The Ghost Sonata – August Strindberg, 1907 ★

Doing the Swedish Limbo

One reason August Strindberg appeals so much to scholars is because he was so many different people in the course of his life. He’s like getting to study a half-dozen writers in one.

He started out composing history plays, became a father of modern drama, an authority of that oxymoron called theatrical naturalism, and finally a pioneer of stage expressionism and surrealism.

By the time we get to The Ghost Sonata, he has reinvented himself again, this time as the metaphysically-focused developer of what are known as “chamber plays,” productions performed in a small space by a handful of actors. The ground he covered was varied and impressive; yet the shape of his work is hard to gauge.

I just can’t follow what goes on in this play. Is it me?

JOHANSSON: They’re queer people here, aren’t they?

BENGTSSON: Ye-es. A bit out of the ordinary anyhow.

JOHANSSON: Is it to be a musical party or what?

BENGTSSON: The usual ghost supper, as we call it. They drink tea and don’t say a word – or else the Colonel does all the talking. And they crunch their biscuits, all at the same time. It sounds like rats in an attic.

The single set on which The Ghost Sonata is performed requires much skill to design. This image is taken from the site https://scenicandlighting.com/portfolio_show/the-ghost-sonata/, where the challenge is explained with images, diagrams, even a computer animation. 

Offering little in the way of actual plot, The Ghost Sonata presents instead a series of hallucinatory fragments, like Strindberg’s earlier A Dream Play. This time, the work is less episodic and more focused, but somehow even stranger, much stranger.

A Dream Play employs the concept of a mystical being visiting Earth and interacting with different people in different ways. That’s out there but graspable. Here, the people we meet are mortals like us, yet the way they operate and the world they inhabit is a kind of rambling chaos. The Ghost Sonata has been described as a vision of the afterlife; basically it consists of odd, unfinished sentences and a lot of sitting around.

In the first scene (of three in this short play), a young student meets an old man outside a large house where a diverse set of characters are seen to live. The old man, whom we learn later is named Jacob Hummel, discovers the young man helped save lives in a building collapse and that his father once had some unhappy business dealings with Jacob.

Hummel (in the wheelchair) meets the student, whose name is Arkenholtz, in the opening scene. In the background is Hummel's old flame, known as "The Mummy." From a performance at Limestone University in South Carolina. Image from https://www.limestone.edu/about/news/reminder-ghost-sonata-be-performed-limestone-theatre-march-14-16.

Explaining “I take an interest in human destiny,” Jacob asks the young man accompany him to an opera and private party. Jacob says he will die soon; the student will make a worthy heir.

OLD MAN: All my life I have taken. Now I have a craving to give – give. But no one will accept... Become my son. Inherit me while I am still alive. Enjoy life so that I can watch, at least from a distance.

It sounds nice. But what’s the real deal? An ominous feeling only grows when the scene shifts to the party, being held inside the house by a colonel whose decrepit wife, called “the Mummy,” shuts herself in a closet. A daughter confines herself in a room bedecked with hyacinths. Hummel reveals himself to be quite ruthless, making clear everyone is somehow under his spell. Rather anticlimactically, it turns out not so.

Hummel is the main character through much of the play, and dominates it right up to the end. While it’s clear he’s no good, his actual nature is left open. Nothing is defined in The Ghost Sonata, but much is hinted at. Was Strindberg laying out the tenets of his newfound religious faith, a melding of Christian and Buddhist traditions formed around teachings by the 18^th century philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg? Or was he just anticipating Beckett by moving toward the theater of the absurd?

Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish polymath like Strindberg, claimed he was able to visit and report on the afterlife. As he influenced Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata is said by many to offer a similar concept, with its characters inhabiting a kind of purgatory. https://medium.com/young-polymaths/young-emanuel-swedenborg-6833cb74831b

The party which centers the play’s middle scene is an odd affair where elderly people sit in silence, apparently in judgment of their own past sordidness. This might fall in line with Swedenborg-type theories of reincarnation and quiet contemplation as a channel to the divine.

At the core of any religion is the struggle with sin. The old man has not only sinned a lot, but as a creditor and a bit of a sneak-thief has recourse to ferreting out the sins of others, which he uses at their expense.

MUMMY: We are miserable human beings, that we know. We have erred and we have sinned, we like all the rest. We are not what we seem, because at bottom we are better than ourselves, since we detest our sins. But when you, Jacob Hummel, with your false name, choose to sit in judgment over us, you prove yourself worse than us miserable sinners. For you are not the one you appear to be. You are a thief of human souls.

The Mummy makes her address to Hummel at the party. Strindberg is ambiguous about her exact appearance. Suffice it to say she is old and creepy, though less menacing than she initially appears. Photo by Pin Lam from https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/experience-the-strange-world-of-august-strindberg-in-the-ghost-sonata-9194959. 

While this might read as a spoiler, there really is no suspense in The Ghost Sonata. Things just unfold, are briefly explained in unsatisfying ways, and then the scene moves on in a wholly different direction. According to Elizabeth Sprigge, translator of my version of the play, much of Ghost Sonata’s inspiration came from Strindberg’s growing commitment to the “merciless exposure of life’s most shameful secrets.”

In the play, the Student speaks most directly to this idea, in the third and final scene. “Sometimes I’m seized with a raging desire to say all I think,” he says. “But I know the world would go to pieces if one were completely candid.” Born too soon for Twitter, I suppose.

This idea might be more compelling if it was carried over through the rest of the play, a character so fed up with social hypocrisy as to render themselves a menace. But it only crops up near the end, in a “by-the-way” fashion. The Ghost Sonata teases out a lot of ideas but doesn’t do much with any of them, least of all in developing a plot.

Sweden's most famous film director, Ingmar Bergman, created four different stage productions of The Ghost Sonata from 1941 to 2000. Above is a scene from the 1973 production, with Gertrud Fridh and Mathias Henrikson. Image from https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/ghost-sonata-1.

If Hummel is the bad guy, does that make everyone else good? What game is he playing with the student in the opening scene? Why does he go along so meekly with his punishment in the second? Why does that woman live in a closet and squawk like a parrot, only to reveal herself later as an austere holder of philosophical truth? And what’s with the third scene, which pulls a romance out of its hat only to cap it off suddenly and unconvincingly with a tragic conclusion?

The play seems little more than an excuse for Strindberg to sacrifice text for subtext more than even he normally did, convert characters into symbols, and roundly question every social norm of the day.

STUDENT: Tell me. Why do your parents sit in there so silently, not saying a single word?

GIRL: Because they have nothing to say to each other, and because neither believes what the other says. This is how my father puts it: What’s the point of talking when neither of us can fool the other?

STUDENT: What a horrible thing to hear!

August Strindberg, as painted by Richard Bergh in 1905, two years before The Ghost Sonata's debut and seven years before Strindberg's death. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Strindberg

Strindberg employed a similar approach in Miss Julie, his best-known play, but at least there he took time out to shape his characters and story in an interesting way. Here the characters flit on and off the stage, getting off some choice lines but nothing more.

Most of these characters exist only to present some abstract idea, rather than advance a plot point. A cook serves bad food, saving the best to eat herself. For some reason, her employers can’t fire her. She jeers at them instead.

“Everything she touches loses its savor,” the student’s third-scene love interest explains. “It’s as if she sucked with her eyes.”

Other characters exist to fill out the background, or address some recondite concerns of the author. There’s the Lady in Black, and her aristocratic beau. There is a former fiancée of Hummel’s who is but barely acknowledged.

The Ghost Sonata ends on this image, the painting Island Of The Dead by Arnold Böcklin. "Böcklin's picture...is seen in the distance, and from the island comes music, soft, sweet, and melancholy." Image from https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-isle-of-the-dead-1883-arnold-bocklin.html

Even the ghosts are blah. There are two of them, listed in the cast as Milkmaid and Dead Man. The former has some unsettled business with Hummel back in Hamburg, while the latter is glimpsed by the student visiting his own funeral.

“You may be sure he’ll count the wreaths and read the visiting cards,” the old man explains. “Woe to him who’s missing.”

The Ghost Sonata could use more of that kind of humor, or something. What I got instead was more in the form of a shrug and a yawn. Strindberg plays to his own conventions in the guise of defying others. If this is how the stage measures progress, I’ll take Shakespeare.