Tuesday, October 14, 2014

There was no hairpin, but I saw it - a week of August Strindberg

This is where I spend a week writing about an author about whom I knew close to nothing a month, or let’s say a year ago, and now I’m some kinda expert.  It’s August Strindberg week!  This’ll be fun!  He was nuts!

He really was somethin’ else.  I will do my best to avoid anything biographical, because that really is all secondhand for me, and at least I did read some of the plays for myself, but I understand the temptation.  What family drama, what wild swings of opinion, what invective.  After a crisis of confidence in his marriage and writing and beliefs Strindberg spent five years working on science.  What science?  Creating gold!  He was an actual alchemist, in the 1890s.  He’s a character in a John Crowley novel.

The sheer bulk of Strindberg’s writing is hard to understand.  He wrote something like eighty plays, of which I have now read eight, and only the most famous. He wrote novels, short stories, history, popular science, and rants.  Elias Canetti, in his memoir A Tongue Set Free, described his mother’s obsessive reading of Strindberg – this was during and after World War I, so after Strindberg’s death.  Teenage Canetti would buy his mother every volume of Strindberg he could find, assiduously avoiding glancing at the contents because his mother forbid it.  Canetti’s book gave me my first hint of what Strindberg meant to people outside of the theater.

No, the first hint, which I did not understand, came from Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography The Magic Lantern (1987).  Bergman constantly returned to Strindberg throughout his life, in his films, his reading, and especially in the theater:

When I was twelve, I was allowed to accompany a musician who was playing the celeste backstage in Strindberg’s A Dream Play.  It was a searing experience.  Night after night, hidden in the proscenium tower, I witnessed the marriage scene between the Advocate and the Daughter.  It was the first time I had experienced the magic of acting.  The Advocate held a hairpin between his thumb and forefinger, he twisted it, straightened it out and broke it.  There was no hairpin, but I saw it.  The Officer was backstage waiting for his entrance, leaning forward at his shoes, his hands behind his back.  He cleared his throat soundlessly, a perfectly ordinary person.  Then he opened the door and stepped into the limelight.  He was changed, transformed: he was the Officer.  (Ch.4, tr. Joan Tate)

I suppose this story has happened to many children at many different plays, but how appropriate that it was this play, one where the theatrical illusion is constantly violated.  The result was a life of the highest creativity that was suffused with Strindberg.

Here is what I read, by the way, the material for the next few days.  This is a good time to let me know what I should have read not instead of but of course in addition to these.  Always in addition.

The Father (1887) – terrific, intense, deeply misogynist, and yet…

Miss Julie (1888) – as a bonus, it has a preface as hilarious as those of Zola.

To Damascus I & II (1898) – these are oddities, but boy do they explain a lot.

The Dance of Death I (1901) – I saw Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen do this one in 2001 or 2002.  Was that ever fun.

A Dream Play (1901) – Bergman has a funny section describing the impossibility of doing this play, yet he tries again and again.

To Damascus III (1904) – more of the above.

The Ghost Sonata (1907) – short, concentrated, pure; Strindberg aspiring to the condition if music.

This will give me something to do.

16 comments:

  1. Strindberg's novel Inferno is all about his time as an alchemist. When you read it, it's not a novel that would immediately strike you as likely to be autobiographical.

    I seem to have a lot of his historical plays, so shall read some of those.

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  2. When you mention Strindberg, I immediately think instead of Ibsen. As rivals (and enemies), they represent a powerful period in modern drama. Ibsen, though, comes out as the champion. Strindberg lingers in our memory as the singular (and perhaps mad) genius. When it comes to theatre production opportunities (and here I now speak as a former theater person [B.A. and M.A. {ABT}]), Strindberg is always a favorite in the theater. I look forward to your comments. Miss Julie, because of its compact power (and its better writing) remains my Strindberg favorite; however, you had to wonder -- given the ostensible realism and naturalism of the play -- how Jean and Julie had enough time to do the you-know-what that becomes the pivotal encounter in the play. Perhaps it speaks to Strindberg's own love life. Hmmm.

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  3. Miss Julie must be a blast to perform. Ghost Sonata is similarly compact, and I saw what can be done with Dance of Death myself. Very easy to see why these particular plays have stayed popular in the theater - juicy stuff for actors and directors, and even for the audience.

    You get at one thing I'll poke at again and again, probably - Miss Julie and A Dream Play are similarly "realistic." Naturalism is, with Strindberg just as with Zola, a con job.

    Critics seem to have trouble not just taking Inferno as memoir. I suppose the novel has been bounced off of the biography enough to give them confidence. Ah, Satanism, that's from life; ah, Swedenborg, that's from life.

    Bergman directed some of the historical plays but never amplifies on them. Other people I have looked at never mention them. Yet there are so many, and they are still performed, at least in Sweden. They are tempting.

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    1. In my undergraduate days, our production of Miss Julie included an inert (artificial) bird that had been rigged with a "blood bladder" so that "blood" would be more obvious when Jean takes a cleaver to Julie's fine feathered friend; obviously our director was obsessed with so-called realistic detail, but since the production was on a large proscenium stage, the effects upon the audience would have been negligible (i.e., they could not see the "blood") but the actors were sufficiently repulsed. The director, BTW, was probably more insane than Strindberg. It was a theatrical marriage (playwright and director) made in hell.

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  4. I just read Strindberg's introduction to "Fraulein Julia." It reminded me of Chernyshevsky addressing the perspicacious reader, funnily enough. "I have done nothing new, since that is impossible," etc. At the same time he defends naturalism he gives his reasons for using such unnatural devices as the soliloquy. Good stuff. Now I'll have to read the play, to see if it's the one Strindberg I've seen (it was back in the 80s at a theater festival, so I don't remember what it was).

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    1. Strindberg's repudiation of anything "new" is quite a load of Swedish reindeer trail-markers. He and his contemporaries were very aware of being very much involved in coming to grips with "new" changes in theatrical aesthetics and technology. The era was exploding with possibilities. His implicit denial of his role in that context is laughable.

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    2. Definitely an elaborate joke. The question I won't be able to answer is who exactly was the target.

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  5. Strindberg defends Naturalism with the aid of dynamite. Not much left when he's done with it.

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  6. As the story goes, Strindberg once attempted to attend a Nobel Prize ceremony without an invitation. When asked by a security guard who he was, Strindberg thundered, "Why, I'm the greatest writer in Scandinavia!" The surprised guard replied, "Oh! I'm sorry that I didn't recognize you, Herr Ibsen. Please, come right in!"

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  7. Pete, that story is so perfect I sincerely hope it is true.

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  8. There are two books missing from your list, and they are probably the most easy to read. They are 'The people of Hemsö' a very atypical Strindberg book and also humorous, and the book with which he made a break through, 'The Red Room' a satirical story of present day Sweden. I remember also having read 'The Defence of a Fool' which is an autobiographic book about his marriage with Siri von Essen.
    What is fascinating me is that a man with his attitude towards women always managed to marry very independent, strong willed women? One would think he would have gone for something easier?
    Lisbeth @ The Content Reader

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    1. "What is fascinating me is that a man with his attitude towards women always managed to marry very independent, strong willed women. One would think he would have gone for something easier?"

      Perhaps the difficulty was what made it interesting for him, and perhaps only very independent, strong willed women enjoyed- if that's the word- the challenge of marrying Strindberg.

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  9. Thanks, that is so helpful. The fiction is especially a mystery to me.\

    Strindberg's marriages - this is cheap psychologizing, but also based on the plays - make him a Freudian poster-boy. If anyone was trying to marry his mother, it was Strindberg. I should write something about The Father.

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    1. If you want another case study on Nordic marriage, take a close look at Ibsen, his marriage, and his extramarital friends. Maybe it's the climate.

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  10. Don't forget the Celestographs: http://hyperallergic.com/116582/the-celestographs-august-strindbergs-alchemical-shots-of-the-night-sky/

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  11. Wow! They're pure photographic plate experiments, whatever Strindberg may have called them or gotten out of them. Amazing.

    I had thought I had never seen any of Strindberg's paintings, but seeing the Celstographs somehow jolted my memory. I've seen the ones at the Musée d'Orsay. I remember this one, or I believe I remember it.

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