Strindberg and Autobiography

Strindberg and Autobiography Michael Robinson ]u[ Norvik Press ubiquity press London Published by Ubiquity Press Ltd. Gordon House 29 Gordon Square London WC1H 0PP www.ubiquitypress.com and Norvik Press Department of Scandinavian Studies University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT www.norvikpress.com Text © Michael Robinson 1986 Original edition published by Norvik Press 1986 This edition published by Ubiquity Press Ltd 2013 Cover illustration: Wonderland (1894) by August Strindberg, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Via Wikimedia Commons. Source: Google Art Project. Available at: http:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AAugust_Strindberg_-_Wonderland_-_Google_ Art_Project.jpg Printed in the UK by Lightning Source ISBN (paperback): 978-1-909188-01-3 ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-909188-05-1 ISBN (PDF): 978-1-909188-09-9 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bab This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This licence allows for copying any part of the work for personal and commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Suggested citation: Robinson, M 2013 Strindberg and Autobiography. Norvik Press/Ubiquity Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bab To read the online open access version of this book, either visit http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bab or scan this QR code with your mobile device: Contents Preface i Chapter One Writing a Life: An Approach to Strindberg’s Project 1 Chapter Two Writing Out and Repetition 21 Chapter ThreeWriting, not Speaking: Strindberg, Language, and the Self 51 Chapter Four Plot and Counter Plot, or Reading and Composing the Text of the Self 93 Chapter Five Publishing the Private, or The Economics of Experience 123 Chapter Six Conclusion 153 Notes 159 Bibliography 186 Index 202 Till Siv Preface This is a book about Strindberg and about autobiographical writing, about how a particular writer projects himself in language, the problems this entails, the subterfuges it engenders, about how he finds and loses himself there. It therefore attempts to place this central aspect of Strindberg’s project upon a more nuanced and substantial footing than the familiar tradition of biographical criticism in Strindberg studies normally permits, and does not restrict itself only to those works singled out by Strindberg as explicitly autobiographical. Nor, I should perhaps add, does it concern itself in any detailed way with the laborious examination of the relative accuracy of the life Strindberg attributed to himself – whether, for example, the description of his early years in The Son of a Servant as a time of fear and hunger is in fact belied by the evident plenitude in the way of food and drink as chronicled in his father’s household accounts. In any case, the myth a writer generates about his own experience is as significant a fact as any other, and a writer like Strindberg merely accentuates the way in which all of us live our lives as fictions in terms of the available narrative and plot structures, structures that incorporate those personal symbolic landscapes which (as Strindberg well knew) are in large part unconsciously fostered by the prevailing doxa or mythologies. I am aware, however, that the approach employed here remains partial. Notwithstanding his achievement in other fields, all of which, including his scientific preoccupations deserve to be taken seriously, Strindberg’s major achievement remains his drama. A consummate creator as well as player of roles, the mosaic work of character which he elaborated in his theatrical projections is an essential complement to the life traced in his prose works, and deserves to be studied as such. Moreover, like Janine Chasseguet- Smirgel, in her analysis of Strindberg in Pour une psychanalyse de l’art et de la créativité (Paris, 1971), “Je n’ai pas manqué toutefois d’être frappée par la pauvreté relative des thèmes des oeuvres biographiques si on les compare à la richesse des élaborations dont ces mêmes thèmes sont l’objet dans l’oeuvre dramatique.” Maybe the occasion to explore this elaborated wealth of drama will one day present itself. As it is, in the protracted passage of this study from its inception into typescript and on to print, there have been numerous developments in Strindberg studies. Not least has been the inauguration of the new National Edition of Strindberg’s Collected Works, the necessary replacement for John Landquist’s long-serving Samlade skrifter. But so far only a small proportion ii Preface of the anticipated seventy-seven volumes has appeared, none of them central works in Strindberg’s autobiographical sequence, and I have therefore continued to use Landquist’s edition. Hopefully, however, this will be one of the last books on Strindberg to do so. Over the same period, there has also been a welcome increase of interest in Strindberg, both in the United States and in Britain. Beginning with Evert Sprinchorn’s important Strindberg as Dramatist (New Haven, 1979) and reinforced by Harry Carlson’s Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth, Walter Johnson’s edition of the plays, new, accessible translations of Inferno and By the Open Sea, and the publication in Britain of biographies by Olof Lagercrantz and Michael Meyer, it is at last becoming possible to envisage a time when English readers will be able to make a more accurate assessment of Strindberg’s achievement in all its facets, though much still remains to be done, particularly in the way of translation. And perhaps, too, this will be accompanied by a more adventurous approach to Strindberg in the theatre, both as regards the selection of plays for production and the manner of their staging. The British theatre has accommodated Ibsen with relative comfort for many years, but it remains largely uncomprehending, even hostile, to the type of stage interpretation which Strindberg’s plays require. My debts in writing this study are several, and of different kinds, all invaluable. Part of Chapter One has appeared in a slightly different form in Scandinavica 23:2 (1984); I am grateful to the editor for permission to reprint it here. Some formulations from Chapter Three, again somewhat altered, were deployed in a paper on “Autobiography and Biography”, given at the British Scandinavian Conference at the University of Wales in 1985, and published in the Proceedings of the conference. While working on the original version of this study, I benefited from two generous grants from the Brita Mortensen fund at the University of Cambridge, and one from Clare College. These were of great assistance to me in enabling me to undertake research in Sweden which was decisive for the direction of my work. For three months in 1979 I was also the fortunate recipient of Strindbergssällskapet’s Strindberg Fellowship in Blå tornet; I am truly grateful to them for providing me with the opportunity to immerse myself in the minutiae of Strindberg’s life and manuscripts, a task made easier by the helpful staff of the manuscript department of the Royal Library in Stockholm. On a more personal level, I owe an enormous amount to Göran Printz- Påhlson for his advice, sympathy and intellectual example in working out my ideas on Strindberg and autobiography, as well as to Ulla Printz-Påhlson for her frequent and generous hospitality. I am also grateful to Elinor Shaffer for her lively interest in this project, and to James McFarlane, both at an early Preface iii stage in my work and latterly for the care and patience he has bestowed in helping a computer illiterate to transform his typescript into print by way of modern technology. Needless to say, any errors that remain are indubitably my own. Finally, my debt to Siv for her support and encouragement in an enterprise whose outcome was sometimes in doubt is incalculable. Chapter One Writing a Life: An Approach to Strindberg’s Project He has dived under, in the Autobiographical Chaos, and swims we see not where. – Carlyle: Sartor Resartus In the bravura discourse on writing which forms the improbable introduction to a correspondence in which he will inscribe himself on the heart of his first wife, Siri von Essen, Strindberg declares: ‘A writer is only a reporter of what he has lived’ (I:190)1. The emphasis already placed on this sentence in the original has helped to foster the notion that, when writing, Strindberg merely transcribed remembered experience from the text recorded in his mind directly to the page in front of him. It is as if the rudimentary phonograph which furnishes his late experimental novella, The Roofing Feast, with an underlying structural image for its stream of consciousness technique, provides the critic with an apt metaphor for this recording and writing process. Just as the machine reproduces the music that is already traced on a cylinder so, each time the novel’s protagonist awakens, ‘the cylinder in the phonograph of his mind began to move again, emitting all his latest memories and impressions, but strictly in order exactly as they had been “recorded”’ (44:61). If for Rousseau memories are ineffaceably ‘gravé dans mon âme’,2 for Strindberg they are ineradicably printed upon the mind, and sustained by what he had come to regard as the authority of Swedenborg, his later work assumes ‘that every least thing that a man has thought, willed, spoken, done or even heard and seen is inscribed on his eternal or spiritual memory; and that the things there are never erased.’3 However difficult it may be to decipher, the past always takes the form of writing, at times uncomfortably lucid and conveniently linear, as in the instance from The Roofing Feast, at others burdened with resistance and only A line with many coils upon it like the image of a script on blotting paper – back to front – forwards and backwards, up and down but in a mirror you can read the script (51:80).

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