The Optical Allusion: Perception and Form in Stoppard's Travesties

The Optical Allusion: Perception and Form in Stoppard's Travesties JOHN WILLIAM COOKE What is pure art according to the modem idea? It is the creation of an evocative magic, containing at once the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself. Charles Baudelaire He thought he saw an Argument That proved he was the Pope: He looked again, and found it was A Bar of Mottled Soap. "A fact so dread," he faintly said, "Extinguishes all hope!" Lewis Carroll STRUCTURING "REALITY": STOPPARO'S MAKERS Early in Tom Stoppard's novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, a character comments, "I look around me and I recoil from such disorder. We live amidst absurdity, so close to it that it escapes our notice.... Since we cannot hope for order let us withdraw with style from the chaos.'" Stoppard likes chaos simply because the mind hates it, will not stand for it, can only hope in the best of worlds to "withdraw with style" from it. Travesries is Stoppard's theater of chaos: snatches of songs, dialogue in limericks, patches of Shakespeare and Joyce, laborious reenactments of Lenin's speeches, crackbrained soliloquies from a senile old man, Zurich during World War I, all shoehorned into a simulacrum of The Imparlance ofBeing Earnest. Our problem is that we are attracted to this chaos; we cannot withdraw from it any more than we can JOHN WILLIAM COOKE withdraw from life's seeming randomness. We cope by trying to whip chaos into shape, make it "understandable." One critic exemplifies this urge by stating, with apparent security, that the theme of Travesties is "uncertainty and confusion ... "" but that is like saying the theme of Macbeth is "murder." "Uncertainty and confusion" is not the theme but rather the raw material from which the story draws its energy. The taming ofthis sort of chaos demands that we alter our critical perspective; we cannot pick thJOugh the mess searching (as did the critic above) for Stoppard's theme, his statement "about the world.'" Further, we must not think Stoppard's sleight-of-word simply masks "the .. . expression of his deepest concerns" (James Saunders, quoted in Tynan, p. 65). Stoppard is hiding nothing; the mask is the face. His language simply reflects the process evident thJOughout Travesties: the process by which we come to "understand," and hence control, the apparent absurdityofthe world around us. Though this process finds its fullest expression in Travesties, this synopsis of a scene from an earlier play, After Magritte, provides a rich illustration of the relation between perception and understanding: a one-legged blind man with a white beard, who may in fact have been a handicapped football player with shaving cream on his face, has been seen hopping, or perhaps playing hop-scotch, along an English street, wearing striped pajamas, convict garb, or possibly aWest Bromwich Albion football jersey. waving with one ann awhite stick, a crutch, or afurled parasol while carrying under the other what may have heen afootball, a wine-skin, an alligator handbag, or a tortoise. (Tynan, p. 41) The first step toward understanding is the apparently simple but everconfounding activity of sense perception. It is through perception, naturally, that we can assume the existence of things, but here more things exist than actually appeared. Each witness saw the same object yet went home believing he saw a different thing: a handicapped football player, a convict with a handbag, or a pajama-clad gentleman with a tortoise. We "understand" both art and life, Stoppard feels, through the process by which percept becomes concept, sense data become reality, randomness becomes truth. "Illusion vs. reality" is not the issue here, however, for in Travesties illusion and reality are not opposed. They cannot, and should not, be distinguished. The process of making meaning - be it telling a story, writing Ulysses, or composing socialist history - is the central focus of Stoppard's play. Consequently, it seems ultimately fruitless to analyze Travesties, certainly to evaluate it, in terms of Stoppard's ability to make comments "about the world." Least of all is Travesties a history play, in which we must judge Tzara against Joyce, or Lenin against (egad!) Carr. Nor...