Tom Stoppard’s Travesties.
Why revolutions inevitably fail.
Making a mockery of Lenin, Joyce and Tzara.
Burton Weltman
“You say you want a revolution.”
The Beatles
Some travesties from Travesties.
Vladmir Lenin on Communism: “We shall establish a free press,” that is, one that promotes only Bolshevik propaganda. And he dons a blonde wig as he hopes to sneak into Russia disguised as a Swedish deaf mute.[1]
James Joyce on modern art: “An artist is a magician” who conjures reality from his imagination. And he pulls a rabbit out of a hat.[2]
Tristan Tzara on Dadaist counter-culturalism: “To a Dadaist, history comes out of a hat.” And he pulls random words from a hat to make what he calls poetry.[3]
Henry Carr on revolution: “According to Marx, the dialectic of history will get you to much the same place with or without Lenin.” Revolution is irrelevant. And he tells Lenin “You’re nothing. You’re an artist.”[4]
History as Travesty.
What if truth is travesty? A travesty is defined as a distorted representation or absurd imitation of something. It is not, however, necessarily a complete falsehood or fraud. There may be some truth and some value wrapped up in the silliness. Good sense may lie in the midst of nonsense.
Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties[5] is a travesty of a travesty of a travesty. Published in 1974, Travesties is a fictional take on the factual coincidence of Vladmir Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara – erstwhile revolutionaries in politics, literature, and counterculture, respectively – having all resided in Zurich, Switzerland in early 1917, along with a minor British diplomat named Henry Carr. It was a chance confluence of the three iconoclasts that is seen in the play through the unreliable eyes of a fictional version of Carr.
In real life during 1917, Lenin, Joyce and Tzara were busy making revolutionary breakthroughs in their respective fields. Lenin was finishing the publication of his book on Imperialism, and he was belatedly taking off for Russia to try to take control of a political revolution that he had not thought possible. Joyce was working on Ulysses, an esoteric stream of consciousness novel of a revolutionary kind. And Tzara was promoting an anti-art performance art and a revolutionary nihilism. Lenin, Joyce and Tzara were also leading figures in erstwhile revolutionary movements – Communism, modernism, and dadaism, respectively – and each took his revolutionary work very seriously. The play makes a travesty of their work.
Travesties is itself a travesty of a play. It presents what are ostensibly the memories of Carr who as an old man, seemingly around 1974 when the play was written, is recalling his time in Zurich during 1917. Carr as he is portrayed in the play bears no resemblance to the real Carr. The real Carr was a dignified gentleman. In the play, the young Carr behaves bizarrely, and the aged Carr is senile and filled with delusions of grandiosity. He is a travesty of Carr.
Carr’s memories in the play are, in turn, befuddled and distorted. He makes ridiculous claims of having influenced Lenin, Joyce and Tzara in their revolutionary work. His self-importance rivals that of the three revolutionaries, who themselves pompously fret and strut through the play. Carr’s memories are also wildly inconsistent. He will, for example, sometimes remember Lenin as a reasonable, highly cultured person and other times claim Lenin was an ignorant, ideologically rigid boor. The memories make for a travesty of a memoir.
Carr’s memories are also garbled – effectively a stream of consciousness – so that the play randomly jumps around in time and subject matter. One minute, for example, people will be discussing politics, and the next minute, without any transition, they will be kissing each other. It makes for a travesty of a drama. Finally, the words and actions of Lenin, Joyce and Tzara that Carr claims to remember are distorted images of things they actually said and did. Sometimes they make sense, other times are mere gibberish. His memories are a travesty of history.
In sum, Stoppard has made a travesty of a play which presents a travesty of an old man’s memories which make a travesty of actual history. The whole thing is very clever and very funny. There are also, I think, some serious messages implicit in the comic chaos, especially pertaining to the illusory nature of revolutions and the illusions of revolutionaries. Stoppard has, I think, made a travesty of Lenin, Joyce and Tzara because he thinks the three would-be revolutionaries and their works were themselves travesties. Using stream of silly consciousness techniques that parody Joyce, making a farce of everything as Tzara does, and mocking Lenin’s political theories, the play implies that revolutions inevitably fail and invariably become travesties of themselves. That is a heavy load of meaning for a light-hearted play, but I think it is so. The purpose of this essay is to explain that conclusion.
The Plot: Not a lot.
There is very little plot to Travesties. The fictionalized Carr is the central character. Given that the play is made up of his memories, everyone and everything revolves around him. The play is essentially a running debate of Carr with Lenin, Joyce and Tzara, with several minor characters occasionally chiming in. The debate is unfocused and consists of seemingly random streams of serious arguments alternating with silly nonsense. Characters sometimes espouse well-reasoned and well-articulated positions, but oftentimes lapse into non sequitur arguments and gibberish.
The opening scene exemplifies the nonsense that permeates the play. It is like a scene from a Marx Brothers movie. Lenin, Joyce and Tzara are writing in the Zurich library. Lenin is writing quietly. Joyce is dictating to a secretary with her repeating his words, seemingly in order to get them right. “Deshil holles eamus,” he says and she repeats it. “Thrice,” he orders her to write it. Then he says “Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn quickening and wombfruit,” and she repeats it. “Thrice,” he again orders. “Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa,” he says and she repeats it.
Meanwhile, Tzara is randomly pulling words from a hat and reciting as poetry what he has made that way. “Clara avuncular! Whispers ill oomparah! Eel nus dairy day Appletzara…Hat!,” he intones. To the play’s audience, Tzara’s random words seem the same as Joyce’s chosen words.
Lenin’s wife suddenly barges in proclaiming in Russian that a revolution has begun in Russia. They converse at length in Russian, which, like the recitations of Joyce and Tzara, makes no sense to the audience. Joyce, meanwhile, begins to recite nonsense phrases that are written on pieces of paper that he randomly pulls from his pocket. “Morose delectation…Acquinas turnbelly…Frateporcospino,” Joyce recites. What he is doing looks and sounds exactly like what Tzara had been doing.
Joyce then picks up a piece of paper that he thinks is his and recites “Lickspittle – capitalist – lackeys – of imperialism.” This seems to be not unlike the nonsense Joyce has previously been reciting. It is, however, Lenin’s paper and when Lenin recognizes the words as his, he reclaims the paper from Joyce.[6] And so it goes. All three of them are babbling gibberish that each of them thinks is of earthshattering importance.
Sense is, however, often mixed with nonsense in the play. In the running arguments that constitute the gist of the play, Lenin presents a Marxist political analysis that is sometimes cogent, other times mere dogma. Joyce displays a literary pedantry that is sometimes fresh, other times lugubrious gobbledygook. Tzara performs anti-art antics that are sometimes clever, other times mere juvenility. Each of them comes up against Carr’s conventional views of politics, literature and art. It makes for a head-turning intellectual round robin.
Compounding the intellectual tumult, each of the four main characters sporadically espouses one of the others’ positions instead of his own. Carr speaking like Lenin, Tzara speaking like Joyce, and so forth. The dialogue in the play also alternates among the rhetorical styles of the four main characters. Sometimes they all speak in Lenin’s stentorian voice, and at other times in Joyce’s stream of obscure references, Tzara’s cascade of nonsense, or Carr’s bland incomprehension.
Adding further to the confusion, the play periodically goes through a “time slip” in which the action goes back to a previous point in the play and the characters begin their discussions again, but often taking stances different than the ones they had taken the first time around.
Compounding the fictional chaos, Travesties incorporates an actual absurd event that resonates through the play. An amateur performance of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest was produced in Zurich around this time. It was produced by Joyce, and Carr played a leading role in it. The performance apparently came off well, but Carr subsequently sued Joyce for the cost of some pants that were ruined during the performance, and Joyce countersued Carr over a small sum of money for unsold tickets to the play that Joyce thought he was owed by Carr. Absurd, but actual fact. Actual fact that supports the absurdity of the fiction.
Finally, as another addition to the unreality in Travesties, the play mimics and mocks The Importance of Being Ernest. Like Wilde’s play, Stoppard’s is full of impersonations, double-identities, misunderstandings, and misdirection. More significantly, the characters in Travesties sometimes take up the names and play the roles of characters in The Importance of Being Ernest as though the Wilde play is reality and 1917 Zurich is imaginary. It is absurd, but that seems to be the point. Reality is absurd, but not necessarily meaningless.
Some Historical Context: What is to be done and undone?
Travesties is a historical play and a play on history. Lenin, Joyce and Tzara were leading representatives of important movements – Communism, cultural modernism, and counter-cultural dadaism, respectively – that were burgeoning in 1917. The three men and their movements subsequently had profound effects on twentieth-century history, effects that resonate today. The co-residence in Zurich of these three erstwhile revolutionaries is a remarkable historical coincidence. Stoppard has, I think, taken advantage of that coincidence to comment on the nature of the revolutionary work being undertaken in 1917 by Lenin, Joyce and Tzara, the nature of the revolutionary movements they represented, and the nature of revolution itself.
I think, in turn, that understanding the play requires some sense of the history of Communism, modernism and counter-culturalism, particularly from the viewpoint of 1917 when the play takes place and the viewpoint of 1974 when the play was written and when Carr is supposedly remembering the events of 1917. The contrast between the two viewpoints is significant. From the vantage point of 1917, one could think that things looked bad in the present but hopeful for the future. The revolutionary work being done by the likes of Lenin, Joyce and Tzara, and the movements they represented, could seem promising. But from the vantage point of 1974, one could conclude that the work of each of them and their movements had failed.
I think that Stoppard’s portrayal of the three revolutionaries reflects the historical failure of their movements at the time he wrote Travesties. As Lenin, Joyce and Tzara are portrayed in the play, Communism, modernism and counter-culturalism began as travesties that seemingly prefigured their degraded ends. What follows is my sense of the history of those movements that I think provides context for the meaning and messaging of the play.
Communism. From the vantage point of early 1917, Communism seemed to be a pipe dream and the idea of a Communist revolution in Russia seemed absurd. Even Lenin said so.
But World War I had changed many things. It was a war that wasn’t supposed to happen. For one hundred years since the defeat of Napolean in 1815, there had been localized wars and revolutionary uprisings, but no major wars or major revolutions in Europe. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were widely celebrated, at least by the ruling classes, as an era of pragmatic and relatively peaceful evolutionary progress. The gradual democratizing of most governments, the growing wealth of capitalist countries, and the burgeoning economic ties among countries, all seemed to mitigate any major war or revolution.
World War I smashed that reformist dream and opened the door to revolutionary movements of both the Left in the form of Communism and the Right in the form of fascism and Nazism. On all sides, the so-called Whig theory of history as a process of gradual and inevitable progress was rejected, and cataclysmic theories of the rise and fall of societies took hold. And the revolutionary trend of the times was now widely seen as part of a historical cycle of alternating reform and revolution that went back at least to the ancient Greeks.
From the viewpoint of 1917, Lenin’s life could be seen as an ideal preparation for the revolutionary moment of that year. He was the progeny of a revolutionary family, and his brother had been executed for trying to assassinate the Tzar. Lenin had, in turn, written in 1902 a handbook on revolution aptly called What is to Be Done?. His book was one of the first to take socialist theory and create something of a blueprint for revolutionary practice.
In What is to Be Done?. Lenin explained his opposition to the large-scale mass socialist political parties and the evolutionary socialist theories and practices that had prevailed to that time within the socialist movement in Russia and most other countries. His book called for a small disciplined elite cadre of revolutionists to control the Communist movement, and ultimately to lead a putschist takeover of the government in the name of the masses.
Lenin’s militant views precipitated a split within the Russian Socialist Party between those promoting militant revolution and those favoring gradual evolution. This split came to a head at the party’s convention in 1903. A majority of the members at the convention supported the gradualist position but the militants were persistent. Debate went on all day and far into the night, intentionally prolonged by Lenin’s followers. Eventually, adherents of the moderate position got tired and started leaving. At that point, Lenin’s followers called for a vote and they had a majority of the remaining delegates on their side. Their views were adopted.
Following the vote at this convention, Lenin’s elitist militants began calling themselves Bolsheviks, which means majority in Russian. They, in turn, called the more popular moderates by the dismissive term Mensheviks, which means minority. And even though the moderates were at all times a majority of the Russian socialists, the names stuck and the moderates had to accept being called Mensheviks. It was a farcical but ominous turn of events.
Despite his militant views, Lenin thought that Russia was not ripe for a Communist revolution in the early twentieth century. Russia was still a dictatorial monarchy with a predominantly peasant economy and only a small industrial capitalist sector. Marx had said that a country was not ripe for Communism until it was highly industrialized with a large well-organized mass of urban industrial workers. So, Lenin thought, the revolution would have to await this development.
In early 1917, Lenin confirmed this position with the publication of his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism which foretold a long period of international capitalist development. Lenin even told a group of his supporters at this time that he would not live to see a revolution in Russia, and that they would have to carry on his work after him.
These were famous last words, as they say. Some four weeks after making this prediction, revolution broke out in Russia and Lenin rushed home hoping to take control of events. Ironically, just as Lenin was successfully engineering a communist revolution in Russia, his book denying the possibility of what he was doing was being published. It is this farcical turn of events that Travesties portrays, and that is reflected in the history of Russian Communism as seen from the vantage point of 1974
From the vantage point of 1974, Communism in Russia and elsewhere had degenerated from utopian hopes of a freely cooperative society – a society in which, Karl Marx had claimed, “the self-development of each will be the basis for the development of all” – into an oppressively bureaucratic reality in which individuals were treated as mere cogs in a social machine.
Russian Communism had gone through several stages. There had been the relatively liberal stage of the New Economic Policy during the early to mid-1920’s. In this period, small farms and businesses continued to be privately owned and operated as in the past, and only large industry and finance were nationalized. Modern ideas of education and modernist culture flourished fairly freely.
This stage was followed by the harshly repressive Stalinist period beginning in the late 1920’s. Stalin nationalized virtually all of the country’s farms and businesses, centralized almost all economic and social activities, and repressed cultural freedom. Following Stalin’s death in 1954, Russia seemed to be moving backward toward its old regime. It had seemingly revolved from an oppressive dictatorial and stodgily bureaucratic Tzarist regime in 1917 to an oppressive dictatorial and stodgily bureaucratic Communist regime in 1974. Leonid Brezhnev ruled in place of Tzar Nicholas, but the more things had changed, the more many of them seemed the same.
From the vantage point of early 2022, as I am writing this essay, Communism has almost everywhere either been overthrown in favor of a degenerate capitalism as in Russia, or morphed into a cut-throat capitalism as in China. And virtually all of the formerly Communist countries have authoritarian political regimes. Russia seems politically to have almost completed a historical circle back to where it was in 1917. With the end of Communism in 1990, a fledgling democracy seemed to be emerging, but this has turned into a virtual kleptocracy and fledgling autocracy. Russian President Vladmir Putin is acting essentially like a Tzar and openly calling for the restoration of the Tzarist Russian empire. Almost a full political circle from 1917 to 2022.
Modernism. Modernism is a broad term that can be used to encompass many different cultural theories and practices, almost too many to be meaningful. There are, however, some common tendencies which one can see in cultural works that are deemed modernist and which validate the use of the term. These include an emphasis on subjectivity and individual introspection, a psychological approach to events and phenomenological approach to experience, and a desire to deal with uncommon things and create unconventional works. “Make it new” Ezra Pound had proclaimed, and the goal of modernists has generally been to promote a permanent revolution of perpetual novelty.
Modernism in literature and art developed in the late nineteenth century and around the turn of the twentieth century as a rejection of mid to late nineteenth century Realism. Realists sought to be objective and to take a social and sociological view of things. They focused on common and concrete realities and emphasized a scientific approach to the world. Whereas novelty was the goal of modernists, the ordinary was the specialty of realists. This conflict between Realists and Modernists was part of a recuring cycle of cultural conflict between realism and rationality, on the one hand, and imagination and emotion, on the other, going back to the Ancient Greeks.
Realism had itself developed as a rejection of early nineteenth century Romanticism that had emphasized subjectivity and emotionality. Realists deemed the Romantics to be shallow sentimentalists who smeared a soppy gloss on the hard realities of the world and, thereby, disguised the truth of things. Romanticism had, in turn, begun as a rejection of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationality and empiricism, an approach that the Romantics deemed to be cold and lifeless. And so on…
From the vantage point of 1917, James Joyce was an arch type of the modernist. And I think you can see the evolution of modernism in the succession of his most famous works. Joyce went from the accessible A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, to the semi-accessible Ulyssus, published in 1922, to the completely inaccessible Finnegan’s Wake, published in 1939. Joyce’s evolution, or devolution, was similar to that of his predecessor Henry James. James was a pioneer of modernism whose career started with comprehensible social novels but ended with incomprehensible internal monologues. Joyce, like James and much of the modernist movement, went so far in the direction of subjectivism as to become nearly solipsistic. In so doing, serious modernist works became inaccessible and alien to most people.
From the vantage point of 1974, modernism had seemingly developed in two contradictory ways. In its high art forms, it had become increasingly abstruse and inaccessible. In its low art forms, it had largely become frivolous, been coopted by consumerism, and devolved into faddism.
In more pretentious forms of consumerism, modernism posed as “camp” art, exemplified by the works of Andy Warhol and his paintings of Campbell’s soup cans. In less grandiose forms, modernism became a gimmick to sell consumer goods. Always seeking new things to sell to a gullible public, manufacturers continually changed the styles of their consumer goods so as to encourage people to throw out their old things and buy new ones, even though the old ones might still be perfectly useable.
Clothes manufacturers would, for example, change the size of the lapel on shirts and jackets, just slightly, but just enough so that people would feel uncomfortable and out of-place wearing their old clothes. The idea of cultural revolution became an advertising ploy. In the early 1970’s, all sorts of consumer products, from autos to underwear, were being advertised as “revolutionary,” although only the hyperbole was exceptional. It was a travesty of a cultural revolution.
From our vantage point today in 2022, modernism has largely been superseded among the cultural elite in the United States by so-called postmodernism. Postmodernists widely promote a complete relativism in culture, ethics and politics. They hold that everything is subjective, and that there are no standards or common frames of reference among people, only individual tastes and individual views. It is a philosophy that is essentially rooted in solipsism, in everyone for and by oneself. With their off-putting rhetoric and anything-goes philosophy, postmodernists have alienated themselves from the general public.
Postmodernism has also provoked an archconservative cultural backlash that postmodernists have difficulty in resisting, since they don’t believe in cultural standards that would enable them to reject the archconservatives for violating those standards, and since they believe that any opinion is justified no matter how ignorant and off-base it is. In this context, the gibberish of the characters in Travesties seems prophetic.
Counter-culturalism. Counter-culturalism has been a significant aspect of Western society going back to the Ancient Greeks. Cycles of conformity and radical nonconformity have recurred throughout Western history. Adherence to honesty and abhorrence of hypocrisy have generally been the central tenets of counter-culturalists. In Travesties, for example, Tzara insists that the only worthwhile question about anything is “Is it a true thing.”[7] Naked reality, stripped of all obfuscations, was the goal.
Among the first counter-culturalists was the Ancient Greek Diogenes the Cynic, who is sometimes called the first hippie. Diogenes was a street performer who acted up and acted out his rejection of social norms. A nihilist who rejected all conventionalities as false and fraudulent, Diogenes lived in the streets and supposedly slept in a barrel. He wandered around, often naked, with the ostensible aim of finding an honest man and never finding one.
Tradition has it that Alexander the Great greatly admired Diogenes and coming upon Diogenes in the streets one day promised that whatever Diogenes wished for most in the world, Alexander would give him. Diogenes supposedly replied that he wished Alexander would move aside and stop blocking the sunlight.
Historically, counter-culturalism has been more of an ethical than an artsy movement. Counter-culturalists eschewed art and literature as it was practiced in conventional ways and measured by conventional standards. They made, instead, so-called anti-art art and unliterary literature. Valuing honesty above all else, they insisted on returning to a supposedly more natural way of life. It was a tradition that was carried on by the so-called Bohemians in the nineteenth century and advanced by Tzara and his fellow Dadaists in the early twentieth century.
From the vantage point of 1917, Tzara’s Dadaism was a reaction against World War I. Dadaists denounced the fraudulence of conventional prewar beliefs that war had become impossible, and the fraudulent prowar propaganda that promoted World War I as a war to end all wars. Dadaists excoriated these beliefs as nonsense that could be combatted only with more nonsense. They claimed that nihilism – a rejection of all conventionalities and a cult of nonsense – were the only ways to shed hypocrisy, promote honesty, and achieve a natural life.
Dada was performance art, mainly spontaneous and aimed at upsetting the audience. Epater le bourgeoisie – sticking it to the middle class – was the aim. Melees often disrupted and ended Dadaist performances. Travesty was their method and their goal.
From the vantage point of 1974, Tzara’s career could be seen as an example of why counter-cultural revolutions fail to achieve their goals. Tzara went from one counter-cultural style to another but eventually ended up joining with Communists to oppose the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe. Originally an anti-war activist, he went to Spain in the mid-1930’s to help the Republicans fight against Franco and the Spanish fascists. Tzara later joined the French Resistance during World War II to fight against the Nazis. It was an ironic turn of events for a pacifist and anarchist. But it was arguably a principled response to the unsustainability of nihilism as a humanistic theory and practice in the face of radical evil. Tzara’s nihilism had disguised an underlying idealism that came to the fore when push came to shove.
From the vantage point of 1974, one could see many counter-culturalists who displayed fewer principles than Tzara when pushed by reality. The gist of the Dadaists’ politically oriented performance art was carried forward during the mid-twentieth century by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin who were leaders of the Yippie movement. In one of their most heralded actions, Hoffman and Rubin proclaimed their intent to levitate the Pentagon as part of a large anti-Vietnam War protest in October of 1967. After a whole lot of hoopla and chanting, the Pentagon stayed put, the protest was broken up by soldiers with fixed bayonets, and the war went on. By 1974, when Travesties was published, Hoffman was dealing in illegal drugs and Rubin was dealing in speculative stocks. A travesty of Tzara’s counter-cultural nihilism as idealism.
From the vantage point of 2022, counter-culturalism has largely disappeared in the United States and Europe. Nihilism has, in turn, degenerated from the euphoric idealism of the Dadaists and has been adopted by violent extremists on the Left and even more on the Right. In January, 2021, as an example, then President Trump and his right-wing nihilist allies tried to overthrow the government of the United States. Primarily motivated by racial fears and religious bigotry, and operating within a nihilist might-makes-right mentality, Trump and his extremist supporters reject the democratic conventionalities and established civic norms of the country.
The former President and his fascistic followers seek to impose an authoritarian regime on the United States that would protect their privileged place in the social order. Winning is everything for them and democratic processes are acceptable only so long as they win with them. As of this writing in early 2022, Trump and his supporters are still active and seem to be actively planning their next attempt at a right-wing revolution. Making a travesty of America.
The Problem with Revolution: To revolve is to return to your starting place.
What goes around comes around, as the saying goes. Revolution is an ill-fitting term to use in describing the progressive political, cultural and social changes sought by Lenin, Joyce and Tzara. To revolve means to go around and come back to where you started. To make a revolution is, by definition, ultimately to get nowhere.
The idea of revolution was invented by ancient astronomers to apply to the rotations of the planets that ostensibly circled around the earth, and that ended each year back where they had started. The word was also applied by engineers to the circular movements of a wheel. A revolution was to move away from a starting point and then circle back to it again.
The first uses of the word to mean radical political change date from the late 1300’s and early 1400’s when the goal of change was to restore things to the way they had supposedly been. The dominant theory of history and social change at that time was that humankind and human society had deteriorated from an ideal past. From the Ancient Greeks through the Middle Ages in Europe, the ideal was deemed to have been in the past, the present was invariably corrupted.
In this context, the aim of a political revolution was to go back – to revolve – to a better past and not to construct something novel in the present. When, for example, monarchs were overthrown, the justification was that the king had been deviating from traditional practices. The idea was to get rid of a king who was exceeding his rightful powers and restore the realm to its rightful ancient ways, thereby making the good old days real again.
The theory of an ideal past and corrupted present was challenged during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Ideas of progressive social change developed. The new theory was that things have been and should be getting better over time. These ideas took time to take hold, and the old and new meanings of social change coexisted and conflicted for several centuries.
The idea that a political revolution meant returning to a better past was the primary theory and motivation of the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This view was the basis for the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century and both the American Revolution and the French Revolution of the late-eighteenth century. In each case, the revolutionaries claimed that kings were overstepping their legitimate bounds, and that the revolutionaries wanted to restore previously existing rights to the populous. In each case, more radical revolutionaries came to the fore in the course of the revolution. They changed the course of the thing in mid-stream and experimented with new social norms and forms. In the end, however, these novel ideas were eventually rejected and things reversed course back toward where they had started. In sum, a revolution.
It was in the nineteenth century that the idea of making social progress through radical political change emerged and it was given the ill-fitting name of revolution. It is ill-fitting because the idea of a progressive political revolution is a contradiction in terms. Modern revolutionaries generally want to make things new, and not return to some prior system. But, while the term revolution doesn’t fit with what most revolutionaries want, it does, unfortunately for them, fit with what they mostly achieve. Which is not a lot. Political revolutions almost invariably fail to achieve the aims of the revolutionaries. They have, instead, an invariable tendency to revolve from one stage to another and eventually return close to their starting points.
While any progressive action is likely to provoke a regressive reaction, revolutions generally fail to achieve their aims because they go too far too fast and provoke a particularly intense backlash. There is a pattern to progressive revolutions. They go first to the left, getting increasingly radical as more extremist revolutionists gain momentum and moderates are overwhelmed, but then they go back to the right, as a backlash turns things around. In the end, they have generally achieved something, but not what they intended, and little that couldn’t have been achieved with less drastic and less destructive methods. Revolutions generally are travesties.
Examples of this pattern include the English Civil War and Commonwealth (1640-1660) and the French Revolution and Empire (1789-1815), both of which were revolts to get rid of monarchies and ended up with monarchies. The American Revolution and Constitution (1775-1789) was a revolt against a strong central government that interfered with the colonies and ended up with a strong central government that interfered with the states.[8] The Communist revolutions in Russia (1917-1990) and China (1948 – Present) were revolts against capitalism and authoritarianism that ended up with capitalism and authoritarianism. In each case, the revolts went through radically democratic and egalitarian phases before relapsing into a revised form of the old order.
In sum, political revolutions generally go too far too fast, which results in collapse, and then relapse into variations of the old order. They get rid of so much of the old order that they end up without a foundation for a new order, nothing to build upon. I think that this same pattern holds for most cultural and counter-cultural revolutions as well. And I think that idea is implicit as a lesson of Travesties.
The Moral of the Story.
Travesties closes with a conversation between Carr as an old man and his wife. She has been dispelling Carr’s recollections of Zurich as exaggerations. She points out inconsistencies within his memories, and between his memories and the facts, and makes fun of his claims to have influenced Lenin, Joyce and Tzara. At one point, Carr claims that if had wanted, he could have kept Lenin from leaving Zurich for Russia and, thereby, would have forestalled the Communist revolution. He says that he didn’t do it because he liked Lenin and was distracted by other events. His wife responds that Carr was only a low-level official and never had that kind of authority. In any case, she says, he never even met Lenin in Zurich.
Carr has to concede point by point that his wife is right and that his vainglorious recollections are wrong. Nonetheless, no sooner has he made his final concession to her than he recycles back to his exaggerated memories, claiming to have known “spies, exiles, painters, poets, writers, radicals of all kinds. I knew them all.” And he closes the play by announcing that he had learned three things from that time. They are “Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary…I forgot the third thing.”[9]
These lessons that Carr claims he has learned from his time in Zurich form a fitting farcical finale for the play. The first two lessons conflate revolutionaries and artists which, as exemplified by the characters in Travesties, makes a travesty of both. The first two lessons also contradict each other. The first implies that you cannot make yourself into a revolutionary. You either have or have not been made that way by circumstances. If you haven’t, then you should become an artist.
But the second lesson implies that you cannot make yourself into an artist. You either have or have not been made that way by circumstances. If you haven’t, then you should make yourself into a revolutionary. But you can’t do that according to the first lesson. Carr’s first two lessons, thereby, constitute a contradiction that keeps revolving around back to itself and is a travesty of logic. Given this illogic of Carr’s first two lessons and the fact that he has altogether forgotten the third, one must conclude that Carr didn’t learn anything from his experiences. But maybe we can.
On its face, the play could be seen as a sendup of history as just a meaningless bunch of distorted memories. I think, however, that the message is just the opposite. It is that even with a bunch of distorted memories you can glean some important truths. And the underlying truth in Travesties, the moral of the story, is, I think, that if you go to vainglorious revolutionary extremes, you should expect to make a fool of yourself and to see your efforts end in travesty.
Lenin, Joyce and Tzara went to revolutionary extremes in their work and in the long run the movements they promoted became travesties of themselves. Carr went to personal extremes in trying to build himself up as an important person in his memoir and he made a travesty of his memories. Stoppard went to artistic extremes in his portrait of these people and made a travesty of a play. But his play is still meaningful.
Stoppard wrote Travesties at a time of significant historical turmoil, during the political and cultural rebellions of the 1960’s and early 1970’s in Western society. I think his portrayal of Lenin, Joyce, and Tzara reflects his take on the would-be revolutionaries and revolutions of that time. The revolutionary posturing of the Weathermen, the counter-cultural exhibitionism of the hippies, the nihilistic antics of the Yippies, were making a travesty of progressive social and cultural movements in the United States. Similar movements flourished in other countries. The play was, I think, a reflection and a critical commentary on the times in which it was written. The relevance of the play for us stems, in turn, from the results and residue of those movements, and the consequences of similar movements today.
BW 1/2022
[1] Tom Stoppard. Travesties. New York: Grove Press, 2017. P.74.
[2] Ibid. P.53.
[3] Ibid. Pp.3-4, 73.
[4] Ibid. Pp.72-73.
[5] Tom Stoppard. Travesties. New York: Grove Press, 2017.
[6] Ibid. Pp. 3-7.
[7] Ibid. P.46.
[8] For a discussion of why and how the American Revolution failed to achieve its goals, I have a series of essays on “Was the American Revolution a Mistake?” posted on this website
[9] Ibid. P.90.
historyaschoice 