Dangerous Vicinity: Theorizing the Neighbour in August Strindberg’s “The Roofing Ceremony”

“Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbour as Thyself”:^[1] Agape and the Abolition of Dissimilarities

In the superb second chapter of his 1847 treatise Works of Love (Kjerlighedens Gjerninger)^[2] Søren Kierkegaard gives a highly intriguing depiction of the biblical commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself.^[3] With his discursive variations on the Great commandment, the Danish philosopher and theologian still challenges ethical reflections today, focusing on the fundamental tension between equality (Lighed) and dissimilarity (Forskjellighed).^[4] In his ethics of love,^[5] set forth in the form of “Some Christian Deliberations”,^[6] Kierkegaard addresses the question of how to secure love against change: While both erotic love and friendship are necessarily preferential and thus vulnerable to alterations, neighbour-love (agape) is not. Agapeistic love is all-inclusive, reaching out to every human being, excluding no one for preferential reasons. But how can such a demand for equality in loving avoid being shipwrecked on man’s natural inclinations? Is it desirable or even possible to love without making distinctions? One of Kierkegaard’s answers is, indeed, staggering: Only in death, he argues, do all dissimilarities disappear; a disappearance which proves to be a precondition for unconditional neighbour-love:

Go, then, and do this, take away dissimilarity and its similarity so that you can love the neighbor. Take away the distinction of preferential love so that you can love the neighbor. […] Death, you see, abolishes all dissimilarities, but preference is always related to dissimilarities; yet the way to life and to the eternal goes through death and through the abolition of dissimilarities […].^[7] (WL, 61–62)

Pointedly formulated, all forms of love that prefer one individual to the other – be it parental love (storgé), erotic love (eros), or friendship and affection (philia)^[8] – present an obstacle to the Christian’s unconditioned love for the neighbour.^[9] Following a provocative line of argument by Slavoj Žižek, in Kierkegaard only death alone levels all distinctions:^[10] “In actuality, alas, the individual grows together with his dissimilarity in such a way that in the end death must use force to tear it from him”^[11] (WL, 88). In his cursory interpretation of Kierkegaard’s “Book of Love”, Žižek goes to such lengths as to claim that “the ideal neighbor that we should love is a dead one – the only good neighbour is a dead neighbor” (Žižek 2005, 3).^[12]

In the following remarks, I will take a closer look at the disturbing image of the dead or rather dying neighbour and the variations of agape,^[13] vicinity and intrusion in August Strindberg’s “The Roofing Ceremony” (“Taklagsöl”),^[14] a short novel from 1906 and one of the Swedish poet’s last narrative works.^[15] I intend to shift the scope of investigation from a more traditional approach that, apart from few exceptions, mainly focuses on problems of narrative technique^[16] to a nuanced close reading that is directed to foregrounding the topicality and the contemporary force of Strindberg’s multilayered text. By examining in detail a series of tropes of ‘being neighbours’ as well as a number of selected images of the eponymous “dangerous neighbor”,^[17] I seek to expand upon and complement more conventional readings of the Swedish author’s late prose text. “The Roofing Ceremony”, as I will argue, serves as a unique archive for manifold concepts of ‘being neighbours’ while at the same time exemplifying that just what constitutes the multifarious figure of the neighbour is constantly changing. Of particular importance are the semantics of several domestic spaces, first of all the private apartment which is inhabited by, as Martin Heidegger puts it, a “being that dwells”.^[18] This culminates in a close examination of the (protagonist’s) private bedroom as a metonymy of intimacy and death. Further discussion is dedicated to the significance of the two opposite buildings that not only dominate the text as a whole but quite literally overshadow the storyline from beginning to end: While the first of the two buildings seems to gain power by progressively rising or growing, thus counterpointing the decay of the agonizing and eventually dying protagonist, the other one is inhabited by a strange and ambiguous creature – a nameless and faceless neighbour, called the ‘Green Eye’ (“Gröna Ögat”).

My approach builds and expands on developments in philosophy, theology, and political theory, and in particular on Žižek’s, Reinhard’s and Santner’s seminal book on neighbour-love as well as on Isabella Guanzini’s remarks on the re-interpretation of the Biblical notion of agape, which has proven to be highly stimulating for my own work: In their essay collection The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theory (2005), the authors discuss, from quite different angles, the biblical commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself as an enigma that calls us to rethink the very nature of subjectivity, responsibility, and community. However, in Strindberg, friend-enemy relations are seldom set in stone but are, on the contrary, frequently decided on an individual basis:^[19] “It is not for word or deed one loves some people, but for secret, often inexplicable reasons. Sometimes, shared antipathies are firmer bonds of friendship than shared sympathies, yet since everything changes no relationship can be depended on”^[20] (RC, 47). Tying in with some of Žižek’s intriguing reflections, Guanzini argues that agape in the biblical sense of the ‘love of one’s fellow man’, actually “can achieve a new legibility through a process of dislocation and translation in other contexts”, generating “a new common discourse” (Guanzini 2016a, 39). This is even closely connected to the role Christian narratives and symbols, and especially the biblical account of neighbour-love, play in the self-understanding of the present.^[21] In the context of these ideas, “The Roofing Ceremony” translates the (Kierkegaardian) discourse of the neighbour into a highly topical and contemporary narrative about various friend-enemy distinctions, about intrusion, and about love and hate between neighbours.

‘Of Parasites and Neighbours’: Elements of a Poetics

In his 1951 lecture “Building Dwelling Thinking” (“Bauen, Wohnen, Denken”) Martin Heidegger reflects on what he calls the “nature of dwelling”^[22] (Heidegger 2001, 146): “We work here and dwell there. We do not merely dwell – that would be virtual inactivity – we practice a profession, we do business, we travel and lodge on the way, now here, now there”^[23] (ibid., 145). Apart from the ontological dimensions of Heidegger’s well-known metaphor of being and the productive interplay between private dwelling and public workspace, there is also an aesthetic element, hidden between the lines, that allows us to reflect on a further ‘being that dwells’, namely, our fellow man in the shape of the neighbour.^[24] In this regard, I would like to quote the perhaps most famous literary depiction of that particular ‘being’, from the forty-ninth note of Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910):

There is a being that is completely harmless if it passes before your eyes, you hardly notice it and immediately forget it again. But as soon as it gets into your hearing in some invisible fashion it develops there, it creeps out, as it were, and one has seen cases where it penetrated the brain and thrived devastatingly in that organ, like the canine pneumococcus that enters through the nose. This being is the neighbor.^[25]

(Rilke2008, 124; italics added)

Rilke emphatically describes the neighbour in terms of parasitism^[26] – a notion that is, in fact, closely related to the concept of vicinity and community in “The Roofing Ceremony”: “This branch of my family […] had now crept up on me, gnawed apart my marriage, and was going to separate me from my wife, my child, my home”^[27] (RC, 47). Instead of seeking what is good for him, regardless of their own interests and preferences, the protagonist’s family behave like parasites, gnawing incessantly away at his physical and mental health. Once more, it is Heidegger who gives an illuminating etymological account of the German Nachbar (neighbour), illustrating the provenance of the term: “The Nachbar is the Nachgebur, the Nachgebauer, the near-dweller, he who dwells nearby” (Heidegger 2001, 145).^[28] The Oxford English Dictionary, in its second edition, defines a neighbour in the first of three sub-entries simply as “a person who lives near or next to another”, focusing on a certain spatial relation between individuals. Thus, the neighbour is basically someone who “occupies an adjoining or nearby house or dwelling”. But there is of course still another aspect that exceeds bare contiguity and is brought to bear in Kierkegaard’s brilliant variations on the notions of neighbour-love: The Greek πλεσιον (plēsion)^[29] which means ‘neighbour’ or simply ‘fellow man’ is someone who is nearby, someone who is so close that he or she can be seen, heard, felt and touched. And this is exactly why this other one “concerns and affects us with a special intensity […] beyond every spontaneous contiguity” (Guanzini 2016b, 201; italics added). In neighbour-love both spatial proximity and the readiness for practiced charity are mutually dependent:

At a distance the neighbor is a shadow that walks past everyone’s thoughts on the road of imagination, but that the person who actually walked by at the same moment was the neighbor – this he perhaps does not discover. At a distance everyone recognizes the neighbor, and yet it is impossible to see him at a distance; if you do not see him so close at hand that before God you unconditionally see him in every human being, you do not see him at all.^[30] (WL, 79–80)

Thus, being neighbours is not exclusively, but to a certain extent, a matter of spatial and thereby quite frequently imposed proximity. The trope of ‘being neighbours’^[31] literally balances on the fine line between intimacy and distance, between familiarity and impenetrable – and sometimes even ‘uncanny’ – strangeness.

Actually, this clash of intimacy and hostility is typical for the extremely productive period in which Strindberg wrote not only “The Roofing Ceremony” but also texts like Alone (Ensam, 1903) and his famous chamber plays (kammarspel).^[32] As will be shown further on, it is no coincidence that in the sequence of five chamber plays, four of them are set in modern apartment buildings – the most common urban form of dwelling that has a great symbolic value in Strindberg’s turn-of-the-century writings.^[33] The term ‘chamber’, especially in the German context of Kammerspiel, generally refers to an enclosed space, a small-sized room, often a bedroom, and it also provides the exclusive setting of “The Roofing Ceremony”.^[34] Strindberg’s highly symbolic urban chambers offer a domestic space where various friend-enemy distinctions are at stake, and where neighbours, in the most confined possible space, instead of practicing neighbourly love, start to torment each other in many different ways, consequently corrupting the supreme ideal of agapeistic love.

‘As I Lay Dying’: Talking Bodies in Pain

In the opening passage of Strindberg’s 1906 novella the reader witnesses the blending together of quite different scenes: The main setting is a characteristic domestic location, namely, the protagonist’s private bedroom which serves as his sickroom and, as the reader learns in the course of the narration, also as his death chamber.^[35] Confined to his bed, the badly injured curator seems to be constantly talking in a flow of semi-conscious first-person speech, telling and re-telling the most intimate episodes of his forty-year-long life. Given the protagonist’s serious illness, the flow of words, and consequently also the narration, is constantly “menaced by the danger of atrophy and collapse” (Perelli 1987, 137). Rather soon we understand that the bedroom serves as a kind of incubator for the protagonist’s train of thoughts: Inside his apartment he talks nonstop, producing a “morphine-induced, semiconscious, first-person speech” (Stenport 2010, 156). However, the moment he is moved out of the apartment, the reader has no access to the curator’s thoughts anymore and the story line is nearly brought to an end. We quickly understand that the moment the patient is moved out of his setting, he no longer exists: “The patient was brought to the hospital in a wagon, was opened and examined, sewn up again, and brought home”^[36] (RC, 55). One would imagine a deathbed scene to be a prototypical scene of forgiveness and reconciliation, since ‘Charity begins at home’. Therefore it is most striking that there are virtually no others at the curator’s deathbed; at least no others that would qualify as family or friends, and thereby as neighbours in terms of his next of kin:^[37] “Have I no friend, then, am I such a bad person! No, I’m not so worthless! Speak!”^[38] (RC, 71). The curator has to face death entirely on his own. He is turned into a talking machine, speaking to an imaginary figure on the wallpaper, finally reduced to a talking body in pain.

This brings to mind other famous literary deathbed scenes known from world literature such as Tolstoy’s “Ivan Ilyich” and his horror as he battles with the idea of his own demise,^[39] or even Philip Roth’s Everyman whose last moments coincide with the completion of the novel^[40] – just as the curator’s death coincides with the completion of the building next door: “In that same moment, the tortured expression left his face, and he lay down in the bed; but, when he glanced in the mirror, he saw the newly built house decorated with wreaths and flags. […] He stretched, drew a couple of deep breaths, and fell asleep, to all appearance, but he died”^[41] (RC, 74; italics added). What unites these depictions of a dying protagonist is, firstly, the unfolding scene of transfiguration and, secondly, the focus on the body’s materiality. In this respect, “The Roofing Ceremony” unfolds a highly symbolical second story-line that duplicates the protagonist’s demise on a material and metaphorical level – albeit in mirror-like fashion: During the last days of his life, the curator deals with his isolation by looking out of the window; he uses a mirror since he is no longer able to move his head: “The sick man glanced at the mirror, and now he saw how the house under construction had grown and threatened to shut the sun out of the sunroom”^[42] (RC, 26–27). What he sees is a five-story apartment building steadily rising on the other side of the street, or rather, the distorted mirror image of that building going up. Finally, and this is what he is waiting for impatiently, the new building will overshadow, will ‘outgrow’ another building, likewise opposite the protagonist’s house – the real building where the Green Eye (“Gröna Ögat”),^[43] his neighbour and archenemy, lives: “When I am at home I sit mostly in the sunroom, and from the window I look out over a garden, beyond which lies a house; and in that house lives a man who is my enemy”^[44] (RC, 13). Comparable to the much more renowned green light in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Strindberg’s ‘Green Eye’ also appears as “the haunting lamp of the dying man’s neighbour” (Perelli 1987, 131). The neighbour turns out to be everything else than a Charitable Other but, on the contrary, as “an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes [the other]” (Žižek 2005, 140). Due to his feebleness, caused by a mysterious accident, the curator is confined to his bed day and night and therefore the more anxious to get rid of the constant sight of his archenemy: “I could not move away, and therefore I wished that the trees in the garden might grow over his window, or that the house might be razed, but it remained, and his green eye was directed steadily at me and my fate”^[45] (RC, 14). He is striving to escape what he experiences as the piercing gaze of the other, ‘directed steadily at him’. But instead of outgrowing his neighbour’s, his enemy’s house, the building is outgrowing the protagonist himself, or even the protagonist’s physical materiality.^[46] Accordingly, the growing house parallels the growing pain of the curator, but, most notably, it acts as a counterpoint to the decay of his own dying body. In the end, the novel does not simply confront us with the dead body of its main protagonist, laid out in his death chamber, but simultaneously presents us with the triumphant ‘body’ of the new building as well as with its celebration, the eponymous roofing ceremony: “And the builders of the house gave three cheers for the leader of their work”^[47] (RC, 74). Consequently, the narrative provides us with an audacious long-term replacement for the vulnerable and febrile male body. The adamant materiality of the non-organic building triumphs over both the protagonist and his body’s mortality.

The protagonist’s reduction to his dying body and slowly extinguishing mind is enforced by the apparent absence of his nearest (in the biblical sense of the term) ‘neighbours’. In the early stages of his illness, for lack of company, he starts talking to an imaginary interlocutor who turns out to be a shape on the wallpaper:

The sick man had slept for a quarter of an hour when he opened his eyes, searching for a certain pattern in the wallpaper that formed a head with a distant resemblance to his friend, the director, who he thought was in the room, and with whom he spoke.^[48] (RC, 8)

A blurred shape on the wallpaper is all that is left of the social community the curator had been part of for most of his life. During the last days of his suffering, he is watched over by Sofia, an archetypal Red Cross nurse^[49] and an anonymous doctor who, however, only steps in to finally seal his fate: “There’s nothing to be done”^[50] (RC, 15). Due to the lack of family and loved ones, the curator clutches at the two professional Samaritans like a drowning man will clutch at a straw: “[A]nd he began to flow outward, reached out for those nearest, the nurse and the doctor”^[51] (RC, 72; italics added). And indeed, the nurse and the doctor are the only ones who ever physically enter his sick room. But they do it merely for professional reasons and not for agape’s sake.

Serial Living: Narratives of Intrusion and Reduplication

Most often, the neighbour is not depicted as the Charitable Other, but rather as both an intimate stranger and the uncanny mediator who embodies the border zone between the houses and rooms next to each other. One key element in this rhetoric of the neighbour is the moment of resemblance, or even more precisely, of an irritating resemblance. The neighbour seems to act as a ‘projection screen’ par excellence exactly because he or she – even as a perfect stranger^[52] – is almost like us. What is most decisive here is the seemingly minor word ‘almost’: our neighbour has almost the same address, almost the same way home, almost the same home as we have; therefore he puts the singularity of our most intimate activities at risk.

This is precisely the case in Strindberg’s “The Roofing Ceremony”, where nearly everything comes in doubles that irritatingly resemble each other.^[53] From the very first page it is obvious that the protagonist’s private apartment – “a modern, standardized middle-class Stockholm apartment” (Stenport 2011, 234), and in particular his bedroom, provide the main, and in fact exclusive location for the uncanny neighbour-story. On a literal level, in order to begin with, the apartment is simply a set of rooms that form a dwelling-place in a typical urban apartment building. At the same time, as Anna Westerståhl Stenport has convincingly shown, it carries a “high symbolical and structural value” (2010, 156), functioning both as a highly productive metonymy of intimacy and as an interior space where both people and reminiscences are constantly circulating. It is intriguing to consider Heidegger’s intertwining of dwelling and contemplating, and then to read the apartment’s interior as a sort of ‘incubator’ for its inhabitant’s most intimate reminiscences, especially with regard to his living together with those next to him. From his sickbed the curator gives us a detailed account of the dissolution of his own marriage. Closely intertwined with and doubling the main narrative is, however, a second story, uncannily resembling his own: The protagonist contemplates in detail the decay of the marriage of his downstairs neighbours – a newly married couple in the apartment below. According to the former, this marriage is a direct reflection of his own desolate marital life: “Just like a year ago, upstairs, with us”^[54] (RC, 17). However, in the telling of his neighbours’ ‘love story’, elaborately and with rich detail, the adjoining apartment becomes the real scene of what happens. Most notable is the fact that “the curator evokes a picture of a marriage simply by interpreting the sounds from below” (Johannesson 1968, 256) – a picture which is confirmed by his visit to the neighbouring apartment in order to make a telephone call. From the very beginning he is a keen observer of the others’ marital life, but from a distance. Neither a relative nor a friend, he inevitably turns into a spy who is first and foremost observing ‘Through the Ear’:^[55] “From my own place upstairs, I had heard the whole story of this marriage’s origin and descent, without knowing its performers, without having really seen them on the stairs, and while remaining entirely unacquainted with the scene”^[56] (RC, 17). This is reminiscent, once more, of Rilke’s famous depiction of neighbourly vicinity as source of inspiration:

I could simply write the story of my neighbors; that would be a life’s work. And then it would be more the story of the symptoms than of the diseases that they have produced in me; but they share with all such beings of the sort that they are known only by the disturbances they cause in certain tissues.^[57]

(Rilke2008, 124)

In this vein, Strindberg’s protagonist also usurps his neighbour’s fate in order to tell his own story: “I am mostly alone, sit silently and write and, consequently, have to hear – and when I have no life of my own to live, I have to live that of others”^[58] (RC, 18–19). It is no coincidence that in 1905 Strindberg started to outline a monodrama with the descriptive title Grannarna (The Neighbours), which is preserved among the drafts from the period in which “The Roofing Ceremony” was written. The content of the monodrama ties closely in with the curator’s account of the marriage of his downstairs neighbours; the drama was, however, never published.^[59]

Keeping the unpublished monodrama and its urban setting in mind, I would like to draw yet another analogy that reinforces the importance of the modern apartment and its fascinating inhabitant as a typical turn-of-the-century arrangement. The modernist author I am referring to here is Franz Kafka and his narrative text “Der Nachbar” (“My Neighbor”) from 1917, a story comprising less than three pages.^[60] Both Kafka’s “My Neighbor” and Strindberg’s “The Roofing Ceremony” employ various strategies of reduplication, thus playing an intriguing numbers game: In both texts the protagonist’s private apartment provides the main setting; and in both texts the apartment is duplicated by a second neighbouring apartment that seems to be much more noteworthy since it discloses the real story that should be told. In both texts the protagonists conjure up life stories from scraps of evidence they collect, constantly observing their neighbours “whose lives [they] can follow through the walls of [their] apartment” (Jacobs 1997, 126).^[61] The solid frame separating the two apartments, the floor/ceiling, has changed into a delicate membrane that no longer separates the self from the other, and the curator, restlessly waiting in the others’ apartment, is no longer able to distinguish between himself and the neighbour, between imagination and reality:

However, now I’m sitting down here, and imagining myself walking up there. […] I imagine, now, how I look from their viewpoint, here below; how they have observed our life up there, witnessed our struggle up there, our child-cries, our musical repertoire – until the eternal silence descended, after two souls had consumed one another, eaten one another up, neutralized one another – [...].^[62] (RC, 26)

Even the once impenetrable walls are transformed into permeable membranes: “When, in the face of her expectations, I did not get up, I felt her hatred radiate through the wall, the shattered evil, the thwarted outrage, and it was as though my room filled with a poisonous vapor”^[63] (RC, 52).

In both Strindberg and Kafka nearly everything comes in pairs,^[64] but there are a few crucial objects that exist only once, taking the similarities between the two texts to extremes: There is only one telephone in both texts, and this telephone – the modern hearing apparatus – is, unsurprisingly, the link between the two adjoining apartments. But whereas Kafka’s increasingly hysterical protagonist never gains access to the other’s apartment,^[65] Strindberg’s curator forces his way into the downstairs dwelling and takes immediate possession of the neighbour’s telephone: “And so I found myself at last within those doors that for four years I had passed by”^[66] (RC, 16–17). Furthermore, there is only one narrative voice and, accordingly, only one perspective on the phenomenon of the relationship between the narrator and his neighbour. In both Strindberg and Kafka, the particular narrative voice is presented in the form of discursive monologues in the protagonist’s first-person speech, which is why both of them appear as hystericized and even paranoid characters. While Kafka’s narrator is a most solitary being, enclosed within the four walls of his room and fantasizing about the other’s life on the other side of the wall, the curator in “The Roofing Ceremony”, in the guise of a parasitic intruder, self-confidently assures himself of the reduplication of his own life:

[A]nd now here I sit in his workroom waiting for a telephone call. It is his room, but a counterpart of mine […]; his tile stove is like mine, his wallpaper the same, but this is my room, abandoned, plundered, in disarray. [...] The door to the hallway and the nursery stand open; through two openings, I see…yes, that’s my wallpaper…my former bedroom, that became the nursery…I am in my place, and yet, in another’s...^[67] (RC, 22–24)

As in Kafka’s similar neighbouring apartments, the two workrooms in “The Roofing Ceremony” are described as counterparts of each other, even though they are coded quite differently: “I see only house drawings, but no house; no living objects, no growing things, no color. [...] I see my warm room, with its colored light and shadow, filled with living plants and stuffed animals, with paintings”^[68] (RC, 22). In this crucial scene the curator is, in a way, at home, and yet in another’s home which appears to him as “a distorted mirror image of [his] own study” (Stenport 2010, 160). This position in between makes him the perfect observer – a spy in the double meaning of the word: He is the one who watches, who listens, who takes part in the other’s most intimate gatherings, but unseen and without participating himself. Although he, apart from his visit to make a telephone call, never actively invades the other’s private sphere, he is present; his motionless figure listening from above, even spying through the neighbour’s mail slot in the outer door,^[69] appears as an incessant intrusion upon the neighbour’s life, doubling “the inevitable intrusion of the others [his extended family]” (Johannesson 1968, 259). Thus, Strindberg’s curator enters invisibly into the everyday life of his neighbours while remaining a detached observer, who envisions how they live together by listening to the sound of the house, snatches of conversations and tunes played. It is striking how often Strindberg’s protagonist figures as a seer, as one to whom ‘revelations’ are made – be it regarding the future of the family in the downstairs apartment or regarding the uncanny nature of certain of the curator’s family members.^[70] The consequence, however, is that the protagonist increasingly seems to be surrounded by ghosts and other dubious creatures:

I would be ashamed, having intruded in this way, innocently in the beginning, of course, but in the end as a spy. […] Did these people match my images of them, or had my imagination made them unrecognizable? One makes homunculi of the people one doesn’t know, and those one knows become ghosts as soon as they are away for awhile.^[71] (RC, 26)

Consequently, the domestic scenery is turned into that of a haunted house, the curator’s life into “a shadow life in a haunted house”^[72] (RC, 57), and the neighbours into enemies, ghosts and homunculi, including visitations of danger and ghostly presences that haunt the curator’s wife’s apartment.^[73] Obviously, the Green Eye watching him from the other side of the street is not the curator’s only enemy; rather, the text is crawling with enemies, once more invoking the imagery of parasitism. This ‘infestation’ includes everyone who threatens his intimate togetherness with his small family, be it the voice of the band sergeant in the very first paragraph,^[74] or his own cousin, the snake charmer who bewitches his wife:^[75] “Gradually, the masks were put aside, and the family vampire began to harass and humiliate me right at my own table”^[76] (RC, 44). The story of the curator’s life is soaked in “[o]ld family feuds, blood revenge, Nemesis tales”^[77] (RC, 38). This holds true even for his immediate family, his blood relatives:^[78]

She [my wife] read his books, played my sister-in-law’s music, and gathered their flowers, which were placed on my table; I ate their new dishes, drank their wines and their variety of coffee. My wife dressed in their fabrics, my child played their games and spoke their language.^[79] (RC, 44)

In “The Roofing Ceremony” the categories of ‘my’ and ‘yours’ are completely out of kilter and the friend-enemy distinction no longer functions. In order to kill his enemy, the dying hero would have to turn against himself – he would have to kill himself: “I was defenseless, could not hit back, not kill, for the enemy was within my own skin”^[80] (RC, 57). The imagery of neighbours as parasites, eating their way through the protagonist’s innards, is intriguing, and even his own wife is part of this vast and sinister conspiracy: “My wife […] commenced to delve into my silent innards, clawing out my intestines so that I bled from the pain”^[81] (RC, 6).

Concluding remark

Finally, it becomes clear that the underlying enmity between the dying curator and his neighbour, the mysterious Green Eye, can be tied to a longstanding reciprocal animosity that dates back to the time they spent together in Congo. While the dying man reflects both on his own tragedies and those in his neighbours’ lives, he suspiciously keeps the window with the green lamp on the other side of the street under careful observation: “[W]hen I see him sitting there, opposite, in his window, lonely and unfortunate, I fancy that he sits there waiting for my misfortune”^[82] (RC, 14). However, the relationship between the two neighbours remains obscure: It remains forever uncertain whether the Green Eye really exists as a person, whether he might even act as a secondary narrator, as Boëthius claims,^[83] or if it is nothing more than a green lamp in a stranger’s window that helps to build up the illusion of a neighbour onto which all his fears are projected. The story of the two schoolmates further substantiates the suspicion that the various strategies of duplication serve mainly to tell ‘the story of the symptoms the neighbours have produced in him’ (see Rilke 2008, 124):

In school, I had a schoolmate who was so like me that we were mistaken for each other by the teachers; we looked so much alike that my own uncle mistook him for me. We kept company without liking each other; we were simply drawn to one another without seeking each other, for like is repelled by like. But we were embarrassed, too, found little to talk of, and went around wondering who would be the first to reveal the secret whose existence we sensed without suspecting its nature. One fine day he died; I did not mourn him but felt his absence.^[84] (RC, 64)

Both the narration of the deceased schoolmate and even the story about a painter who is conned out of his payment^[85] are stories about guilt, punishment, and the (Christian) doctrine of forgiveness, invoking once again the biblical commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself.^[86] In particular, the story about the schoolmate who is “so like [him] that [they] were mistaken for each other”^[87] (RC, 64) is essentially a story about (not) loving the other as yourself; that is, (not) loving an Other who is almost like you, illustrating the fundamental Kierkegaardian tension between equality (Lighed) and dissimilarity (Forskjellighed). Hence, at his deathbed the curator struggles with forgiveness and his guilty conscience: “Do you think, Sophie, he [the Green Eye] has forgiven me?”^[88] (RC, 68).

This brings us back to where we started, namely, to the biblical notion of agape, to Kierkegaard’s book of love and the abolition of all differences through death. In Strindberg’s “The Roofing Ceremony”, the approaching death proves to be the precondition for human relations, finally purified of both love and hatred: “I am certainly very sick, and can hate no longer, I haven’t the strength. Everything shatters at the touch, hate as well as love […]”^[89] (RC, 70–71). The enemy’s death and even his mortal struggle inevitably extinguish all differences, clearing the way to neighbour-love beyond enmity: “He [the Green Eye] sent word that one who is suffering has no enemies”^[90] (RC, 73). In the end, the fundamental tension between equality and dissimilarity is leveled and the individual is united with his fellow men, interconnected by “one and the same bloodstream, in so many rivulets”^[91] (RC, 30). The dying man hallucinates one big community of people, resorting to the imagery of the net:^[92] “What a net, what a weaving is man’s fate. All of us know each other, all are related or in other ways entangled […]”^[93] (Rc, 30). Accordingly, the neighbour is a great deal more than simply “the near-dweller, he who dwells nearby”. In fact, finally arriving at a conclusion of the preceding train of thought, the neighbour seems to be unconditionally every human being:

But there are no limits to the objects, because the neighbor is all human beings, unconditionally every human being. Therefore the one who truly loves the neighbor loves also his enemy. The distinction friend or enemy is a difference in the object of love, but love for the neighbor has the object that is without difference. The neighbor is the utterly unrecognizable dissimilarity between persons [...].^[94] (WL, 74; italics added)