스토파드의 포스트모던 패스티쉬: 『희화화』

Abstract

In his 1974 stage play, Travesties, Sir Tom Stoppard employs the postmodern aesthetic devices of intertextual, historical and artistic pastiche, not only to examine the interdependence of art and history, but also to highlight the validity of art in a time of political upheaval in 1917. Thus, Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece of social critique and comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), provides the stylistic and contextual template, while James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) provides many literary references and allusions. In addition, arguments about the meaning of art are debated by three major revolutionary figures (Joyce, Tristan Tzara, Lenin), whom Stoppard resurrects from literary and political history, and who give their own personal perspectives on the issues being raised. Historical and artistic events take on an almost random pastiche form, as they are filtered through a metadramatic narrator (Henry Carr) and his erratic memory, in a series of comic, multiple rewritings of Wilde, direct quotations of Joyce and Lenin, and references to Shakespearean sonnets, Dadaist poetry and its mode of performance, along with ‘retellings’ of historical ‘facts’ by Lenin and his wife Nadya. The combined effect is a uniquely ‘Stoppardian Comedy of Ideas’, which satirizes both sides of the ‘meaning of art’ argument, just as The Importance of Being Earnest satirizes Victorian England, through both mimicry and exaggeration, using an innovative style that is entertaining and surprising, while delving into important philosophical and aesthetical ideas. The new synthesis of form and content that emerges in this play neither ridicules nor directly critiques the sources, but instead reflects and builds upon them, producing an effect that is both playful and rich in its comedy and wittily allusive in its irony. This paper thus examines Stoppard’s originality and eclecticism in the use of postmodern pastiche techniques in Travesties, and explores how the playwright employs them as effective dramatic tools to dramatize his art. In this way, intertextuality and pastiche, along with ‘textual doubling and its linguistic transformation’ add further dimensions to the dramatic toolbox, as Stoppard encourages the reader and the audience to view contemporary society through the lens of postmodern aesthetics.