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Content THE JOURNEYING SOULS: THE VERBAL AND VISUAL QUEST'IN METAPHYSICAL THEATER AND FILM by ANUAR MOHD NOR ARAI A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Communication-Drama) December 1982 UMI Number: DP22936 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is d ep en d en t upon the quality of the copy subm itted. In the unlikely event that the author did not sen d a com plete m anuscript and th ere are missing pag es, th e se will be noted. Also, if material had to be rem oved, a note will indicate th e deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI DP22936 Published by P roQ uest LLC (2014). Copyright in th e Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © P roQ uest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United S ta tes C ode P roQ uest LLC. 789 E ast Eisenhow er Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 -1 3 4 6 UNIVERSITY O F S O U T H E R N CALIFORNIA T H E G R A D U A T E S C H O O L U N IV E R SIT Y PA R K L O S A N G E L E S . C A L IF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7 ? / » .u This dissertation, written by .................. under the direction of h.is— Dissertation f]om- mittee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of requirements of the degree of D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y Dean N COMMITTEE DISSERT. For my wife, Zahrah Ibrahim, and daughters - Mazura, Zuraira, and Ifa Mutiara - for all the "long waiting" and "isolation" they feared would not end ........... Los Angeles A.M.N.A. November, 1982 CONTENTS Chapters Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................... 3 INTRODUCTION . ..................... 7 I. THE JOURNEYING SOULS: A DESCENT INTO THE PSYCHE . ................................ 30 II. AUGUST STRINDBERG: JOURNEYS INTO THE LABRYINTHS OF DARKNESS AND FIRE ........ 54 III. EUGENE O'NEILL: DOOMED TO GO ON LIVING .... 81 IV. EUGENE IONESCO: WANDERING THE WONDERMENT OF DREAMS ...................... 101 V. SAMUEL BECKETT: PROTUBERANCE IN SHADOWS --- ll9 VI. INGMAR BERGMAN: THE METAPHYSICALLY t g\ GROUNDED INDIVIDUAL ................... 143 71 notes ..................................... It? SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................... 197 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks are due to Prof. Moshe Lazar, Chairman of the Comparative Literature Program, University of Southern California, for his sincere encouragements and guidance towards the present form of this study. I admire his scholarship. His pervasive influence upon my thinking has spurred my interests in the discipline of philosophy and metaphysics of the theater and films, and under his scholarly and intellectual aegis the idea of this book developed. He introduced me to the philosophical and metaphysical thoughts of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Cioran, Unamuno, Descartes, Mircea Eliade, and others. These abstract and interesting realms of theatrical study were pursued in response to his graduate seminars (1978- 1982) on Ionesco, Pinter, Beckett, Strindberg, Goethe and others, and also in response to the series of colloquia conducted by the Comparative Literature Program under his initiative. I am proud to mention here that the colloquia I attended with him and the opportunities I had meeting with other scholars in this field were of great importance in my intellectual future endeavors: The l i v colloquia that I attended were: 1) The Dream and the Play: Ionesco's Theatrical Quest; 2) The Anxious Subject: Night mares and Daymares in Literature and Films; 3) Play Durrenmatt; and 4) The Dove and the Mole: Kafka's Journey into Darkness and Creativity. The scholars and critics that I met personally during the colloquia were: Richard N, Coe, Martin Esslin, George E. Wellwarth, Robert W. Corrigan, Emmanuel Jacquart, David I. Grossvogel, Rosette C. Lamont, Jan Kott, Nicolas Kiessling, Richard Rosenthal, Peter Hodgson, Geoffrey Green, Franca Schettino, Noel Carroll, Lindley Hanlon, Katherine S. Kovacs, Vlada Petrie, Marsha Kinder, Arnold Heidsieck, Joseph M. Natterson, Claude T.H, Friedmann, Joseph A. Federico, Nicola Dufresne, Gernard P. Knapp, Rebate Usmiani, Han Banziger, Gerwin Marahrens, Robert E. Helbling, Armin Arnold, Cornelius Schnauber, Walter H. Sokel, Peter Beicken, Richard Caldwell, Stanley Corngold, John M. Grandin, Bluma Goldstein, Arnold Band, Evelyn Y. Beck, and Moshe Lazar himself, who are all great scholars and critics in the field of theater or film or both. Most importantly there were a number of class seminars with Eugene Ionesco as the writer in residence and also a personal meeting with Frederich Durrenmatt. I also owe a major debt of thanks to Prof. Richard v Toscan, Interim Chairman of Graduate Studies, Division of Drama, University of Southern California, for a vast amount of factual historical materials in the History of Modern Theater, and The History of the American Theater. It was with him that I gathered interests in Antonin Artaud, Alfred Jarry, The Dada, The Surrealists, The Living Theater, Richard Schechner and Joseph Chaikin. He was also very approachable and helpful with all the administrative complications between the Division of Drama and my sponsors. My debts are also due to Prof. Edward Kaufman, Department of Cinema, University of Southern California, who introduced me to the film-works of Charles Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, John Ford, Olson Welles, Federico Fellini, Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Murnau, Luis Bunuel, Akira Kurosawa, Jean Renoir, and Ingram Berman. Prof. Edward Kaufman also introduced me to the film theories of Andre Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Eisenstein. My thanks to Mr. Ernest Nukanen, Instructor of Production, Department of Cinema, University of Southern California for his production classes which will help me in my future involvements in feature productions. My thanks are due also to Prof. Ismail Hussein, Head, Department of Malay Studies (1978), University of Malaya, Prof. A. Bakar Hamid, Coordinator of The Creative and i.y 1 Descriptive Writing Program and Head, Department of Malay Studies (1982), Mr. Mustaffa Haji Shamsuri, the Assistant Registrar of the Academic Staff Training Scheme, University of Malaya (1978-1981), and The Public Service Commission, Government of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, without whose concerns the study leave and the financial' sponsorships would not have been possible. My thanks are due also to Dr. Mary Mann and J.R. Bickers who gave the manuscript the benefit of their comments and editing. Finally, my thanks.to my parents, my wife Zahrah Ibrahim for her love, care, patience and prayers through the years and also her togetherness in pursuing my hopes and aspirations, and to my daughters - Mazura, Zuraira and Ifa Mutiara - who understood the time I needed to complete this dissertation. INTRODUCTION ..... the individual seeks to penetrate into truth and longs after objectivity, yet on the other hand he is unable to divest himself of this isolation and self-seclusion, is unable to overcome this unsatisfied and abstract soul- inwardness .... But all that yearning and heart burning is merely the feeling of the nothingness of the vain and empty void, and fill himself with that which is solid and substantive. - Hegel Metaphysical inquiry changes conceptually from age to age, and in the nineteenth and twentieth century it inclines towards affinity with the forceful movements of pessimism and nihilism. Starting with Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, and with him as prime mover, the age old problem related to life and death that "man was born, he suffered, and he perished" could no longer hold an easily accepted truth. Man has become the central thesis of his pessimism, nihilism replacing a once-profane God. Schopenhauer builds his metaphysical discourse on the notion that the world is Will and Idea and he rejects the Aristotelian and Platonic concept of the "mythic 1 hybrid creature" in man. Schopenhauer believes in "man as man" and seeks to penetrate the "personification of the f Will." Schopenhauer says, "We must therefore assume that there exists in all men this power of knowing the ideas in things, and consequently of transcending their personal ity for the moment, unless indeed there are some men who 2 are capable of no aesthetic pleasure at all." ' He also emphasizes that the Will is "the real inner nature" of man's "phenomenal being, which manifests himself to him 3 as Idea." With this conceptual framework, Schopenhauer's rejection of Aristotelian and Platonic concepts of the "grandeur of the human spirit" and "God's cognizance of human misdeeds" has perverted the sense of hierarchy between Man and God, which interestingly is an offshoot of the classical irony already put forward by Euripides. The Euripidean irony, according to Glicksberg, "is closer to 4 the modern spirit," and he adds that the Euripidean irony is "less traditional in his probing of the depths of the human soul; a realist in his treatment of the tragic v m 5 theme." Euripides says so much about the Gods of Schopen hauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, and other modern writers (that includes Strindberg, O'Neill, Ionesco, Beckett, and Berg man, who are the direct interest of this study). Euripides is "primarily concerned about the Gods except as they per sonify human passions; his interest is focused squarely 6 upon the struggle of his human characters." He is "a dramatist of a different temper and persuasion" in com 2. parison with Sophocles, although the mythological machinery he employs seems Platonic and Sophoclean in nature, the real underlying spiritual fact of his philosophy is blas phemous. Euripides broods in skepticism, and regards the Greek Gods as "malicious, immoral (and) capable of 7 atrocious acts." The mood is identical to that of the modern in that the "worship in Euripidean art" is the worship of "reality and appearance, truth and illusion" that inhibits philosophic metaphysical inquiry towards this age. Euripides' skepticism is Schopenhauer's and Nietzschean's pessimism and nihilism. Euripides envisions "a giggling God in human sufferings" like that of the bacchic Gods; Schopenhauer regards man as the central voice of existence; "Man alone carries about with him, in abstract conception, the certainty of his death; yet this can only trouble him very rarely, when for a single 8 moment some occasion calls it up to his imagination," and Nietzsche emphasizes that God exists but is now dead. Of Nietzsche Glicksberg says, "(Nietzsche) must announce that God is dead and that man, alone in the universe, must learn how to laugh and dance. Only this way can he cure himself of his incestuous pity for himself and his 9 kind." The Superman Zarathustra takes on an anti-Christ odyssey to redemption. The courage of the Superman "can silence suffering, dispel the illusion of time, and even ; 3 10 conquer the fear of death." Nietzsche says: That your dying be no blasphemy against man and earth, my friends, that I ask of the honey of your soul. In your dying, your spirit and virtue should still glow like a sunset around the earth; else your dying has turned out badly. 11 Thus, the private pleasure and sufferings of those who are aware and sensitive to the cause of literature is what we inherit today. The theater and films - in their standing forms and moods - reach a certain "holiness" in our literary conventions. Statement of the Problem The modern theater of Strindberg, O'Neill, Ionesco, Beckett, and the film-works of Bergman are termed pilgrim age dramas. Their works are deeply concerned with the abyss of fate, with their own double shadows, with their "dance of nostalgia"; in short they are in confrontation with despair and with the unfolding fear of life and death. Thus their works, by the elements of their intrinsic logic, project the interplay of the above emotional and intellec tual facets of the authors "vasted regions" of the Self. Swedenborg uses the term "vastation" to mean "being let into one's internals, that is, into what is the spirit's own. " The above authors use the theater and films: a) to project their inner worlds; the journeys, " 4 pilgrimages, or quests used in this study are metaphors of that grand route into the Self through the many stations in life along the via dolorosa to cure themselves of self neurosis ; b) to probe, to excavate, to descend into the psyche or into the dark regions of Self to gather knowledge of the real Being; it is a form of quest for knowledge and Self-knowledge because of such dissatisfactions with the physical world, as cause them "incurable stress" concerning life and existence; c) as a form of personal confession, an exorcism of the psyche, self-therapy, and a mystical adventure into the realm of the transcendental or the surreal. The study attempts to analyze the selected works of the above-mentioned writers and filmmaker in the interest of the three notions directly related to the concept of the "journey"as stated below: a) the via dolorosa: Living is a journey through the many stations in life: b) the movement of pessimism (or the Philosophy of Decadence > : • arid.- its . influence ton 'the:' individual " writers and their works especially that related to the tradition of the quest of the absent God: c) the inner structure of the theater and films related to the quest of the Self, the psychodramatic - _ 5 - ' aspects of the works, and other related structural analyses. , Purpose of the Study This study attempts to discuss and analyze the qualities of Strindberg's, O'Neill's, Ionesco's and Bec kett's plays beyond their theatrical significance. These playwrights are considered to be disturbed by the sense of alienation, estrangement, and submergence into the Self and seek to journey into their inner worlds, or to journey into the psyche to excavate other realities beyond banal reality. They are surfeited by subjectivism and translate their experiences through restrained objectivity. In the whole concept of existentialism and decadent philosophy they are relishing a realistic new form of theatrical expressions. They are highly absorbed in the deeper drama of our time. Bergman is considered in this study because the films of Bergman tolerate the same inner reality with their counterparts in theater. It is for the same aspirations and ideals of looking into his Self and Being that Bergman finds distinction in expression through the medium of the f i . 1ms. The struggle for the truth in Strindberg, O'Neill, Ionesco, Beckett, and Bergman is submergence into the depth 6' of the souls. They are inner men with inner attitudes and visions towards the world. Methodology A most interesting and important aspect of the theater and films is its metaphysical content that reflects the spiristic courage of its delivery and the imaginative level of its responses to the overwhelming and endless search for maturity in thoughts and human experience since Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, and up to the present time. The theater and films could not have matured in extending human thoughts and experiences in the manner we have inherited today unless this had grown out of ethics, philosophy, and metaphysics through various periods of our civilization. In this study the selected playwrights and filmmaker are analyzed in a manner in which the whole concept of the journeying soul, and its verbal and visual manifesta tions, is studied from a common base which may be traced as far back as Euripides and later by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and other philosophers that advance the movement of pessimism and nihilism. Because of the close interrelationship between the selected playwrights and filmmaker, the method of this study is to examine the interweaving philosophical and 7 metaphysical praxis of the above movement - pessimism and nihilism - since Strindberg. The yirorks of each playwright analyzed are those that specifically deal with the concept of existentialism - life and death. The selected texts of the individual writers are referred to as the prime source in this study. Definitions of Terms Metaphysics: The Oxford English Dictionary defines metaphysics as "that branch of speculative inquiry which treats of the first principles of things, including such concepts as being, substance, essence, time, space, identity, etc.; theoretical philosophy as the ultimate science of Being 12 and Knowing." Schopenhauer defines metaphysics by saying, "By meta physics I understand all knowledge that pretends to trans cend the possibility of experience, thus to transcend nature or-the given phenomenal appearance of things, in order to give an explanation of that by which, in some sense or other, this experience or nature is conditioned; or, to speak in popular language, of that which is behind 13 nature, and makes it possible." N. Holmes Hartshorne defines metaphysics as, "... a legitimate and crucial expression to the reflective char- , S' - • * acter of man's existence as doubting, thinking, question- 14 ing. " Metaphysical Theater and Film: Metaphysical theater and films are works of art that are obsessed by "matters of metaphysics;" and the authors of this metaphysical theater and films are impelled by the obsession to understand and excavate the knowledge buried in the objective world and they attempt to find the boundaries of their psychological insecurity. Metaphysical Journey, or Metaphysical Pilgrimage: The metpahysical journey, or the metaphysical pil grimage, is an allegory of a journey into the psyche through the various stations in life along the via dolorosa in search for new meaning and dimensions of the Self to understand life. The psyche of the artist is that of the searcher, the prober, always looking for ways of under standing life and giving it form. Strindberg says, "And I travel northwards, a restless pilgrimage, into the fire of purgatory." Journey: The term journey is used synonymously with the term voyage, pilgrimage, and quest as a metaphor for the inter play between the author's dreaming soul and his creative imagination. The journey denotes a quest of "something ■ ' 9 out of reach” buried deep within the deeper Self, or more properly termed, the ' "psyche. ' ” The author is a perpetual searcher and the allegorical or metaphorical journey, voyage, pilgrimage, or quest expresses his psychic con dition, his perceptions of the world, and his other views related to metaphysical anguish and anxieties in order to cure himself of the nostalgia of existence. Nicole Ward Jouve defines voyage as an allegory of the modern forms of the metaphysical journey; an image of the course of public and private life; of the quest for knowledge and satisfaction; of the exploration 15 of space, eternal and internal.” Paul Claudel uses the term journey in the following manner. He says, ”. ... in its journey from one horizon to the other of the map spread for it in our dreams. The everyday and the familiar, not to say trivial world to which we are accustomed in the day time has become some- 16 thing solemn and sacred.” The term journey in this study explains the following conditions of the individual author's journey into the Self: a) it is a metaphor for the interplay between the author's dreaming soul and his creative imagination. Thus it is a domain of creativity, a domain of hallucination, illusions, and dreams; b) the journey undertaken is a metaphor of the ^ author's quest of the mystery of darkness in order to satisfy his metaphysical nostalgia and anxiety; c) the journey is a quest, a quest for the reasons of human sufferings, anxieties, or other existential problems related to the totality of life and death; d) it is a journey of the inner Self, a journey of solitude* a journey of looking into the inner landscapes of Being; it is a journey for spiritual liberty, a purga tory of self suffering; e) it is self-exorcism of the inner demons and the incubus of death from the infernal world of reality or fantasy in order to release their psychomachia. Visual and Verbal: The terms verbal and visual refer directly to the mode of the metaphysical theater and films which ties favorably with the imageries used by the authors and filmmakers. The mood of the metaphysical theater, both emotionally and intellectually, anchors itself with common, abstract, and obscure words and imageries that five meanings beyond their literal meanings. The verbal and visual images pene trate the realms of philosophy, theology, and metaphysics. Their usage has connection with allegories, symbols, and abstractions (some common and some very personal) in voking spiritual atmospheres and temperaments which grow out of the sensations of existence. -11 The terms also refer to inward movements of the authors, either emotional or intellectual, expressing their profoundly felt regression and progression of the souls. Limitations of the Study This study seeks to narrow down the vast fundamental adventurism of human thoughts and feelings related to the movement of pessimism and nihilism, and seeks to focus on the selected works of Strindberg, O'Neill, Ionesco, Beckett, and Bergman which tie together in the whole notion of the "journeying soul" as the central thesis of this study. The three notions, as stated earlier are related to the "Journeying souls" are discussed and analysed: a) the concept of the via dolorosa; b) the movement of pessimism and nihilism as related to the tradition of the quest of the absent God; c) the structural analysis of the selected theatrical works and films of the above writers related to the quest of the Self, the psychodramatic aspects of the works, and other related structural forms. Review of the Literature The study uses various sources for references: 1. Primary sources; Dramatic texts,autobiographical writings, letters, novels that are available in English. 12 2. Secondary sources: Dramatic and filmic studies and criticisms available in books and journals. Schopenhauer's original writings: The World as Will and Idea (1902) and Studies in Pessimism (1893) are used as references in this study. Works on Schopenhauer in autobiographical and critical forms are utilized to sup plement the study. Thomas Mann’s The Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer (1939) gives a critical analysis of Schopen hauer’s thpughts. Claud Sutton's short chapter on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in The German Tradition in Phi1osophy (1974) analyzes the concept of Atman and Brah man with which Schopenhauer is very involved in The World as Will and Idea. These writings are used as cross- references in the philosophical and metaphysical outlooks of the writers with whom this study is concerned. Dorothea W. Dauer's, Schopenhauer as Transmitter of Buddhist Ideas (1969) is a short comparative study on Schopenhauer and Buddhism. It analyzes various aspects in both thoughts and interestingly it also studies the notion of 'X' (God) used by Schopenhauer. E.M. Cioran's The Temptation to Exist (1976) makes a distinct study of the themes of alienation, estrangement, absurdity, boredom, futility, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, aware ness as agony, and reason as disease which help to eluc idate the concepts of Schopenhauer and other writers selected. The Fall into Time (1970), E,M. Cioran's -o collected essays translated by Richard Howard, contains intriguing articles that analyze the complex faculties of man's existential reality. Cioran says, "Illusion alone is fertile, illusion alone originates. It is by means of illusion that we give birth, that we engender (in both senses of the word), that we participate in the dream of diversity." General studies in this area are utilized. A.E. Taylor's Elements of Metaphysics (1961) is very help ful in the construction of an understanding of metaphysics. Mircea Eliade's Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1960) helps in interpreting Buddhist philosophy or the philosophy that accounts the void and the dream worlds as important to the existence of man. W'.Y. Evan-Wentz's (editor) Tibetan Book of the Dead (1974) helps one understand the concept of the "transcendence over the transitory" and "the art of dying" which is directly related to the playwrights and filmmaker I have chosen in this study, expecially Strind berg and Eugene Ionesco. The Tibetan Book of the Dead will answer the question: Why is there birth and why is there death? Eugene Webb’s The Dark Dove: The Sacred and Secular in Modern Literature (1975) is a very relevant book in the study of metaphysical reality. Webb's chapter on "The Paradox of the Sacred" analyses the concept of God's existence and takes Mircea Eliade's paradigm on sacred beings. Webb also discusses Nietzsche's atheism 14 and Beckett's God-substitute in Waiting for Godot. The book is a study of the sacred and its transformation in modern thought, and the transformation of the secular in relation to it. Writings on Baudelaire, Claudel, and Lautreamont are used in this study to find affinity with Strindberg's, Beckett's, and Ionesco's philosophy on thea ter. Nicole Ward Jouve's Baudelaire: A Fire to Conquer Darkness (1980) and M.A. Ruff's Baudelaire (1966) on "Action and Dreams" and "Paradis Artificiels" help in the understanding of the selected writers in this study. Wal lace Fowlie's Lautreamont (1973) helps in providing mater ials on the movement of decadence, neuroticisra, and creativity. R.D. Laing's The Divided Self (1965) helps in frameworking the psychological perspective on the problem of metaphysical theater and films. His thesis on "The Inner Self in the Schizoid Condition" is interesting and relevant to the study. Lillian Feder's Madness in Liter ature (1980) in a chapter on the "Aesthetics of Madness" gives interesting'critical reviews on Nerval, Lautreamont, and Artaud which are strongly applicable to Strindberg, O'Neill, Ionesco, Beckett, and Bergman. Charles I. Glicksberg's The Ironic Vision in Modern Literature (1969) gives relevant accounts of Schopenhauer's implicit irony of pessimism and Beckett's vision of the absurd. He also discusses some aspects of metaphysics such as the meta- 15 physics of death and the metaphysical basis of nihilistic irony. He also evaluates Thomas Mann's interpretations of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea. In the study of Strindberg, the Inferno - an autobiographical novel - is used as the main source of his metaphysical reevaluations. Gunnar Brandell's Strindberg in Inferno (1974) gives an in-depth study of the Inferno's social background and Strindberg's deep involvement in metaphysical theater and his vision of the world. Elizabeth Springee's The Strange Life of August Strindberg (1949) gives great accounts of Strindberg's life and affinities with other scholars who have shaped his philosophical bearings and thoughts. Karl Jasper's Strindberg and Van Gogh (1977) is an outstanding examination of Strindberg's schizophrenia and creativity made parallel to Van Gogh, Swedenborg, and Holderlin. Walter Johnson's introduction to To Damascus I, II, III in his book Plays of.Confession and Therapy (1979) gives some structural and analytical materials in approaching the above plays. The dramatic texts referred to in the study of Strindberg's metaphysical quest are limited to A Dream Play, To Damascus (a trilogy), and The Great Highway. They are plays that encompass Strindberg's journeying souls. The other plays, written before the Inferno period, are more concerned with other matters than the deeply meta physical. Strindberg's own writing on theater, especially 16 the preface to A Dream Play collected in Arvid Paulson's book Eight Expressionist Plays by August Strindberg (1965) is tremendously useful. David Hesla's The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation on the Art of Samuel Beckett (1971) is a revealing study on Beckett's novels and plays; Beckett's metaphysical interests are well analyzed here. Helene L. Baldwin's Samuel Beckett's Real Silence (1981) is the most interesting book on Beckett's metaphysical quest. He analyzes the concepts of nothingness, the void, the soul, the "waiting," and various other related metaphysical problems central in Beckett's works, both in the novels and the plays. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (1970) by Lawrence E. Harvey is the only book that intelligently analyzes Beckett's poetic works. It is a great source for the understanding of Beckett's metaphysical thoughts. G-C. Barnard in his book Samuel Beckett: A New Approach - Study of the Novels and Plays (1970) interestingly explores the inner working of Beckett's narratives and plays. In his analysis he constantly makes references to the texts which is a good apporach in Beckett's criticism. Melvin J. Friedman's (editor) Samuel Beckett Now: Critical Approaches to his Novels, Poetry and Plays (1970) contains articles on Beckett written by popular critics and scholars of Beckett such as David Hayman, Rosette Lamont, Harvey, and Ruby Cohn. Rosette Lament's "Beckett's Metaphysics 17 of Choiceless Awareness" is an interesting study on Waiting for Godot. The Shape of Paradox (1978) by Bert 0. States analyzes the God-idea in Beckett. States makes interesting observations on other writers such as Roland Barthes, Claudel, and Coleridge and introduces many concepts related to Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The Testament of Samuel Beckett (1978) by Josephine Jacobsen and William R. Mueller is a valuable text, which analyzes Beckett's techniques of writing. Jacobsen and Mueller are interested in his craft- manship primarily as it serves as a vehicle for his vision - his poetical mode, his epistemological sense of the relationship between the human consciousness and the world of space and time, and his comic approach to mankind. Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self (1964) by Frederick J. Hoffman is an epistemological approach on Beckett's works; it is an important book because Hoffman relates Beckett's works to the strains in literature of this century. Nathan A. Scott's Samuel Beckett (1965) analyzes the novels and plays and makes references to Baudelaire, Lautreamont, and Rimbaud in its attempt to give deeper insights into Beckett's works. This is an important book because of its comparative nature. Back to Beckett (1973) by Ruby Cohn - an outstanding Beckett scholar - is a thematic and structural analyses of Beckett's works. The works of Beckett analyzed in this study are: Waiting for 18 Godot, Endgame, and the novel Molloy. Cross references are made to other texts but on a minimal basis. His critical study on Proust, in Proust (1970), is a great source for reference because Beckett talks or writes very little about his own works. Proust reveals various dimensions of Beckett's critical philosophical outlook. Eugene Ionesco's personal writings: Notes and Counter Notes (1962), Frag ments of a Journal (1967) and Present Past, Past Present (1969) and other individual articles are used as basic texts in the study of Ionesco's metaphysical quest. Claude Bonnefoy"s Conversations with Eugene Ionesco (1977) contains various aspects of Ionesco's thoughts. It is an illuminating text in defining Ionesco's theater. The Two Faces of Ionesco (1978), edited by Rosette Lamont and Melvin J. Friedman contains articles written by scholars and critics of Ionesco such as Mircea Eliade, Michel Bena- mou, Roy Swanson, and Lamont and Friedman. Simone Benmussa interviews Ionesco and analyzes his play Hunger and Thirst, and Lamont translates Ionesco's writing "Towards a Dream Theater." This translation is a very important article to understand why Ionesco uses the dream as a major element in almost all his plays. Richard N. Coe's "A world of Infinite Coincidence," "The Void as the Center of Things," and "The Search for Meaning” in his book Eugene Ionesco (1961), help in the understanding of Ionesco's 19 ‘ complex metaphysical quest. The latest book on Ionesco is Moshe Lazar's (editor) The Dream and the Play: Ionesco's Theatrical Quest (1982). It is a collection of essays by Coe, Esslin, Wellwarth, Corrigan, Jacquart, Grossvogel, Lamont, Kott, and Lazar analyzing Ionesco's "Vision of Childhood" to Ionesco's psychodrarnatie stage. The plays of Ionesco analyzed in this study are: The Chairs, Exit the King, A Stroll in the Air, Victim of Duty, Amedee, Hunger and Thirst, and Man With Bags. Jorn Donner's The Films of Ingmar Bergman: From Torment to All These Women (1972) provides summaries of Bergman's major films and examines the techniques and content of the screenplays, emphasizing the essentially "private" nature his subject's comments on the world and on the problem of good and evil. Vernon Young's Cinema Borealis: Ingmar Bergman and the Swedish Ethos (1972) makes compelling analysis and criticism of all Bergman's films and reveals stimulating aspects of Bergmanian metaphysical sensitivity. Peter Gowie's Sweden 2: A Comprehensive Assessment of the Themes, Trends, and Directors in Swedish Cinema (1970) analyzes the major films of Bergman in great depth, with short supplementary chapters on "The Growth of the Swedish Cinema" and a chap ter on "Victor Sjostrom." These give a deeper understand ing of Bergman's works. John Russell Taylor's Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear: Some Key Film-makers of the Sixties (1964) 20 in his chapter "Ingmar Bergman", analyzes the major works of Bergman with special emphasis on The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician, and Through a Glass Darkly Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film (1978) by Bruce F. Kawin analyzes Persona and Shame within the definition of the term he uses - mindscreen. He defines mindscreen: "A mindscreen is a visual (and at times aural) field that presents itself as the product of a mind, and that is often associated with systemic reflexivity, or self-consciousness." Allan Casebier's Film Appreciation (1976) analyzes Wild Strawberries — in a very limited way — in relation to dreams, and also analyzes The Magician in a surrealistic appreciative, framework. The films of Berg man analyzed in this study are limited to: The Seventh Seal,Wild Strawberries, The Magician, and Through a Glass Darkly. Sophus Keith Winther's Eugene O'Neill: A Critical Study (1961) makes good observations on O'Neill’s major dramatic works and analyzes them in view of the author's obsessions with religion, good and evil, deter minism, fatalism, and free will and also the author's tragic sense towards life and death. Edwin A. Engel's The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill (1953) is divided into four major parts that analyzes the works of O'Neill in the following manner: 1) The Sea and the Jungle, 2) Dream and Drunkenness, 3) Death, and 4) Remembrance of 21 Things Past, that cover almost the extant works of the writer in a critical manner. Winnifred Dusebury Frazer’s Love as Death in The Iceman Cometh (1967) analyzes the play thematically and structurally (Setting, Characters, and Action) and gives his critical views on them. A Drama of Souls: Studies in O'Neill’s Super-Naturalistic Technique (1969) by Egil Tornqvist covers various aspects of O'Neill's theater. The study includes analyses of ' O’Neill's tragic vision, his super-naturalistic view on life as a dream in a limited comparison to Strindberg's and Ibsen's methods, his visualized and verbalized souls, and his usage of diction and language. Richard Dana Skinner's Eugene O'Neill; A Poet's Quest (1935) analyzes the inner themes of O'Neill's major plays in the interest of revealing the writer's interior or spiritual progress. Skinner sees O'Neill as an authentic and an instinctive poet. Skinner says, "He writes in a veritable torrent of deep feeling from which his inner attitude toward his characters is clearly discernable at every stage.” Doris F. Falk's Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension (1958) analyzes the writer's life as seen through his characters, the anguish and the conflicts. Frederic I. Carpenter in his book Eugene O'Neill (1964) considers O'Neill's biography as an important element in the study of the author's works. In the first chapter Carpenter analyzes '22 O'Neill's personal life, his family, and his times that recapitulate the universal problems of man's long journey through all times and places. The second chapter analyzes the patterns of O'Neill's tragedies - ~ the romantic dream, the American reality, the human tragedy, the transcen dence - - and considers O'Neill's later plays as the final tragedies from the writer. The other chapters analyze O'Neill's individual plays. 23 CHAPTER ONE THE JOURNEYING SOULS; A DESCENT INTO THE PSYCHE Now it is well worth observing that, on the one hand, the suffering and misery of life may easily increase to such an extent that death itself, in the flight from which the whole of life consists, becomes desirable, and we hasten towards it voluntarily; and again, on the other hand, that as soon as want and suffering permit rest to a man, ennui is at once so near that he necessarily requires diversion. The striving after existence is what occupies all living things and maintains them in motion. But when existence is assured, then they know not what to do with it; thus the second thing that sets them in motion is the effort to get free from the burden of existence, to make it cease to be felt, "to kill time," i.e., to escape from ennui. - Schopenhauer The state of man, according to the philosophy of pessimism, arises from the striving to remove the fear of death, such a fear being well diffused in life itself. Strindberg, O'Neill, Ionesco, Beckett, and Bergman, who lived the same problem,, could relate to the symptoms of "bitter consciousness" as recognized by other philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Leibniz, Unamuno, Kierke- 24 gaard, and others. These writers and thinkers speak of a "common psychic need" for freedom which impelled them to 1 release their pent-up ideas by writing. The "Intellectual continence" they practiced could "exacerbate the inflamed 2 condition of the mind and the volatile ideas therein." However the aesthetic formulation by these pessimistic writers is advanced by their obsession to excavate and understand the sphere of the real Self buried in the objective world and to find the unlimited boundaries of human psychological insecurity. Unamuno says, "If one didn't express those ideas, they would rot on him within, 3 embittering his consciousness.” And Nietzsche, whose influence is widespread, strives for perfect self-know ledge and perfect self-transcendence that would bring men to a new kind of psychic health. The concept of the journeying soul can well be conveyed by taking the developments of literature, philo sophy, and metaphysics under the auspices of Pr.oust, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others. These are the great modern writers and thinkers who started the metaphysical adventurism not for the sake of promoting literature to "entertain the cultured people" but to undertake literature as an awareness of being awakened to the barren emptiness that appeared to be at the center of the world. They are preoccupied by the 25 - assertion that "human reality as something immensely more rich and complicated" has to be lifted up to the surface of reality of the individual. They reject the structural complexity of scientific adventurism which brings no progress but "progressive degradation." Instead they seek literary manifestations on human existence to the depth within themselves that is essentially and radically mysterious. The "really real” to these writers is only that which corresponds to the "depth of the dark inner room of the Self." Through an understanding of Baudelaire, which is conceptually applicable here, Nathan A. Scott Jr. says : We must plunge into the gouffre, into the Abyss, for, if the world is resonant of "infinite things," then we cannot be satisfied with the forest of symbols, since it is but a point of departure and a way of moving into the unplumbed depths of Being-itsdlf. 4 All these writers are obsessed by the gouffre and the abyss. For instance E. M. Cioran, an exiled Rumanian philosopher now residing in France says, VI contemplate, in the abyss into which I see I have fallen, the glut of my iniquities, I seek, to no avail, how to discover and mani fest them to the world, I would walk naked through cities and squares, meat and fishes hung from my neck and crying 5 out: here is the vile creature." This trembling tempera ment - "an all-embracing boredom and suffering of living" - 26 leads him to find concordance with the inner world in an attempt to salvage a newer reality about existence. The inner reality or the "impressions of the voices of the inner world" suggests strong affiliation with the inner ■ sense of dissolution isolation, separation, and angst, that pervades the central thoughts of the writers and thinkers. Thus, they stand at odds with the physical world — the world of reality — which they envisage as a single entity that can never at any time and in any form reveal the totality of reality and truth to the satisfac tion of their own psychic needs. The physical world is thus shallow and inscrutibly banal to these submerged and alienafed writers. Within themselves, in the in accessible dungeon of their beings, in the "gouffre inter- 6 dit a nos sondes" , and in the kernel of their psyche, they seek the reflexes of their intuitive world(s). Their intuitive worlds are created by the mind, and what they invent are images, which are different from the real objects of the world. This rather insane inwardness represents the only plausible mood in which to find the significance of existence. Beckett, one of the well- known pessimists in the theater and novels, says: The only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contrac tion. And Art is the apotheosis of 27 solitude. There is no communication because there is no vehicle of communi cation .... The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn into the core'of the eddy.7 (Italics mine) Thus Strindberg, O'Neill, Ionesco, Beckett, and Berg man pursue the mystery of darkness to satisfy their meta physical nostalgia. The pilgrimages or journeys they take become substantial new encounters to enable them to under stand the conflicts and contradictions inherent in man's physical and spiritual co-existence. Life and death are bordered by metaphysical anxieties such as suspicion, sufferings, fear, boredom, ennui, and other existential problems that are immediate and close to man. These metaphysical sensitivities send them journeying into their inner worlds to understand their inner landscapes and to discover the depth of their Being. They enter the land scapes of the invisible. Their journeying souls begin to struggle in their attempts to grasp the nebulous unknown dimensions. Cioran says, "(I am) clinging to an abyss I would not dream of relinquishing, since it isolates me 8 from becoming." The journey is a metaphor for the interplay between the author's dreaming soul and creative mind or imagin ation. It is the domain of creativity. Robert Brustein 28 says, "(the work of an author) is the expression of a spiritual condition. For he is a militant of the ideal, an anarchic individualist, concerned with the impossible rather, than the possible" and his discontent extends to the very root of existence. The work of art itself becomes a subversive gesture - a more imaginative reconstruction 9 of a chaotic, disordered world." The search for meaning by the modern dramatists and filmmakers is no longer in alignment with the traditional belief of the spirits of divine faith as effected by Christianity and other secular religions of the world which have been further pursued by positive philosophy. However, the journey of modern man - in the whole gamut of existen tialism - encounters spiritual regions that may lead him to newer inner revelations of human conditions within the Self, Being and inner surroundings. The journey of the inner Self is a voyage of solitude, a voyage of looking into the interior of the Self, a voyage of revolt in order to ascertain metaphysical freedom. It is a voyage insti gated by the impact of suffering and the fear of impending death. It is a voyage for spiritual liberty, a voyage to exorcise the inner demons, a voyage into the infernal underworld, and a voyage towards decadence to encounter splintered and embattled individual souls. It is a domain of creativity, a domain of hallucinations, illusions, and 29 dreams. Strindberg, through this "voyage," follows the pattern of the dream to journey into the interior of his psyche, saying that in the realm of dreams anything seems possible and probable, adding that time and space have no reality. The imagination weaves new patterns of existence combining memories, fantasies, absurdities, and improvi sations as if they were entirely possible, probable, logical. As in our dreams, he says, characters split, double, or multiply, and they may vanish and reappear, blur and bcecome clear; all that holds these disparate and ever-changing phenomena together is the ruling conscious ness of the dreamer, who is presumably the author himself^ The theater and films paradoxically incorporate the subjec tive movements of the souls into the surreal transcendental world. The surreal here may suggest the realm that borders life and death. The primal question of life and death recoils in the consciousness of modern man. E. M. Cioran writes: The fear of death attacks our sense of dimension, of immediacy - our illusion of what is solid: space shrinks, shoots from our grasp, turns into thin air, becomes entirely transparent. Our fear replaces space, welling up until it obscures the very reality that provoked it - until it substitutes itself for death. All experience is suddenly reduced to an exchange between the self and the fear, which, as an autonomous reality, isolates us in such unmotivated terrors, such gratuitous shudders that we run the risk of forgettint we are going ... to die, yet fear can supplant our real problems : only to the extent that we - unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it - perpetuate it within our selves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude. 11 Cioran's philosophical thinking could find common axis with Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Strindberg, O'Neill, Ionesco, Beckett, and Bergman. Cioran also believes that the mind is a voyeur, and adds that death knows everything within man. The phenomenal world, carried into the inner state of Being, becomes the central point of reference and a great source of confusion. Strindberg, for example, occupies himself with the obsessive notion that man comes into the world with a burden of sin. Man has to find atonement for the sin and thus existence becomes a miserable entity. Only death is the end of suffering. With this thought very similar to that of Schopenhauer, Strindberg regards life as an unprofitable episode and paves his Will to live to redemption. In To Damascus, he undertakes the voyage, or quest, through a domain of sin and death to eternal life by seeking a strong belief in transcenden talism as a new state of Being free from the sufferings and tortures of the phenomenal world. Thus, he exists in the depth of. the transcendental and mystical world where he feels he vanishes into serene eternity. With a deep sense of vocation for the eternal, to suffice a vanishing entity 31 of his physical Self, Strindberg feels that he had over come the supreme malady of hellish existence. Swedenborg, whom he mentions in Inferno, explains his commitment to a view of life as a persecution. Strindberg says, "I was in 12 Hell and damantion lay heavy upon me." Swedenborgian impulses in Strindberg form a strong basis for his vigorous outlook on existence. He further says, "we have been removed and sent here to suffer the consequences of misdemeanour of which we ourselves have no recollection. Because of a faint-heartedness from which I often suffer, I pushed away into the furthest recesses of my soul the impression that my reading of Swedenborg had made upon me. 16 But the powers would no longer give me any peace." The main theme in Strindberg's post-inferno dramatic works is the "journey into Self." This expresses patterns of disintegrated, fragmented and metamorphosed tempera ments of neurosis along the many stations on the via dolorosa towards so-called self redemption and self-perse cution. Strindberg uses the theater to reshape his diverging views on existence into a kind of pattern to reject "the centrality of a collapsing psyche" which he holds throughout his life. Paul Claudel in a similar tone wrotes: One solitary figure, the only one with a face of his own, speaking amid a semicircle of voices, which, simply by being there, lure and compel him to speech. Every poet has known his auditory horizon, this confused murmur of jumbled phrases, echoing and reechoing until at last they give birth to words. 13 The art becomes a medium to sooth his self-aggressiveness and to cure an ongoing psychomachia. The journey into Self as an intuitive act, puts the author into an ab stracted world(s); and through the reflexion of the mind, the images of his acquired world(s) become a reality. It is a reality of a dream-world. Intuitions become the whole of his existence. On the art of the theater, with dreams as the element through which he carves "his own shadows or doubles” to escape the incubus of doom, Strindberg says: Since dreams most frequently are filled with pain, and less often with joy, a note of melancholy and a compassion for all living things runs through the limping story. Sleep, the liberator, often appears as a tormentor, a torturer, but when the agony is most oppressive the awakening rescues the sufferer and reconciles him to reality. No matter how agonizing reality may be, it.will at' this moment be welcomed cheerfully as a release from the painful dreams. 14 The descent into the psyche is rooted in the skeptical dogmatism of asserting the grounds of understanding and attempting to acquire knowledge of the phenomenal world. It is thus a journey into the psyche through thinking and doubting. Strindberg, for example, questions the problem atic status of his tortured being, tries to determine the sources of his pain and damnation and also attempts to ___________ ■ ________ • _ 33 , find a way out of the impact of self-judgement. He probes into the very core and essence of questioning, but still the penitential journey grew more painful, and thus he inevitably proceeds through it in a circular manner back to the core of his anguish . Moshe Lazar, in his illustration of the beseiged, splintered and embattled souls of these authors, says, "And because there are no definitive "cures" for these beseiged souls, the journey into darkness and back into creativity is always starting all over again, repeating itself with variations, circling in a centrifugal manner around the Self, spinning around 15 that mysterious center where "the end is the beginning".. Moshe Lazar uses the term "psychodramatic stage" to define the new form of theater since Strindberg that also applies directly to the theater of O'Neill, Ionesco, Beckett and t the film works of Bergman which are the interest of this study. To define his notion of the "psychodramatic stage" Lazar says: They are rather fragmentary and kaleido scopic mirrorings of existential anxieties, dreams and daymares, neurotic conflicts and traumas, dreadful or wishful projections, repressed,emotions and discarded memories; the oneiric settings allow metamorphosed images to emerge into light - the visible artwork - from the darkness of the soul, allow for muted voices to ascend from the groves of the unconscious........ 16 The "grove of the unconscious" is the psyche, where "an 17 ongoing psychomachia" is battling with the author's 34 consciousness. The journeying soul, which is strongly related to the quest for the totality of existence in question, need not necessarily be manifested in the manner of an already available and structured human consensus, but concerns rather the eternal worth defined by the existential needs of the individuals. Thus, their existence expresses an attitude towards the deepest inner world which represents the most internalized dimension of their psychic reality. They abide by the organisms of their reality inculcating a new world of their own - a distinctive far-reaching self reflection. This is achieved by their commitment to a "new apprehension'.' of the Self. They come to Self- realization by the illumination of their own understanding of existence and regard themselves accountable to their existential fantasy. The journey takes on self-revelation as the crux of the course. What they call into question is a critical inquiry into the whole problem of metaphysics. M. Holmes Hartshone defines metaphysics as "a legitimate and crucial expression to the reflective character of man’s existence 18 as doubting, thinking, questioning.” These writers have inverted the paradigm of their existence to their neurotic needs. Strindberg takes his painful experience as the basis of his metaphysical search, and promotes his own 35 conceptual understanding of the physical world. He believes that human kind has to take flight from the tyranny and suppression of an unknown power. Since man has been placed constantly on trial for the unseen sins he has done, the fear of persecution by the unknown power is inevitable. In A Dream Play, Strindberg probes this quivering fear that clamours in his mind and thus fills the vacuum of his theater with good and evil, happiness and sorrows from the beginning of life into death to cure him of the neurosis pf impending death. His other plays, The Ghost Sonata, The Great Highway, and To Damascus, both focus on "the light of his dreams" and the real and actual experiences of his life, into an engrossing Self Absorp tion. He says, ",.... in order to save my soul, if nothing else, I fled before the overpowering odds - fled into the wilderness; and there, in the solitude, I again 19 recovered my broken spirit.” In the dramatic works of Ionesco and Beckett, the commitments to inwardness are represented by their Self- analysis of the definition of existence. Beckett in Waiting for Godot questions the epistemological conditions of man and his God, making this questioning an awkward statement. On the question of God in the modernistic sense Glicksberg says: . despair .has also been adapted to the uses of modernity but given a strangely untheological and even sacrilegeous cast. 36 If God is, according to Kierkegaard, the supreme symbol of the absurd, then the metaphysical rebel of our age can sally forth to slay the dragon of the super natural and abolish the lie of the divine. The Devil, by contrast, then becomes the chosen adversary of God, reason incarnate, the cunning Master of the casuistry of doubt, the subtle and puissant ironist. The Devil in modern literature is the personification of this rebellion against God. 20 For Beckett's Molloy, Unnamable, Endgame and Waiting for Godot "God becomes an unnecessary hypothesis" because the whole truth of Beckett's pessimism and nihilism is a useless passion. On Beckett's God and consciousness Glicksberg writes: God is a verbal spook, a vain hypothesis, consciousness is but a revolving kaleidoscope of hypotheses, all reality is appearance. There is no hope of finding a way out, neither by Christian eschatology nor by rational means. 21 Ionesco in The Chairs isolates reality as mere shad ows where beings are consumed in space and time beyond the rules of logic. These vanities, both in Beckett and Ionesco, draw a conclusion that their questing attitudes consciously deny the order of the universe they could not simply take for granted. Their undertakings satisfy their existential anguish and cure them of the neurosis of doubts. Strindberg manifests the willingness to declare sufferings to be nightmarish senselessness in the universe he depicts. O'Neill, like Strindberg, declares the eternal 37 questioning of man in an environment overpowered by the sense of impotence and despair; Ionesco, wholly obsessed with death, places death in a grotesquely comic universe; Beckett is obsessed by a quotidian nightmare in a reality where anything can happen and he quests for a "mysterious authority", for a God that has failed; and Bergman as conjurer expresses personal experience as a "driving force like hunger and thirst" to attain the mystery of existence. The metaphysical question remains: Why is there any thing at all rather than nothing? This question proclaims an individual angst with existence. The metaphysical question is asked because of dread and it expresses the existential awareness of one’s being - that is, being- toward-death. When a metaphysical question is genuinely metaphysical, there is no answer at all. The metaphysical questions of these writers do not supply any plausible answer to the totality of their existence. Their enquiries into the problems of existence end in a much deeper dread and despair. Kierkegaard writes: Despair is the sickness unto death, this agonizing contraction, this sickness is in the self, everlasting to die, to die and yet not to die, to die the death. For dying means that it is ail over, but dying the death means to live to experience death. 22 The alienated selves of these writers are in purgatory. They are more concerned with the inwardness of the subject matter, explicitly or implicitly irrelevant to the existing ethical or theological thoughts of the currently popular disclosures. They embark on a new pessimism as a demand for self-liberation. They magnify the "technically fallen man" into an inner conviction. They take long journeys into Self, finding and criticizing the meanings of existence as they understand it. Combined with self- perpetuating frustrations and fears, they take their art into self-propelling journeys and into the mysterious i transcendental world as wise men and fools at the same time Childishness in Ionesco is an adult explanation of the world: the circus clowns become jugglers in Beckett. Wolfgang Iser says, "..... circus clownery, music hall cross-talk, and dramatic mime, are all found in Beckett's theater ..... to fill life's emptiness .... unlike a real clown, he seeks not to amuse but to cheat his;own 23 boredom; he is acting, but for himself." Bergman takes his moments of agony into a work of art. "The moment of pain (is) the nucleus of your creation," he says. In Strindberg, egocentricity, mania, and his labyrinthis journeys, are self-revelatory; and O'Neill, the most skeptical American writer, makes his doomed characters go on living. The metaphysical theater maintains a negative relation ship to God and a psychology of protest transforms a work of art into madness, dementia and insanity. Michel 39 Foucault says, "The Reason-Madness nexus constitutes for Western culture one of the dimensions of its originality; it already accompanied that culture long before Hieronymus Bosch, and will follow it long after Nietzsche and Ar- 24 taud." Shoshana Felman writes that if madness as such is defined as an act of faith in reason, no reasonable con viction can indeed be exempt from the suspicion of madness. Reason and madness are thereby inextricably linked; mad ness is essentially a phenomenon of thought .... Madness can only occur within a world in conflict, within a con- 25 flict of thoughts. Theater poets like Strindberg, O'Neill, Ionesco, Beckett, and film director Bergman are deeply involved with the urge to creative activity that ascends madness and creates the identity of their inner lives. Theater and films become a medium of a solitary journey into dread as that of one who is mad. Strindberg, confronted with a Self and a double, attempts to overcome his tortuous life by taking refuge in the world of dreams where space and time within his responsive universe could be amplified and modified to his psychic needs. He says, "... the author has in A Dream Play attempted to reproduce the detached and disunited - although apparently logical - forms of dreams. Anything is apt to happen, anything seems 26 possible and probable. Time and space do not exist." 40. Artaud is tormented by the conflict between inner and outer reality, and the fear of the void; Ionesco alluded to the realm of the dead. He believes that living is dying and his plays are metamorphoses of death in life. Beckett becomes silent because "to think is misery"; and Bergman's cinematic dramaturgy concerns itself with mad ness brought about by a world out of balance. The world seems to give them an extraordinary meaning. Both the theater and films seek to understand this mysterious phenomenon. The theatrical and cinematic pilgrimages are funda mental to life, and they involve the whole religious life of their authors and makers. Nicolar Berdyaev says: creativity his that very moment towards transcendence and the evocation of the image of the wholly other in relation to this life. In the realm of creativ ity all things acquire depth, meaning, character and interest, in contrast to the shallowness, insignificance, for tuitousness and insipidity peculiar to the realm of tedious external act. 27 Solitude, anguish, fear, tedium, and ennui are all elementary problems in human existence and their polarities and incoherences are fundamental to life. Solitude causes estrangement and estrangement causes suffering and anguish. Estrangement builds the sense of uprootedness and dis establishment thus creating an objective world in collision with the metaphysical cries of existence. Artaud, for 4l example, having to overcome his fear of estrangement with the objective world, reaffirms a metaphysical entity with his inner world and writes prophetically, that he is not dead but is separated. However, the sense of separation and isolation for Artaud causes him to retreat from the worlds of the other artists into his own self-defined regions of the psyche. The mode of the modern theater since Strindberg becomes a turbulent ocean of human existential questing, taking the Being into rising waves and into the depth of infernal darkness. Darkness and light intersperse the stage with human psychotic outbursts and melancholies. Life becomes annoying, but at the same time there is a "distant hope" longing for liberty. Above all, the theater and films seem to be media of verbal and visual fragments of man's darkened knowledge of the phenomenal world. The theater and films reveal puzzling fragments of life - both childish and mature at the same time. The central theme in the metaphysical theater and films is death anxiety. Strindberg is profoundly conscious of the presence of death which shadows the journeys of his life and he also realizes the transitoriness of his Being into eternity. But Strindberg could not accept death as Christians do, that is, death as one of those threads which are woven to its end. Strindberg accepts almost anything that is associated with the knowledge of death. but his inquisitiveness never escapes the notion of death as an impending horror that suppresses his existence. He uses the term "the Other" or"the Unknown Power" as responsible for his anxiety. He questions the design of human existence and blames thd Unknown of the invisible for his guilt of separation from his true Self. The enigmatic reality of existence is man's foremost metaphysical anxiety. The journeying soul seeks to unravel the unfathomable bondage and servitude with death. The unfathomable is man's absolute relationship to death. Man seeks to understand his finiteness and his infinity. Is Being determined for eternity or has Being lost eternity? Death anxiety has occupied man’s rational and imaginative sensitivity and this phenomenon has chanelled man's deepest anguish into a quest that has no final end. The unfathom able, the invisible, the inexhaustible depth becomes a mirror of doubt. The mirror of doubt reflects its own images in the works of art. Paintings, poetry, theater, and the cinema exorbitantly utilize their media in expressing the core of existence reaching far beyond the ordinary. Schopenhauer, who understands this reality, says, The life of the majority is only a constant sturggle for this existence itself, with the certainty of losing it at last. But what enables them to endure this wearisome battle is not so much the love of life as the fear of death, which yet stands in the background 43 as inevitable, and may come upon them at any moment. Life itself is a sea, full of rocks and whirlpools, which man avoids with the greatest care and solicitude, although he knows that even if he succeeds in getting through with all efforts and skill, he yet by doing so comes nearer at every step to the greatest, the total, inevitable, and irremediable shipwreck, death; nay, even steers right upon it: thus is the final goal of the laborious voyage, and worse for him than all the rocks from which he has escaped. 28 (Italics mine) The dream has become an integral element in the modern theater and films since Strindberg. Calderon's "Life is a 29 dream," is echoed in the works of Strindberg, O'Neill, Ionesco, Beckett and Bergman. It is through dreams (day dreams and nightmares) that the writers could project their expressions closer to the source of their feelings; they could express freely the multi-faceted reality of exist ence; they could stand at extreme poles of their imagin ations, release their "primal scream" in the manner suit able to the themes of their works, and, above all, culmin ate all of this in the structure of their visions. Using the dream as a structure in his plays, Strindberg says: The personalities split, take on duality, multiply, vanish, intensify, diffuse and disperse, and are brought into a focus. There is, nowever, one single-minded consciousness that exercises a dominance over the characters: the dreamers. 30 Ionesco, who is also deeply obsessed by dreams says that existence has become an ever-present obsessive dream: it seems true; it looks realistic. This is due to the 44 fact that he is constantly being carried away into his dream-worlds to overcome the traumatic images of his own Self being dragged into the cradle of the "great vertical graveyard" in real esistence. These are the daymares and daydreams that Ionesco has to take seriously in his works. And since a work of art is "self-introspection and self submergence," as Unamuno terms it, it is thus Ionesco's * own double that plays the role of the characters in all his plays. Moshe Lazar, in his article on Ionesco, says, "The doubles are the dreams and the conscious introspections from the daymares and nightmares enter into the artwork as the multiple voices of the creator's psychodramatic 31 agony.” and adds that, "most of them are, in fact, doubles of himself, even when they are grotesque, exag- 32 gerated, and unlike his conscious Self." As Ionesco writes: So then I am the one who looks at himself (myself), a sort of impotent God. I am not only a watchful eye, I am also the one who experiences the passions, desires, and so forth, which are both myself and not myself. I am within, I am without: the one who makes, who is made, who sees what he does and how it is done, without really understanding. 33 Like his plays Man With Bags, A Stroll in the Air, Chairs and Journey into the Kingdom of the Dead, the shadows, the phantoms, the ghosts, the bodiless voices of the "dead ones" come into interplay with Ionesco's consciousness . ; 45 creating a haunting mystery of the doom world that man has to face with existence. Robert W, Corrigan says, "the heart of every play is a ghost. It is the real subject of every play, and that ghost must be made manifest in perfor mance. If it doesn't appear there is no performance. The 34 challenge to every performer: to make present an absence." Samuel Beckett's fiction deals with total nothingness, meaninglessness, and other related negativism. He takes 1:1 his paradoxical artistic understanding into an investigat ion, an escavation, and an exploration of opposites by sub stituting ignorance for knowledge, impotence for creativ ity, lethargy for efficiency, confusion for understanding, lunacy for rationality, doubt for certainty, illusion for reality. The philosophy of pessimism of Schopenhauer, the name more than almost any other philosopher whom Beckett has affinity with, and who has formed his views on both ethics and metaphysics. Both Schopenhauer and Beckett regard life as a continual struggle between diverging principles all endeavoring to assert themselves while only one could ultimately prevail. Thus, the constant consciousness of defeat in Beckett's works, both in the novels and the plays, reveal his solipsistic view that life has to be overcome only by giving up the struggle as useless. Beckett‘even says, "Nothing is serious." And Helene L. 46 Baldwin says, "For Beckett, there is one story only that is worth telling, and that is the story of a quest, of man in 35 search of the ground of his being." Beckett's world is willy-nilly, self-made, auto- fabricated, a surreal limbo, a cyclical repetitiveness, * absolute zero, a circus ring for comic gamuts, grim and pedantic, shrinking, stasis - all reaching to an entropy of time where time itself is running out. The grand opus Of Beckett's theme is reductio ad absurdum. Durko Suvin summarizes Beckett's works as "the whole savage degrad- 36 ation of world and man." •47 CHAPTER TWO AUGUST STRINDBERG;’ : JOURNEYS INTO THE LABYRINTHS OF DARKNESS AND FIRE Hell? But I had been brought up to regard Hell with the deepest contempt as an imag inary condeption, thrown on the scrap-heap along with other out-of-date prejudices. All the same, I could not deny a matter of fact, the only thing I could do was to explain eternal damnation in this new way; we are already in Hell. It is the earth itself that is Hell, the prison constructed for us by an intelligence superior to our own, in which I could not take a step without injuring the happiness of others, and in which my fellow creatures could not enjoy their own happiness without causing me pain. - Strindberg. In To Damascus, a trilogy, A Dream Play, and The Great Highway, Strindberg represents the stage as a border line between reality and dream and he accomplishes this by reworking his Inferno experiences into plays. His theater becomes an analogy of a journey between the natural world and the world of spirits. With these expressionistic plays, the theater had led us to a gregarious inertia and to a consciousness of Christian faith in order to expurgate the hell within individual man. The Nietzschean disciple in Strindberg manifests the Dionysian attitude to life. 48 On the other hand, Schopenhauer's metaphysical will has given content and direction to Strindberg's theater, in the manner that Schopenhauer has manifested in The World as / Will and Idea. It is the "spiristic phenomena" in Schop enhauer that moves Strindberg into the direction of the Self. Both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have undermined the thoughts of Strindberg, besides others. Strindberg is dis gusted with life, and his aggressiveness has made him turn inward. The themes of his plays in To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Great Highway are interpretations of life and sufferings as the protagonists take long journeys into the Self, criticizing the world of truth. His theater becomes prophetic and explanatory with extreme subjectivism as its mode. This extreme subjectivity is a projection of Strind berg's psychic condition. His influence by Swedenborg's 1 process of vastation is seen in his expressionistic plays. Both Swedenborg and Strindberg internalize their exper iences into a supernatural realm and encounter extraordin ary visions of the spiritual world. The extraordinary vision, according to Karl Jaspers, is "simply from the 2 spiritual necessity of the patient to exist." Jaspers understands that Strindberg is tortured by illusions,■which upon a moral turn, he undertakes and preserves as his philosophical milieu. This, Jaspers believes, is caused by a significant illness - schizophrenia. The inwardness in 49 the works of Strindberg, according to Jaspers, is an Objective expression. Jaspers identifies the depths of illusions in Strindberg as objective, which is contrary to the extreme subjectivism that has been mentioned earlier. Jaspers finds that Strindberg's works never become confused He says: Strindberg never becomes confused: the functioning of his inner life remains always intact, no matter now much reality is expressed in the elementary phenomena; whereas our patients whose depth rests in subjective experience, in the involvement of the entire psyche, will later become disturbed, completely insane in the eyes of the nonpsychiatrist. 3 Inwardness in Strindberg is an eternal fulfillment and an attempt to grasp the sufferings of eternal restless ness. In a study of Holderlin, Jaspers traces the changes in Holderlin's poetic works that can be made directly applicable to Strindberg's inwardness. Jaspers quotes Holderlin, "It should render us true to ourselves, visionary and tolerant toward the world; at the same time, we do not want to permit idle chatter of affection, exag geration, ambition, singularity, etc., to hinder our strug- 4 gling with our might." Like Holderlin, Strindberg is aware of his lack of accord with the world and his time, and he clearly shows an outburst of vehemence in his works. To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Great Highway are "struggles with might" of the experience with God. God 50 seems to be within himself, and he takes a journey to experience God in person. David Scalan says, "He cannot stop searching while there are still more places to search. A simple 'religious experience' is not enough to end his 5 search for (or flight from)God." And Strindberg says, 6 "But the Powers would no longer give me any peace." The journey into the Self is the most critical. 7 Holderlin says, "The more secure man is within himself." Both Strindberg and Holderlin are not affected by the needs of reality. They live for their works without asking for anything else. It is the journey inwards, that is the journey into Self, that characterize their writings. On Holderlin Jaspers writes, "..... he lives entirely for his work without asking for anything else; and this gives him the enthusiasm which can, just as understandably and casually, be related to the schizophrenic euphoric meta- 8 physical stimuli." Jaspers considers Holderlin's burning desire for distant Greece as a schizophrenic reality. "Schizophrenics develop their own myths which for them is matter of fact, existing unquestioningly, and which often takes on a time- 9 less character." This-is similar to Strindberg's mythical figures in A Dream Play, when Indra's Daughter descends from heaven to hear the complaints and grievances of man kind. The mythical figures of Brahma and Indra's Daughter 51 in A Dream Play are reflections of Strindberg's Weltansch auung regarding the totality of existence. Existence is suffering; all being is impermanent. Strindberg's pessimis tic view on existence owes its origin to Schopenhauer. Strindberg believes in the fatality of mankind and the episode on the descent of Indra's Daughter to earth sym bolizes the mysterious fall of the divine to earth. This symbolic cosmological calamity can only be the vision of the insane mystic and these visions suggest the intense sufferings of mankind. Death phenomena has become an exalting call to creativity. Strindberg's death anziety, for example, in both his narratives and theatrical writings, has become an integral part of his burning anguish. The earth is sof- focating him with the air of punishment. In a voice of a fallen man, Strindberg says: My account with life is settled: We are quits! If I have sinned, then heaven knows I have suffered sufficient punishment: For hell! Why, I have crossed a thousand hells right here without the vanities and false pleasure of this detestable world. Born with nostalgia for heaven, I cried, even as a child, over the filthiness of existence, finding myself homeless among my parents and society. 10 Strindberg has journeyed through the dark and shadowy labyrinths in life and felt that hell has persecuted him while living. These terrifying dreams and nightmares which pursue him into daylight, give him an unaccountable an- 52 guish which moves into the world of transcendence. He believes that the transcendent is present in his life. The transcendentalism that occupies Strindberg's thoughts is influenced by his search to move beyond the world of ap pearance to express his inner reality. It is thus a jour-n ney into the extra-terrestrial realm of metaphysics. Pre occupied with extreme sufferings, Strindberg challenged beyondness and the Unseen. He writes: Almost mad with pain, I avoided and neglected my fellow men, refused invitations, drove my friends from me. Silence and solitude encom passed me, the stillness of a desert, solemn, terrifying, in which-I definitely challenged the unseen power to a wrestling match, body against body, soul against soul. 11 Strindberg is a victim of a mania. Uprooted by an intellectual snobbery and mental illness, he journeys the impenetrable darkness to escape the humiliation of death. In a state of mental distress, Strindberg calls for death as an end to his sufferings. This suicidal impulse is due to the "nebula” that he could not grasp. Strindberg's interest in trying to understand the cosmos is vast. From alchemy he studied the making of gold and sulphur, then his interest developed into the realm of Natural Philosophy, and later he tried to become an au thority in the study of Nature. Influenced by many great thinkers such as Haeckle, Darwin, Victor Hugo, Spencer,, Moleschott, and others, Strindberg began to feel that his ' 53 needs were gradually moving towards science rather than literature. These scientific preoccupations in Strind berg's body of work creates a further complicated person ality. Brandell says: The psychotic outbursts that punctuated Strindberg's central religious development also separated the different periods of his speculation in Natural Philosophy - this is especially true of the first and the third crises. In general, one must assume that the psychological forces that gave rise to Strindberg's typical Inferno also determined the orientation of his scientific studies. 12 His alchemic period which can be considered as a fanatical absorption with scientific inquiry, can well be explained by the development of a schizophrenic abnormality in him. His letter to Ola Hansson (July 6, 1889) states, "Liter ature makes me sick and I am gradually moving over to 13 science." This is indicative of Strindberg's existential impulses, trying to understand the cosmological phenomenon around him,, which later show, to a great extent, a per sonality that is chaotic. This chaotic Self of Strindberg is explained by the nature of his work. Strindberg has to overcome a "psychotic outburst" to free himself from the grasp of Nature and from sinking into the depth of darkness However, the alchemic period does not fully fulfill his quest for the "new cosmos" because, "he was not wholly 14 unconscious of the true nature of his interest in science." His "approach to experimentation was more philosophical and 54 15 lyrical than scientific.'' And Strindberg claims a similar outcome in his "cosmic quest" by saying, "I have wandered in the dark ... groped my way forward, stumbled 16 on contradictions, and knocked over new probabilities." He adds, "I am so far into the mountain that I cannot turn back, for no Ariadne has given me the thread to fasten by the entrance. Thus, I rest for a moment and then proceed in the hope that farther on someone will find me, living 17 or dead." The alchemic period reflects Strindberg's existential impulse. It is channeled toward the quest of the cosmic phenomenon, but in his central preoccupation he is predom inantly seeking a metaphysical entity. The scientific inquiry explains his strong sense of intuition to penetrate beyond the wonders of natural phenomena. Whatever the scientific bent that he has explored, influenced by various natural philosophers from Aristotle to his contemporaries such as Schopenhhuer, Haekel, Hartman, Darwin, Strindberg came to the conclusion in 1895 in his "Sylva Sylvarum" that "Everything was replaced with killing monotony; everything was the same as always! everything 18 happened all over again.” Later a new revelation came to him - a new condeption of the world. "Look, here is my universe, as I have shaped it, as it has been revealed to 19 me." When one considers the "nebula" that Strindberg could 55 not grasp, the experience may be alligned in the same way to other pessimistic thought of the time. The cosmic thought that seems to be floating above man's intellectual realm is becoming man's intellectual anguish. There is a condition - both cosmic and individual - of disalignment and disharmony which baffles man's innermost quest for meaning. The consciousness that conquers the mind of man is, in its real sense, the consciousness of a beholder,that controls the entirety of thought. Strindberg, very much influenced by Schopenhauer, in his conviction in Natural Philosophy, undergoes a meta physical journey, attempting to find rational explanation to nature's phenomenal entity. Brandell writes, "In the first draft of Inferno ... Strindberg declares that "God 20 had become both a scientific discovery and a need." 21 The works of Strindberg indicate "a psychic need” that resembles Schopenhauer's inquiries into the wonderment of existence. Schopenhauer writes that "both greater energy of the intuitive faculty of knowledge, and a truer disposition of mind, so that they were capable of a purer, more direct comprehension of the inner being of nature, and were thus in a position to satisfy the metaphysical 22 need in a more worthy manner." Strindberg's existential angolsse is clearly indic ated by his "psychic outburst" that brings Natural Philos- 56 Dphy outside the realm of science. Strindberg's main concern was to utilize the scientific inquiries from various sources. Brandell writes, "Because Strindberg did not m readily think in scientific categories, condepts of law, purpose, and causality were largely foreign to him. His fundamental concern was not with the rational ways of explaining existence, but with competing visions of the 23 world." Strindberg declares that "either the world is nothing but chaos in constant flux, or else there is a 24 secret order behind the courses of events." Strindberg's To Damascus, a trilogy, A Dream Play, and The Great Highway are referred to as station plays, anno tating "the linear concept of existence." Shoshana Avigal says that, "The linear image - derives from the belief that human life has a purpose, it leads in a definite direction towards a final aim. In short, it has meaning. Meaning 25 in this sense, is related to a transcendental object." The sources of movement from station to station in the above plays, are the questing souls. Although refuted to the extent of being in total symbolic dependency on images that are beyond the grasp of ordinary believability, they lead to an invoking relationship with the unknown eternal streams of thoughts, to a further extent where the dependency becomes a "kind of religious truth in itself." The quest takes a form of a dream, a "travelling mind in a '57. nightmarish condition" - with the levels of choice and rejections - that becomes an objectified goal of the purn : < suer. Strindberg's quest seems to have a "path" - the path of Job - that he follows with indifference. The movement towards this goal becomes extremely dubious in a state of semi-consciousness. This is quite true in Buddhist prac tices in meditation where the mind travels freely into levels of cosmic reality, and Strindberg seems to exper ience just the same. In The Great Highway, for example, the metaphysical quest belongs to an "oppressive state of mind" that semi-consciously creates a relationship with the wandering nostalgia of his.psyche. But the wanderings, like the meditative state, are only optical illusions. Un like Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Act Without Words, and Play, where the stage-frame is frozen in a choiceless and and in a disadvantageous entity, Strindberg's The Great Highway and To Damascus are flows of dreamery impressions, taking the journey aloft into the banal, absurd, and the Eternal. Time in Strindberg's expressionistic plays is stretched into abstract co-existence with optical illus ions. The circularity of time, space, and place in his plays seems "all possible” but in another sense - that is metaphysically - it is a dynamic confrontation with pre existing torments of the pursuers. Torments are not conclusions of a state of being but rather are everflowing 58 ' concoctions with the real Self. In Strindberg the visuals will explain the nostalgic concoctions. In The Great Highway, the visualization and verbalization of de rangement , oblivion, fear, distrust, hope, and desapir, speak for themselves in the chaotic state - the conscious mind. The visuals of height, "feeling light", and "attached to earth", are other dependencies that essen tially explain the spiritual nature of the journey. Both the positive and negative sides of his psychotic situations are mirror-reflections of the real Being. Strindberg's characters in The Great Highway, unlike his other protagonists in the pre-inferno dramatic works, are not self-deceived by an enlightenment of the Unknown. They are aware of the benefit of enlightenment. The futile journey they take is determined by a need to co-exist with the Unknown. "God wants you," says Strindberg. The Hunter in The Great Highway, like a resurrected Jesus, has completed Job's wandering existence. The Hunter accepts resurrection to justify his dependence on God. Strindberg's personal diary in his Inferno says, "Was that why my pilgrimage on earth had been like a running of the gauntlet, in which the meanest of the man had rejoiced in 26 whipping me with rods, spitting on me, and defiling me?" Like Job, Strindberg has undertaken a mystical journey in The Great Highway to justify his metaphysical existence * 59 He has taken the labyrinths of darkness and fire through unjustified punishments, but the abysmal world has not completed its devilish cycle. Strindberg's intense life, as reflected in his Inferno and expressionistie plays,is assumed to be the whole truth of.his existence. Existence is merely the demonstration of the intensity of life. When Strindberg writes The Great Highway, taking his personal accounts and dreams as the point of departure, he is modulating it as a spiritual quest to forestall a "status of oneness" that leveled his own being with God. The Great Highway suggests a notion that "life is a long journey towards knowledge and under standing of the transcendental." The central theme in Strindberg's quest is to resurrect himself, like Job or Ismael, for all the sufferings he has undergone in real life in order to gain a sense of unity with the Great one. He seeks to maintain a closer relationship with the Great One for his religious attitude. It is a quest for Eternal salvation and 'liberation. Strindberg's. shift from naturalism and misogynism to expressionism after the long break during the Inferno period, explains that he has become aware of a transition from "mere environmentalism to a verifiable autobiography." This further indicates that he is temperamentally hyper sensitive in a search for the cause of his bitter and 60 torturous existence. Robert Brustein observes his transit ion as: his development from naturalism to expressionism, from scientific materialism to religion and the.super natural, from a convinced misogynist to a resigned Stoic with compassion for all living things ... (his) revolt ... conversion from messianic prophet to an existential visionary is directly con nected with the resolution of (his) conflicts- after years of horrible suffering. 27 Strindberg explores a new area of criticism and awareness, finds new metaphysical realms for his dramatic modes, uses new imageries for his expressionistic visualizations, and takes new allegories for his new illusions. These new realms become the elements of his art to reveal his inner discontentments, leaving naturalistic impressions on life as a once passing reality. In the mode of expressionism, which is more conducive to his state of being, Strindberg is able to incorporate his autobiography more convincingly. The expressionistic plays reveal deep commitments to his Inferno experiences as reactions to circumstances of his past. In Strindberg’s new awareness, it becomes ob vious that the Inferno period has motivated his energy to a total apocalyptic prophesy of a modern man ravaged by self-ambivalences, nightmares, remorse, and cruelty. The Nordic madness seeks deeper spiritual insights in order to resolve his own painful dilemmas. John Milton says, "The 61- mental illness forced Strindberg's thoughts inwards, so far inward that much of his subsequent production was highly 28 personal and private almost to the point of obscurity.” The very inclusive world in the three plays accom modate the residue of Strindberg's tragic experience and reflects great petulance to the hellfires and darkness of his eccentric and chaotic life. The inwardness from a psychodramatic standpoint suggests the temptation of a persona - on the brink of insanity - to find dependability of a secured Unknown power to calm down a nervousness of the impaired self-preservation. In To Damascus, Strindberg exposes a chaotic whirl within himself and experiences a mysterious new identity. The self-detachment is well said by the Stranger in To Damascus II: I am beginning to shrink - to solidify - to assume definite form! What now! Soon I shall be recreated - and out of the murky waters and choas the lotus flower will stretch its head into the sun and say: This is I! ... I must have been sleeping more than a thousand years - I dreamed I was blown to atoms and that I turned into ether ... no longer could I feel anything - I suffered no longer - I felt no joy - I had entered into a state of peacefulness and perfect serenity! But now ... Oh! now I suffer as if I were the whole of mankind ... I suffer - and I have no right to complain. 29 The despairing self-detachment into a new kind of identity, and the use of the lotus flower as an image of "emerging from a subterranean state” in A Dream Play indicate the 62' • general hallucination of a schizophrenic state of a tor mented Self to gain a relief and a cure of his unstable Being. In Buddhist philosophy, the images of shrinking, solidifying, and assuming new forms are justifiable to the whole concept of "cyclical, or repetitive time." Strind berg has read Schopenhauer and Buddhist philosophy, and he believes that "the world has been created ex nihilo." In The Great Highway, Strindberg strongly implies that life is "Self illusory” and "the world is a hopeless cycle without end." The meaninglessness of living in explicit with Strindberg's image of ether (which originates from his Pre-Inferno obsessions in alchemy which ends in failure!) denoting similarity to the image of the Mill of Fate and pulverization. On life, reduced to ashes, Strindberg says, You re-live your life from your birth to the present day, you suffer over again all the sorrows you have endured; you empty again all the cups which you have drunk to the dregs so often; you crucify your skeleton when there is no more flesh left to crucify; you consume your soul shen your heart is reduced to ashes. 30 To Damascus, a trilogy, fits into what Claudel calls 31 a "non-speaking - a kind of shadow" double of the au thor's own Self. It is "a cycle" of three plays that responds directly to Strindberg's Inferno crisis in which the residuals of him being drowned in the underground of Self-illumination and self-submergence are brought up to emerge as a metapsychological uplifting of the beseiged and 63 embattled soul. His skepticism of faith in God, and his terrifying fear of being persecuted while living, acutely experienced in the Inferno, still echo and linger in the trilogy. The trilogy is still strongly bound to Strind berg's own vibration of the Inferno period. But the plays are tracked differently from the autobiographical Inferno by his overwhelming control of the volume of space and time in the form of journeys into the dreams. Arvid Paulson says: In this work, he proceeded to create a virtually new style of dramatic composition, dominated not merely by his memories of the past and his search for inner peace, but the very configuration of dreams and mystic experiences that are surreal rather than real or expressionistic rather than realistic. 32 Thus the epoch of modern drama-making using the dreams as "a perceptive composite portraiture of the contemporary man" in the twilight land of life and death, has taken its form. The dream-form could put in place the double shadows of the author in his own illusive perspective in the dream world. He could penetrate the darkest reg ions of his psyche; he could build the tempo and phase, and 33 plot the development in the manner of a guided dream. In the dream, Strindberg could also exaggerate and paralyze the consciousness of his characters in the manner suitable to his psychic conditions (at the moment of psychic out bursts); he could break down all barriers, he could create 64- a variety of events that follow each other without any logical sequence - the end ends where it begins, that is in a circular manner to suit his labyrinthic fate: in short, he is at ease with all possibilities and probabil ities. He is the center of his own person. It is somnam bulistic.- It is an on-going dramatization of his pursuit and guilt turned into a nightmare. The primal ghosts of persecution in life and death are captured in the capsule of the author's psyche. With To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Great High way Strindberg has moved further away from the traditional theatrical forms (which were more or less in strick logic and needed to reach a conclusion which is pleasing to God) to release his metaphysical anxieties and to illuninate his soul. The author-Self is freer to spew forth his own demons and incubi lingering and parasiting within himself, or suppressing himself from "beneath the tissues of his 34 epidermis." In its proper place, To Damascus is Strind berg's strongest and most intense personal purgatorial exertion of looking into the ambiguous and inconceivable God who is ineongruent and constantly "developing, growing and revealing Himself" in the manner Strindberg knew is dilapidated by conventional ideals. He is thus palpitated, constricted, and made restless by the conventional and dogmatic image of God, and attempts to prophesy in a 65 ‘ grieving manner to move Him out of the conventional dogmatisms of the Gothic Church and the Christian monas teries. He puts Him in place the way He is seen over powering his (Strindberg's) own imaginations and convictions for his religious yearnings. He wishes to reveal God in the manner of Swedenborgian mysticism. God is an on-going experience in the way the psyche works, and thus to unveil God's reality or unreality the pattern of the psyche has to be envisaged. No definite form and statement has to be made, if the psyche-God- dream dictum will not suffice the overall effort of the dream play's construction. Strindberg is conscious that To Damascus is not Everyman, although they have a striking resemblance. The great difference between these two plays is their form; one uses an expressionistic approach on the question of God and the Self , the other is struc tured in the manner of the conventional chamber plays. Besides the structural difference, To Damascus is an in tensely personal confession of the author, whereas Every man is a 'community' drama; it was written for a theater devoted to a group affirmation of widely accepted ideas 35 and within the limit of an established convention." The journey along the many stations in life on the via dolorosa is an extremely painful "body and mind" ad venture of the transitory state of man. Strindberg 6,6 defines this transitoriness as "mere fragments; it has no 36 beginning and no end,” but he also believes that "there must be something higher, something beyond us, beyond the infinite past. The beginning was not when we were born, 37 nor is it the end when we die.” Thus for Strindberg, man has to understand the whole truth of life and its meaning lessness, but the meaninglessness that "fell into the hands of man" (or predestined to such a state by the hands of God) has to be well understood, not forgotten or not ac cepted as a fool who swallows all the words put into his mouth. Strindberg takes on the journey not in the manner as the Mother suggests; "My son! You have taken leave of Jerusalem, and you are now on the road to Damascus ... Continue on the same road that you have travelled to come here - and plant a cross at every station you come to; but halt at the seventh ... You do not have to suffer the 38 fourteen that He had to." The road to Damascus in the orthodox Christian sense is the road to annihilation of the 39 divine ... "what we call the spiritual death." But Strindberg's road to Damascus is an antagonistic defiance of a modern Prometheus who is all negation and nostalgia, contemptuous of the finite, putting into action the cult of negativity which turns against everything that is truly excellent. He rejects the whole idea of being accepted in the eyes of the perceiver as merely invalid. He thus .67 rejects the divine annihilation because he feels that an nihilation is humiliating and more painful than death it self. He says, "I feel it approaching - inevitably ap proaching ... and I am beginning to long for the moment - to pass through the ordeal - the sooner the better - since 40 it must come," but annihilation has to continue. The Stranger says, "Imagine, I am not even permitted to die - and thus have lost the last vestige of what I chlled my religion ... How cleverly calculated! I have heard it said that man can wrestle with God, and not without profit. But battling with Satan - that is something not even Job 41 could do!" The Stranger has then to take the journey under the sun and to seek its routes of escapes although he knows that he will not be able to find them. He further says, "You are a doomed soul 1^1 But you must not remain 42 one." The death-tick has to be challenged. He knows that the project of God - in collaboration with the Devil - is to impose annihilation and humiliation on man. The abyssmal life would not end, and thus "we are doomed to 43 go under! It is as unavoidable as fate," says the Stranger. The sense of doom is clearly indicated by : ' i i ; Strindberg with violent schismatic contours of the dying world as the background of the play. Strindberg's expressionistic plays are reminis cences of his complex emotional, psychic, and intellectual 68 obsessions with the dust and dirt of existence, and also 44 with the "pulverising process of self-examination.'’ His obsessions with the Nordic myth and symbol of the wind mill, for example, fill the spiritual needs of his express- ionistic plays (A Dream Play, To Damascus, and The Great Highway). He has earlier stated in his Inferno that the annihilation by the "auditory sensation" of the wind-mills is part of his.constant fear of the "Hands of the unseen executioner." In the Inferno he writes, "Those are the 'mills of God* which grind slowly but exceedingly small. You are ground to powder, and think it over and done. But no! You are brought again to the mill. Be thankful! That is hell upon, earth, as Luther knew it, and reckoned it a special grave to be pulverized on this side of the 45 grave." The annihilation by the auditory sensation of the wind-mill is a phenomenon that Strindberg constantly relates to the death-tick that never comes; he also 46 relates it to the "gloomy and forbidding landscape" around Klam, a residence of Strindberg's Frida Uhl's grandparents. Strindberg uses the symbolism of the wind-mills in various modes. For instance, in To Damascus, the wind mill is the author's recollection of the "resurgent cyclorama 47 of (his) past." It sums up his subconsciousness of the auditory sensation of the wind mill grinding the 69 existence of man. Richard B. Yowles says that "Strind berg's mill is primarily a mechanism of the mind, the mechanism of conscience, heightened to a function both 48 psychopathic and theatrical." The Stranger in To Damascus I says, "I am being glutted with delicacies as if I were being readied for slaughter; yet nothing seems to have any taste - because it is being offered grudgingly - and I can feel the hate like an icy cellar exuding a damp cold. Can you imagine, I feel a cold wind everywhere - despite the dead calm and the fruitful heat. And that damnable mill - I hear it, continually ... Yes, it keeps 49 grinding - grinding." (Italics mine) This passage con tains the mechanism of mind, and the mechanism of con science from Strindberg's deep-seated penetration into the symbolism of the Nordic myths. The Nordic regard the twins of mills and water as the symbolic dualism of good and evil. In the expressionistic plays, the mills are also used as metaphors in relationship to Strindberg's struc tural emphasis on the dream-like form in his new theatrical experimentation. The mills fit into the "idea of repet ition" (It'll never stop: for there's always water, and when the roll was finished it began again. All the time 50 I heard a mill grinding ... and I can hear it still," ) and this relates to his refutation of the absurdity of the _-L A \ A'. 70 circular recurrence of pulverization on man. In To Damascus II Strindberg makes another return to the sen sation of the wind mill when he says, M...when night has , fallen and the Invisible Ones, who can only be seen in the dark, begin to ride astride his chest - then he will be in terror of the stars, but most of all of the awesome mill of sins that unceasingly keeps grinding the past - 51 grinding it over and over again." Strindberg contin uously keeps returning to the transcendental powers as the source of his endless struggle with existence. This cir cular return implies the wandering and endless nostalgia of pain in man. Upon analysis it appears that Strindberg uses the visual and auditory sensations of the wind-mill in the interest of the structure of the dream play in To Dam ascus , to serve various purposes. It draws the attention of the reader and audience to the different points of view and to the ephemerailty of each wind-mill in place and in connection with the abstract and complex nature of the characters; it enriches the characterization, and completes the details of the splitting Self of the searcher in confrontation with .the humiliation of death and doom; it also enhances the unrelated, dispersed, permeated, and multiplying nature of the play in the manner of the dream; and the metaphorization of the wind-mill itself (by its 71 physical and mythical nature) unconsciously or subcon sciously returns to the "frame of reference" which is already set in the conventional use of it. Thus the circular journey into the labyrinths of darkness and fire is directly related to the■ wind-mill*s pulverization of man, In his dream plays, Strindberg constantly uses symbols that align with his constant fear of damnation by the hell fires of persecution in the hands of God and his Devils. Goya's visualization of the hell chambers in his paintings, Dante's "baleful haze" or vague mental sufferings of the infernal worlds which produce death and doom, and Sweden borg's religious import of things related to faith are Strindberg's related interests. Vowles refers to Strind berg's metaphor of the wind-mill as a Mill of Fate which he identifies with Strindberg's "curious and labyrinthine 52 mythology with the Buddhist samsara" , or negative wheel of life. The mill is also a visual image that merged with the auditory phenomena and adjusted nicely to the world of the unseen powers. It relates to Adam and Eve as God's scapegoats in His various projects on the primal Fall of Man and his Fate. As Strindberg says, "Cursed is the 53 earth for your sake." In To Damascus I the Stranger says "Not for us! Driven from Paradise, we shall wander among stones and thistles ... And when our feet are rent, and 72 our hands are torn and pricked, we will have to sprinkle salt on each other's wounds. And so the eternal mill grinds on - ceaselessly ... for the water that drives it ; 54 1 ! flows on without end.” (Italics mine) The Inferno period sent Strindberg to the brink of insanity in his attempts to repel the electric gridle. Then follows his obsession with ancient alchemy and or iental mysticism, and this is followed by his readings on Oriental philosophy in religion and his influences by the movement of symbolism explored by the contemporary writers of his time. All of these become fused and - diffused in a personal enthusiasm that gives depth and form to his personal life and writings. In alchemy and Oriental philosophy he sees "the logical explanations of 55 the world order in the oriental doctrines of karma" and reincarnation and accepted them as the basis of his own syncretistic religious philosophy. He is also influenced by Schopenhauer's sensory perception, and Baudelaire's and Mallarme's engagements in a quest which takes them eventually deep within the Self, acquiring in the process an almost private symbolism (fragmentary symbolism, or imagery). All this leads to a mysterious, mystical, cabbalic, fetid, and malignant Nordic experience that spills over into the movement of pessimism and nihilism which holds a strange feeling of consanguinity, almost ' 73 of filiation, a fraternity of attitudes toward the human species. The trenchant, sardonic, and poignant force of his plays' spiritual implications are overflowing with pabulum for the lost souls. ■74 CHAPTER THREE EUGENE O' NEILL: DOOMED TO GO ON LIVING That's what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the -ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost. - O'Neill Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night certainly qualifies as a text that reconciles existence with death. In this play O'Neill commits himself to Nietzschean and Strindbergian impulses in viewing life as a force towards redemption. His pessimistic vision no doubt has its sources in the great works of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and others that he has read. O'Neill's great plays include many references to the above influences, and his metaphysical quest is as pro voking as that of those great thinkers. Thus O'Neill's theater, as literature or as his grand opus, is a revealing ________________________ '75 sub-text of the author's endless attempts to understand his individual entity in the whole complex problem of "loss of Self." O'Neill is said to be strained and divided. The tech niques of his departure into pessimism are considered incongruous with his modes of salvation, but many foreign critics find The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day's Journey, in the whole strain of pessimism, as striking works of liter ature of this century. With Strindberg in the background, and O'Neill confesses himself personally to be a disciple 1 of his , he rightfully declares a modest imprint of Strind berg's influence in his works, although he realizes that the extent of moroseness and despair which the "Master" experiences in the Inferno is not comparable and could not be built into his personal life. The similarity could only be a creative process which he undergoes in the years of prolonged nostalgia in the face of coming death. Again like Strindberg, O'Neill attempts to concretize his emotional instability in the form of theater, because this medium convinces him as to its effectiveness as written impressions of distress and fear, and as personal state ments of his past and future. Gassner says, "His illness had brought him face to face with the terror of death, and death, in turn, raised the difficult problem of the meaning of life which become in his case something more than an 76 academic question ... During his convalescence he read not only the classic dramatists but also Ibsen, Wedekind, and 2 Strindberg." O'Neill's metaphysical parameter as encompassed in the notion of "journey" in most of his plays certainly is an idiom that represents the most reflective’inward il lumination of his personal sufferings. Self-illumination becomes the guiding spirit of his fate, and in most of his middle and later plays, he excavates from the deepest quarter of his Being the fatal persecution of existence. It seems to him that fate devours being into malfeasance. Like Schopenhauer, O'Neill finds that "every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction is negative in its character; it consists in freedom from pain, which is the 3 positive element of existence." On fate O'Neill says, "It ain’t your fault, and it ain't mine, and it ain't his neither. We're all poor nuts, and things happen, and we 4 just get mixed in wrong, that's all." Thus fate and O'Neill's vindication of truth and right have come through prolonged discomfiture, suffering and death anxiety, and this by the ultimate verdict of distant posterity. His. verbalization and visualization of truth in Long Day's Journey are definitely his deductions of self-illumination that were raised into speeches of martyrs or prophets excavated painfully from his burden of existence. 77 Through self-illumination - the sources of his fic tions - O'Neill could not anymore be satisfied with pure realism. He prefers to penetrate the core of his exis tential quest and regards realism as a one-faceted entity. In an in-depth study of O'Neill, Tornqvist says: For a dramatist who is primarily concerned, not with the relationship between man and man, but with the relationship between man and God, between man and his own soul, between his conscious and unconscious needs and desires, realism and naturalism are clearly insufficient. To describe these "irrational” inner phenomena, "some form of 'supernaturalism'”, and intensification and distillation of the naturalistic technique is necessary. 5 The middle and late plays of O'Neill indicate a strong pessimistic approach to the qeustion of individualism. With individualism he claims the rights of his perspec tives, and even extends their horizon beyond the courage of his impulses. In Long Day's Journey for example, O'Neill reveals his total honesty with what lay beneath real existence to the extent of making the world inhab itable. It is beyond the relationships of man and man or man and woman, beyond "the pervasive theme of homeless- ness," and beyond even the bounds of the abnormal family sphere that O'Neill wants to reveal. ' Long Day1s Journey intensifies and distills O'Neill's most profound question of "loss of Self" in life. He justifies this by attempting to bridge Self and social abnormality by internalizing 78 Self as the primal source of his salvation. Glicksberg deeply understands O'Neill’s quest of the "beneath real existence" in the theater by saying: O'Neill, however, believed in no secular means of salvation: he had faith in neither God nor man ... He was convinced that man cannot stand too much "reality". O'Neill emphasizes the unrelieved futility of life; there is no overarching providential pattern, no order or purpose in the universe that man can recognize as his own. The laws of Nature are not the laws of man. O'Neill presents a world that is fundamentally meaningless. Like Chekhov, he has no solution to offer; the quest for meaning on earth cannot possibly succeed. O'Neill composed tragedies which reiterate the nihilistic motif that there is no way out for man, though the labor of art that evokes this vision is in itself a refutation of the doctrine of absolute futility. 7 Skinner, in supporting Glicksberg's views., says that O'Neill's plays enter the privacy of one's inner thoughts and feelings, with a certain timeless insistency. Skinner then makes comparison of O'Neill's attitude with that of Shaw and Ibsen to show the difference. Skinner says: neither Shaw nor Ibsen had the poet's gift of reaching to the emotional and moral inwardness of life without any relation to specific events or times, or people. O'Neill has the gift in abundance. His plays are neither social sermons nor contemporary satire. They are more like parables. 8 O'Neill's impact on personal experience in the parables he uses - to apply to his thoughts and emotions, that is - carries him to an area of discomfort which contradicts the weltanschauung-tragodie of common Irish-American optimism. 79 He was accused of charlatanism, morbidity, and immorality for this; but his "pilgrimage into the deep internal dis tillation" of his loneliness, solitude, labyrinths, and soul assertions, is honest and pierces the wall of another's conscience. Skinner says, "His parables are not the outline of himself but the rhythm and splendor and often terror of something far above and beyond his personal 9 experience." (Italics mine). O'Neill says in a letter to 10 George Pierce Baker dated July 16, 1949 that he hopes to become "a mediocre journey-man-playwright," and the word "journey" as an emphasis implies in its most relevant con notation that O'Neill is deeply questing for a resolution of his inner struggles. He seeks in the depth of darkness, the lights of truth. In this respect, his pilgrimage is similar to that of Dante, Milton, and Wagner - a purgatory into Paradise - that besets his prophesies and the integ rity of his temptations. Certainly, O'Neill's fixation in theater is beyond realism. He seeks to explore beyond realism a mode of H expression that could unveil the "behind life" reality of existence. He is deeply inspired by the interiorness or eternal mysteries of existence in Strindberg et al rather than by an endurance for "the banality of sur- 12 13 faces." Very much impressed by "supernaturalism" in the spirit of Strindberg, O'Neill confidently passes a judgement that disqualifies realism as sufficient. 8o "The 'old-naturalism' - or 'realism' if you prefer ... no 14 longer applies," he says. His attempt to search for a more vibrant spiritual discovery has "to ascend above the common experience of the earth" and unveils the "behind- life" entity. Tornqvist says, "The term 'behind-life' relates directly to. O'Neill's concept of fate. It suggests the existence of an eternal, supernatural force ruling man's fate, what Strindberg terms 'the Powers' and which 15 O'Neill simply calls 'Fate' or 'God' or Kierkegaard calls i 'The Unknown.' Thus O'Neill deeply asserts in his 16 writings "the impelling, inscrutable forces behind life," very much in the spirit of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Unamuno, and others. Long Day's Journey, if strictly and rigidly applied to limited realism, is merely psychologizing on the family sphere, but the real force in O'Neill's insights in the play is far beyond man's "falling into the pit of social turmoil." It is a demonstration of a metaphysical tour de force. He has said that he attempts to reveal the primal guilt of existence - life and death. In almost all his plays (that include his Greek adaptations) he plays his roles in preparation for a good death. For him the pur pose of the simple soul is not just putting man to sleep, dreaming the dream of life, but it is to find the meanings of its mystery, and to perpetuate the mythomanias of unbearable existence. O'Neill says: gq to find a meaning for life in and to comfort its fears of death with. It seems to me that anyone trying to do big work nowadays must have this big subject behind all the little subjects of his plays or novels, or he is simply scribbling around on the surface of things ... 17 In Long Day's Journey the Self that O'Neill seems to be deeply concerned with represents the temporal situations of alienation and submergence of man. He apprehends the inward existence qua the mode of Being of man that is characterized by the course of an attempt to achieve a moral mode acceptable to a Being deep-seated in the "soul of the unconscious." Like Jaspers, Strindberg, or Proust, O'Neill attempts to elevate the fundamental terms "exis tence" and "Self" into a self-conscious reflection. With great sensitivity. O'Neill is aware of the grounded inner substratum of his Being and thus communicates "what is manifest" in his mind and soul as the requiem for morality. In this play ".everything that the characters wanted to be" is conjured in the face of struggle, of care and love, truth and lies, of suffering and guilt, and of impending death. It becomes in totality, a tragic fact in Long Day's 18 Journey that the gorgon's head moves towards the thres hold of trivial experiences and hostile circumstances. Richard Hayes says, "The movement of Long Day's Journey spirals inward to the tragic fact; within that adamantine chamber its four major personages weave a seamless pattern « 82 of time, suffering, and nobility, those constants of tragic experience which, ever since Oedipus, have brought the hero 19 to transcendance." O'Neill's absolute sense of temporality by the doom of death in Long Day's Journey is subsequent to the sense of transcendence, as in the works of Strindberg. In Strindberg, the deeper insights of man's existential reality are communicated from the most inward core of Seilf and Being. Long Day's Journey, and Strindberg's The Great Highway, perceive.the unconditioned status of man to an attainable depth-dimension, the outcome of which is the sense of enriching consciousness towards the transcen dental realm that becomes more equivocal in both of them. O'Neill's death wish in Long Day's Journey is reflected by the bare damnation of his four characters that sustain the sense of helplessness, and the sense of impending death as the crux of the author's turbulent horror with exis tence . Similar to Strindberg's persecution mania in the Inferno and Strindberg's damnation in To Damascus, and The Great Highway, O'Neill’s gripping and compulsive deliver ance for the gorgon's head is a belief in a silent and benevolent God. Tornqvist says, "What chiefly concerns 20 him are ultimate, transcendental phenomena ... and "he always felt an urgent desire to return to a belief in a 2! benevolent God." This forging erraticism in O’Neill's 83 Long Day's Journey, and Strindberg's The Great Highway, and To' Damascus is the indispensible revelation of self testimony in rediscovering by investigation or efforts of memory to restore the faith that there is meaning and purpose in existence. No doubt O'Neill’s characters are not truly prepared for withdrawal but instead they are deeply engrossed in retrogradation and accusations against each other: they must cling to the circumstances of living in the face of prolonged doom. They are hurled into the abyss of the deepest darkness. They are condemned, not to death, but to life. They are doomed to go on living. The torment of existence is clearly heard in the voice of one of O’Neill's characters in Long Day's Journey: "You see him and you die - that is, inside you - and have to go on 22 living as a ghost." The sense of doom in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey is measured by the spread of time almost to the brink of suicide. Spiritous liquors and deadly drugs become both spiritual and bodily pains to the Ty rones. They are facing metaphysical time with death. They are seeing more empty space and more void. Richard Hayes puts it interestingly: A wind of time sifts the world of Long Day’s Journey Into Night sighing darkly in its claustral parlors, making a tragic music of attrition and loss which echoes the lulling bleat of the foghorn; not a honeyed music of the eloquent spirit but deathly, grieving ; 84 sharply, a requiem for the tarnished and the irrecoverable: ... talent rusted and run to seed; savannahs of hope grown jungle-wild with the under brush of self; dreams of innocence and honor of God - the morning of life - all come to grief and loss. And above the dirge of mortality, the four voices of Eugene O'Neill's tragedy, each with its motifs, its reasonance and timbre, rise to an intricate counterpoint of conscious pain which scorches the spirit and tears savagely at the nerves. 23 O'Neill’s life is fog-bound. He explicates conn sciously the grandiose events of living in Long Day's Journey. As his senses report it, grandiose living is secluded behind the superficiality of reality. The fog- bounded images of his plays are distinct reviews of human sorrows enveloped in an immense mist or fog. He seems to indicate that life is just that, la niebla ("mist1). He seeks to reveal the internal province of human existence and believes that life seems to be constantly building towards a critical end after a long process of incubation with suffering. In Long Day's Journey, he uplifts this tragic sense and conceives life as a gestation towards doom. All grandiose living, all social products, and all transmissions of human emotions and feelings are made for lying. For O'Neill, man's existential irony only clings to illusions. The aim of living then for O'Neill is to elevate the corpses of thoughts. O'Neill's parallelism with Strindberg's apriorism and Schopenhauer's intellect- 85 ualism, is an acceptance of what seems to converge to a common thought in pessimism that the man of flesh and 24 blood, who is born, suffers and dies - above all, dies. O'Neill's pessimism seems to materialize with the intensity of his sufferings. His doubt in God's reality is what he seeks in death. O'Neill says, "It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea-gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, 25 who must always be a little in love with death.” Here O'Neill reflects the same notion of Schopenhauer's concept 26 of the brute. O'Neill prefers to live on mere instincts rather than to be rooted in the biologically human. This agonizing exchange of a Self for a brute (sea-gull or a fish) strongly indicates his attempt of suspension from human reality into a hazy romanticism with freedom. For O'Neill, sea-gullii or fish, live independently and peace fully devoid of suffering, and their freedom reveals to him the need for refuge from the disappointments of life. The realm of "sky” and "water” release O'Neill from the undefined burned of existence on "earth”. O'Neill needs the feeling of narcissism. "The fog was O'Neill's first and last symbol of man's 27 inability to know himself, or other men, or his destiny." 86 The fog in Long Day's Journey, as a theatrical device, speaks for the play and for the author the sense of del usion, fear, hopelessness, despair, mystery, obscurity, dullness, and confusion that are projected and represented mysteriously as an integrated background of the play. The fog as a momentary phenomenon in Nature's reality - that comes in the morning and night of day - reveals a provoking sense of mystery to his tragic struggle with existence. The fog, as a symbol, aspires to the expression of curios ity with destiny, the submergence of Self into isolation, and affirmation of time passed as a wasted reality. With this notion Nature seems to him to be erected in its own passivity to human reality. The fog is a nucleus of the day from morning to night and it builds his characters into an "embryo of conflicts"; passions, impurities, iniquities, and egotism. His characters in Long Day1s Journey are fog-bathed by the thick blanket of fog-bound environment. They have to inhibit the inaccessible restrictions of the fog, thus the fog symbolizes a "physical body-of-death” that holds his characters in an engaging conflict to the core of the abyss of misery and pain. The characters suffer in a fog-bound reality - a temporal reality that penetrates the soul and its inhabitants. The fog is terrifying and at the same time sorrowful, but it is not false. It is only O'Neill's 87 characters and destiny that seem to falsify the reality outside their inner reality. O'Neill's fog-bound background is a very fascinating visual image. It uplifts ennui, boredom, nauseous anguish and the terror of doom as if a "left hand of Fate” examines through the fog, the destiny of its characters. This suggests that the”hand of Fate” builds "the altar of 1 death." Men could not see through the fog and thus could not see goodness through their own eyes. They are doomed for this failure, but doom does not come. It is prolonged by an orbital cycle - day and night. Falk says, "they may vanish for a while in the vision, but no real self is left to take their place - nothing but the mist,* the fog, and 28 through it the dismal horn of fate." The irony of death in O'Neill's works is similar to that of all those who seek an irrational explanation of the supreme paradox of existence. Dostoevski, for ex ample, "is a metaphysical rebel, a madman, and a mystic who 29 declares that God is 'the pain of the fear of death'." By overcoming this fear, man will himself become God. Suicide is the road to salvation ...and Dostoevski con fesses that God has tormented him all his life. Tolstoy finds that death is impossible to deny. He says, "that life was meaningless ... there was nothing before me but 30 suffering and actual death, absolute annihilation." 88 Schopenhauer, according to Glicksberg "had impressed upon (himself) the insight that whoever is interested in life must be particularly interested in death.' He himself declared that whoever is obsessed by death seeks life in 31 it," and Nietzsche obsessed by the courage to life puts God on the death-bed. All these writers have restored to their lives the verification of death as the ultimate hope Of relinquishing sufferings. They are obsessed by the thought of death and seek to rejoice in "a transcendental leap of faith." The transcendental leap is towards a blasphemous metaphysical irony which beholds a faith that the most fortunate relativity for a non-existent or a dead God is in the "illusion of religiosity." On death, which relates to the dead God, Glicksberg says, "For twentieth- century as well as nineteenth-century man, death is strip ped of its sacred meaning. Dead means a plunge into nothingness, and the vision of nothingness is not be be borne""and adds, "the terminus of human time is the grave, which is supposed to symbolize the time of eternity. The cemetery, a symbolic city of the dead, with its lush vegetation and its gardens must at the same time express 32 the human hope for and belief in the resurrection." O'Neill’s pipe-dreams, as painful endurance into this kind of indispensable illusory religious certainty, suggest man's remarkable pursuit of hope, for "If we are to live," 89. 33 he says, "we must life ... under the spell of hope." But the hope of the eternal, like Glicksberg's vision of the eternal grave, is what O'Neill alludes to. As Edwin A. Engle says of O'Neill's sense of defeatism, O'Neill proposed three ways in which man can 34 find peace: through dream, drunkenness, or death. Willie says, "God I need a drink." And O'Neill, as a man of flesh and blood, is driven hard by the instinct of death and has to draw from the depth of his "woven loom of fate" that the only possible endurance to overcome the horrible nightmare of death is to accept death itself. Thus death becomes the essential contingency of his existence: Death made me think of life. Before that life had only made me think of death ... That's always been the Mannon's way of thinking. They went to the while meeting house of Sabbaths and meditated on death. Life was a dying. Being born was starting to die. Death was being born. 35 (Italics mine ) The above statement on death by O'Neill reveals a certain aura of despair and self-pride with existence: it contains the pride of Dionysian laughter through which O'Neill achieves a way out for his nihilistic despair; it contains puritanism that man is born to guilt and punishment; it contains a certain kind of vain nihilism that transcends his thoughts of death in the Schopen- hauerian manner which believes man is in continuous battle with death; and it contains a certain kind of revolt 90 against self-persecution in the distressed tone of Strindberg - all this in the voice of a fallen man through which O'Neill sustains life as an embodiment of the trivial. The plays of O'Neill are an abyss of self-scorching loneliness. His characters occupy positions that are enclosed in a canopy of funeral celebrations: at the bottom of the sea, in a tomb-like enclosed room, in a Hell Hole, in a morgue w all these justify O'Neill's two worlds, that is, the outward world of physical reality and the inward world where the passionate desire of love and death are the genuine reality of his dreams. O'Neill creates fantastic dreams as a substitute for the reality of the physical world. He lives upon illusion for life which is more than.life, or no life at all. He would prefer no exchange for either one. Thus O'Neill's speeches, in almost all his plays, contain the passionate despair that drives him beyond instinct the tragedy of modern man at the bottom of the cemetery. It is difficult to find where O'Neill's sympathies lie, niether in man nor in God. The either-or dictum fate of man is always at the cross-roads of death. O'Neill generates the touch of death, the house of death, the soporific and sordid Hell Hole, the scuttled and sunk to the bottom of the sea man, the big sleep, the waiting to the end - all are celebrations moving towards the grave. In The Iceman Cometh, Hickey 91 croaks in the depths of & pipe-dream the nervous irritation of death; In Lazarus Laughed Lazarus says, "Death to the old Death." It is an eternal laughter and a cry with pride for the quivering and trepidating rhythm of existence. The forces of death overshadow the desperate efforts of O'Neill's characters to the point of triviality. Every good and evil is relative to O'Neill, and he does not care for any standard as a sure solution to man’s search for happiness. Like Strindberg's natural istic plays, O’Neill is inclined towards the revolution of ethical values in which the final fixed goal is not yet possible to grasp. Sophus Keith Winther writes, "the value of life lies in this struggle itself. Nothing is settled, sealed, and carefully put away. All is change; all action leads to new complications and presumably to new solutions. The world of O'Neill is not static, and hence it is not easy to grasp for the one who will bring to his 36 task only the worn-out traditions of a dead past." The fear of destruction, as a preconceived idea in O'Neill's work, is directly related to the "capricious external power" that leads O'Neill to an "artistic reality" that represents the self-destructive side of man, desiring his own death to excuse his brutal andn&lM'lis±'iCb§g£>iam. Thus O'Neill's bohemian and Pagan ways of life, make theological and metaphysical statements that account God 92 as the reigning power of "the unnamed forces of evil.” According to Winther, "O’Neill has lost all faith in a beneficient ruler of the universe, or a ruler of any kind. God remains only as a symbol of a faith that is neither dead nor dying, but since the terminology of any faith always lingers like a ghost to haunt the spirit of man 37 long after the actual belief itself has passed away.” O'Neill believes that an active and conscious power of evil inflicts pain and suffering on man. In The Iceman Cometh, the secular means of salvation is to journey into Self, discard the old traditional God, and take the pipe dream as a new apostle that can give them "a peace of death." Larry Slade recognizes Hickey "selling the real 38 stuff of salvation" but Hickey, a one-time "great Nihilist, who started a movement that will blow up the 39 whole world" suddenly has brought "a new faith" that Larry Slade knows will not succeed. Glicksberg writes, "Hickey has no faith that his experiment in regenerating these men will succeed; he will not reform them and bring them peace. He knows that Harry Hope and the others will return defeated from their harrowing ordeal; that is the whole point of his infernal scheme. Hickey is bent on depriving these poor wretches of their last resource so that they will be beyond caring what happens to them; he 40 is really offering them "the peace of death." The 93 harrowing ordeal is the merry dance with the bottle in which the catastrophe of a modern plague is in the "milk" of whiskey and spirit. The reference of God's punishment is in what man takes into their visceral systems. The merry dance with the bottle is the dance of death. The soporific and sordid Hell Hole occupants of the drinking den desire death, die several times, but keep on resur recting with new pipe-dreams. The death-tick pulses on. O'Neill's euphonic Hickey is God's sentimental home- comer who supposedly would bring mysterious change to the Hell Hole alcoholic den of invalids, but the change fore runs death along with him. Hickey is the messiah who wears the black shabracks of the Satan-God. The dance of death with Hickey'd didacticism is O'Neill's convenient way of invoking and rebuking the old God. Winther writes, "But O'Neill will not allow (the) old gods to pass away silently and without rebuke. Their long, cruel reign has left deep scars and the spirit of man rises in < J . : indignant and bitter rebellion. O'Neill, the artist interpreting the new courage of a new world, carries with him some of the hatred of the old, for as all great and broad-sweeping conceptions of life are born out of the 41 hell of pain." The Dionysian laughter echoes to the wide grave of the earth. 94 - CHAPTER FOUR EUGENE IONESCO: WANDERING THE WONDERMENT OF DREAMS Most of the time these images of light, quickly fading, or, on the contrary • seeming to arise naturally at the end of a lengthy journey, have not been willed into .existence but found. Or, it is because they first came to in dreams. I mean by this that in my plays, or my written meditations, I have the feeling of embarking on a voyage of exploration, of groping my way through a dark forest, in the middle of the night. I do not know whether I will ever reach my goal, or even if a goal exists. I proceed without a clear outline, and the end comes of its own accord. (Italics mine) Ionesco Ionesco looks at the world with puzzled and distrust ful eyes. The world seems to him to be enveloped by shad ows, darkness, and lights where objects are illuminated in various forms and shapes, sometimes shining and alive, and at other times fading and vanishing. This is due to the fact that he is obsessed by certain terms and expressions that could free him from any quasi-logical arid quasi normal explanations of the world. He is more driven to 95 assert how the world appears to him and this moves him grievously to travel into his own mind and consciousness. This is where the roots of his feelings and thoughts are buried. He is deeply grieved and wounded by the mys tery of living where death sprouts in every corner of his imagination, intuition, and dreams (Amedee). He also realizes that he has to revisit the lost paradise of his childhood days, and to construct his present and future in the search for the lost lights which he was at one time or another familiar with (Man With Bags, and A Stroll in the Air). But the act of repossessing the "paradisiacal light of his childhood" could not any more be an easy interplay of imaginations and feelings because the foliage of the world and society has grown up with his age and he bears witness to such changes since then. Thus Ionesco's First Man in Man With Bags bears witness to the events of creation and seeks to find explanations in his own way. He begins to look for meanings within himself and rejects all banal entities that he sees in the physical world. As sources of reference, his memoirs in Notes and Counter Notes (1962), Fragments of a Journal (1967), Present Past, Past Present (1969), and Deconvertes (Discoveries) (1969) give deep insights of his para doxical and almost obsessive love-hate relationships with reality. Pascal, Baudelaire, and Claudel are in the 96 background of his memoirs and theatrical works, and he emphasizes he had read them; they give a more ambiguous reason for a description of him as a writer who is deeply rooted in the quest of the surreal. He also shows great interest in "spiritual philosophy" or metaphysics when he says that his plays have metaphysical overtones that seem to suggest that he is haunted by a compelling sense of vocation to understand the vertigo of infinite spaces within his psyche. With an interest in metaphysics or the metaphysical, Ionesco becomes more aware of metaphysical humanism and attempts to understand the fundamentals of human problems. Baudelaire's influences (integrations of illusions and reality) are perhaps the most outstanding facts of Ionesco's theater. Darkness and lights which occupy a large magnitude of the works of both writers, explain the similar metaphysical postulation or premise which they are questing. The "I-eye" through which Ionesco sees and magnifies the appealing wonderment and the disturbing anxiety of the conditions, situations, and moods of his existence, is essentially the most genuine and unpretentious personal encounter with the world and with that "monstrous shadow" of a centrifugal or abberrant force which he discovers from the core of his solitude and anguish. It is the deeper Self - the core of Being - of Ionesco's Berenger 97 in A Stroll in the Air for example, that feeds him with the vital sap of the conclaved, fragmented, splintered, and distorted shapes, colors, movements, lights, and darkness of the perceived world. Through the pages of the above memoirs, novel, and his plays, Ionesco interlinks and interlocks his impressions of the outer world or the cos mos and the nether world via his inner world. This is done is a very complementary manner and is the total essence of his phenomenal individuality. Most importantly, Ionesco possesses "the eye, detached and immobile," to contemplate the obvious' stupefaction or astonishment of brightly colored shapes moving across the realm of his consciousness and dream worlds. Ionesco has to struggle to resolve his obligation to conform to images of the world he seeks which are contra dictory with the images that he patterns in his "mind- world." It is obvious that he subjugates the recurrence of self-contemplation in all his observations. He is aware that self-contemplation is the center of the Self that could remove him from the already patterned social realm and relocate him in the cocoon of hallucinatory memories. He observes spaces, colors, movements, shapes in a fete of changing perspectives as the reality of the obverse world. The hallucinatory world is ephemeral, and this ephemerality which he observes performing across the 98 "grand route" of his dream-journeys, is in the real sense, his own hypertrophic Self fascinated by the re pressive, genuine state of his spiritual Self. He is deeply obsessed by the la nostalgie du paradis of his childhood and by the death-rattle of his mature years that spins his anguish, and thus he projects the conflicts that recoil inside the soul of modern man: for he says that nothing happens in the external world that has not first happened within the soul. He is less impressed with the order of Nature than he is with the disorder of his own psyche. In his works "the asserted instincts of trans cendentalism" have become the main preoccupation. In The Chairs, and Exit the King, the awareness of life is heightened by an awareness of the impending horror of death, and thus he exiles himself into the world of dreams - a pilgrimage through the many stations along the via dolorosa into the Self. Of dreams he says, "they are the expression of one's inner thoughts ... (and) one is 1 only conscious, only lucid in dreams." On the whole relationship to life and death, Ionesco notes that in every man, there is a law of gravitation, one pulling him to earth (reality), where he has his time of trial, and the other pulling him to illusions (dreams), where he finds happiness. The reality underlying modern man's anxiety arises from his attempt to be himself or from trying to get beyond himself. Thus man finds that '99 the disorderly in himself is due to the fact that the visible things in the world become his oblivion, and he seeks to reveal the shadows of disaster, catastrophe, and irremediable failure. Thus man. has to communicate with the shadows "within the deepest regions of the psyche" and thus is exiled into the surreal. It is in the realm of the.surreal that Ionesco finds his miraculous presence more meaningful. He is provoked by a spiritual progress within himself to find the bearings of his own analysis of things, feelings, or acts that is more affirmative to his own sensibility. It is an illuminating reason why Ionesco questioningly becomes conscious of the transcendental and the "beyond" surreal. He is constantly revived by dreams that become a bridge between life and death. For Ionesco, the beyond is not in the old theological division, where there are divisions of religions, politics, and ethics, but the beyond where the soul can go deeper into the kingdom of myths, dreams, and mysteries. In A Stroll in the Air, for example, Berenger floats in the air and is transported away beyond the silver bridge where the deep gorge of the abyss lays right beneath, to suggest that the illusion of flying is a liberation from the banal earth. Ionesco writes: I used one of my dreams. The dream of flying ... At the source of this tale is, on one hand, a dream - dream of liberation, of power - and, on the other hand, a critique, a satire, a realistic 1 0q description of the nightmarish life in totalitarian regimes, a prophesy of doom ... The dream is about that man who takes off in the air. The conscious part concerns that which he perceives thanks to his ascension. 2 The kingdom of myths, dreams, and mysteries becomes a dynamic force in Ionesco's works. He is conscious of his own mental life, and the experiences he describes in his memoirs and plays are forces largely hidden from ordin ary consciousness. He asserts affinity with the shadowy and seeks justifications of the illusive world. He shows indifference to understanding life and death in the simple way that ordinary people do, and attempts to break the bonds of reality by his own dissolution. Thus Ionesco revolts against the bondage of reality and gives more room to the infinite - the beyond. He magnifies reality to the point of mere perceptions and his explorations into the Self going deeper into the perceptual world, have close commitments to his mode of understanding life and death. The center of his understanding is in vacuo - in emptiness, in nothingness. He writes, I felt that everything was emptying away, I was not conscious of this as an empti ness devouring my being, holding me captive, I myself being reduced to a kind of frame work around the void, and gradually being consumed and absorbed by nothingness. It was not that familiar sense of heavy empti ness , if I may use such an expression. This time it was like a release, things lost their weight around me, I was cutting adrift from things and they were losing 1 0 1 all arbitrary, conventional significance, all that enormous mass of meanings of all sorts, contradictory, intricate meanings amidst which I had been trapped, that labyrinth of tangled paths in which I had lost my way. Everything was now pervaded by a dazzling light, and as I became aware, with limitless joy, that everything exists, I could think of nothing else but this; everything exists, all things exist; and I became aware that their existence was transfigured, that they existed quite differently, in a heavenly light, delicate, fragile. 3 (Italics mine). In the above statement it seems that Ionesco is oriented towards "becoming an observer of the void” as a result of his obsession with nothingness. There is a strong need for Something in the beyond in darkness that exists as a momentary flickering of light projected from a very distant corner of his universe. It is a desire and a bblief interspersed by fear and doubt discovered from the depth of his inner-Self. Ionesco writes, "I wonder if this strange feeling, this unanswerable and al most unquestioning astonishment is hot the deepest reaction 4 of my consciousness." It is thus understandably clear that his exile into the internal secrets of his being explains the central vital activity of his consciousness. Ionesco is obsessed by the interiorness of his metaphysical postulations to explain his dispossession of empiricism. Thus Ionesco's consciousness is a battle field for his own animawhere an incessant war is fought between . 102 their biological, primitive urges and the powers embodied in the superego. The Berengers ol Ionesco then are all modern men who are no longer a unity, but are confused bundles of human characterizations of human complexes and nerves. They are disassociated and alienated from them selves and Ionesco sees them as "wandering souls" ravaged by their own predicaments. The Berengers are projections of Ionesco's mental confusion about the physical world that seems void but heavy. These characters thus lurk in the darkness and the dank caverns of their psyche, reject visible reality, and abide strongly by impressions that are within themselves. These impressions result from a sense that the universe does not belong to them and they find themselves alien to it as well as their thoughts. For ages man has tried to explain the phenomenal beyond but has concluded that it is nothing. It also happens to Strind berg, O'Neill, Beckett and Bergman as alienated men divided from their selves and from their fellow men. On dread, Kierkegaard says: What is it then? Nothing. But what effect does nothing produce? It begets dread. This is the profound secret of innocence that at the same time it is dread. Dream- ingly the spirit projects its own reality, but this reality is nothing, but this nothing constantly sees innocence outside of it. 5 Ionesco, like Kierkegaard, faces the basic issues of human misery.. Like other modern men who are spell- ______ *103 bound by the mystery of existence, he becomes estranged from God. These men begin to question the validity of God, and find that God is not anymore a spokesman for mankind, and thus they fall into the search for something else. He becomes enveloped in lights and darkness, and to a great extent these are his own interpretations of the entity of existence. The presence of God has always appeared as an anxiety, a reprieval, or an escape and an anti-religious rationality. He begins to defy God and grievously main tains his own confused soul. Ionesco's plays, to a large extent, show a sort of isolation in a peculiar way from God. One thing for certain in his plays is that he finds that the modern soul is not going to find peace so long as it is locked up inside itself, mulling around in the scum and sediment and mud of the beholder's conscious mind. He has to release them all. The God-alternative has to be found. Ionesco's quest of the beyond in Hunger and Thirst is metaphysical and at the moment he was writing the play he was undergoing a period of inspiring religious needs, but he finds the lights in Hunger and Thirst as only a deceiving promise or a reversal of hopes. This inverted quest of Ionesco reflects a terrorized inner world of his spiritual instability and yearning. Thus, in The New Tenant he draws a circle within an expanse of a greater circumference which is his zone of flight into , 104 * . - i -r spiritual death. Mircea Eliade in "Symbolism and Ascen sion," in his book Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, says that the soul abandons the body and flies away into regions inaccessible to the living. By this ecstasy the shaman renders himself equal to the Gods, to the dead, and to the spirits: the ability to "die" and come to life again — that is, voluntarily to leave and to reenter the body denotes that he has surpassed the human condition. In The New Tenant the Gentleman, doing just the same, throws him self out of time into the realm of death away from the material conditon of life. The New Tenant* is an instance of Ionesco's vision of the pregnant world. The proliferation of materialism means the fullness of anxiety and frustration in man, and man has to despair in face of a death that is inescapable. The Gentleman’s preparedness to face death is clear indic ation of Ionesco's refusal of reality and the suicidal temperament of The New Tenant into a sort of incarnated world will preserve for him the pleasures and joy in a world beyond: in a land of Clear Light. This ascentional complex in The New Tenant, and A Stroll in the Air is an existential expression. Ionesco is pessimistic in his view of the human situation and takes into consideration that life is insecure and isolated and he believes that human beings are unable to face the truth about themselves 105 and seek various modes of escapes. Man cannot bear the realization that all the values he lives by, his purpose, his projects, are sustained by the ideology of others (Man With Bags). He finds that life is too great a strain to accept sole responsibility for his own life and seeks justification through the mode of his own nostalgia. Ionesco finds that no universal system is valid. His acceptance of Being, permanence and substance is a move ment towards death. He says, "Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the 6 . death wish." His views of this other phenomenon (the realm of death) have affinity with Schopenhauer's view on the same subject - death. Schopenhauer saw life as a ceaseless struggle against sleep and observed that when the intellect tires and demands sleep, the sleep that > comes harbors for even wisest man, strange, senseless dreams. Ionesco harbors grotesque distortions and baroque neologisms in his theater that originate from his dreams, and he utilizes them as a means to overcome his deep= seated anguish with existence. It is similar to 106 : _______________________________________ Schopenhauer's conception. The constant despair and angoisse is the death-rattle. The theater is a theater of quest - a quest for the surreal buried deep in the psyche Of the writer. Ionesco is so overwhelmed by his poor existence that he seeks to understand himself by quitting all reality and journeying into his own void and labyrinths. It is in the trivial anc in the labyrinthic void that he seeks refuge and the abil ity to render his own strange and improbable universe. His obsession with the tattered and disjointed world suggests strong antagonistic feelings towards objective reality. He views existence with the certainty that all objectivity is nothing but a dream floating incessantly towards death. His inner world is the most liberative force in his exis tence and through dreams he explicates his death anxiety. It is as though Ionesco overcomes the anxiety of death by "learning how to doe" (Exit the King). He says, "Before learning how niether to live nor to die, the immediate problem facing me is learning how to die. This I have set myself. This is the moment, the last possible moment. What an undertaking: Before me a huge wall, a cliff impossible to scale. It's vastly beyond my strength, today at any rate. And yet my duty is to climb over it, 7 or else to pass through it." It is in his daydreams and nightmares that the incubus of death obsesses on him. 107 The truth for Ionesco is that the universe is in a perpet ual state of crisis. Without crisis, without the threat of death, death alone remains. The metaphysical reality that Ionesco seeks to under stand is a very conscious one. The world that he sees through the "I-eye" and through which he magnifies the world in a kaleidoscopic manner, has nothing but the void of concreteness. Thus, to abide by the rules of the ab surd, Ionesco consciously manifests a world of his own and turns to the phenomenal world as nothing beyond anything else. "Nothing gives meaning to meaningless," he says and adds, "Of course it is inconceivable that nothing should be; that there should be nothing. I try to conceive the inconceivable: I suddenly picture a kind of solid whole, compact and absurdly full; to be is equally absurd, though 'possible'. Why is there what there is, why does what is there as it does, why isn't there something different, why are things as they are? Everything is there, all the 8 time, and it's exhausting." Ionesco is obsessed by metaphysical emptiness and feels that nothingness is the center of all events; how ever, nothingness does not mean absolute nothingness to him, because in nothingness he finds an insoluble source of man's anguish. It is in nothingness that man has created a world of fantasy to overcome the inner anguish and interior struggles. In short, the real world is so 108 __ banal to Ionesco, and he has to journey into the anti world through himself to know more what existence is all about. What am I? Who am I? His journey takes on a cir cular labyrinth. He says, "When I begin to write, there stirs within me an even keener and more intolerable aware ness of the tragedy, the danger, the universal anguish, 9 and I long to escape, to divert my mind, to forget it all." He keeps probing into the dark regions of his psyche to attempt to reach understanding of the mysterious world that crushes him from every angle of his existence. Ionesco writes: I cannot understand how it should be that for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years men have accepted life and death in these intolerable conditions: have accepted an existence haunted by the fear of death, amid war and pain, without showing any real, open, decisive reaction against it. How can mankind have put up with being here, having been flung here, with no explanation? We are caught in a sort of collective trap and we don't even rebel seriously against it. All philosophies, all sciences have proved unable to provide a key to the mystery. We are led by the nose, we are conditioned, we are dragged on a leash like dogs. For tens of thousands of years man has been the victim of a hoax. 1 0 In The Chairs, Ionesco's affinity with Schopenhauer is clear. The Old Man and the Old Woman have neither physical reality nor have spiritual or soulish reality. They are mere shadows of existence to suggest that exis tence is nothing else but shadows of both past and present. "They are still shadows ... you won't be &ble to see them come, anyway. There's no use trying. It's dark," the Old Man says. In Schopenhauer's notion of the Will, The Chairs indicates such, that the Will is nothing else hut void of importance. Ionesco could not have been more metaphysically conscious in the play if the Old Man and the Old Woman were existing in real situations. They exist in the grey world of Ionesco's imaginations - in the world of infant fantasy and a world of make-believe. The Chairs suggests the formidable world where everything concrete falls into time unknown to the naked eye. The stage is bare, bane of chairs, bare of the Old Man and the Old Woman, bare of the visitors. However, their voices - their intellkt as Schopenhauer uses it - suggest a phen omenal reality in the minds-eye of the beholder that the intellkt maintains its permanence in man but not in the Will. The Will in Ionesco's Old Man and Old Woman is void. The Will remains as a passing entity in time. They identify themselves with non-existence in seemingly existing situations. They live in the greyish region beyond the colorless horizon of the void where their con sciousness is deceased and is believed to be in a state of sleep or trance. They are unaware that they have been separated from their human-plane-body. The Chairs is one of Ionesco's most difficult plays to analyze. Within its form and theme The Chairs generates various aspects of man's presupposed physical circum- ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________HQf stances that may not be totally realized by the ordinary mind. The metaphysical aspects of the play itself are conveyed through the use of esoteric language and parables that work like fables. Ionesco writes to the first director of The Chairs, in the following manner to suggest to him the difficulty that he might face in presenting the play and also to suggest how he (Ionesco) wants it to be done; Give yourself up to this play, I beg you. Do not minimize its effects, whether it be the large number of chairs, the large number of bells that announce the arrival of the invisible guests or the lamentations of the old woman, who should be like a weeping woman in Corsica or Jerusalem; everything should be .exaggerated, excessive, painful, childish, a caricature, without finesse. It would be as serious a fault to mold the play as to mold the actors' interpretations. As for the latter, one only needs to press a button and start them moving: tell them all the time not to stop half-way but to follow right through and go all out. There must be plenty of great tragedy and biting irony. Allow yourself for a time to be molded by the play. 1 1 The Chairs reveals Ionesco's obsessions with the tremendum mysterium. He looks at the world with ironic Vision. He fused comedy with tragedy, creates tragic farce out of the seriousness of existence, transforms despair with laughter, and pushes normality into the frontier of the unknown. He wishes to discover the ontological void or absence of the world. Everything is an exostosis of his mind at work to overcome his angoisse. He writes: . I l l We are in life in order to die. Death is the aim of existence, that seems to be a commonplace truth. Sometimes, in a trite expression, the banality may vanish and truth appear, reappear, newborn. I am living through one of those moments when it seems to me that I am discovering for the first time that the only aim of existence is death. There's nothing we can do. There's nothing we can do. There's nothing we can do, 12 1 1 2 CHAPTER FIVE SAMUEL BECKETT: PROTUBERANCE IN SHADOWS But what was eminence during in this land with hardly a ripple? And I, what was I doing there, and why come? There are things that we shall try and discover. But these are things we must not take seriously. - Beckett With Samuel Beckett the world becomes willy-nilly, self-made, and autofabricated. This unique vision* re duced to petty mysticism - when read and deeply contem plated - becomes so imperative that the air one breathes turns into a nauseous constituent. For Beckett, every thing gathers on the threshold of banality - stupendous and motionless. It is in the presence of such proclivity that Beckett’s reductionistic view celebrates "nothing ness" as a captivating center of reference for everything - 'reductio ad absurdum1. The above statement is true of Beckett's plays and narratives, especially the trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, and Unnamable. In Molloy,Beckett is so obsessed by the 1 1 3 ^ notion of a "fallen being" as an analogy of man's fate with existence, and endures an inordinate desire to "move 1 downwards" into the deep abyss as a claudere to existence. He enters a mysterious realm of refuge, keeping pace with the succession of losses in existing reality. His world is a world of ultimate chaos, where decadence and useless ness become the images most celebrative to him. What seems to conquer his imagination is the need for a total resignation into abstention. Abstentionism becomes the main preoccupying element in Molloy, Waiting for Godot, and Endgame, but Beckett could not achieve total abstention because the core of suffering keeps "bouncing" at him as a result of a long, alternating process in which a des perate private Self throws itself back and fro into the world in order to find meaning in actions. The core of suffering is deeply submerged in himself, thus alienation and submergence are opposites that encircle, invade and press upon Beckett’s solitude. Thus Beckett's Molloy is trying to avoid the banality of existence getting tangled and imprisoned in "a prism of self-introspection." Everything seems to be distorted by each angle of the prism of self-introspection, and nothing really comes to a complete image. The fragmented images in the prism suggest that man and his Being are fragmented and splintered by the pains and triviality of living. As _________________________ . 114 Unamuno says, "like a recluse in solitude, and of living in a perpetual examination of conscience, is the means of forgetting oneself, of emptying oneself out, of becoming 2 detached from one's own being." And Beckett says, "Per- 3 haps there is no whole, before you’re dead." Thus, the journey towards the moment of death becomes an appealing hope that seems to divert its course towards nowhere. Beckett says, "For I do not know if it was the right road. All roads were right to me, a wrong road was an event, for 4 me." But death is truly coming. "It's coming. It's 5 coming." Death doesn't come that easily, for Beckett believes that living should first be constantly judged by 6 God "with no less impertinence." Sufferings keep permeating and it is useless to think that one is gone because one realizes physically the signs of continuing sufferings. He says, "You are writhing yet, the hair is growing, the nails are growing, the entrails emptying; 7 all the morticians are dead." Beckett seems to suggest.that when one realizes this situation, one finds others that are dead, not one-self and thus one finds life is one great suffering. He ques tions birth as the most delicate and irrelevant cause of it. Beckett's hatred of his mother, for example, who is incarnated in the realm of death in Molloy in a place to which he could not point objectively, makes him . 115 continue the search - "otherwise why this frenzy of 8 wanting to get to her," he says. His visions of his mother as one fragmented, both in body and mobility, is the most crude illustration ever made of her reality. He says, "What did I see of her? A head always. Veiled with hair, wrinkles, filth, slobber, a head that darkened the air. Not that seeing matters, but it's something to go 9 on with." He knows his mother lives in a shamble, implying that the realm of the dead or Eternal reality is a shamble, which is very contrary to conventional Protes tant thoughts that the realm of the dead is a realm of peace and tranquility. According to G,C. Barnard, Beckett is interested in the fantasies of the schizophrenic. This is well defined by Barnard by taking Beckett's imagination and forceful writings as points of departure. The schizophrenics, according to Barnard, are those who show an essential element of withdrawal from the outside world and concen trate upon an inner world of fantasy. Beckett's schizo phrenic impulses in his quest for "a ground of Being", thus journeys into the deep and mysterious "dark interiors' of his own Self. These are the basic illusions of Beckett's "dark pessimistic world" to justify an entity of his estranged life as a misfit in his own terms. It is only in a state of "falling into a solitary void of 116 10 pure consciousness" that one is able to "look into Self" by withdrawing from physical and emotional contacts with the outer world. It is also in such a state of being that Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Proust, and Joyce create worlds of fantasy craving for an inner reality. It is not extraordinary among schizophrenics to put themselves in an extraordinary state of delusion, thus bringing forth bizarre and oblique perceptions of their own reality. The schizophrenic relishes the unexpected and the absurd, in order to find communion with the mysterious Unknown. Like Strindberg, Swedenborg, Joyce, and Proust, Beckett is sensitive to mystical and metaphysical matters to help him understand the relationships between life and death. The total subjectivity of his findings becomes a remarkable incorporation of this kind of existence, that is, an existence provoking questions for answers. The central assertion of Beckett is to disintegrate the problems of living and death in a testifying manner, and he gathers the crux of existence by elucidating conscientious ob jections from his state of affairs. "Everything is de funct us of importance." he says. Beckett responds to his metaphysical questions in various ways. He becomes psychopathetically conscious and aware of a shadowy reality and regards himself as a shadow of his own existe<nce. It is evident that in his writings ___________________________ 117 the shadowy reality of his being becomes a celebrative statement, and he takes this notion as far as it can deliberatively carry him aloft of the external reality which contradicts his conscience. This provocation gives him a sense of alienation and estrangement and also sub merges him deeply into self-introspection. Although one turns narcissistic in this condition, one is at the same time tied to the ground. This double entity in Beckett is dominant. With this view of life, Beckett is deeply absorbed in asserting his deepest and most intense emptiness to express his incomprehensible and incinerating presence in the world. He wishes to reveal, beyond all that is pure and impure, his ascent into the darkness of a diminishable existing reality which he seeks to proclaim as the height of his real life. That, is why in all Beckett's works, the impression of establishing space and time that appear and disappear, decaying, shrinking, and diminishing in a haze of cloudy reality, explains the issue of existence in which "the contemplating Self is left with virtually nothing.” His existence is in a world at an end. He realizes that he himself is existing but existence does not explain the facts of his purposes and goals. Purpose is reduced to nothingness. All things he sees are mere shadows of reality - frozen without a stir, Shrinking, 118' diminishing, and decaying into nothingness. He feels that he is detached from his own being, and no longer a meaningful reality in the world and its environments. He says, "Here nothing stires, has never stirred, will never 11 stir, except myself, who do not stir either...” This resolute denial of importance to existing reality clearly suggests Beckett's belief that skepticism is the only means of determining nothingness, and thus he makes no dogmatic affirmation in all his statements. For.Beckett the earth is naked with nothingness except for dazzled and blinded souls grouping in the gouffre and darkness of skepticism. "I don't know,”, he emphasizes repeatedly, and this explains Beckett's attitude of formulating the idea that "I do not apprehend” the world and its system. In his writings - both the narratives and plays - he is simply reporting his own state of mind about matters around him. In Waiting for Godot,. Endgame, and Molloy, for example, everything seems to be so eloquent but none really utters any meaning. The world is wrapped in nothingness. The point in time and space from which everything is seen and reported by Beckett is a mere caption of ascertainable reality in non-reality. Beckett's captionings do not aim at saying something apt, approp riate, and with a clear point but merely profit from their highly metaphorical formulations in mapping out his 1 __________________________________________________________________________________ .119 gouffre. Estragon exchanges words with Vladimir that carry no meaning concerning their existence; Hamm and Clov keep repeating the words "suffer," "end," "hesitate" in arithmatical pauses that are not accountable for; and the Nagg and Nell dialogues are exchanges of past memories that float in the air. All these actions imply the impact of anxiety and ennui which Beckett tries to emphasize in his writings. The characters become rhe torical machines of "play-acting." They are all "bogged 12 in indolence" and crumbling into the "third zone." Pilling says, "It is the third zone that he most desires, 'a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling 13 asunder of forms'." Beckett looks into matters not strictly for their merits or demerits, relevance or ir relevance, originality.or banality, and appropriateness or inappropriateness, but in order ! ; t o make a point or points out of his captions by way of intenseness but without getting at them. Beckett realizes an impene trability of surface values and rejects any spiritual significance in his narratives and plays. His only possible value, perhaps, is to feel the sense of the depth of his solitude, and also, perhaps, to understand more closely his own patronage of "there is really nothing real and of any significance." The formulae "Perhaps," and "It is Possible", used by Beckett in various places : 120 in his narratives and plays are for the sake of brevity, to avoid disputes about words, and to indicate a non- 14 assertive content of his statements. These formulae also contain Beckett’s modes of conflicting statements. ln Proust Beckett states this skepticism when he says: a life all in length, a sequence of dislocations and adjustments, where neither mystery nor beauty is sacred, where all, except the adamantine columns of his enduring boredom, has been con sumed in the torrential solvent of the years, a life so protracted in the past and so meaningless in the future, so utterly bereft of any individual and permanent necessity, that his death, now or tomorrow or in a year or in ten, would be a termination but not a conclusion. 15 Beckett's soul journeys by night between darkness to another darkness. He would not seriously attempt to understand these things. He knows that he doesn't need to attempt to come to any understanding of anything worthy of possession. In Waiting for Godot for example, the efforts of waiting are doomed from the beginning. The "act of waiting" for Vladimir and Estragon is only "a despair of a theatrical game" that has to proceed to nowhere. The presence of desire in Fladimir and Estragon is only a deceiving make-believe concerning the radiance of Godot. The boredom of waiting is the only valid sub ject of Beckett's introspective imvestigation. He does not affirm or deny anything about the conceptual reality of Godot. The boredom of waiting is an intensely : 121 inward and deliberate condemnation of creation itself. A quest to the center of Being could not be attained without dread and immense suffering. Solitude in Molloy, Waiting for Godot, and Endgame, is "submergence into deep isolation" and thus Beckett's characters, in deep ensimis- 16 mamiento, reach a level of estrangement and loss of Self that leads to nothingness. In having to consider the 'myth' of Godot, the characters have to identify their own existential ambiguity. In the Unnamable Beckett says, "Perhaps I am the prey, on the subject of grey, in the grey to delusions." So the quest of Godot is a quest for one's lesions and wounds in a world of grey or vague impressions. Godot becomes a painful entity to understand because he is mysterious, ambiguous, and irrational. Thus Vladimir and Estragon as circus clowns and stage jugglers "invented" and "objectified" Godot to overcome the uncertainty and ambiguity of His presence. Vladimir's and Estragon's "creativity" - as good story-tellers and narrators - created Godot out of their angst through prolonged ennui and fear, but in the whole effort of waiting the real Godot still does not exist because He is only an invention of Vladimir's and Estragon's creativity. Beckett seems to suggest that Godot exists inside of man's fictional knowledge. Beckett, like Gorky, believes that, "God is 17 a photo of an idea which man invents ..." This is the impression on reading Beckett: that it is not God that • 122 created man but that man created God. Waiting for Godot signifies Beckett's awareness of the entirety of existence. Vladimir and Estragon are haunting voices of despondency and fear to overcome the true state of despairing reality. To overcome the human situation of fading into total nothingness, Beckett invents "nothingness out of nothingness" - words, gestures, notions - and all are reduced to nothingness, protruding deeply into time and space as pure sounds, movements, and ges tures of unspeakable human pains. Saying is inventing for Beckett. He invents nothingness and thus Godot is an in vention of his void illusions. Godot, the unknowable mystery, is the secluded reality in space and time. Here Beckett suggests that Godot is man’s metaphysical reality created through illusions and perpetual habits. The faculty of this unknowable realm is the outcome of man’s attitudes and habits in discovering meanings. Beckett, like Nietzsche and Unamuno, who are quite influenced by Kantian metaphysics, has replaced the function of reason with metaphysical rationalization. Nietzsche says that it is the unconscious which guides intellectual activity, and he also considers that a given philosophy is in itself nothing more than the "confession of its originator and a species of involuntary and unconscious autiobio- 18 graphy." Thus the illusion of Godot is Beckett's way 123 of excavating the unfathomable mystery which is beyond the range of ordinary intellectual activity. Like a cultist or a mystic, Beckett uses time - today, now, and tomorrow (past, present, future) - as intuitive reality to reveal man's endless hope to find communion with "whatever timeless entity." As commonly experienced by mystics, time is the only soluble element and they, in extending their endless inner religious sincerity, probe "the dark night of their souls" towards the loftiest and sublimest passages of their journeys for self-apprehension of the "otherworldliness.” But the "otherworldliness" is an image neither successfully "veiled" nor successfully "made naked" by Beckett's intuitive contemplation. Beck ett attempts to conceptualize and objectify this "hypoth etical reality" by focus on self-contradictory intel ligibility, but the consequence of this approach is that Beckett loses hold of rationality. In Waiting for Godot, Beckett works on pure consciousness’ , and ultimately the subjective form which he observes in Godot is only his real Self. Paul Ilie in the study of Unamuno says: the mirror gave material proof that man existed in the world as integrally as any other visible object. Prior to seeing himself, man could not really believe in his soul - in the fact of his own existence - with the same conviction that he had regarding the existence qf the objects around him. But after the discovery of his self, after watching himself as one more object in the world, 1 2 4 he knew that he was not merely a contem- plator of the phenomenal world but as an actual part of it. 19 Beckett views existence as a faulty incident. "The 20 earth too takes on false colors," he says. Etymolog- ically, the world exists for Beckett without any logical form. He frequently says, "Without your knowing how, or 21 why." Thus Beckett has his own "many little worlds" to purge otit the problems of his existence. The "I exist" in Beckett is "to diminish", "to shrink", "to turn to sand" and ' . ' t o vacate the world", to question it and to leave it, to find other meanings (if any) and to forget it, to know it and not to know it. "To exist" is derived from the latin ex(s)istere - to step out, stand forth, 22 emerge, appear: hence to be visible, be manifest, be. But Beckett does not use the term "to exist” as above, but instead takes an opposing turn for his own conceptual understanding of existence. In Molloy, Beckett's mean ing for existence "is to be back to non-existence" that is to be non-Being or to be in the mother's womb or to be nothing at all. On the incidence of birth, he says, "of her who brought me into the world, through ;the hole in her 23 arse if my memory is correct. First taste of shit." Existence is a great pain for Beckett, and he con stantly strains towards the spurious deeps. He has no compassion as have other popular Christian mystics, 125 transforming brilliant images of the universe into coherent patterns to grasp the incomprehensible. Beckett's mystical insights then are labelled as skeptical, pessismistic, nihilistic, solipsistic or atheistic. He experiences the death of God as his inner reconciliation. His soul finds no communion with God and also finds that the Eternal has been vanquished by Time. Like Nietzsche, 24 Beckett's philosophy is "panic-struck determination," and thus pessimism and nihilism are the sources of his new belief. Beckett aligns well with other pessimists and nihilists, such as Heidegger, who exist on the frontiers of nothing, and with Rilke, Kafka, Thomas Mann and Jaspers, who contemplate the world in the Nietzschean structure. With all these complex assumptions on existence, reading Beckett is an experience, "exhausting, irritating ....which produces either enervation and apathy or a sick exhilaration, like standing on a high and perilous ledge and contemplating what is below - or above," says Baldwin. This is a very constructive statement made by Baldwin to discover the pessimistic struggles in the whole range of Beckett's works - plays and trilogy. The sym bolism he uses has a strong sense of exploration of the crucial question of "the fertile torment of the soul" Beckett doubts his existence and thus his characters jug gle on the verge of a fatalistic world to throw meanings upon themselves. It is because of their senile, almost 126 psychotic, jugglings that the works become exhausting and irritating to the point of total boredom. Beckett finds boredom as "the most tolerable because the most durable of 25 human evils." Suffering and boredom are at the core of Beckett's narratives and plays portraying a world pro gressing towards total emptiness. Raymond Federman says, "man appears alienated.from the source of his existence, cut Off from reality and surrounded by illusions he 26 substitutes for the resulting void." The void seems to appear in a crystal clear glass interchangeably glossy, in front of Beckett's eyes, cloudy, and vivid at the same time, and he has to endure its (the void's) presence as a i mystic would take it - with less fear and even less hope. Being a deep-in-the-soul-mystic, Beckett experiences a darkness of consciousness which frees himself from all possible views of the physical world. He chooses the path of a questioning seedy-solipsist and internalizes all possible sorrows and despair in order to recognize another reality - a more vibrant landscape of a mystical world. A mystic would say, "the void is beyond all relations:" but Beckett in the same voice would say, "Nothing obliges me. " Everything exists in a vacuum for Beckett. There is no force in Nature and so there is no causality. The implication of causality in Beckett's works is only a 127 notion which ought to be employed with abstract usage and total fallacy. The point is that the interactions between things and objects in Nature are simple. They are "causally happening" by chance in a mathematical randoms ness. Natural events become dumb - void of form and void of functions. Beckett says, "Form fading among fading : 27 forms." What is most important for Beckett is to be amused by the banality of reality. Thus, in Waiting for Godot Beckett's tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, must fall into "the rapture of vertigo" to confront the meaningless cruelty of existence in its most banal and brutal form. This suggests that human reality, forced into the mess and chaos of creation, has to acquire the habit of inflicting and enduring the suffering felt upon them. Words become mere words and are spiraling in stasis, beginning in nowhere and ending in nowhere. Beckett says, "How shall I say, I don't know. Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat 28 of composition." Valdimir and Estragon, doing just that in the heat of "playing to kill time" and "settling in 29 the raglimp stasis," keep on waiting in a "nowhere" environment that is neither dark nor light outside but grey, or "light black ... from pole to pole." From the stage setting in Waiting for Godot one understands Beckett's environment. The stage exists in non 128 existence. The environment created by Beckett is only a shadow protuberating into illusive reality. Beckett then is able to wipe it out at will by negating all events to rest in total stasis and absolute nothingness. Rosen says: Skepticism, calm, symmetry, consolation, pessimism - Beckett's themes relate through an obsessive circularity, successively invoking and cancelling one another out. Still we can safely say that skepticism and pessimism are the dominant and ordering tendencies of his art, that they precede his more particular formulations. 30 In Molloy, Waiting for Godot, and Endgame there seems to be much active movement, but nothing becomes movement with real force and meaning. Movements are "movements in stasis" to denote what Beckett seems to imply as the im pressions of being-in-the-waiting, ennui, and boredom in time and space. They are in mental space and time, strug gling for the "irresistibility of being alive" in the search for Self and Being. The objects that move in the environments that Beckett sees and feels come into sight only as "minglings minds at work to reflect a 'heaping weariness'" as experienced in time of acute boredom. This is clearly stated in Beckett's analogy of the changing phases of the "tree of knowledge" in Waiting for Godot, Beckett is more possessed by silence and darkness - this explains his view on existing reality around him that "all 129 31 grows dim," but the efforts and the search that Beckett has mentioned at various times shows another facet of his philosophy of pessimism and skepticism. Man appears to Beckett as only an observable object. Maii himself knows that he doesn’t know. He knows that he knows nothing. He knows that he exists and that he doesn't exist. This paradoxical dualism in Beckett is only a col lection of voices that are measurable in mathematical terms. Beckett suffers in terms of mathematics. All his voices come out between fatigue and ennui of this mathe matical count. The mathematical count towards death and waiting for death is Beckett's main preoccupation. Beckett merges, in the moment of waiting, which is "long and tur bulent," with each hour alien to his characters, into the "strangeness of banality" which he feels as the whole reality of living. Beckett feels that he could not reason the simplicity of banality because, he feels, "All that 32 made a mark, dark forms crowding in a dark place." The world of banality seems so strange and Beckett wonders about understanding it. Thus his characters: Molloy, Vladimir, and Estragon, Hamm and Clov, and others take their journeys to an alien everyday world, cautioning us about details of "routine, at once a condition and function of (their) impeccable habit, an instrument of reference 33 instead of an instrument of discovery." Everything _______________________________________________ 130 seems to choke them in a clamouring soundless silence. Beckett’s banal details put the readers in a shrinking world until, at one time or another, one feels that one is a lost, minute being. Then inflated again, one blinks at the openness without being able to understand anything. This is applicable to all his characters in the narratives and plays. In Endgame, all the characters are reduced to a final state of uselessness. The world for them is at an end. Nothing has meaning anymore; if they exist and speak of existence it is only a necessity in a situation of an approaching apocalypse; and if they are already dead, it is the voices out of the dead. The difference between being alive and being dead is rather difficult to determine. Both states seem to be under similar intolerable condit-^ a ions. The statement that echoes in Endgame is a potent theme: "It's finished, we’re finished, nearly finished" explains that living has no room for explanation. The world is nothing else but helplessness before its ab surdity. These are the layers of Beckett's pessimism: that man is grounded in their whole. In Endgame Beckett points out that all eternal events, all activities, all sensual movements are towards the "internally empty." Their presence only symbolizes "the assertive speaking out of silence." Molloy, for example, speaks about almost everything - farts, bicycles, sucking-stones, tissue papers, arses - merely to fill space and time. 131 Beieke 11 -ft s?object s “ above are jppoken ■ out: : wifchout: ■ ? any reference to principles. It is the act of doing "in a 34 burst of irritation." to fulfill the spontaneity of time. Beckett says: to draw up the list of my possessions and that will be a relief, a welcome relief, when the moment comes ... for I no longer know what I am doing, nor why, those are things I understand less and less, I don’t deny it, for why deny it, and to whom, to you, to whom nothing is denied? And when doing fills me with such a, I don’t know, impossible to express, for me, now, after so long, yes, that I don’t stop to enquire in virtue of what principle. 35 This habit of "doing: to welcome relief in a momentous state carries no meaning for Beckett's existence. "Life is 36 a succession of habits." he says. Vladimir and Estragon, in the same situation as Molloy in exploring the problems and solutions of their being, repeat "habit as a baneful necessity." Thus there is no sound intellectual explan ation for their doings, but instead as assertion to "guar- 37 antee of a dull invoilability." Vladimir and Estragon, mute and corruptible by preordained failure in time - instance, face the problems of boredom, fear, self- loathing, and defeat in a time-state where nothingness is the cruelest state of.their memories. Beckett's works are complex and abstract: they range over wide areas, and contain long lists of influence from other philosophers, poets, and critics. But Beckett 132 succumbs! to appealing his own and in many places one feels, when he has to he, he is far removed from those who influence him. He has his own ways of developing his sensitivity to suffering. Although his own philosophical outlook is indebted to Dante, Swift, Milton, Joyce, Proust, Baudelaire, St.Augustine, Leibniz, Descartes, Nietzsche, Unamuno, Hume, Kant, Zeno, Berkeley, Schopen hauer, Rousseau, Geulincx, Malebranche, Spinoza and Sartre - Beckett shows a great capability to justify his own exultation. He throws great light into the philosoph ical thoughts of our time through his own injunctions. Beckett is a creative and intelligent man who is affected by many philosophers in the details of his out look. John Pilling says, "Beckett ... has received no formal philosophic training ...He finds the articulation of his own personal distress ... not significantly clar ified by formal philosophy. He has read, and been at tracted by, most of the major philosophers from Pythag- 38 oras onwards. Beckett is impressed by the dispassionate and clinical manner of Spinoza's Ethics and immensely attracted to the ideas of order that Spinoza's mathemat- 39 ical form conjures. Descartes gave Beckett a concrete model to seek satisfaction on the fundamental questions, 40 metaphysical, epistemological, and linguistic. Descartes' cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I exist) 133 is imminent in Beckett's narratives and plays, and all his characters a ;re engaged in the act of thinking. But Beckett could not follow Descartes' mind-matter dictum that attempts to prove the existence of God. Beckett's dis approval of Descartes' belief that "no finite being has 41 the capacity to conceive the idea of the finite" is well conceived in Molloy, Murphy, and Unnamable. To sum marize Descartes' great influence on Beckett, Pilling says, "The whole of Beckett's subsequent philosophical thinking is determined by his acceptance of Descartes' methods 42 and rejection of Descartes' consolations." Geulincx, a Cartesian occasionalist, impressed Beckett in many ways. Geulincx' "ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis" (Where you are worth nothing, there you should wish for nothing) attracts Beckett, but Beckett is more impressed by Geulincx' determinism in solving problems. Geulincx, for example, strongly rejected the Stoic attitude to suicide, and Beckett shares it with a strong conviction. Beckett believes that "suicide provides no way out because it involves making a God of oneself in a situation in 43 which God has been seen to be useless." Geulincx in stead believes in "endeavor" where man has to transcend himself in a genuine activity that he has to strive for without being imposed upon from without. The "exertion of willing that desire," or "aversion shall issue in action," 134 in Lucky, Molloy, Murphy, and Malone are reflections of Geulincx- concept of "endeavor.''! Beckett's term is "conation” instead of "endeavor" as used by Geulincx. They mean the same. And both Geulincx and Beckett attempt to 44 avoid "an abrogation of the power of the Will" by taking into consideration, in their "endeavor" and "conation," the elements of diligence, humility, and obedience, because they believe that man has limited power and often acts irrationally. Thus Beckett's characters project a kind of "indifference," presumably Geulincx' in part. John Fletcher's analysis of Geulincx-Beckett similar ity, and differences, is worth quoting here at length. Fletcher writes, Beckett quotes Geulincx' quietist dictum, 'ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis' in Murphy. By this time the philosopher meant, and Murphy understood, that in the physical realm man is quite impotent, even over events in his own body; for Geulincx rejected even Descartes' pineal gland contact, and made the body so much an in timate part of the external world and an object so alien to the mind that only by the benign and predetermined general edict of God can the two incompatible essences, thought and extension, act together in perfect accord. One can therefore see the full import of Molloy's remark, 'my body is what is called, unadvisedly perhaps, impotent': unadvisedly, because only Geulincx and those familiar with him realise how completely impotent even the healthy body is. Man is master of his decisions or intentions, not of his acts and their consequences. So both virtue and plain common sense lead us to make our wills conform to the universal order 135 which is necessary and which is divine; if we do not conform voluntarily, we Will be made to anyhow - hence Molloy's remark that he could not have acted other wise, Geulincx makes a clear distinction between tenacity and obstinacy; we should yield when we know we are working against the universal order. This idea lies behind all Murphy's conduct" 'to die fighting was the perfect antithesis of his whole prac tice, faith and intention1 since our birth is a necessary part of things; here Beckett does not follow him: 'no, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found'. And suicide, which the Beckettians are usually prevented from commiting only their weakness, is never condoned by Geulincx. Undeniably, howeverBeckett has immense sympathy for his noble philosopher who agrees with him on so many points: that the world order is quite beyond our con trol, that we are saddled with a body that is liable to let us down at any moment, and that we know nothing about the essences of things or about the origin of the universe or of our minds - our ignorance entails our impotence over all things except what goes on inside our heads, 45 Beckett's world is in jeopardy but the jeopardy is autofabricated in the psyche. The finite world still stays intact, tangible and a tabernacle for others. 136 CHAPTER SIX INGMAR BERGMAN: THE METAPHYSICALLY GROUNDED INDIVIDUAL The reason is curiosity. A boundless insatiable curiosity, that is always new and that pushes me onwards - a curiosity that never leaves me alone and that has completely replaced my craving for community. I feel like a prisoner who, after serving a long term, suddenly is confronted with turbulent life. I note, I observe, I keep my eyes open; everything is unreal, fantastic, frightening, or ridiculous. - Bergman Bergman loves both the stage and the cinema, and he contributes remarkably more to the latter. He actual izes his interests in both media when he says, "the theater is like a loyal wife, film is the big adventure, the expensive and demanding mistress - you worship both, 1 ' each in its own way.” Vernon Young says, "Bergman believed he first acquired complete artistic contrbl of the medium, he was nevertheless contending that the theater was his wife, the movie his mistress (a metaphor which anyone might interpret with an evaluation of his 137 own). In 1956, Bergman revised the implicit priority, asserting that film was his natural element, a basic need like hunger for bread, that he made films as others might climb mountains, beat their children, or dance the samba. This was perhaps a rhetorical self-indulgence, for at the end of 1959, after completing The Virgin Spring' , he assured me personally that the theater had the primary appeal for him; that film production by its very nature, was an absurd enterprise ... In September of 1967 ... before shooting his twenty-ninth movie, The Shame, he repledged his allegiance to filmmaking and dismissed, not without tears, so to speak., the validity of theater for 2 ; contemporary audience.” Bergman’s commitment to cinema is said to be self-revelatory. It "sucks the life and spirit 3 / out of me. When I am filming, I am ill,” he says. In 1959 Bergman's comment on filmmaking is more valid. He says, "Making a film is not only a problem and dilemma, financial problems, conflicts of responsibility, and 4 anxiety. It is a secret game, memories and dreams." These intense personal statements reveal the remarkable sense of independence aroused in him by a surge of creativity towards self-freedom in his entire filming career. The searches for freedom from solitude and anguish - especially those related to theological, metaphysical, and . 138 c ^eschatological^matters - are not physical concerns that Bergman could easily condone, but they are purely spiritual matters that have to be told with great pain. These are also concerns that have to penetrate the deeper interior landscapes of his consciousness or psyche, or have to penetrate the darkest regions of his agony. Freedom is movement towards the excavation of truth, or freedom is complete withdrawal into some 'monastery' of imaginable other-worldliness - a triumph of thought. As Nicolas Berdyaev says, "I can accept as truth only that which is 5 ’ wrung out from within me." Bergman is also deeply inspired by the content of such freedom in the manner of Berdyaev, Schopenhauer, Dostoevski, Nietzsche, Strindberg, > Tolstoy and other pessimists and skeptics in the literary and philosophical world who look into the matter of life and death as the primal scream of man's existence. This lasting, impassive and frigid skepticism has turned into obduracy. Bergman says that it does not matter whether he would be called "a dragon, a devil, or perhaps a 6r: saint" for what he has done in films. The assertions of truth and freedom are growing in himself just as the bitter longing and search for truth have grown as hunger and thirsting. It is in this compassion with a deep sense of personal commitment that the works of Bergman are parallel with the works of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, 139 Dostoevski, Tolstoy, and Strindberg- In comparison, Vernon Young, a Bergman critic, finds that the work of both Strindberg and Bergman reveal the same Nordic meta physical anxiety. Young writes, "We can with it more satisfactorily account for the histrionic role played by the Devil in Bergman's psychic life: like those dark powers of Strindberg ... it warded off, even if it did not expel, the forces of dread. In neither man would the super-ego remain suspended. Strindberg, after circling close to insanity and toying with the notion of entering a monastery, turned in his last years to a protracted and unavailing journey towards Damascus. Bergman, having played God definitely by creating the miracle ... and having surrended the Devil to the status of a joke, has relapsed into a more bereft state than before, fumbling in dark for the split image which will convey with final 7 authority the schizophrenia of modern man." Like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Strindberg, Bergman has to look into the open abyss and then plunges into the null and void of- existence like the rest of them. Bergman's sense of pessimism in his metaphysical films such as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Through a Glass Darkly, and The Magician is conceptualized as existential anguish in the midst of his sufferings and boredom with the finite conditions of man and the world. 140 These films cover a wide range of matters related to the mysterious forces of God and His Devils that surround and pervade human life and endeavor. Hostility to such mysterious powers is strongly felt in almost all Bergman's films. He manifests the fallen state of the world at the deepest level of its being. His metaphysical questions circle almost the same subjects: God, the Devil, and Death, all of whom he magnifies to the point of obscurity. In his early film Prison, Bergman sees the world as ruled by Satan; in Thirst it is a north-bound train journey which ends in a watery death, implying that the journey is towards the extreme north, the extreme winter cold - * that is, death; life is quickened by the kiss of death in Summer Interlude; in Naked Night it is human obsessions with silence, emptiness, lies - they could not find n answers for their own conditions, but they are yet living. This fate is worse than death. The metaphysical question of God, the Devil, and Death becomes more vibrant in The Seventh Seal in which Bergman poses the awful problem of the Silent God and the end of the world; and Through A Glass Darkly a girl named Karin, in a state of dementia almost to the brink of insanity, sees God as a spider. The Magician is about "the mufflesd voices of the dead and 8 the maddening voices of those living." God, the Devils, ennui, fear, and Death shape the absurdity of Bergman's ,1 4 1 existence. Bergman's skepticism explores these metaphysical doubts in great depths. It concerns the various dimen sions of human-contrived nightmares in existence. Scho penhauer ways, "Life is a bad dream from which we have to 9 wake." It is true that the metaphysics of death in Bergman's works is directly related to the awakened dreams -*~a quest of the Silent God, the silent transcendental God whom Bergman wanted to be mundane. This is the source of the hazard of his existence. In Through a Glass Darkly, it is the vision of the mundane God that brings Karin to the level of dementia and schizophrenia that make her reveal the false dreams, false hopes, and false masks of God. Her private view of God has deepened her despair. Vernon Young writes, it is"behind the wallpaper that Karin, in her onset of progressive schizophrenia, hears voices in this pseudo-floral and immured world where she hopes to T0: meet God." In'her room she feels a premonition of some thing evil. As her eyes focus on one point, the Devi1-God materializes, but who and what is the Devil? It is the projection of Karin's sense of guilt, a product of hal lucination that Bergman accounts for on physiological, as well as psychological, grounds. It is the nature of s her mental and spiritual illness that Karin finds it difficult to distinguish reality from imagination. It ; 142 is the mood of Karin's humanistic courage or the ironic contemplation which underlies the concealed despair of man's endless search for the vision of God. The spiritual distress, the blinded faith, and the verbal strength in Karin make God appear as a mundane figure. She says, "He came up to me and I saw his face, loathsome evil face. And he clambered up on to me and tried to force himself into me. But I protected myself. All the time I saw his eyes. They are cold and calm. When he couldn't force himself into me, he climbed quickly onto my breast and my face and H went on up the wall." The spider God, who is also a rapist, is inspired by an acquisitive mania of Karin's obsession with impending death. She longs for "an open door through the wall paper" to welcome "anything definite" to bear her guilt. The frenzied delirium contains Karin's unresolved contradictions in her attempts to delineate the forces of fate and love in her decayed reality. The glaring discrepancy between reality and illusion is the intermediate equation that Karin could most possibly draw. The pipe-dream she has after having the hypodermic needle, puts her in a realm of two worlds in which the schizophrenic experience becomes a flirt with God as experienced by David, who creates monsters in his novel. Through a Glass Darkly has common vision with Dostoevski's novel, The Possessed. Like Karin, Ivan 143 Karamazov, a metaphysical revel, a madman and mystic, 12 declares that God is the pain of the fear of death. The vision of the Man-God, the Animal-God, emerges in the works of art between the fatality of death and the instinct to grasp the nebulous "Silent One.” The journey into the souls of human passions is the most sensitive theme in Bergman's films. He keeps on returning to these themes of the journey as if in them he might find opportunities of meeting his real Self, or opportunities of contemplating the gnostic and biocosmic worlds of his dreams, thus confronting the utter darkness and emptiness of existence. Bergman feels that he could not remain contented within the closed circle of one dimensional, flat, mundane existence. He returns to sacerdotal themes in The Seventh Seal; he uses mysticism and exorcism in The Magician to bring forth human con frontations with the Satan-figure in God; he chooses the complex scheme of salvation in Wild Strawberries where Isak Borg in his uncherished, uneschewed pity over himself finds that the pilgrim into time will end in death. In his fear to die, Isak Borg first takes a journey into the dilillusionment of hhildhood memories where he could inaugurate his "lost paradise" in the opposite chair with Death; and in Through a Glass Darkly Karin, with her elated fate and hope, faces a God Who betrays her. _______________________________ .144__ Bergman's transformation of the world, at least in this crisis of humanism and the existential dialectic of his creativity, owes its sources to the notion that he is shrinking away into the void, and that he is thrown into the depths of nothingness.- Thus the metaphysical fear he faces has to be uplifted so that the fear that grows and moves in his heart and mind could be "abluted” to the lights of hope that he restores to cure him of the neurosis of existence. He wishes to counsel his fears so that he could unfold the mysterious contradiction that exists in his psyche. He uses the films to be aware of all things restored in reality and in his imagination. He is embroiled in the fusion of reality and imagination. Bergman's pessimistic attitude towards life becomes the strongest single compulsion in his imagination. Jux taposing intellectualism and emotionalism in a single creative mode, with artistic ingenuity, in order to ex plore the possibilities of the mechanisms of his art through careful selections and references, he hopes that he could be able to recreate and represent the sensations of his visions in filmic images and footages. He also hopes that he could reach "the gates of his Paradise" in the face of God whom he has already discarded. It seems that for Bergman the real is never quite real. His works are abstract and complex; thus, critics 145 find him overtly intellectualizing. This misconception results from a lack of understanding of his vision. The complexity of.his works is the complexity of his psyche. His grand illusion is self-devoured in skepticism. Like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Strindberg, Bergman is re moved from the simple equation of life equals death in the traditional Christian sense. He has to review human exis tence as an individual. He has to look for another way of ''creativity” bringing about the transfiguration of his grand illusion and the end of the world with the emergence of a new "Hell” on a new "Earth.” In The Seventh Seal the new "Hell” is the "Hell" of Goya's and Bosch's paintings, where the ruling God creates the megalomania of his "global feverish chamber of Hell" within the con<- cept of the black plague. He probes and interrogates the sacerdotal ceremonies. Monks, bishops, flagellants, religious enthusiasts, and the whole mechanism of the Christian church are seen as significant in order to parallel the confessions of prayers for the "flesh and blood" and the hungry Gods of the bacchic ceremonies in the Greek myths. The melancholy of Christianity yearning for eternal rest is juxtaposed with sufferings, sterility, cruelty, burning stakes, the squirrel Satan, and fake messiahs of the church. Isak Borg's grand illusion in Wild Strawberries no longer serves the broadening and 146 deepening consciousness of self-guilt. In a spindrift of illusion Isak Borg has to reconcile himself to the finality of death. Bergman underscores the psychic sanatorium of Antonius Block and Isak Borg along the grand illusion of self-diagnosis. The Swedish tradition in films is unique - uniquely Swedish enclosed philosophy of decadence. Sjostrom's and Bergman's creative intellectualism and emotionalism are closely knit in with the general peculiar homogeneity of the Swedish struggles over the supremacy of their natural instincts. The Swedish films have gazed inwards to examine the human souls, and the curious sado-masochis- '13 tic traits in man’s nature. Sjostrom, for example, 1 takes "his camera out of doors ... to achieve authenticity in even the tiniest details" in the Swedish tolerance with existence. Sjostrom is a pantheist, who blends the Swedish landscapes (Gotland, Grimstad, Lappland) with inexorable-.force in with the characterizations of his characters. Sjostrom uses the landscapes as symbolic transformation of his inner world. One has to understand the background of the film- works of Sweden in order to be able to feel the Swedish consensus on existence. The extent to which emotional ism is extended in the film-works has relationship to the "pantheistic rapport" of the Swedes with nature. On the _________________________ 147 influence of the Swedish landscapes and the "total hours of darkness and lights" Cowie says, "Through the extended autumn and winter seasons in Sweden there is a simultan eous feeling of anticipation and regret for the fleeting weeks of summer sunshine and happiness. Swedish artists, therefore, have used summer as a physical embodiment and sometimes as a symbol of the lofty hopes and dreams of paradise entertained by human beings, in films, like Summer Interlude, Summer with Monika, and One Summer of Happiness. The dark recesses of the forest become the .14 above of Death and his ministers." Similar to the other Swedish writers, Bergman is deeply concerned with time - dream-time - as the main element for his spiritual pilgrimage. He sees enormous human weariness, exhaustion, fear, loneliness, boredom, inspirations, spiritual pride, eternal hopes, and irony with God, in time. The dream, the imagination, the visionary, and the real are alike to Bergman. His aspir ations towards the infinite, the Eternal, the mysterious core of beings are free associations with the dreams in which the boundary that borders the dream and reality is captured in time. Time is time-quest, which is being pursued by the characters. Time is a return to Self in search for some ecstatic infinite, a release from "the here and now" in -'the- face of"God' "the mathematique 148 superle-ruref'" and time is the cycle within the central movement of the writer's psyche. The fall into time is the fall into the state of darkness where the meanness and cruelty and vanity of life lie. In his study of Baudelaire, Nicole Ward Jouve says, "but rather a state of darkness, such that it must escalate into infinite cruelty. There is a circle in Dante's Purgatory in which the angry grope their way through impenetrable darkness; it is generated by their own anger, blinding the light of 15 their reason." In Wild Strawberries Bergman is able to capture Isak Borg's circle of impenetrable darkness, his disquieting dreams, his intense spiritual topography, his fears, his fantasies, his nightmares and his dialogues with death in dream-time and real-time. Isak Borg is drawn into the eternal silence and darkness of his deepest agony with time running out. Time in Wild Strawberries is Isak Borg's reminiscence of the journey towards death. The journey along the many stations on the via dolorosa in the manner of Strindberg's To Damascus and The Great Highway, begins with Isak Borg who wishes to reveal his passions for truth. Bergman shows the various different levels of Isak Borg’s consciousness concerning the guilt of errors, lies, hopes and despair, childhood memories, follies of mankind, and impending death encroaching upon his old age. 1 4 9 kS The journey into dreams beings with Isak Borg con templating and strolling through a strangely deserted ; street reflecting "the terrible barren plain" of his consciousness: the sun gives him no warmth but instead the feeling of chill; the stillness is gripping, nothing is heard, creating an absolute silence; and the environment becomes vague, grotesque, and frightening. In a frenzied nightmarish manner, the experience develops into a more tragic pace - Isak Borg sees that the hands of a clock have disappeared, the dial is blank, and below it someone has smashed both the eyes so that they looked like watery, pools. He finds that his old reliable gold time-piece has also lost its hands. He then sees a man standing on the street corner, his back towards him. He rushes to him and touches his arm, and to his amazement the figure collapses as if it were made of dust or frail splinters. Isak Borg then finds himself lost in a city where everyone is dead. There is no sign of a living soul. The street seems endless to him. Then the church bell tolls but everything that surrounds the church is grey and barren. There is a funeral procession, led by an ancient hearse and followed by some old-fashioned hired carriages. The carriages are pulled by meager-looking horses in black s shabracks. The hearse turns in front of the church and sways and rocks like a ship in a storm. A wheel from the _______________ 150 hearse gets loose, rolls towards Isak Borg who avoids getting hit, strikes the wall of the church and splinters into pieces. The huge hearse sways and teethers on its three wheels and suddenly a coffin is thrown out and falls into the street - it overturns and is partly smashed. The tolling of the church bell has stopped. In a fearful curiosity, Isak Borg approaches the coffin. He leans forward and the dead hand in the coffin clutches Isak Borg’s arm and pulls him down with enormous force towards the casket. Then in horror, Isak Borg sees that the corpse is himself, staring without any emotion, and it seems to be smiling scornfully. He continues to struggle and during this senseless horror he awakes from his 16 dream. Bergman creates these visual images in the dream sequence reflecting the multileveled existential quest of Isak Borg's spiritual pilgrimage. He is placed in an environment where reality and non-reality are blended into one. In a comparatively religious framework, Bergman uses the church as a symbol of "death and deceiving Eternity." It is Isak Borg's trivial moment in confrontation with the supercilious mockery of his own image with death. The tolling of the church bell signifies the resignation of man to death, and the grey ness of the church and its surroundings suggest "the ________________ 151 sad peace of a barren land” that man has to hope for in religion. The church has always been Bergman's referent in his battle for a more rational synthesis of existence. Wild Strawberries strongly reveals Bergman's sense of abandonment by the church when Isak Borg is "railed” down by death while the solemn church looks at him with disfavor. The church instead brings out the hands of doom to Isak Borg. This dream sequence acts as an intro duction to the various facets of Isak Borg's spiritual journey in the latter part of the film. Richard A. Blake 17 calls it "the double theme in motion” where Isak Borg faces reality and illusions as the reminiscence of the real entity of his existence.- The dream sequence is a falling into time-future. Death and time, time and death are related metaphysical mystery. The expectation and the anticipation of events in life have haunted Bergman in his dreams and imagination. Like Dreyer and Victor Sjostrom, Bergman responds to his dreams as purely emotional sources and regards them as the main realm of his creative act; and this constant inner withdrawal - the dream worlds - as self-illumination in the face of reality, becomes the embodiment of his ideas, belief, and filmic forms. He strongly disregards the primitive law of nature, the rational, and even the legal istic world; for him "the real world” is seen through his efforts in the embodiment of his vision of the Fall of _____________________________ 152 Man. He is in constant pursuit of inner satisfaction. Thus he disregards the efforts of painful comprehension experienced by critics and the audience, for he himself (by the nature of his abstract creation, in which he attempts to reveal the heart of the world through the purpose of existence, become incomprehensible) broods in a similar way with the rest of human beings to overcome his own puzzlement over existence. He himself finds that his own works become strange to himself. He takes music as a referent to explain the ambiguity, inconsistency and contradictions in his works. He says, "I have never under- . 18 stood a piece of music in my life. I always only feel." This statement explains what really constitutes his work, which is more towards the emotional rather than the intellectual. He orchestrates his wishes to transmit or communicate the inner impressions of his sufferings, agonies of discontentment and embarrassment as the main impulse of his creativity. In Wild Strawberries it is total emotionalism that Bergman attempts to portray through Isak Borg. Jorn Donner writes, "Isak Borg is afraid of dying, afraid of ultimately drying up, afraid of a hor rible doom. He has lost the woman he loved. He has had an unhappy marriage. Isak Borg lives shut hp in his own world. The question of the film is this: Can he get ' - ' 1 9 ' out of it?" The real answer is: The answer is the 153 question, and the question is the answer. Bergman used to say: "This is very important: - I never ask people to- 2 0 ' ' - s understand what I have made." His works are personal poems, music - ambiguous and captivatingly intriguing. Bergman’s commitment to filmmaking is strong and bold. He says, "I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon's head, an angel or a devil - or perhaps a saint - out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the feeling of contentment that matters. Regardless whether I believe or not, re gardless whether I am a Christian or not, I play my part at the collective building of the cathedral. For I am an artist and a craftsman; and I know how to chisel stones 2iv- , — into faces and figures." Bergman knows that the anguish of life is a kind of Tower of Babel. Bergman finds it difficult to express his longing and search for truth in films. He finds himself in a bitter situation in detaching himself from fiction and reality, because he feels that there is no final statement that could be conclusive as a single entity to explain the vast fundamental concern of man. He is aware of other possib ilities that conquer his imagination and frequently finds himself betrayed by the images he himself created. In The Magician, for example, Vernon Young finds that Bergman has been confused as to how to convey a moral or a metaphy-' 154 physical ambiguity. Young says, ”1 am convinced of the opinion that in his latest films he has lost the power of discerning what is self-evident to an audience and what is absurd. I am convinced that he has ultimately unclear 22 , ideas about the nature of catastrophe^” But Bergman frankly says, "Certain things in life are impossible to 23 ' ■ ' represent^" This is a revealing statement made by Bergman to explain the reasons why he gets deeply involved in meditating upon the freedom of thinking and actions. The modern compulsion has to move forward within the growth of a soul that is ready to recognise the infernal circle of new desires. Nicole Ward Jouve says that the "circle is doomed to endless escalation, and ever more rapid parody. It is caught - and the individual with it - in the fatal compulsion to rush forward, as though forward were towards somewhere else, which is the modern form of 24' the "voyage-. " For Bergman, like Baudelaire, "the move ment it accomplishes is circular, pointless, self-contra dictory; though he insists on the greatness of its . 25 ■ . pathos^" Thus the forward compulsion has to be ambig uous . The Magician is one of Bergman's most ambiguous films; it can be analyzed from many different angles and in many different ways. The magician, Vogler, could be Bergman's real person behind the mask - the conjurer, the •155 charlatan, the exorcist, the supernatural writer, a blasphemous figure, a neocromancer, an entertainer - all these are attached to Bergman's exteriorization and interiorization of the masks within himself in his career as filmmaker and an artist. It is Bergman's impulse of self-fragmentation. The ambiguity in The Magician is in itself the ambiguous impressions produced in the creative act of being an artist. It is an exhib ition of the actor's art, the acrobat's show, with fear, sentimentality, the marrow freeze of exorcism, and madness. Bergman tries to play with anguish’ and terror as related experiences, but terror is more poignant, more intense and overpowering in The Magician. On the metaphysical level, The Magician is an outward manifestation of "man- being God" with an out-moded miracle tool of magic. Bergman's films have given birth to further egotism, sufferings, opprobrious scuttle, and reverential problems which he finds difficult to diminish. It bedomes a necessity for Bergman then, to maintain that the images of "darkness" and "lights" transposing each other in various of his films reflect the undetermined facts of possibilities of the amazing power of freedom he seeks to reveal. In The Seventh Seal he is deeply concerned with the insensate love of ordinary people and through the medium of film (which is fearful, problematic and 156 Impossible to himM this concern has become hn insinuating course of his commitment. He emphasizes the purpose of use to Charles Thomas Samuels, when he says, "Please use them, I will come back and make other new and beautiful 26 things." This reveals his major impulsive inspiration to work out and explore the interweaving fabric of ambig uity. The center of Bergman's thought, which becomes an intense concern, is to overcome the torment of existence and to communicate it in the fulfillment of love. This is very true of The Seventh Seal, in which Berman, who is sensitive to the waning conditions of man in the face of impending apocalypse * presents the primal question of the reility of man which he could not falsify - that is, the novelty of love. The bowl of wild strawberries with milk symbolizes "the warmth of life, the human values, un- 27 damaged by metaphysical fear," and after taking it, Antonius Block says, "I shall remember this moment, the silence, the twilight, the bowl of strawberries and milk, your faces in the dusk, Mikhael sleeping, Jof with his lyre. I'll carry this memory between my hands, as care fully as if it were a bowl filled with fresh milk. It will 28 C ' be a sign - a great consolation." The great consolation that Antonius Block finds during the brief meeting with Jof and Mia is the simple spiritual humanism that they should comply with in life. 157 Jof and Mia are stage performers in home parody, burlesque, satire, carricature, paradox, folly, laughter, and light tragedy without self-indulgence, restraint, human reason, and distress, and without the ghost dance of death in the manner of the Commedia del Arte. The simple puzzle in their lives is to entertain the crowd and enjoy the changes of seasons as they go along the journeys to entertain them. Mia says, "One day is like another. The summer, of course, is better than winter, because in summer you don't have to 29 be cold. But spring is best of all." Jof's and Mia's simple voyage through life is the principle of stable - Being. They quest no ultimate meaning, no cosmic signific ance, and time-in-time is plain professionalism for their arts. Peter Cowie says, "Theirs is an implicit faith in 30 the beauty of life," But Antonius Block, who is profoundly individualistic, carries life too far beyond, .comme il faut with existentialism, nihilism, pessimism, parochialism, and incessantly urges himself forward into a restless multiplicity of directions in his life journeys. The fretful misery of love he searched for throughout the Crusade years are reduced to Jof's and Mia's performance of pure existence. Block is a conjurer, and incomes, a scoffer, a blasphemer, and a Sabbath-breaker who contin uously attempts to convey the mood of skepticism, to reason and to justify the incomprehensible paradoxes and 158 enigmas of existence, to re-examine the traditional religious faith in Christianity and to prove that man is in search of spiritual ablution - all these throw him into metaphysical confusions that breed sufferings, frag mentations, negative assertiveness, pervasive splenetic moods, and bad conscience. These confusions oscillate easily from pain to ennui through the whole length of his journeys in life. Thus for every breath he draws, Antonius Block has to battle with his intellectual anguish. He has to assail with fear like Faust who regards life as a death-trap. Bergman's tendency to break away from reality into a soothing "reality of dreamy illusion" explains his difficulties in overcoming what is real. Like Claudel and Baudelaire, Bergman finds that the dream illusion fuses and molds together something in the psyche "like a store-house" of his imagination. Unlike painting and sculpture, optical illusions in films have to be mobile and moving and have to utilize space and time, volumes and shadows, to create and transfer them in a world that blends together the contours of the filmmaker's im pressions with anything he attempts to portray on the screen. Bergman brings these illusions back to life, back to the whole pursuit of despair, and back to the ines capable reality of existence. These illusions are not 159 reality. They are not turath. They are not devoted to any form of allegation. They are the filmmaker's unjustified realms of intellectuality. Bergman says, "Please do not talk about truth: it doesn't exist! Behind each face there 31 ' .................... ^ is another, another, and another," Bergman experiences difficulties in arriving at a common and acceptable definition of reality. This is largely due to his childhood experiences. His early childhood had very few contacts with reality or channels to it. He was afraid of his father, mother, elder brother - everything. He says, "I had great difficulty with fiction and reality; as a small child I mixed them so much that my family always said X was a liar. Even when I grew up, I felt blocked. I had enormous difficulty speaking to 32 others." \Vith the above childhood experience, Bergman has to take things."face to face with himselfV" He transcends his creative genesis and shares the common problematic literary fulfillments with other great writers. Quite similar to Eugene O'Neill in manifesting "the big subject behind all the little subjects" (that is the metaphysical), Bergman says, "Regardless of my beliefs and my own doubts which are completely without importance in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its creative urge the moment it was separated from worship. It severed the umbilical cord and lives its own 16:0 sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. The individual has become the highest form and greatest bane of artistic creation. Creative unity and humble anonymity are forgotten and buried relics without significance or meaning. The smallest cuts and moral pains of the ego are examined under the microscope as if they were of eternal 33 importance." (Italics mine) Bergman thus enjoys scorning reality and takes great interest in his perceptually findable reality. To him reality is blurred in naivete. The world of his interiors becomes the source of freedom for his creativity. At the deeper level of his sensitiv ity, Bergman touches the depths of the human soul and persists in struggling for the freedom and dignity of his chosen art form, no matter what the critics and audience feel; he continues to probe into the agonies of his nostalgia and anguish that are driven by his pessimistic view of existence. On anguish, which is directly applic able to Bergman, Nicolas Berdyaev says, "Anguish points to the world above and is associated with the experience of the insignificance, precariousness and transitoriness of this world. Anguish bears witness to the transcendent and, at the same time, to the distance, the yawning gulf that exists between man and the transcendent. Anguish is also a longing for another world, for that which is beyond the boundaries of this finite world of ours. It spells 161 solitude in the face of the transcendent; it is the point of greatest conflict between my existence in the world and the transcendent. Anguish can awake my awareness of God, but it can also signify my God-for-sakenness. It inter venes, as it were, between the transcendent and the abyss 3 4 ■ ■- ■ •*'. , - / , ' of non-being, a void." In The Seventh Seal, the anguish that Berdyaev relates to is almost an aggregate of Bergman's deductions on the notions of insignificance, precariousness, and transitor iness of this world. The Seventh Seal goes back to the memories of the peasant paintings in the Swedish chapels, the childhood bed stories of angels, saints, dragons, pro phets, devils, human beings, the beauty of Heaven, and the infernal tortures of Hell. They become Bergman's adult daydreams and nightmares which relate directly to his metaphysical awareness, his vision of the"face" of God and the Devils, and the superimposed vision of life and death. This consciousness - the mood of - disillusionment - merges at the intersections of the highway of Bergman's religious life. Thus Antonius Block, Bergman's double, takes a journey through time and space to understand the sub terranean landscapes of his fears and disillusionments with God whom he feels "responsible for all the complexes, vanities, and desires that man is heir to, and which re- 35 duce him to a posturing idiot ..." 162 Glicks.berg in his study on ’ ’ Death the Supreme Ironist” writes, "The. ironist announces his discovery that men die and never come back to life. For him it is an ’original’ discovery, a truth which is like a thorn in his flesh and which he continues to contemplate with undisguised astonishment. Men die, but each being ... refused to believe that this applies to him. Life goes on while the fact of death is handled as if it were a statistical incident. How can men live with this knowledge of death - death that is always there, waiting for them always in the background, prepared to deliver the summons or, what is even worse, drag them off without warning in the dark of 36" • . night?” Bergman is one of those ironists who confronts life and death as a prime concern of his metaphysical revolt. In The Seventh Seal Bergman reveals the fatal falsification of human unconscious doubts about life and death. Life and death is not mere instinct, but an expres sion of the authors' irony and brutality in a constructive confrontation with them. The concept of free will that gives man a sense of freedom could not be revealed in the type of destiny described by Christianity alone. Man has to understand the evidence and complexities of its reality. Thus death, the pro re nata in The Seventh Seal, is captured in the symbolic journey of Antonius Block through a long and difficult road to freedom from death. 163 The whole film expresses Bergman's endless questioning hlong' the via\dolorosa in formulating the truth between reality and dreams where life and death stand in the center. He approaches the freedom of life and death in the manner of Dostoevski's The Possessed. Dostoevski and Bergman are tormented by the question of the existence of God, Glicksberg, in his study of Dostoevski writes, "If there is no God and no personal immortality, then why bother about virtue and ideals? In his major novels Dostoevski wrestled with the problem of good and evil and depicted the upsurge of the irrational in man. The human longing for faith in God and the Resurrection is mocked "37' - by the diabolical voice of atheism., " Bergman's The Seventh Seal wishes to abandon the idea of God; like Strindberg with religious needs, he determines to make war on the God of the old while advancing towards something new. Peter Cowie says that Bergman joins forces with the modern Swedish philosopher, Hedenius, in believing that religious experience must be capable of communication even to a non-believer. In The Magician, Bergman uses the motifs of Satanism, black arts, occultism, and medieval chemistry in self-demonstration and self dramatization of his search for this incommunicable, silent, and fantastic absolute -God. 164 CONCLUSION The deeper we take root in appearance, the more productive we are: to produce a work is to espouse all those incom patibilities, all those fictive oppos itions so dear to restless minds. More than anyone, the writer should know what he owes to these semblances, the decep tion, and should beware of becoming in different to them: if he neglects or denounces them, he cuts the ground from under his own feet, he suppresses his materials, he has nothing left on which to work. And if he then turns to the absolute, what he finds there will be, at best, a delectation in stupor. - Cioran. The fashionable disparagement of reason, the exaltation of Will, and the flows of irony and paradox in the works of modern mytaphysical theater and film have shown the offensive, antagonistic and rancorous confron tations with the totality of existence. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Unamuno, Kierkegaard and Cioran in philosophy and metaphysics; Strindberg, O'Neill, Ionesco and Beckett in theater; and Bergman in Film are relentlessly "decor ticated souls" whose needs for life and being (from which 165 their logical and non-logical deductions of existence is null and void of importance) are merely adumbrations of their Selves. For them life is so faint and obscure, it serves only as a shadow that protrudes on the face of reality. Life serves them the transgressions into psychic reality in which the dreams, the nightmares and daymares, the hallucinations and illusions, echoes and mirages are more meaningful to their spiritual sense of purpose and direction. The ontological transmogrification of their souls are often unreal, grotesque, bewildering, and some times in total closure with reality at hand. These writers are captive prisoners of the void, thus they take their labrinthis routes of escapes in a circular manner into Self to reveal their inert souls and possibly to escape the bondage of existence. But, according to Cioran "every new acquisition signifies a new chain, every power factor a cause of impotence. Even our talents contribute 1 to our bondage." The works of these writers are drawn from the furtive regions of the souls or the psyche or the mind to conquer the paralytic truth of existence so as to cure them of the meandering fate of debased and sordid existence. Cioran also observes that the release from such conditions is itself useless, and says: All that we possess or produce, all that is superimposed upon our being or 166 proceeds from it denatures us, smothers us. And our being - what a mistake, what an injury to have adjoined it to existence, when we might have persevered;, intact, in the virtual, the invulnerable! No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if ever there was one. Yet it is with the hope of being cured of it some day that we accept life and endure its ordeals. The years pass, the wound re mains. 2 (Italics mine) The cyclical return into time (time that occupies the center of these writers' consciousness) is the true realm of their anguish and nostalgia. Strindberg considers time and space as non-existent because the nature of the psyche penetrates the zones of time in the manner the writer wishes it to be. Strindberg says, "On a flimsy foundation of actual happenings, imagination spins and weaves in a new pattern: an intermingling of remembrances, experiences, whims, fancies, ideas, fantastic absurdities 3 and improvisations of the mind." The logical linearity of time is not congruent with the writers' psychic reality. The journey into Self is egocentric and is outside linearity and outside narrative, with many ellipses 4 and laconic utterances. Time, which is also a Beckettian parody, is charged with nonsense, overorderliness, satric semantics, painful humor, laughable tragedy, clownishness, banality, and a game of silence for the ritual death of man. Time for Beckett is the symbol of the aliene appentens world. Beckett writes, "Moments 167 for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is 5 over, reckoning closed and story ended.” The whole concept of time, the living masks of ignorance, and the equivocal anti-heros of modern liter ature relate well with the vanity of existence and the sufferings of the world. Moshe Lazar uses the phrase 6 "the pursuit of the wind" (or the pursuit of the phan toms) in reference to the Book of Ecclesiastes to denote the vanity of vanities in existence. Schopenhauer calls attention to this notion too, which he terms the "Incompre hensible phenomena." He says, "(Life is) an unprofitable episode, disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence. And, in any case, even though things have gone with you tolerably well, the longer you live the.more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, 7 nay, a cheat." The attempt to attain freedom from the disappointment of life and the search to unfold the mystery of existence are well expressed in the works of these pessimistic writers, but they, according to Glieksberg - in the whole excavatory undertakings of sufferings and affliction - find that "there is no secret or noumenal truth to be 8 discovered." Strindberg, for example, finds no "monastery for self-salvation" and says, "I have been stuffed full of lies. Everything I have believed in has proved to be a IBS 9 fraud. For that reason my whole life has become a lie.” The only possible monastery of salvation for Strindberg is in the sanatorium of amnesty. In his expressionistic plays, The Great Highway, A Dream Play, and To Damascus, Strindberg makes constant examination'of his inner Self with the repeated patterns of the universe. Thus, the escape from pain is inevitable. As a Searcher, a Seeker, or a Hunter, his exploration of dreams is a continuous attempt to reveal his ordeal with existence. In A Dream Play Strindberg says, "In you I see beauty - which is the harmony of the universe. Only in the solar system's motion, in the exquisite, inspiring chords of a stringed instrument, in the vibrations of light do I find delineated anything resembling the beauty of your figure 10 ... You are a child of celestial spheres," to suggest his final dream of salvation. Ionesco illuminates his "vertical graveyards":sto reveal the living thoughts of his dreams and nightmares as the prime source of his disillusionments with existence. He finds it comfortable, in the regions of "dark lamen tation," to reveal his melting moods of the death songs of human kind. He puts in writing the impressions of one of his dream journeys in the following manner to suggest the grand delusions of man in the realm of deaths I take the train; I see no other travellers. _________________ 169 I lie down in one of the open trucks, and the train moves slowly down the hill. At the bottom, at the end of the rails which are gleaming because it must have been raining, I catch sight of a dark tunnel. I feel a certain anxiety. We move forward, reach the bottom of the hill, close to the mouth of the tunnel; the engine goes in, the trucks follow, and mine in its turn, still uncovered, moves into the dark passage. My anxiety increases slightly. Then, once I am inside the tunnel, it disappears. The darkness is all around me; no opening to right or left, no overhead; a dark, semi circular ceiling. It is strange that my anxiety should have utterly vanished; not only do I feel no fear, but on the contrary I am filled with a sense of well-being. It moves gently forward, I feel relaxed: a grey light,- a little building like a strange station, dark vegetation. I wake up. 11 The world of dreams cures Ionesco of his bereavement over death. Strindberg, in his love for illusions, takes the symbol of the "awesome mill" to denote the pulverisation of human beings into power; and in the manner of an insane infidel he reveals his multifaceted realms of the inner souls the terror of death - death against time - and flashes through the inner-eye of his works the trammeled and the unbalanced Heaven and Hell as if Death and Time, Time and Death are initiated from the Kingdom of Darkness. The "dim hope of amelioration” in Strindberg's works is am energy of pessimism and skepticism. Beckett writes about death and the uselessness of existence by repeating his favorite phrase "the creature of routine" as the faculty of his sufferings. Molloy, 170 Vladimir, Estragon, Hamm, and Clov are all beings embroiled in space and time where meanings are indefinite and life is a circuit of sepulchre. He invokes the faith of one engulfed in the zone of zero. Schopenhauer sees man as "an acrobat on a rope" to illustrate his notion of the unstable entity of human beings in the world. On the vanity of existence Schopenhauer writes: In the first place, a man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be dis appointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment,- always vanistiing; and now it is over." 12 O'Neill's melancholic murmur of the pipe-dream is an expression of his doom. Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest of the pessimists, O'Neill celebrates the fact of doom as an inseparable reality of existence. He believes that there is no way out but death. In The Iceman Cometh, O'Neill reveals the life of a group of people who have withdrawn from life and wait in the grandstand of death the final conclusion of existence. Like Beckett, Ionesco and Strindberg the final call never comes and thus as dead immortals O'Neill's characters 171 submerge themselves into pipe dreams where the hope of eternal life in terms of death could no longer be an illusion but a reality. It is the disconsolateness of not being able to die that O'Neill is deeply concerned with in the play. Larry says, "the lie of a pipe-dream is what gives ilife to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober ... Mine are all dead and buried behind me. What's before me is the comforting fact that death is a fine long sleep and I'm damned tired, and it 13 can't come too soon for me." It is the annihilation of the Self in the pipe-dreams that the Self can annihilate the dilemma of death. Bergman's films are deeply concerned with his metaphysical anxiety, and he has established himself as a unique film-maker through his metaphysical ponderings. Bruce F. Kawin says, "Bergman established his unique voice, artfully integrating metaphysical ponderings with tragicomic studies of loneliness, love, professional fulfillment, and death. These 'big-issue' films are often brooding and melancholy, characterized even in their comic moments by religious anxiety. Their pronounced fear of death is inseparable, however, from their celebration of 14 life, and ... the central moody worrier." 172 NOTES Introduction 1 Charles I. Glicksberg, The Ironic Vision in Modern Literature The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969) p.26. 2 Arthur Schopenhauer, Selections, ed. DeWitt H. Parker (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956) p.1 2 0. 3 Cited by Glicksberg, p.42. 4 Ibid., p.30. 5 Ibid., p.30. 6 Ibid.xn p. 31. 7 Ibid., p.30. 8 Schopenhauer, p.198. 9 Glicksberg, p.54. 10 Ibid., p.57. 11 Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968) p.185. 12 The Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. XI, 1961. 13 Schopenhauer, p.288. 14 M. Holmes Hartshorne, "The Self: Existence or Substance" in Gerald E. Muers (editor), Self, Religion and Metaphysics (New York: Macmillan, 1961) p. 22 15 Nicole Ward Jouve, Baudelaire: A Eire to Conquer Darkness (New York: St Martin's Press, 1980) p.240. 1 7 3 16 Paul Claudel, Claudel on the Theater, trans. Christine Trollope (Miami, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1972) Chapter One The Journeying Souls: A descent into the Psyche 1' Paul Ilie, Unamuno: An Existential View of Self and Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967) p.135. 2 Unamuno cited by Ilie, p.135. 3 Ibid., p.135. 4 Nathan A. Scott, Samuel Beckett (New York: Hillary U House Publishers Ltd., 1965) p.10. 5 E.M. Cioran, Temptation to Exist, trans. .Susan Sontag (New York: The New York Times Book Co., 1976) p.159. 6 Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1970) p.18. 7 Ibid., p.47,48. 8 E.M. Cioran, p.62. 9 Robert Brustein, The Theater of Revolt: An Approach to Modern Drama (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1964) p. 9. 10 See Preface to A Dream Play, in Arvid Paulson, ed., Eight Expressionist Plays,(New York: Bantam Books, 1965) p.343. 11 E.M. Cioran, p.208. 12 August Strindberg, Inferno, trans. Mary Sandbach (London: Hutchinson of London, 1962) p.121. 174 13 Ibid. , p.121. 14 See Arvid Paulson, Preface to A Dream Play, p.343. 15 Moshe Lazar, "The Psychodramatic Stage: Ionesco and His Doubles," in Moshe Lazar, ed., The Dream and the Play: Ionesco's Theatrical Quest (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1982) p.136. 16 Ibid., p.135-136. 17 Ibid., p.136. 18 M. Holmes Hartshorne, "The Self, Existence and Meta physics," in Gerald E. Myers, ed., Self, Religion hnd Metaphysics (New YorkL Macmillan, 1961) p.22. 19 Strindberg, To Damascus III, in Paulson, p.284. 20 Glicksberg, p.160. 21 Ibid., p.241. 22 Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and the Sick- j ness Unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie(Princeton, us. N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974) p.151. 23 Wolgang Iser, "Action and Play in Beckett's Theater," Modern Drama, Vol. 9, No. 3, December, 1966, p.243. 24 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 1973) p.xi. 25 Shoshana Felman, "Madness and Philosophy or Liter ature’s Reason," Yale French Studies, No. 52, 1975, p.206. 26 See Preface to A Dream Play in Paulson p.343. 27 Nicolas Berdyaev, Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography, trans. Katharine Lampert (New York: Collier Books, 1962) p.54. 28 Schopenhauer, Selections, ed. DeWitt H. Parker (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956) p.232. 29 Lazar, p.140. 175 30 See Preface to A Dream Play, p.343 31 Lazar, p.143. 32 Ibid., p.143 33 Eugene Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal, trans. Jean Stewart (New York: Grove Press, 1968) p.30. 34 Robert W. Corrigan, "The Theater of Ionesco: The Ghost of Primal Dialogue," in Lazar, p.56. 35 Helene L. Baldwin, Samuel Beckett's Real Silence, University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1981) p.8 . 36 Durko Suvin, "Beckett's Purgatory of the Individual," Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 11, No. 4, Summer 1967, p.31. Chapter Two August Strindberg: Journeys into the Labyrinths of Darkness and Fire. 1 "Vastation" means "being let into one's internals, that is, into what the spirit's own." - cited by I Evert Sprinchorn in "Hell and Purgatory in Strind berg," Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 50,. No. 4, Autumn 1978, p.374. 2 Karl Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, trans. Oscar Grunow and David foloshin,(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977) p.133. 3 Ibid., p.130. 4 Holderlin, cited by Jaspers, p.141. 5 David Scalan, "Road to Damascus, Part I: A Skeptic's Everyman," Modern Drama, Vol. 5, No. 3, Dec., 1962, p.344. 176 6 Strindberg, Inferno, 0 . 1 2 1 7 Holderlin, cited by Jaspers, p.143. 8 Jaspers, p.144. 9 Ibid., p.146. 10 Inferno cited by Robert Brustein, Strindberg: Selected Plays and Prose (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964) p.134. 11 See Inferno, p.23. 12 Gunnar Brandell, Strindberg in Inferno, trans. Barry Jacobs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974) p.160. 13 Strindberg, cited by Brandell, p.163. 14 Ibid., p.164. 15 Ibid., p.164. 16 Ibid., p.165. 17 Ibid., p.165. 18 Ibid., p.185. 19 Ibid., p.186. 20 Ibid., p.160. 21 Ibid., p.160. 22 Schopenhauer, Selections, ed., Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar-Straus-Giroux, 1976) p.285. 23 Brandell, p.161. 24 Ibid., p.162. 25 Shoshana Avigal, "Beckett's Play: The Circular Line of Existence," Modern Drama, Vol. XVIII, No.3, Dec., 1975, p.251. 26 See Inferno, p.146. 27 Robert Brustein, The Theater of Revolt (Boston: 177 Atlantic Monthly Press, 1964) p.99-100. 28 John Milton, "A Restless Pilgrim: Strindberg in the Inferno," Modern Drama, Vol. 5, No. 3, Dec., 1962, p.306. 29 Strindberg, To Damascus II, in Paulson, p.255. 30 See Inferno, p.166. 31 Claudel, Claudel on the Theater, p.72. 32 Paulson, p.5. 33 Paul Claudel says, "But in drama we penetrate into the darkest regions of the human brain, that of dreams. In dreams our minds are reduced to a passive state, called the plateau, and invaded by ghosts - and where do they come from? not only from the memory - which induces us to take part in bringing an event to pass. I call drama a guided dream. See Claudel on the Theater, p.173. 34 Strindberg frequently uses the phrase, "I am born without an eperdemis." 35 Scalan, p.344-351. 36 See Paulson, p.286. 37 Ibid., p.286. 38 Ibid., p.193. 39 Ibid., p.193. 40 Ibid., p.161-162. 41 Ibid., p.181. 42 Ibid., p.143. 43 Ibid. , p. . . 215 . 44 Richard B. Vowles, "Strindberg and the Symbolic Mi 11," Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, May, 1982, p.115 45 Strindberg, cited by Vowles, p.111. 178 46 Ibid., p.112. 47 Ibid., p.119. 48 Ibid., p.113. 49 See Paulson, p.178. 50 Ibid., p. 51 Ibid., p.254. 52 Vowles, p.117. "Samsara" means "purification of the soul through sufferings." Strindberg, in his play To Damascus I, II, and III, makes various references to this notion. In To Damascus III the Tempter says, "There is no lack of logic in that - but the whole of life is so full of errors and transgressions, offenses, and defects. And no matter now trivial they may be in relation to human weakness, we are nevertheless being punished by the most consistent revenge." (Arvid Paulson, p.295). In Buddhist philosophy "sangsara" is illustrated in the following manner: "I, by not having understood these (things) in that way hitherto, have held the non-existent to be the existent, the unreal to be the real, the illusory to be the actual, and have wandered in the Sangsara so long. And even now if I do not recognize them to be illusions, then, wandering in the Sangsara for long ages (I shall be) certain to fall into the morass of various miseries. Indeed, all these are like dreams, like hallucin- : ations, like echoes, like the cities of the Odour- eaters, like mirage, like mirrored forms, like phantasmagoria, like the moon seen in water - not real even for a moment. In truth, they are unreal; they are false." (W.Y. Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Book of the Dead, p.181). 53 Strindberg, To Damascus III, in Paulson, p.304. 54 Strindberg, "Tribulations” in Inferno, p.164-168. 55 "karma" according to C.G. Jung implies "a sort of psychic theory of heredity based on the hypothesis of reincarnation, which in the last resort is an hypothesis of the supratemporailty of the soul. Neither our scientific knowledge nor our reason if's and but's. Above all, we know desperately 179 little about the possibilities of continued existence of the individual soul after death, so little that we cannot even conceive how anyone could prove anything at all in this respect. Moreover, we know only too well, on epistemological grounds, that such a proof would be just as impossible as the proof of God. Hence we may cautiously accept the idea of karma only we understand it as psychic heredity in the very widest sense of the word. Psychic heredity does exist - that is to say, there is inheritance of psychic characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character, special gifts, and so forth ("Psychological Commentary" on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, p. xliii). Chapter Three Eugene O'Neill: Doomed to Go On Living 1 In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech O'Neill says: "(He) above all else, first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with, the urge to write for the theater myself. If there is anything of lasting worth in my work, it is due to that original impulse from him, which has continued as my inspiration down all the years since then - to the ambition I received then to follow in the footsteps of his genius as worthily as my talent might permit, and with the same integrity of purpose ... I am only proud of my debt to Strindberg, only too happy to have this opportunity of proclaiming it to his people: For me, he remains, as Nietzsche remains in his sphere, the Master, still to this day, more modern than any one of us, still our leader." (See Nobel Prize Library, Alexis Gregory, New York, and CRM Publishing, Del Mar, California, p.131-132 for full text of the speech). 2 John Gassner, Masters of the Drama (New York: Dover, 1954) p.646. 180 3 Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (Paternoster Square: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1893) p.15. 4 Eugene O'Neill, Ann a Chri s ti e, cited by Egil Torn- qvist, A Drama of Souls (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969) p.15. 5 Tornqvist, p.43. 6 Frederic I. Carpenter, Eugene O'Neill (New York: Twayne Publishing, 1964) p.158. 7 Glicksberg, p.151. 8 Richard Dana Skinner, Eugene O'Neill: A Poet's Quest, (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1935) p.1-2. 9 Ibid., p.3. 10 O'Neill says, "I am to be an Artist or Nothing" a letter to George Pierce Baker, reprinted.in Oscar Cargill, et. al., O'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, (New York, 1961) p.19-20. 11 O'Neill's note to The Spook Sonata, cited by Torn qvist , p.33. 12 Ibid., p.32. 13 See Tornqvist for more details, p.31. 14 cited by Tornqvist, p.32. 15 O'Neill says, "And just here is where I am a most confirmed mystic, too, for I'm always trying to interpret Life in terms of lives, never just lives in terms of characters. I'm always acutely conscious of the Force behind - Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it - Mystery certainly - and of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self-destructive struggle to make the Force express him instead of being, as an animal is, an infinitesimal, incident in its expression. And my conviction is that this is the only subject worth writing about and that it is possible ... (See Cargill, for O'Neill’s letter to Arthur Hobson, p. 125-126). 181 16 Tornqvist, p.33. 17 O'Neill's letter "On Man and God," in Cargill, p.115. 18 Gorgon = Gr. myth, one of the three mythical personages, with snakes for hair, whose look turned the beholder into stone-(See Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. IV, p.306). 19 Richard Hayes, "Requim for Morality," Commonweal. LXV, Feb., 1954, p.467-468. 20 Cited by Tornqvist, p.11. 21 Ibid., p.12. 22 Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956) p.131. 23 Richard Hayes, p.467. 24 See Jose Rubin Barcia and M.A.Zietlin, ed., Unamuno: Creator and Creation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) p.103. 25 See Long Day's Journey, p.153-154. 26 "In his powers of reflection, memory and foresight, men possesses , as it were, a machine for condensing and storing up his pleasures and his sorrows. But the brute has nothing of the kind; whenever it is in pain, it is as though it were suffering for the first time, even though the same thing should have previously happened to it times out of number. It has no power of slimming up its feelings (Schopen hauer, Studies in Pessimism, p.16). 27 Doris V. Falk, Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension: An Interpretative Study of the Plays (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958) p.181. 28 Ibid., p.189. 29 Dostoevski, The Possessed, cited by Glicksberg, p. 74. 30 The Religious Writings of Leo Tolstoy (New York: Julian Press, 1960) p.47 cited by Glicksberg, p.83. 182 31 Glicksberg, p.195. 32 Ibid., p.32. 33 Ibid., p.152 34 Edwin A. Engel, The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953) p.277. 35 Eugene O'Neill cited by Sophus Keith Winther, Eugene O ' Neill: A Critical Study (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961) p.50. Winther relates this to O'Neill's conception of Puritanism. He writes, "Puritanism becomes the embodiment of all that is evil and degenerate in the life of man. Under the guise of its pretended ideals, man is being led to destruction. To O'Neill, Puritanism in its emphasis upon the life hereafter has destroyed life here; it is to him not a religion of salvation but a religion of death." 36 Winther, p.125. 37 Ibid., p.70-71. 38 Glicksberg, p.154. 39 Ibid., p.154. 40 Ibid., p.155. 41 Winther, p.75. Chapter Four Eugene Ionesco: Wandering the Wonderment of Dreams 1 Ionesco, Fragments of A Journal, trans. Jean Stewart (New York: Grove Press, 196 8 ) p.52. 183 2 Ionesco, cited by Lazar. 3 Fragments of A Journal, p.41-42. 4 Ibid., p.43. 5 Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957) p.38. 6 Fragments of A Journal, p.56. 7 Ibid., p.52. 8 Fragments of A Journal, p.41 9 Ibid., p.28. 10 Ibid., p.30-31. 11 Ionesco, Notes and Counter Noteig, trans. Donald Watson, (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1964) p.184- 185. 12 Fragments of A Journal, p.25. Chapter Five Samuel Beckett: Protuberance in Shadows 1 See John Pilling, Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976) p.56. 2 Unamuno, cited by Paul Ilie, Unamuno: An Existential View of Self and Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press) p.51. 3 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965) p.27. 4 Ibid., p.30. 5 Ibid., p.27. 184 ' 6 Ibid. , p.25. 7 Ibid., p.27. 8 Ibid., p.34. 9 Ibid., p.19. 10 See Ilie, p.52. 11 Molloy, p.40. 12 See Pilling for further details, p.55. 13 Pilling, p.55. 14 According to Sanford G. Etheridge, Scepticism, Man and God: Selections from the Ma.jor Writings from Sextus Empiricus (Middletowp: Wesleyan University Press, 1964) p.81 "assertion" has two senses, a general sense and a special sense. In the general sense it is understood as an expression indicating affirmation or negation, such as "It is day" and "It is not day." In the special sense it indicates affirmation only, and in this sense of the word negative statements are not called assertions. Non assertion, then, is a misuse of assertion in the general sense in which, as we say, both affirmation and denial are implied. Hence non-assertion is a state of mind we are in, in consequence of which we declare that an expression neither affirm nor deny anything. From this it is clear that even non assertion is not something we employ in the opinion that the nature of things is such as absolutely to call for it. On the contrary, our employment of it simply indicates that at the moment we utter it we find ourselves in this particular state regarding the problems of our inquiry. One must also reember that, as for dogmatic assertions about the non-evident, we neither affirm nor deny them; we yield our assent only to such propositions as move us emotionally or drive us under compulsion to do so. (Italics mine) "Compulsion" involves habits, or habitual assoc iations between phenomena or appearances. 15 Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1970) p. 50. 185 16 See Ilie for term used by Unamuno, p.49. 17 Cited by Glicksberg, p.145. 18 Cited by Ilie, p.49. 19 Ibid., p.29-30. 20 Molloy, p.42. 21 Ibid., p.40. 22 See Gerald E. Myers, ed., Self, Religion and Meta- Physics (New York: Macmillan, 1964) p.14. 23 Molloy, p.16. 24 Proust, p.16. 25 Raymond Federman, Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett's Early Fiction, cited by Helene L. Baldwin, Samuel Beckett's Real Silence (University Park: Pennsyl vania State University Press) p.2. 26 Molloy, p.17 27 Ibid., p.28. 28 Ibid., p.26. 29 Steven J. Rosen, Samuel Beckett and the Pessimistic Tradition (New Brunswick; Rutgers University Press, 1976) p.56. 30 Molloy, p.8 . 31 Ibid. , p.23 . 32 Ibid., p. 17 33 Ibid., p.45. 34 Ibid., p.45. 35 Proust, p.8 . 36 Cited by Rosen, p.193. 37 Pilling, p.111. 186 38 Ibid., p.112. 39 Ibid., p.112 40 Ibid., p.113. 41 Ibid., p.114. 42 Ibid., p.121. 43 Ibid., p.115. 44 John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett's Art (New York:. Barnes and Noble, 1967) p.133-134. Chapter Six Ingmar Bergman: The Metaphysical Grounded Individual 1 Birgitta Steene, Focus on the Seventh Seal (Engle wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall Inc., 1972) p.3. 2 Vernon Young, Cinema Borealis: Ingmar Bergman and the Swedish Ethos (New York: Equinox Books, 1971) p. 6. 3 Steene, Ibid., p.6 . 4 Ingmar Bergman, "Dreams and Shadows," trans. P.E. Burke and Britt Halverson, Films and Filming, October, 1956, p.15. 5 Nicolas Berdyaev, Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography, trans. Katharine Lampert, (Nbw York; Collier Books, 1962) p.63. 6 Bergman, "Dreams and Shadows", p.16. 7 Young, p.37-38. 8 Ibid., p.186. 187 9 Schopenhauer, cited Glicksberg, p.44 10 Young, p.201. 11 Ingmar Bergman, Through A Glass Darkly in A Film Trilogy, trans. and ed. Paul Britten Austin, (New York: Orion Press, 1967) p.58-59. 12 Peter Cowie, Screen Series: Sweden 2 (New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1970) p.9. 13 Ibid., p.9. 14 Nicol Ward Jouve, Baudelaire; A Fire to Conquer Darkness (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980) p.130. 15 „See Ingmar Bergman's illustrations of the dream sequence in the film text. 16 Richard A. Blake, "Wild Strawberries: Theology and Psychology," in Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism, ed. Stuart M. Kaminsky and Joseph F. Hill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) p.171. 17 Charles Thomas Samuels, "Ingmar Bergman: An Inter view," in Stuart M. Kaminsky, ed., Ibid., p.102. 18 Jorn Donner, The Films of Ingmar Bergman: From Torment to All These Women, trans. Holger Lundberg (New York: Dover Publications, 1972) p.155. 19 Samuels, p.102. 20 Bergman, "Dreams and Shadows," p.16. 21 Ibid., p.16. 22 Young, p.175. 23 Samuel, p.109. 24 Jouve, p.59. 25 Ibid., p.59. 26 Samuels, p.103. 27 Napolitano, "Dal settimo sigillo alle soglie della vita," cited by Jorn Donner, p.148.^ 188 28 Bergman, cited by Cowie, p.145. 29 Bergman, cited by Cowie, p.147. 30 Cowie, p.147. 31 Samuels, p.121. 32 Ibid., p. 100., 33 Bergman, "Dreams and Shadows,” p.16. 34 Berdyaev, p.50. 35 Cowie, p.142. 36 Glicksberg, p.90. 37 Ibid., p.74. Conclusion 1 E.M. Cioran, The Fall Into Time, trans. Richard Howard (Chicago: Quadrangle Boos, 1970) p.69. 2 Ibid., p.69. 3 August Strindberg, Preface to A Dream Play in Paulson, p.343. 4 Dina Sherzer, "Beckett's Endgame., or What Talk Can Do," Modern Drama, Vol.22, No. 3, Sept. 1979, p.301. 5 Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958) p. 83. 6 Discussions with Moshe Lazar,. 1982. 7 Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1893) p.14 8 Glicksberg, p.255. 189 9 Paulson, p.453. 10 Ibid., p.348. 11 Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal, trans. Jean Stewart (New York: Grove Press, 1968) p.80. 12 Schopenhauer, p.35. 13 Eugene O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh, p.10. 14 Bruce F. Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard and First-Person Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978) p.95-96. 190 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Books Baldwin, Helene L. Samuel Beckett's Real Silence The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1981. Barcia, Jose Rubin and Zeitlin, M.A. (editors) Unamuno: Creator and Creation University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1967. Barnard, G.C. Samuel Beckett: A New Approach - A Study of the Novels and Plays Dodd, Mead and Co., Ltd., New York, 1970. Berdyaev, Nicolas Dream and Reality: An Essay in Auto biography , translated by Katharine Lampert. Collier Books, New York, 1962. Beckett, Samuel. Proust. 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