A Dream Play by August Strindberg.
Title: A Dream Play.
Author: August Strindberg.
Genre: Fiction, literature, plays, surrealist fiction, fantasy, philosophical fiction, social criticism.
Country: Sweden.
Language: Swedish.
Publication Date: Written in 1901, premiered April 17, 1907.
Summary: Strindberg wanted “to imitate the disjointed yet seemingly logical shape of a dream" with this play. The primary character in the play is Agnes, a daughter of the Vedic god Indra. She descends to Earth to bear witness to problems of human beings. She meets about 40 characters, such as four deans representing theology, philosophy, medicine, and law. After experiencing all sorts of human suffering like poverty, cruelty, and the routine of family life, the daughter of gods realizes that human beings are to be pitied.
My rating: 8.5/10.
♥ DAUGHTER: ...You don’t bargain about what you have to do.
♥ LAWYER: ...Look at these walls! Doesn’t it seem as if the wallpaper is stained with every kind of sin? Look at these papers: the records I keep of injustice. Look at me... I never see any smiles on the people who come here, nothing but angry looks, bared teeth, clenched fists… And they spit out all their anger, envy, and suspicions on me… You see how black my hands are? I can never get them clean. You see how they’re cracked and bleeding… I can never wear the same clothes for more than a day or two; they stink of other people’s crimes… Sometimes I try fumigating the place with smoking sulphur, but it doesn't help. I sleep in the next room and dream of nothing but crimes… I have a murder case right now, but as terrible as that is, do you know what’s worse? ...Separating husbands and wives! ----It’s as if heaven and earth cried out against the betrayal - betrayal of Nature, virtue, love… And do you know, after all the mutual accusations have filled the realm of paper. and someone sympathetically finally grabs one of the parties by the ear, pulls him or her aside, and in a friendly way asks the simple question: “What have you actually got against your husband or wife?” - they just stand there speechless. They don’t know. Oh yes, in one case the trouble started with an argument over a salad. Another time it was a single word, or something equally trivial. But the pain, the suffering! These I have to bear!
♥ DAUGHTER: It is a crazy world! Take those representatives of the four university faculties, for example! … The government is afraid of change, so it supports all four: theology, the study of God’s truth, which claims to be wisdom itself! Amd medicine, which always challenges philosophy and calls theology not an academic discipline but a superstition… And they all sit together on a council which is supposed to teach young people respect - for the university. It’s nothing but a madhouse! And heaven help the first person to see the truth!
♥ BLIND MAN: ...I once asked a child why the ocean was salty. And the child, whose father was away on a long voyage, answered without hesitation: “The ocean is salty because sailors cry so much.” “And why do sailors cry so much?” I asked. “Well,” he answered, “because they always have to go away… And that’s why they always dry their handkerchiefs up in the masts!” … “Why do people cry when they’re sad?” I continued … “Well,” he said, “because sometimes you have to wash the windows of your eyes to see more clearly!”
♥ LAWYER: Back to your duties.
DAUGHTER: What are they?
LAWYER: Everything you dread doing. Whatever you don’t want to do but must! It means giving up things, denying yourself, going without, leaving behind… It’s everything unpleasant, disgusting, painful…
DAUGHTER: Are these no pleasant duties?
LAWYER: Only those that are already done…
DAUGHTER: And no longer exist… So duty is everything unpleasant. What’s pleasant then?
LAWYER: What’s unpleasant is what’s sinful.
DAUGHTER: Sinful?
LAWYER: And so must be punished. Yes. If I have a really pleasant day and evening, a guilty conscience makes me suffer the pangs of hell the next day.
♥ DAUGHTER: ...We winds, children of the air,
sing the lamentations of men.
Have you heard our song
on autumn nights
in oven doors,
in window cracks,
in the weeping of the rain on the roof tiles,
or on a winter night
in a snowy wood?
Have you heard on a wind-blown sea
the weeping and wailing
in the tackle and sails? …
It is we, the winds,
children of the air.
Men breathed us in
and taught us
these songs of pain…
In the sickroom, on the battlefield,
but mostly in the nursery,
where the newborn cry
and wail and scream
from the pain of being.
It is we, we, the winds,
who whine and wail
woe! woe! woe!
♥ DAUGHTER: … All this I have dreamed…
POET: All this I have written…
DAUGHTER: Then you know what poetry is…
POET: Then I know what dreams are… What is poetry?
DAUGHTER: Not reality, but more than reality… not dreams, but waking dreams, reveries…
POET: And the children of man think we only play… only make-believe!
DAUGHTER: It’s just as well, my friend. Otherwise nothing would ever get done in this world. If people took you seriously, they would only lie on their backs and look up at the sky. No one would touch a plow or a shovel, a pick or a hoe.
♥ DEAN OF THEOLOGY: I believe this door must not be opened since it conceals dangerous truths.
DEAN OF PHILOSOPHY: The truth is never dangerous.
DEAN OF MEDICINE: What is truth?
DEAN OF LAW: Whatever can be proven by the testimony of two witnesses.
DEAN OF THEOLOGY: With two false witnesses anything can be proven - by a crooked lawyer.
DEAN OF PHILOSOPHY: Truth is wisdom, and wisdom is knowledge and the core of philosophy… Philosophy is the science of sciences, the sum of all learning, and all other sciences are its servants.
DEAN OF MEDICINE: The only science is natural science. Philosophy is not a science. It’s only empty speculations.
DEAN OF THEOLOGY: Bravo!
DEAN OF PHILOSOPHY (to the DEAN OF THEOLOGY): So, you say bravo! And what are you? You’re the archenemy of all learning, the very opposite of science. You are ignorance and darkness…
DEAN OF MEDICINE: Bravo!
DEAN OF THEOLOGY (to the DEAN OF MEDICINE): Look who’s shouting bravo now! Someone who can’t see beyond the end of his nose except through a magnifying glass! Someone who believes only what his deceptive senses tell him: your eye, for example, which could be far-sighted, near-sighted, bleary-eyed, cross-eyed, one-eyed, color-blind, red-blind, green-blind, just plain blind…
♥ DAUGHTER: ...In the dawn of time, before the sun shone, Brahman, the divine primal force, allowed itself to be seduced by Māyā, the world mother, into propagating. This contact between divine and earthly substances was heaven’s original sin. And so the world, life and human beings are only an illusion, a phantom, a dream image…
POET: My dream!
DAUGHTER: A dream become reality! … But to be set free from this earthly substance, Brahman descendents seek self-denial and suffering… There you have suffering as liberator… But this yearning for suffering comes in conflict with the desire for pleasure, or love… Do you understand then why love is sublime joy and the greatest pain, the sweetest and the bitterest? Do you understand then what woman is? Woman, through whom sin and death entered life?
POET: I understand! … And the outcome? …
DAUGHTER: Struggle between opposites generates power, as when fire and water make steam…
♥ DAUGHTER: … Now as I go… in the moment of parting,
leaving behind a friend, a place,
how great I feel the loss of all I loved
how great the regret for all I offended…
Oh, now I know all the pain of being,
this is what it’s like to be human…
You miss even things you didn’t value,
regret even wrongs you didn’t commit…
You want to go, and you want to stay…
And so the heart is divided,
as if wild horses were pulling it apart,
torn by contradictions, indecision, uncertainty…