For an extreme example of what George Calderon called Chekhov’s ‘disjunctive manner’, I recommend:
George touched on aspects of the ‘disjunctive manner’ in the Introduction (1912) to his translations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard, but he had expressed it most succinctly the year before in his article on the exhibition of Post-Impressionist painters at the Grafton Gallery that Virginia Woolf famously said ‘changed human character’:
With regard to grotesqueness in the first place, it has its uses. When a man of Gauguin’s intelligence and accomplishment paints Christ in the Garden looking ridiculous with his great patch of red hair, one must consider whether it was not perhaps done with a good intention (which fails, however, a little with myself). Pathetic things in real life have a way of mixing themselves up with grotesque things. Realists have seized on this confusion to convey the pathos of life with its natural rough flavour about it. Characters in Tchekhov’s plays will suddenly pull out a cucumber and begin to eat it, or exclaim apropos of nothing ‘My little dog eats nuts’, or the like, and the reality of their inconsequences raises the value of the adjacent pathos. That may have been Gauguin’s intention with the Christ.
However, I did say extreme example. That is because the ‘disjunction’ in this film is between pure harmony and pure disharmony. The very rich Florence Foster Jenkins loves the harmony of the great singing voice, and she can hear it in her head when she herself sings, but her own singing (e.g. in the Carnegie Hall!) is excruciatingly disharmonious. There is a grotesque disjunction between the harmony in her brain and the discord her voice produces — and nobody for most of the film has the heart to tell her so. The effect is hilarious and unbearable by turns and often simultaneously (cf. Chekhov). But there is also plenty of, in George’s words, ‘adjacent pathos’, because the disjunction in Florence’s brain may really have been caused by the syphilis her first husband infected her with, from which she made a remarkable recovery, and in any case she displays an eye-watering faith in herself. Despite its huge dissonantal ‘inconsequences’, the film is as much about the human spirit as, say, the women’s arias at the end of Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters.
Meryl Streep flutters, bustles, twitters and beguiles as Florence Foster Jenkins, and the role of her much younger husband elicits the best acting of Hugh Grant’s career; but for me it is Simon Helberg as the pianist who achieves true Chekhovian range and depth.
For the archive of posts since 31 July 2015, please click here.
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Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George Calderon c.1901
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
George Calderon, 1912
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Captain of the 11
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
More Chekhovian than Anton
For an extreme example of what George Calderon called Chekhov’s ‘disjunctive manner’, I recommend:
George touched on aspects of the ‘disjunctive manner’ in the Introduction (1912) to his translations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard, but he had expressed it most succinctly the year before in his article on the exhibition of Post-Impressionist painters at the Grafton Gallery that Virginia Woolf famously said ‘changed human character’:
However, I did say extreme example. That is because the ‘disjunction’ in this film is between pure harmony and pure disharmony. The very rich Florence Foster Jenkins loves the harmony of the great singing voice, and she can hear it in her head when she herself sings, but her own singing (e.g. in the Carnegie Hall!) is excruciatingly disharmonious. There is a grotesque disjunction between the harmony in her brain and the discord her voice produces — and nobody for most of the film has the heart to tell her so. The effect is hilarious and unbearable by turns and often simultaneously (cf. Chekhov). But there is also plenty of, in George’s words, ‘adjacent pathos’, because the disjunction in Florence’s brain may really have been caused by the syphilis her first husband infected her with, from which she made a remarkable recovery, and in any case she displays an eye-watering faith in herself. Despite its huge dissonantal ‘inconsequences’, the film is as much about the human spirit as, say, the women’s arias at the end of Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters.
Meryl Streep flutters, bustles, twitters and beguiles as Florence Foster Jenkins, and the role of her much younger husband elicits the best acting of Hugh Grant’s career; but for me it is Simon Helberg as the pianist who achieves true Chekhovian range and depth.
For the archive of posts since 31 July 2015, please click here.
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