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THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS, PART ONE: A SKEPTIC'S EVERYMAN AUGUST STRINDBERG was continually and intensely alive. "I was born without an epidermis," he was fond of remarking. Unlike most mortals, he was incapllble of a life which features one or two "highlights" separated bylong stretches of more or less drowsy routine. Everything that happened to him was a crisis: even his hangovers seemed to have been festivals of guilt and repentance. None of the ordinary, or extraordinary , human problems were simple for Strindberg, and especially not the problem of God. It is no wonder, then, that The Road to Damascus, a trilogy which grew out of the strenuous religious experiences of his Inferno period, presents such a strange and intricate blend of skepticism and faith. Although at the end of the trilogy the leading character (the autobiographical Stranger) enters a monastery, he does so in a bewildered and resigned way, and not in a spirit of climactic conviction. He does not seem to be much nearer religious conviction than he is at the end of Part One as he stands hestitatingly at the door of a small Gothic church. The Stranger's problem with God is Strindberg's: it consists in never having satisfactorily experienced God in person; or, more precisely, in an umvillingness to trust, in the light of later experience, what seemed to be, at the time, an experience of God. Unless the experience is continuous and overpowering, he cannot accredit it. He cannot stop searching while there are still more places to search. A simple "religious experience" is not enough to end his search for (or flight from) God. As Strindberg was not willing to let others suffer for his sin, so he was unwilling to take anyone's word but God's, on the subject of God. Strindberg, God-obsessed though he was, was not graced with the simple, conventional faith of the Christian Church. And yet The Road to Damascus, Part One, ends with a demonstration of the power of faith.1 In the final scene, the Stranger returns to the Street Comer where he began the pilgrimage which constitutes the play. He remembers that he has left an unclaimed letter in the post office. The Lady-his mistress, wife, and companion-reminds him that he has purposely not claimed the letter because he believes 1. All quotations are from August Strindberg, The Road to Damascus (1), trans. Graham Rawson (New York, 1960). 344 1962 ROAD To DAMASCUS, I :345 it to contain nothing but unpleasantness. She then suggests that he change his mind and claim it, "in the belief that what it contains is good." Her suggestion-to have faith-is in substance the same as the Beggar's, earlier in the play, which the Stranger accepted "as an experiment," and which yielded good results. The Stranger accepts the Lady's challenge: <'I'll make the attempt." He finds that the letter contains the money he has been waiting for throughout the play, and is ashamed. "I didn't want to be made a fool of by life," he says. "That's why I wasl" He couldn't adopt a blind faith in Providence, and now Providence has proved him wrong. But has the "miracle" changed him? The Lady, who has been trying to get him into the Church, once more urges him to accompany her. He consents to "go through that way." "But," he adds, "I can't stay." He admits only that he may hear "new songs." The Lady has the last word. "Come," she beckons him. The curtain falls, leaving the Stranger about to enter, but not entering, the Church. There is no reason to assume that he will certainly behave differently in the future, as the beneficiaries of Divine Providence are wont to do. But neither is he the Village Atheist, recalcitrant and stubborn to the last. He experiences the "miracle"; its implications are clear to him; he doesn't explain it, debate it, or defend a previous position. He accepts it, and goes on. This is his basic action throughout the play: to accept the experience, and go on. In order to dramatize this action of "going on" from experience to experience, Strindberg has constructed his drama in the form of a "wander play," that is, a play of many scenes which provide a variety of circumstances for the central character to act in. Unlike his other "wander plays" (e.g., Lucky Pehr, The Great Highway), however, To Damascus contains a special feature, which might be labelled the "scene revisited." In the second half of the play, the Stranger revisits each of the first eight scenes in the play in reverse order, and ends where he began. The ninth and central scene, the Convent, is not revisited, but the circumstances of each of the other scenes and the Stranger's action as he revisits them, are altered after the experience of the Convent scene. The author's purpose in using such a structure is to dramatize the crises of a human soul in a variety of circumstances and to dramatize the relation of these crises to a central experience: the Convent scene. The Convent scene, however, does not show us the Stranger in the throes of a climactic vision, but rather as the recipient of certain veiled and symbolic suggestions. But if the experience he undergoes in the Convent scene is unclear, still it is crucial to the general tone of the remainder of the play, and to the Stranger's attitude as he revisits each of the eight scenes. 346 MODERN DRAMA December In its general outline, this play bears a striking resemblance to the famous Anglo-Dutch morality, Everyman. In this late fifteenth-century work, Everyman is summoned by Death to a reckoning with God. Everyman is taken by surprise. "0 Death," he says, "thou comest when I had thee least in mind." Everyman then attempts to persuade various "characters" to accompany him to the seat of divine Judgment. The play can be divided into nine "stations" or "scenes." These scenes have no designated physical location, as in To Damascus, but each can be identified as a particular spiritual location. The drama is written in one continuous act, but the spiritual locations are easily identified. The play begins with a prologue by the Messenger, in which the argument of the play is set forth: the location here is the stage, set in the real world of the audience. The second s~ne is a conversation between God and Death about the spiritual condition of Everyman. In scene three, Death confronts Everyman, and apprises him of God's purpose: Everyman faces Eternity. Scene four is a search for the Eternal in the human: Everyman tries to enlist the help of Fellowship, Kindred, and Goods, but is refused. Then he turns, in the fifth and central scene, to Good Deeds who informs him that he (Good Deeds) is so neglected that he cannot make the journey, and advises Everyman to apply to Knowledge. Knowledge agrees to go with Everyman and leads him to Confession, who advises penance and awards Everyman the cloak of Contrition. Now Everyman is spiritually prepared to revisit the scenes he has just passed through. In his search for the Eternal in the human he is able to enlist the aid of Discretion, Strength, Beauty, and Five Wits; he can now distinguish the enduring from the transitory in human life. In scene seven, he comes to his grave, analogous to his meeting with Death in scene three. He now willingly accepts death, with Good Deeds at his side. In scene eight, Good Deeds, Knowledge, and an Angel generalize on Everyman's spiritual condition, as God and Death did in scene two. In the last speech of the Doctor, the summary epilogue , we are returned to the world of the first scene. Thus the crises of a soul are depicted in terms of the general experience of. humanity, with religious vision as the central experience, coloring all the others. Everyman is, significantly, an anonymous play and deals, as the title suggests, with the generality of Christian mankind and with experiences ascribed to every member of that class. To Damascus, on the other hand, is far from anonymous. It is difficult to imagine that any scholar could wrongly assign the authorship of this drama, if it turned up unsigned in some forgotten archive. And even if we overlook the fact that most of the play's materials come directly from Strindberg's life, we see that it is a play about a particular individual, 1962 ROAD To DAMASCUS, I 347 the Stranger, and his particular reactions to the "wander" experience. Everyman is a "community" drama; it was written for a theater devoted to group affirmation of widely accepted ideas, and within the limits of an established dramatic convention. Strindberg, after writing To Damascus, was not even certain that it was a drama, according to the understanding of his contemporaries; he advised his publisher to put it aside if he found it unacceptable. The play was an attempt to give a form to an intensely personal and chaotic experience. Everyman is a generalization based on an accepted moral code, while To Damascus is a dramatization of a particular individual's experience of moral chaos. If we examine the latter play in more detail, with Everyman as a background, the ambiguous and personal nature of the experience can be more clearly seen. We first encounter the Stranger in a Street, "uncertain which way to go." This is the world, with its cafe, post office, and Church, where the Stranger begins and ends his journey. The Stranger, unlike Everyman , has not been living a sensuous life, heedless of the Eternal; nor has he forgotten death. His religion, he explains to the Lady, is "only this: that when I can bear things no longer, I shall go." He reserves the ultimate initiative to himself, not to death. He also explains to the Lady that he has been waiting for something-he is not sure whatfor forty years, and then later confesses that he is really waiting for the post office to open. This technique is typical of the way Strindberg manages to keep the tone of the play half natural, half supernatural. Looked at one way, the Stranger's action throughout the whole play seems merely to be that of waiting for the post office to open. But it only "opens"-that is, the money only arrives-after all the stations of the play have been visited. And the "money" theme, so insistent in the pre-Convent scenes, disappears with the Stranger's emergence from the Convent. Mter being expelled from the cafe (the vanity of Fellowship), the Stranger resolves to readopt the role of liberator, and rescue the Lady from her intolerable husband. When this liberation is accomplished, the Lady and the Stranger take stock of their condition in a Hotel Room which reverberates with the guilt of past and present acts of desertion. They find that their dream of freedom has turned into a nightmare of pursuit and guilt: "This honeymoon's becoming a pilgrimage ." "Of our own free will," suggests the Lady, " we must accept the worst." This decision gives them "three days of happiness" by The Sea, but the idyll does not last. Anxiety returns and the couple discuss the necessity of suffering for their sins. In the middle of this religious theme, Strindberg reintroduces the theme of money. Again, the play shifts into the practical world, with the Stranger's discovery that his .'348 MODERN DRAMA December accounts show that he is owed nothing, as if in response to his blasphemous wish to become the Creator and remake the world without suffering. Goods, then, are not simply represented by Strindberg as a vain pursuit, but rather they come to suggest the condition of the Stranger's spiritual account, while at the same time functioning in a more practical context: money prevents the Lady and the Stranger from consummating their freedom. The couple now must, as a result of this setback, take refuge with the Lady's mother. On the Road, they lament their beggary, and in the Ravine, the Stranger throws away his last copper. This action suggests both the Stranger's spiritual bankruptcy and the phase in Everyman where the hero learns the vanity of Goods, and applies to Good Deeds for his salvation. In To Damascus, as might be expected, these phases of experience overlap and run parallel to one another-as they do, in fact, in life. Little attempt is made to abstract experience or to assign specific values to symbolic items. The important thing is the suggestive power of experience itself, not the power of symbols to render experience abstractly. Strindberg sees his symbols from the "inside," subjectively. In the Kitchen and the Rose Room, the Mother reveals herself as the Stranger's enemy (the vanity of Kindred). She sees herself as one of the deserted, against whom the Stranger's transgressions have been singular: he has left his wife and two children, and then stolen another man's wife. She gives the Lady the sinful book the Stranger has written, in the hope of causing trouble between them. When the Lady admits that she has "eaten of the tree of Knowledge," the Stranger confesses that the book was sinful, but complains: "I've never seen a good action get its reward" (the inefficacy of Good Deeds). The Stranger, confronted thus with the total of his guilty life-letting another suffer for his sins, mistaken liberal notions, desertion and conspiracy to desert, blasphemy, total spiritual bankruptcy-rushes out to challenge personally the Almighty. It is as if Everyman, when confronted with his spiritual unpreparedness, demanded an interview with God. "I must clear everything up," the Stranger says as he leaves. In the following scene, the Convent scene, we discover the Stranger recuperating from a fever. He had been found raving in the hills and threatening with a cross someone in the skies. When he asks the Abbess what he was saying in his delirium, she replies, "You had the usual feverish dreams." His confession does not lead to absolution because, in the words of the Confessor, "What you said was spoken in a fever." One of the things the Stranger insisted on, in his fever-i.e., in his struggle with God-was that he should be allowed to pay for himself in the hospital. "I want no charity," he says twice to the Ab- 1962 ROAD To DAMASCUS, I 349 bess. The Stranger sees in the Convent the images ("Are they real?") of his "victims" and hears the Confessor speak a premonition of Judgment : Quantus tremor est futurus Quando judex est venturus? followed by the curse of Deuteronomy, all of which seems to apply to the Stranger's life. His reaction to these experiences is characteristically ambiguous: "Are they temptations to be resisted, or warnings to be obeyed?" He does not put on the cloak of Contrition but describes his condition as a "fever" and resolves to "go to a real Doctor." Strindberg 's symbols, as has been mentioned, do not specify but suggest. The mention of the Doctor suggests: a rejection of religion in favor of something more immediately efficacious, perhaps science; conviction that he has sinned against the Doctor (the Lady's husband) and a resolution to apply to him for absolution; or perhaps a resolution to return to the Lady, his former and only source of life and strength. As he prepares to go the Abbess adresses him: ABBESS: Should you need charity again, you now know where to find it. STRANGER: No. I do not. ABBESS: (in a low voice) Then I'll tell you. In a "rose" room, near a certain running stream. STRANGER: That's the truthl Such advice, even "in a low voice," is surprising from the Abbess. But the Stranger, who always calls her "mother," has reacted to her as a woman, not as a religious figure. The Abbess recalls to him the comfort and charity to be found with a woman-mother or wife. The Stranger must therefore return to the Rose Room, to the Lady, his deserted second wife, and to her Mother, also a deserted woman. For the Stranger this is the action he must pursue, the thing he must go on to, as a result of the Convent experiences. In the Convent scene the striking formality of the structure of To Damascus contrasts interestingly with the nondialectical and highly ambiguous nature of its material. When the Stranger returns to the Rose Room, the Mother is subtly changed: her vindictiveness is at least passive, now. The Stranger, too, confesses to a change: ''I'm ruined; for I've lost all aptitude for writing. And I can't sleep at night." In the Kitchen the two continue their dialogue and the Mother, who had vowed to betray the Stranger in this room before, now prays for him; but when she suggests to him that he has undergone spiritual death and is "on the road to Damascus," he replies that she speaks "in riddles." The Ravine no longer arouses disquieting thoughts and images in the Stranger's mind. The character- 350 MODERN DRAMA December istic rudeness of the Smith and the Miller's wife invigorates him: "It helps to lighten my conscience." The Stranger is working out his penance, if that is what it is, in his own way, ignoring the kind of advice which Everyman welcomed from Confession. His view of life has apparently changed, through whatever Knowledge he gained at the Convent. But he does not specifically pursue Discretion, Strength, et al. This Knowledge was simply a stage in a continuum, not a crisis which altered everything. When the Stranger meets his alter ego, the Beggar, on The Road (where he had before lamented his own beggary), the Beggar asks, in the words of Christ: "Saul, Saul! Why persecutest thou me?" The Stranger "goes out with a gesture of horror." He is suffering for his own sins and is horrified by the possibility ofthe reality of Christ. The scene by The Sea is characterized now, not as before by the anguish of suffering, but by a vision of three white crosses which the Lady takes to mean "good fortune." It is here also that the Stranger recalls the Beggar's advice "to believe ... good intentions," and how by following this advice, he has been strengthened. The Stranger's next station is the Doctor's House, whence he goes to be forgiven for stealing the Doctor's wife, to receive a judgment on his sanity, and, curiously, to confirm his suspicions that the Doctor is marrying his (the Stranger's) first wife, and taking his two children. This composite of experiences is reminiscent, although not correspondent in all parts, of the mention of the Doctor in the Convent scene. The Doctor, although now a milder man (he has removed his lightningattracting woodpile), is still a bit sinister. He tells the Stranger that the Convent of St. Saviour was an asylum, and then immediately orders the front door and the gate shut. When the Stranger offers him his hand (the Doctor had before offered the Stranger an amputated arm and leg), he says: "... what is the use of my forgiving you, if you lack the strength to forgive yourself. Some things can only be cured by making them undone. So this can never be." "St. Saviour . . .," the Stranger begins. "Helped you," the Doctor cuts in. And the Convent experience is left at that. Not: "Into thy hands I commend my spirit," but: "St. Saviour ... helped you." In the final scene of the play, we discover the Stranger back at the Street Comer, drawing in the sand. He claims the letter, discovers the long-awaited money, and prepares to leave for the mountains with the Lady-after a visit to the Church. To say that August Strindberg was a religious skeptic, then, by no means exhausts the problem of his religious thought and experience in the Inferno period. For him it was not merely a question of affirming or denying the existence of God, of taking refuge in Catholicism, agnosticism , or natural science. For Strindberg, God was not something 1962 ROAD To DAMASCUS, I 351 which merely produced attitudes and opinions: God was an experience. In his Inferno period Strindberg struggled with God, pursued and was pursued by God, but was never convinced that they had met face to face. "I looked for God," he says, "and found the Devil." Strindberg, in his egomania, was deeply concerned with God's relation to himself and refused to accept secondhand testimony as to His existence and whereabouts. H God could not convince August Strindberg, he was no God. Strindberg never defined his religion in terms of a church or a dogma. He seemed always to be awaiting new evidence from life. Like Adolphe in Crime and Crime, he was willing to wait for the evening papers where he might perhaps find "a basis for a new point of view." He never really abandoned his early devotion to naturalism in the sense that he always demanded the evidence of life as a basis for belief; indeed, it might be said that the evidence of life, all of it, was the only thing he believed in. It is astonishing to consider, then, the depth and power of his experiences of God. Strindberg's skepticism produced an extraordinary quantity and quality of religious experience. DAVID SCANLAN ...

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