I, Vanya

How to write about the things we love.

As a connoisseur of tales of beleaguered, European males of a certain age— which I’ve enjoyed since my early-onset beleaguerment appeared shortly after my twenty-fifth birthday—I have a thing for Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. I think it is perfect, an exemplary representative of a strain of fed up literature that runs from Rameau’s Nephew—for which my fondness is obvious—through Bartleby to Notes from Underground, The Moviegoer, The Graduate, and on and on. One could argue, of course, that this entire tradition is decadent and irrelevant, straight up “complaint rock,” to steal a phrase from Clueless. There is that. But one could also put Chekhov and company in a more favorable light by noting what these complaints imply, which is that in modernity even the winners lose. It’s bad at the bottom, yes, but it also sucks at the top.

It is popular, and appropriate, to judge a society by how it treats the marginalized, but how it deforms the privileged is also fair play, and alive and well in contemporary entertainments, from Ruben Östlund’s bourgeois squirm fests to the cringe comedy of The Curse. What, exactly, Sartre meant by “Hell is other people” is a matter of debate, but Chekhov seemed to have had an idea.

There are so many things I love about Uncle Vanya. Let me try to catalog them.

First is its naturalistically rendered sense of unreality. When the play begins, the entire household is in a torpor—Uncle Vanya himself is asleep—seemingly brought on by the arrival of Vanya’s brother-in-law, an alazonic professor, and his beautiful young wife. The atmospheric ennui is less a mood than an hallucination, as if there has been a gas leak. No one works, no one sleeps at night, everyone drinks too much. “This house” becomes an oppressive force that no one can seem to escape. There has been an interruption—a break from reality—like Mann’s Venetian contagion or DeLillo’s “airborne toxic event.” In this fissure, everyone sees clearly, or thinks they do. Each character sees that they are unhappy while being furious at the others, whom they take to be content.

At the center of this is Vanya, though Vanya does not quite occupy the center of the play. That’s the second thing I like about it. Its lopsidedness. In thinking about Rameau’s Nephew, I’ve come to see that “nephew” is the most hilarious of all kinship relationships. The boss’s son is a menace, but his nephew is a joke. Fathers and Sons can’t not be a tragedy, while Uncle Vanya must be a comedy. In Northrop Frye’s account of the modes of fiction—which I find to be a useful lens—literature progresses historically from the mythic, where the protagonists are higher than the human, gods, to the low mimetic, or naturalistic, where the protagonists are just like us. But that is not the final mode. That mode, the ironic, goes one step further. The protagonists are lower than the reader. Scoundrels and outsiders and anti-heroes. They are Don Quixote and Rameau’s nephew. Dostoyevsky’s underground man and Ignatius J. Reilly. At this stage, past the point of mimetic inversion, Frye struggles to hold his taxonomy together. Detective novels become the popular form of the ironic mode, where the protagonists are separated from the community, as in tragedy, but without reunion, as in comedy. The gumshoe remains an outsider, patrolling the frontier between order and chaos.

The third thing I love about Uncle Vanya is that its title character lingers at this frontier, and the play itself has one foot in the low mimetic, one in the ironic. It is at this precise crossover point where the naturalistic becomes ironic, art becomes modern, and—to be honest—art becomes compelling to me, personally.

This might be a strange thing to say in an essay about a work of art—a work of criticism?—and it strikes me as strange, this injection of my personal preferences, but I’ve been struggling lately about how to write about things. With Lou Reed’s Nephew out the door, I’ve been wanting to write—I announced my plan to do so in December—but none of the ways I’ve written before have felt right.

In the past, I have written as a scholar, a journalist, a blogger, a fiction writer. I have filled endless journals and even set out (starting five or six years ago) to rebuild my relationship to writing from the ground up, like Tiger Woods’ golf swing. (Though it has not felt like it, I guess this was successful, since it led to LRN.) I have resisted the pull of the confessional—though here I am teetering—and the prescriptive, both of which engage the limbic system of the online world in cheap ways. My problem, I suppose, has been how to write about things I’m enthusiastic about—things that “move” me, as they say—without being a know-it-all or an ass.

“Know-it-all” is now an untenable pose, it seems to me, in a world of easily accessible information. (Though this doesn’t seem to have discouraged too many people.) There will always be something you haven’t read or considered, and someone who relishes bringing it to your attention. “Ass” is always a live possibility, whenever one speaks about anything, but seems to become less likely the less certain one is. Some humility is called for. Criticism need not be an edict or a worldview. Its ambitions, or mine, might be more modest. More than an “Amazing!!!” but less than a “here is why this is everything.” I think what I’d like to write are envelopes. Inside I’ll tuck something I appreciate. On the outside I’ll write, “Here is what I see, do you see it, too?”

Sarah Bakewell, in her terrific book on Montaigne, How to Live, notes how frequently the inventor of the essay goes on for pages and pages before ending with a conclusion along the lines of, “of course I could be wrong.”

So, of course I could be wrong, but it seems to me that Uncle Vanya sits at the threshold of modernity, at the frontier between mimetic and ironic, when we, like Uncle Vanya, wonder what it was all about in the end. Our lives. History. (I am keenly aware that this entire epoch of irony might one day occupy a page or two in some future Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, who will pity me for being stuck in such an anemic aesthetic frame.)

But the fourth and final thing I love about Uncle Vanya is that its final monologue, delivered by Vanya’s niece Sonya, can be read from either side of this frontier.  

I went and saw Steve Carrell in Uncle Vanya a few weeks ago. It was fine. I could hear all the words. I don’t like to read plays, so I like actors to read them to me. I fell in love with the play through Vanya on 42nd Street, Louis Malle’s last film, so Wallace Shawn is Vanya to me. Trenchant. Unattractive. Pathetic. Carrell didn’t find all of the role. Alison Pill stomped around like an acting student, but she did manage, in the end, to nail the Sonya monologue. The play sets you up for it. The whole thing works in its favor. I don’t think this was the translation used but it goes something like below, after everyone has left. The pause in reality has ended. Vanya and Sonya recede into the background, into the earth, in an awareness “that hardly differs from the kind of consciousness the soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented thereon,” to steal a famous line from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. I imagine that in a minute, when the stage goes dark, both will leave history, becoming one with the timeless land.

I have faith, Uncle, fervent, passionate faith. We shall rest. We shall rest. We shall hear the angels. We shall see heaven shining like a jewel. We shall see evil and all our pain disappear in the great pity that shall enfold the world. Our life will be as peaceful and gentle and sweet as a caress. I have faith; I have faith.

That’s one side of the line. The low mimetic. The sentimental. The banal.

Vanya says nothing. He’s on the other side of the line. The ironic. As heart-rending and cathartic as mimetic art can be, Vanya understands, as I do, that Sonya is a fool.