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To Damascus I: Reading the Set
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 28, Number 4, Winter 1985
- pp. 563-580
- 10.1353/mdr.1985.0021
- Article
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To Damascus I: Reading the Set NATALIE SANDLER When Strindberg completed To DamascusJin 1898, he had already written two other journey plays, Lucky Peter's Journey and The Keys to Heaven. Whereas both treated religious themes, To Damascus J was the first of Strindberg's dramas to link self-recognition with the quest for God. The pilgrimage of the Stranger, or literally of the Unknown One, is toward recognition of God and self, and is modeled after the journey of Saul, a journey which led to his conversion . In the play, the Stranger's conversion, or near conversion, takes place through interaction with the landscape and important characters, male doubles of himself, all reflections of his guilt and preoccupations. The emphasis is on recognition. Ifone sees the resemblance between landscape and self, one is brought face to face with painful aspects ordinarily hidden, and forced to see clearly as in an undistorted mirror. Since spiritual and psychological change is brought about by seeing, the decor is crucial. The question of realism in the scenic presentation of To Damascus J has frequently been treated by critics. Critical opinion has fallen generally into two camps. According to the first, the play is nonrealistic; the surface of reality has been distorted, and thus the play portrays a nightmare or a hallucination. According to the second, the play is realistic; there is no distortion, and life is presented as strange but nevertheless real. I What both camps have in common is the assumption of consistency in scenic presentation. I shall argue that there are in To Damascus I various modes of scenic presentation, some of which involve distortion to one degree or another, some of which do not. I shall claim further that within the scenic modes there are two constants: the reflection ofthe central character in the setting and the process by which he and the audience interpret the set. Before To Damascus J was written, Strindberg had steeped himself in romantic literature, and he saw himself as drawing, during that period, from a Romantic tradition.2 From this tradition, Strindberg exploited the strong NATALIE SANDLER correlation between a character's mood and the landscape he inhabits, a correlation Strindberg would have noticed, for instance, in the work of Poe, whom he greatly admired.3 In To Damascus1there is a similar relationship: the sets mirror the emotional states of the central character. But Strindberg has taken the relationship a step further: the sets function in a dynamic relationship to the central character. The Stranger "reads" the sets as orie would read a language and interprets their meaning, so that the "reading" becomes an important part of his psychological dynamics. The sets not only mirror, but create psychological or spiritual change. The change in the central character is effected, then, by "reading" the visual phenomena of his environment as a system of symbols or signs which constitutes, by its power to communicate, a kind of visual language. Here the psychological merges with the religious, for the phenomena which the Stranger recognizes as reflective ofhimselfare also recognized as deriving from a higher power. The words "someone is fighting against me" reverberate through the play. Thus, the psychological and the religious do not exclude each other; rather, in this essentially religious play, it is important that one includes the other. A sign is recognized, then, for its revelatory power, whether seen in the distorted images of the asylum, the clouds shaped like crosses, or the realistically drawn set of "On the Road." The change in the atritude ofthe central character corresponds to the implicit two-part structure of the play. Although To Damascus 1has five acts, the scene in the asylum is placed at the center ofthe play and divides it in half. Although there are seventeen scenes in the play and nine locales, the asylum (scene nine) is the only locale that is not repeated. It effects a radical transformation in the Stranger's outlook. After the asylum scene, the locales are repeated in reverse order until the Stranger finds himself back in the original set. After the asylum, then, the Stranger's mood has altered; and his deepening penitence is mirrored in the change...