The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [308]
One, which will be the theme of the next chapter, was how, particularly in the century's closing decades, films, plays and novels became so obsessively preoccupied with images of sex and violence. But before we come to that we must first consider another development in modern storytelling which, although less blatant, was equally revealing. This was the way in which the works of so many twentieth-century playwrights, novelists and film-makers seemed to express the sense of having arrived at a kind of cosmic and spiritual dead end.
There was no more celebrated instance of this kind of story than a play which was first staged in a tiny theatre in Paris midway through the century, and again to even greater acclaim in London two years later: a drama so unusual that it was immediately recognised as something quite new in the history of storytelling. This was not least because Waiting for Godot (1953) had virtually no story. Two tramps are waiting by the side of a road for the promised arrival of a mysterious character called Godot. Eventually two more men arrive, one driving the other in front of him like an animal. After a series of exchanges, the newcomers then move on. A second act more or less echoes the first. At the end the two tramps are still waiting in vain for the elusive Godot, who never appears.
But to see how that change which had come over stories in the nineteenth century was eventually to lead to the limbo world of Samuel Beckett, we must first go back to the work of a dramatist who had been writing half a century earlier.
Anton Chekhov: The disappearance of the Self
Just when Thomas Hardy was nearing the end of his career as a novelist in England, a young doctor at the other end of Europe was embarking on a sequence of plays which, psychologically, were to take storytelling into a new phase of its evolution. What we see in each of the five major plays written by Anton Chekhov between 1887 and his early death from tuberculosis in 1904 is a little group of people, somewhere in provincial Russia, who are going nowhere. They are trapped in a peculiar web of frustration and futility. Almost all his characters are defined by their yearning for something which does not exist. If they are young, they are dreaming of an imaginary future where life will somehow be better. By the time they are middle-aged or old, they are harking back to something they have lost: love, life, the enthusiasms and energy of youth. Away from this cycle of false hope souring into disillusionment and despair there is little else. And each time we then see them drifting towards a final shocking event which brings home just how hopeless and empty their lives have become.
The first of the sequence, Ivanov (1887), centres on a middle-aged landowner in the depths of what we would call a mid-life crisis. He has frittered away all his talents, energy, hopes and money. He is bored and irritated by all around him, but hates himself just as much, for being constantly `bad-tempered, rude and pettyminded'. He did once love his wife Anna. She recalls how, when they first met, his `eyes used to glow like burning coals when he talked with passion'. But no longer. Now, when he learns she is ill with TB, the news leaves him cold. As the young doctor Lvov bluntly tells him, he has been reduced to a state of nothing but 'heartless egotism'.
The action begins when Ivanov pays a visit to his neighbours, where their young daughter Sasha declares that she loves him, precisely because he seems such a lost soul. It is her mission to redeem him. They kiss and are seen by Ivanov's horrified wife, Anna. Back home, the self-hating Ivanov tells Lvov `at 26 we are all heroes, we undertake anything, we can do anything; but at 30 we are tired already, and good for nothing'. When Sasha comes over to visit Ivanov, Anna accuses him of lying. He vindictively hits back by telling her she is going to die, and is immedi ately filled with remorse: `how wicked I am'. In the final act, a year later,