“Stark Raving Sane”

Stoppard’s The Invention of Love is the last of the three plays (the other two being The Real Thing and Arcadia) which are usually mentioned when discussing love and romance in Stoppard’s writing. Much like his subject, scholar poet A. E. Housman, Stoppard was frequently considered early in his career to be ‘heartless’ in that his early plays seemed to lack genuine human emotion. In the first two ’love’ plays, romance, love, and sex were openly treated and acknowledged as driving significant parts of the plot. In Invention, however, love is treated with a degree of removal, as something either confined to paper and the written word rather than an active emotion, or in the case of the protagonist’s romantic aspirations, something to be suppressed, denied, and silenced.

For the scholarly characters, love is a constant topic of discussion, but they confine their discussion to the classical works they study; though they laud and praise the beauty and evocativeness of the classical poets’ treatments of love, they do not carry this discussion into their own lives. They are preoccupied with the attempt to capture genuine emotion through the written word – the exact struggle Stoppard, too, is dealing with – but they ignore the genuine emotion in their own lives.

The elderly AEH tells his younger self that the pursuit of truth is in a sense the ultimate happiness, the ultimate good – yet AEH spends the majority of his life suppressing and hiding the truth of his love for Mo Jackson and denying to the world at large the nature of his feelings. While it is understandable that he should hide his love given the views of the time period, it is gut-wrenching to imagine how it must have felt for AEH, so devoted to removing all doubts and discovering every tiny truth in his scholarly work, to have to deny a major component of his identity.

The dialogue between the deceased AEH and his younger self, Housman, is fascinating for a number of reasons. This is a new twist on Stoppard’s characteristic doubling device; he presents the same character at different ages in several other plays, such as Travesties and Arcadia, but here the two selves actually interact and influence each other. AEH’s cynical jabs and pointed remarks actually shape Housman into the person who will eventually become AEH – in a sense, he is creating himself, introducing a kind of time paradox into their dialogues. That assumes, of course, that their dialogues actually take place and that their interactions are not merely a figment of AEH’s imagination or some kind of supernatural under-worldly spectre – which could be the case, given that AEH encounters his younger self while the dead man is traversing the river Styx. The boatman Charon’s remark that the trio of Oxford undergrads have brought their own boat with them seems to suggest that all the characters traveling the same river, the Styx, and therefore are inhabiting some kind of Limbo – whether truly in the afterlife, or all inside the feverish mind of the dying AEH.

Several of the characters preach a kind of ‘carpe diem’ philosophy about seizing what time is given and making the most of it, but it is questionable how many of these characters truly live that philosophy out. Oscar Wilde is one – “better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light,” as he tells AEH, and Wilde is one of the few characters who (claims, at least) to repent nothing and has the fewest regrets.

 As in many other Stoppard plays, there is an underlying discussion of the function of art – in this case, writing. Characters in many of the previous plays have struggled with the question of how to justify art to the starving impoverished mainstream population, how to give value to something essentially useless. AEH claims that the very value of scholarship is in its uselessness:

“Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it’s for the fainthearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn’t matter where on what, it’s the light itself, against the darkness”

AEH and the other Oxford scholars, however, separate their creations, works of scholarly writing, from art, and even set the two up in conflict with each other. They claim there can be no overlap between the two, and the endeavor to keep these two realms separate is what divides AEH into the two different people – “A poet and a scholar…it sounded like two different people” – for whom Charon is waiting at the opening of the play.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Research, Stoppard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.