"Seymour Levin the ex-drunkard and Gregor Samsa the bug embody acts of colossal self-travesty, affording both authors a weirdly exhilarating sort of masochistic relief from the weight of sobriety and dignified inhibition that formed the cornerstone of their staid comportment," Mr. Roth writes.
What, then, to make of a novella that chooses as its focus the bewildered losses of an ageing actor, a man who, on discovering that he has become "a self-travesty grounded in nothing", develops a fear of the words "thin air", as spoken by Prospero, sensing in them "an obscure indictment"?
On the face of it, this rediscovered music told the story of a project that Self Portrait travestied – whose working title, according to one of the musicians involved, might have been Folk Songs of America, pointing to two later albums on which Dylan re-explored the folk repertoire, Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993).
No such possibility for Travesty, a self-contained two-hander stage play from Williams, whose 2014 show Capitalism so blazingly and black-comically articulated anti-capitalist impotence and generational despair.
When Michel Houellebecq's mother disowned him for producing what she saw as a travesty of her real self in his fiction, Houellebecq retreated into the French role of the amorally licensed artist.
For his part, Mr. Cook sees the move to self-service tech support as a travesty.
"Loot" can lapse into travesty or trudge on to self-consciousness -- overly serious, overly sincere and sluggish.
In "The Invention of Love," the elderly poet A. E. Housman, like Henry Carr in "Travesties," comments on his younger self.
It is "self-evidently soulless," a "soul-crushing disaster," a "travesty, a witless wonder" and "nakedly idiotic".
"What self-centered, irrational decision process got him to this travesty?" MacGaffin told me.
