Tom Stoppard: The Monological Imagination

Tom Stoppard: The Monological Imagination IAN MACKENZIE The recent rediscovery and translation into French and English of Mikhail Bakhtin's writings on Dostoevsky and the theory of the novel have led to the wide dissemination of his concept of "dialogue.'" Few attempts have been made to apply Bakhtin's theories to drama, a literary form that would appear to be intrinsically dialogical. This article considers the writing ofTom Stopparda dramatist who asserts that his plays work out his own dialogues - in the light of Bakhtin's principles. The article's conclusions are essentially foreshadowed in its title. Bakhtin proposes a dialogical both/and rather than a dialectical either/or, and argues that dialogism, always implicit in the novel, found its purest expression in Dostoevsky, who had a "surplus of vision"; whereas in Tolstoy'Snovels, for example, there is but one voice, one supposedly ultimate, transcendental truth placed in the characters' mouths by the author, in Dostoevsky the characters exist to address each other and to challenge each other's ideas. Where the monological author makes his characters' thoughts and actions fit his overall plan, the dialogical or polyphonic author creates distinct and autonomous personalities, with their own dialogically juxtaposed styles or dialects or voices. The characters are capable of standing alongside their creator, of disagreeing with and rebelling against him. Their thoughts and actions are (obviously) written by the author, but are not "his." The characters are placed in a situation which produces a potential conflict among them, and they interact in a way that is neither predetermined nor foreseeable,just as real people live in an "unfmalizable" and indeterminate world without an overall plan. Stoppard has outlined his conception of playwriting in several articles and interviews, and if one takes his claims at face value they appear fairly "Bakhtinian." He is fond ofsaying that "A play is nolthe end product ofan idea; the idea is the end product of the play.'" Setting out to write with an idea leads to "committed writing," which Stoppard tends to distinguish from "art." In an Stoppard: The Monological Imagination 575 interview published in 1974, he states that the element he finds most valuable in his work is that "there is very often no single, clear statement .. . What there is, is a series of conflicting statements made by conflicting characters, and they tend to playa sort of infinite leap-frog. You know, an argument, a refutation, then a rebuttal of the refutation, then a counter-rebuttal, so that there is never any point ... at which I feel that is the speech to stop it on, that is the last word."3 Stoppard claims to work out his ideas while writing. "When I started writing plays I never thought of myselfas somebody writing plays to give expression to his own thoughts, to his voice. In point of fact my plays tended to be about double acts." He lists Rosencrantz and Guildenstem, Moore and Jumper, Carr and Tzara, and Carr and Joyce, before continuing, "I tended to write plays which somehow worked out my own dialogues." Although Rosencrantz and Guildenstem are more like two halves of a single act, Travesties does indeed seem to be a dialogical working out of various thoughts and anxieties about the nature and function of art. But if this play does not express Stoppard's voice in the sense of an explicit point of view, it does give free rein to his voice in the sense of a manner of speaking. Stoppard concedes that in his plays, "people do all tend to speak with my tone of voice." '" rely quite a lot on the actors differentiating between the characters because characters with a capital 'K' isn't something that interests me very much. Quite a lot of my lines could be given to different people in the play."4 Travesties also includes the voice of Lenin, who quotes from his published writings, although this character is only loosely integrated into the play. But Stoppard's more political plays are less dialogical and give greater priority to the author's own beliefs. Stoppard presents some of these explicitly in a review of Enemies ojSociety by his friend Paul Johnson. The essential beliefs...