Revision, Analogy, and the “Problem of Reality” in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and Human Touch

Abstract

Published eight years after the premiere of Copenhagen, his celebrated play about atomic physics, Michael Frayn’s Human Touch (2006) reflects on the epistemological and phenomenological implications of human experience, syntax, and quantum mechanics. Summarily, Frayn posits that reality’s fundamental indeterminacy makes thought, language, identity, culture, and experience possible at all. The book echoes more than Copenhagen’s themes, however, and the pair’s structural similarities invite readers to rethink Copenhagen as a piece of philosophical theatre. The play foregrounds the process of drafting and redrafting, and it stands as a draft of the ideas in the book that soon followed. The book follows suit as it drafts and redrafts its central question through its prodigious length. In conversation with Human Touch, we can read Copenhagen as an exploration of our ability to forge connections between otherwise disparate features of reality (including quantum mechanics). More crucially, Copenhagen demonstrates the pivotal role that theatre plays in the indeterminate epistemology that Frayn espouses in Human Touch. In doing so, Copenhagen embodies an earlier draft of the epistemology Frayn later explicates in the book. In other words, Copenhagen represents a rare example of a thinker working through philosophical ideas on stage before committing them to an argument.