Strindberg and the New Poetics

STRINDBERG AND THE NEW POETICS SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, in An Apology tor Poetry, complained of mongrel tragi-comedies with their ludicrous mixture of horn-pipes and funerals . In one sense, Sidney's complaint seems old-fashioned, a classical insistence on purity of genre, limited by the dramas available at the time-a time when "absurd" was a synonym for bad. But Sidney was doing more than mouthing contemporary standards; he was focusing upon a problem that must concern literary critics and directors in any age. A director may be most interested in what will please now; a critic may be interested in what will please many and please long; both need in some manner to examine the demands of an audience. Sidney raises this question: to what degree can comedy and tragedy, humor and pathos, be mixed without leaving the audience in a muddle ; to what degree is variety possible? Dryden and Dr. Johnson, with the example of Shakespeare before them, defended a mixed drama. Dryden, a practicing playwright, was cautious: variety, because it was pleasurable, he welcomed, provided it was well-ordered; humorous interludes were appropriate in tragedy, provided they were interludes, presented as relief from or contrast to the predominant tragic tone. Johnson, well-read, but seldom a theater-goer, defended the mingled drama because it mirrored "the course of the world, in which ... at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend." Such drama exhibited "the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow." But a sad succession of eighteenth-century "sentimental comedies"-where the dramatist in trying to satisfy all emotions ended in satisfying few or none-testified to the dangerous cohabitation of humor and pathos; David Garrick, faced with this bastard species, asked the dramatist and the audience to make up their minds: "Are you for dimples, ladies, or for tears?" The first part of Strindberg's The Dance of Death-a drama complete in itself-provides a modern example of the difficulties involved. The play offers discordant if not opposite qualities; it is, in fact, a mixture of horn-pipes and funerals. The literary critic, reading the play in the security of his closet, can delight in its wild incongruities of dialogue and structure; writing in the relative security of the learned journals, he can afford to be pluralistic; for him, there is nobody standing like St. Peter at the gates of heaven, pronouncing "Pass" or "No, that's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all." 1 2 MODERN DRAMA May But a director, with both an audience and the reviewers to worry about, cannot flirt for long with multiple readings; he must decide on one way to read the play, one style for its production. American directors, in an attempt to give The Dance of Death a consistent style, have been forced to gloss over as best they could those elements which make the play, in reading, a rum experience. Influenced possibly by the naturalism of The Father, they have chosen to stage The Dance of Death as naturalistic melodrama: the San Francisco Actor's Workshop, before its partial move to Lincoln Center, staged Part I naturalistically ; the Guthrie Theatre during its 1966 season did both parts, and the treatment again was basically straight. But the first part of The Dance of Death is not only unlike the symbolic drama of The Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata; it is also unlike the naturalistic drama of Miss Julie and The Father. Without reaching the full-fledged absurdity of the dramas of Ionesco, The Dance of Death is nevertheless typical of that kind of modern drama whose absurd contrasts reRect the discordant, complex lunacy of our world. The teen-age pop song "Silent Night and the Seven O'Clock News" is an overt and elementary example of heterogeneous ideas and moods yoked violently together ; Truffaut's Jules and Jim far more delicately balances humor and pathos; Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, enough like The Dance of Death to be an adaptation, also represents our new sense of "comedy," for we laugh, perhaps...