Tom Stoppard: The Artist as Critic PDF
Preview Tom Stoppard: The Artist as Critic
TOM STOPPARD: THE ARTIST AS CRITIC Tom Stoppard: The Artist as Critic Neil Sammells M MACMILLAN PRESS © Neil Sammells 1988 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1988 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Sammells, Neil Tom Stoppard: the artist as critic. 1. Stoppard, Tom - Criticism and interpretation I. Title 822' .914 PR6069.T6Z/ ISBN 978-1-349-18972-4 ISBN 978-1-349-18970-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18970-0 For Barbara and for my parents Contents Acknowledgements viii Preface IX PART I 1 Formalism: An Aesthetics of Engagement 3 2 Stoppard as Critic 16 3 The Novel as Hinged Mirror 40 4 A Theatre of Formalism 54 PART II 5 The Dissenters 89 6 The Dissidents 111 7 A Politics of Disengagement 123 Notes and References 143 Bibliography 151 Index 159 vii Acknowledgements I should like to thank the editors of Critical Quarterly, Modern Drama, the Swansea Review and The Art of Listening for permission to use material which had already appeared in different forms. I am grateful to Tom Stoppard himself for answering my enquiries and allowing me to use quotations from his letters. This book was completed with the aid of a research grant from Bath College of Higher Education. Extracts from the plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Artist Descending a Staircase, After Magritte, The Real Inspector Hound, Travesties, Albert's Bridge, If You're Glad I'll be Frank, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul and Night and Day are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd, London and Grove Press, Inc, New York; extracts from The Real Thing are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Inc, London and Boston; and extracts from Another Moon Called Earth, A Separate Peace, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, The Real Thing, Squaring the Circle, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, and Jumpers are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd, London. Vlll Preface In The Real Thing Henry ('one of your intellectual playwrights') muses on the fate he feels he shares with all artists in general and Elvis Presley in particular: people saying they prefer the earlier stuff. His daughter responds with the not wholly consoling suggestion that maybe he was better then. Stoppard offers this distinction between his own earlier and more recent work in a characteristic spirit of self mockery and self-protection - but it is my contention that (in respect of the full-length stage-plays at least) the chronological division holds good. The break which separates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers and Travesties from Night and Day and The Real Thing is clear and damaging. Stoppard shifts from applying an aesthetics of engagement to placing his work at the service of a politics of disengagement. I shall not hazard a guess as to whether the same could be said of Elvis Presley. The structure of my argument is reflected in the two-phase move ment of this book. Part I claims that the successful Stoppard is the artist as critic. It contains the first extended discussion of Stoppard's work as a theatre critic for the short-lived magazine Scene in the early 1960s and argues that he there sketches out an aesthetics of engagement, the basic premise of which is that artistic freedom cannot exist in a vacuum. Instead, the artist's freedom is seen as a function of his critical engagement with the literary forms at his disposal, an engagement which enables a concomitant critical response on the part of his audience. Part I begins with an examin ation of Russian Formalist critical theory, based on my notion that its categories and terminology illuminate Stoppard's critical premises and their relationship to his fictional and dramatic practice. (We might almost apply to Stoppard what Boris Eichenbaum says of O. Henry: that it is as if he had taken up 'The Formal Method' and had his ear bent by Viktor Shklovsky.) I then consider Stoppard's drama ix x Preface as a Theatre of Formalism and analyse the different ways in which his work undertakes its critical enterprise. This critical impulse is defined in the pointed underscoring of generic devices which defines Stoppard's parodic strategies and in his interpretive and transforming 'play' with specific pre-texts such as Hamlet and The Importance of Being Earnest. I do not, however, attempt a comprehensive survey of the pervading allusiveness of Stoppard's work, though for reasons which will become apparent Jumpers and Travesties receive a more detailed treatment in this respect. Nor is this book a 'source-study'. The literary bloodline of The Real Inspector Hound, for instance, can be traced back beyond Sheridan and Buckingham at least as far as The Knight of the Burning Pestle and the inductions of Jonson and Marston; an examination of this relationship would be more at home in a general history of self-consciousness in the English Theatre. Similarly, to attempt an inventory of the literary antecedents of the whodunnit-form of Jumpers would have been to consign myself to a series of almost infinite regressions. Instead, I concentrate on only those instances where the 'source' is specific and acknowledged, as in the case of Travesties and Wilde, and where Stoppard mounts a thoroughgoing, critical engagement with the pre-text. Considerations of consistency do not, however, prevent me from dwelling on a specific but unac knowledged 'source' for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: James Saunders' Next Time I'll Sing to You. Part I demonstrates that Stoppard's best work earns its liberty by virtue of its form. In Part II I investigate the political dimension to Stoppard's preoccupation with the nature of freedom and criticism. I stress the continuity between the earlier stuff and recent plays by noting the development of dissenting, peripheral figures into dissi dents, but the main thrust of this second part of the argument is to show how Stoppard's work hardens into a militant conservatism that it is both aesthetic and political and which denies his distinctive achievements as a dramatist. Given the fact that my concern is with mapping out and following a theoretical approach which might best throw into relief both the strengths and weaknesses of Stoppard's work, I have not felt obliged to deal with each of his plays in turn. Consequently, a number of the 'nuts 'n bolts' comedies such as Dirty Linen and The Dog It Was That Died are not examined here. Stoppard's adaptations from Schnitzler, Nestroy and Molnar are also excluded (although some lessons might have been drawn from the rather desperate facetious- Preface xi ness of On The Razzle and Rough Crossing). However, Tango (adapted from Mrozek) is important to the argument of Part II and I have included it accordingly, preferring again to be inconsistent rather than determinedly neat. In conclusion, I should like once more to thank Tom Stoppard for permission to quote from his letters to me. No doubt there is much here with which he will disagree, but I hope that he finds my reasons for preferring some of his works to others at least worth engaging with, if not directly relevant to his experience of writing them. I am also grateful for their advice and encouragement to former colleagues at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, particularly Kelsey Thornton and Bob White, and present colleagues at Bath College of Higher Education (especially Ian Burton, who knows more about self-consciousness than most). My greatest debt is to Barbara, who had no time for typing or proof-reading and prefers my earlier work. Neil Sammells
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