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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2022
To all appearances, August Strindberg would seem to be the most revolutionary spirit in the theatre of revolt. Actually, that distinction must go to Ibsen, but Strindberg is certainly the most restless and experimental. Perpetually dissatisfied, perpetually reaching after shifting truths, he seems like a latter-day Faust with the unconscious as his laboratory—seeking the miracle of transmutation in the crucible of his tormented intellect. The metaphor is precise, for transmutation—the conversion of existing material into something higher—is the goal of all his activity, whether he works in science, turning base metals into gold, or religious philosophy, turning matter into spirit, or in drama, turning literature into music. His entire career, in fact, is a search for the philosopher's stone of ultimate truth through the testing of varied commitments.
1 See The Father, Act I, where the Doctor says: “And I should like you to know, Captain, that when I heard Mrs. Alving blackening her late husband's memory, I thought what a damned shame it was that the fellow should be dead.” Either the Doctor or Strindberg has not read Ghosts very carefully, because, before the end of the play, Captain Alving's blackened memory has been partially whitened again.
2 Pär Lagerkvist's comments are typical. In order to praise Strindberg, Lagerkvist has to attack Ibsen, employing all the rusty artillery of anti-Ibsenist criticism: “Ibsen, who was long the modern writer par préférence because he exhaustively plodded through all the social, sexual, and mental-hygienic ideas and ideals which happened to come up for discussion, merely weighs us down with his perfectly consummated and fixed form, impossible of further development….” (“Modern Theatre: Points of View and Attack,” Tulane Drama Review, Winter 1961, p. 22). At this point it should hardly be necessary to repeat that Ibsen's forms are far from fixed and his basic subject matter has very little to do with social, sexual, or mental-hygienic ideas.
3 I am indebted to Evert Sprinchorn for calling my attention to this untranslated poem. The translations I have used in this essay are those of Elizabeth Sprigge, except for that of Mm Julie which is by Professor Sprinchorn.
4 Love and nourishment, in fact, are always rather closely related in Strindberg's mind. His striking image of the Vampire cook in The Ghost Sonata—who “boils the nourishment out of the meat and gives us fibre and water, while she drinks the stock herself“—probably stems from his childhood feelings of love-starvation; the Milkmaid, on the other hand— reflecting the other side of Strindberg's ambivalence—is a symbol of female generosity and mammary abundance. The miserly Mother in Strindberg's chamber play, The Pelican (1907), who starves the household of food and love—thus murdering her husband and weakening her children— is another example of the ungiving maternal Vampire.
5 Elizabeth Sprigge, in her sensitive biography, The Strange Life of August Strindberg, has called attention to the soothing influence this gentle and maternal woman exercised on the ailing dramatist. She called him “my child” and Strindberg called her “Mother.” As he writes to Frida Uhl, “The mere presence of this mère comforts and soothes me. La douce chaleur du sein maternel, as Baudelaire calls it (I think it was he), does me good.” Needless to say, I am deeply indebted to Miss Sprigge's voluminous researches throughout this essay.
6 All his wives remarked upon Strindberg's continual alterations in feeling. Harriet Bosse, more sympathetic than the other two, puts it this way: “I have a feeling that Strindberg revelled in meeting with opposition. One moment his wife had to be an angel. The next the very opposite. He was as changeable as a chameleon.” (Letters of Strindberg to Harriet Bosse, ed. and trans, by Arvid Paulson, p. 87.)
7 Strindberg's uncertain virility is clear not only in his work but in his letters; one of his greatest fears is that he will not be considered an adequate lover. Writing to Harriet, he says: “The day after we were wed, you declared that I was not a man. A week later you were eager to let the world know that you were not yet the wife of August Strindberg, and that your sisters considered you ‘unmarried'…. We did have a child together, didn't we?” (Letters to Harriet, pp. 52-8.) Strindberg had the conviction, also, that “where sensual pleasure is sought, there will be no children.” Considering his need to keep the sex act pure, it is remarkable he was able to have relations at all.
8 Strindberg eventually grew quite lucid about the pathological origins of his feelings towards women; and though he could never cure himself of his neurosis, he knew himself to be imprisoned in a cycle of eternal repetition, dating from his childhood.
9 Strindberg's concept of Naturalism is far from conventional, for he rejects the typical Naturalist play as mere “photography,” offering a special form of conflict in its stead: “This is the misunderstood naturalism which holds that art merely consists of drawing a piece of nature in a natural way; it is not the great naturalism which seeks out the points where the great battles are fought, which loves to see what you do not see every day, which delights in the struggle between natural forces, whether these forces are called love or hate, rebellious or social instincts, which finds the beautiful or ugly unimportant if only it is great.” (“On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre,” 1889.)
10 Strindberg is very fond of this image. He uses it again, after reading Hedda Gabler, to describe his imagined influence on Ibsen—though now, significantly, the husband-wife roles are reversed: “See now how my seed has fallen in Ibsen's brain-pan—and germinated. Now he carries my semen and is my uterus. This is Wille zur Macht and my desire to set others’ brains in molecular motion.“
11 It should be noted that in two of these plays, the male figure is reduced to impotency by the connivance, direct or indirect, of an older man who is related to the female antagonist: Julie's father, the Count, in Miss Julie; Tekla's first husband, Gustav, in Creditors. In a Freudian analysis, this older man would be seen as a father-figure, punishing the son—through a symbolic emasculation—for his incestuous relations with the mother. This hidden theme—as Denis de Rougemont has pointed out in Love in the Western World—is very common to European love literature: its literary source is the Tristan myth, but its psychological source is the family romance. Strindberg's unconscious dramatization of the family romance is especially clear in Creditors, a play which evokes Strindberg's feelings towards Siri and her first husband, Baron Wrangel—both unconsciously identified with her own parents. Here Gustav (Wrangel) revenges himself on Adolf (Strindberg) for stealing away his wife, Tekla (Siri). Thus, Adolf's fit of epilepsy at the end of that play is really a symbolic castration.
12 If The Father is a reënactment of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, The Pelican is a modern version of The Choephori. Frederick ana Gerda, the two dispossessed children, are like Orestes and Electra swearing vengeance on their mother for the “murder” of their father. The Aegisthus of the piece is Axel, the mother's second husband and co-conspirator.
13 “It is interesting to note that Strindberg—determined to give his hero a masculine profession—provides him with the calling of Baron Wrangel who was also a Captain in the Guards. Strindberg regarded Siri's first husband, like he regarded his father, as a figure of superior virility, and often tried to supplement his own weakness by identifying with Wrangel's strength. Even in Creditors, this partial identification is clear—for if Gustav is the father revenging himself on the son, he is also Strindberg revenging himself on Siri.
14 Considering the Captain's willingness to act the passive infant, in fact, he seems rather obtuse when he asks, in Act I, “Why do you women treat a grown man as if he were a child?“
15 The ability to function as a scientist is always a proof of balance for Strindberg, though it would make little impression on a psychiatrist. In Act I, the Doctor shows astonishment that the Captain's mind might be affected, because “his learned treatise on mineralogy… shows a clear and powerful intellect.” In Inferno, Strindberg also refers to his scientific experiments to convince himself that he could not be insane.
16 Strindberg's hesitation is also evident in his conception of Laura's character. Is she consciously evil, like Iago—a predatory animal who fights with everybody who thwarts her will? Or is she merely unconsciously wicked, having unthinkingly perpetrated, as the Pastor calls it, “a little innocent murder that the law cannot touch. An unconscious crime.” Just as the Captain wavers between his love of the mother and his hatred of the wife, so Strindberg wavers between these two interpretations of Laura. When there is no longer any need to lie, Laura tells her husband: “I didn't mean this to happen. I never really thought it out. I must have had some vague desire to get rid of you—you were in my way—and perhaps, if you see some plan in my actions, there was one, but I was unconscious of it.” The Captain answers, “Very plausible“—but the plausibility of Laura's defense is hardly supported by her other speeches to her husband, by her cunning insinuations to the Doctor, and by her obvious decision to proceed with her plan right after she has been informed that an insane man loses his family and civil rights.
17 It is doubtful if such a thing as Naturalist impartiality can ever be absolute, since the need for some principle of selection ultimately in of Miss Julie with the work of Chekhov, for example, will show how far short Strindberg falls of objectivity. Actually, Strindberg's animus against emancipated women, his attraction to aristocratic supermen, and his revulsion to dirt are all qualities which testify to his essential alienation from the Naturalist vision—which is often democratic, egalitarian, “advanced” on such social questions as female rights, and rather obsessively rooted in sordid details.
18 Actually, Julie—with her white skin, aristocratic bearing, and emancipated opinions—is another, more lucidly executed portrait of Siri. And so there may be a touch of self-contempt in Strindberg's remark that “degenerate men unconsciously select their mates from among these halfwomen.“
19 Martin Lamm reports that, in Strindberg's original conception, Julie was to snatch the razor from Jean's hand with the taunt, “You see, servant, you cannot die.“
20 See Brown's fascinating book, Life Against Death. The excrementalist is appalled by the sexual act because it is consummated so near the excretory organs. Jonathan Swift, a writer obsessed by this fact, writes: “Should I the Queen of Love refuse/Because she rose from stinking ooze﹜” In writing to Siri, Strindberg uses much the same imagery: “You're walking in filth—you, the queen with the sunlit forehead.” Even the act of writing often seems excremental to Strindberg. To Siri, he says, “I can get poetry out of filth if I must,” and he tells Harriet, “To put things into words is to degrade—to turn poetry into prose!” After a while, Strindberg came to believe that the very act of living was filthy, and the only thing clean and pure was death.
21 In The Ghost Sonata, Strindberg uses the image of the Hyacinth in the same way. The bulb is the earth; the stalk is the axis of the world; and the six-pointed flowers are the stars. Buddha is waiting for the Earth to become Heaven: i.e., for the Hyacinth to blossom, aspiring beyond its mired roots.
22 This, like everything else in the play, is a perception which Strindberg reached through personal suffering. As he writes in Inferno: “Earth, earth is hell—the dungeon appointed by a superior power, in which I cannot move without injuring the happiness of others, in which others cannot remain happy without hurting me.“