August Strindberg, the Ghost Sonata, and the Making of Modern Drama
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CHAPTER 9 AUGUST STRINDBERG, THE GHOST SONATA, AND THE MAKING OF MODERN DRAMA August Strindberg shares with Henrik Ibsen the distinction of having most influenced the development of drama in the twentieth century. Although both men overcame the deadening limitations of the dominant form of their day, the well-made play, Strindberg’s search for new, more expressive forms was more far-reaching than Ibsen’s and had profounder implications for subsequent dramatic practice. Ibsen vitalized the well-made play by turning it into a subtle poetic instrument for the expression of psychological insight and philosophical speculation. But Strindberg wrenched the pièce bien-faite, as the French termed it, beyond recognition by emphasizing the grotesque and the irrational—by mirroring both more starkly and more spiritually the existential dilemma that torments humankind in the modern era. Although drama was only one of Strindberg’s literary outlets, the sheer bulk of his dramatic works is impressive: forty-seven full-length plays, twelve short plays, and four dramatic fragments (together with extensive theoretical writings on drama that show him to have been acutely aware of his role as an innovator). Even more impressive is the broad range of styles and genres that he mastered. It is tempting to categorize the different styles Strindberg employed as either naturalistic or non- realistic, but the contours are often blurred. The so-called naturalistic plays are jarringly larger than life, and the non-realistic ones are grounded in commonplace details that evoke a strange atmosphere of “half-reality.” As for genres, Strindberg experimented in a variety of them: the chronicle, history, or period play; tragedy and comedy as well as tragicomedy; folk drama and the fairy tale or fantasy; pilgrimage drama, verse drama, plus his own invention, the “chamber play.” Through all this work, he has come down to us, moreover, as one of the most autobiographical of writers. Throughout his life Strindberg suffered from a variety of anxieties and compulsions, and throughout his career he exploited his personal as well as psychic problems in novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and plays. A highly subjective, self-conscious artist, he searched for form as a means of giving structure and meaning to his own tumultuous existence. And it was not by accident that Strindberg chose the pilgrimage as the structural form for several of his finest dramas, since he himself was engaged in an endless quest for the sources and significance of his private suffering. The tribulations of Strindberg’ s life—a troubled childhood, unhappiness in marriage, chronic financial difficulties, stormy literary as well as political controversies, and, above all, the solitude that brought 113 Chapter 9 him despair together with inspiration—were thus transformed or objectified into brilliantly revealing images of anguish, alienation, and anomie. As for his unhappiness in marriage, Strindberg divorced three times, and each of his marriages was a tormenting experience for him as well as for his wife. This was particularly true of his first marriage to Siri von Essen, an aspiring actress of little talent who had divorced her first husband, a baron, in order to marry Strindberg. Before the union, Strindberg had worked briefly in various jobs , as a tutor, telegraph clerk, journalist, librarian, and actor; once he became involved with Siri, however, he devoted himself almost exclusively to his writing. They remained married from 1877 to 1891, but long before they were divorced their affection for each other had given way to violent quarrels, mutual jealousies, and bitter recriminations. During the disintegration of the marriage, Strindberg turned out a series of autobiographical novels, among them A Madman’s Defense (1886), which details his relationship with Siri and her former husband. At the same time, he was also writing a series of powerful naturalistic dramas, all dealing with forms of class struggle, sexual strife, and psychological conflict between men and women, including The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), The Creditors (1889), and The Stronger (1890). A reaction against elaborate plotting, excess verbiage, and character-typing, these plays combine a scrupulous attention to the Aristotelian unities with the exploration of heredity, milieu, and even chance or coincidence as the bases for drawing “subjective” characters—that is, complex, even contradictory, modern ones that resist superficial analysis or interpretation. Strindberg was married once again in 1893, this time to a young Austrian journalist named Frida Uhl, but their relationship quickly disintegrated into many of the same patterns that had characterized his first marriage. And by 1894 he himself was beginning to experience a psychological deterioration that was to extend over the next two years, during which he suffered from a profound sense of guilt and spiritual turmoil, as well as from a variety of paranoiac hallucinations. During this time Strindberg immersed himself in the mystical works of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) and other religious writers, in addition to turning his hand to painting, photography, and experiments in alchemy. By 1897, he had already chronicled his mental breakdown in a thinly veiled novel titled Inferno, and by 1898 (after returning to Sweden from a fifteen-year expatriation), he had begun another immensely productive period of writing that was to continue until the end of his life. This fertile period effectively divides Strindberg’s playwriting into two major stages: the naturalist works from the late 1880s to the early 1890s, and the predominantly expressionist dramas that date from 1898 onwards. These later plays display a preoccupation with distorted inner states of mind—a preoccupation that understandably derived from his “inferno crisis.” The fragmentation of character so characteristic of Strindberg’s expressionism first appears in To Damascus (parts I & II, 1898), a play with Biblical overtones but simultaneously 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)—which did so much to free 114.