Tom stoppard, p.27
Tom Stoppard, page 27
What is the relation between belief and morality? In a context of cultural instability and scepticism, can the existence of God be proved, and a claim be made for universal moral values? For a writer who was not conspicuously religious or moralising, whose default position was uncertainty and ambivalence, and who wanted above all to entertain his audience, putting these questions on stage was a major, self-made, intellectual challenge. And, once aired, these questions never went away. His characters were still arguing over them, thirty years later, in The Hard Problem.
But to describe Jumpers as an argument about God and morality—which it is—gives a wildly misleading impression of it as a play. Jumpers is showbiz incarnate: tricksy, hilarious, flamboyant, startling. It does as many things at once as it can: slapstick bedroom farce with a flash of naked bottom, situational comedy of errors, split-screen double act, musical, circus, murder mystery, domestic marital drama, dream sequence, futuristic fantasy, surrealistic nonsense play. It uses songs, moonscapes, trapezes, gymnastics, television screens, tape recordings, optical illusions, swinging doors, sudden blackouts, a revolve (where obtainable), a bow and arrow and a tortoise. David Leveaux, who did the 2003 revival of Jumpers, says there is something “gloriously hallucinatory” about the play. Like its acrobats, or its men on the moon, it defies gravity. But gravity is in it.
It starts with a baffling scenario, like After Magritte: What on earth are we watching? There is some kind of victory party going on, with a Master of Ceremonies and a glamorous and half-drunk chanteuse who is cracking up and can’t remember her songs, all of which involve the moon. Offstage there’s a pianist and other musicians. There’s a daring young woman on a flying trapeze who is doing a striptease, and a porter in a white coat serving drinks, unaware that he keeps getting between her and her audience at critical moments. The singer’s husband is in the room next door, phoning the police under a false name, with some difficulty, to complain about the noise in his own house. (“My name is Wittgenstein…Oh, good God—‘W’ as in Wagner, ‘I’ as in id…no I D, ‘D’ as in dog…bow-wow…”) Then, bounding and tumbling onto the stage, there’s a troupe of (rather incompetent) yellow-suited acrobats, who turn themselves into a human pyramid. A shot suddenly rings out, the pyramid implodes, and a dying man clings to the singer and covers her dress with blood. The Master of Ceremonies reappears in her bedroom, identifies the dead man and leaves, promising to return and sort everything out. A picture of astronauts landing on the moon comes up on her giant TV screen. It’s the next day. The husband is dictating a lecture on philosophy to his silent secretary, last night’s girl on the trapeze, but he has the wrong first page: “Secondly!” he begins. In the next room, his wife is calling out, “Help! Murder!”
Stoppard loves this teasing trick of “ambushing” his audience, putting “Secondly” first, plunging us into a “what was that?” moment which then gets a more-or-less logical explanation. Because Jumpers is a play about belief and proof, we keep being asked if seeing is believing and whether we can trust the evidence of our own eyes and ears. If Archie, Master of Ceremonies, University Vice-Chancellor, celebrated ladies’ man, psychiatrist, dandy, gymnast (trampoline his speciality), fixer, logical positivist and part-time coroner, is constantly found in a compromising position with Dotty in her bedroom, does that mean he’s her lover? If we see a huge grainy shot of a pitted landscape on the giant screen, is that the surface of the moon, no longer distant or mysterious, or Dolly’s glamorous skin in unromantic close-up? If, when the besotted Inspector enters the fallen star’s bedroom, the sound effects are a loud animal bray and the noise as of “a trumpet falling down a flight of stone stairs,” what are we really hearing? When George stands on a chair to reach up to the top of a cupboard and fetches down a dead hare impaled with an arrow, then steps fatally onto his tortoise while Dotty sings a romantic popular song in the next room, and falls to the floor weeping, how has this state of affairs come about? When he opens the door to Inspector Bones “holding a bow and arrow in one hand and a tortoise in the other, his face covered in shaving foam,” what is the Inspector to make of it? Inspector Bones, who’s in the baffled position of Charlie in Dogg’s Our Pet, the Inspector in The Real Inspector Hound or Foot of the Yard in After Magritte, certainly has his work cut out making sense of the evidence, not least because he’s blinded by his star-struck passion for Dotty, and is exceptionally boneheaded:
George: Yes, I’m something of a logician myself.
Bones: Really? Sawing ladies in half, that sort of thing?
Logician or magician? Acrobats or philosophers? The play’s key comic strategy is to make metaphors literal. The fable of the hare and the tortoise requires a real hare and a real tortoise, George’s unfortunate pets, Thumper and Pat. Metaphors for thinking and arguing—hitting the bull’s eye, shooting an argument full of holes, splitting hairs—are demonstrated, ineptly, with a real bow and arrow. The metaphorical moon, subject of a million love songs and romantic poems, has become all too real. The philosophers—with one exception—are all jumping gymnasts.
Bones: Who are these acrobats?
George: Logical positivists, mainly, with a linguistic analyst or two, a couple of Benthamite Utilitarians…lapsed Kantians and empiricists generally…and of course the usual Behaviourists…a mixture of the more philosophical members of the university gymnastics team and the more gymnastic members of the Philosophical School. The close association between gymnastics and philosophy is I believe unique to this university and owes itself to the Vice-Chancellor, who is of course a first-rate gymnast, though an indifferent philosopher.
(Bones stares at him and then walks into the study and sits down like a man who needs to sit down.)
Jumpers is a topsy-turvy nonsense play, culminating in a dreamlike coda, a mock seminar or trial, possibly George’s nightmare, in which the language of philosophy, already pretty far-fetched, turns into gibberish. As in a high-wire balancing act, unreality and absurdity are sustained all through. But at the same time we need to be taken in, and we have to mind.
The characters are partly caricatures: absent-minded unworldly academic philosopher; gorgeous musical star who’s having a breakdown; sinister Machiavellian villain pulling the strings; buffoonish Dogberry of a policeman speaking in murder-mystery clichés; comically discreet servant who turns out to be the cleverest man in the room. They have caricature names, too: “Dotty,” “Jumper,” “Bones,” “Crouch.” But they also have to behave like human beings and seem plausible and believable. The dialogue is fizzing with puns, wordplay, running gags, misunderstandings, quick-fire repartee, one-liners and breathtaking monologues. But people also speak of feelings and emotions, and if you shoot them they bleed. At certain points, the audience stops laughing.
Stoppard describes Jumpers, when asked, as “a marriage between a play of ideas and a farce,” a combination of “satirical elements and melodramatic elements” underpinned by “displays of mock erudite philosophy, philosophical jokes, all kinds of jokes”—or a play about a man who steps on a tortoise. The jokes, by a writer who likes difficult intellectual specialist fields and has no academic training, are about “academics squabbling,” the thought processes of linguistic philosophy, “which should occupy the position in life similar to that of collecting labels off triangular pieces of cheese,” and the helpless incompetence of high-minded intellectuals in matters of life and death.
George’s very name is a joke. He has the misfortune of sharing it with one of Britain’s best-known early-twentieth-century moral philosophers, G. E. Moore, who like him was an “intuitionist” and believed that “goodness was a fact,” though unlike him did not believe in God, and “whether or not from intuition, was never in when I called.” A mild protest about his use of the names George and Dotty Moore was made on behalf of G. E. Moore’s widow, Dorothy Moore, and Stoppard wrote apologetically to her:
My own George makes a great fuss about not being the real George Moore, a fact which he finds painful…there is no danger of anyone in the audience assuming that the real Dorothy Moore cavorts around in the outrageous manner of Diana Rigg…I admire your late husband enormously, and I believe he would not have been unsympathetic to the dilemma of “George Moore.”
Our George Moore’s branch of philosophy, according to his opponents, is also a joke. He hopes “to set British moral philosophy back forty years, which is roughly when it went off the rails.” His career is pathetic, as Dotty frequently points out. He never wrote his masterpiece, The Concept of Knowledge, because some other obscure philosopher stole his title, and all the other good titles had already gone: “Ryle bagged ‘The Concept of Mind’ and Archie bagged ‘The Problem of Mind’ and Ayer bagged ‘The Problem of Knowledge.’” His Chair in Moral Philosophy is about the lowest you can go: “Only the Chair of Divinity lies further below the salt.” He “cuts a ludicrous figure in the academic world” as the last “tame believer,” kept on show like the stained glass in what is now the university gymnasium.
George’s enormous, dishevelled, rhetorical monologue is a comical tour de force, something like Lucky’s astounding speech in Waiting for Godot. It also owes something to Václav Havel’s 1968 play, The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, which has a social scientist dictating a confused lecture to his secretary. George’s lecture is also being dictated to a silent secretary in the teeth of numerous interruptions. It is meant for that evening’s university symposium on “Man—good, bad, or indifferent?” (The whole of Jumpers takes place, like an Aristotelian tragedy, in twenty-four hours and in one setting.) It’s a pastiche of the language of moral philosophy, in the style of Beyond the Fringe (where Jonathan Miller sent up A. J. Ayer). But the particular, painful, joke about George is that this unstoppably loquacious man is unable to say exactly what he means. He “can’t seem to find the words…or rather, the words betray the thoughts they are supposed to express.” When he does find the words, he seems to himself to be reducing “a complex and logical thesis to a mysticism of staggering banality.”
What George is trying to prove, though, is a serious matter. As he keeps asking: “Does God exist?” “Is God?” Or rather “Are God?”—since there seem to be two of Him, a God of creation and a God of goodness, “to account for moral values,” who don’t seem logically connected. Dotty asks the question more simply:
George: But when we place the existence of God within the discipline of a philosophical inquiry, we find these two independent mysteries: the how and the why of the overwhelming question: —
Dotty (Off): Is anybody there?
George (Pause): Quite.
George can’t speak as directly as Dotty. Instead, he ties himself up in elaborate conundrums. He sets out to refute, with bow and arrow, Zeno’s famous paradox of the flight of the arrow (as recorded by Aristotle), which states that at any given instant, breaking its flight down arrow-length by arrow-length, you cannot tell if it is moving or not. The arrow, at every infinitesimal instant, is just where it is. It follows, according to Zeno, that the arrow never moves. The logical conclusion, according to George, would be that the arrow never reaches its target, and “St. Sebastian died of fright.” (Why Zeno claimed that an arrow which is apparently in motion never moves, obviously a false claim if we believe our senses, is still a bit of a mystery.) Similarly, George proposes to demonstrate the story of the tortoise and the hare, using his two pets (but where is Thumper?), which he has confused with Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, whereby if the tortoise gets a head start and Achilles runs, however fast, to the spot the tortoise just left, he can never catch it up.
Why does George need to air these ancient arguments about motion and time? Because Stoppard, like George (and like Beckett, who also cites Zeno in Endgame), is fascinated, in his thinking and his theatrical inventions, by what makes up the here and now, and by the speed and movement of time. And also because George is trying to work out whether it is possible to think back through an infinite series of moments to a “First Cause,” point zero, so as to prove the existence of God. He wants to argue that God can be “logically inferred from self-evident premises.” Just as a perfect circle can be inferred from a polygon even if you’ve never seen a circle (keep drawing a polygon again and again, repeatedly doubling the number of its sides, and eventually you arrive at a circle) so the unknowable existence of God can be inferred from what we do know and can prove.
What we do know and can prove, George argues, sidestepping from belief to ethics, is that “good and evil are metaphysical absolutes,” though he knows that such claims make him into a crank. He has to depend on intuition and instinct, forms of “irrationality.” “What is honour? What are pride, shame, fellow-feeling, generosity and love? If they are instincts, what are instincts?…Whence comes this sense of some actions being better than others?—not more useful, or more convenient, or more popular, but simply pointlessly better? What, in short, is so good about good?” The possibility of belief in God is merged into intuitions about human goodness. This is summed up, with feeling, in a mundane modern image:
And yet I tell you that, now and again, not necessarily in the contemplation of rainbows or newborn babes, not in extremities of pain or joy, but more probably ambushed by some quite trivial moment—say the exchange of signals between two long-distance lorry-drivers in the black sleet of a god-awful night on the old A1—then, in that dip-flash, dip-flash of headlights in the rain that seems to affirm some common ground that is not animal and not long-distance lorry-driving—then I tell you I know—I sound like a joke vicar, new paragraph.
Stoppard usually says that “the play…is an argument between two points of view, both of which I can see virtue in.” But he does come out on George’s side in interviews:
Are you religious?
TS: Well, I keep looking over my shoulder. When I am asked whether I believe in God, my answer is that I don’t know what the question means. I approve of belief in God and I try to behave as if there is one, but that hardly amounts to faith.
The fashion of the time is against George: he is lost in a universe of technology, relativism and rationalism. His more powerful opponents argue that anything that cannot be proved through common sense and reason is nonsense. According to the Jumpers, led by the chief empiricist, Archibald Jumper, and by Duncan McFee, the Jumper who was shot—possibly because he was on the verge of recanting his rationalist position—there are no absolutes, or universal moral values, let alone a God. “Things and actions, you understand,” as Dotty explains to George, parroting Archie, “can have any number of real and verifiable properties. But good and bad, better and worse, these are not real properties of things, they are just expressions of our feelings about them.”
Stoppard is not making any, or much, of this up. When George protests against McFee’s argument that all behaviour is socially conditioned and all concepts of beauty and virtue are products of evolution and environment (never mind McFee’s fictional example of Tarzan, who, brought up among apes, wishes he looked less like a human), he is really taking on B. F. Skinner, whom Stoppard called “a highly provocative fascinating intelligent brilliant wrong-headed oaf.” Skinner proposed that behaviour is controlled by rewards and punishments, and that “moral judgments do not have an absolute validity but rather are a means of avoiding or preventing socially undesirable types of behaviour and action.”
The moral relativism of that school of psychology links to Stoppard’s main philosophical bugbear. By 1972, logical positivism was nothing new. “I was attacking a dodo.” It dated back to the 1920s and 1930s, and had long been disputed, for instance by the philosopher C. E. M. Joad, who lends George some of his arguments. But in the 1970s it was still being taught in philosophy courses, alongside newer versions of moral relativism in disciplines like literary theory and sociology. And, even if Jumpers seems to be taking place in some vaguely futuristic universe, George is an old-fashioned philosopher.
It’s funny that George tells the police his name is Wittgenstein, because Wittgenstein powerfully influenced the Vienna School of logical positivists, who maintained that “only propositions concerned with matters of fact or with logical relations between concepts are meaningful.” (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” was Wittgenstein’s famous phrase.) Other propositions, for instance to do with ethics or religion, have “emotional or exhortatory but not cognitive content: they lack sense.” All propositions other than those of “natural science, logic and mathematics” are thus “nonsensical.”
The boldest English proponent of this school was A. J. Ayer, whose youthful book Language, Truth and Logic (1936) is a main source for the Jumpers (and some of whose mannerisms Michael Hordern picked up in his performance as George, perhaps via their mutual friend Jonathan Miller). Ayer argued that “to assert that there is a non-empirical world of values, or that men have immortal souls, or that there is a transcendent God, is literally senseless.” “Ethical judgements…have no objective validity whatsoever.” George explains this line of thought to a disbelieving Inspector Bones.
George: He thinks good and bad aren’t actually good and bad in any absolute or metaphysical sense…The point is it allows him to conclude that telling lies is not sinful but simply anti-social.
Bones: And murder?
George: And murder, too, yes.
Bones: He thinks there’s nothing wrong with killing people?
George: Well, put like that of course…But philosophically, he doesn’t think it’s actually, inherently wrong in itself, no.
George’s comment on this always gets a big laugh: “Well, he’s completely mad, of course. They all are.” But making that point doesn’t mean he will win the argument.
