A P.S. to paradox

After the flights of fancy of my previous post, I ought to make it clear that what really interests me about paradox is (1) why were Edwardian writers, particularly George Calderon, so mad on it, (2) is it yet another of the things that puts us off their writing today, and (3) what does the phenomenon add up to? Paradox is an intriguing aspect of what is perceived as the Edwardians’ superficiality. So, committed as I am to re-evaluating the Edwardians through my exploration of George and Kittie’s lives, I have to grapple with paradox.

The most famous paradoxer of the age was George Bernard Shaw. His ‘cleverest’ characters always talk in paradoxes. But this was probably perceived by audiences as just a ‘Socialist’ development of the epigram in Oscar Wilde’s and other Late Victorians’ plays (not to mention Restoration comedy). The element of surprise in Shaw’s ‘outrageous’ paradoxes doubtless provoked gales of laughter, but did anyone take his paradoxes seriously? As my friend Bryan wrote in one of his emails, ‘they are the intellectual equivalent to the old custard-pie-in-the-face gag: it amuses the onlooker but nobody really gets hurt because it’s just froth’. Moreover, Shaw’s clever men talk just like Shaw, whom George plausibly termed a ‘solipsist’.

George’s most successful play, The Fountain, is in many ways a parody of a Shaw play, and in it the Fabian hero Wren spouts paradoxes throughout; in fact his problem and his comedy is that he just can’t stop talking, even as the curtain descends on him at the end. But he also keeps saying things about the Edwardian rich and poor that make sense. Even his paradoxes aren’t just ‘froth’. For example, the words of his that I take as my epigraph to Chapter 10: George Calderon the Dramatist, are:

This general ignorance is the oddest feature of modern life. I knew a case of a temperance mission entirely supported by brewery shares.

The last sentence trips beautifully off the actorial tongue, it sounds witty, it surprises by its Shavian paradox, but perhaps there is something more serious underneath? To quote my mathematical friend again:

I would regard the temperance mission supported by brewery shares as a perfectly logical arrangement, generating a kind of economic negative feedback loop which would be much more stable than alternatives. If the work goes badly, the shares will rise and there will be more resources to beef up the mission; if the work succeeds, the brewery will fail just as the mission’s work is completed. A modern comparison: Cancer Research UK advertises that its scientists are working to put themselves out of a job.

So the paradoxes in George’s full-length plays, The Fountain, Cromwell: Mall o’Monks, and Revolt, are more like Jim Al-Khalili’s P2s and P3s — ‘perceived paradoxes’ and ‘resolvable perceived paradoxes’.

But what I really wrestle with is the problem of George’s self-referential paradoxes, which are P1s in the Al-Khalili classification, i.e. statements ‘constructed in such a way that there really is no way out of the loop’. This type of paradox is at the heart of several of George’s stories and one-act plays. In ‘The Lieutenant’s Heroine’ (1900) kismet (fate, destiny) is proven, disproven, proven, disproven…; in Geminae (1913?) identical twins are identical (one person), aren’t identical, are identical, aren’t identical…; in The Two Talismans (1913/14) character is fate, isn’t fate, is fate, isn’t fate… As Raymond Smullyan says in Alice in Puzzleland (1982), this kind of paradox is akin to saying ‘I know a man who is both five foot tall and six foot tall’. In the case of George’s stories and short plays, it makes them feel curiously empty in the centre. If they just present vicious circles what is the point of them, one asks today?

I have recently come to the conclusion that they are probably products of George’s belief in Taoism (q.v., as they say, along with Raymond Smullyan). George immersed himself in Taoist texts around 1905 and it is possible to find elements of the ancient philosophy in all his subsequent works. The object of creating a play in which the terms of the conflict cancel each other out, would therefore be to prove/suggest that there is a deeper reality (the ‘Tao’) beneath the appearances of the everyday world. This is particularly observable in The Fountain, where Wren refers to himself as ‘the sage’, i.e. the hero of Lao Tsu’s ‘sayings’, and preaches ‘doing nothing’ in order to ‘achieve wonders’ because ‘Progress is Nature’s affair’ — strongly suggestive of the Taoist doctrine of wu wei, ‘action through inaction’. However, this does not make George’s self-referential paradox plays any more likely to appeal to modern audiences.

It may be that in both Shaw and Calderon the paradox is just a means of ‘making strange’ in order to provoke laughter and critical thought simultaneously, and it is only because this Making Strange isn’t part of a whole rationalistic engaged theatre of Alienation Effects, like Brecht’s, that we can’t make sense of it.

Equally, you may think: ‘Give over, Patrick, you’re making ridiculously heavy weather of this, it’s all just Edwardian Fun!’ Hm…well that’s probably how contemporary audiences did take it in George’s plays, but don’t get me started: the Edwardians’ concept of ‘fun’ is as problematical as their love of ‘amateurism’!