LECTURE 4

STRINDBERG'S INFERNO

1. STRINDBERG, IBSEN, NIETZSCHE

Strindberg hated Ibsen. Ibsen was aware of Strindberg's antagonism towards him, and kept a portrait of Strindberg on his wall: "I cannot write a line," he remarked, "without that madman standing and staring down at me with his mad eyes." On the other hand, Strindberg adored Nietzsche, as he made clear with a vivid metaphor: "My spirit has received in its uterus a tremendous outpouring of seed from Friedrich Nietzsche, so that I feel as full as a pregnant bitch." He shared his master's view of life as a perpetual struggle between the strong and the weak.

Like Nietzsche, Strindberg was a misogynist. "You'll see there's a good market for 'Woman Hate' now, he wrote to his publisher in 1888. "The Doll's House period is over." Again: "What would have happened to A Doll's House if Helmer had received a little justice? Or to Ghosts if Mr. Alving had been allowed to live and tell the audience that his wife was lying about him? No–just blame everything on them, blacken their names, tread them in the mud so that they haven't a square inch left clean–that makes for good theater!"

Combat was Strindberg's way of sustaining his self-esteem and stimulating his creativity. He hated his rivals (not only Ibsen, but also Shakespeare), and he despised most ethnic groups: the Swedes, of course, but also the Germans, the French, the English, and above all the Jews. "My writing," he complained in the standard idiom of antisemitism, "is sucked dry by Jews, who have squeezed the brain and blood from my body." Similarly, women were witches who drained his precious bodily fluids, and he boasted that he wrote his strongest plays during periods of celibacy: "I was always able to preserve my great brain from the influence of my sexual instinct so that I loved, coupled passionately, and thought lucidly all the time, and then I wrote."

Still, he was not without anxiety in matters of virility. He suspected his first wife, the actress Siri van Essen, of being unfaithful to him, both with other men and with a young Danish girl, short-haired and cigarette-smoking. After his separation from her, unease about the quality of his genital equipment was intense. He arranged to have himself measured in Denmark, "in the presence of witnesses, including a prostitute who had given a certificate of approval although sine laude [without praise]." No matter, he reassured himself, science had proved that in "very powerful men" the male sexual organ was often "very small" and with regard to his wife's complaints in particular, he decided that the best defense was an aggressive offense. So in addition to lesbianism he accused her of careerism and competitiveness, drunkenness, shrewishness, coquetry, uncleanness, bearing him another man's child, doubting his sanity, and botching the household accounts.

2. BARBARIAN AND INVADER

He was born in Stockholm in 1849 (twenty-one years after Ibsen), the fourth child of a tailor's daughter who had been in domestic service and a bankrupt shipping agent who claimed to have noble blood. He adored his mother and hated his father, but his mother seemed to prefer his brother, so he hated her as well. At eighteen he went to Uppsala University where he read medicine but failed his exams, then failed as an actor, and finally became a librarian. He married Siri in 1875 and began to make a reputation with short stories and autobiographical novels. But as in the case of Ibsen, it was not until he left Scandinavia that he really broke through as an artist.

He spent much of his working life in France and Germany, gasping, as he put it, for fresh air, and contemptuously denouncing the philistine puritanism of his native land. On the other hand, as an outsider, living in cheap hotel rooms and boarding houses, he could work himself up into fits of fury against his hosts. He was the kind of artist whose derangements and paranoia were put to controlled, productive use in his writing. And when he found himself in difficulties–divorce, libel suits, debts–he could move. In a world without passports, work permits, cards of identity and residence, and above all, without inflation–where small sums and middle-class self assurance could go a long way–the writer could be peripatetic. Strindberg's career is another example of the artist from the periphery who invades the old culture capitals–Munich, Berlin, Paris–and finds a ready response there.

Munich was a more lively cultural center than Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century, partly because Bavaria in this period was more liberal than Prussia. The ruling elites were trying to modernize the state and to diminish the influence of the conservative Catholic Church. Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) found a base in Munich, as did abstract art a decade later with Kandinsky. A German Bohemia flourished in the working-class district of Schwabing. And the city, as we'll see, also played host to the most lively cabaret in Imperial Germany, a place where Strindberg socialized with the German and Scandinavian avant-garde.

3. FROM NATURALISM TO EXPRESSIONISM

He wrote with unprecedented candor about sex. He excelled in depicting people driven by love, hatred, jealousy, or some mixture of these into a nightmarish state of hysteria and madness. He perfected a tense, nervous kind of dialogue, less deliberate and more fragmentary than Ibsen's. And in his early "naturalist" plays–Creditors, Miss Julie–he cut the classical three-act construction to a single act focused on a crisis in relations between a man and a woman, or a triangular relationship in which a whole spectrum of suicidal and homicidal emotions appears. Like Ibsen he had an acute sense of the fundamental importance of role-playing, but his exposure cut deeper. His characters often come to see themselves as marionettes who are unable to escape from the absurd and self-destructive situations in which they find themselves. The Dance of Death, in particular, "is an unmatched black comedy about the routines and pyrotechnics of marriage, the emotional calisthenics that characterize life between men and women who know each other all too well" (Arnold Weinstein). In Ibsen's A Doll's House Nora is treated as if she were a child by her husband; in Strindberg's Dance of Death it is the male who is infantilized, deprived of his cigar and whiskey, forced to drink milk. Marriage is a clammy, claustrophobic hell.

Strindberg impatiently rejects nineteenth-century notions of fixed dramatic characters acting according to their types. "My hypothesis," his mentor Nietzsche once wrote, "is the subject as multiplicity." By this Nietzsche meant that the notion of a unitary, coherent self or soul is as much a fiction as God allegedly is. Strindberg agrees: "Since they are modern characters, living in an age of transition more urgently hysterical at any rate than the age which preceded it, I have drawn my people as split and vacillating, a mixture of the old and new." Again: "My characters are conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothing patched together as is the human soul." His preface to Miss Julie is the classic declaration of early modernism that human nature is elusive, contradictory, indeterminate, ambivalent, vacillating. It's possible, for example, to experience both feelings of hatred and of lust towards the same person, as Strindberg himself did with all of his wives and lovers. The self as a field of conflicting forces and drives–it's a premise common both to Nietzsche, whom Strindberg admired, and Freud, whom he anticipated.

"The dialogue, too, wanders, providing itself in the opening scenes with matter which is later taken up, worked upon, repeated and added to, like the theme in a musical composition." In other words, the characters' speech is not simply an expression of their consciousness. Give up the notions of character as an organic, unified whole, and of action as a matter of simple cause and effect, and the border between the conscious and the unconscious begins to break down. The way is open for the theater to incorporate dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, and fantasies. Strindberg's naturalism, his new realism about sexuality and class, spills over into expressionism, which plunges into the depths of the psyche.

Naturalism offers a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment (Ibsen's Oswald, dying of hereditary syphilis, is an example). Expressionism presents a world violently distorted under the pressure of intense personal moods, ideas, and emotions: image and language thus express feeling and imagination rather than represent external reality. In Strindberg's "dream plays" projection and embodiment of psychic forces take the place of imitation of external facts; association of ideas supplants construction of plot based on logical connection of cause and effect. One of Strindberg's great achievements–anticipated, to be sure, by his hated rival Ibsen–was to find theatrical means of presenting the unconscious drives and desires of his characters on the stage.

4. STRINDBERG, MUNCH, WEDEKIND

Another precursor of expressionism was Frank Wedekind, a brilliant young playwright who explored the power of sexuality and imported the techniques of cabaret and circus into the theater. Wedekind began his career in Munich, at a cabaret called The Eleven Executioners, where he sang his own songs and wrote satirical sketches that combined entertainment and social criticism. He created the most famous image of female sexuality in fin-de-siècle theater: Lulu, the artist's model/prostitute/party girl/femme fatale. There are multiple connections with Strindberg. The model for Lulu was a Norwegian woman named Dagny Juel. She was, briefly and catastrophically, Strindberg's lover, and also Munch's model for his great series of madonnas and vamps. Eventually she married a Polish Nietzschean named Przybyszewski.

Here is a contemporary description of their life together: "He, a pure-blooded Pole who wrote avant-garde novels in German and suffered from hallucinations....She, a Norwegian, very thin, with the slender face of a fourteenth-century madonna and a smile that drove men mad. She was called 'The Spirit.' She was able to drink a liter of absinthe and not get drunk... An upright piano stood in the exact center of this shabby room. While one of the men danced with The Spirit, the other two sat at the table and eyed her intently. The first was Munch, the second, as often as not, was Strindberg." You can see this cast of characters in Munch's lithograph Jealousy. Strindberg had a brief affair with Dagny, followed by a bitter breakup. Strindberg denounced her as a vulture, a vampire, a witch–this is the figure, refracted through Strindberg's eyes, that Wedekind turned into Lulu.

Eventually Wedekind had an affair and a child with Strindberg's second wife Frida. Strindberg fled to Paris where he performed experiments in alchemy and imagined that Dagny's husband, Przybyszewski, was trying to kill him by beaming electric currents or poison gas through the wall of his hotel room. Dagny was eventually shot and killed by another of her lovers, then immortalized by Wedekind as Lulu in a play about the grotesque commercialization of sexuality and art. The Lulu plays use the image of the dance of death once again–the dancer/seductress who lures men to their doom. But the point for Wedekind was not simply that women were temptresses, but rather that modern society brought lust and greed together by commercializing both sexuality and art. Wedekind was, more than Strindberg, a social critic as well as an artist capable of exploring the complexities of sexuality and identity in the theater.

Strindberg was less a social critic than a visionary dramatist who offered a new conception of character and personality on stage: the self as a series of impersonations and performances, or as a furnace of contradictory desires and motives and moods. The very notion of character implies a stability and coherence which is foreign to Strindberg's view of human nature. Situations may be static, as in the marriage inferno of The Dance of Death, but character fluctuates from moment to moment. And nowhere is this more true than in that strange ballet of sexual Darwinism, Strindberg's Miss Julie.

RECOMMENDED:

Elaine Showalter, "Monster and Master: August Strindberg's Combative Correspondence," Times Literary Supplement, 29 August 1992.

Declan Kiberd, "Strindberg's Villains: The New Woman as Predator," in Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (London, St.Martin's, 1985).

Robert Brustein, "August Strindberg," in The Theater of Revolt (Boston: Little Brown, 1964).

George Steiner, "The Demon Master," The New Yorker, 27 May 1985.