Abstract
Creation, for Stoppard, is dissent. His drama, at its best, is not simply a gesture of refusal: it earns its liberty, as we have seen, by means of a critical engagement with the demands of conformity. Dissent is, for the artist, both invigorating and necessary; for Stoppard’s spiritual loners (that long succession of his characters who refuse the common ground), it is necessarily painful and disabling. In his more recent work the loner as tame believer, as bemused mystic consigned and resigned to the periphery, becomes the loner as political dissident. There is nothing arbitrary about this explicit appearance of politics in Stoppard’s work; it bears witness to his continued engagement with the problem of criticism. However, an examination of the ways in which the early dissenters develop into the dissidents will prepare the way for our understanding of how Stoppard betrays himself into a contradiction of his own aesthetics of engagement.
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Notes and References
In Albert’s Bridge and If You’re Glad, I’ll be Frank (1969) p. 45.
In The Dog It Was That Died and Other Plays (1983) p. 180. This version of the play can be compared with the earlier and slightly fuller version published by French (1977).
Albert’s Bridge (new edn, 1970) pp. 15–16.
Fraser’s words are a slight variation on those used to describe Moon’s feelings. See Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, p. 19.
S. Mrozek, Tango, trans. N. Bethell and T. Stoppard, in M. Esslin (ed.), Three East European Plays (Harmondsworth, 1970) p. 114.
Ibid., p. 15.
J. Bennett, ‘Philosophy and Mr Stoppard’, Philosophy 50 (1975) 5.
See A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (Harmondsworth, 1971) p. 58.
B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy (2nd edn, 1979) p. 785.
Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, p. 142–3.
Ibid., p. 157.
Bennett, ‘Philosophy and Mr Stoppard’, p. 6.
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge, 1903) p. 17.
As W. Hund explains in The Theory of Goodness in the Writings of G. E. Moore (Notre Dame, 1964) p. 17, the purpose of Moore’s meta-ethics is to show that all ethical meanings refer to the primary meaning of good in a way similar to that in which ‘healthy’ as predicated of climate, food, medicine, etc., refers to the way it is predicated of an organism.
Recalled by A. J. Ayer in The Central Questions of Philosophy (Harmondsworth, 1976) p. 38. For a further discussion of Moore’s commonsense view of the world, and his taste for practical demonstration to support it, see Ayer’s Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage (1971), especially pp. 175–87. Ayer also discusses here the influence of Principia Ethica on the sensibilities of the Bloomsbury Group, p. 137, and the propensity of later linguistic analysts to venerate Moore, rather than Russell. See p. 142 and pp. 244–5.
Bennett, ‘Philosophy and Mr Stoppard’, 6.
Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, p. 67.
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© 1988 Neil Sammells
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Sammells, N. (1988). The Dissenters. In: Tom Stoppard: The Artist as Critic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18970-0_5
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