The Death and Life of Drama by Lance Lee

Author:Lance Lee [Lee, Lance]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
ISBN: 9780292796744
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Wild Strawberries

In the Beginning Isak Borg readily admits he’s “difficult” to get along with. He is a model of self-centeredness, widowed, callow, superficially polite and courteous yet ruthless. He embarks on a journey to receive an award, a symbolic journey quest, if you will, accompanied by his son’s wife, Marianne. On the trip he is assaulted by memories of his childhood home and his young love, Sara, who finds Isak’s cousin Sigfrid so much more interesting in Isak’s flashbacks and eventually marries him. They pick up a young, hip Sara with two companions who both are in love with her, and briefly an older couple enmeshed in a venomous relationship whom Marianne throws out for the “children’s” sake. Isak admits the older couple’s relationship echoes his and his dead wife’s. Sara’s two lovers argue over faith vs. materialism at a lunch stop, and, surprisingly, Isak knows the words to a poem that celebrates God’s love everywhere. Love is in short demand, however. Isak, we now sense, is caught in a false modus vivendi on which his self-esteem is built.

Isak’s memories deepen in the Middle as he relives a scene of his wife’s infidelity and her summation of how cruelly understanding he will be later. Apparently he was. In a memory that turns into a dream, he is taken into a room and examined. He is a doctor, but suddenly cannot understand or do anything. He is incompetent, not a man going to get an award for distinguished service. He has forgotten a person’s first duty: to ask for forgiveness. The presaged awakening at the end of the Beginning has now been made overt.

But Marianne is uninterested in Isak’s dreams and memories: to her, he’s just like his son, Evald. She doesn’t believe there’s any change going on in him at all. What is Evald like? He is a man who, like Hamlet in Hamlet, can only perceive the horror of life, and is appalled Marianne wants a child. Marianne is pregnant and went to visit Isak to have some time alone to decide what to do, for Evald wants an abortion. Marianne has decided to keep the child. Isak is horrified at this vision of his son; between his own memories and this revelation he is motivated to do something wholly out of character: to help. He will even, in a symbolically huge step for him, tell Evald to forget repaying an outstanding loan, revealing how dry—like a ledger book—has been this father and son relationship.

He receives his award in the End, after they reach Evald’s, and tries unsuccessfully to talk to his son, who misunderstands him to be asking for reassurance the loan will be repaid. Isak is unable to sort this out before Evald leaves for an evening with Marianne; nonetheless, Isak has tried to ask for forgiveness in his way. He tries to move to a first name basis with his old housekeeper and in effect companion, but she refuses; change, as always, is an issue, and from her point of view, this one is too late.

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