Strindberg's To Damascus: Archetypal Autobiography

Strindberg's To Damascus: Archetypal Autobiography DIANE FILBY GILLESPIE In August Strindberg's last play, The Great Highway, the Hunter, an architect, encourages the Woman to remember his buildings after his death but to forget him. I Such a statement seems inconsistent with Strindberg's own practice as a writer, particularly with his many frankly autobiographical prose works. In a letter to his sister dated 13 June 1882, he wrote: "creating literature does not mean inventing, finding what has never existed; literary creation means relating what one has lived. The writer's art consists in arranging his memories, impressions and experiences."2 The artist, in other words, cannot be totally forgotten. The significant word in Strindberg's remark, however, is "arranging ." Memories, impressions, and experiences.are only the available materials out of which the architect designs his buildings. Not the materials themselves, but the ways they are used are most important. Possibly Strindberg's autobiographical prose works are his primary attempts to cope with personal experiences and psychological problems, while the plays, with their visual and aural dimensions, are the more consciously aesthetic arrangements or refinements of the same materials. In several plays of his later period, Strindberg's themes are the inevitable sin and suffering in hUman relationships,3 the fickleness of fame, and the contradictory nature of human experience. The plays are theodicies justifying the ways of the "Powers" to man or the ways of man to the "Powers." To Damascus is the most panoramic, although not necessarily the most successful, of these treatments of sin and suffering. Parts I and II, along with the autobiographical novel, ['!lerna, are the immediate products of the psychological crisis which altered the course of Strindberg's life and art. Many critics assume, therefore, that the play cannot be fully understood apart from the details of Strindberg's experiences and psychological problems during this period of upheaval.4 The play, consequently, is read as a kind of case study or personal confession. But when we know that the Lady is a composite of Strindberg's To Damascus Strindberg's wives, that the Mother is Mamma Uhl, the mother of his second wife, and that many of the scenes occur in and around the Uhl home, we still cannot account for any impact the play has on either reader or audience. Our emotional identification with the subject of a case study is minimal; and we are often more embarrassed than engaged by personal confession. To Damascus, however, evidences a conscious effort to universalize personal experience. To the extent that the play "works," it does so because Strindberg touches experiences fundamental to the human condition and embodies them in symbols to which we can all respond. He is working, in other words, with what Carl lung calls "archetypes," the "mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual's own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes ofthe human mind."5 These mental fOnTIS are represented or repressed in various ways according to cultural and individual differences, but the fundamental patterns and many of the symbols remain constant. Because Strindberg's psychological idiosyncrasies have received so much attention, an attempt to read at least one of his plays archetypally helps to achieve a more balanced critical perspective. A Stranger in To Damascus is on a pilgrimage which is life. He quests after various secular grails which, when found, prove to be brass rather than gold. The Lady tells him, however, that he searches for the wrong things: "But why haven't you desired things that transcend this life, that can never be sullied?" (Pt. I, i, p. 28). So his pilgrimage has a decided spiritual dimension as well. He travels the sarne road as Shakespeare's characters and Goethe's Faust, a road of physical and spiritual birth, death, and rebirth. Strindberg's comments in Ope/! Leiters to the [/!Iimate Theatre indicate his preoccupation with this basic pattern in the human experience. To Strindberg, Shakespeare's characters are projections of Shakespeare himself at various stages in his life cycle and, more generally, representations of Man. "Who is Hamlet?" Strindberg asks. He is Shakespeare; he is man when...