[In the following essay, Walsh remarks on the mixture of dramatic styles Strindberg used in The Pelican.]

Despite its popularity in Scandinavia, The Pelican has been performed only rarely in the United States, and it has not attracted the kind of close critical attention given Strindberg's better known works. At first glance, the dramaturgical innovations in The Pelican strike one as slight compared, for example, with those in The Ghost Sonata, and the tone and tenor of the language, the catalog of mundane concerns, and the tangled skein of domestic relationships seem to reduce the play to a pathological melodrama about an unfortunately peculiar family. This was the reaction of the Stockholm critics to the premiere performance of The Pelican at the Intimate Theater. August Brunius, for example, wrote that although “the opening note of the play was interesting and, had it been carried out with energy, would have had a beautiful result,” the play lacked “real conflicts, dramatic drive and power. The author foregrounds trivialities, an unending squabble over food and fuel.” Sven Söderman found the play a depressing witness “to its author's inner brokenness” and “exclusively pathological” even in its strong scenes. Vera von Kraemer considered the question of food “the essential tragedy of the piece which functioned as incessantly pure parody.”¹

The critics of Strindberg's day were more intent on preserving distinct levels of representational style than are critics today. Consequently, they were baffled by the deliberate mixing of stylistic levels employed in the drama and chose to view its hyperbolic and symbolic domestic situations in relation to daily life—the referent usually postulated in realistic drama—rather than to the stylized and often exaggerated psychological states postulated as the referent in poetic tragedy. Thus, when judged by the standards of the conventional domestic drame, which had served as the basic organizing principle of the play, it was considered a pathological and grotesque testament to the author's obsession with trivialities. This initial assessment blinded critics to the dramaturgical innovations in the play—the deliberate mixing of stylistic levels, the conscious intensification of verbal and visual metaphors capable of intimating deeper significance, and the dual perspective achieved by the intentionally ambiguous parallel development of two carefully linked dramatic structures.

In the dramas of his naturalistic period, Strindberg had experimented with a dramaturgy based on surface action and psychological subtext. In the Chamber Plays he extended this experiment, focusing attention on the moments when surface and subtext change positions, while at the same time extending the subtext of the drama to include metaphysical resonances. In so doing, he shifted the weight of the drama away from the surface action to a second parallel action that intimates the presence of a metaphysical order operating beyond the physical action of the drama, although communicating and communicated through the same entanglements of domestic, mundane concerns.

The surface action of The Pelican moves forward with calculated precision, adhering as Ingvar Holm has demonstrated to Freytag's model of a “rising and falling action,” which reaches its high point when Fredrick finds the posthumous letter from his father. The scenes that follow show the Mother humiliated as the children take their revenge, leading to a moment of recognition and the final catastrophe.² Parallel to this, however, is also a latent action in which the Mother is first tested and then punished by a power outside the realm of human control, which employs naturally explicable phenomena as agents. The compounding of two stories—the one a story of crime and retribution carried out by characters physically embodied by actors on the stage, and the other a story of guilt and punishment carried out not by physically embodied characters but by absent “powers” whose presence is made manifest in the stage properties and mise en scène—leads to inevitable and intentional ambiguities for actors and audience alike. The first story turns on the uncovering of a consciously concealed crime leading to externally motivated retribution; the second, on the internal recognition of unconscious guilt leading to a moment of reconciliation. That moment follows the catastrophe when Fredrick and Gerda are transported from the realistic scene onto a higher plane of spiritual enlightenment dramatized in the reverie of light and the talk of “summer holidays” beginning.³

The psychologically ambiguous motivations of the Mother are central to this parallel development and allow for the dramatic elaboration of the post-Inferno perspective in which “there are crimes and crimes.” Without the surface action, and the suspense it affords, the more subtle structure would lose its dramatic intensity and theatrical viability, devolving into the florid poetic fantasies associated with the French symbolists of the 1890s and evident in the fragment Toten-Insel, which Strindberg set aside to write The Pelican.⁴ It was to avoid such undramatic, overly significant flights of poetic fancy that Strindberg developed his theory of “new naturalism,” elaborating in the Chamber Plays a new form to communicate his new perspectives on life.

Today we are better prepared to appreciate the deliberate mixing of representational levels in a play like The Pelican and the parallel development such mixing facilitates. On close examination, we see that the seemingly obsessional concern with mundane trivialities simultaneously serves as pivotal marker both to objectify the metaphysical dimension of this new perspective on life in concrete and familiar terms that can be realized on stage and to dematerialize these familiar and concrete objects into metaphoric vehicles for the metaphysical intimations associated with them in the text. Modern scholars generally agree that The Pelican shares central themes and motifs with the other Chamber Plays, among them the perception of the world as a “web of illusions and lies,” the motif of sleepwalking in which psychological motivations are compounded by a reverie of escape into an idealized past, and a latent concern for the Swedenborgian settling of accounts.⁵ As yet, however, the particular strategies for integrating these concerns and motifs into the drama and communicating them on the stage have not been examined, nor have the dramaturgical consequences of these strategies been appreciated.

Like the other Chamber Plays, The Pelican demands the audience divide its attention between plot and character on the one hand and the thematic development and tonal motifs on the other. To aid this shift in attention and to intensify the ambiguity generated by the parallel development of conflicting stories, both turning on the central character of the Mother, Strindberg has employed a number of textual markers to actors and audience alike, which can be read as deliberate clues to performance strategies.

Strindberg's own attention to stagecraft and the art of acting in the Open Letters to the Intimate Theater suggests that close critical attention to the markers and clues written into the text can prove valuable. Although it is perhaps premature to speak of a deliberate vocabulary of textual clues based predominantly on the evidence of a single text, the particular textual clues I examine here proved valuable to the actors I worked with in a production of The Pelican at the University of Toronto in October 1982. Furthermore, they point with self-verifying consistency toward the explicit elucidation and elaboration of the dual movement in the drama outlined above and the dual perspective generated by it in the audience.

In his Open Letters to the Intimate Theater, Strindberg writes about the actor penetrating and “mastering the role.”⁶ He speculates that the actor becomes entranced, enters the role, and in fact becomes it, filling it from within with his own personality.⁷ In the “Third Letter” he writes: “Being the character portrayed [rollen] intensively is to act well, but not so intensively that he forgets the ‘punctuation’; then his acting becomes flat as a musical composition without nuances.”⁸ In the “First Letter” Strindberg cautioned the actors of the Intimate Theater not to slur over consonants and to pay particular attention to the internal rhythms of a speech, whether legato or staccato. Above all, the actors must remember they are “talking to an audience of many people whether … [they] want to or not.”⁹ The legato that Strindberg asks his actors to observe “means that all the words in the phrase steal after each other in rhythmic movement in keeping with one's breathing”; staccato, he says, “has its justified effect, as we know, when one is excited or angry and is gasping for breath.”¹⁰ It is my contention that the phrasing, rhythms, and stylistic alterations in The Pelican not only mark emotional nuances but also serve to underscore thematic transitions and juxtapositions that facilitate the shift of attention from plot and character to tonal and thematic development and back, while at the same time facilitating the elaboration of the parallel structure.

To illustrate the particular use Strindberg makes of textual markers in The Pelican and the integrating function they serve, I would like to examine closely a few selected segments in the drama, beginning with the opening of the third scene, which strikes me as particularly complex. In this brief exchange between mother and daughter, several themes from the first scene are compounded and reiterated in light of the expanded context supplied in the second scene. The segment is composed of nine elliptical sentences constituting three exchanges. In the first, the Mother asks if Gerda recognizes the music that is being played:

MOTHER:
Do you recognize it?
GERDA:
The waltz? Yes!(11)

In the second exchange the Mother expands upon Gerda's curt answer, compounding her memory of the wedding and her hidden desires for Axel, which were exposed in the last part of scene 1 and in scene 2. The tone here suggests that of a dream as the Mother passes with unself-conscious ease from direct address to private reverie: “Your wedding waltz, which I danced right through to morning!” Gerda's response is again terse—“I?—where is Axel?”—but the elliptical progression of thought, marked in the text by the dash that separates the first and second sentence, is readily supplied by the audience from the information gleaned from the preceding scene. Knowing that Gerda has become aware of her mother's hidden desire for Axel, the audience follows Gerda's progression from the ambiguous personal pronoun to the accusatory, possibly cynical, and certainly direct question. The Mother's response—“How should I know?”—is psychologically ambiguous. It is either a direct evasion or a self-conscious denial that Gerda has penetrated the secret desire concealed in her momentary reverie. In Swedish the interrogative is contracted “Va^[d^] rör det mig?” (How should I know?), facilitating a staccato delivery that marks the heightened emotion of agitation or bewilderment. The ambiguity is partially resolved in Gerda's final response—“So! Quarrelled already?”—and the exchange of glances that fill the pause that follows it. Again this line is marked in Swedish by a contraction and ellision: “Seså! Han I grälat redan?.”

Recalling Strindberg's insistence that such contractions be avoided on stage, we can assume that here they are employed to mark a moment of particular intensity and significance. The final unanswered question reverberating in the pause is in fact a direct echo of the Mother's question to Axel in scene 1 where the audience learned from Axel that the wedding was “particularly successful,” and that the Mother first cried and then “danced every dance” so that Gerda was “almost jealous” (229):

MOTHER:
What? Aren't you happy?
SON-IN-LAW:
Happy? Sure, what's that?
MOTHER:
So? Have you quarrelled already?

In Swedish, the moment is again introduced by a contracted interrogative (Va?) and intensified by Axel's dejected slang response. Axel then goes on to say that he and Gerda have done nothing but fight since the engagement began, calling into question his peculiarly truncated statement that the wedding was “particularly successful. Particularly” (229).

On further reflection, it is not only the line “Have you quarrelled already?” but the whole scene between Axel and the Mother that is echoed in the pause following the elliptical opening exchange of scene 3: the reverie called up in the Mother by mention of the wedding waltz; the question, “Where is Gerda?” (228), echoed in Gerda's question, “Where is Axel?”; Axel's dejected denunciation of the possibility of happiness so carefully amplified and extended, revealed in the dialogue between Frederick and Gerda in scene 2 (244-47); and the Mother's dawning realization of her own entrapment. On a deeper level, the sense of déjà vu recorded in the exchange of glances during the pause reinforces the dramatic reversal of roles in the closing of scene 2 when Gerda invited Frederick and Axel into her kitchen for steak and sandwiches (257-58). Linking this reversal with the revelations of scene 1 compounds the pause with a sense of the settling of accounts as past moments and perceptions return to haunt the present.

On stage, I would suggest, this last sense is further intimated by the book Gerda is holding, which can be treated as a multivalent sign conjuring up the metaphysical themes associated with the inventory and the settling of accounts. In this way, the pause and the exchange of glances serve as a transitional marker into the subsequent dialogue about the cookbook, at which point the actors' and audience's associations with the book change. We know that Strindberg used such transformational strategies in A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata, in which both stage properties and characters split, double, and multiply. Whereas there is no direct textual evidence or specific stage direction to suggest that the book be treated one moment as inventory ledger and the next as cookbook, or that Gerda one moment can embody the presence of the testing powers and the next the ethos of the revenging daughter such an interpretation underscores the implicit connection between the real inventory discussed in the opening scene, the inventory of crimes and recriminations dramatized in the surface action of the play, and the inventory of a soul's progress intimated in the latent structure. By writing into the drama text specific clues that mark segments where the surface and latent actions change positions, Strindberg allows the audience to follow the parallel development and encourages the dual perspective in which a thing is both itself and something else. At the same time, he draws the audience into an experience of the duality of human motivation and the multivalent nature of physical phenomena.

What is most surprising is that the subsequent dialogue about the cookbook proceeds as if the earlier exchange had not taken place. It is of course up to the actors to treat this earlier segment in such a way as to call its reality into question, marking the transition from one stylistic level to another, but Strindberg has given the actors sufficient clues for this and, in the transitional pause, has given the audience time to absorb the moment, catch its echoes, and carry the necessary associations into the subsequent dialogue.

In the Toronto production I chose to heighten the sense of dislocation in this segment and bring the metaphysical action deliberately to the surface by allowing the realistic tenor of the action to recede momentarily. This was marked in the mise en scène by increasing the intensity of the lighting. As the Mother danced the hypnotic wedding waltz, the actor playing the part of Gerda entered with book and pen, indicating gesturally the action of taking inventory of the contents of the room. When the Mother tried to extend her moment of internal reverie, she was confronted by a series of testing questions and accusations emanating not so much from the character Gerda as from the situation of inventory-taking. The truncated and abbreviated exchanges were deliberately phrased to echo the earlier moments in the drama to which they refer. At the end of the segment, the “powers” relinquished control of both Gerda and the Mother, with a demonic laugh emanating from the actor playing Gerda, after which the lighting changed back to what had been established as normal and the actor resumed her previous role. The pause served as a transitional marker between stylistically distinct levels of representation and as a pivotal point on which the actor playing the Mother could turn from internal reverie to characteristics associated with the Mother in the surface action, while the actor playing Gerda could turn from the embodiment of the testing powers to the character identified by the audience as Gerda.

The recapitulatory exchange at the beginning of scene 3 plays almost like a false start, ending with a showdown of unanswered questions. A similar exchange begins the play when Margret enters the sitting room already occupied by the Mother. Three times the Mother asks Margret to “Close the door please” (215). There is no indication in the text that Margret does. Instead she asks, “Is Madam alone?” to which the Mother responds by drawing attention to the “dreadful weather,” and the Mother repeats her command. Only after the third repetition do the characters make contact and let the dialogue get under way.

As with the opening of scene 3, and throughout the play, the dialogue here can be psychologically explained and motivated, but the unsettling effect on the audience of the triple repetition and the disjointed staccato of unanswered questions cannot be denied. The ambiguity of dual perspectives is both deliberate and essential here as well. If the beginning of scene 3 serves as recapitulation, the opening of scene 1 serves as premonition, establishing the mood of enclosure, isolation, and nervous agitation that permeates the play. The abrupt shift from the repeated command to “Who is that playing?”—marked in the text by a dash—and Margret's apparently unconnected reference to the weather establish an unconscious link between the music, which only later we learn Fredrick plays to keep warm (216, 218), and the wind that invades the room twice, endowing both music and wind with an inexplicable sense of mystery while subtly and succinctly establishing the parameters of the room by the sounds that both surround and permeate it. The brief exchange serves further to indicate, and alert the audience to, the disjointed form of exposition employed in the play, which proceeds by intimation and the gathering of associations.

When a few lines later Margret asks why the Mother remains in the apartment where her husband died, she answers that the landlord will not let them move, nor can they so much as stir (216).¹² Here again a pause is used to indicate a transition in thought as the Mother's attention is drawn to the sofa: “Why did you take the cover off the red sofa?” On the surface the pause marks a change of focus; on a deeper level, however, it serves to underscore the preceding line, linking it with the subsequent one. The disjunction draws attention to the psychological thought process whereby the Mother associates her entrapment with the death of her husband. On the surface level of crime and retribution, the sofa, which later the Mother says “looks like a bloody butcher's block” (238), becomes a concrete symbolic reminder of her own part in her husband's death and of the possibility that she will be found out. On the metaphysical level, the sofa is not only a reminder but a scourge. The terrifying prospects of imprisonment that motivate the mother's hysterical denial of responsibility for the death of her husband later in the scene (239) are presaged here with the added ironic intimation that the Mother's fear of unjust imprisonment—that is, imprisonment outside the letter of the law—itself constitutes a prison for an act outside the letter of the law. While the Mother may be able to cover up her past actions, she cannot escape from their consequences. On the metaphysical level, both past actions and consequences are objectified in the room itself and its furnishings as items to be counted in the inventory. Again, the author's close attention to indicating within the rhythms and pauses of the text both surface motivations and latent metaphysical intimations, and the careful clues to actors and audience, establish implicit connections and associations without overweighing the realistic tenor of the scene. The room that the Mother had thought to take possession of at the death of her husband has in fact taken possession of her and holds her captive.

The mystical implications of this are subtly suggested in Margret's response, the naturalness of which is intruded upon by the pause that follows it: “I had to send it to be cleaned. (Pause.) Madam knows that, well, he drew his last breath on that sofa; but take it away then.” (210). Margret, the chattering maid, functions on the metaphysical level as an agent of the testing “powers” that strive throughout the play to wake the Mother to consciousness. Here, as at the beginning of scene 3, the pause serves as a pivotal point on which the actor can turn from the embodiment of the testing “powers” to the realistically portrayed maid. It is Margret who has uncovered the sofa, the first in a long series of uncoverings; it is she, moreover, who has sent the cover to be cleaned. Her tasks as maid are at once realistic and endowed with metaphysical resonances.

The skill with which this opening scene is crafted ensures that, if the actors are conscious of the multiple levels of development, effect, and association here, these can be directly conjured up in the mind of the audience through only the most subtle accents on the part of the actors. The ambiguity of multiple messages is essential. The pauses and phrasing intimate the deeper significance and mark moments of stylistic transition, freeing the actors to respond naturally to the realistic flow of the scene. The pauses thus serve a dual function as pivotal points for the actors, marking the interchange of surface and latent actions, and as clues to the audience, indicating the psychological and metaphysical significance of the dialogue.

If we turn briefly to the other pauses in the opening dialogue, we see this strategy repeated. The pause that precedes Margret's suggestion that she light a fire echoes the unspoken accusation contained in her interjectory “Yes, yes …,” which had likewise prefaced her previous speech about the underdeveloped Gerda (217-18). Again the pause intensifies the transition, connecting the children's weakness and the money that cannot be accounted for with the unlit fire. The cold stove becomes another objectified accusation. At the same time, Margret's repeated interjection turns on and magnifies the psychological ambiguity of Margret's motivation, suggesting both that she has heard this all before and that she chooses to set aside the Mother's excuse for a more appropriate time and place.

On the metaphysical level, the repeated interjections mark the actual process of the inventory being taken while imputing into the scene a sense of testing as the unseen “powers,” through the agency of Margret, offer the Mother the opportunity to recognize and acknowledge her guilt and its consequences. This last sense is further amplified in the next pause, following the Mother's admonition, “Watch yourself, Margret.” (218). In the intervening lines Margret has stated her accusations more directly; the Mother responds first with nonchalance, then with a sense of dismissal, and last with agitation. At this point the progression is disrupted by a significantly ambiguous pause in which the Mother tries to locate a sound she has apparently heard from outside the room: “Is there someone out there?” Margret denies anyone is there, compounding the audience's momentary confusion and marking the haunting presence of the unidentified “power” hovering around the parameters of the room, presaged in the opening scene. This haunting presence, which gradually materializes out of the Mother's fear of punishment and her unacknowledged guilt, will remain ambiguously identified with both the dead husband and the benevolent “powers,” aiding the simultaneous development of the surface action of crime and retribution and the parallel structure of testing and punishment, while subtly integrating the two.

The first pause after Fredrick's entrance, like those in the scene with the maid, is naturalistically motivated, as the stage direction indicates: Fredrick “pretends to read” (221). However, it follows the Son's verification of the chill in the room, calling up Margret's attempts to light a fire, which had been similarly marked. Again the pause serves as a transitional pivot from the chill to the inventory and on the metaphysical level from “the death-like cold,” which, Brian Rothwell writes, is “literally the past,”¹³ to the settling of accounts. The precision with which the scene not only conjures up the chill in the room but links it with the metaphysical structure of the play, making both reverberate in the pause, identifies the cold not only as the past but as the haunting presence of the past in the present. Also prevalent is the chilling terror that, because palpably present in the furnishings and atmosphere of the room, the past will be found out. Here as elsewhere, the pause serves both to mark a transition and to draw connections on a level beneath the surface of the action.

The tone of profound exhaustion and the escape into a private reverie of dreams and memories, identified in the text with metaphors of sleepwalking, is marked by a similar series of textual clues, and connected implicitly with the profound sadness over the impossibility of happiness. This minor tonal motif, introduced in the initial exchange between the Mother and Axel, is amplified in the second scene between Gerda and Fredrick. “Are you happy?” (244), Fredrick asks, pausing after his declaration that he will never get married. “Jaha!” (Oh yes!) Gerda answers; “When one finally has what one has always wanted one is happy.” A few lines later, after Fredrick has prompted Gerda to examine the facts of her situation—that Axel has gone off to a restaurant on their first evening home and that the honeymoon was cut short because Axel missed their Mother—he asks if Gerda “had a nice trip.” “Jaha!” (245) she answers again, this time with less conviction, prompting Fredrick's compassionate “Poor Gerda.” Later we learn that Axel struck her on their wedding night (254), a fact which Gerda tries both to cover up and to forget. On the psychological level, the revelation of that slap (Fredrick has apparently learned about it from the Mother, “who can use the telephone better than anyone” [245]), is intimated in the pauses that precede Fredrick's questions. On the metaphysical level, this discovery of Gerda's innermost secret intimates the eventual uncovering of all secrets, whether acknowledged or not. The complexity of this segment and its entangled exposition serve to implicate all the members of the household in the web of lies and illusions that is the world of the play. At the same time, Fredrick's simple statement of compassion—“Poor Gerda”—remains as a strikingly real moment of connection between brother and sister. This formula is repeated with growing intensity and frequency toward the end of the play; the phrase “poor mamma” appears four times in the closing reverie of the play after the Mother's death.

The mood of profound sadness and the compassion it generates is heightened and tied to the motif of sleepwalking when Gerda acknowledges that “the greatest pain” is to discover the emptiness of one's fondest happiness (“den högsta lyckans intighet”) (247). Here too the statement is preceded by Fredrick's repetition of the phrase of compassion and interrupted by a signifying pause, and further marked by the substantive lyckan (happiness). This devastating admission follows Gerda's attempt to escape into a reverie of past memories: “Let me sleep!” The transition is marked in the text by a decelerating tempo and a three-part movement from direct address, through transitional impersonal pronoun, to a first-person presenttense recreation of a past moment: “Do you remember as a child … people called one evil if one spoke the truth. … You are so evil, they always said to me …” (246). Here as elsewhere in the drama, the escape into reverie is exposed by the presence of the other. Like the accusations physicalized in the furnishings of the room and in the intrusion of the outside power as wind and warning knocks, the moment of reverie brings the past palpably into the room as the actor physicalizes the moment recreated by the character from her memory.

In the foregoing analysis I have shown how Strindberg employs particular textual clues to mark important transitional segments in the drama where subtext surfaces and surface action recedes, or where past actions and motivations become palpably present on the stage, momentarily compounding the fictional present tense of the drama with the fictional past-made-present. I have shown how the interchange of surface and subtextual actions results in an alteration of stylistic levels of representation that integrates the tonal and thematic concerns of the drama into the surface action while intimating their deeper metaphysical resonances.

The most significant dramaturgical consequence of this experiment resides in the freedom it gives the dramatist to develop two contrary although parallel actions in the drama. The latent structure of testing and reconciliating can be seen to encircle the surface action of discovery and retribution; at the points where the surface action decelerates, the metaphysical process intensifies. Aware of the dramaturgical power of the suspense generated in the surface action, Strindberg carefully paces the intrusions into the room by the unseen “powers,” whether represented scenographically (lights, sound, wind) or through the agency of one of the characters, so as not to interfere with the “rising and falling” pattern of the surface action. The deliberate ambiguity of contrary movements, like the deliberate mixing of stylistic levels and referents, enhances the peculiar sense of dislocation in the drama while allowing the latent metaphysical parallel action to change places with the surface action at carefully marked moments, enhancing the duality and otherworldliness of the dramatic experience.

I trust these few illustrations sufficiently suggest the parallel structure I have identified and confirm the internal integrity of the play and the function of the intentional mixing of representational styles. Further I hope these illustrations demonstrate the function of such textual clues as contractions, repetitions and pauses that serve as directives to both actors and audience, underscoring and amplifying the dynamic vision and shifting the perspective that informs the drama. Once these textual clues have been identified and explored, it remains for the actors and director to make them physically present on the stage. But without a doubt, the particular decisions and strategies that director and actors choose should not seek to resolve intentional ambiguities or ignore deliberate markers necessary for the shifting perspective demanded by the drama.

Notes

1. Quoted in Gunnar Ollén, Strindbergs dramatik (Stockholm: Radiotjänst, 1949), 33.

2. Ingvar Holm, Drama på scen (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1969), 180-81.

3. Brian Rothwell, “The Chamber Plays,” in Essays on Strindberg, ed. Carl Reinhold Smedmark (Stockholm: Beckmans, 1966), 31, draws attention to the section “The Examination and Summer Holidays” in En blå bok I in which the fictional teacher describes how “the dissonances of life increase with the years” until one comes to live “more in memory than in the moment.” This section of En blå bok elucidates both the psychological and the metaphysical processes explored in The Pelican and deserves fuller attention. Of particular importance here, however, is the metaphysical connection between testing and release, and the suggestion that this pattern of testing and release is a vital process of old age, when one has faith in an afterlife. This connection, indicated in the title of the section, is intensified in the closing line in which the “and” of the title is replaced by the stronger conjunction “with”: “Examen med sommar lovet!” (Examination with summer holidays!). See Samlade skrifter av August Strindberg, 46, John Landquist (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1912-21), 247-48.

4. See Ollén, Strindbergs dramatik, 226-28. Ollén considers the discarded fragment, printed in Samlade otryckta skrifter av August Strindberg (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1918), 1:293-310, as “an introduction” to The Pelican, which, he suggests, traces the events on Earth following the burial of the main character in Toten-Insel. Martin Lamm, Strindbergs dramer (Stockholm: Bonniers 1926), 2:404, suggests that The Pelican represents an attempt by the author to rework in a new form the autobiographical material that had inspired Toten-Insel. Lamm does not, however, go on to examine how this new form allows the author to express the metaphysical convictions of Toten-Insel in a dramatic form that communicates both to the converted symbolist and to a wider public.

5. See, for example, Rothwell, “The Chamber Plays,” 30-33; Evert Sprinchorn, Strindberg as Dramatist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 273; and Egil Törnqvist's illuminating study “The Structure of Pelikanen” in Strindbergs Dramen in Lichte neuerer Methodendiskussionen (Basel: Helbing and Lichtenhahn, 1981), 69-81.

6. August Strindberg, Open Letters to the Intimate Theater, trans. Walter Johnson (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), 26-27.

7. Ibid., 23.

8. Ibid., 132.

9. Ibid., 25.

10. Ibid., 27.

11. Strindberg, Samlade skrifter 45:259. All parenthetical page references in the text refer to this volume.

12. See Törnqvist, “The Structure of Pelikanen,” 77, for a reading of the psychological and metaphysical connotations of this exchange. Törnqvist points out the existential character of the situation, which, he says, suggests “man's imprisonment in life, his awareness of his shortcomings and his concomitant fear of death.” To this I would add the metaphysical intuitions of the link between testing and release suggested by the previously cited passage from En blå bok I.

13. Rothwell, “The Chamber Plays,” 32.