- Original context of piece/excerpt: Honours, submitted October 2004
- Abstract: This thesis suggests a reappraisal of Chekhov’s two mature plays Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard as comedies that strategically employ aesthetic distancing between audience and characters through comedy, rather than simple identification. This is in contrast to a history of performance that has tended to follow the Stanislavsky System, which inadvertently eschewed the comic potential of the works in favour of an approach that favoured the psychology of the characters. This work argues for a literary and dramatic re-appraisal of these works as highly ironic, if sometimes bleak comedies.
Introduction (Excerpt)
In this thesis I intend to explore the meaning and uses of the Comic in Chekhov’s last plays Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. As a theoretical basis I shall draw upon the writings of Aristotle, Henri Bergson, George Meredith and a number of Chekhov critics and scholars.
Using as a starting point Bergson’s conception of comedy as a mirror of society and corrective of unsociability and Aristotle’s notion that comedy reflects what is socially “disgraceful” I shall argue that Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard are essentially Comic works (as opposed to comedies) that show us a philistine life in need of amelioration.
In critical orthodoxy Chekhov has been perceived variously as tragedian, poet of hopelessness and raconteur of individual psychology. These accounts, contained in the works below cited have tended to isolate singular aspects of Chekhov’s technique with little reference to the plays’ dialectical forms, in which elements of farce and tragedy reflect and underscore each other. Bert States argues that the structure of Chekhov’s plays is dialectically “antagonistic” and that in Chekhov we encounter, virtually for the first time in the theatre, an almost purely Comic and ironic world view.
This view, States argues, is integrated within that archetypal modern technique of “Creating a total psychology, a psychology of the human condition, rather than a psychology of the protagonist.”
Chekhov uses the Comic form, which is life seen from a distance, as the means of creating this objective impression. He shows us the same “Preposterous human spectacle” that induces tears in tragedy, yet at the very moment that aesthetic involvement is initiated he pulls back, causing his “Tragic” characters to repeat themselves ad infinitum or fall downstairs after a solemn pronouncement – effecting, in the end, not tragedy, but a refraction of tragedy.
Conclusion
Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard are extraordinarily rich and complex works and the ambivalence of their humour expresses something quite fundamental to that same duality or “doubleness” that characterises human experience and understanding.
Vladimir Yermilov is correct in his assertion that Chekhov is essentially a humorist whose works derive much of their Comic power from a fundamental sense of incongruity between a semblance of understanding and an underlying inability to understand.
George Calderon also speaks of Chekhov’s Comic Spirit as inextricably bound with a sense of incongruity, subsisting between the underlying order of the world and its apparent, empirical disorder. It is this very sense of doubleness and incongruity that leads States, quite rightly, to refer to Chekhov’s form as “antagonistic” and his plays as a “carefully supervised irony.”
The tragedy that has often been ascribed Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard plays is spurious in the sense that tragedy presents man as victim of a hostile agency both internal (i.e. psychological) and external, over which, through death or suffering, he ultimately triumphs.
Both Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard depict painful and confusing systems of life but they are distinct from tragedy, not only on account of the nature of the suffering they depict, but also in their endings, muted but devastating, in which “there is no villainy, no message, no lesson, no argument” but rather an overpowering “frustration of clear meanings and conclusions.”
In their endurance without understanding, the Prozorovs in Three Sisters and the landowners in The Cherry Orchard are revealed, in the end, not as Oedipus blinded or King Lear crazed, but as Mother Courage dragging her wagon behind her into grey amplitude, no more conscious at the play’s close than at the start, destined to fall into the same contradictions and limitations, the same viciousness that gives birth, in each instance of its imperfection, to the Comic Spirit.
At its most austere, as in the cherry orchard’s felling or Toozenbach’s murder in Three Sisters, Chekhov’s Comic Spirit scarcely arouses a smile, let alone laughter. Laughter is carried by Chekhov’s comedy but it is not its final aim – the end of Chekhov’s comedy, if it may, for the purposes of discussion be reduced to one, overriding end, is that Life as it is lived: tediously, imperfectly and often sordidly, is really Comic.
Comedy, with its fixation on human vanity moves towards its diminution in tragedy before it is resurrected by human understanding. By laughing at Chekhov, be it with existential uncertainty about man’s place in the universe, Meredith’s aristocratic laughter or with Bergson’s intention to humiliate, we tacitly acknowledge the whole painful and amusing human drama that Chekhov’s plays make immediately available to us.
In this sense perhaps our laughter proceeds simply from being overwhelmed by the impression of our own frailty – and perhaps it is best that Chekhov permits us the recourse of laughter as a means of accepting an otherwise unacceptable vision.
As affected by tragedy human consciousness is perhaps bound to yearn for an end to all that is painful and irrational in life – to effect change precipitously as opposed to reasonably. Comedy and the Comic make a different, if slightly cooler appeal to human consciousness.
By allowing distance from the source of human anxiety – that which is perhaps naturally attached to social life in all its intricacy – and by perpetuating such a distance, laughter triggers that part of our consciousness that is analytical and the opposite of precipitous.
This is a particularly fitting response considering the complexity of the ills that Chekhov diagnoses. I believe that this distance, symptomatic of an almost overpowering attempt on Chekhov’s part to interrogate the foundations of human understanding, is the essence of Chekhov’s Naturalism and of his objectivity.
Alae Taule'alo 