Re-writing and Mystifying Wilde’s ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ by Tom Stoppard

Nevin Yildirim Koyuncu (Ege University, Izmir, Turkey)

Email: nevin.koyuncu@ege.edu.tr

 

ABSTRACT:

Travesties by Tom Stoppard, his most radical play based on allusion and parody, is a re-writing of Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde’s play functions both as a play within Stoppard’s play and as an outer frame of the protagonist-narrator Carr’s play. At the beginning of the play it is indicated that most of the action takes place in Carr’s memory but we cannot rely on it since it is defective and amnesic. Carr’s illusive memory provides the shifting perspective through which the play becomes the embodiment of parody or travesty as its title suggests. In Bakhtin’s terminology parody is double-voiced discourse that uses another text or style to create “a semantic intention that is directly opposed to it” (Bakhtin 1984, 193). It involves gross distortion and incongruity. Drawing on Wilde’s statement that all art is “useless,” and that life imitates art more than art imitates life (meaning that art cannot have any social or political aim apart from itself), the play turns around the question of perception reflected through the distorted memory of Carr, travestied figures of important historical and literary figures such as Joyce, Tzara, and Lenin who all have something to say about the function of art. Stoppard’s approach in his play can be summed up as combination of philosophically significant issues with intellectually trivial theatrical ingredients that produces the incongruity while raising or generating significant questions as to the nature of art and its production, the function of art, ambiguity and of meaning and memory, the unsettled debate between fact and fiction and so on. Through an ironic prism it tries to touch upon and illuminate these issues by also parodying them. The paper will focus on the play as a parodic, self-conscious re-writing (or metadrama) of other texts trying to reveal its stylistic foundations and, in the meantime, will discuss what kind of answers offered to the issues raised emerge out of the play.