Strindberg's Ghost Sonata: Parodied Fairy Tale on Original Sin

STRINDBERG'S GHOST SONATA: PARODIED FAIRY TALE ON ORIGINAL SIN DESPITE A GOOD DEAL OF INTEREST IN Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata, critics, as Evert Sprinchorn puts it, "seem reluctant to declare that the play possesses any great coherence."! There has been, in fact, a marked willingness to take the dodge that "dreams needn't make sense": doubly specious, since plays are not dreams, however "dreamlike ," and even dreams have, if not a logic, a psychologic. The many readers who find The Ghost Sonata one of the most exciting pieces in modern drama-however much avoided by pusillanimous directors -are surely correct. The play, that is to say, for all its admitted redundancies and even symbolic nonsequiturs, must have a thematic and symbolic coherence. The thesis here advanced-which by no means explains everything-is that The Ghost Sonata takes as its main structural mode the fairy tale, that it is in fact a parodied fairy tale of sorts, and that this form is the means of saying something about Original Sin. Strindberg's was a basically religious consciousness, and a fascination with the concept of Original Sin would seem a natural corollary of his known obsessive fascination with guilt, especially marked in the chamber plays. The Burned House, which immediately precedes our play in the group, and is closely associated with it in the writing, turns on a question of the guilty past, and is full of allusions to the Garden, the Tree of Knowledge, and the loss of an (equivocal) childhood innocence. The Ghost Sonata, with that hallucinatory clarity peculiar to the surrealistic work, focuses on the universality and inescapability of guilt, bearing down on "innocent" and "sinful" alike in a debacle which seems fully as terrible as the pagan retribution rejected by the play-and this despite the concluding unction of the Student's words on patience and hope, accompanied by "a white light," Bocklin, and "soft, sweet, melancholy" music.2 Early in Scene I when the Old Man begins to open out the insanely complicated relationships binding the inmates of the Colonel's house, 1 August Strindberg, The Chamber Plays (New York, 1962), p. xix. 2 Most of the quotations from The Ghost Sonata are in the Otto Reinert translation in Modem Drama (Boston, 1961); occasional use has been made of the Sprinchom edition cited above. 189 190 MODERN DRAMA September the Student says, "It's like a fairy story." Hummel, in replying, "My whole life's like a book of fairy stories, ... held together by one thread, and the main theme constantly recurs," seems to corroborate their genre and hints that his story-and our play-is about something specific. Seen in broad relief, The Ghost Sonata contains all the elements of the fairy story, and it is this which gives it a kind of structural cohesiveness not found in the other chamber plays, which seem to spill their symbols into a void. We have a poor but heroic youth, and one, moreover, especially blessed or singled out by destiny (a "Sunday child" with the gift of second sight). Our Student is enraptured of a beautiful and highborn maiden, who lives in a "castle" imagined by the Student to enclose all his life's desires. He thinks his suit is hopeless, but a "fairy godfather" with an aura of immense and mysterious powers appears and promises him an entree to "doors and hearts." In Scene II we discover, as we might have expected, that there are "ogres" in the ,castle who have the maid in thrall; but the fairy godfather is prepared to do them battle. In the third scene we would further expect the fairy princess and hero to be united and "live happily ever after." Just how trueand false-to the facts of the play this outline is should be apparent; yet in the play's relation to this submerged paradigm, I am suggest- .ing, lies much of its meaning. For the fairy tale, after all, is a projection of the return-to-Paradise wish. Whatever his ill fortune (symbolic of the fallen world), the hero's desert is always good (he is naturally good, an erect Adam), and the powers that be...