Tom Stoppard: Craft and Craftiness
| Autor: | Elissa S. Guralnick, Katherine E. Kelly, Paul Delaney |
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| Rok vydání: | 1992 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 107:354-354 |
| ISSN: | 1938-1530 0030-8129 |
| DOI: | 10.2307/462647 |
| Popis: | Elissa S. Guralnick's reading of Tom Stoppard's Artist Descending a Staircase, one of the most exuberant of the playwright's postmodern parodies, is right on the mark ("Artist Descending a Staircase: Stoppard Captures the Radio Station-and Duchamp," 105 [1990]: 286-300). Paul Delaney's objection to her characterization of the play as resisting a single unified "meaning" raises more questions than it could hope to answer (Forum, 106 [1991]: 1170-71), but one of these should at least be acknowledged: what is the relation between the Stoppard who, for over twenty years, has granted (and expertly orchestrated) media interviews about his plays and their meaning and the Stoppard who speaks through his dramatic characters? Put a slightly different way, what is the difference between the Stoppard persona carefully constructed for interviews (dedicated father, sincere patriot, antiacademic, earnest moralist, etc.) and the "voice" of the author Stoppard as it emerges through the characters in his plays and through his journalism? Confusingly, these voices sometimes sound identical, while at other times they sound distinct. Not in Artist but certainly in other plays, notably Travesties, Stoppard's manipulation of his personas is less than completely ingenuous. In Travesties, he wishes to give the impression of straddling the fence in the art-politics debates, but he stacks the cards in favor of art (i.e., limerick-spouting "James Joyce" emerges the clear hero of the play, while "Lenin" is consigned to a mock-documentary but aesthetically inferior position). My point is not that Stoppard should have treated Lenin with greater respect (on the contrary, the playwright's error was to shrink from parodying Lenin as vigorously as he parodied the artist figures) but that the "truth" about the author Stoppard and his declarations of intent is, to echo Oscar Wilde, rarely pure and never simple. As an admirer of Stoppardian virtuosity, I concede the correctness of Delaney's insistence on the playwright as an ingenious craftsman. But Stoppard is nowhere so crafty as in his description of Artist Descending a Staircase as seventyfour minutes of airtime spun out as "filler" for a oneminute tape gag. Why not ask "Stoppard himself' which of his many voices to believe? By all means go ahead, but be sure you have heard all of them before deciding which one speaks the Truth. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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