several modernist things

chekhov ibsen beauvoir

In the past: grad school and adjunct christmas vacations where I was wringing the last everliving drop of time for work out of a scattered sense of time, the horrible mixture of irritation at the timelessness of no schedule and the counting-dread of each new wasted second. No way to live, and no way to work, either.

At present: I’ve been looking around for things to read to enjoy the sense of (temporary) boundless time of the days between advent and epiphany, something to settle me out of the sense of rush and time and deadlines, where timelessness is more like peace.

And so I’ve found my way to a few small plays over the past week, some in the theater and some out, with the comforting and rather silly sense of high school nostalgia, where in my small town I went back and forth between the foreign film section of the blockbuster and a top one hundred list of plays you should read by Steve McConnell of boston conservatory. This landed me, back then, somewhere between ibsen and bergman for several years (do we call that strindberg?), and leaves me now with a wish for a working vhs player, detailed memories of Nora pretending to be a squirrel in the 1973 claire bloom sir anthony hopkins film, and (this is even painfully true) a strong sense of return at the sound of the swedish language.

In book terms: I finally found the right momentum for The Seagull, of which I saw a terrible production last spring and wrote about here at that time. Chekhov is brilliant at displaying the pointlessness of small vanities, and it was a pleasure to overwrite the “updated” version I had seen, filled up with fun contemporary vanities for the modern viewer, with Chekhov’s much more insightful versions of despair. In The Seagull, there’s a cut-it-with-a-knife tension between a mother and son, successful past prime actress and unknown-writer son respectively, for whom she, the mother, will not even shell out the funds for a winter coat. And she never reads his play! In the end, the son shoots himself, a lesson for mothers all. In the theater version I saw, the adaptor, himself a professor-writer, was much more focused on the storyline where the writer seduces a young girl in order to make himself feel better, and on the isolated vanities of mother alone and son by himself, than on the ways each dreadful pair richocheted their vanities off of each other down into various graves. I’m still mad at how badly this adaptation turned out, and it’s certainly melancholy to contemplate how much more nihilistic and less revelatory isolated vanity is, than what Chekhov manages to portray. To miss the point even of vanity! Even Morrissey would have blushed.

Next up was Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, written ten years after A Doll’s House, the latter also written about in the same spring post, and the former of which I’d never heard of to remember. At first I was thinking it was going to be rather Ibsen light, but the fifth act turned it around, and it ended up being a strange mix of mysticism and a redux of Nora’s revelation that she has never made a choice in the full consciousness of being a free human being. But this time, partly by the help of several sea-water metaphors, it ended well for nearly all concerned, a christmas surprise.

I’m particularly glad for my high school Ibsen, because the things that Nora describes are or ought to be truly preliminary, not to say adolescent, but are the right prelude to something more concrete. That is, in Beauvoir Second Sex terms, the realization that one has conceived of one’s self as less than free, less than human—conceived as one’s self as, well, baby—stands in metaphysical time before the attempt to make a life of integrity out of the peculiarities of one’s situation and predicaments, the mixture of freedom and necessity we all ultimately have to learn to live with. Nora realizes she can’t do that yet because she’s never dealt with the true anxiety of freedom, and so she makes the terrible choice to leave not as a neat solution, but as a preliminary to any kind of human choice at all. The ending of A Doll’s House is like the ending to Medea: you see why she did it and why she felt she had to do it, but it’s not exactly an exemplar. And aesthetically speaking, it’s like the playwright gives you one less plot point than he would really like to do: he can’t write a better ending any more than Nora can see into the future, yet.

This is the problem that The Lady from the Sea is trying to solve, with the sea as the turbulent unknown freedom that draws the lady in question, which she can only see as destruction that she must give herself over to, until she obtains the freedom from a marriage of unthinking necessity that allows her to see clearly enough to ultimately, return to it. If it were a lesser playwright, or indeed, by someone who was not the author of A Doll’s House, this ending would be a) offensive and b) not realistic in any dramatically satisfying way, but I was pleased and surprised by what my youthful friend managed to do with his plot. And it reminded me that part of my instinct to reach for Beauvoir-type explanations of these puzzles is certainly also from Ibsen, and makes me smile to think of Ibsen’s influence on Beauvoir, and then it frustrates me, too. Again and again people will tell you that Beauvoir and feminism generally don’t see the problems of freedom, the problems of autonomy without the corresponding reality of interdependency, the roadblocks of situation and necessity, and so on. But . . . she does? And so does Ibsen. The Lady from the Sea is from 1889! And the Medea-mother in The Seagull is from 1896……..

And so in my timeless vacation I contemplate the endless dialectical roadblock loop I would like sublate if I could figure out the right place to poke the beast. Fortunately this is not precisely my job, this vacation, but it does point me back to the freedom of work freely taken up again, soon. Well, in a bit.