Travesties: Tom Stoppard’s Joyce and Other Dadaist Fantasies, Or History in a Hat

Abstract

The original impulse for this essay was to examine gaps between biographical fact and character in Travesties.1 I was then going to expose historical incongruities within play and argue that Tom Stoppard's redaction of lives and events was demanded by conditions of dramatic performance. Such an explanation would not ease anxieties of those who are literally minded, but then I remembered Oscar Wilde. In Stoppard's The Invention of Love, Wilde remarks that biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes. I was said to have walked down Piccadilly with a lily in my hand. There was no need. To do it is nothing, to be said to have done it is everything.2 A few lines earlier, Wilde corrects A. E. Housman's belief that a newspaper report of an inquest is truthful: On contrary, Wilde replies, it's only fact. Truth is quite another thing and is work of imagination (Love 93). Imagination's link to truth makes acceptable fissures and disruptions found in Travesties. In this context, Stoppard's realignment of habits and characteristics of James Joyce or Tristan Tzara or Vladimir Lenin, found in Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, Hans Richter's Dada: Art and Anti-Art, or Edmund Wilson's To Finland Station, bothers us less.3 Stoppard has never hidden his sources and, in fact, takes pride in listing his reading and origins of his ideas. But much remains out of sync in play that still nags audiences, alternately increasing their pleasure and calling into question play's success. The treatment of time is a starting point. The calendar of play and that of history do not match, and many have amused themselves by working out discrepancies. But facts and dates always mislead, and Stoppard himself dispenses with them in his work as well as in his life. He prefers to juggle history so that historical characters meet, although no actual record of such encounters exists. He thinks nothing of putting Lord Byron into a mysterious situation in Arcadia or depicting gatherings among a host of early Russian revolutionaries that may or may not have happened in The Coast of Utopia.4