[In the following essay, Roken spotlights Strindberg's presentation of visual information as an element of his narrative technique.]

The question of how that which the writer-dramatist wants to communicate is passed on to the reader-spectator as experience of knowledge was one of Strindberg's primary concerns. In several of his plays, the actual process of passing on information and the issue of its authenticity are placed in the foreground, thus confronting us as spectators with problems that careful narratological and rhetorical analysis of fiction has taught us as readers to carefully sift and weigh for possible counterversions that are in some way embedded in the text itself.¹

In this paper I investigate how the visual information, based primarily on our perception of the scenographic elements in some of Strindberg's major plays, is “narrated” by the dramatist through the manner and order of its presentation to us. The playwright's selection of locus and events are the key to the narratological scheme of the play. An examination of how the dramatist-narrator has visually “cut into” the fictional world of his characters with his selection of stage events will clarify how the rhetorical devices affect us. Watching a theatrical performance (and reading a script) implies that we are constantly adjusting visual and verbal information to make it coherent. By concentrating here on the visual aspects, I hope to fill a gap in the appreciation of Strindberg's genius.

In an interview about his art as a stage director, Ingmar Bergman made the following comparison between Ibsen and Strindberg:

To me, the most fascinating thing about Strindberg is that enormous awareness that everything in life, at every moment, is completely amoral—completely open and simply rooted. … With Ibsen, you always have the feeling of limits—because Ibsen placed them there himself. He was an architect, and he built. He always built his plays, and he knew exactly: I want this and I want that. He points the audience in the direction he wants it to go, closing doors, leaving no other alternatives. With Strindberg—as with Shakespeare—you always have the feeling that there are no such limits.²

This statement is true in several respects, finally, because Strindberg has presented us with a very subjective view of the world, a view that not only changed several times during his own career as a writer but also took sudden and unexpected turns within the individual works themselves. I will show how this subjectivity operates in the theater.

In Strindberg's dramatic production, the stylistic developments that had been started by Ibsen's decision—after writing Peer Gynt—to place the dramatic action in the bourgeois drawing room, now came full circle: in Strindberg's expressionistic plays we again find ourselves in the vast landscapes that have to be understood and interpreted as metaphorical explorations of the vast inner landscapes of the subjective mind. In Peer Gynt there is an excursion into these inner landscapes when Peer visits the world of the trolls. It can take place, however, only after Peer hits his head on the rock and faints (act 2). It is thus motivated on the “realistic” level of plot in the progression of the play. In Strindberg's post-Inferno plays, the so-called expressionistic ones, the motivation for this exposure of the inner regions of the mind is, however, only “aesthetic.” This means that it is based solely on an acceptance by the spectator of the literary and theatrical conventions through which the protagonist's mental life is presented.

These aesthetic intentions were given a rather negative interpretation during Strindberg's own lifetime when the post-Inferno plays were originally published and performed in Stockholm (the first decade of this century). Even in the recent study Tragic Drama and Modern Society by John Orr, these conventions are seen as a limitation that finally hinges on Strindberg's own madness. Orr claims.

The limitation of Strindberg is seen more easily by comparison with the painting of Munch or Kokoschka. Here the expressionist method was used to enlarge the figurative dimensions of art and represented a step forward in the history of painting. But theatre invariably imposes a distance between the spectator and the hero which has to be overcome both technically and thematically by the actor's performance. It has no equivalent of the novelist's “point of view” which can lead us, through indirect speech, into the mind and sensibility of the character. Strindberg's attempt at such direct exposure through dramatic speech can be compelling and equally disturbing, but the sense of distance is always there. The attachment of an expressionist method to the exploration of the human unconscious ultimately led him to a pathological vision of the world.³

If, on the other hand, we accept the aesthetic “limitations” or “givens” of the theater as an artistic medium, limits that involve the fundamental issue of how and to what extent the inner privacy of the mind can be presented to an audience during a live performance, then the methods of perception developed by Strindberg do not seem as disturbing as Orr implies. Strindberg is, rather, bringing the narrative techniques of the theater into areas of perception that had not been explored before. As Orr rightly observes, the questions of point of view and narrative technique lie at the center of Strindberg's communication with his audience. This shift of emphasis in the modes of theatrical communication and perception has determined the nature of Strindberg's plays on almost all levels, although I will concentrate primarily on the visual implications of the shift. The major change Strindberg effects is the gradual abandonment of the realistic stage convention wherein the proscenium arch is the aesthetic frame through which the dramatic action and the fictional world are statistically presented and perceived.

In the dramas of Ibsen and Chekhov, for instance, the proscenium arch is basically equivalent to the imaginary fourth wall that separates the stage action from the audience. It is a dividing line that places the dramatic action and the audience in a static relationship to each other. In Strindberg's plays, however, there is a constant manipulation of our vision and point of view, which in many respects resembles the function of the narrator in a novel or even the camera in a movie. Strindberg has elaborated a dynamic dramatic/theatrical method of presentation through which he shows us his heroes and their fictional world from several changing points of view during the progress of the action. This also leads to a different, and sometimes much closer, involvement of the reader-spectator in the fictional world Strindberg presents than in those of Ibsen and Chekhov.

Susan Sontag, in an article analyzing the differences between theater and film, quotes Panofsky's formal distinctions between seeing a play and seeing a movie:

In the theatre (Panofsky argues) “space is static; that is, the space represented on the stage, as well as the spatial relation of the beholder to the spectacle is unalterably fixed,” while in the cinema, “the spectator occupies a fixed seat, but only physically, not as the subject of an aesthetic experience. In the theatre, the spectator cannot change his angle of vision.” In the cinema the spectator is “aesthetically in permanent motion as his eye identifies with the lens of the camera, which permanently shifts in distance and direction.”⁴

Sontag subsequently argues against Panofsky's attempt to keep the two art forms separate. Sontag quotes from several movies and theater styles to show that only in the use of “a realistic living room as a blank stage”⁵—that is, in the plays of Ibsen—does the theater become as static as Panofsky claims. Here I will argue, in concurrence with Sontag's views, that Strindberg developed theatrical techniques in which the eye of the spectator actually “identifies with the lens of the camera, which permanently shifts in distance and direction,” and that he has actually turned this lens into an invisible narrator in some of his plays. I will primarily focus on Miss Julie, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata. These plays illustrate Strindberg's fundamental dramatic-theatrical devices that bridge the distinctions often made between the pre- and post-Inferno plays. These similarities do not of course completely erase the important differences between these two periods in Strindberg's creative life.

No matter what final meaning we ascribe to Ibsen's plays, his principal characters are usually involved in quests toward understanding and overcoming specific past events that have become overshadowed by guilt. When these past experiences resurface, there is usually some kind of catastrophe. By “closing doors,” as Ingmar Bergman expresses it, Ibsen really leaves “no other alternatives” for his heroes. In Chekhov's plays, all the doors have been opened, but his main characters have no deep urges or possibilities to use them to change their lives or move on to new situations or places. His protagonists are caught somewhere between paralysis and despair, which, precisely because the doors have been opened, involves them in very painful struggles. In the context of Chekhov's major plays, these struggles are understood neither as failures nor as successes, just as phases of suffering and despair, mixed with varying degrees of irony.

These fundamental differences of presentation of the fictional world are also expressed on the level of scenographic presentation. In Ibsen's realistic plays, the setting very often focuses on a single physical point, which, in terms of the play's action and the main character's past, is a visual representation of the past catastrophe. Examples of this principle are the attic in The Wild Duck or the mill stream in Rosmersholm. Chekhov, on the other hand, presents a scene that leads in several different directions. His protagonist stumbles because he or she is not sure which choice to make, whereas Ibsen's fails because his or her choice is undermined by a sense of guilt from the past.

In Strindberg's plays, it is never clear what his main character's world looks like and whether it has one or many focal points. This obviously makes it much harder to interpret his plays and is probably one of the reasons why so much of the criticism and interpretation of his work had drawn correlations between Strindberg's own life as son, husband, father, and writer and his literary output.⁶ There was for a long time no other direction to take. His poetry, novels, and dramas have in several cases even been treated as private documents or “diaries” of a struggling individual, who in his writing sought a final and public outlet for his personal suffering. Strindberg himself is largely responsible for directing his critics toward this kind of criticism by writing the confessional autobiographical novels The Defense of a Madman and The Son of a Servant.

Several of his plays, such as Miss Julie, The Father, To Damascus (I), and many more, have also been given biographical interpretations. In them he exposes not only the private lives of his characters but also his own private life in the public sphere of the theater. This of course is a further development of the dialectic between the private and the public, a very important aspect of theatrical communication, which in this case is realized in the form of open confession.

In analyzing the works of Ibsen and Chekhov it is possible to use the visual focal points in their fictional worlds as “keys” to interpreting the strivings and dreams of the characters. One of the salient features of these focal points, whether they are singular or multiple, seen or unseen, reachable or unattainable, is that apart from being physically present in the fictional world and in the consciousness of the characters, they are static. Once such a focal point has been established, in Ibsen's plays for example, there is a relatively high degree of certainty that it will remain in place until the characters have concluded their struggle at the end of the play. One of the primary guarantees and safeguards for this static quality is the steady frame of the proscenium arch through which the fictional world is perceived. And in Chekhov's plays, where there are several focal points or where the physical point of view changes in different acts, for example, in The Cherry Orchard, they still remain rather constant.

However, the assumptions that are part of the realistic tradition are drastically altered in Strindberg's plays. It is possible to identify two important features in several of his plays which, by being present in varying degrees, change the whole relationship between the presentation of the stage action and the perception of the audience. The first feature is a visual focal point that constantly changes or occasionally disappears or is very difficult to find; this feature is present in the proposed set for the play as well as in the consciousness of the characters in relation to the world they inhabit. The second important feature, which relates to the first, is the superimposition of some kind of “filter” or “camera” on the fictional world presented on stage. With the help of this “camera,” Strindberg directs the audience's perception and vision of the stage world in a manner similar to the manipulations of the narrator in the novel and the camera in the movies. The camera has of course frequently been compared to the narrator.⁷

I am using the concept camera very deliberately here because Strindberg succeeded in arriving at theatrical effects that resemble the way a photograph “cuts out” a piece of reality: not a symmetrical joining of one wall to the other walls in the house—the basic fourth-wall technique of the realistic theater—but rather an asymmetrical cutting-out. Furthermore, Strindberg used cinematographic techniques resembling zoom, montage, and cut, which are highly significant from the strictly technical point of view and for the meaning of the plays. Historically, photography and movies were making great strides at the time and were art forms to which he himself—as photographer and as movie writer—gave considerable attention and interest. During Strindberg's lifetime, both The Father and Miss Julie were filmed as silent movies by the director Anna Hofman-Uddgren and her husband, Gustaf Uddgren, writer and friend of Strindberg, but only The Father has been preserved.⁸

Strindberg thus developed dramatic theatrical techniques that, like the movie camera, can bring the viewer very close to the depicted action and, at the same time, can quite easily change the point of view or direction of observing an event or succession of events. The disappearance or near disappearance of the static focal point is largely the result of the introduction of these different photographic and cinematographic techniques. When the characters, the action, and the fictional world are continuously presented, either from partial angles or from constantly changing ones, it is often impossible for the spectator to determine where the focal point is or what the central experiences are in the characters' world. This in turn is a reflection of the constant and usually fruitless search of the characters for such focal points in their own lives.

Whereas Hedda Gabler's lack of will to continue living was based on her refusal to bear offspring within the confines of married life, Miss Julie's despair primarily reflects her unwillingness merely to exist. Of course, there are external reasons for her suicide, and Strindberg has taken great care both in the play and in the preface almost to overdetermine her final act of despair. Nevertheless, as several critics have pointed out, there are no clear and obvious causal connections between her suicide and the motives presented. Instead, this final act of despair is triggered by an irrational leap into the complete unknown, as she herself says “ecstatically” (according to Strindberg's stage direction) in the final scene when she commands Jean, the servant, to command her, the mistress, to commit suicide: “I am already asleep—the whole room stands as if in smoke for me … and you look like an iron stove … that resembles a man dressed in black with a top hat—and your eyes glow like coal when the fire is extinguished—and your face is a white patch like the ashes.”⁹ These complex images within images resemble links in a chain, and they illustrate the constant movement or flux of the despairing speaker's mind. For Miss Julie there is no fixed point in reality, no focal point, except her will to die, to reach out for a nothingness.

In Strindberg's description of the set in the beginning of Miss Julie, he carefully specifies how the diagonal back wall cuts across the stage from left to right, opening up in the vaulted entry toward the garden. This vault however, is only partially visible. The oven and the table are also only partially visible because they are situated exactly on the borderline between the stage and the offstage areas. The side walls and the ceiling of the kitchen are marked by draperies and tormentors. Except for the garden entry, there are no doors or windows. As the play reveals, the kitchen is connected only to the private bedrooms of the servants Jean and Kristin; there is no direct access to the upper floor where the count and his daughter, Julie, live except through the pipe-telephone.

In his preface to the play, Strindberg explained: “I have borrowed from the impressionistic paintings the idea of the asymmetrical, the truncated, and I believe that thereby, the bringing forth of the illusion has been gained; since by not seeing the whole room and all the furnishings, there is room for imagination, i.e., fantasy is put in motion and it completes what is seen.”¹⁰ Here Strindberg describes the imaginative force of this basically metonymic set. But rather than following the custom in realistic theater of showing the whole room as part of a house that in turn is part of the fictional world of the play, Strindberg very consciously exposes only part of the room. He claims it should be completed in the imagination of the audience. As Evert Sprinchorn comments: “The incompleteness of the impressionist composition drew the artist and the viewer into closer personal contact, placing the viewer in the scene and compelling him to identify with the artist at a particular moment.”¹¹

The audience comes closer not only to the artist through this view of the kitchen from its interior but also, by force of the diagonal arrangements of the set, to the characters inside the kitchen. This is because the fourth wall, on which the realistic theater was originally based, has been moved to an undefined spot somewhere in the auditorium, the spectators are in the same room as the dramatic characters. It is also important to note that, to achieve this effect, Strindberg also removed the side walls from the stage, thus preventing the creation of any kind of symmetrical room that the spectator could comfortably watch from the outside. Furthermore, the audience is not guided regarding the symmetries, directions, or focal points in the set itself, which the traditional theater strongly emphasized. The only area that is separated from the kitchen is the garden, visible through the vaulted entry, with its fountain and, significantly enough, its statue of Eros. Thus, the physical point of view of the audience in relationship to the stage is ambiguous.

What is presented is a “photograph” of the kitchen taken from its interior, drawing the audience's attention to different points inside or outside as the play's action develops. The set of Miss Julie can, furthermore, be seen as a photograph because while the spectators get a close view from the inside of the kitchen, they also experience an objective perception of it and the events taking place there through the frame of the proscenium arch. The comparison between Strindberg's scenic technique in Miss Julie and the photograph is compelling because of the very strong tension between intimacy and closeness on the one hand and objectivity and distance on the other; this sort of tension has often been observed to be one of the major characteristics not only of the play but also of photography, as the practice of documenting and preserving large numbers of slices of reality. The photograph also “cuts” into a certain space from its inside, never showing walls as parallel (unless it is a very big space photographed from the outside), at the same time it freezes the attention of the viewer upon the specific moment. In photography the focus is on the present (tense), which is “perfected” into a “has been” through the small fraction of a second when the shutter is opened. Barthes even goes so far as to call this moment in photography an epiphany.¹²

This is also what happens in Miss Julie when the attention of the audience is continuously taken from one temporary focal point to the next by force of the gradual development of the action. Our eyes and attention move from the food Jean is smelling to the wine he is tasting, to Miss Julie's handkerchief, to Kristin's fond folding and smelling of the handkerchief when Jean and Miss Julie are at the dance and so on. In Miss Julie these material objects force the characters to confront one another and to interact. They are not objects primarily belonging to or binding the characters to the distant past toward which they try to reach out in their present sufferings—as are the visual focal points in Ibsen's plays or even the samovars and pieces of old furniture in Chekhov's plays. The objects in Miss Julie are first and foremost immersed in the present, forcing the characters to take a stance and their present struggles to be closely observed by the audience.

In Miss Julie the past and the future have been transformed into fantasy, so the only reality for the characters is the present. Because Jean and Miss Julie are forced to act solely on the basis of the immediate stimuli causing their interaction, and because the kitchen has been cut off diagonally leaving no visually defined borders on- or offstage, it is impossible to locate any constant focal points, either outside or inside the fictional world of the play and the subjective consciousness of the characters. This “narrative” technique achieves both a very close and subjective view of the characters and a seemingly objective and exact picture of them. The temporal retrospection has also been diminished because Jean and Miss Julie are not as disturbed by irrational factors belonging to a guilt-ridden past as, for example, the Ibsen heroes are. Strindberg's characters are motivated primarily by their present desires.

This of course does not mean that there are no expository references to the past in Miss Julie; on the contrary, there are a large number of references to specific events in the lives of the characters preceding the opening of the scenic action. The play, in fact, begins with a series of such references, all told by Jean to Kristin. Thus, we learn that Miss Julie is “mad again tonight” (inferring that it is not the first time this has happened), as represented by the way she is dancing with Jean. And to give her behavior some perspective (just before her entrance), Jean relates to Kristin how Miss Julie's fiancé broke their engagement because of the degradations he had to suffer, jumping over her whip as well as being beaten by it. These events are, however, never corroborated by other characters in the play. Miss Julie's subsequent behavior does to some extent affirm Jean's story, but we can never be completely sure.

What is specific to Strindberg's plays is not the omission of the past—which absurdist drama emphasizes—but rather a lack of certainty regarding the reliability of what the characters say about that past. And since in many of Strindberg's plays there is no source of verification other than the private memory of the character speaking, the past takes on a quite subjective quality. Miss Julie gives her version of her past and Jean relates his, and the possible unreliability of these memories is confirmed when Jean changes his story of how he as a child watched her in the garden. Unlike the past in most of Ibsen's plays, which is objectively verified through the independent affirmations of other characters. There are certain important events that cannot always be completely verified, such as the real identity of Hedvig's father in The Wild Duck, but the characters act on the assumption that they know. And there is enough evidence, given by several characters independently of one another, to grant that they are right.

The major outcome of past actions, guilt, is objectified in Ibsen's plays. That is the reason why it can be given a specific geographical location in the outside world, which becomes the “focus” (in all respects) for it. In Strindberg's fictional worlds there is definitely an awareness of past actions, that is of guilt, but it exists as a private limbo in the subjective consciousness of the individual characters and thus cannot be projected onto the objective outside world. That is why in Strindberg's plays there is either no visual focus or a constantly moving one.

In Miss Julie the two principal characters continuously try to turn their respective opponents into the focal point onto which their own guilt and related feelings of inadequacy and general frustration can be projected. That is one of the major reasons for their sexual union and the distrust and even hatred to which it leads. Just how fickle those focal points are, however, can also be seen as in Miss Julie's last desperate attempt to find some kind of support in Jean for her step into the unknown realm of death. Jean's face has become a white spot, resembling to Miss Julie the ashes of a fire because the light of the sun—which is rising at this point in the play—is illuminating him. Again the present situation becomes the point of departure for her wishes. And when Miss Julie wants to die, her wish is thus focused on Jean's illuminated face. In Ghosts Ibsen used the same images (the fire and the sun) at the end of the last two acts as objective focal points. Strindberg has compressed these images into one speech in which they are projected onto Jean by the fantasy of Miss Julie's subjective consciousness. Ibsen gives a “scientific” explanation of Oswald's madness for which the sunset is a circumstantial parallel, whereas Strindberg lets the sunset motivate the outburst of Julie's death wish, as expressed from within. Thus the preparations for the introduction of expressionism, wherein everything is projection, had already been made in Strindberg's pre-Inferno plays.¹³

In A Dream Play, in which the subjective is much more emphatically central than it is in Miss Julie, Strindberg wished to integrate and develop the complex procedures of perception related to photography with an explicit moral vision of humanity. In A Dream Play there is not only a single lens photographing the stage of tragic events at one relatively fixed point in time and space as in Miss Julie but a complicated camera that zooms in and out on the events and juxtaposes different images in space and time through a dream filter, using a montage technique.

In his first expressionistic play, To Damascus (I), in which the protagonist quickly moves from one place to another, Strindberg used a variation of the “station drama,”¹⁴ employing a mirror construction. This means that the scenes of part II, after the climax in the Asylum, are arranged in reverse order from part I and lead the hero gradually back to the place where he began. In a letter to a friend, the Swedish author Geijerstam, Strindberg described his use of this structure:

The act lies in the composition, which symbolizes the repetition (Gentagelsen) Kierkegaard is talking about; the events roll up towards the asylum; there they reach the edge and are thrown back again; the pilgrimage, the homework to be done over again, the swallowings; and then things start anew, where the game ends it also started. You may not have noticed that the scenes roll up backwards from the Asylum, which is the backbone of the book which closes and encloses the plot. Or like a snake that bites its own tail.¹⁵

When Strindberg in his short preface to A Dream Play also refers to the “nonconnected but seemingly logical form”¹⁶ of the dream used in this play (as well as in the earlier To Damascus), the assumption that the mirror construction has also been applied would not be far-fetched. In A Dream Play, however, the realization of the mirror construction is only partial and very fragmentary. In its present form, the play contains the following scenes:

1. prologue in heaven
2. garden with growing castle
3. a room in the castle
4. another room in the castle with the dead parents
5. opera corridor
6. Lawyer's office
7. church
8. Fingal's Cave
9. living room behind Lawyer's office
10. Foul Strand (Fair Haven behind)
11. Fair Haven (Foul Strand behind)
12. classroom in yellow house in Fair Haven
13. by the Mediterranean
14. Fingal's Cave
15. opera corridor
16. outside the castle

Lamm claims that Strindberg had actually intended at some point to repeat the scheme of mirror construction from To Damascus (I) but that he later abandoned it. Ollén has called the structure of the play “Contrapuntal” in an attempt to reflect Strindberg's own use of musical terminology to describe his dramatic structure, as in the Chamber Plays. Sprinchorn has likewise argued that the repetition of certain scenes reinforces the cyclical structure for the purpose of what he sees as a Freudian “secondary elaboration.”¹⁷

However, as can be easily seen in the preceding enumeration of scenes, Strindberg has actually repeated only three scenes in part II. Going backward, scene 16 repeats the location of scene 2, scene 15 returns to that of scene 5, and scene 14 to that of scene 8. It is worth noting that in the last three scenes of part II the locations of three different scenes from part I (2,5,8) are repeated, and that each time two scenes from part I (3-4 and 6-7) are skipped in the return. Scene 13, the scene with social pathos, which takes place by the Mediterranean, does not appear in part I and, as a matter of fact, Strindberg added it, along with the opening scene—the prologue in heaven—to the already finished play at a later time. In one sense the scenes of Foul Strand and Fair Haven are also repetitions because each time the other is shown in the background. The aesthetic technique Strindberg employed in the scenic depiction of the two beaches, which is where the so-called edge mentioned in his letter about To Damascus (I) is located, will be carefully analyzed below.

In the kind of artistic economy that Strindberg practiced in A Dream Play, the scenes missing in the mirror construction are not completely absent, however. Instead of visually repeating the scenic images from part I in reverse order in part II, Strindberg often repeats on the level of dialogue and appearance of representative characters. These repetitions become in effect reminders of the scenes that are missing. They also, interestingly enough, usually appear in the text in the exact reverse order from part I, so that we are at least reminded of the mirror construction. In part II the Lawyer's dwellings, the church, and the Lawyer's office are not presented as full scenes but are referred to textually; the journey of Indra is proceeding in reverse order. The Lawyer appears at the end of the schoolhouse scene (scene 12) asking his wife to return to their home (scene 9 in part I). At the end of his second appearance in Fingal's Cave (scene 14) the Poet has a vision of the church tower, which returns us to the church (scene 7 in part I), which then came before the cave (scene 8). At the end of the second opera corridor scene (scene 15) the Lawyer again appears, reminding his rebellious wife of her duties and thus repeating the scene in the Lawyer's office (scene 6 in part I). In this last example the strict order of the mirror construction is, however, somewhat upset.

One interesting instance of this verbal repetition of scenes is the description of the soldiers marching on the tower of the church (end of scene 14), an image Lamm refers to as “one of those places in A Dream Play where the reader is called upon to make fruitless interpretations.”¹⁸ In the framework of the scenic structure of the play, however, Strindberg actually makes us return to the church (scene 7 in part I) through the powerful image of death. This poetic description recalls the complex arrangement of image within image seen in Miss Julie when the fire in the oven is extinguished, when one image becomes involved in the next through a constant metamorphosis between light and shadow. The Poet in A Dream Play is describing soldiers marching on a field while the sun is shining on a church so that its shadow can be seen on the field. Through the juxtaposition of images on the field, they appear to be actually walking on the church tower:

Now they are on the cross, but I perceive it as if the first one who is walking on the rooster must die … now they approach … the corporal is the first one … haha! A cloud is approaching, covering the sun of course … now they are all gone. … The water of the cloud extinguished the fire of the sun! The light of the sun created the dark image of the tower, but the dark image of a cloud muffled the dark image of the tower.¹⁹

What we see on the field is actually some kind of photographic image, a “dark image” (mökerbild in Swedish), a negative through which the movement of the cloud is transformed into another image. It is worth emphasizing that in both plays Strindberg superimposed images of light and shadow—a technique closely related to photography—to create the different images of death.

In addition to the complex metamorphosis on the level of imagery, the scenery onstage changes from Fingal's Cave to the corridor outside the opera while the poet is speaking (from scene 14 to 15), thus superimposing additional images upon the already rather complex visual images presented. This combination of verbal and visual images could without a doubt be termed theatrical montage, in analogy to Eisenstein's “film montage.”

Before I analyze how and when the “edge” of A Dream Play is reached, I must make some general remarks about the technique of “zooming” in A Dream Play. What the audience actually sees, at least in the first part of A Dream Play, is a fictional dream world, a world with a “dream atmosphere” (drömstämning), to use Bark's terminology,²⁰ in which the walls of the castle and of other dwellings are peeled off, crumble, or simply go through various metamorphoses, gradually drawing the audience closer and closer toward the fictional offstage world, in the direction of some kind of center that remains elusive. This is, as a matter of fact, a visual version of Peer Gynt's famous onion, which leaves him with empty hands after it is completely peeled. Strindberg very carefully specifies in his stage directions that the transitions from scene 2 to 8, 9 to 13, and 14 to 16, respectively, stress the continuity of movement from scene to scene. Backdrops and screens are removed, replaced, or turned when the curtain is open, and objects that had a certain function in one scene are transformed through the dream to reappear with a different function in the next.

One of many such changes is the transformation of the organ in the church in scene 7 into Fingal's Cave near the ocean in scene 8, a shift effected primarily by lighting, as the stage directions indicate. The continuity between the different locations presented on stage is strongly stressed and represents Strindberg's theatrical expression of the connectedness of images in the dreamer's mind. Strindberg has introduced a theatrical, aesthetic continuity as a reflection of the dream, thereby underscoring its isolation from all kinds of everyday reality. As Harry Carlson has explained, the aesthetic principle behind these transformations is the revelation of “a critical continuity of identity between the two scenes. Objects have changed, but somehow remain the same. One implication is that no matter how the two locations may seem to differ from each other, underneath they are fundamentally alike: we are still in a world of illusion and pain.”²¹ I must stress, however, that this identity is not static because there is flux and movement from place to place effected by the zoom action of the “camera” through which we perceive Strindberg's fictional world.

The two outdoor scenes at Foul Strand and Fair Haven (10 and 11) are extremely important with regard to the visual aesthetics of A Dream Play. When we see the ugly landscape of Foul Strand in the foreground in the first of these two scenes, beautiful Fair Haven can be made out in the background on the other side of the bay that separates them. In the following scene, after the short blackout prescribed in the stage directions, the relative positions of Foul Strand and Fair Haven have changed so that Fair Haven is now visible in the foreground, the bay again in the middle ground, and Foul Strand submerged in shadow in the background. This kind of visual technique, which can be termed a “turn-around,” has been used by Strindberg several times. The “turn-around,” or “edge,” as Strindberg calls it in his letter to Geijerstam, is the place from which the scenes are rolled up backward again. The very important innovation in A Dream Play, however, is the interesting manipulation of the spectator's point of view. It can be described as a change of position on the part of the audience so that after the “turn-around,” the fictional world is perceived from exactly the opposite standpoint: in each of these two scenes the other place is seen in the background. Through the change of angle or “camera” position, the audience is allowed to see the action from a vantage point behind the scene, thereby viewing from behind what was formerly seen from the front.

With the help of Strindberg's “camera lens” on the action, the audience can not only follow the heroine from one point in space to another as in picaresque “station drama” but also examine the fictional world by perceiving it through specific angles, perspectives, and sudden jumps from one point in space to another diametrically opposite point in space. In cinematographic terms, the camera has moved, and, from the audience's perspective, Indra's slow and gradual return to heaven is now seen from the completely opposite angle.

It is thus as a result of the “turn-around,” or reversal of directions, that the backward movement in the scenic succession is actually precipitated. Now the camera that had been zooming in toward the open seaside landscape of the archipelago has been turned the opposite way. But instead of returning directly to the home of the Lawyer and his rebellious wife, we are given a look into the schoolhouse where the grown-up Officer is sent back to the schoolbench and where normal everyday logic breaks down. At this point the Lawyer appears again to remind his wife of the duties that still remain: “Now, you have seen almost everything, but you have not seen the worst. … / Repetition. … Returns. … Going back! … Redoing the homework. … Come!”²² Both Agnes and the Officer thus have to return in humiliation to a former traumatic situation of confinement. This is, however, not simply a return to a trite childhood or marital reality; in the larger structure of the play, the heroine is taking the route back to heaven, the place from where she originally came.

Strindberg has, as he explains in the letter to Geijerstam, employed the Kierkegaardian moral-psychological concept of gentagelsen, or repetition, in A Dream Play. In 1843 Søren Kierkegaard had published an introspective work called Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, which Strindberg clearly knew about or had read. Kierkegaard's work is a philosophical and autobiographical explication of the moral-psychological concept of repetition. He writes:

When one does not possess the categories of recollection or of repetition the whole of life is resolved into a void and empty noise. Recollection is the pagan view of life, repetition is the modern view of life, repetition is the interest of metaphysics, and at the same time the interest upon which metaphysics founders; repetition is the solution contained in every ethical view, repetition is a conditio sine qua non of every dogmatic problem.²³

In A Dream Play Kierkegaard's moral concept is also used as an aesthetic structuring principle in that the idea of return is the basis for development of the plot and for the succession of the dramatic locations. Strindberg also applied it on the moral level of the play in that the central lesson Indra learns about humankind is that everything in life is repetitious. This is true of the small and the large duties of everyday life, the fixed return to childhood and, of course, the constant suffering of all humankind, which is the central theme repeated over and over again in the play. One could even claim that Strindberg attempts to unify the ethical and aesthetic spheres, presented as irreconcilable opposites in Kierekegaard's Either/Or, by showing in A Dream Play that repetition is an aesthetic concept as well as a moral one. For Indra and the Poet, beauty is contained within the ethical law based on her return to heaven, which, in terms of the play's aesthetics, is structurally worked out as a formal repetition. The theme and concept of repetition is thus embedded in the play in multilevel fashion to interweave its aesthetic and moral dimensions.

It is also possible to compare Strindberg's methods of theatrical composition and perception with the perceptual modes developed at about the same time by Picasso in his cubist paintings.²⁴ In his attempt to depict a three-dimensional reality in a two-dimensional medium, Picasso gave a pictorial account of how he moved around the depicted objects in space by showing through paint on canvas what these men and women looked like from different angles simultaneously. Strindberg, working in the three-dimensional, temporal medium of theater, also depicted characters and objects from several angles and points of view. By repeating the events and locations from the first part of A Dream Play from behind the scene in the second part, the audience is visually drawn into the fictional world from two completely opposite points of view.

This multiple perspective technique is also comparable to the complex structure developed by Stoppard in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which a certain number of episodes in the backstage world of Hamlet are independently dramatized. We can even imagine two audiences—one watching Shakespeare's play and the other watching Stoppard's—sometimes seeing the same play from diametrically opposed angles but usually watching different parts of one fictional world. The actor in Stoppard's play tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern what they, as actors, are really doing in the theater: “We keep to our usual, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.”²⁵

The aesthetics of repetition Strindberg in various ways developed has been extremely important for writers like Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco, and Genet and for modern theater and art in general.²⁶ Suffice it to mention here that when we are watching Waiting for Godot we have no idea how many times the ritual of waiting has been repeated before the play starts and between the two acts. This kind of repetition is very different from the probing of their own past in which Ibsen's protagonists are involved or the nostalgia in which Chekhov's are caught. Strindberg's protagonists are trapped in a condition that, once we accept the premises and the presentation, is a universal Sisyphean limbo, not just a psychological probing into the tragic past of an individual. One of the primary features of this Strindbergian condition humaine is the fact that the protagonists are caught and imprisoned in behavioral patterns and in a fictional world they are never sure they can leave or transcend, not even at the moment of death, unless of course the protagonist is a divinity, as is Indra's daughter in A Dream Play.

In The Dance of Death (I), for example, the central theme is that there is definitely no transcendence from the repetitive patterns Edgar and Alice have created in their marriage. The five opening lines of the play are extremely indicative of the kind of repetitive life the couple has led for almost twenty-five years:

THE Captain:
Would you like to play something for me?
ALICE:
What shall I play?
THE Captain:
What you want!
ALICE:
You don't like my repertoire!
THE Captain:
And you don't like mine!(27)

The Captain's request to hear his wife play something is not granted at all at this point; much later she plays the “Dance of the Bojar,” during which he has his famous fainting spell, a symbolic death within a life that is very much like death. Alice does not answer but retorts with another question, which leaves it up to the Captain to decide what music he wants to hear. But he also refuses to make a decision and returns the initiative to Alice, who refrains once more by claiming that he does not like her repertoire, to which he in turn retorts that she does not like his.

This kind of procedure in which both partners refuse to gratify the other one is repeated over and over in The Dance of Death (I) until, ironically enough, they agree at the end of the play to seek reconciliation in the celebration of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The repetitive patterns of behavior from which their marriage suffers are expressed implicitly on the level of the dialogue itself. The use of the word repertoire, ambiguously referring to Alice's playing the piano as well as to all the petty tricks of their married life, is the key to the motif of repetition in the play; this repertoire is constantly repeated.

The principle of repetition, as Strindberg developed it in his plays, was an attempt to artistically concretize something beyond the particular fate of the individual and to reach a dramatic formulation of a universal human condition. Strindberg's characters are not primarily motivated as individuals trying to find a solution to a personal problem, as are Ibsen's, but are representative types of human beings, caught in an existential dilemma in which there apparently is very little or no chance for redemption.

The spatial-scenographic metaphor most frequently used by Strindberg to express this universal condition is the presentation of different kinds of closed spaces from which the main characters cannot escape. The kitchen in Miss Julie, the Captain's hiding room in The Father, and the straitjacket into which he is tricked are motivated primarily on the realistic level, even though they achieve a more general social or spiritual significance. In The Dance of Death (I), however, the tower in which Edgar and Alice “live” is a metaphysical and spiritual prison that makes it impossible for them to escape from their “death in life.” In A Dream Play this imprisonment is dramatized on a grand scale through the separation and opposition between the worlds of matter and spirit. There remains only one channel of communication between them through which the daughter of Indra but not the mortals can escape. The sufferings of this world are a universal condition for which there is no solution—except for death itself.

In my opinion the play by Strindberg that most forcefully presents death, not only as the accidental outcome of a situation where all other solutions have failed but as the one necessary escape from the confinement of the base repetitiveness of the material world, is The Ghost Sonata. Here the Young Lady gradually withers away into a death that is the logical result of the degraded and depraved spiritual condition of humanity. Not even the love of the Student can redeem her from this universal depravation.

I am particularly concerned with how the scenography expresses this separation from life and the growing awareness that ultimate truth lies beyond life in The Ghost Sonata.²⁸ The visual representation is in this case too, of course, parallel to the textual elaboration of the same theme: behind the façade of appearances and that which seems to be true about the lives of the characters in the play, a very different truth has been hidden. What we initially perceive is false. Hypocrisy and deception reside behind the walls of the modern well-to-do bourgeois house presented in the first act. As they are gradually exposed, they threaten to shatter the very foundations not only of the house but of society and the whole social order as well. The play's revolutionary message has, however, been immersed in an atmosphere of resignation and religious sentiments so that when The Ghost Sonata ends, the only future that seems to remain is one of eternal death. The three short acts of the play present a gradually intensified revelation of the rotten foundations of the house as well as of society itself. Visually this is presented by a gradual zooming in toward the center of the house.

The first act presents the exterior facade of the house, the street corner with a fountain, and a telephone booth; and through the windows on the facade, the so-called oval room is visible. In the second act, the Strindbergian camera has zoomed in on the oval room, which now opens up into two different directions in the background: to the right is the green room where the Colonel can be seen, and to the left is the hyacinth room where the Young Lady is visible from the beginning of this act and where the Student later joins her. The third act takes place in the orientally furnished hyacinth room, which was visible in the background during the second act. This succession accentuates the continuity of the fictional space throughout the three acts. But instead of zooming in on the scene in the hyacinth room from the oval room and thereby gradually drawing the audience into the fictional world in straight one-directional fashion, Strindberg has effected a “turn-around” with his camera, displaying (in act 3) the oval room—which was the setting for act 2—in the background with the Colonel and the Mummy visible through a door on the right. The kitchen, from which the destructive forces of this act appear in the form of the vampiric Cook, appears in the background on the left.

The effects this “turn-around” can have on an audience are quite stunning. At the end of the ghost supper in the second act, the mad Mummy who has been imprisoned in the closet for twenty years is finally released. The Mummy is actually the Young Lady's mother, who conceived her with Hummel, her former lover, outside of her marriage. It is mainly the guilt resulting from this union that has led the Mummy to a state of death and madness, and only through the mock reunion with Hummel (who, because he killed the Milkmaid, is even more guilt-ridden than she) can she be released. When Hummel takes over her place in the closet, it is a ceremonially structured revenge, which in a way is also a minor “turn-around,” wherein the characters exchange points of view. Hummel, his sinful past now completely revealed, is, by taking the Mummy's place, thus “liberating” her, while one of the servants, Bengtsson, places a death screen in front of the door of the closet. After all the characters present have pronounced a ceremonial “amen” over the death of Hummel, Strindberg directs the audience's attention toward the hyacinth room—in the background behind the oval room—where the Student is singing a song of reconciliation and hope with the Young Lady accompanying him on the harp. The older generation has found no resolution to their conflicts and guilt except in hatred and revenge, so the audience is naturally guided to the only existing hope: the younger generation.

The setting of the third act confirms this hope because, as mentioned above, it takes place in the hyacinth room where the young couple has been seated throughout the second act. Thus our attention has gradually become focused on the young couple and the possibility of a happy future for them. Because of the “turn-around,” the older generation—having definitely outplayed its role—has been placed in the background. The “turn-around” changes the audience's point of view in relation to action in space, since it is now viewing from “behind” what was formerly seen from the “front,” as in A Dream Play. Moreover, the “turn-around” changes the audience's temporal points of reference: in act 2 the young couple in the background represent the future and its possibilities, in act 3 the characters in the background represent the lost past and its guilt and limitations.

Strindberg has also achieved another interesting effect in the passage from the second to the third act, an effect involving our perceptions and interpretation of time as well as space. The first words uttered in the third act are the Young Lady's exclamation “Sing now for my flowers!” They seem to refer directly to the song about the sun that the Student has just sung at the end of act 2, while he and the Young Lady were still in the background. Thus there seems to be a temporal continuity in the plot, as in Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkmann in which all the acts are consecutive. What at first seems to be temporal continuity is in fact underlined by the spatial continuity of the same two rooms in both acts. This sense of continuity is further reinforced by the continuing presence in act 3 of almost all the characters from act 2. The Student and the Young Lady are now in the foreground instead of the background, and the Colonel and the Mummy—“the parents”—remain in the oval room following the fatal ghost supper that has just ended.

After approximately five minutes of performance, however, the audience learns through the young couple's conversation that Hummel's funeral has already taken place; thus it is not seeing a scene directly subsequent in time to the death scene of Hummel that took place at the end of act 2. This detail is one of the ever more numerous contradictions between what the audience thinks it sees and what is actually presented. Törnqvist affirms this interpretation of the play: “The fundamental theme or leitmotif of The Ghost Sonata is found in the conflict between illusion and reality, between Sein and Schein. In the antithesis between mask and face, façade and interior, word and deed, in the depiction of the dead—everywhere we are confronted with the fundamental idea that the world is not what it looks like and mankind not what it seems to be.”²⁹ Strindberg has transformed not only the Student (who, as Törnqvist has pointed out, is the protagonist-observer in the play) but also every spectator into an active participant-observer in the revelation of deceptions and lies and the discovery of something that at least for the moment seems to be closer to the truth. The audience thus becomes involved in the actual process of discovery, Aristotelian anagorisis, not only through the mediation of the characters and their dialogue but through directly presented theatrical events. In this kind of direct presentation the spectators are no longer passive eavesdroppers who can sit back and pass moral judgments on what they see. Instead they have become active participants in the process of perception and interpretation itself, just as the protagonist perceives and interprets what to him seems to be the truth.

The “camera” Strindberg has introduced as a mediator between the fictional events and the audience does not necessarily bring the audience closer to the truth of the depicted reality in The Ghost Sonata. Rather, it brings it so close to the action, selecting the angles and points of view in such a narrow manner, that the moment new information is available, enabling the audience to make new connections and draw different conclusions—which the very limited “camera angle” has left unexplored or ambiguous—the fictional reality itself has to be reinterpreted and reevaluated. The problem is not that the “camera” lies; it just gives a very limited and selective slice of reality, one that can heavily distort the images projected, especially in their relationship to the fictional world as a whole. By presenting in The Ghost Sonata the possibility of distortions of fictional reality and by emphasizing the role of the spectators as participant-observers in such clear terms, Strindberg has in effect precisely identified the limitations in the methods of representation and perception that the realist theater thought it could solve unambiguously by tearing down the fourth wall of the drawing room, thereby opening it up for what was considered “objective” observation. Strindberg showed, however, that the closer the distance from which spectators observe an event, the more “subjective” their viewpoints.

The Ghost Sonata also contains an image of inversion that is related to the light-shadow images from Miss Julie and A Dream Play. In the latter plays, death is seen as a photographic image in which there is some kind of exchange between light and shadow. In The Ghost Sonata, this reversal is conceived in terms of language and silence. Hummel claims that languages are codes and that words actually hide the truth. It is only through silence that everything is revealed, he says. Furthermore, it is when the Student wants to tell the Young Lady “his” truth about her beauty that she gradually crumbles behind the death screen. When the screen makes its second appearance in the play, to separate the Young Lady from the world, the Student can only give her his blessings for having been able to escape from all the madness and suffering of this material world.

Just as what the audience sees is a clouded reality, what it hears is masked truth. Silence alone hovers over truth, as in Wittgenstein's enigmatic final statement in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Wovon man nicht darüber, reden kann, muss man schweigen” (What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence). In The Ghost Sonata, this silence is realized through that final exit behind the death screen where some kind of truth can supposedly be reached. But the living have no access to it. In its unattainability it resembles the frustrated attempts of Didi and Gogo to reach the world of Godot, who is situated beyond the place where they are now.

Strindberg leaves no road unexplored in his effort to materialize the grandeur of that beyond. The final gesture of the play, when “the room disappears; Boecklin's Toten-Insel becomes the backdrop,”³⁰ is Strindberg's desperate effort to make the immaterial perceivable. The movement of the “camera” in space thus becomes completely frozen, showing the barren landscape that cannot be further penetrated. If only because the audience's perceptions cannot stretch any farther.

Notes

1. See, e.g., Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).

2. Interview with Ingmar Bergman in Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker, Ingmar Bergman: Four Decades in the Theater (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 222.

3. John Orr, Tragic Drama and Modern Society (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1981), 52. Strindberg's contemporary critics, particularly in Sweden, considered him to be a pathological madman whose writing bore witness to the fragmentary nature of his mind. Only after Max Reinhardt presented his productions of the Chamber Plays in Sweden did the predominantly negative view of them change there too. See Kela Kvam, Max Reinhardt og Strindbergs visionaere dramatik (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1974); Göran Stockenström, Ismael i öknen: Strindberg som mystiker (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1972), 483; and Freddie Rokem, Tradition och förnyelse (Stockholm: Akademilitteratur, 1977), 27-34.

4. Susan Sontag, “Theatre and Film,” in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 103-4. See also, e.g., Nils Beyer, Teater och film (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1944); and Allardyce Nicoll, Film and Theatre (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1936).

5. Sontag, “Theatre and Film,” 104.

6. Martin Lamm's important study on Strindberg, originally published in 1918-20, made the correlation between Strindberg's private life and his art, and many later critics have followed suit. (See n. 17).

7. See, e.g., Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972); William Luhr and Peter Lehman, Authorship and Narrative in the Cinema (New York: Putnam, 1977); and Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).

8. Rune Waldekranz, “Fröken Julie i filmiska gestaltningar,” in Perspektiv på Fröken Julie, ed. Ulla-Britta Lagerroth and Göran Lindström (Stockholm: Rabén and Sjögren, 1972), 135-52.

9. August Strindberg, Samlade skrifter (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1914-21), 23:186. All translations of citations from this source are my own.

10. Ibid., 111-12.

11. Evert Sprinchorn, Strindberg as Dramatist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), 28.

12. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

13. See, e.g., C. E. W. L. Dahlström, Strindberg's Dramatic Expressionism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1930), for an interesting expressionistic interpretation of Strindberg's naturalistic plays.

14. See Peter Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1956), 40-42, who calls this structure “station drama.” (English trans: Theory of the Modern Drama, trans. Michael Hays [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 25-28.)

15. Strindberg, Brev (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1970), 12:279-80. Letter of Mar. 17, 1898. My translation.

16. Strindberg, Samlade skrifter 36:215.

17. Lamm, Strindbergs dramer (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1966), 217; Sprinchorn, Strindberg as Dramatist, 156-58.

18. Lamm, Strindbergs dramer, 331. My translation.

19. Strindberg, Samlade skrifter 36:309.

20. Richard Bark, Strindbergs drömspelsteknik i drama och teater (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1981).

21. Harry Carlson, Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 165.

22. Strindberg, Samlade skrifter 36:282.

23. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. W. Lowrie (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), 52-53. On Kierkegaard's importance for Strindberg see, e.g., E. Johanneson, The Novels of August Strindberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); and Gunnar Brandell, Strindbergs Infernokris (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1950).

24. Sprinchorn writes: “It is worth noting that Strindberg composed The Ghost Sonata and liberated drama from its long enslavement to character and motivation in the same year that Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and shattered the old concepts of the relationship of art to nature” (Strindberg as Dramatist, 276). Sprinchorn does not, however, elaborate the details of the pictorial similarities between the two artists. It is also important in this connection to stress Strindberg's own work as a painter. See Göran Söderström, Strindberg och bildkonsten (Stockholm: Forum, 1972).

25. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 20.

26. S. Rimon, “The Paradoxical Status of Repetition,” Poetics Today 1, no. 4 (1980): 151-59, has, on the basis of Lacan's work, analyzed different categories of repetition that are applicable to modern literature. Metz, in his analysis of film (see n. 7), extends these to include the act of viewing itself as a constant repetitive return to the primal scene of the parents.

27. Strindberg, Samlade skrifter 34:7. See also Rokem, “Dödsdansens första tur,” in Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 1 (1981), where I have indicated how Searle's speech-act theory (John R. Searle, Speech Acts [London, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969]) can be applied to an analysis of the opening scene of The Dance of Death (I) in order to understand the dramatic tensions this kind of unresolved speech-act pattern generates. In the opening scenes of Ionesco's Chairs, it is clear that the old couple is involved in a “game” that has definitely been played a number of times before.

28. References are to Strindberg, Samlade skrifter 45.

29. Egil Törnqvist, Strindbergian Drama: Themes and Structure (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982), 205. See also his more detailed analysis in Bergman och Strindberg: Spöksonaten—drama och iscensättning Dramaten 1973 (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1973).

30. Strindberg, Samlade skrifter 45:211.