Fall 2003 77
Maurice Yacowar is professor o f English and F i lm Studies at The University o f Calgary, Canada. His
latest book is The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television's Greatest Series (Continuum).
Just a Moment in Stoppard's Utopia
Maurice Yacowar
A single moment in Tom Stoppard's new 9-hour trilogy, The Coast of Utopia,
concentrates its major themes and strategies. Before we tum to that moment,
however, perhaps a detailed overview is in order, because The Coast of Utopia
may well prove an instant monument. With its 5//z/7ewc/z-challenging length,
buoyant Stoppardian density, and need of massive resources, who but London's
subsidized National Theatre could ever afford to mount it?^ The Olivier's rotating
stage and William Dudley's brilliant design for sets, costumes, and the cyclorama
slide and video projections managed to make the debates theatrical. But that budget
would likely preclude any production in Russia (where, of course, Stoppard used
to be banned anyway). Yet where else is there a sufficient audience for such a
laborious anatomy of the politics of the Left? Hardly in America, where "liberal"
has become a pejorative closer to "traitor" than to "ratfink." In short, the Olivier
audiences had a rare privilege indeed, for this ambitious triumph is likely to prove
more often honoured in the read than in the performance.
At the National it worked. As John Peter reviewed the first all-day performance
of the three plays, "With intervals, it lasted nearly 12 hours, but the 1,100-seat
Olivier theatre was packed to the rafters and the sense of intense attention was
palpable."^ The trilogy is, as Rosencrantz—or is it Guildenstem?—might say, "a
hit, a palpable hit."
***
First, then, the trilogy, on which Stoppard worked from 1997 until its August
2002 premiere at the London National's Olivier Theatre directed by Trevor Nunn.
In three sequential dramas, Stoppard explores the revolutionary philosophy, politics,
and personalities in Russia between 1833 and 1865, the seeds for the 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution.^
The first. Voyage, demonstrates the effects of German Romanticism on the
Russian upper classes. Shipwreck chronicles the development of social criticism
in Russia, 1846-52, and the failure of the 1848 Paris Revoh. Here the radical writer
Alexander Herzen, who will prove the trilogy's hero, loses his mother and son in a
shipwreck, and his wife thereafter. In Salvage, Herzen launches the revolutionary
newspaper The Bell and reaches his own measured conclusion about the nature of
revolution.
78 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
Stoppard's point is that human nature is too flawed ever to achieve any Utopia.
Any glorified abstraction—whether a political ideal or a work of art—is as likely
to obscure the quest as to advance it. As we Voyage toward Utopia, through the
manifold dangers of Shipwreck, with humanist compromises, we may Salvage some
of our mission, but, at best, we cannot get closer than the coast of Utopia. Like that
other unachievable ideal, Christianity, the political ideal is necessarily an unending
process. Uhimately Herzen rejects Utopianism: "A distant end is not an end but a
trap. The end we work for must be closer, the labourer's wage, the pleasure in the
work done, the summer Hghtning of personal happiness .. ." (Salvage 118).
Ironically, Stoppard's last father figure (Herzen) here echoes the first, also
named Alexander, the senior Bakunin: "Philosophy consists in moderating each
life so that many lives will fit together with as much liberty and justice as will keep
them together—and not so much as will make them fly apart, when the harm will
be the greater" (Voyage 24). But with his selfishness, and his cruelty to his serfs,
Alexander Bakunin resembles his antagonistic son, Michael: "Revolution is his
new philosophy of self-fulfilment" (Voyage 109), not the service to his country
Michael professed as a soldier. Herzen is Stoppard's hero: he lives his values
selflessly and generously and has a knack for aphorism and paradox.
Our required values begin with the unstrained "quality of mercy" that Tatiana
Bakunin quotes in the first scene. Stoppard values the individual human act of
charity above the large, ostensibly generous sweeps of history. Hence, little Olga's
malapropism about a woman's hysteria: "When she gets historical the only thing
that calms her down is intimate relations" (Salvage 84).
***
I tum now to the individual plays, with the preface that, though Stoppard has
said they can be seen in any order, their meaning and emotional impact would be
much diminished if taken out of sequence.
Voyage begins as a Chekhovian drama set on the Bakunin country estate 150
miles northwest of Moscow. The action of the first act centers on Michael Bakunin
and his four educated sisters (presumably that's Chekhov's three plus VAT!): Liubov,
Varenka, Tatiana, and Alexandra. Act II covers the same time period—March 1834
to Autumn 1844—but from the larger context of Moscow and St. Petersburg, before
retuming to close on the twilight of the aged, blind Bakunin senior. Domestic
situations or personal impulses limned in act I are explained or redefined in act II.
These range fi'om the career of a vagrant pocket knife to the Bakunin girls' romances.
High passions and mortal blows are reported in passing, as if they were incidental
to the political focus. But Stoppard's point is that individual lives are more important
than the lofty abstractions in whose name people are devoured. Self-serving causes
are embodied in the fat, cigar-smoking Ginger Cat at the fancy dress ball, "this
Moloch that eats his children" (106).
Fall 2003 79
Though Michael Bakunin's radicalization seems supported by his parents'
arrogance and cruelty, all he does is scrounge money and suppress his sisters. He
has them do the translation he is paid to write. He is as selfish and unproductive as
the tradition he seeks to overthrow for "the great discovery of the age! The life of
the Spirit is the only real life." Professing that "The outer worid of material existence
is mere illusion" (9), he constantly entreats his dad and friends for money.
In Voyage, Michael moves from dashing soldier to exiled renegade. He resigns
his commission, "On grounds of ill health . . . I'm sick of the Army," having been
shocked to find "the whole Army's obsessed with playing at soldiers" (14-15). As
he fervidly sweeps from Kant to Schelling to Fichte to Hegel, one appreciates his
father's summary: "You've changed windbags, that's all" (46). In a parody dialectic,
his colleague Belinsky lives above a blacksmith's forge and beside a laundry;
respective images of a harsh, contaminating material reality and the philosopher's
doomed compulsion to sanitize it confront each other.
In Shipwreck, Stoppard explores the effects of the intelligentsia: "A uniquely
Russian phenomenon, the intellectual opposition considered as a social force" (17).
Now Bakunin argues against putting "ideas before action. Act first! The ideas will
follow, and if not—well, it's progress" (37). The fool grows dangerous. For acting
on abstract principles can have harsh consequences, whether politically—as in the
thousands gobbled up by the Moloch revolution—or personally—as with the first
Natalie's destructive infidelity to Herzen. Natalie and Herzen never recover from
her rationalized self-indulgence. Across the trilogy, Stoppard prefers Herzen's
rational humanism over Bakunin's irresponsible "action." Herzen's generosity
emphasizes Bakunin's parasitism.
Again, political debate pales beside the characters' heartbreaks, such as
Herzen's loss of his family. Preferring people over abstractions, news of Belinsky's
death ends Herzen's discussion with Turgenev: "No, no . . . oh, no, no, no . . . No!
. . . No more blather please. Blather, blather, blather. Enough" (56). Earlier Herzen
rejected the "ceaseless March of Progress": "Oh, a curse on your capital letters!
We're asking people to spill their blood—at least spare them the conceit that they're
acting out the biography of an abstract noun!" (18).
As our perfection is impossible, even the esteemed Turgenev foolishly pursues
an uninterested opera singer. After the overthrow of Louis Philippe's monarchy,
"In a free vote, the French public renounced freedom" (62). As poet George Herwegh
is shocked to learn, "history has no respect for intellectuals. History is more like
the weather. You never know what it's going to do" (63)—like the shipwreck that
shatters Herzen's life. More practical than the revolutionary's hands-on politics is
the Herzens' hands-on attempt to teach their deaf son Kolya speech. As the dashed
Herzen concludes, "If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond
vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us" (100-101).
80 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
The more intimate fmale, Salvage, centers on the wise Herzen from 1853 to
1868. At forty, he avers, he has "lost every illusion dear to me" so "the world will
hear no more of me" ( 18). But even as his London estate slides from Hampstead to
Finchley to Fulham, it remains the vital hub for revolutionary rhetoric and European
gossip. The idea of starting an expatriate Russian press and an affair with another
Natalie (née Natasha) revitalize him.
The title points to a range of salvage operations. Herzen's publication salvages
him from despondency. Malwida saves the children and Herzen from chaos, then
Natalie saves them from Malwida's order. Natalie salvages Ogarev from his misery
after his wife leaves him. After losing Natalie to Herzen, Ogarev salvages the
prostitute, Mary, and her young son, Henry. The latter familiarly helps Ogarev
through an epileptic fit. Ogarev lives Herzen's/Stoppard's values. Serving an
individual life outweighs any abstract ideal.
***
Finally, to that promised moment in which the trilogy's themes and strategies
concentrate. In Shipwreck, a scene set in June 1849 opens with an explicit allusion
to Manet's famous painting Déjeuner sur l'herbe^ Two fully dressed men frame
the nude Natalie Herzen: her husband Alexander and the German poet George
Herwegh. The latter's wife, Emma, dressed and obviously pregnant, stoops to pick
a flower behind Natalie. Another dressed man, Turgenev, sits stage left, drawing
on a sketchbook. Natalie appears to be posing for him.
As the scene unfolds we leam that Natalie is instead exposing herself only to
George, whom she is about to take as a lover. Turgenev is actually sketching Emma,
who is uncomfortable from posing stooped over. As Stoppard explains in his notes,
this tableau overlaps two locations, Natalie and George in the bush alone—
ostensibly hunting mushrooms—and their spouses' more open space.^ Of course,
in Arcadia, Stoppard played two different time periods (1809 and 1989) in the
same space. Here he plays two physical spaces together at the same time. The
context of art, i.e., the specific Manet composition, seems to perform the deception.
As if to prove Bakunin's early assurance that "the outer world of material
existence is mere illusion" (Voyage 9), Stoppard collapses two physical spaces
into one. The material illusion denies the two locales' integrity. Conversely, this
illusion conveys greater truths: for showing the lovers in the context of their
respective mates more accurately represents their situation than their physical
separation would, and for their mates' affair will affect Herzen and Emma
calamitously. The illusion that combines two physical spaces contradicts the lovers'
naïve rhetoric of romantic freedom.
Yet the image remains misleading. The Manet parody initially implies that
Natalie addresses her nudity to the group and that her husband accepts that exposure.
This art image does not harmonize its divergent components and tensions, but
creates a false impression that it does. The marriages' turmoil will prove the real
Fall 2003 81
human cost when fervid ideahsts abandon themselves to an abstraction, whether it
is art (pace the Manet) or political philosophy (the radical free love and spiritualism
by which Natalie rationalizes her affair with Herwegh).
Moreover, as this scene occurs fourteen years before Manet made this painting,
the characters seem to inhabit an as yet unrealized pattem. This posits art as a
parallel to politics and philosophy: an abstraction intended to improve the human
lot, but which can prove disastrous instead. In Voyage, Belinsky collates art and
politics: "If something true can be understood about art, something will be
understood about liberty, too, and science and politics and history—because
everything in the universe is unfolding together with a purpose of which [his
criticism] is a part" (39). In Shipwreck, Turgenev agrees with Herzen that "a singleminded
conviction is a quality of youth, and Russia is young. Compromise,
prevarication, the ability to hold two irreconcilable beliefs, both with ironic
detachment—^these are ancient European arts . . . " (55). Far from not taking sides,
"I take every possible side," Turgenev explains later {Salvage 96). For Stoppard,
any exclusive abstraction—whether in art, politics, or philosophy—represents the
dangerous delusions of Utopianism.
Similarly, Stoppard's characters often unwittingly echo lines from literature,
whether the Russian classics—e.g., Liubov's wail for "Moscow!" {Voyage 42) and
Michael's (then Herzen's and George's) "What is to be done?"^—or the modem
colloquial—"What is wrong with this picture?" (asked variously by Stankevich,
Turgenev, and Herzen). As they are not knowingly quoting a text, they operate in a
context beyond their apprehension, just as they plan and theorize completely
unaware of their situation. Hence, the stmcture of Voyage, where the scenes of act
II interlock with and explain the scenes of act I. The Manet image reminds us that
one's vision is inevitably partial, restricted by one's own perspective and experience.
This notion argues against imposing any theory about human society and how best
to serve it.
As Stoppard always relishes reminding us, a lot of learning can also be a
dangerous thing. It can breed vanity, selfishness, lack of scmple, as Belinsky
properly charges Michael, "and above all your permanent flight into abstraction
and fantasy which allows you not to notice that the life of the philosopher" depends
upon exploiting the serfs "who somehow haven't managed to attain oneness with
the Absolute" {Voyage 101). Michael is shocked to leam that the family's food
comes through some profession called "Agriculture," and he demands that the
blacksmith below Belinsky's flat hammer more softly. Similarly, our knowingth&
Manet makes us believe the illusion that the characters are all in the same space.
The Manet image also exemplifies the presence of absence and the ambiguity
of physical presence. Belinsky describes the artist's power:
82 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
A poem can't be written by an act of will. When the rest of us are
trying to be present, a real poet goes absent. We can watch him
in the moment of creation, there he sits with the pen in his hand,
not moving. When it moves we've missed it. Where did he go in
that moment? The meaning of art lies in the answer to that
question.. . . Every work of art is the breath of a single eternal
idea breathed by God into the inner life of the artist. That's where
he went. (Voyage 39,41).
In Shipwreck, with the monarchy replaced by a republic that acts like it, a
tattered "Blue Blouse" (worker) appears motionless and invisible to the lazing
Natalie, Natasha, and George. He is only seen by Herzen, but even his address is
rhetorical: "What do you want? Bread? I'm afraid bread got left out of the theory.
We are bookish people, with bookish solutions" (51). In Salvage, Bakunin seems
to appear to Herzen in the flesh on page 90, having just escaped from Siberia. This
action means that his otherwise naturalistic appearance on page 35 was Herzen's
fantasy. This notion is supported by Bakunin's sudden materializing behind him
("I thought it was [his dead wife] Natalie") and by this jocular exchange:
"BAKUNIN (happily): You faintheart. You need me to remind you what it is to be
free. / HERZEN: But you're in prison. / BAKUNIN: That's why you aren't free"
(36). Herzen's capacity to see the absent, to apprehend beyond his own personal
situation and desires, enables him to transcend the self-serving rationalizers.
Stoppard provides a verbal equivalent to visualizing the absent. He deals strictly
with unspoken inferences, not implications, in Turgenev's exchange with Emma,
when she is properly concemed about her husband's fidelity:
EMMA: I want to ask you something but you might be angry
with me.
TURGENEV: I'll answer anyway No.
EMMA: But how do you know the question?
TURGENEV: I don't. You can apply my answer to any question
of your choice....
EMMA: Devotion such as yours should not go unrewarded.
(Pause.) Now I want to ask you something else.
TURGENEV: Yes. (Emma starts to weep.) I'm sorry. (78)
The theme of present absence includes Stoppard's doubling characters' names.
The two father figures are Alexanders—^Bakunin and Herzen. Herzen's wife is
Natalie, but so is her friend (introduced as Natasha) whom he later loves. Ogarev
was married to the unfaithful Maria and ends up with the devoted prostitute Mary
Sutherland. In Voyage, five radicals are Nicholases (Nikolai?)—Stankevich, the
Fall 2003 83
silly editor Poleyev, and the three young members of Herzen's circle. Add another
radical Nicholas, Sasanov, in Shipwreck and a Chemyshevsky in Salvage, The
shared name may suggest the lack of individuation among the radical "thinkers,"
especially in Voyage, from v^hich only Ogarev remains significant. Also, the
presence of one of these characters provokes a distinction from the other; the
presence evokes the absent. Natalie makes this explicit in the last scene, when she
tells Herzen she is only a replacement for the Natalie who died in Shipwreck: "I am
not the real Natalie. The real one is in the sky" {Salvage 112).
At the National Theatre, this doubling was augmented by the casting of the
strong actor Eve Best as Liubov in Voyage, Natalie in Shipwreck, and Malwida in
Salvage. Here Best projected a spectrum from destructive romanticism to
responsible practicality. John Carlisle played the aristocrat Alexander Bakunin,
Leonty Ibayev (the Russian consul in Nice), and Stanislaw Worcell (an exiled
Polish nationalist), characters that diminish in power as they increase in political
status. In this meta-theatre, the characters live in another pattem beyond their
comprehension, their performer, so again any absolute understanding is impossible
for them.
All this suits Stoppard's familiar stock and trade—dramatic irony. The
characters' understanding is undermined by our broader vision. Thus, after the
Manet exposure of the affair, George blithely tells Emma they will be sharing a
house with Herzen and Natalie, and Herzen tells Emma her husband is "kindness
itself for offering to escort Natalie and the children south. In Voyage, Mother
Bakunin's apparent non-sequitur about Michael—"STANKEVICH: Is he studying
philosophy? / VARVARA: Yes, he's at the Artillery School" (63)—is validated
first as a metaphor (Michael will make a weapon out of his radical philosophy) and
later by Michael's observation: "Study is difficult in the Artillery, owing to the
loud explosions which are a regular feature of Artillery life" (70). In Shipwreck,
Herzen calls Ogarev "a free man because he gives away freely" (65)—as Ogarev's
wife Maria poses nude for an unseen painter. Ogarev seems more giving than he
realizes.
Re-enforcing the theme of limited comprehension, Stoppard continually upsets
our plot expectations. In the first scene of Voyage, Liubov is engaged, but "the
newlyweds" referred to at the start of act I, scene 2 tum out to be Varenka and her
Dyakov. The gunshot that disturbs the crows on page 42 kills Pushkin on page 95.
Finally, lest anyone think Stoppard's portrait is of an exclusively Franco-
Russian picnic, clearly his epic addresses the contemporary West, especially Britain.
His analysis of the Left's need for compromise and conciliation applies equally to
Tony Blair's New Labour government and to George Bush's Right in/to America.
Thus Ogarev: "With all this liberty, there's no beggar in France or Russia as destitute
as the London poor, and with all this poverty, no Frenchman or Russian has his
liberty guarded like a London beggar. . . . What exactly is going on here? Do
84 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
poverty and liberty go together, or is it the English sense of humour?" (Salvage
11). The characters' bewailing the lack of a national literature and a rational, just
govemment can be heard even more widely. Stoppard's assault on Utopianism is a
response to the firebrand, revolutionary idealisms across our globe. Herzen's last
words address all bellicose idealists, whether they are suicide bombers or their
avengers:
We have to open men's eyes and not tear them o u t . . . and if we
see differently, it's all right, we don't have to kill the myopic in
our myopia . . . We have to bring what's good along with us.
People won't forgive us. I imagine myself the future custodian
of a broken statue, a blank wall, a desecrated grave, telling
everyone who passes by, "Yes—yes, all this was destroyed by
the revolution." . . . [in Russian:] Will you give me a kiss? (118-
19)
The translated revolution is less important than one honest kiss. Stoppard privileges
the individual human exchange over any political, philosophical, or aesthetic
abstraction. The Manet trick is an example. For intimate relations are our only
cure for the hysterias of history.
Notes
1. The cast o f thirty played seventy characters and wore ninety-six wigs, forty face-sets (moustaches
and beards), and 416 costumes. Of the latter, 271 were for the actors, sixty for their understudies and
eighty-five for the stagehands.
2. "Culture," Sunday Times, August 11, 2 0 0 2 , sec. 9: 17.
3. Unless otherwise noted, all citations from the plays are from the Faber and Faber editions of
the trilogy (London, 2002).
4. The Manet image in the setting is de/pre-scribed o n pp. 73-4.
5. The scene reverses the situation that opened Shipwreck, where Ogarev read to N a t a l i e while
Herzen and Granovsky were off picking mushrooms. There Ogarev suggests his l o v e for his wife
Maria has waned.
6. This latter quote is also the title o f a political novel that Nikolai Chemyshevksy ( a minor figure
in Salvage) wrote in 1863 as a rebuttal to Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862).
Fall 2003 85
No comments:
Post a Comment