Beyond Damascus: an Examination of Strindberg's The Great Highway as a Last Play

Beyond Damascus: an Examination of Strindberg's The Great Highway as a Last Play DOUGLAS ABEL There is usually a risk involved in considering a playwright's last work as a dramatic "summary and conclusion," a final statement of his view of life. Henrik Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken, is a case in point; it is "conclusive" merely by accident. It may have been the last theatrical statement he was able to make, but it was not the last statement he planned to make. As Michael Meyer points out, Ibsen took pains to make it clear that he intended it, not as his final word, but as adeclaration that he had now finished with the realistic type ofdrama through which he had won international recognition, and was intending to break out into new and experimental fields.l Only the illness and resulting inability to write which struck Ibsen after he completed When We Dead Awaken made the play his "last words." August Strindberg's last drama, The GreatHighway, presents fewer problems in interpreting its status as a final dramatic work. Both the author's own statements and the language and form of the play itself make it much more certain that he intended the work to be a concluding dramatic statement and a summation of his life experience. Arvid Paulson notes that Strindberg had "spoken ofhis lastplay as his farewell to life and his testament'" and Elizabeth Sprigge declares that Strindberg's health was failing and he had the urge to write, as his farewell to life. one more drama ofthejourney, in which he, as the Hunter, could express the unending conflict in himself between the terrible heights of heaven and the dear but dirty plains of eanh.J It is, therefore, both critically acceptable and dramatically useful to examine The Grea/ Highway as Strindberg's ultimate statement about the great questions which have occupied him throughout his dramatic career: the problem ofhuman (1991) 34 MODERN DRAMA 351 352 DOUGLAS ABEL existence and suffering; of the pain which exists in the midst of joy; of the incomprehensibility of man's life on earth. Even a cursory reading of The Great Highway gives the strong impression that it is very consciously and deliberately written as a last play; there is a clear sense of looking, through the eyes of the Hunter, back at the past and engaging in a final attempt to make sense of what has previously been experienced. The first line of the drama, uttered as the Hunter gazes down upon the human world from icy and inhuman heights, initiates an action of fe-examining and reevaluating which continues through the play's seven short scenes or "stations" (p. 295). The Hunter asks, •'Where have I got to, and how far have I come?" (p. 301). High on a mountain path, with the choice of going either further up and away from life, or back down into the human world, he must' 'pause here for a little while, / and breathe / and think" (p. 301). And only a "little while," occupied chiefly with reflective thought, seems to pass in The Great Highway. Audience anticipation of a swift, almost perfunctory lastjourney through life is reinforced by the Hunter's decision to descend from the mountains "to walk a while yet among the sons of man" (p. 349). The "while" of that walk is as short as dramatically possible. The Hunter makes only seven stops on his "highway" and only five in the world of men before he resolves to abandon humanity forever, to seek solace in the frozen heights and to wait, patiently and briefly, for death: There with the hennit ] will stay and wait for the release. Surely he will grant me a grave beneath the cold white blanket. and will write in the snow a fleeting epitaph: Here Ishmael rests, the son of Hagar. ... (P.351)4 In comparison with the seventeen scenes ofTo Damascus (I), with the expansive sweep ofthe full To Damascus pilgrimage, or with the multiply extended vision ofA Dream Play, the dramatic and thematic action of Strindberg's last play is unusually brief. Strindberg emphasizes the summing up ofone man's experiences...