Film and Reflexivity

[Hershom K. Bazerman]

TS seems to have too much clever and too little substance to be all that 
related to Pynchon. He does have much the same type of wordplay, although 
his is a bit more literary. He also incorporates science in much the same 
way (Hapgood, Arcadia). Also, in Rosencrantz&Guildenstern (Which I think 
is the most emotive of his plays), R&G seem very related to Slothrop 
(Whose initials are also TS...). That helplessness is what IMHO lets you 
connect to R&G much more than to his other plays. But, if you look more 
at style, and less at extremely broad generalizations, Stoppard is obscure 
for the sake of obscurity (The suitcase switching in Hapgood) rather than 
for artistic merit. It's all witty reparte, but the plots and the 
interactions (esp. in his more recent "naturalistic" plays) are extremely 
simple, almost mere contrivances to keep the characters talking. TS 
himself has said that he often doesn't care which character does the 
talking, because the ideas are what's important. TRP on the other hand 
pays much more attention to his individual characters, down to the 
smallest detail.

--bazerman at cs.ucsb.edu

On Tue, 6 Feb 1996, Teen Age Riot wrote:

> While we're still in this mood of purging our thoughts of all other artists
> Pynchonian, lemme throw another name out, more out of circumstance than of
> strong correlation, but an interesting comparison nonetheless:  How about
> Tom Stoppard?  He's here at Penn this week for an assortment of festivities,
> and I'm going to hear him speak tomorrow on "The Landscape of Late
> Modernism"(4 pm at the Annenberg School Theatre if any of you are in the
> Philadelphia area), and it got me thinking.  He cowrote the script for
> _Brazil_, which we seem to agree smacks quite a bit of TRP. While I hate to
> attach any sort of blanket statement to his work, as he's way prolific, he
> has tackled certain themes which p-listers might find familiar: the role of
> the individual driven by larger forces, the interplay of science, art, and
> history, etc.  And don't forget that all-important first name factor. 
> 
> Al
> 
>   
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