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yes, think of a woman in a house of net
that strains the oxygen out of the air
thickening the night to Indian ink
or think if you prefer
- Flora Crewe1
In 1972, Tom Stoppard was the first contributor to a series of essays focusing "on the interplay, if any, between `Doers and Thinkers."" In his article, Stoppard, the quintessential Doer, defends the art of the play against the "pointless analysis" of Thinkers who inhabit "academic circles." Damning with no praise at all the "academic preoccupation with the creative work of other people" (emphasis added), Stoppard defines the separate spheres relegated to playwrights (that is, creative artists who work for a living) and professors, "the vast oracular Lego set of Lit Crit with its chairs and lectureships, its colloquia and symposia, its presses, reprints, offprints, monographs, reviews, footnotes and fireside chats...." For Stoppard, "writing-aboutwriting" is merely the "pffttzzz," not the Coke, "not the real thing," and he aims his satirical barbs at the cabal of professors who "continually acknowledge each other with endorsements or rebukes" and at the purveyors of "footnotes" and "monographs" who seek reflected fame. "[T]he habit of making undeniable but gratuitous connexions is the measles of critical diseases," Stoppard asserts.2
Surprisingly, Stoppard waited until I991 to skewer in a creative work those purveyors of footnotes and monographs. In his brilliantly poetic radio drama In the Native State, Stoppard creates a "voice-over" pompous "Thinker" who provides nearly useless connections and, occasionally, misleading "notes" for his Selected Letters of Flora Crewe, and therefore for the "text" of the play. Pike - "age not crucial (thirty-five to fifty-five), educated American, Southern accent"3- "sound[sJ rather like Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind" (NS 28). Asserting professorial authority every time he speaks, Pike is a flat character representing Lit Crit at its most fatuously oracular. He appears in only four of the nineteen scenes and has approximately twenty speeches, many of which are one-line interruptions to inform listeners that, for example, "The Queen's Elm" is "A public house in the Fulham area of Chelsea" (NS 31), or that "all Sikhs are named Singh (however, not all people named Singh are Sikhs)" (NS 63). His tone is smarmy; his insights correspond perfectly to the academic "pffttzzz"...