Travesties | It is Written: Tom Stoppard and the Drama of the Intertext
In the following essay, Meyer explores how Stoppard uses intertextuality in Travesties to comment on writers, their art, and politics.
In Tom Stoppard's 1964 story,"Life, Times: Fragments," the writer-protagonist seeks originality by consciously denying the influence of previous writers: imagining himself a general on the field of battle, he surveys the corpses of the powerful precursors he has just vanquished. His first-person accounts, however, are inevitably derivative, filled with the haunting echoes of the very writers— primarily Beckett and Hemingway—he has supposedly killed off by the force of his own self-originary powers. "Artistic recyclying"—dramatic allusion, intertextuality, parody, travesty—is not...
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