How Many Travesties Are There?

Trav-es-ty…An exaggerated or grotesque imitation, such as a parody of a literary work. … A debased or grotesque likeness;

Second thoughts on Stoppard’s Travesties: how many travesties are there? The play itself is, perhaps, a travesty of Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest. Earnest is itself a travesty of—well, just about everything, but perhaps in particular, on Victorian middle class mores. Old Carr’s memory is a travesty on truth and history (the diary, as Wilde would say, of things that never happened). Tristian Tzara’s dada is certainly intended as a travesty of art. I am a bit reluctant to treat James Joyce as a travesty, although Stoppard turns him into as fine a travesty of verse drama as you are likely to hear (exceeding but by a gnat’s crotchet the splendid little bit of Gallagher-and-Sheehan later in the same show). Lenin: now there was a travesty: of the enlightenment, at least, and of Russian culture. Whether Lenin was a travesty of revolution is perhaps a nicer question: perhaps revolution itself is a travesty of itself. That, at any rate, may be the point of the smashing denouement in the second act, where Stoppard puts a line of Wilde into the mouth of Lenin (I won’t repeat it here, but you’ll know it when you hear it)—and it fits, oh boy it fits.

There. Are there any more?

Fn: There's a fine piece by Charles Simic in a recent New York Review of Books of the new Dada show at the Met. See it here.