August Strindberg and Visual Culture: The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Image, Text and Theatre 9781501338007, 9781501338038, 9781501338021

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August Strindberg and Visual Culture

August Strindberg and Visual Culture The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Image, Text and Theatre Edited by Jonathan Schroeder, Anna Westerstahl Stenport and Eszter Szalczer

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP , UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Jonathan Schroeder, Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Eszter Szalczer and contributors, 2019 Jonathan Schroeder, Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Eszter Szalczer and the contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xvii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover illustration © Kjetil Jul All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schroeder, Jonathan E., 1962- editor. | Stenport, Anna Westerstêahl, editor. | Szalczer, Eszter, editor. Title: August Strindberg and visual culture: the emergence of optical modernity in image, text, and theatre / edited by Jonathan Schroeder, Anna Westerstêahl Stenport and Eszter Szalczer. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018030955 | ISBN 9781501338007 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501338021 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Strindberg, August, 1849-1912—Criticism and interpretation. | Modernism (Aesthetics) Classification: LCC PT9817.A7 A94 2018 | DDC 839.72/6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030955 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3800-7 PB: 978-1-5013-6326-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3802-1 eBook: 978-1-5013-3801-4 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations Contributors Foreword: An Extraordinary Transdisciplinary Artist Daniel Birnbaum Acknowledgements Introduction: Visual Culture, August Strindberg and the Double Image of Modernity Eszter Szalczer, Anna Westerstahl Stenport and Jonathan Schroeder 2 Hands, Dissection and Embodied Seeing: Strindberg and Munch Allison Morehead 3 ‘May the Force Be With You’: Strindberg’s Paintings Arnold Weinstein 4 Strindberg the Environmentalist? Bloodstained Landscapes and the French Tradition of Nature Painting Eszter Szalczer 5 Ghost Vessels: Anti-Theatricality, Visuality and Disembodiment Across Strindberg’s Late Chamber Media Amy Holzapfel 6 Méliès’ Dream Film and Strindberg’s Dream Play: Compressing Time and Space Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerstahl Stenport 7 Strindberg and the Images of the Stage: A Dramaturg’s Perspective Magnus Florin 8 Staging Strindberg’s A Dream Play: A Visual Essay Robert Wilson 9 Robert Wilson’s Photographic Elements of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Jonathan Schroeder 10 Dream-Playing the Archive: Exploring the 1915–18 Düsseldorf Production of A Dream Play Astrid von Rosen 11 Anticipations of the Digital: Dispersing Strindberg Berndt Clavier and Timothy H. Engström

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1 19 35

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95 113 117 135

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12 Picturing Miss Julie: Gender and Visuality in Performance Practice Kristina Hagström-Ståhl 13 Strindberg’s Self-Portraits in Context Lisa Hostetler 14 My Strindberg ‘Selfies’ Pierre Guillet de Monthoux 15 Scenography, Photography, Cinematography: Strindberg and the Technologies of Visual Representation Freddie Rokem 16 Liv Ullmann’s Miss Julie (2014): An Interview with Reflections Anna Westerstahl Stenport and Eszter Szalczer Index

167 183 187

193 213 219

List of Illustrations Figures 1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 3.1 4.1 5.1 5.2 8.1–8.33 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 12.1 12.2 13.1 13.2

August Strindberg, Fotogram, 1892–96 9 20 Julien Leclercq, Strindberg’s Hand, 1895 22 X-Ray of Edvard Munch’s Hand, 1902 23 J. Lemot, Gustave Flaubert Dissecting Madame Bovary, 1869 24 August Strindberg, Gersau, 1886 25 Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait with Cigarette, 1895 26 Edvard Munch, Edvard Munch’s Hand, 1878 28 Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632 29 August Strindberg, Gersau, 1886 31 Edvard Munch, Drawing, 1896 44 Edvard Munch, Portrait of August Strindberg, 1896 56 Eugène Cuvelier, Quarry at the Sands of Macherin, 1863 78 Edward Steichen, Portrait of Maurice Maeterlinck, 1901 August Strindberg (with Herman Anderson), Self-Portrait Possibly 79 Taken with the Wunderkamera, 1906 Preparatory materials and sketches for August Strindberg’s 118–134 A Dream Play, 1997. Robert Wilson A Hampton Graduate’s Home, photograph by Frances Benjamin 137 Johnston, 1900 August Strindberg, A Dream Play. Directed by Robert 138 Wilson, 1998 The Improved Well (Three Hampton Grandchildren), photograph 139 by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1900 August Strindberg, A Dream Play. Directed by Robert Wilson, 1998 139 August Strindberg, Miss Julie. Directed by Kristina 170 Hagström-Ståhl, 2012 August Strindberg, Miss Julie. Directed by Kristina 171 Hagström-Ståhl, 2012 184 August Strindberg with guitar in Gersau, Switzerland, 1886 Pierre-Louis Pierson, Portrait of Countess Virginia Oldoini Verasis 185 de Castiglione as ‘Béatrix’, 1856–57

viii 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5 16.1

List of Illustrations August Strindberg, Self-Portrait, Gersau, c. 1886 August Strindberg, Self-Portrait, Gersau, c. 1886 August Strindberg, Self-Portrait, Gersau, c. 1886 August Strindberg, Self-Portrait, Gersau, c. 1886 Stage and auditorium of The Intimate Theatre, Stockholm August Strindberg and his wife, Siri von Essen, playing backgammon, 1886 Miss Julie at the Intimate Theatre, Stockholm, 1907 The Father at the Intimate Theatre, 1908 The Father [film], 1912 Promotional poster for Miss Julie, directed by Liv Ullmann, 2014

Plates 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 7.1 7.2

August Strindberg, Dubbelbild, 1892. August Strindberg, Celestografi, 1894. Edvard Munch, On the Operating Table, 1902–03. August Strindberg, The Solitary Fly-Cap, 1893. August Strindberg, Palette with Solitary Flower on the Shore, 1893. August Strindberg, The Lonely Poisonous Mushroom, 1893. August Strindberg, Golgatha, 1894. August Strindberg, High Sea, 1894. August Strindberg, The City, 1903. August Strindberg, Danube in Flood, 1894. August Strindberg, The Greening Island II, 1894. August Strindberg, Wonderland, 1894. August Strindberg, Wave IX, 1903. Claude Monet, Luncheon on the Grass, 1865–66. Claude Monet, The Goods Train, 1872. Carl Fredrik Hill, Autumn Landscape, 1875. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mother Anthony’s Tavern, 1866. Claude Monet, The Artist’s Garden at Argenteuil, aka The Dahlias, 1873. August Strindberg, To Damascus I-II-III, Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, 2012. August Strindberg, To Damascus I-II-III, Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, 2012.

188 188 189 189 197 200 202 207 208 214

List of Illustrations 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 8.10 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6 16.1 16.2

August Strindberg, A Dream Play, Stadsteatern, Stockholm, 1998. August Strindberg, A Dream Play, Stadsteatern, Stockholm, 1998. August Strindberg, A Dream Play, Stadsteatern, Stockholm, 1998. August Strindberg, A Dream Play, Stadsteatern, Stockholm, 1998. August Strindberg, A Dream Play, Stadsteatern, Stockholm, 1998. August Strindberg, A Dream Play, Stadsteatern, Stockholm, 1998. August Strindberg, A Dream Play, Stadsteatern, Stockholm, 1998. August Strindberg, A Dream Play, Stadsteatern, Stockholm, 1998. August Strindberg, A Dream Play, Stadsteatern, Stockholm, 1998. August Strindberg, A Dream Play, Stadsteatern, Stockholm, 1998. Scenography sketch for A Dream Play, by Knut Ström, 1915. Scenography sketch for A Dream Play, by Knut Ström, 1918. Scenography sketch for A Dream Play, by Knut Ström, 1915. Scenography sketch for A Dream Play, by Knut Ström, 1918. Scenography sketch for A Dream Play, by Knut Ström, 1915. Scenography sketch for A Dream Play, by Knut Ström, 1917–18. August Strindberg, Miss Julie. Directed by Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, 2012. August Strindberg, Miss Julie. Directed by Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, 2012. August Strindberg, Miss Julie. Directed by Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, 2012. August Strindberg, Miss Julie. Directed by Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, 2012. August Strindberg, Miss Julie. Directed by Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, 2012. August Strindberg, Miss Julie. Directed by Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, 2012. Promotional poster for the film Miss Julie. Directed by Liv Ullmann, 2014. Still from Miss Julie. Directed by Liv Ullmann, 2014, starring Jessica Chastain and Colin Farrell.

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Contributors Daniel Birnbaum is the Director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. He was co-curator of the 2003 Venice Biennale and director of the 2009 Venice Biennale. He is a regular contributor to Artforum, and a professor at the European Graduate School. Birnbaum has a PhD in Philosophy from Stockholm University, and is a prolific writer, curator and critic. He has many books as well as translations of Novalis, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida and Thomas Bernhard. Berndt Clavier is Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Communications at Malmö University in Sweden. His research explores how certain aesthetic structures which have become peculiar to the novel as a cultural form base themselves on earlier cultural patterns which are modified and transformed in order to produce new content. Current writing includes work on concepts like transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, citizenship and race. Timothy H. Engström is Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. His PhD is from University of Edinburgh, Scotland, including studies at Lund University in Sweden and the Universities of Göttingen and Tübingen, Germany. He has been a Research Fellow at the University of Marburg, Germany and at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh, Scotland, and a Visiting Professor at Malmö University, Sweden. He has published in the areas of rhetorical theory, aesthetics, and philosophy of technology. His most recent book, with Evan Selinger, is Rethinking Theories and Practices of Imaging. Magnus Florin is an author, literary critic and dramaturg at Dramaten (The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden). Among his novels, The Garden (Trädgården) is translated to English (Vagabond Press, 2014). He is co-editor with Ulf Olsson of Köra och vända. Strindbergs efterlämnade papper (Albert Bonniers, 1999), a collection of fragments and sketches from unpublished writings of August Strindberg. Pierre Guillet de Monthoux holds professorates at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Denmark, Uppsala University, Sweden, and Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), Sweden. He is the Director of the Art Initiatives at CBS and SSE, and he is a member of the European Cultural Parliament. His PhD is from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. His main research focus areas include art, aesthetics and management philosophy. His books include The Art Firm: Aesthetic Management and Metaphysical Marketing from Wagner to Wilson (Stanford Business School Press),

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Aesthetic Leadership (Palgrave Macmillan) and The Moral Philosophy of Management (M. E. Sharpe). Kristina Hagström-Ståhl is Professor of Performative Arts at the Academy of Music and Drama and PARSE (Platform for Artistic Research Sweden), University of Gothenburg, Sweden, as well as a director in theatre and opera. She works at the intersection of critical theory and performance practice, with research interests in feminist performance, cultural and psychoanalytic theory, and interdisciplinary collaboration in the arts. Kristina has a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Amy Holzapfel is Associate Professor of Theatre at Williams College, USA. Her principal research interests include: nineteenth-century European theatre, theatre and visual culture, dance-theatre and contemporary performance. Her book, Art, Vision and Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama: Acts of Seeing (Routledge, 2014) explores how modern theories of vision in art and science impacted the rise of the realist movement in theatre. She has published articles in various anthologies and in the journals Contemporary Theatre Review, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama and Theater. She received her MFA (2001) and DFA (2006) in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama and her BA from Brown University (1996). Lisa Hostetler is Curator in Charge of the Department of Photography at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, USA. Previously, she served as curator of photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and she spent several prior years working in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hostetler holds a BA in Art History from New York University and a PhD in the History of Art from Princeton University. She has taught at New York University, Princeton University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her books include Eugene Richards: The Run-on of Time (with April M.  Watson, 2017), A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age (2016), Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman (with Katherine Bussard, 2013) and Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940–1959 (2009). Scott MacKenzie (Ph.D. McGill University) is Associate Professor, and crossappointed to the Department of Film and Media and the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. He has written more than 50 peerreviewed articles and chapters on film and media, documentary film, activism, Arctic cinemas and European film and media. His books include: Cinema and Nation (with Mette Hjort, Routledge, 2000); Purity and Provocation: Dogma ’95 (with Mette Hjort, BFI, 2003); Screening Québec: Québécois Moving Images, National Identity and the Public Sphere (Manchester University Press, 2004); The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (with Brenda Longfellow and

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Thomas Waugh, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013); Film Manifestoes and Global Cinema Cultures (University of California Press, 2014), Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (with Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Edinburgh University Press, 2014), Arctic Environmental Modernities: From the Age of Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene (with Lill-Ann Körber and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Palgrave, 2017) and The Cinema, too, Must be Destroyed: The Films of Guy Debord (forthcoming, Manchester University Press). Allison Morehead is Associate Professor of Art History and Cultural Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. A specialist in French and Scandinavian symbolist visual practice in the context of scientific epistemologies, and in the institutional collecting and exhibiting of the art of psychiatric patients circa 1900, she is the author of Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), which includes chapters on the work of August Strindberg and Edvard Munch. Her recent articles include ‘Translating and Understanding: Gauguin and Strindberg in 1895’ in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (2014), ‘Lithographic and Biological Error in Edvard Munch’s Women in the Hospital (1896)’, Print Quarterly (2014), and ‘Defending Deformation: Maurice Denis’s Positivist Modernism’, Art History (2015). She is currently working on an exhibition on Edvard Munch and medicine, and a book project entitled Gambling and the Modern Imaginary. Freddie Rokem is Professor Emeritus from the Department of Theatre at Tel Aviv University, Israel, where he held the Emanuel Herzikowitz Chair for Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art. He is currently the Wiegeland Visiting Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. His recent books include Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance (2010; translated to Italian, Polish and German); Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre (2010, co-edited with Jeanette Malkin); Strindberg’s Secret Codes (2004) and the prize-winning book Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (2000; translated to German and Polish). He was the editor of Theatre Research International from 2006–09, and a co-editor of the new book series Performance Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan) from 2012–17. He has been a visiting professor at universities in the United States, Germany, Sweden and Finland, and is also a translator and a dramaturg. Astrid von Rosen is an Associate Professor in Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and a research coordinator for the Embracing the Archives cluster at the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies. Her research interests include historiographical and participatory approaches to independent dance community archives and archiving, the power of images in relation to social change and transformation, and border crossing methodological development. Recent publications include (as editor and contributor) Dream-Playing across Borders: Accessing the Non-texts of Strindberg’s A Dream Play in Düsseldorf 1915–18 and Beyond (Makadam, 2016), and ‘ “Dream no Small Dreams!” The Importance of Impossible

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Archival Imaginaries in Dance Community Archiving in a Digital Age’, in Rethinking Dance History (Routledge, 2017). Jonathan Schroeder is the William A. Kern Professor in the College of Liberal Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. He has a BA in Psychology from the University of Michigan and an MA and PhD in Social Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and he did postdoctoral work at Rhode Island School of Design. He has published widely on visual culture, consumer aesthetics and identity. His books include Visual Consumption (Routledge, 2002), the Routledge Companion to Visual Organization (with Emma Bell and Samantha Warren, 2014) and Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America (with Janet Borgerson, MIT Press, 2017). He has held visiting appointments at Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities, Göteborg University, University of Auckland, Stockholm University and London School of Economics. Anna Westerstahl Stenport is Chair and Professor of the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. She has written more than 40 peer-reviewed articles and chapters on theatre, literature, cinema, Nordic and European studies. She is the author of Locating August Strindberg: Modernism, Transnationalism, Setting (Toronto University Press, 2010), editor of The International Strindberg: New Critical Essays (Northwestern University Press, 2012) and co-editor with Eszter Szalczer of a special journal issue on Strindberg and Radicalism – Strindberg and the Avant-Garde Scandinavian Studies 84:3 (2012). Other books include Nordic Film Classics: Lukas Moodysson’s ‘Show Me Love’ (University of Washington Press, 2012), Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (Edinburgh University Press, 2014, with Scott MacKenzie) and Arctic Enviornmental Modernities: From the Age of Polar Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017, with Scott MacKenzie and Lill-Ann Körber). Eszter Szalczer is Professor of Theatre and Head of History, Literature and Criticism of the Theatre Program, Department of Music and Theatre at the University at Albany, SUNY, USA. She holds a PhD in Theatre History from the City University of New York and a Doctorate in Comparative Literature from Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary. Her books include August Strindberg (Routledge, 2011) and Writing Daughters: August Strindberg’s Other Voices (Norvik Press, 2008). She is the author of numerous journal articles on Strindberg, has contributed chapters to edited volumes including The Cambridge Companion to August Strindberg and co-edited with Anna Westerstahl Stenport the Strindberg special issue of Scandinavian Studies 84:3 (2012), entitled Strindberg and Radicalism – Strindberg and the Avant-Garde. Liv Ullmann is an internationally renowned actress, famous for her work in the films of Ingmar Bergman, such as Persona, Scenes from a Marriage, and Autumn Sonata. In 2014, she wrote and directed a new film adaptation of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. She serves as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and is a co-founder and honorary chair of the Women’s Refugee Commission, which is dedicated to protecting the rights of

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refugee women to sexual and reproductive health care, to an environment free from gender-based violence, and to economic and social empowerment. Arnold Weinstein received his BA in Romance Languages from Princeton University (1962), and both his MA (1964) and PhD (1968) in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. He is currently the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, USA. Professor Weinstein’s books include Vision and Response in Modern Fiction (Cornell University Press, 1974), Fictions of the Self: 1550–1800 (Princeton University Press, 1981), The Fiction of Relationship (Princeton University Press, 1988), Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo (Oxford University Press, 1993), A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life (Random House, 2003), Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison (Random House, 2006), Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art from Ibsen to Bergman (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Morning, Noon and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books (Random House, 2011). He has published articles on American, French, German and Scandinavian literature. His two most recent books were awarded special recognitions: Northern Arts was named runner-up for Book of the Year by The Atlantic, and Morning, Noon and Night was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction. Robert Wilson is an internationally renowned artist and theatre director. Since the late 1960s, Robert Wilson’s productions have decisively shaped the look of theatre and opera. Wilson’s numerous awards and honours include an Obie award for direction, the Golden Lion for Sculpture from the Venice Biennale, the third Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Premio Europa award from Taormina Arte, two Guggenheim Fellowship awards, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship award, a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement. He has been named a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture.

Foreword: An Extraordinary Transdisciplinary Artist Daniel Birnbaum, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden

It is a relatively recent phenomenon that when there are big art shows somewhere in the world today, in Paris or Germany or elsewhere, and one wants to say something about early modernism in Scandinavia, August Strindberg is key. He is no longer mentioned only as a major writer but he is now also fully established as a transdisciplinary and experimental artist. His great relevance not only for the theatre and the novel, but also for the other arts, is being recognized. Although some viewed him as an amateur painter, he accomplished aspects that are hard to understand that they could be done in those early years when there was no abstract art yet. His visual work looks very much like an invention of abstraction. Of course, most of the time one could also see in his paintings that there was a sea, or a storm, or another figurative element there. But his paintings verge on abstraction in very interesting ways. I know that some contemporary German painters, such as Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, have shown interest in Strindberg’s painterly activity. He has been an important but perhaps unexpected source of inspiration for contemporary art. For Strindberg, photography was akin to a mystery – how could one make photographs of things? He had great occult interests and wrote a strange thesis on phosphorus. He was a person who took interest in almost everything. I think that his photography is possibly even more interesting than his paintings. As part of his interest in alchemy, he made photographs without the camera and without optics, simply with chemistry. He would put photographic plates outside on the snow or on the ground and make photos of the sky. They were called celestographs. Of course, they were not photographs – they were simply grainy images, at least as far as I’m concerned. But they seem to depict the starry skies. And they are also anticipating many later developments in visual arts. The experiments of Man Ray – or more recently a photographer such as Wolfgang Tillmans – are evocative of Strindberg’s photography. Tillmans can be seen as having two primary interests. On one hand, he captured a non-normative social life of the gay scene and other ways of living together. He produced a portrait of his generation – people living in London and other places in the 1990s. And on the other hand, he was very much interested in pure photography – simply the possibility of creating interesting imagery without chemistry. I know that Tillmans has been interested in Strindberg’s experiments. So, I believe that Strindberg’s early work is an important source of inspiration for practitioners who come to the discipline from different fields.

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The most intriguing aspect of Strindberg is his radical, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary approach in arts, writing, philosophy and life. He is one of the total artists. Beyond art, his experimentation includes new forms of knowledge production. It is fascinating that he is so broad in his interests. In that sense, he is a unique figure. One of the more boring and depressing aspects of modern art is its increasing specialization. People are either painters, or they are only interested in dance, for example. But sometimes there are examples of artists who branch out and create links between the disciplines. We can see certain moments in Dada, or in the 1960s, as represented by an interest in crossovers between disciplines. In the Bauhaus period, we can find examples of that, and in the Black Mountain College and the mix of Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and that entire group. We occasionally find individual people who in their own practice bridge all these different disciplines. Strindberg is a particularly extreme and important example of such crossover practices. Strindberg also has an important place in fin-de-siècle Scandinavian culture. I participated as a writer in a show called Nuit Blanche at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris in the late 1990s. At that museum, they often did these great historical exposés, while at the same time foregrounding contemporary artists. This particular show included the great Nordic painters. The only Swedish participant in the more classical section was Strindberg. I remember thinking that he was in many ways more interesting than some of the other greats. I’m sure Edvard Munch is a greater painter than Strindberg, and in the development of painting, Munch would be much more influential and reaches a bigger audience. But as a figure, a uniquely explosive and weird persona, Strindberg is at least as fascinating.

Acknowledgements The inspiration for this book had its origins at the Strindberg: Author, Visual Artist, and Playwright Symposium held at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Thanks to Cecilia Ovesdottir Alm for organizing the event, and to the symposium speakers and participants including Janet Borgerson, Babak Elahi, Eileen FeeneyBushnell, Peter Ferran, Lisa Hermsen, Jessica Lieberman, David Munnell, Sandra Saari and Clarence B. Sheffield, Jr. We thank Jamie Winebrake, Dean of the RIT College of Liberal Arts for support, as well as Israel Brown, Andrea Hickerson, LaVerne McQuiller Williams and Cassandra Shellman. At Bloomsbury, we thank Margaret Michniewicz for her interest, guidance and belief in the project, as well as Mark Dudgeon and Jenny Rideout for initial support, and Katherine De Chant, Amy Jordan and Erin Duffy for editorial assistance. Thanks also to Rebecca Willford, Linda Fisher and Les Glazier for their work in production. Thanks to Angela Anderson and Noelle Belanger for editing work on the manuscript; to Sarah Davis for work on permissions; and to Roger Feldman at Feldman Associates for picture research. For assistance with permission to reproduce artwork, we sincerely thank Hedwig Müller at Theatre Studies Collection, University of Cologne; Erik Höök at the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm; Sofia Skoglund at the Swedish Museum of Performing Arts; Lina Ålenius, Anna Gullmark, Andreas Nilsson and Johanna Rylander at Malmö Museum; Charlotta Svensson at Kulturförvaltningen, Malmö; Marina StrouzerRodov at Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Ann-Charlotte Knochenhauer at the National Library of Sweden; Ingeborg Røsberg, personal assistant to Liv Ullmann; Ales Ree and Anne-Line Berg at Maipo Film; Kaia Høidalen at the Norwegian Film Institute; Moe Kondo at Pola Museum of Art, Kanagawa, Japan; Stephanie Dickey at Queens University, Canada; Camille Lévêque-Claudet at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne; Calle Söderberg and the Ström-Söderberg family; Erik Höök at the Strindberg Museum in Stockholm; Halvor Bjørngård and Karen Elizabeth Lerheim at the Munch Museum; Aleksandra Kuczynska, Peter Karlsson and Erica Wänelöf at Norstedts publishing; Wendy Zeiger at Bridgeman Art Library; Liz Kurtulik Mercuri at Art Resource; Christof Belka, Julian Mommert, Noah Khoshbin, and Clemens Thornquist for assistance with figures from Robert Wilson’s A Dream Play; and Lesley Leslie-Spinks for graciously allowing use of her Dream Play photographs. We thank Michael Newton at Zone Books for permission to reproduce an epigram from Henri Focillon, translated by S. L. Faison, Jr. We also acknowledge the support of the William A. Kern endowment and a College of Liberal Arts Publication Cost Grant from RIT, the European Union Center and the Conrad Humanities Professorial fund at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Swedish Institute, Stockholm and the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Institute of Technology.

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Introduction: Visual Culture, August Strindberg and the Double Image of Modernity Eszter Szalczer, University at Albany, SUNY, USA, Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA and Jonathan Schroeder, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

In his essay ‘A Glance into Space’ (Un Regard vers le Ciel’), first published in the French occultist magazine l’Hyperchimie in 1896, August Strindberg writes [i]s the sun round because it looks round to us? And what is light? Something outside me or within, subjective perceptions? … Is it … the inside of the eye that the astronomer reproduces in word and image, and is it the lenses of the telescope that he photographs on the photosensitive plate? (2006a: 165–166).

These reflections exemplify the centrality of vision in August Strindberg’s creative process. The exploration of the visual represents the common thread that links all of Strindberg’s multifaceted oeuvre together, from drama and fiction through scientific and occultist studies to painting and photography. This book places the rich and heterogeneous oeuvre of this extraordinarily prolific artist within the framework of visual culture in an attempt to understand connections between modernity and visuality and the perceptual and representational paradigm shifts constituted through these connections. August Strindberg and Visual Culture brings together scholars, practitioners, artists and public intellectuals in novel constellations to reassess a major literary figure from the perspective of visual theory and art history. In keeping with Strindberg’s boundarycrossing, experimental and multi-modal strategies of making art, the book engages interdisciplinary approaches that inform the study of the works, practices and larger cultural context of his work. Together, the chapters elaborate, for the first time, how August Strindberg’s writing and artistic practice presage and influence key visual theories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. August Strindberg and Visual Culture provides a new and ground-breaking perspective on a complex and prolific body of work by exploring how his radical conceptions of the visual led him to challenge the boundaries of such traditionally conceived literary and visual arts genres as drama, fiction, nonfiction, photography and painting. Beyond his own visual production, however, the

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book explores his continuing influence on visual culture, by looking at contemporary connections to his work within photography, stagecraft and visual art. The book charts vital intersections between theatre, aesthetic theory and visual elements in Strindberg’s work that have been left largely unexplored. Thus, rather than following traditional genre-bound critical approaches, the contributors navigate through uncharted – and in Strindberg’s case – extremely productive territory by focusing on the intermediality of individual works, the corpus as a whole, and their connections to a wide array of historical and contemporary artists, writers, photographers, film, theatre and museum practitioners. Our broader aim is to establish a new conceptual framework for integrating visual culture and cinema studies with theatre practice and modernist drama. Visual culture can be described as a field of study ‘concerned with visual events in which information, meaning, or pleasure is sought […] in an interface with visual technology’, the latter defined as ‘any form of apparatus designed either to be looked at or to enhance natural vision, from oil painting to television and the Internet’ (Mirzoeff 1998: 3). It is precisely its ubiquitous and dynamic relationship to visual culture that makes Strindberg’s contribution representative of the modern: the work of an artist confronted with a world that cannot be understood via traditional explanations; a world whose boundaries are constantly redrawn by a steady flow of visual information and visual technologies that seem to challenge received notions of inside and outside, subject and object. ‘Where does the self begin and where does it end?’ Strindberg asks himself as he continues speculating on the shape of the sun in ‘A Glance into Space’; ‘[h]as the eye adapted itself to the sun? Or does the eye create the phenomenon called the sun?’ (Strindberg 2006a: 166). These are not rhetorical questions for Strindberg but ideas that serve as launch pads for experimentation, using himself – whatever that means to him at that moment – as the object and the instrument, inserting his body into visual technology, making his eye serve as both lens and photosensitive plate, in an attempt to penetrate the surface of the visible and push deeper into the invisible. What can be visible is an overarching concern for Strindberg. On the title page of his Occult Diary (1896–1907), he includes his favourite line from the Talmud as a motto: ‘If you wish to know the invisible, observe with an open gaze the Visible’ (Strindberg 1977: 3), indicating a constant awareness and practice of double vision. Even when interpreting his own paintings, in which he attempted to imitate what he construed as nature’s spontaneous way of creating images by chance, he saw both an exoteric and an esoteric meaning materialize in them simultaneously (Hedström 2001: 48–55). While working in varied genres and media, including fiction, poetry, theatre, non-fiction, illumination, sketching, painting, photography, linguistics and chemistry, among others, a pivotal impetus for Strindberg was what has been identified as the stated purpose of visual-culture research, namely, to problematize the visible, ‘to interrogate dominant readings, to trouble singular meaning’ (Campbell and Schroeder 2011: 1506). W. J. T. Mitchell offers another influential definition of visual culture as ‘ “the study of the social construction of visual experience”, which represents a “pictorial turn” that permeates a whole variety of fields and disciplines’ (Mitchell 1995: 540–541). This

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‘pictorial turn’ has been described as ‘the fascination with the visual and its effects that marked modernism’, which indicates ‘a growing tendency to visualize things that are not themselves visual’ with the help of increasingly advanced visual technologies that have the ‘capacity to make visible things that our eyes could not see unaided’ (Mirzoeff 1998: 3, 5). What could be more telling of this fascination than the figure of the scientist Captain in Strindberg’s 1887 naturalistic play, The Father (Fadren)? The Captain boasts that with the help of a spectroscope – not a microscope, as his wife Laura would have it – he has ‘been analyzing meteorite samples and found carbon – evidence of organic life’, which means he is able to discern the past, ‘not what’s happening, but what has happened’ on the planet Jupiter (Strindberg 1981: 30). What is at stake here is the question of visibility: the irony that the Captain might be able to peer into his spectroscope and see evidence of life on other planets, but the view of his own progeny is rapidly being obscured as the certainty of his – and indeed of all fathers’ – paternity is brought into question. Today, of course, DNA testing, a form of visual technology unavailable during Strindberg’s lifetime, would resolve the matter, but modernity’s questioning of origins remains, ever since the dawn of ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’ (Benjamin [1936] 1968). Strindberg continually embraced new visual technologies, including the X-ray, and incorporated photography and many other scientific, painterly, theatrical and cinematic techniques in his work. In part, Strindberg sought to unearth what he considered those lost origins – of language, of matter, of the world which, as the Poet says in A Dream Play (Ett Drömspel) (1901) is just ‘a false copy’ of the original – and to observe, capture, project, reproduce, mobilize and bring into dynamic relationships images, both textually and visually. And thus, whereas Strindberg is known primarily as a playwright whose name hallmarks modern drama and theatre, the intent of this volume is to bring into focus a wider spectrum of his boundary-crossing work that included – beyond, or rather along with, literary representations – painting, photography, scenography, chemistry, botany, alchemy, performance practice, as well as philosophical, theoretical and historical reflections on innumerable aspects of these diverse fields. Approaching Strindberg’s work through the lens of visual culture helps us deconstruct artificial boundaries between the literary and the visual, between text and image, and between writer and artist. This approach, which is reflected in the individual chapters as well as in the structure of our book as a whole, seeks to respond to Strindberg’s own transdisciplinary practices and aesthetics. It also helps us to contemplate the fruitful simultaneity of artistic, scientific and mystical-occult modus operandi that Strindberg typically engaged in.

Strindberg and visual media Strindberg’s work as a visual artist is usually divided into discrete phases of intense engagement followed by long periods of inactivity as painter or photographer. For example, after some early paintings in the 1870s, he would not return to the medium until 1892, the time of his divorce from his first wife Siri von Essen, while he was staying alone on the island of Dalarö in the Stockholm Archipelago. A new burst of paintings

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ensued during courtship and marriage with his second wife Frida Uhl in 1894 while living in Dornach, Austria, and then again during their soon-to-be separation and his departure for Paris, for a stay that extended into 1896. He then would not take up painting again until the early 1900s, commencing his final period as a pictorial artist (Söderström 1972; Hedström 2001: 9–101). Similarly, although Strindberg had been interested in photography since his youth and had already owned a camera by 1861/62 (Hemmingsson 1963: 16), his first significant photographic enterprises, which included an unsuccessful attempt at the photographic documentation of an ethnographic journey through France for the book that eventually became Among French Peasants (Bland franska bönder) (1889), and a series of ‘impressionist’ family photographs taken in Gersau, Switzerland, occurred in 1886, after which he would return to the medium in the 1890s when his work included, besides family and self-portraiture, some remarkable experiments by manipulating photosensitive plates without lens and camera. Over a final period in the early 1900s Strindberg experimented with photographic ‘soul portraits’ and cloud studies using his so-called wonder-camera (the Wunderkamera), which he designed and constructed with fellow photographer Herman Anderson (see Hemmingsson 1963; Rugg 1997: 80–131; Szalczer 2001). Strindberg’s theories, criticism, and practice of the visual arts, and his profound engagement with visual technologies were not simply a response to the currents of the times, with which he was intimately familiar. Rather, his own work with visual media often initiates a ‘radical and bold break with the image making conventions [bildkonventioner] of the later nineteenth century’ (Lalander 1999: 91, trans. by authors). That is especially the case with Strindberg’s approach to self-portraiture, and the ways in which he describes himself in visual terms in his autobiography, which challenges any notion of a unified self and explores an ambiguous relationship between the perspectives of ‘photographer and photographed, and photographing subject and photographed object’ (Rugg 1997: 102). For example, in his major study of Strindberg’s ‘visual imagination’, Harry G. Carlson presents Strindberg’s preoccupation with visual media during his years of exile in Berlin and Paris in the 1890s as a self-healing process, where ‘the coalescence of various forces in the fin-de-siècle climate of artistic renewal’ not only influenced his ‘personal renewal’ but also ‘enabled him to restart his creative engine and begin anew’ (Carlson 1996: 3). According to the classic biographical approach of Strindberg studies (greatly informed by the author’s fictionalized autobiographies and numerous letters), his formidable contributions to visual culture have consistently been interpreted as the direct outcome of personal experiences and idiosyncrasies. It is true that some of Strindberg’s own production of visual media, especially his painting, tended to occur in moments of severe crises or periods of intense expectations – such as marital stress, psychotic episodes, or the impending birth of a child – often associated with simultaneously occurring writer’s block (Söderström 1991: 14). Biographical approaches have shed light on significant aspects of Strindberg’s work in the context of visual culture, though these interpretations unnecessarily confine Strindberg’s work to biographical matters.

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August Strindberg and Visual Culture, on the other hand, foregrounds contributions to aesthetic and intellectual history and visual culture while minimizing the chronological and biographical in favour of the thematic, multi-modal and transdisciplinary. The book offers insights into Strindberg as a multimedia artist, whose writing is inseparable from his visual imagination and from the visual technologies of his time. Some scholars have indeed explored Strindberg’s interest in turn-of-the-century media technologies, including the laterna magica, the sciopticon and the panorama, from the perspective of media archaeology and media history (see, notably, Hockenjos 2007), informing many strands of this book. It is our contention that Strindberg epitomizes the modern writer precisely because his work is so deeply embedded in visual culture in meaningful and often anticipatory ways – as part of a ceaselessly ongoing and lifelong process. We do not believe that Strindberg’s visual practices are by-products of his life or offshoots of his writing (or of any difficulties in writing, for that matter). Instead, we examine what questions he was drawn to and led him to explore visual media and produce a heterogeneous and multi-variegated body of work. Another aspect of Strindberg’s involvement with visual media is important to stress: a pronounced effort to fully explore the potentialities afforded by the specific medium at hand, especially in painting or photography. In other words, while image and text often appear combined, it seems that neither is there to merely serve or illustrate the other. Strindberg’s paintings, for example, completely disengage from literary (narrative) representation and often from an attempt at referentiality. Instead, they bear marks of attention to the material technologies pertaining to the medium and attempts to achieve as much ontological immediacy as possible. That includes the remarkable materiality of Strindberg’s paintings: he used a palette knife instead of a paintbrush and applied oil paint directly on wood or cardboard panel. This practice, moreover, has been described as displaying as powerful a presence of matter as the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, by which ‘the tactile surface not only presents a picture of nature, but also gives the impression of being a piece of nature’ (Feuk 1991: 11).

Double pictures and metapictures ‘Looking at images across disciplines can help us to think about the interrelatedness of different kinds of visual media’, observe Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright in their introduction to visual-culture studies (Sturken and Cartwright 2009: 2). This is precisely what this book undertakes. It explores the significance of intervisuality, that is, ‘the simultaneous display and interaction of a variety of modes of visuality’ (Mirzoeff 2002: 3) in Strindberg’s work and legacy. As an introduction to this approach across Strindberg’s body of work, let us look at a few examples taken from different media he consistently explored and experimented with throughout his creative life: painting, drama and photography. The well-known 1892 oil painting Dubbelbild (Double Image), so dubbed by Göran Söderström (Lalander 1992: 26), in which one motif visible along two edges of the picture plane

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encloses another as if in an odd frame, provides a compelling case study of Strindberg’s playful exploration of the philosophies and practices of the visual (Plate 1.1). The painting looks like a montage of two images: a dark and a light landscape (or seascape) superimposed. As our gaze keeps shifting focus between these two layers, it is uncertain whether we are watching the lighter image through an opening cut in the darker one, or the darker image threatening to throw off its cover, a mere theatre curtain, at any moment. According to Per Hedström, Strindberg might have painted the lighter image over the top of an older existing painting (Hedström 2001: 43). Be that as it may, the result is a picture-within-a-picture, which at the same time eliminates the viewer’s sense of inside and outside. Since the picture frame is opened up, the compositional distinction between figure and ground is eliminated, and a new dialectics of perception is mobilized: the frame threatens to interfere and take over the image, while the image finds its way into the real. Like the famous duck–rabbit image, Strindberg’s painting confounds onlookers’ perspectives and thereby their perceptions, presenting them with incessantly shifting illusions. Double Image can be seen as a metapicture, a picture about pictures (Mitchell 1994: 35–82) that questions itself as a painting and comments on the nature of perception and representation. As we now turn to Strindberg’s theatre, we discover an abundance of double images or ‘metapictures’ manifesting both textually and scenically. Thus, for example, the plot of The Ghost Sonata (1907) – one of Strindberg’s late Chamber Plays  – is framed by two images, suggesting a journey from image to image: it opens with a view of a modern urban house facade seen from the street and concludes with a projection of Arnold Böcklin’s painting The Isle of the Dead (Die Toteninsel) (1880) invading the stage. Rather than providing a background to the unfolding action as in traditional theatre, images in this play – and, as several chapters in our volume show, in other Strindberg plays as well – take on the force of dramatic action. The dialogue is composed of sequences that operate on the set, constructing and deconstructing images. The drama follows a trajectory from the exterior of an inviting, pleasant home bathed in sunshine to a dire vision of death, taking us on a journey beyond what is visible on the surface, towards something obscure, into the realm of the unknown. The same structure is reproduced by each of the play’s three scenes: a beautiful image is presented only to be destroyed, and something unpleasant is exposed beneath the attractive facade, all the while challenging binary oppositions of exterior and interior, visible and invisible, objective and subjective, living and dead, reality and illusion. A closer look at the play’s scene-by-scene microstructure reveals the journey structure as a central plot-forwarding device, but it is a journey made by means of words that penetrate spaces, tear down facades and walls, tear off veils and masks, for the sole purpose of making the hidden images visible. As the curtain opens, an appealing image of the home of wealth and tranquility appears, but it is already punctured, revealing through its openings pathways into a quite different underlying reality. We catch sight of characters and objects in the windows, placed on the borderline between outside and inside. Our attention is drawn to these figures framed by door and window openings, like so many picture frames. The initial moments of the play are used to

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induce the audience to look – to look long and carefully – establishing sight as the guiding principle of the play’s dramaturgy. Such framing of the drama within the realm of the visual sets up The Ghost Sonata as a meditation on visual and theatrical representation, conflating the two and playing with the motif of infinite multiplication of images-within-images and plays-within-plays. There is an interesting parallel between the elaboration of the opening scene in The Ghost Sonata and the visual technique of Strindberg’s Double Image, where the two superimposed images are painted in different scales. In the painting, the tempestuous waves on the periphery appear closer to the viewer, whereas the image inside the frame seems more removed and in a smaller scale. This approach signals an interest in exploring the mode and range of visual perception, just as The Ghost Sonata’s set challenges assumptions of what was supposed, in drama and stage practices of the time, to be foregrounded or de-emphasized in terms of narrative and thematic development. In later scenes of The Ghost Sonata we find ourselves inside an apartment and meet the figures we previously saw from the outside-street perspective. In a series of violent verbal attacks, the characters mutually ‘unmask’ one another, exposing decaying and unidentifiable bodies beneath the facade of seemingly distinct individuals. The play dismantles the human figure on the stage and presents it as an image whose referentiality is brought into question. The Ghost Sonata, like Dubbelbild, functions as a metapicture. The play questions the mimetic quality of the stage image and the actor’s body on stage, challenging the conventions of the realistic theatre. Strindberg’s play construes traditional theatre as a house of collapsing facades around the notion of the ghost as a figure of absence, anticipating such experiments of high modernity as Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, developed in the 1930s, in which the primacy of the drama text is replaced by deliberate assaults on the senses; the post-World War II, non-linear, non-sequitur and image-driven anti-drama of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco; or, in our own time, American stage director Robert Wilson’s postmodern Theatre of Images, where fragments of text, sounds and images slowly unfold into a sensory landscape, inviting spectators to enter a world of altered consciousness and unknown dimensions.

Nature’s pictorial urge and the distorting eye In his aforementioned essay ‘A Glance into Space’, where Strindberg reflects upon the nature of light and visual perception, he also questions the eye’s ability to convey accurate information from the external world to the mind. Looking into the sun at the time of the vernal equinox triggers his reflections on the nature of vision and he wonders if the sun might be ‘the omnipresent primeval light, which my imperfect eye can only apprehend as that round, yellow spot on the retina’ (Strindberg 2006a: 165–166). These speculations epitomize a radical departure from the prevailing naturalist aesthetics of the time, according to which photographic exactitude increased an artwork’s ability to convey the truth of an observable reality. The essay questions both the existence of such an external reality and the objectivity of our perceptions of it.

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Such aesthetic and philosophical considerations spawned a new theory of painting that Strindberg called ‘wood nymphism’ (skogssnufvism) (see Carlson 1996: 177), which he eloquently elaborated in the 1894 essay, ‘Des Arts Nouveaux! ou le hasard dans la production artistique’ [‘The New Arts! or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation’] (Strindberg 2006b). The essay, which was preceded by a series of paintings done with a new method Strindberg came upon by chance, advances the theory of automatic art, ‘independent of the conscious intent of will of the artist’ (Carlson 1996: 178) and dependent wholly upon the shifting view of the beholder. You all remember the fairy-tale about the boy out strolling in the woods, who comes upon a wood nymph. … As he draws closer she turns her back, which now resembles a tree stump. [The boy] never sees anything but a stump, and his lively imagination invented all the rest. (Strindberg 2006b: 105)

The narrator then asks the reader to consider the situation as an analogy with modernist paintings, where at first ‘one sees only a chaos of colours; then it begins to assume a likeness, it resembles, but no: it resembles nothing’ (Strindberg 2006b). A passionate revolt against what W. J. T. Mitchell called the ‘ready-made subjectobject binarisms’ (1994: 22), which even today haunt our perceptions, led Strindberg to undertake a series of photographic experiments in the 1890s, where he, in deep mistrust of the distorting mediation of lens and camera, and indeed of the eyes, would seek out ways to fix natural processes on photosensitive plates without the mediation of optical instruments. Testifying to this process of reconfiguration, there is a series of photograms of various crystal formations from 1892–96, preserved in Strindberg’s so-called Green Sack, a large portmanteau filled with unpublished notes, fragments, drafts and sketches, now part of the Strindberg Archives at the Royal Library in Stockholm. Unique for their time, these images were taken without lens and camera, by having saltine solutions crystallize on glass plates that were then placed onto photosensitive paper. As the plates were removed, the patterns of the crystals remained copied on the paper displaying delicate patterns of crystalline formations (Figure 1.1), which to Strindberg served as proof for nature’s way of both creating life forms and representing them. As the volume Jardin des Plantes (1895), a collection of essays on nature, demonstrates, Strindberg had been preoccupied with the idea of how forms of matter, both organic and inorganic, were produced by nature by way of mimicry, imitation and simulation and then displayed in often deceptive observable shapes and colours. In other words, Strindberg at this time detects a pictorial urge in nature and perceives the processes of nature as a ubiquitous spectacle, where animal, plant and mineral life playfully disguise themselves, copying one another’s shapes and patterns (Szalczer 1998: 10–15). The processes of crystallization are seen as manifestations of nature’s ‘form-giving drive’ (Strindberg 2010: 172). The essay ‘Stenarnes suckan’ (‘The Sighing of Stones’) (see Strindberg 2010: 167–189), for example, describes how the narrator comes upon a window pane covered with ice-ferns while walking on the streets of Berlin. To his astonishment, the crystalline patterns seem to imitate the evolutionary grades of plants, encompassing the whole botanical system, from algae through lichen and ferns to grasses and palms. He then

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Figure 1.1 August Strindberg, Fotogram, 1892–96. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm. concludes, if – according to a current theory – the earth took shape so that ‘the tenuous nebula condensed into water and primary rocks, then nothing is more logical than to think that the forms of plants took shape by the increasing condensation of water on the surface of the earth, just like on the window-pane’. Thus, nature makes sketches in one life form to improve and carry them out in another, a process which, the narrator attests, he reproduced several times using crystalline solutions on plates, which he also ‘photographed copying them directly onto paper’ (Strindberg 2010: 175). A different method was devised for the so-called ‘Celestographs’ (1894), another collection of experimental photographs in the Green Sack (Plate 1.2). They were made by exposing photosensitive plates – previously immersed in developer – directly to the starry sky. In the essay entitled ‘Om ljusverkan vid fotografering: Betraktelser med anledning av X-strålarna’ (‘On the Action of Light in Photography: Reflections Occasioned by the X-rays’) (1896), the narrator relates how he had carried out his experiments in 1894, photographing celestial bodies taken without camera or lens. Sitting at his desk, he caught sight of the reflection of the moon in the mirror in front of him. ‘How would the mirror catch and reflect the moon if the lens of my eye and the camera were not there to distort it?’ he asked himself. According to the laws of optics, every point on the plane surface of the mirror must return the light of the moon. If the mirror was spherically concave, the rays

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August Strindberg and Visual Culture of the moon would on the contrary be collected in one point and produce a small round image, similar to the one we call the moon, and can see with our naked eye. … And so I exchanged the mirror for a silver bromide plate, and to achieve a stronger effect I placed it in the developer and exposed it at the same time. (Strindberg 2006c: 163)

As the essay reports, Strindberg submitted his ‘Celestographs’ to the French Astronomical Society, but did not receive any noteworthy response and the fragile images remained buried in his Green Sack until 1993, when they were for the first time exhibited at Stenström’s Gallery and Café in Stockholm (Feuk 1993). Douglas Feuk interprets the star-like patterns on the surface of the Celestographs as chemical pollution and specks of dirt rather than the unmediated reflection of the starry sky, as Strindberg would have it. He sees these images as examples of ‘alchemical dreams’ of transformation, a yearning for change, and compares Strindberg’s image-making technology to that of the topographic ground studies, named Texturologies, of Jean Dubuffet in the 1950s (Feuk 2001: 126). Considered as a project that challenged current visual technologies, the photograms in fact demonstrate Strindberg’s theory of ‘natural art’ laid out in ‘The New Arts! or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation’. They are examples of his experimental practices aimed at changing conventional ways of seeing and testing the limits of perception and visual representation. The photograms stand witness to both the modernist quest to make visible the unmediated essence of things and the impossibility of this quest. By mobilizing visual culture as an important analytical tool, we seek to deconstruct artificial boundaries between literature and visual arts, between text and image, to reflect (and reflect upon) acts of dismantling integral to Strindberg’s oeuvre. The chapters that follow examine the intervisualities posited as well as inspired and anticipated by Strindberg, focusing on intersections of scenography, performance practices, material archives, painting, photography, projections, cinema, digital media and literary representations – all bound up with investigations of visibility and visual technologies.

The structure of the book August Strindberg and Visual Culture brings together a diverse set of disciplines, including visual culture, art history, performance and theatre studies, media and cinema studies, and philosophy of technology, to present a nuanced understanding of Strindberg’s deep engagement with modes of vision, perception and representation. A distinctive aspect of the book is the inclusion of a visual essay and several short reflection pieces by internationally recognized directors, artists, practitioners and curators. These reflection pieces are interspersed with the longer chapters. Taken together, these contributions form an innovative and ground-breaking knowledge and appreciation of visual culture in the context of wider intellectual currents. In Chapter 2, ‘Hands, Dissection and Embodied Seeing: Strindberg and Munch’, art historian Allison Morehead examines the role of the body in relation to visual culture.

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Discussing texts, photographs, paintings, prints and drawings, Morehead analyses representations of hands – and especially the role of touch – in the work of Strindberg, Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, and contemporary French artists and philosophers. Both Strindberg and Munch often described their practices of visualizing the body and its interior through the metaphor of dissection, which is literally the plunging of hands into a body in the name of science. Morehead notably considers the metaphor as an invitation to engage in especially embodied forms of seeing linked to the production of knowledge, arguing that this interest becomes a sign of Strindberg’s and Munch’s anxious attempts to reinsert the male body back into the work of art. This groundbreaking comparative analysis situates both Strindberg and Munch within a rich discursive context of body writing and body imagining at the turn of the century. Literary scholar Arnold Weinstein’s chapter ‘ “May the Force Be With You”: Strindberg’s Paintings’ discusses issues of power and energy in Strindberg, and develops linkages with technology and what can be called ‘intermediality’. In drawing on a range of literary and artistic work, he reveals how Strindberg productively explores the modalities of sight and sound, and argues that his paintings become the privileged, indeed perfect, medium for representing his charged world. Deploying the innovative metaphor of the force, he closes by pointing out how Strindberg’s experiments matter for the contemporary ‘wired’ world of currents that flow into and out of us. Continuing an examination of Strindberg’s relationship to painting, Eszter Szalczer’s chapter ‘Strindberg the Environmentalist? Bloodstained Landscapes and the French Tradition of Nature Painting’ discusses an often-overlooked novella’s close connection to the contemporary French art scene. Samvetskval (1884) (translated as The German Lieutenant) takes place in the area of the Fontainebleau forest near Paris, which served a crucial role in the modernization of the pictorial art, as manifested in the work of the Barbizon school of painters and later the Impressionists. But the nineteenth century also brought modern technological developments, including the railway, which helped transform what had been thought of as a patch of ‘untouched nature’ into a site of spectacle, tourism and entrepreneurship. The chapter discusses Strindberg’s novella from several complementary perspectives, examining how Samvetskval functions as a literary text that centres on visual perception and how it engages with the French artistic tradition and innovation, constructing a specular discourse between art and literature. In addition, the essay attempts to generate an ongoing commentary on Strindberg’s text in light of recent landscape theories and eco-critical considerations. If Szalczer’s examination of Strindberg’s interest in contemporary French painting foregrounds the literary imagination’s relationship to pictorial art, Amy Holzapfel’s chapter ‘Ghost Vessels: Anti-theatricality, Visuality and Disembodiment Across Strindberg’s Late Chamber Media’ examines how Strindberg re-conceptualized early twentieth-century theatre as visual, which, like painting and photography, could offer a vessel for immaterialized forms. As a theatre scholar, Holzapfel describes how Strindberg – like French-language symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck – struggled with the problem of theatre’s reliance on the living, breathing human body as its primary medium of expression. Drawing also on Maeterlinck’s contributions to

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discourses of European drama, this chapter defines and foregrounds the concept of the chamber as a key anti-theatrical and pictorial intervention of the modernist stage, one that offered theatre artists a strategic solution to the problem of the materiality of the actor’s body, without resorting to the use of puppets. The idea of the chamber – a vessel into which living actors enter through unconscious states of sleep and trance – participates in modernism’s powerful and enduring critique of mimesis, allowing actual embodiments to become dematerialized abstractions. Instead of striving to make the ghosts of his brain appear real, Strindberg, like his contemporary colleagues, sought to transform reality into a container for ghosts. In their chapter ‘Méliès’ Dream Film and Strindberg’s Dream Play: Compressing Time and Space’, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerstahl Stenport continue Holzapfel’s line of thought through a comparative analysis that combines the perspectives of film and theatre studies, as well as French and Swedish source material. They argue for the close and overlapping developments in turn-of-the-century cinema and theatre for representing spatio-temporal compression in relation to dreaming, magic, projection technologies and the representation of consciousness. Foregrounding the works of Parisian theatre and film director George Méliès and his dream films – féeries – and Strindberg’s writings on dreaming, stage production and cinematography, MacKenzie and Stenport elaborate on the limitations of separating stage and screen theory, as has often been done in both cinema and performance studies, to provide a historical assessment of similarities between the two art forms. The centre of the book is dedicated to reflections on several important productions of one of Strindberg’s most famous dramas – A Dream Play. Magnus Florin’s piece ‘Strindberg and the Images of the Stage’ represents his perspective as chief dramaturg of The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm as he discusses the visual aspects of producing a Strindberg play. He brings a deep understanding of staging Strindberg to his contribution, and reveals the behind-scenes process of considering how to make his work relevant to contemporary theatre. In a remarkable piece called ‘Staging Strindberg’s A Dream Play: A Visual Essay’, artist and director Robert Wilson shares his personal portfolio of images designed as production notes for an innovative 1999 production at the Stockholm City Theatre. This represents Wilson’s working method – he gathered visual images and sketched scenes that he then worked up into more-formal staging. A few of these have been available via his website, but this is the first time all have been reproduced and, as such, provide a rich visual glimpse into his working methods. In his reflection piece ‘Robert Wilson’s Photographic Elements of Strindberg's A Dream Play’, visual culture scholar Jonathan Schroeder discusses the visual strategies of Wilson’s production, and how these connect to American photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston, whose images provided inspiration for Wilson’s staging. Art historian Astrid von Rosen’s case study of an important (though often overlooked) early-European-expressionist production, ‘Dream-Playing the Archive: Exploring the 1915–18 Düsseldorf Production of A Dream Play’, offers a rich, archival analysis of an early production of A Dream Play, staged by Knut Ström. In combing the archives to reveal how the staging of the play evolved, she pays close attention

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to costumes, props and stage design. She demonstrates how these visual and multimodal traces can be considered key sources for a better, empirically anchored and more diversified understanding of A Dream Play, as well as an increased awareness of how Strindberg’s work makes powerful connections to contemporary existence and social transitions. As part of an interdisciplinary project centred at the University of Gothenburg, von Rosen and her colleagues created a digital research archive that entailed an enormous, creative effort to discover new materials, create drawings of sketches that could not be photographed, and digitizing and ordering the material. She writes passionately that such reassembling of materials from elusive, often non-written histories can be framed as a political act of resistance against the fragmentation caused by destruction and war, ordinary carelessness and institutional stinginess that interfere with accessible and democratic archives. In their chapter ‘Anticipations of the Digital: Dispersing Strindberg’, philosophers Berndt Clavier and Timothy Engström address the relationship and tension between literary modernism, the philosophy of technology, and visual cultures in ways that frame an analysis of Strindberg and what the authors describe as his ‘pictorial urge’. Discussing literary works such as By the Open Sea (I havsbandet) (1890) and Among French Peasants (Bland franska bönder) (1889), the chapter addresses multiple emerging optical technologies of Strindberg’s period – in photography, science and visualized cognition of various kinds – and how these infiltrate and reshape the author’s relationship to traditional categories of genre, authorship and identity. Clavier and Engström furthermore query the kinds of technological and authorial agencies intertwined in the production of Strindberg’s artefacts, as well as in the production of the many Strindbergs encountered through the process of generating those artefacts. In so doing, the chapter points forward to a twenty-first-century conception of subjectivities digitally construed – dispersed, networked, connected and isolated. Thereby, they argue, Strindberg embraces modernity’s insistence on sight and visuality, yet challenges its promise of a consolidated, unified self. In ‘Picturing Miss Julie: Gender and Visuality in Performance Practice’, director and performance scholar Kristina Hagström-Ståhl examines a production of Miss Julie that relates to many of the questions that Clavier and Engström raise in relation to optical technologies and philosophies of perception. She draws upon fellow contributor Rokem to reframe Strindberg’s Miss Julie, which she directed in 2012 at a regional theatre in Sweden as part of the Strindberg centennial. She highlights Strindberg’s profound preoccupation with gendered relations and subjectivity as complementing his theatrical use of photographic and cinematographic techniques and metaphors, the expressionism found within Strindberg’s realism; and the creation of character via subjective vision and psychological projection. Through both her analysis and her direction, she shows how a focus on visuality offers new possibilities for the scenic, spatial and embodied interpretation of Strindberg. Two short and related reflection pieces follow on from Hagström-Ståhl’s selfreflexive analysis of Miss Julie, as these two reflection pieces address similar modalities of visual culture. In the first, ‘Strindberg’s Self-Portraits in Context’, photography curator Lisa Hostetler of the George Eastman Museum discusses the emergence

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of visual celebrity culture at the end of the nineteenth century, how this shaped the ways in which public figures such as Strindberg presented themselves to broad audiences. Hostetler traces connections between popular-culture phenomena such as easily reproducible cartes de visite and cabinet cards, which introduced a flexible and malleable sense of self through portraiture to mass audiences. As scholar Linda Haverty Rugg has discussed at length in her book Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography (Rugg 1997), Strindberg perceived his own persona and subjectivity as bifurcated, shifting and unstable, just as practices of photography in popular culture supported such a notion, Hostetler argues. In his reflection piece ‘My Strindberg “Selfies’ ”, Pierre Guillet de Monthoux presents a personal history that connects with the perspectives of Hostetler and Rugg, by addressing his experience of living with Strindberg’s photographs of himself – given to Guillet de Monthoux’s grandfather by Strindberg – in his own domestic space. Guillet de Monthoux, like Hostetler, links the practices of late-nineteenth-century self-portraiture to twenty-first-century mass distribution of ‘selfies’ through digital and social networks. Theatre scholar Freddie Rokem’s chapter ‘Scenography, Photography, Cinematography: Strindberg and the Technologies of Visual Representation’ addresses the impact of technological innovations for visual representation in Strindberg’s theatrical work. He focuses on how new visual media affected the Strindbergian stage as the space where actors appear, representing dramatic characters, influenced by his interest in emerging forms of cinematography. He offers insightful readings of two of Strindberg’s naturalistic dramas, The Father, from 1887, and Miss Julie, from the following year, drawing upon intensive archival research on productions in Strindberg’s time as well as film adaptations made just before his death. He discusses how Strindberg contributed to the transformation of what had previously been conceptualized as stage-decoration transformed into scenography, as a form of writing rather than just an adornment. He argues that Strindberg not only understood how central new forms of visual expression – such as the projection of moving images – would be for the future of the visual arts, including the theatre, but that he also presciently sensed that these forms would continue to be employed in interaction with traditional forms of visual expression such as painting and sculpture. An interview with celebrated actress and director Liv Ullmann forms the concluding piece in the book, as she addresses the impetus for her film adaptation of Miss Julie (2014). She illuminates the ways in which she seeks to bring the questions asked by Strindberg’s play into the present, while maintaining a period set and historical framework. Ullmann notably discusses the benefits of ‘filmed theatre’, since cinematography, Ullmann argues, allows one to enter into the mind of the characters. This interview represents one of many varied approaches to visual culture offered by August Strindberg and Visual Culture, as the book expands critical image studies to include contributions of a major modernist playwright and innovative artist working across media, in photography, painting, sculpture and set design. In so doing, the book integrates practices of visual-culture studies and media technology and theory, philosophy of the image, theatre, art history and cinema studies. As a whole, August Strindberg and Visual Culture makes a case for Strindberg’s under-explored significance

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for the development of twentieth-century and twenty-first-century aesthetic theories and what we term ‘optical modernity’ through its contributions from renowned international scholars, writers and artists representing a wide range of disciplines, methodologies and approaches.

Works Cited Benjamin, W. ([1936] 1968), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in W. Benjamin and H. Arendt (eds), Illuminations, trans. H. Zorn, 217–251, New York: Schocken Books. Campbell, N. and Schroeder, J. (2011), ‘Visual Culture’, in D. Southerton (ed.), Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, 1506–1510, London: Sage. Carlson, H. (1996), Out of Inferno: Strindberg’s Reawakening as an Artist, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Feuk, D. (1991), August Strindberg: Inferno Painting Pictures of Paradise, Copenhagen: Bløndal. Feuk, D. (1993), Ljusbilder – Svartkonster: fotografiska experiment of August Strindberg, Exhibition Catalogue, trans. B. Danielsson, Stockholm: Stenströms Galleri och Café. Feuk, D. (2001), ‘Dreaming Dematerialized: On August Strindberg’s Photographic Experiments’, in P. Hedström (ed.), Strindberg: Painter and Photographer, 117–130, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press in Association with the National Museum, Stockholm. Hedström, P. (2001), ‘Strindberg as a Pictorial Artist’, in P. Hedström (ed.), Strindberg: Painter and Photographer, 9–101, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Hemmingsson, P. (1963), Strindberg som Fotograf, Stockholm: Bonniers. Hockenjos, V. (2007), ‘Picturing Dissolving Views: August Strindberg and the Visual Media of his Age’, PhD diss., Stockholm Universitet, Stockholm. Lalander, A. (1999), ‘Målaren’, in M. Brundin (ed.), August Strindberg: Diktare och Mångfrestare, 90–98, Stockholm: Kungliga Biblioteket. Lalander, F., (ed.) (1992), August Strindberg – Karl Kylberg – Max Book, Exhibition Catalogue, Stockholm: Liljevalchs Konsthall. Mirzoeff, N. (2002), ‘The Subject of Visual Culture’, in N. Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edn, pp. 3–23, London and New York: Routledge. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994), Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1995), ‘Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture’, Art Bulletin, 77 (December): 540–541. Rugg, L. H. (1997), Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Söderström, G. (1972), Strindberg och Bildkonsten, Stockholm: Forum. Söderström, G. (1991), ‘Strindberg, Målaren’, in B. Springfeldt and G. Söderström (eds), August Strindberg: ‘Underlandet’, 7–19, Malmö: Malmö Konsthall. Strindberg, A. (1977), Ockulta Dagboken. Facsimile Edition, Stockholm: Gidlunds. Strindberg, A. (1981), Strindberg: Five Plays, trans. H. G. Carlson, Berkeley : University of California Press.

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Strindberg, A. (2006a), ‘A Glance into Space’, in M. Robinson (ed.), August Strindberg: Selected Essays, 165–166, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strindberg, A. (2006b), ‘The New Arts! or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation’, in M. Robinson (ed.), August Strindberg: Selected Essays, 122–134, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strindberg, A. (2006c), ‘On the Action of Light in Photography’, in M. Robinson (ed.), August Strindberg: Selected Essays, 160–164, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strindberg, A. (2010), ‘Jardin des Plantes’, in P. Stam and E. Bladh (eds), Samlade Verk, Vol. 35, Naturvetenskapliga Skrifter I, Stockholm: Norstedts. Sturken, M. and Cartwright, L. (2009), Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Szalczer, E. (1998), ‘Spectator, Spectacle, and the Modern Self: The Cosmic Theatre of Strindberg’s Prose Works’, Scandinavica, 37: 5–44. Szalczer, E. (2001), ‘Nature’s Dream Play: Modes of Vision and August Strindberg’s ReDefinition of the Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 53 (1): 33–52.

Suggestions for Additional Reading Ashby, C. (2017), Modernism in Scandinavia: Art, Architecture and Design, London: Bloomsbury. Balzamo, E. and Briens, S. (eds) (2012), Strindberg et la Ville/The Cities of Strindberg. Deshima, vol. Horsérie 2, No. 2. Birnbaum, D. (1999), ‘Robert Wilson: Stadsteatern, Stockholm’, Artforum, 37 (6): 92. Brain, R. M. (1992), ‘How Edvard Munch and August Strindberg Contracted Protoplasmania: Memory, Synesthesia, and the Vibratory Organism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 35 (1): 7–38. Brecht, S. (1982), Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson, London: Bloomsbury. Engellau-Gullander, C. (ed.) (1994), August Strindberg som Målare och Kritiker, Stockholm: Nationalmuseum. Fraser, C. (1994), Ensam och Allén, Stockholm: Svenska Humanistiska Förbundet. Granath, O. (2005), August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer, London: Tate Museum. Hedström, Per. (ed.) (2001), Strindberg: Painter and Photographer, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hockenjos, V. (2002), ‘Strindberg and the Sciopticon’, in E. Hedling and U. B. Lageroth (eds), Cultural Functions of Intermedial Exploration, 103–112, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hockenjos, V. (2003), ‘Time and Place Do Exist. Strindberg and Visual Media’, Performing Arts Journal, 25: 51–63. Holmberg, A. (2005), The Theatre of Robert Wilson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holzapfel, A. (2014), Art, Vision, and Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama: Acts of Seeing, New York: Routledge. Houe, P., Rossel, S. H. and Stockenström, G. (eds) (2002), August Strindberg and the Other: New Critical Approaches, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Meidal, B. and Wanselius, B. (2013), The Worlds of August Strindberg, Stockholm: Max Ström.

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Meyer, C. (ed.) (2008), Strindberg, Schönberg, Munch. Nordic Modernism in Schönberg’s Vienna Around 1900, Vienna: Arnold Schönberg Center. Mirzoeff, N. (2009), Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd edn, New York: Routledge. Moi, T. (2006), Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press. Morehead, A. (2017), Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Petri, G. (1999), Der Bildprocess bei August Strindberg, Köln: Seltmann Hein Verlag, 1999. Renner, E. (1988), ‘August Strindberg’s Photographic Transformation’, Pinhole Journal, 4 (1): 12–18. Robinson, M. (1988), ‘New Arts, New Worlds’, in Studies in Strindberg, 145–167, Norwich: Norvik Press. Robinson, M. (1991), Strindberg and Genre, Norwich: Norvik Press. Rokem, F. (2004), Strindberg’s Secret Codes, Norwich: Norvik Press. Schmidt, T. M. (ed.) (1972), Strindbergs Måleri, Malmö: Allhems. Schroeder, J. E. (2002), Visual Consumption, New York: Routledge. Stenport, A. W. (2010), Locating August Strindberg’s Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, Setting, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Stenport, A. W. (ed.) (2012), The International Strindberg: New Critical Perspectives, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Söderberg, R. (1989), Edvard Munch/August Strindberg: Fotografi som Verktyg och Experiment, Stockholm: Alfabeta. Söderström, G. (2017), Strindbergs Måleri, Stockholm: Bokförlaget Langenskiöld. Szalczer, E. (2001a), ‘Growing Castles’, in G. Rossholm, B. S. Sjönell and B. Westin (eds), Strindberg and Fiction, ‘Stockholm Studies in Literary History, Criticism and Theory’, series no.1, 257–274, Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International. Szalczer, E. (2001b), ‘Nature’s Dream Play: Modes of Vision and August Strindberg’s ReDefinition of the Theatre’, Theatre Journal, Special Issue on Theatre and Visual Culture, 33–52. Szalczer, E. (2003), ‘Strindberg & The Visual Arts’, Journal of Performance and Art, 25 (3): 42–50. Szalczer, E. (2009), ‘Performing Theatre History: The Case of Strindberg’s Modernity’, in J. Roach (ed.), Changing the Subject: Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies 1959–2009, 28–47, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Szalczer, E. (2012), ‘The City as Stage’, Deshima, Special Issue: Strindberg et la Ville/The Cities of Strindberg, hors série 2, 147–158. Varnedoe, K. (1988), Northern Light: Nordic Art at the Turn of the Century, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Von Rosen, A. (ed.) (2016), Dream-Playing across Borders: Accessing the Non-texts of Strindberg’s A Dream Play in Düsseldorf 1915–18 and Beyond, Göteborg: Makadam. Weinstein, A. (2008). Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art, from Ibsen to Bergman, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

2

Hands, Dissection and Embodied Seeing: Strindberg and Munch Allison Morehead, Queen’s University, Canada

Knowledge of the world demands a kind of tactile flair.

(Focillon 1989: 162)

August Strindberg’s quasi-autobiographical novel Inferno (1897), a dramatized firstperson account of neurosis, paranoia and obsession, notoriously begins with hands. The narrator’s descriptions of his black and bleeding hands, and then of his wrapped, bound and useless hands – the results, he tells the reader, of chemical experiments – give way to his perception of an invisible hand directing events and meting out punishment. As Anna Westerstahl Stenport points out, the hands of Inferno are integral to the book’s structure: embodied and disembodied fragments that link together the text’s fragments and temporal disjunctions (Stenport 2010: 97). But their scarring might be read as marking the act of writing itself, as highlighting, in Linda Haverty Rugg’s words, ‘an anxiety about the body’s absence and an attempt (always frustrated) to fold the body back into writing again’ (Rugg 2002: 20–21). Ranging over texts, photographs, paintings, prints and drawings, this chapter meditates on representations of hands and provocations to touch, not only in the work of Strindberg, but also in that of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. Both Strindberg and Munch often described their practices using the metaphor of dissection, which is literally the plunging of hands into a body in the name of science. Here I consider that metaphor as an invitation to engage in especially embodied forms of seeing linked to the production of knowledge and as a sign of Strindberg’s and Munch’s anxious attempts to reinsert the male body back into the work of art. There is a poignant photograph of the scarred hand belonging to the body that wrote Inferno, the body whose absence is inscribed throughout the text. Probably not long after his hands were treated at Paris’s Hôpital Saint-Louis in early 1895, Strindberg submitted his left hand to being photographed, palm forward, with the lingering scars of his skin ailment still clearly visible (Figure 2.1). The photographer of Strindberg’s hand was one Julien Leclercq, an acolyte of the symbolist poet and

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Figure 2.1 Julien Leclercq, Strindberg’s Hand, 1895. Public domain. Provided courtesy of Nordiska museet, Stockholm. critic Gabriel-Albert Aurier and one of a handful of young male admirers of Paul Gauguin, the symbolist painter who had briefly returned to Paris from the South Pacific in order to manage his business interests and to reassert himself within avantgarde circles.1 In the mid-1890s, Leclercq was best known as an art critic, and later as a promoter of the works of Vincent van Gogh. But at the same time he was also collecting photographs of the hands of well-known figures, many taken by himself, in preparation for the book Le caractère et la main (Character and the Hand), which was published posthumously in 1908. Offering a scientific, physiological basis for chiromancy (Leclercq insisted on the word ‘chirology’) in a text that at times reads as a trophy hunt for celebrity-hand photographs, Leclercq classed Strindberg’s hand as ‘passionate’, alongside that of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and the painter Eugène Carrière. Another painter, James McNeill Whistler, and the poet Paul Verlaine were identified as having ‘brilliant hands’, the chemist Marcellin Berthelot had an ‘intellectual hand’, and the naturalist novelist Émile Zola possessed a ‘practical hand’ (Leclercq 1908: 157, 175, 187, 211). Leclercq interpreted Strindberg’s hand as ‘very curious’, as characteristically passionate but approaching the practical. Strindberg’s hand indexed his ‘concern’, in Leclercq’s words, ‘for science, … truth, and the spirit of method … that his impassioned imagination nevertheless takes beyond science, truth, and methods’ (Leclercq 1908: 195, 197). The hand, ‘harmonious organ par excellence … agile and clever instrument of our flexible intelligence’, in the words of an early-twentieth-century physiologist, carries

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with it an almost overwhelming synecdochal power (Richet 1909: ii). Aristotle likened the soul to the hand, ‘for the hand is the instrument of instruments’ (Aristotle 1993: III, 8, 432a1–2), and elaborated: It is not true to say that man is the most intelligent animal because he possesses hands, but he has hands because he is the most intelligent animal … it is to that animal which has the capacity to acquire the greatest number of arts that nature has given the most useful of instruments, namely the hand. (Aristotle 2001: IV, 10, 687a15–23)

In other words, the hand has traditionally been viewed as the ultimate sign of man as a different and superior kind of animal, an instrument that in its apparent sophistication, multitude of uses, and infinite flexibility – the tool that can make use of any number of other tools – purportedly separates humanity from the rest of the animal world. Such thinking would reach its apogee with Martin Heidegger, who maintained that the hand, singular, was much more than simply an organ that could grasp (since even apes could grasp), but that it ‘occupie[d] … man’s essence’, by which Heidegger tied thinking and speech inextricably to the body (quoted in Derrida 1989: 182). With evolutionary theories, however, came rising concerns about the morphological similarities between human hands and the appendages of other primates. The nineteenth-century French anatomist and anthropologist Paul Broca anxiously emphasized the differences between hands and feet in order to reassert the perfected superiority of the human hand over and against the feet-like front ‘paws’ of other primates (quoted in Brun 1963: 2–3). Strindberg reproduced a drawing of a chimpanzee’s hand in A Blue Book. Noting the similarities with human hands, he asked the same loaded question as Broca: ‘paw or hand?’ (Strindberg 1997: 322). Leclercq’s book of photographs included the hands of orang-utans, chimpanzees and gorillas, reproduced against the same dark background as the hands of men. But, like the hands of women, he relegated these to their own sections, separated from the hands of men grouped together by those admirable ‘human’ characteristics such as passion, brilliance, intellect and practicality. Beyond indexing the hand as a sign of man’s intelligence, capacity for knowledge, character, and even genius, Leclercq’s photograph of Strindberg’s scarred hand also suggests the hand as an intercessor, often the first point of contact between self and other, and thus a site of vulnerability, intimacy and possible contagion. In the latenineteenth century the hand was a frequent site for diagnosing secondary syphilis, a disease that provoked enormous concern within Strindberg’s circles of the 1890s, so much so that Strindberg felt the need to publicly deny that the ailment on his hands that had landed him in the Hôpital Saint-Louis was due to a venereal disease (Le Matin 1895). A 1902 X-ray of the left hand of Edvard Munch, a member of Strindberg’s circles in both Berlin and Paris, further implicates the hand’s role in the potential trauma of intimate contact (Figure 2.2). The X-ray, showing a bullet lodged in the middle finger of Munch’s non-dominant left hand, which he would subsequently refer to as his ‘hand of fate’, was taken after a supposed altercation with a lover and in preparation for an

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Figure 2.2 X-Ray of Edvard Munch’s Hand, 1902. Reproduced by permission of the Munch Museum, Oslo.

operation to remove the foreign body (Plate 2.1). The penetrative view afforded by the new technology of X-rays, which fascinated both Strindberg and Munch, signifies a mode of looking, writing, photographing and painting that we might call dissectionist or vivisectionist.2 The author or artist as heroic anatomist or dissector, a figure incarnated by Leonardo da Vinci, stretches back at least to the Renaissance (Park 1994: 16), but the trope took on new potency in the nineteenth century in view of naturalism’s claims to scientific authority as well as critiques of naturalism tied to the anti-vivisectionist movement.3 Gustave Flaubert, for instance, was figured as an anatomist covered in gore, triumphantly holding up the skewered heart of Madame Bovary (Figure 2.3), an image of the author as reviled vivisector that Strindberg would embrace. Regarding his first series of essays entitled Vivisections, a collection of what he called ‘Psychological Studies’, Strindberg provocatively wrote, ‘my investigation focuses upon living persons. That some of them perish is quite normal with vivisections, when fistular canals are inserted all the way into their intestines’ (Strindberg 1992: 1:229). Strindberg especially viewed his more autobiographical writing as a form of self-dissection, comparing the publication of his multi-volume autobiographical project, including Inferno, to ‘selling one’s corpse to the dissection room’ (Strindberg 1992: 1:210).

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Figure 2.3 J. Lemot, Gustave Flaubert Dissecting Madame Bovary, from Parodie, December 1869. Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek. Reproduced by permission of Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Moreover, Strindberg recognized the potential for trauma in the procedure of separating writing from the body of the writer. In a poem, he likened the heart of a calf he saw hanging in the window of a butcher's shop to an image of a ‘thin-clad little book’ hanging in a book shop, ‘a heart taken out/That dangles there on its hook’, thereby connecting the practice of writing with the author’s own dissection and expressing an implicit longing to return the heart to the body (‘Somnambulistic Nights in Broad Daylight’, quoted in Stenport 2004: 162–163). For his part, Munch linked dissection to his intent to lay bare the modern soul, especially his own: ‘It is important for me’, Munch wrote, ‘to study the various inherited phenomena that form the life and destiny of a human being …. Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied the recesses of the human body and dissected cadavers, I try to dissect souls’ (Munch 1909–11).4 In representing themselves as dissectors, vivisectors and anatomists of the soul – the souls of others as well as their own – both Strindberg and Munch figured their projects as penetrative, invasive and potentially traumatic, but ultimately justified in being directed at the production of a kind of objective, scientific knowledge. The act of dissection embodies the act of seeing in order to know. Before surgical gloves came into widespread use in the last decade of the nineteenth century, dissectors, at great risk to their own health, used their bare hands to cut into a body (Shoja et al. 2013: 154, 158), to penetrate that body, and to keep that body open: acts

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of touch thereby enabling, even framing, a radical, interior view. Strindberg's and Munch’s dissection metaphor not only underlines the writer and artist as analyst intent on ‘the atomization of the individual’ (Rugg 1997: 87), or as concerned with dramatic tropes that signify anti-mimesis (Holzapfel 2008: 330). Dissection also allegorizes a way of seeing and a way of knowing structured by touch, or ‘tactile flair’ in the words of Henri Focillon. Despite the influence of phenomenology on, for instance, readings of the work of Paul Cézanne, art history has tended to privilege and to assert modernist practices as dominated by optical ways of seeing, including various forms of abstraction construed and constructed as disembodied and as eschewing materiality and the haptic for visuality.5 Strindberg’s and Munch’s hands and the various forms of touch invited by their works reveal haptic and more embodied forms of seeing to be at the heart – I am tempted to say 'the beating heart' – of their practices. Hands approach hearts in two often-compared images of Munch and Strindberg, a photograph of Strindberg wearing a top hat and holding a cigarette, one of an unusual series of photographs of himself and his family taken in Gersau, Switzerland in 1886 (Figure 2.4), and Munch’s painted Self-Portrait with Cigarette of 1895 (Figure 2.5).6

Figure 2.4 August Strindberg, Gersau, 1886: ‘He had put on his black frock coat and looked respectable, but happy as well’. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm.

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Figure 2.5 Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait with Cigarette, 1895. Reproduced by permission of the Munch Museum, Oslo.

Strindberg and Munch look directly out of the two images, functioning as both objects and subjects of the gaze; they appear to scrutinize the viewer and implicitly themselves in an intense, discomforting manner. Each holds a cigarette in one hand in the midst of either lowering it or raising it to the lips, the lingering smoke in the images creating a sense of space shared with the viewer. In both cases, only one hand – Strindberg’s non-dominant left, Munch’s dominant right – is visible, held up towards the left side of the body, offering the only representation of skin aside from the face. The connections between the hand, the head and the heart, seats of creativity, intellect and passion, are thus made abundantly clear. In the case of the photograph of Strindberg, the combination of top hat, gloved right hand and ungloved left hand suggests potential intimacy with the viewer.7 The intimations of impropriety are reinforced by the text Strindberg wrote beneath one copy of the photograph, ‘He had put on his black frock coat and looked respectable, but happy as well’, a quote from his novel The Red Room implying that respectability and happiness can only be mutually exclusive.

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In the dramatically lit self-portrait by Munch, the artist’s right hand, his painting hand, is placed at the centre of the image. Rendered in much greater detail compared to his sketchily painted jacket sleeve, it appears detached from the body, but alive, almost its own creature ‘overflowing the frame’, to borrow the words of Jacques Derrida, describing the hands in photographs of Heidegger (Derrida 1989: 169). But like Strindberg, Munch holds not the instrument of his genius, a pen or a paintbrush, but a cigarette, which Patricia Berman has identified as a fin-de-siècle ‘emblem’ of bohemianism, erotic interaction and female sexuality (Berman 1993: 627).8 Both images have been read as their authors’ attempts to portray their own souls, but in conjunction with the prominent hands holding phallic objects, surrogates for pen and paintbrush, near their hearts; they appear to also be intense scrutinizers, bearers of a penetrating masculinist gaze that strikes me as at once threatening and revealing, dissectionist in intent. In both instances, they might as well be holding scalpels; seeing and seeing well – which is to say seeing in the name of knowledge – involves the intimation of touching, penetrating the body, and even death. The image of hand and heart – hand penetrating body to remove heart – figured both by the caricature of Flaubert and in Strindberg’s poem imagining a book to be like a heart dangling on a meat hook, appears often in Munch’s works, for instance in the 1902–03 painting On the Operating Table (Plate 2.1). Laid out like a corpse on a

Figure 2.6 Edvard Munch, Edvard Munch’s Hand, 1878, watercolour and pencil (T2729). Reproduced by permission of the Munch Museum, Oslo.

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dissecting table (Munch would use a similar plunging perspective for his later images of the anatomist Dr Kristian Schreiner in a dissecting room), Munch apparently depicts the operation to remove the bullet from his hand. The central figure’s left hand, not evidently damaged, is curled in a loose fist and placed above his heart, while a large area of bright-red paint, presumably signifying a bloodstain on the white sheets, appears to float on the surface of the work, an amorphous alien form removed from the body – both the body in the work and the body of the work – in order to hover on the surface of the canvas. It is not in the least unusual for an artist to draw, usually at an early stage in their training, their non-dominant hand, as Munch did in 1878 in a delicate pencil-andwatercolour study done when he was around 15 years' old (Figure 2.6) and as Pablo Picasso would do on numerous occasions, beginning as a student (Galassi and McCully 2011: 84). Such hand self-portraits invite the viewer to occupy the position of the artist who has placed his hand, disembodied, even anatomized, resting on the table for the purpose of study. But in Munch’s drawing, the left hand is not really at rest. The index finger flexes in a gesture that seems intentional, signalling that the hand holds the paper on which the right hand draws. This invokes a dialogue between the two hands, which is in turn a dialogue between the hand and the thinking artist and the thinking viewer, both incarnate. In the essay ‘In Praise of Hands’, Focillon wrote: Here, facing me, are these tireless companions who for so many years have served me well, one holding the paper steady, the other peopling the white page with hurried, dark, active little marks. Through his hands man establishes contact with the austerity of thought. They quarry its rough mass. Upon it they impose form, outline, and in the very act of writing, style. (Focillon 1989: 157)

Munch’s modest and thoroughly conventional gesture of drawing his hand nevertheless invokes the kind of embodied seeing and thinking that would remain central to both Munch’s and Strindberg’s practices. In the European traditions of both art and medicine, the hand and the practice of anatomy are frequently intertwined, as in Leonardo’s Studies of the Skeleton, Bones, and Muscles of the Right Hand (c. 1452–1519), in a woodcut portrait of Andreas Vesalius, showing the legendary anatomist presenting the anatomized forearm and hand in order to demonstrate the functioning of the flexor digitarum profundis, the muscle that enables the fingers to be flexed, and most spectacularly in Rembrandt’s celebrated group portrait of 1632, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (Figure 2.7) (Kemp 2000: 25). The central figure of Rembrandt’s painting, Dr Tulp, wields forceps in his right hand to hold up the musculature of the corpse’s forearm, and gestures with his left hand, presumably talking about or even mimicking the complex movements of the hand, whose inner workings have been revealed to his audience and indeed to the beholder of the work (Schupbach 1982; Middelkoop et al. 1998). It is in this spirit of dissecting the hand for a special kind of knowledge not only of the body but also of the human mind that we might see Munch’s lithographic Self-Portrait with a Skeleton Arm, an evocation of death to be sure (Heller 1984: 153), but also a suggestion that

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Figure 2.7 Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632. Mauritshuis Museum, The Hague, the Netherlands.

through the penetrative act of dissection, in seeing through touch, great truths might emerge. The disembodied, skeletal hand at the bottom of Munch’s lithograph stands in for a more-embodied hand and arm that are often included, pushed to the forefront of the image, in portraits and self-portraits of artists, writers and musicians as intellectuals.9 Stéphane Mallarmé was photographed by Nadar in a characteristic pose, sitting at his writing desk, right hand holding a pen above a sheet of paper weighed down by an inkpot, left hand resting on the table near the edge of the paper, as if having paused only briefly to look up from his work to engage the viewer. In a print directly referencing Rembrandt, Henri Matisse portrayed himself in the act of etching his own self-portrait, his enormous hands projecting forward into space as if trying to make contact with the surface of the plate as he scrutinized his own countenance. In such images, the hand is rendered as the body part closest to the viewer, often frozen in the midst of action, holding the pen, the etcher’s stylus, or the instrument about to be played. In his Gersau photographs, which have a stillness about them not often emphasized, Strindberg referenced these familiar topoi of the portrait of the intellectual, but also underlined how performative they were. Sitting at a writing desk, his hand holds a pen hovering not above the paper but touching or nearly touching it (Figure 2.8). The inkpot in the foreground reminds the viewer of how staged the scene is, for a loaded pen held to paper for the length of time needed to complete the exposure would surely have created an ink blot. Likewise, the photograph of Strindberg holding a guitar, right thumb about to pluck a string, mouth partly open as if in the midst of a note,

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Figure 2.8 August Strindberg, Gersau, 1886. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm.

presents a body and its gestures frozen, rather than a snapshot of a moment in time. The photograph of Strindberg at his writing desk with his head down resting on hands runs counter to other photographs in the series. The viewpoint is almost level with the surface of the writing table, producing a ‘portrait’ of the top of the author’s head resting on clasped hands, the body folded to bring head, heart and hands into close proximity, united less in a gesture of introspection and more one of inaction; rather than a moment in time, or a frozen pose, the viewer senses that he could have stayed like that forever, ceasing to ever think or write again. To say that ‘knowledge … demands a kind of tactile flair’ is to recognize the full import of words such as ‘grasping’, which connotes touch and holding as well as the idea of acquiring knowledge, and ‘apprehension’, which derives from the Latin apprehendere, meaning to seize or to grasp (Kemp 2000: 23). Common features of Strindberg’s painting practice, especially between 1892 and 1894, include thickly applied paint, a certain emphatic materiality that begs to be both seen and touched, and an element, often an odd one in the foreground, that, once viewed, the beholder is invited to grasp. The tiny mushroom in the lower right-hand corner of The Solitary Fly-Cap of 1893 (Plate 2.2), which appears to be a beach scene or seascape, begs to be plucked, to be rescued, through touch, from its incongruous setting, likewise the purple loosestrife or the solitary thistle. To grasp these objects, however, is to kill them, just as to grasp or to seek to know the body through dissection or vivisection either follows or brings about death.

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In others of Strindberg’s paintings, the object to be grasped is not a natural object, but a man-made one, the sounding buoy or the broom buoy offering a modicum of stability in the midst of a stormy sea. But these flimsy, seemingly pathetic objects provide little succour in the midst of nature’s sublime power; holding on to the sounding buoy or the broom buoy offers little chance of the viewer being buoyed. One very singular painting, the Palette with Solitary Flower on the Shore (Plate 2.3), combines the natural object to be grasped with the man-made object, in this case the palette that functions as the support for the painting itself, thumb-hole at the top inviting viewers to insert their own digit. Paintings on palettes often act as surrogate self-portraits, virtuoso displays of what might be done with an unorthodox support and with leftover paint. For Strindberg, however, the palette painting links the invisible hand of Inferno, the hole or cavity to be penetrated, and palette scrapings, the accretions that set off his meditations on chance in his 1894 article ‘The New Arts! Or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation’. An embodied form of seeing – seeing as touch – takes on much more penetrative, dissectionist associations in paintings such as Wonderland (see Plate 3.7), Inferno, or even The Avenue, which all invite the viewer into a hole or a passageway. To enter into the logic of these paintings is to engage in a gendered discourse of penetrating and mastering nature, to participate, in the words of Émile Zola, in the ‘penetrating joy … [of] dissecting a being’ (Zola 1991: 141). But in a twist typical of the fin-de-siècle crises in masculinity that modernists such as Strindberg and Munch experienced, if not always recognized, that act of penetration does not, given the abstraction and ambiguity that lie ‘through’ the surface of the works highlighted as mere surface, lead to anything knowable or even discernible. This was one source of the doubt that Maurice MerleauPonty identified as characteristic of, even necessary to, Cézanne’s modernist practice (Merleau-Ponty 1964). And, if we follow the arguments of Anna Chave, this may also be the source of the perilous and shattered space in the cubist works of Picasso, which in their denial of deep, perspectival space, have ‘a subtly emasculating or dephallicizing effect on the male viewer’ that invokes a crisis in male knowledge. ‘If his penetrant member no longer functions as a passkey to the world of knowledge’, Chave writes, ‘with its keyholes newly obstructed, he must prepare to apprehend pictures – and perhaps not pictures alone – in another way’ (Chave 1994: 602). Suspecting that they might not attain the knowledge sought is ultimately the source of the anxiety that I think underlies both Strindberg's and Munch’s self-imposed dissectionist way of seeing. To paraphrase Rugg, if the haptic ways of seeing invoked by hands and the invitation to touch in Strindberg’s and Munch’s visual practices are, at least in part, attempts to fold the male body back into various creative acts, attempts allegorized by the penetrative, invasive act of dissection (and the scarring that act might incur), then the anxiety about the body’s relationship to the creative act is also an anxiety about the body’s relationship to the world, and about knowing both the body and the world as either separate entities or as one and the same. What can be, quite literally, grasped? What is the nature of the body that does that grasping? And how is that body different or discontinuous from what it seeks to grasp? Such questions make an ink drawing by Munch seem to me especially poignant (Figure 2.9). At the top of the sheet lies a body that hovers between being a corpse and

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Figure 2.9 Edvard Munch, Drawing, 1896 (T401). Reproduced by permission of the Munch Museum, Oslo. a skeleton, drawn in a plunging perspective reminiscent of Munch’s position on the operating table and Schreiner’s corpse on the dissecting table. An oversized fly emerges from between the body’s legs leaving behind a trail of dirt or perhaps bodily matter. Below is a long bone, with a fly seated upon it, and below that a skeletal hand delicately holding a flower between the tips of its fingers. One of a number of drawings that Munch did for an unrealized project to illustrate Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Une Charogne’ (‘A Carcass’) from Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil),10 the drawing relates closely to the poem, which describes ‘Nature’ as actively conspiring to return the body to the natural world. The poem describes a body’s decaying as foul, unnatural, and yet ultimately fascinating and memorably multi-sensory. In contrast, the dissectionist mode, plunging one’s hands into a body and taking it apart in the name of knowledge, might in fact be incapable of revealing the mysteries of a body that nature itself can decompose much more spectacularly. Throughout this chapter, I have conflated dissection and vivisection in order to focus on a penetrative and embodied mode of seeing as knowledge production, but also because Strindberg tended to either collapse dissection and vivisection or to

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make an exaggerated distinction between the two, for instance by loudly taking on the mantle of the despised vivisector. It is significant that in 1912 the critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire claimed that an artist such as Picasso was specifically not a vivisector, but rather ‘studies an object the way a surgeon dissects a cadaver’ and, in doing so, produces ‘pure painting’ (quoted in Shiff 2010: 62). Richard Shiff points out that Apollinaire’s metaphor displaces the ‘subject-object’ of the painting (in more common parlance, the subject matter), rendering it dead, so that painting, pure painting, could effectively revivify the corpse. ‘Pure painting’, in Shiff ’s words, ‘was painting inside painting’ (Shiff 2010: 63). Strindberg’s and Munch’s writings, photographs, paintings and drawings were far from ‘pure’, but in invoking the dissectionist metaphor, they expressed a desire to get inside their art, their hands, sometimes scarred but nevertheless their essence as thinking men, leading the way.

Notes 1

Julien Leclercq (1865–1901) was married to the Finnish pianist Fannie Flodin. During their engagement he travelled to Scandinavia and organized a number of art exhibitions abroad. Leclercq wrote a lengthy review of Strindberg’s Le Plaidoyer d’un fou (Leclercq 1895). On the correspondence between Gauguin and Strindberg, see Morehead 2014; Jörngården 2014. 2 On Strindberg as a vivisector, see, among others, Robinson 1996: 4, 230; Rugg 1997: 87; Holzapfel 2008. 3 The term ‘vivisection’ emerges in the nineteenth century specifically to critique the practice. See Rupke 1987: 30. 4 This text was part of a larger, unpublished project eventually called The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. See Woll 1978. Its original title, the Mad Poet’s Diary, may relate to Strindberg, who significantly gave the manuscript of Le Plaidoyer d’un fou to Munch in the 1890s. See Flugsrud 1974. 5 See especially Callen 1995: 126–164; Jones 2005. On the distinction between the optic and the haptic, see Riegl 1985. On the haptic as an undercurrent of twentieth-century art practices, including those of Cézanne and Francis Bacon, see Deleuze 2003. 6 These two images have been compared in Eggum 1989: 60 and in Berman 1993: 631. 7 In the nineteenth century, when calling on a woman, men were expected to keep their hat and gloves on. When they anticipated meeting a male friend, men often wore a glove only on their left hand, expecting to extend their gloveless right hand in greeting. See Beaujot 2012: 36. 8 On the conjunctions of head and hand in Munch’s portrait, and the replacing of a paintbrush by a cigarette, see Eggum 1978: 20; Müller-Westermann 2005: 47; Mørstad 2006: 95. 9 On this ‘hand play’, also characteristic of photographs of Heidegger, see Derrida 1989: 168–169. 10 On this project, see Torjusen 1978: 201–204.

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Works Cited Aristotle (1993), De Anima, trans. D. W. Hamlyn, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Aristotle (2001), On the Parts of Animals, trans. J. G. Lennox, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Beaujot, A. (2012), Victorian Fashion Accessories, London: Berg. Berman, P. G. (1993), ‘Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait with Cigarette: Smoking and the Bohemian Persona,’ The Art Bulletin, 75 (4): 627–646. Brun, J. (1963), La main et l’esprit, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Callen, A. (1995), The Spectacular Body: Science, Method, and Meaning in the Work of Degas, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chave, A. (1994), ‘New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: Gender, Race, and the Origins of Cubism’, The Art Bulletin, 76 (4): 596–611. Deleuze, G. (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. D. W. Smith, London: Continuum. Derrida, J. (1989), ‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand’, trans. J. P. Leavey, Jr, in J. Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, 161–196, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eggum, A. (1978), ‘Munch’s Self-Portraits’, in R. Rosenblum, A. Eggum, R. Heller, T. Nergaard, R. Stang, B. Torjusen and G.Woll (eds), Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, 11–31, Washington: National Gallery of Art. Eggum, A. (1989), Munch and Photography, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Flugsrud, S. (1974), ‘En dåres försvarstal. Et Strindbergsmanuscrift på vandring’, Nordisk Tidskrift, 50 (3): 125–137. Focillon, H. (1989), ‘In Praise of Hands’, in The Life of Forms in Art, trans. S. L. Faison, Jr, 157–186, New York: Zone Books. Galassi, S. G. and McCully, M. (2011), Picasso’s Drawings 1890–1921: Reinventing Tradition, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Heller, R. (1984), Munch: His Life and Work, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holzapfel, A. S. (2008), ‘Strindberg as Vivisector: Physiology, Pathology, and AntiMimesis in The Father and Miss Julie’, Modern Drama, 51 (3): 329–352. Jones, C. A. (2005), Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jörngården, A. (2014), ‘Two Barbarians in Paris: Gauguin and Strindberg’s Gendered Dialogue on Time and Place’, French Studies, 68 (4): 493–509. Kemp, M. (2000), ‘The Handy Worke of the Incomprehensible Creator’, in C. R. Sherman (ed.), Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, 22–27, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Le Matin (1895), ‘À l’Hôpital Saint-Louis’, 14 January. Leclercq, J. (1895), ‘Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, roman d’August Strindberg’, in Revue encyclopédique, February, 43–46, Paris: Au Bureau Central de la Revue Encyclopédique. Leclercq, J. (1908), Le caractère et la main: 30 mains de personnages contemporains, Paris: F. Juven. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964), ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H. L. Dreyfus and P. A. Dreyfus, 9–25, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Middelkoop, N., Enklaar, M. and Van der Ploeg, P. (1998), Rembrandt Under the Scalpel: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp Dissected, The Hague: Mauritshuis.

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Morehead, A. (2014), ‘Understanding and Translating: Gauguin and Strindberg in 1895’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 13 (1): 8. Available online: http://www.19thcartworldwide.org/spring14/morehead-on-gauguin-and-strindberg-in-1895 (accessed 15 May 2018). Müller-Westermann, I. (2005), Munch By Himself, New York: H. N. Abrams. Munch, E. (1909–11), MM T 2734, Sketchbook, Munch Museum, in Edvard Munch’s Writings. Digital Archive, published by the Munch Museum. Available online: http:// www.emunch.no/ (accessed 14 January 2014). Mørstad, E. (2006), ‘Responding to Self-Portrait with Cigarette: A Case History’, in E. Mørstad (ed.), Edvard Munch: An Anthology, 87–120, Oslo: Oslo Academic Press. Park, K. (1994), ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 47 (1): 1–33. Richet, C. (1909), ‘Preface’, to N. Vaschide, Essai sur la psychologie de la main, i–v, Paris: Rivière. Riegl, A. (1985) Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes, Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider. Robinson, M. (1996), ‘Introduction’, to A. Strindberg, Selected Essays, ed. and trans. M. Robinson, 1–22, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rugg, L. H. (1997), Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rugg, L. H. (2002), ‘Writing on the Body: Scars as Metaphor for the Break Between Analog and Digital Representation’, in R. J. Granqvist (ed.), Sensuality and Power in Visual Culture, 19–33, Umeå: Institutionen för moderna språk. Rupke, N. A. (ed.) (1987), Vivisection in Historical Perspective, London: Croom Helm. Schupbach, W. (1982), The Paradox of Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy of Dr. Tulp’, London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. Shiff, R. (2010), ‘Dream of Abstraction’, in T. Maloon (ed.), Paths to Abstraction 1867– 1917, 53–69, Sydney : Art Gallery of New South Wales. Shoja, M. M., Benninger, B., Agutter, P., Loukas, M. and Tubbs, R. S. (2013), ‘A Historical Perspective: Infection from Cadaveric Dissection from the 18th to 20th Centuries’, Clinical Anatomy, 26 (2): 154–160. Stenport, A. W. (2004), ‘Making Space: Stockholm, Paris, and the Urban Prose of Strindberg and His Contemporaries’, PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley. Stenport, A. W. (2010), Locating August Strindberg’s Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Setting, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Strindberg, A. (1992), Strindberg’s Letters, 2 vols, ed. and trans. M. Robinson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strindberg, A. (1997), En blå bok I. Vol. 65 of Samlade Verk, ed. G. Ollén, Stockholm: Norstedts. Torjusen, B. (1978), ‘The Mirror’, in Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, 184–212, Washington DC: National Gallery of Art. Woll, G. (1978), ‘The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil’, in Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, 228–247, Washington DC: National Gallery of Art. Zola, É. (1991), ‘Édouard Manet’, in J.-P. Leduc-Adine (ed.), Écrits sur l’art, 141–169, Paris: Gallimard.

3

‘May the Force Be With You’: Strindberg’s Paintings Arnold Weinstein, Brown University, USA

August Strindberg would have had no trouble in understanding the famous exhortation of Obi-Wan Kenobe, but he might have added: my experiments were in advance of your science fiction, and I have tracked the Force (or the Powers (‘Makterna’), as he regularly called it) in virtually every realm: in my life, in my plays (from the early Naturalist to the late Chamber works), in my autobiographical writing, in my forays into science and alchemy, and (central to our purposes) in my paintings. Despite the received view that Strindberg painted only when he was experiencing a dry spell as a writer,1 I want to argue that those paintings offer the supreme representation of the Powers, beyond all anthropocentric trappings, going through their sovereign sport. Further, the paintings give testimony to the twenty-first-century Strindberg, the man who understood the modalities and conventions of the visual arts – painting but also photography – as constructs that could be examined, rethought, and even deconstructed. But we cannot take the measure of the paintings nor recognize them for the stunning breakthrough they depict, until we widen our optic and consider how central and despotic the Force (as concept) is to Strindberg’s entire life and writing, from beginning to end. Strindberg’s world is charged, and all of us are carriers. McLuhan would later argue that the development of the media – from phonograph to telephone and (what didn’t yet exist) the internet – was best understood as extensions of the human central nervous system, as perception-and-reach multipliers. Hence, perceptual organs are Strindberg’s outposts, and he bids to open them: the Blind Man in A Dream Play (1901) cannot see, but he can hear the suffering of his son at sea; the Student in The Ghost Sonata (1908), a ‘Sunday child’, sees what others cannot. In The Stronger (1889), he does an experiment in speech and silence – two characters on stage: one speaks, the other doesn’t; and we experience the unremitting build-up of sheer energy between this duo, yielding what one would have to call a duet. He writes, in one of his letters, about hearing the sounds in his pillow: sounds created long ago by the crickets who sang in the fields of flax that became the cloth on which he now lays his head. How does one possibly take the measure of such an orchestral scheme? The seemingly discrete world of objects (such as a pillow) is a magic, pulsating site still resonating with insect ‘songs of years past’.

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One of his strongest and instructive notations in A Dream Play is, I believe, the espying of a ‘floating windpipe’ in the ocean.2 A floating windpipe: not a bad figure for Strindberg himself as the ‘organ’ ensconced in the elements. In that play, the winds sing their mournful plaint, telling us of sickrooms and battlefields and nurseries, reminding us, as Shakespeare did, that we enter the world screaming; waves also speak in multiple tongues: green, wet, salt, fire, ‘quenching, burning/cleansing, bathing, breeding, bearing’. Those winds and waves are to reappear – to be made visible in all their power – in the paintings, and it seems fair to say that Strindberg-the-windpipe gives them utterance, speaks them through paint itself. The Force can be especially highlighted via media breakthroughs, and Strindberg was fascinated by the engendering force of technology. In The Father he tells us that the gossips telefonerar the news of his family to the outside world, and the signal difference between microscopes and spectroscopes comes in for major dramatic emphasis, testifying to an abiding fascination with the teeming life that can be seen, beyond the reach of the unaided eyes; in Miss Julie we never see the old Count, but we have the implements of his power: the bell that announces his wishes, the speaking tube that delivers his orders, even the old man’s boots that cumulatively broadcast the hierarchy of power so forcefully that Jean sends Julie to her death under their sway. Often enough Strindberg’s discourse of power displays its debts to the Spiritist Zeitgeist that occupied the minds of many late-nineteenth-century writers and artists. This was a time of hypnosis, table rapping, mediums, mesmerism, and other assorted last-ditch efforts to assert the primacy of spirit behind the empirical and material schemes that seemed alone to matter for the burgeoning scientific world view. ‘Le retour de l’âme’ (the return of the soul) is how he expressed it to Frieda, enlisting a venerable Old World noun. But do not be deceived; he also saw his cultural moment as modern: ‘A nous, hommes de vapeur, d’électricité, de poste par poste, de téléphone un volume à trois Francs cinquante, qui se lise entre Paris et Versailles; à nous le langage de téléphone; bref, net, correct!’ (Ours, men of steam, electricity, mail delivery, telephone, three francs fifty per volume, can be read between Paris and Versailles, ours the language of the telephone; short, clear, correct!).3 And it is essential to recognize the role of visuality in all this. Baudelaire praised Constantin Guys as ‘painter of modern life’, and Walter Benjamin has emphasized the ‘frisson nouveau’ found in Baudelaire’s own ‘Tableaux Parisiens’ (Parisian Tableaux). Strindberg’s modernity, albeit not directly urban in the sense of Baudelaire or Benjamin, points further still: towards a view of the world as flowing currents, as energy systems, as a Force that can go by many names and be ‘packaged’ in many forms. But his signature note is that these forms are fluid and malleable; and that they interpenetrate. He is happy to describe the sea in terms only a chemist would use: ‘Havet är grönt,/ så dunkelt absintgrönt;/ det är bittert som chlormagnesium/ och saltare än chlornatrium;/ det är kyskt som jodkalium’ (The sea is green,/ so dark absinthe-green;/ it is as bitter as chlor magnesium/ and saltier than chlor natrium;/ it is as chaste as iodine potassium). He would have admired Einstein’s formula ‘E=mc2’, and he would, I believe, have understood the poaching and hacking and sheer explosions that can take place when one raids these corralled precincts. There too, he might have thought: I got there first, my

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view of energy is an affair of breaking through barriers, enclosures, frames and borders in order to liberate the indwelling power. But, he would also have grasped the tragic human implications of such incursions and emancipations, and he would have sensed the prophecy of Oppenheimer’s remark at the sight of the mushroom cloud that followed upon the breaking through of the atom’s armature: ‘I am death, the destroyer of worlds’. We are not far from mushroom clouds (and mushrooms) in his strongest paintings. ‘May the force be with you’ is an exhortation, a wish, and it therefore gives pause. It tells us that the force may not be with us, and it hints at something considerably worse still: the force may be against us. August Strindberg understood that human ingenuity just might prevail over larger-than-life forces, just might yoke them into one’s own design. After all, Prometheus was not offered fire; he had to steal it. Strindberg’s Inspector Borg is no less wily and tactical in his dealings with the Force, as we see in By the Open Sea: Don’t you see how you grow instead of shrink when you outwit the wind and force it to take you to the right, when it wants to take you to the left? Don’t you feel what great power there is in you when you ride a wave which wants to press you down to the depths with its weight of thousands of pounds? (Strindberg 1984: 81)

Borg’s tone is that of a surfer-engineer – it is not for nothing that folks today ‘surf the Net’ – and his jousting with wind and waves already points, materially, to the canvases to come. (The Promethean programme is not cashiered merely because Borg goes under.) Proust was to use, around 1920, a similar conceit – and apply it directly to art – when he explained the ‘boosting’ power of Bergotte’s writing in terms of a motor that succeeds in intersecting the vertical with the horizontal, a motor that is ‘capable of converting its speed to lifting power’. On this head, art – wrongly thought of as static and gathered – is combustible, is about ‘busting’. Decades earlier, however, Strindberg had expressed the same view of art as power system that courses into and alters lives. Consider this stanza from his poem, ‘Gatubilder’ (Street Scenes) (1902): Dark is the hill, dark the house – but darkest is its cellar – subterranean, windowless – the staircase serves as door and window – and down there deepest in the darkness stands a humming dynamo, sparks flying around its wheels: black and horrifying, hidden, it grinds light for the entire neighbourhood. (Mörk är backen, mörkt är huset – mörkast dock dess källarvåning – underjordisk, inga gluggar – källarhalsen är båd’ dörr och fönster –

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August Strindberg and Visual Culture och därnere längst i mörkret syns en dynamo som surrar, så det gnistrar omkring hjulen: svart och hemsk, i det fördolda, mal han ljus åt hela trakten.)

This piece has a Gothic colouration – dark cellar, underground, black machine, sparks – but ‘humming dynamo’ (‘en dynamo som surrar’) testifies to a different power regime altogether, far beyond spooks and goblins. What is especially striking is how this energy system is put to use: it may be hidden and dark, but it produces light, and it does so for the public at large. I see here, figured as machine, an artistic, indeed spiritual, credo on Strindberg’s part: the more occulted material he cargoes into his work, the more light he produces for society. He is nothing less than a public-utility system. He makes electricity; he makes power for us. Once again we reference Inspector Borg in a moment of exaltation: ‘He felt his ego expand, his brain-cells increase, break through their shells, multiply and form new types of ideas which would one day go forth as thoughts. These would fall into other brain-pans like yeast and, if not before his death then after it, would cause millions to become the forcing-beds for the seeds of his thoughts’. Thought courses through the world like a seminal, life-giving, generative force. And ‘dark’ thoughts – suffering, misery, anguish, fear: the whole host of painful stimuli that might well constitute that humming dynamo in the cellar, in one’s own cellar – are transfigured into light. This is not only a redemptive vision – my suffering seeds the good – but a formula that will find its ultimate working out as light, as paintings that exist solely on a visual, optical plane. We find this same astonishing locution of grinding light at the end of The Father, where the genteel man of science who is doing down for the count tells us what it feels like when the inner landscape becomes toxic and revolts, doing you in: ‘Now there are only shadows, hiding in bushes and sticking out their heads to laugh. It’s like grappling with thin air, fighting with blank cartridges. A painful truth would have been a challenge, rousing body and soul to action, but now … my thoughts dissolve into mist, and my brain grinds emptiness until it catches fire’. Grinding (agrarian) becomes combustible, births light. Strindberg is defining the human mind in terms of neural energy, and in such a scheme anguish and pain become productive; Aristotle’s view of catharsis was already deeply physiological and purgative, but Strindberg has reconceived tragedy as fissile, as fire produced by grinding. The humming dynamo and the brain that grinds emptiness and sends its cells into the world like yeast figure forth a delivery system that issues the suffering artist out into the world, reveals his Cross to be redemptive and light-making: a familiar paradigm at home in Christian doctrine. (Is it a stretch to claim that this volume on Strindberg, more than a century after his death, bears out the prophetic claims put forth by Borg: Strindberg has indeed ‘gotten into our brain pans’, and he’s there to stay?) We must ponder the inherent violence in the word ‘grinding’, for it signifies the crushing of a husk or shell in order to open it up and release or liberate its seed, its creative power. The walls of grain, but also the walls of psyche and self, including the

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notional and generic walls that separate spirit and matter, sky and water, sound and silence, me and you. Walls are systematically breeched to produce power. Strindberg’s discourse is that of a scientist studying the Force, and in this light his breaking-through formula – perfectly captured by the (military) Swedish term used to characterize his literary moment, genombrott – aligns individual undoing with a broader programme of boundary-crossing, now allied to scientific discovery.4 In this sense, our current term ‘intermedial’ seems to me both apt and insufficient, for it seems only aesthetic, and it thereby misses the pathos that seems hard-wired (as it were) in this experimental agenda of a writer who saw transformation everywhere, inwardly as well as outwardly, and who practised alchemy as one of its chief manifestations.5 I am thinking especially of the harrowing episode in Inferno (his tortured account of a breakdown in Paris published in the mid-1890s) when the protagonist enters his room and finds someone already there, a ghostly presence; immediately thereupon the language moves into ‘energese’: he speaks of a humming in his ears, compares it to the noise of a water-mill, then enlists this figure as conduit of his own charged memories, now relived. ‘The Mills of God’ are invoked, and rarely has that agrarian figure been less of a figure, more of a scientific description of the anguished neural traffic that inhabits him, that keeps his past alive and sends it coursing into his mind; but note the changed directionality: nothing here about transmitting light to the neighbourhood; instead, he is ground into powder, into nothing. You don’t ride the waves, they ride you. Throughout Inferno we see what this feels like, as Strindberg is, at his worst moments (and they are many), assaulted by electronic jolts wherever he goes – hotel in Paris, lodging in Dieppe –‘signifying’ for him the Powers or Force that malevolently are coming at him, much the way a boomerang would nail you, and nail you all the harder, the harder you threw it. That is Strindberg’s world. One can enlist the term, conduit, to describe the Strindbergian view of the human within a pulsing world. Its more exalted sibling term, Conductor, is plausibly a posture that Strindberg (the music lover) would have endorsed, since it connotes a giddy measure of control: the control of the inventor, of the dynamo, of the energy source that outputs and delivers. But ‘conductor’ also means a medium that conducts heat, light, sound or electricity. Strindberg fascinates most when he experiences the dreadful reversibility of this model: the current that delivers me to you can go into reverse: it can deliver you to me. Strindberg’s most harrowing work is testimony to just these types of assault and attack, whereby one finds oneself on the receiving end of the current. We may see this as annihilation – Strindberg was to use Swedenborg’s term, ‘vastation’, to characterize it – but we are also free to see this as a ballet, as a dance, as a kinetic depiction of world and self as interconnected, as flowing forces. (Consider Dance of Death (1901) in this light: not as lacerating marital drama, but as rhythmic, paired, performative, ludic.) That is how he understood art. Mimesis as such – posited by Aristotle as the cornerstone of art, but derided by Plato as ever-weaker copy of Truth – does not interest him. The familiar claim that his choice of seascapes and skyscapes as subject matter for his paintings reveals his awareness that he was insufficiently ‘trained’ to depict the human figure seems off the mark to me, whatever its veracity may be. Consider

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the work of the two great contemporary painters he knew well, and whose work he more or less ‘introduced’ to Parisian audiences: Gauguin and Munch. Whether you regard them as Symbolist or Expressionist, it is clear that detailed, nuanced ‘realistic’ depictions of faces and bodies were not their gambit. Strindberg speaks of Gauguin’s work as giving us trees no botanist has ever seen, animals no Cuvier has ever suspected, as well as a physical setting of great majesty (sea, sky, volcano) that no god could ever inhabit. With regard to Munch (whose work he initially compares to music), he goes about tracking currents, especially in his account of Jealousy, which he ‘reads’ as a vicious ‘ménage à trois’ whereby two males ‘connect’ via the vehicle of the woman’s body. (‘Wombs are only birds’ nests in which the cock lays his eggs’, he had earlier written to Lidforss, as well as holding forth on the notion of sans clou, or male semen being passed on, via sexual congress.)6 Now, this is a kinetic transportation system that gets our attention. ‘Fellow-travelling’ – men mating without knowing it, via the woman’s body – gets redefined here, with a vengeance. Whatever labels you want to apply to Strindberg – misogynist, paranoid, deranged – it is crucial to see that he is ever measuring traffic.7 Mutability seems his signature. This is no less true of his paintings, even where the ‘human’ has been removed from the scene. He clearly sensed he had broken new artistic ground, that his type of non-figurative nature paintings differed entirely from the Symbolist work of a Puvis de Chavannes – ‘Ni ha Puvis de Chavannes mytologi-prerafaleit-figursymbolism nu, men naturlandskap – utan figurer-symbolism – har endast jag gjordt!’ (You have Puvis de Chavanne’s mythology-Pre-Raphaelite-figurative symbolism now, but nature landscapes – without figurative symbolism – have I alone created!) – just as it differed from the earlier Impressionists’ work (that he’d written about, for a Swedish audience), or Naturalists’ work (that he’d also discussed in his writing).8 Willy Gretor had promised him a great painterly Parisian breakthrough in the early 1890s – Gretor, crook or not, also invested in Van Gogh and Gauguin – but that scheme was poisoned by Gretor’s suspected scurrilous exploits as purveyor of counterfeit work; many of Strindberg’s best paintings were sent out to friends for storage or as a gift, so that he wasn’t always sure who had what, when he pleaded with them during hard times to sell them for a few crowns each. But he never doubted their worth; it was his timing that was wrong, and I believe he knew it; and he was proven right, as we know today, and I feel that he anticipated that as well: Inspector Borg had prophesied no less. Let me begin with one of the most lovable – how often do you see that word in Strindberg criticism? – paintings: The Lonely Poisonous Mushroom (Plate 3.1). This depiction of a sun-and-cloud-drenched beach setting, with its tiny little cluster of mushrooms in the bottom corner, has an astounding materiality about it. Light pervades everywhere, but instead of the airiness produced by so much Impressionist work, Strindberg’s version is earthbound as much as skybound, and the sand seems almost like clay, conferring on the entire piece a kind of thickness of surface, with little ridges and excrescences and layered markings (obviously put on directly by palette knife), yielding a dense texture, not far from what Dubuffet would later term ‘texturologies’.9 Whereas one half expects thick and heavy sand, the striated, yellowish, cloud-like vapours, dancing through the blue, are no less done in impasto fashion,

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with small gloops of paint, in fanciful swerves and lines, achieving a congealed, almost pock-marked look, yielding something leathery as well as airy. This world is clay-like, viscous and scaly, heavy with matter even if saturated by light. It also sports what is to be Strindberg’s trademark: an insolent horizontal border (established by a thin, razor-like ridge of paint) that slices across the middle of the piece, sovereignly sorting out sky and water in a scheme that refuses to acknowledge their differences, since the whitish-blue tints are rigorously the same above and below the horizon line. The monist Strindberg is on show here, the fellow who believes that the elements are mutable, that our labels and distinctions are possibly whimsical, perhaps even cognitively defensive, given the poaching and secret sharing that stamp our flowing world. Feuk (2001), in dealing with Strindberg as photographer, has espied in the Swede’s work ‘a dreamlike striving for form; matter’s own code’ (129), and he himself has said that nature’s own creative process, cued to transformation and metamorphosis, is his truest target. One suspects that Strindberg the code-seeker would have thrilled at the elegance of the double-helix model advanced by Crick and Watson. Stability, or simply ‘holding on’, comes in for trouble in such a mobile scheme. The depiction of an isolated, often vertical object (either natural or man-made) in an overwhelming, seemingly hostile setting of either water or air or (as here) sand, is a familiar topos in Strindberg’s paintings. In some instances we see a thistle or a sandflower isolated on a beach; in others, often the most dramatic of all, we find a lighthouse or a buoy or what the Swedes call a ‘mare’: these structures, whether they be mounted on a cliff, or emerging from the sea as marker, all look eerily like a combination ladder/gallows, holding their own, measuring, either resisting or moving with the flow. The symbolism (of man-against-the-elements; climbing/falling) is hard to overlook. We see in these pieces a storm-tossed rendition of Nature’s routine workouts, giving gravity (of air, of water) its terrible due, pitting objects everywhere against the Force, showing our natural habitat to be a place of contest and striving: either over an abyss or within a vortex. I think of Wallace Stevens’ line: ‘From this the poem springs/ That we live in a place that is not our own/ and much more nor ourselves/ And hard it is in spite of blazoned days’. The American poet posits our exiled station as the spur to creativity and poetry; the Swedish playwright/painter is more egalitarian, for he knows that we are made of the same stuff, the same flowing currents that our setting is composed of. Human doing? Not likely. One could say that all man-made structures, in this light, are at once ladders and gallows. Back to mushrooms. What is lovable here? The little mushroom family, of course. The Swedish title is ‘Den Ensamma Giftsvampen’, and of course ‘ensam’ translates as both ‘alone’ and ‘lonely’, both of which notions might apply to the piece, but only one of which is subjective. And it matters. This discrete symbolism differs entirely from that of the Symbolists who were his contemporaries; one might term it an environmentalist parable. But positing the family as primal unit gestures towards a view rarely accorded to a man usually considered egomaniacal, and it speaks to the irrepressible domestic, even parental, longings so basic and enduring in Strindberg’s peripatetic, tumultuous life. This is an oneiric family portrait. Further, it matters that this is a toxic mushroom,

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possessed of its own indwelling counter-Force (despite its puny size), able to hold its own and even to protect its own, indeed thriving in an inhospitable world. (This last assertion is unprovable; perhaps mushrooms love their setting; visually, however, they are as isolated and ‘on their own’ as the thistles or buoys or ‘mares’ that dot Strindberg’s paintings.) Sprouting unbidden out of the dense sand, outfitted with its large, red umbrella cap, even if (especially if) tucked away in a corner of the painting, this organic trio offers a testament to grit, loyalty and integrity. Even this minimal ‘last stand’ of the mushroom family looks triumphal when contrasted with Golgatha (Dornach) (1894) (Plate 3.2). We know that the stint in Dornach was a time of rare tranquility for Strindberg and Frieda, yet this depiction of the worked-up and roiling waters is anything but peaceful. Sea and sky come to us as a tumult of black-and-white pulsions, each having its indwelling force, locked in an embrace of swirling currents and pulsing energy. I am uncomfortably aware that my own metaphor, ‘locked in an embrace’, seeks to confer a human meaning on this spectacle of raw power, because one feels, above all, that the elements not only rule supreme, but that they are sui generis, made up of the same vital energy, mocking our customary distinctions (such as sea and sky as somehow bounded and different). I called The Lonely Poisonous Mushroom a family portrait, and I think one can say the same for Golgatha. And the mushroom family has a muscular ‘can-do’ pride and integrity that one cannot easily find in this seascape, with the tiny exception of the three minuscule crosses one discerns in the lower right of the canvas, just perceivable over the edge of the water. When mushrooms become crosses, the stakes change. Strindberg himself has said it might be a three-master in the throes of the sea, or it might indeed be a salute to the faraway and long-ago three crosses that helped shape the originary Christian landscape.10 One is awed by the cogency of the painting’s title. To see the three crosses of Scripture as analogues for the three masts of frail human craft – and to see how puny, alien and toy-like their presence is in this embattled play of the elements – is to gauge the echoing power of Strindberg’s philosophical painting. It is hard to escape the view that these tidings are not good, that the very project of culture – whether it be the survival of Christ’s legacy or the survival of human structures floating on a sea – is up against very great odds. The Force may be against you, not with you. It is a question of interpreting the signs, even of sensing their possible fraudulence. One remembers the moment in A Dream Play when Indra’s Daughter points to a heap of flotsam on the waves, and sees that all that is left of the sunken ships are their figureheads, their names: Justice, Friendship, Golden Peace and Hope. Coming from a writer, this is quite a rebuke to human arrogance: we are awash in beautiful words, but this nominal parade is utterly bogus, without substance, mere debris. But the stilldarker premise here is that language itself lies, can only lie. Recall Hummel’s bleak theory at the ‘ghost dinner’ in The Ghost Sonata: ‘The other day I read that the reason different languages developed was because primitive tribes tried to keep secrets from each other’. Might it be the case that for all his fascination with language – and at the end of his life, Strindberg was involved in mad linguistic explorations – Strindberg sensed all along, independent of the malice of a Hummel or primitive tribe, that

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painting is, along semiotic lines, integral rather than differential, that colours need no dictionaries?11 Three masts or three crosses? We cannot say. But we can say that the question does honour to the painter, that it offers as its last truth the riddle of interpretation, of guesswork in a scheme that we futilely seek to domesticate and to order. My next painting, High Sea (Plate 3.3), dispenses with even the bare hint of salvation or reward or ‘Meaning’. No crosses, no human contours in sight. Just the tempestuous ocean speaking its rude and imperious and sublime ‘language’. We call the worked-up sea ‘high’ and I believe the term suggests something closer to majesty than height alone. This scene of raw power is alien to human pattern, for it knows only rising and falling, tumescence and spending, as long as the winds’ will. What would a windpipe do here? It has been noted that Strindberg experimented with plaster in his paint to produce the peculiar play of light in the piece, for the painting has a roasted, burnt effect (a surprising tonality for water at the pitch of paroxysm), which Strindberg achieved either through a real burner or a lamp. A burning sea: one sees no flames here, nothing quite like the scenes described in the Book of Revelation. Yet we are meant to feel the fire. Here would be the monistic Strindberg with a vengeance, the man who burnt his hands via his alchemical experiments, again showing us how the opposed elements can merge in their timeless dance, tossing our categories and concepts about with the same ease they advertise in their tumultuous play. One remembers that humming dynamo that grinds light for the entire neighbourhood; no imaginable neighbourhood here, no dynamo nor cellar here. Nature’s ‘machinery’ is alien to human purposes, and no programme of social pay-off is conceivable in this scheme. One way of gauging the integrity of High Sea is to contrast it with Munch’s wellknown portrait of Strindberg with its infamous frame that has jagged lightning on one side and a woman’s body on the other, as if to say: here is August Strindberg’s ‘force field’ (Figure 3.1). Electricity and eros are presented as the twin forces that fuel Strindberg, that ‘frame’ his life and work, that even turn him into their ‘thing’, their ‘jouet’ (toy). Much to agree with here. I love Munch’s piece, but want to say that Strindberg’s depiction of the Force itself, properly devoid of any human form, has a majesty that no portrait can rival, for it rejects any anthropomorphic, recuperative strategy whereby the power of psyche and the power of nature are shown to be in cahoots. There is a basic humility in this painting that eschews human presence, that presents a world utterly inhospitable to human design. The only strategy for lassoing such art for human purposes is to step back and realize that it requires human eyes and human craft to make/depict such a scene, and that Strindberg the Conductor – like Strindberg the windpipe – is present even when he is absent. The very act of representation installs the no-longer-visible human source, not on the canvas itself, but in the mind of the viewer. ‘Hög sjö’, Göran Söderström has argued, is as close as Strindberg ever came to fully non-representational art, suggesting that he either could not or would not take the final step away from some form of symbolism or anthropomorphism. I have suggested that the anthropomorphic cannot easily be jettisoned, at least inferentially, even in

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Figure 3.1 Edvard Munch, Portrait of August Strindberg, 1896. Private Collection, reproduced by permission of De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images.

work where the elements alone rule. One further painting – Strindberg’s very richest, in my view – warrants our attention along these lines: Staden (The City), done in 1903, and arguably more staid and less ‘emancipated’ than ‘Hög Sjö’, but with a poetic and philosophic payload beyond anything else he ever did (Plate 3.4). Minimally representational, it sports the now-familiar, still majestic and tumultuous play of light and dark and swirling forces in the grand depiction of the clouds that constitute the great bulk of the painting. And again we find the defining horizontal line that divides the elements, this time bounding a serene strip of water that is but a narrow ribbon of calm, since the ceaseless play of nature animates the bottom part of the painting with its dark, rugged, restless action. One cannot easily determine whether the base of the painting depicts agitated sea or rocky beach – a Strindbergian signature: this undecidabilty, virtually deconstructive in its open-endedness – but unmistakable is the concert of the elements whose sovereign play seems to contain altogether what is in between, as if they could (and are about to) join forces to swallow the world in their wave action.

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What is in between? Posed atop (on half of) the horizontal line separating water from sky are tiny, illuminated structures, as minuscule as the components of a faraway doll's house: diminutive structures of buildings both horizontal and vertical, matchlike in their dimensions, except for the one larger, dominating, luminous dome with surrounding greenery rising over the toy building and conferring its toy authority onto the scene. Jouet. It is a church. It may be Katarina Church in Stockholm; it may be a memory of Venice. It shimmers in this stormy setting, as if it captured all the light the cosmos has to offer, but we the viewers (of the empowered sea and sky) must feel that that amount is not very great. The light of human culture and religion is real, but it is dwarfed by the elemental forces surrounding it. Human civilization – its edifices, its proud structures – is little more than a buoy in the sea. Yes, human doing is real, but it is merely a speck of light in this roiling tempest of cosmic forces. Very little of this magnificent painting is devoted to the city in its middle, yet one is entitled to think of other city representations, where the elements also seem to rule supreme, such as the late depictions of both Venice and London done by Monet, where atmosphere (fog, mist, water, cloud) seems in charge, turns the physical setting almost ghostly and mirage-like. There is an entire discourse of urban malaise in laternineteenth-century art and literature, as intuited by Baudelaire, and then theorized by Benjamin, T. J. Clark and others, and we are urged to see in this large body of work (Manet, the Impressionists, prose poems of Baudelaire, etc.) the makings of a new aesthetic, indeed a new order. Monet’s ‘Gare St Lazare’ may well announce a new muscular urban order – steam-filled setting, empowered monstrous locomotive, massive structures of glass and iron – but Strindberg’s sights seem quasi-planetary, meant to show us our puniness and vanity when measured against the roiling elements. The power of wind and wave, Inspector Borg had said in By the Open Sea, ‘wants to press you down to the depths’, and this painting helps us to see that not only the individual afloat in the current but indeed the entire human project is subjected to this massive elemental threat. The City reminds us of how meagre our resources are, and it is a rebuke to human pride. This painting conveys, in quasi-institutional fashion, the fragility of culture. Our history as a species is dotted with moments when we are obliged to re-sample this bitter medicine. It must have been felt when Vesuvius erupted. The tsunamis of the twenty-first century that ravaged 14 countries in the Indian Ocean in 2004 and hit Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, as well as the more-routine devastation of hurricanes, tornadoes and floods that so often takes pride of place in the evening news, all testify to the invincible power of the unleashed elements. Strindberg has no programme, he is not a precursor of the Environmental movement, but his paintings speak to us of the hubris that stamps our posture, our preconceptions, our complacency, in a world we did not make and cannot control. Not all of Strindberg’s paintings are sound and fury. ‘Vinden vilar, viken ligger som en spegel’ (The wind rests, the bay lies like a mirror), as he says in one of his loveliest poems of nature in its serene phase. Yet, there is nothing of a Ruysdael or tranquil ‘landscaper’ in him.12 Even that quiet poem just cited, ‘Lördags kväll’ (Saturday night), closes on a note of remembered threat: ‘men i stranden ännu havet gormar;/ det är bara dyningar från veckans stormar’ (but on the beach the sea still rumbles;/ it’s just

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the swells of the week’s storms). Nothing is entirely still in his best paintings, as if the Force were showing us only a more benign face. Some pieces, such as ‘Översvämning vid Donau’ (Flooding of the Danube) and ‘Den Grönskande Ö’ (The Greening Island), are exquisitely poised diptychs marrying water, light, sky and vegetation in dizzying, fairytale fashion, yielding a world that seems mirror-like, as each realm reflects, balances and plays with the other. Nature comes across as fertile and profuse yet orderly in her abundance, committed to emerging forms and flowing currents, so that the solid and the liquid and the airy, stamped by the same impasto technique, each acquire a thick painterly rugged texture. The Danube in Flood is given to us as Revelation, with the central green growth emerging on the order of a Creation-myth, at once anchored and soaring, holding its own against the grainy, pocked surfaces both below and above (Plate 3.5). The Greening Island is more ethereal, as if wafted from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or better still, the magic site of The Tempest, under Ariel’s jurisdiction, with no Caliban on the premises (Plate 3.6). Strindberg-as-Prospero rules over this kingdom, dispensing air, water, rock, plant to its proper place, and the bright yellow-and-white sky bestows a kind of grace upon the scene, descending through the dense, green growth onto the bed of rock that then yields to the light-inflected water, so that light everywhere works as frame, as guarantor. Light as frame, as guarantor. Remember the humming dynamo: it grinds light for the entire neighbourhood. But sunlight is also photosynthesis: nature’s own energy factory; and light is also the very medium of painting, more even than paint itself, for it is at the root of visuality, of the very modus operandi that underwrites ocular perception. The masterpiece along these lines is Underlandet, translatable both as ‘Underworld’ or ‘Land of Wonders’, painted in Dornach in 1894 (Plate 3.7). It has the shape of a wreath, of a thickly interwoven natural setting that encircles a luminous ‘hole’ in the centre. To understand the genesis of this painting, we possess a rare document: ‘Des arts nouveaux: ou Le Hasard dans la production artistique’ (The new arts: or the role of Chance in artistic production), written by Strindberg in (rough) French and published in Paris in La Revue des Revues in late 1894, spelling out his strikingly modern theory of artistic creation, and enlisting this painting as prime exhibit. Strindberg’s theory of production centralizes the role of chance and even free association – a prescient forerunner of ‘automatic writing’ so dear to the Surrealists a generation later – and he is as drawn to the vagaries of interpretation as he is to creation. No less interestingly, he even foreshadows what Roland Barthes was, some 80 years later, to term ‘le plaisir du texte’ (the pleasure of the text), in claiming that ‘la fantaisie en mouvement rien n’est plus agréable’ (nothing is more pleasurable than fantasy in motion), and that the end result is ‘l’art naturel, ou l’artiste travail [le] comme la nature capricieuse et sans but déterminé’ (natural art where the artist works as capricious nature does, without a defined goal). What is being stressed here is the autonomy – even the ‘volition’ – of the medium itself. It is hard to overstate the modernity of this position. The ‘narrative’ of the painting’s genesis is charming: he starts with an undetermined motif, a shaded forest interior from which one glimpses the sea at sunset; this design is to be executed by palette knife at high speed, as he posits greenery, brush, treetops on his board, but when he examines his result, he can’t find the sea, but only a luminous

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opening with pink and bluish light, giving him the impression of elves dancing about. And his forest has become a grotto. Back to work: he gets water reflections in, but sees a dash of pink which – as he plays with it – becomes roses framing the pond, roses, nothing but roses. Final remaining patch of work is done by fingers – no knife needed now – and voilà: all done. The essay closes with Strindberg’s brilliant artistic credo: ‘Imiter la nature à peu près; surtout imiter la manière de créer la nature’ (Imitate nature more or less; imitate especially the way of creating nature). One might see the repeated use of ‘imiter’ as evidence of a mimetic imperative, but the logic of the ‘manifesto’ goes the other way: the artist’s job is to embody the creative process, to hallow the immediacy of creation itself, to make art in the same way that nature makes life. This brings me back to light. Freudian critics have not failed to sense in the wreathlike form of Underlandet a kind of womb to which the painter seeks to return; but the Force has a visual logic as well: the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ is a vortex sucking in our own vision, yielding a kind of ocular voyage of sorts as we go through the (resistant) undergrowth and tunnel towards the beckoning light. One thinks of Dante’s first line in The Divine Comedy about being lost in a dark wood. Yet, this painting is an allegory of birth rather than salvation, and it is less the birth of the soul than that of the painting. We are ‘drawn’ to the light (in all senses of the phrase) all our lives. Many are the mysterious paintings that enlist this arbour-like frame with its resultant yearning: ‘Inferno’ and ‘Yellow Fall Painting’ both hallow the same scheme and, even if the colours are radically different, the ‘tug’ – the Force – is the same. Melville had written, in the sublime ‘Whiteness of the Whale’ chapter of Moby Dick, that the dazzlingly coloured spectacle our eye takes in is ‘but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within’ (Melville 1892: 186). Even Strindberg’s darkest Swedenborgian doubts do not quite go that far, but he hallows light as the engendering principle; he had written to Gauguin that the sunlit world of the Tahiti paintings was not dark enough for him (as Northerner), yet his own work is even more dramatically heliotropic. But unlike the pagan primitive Gauguin, Strindberg – passionate amateur and experimental photographer – ‘saw’ light as a scientist might have, as a man who would have found the old debate about wave versus particle theory to be interesting, not merely because they are different, but because they are multiple. Further, he would have enjoyed the mid-twentieth-century cartoon image of a light bulb going on in someone’s mind, when a mental breakthrough happens. All this is to say that some of Strindberg’s most provocative paintings are self-regarding, are about painting. This goes beyond his interest in the haphazard creative process; it extends to the very modality of the painted work. We see this upfront in one of his boldest paintings, Dubbelbild, which, by dint of its superimposing of two radically different pieces – one brilliantly sunlit, depicting either an alpine landscape or a seascape; the other a rendition of roiling grey, yellow and grey smears and yellowish daubs of paint that resemble the storm-tossed work (but could be rock or even lava) – probably stands alone in nineteenth-century pictorial art (Plate 1.1).13 It has been suggested that he may have had in mind Carl Larsson’s double-image cover of By the

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Open Sea, but such a view scants the shockingly ‘surgical’, inquisitive, deconstructive character of this meditation on what art is, and what it is made of. The worked-up grey area serves as a hopelessly skewed asymmetrical framing device for the rest of the picture, defying all conventional compositional strategies, almost to the point of antagonism … or even mockery. The term ‘restless’ is often used to describe Strindberg, but it seems far too tame to me, because what we encounter, over and over, in his work is an intense, no-holds-barred, exploratory imperative, a will to expose – indeed to rupture – the very conventions that undergird and make possible representation itself. I believe that the group of ‘Wave’ paintings he did in 1903, at a time when he is said to have been calmer and less path-breaking as a painter, offer a no-less dramatic but even further-reaching manifestation of this ‘deconstructive’ attitude, and they keep covenant with the central motifs of the critical argument I’ve been making throughout this essay. My example is Vågen IX (Wave IX), which I take to be the most insolent and emancipated work in the series, and perhaps in Strindberg’s entire oeuvre (Plate 3.8). Once again we see the impudent horizontal line that adjudicates the volumes of air, liquid and solid, but these volumes are now altered. The ocean is a massive block of thick inky substance, capped with cavalier white froth, the whole delineated clearly on both ends, rising almost like a submerged land mass out of the water. (There is something astounding in the boundedness of the water, as if it were a huge amorphous chunk of coal, miraculously afloat.) Over it we see layered, down-rushing clouds, viscous-like in the thick paint that gives them swirl and heft, moving from grey and white at the bottom up to darker, almost black, flowing segments on top, coming like unfurling waves. Waves below, waves above. One feels that these clouds are out to crush the sea, to make impact and throttle their ancient adversary. These cloud formations are again done in impasto, with thick gobbets of colour, laid on by palette knife, conveying the feeling of some huge curtain of air and liquid, with the weight of thick velvet, shot through with oil and glints of light, en route to the rising mass of black sea water that seems to offer an embrace. And in between: a sulphurous yellow patch of air, with a circular wave pattern, working as the thinnest-possible buffer, so thin that the canvas itself shows through the paint, as if to advertise: this is paint on cloth, not air/sea/cloud.14 We recall that Staden located human culture in the threatened ‘in between’; this piece puts canvas itself where the City was, and it thereby flaunts, as final guarantor of authenticity and artisanal truth, its own materiality. The painting thus has a rare formal insolence, insisting on its character of artefact, of made thing, yet the radical honesty of the piece heightens its impact, as it stages in wondrous egalitarian fashion the arrayed creative Powers on show: the planet’s, the sky’s, the ocean’s, the painter’s, the paints’. One senses a kind of biblical hush here, reminiscent of the fateful incipit in Genesis when the Lord divides the world up into sea and land, light and dark. Or perhaps a form of Last Judgement where the final truths are revealed. And the artist’s final truth is his pen or paper or his brush or his canvas. He is still further our contemporary. Strindberg could have known nothing about what we today think of as a threatened environment or an energy crisis. Yet, my title,

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‘May the Force be with you’, could be the call-to-arms for today’s environmental scientists bent on using the Force of the sun or the wind or the waves to right, perhaps to save, our planet. I have suggested that there is an apocalyptic dimension to works such as Staden or Golgatha, but the counter-move of salvation, on enlisting the elements for us, is no less present, even if never emphasized as such. More than any writer or artist of his time, he grasped the immensity of the Powers that rule life, both inwardly and outwardly. I said that he sensed the ‘force-multiplier’ potency of technology, but one can unpack this phrase still further: he senses that force itself is a multiple, that it overruns all our lazy categories and distinctions between subject and world, just as it does between land and sea and air. His work as a whole displays the remarkable commerce between these realms. Today’s energy-producing wind farms dotting the landscape may properly be thought of as beneficial variants of those Mills of God about which Strindberg wrote. God’s mills, he understood in his very bones as tragic writer, break through the husk of the human soul, and they do so in order to liberate Power, Force. This is already a nuclear formula, as well as a prelude to breakdown. His written work speaks to us of the existential price paid for such arrangements. Yet, even there, it boots not to ascribe such views to paranoia or the like; I feel that he is surprisingly of our moment, inasmuch as his working view of the human brain is akin to today’s neurological science. It is true that he does not speak of the cerebral cortex or firing synapses that cargo our neural currents, but his picture of the human subject is porous and charged, indeed wired, inserted into a pulsing scheme of considerable grandeur, at once issuing and receiving messages. It is hard not to think of today’s digital culture with its arsenal of messaging, of inputs and outputs, of incessant traffic. But Strindberg’s scheme has none of the seductive – illusory? – control that today’s mania with IT advertises so brazenly, with an app for every conceivable whim, yielding the most ‘plugged-in’ culture ever before seen. Strindberg’s human subjects are also endlessly online – he felt the sexual congress Harriet Bosse had with other men when they were separated, as he had earlier felt electric shocks emanating from those who hated him – but they have precious little authority or control. They can neither turn the machine on or off. They negotiate the Force all their lives. We may well dismiss such views of the subject as delusional, but one is nonetheless struck by Strindberg’s integrity, his bequeathing us a Weltanschauung where one cannot sort out the physical from the metaphysical, the affective from the elemental. Let me go further still: today’s world of humans-with-earplugs endlessly peering into screens, sometimes as small as a watch, strikes me as camouflaged, as innocuousseeming (and deprived of both wonder and threat) only because we have ‘naturalized’ it; Strindberg’s work fascinates because it ‘writes large’ the electrical, charged, flowing world of energy, and its most extreme depictions (which are all too easily pathologized) do us honour: they restore grandeur to our arrangements. But the paintings are different; they dispense with the human figure altogether, and they showcase the greatest spectacle of all: what Power looks like. They offer, in ways that the writings cannot, a portrait of his world: its force fields, its tentacular reality as ecosystem, its roiling grandeur. The human may well be a shell that is pulverizable,

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but it is also a conductor. He is to be understood more as floating windpipe than as Prospero, for he is the conduit for the Powers. We can call him ‘intermedial’ in the sense that he himself is the ‘inter’ figure, the one betwixt and between, the one who experiences and graphs the traffic. Obi-Wan Kenobe spoke to us of faraway galaxies. Strindberg focuses on our own.

Notes 1

See Cecilia Engellau-Gullander (1994), who suggestively claims that painting was for Strindberg ‘en form av terapeutisk verksamhet’, enabling him to ‘skapa ett mentalt andrum’ (33). 2 Hedström 2001 notes a comparable Strindbergian reference in By the Open Sea to one of the whistle buoys seen so often in his paintings, but now figured as ‘an excised lung with its big, black windpipe pointing aslant up into the sky’ (40). 3 From Qu’est-ce que le moderne, cited by Söderström 1972 (261). 4 For an early view of Strindberg as self-exploratory in a quasi-scientific sense, see Spinchorn 1982 for a thoughtful view of the ‘guinea pig’ thesis. 5 Seraller (1994) rightly links Strindberg’s efforts in photography, as well as in painting, to his belief in monism, ascribing transformational energy to matter itself, ‘materiens omgestaltande förmågan’ (56). 6 See Meyer (1985) for this citation of Strindberg’s letter to Lidforss (288). 7 See Olsson (2007) for a rather different view of ‘sex traffic’ in Strindberg. 8 See Söderström (1972) for repeated assertions on Strindberg’s part, in the 1890s, that he had broken new ground in his paintings. 9 See Feuk (2001) for a fascinating discussion of Strindberg’s photographic experiments, especially regarding ‘photograms’ and ‘celestographs’, where the parallels with Dubuffet’s manner are rewardingly brought to bear. Feuk makes ambitious claims for the sheer scientific potential in Strindberg’s experiments, but he also aligns this work with the alchemical forays of the 1890s and the idealist convictions of his Spiritist culture. See, also, Weinstein (2008), especially the discussion of Inferno (111–142). 10 Engellau-Gullander (1994) cites a letter from Strindberg to Littmansson where ‘Golgatha’ is described, along symbolic lines, as follows: ‘En man i blåsande regnkappa står på en strandklippa som besköljes af hafsvågorna; längst ut i horisonten de tre hvitmålade aftacklade masterna af en strandad bark [ …–––] de tre masterna med mersarna tvärs över ser ut som Golgatha, eller tre grafkors och kan vara en trimurti, men det beror på smak’ (25). Strindberg’s suggestion, ‘det beror på smak’, illustrates his enjoyment of ‘esoteric/exoteric’ interpretive possibilities; it is also the case that he used this same motif in To Damascus, when the Lady espies a wrecked ship in the sea, leading the Stranger to whisper to her: ‘Three crosses! What new Golgotha awaits us?’. 11 See Lagercrantz (1979), 444–446, for a brief account of Strindberg’s frenetic search for the ‘Original’ language (which he took to be Hebrew), and the astonishing linguistic theories he speculated upon in his last years. More recently, Freddie Rokem (2002) has written on the significance of ‘secret codes’ in Strindberg’s research in ‘dead languages’ (43–55).

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12 We know that Strindberg long loved Ruysdael’s tranquil landscapes, doubtless finding them parallel to the serenity he sometimes appreciated in Kommendö’s setting. See Serraller (1994) for interesting commentary on Strindberg’s evolving artistic tastes. 13 ‘Lava’ is a suggestive term for Strindberg’s praxis; Serraller (1994) has invoked it as a figure for the psychic energies at work: ‘Ständigt behärskad av en oerhörd psykisk press, som var helt enkelt uttryck för en djup själslig kris, förvandlade Strindberg måleriet till ett slags själsligt lava som koagulerar på duken likt ett destillat, hastigt hopkommet av en alkemist som förtvivlat söker efter de vises sten – en ouppnåelig frälsning’ (66). I would quarrel with ‘helt enkelt’ as ever appropriate for Strindberg, but the brilliance of ‘lava’ and ‘coagulation’ as figures at once material and psychic seems right to me, even if the alchemical claims must be speculative. 14 One recalls Munch’s anguish, when trying to make The Scream fully represent the psychic violence of his nightmare about a blood-filled sky through which nature’s scream coursed; Munch was desperate to somehow convey actual blood on his canvas, whereas all he had at his disposal was paint. Strindberg reverses Munch entirely, for he has understood that the naked canvas has a power that rivals anything paint can do, for it is ‘ground zero’ in art.

Works Cited Engellau-Gullander, C. (1994), ‘Strindberg som Målare’, in August Strindberg som Målare och Kritiker, 21–34, Stockholm: National Museum. Feuk, D. (2001), ‘Dreaming Dematerialized: On August Strindberg’s Photographic Experiments’, in P. Hedström (ed.), Strindberg: Painter and Photographer, 117–130, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press in Association with the National Museum, Stockholm. Hedström, P. (2001), ‘Strindberg as Pictorial Artist – A Survey’, in P. Hedström, D. Feuk, E. Höök, A. Lalander and G. Söderström (eds), Strindberg: Painter and Photographer, 9–102, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lagercrantz, O. (1979), August Strindberg, Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand. Melville, H. (1892), Moby Dick or The White Whale, Boston: The St. Botolph Society. Meyer, M. (1985), Strindberg, New York: Random House. Olsson, U. (2007), ‘Könstrafik’, in Invändningar: Kristiska Artiklar, 231–242, Stockholm: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion. Rokem, F. (2002), ‘Secret Codes: Strindberg and the Dead Languages’, in P. Houe, S. H. Rossel and G. Stockenström (eds), August Strindberg and the Other: New Critical Approaches, 43–55, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Serraller, F. C. (1994), ‘Den Sjunkna Klockan’, in August Strindberg som Målare och Kritiker, 45–70, Stockholm: National Museum. Söderström, G. (1972), Strindberg och Bildkonsten, Stockholm: Forum. Spinchorn, E. (1982), Strindberg as Dramatist, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Strindberg, A. (1972), Qu’est-ce que le Moderne, cited in G. Söderström, Strindberg och Bildkonsten, 261, Borås: Forum. Strindberg, A. (1984), By the Open Sea, trans. M. Sandblach, New York: Penguin. Weinstein, A. (2008), Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art from Ibsen to Bergman, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

4

Strindberg the Environmentalist? Bloodstained Landscapes and the French Tradition of Nature Painting Eszter Szalczer, University at Albany, SUNY, USA In memoriam Harry G. Carlson (1930–2012)

In the late 1990s Strindberg scholar and translator Harry G. Carlson pursued what was intended as a book-length study of forest imagery throughout Strindberg’s texts. His work included research at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris and visits to sites at the Forest of Fontainebleau south-east of Paris. While the onset of illness prevented the completion of the project, in 2012 – the centennial year of Strindberg’s death – Carlson expressed to me his wish to see the research brought up to date and completed as a collaboration. The rapid worsening of his condition, however, would not allow the commencement of the work. As a tribute to the great scholar, I take materials that Carlson left behind, including an incomplete and fragmentary draft (Carlson 1995-2003) with the working title ‘Strindberg and the Enchanted Forest’ as well as research notes and sources (books, articles, clippings and photographs), as my primary inspiration and starting point for the present chapter, utilizing them as a depository of sediments in the great flow of research (see Note on referencing Harry G. Carlson’s research in Works Cited). In seminal studies including Out of Inferno and ‘Strindberg and Visual Imagination’ (Carlson 1996 and 1991) Carlson was one of the first scholars to situate Strindberg’s contribution within the context of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century visual culture and to initiate crossdisciplinary research that linked Strindberg’s work in visual and literary media.

Whether working in literary or visual media, involved in drama, fiction, painting, photography, scientific prose or travel writing, Strindberg’s engagement with nature was ubiquitous and lifelong. This chapter looks at how Strindberg’s conception of nature reflects shifting perceptions of modernity, embodied in landscapes of trauma, violence and expropriation. Samvetskval, one of a series of short fiction pieces that were originally published in 1885 in the volume Utopier i verkligheten (Strindberg 1990), will serve as a key example for ways in which Strindberg worked out a radically

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innovative perspective on nature. The novella, whose title in direct translation means ‘pangs of conscience’, has appeared in English translation as The German Lieutenant (Strindberg 1915), the title by which it will be referred to in this chapter. It is a text that affords insight into Strindberg’s employment of nature tropes across geographical, national and medial boundaries and into his investigations of the changing concepts of nature amidst technological and political encroachments of modern life. The first part of The German Lieutenant is set in the region of the Fontainebleau Forest in France, and the second and final part takes place in the Swiss Alps. In Harry G. Carlson’s typewritten draft of ‘Strindberg and the Enchanted Forest’ the novella features as the central text, discussing Strindberg’s fascination with forest imagery, his experimentation with ‘painterly writing’, and his relationship to French landscape painting (Carlson 1998: 1–29). While the present study takes its cue from Carlson’s findings, it narrows the focus on part one of the novella in order to consider larger implications of Strindberg’s text – a text that is concerned with positioning the human figure in a landscape of modernity. Through the lens of recent landscape theory and eco-critical thought, the following pages explore how Strindberg’s novella questions humanity’s relationship to nature, anticipating the environmental catastrophe of the post-industrial world. By the time Strindberg wrote The German Lieutenant, he had the opportunity to make several study trips to France. ‘What’s lacking in the midst of this incredibly abundant nature – is nature itself ’ – he observed as he travelled by train through the French countryside in 1876. He then goes on to explain: In a land one-fifth larger than Sweden and nine times the population, people must attack nature and wring from her what she can give because they cannot afford to preserve the forest’s shadowy mystery. And so you cannot find solitude in nature’s bosom because you cannot walk far without meeting another person. (Strindberg 2009: 116 [HGC])

Strindberg was not the first to notice the disappearance of nature from the French landscape. In French art criticism, it was the new mode of painting, which came to be called Impressionism, that gave rise to such deliberations. In 1866 Émile Zola commented on Claude Monet’s characteristic approach to painting outdoors: In the country Claude Monet prefers a view of an English park to a corner of the forest. He takes pleasure in discovering traces of humanity everywhere, he wants to live continually in a human environment. Like a true Parisian he takes Paris with him to the countryside, he cannot paint a landscape without including welldressed men and women. (quoted in Adams 1994: 178)

Even a superficial glance at some of Monet’s painting from the period, such as the 1865–66 study for his famous Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l’herbe), illuminates Zola’s point (Plate 4.1). A party of 11 attractive young people, dressed according to the latest Paris fashion, casually picnic on the grass under the sheltering shade of giant trees; various dishes, including a cake and a whole chicken laid on porcelain plates

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amid glassware and scattered wine bottles, are set on a white cloth, while a servant, looking on, is discretely positioned further off behind a tree (Adams 1994: 8). The Parisian salon seems to have been transplanted into nature. Even one of the trees bears a human mark: a heart struck by Cupid’s arrow and the letter ‘P’ carved in its trunk. Yet, this was precisely the kind of terrain that attracted Strindberg when he wrote The German Lieutenant in which he set out to investigate shifting relationships between nature and its representations through the constructions and destructions of landscape.

Landscape in crisis The first part of The German Lieutenant takes place in the Fontainebleau Forest, the vast woodland some 50 kilometres south of Paris, and its surrounding villages. The story depicts an incident during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). The opening line specifies the date: ‘It was fourteen days after Sedan’ (Strindberg 1915: 1), referring to the Battle of Sedan on 1 September 1870, where the Prussians defeated the French army and captured Napoleon III. By mid-September then, the mighty Prussian army, equipped with the most modern military technology (which included transport by railroad), had invaded the Fontainebleau Forest on its way to Paris (Wawro 2003: 211–230). Strindberg set his fictional story against this background of recent history, in a landscape that before the war famously harboured artists who had left their Paris studios to paint nature in its ‘natural setting’, including the Barbizon School around mid-century, and soon thereafter the Impressionists. Strindberg’s story involves a German lieutenant, Herr von Bleichroden, stationed with his men in a Marlotte inn. He is extremely troubled because he must carry out an order: the execution of three French snipers, who had been caught in the woods. The snipers, called francs-tireurs, were a guerilla force of armed civilians during the Franco-Prussian War, crucial to the French resistance and especially active following the Battle of Sedan (Wawro 2003: 237–238). The lieutenant in Strindberg’s story turns his grim duty over to a subordinate and leaves the premises to take a small group of soldiers on a reconnoitring trip into a section of the nearby Fontainebleau Forest. Here he orders his troops to rest and, seeking solitude, walks into the Gorge aux loups (the Ravine of the Wolves), one of the great tourist sites in times of peace, less than three kilometres outside Marlotte (Carlson 1998: 9–10). He returns to his lodgings only after a life-changing encounter with the forest, which propels him into madness only to come to his senses in an insane asylum, in the second part of the novella, in the midst of a magnificent Alpine landscape in neutral Switzerland. While the novella can be read as a pacifist piece – indeed, even Leo Tolstoy praised it for its pacifist quality (Robinson 2008: 403, 421) – I propose here to follow Harry G. Carlson’s lead and explore The German Lieutenant as a literary text that pivots on visual perception in relation to landscape (Carlson 2002: 79). From the outset, the novella purposefully engages with the French artistic tradition and innovation, constructing, as we shall see, a specular discourse between painting and literature. The first part of the novella clearly foregrounds a landscape in crisis, the forest devastated by war and

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traversed by forces of destruction. But what were the circumstances under which this confrontation of the human and the non-human living world occurred? And how was one to understand the term ‘nature’ in nineteenth-century France? The history of the Fontainebleau Forest, in which our story is set, could be illuminating. In his popular guidebook published in 1834, Etienne Jamin claimed that the one place in France where Eden might be found was precisely here, at this wild spot of nature that retained ‘its virginal character, that natural physiognomy which was akin to the first forests of the world’ (quoted in Green 1990: 169). But over the course of the nineteenth century this romantic notion of unspoiled nature that crystallized in the image of the Fontainebleau Forest turned into nothing but a persistent dream. From the 1820s the commercial interests of contractors in the building industry started descending on the woods, as loggers raided ancient trees for timber and stonebreakers attacked massive blocks of sandstone that were cut up to cobble the streets of Paris (Carlson 1998: 18). This uneasy process was documented in the work of visual artists. One example can be seen in the work of photographer Eugène Cuvelier, who resided in the town of Thomery at the edge of the forest from 1859 to his death in 1900, capturing views of every corner of the woodland. His Quarry at the Sands of Macherin (Carrière aux Sables de Macherin) (1863) shows magnificent boulders broken up into piles of cobblestones, revealing a chasm in the continuity of the forest’s misty groves, streams, shrubs and clearings rendered in other photographs (Figure 4.1). ‘Eugène Cuvelier’, wrote the painter Jean-François Millet to his friend Théodore Rousseau, ‘showed me a few very beautiful

Figure 4.1 Eugène Cuvelier, Quarry at the Sands of Macherin, 1863. Reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Harriette and Noel Levine Gift and Rogers Fund, 1996.

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photographs, some taken in his region and others of the forest. They are taken with taste and in the most beautiful places, all destined to disappear’ (quoted in Challe 1996: 21). Indeed, the unstoppable tide of industrialization and concomitant cultural and technological developments transformed this 25,000-hectare old royal hunting preserve into a prosperous resort area open to the public, which mainly consisted of the Parisian bourgeoisie. Picturesque trails were established, most notably by ClaudeFrancois Denecourt, who is credited for being ‘the man who invented hiking’ (Schama 1995: 457); and a multitude of guidebooks, listing noteworthy sights and popular inns, cafes, castles and museums in neighbouring towns and villages such as Barbizon, Marlotte, Grez and Fontainebleau, were published in numerous editions. In the late 1830s and early 1840s France saw the construction of a railway system – the Paris– Lyon line with a stop in Fontainebleau opened in 1849 – that could deliver passengers from the capital to the forest region in an hour’s time. By the 1860s a heavy traffic in tourists numbered 100,000 per year (Daniel 1996: 9). Meanwhile landscape painters, who sought to work outdoors rather than in their studios, had begun frequenting the forest as well. In the 1820s and 1830s artists such as JeanBaptiste-Camille Corot and Théodore Rousseau travelled to the area and helped to create informal artists’ colonies in the villages of Chailly and Barbizon (Green 1990: 92–93, 116– 120, 154–181). For these artists’ groups, the forest meant more than ‘an open-air studio’; it became a ‘laboratory in which they examined the subtle shifts in time of day, season, and atmospheric change with an almost scientific rigour’ (Jones 2008: 12). Soon a younger generation of painters, the Impressionists, also found their favourite spots in the forest where they began to challenge established techniques and boundaries of painting. In 1867 the poet Stéphane Mallarmé called the Impressionist painter ‘the energetic modern worker … [who strives] to reproduce [nature], such as she appears to just the pure eyes’ (Mallarmé 1986: 31, 33). These ‘reproductions of nature’ by now, however, depicted landscapes that were traversed by steam-powered trains and spotted by factory chimneys spouting smoke, as for example in Monet’s 1872 painting The Goods Train (Le Convoi de Chemin de Fer) (Plate 4.2). But even in the absence of such explicit markers of modernization, as for example in Monet’s paintings of lush flower gardens, the Impressionist landscapes starkly depart from the Barbizon painters’ search for nature ‘untainted by the modernization of urban life’. The new paradigm of nature, as exemplified by Monet, was ‘that of the middle-class city-dweller who thinks of the village as a place to build his domain’ (Herbert 1982: 158). At the same time an insatiable interest in all kinds of representations of landscape, from cheap illustrations to photographic reproductions and diorama displays, helped to turn nature into a commodity that was sought after in urban centres such as Paris (Green 1990: 95–110). These developments transformed the Fontainebleau Forest into a ‘bourgeois ideal of nature’ (Adams 1994: 183) and an important site of spectacle, tourism and entrepreneurship.

Strindberg the art critic Even Scandinavian artists founded their art colony in the area of the Fontainebleau Forest, namely at the village of Grez-sur-Loing. Strindberg made a brief visit here in

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September 1883 with the intent to gather material for an essay on Swedish visual artist Carl Larsson, commissioned by his publisher Albert Bonnier (Söderström 1972: 86). It was in the year following this journey into the Fontainebleau area that he composed The German Lieutenant, one of many prose fiction works typically marked by ‘the complex construction of setting across national traditions, languages, and trajectories of travel’ (Stenport 2010: 6). But rather than Grez, it is the village of Marlotte, the site of one of the famous French artists’ colonies during the 1860s, which Strindberg uses as the setting for part one of the novella. The visit to Grez was not the first time Strindberg would recognize deep-seated connections between the Fontainebleau setting and modern French painting. Working as an art critic between 1872 and 1878, he had been keenly aware of both the French pictorial tradition and the innovations of the Barbizon painters and the Impressionists, many of whom, including Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, PierreAuguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, famously spent time in Marlotte and its surroundings. One of Strindberg’s tasks at the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter at the time was to follow art columns of the international press and provide clippings on new developments (Söderström 1972: 50). His article series entitled ‘The New Landscape Painting’ (‘Det nya landskapsmåleriet’) (Strindberg 2009: 103–110), which was first published in October 1874, helped to introduce modern Swedish art criticism with an international outlook. Instead of discussing the motifs of paintings, which was customary in Swedish academic art criticism, Strindberg focused on the painterly method, on ‘how it is done’. According to Göran Söderström, the article series can be read as a manifesto for a freer technique of painting, inspired mainly by the latest French developments, which was about to fledge in Sweden. In the articles, Strindberg encourages faithful and in-depth depictions of nature ‘seen through a temperament’ as opposed to the convention-based aesthetics of idealized landscapes (Söderström 1972: 51–52). In an 1877 article series, written also for Dagens Nyheter, Strindberg extensively comments on the Barbizon painters, including Corot, Daubigni and Rousseau, concluding that none of them copies nature with all its details but, rather, they ‘breathe their living spirit into the half-alive objects of nature’. Strindberg goes on to discuss Corot’s influence on Swedish painter Carl Fredrik Hill’s Autumn Landscape (Höstlandskap) (1875), exhibited in Stockholm at the time (Plate 4.3). In Hill’s painting he sees Corot rendered by ‘a fantastic pupil. … who … assumed the master’s manner of painting completely. … This autumn landscape undeniably gives us an impression. Everything is floating and mystical. The eye works seeking a fixed point, which does not exist’. While Strindberg finds pleasure in this aspect of the painting, he critiques the colour palette because, he claims, ‘nature is not brown or monotonous. … Corot has a grey-violet colour tone and a subtle brushwork, which looks like the colour being breathed out over the canvas; [Corot] never forgets a reflection, and is never really unnatural’ (Anderberg 1926: 167–168). In October 1876, between the publication of these two article series, Strindberg made his first trip to Paris where he had the opportunity to study the work of the Impressionists in person. In the essay ‘From the Café l’Ermitage to Marly-le-Roi’ (‘Från Café l’Ermitage till Marly-le-Roi’) he describes the experience, framed as a debate in dialogue form. The

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narrator visits a cafe frequented by Scandinavian artists and sits down with them by a glass of ‘nerve-wracking absinth’ to discuss art. The most-often-recurring words in the conversation, he observes, are ‘nature, colour, air’. The following day a friend takes him on a tour of art galleries, but he is still unable to identify either nature or a unique underlying French principle in the works he sees. Finally, in one of the galleries, his companion mysteriously lifts a drapery, unveiling six landscapes painted by Impressionists, ‘thick, reddish-blue, miserable and all look the same’. The painters’ names are ‘Manet, Sisley, and Money – (perhaps it is misspelled)’. He decides to describe Sisley’s painting in detail, but warns the reader to pay close attention to the sequence of tenses in his description, because the work depicts ‘a plot in the present, perfect and future tenses, [using] indicative and conjunctive’ (Strindberg 2009: 111–113). The narrator’s use of linguistic markers of time and mood reveals the writer’s attempt to translate the visual experience into literary terms. He then goes on to decipher both the scene on the canvas and the manner of its execution, or rather the mood and sense of movement the painting evokes in the viewer: It looks like the sun has just risen on a very cold summer morning – or it could be noon or evening – and seems to be illuminating a small town of limestone … which we only catch a glimpse of in passing, as if from an express train. … A train has just passed [which we see from] the cloud of steam condensed at the right edge of the painting. Another train passes across the canvas, yes, passes, since it is painted so that its speed is visible, the motion and the shaking of the wheels and passengers looking out the windows, and the landscape is painted completely as if seen from the window of a railroad car. In short, it was but a fleeting impression; like a photo of a moving object. … That is to say … one is to paint the impression, and not nature itself. (Strindberg 2009: 113–114)

Strindberg here conceptualizes Impressionist painting as an act of looking and locates ‘impression’, ‘motion’ and ‘speed’ in the beholder’s eye rather than in nature. Though scholars have been unable to identify the specific Sisley painting he describes (Strindberg 2009: 395), Strindberg clearly recognizes the relationship between modernity, technology and nature as the crux of the Impressionist technique and, even more importantly, acknowledges the circulation of the gaze as essential to the composition of landscape. As the viewer, in this case Strindberg’s narrator, looks at the painting representing a landscape, his gaze meets that of the passengers looking out of the train windows. The landscape that both the viewers of the painting and the passengers are looking at is situated somewhere within the terrain of this instantaneous exchange of looks. This volatility and uncertainty of vision, reflected in Strindberg’s assessment of Sisley’s painting, resonates with the satire of an ‘Impressionist novel’, published in 1877 in Le Télégraphe: A white – or black – form, which could be a man unless it be a woman, moves forward (is it forward?). The old sailor shudders – or is it sneezes? – we can’t be sure. He cries, ‘Let’s go!’ and throws himself into the whitish – or blackish – sea (we can’t be sure) which could be the ocean. (quoted in Clark 1999: 21).

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According to T. J. Clark, Impressionist painting was ‘supposed to be about seeing and the painter determined to stick to the look of a scene at all costs’, creating ‘unprecedented equations between the painted and the visible’, which often resulted in ambiguous perspectives that echoed ‘the character of modern life’ (1999: 21). Similarly, Strindberg in The German Lieutenant adopts a narrative technique that seeks to capture a sense of instantaneous change rather than an objective, consistent depiction of either the setting or the story. The text stages the visible from constantly shifting perspectives and distances: it traces the protagonist’s subjective perceptions of his environment in minute detail, while at the same time inserts an extra-diegetic observer/narrator that perceives the protagonist perceiving, watches him looking. For example, following an extended depiction of the landscape as perceived by the lieutenant looking out of his window, the narrator remarks, ‘[he] sat with his pen at rest, visibly entranced by the beautiful scene’ (Strindberg 1915: 3, emphasis mine). This is just one striking example of the compositional strategy whereby a single segment of the text draws readers into the protagonist’s perspective, allowing them to share his perceptions, while also inviting them to assume the narratorial position that affords an external view of the lieutenant in the act of looking. By the time Strindberg wrote The German Lieutenant, however, his views on painting had changed significantly. He now denounced the purely aesthetic qualities of art and sought instead its utilitarian value. Painting, he declared, should make ‘humankind happier and better’. In a letter to Carl Larsson, he aligned himself with the ‘objective’ realism of Zola as opposed to the paintings of Manet whose ‘melon does not offer the truth to the world, rather a lie, since a melon does not look like that in nature’ (quoted in Söderström 1972: 94). In this context, Strindberg’s strategic positioning of The German Lieutenant in a setting associated with the French tradition of nature painting in general and with the Impressionist painters in particular is by no means a coincidence. Nor is it simply an attempt to realistically recreate a specific cultural– historical moment. Rather, as we shall see, it reveals a commitment to exploring connections between visual perception and subjectivity on the one hand, and between the visual and the literary medium on the other.

Landscape and memory The historical specificity of the story’s placement is an important aspect of the narrative stratagem. The German Lieutenant is indeed based on historical events occurring during the Franco-Prussian war, literary and pictorial depictions of which were widely available at the time when Strindberg worked on the novella. Events of the war were still vividly recalled by residents of the Fontainebleau region. Strindberg owned a copy of the 18th edition of Denecourt’s guidebook, which contained detailed maps as well as legends and historical narratives set in the Fontainebleau Forest and its towns. These feature incidents of the Franco-Prussian conflict that contain seeds of the story in Strindberg’s novella (Carlson 1998: 12). In his edition of the guidebook, for example, several episodes ‘during the fateful 1870–71 war’ are related, when ‘the

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Forest of Fontainebleau sheltered several snipers, who, under the command of M. de Montdésir, succeeded in harassing the enemy’, that is, troops of the Prussian Army. ‘Still remembered are the extensive searches conducted by the Prussians across mountains and valleys to get rid of them’, Denecourt assures his readers; and later he goes on to relate a specific story of an event that took place in December 1870, when ‘the Prussians who came to attack snipers on the Melun road captured a poor guard by the name of Chauvaud carrying packets of bullets and shot him’ (Denecourt and Colinet 1876: 72, 413 [HGC]). Strindberg might also have seen such publications as the 1872 edition of Eugène Müller’s Memoirs of a Franc-tireur (Les mémoires d’un Franc-tireur), which contained illustrations of the stories recalled. ‘By mid-September’, when the story of The German Lieutenant takes place, ‘the francs-tireurs were buzzing around Paris, ambushing German patrols in the woods and sniping from villages’. The Germans responded by burning villages to the ground and ‘summarily executing francs-tireurs’ (Wawro 2003: 257). While both Denecourt and Müller depicted the French snipers with a patriotic stance as heroes of the French resistance, Strindberg decided to represent events from the Prussian officer’s point of view. As already noted, the novella shares its setting with that of the Impressionist landscape painters, as the action unfolds in Marlotte and at several wellknown sites of the forest. The fictional inn that serves as lodgings for the Prussian soldiers seems to be modelled on the famous Marlotte inn, known as the Tavern of Mother Antony, a beloved gathering place for the Impressionists, memorialized in Renoir’s painting, Mother Anthony’s Tavern (Le Cabaret de la mère Anthony) (Marlotte, 1866) (Plate 4.4). Renoir describes this work as one that evokes the most pleasant memories: I took as the subject of my study the common room, which also served as the dining room. The old woman in a headscarf is mère Anthony; … the superb girl serving drinks is the waitress Nana. The white poodle is Toto, who had a wooden leg. I had a few of my friends, including Sisley and Le Coeur, pose around the table. As for the motifs … [in] the background … , I took them from actual paintings on the walls. They were the … handiwork of regular customers. I myself drew the Mürger silhouette, … reproduced in my canvas, at the top left. (quoted in Tinterow and Loyrette 1994: 452)

The inn where The German Lieutenant is set, named Café du Cercle, has strikingly similar features to those in Renoir’s painting and description (Carlson 1998: 15). But because of the war, the artists have all fled, and left only their work behind on the walls. As the lieutenant looks about the inn’s dining room, he notices that the walls are covered with oil paintings, reminders of sunny moments in this beautiful, hospitable land, which had opened its art schools and exhibitions to foreigners. Here were … coastal views of Normandy and Bretagne, Dutch windmills, Norwegian fishing places and Swiss Alps. … [There was also a] paint-smeared palette … [that] looked like a freshly removed liver hanging in a tripe-shop window. (Strindberg 1990: 145 [HGC])

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This depiction echoes Renoir’s memories of the Marlotte inn, except that we are looking at the paintings, mostly landscapes, through the lieutenant’s eyes and realize that neither we, nor him, share these memories. The idyllic scene of the past is strangely displaced by the reference to gutted entrails evoked by the paint-smeared palette: a bloodstain that seems to cry out to us in this seemingly peaceful environment. The lieutenant’s reaction is telling: he feels embarrassed, ‘like one who has intruded into a stranger’s house, and expects the owner to come and surprise him’ (Strindberg 1915: 5). Like fossils, the objects that draw the lieutenant’s attention trace the identity of the place unfamiliar to the intruder, each carrying a past inscribed in it; objects whose presence points at what is no longer there. The setting of the novella is in fact characterized by the striking absence of the artists from the inn that used to be their ‘natural habitat’. Their attribute, the paint-smeared palette, thus represents this absence, like an open wound on a body from which the liver has been torn. The paintings and other paraphernalia belonging to the artists are traces of a former unspoiled state of the now war-ridden environment.

Reciprocity of vision The Prussian invasion of the Fontainebleau Forest featured in Strindberg’s novella, and the lieutenant’s intrusion into the terrain of French landscape painters reflect Strindberg’s own appropriation of the French landscape and art history. The German Lieutenant thus examines relationships between invader and invaded, exploiter and exploited, in a multi-modal text that itself is composed as a literary exploitation of visual modes of representation. The landscape of the Fontainebleau Forest is thus constructed in this process of circulation across multiple modalities, cultures, languages and geographical boundaries. As the German lieutenant surveys remains of the French past, the interior of the inn emerges as a testimony to its own destruction by the invading Prussian army, a sight now thrown back at the intruding Prussian officer. With all its signs of absence, the place stares back at him who is present and holds him captive in its grasp. Expounding Jacques Lacan’s theory of vision, James Elkins concisely portrays the situation that the lieutenant of Strindberg’s novella finds himself in as he surveys the interior of his lodgings and its surroundings: [Lacan] thinks of seeing as a reciprocal process: as I look at someone or something, it looks back and our gazes cross each other … I see and I can see that I am seen, so each time I see, I also see myself being seen. Vision becomes a kind of cat’s cradle of crossing lines of sight, and Lacan thinks of the whole scene as a kind of trap: we are ‘caught’ … ‘manipulated, captured, in the field of vision’. (Elkins 1996: 70)

Indeed, the entire narrative of The German Lieutenant hinges on vision: on compulsive acts of looking and frantic attempts to avoid looking. The text is strewn with selfconscious indications of its crossovers between visual and narrative strategies.

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As we have seen, from the very beginning, the text calls attention to its setting as a well-known painterly environment. The story is told by a series of images that are overwhelmingly landscapes, images painted by words. In the opening sequence we find Herr von Bleirchroden sitting at his desk in the former dining room of the inn, now serving as his room. A geologist by profession, he feels uncomfortable in his military role as a lieutenant in the Prussian army. We discover him sitting in his shirtsleeves, while next to him, thrown over the back of a chair, lies ‘his military coat with its stiff collar … [hanging there] limp, collapsed like a corpse, with its hollow arms seeming to [convulsively] clutch at the legs of the chair to keep itself from falling headlong’ (Strindberg 1915: 1). This introduction shows the story’s ‘hero’ as a double figure, split into two persons shown side by side: the geologist undressed to his shirtsleeves and the soldier represented by the military coat, which evokes the image of a person in his death throes or as if seized by hysterical spasms. This conflict between the lieutenant’s civil profession and his current condition as an officer of a conquering army is still further elaborated in the opening paragraph: The back of the coat was as dusty as a [highway], and the lieutenant-geologist might have studied the tertiary deposits of the district on the edges of his muchworn trousers. When the orderlies came into the room with their dirty boots, he could tell by the traces they left on the floor whether they had been walking over Eocene or Pliocene formations. He was really more a geologist than a soldier. (Strindberg 1915: 1–2)

Bleichroden’s actions throughout the story are indeed more of a geologist’s than a military officer’s: from the opening lines, he is preoccupied with uncovering the past in the hidden sedimentary structure of his newly found residence, which he traces in the material objects, in the human-made environment, and in the surrounding land formations. Indeed, a geologist — from the Greek ‘geo’ = ‘earth’, and ‘logia’, from root of legein ‘to speak’ (Etymology Dictionary Online 2016) — by profession, he continually tries to decipher the speech of the earth. Such behaviour is grounded in questioning, something highly unbecoming for a soldier, especially since it can lead to the questioning of one’s orders and one’s own thoughts and actions. Throughout the novella we constantly ‘see’ the lieutenant interact with his surroundings and being affected by the landscape he views. Following this brief introduction of a strikingly unstable central character, shown to us in the twin image of the upright human figure and his tumbling coat, a subtle transition takes place in the narrative perspective: suddenly we find ourselves assuming the lieutenant’s spatial and visual position. Our gaze is drawn away from his figure and the uneasy interior enclosing him, to the bright exterior seen through the window, as he observes the landscape unfolding before him. The narration assumes the perspective of a painter, and ‘we can almost see autumnal harvest colours being splashed onto a canvas’ (Carlson 1998: 18) to capture a fleeting impression as the image framed by the window is forcefully described in minute detail: ‘Orange-red pumpkins sunned themselves alongside grey-green artichokes; fiery-red tomatoes climbed up sticks … ; sunflowers, as big as dinner plates, turned their yellow disks westward, where the sun

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started to sink’. But following these images brimming with life, the landscape suddenly acquires darker undertones, showing ‘a profusion of dahlias [which] provided a giant, resounding, concert of colours: … purple like congealed blood, blotchy-red like newly butchered meat, salmon-red like entrails put out to cool … ’ (Strindberg 1990: 143 [HGC]). This oppressive imagery sustains the motif of death and violence, which began with the image of the military coat, but now projected onto the landscape. The lieutenant’s anxiety over his duty to have the French snipers killed literally colours his view, even before any explicit reference to his situation is made. The significance of Strindberg’s use of colour, especially of shades of red, must be noted here with special reference to the novella’s cross-cultural setting. Strindberg seems to be deliberately playing with French versus Swedish visual aesthetics and painting conventions by opting out from the grey tone he had observed in Corot and the French Impressionists. Regarding the tonality of hues, observes Harry G. Carlson, Strindberg departed sharply also from the Scandinavian painters at Grez. Oscar Törnå, Karl Nordström and Carl Larsson, for example, ‘used softened colors, to evoke, as their French counterparts did, a sense of haze that tended to bathe landscapes in the region with silvery light’ (Carlson 1998: 19). In the essay depicting the Sisley painting, Strindberg criticizes Scandinavian landscape painters for imitating the French colourpalette, which he finds ‘colourless’ compared to the vivid tonality of the Scandinavian landscape. ‘You will seldom if ever see a clear, blue sky’ in France, he complains. ‘Generally, the sky has a silvery gossamer across it, making it difficult to say whether it is overcast or clear. The light released through this wraps all objects in a silver-grey misty cloud, which dampens or kills … colour’, all of which can be attributed to ‘geological, climactic, and meteorological circumstances’ (Strindberg 2009: 116 [HGC]). Yet, the lieutenant’s vision of the inn’s garden in the novella has a striking connection to French and specifically Impressionist landscape painting. The composition of his view, the colours, and even the naming of the flowers, evoke the image of Claude Monet’s 1873 painting, The Artist’s Garden at Argenteuil, aka The Dahlias (Le Jardin de l’Artiste à Argenteuil), in which a torrent of deep-red colour from a bushy array of dahlias spills over onto the greenery of the ground, like a flood of blood (Plate 4.5). Upon the far edge of the scene, Monet placed a house overlooking the garden, with its double windows facing the viewer as if gazing out upon us from some unknown depths of the painting. Monet’s work incorporates an exploration of the reciprocity of vision, and the relationship between the painter, the landscape and the viewer of the painting, as a constantly flowing exchange, also expressed by the circular motion of the composition from sky to flowers to ground, up the gently bending tree and back to the sky. While this is just one among many possible readings of Monet’s highly complex painting, it helps to shed light on Strindberg’s rumination in The German Lieutenant on the reciprocity of vision, on the circular flow between human and non-human, and on the processes of exchange between French and German, and ultimately Swedish, perceptions of nature. The text’s placing of the landscape, as it were, on the windowpane, adds another interesting angle to reflect upon the reciprocal perceptions and tensions brought by modern visual technologies. As Harry G. Carlson notes in his draft for ‘Strindberg and the Enchanted Forest’, one of the major changes during the nineteenth century that

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took place within visual culture came from the shift of emphasis from ‘what the painter saw’ to ‘how the painter saw … Probably the most powerful agent of change was the invention of the camera and the art of photography in the 1840s’ (Carlson 1998: 21). Strindberg became intensely interested and began experimenting with photography in the mid-1880s, during which he also composed The German Lieutenant. As Daniel Challe points out in his essay on the photographer Eugène Cuvelier, through the 1860s – when the Impressionists worked en plein air in the Fontainebleau region – ‘painting, and specifically the tabular structure of the easel picture remained the theoretical and visual model informing the apprehension of nature’ for painters, photographers and writers alike (Challe 1996: 20–21; quoted in Carlson 1998: 21). Some of the most important early French nature photographers, including Eugène Cuvelier, ‘were obviously landscape painters using cameras instead of paints, brushes and canvases’ (Carlson 1998: 21). Strindberg’s narrative then seems to freely cut across different modalities, mixing constantly shifting perspectives and distances, zooming in and out of view, like photography, at the same time keeping the tabular structure and colour of the painterly approach. The linear perspective used in depicting the lieutenant’s view in three dimensions is a painterly convention borrowed from the technology of the camera obscura, which was essential to the development of photography (Szalczer 2001: 44–45). In the continued depiction of the landscape outside the lieutenant’s window, there is now a series of shifts in distance introduced, so that our view, with that of the lieutenant, is extended along the perspective of the garden path all the way ‘furthest back, [to] the shadowy oak crowns and beech arches of the Fontainebleau Forest’ where ‘the trees’ contours resembled a screen of fine Belgian lace that broke up the horizontal rays of the setting sun into golden threads’ (Strindberg 1990: 143 [HGC]). Mentally, the lieutenant has already escaped from his responsibility for the executions into the lacework of the forest with its promise of a hiding place as well as redemption. Martin Heidegger’s ruminations on the concept of ‘location’ are helpful for the understanding of Strindberg’s narrative strategy. ‘Space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object, nor an inner experience’, he explains in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’. ‘When I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there. … I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the room, and only thus can I go through it’ (Heidegger 1971: 157). In The German Lieutenant the Forest of Fontainebleau serves not simply as an evocative image but also as a space that obtains specific meanings as a location in the process, intentionality and reciprocity of perception.

Double vision In The German Lieutenant Strindberg experiments with an elaborate narrative technique that allows the reader to share the lieutenant’s horror, by having us share his perceptions. Narration is used not only as a paintbrush but also as a camera with which to visually manipulate the reader’s position vis-à-vis the main character as well as the

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landscape. Strindberg deploys this ‘double-vision’ narrative technique throughout the novella, when he lets us observe the officer in the act of looking, while at the same time compels us to assume his perspective. Within the same passage we are alternately shown either close-up views of the lieutenant as he contemplates his surroundings or snapshots of what he observes. Whether we are let in on his field of vision (external or internal) or we watch him react to his perceptions, we are afforded a severely limited view, which zooms in on the constantly changing relationship between the human figure and its surroundings, constructing the two as a single unit, a spatio-temporal continuum. The highly self-reflexive text alerts us that we behold a landscape of the lieutenant’s own making. Despite the third-person narration there is no way to verify the objectivity of the lieutenant’s vision. References to the landscape before him as artifice abound, from details of the painterly colour-palette to pointing out the window as the frame of ‘the beautiful painting’ (‘den härliga tavlan’) (Strindberg 1990: 143). The passage also stresses compositional principles such as linear perspective to create a sense of depth to the image observed, and clear distinctions between the picture planes: ‘Then there was the sand-strewn path lined by two rows of giant gilly-flowers … , they continued the perspective to where the vineyards stood in their brownish-green array’ (Strindberg 1915: 2–3). In this way, the text deconstructs landscape as an ‘innocent’ view of natural surroundings and posits it as artifice: a result of the beholder’s construct. And since the text gives us no other choice but to share the officer’s view, we find ourselves  actively engaged in the process of looking at and  simultaneously painting a landscape. But the lieutenant’s view of the landscape lying outside his window is also punctuated with visions from the past: images of his homeland left behind. ‘ “What a lovely land!” he thought, and his recollection went back to the sandy plain of his home, diversified by some wretched stunted firs which stretched their gnarled arms towards the sky as though they implored the favour of not having to drown in the sand’ (Strindberg 1915: 3). This passage again includes an instance of double perspective: we watch the lieutenant watching the landscape. We see him at a distance while simultaneously experiencing his view, external (the landscape) and internal (his memory of another landscape). At the same time Strindberg deploys another device here that will recur throughout the novella: third-person narration interwoven, within the same sentence, with the direct utterance of the character’s internal thoughts. This is ‘that great narrative device known as “free indirect style” ’, which Franco Moretti calls ‘the third voice, intermediate and almost neutral in tone between character and narrator’, used to convey the emotional upheaval of the character while evoking ‘the typical distance of narrative discourse’. While this style of narration permeates the inner voice of the character with ‘the impersonal stance of the narrator’ (Moretti 2005: 81–82), in The German Lieutenant it is invariably associated with an act of looking. More precisely, this mode of narration is employed to foreground the lieutenant’s inner vision, revealing the subjectivity of a seemingly impartial view. Through the manipulation of the narrative voice, the reader is thus drawn into a highly innovative experiment of creating a nascent landscape and a text looking at itself.

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Stratification The privileging of views of nature and of visual perception in the novella begs the question: what is a landscape? Or more precisely: what is the conception of landscape that The German Lieutenant invites us to contemplate and draws us into? According to Jay Appleton, landscape ‘is a kind of backcloth to the whole stage of human activity’ (Appleton 1975: 2). Appleton studies landscape from the point of view of behavioural science and anthropology, which, as we shall see, offers a useful approach to Strindberg’s novella. More-recent theories stress the complexity and the ambiguity inherent in the term itself: used to denote both a place and its representation, the word ‘landscape’ blurs the distinction between the two. But whether cultivated or wild, a landscape is already an artifice at the moment of its beholding, that is, before it becomes the subject of a work of art. By simply looking, we are already shaping a landscape, ‘selecting, editing, suppressing or subordinating some visual information in favour of promoting other[s]’ (Andrews 1999: 3). To borrow W. J. T. Mitchell’s succinct definition, landscape is ‘a natural scene, mediated by culture’, and, as such, it is not simply a visual arts genre but rather a medium of exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other (Mitchell 2002: 14). Landscape is indeed a medium, argues also Rachael DeLue, ‘in the manner in which humans use landscapes … as means of artistic, social, economic, and political ends … [and] in which landscapes … act on and shape us, as if agents in their own right’ (DeLue 2007: 11). Or, according to a succinct rendering of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to vision, ‘there is no human perception that is not reciprocated by the earth’ (Garrard 2012: 35). These arguments offer us a useful approach to Strindberg’s project in The German Lieutenant. The protagonist engages precisely in this kind of exchange, however unconsciously, and the reader is taken along on that journey. As he views the landscape through the window for the first time, he becomes aware of the sentry crossing the picture frame, the sun glittering on his bayonet, threatening to destroy the charming landscape. He cannot bear looking at this living reminder of his own involvement in the invasion of the land, and quickly averts his gaze towards the courtyard on the left. Here he beholds the kitchen building with its yellow-plastered walls, and ‘an old knotty vine spreading out against it like a skeleton of some animal in a museum; a vine without leaves and grapes, standing there as if crucified’ (Strindberg 1915: 4). The constructedness of landscape is bluntly exposed as the lieutenant’s preoccupation with death, as suffering and crucifixion shape every frame of his view. The visual clues of the narration, such as references to blood, gutted entrails, and the animal skeleton detected in the landscape, question the objectivity of vision. In addition, the biblical iconography of Christ as the vine whose barren branches are thrown onto the fire (John 15.2) suggests that visual perception is informed by learned cultural imagery as much as by subconscious impulses. What the lieutenant seems to contemplate ‘outside’ actually charts an inner landscape. Tired of being reminded of his grave mission at every glance, he now turns back to the interior and explores the objects in the room. It is at this point that he discovers the oil paintings on the walls along with the paint-smeared palette and some

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red Spanish militia caps belonging to the now-absent painters. The intimacy of the viewed scene makes him feel uncomfortable, all the more so, since the imagery of blood, wounds and torn-out and displayed internal organs (the paint-smeared palette that looks like a liver in a butcher’s shop window) is sustained. To flee from this vision, the lieutenant settles down at his desk with the intention of completing a letter to his wife. But his thoughts are once again drawn to the landscape outside the window: now recalling scenes from the past. In his letter he describes how he and his soldiers destroyed the land and killed the locals who had cultivated it for many years, only to build defences for themselves: In the unwooded tract … there was nothing to use but the vines and their stakes. It was a strange sight to see how the vineyards were rifled in an hour – how the vinestems were torn up, together with the leaves and grapes, to form … bundles, which were quite wet with the juice of the crushed, half-ripe grapes. It was said that the vines were forty years old. Thus we destroyed the work of forty years in an hour. And that too in order to shoot down those who had provided the material for the [defences that] protected us! (Strindberg 1915: 7)

This memory places the officer’s previous view of the landscape in a new light. The image of the ‘old knotty vine’ is now brought into the larger context of the desolation of the land, while the lieutenant’s personal memory of uprooting the vineyard and murdering the locals is linked to another parable of the vine. The Book of Ezekiel compares the faithless to the wood of the vine, which is fit only as fuel for fire, and is associated with the destruction of the land and its people (Ezekiel 15.1–8). The repeated emphasis on the number ‘forty’ evokes desert imagery; Moses lived in the desert for forty years before he was chosen to lead his people out of captivity (Exodus 24.18) and Jesus was tempted in the desert for forty days (Luke 4.2; Mark 1.3). In this light, the bloody colouring that initially seemed to paint the ripeness of harvest turns out to be patches covering the bleeding wounds of the land; bloodstains that invoke submerged scenes of violence from the past. Both personal and cultural memory serve to bring to the surface invisible layers deposited in the landscape. The act of looking, whether it is looking around the room, gazing out through the window, or internally contemplating the landscapes of the past, is a way of exposing strata of memory that not only gives meaning to the visible but also shapes our perception of it.

Topography Much of contemporary eco-critical thought and landscape theory has been informed by Heidegger’s examination of humans dwelling on earth, in which he views landscape as ‘the earth “gathered”, by a “thing” that draws its relations in time and space into its being’ (Árnason et al. 2012: 3). In ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Heidegger uses the example of a bridge as a ‘thing’ that creates a landscape: ‘it does not just

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connect banks already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream … With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them … The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream’ (Heidegger 1971: 152). The same way as a bridge affords passage from one bank to another, the traces of memory in The German Lieutenant serve to afford passage between past and present and thus to elaborate the meaning of the landscape. This temporal layering of landscape in the novella affords us to read a deeper significance into the land underneath the visible surface, like sedimentary layers of the earth studied by the geologist. Again with the help of what is present, absence is revealed; with the help of the visible, the invisible, submerged landscapes are invoked. This perpetual metamorphosis of the landscape, coupled with the constantly shifting perspective between inside and outside, spatially and figuratively, provides an intricate narrative pattern in The German Lieutenant, one that erases the distinction between mental and optical images. As the time for the execution of the French snipers approaches, the lieutenant leaves the premises and, under the pretence of taking his men to patrol the surroundings, flees into the forest. The real reason behind his escape is an irrepressible urge to avoid visual exposure to the execution. He feels as if ‘he were running away from a foe of superior power’ (Strindberg 1915: 15), and darts ahead with such a speed that his soldiers can hardly keep up with him. A shift in perspective allows us an external view, which amounts to a psychological portrait, making us experience the lieutenant’s state of mind while seeing him experience it: ‘He did not turn round, but the soldier next behind him could see how the cloth of the back of his coat twitched from time to time, as when one shudders, or expects a blow from behind’ (Strindberg 1915: 15). As we assume the perspective of the soldier following the officer in flight, we are drawn into the visual position of a predator pursuing a prey, which highlights a vital aspect of Jay Appleton’s landscape theory, rooted in behavioural science. Appleton’s ‘prospect-refuge’ theory of experiencing landscape, which W. J. T. Mitchell dubbed ‘predatory view’, helps to shed light on the narrative thrust of the text at this point. A predatory view emerges when the spectator is grounded in a visual field of violence (as in the case of hunting, war or surveillance), and observes the landscape from a sheltered position, as if it were a strategic field in which prospects, refuges and hazards are highlighted (Appleton 1975: 67–72; Mitchell 2002: 16). Once the lieutenant in Strindberg’s novella leaves the safe interior of the inn, he turns from predatory observer into an unsheltered prey. He seeks refuge and healing in the forest, but instead he finds a ruthless struggle of the species for survival. As he goes off into the woods by himself, he discovers with horror how the small oaks had plumed themselves out into bushes in order to kill the tender beech plants, and how out of every thousand beeches only one was able to get into the light and become a giant, which would in turn steal life from the others. And the ruthless oak – which had reached out his brutal, twisted arms as if he wanted to keep the sun all for himself – had devised underground warfare.

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August Strindberg and Visual Culture He sent out roots for many hundreds of metres, undermining the soil, consuming every last particle of nourishment before the others did, so that when he couldn’t shadow his opponents to death, he starved them to death. The oak had already murdered the spruce forest. But the beech came as an avenger, slowly but surely, because his bitter fluids killed everything where he gained dominance. He had contrived a poison, and it was overwhelming, for not a plant could grow in his shadow. The earth around him was as black as a grave, and so the future was his. (Strindberg 1990: 150–151 [HGC])

The Darwinian imagery of ‘the survival of the fittest’ reveals landscape both as an ideological construct and as a reflection of the lieutenant’s mindset, depicted with a military nomenclature. The seeming naturalism of the scene observed by the lieutenant, however, anticipates the expressionistic technique of Strindberg’s later drama where, as for example in To Damascus Part 1 (Till Damaskus) (1898), the central figure’s fears and desires are projected onto the landscape and visualized in the stage set. In The German Lieutenant the hero has now entered the very landscape that he previously viewed from a distance and this landscape reflects the image of war back upon him. This confrontation with the forest sends the lieutenant down the path of complete Dionysian dissolution, driving him into insanity. ‘The lieutenant wandered on and on. … In fact he hardly thought any more, for all the activities of his soul seemed crushed into a mortar pulp’ (Strindberg 1915: 17). Madness arises once the lieutenant switches his viewing position as a predatory observer to that of an unwilling prey. He expects to find refuge in the forest but once he gives up his safe distance behind the window frame, the spectator becomes an actor on the stage of the wild. No longer being able to distinguish himself from the landscape, he now becomes part of it like a hunted animal. As David Abrams observes, exploring Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the reciprocity of perception, ‘to touch the coarse skin of a tree is … to experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree. And to see the world is also, at the same time, to experience oneself as visible, to feel oneself seen’ (Abram 1996: 68). Insanity takes over when the distinction between observer and observed ceases, and the landscape encloses the officer who has become utterly disoriented, no longer capable of maintaining his military command, strategic planning or surveillance. When, after long hours of aimless marching, the lieutenant returns to the inn, he blindly gropes around the moonlit courtyard, instinctively searching for the spot where the execution took place in his absence. He discovers the barren vine by the kitchen building, which he observed earlier that afternoon from his window ‘standing there as if crucified’. He wonders if it is the same vine, since it curiously seems to burst with life, full of fruit of ‘the finest red clusters’. As he approaches the wall, he steps in ‘something slippery’ with a nauseating smell that reminds him of a butcher’s shop. He now realizes that it is ‘certainly the same [vine], but the plaster of the wall was broken by bullets and sprinkled with blood’ (Strindberg 1915: 22). He quickly leaves the yard but as he stumbles into the house and to his room, he smears the blood on his feet all over the floor. He has become the artist of the inn, leaving his mark painted with blood. When he finally flees into his bed from the bloody sight of his surroundings, he is met

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with an even more shocking experience. He tries to read Schopenhauer, but suddenly lets the book drop for he heard someone crying and tossing about in his bed. Who was in the bed? He saw a body, the under part of which was painfully contorted by cramp, while the muscles of the chest stood out strained like the staves of a cask, and he heard a low, hollow sound like a shriek smothered under the bedclothes. It was his own body! Had he then been divided into two, that he heard and saw himself as though he were another person? (Strindberg 1915: 27)

In this passage the initial doubling of the geologist and the soldier, embodied in the image of the officer’s person and his military coat side by side, returns with a vengeance. The deeper he descends into madness, the wider the split between his two irreconcilable personas. The lieutenant’s last desperate action aims to cancel out this unbearable split. He rises from his bed and throws himself out of the very window through which he first beheld the magnificent autumn landscape. He ends up on the other side, where all distinction between human and non-human ceases. As MerleauPonty says, ‘flesh … is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body; of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested in particular when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the things, [while] as tangible descends among them’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 46). Like Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the novella foregrounds the reciprocity between the experiencing body and its surroundings, minutely recording the protagonist’s sensations while at the same time showing him experiencing them. Strindberg’s narrative apparatus – including the use of the geo-historical setting of the French Impressionists, textual mimicry of impressionist painterly techniques in depicting landscape instantaneously as it is being seen, and allusions to impressionist paintings – provides a sensuous texture, with emphasis on the visible interaction between the lieutenant’s body and its environment. The imagery of war at the age of industrialism, which casts its shadow onto the landscape throughout the text, betrays a sense of modernity’s pangs of conscience as a central impulse of the novella. The ironic double figure of the soldier-geologist gains its specific meaning in this context. Today, at a time when we are confronted with the consequences of human destruction of our nurturing planet with a terrifying urgency, Strindberg’s vision articulates a powerful wake-up call. It is a vision that deconstructs the picturesque image of the Fontainebleau Forest, foregrounding it as a landscape of violence, in complex ways that involve the narrative evocation of painterly representations and scenes of exchange between the observer-invader and the colonized landscape. Like the landscape in The German Lieutenant, Strindberg’s text preserves traces of memory: fragments of other texts – maps, guidebooks, scriptural references and, above all, paintings – inscribed in the geography of the place. Similarly, my chapter took its inspiration from Harry G. Carlson’s unfinished project on Strindberg and the enchanted forest, and, without attempting to reconstruct it, invokes its memory as an indelible mark in the textual landscape of Strindberg scholarship.

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Works Cited Note on referencing Harry G. Carlson’s research: A bracketed [HGC] at the end of a citation in the ‘Works Cited’ section below indicates Carlson’s original sources; for sources taken from Samlade skrifter av August Strindberg (1912–21) citations in my text are replaced by the new text-critical edition of Strindberg’s collected works, August Strindbergs Samlade Verk. A bracketed [HGC] following a quotation indicates Carlson’s unpublished translations found in his typewritten notes to the project. All unpublished materials are used with the permission of the Harry G. Carlson Estate. Abram, D. (1996), The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-ThanHuman World, New York: Pantheon Books. Adams, S. (1994), The Barbizon School and the Origins of Impressionism, London: Phaidon Press. [HGC]. Anderberg, A. E. (1926), Carl Fredrik Hill. Hans Liv och hans Verk, Malmö: Föreningen Malmö Musei vänner. [HGC]. Andrews, M. (1999), Landscape in Western Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [HGC]. Appleton, J. (1975), The Experience of Landscape, London: Wiley. Árnason, A., Ellison, N., Vergunst, J. and Whitehouse, A. (eds) (2012), Landscapes Beyond Land: Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Carlson, H. G. (1991), ‘Strindberg and Visual Imagination’, in M. Robinson (ed.), Strindberg and Genre, 265–268, Norwich: Norvik Press. Carlson, H. G. (1995–2003), ‘Forest Notes’, miscellaneous typewritten research notes. Carlson, H. G. (1996), Out of Inferno: Strindberg’s Reawakening as an Artist, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Carlson, H. G. (1998), ‘Strindberg and the Enchanted Forest’, typewritten manuscript. Carlson, H. G. (2002), ‘Landscape as Mediator in Strindberg’s Search for the Other’, in P. Houe, S. H. Rossel and G. Stockenström (eds), August Strindberg and the Other: New Critical Approaches, 77–89, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Challe, D. (1996), ‘Eugène Cuvelier or the Legendary Forest’, in U. Gauss (ed.), Eugène Cuvelier, 16–77, Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz. [HGC]. Clark, T. J. (1999), The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Daniel, M. (1996), Eugène Cuvelier: Photographer in the Circle of Corot, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Available online: http://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/ eugene_cuvelier_photographer_in_the_circle_of_corot (accessed 5 September 2017). DeLue, R. Z. (2007), ‘Elusive Landscapes and Shifting Grounds’, in R. Z. DeLue and J. Elkins (eds), Landscape Theory, 3–14, London and New York: Routledge. Denecourt, C.-F. and Colinet, C. (1876), L’indicateur historique et descriptif de Fontainebleau: Itinéeraire de la foret et des environs, 18th edn, Paris: Fontainebleau. [HGC]. Elkins, J. (1996), The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, New York: Simon & Schuster. Etymology Dictionary Online, ‘s.v. “Geology” and s.v. “-logia” ’, accessed 20 October 2016. Available online: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame= 0&search=geology and http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_ frame=0&search=-logy. Garrard, G. (2012), Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom, 2nd edn, New York: Routledge. Green, N. (1990), The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth Century France, Manchester: Manchester University Press. [HGC].

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Heidegger, M. (1971), ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in A. Hofstadter (trans.), Poetry, Language, Thought, 143–161, New York: Harper & Row. Herbert, R. L. (1982), ‘Industry and the Changing Landscape from Daubigny to Monet’, in J. M. Merriman (ed.), French Cities in the Nineteenth Century, 139–164, London: Hutchinson. Jones, K. A. (2008), In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet, Washington DC: National Gallery of Art; Houston: The Museum of Fine Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mallarmé, S. (1986), ‘The Impressionists and Edouard Manet’, in C. S. Moffett (ed.), The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886, 27–34, Seattle: University of Washington Press. [HGC]. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968), The Visible and the Invisible, ed. C. Lefort, trans. A. Lingis, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2002), ‘Imperial Landscape’, in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power, 2nd edn, 5–34, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [HGC]. Moretti, F. (2005), Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, New York: Verso. Robinson, M. (ed.) (2008), An International Annotated Bibliography of Strindberg Studies 1870–2005, Volume One: General Studies, London: Modern Humanities Research Association. Schama, S. (1995), Landscape and Memory, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. [HGC]. Söderström, G. (1972), Strindberg och Bildkonsten, Stockholm: Forum. [HGC]. Stenport, A. W. (2010), Locating August Strindberg’s Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Setting, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Strindberg, A. (1915), The German Lieutenant and Other Stories, trans. C. Field, London: T. W. Laurie. Strindberg, A. (1990), Samvetskval, in S.-G. Edqvist (ed.), August Strindbergs Samlade Verk. 19, 141–179, Stockholm: Norstedts. Strindberg, A. ([1881] 2009), ‘Kulturhistoriska Studier’, in P. Stam (ed.), August Strindbergs Samlade Verk. 7, Stockholm: Norstedts. Szalczer, E. (2001), ‘Nature’s Dream Play: Modes of Vision and August Strindberg’s Redefinition of the Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 53 (1): 33–52. Tinterow, G. and Loyrette, H. (1994), Origins of Impressionism, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. [HGC]. Wawro, G. (2003), The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–71, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5

Ghost Vessels: Anti-Theatricality, Visuality and Disembodiment Across Strindberg’s Late Chamber Media Amy Holzapfel, Williams College, USA

A writer cannot bear to see the products of his imagination made real, for they never come true. That goes even more for the acting! I don’t think I dare watch you! August Strindberg, refusing an invitation by August Falck to attend a performance of The Pelican at the Intimate Theatre in 1907. (Törnqvist and Steene 2007: 114)

What might account for Strindberg’s blatant opposition – blossoming in his older years – to attending performances of his own plays? Was he reprising an earlier role – madman, misogynist, occultist? Or was he fashioning a new role for himself: Strindberg as modernist? Alongside many of his contemporaries – Maurice Maeterlinck, Aurelian LugnéPoe, Edward Gordon Craig and Stéphane Mallarmé – as well as later modernists  – W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett – Strindberg struggled with the problem of theatre’s reliance on the living, breathing human body as its primary medium of expression. Seeking a way around the contrivance of the living body, Strindberg re-conceptualized the theatre as a visual form that, like painting and photography, could offer a vessel for immaterialized forms. This chapter defines and foregrounds the concept of the chamber as a key anti-theatrical and pictorial intervention of the modernist stage, one that offered theatre artists a strategic solution to the problem of the materiality of the actor’s body, without resorting to the use of puppets. The idea of the chamber – a vessel into which living actors enter through unconscious states of sleep and trance – participates in modernism’s powerful and enduring critique of mimesis, allowing actual embodiments to become dematerialized abstractions. Instead of striving to make the ghosts of his brain appear real, Strindberg sought to transform reality into a container for ghosts. In Stage Fright, theatre historian Martin Puchner identifies a resistance towards the theatre as one of modernism’s most central and defining principles. Tracing modernist anti-theatricality throughout the early to mid-twentieth century, Puchner identifies

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how many modernist dramatists struggled not to ‘do away with theatre’ but instead to keep it ‘at arm’s length’ (Puchner 2002: 2). Many forces contributed to modernism’s resistance to theatre, but chief among them was a critique of imitation, or mimesis, and the live body of the human actor, which were conceptually linked, as Puchner makes clear: ‘Once the nature of mimesis is subject to scrutiny and attacks, as it is in modernism, this double affiliation of the theatre becomes a problem because, unlike painting or cinema, the theatre remains tied to human performers, no matter how estranged their acting might be’ (Puchner 2002: 5). For Maeterlinck and Craig, the solution to this ‘double affiliation’ was to substitute live actors with marionettes. As an emergently selfidentified modernist, however, Strindberg sought to find his own unique way around the ‘troubling presence of the human actor on the stage’ (Puchner 2002: 5). This chapter examines how Strindberg’s life-size photographs and Chamber Plays, with their dream- and image-driven structures and narratives, functioned as solutions to modernism’s resistance to the problem of the actor’s material embodiment. Surveying the fruitful artistic years of 1905 to 1908, I explore the foundations of Strindberg’s photography and plays from this period as deeply rooted in a culture of modernist antitheatricality. Strindberg sidestepped theatre’s reliance on the actor’s reality through visual, dramaturgical and intermedial interventions traceable throughout much of his post-Inferno artwork.1 The model of the chamber allowed for theatre itself to become a visual art form – akin to painting, photography or cinema. Once freed of its dutiful ties to the material world, theatre too could provide an open platform for modernism’s devotion to abstraction. The modernist idea of the chamber as a death-like container for the live body of the actor allowed for a new form of visual subjectivity to emerge, one that is simultaneously disembodied and embodied, simulated and dissimulated, theatrical and anti-theatrical, mimetic and diegetic. In this way, the concept of the chamber anticipates an even more recent shift, away from the flesh-and-blood bodies of modernism and towards the cyber-bodies of the posthuman age (Taylor 2010: 15).

Marionette photos: Maeterlinck and Steichen, Strindberg and Anderson In 1906, Strindberg collaborated with Swedish photographer Herman Anderson to produce a series of life-size photographic portraits, mostly heads, several of them selfportraits. Some of these portraits were made with a new photographic technology, the Wunderkamera, a pinhole camera with a piece of glass for a lens, constructed by Strindberg himself. Other portraits in this series were produced by the aid of a more conventional camera. The aim of these photographs was allegedly to create ‘psychological portraits’, studies that would reveal the inner soul of the sitter, employing the camera as conjurer or analyst (Campany 2005: 118). As Campany explains: ‘These were long exposures during which sitters would be encouraged to be open to mental suggestion from Strindberg. Extending the portrait beyond the instant he felt much more of the inner life and personality of the sitter could be expressed’ (Campany 2005: 118).

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The portraits produced by Strindberg and Anderson are particularly significant for their large format, that is, their life-size scale. As Per Hedström observes, ‘The portrait technique developed by Strindberg and Anderson was based on the model’s features being life-sized and illuminated by soft natural light’ (Hedström 2001: 82). The final dimensions of the photographs – 30 by 24 centimetres – mattered greatly, since the produced visual image approximated the actual dimensions of a real body. According to David Campany, the ‘actual size photograph seemed to offer the opportunity for direct communion or spiritual attachment to the sitter. The physical presence and immediacy of the image suggested a relation that would transcend the cold, objectifying effects of the medium’ (Campany 2005: 118). The photographs display a pronounced antimimetic quality, even as they strive to reveal greater fidelity towards their sitter’s inner subjectivity and psychology. Both Campany and Hedström view the life-size portraits as Strindberg’s experiments in Pictorialism, a style of photography that sought to borrow many of the conventions of painting to create subjective, artistic (rather than transcriptive) photographs, thereby raising the status of photography from a technical craft to a fine art. As Campany writes: ‘For [Strindberg] the glass lens of the camera was not so much a portal as a source of distortion and subversion … a barrier that broke natural connections’ (Campany 2005: 118). According to reports by the amateur photographer Gustaf Eissen, a friend of Strindberg’s who visited the Wunderkamera studio, Strindberg used an unpolished lens of his own devising precisely because he felt it made his pictures better (Hemmingsson 1963: 127). As Linda Haverty Rugg observes, to Strindberg, the unpolished glass ‘diffused the light cast through it and softened the lines of the photographed object’ (Rugg 1997: 117). This technique of softened focus and lines was a chief formal characteristic of Pictorialism, observable in the work of many other photographers from the period, such as Peter Henry Emerson, Julia Margaret Cameron and Edward Steichen. Steichen, an American photographer born in Luxembourg, was the protégé of photographer Alfred Stieglitz, a giant known for his advocacy for photography as an art through his gallery and the journal Camera Work.2 As a young man, Steichen greatly admired the Belgian Symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck, whose criticism, poetry and dramas, intended to ‘throw light upon the existence of the soul’ (Dukore 1974: 727), greatly influenced Strindberg as well. In 1901, Steichen photographed Maeterlinck at the author’s writing desk (Figure 5.1). In the photograph, Maeterlinck, whose face is cast in shadow, stares directly out at the viewer. The bright whiteness of his collar contrasts with the near jet-black tone of his jacket, creating an eerie effect, through which Maeterlinck’s head appears to be almost floating in mid-air. The writer is poised mid-composition, as if Steichen has caught him in the act of making his poetry. Maeterlinck’s hands also appear in shadow, gently resting upon the manuscript’s flesh-like papers, seductively arrayed on the desk below him. The photograph, printed in the dimensions of 33 by 26 centimetres, offers a Pictorialist interpretation of the future Nobel-Prize-winning writer, conjuring a melancholy, mystical, romantic impression of its sitter rather than striving to obtain a more objective portrayal. The photograph appeared in print in the 1906 edition of Camera Work, within an issue titled ‘Special Steichen Supplement’, devoted to Steichen’s photography.

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Figure 5.1 Edward Steichen, Portrait of Maurice Maeterlinck, 1901. Museum Arnold Vander Haegen, Ghent. © Lukas – Art in Flanders VZW.

Steichen’s portrait of Maeterlinck provides a fruitful comparison to one of Anderson’s portraits of Strindberg, coincidentally also printed in 1906 (Figure 5.2). Although Strindberg and Anderson may never have seen Steichen’s portrait of Maeterlinck, they certainly would both have been aware of Steichen by the time they were setting to work on their collaborations. Steichen’s photographs of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin in his studio, for example, taken in 1902, were widely circulated throughout Europe and America. Just as Steichen chose to show his admiration for Maeterlinck as an artist by taking his photograph, so too did Anderson play a principal role in aiding Strindberg’s self-presentation as a modernist. The Self-Portrait of Strindberg (which may not have technically been a self-portrait due to the assistance of Anderson) is, like Steichen’s of Maeterlinck, stylistically Pictorialist. Strindberg’s face appears in half-shadow, emphasizing his right side by darkening his left, to the point at which one can barely make out the features of his left eye. As is the case with Maeterlinck in Steichen’s portrait, the whiteness of Strindberg’s collar stands out in sharp, bright relief against the abstract, blackened surround of his context. Strindberg, like Maeterlinck, appears as a brooding, melancholy, soulful poet – a romantic visionary of the modern age. The play of black and white contrast, as with the black/white divide of Strindberg’s face, articulates a Manichean duality, suggestive of Strindberg’s writings on various binary dualities: male/female, weaker/

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Figure 5.2 August Strindberg (with Herman Anderson), Self-Portrait Possibly Taken with the Wunderkamera, 1906. Reproduced by permission of Nordiska Museet, Stockholm.

stronger, science/art, etc. We see both the black and white side of Strindberg here, both his transparency and hiding, illustrating his skill at strategically revealing and deceiving aspects of self. The photographs of both Maeterlinck and Strindberg produce not only psychological portraits but also ghostings of their subjects, as if only the camera were capable of capturing the true ‘spirit’ of either artist.

A newly discovered country: Strindberg and Maeterlinck I introduce a comparison of these two photographs not only for their formal similarities but also because I wish to position Strindberg as a modernist who stood firmly in the shoes of Maeterlinck for other reasons. Maeterlinck, who identified primarily as a Symbolist, was, like Strindberg, a dramatist, poet, essayist, critic and even, in his later years, science writer. His first major lyrical drama, Princess Maleine, appeared in 1889 and received praise from, among other critics, Octave Mirbeau, the French literary critic of Le Figaro, thus cementing the foundations of his fame. In his dramatic oeuvre, Maeterlinck sought a static art form, a theatre that would replace speech with silence, action with stillness, sight with blindness, and representationalism with abstract figuration. In Symbolist works such as The Intruder (1890), The Blind (1890), Pelleus and Melisande (1892) and The Interior (1895), he desired to penetrate deep into

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human consciousness and reveal the world beneath the surface of visible reality. In many of his plays, he sought to replace his actors with shadows, reflections, sculptures or puppets; in his words, with ‘marionettes’. For Maeterlinck, the body interfered with the portrayal of the symbolic, a problem due to its materiality. Martin Puchner suggests that ‘most symbolist plays from Maeterlinck to Hofmannsthal envisioned their plays to be exclusively acted by marionettes, for marionettes did away with the independent agency of the actor, which was so adversarial to the project of symbolism on the stage’ (Puchner 2002: 127). David Krasner notes that, for Maeterlinck, ‘Performance eradicates the symbolic, akin to a living person stepping out of a painting’ (Krasner 2008: 65). It makes sense that, as a symbolist, Maeterlinck should have designed many of his plays as closet dramas, intended for readers but not for actual production in theatres. Strindberg’s admiration for Maeterlinck is well known; Kela Kvam writes, for instance, of Strindberg’s ‘kinship both in thematic content and dramatic form’ (Kvam 1991: 111) with the Flemish writer throughout the post-Inferno period. Strindberg had first come across Maeterlinck’s writings while living in Paris, but confesses in one of his late essays on historical drama: ‘He was a closed book to me, so immersed was I in materialism’ (Strindberg 1966: 299–300). It was only after his Inferno years (1896–99) that Strindberg returned to Maeterlinck’s plays and essays again: ‘Then he came along a newly discovered country and a new time’ (Strindberg 1966: 300). He particularly admired Maeterlinck’s collection of essays, The Treasures of the Humble (1896), referring to the work in a letter addressed to Emil Schering, dated 30 April 1901, as ‘the greatest book I’ve ever read’ (Törnqvist and Steene 2007: 93). He even goes so far as to suggest to Schering that if anyone should wish to understand his upcoming work they ‘should read Maeterlinck’ (Törnqvist and Steene 2007: 93). Strindberg also admittedly adored Maeterlinck’s fantastical drama Princess Maleine, writing in a letter to Vilhelm Carlheim-Gyllensköld in 1901 that the play had ‘instilled in him the feeling that something new is entering into him, but that there remains some slag left in his body and soul still to be burnt’ (Kvam 1991: 112). Strindberg viewed Maeterlinck as an almost incomparable influence in this sense, at times bemoaning his inability to fully attain the same beauty in his own dramas as that he saw expressed by Maeterlinck’s plays: ‘I know I have only stopped at the portal’, he writes of his love for Maeterlinck in a letter to his second wife, Harriett Bosse, in 1901, ‘I must burn the slag in my soul before I am worthy of entering’ (Kvam 1991: 112). According to Kvam, Strindberg’s success as an artist during these later years was, in fact, dependent on his failure to write exactly like Maeterlinck, precisely because Strindberg suffuses his own dream plays with an added component of reality, personal narrative and inner conflict drawn from his own life experience: ‘Strindberg’s drama has body as well as soul’, concludes Kvam, ‘ – Maeterlinck’s has only soul’ (Kvam 1991: 113). Summarizing his view on Maeterlinck’s influence on Strindberg, Kvam argues further that, ‘Materlinck’s world is a world of unreality and dreams [whereas] Strindberg always maintained a grip on reality …’ (Kvam 1991: 112). Yet, on the other hand, seen from the point of view of modernist anti-theatricality, bodies were precisely what Strindberg was also struggling to sidestep within his artwork.

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Strindberg, of course, never desired to write his own plays only as closet dramas. He wished for them to be performed, even going so far as to initiate the building of his own theatre for the very purpose of staging his own plays. Inspired by Max Reinhardt’s Kleines Theater in Berlin, Strindberg collaborated with the Swedish director, actor and producer August Falck to open the Intimate Theatre in November 1907. An important architectural feature of the Intimate Theatre was its inclusion of copies made by Carl Kylberg of two paintings by the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin, The Isle of the Dead (Die Toteninsel) (1880) and The Isle of the Living (Die Lebensinsel) (1888), positioned on either side of the stage. Isle of the Dead depicts a widow, shrouded in white, standing at the bow of a small boat, which bears the coffin of her husband, heading towards an inlet between two massive stone cliffs into which are built marble tombs or, as it were, chambers. In Isle of the Living, Böcklin paints a contrasting image depicting an island paradise, inhabited by swans and mythic figures, wading and frolicking amid peaceful waters. Lynn R. Wilkinson has viewed the reproductions of the Böcklin paintings as instrumental to Strindberg’s development as an artist during this period, noting as well how the dramatist, following his completion of Ghost Sonata (which concludes with the image of the Isle of the Dead), began work on another piece, aptly titled Toteninsel, in which a young man awakens inside the world of Böcklin’s painting. Attuned to Strindberg’s positioning in the context of fin-de-siècle visual culture, Wilkinson views the reproductions of Böcklin’s paintings on either side of the Intimate Theatre stage as ‘a kind of double framing, inviting spectators to view the performance as an illusion within a frame that is itself a framed illusion’ (Wilkinson 2009: 110). This type of liminal balancing between material and immaterial, living and dead, representational and abstract, theatrical and anti-theatrical worlds, serves as a dominant concept throughout much of Strindberg’s post-Inferno work. Yet, the placement of paintings on either side of the stage also positions the theatre as a chamber or vessel for transformation of the live, embodied actor into the immaterial, abstracted realm of the dead. The paintings signal not only that the theatre is itself illusionary but also that it can, like the visual media of painting and photography, transcend (or evade) the world of living bodies. Modernist theatre can transform the material into the immaterial by conceptualizing the theatrical apparatus itself as a chamber. Tension between wanting actors and not wanting actors arises time and again throughout Strindberg’s writings on the Intimate Theatre. In Open Letters to the Intimate Theater, Strindberg confesses, ‘When I see my play performed without noticing the actors, it has been acted well’ (Kvam 1991: 113). How does one stage a play, however, without noticing the actors? The problem relates to Maeterlinck’s work as well. Elsewhere in his Open Letters, Strindberg agrees with Maeterlinck’s own assessment of his plays as not intended for the theatre: [Maeterlinck] calls his finest plays marionette plays and considered them unproducible on the stage. By marionettes he does not mean what we call Kasper but figures of real proportions manipulated by means of wires, which make possible such scenes as the black dog’s or the little lamb’s, and even leads to an angularity of movement that seems conventional. This fact made people feel that

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In other words, according to Strindberg, the reason why Maeterlinck’s ‘marionette dramas’ are ‘best unperformed’ is that no live actor seems capable of acting them without resorting to the gestural vocabulary and ‘exalted style’ of older theatrical and operatic traditions. The problem, in other words, is not with Maeterlinck’s plays themselves but with their actors, who inhabit abstracted, immaterial worlds through their own sloppy, material, mimetic bodies. The actor cannot help but make signs with his body that betray the larger Symbolist fidelity to abstraction and the spirit. Offering directorial advice to those who may be set upon by the task of producing a Maeterlinck drama, Strindberg thus suggests: Forget the term ‘stylizing’, and instead ask the actors to try to gain entrance into this poet’s marvellous world, where everything has proportions, tones, and light other than we have in this world. If the actor can do this, he will have succeeded; otherwise, he will remain outside, the world [of Maeterlinck] closed to him. It cannot be learned, it can perhaps be acquired, but as part of the price: a wandering through Inferno. (Strindberg 1966: 301)

Here, Strindberg writes of Maeterlinck’s unproducible worlds through language that conjures to mind a description of photography: ‘proportions, tones, and light’ that exist beyond the world sound like those appearing in the portraits made by Strindberg and Anderson. Similarly, Strindberg’s description of Maeterlinck’s world as an Inferno of ‘despair, disaster and heaviness’, through which an actor must wander and within which ‘there is light in the darkness, beauty in the suffering, and sympathy in everything that lives’ (Strindberg 1966: 300), might just as well be written of Steichen’s photograph of Maeterlinck, or, for that matter, Strindberg’s life-size Self-Portrait from 1906. In either case, the photograph provides a chamber – a contained, hollow, disembodied form – which the artist fills with light, shadow, tones and proportions that, while referring to the dimensions of the real world, offer key abstractions from its material contours. How then might Strindberg's and Anderson’s life-size portraits be understood as photographic versions of closet dramas, conceptually akin to Maeterlinck’s ‘marionette plays’?

Life-size marionette plays Just as Maeterlinck’s marionette plays may be read as allegories for photography, so too may Strindberg’s life-size photographic portraits be interpreted as allegories for a modernist theatre that circumvents the problem of the bodies of actors through

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the formal intervention of the visual image. In both comparisons, the problem of the actor’s physical body and materiality is sidestepped through the medium of the chamber, a word itself derived from the Greek word camera, which cradles a disembodied body or image as substitute for the actual, material subject. The life-size aspect of the photographs positions them almost as ‘marionettes’ in the way Strindberg describes Maeterlinck’s idea of the marionette, that is, not as a puppet but as a ‘figure of real proportions’ (1966: 300, my emphasis).The actuality of the photograph, its real dimensionality in 24 by 30 centimetres, is instrumental in the process of producing a surrogate or, as it were, actual-size ‘marionette’; one that stands in place of the material body of the sitter. In many ways, Strindberg may have thought of his portraits as puppets, dangling upon his own strings. Along such lines, Linda Haverty Rugg views Strindberg’s life-size photographs as media endowed, for the artist, with telepathic powers (Rugg 1997: 118). She considers both presence and absence of the subject as integral to the photograph’s meaning as well, noting that Strindberg felt he was in contact with a person when he looked at their photograph, conceiving of the act of looking as relational, and ‘yet photographs also signify their subjects’ absence’ (Rugg 1997: 18). Noting how Strindberg kept a lifesize photograph of Harriet Bosse behind a curtain in his apartment, treating her image as a devotional ‘icon in moments of distress’ (Rugg 1997: 119), and, at other times, a sexual object, Rugg concludes: ‘Her photograph asserted her continued presence in his life when he was most in need of it’ (Rugg 1997: 118). There’s another way to read the anecdote, however: by placing the life-size image of Harriet Bosse behind a curtain, opened and closed at his own will, Strindberg was creating what was essentially his own personal, intimate theatre, in which he could manipulate and control the bodies of his actors, in this case Harriet, through the surrogate of the life-size photographic image. Harriet becomes a marionette, tucked inside the darkened chamber of Strindberg’s autobiographical closet drama. It is important to note as well that Harriet, in the photograph, was costumed as Puck from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Meta-theatricality provides yet another frame around the real persona of Harriet, providing an even deeper level of abstraction from her living, embodied self. For Rugg, the photographs of others are intended to ‘reinsert their presence’ into Strindberg’s increasingly lonely social life, yet the self-portraits ultimately ‘reveal an anxiety about his own coming absence (his death)’ (Rugg 1997: 118). Psychoanalysing Strindberg’s turn to the fabrication of his self in the photographic object as a quest for immortality, Rugg views the process of self-objectification as that which creates Strindberg’s ego. I am less interested in the psychoanalytic aspects of his life-size photo project than in its modernist anti-theatricalist ones, however. Viewed as modernist interventions, Strindberg’s life-size photographs participate within a broader strategy for circumventing the material body of their subjects, a way to avoid the body as an interference with the artist’s abstractions, a way of privileging the spiritual and immaterial over the material, mortal self. Yet, at the same time, there remains a theatrical mission within all of Strindberg’s art from the period. Like later modernists, he insists not so much upon eradicating or doing away with theatre entirely but upon holding it at arm’s length, controlling and

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manipulating it as an art form by producing a distinctly modernist trope: a theatre made up of chambers that can transform material bodies into immaterial images, imitative figures into non-imitative abstractions through an emphasis on visuality. Strindberg’s Chamber Plays may be thought of, like his life-size photographs, as venues for spiritual transformation as well as methods for keeping theatricality at bay.

Chamber Plays as Wunderkameras Like his life-size photographs, Strindberg’s Chamber Plays also present strategic evasions of the actor’s material, mimetic body. While Maeterlinck wished to replace the actor’s body with ‘a shadow, a reflection, a sculpture, or a puppet’, (Krasner 2008: 65), Strindberg finds ways to do so through the intermedial, dramaturgical concept of the chamber, which conceptually functions in a theatrical context as a camera might, that is, as a medium capable of transforming real bodies into dematerialized abstractions. Strindberg’s Chamber Plays are intended, like the Wunderkamera, as technology that provides the means for the actor to transport himself (or herself) from a flesh-andblood being to a body that has, in a sense, forgotten itself as a body. Yet another major influence on Strindberg during the period in which he wrote his ‘Kammarspel’ – Storm (Oväder) (1907), The House That Burned (Brända tomten) (1907), The Ghost Sonata (Spöksonaten) (1907), The Pelican (Pelikanen) (1907) and The Black Glove (Svarta Handsken) (1908) – was the English director, actor and theatrical entrepreneur Edward Gordon Craig. Strindberg read Craig’s manifesto On the Art of Theatre in 1905, shortly after it was published. Like Maeterlinck, Craig struggled to actualize a theatre that would avoid the problem of its reliance on the imitative instrument of the actor’s body. For Craig, as for Maeterlinck, writes Martin Puchner, ‘Symbolism is enamoured with abstraction and must mould bodies and their materiality in the spirit of abstract thought’ (Puchner 2002: 128). To this end, Craig famously devised a theatre that would replace live actors with ‘über-marionettes’, actual puppets with disjointed, articulating limbs, modelled after German dramatist Heinrich Von Kleist’s vision of mechanical performers in his earlier essay ‘On the Marionette Theatre’. As Craig explained, ‘Do away with the actor, and you do away with the means by which a debased stage-realism is produced and flourishes’ (Craig 1956: 81). For Craig, the marionette allowed for no comparison to be made between theatre and reality, or, in his words: ‘No longer would there be a living figure to confuse us into connecting actuality with art; no longer a living figure in which the weakness and tremors of the flesh were perceptible’ (Craig 1956: 81). Craig’s inanimate über-marionette would not compete with life, as an actor would, but rather ‘go beyond it’ (Craig 1956: 84), aiming to ‘clothe itself with a death-like spirit while exhaling a living spirit’ (Craig 1956: 85). Text presented another problem for Craig along such very lines. Sceptical of the dramatist’s project of making actors mouthpieces for his own projects, Craig envisioned a director’s theatre as that which might at last replace the writer’s theatre of embodied illusionism. While Strindberg was in agreement with many of Craig’s ideas about abstractions of lighting as well as the adoption of a larger, Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk (or ‘Total Work

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of Art’) for the stage, he could not agree with the abolishment of the actor and writer as principal forces behind the art form. As Susan Prideaux suggests, ‘Mask and mime were further than Strindberg was prepared to go, despite the pull of dematerialization, a word both he and Craig were using frequently at this time’ (Prideaux 2012: 288). Prideaux views Strindberg’s interplay of magic lanterns with real actors as one example of the influence that Craig’s theories may have had upon the creation of the Intimate Theatre. Nevertheless, the Chamber Plays offer unique strategies for dealing with live actors on stage that are similar to those confronted in the theatre of both Maeterlinck and Craig: the problem of the actor’s own consciousness towards his playing, the mimetic referral of the actor’s body to material reality, and the inability of the live actor to become an abstraction. These were all, of course, issues that later modernists like Beckett and Brecht would also have to confront. In Open Letters, Strindberg struggles to articulate what makes great actors so great. He views acting as ‘at once the most difficult and the easiest of all the arts’ (Strindberg 1966: 208). While admitting that acting may be ‘like the beautiful, impossible to define’, Strindberg is clear that the art form is ‘not the art of dissembling, because the great actor does not dissemble’ (Strindberg 1966: 208). Rather, the true actor is ‘honest and sincere, plain and unvarnished, while the low comic does everything he can to disguise himself with masks and costumes’ (Strindberg 1966: 208). True acting, in other words, is not imitation. Strindberg is, in fact, careful to distinguish the kind of acting that will define his Intimate Theatre from that of an ‘imitative’ style. In this way, he echoes the sentiments of Craig almost exactly, who writes of the more vulgar, common puppets of the popular theatre as ‘love comedians [who] imitate the comedians of the larger and fuller-blooded stage’ (Craig 1956: 82). Unlike his modernist contemporaries, however, Strindberg resists the option of replacing the live actor with the puppet. Instead, he instructs the actor to possess two qualities: first, ‘The actor must be able to devote his full attention to his role, that is, to be able to concentrate all his faculties on it and not allow anything to distract him’ (Strindberg 1966: 209). He compares the actor to an accomplished musician in this sense, one ‘who knows what happens if one’s thoughts begin to stray’, that is, ‘the notes fade away, the fingers wander and blunder, and the result is confusion’ (Strindberg 1966: 210). Second, the actor, according to Strindberg, must possess a strong imagination, leading to ‘the ability to conceive characters and situations so vividly that they assume bodily form’ (Strindberg 1966: 210). In other words, the actor loses his own body in the imaginative process of stepping into the role of the character. Here, he elaborates that the actor accomplishes this by putting himself ‘in a trance, forgetting himself, and finally actually becoming the person he is supposed to represent’ (Strindberg 1966: 210, my emphasis). He compares this process to ‘sleepwalking’, noting that ‘If the actor is disturbed and awakened from trance, he becomes flustered and forgets everything’ (Strindberg 1966: 210). This is why, Strindberg writes, he never likes to interrupt a scene, precisely because it ‘pains an actor to be awakened. He stands as if in a daze, and it takes some time for him to fall back to sleep and to regain the right tone and feeling’ (Strindberg 1966: 210). Suggestively, the concept of the actor as a sleepwalker or figure

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in a state of trance may be found in Craig’s work, as well, where he specifies that the über-marionette’s ‘ideal will not be the flesh and blood but rather the body in trance’ (Craig 1956: 84–85, my emphasis).

Move as little as possible Strindberg’s theorization of the actor as a body in trance or a deep state of sleep, in which he forgets his actual self and merges fully into the abstracted body of the character, reveals an undercurrent of modernist anti-theatricality operating beneath his formation of a canon of drama intended for his Intimate Theatre. In a letter from January 1908, written to the actress Svea Ahman, who played the Daughter-in-law in The House That Burned, the Mother in The Pelican and the Mummy in Ghost Sonata, Strindberg insists that in order to save herself from public ridicule she observes the following directions: ‘Move as little as possible on stage, rather sit still; don’t accompany every word with grimaces or gestures; restrict your voice to one register, and don’t run up and down the scale; above all, don’t squeak; speak more slowly, monotonously like educated people, almost as if it were an off-book rehearsal, without any nuances’ (Törnqvist and Steene 2007: 116). Strindberg’s emphasis on stillness, quiet restraint and unaffected acting recalls both Craig and Maeterlinck’s call for physical limitations of the chaotic flesh-and-blood materiality of the actor. For his part, Falck followed Strindberg’s suggestions for a theatrical style that would de-emphasize the living, imitative body of the actor and actress in favour of a deathlike style of abstraction and estrangement. In her discussion of the first production of Ghost Sonata at the Intimate Theatre, directed by Falck, Eszter Szalczer describes how ‘the acting style of the company seemed to reviewers artificial, affected, and lifeless – an impression that was enhanced by the performers’ monotonous declamation and universally chalk-white make-up, which made them look “really starved” ’ (Szalczer 2011: 179). Even more importantly, Szalczer describes, the actors were viewed by the critics as puppets, ‘compared to wooden dolls, mannequins, and automatons – carried out most consistently by Helge Wahlgren as the Student’ (Szalczer 2011: 179). Szalczer views these stylistic choices as an attempt by Falck and Strindberg to create a ‘mysterious Maeterlinckian atmosphere’ modelled after the style of a Theatre de L’Oeuvre production of Pelleas and Melisande, which had toured Stockholm in 1894 (Szalczer 2011: 179). Ghost Sonata was not the only play to prompt such stylistic and conceptual abstractions, however. Surveying the rich artistic terrain of his five Chamber Plays, one may extract a number of prominent tropes, mechanisms and techniques that, when viewed together, illustrate Strindberg’s creation of a theatre that could evade or mediate the problem of the imitative actor on the stage by creating dramaturgical interventions akin to those used by his contemporaries, Maeterlinck and Craig. The Chamber Plays, as dramatic analogues for the Wunderkamera, are vehicles for a subject’s transportation or the experience for an actor of ‘wanderings through the Inferno’, as in the case of Maeterlinck’s earlier ‘marionette’ dramas.

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Beauty without flesh: musicality, meta-theatricality, immobilizations, silences Much scholarly focus has been directed towards the musicality and conceptual frame of the ‘Opus’ as organizing principle for the dramaturgy of the five Chamber Plays. There is no doubt that Strindberg, as he made clear himself, intended these plays to be read in relation to Reinhardt’s modernist innovation, in the Kammarspiel-Haus, of ‘the concept of chamber music transferred to drama’ (Strindberg 1966: 19). Strindberg praises Reinhardt specifically for his ‘intimate action, the highly significant motif, the sophisticated treatment’ (Strindberg 1966: 19). As Strindberg specifies of his own Chamber Plays as well, intended for the Intimate Theatre: In drama we seek the strong, highly significant motif, but with limitations. We try to avoid in the treatment all frivolity, all calculated effects, places for applause, star roles, solo numbers. No predetermined form is to limit the author, because the motif determines the form. Consequently: freedom in treatment, which is limited only by the unity of concept and the feeling for style. (Strindberg 1966: 19)

Strains of modernist anti-theatricality undergird Strindberg’s concept of a drama that avoids all ‘calculated effects, places for applause [and] star roles’. In place of such histrionic traditions, the Chamber Plays employ musicality and meta-theatricality as formal solutions to the inherent problem of staginess, artificiality and theatricality. Each of the five Opuses consciously toys with the idea of theatre as a medium for the re-enactment of memory, for the embodiment of past, immaterial forms to become dangerously re-materialized. Just as a Beethoven sonata or Chopin impromptu brings back a memory of one’s past, so too can theatre recall associations or past events, yet, unlike music, it is tasked with the problem of repositioning them in human bodies. The Stranger in The House That Burned views his family’s burnt home as a memory-scape of youth: ‘It’s as if the bench under me were sinking away and I were falling through time, sixty years, down into childhood’ (Strindberg 1973: 155). At the end of The Black Glove, the Old Man begs the Christmas Spirit to leave his precious cabinet of papers alone. ‘Don’t wake up the dead! You raise the spirits!’ he screams, to which the Christmas Spirit replies, ‘Yes, in order to show you that life is a spirit imprisoned in a body, in matter. Watch out, because I shall raise them now, I’m about to conjure!’ (Strindberg 1991: 218). Like the Christmas Spirit, the theatre is a mechanism capable of conjuring the dead, the immaterial form, back to the world of the living. The problem is that when the actor performs, he steps into a dead body and, in some sense, must also become dead. Or do the dead live again? In Storm, the Gentleman conjectures that ‘If the dead were to walk again, they would be ghosts’ (Strindberg 1973: 116). Each of the Chamber Plays is a ghost drama, in this sense, a medium through which the dead (characters) may walk again by inhabiting the bodies of the living (actors). Like musicality, meta-theatricality functions as an anti-theatrical strategy as well, through the overarching concept of the ‘house’. Through the architecture of the house,

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a dominant motif organizing the spatial design of each play – Storm as silent house, The House That Burned as ruined house, Ghost Sonata as strange house, The Pelican as stripped house and The Black Glove as haunted house – Strindberg employs the allegory of the stage-house as an additional meta-theatrical frame, so as to provide a level of abstraction around the entire project. Each house is itself a theatre, an allegory illustrating the artifice and illusion of the real world. Within this larger meta-theatrical context of abstraction, Strindberg adds many more layers of anti-theatrical gestures and motifs that attempt to deal even further with the problem of the imitative, material body on stage. Each of the five Chamber Plays constructs worlds within worlds, windows within windows, frames within frames, boxes within boxes, rooms within rooms, and intimate stages upon the Intimate Theatre’s stage. Nearly all of the plays contain interior spaces or rooms seen through windows, the blinds for which function like curtains opening on miniature theatres, on which the dead (memories) perform as apparitions. Perhaps if Strindberg can offer consciousness towards the frame of the Chamber Play as a medium for re-materializations of the dead, rather than dematerializations of the living, he can avoid the problem of embodied, imitative theatricality that has similarly plagued his modernist contemporaries, without resorting to the extreme of replacing actors with marionettes. Thus, whereas Craig and Maeterlinck’s theatres turn the living into the dead (actors into puppets), Strindberg’s refashions the dead back into the living (dead souls into actors). Either way, modernist anti-theatricality resides beneath the surface of both pathways of transformation. At the same time, actors, within all of Strindberg’s Chamber Plays, are in many cases driven to extremes in which, as performers, they might as well be marionettes. Characters are often beset with physical disabilities and constraints to the bodily manoeuvrability of the actors playing them: in Ghost Sonata, Hummel in a wheelchair foreshadows the mouth-centred narcissist of Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame, while the Mummy, stuck in the closet, ‘both to get out of seeing and to get out of being seen’ (Strindberg 1973: 211), anticipates the immobilized figures of Nagg and Nell, entombed in trash bins, or the immovable Winnie from Beckett’s Happy Days, buried up to her neck in a mountain of sand. The Mummy is herself likened to a parrot, a recording device that can only transcribe but not interpret life. Under this rubric of immobilization, silence functions as a key aspect of restraint too. Maeterlinck advocated for a theatre of silence, one in which ‘real silence’ might be recognized as ‘the source of the undercurrents in our life’ (Maeterlinck 1900: 12). For Maeterlinck, speech conceals what silence reveals, or, as he wrote famously: ‘speech is of time; silence is of eternity’ (Maeterlinck 1900: 4). This is because speech can never express what’s real without relying on the material body as its vehicle of expression. Once the lips still, the ‘soul awakens and sets forth on its labours’ (Maeterlinck 1900: 12). The turning away from speech towards silence participates in modernism’s greater attempts to dissociate its various forms of media from reliance on the flesh-and-blood body of the actor. Strindberg likewise conceived of his Chamber Plays as media in which words triumph over actions, silences over speech. The meta-theatrical conceit of the dumb-

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show is prevalent throughout the Chamber Plays as well, which use the screen or gauze or muslin sheet as a way of effectively distancing the imitative bodies of live actors, who become instead like silent puppets motioning behind slim veneers. The first act of Storm, subtitled The Silent House, opens on a house whose second-storey windows contain red curtains drawn and lit from within, so that it appears from the outside as if one is seeing ‘bloody dramas’ (Strindberg 1973: 101). In The Black Glove, Kristen and the Wife portray a silent scene in which they learn of the child, lost in the ice, and later, the Old Man opens up his cabinet to see a vision of his old country cottage and a young mother dressing her child. In these silent dumb-shows, Strindberg provides his audiences with experiences of witnessing beauty without flesh, scenes that distance the actual material bodies of the actors by turning them into pictures of memories, or visual scenes extracted from albums stored in the mind. As Hummel in Ghost Sonata observes, ‘Silence can conceal nothing … which words can’ (Strindberg 1973: 215). Characters often appear as silent silhouettes or disembodied projections behind these sheets or screen or windows, as if conjured from a dream or memory, not only as a way of introducing visuality as an aesthetic innovation but also as a way of sidestepping the problem of the actor’s body as a purely imitative construct. At the end of Storm, the windows are shut and curtains are drawn, so that the memories ‘may lie down to sleep in peace’ (Strindberg 1973: 50) once more. The figure of the vampire, which appears throughout the Chamber Plays, may be read as a modernist anti-theatrical thematic intervention, too. Eszter Szalczer suggests that the vampire leitmotif, playing into Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences, provides a meta-theatrical quality to the Chamber Plays, ‘where life appears as a masquerade and clear vision is afforded only to those wanderers who have had a glimpse of the other side’ (Szalczer 2011: 104). A vampire is, after all, a dead figure that steals life from the bodies of those living. In Ghost Sonata, Hummel wants the Student to become his bodily surrogate, seeing and living life for him from a distance (Strindberg 1973: 202). Here, the vampire functions almost as a director, stealing other people’s bodies and ‘directing them’ about the world (Strindberg 1973: 204–205). On the other hand, the vampire stands for a character, a disembodied soul that temporarily co-opts the living, breathing actor without actually having to reside in its own body. In the House That Burned, we hear from the Lady that ‘People depict each other according to their own image’, and from the Stranger, ‘and they’re like theatre directors assigning roles to each other’ (Strindberg 1973: 178). In The Pelican, a ‘psychic murder’ has occurred in the house before the play even begins, recalling Strindberg’s earlier fascination with Ibsen’s use of the ‘soul murder’ in Rosmersholm. Elise is a ‘sleepwalker’ (Strindberg 1973: 233), unaware of the significance of her actions, ‘lulling others into states of sleepwalking too’ (Strindberg 1973: 234). The play stages an awakening of the children towards their father’s perspective on his failed marriage when they read a letter he’s left behind. Awakenings of the soul, the truth, illustrate that we see people only through the interpretations of others more powerful than ourselves. This doubleness of self and other, vampire and victim, ghost and living subject, complicates our ability as audiences to apply a simple interpretation to the actor himself, who appears instead as an abstraction by channelling immaterial forms.

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That is, the actor is not merely playing the imitative role of a character; he is temporarily embodying that which no longer exists as a body, whether ghost, vampire or spirit.

Preservations, sleepwalkings and awakenings Photographs, paintings, albums, statues and sculptures also function meta-artistically. Such silent, still or ‘dead’ objects stand in for living bodies of actors in numerous cases within the plays: in Storm, the Gentleman has positioned a photograph of his mistress between the candelabras on the wall (Strindberg 1973: 112), just as Strindberg did with the life-size photograph of Harriet Bosse; in Ghost Sonata, the white marble statue of Lady as a young woman foregrounds the loss of her youth to time; and in The Black Glove, the Old Man attempts to preserve animate life through taxidermy. Photography, statue and taxidermy are all mechanisms, in other words, in which the living are effectively rendered as dead, turned into material objects that, while capable of being preserved, are inanimate. In contrast, theatre is a medium that dabbles in dead forms only to reanimate them. Theatre is a space of death because it reveals the truth. Or, is theatre life-like in that the world is ‘a bad copy’, from which release comes only in death and escape into an ‘original’, as we hear in Ghost Sonata (Strindberg 1973: 188)? As the Stranger alerts the Lady in The House That Burned, death is the opposite of theatre: ‘a life with no resemblance, only actuality, only truth’ (Strindberg 1973: 179). A paradox thus operates throughout the Chamber Plays between theatre as a medium for conjuring, for making something out of nothing (the living out of the dead), and theatre as a venue for unmasking, making nothing out of something (the dead out of the living). The character of the sleepwalker figures prominently throughout Strindberg’s Chamber Plays, further illustrating this tension. Many of Strindberg’s more central characters – the Gentleman in Storm, the Stranger in The House That Burned, Hummel in Ghost Sonata, Gerda in The Pelican and the Old Man in The Black Glove  – are variations of sleepwalkers, awakening from their deep states of unconsciousness and delusion towards their more truthful lives and memories. Often assisted by Spirits or visitations, these sleepwalkers avoid consciousness towards their own predicaments; as characters, they allow actors to enter into trance-like states in which they might even forget their own bodies on stage, reminding us again of Strindberg’s metaphor for the actor or actress as a ‘sleepwalker’. Like actors interrupted from their states of trance, finding themselves ‘flustered and forget[ting] everything’ (Strindberg 1966: 210), so too do many of the characters in the Chamber Plays experience suffering and confusion in the moment of their awakening from unconsciousness. Many characters awaken only to discover that they are ghosts, as the Stranger does in The House That Burned, haunting their own former homes, or as characters acting within the dramas of their own lives. If, in the moment one sees oneself, one dies, then all that can really be wished for, in the end, is to die. Yet, the characters, like actors in a trance, struggle to hold on to their states of sleep: ‘I’m sleepwalking, I know’, says Gerda in The Pelican, ‘but I don’t want to be awakened! Then I wouldn’t be able to

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live’ (Strindberg 1973: 257). Yet, then again, ‘we’re all sleepwalking’ (Strindberg 1973: 257). In order to live, to function in life, one must, Strindberg seems to be suggesting, become an actor. To awaken is to risk recognizing that theatre constitutes all of life. To be a sleepwalker in Strindberg’s plays, however, is also, like an actor, to have lost one’s sense of self or one’s memory. In The Black Glove, the Young Wife, having lost her child, stumbles around in a state of ‘trance’, mumbling softly aloud, ‘Where am I? Who am I?’ (Strindberg 1991: 209). The Young Wife, haunted by loss, expresses a feeling of displacement in her own home: ‘I never felt at home here. It held out promises that it didn’t live up to … It resembled, but was not … a work of art, perhaps, but badly flawed, too much body and too little soul, and how tragic that one could not be … could not become what one most wanted to be’ (Strindberg 1991: 223, my emphasis). The critique of art that resembles art but is not art, and that contains ‘too much body and too little soul’ was familiar ground for Maeterlinck too, of course. For Maeterlinck, the abstraction of sleep provided a rich motif for the soul, which is ‘like a dreamer, enthralled by sleep, who struggles with all his might to move an arm or raise an eyelid’ (Maeterlinck 1900: 31). As the dramaturgical equivalents of ‘awakenings of the soul’ (Maeterlinck 1900: 25), many of Maeterlinck’s dramas consciously strive to evade psychological realism in favour of transcendentalism. ‘The human soul’, he writes, ‘is a plant of matchless unity, whose branches, when the hour is come, all burst into blossom together’ (Maeterlinck 1900: 37), a description comparable to Strindberg’s image of the blossoming hyacinth flower in Ghost Sonata. Eszter Szalczer views Strindberg’s emphasis on visual images in the Chamber Plays as his way of ‘signalling stations over the course of the journeys of transition from outside to inside, from dreaming to awakening, from conscious to unconscious, from illusion to reality’ (Szalczer 2011: 103). This may be true in a narrative sense, but from a more performative point of view, Strindberg’s focus on visuality within his Chamber Plays allows him to transform what is real, material, conscious and embodied into what is dematerialized, disembodied and unconscious, or, in a word, dead. Strindberg’s visual and meta-theatrical abstractions in his Chamber Plays present mediations on mimesis, ways of getting around the problem of theatre’s tedious reliance on the actor’s imitative body. If Maeterlinck imagines a theatre of ‘beauty without tears’ (Krasner 2008: 70), Strindberg conceptualizes a theatre in which the ‘ghosts of [his] brain’ might appear on stage without becoming real. As works for the theatre that strategically evade the problem of an actor’s embodiment, Strindberg’s Chamber Plays anticipate the shift towards disembodiment that constitutes our posthuman era.

Strindberg as proto-posthumanist On the one hand, Strindberg’s late dramatic and photographic innovations would seem to have little in common with the art and media of our own digital era, arising as they did nearly a century ago; on the other hand, Strindberg’s attempt to evade the problem of materiality through intermedial strategies in his artwork speaks directly to the very concept of posthumanism. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine

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Hayles juxtaposes the liberal humanist tradition with posthumanism to illustrate how tensions between embodiment and disembodiment characterize debates about our future. She ends the book by emphatically arguing against the ‘expectation that the corporeal embodiment that has always functioned to define the limits of the human will in the future become optional, as humans find ways to upload their consciousness into computers and leave their bodies behind’ (Hayles 1999: 2). In her most recent book, My Mother Was a Computer, however, Hayles alludes with her title to her acceptance of a troubling evolution: ‘the displacement of Mother Nature by the Universal Computer’ (Hayles 2005: 3). Whereas in the modernist tradition, the body arguably becomes a container for the mind, with the onset of the digital age, the computer becomes a container for the body. As Hans Moravec suggests with his term ‘post-biological’ (Moravec 1988), the digital era foregrounds the possibility of transcendence over the material body, as we revel in the anonymity and cyborgness of our online subjectivities. While Hayles’s conception of the posthuman subject refers to the cyborg, alien, as well as other forms whose bodies coexist with contemporary media – such as computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and robot technology – it is possible to locate a historical antecedent for the construct in Strindberg’s creation of his Chamber Media. Surveying his portraits made with Anderson and his Chamber Plays – both forms in which the material bodily subject is replaced by its mediated, immaterial surrogate, whether as visual image or ghost – one finds that Strindberg ultimately embraced what Bruce Clarke has referred to as the ‘restless transformations’ of the human (Clarke 2002: 161). As Clarke suggests, posthumanism oddly exhibits what makes us most human, which is that ‘the essence of the human is to have no essence’ (Clarke 2002: 170). This idea of the human as a constantly evolving form that, at bottom, has no permanence, no fixed ‘I’, resonates with many of Strindberg’s unclassifiable, intermedial subjectivities. As one of the characters from an earlier play, Creditors, summarizes: ‘You cannot resolve a complex life to a single figure’ (Strindberg 2000: 160). The model of the self as an irresolvable confluence or conglomerate of material identities and particularities that are evolving over time, found throughout his dramatic and autobiographical literature, as well as his photography, articulates a concept of posthumanism nearly a century before the term was coined. In his refusal to attend performances of his plays, Strindberg may have been posturing as a modernist in his day, but in recreating new forms of media that substituted photographs for bodies, and ghosts for characters, he may have been stepping into a role that hadn’t even been invented yet: the posthumanist.

Notes 1 See: Carlson 1996; Rugg 1997; Hedström et al. 2001; Szalczer 2001, 2003; Hockenjos 2003; Campany 2005; Granath 2005a, b; Allen 2012; and Lahelma 2014. 2 See: http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2010/stieglitz-steichen-strand.

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Works Cited Allen, R. (2012), ‘Earthbound: Strindberg’s Dream Play Reimagined for the Era of Digital Media Convergence’, Scandinavian Studies, 84 (3): 413–424. Campany, D. (2005), ‘Art, Science and Speculation: August Strindberg’s Photographics’, in O. Granath (ed.), August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer, 113–130, London: Tate Publishing. Carlson, H. G. (1996), Out of Inferno: Strindberg’s Reawakening as an Artist, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Clarke, B. (2002), ‘Mediating the Fly: Posthuman Metamorphosis in the 1950s’, Configurations, 10 (1): 169–191. Craig, E. G. ([1911] 1956), On the Art of the Theatre, New York: Theatre Arts Books. Dukore, B. F. (1974), Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski, Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers. Granath, O. (ed.) (2005a), August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer, London: Tate Publishing. Granath, O. (2005b), ‘A Writer’s Eye’, in O. Granath (ed.), August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer, 9–30, London: Tate Publishing. Hayles, K. (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, K. (2005), My Mother Was a Computer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hedström, P. (2001), ‘Strindberg as a Pictorial Artist’, in P. Hedström (ed.), Strindberg: Painter and Photographer, 9–101, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Hemmingsson, P. (1963), August Strindberg som Fotograf, Stockholm: Bonniers. Hockenjos, V. (2003), ‘Time and Place Do Exist: Strindberg and Visual Media’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance & Art, 25 (75): 51–63. Krasner, D. (ed.) (2008), Theatre in Theory: 1900–2000, An Anthology, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Kvam, K. (1991), ‘Strindberg as Innovator of Dramatic and Theatrical Form’, in M. Robinson (ed.), Strindberg and Genre, 108–118, Norwich: Norvik Press. Lahelma, M. (2014), ‘Ideal and Disintegration: Dynamics of the Self and Art at the Finde-Siècle’, PhD diss. University of Helsinki, Faculty of Arts, Department of Philosophy, History, Culture, and Art Studies. Maeterlinck, M. (1900), The Treasure of the Humble, trans. A. Sutro, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. Moravec, H. P. (1988), Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Prideaux, S. (2012), Strindberg: A Life, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Puchner, M. (2002), Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rugg, L. H. (1997), Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strindberg, A. (1966), Open Letters to the Intimate Theater, trans. and ed. W. Johnson, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Strindberg, A. (1973), A Dream Play and Four Chamber Plays, trans. and introductions by W. Johnson, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Strindberg, A. (1991), The Chamber Plays, trans. E. Martinus, Bath, UK: Absolute Classics.

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Strindberg, A. (2000), Strindberg: Plays Three: Master Olof, Creditors, To Damascus (Part I), trans. and introduced by M. Meyer, London: Methuen. Szalczer, E. (2001), ‘Nature’s Dream Play: Modes of Vision and August Strindberg’s ReDefinition of the Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 53 (1): 33–52. Szalczer, E. (2003), ‘Strindberg and the Visual Arts’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance & Art, 25 (3): 42–50. Szalczer, E. (2011), August Strindberg, New York: Routledge. Taylor, D. (2010), ‘Save As … Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies’, Foreseeable Futures #10, Position Papers from Imagining America, Seattle, 2010, 2–17, Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. Available online: http://imaginingamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Foreseeable-Futures-10Taylor.pdf (accessed 5 September 2017). Törnqvist, E. and Steene, B. (eds) (2007), Strindberg on Drama and Theatre, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Wilkinson, L. R. (2009), ‘The Chamber Plays’, in M. Robinson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to August Strindberg, 107–120, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Méliès’ Dream Film and Strindberg’s Dream Play: Compressing Time and Space Scott MacKenzie, Queen’s University, Canada and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Debates about how August Strindberg’s A Dream Play (Ett Drömspel) (1901) relates to early film form have often focused on establishing historical notions of media specificity, prevalent in both cinema and theatre scholarship. In this chapter, we challenge some of the ideological investments that have kept theories of stage and screen separate. In short, the philosophical line drawn about medium specificity in theatre and early cinema assumes a firm binary between theatre/performance/stage practice as verbal and early cinema/film/recording/projection as visual (Knopf 2005). Similarly, such reductionist arguments assume that stage practice, understood to be immediate, embodied and ephemeral, is distinct from the cinema, understood to be technologically mediated and repeatable. By the same token, a wide variety of terms were used to describe early cinematic cameras and projectors, many drawing upon etymologies of sight and writing, along with words signalling magic, light, theatre, kinetics and embodied experiences. These include the laterna magica, kinetoscope, theatrograph, bioscope, vitascope, cinematograph, kinematograph, Ouimetoscope, vitagraph and Mutoscope. These terms signal the belief in a conceptual overlap and amalgamation of a variety of representational forms. This is also true of terms in various languages for cinema as a location for motion-picture projection: for instance, ‘Biograf ’ in Swedish; ‘Kino’ in German and Norwegian; ‘movie theater’ in American English. There is a great fluidity in discourses about historical film production and projection as part of the emerging cinema and experimental theatre around 1900. Indeed, much of early film can be seen in light of the term coined by Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault, that of a ‘cinema of attractions’. As Gunning notes: ‘The history of early cinema, like the history of cinema itself, has been seen under the hegemony of narrative films’ (2007: 384). By way of contrast, Gunning postulates that early (that is, pre-1906) cinema is of another kind: ‘What is the cinema of attraction? First it is a cinema that bases itself on the quality that [Fernand] Léger celebrated. It’s the ability to show something … this is an exhibitionist cinema’ (386). As we shall see, early cinema, then, both because of its technological limitations and because of the

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immense popularity of the views and spectacles it offered, was exploring, from the years 1895–1906, many similar aesthetic inventions and preoccupations as those found in A Dream Play.

Strindberg, the cinematographer Strindberg was living in Paris at the birth of cinema, at the time of the Lumière brothers’ first public film screening on 28 December 1895 at Le Salon Indien du Grand Café. We do not know if he attended the screening or any moving-image exhibitions while in Paris. Yet in his 1898 work set in Paris, ‘Jacob Wrestles’ (‘Jacob lutte’), the author describes how he is seated on an outdoor patio at the Boulevard Saint-Germain, with carriages and buses moving past him, as ‘a most lively cinematographic scene’ (‘un tableau cinematographique [sic] des plus animés’ Strindberg 2001: 251). This is the first of only a few times that Strindberg used a version of the term cinematographique (in French or Swedish), and it demonstrates a familiarity with early cinema’s aesthetics, visual codes and representational strategies. Though short, the statement echoes many tropes of early actualités, which emphasize capturing the movement of everyday urban modernity, including busy street scenes in which vehicles and people are observed by a documenting camera. Strindberg’s account of the scene, moreover, posits the narrator’s gaze to be functioning as a camera, seated in front of ‘a scene lit by streetlights’ (‘les revérbères allumés éclairent un tableau’: 251). This quotidian Parisian street scene in ‘Jacob Wrestles’ thereby also signals an interest in the subjective experience of the world afforded by the cinématographe. Combining two representational modes, the narrator’s vision of the world becomes mediated through a cinematographic metaphor. Remarking on this passage, some have even called this mode ‘pre-surrealistic’ (GavelAdams 2012: 347). What is furthermore significant is that Strindberg’s understanding of cinematic aesthetics encapsulate both the realistically verifiable of everyday practices and the subjective, mediated rendition of those events. This tension lies at the heart of early accounts of the nature of the cinema and has informed both classical and contemporary film theory, including the understanding of cinema as an autonomous art form (for a survey of these debates, see Mazaj, Corrigan and White 2010). During his second extended stay in Paris in 1894–98, Strindberg wrote extensively about visuality and different modes of perception, including in a rich sequence of essays from 1896, including ‘Deranged Sensations’ (‘Sénsations détraquées’, 1894); ‘The New Arts! Or the Role of Chance in Artistic Creation’ (‘Des arts nouveaux! or Le hasard dans la production artistique’, 1894); ‘On the Action of Light in Photography’ (‘Om Ljusvärkan vid fotografiering. Betraktelser med anledning af X-strålarne’, 1896); and ‘A Glance Into Space’ (‘Un Regard vers le Ciel’, 1896). When he returned to Stockholm, his literary production accelerated, with a continued interest in visuality that transformed his drama, prose, painting and photography. Specifically, the period around 1900 gave rise to what Strindberg called his Dream Plays, which were a radical challenge to key tenets of Western theatre. To Damascus I and II (Till Damaskus I and II) (1898) and A Dream Play (written 1901; first published 1902; first staged 1907) are known as some of theatre’s earliest proto-

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expressionist and modernist plays. Emphasizing pictorial and visual qualities, conveying an interest in projecting onto the stage fluid senses of self, the dream play technique conveys ‘[…] the shock of a fragmented, disintegrating self, and the lack of a stable external reality and a rational order of society [ … and … ] rejected the phenomenal world that seemed to offer only deceptive appearances’ (Szalczcer 2011: 82). Many scholars have suggested connections between the dream play technique and the cinema, and have done so in two dominant ways. First, A Dream Play (1901), Ghost Sonata (Spöksonaten) (1907) and the dramaturgy of other early-twentieth-century plays have been construed as formally and metaphorically pre-cinematic; as, in the words of Birgitta Steene, having ‘forecasted the structure of a film’ (cited in Hockenjos 2002; see also Rokem 1997). A common denominator in this scholarship is to posit A Dream Play as foreshadowing practices in European and American narrative, fiction cinema, which developed from the 1900s to the 1920s through techniques such as cross-cutting, jump cuts, tracking shots and close-ups (see Sprinchorn 1982: 251, and for a related perspective, Werner 1991). The second strand of scholarship, notably represented by Hockenjos (e.g. 2002, 2003, 2007), argues that Strindberg had no direct interest, at all, in early cinema as a medium with aesthetic or narrative value in and of itself, and that he was interested only in visual-display technologies that were fully established at the time, such as the laterna magica, the slide show, the sciopticon, or the panorama. These dominant lines of inquiry have one thing in common: they disregard the historical complexity of how fin-de-siècle stage and screen practices interacted and developed in parallel to each other through cross-fertilization.1 Many aesthetic and representational preoccupations in A Dream Play are also central to the cinema from early actualitiés onward. In particular, both consistently mobilize spatio-temporal compression as a narrative and formal strategy. For example, A Dream Play’s amalgamation of fairy tale and urban settings shows a similarly expansive reach as do those of early cinema practice, with the play’s locations shifting between the countryside, domestic interiority, a theatre, the Mediterranean region, and spaces of the spiritual and the mythological. In a similar fashion, screenings of early cinema programmes – often in storefronts as ambulatory programmes – juxtaposed time periods, characters, genres of expression, and topics. Programmes were often also coupled with live performances. Many films also deployed spatio-temporal compression within their diegesis, for example using the jump cut to make an item disappear or reappear as if by magic. Like A Dream Play, early cinema was, in general, uninterested in deploying a classical narrative arc or in demonstrating character development, in favour of exploring alternative forms of spatial and temporal representation, juxtaposing the familiar and everyday with the exotic, magical or hyper-modern, and, as in A Dream Play, multiple performance modes from the lyrical to the philosophical, melodramatic or expressionist.

Strindberg’s dream play and Méliès’ dream film Strindberg’s interest in visualizing and embodying through theatrical performance a dreaming consciousness on stage reflects ‘the subjective quality of his work – where the action, the set, the dialogue, and the characters chart a mental landscape’ (Szalczer

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2011: 83). Strindberg’s famous Preface (‘Erinran’) to A Dream Play from 1907 outlines the methodology guiding the conception of the play as it was being produced for the stage for the first time: I have in the present dream play sought to imitate the incoherent but ostensibly logical form of our dreams. Anything can happen; everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. Working off some insignificant real events, the imagination spins its threads of thoughts and weaves them into new patterns – a mixture of memories, experiences, spontaneous ideas, impossibilities, and improvisations. (Strindberg 2012: 646)

The Preface to A Dream Play certainly aligns with the spatio-temporal compression underpinning much of early cinema. In addition, Strindberg’s writing about his dream-play technique connects with a prevalent genre of early cinema: the dream film. The ‘dream film’ or ‘fantastic views’ (from the French vues, being a popular term for the cinema at the time) mobilized trick filming, anti-realism and ‘magic’ for the purpose of representing interiority and dream states. The term was most often used as a catalogue description so that exhibitors would know what genre of film was on offer. The foremost practitioner of this early genre was Parisian Georges Méliès (1861–1938). Méliès is known as one of the most elaborate screen-and-stage artists of the turn of the century, and director of a wide range of classic trick-films in the genres of melodrama, fantasy, comedy and, from 1902, dream film (Frazer 1979). Méliès, who was both a practising magician working in the popular theatre and a stage director, drew on his theatre experience and background, shooting his dream films exclusively in the studio, where the painted backdrop, as in a theatre, sets the stage for dreaming. Méliès himself was quite familiar with symbolist and turn-of-thecentury Parisian stage practices (see Frazer 1979), drawing on the tricks possible to produce through scenography and props when staging in order to achieve some of the dream effects of his early cinema (see Ezra 2000). It is worth quoting him at length in his 1906 formulation of the potential of fantastic and transformative vues (also known as dream films): I now come to the category of cinematographic views exhibitors call transformative views. I find this trade name, however, unsuitable. Since I myself created this special area, I think I may say that the term fantastic views would be far more accurate. For if a certain number of these views in fact include scene changes, metamorphoses, or transformations, there are also a large number without transformations. They have instead many trick effects of theatrical machinery, mise-en-scène, optical illusions, and a wide range of processes that can only be called trick shots, hardly an academic term, but one that has no equivalent in refined discourse. Whatever the case may be, this category’s domain is by far the most extensive, for it encompasses everything from natural views (documentary [non-préparées] or contrived [truquées] although shot outdoors) to the most imposing theatrical performances. It includes all the illusions that can be produced by prestidigitation,

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optics, photographic tricks, set design and theatrical machinery, the play of light, dissolves (dissolving views as the English have called them), and the entire arsenal of fantastic, magical compositions that turn the most intrepid into madmen. (Méliès 1988: 38)

Here, Méliès outlines his preferred mode of cinematic practice, arguing against the realism of ‘natural views’ and ‘scientific views’, foregrounding the dream-like transformative powers of the cinema – although he does not like the latter term. Méliès’ understanding of the transformative power of moving image is not tied to the medium of film, as these aesthetic approaches are also reflective of a variety of strands of contemporaneous theatre. Indeed, magical-transformation scenes were much more prominent in the melodramas of popular theatre than in the avant-garde stage practices at the time. In the French theatre, the ‘féerie’ (in the form of melodrama, opera or pantomime) was influential throughout the nineteenth century. Plots often centred on supernatural forces in a battle of good versus evil and were set in fantastic or exotic landscapes, where characters would move through numerous adventures, with magic at hand to transform people, objects and locations. The stage practice involved mime, acrobatics, pyrotechnics and various forms of trick spectacles – including dioramas – with the ensuing results comparable to ‘dreams’, in the words of French novelist and critic Théophile Gautier (French novelist and critic Théophile Gautier in 1844 (cited in Kovács 1976: 2)). As Katherine Singer Kovács demonstrates, Méliès’ film-making was deeply influenced by this popular French theatre form (1976: 7–8). Similar assumptions guide A Dream Play’s interest in perception and the malleability of physical objects, everyday spaces, or sets that transform from buildings that grow of their own accord in the city to an ocean cave, though Strindberg’s play operated in a different aesthetic register and on assumptions of a much smaller stage budget than that of the large popular productions driven by melodramatic and magic action. Yet, an interest in challenging perceived reality and foregrounding space–time compression align. For example, in Scene 2 of A Dream Play, one character exits straight through a wall, and props are supposed to change seamlessly and magically with the curtain open for all to see, transitioning, as in the stage directions for Scene 4, from a door to a filing cabinet, and from a linden tree to a coat hanger. Such transformations of physical objects would have been easier to convey cinematically through superimposition or jump cuts (both techniques used by Méliès and others at the time; see Kovács 1976: 10) than with props on stage. Similarly, in A Dream Play, a God’s daughter descends from the heavens to walk the streets of a modern city, which aligns with tropes of early trick filming that often juxtapose the immaterial world with the material world. This is the case in Méliès’ The Astronomer’s Dream (Le Rêve d’un astronome) (France, 1898), which integrates the astronomer’s key tool, the telescope, as a photographic apparatus, with dream episodes in which the celestial object of study (the moon) comes to quite violent life. The Astronomer’s Dream uses a variety of techniques, from jump cuts to chalk animation to the use of the backdrop as an active character, which allows for the Moon to jump in from the sky to the astronomer’s observatory, compressing time and space. Similarly, in A Dream Play, the Growing Castle functions both as a backdrop

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and a character, as Szalczer argues (2001), to create fluidity and plasticity in both visual and narrative registers. Contemporaneous Méliès' films such as The Rajah’s Dream or The Enchanted Forest (Le Rêve du Radjah ou La Forêt Enchantée) (France, 1900) mobilize the dream trope as well. In this work, the Rajah falls asleep after trying to catch a bird, then appears through a jump cut into a dreamscape. The film uses tricks to make objects disappear or appear (to comic relief), while embedding the transformations of the material realm into the immaterial within a frame of a dreamer’s consciousness. There are also some striking differences. For example, A Dream Play has no embodied dreamer like the Rajah or the Astronomer. Scholars have queried whether the dreamer is the Daughter, the Officer, or the implied author, or whether there is a constantly changing dreamer, standing outside the dream world (see, for example, the latter in Carlson 1982: 137–190; see also Szalczer 2009). There have been debates about whether the dreamer is extra-diegetic or intra-diegetic or both. Also, the transformation in A Dream Play from material to immaterial is inverted, or rather more complicated: the Daughter descends from the immaterial realm (heaven) to the material, but the material world turns out to be a dream. The significance of this fluid approach to conceptualizing and seeking to stage a dreamer’s consciousness correlates with the play’s efforts to visually ‘dematerialize’ the dream (i.e. present the material world as immaterial), as the author wrote the Preface to the 1907 premiere, recognizing that contemporary stage practices would come up short in terms of relaying the kind of spatio-temporal complexity that the drama promotes. Yet there are also many similarities: as in A Dream Play, the plasticity of space and objects are foregrounded in many of Méliès’ dream films, while temporal linearity is maintained in the frame, but not incorporated into the dream sequence in terms of narrative or plot progression. Ferdinand Zecca, who began his career as Méliès’ editor, straightforwardly juxtaposed dreaming and reality through montage in Dream and Reality (Rêve et réalité) (France, 1901), though without Méliès’ interest in depicting the fantastical or magical as constitutive of the dream film. Unlike the aforementioned Méliès' film, Zecca’s film starts in a dream, unbeknownst to the spectator, and then follows a realistic mode in which a man sits with a beguiling woman in a hood. He removes the hood, and he sees a beautiful woman with whom he shares champagne. A jump cut reveals him in bed with another woman, presumably his wife, who is encoded as not attractive at all, as she is played by a man. The transgendered part of Zecca’s film is perhaps one of the most innovative aspects of it, signalling that, when dreaming, some conventional boundaries can be crossed. Dream films, then, could begin in either the immaterial or material world; what was important, as Méliès notes, is the transformation. Spatio-temporal displacement, so central to the emergent cinema and to radical rethinkings of the aesthetics of the theatre, as exemplified by Strindberg’s A Dream Play, can be seen as a fin-de-siècle zeitgeist that transcends media. Indeed, spatiotemporal displacement as an aesthetic strategy is the glue that binds Strindberg and the new media of cinema; similarly Méliès wanted to ‘advance’ theatre staging through cinematic technology by trick filming himself out of the constrictions of contemporary theatre. Spatio-temporal displacement is also central to the emerging

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notions of a new historiography at the time, and found in early cinema, A Dream Play and many other fin-de-siècle manifestations. For instance, Méliès’ L’Affaire Dreyfus (France, 1899), an eleven-part serial, brings the recent past back into the present as if it were real and the camera present, collapsing temporality in the process. A Dream Play is expansive in terms of its genres (the play has both the tropes of the travel film and the trick film), spatio-temporal displacement, and the entering of quarantined spaces – much akin to the collapse of private space into public viewing in Edison’s The Kiss (USA, 1896), where two individuals kiss on-screen for the first time, which was a cause célèbre as it provoked intense backlash from the Catholic Church.

Psychology and consciousness The fact that early cinema often depicted dreaming is perhaps not surprising, since the new moving-image technologies would seem highly appropriate for that purpose (neither is it surprising that an innovative playwright such as Strindberg aligned himself with this preoccupation as a vehicle for challenging conventional theatre practices). It is, moreover, clear that a contemporary interest in aligning cinema with emergent discourses on the flexibility of human perception, physiology, consciousness and the subconcious quickly took hold. This is precisely the project of German-American psychologist Hugo Münsterberg in his key study The Photoplay: A Psychological Study from 1916. As the cinema can have, for instance, flashbacks and flash-forwards, dream sequences and hallucinations, for him it follows ‘the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world’ (1970: 41). Münsterberg construes the cinema as an art form fully developed by the mid-teens, and one that mobilized an aesthetic that has far more in common with memory, dreams and imagination than the theatre. For him, the cinema has ‘furnished art with a means which far transcends the power of any theatre stage’ (1970: 38). Münsterberg and other contemporary theorists of aesthetics, philosophy and psychology thus saw the cinema affording great possibilities to visualize dreaming and psychological interiority. Strindberg’s recourse to the frame of a dreamer’s consciousness in A Dream Play correlates with an interest in expanding the conventional ramifications of stagecraft and theatre practice at the time. Münsterberg further argues that ‘The objective world is moulded by the interests of the mind. Events that are far distant from one another so that we could not be physically present at all of them at the same time are fusing in our field of vision, just as they are brought together in our own consciousness’ (1970: 46). These characteristics of the medium, he claimed, only film held. Theatre practitioners, such as Strindberg, also understood the staged medium to be dynamic in its interest in spatio-temporal compression. Münsterberg argues that the cinema offers a far more apt representation of different, conjoined aspects of consciousness than the theatre: ‘Depth and movement alike come to us in the moving picture world, not as hard facts but as a mixture of fact and symbol. They are present and yet they are not in the things. We invest the impressions with them’ (1970: 30). Implicitly, Münsterberg is tearing down the dichotomy between realism and fantasy in cinema; he is also, perhaps unbeknownst to himself,

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describing the aesthetic project of the dream play technique. From this perspective, early cinema shares some aspects with discursive practices used to recall a dream – episodic, truncated, inconclusive and fragmented – which are similarly mobilized in A Dream Play. Such an approach is evident, for instance, in Edwin S. Porter’s Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (USA, 1906), which offers a live-action fantasy that juxtaposes realism, dream and hallucination. After eating a very large Welsh rarebit, the main character enters an urban space. As he holds a lamp post whilst hallucinating, the background imagery foreshadows the urban magic of the city films of the 1920s and 1930s, with an innovative use of what seems to be hand-held-camera back-projections that reflect the disorienting city landscape. Later, once he falls asleep, his dreams, through split screen, are haunted by devils who torment his subconscious. Then his bed flies through the air over the city landscape. He awakens, disoriented from the inner journey he has undertaken, which has been shown to the audience from his subjective point of view. Dreaming, magic, and subjective thought and recollection processes were thus diegetically present in early cinema. Indeed, Porter’s film echoes many of the concerns one finds in the perils and pleasures of urban modernity at the time. Later film historians have echoed these interests in foregrounding conceptual connections between the cinema and dreaming. Michael Chanan’s study of the earliest days of English cinema, The Dream That Kicks (1980), similarly makes an explicit analogy between dreaming and film. Significantly, he places the cinema outside a straightforwardly conceptual realm, as dreams are inarticulate and non-conceptual. And if illusion can be sustained by appealing to a sense of magic, there is also a sense in which the magic which appears automatically, as it were, on the screen appeals to our sense of dreaming. A dream is a vision which seems to pass before us without our having to do anything … A dream, however, is not so much an object as a process. Likewise a film. (Chanan 1980: 321)

Chanan therefore argues that films have more in common with dreams than with the supposed materiality of the written word.

Strindberg’s cinematic Intimate Theatre At the time he was writing the Preface to A Dream Play, Strindberg was deeply concerned with questions about the connections between stage and screen, including as part of his engagements with the ensemble of the Intimate Theatre, the venue he co-directed with August Falk in Stockholm in 1907–10. The Intimate Theatre notably produced most of Strindberg’s innovative Chamber Plays at the time. Strindberg’s stage and screen interests took a number of forms, including as part of non-realist and non-naturalist character development. Early cinema, and especially the dream film, rarely focused on character development but rather used the cinematic medium

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to create effects of magic and the unexpected. Strindberg relayed his thoughts on the process of characterization in cinematic terms to members of his ensemble. He writes: See, how through the cinematograph many light pictures must be taken in sequence for one single movement to emerge, and, nevertheless each image trembles. In each vibration a middle step is missing. When a thousand images of each moment would be needed to depict the movement of an arm, how many myriads of such image moments would thus be needed to depict the movements of the soul. The writer’s depiction of humans is therefore one of abbreviations, contours, and all far from complete and all half false. (Strindberg 1999: 65, our translation)

In this piece, Strindberg echoes a paradox outlined by Chanan and known to early cinema theorists such as Münsterberg, namely the seeming disconnect between the material and immaterial. Investigating the paradoxical relationships between materiality and immateriality lies at the heart of A Dream Play. In a first-yearanniversary letter to the cast and director of the Intimate Theatre, Strindberg went even further in acknowledging the close connections between cinema and theatre. He reflects frankly on the decline in the attractiveness of theatre to Stockholm audiences, and the ways in which the Intimate Theatre had adapted successful strategies of cinema projection: The main house audience has consequently disappeared, to the benefit of movie theatres. This modern locale called movie theatre [biograf] is a part of contemporary times and has increased in popularity. It is democratic; all seats are equally good; same price; and no wardrobe fee. And for a very low price, each person can choose what is desired for some leisure during the day, some small distraction, an actualité, or plain entertainment. As one can learn something from anything, the Intimate Theatre has borrowed two principles from the movie theatre: all seats are equally good; and some days performances are given at a time that is not too close to bedtime. The movie theatre is the first nail in the coffin of theatre; its high prices the second. The third is the late hour, late also for those who do not necessarily go to bed early; the fourth is the long plays, what the French call ‘machines’. (Strindberg 1999: 121, our translation)

Indeed, the playwright states in the same piece that he would rather attend a movie theatre (‘biograf ’), or even a circus, to get some harmless entertainment (127) than sit through some of the laborious contemporary plays. Strindberg’s stance parallels Méliès’ commitment to popular culture through the cinema. These quotes cast the stereotypical image of Strindberg as an elite, high modernist in doubt; at the very least he was willing to adopt the popular democracy found in early nickelodeons to his own ‘Intimate Theatre’. There are also connections to Méliès’ practice in this regard, which challenged some aspects of perception and space–time compression through the

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cinematic medium, while maintaining some of the basics of theatre practice. Though the French director employed spectacular visual trick filming, the basic foundation of his cinematic representational practice maintains the physical stage as a baseline. Though figures may disappear or transform through an act of film ‘magic’, the movement of actors across his studio’s stage is configured in one plane (thereby maintaining the illusion of a fourth wall – the baseline of realist theatre), complemented by the use of a stationary camera that occupies the perspective of a spectator in an orchestra seat (1979: 7–8). The representational register is one of filmed theatre (often in the form of the féerie – or enchantment) in most of Méliès' films. Strindberg and Méliès, like many other stage artists and visual storytellers at the turn of the century, thus borrow from and engage in dynamic ways with practices and assumptions that were shared by both art forms at the time.

The technology of magic on stage and screen The first sustained screening of the Lumières’ films in Stockholm was held at the 1897 Industrial Exhibition, a summer-long fair, celebrating Sweden’s industrial and economic prowess (see Pred 1995; see also Snickars 2001). The moving image screening attracted much attention, and one newspaper reviewer queries its novelty while describing it as magic or sorcery: ‘But how does this magic [“trolleri”] work? […] The device is simply a photographic device, which shoots a string of photographs faster than one can blink. […] The images follow one upon the other so quickly, that the eye cannot register them as one separate from the other, but sees them as a continuous series of movement’ (cited in Furhammar 2003: 14). This review touches on central aspects of the discourse of early cinema, namely the divergent discourses surrounding this new representational form: is it simply a mechanical development (‘a photographic apparatus’), a challenge to human perception (‘faster than the eye can blink’), or seemingly magical (conveying ‘movement’)? Indeed, early cinema accounts all over Europe and North America emphasized the seeming ‘magic’ or ‘sorcery’ of the new medium, while also seeking to explain it as a rational technological development that nevertheless produces an alternative imaginary physical world (see, for instance, Armes 1974: 24; Barnouw 1974: 7–8; MacKenzie 2004: 70). In A Million and One Nights (1926), one of the first histories of cinema in the English language, author and film editor Terry Ramsaye considers the difference between the ‘camera’s eye’ and ‘the projecting eye’ (1986: 172). Ramsaye’s account connects to a discursive register surrounding early cinema and films produced around 1900: Following the researches of the experimental psychologists we must admit that the eye can only see what there is to be seen, namely a series of still pictures. The mind does the rest. By simile we may say that the screen shows the eye a row of dots and that the visual imagination makes a continuous line of it. We often, elsewhere than the screen, think we see motion where none exists. There is assuredly no motion on the screen. The success of still pictures of the object in motion appear merely to

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supply cues to an altogether mental process by which we build our impression of seeing it move. (Ramsaye 1986: 169)

Ramsaye recognizes that perception and subjectivity always guide the meaningmaking process. This sheds light on Strindberg’s and Méliès’ aesthetic strategies of mobilizing different forms of storytelling predicated on spatio-temporal compression or displacement. In addition, Ramsaye’s formulation foregrounds that spatiotemporal displacement not only compresses time, but also expands it, from stillness to movement. Early cinema was similarly expansive in terms of other sensory registers. For instance, early cinema was rarely silent, as musical performance provided accompaniment and bonimenteurs gave live commentary. Similarly, early cinema was also a literary medium through the use of inter-titles. Only with the sound transition did films become ‘theatrical’ in the sense of filming on stage, which reflected the limitations of the technology at the time. As a drama, A Dream Play challenges and investigates tension between dialogue, silence and sound. Some monologues are long and stilted (and do not advance the action), while dialogue is sometimes composed of non sequiturs and seemingly absurd statements, including discussion about a clover leaf on a door and a green fishnet that is never put to use. Using the spoken word in these ways challenges the notion that action-driven dialogue is primary in theatre. Though colour on film was intermittent and often used as spectacle in the form of hand tinting, the range of colouration techniques of early cinema is significant. Early cinema colour tinting was used to manipulate the status of the photographic image as a realistic slice of life or as limited to everyday snapshots, using the process of colour application by hand to turn the photographic image into one of fantasy, dream and imagination (see, for instance, Fossati et al. 2015). Even in short documentary reels, ostensibly about everyday situations that could be documented by anyone with a camera, such as the supposedly realistic actualités of the Lumière brothers, cinematographers such as these quickly turned the assumption of realism on its head, as exemplified by films such as Démolition d’un mur (Demolition of a Wall) (France, 1895). In this early actualité, a wall, through reverse motion, rebuilds itself when projected backwards, creating a vision that challenged basic observable laws of physics. In addition, projections of early films were directed affairs, by which the human hand-cranking of the projector could speed up and slow down the film strip as it moved through, manipulating further the kinetic illusion of a film such as Demolition of a Wall. This kind of non-automated but human-mobilized projection also ties this to theatre: the projection of moving images on a film strip was directed, similar to what a theatre director could do in terms of directing the images on stage. As Paolo Cherchi Usai points out, The ideal projection speed could vary even within the same film, either because the shooting conditions varied, or in order to obtain the desired comic or dramatic

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effects. It also happened that projectionists drastically increased the projection speed (sometimes causing protests from the public) in order to add to the number of daily shows, or that they changed it at the suggestion of the musicians who otherwise might not be able to follow a certain action, or to give a scene the desired emotional impact. (1994: 16–17)

Historical conditions surrounding the recording and projection of moving images in the way described by Cherchi Usai help to deconstruct a facile dichotomy between cinema as an unchanging spectatorial process and the vagaries of a daily or nightby-night theatrical performance as changing. This dichotomy has tended in past scholarship to be affirmed as the notion of the visual image (cinema) as not only stable and unchanging, but also as an uncontested document that conveys both meaning and veracity; this is based on the now oft-criticized equation between sight and knowledge, whereas spoken words (as in the case of theatrical production) are posited as ephemeral, transitory, contradictory, or lacking in fixed knowledge and meaning. This not only privileges cinema on shaky grounds but reduces theatre to the spoken word, and disavows its constituent visual qualities. Strindberg’s A Dream Play goes against the grain of such argumentation.

Stage projection, screen spectacle and the sleeping city Around 1900, Strindberg was interested in precisely the malleability of projected images, including the ways moving images could compress time and space as if part of a dream. In a manuscript fragment, he writes about plans for a Sciopticon Theatre, likely imagined as a blended media-performance space that would combine actors on stage with the projection of a succession of images behind them (see Hockenjos 2003: 112). Such a design would create a sense of movement in three dimensions through a combination of technology and human embodiment. Strindberg sketched out a play to be performed there, which he called ‘The Sleeping City’ (‘Den sovande staden’; see Hockenjos 2003: 56, 58). The fragment contains a short dramatic sequence, with stage directions, a list of characters, a note about piano accompaniment, and the inclusion of a sciopticon (see Florin and Olsson 1999: 94–95). The manuscript fragment thematizes life in the contemporary modern metropolis, while foregrounding an ensuing transformation of visuality and perception: ‘World of Illusions. Life as a dream, a prison. World of insanities, everything betrays, everything gets blurred’ (cited in Florin and Olsson 1999: 94, our translation). ‘The Sleeping City’ fragment demonstrates the fluid boundaries between the visual, staging, performance and thematic aspects that indicate a close proximity of stage and screen practices around 1900, and how those are encapsulated in both theatrical and cinematic discourse at the time. In 1903 Strindberg explained in letters that he sought to draw upon sciopticon technology for staging A Dream Play, to achieve effects of dissolving, moving, and montage effects that could substitute for painted backdrops, physical

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objects used as props, or give the impression of temporal variability (Ollén 1982: 446, 451–452). These brief excerpts signal Strindberg’s interest in using contemporary visual technology to stage that which is difficult to represent on stage: interiority, subjectivity and perceptual variance. It also indicates an interest in explicitly linking sleep, projection, urban modernity and dreaming, as the title of ‘The Sleeping City’ illustrates. Around the time Strindberg composed the Preface to A Dream Play in time for its first production in 1907, he had established the Intimate Theatre in the basement of a Stockholm apartment building. This small, underground space could be seen as a concrete development of the Sciopticon Theatre that came to nought. The space shares similarities in architecture with nickelodeon theatres (often small and in storefronts; sometimes makeshift venues) that were by then established in Europe and North America. While the Intimate Theatre was modelled on Berlin predecessors in the Kammerspiele tradition, it was very different both from contemporary large theatre buildings for popular melodramas, farces and musicals and from large cinema palaces (which were beginning to emerge at that time). Establishing the Intimate Theatre thereby signals a different interest in performance and public-engagement space from that of a large mass-medium venue such as mainstream, for-profit theatres or cinema palaces. It is clear that Strindberg sought to integrate visual-display techniques of the time for his production, including the laterna magica (see Szalczer 2001: 140–144; Gavel-Adams and Stenport 2012; Stenport 2012). The Intimate Theatre can thereby be understood as part of a general interest in mixed stage technologies, in ways that integrated optical projection with human performance, as did many of the early cinema screenings. The urban development of modern cities is reflected as allegory in A Dream Play’s introductory and closing stage sets of the Growing Castle, which sprouts out of the ground as a metaphor for Stockholm as an expanding capital. Furthermore, A Dream Play is set largely in public and private urban spaces, juxtaposing urban exteriors with domestic interiors. Yet, there are tensions in the exhibition practices and portrayals of spaces like these. In Stockholm of the early 1900s, mass-market cinema and highbrow theatre exhibition practices did not meet or overlap as the two art forms were maintained as separate by both the intelligentsia and the press (see Waldekranz 1976: 405; Furhammar 2003: 12–15), though, as we have seen, stage and exhibition practices were actually not always that dissimilar. Strindberg’s plays furthermore occupied a status of high, contested and difficult art by this time, in sharp contrast to the popularity of his earliest plays. In A Dream Play denizens circulate through a wide variety of urban, rural, domestic and foreign locations as if these were part of a dreamlike or phantasmagoric juxtaposition of locations and time periods, which is exactly what the urban mass-media cinema culture of the early twentieth century promulgated. Though A Dream Play does not specifically reference an urban cinematic framework, its structure, sets and characters signal a close familiarity with the visual, thematic and narrative strategies that dominated both urban film exhibition and diegesis at the time.

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Space–time compression on stage and screen Strindberg’s interest in performance experimentation and mobilizing both established and emergent visual technologies in the theatre resonate with contemporaneous urban cinema exhibition, which was diverse and multifaceted, juxtaposing locations, time periods, genres and performance styles during programmes that would often shift frequently, depending on films available and the live-performance options. The juxtaposition of subject matter and locations, while manipulating chronology, where time speeds up and slows down, is also part of A Dream Play’s structure and technique. For example, the Officer grows old in minutes, then becomes young again. Many of the scenes in A Dream Play function as disjointed snapshots of modernity, like the films in an early cinema programme, evident, for example, in the Coal Heaver’s scene set in ‘the Mediterranean’ (Scene 10), where statements by exhausted workers reflect contemporary labour-movement rhetoric in the call for fair pay, rest and equitable conditions. The setting and actions at the eerie cholera quarantine on an island off the Stockholm archipelago (Scenes 7–9), with its surreal elements, suggest a protoexpressionist dystopian allegory of modernity. Fantastical and magical elements of the play, such as the god Indra’s daughter descending from the heavens and transitioning into an overburdened mother and housewife, or the final scene set in a mythical, Celtic mythology-inspired and neo-Romantic Grotto of Fingal (Scots Gaelic for ‘foreign tribe’), off the coast of Scotland, continuously juxtapose locations and time periods. These kinds of scene are not only indicative of Strindberg’s dream-play technique, but also reflect the kinds of scene, location and time-period juxtapositions featured in early cinema and film programmes. The compression, and indeed reversal, of time and space is a central feature of cinema since its inception in 1895. It is also a key element of magic. Though integral, time and space compression is an often overlooked aspect of film history. For example, Alice Guy – Blaché’s La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy) (France, 1896; the first film directed by a woman) uses jump cuts allowing babies to magically appear under cabbage leaves, compressing both time and space. Gardens spring to life with handtinted colour and magic in works such as Springtime Fairy (La Fée printemps) (Segundo de Chomón and Ferdinand Zecca, France, 1902). These films, and many others like them, foreground the fact that the staging of the real and the dream, and the interstitial space in between, was a central aspect of early cinema. Such filmic techniques indicative of early cinema work in a similar fashion to the shifting spaces and temporalities of A Dream Play. Some stage directions in the play correlate directly with time and space compression constitutive of early cinema: In Scene 3, for example, The backdrop is drawn up, and a new backdrop is seen, representing a dirty, brick or stone, peeling party wall. In the middle of the wall is a gate opening on to an alleyway that leads to a bright green area, in the centre of which stands a colossal plant – a blue monkshood (Aconitum). The gate functions as a stage door entrance and to the left of it sits the Stage-Door Keeper – a woman wearing a shawl over her

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head and shoulders. She is working on a huge bedspread with a pattern of stars. To the right is a billboard, and the Bill-poster is washing it. Leaning against the wall next to him is a dip net with a green handle. Farther to the right is a door with an air hole in the shape of a cloverleaf. Left of the gate stands a small linden tree with a pitch-black trunk and a few pale green leaves. Next to it is a small, round, cellar window. (Strindberg 2012, Sprinchorn translation: 280)

Changing scenes like this one are taken for granted by the characters, and the play itself never self-reflexively remarks on these unrealistic traditions that challenge basic laws of physics. Instead, by virtue of recurrent changes in backdrops, props and set design, the dreamlike components of the play are continuously reinforced. The spectacular ending to A Dream Play, in which the Growing Castle goes up in flames, resonates with contemporary cinema as well as with popular theatre practices along the lines of the féeries. In Zecca’s The Golden Beetle (Le scarabée d’or) (France, 1907), for example, a turbaned villain dances in front of a transmogrifying backdrop of a castle, which seems to go up in flames. Fairies then enter onto the stage. In Scene 8, the conclusion to A Dream Play, the castle burns and Indra’s daughter returns to the heavens, as demonstrated by the stage directions and use of a painted backdrop and props. ‘She enters the castle. Music. The rear of the stage is lit up by the burning castle and reveals a wall of human faces, questioning, sorrowful, despairing. As the castle burns, the flower bud at the top bursts into a huge chrysanthemum’ (Strindberg 2012, Sprinchorn translation: 354). Time and space are repeatedly compressed and juxtaposed in the dream play technique, just like locations and events depicted in early cinema challenge realistic assumptions of chronology and geography. Early cinema also deployed time innovatively, and temporal progression was not fixed. Hand-cranking of both cameras and projectors created variable speeds of recording and screening. Just because early cinema employed a novel technology – the moving-image camera and projector – it does not mean that temporal progression was standardized, or corresponded to measured clock-time. A Dream Play draws on varied measures of temporality, as time speeds up in certain instances – the rapidly ageing Officer who waits for his loved one at the Theatre is one example; the agelessness of Agnes is another. The play emphasizes simultaneous coexistence of different perceptual realms and temporal experiences, as the group of characters surrounding the Officer do not age, nor do the people with whom Agnes interacts remark on her being an immortal god’s emissary, who enters into a domestic situation of strife and gripe. Along these lines, Ramsaye remarks on the temporal flexibility of the cinematic medium: The slow motion effect is produced by speeding up the camera so that the action occupying only a brief period of actual time is, because of the multiplicity of recorded images, spread over a longer period of time. By direct reversal of this set of rates the effect of extremely accelerated motion is produced by slowing the camera to space its recorded phases of motion so far apart that the action of a long period may be crowded into a short period on the screen. (Ramsaye 1986: 173–174)

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The acceleration and deceleration of time through these techniques not only lead to spatio-temporal displacement and compression but also to the ability to see movement in ways that are beyond the ability of the human eye in everyday existence or reality. The dream play technique, coupled with Strindberg’s meta-theatrical interests, thus indicates a strong interest in challenging contemporary mainstream theatrical practices, including in ways that align with how early cinema themes, plot and exhibition practices were conceived. These techniques, moreover, are most clearly articulated in Strindberg’s approach to characterization in drama, including interest in embodying – on stage – psychological interiority, and also in articulating human subjectivity in ways that had rarely been seen in the theatre before. These intriguing connections between stage and screen practices, and the fluid assumptions of what the cinematic medium could entail in the early twentieth century are worth taking seriously. They point to a much closer connection between the art forms than have previously been encouraged, while demonstrating that studying the historical factors underlying what has subsequently been understood as groundbreaking and innovative – such as Strindberg’s dream play techniques – builds on a wide and expansive confluence of factors.

Note 1 Another line of scholarship is biographical, which has sought to investigate why Strindberg himself was never actively involved in film-making or scriptwriting for the screen, despite his positive impression of the cinematic medium. By 1911, Strindberg indeed looked favourably upon the possibility of cinematic adaptations of his plays as he wrote to the director-producer couple Anna Maria Hofman-Uddgren and Gustaf Uddgren: ‘Please feel free to cinematograph as many as you like of my plays’ (cited in Strindberg 1966: 123, our translation). The Father and Miss Julie were both adapted as films in 1911 by Hofman-Uddgren, with actors from Strindberg’s and August Falck’s Intimate Theatre (see Werner 1991; Waldekranz 1993; Lalander and Landqvist 1995).

Works Cited Armes, R. (1974), Film and Reality: An Historical Survey, London: Penguin. Barnouw, E. (1974), Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carlson, H. G. (1982), Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth, Berkeley : University of California Press. Chanan, M. (1980), The Dream That Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain, London: Routledge. Cherchi Usai, P. (1994), Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent Cinema, London: British Film Institute. Ezra, E. (2000), Georges Méliès: The Birth of the Auteur, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Florin, M. and Olsson, U. (1999), Köra och Vända: Strindbergs Efterlämnade Papper, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag. Fossati, G., Gunning, T., Yumibe, J. and Rosen, J. (eds) (2015), Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Frazer, J. (1979), Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès. Boston: G. K. Hall. Furhammar, L. (2003), Filmen i Sverige: en Historia i Tio Kapitel och En Fortsättning, 3rd revised edn, Stockholm: Dialogos. Gavel-Adams, A.-C. (2012), ‘The Surreal Paris of August Strindberg’s “Jacob lutte” ’, Scandinavian Studies, 84 (1): 347–358. Gavel-Adams, A.-C. and Stenport, A. W. (2012), ‘Introduction: Strindberg and the Stage’, in August Strindberg, Selected Plays Vol 1, ix–xxv, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gunning, T. (2007), ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Cinema, Its Spectator, and the Avant Garde’, in W. Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 381–389, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Hockenjos, V. (2002), ‘Strindberg and the Sciopticon’, in E. Hedling and U.-B. Lagerroth (eds), Cultural Functions of Intermedial Exploration, 103–112, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hockenjos, V. (2003), ‘Time and Place Do Exist: Strindberg and Visual Media’, PAJ: Performance Art Journal, 25 (3): 51–63. Hockenjos, V. (2007), ‘Picturing Dissolving Views: August Strindberg and the Visual Media of His Age’, PhD diss., Stockholm: Stockholm University. Knopf, R. (2005), ‘Introduction’, in R. Knopf (ed.), Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology, 1–20, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kovács, K. S. (1976), ‘Georges Méliès and the “Féerie”’, Cinema Journal, 16 (1): 1–13. Lalander, A. and Landqvist, M. (eds) (1995), Strindberg och Stumfilmen, Stockholm: Strindbergsmuséet. MacKenzie, S. (2004), Screening Québec: Québécois Moving Images, National Identity and the Public Sphere, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mazaj, M., Corrigan, T. and White, P. (eds) (2010), Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, New York: St Martin’s Press. Méliès, G. (1988), ‘Cinematographic Views’, in R. Abel (ed.), French Theory and Criticism: 1907–1929, 45–47, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Münsterberg, H. (1970), The Film, A Psychological Study: The Silent Photoplay in 1916, New York: Dover. Ollén, G. (1982), Strindbergs dramatik, Stockholm: Sveriges Radios förlag. Pred, A. (1995), Recognising Urban Modernities, London: Routledge. Ramsaye, T. (1986), A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture Through 1925, New York: Touchstone. Rokem, F. (1997), ‘Det filmiska som visuell struktur och metafor i Strindbergs teater’, Strindbergiana, 12: 12–18. Snickars, P. (2001), Svensk film och visuell masskultur 1900, Stockholm: Aura. Sprinchorn, E. (1982), Strindberg as Dramatist, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Stenport, A. W. (2012), ‘Introduction: The International Strindberg’, in A. W. Stenport (ed.), The International Strindberg: New Critical Essays, 1–25, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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Strindberg, A. (1988), Ett Drömspel, in G. Ollén (ed.), Strindbergs samlade verk, 46, Stockholm: Norstedts, 1988. Strindberg, A. (1996), Strindbergs Brev, vol. 20, ed. B. Meidal, Stockholm: Bonniers. Strindberg, A. (1999), ‘Teater och Intima Teatern’, in P. Stam (ed.), Strindbergs samlade verk, 64, Stockholm: Norstedts. Strindberg, A. (2001), Legender, in A-C. Gavel-Adams (ed.), Strindbergs Samlade Verk, 38, Stockholm: Norstedts. Strindberg, A. (2012), A Dream Play, ed. and trans. E. Sprinchorn; 2nd edn by A.-C. Gavel-Adams and A. W. Stenport, Selected Plays II, 641–732. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Szalczer, E. (2001), ‘Growing Castles’, in G. Rossholm, B. S. Sjönell and B. Westin (eds), Strindberg and Fiction, 257–273, Department of Literature and History of Ideas, Stockholm University. Szalczer, E. (2009), ‘A Modernist Dramaturgy’, in M. Robinson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to August Strindberg, 93–106, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Szalczer, E. (2011), August Strindberg. Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists, London: Routledge. Waldekranz, R. (1976), Så föddes filmen: Ett massmediums uppkomst och genombrott, Stockholm: PAN/Norstedts. Waldekranz, R. (1993), ‘Strindberg and the Silent Cinema’, Nordic Theatre Studies, 6 (1–2): 50–58. Werner, G. (1991), ‘Strindberg som förebådare av ett nytt medium: filmen’, Strindbergiana, 6: 113–120.

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Strindberg and the Images of the Stage: A Dramaturg’s Perspective Magnus Florin, The Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, Sweden

When preparing for her staging of August Strindberg’s Easter at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1995, British director Katie Mitchell travelled to Stockholm. It was a ritual visit that included a viewing of the play’s original manuscript at the National Library. Katie did not hesitate to cheerfully share her opinion of Strindberg as misogynistic and crazy, especially when it came to biblical zeal. She reaped great dividends from this last point, at least, as we carefully went through the play with all its religious references. But she was not quite as prepared for her discovery of the theatre-man Strindberg’s visuality. Beginning with the initial stage directions, he sketches the play’s time and place using just a few visual elements: the glass veranda, the spring-green of the treetops in the garden, the date display below the mirror, and the gas lamp on the street. Then a beam of sunlight falls into the room from the left and illuminates one of the chairs by the sewing table – it is as though the scene is ignited in order to bring the play to life. For example, one of the main characters, Ellis, steps in, ‘looks around’ (stage direction), and his gaze prompts the sketch of time and place to continue through dialogue: ‘inner windows out, floor scrubbed, curtains cleaned … indeed, it is spring again! And they have chopped the ice from the street, and the pussy willow is blooming down by the river … yes, it is spring … ’. I did my best to help Katie to appreciate what it meant that the inner windows had been removed and that the ice had disappeared from the streets. It was a classic problem of translation, but above all it was a lesson in Strindberg’s visual imagination. I believe that as a director who thinks in images she found this quite stimulating. She would eventually go on to use advanced video technology to create her personal interpretation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie when she staged it at Berlin’s Schaubühne Theatre in 2010. That production drew the words into the background as much as it accentuated images (Strindberg, 1960: 290). I myself had received a basic initiation into Strindberg’s visuality when Wilhelm Carlsson directed The Black Glove at Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theatre (Dramaten) in 1988. The original manuscript of that play was also to be found at the National Library, but what interested Wilhelm and me were the twenty or so notes from Strindberg that guided the way to the completed Chamber Play. Those notes actually concerned a play by the name of Christmas. It was never finished but was reworked into the play we had at hand.

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The notes do not describe the action of the planned play. Instead, Strindberg composed lists of various sorts: of the acts and the locations and times in which they will play out; of the roles (such as the Son, the Mother, and so forth); and of the motifs (the Lost Son, the Engagement, the Lost Ring). It was worthwhile for Wilhelm and me to receive insight into the way the material for The Black Glove came into being, and we took special notice of lists of various objects. They were grouped under headings such as Toys (the Nutcracker, the Diorama, the Screeching Cat, the Rocking Horse) and Storybooks (The Thousand and One Nights, Hop-o’-My-Thumb, Cinderella). Other lists included the Star, the Coffee Table, the Crib, the Boot, the Mirror, the Postcard and the Thistle. The lists shift and continue over several pages. One note was titled Sound, and included the Weathervane, the Ambulance Wagon, the Doves. A few significant dramatic incidents are also noted: the Christmas Beer is raised, the Money Boxes are opened, the Housekeeper wants to go. Faced with all of these lists, Wilhelm and I felt that we were in the midst of a process in which Strindberg’s drama was taking shape. We could see the way it was brought forth in a very material fashion. Little by little, the objects, the sounds, the motifs and the episodes built up the world and the events that would equal the completed drama. We thought it was downright difficult to separate object from theme in those lists: things and motifs flow into one another. The working notes told us something meaningful about the essence of Strindberg’s imagination and it became one of the keys to Wilhelm’s staging of The Black Glove. This very object-oriented, physically tangible nature of Strindberg’s plans and drafts strikes each person who studies them (one point of entry is via Barbro Ståhle Sjönell’s 1991 catalogue of Strindberg’s unfinished manuscripts, collected in the archive called ‘Gröna Säcken’). One soon comprehends that it is the concrete that gives the author energy, expressed in the form of countless lists of objects, times, places, sounds, names, incidents, and so on. Turning to the series of Strindberg’s plays performed during the last century at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, we can see how often the interpretation of the different directors, stage designers, costume designers and property masters is guided by the visual – that which is seen upon the stage. Intrigue is one matter, the characters and roles another, but the purely visual becomes a demanding aesthetic aspect for those who stage Strindberg. Certain plays, such as To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata, give a powerful impression of a rebus-like or puzzle-like fantasy. The stream of images seems to be linked, to create meaning together in the same way a rebus or a word puzzle adds objects together. Pile of wood + ice box. Fishing net + four-leaf clover. Crutches + hyacinths. The stage directions allow the visual to take the lead: the straitjacket in The Father, the siskin – a small songbird – in Miss Julie, the date display in Easter, the playing cards in The Dance of Death, the street lamp in Storm, the flowering tree in The Burned Site, the fire in The Pelican. The very titles of the plays contain an enchanted set of props – slippers, dance, keys, fire, path, glove. Strindberg himself showed great interest in set design, both as an author and a theatre man. Early on, the Royal Dramatic Theatre’s productions of his plays signified

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a departure from the customs of the day. Strindberg’s historical drama Mäster Olof was the theatre’s inaugural play in 1908, produced in Dramaten’s new building at Nybroplan in central Stockholm. The production was celebrated largely thanks to its impressive visual impact, through the work of Carl Grabow, a pioneer of the time in stage design, with his sets executed by scenic painter John Ericsson who brought contemporary influences from Vienna and Munich. But the emphasis on the visual had its true, early breakthrough there through Max Reinhardt’s A Dream Play in 1921, with Alfred Roller’s expressionist sets. In 1933’s Storm, the young director Alf Sjöberg contrasted the dreary building facade with actress Harriet Bosse as a poisonous demon in verdigris and poppy red. Olof Molander, the Royal Dramatic Theatre’s most prominent director for many years, allowed Strindberg’s plays to become psychological self-portraits in a turn-of-the-century Stockholm that was not too far in the past and could still be conjured by audiences and through architectural vestiges. Molander’s A Dream Play from 1935 became one of the Royal Dramatic Theatre’s signature performances, with ground-breaking scenery by Sven Erik Skawonius and optical projections by the artist Isaac Grünewald. In 1949’s The Great Highway, Molander had images of the city’s facades accompanying the play. He foregrounded the popular Stockholm arcade, Birger Jarlspassagen, close to the theatre, and opened out the scenery both to the writer’s last home Blå Tornet and to the statue of Sweden’s King Charles XII in nearby Kungsträdgården. Per Verner-Carlsson gave a radical interpretation of Strindberg’s dreamlike images in a surrealist-ritual staging of The Pelican in 1968. My own experiences with the Royal Dramatic Theatre’s production of Strindberg, from Donya Feuer’s Easter in 1981, with set design by the artist Lenke Rothman, to Karl Dunér’s To Damascus I-II-III with his own set design in 2012, have time and again shown me that the keys to Strindberg interpretation are to be found in the visual and the physical (Plates 7.1 and 7.2). Perhaps this is because those staging the plays feel that Strindberg’s images exist in a sort of energized transitional state. On one hand, these images are about to be transformed into roles and lines of intrigue; on the other hand, they are about to disappear, like illusions that must be captured quickly by the eye before they vanish. As one Strindberg fragment reads: ‘The image dries up, threatening to fall apart’ (see Ståhle Sjönell 1991: 37). There is a sense of photographic processes going on, a delicate visual chemistry, where images come towards the spectator’s eye, staying awhile, and then, perhaps, disappearing altogether. Translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles.

Works Cited Ståhle Sjönell, B. (1991), Katalog över ‘Gröna Säcken’, Strindbergs Efterlämnade Papper i Kungl. Biblioteket. SgNM 1-9 [Catalogue of ‘The Green Sack’, Strindberg’s Collected Papers at the National Library], Stockholm: Acta Bibliothecae Regiae Stockholmiensis. Strindberg, A. (1960). ‘Easter,’ in Seven Plays, trans. A. Paulson, 283-336, New York: Bantam.

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Staging Strindberg’s A Dream Play: A Visual Essay Robert Wilson

Editors’ note. In 1997, theatre director Robert Wilson staged August Strindberg’s masterpiece A Dream Play (Ett Drömspel) for the Stadsteatern in Stockholm. The production went on to be performed in Nice, London and New York. Wilson maintains that the best way to understand his artistic process is to study his sketches and storyboards for his productions. Here, we reproduce the full set of his preliminary sketches for his production of A Dream Play, which include Wilson’s reproductions of Frances Benjamin Johnston’s photographs, which he used as inspiration and visual guidance for many scenes. In addition, we present photographs of the Stockholm performance of A Dream Play (Plates 8.1–8.10) and Wilson’s brief remarks about the process of staging the play. All sketches by Robert Wilson, 1997. Strindberg still has a mystery. He writes about characters which one cannot relate to in a natural, psychological way. The actor, director and designer have a kind of freedom that does not exist in most contemporary plays. No one has come from heaven to the earth and back. I liked the challenge of doing this masterwork at the Stadsteatern Stockholm with great actors. I used Frances Benjamin Johnston’s photographs as a counterpoint reference for the play. Working with Strindberg’s A Dream Play gave me more confidence to trust the unknown.

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Robert Wilson, sketchbook for A Dream Play.

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Figures 8.1 – 8.33 Preparatory materials and sketches for August Strindberg’s A Dream Play, 1997. Robert Wilson. Used by permission.

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Robert Wilson’s Photographic Elements of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Jonathan Schroeder, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

In 1998, Robert Wilson, the American avant-garde visual artist and theatrical director, staged Strindberg’s surreal masterpiece, A Dream Play (Ett Drömspel) at the Stockholm City Theatre, Stadsteatern. A Dream Play concerns a character called Agnes – or Indra’s daughter – who comes to earth and experiences earthly emotions of love, loss and longing. Wilson transformed Strindberg’s elliptical, stream-of-consciousness story into a dazzling visual experience, illuminated with his trademark elaborate, computercontrolled lighting. Wilson’s production, staged for Stockholm’s year as European cultural capital, was a resounding success, and it has since been performed in Nice, New York and London, described as ‘a hypervisual, aesthetic installation, stunning to look at – but not all that easy to grasp’ (Gavel Adams 2009: 44). The New York Time’s review of its performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music had this to say: ‘It does seem to have been a natural, if challenging, match, for the sensibilities of Mr. Wilson, whose favored tools of presentation are visual and aural, as against narrative, an approach to storytelling that has more in common with a symphony conductor or a painter than a director of conventional drama’ (Weber 2000). In Wilson’s final scene, Agnes begins to slowly walk backwards up a long path that traverses the entire stage, a ramp, really, that leads up and out of the scene (Plate 8.10). She is returning to heaven, from where she was sent by her father to see ‘whether the constant complaints and mournings of humans were justified’. She stepped delicately, each step deliberate, paced. Like a tightrope walker, her movement alone kept the rapt audience on edge. Her gradual ascent and departure probably took around two or three minutes, but time seemed to stand still. She walks up the ramp – out of sight, to mark the ending of the play. For me, this was a remarkable introduction to Strindberg’s work, which I encountered as an outsider – newly moved to Stockholm, unfamiliar with his plays, and with only the most basic understanding of Swedish. I experienced Wilson’s production visually, as he staged A Dream Play with a visually striking tableau that juxtaposed traditional elements from past productions with seemingly unrelated imagery that, I would find out later, formed the foundation of his vision for the play. Upon telling an American friend about the play, he stopped me and asked, ‘Did you understand it?’ I was a bit taken aback. A Dream Play, of course, was performed in Swedish,

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so I assume he meant did I understand the language, or perhaps was I able to comprehend the basic ideas of the play? And besides, as a perceptive review of the production noted: ‘Wilson does not interpret Strindberg’s play but rather presents the work to the spectators and invites the spectators to generate an interpretation or a dream for themselves’ (Gavel Adams 2009: 45). But the question is an interesting one – it begs for a closer look. What exactly was the ‘it’ that I was to understand, misunderstand or not understand? I certainly enjoyed the play, and was able to see it again in France with French subtitles, which I could read fairly well. By that time, my Swedish had improved a bit, so I could also catch more of the actors’ words. Yet the experience of the play was primarily visual; each scene was set up like a photograph that slowly came alive as the action unfolded. As Eszter Szalczer remarked about the play, ‘the eye has become the source and the target of the dramatic experience’ (Szalczer 2001: 50). After reflecting about this central question of interpretation for quite some time, I think I understood a version of the play that struck me deeply – it remains one of my favourite theatrical experiences. But I still find the question curious, and important for any project about visual culture. Of course, my experience of Wilson’s production depended less upon a familiarity with Strindberg or Swedish theatre and more upon a visual imagination, stoked by the play’s dramatic lighting, odd set design, and the use of an American photographer’s early-twentieth-century images. I read Swedish curator and writer Daniel Birnbaum’s review of the production in Artforum, in which he contrasted Wilson’s production with an important historical genealogy of A Dream Play productions, including several by Ingmar Bergman, Sweden’s legendary film and theatre director (Birnbaum 1999: 92). He noted that Wilson did not draw upon Stockholm imagery for the sets; his settings are much less rooted in time and place, pushing the play into a more international arena. He wondered about the photograph of a house that provided an opening backdrop for the play. The two-storey wooden house looked old – solid, yet mysterious. Why did Wilson use this image? For me, the photographic backdrop provided a key into the play. I gave a presentation on Wilson’s A Dream Play at a theatre conference in Nice in conjunction with its performance in the European Theatre festival. In the talk, I concentrated on the photograph that opens up the play as a structural device that unifies the entire work. That photograph is a black-and-white image of a two-storey house, with wooden weatherboard siding, and steps leading down from the front porch. Two girls are posed in front of the house, one with a bicycle. To me, it looked like an early-twentiethcentury image – perhaps of an immigrant household. Later, back in Stockholm, I was discussing A Dream Play with a colleague who informed me that that photograph was by an American photographer, Frances Benjamin Johnston. In fact, several of A Dream Play's sets borrowed from Johnston’s imagery of the Hampton Institute, taken for the 1900 Paris Exposition (Johnston 1966). The Hampton Institute was a vocational training school for African Americans set up during reconstruction to help to train and prepare former slaves for life in postslavery United States. These photographs reflected a central theme in Johnston’s work – to emancipate the underprivileged through positive representation – and seem to tangentially resonate with Swedish ideals of the social welfare state.

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Figure 9.1 A Hampton Graduate’s Home, photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1900. Museum of Modern Art, New York/Art Resource.

The photographs, exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1966, depict serious, well-groomed, hopeful African Americans and Native Americans, earnestly posing for a famous photographer’s camera, around the turn of the twentieth century, a time that coincided closely with Strindberg’s writing of A Dream Play (Kirstein 1966). Johnston was a working photographer who had photographed the Hampton Institute specifically to show the progress made by its African American and Native American pupils (Figure 9.1). The photographs were first exhibited at the 1900 Paris World Exhibition. They represent the American Dream as well as the fabled ‘melting pot’. One imagines that Wilson, newly arrived in New York from Texas, had seen the show, and it remained in his memory. Johnston’s Hampton Album images supply an interesting clue to Wilson’s enigmatic staging of A Dream Play. Page after page reveals his visual inspiration for each scene: the house that begins the play is pictured in the photograph ‘A Hampton Graduate’s Home’, a curious scene that involved huge cow figures and directly quotes ‘Agriculture. Sampling Milk’, and the penultimate scene in the play – where the cast gather on steps and unburden their innermost wishes – comes from ‘The Post-Graduate Class of 1900’. Wilson’s use of Johnston’s images catapulted Strindberg’s play into a postmodern visual register, connecting early-twentieth-century photographs and a 1960s exhibition to a

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Figure 9.2 August Strindberg, A Dream Play, 1998. Directed by Robert Wilson. Scene Nine: Fairhaven. Stadsteatern, Stockholm. Photo: © Lesley Leslie-Spinks. Used by permission.

contemporary production of a fin-de-siècle Swedish play. His vision was not tied to the play’s Swedish context, realist architecture or Strindberg’s stage directions – and thus expanded A Dream Play’s potential to connect with broader, contemporary and universal themes (Figure 9.2). Seeing these photographs – months after attending the play – sent a shiver up and down my spine, as if I were seeing my dreams photographed and reproduced in a rather obscure, decades-old, out-of-print book. In her photographs, ‘hearts beat, breath is held; time ticks. Eyelids barely flutter. Outside of Hampton there is an ogre’s world of cruel competition and insensate violence, but while we are here, all the fair words that have been spoken to the outcast and injured are true. Promises are kept. Hers is the promised land’ (Kirstein 1966: 11). And sure enough, when I had the opportunity to view Wilson’s preparatory sketches and material for staging A Dream Play, several of Johnston’s photographs appear as visual guides for the production (see Chapter 8). So the photographs were vitally important themes in the play (Figures 9.3, 9.4). I had understood that much, after all. In Wilson’s production, Strindberg’s A Dream Play provided a visual experience, much like a film, one that built upon photographic images from a distinctly different time and place, yet which resonates with themes of alienation, assimilation and prejudice. Wilson visually articulated key aspects of the Swedish twentieth-century experience – the cultivated simplicity of Scandinavian modernism, Sweden’s social democratic engineering efforts to improve the citizenry and ensuing problems with conformity,

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Figure 9.3 The Improved Well (Three Hampton Grandchildren), photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1900. Museum of Modern Art, New York/Art Resource.

Figure 9.4 August Strindberg, A Dream Play, 1998. Directed by Robert Wilson. Scene Nine: Fairhaven. Stadsteatern, Stockholm. Photo: © Lesley Leslie-Spinks. Used by permission.

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and the functionalism of the people’s home, as represented by Johnston’s Hampton photographs. Like Wilson’s stage work, Johnston ‘had a developed personal vision and characteristic style. A simple monumentality in miniature, a sober austere placement of figures’ (Kirstein 1966: 9). Wilson’s exaggerated, elongated stage chairs, for example, seem to stand in for, and almost mock, the clean lines of Scandinavian functionalism. When I showed Swedish friends Johnston’s photographs, many felt as if a puzzle had been solved – what were those images doing in A Dream Play? Wilson had ‘sampled’ images that connected Strindberg’s play to another world, visually linking Agnes’s earthly struggle with African American and Native American struggles in the United States, with household labour, and with the architecture of home. Strindberg’s universal themes of identity and its quest found a compelling expression in Wilson’s striking visual language that has done so much to open up new possibilities in contemporary theatre. Wilson’s A Dream Play also reveals how Strindberg’s work can connect to current aspects of visual culture, including photography, remixing, sampling and juxtaposition.

Works Cited Birnbaum, D. (1999), ‘Robert Wilson: Stadsteatern, Stockholm’ [review of A Dream Play], Artforum, February, 92. Gavel Adams, A.-C. (2009), ‘From Dream Play to Doomsday: Enter Lepage, Wilson, Ek. Exit Strindberg. Stagings of A Dream Play 1994–2007’, North-West Passage: Yearly Review of the Centre for Northern Performing Arts Studies, (6): 39–53. Johnston, F. B. (1966), The Hampton Album, New York: Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday. Kirstein, L. (1966), ‘Foreword’, in F. B. Johnston (ed.), The Hampton Album, 5–11, New York: Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday. Szalczer, E. (2001), ‘Nature’s Dream Play: Modes of Vision and August Strindberg’s ReDefinition of the Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 53 (March): 33–52. Weber, B. (2000), ‘Strindberg, Influenced by Freudian Sleep’, New York Times, 30 November.

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Dream-Playing the Archive: Exploring the 1915–18 Düsseldorf Production of A Dream Play Astrid von Rosen, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Ethics means staying in questioning for longer.

(Antonia Pont 2015)

When August Strindberg’s innovative drama A Dream Play first premiered in April 1907 at Svenska Teatern in Stockholm, the author was unhappy with the – according to him – too material stage design of the production. In the following years, and in particular in Germany, the task of staging Strindberg’s post-Inferno dramas, such as A Dream Play, To Damascus and the Chamber Plays became a feverish project for modernist directors and scenographers seeking to reform theatre so that performances would become total works of art. This meant that all the artistic elements (spoken words, corporeal movements, costume, stage architecture, sound, music and light) should resonate with each other and be unified under the wings of the all-powerful director, often in close collaboration with a scenographer-technical director (called a Künstlerisher Beirat in Germany).

Strindberg and the young painter-boy Knut Ström The young Swedish ‘painter-boy’ (his own expression) Knut Ström (1887–1971) was to become one of these ambitious pioneering theatre reformers. In 1907, Ström was given the opportunity to make designs for Storm, at Strindberg’s Intimate Theatre in Stockholm, an experimental venue mobilizing the latest ideas from the European avant-garde for not always positive audiences. The scenography (at this time called decorations) he created for Storm was at least partly appreciated by Strindberg, and this fed into Ström’s passionate engagement in what was termed the ‘fight against naturalism’. A few years later, after having worked in the theatre industry in Berlin, and becoming influenced by the famous director Max Reinhardt and his scenographer Ernst Stern, as well as by the modernist dance at the German cabarets, Ström was

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appointed Künstlerisher Beirat at Schauspielhaus, Düsseldorf. This was an astonishing career move for the young Swede, coming from a lower-middle-class family of entrepreneurs, and striving to earn a living from working for theatre (in the broadest sense of the word) decorators and selling his own paintings in a rapidly growing Stockholm (von Rosen 2010). In Düsseldorf, Ström made the scenography for, and directed or co-directed, several of Strindberg’s plays, among them There are Crimes and Crimes, Storm and The Pelican. He also created sketches that did not lead to staged events, such as The Road to Damascus I. The most ambitious of all these projects was A Dream Play – Ström started to make a detailed, highly qualified and equally enigmatic series of sketches and storyboards for it in 1915. He continued to work on the drama until it finally premiered on 16 October 1918, co-directed by himself and actor Paul Henckels. This was the third production of A Dream Play in Germany, but my main interest lies not in who was first, second or third, but in the epistemological, that is, what can be known and through which procedures, circumstances concerning the by now professional practitioner Ström’s interpretation of Strindberg’s dramatic text. In what follows, I demonstrate that the visual and multi-modal traces of Ström’s three-year working process can be considered key sources for a better, empirically anchored and more diversified (in relation to previous research) understanding of how A Dream Play could be understood during the First World War.

Archives across borders Essentially a drama about human suffering, dreams, hope and transformation, when interpreted and staged, A Dream Play will inevitably take on the charges of its time. When the main character, Indra’s daughter, comes to earth to go through a series of trials, she becomes a nexus where the dramatic text and time-bound and space-bound factors coalesce and traverse each other. Moving away from the narrow aesthetic and text-based approaches that traditional analyses of modernist theatre productions often have been limited to, it is worth pointing out that the Düsseldorf premiere occurred only a few weeks before the armistice. Thus, this particular A Dream Play endeavour was not only immersed in the complex charges of the modern art movements, but also the staging, performance and reception were profoundly affected by the First World War, which can be perceived in how the sketches change from 1915 to 1918 (Plates 10.1–10.6). For example, in a 1915 sketch, the leading character of Indra’s daughter enters as a young modern woman with short haircut – her hairclip is a swastika, a sun sign that in 1920 would become a notorious Nazi symbol – wearing a slender mandorla-shaped, fashionable emeraldgreen dress, whereas a 1918 sketch depicts her as a divine moon goddess, clad in azure blue, with her head in a pentagon inscribed with a lotus flower, against a circle of fiery zodiac signs. In another example, Ström’s rendering of the conjugal bed – where Indra’s daughter and the Lawyer are supposed to consummate their troublesome marriage – changes from a covered bed in a space with ‘sandy’ walls that vibrate and

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shimmer in 1915, to 1918’s plain-green hospital bed in a dense-brown and muddy grotto-like chamber. Furthermore, acknowledging that Ström was not only a modernist scenographerdirector, but also a husband, married to the artist Anna (born Holmberg), and the father of their two small children, makes it easier to understand the extent to which the war affected his work with A Dream Play, including its aftermath. In 1919, the family left Germany, due to the acute dangers of the war, as well as the children having rickets due to starvation, and settled in Gothenburg. Around this time, the disintegration of the materials from Ström’s work in Germany starts, as an effect of the threatening turmoil. Recognizing that the war’s ghostly presence traverses space and time, and haunts institutional interests and conflicts, as well as scholarly and family (Ström’s children and grandchildren) engagement concerning the legacy, Ström developed the idea of creating a scholarly counter-archive. This would, for example, give Anna Ström a voice, as her letters and drawings sent to her family in Sweden provide a personal – not suitable in traditional distanced and generalizing studies – access to the Düsseldorf war context. Literally travelling across borders, visiting various institutional archives and collections, making drawings of sketches that could not be photographed, ordering digitized copies, establishing contact with Ström’s relatives, scanning newly surfaced materials, and creating new sources out of experimental activations of traces – all formed part of the prosaic process to create the archive. These efforts resulted in a reimagining of the research-archive concept as a collection of mostly, but not only, non-textual traces that serve as starting points for new trails that help re-map the Strindbergian landscape in time and space. Thus, the reassembling of materials from a non-written history can be considered a political act of resistance against the fragmentation caused by war, archival greed, ordinary carelessness and other factors not conducive to a shared and democratic archive. While the research archive – in digital form – kept growing in my computer, a transdisciplinary project, called ‘Dream-Playing across Borders: Accessing the NonTexts of Strindberg’s A Dream Play in Düsseldorf 1915–18 and Beyond’ was developed, consisting of six scholars, who would engage with the assembled materials as well as dig out new fragments. The project, situated at the University of Gothenburg, started in 2013 and ended (at least temporarily) in 2015. The participants and contributors are Alf Björnberg, Per Magnus Johansson, Viveka Kjellmer, Mats Nilsson, Astrid von Rosen and Ylva Sommerland. In what follows, I will exemplify and discuss some of our explorative and inventive approaches to the reimagined research archive.

Dream-playing the archive in space and time The overarching analytic model for the project comes from my research on scenography history, and operates in three analytically separated but always entangled registers (not layers or levels, since they too easily seem to create hierarchies): (1) material-sensualreal and impossible (for example failing-technology) features, (2) cultural and personal imaginaries, and (3) symbolic and lawgiving structures. Dream-playing is a concept that

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addresses the complex and often difficult processes of translation and transformation that might occur between times, places, different types of archival materials, practice and theory, and scholarly traditions. Something is always lost in translation, but within this very loss lies the seed of critical thinking and new knowledge. For example, when striving to find written words that fit the corporeal expression (this is an act of translation) of A Dream Play’s Daughter in the above-mentioned sketch for the small chamber inside the Lawyer’s office, one will lose the feeling of direct sensory impact of the image, but start a process of verbalization that will make it possible to share, scrutinize and evaluate the activation and the analysis. The ethics of the dream-playing process has, in the words of literary scholar Antonia Pont, to do with ‘staying within questioning for longer’ (Pont 2015). In the above, the word dream refers to vertiginous processes taking place in darkness when sleeping, or in twilight when daydreaming, as well as a more conscious hope for something meaningful in the future. As Strindberg so aptly states in a letter from 1887, we need the darkness; and as he also knew, we need frameworks and structure. So, playing refers to creative and active engagement that hopefully facilitates a positive transformation process, framed by a set of rules that all the players (in this case scholars) agree upon (Sauter 2010). Importantly, the analytic model takes the complexity of non-texts (human and non-human) – the visual, spatial, audial, multi-sensorial and corporeal – as its point of departure, understanding them as expressive agents of performance. Texts, written words, are never dismissed, but activated in space and time. Navigating with the help of this model, the scholars were free to both zoom in on a past theatrical event and zoom out to explore various contexts. For example, a study of how the music by Swedish composer Wilhelm Stenhammar was used in the 1918 performance and perceived by the local critics also explores adaptations across borders, time and space, as well as multi-modal aspects such as the use of a dominator (a musical instrument, presented on the playbill) in early film music. Another strategy for activating the archive was the playful idea to stage a selection of Ström’s sketches as paintings in an imaginary exhibition, and thus – temporarily – turn away from the close theatrical context as well as the dramatic text. This provided an opportunity to engage closely with the images, carefully translating some aspects – shimmers, hues, vibrating compositional intrigues, geometrical choreographies – to written words, so that their voice could be heard in relation to the modernist movements in the art world. There is not much information about the actress Ellen Widmann playing Indra’s daughter in Düsseldorf in 1918. However, the creation of Widmann’s biography managed to bring about a more corporeal actress. The archive was activated by way of moving through time, space, text and urging questions about hope and the possibilities for transformation, the results feeding into our understanding of the – in particular for women – charged political context, beyond Ström’s rather abstract sketches. Moving on to Strindberg’s dramatic text, the act of dream-playing brings about hope and vital questions concerning life in our gravity-bound bodies and our longing for eternity. This, in turn, resonates with the already-hinted-at exploration of the relationship between Ström’s costume sketches and a visual culture featuring modern women in short hair and fashionable dresses, dreams and images that became contested during the war.

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When conducting historical research, the activation of a scenography sketch can be understood as an event, so that the performers (present within the image or imagined) and audience (imagined) are positioned in a co-creative space. When we enacted the precarious – stiff, charged, vibrating – choreographed-scenographed figurations featuring, for example, Indra’s daughter, or the Maids in sketches from 1915 and 1917–18, a transmutational pattern emerged, always employing a moreor-less clear or complete Y-shape, in alchemical imagery, indicative of the painful merging of opposites in the struggle for wisdom (metaphorical gold). Eventually this led to the understanding of the traces after Ström’s three-year work process as a thoroughly elaborated visual and spatial alchemical interpretation of A Dream Play. This does not elide the obvious theosophical influences that can be found in many of his sketches, but demonstrates how it was operationalized. Hence, the visual work of practising scenographer Ström manages to bring out a convincing idea of how A Dream Play could be interpreted in early-twentieth-century Germany. Towards the end of the century, academics have, in more-or-less convincing ways, discussed alchemical dimensions of the drama (in the text as well as in stagings) – but Ström did this much earlier, in images. While we cannot reconstruct exactly how it looked on stage in 1918, it has, I would suggest, been possible to reveal the basic operations in Ström’s intriguing, detailed scenographic interpretation of A Dream Play.

Scenographing Strindberg! A first outcome of the small-scale and short-term dream-playing project, briefly outlined in this text, is that the putting together of mostly non-text-based materials – now in digitized form – has happened through a conscious and activist creation of a space for critical dream-playing. Whereas the growing digital research archive is no substitute for engaging with the material items in situ, it does offer new possibilities for historical inquiry across national and other borders. I think it is fair to say that the collaborative inquiry provides a powerful example of how a predominantly visual interpretation by a practitioner such as Ström manages to bring out how core elements in A Dream Play become productive in context. This opens the way for further testing of visual and multi-modal approaches in relation to Strindberg’s dramatic work. Thinking broadly ahead, I see how the project might open the door to original archival research, and a revisiting and rethinking of how non-textual sources are employed in visual-culture studies, as well as into what they might contribute in relation to traditional (e.g. textbased) studies. Focusing on my own research field, scenography is today theorized as an active and affective agent of performance, not a mute and solely material background. When activating the visual, spatial, aural, corporeal (and so forth) archive, we engage in scenographing, a co-creative activity (the body of the scholar ‘dances’ with the archival materials) – not a distanced study of objects or architecture. When Indra’s daughter descended to theatrical war-tired earth in October 1918 in Düsseldorf, she did so immersed in music by Stenhammar, a fact that should call out the necessity of

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interdisciplinary work, as the scenographic sketches, and related materials, never stand alone. Strindberg’s border-crossing, transnational, multidisciplinary drama, A Dream Play, continues to inspire the stagings and the discussions about them in a global world. A second outcome of the project, grown out of intense discussions, is a heightened awareness of the drama’s capacity to force anyone (in the theatre, in the academy, or anywhere else) to engage with it through interpretations that one way or another are connected with current human dramas and societal changes. I would like to temporarily bring this text to a closure by posing some questions, for future dream-playings: What, for example, characterizes the difference between dream and reality in our society today? How can change come about, without one form of barbarism simply replacing another? How can scenography and its dancerly, spatial, temporal, material, imaginary and symbolic image-spaces be productive in such complex discussions about visual culture? Strindberg’s drama has shown itself able to set such questions in motion in the past and present, and will likely continue to do so in the future. As a former dancer, I now bow, and humbly ask you to ponder what the active – scenographing! – body on the historical stage in a visual-spatial-multisensorial sketch (or model or other device) might contribute in the future.

Works Cited Pont, A. (2015), ‘Encountering Causalities’, Dancehouse Diary, Issue 8. Available online: http://www.dancehousediary.com.au/?p=2956. von Rosen, A. (2010), ‘Knut Ströms Scenografi och Bildvärld: Visualisering i Tid och Rum’ [‘Knut Ström’s Scenography and Visual World: Visualization in Time and Space’], PhD., Gothenburg Studies in Art and Architecture 32, Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg. Sauter, W. (2010), ‘Cyclic Perseverance and Linear Mobility of Theatrical Events’, in C. M. Canning and T. Postlewait (eds), Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, 137–139, Iowa City : University of Iowa Press.

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Anticipations of the Digital: Dispersing Strindberg Berndt Clavier, Malmö University, Sweden and Timothy H. Engström, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

What is the relationship or tension between literary modernism and the philosophy of technology for framing an analysis of Strindberg and his relationship to the visual? How are the emerging optical cultures of Strindberg’s period – in photography, science and visualized cognition of various kinds – infiltrating and reshaping his relationship to traditional categories of genre, authorship and identity? How are technological and authorial agencies intertwined in the production of Strindberg’s artefacts, in the production of the many Strindbergs we encounter? What kinds of hybridity might be operating in and through Strindberg that more traditional and hagiographic accounts of ‘the author’ and more empirical fidelities to ‘the work’ might be missing? Anachronism is hermeneutically useful. Strindberg registers and explores the boundaries of thinking about and expressing the conditions of contemporary embodiment, engaging with kinds and qualities of techno-mediated perception and identity that seem all the more prominent now. And Strindberg’s experimentalism does this, we argue, in anticipatory ways and through prescient forms and hybridities that are tellingly related to the digitizing forces of the present; forces that distribute and disperse ‘author’ and ‘artefact’, that remake and reorganize conventions of sight and representation, in unsettled and unsettling ways. In effect, we argue that Strindberg is an important figure for considering the intertwined agencies of the ocular and authorial, and doing so through lines of force and flight that seem even more contemporary now. His entanglement with techniques and tropes of sight is central to these intertwined agencies. We hope to show that Strindberg’s writing can be read as an allegory about the conditions through which forms of subjectivity are produced and made variously visible and distributable within an emerging technical-visual economy, of which Strindberg saw only the beginning.

Borg as a visual thinking machine In Strindberg’s short novel By the Open Sea (1890), the main character Borg is possessed and dispossessed by his ‘pictorial urge’ (Strindberg 1984: 12, 1982: 18). As Borg approaches his station in Österskär, he lights up the night sky with a bunch of storm

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matches. The passage is described as revealing a ‘picture […] vivid and sudden as the picture in a magic lantern’ (Strindberg 1973: 18, 1982: 13). Significantly, the storm matches are aligned to the technology of the sciopticon by Borg, and this enables him both to penetrate the darkness of the open sea and to retain the ensuing image in his mind ‘long after the darkness had once more closed around them’ (Strindberg 1973: 18, 1982: 13). The storm matches become the light of the machine as the metaphor congeals the scene into a picture. Later, when Borg lands and surveys his lodgings, we are told that the ‘blank, shapeless, colourless nothing of the white-washed walls’ is what prompts his urge for images in ways that ‘the cave or hut of the savage had no power to evoke, of which the forest with its everchanging colours and contours knew nothing; a desire which neither the plain, nor the heath with its ever-varying atmosphere, nor the restless, infinite sea had ever awakened’(Strindberg 1973: 29, 1982: 18). This urge for pictures – with its evolutionary genealogy of caves, huts, savages, forests, plains, heaths and sea – stays with Borg throughout his time on Österskär, as if the magic lantern is now lodged inside his head: a mode of seeing, of imagining and imaging, of conjuring and representing the real at the same time. As an extension of his own language, his metaphors and his technologically enhanced sensations, Borg’s urge for images is what makes him part machine, enabling him to leave behind ‘the first childish attempts of nature to emerge from chaos’ (Strindberg 1973: 42, 1982: 26). Borg frequently refers to his mind as a thought-machine (tankeapparat) and much of the work of this machinery is to project sight. Other senses are almost banished from the free, indirect speech and thought of the novel. As Borg wakes up in his lodgings the morning after the horrific passage to the islands, he tries to apprehend the room by listening to sounds. At first, ‘his ear caught low sounds which he had never before been able to hear’ (Strindberg 1973: 31, 1982: 20). But the audible catalogue quickly dwindles into a nothing, from the sound of his sheets when he moves to the reverberation of his heartbeat in the rickety bed, until all he can hear is silence. The acoustic emptiness is barren to Borg: it does not produce a similar ‘urge’ or similar mechanization and transformation of thought as a visual apparatus does. When he rises from his bed, he hears the empty sounds of his steps. But again, sound prompts nothing and Borg feels enclosed as if in a ‘crystal, a hexahedron. The straight lines, the spaces of equal size, divided his thoughts into squares, ruled his soul with lines, brought it down from the freedom of organic life to dead forms; they cut down the superabundant vegetation of his brain with its ceaselessly changing impressions’ (Strindberg 1973: 42, 1982: 26); in effect, the white walls seem to place his body in a computationally and technologically constructed space. To break free, the empty limestone cube is subjected to the contents of his luggage and his first order of business is to control the admission of light with a pair of ‘flesh-coloured Persian curtains’ (Strindberg 1973: 44, 1982: 26). The rest of Borg’s luggage seems to contain nothing that is not also a reflector for his projections. Even the books and periodicals in Borg’s makeshift library seem to be there mainly to produce an explosion of colours and scenes: Badeker in scarlet and gold, resembling a man who, on a fine Monday morning, gives care the slip and starts on a journey. Others, like the Encyclopædia

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Britannica, a long procession, were dressed in black. The paperbacks wore light, gay summer dresses. The Revue des Deux Mondes was clothed in salmon-pink, the Contemporaine wore a lemon-coloured dress, the Fortnightly was in blue, the Morgenländische in emerald. (Strindberg 1973: 46, 1982: 26)

Even if the contents of the books of Borg’s library are sometimes referred to, it is often to make space for another projection. Repeatedly, Borg literalizes images, projects them onto reality using ‘his tools’, by which he means the ‘instruments and books which had grown on him like new senses, new organs, stronger and finer than those with which nature had endowed him’ (Strindberg 1973: 46, 1982: 28). Increasingly, being and instrumentation are inseparable. The boundaries between the self and technological prosthetics intruding on the self cannot be demarcated. For Borg, believing is not the result of subject-centred seeing. Rather, seeing through a variety of apparatuses is to be cognitively driven in ways that do not stabilize belief. Such apparatuses induce and disperse and share cognitive agency with the observing subject, as when the underwater world is revealed to him (and to the much-amazed pilot Borg has ordered to accompany him) by his use of a bathyscope. After noting the catalogue of fish that the bathyscope reveals, Borg turns his attention to ‘the splendid picture that had unfolded itself on the surface of the sea’ (Strindberg 1973: 27–28, 1982: 32): The segment of water that was spread out some way ahead of the boat was ultramarine-blue, until the drift ice took over and the scene became completely arctic. Islands, bays, creeks and sounds were outlined as if on a map. Where the ice had mounted a reef, mountain tops had been formed by one block pressing down the first, and another, in its turn, climbing upon the second. The ice had also struggled up the rocks, formed vaults and grottoes, built up towers, church ruins, casements and bastions. The magic of all these shapes was that they seemed to have been made by a gigantic human hand. They were not like the accidental shapes created by nature, but awakened memories of human inventions that had been made in past periods of history. In one place the blocks had piled up into Cyclopean walls, or laid themselves out like an Assyrian-Greek temple. In another, by repeated blows, a wave had dug itself a Romanesque barrel-vault and gnawed a rounded arch that had settled into an Arabian horseshoe, out of which sun and spray had bitten stalactites and honeycombs. Here the whole length of a wave had eaten a vaulted passage out of a piled-up wall, thus making a Roman aqueduct, while over there stood the foundations of a medieval castle, which bore traces of fallen pointed arches, ornamental gables and pinnacles. (Strindberg 1973: 28, 1982: 32–33)

The ultramarine water segment in front of the boat acts as a screen for the magic lantern now firmly lodged inside Borg’s mind. The ice and snow that still linger have drifted into architectonic shapes taken from antiquity (or from images of antiquity), and the emptiness of the stone and ice landscape fills his mind’s eye with the archaeological remains of human history and beyond, to the stalactites and brood combs of a world before man.

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Borg’s reliance on and entwinement with technology are repeated throughout the novel. In Borg’s mind, his use of technologically enhanced perception is one of the principal differences between himself and the island population. And always, the technology is there to interact with his ‘brain’ in order to produce an image, a picture, a scene. In this sense, Borg is a close relation of the letter-writing scientist of Antibarbarus, perhaps one of Strindberg’s most enigmatic creations. In a series of five letters addressed to ‘you’, Strindberg gives voice to his scientific speculations in the fields of chemistry and optics, speculations that develop into a wild, sometimes incoherent materialist cosmology intended to critique and contradict received scientific opinion. As Per Stam notes in the scholarly edition of Strindberg’s science writing, Antibarbarus is connected to Borg’s speculations about nature in By the Open Sea (Strindberg 2010: 375). Stam, however, immediately links Borg and the Strindberg of Antibarbarus to Nietzsche. Yet, he also recognizes the weakness of the link by citing Sten Selander’s early critical assessment of the intellectual proximities between Nietzsche and Strindberg (Strindberg 2010: 376–377). Selander finds little that actually connects Strindberg and Nietzsche in terms of their general empiricalscientific outlook. At most, he argues, the parts of Strindberg that are compatible with Nietzsche are the parts that are acceptable to a ‘righteous Darwinist’ (Strindberg 2010: 377). Yet this, too, misses the point. It is the materialist outlook that springs out at the reader of Antibarbarus and By the Open Sea. There is a deeply conflicted and unresolved tension inherent in the scientific process of validation itself, and especially of the ways in which the senses are part of this validation through experiment and instrumentally mediated observation. In Antibarbarus, the conflict is evolutionary, beginning in ‘the error inherent in the eye while seeing’ (Strindberg 2010: 83). Most animals, Strindberg argues, have evolved brain functions that compensate for this error. However, once Strindberg has finished speculating over octopuses, trout, insects, adders, cattle, horses and begins to assess the human eye, he immediately resorts to technology, and particularly to the camera and the lens to elucidate the problem. What is more, even though technology and instruments are necessary for sight to access cosmologically significant data, the role played by technology is ambivalent, according to Strindberg – not only does it allow a seeing beyond plain sight, it also enhances the genetically coded errors of vision. Antibarbarus ends in a series of exhortations about the impossibilities of accurate and objective sensing and of the necessity to recognize the dispersal of sight entailed by technological mediation. In this sense, Borg’s name is a handy bit of linguistically mashed-up and associative irony. The name itself now suggests ideas of ontological hybridity and the infiltration of technology into sight, into ‘naturalistic’ perception and the brain. Strindberg is opening a channel that has been recognized only recently by, for instance, N. Katherine Hayles, in a series of books on the many implications of distributed cognition. In Hayles’ work, the relevant version of this story might be summed up in the phrase ‘how information lost its body’ (Hayles 1999: 291) or, as she puts it in her more recent work, how ‘the deep interpenetration of technical nonconscious cognition into a wide variety of complex systems, including literature and other creative arts, disperses agency’ (Hayles 2015: 33). It suggests how certain kinds of technology produce the effects being

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identified with Borg/Strindberg and re-pattern and redistribute identity, authorship and our reception; it suggests the doubling effects that emerge between techniques for having and for reporting perception, between having and being an instrument. Strindberg’s Borg is registering a technological enframing of identity, of perception, of recording, inventing and writing all at once. This, in turn, suggests reframing and redistributing the very question of literary influence, and doing so in ways that are not fundamentally organized around isolated forms of (inter)textuality but, rather, around a broader field of technological agencies that do not rely on an intentional and controlling consciousness for mediating the force of their influence. The mechanics at play contribute to the production, collection, cataloguing and re-aggregation of perceptions and sentences that are no longer centred on the book or caused by an author. What we are perhaps witnessing is not Strindberg’s controlled deployment of imagery but, in equal measure, a cipher-like subjection to forces emanating from elsewhere. Karl Åke Kärnell recognizes this force in his magisterial study of Strindberg’s imagery. According to Kärnell, Strindberg’s metaphors are not only innumerable and detailed in ways never seen before, they also ‘mirror a larger societal transformation, a new social reality’, in that they ‘directly appropriate the technical civilization of his time’ (Kärnell 1969: 81). Indeed, the wealth of imagery in Strindberg’s writing is noticeably greater than before, and the ontological and epistemic domains from which the imagery comes are new domains, primarily from science and technology. The technical proliferation of image-making accelerates the spread of images, and this is stylistically measurable in Strindberg’s writing. According to Kärnell, no one has introduced more new imagery into Swedish than Strindberg. Kärnell attributes this appropriative ability to Strindberg’s ‘receptivity, his talent for making experiences and observations of all kinds metaphorically productive’ (Kärnell 1969: 92). But rather than making Strindberg’s genius the touchstone of this pictorial and metaphorical appropriation, we might understand it as moments when technological agency redistributes cognition out from under a controlling consciousness. Our point is that this quantitative accumulation represents an ontological challenge to the very notions of authorship and textuality.

Technological and literary agencies; re-framing authorship and influence In effect, Strindberg’s oeuvre represents a particularly sustained moment when an authorial persona seems to become constantly overwhelmed by the various empiricaltechnological ways in which the world is becoming known and ordered. His authorial persona seems both threatened, momentarily recovered and remediated in the same moments, held together by the power of genre and the conventions of readers, even as Strindberg transgresses and alters and blurs ready-made genres. As Adena Rosmarin so pointedly remarks, ‘once genre is defined as pragmatic rather than natural, as defined rather than found, and as used rather than described, then there are precisely as many genres as we need, genres whose conceptual shape is precisely determined by that

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need’ (Rosmarin 1986: 25). If we bring this generic plasticity into our understanding of Strindberg’s works, we are no longer bound to assume connections between mind and work based on models of consciousness that infer correspondences between the mind of the author and the resulting work. Instead, the field is opened for interpretations into what Hayles calls ‘complex functionalities affecting cognitions at multiple levels and sites, human and technical’ (Hayles 2015: 34). This insistence of technology and technique affects the language, the imagery and the visual quality of Strindberg’s structuring devices (plots, tableaux, gestures). This insistence affects the choice of projects he undertakes in the first place. Again, Strindberg is anticipatory, meeting the universe halfway and being met by the technologies and techniques that make it available for perception and description – and not just in his ‘science writing’. We have become increasingly aware of the inter-agential or interactionist ways that contemporary science goes about deploying technologies and constructing worlds, and the ways that technologies offer up metaphors for the very descriptions they facilitate (see Barad 2007). Such accounts can be generalized in ways that relate directly to how literary categories – author, work, language and meaning, etc. – are made available and altered in the field of literary studies, and now increasingly altered in response to digital technologies and techniques. In Strindberg’s case, his own idiosyncratic science writing exemplifies precisely this inter-agential relationship, between science and authorship, technology and narration, what acts and what is acted upon. Our point is that such interactions are not restricted to the ‘literary’. Unlike the later modernists, Strindberg’s authorial persona inevitably lo(o)ses control, is dispersed, almost destroyed by the incessant gauging-activity of visual technologies and techniques. The literary and the ocular become inseparably entangled, each acting on the other, the line of demarcation becoming blurred. This absence of control becomes evident in, for instance, the relationship that Strindberg has to Nietzsche, something that Strindberg scholarship has long treated as a question of influence. In this context, By the Open Sea is, together with the Preface to Miss Julie (1888, Preface 1889), often represented ‘as the apex of Nietzsche’s presence in Strindberg’s work’ (Stern 2008: 23). In his letter to Georg Brandes on 22 April 1890, Strindberg explains that his thinking has anticipated Nietzsche and that he is about to ‘stage the whole problem in a great novel in the autumn’ (Strindberg 1964: 36, our translation). But as Stern also notes, the traditional focus on influence cannot accommodate a more general and wider similarity between the two writers, a relationship that Strindberg himself addresses in the correspondence to Brandes. Here, Strindberg makes it clear that Nietzsche’s philosophy is not an influence in the traditional sense. Strindberg writes that he, ‘intends thenceforth to experiment with the position in order to see where it leads’ (Strindberg 1964: 26, our translation). Even if Nietzsche’s philosophy refuses to become a stringent conceptual theory (or a programme), it is nevertheless rigorous enough to be outlined. But can the same thing be said about Strindberg? Our view is that Strindberg’s aesthetic openness is much more all-encompassing and much less intentional than Nietzsche’s project of genealogy, let alone the dialectic device of distance/irony and engagement/polemic presented by Stern. Something else is happening here, and it is not necessarily

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anticipating aesthetic modernism. At work is an aesthetic experimentation, and not simply an aesthetic experimentalism, which opens up to a world outside of human control, a world into which technologies of various kinds are admitted, and which in turn mediate perception in ways that cannot be easily described in agential or literary/ authorial terms, as ‘aesthetic strategies’, ‘devices’ or ‘conceits’. Kärnell’s observations about Strindberg’s imagery are an example of this cipher-like attribution, where technologies and techniques and Strindberg’s metaphors are co-productively turned towards each other, sometimes stirred into each other, their independence lost to each other. There seems to be little ‘theory’ involved in Strindberg’s ‘experiment with the position’, no conceptual foundation for his ‘staging’ of ‘the entire problem’. Strindberg’s last photographic project with the Wunderkamera is emblematic of this technological-aesthetic experimentation and co-determinacy. The camera was designed and constructed by Strindberg and his photographer friend, Herman Anderson, in order to produce life-size photographs, and Strindberg used it for the purposes of self-portraiture. The camera was a metre long, had a focal distance of 30 centimetres and required an exposure time of 300 seconds. As Linda Haverty Rugg suggests, ‘Strindberg’s drive to produce life-sized images clearly arises from the same need to approach the experience of reality as closely as possible’ (Rugg 1997: 118). But in line with the discussion of vision in Antibarbarus, the camera is also a potential source of problems, especially if it produces representations that are too clear and detailed. Rugg continues: ‘In Strindberg’s imagination, photographs are charged with the task of performing as stand-ins for their subjects, a task they perform best when they convince the observer that the subject is as good as present. Excessive clarity of line and reduction of size destroy that illusion’ (Rugg 1997: 118). What distinguishes these shots from earlier, more-naturalistic attempts at self-portraiture (like the Gersau photographs) or the ‘psychological’ portraits of his Berlin period, is that here, according to Rugg, Strindberg is set on capturing his soul. This is possible, Rugg claims, because of Strindberg’s belief in the ‘confluence of telepathy […] and photography’ (Rugg 1997: 107) and the influence that Swedenborg’s ‘correspondence theory’ has on his thinking after the Inferno crisis (Rugg 1997: 116). But in order to make that claim, Rugg needs to disregard Strindberg’s continued emphasis on the senses as a source of empiricism. The building of the Wunderkamera is not prompted by mysticism or telepathy, but rather by the continual struggle Strindberg has with visual technology. It constantly produces new possibilities while amplifying the opportunities for error or to be misled. The question is then less whether Strindberg believes in spirituality and mysticism, or whether Swedenborg provides him with a ‘method’, but how he goes about representing the relationship between the new, sense-augmenting technologies and the world he hopes to address in his writing and visual art. Brandell has already made this point very clear: just as self-obvious as the concepts of theology and mysticism are to Swedenborg, just as doubtful do they become in application to Strindberg […]. He does not have access to any source of knowledge beyond the regular. He observes with his

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five senses, spells things out and adds them together and sometimes he arrives at astonishing interpretations – but the method is empirical, not mystical. (Brandell 1989: 287, our translation)

For Strindberg, technology is about sense-making, about empirical engagement. But it often serves to multiply cognition and to disperse authority, separating and reorienting his sense-making and his sensing. In effect, Strindberg’s beliefs seem less decisive, less stable and less persistent in their effects than the various visual media through which Strindberg is working. Control is distributed. The absence of subject-centred control suffered by his protagonists and by Strindberg himself in his attempts at self-portraiture are, rather, an instance of the loosening that Friedrich Kittler describes so provocatively and that makes objectoriented, works-oriented analysis seem incomplete. Kittler writes: Once the technological differentiation of optics, acoustics, and writing exploded Gutenberg’s writing monopoly around 1880, the fabrication of so-called Man became possible. His essence escapes into apparatuses. Machines take over functions of the central nervous system, and no longer, as in times past, merely those of muscles. And with this differentiation – and not with steam engines and railroads – a clear division occurs between matter and information, the real and the symbolic. When it comes to inventing phonography and cinema, the age-old dreams of humankind are no longer sufficient. The physiology of eyes, ears, and brains have to become objects of scientific research. For mechanized writing to be optimized, one can no longer dream of writing as the expression of individuals or the trace of bodies. The very forms, differences, and frequencies of its letters have to be reduced to formulas. So-called Man is split up into physiology and information technology. (Kittler 1999: 16)

Technological mediation shapes and re-frames ontology and epistemological practice. Fundamental changes in technological milieu and techné do not merely produce new images and metaphors for the author’s deployment, they transform how we produce, conceptualize and interact with worlds, with subjects and objects; they transform the inter-agential ways that ‘writing’ and ‘authoring’ are understood. And this happens because technologies and techné have transformed the way that we understand how the human and non-human interact and co-produce each other. There are reasons why Kittler’s view might smack on occasion of a kind of causal determinism, of relativizing ontology too radically – both Hockenjos and Schröder think this is the case, and that a focus on ‘works’ is thus compromised (Schröder and Hockenjos 2005: 22–25). Our purpose is not to defend Kittler’s occasional overreach; it is not to substitute apparatus for author as if a traditional causal argument were still at play. On the contrary, it is this traditional notion of causal argument that has been undermined by technologically distributed agency, and which is exemplified by Strindberg. Our appeal to Kittler is a way of foregrounding an aggregation of forces that, as one sees described in Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies more broadly,

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is understood to contribute to what counts as a meaningful unit of understanding, or a unit of ‘work’, in the first place, or as a method for interpreting works, techné and authorship in relation to each other.1 Kittler, among many others, is providing a paradigm for explaining significant changes in a field of understanding: in this case, in the field of artefactual production and subject formation and management. It is a way of engaging this production in ways that are not reducible to a single unchanged and unchanging subject – or concept of ‘author’ – who is responsible for such a paradigmatic shift: a shift to new, agentially interpenetrating technologies and apparatuses for producing, distributing and circulating beings. In effect, Kittler helps us to explain our inability to frame Strindberg simply or even primarily as a literary modernist. Our concern is to resituate appeals to the senses and subject-centred cognition in relation to apparatuses, as subject to apparatuses. Over time and incrementally, reading and writing become ‘seeing’, that is, both organized and distributed via a range of ocular apparatuses. What Kittler argues is that the senses become subject to apparatuses, and that cultural practices become dependent on sensory machines. This affects the protocols of reading, of generating shifting coherencies and realignments in various discourses and genres. As Giorgio Agamben also argues, these developments produce a feeling of dislocation vis-à-vis the coherency that print managed to accrue for the subject. Strindberg’s use of technology is open to new possibilities for producing connections between sensation and sense. As such, the new visual technologies engaged by Strindberg are examples of the connection between the ‘boundless growth of apparatuses’ and ‘the equally extreme proliferation of processes of subjectification’ (Agamben 2009: 15). However, as Agamben points out, the problem is not that this technological interactivity erases or overcomes the solidity of the subject and its personal identities. Instead, the technological dissemination ‘pushes to the extreme the masquerade that has always accompanied every personal identity’ (Agamben 2009: 15). In effect, dispersal and distribution countervail ontological identity, which is how we understand Strindberg, whether in relation to photography, writing or science and technology. In other words, the ‘Geist’ that literature contributed to consolidating was historical and dependent on the medium of print – and ‘the lair of the skull’, as Benedict Anderson puts it (Anderson 2006: 35). Once print became overshadowed by other media, the particular spectacles of print culture – the subject, scenic description, linear narrative – were problematized. But as Strindberg’s many hybridized artefacts and always incomplete self-constructions suggest, this problematization is not the effect of any strict, causally determined structure. And the response to the emergence of these technologies and apparatuses is not necessarily coherent or determined, also as the case of Strindberg makes clear. Thus it is also not enough to search out technologically appropriated and deployed visual metaphors and images to explain this word or that word as coming from this or that gadget. Something happens on the level of literature, authorship and agency itself as the age of the ocular takes hold. Strindberg registers this shift and dispersal and ontological instability, and he tries to deal with it artistically, scientifically, religiously, politically, personally, in all sorts of un-unified and un-

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unifiable ways. These effects go well beyond ‘imagery’, beyond dynamics internal to a work, and they thus alter our reading of Strindberg. Sara Danius, for example, tells a different story, one in which her modernist authors increasingly internalize their relationship to the ‘technologies of perception’, first in terms of thematization (her examples are Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann) but later also, with James Joyce, as the ‘full blown internalization of technological modes of representing the real’ (Danius 2002: 23). But this idea of a progressive internalization is itself a remnant of a framework that Strindberg’s oeuvre calls into question. To put it differently: Strindberg makes regular recourse to a historical subjectivity that the technologies of perception are already both dispersing and re-aggregating. He asks these technologies to be extensions of the senses and servants of authorship but runs aground, chasing after a self that is already a distributed result of their agencies. Strindberg’s genre-busting is thus of a different kind, and seems more intimately intertwined with the mechanics of a new era, especially when compared to the ideals of other modernists (e.g. Joyce and Proust). In Remembrance of Things Past – just to briefly illustrate the point – it is in the theoretical reflection (and hence distance) of the memory of what was sensed (another distance) that is often, as Danius shows, technologically mediated. And this permits Proust’s meditations to produce some solidity for the self. In Strindberg, it is seldom in reflection (distance) that the subject-work is carried out. Instead, Strindberg works in ‘the now’ of the sensation, not its tranquillized memory. He produces a kind of technologically mediated immediacy that has already stirred the self into parts that remembrance cannot restore. Technologically mediated perceptions are asked to deliver sensory data that can function right away, not later, not as elements of a theory or a unifying control function. And this may be the most significant difference between the modernists and Strindberg. Strindberg is much more immediate, optically saturated and eager, more directly propelled and dispersed than distancing and reflective. And in this way, perhaps Strindberg’s oeuvre, once relieved of subject-centred analysis, is more important for its prescient postmodernism than it is to the project of literary modernism.

Ocular-induced experience and writing in Strindberg Language, and not just the theatrically staged language we are familiar with in Strindberg, comes to us under certain conditions of visibility; it finds us within certain conditions of space, as Foucault has demonstrated, and it operates under the sway of ocular machinery, as Borg’s ‘tankeapparat’ has suggested. It doesn’t simply emerge out of or facilitate description – a now quaint hope of the positivists. Strindberg explores these conditions in particularly prescient ways, especially regarding how technologically created conditions of sight and representation can unsettle the smooth operations of dominant ‘realist’ modes of linguistic production, and can metaphysically unsettle the objects and (authorial) subjects within those operations. And this interplay among language, technology and techné can be explored across a much larger scene of genres and authorial experiments – essays, pictures, paintings, ethnographies, vivisections,

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novels, letters – than has been generally considered in relation to Strindberg. It can be mapped onto a sprawling and quintessentially modern-postmodern drama: subjects being conjured, simultaneously stabilized, abbreviated and distributed across shifting scenes, images, projections, and spaces both real and fictional, and through a wide range of textual and artefactual forms, in which no position of subjectivity or observation remains fixed or enduring. Many of Strindberg’s literary forms are about what to look at, how to see and observe, and about how to construct an authorial subject-position in the process: whether it is about French Peasants, or Flower Paintings, or Scanian Nature, or the stage; whether in letters, essays, vivisections, scientific reports or celestographs. Strindberg seems never to give up on the maintenance of a paradoxical complementarity: he affirms the observer, on the one hand, with all the authority this acquires from the language of optics, science, empiricism – from a Baconian confidence and hope – and he affirms the perspectival subject on the other, assembling the observed in shifting and narratively unstable ways.2 His genre-transgressive writing implicitly poses the question of who the observer-narrator is or might be at all. For every observational topic he takes up, he is at the same time multiplying himself as subject, showing something and showing something of himself, observing and improvising, disappearing and reappearing, producing prose and producing himself – ‘scribo, ego sum!’ (Strindberg 1958: 209). His entanglement with techniques and tropes of sight is central to this dynamic. As we have been arguing, his writing can be read as an allegory about the conditions through which subjectivity is produced and made variously visible and relocatable within an emerging technical-visual economy – imago, ergo sum! Strindberg also explores an unashamedly idiosyncratic form of science writing: alchemy, botany, astronomy, chemistry, geology, cosmology and magic – but all as desires for authorship – could he have resisted the digital blog, had it been available? At the same time, however, this writing is mediated through a new economy of the image. Photography and other forms of making-visible are essential to the formation of these disciplines and to the notions of ‘objectivity’ that are deployed by their authors.3 These sciences are not only metaphysical tropes of what there is to be discovered or uncovered, but also commitments to what can be made visible, albeit in textual and author-driven transcription. It is a text that writes these fields into a kind of visibility, into a kind of subject-relevant form of experience, while at the same time undercutting the sovereignty assumed by objectivist forms of representation. As Michael Robinson puts it in his Introduction to Selected Essays: ‘the self that lives this life must remain the basis of all [Strindberg’s] research’ (Strindberg 1996: 13). But it is a self that is re-formed and distributed through various acts of seeing and writing, and so no firm basis at all! Strindberg, in sometimes contradictory and inconsistent ways, affirms the ineliminability of authorship to the notion of scientific observation, sometimes with the rhetorical and metaphysical grandeur of Schelling – a leading light of philosophical romanticism/naturalism at the time. F. W. J. Schelling may be the last systematic and grand gasp of romanticism in relation to the emerging sciences of nature, one that lingers in Strindberg: the desire to hold on to a cosmological space for consciousness, as the metaphysically required medium through which the new

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scientific and technological über-agencies of the age must themselves pass in order to become self-aware forms of understanding.4 On the other hand, Strindberg sometimes dreamily suggests the centrality of the unconscious, and sometimes the myth-making aestheticism of Nietzsche, but always with a shifting eclecticism that has become emblematic of our postmodern and digital context. Photography, painting, cinema and projection techniques of various sorts become for Strindberg ways to engage endlessly with both the immediacy of the concrete and real and with their evanescence, for the sake of what is invisible and spectral, for the sake of what cannot be seen behind the stable veil of the chemically captured moment of sight. Descriptive science is not the last word, so long as authorship is concerned. Through Strindberg’s images of phantoms, visions, mirages, delusions, illusions, mirrors, copies, and their appearance and disappearance in various forms of writing, he ‘authors’ worlds in which nothing lasts long enough to provide a foundation, except for the ambition of the aesthetic act itself and the self-making this appears to promise. In this sense, his work, like Nietzsche’s, is emblematic of the deepest dilemmas of modernity and postmodernity. Through his engagement with visual technologies and techniques, Strindberg elaborates a shifting tableau where the very tactility of the expression becomes the ground for a profound phenomenological uncertainty. This tableau suggests a disposition of appearing and disappearing authorial subjectivity that can be located across genres and ‘periods’ in Strindberg’s oeuvre. In surprisingly contemporary ways, the image becomes a way into the real, and a way of constructing the real, coaxing it out and exploring its ultimately hidden nature at the same time. Strindberg explores an experience of double-perception, in which the subject/object is emphatically and fully there and elusive; he/it is a concrete presence captured before us and completely eluded, stare as we will. As such, Strindberg embraces modernity’s insistence on sight and visuality, yet challenges its promise of a consolidated, unified vision: at the apex of his line of sight, there is no Archimedean vantage point, no god’s eye view. The scientific and the aesthetic are inseparable, as the speaker of Antibarbarus frequently points out. The objective image is co-authored by the imagination (fantasien). Strindberg’s explorations of and with the techniques and agencies of sight permit him to lay claim to a kind of objectivity and universality that the cultural specificity of linguistic acts by themselves cannot claim. Yet the observer is always an ‘I’. A subject occupies both a metaphysically necessary and grammatically essential space even in the applications of visual technologies and the quasi-scientific uses to which they are being put. This metaphysical and identity-driven elision of the objectively imaged and the authored is essential to Strindberg’s work and to his relevance to providing a lineage of some of our contemporary text-image cultures.5 Thus our interest lies less within Strindberg studies per se than in exploring a prescient hybridity, in his elaborations of techniques of sight and elisions of space as indeterminate zones of exploration and encounter, where the subject engages his own dislocation and abbreviation in a way that is increasingly organized around fleeting and plural visibilities and ‘durées’ – punctuating and stalling the flow of time, compressing and dissolving a sense of stable objectivity or identity. Strindberg’s

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labour represents, in its complex aggregate, the importance of considering the very role that technologically mediated visualities and spatialities play in the production, organization and circulation of subjects and objects. In addition, there may indeed be ways in which the expectations of the camera, of image-capture and image-projection, shape the kinds of project Strindberg undertakes in the first place and the ways in which his texts operate as a result; and this happens in ways that are not organized by any straightforward notion of textuality or genre. It may be that picture-theory notions of memory, of embodied techno-perception, are changing in response to new forces of visual economy, despite Strindberg’s textual appropriations. As Peter Galison has demonstrated and we have noted earlier, the very notions of objectivity and of the observing and representing subject in the sciences undergo enormous change at this time and in response to various mechanizations of seeing and representing. In Strindberg’s case, what we see is an exploration and expression of techné and visuality that is crossing boundaries of literary genre and discipline; he is creating new relationships between viewing and writing. The boundary between and agentially intertwined relation between imaging and writing, between collecting (images, spirits, scenes) and recollecting (in the memory of the writer, or reader, or theatrical spectator), between capturing and authoring, remain fluid and ontologically unstable. It is well known that Strindberg combined many representational tactics that derive from many different technologies and techniques. To repeat, our concern, however, is to frame this encounter less within the discourse of ‘literary modernism’ and an author-subject’s intentionality than within a larger frame: the emergence of technological agencies with which Strindberg is interacting, and that produce new conditions of embodiment and subjectivity that are increasingly organized around the visual, and that engender techniques that participate in human/non-human mergers of sight, thought, knowledge production and expression. Given these conditions, writing cannot be adequately located in relation to a reflective subject in repose with his page. The agencies collating themselves through the active cipher of Strindberg suggest dynamics that are not reducible to the properties of a work, and suggest that authoring has become dispersed and distributed across a range of intersecting agencies that become particularly and importantly revealed through Strindberg. Our question is not about paradox or about whether Strindberg believes, for example, in spirituality and mysticism or has a particular state of mind in which there are beliefs, but rather how he goes about pursuing and being pursued by an empirical surplus of technologically mediated imagery that his beliefs – whether about the real, the mystical, or the text – are not able to frame or control.

An ocular stage; Strindberg’s distributed scenes and dispersed subjects It is obviously not only natural science that has moved increasingly towards an ontological and epistemic dependence upon visually instrumentalized practices. A case can easily be made that anthropology and ethnography were, at their inception,

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no less devoted to (culture-) collecting and categorizing, and no less framed by their relation to optical devices and ocular-centric metaphors for collecting and representing its objects. Collecting objects/images and collecting cultures worked hand in hand (Clifford 1988).6 Anna Westerstahl Stenport pursues a related and compelling line of thinking in her analysis of Strindberg’s Among French Peasants, especially regarding Strindberg’s anticipation of the photographic as a contributing force to his ‘observations’. Her account also deals directly with the question of framing by placing Strindberg fundamentally within the context of literary modernism and the ‘crisis of representation’ (Stenport 2010). Strindberg indicates a strong awareness of the role that visual culture, visual techniques and visual representations play in framing the rural and the peasant – a focus on realist painting clearly will not do for re-conceptualizing or grounding a visual ethnography. On the contrary, the train – a technology of motion that transforms sight and space – transforms his description of landscape. His descriptions are painterly but not mimetic (imitative); they are, rather, impressionistic. He is their author; his gaze remains central. It is dependent, however, on techniques of speed – the eye needs to be a different kind of ‘shutter’ when looking from a train. Strindberg conceived this project as requiring a camera. It is implicit up front in how he conceives of the nature of representation/vision. And although no actual photographs came of it, one wonders how this expectation shaped how he saw and wrote at all, how the expectations of the camera shaped the anticipatory universality (‘transnational’, for Stenport) ambitions of the project in the first place, and how this might happen in ways that are not straightforwardly literary, text-centric, or a direct causal function of authorial intention. The camera gets theorized, but after the fact, as ‘an aid for memory’ (Strindberg 1991: 80, our translation). But the phrase is theoretically retroactive, an after-effect of not having any photographs to show. Equally interesting, however, is to consider how picture-theory notions of memory, of embodied techno-perception, are changing in response to new forces of visual economy, despite Strindberg’s authorial attributions. What we have is less a ‘crisis’ of representation than a surfeit, one that is continually incited by this new visual economy. In looking for new models of ethnographic representation, he is already moving, seeing and thinking through visual modalities and techniques. In crossing boundaries of genre, he is already expressing new relationships between viewing and writing. The boundary between and relation between imaging and writing, between collecting (images) and recollecting (in memory), between capturing and authoring, are fluid and dialectically interpenetrating. The camera is already part of the collecting unconscious of ethnography. But the image is ultimately unstable, always circulating between the moment of time it captures and being a moment that is forever past, circulating between the image-technique as possessing its own scene-constructing properties and the constructionist capacities of the subject-author snapping and contextualizing the picture. The ontological register seems appropriate here: embodied perception and technologically mediated representation are inseparable. Technologies and techniques of sight and representation are participants in the ‘human’ act of vision, and they

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work directly on the genre-busting moves one regularly sees at work in Among French Peasants (and elsewhere). In effect, there is no ‘human’ act of vision, autonomously conceived; no contemporary act of writing, whether ethnographic or fictional (or both together for Strindberg) that is not intertwined with the saturating and transforming agencies and effects of visual technologies and techniques. Strindberg is no naturalist or realist regarding the image; he is no longer able to position the body (or mind) itself as ontologically separate from the agencies of these technologies. The practice of taking and making images, of deploying them as evidence or trope or metaphor, remains both multivalent and intertwined: their ‘truth’ and their ambiguity allow Strindberg to go both ways. The visual is the new universal (objective and scientific, when it suits him), while the inscription of the visual in the text preserves the author function of the subject – ambiguous, unsettled, and dispersed across different techniques, but never absent. As Stenport notes, Strindberg combines many representational tactics that derive from many different technologies and techniques: ‘ethnography, documentary reportage, travel narrative, historiography, painting, and photography’ (Stenport 2010: 76). But this may function less as an illustration of ‘modernism’s difficulty’ (our emphasis) and more as the emergence of technological agencies with which Strindberg is interacting, and that produce new conditions of embodiment and textuality that are increasingly organized around the visual, to which literary modernism and its anxieties are themselves increasingly marginal. It is a question of agency and, therefore, framing. There is no doubt that Strindberg positions himself in Among French Peasants as an exile with transnational literary ambitions, as observer, reporter, scientist, aesthete and literary creator-narrator altogether. What is interesting, however, are the ways in which the camera induces different relationships to the objectification and framing of the other, while being the other’s faithful recorder. Strindberg positions himself as the insightful exile who is still reliably connected to the real, while seeing and authoring at the same time. Visual techniques are playing a direct role in ‘reconceiving … new literary and representational forms’ (Stenport 2010: 84), but the literary modernist frame may not be capturing the role that these new technological currents and visual currencies are playing in the larger sense. What we are wanting to foreground are those moments when the agency of the technical/visual may deserve more prominence than the literary per se. The tensions generally ascribed to literary modernism regarding national and transnational textual ambitions might too quickly gloss a technical/ontological tension with regard to how we make the real, represent the real, and become redeployed as intentional subjects and authors when put in the context of new visual technologies and techniques. Strindberg intends no doubt to subsume observational techniques, such as painting and photography, to text and authorship. But this begs the question as to whether modernist poetics and authors are what is at stake more generally. In effect, Strindberg may open up the possibility for tracking a different set of framing dynamics that are more techno-ocular, more emphatically consolidated in their cumulative power in the present: overarching forces and trajectories that cross Strindberg’s various genres and media explorations. This is not to force a new label on Strindberg, arguing that

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he supersedes modernism and anticipates the postmodern. Rather, it is to argue that Strindberg criticism has dealt with his relationship to genres of writing and to visual technologies through the centrality of Strindberg’s consciousness, thus not giving enough attention to how that consciousness is itself distributed in relation to the agential forces of camera lenses, projection techniques, microscopes, gelatin silver bromide plates, telephones, phonographs, hydrometers, and boiling tubes, etc. Thus reciprocally, by understanding Strindberg in this inter-agential way, we acquire a better understanding of precisely these forces and trajectories, especially insofar as they have to do with visuality, technology and space, and of course with the many Strindbergs we are considering. But perhaps these dynamics are even more pronounced and performatively enacted in the Chamber Plays, as the work of Eszter Szalczer compellingly demonstrates (Szalczer 2001). These plays, she argues, foreground techniques of sight to an unprecedented degree in modern theatre. Our point is that these plays are both concrete and relentlessly ontological in their questioning: a reflection on language and on subjectivity in the context of constructed conditions of space and visibility. But perhaps what Strindberg eventually did was not simply change the shape of theatre, but create a scene, a sense of space and sight, through which to observe a larger and quintessentially contemporary drama: subjects being conjured, momentarily stabilized, and distributed across shifting scenes, paintings, images and spaces of one sort or another, in which no location or position of subjectivity or observation remains fixed. He brings the ontological question of the subject/subjectivity directly into the context of techniques of visibility, for which the cluster of concepts associated with naturalism (regarding theatre) and realism (regarding sight and space) are inadequate. It is of course well known, but perhaps under-appreciated, that Strindberg was a gifted painter and photographer, was deeply engaged with the painters of his day – Munch, Gauguin and many others – that he was influenced by Turner, and was fully aware of how visual practices and techniques were divesting themselves from the constraints of mimesis, in order to move on to more unsettling and unsettled concerns (a theme that Michael Robinson also explores). Even photography for Strindberg seems to be a way to obsess endlessly about the immediacy of the concrete, but for the sake of what is invisible, spectral, what cannot quite be seen under the shimmering surface. The Chamber Plays, in their aggregate, exemplify a point at which the combined effects of the genre (Chamber Play), the visual, and embodied-but-dispersed subjectivities are intensified and displayed. Our interest, in other words, is to pinch as much as we can from Szalczer’s analysis and suggest some ways in which images and shifting conceptions of space take on a kind of 'characterological' as well as performative and allegorical force in the plays. In To Damascus, the subject moves between two unstable spaces: there are abrupt shifts from the street corner to the asylum, and the shifting is itself an ominous evocation, enacting not only instabilities of theatrical space but a sense of the kinds of space where modern subjectivity will be observed, will be dispersed – in proto-Foucauldian ways – between the liberated anonymity of the urban and the disruption and pathology associated with the clinically constructed and confined subject of the ward.

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In The Dance of Death, the stage is an analogue of the asylum, a mode of isolation and confinement, where subjects are housed and made rigorously and ruthlessly visible in their invisible struggle to become alive beyond their subjugation, whether to an empty marriage, or in the space of an island fortress or prison, or at home in the drawing room. The shifts in space/time are allegorical moves that seem to emphasize both difference and relentless sameness, without clear boundary or ground; an allegory that leaves Alice and Edgar dancing around between spaces without the agency required to evade their emptiness: there is no space or container to fill. Similarly, in A Dream Play, the frequent changes of scene and visualization completely undermine any remnant of realism, and the unsettled visual techniques of painting and montage are themselves the dramatic agents of the unsettling. Everything is unstable and illusory, and the joint commitment to construct stable spaces for the projects of a stable subject is denied. On the contrary, there seems to be a fluid and destabilizing analogical play between the visually constructed – as suggested in painting, montage, photography, and their dematerialization of stage and space – and the subjective challenge to produce ontologically enduring identities. Perhaps even more suggestive, in The Ghost Sonata, Szalczer persuasively demonstrates that the entire plot is subordinated to visual leitmotifs, in which images take on a force of dramatic action. It is, in fact, a visual experience that frames the play. In the end it is an image that replaces and abstracts us from the space, and real space succumbs to a two-dimensional representation floated across the stage: Böklin’s Toten Insel. In effect, these plays, like so much else in Strindberg, are organized around appeals to sight, to techniques of the visual, to the dematerialization of space, and played out as such; their significance, in other words, may be in their prescient hybridity, anticipating, as critical theorist Raymond Williams noted, the scope of the cinematic, of later situationist explorations of sight and space as indeterminate zones of exploration and encounter, where the subject engages his own displacement and dispersal in a way that is increasingly organized around the imaged (and, thereby, the imaginary). The stage becomes itself a constructed venue; it becomes what Bachelard says about the ‘house’ in the poetics of space: a site through which thought, memory, dream – and for Strindberg also dread – are, through visual technology and techné, interwoven. His theatre demonstrates the need for an essentially fictional space for playing out the very role that space and visibility play in the organization of subjects and distributions of identity, and Strindberg does so through sliding layers of visuality and both real and virtual shifts of space that do not and cannot really exist except as technologically produced. In these ways, Strindberg anticipates an even more intensely visual culture than his own. Moreover, when seen through the lens of our digital moment, his oeuvre is recognizable as part of a genealogy of writing and likewise of subject-formation and distribution that has become all the more saturated by ocular-centric techné than his own era could have imagined. Perhaps Strindberg helps us to more effectively imagine the agency and persistence of these forces of techné in our own unsettled present. Strindberg’s destabilizing relationship to various genres of writing and modes of imaging

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were evident already to contemporary commentators like Georg Lukács, who in his tribute on the occasion of Strindberg’s sixtieth birthday points out that Strindberg’s greatness depends on his constant aesthetic and ontological fragmentations; ‘the expressive forms available to [him] were both everything and nothing at the same time’ (Lukács and Kadarkay 1995: 92). The reasons for these fragmentations Lukács finds in what he calls the limitations of ‘modern bourgeois, individualistic life’ (Lukács and Kadarkay 1995: 92). Consequently, only ‘beautiful ecstasies and the headaches of evanescent moments’ remain to be had at a point in history that no longer ‘inspires ideals’ (Lukács and Kadarkay 1995: 92). What makes subject-centred and unified vision impossible in Strindberg, however, is not the fragmentation Lukács says he has found, or the limitations of modern bourgeois life he finds responsible for it. It is the emergence and persistence of ocular techné that co-produce Strindberg’s cognitive and aesthetic vision, whether he is looking down a microscope, at a stage, out of a train window, looking at the sea or at a painting of the sea. Strindberg’s writings destabilize identity and subjectivity because they participate in a moment when, as Agamben puts it, the ‘boundless growth of apparatuses’ with which sensibilities are made ricochet in an ‘extreme proliferation of processes of subjectification’ (Agamben 2009: 15). Today, we recognize this as a moment when technology codifies being in such a way that ‘information’, as Hayles puts it, has ‘lost its body’ (Hayles 1999: 24). Strindberg registers this moment again and again: his ‘instruments’ interpenetrate the ‘thought machine’ that seeks to control them, but to no avail. Reading Strindberg through ocular-centric processes and expressions of ‘technical nonconscious cognition’ requires abandoning a work-centred and subject-centred description of his oeuvre. Further, it invites a re-description of his oeuvre as saturated by forces that refuse reduction even to the notion of text. We hope to have shown that such a re-description of Strindberg also helps to make the history of our ocular-centric and digital present more visible.

Notes 1 Bruno Latour writes: ‘We must learn to attribute – redistribute – action to many more agents than are acceptable in either the materialist or sociological account … Purposeful action and intentionality may not be properties of objects, but they are not properties of humans either. They are properties of institutions, or apparatuses … ’ (Latour 2009: 171). 2 See John Richetti’s Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume on the role Bacon plays in the rhetorical invention of ‘empiricism’ as a literary form. 3 See Peter Galison’s Image and Logic, as well as his and Caroline Jones’s Picturing Science, Producing Art for discussion of how new conceptions of scientific objectivity emerged in relation to imaging technologies and optical metaphors, and how these displaced subject-centred conceptions of scientific judgement and authorship. 4 See Schelling’s First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature; and for a sense of the revival Schelling’s efforts are enjoying in the present, see Iain Hamilton Grant’s Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, 2008.

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5 See W. J. T. Mitchell’s Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture and Media Aesthetics and What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images for compelling accounts of the kinds of agency and effects that emerge in a variety of related image-cultures. 6 See especially Chapter 10. ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’, for an account of how the economy of object- and image-collecting served, metonymically and methodologically, to stimulate a new kind of ethnography: collecting objects and images and collecting cultures were inseparable.

Works Cited Agamben, G. (2009), What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Anderson, B. (2006), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Barad, K. M. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brandell, G. (1989), Strindberg – Ett Författarliv. D. 4, Hemkomsten – Det Nya Dramat: 1898–1912, Stockholm: Alba. Clifford, J. (1988), The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Danius, S. (2002), The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hayles, N. K. (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. K. (2015), ‘Nonconscious Cognition and Jess Stoner’s I Have Blinded Myself Writing This’, in N. Jones and S. Skinner (eds), Torque #2, The Act of Reading, Liverpool and London: Torque Editions. Kärnell, K.-Å. (1969), Strindbergs Bildspråk, Stockholm: Geber. Kittler, F. (1999), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Latour, B. (2009), ‘A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans: Following Daedalus’s Labyrinth’, in D. Kaplan (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Technology, 158–172, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Lukács, G. and Kadarkay, A. (1995), ‘August Strindberg: On His Sixtieth Birthday’, in The Lukács Reader, 91–96, Oxford: Blackwell. Rosmarin, A. (1986), The Power of Genre, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rugg, L. H. (1997), Picturing Ourselves: Photography & Autobiography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schröder, S. M. and Hockenjos, V. (2005), Historisierung Und Funktionalisierung: Intermedialität in Den Skandinavischen Literaturen Um 1900, Berlin: HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin. Stenport, A. W. (2010), Locating August Strindberg’s Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Setting, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Stern, M. J. (2008), Nietzsche’s Ocean, Strindberg’s Open Sea, Berlin: Nordeuropa-Institut der Humboldt-Universität. Strindberg, A. (1958), August Strindbergs Brev. 6, Augusti 1886–Januari 1888, ed. T. Eklund, Stockholm: Bonnier.

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Strindberg, A. (1964), August Strindbergs Brev. 8, Januari 1890–December 1891, ed. T. Eklund, Stockholm: Bonnier. Strindberg, A. (1973), By the Open Sea, trans. E. Schleussner, New York: Haskell House. Strindberg, A. (1982), I Havsbandet, ed. H. Lindström, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Strindberg, A. (1984), By the Open Sea, trans. M. Sandbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Strindberg, A. (1991), Bland Franska Bönder: Subjektiva Reseskildringar, ed. P. E. Ekholm, Stockholm: Norstedt. Strindberg, A. (1996), August Strindberg: Selected Essays, ed. M. Robinson, New York: Cambridge University Press. Strindberg, A. (2010), Naturvetenskapliga Skrifter. I, Antibarbarus; Sylva Sylvarum; Jardin Des Plantes, eds P. Stam and E. Bladh, Stockholm: Norstedt. Szalczer, E. (2001), ‘Nature’s Dream Play: Modes of Vision and August Strindberg’s ReDefinition of the Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 53 (1): 33–52.

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Picturing Miss Julie: Gender and Visuality in Performance Practice Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Art, Sweden

In the following pages, I will discuss my directorial approach to August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, which I staged at Scenkonst Sörmland, one of Sweden’s regional theatres, as part of the Strindberg centennial in 2012. The production was undertaken as part of an artistic research project on gender and the theatrical canon in collaboration with Stockholm University of the Arts. As a feminist scholar and director, I am interested in possible encounters between critical theory and creative practice. I will attempt to contextualize my directorial choices within a discursive framework, offering critical reflection on my own practice-based incorporations of theoretical analysis. My ambition in taking on Strindberg’s most-canonized and allegedly mostmisogynist drama was to stage an encounter with Strindberg’s world of ideas in his moment of writing, by creating a performance exploring the converging thematics of gender, modernity and visuality. My incentive for this interpretation came from Freddie Rokem’s reading of the play in his book Strindberg’s Secret Codes, where he demonstrates how notions of the visual shape Strindberg’s modernist theatrical aesthetic. Exploring Strindberg’s intense preoccupation with the visual and spatial components of his dramatic work, Rokem argues that Strindberg attempted to create a ‘visual “score” ’ in which he ‘carefully and consciously orchestrated the visual experience of his potential audiences’ (Rokem 2004: 11). In this process, Strindberg paid particular attention to scenic design, the performance and movements of the actors, and the communicative relationship between the world of the stage and its audience. Rokem situates his analysis in Jonathan Crary’s discussion of the transformation of vision in the nineteenth century – from a perception of objectivity and fixity associated with the camera obscura to a notion of subjective vision – suggesting that one of Strindberg’s main objectives was the use of theatrical performance to explore inner and subjective visions (Crary 1992: 12–14). In this text, I will discuss three aspects of Rokem’s reading that came to inform my mise en scène of Miss Julie: the incorporation into theatrical representation of photographic/ cinematographic techniques and metaphors, including the use of shifting perspectives and focal points; the elements of expressionism embedded in Strindberg’s theatrical realism; and the construction and development of character through subjective vision and psychological projection. Rokem’s argument, however, while intrinsic to my own understanding and

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scenic interpretation of Miss Julie, contextualizes Strindberg’s plays specifically within a visual-modernist aesthetic, largely disregarding Strindberg’s equally intense preoccupation at the time with gendered relations and subjectivity. I saw an opportunity to explore Rokem’s analysis through creative practice, while enriching his argument by foregrounding the gendered – and normative – dimensions of modernist visuality. As a critical concept, visuality opens up a range of possibilities for the scenic, spatial and embodied interpretation of a play like Miss Julie. Described by Amelia Jones as ‘the conditions of how we see and make meanings of what we see’ (Jones 2003: 3), visuality posits the act of looking as intrinsically connected to the activity of meaning-making. Maaike Bleeker, writing on visuality in theatrical contexts, goes further to suggest that the term implies ‘… locating vision within a specific historical and cultural situation … in which what we think we see is the product of vision “taking place” according to the tacit rules of a specific scopic regime and within a relationship between the one seeing and what is seen’ (Bleeker 2008: 2). Implied is thus the necessity of drawing attention not only to what the audience sees, but also to the many parameters (tacit or not) that condition the audience’s act of looking. Bleeker foregrounds the relationship between the observer and the presumed object of the gaze (a relationship intrinsic to the notion of subjective vision). Central to my own incorporation of visuality as a creative tool is the notion that visual experience may be understood in terms of normativity, regulated by historically, socially and culturally defined norms. A discussion of gender is indispensable for our understanding of both modernity and visuality. Jones argues that feminism evolved in symbiosis with modernity, ‘itself coincident with the development of the camera, media imagery and, in short, modern image culture’, and that visual culture ‘as a mode or strategy of interpretation, is always already determined in and through relations of sexual difference … ’ (Jones 2003: 3) While visuality and visual culture are by no means interchangeable terms, and neither are gender and feminism, Jones’s point, like my own, is that we cannot consider modernist developments in the production and reception of images, nor in the strategies and relational conditions of vision taking place, without critically considering the gendered dimensions of these operations. Contemporary discourse on visuality resonates with formulations on the gaze and scopic regimes in feminist theory (Laura Mulvey’s work, for example) and can thus be said to contain an implicit, or sometimes explicit, gender critique. As such, the discussion of vision in modernist aesthetics can be understood as invoking and activating a critique of the scopic regimes that regulate acts of vision and spectatorship, which in themselves are gendered and must be understood as and through operations of power. The offer to direct Miss Julie came with a specific set of conditions: to stage the play with a critical gender perspective without deconstructing the text, altering the plot, or recasting the characters. It was to be performed straight, while incorporating a critical gender perspective into the performance process itself. Miss Julie needed to be recognizable as Miss Julie, yet provide the audience with an opportunity to consider its gender politics in new ways. Prior to this commission, I had not given Miss Julie much consideration as a director, feeling a stronger pull towards Strindberg’s expressionist drama. My sense of

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the play was admittedly superficial and influenced by others’ interpretations rather than by any close reading of my own; however, I felt resistance towards the contempt and derision of femininity and the effeminate, which I perceived as the play’s premise. Strindberg’s famous exploration of theatrical realism through the seduction and fatal undoing of the aristocratic Julie is often construed as a war of the sexes (and classes), in which Julie’s father’s servant, Jean, emerges as the victor. Whether we choose to read the play in psychological terms, considering its conflict and Julie’s suicide in this light, or to view the outcome as symbolic of the demise of the last strains of feudalism in Sweden (and with it the fall of the possibly effeminate upper classes), the denouement of the play is predicated on the destruction of the feminine, or of woman at her own hand, while the masculine entity continues to rise and thrive. Additionally, the play’s canonical status, as well as its performance history and context of reception in Sweden, intimidated me. My main references were the stage versions by Ingmar Bergman (Royal Dramatic Theatre, Sweden, 1985) and Thommy Berggren (Royal Dramatic Theatre, Sweden, 2005), the televised production by Keve Hjelm (Sveriges Television/Swedish Television, 1969), as well as Alf Sjöberg’s classical 1951 film. None of these, I would argue, take issue with Strindberg’s presentation of gendered conflict, nor do they problematize theatrical conventions of gender representation. While one advantage of staging plays from the canon is that the audience can be expected to know something of the basic plot, the characters, and sometimes the performance history, seminal productions can influence the audience’s view of a canonized drama like Miss Julie, making it difficult to perceive the work and its characters in other terms. Simultaneously, the urge to bring out something new or to comment on canonized plays can burden the directorial concept to the point of over-determination; my challenge was therefore to create my own version of Miss Julie, working both with and against preconceived notions of the play and its characters, but without overly conceptualizing the play. I was not convinced that it would be feasible to maintain a critical gender perspective throughout the play’s progression without altering or commenting on the plot or the play’s dramaturgy. Furthermore, I realized that there was no point in trying to highlight latent or underlying aspects of gender – normally an effective feminist strategy – because the play is so explicitly structured around the thematics of gender, sexuality, power and social class. I had already decided that I had no interest in setting the action in a different time period or cultural context, a common re-framing strategy used to provide perspective or add meaning to canonized texts. Instead, I became interested in what it was that Strindberg was trying to do with this play. Strindberg authored an extensive preface contextualizing Miss Julie in a larger argument on the state of theatre, detailing the challenges involved in presenting audiences with new ways of seeing and the effects of social, historical and cultural change on both politics and aesthetics. In this preface, he not only creates a backstory for the drama at hand, but also reveals his ambition to reinvent theatrical form so as to create a modern theatre reflecting the times. He outlines his views on what he considers to be modern forms of dramaturgy, character, dramatic language and visual presentation, while describing the ideal performance arrangements for this particular work, including movement and positioning, lighting, and the actors’

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appearances. Pondering modernity from the point of view of social transformation and the conditions of subjectivity, he reviles the women’s movement while recognizing (albeit with some irony) that ‘the man-hating half-woman’, that is, the feminist, is also part of what may be deemed modern (Strindberg 2012: 216). Rather than offering a corrective to Strindberg’s position on gender and feminism, I decided to explore the complex of gender as it appears in the play and in presentday discursive formations. Strindberg’s elaborations on gender identity in Miss Julie and his preface to it are rife with contradiction; while claiming to prove woman’s inherent inferiority to man, the play simultaneously posits gender as a critical notion, as something acquired (or imposed) rather than innate, regulated through relationality and social norms. This double perspective and the logical instability it indicates, drew me to investigate the possible meanings gender might acquire in the staging process. I felt inclined to respond to Strindberg’s preface and to use it as the basis for my mise en scène by acquiescing to certain requests, complicating some of his ideas and elaborating on others. Additionally, I decided that I would create a preface of my own, introducing my interpretation of Strindberg’s visual score in gendered terms (Figure 12.1). The performance took place at the estate of Nynäs Slott, a late-nineteenth-century mansion that doubles as county museum in Södermanland, south of Stockholm. In the carriage house, which had been re-fashioned to look like a small rural cinema, the audience was seated facing a wall with a movie screen. This screen, which doubled as a curtain for the stage, in fact covered a small (approximately 4 by 2.5 metres) proscenium cut-out in the wall. As the lights dimmed, a trio of musicians – accordion, violin, oboe d’amour – began to play a musical overture. On the screen, a silent film, shot in grainy black and white and complete with titles and captions, was projected, introducing elements to come in the play.

Figure 12.1 August Strindberg, Miss Julie, 2012. Scenkonst Sörmland, Sweden. Directed by Kristina Hagström-Ståhl. Photographs and set design by Sven Dahlberg.

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Figure 12.2 August Strindberg, Miss Julie, 2012. Scenkonst Sörmland, Sweden. Directed by Kristina Hagström-Ståhl. Photographs and set design by Sven Dahlberg.

In the film, Julie’s songbird, sketched into being in a short stop-motion film, colourinversed like a photographic negative, is gradually enclosed in a cage; next, in a zooming sequence, the camera, at first capturing the summer sky over Nynäs, approaches the mansion from afar. Entering the mansion through the front door and transporting us into the kitchen – which closely resembles Strindberg’s set description in the opening stage directions to the play – the camera pans across the room and settles on a photographic still of the space, taken at an angle (Figure 12.2). In the next sequence, we are aboard a train moving alongside a mountain lake in Switzerland; the camera cuts to a series of three extreme close-up shots of each character’s eye, gazing into the camera, filling the screen. Finally, the image dissolves back into the still of the kitchen, and the camera rests there. As the musical overture ends on a lingering, dissonant chord, this photograph is replaced by a passage from Strindberg’s preface to Miss Julie: I say Miss Julie is a modern character not because the man-hating half-woman has not always existed but because she has now been brought out into the open, has taken the stage, and is making a noise about herself. Victim of a superstition (one that has seized even stronger minds) that woman, that stunted form of human being, standing with man, the lord of creation, the creator of culture, is meant to be the equal of man or could ever possibly be, she involves herself in an absurd struggle with him in which she falls. Absurd because a stunted form, subject to the laws of propagation, will always be born stunted and can never catch up with the one who has the lead. As follows: A (the man) and B (the woman) start from

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the same point C, A with a speed of let us say 100 and B with a speed of 60. When will B overtake A? Answer: never. Neither with the help of equal education or equal voting rights – nor by universal disarmament and temperance societies – any more than two parallel lines can ever meet. (Strindberg: 216–217)

With the projected text still in place, the screen/curtain is raised to reveal Julie, standing alone on stage, razor in hand, gazing at the audience. The set is completely white and designed to invoke both the interior of a box camera and a tiny perspectival proscenium stage. Two kitchen chairs and a table are the only objects in the room. The written text is projected onto the whole space, as well as onto Julie’s body and face. Julie proceeds to recite the text aloud to the audience. Meanwhile, the lingering chord gives way to a lilting tune in three-quarter time, reminiscent of the folk music often played at Midsummer. As Julie ends her monologue, she moves upstage and stands by the back screen, leaving centre stage empty. On cue, Jean bursts through an opening in the wings, the Count’s boots in hand, and exclaims his famous opening line: ‘What a night! Miss Julie is wild again! She is absolutely wild!’ (220). The play, as written, has commenced. In the empty space, Jean’s line could be directed at anyone, perhaps himself, or the audience. As a small door opens and Kristin thrusts her head into the space, countering: ‘You took your time getting back!’ (220), Julie retreats to the back corner and observes the opening scene as it is played out. Kristin sets flowers and food on the table for Jean, fawning over him as he eats. Meanwhile they tell each other, as well as the audience (to whom they turn occasionally in direct address) about Julie, portraying her as transgressive, insatiable, power-hungry, beautiful and sexually adventurous, and yet capricious and unhappy (220–222). Julie, positioned in the back corner, listens and observes. The audience watches her watching Jean and Kristin. From time to time Julie gazes directly at the audience, seemingly competing with the other two for their attention or sympathy. Thus, the spectators are presented with a subjective image of Julie while simultaneously possibly taking on her point of view. In contrast, most scenic interpretations of Miss Julie would introduce the protagonist through a process of objectification, presenting her in her absence before allowing the character to complete her first action or utter her first line. Our production sought to resist this objectification as well as foreground the dramaturgical strategies positioning Julie’s character as a projection surface for the other characters’ – and the audience’s – fantasies. Upon Julie’s cue to enter, she simply steps into the action from her on stage/off stage vantage point and delivers her opening line. Jean and Kristin leap apart, hiding the bottle of wine they have taken from the stores, and assume their attentive yet submissive positions as servants. From there on, all three characters follow the script (Plates 12.1–12.4). This prologue constituted my attempt at framing the play, one of my central strategies for providing a critical perspective as well as situating the drama aesthetically and contextually. It aimed to introduce the question of visuality and the act of looking while providing commentary on Strindberg’s positioning of the play’s (presumed) protagonist, and on the set-up of the dramatic conflict. The intention behind quoting

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an excerpt from Strindberg’s preface was to remind the audience that the play and its dramatic conflict are already framed by a thesis on gender and modernity set forth by the author. Allowing Julie herself to present this thesis provides a double perspective on her character, as being both subjected to and an agent of the conflict at hand; it was also intended as a comment on the act of looking, with which the audience was about to engage. Exploring several simultaneous points of entry, the play’s opening aimed to draw attention to the fact that every starting point constitutes a decision that influences how an onlooker may understand what is to come. By beginning Miss Julie in this manner I wanted to offer the possibility of viewing the drama through the (subjective) eyes of the protagonist, as well as through the disembodied (and therefore seemingly objective) gaze of the playwright. My incentive had come from Strindberg’s own desire to contextualize; however, I made the choice to incorporate the preface into the staging itself (in the shape of the overture-as-prologue), so as to enact the dramatic illusion while simultaneously demonstrating the construction behind it. If what we think we see is regulated by a specific scopic regime, the regime itself needs to be made visible as part of the act of looking. The gaze of the spectator, conditioned by technological, dramaturgical and subjective decisions and influences, affects the object on view as well as the interpretive processes connected with aesthetic experience. In his preface, describing the play’s visual and spatial set-up, Strindberg asserts that he has ‘borrowed from impressionistic painting the idea of asymmetrical and open composition, and … thereby gained something in the way of greater illusion’ (214). Connecting theatrical performance to other, more explicitly visual art forms is one way for Strindberg to situate the play within modernist aesthetics and discourse. These choices affect the spectator’s understanding of space and temporality, as well as the presentation and development of character (and plot). He also suggests an awareness of the audience’s visual experience, and understands how his manipulation of perspective and composition, together with their act of looking, will contribute to the making of meaning in the experience of the play’s performance. As Rokem indicates, Strindberg also imports modernist forms of image-making associated with subjective vision, above all the possibilities presented by the lens and production technique of the camera, that is to say, photographic and cinematographic techniques, into theatrical representation (Rokem 2004: 19). Superimposing a filter or lens – a type of camera vision – on the space of the stage, Strindberg appears to guide the gaze of the spectator through shifting perspectives and focal points. My creative team and I decided to use these aesthetic strategies as starting points for our own exploration of perspective, camera techniques and subjective vision. Having appropriated the concept of the visual score as a dramaturgical tool, I used it as a basis for organizing the visual world of the play. It functioned not as a script or blueprint for performance, but rather like a musical score, accompanying and co-narrating the turns, events and moods of the plot. The score was created through a series of video projections, shot with a smartphone using a camera filter app designed to reproduce the texture and quality of early-twentieth-century celluloid film (this technique representing an attempt to stage an encounter between the technological advances of Strindberg’s period and my own).

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We began by presenting the photographic metaphor that Strindberg prescribes for the set: his stage directions ask for a kitchen set in a mansion, rendered in realistic detail, yet presented diagonally, at an angle, and with the table, stove and vaulted entry only partially visible. Invoking impressionistic composition, Strindberg presents the set as a photographic cut-out of a larger space (Rokem 2004: 21), encouraging his audience to imagine how the room extends beyond the given (proscenium) frame (Strindberg 2012: 214). We chose to reverse and literalize Strindberg’s metaphor by projecting a photograph of the late-nineteenth-century kitchen at Nynäs Slott onto the whole set, including onto the wings, replicating the visual composition that Strindberg suggests. In this, we sought to recognize Strindberg’s use of photographic and subjective vision in theatrical representation, while situating the play in a more contemporary theatrical aesthetic in which projections onto screens and stark, black box sets have become the norm. Throughout the course of the play, the combined and simultaneous presentation of embodied, onstage, theatrical performance and superimposed camera perspective continued, as though the stage space were the inside of a camera for the audience to look into and through, and the back screen its aperture or lens (Plates 12.5–12.6). Transitioning out of the photo rendition of the kitchen in the first scene of the play, we used filmed sequences that began as wide shots, providing an overview of the kitchen as a whole, and gradually zoomed in on various surfaces, objects and utensils. As the scene progressed, we first focused on the architecture and the furniture of the room, then on a collection of pots and utensils on the cast-iron stove, and finally on the rough surface of the stove. This surface was zoomed into so closely that one’s sense of perspective was lost; its uneven texture began to resemble the topographic formations of a landscape, or a map rendered in three dimensions. In the following scenes, this camera movement was repeated, the projection gliding over and closing in on elements from other rooms in the mansion. Thus, the audience’s gaze became intimately acquainted with the texture of curtains and wallpaper, as well as with the surfaces of the elaborate ceiling stucco and centuries-old oil paintings. While illustrating the loss of perspective or focal point as the close-ups affect our perception of both of the objects depicted as well as our sense of depth and space, this camera technique aimed to imitate a form of scientific observation (the ideal of the naturalist movement) as if through a microscope or a magnifying glass. Foremost, however, the idea was to turn the set and the world of the play into a site of subjective vision (positioning the set and the action inside the act of looking through a camera), unmooring the room itself from a fixed or objective sense of reality. As Rokem argues, Strindberg’s use of photographic metaphor places the audience simultaneously inside and outside the world of the play; the conventional ‘fourth wall’ of theatrical realism seems to be behind the onlooker, displacing the stage–audience divide (Rokem 2004: 20). While positioned at a seeming distance from the objects and events portrayed, the spectator also experiences the intimacy of viewing a photographic cut-out or close-up. The photograph furthermore captures a double temporality, representing at once the immediacy of the present and the past-ness of the has-been (Rokem 2004: 21). Our objective was precisely to convey that sense of temporal

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fluidity, to set the play in the here and now while simultaneously invoking the pastness of Strindberg’s period and the play’s performance history. I hoped that portraying the characters through photographic techniques would create a simultaneous sense of immediacy and mediation. Likewise, the shifting perspectives generated by the moving camera, cutting between objectifying distance and close proximity, would provide a counterpoint to the immediate sense of the now, sometimes reinforcing this experience, sometimes interrogating its present-ness and presumed authenticity. Presenting the world of the play as image would mean revealing the structure behind the ‘as if ’ – a basis of theatrical realism – while simultaneously acting on the suspension of disbelief so central to the contract or agreement between the onstage world and its audience. Furthermore, by entering into an agreement with the audience in which it becomes possible to believe in illusion while simultaneously seeing how the illusion is created, we would be able to allude not only to the destabilization of visual objectivity shaping Strindberg’s aesthetic, but also probe the conventions of realism and interrogate gender as a given or fixed category. Thus, the use of shifting perspectives and unstable, subjective visions and projections could function both as a material framework for staging the play, and as a metaphor for how we are to understand character, plot and action – as well as the question of gendered subjectivity – in the course of the performance. While this type of formal and theatrical language appears more obviously connected to the expressionist aesthetic that emerges in Strindberg’s post-Inferno period than to the realism for which Miss Julie is known, I followed Rokem’s suggestion that Miss Julie contains ‘preparations for the introduction of expressionism, wherein everything will be seen as such projections of subjectivity’ (Rokem 2004: 24). A surprising amount of support for this interpretation was available in Strindberg’s preface. Starting with the claim that ‘the motivation for the action is not simple and … the point of view is not single’, Strindberg proceeds to provide ‘the tragic fate of Miss Julie with an abundance of circumstances’ that have little to do with psychology, and even less to do with innate or stereotypically gendered character traits (Strindberg 206). He instead invokes ‘further and more immediately: the festive atmosphere of Midsummer Eve, … the long summer twilight, the highly aphrodisiac influence of flowers …’ (206). These circumstances have closer bonds to summer solstice as a pagan celebration of fertility and as a turning point in the calendar than to psychological figuration. Here, Strindberg suggests that outer elements, pertaining to setting and environment, may influence a character’s psyche and course of action; likewise, one surmises that the inner emotions of a character could affect the external world. Midsummer’s mythic function as a night that undoes the dichotomies of darkness and light promises to stage an inversal of the received world, and to produce negative or reversed versions of familiar images. I imagined this promise could be extended to the possibility of undoing dichotomies of male and female; enabling transgression and excess, it would allow for a slippage of gendered categories, of logic and meaning. The desires awoken in Julie and Jean on this particular night could thereby have more to do with a longing to defy norms and push the boundaries of a given role or form, to try out a new position and a different identity, than with sexual consummation

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per se. Perhaps Julie and Jean do want not so much to seduce the other as to take the place of the other, if given the opportunity to inhabit – however briefly – a social and gendered position conceived as opposite and prohibited to their own. The attraction and intimacy between Julie and Jean are manifested when, in the first part of the play, they narrate a dream to each other. Both characters’ symbolically charged dreams involve a change of position: Julie, perched high up, longs to fall, while Jean, gazing upward from the ground, longs to rise. What if this were possible for a night? What rude awakening would then follow, once night ended and order was restored? While reading the script more closely, I became aware of the prominence of dreams, fantasies and memories, which structure the audience’s perception and understanding of the characters. Furthermore, I realized the extent to which the plot revolves around events that take place in the past, although we can never be certain of the truth and accuracy of these memories and projections. As such, the characters appear to lack internal logic, and the audience’s perspective on them shifts with the twists and turns of the play’s progression. In his preface, Strindberg describes these characters not in terms of individual or progressive psychology, but rather as ‘conglomerations from various stages of culture, past and present, walking scrapbooks, shreds of human lives’ (208). As Rokem points out, the photographic metaphor extends to Strindberg’s character composition in that the audience is given a simultaneously subjective and objective view of Julie, Jean and Kristin (Rokem 2004: 23). The sense of objectivity is based on the presentation of the characters as shaped by events in their respective pasts; however, any notion of objective truth is unmoored as those events turn out to be unverifiable and sometimes potentially false. In a certain sense, through the dissolution of the stable and coherent self, through the non-fixity of time and place, as well as through the dimension of dreams and the constitutive presence of subjective visions, Miss Julie reflects Strindberg’s later dreamplay aesthetic. I therefore decided to foreground the expressionist qualities that I discerned in my reading of the play. I began to see a particular potential in Miss Julie, in that the expressionist point of view could be contrasted with a realist aesthetic, or rather that these two could coexist, allowing the dramatic conflict to be enacted in part through a clash in theatrical form. For this reason we set the play in several realities at once: in the kitchen of the mansion (represented as photo-image); on the stage or space of a theatre (a crossover between a perspectival proscenium stage and a modernist, colour-inversed black box); in the inside of Strindberg’s box camera (or potentially a camera recording moving images); and in the interior and emotional world(s) of the characters. We used theatre architecture, moving images, and references to photographic and filmic equipment and technologies to introduce multiple ways of seeing, as well as technology and materials from different periods to make not only the characters but also our elements of design into ‘conglomerations from various stages of culture, past and present’ (Strindberg: 208). The acting style was borrowed from genres outside realism (including clowning techniques, elements from musical theatre, and Brechtian Verfremdung effects) in order to contextualize and make realism itself visible as a genre or technique rather

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than a neutral or authentic, non-heightened stage language. While there is not enough space here to account for the complex and detailed work undertaken by the actors, nor for the theoretical framework underpinning that aspect of the creative process, it is important to point out that a large part of the work on critical gender perspectives took shape through the performers’ embodied interpretation and performance of Strindberg’s text and characters. As such, we worked with a form of visual and relational gender coding of the actors’ bodies and actions, as well as with spatial choreography and relationships, audience interaction, and the actors’ use of the gaze. Our technique was intended to work with and against notions of gender ideals as they are expressed theatrically within the conventions of realism. One starting point for both Jean’s and Julie’s characters was their ongoing struggle – and ongoing failure – to live up to normative ideals regarding masculine and feminine gender, hetero-normative conceptions of complementarity, and expressions of desire (related to class and social standing), as they are conventionally staged in theatrical realism. Another starting point was the pairing of desire and revulsion associated with the idea of transgressing given social roles and the taking of the place of the other. Physically, the three characters were made to resemble each other as much as possible, in near-identical, all-black outfits consisting of broad-shouldered blouses, corsets and riding pants. In its exaggerated hourglass shape, referencing at once archetypal signs of masculinity (broad shoulders, military trousers) and of femininity (slim waist, wide hips), their silhouette suggested that the characters might share aspects of, or perspectives on, the same figure. While based on latenineteenth-century photographs, the costumes were constructed using non-period (mostly present-day) techniques and materials. The contrast between the black costumes and the white set was intended to invoke the black-and-white imagery of early silent film, and more symbolically reference the inversion of darkness and light at Midsummer. The musical score was conceived in a manner analogous to the costumes, referencing the scores of early-twentieth-century silent film as well as late-nineteenth-century folk and art music, but with a contemporariness with regard to tonality, harmonies and melodic shape. As the play progressed, the music took on qualities associated with minimalism and ultimately postmodern aesthetics, including the non-traditional use of instruments to convey the inner emotional turmoil that Julie experiences towards the end of the play. The inner emotions of the characters were also invoked through projections of specific imagery and visual materials. Primarily, we used front and back projections of two of Strindberg’s 1893–94 celestographs (see Plate 1.2 for an example of this image form) to set the stage for Julie’s and Jean’s night together and to connect the play to Strindberg’s post-Inferno aesthetic. The first celestograph, a depiction of the night sky, appeared during the sequence when the two characters begin to narrate their dreams to each other. Processed through a projector with a filter, creating the illusion of simultaneous rotation and forward movement, the photographic image created an impression of the set floating slowly through space, as though it were

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becoming dislodged from the rigid social realities of life on the estate. The second celestograph, this time of the sun, was projected in a similar rotating and zooming manner at the moment of sunrise, when Julie and Jean become aware of the reality of what they have done, and realize what the consequences may be. This second sequence of events culminates with Jean killing Julie’s tiny songbird – a symbol of her spirit and her (curtailed) freedom. This use of the celestographs invoked an expressionist aesthetic in which the inner emotions, experiences and desires of the characters are projected onto, and begin to shape, the outside world. Furthermore, the projection technique provided a form of double perspective; while the manipulation of the image suggested spatial depth, simultaneously the two-dimensional flatness of the photographic image was foregrounded as the backs of the celestographs, labelled in Strindberg’s handwriting with the words Stjärnhimlen/Les étoiles (the stars) and Solen/Le soleil (the sun), respectively, were included in the projection. The transformation of the room was also paired with the transformation of Julie’s character and her physical appearance; as the plot unfolds, she gradually takes on the traits and movement patterns associated with female-type characters from expressionist silent film. When Jean kills her bird, she reaches a kind of expressionistic peak, standing paralysed and statuesque with a grimace on her face. During the killing of the songbird and Julie’s monologue after this deed, the strong, red colour of Strindberg’s solar celestograph floods the walls, ceiling and floor of the space, filling the room, alluding to the bird’s blood and to Julie’s inner emotional state. Meanwhile, these outward expressions of the characters’ inner emotions or ‘subjective perceptions’ are also present in the script of the play and can take the shape of psychological projections outside the character or onto their adversary (Rokem 2004: 24). In my mise en scène, the killing of the bird became one such projection, allowing the characters’ interior emotions and experiences, as Strindberg imagines them, to be expressed through the actions and reactions of the other character. We decided that Jean’s actions should physically enact what the death of the bird means to Julie emotionally – or rather the emotional state that Strindberg prescribes for Julie’s character in response to the killing. The purpose of this scenic choice was to underscore an aesthetic strategy used by Strindberg in his incorporation of subjective vision, while offering a critical gender perspective by reusing this strategy as a form of role reversal. Rather than the swift, rather macho and emotionally void gesture that Strindberg suggests for Jean, in which he places the bird on a chopping block and lops its head off in mid-sentence, hardly breaking his stride, Jean would instead twist, crush and stomp the bird to death in a frenzied, near-hysterical fit of disgust, paired with a certain elation upon completing the action. Exhausted from the effort, he would sink onto a chair while Julie, recovering from her paralysis, would utter her monologue addressed to him very slowly, deliberately and monotonously, in a low-pitched and unemotional voice. This response, staging stereotypical (albeit idealized) masculine qualities and actions, would invert a situation in which she is expected to seem helpless and her rage of no consequence, despite the violent imagery and the verbal threats that Julie directs against Jean, while Jean, in his determination, is expected to act unmoved, superior and slightly menacing.

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In the course of rehearsals I realized that it was possible to read several more similar psychological projections, charged with gendered role reversals, into the text and the plot. The last section of the play in particular seems to explore this narrative and aesthetic strategy, while underlining sexual difference in a manner that further complicates Strindberg’s stand on gendered relations. Once Kristin has interrupted Julie’s and Jean’s affect-laden, nightmarish interactions around the dead bird, dismissed as nonsense Julie’s dream of a joint future at Lake Como (which she has overtaken from Jean), and given Jean a piece of her mind, she leaves the unhappy couple to their joint fate. Sitting centre stage in identical but mirror-inversed positions, in our staging they appeared as dishevelled reflections of one another, and of the fantasies they held of themselves and projected onto each other. At this point, Julie asks Jean: ‘What would you do if you were in my place?’ (272). After some hesitation, Jean appears to understand the reality of being in Julie’s place, and responds that he knows what he would do. ‘Like this?’ Julie asks, and in Strindberg’s stage direction she ‘picks up the razor and makes a gesture with it’ (272). ‘Yes’, responds Jean, emphasizing, however, that he would not do it; after all, there are differences between him and Julie. Julie. Because you’re a man and I’m a woman? What difference does that make? Jean. Just the difference that there is – between man and woman! (272–273). I consider this exchange a key moment in Miss Julie, as it brings together some of the most important themes of the play, pertaining both to plot and dramatic construction, while pinpointing central questions on visuality as well as gender. First, Julie asks Jean to put himself in her place – something he has ostensibly been longing to do throughout the play, but which now appears decidedly less desirable than before. Second, through this image of displacement and trading places, Jean introduces the possibility of suicide as though he were considering it for himself (and it is a repetition of his memory or fantasy of attempting suicide as a child, out of desire for Julie and her social position). However, third, he very quickly distances himself from this act, claiming sexual difference as evidentiary justification. Meanwhile, Jean cannot answer Julie as to what difference gender really makes, except by reverting to a circular, seemingly common-sensical but actually nonsensical logic (the difference between a man and a woman equals the difference between a man and a woman). In order to stress the circularity of Jean’s argument, I let the actors repeat this last exchange over and over, like a broken record. Julie ultimately ended the repetitive loop of their exchange with a monologue that concludes: ‘What difference does it make who’s to blame? I’m still the one who has to bear the guilt, suffer the consequences – ’ (273). For an instant, Strindberg appears to problematize conventional gender positioning, expressing sympathy for his female protagonist and framing her as the subject and point of identification of the conflict. The following moment, however, the perspective is reversed, as if a camera were cutting between close-ups of the two interlocutors.

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The received understanding of this scene and of the gesture performed is that Julie imitates slitting her own throat with the razor. However, Strindberg in fact does not specify or describe the gesture, but leaves it to actors and directors to interpret his intentions. In a manner echoing his use of impressionistic techniques in his stage directions for the set, Strindberg thus asks the reader, performer or audience member to visualize what is, so to speak, outside the textual frame. The gesture is never described verbally by the characters, nor is death mentioned explicitly. Julie’s possible suicide is unspoken, merely intimated through a visualized gesture (which itself is only implied) and verbal elision. Yet it is on this element that the plot and the received meaning of the play both turn. In our version, Julie started to perform the gesture with the razor, moving her arm forward as if to slice it through the air in front of Jean’s throat. He interrupted her gesture by grabbing her hand in mid-air. Thus, the gesture remained implicit, but I would be very surprised if any single member of our audience failed to understand what it was that was implied. Ultimately, Jean is called upon by the servants’ bell to resume his position and return to his service with the Count. Here, in a second act of displacement, Jean spells out the deed to which he implicitly destines for Julie: ‘If the Count came down here now and ordered me to cut my throat, I’d do it on the spot’. Picking up on this explicit utterance, Julie retorts: ‘Then pretend you’re him. Pretend I’m you’ (274). Here Julie suggests that Jean should put her in his place, as she previously prompted him to put himself in hers. And once again, the question of gender is presented through a contradiction, as Jean claimed earlier that he would not do what he is suggesting that Julie should, based on a perception of gender difference. When Jean once again repeats his suggestion to Julie in the very last scene of the play, it is through a whisper in her ear, which the audience cannot hear. Thus no one knows what he is telling her, and yet the audience is made to infer that he is ‘pretending to be the Count’ and thus commanding her to cut her throat. In the final line of the play, Jean exclaims to Julie: ‘It’s horrible! But there’s no other way for it to end. – Go!’ and in Strindberg’s stage direction, ‘Miss Julie walks resolutely out the door’ (275). Presumably, this is to perform the gesture and take her life but, again, the audience is left to surmise and visualize what happens off stage. I decided to stage these last lines a little against the grain, taking the audience outside the world of the play while still in it, by reconnecting to the opening moments of the performance. Thus, in my version, Jean directs his ‘It’s horrible! But there’s no other way for it to end’ to the audience. Offering meta-commentary on the play, this direct audience address suggests that both Julie’s impending suicide and the fact that the play always ends this way are horrible. Jean then approaches the very front of the stage and bows solemnly to the audience, at once character and actor preparing to make his final exit. Directing his ‘Go!’ to Julie, he picks up the Count’s boots and walks out of the door (presumably to return to the Count’s service). Julie is left alone on stage, razor in hand, in the spot where she stood when the curtain was raised at the beginning of the play. In this manner, the question of dramaturgical form became a matter of gender perspective; rather than allowing my two adversaries to start at one point and race

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along, following parallel, non-intersecting lines, I wanted their trajectories to reflect the non-linear, asymmetrical and conglomerative dramaturgy and character work that Strindberg suggests in his preface to the play. To this end I gave the production a circular and implicitly repetitive form, albeit with an open end. My main objective was to give Julie a subject position within the play, to make it her play while recognizing that its textual dramaturgy positions her as object. I took my inspiration from a statement uttered by Bibi Andersson, the actress who played Julie in Keve Hjelm’s 1969 version: ‘The play should have been titled Jean!’ Made in the course of an interview in Ann Victorin’s documentary film 100 Years in the Limelight (2006), Andersson’s claim infers that the plot unfolds from Jean’s point of view, and that it is with him that the audience’s sympathies lie. Also, the first and last lines of the play are given to Jean, thus allowing him to frame the narrative of Miss Julie’s demise. I therefore decided that I would let Julie both set the scene and have the last word – even though her last communication with the audience is neither verbal nor definitive. Rather, she opens and closes the razor while contemplating its shape, repeating this gesture one last time before settling her gaze on the audience as if to say ‘is there really no other way for it to end?’ In Strindberg’s text, Jean is left alone on stage with a choice – to return to the Count or to leave the mansion, perhaps to pursue his dream of owning a hotel in Switzerland. In our version, Julie is left with a choice – to end her life, to stay, or to leave. As she stands, pondering and turning her gaze on the audience, the curtain is lowered and a multi-layered film containing elements and symbols from the play is shown using front and back projections on the screen. Once again we see the mansion from a distance, as well as the close-up of Julie’s eye. Interspersed with images from the overture are details from the video projected during the play. In the final sequence of the closing film, we are once again aboard a train in Switzerland, rounding a corner. As the music ends, the view opens up on a lake at the foot of a mountain. Whether this final image suggests that Julie travels, fulfilling her dream, or whether it symbolizes the loss of that same dream, is left to the audience to decide.

Works Cited Bleeker, M. (2008), Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Crary, J. (1992), Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jones, A. (ed.) (2003), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, New York: Routledge. Rokem, F. (2004), Strindberg’s Secret Codes, Norwich: Norvik Press. Strindberg, A. ([1986] 2012), Selected Plays, Volume I, 2 vols, rev. edn, trans. E. Sprinchorn, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Victorin, A. (2006), 100 år i Rampljuset (100 Years in the Limelight). Documentary film. Directed by Ann Victorin, Stockholm, Sveriges Television.

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Strindberg’s Self-Portraits in Context Lisa Hostetler, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York, USA

Strindberg’s self-portraits may be productively understood in the context of PierreLouis Pierson’s photographs of the European celebrity Countess de Castiglione, who posed in a number of different guises beginning in the 1850s and continuing through the mid-1890s. The Countess tended to present herself as an enigmatic object of desire with multiple facets to her personality – glamorous, educated, carefree, winsome, and so forth (Heilbrun 2000). Compared to, for example, Strindberg’s famous ‘troubadour’ self-portrait with guitar from the 1886 suite of Gersau images, (Figure 13.1) the Countess’s poses appear to reflect aspects of herself that she wanted to project to an audience (Figure 13.2), whereas Strindberg seems to try out different roles that he could perform socially or vocationally. The idea of thinking of one’s self – or selfhood – as a malleable concept and the presentation of that self to society in different ways formed a particularly salient current in photography – a medium of popular visual culture – during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Self-portraiture as a genre of photography has existed since the invention of the medium of camera technology. But as photography became the dominant medium for portraiture, and popular standard formats such as the carte de visite and cabinet card were introduced, these images also engendered the notion of celebrity (see SolomonGodeau 1993; Apraxine 2000). Used as social and networking tools – as calling cards, mementos, and for collection and trading – these cards cemented the idea of the celebrity as visually constituted, and whose popular persona signalled something distinct from character; that is, one/anyone might become famous based on their image rather than on their position or their deeds. Cartes de visite of personalities like Queen Victoria, the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt, and of the Countess de Castiglione were extraordinarily popular in the second half of the nineteenth century. Normal people owning images of individuals who were not friends or family – who were not even known to them – was new at the time. From this perspective, seeing one’s self in a number of different guises was not unusual. This historical context is important to keep in mind when we discuss Strindberg’s photography. His selfportraiture resonates with ideas that were circulating widely in popular culture at the time.

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Figure 13.1 August Strindberg med gitarr i Gersau, Schweiz (August Strindberg with guitar in Gersau, Switzerland), 1886. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. This file was provided to Wikimedia Commons by the Nordiska museet as part of a cooperation project with Wikimedia Sverige.

The Kodak was introduced in 1888. Before that moment, the most common photographic process involved glass-plate negatives – wet or dry – and commercially manufactured albumen papers. So, when Strindberg was staging his self-portraits, it was more difficult to make a photograph than it would be after the Kodak’s introduction in 1888. After the invention of the snapshot camera, making a photograph was not nearly as much like performing a chemistry experiment as it had been previously. The introduction of the Kodak also accelerated the production of pictures, because one simply exposed the film already loaded into the camera and then simply returned it to the company, which processed the film, made prints from the negatives, reloaded the camera with film, and returned it to the customer so that they could take more pictures. Another trend in photographic visual culture during this time was the proliferation of images of social types, including through stereographs of stock characters such as ‘street urchin’, or the ‘chimney sweep’ or ‘the gossip’. The stereograph was an exceedingly popular mass-produced three-dimensional image technology, common in homes from the mid-century onward. There was thus a growing photographic inventory of generic types within contemporary society. For entertainment, people would sit around in their parlour and look into a stereoscope and see the scenes, or pass around

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Figure 13.2 Pierre-Louis Pierson, Portrait of Countess Virginia Oldoini Verasis de Castiglione as ‘Béatrix’, 1856–57. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005.

cartes de visite or cabinet cards with similar portraits. I believe this practice – and the ready availability of portraits in all price ranges – was something that helped people to imagine themselves in potentially new or different roles. Thus, Strindberg, photographing himself in different roles, milieus and poses, connects to contemporary social and popular practices. This is also relevant for someone who writes plays – many of which are set in domestic spaces similar to those where the mass medium of card stock characters could be encountered. In this way, Strindberg could be seen as visually writing a play for himself as the main actor and distilling the narrative into a single image. He may be using photography as a way of exploring fictional characters, too. Prior to the invention of photography, one had to travel to see an image of a famous person or historical figure in the form of a painting or statue. Though the image of a famous person might get translated onto a coin or stamp, or reproduced in a print of a drawing, engraving or etching, none of these transcriptions nor the original painting were considered to be as truthful as a photograph, because those representations were filtered through the subjectivity of the person who manually produced the image. Photographs, in contrast, seemed to be automatically created by the interaction of light and chemicals in a machine. Moreover, photographs were considered so realistic and intimate by period audiences that one could feel as though one knew the subject in some

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sense – even when he or she were a stranger. That is akin to our present relationship to film stars or television stars; we think we know them somehow because we have seen them close up in a film or every week on television, yet we really do not know them at all. Significantly, in the late-nineteenth century, people could visit a photography studio and obtain a portrait of themselves in the exact same format as a carte de visite they may own of Queen Victoria or the Countess de Castiglione. So the idea that these famous people were people just like them suggested that anyone could become famous based on the appeal of their image, ushering in the culture of celebrity that we know so well today. The Countess de Castiglione was this sort of person. She was considered to be very beautiful, engaging and alluring, and she became widely known for these traits through the dissemination of photographs of her. Photography made celebrity a much more familiar and accessible idea. Taking Strindberg’s self-portraiture forward in time, I am reminded of Cindy Sherman when looking at Strindberg’s famous self-portrait taken in the Stockholm archipelago in 1891. There, he seems to be posing as a fisherman, presenting himself as a character in contemporary visual culture, just as Sherman’s portraiture imagines roles for herself as part of a visually inflected popular culture. Strindberg’s self-portraits also resonate with our contemporary explosion of self-portraiture and, of course, the selfie. With the selfie, we put ourselves into all kinds of contexts – both real and imagined. We might put a picture on Instagram or Facebook for our friends – but not show it to our parents. We know our audience and present ourselves accordingly in a very selfconscious way. We see this in selfies, and we see it in Strindberg’s self-portraiture. The impulse to perform versions of ourselves for the camera has intensified since his time, and it has become so internalized that it seems natural to be a different person for our mother than we are for our best friend. It is a very modernist idea to not see the self as a single unitary entity but to have multiple, different facets – some of which are in conflict with each other. It reminds me of George Simmel’s sense of the multiple stimuli of city life and how its distractions affect your mental life, as well as Freud’s idea of anxiety in the modern city – modern life demands that people be sort of ‘staccato’ in the way that they approach the world. Strindberg’s self-portraits dovetail explicitly with modernist ideas about a shifting and multi-various self, and speak to the character of modernity.

Works Cited Apraxine, P. (2000), ‘The Model and the Photographer’, in P. Apraxine and X. Demange (eds), La Divine Comtesse: Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione, 22–51, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Heilbrun, F. (2000), ‘The Posthumous Life’, in P. Apraxine and X. Demange (eds), La Divine Comtesse: Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione, 74–87, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Solomon-Godeau, A. (1993), ‘The Legs of the Countess’, in E. Apter and W. Pletz (eds), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, 266–306, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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My Strindberg ‘Selfies’ Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Rolling around in the drawer, the cylinder looked for all the world like an old cigar tube. I knew better though. I knew the cylinder held something of value, a connection to a world I knew well from family accounts. I opened the container and started to tap out its contents; it appeared to be a brittle, yellowing roll of paper, dry and hard and crackling in response to my curiosity. I stopped my tapping and instead peeked carefully inside the tube. In my very brief look, I immediately recognized August Strindberg and also realized that this picture was a thing to be handled with care; its value could be destroyed by too much poking and tapping. This was a job for a conservationist, a specialist in old photographs, or even a museum curator. It would take an expert to get August into the light of modern day. In my mind, I went over what I knew about the photograph in the tube. First, this picture of Strindberg had once belonged to my maternal grandfather Dr Bror Gadelius (1862–1938), known as the father of Swedish psychiatry and credited with having freed many a madman from mental darkness and for having turned dark asylums into sunny hospitals. Long a member of the Nobel committee, my grandfather is also remembered for having opposed Sigmund Freud’s nomination for laureate. I also knew that August is in many of the photo collections of my grandfather’s family and that August was no stranger to the mental darkness that my grandfather had worked so hard to alleviate. Second, I knew that August Strindberg loved to be photographed; he was his own favourite subject. Yes, I thought, had August been living about a century later, he would have loved the idea of a ‘selfie’; he would have embraced with glee the idea of posing himself in the most casual, flattering way and then holding his phone at arm’s length and catching the shot (Figures 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 14.4). Can you imagine what his Facebook page would look like? What I did not know was how Bror Gadelius knew August Strindberg. I do know that my grandfather’s best friend was Lund University philosophy professor, Axel Herrlin, and that Herrlin knew Strindberg. Could that be the connection? Perhaps so, but first I needed to locate someone to help me unroll the paper in the tube. And perhaps in the process I would find out more about his tie-ins with my family. My mother was born in Stockholm in 1907, five years before Strindberg died there at

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Figure 14.1 August Strindberg, Self-Portrait, Gersau, c. 1886. Collection of the Guillet de Monthoux family.

Figure 14.2 August Strindberg, Self-Portrait, Gersau, c. 1886. Collection of the Guillet de Monthoux family.

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Figure 14.3 August Strindberg, Self-Portrait, Gersau, c. 1886. Collection of the Guillet de Monthoux family.

Figure 14.4 August Strindberg, Self-Portrait, Gersau, c. 1886. Collection of the Guillet de Monthoux family.

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the age of sixty-three. While my mother was growing up, Stockholm was small, and everyone knew everyone else. Everyone knew Strindberg as well, and he had gained the reputation of being mentally ill. On a visit to Lausanne, Switzerland, I dropped by the Musée de l’Art Brut, which houses the collection of outsider art pulled together by French artist Jean Dubuffet from a number of asylums after the Second World War. Dubuffet had valued the raw creativity he sensed in the artwork of the insane. This type of art had first been collected and exhibited in Heidelberg by German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933) in the 1920s. In fact, Prinzhorn had written to my grandfather asking him to donate art works he might have collected from his Swedish patients. I knew that my grandfather would have had problems with the idea of showcasing a patient’s drawings from therapy as art; instead, eighty years later, I donated Prinzhorn’s correspondence to my grandfather to Madame Piery, head of the Lausanne museum. To be sure, my grandfather would also have had problems with how much people pay for a Strindberg painting. Not that he disliked art … quite the contrary … Grandfather had actually wanted to become an artist himself. His idea of relaxation after a hard day’s work in the Konradsberg hospital was to spend some time at his easel. He loved art and was fascinated by what his patients could draw when provided with art materials in therapy sessions. When Kandinsky put on a show in a Stockholm gallery, he bought a little piece; he was seriously puzzled by the fact that real artists had begun painting as mental patients. Prinzhorn believed that outsider art opened windows closed by cultural prejudice. By contrast, Bror Gadelius preferred the shutters to be left closed, leaving the cultural inside intact. Art was the servant of culture and not the other way around. In one well-known photograph, Strindberg walks the snowy streets of Stockholm, lonely and cold in his top hat, the fur collar of his heavy winter coat covering his dark, depressed face. This photograph takes me back to the empty and lifeless Sweden of my childhood. All days were like Good Friday: eerily silent, shops closed, a single cinema open and – with the blessing of the Swedish Lutheran church – projecting Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal to an empty auditorium. My mental photograph is of Sweden as a never-ending strip of thorny pine trees, hopelessly empty of villages, jolly bistros and artful surprise to interrupt the monotony of dripping nature. I left Lausanne for Geneva, still in search of the straight answer to the question of how to extract and preserve my photo in the tube. It finally came from a most unlikely ‘expert’ who – in addition to being filthy rich and disgustingly drunk – advised me to ‘just throw the roll in a basin of water’. And I did. And as a result, today I can admire Grandfather’s Strindberg ‘selfies’ on my wall: five prints from the so-called Gersau series shot by Strindberg in Switzerland in 1886. When I was a boy, my mother introduced Strindberg to me mainly as being a former patient of my grandfather, the great Swedish psychiatrist. The hero was my grandfather and Strindberg was his patient. But was he really Bror Gadelius’s patient? Well, that never became clear and I only recall mother mumbling something about Strindberg ‘being a difficult case’. So for a long time the selfies rested rolled up

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somewhere at home. Now they are up on my wall and I hope my daughters Esther and Maja will find the same moral support in the gaze of Strindberg as I have. In a small country like Sweden, you have to be a difficult case to let your ideas loose and make an impact on the world. In old age, Gadelius turned to modern art and even collected what we today call outsider art. Strindberg today is the insider and who else but me recalls Gadelius – the outsider?

15

Scenography, Photography, Cinematography: Strindberg and the Technologies of Visual Representation Freddie Rokem, Tel Aviv University, Israel

Look, how it is necessary in cinematography to take many pictures in a row in order to achieve one single movement, and still the picture comes forth shuddering. In every vibration a connecting link is missing. When it is necessary to have a thousand moments captured by images for the movement of an arm; how many myriads are needed to depict one motion of the soul. The depictions the writer makes of humans are therefore nothing but abbreviations, silhouettes, all imperfect and all half false. Therefore a true character depiction is difficult, almost impossible; and if one tried to make it completely true nobody would believe it. It is only possible to suggest! (Strindberg 1999: 65)1

The invention of photography gradually enabled representations of movement through cinematography, which had a revolutionizing effect on a broad range of artistic practices. More than 175 years after the first Daguerre photography, there is no doubt that these technologies have radically transformed our visual sensitivities. August Strindberg followed the developments in visual technologies closely, and quickly understood that they generate innovative potentials for the arts. In the above epigraph from one of his short essayistic reflections published in the so-called Blue Book series (composed during the last years of his life), Strindberg suggests that in spite of its obvious limitations, the new methods for depicting movement will enable us – and this was no mere metaphor for him – to perceive minute emotional fluctuations that had previously not been available to the human eye. The aim of this chapter is to examine the impact of technological innovations for visual representation in Strindberg’s work as a dramatist and his conception of the stage. In particular, I will focus on how new visual media affected the Strindbergian stage as the space where actors appear, representing dramatic characters whose complex inner emotional lives he wanted to expose according to his understanding of cinematography. Examining two of his naturalistic dramas, The Father (Fadren) (1887) and Miss Julie (Fröken Julie) (1888), I address their visual composition, productions of

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the plays at Strindberg’s Intimate Theatre (Intima Teatern) in Stockholm, as well as film adaptations made during his own lifetime, in 1911–12.2 Strindberg was an important dramatist for the gradual transformation of staging during the twentieth century. What had previously been conceptualized as stagedecoration transformed in Strindberg’s plays and staging directions into scenography, as a form of writing rather than just an adornment. Inspired by the new technological developments of visual representation, Strindberg turned the stage into an instrument for inscribing the external and internal life stories of human beings in a spatial medium. In doing so, he joins a number of other influential theatre artists exploring these new directions, such as the innovative stage designers and theorists Adolphe Appia, Mariano Fortuny and Edward Gordon Craig. But Strindberg was unique in being able to articulate how the new forms of visual representation influenced his practices as a dramatist, which in turn led to his direct involvement in the productions of his own plays at the Intimate Theatre in Stockholm. Today, when we open our computers, we are exposed to visual ‘effects’ that were not even possible to imagine a few decades ago, and certainly not during the last third of the nineteenth century, when the impacts of the new media of representation were just beginning to be noticed, discussed and then integrated into the work of numerous artists. As an early modernist with more than just a shade of a mystic temperament (which he actually shared with many of his fellow modernists), Strindberg quickly realized that the emerging technological inventions of photography, early cinema and moving-image projection, and lighting and stage designs for creating visual representations could not replace the traditional forms of expression, but would rather enhance them with new meanings and possibilities within the broader, dynamic field of visual representation. The new technologies raised questions concerning the conditions for visibility and what it means to be seen and to appear, thereby also influencing our understanding of emotions and the human psyche. Strindberg’s claim in the quote above signals the dynamic relationship between visual media and the perceptions of the self as well as of others. For instance, to him, even the apparent realism of early moving images is deceptive: these ‘shuddering’ images may be able to represent physical movement in innovative ways, but remain, like writing, ‘nothing but abbreviations, silhouettes, all imperfect and all half false’ (Strindberg 1999: 65). The developments in visual technologies of stagecraft and screen craft have also altered our understanding of what it means to be human and to be part of a social network consisting of other humans. For Strindberg, as for many of his early fellow modernists, safeguarding the human/e in a society threatened and even consumed by the advances of technology and the invention of new destructive machines was a crucial concern. But the ambition to safeguard the human/e was (in some sense) bound to fail, and therefore Strindberg has also shown us that the responsibility of the artist is to demonstrate how these failures gain ground, leading to humiliation, violence and destruction, and must be avoided as much as possible, or at least be more fully understood. However, even if the issues that have to be confronted as a result of the new technological developments are ethical, the method of inquiry must first of all be formulated in aesthetic terms: by examining the artistic language(s) that the artist

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employs for his/her expression. This will help us to see not only how quickly Strindberg (first intuitively) grasped the importance of the new technologies for creating images, but also – by beginning to formulate the implications of the technological innovations for visual representation – that he understood that the frozen images of photography and the dynamic ones of film-making would not replace traditional artistic practices. On the contrary, Strindberg experiments with these new visual technologies as a means of redefining and reinvigorating the creation of the scenic spaces where live actors will continue to appear. Strindberg not only intuited how central new forms of visual expression – such as the projection of moving images – would be for the future of the visual arts, including the theatre, but also that these forms would continue to be employed in interaction with traditional forms of visual expression such as painting and sculpture. In part, these new expressive forms serve as narratives, which by themselves as well as in tandem with his own prolific oeuvre as a playwright convey the quickly changing human condition as he understood it.

The stage between the living and the dead Though Strindberg himself never wrote a script for the screen or directed a film (see MacKenzie and Stenport in this volume; see also Waldekranz 1993 and Werner 1991), he was very positively disposed to film adaptations of his plays. When early film producer and journalist Gustaf Uddgren asked for permission to make films based on previous productions of his plays, Strindberg immediately responded with a telegram: ‘Please, go ahead and cinematograph as many of my plays as you want’ (telegram from 20 September 1911). After this enthusiastic agreement, Uddgren and his wife, the actress and director Anna Hofman-Uddgren, undertook the adaptation of Strindberg’s two most popular productions at the Intimate Theatre in Stockholm, Miss Julie and then The Father, of which the latter is the only extant film of the six films made by Anna Hofman-Uddgren, the first woman director in Swedish film history. These two Strindberg films are in many ways a direct continuation of the media experiments in photography and staging that Strindberg had previously initiated, and he is said to have enjoyed both of the films when he saw them in a private screening before they premiered (Waldekranz 1966: 150). Both of the plays had been performed at the Intimate Theatre with roughly the same casts as were later employed in the films, with August Falck, co-founder with Strindberg of the Intimate Theatre, playing the lead male role in both performances as well as in the two films. The Intimate Theatre was inspired by ideas from experimental stages in the European theatre capitals, in particular in Paris and Berlin. Initially, only Strindberg’s own plays were to be staged, but these were not always well received by critics and audiences. This became an issue that eventually led to the closing of the theatre in 1910, after Falck wanted to introduce other avant-garde dramatists in addition to Strindberg. The Intimate Theatre was located at Norra Bantorget in central Stockholm – approximately a ten-minute walk from Strindberg’s home on Drottninggatan where he

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lived during the last years of his life. It had a proscenium stage with an auditorium with seats for approximately 150 spectators. The stage itself was quite small and narrow, measuring only 6 by 4 metres, while the proscenium was approximately 3 metres high, with an elevation of approximately 70 centimetres above the floor of the auditorium. This stage space was actually not significantly larger than many of the living rooms in the bourgeois apartments where Strindberg, as well as the characters in his plays and the spectators who saw them at the Intimate Theatre, lived their daily lives. One of the major innovative aspirations of the avant-garde theatres of the time, such as André Antoine’s Free Theatre (Théâtre Libre) in Paris, Otto Brahm’s Free Stage (Freie Bühne) in Berlin, as well as the Intimate Theatre, was to create a high degree of correspondence between the size of the stage space and the fictional space represented on the stage. A key objective of such a design was to show the human figure in its natural size, not just as a small speck of dust on a huge stage in front of a large audience, where some spectators were situated more than a hundred metres away from the actors on the stage. In the new, intimate (or the so-called chamber) theatres, the spectators were no longer watching an actor or actress appearing as a minuscule figure. The design taught audiences to follow the actors’ bodily and facial expressions. These actors were not only close in spatial terms, but also with regard to the challenges that the characters they played faced in the gradually more complex social and human contexts presented on the stage, suggesting struggles against the forms of oppression and humiliation that the emerging mass societies were producing. The invention of electric lighting radically changed daily life in urban centres. Electricity also made it possible to illuminate the stage in new ways, enabling the spectators to withdraw into the anonymous privacy created by the gradual dimming of the auditorium. This development of stage technology was crucial for carrying out the innovative specular project that provided a close and detailed view of the human body and the emotions it literally projected. At the same time, the specular configuration of theatre space functioned as if a mirror were positioned closely before the eyes of the audience, where the images were gradually becoming sharper and more focused. From the introduction of such a visual apparatus, as Strindberg was no doubt aware of, it was not a long step to the spaces of cinema projections. What later became known as movie theatres or cinema palaces were initially quite small in size, more like the Intimate Theatre. Gradually, the cinematographic medium also began to magnify the human images on the screen in the form of close-ups, though Hofman-Uddgren’s film of The Father contains no such enlargements, as only full-figure human bodies are shown on the screen. Rather, this 1912 film primarily reproduces the experience of the theatregoer, who can at any moment view the whole stage and the full-size human bodies of the actors. Other filming techniques – some of which were practised at the time of The Father’s adaptation – more strictly regimented what the viewer sees in terms of framing and focal point. It is possible though – and I will return to this later – that there were close-ups in the now lost Miss Julie film, which on the whole seems to have been more experimental than its follow-up of The Father. On each side of the proscenium of the stage of the Intimate Theatre, just as in many of the homes of the spectators, there were copies of two well-known paintings by

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the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, The Island of the Living (on the left of the stage) and The Island of the Dead (on its right). Strindberg had commissioned the Swedish painter Carl Kylberg to make copies of these paintings specifically for the theatre. Strindberg thereby staged the stage of his theatre between two well-known visual representations, leading from the ‘living’ to the ‘dead’. The Island of the Dead has also been incorporated into the final scene of The Ghost Sonata (Spöksonaten) (1907), the fourth and best-known of Strindberg’s Chamber Plays. The Ghost Sonata premiered at the Intimate Theatre in 1908 and received quite a negative reception among critics. The daring innovation of using a well-known painting both as an iconic presence in the theatre and for the last ‘act/scene’ in a play that ends with the death of a young woman provides a clear example of Strindberg’s experimental approach to the total, spatial experience of the theatre (Figure 15.1). Miss Julie and The Father were well received and popular when staged at the Intimate Theatre in 1907 and 1908 (respectively), and were both still in repertoire in 1910 when the theatre closed down. Miss Julie had premiered in Sweden in 1906 (in Lund), with August Falck, who had also directed the performance, playing Jean. After it was performed in Stockholm, the plans for the Intimate Theatre materialized the following year, in 1907.

Figure 15.1 Stage and auditorium of the Intimate Theatre, Stockholm. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm.

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The Uddgrens’ film adaptations of these productions were no doubt intended to extend the ‘life’ of these performances, making them available both for those who wanted to see them again as well as for those who had not been able to see the productions at the Intimate Theatre itself. When adopted for the medium of silent film, the duration of the productions was shortened, while the space of the action was expanded – some off stage spaces that were mentioned in the plays’ stage directions were included in the films. The cinematographic medium created possibilities for movement within a larger fictional space. This creates an expansion in two registers. What is shown on the screen can show what is beyond the claustrophobic space of the ‘living-room’ in which the protagonists of the realistic and naturalistic theatre had traditionally been ‘trapped’. The barrier of the fourth wall of the proscenium stage of late-nineteenth-century theatre was challenged by the cinematic medium and has continued to be so by our more contemporary performance arts as well as by digital media, drawing attention to the issue of framing, which was an important function of the proscenium in the traditional theatres. In the next section, I will point out some of the innovative framing devices that became possible, and perhaps even necessary, in the wake of the invention of photography.

Strindberg’s ‘optical unconscious’ Before considering the two Hofman-Uddgren films more closely, I will examine Strindberg’s visual conception of Miss Julie. I do so because I argue that this play constitutes a paradigm shift from the traditional conventions of scenic design as practised by the realistic/naturalistic theatre to a visual conception closely related to the development of photography as known and actively practised by Strindberg himself. The action of Miss Julie takes place during a few intensive hours of the nocturnal Midsummer night celebrations in the ground-floor kitchen of the mansion belonging to Julie’s family, where Jean is a servant. As a result of these celebrations, which include Julie and Jean drinking and dancing together, they become involved in a brief erotic encounter for which they are no doubt both responsible, as a result of which Julie commits suicide. As I have shown in my previous work on Strindberg (Rokem 1986, 2004) – and I will develop some of these ideas here – the visual conception of Miss Julie is radically innovative and deserves special attention in the broader context of the spatial paradigms Strindberg initiated and developed. In the stage directions to this play he introduced a diagonally designed scenography, cutting through the stage asymmetrically. According to Strindberg’s stage directions, the performance takes place in a Large kitchen, the ceiling and side walls of which are hidden by draperies. The rear wall runs diagonally from down left to up right. On the wall down left are two shelves with copper, iron and pewter utensils […] Visible to the right is most of a set of large, arched glass doors, through which can be seen a fountain with a statue of Cupid, lilac bushes in bloom […] At down left is the corner of a large tiled stove; a portion of its hood is showing. (Strindberg 1983: 76)

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In the preface to Miss Julie, which Strindberg wrote after completing the play, in order to explain and justify the way in which it was written and designed, he also draws attention to the diagonal stage-set, though formulating this idea in somewhat different terms: As for the scenery, I have borrowed from impressionist painting the device of making a setting appear cut off and asymmetrical, thus strengthening the illusion. When we see only part of a room and a portion of the furniture, we are left to conjecture, that is to say, our imagination goes to work and complements what is seen. […] I have placed the upstage wall and the table diagonally so that the actors can play facing the audience or in half-profile when they sit opposite each other at the table. I saw a diagonal backdrop in a production of Aida; it led the eye out into unknown vistas and did not look simply like a defiant reaction to the boredom of straight lines. (Strindberg 1983: 73–74)

Strindberg’s description of impressionistic art resonates with the motif and composition of a painting such as In a Café, or The Absinthe Drinker, (1873) by Edgar Degas. This work had received much attention when it was first exhibited, mainly because it showed a man and a woman sitting side by side drinking in a cafe, staring emptily into the space in front of them, without enabling the viewer of this painting to see what they are looking at. Their blank expressions create a complex emotional reaction to the painting. Degas composed the scene so that it gives the impression of being a snapshot taken by an onlooker sitting at a nearby table. Impressionist painters often used this technique. As scholars such as Marien have argued, this compositional technique was likely influenced by their exposure to photography (Marien 2006: 158–159). The diagonally situated kitchen of Miss Julie shares many of these characteristics. It has the potential of being a snapshot taken by a spectator in the theatre. The asymmetric impression of the diagonal arrangement introduces a photographic element in Miss Julie’s scenography, which breaks the conventions of the realistic theatre where the proscenium represents the fourth wall of the room where the dramatic action takes place. Thus, Strindberg’s stage directions suggest that the spectators are exposed to a photograph-like composition, where they are physically included in the space of the stage-event, even if they are in fact watching it from the theatre auditorium. This is a different form of framing from a traditional theatre design, by which spectators perceive a room from behind a fourth wall, in this case watching what is happening on the stage as through an imaginary ‘keyhole’. Strindberg’s stage directions for the kitchen in Miss Julie also include no windows or doors except for the partial view of the big, arched doorway on the right, with glass doors, through which it is possible to see the garden outside. This is where Jean and Julie see the approaching peasants who come to make fun of the lady of the house and her servant, forcing the couple to take refuge in Jean’s room, because there is no other exit through which they can find a place to hide from the peasants' scorn. Two years before conceiving the radical diagonal scenography of Miss Julie, Strindberg experimented with similar compositions in his own photography, notably

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Figure 15.2 August Strindberg and his wife, Siri von Essen, playing backgammon, 1886. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm. the self-portraits known as the Gersau suite (Figure 15.2). The well-known (‘selfie’) photo of himself and his wife Siri von Essen playing backgammon in Gersau, in Switzerland, 1886, belongs to a series of photographs of Strindberg and his family, using a camera where Strindberg himself, probably with a cord extension to be pressed as the trigger, was also able to be included in these photos, though frequently it was his wife who pressed the trigger (Szalczer 2001: 36–37).3 In the backgammon photograph, where it was most likely Siri who pressed the trigger of the extension cord, both the man and the woman concentrate on a game and are thus involved in a struggle or competition, much as Strindberg would script Jean and Julie in the later play. This image provides a compelling contrast with the couple in Degas’s painting who gaze blankly in the same direction into an unknown space outside the frame. Strindberg, like Degas, transposes visual composition techniques of photography into another medium, in this case the stage directions of Miss Julie. Strindberg’s backgammon photo visually emphasizes the diagonal table, which cuts through the space from Siri’s dress (on the right) towards a point outside the frame (on the left, somewhat closer to the viewer). Similar to the hanging curtains in the scenography of Miss Julie, the viewer of the photo gets no clear sense of the space behind Strindberg’s back. There is something there, but it is not clear what it is. The photo has no discernible background and is taken from a relatively low angle,

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with Strindberg seated in the centre behind the large table. But he is neither looking at his wife, nor in the direction of the camera. Although she is larger in size in the photograph, she has been marginalized by having her back to the camera; similarly, we can see only the outline of her profile whereas Strindberg’s face is fully exposed. The photography emanates a sense of having been shot secretly, by someone who does not want to be seen by the two players. This could of course be Strindberg himself, secretly watching his wife from behind her back; just as Jean in the play Miss Julie says that he has seen the mistress of the house from behind, in implicit evidence of their sexual encounter. The position of husband and wife on opposite sides of the table in the backgammon photograph – with both of them focusing intently on the game – creates a diagonal line that begins from her, located closer to us and higher up in the frame than he is. This leads to his face cutting through the picture in a line almost parallel to the diagonal line of the table. The carefully arranged photographic composition exhibits a dynamic human interaction. Such compositional techniques differ from arrangements on a traditional, symmetric proscenium stage, where all diagonals are generally directed towards a single focal point at the back of the stage. In the photograph, it is Strindberg himself, simultaneously in the roles of husband and photographer, preparing his next move on the backgammon board that is the focal point. Board games are an interesting metaphor for a dramaturgical scenario. I have previously analysed the chess games between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, which were also photographed – by Ruth Berlau – when Benjamin visited Brecht in his exilic home in Denmark in 1934. At this time Brecht and Benjamin discussed the possibility of creating a dramaturgical scenario that would include the rules of two board games, besides chess also the FarEastern game of Go (Rokem 2012). Here, the game of backgammon serves as an erotic arena for the battle of the sexes. The diagonality of the backgammon photo is organized according to the same visual principles that Strindberg would later propose for his stage directions of Miss Julie, which include a scene with a man and a woman seated at a table with a bottle of wine between them, playing a game of seduction. There are similarly seductive signs in the backgammon photo, with the cigarette of the husband as a phallic extension and the bottle of wine and the half-filled glass, with both of them focusing on the next move of the game. The first performance of Miss Julie in Copenhagen famously featured Siri von Essen in the role of Julie. Staged by Strindberg, this production makes clear that Julie commits suicide at the end of the play, thus providing an implicit correlate to the backgammon photograph where Siri is marginalized as the two protagonists compete in a game. Photographs of the production of Miss Julie at the Intimate Theatre from 1907 make clear that the stage space used for the kitchen does not follow Strindberg’s own stage directions (Figure 15.3). Instead, because of the narrow stage in the Intimate Theatre, it consists of a shallow, rectangular space, with two side walls that gradually diminish in size towards the rear wall, which includes what appears to be a garden door in the centre, and a door leading to Jean’s room on the left. The table on the right is situated on a somewhat diagonal angle, but since the visual documentation of the production

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Figure 15.3 Miss Julie at the Intimate Theatre, Stockholm, 1907. Directed by August Strindberg. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm. does not show the front of the stage, it is not possible to say exactly how it had been placed and how the stove on the left was related to the proscenium arch. My impression is that the proscenium arch and the fourth wall of the kitchen aligned in accordance with conventional practice. It is important to make a distinction between the more conventional scenography of the 1907 performance of Miss Julie at the Intimate Theatre and the influence of the Gersau photo on Strindberg’s artistic intuitions and ‘optical unconscious’ when he wrote the play almost 20 years earlier. Walter Benjamin coined the expression ‘optical unconscious’ in his ‘Little History of Photography’ to examine the ‘image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things’ that the camera is able to capture, and are meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which enlarged, and capable of formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable. (Benjamin 2001: 512)

In Miss Julie, Strindberg explored the tensions between technology and magic, which for him were very closely related to each other and even interchangeable. Although Strindberg’s very explicit instruction that the back wall of the stage must be diagonal (which results in only a partial view of the kitchen) was not followed in the 1907 production of Miss Julie, it is necessary to examine existing visual conventions of the theatre at that time in order to understand its significance. The realistic theatre, which was the norm in the 1880s when Strindberg wrote Miss Julie, was based on the principle of one-point perspective. The left and right sides of the stage were basically symmetrical, directing the eye to a charged focal point at the back

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of the stage. There was a structural symmetry between the stage and the auditorium as well (which can be clearly seen in the photo of the 1907 production), converging (as two separate rooms) in or under the proscenium arch. The focal point at the back of the stage, where the deus ex machina could appear, existed already in Ancient Classical theatre and was adapted to function in indoor spaces during the Renaissance. It was further developed and refined by the Baroque theatre, a direct predecessor of the realistic theatre. Most of Ibsen’s realistic dramas were written with this convention in mind, and often a catastrophic ending would originate from or take place in this focal point, in a dystopian displacement of the traditional focal point of Baroque theatre. Examples of this include A Doll’s House, where Nora leaves her home through one of the doors in the back; in Ghosts, when the sun rises over the fjord as Osvald draws his last breath; and in Hedda Gabler, where she commits suicide behind the curtain in her private room (Rokem 1986). Another convention of the Baroque theatre, which persists in some modern theatre spaces, is the construction of the stage floor, which gradually angles up towards the back of the stage. The practical motivation for this ascent is to ensure that the actors situated towards the back will not be obstructed by the actors in front of them. The elevation at the back of the stage is complemented by the gradual elevation of the rows in the auditorium, so that the spectators do not obstruct those seated behind them. The scenographic and architectonic properties of the inclined stage led to some interesting complications, which became an integral aspect of the visual apparatus or machinery of the traditional proscenium stage. Because of the gradual elevation of the floor, the ‘tormentors’ (the hanging curtains on each side of a stage that block the wing areas as well as the side lights from the audience) gradually diminish in height towards the back of the stage and hang closer together the further away they are from the audience. This three-dimensional architectural space, where the fourth wall has been dismantled, has been modelled on the aesthetic conventions of perspective in the two-dimensional medium of painting, creating what is frequently referred to as forced perspective. These borrowed two-dimensional features became an integral feature of the three-dimensional scenographic space, directing the viewer’s gaze towards a focal point situated behind the back wall of the stage. Take for example the technique of foreshortening, through which the sense of depth on a two-dimensional canvas is created, in which the back wall of the theatre space is significantly smaller in size than the proscenium arch. One of the intriguing consequences of the application of the principles of twodimensional pictorial and visual representation in a three-dimensional architectural space is the variation of the viewers’ perception of the size of human figures depending on where they are on the stage. The human figure positioned upstage generally appears reduced in size in relation to the surrounding scenography, while the same figure positioned upstage is perceived as being larger than its actual size due to the principles of foreshortening. This reversal of the real and perceived dimensions of the human body can produce uncanny effects. The spectators – without necessarily being aware of the distortions this creates – are in effect exposed to a three-dimensional space magnified through the

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use of the two-dimensional techniques of painting. This creates an impression of a space that is significantly larger than its actual volume. With the invention of photography and film, the differentiation between two- and three-dimensionality became blurred and was sometimes even erased, for example when viewers (according to what is apparently an urban legend) expected to be run over by the locomotive approaching the camera on screen in the short film by the Lumières brothers shown in 1896. Photography is a two-dimensional medium to which we assign a high degree of reliability for showing what ‘reality’ looks like, which was the basic thesis introduced by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (Barthes 1980). Looking again at the Gersau photo, Strindberg himself is in the very centre of the photograph. While his figure is smaller than that of Siri, who is obviously closer to us on the right side of the photo, Strindberg appears more ‘impressive’, even ‘bigger’ in some sense, ‘enlarged’ by his position in the focal point, despite the non-compliance of the visual arrangement of the photo and the darkness of the background with traditional one-point perspective. One possible explanation for this is that the photographic lens distorts what we perceive through our vision, while the diagonal between the two human figures simultaneously creates a foreshortening effect. I doubt that Strindberg knew exactly how to calculate these distortions, but he must have been intuitively aware of them. Jean is both ‘big’ and ‘small’ in relation to the scenography, and the photograph brings out this ambiguity.

Miss Julie: From the stage to the screen By exploring the compositional techniques of photography in Miss Julie, Strindberg intuitively responded to the question of how the human figure is perceived in a space that is not constructed according to the conventions of pictorial symmetry and foreshortening behind a proscenium arch that neatly frames the action. By situating the spectators inside the kitchen where the camera was and where the action takes place, the Gersau photo gave a partial answer to the question by showing that Strindberg himself (aka Jean) had become the focal point. Surrounded by darkness rather than the organizing principles of pictorial symmetry, he becomes a force possessing almost supernatural powers, showing the woman he just made love to that there is no other solution than for her to cut her throat, because as Jean says, ‘if the Count came down here now – and ordered me to cut my throat, I’d do it on the spot’ (Strindberg 1983: 111). The final scene of the play leading up to Julie’s leaving the kitchen to commit suicide is a transformation of a deus ex machina. Instead of a supernatural being entering the scenographic space from the outside, Julie – who is still the lady of the house – commands Jean to act as ‘a hypnotist in the theatre’, and to ask his subject, who is asleep, to take a broom and sweep. As the first rays of early-morning sunshine enter the room from behind Jean’s back, Julie says that The whole room is like smoke around me … and you look like an iron stove … shaped like a man in black, with a tall hat – and your eyes glow like coals when the

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fire is dying – and your face is a white patch, like ashes […] it’s so warm and good […] and bright – and so peaceful! (Strindberg 1983: 111–112)

At this point Jean puts the razor in her hand, saying ‘Here’s the broom! Go now while it is bright – out to the barn, and … ’, ending by whispering something in her ear (Strindberg 1983: 112). The sunrise in the early-morning hours of the Midsummer night (during which it has not really been dark at all) gradually transforms Jean into a dark silhouette, illuminated (on the stage by electric lighting) from behind. Here we have a literal realization of ‘photography’ as a form of writing with light. Just before Julie leaves the kitchen, Strindberg staged an additional deus ex machina. The Count, who never appears on the stage itself, returns home and, from his upstairs apartment, rings the bell, which is most likely the small device to the left of the door in the photo from the performance at the Intimate Theatre. The reactions to the early performances of Miss Julie clearly show that Strindberg had transgressed the border of what could be shown publicly on stage at that time. The first performance of Miss Julie was scheduled to take place in Copenhagen on 2 March 1889, but was prohibited by the local censorship board who claimed that it was offensive to have Jean and Julie enter his private room and make love during the action of the play itself, even if it were not shown on stage. It would have been permissible, the censors argued, to show the mutual attraction of Jean and Julie if they had found refuge in the garden, rather than in Jean’s private chamber. In spite of the threat to cancel the Copenhagen performance, Miss Julie premiered a little over a week later, on 11 March 1889, with Strindberg’s wife Siri von Essen playing Julie. An alternative venue had been found and the performance was declared to be a private event over which censorship regulations had no legal authority (Josephson 1965). Because the filmed version of Miss Julie has been lost, it is impossible to discuss in detail how the adaptation relates to the play and its production at the Intimate Theatre. We do know, however, that the actors in the film were the same as in the stage version. Hofman-Uddgren added several scenes, which took place in the so-called offstage spaces of the written play. These scenes included the Midsummer night dances in the barn, the establishment of the erotic attraction between Jean and Julie (which is clearly indicated in Strindberg’s text), a scene with Jean and Julie in the garden, as well as one of several shots from Jean’s room that were cut from the film, alluding to their sexual encounter, and, finally, Julie’s suicide scene. In the Intimate Theatre production, in accordance with Strindberg’s idea of suggestiveness that he referred to in his preface, the spectators had to imagine what happened in these places. Given the easy access to a broad range of locations that the cinematographic medium offered, HofmanUddgren created a film with complex dynamic movement, openly revealing what the text suggests. It seems that the film version of Miss Julie was even more experimental than the play itself, as well as being more experimental than the film version of The Father, which I will discuss later. The entry for the Miss Julie film on the Swedish Film Institute’s website is based on sources from contemporary newspapers as well as on the censorship board’s decision concerning the film (Svensk Filmdatabas (The Swedish Film Database) n.d.).

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From these sources we learn that scenes from the dance at the barn, from Jean’s and Julie’s walk back to the mansion, from Jean’s bedroom, as well as the suicide were included in the original version of the film, but since the film has been lost, it is impossible to say anything definitive about how these scenes were realized cinematographically. Because the censorship board for films had just been established in Sweden, the database also includes information about passages that were cut, as well as the board’s recommendations, giving us some insight into the unique qualities of the film. It is interesting to compare these recommendations with the limitations the play was subjected to before its first performance in Denmark. The following quote is taken from The Swedish Film Database (see above), which is purportedly the exact formulation from the Swedish censorship board decision in 1912: Censorship decision: 3.777; date Jan 18, 912. Comment: 750 meters, two cuts were made: 1) the scene where Miss Julie makes the sign of a cut over her chin with the razor; 2) the suicide scene (the whole scene in front of the pillars). These are to be cut because they show scenes of horror and suicide in a way which could lead to violence or create excitement. In connection with what one of the people involved in the filming said, the board expressed its recommendation that the owner of the film will also take out the section where after the scene in the room of the servant, he arranges his clothes in the kitchen, as well as the text about the woman who has been ‘shamed’ and what is connected with this.

The Father: From stage to screen The film version of The Father is less experimental than the film version of Miss Julie. In the stage version of The Father at the Intimate Theatre, the scenography was completely white (Figure 15.4). The action took place in a furnished, white-box stage with many small objects and pictures hanging on the wall, with four rifles creating a clear focal point. The paintings were most likely too small for the spectators to see the details and were primarily meant to signify a painting as something that hangs on a wall, rather than the objects depicted on the canvas or their technique or style. Because of the bright lighting, some of the human figures throw shadows on white walls behind them, creating a strange sense of depth on the shallow stage. The painting on the top of the triangle of paintings hanging to the left of the rifles on the back wall is actually by Strindberg himself and called Skogsbrynet (The Edge of the Forest).4 According to the website of Nordiska Museet, which owns this painting, it is one of Strindberg’s last paintings, from 1905, and it belonged to August Falck, Strindberg’s co-director at the Intimate Theatre and its lead actor, until 1918 when it changed ownership and was donated to the museum.5 The centre of the painting is illuminated by the sun and it is surrounded by the dark forest below it and a threatening cloud above – a clear reference to the situation of the Captain who is surrounded by dark forces. It is composed according to the principles of many of Strindberg’s paintings, with a bright area in the centre providing a perspective of almost infinite depth while

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Figure 15.4 The Father at the Intimate Theatre, 1908. Directed by August Strindberg. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm.

the surroundings are dark and impenetrable, consisting of the forest and the cloud in this painting, or by rock formations in many others. This is a transformation of a scenic space into a pictorial one, with a celestial image in the centre. The scenography of the two-dimensional film version is also diametrically opposed to the three-dimensional stage version at the Intimate Theatre. Instead of the sparsely furnished living room in the white-box stage version, the film takes place in a predominantly dark space with massive pieces of furniture. Because of the difficulties of illumination of indoor sets, The Father, like Miss Julie, was filmed on an outdoor stage. According to Waldekranz (1966), the furniture had apparently been used for another theatre production on that stage and was not designed specifically for the film. It is impossible to say if the dark space was an intentional choice or if it were merely the result of circumstances. Either way, we can discuss only the aesthetic effects of this choice. It is also interesting to note that the two photographic spaces I have chosen (and obviously not for that reason) – the backgammon photo and the set for the film version of The Father – are both much darker than the corresponding scenographic spaces. The two larger paintings on the wall of the film set, which both depict women dancing, presumably in a forest, create a very different atmosphere from that of the stage version, emphasizing the opposition between the male characters and the female ones (Lagerkrantz 1997: 43). The dark clothes of the actors also produce a much darker feeling than does the stage version, with its almost surgical bright light. It is, however,

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Figure 15.5 The Father [film], 1912. Directed by Anna Hofman-Uddgren. Reproduced by permission of Svensk Filmindustri.

impossible to know exactly how the viewers of the film experienced these visual effects the first time it was shown, because of the different experience of watching human images on screens that we have today as compared to what they had (Figure 15.5). Unlike the stage version, there is an outdoor scene in the film showing the Captain leaving the house in a state of emotional turmoil, which comes at the end of the first act in Strindberg’s play. We then see a servant preparing the horse as if he has done this many times already in such situations of anger and excitement, while the Captain, who is restless and impatient, ascends the carriage. First, he rides in one direction, away from his home, and then he is seen returning on the same route. The camera is static and we have no idea where the ride in the carriage has taken him. What matters is the emotional state expressed by the journey. After he returns, he continues to argue with his wife about who has the right to make decisions for their daughter. Apart from this scene, there is no major change in the script of the film, except of course that it is a silent film with slides containing very short excerpts from the dialogue. The Father, like Miss Julie, contains some potentially transgressive scenes, which could have been shown as retrospective flashbacks in the film, but are not. One such potential scene is when the Captain remembers that while he was lying sick in his bed he could not hear Laura’s answer to the lawyer’s question of whether she was pregnant or not, hinting at the possibility that their daughter, Berta, is in fact not his daughter.

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This possibility is one reason, if not the major reason, for his outbursts of anger and impatience, and although it exists as a potential possibility in the play, it was not developed in the film. Relying on the spectators’ prior knowledge of the plot development, there is a short line by Laura, the wife, who says (and it appears on a projection) ‘tomorrow you will be put under custody’ (Fadren 1912). Having threatened her husband, Laura begins to exit through the door, and at this point the Captain picks up the lamp from the table and throws it violently through the door, into the darkness. Within the larger context of the realistic/naturalistic theatre, this is quite a remarkable scene, alluding to some form of violent aggression not only by the husband towards his wife, but also with regard to the visual apparatus of the theatre, by throwing a lamp at the female protagonist through the door, using it as a weapon against her. The film version follows the end of the second act in Strindberg’s drama text, where Laura says to the Captain that now he has ‘fulfilled your unfortunately necessary function as father and breadwinner, you’re not needed any more, so you can go’ (Strindberg 1983: 50). The stage direction following this sentence states that ‘The Captain crosses to the table. As Laura disappears through the door, he picks up the lighted lamp and throws it after her’ (Strindberg 1983: 50). In this context, I am reminded of a comment Strindberg made in his preface to Miss Julie, after describing what can be gained by a diagonal scenery, saying that I have also profited by doing away with those tiresome exits through doors because scenery doors, made of canvas, wobble at the slightest touch; they cannot even allow a father to express his anger after a bad dinner by going out and slamming the door behind him ‘so that the whole house shakes’. (Strindberg 1983: 73)

In The Father, which was written the year before Miss Julie, Strindberg has not yet done away with the doors, but he is certainly confronting a situation where a father expresses anger, and not just after having had a bad dinner. The act of violence, throwing the lamp at Laura as she has just left the room, creates a sudden interruption, what in film language is termed a ‘cut’, which in theatre usually signals the end of an act. The end of the second act, both in the play and on the screen, is quite an extreme interruption.

Concluding remarks It is impossible to draw any definitive conclusions from the ways in which Strindberg’s dramatic writing incorporates such interruptions into the flow of the action, and to what extent these have had any clear effect on the development of film narration, and to what extent the film narration was influenced by the possibilities that the new media of photography and film introduced. The arrival of the peasants in Miss Julie, which forces Jean and Julie into his private room, can be seen as one of these interruptions that changes the basic conditions of the relationships between the characters in the play. This is also the case when Hamlet enters Gertrude’s closet in the third act of

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Shakespeare’s play, when Polonius is hiding behind the arras. When Gertrude shouts for help after Hamlet threatens her, and Polonius also shouts, Hamlet suddenly reacts by stabbing Polonius, changing the basic circumstances. The common feature of these scenes is a sudden, emotional outburst, triggering, or triggered by, a sudden interruption. The awareness of these interruptions was intensified with the technological inventions that made ‘snapshots’ possible, which captured and revealed these extreme emotional states. Walter Benjamin’s writing on Brecht’s technique of alienation in the section ‘The Interruption’ (Die Unterbrechung) in his essay ‘What is Epic Theatre?’, published in 1939, centres on what Benjamin terms the ‘uncovering of conditions’. This form of alienating exposure is brought about by processes being interrupted. Take the crudest example: a family row. Suddenly a stranger comes into the room. The wife is just about to pick up a bronze statuette and throw it at the daughter, the father is opening the window to call a policeman. At this moment the stranger appears at the door. ‘Tableau’, as they used to say around 1900. That is to say, the stranger is confronted with a certain set of conditions: troubled faces, open window, a devastated interior. There exists another point of view [Es gibt aber einen Blick] from which the more usual scenes of bourgeois life do not look so very different from this. (Benjamin 1973: 18–19)

For Benjamin, the similarities between the conventions of traditional bourgeois theatre and Brecht’s Epic Theatre are apparently as important as the differences between them. In Strindberg’s work, these conventions are just about to collapse. Benjamin was one of the early theoreticians of the new technological inventions in film and photography and, like Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer, he never lost sight of their radical implications for the arts. While Benjamin’s seminal essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) is his most wellknown text developing these ideas, his ‘Little History of Photography’ from 1931 has many affinities with Strindberg’s somewhat anarchistic project of making room for photography and film in his artistic practice. In this essay, Benjamin reflects on the representation of the human figure within a photographic, photographed space, claiming that it reveals a ‘secret’. Echoing Strindberg’s insights, Benjamin writes, No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that longforgotten moment the future nests so beautifully that we, looking back may rediscover it. For it is another nature that speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: ‘other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness, gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. Whereas it is a common-place that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second

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when a person actually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. (Benjamin 2001: 510)

It was only after Strindberg’s death in 1912 and with the events of the First World War that the more profound social and aesthetic consequences of the new technologies of photography and film became more fully understood and theorized. Strindberg must, however, be seen as a pioneer who experimented intuitively while making room for the experimentation of others by allowing two of his most popular plays to be ‘cinematographed’.

Notes 1 My translation (Freddie Rokem). The Swedish original: Se, huru vid kinematografen många ljusbilder måste tagas i följd för att få en enda rörelse till stånd, och ändock darrar bilden fram. I varje vibration fattas en mellanled. När det skulle behövas tusen momentbilder för en armrörelse, hur många myriader skulle då icke behövas för att skildra en själsrörelse. Diktarens mänskoskildring är därför bara förkortningar, konturteckningar, alla ofullkomliga och alla halvfalska. En riktig karaktärsskildring är därför svår, nästan omöjlig;och försökte man göra den fullt sann skulle ingen tro på den. Man kan bara antyda! 2 I have previously analysed the photographic and cinematographic dimensions of Miss Julie (Fröken Julie) (1888), A Dream Play (Ett Drömspel) (1901) and The Ghost Sonata (Spöksonaten) (1907), as well as with the representations of photography in Strindberg’s last play The Great Highway (Stora Landsvägen) (1909). See Rokem 2004. 3 In November 1886 Strindberg sent an album with 19 family photographs, each with a short caption, to his publisher Bonnier in Stockholm, offering him the chance to publish it in the form of a book, also making some suggestions concerning possible follow-up writers who could be depicted in this form of domestic reportage. Bonnier declined, arguing that the production costs of such a book would be too high. The album remained in the archives of the publishing house and was printed in an edition of 6,500 copies for Christmas 1997, but was not for sale (Strindberg 1997). 4 I want to thank Erik Höök, the head curator of the Strindberg Museum and Archives in Stockholm, for supplying this information as well as for all his assistance in the preparation of this article. 5 Strindberg’s painting Skogsbrynet (The Edge of the Forest), from 1905, is available at: https://digitaltmuseum.se/011023636869/oljemalning?slide=0.

Works Cited Barthes, R. (1980), Camera Lucida, trans. R. Howard, New York: Hill and Wang. Benjamin, W. ([1939] 1973), Understanding Brecht, trans. A. Bostock, London: NLB. Benjamin, W. ([1931] 2001), ‘Little History of Photography’, in M. P. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (eds), Selected Writings, vol. 2 1927–1934, trans. E. Jephcott and K. Shorter, 507–530, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Fadren (1912), film of Strindberg’s The Father directed by Anna Hofman-Uddgren, Orientaliska Teatern, Stockholm. Josephson, L. (1965), Strindbergs Drama Fröken Julie, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Lagerkrantz, M. V. (1997), ‘Anna Hofmann Uddgren; Varitéaktris, Cirkusdirektris och Strindbergs Första Regeissör på Vita Duken’, Strindbergiana, Atlantis, 12: 24–45. Marien, M. W. (2006), Photography: A Cultural History, 2nd edn, London: Laurence King Publishing. Rokem, F. (1986), Theatrical Space in Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg: Public Forms of Privacy, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Rokem, F. (2004), Strindberg’s Secret Codes, Norwich: Norvik Press. Rokem, F. (2012), ‘Dramaturgies of Exile: Brecht and Benjamin “Playing” Chess and Go’, Theatre Research International, 37 (1): 5–19. Strindberg, A. (1983), Strindberg: Five Plays, trans. H. G. Carlson, Berkeley : University of California Press. Strindberg, A. (1997), Tolf Impressionist-bilder, Stockholm: Bonniers. Strindberg, A. (1999), ‘Karaktärsteckning’, in P. Stam (ed.), Teater och Intima Teatern, August Strindbergs Samlade Verk. 64, Stockholm: Norstedts. Svensk Filmdatabas (The Swedish Film Database) (n.d.), Fröken Julie 1912, Svensa Filminstitutet (Swedish Film Institute). Available online: http://www. svenskfilmdatabas.se/sv/item/?type=film&itemid=3258 (English: http://www. svenskfilmdatabas.se/en/item/?type=film&itemid=3258) (accessed 14 May 2018). Szalczer, E. (2001), ‘Nature’s Dream Play: Modes of Vision and August Strindberg’s ReDefinition of the Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 53 (1): 33–52. Waldekranz, R. (1966), ‘Strindberg och Stumfilmen’, in C. R. Smedmark (ed.), Essays on Strindberg, 145–160, Stockholm: Strindberg Society, J. Beckman, [Seelig]. Waldekranz, R. (1993), ‘Strindberg and the Silent Cinema’, Nordic Theatre Studies, 6 (1–2): 50–58. Werner, G. (1991), ‘Strindberg som Förebådare av ett Nytt Medium: Filmen’, Strindbergiana, (6): 113–120.

16

Liv Ullmann’s Miss Julie (2014): An Interview with Reflections Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA and Eszter Szalczer, University at Albany, SUNY, USA

Liv Ullmann is a world-renowned director and actress, having worked extensively in both capacities in theatre and on film. She is known also for her numerous collaborations with Ingmar Bergman, starring in classics such as Persona (1966) and Cries and Whispers (1972), while later directing several of Bergman’s scripts, including Faithless (2000) for the screen and Private Confessions for TV (1996) and the stage (2016). Miss Julie is the most filmed of Strindberg’s plays. Previous productions include Anna Hofman-Uddgren’s 1912 silent cinema version with a cast from Strindberg’s own Intimate Theatre; Alf Sjöberg’s famous 1951 dream scape rendition that helped usher in the new wave of French film; John Glenister’s 1972 BBC TV-version of a theatre production with Helen Mirren in the lead role, and Mike Figgis’s costume drama from 1991. Ullmann’s version of Miss Julie (Norway, 2014) features a cast of well-known European character actors: Jessica Chastain (Julie), Colin Farrell (John) and Samantha Morton (Kathleen) (Plate 16.1). The film premiered at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. Set in Fermanagh County, Northern Ireland in 1890, Ullmann makes extensive cinematographic use of the Coole Castle in which the film was shot, using rooms and spaces to connote emotional states, convey anxiety, and signal development in the relationships portrayed on screen (Figure 16.1). This interview took place in April 2015. Anna Westerstahl Stenport: Miss Julie was your first film in fourteen years since Faithless – what prompted you to make the film? Liv Ullmann: I have always been more interested in Henrik Ibsen than August Strindberg. I never dreamt of directing or acting in a Strindberg play. But when I began looking at Miss Julie I asked myself, ‘Oh, why did I never want to play her!’ But I could direct that play, I thought. When I got an offer from two or three producers to do a movie about a woman, I proposed ‘What about Miss Julie?’And they said ‘fine’. AWS and Eszter Szalczer: Strindberg does not show Miss Julie’s death scene, whereas in the visual universe of your film, her death organically evolves from the imagery.

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Figure 16.1 Promotional poster for Miss Julie, directed by Liv Ullmann, 2014.

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She dies in nature, amidst an abundance of flowers, her blood and red hair mingling with the flow of the river, as she becomes part of nature drifting away into a dream of annihilation. Nature-imagery throughout the film is beautifully tied in with the final shots that evoke the Ophelia-iconography of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Tell us a bit about the process. LU: When I began writing the script, I became aware of how tormented Julie is, not by John but by her own conflicting impulses. She cannot be part of people and she cannot accommodate herself to any choice that human life demands, such as love. To me, she is a person of non-existence. And non-existence is very close to death. Non-existence is a way of seeking death. And death is central to the play. AWS: You’ve done the research on the play and for those of us who have as well, we know a lot has been written about it and that there are so many stage productions of the play. We would be interested in hearing something about how – and especially given your experience as a theatre director and film and theatre actress  – you went about thinking about visualizing Miss Julie for a cinematic medium, for the screen. What were some of the considerations that went into taking the text not only from written script to the theatre but also to the particularly visual medium of the cinematic? LU: Miss Julie is a drama and one of my strengths is in the theatre. And I find filmed theatre very interesting. I chose to do Miss Julie as filmed theatre because of the wonder of cinema: you can come close to characters, which you can never do in the theatre. It is almost like being with them on the stage. You can see not only the two characters or the main character but you can also see the area around them and how important that space is. In Miss Julie, for example, the locations surrounding the kitchen are important for showing class differences. In my version, filmed at Coole Castle, characters cannot look out through the window, because the people who work and live in that kitchen are not allowed to have rooms above the ground. There’s a tunnel that goes into their existence because they are not allowed to walk on the grass, in the fields, or through the gardens, since those spaces belong to the upper class. And I can convey these symbolic relationships through the closeness of the camera, while, at the same time, it is as if the audience can be on stage at the same time. As a film director, you have the privilege to show such complexity. AWS and ES: One of the most striking visual aspects of the film is the recurring juxtaposition of interiors and exteriors. Strindberg’s stage play deploys the classical three unities of drama (those of time, place and action), in order to experiment with what he describes in the play’s famous preface as a modern requirement of extreme condensation. Thus, the drama is confined to one setting, inside the basement-level kitchen of the manor house where the servants’ quarters are located. Your film, on the other hand, expands both space and time already in the opening sequence, showing the liminal space between inside and outside: a

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LU: Actors are critical. You can only convey this symbolism if you really allow your actors to act. They need to act like they would do in the theatre. In my experience, actors really like this freedom. For Miss Julie, we had six days of rehearsal before shooting. We went through the whole play together, start to finish. I was very lucky in that the actors knew their lines beforehand, which was fantastic. I never expected that. Jessica Chastain, who plays Julie, really adopted the idea that Julie feels hopeless, in the moment she comes into the kitchen. And she is hopeless because all she wants is to die. The film’s visual language seeks to convey that. AWS: It’s fascinating to hear you describe what you found compelling about Miss Julie, both the character and the play. Do you find similarities between Strindberg, Ingmar Bergman, and your own practice as a director? LU: I know that some of these thoughts about death and non-existence I had about Strindberg I would have shared with Ingmar Bergman. I think even Ingmar would have acknowledged their presence. He staged Miss Julie in 1985 for what became a travelling international production and I know it was very good. But I never saw it. I wasn’t even aware he had done it when I started my Miss Julie. But I have seen the film by Alf Sjöberg (1951), which won the major prize in Cannes. But I thought that version was terrible and that it had nothing to do with what I believe Strindberg was really writing about. Strindberg is interested in people’s experiences of life and death. I believe that the play conveys a pointed stance on death, which is specific and nihilistic. AWS and ES: Miss Julie’s starved gaze is a recurring image throughout the film. We  see a seemingly impenetrable gate or we enter the landscape through the window frame. The outdoor scenes are shot like dreamscapes, especially when it comes to the forest or the river. The claustrophobic indoor scenes assume a nightmarish quality, through visual reminders of confinement in the sense of long corridors, dungeon-like staircases, and heavy walls and gates. There is a very deliberate visualization at play in your version, partly reminiscent in some instances of a film like Cries and Whispers. LU: I truly believe that Ingmar would have liked my interpretation. A lot of it is very much influenced by him, by many things that he expressed in conversation, and by the many strategies he chose in the films that I did with him. AWS: Is Strindberg relevant today?

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LU: Yes, absolutely! Both Miss Julie and Strindberg remain relevant. For Julie, nonexistence was death. For a lot of people today, non-existence means alcohol and drug abuse, as ways to blank out in search of serenity. The play is about gender relations and about relations between men and women. That relationship is even more complicated today; worse, I believe. Nobody will say that there is a difference between men and women. But we know – especially women – that there is a difference. And I know from my own experience that we, as women, are still dancing around, playing roles, or projecting an image and trying to get our way in that way, instead of being absolutely secure in ourselves and standing by who we are. Class differences are enormous today, too; worse than they were then and as bad as they have ever been. A privileged small percentage of the world population has it all, while the majority of people have nothing. So many people in the world today are refugees or migrants, having no roots, and belonging nowhere. Obviously, those are the kinds of things that Strindberg wrote about. He wrote about the class system, just as he wrote about men and women. AWS and ES: In one instance in the film, John is slapped by Miss Julie in the kitchen, in front of his fiancée, Kathleen, who silently takes in the humiliation – hers and John’s. Kathleen has a foregrounded significance in your film. Your take on the play’s gender relations is clearly your own. LU: In contrast to his reputation as misogynistic, I do not believe that Strindberg hates women. He was always preoccupied with and by them. But I do believe that he had this fear, this horrible fear, of women. In Miss Julie, he makes Kristin (Kathleen, in my film) the person of compassion and morals. So in spite of what he pronounced, I think he wanted to understand also the relationships between women. And because my film is an adaptation, I have at times, when Miss Julie or John are silent, given them words for what I believe they were thinking. So I let them say it. I believe my adaptation is faithful to Strindberg and I think in the end he wouldn’t mind the changes. AWS: Would you do another Strindberg production? LU: I am not sure if I would do another Strindberg adaptation. Actually, I think about it in terms of class. My age and my gender, and also being an actress, those three things work against me. Gender makes it difficult. Because I at times can be like Nora and smile when I should have been more … [Ullmann becomes silent.] I am adapting Ingmar Bergman’s novel Private Confessions, which I did as a TV film in 1996. The Norwegian National Theatre asked me to do it. It is a fascinating experience, adapting for the stage and to return to a text I have worked with in the past and to transfer it to another medium. I am glad to be directing it again. Private Confessions is a script about religion. It talks about where we are today and how difficult it is to speak as human being to human being – and here I think about all the computers and emails that hinder direct

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Index Abram, David 70 abstract thought 76, 84 actors, their bodies and acting style 76, 84–7, 90–1, 177, 216 Agamben, Giorgio 155, 164 Ahman, Svea 86 Alighieri, Dante 47 Anderson, Benedict 155 Anderson, Bibi 181 Anderson, Herman 4, 76–8, 82, 92, 153 Apollinaire, Guillaume 32 Appia, Adolphe 194 Appleton, Jay 67, 69 Aristotle 21, 39 Artaud, Antonin 7 Aurier, Gabriel-Albert 20 Bachelard, Gaston 163 Barbizon school of painters 11, 55, 57–8 Barthes, Roland 46, 204 Baudelaire, Charles 31, 36, 45 Beckett, Samuel 7, 75, 85, 88 Beethoven, Ludwig van 87 Benjamin, Walter 36, 45, 201–2, 210–11 Berggren, Thommy 169 Bergman, Ingmar 136, 169, 190, 213, 216–18 Berlau, Ruth 201 Berman, Patricia 26 Bernhardt, Sarah 183 Berthelot, Marcellin 20 Birnbaum, Daniel 136; author of Foreword Björnberg, Alf 143 Blaché, Alice Guy 108 Bleeker, Maaike 168 Böcklin, Arnold 81, 196–7 Bonnier, Albert 58 Bosse, Harriet 49, 83, 90, 115 Brandell, Gunnar 153–4 Brecht, Bertolt 75, 85, 201, 210

bridges 68–9 Broca, Paul 21 The Cabbage Fairy (film) 108 calling cards (cartes de visite) 183–6 Camera Work (journal) 77 Campany, David 76–7 Campbell, Norah 2 Carlson, Harry G. 4, 8, 53–5, 63–5, 71, 100 Carlsson, Wilhelm 113–14 Carrière, Eugène 20 Cartwright, Lisa 5 Castiglione, Countess de 183–6 celebrity culture 13–14, 186 censorship 205–6 Cézanne, Paul 24, 30 Challe, Daniel 65 Chamber Plays and chamber theatres 75–6, 81–92, 102, 141, 162, 196–7 Chanan, Michael 102–3 Chastain, Jessica 216 Chavanne, Puvis de 40 Chave, Anna 30 Cherchi Usai, Paolo 105–6 Chopin, Fréderic 87 cinema and cinematic practice. See film cinema culture 107 ‘cinema of attractions’ 95 City Theatre, Stockholm 12 Clark, Bruce 92 Clark, T.J. 45, 60 colour on film 105 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille 57–8, 64 Craig, Edward Gordon 75–6, 84–8, 194 Crary, Jonathan 167 Crick, Francis 41 ‘crisis of representation’ 160 Cuvelier, Eugène 65 da Vinci, Leonardo 22–3, 27 Dahlberg, Sven 171

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Danius, Sara 156 Daubigni, Charles François 58 Degas, Edgar 199–200 DeLue, Rachael 67 Demolition of a Wall (film) 105 Denecourt, Claude-François 57, 60–1 Derrida, Jacques 26 dissection 22–4, 31–2 DNA testing 3 ‘dream films’ 98, 100 ‘dream plays’ 96–7, 102–3, 108–10, 143–6, 176 Dubuffet, Jean 10, 40, 190 Dukore, Bernard F. 77 Dunér, Karl 115

Gaudreault, André 95 Gauguin, Paul 20, 40, 47, 162 Gautier, Théophile 99 Gavel Adams, Ann-Charlotte 135–6 gender perspective 168–70, 177–80 Gesamtkunstwerk concept 84–5 Glenister, John 213 Grabow, Carl 115 Green Sack collection 8–10 Gretor, Willy 40 Grünewald, Isaac 115 Guillet de Monthoux, Pierre 14; author of Chapter 14 Gunning, Tom 95 Guys, Constantin 36

Einstein, Albert 36 Eissen, Gustaf 77 Eliot, T.S. 75 Elkins, James 62 Emerson, Peter Henry 77 Ericsson, John 115 Essen, Siri von 3, 200–1, 205

Hagström-Ståhl, Kristina 167–81; author of Chapter 12 Hamlet 209–10, 215 Hampton Institute 136–40 hands, representation of 19–32 Hayles, Katherine 91–2, 150, 152, 164 Hedström, Per 6, 77 Heidegger, Martin 21, 26, 65, 68–9 Henckels, Paul 142 Herrlin, Axel 187 Hill, Carl Fredrik 58 Hjelm, Keve 181 Hockenjos, Vreni 5, 97, 154 Hoffman-Uddgren, Anna 195–6, 198, 205, 213 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 80 human figures, perception of 10–12, 204 humanism 91–2

Falck, August 75, 81, 86, 102, 195, 197, 206 féerie form 12, 99, 104, 109 femininity 169 feminism 168–70 Feuer, Donya 115 Feuk, Douglas 10, 41 Figgis, Mike 213 film 12–14, 95–110 filmed sequences within plays 174 filmed versions of plays 14, 104, 195, 198, 205–9, 213–15 First World War 142, 211 Flaubert, Gustave 22–3, 26 Focillon, Henri 24, 27 Fontainebleau Forest 55–62, 65, 71 forced perspective 203 Fortuny, Mariano 194 Foucault, Michel 156, 162 framing devices 198–9 French Astronomical Society 10 Freud, Sigmund 186–7 Gadelius, Bror 187, 190–1 Galison, Peter 159

Ibsen, Henrik 89, 203, 213 impressionist painting 11, 40, 54–61, 64–5, 71, 173, 199 inclined stages 203 intermediality 11 intervisuality 5 Intimate Theatre (Intima Teatern), Stockholm 81, 85–8, 102–3, 107, 141, 193–8, 201–2, 205–7 Ionesco, Eugene 7 Jamin, Etienne 56 Jesus Christ 68 Johansson, Per Magnus 143

Index Johnston, Frances Benjamin 12, 117, 136–40 Jones, Amelia 168 Joyce, James 75, 156 Kandinsky, Wassily 190 Kärnell, Karl Åke 151, 153 Kiefer, Anselm 5 Kirstein, Lincoln 140 Kittler, Friedrich 154–5 Kjellmer, Viveka 143 Kleist, Heinrich von 84 Kodak cameras 184 Kovács, Katherine Singer 99 Kracauer, Siegfried 210 Krasner, David 80, 84, 91 Kvam, Kela 80 Kylberg, Carl 197

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Mitchell, Katie 113 Mitchell, W.J.T. 2, 8, 67, 69 modernism 3, 8, 10, 12, 75–6, 79–84, 87–9, 92, 96, 141, 147, 155–6, 159–62, 167–8, 173, 186, 194 modernity 36, 54 Molander, Olof 115 Monet, Claude 45, 54, 57, 64 Moravec, Hans 92 Moretti, Franco 66 Moses 68 moving images 104–6, 109, 194–5 Müller, Eugène 61 Mulvey, Laura 168 Munch, Edvard 11, 19–32, 40, 43–4, 162 Münsterberg, Hugo 101–3 Musée de l’Art Brut 190 music in plays 177

Lacan, Jacques 62 Lalander, Agneta 4 landscape 60–2, 66–60 Larsson, Carl 47–8, 57–60, 64 Leclercq, Julien 19–21 Léger, Fernand 95 Lemot, J. 23 Lugné-Poe, Aurelian 75 Lukács, Georg 163–4 Lumière brothers 105, 204

nature, engagement with 8, 45–6, 53–9, 64, 67 nickelodeon theatres 107 Nietzsche, Friedrich 150, 152, 158 Nilsson, Mats 143 Nordström, Karl 64 Nynäs Slott, 170, 174

McLuhan, Marshall 35 Maeterlinck, Maurice 11–12, 75–88, 91 Mallarmé, Stéphane 28, 57, 75 Manet, Édouard 59–60 Mann, Thomas 156 Marien, M.W. 199 marionettes, use of 80–8 materiality and immateriality 103 Matisse, Henri 28 Méliès, Georges 12, 98–105 Melville, Herman 47 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 30, 67, 70–1 meta-theatricality 87–9 Millet, Jean-François 56–7 A Million and One Nights (film) 104 mimesis 75–6 Mirbeau, Octave 79 Mirren, Helen 213 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 2–3

perception, visual 7, 10, 60 photography 4, 8–9, 13, 41, 47, 65, 76–8, 82–3, 153, 160, 162, 174, 183, 185, 193–5, 198–201 Picasso, Pablo 27, 30, 32 Pictorialism in photography 77–8 Pierson, Pierre-Louis 183 Piery, Madame 190 Plato 39 Pont, Antonia 141, 144 Porter, Edwin S. 102 posthumanism 91–2 Prideaux, Susan 85 Prinzhorn, Hans 190 proscenium stages 198–204 ‘prospect-refuge’ theory of experiencing landscape 69 Proust, Marcel 37, 156 Puchner, Martin 75–6, 80, 84

Oppenheimer, Robert 37 ‘optical modernity’ 14–15

222

Index

Ramsaye, Terry 104–5, 109 Reinhardt, Max 81, 87, 115, 141 van Rijn, Rembrandt 27–8 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 58, 61–2 Robinson, Michael 157, 162 Rodin, Auguste 20, 78 Rokem, Freddie 167–8, 173–6; author of Chapter 15 Roller, Alfred 115 Rose, Harriet 80 Rosen, Astrid von 13, 143; author of Chapter 10 Rosmarin, Adena 151–2 Rothman, Lenke 115 Rousseau, Théodore 56–8 Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm 12, 113–15 Royal Library, Stockholm 8 Rugg, Linda Haverty 4, 19, 24, 30, 77, 83, 153 Scenkonst Sörmland 167 scenography and scenographing 14, 141–6, 194, 198–9, 202–7 Schelling, F.W.J. 157 Schering, Emil 80 Schreiner, Karl 27, 31 Schröder, Stephan M. 154 Schroeder, Jonathan 2; co-editor, co-author of Chapter 1 and author of Chapter 9 sciopticon technology 106 Sedan, Battle of (1870) 55 Selander, Sten 150 ‘selfies’ 14, 186–7, 190–1, 200 self-portraits 183–4, 188–9 Shakespeare, William 36, 83, 209–10, 215 Sherman, Cindy 186 Shiff, Richard 32 Simmel, Georg 196, 210 Sisley, Alfred 58–9, 64 Sjöberg, Alf 115, 169, 216 Skawonius, Sven Erik 115 sleepwalking 90–1 ‘snapshots’ 210 Söderström, Göran 5, 43, 58 Sommerland, Ylva 143 Springtime Fairy (film) 108 Ståhle Sjönell, Barbro 114–15

Stam, Per 150 Steene, Birgitta 97 Steichen, Edward 77–8, 82 Stein, Gertrude 75 Stenhammar, Wilhelm 144–5 Stenport, Anna Westerstahl 19, 58, 160–1, 213–17; co-editor and co-author of Chapters 1 and 6 stereographs 184 Stern, Ernst 141 Stern, Michael J. 152 Stevens, Wallace 41 Stieglitz, Alfred 77 Stockholm 3, 10, 45, 58, 86, 96, 103–4, 107–8, 113, 115, 135–6, 142, 186–7, 190 Stockholm International Exhibition (1897) 104 Strindberg, August aesthetic openness 152–3 archives 8 authorial persona 151–2, 157 biographical and autobiographical works 4–5, 22 essays by 1, 8–10, 22 experimentalism of 147, 211 interest in cinema 97, 103, 106–7, 194–5 interest in photography 4, 8–9, 13, 41, 47, 65, 76–7, 82–3, 153, 160, 162, 174, 183, 185, 193–5, 198–201 interest in science and technology 36, 96, 155, 159, 161, 195 narrative technique 65–6 paintings by 5–8, 11, 29–30, 35, 40–8, 81, 162, 206 pictures of 24, 29, 43, 78–9, 82, 153–4, 183–91, 200–1, 204 plays and other work in the theatre 3, 6–7, 11–12, 14, 35–6, 75–6, 81, 85–8, 97, 103–4, 107, 110, 113–15, 193–4, 199 poetry by 37 self-portraits 183–4, 188–9 use of imagery 151, 153 visual culture’s centrality in the work of 1–5, 13, 113–15, 140, 147, 158–60, 163, 167 work as an art critic 58

Index Strindberg’s works Among French Peasants (Bland franska bönder) 13, 160–1 Antibarbarus 150, 153, 158 The Avenue 30 The Black Glove 87–91, 113–14 A Blue Book 21, 193 The Burned Site 114 By the Open Sea (I havsbandet) 13, 37, 45, 147–52 ‘Celestographs’ 9–10 ‘Character Depiction’ 103 ‘The City’ (‘Staden’) 44–5, 49 Creditors 92 The Dance of Death 39, 114, 163 Double Image (Dubbelbild) 7, 47 A Dream Play (Ett Drömspel) 3, 12–13, 35–6, 42, 95–109, 114–15, 117, 163 City Theatre production of 135–40 Dusseldorf production of 141–6 preparatory materials and sketches for 118–34 Easter 113–15 The Edge of the Forest 206 The Father (Fadren) 3, 14, 36, 38, 114, 193–7, 205–9 ‘Flooding of the Danube’ 46 Fotogram 9 ‘From the Café l’Ermitage to Marly-leRoi’ 58–9 The German Lieutenant (Samvetskval) 11, 53–5, 58–71 The Ghost Sonata (Spöksonaten) 6–7, 35, 42, 81, 86–91, 97, 114, 163, 197 ‘A Glance into Space’ (‘Un Regard vers le Ciel’) 1, 2, 7 Golgatha 42, 49 ‘The Greening Island’ 46 High Sea (Hög sjö) 43–4 The House That Burned 87–90 Inferno 19, 22, 30, 39 ‘Jacob Wrestles’ (‘Jacob lutte’) 96 Jardin des Plantes 8 The Lonely Poisonous Mushroom 40–2 Mäster Olof 115 Miss Julie (Fröken Julie) 13–14, 26, 113–14, 152, 167–81, 193–209, 213–17

223

preface to 169–76, 181, 199 ‘The new arts: the role of chance in artistic creation’ 8, 10, 46, 96 Occult Diary 2 ‘On the Action of Light in Photography’ 9 Open Letters 85 Palette with Solitary Flower on the Shore 30 The Pelican 88–91, 114–15, 142 The Red Room 25 ‘Saturday night’ (‘Lördags kväll’) 45 ‘The Sighing of Stones’ (‘Stenarnes suckan’) 8 ‘The Sleeping City’ 106–7 The Solitary Fly-Cap 29 ‘Somnambulistic Nights in Broad Daylight’ 23 Storm (Oväder) 87–90, 114–15, 141–2 ‘Street Scenes’ (‘Gatubilder’) 37–8 The Stronger 35 There are Crimes and Crimes 142 To Damascus (Till Damaskus) 70, 96, 114–15, 141, 162 Toteninsel 81 Vivisections 22 ‘Wave’ paintings 48 ‘The wind rests, the bay lies like a mirror’ 45 Wonderland (Underlandet) 30, 46 Ström, Knut 12, 141–5 Ström (born Holmberg), Anna 143 Sturken, Marita 5 ‘survival of the fittest’ 70 Swedenborg, Emanuel 89, 153 Swedish National Library 113 Symbolists 41 syphilis 21 Szalczer, Eszter 86, 89, 91, 96–100, 136, 162–3, 213–17; co-editor, co-author of Chapter 1 and author of Chapter 4 Theatre of Cruelty 7 Theatre of Images 7 theatre practice 99–103, 106–7, 110, 169 links with cinematography 102–3, 110 time and space compression 108–10 Tolstoy, Leo 55

224 topography 68–71 Törnå, Oscar 64 transcendentalism 91 trick shots in film 98 tsunamis 45 Tulp, Nicolaes 27–8 Turner, J.M.W. 162 Uddgren, Gustaf 195, 198 Uhl, Frida 4 Ullmann, Liv 14, 213–18 Van Gogh, Vincent 40 Verner-Carlsson, Per 115 Vesalius, Andreas 27 Victoria, Queen 183, 186 vision, objective and subjective 167–8, 174, 178. See also Strindberg, August visual culture changes in 64–5 definitions of 2–3 research on 2

Index visual technology definition of 2 Strindberg’s involvement with 3–5, 10, 195 visualisation of the body 10–12 visuality, concept of 36, 168 Wahlgren, Helge 86 Waldekranz, Rune 207 Watson, James 41 Whistler, James McNeill 20 Widmann, Ellen 144 Wilkinson, Lynn R. 81 Williams, Raymond 163 Wilson, Robert 7, 12, 117–40; author of Chapter 8 wood nymphism 8 Wunderkamera device 4, 76–9, 84, 86, 153 Yeats, W.B. 75 Zecca, Ferdinand 100, 109 Zola, Émile 20, 30, 54, 60

Plate 1.1 August Strindberg, Dubbelbild, 1892. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm.

Plate 1.2 August Strindberg, Celestografi, 1894. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm.

Plate 2.1 Edvard Munch, On the Operating Table, 1902–03. Reproduced by permission of the Munch Museum, Oslo.

Plate 2.2 August Strindberg, The Solitary Fly-Cap, 1893, private collection. Figure courtesy of the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne.

Plate 2.3 August Strindberg, Palette with Solitary Flower on the Shore, 1893, private collection. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm.

Plate 3.1 August Strindberg, The Lonely Poisonous Mushroom, 1893. Strindberg Museum. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm.

Plate 3.2 August Strindberg, Golgatha, 1894. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm.

Plate 3.3 August Strindberg, High Sea, 1894. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm.

Plate 3.4 August Strindberg, The City, 1903. Reproduced by permission of the National Museum of Sweden, Stockholm.

Plate 3.5 August Strindberg, Danube in Flood, 1894. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm.

Plate 3.6 August Strindberg, The Greening Island II, 1894. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm.

Plate 3.7 August Strindberg, Wonderland, 1894. Reproduced by permission of the National Museum of Sweden, Stockholm.

Plate 3.8 August Strindberg, Wave IX, 1903. Reproduced by permission of the Strindberg Museum, Stockholm.

Plate 4.1 Claude Monet, Luncheon on the Grass, 1865–66. Reproduced by permission of Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 4.2 Claude Monet, The Goods Train, 1872. Reproduced by permission of the Pola Museum of Art, Kanagawa, Japan.

Plate 4.3 Carl Fredrik Hill, Autumn Landscape, 1875. © Carl Fredrik Hill/reproduced by Johanna Rylander/Malmö Art Museum.

Plate 4.4 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mother Anthony’s Tavern, 1866. Reproduced by permission of the National Museum of Sweden, Stockholm/Bridgeman Images.

Plate 4.5 Claude Monet, The Artist’s Garden at Argenteuil, aka The Dahlias, 1873. Reproduced by permission of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA/Bridgeman Images.

Plate 7.1 August Strindberg, To Damascus I-II-III, 2012. Direction and stage design by Karl Dunér. Stage design model at the workshops. Photo: Sören Vilks, Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm. Used by permission.

Plate 7.2 August Strindberg, To Damascus I-II-III, 2012. Direction and stage design by Karl Dunér. Actor Johan Holmberg, playing the protagonist The Stranger. Photo: Sören Vilks, Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm. Used by permission.

Plate 8.1 August Strindberg, A Dream Play, 1998. Directed by Robert Wilson. Prologue: Heaven. Stadsteatern, Stockholm. Photo: © Lesley Leslie-Spinks. Used by permission.

Plate 8.2 August Strindberg, A Dream Play, 1998. Directed by Robert Wilson. Scene One: The Rising Castle. Stadsteatern, Stockholm. Photo: © Lesley Leslie-Spinks. Used by permission.

Plate 8.3 August Strindberg, A Dream Play, 1998. Directed by Robert Wilson. Scene Three: The Stage Door. Stadsteatern, Stockholm. Photo: © Lesley Leslie-Spinks. Used by permission.

Plate 8.4 August Strindberg, A Dream Play, 1998. Directed by Robert Wilson. Scene Three: The Stage Door. Stadsteatern, Stockholm. Photo: © Lesley Leslie-Spinks. Used by permission.

Plate 8.5 August Strindberg, A Dream Play, 1998. Directed by Robert Wilson. Scene Five: The University. Stadsteatern, Stockholm. Photo: © Lesley Leslie-Spinks. Used by permission.

Plate 8.6 August Strindberg, A Dream Play, 1998. Directed by Robert Wilson. Scene Six: Fingal’s Cave. Stadsteatern, Stockholm. Photo: © Lesley Leslie-Spinks. Used by permission.

Plate 8.7 August Strindberg, A Dream Play, 1998. Directed by Robert Wilson. Scene Nine: Fairhaven. Stadsteatern, Stockholm. Photo: © Lesley Leslie-Spinks. Used by permission.

Plate 8.8 August Strindberg, A Dream Play, 1998. Directed by Robert Wilson. Scene Nine: Fairhaven. Stadsteatern, Stockholm. Photo: © Lesley Leslie-Spinks. Used by permission.

Plate 8.9 August Strindberg, A Dream Play, 1998. Directed by Robert Wilson. Scene Thirteen: The Burning Castle. Stadsteatern, Stockholm. Photo: © Lesley Leslie-Spinks. Used by permission.

Plate 8.10 August Strindberg, A Dream Play, 1998. Directed by Robert Wilson. Epilogue. Stadsteatern, Stockholm. Photo: © Lesley Leslie-Spinks. Used by permission.

Plate 10.1 Scenography sketch for A Dream Play, the Prologue, by Knut Ström, 1915 (project). Courtesy of Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung der Universitet zu Köln.

Plate 10.2 Scenography sketch for A Dream Play, the Prologue, by Knut Ström, 1918. Courtesy of Scenkonstmuseet.

Plate 10.3 Scenography sketch for A Dream Play, the small chamber inside the Lawyer’s office, by Knut Ström, 1915 (project). Courtesy of the Ström family.

Plate 10.4 Scenography sketch for A Dream Play, the small chamber inside the Lawyer’s office, by Knut Ström, 1918. Courtesy of Scenkonstmuseet.

Plate 10.5 Scenography sketch for A Dream Play, the maids at Fairhaven, by Knut Ström, 1915 (project). Courtesy of the Ström family.

Plate 10.6 Scenography sketch for A Dream Play, the maids at Fairhaven, by Knut Ström, 1917–18. Courtesy of Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung der Universitet zu Köln.

Plates 12.1, 12.2 August Strindberg, Miss Julie, 2012. Scenkonst Sörmland, Sweden. Directed by Kristina Hagström-Ståhl. Photographs and set design by Sven Dahlberg.

Plates 12.3, 12.4 August Strindberg, Miss Julie, 2012. Scenkonst Sörmland, Sweden. Directed by Kristina Hagström-Ståhl. Photographs and set design by Sven Dahlberg.

Plates 12.5, 12.6 August Strindberg, Miss Julie, 2012. Scenkonst Sörmland, Sweden. Directed by Kristina Hagström-Ståhl. Photographs and set design by Sven Dahlberg.

Plate 16.1 Promotional poster for the film Miss Julie. Directed by Liv Ullmann, 2014.

Plate 16.2 Still from Miss Julie. Directed by Liv Ullmann, 2014, starring Jessica Chastain and Colin Farrell.