Strindberg's Unknown Comedy

Strindberg's Unknown Comedy DANIEL DAVY How could a play entitled Crime and Crime ~d obviously preoccupied with aconflict between forces of good and evil be devoid of moral content? - James L. Allen, Jr.I Don'1 you know this is the witching hour? That's when you hear things - and see things sometimes. Staying up all night has the same sort of magic as crime. Puts you over and above the laws of nature. - Crimes and Crimes2 August Strindberg's comedy Crimes and Crimes is not "unknown" because of Strindberg - the play is clearly designated "A Comedy" on the title page - but because of the virtual unanimity of critical response to the play which totally ignores this classification. Although a considerable degree of variability exists between individual shadings of interpretation, the vast majority of criticism is of one mind in taking the "dark" or "serious" manifest content of the play at face value. As Barry Jacobs observes, "The generic subtitle of Brott och brott has caused readers problems from the very start. Some early reviewers...found 'komedi' utterly inappropriate...when he produced the play in 1902, Max Reinhardt relabelled it 'tragicomedy'."3 As is evident from the following representative sampling of critical opinion, this "relabelling" has continued virtually all the way to the present day: Modern Drama, 40 (1997) 305 306 DANlEL DAVY The contest...CQmes to be reminiscent of the struggle between good and evil forces for the protagonist's soul in the typical morality drama.... . . . the battle of the sexes in Crime and Crime is representative of another battle in human experience, the battle between good'and evi1.4 [T}he play is substantially a study ofguilt and retribution....(and) ademonstration ofthe workings of sin.... 5 Though Strindberg attacks the evil will, the secret crime, he defends it...with characteristic ambivalence....The result of this line of thought is, obviously, that acrime is something good...that it is agrace bestowed from on high, provided it is followed by pangs of conscience and purification through suffering.6 Both the literary and theatrical value of the play depend upon the skil1 with which Strindberg and his producers create adark mood that suggests moral license and depravity .7 There Are Crimes and Crime [sic] may, then, be considered a study of guilt in dramatic form.s [Crimes and Crimes is1 aplay dealing with success, arrogance, and the power of secret desires.... The subject is the guilt felt by the hero for imagined crimes.9 One possible clue that the majority view of the play has been misdirected lies in a remark of F.L. Lucas, who dismisses the play in a single comment contained in a note: "I have not thought it worthwhile to deal with Crime and Crime .... Though intense in certain scenes. it seems a rather foolish play."lo This verdict on Crimes and Crimes is consistent with the relatively sparse body of commentary surrounding the work. Two major Strindberg studies of relatively recent origin - Egil Tornqvist's Strindbergian Drama: Themes and Structure (1982), and Harry Carlson's Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth (1982) - do not deal with it at all, a silence that clearly speales an opinion in harmony with Lucas's appraisal of the playas "foolish" and unworthy of analysis. But is it not possible that Strindberg himself was well aware of the apparent discrepancy between comedy and his own play, and that the foolishness in question does not pertain to Crimes and Crimes but to a body of criticism which superimposes its own dramatic objective upon the play and then damns the play for failing to achieve it? Is it not also possible that the same cluster of characteristics - crime and the guilty conscience, "thought crime," the wanton abandonment of family and friends, the death of a child, and so on - which fails to cohere as a serious drama might well succeed if viewed from another, "comic," perspective? What might such a perspective be? Strindberg's Unknown Comedy 307 In an essay entitled "Strindberg: The Absence of Irony," R.J. Kaufmann takes issue with George Steiner's frequently cited view that Strindberg's dramatic work is the product of personal obsession and is lacking...