Oh Comedy

The third Act of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard exhibits element of comedy. Comedy isn’t always great. In this case, it is so lame that it becomes funny. It is almost as if the comedy lied behind ridiculing comedy by making it absurd. Of course, that is what it seems to me, facing a device capable of sending an entire human experience to another country in seconds. Checkhov might have been facing a quill, or maybe he was inscribing words into clay tablets. Whichever his preferred method of writing was, his comedy was that much different from my wireless keyboard. My guess is he wouldn’t have found a your momma joke very funny. What a party-pooper.

The third act is much like the two previous. A comedy so tedious should be illegal. How thrilling would it be to read Chekov then? Okay, we get it. They have no money to pay for their luxuries. Chill Checkhov, no need to make that any more evident. Much like a child begging for you to listen to his story, the intrusive musicians finally make their way into the stage. Varya says, “here we’ve hired musicians, and what are we going to pay them with?” To which Trofimov responds, “if the energy you have expended… had gone into something else, ultimately, you might very well have turned the world upside down.” (353). How absurd. The stubborn Trofimov puts down the few words that make some logical sense in the play. But who’s lines would you rather read? The play is already monotonous as it is, imagine if things started to make sense. His comedy lies in making a representation of routine so absurd that questions the utility of our existence.

The family lies in the brink of bankruptcy. They have been given a solution to their troubles and the means to achieve it. However, they remain unshaken by their future. Unless it is college, for who would want to miss so much fun? When some more sense finds its way miraculously into the play hinting towards future stability, the mother confesses that she “would gladly let you marry Anya, I swear it, only you must study, my dear, you must get your degree” (358). Because that will be really useful once they’ve lost all possessions. As long as they have enough material to feed their tedious conversation it makes sense to keep it up. I warn you, the modern Chekhov lives in Pasto, and we just haven’t been able to find him.

His comedy lies on absurdity. Everything the character say from their solutions to their responses makes no sense with anything any other character thinks about. He mocks something so mundane as routine making it absurd, thus demonstrating how empty so many things we praise could really be. I’m sorry if my comedy is worse than his. I find comfort in thinking we could have been good friends.

A Blog Post

In his play, The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov exhibits possibilities of literature new to my experience. In his description of events, he integrates vivid detail along with mention to banal activities. As we read we find characters doing anything from smoking to eating pickles, even when mention of these makes no relation to the dialogue. I had never read anything of the sort, expecting every word to add up to the ultimate meaning of a text. It took some time for me to adapt to this new narration, and still longer for me to appreciate such intense detail.

At the beginning of Act 2, Charlotta begins to share her past. She mentions details about her parents, her education and her country of birth. Suddenly, the narration intrudes into her story as we learn that she “takes a cucumber out of her pocket and eats it” (337). Not only is it completely isolated from her story; there is nothing that leads up to, or suggests, the entrance of a vegetable. At first it seems weird, almost as if this play was some sort of strange production from one of those guys in history whose strange mental state is their most intriguing asset. It continues to happen repeatedly, and as we read “Yawns, then lights a cigar,” we feel as if we were about to yawn as we create connections to reality. Then, after enough yawns, we realize that the problem is not this text but other narrations we are used to. Our frustrations don’t come from abnormality, but from extreme normality. It is Chekhov’s intent to mimic reality, or the normal, mundane events of everyday life, that exasperates us.

Reflect now upon the implications of reality. The first problem I face after such reflection is the intent of literature. Is writing, and other forms of art, supposed to imitate reality as to produce a tangible record of history? Are they supposed to recreate reality with opinion as to allow other to live their experience, or is it supposed to be an outlet for creativity and the materialization of individual conceptions? I tend to be very objective, and therefore writing in my life used to be primarily a means to keep record and reflect reality. Although I continue to enjoy objective writing and such texts that analyze numbers and a reality founded in science, these past years I have undergone a paradigm shift. With every novel that I read I begin to question my mentality as I find delight in literature beyond the mere facts writing can transmit. Even beyond that, this play proves how facts can become tiresome at times when our lives are already being bombarded by meaningless data.