[In the following essay, Davy analyzes Crimes and Crimes as a tragicomedy.]

How could a play entitled Crime and Crime and
obviously preoccupied with a conflict between
forces of good and evil be devoid of moral
content?

—James L. Allen, Jr.¹

Don't you know this is the witching hour?
That's when you hear things—and see things
sometimes. Staying up all night has the
same sort of magic as crime. Puts you over
and above the laws of nature.

—Crimes and Crimes²

August Strindberg's comedy Crimes and Crimes is not “unknown” because of Strindberg—the play is clearly designated “A Comedy” on the title page—but because of the virtual unanimity of critical response to the play which totally ignores this classification. Although a considerable degree of variability exists between individual shadings of interpretation, the vast majority of criticism is of one mind in taking the “dark” or “serious” manifest content of the play at face value.

As Burry Jacobs observes, “The generic subtitle of Brott och brott has caused readers problems from the very start. … when he produced the play in 1902, Max Reinhardt relabelled it ‘tragicomedy’.”³ As is evident from the following representative sampling of critical opinion, this “relabelling” has continued virtually all the way to the present day:

The contest … comes to be reminiscent of the struggle between good and evil forces for the protagonist's soul in the typical morality drama. …

… the battle of the sexes in Crime and Crime is representative of another battle in human experience, the battle between good and evil.⁴

[T]he play is substantially a study of guilt and retribution … (and) a demonstration of the workings of sin. …⁵

Though Strindberg attacks the evil will, the secret crime, he defends it … with characteristic ambivalence. … The result of this line of thought is, obviously, that a crime is something good … that it is a grace bestowed from on high, provided it is followed by pangs of conscience and purification through suffering.⁶

Both the literary and theatrical value of the play depend upon the skill with which Strindberg and his producers create a dark mood that suggests moral license and depravity.⁷

There Are Crimes and Crime [sic] may, then, be considered a study of guilt in dramatic form.⁸

[Crimes and Crimes is] a play dealing with success, arrogance, and the power of secret desires. … The subject is the guilt felt by the hero for imagined crimes.⁹

One possible clue that the majority view of the play has been misdirected lies in a remark of F. L. Lucas, who dismisses the play in a single comment contained in a note: “I have not thought it worthwhile to deal with Crime and Crime … Though intense in certain scenes, it seems a rather foolish play.¹⁰ This verdict on Crimes and Crimes is consistent with the relatively sparse body of commentary surrounding the work. Two major Strindberg studies of relatively recent origin—Egil Tornqvist's Strindbergian Drama: Themes and Structure (1982), and Harry Carlson's Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth (1982)—do not deal with it at all, a silence that clearly speaks an opinion inharmony with Lucas's appraisal of the play as “foolish” and unworthy of analysis. But is it not possible that Strindberg himself was well aware of the apparent discrepancy between comedy and his own play, and that the foolishness in question does not pertain to Crimes and Crimes but to a body of criticism which superimposes its own dramatic objective upon the play and then damns the play for failing to achieve it? Is it not also possible that the same cluster of characteristics—crime and the guilty conscience, “thought crime,” the wanton abandonment of family and friends, the death of a child, and so on—which fails to cohere as a serious drama might well succeed if viewed from another, “comic,” perspective? What might such a perspective be?

In an essay entitled “Strindberg: The Absence of Irony,” R. J. Kaufmann takes issue with George Steiner's frequently cited view that Strindberg's dramatic work is the product of personal obsession and is lacking in unity and coherence.¹¹ Kaufmann agrees with the former view but argues that the obsessive character of Strindberg's writing leads to drama that is “overunified,” and to dramatic “characters [that] are not free to choose, they cannot release their obsessive grip long enough to change, to choose or learn, they lack the illuminating irony and self-humor which is the emotional expression of this missing freedom.”¹² Kaufmann then turns his attention to Strindberg's own views on “humor,” citing a passage in The Son of a Servant, and then commenting:

Humor reflects the double reaction of man to conventional morality. … Humor speaks with two tongues—one of the satyr, and the other of the monk. The humorist lets the maenad loose, but for old unsound reasons thinks that he ought to flog her with rods. … The greatest modern writers have thrown away the rod, and play the hypocrite no longer, but speak their minds plainly out.

As always, Strindberg unquestioningly assumes that sincerity is the same as single-mindedness. … The doubleness of vision necessary to comic writing, from Aristophanes to Shaw, he sees as hypocritical compromise. The freedom of an irony which says one thing and means another, which lets folly be spoken and then measures it, he will not consider. … There is here as elsewhere a disastrous separation between the intellect and the feelings.¹³

In my view Kaufmann's identification of obsessive “singlemindedness” and the absence of self-irony as a dominant characteristic of Strindbergian drama is generally an accurate observation, with, however, Crimes and Crimes standing out as a single and notable exception. I would argue that “self-irony” is not only evident throughout the play but is indeed the controlling characteristic that defines the arena in which the comedy of Crimes and Crimes occurs. In being thus “self” oriented the play is typical of Strindberg, but singular and atypical in its quality of ironic self-reflection¹⁴ spun out in dramatic form. In a sense, Strindberg has taken both his own advice and Kaufmann's; he has “let the maenad—or satyr—loose,” but has sent the monk stalking after (comic spyslass in hand), and in doing so has achieved that “doubleness of vision” which Kaufmann accurately identifies as essential to comedic writing.

A clue to what I mean here occurs in the passage cited in the epigraph to this essay. The passage occurs near the middle of Act Two; Maurice is nervously reflecting upon his initial transgressions, and Henriette impatiently responds: “Don't you know this is the witching hour? That's when you hear things—and see things sometimes. Staying up all night has the same sort of magic as crime. Pats you over and above the laws of nature” (511). The key ideas here are “magic” and “over and above the laws of nature.” I would argue that in this deceptively “naturalistic” play, Strindberg has created a consciously artificial world operating under subtly altered “laws of nature” wherein the sense of being circumscribed by irreconcilable psychic conflict has been “magically” transformed. The playwright has taken his own habitual psychic frown and placed it, as it were, in front of a fun-house mirror: the “serious themes” remain but are now addressed in a context where they can be quite consciously played with. Indeed, this sense of conscious play seems to me the operative law governing the world of Crimes and Crimes.

Such a dramatic strategy is clearly at a far remove from Kaufmann's charge of an absent self-irony in the playwright's work but just as clearly consistent, as previously noted, with artistic “self” absorption. The most prominent feature of the play that illustrates this point is the central motif of “thought crime” itself. The morbidly introspective artist who created a domestic and naturalistic world of sexual paranoia in The Father (but where the true dramatic arena is the psychology of the protagonist and the playwright) and the overtly “expressionistic” dramatist of The Ghost Sonata (whose Mummy exclaims: “Out Crimes and our secrets and our guilt bind us together! We have split up and gone our separate ways an infinite number of times. But we're always drawn back together again. …”¹⁵) is invariably “drawn back again” to his own obsessive psychology. The play, therefore, like so much of his other work, is very much “about” Strindberg but about us as well. The comic logic of Crimes and Crimes is in a sense the converse, in dramatic form, of the old joke, “Everything I like is either illegal, immoral or fattening.” The (self-ironic) humor of this observation is derived from its underlying “dark” content: the too frequent gulf in human experience between what we perceive as “good” or morally good on the one hand, and what we spontaneously desire on the other, The “joke” neutralizes the psychological tension, usually trivial but at times profound, between the “maenad and the monk” (or between the Freudian “id” and “superego”) that are so deeply embedded in human nature.

The terrain of this conflict is of course the mind or psychology, and so also the playing field of Crimes and Crimes. The dramatic converse of the above joke is an overtly serious action that covertly or strategically plays with the absurdity of this unresolvable predicament of the human condition.

Thought Crime! Is it not possible that this pivotal concept around which the entire play is based is intended as a joke? Is the soldier under fire who thinks and even speaks of running away but nevertheless holds his ground guilty of a “coward crime”? Is a partner in a marriage who entertains erotic thoughts of another guilty of adultery? Are we morally, or spiritually, responsible for our thoughts or our deeds; and are not our deeds, including our “non-sins of omission,” all the more meritorious when maintained against strong, “bad,” impulses to the contrary? The point seems too obvious to be in need of any real argument.

The concept of play, particularly the special category of “mind play” discussed above, goes to the very heart of the idea and function of dramatic comedy. Johan Huizinga says of play that,

[I]t is a significant function—that is to say, there is some sense to it. In play there is something “at play” which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. … However we may regard it, the very fact that play has a meaning implies a non-materialistic quality in the nature of the thing itself.¹⁶

(original emphasis)

One key component of this “other-worldly” quality, says Huizinga, is play's powerful capacity to absorb our attention progressively: “This intensity of, and absorption in, play finds no explanation in biological analysis. Yet in this intensity, this absorption … lies the very essence, the primordial quality of play.”¹⁷ Hans-Georg Gadamer expands on the significance of play's power to “absorb” the mind:

It is part of play that [its] movement is … without effort. It happens, as it were, by itself. The ease of play, which naturally does not mean that there is any real absence of effort, but phenomenologically refers only to the absence of strain, is experienced subjectively as relaxation. The structure of play absorbs the player into itself, and thus takes from him the burden of the initiative, which constitutes the actual strain of existence.¹⁸

If we were to summarize the respective points of Huizinga and Gadamer above, we would arrive at something like the following formula: play is a significant and “meaningful” function that can totally absorb the mind, transcend the demands and problems of the “real” or material world as it does so, and simultaneously “relax” and release the mind via this very process of “transcendent” absorption. Whatever else it might be, therefore, play carries a deeply inherent quality of affirmation of self and the world, and the relationship between the two, a spirit which is of course closely associated with dramatic comedy. It is therefore astonishing, with reference to the “comedy” of Crimes and Crimes and the negation of that label by critical consensus, that the influence of Fredrich Nietzsche, particularly Nietzsche's concept of “eternal return,” has been entirely overlooked.

That Strindberg was influenced by the ideas of Nietzsche is hardly in doubt: “My spirit has received in its uterus a tremendous outpouring of seed from Frederick Nietzsche, so that I feel as full as a pregnant bitch. He was my husband,”¹⁹ Nietzsche's concept of the “eternal return” was first mentioned in The Gay Science (1882) and was first fully articulated as the central idea of what is probably his most famous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885).²⁰ Strindberg, as the self-proclaimed “pregnant bitch” of his philosophical husband, carried on an extensive correspondence with Nietzsche which establishes that he had enthusiastically consumed Zarathustra by 1888.²¹

What exactly does the “eternal return” mean, how does it appear in Crimes and Crimes, and what is its significance to the play of “comedy” in the work. There are five more or less explicit references in the play, and without reference to the connection with Nietzsche, they might well appear as the very immature around which the “dark” thematic significance of the play is wound. The first overt reference occurs in Act Two when Maurice, at Henriette's urging, anticipates and “rehearse[s] the scene” of Adolphe's arrival at the café to confront the trio's changed relationship; Henriette enthusiastically responds: “Wonderful! Right on the nose! You must have been in this situation before,” (510-11). The second reference occurs later in Act Two, immediately after the issue of Marion has been raised; Henriette exclaims, “Your child will kill our love!” and Maurice responds: “Never! Don't you see, our love will kill every thing that stands in its way, but it cannot be killed!” Henriette then consults the fates by “cut^[ting^] a deck of cards” (conveniently at hand), with the following result: “You see! The five of diamonds! The guillotine!—Is it really possible that everything is all worked out in advance? That our thoughts are led like water through pipes, and that there's nothing we can do about it?” (517). The third reference occurs near the end of Act Three where we find that time has confirmed the oracle of the deck of cards: Marion has died, the couple have been arrested, Maurice's theatrical success has collapsed, and now Adolphe has been abruptly elevated to the category of successful artist, as he and Henriette ruminate at the same table in the same café where Maurice and Henriette had celebrated earlier. Henriette says, “Strange how everything comes again, everything repeats itself. Exactly the same situation, the same words, as yesterday when we were waiting for you. …” (534-35). The last two references occur in Act Four, the first shortly after the now reunited Maurice and Henriette have failed to commit suicide and have exhausted themselves with a long round of recriminations and accusations: “Oh, Maurice! We're running around in circles, like slaves on a treadmill whipping each other. Let's stop before we drive each other crazy” (543). The final reference occurs in the play's final scene, where the threat of “craziness” seems possibly confirmed as Emile “returns” to Maurice a package from his sister. Maurice opens it: “The tie and the gloves that Jeanne gave me for the opening night of my play, I let Henriette throw them into the fire. … How did they get here? Everything is dug again, everything comes back!” (554).

The continual return of this motif (and there are additional implied instances) is so persistent as at least to imply its presence as a significant component in the fabric of Strindberg's play, as it is indeed in Nietzsche's philosophy Nietzsche asserts that a world lacking a transcendental dimension would be of necessity finite; in a finite creation, given enough time and despite—or because of—the continual flux of birth, death, and the mutability of all things, every possible “instant” of creation—with all things as they once were—would at length reformulate itself, or “return.”²² The eternal return thus turns any metaphysical notion of “eternity” on its head, as it assigns a new kind of “immortal” status to each instant of this life and this world even as it passes away.

What are the consequences of this perspective for the human psychology that contemplates it? At the conclusion of The Gay Science, Nietzsche expresses the significance of this idea via an aphorism in which a “demon” whispers the eternal return into the ear of a human and then asks rhetorically if this would not be perceived as appalling and monstrous, with “nothing [ever] new” and every “pain … joy … thought and sigh … small or great” doomed to eternally come again, exactly as before. Or, and the aphorism concludes with this question:

The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?²³

(emphasis added)

If “everything comes back,” where does “everything” begin? Are we re-experiencing—trapped!—what has already occurred, implying that the “world creates us,” or experiencing what will return for the first time in the “now” of the present moment even as it passes, implying “we create the world”? The question is irrelevant because the conception is not linear but circular: all “returning pasts,” “waiting futures,” and “lived experiences” are folded together in the eternal now of the present moment. And it is the very finitude and “materialism” of the conception that leads to the powerful and extraordinary impetus to affirmation implied in the concluding statement from The Gay Science quoted above. The huge “deck of cards” is not infinitely huge; some cards are present; others are absent: the deck is created only in the eternal now of lived experience. We create eternity right now. And the realization (or indeed, Artistotelian anagnorisis) of this point leads to the (incredulous!) smile of comedy rather than the frown of tragedy, for surely we would “crave nothing more fervently” than to “act” forever in the one archetype rather than the other. Nietzsche reflects upon his own initial “realization” of the concept in Ecce Home (1888; 1908): “… the idea of the eternal recurrence [original emphasis], the extremest formula of affirmation that can ever be attained [emphasis added]—belongs to the August of the year 1881: it was scribbled down on a piece of paper, with the postscript: ‘6,000 feet beyond man and time.’”²⁴

Nietzsche, at “6,000 feet beyond,” was clearly living in his own world at the moment of conceiving the eternal return, and so, I have argued, is Strindberg/Maurice in Crimes and Crimes. It is indeed a world full of “woe,” but one cauted at an odd, “funhouse” angle so as to enable Strindberg to join Nietzsche, in Daniel Chapelle's words, “in unbridled and life-affirming experimentation and playfullness.”²⁵ “Playfulness” is explicitly rendered in the first of the play's “return” instances cited above, as Henriette's calls for Maurice to “rehearse the scene” (510) of Adolphe's impending arrival. Strindberg, as “play”-wright Maurice, here metatheatrically “plays a scene” within his own play, a sequence of self-reference whose artifice is only additionally enhanced via its construction within the growing “dark” scenario of a typical “Strindbergian drama.” But is not this “darkness” rendered simply ridiculous upon consideration that its centerpiece of the grand and destructive passion of the two lovers is nothing more than “water [flowing] through pipes,” (517) an assemblage, indeed, constructed by Strindberg himself, grinning in the wings? As Adolphe earnestly recounts to Madame Catherine in Act Three after briefly reviewing the tragic history of the pair: “It was as if an invisible being had woven the plot and driven them into each other's arms” (521). But the tragic couple, by Act Four seemingly trapped like Paolo and Francesca to blow around forever in the second circle of hell²⁶ (“Oh, Maurice! We're running around in circles, like slaves on a treadmill whipping each other” [543]), are perhaps comically redeemed shortly thereafter by Maurice's cry, “For God's sake, let's get off this merry-go-round,” (546) shortly before the close of the first scene of the Act. Circling still, the pair have at least removed from slave's quarters to the carnival, where the gaudy, painted mounts (horses, dragons, etc.) on the spinning wheel bob merrily up and down like the respective fortunes of playwright and painter in Crimes and Crimes. And the weird “laws of nature” of the spooky fun house located next door are clearly in evidence as Jeanne's gifts to Maurice, burned up by Henriette in Act Two, are “dug up” and come round again shortly before the play's climax (Maurice “How did they get here? … [E]verything comes back!” [554]).

But is there anything else? Strindberg called the play a comedy, and the reiterated comic affirmation of the eternal return would seem to confirm the playwright's stated intention, and yet there is much else in the play that remains still shrouded, apparently, in the gloom of psychic darkness. Let us return to the play and see what additional light might be shed upon it.

The first scene of Crimes and Crimes is set “in the Montparnasse Cemetery,” where Jeanne is waiting anxiously for Maurice to appear. Our attention is quickly drawn to the image of the cross with the somber Latin inscription, “O Crux! Ave Spes Unica! [Hail the Cross! Our only hope!]” (485). Critics have made much of this image as one of the obviously “serious” opening motifs in the play, and Strindberg's use of it does indeed seem significant but in quite another sense. Why, we must ask, is Jeanne meeting Maurice in a cemetery in the first place? There is no logical reason in the circumstances of the play for choosing such an ostentatiously gloomy rendezvous, and this aura of incongruity is only enhanced by the spectacle of little Marion, who accompanies her mother, “playing” amidst the tombstones and the dead and dying flowers of the departed.²⁷ The cemetery functions as a visual metaphor for the “oppressive” thematic material of the play, and yet when we consider it in the context of the logical circumstances of the plot, its use seems highly artificial and thus tends to highlight precisely this characteristic—as opposed to the grimly “realistic” interpretation—of the play's overall “crime” motif. The wages of sin may indeed be death and the grave, but the symbolic embracing of this “end” before the “cause” has even appeared seems slyly calculated to evoke at least a faint sense of the absurd from the very outset of the play.

The next event in the play is the appearance of Jeanne's brother Emile, and the discussion between the two carries an obvious expository function. However, Emile's appearance in this context provides the occasion for an additional infusion of the aura of absurdity that colors the entire scene. He enters with the line: “Hello, Sis! What are you doing here?” (487). This question—which we were just asking ourselves—might well be turned upon its author: what is Emile doing there? Is he simply out taking the air, strolling through the graveyard, when he stumbles upon his sister of all people? Thus far in the play the characters seem to be functioning in the manner of carrier pigeons, all homing in upon the cemetery with a pre-ordained “inevitability” that would appear distinctly ominous, were it not even more distinctly ridiculous.

This aura of the absurd and even surreal reappears immediately in scene two, of the scene shifts to “The Crêmerie,” the modest café operated by Madame Catherine (493). It is here that we—and Maurice—first encounter Henriette, whose initial appearance in the play is as strikingly exotic and sensational as was Jeanne's conversely “dark” appearance in the gloom of the cemetery, and equally as exaggerated and artificial. Maurice is already seated in the restaurant when Henriette abruptly enters, asks for Adolphe, and immediately exits; she spins in and out of the scene as a kind of glittering erotic cyclone, instantly bedazzling the fatally attracted Maurice. “Who in blue blazes was that?!” he exclaims (494),²⁸ and continues shortly afterward: “You saw, didn't you? She didn't walk through the door: she vanished, and a little whirlwind sprang up which pulled me after her.—Go ahead and laugh!—But why is that palm tree on the sideboard still shaking? What a diabolic woman!” (495). Henriette's “diabolic” presence sends Maurice into an erotic swoon that will continue until the end of the play, despite the fact that he has seen her for all of about fifteen seconds. This quality of giddy unreality generated by the initial contact between the lovers only intensifies as the scene continues. Madame Catherine's response to the seismic event of the sighting of Henriette is almost as hyper-accentuated as that of Maurice, as she at once sets about her series of frantic “warnings” that continue throughout the scene: “Well, then, get out, get out!” (495). After Henriette re-enters the scene somewhat later, Madame Catherine will twice gesture “warning^[s^]” to Maurice (496) and “^[knock^] over … glasses and bottles” in her efforts to intervene (501), and the scene will conclude with the following burst of near hysteria:

MADAME Catherine:
Don't do it! Don't do it!
MAURICE:
Do what?
MADAME Catherine:
Just don't do it!
MAURICE:
Fear not!

(502)

Given the instantaneous zeal with which she takes up her role as “blocking agent,” Madame Catherine's function in the scene is as incongruous and artificial as the earlier initial appearances of Jeanne, Emile, and Henriette—particularly so when we consider the context of the sophisticated and casually amoral Parisian milieu in which the scene occurs.

During the course of this action Maurice attempts to flee the café through the rear entrance but is comically “blocked” in this direction as well, literally “bump^[ing^] into” (495) none other than Emile, who has expediently only just returned from his excursion through the cemetery. Maurice spins about only to confront Henriette, who just at that instant re-enters the café. At this point in the action one must check the instinct to return to the title page to see that it is indeed Strindberg and not Feydeau who is the author of the play.

When the two lovers finally begin to interact in the scene, an additional comedic element is generated, but one functioning on an altogether different plane. During the following exchange, the topic of “crime” occurs for the first time in the play:

HENRIETTE:
Who knows what goes on in our heads?
MAURICE:
Yes, imagine being held responsible for our thoughts. Life would be impossible.
HENRIETTE:
Don't tell me you have evil thoughts?
MAURICE:
Of course I do. And in my dreams I commit the grimmest crimes …
HENRIETTE:
In dreams, oh, well—!

(498)

It seems to me quite relevant to the overall scheme of the play that Strindberg first introduces the idea of “crime” in the context of the purely subjective domain of “dreams” and “thoughts,” a plane of existence where the objective “laws of nature” no longer operate. The mind's potential for release or freedom, its capacity for intellectual and artistic play with the forms, images, and ideational content of the mind on the level of thought, is far greater than that afforded by the limitations of objective reality, the grim “reality principle” of Strindberg's contemporary Freud. One can restructure one's “thoughts,” accomplish literally anything in “dreams,” and, very significantly, re-order the constituents of existence—both objective and subjective—in the imagined world, the artifact, of a “play.”

This descent into the psyche and its inherently expanded potential for freedom and play continues and accelerates in Act Two, as the scene shifts to “The Auberge des Adrets,” yet another café but “decorated in a flamboyantly theatrical, baroque style” (503), a sensuous upgrade in decor expressionistically parallel to Maurice's increased intimacy with Henriette, and to the fulfillment of desire on all levels.²⁹ And it is precisely this pure note of “desire and fulfillment” that is sounded so emphatically in the scene, as Maurice exclaims: “What a night, what a wonderful day! I still can't believe it. A new life has begun for me! The producer thinks I'll make a hundred thousand francs out of this play. … […] I'm buying a villa outside the city—and I'll still have eighty thousand left! I won't be able to take this all in until tomorrow. […] (Sinking down in his chair.) Have you ever been really and truly happy?” (503). We are presented here with a kind of archetypal fantasy of the dream come true but consciously articulated, as the playwright descends into his own “primary process” and there aesthetically—and playfully—reconstructs the eternal conflict between “reality” and “pleasure” principles. As Maurice/Strindberg will shortly exclaim, remembering the “reality” of Jeanne's injunction that Marion needs new clothes: “But I don't get any fun out of it! And I want to get some fun out of life before it all disappears down the drain!”³⁰ (505). This outburst is almost immediately followed by the stage direction “The clock strikes twelve,” an obvious comic punctuation of the declaration just past. One thinks of Dr. Faustus poised on the brink in Act Five, “Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls,” and any number of additional “fated” moments of literature and drama.

But it is not only the seizing of all that is instinctually “good” in the scene that calls attention to itself but also the striking levels of equally “instinctual” aggression in the scene as well. Henriette reminds Maurice of the many old friends waiting to congratulate him at Madame Catherine's, and Maurice responds with the first of a whole series of gratuitous bursts of aggression that will continue throughout the scene: “Let them wait! They made me promise, and now I take back my promise” (505). And a few moments later: “I can hear what they're saying. ‘He'll come. Good guy. Doesn't forget his friends. Doesn't go back on his word. He'll come, take my word.’—Now they'll have to eat their words” (506). As for the former boyfriend and best friend Adolphe, he is symbolically smashed as a champagne glass and assailed in absentia with the following (in a series of exchanges with Henriette): “As I crush this glass under my feet, so shall I grind into dust that image of yourself which you have built in a little temple that shall be yours no longer!”; “I want to wipe him from the living, erase even the thought of him, render him unborn, unmade, nonexistent”; and “We'll drive his ghost into the wild woods, bury our memories of him, and let the days we spend with each other pile up like rocks on top of him” (507-08). If interpreted “seriously,” this type of aggression might well be viewed as an overreaction against feelings of guilt; however, the extravagant imagery and hyperbole of the various denunciations (including friends with whom there is no intrinsic “guilt” relationship), coupled with the earlier expressions of jubilation over success and sensuality, all lend themselves to the notion that the entire scene is consciously and artificially designed as a kind of “dream of the id,” a celebration of “me!” on all levels.³¹

This intense, “subjective” focus of the scene is additionally enhanced by the “voiceover” of the Beethoven sonata practice which begins offstage in the middle of the passionate colloquy between Maurice and Henriette.³² The use of this device is significant in a number of ways. First, the nervous, hectic, semi-obsessed quality of the principal theme in this movement of the sonata is strongly evocative of the psychological rhythms of Maurice himself as he plunges every more deeply into Strindberg's weird world of dreamscape bliss and criminality. The music is a kind of aesthetic electroencephalogram, a parallel artistic expression of Maurice's melodic “movement” through the play.

Second, the element of repetition inherent in the pattern of sonata form in the music replicates the larger aesthetic motif in the play of eternal return. This pattern is not only inherent within the music but is itself repeated throughout the scene, as Strindberg indicates in a stage direction immediately before the scene's conclusion: “During the whole of this scene, the pianist in the next room has been practicing the Beethoven Sonata, sometimes pianissimo, sometimes madly fortissimo” (511). The repetitive, intensely “obsessive” quality of this piece, constantly repeated, functions as a kind of comic underlining, and undermining, of the “dark” theme of psychological crime and conflict in the play. Here are Maurice and Henriette on the topic of guilt:

MAURICE:
We were driven together, like wild game by the baying hounds. Who's guilty in all this? Your friend, my friend [. …]
HENRIETTE:
Guilty or not guilty—what's that got to do with it? And what's guilt?

(507)

“Guilty or not guilty [. …] what's guilt?” Once again we see the quality of a kind of hallucinatory giddiness evoked by the playwright; cause and effect are beginning to blur and run together; the “serious” guilt theme begins to spin as on a carnival merry-go-round, while the “serious” Beethoven theme plays madly in the background, its own “laws” altered so as to become but a zany, hurdy-gurdy accompaniment.³³

One of the most prominent comic devices Strindberg employs in Acts Three and Four is the use of the “police”—obvious symbols of “crime” and “guilt”—whose initially “ominous” appearance in the action soon gives way to absurdity. Here is the Inspector early in Act Three presenting the case against Maurice:

Last night Maurice was seen at the Auberge des Adrets with an unidentified lady. Their conversation […] dealt with crime. Words like Place de Roquette and guillotine were spoken [. …] More damaging is the testimony of the headwaiter who served them a champagne breakfast […] this morning. He testifies to having heard them wish for the death of a child. The man is reported to have said, “Better if it never existed.” To which the woman replied, “Absolutely. But it does exist.” And later in the conversation someone said, “The one will kill the other,” to which the reply was: “Kill. That's no word to use,” and “Our love will kill anything that stands in its way”! And also: “The five of diamonds” … “the guillotine” … “Place de Roquette.”—Now as you can see, all this builds quite a case against the man [. …] There you have the hard facts.

(523-24)

This overheated narrative, which establishes no coherent context and which consists entirely of a series of impressionistic fragments “overheard” by waiters rushing back and forth from the kitchen, constitutes the “hard facts” of the case against Maurice. One might indeed convict on such evidence in a courtroom of dreams or nightmares, but in the light of day this “evidence of crime,” like so much else in the play, is more evocative of farce than fate.

By the end of Act Three the comedy inherent in the misadventures of Henriette and Maurice is increasingly apparent. Their “crimes” and subsequent “guilt” take on an obvious clown-like demeanor as they are evicted from the Auberge des Adrets as “tart” and deadbeat respectively,³⁴ then fall into a “despair” and opt for suicide, which results in the following exchange which opens Act Four:

HENRIETTE:
You don't want to die?
MAURICE:
I'm not up to it.

(540)

In the earlier scene the police are once again happily employed by Strindberg as they silently and auspiciously enter the action (“Two Plainclothes Men have quietly seated themselves at one of the rear tables” [536]) shortly after the entrance of Maurice, shadowing and “following” the accused in the style of the Boulevard crime thriller which had already been mockingly evoked by Strindberg. The police are of course the agents and icons of “morality” and “justice,” wholly appropriate figures to be employed in a drama probing the high crimes of the spirit and the anguish which follows. It is therefore utterly ludicrous, and obviously comedic, that when at last the hand of justice falls on the shoulder of the fated pair, it is revealed in the following terms:

HENRIETTE:
What do you want?
FIRST Detective:
I'm with the vice squad. Yesterday you were here with one guy and today you're here with another. That looks like soliciting to me [. …]

(538)³⁵

Also notable is “The Luxembourg Gardens. Near the statue of Adam and Eve” (540), as the setting for the initial scene of Act Four. The obvious Garden of Eden symbolism, with Maurice and Henriette as the innocents who sin and are then cast out, has been stressed by numerous critics as one of the more prominent of the dark symbols in the spiritually “dark” landscape of the play. But the serious purport inherent in the symbolism does not necessarily imply its serious dramatic function in the play. Adam and Eve are created in the Garden of Eden, commit their crime within the Divine sanctuary, and are then cast out; Maurice and Henriette have played out their hapless melodrama of “crime” in a wholly secular environment, fall into a “despair” that leads to a clownish gesture at suicide, and only then come blundering into this “Garden of Eden.” The somber “moral” implications of the symbolism are neutralized and rendered comic by this deliberate switching around of the “cause and effect” relationships.

But having brought his protagonists into “Paradise,” Strindberg cannot resist the opportunity of playing God and casting them out again; what is notable is the particular style of eviction He employs. The scene is set with the following melodramatic stage direction: “A roll of drums is heard in the distance” (546) Maurice and Henriette respond with the following exchange:

MAURICE:
They're closing the garden. … “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; … thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.”
HENRIETTE:
“And the Lord said unto the woman. …”

(546)

We can picture the contorted brows of Maurice and Henriette as they wrestle with biblical quotations in their efforts to derive “meaning” from this pregnant moment. But who appears as the Divine messenger to cast the hapless couple forth?

A CARETAKER:
(in uniform. Politely)
Sorry, Madam, Monsieur; we have to close the garden.

(546)

Maurice and Henriette thus make their way out of Eden not with a tragic bang but with a comic whimper—“politely”—and move into the play's final scene, perhaps the most overtly comedic of the entire play.

The play's final scene is structured as a kind of great “revolve” that brings Maurice back to his subjective origin in the play of promise and great expectations, and thus replicates in small the motif of eternal return that has proved so significant throughout. The scene opens with Maurice offstage; in quick succession Adolphe reveals that Marion has died of natural causes, and Henriette enigmatically announces, “Now I know what I have to do” (550) before she exits the play as abruptly and portentously as she had originally entered it. Maurice, ignorant of these and other relevant events and still in the grip of sundry “thought crimes,” enters and is shortly followed by Emile, who returns Jeanne's gifts which Henriette had earlier thrown into the fire. “Reality” thus tilts on its axis: as Henriette (and the “murder” of Marion) disappears, the gifts reappear; the subjective apparitions of “pleasure” and “crime” (subconscious id and super-ego, “Yes!” and “No!”) are now removed from the play, thus allowing Maurice to “return” to a coherent order of being. This he attempts to do via an exchange of moral courtesies with Emile, and a vow to the Abbé to embrace the Church and turn away from worldly pursuits forever. But the wheel continues to turn—spinning Maurice giddily “through” the Church, as it were; no sooner does Maurice utter his “serious” vow, than he is interrupted by a comic phone call:

THE Abbé:
Give me your hand. I don't want you looking back!
MAURICE:
(standing up and offering his hand)
Here is my hand, and all my heart!
THE Waitress:
(entering from the kitchen)
Telephone call for Monsieur Gérard!
MAURICE:
From whom?
THE Waitress:
From the theater.

(555)

At this juncture the action is interrupted by the following stage direction: “Maurice tries to break away from The Abbé, but The Abbé holds him fast by the hand.” The upshot of this farcical tug of war between this world and the next is of course the climactic event of the play³⁶ and also the single most prominent element of the drama to be singled out for criticism. The ending, in which Maurice spends a single night in the sanctuary and then returns to his life in the theater, is generally regarded as weak and anticlimatic given the dark and somber drama that has gone before. This “logic of the serious”³⁷ is particularly procrustean when applied to this scene. Here is an example of a “serious” defense of the ending:

The point of Maurice's choice is that although he decides to do both things, he chooses to do one before the other. Instead of rushing off to the renewed production of his play on it, opening night, he keeps his promise to go with the Abbé on that night and postpones attending the play until the following night. Instead of succumbing completely to his worldly interests, he puts first things first.

(original emphasis)³⁸

Yes indeed, Maurice offers his “penance,” but it is so obviously a comic one! Twenty-four hours as a spiritual contemplative followed by a lifetime of worldly indulgence: one can imagine Groucho Marx devising such a solution to a “spiritual crisis.”

Perhaps the Abbé can offer a more compelling rationale for the ending of the play, as he addresses Maurice moments before the final curtain: “I have nothing to give you except a good scolding and you can give yourself that.[. …] The fact that you've learned your lesson so fast indicates to me that you have suffered as much as if it had lasted an eternity. And if Providence has given you absolution, what more can I do?” (557). A “good scolding” is in fact all that is merited in this “dark” comedy of the mind, where “Providence” is the God of that domain and of the play—Strindberg, the “playwright” himself. And this comic climax, and “absolution,” is indeed justified on a purely subjective level, where time does not exist, and two days will stand in quite nicely for eternity. For the Abbé invokes, not the logic of God, but of Nietzsche—the eternal now of the eternal return in the present moment. The climax of comedy is always the joyous grin of “yes!”, and Nietzsche's question, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” is answered, in response to the “anticlimatic” ending, by the chorus of voices that end the play:

MADAME Catherine:
Maurice, I think you've got it!
ADOLPHE:
I know he's got it!
THE Abbé:
Why, I believe he has!

(557)

Notes

1. James L. Allen, Jr., “Symbol and Meaning in Strindberg's Crime and Crime,” Modern Drama 9:1 (1966), 72.

2. August Strindberg, Crimes and Crimes, in Selected Plays: August Strindberg, trans. Evert Sprinchorn (Minneapolis, 1986), 511. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

3. Barry Jacobs, “Strindberg's Advent and Brott och brott: Sagospel and Comedy in a Higher Court,” in Strindberg and Genre, ed. Michael Robinson (Norwich, England, 1991), 179.

4. Allen, Jr., 62-4. See note 1.

5. Maurice Valency, The Flower and the Castle: An Introduction to Modern Drama (New York, 1963), 309.

6. Gunnar Ollén, August Strindberg, World Dramatists (New York, 1972), 67-8.

7. John Ward, The Social and Religious Plays of Strindberg (London, 1980), 174.

8. Walter Johnson, introduction to There Are Crimes and Crimes, in Dramas of Testimony: The Dance of Death I and II, Advent, Easter, There Are Crimes and Crimes, by August Strindberg, trans. Walter Johnson (Seattle, 1975), 259.

9. Evert Sprinchorn, Strindberg As Dramatist (New Haven, 1982), 236, 238.

10. F. L. Lucas, The Drama of Ibsen and Strindberg (London, 1962), 387, n. 1.

11. “Strindberg's characters are emanations from his own tormented psyche and his harrowed life. Gradually, they lose all connection to a governing center and are like fragments scattered from some great burst of secret energy.” George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York, 1961), 298-99.

12. R. J. Kaufmann, “Strindberg: The Absence of Irony,” in Strindberg: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Otto Reinert, Twentieth Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971), 57-9.

13. Ibid., 59, quoting August Strindberg, The Son of a Servant: The Story of the Evolution of a Human Being, trans. Evert Sprinchorn (Garden City, NJ, 1966), 152-53.

14. The important notion here is duality—self reflecting on self—rather than the “single” mindedness so typical of Strindberg.

15. August Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata, in Selected Plays: August Strindberg, trans. Evert Sprinchorn (Minneapolis, 1986), 764.

16. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (New York, 1970), 19.

17. Ibid., 21.

18. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, 1985), 94.

19. August Strindberg, Letters ^[of Strindberg^] to Harriet Bosse, trans. Arvid Paulson (New York: Nelson, 1959), 87, as quoted in Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt (Boston, 1964), 102.

20. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (Baton Rouge, LA, 1965), 167, 177.

21. “Without doubt you have given mankind the deepest book (Thus Spake Zarathustra) that it possesses, and what is more, you have had the courage and perhaps the urge, to spit these splendid sayings in the very face of the rabble.

    “I close all my letters to friends: Read Nietzsche! That is my Carthago est delenda!” Strindberg to Nietzsche, quoted in V. J. McGill, August Strindberg: The Bedeviled Viking (New York, 1965), 287. Only Parts 1 to 3 were included in the one-volume re-issue of 1887; Strindberg would have had to read Part 4 in the private edition of 1885.

22. That is to say, the creation is rather like a deck of cards with a finite number of possible sequences of each card in the deck. However big the deck and however exponentially larger the possible number of combinations becomes, it is still a finite number. Keep “shuffling,” and each sequence will eventually come round again.

23. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1974), aphorism 341, quoted in Daniel Chapelle, Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis (Albany, NY, 1993), 1. For excellent elaborations of the concept and its significance, see Chapelle 1-14; and Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, 1974), 316-33.

24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, sect. Z, quoted in Hollingdale, 177. The significance of eternal return is brought home even more powerfully in Zarathustra: “Pain, too, is a joy. … Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? … then you said Yes, too, to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored. If ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said ‘you please me, happiness! Abide, moment!’ then you wanted back all. All anew, all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamored—oh, then you loved the world. Eternal ones, love it eternally and evermore: and to woe, too, you say: go, but return! For all joy wants—eternity!” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, vol. IV, sect. 19, quoted in Kaufmann, 320-21. See note 12.

25. Chapelle, 3. The quotation refers specifically to Nietzsche's conception of the human significance of eternal return. See note 24.

26. The famous lovers appear in Canto V of Dante's Inferno.

27. Although Strindberg has obviously created the setting of this initial scene to account for Marion's death (probably caused by arsenic poisoning contracted by close contact with these burial grounds), the very “planting” of this scenic environment calls attention to the self-conscious artfulness and playful nature of the play's construction and strategy. From a purely naturalistic perspective, the setting is entirely arbitrary and incongruous, particularly when one considers that Strindberg could easily have devised an alternative “realistic” explanation for Marion's death.

28. This “double” emphatic punctuation has apparently been added by Sprinchorn in his translation. Elizabeth Sprigge's translation is, however, equally emphatic in its own style:

    HENRIETTE:

    Thank you. But I would prefer to wait for him outside.

    (Exit Henriette)

    MAURICE:

    Who … was … that?

    MME Cathérine:

    That was Monsieur Adolphe's lady friend.

    MAURICE:

    Was … that … she?

    Elizabeth Sprigge, trans., Crime and Crime: A Comedy, by August Strindberg, in Five Plays of Strindberg (New York: Anchor, 1960), 65.

29. The setting serves another comedic function as well, as Evert Sprinchorn points out: “Strindberg had his tongue in his cheek when he let Henriette and Maurice have their rendezvous in a tavern called l'Auberge des Adrets. This aubere was the locale of a melodrama of the same name. In 1823 the actor Frédérick Lemaître achieved instant fame by playing this unbearably banal criminal drama for laughs.” Sprinchorn, 241. Variations on a theme of “tongue in cheek” is of course the present argument for the entire play.

30. Strindberg has additional “fun” in the tongue-in-cheek mode with Henriette's and Adolphe's descriptions to Maurice of the play that has brought about this overwhelming success:

    HENRIETTE:

    […] Don't you feel how the air caresses you today? It's filled with the good wishes of a thousand souls …

    […]

    ADOLPHE:

    —a thousand souls thanking you for making them feel better. Everyone was writing such pessimistic stuff, saying people were bad, life hopeless, without meaning. Then you came along with your play. Made everybody feel good. Felt like lifting up their heads.

    (515)

    Strindberg's self-referential pun on his own typically “dark” dramatic work seems obvious.

31. Maurice virtually confirms “Strindberg's” intent in a later speech to Henriette:

    No, it isn't a dream, but once upon a time it was! You know, when I was a poor young man who walked down there in the woods and looked up to this pavilion, it seemed to me like a castle in a fairy tale, and I'd dream that being up in this room with its balcony and its thick curtains would be absolute bliss! And to sit here with the woman I love and watch the sun rise while the candelabra were still burning—that was the wildest dream of my youth. Now it's come true; I have nothing more to live for!

    (513)

    We are thus presented with a continual self-referential “flipping” of dream/fantasy and reality: Maurice's boyhood “dream” which has now become a “reality,” but which is really only a “play,” which is Strindberg's own fantasy/dream, which is now made real as a play, objectified on both page and stage.

32. Strindberg's stage direction reads: “During this speech someone in the next room has begun to play Beethoven's Sonata No. 17 … the finale allegretto—at first very softly, then faster and faster, passionately, stormily, and finally with complete abandon” (506).

33. It is also worth noting that the Beethoven sonata played here is frequently labeled “The Tempest,” following a remark of Beethoven that the significance of the piece could be found in Shakespeare's play of that name (Jacobs, 187, n. 27). It is perhaps stretching a point but nevertheless strangely coincidental that Shakespeare's famous play is also set in a special “enchanted” world, and features a host of sinister plots and “crimes” that are all effortlessly forestalled by the powers of the protagonist/“playwright.” The “waving of the magic wand” to turn “darkness” to light will of course also occur at the conclusion of Crimes and Crimes.

34. HENRIETTE

    […] I'm ready to throw myself in the river. How about you?

    MAURICE:

    (taking her by the hand and walking out with her) End it all? Sure. Why not?

    (539)

    These are the final lines of Act Three, which are then immediately followed—or broken only by the “dramatic pause” of the Act break, if so staged—by the “change of heart” exchange that opens Act Four, an obviously comic juxtaposition.

35. In the Luxembourg Gardens, the “plainclothesmen” put in yet another appearance in this mode of “pursuit” (“Two Plainclothes men can be seen at the rear” [514]), but then simply hang about ineffectually in the background for the duration of the scene. They appear but are ignored by the major characters; they lack any genuine action in the scene, and the absence of effective function cancels the “menace” of their appearance and renders them ridiculous.

36. A “dramatic climax” which is comically undermined via Madame Catherine's metatheatrical preamble: “Well, playwright? How are you going to end this?” (557). Madame Catherine had just a few seconds earlier revealed her own “subjectivity”—actress!—in the same metatheatrical style by responding to the Abbé's injunction to “take this matter a little more seriously”: “I can't. I can't. I can't keep a straight face any longer. (She explodes into laughter, covering her mouth with her handkerchief.)” (556). Madame Catherine may be overly giddy, but the critics are not.

37. “A great deal of foreboding and psychological tension is built up throughout the first three acts, only to be deflated gently in the fourth. Without pleading for a theatre of catharsis, we can still require a climax, which would make of the powerful evil we have had preached at us for an hour and a half something more than a slight case of extramarital adventure,” Ward, 178. See note 7.

38. Allen, 72. See note 1. Evert Sprinchorn's comment on the final scene is an interesting variation on Allen:

    Though most readers feel that Strindberg provided his drama with a false and happy end by letting Maurice off too easily. … Maurice is being denied the highest merit and is left in the limbo of the unexceptional. … Since there is nothing profound about him, neither his vastation nor his regeneration, he can quickly slip back into his normal mode of being.

    (Sprinchorn, 239)

    Once again, the criticism is of a “false and happy end” of a play that is explicitly designated a comedy. It seems to me that the strongest possible clue that Sprinchorn is on the wrong track is once again the logic employed to make sense of the play as a “serious” drama in this context: why would a playwright as self-absorbed and with as great a propensity for self-dramatization as Strindberg create a protagonist as obviously autobiographical as Maurice, and yet render him “unexceptional,” as “average” and as mundane as the picture that emerges from the above quotation?