Metaphorical Analysis of Temporality in Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” in Light of Paul Ricoeur’s Literary Theory

Since the human mind is temporal, his/her thoughts and the incidents s/he remembers from the past and narrates are temporally interpreted as well. Therefore, understanding the temporal dimension of the narratives leads to a profound recognition of both narratives and life which can be interpreted through textual signs. From this viewpoint, the present paper attempts to engage critically with Tom Stoppard, the contemporary British playwright who utilizes time-plays for conveying his thoughts. This study intends to deal with the hows and whys of the historical past in light of Paul Ricoeur’s narrative theory. Travesties, going under the sub-genre of ‘memory play’, put prominent figures of politics and literature from different times and places along with each other to reveal their outlooks by representing opposed discourses regarding the definitions of art. To examine temporality in the narrative, the genre of drama was chosen for the opposed discourses as this genre offers the opportunity to represent binary dialogues in a dialectic manner based on their spokesmen’s lived experiences. Thus, each concept is pitted against its ‘other’, some of them have been characters, schools of thought, or even dimensions of time. This openness to the ‘other’ points to morality, and consequently, the order resides in the narrative that this study reflects. In this regard, time is considered metaphorically to get a hermeneutic understanding of the narrative. For this purpose, the time-plays are interpreted with a narratological approach. Correlative is Ricoeur’s three phases of mimesis, memory, and forgetting, and the related ‘narrative time’ theory.