Travesties Words on Plays (2006)

by tom stopparddirected by carey perloffamerican conservatory theaterseptember 14–october 15, 2006

WORDS ON PLAYS prepared by

elizabeth brodersenpublications editor

jessica werner zackcontributing editor

michael pallerresident dramaturg

margot melconpublications & literary assistant

ariel franklin-hudsonliterary intern

a.c.t. is supported in part by grants from theGrants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fundand the National Endowment for the Arts, whichbelieves that a great nation deserves great art.

Travesties

A M E R I C A N C O N S E R VAT O R Y T H E AT E R

Carey Perloff, Artistic Director Heather Kitchen, Executive Director

P R E S E N T S

© 2006 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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table of contents

1. Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of Travesties

7. From the Directorby Carey Perloff

9. Travesties Content and Formby Michael Paller

15. Ping Pong? Chess? Stoppard’s Theatrical Back-and-Forthby Jessica Werner Zack

19. A Playwright on the Side of Rationalityby c. e. Maves

21. A Brief Biography of Tom Stoppard

22. Henry Wilfred Carr (1894–1962)by Tom Stoppard

25. A Brief Biography of James Joyce

30. A Brief Biography of Tristan Tzara

33. Dadaby Paul Trachtman

38. A Brief Biography of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

45. Meanwhile, Outside Switzerlandby Michael Paller

50. Earnest Travestiedby Ariel Franklin-Hudson

55. Ulysses Travestied

61. Shakespeare Travestied

65. Questions to Consider

66. For Further Information . . .

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characters, cast, and synopsis of TRAVESTIESTravesties premiered at the Aldwych Theatre, London, on June 10, 1974, in a productionby the Royal Shakespeare Company. The original Broadway production of Travestiesopened at the Ethyl Barrymore Theatre (New York) on October 30, 1975. AmericanConservatory Theater presented Travesties, directed by Nagle Jackson, at the GearyTheater, opening March 29, 1977.

characters and cast

henry carr Geordie Johnsonappears as a shabby and very old man and also as his youthful elegant self.

tristan tzara Gregory Wallaceis the Dadaist of that name. He is a short, dark-haired, very boyish-looking young man,and charming (his word). He wears a monocle.

james joyce Anthony Fuscois James Joyce in 1917–18, aged 36. He wears a jacket and trousers from two different suits.

lenin Geoff Hoyleis Lenin in 1917: aged 47.

bennett Geoff Hoyleis Carr’s manservant. Quite a weighty presence.

gwendolen René Augesenis Carr’s younger sister; young and attractive but also a personality to be reckoned with.

cecily Allison Jean Whiteis also young and attractive and even more to be reckoned with. Also appears as her oldself.

nadya Joan Mankinis Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife: aged 48.

Tom Stoppard’s character descriptions are excerpted from Travesties (Grove Press: New York, 1975).

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OPPOSITE Photo collage by Elisabet Zellon.

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setting

Most of the action of Travesties takes place in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1917, duringWorld War i, and focuses on three revolutionaries: the communist leader Vladimir

Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, and the modernist writer JamesJoyce. Henry Carr, a minor British official, relates the trio’s actions and dialogue throughhis (rather unreliable) memories of that period. Reflecting the uncertain nature of Carr’smemory, much of the action takes place in repetitive “time-slip” scenes, in which a seriesof differing conversations unfolds, each conversation pursued anew from the same startingline of dialogue.

The play is set in two locations: the Zürich Public Library, where the principal charac-ters interact, and the drawing room of Carr’s apartment in Zürich, where the now elderlyman recalls the past. The dialogue focuses on the revolutionaries’ politics and philosophiesat a turning point in each man’s life: Joyce’s writing of the controversial novel Ulysses, pub-lished in serial form 1918–1921 and as a complete novel in 1922; Tzara’s development of theprinciples of Dada, a nihilistic movement in art and literature; and Lenin’s work on hisbook Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, first published in pamphlet form in 1917,and eventual decision to journey back to Russia to take part in the Russian Revolution.

Act i. scene 1. The Zürich Public Library, 1917. Gwendolen sits with James Joyce, tran-scribing an early draft of what will later become Ulysses. Lenin and Tristan Tzara are

also present and writing. Tzara finishes and promptly proceeds to cut up his compositionword-by-word. He places the pieces of paper in his hat, dumps them out again on thetable, and begins to arrange them randomly into new, somewhat nonsensical sentences,which he then reads aloud as a Dadaist poem. Joyce reads sentences from his own manu-script, which also appear to be nonsensical.

Cecily, a young, attractive librarian who has been helping Lenin work on his book onimperialism, enters. She inadvertently picks up a folder containing Joyce’s manuscript,while Gwendolen picks up an identical folder holding Lenin’s draft. Neither notices themistake, and both leave.

2. Lenin’s wife, Nadya, arrives, telling him—in Russian—that a revolution has begun.They leave hurriedly, bumping into Joyce as they go.

3. Carr’s apartment, many years later. Carr, now an elderly man, reminisces about figuresfrom his past. He recalls his experiences with Joyce during a production of Oscar Wilde’sThe Importance of Being Earnest, and the subsequent litigations each party pursued againstthe other over financial matters associated with the production. Carr then turns his atten-


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tion to Lenin’s character and his role in the Russian Revolution, and then to the Dadaistart movement.

4. Carr’s apartment, 1917. Bennett enters, tells Carr that the newspapers are on the side-board, and Carr carries on about the war.

5. A time-slip scene. Bennett repeats that the papers are on the sideboard. Bennettannounces Tzara; Carr denounces those who pass themselves off as spies.

6. A time-slip scene. Bennett again repeats that the papers are on the sideboard. Carr andBennett discuss the revolution in Russia.

7. A time-slip scene. Bennett again repeats that the papers are on the sideboard, and heand Carr discuss further developments in Russia.

8. A time-slip scene. Bennett again repeats that the papers are on the sideboard, followedby more discussion of the Russian situation. Bennett informs Carr that Lenin is in Zürichand that the British foreign minister wants Carr to spy on Lenin and ascertain his plans.

9. Carr’s apartment, 1917. Tzara arrives, a “Romanian nonsense,” and announces his planto propose marriage to Gwendolen.

10. Tzara is quickly followed by Joyce and Gwendolen. Gwen and Tzara are transfixedby one another. They make their introductions, expressed in limerick form.

11. Joyce asks for Carr’s official support and money to fund a production of TheImportance of Being Earnest, while Tzara explains the tenets of Dadaism. Tzara argues infavor of art based solely on chance—and thus on a new meaning of art. Carr rejects theidea that Tzara can simply redefine art. The scene ends in an explosion of rude epithetshurled back and forth as they argue heatedly over the causes and justification of the war.

12. Carr’s apartment, many years later. Carr, once again an old man, reminisces about thetrenches, at first nostalgically, then with gratitude that his wound has landed him in theconsulate.

13. Carr’s apartment, 1917. A time-slip scene. Tzara arrives again, to propose toGwendolen. As Tzara and Carr emulate characters from The Importance of Being Earnest,Carr hears about Cecily for the first time, and about her conservative taste in poetry. Healso learns that Gwendolen is working for Joyce. Carr refuses to give his consent forGwendolen to marry Tzara unless Tzara clears up the question of “Jack”: Tzara explainsthat, to avoid a conflict with Lenin, who holds Dadaists in contempt, he identified him-self on his library card as “Jack” Tzara, Tristan’s older brother. Carr and Tzara argue aboutart and the artist, ending in an explosion of rude epithets.

14. Another time-slip scene. In an expanded version of Scene 10, Gwendolen and Tzaraare again transfixed by each other. After introductions are made all around, Tzara beginswork on a poem for Gwendolen, while Joyce discusses the production of Earnest with Carr.


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Initially, Joyce asks for financial backing and the approval of the consulate, but he then asksCarr to play the leading role: “not Ernest, the other one.” Carr is flattered and agrees toplay the part as he and Joyce move into the next room, leaving Tzara and Gwendolen alone.

15. Tzara has cut up a Shakespeare sonnet (the 18th) and put the pieces into his hat; hesorts the words randomly into poetic lines and offers the results to Gwendolen. Their con-versation is expressed in lines from Shakespeare plays.

16. When Tzara tells Gwendolen that he loves her, she says that she was destined to lovea poet, and so she will love him, particularly since they share an admiration for Joyce—forshe could not love anyone who did not. As they embrace, Joyce crosses the room on hisway out and admonishes them. Gwendolen retires to tell Carr that she loves Tzara, andgives Tzara a folder that she believes contains a chapter from Ulysses to read, assured thatit will further cement their love. (In fact, however, she has handed him Lenin’s politicalwriting.)

17. Joyce returns and begins to use his hat for magic tricks, as he grills Tzara on the ideasof Dada. The conversation escalates until they are shouting at each other, making accusa-tions and generally disapproving of each other’s views on art; the argument concludes inan explosion of rude epithets on Tzara’s part and a passionate defense of art as Joyce under-stands it. Joyce leaves in a rage, but not before pulling a rabbit out of his hat.

18. Carr’s apartment, many years later. The elderly Carr bitterly summarizes the lawsuitsagainst Joyce, culminating with: “I flung at him—‘And what did you do in the Great War?’‘I wrote Ulysses,’ he said. What did you do?” Joyce has the last word on the lasting value ofart, and of art as he defines it.

Act ii. scene 1. The Zürich Public Library, 1917. Cecily is at her desk giving animpromptu rundown, in the form of a history lecture, of events in January 1917.

Nadya and Lenin are working in the library, and they replay their conversation from Act i, this time translated by Cecily into English.

2. As Nadya and Lenin leave, Carr enters, disguised so he can spy on Lenin. Cecilymisidentifies Carr as Tristan Tzara, whom she believes to be the decadent, nihilist youngerbrother of “Jack” Tzara (the actual Tristan, whom she met earlier). Their dialogue is pep-pered with references to The Importance of Being Earnest, as Carr begins to court Cecily;going along with her mistake, he, as “Tristan,” asks her to reform him, claiming to be readyto renounce his Dadaist beliefs. They discuss Lenin’s impending return to Russia, as wellas the justification for art and the duty of the artist in society. The conversation ends in aheated exchange of references to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.


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3. A time-slip scene. Cecily and Carr, who again poses as Tristan Tzara, discuss hisreform. This time Carr speaks in the form of a history lecture; the conversation quicklydegenerates into a biting argument over Marxism, European politics, and the imperialistwar, in which Cecily gives Carr/Tristan the folder that she believes contains Lenin’s man-uscript, hoping to enlighten him.

4. The same time-slip scene, continued. While Cecily becomes increasingly worked up,Carr begins to fantasize about translating her passion for politics into a different kind ofpassion altogether. As Cecily strips, the conversation degenerates into a tirade of “-isms”:Bolshevism, imperialism, capitalism, Zimmerwaldism, etc.

5. A new time-slip scene. We are back again at the beginning of Carr/Tristan’s reforma-tion. This time, he immediately declares his love for Cecily. She confesses that it has alwaysbeen her dream to reform a decadent nihilist. They fall behind her desk in a fit of passion.

6. Lenin and Nadya return, she dressed severely and he disguised as a parson, both readyfor their escape from Switzerland to Russia. Nadya relates their idea to obtain the pass-ports of two deaf-mute Swedes, a plan that does not come to fruition.

7. Split scene: the library and Carr’s apartment, 1917. The genuine Tristan Tzara enters anddiscovers Cecily in the arms of Carr, who is pretending to be Tristan while Tristan pretendsto be Jack. Introductions are made among Lenin, his wife, and both Tzaras. Cecily thenleaves with Lenin and Nadya, and the “brothers” are given the chance to reconcile overmuffins. Carr discusses his feelings for Cecily with Tzara, as Lenin and Nadya describetheir ultimately successful departure from Switzerland for Russia.

8. Lenin speaks vehemently to the masses in a crowded public square in Russia, with aparaphrase of Act i of The Importance of Being Earnest.

9. Carr’s apartment, many years later. Carr reminisces as an old man about the conflictbetween his love for Cecily and his duty as a government official, and how he let Leninslip away.

10. In the form of an illustrated history lecture, Nadya recalls Lenin’s conservative tastein art, while Lenin reinforces her comments with excerpts from his speeches. Carr period-ically chimes in his agreement, as all three paint a picture of Lenin’s views on art and theartist.

11. Carr’s apartment, 1917. Gwendolen is in her brother’s apartment when Cecily arrives,and, in song, they introduce themselves to each other and agree to become fast friends. Asthe song continues, they discuss such matters as overdue library books and Lenin’s recentdeparture from Switzerland. When they reach the topic of Tristan Tzara, there is bitterconfusion: Gwendolen is in love with Tzara because he is the great Dada artist, whileCecily thinks she herself is in love with Tzara (although she is actually in love with Carr,


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posing as Tzara), because she believes she can reform him artistically. The song becomesincreasingly nasty as the two girls transform from friends into enemies.

12. Carr enters. Cecily believes him to be Tristan Tzara, which Gwendolen immediatelyrefutes by revealing that he is in fact her brother, Henry Carr, British consul. When thegenuine Tzara enters a moment later, Gwendolen takes him for the Tristan he truly is,while Cecily recognizes him as Comrade Jack, a luminary of the Zimmerwald Left.Bennett brings Carr the news of the day, which includes telegrams of congratulations forhis performance in Earnest, as well as orders to make sure Lenin does not leave Zürich,which has already happened.

13. Joyce arrives, and he and Carr immediately argue about money owed from the pro-duction of Earnest. Carr insists that Joyce will have to take him to court to receive pay-ment, as Tzara insults the chapter of Ulysses he has just read. Gwendolen and Cecily returnas Joyce studies the manuscript given to him by Tzara. He reveals that it is not his chapterat all. It turns out that Tzara, hoping to appease Gwendolen, has read Lenin’s chapter onimperialism, believing it to be Joyce’s novel. Meanwhile, Carr, hoping to impress Cecily,has read a chapter from Ulysses, believing it was Lenin’s manuscript. The question of mis-taken identities is cleared up, and both men declare the respective manuscripts unreadable.The lovers reunite happily, each pair once again believing they are of the same mind,artistically.

14. All dance in love and reconciliation.15. Carr’s apartment, many years later. Cecily, now many years older and Carr’s wife,

comes in to berate her husband for misremembering nearly everything. She insists thatCarr was never the British consul (who was in fact a certain Percy Bennett) and neverknew Lenin, and that she never helped Lenin write his book on imperialism; the produc-tion of Earnest did occur, however, and Joyce did take Carr to court.

16. Old Carr refuses to acknowledge that his version of the past is faulty. As the playends, he is left with his memories, accurate or not, as he returns to the point where the playbegan. �


from the directorby carey perloff

tzara: Man cannot live by bread alone!carr: Yes, he can! It’s art he can’t live on!

—Travesties

Artists (and their detractors) have been debating the value and purpose of art sincepaintings first appeared on the walls of caves. Tom Stoppard has taken particular

pleasure in trying to understand, in both comic and deeply serious ways, the role that artplays in the evolution of society. His new play Rock ’n’ Roll, which opened in London inJune, reveals the way pop music exploded the stasis of Czech communism, simply byasserting its anarchic right to exist. And in Travesties, his madcap and astonishing riff onthe coincident presence of three of the western world’s major cultural players in 1917

Zürich, he throws together radically different notions of art to make us wrestle with thebig questions of aesthetics and politics that continue to preoccupy him.

Perhaps because he has always taken such enormous pleasure in writing, Stoppard has,at times in his career, seemed almost guilty about being a successful artist, a guilt which isreflected in Henry Carr’s envious comment to Tristan Tzara in Travesties: “For every thou-sand people, there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, andone lucky bastard who’s the artist.” Travesties pits two radically different artists ( JamesJoyce and Tristan Tzara) against Lenin the political revolutionary, and shows us what happens when their opposing points of view collide. We discover the irony that politicalradicalism often seems tied to aesthetic conservatism (radical Lenin loves Beethoven andhates the avant garde), while aesthetic radicalism can be coupled with a strange indiffer-ence to political upheaval (“What did you do in the Great War?” Carr imagines askingJoyce. “I wrote Ulysses. What did you do?” Joyce sneers.) Or, as Tzara memorably observes,“The odd thing about revolution is that the further left you go politically the more bour-geois they like their art.”

The relationship of art to politics has always been a fraught one; from his early days asa journalist, Stoppard’s view has been that if you want to effect political change in the shortterm, “then you can hardly do worse than write a play about it. That’s what art is bad at,”he told Theatre Quarterly in 1974. (“A play makes people think longer and more deeply,” hetold a.c.t. in 2002, “but a newspaper story makes them react, in a more visceral way.”) ButStoppard also continues to believe that, “without artists, the injustice will never be eradi-

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cated.” In the long run, in a fascinating, elusive, but incontrovertible way, art changes con-sciousness. This is why it matters, why it must be fought for, and why it always threatensthe status quo.

We’ve chosen Travesties as the beginning of a yearlong anniversary celebration of 40

wild and wonderful years of American Conservatory Theater. The beloved Stoppard hassince the early ’70s looked at himself as the “house playwright” at a.c.t. and vividlyremembers coming here in 1977 for rehearsals of Travesties when it was first produced inSan Francisco. Stoppard exemplifies so much of what a.c.t. has striven for over these fourdecades: a passionate theatricality, an irrepressible love of actors and of language, a wickedsense of humor, an outrageous ambition, and a deep belief in an audience’s appetite forencountering new worlds and surprising truths. We look back on the past 40 years withgreat pride, and we look forward to this anniversary season with great anticipation; in it wewill return to work that has meant so much to us in our history, and we will also introducemajor new plays that will usher in the next 40 years. Welcome to Travesties! �

Photo of the set model for Act II of Travesties, designed by Douglas W. Schmidt


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TRAVESTIES: content and formby michael paller

Art . . . is important because it provides the moral matrix, the moral sensibil-ity, from which we make our judgments about the world.

But I must make clear that, insofar as it’s possible for me to look at my ownwork objectively at all, the element which I find most valuable is the one thatmost people are put off by—that is, that there is very often no single, clearstatement in my plays. What there is, is a series of conflicting statements madeby conflicting characters, and they tend to play a sort of infinite leap-frog.

What happens in my plays is a kind of marriage of categories. It’s not myobjective in the sense that I calculate it—it just seems to be what I’m doing, theway things come out. But I want to marry the play of ideas to farce. Now thatmay be like eating steak tartare with chocolate sauce, but that’s the way itcomes out.

—Tom Stoppard, to interviewer Ross Wetzsteon in the Village Voice, whenthe play opened on Broadway in 1975; quoted in

Tom Stoppard in Conversation, edited by Paul Delaney

tzara: The poor girl is so innocent that she does not stop to wonder what pos-sible book could be derived from reference to Homer’s Odyssey and the DublinStreet Directory for 1904.carr: Homer’s Odyssey and the Dublin Street Directory?tzara: For 1904.carr: I admit it’s an unusual combination of sources, but not wholly withoutpossibilities.

—Travesties

content: themes and ideas

It seems that two major oppositions can be found in Travesties. The first is the opposi-tion of two kinds of art: Tristan Tzara’s and James Joyce’s. Although both are formalist

and thus reflect the objective world less directly than other kinds of art, they begin withdifferent assumptions. Tzara’s art is based on chance and decries all traditional forms andpurposes of art. Dada attacks rationality and celebrates randomness and confusion; it


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condemns traditional art and the notion that it ennobles the human experience. For Dada,art is no more life affirming or ennobling than any other human product or procedure,including war. Joyce’s art, however, while not traditional in form, serves one of art’s tradi-tional functions: to arrange the randomness and chaos of life into a form that lends itmeaning. Giving life meaning lends it nobility. Stoppard prefers one of these kinds of artover the other, although this may not always seem clear.

The second opposition is between those who believe that art, as it has been tradition-ally understood, has worth in a world torn by strife and a million different kinds of injustices; and those who believe that in such a world art is irrelevant, and that artists areno different from anyone else—except, perhaps, luckier, in that they get to play in thesandbox while the rest of us have to work for a living. In Travesties Henry Carr arguesagainst the notion that art has any special value or that artists have any claim to being special people (they merely have passes—“chits from matron”—to “mess about in the artroom” for life). This statement goes unanswered at the time, but is later rebutted by Joyce,who insists that it is art that gives human experience meaning. The argument is strong notonly by virtue of the words, but by its place in Act i: it is near the end; and the very end ofthe act gives Joyce’s position virtually the last word.

The case has to be expressed strongly. After all, while Joyce, Tzara, and Carr argue aboutart, eight million soldiers and more civilians are dying in the war being fought all aroundthem.

The scenes that carry most of the burden of these oppositions are in the middle of Acti, scenes 11 and 13, and are the longest traditional, realistic scenes in the play. Scene 11 isan example of hupokrisis, a form originally found in Greek tragedies, where the dialogueis cast as a kind of law-court debate, in which the participants state their case as force-fully as they can.

Another idea is asserted strongly, but not argued at as great a length: “[T]he odd thingabout revolution is that the further left you go politically the more bourgeois they like theirart,” Tzara asserts, and we hear later how Lenin wept over a Beethoven sonata, despisedanything modernist, and distrusted art in general. There’s nothing very surprising aboutthis: people who devote themselves on a daily level to large social causes are committed tothe objective world; if they are interested in art at all it’s likely to be the art that mostdirectly resembles it. Many activists have little use for anything that seems not directly con-nected to the world they want to reform. Likewise, artists who are primarily interested insocial conditions, such as August Wilson and David Hare: they’re interested in the objec-tive, “real” world and so create art that resembles it. Stoppard is not—or wasn’t, at the timehe wrote Travesties—that kind of artist.


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The really important statements of the play, however, are not made in the argumentsput forth in its content. The important assertions are made through the play’s form.

form

T ravesties is very much a formalist work, and its meaning resides as much in the waythat the content is expressed and deployed as it does in the content itself. Here, form

is content. It is especially important, therefore, to pay great attention to the form, whichshould be kept as clearly before the audience as the play’s ideas or emotions: the form isthe play’s ideas and perhaps even its emotions. Stoppard has constructed the play out ofmany disparate, often incongruous, elements, and the choice that must be made is eitherto present these disparate pieces as a smooth, homogeneous whole, or to highlight theirdifferences and allow the audience to distinctly discern the separate pieces.

the first things we seeNot always, but often, the very first thing we see or hear happen in a play tells us a greatdeal about what the play will be about. This isn’t a conscious playwriting technique; itseems to be the way the unconscious often begins to order its material.

The first thing we see in Travesties is Tristan Tzara creating a poem by cutting up sen-tences, pulling the separate words out of his hat, randomly arranging and then readingthem aloud. So the first thing we see is an act of radical formalism.

The second thing we see is Cecily, an employee of the library, shushing him. Herewe have an immediate conflict: between a radical pronouncement of what art should bein 1917, and a rebuttal from the staid forces of convention (and in this context, whatbetter representative of the staid forces of convention than a public library inSwitzerland?). The stage direction says that her admonition is “to the library ingeneral,” but the audience will experience it as being directed primarily at Tzara, thedisturber of the peace. In any case, we’ve just seen, in small, the conflict between radicalformalism and traditionalism.

The third thing that happens is Joyce chiming in with an excerpt from “The Oxen ofthe Sun” episode of Ulysses, followed by another hat poem by Tzara: two opposing formsof art, both formalist: one very carefully planned out and written, the other completely ran-dom. We’ll find these forms in conflict throughout the play, as well. When Cecily re-entersa moment later, she shushes them both. Meanwhile, working quietly away at another tableis Lenin, whose experiment in radical communist socialism will shortly turn the traditionalworld on its ear in another way.


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structure The play’s formalist nature expresses itself in big ways and small. The most prominentexample, perhaps, is in the convention that the story is told by Carr, whose memory isunreliable at best. His memory is like a magpie’s nest, composed of various bits and scraps.Stoppard shows us the unreliability of Carr’s memory primarily through “time slips,” inwhich the action stops and then replays itself differently from the first time we saw it—rather like cubism, showing us the action from different angles but in, as it were, the sameplane. In Act i, for example, the scene beginning with Gwendolyn and Joyce’s entrance isplayed twice: once in limerick form and again, later, expanded in traditional dialogue.Stoppard suggests lighting changes between many of these time slips and the differentforms of presentation so that they can be perceived as separate units. Carr’s long mono-logues are also formalistic, moving in stream of consciousness from one topic to another,unrelated one. (In a way, all bureaucrats are formalists, in that their interest lies less in con-tent than in its order and arrangement. For them, the order of things is their meaning.)

Formalism also functions on a scenic level; that is, entire scenes are played out in formsother than traditional, realistic-seeming dialogue:

The limerick scene (Act i, scene 10)The hupokrisis, or rhetorical argument scene (Act i, scene 11)The Shakespearean quotations scene (Act i, scene 15)The catechism scene (Act i, scene 17)The history lecture scenes (Act ii, scenes 1, 3, 6, 7, 10)The Gallagher and Shean scene (Act ii, scene 11)

Half of the scenes in Act i are expressed with some kind of formalism. Of those thataren’t, four are short transitional scenes.

Often there is no transition between these scenes and the traditionally written scenesthat precede or follow; they simply bump up against each other. In this sense, too, the con-flict between art forms is played out across the entire play. Stoppard makes no attempt tosmooth out the different forms or seamlessly link them. He lets each one stand out. Inaddition, interspersed throughout the traditional dialogue scenes are large swaths of TheImportance of Being Earnest, either quoted directly or paraphrased—Earnest travestied.

On the next level down, as it were, we have scenes that are mostly composed of tradi-tional dialogue but that may be interspersed or interrupted with other forms that may beseveral lines long or just a single line. Here are a few:


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In the first library scene, Lenin and Nadya have their own scene in Russian.On his exit, Lenin, in a single line, begs Joyce’s pardon in four languages andJoyce replies in turn.In Act ii, Nadya and Lenin’s Russian scene is played again, this time inEnglish.Cecily engages in a strip-tease.Many scenes intersperse Stoppard’s own dialogue with quotes and paraphrasesfrom The Importance of Being Earnest.

In the library scenes, the words of Lenin and Nadya have a strongly narrative quality,which isn’t surprising, considering that Stoppard derived them directly from Nadya’sMemories of Lenin and Lenin’s collective writings. The same may be said of the chunks ofMarxist theory and Russian history, which are derived, with their bookish sounds intact,from Edmund Wilson, et al. They are presented, as noted, like lectures in a course in polit-ical history.

juxtaposition of opposites One of the play’s central formalist structural devices is the juxtaposition of opposites. Thelargest juxtapositions are the views of art held by Joyce and Tzara, and the views of theworth of art as argued by Joyce, Tzara, and Carr. As Stoppard himself has said, these argu-ments are never resolved in the play. Neither do they move the action forward as theymight in a more conventional play; they leave the world of the play unchanged (as Joycesays of Ulysses’s effect on society). Their conflicting statements are left to sit side by side,and the tension they create but never resolve is a large part of the play’s energy.

The two largest structural examples are the arguments between Tzara and Carr (Act i,scenes 11 and 13). It’s typical of the play that Tzara defends the necessity of art against Carrin the second argument, while in the short, sharp opposition of viewpoints following thecatechism scene (Act i, scene 17), he attacks the accepted notion of art, which Joycedefends.

During the catechism scene and the opposing statements that follow, we not only hearthe opposition argued, we also see the opposition created: Tzara has used Joyce’s hat for thebits of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 from which Cecily has by chance created an obscene poem.When Joyce later puts the hat on, he is covered with the bits of paper. During his scenewith Tzara, he picks the pieces off of his clothes and puts them into the hat. He then pullsout of the hat a paper geranium: that is, he has created a work of art by reassembling bitsof material into something that has a coherent, recognizable form.


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joyce vs. tzaraStoppard has said that no given play of his makes any clear statement. As far as the con-tent of Travesties is concerned, he is right. But the form of the play tells us something dif-ferent: in the argument between Joyce and Tzara, Stoppard clearly chooses Joyce. Travestiesis, in large, a tribute to Joyce and his methods. Stoppard may not have planned this as such,but the play is a work composed of several different formal methods of expression, fromlimerick to vaudeville song to Shakespearean pastiche to stream of consciousness to cate-chism to history lecture. It is an example of neither anti-art nor randomness. It can beenjoyed for its distinct component parts and can also be seen as a whole—like Ulysses nota smooth-surfaced, harmonious whole, but a whole of bustling intellectual and structuralcomplexity in which the complexity is meant to be experienced and relished.

Indeed, the form communicates theplay’s “message” ( Joyce’s art over Tzara’s)more thoroughly than the contentexpresses the oppositions mentioned at theoutset. The arguments about the value ofartists and of different kinds of art is nolonger voiced in Act ii. As content, it dis-appears at the end of Act i. The seriouscontent of Act ii has to do with Lenin’sjourney to Russia and his conservativeviews of art. No argument is made here; weare simply shown Lenin as an example ofthe phenomenon of the conservative artis-tic tastes of radical political leaders. Theargument for Joyce’s kind of art as opposedto Tzara’s, however, is woven into the play’sform from beginning to end, and indeed, asthe lights go down on the final scene, theform suggests that the play is about to startagain, just in case we didn’t get the pointthe first time through. �

Costume sketch of Gwendolen by Deborah Dryden


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ping pong? chess? stoppard’s theatricalback-and-forthby jessica werner zack

T hroughout his prolific and profoundly successful career as a playwright, Tom Stoppard hastaken pride in his facility for refuting his own assertions. He has an uncanny ability, on

vivid display in his plays and in his public statements and interviews about his plays, to hold bothsides of an intellectual argument. As a dramatist, he is by equal turns verbal aggressor anddefender, a devil’s advocate of even his own cherished views. He needles and explores both sides ofa contested opinion, for the sake of entertainment, for the sake of argument itself, and for the sur-prising gratification (for himself and his audience) to be found in the exercise. “It’s like playingchess with yourself,” Stoppard has said of this trait, in response to a question about whether heallows all the characters in Travesties (and the same could be asked of the verbally dueling figuresin so many of his plays) to speak equally without the playwright choosing sides himself. “I don’twant to give any of them shallow arguments and then knock them down. No, you have to givethe best possible argument for each of them.…You have to try to win just as hard with the blackas you do with the white.”

This ability to reason himself into and out of intellectual corners has become a hallmark ofStoppard’s particular genius. “His interest is less in offering a judgment than in making light ofother people’s pretensions,” wrote Mel Gussow in 1989 following a wide-ranging discussion withStoppard on subjects, including a New York revival that winter of Travesties. Gussow deemedStoppard “ever the equilibrist, giving both sides equal time and equal weight.”

No matter the particulars of the subject up for debate in a Stoppard play—modernist and figurative art (Jumpers), order and chaos theory (Arcadia), espionage and quantum mechanics(Hapgood), journalistic integrity and the business of newsgathering (Night and Day), adulteryand the limits of language in the face of real emotion (The Real Thing), or the artist’s value ina politically fraught world (Travesties)—his plays are always on some level dramatic presenta-tions of what Stoppard has called “simply stuff which I’ve ping-ponged between me and myself.”

As has become typical of Stoppard’s plays, Travesties was born of the playwright’s discovery(through his notoriously voracious reading habits) of a bizarre historical coincidence. “It beganwith the historical nugget that Lenin, [Tristan] Tzara, and [ James] Joyce were residents ofZürich in 1917. It seemed a fruitful situation,” says Stoppard. Stoppard let his imagination runwild with the possibilities for intellectual one-upsmanship inherent in the meeting of these threepowerhouses of 20th-century art and thought. After throwing together Russia’s great revolution-


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ary, the experimental Dada poet, and the modernist Irish novelist, Stoppard then landed on the(real) character of Henry Carr, a little-known and quite senile minor official in the British con-sulate. Carr’s faltering memory serves as the lens through which we experience the dramatic,humorous, and ridiculous exchanges among the play’s key players.

Joyce, Tzara, and Carr question and deliberate the artist’s role in society: Can an artist everbe an instigator for social change? Lenin, in counterargument, holds most art in contempt, the creative act itself presumably a paltry endeavor in the face of his zeal for reshaping Russia’s fun-damental social order. According to A.C.T. Dramaturg Michael Paller, the central questionStoppard raises in Travesties is “between those who believe that art, as it has been traditionallyunderstood, has worth in a world torn by strife and a million different kinds of injustices; andthose who believe that in such a world art is irrelevant, and that artists are no different from any-one else—except, perhaps, luckier, in that they get to play in the sandbox while the rest of us haveto work for a living.”

This subject has been central to Stoppard’s work since he first began writing plays, after leav-ing behind an early career as a journalist. In Travesties, he adroitly plays every angle of the issue,leaving it for us (and maybe for him as well) to come to our own conclusions. Wrote Gussow,“Listening to the debate, one can almost sense the playwright cheering each team, trying to makeup his mind as he weighs polarities.”

Stoppard has spoken on this and other issues germane to Travesties in numerous interviewssince the play’s groundbreaking 1974 premiere. Below is a collection of opinions and insights, allStoppard’s own (unless otherwise indicated, the following passages are excerpted from TomStoppard in Conversation, edited by Paul Delaney).

on the artist’s secret guiltThere’s a line in Artist Descending a Staircase that says that in any community of 1,000

people there’ll be 900 doing the work, 90 doing well, nine doing good, “and one lucky bas-tard writing about the other 999.” Stoppard laughs. “I’ve always felt that the artist is thelucky man. I get deeply embarrassed by statements and postures of ‘committed’ theater.There is no such thing as ‘pure’ art—art is a commentary on something else in life—itmight be adultery in the suburbs, or the Vietnamese war. I think that art ought to involveitself in contemporary social and political history as much as anything else, but I find itdeeply embarrassing when large claims are made for such an involvement: when, becauseart takes notice of something important, it’s claimed that the art is important. It’s not. Weare talking about marginalia—the tiny top fraction of the whole edifice. When Auden saidhis poetry didn’t save one Jew from the gas chamber, he’d said it all. Basically I think thatthe most committed theater in the land—I suppose that might be the Royal Court—has


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got about as much to do with events in the political arena as the Queen’s Theatre inShaftesbury Avenue. I’ve never felt this—that art is important. That’s been my secret guilt.I think it’s the secret guilt of most artists.”

on the possibility of political art

isn’t there the danger that one just ends up with the conclusionthat all political art is perhaps well-intentioned but impotent,so why bother?The possibility of political art having a political effect in close-up, in specific terms, cer-tainly exists, though I can’t offhand think of an example of it happening, but it is in anycase marginal compared to the possible and actual effects of, say, journalism.

and this is presumably why your plays tend to bear on life in anoblique, distant, generalized way?Well, that’s what art is best at. The objective is the universal perception, isn’t it? By allmeans realize that perception in terms of a specific event, even a specific political event,but I’m not impressed by art because it’s political, I believe in art being good art or bad art,not relevant art or irrelevant art. The plain truth is that if you are angered or disgusted bya particular injustice or immorality, and you want to do something about it, now, at once,then you can hardly do worse than write a play about it. That’s what art is bad at. But theless plain truth is that without that play and plays like it, without artists, the injustice willnever be eradicated.

you said that in TRAVESTIES you asked the question whether theterms “artist” and “revolutionary” were capable of being synonymous—did you come to any sort of conclusion?The play puts the question in a more extreme form. It asks whether an artist has to justifyhimself in political terms at all. For example, if Joyce were alive today, he would say, juntasmay come and juntas may go, but Homer goes on forever. And when he was alive he didsay that the history of Ireland, troubles and all, was justified because it produced him andhe produced Ulysses. Okay. So clearly one now has to posit a political prisoner taking com-fort from the thought that at least he is in the country of Joyce, or of Homer, and to askoneself whether Joyce, in moral terms, was myopic or had better vision than lesser men.And my answer to that question is liable to depend on the moment at which you run outof tape. Of course one feels uneasy in trying to work out questions that involve oneself, in


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terms of authentic geniuses, but it helps to clarify the issue. How do you measure thelegacy of a genius who believed in art for art’s sake?

on the marriage of categoriesI must make clear that, insofar as it’s possible for me to look at my own work objectivelyat all, the element which I find most valuable is the one that most people are put off by—that is, that there is very often no single, clear statement in my plays. What there is, is aseries of conflicting statements made by conflicting characters, and they tend to play a sortof infinite leap-frog.

What happens in my plays is a kind of marriage of categories. It’s not my objective inthe sense that I calculate it—it just seems to be what I’m doing, the way things come out.But I want to marry the play of ideas to farce. Now that may be like eating steak tartarewith chocolate sauce, but that’s the way it comes out. Everyone will have to decide for him-self whether the seriousness is doomed or redeemed by the frivolity.

…I don’t think of [my plays] as being opaque (that would be a distinct failure in a play).

I consider clarity essential. On the other hand, if you consider the mixing up of ideas infarce a source of confusion, well, yes, God knows why I try to do it like that—presumablybecause I am like that. Plays are the people who write them. Seriousness compromised byfrivolity. . . . My plays are a lot to do with the fact that I just don’t know.

stoppard, right or left?

where do you stand politically?I try to be consistent abut moral behavior. Let other people hang labels. It’s a tacticaldistortion to label certain attitudes right or left. I’m a conservative in politics, literature,education, and theater. My main objective is to ideology and dogma—Holy Writ foradherents. My plays don’t break rules. If you take the orchestra away from Every Good Boy,it is a series of scenes telling a coherent story. I don’t write Terrence Rattigan plays, but Ithink I have more in common with Rattigan than with Robert Wilson. We attempt to be coherent tellers of tales. In Travesties, a lot of odd things happen, but the crucial thing isthat the whole play is filtered through the memory of an old man—and the audienceknows it. I don’t want to write utterly conventional plays. Plays are events rather than texts.They’re written to happen, not to be read.

—from Conversations with Stoppard, by Mel Gussow�


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a playwright on the side of rationalityby c. e. maves (1977)

In March 1977, Stoppard came to San Francisco to sit in on rehearsals for an A.C.T. productionof Travesties and to take part in a question-and-answer session sponsored by A.C.T. as “An

Evening with Tom Stoppard.” During the discussion, the playwright responded to questionsabout Jumpers, Dirty Linen, and Travesties, about influences on his work, his techniques ofwriting, and his advice for ayoung writer. Confronted by onequestioner who was “interestedin knowing where your ideascome from,” Stoppard quipped, “Iwish I knew where they comefrom; I’d move there.” Agreeingwith another member of theaudience that his plays are non-linear, he explained that eventhough “Travesties is a playabout real people in a real placeat a real time,” it does not use ahistorical treatment, “a linearone, putting the events in theright order,” because “I don’tthink it tells the truth.”

In conversations with various Bay Area journalists during his stay, Stoppard went to somepains to distinguish his style of theater from “anarchic or unstructured art.”

Tom Stoppard ordered Campari over ice and talked about complexity. “If a play has aneasily compressible meaning, it’s a failure. I used to hear writers say, ‘If I could tell you

what it means, I wouldn’t have written it.’ That always sounded pretentious to me, butexperience teaches you that it’s the truth.”

Born in 1937, Stoppard looks a lot younger. With his tousled black hair and amiablyrugged features, he might well be a senior rock idol or rugby captain. Instead, he is quitepossibly the finest living British dramatist.

Deborah May and Sydney Walker in the 1977 production of Travesties, directed byNagle Jackson (photo by William Douglas Ganslen)


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He is in San Francisco for the American Conservatory Theater production of his latestplay, Travesties, which will open Tuesday night at the Geary.

“It’s sort of three-legged, and the three legs are Lenin, the political revolutionist; TristanTzara, the artistic revolutionist; and James Joyce, the artistic evolutionist. The three legs areheld together by Henry Carr,” who was a minor British official in Zürich when thatimprobable trio gathered there in 1917.

The Campari arrived, and I asked Stoppard where he got the plot for Travesties.“Its historical nugget was mentioned to me by a friend back in 1960. It seemed like a

fruitful idea, so 14 years later I wrote a play about it.”The occasion for all this chat was a San Francisco press luncheon with Stoppard and

the play’s director, Nagle Jackson. Another reporter wondered if Stoppard has any specialfeeling for San Francisco and for a.c.t. “Haven’t you noticed? I’m the house playwright!”he answered.

He is relaxed and very candid about his personal relationship with his latest play. “I haveTzara the Dadaist argue against Joyce the traditionalist, and a lot of the audience decidesthat Tzara is right. Actually, I empathize with Joyce, though I don’t necessarily give himthe last word. The play is a dialectic; it just happens that I’m on his side.”

And what side is that? “The side of logic and rationality. And craftsmanship. There’s acorrelation between craftsmanship and art—craftsmanship is what crystallizes art. I haveenormous admiration for well-made plays. I’m much more like Terence Rattigan than,” hesearches for examples, “Cocteau or Arrabal.”

What about Samuel Beckett? “The early plays of Beckett are significant for me in thatthey didn’t rely on elaborate theatrical paraphernalia. They redefined minimums, theyshow us how much can be done with little.” . . .

Stoppard ordered papaya for dessert, and I asked, “Do you think you’re at the Hamletstage of your career, or maybe at The Merchant of Venice stage, or maybe even back at theHenry IV, Part 3 stage?”

Tom Stoppard laughed. “That’s wonderful. I sometimes think,” he said, dodging theShakespearean comparison, “that I’m at the Gammer Gurton’s Needle stage. Travesties wasdifficult to write, and I feel it’s as good as I can do. Perhaps, as they say nowadays, I’vealready ‘peaked.’” One sincerely doubts it.

This article originally appeared in the Palo Alto Times, March 25, 1977. Introduction excerpted and adapted from Tom Stoppardin Conversation, edited by Paul Delaney (© 1994 by the University of Michigan).


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a brief biography of tom stoppard

Tom Stoppard worked as a freelance jour-nalist while writing radio plays, a novel

(Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon), and the first ofhis plays to be staged in England, Rosencrantzand Guildenstern Are Dead (a.c.t. 1969, 1995),winner of the 1968 Tony Award for best play.His subsequent plays include The RealInspector Hound, After Magritte, Jumpers(a.c.t. 1974), Travesties (a.c.t. 1977), EveryGood Boy Deserves Favour (with AndréPrevin), Night and Day (a.c.t. 1981, 2002), TheReal Thing (Tony Award; a.c.t. 1987, 2004),Hapgood (a.c.t. 1990), Arcadia (OlivierAward, New York Drama Critics’ CircleAward, and Tony Award nomination; a.c.t.1995), Indian Ink (a.c.t. 1999; u.s. premieredirected by Carey Perloff ), and The Inventionof Love (a.c.t. 2000; u.s. premiere directed byCarey Perloff ).

He is currently revising his trilogy, The Coast of Utopia (which opened at London’sNational Theatre in August 2002), for its American premiere at Lincoln Center this fall.His most recent play, Rock ’n’ Roll, opened to favorable reviews and a sold-out run atLondon’s Royal Court Theatre in June 2006. He is also currently working on the screen-play for Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Ultimatum, the third installment of the successfulJason Bourne films (starring Matt Damon).

Stoppard’s translations and adaptations include Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba,Schnitzler’s Undiscovered Country and Dalliance, Nestroy’s On the Razzle, Vaclav Havel’sLargo Desolato, and Rough Crossing (based on Ferenc Molnar’s Play in the Castle). He haswritten screenplays for Despair, The Romantic Englishwoman (coauthor), The HumanFactor, Brazil (coauthor), Empire of the Sun, The Russia House, Billy Bathgate, Rosencrantzand Guildenstern Are Dead (which he also directed and which won the Prix d’Or for bestfilm at the 1990 Venice Film Festival), Shakespeare in Love (Golden Globe and Academyawards, with coauthor Marc Norman), and Enigma. Stoppard received a knighthood in1997. �

Photo of Tom Stoppard by Amie Stamp


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henry wilfred carr, 1894–1962by tom stoppard

The reader of a play whose principal characters include Lenin, James Joyce, and TristanTzara may not realize that the figure of Henry Carr is likewise taken from history.

But this is so.In March 1918 (I take the following information from Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce),

Claud Sykes, an actor temporarily living in Zürich, suggested to Joyce that they form a theatrical company to put on plays in English. Joyce agreed, and became the business man-ager of The English Players, the first production to be that of The Importance of Being

Earnest. Actors were sought. Professionalswere to receive a token fee of 30 francs andamateurs to make do with 10 francs fortram fare to rehearsals. Joyce became veryactive and visited the consul general, A.Percy Bennett, in order to procure officialapproval for the Players. He succeeded inthis, despite the fact that Bennett “wasannoyed with Joyce for not having reportedto the consulate officially to offer his serv-ices in wartime, and was perhaps aware ofJoyce’s work for the neutralist InternationalReview and of his open indifference to thewar’s outcome. He may have even heard ofJoyce’s version of ‘Mr. Dooley,’ writtenabout this time . . .”—I quote fromEllmann’s superb biography, whose com-panionship was not the least pleasure inwriting Travesties.

Meanwhile, Sykes was piecing togethera cast . . . “An important find was TristanRawson, a handsome man who had sungbaritone roles for four years in the CologneOpera House but had never acted in a play.After much coaxing Rawson agreed to take

Costume sketch of Henry Carr by Deborah Dryden


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on the role of John Worthing. Sykes recruited Cecil Palmer as the butler, and found awoman named Ethel Turner to play Miss Prism. . . . As yet, however, there was no one totake the leading role of Algernon Moncrieff. In an unlucky moment Joyce nominated atall, good-looking young man named Henry Carr, whom he had seen in the consulate.Carr, invalided from the service, had a small job there. Sykes learned that he had acted insome amateur plays in Canada, and decided to risk him.”

Carr’s performance turned out to be a small triumph. He had even, in his enthusiasm,bought some trousers, a hat, and a pair of gloves to wear as Algernon. But immediatelyafter the performance the actor and the business manager quarreled. Joyce handed eachmember of the cast 10 or 30 francs, as prearranged, but succeeded in piquing Carr, wholater complained to Sykes that Joyce had handed over the money like a tip.

The upshot was disproportionate anddrawn out. Joyce and Carr ended up going tolaw, in two separate actions, Carr claimingreimbursement for the cost of the trousers,etc., or alternatively a share of the profits,and Joyce counter-claiming for the price offive tickets sold by Carr, and also suing forslander. These matters were not settled untilFebruary 1919. Joyce won on the money andlost on the slander, but he reserved his fullretribution for Ulysses, where “he allottedpunishments as scrupulously and inexorablyas Dante. . . . Originally Joyce intended tomake Consul General Bennett and HenryCarr the two drunken, blasphemous, andobscene soldiers who knock StephenDedalus down in the ‘Circe’ episode; but heeventually decided that Bennett should bethe sergeant-major, with authority overPrivate Carr, who, however, refers to himwith utter disrespect.”

From these meager facts about HenryCarr—and being able to discover no oth-ers—I conjured up an elderly gentleman stillliving in Zürich, married to a girl he met in

Costume sketch of Cecily by Deborah Dryden


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the library during the Lenin years, and recollecting, perhaps not with entire accuracy, hisencounters with Joyce and the Dadaist Tzara.

Soon after the play opened in London I was excited and somewhat alarmed to receivea letter beginning, “I was totally fascinated by the reviews of your play—the chief reasonbeing that Henry Carr was my husband until he died in 1962.” The letter was fromMrs. Noël Carr, his second wife.

From her I learned that Henry Wilfred Carr was born in Sunderland in 1894 andbrought up in County Durham. He was one of four sons, including his twin, Walter, nowalso dead. At 17 Henry went to Canada where he worked for a time in a bank. In 1915 hevolunteered for military service and went to France with the Canadian Black Watch. Hewas badly wounded the following year and—after lying five days in no-man’s land—wastaken prisoner. Because of his wounds Henry was sent by the Germans to stay at amonastery where the monks tended him to a partial recovery, and then as an “exchangeprisoner” he was one of a group who were sent to Switzerland.

Thus Henry Carr arrived in Zürich where he was to cross the path of James Joyce andfind himself a leading actor in both onstage and offstage dramas, leading to immorality ofa kind as a minor character in Ulysses.

It was in Zürich, too, that he met his first wife, Nora Tulloch. They married in Englandafter the war and later he took her back to Canada where he found a job in a departmentstore in Montreal. He rose within the organization to become company secretary.

In 1928, while in Montreal, he met Noël Bach and after his divorce they were marriedthere in 1933. The following year they returned to England. Henry ultimately joined afoundry company and when the next war came he and his wife were living in Sheffield.They were bombed out and moved to a Warwickshire village, where Henry commandedthe Home Guard, and they stayed in Warwickshire in the postwar years.

In 1962, while he was on a visit to London, Henry had a heart attack, and he died in St.Mary Abbots Hospital, Kensington. He had no children.

I am indebted to Mrs. Noël Carr for these biographical details, and, particularly, for herbenevolence towards me and towards what must seem to her a peculiarly well-named play. �

From the introductory notes to Travesties, by Tom Stoppard (Grove Press: New York, 1975).


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a brief biography of james joyce

As an artist I am against every state. Of course I must recognize it, since indeedin all my dealings I come into contact with its institutions. The state is con-centric, man is eccentric.Thence arises an eternal strug-gle. The monk, the bachelor,and the anarchist are in thesame category. Naturally I can’tapprove of the act of the revo-lutionary who tosses a bomb ina theatre to destroy the kingand his children. On the otherhand, have those statesbehaved any better which havedrowned the world in a blood-bath?

—James Joyce, quoted inJames Joyce, by Richard

Ellmann

A writer should never writeabout the extraordinary. That isfor the journalist.

—Joyce to Djuna Barnes

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Rathgar, a suburb ofDublin (where his name was accidentally registered as “James Augusta Joyce”). His

father, John, who would figure in several of his son’s books (including as Simon Dedalusin A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, and as Gabriel Conroy in “TheDead”), was an amateur actor and popular tenor. He was employed first in a Dublin dis-tillery, then as tax collector for the city of Dublin. James’s mother, Mary Jane Murray Joyce,was a gifted pianist, but spent most of her married life pregnant; she endured 13 pregnan-cies, including three miscarriages.

Endowed with a fine tenor voice and a love for music (he once entered a singing com-petition against the noted Irish tenor John McCormack), James Joyce was described by his

James Joyce, 1919 (© Bettmann/CORBIS)


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brother Stanislaus as tall, thin, and loose-jointed, with “a distinguished appearance andbearing.” In spite of ten major operations to save his sight, he was almost blind at the timeof his death. He often wore a black patch over his left eye and dressed in somber colors,although his friends remember him as witty and gay in company.

Joyce went to Clongowes Wood, entered the Royal University at St. Stephen’s Green ona scholarship, and there studied languages together with courses in mathematics and phi-losophy. He began to write prose sketches in 1900 with the composition of epiphanies, shortwritings in the form either of dramatic vignettes or prose poems.These short notations werefirst circulated by him in manuscript, but later used to indicate moments of heightened per-ception in the novels from Stephen Hero to Ulysses. A good linguist, from an early age he readand studied widely, and in 1901 wrote a letter of profound admiration in Dano-Norwegianto Henrik Ibsen (he had learned the language specifically to read the playwright’s work).

After first enrolling at the medical school of the Royal University, Joyce left Dublin forParis on December 1, 1902, with a view to training there instead, but encountered difficul-ties over entrance qualifications. He returned the following August on the news of hismother’s impending death. Once back in Dublin he embarked on a period of dissipationwith Oliver St. John Gogarty, a fellow poet and sometimes friend (who would be themodel for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses). He earned a little money writing book reviews forthe Dublin Daily Express and began a series of short stories, which eventually becameDubliners. Some of the stories appeared in 1904 in the magazine The Irish Homestead.

In June that year he met Nora Barnacle, a girl from Galway who was working as achambermaid. His love for her opened a source of ordinary human feeling upon which hewould draw at all stages of his career, basing Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle inUlysses and Finnegans Wake on her vitality. In October 1904 Joyce left Dublin with Norafor a teaching post in Trieste, a port city on the Adriatic (and at the time part of theAustro-Hungarian Empire), where he remained for ten years. With Joyce’s encourage-ment, his brother Stanislaus joined them in 1905, just after James and Nora’s son, Giorgio,was born. Stanislaus became an economic mainstay for the family, which was almost alwayswithout money (and what money came in was mostly spent by James in pubs). James leftthe Berlitz School in 1907, taking with him some private pupils who provided better ratesof payment. That same year he published, to the excitement of almost no one, ChamberMusic, a volume of poetry. In July 1908, his daughter, Lucia, was born in the pauper’s wardof the city hospital in Trieste (where James was also confined, with rheumatic fever). WhenNora left with the baby, she was given 20 crowns in charity. Lucia was marked for tragedy.As a young woman she showed promise as a dancer, but by her early 20s began to showsigns of mental illness; she would be institutionalized for much of her life.


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In 1909 Joyce undertook to open a Dublin cinema, the Volta (the first in Ireland), for aTriestino company. Owing to his choosing Italian rather than American films, the audi-ence rapidly fell off and the venture failed. In 1913 w. b. Yeats alerted Ezra Pound to Joyce’stalent, and when Joyce sent him the first chapter of his autobiographical novel Stephen Heroin its revised form, Pound found a publisher for it: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manfirst appeared serially in a small literary magazine, The Egoist (February 1914–September1915), and then in book form in New York (1916), an Egoist Press edition following inLondon (1917). Dubliners was finally published in London in June 1914. Joyce now beganto receive financial support through Pound’s advocacy, notably from Miss Harriet ShawWeaver (co-editor of The Egoist with Dora Marsden). Improved finances and Pound’s crit-ical support gave Joyce the confidence to commence a novel that he had contemplated asa final story for Dubliners. He began writing Ulysses with the “Calypso” episode on March1, 1914, and he had completed the first three chapters by early 1915.

World War i compelled Joyce to move to Zürich at the end of June 1915 (for one thing,virtually all of his male students had been conscripted). There he continued with Ulysses.With strong backing from Yeats and Pound, Joyce received a grant from the Royal LiteraryFund in 1915, and shortly thereafter a grant from the Civil List. (The Civil List is publicmoney given to the British monarch and her or his family mostly to cover their staffs’

T he young Joyce who had arrived at University College, Dublin,in 1899 was “tall, slim, and elegant,” with “an erect yet loosecarriage; an uptilted, long, narrow head, and a strong chin that

jutted out arrogantly; firm, tight shut mouth; light-blue eyes [that]could stare with indignant wonder,” as Con Curran remembered himfrom that time. In later years he grew conspicuously slighter butalways retained a dandified air, which he enhanced by a cane andrings. His hair was severely swept back, and he wore broad felt hatsin the fedora style. He had the “stork’s legs” that he attributed toLeopold Bloom, and on these he occasionally danced an Irish jig ofhis own invention—the celebrated “spiderdance.” The thin lips, deter-mined chin, and prominent forehead of the young artist produced intime a somewhat concave physiognomy in the ageing writer, which,when surmounted by the thick lenses of his round spectacles thatmagnified the conspicuous effect of repeated surgery to his left eye,oddly anticipated the aspect of the death mask that was made of himon January 13, 1941.

—Oxford Dictionary of National Biography


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expenses. For a time, the monarch could also donate some of it to men and women whohad distinguished themselves in the arts and sciences.) The British government, whichsponsored both gifts, suggested that they would look kindly on his performing some serv-ice in Zürich in return. The government had some pro-Allied journalism in mind; instead,Joyce cofounded with Claude Sykes The English Players and embarked on their first pro-duction, The Importance of Being Earnest. Early in 1918, he was mysteriously summoned tothe Eidgenössiche Bank; he had to borrow the black suit that was required to call on Swissbankers. He was told he would receive a gift of one thousand francs a month for a yearfrom an anonymous benefactor, whom he later learned was Mrs. Harold McCormick, wifeof the farm machinery tycoon and a daughter of John D. Rockefeller. She was living inZürich and patronizing writers and artists, including Carl Jung. The gift, along with thesupport of Harriet Weaver, eased his financial situation considerably.

Joyce’s one play, Exiles, was published in 1918 and produced unsuccessfully in Munich in1919. It was a study of jealousy that he’d begun in 1913, when he was urging Nora towards infi-delities in a spirit of emotional inquiry (and, perhaps, to ease his conscience over his own phi-landerings; in any case, she turned down the invitation). It would be produced in London bythe Stage Society in 1926 and wasn’t revived until 1970 when it was directed by Harold Pinter.

Joyce returned to Trieste in 1919 before moving to Paris in 1920 on Pound’s advice. Therehe soon met Sylvia Beach, who offered to bring out Ulysses under her Shakespeare &Company bookshop imprint, with the help of Adrienne Monnier. The book appeared intime for Joyce’s 40th birthday, February 2, 1922. During this period he met and befriendedSamuel Beckett, and the young writer sometimes took dictation for Joyce’s next large proj-ect. During the autumn of 1922 Joyce began to compile notes for a new book, incorporat-ing unused material from Ulysses. During that year he studied Sir Edward Sullivan’s 1920

Studio edition of the Book of Kells, drawing his friends’ attention to what he considered tobe the Irishness of its densely patterned illuminations. The ensuing labor of Work inProgress—as the book was known before publication—took 17 years, during which Joyceexperienced physical, mental, and emotional trials. Finnegans Wake, as it was eventuallycalled, was completed in November 1938 and published on Joyce’s 57th birthday in 1939.The outbreak of World War ii caused the Joyces to move to Gérand-le-Puy, a town nearVichy. In December 1940, the family entered Switzerland with special visas—all exceptLucia, his daughter, who was by then in a sanatorium. Joyce died after an apparently suc-cessful operation for an ulcerated duodenum on January 13, 1941. �

Adapted from “Joyce, James [Augustine Aloysius],” in The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, edited by RobertWelch (Oxford University Press, 2000), and Oxford Reference Online, http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t55.e1201 (accessed June 20, 2006).


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joyce in zürichZürich was full of stimulation. Poles, Greeks, Germans, conscientious objectors, artists,chancers, and spies had all convened in the same city and frequented the Pfauen Café,where [ Joyce] himself drank and overheard . . . theories of futurism, cubism, and Dadaism.

His listeners must have been enthralled by this lank, sandy-haired Irishman, with thenear-boneless handshake and the supple wit, questioning each on what he knew best. Hecopied their slang and their anecdotes onto slips of paper which he consigned to his pock-ets. He spoke five languages and had as well a smattering of Greek, though not classicalGreek. Greeks meant good luck, nuns ill luck. He would have to know if the pigeons whichflew between Scylla and Charybdis bore a resemblance to the Dublin ones and he wel-comed anatomical descriptions of the sirens in their coral caves, poised to bewitch sailors.Each country and therefore each countryman had his own bit of private lore and mobmanners to impart. He questioned the locals on the spring rite in which the winter demondressed in cotton was placed on a wooden pyre and set fire to. He copied down Frenchsongs and he particularly liked the scatological ones. He carried a pair of miniature doll’sdrawers, which he would put two fingers into and dangle puppetlike on the counter tableto the amusement of the motley clientele. . . .

All his life he was a voracious reader. He read books, pamphlets, street directories, every-thing and anything to feed his eclectic tastes and his lust for knowledge. In his library after hisdeath there were almost a thousand volumes, books as diverse as A Clue to the Creed of EarlyEgypt, Apuleius [a second century b.c.e. Roman writer], Aeschylus, Psyche and Cupid,ThomasAquinas, Plato, Nietzsche, Irish melodies, Historic Graves of Glasnevin Cemetery, Cowper’stranslation of the Odyssey, a pocket missal that had belonged to his cousin, Fanny Hill’s unex-purgated memoirs, a book on uric acid, another on masturbation, a little handbook on for-tune-telling by cards, and the catalogues from the modish shops in London and Dublin. . . .

He rarely spoke of the war and he never wrote about it. He believed that politics andgovernment were for specialists and he was a specialist in only one thing. . . . Years laterJoyce told the Polish novelist Jan Parandowski that there was fighting on all fronts, thatempires fell, kings went into exile, the old order was collapsing, but he worked with theconviction that he was doing something for the most distant future. . . .

Indeed, Joyce was quite indifferent about the outcome of the war—as were manyIrishmen who felt little allegiance to Great Britain. He also did some journalism for a neu-tral journal, The International Review. Both of these facts were known to the British con-sul-general in Zürich, A. Percy Bennett. Richard Ellmann speculates that Percy mighthave heard of Joyce’s cheeky, anti-British version of the song “Mr. Dooley.”

—From Edna O’Brien’s James Joyce


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a brief biography of tristan tzara

Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada;a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada;. . . abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; ofevery social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets:Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions, and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition ofmemory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada;abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every godthat is the immediate product of spontaneity: Dada; . . . to respect all individ-uals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent,vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; . . . to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideaslike a luminous waterfall, or coddle them—with the extreme satisfaction that itdoesn’t matter in the least. . . . Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tensecolors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, incon-sistencies: LIFE.

—“Dada Manifesto,” Tristan Tzara (1918)

At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposedto create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued [and]wrecked the theater. André Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movementand grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch.

—“The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin,” by William S. Burroughs

As befits a Dadaist, Tristan Tzara’s date of birth is uncertain. Some sources say he wasborn on April 4, 1896, in Moinesti, Bacau, Romania; others give the date as April 16.

His name was Samuel Rosenstock; he didn’t legally change it to Tristan Tzara until 1925.He is remembered as a proponent and theoretician of Dadaism, an intellectual movementof the World War i era whose adherents espoused intentional irrationality and urged indi-viduals to repudiate traditional artistic, historical, and religious values.

In response to the alienation and absurdity of World War i and the staid, unimagina-tive art forms predominant in Europe during that era, Tzara and other European artistssought to establish a new style in which random associations would serve to evoke a vital-ity free from the restraints of logic and grammar. Tzara articulated the aesthetic theories ofDadaism in his 1924 seminal collection of essays, Seven Dada Manifestoes. This volume, in


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which Tzara advocates “absolute faith in every god that is the immediate product of spon-taneity,” represents a chaotic assault on reason and convention. Although his work oftendefies standard classification and is regarded by most contemporary English-speakingscholars as little more than a literary curiosity, Tzara is esteemed in France for his large anddiverse body of poetry, which is unified by his critique of and search for a universal lan-guage and cosmic wisdom.

Tzara’s first published poetry appeared in a literary review in 1912. Many of these poems,written in Romanian and influenced by French symbolist writers, appear in Les premièrspoèmes. Tzara emigrated to Switzerland from Romania in 1916. Together with Jean Arp,Hugo Ball, and others, Tzara founded the Dada movement and staged Dadaist perform-ances at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. Tzara’s early Dadaist verse, written between 1916

and 1924, utilizes agglomerations of obscure images, nonsense syllables, outrageous juxta-positions, ellipses, and inscrutable maxims to perplex readers and to illustrate the limita-tions of language. Volumes such as Vingt-cinq poèmes (1918) and De nos oiseaux (1923) dis-play the propositions outlined in Tzara’s manifestoes and critical essays, often blendingcriticism and poetry to create hybrid literary forms.

Tzara left Switzerland in 1919 and settled in Paris, where he engagedin Dadaist experiments with such literary figures as André Breton and Louis Aragon.Serious philosophical dif-ferences caused a splitbetween Tzara and Bretonin 1921; soon after, Bretonfounded Surrealism, andby 1922, the Dada move-ment had dissolved. By1929, however, Tzara wasparticipating in the activi-ties of the Surrealistgroup. In this environ-ment, he created a moresustained and coherentpoetry that placed lessemphasis on the ridicu-lous than his Dadaistverse. Tzara’s works pub-lished during this period

Tristan Tzara (second from left) at a Dada meeting. Photo from the Frankfürter Zeitung,January 11, 1921 (Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, France, ArchivesCharmet / The Bridgeman Art Library).


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include L’homme approximatif (1931), an epic poem widely considered a landmark of 20th-century French literature. This work portrays an unfulfilled wayfarer’s search for a uni-versal knowledge and language. This and Tzara’s later Surrealist volumes—L’arbre desvoyageurs (1930), Oú boivent les loups (1932), L’antitête (1933), and Grains et issues (1935)—reveal his obsession with language, his vision of humanity’s destiny of tedium and alien-ation, and his concern with the struggle to achieve completeness and enlightenment.

In 1934, Tzara left the Surrealists to join France’s Communist Party. As his commit-ment to left-wing politics increased, his poetry included greater political content andstressed revolutionary and humanistic values, while maintaining his lifelong interest in freeimagery and linguistic experiments. His work in these years focused on his impressions ofSpain during the country’s civil war, in which he served on the Loyalist side, and life insideNazi-occupied France during World War ii, where he belonged to the Resistance. Criticsgenerally regard such later works as less vigorous and inventive but more controlled thanhis earlier poetry. The more important point, however, would be Tzara’s politically com-mitted stance, a far cry from the Cabaret Voltaire of Zürich in 1917.

Tzara’s dramas have received less critical attention than his manifestoes and poetry.Written during his Dadaist phase, Tzara’s best-known plays, Le coeur a gaz (1920) andMouchoir de nuages (1925), rely on absurdity and wordplay, parodying such literary forms asclassical Greek and Shakespearean theater and French symbolist poetry. In Essai sur la sit-uation de la poésie (1931), a collection of critical essays, Tzara celebrates poetry as a liberat-ing force from conventional modes of expression.

Tzara died in Paris, December 24, 1963.

Excerpted and adapted from “Tristan Tzara,” Contemporary Authors Online (Gale 2006), http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC.

The bourgeois regarded the Dadaist as a dissolute monster, a revolutionary

villain, a barbarous Asiatic, plotting against his bells, his safe-deposits, his

honors list. The Dadaist thought up tricks to rob the bourgeois of his sleep.

. . . The Dadaist gave the bourgeois a sense of confusion and distant, yet

mighty rumbling, so that his bells began to buzz, his safes frowned, and his

honors list broke out in spots.

—Hans Arp


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dadaby paul trachtman

In the years before World War i, Europe appeared to be losing its hold on reality.Einstein’s universe seemed like science fiction, Freud’s theories put reason in the grip of

the unconscious, and Marx’s Communism aimed to turn society upside down, with theproletariat on top. The arts were also coming unglued. Schoenberg’s music was atonal,Mallarmé’s poems scrambled syntax and scattered words across the page, and Picasso’sCubism made a hash of human anatomy.

And even more radical ideas were afoot. Anarchists and nihilists inhabited the politicalfringe, and a new breed of artist was starting to attack the very concept of art itself. InParis, after trying his hand at Impressionism and Cubism, Marcel Duchamp rejected allpainting because it was made for the eye, not the mind. “In 1913 I had the happy idea tofasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn,” he later wrote, describing theconstruction he called Bicycle Wheel, a precursor of both kinetic and conceptual art. In 1916,German writer Hugo Ball, who had taken refuge from the war in neutral Switzerland,reflected on the state of contemporary art: “The image of the human form is gradually dis-appearing from the painting of these times and all objects appear only in fragments. . . .The next step is for poetry to decide to do away with language.”

That same year, Ball recited just such a poem on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire inZürich, a nightspot (named for the 18th-century French philosopher and satirist) that he,Emmy Hennings (a singer and poet he would later marry), and a few expatriate pals hadopened as a gathering place for artists and writers. The poem began: “gadji beri bimba /glandridi lauli lonni cadori. . . .” It was utter nonsense, of course, aimed at a public thatseemed all too complacent about a senseless war. Politicians of all stripes had proclaimedthe war a noble cause—whether it was to defend Germany’s high culture, France’sEnlightenment, or Britain’s empire. Ball wanted to shock anyone, he wrote, who regarded“all this civilized carnage as a triumph of European intelligence.” One Cabaret Voltaireperformer, Romanian artist Tristan Tzara, described its nightly shows as “explosions ofelective imbecility.”

This new, irrational art movement would be named Dada. It got its name, according toRichard Huelsenbeck, a German artist living in Zürich, when he and Ball came upon theword in a French-German dictionary. To Ball, it fit. “Dada is ‘yes, yes’ in Romanian, ‘rock-ing horse’ and ‘hobby horse’ in French,” he noted in his diary. “For Germans it is a sign offoolish naiveté, joy in procreation, and preoccupation with the baby carriage.” Tzara, who


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later claimed that he had coined the term, quickly used it on posters, put out the first Dadajournal, and wrote one of the first of many Dada manifestoes, few of which, appropriatelyenough, made much sense.

But the absurdist outlook spread like a pandemic—Tzara called Dada “a virginmicrobe”—and there were outbreaks from Berlin to Paris, New York, and even Tokyo. Andfor all its zaniness, the movement would prove to be one of the most influential in mod-ern art, foreshadowing abstract and conceptual art, performance art, op, pop, and installa-tion art. But Dada would die out in less than a decade and has not had the kind of majormuseum retrospective it deserves, until now.

The Dada exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, d.c. (on viewthrough May 14, 2006) presents some 400 paintings, sculptures, photographs, collages,prints, and film and sound recordings by more than 40 artists. The show, which moves toNew York’s Museum of Modern Art ( June 18 through September 11), is a variation on aneven larger exhibition that opened at the Pompidou Center in Paris in the fall of 2005. Inan effort to make Dada easier to understand, the American curators, Leah Dickerman, ofthe National Gallery, and Anne Umland, of MoMA, have organized it around the citieswhere the movement flourished—Zürich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, and Paris.

Dickerman traces Dada’s origins to the Great War (1914–18), which left 10 million deadand some 20 million wounded. “For many intellectuals,” she writes in the National Gallerycatalog, “World War i produced a collapse of confidence in the rhetoric—if not the prin-ciples—of the culture of rationality that had prevailed in Europe since theEnlightenment.” She goes on to quote Freud, who wrote that no event “confused so manyof the clearest intelligences, or so thoroughly debased what is highest.” Dada embraced andparodied that confusion. “Dada wished to replace the logical nonsense of the men of todaywith an illogical nonsense,” wrote Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, whose artist husband, FrancisPicabia, once tacked a stuffed monkey to a board and called it a portrait of Cézanne.

“Total pandemonium,” wrote Hans Arp, a young Alsatian sculptor in Zürich, of thegoings-on at the “gaudy, motley, overcrowded” Cabaret Voltaire. “Tzara is wiggling hisbehind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowingand scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeckis banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano,pale as a chalky ghost.”

These antics struck the Dada crowd as no more absurd than the war itself. A swiftGerman offensive in April 1917 left 120,000 French dead just 150 miles from Paris, and one

OPPOSITE P. 1921, collage by Raoul Hausmann (Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany / The Bridgeman Art Library)


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village witnessed a band of French infantrymen (sent as reinforcements) baa-ing like lambsled to slaughter, in futile protest, as they were marched to the front. “Without World Wari there is no Dada,” says Laurent Le Bon, the curator of the Pompidou Center’s show. “Butthere’s a French saying, ‘Dada explains the war more than the war explains Dada.’”

Two of Germany’s military leaders had dubbed the war Materialschlacht, or “the battleof equipment.” But the dadas, as they called themselves, begged to differ. “The war is basedon a crass error,” Hugo Ball wrote in his diary on June 26, 1915. “Men have been mistakenfor machines.”

It was not only the war but the impact of modern media and the emerging industrialage of science and technology that provoked the Dada artists. As Arp once complained,“Today’s representative of man is only a tiny button on a giant senseless machine.” The

dadas mocked that dehumanization withelaborate pseudodiagrams—chockablockwith gears, pulleys, dials, wheels, levers, pis-tons, and clockworks—that explained noth-ing. The typographer’s symbol of a pointinghand appeared frequently in Dada art andbecame an emblem for the movement—making a pointless gesture. Arp createdabstract compositions from cutout papershapes, which he dropped randomly onto abackground and glued down where theyfell. He argued for this kind of chanceabstraction as a way to rid art of any subjec-tivity. Duchamp found a different way tomake his art impersonal—drawing like amechanical engineer rather than an artist.He preferred mechanical drawing, he said,because “it’s outside all pictorial conven-tion.” . . .

Duchamp traced the roots of Dada’s far-cical spirit back to the fifth-century b.c.e.Greek satirical playwright Aristophanes,says the Pompidou Center’s Le Bon. Amore immediate source, however, was theabsurdist French playwright Alfred Jarry,

Costume sketch of Tristan Tzara by Deborah Dryden


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whose 1895 farce Ubu Roi (King Ubu) introduced “Pataphysics”—“the science of imaginarysolutions.” It was the kind of science that Dada applauded. Erik Satie, an avant-gardecomposer who collaborated with Picasso on stage productions and took part in Dadasoirées, claimed that his sound collages—an orchestral suite with passages for piano andsiren, for example—were “dominated by scientific thought.”

Duchamp probably had the most success turning the tools of science into art. . . . In1917, he bought a porcelain urinal at a Fifth Avenue plumbing supply shop, titled itFountain, signed it R. Mutt, and submitted it to a Society of Independent Artists exhibi-tion in New York City. Some of the show’s organizers were aghast (“the poor fellowscouldn’t sleep for three days,” Duchamp later recalled), and the piece was rejected.Duchamp resigned as chairman of the exhibition committee in support of Mutt and pub-lished a defense of the work. The ensuing publicity helped make Fountain one of Dada’smost notorious symbols, along with the print of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa the fol-lowing year, to which Duchamp had added a penciled mustache and goatee.

Parodying the scientific method, Duchamp made voluminous notes, diagrams, andstudies for his most enigmatic work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (or TheLarge Glass)—a nine-foot-tall assemblage of metal foil, wires, oil, varnish, and dust, sand-wiched between glass panels. Art historian Michael Taylor describes the work as “a com-plex allegory of frustrated desire in which the nine uniformed bachelors in the lower panelare perpetually thwarted from copulating with the wasplike, biomechanical bride above.”

Duchamp’s irreverence toward science was shared by two of his New York companions,Picabia and a young American photographer, Man Ray. Picabia could draw with the precision of a commercial artist, making his nonsensical diagrams seem particularly convincing. While Duchamp built machines with spinning disks that created surprisingspiral patterns, Picabia covered canvases with disorienting stripes and concentric circles—an early form of optical experimentation in modern painting. Man Ray, whose photo-graphs documented Duchamp’s optical machines, put his own stamp on photography bymanipulating images in the darkroom to create illusions on film.

After the war ended in 1918, Dada disturbed the peace in Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, andParis. In Berlin, artist Hannah Höch gave an ironic domestic touch to Dada with collagesthat incorporated sewing patterns, cut-up photographs taken from fashion magazines, andimages of a German military and industrial society in ruins.

In Cologne, in 1920, German artist Max Ernst and a band of local dadas, excluded froma museum exhibition, organized their own—“Dada Early Spring”—in the courtyard of apub. Out past the men’s room, a girl wearing a “communion dress recited lewd poetry, thusassaulting both the sanctity of high art and of religion,” art historian Sabine Kriebel notes


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in the current exhibition’s catalog. In the courtyard, “viewers were encouraged to destroyan Ernst sculpture, to which he had attached a hatchet.” The Cologne police shut downthe show, charging the artists with obscenity for a display of nudity. But the charge wasdropped when the obscenity turned out to be a print of a 1504 engraving by Albrecht Dürertitled Adam and Eve, which Ernst had incorporated into one of his sculptures.

In Hanover, artist Kurt Schwitters began making art out of the detritus of postwarGermany. “Out of parsimony I took whatever I found to do this,” he wrote of the trash hepicked up off the streets and turned into collages and sculptural assemblages. “One caneven shout with refuse, and this is what I did, nailing and gluing it together.” . . . The free-form construction built out of found objects and geometric forms that the artist called theMerzbau began as a couple of three-dimensional collages, or assemblages, and grew untilhis house had become a construction site of columns, niches, and grottoes. In time, thesculpture actually broke through the building’s roof and outer walls; he was still workingon it when he was forced to flee Germany by the Nazis’ rise to power. In the end, the workwas destroyed by Allied bombers during World War ii.

Dada’s last hurrah was sounded in Paris in the early 1920s, when Tzara, Ernst, Duchampand other Dada pioneers took part in a series of exhibitions of provocative art, nude per-formances, rowdy stage productions, and incomprehensible manifestoes. But the move-ment was falling apart. The French critic and poet André Breton issued his own Dadamanifestoes, but fell to feuding with Tzara, as Picabia, fed up with all the infighting, fledthe scene. By the early 1920s Breton was already hatching the next great avant-garde idea,Surrealism. “Dada,” he gloated, “very fortunately, is no longer an issue and its funeral,about May 1921, caused no rioting.”

But Dada, which wasn’t quite dead yet, would soon leap from the grave. Arp’s abstrac-tions, Schwitters’ constructions, Picabia’s targets and stripes, and Duchamp’s readymadeswere soon turning up in the work of major 20th-century artists and art movements. FromStuart Davis’s abstractions to Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, from Jasper Johns’s targets and flagsto Robert Rauschenberg’s collages and combines—almost anywhere you look in modernand contemporary art, Dada did it first. Even Breton, who died in 1966, recanted his dis-dain for Dada. “Fundamentally, since Dada,” he wrote, not long before his death, “we havedone nothing.” �

This article originally appeared in the May 2006 issue of Smithsonian magazine. © 2006 Smithsonian Institution (accessed July14, 2006, at http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2006/may/dada.php).


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a brief biography of vladimir ilyich lenin

Few events have shaped contemporary history as profoundly as the 1917 RussianRevolution and the Communist revolutions that followed. Each one of them was

made in the name of v. i. Lenin, his doctrines, and his political practices. Contemporarythinking about world affairs has been greatly influenced by Lenin’s impetus and contribu-tions. From Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points to today’s preoccupation with wars ofnational liberation, imperialism, and decolonization, many important issues of contempo-rary social science were first raised or disseminated by Lenin; even some of the terms heused have entered into popular vocabulary. Even opposition to Lenin often takes Leninistforms.

formative yearsVladimir Ilyich Lenin was born in Simbirsk (today Ulyanovsk) on April 10 (Old Style),1870. His real family name was Ulyanov, and his father, Ilya Nikolaevich, was a high offi-cial in the czarist educational bureaucracy who had risen into the nobility. Vladimirreceived the conventional education given to sons of the Russian upper class, but turnedinto a radical dissenter. One impetus to his conversion doubtless was the execution byhanging of his older brother Alexander in 1887; Alexander and a few associates had con-spired to assassinate Czar Alexander iii. Lenin graduated from secondary school with highhonors and enrolled at Kazan University, but was expelled after participating in a demon-stration. He retired to the family estate but was permitted to continue his studies in absen-tia. He obtained a law degree in 1891.

When, in 1893, he moved to St. Petersburg, Lenin was already a Marxist and a revolu-tionary by profession, joining like-minded intellectuals in study groups, writing polemicalpamphlets and articles, and seeking to organize workers. The St. Petersburg Union for theStruggle for the Liberation of Labor, which Lenin helped create, was one of the importantnuclei of the Russian Marxist movement.

In 1897, Lenin was arrested, spent some months in jail, and was finally sentenced tothree years of exile in the Siberian village of Shushenskoye. He was joined there by a fel-low Marxist, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, whom he married in 1898. (Krupskayawould remain his devoted companion, secretary, and fellow revolutionary until Lenin’sdeath in 1924; her memoir Recollections of Lenin [1957] was primary source material for TomStoppard in writing Travesties.)


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emigration to europeNot long after his release from Siberia in the summer of 1900, Lenin moved to Europe,where he spent most of the next 17 years, moving from one country to another at frequentintervals, periods of feverish activity alternating with episodes of total frustration. His firststep was to join the editorial board of Iskra (The Spark), then the central newspaper ofRussian Marxism, where he served together with the top leaders of the movement. Afterparting from Iskra, he edited a succession of papers of his own and contributed to othersocialist journals. For some time, Lenin also conducted a training school for Russian rev-olutionaries at Longjumeau, a suburb of Paris.

lenin’s thoughtA Marxist movement had developed in Russia only during the last decade of the 19th cen-tury as a response to the rapid growth of industry, urban centers, and a proletariat. Themovement’s first intellectual spokesmen were individuals who had turned away from pop-ulism, which they regarded as a failure. Instead of relying on the peasantry, they placed

Lenin, c. 1920, addressing a mass meeting in a public square in Moscow, making a stirring appeal for the men to keep togetherfor the glory and safety of Russia (© Bettmann/CORBIS)


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their hopes on the workers as the revolutionary class. They opted for industrialization,modernization, and Westernization. They declared their immediate aim to be a bourgeoisrevolution that would transform Russia into a democratic republic.

In accepting this revolutionary scenario, Lenin added the important proviso that hege-mony in the coming bourgeois revolution should remain with the proletariat as the mostconsistently revolutionary of all classes.

At the same time, Lenin, more than most Marxists, made a clear distinction between theworkers’ movement, on the one hand, and the theoretical contribution to be made by intel-lectuals, on the other. Of the two, he considered the theoretical contribution the moreimportant, the workers’ movement being a merely spontaneous reaction to capitalistexploitation, whereas theory was an expression of consciousness, meaning science andrationality. Throughout his life Lenin insisted that consciousness must maintain leadershipover spontaneity for revolutionary Marxism to succeed. This implies that the intellectualleaders must prepare the proletariat for its political tasks and must guide it in its action.Leadership and hierarchy thus are key concepts in the Leninist vocabulary, and the role andstructure of the party are expected to conform to this conception. The party is seen as theinstitutionalization of true consciousness. It must form the general staff of the revolution,subjecting the working class and indeed all of its own members to command and discipline.

Lenin expressed these ideas in his important book What Is to Be Done? (1902), its titleexpressing Lenin’s indebtedness to the classic 1863 work by radical Russian journalist andpolitician Nikolay Chernyshevsky. When, in 1903, the leaders of Russian Marxism met forthe first important party congress, formally the Second Congress, these ideas clashed headon with the conception of a looser, more democratic workers’ party advanced by Lenin’sold friend Julius Martov. This disagreement over the nature and organization of the partywas complicated by numerous other conflicts of view, and from its first important congressRussian Marxism emerged split into two factions. The one led by Lenin called itself themajority faction (bolsheviks); the other got stuck with the name of minority faction (mensheviks).

Mensheviks and Bolsheviks disagreed not only over organizational questions but alsoover most other political problems, including the entire conception of a Marxist programfor Russia and the methods to be employed by the party. Bolshevism, in general, stressedthe need for revolution and the futility of incremental reforms; in comparison toMenshevism it was impatient, pragmatic, and tough-minded.

Lenin spared no effort to build just this kind of party over the next 20 years, despitefierce attacks on his position by some of his closest comrades of the Iskra days, GeorgyPlekhanov, Julius Martov, and Leon Trotsky. Versed in many languages, Lenin spoke


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Russian with a slight speech defect but was a powerful orator in small groups as well asbefore mass audiences. A tireless worker himself, Lenin made others work tirelessly. Self-effacing, he sought to compel his collaborators to devote every ounce of their energy tothe revolutionary task at hand. He was impatient with any extraneous activities, includingsmall talk and abstract theoretical discussions. As one Menshevik opponent describedLenin: “There is no other man who is absorbed by the revolution 24 hours a day, who hasno other thoughts but the thought of revolution, and who even when he sleeps, dreams ofnothing but revolution.”

Lenin was in fact suspicious of intellectuals and felt most at home in the company ofsimple folk. Having been brought up in the tradition of the Russian nobility, he lovedhunting, hiking, horseback riding, boating, mushrooming, and the outdoor life in general.He sought to harden himself with systematic physical exercise and generally forbade him-self hobbies that he considered time wasting or corrupting: chess, music, and companion-ship. While his lifestyle was that of a dedicated professional revolutionary, his tastes in art,morals, and manners were rather conventional.

In January 1905, protests and general strikes in St. Petersburg and other Russian indus-trial centers ignited widespread revolt throughout Russian society. The revolution sur-prised all Russian revolutionary leaders, including the Bolsheviks. Lenin managed toreturn to Russia from Switzerland only in November, when the defeat of the revolutionwas a virtual certainty. But he was among the last to give up. For many more months heurged his followers to renew their revolutionary enthusiasm and activities and to preparefor an armed uprising.

bolshevism as an independent factionIn the 12 years between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, Bolshevism, which had begun asa faction within the Russian Social-Democratic Workers party, gradually emerged as anindependent party that had cut its ties with all other Russian Marxists. The processentailed prolonged and bitter polemics against Mensheviks, as well as against all thosewho worked for a reconciliation of the factions. It involved fights over funds, struggles forcontrol of newspapers, the development of rival organizations, and meetings of rival congresses.

In about 1905, the international socialist movement began to discuss the possibility ofa major war breaking out. In its congresses of 1907 and 1912, resolutions were passed whichcondemned such wars in advance and pledged the parties of the proletariat not to supportthem. Lenin wanted to go further than that. He urged active opposition to the war effortand a transformation of any war into a proletarian revolution. He called his policy “revo-


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lutionary defeatism.” When World War i broke out, most socialist leaders in the countriesinvolved supported the war effort. For Lenin, this was proof that he and they shared noaims or views. The break between the two schools of Marxism had become irreconcilable.

Forced into exile again in 1907, Lenin reached neutral Switzerland in September 1914,there joining a small group of antiwar Bolshevik and Menshevik émigrés. The war virtu-ally cut them off from all contact with Russia and with like-minded Socialists in othercountries. Nevertheless, Lenin attended several conferences of radical socialists opposed tothe war or even agreeing with his revolutionary defeatism. He read extensively on theMarxist theory of state and wrote a first draft for a book on the subject, The State andRevolution. He also immersed himself in literature dealing with contemporary world pol-itics and wrote a book that may, in the long run, be his most important, Imperialism: TheHighest Stage of Capitalism (1916), in which Marxism is effectively made applicable to the20th century. First published in Russia in 1917, Imperialism to this day provides the instru-ment that Communists everywhere employ to evaluate major trends in the non-Communist world.

By the beginning of 1917, Lenin was suffering from fits of despondency and wrote to aclose friend that he despaired of ever witnessing another revolution. This was about amonth before the fall of Czar Nicholas ii.

lenin returns to russiaDuring the week of March 8–15, 1917, the starving, freezing, war-weary workers andsoldiers of Petrograd (until 1914, St. Petersburg) succeeded in deposing the czar. Therevolution found Lenin in Zürich and, like most of the socialist leaders, it caught him bysurprise. “It’s staggering!” he told his wife when he heard the news. “It’s so incrediblyunexpected!” Historian Orlando Figes relates Lenin’s attempts to leave Switzerland:

Lenin was determined to get back to Russia as soon as possible. But how couldhe cross the German lines? At first he thought of crossing the North Sea bysteamer, as Plekhanov had already done. But the British were hostile to theRussian Marxists: Trotsky and Bukharin had both been detained in England ontheir way back to Russia from New York. Then he thought of traveling throughGermany disguised as a deaf, dumb, and blind Swede—until Krupskaya hadjoked that he was bound to give himself away by muttering abuse against theMensheviks in his sleep. In a moment of desperation he had even consideredhiring a private airplane to fly across eastern Europe; but then the thought of


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the dangers involved put him off this harebrained scheme. When it came to put-ting himself at physical risk, Lenin always had been something of a coward.

It took a good deal of negotiation and courage for Lenin and a group of like-mindedRussian revolutionaries to travel from Switzerland back to Russia through enemy territory(Germany). Much has been made of Lenin’s negotiations with an enemy power and of thefact that some Bolshevik activities were supported financially by German intelligenceagencies. From Lenin’s point of view the source of aid was immaterial; what counted wasthe use to which it was put. In any case, the Germans thought it a good gamble to assistLenin; they hoped that his presence in Russia would destabilize the already weak provi-sional government.

Lenin arrived in Petrograd on April 16, 1917. For Lenin this was the end of an unex-pected journey. Once he had returned to Russia, Lenin worked feverishly and relentlesslyto exploit the revolutionary situation that had been created by the fall of czarism so as toconvert it into a proletarian revolution that would bring his own party into power.

The result of his activities is well known: Opinions in Russia quickly became more andmore polarized. Moderate forces found themselves less and less able to maintain even apretense of control. In the end, the so-called provisional government, then headed byAlexander Kerensky, simply melted away, and power literally fell into the hands of theBolsheviks. As a result of this so-called October Revolution, Lenin found himself not onlythe leader of his party but also the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (equiv-alent to prime minister) of the newly proclaimed Russian Socialist Federative SovietRepublic.

ruler of russiaDuring the first years of Lenin’s rule as dictator of Russia, the major task he faced was thatof establishing his and his party’s authority in the country. Most of his policies can beunderstood in this light, even though he alienated some elements in the population whilesatisfying others. Examples are the expropriation of landholdings for distribution to thepeasants, the separate peace treaty with Germany, and the nationalization of banks andindustrial establishments.

From 1918 to 1921 a fierce civil war raged, which the Bolsheviks finally won against seem-ingly overwhelming odds. During the civil war Lenin tightened his party’s dictatorship andeventually eliminated all rival parties from the political arena. A spirited defense of his dic-tatorship can be found in “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky” (1918),in which Lenin answers criticism from more moderate Marxists. Lenin had to create an


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entirely new political system with the help of inexperienced personnel; he was heading atotally exhausted economy and had to devise desperate means for mobilizing people forwork. Simultaneously he created the Third (Communist) International and vigorously pro-moted the spread of the revolution to other countries; and meanwhile he had to cope withdissent among his own party comrades, some of whom criticized him from the left. Thepamphlet “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder” is a response to this criticism.

By the time the civil war had been won and the regime firmly established, the economywas ruined, and much of the population was bitterly opposed to the regime. At this pointLenin reversed many of his policies and instituted a trenchant reform, called the NewEconomic Policy. It signified a temporary retreat from the goal of establishing communismat once and a resolve to make do with the social forces available: the Communist partydeclared itself ready to coexist and cooperate with features of the past, such as free enter-prise, capitalist institutions, and capitalist states across the borders. For the time being, theSoviet economy would be a mixture of capitalist and socialist features. The stress of theparty’s policies would be on economic reconstruction and on the education of a peasantpopulation for life in the 20th century. In the long run, Lenin hoped that both these policies would make the blessings of socialism obvious to all, so that the country wouldgradually grow into socialism.

In 1918 an assassin wounded Lenin, age 48; he recovered but may have suffered lastingdamage. On May 26, 1922, he suffered a serious stroke from which he recovered after someweeks, only to suffer a second stroke on December 16. He was so seriously incapacitatedthat he could participate in political matters only intermittently and feebly. An invalid, helived in a country home at Gorky, near Moscow, where he died on January 21, 1924. Hisbody was preserved and is on view in the Lenin Mausoleum outside the walls of theMoscow Kremlin. �

Adapted from “Vladimir Ilich Lenin,” Encyclopedia of World Biography, second edition (Gale Research, 1998); A People’s Tragedy:The Russian Revolution 1891–1924, by Orlando Figes (Pimlico, 1997); and “Lenin, Vladimir Ilich,” Encyclopædia Britannica,http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-60990 (accessed July 12, 2006).


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meanwhile, outside switzerlandby michael paller

My dear Tristan,” Henry Carr says in Travesties, “to be an artist at all is like living inSwitzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zürich, in 1917, implies a degree

of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.” To understand thepower of this statement, it may help to know a little about the unprecedented nature of thewar raging all around Switzerland in 1917.

Although Europe had seen small, localized wars in the 19th century, World War i (or asit was generally known before 1939, “The Great War”) shattered a century of general peace.British historian David Stevenson writes: “Since the defeat of the French Revolution andNapoleon in 1792–1815 . . . there had been no general conflict involving all the great powers. European governments and peoples were accustomed to prospective wars of theimagination, in the scenarios of military planners and the best-selling future-gazing liter-ature that proliferated in the pre-1914 decades. They were little better equipped to face thereality than we would be a nuclear strike.”

There are many theories as to why the European powers gambled on war in 1914.Germany wanted desperately to expand its trade, and some in its government felt that GreatBritain was blocking the realization of those desires in Africa and the Mediterranean;Britain, and certainly France, which had suffered a humiliating defeat and the loss ofAlsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1870–71 in the Franco-Prussian War, feared that Germany’simperial ambition and militarism were the greatest dangers facing Europe. The empire ofAustria-Hungary felt that its Balkan states, especially Serbia, were fomenting rebellionamong their people despite defeats in two recent wars; it also felt surrounded by enemies tothe East (Russia) and South (Serbia and Romania). Germany, for its part, felt threatened byBritain on the seas and by France in the West, Russia in the East, and the Balkans in theSouth; it was determined sooner or later to expand its borders and sea power through war.

None of these conditions might have led to the disastrous result of 1914–18, however,had it not been for the existence of several interlocking treaties between the powers pledg-ing to come to each other’s defense if attacked by another European power. Their existenceled, on the one hand, to mutual deterrence, but on the other hand, it also meant that “anyclash between two powers would trigger a showdown between two coalitions.”

On the eve of the war, the primary coalitions were Germany/Austria-Hungry andFrance/Russia. Italy was loosely associated with the former and Great Britain with the lat-ter. Once Austria-Hungary mobilized against Serbia, Russia, as Serbia’s ally, felt it had to


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mobilize against Germany—and then, like dominoes falling, each country, in accordancewith its treaties, responded. Soon virtually all of Europe was at war.

the immediate causeOn June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarianempire, visited Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, then a province of the empire. While he andhis wife were being driven through the city on the way to a town hall reception, a bombwas hurled at the car. The duke and duchess escaped unhurt—and then had to sit throughthe mayor of Sarajevo’s address extolling Bosnia’s loyalty to its Austrian masters. As thecouple returned through town in their open car, they were approached by a young Bosnianstudent, Gavrilo Princip, who took aim with a pistol and killed them both.

As Stevenson points out, although tensions in Europe were high in 1914, a war thatengulfed the continent was not inevitable, and if one had not broken out that year, it mightnever have happened at all. Austria’s response to the assassination of its future emperorprovoked a series of reactions that brought on the cataclysm.

Ruins of Revigny-sur-Ornain after the Battle of Verdun, 1916. Photo by Jacques Moreau (Archives Larousse, Paris, France,Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library).


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Princip and the group of conspirators to which he belonged, a secret revolutionary soci-ety called Young Bosnia, were Bosnian citizens, but Austria insisted that they were sup-ported in their plot by the government of Serbia. Why? The history of the Balkan statesis deeply complicated, but, briefly, a great many ethnic Serbs lived in Bosnia (42% ofBosnians were of Serb origin), which was annexed by Austria in 1908. The Serbian gov-ernment, along with a number of secret nationalist societies, had agitated against Austrianrule in Bosnia for years. So when Princip assassinated the archduke and his wife, Austriablamed Serbia. Indeed, in many respects, Austria was right to do so, as one of the mainSerbian nationalist secret societies, the Black Hand, had provided Princip and his co-conspirators with weapons and training in Serbia and helped them cross the border intoBosnia undetected. Many Serbian army officers and government officials were, in fact,aware of the plot, although the highest-ranking were not.

The Austrian emperor, Franz Joseph, and his foreign minister, Leopold von Berchtold,wrote to the German kaiser, Wilhelm, saying that the countries’ alliance would not besecure in southern Europe until Serbia was “eliminated as a political factor in the Balkans.”The German response was as supportive as the Austrians could wish, urging the Austriansto take the strongest measures possible against Serbia, believing that such action wouldincrease the prestige of Germany’s primary ally. Wilhelm said that Austria “must marchinto Serbia” and would have German backing, even if war with Russia (a Serbian allybecause of the Slavic origins of most Serbs) resulted. Neither Austria nor Germany hadany idea that retaliation against Serbia for the murder of the archduke would lead to a gen-eral war.

Encouraged by the German promise of support, Austria sent Serbia an ultimatum.Berchtold demanded that the Serbian government suppress all anti-Austrian organizationsand publications, eliminate anti-Austrian propaganda from schools, remove governmentand army officials guilty of anti-Austrian propaganda, prosecute all people directly or indi-rectly involved in the plot to kill Franz Ferdinand, and, most provocatively, allow Austrianofficials to oversee the entire program.

Berchtold’s ultimatum was intentionally harsh; he expected that the Serbs would rejectit, leaving him a clear path to declare war. The ultimatum was delivered on July 23; theSerbian government was given 48 hours to comply. The reply came with minutes tospare—and was surprisingly compliant.

The only point the Serbs rejected was the last. If Austria was not satisfied, the reply said,it should submit the matter to the International Court at the Hague, in the Netherlands.Austria declared the reply unsatisfactory, broke off diplomatic relations, and on July 28

declared war. Suddenly, Germany advised Austria to proceed with caution, but it was too


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late. Once Austria declared war, Russia began mobilizing to come to the aid of its allySerbia. Germany declared war on Russia on August 1 and on Russia’s major ally, France, onAugust 3. In any case, France was bound by its treaty with Russia to mobilize once Germany

declared war on Russia. The major continen-tal powers—Germany, France, Russia, andAustria-Hungary—were now at war, andwhen Germany demanded that Belgium allowfree passage of German troops through thecountry, England was brought into the fray, asit was compelled by treaty to defend Belgium.England declared war on Germany on August4. On the eve of the war, after all hope ofpeace had faded, the British prime minister,Sir Edward Grey, sadly observed, “The lampsare going out all over Europe.”

Stevenson: “Germany willed a local warbetween Austria-Hungary and Serbia, delib-erately risked a continental war againstFrance and Russia, and finally actually startedone.” Now that the great European partnerswere at war, their colonies and protectorateswould be dragged in, as well, includingCanada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Italy,Portugal, Romania, and Japan on the Allied

side, and Turkey and Bulgaria joining Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Serbia to form theCentral Powers. The United States joined the war on the Allied side in 1917, as did Chinaand Greece. The conflict was now worldwide.

why was this war different from all other wars?James Joyce claimed to be totally indifferent about the war—who won, how it was fought,and so on. With all due respect to Joyce who, like a great many people in Switzerland, hadthe luxury of ignoring what was raging all around him, the Great War saw the desire ofhumankind to destroy itself finally matched by the technological ability to do so.

Before World War i, warfare had generally consisted of mobile encounters that tookplace between forces armed with rifles that had to be reloaded after a single shot, fired byinfantry soldiers, whose weapons also had bayonets attached. Also, cavalry forces armed

Two soldiers carrying an injured comrade in the trenches atFort-de-Vaux, 1914–18 (Private Collection / Ken Welsh / TheBridgeman Art Library)


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with sabers led charges in open fields. Artillery usually consisted of relatively small fieldpieces that could be hauled by horses or men. Even with this “primitive” technology, armiescould inflict much damage. At the battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War in 1863,total losses over three days were about 50,000 soldiers. By 1914, however, our ability toslaughter each other had grown exponentially. In the intervening years, we had inventedthe machine gun, barbed wire, poison gas, and huge artillery pieces with brakes.

The machine gun could fire up to 600 bullets a minute (10 per second), with a range ofone thousand yards. The old artillery, without brakes, would recoil significantly after beingfired, so that the gun had to be painstakingly moved back into position and re-aimed aftereach round. The new guns remained motionless when fired, so they could fire many morerounds, much more rapidly, than previously.

the cost in human livesThe consequences of these advancements had not been fully assimilated by French mili-tary leaders, in particular, who believed that warfare was largely a matter of personal honorand bravery. So the first months of the war saw French infantry and cavalry flinging them-selves headlong into the teeth of German machine guns and barbed wire. By the end ofAugust 1914, the French had suffered more than 260,000 casualties. On August 22 alone,27,000 men died. By the end of the year, the French had suffered the deaths of 380,000

and wounding of 600,000—nearly a million men—and the Germans only slightly fewer.On July 1, 1916, in the Battle of the Somme, the British alone lost 57,470 men, the singleworst day of the war.

Both sides learned their lesson, and the war quickly became a defensive one, each sidedigging trenches facing the other across a no man’s land of anywhere from a few hundredfeet to several miles. When an attack was ordered, the artillery would fire for several hours,and then the men would “go over the top,” leaving the trenches and crossing the no man’sland littered with mine fields and barbed wire, hoping that the artillery fire had wiped outnests of enemy machine gunners.

Until the last months of 1918, the war remained a stalemate; very little ground changedhands. For example, in February and March 1915 in the Champagne region, French lossesamounted to more than 50,000 men for a gain of 500 yards of blasted earth. In the city ofVerdun, a monument was raised to 150,000 men who were killed there, but whose bodieswere so mangled they could not be identified before they were buried.

In all, more than 8,500,000 soldiers were killed between 1914 and 1918. In addition, it isestimated that 13,000,000 civilians in Europe, Asia Minor, and the Middle East died as aresult of the war, from military encounters, starvation, exposure, and disease, including a


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EARNEST travestiedby ariel franklin-hudson

T he Importance of Being Earnest, subtitled “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,” wasOscar Wilde’s last play. Earnest opened on February 14, 1885, at the St. James Theatre

in London; a week later, Wilde received a card from the marquess of Queensbury—thefather of his purported lover, Lord Alfred Douglas—accusing Wilde of sodomy. Wildesued the marquess for libel, but failing to prove the charge false was himself tried and con-victed of sodomy and “gross indecency.” He was jailed for two years and his literary careerended. Earnest and An Ideal Husband, both in the midst of successful runs in the West End,were immediately closed. Almost 15 years passed before Earnest was acknowledged as oneof the great English language comedies. Earnest is best known for its farcical plot and wittydialogue, but it is also full of sly social commentary, satire, and heightened theatricality.Wilde’s plays were extremely successful, not least because they played into and subtlysubverted the social and theatrical conventions of the time.

Stoppard says that he was inspired to write Travesties, in part, by James Joyce’s 1918

Zürich production of Earnest. Travesties demonstrates this inspiration by mirroring askewed version of the plot, dialogue, and characters of Earnest. In nearly every scene, linesare directly quoted and paraphrased from Wilde; the plot devices of Travesties—romance,mistaken identities, misplaced manuscripts, and farcical turns—are all adapted fromEarnest. Stoppard parodies Wilde’s parody by turning Earnest’s scenes into limericks andsongs, and altering Wilde’s lines to fit Travesties’s rather different characters and setting.

The Importance of Being Earnest is not the only literary work incorporated in Travesties.Stoppard liberally quotes Shakespeare, Joyce’s Ulysses, the writings of Lenin and NadezhdaKrupskaya, and a variety of historical texts. These texts are altered and appropriated—ortravestied—to serve the needs of the play. In all cases, however, Stoppard and his charac-ters have a rollicking good time.

synopsis of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

act i: At Algernon (“Algy”) Moncrieff ’s bachelor flat in London, Algernon’s friend JackWorthing announces his intention to propose marriage to Algy’s cousin GwendolenFairfax. Algy quizzes Jack about his identity. Jack admits to leading a double life; he goesby the name “Ernest” in town and by “Jack” in the country. When he is in the country, hepretends to have a good-for-nothing brother in London named Ernest whose wicked waysnecessitate frequent trips to the city to rescue him, so that he may escape to London when-


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ever he likes. In the course of the conversation, Jack also admits that he is guardian to ayoung woman, Cecily Cardew, who lives in Jack’s country home. Algy’s Aunt AugustaBracknell and cousin Gwendolen arrive for tea. Algy draws Lady Bracknell aside, allow-ing Jack to propose to Gwendolen. Gwendolen accepts, because she has always known thatshe was destined to marry someone named Ernest. Lady Bracknell returns; horrified by theproposal, she sends Gwendolen to wait in the carriage and interrogates Jack. During herquestioning, Jack reveals that he has no parents and was found as a baby in a handbag atVictoria Station. Lady Bracknell rejects his suit and sweeps out. Jack tells Algy that heintends to get rid of his imaginary brother, in part because Cecily, hearing about the mis-adventures of “Ernest,” has become infatuated with the mysterious man. Algy himselfbecomes rather interested in Cecily. Gwendolen returns, and Jack gives her his address inthe country. Algy secretly copies down the address.

act ii: In the garden of Jack’s country manor, Cecily does her best to avoid a Germanlesson with her governess, Miss Prism, until the Reverend Dr. Chasuble arrives and drawsMiss Prism away for a walk. As soon as they depart, the butler announces the arrival of“Mr. Ernest Worthing,” and Algernon enters, pretending to be the imaginary brother.Cecily welcomes him, delighted by the chance to reform Jack’s wicked sibling. They flirtand go into the house. Miss Prism and Dr. Chasuble return and are joined by Jack, who isin full mourning for the brother he has decided to announce is dead. Cecily appears, how-ever, with the news that Ernest has come to visit. Jack, Miss Prism, and Dr. Chasuble areunderstandably confused—until Algy enters, presenting himself as the obviously living“Ernest.” Jack is furious, but plays along as Cecily forces Jack and his “brother” to shakehands.

Alone again, Algy tells Cecily that he loves her. Cecily, pleased, informs him that theyhave been engaged for three months already, for Cecily, like Gwendolen, is in love with thename of Ernest; she has created an entire fantasy romance—now made real—with Jack’simaginary brother. Algernon leaves; the butler announces the arrival of Gwendolen, whohas come down from the city to see Jack (whom she knows by the name “Ernest”). Cecilyand Gwendolen are polite to each other until it becomes clear that they are each engagedto a Mr. Ernest Worthing. They trade insults. Jack and Algy return; Cecily and Gwendolenreveal the true identities of the men, and Jack admits that Mr. Ernest Worthing does notexist. Both betrayed, Cecily and Gwendolen become instant friends and retreat to thehouse. Algy and Jack remain outside. Jack despairs. Algy eats muffins.

act iii: Jack and Algy go into the house and beg forgiveness from Gwendolen andCecily. Appeased, the lovers fall into each other’s arms. Lady Bracknell arrives. Uponlearning that Cecily is an heiress, Lady Bracknell consents to Cecily and Algernon’s


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engagement. Jack, however, refuses to give his consent until Lady Bracknell consents toJack and Gwendolen’s engagement. Into this stalemate come Dr. Chasuble and MissPrism. Miss Prism and Lady Bracknell recognize each other; Lady Bracknell reveals that,28 years before, Miss Prism—then the Bracknells’ governess—left Lady Bracknell’s housewith a baby and never returned. Miss Prism confesses that, in a moment of weakness, sheplaced the manuscript of her three-volume novel in the baby’s perambulator, and the babyin her handbag. The baby, of course, was Jack—Algernon’s older brother. Jack discoversthat he was named for their father, Ernest John, and many of the lies suddenly becometruth. The lovers are united at last and Jack realizes the “vital Importance of BeingEarnest.”

character parallels in TRAVESTIES

With a few notable exceptions, the characters in Travesties echo the characters in TheImportance of Being Earnest. Carr is Algernon; Tzara is Jack; Gwendolen and Cecily are,well, Gwendolen and Cecily; Bennett is both Algernon’s valet and Jack’s butler; and Joyceis Lady Bracknell.

The real Henry Carr played Algernon in James Joyce’s historical Zürich production ofEarnest; in Travesties Carr also imitates Algernon’s language and actions. In the first act ofTravesties Carr quizzes Tzara about his multiple identities, and Tzara, Gwen, and Joycesweep into Carr’s sitting room just as Jack, Gwendolen, and Lady Bracknell sweep intoAlgernon’s apartment in the first act of Earnest. In the second act of Travesties Carr, undera false name, goes to the library to woo Cecily, just as Algernon goes to Jack’s countryhome to woo a different Cecily in the second act of Earnest.

While the imaginary brother scheme is different in Travesties, the results and characterparallels are generally the same. Tzara, who has created an imaginary brother and alternatepersonality, is Jack to Carr’s Algy. Tzara is engaged to Gwendolen—just like Jack inEarnest, he proposes in Act i—and Carr plays Tzara in order to woo Cecily.

James Joyce, perhaps most oddly, is cast as Lady Bracknell in Stoppard’s appropriationof Earnest. Joyce has a misleadingly feminine name, and he serves as Gwen’s mentor,employer, and chaperone—more or less. After Tzara proposes to Gwen, Joyce interrogateshim just as Lady Bracknell interrogates Jack, although on a radically different subject. Theparallel is cemented when we learn that Joyce was accidentally named James Augustainstead of James Augustine.

As their names indicate, Stoppard’s Gwendolen and Cecily are drawn directly fromEarnest. Still, they are Stoppard’s creations, not Wilde’s, and they are as engaged with theories and historical events as are their more “real” historical counterparts.


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Lenin and Nadya are the only characters in Travesties who do not seem to doubleEarnest characters. Lenin and Nadya do not fit the tone of Earnest, and, although they areoccasionally onstage during Earnest-like moments, do not really engage with the Earnestplot—although Lenin’s manuscript does. There is one stage direction, however, that sug-gests otherwise (Act ii, scene 6): “Lenin enters, wearing a clerical collar, but otherwisedressed in black from parson’s hat to parson’s leggings. He and Nadya look at each otherand despair—Chasuble and Prism.” Lenin and Nadya quickly revert to themselves, how-ever, and leave the Earnest plot to the rest of the characters.

EARNEST quotations in TRAVESTIES

So much of Travesties is directly quoted or adapted from Earnest that it would be pointlessto attempt a complete catalogue of quotations and allusions. Nevertheless, some momentsin Travesties are more Earnest-like than others. Here are a few examples:

carr: it is made out in the name of mr. jack tzara, and your nameisn’t jack, it ’s tristan.tzara: no it isn’t, it ’s jack.carr: you have always told me it was tristan. i have introduced youto everyone as tristan. you answer to the name of tristan. yournotoriety at the meierei bar is firmly associated with the nametristan. it is perfectly absurd saying your name isn’t tristan.tzara: well, my name is tristan in the meierei bar and jack in thelibrary, and the ticket was issued in the library.

algernon: Besides, your name isn’t Jack at all; it is Ernest.jack: It isn’t Ernest; it’s Jack.algernon: You have always told me it was Ernest. I have introduced you to every one asErnest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You arethe most Ernest-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying thatyour name isn’t Ernest. . . .jack: Well, my name is Ernest in the town and Jack in the country, and the cigarette casewas given to me in the country.


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lenin: to lose one revolution is unfortunate. to lose both wouldlook like carelessness!

jack. I have lost both my parents.lady bracknell. Both? To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose bothlooks like carelessness.

cecily: yes. the gentleman who has his arm around your waist is aluminary of the zimmerwald left.gwen: are they bolsheviks? cecily. well, they dine with us.

cecily: I knew there must be some misunderstanding, Miss Fairfax. The gentleman whosearm is at present round your waist is my guardian, Mr. John Worthing.. . .lady bracknell. What are your politics? jack. I am afraid I really have none. I am a Liberal Unionist.lady bracknell. Oh, they count as Tories. They dine with us.

joyce: miss carr, where is the missing chapter???carr: excuse me—did you say bloom? joyce: i did.carr: and is it a chapter, inordinate in length and erratic instyle, remotely connected with midwifery? joyce: it is a chapter which, by a miracle of compression, uses thegamut of english literature from chaucer to carlyle to describeevents taking place in a lying-in hospital in dublin.carr: it is obviously the same work.(GWEN AND CECILY SWAP FOLDERS WITH CRIES OF RECOGNITION.)

lady bracknell. Miss Prism! Did I hear you mention a Miss Prism? chasuble. Yes, Lady Bracknell. I am on my way to join her.lady bracknell. Pray allow me to detain you for a moment. This matter may prove to beone of vital importance to Lord Bracknell and myself. Is this Miss Prism a female of repel-lent aspect, remotely connected with education? chasuble. She is the most cultivated of ladies, and the very picture of respectability.lady bracknell. It is obviously the same person. . . . (Enter Miss Prism hurriedly) . . .lady bracknell. Prism! Come here, Prism! Prism! Where is that baby?


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ULYSSES travestied

I’ve put so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy forcenturies arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’smortality.

—James Joyce on Ulysses

In Travesties, Tom Stoppard quotes liberally from James Joyce’s Ulysses, considered bysome to be the greatest novel of the 20th century. All of the action of the novel takes

place in Dublin, Ireland, on a single unremarkable day ( June 16, 1904). Constructed as amodern parallel to Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses follows the story of three central characters—Stephen Dedalus (the hero of Joyce’s earlier Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), LeopoldBloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, and his wife, Molly Bloom—who are intended tobe modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope. By the use of interiormonologue Joyce reveals the innermost thoughts and feelings of these characters as theylive hour by hour, passing from a public bath to a funeral, library, maternity hospital, andbrothel.

Written over a seven-year period from 1914 to 1921, the novel was serialized in theAmerican journal The Little Review from 1918 to 1920, when the publication of the“Nausicaa” episode led to a prosecution for obscenity. The book was first published in itsentirety in Paris in 1922, but was banned in both the United States and United Kingdomuntil the 1930s. The work was blacklisted by Irish customs.

Ulysses is a massive novel: 267,000 words in total from a vocabulary of 30,000 words,with most editions weighing in at between 800 and 1,000 pages, and divided into 18 chap-ters. At first glance the book may appear unstructured and chaotic, but two schematareleased by Stuart Gilbert and Herbert Gorman after publication to defend Joyce from theobscenity accusations make the links to the Odyssey, and much internal structure, explicit.

The book is most famous for its use of a variant of the interior monologue known as the“stream-of-consciousness” technique. Joyce claimed to have taken this technique from a for-gotten French writer, Édouard Dujardin (1861–1949), who had used interior monologues inhis novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888; We’ll to the Woods No More), but many critics havepointed out that it is at least as old as the novel itself, though no one before Joyce had usedit so continuously. Joyce’s major innovation was to carry the interior monologue one stepfurther by rendering, for the first time in literature, the myriad flow of impressions, halfthoughts, associations, lapses and hesitations, incidental worries, and sudden impulses that


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form part of the individual’s conscious awareness along with the trend of his rationalthoughts. This stream-of-consciousness technique proved widely influential in much 20th-century fiction.

In Ulysses, Joyce, like Stoppard in Travesties, played with formal conventions of languageand literary construction. In the much-praised “Oxen of the Sun” chapter (Episode 14), forexample, the language goes through every stage in the development of English prose fromAnglo-Saxon to the present day, symbolizing the growth of a fetus in the womb. In the“Aeolus” chapter (Episode 7), set in a newspaper office with rhetoric as the theme, Joyceinserted hundreds of rhetorical figures and many references to winds—something “blowsup” instead of happening, people “raise the wind” when they are getting money—and thereader becomes aware of an unusual liveliness in the very texture of the prose. And thefamous last chapter of the novel, in which we follow the stream of consciousness of MollyBloom as she lies in bed, gains much of its effect from being written in eight huge unpunc-tuated paragraphs.

Ulysses, which was already well known because of its censorship troubles, became imme-diately famous upon publication. Joyce had prepared for its critical reception by having alecture given by Valery Larbaud, who pointed out the Homeric correspondences in it andthat “each episode deals with a particular art or science, contains a particular symbol, rep-resents a special organ of the human body, has its particular colour . . . proper technique,and takes place at a particular time.” Joyce never published this scheme; indeed, he evendeleted the chapter titles in the book as printed.

Excerpted and adapted from “Joyce, James,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 2006, Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service,http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-3775 (accessed July 17, 2006); and from The Study Guide for Court Theatre’s 2005 Productionof Travesties, by Tom Stoppard, http://www.courttheatre.org/home/plays/0405/travesties/studyguide/studyguide.shtml#Ulysses(accessed July 17, 2006).


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a short guide to references made by tom stoppard inTRAVESTIES to james joyce’s ULYSSES

joyce (DICTATING TO GWEN): deshill holles eamus…gwen (WRITING): deshill holles eamus…joyce: thrice.gwen: uh-hum.joyce: send us bright one, light one, horhorn, quickening andwombfruit.gwen: send us bright one, light one, horhorn, quickening andwombfruit.joyce: thrice.gwen: uh-hum.joyce: hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! gwen: hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! joyce: hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! gwen: likewise thrice? joyce: uh-hum.This incantation opens Chapter 14 (“Oxen of the Sun”) of Ulysses, which takes place in amaternity hospital in Dublin. In Travesties, it is this chapter that is accidentally exchangedwith Lenin’s essay.

Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated explains as follows:

Deshil Holles Eamus—“Deshil” after the Irish deasil, deisiol: turning to theright, clockwise, sunwise; a ritual gesture to attract good fortune, and an act ofconsecration when repeated three times. “Holles” is Holles Street in Dublin;the National Maternity Hospital stands on the corner of Holles Street andMerrion Sqare North. “Eamus,” Latin: “Let us go.”Send us . . . quickening and wombfruit—An invocation to the sun as a sourceof fertility. “Horhorn” suggests Dr. Andrew J. Horne, one of the two masters ofthe hospital; it also suggests the horned cattle of the sun-god.Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!—The cry with which a midwife celebrates the birthof a male child as she bounces it to stabilize its breathing.


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joyce: “morose delectation . . . aquinas tunbelly . . . frate por-cospino . . . und alle schiffe brücken . . . entweder transubstan-tiality, oder consubstantiality, but in no way substantiality.”“Morose delectation Aquinas tunbully calls this, frate porcospino” is from Ulysses Chapter 3(“Proteus”), which is written in a stream-of-consciousness narrative form. Not everythingmakes sense. Ulysses Annotated explains:

Morose delectation—The sin of letting the mind dwell on evil thoughts (SeeSt. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica . . .).Tunbelly—Because the St. Thomas of medieval legend was so big-bellied thattables had to be cut out to fit around his stomach.Frate porcospino—Italian: “the porcupine monk” or “Brother Porcupine,” thatis, Aquinas’ argument is prickly and difficult to attack.

“Und alle Schiffe brücken” is a phrase sung by Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses Chapter 16(“Eumeus”). It is actually Dedalus’ slightly mistaken version of a line from a song byJohannes Jepp. From Ulysses Annotated:

Und alle Schiffe brücken—German: literally, “And all ships are bridged,” appar-ently [Dedalus] mistakes brücken for “broken” in an attempt on Johannes Jepp’sline “Welches das Schiffe in Unglück bringt” (“Which brings the ship into misfortune”).

“Entweder transubstantiality oder consubstantiality . . . scurvy word” is from UlyssesChapter 14 (“Oxen of the Sun”). What this means in the context of the chapter is unclear,but the language itself is moderately explicable. From Ulysses Annotated:

Entweder . . . oder—German: “Either . . . or.” The play on words recalls[Dedalus’] earlier contemplation of heresies. . . . “Transubstantiation” is themiraculous change by which, according to Catholic doctrine, the Eucharisticbread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, although their appear-ance remains unchanged. “Consubstantial” means sharing the same substance,as in theological terms the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit do. Accordingto the Lutheran doctrine of “consubstantiation,” the bread and wine do notbecome, but rather they coexist with, the body and blood of Christ during theEucharist. “Subsubstantiality” ( Joyce’s coinage) suggests that the substance ofbread and wine is debased.


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joyce: i am an irishman. the proudest boast of an irishman is—ipaid back my way.From Ulysses Chapter 2 (“Nestor”):

Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is theproudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s mouth? . . .

—That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.—Ba! Mr. Deasy cried. That’s not English. A French Celt said that. He

tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.—I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. I paid my way.

joyce: what, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, weretzara’s thoughts about ball’s thoughts about tzara, and tzara’sthoughts about ball’s thoughts about tzara’s thoughts aboutball? tzara: he thought that he thought that he knew what he wasthinking, whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that hedid not.From Ulysses Chapter 17 (“Ithaca”):

What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom’s thoughts aboutStephen’s thoughts about Bloom and Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’sthoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen?

He thought that he thought that he was a Jew, whereas he knew that heknew that he knew that he was not.

Gwen in Travesties observes that Chapter 17 of Ulysses is “cast in the form of theChristian Catechism.” In other words, the chapter follows a question-and-answer pattern.Stoppard’s scene in Travesties between Joyce and Tzara also follows this pattern, imitatingthe style (and, here, the exact language) of Joyce’s chapter.

tzara: it was more to make the point that making poetry shouldbe as natural as making water—joyce: god send you don’t make them in the one hat.From Ulysses Chapter 1 (“Telemachus”):

—When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when Imakes water I makes water.


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—By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling:—So I do, Mrs. Cahill, says she. Begob, ma’am, says Mrs. Cahill, God send

you don’t make them in the one pot.

carr: the counter-claim of henry carr is denied. herr carr toindemnify doktor joyce sixty francs for trouble and expenses. inother words, a travesty of justice.From Ulysses Chapter 15 (“Circe”):

j. j. o’molloy (In a barrister’s grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with a voice ofpained protest): This is no place for indecent levity at the expense of an erringmortal disguised in liquor. We are not in a beargarden nor at an Oxford rag noris this a travesty of justice.

old cecily: i do remember joyce, yes you are quite right and he wasirish with glasses but that was the year after—1918—and thetrain had long gone from the station! i waved a red hanky andcried long live the revolution as the carriage took him away inhis bowler hat and yes, i said yes when you asked me, but he wasthe leader of millions by the time you did your algernon.From Ulysses Chapter 18 (“Penelope”):

. . . as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose inmy hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how hekissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as anotherand then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked mewould I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around himyes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume was goinglike mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.


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shakespeare travestied

In Act i, scene 15 of Travesties, Gwendolen and Tzara express their conversation in thewords of Shakespeare. Below is a guide to the Shakespeare plays quoted by Stoppard.

gwen: sonnet 18Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate:Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;But thy eternal summer shall not fadeNor lose possession of that fair thou owest;Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

gwen: you tear him for his bad verses?From Julius Caesar (Act iii, scene 3):

cinna the poet: I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.fourth citizen: Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.cinna the poet: I am not Cinna the conspirator.fourth citizen: It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck but his name out ofhis heart, and turn him going.

gwen: these are but wild and whirling words, my lord.From Hamlet (Act i, scene 5):

horatio: These are but wild and whirling words, my lord.


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gwen: truly i wish the gods had made thee poetical.tzara: i do not know what poetical is. is it honest in word anddeed? is it a true thing?From As You Like It (Act iii, scene 3):

touchstone: When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good witseconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more deadthan a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made theepoetical.audrey: I do not know what “poetical” is. Is it honest in deed and word? Is ita true thing? touchstone: No, truly; for the truest poetry is the most feigning, and loversare given to poetry; and what they swear in poetry may be said as lovers theydo feign.audrey: Do you wish, then, that the gods had made me poetical?

gwen: sure he that made us with such large discourse, lookingbefore and after, gave us not that capability, and godlike reasonto fust in us unused.From Hamlet (Act iv, scene 4):

hamlet: How all occasions do inform against me And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.Sure he that made us with such large discourse,Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To fust in us unus’d.

tzara: i was not born under a rhyming planet.From Much Ado about Nothing (Act v, scene 2):

benedick: Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme; I have tried: I can find out norhyme to “lady” but “baby,” an innocent rhyme; for “scorn,” “horn,” a hardrhyme; for “school,” “fool,” a babbling rhyme; very ominous endings: no, I wasnot born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.


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[Enter beatrice] Sweet Beatrice, wouldst thou come when I called thee?

tzara: those fellows of infinite tongue that can rhyme them-selves into ladies’ favours, they do reason themselves out again.From Henry V (Act v, scene 2):

henry: I speak to thee plain soldier: If thou canst love me for this, take me: ifnot, to say to thee that I shall die, is true; but for thy love, by the Lord, no; yetI love thee too. And while thou livest, dear Kate, take a fellow of plain anduncoined constancy; for he perforce must do thee right, because he hath notthe gift to woo in other places: for these fellows of infinite tongue, that canrhyme themselves into ladies’ favours, they do always reason themselves outagain.

tzara: and that would set my teeth nothing on edge—nothing somuch as mincing poetry.From Henry V, Part 1, (Act iii, scene 1):

hotspur: Marry,And I am glad of it with all my heart:I had rather be a kitten and cry mew Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers;I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn’d,Or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree;And that would set my teeth nothing on edge,Nothing so much as mincing poetry:’Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag.

gwen: thy honesty and love doth mince this matter—From Othello (Act iii, scene 3):

othello: I know, Iago,Thy honesty and love doth mince this matter,Making it light to Cassio. Cassio, I love thee But never more be officer of mine.


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gwen: put your bonnet for his right use, ’tis for the head! From Hamlet (Act v, scene 2):

osric: Sweet lord, if your lordship were at leisure, I should impart a thing toyou from his Majesty.hamlet: I will receive it, sir, with all diligence of spirit. Put your bonnet to hisright use. ’Tis for the head.osric: I thank your lordship, it is very hot.hamlet: No, believe me, ’tis very cold; the wind is northerly.

gwen: i had rather than forty shilling i had my book of songs andsonnets here.From The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act i, scene 1):

slender: I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnetshere.

tzara: but since he died, and poet better prove, his for his styleyou’ll read, mine for my—love.From Sonnet 32:

If thou survive my well-contented day,When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,And shalt by fortune once more re-survey These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,Compare them with the bettering of the time,And though they be outstripp’d by every pen,Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,Exceeded by the height of happier men.O, then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:Had my friend’s Muse grown with this growing age,A dearer birth than this his love had brought,To march in ranks of better equipage:But since he died and poets better prove,Theirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love.


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questions to consider

1. What does the title of the play mean? What is being “travestied?”

2. In Travesties, Tom Stoppard references many other works of literature. How many areyou familiar with? How important is your familiarity with the original works to yourunderstanding of the play?

3. In Travesties, the character Tristan Tzara, in response to Joyce’s questioning of his poem,says, “It is without meaning as Nature is. It is Dada.” What do you think of Dada as anartistic ideal and a cultural movement? Is it legitimate? Does art guided by chance affectyou differently than art based on logic? Realism?

4. Dada was founded in part as a reaction to the absurd horrors of World War i. What kindof art do you think Dada artists would be making today?

5. Each of the characters seems to have a different view of art, and its importance to soci-ety. How does Tzara’s view compare with Lenin’s? What about Joyce’s and Carr’s? How arethey similar? How are they different? What political, social, and economic factors affect aperson’s view on the importance of art? Do you think one of their views has become themainstream value we place on art in today’s society?

6. What is going on in the world outside Switzerland in 1917? How are those eventsbrought into the world of the play? Consider the war, the revolution in Russia, economicstability in Europe, past and future international relations, and the rising voice of dissent.How isolated is Zürich during this time? Could this play take place anywhere else?

7. There are many stages of love and courtship represented in Travesties: Cecily and Carr;Gwen and Tzara; Lenin and Nadya. How does Stoppard portray love and relationshipsbetween the men and women in this play? Are they realistic or ridiculous?

8. What do you think of the scenic, lighting, and costume designs for Travesties? How doesthe design of the show reflect the scenes that take place in Carr’s memory? How accurateis your own memory? Do you remember how events actually looked, or is memory moreabout abstract impressions and feelings?

9. What is the significance of the “time-slip” scenes? What effect do they have on the waythe story is told? What about the use of the scene using only limericks? Or the scenebetween Gwen and Cecily that is entirely sung? How do those scenes help illustrate whatkind of play you are watching? How does that change the “reality” of the play?


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for further information…

on and by tom stoppardCalvert, Ben. Study Guide for Court Theatre’s 2005 Production of Travesties, by Tom Stoppard.http://www.courttheatre.org/home/plays/0405/travesties/studyguide/studyguide.shtml.

Delaney, Paul, ed. Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1994.

Fleming, John. Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order among Chaos. Austin: University of TexasPress, 2001.

Gussow, Mel. Conversations with Stoppard. New York: Grove Press, 1996.

Hayman, Ronald. Tom Stoppard. London: Rowan & Littlefield, 1980.

Hunter, Jim. Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties,Arcadia. A Faber Critical Guide. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.

Jenkins, Anthony. The Theatre of Tom Stoppard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1989.

Jenkins, Anthony, ed. Critical Essays on Tom Stoppard. London: g. k. Hall, 1990.

Stoppard, Tom. Travesties. Berkeley, ca: Grove Press, 1979.

on and by james joyceAttridge, Derek, ed. The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2004.

Ellman, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press usa, 2003.

______. Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett. New York: G. Braziller, 1988.

Gifford, Don. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1988.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Vintage International,2003.

______. Dubliners. New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2001.

______. Finnegan’s Wake. New York: Penguin Classics, 1999.

______. Ulysses (Annotated). New York: Vintage International, 1990.


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on tristan tzara and dadaBuot, François. Tristan Tzara. Paris: Grasset, 2002.

Dickerman, Leah. Dada: Zürich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, Paris. New York:Distributed Art Publishers, 2005.

Gale, Matthew. Dada and Surrealism. London: Phaidon Press, 1997.

National Gallery of Art. Dada. http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/dadainfo.shtm.

Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. Translated from the German by David Britt. NewYork: Thames and Hudson, 1997.

Tzara, Tristan. Approximate Man and Other Writings. Translated and introduced by MaryAnn Caws. Boston, MA: Black Widow Press, 2005.

______. Chanson Dada: Tristan Tzara Selected Poems. Translated by Lee Harwood. Boston,MA: Black Widow Press, 2005.

______. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. London: Calder Publications, 1981.

on and by vladimir ilych leninClark, Ronald William. Lenin. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Krupskaya, Nadezhda Konstantinovna. Reminiscences of Lenin. Translated by BernardIsaacs. New York: International Publishers, 1970.

Lenin, Vladimir I. Collected Works of V. I. Lenin. New York: International Publishers, 1927.

______. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press,1997.

______. What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement. Translated by J. Finebergand G. Hanna; edited by V. J. Jerome. New York: International Publishers, 1969.

Rabinowich, Alexander. The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd.New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.

Shukman, Harold. Lenin and the Russian Revolution. New York: Putnam, 1967.

Volkogonov, Dmitri Antonovich. Lenin: A New Biography. Translated and edited byHarold Shukman. New York: Free Press, 1994.


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