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Strindberg's Isle of the Dead
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 1962
- pp. 366-378
- 10.1353/mdr.1962.0026
- Article
- Additional Information
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STRINDBERG'S ISLE OF THE DEAD FROM TIME TO TIME a bold hand and a sympathetic heart conspire to complete a play left unfinished by the author. The four dramatic fragments left by August Strindberg and issued posthumouslyl are not, except in one instance, of such shape and moment as to prompt extrapolation ; but they are worth attention simply for the light they shed on the aging playwright. All of them date from the last ten years of Strindberg's life; two are substantial and especially revealing. Though I am chiefly concerned with presenting the first English translation of Toten-Insel, or The Isle of the Dead, perhaps the most personal and certainly the strangest of the fragments, something might be said about the others. The Dutchman, written in the summer of 1902 in a combination of prose and free verse, survives in two acts and part of a third (51 pages).2 The shipwrecked captain of the title, also, as it develops, a painter, finds himself in a seaport square quite like the city scene of the chamber play Storm. In an encounter with his mother he argues the responsibility for the failure of six previous marriages, and then embarks on a seventh with no less than Lilith, in spite of the attempted intervention of his devoted painter-apprentice Ukko. His mother suggests that expiation for past error comes through a faithful woman, but Ukko knows that the only expiation is through suffering. With Lilith's departure and the dissolution of this seventh union, the fragment ends. As early as 1888 Strindberg had identified the Inspector in that collection of stories The Life of the Skerries Men with the Flying Dutchman , and the curious fusion of this myth with that of Bluebeard appears fleetingly in the Fingal's Cave episode of A Dream Play, when Indra's daughter and the Poet catch a glimpse of what they believe to be his phantom ship. DAUGHTER: ••• Why is he punished so cruelly, and why does he not come ashore? POET: Because he has seven unfaithful wives. DAUGHTER: Shall he be punished for that? POET: Yes. All righteous men condemn him. DAUGHTER: Incomprehensible worldI ... The Dutchman fragment does nothing to make the world any more comprehensible, and perhaps that is why it was left unfinished; but the Strindberg authority Martin Lamm calls it his "poetically finest 1. Samlade otryckta skrifter, I. Dramatlska arbeten (Stockholm, 1918), 201-310. 2. Available in French, translated by C. G. Bjurstriim, as "Le Hollandais," La revue the8trale, IX, No. 30 (1955), 43-74. 366 1962 STRINDBERG'S ISLE OF THE DEAD 367 portrayal of the love-hate complex,"3 chiefly on the basis of such passages as the apostrophe which pays elaborate geometric tribute to the female form, a lyric monologue that Strindberg thought enough of to include in the collection Fairhaven and Foulstrand (1902): See the colossal parabola of hips, the course of comets extended into space suspected but unknown; she turns and then I see the same lines transformed into half elipses, forming the earth's path around the sun, together making the ovoid from whose foci radiate the rays of the womb.... Strindberg could not have found a better dramatic projection of his own tangled marital life than this abortive encounter between the Flying Dutchman, modernized but still the bedeviled wanderer, and Lilith, the vampire woman, the Babylonian adventuress of the night. The play bears most directly on. Strindberg's third marriage to the actress Harriet Bosse. He sent her the manuscript on 5 July 1902 with the note: "Read the accompanying and you will see what feelings you inspired in me when last I saw you. This was written the day after you left." And then, after a brief reunion, he concluded a· letter of 20 July: "What a wonderful day, yesterdayl How fortunate for The Hollanderl"4 It was probably just this reconciliation that caused Strindberg to abandon the play; as Gunnar Ollen puts it, peace had broken out again. But The Hollander was later completed in a few deft strokes by another hand, namely that of Herbert Grevenius, and the resultant one hour and fifteen minute construction, an unhandy length for...