Earning Liberties: Travesties And The Importance of Being Earnest

Earning Liberties: Travesties And The Importance ofBeing Earnest NEIL SAMMELLS David Rod has argued in Modern Drama that critics of Stoppard's Travesties have paid insufficient attention to the views on art and politics of Henry Carr, the minor consular official who regales us with his version of life as it most certainly was not in Zurich during the Great War. 1 Carr, Rod insists, rejects the various idealisms of Tristan Tzara, James Joyce and Lenin to present an independent position of his own, founded upon a practical consideration of what art has been and what it has accomplished; Carr contributes tellingly to the debate as Stoppard creates a balance "among the four opposing aesthetic viewpoints presented in the play, a balance that does not tip in Carr's favor even though his memory controls most of the events in the play.,,2 Rod is right to suggest that Stoppard does not allow anyone of his antagonists to win the debate, but his remarks do less than justice to the complexity of Travesties. As important as what is said is how it is said; Rod's notion of a "balance" among the opposing viewpoints does not locate the real centre of Stoppard's dramatic strategies, which is the form of the play itself. It is the paramount achievement of Travesties that it addresses itself to the debate about the nature of art not by means of a spokesman (whether Carr or anyone else) but by its own method of procedure. Many critics, however, have been keen to lobby for James Joyce, to identify his as the voice of Stoppard in the great debate on art and politics.3 Significantly, though, the play first presented itself to Stoppard as a debate between Tzara and Lenin based on the fact that although they were in Zurich at the same time they never met: "This seemed a rather interesting fact of history to keep in one's mind. I never quite forgot it and never quite did anything with it, and then I started working on Travesties." As he did so he became "dimly aware ofJames Joyce's part in all this.,,4 Lenin, of course, calls for a literature that conforms. "Today," he bellows at us, alone on the stage, "literature must become party literature! Down with non-partisan literature! Down with literary Travesties and The Importance ofBeing Earnest 377 supermen!"S His art which must not question but simply obey is directly opposed to the self-conscious delinquency urged by Tzara. The artist, Tzara claims, was the priest-guardian of the magic which first conjured the intelligence from the appetites, putting humanity on the first rung of the ladder to consecutive thought. His own anti-art is a protest against the abject prostitution of this exalted heritage. "Art created patrons and was corrupted," he raves: "It began to celebrate the ambitions and acquisitions ofthe paymaster. The artist has negated himself: paint - eat - sculpt - grind - write - shit" (p. 47). Joyce's deferred entry into the scheme of things does not, of course, necessarily preclude Stoppard's turning to him as a spokesman, as an alternative to the mutual antagonism ofTzara and Lenin. What does preclude it is notjustJoyce's inescapably parodic treatment butthe nature ofthe play itself. The opposition between Tzara and Lenin restates to some extentthat between the conformist realism of Donner and the avant-garde, delinquent gestures of Beauchamp; Stoppard, indeed, adapts many of the speeches from Artist Descending a Staircase to construct the debate in Travesties. Conformism and delinquency are the twin poles between which Stoppard's best drama in general, and Travesties in particular, chooses to function; in investigating that polarity Stoppard needs no spokesman, the play stands up and speaks for itself. Travesties is unabashed in declaring the intricacy of its own design, and its flamboyant cleverness has distressed some of its critics. Kenneth Hurren, for instance, felt there was something intoxicated about Stoppard's achievement on the first night of the original London production. "Everything was gathered together again consummately," he acknowledged of the play's climax, "after the fashion of an amiable drunken actor who trips over a chair and walks through the scenery but...