Like a holiday whose meaning metamorphoses over the centuries, my tradition of starting each year of reading with some plays has origins from a bygone era – a previous millennium, in fact. My first ten-year reading plan, which came with the set of Britannica Great Books, started many years with Greek plays and then proceeded somewhat chronologically throughout any given year. Tom Stoppard is not an ancient playwright. He is, in fact, one of the most recent authors on my schedule for 2021. But playwright he is, so January he comes!
My reaction to the plays that I read isn’t fair, I know. Dramatic works should be seen, not read. But I don’t have the luxury of watching performances, and I’m interested in Stoppard’s wordplay and philosophical meanderings. Given that caveat, I’ll say that, while I enjoyed Jumpers and Travesties much more than I enjoyed the Stoppard plays I read three years ago, I still wish I liked them better. I want to love these plays; I really do. Let’s list the possible explanations for my disappointment:
(1) The plays aren’t very good, and their accolades come through an emperor’s-new-clothes dynamic.
(2) The plays are good, but I don’t know enough to see everything that’s good about them.
(3) I want something in a play that Stoppard, writing perfectly good plays, just doesn’t provide.
I think the truth includes elements of options 2 and 3, although I wouldn’t be surprised to find fans who secretly see the emperor as naked. But option 3 surged to the fore when I read one particular exchange in Travesties. This play consists entirely of recollections by the main character of meeting Lenin, James Joyce, and dadaist Tristan Tzara in Zurich in 1917. All are seeking ways to negotiate a world newly unmoored from traditional views of its coherence. Some character (I don’t remember which one) says something a little crazy (they all do), and after someone calls the utterance nonsense replies, “Yes, but at least it’s clever.” A page or two later, Tzara speaks the line, “Dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada.” Again someone says he’s speaking nonsense, but Tzara gives an extra turn to his reply: “Yes, but at least it’s not clever.”
Is my problem that I’m trying to find something clever in Stoppard’s word salad when he just wants me to enjoy the mixed greens? Maybe. But then, somebody in the play (yes, somebody – it would all be easier to keep track of if I could see performances) says words to the effect of “We can no longer believe in causation because of the war.” See, I think that’s pretty clever, and I want more of that. So I still have some money on option 2; I’m concerned that maybe Stoppard is clever all the time while I just don’t catch it all. On the other hand, I do like the tastes and textures of a random assortment of romaine, spinach, cherry tomatoes, red onions, croutons, and italian dressing, so I’ll be keeping this play in mind when, later this year, I tackle the greatest tossed salad of them all: Finnegan’s Wake.
I can’t sign off without a word about the third play I read in these last few days: Molière’s Tartuffe. This play didn’t make me question my habits of reading and thinking as Travesties did. It just invited me to read and think and enjoy and laugh. The religious hypocrite Tartuffe gets many people to parrot his nonsense while using a cover of piety to acquire donations and sexual favors, and it’s hilarious. What a relief it is to laugh at heretical chicanery! I don’t get any sense that Molière meant to label all of Christianity as Tartuffian; the character who restores order at the end is a good, reasonable, caring, sympathetic Christian man. I suppose it’s possible that the playwright simply put him in for the sake of appearances, as a screen behind which to hide his contempt for Christianity. But if so, the Church still saw the play as an attack on religion and banned it; so the supposed ploy didn’t work. In any case, I prefer to take Molière and his play at their surface-level word, and their patent message is that we cannot let true Christianity be defined by any person who self-announces his special favor with God, expects all good Christians to stay loyal to him, and then uses their support to gain power, money, and sex. Tartuffe, you deserve your downfall!
A post-scriptum: Blogspot's editor doesn't approve of the noncapitalization of "italian dressing." I guess it would want me also to capitalize "french fries" and "roman numerals." Well, now that I've typed those phrases into the editor, I can report that it has absolutely no problems with my formatting. By analogy, I stand by my lower-case "i." And may I also note that Blogspot's editor flags the word "Blogspot's"?
No comments:
Post a Comment