Jumpers
‘God’ by appointing their ‘spokesman for Agriculture’ (I, p. 28) as Archbishop of Canterbury. The question, therefore, of ‘Is God?’, which George claims to be a reoccurring one, seems only to replay within his own mind. The moral and philosophical beli efs at the core of George’s life are under threat, and so he is driven to justify them by answering this constant, nagging question, and yet he never can. The play is punctuated with his lengthy and often tenuous arguments in favour of faith and moral absolutes, not as a reflection of his incompetence but to show just how desperately he desires to provide some justification for his beliefs in the face of a society hostile to those same principles. The audience certainly sympathizes with his plight, and yet, as with any anti-hero, his flaws are often irritating. His messy argumentation, which he himself describes as ‘necrophiliac rubbish’ (I, p. 16) in a bout of frustration, are often incomprehensible and dull, while he displays a significant lack of empathy in his continued shunning of Dotty, at one time describing her episodes of mania as ‘childish nonsense’ (I, p. 19). George is an anti-hero, and more so a modernist one, as his flaws thwart the pursuit of Reason, the goal of the ‘modernist philosopher’. Indeed, George’s long and chaotic monologues, which might as well be soliloquys as the presence of the silent secretary has very little effect on George nor on the audience, echo the reintroduction of stream-of-consciousness narration present in other modernist texts, such as Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). 9 Other modernist aspects to the play include the absurdity of the c oda, with Archie’s nonsensical speech, such as ‘if goons in mood, by Gad is sin different or banned good, f’r’instance’ (coda, p. 73), as well as the non-sequiturs in dialogue throughout the play. Stoppard also makes use of many postmodernist literary techniques, yet they influence the mood more strongly than the modernist ones. He employs pastiche, combining the ‘ whodunnit ’ murder mystery of McFe e’s death 10 with the tragedy of not only Dotty’s situation as she deteriorates mentally, trapped in an apathetic marriage, but of George, condemned to fruitless ruminations and paralysed in the complexities of his own thought. All this, along with the burgeoning romance between Dotty and Archie and the ironic comedy infused into every line of the play, create a characteristically postmodernist undertone which offers little certainty and assurance to the audience. The irony is comically apparent at times; Stoppard’s precise description of the setting, so that ‘when [the door] is wide open the inside of it is hidden from the audience’, means that the body of McFee, attached to the back of the bedroom door, is clearly visible to the audience when the door is closed and George is not present in the room, but as George enters, the door opens and the body is obscured from his view. This results in him being blissfully ignorant of a corpse, and therefore a murder, even as Bones questions him about it. Crouch, the caretaker, la ments to George that he’d ‘made quite a friend of him’, implying the ‘him’ to be McFee, and yet George assumes he means his missing rabbit, and replies ‘do you real ize she’s [Dotty’s] in there now, eating him?’ (II, p. 67), much to the surprise of Crouch a nd the amusement of the audience. The comedic irony both serves to suggest that McFee’s death is in fact rather meaningless, but also symbolically represents the postmodernist notion of subjective truth, as George, who never actually sees the body, lives in a different, yet equally as authentic, reality. The symposium, ‘in bizarre dream form’ ( coda stage direction) is an example of postmodernist magic realism and characterize s the final atmosphere of the play as one of confusion and futility. So, Stoppard’s use of techniques belonging to both modern and postmodern drama create a play with significant modernist character but with an undeniably postmodernist undercurrent.
9 Stream of consciousness . 10 See Hinden 1981: 5.
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