Shiraz University
Faculty of Literature and Humanities
Ph.D. Dissertation in English Literature
The Seminal Influence of Chekhov and Strindberg on
the Subsequent Drama, Mainly on Beckett and Pinter
By:
Samira Sasani Sarvestani
Supervised by
Prof. P. Ghasemi
January 2012
IN THE NAME OF GOD
The Seminal Influence of Chekhov and Strindberg on
the Subsequent Drama, Mainly on Beckett and Pinter
BY
SAMIRA SASANI SARVESTANI
THESIS
SUBMITTED TO THE SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL
FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF
PHILOSOPHY (PH.D.)
IN
ENGLISH LITERATURE
SHIRAZ UNIVERSITY
SHIRAZ
ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN
EVALUATED AND APPROVED BY THE THESIS COMMITTEE AS: EXCELLENT
January 2012
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Declaration
I, Samira Sasani Sarvestani, a graduate in English Literature from Faculty of
Literature and Humanities, declare that the dissertation is the result of my own
research and whenever I have made use of other sources, I have cited the
accurate specifications regarding the sources. Moreover, I declare that my
study and the subject of my dissertation are not repetitive. And I undertake that
I will not publish the results of my study without, an authorization from Shiraz
University or I will not give it to anyone. In conformity with the Mental and
Intellectual Ownership Regulations, all rights of the present study are reserved
for Shiraz University.
Name: Samira Sasani Sarvestani
Date: 15/11/1390
To
My Devoted Mother
Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to thank God for helping me and carrying me
through the process of writing this research. I express my sincere thanks
to my highly supportive and thoughtful supervisor, Dr. Ghasemi. I am
very much thankful to Dr. Pourgiv, Dr. Anushiravani, Dr. Abjadian and
Dr. Luc Gilleman for all their advice, support and time. And special
thanks to my devoted mother, father and my brother. I am very much
indebted to my mother for her love, devotion, encouragement and
affections; I could not have completed this without all of your love and
support.
ABSTRACT
The Seminal Influence of Chekhov and Strindberg on the
Subsequent Drama, Mainly on Beckett and Pinter
By
Samira Sasani Sarvestani
Employing Harold Bloom’s theory of “literary influence”, this research aims to
achieve a new understanding of some of the later writers who have been, consciously
or, otherwise, under the influence anxiety of Chekhov and Strindberg. This research
investigates Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett who have never acknowledged their
indebtedness to Chekhov and Strindberg and consequently not much work has been
done on them from this point of view; though, their plays reflect this influence
anxiety. The researcher also studies playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill and
Tennessee Williams who have repeatedly acknowledged their indebtedness to
Strindberg and Chekhov, respectively, to show their shared agony. The research
argues that O’Neill’s drama is very much indebted to Strindberg’s dramatic theories,
his naturalist and later on his expressionist plays, technically and thematically. About
Chekhov’s wide range of influence, among those who have acknowledged his
influence, Tennessee Williams is investigated to reveal the reason of his
acknowledgement and to contribute to different interpretations of his drama by
showing his similarity to Chekhov’s dramatic tradition.
On the other hand, not much work has been done on the influence of Strindberg on
Pinter and Chekhov on Beckett, so this research aims to achieve a new understanding
and interpretation of Pinter and Beckett’s drama under the light of the influence
anxiety they have got from their precursors. Indeed, so much modern drama is about
passivity, inaction and consequently the sense of ennui and desperation; and that is
Chekhov’s major concern. Likewise, so much modern drama is about different forms
of entrapment in relationships; and that is Strindberg’s major theme. Harold Pinter,
very much like Strindberg, foregrounds not plot but human interaction in his plays
and shows how people’s very attempts at creating clarity lead to increased
befuddlement. Samuel Beckett also, very much like Chekhov, foregrounds not plot
but people’s stagnancy and inaction in his plays and shows how people are passively
waiting for the godot-like figures to save them without performing any action,
themselves.
Key words: Literary Influence, Drama, Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg, Samuel
Beckett, Harold Pinter
V
Table of Contents
Chapter 1:
1
Introduction
1
Significance of the Study
19
Objectives of the Study
19
Review of Literature
20
Research Methodology
24
Questions of the Study
26
Chapter 2: Harold Bloom’s Theory of Literary Influence and Watzlawick and
27
Laing’s Communication Theory
Chapter 3: The Acknowledged Influence of August Strindberg on Eugene
52
O’Neill and Anton Chekhov on Tennessee Williams
Chapter 4: The Influence of August Strindberg on Harold Pinter: Entrapment
125
in Relationships
Chapter 5: The Influence of Anton Chekhov on Samuel Beckett: Inaction and
183
investment of hope into Godot-like Figures
Chapter 6: Conclusion
236
Works Cited
243
VI
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
0
Chapter One
Introduction
While some critics regard studies of influence with a tolerant smile or even
with scorn, an understanding of influence is indispensable to the concept of
literature as a continuum or to the idea of literary development. Although our
notions of literary originality and independence are quite different in the
twentieth century from what they were in the seventeenth century, for example,
there is no denying that literary influence is still a very real and powerful force.
Flaxman believes that writers are themselves often more frank about this than
critics, and some authors admit or specifically acknowledge the influence of
others (51).
Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov establish the importance of modern
period. It is in the substance and range of their work that new drama,
essentially, came into existence. They are not contemporaries; Ibsen was born
twenty one years before Strindberg, and thirty two years before Chekhov, but
they were all writing in the 1880s and 1890s shaping the central core of new
drama. Each has his own influence on his specific subsequent dramatists—
though these three playwrights have something in common—and imposes his
own idiosyncratic impacts on them. For instance, Henrik Ibsen most obviously
influenced the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw who wrote "The
Quintessence of Ibsenism" and the American Arthur Miller who wrote political
and social problem plays. August Strindberg influenced Eugene O'Neill who
1
repeatedly acknowledges that influence. O'Neill called Strindberg "the
precursor of all modernity in the theatre" (qtd. in Hartman 216). Significantly,
half of O'Neill's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1936 was devoted to
Strindberg. O'Neill says:
If there is anything of lasting worth in my work, it is due to
that original impulse from him, which has continued as my
inspiration down all the years since then to the ambition I
received them to follow in the footsteps of his genius as
worthily as my talent might permit, and with the same
integrity of purpose. Of course, it will be no news to you in
Sweden that my work owes much to the influence of
Strindberg. That influence runs clearly through more than a
few of my plays and is plain for everyone to see. Neither will
it be news for anyone who has ever known me, for I have
always stressed it myself. (qtd in “Literary Paragons”, Egil
Tornqvist 26)
As an instance, O'Neill's Recklessness is much indebted to Strindberg's
Miss Julie. Tennessee Williams also acknowledges the influence of Anton
Chekhov. A great range of work has been done on their great impact on
different dramatists and these are some examples of their influence on their
following dramas. In between, there are some playwrights who were
influenced by them but not much work or even no work at all has been done on
them. Studying Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Brian Friel, David Mamet,
2
Wallace Shawn and also some others, one deduces the influence of Strindberg
and Chekhov on them.
To make a long story short, modern drama is not that much modern, or in
other words, searching and studying variously different plays and playwrights
reveal the seminal influence of continental playwrights in creating the socalled modern drama. Christopher Bigsby (2004) believes that the essence in
old and new drama is the same but the matter is how much one removes an
element from it. For instance, "Pinter removed the history, the narration;
Beckett the characterization" (16).
To Kaufmann (1962), Ionesco and Beckett seem profound since, like
almost everything profoundly "new" in the modern theatre, they go back to
Strindberg and Chekhov. He quotes from what Thomas Mann, in a too littleknown tribute to Strindberg said, when accepting the Nobel Prize in 1929:
"Strindberg's influence, moral and artistic, can be compared only to Tolstoy.
One of the things they have in common is a kind of tremendous helplessness.
In Strindberg, this sometimes results in a half involuntary and— to my mind—
half deliberate, demonical comic strain of incomparable power" (qtd in
Kaufmann 99).
In this introduction Chekhov and Strindberg's ideas, methods, and their
themes are very briefly reviewed to pave the way for relating their theatrical
ideas and their actual plays to some other dramatists not discussed before or
whose work has not been investigated in relation to the issue of influence.
Some Chekhov Scholars discuss the stagnancy and passivity of Chekhov's
characters. Among those are Gilman and Raymond Williams. Gilman argues
3
that Chekhov articulated a dramatic universe in which the questions of
goodness and evil as ethical categories, heroism and villainy as combatants no
longer operate. He depicts a universe in which there is no outcome or
denouement; he depicts an absolute moral kind in which personal fate has been
transmuted into a matter not of triumph or defeat but of endurance (Making of
Modern Drama 143). Raymond Williams quotes from William Archer that
nothing can be seen in the Cherry Orchard but empty and formless timewasting. The devotees of Chekhov, on the other hand, acclaim his works as
“really lifelike and free from any tiresome moralizing” (109).
Chekhov shows the active struggle in which no outcome is possible, but
stalement. Almost every one wants change; almost no one believes it is
possible. "It is the sensibility of a generation which sits up all night talking
about the need for revolution, and is then too tired next morning to do anything
at all, even about its own immediate problems" (Raymond Williams 115).
Gilman states that Chekhov's plays are permeated with unhappiness and also
with "a rueful awareness of social malaise and of the particular unhappiness of
people without ambitions or without the power to implement the ones they
have"(Making of Modern Drama 133). This world is very powerfully created
in The Three Sisters and in The Cherry Orchard. Raymond Williams says that
In The Three Sisters it is the longing to make sense of life, to have a sense of a
future, in a stagnant and boring society. In The Cherry Orchard it is an attempt
to come to terms with the past. "In neither situation is any real success
possible: what happens is not to change the situation, but to reveal it" (116).
Trofimoff, in The Cherry Orchard, says:
4
. . . we have not made up our minds how we stand with the
past; we only philosophise, complain of boredom, or drink
vodka. It is so plain that before we can live in the present, we
must first redeem the past, and have done with it; and it is only
by suffering that we can redeem it, only by strenuous
unremitting toil. (264)
Trofimoff, himself, practically does no work. This neither means that he is
wrong, nor that what he says can be disregarded. It is the dominant mood of
the play. This precise paradox can be seen in Trofimoff and in the others,
between what can be said and what can be done; what is believed and what is
lived. Inevitably such a man, such a situation, such a generation can seem
comic. It is easy to laugh at them and at what Chekhov calls their “neurotic
whining” (Raymond Williams 116). What has been said about Chekhov is the
very characteristic of the modern period. It is the age of passivity, stagnancy,
wasteland, hollow men. It is the age of J. Alfred Prufrock-like characters or it
is the age in which action leads to inaction. Concerning the dramatic world of
Chekhov, Raymond Williams argues that the consequences in method are
important. First, there will be no isolated, contrasting characters. The crucial
emotion is that of a group. Second, there will be no action: things will happen,
but as it were from outside: what happens within the group is mainly gesture
and muddle (117).
Concerning Chekhov's employment of a new kind of dialogue, Raymond
Williams argues that Chekhov attempted paradoxically to create disintegration
5
without weakening the sense of common condition. Raymond Williams
believes that it is something very original merging into modern drama.
Chekhov himself says, "I omit the names of speakers so that the form of a
connected dialogue, connected, paradoxically, to show disconnection, can be
followed" (qtd in Raymond Williams 119). Chekhov also uses another
technique which Magarshack calls 'indirect action”. Richard Gilman insists
that Magarshack is right in using the terms "direct" and "indirect" as far as they
go. For example in The Seagull the crucial action of a physical kind takes place
almost entirely offstage and the activities that do occur onstage are oblique,
heavily verbal, and without resolution (Making of Modern Drama 134).
Unusual silences are part of his convention. What Chekhov does then is to
invent a dramatic form which contradicts most of the available conventions of
dramatic production (Making of Modern Drama, Gilman 119-120).
Concerning Strindberg, Raymond Williams discusses that Strindberg was
in revolt against the “patent-leather themes” of the intrigue drama. In a letter of
1884, Strindberg told a Swedish producer that he was planning a modern
comedy with "a locomotive (real, all fired up), a parsonage, an apple tree (real)
in blossom, a tunnel, a train station, a room in a Swedish manor house, a mill, a
coffin, a corpse, a bedroom with a double bed, a commode, and so on" (qtd in
Sprinchorn 124). Sprinchorn notes that the comic actors were "masters of the
light touch, the quick give-and-take of witty dialogue, the small but expressive
gesture. Compared to tragic actors, they were cool and detached. It was this
comic style that Strindberg in the 1880's opted for in his Naturalist tragedies"
6
(126). Strindberg's ideas of reform are more justly represented by the opening
paragraph of his Preface to Miss Julie (1888):
Dramatic art, like almost all other art, has longed seemed to
me a kind of Biblia Pauperum—a bible in pictures for those
who cannot read the written or printed work. And in the same
way the dramatist has seemed to me a lay preacher, hawking
about the ideas of his time in popular form—popular enough
for the middle classes, who from the bulk of theatrical
audiences, to grasp the nature of the subject, without troubling
their brains too much. The theatre, for this reason, has always
been a board school, for the young for the half educated, and
for women, who still retain the inferior faculty of deceiving
themselves and allowing themselves to be deceived: that is to
say, of being susceptible to illusion and to the suggestions of
the author. (103)
Strindberg in Miss Julie also attempts to fashion new conventions. The
“new wine had burst the old bottles”; or, more precisely, the old bottles had
soured the new wine. What Strindberg says is worth mentioning in length:
In the present drama I have not tried to do anything new—for
that is impossible—but merely to modernize the form in
accordance with what I imagined would be required of this art
from the younger generation. . . . In regard to the characterdrawing, I have made my figures rather characterless, for the
7
following reasons:
The word 'character' has, in the course of the ages, assumed
various meanings. Originally, I suppose, it signified the
dominant characteristic of the soul-complex, and was confused
with 'temperament'. Afterwards it became the middle-class
expression for the automaton. An individual who had once for
all become fixed in his natural disposition, or had adapted
himself to some definite role in life—who, in fact had ceased
to grow—was called a character' . . . . the middle-class
conception of the immobility of the soul was transferred to the
stage, where the middle-class has always ruled. A 'character'
on the stage came to signify a gentleman who was fixed and
finished: one who invariably came on the stage drunk, jesting
or mournful. For characterization nothing was required but
some bodily defect—a club-foot, a wooden leg, a red nose; or
the character in question was made to repeat some such phrase
as 'That's capital', 'Barkis is willin'', or the like. . . . . .(106)
The preface to Miss Julie tells us what Strindberg had noticed: that men
and women had become "split" and "vacillating" a "mixture of old and new";
that human souls are "fragments", "torn shreds . . . patched together" (107).
He maintains:
Since they are modern characters living in an age of transition
more urgently hysterical at any rate than the age which
8
preceded it, I have drawn my people as split and vacillating, a
mixture of the old and new . . . My souls are agglomerations of
past and present cultures, scraps from books and newspapers,
fragments of humanity, torn shreds of once fine clothing that
has become rags, in just the way that a human soul is patched
together. (107)
Plays for a long time had been images of wholeness, continuity, and
coherence, stable little models for the reinforcement of the audience's illusory
sense of their own world's fixity. Miss Julie, Gilman believes, establishes a
counter world of discontinuity, fragmentation, and contradiction, not simply as
its theme, but as its manner. This is the true purpose of the breaking up of the
logical pattern of stage dialogue and the introduction into plot of a multiplicity
of motives that Strindberg talked about (Making of Modern Drama 101). There
is incoherence, fragmentation, and disintegration in Jean, for example, who is
finally seen not as Julie's executioner but as the agency of her self-knowledge,
as she is his. For he, too is made aware of his lack of freedom, his incoherent
self. He prods Julie to suicide but he cannot really live either, being still bound
to his subservience, fear, and unaccountable guilt and more deeply his invented
and therefore sterile persona. They have fought each other to a standstill. Jean,
at the end of the play, murmurs with himself: “you take all my strength from
me, you make me a coward," he tells her (Miss Julie 158).
Even Strindberg's view of Naturalism is different:
Naturalism [he wrote] is not a dramatic method like that of
9
Becque, a simple photography which includes everything,
even the speck of dust on the lens of the camera. That is
realism; a method, lately exalted to art, a tiny art which cannot
see the wood for the trees. That is the false naturalism, which
believes that art consists simply of sketching a piece of nature
in a natural manner; but it is not the true naturalism, which
seeks out this points in life where the great conflicts occur,
which rejoice in seeing what cannot be seen everyday. (qtd in
Raymond Williams 83)
Generally speaking, August Strindberg's plays are traditionally divided into
two major stages—his Naturalist period of the late 1880s and early 1890s, and
his predominantly Expressionist period (which also includes some Swedish
history plays) from 1898 onwards though his focus on the psychology of his
characters remains consistent. Of the Naturalist plays, The Father (1887) and
Miss Julie (1888) are reactions against the standard French intrigue drama with
its elaborate plot and typed characters; in the Theatre of Avant-Guard, Robert
Knopf (2001) states that these works combine a scrupulous attention to the
Aristotelian unities with the exploration of heredity, milieu, and immediate
circumstances as the bases for the drawing of complex, modern characters
(127).
From 1894 to 1896, Strindberg underwent a psychotic change which is
called his "inferno crisis." From then on, his plays display a preoccupation with
distorted inner states of mind. The fragmentation of personality, so
characteristic of Strindberg's Expressionism first appears in To Damascus
10
(1898), a play with biblical overtones but at the same time a projection of the
problems of the dramatist's second marriage. The full-blown Expressionism
that followed is chiefly represented by A Dream Play (1901). It freed the stage
from the time-and space-bound assumptions of Naturalism. Dance of Death
(1900) is another example (Knopf 127). Kaufmann (1962) in "On the Newness
of Modern Drama" argues that what Strindberg specifically offers to the new
drama is well summed up in two speeches of his last play, The Great Highway
(1909), an auto-biographical drama which expressionistically recounts the
stations in his own pilgrimage between a heaven and a world whose mortal air
he breathed in torment. The author's persona, The Hunter, fears the warmth,
the confusing complexity, the blood and the mire of human relationships which
engulf his identity (101).
Strindberg’s preface to A Dream Play ranks with the preface to Miss Julie
as one of the key documents of modern thinking about the drama:
In this dream play, as in his former dream play, To Damascus,
the Author has sought to reproduce the disconnected but
apparently logical form of a dream. Anything can happen;
everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not
exist; on a slight groundwork of reality, imagination spins and
weaves new patterns made up of memories, experiences,
unfettered fancies, absurdities and improvisations.
The characters are split, double, and multiply; they evaporate,
crystallize, scatter, and converge. But a single consciousness
hold sway over them all—that of the dreamer. For him there
11