etely deny chaos and believe in predeterminism to it's fullest. Another of Stoppard's comedies, Travesties, shows the ways in which some of society's most famous and influential people dealt with chaos. Stoppard does this by once again holding a mirror up to the audience and creating a burlesque out of the characters of Tristan Tzara, James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin. The main character in Travesties is Henry Carr, a no-name who happens to run into all three of these famous people. The play is told through the memories of the aged Carr recalling his times with these three minds and his failed attempts to become famous himself. Tristan Tzara, the founder of the Dada movement, fully accepts chaos. In fact, he went as far as to make chaos his art form by cutting up sonnets or writing random words, throwing them into a hat and drawing them out one by one to make a new and completely meaningless piece of "art." Tzara has fully accepted chaos and wants to use chaos through art to make society more comfortable with the idea that nothing is truly definite. Tzara is in no way trying to find order in the chaos. He shows his strong conviction for his art throughout the play, saying one time that "The difference between being a man and being a coffee-mill is art." (Act I, pg. 29). This ties in with Stoppard's seeming comparison of modern people to machines.The Player from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is also a vibrant artist who is always in character and always in costume. Neither he nor Tzara know the boundary between art and real life. The Player is always acting and Tzara is continually cutting up Shakespeare's sonnets and other bits of poetry and randomly re-arranging the words, despite the fact that the poem no longer makes any sense. The difference between these two characters is the type of societal views which they represent. The Player represents predeterminism while Tzara joins Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in accepting the chaos and doing ...
