"The transition from tragedy to comedy is effected simply by sitting down." --Henri Bergson.[1]
The plays of Anton Chekhov have often been misinterpreted by many as plays in which the characters merely sit around and talk, and nothing happens. These same people also fail to find humor in these plays, seeing them with the same "sadness-cum-despair syndrome" that Stanislavsky had when he produced them.[2] However, if we look at the plays closely and examine them in relation to the ideas set down by Henri Bergson in his essay, "Laughter," we discover many amusing elements in Chekhov's dramatic works, enough to confirm the hypothesis that the plays are comedies.
This is the approach of the present study: to look at Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in terms of three of Bergson's criteria--the indifference of the audience to the characters' plights, the playwright's use of repetition, and the rigidity and automatism of the characters--and discover precisely why the play is not a tragedy or a drama, but is instead an amusing play about foolish characters living in their own little worlds, to the exclusion of all others.
In the action of Uncle Vanya, we see a household upset by the arrival of Alexander Vladimirovitch Serebryakov, an aging and retired professor, and Yelena Andreyevna, his young wife. Before their coming, everything had been orderly on the estate and schedules had been maintained, but now things are in constant uproar. Serebryakov is disrupting the lives of all in the house: his daughter, Sonya Alexandrovna; his mother-in-law, Marya Vassilyevna Voynitsky; his brother-in-law an Petrovitch (Vanya) Voynitsky; his doctor, Mihail Lvovitch Astrov; and the servants, Telygin and Marina. Vanya in particular becomes so disordered by the intrusion that in Act III he pattempts to shoot Serebryakov, and as a result, the professor and his wife leave in Act IV, with the house returning much to normal--Vanya and Sonya resume the maintenance of the house and the accounts, Astrov returns to his patients and the forest, Marya goes back to her pamphlets, and the servants quietly continue their chores.
At the end of the play then, we have almost the same situation that we had earlier, before Serebryakov's arrival (prior to the play's beginning). This circular motion with no Changes in the characters' lives or attitudes along with their inability to change, distances us and does not allow empathy to enter into our consideration of them. As Bergson notes, "Absence of feeling usually accompanies laughter....Indifference is its the natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.[3]
Indeed, we feel no emotion for these characters, since they seem to feel little emotion themselves, merely automatically flying into rages or tears with little cause. (This automatism will be covered in more detail later.) This along with the fact that there is little plot, suggests to us that this is a comedy,[4] and our hypothesis is proved correct (for the moment) with this distancing taken into account. Every time it seems that someone will escape the treadmill upon which he or she is placed, the character does something foolish to negate his or her progress. For example, in Act III, Sonya finally has an opportunity to discover whether Astrov returns her affections. Yelena has promised to speak with the doctor on the matter and Sonya exits to find Astrov and send him to Yelena. Sonya desperately wants to know, but her fear propels her more desperately in the opposite direction. The stage directions note that she is "in violent agitation."[5] As she begins her exit, the following dialogue ensues:
Sonya: Yes, yes...I shall tell him you want to see his charts (is going and stops in the doorway )...No, uncertainty is better.... One has hope, at least....Yelena: What do you say?
Sonya: Nothing (goes out). [p. 222]
Sonya can not master her own fate; she is too nervous for the truth and can stand neither ignorance nor knowledge. As she struggles with her strong desire to know and her equally strong desire not to know, we see a marionette being pulled in two directions at once. A person, like a marionette is comic in this situation. We feel no empathy for Sonya here nor for the others in their moments of indecision. Granted, we do not guffaw wildly, but the scenes are nevertheless amusing.
Another comic device used several times by Chekhov in this play is repetition. Bergson calls it "one of the usual processes of classic comedy,[6] and defines it as a word, a sentence or a situation "which recurs several times in its original form, and thus contrasts with the changing stream of life.[7] Twice it is mentioned that Yelena is young and beautiful while her husband is old and infirm. Vanya, her admirer, is the first to bring it up (p. 197), lamenting the circumstances of it. Serebryakov later speaks to his wife about the same thing (p. 206). The fact is reinforced, and it is comic because Vanya's accusation is a point of Serebryakov's self-doubt. Vanya also suggests that his antagonist "has been lecturing and writing about art for twenty-five years, though he knows absolutely nothing about it" (p.197 ) and then accuses Serebryakov of it face-to-face in Act IV. The repetition is the same, but the situation has changed, from being spoken in third person to first person. Vanya finally confronts the man who has "injured" him.
Chekhov also used repetition Or a phrase that is followed by a different phrase for contrast. In Act I, Yelena to fill a pause says, 'What a fine day! It's not too hot," to which Vanya replies 'A fine day to hang oneself" (p. 200). He inverts her statement to the opposite meaning. Another contrasting repetition comes earlier in Act I when Sonya says, "The tea is cold! Telyegin says precisely the same thing only in a much more clinical way: n The temperature in the samovar has perceptibly dropped" (pp. 198-199). He has restated her opinion in different terms for comic effect; we laugh because of the formal sound of this sentence in contrast to her emotional line.
A repetition in action also appears at the end of Act I (pp. 202-203). Astrov leaves, trailed by Sonya asking her uncaring beloved when he will return. A few moments later, Yelena exits into the house to get away from Vanya who then follows her, his uncaring beloved, off the stage. Repetition is not exactly in "the original form--the same people, the same situation--but it is similar enough for it to be humorous.
We now turn to the largest part of the humor of Uncle Vanya, which falls in the category to which Bergson refers most frequently: that of man becoming an automaton. As Bergson says, "The attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.[8] Or more simply "We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of becoming a thing."[9]
Characters who fall in this category have a certain "mechanical inelasticity"[10]--that is they enter, with a certain behavior, situations which call for a different response, but due to their- inelasticity, they continue acting and re- acting the same which sets up a comic tone.
The entire play of Vanya is an example of inelasticity. As noted earlier the routine of the house has been destroyed by the arrival of the professor and his wife. Marina explains the situation:
Such goings-on! The Professor gets up at twelve o'clock, and the samovar is boiling all morning waiting for him. Before they came we always had dinner about one o'clock, like other people, and now they are here we have it between six and seven. The professor spends the night reading and writing, and all at once, at two o'clock in the morning, he'll ring his bell. Goodness me! What is it? Tea! People have to be waked out of their sleep to get him the samovar. What goings-on! [p. 195]
Since it looks as if they will be at the estate for "a hundred years" (p. 195), the people should get used to it. But they do not, and merely continue to complain of their now disordered routine. Their inflexibility is ludicrous in the face of eternity.
Individual characters are constantly displaying their inelasticity, and others comment on it. In Act I, Vanya complains that his "old magpie maman [Marya Voynitsky] is still babbling about the rights of women. With one foot in the grave, She is still rummaging in her learned books for the "dawn of a new life" (p. 196).
In the same speech, Vanya seems to be aware that he too, is inflexible. He says, "I am just as I always was, perhaps worse for I have grown lazy. I do nothing but grumble like some crow" (p 196). He makes us aware of his problem in these sentences, and at the same time distances us, refusing our empathy; he knows his rigidity yet does nothing to change. At the end he resumes his mechanical function of adding the accounts of the estate. How can we feel sorry for him? He is his own victim.
We do actually laugh at this robot when he is around Yelena and automatically switches to the "love mode" of his internal program. In her presence he becomes a young Werther (although at 47, too old for the role ) and everything else is excluded, his senses blocked out. This absent-mindedness ( as Bergson calls it ) is shown first in Act I, when Telyegin speaks of the weather. Vanya, oblivious to this speaks only of his loved one (p. 196). The world fades, and only her presence remains for him to speak of it. He does not listen to her entreaties for him to stop; he hears only her sweet voice. The "love mode" cancels all other functions in him.
If Vanya is a "love machine," then Serebryakov is a "writing machine," and this is what Vanya calls him (p. 200). We are told by Vanya that:
The Professor as before sits in his study writing from morning till dead of night....for twenty-five years he has been chewing over other men's ideas about realism, naturalism, and all sorts of nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been lecturing and writing on things all intelligent people know about already and stupid ones aren't interested in--so for twenty-five years he has been simply wasting his time. [Pp. 196-197]
Serebryakov not only writes automatically, but also dresses automatically. In Act I, though it is unbearably hot he wears "his greatcoat and galoshes, with an umbrella and gloves, too" (p. 196). He is likewise polite; by the end of the play he has been verbally abused, nearly shot, and generally disliked, yet at his leave-taking he says most graciously--and probably sincerely--"Thanks for your pleasant company. I respect your way of thinking, your enthusiasm, your impulses... (p. 240).
Astrov, too, is programmed, and has two modes one stronger than the other. When not doctoring, he works planting trees and at one point orates for a minute and a half about his work in the forest, that when he sees his handiwork, his soul "is filled with pride, and I... However..." (p. 202). Seeing a glass of vodka brought for him stops him and he switches from his forestry program to his drinking program, his primary function, a habit about which he is less than proud. For a moment his human pride swells, but it is knocked down by a vice that is mechanical. He, too is in the realm of the machine.
Perhaps these instances are only slightly amusing to a reader or spectator but one can not help laughing aloud at Telyegin and his single track. A very moral man, he can not cease to do his husbandly duty though the object of that duty does not deserve it. He tells us of his wife who:
Ran away from me with the man she loved the day after our wedding on the ground of my unprepossessing appearance. But I have never been false to my vows. I love her to this day and am faithful to her. I help her as far as I can, and gave all I had for the education of her children by the man she loved. I have lost my happiness, but my pride has been left to me. And she? Her youth is over, her beauty, in accordance with the laws of nature, has faded, the man she loved is dead.... What has she left? [p. 198]
This man does not, as the saying goes have his stuff together. He owes the woman nothing since she treated him as she did, but he has turned the other cheek and supported her since they were married. His reason for it originated in Church rules, but the reason was then forgotten leaving only the rule that he has followed automatically.
As David Magarshack tells us, "Chekhov objected to... the propensity of academics to stick labels on everything and, particularly to accuse him and his plays of 'realism, naturalism and all sorts of other nonsense."[11] From Bergson's writing, we find the idea that comedy is not naturalistic or realistic, and presents only a semblance of life with characters occasionally exhibiting machine-like behavior. Using these two statements as premises, we must then conclude that Chekhov's plays, with Uncle Vanya as a prime example are indeed comedies.
This is not to suggest that Chekhov's characters are totally inhuman and devoid of any feeling; it is possible to analyze them in strict Freudian and psychological terms. However, these are still to be considered, not as psychologically real human beings, but objects of art created by an artist's mind.
There are also those who will say the characters are tragic, trapped as they are in an existential prison, unable to escape from their lot, and so we must feel sorry for them. These people see themselves as trapped and it is they who want our sympathy. Unfortunately they focus too much on themselves and not on Chekhov's work as it was written.
If Chekhov's plays are comedies and I believe they are, then the application of Bergson's criteria for humor in analysis is a viable one and can aid in the understanding and the production of these plays in the way the playwright intended them to be produced.
2 David Magarshack, The Real Chekhov (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), p. 10.
3 Bergson, p. 63.
4 "And so we see why action is essential in drama but only accessory in comedy. In a comedy, we feel any other situation might equally well have been chosen for the purpose of introducing the character; he would still have been the same man though the situation were different." Bergson, p. 154.
5 Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Bantam Books, 1958), p. 221. Subsequent references to the play will be found in the text.
6 Bergson, p. 107.
7 Bergson, p. 119.
8 Bergson p. 79.
9 Bergson, p. 97.
10 Bergson, p. 67.
11 Magarshack, p. 84.
Chekhov, Anton. Uncle Vanya. In Four Great Plays By Chekhov. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Bantam Books 1958, pp. 191-244.
Magarshack, David. The Real Chekhov. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972.