Sir Tom Stoppard, the early plays.
9. Travesties
Sir Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties (1974) might be seen as a return to the problems he dealt with right at the beginning of his career in A Separate Peace (1960) and Enter a Free Man (1963). In these plays the ‘heroes’ lived in a world of their own so separate from the real world that they were unable to function in society. In Travesties, with Dogg’s Our Pet (1971) as a stepping stone, this simple opposition between the individual and the rest of the world is scrapped in favour of a philosophical standpoint which asserts that, to an extent, every individual lives in a world of his own.
A ‘real world′, separate from our perception and interpretation of it may or may not exist. But the term applies to what seem to be areas of common experience, about which we seem to be able to communicate in a more or less common language.
Travesties is ostensibly concerned with artists, and their relationship with the world they live in. As we saw in A Separate Peace, and Enter a Free Man (in which being an inventor can be equated with being an artist), it is one of Stoppard’s basic assumptions that the artist creates a world of his own, and, to an extent, lives in it as an alternative to the real world. In Travesties we have two artists, Tristan Tzara and James Joyce, with very different approaches to their lives and their art. For Tzara, the Dadaist, art is a revolutionary act in itself, breaking down our usual assumptions about the world, and Art.
‘Tzara (To Joyce): You’ve turned literature into a religion and it’s as dead as all the rest. It’s an overripe corpse and you’re cutting fancy figures at the wake. It’s too late for geniuses: Now we need vandals and desecrators, simple minded demolition men to smash centuries of baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple, and thus finally, to reconcile the shame and the necessity of being an artist!’ (p.62.)
For James Joyce art is justifiable for its own sake, operating on a level above political or social revolution.
‘As an artist, naturally I attach no importance to the swings and roundabouts of political history.’ (p.50)
Lenin is a third point in the argument, asserting that art is only valid as an aid to political revolution.
‘Lenin: Today, literature must become party literature. Down with non-partisan literature: Down with literary supermen. Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, a cog in the Social Democratic mechanism.’ (p.85)
One could pursue the arguments about the relationship between art and society through the play; this is one level on which the play functions. But more importantly we are given an overview of the whole problem, and here Stoppard uses the stage to dramatise a concept, by the fact that we are seeing the events of the play through the distorting medium of Henry Carr’s memory.
We are introduced to this dimension of the play by having Carr as narrator, and reminded of it by the repeated ‘time slips’, in which a scene is played two or three times, slightly differently each time as Carr’s memory plays tricks on him. The egocentric Carr’s best memory of the war years in Zurich is that he played a leading role in Joyce’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Thus the events of Travesties are structured around the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest.
The play takes its title from the fact that Carr’s memory tends to oversimplify the characters he met, and hence they are often seen as travesties of themselves. For example in one scene the dialogue falls into the form of limericks, and in another into the form of question and answer, travestying Joyce’s techniques in Ulysses. The point of this is that while Joyce, Tzara and Lenin are each ‘living in their own world’, asserting that their view of reality is more valid than the others, the whole picture presented to the audience is itself only Carr’s view of reality.
For the first few minutes of the play not a single sentence of comprehensible English is spoken. Tzara is picking words from a hat, Lenin is speaking Russian, and Joyce is speaking the language of Ulysses. To the audience it is incomprehensible nonsense, until Henry Carr arrives on stage to begin his narrative. The implication suggested by this dramatic structure is that ‘objective reality′ is incomprehensible without somebody there to comprehend it; and the person comprehending reality will distort it according to the limitations on his ability to perceive, and the personal interpretation he puts upon what he perceives. The logical implication of this is that we all live in our own private reality. We are our own narrators, and we distort reality just as Henry Carr does. And our attempts to re-create or assert our view of reality will be more or less a travesty of objective reality.
It is interesting that his final statement on this theme rests on a concept of ‘relativity’; that ‘reality’ is relative, depending on the observer, in the same way that the fate versus free will, and order versus chaos themes ended with the concept of ‘perspective’. They are, fundamentally, the same concept, relativity being a more sophisticated development of ‘perspective’. It is also interesting to note the similarity between these conclusions and the prevailing scientific doctrine of the day: Einstein’s theory of Relativity.
Travesties is a play about the inescapable subjectivity of all Human experience, and hence of any human concept of ‘reality′. For Stoppard it seems to mark the end of a line of enquiry which began in 1960 with A Separate Peace.
In this cycle of works Stoppard is reflecting the climate of uncertainty which affects us all in this age of relativity.
‘Dotty: You′re probably still shaking from the four-hundred-year-old news that the sun doesn’t go round you
George: We are all still shaking. Copernicus cracked our confidence, and Einstein smashed it for if one can no longer believe that a twelve-inch ruler is always a foot long, how can one be sure of relatively less certain propositions, such as that God made the Heaven and the Earth.’ (Jumpers)
Read the full version of this essay at:
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Ian Mackean runs the site literature-study-online.com/ literature-study-online.com, which features a substantial collection of English Literature Resources and Essays, and where his sites on Books Made Into Movies, and Short Story Writing can also be found. He is the editor of The Essentials of Literature in English post-1914, published by Hodder Arnold. When not writing about literature or short story writing he is a keen amateur photographer, and has made a site of his photography at photo-zen.com/ photo-zen.com