The English writer CP Snow argued in 1959 that modern intellectual life has divided into two camps. Literary intellectuals were on one side and scientists were on the other, creating what Snow called “a gulf of mutual understanding”. He worried that this division harmed public life because each group rejected what the other knew and valued. Many readers have seen Tom Stoppard’s play arcadiaAnd especially now after his death on November 29, as a work that examines that divide. However, a closer look reveals arcadia Actually refutes Snow’s thesis.
The play moves between two periods in the same English country house, Sidley Park. In the early 1800s, a young girl named Thomasina Coverley studied with her teacher, Septimus Hodge. In the late 20th century, a group of researchers try to piece together what happened in those years: they are particularly interested in a solitary man who later lived in a small lodge on the property.
In the 19th-century scenes, the divide between “cultures” has yet to be smoothed over – and yet viewers can already feel the pressures that will later fuel Snow’s diagnosis. Septimus is a classical teacher versed in Latin, poetry, and Newtonian mechanics. Thomasina is his pupil, but she is also an early scientist in everything but name, having invented the first methods for calculation and thought about why some processes in nature could not be reversed. She reads poets and does advanced calculations at the same table.
Tom Stoppard at a performance of Arcadia in New York City in 2011. , Photo Credit: Getty Images
The 20th century aspect of the play comes closer to Snow’s picture of two opposing camps. Valentine Coverly is a scientist who works on mathematical models and is an advocate of contemporary number-driven work. He writes code and discusses chaos theory. Bernard, the literary scholar, cares about style and pretentiousness and he openly satirizes physics and cosmology, an approach very close to that described by Snow. Hannah, a historian of ideas, sits between them. She is not a scientist but she insists on the evidence and is skeptical of Bernard’s romantic story.
Snow’s photo helps explain why those modern scenes feel like a clash of viewpoints rather than just personalities. Bernard symbolizes a “traditional culture” that marginalises science to questions of meaning while Valentine symbolizes the kind of scientific literacy that Snow thought necessary in public life but lacked.
search for meaning
But arcadia Doesn’t just reinstall Snow. This shows that simple opposition falls apart when you look closer. Thomasina’s work is pure mathematics yet inspired by curiosity about rabbits and rice pudding. Septimus is a learned man who spends his later life on long, lonely calculations. Within the play’s local legend, the “Preacher” first appears as a familiar Romantic figure – a half-mad sage who has withdrawn from society to contemplate non-worldly questions. It’s exactly the kind of picture that Snow would have grouped with poets and saints, but what “Preacher” really leaves behind is a carefully drawn pattern of numbers. Stoppard’s choice thus shows that the intense, solitary search for meaning can take not only literary or philosophical forms, but also mathematical forms.
Dan Stevens as Septimus Hodge and Jessie Cave as Thomasina Coverley in the production of arcadiaDirected by David LeVox at the Duke of York’s Theater in London. , Photo Credit: Getty Images
Actually, the way arcadia Its use of setting – a single room – also cuts across Snow’s gap between cultures. On the same table in the room are Thomasina’s equations, Septimus’s translation, the Valentine Code printout, Hannah’s notebook, and Bernard’s lecture script. This Stoppardian staging is not accidental, but emphasizes that these activities share a physical and social space. Thematically, too, both historical and modern stories deal with similar problems: incomplete evidence and the difficulties of recovering the past.
Readers and critics have also linked the play to late 20th-century ideas about anarchy and irreversibility. In his 1987 book Chaos: Creating a New ScienceFor example, American author James Gleick introduces readers to new ways scientists describe complex behavior. (Stoppard has said that this book inspired him to write arcadia.) “Gleick wrote about amazing mathematical entities called strange attractors and fractals and, importantly, how these ideas were not limited to physics or mathematics. They shaped how people thought about weather, populations, even the behavior of dripping faucets. For Gleick, anarchy was a set of tools that, once mature, could be spun into different fields. This is exactly the kind of movement that Sidley Park Runs in short form.
A scene from David Levox’s production of Tom Stoppard arcadiaAt the Duke of York Theater in London, 2009. , Photo Credit: Getty Images
In his 1984 book order out of chaosBelgian chemist Ilya Prigogine and Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers moved in a different direction, as University of Sheffield scholar Gemma Curto found last year. Prigogine and Stengers argued that modern physics and chemistry have forced science to take time and immutability seriously. Many older theories considered the most basic laws to be timeless and reversible, and marginalized questions of chaos. But Prigogine and Stengers emphasized that processes that cannot be reversed and systems that are far from equilibrium are actually at the center. And from this he concludes that scientific work does not lead to a single, separate view of reality. Instead, it is an ongoing, historical interaction between humans and the world they study. Scientific concepts emerge at particular moments in response to particular problems, then spread into the broader culture.
no two cultures
In this background it becomes clear that arcadiaTalk of entropy and chaos is filtered through mathematics lessons, landscape design, literary criticism, and local legend. They’re all part of how its characters debate about taste, responsibility, and loss, exactly the kind of cross-field journey Gleick described and the historical circulation Prigogine and Stengers described. They show that concepts born in physics and mathematics are not destined to live in a sealed box. Instead, if they are allowed, they can become part of a shared cultural vocabulary that shapes how people talk about time and history and change.
Thus Snow’s concept persists arcadia By sharpening the modern-day conflicts between Bernard, Hannah and Valentine, where the fault line between literary performance and quantitative modeling is clear – and by providing a useful contrast with 19th-century material, where that line has not yet hardened and Thomasina and Septimus still inhabit a mixed intellectual world.
At the same time, the way Stoppard handles the work of “the hermit” and Thomasina undermines the idea that “science” equates to cold, external order while “humanity” equates to passion and interiority. The core of the play runs through a set of calculations that never reach their intended audience, as if to say that the solitary search for meaning can also be mathematical and literary. in what sense, arcadia Uses Snow’s division to outline their conflicts but ultimately pushes against it, showing that the ways in which people seek understanding cannot be clearly separated in the two cultures.
mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in
published – December 04, 2025 03:05 PM IST