ON STRINDBERG

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I wish to add a footnote to the review of The Ghest Sonata. Robert W. Gordon points out that we best understand the play by reference to the playwright and his psychological condition. F. L. Lucas has observed the same thing, adding with the benefit of scholarly research some interesting correspondencies between the play and the playwright's life. Unfortunately for Mr. Lucas and Mr. Gordon, this is an easy way out. As long as we can comfort ourselves in the belief that we are witnessing another person in a state of psychological undress, we can maintain exactly the kind of detachment which is the real Evil for Strindberg.

The Ghost Sonata is a play about the kind of judgments we are likely to make with insufficient knowledge of one another's motives, and, more importantly, with insufficient knowledge of our own intentions. These judgments have nothing to do with any rigid rules of human procedure which the playwright is trying to foist off on us. Rather they involve the immediate, second-to-second perceptions and judgments by which we decide within ourselves about the character of our fellow human beings. The nature of the Good and Evil on which these judgments are based (either by us or by Strindberg) is no more Nietzschean than it is Christian or humanitarian or Talmudie.

The structure of misplaced judgment which leads to a terrible lack of compassion creates all of the catastrophes of the play. Hummel, the avenger, has let his self-righteousness blur his own intrinsic faults. The Mummy's self-conscious expression of her own guilt and her forty years of repentance does not prevent her from turning on Hummel with a vituperation equal in degree to the Old Man's. Even the student (whom Mr. Gordon took, as far as the text is concerned and not the production, to be helpless in the face of some great farce moving without him) too is guilty of an awful lack of understanding. He fails to comprehend the girl's neurotic hallucination at exactly those key places where his understanding of her predicament would have ended the cycle of antipathy and blind cruelty, rather than perpetuating it into forever.

All this is within the play. The added conception by Strindberg which makes his play a brilliant contribution to the literature of morality is the dramatic relationship between the play per se and the audience. The play is not "lopsided, shambling and confused" if we enter into it with the same lack of knowledge that the Student demonstrates in the first scene. Like us, he wavers between condemnation of Hummel for the heinous sins done to his father and sympathy for the Old Man because of the telling presence of his mortality, the moments when decay and ruin reduce Hummel to a state of absolute dependency on the understanding of at least one human being--in this case, the student. What are we to think when Hummel, who rises to a height of awful vindicativeness toward the end of the second scene, is suddenly reduced and piteously destroyed? It is Strindberg who failed, or did we make our judgment on the most obvious manifestations of the old man's character? More to the point, when the student, who has been so much of our own naive viewpoint for so long, suddenly turns on the girl in the final sequences and destroys her by his own willful misapprehension of her world picture, should we blame Strindberg for inconsistency, or pay better attention to his frightfully economical dramaturgy? By attempting the latter, it is possible to discern the terrible logic of the play. This logic, of course, works on us as confusion if we refuse to see everything the play offers us; on the other hand, if we pay close attention to the source of our confusion, the logic works on us as a very potent lesson in the basis of moral judgment, with or without a rigid code of ethics.

By slipping so easily into convenient beliefs about Good triumphing over Evil (Mummy defeats Hummel) or explanations like the mechanical one of the third scene with relation to the Cook, a critic reveals something more about his own modes of perception than he does about Strindberg's intentions, "fantasies and obsessions." In this sense, he both misses the truth of the play, and, by this very fault, proves its validity. We so much the more belong to Strindberg's configuration by every insufficient and damaging appraisal we make of the appearances before us. Thomas J. Babe, Jr. '63,   Director, "Ghost Sonata."

[Ed. Note: Mr. Babe has said precisely and thoroughly just what I was trying to express in my very awkward review. I never meant to Imply that we must see "The Ghost Sonata" through Strindberg's psychological history, or even that we must be aware of this history. That would be bad journalism and bad sense. But I did mean that Evil or not, a stage imposes some detachment on its audience, and that we can only overcome this detachment by seeing the play as "shifting states of mind" with which we can sympathize--"immediate, second-to-second perceptions and judgments," Mr. Babe more aptly puts it. Our quarrel, if any, is that Mr. Babe thinks we in the audience can enter directly into the play, and I that we can do so only gradually, through perceiving ourselves in the mind behind the play. Harvard audiences may be overintellectual, but more to the point, they haven't been living with the play for months like Mr. Babe.

One more point: I used the name of Nietzsche as a shorthand for the kind of mercurial frame of mind we're talking about, and definitely not to suggest any "rigid rules of human procedure," or "rigid code of ethics." But this is a small point indeed, and I certainly would not have had to make it if my review had been as clear and meticulous as Mr. Babe's letter and, I should add, his direction of "The Ghost Sonata."--R. W. Gordon.]