PRECURSORS
The transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in Europe is characterized by a plethora of artistic styles and movements, a rich confusion with no clear-cut tendency or direction. The various ‘isms’ follow each other, or exist side by side, or overlap: naturalism, impressionism, symbolism, neo-romanticism, art-nouveau, then futurism and expressionism – these are the labels which, frequently unsatisfactorily, adhere to the conflicting ways of thought and feeling which crystallized between the late 1880s and the early 1920s, and which betray a profound uncertainty in man’s imaginative response to the world around him.
A certain degree of over-simplification is perhaps inevitable during a discussion of literary movements and their aims. But a tendency which becomes increasingly apparent in these years is what might be called anti-naturalism. It would be false to see in symbolism a ‘reaction’ here, for the two schools, both stemming from France, exist side by side: neither is it correct to see impressionism as a movement away from naturalism, for the two schools have much in common; it would be closer to the truth to see, on the one hand, a naturalist-impressionist tendency and, on the other, a symbolist-neoromantic attitude in literature and the arts. The former movement would contain the names of the French novelists such as Zola, Maupassant and the Goncourts, also the French painters who conveyed the tactile essence of reality on their canvasses and, in the theatre, the names of Ibsen and Gerhart Hauptmann; the latter movement would claim Mallarme and Verlaine, Huysmans and Maeterlinck, Stefan George, early Rilke and Hofmannsthal. The naturalist-impressionist tendency found in life material which was worthy of description and comment; the symbolist-neoromantic attitude was one of flight from the world towards the creation of artificial paradises and rarefied beauty.
It became apparent, however, that both these attitudes failed to satisfy on a profound level. For naturalism and impressionism remained too near the surface of things, while symbolism and neoromanticism, in their flight towards the rarefied and the refined, became ultra-precious, decadent and jejune: a new vision, a new energy and a new restlessness were needed. It is not simply that a more ‘modern’ way of thinking and feeling was felt to be lacking, for the naturalists had prided themselves on their modernity, but art seemed to have reached an impasse: a new passion was needed, a new pathos, the expression of a subjective vision regardless of mimesis, a concern for human life, a concern for man crushed by pitiless machinery and ruthless cities which was far more intense and poignant than the naturalist’s description of social conditions. Likewise the emphasis on inner vision, on the creative powers, on the imagination above all, was to exceed the symbolist cult of the soul. More vital emotions, more dynamic powers of description were extolled, a creation from within, an intense subjectivity which had no reluctance in destroying the conventional picture of reality in order that the expression be more powerful: this is the new tendency. And if distortion and aggressive expression of emotion were found in earlier works of art, then these works were extolled as forerunners of the new outlook.
Like so many titles used to designate the various literary movements, the term ‘expressionism’ originated in painting, and only later came to describe a literary phenomenon. John Willett finds the terms used as early as 1850 to describe ‘modern’ painting; he also quotes it (in Expressionism, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1970, p. 25) as having been used in Manchester in 1880 to describe ‘those who undertake to express special emotions or passions’. Many critics point to the use of the word ‘expressionist’ to designate the particular intensity of the work of those painters who strove to go beyond impressionism, beyond the passive registration of impressions towards a more violent, hectic, energetic creativity such as is found above all in Van Gogh. The dissolution of conventional form, the abstract use of colour, the primacy of powerful emotion – above all the turning away from mimesis herald a new consciousness and a new approach in painting, which literature was to follow. The growing independence of the image, the absolute metaphor, the intense subjectivity of the writer and the probing of extreme psychological states – above all the artist as creator, as passionate centre of a whirling vortex: all this becomes more and more apparent, as both the objectivity of the naturalists and the l’art pour l’art aspect of symbolism are left far behind.
A most interesting letter which demonstrates the reservations felt by Zola when confronted by the new direction in the theatre is that which he wrote to Strindberg on December 14th, 1887, to comment on the latter’s play The Father. Zola objected to the schematic nature of Strindberg’s characters, their lack of reality, and to the Captain particularly, ‘who does not even have a name …’. Zola felt estranged from the new direction that Strindberg’s drama was taking, a path towards abstraction, to the use of types rather than individuals and a lack of concern for naturalistic plausibility; here was no ‘coin de la nature vu à travers un tempérament’ (‘segment of nature seen through the eyes of a certain temperament’), but life flowing through a soul, a universalization of autobiographical material. The Dance of Death (1900) would, surely, also have met with Zola’s strictures, with its effect almost of pantomime, its two primitive creatures locked in a love-hate embrace using a contrapuntal dialogue on their claustrophobic island.
It is, however, not until To Damascus (1898–1901) that a work is encountered which definitely marks the end of naturalist drama for Strindberg; it has been called the first expressionist play, where all the characters are emanations of a soul, symbolizing powers with whom the Unknown One is in combat. The canons of naturalism, the demand for plausibility and inner logic are totally ignored: an intense subjectivity prevails. The beggar, the woman, the doctor and the madman Caesar all represent aspects of the Unknown One’s psyche, and move before him during his journey of self-discovery. They can be called symbols: the beggar is that degradation which the arrogant protagonist fears, yet which is necessary for his rebirth; he is the embodiment of the Unknown One’s repressed thoughts, a reminder of a possibility of existence towards which the hero must move. Walter Sokel, in The Writer in Extremis (Stanford, 1959, p. 35) calls him ‘the literal embodiment of a leitmotiv, an aesthetic attribute in the disguise of a human shape, a function of the dramatic idea’. The woman would be the link with life, a fusion of the sexual and the sublime which torments and inspires; the Doctor represents the Unknown One’s guilt, while Caesar the madman would be a caricature of the protagonist’s arrogance and pride. The complex trilogy portrays a gradual process of self-awareness, a Road to Damascus both painful and necessary, a Passion marked by the stations of the cross. The Christian terminology used here is appropriate, for the concern with the soul, with the inner life and the birth of a new man, betray an undeniably religious concern which will characterize many expressionist writers: the ego is seen as a magic crystal in which the Absolute is in constant play.
It may be of interest here to mention briefly a remarkable piece of dramatic writing which anticipates Strindberg’s method by over three hundred years. This is Act Three of King Lear, in which, in scenes iv and vi, both the natural elements and the characters may be regarded as manifestations of Lear’s tormented condition. The spectator enters into Lear’s mind by seeing him grouped with three other characters, each of whom is a projection of some part of that mind. Through the Fool, Lear’s repressed self-reproach rises to consciousness; Kent, as the loyal servant, recalls those supposedly ‘natural’ relationships of King and subject, master and servant, parent and child, which sustained Lear in the role that was his early in the play; Poor Tom (who is really Edgar, but for the time being Edgar is lost in Poor Tom) is Lear’s vision of man deprived of those relationships and of all other removable supports, in short, ‘unaccommodated man’. Lear’s discovery of truths about himself and about the life around him is communicated to us through the movements, gestures and speeches of this group of characters.
With A Dream Play (1901–1902) Strindberg approached an almost neo-romantic mystery play such as Hofmannsthal might have written (with the description of the castle of life, for instance, from which the crysanthemum-soul arises), but that which might be called the expressionist element is seen in the way in which the characters appear as symbols or fragments of a dreaming mentality. In the ‘Reminder’ which Strindberg desired to have printed on the programme he wrote: ‘The characters split, double, multiply, vanish, solidify, blur, clarify. But one consciousness reigns above them all – that of the dreamer; and before it there are no secrets, no incongruities, no scruples, no laws. There is neither judgement nor exoneration, but merely narration.’ (See C. L. Dahlstrom, Strindberg’s Dramatic Expressionism, Ann Arbor, 1930, p. 177.) The concentration on a dream-reality, of course, looks forward to surrealism, but it also exemplifies a growing tendency of expressionism to admit, and extol, the mystical, quasi-religious yearnings of the human soul. It is obvious that Strindberg is of great importance in any inquiry into the roots of the anti-naturalist tendency in the theatre: between 1913 and 1915 there were one thousand and thirty-five performances of twenty-four different Strindberg plays in Germany alone, and it was in Germany above all, as we shall later see, that Strindberg’s expressionist tendency was to be developed and modified.
If To Damascus portrays the soul’s struggles to find and transcend itself, then a writer must be mentioned who is of crucial importance at this time, and who may well be seen caricatured as Caesar in Strindberg’s play. This is Friedrich Nietzsche, with whom Strindberg corresponded briefly before and at the time of Nietzsche’s mental collapse (Nietzsche’s letter of 7 December 1888 congratulated Strindberg on his own translation into French of The Father, and suggested that Strindberg might undertake the translation of Ecce Homo). A discussion of Nietzsche is vital in any description of the precursors of expressionism: he is a European, rather than simply a German, phenomenon and, for good or for ill, stands behind so many developments in twentieth-century art and thought. The dithyrambic ecstasy of Thus Spake Zarathustra reverberated through literature and music before the First World War; a perverse distortion of his thinking also became apparent in the Third Reich. It was Nietzsche’s emphasis on self-awareness, self-mastery and passionate self-fulfilment that gave the expressionist mode of thought its keenest impetus. The naturalists may have applauded Nietzsche’s attack on bourgeois complacency, and the symbolists have thrilled to his vision of the poet-prophet remote in azure loneliness: it was the expressionist generation, however, which was overwhelmed by his daring pathos, his insistence on the destruction of the old and moribund, and his emphasis upon daring and vision. ‘Develop each of your powers – but this means: develop anarchy! Perish!’ ‘Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness with which you should be filled?’ ‘My brothers, destroy, destroy the ancient tablets!’ Nietzsche’s imperious apostacy thrilled a whole generation of poets and thinkers; his emphasis upon idealism, upon the will and upon passionate ecstasy found its counterpart in the intense subjectivity of many of the expressionists, and their demand for a New Man, whose features often bore a distinct resemblance to those of Zarathustra. Above all it was Nietzsche’s worship of creativity and the life-force which struck the deepest roots in the new mentality.
But the movement, or mentality, known as expressionism is complex, and contains many divergent tendencies and contradictions which are to be found at the heart of Nietzsche himself. Beneath the passionate proclamations and the dithyrambic ecstasies a softer tone is heard in Nietzsche, a voice full of disquiet and foreboding. The madman who appears on the market-place (see Book Three of The Gay Science) flings his lantern to the ground and cannot hold back his fearful knowledge that, after God’s death, man is plunging into icy nihilism. ‘Where are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not staggering, backwards, forwards, sideways, in all directions? Is there an Above, a Below? Are we not wandering through an eternal nothingness? Does not empty space breathe at us? Has it not grown colder? …’ Can man indeed fill the void of God’s absence, or is man not destroyed by the enormity of the crime of deicide? Is man striding forward to a new vision, glorious in his beauty and power, or is the world moving into anarchy and disintegration? Nietzsche’s own uncertainty was reflected in the different emphases of the expressionist writers, some of whom glory in spiritual and political visions of Utopia while others are unable to banish the spectre of nihilism and anticipations of a universal dread. The tensions in expressionism, particularly in Germany, do not simply result from the hopes and terrors brought about by the First World War: they go back to Nietzsche, but are also, of course, the positive and negative poles of the human psyche; the expressionist writers, however, with their predilection for extreme stat...
