스트린베리의 몽상극 기법이 오닐 극에 미친 영향 - 『다마스커스로』와 『황제 존스』를 중심으로 - (2001)

In his Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech at the Swedish Academy in 1936, Eugene O’Neill names August Strindberg as the main inspiration for his ambition to become a dramatist. Accompanying his father's theatre company throughout the country who performs The Count of Monte Cristo for almost thirty five years, O'Neill experiences the general trend in his contemporary theatre, but what is more important in his self-education is the avant-garde theatre movement introduced from Europe. O'Neill, as a study of his oeuvre easily reveals, is not so much interested in the theatre which deals with the web of relationships among the members of the society as in the theatre which reveals the landscape of the psyche hidden behind the external appearance. The dream play techniques that Strindberg employed in such plays as To Damascus and A Dream Play present him with wonderful possibilities to realize his dream of becoming a dramatist of souls.
This essay compares Strindberg's To Damascus and O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, first, in order to study the so called dream play techniques and, second, to examine the influence of the Swedish dramatist on O'Neill, the father of American drama. To Damascus I, first produced in 1900, can be said to draw the line between the traditional theatre and the modem theatre in both content and form. In the First Part of To Damascus the idea that life itself has the character of a dream and that the real nature of reality is spiritual is emphasized by the Stranger. In the play the action progresses through a series of nine scenes from a city street to the refectory of a convent; from this point, the hero retraces his steps scene by scene until he arrives once again at the point of departure. Here the play ends, precisely where the play begins. The Stranger is discovered to sit on the bench and write something on the ground with his cane both at the beginning and the end. A good way of understanding the structure of the play is to see the Stranger’s writing gestures as the frame of waking life that surrounds the dream sequence, and thus to consider all the action of the play taking place in the Stranger's mind while he is writing on the sand.
While To Damascus I has a circular structure with the protagonist returning to the point of departure at the end of the whole action, The Emperor Jones is not a full-fledged dream play with all the aspects of circular structure. The play only has the second half of the circular structure with the first half hinted in the protagonist’s recollections of his past. When the curtain is raised, the protagonist has already reached the top of the world and now is about to climb down toward the bottom where he is to discover his original self. In Scene 7 Jones finds himself with The Witch Doctor by the river in Congo who is preparing offerings to the god of the river. He has had University Pressed and exploited the native people of the island in the West Indies for many years telling them that he has magic power and can only be killed by a silver bullet that he carries in a chamber of his pistol. Ruling the native people of the island he has abandoned the Christian God and served the evil god. Now the evil god wants Jones to be the offerings. Jones is saved at the last moment when he successfully repulses the crocodile god by firing the silver bullet just as the Stranger turns out a reborn Christian after the trial in the Asylum scene. In the refectory of the convent the Stranger meets all the people, projected from his mind, who had been in his mind in the form of regrets, anxiety, guilt, and hostilities. The Asylum scene is the turning point at which the protagonist is transformed into a new man. If the people and things in the first half were projections of the protagonist’s evil, the second half is marked by a successive harmonization analogous to the Stranger's inner change.