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Journal of Narrative Theory, Volume 45, Number 1, Winter 2015, pp.
46-78 (Article)
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Retreating Reality:
Chekhov’s South African Afterlives1
Jeanne-Marie Jackson
“I’m crazy about Chekhov. I never knew anyone that wasn’t.”
—Woody Allen
Chekhov’s name is hardly the first we would associate with the country of
Nelson Mandela, De Beers diamonds, or the vuvuzela. Yet “Say ‘The
Cherry Orchard set in South Africa,’” theater legend Janet Suzman volunteers, and “their faces will light up” (New Statesman). This might have
come as a surprise to Chekhov’s contemporaries, whose charges of “contentless” formalism prompted some key Russian formalist insights:2
“[They] did not understand that Chekhov wrote about life’s trivialities
completely not because he did not see . . . anything big,” Boris Eikhenbaum once wrote. “Chekhov’s method displaced the distinctions and oppositions between social and personal, historic and intimate, collective and
private, big and small . . .” (227).3 And if Chekhov as timeless muse has
long since become a cliché, his hallmark brand of quotidian realism may
still be a provocative starting point for theorizing 1990s South African
writing. Njabulo S. Ndebele famously called for a turn to the everyday in
the first year of the decade: “The ordinary daily lives of people should be
the direct focus of political interest,” he wrote, “because they constitute
the very content of the struggle” (55).
JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 45.1 (Winter 2015): 46–78. Copyright © 2015 by JNT:
Journal of Narrative Theory.
Retreating Reality
47
But what if focusing on the ordinary is polemical for the opposite reason, because it marks a retraction from political dictate altogether in its
own kind of struggle for a space in which meaning is self-contained? And
how might narrative theory, so often denounced for its technical remove,
provide a way into the thorny debates over artistic production in postapartheid South Africa? Using these questions as points of departure, this
three-part essay explores the appeal to and of trans-historical forms in the
aftermath of social and political upheaval. I focus on Afrikaans playwright
Reza de Wet’s responses to Chekhov’s major dramas in her Russian Trilogy
(1996–2001), arguing that she upholds the idea of timeless Chekhovian
domesticity even as she demonstrates the complex impossibility and perhaps undesirability of recreating it. Harnessing South Africa’s vigorous interrogation of fiction’s role outside the teleology of crisis, I set the stage
for a kind of formal-ideological criticism that has not always been forthcoming vis-à-vis postcolonial texts: how do we extrapolate “timely” meaning from “timeless” structural models? What do we gain or give up by
considering postcolonial literature through a comparative narratological
lens? By tracing a central category that I call “micro-narrative” through its
energizing effect in Chekhov’s plays, stagnation in de Wet’s sequels and,
finally, its implications for the conflicted reception of her work, I show
how the shared terrain of mundane experience is affirmed from opposite
sides of a widening chasm.
I. The Micro-Narrative is the Message:
Structures of Chekhovian Timelessness
Best known for her magical realist and quasi-folkloric representations
of a rural Afrikaans milieu, the Russian settings, characters and everyday
focus of de Wet’s Chekhov sequels—Three Sisters Two (1996), Yelena
(1998) and On the Lake (2001)—mark a departure from the earlier work
on which she built her reputation. The trilogy is also anomalous in the
larger context of 1990s Afrikaans fiction, which, as numerous scholars
have pointed out, was still reckoning with and atoning for the troubled, immediately recognizable past (van Coller). Perhaps for these reasons—and
because she does not embody the political and content-heavy sense of
South African literature that has the most global traction—de Wet has been
all but completely overlooked in American scholarship on South African
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writing despite her many prominent awards.4 For this first part of the essay
I will follow her cues on Chekhov to trace the interplay of interior and exterior narrative dimensions in his work, establishing a source for its energy
as de Wet sees it. This is an indispensable step in situating her controversial complication of the totality-through-isolation that I aim to work
through.
In an article about her own adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (to which de Wet’s Russian Trilogy has been compared), Suzman argues that the obvious rationale behind “updating” or indigenizing
Chekhov is to convey broad thematic or cultural affinities.5 “[Y]ou cannot
even begin to write a play about a country until you know the call of the
first bird outside your window when you wake” (New Statesman), she
writes, capturing the typical attribution of Chekhovian “timelessness” to a
focus on minutiae that can be directed toward timely local contexts. And
yet de Wet uses this mundane realist genre to depart from obvious topicality, planting in its place something like the seed of timelessness as a formal phenomenon.6 She invokes structural intricacy against the interpretative truism of Chekhovian plotlessness (and frequently, non-narrativity).
Chekhov from her vantage is ebullient rather than elegiac, and this energetic quality stems not merely from subjects with enduring appeal but
from “the artistic structure he creates around the pessimistic givens that
transcend [difficult] circumstances” (Blumberg 251).7
What de Wet gestures toward, and what I will push further, is that
Chekhov exploits static, shapeless or otherwise “non-narrative” content—
Stephen Hutchings attributes Chekhov’s innovation precisely to “dull rituals and inconsequential marginalia” that “[generate] a mockery of the plotting necessary for good narrative” (3)—to privilege a principle of
narrativity over emplotment as such, narrowing the already restrictive dramatic environment to isolate narrative from event. The plays “unfold as if
on the threshold of [a] walled edifice,” Svetlana Boym ventures, “usually a
domestic space of common sense, contentment, and common ways, whose
inhabitants dream of escape and very often end up escaping their dreams”
(52). This image of “walled” separation is key to my argument, and conjures roughly commensurable ways of accounting for a sense of narrative
duality, containedness, and ultimately plenitude: Chatman’s model of kernel and satellite, for example, posits a relationship between narrative progression and moments of choice, with minor events “filling in, elaborat-
Retreating Reality
49
ing, completing the kernel” (54).8 When Franco Moretti revisits this concept in The Way of the World, though, he outlines the development from
nineteenth-century realism to modernism as one in which the complementary relationship between kernel and satellite breaks down, allowing narrative to concentrate only on one or the other (234). Neither approach quite
accounts for how this schema facilitates the robustness of Chekhov’s
tightly bound space, which as Boym indicates effects a more complex reality rather than its reduction.9
To borrow Ruth Ronen’s terminology, what is the source of
Chekhov’s enduring “effect of the real” (282) if not merely stories or
thematic material that can be re-staged or adapted to reference any number of extra-literary contexts? The answer is that the ostensibly suffocating isolation of, for example, The Seagull or Three Sisters (both of which
are the basis for de Wet sequels) enables an energetic and constructive
narrative paradigm that accounts for what we might call the “timeless
timeliness” of Chekhov’s work. Instead of attributing his far-reaching
appeal and transposability to content so small that it bypasses socio-historical boundaries, de Wet’s meticulous attention to Chekhovian form invites us to explore the universalizing capacity of ostensible non- or, as
Hutchings proposes, even anti-narrativity.10 If we define narrativity generally (if somewhat vaguely) along Jerome Bruner’s lines as the process
by which particular events unfold into meaning over time, what I call
micro-narrative is the unfolding of meaning outside of, or even in opposition to the “plot” of a given work. In other words, the kernels—“narrative moments that give rise to cruxes in the direction taken by events”—
that Chatman suggests “cannot be deleted without destroying . . .
narrative logic” (53) are deleted, or at least de-emphasized, in favor of
narrative and thematic minutiae that enact their own intensification.
Micro-narrative marks a conflation of referential and narratological categories: uneventful mundane realist content brings something like
“pure” narrativity to the fore.
Far from provincial tedium “[inducing] reality to equate itself with
the subversion of its own narration” (Hutchings 4), Chekhovian micronarrative accentuates characters’ unifying participation in the play’s
well-wrought structure. Yet Chekhov’s turn away from “kernel” events
does not really signal a modernist preference for satellites (per Moretti),
or the refutation of narrative hierarchy and duality altogether. It repre-
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sents, rather, the sustained isolation of kernel from satellite—imprecisely the isolation of summarizable “story” (fabula) from the sensemaking activity of syuzhet—to reshape our understanding of what constitutes a whole: I mean micro-narrative to represent the complete
convergence of structure and theme, inverting the common equation of
fabula as a kind of “raw material” to make narrativity precisely that. In
other words, even if the “notion of narrativity as meaning-imposing
structure has already become a theoretical cliché” (Ronen 280), there is
room to elaborate on narrativity not as a force to reveal or organize
meaning, but as a distinct type of meaning which is activated from the
inside out by micro-realist content. While Lyotard’s concept of les petits
recits lays the groundwork for thinking about “micro” narratives as
forces for de-naturalizing rather than reinforcing meta-narrative, it
nonetheless relegates the idea of the local to a quintessentially postmodern destabilizing or disorganizing role. On the contrary, I am trying to
account for the energizing, enduring, self-totalizing function of narrativity-as-meaning within a given text.
Consider this example from The Seagull, which de Wet appropriates
in her play On the Lake and which presents itself as a kind of formal laboratory to work through these ideas in more detail. By the end of Act 1,
the aspiring writer Konstantin’s lengthy, monologic ruminations on “new
forms” (114) give way to frantic dialogue that marks an acceleration in
narrative momentum: in other words, what meaningfully “happens” in
the play already defies summary declaration as any kind of story or kernel event. It does so, however, through juxtaposition with an “event” in
order to enforce the necessity of maintaining this distinction for its subversion to unfold. Konstantin, in response to Dorn’s rambling feedback
on his arcane symbolist play-within-a-play (the diegetic exercise par excellence), musters only single sentence responses that show the urgency
of his unrequited love for the young actress Nina when compared to
loftier matters:
Retreating Reality
51
The dialogue proceeds along these lines until a third character is introduced just before the act’s conclusion, as Konstantin’s responses (and
Chekhov’s directions for the actor issuing them) grow more dire: “(Impatiently) Where’s Nina?” and finally, “I don’t care, I’m going. I have to!”
(124). The counter-paradigm to Dorn’s abstract and monologically presented one is not merely stated through dialogue, it is dialogue, as the
satellite conversations filling in the “event” of the play-within-a-play in
fact undermine its significance. In other words, the play “happens” and
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“means” only at this micro-narrative level, its form enacting its content beneath the high-stakes, credo-against-credo battles superficially being
waged.
In this light, there is cause to challenge Raymond Williams’ relevant,
astute but too-wistful reading of Chekhov as “the realist of breakdown, on
a significantly total scale” (169). When Williams bemoans that “the general conditions of social life . . . are converted into absolutes” (170), he
means to decry the division of representational reality into public and private spheres. Chekhov thus embodies not the erasure of this divide per
Eikhenbaum, but paralytic confinement to the fixed and limited realm of
the private or mundane. But while it may be true that “[nineteenth-century] realism of man in society” gives way in Chekhov to “the quite different mode of man in an environment,” this isolation has constructive consequences, as well: it is not the case that “inevitably, no action but
withdrawal can follow” (Williams 170) from fixing the material conditions of social life to create a hermetic representational environment.
Williams does not quite credit that total breakdown, what he calls the “orchestration of responses to a common fate” (173), for allowing Chekhov to
formally reconstitute a sense of totality from the inside out; seeming satellites that elsewhere might “fill-in” kernels’ meaning in fact reinscribe
themselves as newly dynamic points of focus. As synchronic or descriptive
paradigms are deployed and made irrelevant within the play (such as the
event of Konstantin’s exercise in non-narrative art), it holds together as a
whole by enacting narrativity as meaning rather than merely its organizing
principle. The “flesh on the skeleton” (Chatman 54) of satellites, in other
words, is also its lifeblood.
If The Seagull is “about” anything, therefore, it is about narrativity’s
power to facilitate robust reality both without the validating presence of
traditional “kernels” and without sacrificing the totality of meaning that
interplay between kernel and satellite traditionally afforded.11 To follow
Raymond Williams’ reading, Konstantin’s off-stage suicide at the end of
The Seagull augurs the “breakdown of meaning . . . so complete that even
the aspiration to meaning seems comic” (174). Yet we might see the fact
that the suicide occurs outside the play’s representational sphere as evidence of the inverse: of narrativity’s (or “filling in’s”) on-stage triumph in
upholding the possibility of meaning through formal totalization, facilitat-
Retreating Reality
53
ing a timeless or referentially unbound “effect of the real” that links narrativity with mundane social interactions.
In the moments leading up to the play’s conclusion (and Konstantin’s suicide), this disjuncture is brought into bold relief through juxtaposition of
meta-literary discussion with a routine card game. As the successful realist
writer Trigorin surmises that Konstantin has failed artistically because he
“never writes about ordinary people (Ни одного живого лица)” (154),
Masha begins calling out card numbers every few lines. What Arkadina
admits is a boring game (153)—the seeming essence of Chekhovian tedium—becomes a vigorous and unrelenting source of on-stage momentum, allowing the marked progress of a mundane pastime to contain and
trivialize Konstantin’s existential turmoil:
The tightly constrained on-stage environment may be stifling but it is also
intensely fomentive, while Konstantin’s off-stage suicide is the ultimate
narrative dead end. The Seagull thus concludes by dichotomizing major
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event and micro activity, maintaining a division between kernel and satellite (the card game discussion does in some sense shed light on the suicide, if only to undermine its significance) but through it, transforming the
latter: we can imagine a screen divided into two halves, one light and one
dark, with the play’s mundane micro-narrative developing long after its
plot dramatically concludes. It is because the “event” of Konstantin’s death
exists apart from, not through the play’s privileged representational mode
that The Seagull can maintain a sense of totalizing incompletion, even as
one of its major characters self-destructs. In writing sequels to Chekhov
plays rather than just localized adaptations, de Wet seems to have sensed
this same self-sustaining paradox.
Chekhovian characters’ quintessential struggle against time provides
another way into this collective construction of meaning rather than its
dissipation, and also into more direct comparison between a Chekhov play
and its de Wet sequel. Time as external adversary is the means by which
the interactive interior of Three Sisters, for example, becomes its all-encompassing meta-structure. Stifled (like most characters in The Seagull)
by the sluggishness of their cloistered existence, the Prozorov women initially seem paralyzed by longing for the past. In the opening lines of the
play, Olga’s languid retrospection is offset by a clock’s striking noon; as
she looks backwards, the play already begins to outpace her (262). This
aimlessness is often read as the evacuation of present meaning from the
sisters’ lives, as they struggle to keep pace with the play’s external rhythms
(Gilman, Hahn, et al.). Yet in the minor character Fedotik, we see how the
shared, experiential present—melancholy as it may seem—in fact overwhelms abstract and isolating alternative temporalities. He commands the
entire group to hold still while he snaps pictures, thwarting the demand for
the play’s interior pacing or reality to correspond to an exterior one. Such
defiance of the clock chiming that recurs throughout the play bridges the
sisters’ crippling nostalgia with the present, interactive moment by producing a keepsake record. Raymond Williams extends his argument about
breakdown in The Seagull to Three Sisters with a poignant formulation:
“[I]n a tragic tension, the failing memory that there has been significance
comes through as heartbreaking, for even a failing memory of a past that
has meant something . . . implies a condition other than the present, and
this can turn into a breaking hope for the future” (174). But Fedotik and
his camera represent a memory of significance within the play, endowing
Retreating Reality
55
it with a meaningful point of immediate, internal reference. While the sisters may not have a future, we still see their past being made, and not just
recollected.
In fact, a sense of time that socially and narratively potent characters
(and they are always one and the same) grow to experience together becomes the formal structure in which ostensible clock determinism is contained: acts do not proceed linearly but with long time gaps in between,
synchronizing our experience of the play’s narrowly confined reality with
characters’ sense of time as something lived through. The sluggish pace of
Act One, which opens at noon to span only a few hours, gives way to a
second act that opens at 8:00 in the evening. In the lengthy but indeterminate interim, much has “happened” off-stage and Natasha’s (Andrey Prozorov’s wife) household dominion is secured. This positioning of ostensibly random, relativistic time frames side by side with the play’s steady
ticking of minutes is, as Richard Gilman once noted, disconcerting: “The
data of our inferences . . . have the effect of adding to what we actually see
and hear a greater weight of ‘timelessness.’” (153). By Act Three, which
occurs after midnight, each day seems extended for a mercilessly long duration, almost literalizing the sisters’ battle with time’s measured exteriority. “It is also the point at which . . . the general sense of loss . . . is at its
most intense” (303), Beverly Hahn affirms. What such doleful interpretations of the play’s temporal structure miss is that Three Sisters is not essentially a chronicle of time’s universal tyranny over individual lives, as so
many have contended (Kirjanov 5). Its accomplishment is to narratively
actualize the many minute happenings through which time is unifyingly,
meaningfully experienced; to enact the play’s recalibration and self-totalization by using plot points or “events” to, in fact, “fill-in” (or accentuate)
the rich, raw material of narrativity.
And thus when Chebutykin smashes the sisters’ precious heirloom
clock in the play’s most famous scene, it is not a final blow to their fragile
sense of purpose but evidence that their nostalgia is now an unnecessare crutch.12 Masha’s “[. . .] мы останемся одни, чтобы начать нашу
жизнь снова. Надо жить . . . Надо жить . . . / We’re alone, and now we
have to start our lives all over again . . . we have to go on living” (318)
should not be mistaken for mere resignation, as it also catalyzes a progressively more affirmative exchange among the sisters: Irina and Olga pick
up where Masha trails off to both recapitulate and build upon her wistful
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tenacity, each granted more dialogue than the last in a formal embodiment
of the play’s unlikely momentum. “Bce paBHO! Bce paBHO!/What difference does it make? What difference does it make?” Chebutykin then mutters absently, before Olga interjects with the play’s last words. But when
she answers, “Если бы знать, если бы знать!/If only we knew! If only we
knew!” (319), I read it as a response not to Chebutykin but to her sisters,
in an insistent return to their escalating exchange just prior. It is Chebutykin as time’s—as externality’s—ally who we therefore see excluded, in a
conclusive testament to the self-“universalizing” capacity of the play’s formal construction. The kernel is not illuminated by the satellite, but engulfed by it even as the necessity of this distinction is affirmed.
What Jonathan Culler once called the lack of a “harmonious synthesis”
(35) between story and narrativity is indeed the problem that The Seagull
sets out and Three Sisters grows out of—most “events” are off-stage and
have no meaningful impact on what is actually represented—but the plays’
micro-narrative energy is not interestingly diegetic. It is not enough, therefore, to elaborate once more on narrativity as distinct from other modes of
representation, or speak of drama in narrative terms by way of perspectival
innovation (Jahn). To understand Chekhov’s transposable appeal as I think
de Wet manipulates it, we must uncover the particular formal and thematic
conditions that allow narrativity not to arrange or contain raw content that
might also be presented in other ways, but to become content with a noless robust effect. As I have outlined, this is distinct from postmodern or
poststructuralist attempts to unseat narrative’s primacy over story, because
the effect I am concerned with is not a destabilization of totality as an idea
but rather its inside-out formal reinscription.
II. You Can’t Keep Pace with Timelessness:
De Wet’s Self-Disabling Response
When Reza de Wet picks up with Chekhov’s Prozorov sisters twenty
years into their future in Three Sisters Two, the momentum of the original
play has given way to a zero-sum struggle between contained domestic
space and the encroaching violence of an outside political one. And
though de Wet draws on a cultural affinity for Chekhov’s milieu in her efforts to recreate it,13 this work is not a straightforward parallel or recognizably “South African” (unlike her earlier cross-generic dialogue with the
Retreating Reality
57
farm novel): in fact, Three Sisters Two pushes against such over-determined forms of localized reference. Absent a “timely” referent, though,
the fertile space of Chekhovian mundanity becomes one of narrative and
ethical stagnation. If Chekhov’s sisters persist through time to generate reality from within, de Wet’s more jaded versions tread water to resist absorption into impending totalization as dictated to them. The isolated
provincial settings of Chekhov’s major dramas, which Janet Suzman likens
to the rural South African estates that she and de Wet knew as a child,14
end up compromised by de Wet’s very efforts to sustain their self-sufficiency of meaning.
For a writer who is widely seen to skirt political issues (a supposition
that I will take up in more detail in the third part of this essay), de Wet
seems surprisingly preoccupied with the world beyond the estate. Soon
into the first act of Three Sisters Two, the best known play in the Russian
Trilogy, a dejected Olga is introduced arriving home from the market:
“Kyk net hoe lyk ek. Asvaal van die stof. Ek moes weer ure in die tou
staan. Die mense het geskreeu en gestamp en so aaklig geruik. [. . .] En na
alles kry ek toe amper niks vir ons koepons nie. [. . .] Daar was vandag nie
eers vrot vis of perdevleis nie (11)./ Just look at me,” she cries, “Covered
in dust. I had to stand in that queue for hours. The peasants were shoving
and pushing. And the way they smell! [. . .] And after all that I got hardly
anything for our coupons. [. . .] Today they didn’t even have any rotten fish
or horse-meat” (de Wet 25). Right away we notice that while Chekhov
maintained the timeless tedium of everyday life amidst and apart from political upheaval, de Wet fixates on a dystopic incursion into the meaningful
private sphere. In Chekhov’s world, the collective experience of existential
despair is a source of ongoing, internal struggle and narrative energy. Revolution in Three Sisters Two, on the other hand, upsets even this chance at
fruitful malaise by re-directing the constructive momentum of the play toward external conflict.15
This is also a marked departure from the mediated class tensions between the sisters and Natasha, their brother’s wife, in the original Three
Sisters. Chekhov’s Olga is offended by Natasha’s mistreatment of their elderly, live-in nanny Anfisa, who Natasha callously insists “should be living on a farm” (294). But because Olga takes issue with the coarseness engendered by Natasha’s pretensions and not with class mobility itself, we
are allowed to fall back on an ethical high ground that redeems her
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from simple snobbery. Пойми, милая... мы воспитаны, быть может,
странно, но я не переношу этого. Подобное отношение угнетает
меня, я заболеваю . . . / We may have been brought up rather differently,”
Olga chastises Natasha, “still, I . . . I can’t bear scenes like that. I get depressed when I see someone treated like that . . . I get physically
sick . . .” (294). So while Three Sisters Two picks up on this anxiety about
the encroaching lower classes, de Wet’s Olga no longer responds to a particular objectionable behavior, but to the very fact of the perceived threat.
Whereas in Three Sisters Natasha’s transgression is an intimate one (she
introduces a hostile outside sensibility into the self-sustaining confines of
the Prozorov household), in Three Sisters Two it is Olga who ventures beyond the play’s domestic center into the degrading public domain.
If we see this as transparent commentary on South African life and politics, the social and racial implications are troubling. André Brink has done
exactly this, and takes issue with “the tenuous ideological substratum of
[Three Sisters Two], namely, the undisguised nostalgia for a past when the
upper classes (read, ‘white suprematists’) had exclusive access to the good
life, before revolutionary (read, ‘black’) upstarts spoiled it all” (173). His
approach advances a referential paradigm for the play as a whole, in which
any given aspect can be excerpted and mapped onto current socio-political
reality: the Russian Revolution stands in for South Africa’s own political
tumult, and a struggle for non-political meaning becomes a statement
against political progress.
Brink bases his reasonable, but faulty, judgment on the premise that,
“de Wet does not set out to relativize, revitalize, or deconstruct an earlier
model but merely to copy it, in the way generations of art students copy
the masterpieces of the National Gallery, the Louvre, or the Met to hone
their skills” (173). This would be difficult to refute were de Wet’s work not
such a studied departure from the key particularities that I have outlined of
Chekhovian micro-narrative structure. In simplifying Olga’s class condescension from Three Sisters to Three Sisters Two, for example, de Wet lays
the groundwork for a preservationist, self-consuming narrative design that
works against the socially and structurally expansive one I have elaborated
in Chekhov. But though de Wet’s Olga has lost the complexity of her
Chekhovian predecessor, her self-interestedness is in fact a testament to
the ethical pitfalls of such diminution. Because the anxious exploration of
narrowed and declaimed, rather than expansive and enacted modes of rep-
Retreating Reality
59
resentation is definitive of the play as a whole, it is implausible to take
Three Sisters Two as a proactive political statement or attempt to reproduce Chekhov as a “timely” dictate. In other words, de Wet is looking to
opt out of political determination altogether, but if there is timeliness in
this goal it lies in her inability to represent any meaningful alternative.
Still more revealing of this fact is the political resonance that de Wet introduces to both the smashed porcelain clock of Three Sisters and Masha’s
remark that, “Тысячи народа поднимали колокол, потрачено было
много труда и денег, а он вдруг упал и разбился. Вдруг, ни с того
ни с сего. / A thousand people raise a bell, they spend all kinds of money
and effort, and all of a sudden it falls and goes smash. All of a sudden. Nobody’s fault” (309). I have demonstrated that the seeming fatalism of such
comments in Three Sisters and the symbolic destruction wrought by the
clock’s smashing are undermined by the play’s unifying micronarrative: the kernel, or moment of choice, that the smashing within the
play seems to represent is diffused by Masha’s reaction to it, even as that
reaction is in turn diffused by the momentum it engenders. But though the
smashing motif resonates through de Wet’s sequel, the original progression from “kernel” action (Chebutykin smashing a significant object) to
“satellite” commentary (Masha’s remark about the church bell)—a structural robustness that ultimately undoes this very dichotomy—is collapsed
into a single symbolic, politically transparent “event” that the audience
hears but which is not represented on stage:
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The steady and certain destruction of the church bells, clearly intended as
relics of the pre-Bolshevik Orthodox order, happens outside the representational bounds of the play but does not “happen” on any meaningful narrative level.
When Chebutykin drops the heirloom clock in the final act of Three
Sisters, in other words, what actually occurs is the trivialization of symbolic events: the scene’s most interesting function is not to metaphorically
represent the loss of the sisters’ past, but to catalyze their more immediate
participation in the play’s present, ongoing creation of itself as a self-contained whole. In Chekhov, then, we are left with the sense that narrativity
is a continual source of meaning that defies declamation, allowing de Wet
to pick up plausibly with her sequel. But with de Wet’s literal and transparently politicized dismemberment of the sources from which her characters derive meaning (in this case, the church bells) introduced in only the
second act of her response, it is clear that momentum will run out long before we get to a Three Sisters Three. In the case of Three Sisters Two, the
internal narrative of the Prozorov household is held hostage by the external, fabulaic event or distant kernel of the bells’ destruction.
This stands in sharp contrast to the disjuncture between, for example,
The Seagull’s micro-narrative and practically irrelevant off-stage events
(such as Konstantin’s suicide). A lotto scene in Act 3 of Three Sisters Two
all but explicitly alludes to the final card game in The Seagull, yet the
socio-political unease of the new post-revolutionary setting has altered its
effect entirely. Characters are no longer unified in a kind of narrative exclusivity, but tense to the point of alienation from one another as Olga distractedly calls out numbers: “Agt-en-sewentig. Ses-en-vyftig (Skreeu
skielik) Ek het gesê hou op!/Seventy-eight. Fifty-six,” she proceeds, before
snapping, “I told you to stop it!” at her waltzing sister (62). Because the
insistently demarcated triviality of The Seagull’s corresponding moment is
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pitted against off-stage emplotment, the determinative and socially corrosive power of external event in Three Sisters Two marks an important reversal of course. De Wet’s stage directions when the card game is introduced set
the stagnant tone for what might have been a point of narrative acceleration:
a record gets stuck and plays the same phrase over and over (61).
The “space beyond” of de Wet’s Chekhovian landscape has become definitively political (as opposed to just irrelevant), and poses a direct threat
to private life (which in Chekhov is a canvass for imbuing satellites with
the hierarchal significance traditionally afforded the kernel). Reviewers
may well be justified in criticizing de Wet’s inattention to the political
complexities of Revolutionary Russia (a trend that I will explore in the
final section of this essay), but Olga’s complaints about government visitors to her classroom belie any reception of Three Sisters Two as altogether
disengaged:
Like Konstantin’s symbolist experiments and artistic diatribes in The
Seagull, though, this seemingly definitive statement is all but immaterial
to the play’s social energy and narrative progression. Though de Wet’s
stage directions for Olga note that she “seems overcome” (44), her sister
Masha is barely interested enough to muster a response. “Poor Olga,” she
quips, before returning to her own romantic daydreams (44). Taken in isolation, this passage seems to infuse Three Sisters Two with problematic political commentary; however, within the narrative context of the play, it
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does hardly more than fill up space. In this case, the power of Olga’s (or de
Wet’s) seeming political agenda is negated by its demonstrable insignificance—it is a statement with no effect. The private sphere to which Olga
flees from peasants and officious bureaucrats may have the comforts of
home and the trappings of moral truth, but it is as suited to a still life
painting as to narrative fiction.17
This development from original play to sequel begs mention of what
Rosalind Krauss has called the paraliterary space of “debate, quotation,
partisanship, betrayal [and] reconciliation” that is not “the space of unity,
coherence or resolution that we think of as constituting the work of literature” (292). Reza de Wet has been unusually forthcoming both about the
affinity that she as an Afrikaner feels for Chekhov’s ill-fated Russian aristocrats and about her disdain for theater with a sociopolitical orientation.
“It demeans theatre,” she claims. “Theatre has a much more profound
function. It has the profound function of transforming. To enlighten or to
inform is deadly” (Solberg 188). Her artistic vision seems thus (like
Chekhov’s) not overtly anti-political, but willfully outside of the political.
Nonetheless, some of de Wet’s statements seem to confirm André Brink’s
suspicions about the conservative subtext of her work, as when she expounds on a colleague’s insight that, “‘Today the Afrikaner is living
Chekhov’” (Blumberg 243):
Everything has been lost for the Afrikaner—Afrikaans is
marginalized, there’s chaos, danger, people have lived behind fences, everyone’s scared, and the money is worth
nothing. All in all, it is really like the aftermath of the
[Russian] Revolution when everyone in Russia was suffering and starting to wonder whether it wasn’t better before,
even if it was atrociously wrong. That is why the writing of
the play was enormously cathartic, because I could express
those doubts and fears and the refusal quite to come to
terms with it. A lot of Afrikaners do that—glossing over,
and still talking the old lingo of being very liberal, being
euphoric and looking at [Mandela’s] inauguration over and
over again.18 (Blumberg 244)
We are left struggling to reconcile such frank political commentary with
the more oblique, non-referential demands de Wet makes of her art. Given
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such candor and a demonstrated willingness to address South Africa in her
earlier work, why bother with Revolutionary Russia as a metaphor?
Ultimately, it is a strategy of historical commentary through displacement, a suggestion that narrative has an oblique rather than direct relationship with political life. If we read Three Sisters Two not as a proactive ideological statement—de Wet does not, as Brink supposes, seek to return to
the “atrociously wrong” circumstances whose illusion of moral simplicity
is long since shattered—but as a disabling attempt to escape the political
anxieties for which there is no apparent resolution.19 The play does not enable nostalgia and isolationism, in other words, but structurally embeds
them to arrive at a narrative dead end: de Wet’s three sisters do ultimately
leave what Raymond Williams called their cut-off “environment” to join
the broader political and social world of Moscow, but only outside the
bounds of the play. This fosters the impression that the meaningfully insignificant world of Chekhov has become an unsustainable limbo, as encroaching political reality renders private meaning forcibly incomplete. De
Wet hints interestingly at her discomfort with metanarrative, however
noble, when she rejects the “linear theatre that Athol Fugard forced down
[black South Africans’] throat” (Solberg 188). The gunshots that resound
throughout Three Sisters Two, however, make it difficult to believe that the
micro-narrative private domain or de Wet’s artistic credo will triumph over
off-stage events: more likely, their coincidence spells the violent defeat of
the “timelessly” alternative Chekhovian everyday.20
To see just how radical a re-shaping of Chekhov de Wet ventures, I will
detour briefly through Uncle Vanya and then de Wet’s response play Yelena, set in the politically pivotal (Russian) year of 1905. While de Wet
collapses the already isolated estate of the original play into the still narrower shape of a “vortex [Yelena] which the other characters circle
around” (de Wet 10–11), the original figure of Yelena has no place in
Uncle Vanya’s redemptive micro-narrative moments. Literal isolation, as in
earlier Chekhov plays, enables narrativity as a source of meaning over and
against “events” of declamatory despair. Sonya’s powerful reconnection
with her uncle, for example, as she articulates the play’s ostensible stoic
ethos of thankless labor and delayed gratification (253), rests uneasily
with the intimate, minutely fashioned catharsis that takes place on stage
after Yelena has left. The tension between Sonya’s capacious vision for the
future and the subtle acts of solace she performs is (as de Wet once noted
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of Chekhov) somehow exhilarating: she rests her head in Vanya’s hands,
wipes his tears with her handkerchief, and offers him a tender embrace
(253). The disjuncture between the bond that is represented and the misery
being professed, between tangible suffering and abstract jubilation, invites
us to again read the scene’s micro-narrative against, rather than as revealing of, the declamatory kernels that might comprise a story or summary of
the play. Yelena is at best immaterial and at worst a hindrance to this
process.
Though de Wet does not grant Yelena an explicitly political space beyond the pale of provincial isolation, its title character, like Olga at the
start of Three Sisters Two, is introduced seeking refuge from a crude and
hostile outside world. But whereas Three Sisters Two merely introduces
opposition between political referentiality (which might be expected of de
Wet as a South African writer in the 1990s) and the self-totalization of the
original play, Yelena altogether reverses the momentum of Uncle Vanya. In
other words, Yelena’s return indicates at once the impossibility for de Wet
of depicting her outside the “universal” realm of mundane Chekhovian
content, and de Wet’s anxiety about that realm’s stagnation in her absence.
Uncle Vanya’s four acts alternate between day and night and take place in
four different parts of the estate, both outside and in, spanning only a few
days: while little “happens” in the play, such dramatic and concentrated
temporal movement effects a sense of immediacy and fomentation. Yelena,
in contrast, is set entirely at night in a single room that de Wet describes as
“claustrophobic and gloomy” (de Wet 99), but spans two months between
the first and second acts alone.
This results in a mood of malaise through isolation, rather than dynamism through concentration: “You see . . . it’s very lovely here in the
country,” Yelena says, “But the heat . . . the mosquitoes . . . It’s all making
me much worse” (de Wet 120–121). De Wet reaches past the point of
Chekhov’s timelessly resonant, everyday realism to arrive at a kind of
time-curdling (if more recognizably South African)21 naturalism: Yelena is
literally stifled by Chekhov’s most fertile ground. In the play’s definitive
and most haunting scene, her role as narrative sustenance for a flagging
genre is made sordidly clear: slowly undressing a drugged and unconscious Yelena at the play’s halfway point, Astrov and Vanya reprise the tension between sorrowful declamation and solacing narrativity from the
final moments of Uncle Vanya.
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In a dark inversion of Sonya’s escalating gestures of micro-narrative
comfort and their enlivening effect on her uncle, Astrov dismantles Yelena’s agency by removing first one shoe, then the other, then sliding his
hands up her body to undo her blouse. All the while, de Wet’s Vanya and
Astrov proclaim their kindness and generosity toward this “poor, weak
creature” (132), their dialogue petering out as Astrov carries Yelena ominously to the bedroom and the scene fades to black. There is no card game,
no humdrum alternative to the “event” that we know is occurring offstage, no relieving continuation of narrativity as the plottable story expires. By Yelena’s conclusion, as at the end of Three Sisters Two, we see
narrativity degraded as a source of meaning in its own right, and with it
the contained, mundane environment that Chekhov “universalized”
through it.
III. An Intricate Failure:
The Risky Business of Canonical Affirmation
Despite (or perhaps because of) the complex and subtly incendiary nature of her work, Reza de Wet has received scant critical attention outside
of South Africa. While issues like source language and circulation may
partially account for her low profile despite her high stature, these pragmatic explanations conceal the more provocative paradigmatic ones that I
have traced up to this point. In the case of de Wet’s responses to Chekhov,
this oversight seems to result rather from the destabilizing and inexactly
referential localism she takes up, which does not readily map onto more
apprehensibly “global” visions of indigenized classics or onto dominant
representational trends in South African theater. Ian Ferguson addresses
this problem directly in South African Theatre Journal, noting that,
Reza de Wet’s decision to base her play on ideas embodied
in a text that was first produced in Russia ninety-six years
ago and to set her play seventy-six years in the past triumphantly demonstrates how culture can draw from many
wells and springs to enrich and develop our individual understanding of society. It is an object lesson for South
Africans who tend to place too much confidence and pride
in strictly local cultural values. (320–21)
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He does not comment, however, on the different and “timeless” type of localism that Three Sisters Two does uphold, which we might say privileges
the immediate or inside-out generation of meaning over politically salient
local values as already formed.
An overview of the conflicted and often tepid reception of Three Sisters Two by South African and English critics alike helps crystallize some
of the larger debates over South African, and more broadly over postcolonial fiction in which de Wet’s work is embedded. It also sheds light on the
difficulty of processing de Wet’s Chekhov plays through the timely prism
of postcoloniality, and by extension that prism’s limitations. Though South
African scholar Temple Hauptfleisch, for example, notes that de Wet is “A
remarkable phenomenon in the South African theatrical landscape” whose
plays are “highly regarded by academics for their literary qualities” (53),
this has not resulted in an outpouring of critical praise. In fact, Hauptfleisch notes that “. . . in the majority of English publications on South
African theatre [de Wet] is seldom mentioned and makes way for authors
who have written one or two plays of far less complexity, albeit works of
more immediate political ‘relevance’” (54). Reza de Wet, we are told,
writes “social rather than political plays” that “have focused on specific
socio-cultural issues relating to her Afrikaner roots and her identity as a
woman within that context, not on what appeared to be the burning political issues of the day” (56).
De Wet herself is less forthcoming about the significance of even social identities to her work, and when asked about the role of feminism in
her plays claims that “exploring the masculine aspect within [herself] is
more important . . . than exploring it as a social issue” (Hauptfleisch 59).
And while she does speak openly in interviews about her experience as an
Afrikaner and a woman, it is invariably in terms of these roles’ shifting
content—in fact, of the process of shifting itself—making Hauptfleisch’s
schema of limited use. And in a literary community for which the separation of the micro-social from the meta-political is often seen as at least impossible and perhaps unconscionable, it is no wonder that de Wet’s complication of even basic social categories has met with resistance. As Louise
Viljoen points out, “. . . a strong tradition of dissidence in Afrikaans literary texts from the early sixties onward . . . counteracted the Afrikaner nationalist nature of earlier Afrikaans texts. During the eighties this tradition
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grew so strong that it became the dominant strain in Afrikaans literature
rather than a marginal one” (65).
Perhaps the most esteemed spokesperson for this tradition is the
Afrikaans novelist André Brink, whose academic work has touched eloquently on the waning of political theater in 1990s South Africa. In addition to ushering in an ostensibly less urgent and uniformly focused political climate, Brink indicates that this is a period of intense formal
adjustment. More specifically, the unveiling of taboo South African realities has receded as an intrinsically compelling artistic aim. He writes that,
For more than a decade [political activity] expressed itself
in Protest Theater, much of it in the form of representing
black oppression: To black audiences, it defined and interpreted the extent and nature of their own suffering; to
whites, it offered some of the first images of what it meant
to live beyond the great divide. Most of [Athol] Fugard’s
achievement can be approached in this context, drawing as
he did on his close association with black actors in their
own environment, a world that had been (and regrettably
continued to be), for many whites, a closed book and a
space of darkness. (168)
In the absence of a common and readily available political objective, the
power of mimesis as valuable in and of itself begins to ebb. And in Brink’s
estimation, the form of theatrical expression is subsidiary to the specific,
contemporaneous real-life content that it represents. Literary form need
only strive to accommodate an intrinsically compelling reality, as it tackles
“the disconcerting challenge of having to compete with the exaggerations
and passions of real life, of unfolding history and the violence, poverty
and injustice that come with it” (174). In this sense, the magical realism of
de Wet’s earlier work might be seen as more, rather than less, referential to
its South African context than is the mundane realism of her Chekhov
sequels.
The dominant realist tradition in twentieth-century South African literature thus stems not from an ideal of referential art as such, or from compressed literary-historical evolution, but from the simultaneously moral
and formal dictates of the particular reality it reflects. This is an abrupt
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about-face from what Ruth Ronen refers to as the “semiotic turn” (282)
that took place in literary studies while protest literature flourished in
South Africa, a turn that Paul Ricoeur once summarized as “[prolonging
the] suspension of the ostensive reference to the world and [transferring]
oneself into the ‘placeless place’. . .” (111). To the contrary, Brink yokes
the de-naturalizing impact of realism precisely to its external referentiality—its reflection of a particular time and place—and charges it with a socially and artistically totalizing mission that is out of sync with a structuralist or poststructuralist paradigm.
So while these movements generally attribute literary efficacy to a kind
of self-referentiality, Brink gestures toward something closer to Raymond
Williams’ quintessential description of nineteenth-century realism. “The
condition of realism in the nineteenth century was in fact an assumption of
a total world,” Williams writes in Modern Tragedy. “In the great realists,
there was no separation in kind between public and private facts, or between public and private experiences” (169). De Wet’s Three Sisters Two
seems to fuse these positions: it confirms but nostalgizes what Williams
bemoaned as the “breakdown” (169) of public and private into discreet
representational spheres. In this formulation, Chekhov represents the private, or at least the possibility of forging a reality whose meaning is not
conditioned by social or political implications: “[Drama] is not the place
where things really happen,” de Wet asserts. “It is another place. It is a
third reality, where non-reality and reality intersect and form this special
shape . . . And I think Chekhov is very much in that realm” (Solberg 179).
De Wet’s reflections on public and private could not be more contrary
to Brink’s, though, or to the realist totality whose loss Williams regrets. “I
do yearn back to my childhood, when, without knowing that it was wrong,
we lived closely with black people,” she confides. “All the people in my
grandmother’s house who were doing the ironing, cooking and cleaning—
there was enormous love between all of us, immediate intimacy. [. . .]
There was this wonderful sense of safety and security of the rural existence” (Blumberg 245). The distinction between intimate, immediate
meaning and public values is roughly corollary to de Wet’s classically formalist views on literature, in which dramatic wholeness and catharsis are
an escape from social homology. “I am, like Chekhov, yearning for a time
of simplicity and beauty when there is no awareness,” she continues. “It
really is an ancient and archetypal situation: a time of unity, the oneness of
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the universe” (Blumberg 246). Likewise, she advocates that, “theatre . . .
should evoke a different world and transport the audience into a different
reality, a heightened reality of some kind or another. [. . .] Then you can
see your own world in a different way” (Blumberg 250). In other words,
the difference between a traditional literary realist paradigm and de Wet’s
ambitions for drama is the difference between totality as binding art to
world, and totality as a means of preserving artistic meaning from the
world.
Brink’s disappointment with de Wet and with the less engaged, somewhat aimless turn of South African theater on the whole is therefore unsurprising. In addition to his outright hostility toward what he sees as de
Wet’s underlying conservatism, Brink concludes that her work “often lacks
the kind of vision or the courage of invention that makes true theater memorable,” and registers Three Sisters Two as “a clever but rather futile exercise” (172). This is a sentiment echoed in the reception of Three Sisters
Two outside of South Africa, as well, though English critics depart from
Brink’s premium on newness to prioritize fidelity to Chekhov.22 Michael
Billington of The Guardian, in his review of a 2002 production of Three
Sisters Two in the UK, bemoans the work’s technical self-absorption and
inattention to political detail. More interestingly, he pits de Wet’s formal
experimentation against what he sees as the more worthwhile goal of documenting Chekhov’s political era, noting disparagingly that Three Sisters
Two is “more postmodernist than post-revolutionary” and that it “fails to
make clear the complex politics of [Chekhov’s] time.” In this odd use of
the term “postmodern,” Billington hits on a point of confusion that some
academics also fall prey to: in fact de Wet has not attempted an exercise in
relativism or non-closure, but a self-contained semiotic whole that is only
experimental by virtue of the (explicitly) socially engaged realism it is
compared to. 23 This miscategorization is also important because it speaks
to the larger issue of placing de Wet’s work: since it is not obviously South
African, it seems that it must be something opposed to the political realism
that South Africa is best known for abroad.24
Three Sisters Two is thus left in an impossible position: it is neither of
Chekhov’s time and place nor of its own, neither formally novel nor the
mimetic expression of an urgent reality. A brief Afrikaans review of the
play notes that, “As you listen to how the political configuration [in postrevolutionary Russia] has changed, how public services such as hospitals
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and the postal service are falling apart, you almost imagine you’re listening to a farm family somewhere in the South African countryside”
(Hough).25 The operative concept in this more astute reading is not the
comparison between Russia and South Africa or between past and present,
but the easily overlooked “almost”: Three Sisters Two addresses its audience’s lives but indirectly, avoiding explicit commentary to tease at the periphery of political relevance.
In this sense, de Wet’s responses to Chekhov do not fit within most familiar and often dubious paradigms for “postcolonializing” canonical
works. If not straightforward adaptations of “Western classics to local situations” (Raji 139), canonical engagements by writers from postcolonial
traditions are typically processed as what Wumi Raji calls countertexts,
often still drawing on the limiting (and in its own way classic) model of
The Empire Writes Back and other such seminal work on appropriation. In
his discussion of Athol Fugard’s The Island, though, a South African version of Antigone, Raji suggests that often what we actually see is “almost
totally unqualified approval of . . . the original” (149). Using Fugard and
South African theater as a case study, he goes on to develop an alternative
mode to “countertextual” appropriation, one that actually “stretches the
theme of the original play further, and in such a way as to make it accommodate the context of the South African struggle against racial segregation” (149). Fugard’s play, that is to say, is an example of making a “timeless” work into one that is “timely” or referential, harnessing the best of
Sophocles’ structure to distinctly South African realities.
Yet though de Wet fits inside these lines in terms of her open endorsement of Chekhov, she produces neither “discursive confrontations with the
Empire” (151) that result in a de facto postcolonial canon or localized,
even mobilized versions of classic works. Her vision is dislodged from
both Chekhov’s reality and the social realities (of South Africans, of
Afrikaners, of women) that she is supposed to be speaking for, but
nonetheless bound to a particular set of mundane realist conventions.
“Postcolonial ‘writing back,’ to undermine the opposition [between center
and margin], requires a specific perspective of alterity” (Van der Merwe
82), asserts an Afrikaans dissertation that treats de Wet.26 Again we see the
difficulty in situating her work in this terms: Three Sisters Two is not instantiating any one marginalized set of local values, nor does it undermine
the notion of Chekhov as somehow “timeless.” Instead it represents ill-
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fated nostalgia for a formal space in which meaning is “locally” generated,
for a transposable self-sufficiency that is at once more immediate and
more abstract.27 To return to the language of narratological division, de
Wet strives to preserve a fertile ground for narrativity as the raw material
of meaning. In this case, though, the risks of privileging such smallness
are too great, and the “limitless elaboration” (Chatman 54) of satellites—
the infinite, intimate spaces between events—is evacuated by what Moretti
calls the redeeming epiphany of a “perfect kernel” (241).
Conclusion
How can a literary work be timely and universal, compellingly “real”
and internally self-sufficient? How can it be resoundingly of a time and
yet enact that time’s transcendence? We find ourselves looping back to
Chekhov in search of an answer, struggling for balance between a perhaps
too-scientific narratological lexicon and the more rousing, but often elusive, language of social topicality. Against the tide of postcolonial and
postmodernist suspicion, Reza de Wet seeks rather than undermines the
capaciousness of vision that Raymond Williams feared had been lost in realism’s twentieth-century retreat behind the wall of private life. Yet in
yearning to make smallness big and narrativity into its own distinct brand
of meaning, she enacts a disjuncture, wrought from without, between her
paradigm and her moment. Chekhov’s most famous dictum, demanding
absolute correspondence between content and form, insists that a gun
placed onstage in the first act of a play must go off by the last. The difference is that Chekhov could begin with a gun and work toward a shot, while
the gun left on stage for Reza de Wet was fired before she got there.
Notes
1.
I am substantially indebted to Ilya Kliger, James Maguire, and the judges of the 2011
International Society for the Study of Narrative graduate essay prize for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this work.
2.
For a detailed description of Chekhov’s often unfavorable reception by his contemporaries and a summary of the consensus on characteristic Chekhovian “plotlessness” see
chapter 1, “Anton Chekhov: Reinventing Events” in Cathy Popkin’s The Pragmatics of
Insignificance.
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3.
English translation by author.
4.
De Wet has twice won the highest prize in Afrikaans literature, the Hertzog, including
in the pivotal year (for drama) of 1994. For a full list of awards see: http://www.
4wall.com/authors/authors_w/de_wet/reza_de_wet.htm
5.
For a comparison of Suzman and De Wet, See Marisa Keuris’ article “Found in Translation: Chekhov Revisited by Reza de Wet and Janet Suzman.”
6.
For a comprehensive history of the global Chekhov and the interesting paradigmatic
transition from “Chekhov in Africa” to something more like the “African Chekhov,”
see Laurence Senelick’s 1997 book The Chekhov Theatre.
7.
Also see Nikita Nankov’s article “Narrative Realms/Narrative Limits: Chekhov’s Story
‘At Home’ in the Context of Modernity” in which he asserts that, “The presumption of
this interpretation is that the work of art and the real world are structurally homologous, which means that the work represents reality not through what it says but by how
it says it” (441).
8.
In addition to Chatman and Moretti, see of course Barthes and Duiset, “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.”
9.
This question is especially apposite given the many efforts to see Chekhov as a
proto–modernist. See, for example, Stephen Hutchings’ Russian Modernism: The
Transfiguration of the Everyday or Harold Segel’s Body Ascendant: Modernism and
the Physical Imperative.
10. Of her creative process de Wet says, “I read all the first acts of all [Chekhov’s] plays.
Then all the second, third, and fourth acts. He actually wrote in a very musical, symphonic way” (de Wet and Blumberg 246) and “I used my own ‘distilled’ version of the
characters from Three Sisters [to write Three Sisters Two] but took elements of the
plot, structure, tone and rhythm from The Cherry Orchard” (de Wet 8).
11. Moretti describes “the nineteenth-century episode, where the functions of a kernel and
those of a satellite balance each other” (234).
12. Beverly Hahn interprets the scene along typically metaphoric lines as “the shattering
of [the sisters’] dream” (302).
13. Of the Russian-Afrikaner affinity de Wet says, “I suppose on the simplest level these
plays, speaking so poignantly of a vanishing order, reflected my situation as a ‘privileged’ Afrikaaner standing on the threshold of far-reaching socio-political change. I
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could identify with these characters who sense that their existence is precarious and
morally flawed” (de Wet 7).
14. “The Afrikaner, especially, finds deep emotional affinities with the Russian passion for
the land and its landscapes, for the size and the remoteness of the estates, for the ebullient and sentimental people who inhabit them and, not least, for the complex symbiotic relationship between landowners and peasants. South Africa is a sad country and I
think Russia is, too” (Suzman xxii).
15. South African scholar Marisa Keuris notes, “It is clear . . . in The Cherry Orchard that
a fundamental shift had already occurred in that society and that the orchard’s changing hands from Ranyevskaya to Lophakin is a mainly symbolic action” (“Dramatic
Language” 12).
16. Bracketed text is translated into English by author, and does not appear in de Wet’s
English translation of the play.
17. This is a good point at which to differentiate my ideas on micro-narrativity from Gary
Saul Morson’s prodigious writing on “prosaics,” which might seem to advance a similar vision of mundane realism as an alternative to political metanarrative. Morson sees
“the ordinary, messy, quotidian facts of daily life” (516) as a means of escaping an
overly systematized division, in his case between totalizing and relativizing ways of
seeing the world. By contrast, I am proposing that Chekhov generates meaning precisely through a principle of narrative division that then enacts its own subversion.
18. For a provocative discussion of how South Africa has been frozen in apartheid by the
Western critical imagination, see Rita Barnard’s article “Oprah’s Paton, or South Africa
and the Globalization of Suffering.”
19. Edward Barnaby’s admonition that, “[R]ealist fiction is vulnerable to . . . distortion
when [it] comes to be fetishized for its level of material detail as a cultural artifact or
museum-piece from which one can extract authentic access to an historical moment”
(42) is especially apposite here.
20. De Wet’s opinion of recent South African artists further evinces her skepticism of art as
a force to raise consciousness of or represent, rather than engender and enrich reality:
she calls William Kentridge’s work on apartheid violence, for example, “a bit opportunistic” (Solberg 190).
21. In addition to Janet Suzman’s earlier remarks about the importance of the South
African landscape to Chekhov adaptations, see J.M. Coetzee’s 1986 article “Farm
Novel and ‘Plaasroman’ in South Africa.”
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22. See also Stuart Young’s review of Seagulls by Andrzej Sadowski and The Free State by
Janet Suzman in Theatre Journal, and Gordon McVay’s review of de Wet’s A Russian
Trilogy in The Slavonic and East European Review.
23. See, for example, discussion of Drie Susters Twee in the Afrikaans dissertation “Selfrefleksiwiteit in die (post)modernistiese drama/teater” (1995) by P.C. van der Westhuizen. André Brink does not mistake “formalism” for “postmodernism” in such broad
terms, though, and in fact notes that, “The whole explosion of postmodernist theater
has, so far, largely bypassed South Africa” (173).
24. See articles by Rita Barnard and Clive Barnett for more discussion of South Africa’s
perennially “timely” and problematically politicized global literary niche.
25. English translation by author.
26. English translation by author.
27. Though I do not venture a close comparison between Janet Suzman’s response to
Chekhov and Reza de Wet’s in this essay, it is worth addressing the fact that Suzman’s
more typically “indigenized” text (which is to say one that, like Fugard’s, inserts South
African characters and situations directly in place of the original Russian ones) has
been by far the better received of the two. A review of a 2000 production of Suzman’s
The Free State challenges the play’s self-designation as a “response,” but notes that as
an adaptation it is “a particularly fine and enlightening one” (Shuttleworth). Unlike
Three Sisters Two, The Free State comes off as politically compelling: “Suzman repudiate[s] the assumption that Chekhov is essentially psychological” and “effortlesly recuperate[s] the socio-political discourse in Chekhov” (Young 568). John Tulloch’s
book Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production and Reception explores the play’s favorable overseas reception based on political misinterpretation in considerable detail.
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