[In the following essay, Carlson examines the progrss of Strindberg's naturalistic period, from The Father through Miss Julie to The Creditors.]

The sheer intense virtuosity of Strindberg's performance during his so-called naturalistic period was impressive. He was a diligent journalist, plundering the details of his own life for copy; a developing author, restlessly experimenting with new forms of expression in drama and fiction; and an eloquent mythopoeic artist, constantly searching for ways to anchor the present more firmly in the past.

In his plays there are two progressions apparent from The Father to Creditors. First, there is a process of distillation, Strindberg trying to present what is quintessentially dramatic and nothing more. He scraps the elaborate intrigue apparatus of the well-made play—with its numerous characters, complicated subplots, and heavy exposition—in favor of a minimum of characters presenting the heart of an action in the shortest time possible. In The Father there are nine speaking roles and three acts. In Miss Julie there are only three speaking roles and one act, but there is the complication of a time change: the stage directions call for the sun to rise. Creditors, as well, takes place in one act, but Strindberg took pride in the fact that it was leaner and more compact than Miss Julie; in a letter he boasted: “three persons, one table and two chairs, and no sunrise!”

The other progression involves experimentation in a range of styles that can be seen as representing different phases in the development of dramatic form from more primitive to more sophisticated. The three plays are alike in that they all approach the boundary line of drama and ritual, even to the inclusion of sacrificial victims: in each instance the tragic fate of the protagonist has about it the quality of an offering demanded by the inexorable movement of destiny. The plays differ in that while Miss Julie and Creditors have the superbly disciplined austerity of classical tragedy, drama stripped down to the archetypal confrontation of three actors—protagonist, deuteragonist, and tritagonist—The Father has a rough-hewn, primitive feel, like a chunk of archaic statuary. If Miss Julie and Creditors resemble classical Greek tragedy, The Father seems preclassical, a throwback to an earlier time when conflict was not between two or three characters, but antiphonal, between chorus and chorus leader. At the end it is the Captain versus everyone else, the sacrificial victim versus the followers and servants of the Great Mother.

Like certain Greek tragedies, Miss Julie has two choruses. The first is the group of offstage midsummer celebrants who are heard mocking Julie and Jean in song before they come on stage to dance and sing while the mistress of the manor and her father's valet are making love in his room. The second chorus is Kristin. In true classic spirit she is a reminder to Jean and Julie of the larger social consequences of their actions: she warns them of the price they will have to pay for their indiscretion.

In mood and tone, Creditors differs sharply from its predecessors. The almost formal symmetry of its scene structure, together with the cynical, often brutal, but nevertheless elegant and witty dialogue, make the play a gem of sophisticated black comedy. The streamlined plot involves a man who comes to take vengeance against his former wife by committing a psychic murder of her current husband. Returning incognito to the same resort hotel room he once shared with his wife, Gustav visits Adolph while Tekla is away on a trip and uses the power of suggestion to blacken her image and to produce a fatal attack of epilepsy in his hapless victim. The play's continuous action is separated into three scenes: in the first, Gustav undermines Adolph's faith in his marriage; in the second, Adolph confronts the returning Tekla with his suspicions while Gustav eavesdrops next door; and in the third, Gustav demonstrates Tekla's fickleness while Adolph now eavesdrops and presumably fumes with anger until he suffers the fatal attack.

As was true of his other naturalistic plays, much of the power of Creditors is due neither to its fidelity to an objective, scientific approach, nor its elegant construction; the power is generated by an evocation of mythic forces in conflict.

The mythic setting is the same as it was in The Father and the second half of Miss Julie: after the Fall. In Miss Julie Jean and Julie fearfully await the return of the Count, as Adam and Eve awaited inevitable retribution from Yahweh. In Creditors Yahweh has arrived in the person of Gustav. As we listen to him pretending to speculate to the unsuspecting Adolph about how Tekla and Adolph must have met behind his back, we can also hear the wrathful God of the Book of Genesis describing how he discovered that his laws had been disobeyed:

GUSTAV:
[cooly, almost jokingly]
The husband was on a research trip and she was alone. … Then he arrived and gradually the emptiness was filled. By comparison, the absent one began to fade, for the simple reason that he was at a distance—you know, fading in proportion to the distance. But when they felt passion stirring, they became uneasy—about themselves, their consciences, and about him. They sought refuge and shielded themselves behind fig leaves, played brother and sister, and the more carnal their feelings became, the more spiritual they pretended their relationship to be; … they found each other in a dark corner where they were certain no one could see them. [with mock severity] But they felt that there was one who saw them through the darkness and they became frightened; … he became a nightmare who disturbed their dreams of love, a creditor who knocked at the door; … they heard his disagreeable voice in the stillness of the night. …

(23, 206-207)

There is a peculiar, omniscient quality in the speech, and this is not the only peculiar thing about Gustav: he is uncanny, and what makes the uncanniness particularly effective is that it is rendered subtly. As the play unfolds, the mood is that of a psychological thriller, and the focus of attention is primarily on Adolph, Tekla, or their marriage; we are never encouraged to question deeply Gustav's nature. His cynicism is entertaining and the fact that we do not completely understand at first what he is doing or why he is doing it only stimulates our curiosity and adds to the suspense. When we finally discover that he is Adolph's predecessor, was slandered by Tekla, and depicted as an idiot in one of her novels, we can accept tentatively that his behavior was provoked by revenge, despite the fact that he acts “cooly, almost jokingly” and is curiously devoid of passion. Carl Reinhold Smedmark has described Gustav as the least explained character in the play: “About him we know no more than what his actions reveal and that he helped to shape Tekla's personality.” I think we know a good deal about him, but much of the information is mysterious.

Gustav is first presented as an unknown benefactor, whose visit has had a salutary effect on the precarious state of Adolph's health.

ADOLPH:
In these last eight days you've given me the courage to face life again. It's as if your magnetism radiated over me. To me you've been a watchmaker, fixing the works in my head and rewinding the mainspring.

(197)

The numinous powers ascribed to the visitor—restoring the “courage to face life,” “magnetism,” “watchmaker”—indicate that he might be a healer of some sort. But the healer's powers are frightening.

GUSTAV:
Take my hand!
ADOLPH:
What dreadful power you must have! It's like gripping an electrical machine.

(217-218)

Adolph is constantly startled by how much the stranger knows about his life.

GUSTAV:
What did you say to annoy her?
ADOLPH
You are dreadful! I'm afraid of you! How can you know this?
GUSTAV:
I know what it was. You said: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Flirting at your age, when it's too late for another lover.”
ADOLPH:
Did I say that? I must have said it. But how could you know?

(219-220)

Tekla, too, is fascinated by Gustav's unusual powers—“You've said exactly what I was thinking,” she admits to him, “you've understood me!” (251)—and she finds him disturbing, almost supernaturally so.

TEKLA:
Go away! I'm afraid of you!
GUSTAV:
Why?
TEKLA:
You take away my soul.

(259-260)

Gustav's personal life is only vaguely sketched, and what he says about it himself is sometimes deliberately misleading. He tells Tekla, for example, that he is going to remarry, then later admits he lied.

TEKLA:
And now you're going home to your fiancée!
GUSTAV:
I have none—and never want one! I'm not going home, because I have no home and don't want any.

(267)

The rootlessness Gustav admits to here adds to the uncanniness. When Tekla finally discovers the destructive purpose of his visit, she asks, “Are you absolutely void of feelings?” He replies, “Absolutely” (264-265). A frightening figure without feelings and without a home. Everything we learn about Gustav tends to abstract and dehumanize him. His resemblance to the unforgiving Yahweh, who catches up with Adam and Eve, is reinforced by his occupation: a teacher of dead languages (217). What a splendidly ambivalent image! On the one hand are implied ancient tongues and ancient truths; the languages of the Bible and of religious ritual. On the other hand, obsolescence: the languages are dead and, by implication, so is God. The character becomes an illustration of a paradox Strindberg long found fascinating, one which he would explore intensively after the Inferno. In the conscious mind of modern, skeptical man, God is dead, but in the unconscious mind a presence persists: it is we but also an Other—an awareness with awesome power. Gustav is Adolph's double and he is God, Adolph can no more escape this creditor than Adam could escape Yahweh.

As in Miss Julie, the aspect of the Fall theme stressed in Creditors is alienation. In the fear of the Count in the first play and Gustav in the second is mortal fear of alienation from the divine. A deeper implication is that, although Adam and Eve had to pay a penalty for having tasted the forbidden fruit, the punishment meted out was too severe: banishment from the harmony they shared with God.

The most eloquent expression of the alienation theme appears in the final moments of the play. Behind the dialogue between Tekla and Gustav runs another dialogue: between Eve and Yahweh, with Eve trying to fathom the meaning of alienation from the divine, and Yahweh insistent upon exercising such prerogatives as vengeance.

TEKLA:
How is it that you, who regard me as innocent since I was driven by my nature and the circumstances to behave as I did … how can you think you have the right to vengeance?
GUSTAV:
For that very reason. Because my nature and the circumstances drove me to seek vengeance!
Have you nothing to reproach yourself for?
TEKLA:
Nothing at all! … Christians say that Providence governs our actions, others call it fate. So, we're guiltless, aren't we?
GUSTAV:
… Guiltless, but responsible! Guiltless before Him, who no longer exists; responsible to yourself and to your fellow human beings.
I'm going to leave by the eight o'clock boat. …
TEKLA:
Without reconciliation?
GUSTAV:
Reconciliation? You use so many words that have lost their meaning.

(264-267)

Strindberg at one time thought of ending the play the moment Adolph reenters the room and collapses in the doorway. In the final version two additional speeches follow the collapse, resuming and concluding the sotto voce dialogue of Eve and Yahweh.

TEKLA:
[throwing herself upon Adolph's body and caressing him]
… No, God, he doesn't hear. He's dead! Oh, God in heaven, oh my God, help us, help us!
GUSTAV:
She really does love him, too! … Poor creature!

(269)

Something has happened to Gustav in this last speech. It is as if after disbelieving in human emotion he suddenly has cause to question the disbelief. But the gap between Tekla's cry for help and Gustav's continued detachment—between mortal aspiration and divine aloofness—is too great to bridge. Gustav resembles the God of Strindberg's creation play: the demiurge, who creates the world for his own amusement, like a game, and is oblivious to the meaning of human suffering. At the end of Creditors the game suddenly ends and only the gamemaster is ignorant of how high the stakes were.

Throughout the play the loss of Eden, the loss of harmony, implies a longing to restore it. This longing is what Adolph is talking about when he explains how and why he came to need Tekla: “She would be what God was for me before I became an atheist. … I cannot live without … a woman to respect and worship.” Gustav replies in disgust, “Oh hell! You might as well take God back then, if you need to have something to genuflect to” (213). He is contemptuous of the lure of the eternal feminine and assumes the watchmaker role Adolph attributed to him earlier. Woman as a machine, Gustav asserts, is an inferior version of man:

GUSTAV:
You see, something is wrong with the mechanism! The watchcase is that of an expensive lever-escapement, but the works are cheap cylinder-escapement.
Have you ever seen a naked woman? Yes, of course! An adolescent male with teats, an immature man, a child that shot up but stopped developing, a chronic anemic who has regular hemorrhages thirteen times a year! Whatever can come of that?

(214)

There is an outrageous objectivity in Gustav's tone, not only here but elsewhere in the play, an arrogant distancing; this is a manufacturer talking about an imperfect product, or the creator talking about an abortive creation. The effect produced is one of the secrets of the play's continuing popularity with theatre audiences: Gustav's outrageousness is amusing as well as shocking, witty as well as uncanny. “You have a way of saying rude things,” Tekla tells him, “that makes it impossible to be angry with you” (260). Strindberg must have been aware that if the character came across as too portentously, too obviously God-like, the play would turn into leaden melodrama. Probably nothing is more responsible for production difficulties with his plays than the failure to understand how marvelously he could use humor both to mitigate and enrich the pessimism of his themes. “After the Fall” has comic as well as tragic aspects. The archly amusing dialogue of Creditors works beautifully to mute without obscuring the uncanniness. When Edward Brandes wrote in a review of the published play that he found Gustav a moralizing avenger, Strindberg hastened to warn the actor who was to perform the role in the first production:

Dear Hunderup, perform the whole role playfully good-natured … and … solely as psychological demolition work—so that there is truth to Tekla's words: that she finds Gustav “so free from morality and preaching.”

In other words: Gustav as the cat playing with the mouse before he bites him! Never angry, never moral, never preaching!

The most important clue to Gustav's mythic identity is in the last scene. While Adolph eavesdrops in the adjoining room, Tekla unknowingly allows her former husband to entice her into a compromising intimacy, and she is horrified when Gustav makes her realize the situation.

GUSTAV:
Do you know where your husband is?
TEKLA:
Now I think I know! … He's in your room next door! And he's heard everything! And seen everything! And he who sees his fylgia dies!

(268)

A fylgia in Norse mythology is an attendant spirit, a kind of follower or second ego, capable of assuming human form. English-speaking translators of Creditors have rendered fylgia as “guardian spirit,” “familiar spirit,” and “ghost”. In 1894, when a French production was being prepared at Lugné-Poe's Théâtre de l'Oeuvre and translator Georges Loiseau wrote the author for advice, Strindberg recommended that Tekla's line read: “Celui qui a vu son ombre, va mourir,” but ombre (ghost or shadow) did not quite satisfy him, for he added: “In our mythology to see oneself (Sosie?) [double, second self] was an omen of death.” The playwright's efforts at clarification went for naught, however; the line was omitted in the published version.

Double, second self, shadow, ghost: each points up Gustav's uncanniness. But for what purpose? Was Strindberg simply adding a spooky quality to the play, or was he attempting to illuminate character relationships and theme? To answer this, we need to know more about Gustav's intentions: what has he really come for? At the opening of the play the one thing we know for certain is that he is interested in probing, searching, and digging. After learning that Adolph has a serious marital problem he asks,

GUSTAV:
“Tell me, since you've already taken me so deeply into your confidence, have you no other secret wound that torments you? It's unusual to find only one cause for disharmony, since life is positively gaudy with opportunities for things to go wrong. Have you no corpse in the cargo that you're keeping to yourself?”

(203)

For English-speaking readers the phrase “corpse in the cargo” (“lik i lasten”) is more meaningfully translated as “skeleton in the closet,” but what is lost thereby is an expressive nautical resonance. An old superstition among Scandinavian sailors holds that a ship with a corpse on board will sink. Ibsen is usually credited with adding a metaphoric meaning: in a letter to Georg Brandes he used a corpse in the cargo to indicate the ghosts of old ideas that must be dumped overboard so that new ideas can be heard. But the image has more poetic meaning than this. Peer Gynt, returning home to Norway as an old man after a wasted, unfulfilled life, is also a corpse in the cargo, and the ship he travels on goes down.

In Creditors, the corpse is a buried mystery that perhaps should remain buried. Gustav, after first trying to get Adolph to reveal the “secret wound,” seems to change his mind and indicates that it would be better to leave well enough alone:

GUSTAV:
“You see, there are disharmonies in life that can never be resolved. So, you have to stuff wax in your ears and work! Work, grow old, and pile masses of new impressions on the cargo hatch—that way the corpse will remain quiet”

(204)

Piling “masses of new impressions on the cargo hatch” brings to mind the passage discussed earlier in connection with Master Olof about the organist in The Romantic Organist on Rånö, whose reluctance to remember the circumstances of his mother's death caused him to “pile masses of impressions” on “the black spot” (21, 245). Not surprisingly, perhaps, Creditors and the novella were written at about the same time and provide another example of Strindberg's ability to make similar or even identical images function well in different contexts.

Adolph, like the organist, has something to hide, and Gustav is only feigning disinterest in finding out what it is; he is deadly serious about collecting the corpse, and he ferrets for it until Adolph is destroyed. If Gustav is one of the “creditors” the play is about, it is not in an ordinary sense. His uncanniness, we can now see, is similar to the uncanniness of the character in fairy tales who reappears after a long absence to collect debts that have accumulated as promises unfulfilled. Adolph owes a debt, not so much to Gustav as to himself. He has failed to pursue the quest for the lost harmony properly; there are disharmonies still to be resolved within.

In seven years of marriage Adolph has done all the giving and Tekla all the taking. The consequence is that he has become hopelessly dependent on her. He sometimes thought of being free of her, but no sooner had she gone for a time than he missed her dreadfully. He is an Adam whose undoing was the making of Eve:

ADOLPH:
[I] longed for her as if for my arms and legs! It's strange, but sometimes it seems to me as if she were not a separate person but a part of me, an intestine that carried away my will, my desire to live. It's as if I had deposited in her my very solar plexus that the anatomists talk about

(23, 194)

His longing for Tekla has its roots in the same problem suffered by the Captain in The Father: a difficulty in separating the need for maternal love from the need for sexual love. And Tekla, like Laura, no longer wants to play impossible roles:

TEKLA:
I've grown tired of being a nursemaid.
ADOLPH:
Do you hate me?
TEKLA:
No! I don't, and I don't think I can, either! But that's probably because you're a child.

(242-243)

Tekla is accused of having totally devoured Adolph—his courage, soul, knowledge, and faith—and Gustav characterizes the situation as an instance of “cannibalism.” Yet, when Tekla appears, she turns out not to be the terribly evil person conjured up in the two men's conversation. The reason Adolph is so dependent on her and has allowed his marriage to deteriorate is that he had wanted Tekla to be his “better self,” to which Gustav responds with advice Adolph might have profited from earlier: “Be your own better self” (209).

Gustav is not simply a bitter former husband seeking revenge, he is a force of destiny thrusting Adolph into a terrible self-confrontation, and his uncanniness serves the purpose Freud indicated in his essay “The Uncanny”: “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” As fylgia, Gustav is Adolph's double, and a double, says Freud, is a “ghastly harbinger of death.” The terrifying and familiar thing that Adolph is led back to by Gustav's presence is a fatal psychic weakness, a lack of will.

When Adolph speaks of a loss of will, he resembles the protagonists in Strindberg's other naturalistic plays. The Captain says that he was an unwanted child, conceived against his parents' will and so was born “without a will” (66). Julie says that as far as she knows she came into the world against her mother's wishes, and when she wants Jean to give her the strength to commit suicide, she says to him: “You know what I should do, but lack the will to. … Will it, Jean, order me to carry it out!” (185).

Strindberg connects faith and will in an essay, “Mysticism—For the Present,” written between the time he wrote The Father and Miss Julie and Creditors: “Faith is nothing other than a concentration of wish and desire heightened into conscious will, and the will is the greatest manifestation of nerve movement and therefore summons for its disposal the maximum possible energy” (22, 186-187). Faith and will become the instruments through which psychic energy flows; when they are absent, the individual lacks the means to cope with life's problems. In the context of Strindberg's naturalistic plays, lack of will represents the incapacity to battle and conquer the destructive aspects of the unconscious. The Captain cannot overcome the challenge of the Great Mother; Julie canot deal with the fear of Eros; and Adolph cannot resolve psychic disharmonies on his own, as an independent person, in order to become his own “better self.”

Perhaps in the concept of a lack of will Strindberg was searching for a modern psychological mechanism equivalent to the tragic flaw of Greek tragedy. Both are like the concealed flaw in a piece of metal that is often invisible to the naked eye. The metal appears to be perfectly sound, until one day, under a certain kind of stress, it cracks. The concealed flaw is the corpse in the cargo Gustav is after. In this way he becomes, along with Laura in The Father or Jean in Miss Julie, not so much a villain as a catalyst who precipitates the moment of fatal stress. The Captain, Julie, and Adolph are not crucified by their adversaries; they impale themselves on their own weaknesses. The power of the unconscious arouses in them a feeling of dread, that paralyzing combination of fear and fascination. They feel a calling to fight against the power, but they are doomed soldiers in a futile war. They cannot win because of the ambivalent feelings they have about the enemy: their desire to win is undermined by a desire to surrender; the desire to live, to answer the challenge of Eros, is canceled by a stronger allegiance to Thanatos. Gustav is the herald who reminds Adolph of the calling that went unanswered, the self that was never realized.

Gustav and Laura belong to that tribe of dramatic figures—Iago is also a member—often described as pure evil. It is difficult to find a personal motivation in them strong enough to explain the terrible destruction they bring about. Hate might explain it, but Gustav especially is not really emotionally involved enough to hate. We can understand these characters better in terms of the concept so highly valued by programmatic naturalists: survival of the fittest. Rather than forces of pure evil, they are nature's instruments for finding and eliminating weakness. In a sense, they are no more evil than any predator who searches for the one lame animal in a herd and then tracks it endlessly until it is brought down. Consequently, the sense of awe we feel in the tragic destiny of a figure like the Captain, or Othello, is not in the distance they fall but in the sovereign majesty of a nature constantly balancing the scales. “I can find the joy of life,” Strindberg said in the preface to Miss Julie, “in its cruel and powerful battles, and my enjoyment comes from being able to know something, being able to learn something” (23, 101).

If Strindberg's so-called naturalistic plays survive as viable stage pieces that attract actors and audiences alike, while other specimens of the genre, even from eminences like Zola, are dead, it is because Strindberg knew how to stage the kind of confrontations that make for great drama. The intersection at which his characters meet is only incidentally the “scientifically” fixed point of historic time and place defined by late-nineteenth-century literature, where the laws of heredity and environment reign. His people obey higher laws than deterministic naturalism. “Human society,” said Joyce, “is the embodiment of changeless laws which the whimsicalities and circumstances of men and women involve and overwrap. … Drama has to do with the underlying laws first, in all their nakedness and divine severity, and only secondarily with the motley agents who bear them out.”

The real adversarial relationship between Strindberg's “motley agents” is not character versus character but the hero versus the Other. In The Father and Miss Julie the Other—Laura's mother in the first play, the Count in the second—is offstage, as if to indicate that its presence is so terrible that one dare not face it directly. In Creditors Strindberg brings the Other, Gustav, onstage, and the enemy proves as formidable as we had been led to anticipate. But whether offstage or on, the Other is both more and less than an external force; the enemy for the hero is within.

A paradox exists: because the enemy is an intimate, because the enemy is oneself, even as the Other throws down the gauntlet and challenges to mortal combat, it is a potential ally. Intimate enemy can also be intimate friend. But there is a big “if”: enemy can become friend only if the hero can transcend the fear and respect that are so rightly due the Other as personification of the awesome powers of the unconscious, and learn trust. From Master Olof through Creditors we have seen that the heroes either perish, as the Captain, Julie, and Adolph do, or capitulate to a life of slavery, as do Olof and Jean. They could not learn that a calling involves the paradoxical obligation both to battle and to trust the Other.

Between 1893 and 1897 a crucial hiatus occurred in Strindberg's career as a dramatist. He not only abandoned drama but belles lettres generally. When he returned to playwriting in To Damascus, his hero's struggle for self-realization moved into a new phase. The hero and the Other continued to grapple, and the stakes were just as high, but the hero had a acquired a measure of confidence and the contest become less one-sided. A particular mythic image now appeared and reappeared in Strindberg's fiction and drama: Jacob wrestling with the angel. The Strindbergian hero had learned that like Jacob he could wrestle all night with the Other and not only survive but earn his opponent's respect and even support. Of course, a price must be paid: Jacob walked lame for the rest of his life. And before one exults in the victory it would be well to remember, as Jung observed, that the angel emerges from the fight without a scratch.