a self- simi-
lar structure. In thi s manner Stoppard's play can be seen as a dynamic process,
agai n pointing to c haos theory, which is often understood as a science of
becoming rather than being. Arcadia is thus more than just a story set in a
country house in Derbyshire. Stoppard has created a miniature universe at
Sidley Park whose evolution he lets the audience observe. However, simple
observation is not enough. Upon studying the play, one realizes the limitations
that are contained in the role of the spectator itself. It becomes clear that, even
though predetermined (be it by a playwright or natural processes), it is impos-
sible fully to understand the conditions of one's own role.

NOTES

I James Gleick, Chaos. Making a New Science (New York: Penguin, 1987),6. All
three theories defy elements of Newtonian physics. As a physicist remarks, "Rela-
tivity eliminated the Newtonian illu sion of absolute space and lime; quantum the-
ory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and
chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability." Joseph
Ford, "What is Chaos. That We Should Be Mindful of It?" (preprint, Georgia tnsti-
tute of Tec hnology), 12, quoted in Gleick, 6.
The author would like to thank Professor lames Hurt , University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, for his insightful comments and support in the preparation of
this paper.
2 Obviously, in a case such as Arcadia, this use of chaos theory has been conscious
on the part of the author. However, this does not mean that ideas of chaos theory
 SUSANNE VEES-GULANI

cannot be found in works written before a specific theory was fanned in the sci-
ences. In Chaos under Control: The Art and Science of Complexity (New York:
W.H. Freeman and Company, 1994),366, David Peak and Michael Frame point
out that, since "nature exhibits fractals and chaos. and because literature in some
way reflects nature," fractals and chaos " have occurred (though not, perhaps,
labeled as such) to authors in the past." Examples for explorations of this phenom-
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enon can be found in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Sci-
ence, ed. N. Katherine Hayles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
3 In an interview with David Nathan, Stoppard remarks: " You see, I got tremen-
dously interested in a book called Chaos by James Gleick which is about this new
kind of mathematics. That sounds fairly daunting if one 's talking about a play. I
thought, here is a marvellous metaphor." Tom Stoppard. " In a Country Garden (If
It Is a Garden)," interview by David Nathan, in Tom Stoppard in Conversation, cd.
Paul Delaney (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 263.
4 Richard Hornby, "Mathematical Drama," Hudson Review, 48:2 (1995-96), 279·
5 Ibid., 281.
6 Peak and Frame. 158. See note 2.
7 For instance, Gleick slates, "Now that science is look ing, chaos seems to be every-
where ... A flag snaps back and forth in the wind. A dripping faucet goes from a
steady pauem to a random one" (GJeick, 5, emphasis added). See note I.
8 Peak and Frame, 26.
9 Gleick,227·
10 The image and many related ones can be found in Pl ates 2-8 of Peak and Frame's
excellent introduction to chaos theory. Chapler 7 of the same text (243-75) gives a
description of how this set is generated; it is easy to read yet does not gloss over the
subject's inherent complexity.
II Peak and Frame, 29.
t2 Ibid., 75- 112.
13 In Chance and Chaos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), David
Ruelle attributes the knowledge of this phenomenon to the studies of the French
mathematician Jacques Salomon Hadamard, as well as of the French scientist
Henri Poincare, and stresses that "this knowledge has never been forgotten" among
mathematicians (73-79).
'4 Peak and Frame, 160.
15 Ibid., 158. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions is often described as the
" Butterfly Effect" and connected with the example of how the beating of a butler-
fly's wings can influence the way the weather behaves thousands of miles away
(see, for example, Barbara Riebling, "Remodeling Truth, Power, and Society:
Implications of Chaos Theory, Nonequilibrium Dynamics, and Systems Science
for the Study of Politics and Literature," in After Poststrllctllralism Interdiscipli-
nariry alld Literary Theory, ed. Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling [Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993], 183-84). In reality , though , the term
refers to "[t]hc growth of uncertainty in chaotic phenomena." Peak and Frame, 159.
 Chaos Theory in Stoppard's Arcadia

16 Peak and Frame, 72.

[7 Ibid., [55·
[8 Gleick, [40.
19 Ruelle, 64--65 (see note 13). For a depiction of a strange attractor, see ibid" 62.
20 Peak and Frame, 161-86. A detailed discussion of bifurcation diagram s in this sec-
tion of Peak and Frame 's book includes several diagrams that illustrate the concept
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of bifurcation doubling.
2[ Ibid., [6[.
22 Ibid., 173.
23 Most of the explanations of chaos theory can be found in scene four - not surpri s-
ingly, this scene also marks the cenac in the construclion of the play. See Tom
Stoppard, Arcadia, corrected ed. (London: Faber, 1993),43-52. Subsequent refer-
ences appear parenthetically in the text.
24 Stoppard models Valentine's uuerance closely after Gleick. With respect to the
passage quoted, see Gleick's prologue: "the revo lution in chaos applies to the uni-
verse we see and touch, to objects at human scale. Everyday experience and real
pictures of the world have become legitimate targets for inquiry" (6).
25 Valentine stresses the necessi ty of guessing as well: "You start guessing what the
tunc might be. [... ] You try thi s, you try that, you start to gel something [ ... ] and bit
by bit [ ... J - the lost algorithm !" (46). The use of trial and error reflects Gleick's
point about the Mandelbrot set: "Unlike the traditional shapes of geometry, circles
and ellipses and parabolas, the Mandelbrot sc t allows no shorlcuts. The only way to
see what kind of shape goes with a particular equation is by trial and crror." Gleick,
226.
26 Gleick, 94, loosely quoting Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature
(New York, 1977), r. See also Peak and Frame, 2-3.
27 Valentine points the problem out to Hannah:
"The electronic calculator was what the telescope was for Ga lileo. [... J
[... J There wasn't enough time before. There weren't enough pencils!" (51, inter-
vening dialogue omitted)
28 Valentine 's work with grouse shows how chaos theory is situated beyond the tradi-
tional borders of di sc iplines and is concerned with universal behavior.
29 Gleick, 228.
30 Ibid., [39·
31 Horace Walpole is also mentioned in the past in connection with Lady Croom and
her view of the new garden that will be constructed at Sidley Park ( 13).
32 This difference between creator and analyst is also repealed on other levels: Tho-
masina can be seen as a real discoverer of chaos theory , while Valent ine is
removed from thi s process and can only apply the theory by analyzing data accord-
ing to its principles.
33 John Lahr. " Blowing Hot and Cold: Chaos Meets History in a Brilliant New Play,"
review of Arcadia. by Tom Stoppard, dir. Trevor Nunn, Vivian Beaumont Theatre.
New York, New Yorker ([ 7 April [995), 11 2.
 SUSANNE VEES~GULAN I

34 Stoppard offers an interesting exam ple of a false prediction of the future. Thoma~
si na tell s Septimus: "You will be famous for being my tutor when Lord Byron is
dead and forgotten" (37). But the audience learns later that Thomasina dies young
in a fire and thus turns oul to be "forgouen," whereas Lord Byron becomes one of
the most famous English poets. This example points at both the ironic and the sad
twists that the unpredictable course of history can takc.
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35 Gleick, 117-18, quoling John Fowles, A Maggot (Boslon, 1985), II.

36 Hannah remarks about the hermit: " Peacock says he was suspected of geni us. It
turned out, of co urse, he was off his head. " (27). Similarly, Chloe calls Gus
"genius," in res ponse to which Va lentine remarks: "it's what my mother ca ll s him
- on ly site means it" (33-34, 48).
37 Gleick,221.
38 Peak and Frame, 72, fig. 2.28. From Chaos under Control: The Art and Science of
Complexity by Peak and Frame. © 1994 by W.H. Freeman and Company. Used
with permission.
39 Stoppard uses thi s fact for another humorous dig at Bernard. After having found
ou l that his due l theories were wrong, he takes comfort in the fact that he has at
least discovered four new lines wri tten by Byron. He feels surc that he is right
about the truth of thi s assumption: "as far as I'm concerned [Byron] wrote those
lines as sure as he shot Ihat hare" (89).
40 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Colum~
bia University Press, 1988), 10.
41 Anne Banon, "Twice around the Grounds," review of Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard,
and of Arcadia, Vivian Beaumont Theatre, New York, New York Review of Books
(8 June 1995),30.
42 Lahr, 11 2. See note 33.
43 David Guaspari, "Stoppard's Arcadia," Antioch Review, 54:2 (1996),223.
44 Paul Delaney, editor's introduction to "Plotting the Course of a Playwri ght," inter~
view wi th Tom Stoppard, by Nigel Hawkes, in Tom SlOppard in Conve rsatiol1,
265. See note 3.