The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [312]
`Life's but a walking shadow'
What is new about this world conjured up by Chekhov is that for the first time we get a real preview of what was to lie at the end of that road which storytelling had begun to take in the dawn of Romanticism.
Certainly a central clue to the peculiar, stifling, trapped air which surrounds almost all the unhappy people in his plays is that none are ever strong enough to take control of their own lives (as a friend of mine once impatiently remarked `if those girls really wanted to go to Moscow why didn't they just go down to the railway station and buy tickets?'). None of them ever look inwards, to know and change themselves. There is no growth in Chekhov's characters, except that of foolish dreams and decay. No one even begins to embark on that voyage of internal discovery which leads to transformation. We merely see weak, static figures, creatures of circumstances, without self-knowledge, doomed to the eternal round of youthful energy and optimism pinned on false, external goals, slowly souring into non-comprehending exhaustion and futility. It all echoes the view of human existence Chekhov expressed in a comment to Gorky: `the Russian is a strange creature ... in his youth he fills himself greedily with anything he comes across, and after 30 years nothing remains but a kind of grey rubbish'. In the end, since there is no hope of maturity or wholeness, the only escape lies either in some despairing act of violence, or in fantasising about some distant future state, whether in this world or the next, where `life will be different. It will be happy.' Human beings, as Chekhov portrays them, are little more than wraiths chasing shadows, hoping for a dawn which never comes.
In itself, however, this was not the first time a storyteller had given expression to such a bleak view of human nature. Nowhere is that sense of nihilistic futility which runs through Chekhov's plays more eloquently summed up than in one of the most familiar soliloquies in literature:
Macbeth's words might seem a perfect mirror to the world of Chekhov. But the point is that Shakespeare sets this despairing view in a very specific psychological context. He puts it into the mouth of the blackest of his tragic heroes, at a precise moment in his downward course. The reason why Macbeth sees the world like this is that he is at just the point in the Nightmare Stage of his Tragedy where all the self-defeating futility of his tragic adventure is finally being brought home to him. He has long since cut himself off from the Self. He has become totally isolated in his own egotism. And now external reality is finally crashing in on him, he can see nothing more than the end of the road to which egocentricity must eventually lead: a world devoid of meaning.
What Shakespeare was saying was that this is how the world must eventually look to someone who has inwardly lost contact with anything outside his own ego. The human psyche is so constituted, as he recognised with all the intuitive understanding of a great artist, that for anyone who views human existence from this shrunken perspective it will eventually come to seem exactly as Macbeth saw it: wearisome, unreal and utterly pointless, `signifying nothing. But, of course, no one knew better than Shakespeare that this represents only one, very limited aspect of human experience. It is possible to view life from a quite different, much deeper perspective. Only then does it take on colour and meaning, revealing its true patterns and purposes.
In Chekhov, however, beneath the apparently beguiling surface of his plays, he concentrates on that particular limited perspective to the exclusion of almost everything else. The little world he presents is one of people who may not be so obviously dark as Macbeth, but who still only really exist in terms of their ego. And the significance