[In the following essay, Grabowski explores Strindberg's innovative departure from realism in A Dream Play.]

I

Towards and around the turn of the century, three leading Scandinavian authors were venturing, each in his own way, into a kind of drama which has traditionally been referred to as one of symbolism. The two older of the three, Ibsen and Strindberg, had already become established as dramatists of the foremost rank, while the third, Knut Hamsun, had only recently won fame as the author of three intensely lyrical novels, Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892), and Pan (1894). Between the two latter works, Hamsun had published two straightforwardly realistic novels, Editor Lynge and Shallow Soil, and with At the Gates of the Kingdom (Ved Rikets Port, 1895), the introductory play in his trilogy about the philosopher Kareno, he was back again into what can best be described as a rather gross and wooden realism. But the second play in the trilogy, The Game of Life (Livets Spil, 1896), was realistic only in the most formal way; actually, it was farther away from realism than anything Hamsun had written or would ever write again. 1896 was also the year in which Ibsen published John Gabriel Borkman, which was followed three years later by his last play, When We Dead Awaken. At this very time, Strindberg had embarked on his trilogy To Damascus (1898-1904), and with that, on the last phase of his dramatic career—the high point of which was reached with A Dream Play in 1902.

For a conceptual frame of reference, the present discussion will bypass the concept of symbolism and rely in its stead on what I have termed the concept of unreality. This means that, in looking at the works to be discussed here, I will be concerned with the immediate dramatic texture and effect of the specific departure from “realistic” everyday experience made by each of these works, rather than with the conceptual “meaning” of their non-realistic contents. Thus the question “What does it mean?” is superseded by the two questions “How does it feel?” (i.e. from the point of view of the reader/spectator) and “How is it done?” (i.e. from the point of view of the author); in other words, the analytic effort is shifted from the interpretative to the strictly aesthetic level. Consider, as an example, The Master Builder. In this play, everything pertaining to Solness' previous career and current endeavour as a tower-builder comes across in a matter-of-fact way once one accepts the slightly unusual premise; furthermore, everything, including Solness' fall from the tower at the end of the play, is conveyed indirectly, i.e. not through immediate, visual stage action. Thus while the tower symbolism can be said to be, in a certain degree, “fantastic” (in that it embodies an extent of spiritual striving far beyond the average, materialistically bounded scope of human aspiration), it is never translated into action before our eyes with the kind of captivating immediacy which would create a true moment of “unreality” on the stage. By contrast, Hilde Wangel can be said to be an “unreal” figure inasmuch as she presents herself as an alter ego projection of Solness' own mind; but one never escapes the uncomfortable feeling that Ibsen is at the same time trying to get her accepted as a flesh-and-blood character and never really makes up his mind about what he thinks she is. Strindberg, in his fashioning of the characters surrounding the hero of To Damascus, is far more clear and bold. In this trilogy (as well as in such a work as The Great Highway, his last play), the reality of everything that goes on around the hero is formal to the point of transparency: through it we perceive, as through a two-way mirror suddenly lighted from behind, a second, “sub-real,” authentic texture of reality underneath the seeming reality layer of flesh and blood, and we realize that the latter is an illusion—that, indeed, the external world around the hero is a mental shadow world projected, as it were, before our eyes as living, objective reality.

Mental contents—thoughts and feelings at the conscious level, secret hopes and fears at the level of the personal unconscious—projected as immediate, objective reality: this, then, would serve as a possible definition of unreality. It would certainly be a valid definition, as one realizes immediately when applying it to such works as Strindberg's later dramas or the novels of Kafka. On the other hand, these highlights of unreality writing are so uncompromisingly transfused with unreality that even a fairly general definition such as this one will fit. But when it comes to more hybrid creations, i.e. works of a fairly realistic framework with sudden, more or less isolated flashes or passages of unreality—works such as a number of Chesterton's detective stories, or the plays by Ibsen that we are going to discuss here—a more thorough-going clarification of the concept of unreality will be needed in order to grasp in depth the aesthetics of each particular moment of unreality. I will devote the following section to an attempt at such a clarification.

II

From a conceptual point of view, the most orthodoxyl classical example of unreality in Ibsen is furnished, paradoxically enough, not by one of his later plays, but by a play from his middle, so-called realistic period, the tragedy Ghosts (1881). The play¹ is patterned on a classical A_a-B-A_b structure, where A_a represents the originally known presence of some fateful circumstance relating to the life of the person/persons involved; B the stage at which this circumstance has been repressed or spontaneously forgotten to the point where the situation can be experienced as being totally divorced from it—i.e. reality B defined as the diametrical opposite of the original A; and A_b the final, cataclysmic point at which A re-emerges and reveals itself as having always been present, secretly built into the situation all along, i.e. B=A² It is this sudden, simultaneous presence of two seemingly totally opposite definitions of the reality, of matter and anti-matter, as it were, at one and the same time (they can't possibly both be present at once, yet they are!) which creates the great abysmal moment of unreality: the moment at which the mirror suddenly becomes transparent, and a new, old truth—which at this very instant you realize that you somehow knew all along—imposes itself on the long-standing, accustomed reality from behind it, appearing together with it in the mirror for one frozen, ghostlike second before destroying it and dissolving everything into infinite disaster. (It should be added that the same structure can be used as a basis for comedy, with a happy surprise ending in the place of catastrophe.)

It may be said that, in terms of dramatic structure, Ibsen's most celebrated contribution to world drama was his development of a technique through which an originally concealed dimension, the buried past, was made to penetrate gradually into a surface dimension, the everyday present, so that eventually it shatters the picture of reality represented by the latter. The actual “unreality,” as I have already pointed out, consists in the emerging awareness of not one but two layers of truth, and the seemingly abysmal contradiction between them. The evidence of the second layer may have been there all the time, but we perceive it only gradually. It should be noted that although the conclusive revelation always comes as a shock the recognition may actually have been emerging for quite a while, i.e. the formal reality of the surface situation may have started dissolving, more or less perceptibly, into unreality perhaps even before the middle of the plot. The great art of this double-level technique is to make us potentially aware of the truth at a relatively early stage, yet on the other hand to get us so involved in the goings-on at the surface level as simultaneously to make us continue our subscription to the illusion of the latter's claim to truth being the only valid one. Face to face with the final revelation, then, we are able to experience a shock which is doubly cataclysmic because we “never knew”, yet “always knew.” It should be pointed out that, in addition to its other functions, the chorus in the classical Greek tragedy contributes towards exactly this effect: the maintenance in the spectator of the awareness that hidden forces are operating underneath the surface, steering events towards an outcome which may seem negated in terms of the present, yet which will itself in time negate the present conclusively, transforming it back into the all-engulfing past.³ Given this last formulation, we are now in a position to recognize the true cosmic foundation of the A-B-A structure. If for the A-quantity, “the allengulfing past,” we substitute the quantity “eternity” (or “timelessness”), and for the B-quantity, “the present,” the quantity “earthly life” (or “time”/“temporalness”), the resulting A-B-A structure now describes that journey from an eternity realm into a temporal life realm and back into eternity which not only organic life on this planet, but everything in the cosmos including the stars themselves, completes. As far as individual human existence is concerned, the idea of a so-called “rediscovery of eternity” refers to the fact that, having spent the first nine months of our lives in a most definite realm of timelessness, the womb, we carry the memory of this experience around with us, imprinted on our unconscious as an a priori experiential attitude: i.e. the built-in possibility of emerging, at some later point of our temporal existence, into a re-experiencing of the dimension of eternity: of merging totally into a vision of temporal things sub specie aeternitatis, as well as of the cosmic void beyond all temporal life. Whether or not the potential for these total unreality experiences is actually fulfilled depends, of course, entirely on what course an individual's personal existence takes, what kind of experiences he encounters in life, and so on. But it is undoubtedly part of a truly fulfilled existence that at some stage the individual will be entering into a new mode of experiencing his life and everything around him—as if from then on the temporal vision of the temporal is slowly receding, slowly blending with and giving way to the timeless version of itself. The increasing double-level quality of experience during this later phase—roughly speaking the second half of life—parallels, of course, the increasing unreality in the second half of the dramatic A-B-A structure, as the awareness of A is re-emerging into the present. It is this A-B polarity, then, which contains the key to the entire aesthetics of unreality. B as the temporal, A as the timeless—i.e. that which, throughout the vicissitudes of temporal reality, has been ever present in some secret, hidden form and suddenly starts re-emerging, totally redefining the reality of B—: behind what we were seeing as B there was A the authentic, eternal version of our reality, all along. Or, more schematically: A_a as the thesis, B as the antithesis, A_b as the synthesis of A and the presumed B, the climactic moment of unreality. On the basis of this fundamental polarity, we can designate a number of specific polarities contained by it: Earth vs. Cosmos/the spiritual realim, the Conscious vs. the Unconscious, Light vs. Darkness, Present vs. Past (and Future), Objective reality vs. Subjective imagination, Free agency vs. Fate—or, on an even more specific psychological level, Conscious awareness vs. Unconsciously (or half-consciously) registered (but not consciously embraced) information.⁴ Out of all these individual polarities emerges a synthesizing definition of unreality as the timeless version of the temporal, or the emergence of a timeless realm into the realm of time-bound reality.

This second general definition is one of more far-reaching applicability, for it allows us to orient our aesthetic compass in terms of single, isolated moments of unreality, i.e. the scattered, but decisive veins of unreality in such works as may not actually exhibit a solid texture of unreality (in the manner of Kafka's later novels), nor have been structured on the basis of complete rediscovery models (in the way of Kafka's Amerika or Ibsen's Ghosts). I shall deal with four of Ibsen's later plays on this more fragment-oriented basis of analysis; however, before turning to this concluding task, I will attempt a brief delineation of the respective textures of unreality of two outstanding dramatic unreality creations from this period, Strindberg's Dream Play and Hamsun's Game of Life.

If A Dream Play must have seemed strikingly advanced at the time of its appearance, it still blooms today, almost seventy years later, with the same profound cosmic gaiety, the same priceless artistic freedom and sophistication. There is no doubt that this technique of seeking to reproduce, as Strindberg himself stated, “the disconnected, yet apparently logical, form of the dream” vastly influenced the technique of Kafka in his two last novels, The Trial and The Castle. In contradistinction from these two works, A Dream Play does not even exhibit a tenuously paraphrasable story line; its only forward movement rests on the play's formal design as a “Visitor's progress,” i.e. the increasing degree to which Indra's daughter becomes personally involved as she proceeds on her sightseeing tour through life on the planet Earth, and the way in which the quality of her experiences changes in the process. But the basic “meaning” of the play's structure, i.e. the fundamental planetary anchorage of its aesthetic reality, is the “dream” itself: i.e. our planetary world as seen through the Hindu doctrine of material life as a dream Thus in addition to the consistent dissolution of time and space, the majority of scenes combine, with the absurd logic of the dream, elements of an extrinsically contradictory nature, thus creating a succession of intrinsically meaningful, “unreal” visions of human reality. Scene follows upon scene in a manner which seems totally arbitrary, yet in most cases each scene is subtly linked with the previous and following one through hidden associative devices of motif and language. Thus at the formal level this double-quality effect of fluidity and firmness reflects the vast flux and order of the cosmos—while at the ideational level all the play's scenes remain tightly bound together by the cardinal constructs—disillusionment, attrition, suffering—through which these beautifully bleeding, smiling vistas of earthly life are seen as they pass kaleidoscopically before our eyes. The play's texture is one of total, exquisite unreality, at a supreme level of integration. One feels that all basic aspects of human existence have been absorbed into it; indeed, the gatekeeper's star-quilt becomes a perfect metaphor of the totality of the play itself. Never has Strindberg's basic subjective negative construct on life translated itself into such an all-encompassing vision of life in general. Thus the play's central consciousness—“the consciousness of the dreamer” as he calls it—is not the expression of some limited subjectivity (the way it is so often felt in To Damascus, not to speak of the major part of that whole school of expressionism which was later to arise in Germany in the wake of Strindberg), but rather a supra-personal, super-objective eye with a claim to total planetary awareness. The play then becomes a journey from cosmic reality into a material earth-dream (which threatens to trap the central figure in a fake, i.e. pseudo-objective, temporal ‘reality’), and back into the eternal cosmic realm from which she came.

Notes

1. In the following, a thorough familiarity with the plot of Ghosts is assumed on the part of the reader.

2. To be more mathematically precise, this can be more properly formulated as B=BCA), where the bracket indicates the realization of the hitherto unrealized presence of the A factor in the B process: this is the realization that B never stood alone but was always multiplied by A. This multiplication has now become a conscious act.

3. The awareness of the “tragedy” is then born in us through two realization: 1) That the hero's striving has been in vain from the beginning; 2) the realization of his blidness (It is characteristic that a traditional, conceptually oriented, view of tragedy will tend to center on the former factor, while an aesthetically oriented view will center on the latter. It is certainly the second one which is the more fascinating, since the sudden realization that this abyss had been existing all along, and that you had even somehow known it, produces that explosion of terror which is commonly known by the Aristotelian term catharsis.)

4. On the explicitly aesthetic level, corresponding polarities can be perceived in each individual sense field. Thus in music, a number of major-minor combinations will produce a mood of cosmic timelessness, and similar effects can be combinationally achieved in the field of colour. The feeling of coldness as a simultaneous response to a very hot stimulus is an unreality experience. Moving beyond individual sense fields into combined sense of experiences, we recognize the phenomenon of synesthesia as an exemplary unreality experience.