Tom Stoppard's Jumpers

Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers (1972) is as absurd and delightful as modern plays get, barring some of Beckett. It is also as satirical. In Jumpers, academic philosophy is the prime target, represented in miniature by logical positivism, a school of philosophy that tried, through the development of an ideal language, to get to the bottom of reality. The play, wonderfully enough, has no basis in reality, for it is constantly crowded out by acrobatic scholars, high jinks, an inner play, and an assortment of two-dimensional characters — by all of which it masterfully proves its point. In exposing and ridiculing the absurdities of logical positivism, Stoppard shows how academic philosophy in general, often obsessively preoccupied with the nature of reality, tends to be blind to it.

The play’s main narrative — a detective story revolving around a murder — is never actually resolved. Instead, it is continually deferred by the insistent questioning of human action, values, and beliefs. The act of murder itself is subject to epistemological interrogation: How do we know it is wrong? How do we know it isn’t something else, like an expression of the “antisocial”? In this dystopian world, where the tenets of logical positivism constitute a normative world-view, Stoppard deftly shows its implications on human experience and perception. Indeed, the true reductio ad absurdum is the triumph of irony, for in the process of determining reality with linguistic precision (“gymnastics”), one strays further and further away from it. In the court of philosophers, something as obviously wrong and deviant as murder may never be prosecuted, because it is never “adequately” defined.