Sir Tom Stoppard’s Early Works.
8. Dogg is our mascot
Before seeing one of Sir Tom Stoppard’s major plays, Travesties (1974), it is worth taking a look at his short play Dogg’s Our Pet (1971) (revived to support Cahoots Macbeth 1979) in which he illustrates the basic idea of Transvestites. Although Dogg’s Our Pet, a very short and simple play, is a useful milestone in the evolution of Stoppard’s ideas about language. His interest in the way in which different forms of language have implicit meanings of their own, distinct from their content, was evident in earlier works, for example the contrast between poetry and the talking clock in If You’re Glad I’ I’ll be Frank. 1966), and the contrast between Shakespearean and modern language in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966). In these cases the different languages reflected different ‘mentalities’ or different approaches to life, and this is the starting point of Travestis. At the same time, Stoppard is interested in the philosophy of the relationship between language and meaning, which is the subject of Dogg’s Our Pet, indicated, for example, by this speech by George de Jumpers (1972):
‘This confusion, which only indicates that language is an approximation of meaning, and not a logical symbolism for it.’ (p. 24.)
This is the kind of problem Wittgenstein deals with in the first part of his Philosophical Investigations, and Dogg’s Our Pet is virtually a dramatization of the opening paragraph of Philosophical Investigations.
Wittgenstein begins by distinguishing between the meaning of a word and the way a word is used. One of the examples that he uses to illustrate his theory is that of a builder who is building a platform and calls his partner “brick”, “block”, “plank”, etc. Stoppard takes this example directly from Wittgenstein and stages it. The builder is working in a school, his assistant being one of the schoolboys who have a private language of their own. (The kids are public school guys and the builder is working class, so they’re people who “don’t speak the same language in more ways than one.” This social theme is not developed in this play, but is picked up and expands in Professional Misconduct).
Sometimes when the builder calls out, “plank,” “brick,” etc. the appropriate items are thrown to it, but sometimes an unexpected item is thrown. It is obvious that children have the same words in their vocabulary, but they use them in different ways. Hayman (R. Hayman: Tom Stoppard: Heinemann) provides a translation: Plank = Here, Slab = Done, Cube = Thank you, etc.
The play is essentially an entertaining puzzle to stimulate the audience to think about the way we use language. But it also has significant meaning in that the children and the builder, working together, manage to build a platform. Thus, while each has a language of their own, and therefore, to some degree, lives in a world of their own, their languages and worlds overlap enough that they communicate and work in an intermediary “real world.” This is the central concept to understand Stoppard’s great work Travesties.
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http://www.literature-study-online.com/essays/stoppard.html