August Strindberg

Eszter Szalczer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136979750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

Dramatist, theatre practitioner, novelist, and painter, August Strindberg's diverse dramatic output embodied the modernist sensibility. He was above all one of the most radical innovators of Western theatre.

This book provides an insightful assessment of Strindberg's vital contribution to the dramatic arts, while placing his creative process and experimental approach within a wider cultural context. Eszter Szalczer explores Strindberg's re-definition of drama as a fluid, constantly evolving form that profoundly influenced playwriting and theatrical production from the German Expressionists to the Theatre of the Absurd. Key productions of Strindberg's plays are analysed, examining his theatre as a living voice that continues to challenge audiences, critics, and even the most innovative directors.

August Strindberg provides an essential and accessible guide to the playwright's work and illustrates the influence of his drama on our understanding of contemporary theatre.

PART I

Versions of a life

1 Problematics of biography vs autobiography

While there are a great number of Strindberg biographies and a massive body of Strindberg criticism incorporating a biographical approach to Strindberg’s work, Strindberg ‘the person’ still remains an elusive figure and many factual details of his life are still disputed. There have been contradicting reports, for example, of the author’s mental health throughout his life, the circumstances of his childhood, his relationship to his mother, and the ups and downs of his various marriages. Thus, for instance, symptoms of insanity described in Strindberg’s autobiographical novels, A Madman’s Defence (1887–88) and Inferno (1897), convinced several critics of the author’s actual mental illness (see Brandell 1974: 66–97 and Jaspers 1977), while at least one biographer, Jan Myrdal, considers them as signs of normal, though most often repressed, reactions of an average person, and maintains that Strindberg exposes typical Swedish male attitudes and experiences still relevant at the end of the twentieth century (Myrdal 2000: 12–18, 72–82).

Another representative approach is that which demands adherence to factual truth from the autobiographical works. In his book exploring the author’s psychological evolution as reflected in his writings, Torsten Eklund, for example, notes that facts of Strind-berg’s first marriage are clearly falsified in A Madman’s Defence (Eklund 1948: 195). Some thirty years later Michael Meyer, who contends in his biography that Strindberg’s autobiographies illustrate ‘his unreliability as a witness’ (Meyer 1985: 27), prefers to use his letters, diaries, and the testimonies of his contemporaries. But, as Meyer claims in his preface, ‘Strindberg made enemies all his life’ and therefore ‘the evidence of enemies is as important to a biography as that of friends. Love can distort the truth as much as hostility’ (Meyer 1985: xiii–xiv). Accordingly, he feels justified in citing the playwright’s adversaries most extensively throughout his book. This method, however, fails to amount to a reliable or informative biography, and replicates instead the subjective and personal perspective that Meyer attributes to Strindberg’s autobiographical writings.

Strindberg’s apparent favouring of the autobiographical mode of writing gave rise to the ‘biographical school’ that has dominated Strindberg criticism ever since Erik Hedén’s first Swedish biography, published in 1921, introduced the critical practice of reproducing the writer’s life from his text and identifying the characters in his books with actual persons in his life. Subsequently Martin Lamm, the Swedish scholar who for the first time made use of a variety of external sources besides the texts, still proclaimed that ‘by having depicted Strindberg’s personality, one has already revealed the characteristics of his literary work. There are certainly few writers in world literature whose life and poetry are so completely united as his.… To read him is the same as to live with him’ (Lamm 1924: 19). But Lamm’s reading of the work as life is highly misleading and problematic from a theoretical point of view, because it presents the purposeful composition of a literary text and the subjective workings of memory as unmediated truth.

A much more balanced perspective is offered by Swedish scholar Gunnar Brandell in his monumental four-volume biography, Strindberg – Ett författarliv (Strindberg – The Life of an Author), published between 1983 and 1989. In the preface to the first volume Brandell argues against critics who treat Strindberg’s autobiography as fiction and discard it altogether as a valid source of information regarding his life. He considers the autobiographical works as memoirs that must be treated with caution because of the natural failings of memory and the distortions of stylistic devices that aim at shaping literary works out of life experience (Brandell 1983–89, vol. 1: 7). While Brandell considers the autobiography an indispensable resource in establishing Strindberg’s perspective on himself at the time of writing the individual works, he richly documents his biography with what he calls ‘external sources’: diaries and letters of Strindberg’s contemporaries, newspapers, and legal documents, including materials that were unavailable to Strindberg (Brandell 1983–89, vol. 1: 11–12).

The most helpful perspective is offered by Olof Lagercrantz’s 1979 biography (translated into English in 1984), which assesses factual details recorded by Strindberg as ‘rehearsals’ and experiments for works to be written. He finds the autobiography ‘useless as a source’ because ‘for every phase of his life, Strindberg decided how he wanted to be understood and deliberately created a persona for himself’ (Lagercrantz 1984: 20). Reviewing Strindberg’s correspondence in 1887 (the year in which The Father, the play in which the title character goes insane, was written), Lagercrantz notes that his letters became ‘more bizarre than ever’.It is difficult to discern which elements of them are to be taken seriously and ‘what is role-playing and sketches for creative work. It seems that he frequently appeared in the garb of his invented figures and spoke through their mouths’ (Lagercrantz 1984: 170). Similarly, Lagercrantz regards the delusional quality of Strindberg’s letters in 1896 as preparation for the autobiographical novel Inferno (1897):

He recognized the entire region [Klam, Austria] as identical with the hell he read about in Swedenborg. The ravine resembled the entrance to the nether world in Dante. A pigsty by the road with its seven gates (which is still there) led his thoughts to the red-hot sarcophagi in the Canto X of Dante’s Inferno.… Strindberg did not believe in it as a genuine identification: in his diary, he drew an entirely different building with six doors.… He arranged things, and was not a victim of delusions. He was looking for metaphors and symbols to use in his novel.

(Lagercrantz 1984: 279)

Lagercrantz avoids collapsing the distinction between Strindberg’s life and work; his concern is neither to credit nor discredit Strindberg’s records of ‘facts’ occurring in his life, but to incorporate information as part of the creative process, allowing his readers insight into the intellectual and artistic crucible out of which the works emerged.

Critics’ and readers’ fascination with the author’s personal life originates in Strindberg’s own preoccupation with presenting his life in an extended series of autobiographical works. The best known of these are the four volumes – The Maidservant’s Son, Time of Ferment, In the Red Room and The Author – written and published in 1886 under the comprehensive title, The Maidservant’s Son: The story of a soul’s evolution. But already the subtitle of the series suggests the arrangement of autobiographical material with a specific purpose in mind: to offer a Darwinian, evolutionist account of a life, in keeping with the naturalist quest to treat literature as a branch of progressive natural science. In 1904, long after he gave up naturalism, Strindberg sent a list of works to his German translator, Emil Schering, indicating that in case of his sudden death those writings should be included in a single volume of his autobiography with the title ‘The Maidservant’s Son’. The list comprised The Maidservant’s Son (1886), Time of Ferment (1886), In the Red Room (1886), The Author (1886), A Madman’s Defence (1887–88), Inferno (1897), Legends (1898), ‘The Quarantine Master’s Second Story’ (The Cloister, 1898), Alone (1903), The Occult Diary (1896–1908), and his letters. ‘This is the only monument I desire’, he concludes the letter, ‘a black wooden cross and my story’ (Strindberg 1992: 712). What is striking about this list is the heterogeneity of genres designated as ‘autobiography’, including the author’s diaries and correspondence. Moreover, the autobiographical mode extends to still other genres Strindberg worked in, including plays, novels, short stories, and essays, in all of which occur either direct references or veiled allusions to his own life events and experiences.

Thus, one of the most prevalent characteristics of Strindberg’s writing is its self-referential nature, owing to his recurrent claim that an author’s most appropriate subject is oneself, the single life that can be truthfully presented with the help of memory, whereas other people’s lives remain to us a mystery. The preface to The Maidservant’s Son, for example, consists of a mock interview with the author, who describes his book as ‘the story of the evolution of a human being from 1849 to ’67 in the middle of Sweden’ (Strindberg 1966b: 1), and then lays out his arguments validating the autobiographical authorial position:

I think that the life of a single individual described at length and depth is truer and more enlightening than the life of a whole family. How can one know what’s going on in someone else’s mind? How can one know the complicated motives behind someone else’s acts? How can one know what someone else said in an intimate moment? One can’t. One fabricates, makes up.… There’s only one person’s life we really know and that one is our own.

(Strindberg 1966b: 6)

This was written in 1886, during the heyday of nineteenth-century European naturalism, when Strindberg still subscribed to the idea that literature and theatre should break with fictional representations of life and people and strive for a scientific objectivity by gathering and presenting human data with as detailed exactitude as possible (Strindberg 1966b: 7–8). And even though by the 1890s he had become disillusioned with naturalism and searched for other means to reinvigorate drama and theatre, the autobiographical quest of projecting oneself into the work remained, but with a much different emphasis. From the late 1890s onward Strindberg grew increasingly suspicious of an observable, objective reality, and at the same time he was able to distance himself from his own life, past and present. His correspondence and plays of this period testify to his growing sense of the illusory and deceptive quality of the phenomenal world. Poet and writer characters in plays, such as To Damascus I and II (1898) and A Dream Play (1901), express their experience that poetry and dreams are more essential and authentic than the so-called external reality. The concept of the self as a volatile and temporary construction becomes an underlying theme in these plays in which characters seek in vain to reassemble fragments of their disintegrated identities. Thus the belief – reflected in the autobiographical works of the naturalistic period – that external reality (comprised of hereditary, social, and environmental factors) defines the self gave way to artistic techniques whereby notions of identity and reality are constantly tested, indicating a shift from a naturalist to a more radical and distinctly modernist aesthetics.

Youth and early work: 1849–72

It is, then, not an easy task to reconstruct a life that has so many variants and interpretations. In the following pages an outline of a basic factual background is provided to help discern the nature of myth-construction pursued by both the writer and his critics. Johan August was the first legitimate child of his parents, former servant girl and waitress Ulrika Eleonora Norling and the well-to-do shipping merchant Carl Oscar Strindberg. Ulrika Eleonora bore eleven children to Carl Oscar, of whom seven survived, before she died of tuberculosis in 1862. At the time of Johan August’s birth, the Strindbergs lived in a spacious house by the so-called Riddarholm-port in central Stockholm bustling with lively commercial life, where Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic Sea.

The Maidservant’s Son (1886) tells of Johan’s (Strindberg’s autobiographical self) first experiences of social injustice and class distinctions at an early age; as he observes how students from different backgrounds are treated differently at his first school in Stockholm – the Klara School for students of overwhelmingly wealthy background – and at Jacob’s School for the lower classes, which he attended later. His empathy with the difficult lives of his destitute, lower-class peers, who often dropped out of school early and went on to work as sailors, reveals the perspective of the mature author/narrator looking back at his childhood and retrospectively constructing his image as ‘the son of a servant woman’.

A more pronounced political outlook that took the form of social criticism started to take shape as Strindberg began his attendance at the University of Uppsala in 1867 and the following year took up elementary school teaching and tutoring in Stockholm. He was struck by the vast differences between the circumstances of his pupils in the poverty-stricken Stockholm slums and the privileged lives of the upper-class homes that could afford private tutoring for their children. All these experiences contributed to the rise of his political consciousness at a time when Stockholm was witnessing clashes between royalists and republicans, and the cultural impact of European social unrest, as evidenced by events such as the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), followed by the Paris Commune (1871), contributed to increased tensions between the upper and lower classes of Sweden. As is apparent from several works depicting this period, such as The Maidservant’s Son and the break-through novel A Red Room (1879), Strindberg sided with the oppressed and identified with the ideals of the French revolutionaries.

During the same time period Strindberg started preparations for medical studies by taking chemistry classes and apprenticing himself to the physician Dr Lamm, whose sons he tutored. As it turned out, however, he was more interested in becoming an actor and he took a job as a supernumerary at the state-funded Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm in 1869. In the same year he completed his first play, which he tried to place at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, without success. Strindberg’s earliest plays include A Name Day Gift (1869), a now lost two-act comedy about a conflict between a father and his son; The Freethinker (1869), about a teacher who loses his Christian faith; and the history play Greece in Decline (1869), later reworked as Hermione (1870). In Rome (1870), a comedy about Danish sculptor Bertil Thorvaldsen, was the first piece accepted and staged by the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and was received sympathetically (Lamm 1971: 16). His next play, The Outlaw (1871), a one-act piece set in twelfth-century Iceland, treating the conflict between paganism and Christianity, was also performed at the Royal Theatre and received bad reviews, but won the admiration of King Charles XV, who awarded the young playwright a small stipend (which, however, ceased upon the King’s death in 1872, see Lagercrantz 1984: 33–34). This recognition encouraged Strindberg to leave his medical studies in Uppsala without completing a degree and he moved to Stockholm, where he supported himself as a freelance journalist, writing articles about social issues, critiquing the undemocratic educational system or the stifling power of Swedish bureaucracy for ‘neo-liberal’ papers (Stockholms Aftonpost and Götebors Handelstidning) (Brandell 1983–89, vol. 1: 120). He briefly worked as editor of the insurance magazine Svenska Försäkringstidning, only to be soon dismissed because of his sharp criticism of certain insurance companies and of the entire insurance business (Lagercrantz 1984: 46). Fleeing from his creditors in 1873, Strindberg travelled to the west coast of Sweden. After another unsuccessful attempt at becoming an actor in Gothenburg, he returned to the Stockholm Archipelago, an area he was deeply attached to until the end of his life. From the Isle of Sandhamn he wrote a series of sketches depicting the life of the people and the natural landscape in the Archipelago, which were published in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter (Lamm 1971: 41–47).

In 1872 Strindberg completed what is today considered not only his first masterpiece, but also the first modern Swedish drama (Brandell 1983–89, vol. 1: 129), Master Olof, a history play about Olaus Petri, the sixteenth-century leader of the Swedish Reformation. The play, which took nine years to move from page to stage, brought Strindberg a national reputation as an original as well as controversial playwright (see Part III).

The young writer and old Sweden: 1873–80

The span of Strindberg’s lifetime was a politically and culturally turbulent era in Sweden. While the leading European countries had been undergoing modernisation and major social, political, and cultural shifts associated with scientific progress and the industrial revolution, Sweden’s conservative monarchy and still nearly feudal estate system based on a rural economy lingered on. This conventional socio-economic organisation began to give way to a market economy, a bourgeoisie with more democratic leanings, and a labour movement, only towards the end of the nineteenth century. During the period of Strindberg’s childhood and youth Sweden had four estates: the nobles, the clergy, and the burghers forming the upper class, and the fourth estate, which included the land-owning peasants and a miscellaneous group of soldiers, sailors, and both agricultural labourers and factory workers, constituting the lower class (see Strindberg 1966b: 11, n.1). The estate system remained in place until 1866, when the parliament, led by the upper class, which was dominated by the privileged nobility, was dissolved, opening the door for more democratic developments. While Brandell contends that Strindberg’s early years coincided with the liberal reform period that eventually led to Sweden’s complete transformation (Brandell 1983–89, vol. 1: 13), there was still a long way to go before a breakthrough could be achieved. Class privileges seemed to have been eliminated o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Overview
• Part I Versions of a life
• Part II A life in the theatre
• Part III Key plays
• Part IV Key plays/productions
• List of play titles and English translations
• Bibliography
• Index