“TRIGORIN: Yes. Writing is a pleasure to me, and so is reading the proofs, but no sooner does a book leave the press than it becomes odious to me; it is not what I meant it to be; I made a mistake to write it at all; I am provoked and discouraged. Then the public reads it and says: "Yes, it is clever and pretty, but not nearly as good as Tolstoy," or "It is a lovely thing, but not as good as Turgenev 'Fathers and Sons,'" and so it will always be. To my dying day I shall hear people say: "Clever and pretty; clever and pretty," and nothing more; and when I am gone, those that knew me will say as they pass my grave: "Here lies Trigorin, a clever writer, but he was not as good as Turgenev.”
“SORIN. I am going to give Constantine an idea for a story. It shall be called "The Man Who Wished—L'Homme qui a voulu." When I was young, I wished to become an author; I failed. I wished to be an orator; I speak abominably, [Exciting himself] with my eternal "and all, and all," dragging each sentence on and on until I sometimes break out into a sweat all over. I wished to marry, and I didn't; I wished to live in the city, and here I am ending my days in the country, and all. “
- Chekhov’s The Seagull
“Glenn mortally wounded Wertheimer with his loser, I thought, not because Wertheimer heard this concept for the first time but because Wertheimer, without knowing this word loser, had long been familiar with the concept of loser, but Glenn Gould said the word loser out loud in a crucial moment, I thought. We say a word and destroy a person, although the person we’ve destroyed, at the moment we say out loud the word that destroys him, doesn’t take notice of this deadly fact.”
- Thomas Bernhard, The Loser
“Every superior human being will instinctively aspire after a secret citadel where he is set free from the crowd, the many, the majority, where, as its exception, he may forget the rule ‘man’… all company is bad company except the company of one’s equals.”
- Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
I don’t trust geniuses. Neither do I trust the concept of ‘having a special something’. What we attribute to talent is merely a combination of two things, experience and code. We cannot create anything of significance without having frequent discourse with life. We also cannot create anything of significance without having a crystalized coda as to why we create. I don’t trust ‘great men’ theories of the world.
Chekhov’s The Seagull is probably one of my most favorite plays in the world. The story is relatively simple yet also complex, simple in its plot but complex in its execution. It was Chekhov’s first ‘theater of moods’, a type of theater that focused less on running action, plot arcs, narrative and focused more on the underlying interaction of the moods between characters. It’s a very honest, subtle play. Treplieff, a budding experimental playwright, lives in the country near a lake where he spends the days planning his new plays with his actress friend and lover Nina. The play opens with Treplieff planning a play to show to his mother, a famous actress from Moscow. His mother also brings along her lover, a famous romantic novelist called Trigorin. During the course of the play aesthetic ideals clash with one another, romances are made and broken, and it becomes a great tragedy. Trigorin is the ‘mainstream’ novelist made cynical by his realization that no matter how famous his works are to the general public, he will never reach the heights of genius as that of other great Russian novelists such as Tolstoy. Treplieff finds himself at odd with his mother because his plays are too daringly experimental for her tastes. Nina (the ‘seagull’ who wishes to fly from the lake) is a complete idealist that wishes to become a famous actress in Moscow and finds herself falling in love with Trigorin solely because of his status as a ‘famous person’.
“NINA: You work too hard to realise the importance of your writings. What if you are discontented with yourself? To others you appear a great and splendid man. If I were a writer like you I should devote my whole life to the service of the Russian people, knowing at the same time that their welfare depended on their power to rise to the heights I had attained, and I would harness them to my chariot.”
This occurs in one of the climatic moments of the play, when Nina has a long talk with Trigorin about his fame. She believes him to be an ‘untouchable’ entity though he firmly denies it. As a result she falls into a self-destructive romance with him. By the end of the play her ideals have changed firmly, as a result of much suffering and hardship.
““NINA: I know now, I understand at last, Constantine, that for us, whether we write or act, it is not the honour and glory of which I have dreamt that is important, it is the strength to endure. One must know how to bear one's cross, and one must have faith. I believe, and so do not suffer so much, and when I think of my calling I do not fear life. “
This statement was revelatory to me. The idea of creation was not distinct from the idea of living. A creator’s ‘artistic vision’ was not separated from the way he lived, from his own personal ideals. It was not a personal realm that he withdrew himself into to deny life in art but it was a realm where he extended his own life by crystallizing his thoughts and experiences into acts of beauty.
“TREPLIEFF: The conviction is gradually forcing itself upon me that good literature is not a question of forms new or old, but of ideas that must pour freely from the author's heart, without his bothering his head about any forms whatsoever.”
Treplieff makes this change as well when, after being deserted by Nina, he eventually forges a small name for himself through writing his own novels. He deserts the idea of creating a ‘grand avant-garde’ and focuses on using the writing process as a way to live. Sadly this realization occurs as a result of much despair and he is irrevocably broken in the process.
If I were to make comparisons though I would think that Misaki or even Mashiro represents Treplieff the most. He is definitely the ‘genius with a special something’ in the play, being both psychologically off and tempestuous in his emotions and aesthetic ideals. But instead of being lauded by the public, like what happens in Sakurasou, he finds himself decaying in a small countryside. His psychoses make him pathetic and delusional even though they fuel his creative drive. This is Chekhov’s version of the revolutionary talent, an impotent madman with delusions of grandeur. Yet he, along with Nina and Trigorin, are stupendous characters to me. Both Nina and Treplieff are extremely naïve and overabundant with feeling and youthful vigor, which in the end becomes disastrous for both of them. Yet Chekhov doesn’t judge them for it but rather merely shows them as they are; this is his strength as a playwright, to portray rather than moralize. It even depends on which version of the play you watch. They can either be caricatured into great fools too caught up in idealism or beautifully portrayed as youths struggling with their own dreams and life against a massively cruel world that breaks them.
Trigorin even regains some of his idealism when he meets Nina, which of course makes things all the worse by the end of the play. Does that make The Seagull cynical in its ideas? That every dream chased can easily be broken? I think the play is much more complicated than that. Even though Treplieff’s play is booed and jeered at in the first act, one of the audience members, a doctor called Dorn, finds himself silently enraptured by the play. Treplieff’s vision managed to reach a single person, and later he actually gets the recognition he deserves, although it is already too late by then.
There is another novel by Thomas Bernhard, definitely the polar opposite of Sakurasou, called The Loser. Bernhard is famously known for his raging anger and spite in his books. His style of writing is usually a ranting stream-of-consciousness filled with general disgust at everything in life. The Loser is about two pianists who make friends with the real life genius pianist Glenn Gould, and how they are destroyed as a result. Gould’s genius becomes too much for one of the characters so much so that he commits suicide, while the other, the narrator who is visiting his funeral, has left piano playing forever. Both of these characters are Rita taken to the extreme. Genius is seen as a monster in The Loser, not a God but a Demon that wrecks the lives of everyone around for the worse. In Sakurasou the talented characters eventually become motivating figures for the rest of the cast. The Loser makes the statement that those with talent are really alien to the ‘norm’, completely untouchable. Sakurasou portrays them as human gods; they reached their position due to hard work but also due to certain ‘problems’ which make them alienated but masters at their craft, and they can still be reached but only with tremendous effort on the part of the rest.
I don’t trust either The Loser’s view of genius nor do I really trust Sakurasou’s view of it. The Seagull is, to me, the most brilliant and powerful vision of the creative process. It is an act of love but it can also be a self-destroying act, but it is never placed in a sphere away from humanity; in fact to create is an extremely human activity.
Yet despite my tract on the ideals touted by Sakurasou, I still feel a certain admiration for the show. It’s entirely a light novel rooted in the Coming-of-age or Bildungsroman genre. It has the same atmosphere as stories – stories like The Magic Mountain or Demian. It has a lesson to impart and it does so with the greatest Romanticism. The characters are brimming full of passionate intensity. Many of the conventions prominent in the medium are still there: The standard Japanese openness to nudity, running gags, romance subplots, cherry-blossom and sunrise scenes. In a way its familiarity can be detrimental to some who feel its too clichéd, there are too many evocations of Toradora or Clannad like shows, but its flaws are curbed by its pathos and ethos.
A flaw that is more glaring to me though, is that we can’t really see the ‘genius’ of the geniuses in the show. Mashiro seems to be a painter of the Impressionist Romanticist vein like Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner or James Whistler, but of course the show glosses over her actual works and proclaims her as a genius. I have nothing wrong with this part, since we can’t expect a light novel to make a masterpiece painting just for the sake of an animated show. Likewise Misaki is sort of a creator like Gundam’s Tomino with a Trigger-esque (as in Imaishi’s new studio, split from Gainax) insanity. Mashiro’s manga is also far from Inio Asano or Chris Ware standard; it seems to be a standard shoujo work. I’m also okay with this part, just some thoughts that entered by head. What I have gripes with is once again what I meant earlier when I said an artist must have ‘coda’. It’s also the problem when you place ‘genius’ in a realm away from humanity and nature, like its an alien or divine object that has nothing to do with one’s personal life.
Every work of art has its driving force in the person’s life. Sakurasou’s characters generally see the drive for their creation as ‘the love of the creative process’. But this love is crystallized in various different forms and ideals rather than just being a force on its own. By this I mean that we can say Richard Wagner created Tristan and Isolde because of his ‘love of the art’, but this love was crystallized in his Schopenhauerian aesthetic ideology. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy wrote because of their Christian spirit. Kafka, partially out of therapy due to his overbearing father and the ennui of his life, but also due to his revolutionary ideals about modernity and alienation. The Beat Generation wrote to express individuality and wildness. Proust wrote to cherish his own memories and sensuality. The fact is that a creative person is utterly haunted by his art. His art is not distinct from his life. But generally artists are portrayed in fiction as placing creation in a separate realm (In Sharin no Kuni, Sachi’s arc is pretty much Sakurasou condensed and probably done better, but it stills lacks this aspect). Sakurasou’s characters do much to talk about the will to create but never about the things they actually create, never about why they create. Artists, though they are animated by the Muse, still have a reason for creation, still have something to express. The creators of Sakurasou seem alienated from their art, like it’s only a profession rather than a way of life.
“TRIGORIN: I see nothing especially lovely about it … Let us discuss this bright and beautiful life of mine, though. Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man: he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth—I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can't help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that? Oh, it is a wild life! Even now, thrilled as I am by talking to you, I do not forget for an instant that an unfinished story is awaiting me. My eye falls on that cloud there, which has the shape of a grand piano; I instantly make a mental note that I must remember to mention in my story a cloud floating by that looked like a grand piano. I smell heliotrope; I mutter to myself: a sickly smell, the colour worn by widows; I must remember that in writing my next description of a summer evening. I catch an idea in every sentence of yours or of my own, and hasten to lock all these treasures in my literary store-room, thinking that some day they may be useful to me. As soon as I stop working I rush off to the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there, but no! Some new subject for a story is sure to come rolling through my brain like an iron cannonball. I hear my desk calling, and have to go back to it and begin to write, write, write, once more. And so it goes for everlasting. I cannot escape myself, though I feel that I am consuming my life. To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from their stems, and trample the roots that bore them under foot. Am I not a madman? Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally diseased? Yet it is always the same, same old story, till I begin to think that all this praise and admiration must be a deception, that I am being hoodwinked because they know I am crazy, and I sometimes tremble lest I should be grabbed from behind and whisked off to a lunatic asylum. The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me by my writing. A young author, especially if at first he does not make a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world. His nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking; he is irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye, like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone. I did not know my readers, but for some reason I imagined they were distrustful and unfriendly; I was mortally afraid of the public, and when my first play appeared, it seemed to me as if all the dark eyes in the audience were looking at it with enmity, and all the blue ones with cold indifference. Oh, how terrible it was! What agony!”
This is perhaps Trigorin’s best lines in The Seagull. He is haunted by art. It creeps into every moment of his life. The fervent need need need to create, to let loose all the ideas in one’s head on the world. It haunts him to the point of pain and great insecurity. The real love for art is signified not by just talking about the will to create, but by talking about your creation, as if it was already there in your hands, everything it means to you and how it defines your life, even though you have not seen it come into fruition. The impulse to create is the impulse to live, to make something that can be lived greater and better than anything you have lived before.
