The Spectator Seized by the Theatre: Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata

THE SPECTATOR SEIZED BY THE THEATRE: STRINDBERG'S THE GHOST SONATA THE DIVERGENCE OF CRITICAL RESPONSE TO Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata is adequately represented by Eric Bentley and Maurice Valency . Bentley writes: "For all the heterodoxy of style and the fantasy of the action, the play is simple in structure and straightforward in its symbolism. The three compact scenes constitute a statement, a counterstatement, and a conclusion."! Valency, on the other hand, states that "Unquestionably the play has many faults. Its underlying narrative is fantastically complex. The relation of its three movements is neither close nor entirely apparent." The play, Valency concludes, is "a momentary glimpse of the world through the eyes of madness."2 Although it has frequently proved a temptation to locate, in Strindberg 's art and vision, more of the apoplectic than the apocalyptic, to over-emphasize, or indeed to take refuge in psychoanalysis rather tha~ criticism, the extraordinary sense of form which is apparent in much of Strindberg's art would seem to argue that Bentley's sensitivity to the overall clarity of design in The Ghost Sonata is valid. From his earliest plays on, Strindberg was subject to a deeply felt urge to objectify the interior life so as to give it shape. Like others of his epoch, he endured the abrupt disappearance of the gods and the resultant sense of dispossession. However, as Wallace Stevens observed , "There was always in every man the increasingly human self, which instead of remaining the observer, the non-participant, the delinquent, became constantly more and more all there was or so it seemed; and whether it was so or merely seemed so still left it for him to resolve life and the world in his own terms."3 For Strindberg, as perhaps for most others suddenly in exile, a complete resolution of the self and the world was· never possible. Nonetheless, Strindberg attempted to meet the challenge "to resolve life and the world in his 1 Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker (New York, 1946), p. 170. 2 Maurice Valency, The Flower and the Castle (New York, 1966),p. 348. See also George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York, 1961). pp. 298. ff.; Steiner claims that "The conception of the world implicit in Strindberg's plays is hysterical and fragmentary." . 3 Wallace Stevens, "Two or Three Ideas," in Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York, 1957), p. 206. 373 374 MODERN DRAMA February own terms." Something of this attempt is evidenced in the various prefaces, letters and essays from the Preface to Miss Julie, through "':[he New Arts, or the Role of Chance inArtistic Creation"4 to Open Letters to the Intimate Theatre; together, these works reveal in Strindberg a mind seriously determined to forge a new and a vital aesthetic of the theatre, an aesthetic responsive to an ever-changing vision of the self and the world. The "heterodoxy of style" in some of the late plays is to be seen as the direct expression of this everchanging vision-a vision' 'characterized by a moral' and intellectual turbulence well beyond the sense of a relatively calm and logical response which might inform the more conventional sequential dramatic structure implied by Valency. On the other hand, although Bentley's sensitivity to the controlling shape of The Ghost Sonata is surer than Valency'S, there is little evidence to support the rigidity of his formula: statement, counterstatement and condusion.5 The structure of the play is, as Bentley suggests, "simple'" and "straight., forward"-but for important reasons other than those his analysis proposes. By the time of the writing of The Ghost Sonata~ Strindberg, was clearly beyond the realist conventions which informed such achievements as The Father, Miss Julie and The Bond-although he con~ tinued his intense concern with the problems of guilt and the classsex struggle with which those and other plays dealt. By as early as the writing of Master Olof (1872-6), Strindberg was experimenting with his concept of polyphonic composition, which he considered "a symphony , in which all the voices were interwoven (major and minor characters were treated equally), and inwhich no one accompanied the soloist."6 This concept of polyphonic...