Strindberg and Ibsen: Toward a Cubism of Time in Drama

Strindberg and Ibsen: Toward a Cubism of Time in Drama BENJAMIN K . BEN NETT In some ways the relation between Strindberg and Ibsen is entirely obvious. The echoes of Peer Gynt in Lucky Pellr's Journey and the attack on A Doll's House in Sir Bengt's Wife require no comment; nor does it seem to me at all unlikely - even though the original titles are not as similar as their English translations - that The Ghost Sonata has to do with Ghosts in an oblique manner. In both the visionary and the realistic modes, the attempt to surpass Ibsen is a constant factor in Strindberg's intention; Strindberg is always more extreme, but the distance separating him from Ibsen is still finite, Ibsen's presence in his background still discernible. My aim, however, is to show that the question ofrime suggests a deeperievel of dramatic form on which Strindberg follows Ibsen and measurably surpasses him. It must be emphasized that the extent to which Strindberg was conscious of this particular relation to Ibsen has little bearing on the argument. The question of time belongs to the very essence of the dramatist's task and cannot be understood in terms of technical or thematic devices that might be regarded as the stock in trade of a particular poet or school . That Ibsen and Strindberg approach the question in basically the same way is certainly no accident. But it is not something Strindberg needs to have concentrated on in his relation to Ibsen; it is simply part of his striving to be a better dramatist. Throughout the following I shall draw an analogy between time in drama and space in painting. It must be recognized, first, that a dramatic scene does not actually contain time in any more than the limited sense in which a painting contains space. A certain amount of time is required for performance, but the sharp formal boundedness of the scene, its containment between a beginning and an end beyond which it simply does not exist, fails to satisfy our notion of time as an unceasing and uninterruptible flow . The scene, or the playas a whole, has the character of an interlude, a segment of our existence that is separated artificially and devoted to a ritual, or an evoked reality, entirely distinct from the world in which we live the rest of our lives. . Strindberg and Ibsen: Toward a Cubism of Time But reality includes time, and it follows that drama, if it seeks to imitate reality, must create an illusion of unrestricted time comparable to the illusion of unrestricted space created by the painter on his two-dimensional surface. This necessity produces what I shall call temporal perspectivism in Western drama. Just as the painter gives the impression ofplanes situated behindthe plane ofhis canvas - by using lines that are assumed to be parallel in reality but converge in his drawing - so the dramatist, by making his plot depend on events in the relatively distant past, gives the impression of a temporal continuum extending beyond the limits of what is performed. This is not to say that all Western drama employs temporal perspective to the same degree. There are dramatic conventions in which the illusion of temporal depth is of no particular importance; in French classical drama and in German Classicism, the past is as a rule clearly subordinate to a present action on which our attention is focused. And even in those conventions where temporal depth is important, there are widely different ways of achieving it. In ancient and Renaissance drama, for example, the procedure tends to be highly formal , as it were geometrical, corresponding to the use ofarchitectural outlines to define space in Renaissance painting. The past is narrated by a chorus or prologue, or else it is revealed in stylized dialogue, like Oedipus's questioning of witnesses in the Tyrannos. But with the growth of literary realism in the nineteenth century, the technique of temporal perspective, as a means of increasing the illusive power of staged fictions, was developed differently, since realist conventions exclude anything like the style of ancient tragedy. Hence the importance ofwhat is usually called indirect exposition. The present is dominated...