SummaryThe field of investigation In the dissertation Instability and Impurity: Studies in Strindberg’s Autobiographical Prose Writings,
I assume that instability, impurity and lability are characteristic
features of August Strindberg’s writings. Several studies have noticed
these aspects, but mostly casually and without systematic scholarly
discussion. It has been regarded as an aesthetic, cognitive, or even
ethical deficiency in his for – other reasons – canonised works. Here,
however, I propose a systematic discussion of it as a positive quality,
which brings Strindberg in contact with modernism and modern theory of
literature. For this reason, I focus on that which points forward in
Strindberg’s efforts. The dissertation aims at constructing the
modernity of texts that have long been part of literary tradition. It
does not intend to reconstruct Strindberg’s own intentions and contexts,
but rather to detach his works from them. The emphasis is on the
autobiographical texts regarded as texts and not as evidence of the life
of the author. This means that I see instability and impurity as a
textual problem. It is part of a poetics that I describe as Strindberg’s
impure writing, and which I construct by systematic readings in a
limited body of works, here termed ‘Strindberg’s autobiographical prose
writings’. There are several reasons for choosing the auto-biographical
writings as the primary material. Next to the dramas, I see them as
Strindberg’s most important innovative contribution to modern
literature. They raise such radical questions concerning representation
so radically that it is highly regrettable that Strindberg’s endeavours
usually have remained unnoticed in the comprehensive international
research on autobiography, which for several years has given the genre a
privileged position in textual theories. Defining a clear-cut body of
autobiographical works causes difficulties. In itself, autobiography has
been a challenge to generic distinctions, and further problems derive
from Strindberg’s blurring of the borderlines between fiction,
autobiography and other discourses. As an experiment, I have chosen to
discuss the rather heterogeneous group of texts, which Strindberg has
himself retrospectively labelled as autobiographical: the four volumes
of Tjänstekvinnans son (The Son of a Servant, written 1886), Han och hon (He and She, prepared for publication 1886), Le Plaidoyer d’un fou (A Madman’s Defence, written 1887-8), Inferno (1897), Legender (Legends 1898), Klostret/»Karantänmästarns andra berättelse« (»The Cloister/ The Quarantine Master’s Second Story«, 1898/1902) and Ensam (Alone, 1903). THE FIELD OF INVESTIGATION 429 Strindberg
surely wanted to set this group of texts off from the rest of his work,
and editors and scholars have followed his intentions. Nevertheless,
this dissertation assigns them neither a common essence nor distinctive
features that once and for all separate them from texts as
»Kvarstadsresan« or »Hjärnornas kamp«, which Strindberg did not include
on his lists of autobiographical writings. It rather sees the works
treated as instructively divergent. They span genres such as the novel,
short story, evolutionary autobiography, memoirs, self-portrait and
epistolary novel, and they also encompass several narrative modalities.
They thus allow a dialogue between different forms of written
self-representation and the expectations released by a specific genre:
autobiography. Thus, the delimitation of a body of works has other
advantages than the designation of an inner unity. It includes major
works from two fertile periods that also represent an important
transition in literary history: the shift from naturalism to
post-naturalist poetics. A central objective is exactly to construct
Strindberg’s road to modernism through a reading of his wrestling with
the forms of self-representation in an attempt to accommodate them to
the experience of modernity. Unlike the main currents in Strindberg
scholarship that have very often dealt with questions of influence,
biography, his place in the history of ideas and other often
extra-textual matters, the major part of this dissertation features
separate readings in individual works. This is also, what distinguishes
it from Michael Robinson’s inventive opening of the discussion of Strindberg and Autobiography (1986).
His focus is on self-representation rather than on autobiography as a
genre. Works and letters are treated as a total corpus; and quite often,
undoubtedly corresponding with Strindbergian intentions, quotes from
disparate sources are combined. While he tends to describe the
represented life as alienated in the forms of writing, I focus on the
interplay between life, self and writing as the irreducible aspects of
autobiography. In the last decade, comprehensive studies appeared in
some of the works treated here. In Levande död (1996), Ulf Olsson comments on Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and Inferno. The turning point in his readings is, however, allegory, and not self-representation. Self-representation is the pivot of Die Autorfigur (1999) by Wolfgang Behschnitt, who provides extensive readings of Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and especially Tjänstekvinnans son,
but also includes the dramas in his investigation. His description of a
dialectics between construction and negation of images of the author
throughout Strindberg’s works approaches my position; but while he tries
to reconstruct a logic, I also delineate the historical changes in
Strindberg’s method of self-representation and his poetics. That is why I
present readings of the singular works in chronological order. In each
case, I ask questions concerning genre, subjectivity and representation.
Inspired by structural theories, I study the construction of meaning
through narrative, thematic and discursive patterns. The focus is,
however, on the desta- 430 SUMMARY SUMMARY bilisation of these
patterns. Instability occurs in all the texts treated, but it does not
remain the same. In the succession of works, I follow the traces of a
crisis in representation, which reaches a peak in Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, Inferno and the second section of Legender.
As a whole, the dissertation is composed as follows: 1. Introduction 2.
Strindberg and Autobiography (including a discussion of
»Karantänmästarns andra berättelse«) 3. Tjänstekvinnans son 4. Han och hon 5. Le Plaidoyer d’un fou 6. Literary Impurity 7. Inferno 8. Legender 9. A Melancholy Constellation 10. Ensam 11.
Summary. The instability that I regard as constitutive for Strindberg’s
self-representations, is over-determined. It is typical of a tendency
within the genre: the modern, individual autobiography. To
stress his own individuality, the writer opposes the given forms of
representation. Instability is enhanced by individual dispositions like
Strindberg’s strong anxiety of influence and the complex, which I
describe as a melancholy pattern in his texts; but it also points to
displacements in cultural, biographical and aesthetic horizons of
experience caused by modernity. My main interest is not,
however, to explain the genesis of instability, but to study its
results. The most important of these results are the very texts treated:
versatile prose writings that avoid what Adorno called "false
reconciliation". Truly, the writing of autobiography is often an attempt
to find or create stable patterns of meaning by binding biographical
and textual elements together in intelligible wholes. This is one side
of Strindberg’s enterprise as well. However, it is balanced by an
inclination towards dissolution of meaning and decentering of the text.
The opposition to closure makes all works into provisional experiments. The Results of the Investigation The
Field of Autobiography The works discussed are not all autobiographies
stricto sensu. Nevertheless, they pose the crucial questions of the
genre, and they use its typical discourse. To understand this field, I
develop a conception of autobiography with life, subject and forms as
its irreducible, but interacting core aspects. I discuss genres as
formalisations of conventions of reading and writing. In the 1880s, the
dominating norm was still the modern autobiography in the tradition from
Rousseau. I de-scribe its horizon of expectations with reference to
Philippe Lejeune’s definition of autobiography as a retrospective
narrative written by a real person with a focus on his individual life,
in particular the story of his personality. Autobiography is referential.
Although this dissertation does not follow the biographical method in
its zealous mapping of the external referent of autobiography, it
maintains reference as a resistance to the free play of language or THE
RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATION 431 subjectivity. Most of all it
insists on discussing its textual functions. Strindberg deliberately
used autobiographical reference to challenge the dominating regimes of
representation, e.g. by publishing tabooed intimate matters related to
identifiable persons. That is why attempts to read Le Plaidoyer d’un fou as
pure fiction fail. Strindberg explores the boundary between fiction and
autobiography by making reference possible but uncertain. His use of
names and signatures only enhances this uncertainty by making the
contract between text and reader ambiguous. Thus, his texts approach the
purposely paradoxical reference of what some scholars have called
‘autofiction’. Autobiography depicts the routes of a life through a
historical, geographical and social world. What holds it together is,
however, not the referential facts, but the self-interpretation of a subject concerned
with its own identity. This makes autobiography an exclusive form of
life history. Large groups of people have been reluctant to focus on the
individual self. Nevertheless, most authors with literary ambitions
responded to the autobiographical central perspective as the dominating
norm. By the use of it, they were negotiating constitutive cultural
concepts regarding the subject, representation, meaning and identity.
The delegitimation of traditional collective paradigms of interpretation
made autobiography and the biographical novel into instruments for a
modern subject trying to re-define its relationship to its own identity
as well as to the social communities. Meaning was situated in the life
of the individual. The historical conditions of the genre are repeated
in the singular work: the impulse to write typically stems from a loss
of certainty, orientation and identity. Autobiography not only
describes, it also serves as a transformation of fundamental relations.
The writer recapitulates his past in order to create a new identity;
conversion is one of its basic forms. In Tjänstekvinnans son,
e.g., Strindberg drops his faith in God as well as in woman. In his
series of self-representations, Strindberg is in a dialogue with
important modalities of autobiography: the story of the formation of the
writer (Tjänstekvinnans son), the apology of the self (Le Plaidoyer d’un fou), the confession and the conversion (Inferno). He uses the centripetal rhetoric of the genre; in Inferno he even talks of finding his life’s ‘equation’. Nevertheless, he also opposes it by a series of centrifugal movements. In Tjänstekvinnans son,
instead of a synthesis the narrator refers the reader back to the raw
material, i.e. the singular biographical episodes and the many pages of
the book, and forward to future events. Here as elsewhere supplements
and deferment counteract closure. While Han och hon is an epistolary novel without a single perspective, Legender approaches
the memoirs by focusing on other people’s lives. Considered as a whole,
the group of texts that are treated form a series of re-definitions of
the self. Notwithstanding Strindberg’s penchant for mythologising
himself, I emphasise their hypothetical character, which is partly due
to 432 SUMMARY SUMMARY the challenge to the singular,
retrospective perspective caused by seriality itself. The individual
autobiography is not definitive, but only one version of a life
(hi)story. Strindberg’s continual self-revision represents an aspect of
modernity that has subsequently become generalised: the need for
constant renegotiation of identity. His autobiographical endeavour makes
it obvious that autobiography is bound to a modern subjectivity, but
not to early modern notions of autonomy, substance and authenticity. On
the contrary, he repeatedly contests the self, which is the subject and
centre of autobiography. Tjänstekvinnans son programmatically rejects its autonomy, unity and constancy. Whereas Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, Inferno and »Jakob brottas« depict an unstable and decentred subjectivity, Ensam maintains
notions of a centre, which is however empty. Following the movement
beyond the subjective central perspective, the dissertation highlights
the importance of the interaction with others for the writing of
autobiography, a fact that the ideology of the autonomous subject
obscures. As a written and published self-representation, autobiography
is also a communicative act. To become readable, the writing subject
must insert itself into a community of interpretation. Identity needs
social sanction. Very often, an impulse to write is an imbalance in
social relations. Strindberg’s characters feel slighted and denounced.
Their desire for recognition turns into a struggle for power, which
replaces dialectics with identity logics. I show that in this process
the dialogue with others is not perceived as an enriching correction of
subjective one-sidedness, but as an invasion of the ego. In Le Plaidoyer d’un fou other people’s unauthorised tales are motivating forces for Axel’s desire to claim his rights as the author of his own story.
A lack of supremacy leads to a panic enforcement of the principle of
individuation. In Strindberg’s case, the disturbances of the
interpersonal relationships are vehicles of experiments with forms of
self-representation that lead beyond the harmonising
subject-object-dialectics of the Bildungsroman and the Goethean
tradition of autobiography. Beyond Narrative: The Forms of Autobiography
The textual counterpart to this fight against the others is the
distrust with which the texts treated meet traditional literary and
rhetorical means of expression. In what Renza has called a
self-reflexive and ‘paranoid’ mode of writing, autobiographers like
Rousseau and Strindberg try to avoid renouncing their individuality and
being trapped in collective forms. This endeavour manifests itself in a
movement away from the ideal type described by Philippe Lejeune. In a
preface to Tjänstekvinnans son, Strindberg opposes genre
classifications. He uses the third person and makes no autobiographical
pact with the reader. The uncertainty lives on in Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and Inferno, which continually put forward and THE RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATION 433 withdraw
invitations to either autobiographical or fictional readings. The texts
are constantly moving into other genres or discourses: memoirs, diary,
letters, self-portrait, naturalist or allegorical fiction, documentary
or historical study. In the anonymous prose of Ensam, finally,
fiction as well as referentiality reaches a degree zero, and genre
awareness is no longer precarious. The awareness of genre is followed by
an acute awareness of and distrust in the fundamental notions and
matrices of autobiography. The dissertation studies narrative, images
and conceptual discourses as the means, by which the autobiographer
makes meaning. In each work, I describe a double movement: a strong
effort to make life coherent and readable, which is however counteracted
by a denunciation of the very forms used to achieve this effect. In the
field of conceptual discourses such as psychology, theology, sociology,
anthropology or history, I thus focus on Strindberg’s tendency to
denounce the authorities on whom he leans. His relation to his own
frames of reference is revisionist. Similarly, the incommensurability of
the images used frequently opposes their fixation into a personal myth.
In early works like Han och hon, the dissertation even tracks
down an ironic playfulness and self-conscious theatricality in the
presentation of self-images, which serve as a warning against taking the
later identifications and masks for firm and canonised truths. The most
important matrix is narrative. The dissertation particularly
concentrates on the plots that until Inferno serve as the main
instrument of understanding and of textual coherence. In each work, I
observe a departure from narrative time, e.g. the notion of growth and
progression, and from narrative structure. Tjänstekvinnans son contests
the validity of the great narratives belonging to the philosophy of
history. In its own writing of life history, the criticism of causality
and coherence results in a resistance to closure. The compositional
complexity of Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and Inferno shows
that narrating has become problematic. The plot is threatened by
reversibility, as narrative progression is counteracted by a cycle of
fall and regeneration. Beginnings lose their singularity, and endings
are no longer definitive. Strindberg also departs from narrative central
perspective. Scenes detach themselves from the whole and stand alone as
tableaux. In Inferno, the counterpart to this disintegration
is the use of the diary form. In the late works, Strindberg finds an
alternative to narrative time in rhetorical and thematic principles of
organisation. He approaches the spatial forms that became a
ground-breaking part of his post-Inferno dramas, and which Joseph Frank
described as emblematic of modernist prose. A Crisis in Representation
Strindberg’s autobiographical works manifest a strong will to knowledge.
But they also foreground difficulties in the understanding and
articulation of expe- 434 SUMMARY SUMMARY riences. Tradition is
regarded as invalid, the interpretive communities as false. Even
intimate relationships such as marriage or friendship are mistrusted.
The subject can only rely on itself, and this self seems insecure,
discontinuous and labile. The destabilisation of forms, genre, tradition
and self comes to a head in what I label a crisis in representation,
which leads Strindberg beyond the naturalism that he introduced in Tjänstekvinnans son. I read Le Plaidoyer d’un fou as
a transitional work. Its frame of understanding is naturalist; but the
central aspects of representation (perception, memory, interpretation,
articulation) have become so problematic that Axel cannot form a stable
image of his past. His lack of authority is demonstrated by his
hystericised discourse. Desire invades enunciation. Language, his
medium, seems as uncontrollable as woman, who is made a metaphor of the
unrepresentable. – Inferno is about horror, which again points
to the unknown and unrepresentable and makes interpretation imperative.
The relations with the outside world are intellectualised: in a
polymorphous semiotics, things, places, events and persons are made into
signs that have to be read allegorically. The many questions,
hypotheses and conjectures demonstrate the uncertainty common to
narrator and protagonist. God is invoked, but does not stabilise things,
for the field of religion is also decentred, conflictual and
reversible. At the same time analogy becomes a central cognitive
instrument. More than other epistemological paradigms such as
classification or historical progression, it makes knowledge itself into
an infinite series of displacements and condensations. Uncertainty thus
lives on in Strindberg’s experiments with religious forms. The closure
of this crisis consists in a displacement of epistemological
difficulties to ontological conditions. Focus is no longer on the
subject of knowledge, but on the order of the world. Inconstancy is thus
moved from modernity and individual life history to earthly life as
such. The accept of fragmentation, ambivalence, contingency and
instability in Strindberg’s post-inferno works at the same time implies a
departure from realist forms of representation. The dissertation
emphasises that this is no anti-mimetic departure from representation as
such, but rather a demonstration of the inadequacy of existing forms.
The crisis in representation is thus an important motive for the
creation of a modernist poetics. Between Realism and Modernism In order
to place Strindberg’s poetics of self-representation in literary
history, I present theories of realism and modernism. I introduce the
term ‘Strindberg’s impure writing’ to designate the intermediary field
occupied by his autobiographical prose and several other writings.
Impurity is opposed to the dominating view of art, especially to the
demarcations of the aesthetics of autonomy. It manifests THE RESULTS OF
THE INVESTIGATION 435 itself in a hybrid prose that combines
fiction, science and polemics. Strindberg is in a lifelong dialogue with
impure genres as the essay, travel literature, satire and, of course,
autobiography. He deliberately widened the boundaries of what could be
published as a novel, an autobiography or as non-literary
prose. His endeavours are demonstrated by a discussion of his use of a
homemade hybrid genre, the ‘vivisection’ "Hjärnornas kamp". The
dissertation points out the affinity between Strindberg’s impure writing
and literary realism. Among other things, it stresses his
anti-idealism, the radical referentiality of his texts, and the opening
of vocabulary and subject matter toward fields of experience, which
idealism had rejected as low, impure and prosaic. Strindberg’s realism
is never uncontested. On the one hand he tries to do better than Zola in
the field of documentary realism, on the other hand he unmasks realism
as a specific literary rhetoric. He uses well-known reality effects,
but he also breaks down illusions, not least by establishing a friction
with facts. With openly autobiographical references verging on tactless
indiscretion, Le Plaidoyer d’un fou thus challenges not only
the good taste and the beautiful illusions, but also fiction as such.
The crisis in representation leads to a move from realism to modernism. I
define modernism by three characteristics: 1) modernity is its horizon
2) the destabilisation of representation and the mortification of
traditional literary forms are its impulse 3) experiments with new modes
of expression form a central aesthetic effort. From the first pages of Tjänstekvinnans son, which describe national history as a series of permanent transitions, the modernisation of
culture forms the background of the works treated. The delegitimation
of tradition is also decisive for the crisis in representation, which
is, however, reinforced by individual factors that shake existential
confidence: divorces, exile, trials etc. An important side of the destabilised representation is
the writer’s distrust in his own medium. Throughout his
autobiographical writings, Strindberg stresses the faithlessness,
inadequacy and falseness of words. Ensam, e.g., focuses on misunderstandings and incongruities that separate people. In Inferno words
are opaque and hieroglyphic, full of esoteric meaning. They have to be
read allegorically, as some one else is speaking in tongues behind our
communicative intentions. I emphasise Strindberg’s active role in the
destabilisation of representation. By challenging the conventions of
interpretation, communication and literature, he participated in a
modernist negation of tradition. Ödeläggelse (Destruction) he called it, with a term borrowed from Swedenborg. Experimentally he represented the world as strange. To this purpose he confronted the extremes: the borderlines of culture, science, mind and literature. In Inferno, the hero is described as an avant-gardist explorer of an unknown world requiring a new language. Here 436 SUMMARY SUMMARY as elsewhere the annihilation of tradition is seen as the precondition for a new beginning. Just as in A Dream Play, Strindberg is in his self-representations trying to weave new patterns. The desire for literary renewal was already conspicuous when Strindberg declared that he wrote Tjänstekvinnans son in ‘a strange novelistic form’ and as a piece of future literature. Inferno was
launched as an ostentatious introduction of a post-naturalist poetics.
By no longer viewing the facts and objective structures of the past as
compelling determining factors, Ensam finally claimed a release
from realist constraints on poetic imagination. A poet detached from
time and space has the past at his free disposal. Here, the dissertation
sees an affinity to the view of history and the poetics of
postmodernism. This aestheticist freedom is, however, counteracted by
unresolved discords. Ensam is thus not the solution to the
problems of self-representation, but rather one out of several attempts
to break new ground. Like the whole body of works treated, it is
hypothetical and provisional. The muted aestheticism of Ensam is
not the most typically Strindbergian road to modernism. He did not give
up representation; he rather complicated it. Paradoxically, his return
to religion also led to modernism. The effect of his efforts to restore
faith and Christian literary forms was a devaluation of the normative
validity of tradition. His beliefs remained private, peculiar and
incapable of forming a shared frame of reference. That is why allegory
is transported from an ethical and religious register to an intrinsic
aesthetic. Forms borrowed from Christian tradition are thus detached
from their context and made available as artistic devices. Strindberg
set them free as artistic means of expressions – just like he in Ensam claimed
to have his own memories at his disposal as building blocks for his own
constructions. This is how the techniques of his post-Inferno works
were actually appropriated by German expressionism. Recurrent Patterns
The dissertation also points out several continuities between the works,
one of which is instability itself. Another is the use of a
melodramatic style as a non-modernist response to modern problems with
representation. In a separate chapter, I map a ‘melancholy pattern’ as a
dynamic constellation that links together themes and textual strategies
across the works and connects them with Strindberg’s other writings.
Its turning point is a fixation with separations. The dissociation of
the individual from community, which is the drive of autobiography, is
also one of the recurrent points of pain in his works and a factor,
which makes his self-representation so precarious. A symbolic loss of
communities frames his autobiographical suite from Ishmael in Tjänstekvinnans son to Ahasverus in Ensam. His works are full of premature babies and unhappy, weaned children. THE RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATION 437 The
process of separation leaves wounds to be reopened by future departures
from communities. The allergy to divisions thus also affects the
relationship to society, language, history and religion. That makes
individual experiences of loss converge with aspects of modernity,
especially its detachment of the individual from family and other
communities. The recurrence of the same structures in different fields
is exactly what constitutes a pattern. Self-images and social and
textual relations may all be connected with the ambivalence towards
separation. Strindberg’s characters are never closed and complete
entities. He rather depicts them as permeable; notions of invasion and
incorporation mark their bodily, mental and textual relations with
others. The denial of surrogates for the lost paradise leaves its mark
on the scepticism towards everybody who is in an authoratative position.
The dissertation reads Strindberg’s revisionism as well as the
resistance to narrative time in the light of the melancholy pattern. On
the other hand, it insists that these and other facets of his
autobiographical writings cannot be reduced to mere reflections of
psychological dispositions of the author. They are due to so many
private, aesthetic and epochal factors that I refrain from making
unambiguous and totalising explanations, and instead concentrate on
their effects. The Effects of Instability Regardless of their genesis,
the works treated here configure a transition to a post-traditional
modernity characterised by its constant renegotiation of know-ledge,
schemes of understanding and individual identity. The result of
Strindberg’s endeavours is surely no definite truth, neither the faith
of Inferno nor the aestheticism of Ensam, but rather
the mobility and the will to innovation that characterises the whole
series of self-representations and makes every single text transitional.
Provisionality is their hallmark. However, I emphasise that this is not
a renunciation of knowledge and self-representation. On the contrary,
Strindberg incessantly re-shapes versions of life history. The result is
also the texts themselves: a series of hardly domesticable, impure and
instable works that constitute one of Strindberg’s main contributions to
European literature. His autobiographical prose is, considered as a
whole, a great work in its own right. This is not the case in spite of,
but rather because of its impurity and instability.SummaryThe field of investigation In the dissertation Instability and Impurity: Studies in Strindberg’s Autobiographical Prose Writings,
I assume that instability, impurity and lability are characteristic
features of August Strindberg’s writings. Several studies have noticed
these aspects, but mostly casually and without systematic scholarly
discussion. It has been regarded as an aesthetic, cognitive, or even
ethical deficiency in his for – other reasons – canonised works. Here,
however, I propose a systematic discussion of it as a positive quality,
which brings Strindberg in contact with modernism and modern theory of
literature. For this reason, I focus on that which points forward in
Strindberg’s efforts. The dissertation aims at constructing the
modernity of texts that have long been part of literary tradition. It
does not intend to reconstruct Strindberg’s own intentions and contexts,
but rather to detach his works from them. The emphasis is on the
autobiographical texts regarded as texts and not as evidence of the life
of the author. This means that I see instability and impurity as a
textual problem. It is part of a poetics that I describe as Strindberg’s
impure writing, and which I construct by systematic readings in a
limited body of works, here termed ‘Strindberg’s autobiographical prose
writings’. There are several reasons for choosing the auto-biographical
writings as the primary material. Next to the dramas, I see them as
Strindberg’s most important innovative contribution to modern
literature. They raise such radical questions concerning representation
so radically that it is highly regrettable that Strindberg’s endeavours
usually have remained unnoticed in the comprehensive international
research on autobiography, which for several years has given the genre a
privileged position in textual theories. Defining a clear-cut body of
autobiographical works causes difficulties. In itself, autobiography has
been a challenge to generic distinctions, and further problems derive
from Strindberg’s blurring of the borderlines between fiction,
autobiography and other discourses. As an experiment, I have chosen to
discuss the rather heterogeneous group of texts, which Strindberg has
himself retrospectively labelled as autobiographical: the four volumes
of Tjänstekvinnans son (The Son of a Servant, written 1886), Han och hon (He and She, prepared for publication 1886), Le Plaidoyer d’un fou (A Madman’s Defence, written 1887-8), Inferno (1897), Legender (Legends 1898), Klostret/»Karantänmästarns andra berättelse« (»The Cloister/ The Quarantine Master’s Second Story«, 1898/1902) and Ensam (Alone, 1903). THE FIELD OF INVESTIGATION 429 Strindberg
surely wanted to set this group of texts off from the rest of his work,
and editors and scholars have followed his intentions. Nevertheless,
this dissertation assigns them neither a common essence nor distinctive
features that once and for all separate them from texts as
»Kvarstadsresan« or »Hjärnornas kamp«, which Strindberg did not include
on his lists of autobiographical writings. It rather sees the works
treated as instructively divergent. They span genres such as the novel,
short story, evolutionary autobiography, memoirs, self-portrait and
epistolary novel, and they also encompass several narrative modalities.
They thus allow a dialogue between different forms of written
self-representation and the expectations released by a specific genre:
autobiography. Thus, the delimitation of a body of works has other
advantages than the designation of an inner unity. It includes major
works from two fertile periods that also represent an important
transition in literary history: the shift from naturalism to
post-naturalist poetics. A central objective is exactly to construct
Strindberg’s road to modernism through a reading of his wrestling with
the forms of self-representation in an attempt to accommodate them to
the experience of modernity. Unlike the main currents in Strindberg
scholarship that have very often dealt with questions of influence,
biography, his place in the history of ideas and other often
extra-textual matters, the major part of this dissertation features
separate readings in individual works. This is also, what distinguishes
it from Michael Robinson’s inventive opening of the discussion of Strindberg and Autobiography (1986).
His focus is on self-representation rather than on autobiography as a
genre. Works and letters are treated as a total corpus; and quite often,
undoubtedly corresponding with Strindbergian intentions, quotes from
disparate sources are combined. While he tends to describe the
represented life as alienated in the forms of writing, I focus on the
interplay between life, self and writing as the irreducible aspects of
autobiography. In the last decade, comprehensive studies appeared in
some of the works treated here. In Levande död (1996), Ulf Olsson comments on Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and Inferno. The turning point in his readings is, however, allegory, and not self-representation. Self-representation is the pivot of Die Autorfigur (1999) by Wolfgang Behschnitt, who provides extensive readings of Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and especially Tjänstekvinnans son,
but also includes the dramas in his investigation. His description of a
dialectics between construction and negation of images of the author
throughout Strindberg’s works approaches my position; but while he tries
to reconstruct a logic, I also delineate the historical changes in
Strindberg’s method of self-representation and his poetics. That is why I
present readings of the singular works in chronological order. In each
case, I ask questions concerning genre, subjectivity and representation.
Inspired by structural theories, I study the construction of meaning
through narrative, thematic and discursive patterns. The focus is,
however, on the desta- 430 SUMMARY SUMMARY bilisation of these
patterns. Instability occurs in all the texts treated, but it does not
remain the same. In the succession of works, I follow the traces of a
crisis in representation, which reaches a peak in Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, Inferno and the second section of Legender.
As a whole, the dissertation is composed as follows: 1. Introduction 2.
Strindberg and Autobiography (including a discussion of
»Karantänmästarns andra berättelse«) 3. Tjänstekvinnans son 4. Han och hon 5. Le Plaidoyer d’un fou 6. Literary Impurity 7. Inferno 8. Legender 9. A Melancholy Constellation 10. Ensam 11.
Summary. The instability that I regard as constitutive for Strindberg’s
self-representations, is over-determined. It is typical of a tendency
within the genre: the modern, individual autobiography. To
stress his own individuality, the writer opposes the given forms of
representation. Instability is enhanced by individual dispositions like
Strindberg’s strong anxiety of influence and the complex, which I
describe as a melancholy pattern in his texts; but it also points to
displacements in cultural, biographical and aesthetic horizons of
experience caused by modernity. My main interest is not,
however, to explain the genesis of instability, but to study its
results. The most important of these results are the very texts treated:
versatile prose writings that avoid what Adorno called "false
reconciliation". Truly, the writing of autobiography is often an attempt
to find or create stable patterns of meaning by binding biographical
and textual elements together in intelligible wholes. This is one side
of Strindberg’s enterprise as well. However, it is balanced by an
inclination towards dissolution of meaning and decentering of the text.
The opposition to closure makes all works into provisional experiments. The Results of the Investigation The
Field of Autobiography The works discussed are not all autobiographies
stricto sensu. Nevertheless, they pose the crucial questions of the
genre, and they use its typical discourse. To understand this field, I
develop a conception of autobiography with life, subject and forms as
its irreducible, but interacting core aspects. I discuss genres as
formalisations of conventions of reading and writing. In the 1880s, the
dominating norm was still the modern autobiography in the tradition from
Rousseau. I de-scribe its horizon of expectations with reference to
Philippe Lejeune’s definition of autobiography as a retrospective
narrative written by a real person with a focus on his individual life,
in particular the story of his personality. Autobiography is referential.
Although this dissertation does not follow the biographical method in
its zealous mapping of the external referent of autobiography, it
maintains reference as a resistance to the free play of language or THE
RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATION 431 subjectivity. Most of all it
insists on discussing its textual functions. Strindberg deliberately
used autobiographical reference to challenge the dominating regimes of
representation, e.g. by publishing tabooed intimate matters related to
identifiable persons. That is why attempts to read Le Plaidoyer d’un fou as
pure fiction fail. Strindberg explores the boundary between fiction and
autobiography by making reference possible but uncertain. His use of
names and signatures only enhances this uncertainty by making the
contract between text and reader ambiguous. Thus, his texts approach the
purposely paradoxical reference of what some scholars have called
‘autofiction’. Autobiography depicts the routes of a life through a
historical, geographical and social world. What holds it together is,
however, not the referential facts, but the self-interpretation of a subject concerned
with its own identity. This makes autobiography an exclusive form of
life history. Large groups of people have been reluctant to focus on the
individual self. Nevertheless, most authors with literary ambitions
responded to the autobiographical central perspective as the dominating
norm. By the use of it, they were negotiating constitutive cultural
concepts regarding the subject, representation, meaning and identity.
The delegitimation of traditional collective paradigms of interpretation
made autobiography and the biographical novel into instruments for a
modern subject trying to re-define its relationship to its own identity
as well as to the social communities. Meaning was situated in the life
of the individual. The historical conditions of the genre are repeated
in the singular work: the impulse to write typically stems from a loss
of certainty, orientation and identity. Autobiography not only
describes, it also serves as a transformation of fundamental relations.
The writer recapitulates his past in order to create a new identity;
conversion is one of its basic forms. In Tjänstekvinnans son,
e.g., Strindberg drops his faith in God as well as in woman. In his
series of self-representations, Strindberg is in a dialogue with
important modalities of autobiography: the story of the formation of the
writer (Tjänstekvinnans son), the apology of the self (Le Plaidoyer d’un fou), the confession and the conversion (Inferno). He uses the centripetal rhetoric of the genre; in Inferno he even talks of finding his life’s ‘equation’. Nevertheless, he also opposes it by a series of centrifugal movements. In Tjänstekvinnans son,
instead of a synthesis the narrator refers the reader back to the raw
material, i.e. the singular biographical episodes and the many pages of
the book, and forward to future events. Here as elsewhere supplements
and deferment counteract closure. While Han och hon is an epistolary novel without a single perspective, Legender approaches
the memoirs by focusing on other people’s lives. Considered as a whole,
the group of texts that are treated form a series of re-definitions of
the self. Notwithstanding Strindberg’s penchant for mythologising
himself, I emphasise their hypothetical character, which is partly due
to 432 SUMMARY SUMMARY the challenge to the singular,
retrospective perspective caused by seriality itself. The individual
autobiography is not definitive, but only one version of a life
(hi)story. Strindberg’s continual self-revision represents an aspect of
modernity that has subsequently become generalised: the need for
constant renegotiation of identity. His autobiographical endeavour makes
it obvious that autobiography is bound to a modern subjectivity, but
not to early modern notions of autonomy, substance and authenticity. On
the contrary, he repeatedly contests the self, which is the subject and
centre of autobiography. Tjänstekvinnans son programmatically rejects its autonomy, unity and constancy. Whereas Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, Inferno and »Jakob brottas« depict an unstable and decentred subjectivity, Ensam maintains
notions of a centre, which is however empty. Following the movement
beyond the subjective central perspective, the dissertation highlights
the importance of the interaction with others for the writing of
autobiography, a fact that the ideology of the autonomous subject
obscures. As a written and published self-representation, autobiography
is also a communicative act. To become readable, the writing subject
must insert itself into a community of interpretation. Identity needs
social sanction. Very often, an impulse to write is an imbalance in
social relations. Strindberg’s characters feel slighted and denounced.
Their desire for recognition turns into a struggle for power, which
replaces dialectics with identity logics. I show that in this process
the dialogue with others is not perceived as an enriching correction of
subjective one-sidedness, but as an invasion of the ego. In Le Plaidoyer d’un fou other people’s unauthorised tales are motivating forces for Axel’s desire to claim his rights as the author of his own story.
A lack of supremacy leads to a panic enforcement of the principle of
individuation. In Strindberg’s case, the disturbances of the
interpersonal relationships are vehicles of experiments with forms of
self-representation that lead beyond the harmonising
subject-object-dialectics of the Bildungsroman and the Goethean
tradition of autobiography. Beyond Narrative: The Forms of Autobiography
The textual counterpart to this fight against the others is the
distrust with which the texts treated meet traditional literary and
rhetorical means of expression. In what Renza has called a
self-reflexive and ‘paranoid’ mode of writing, autobiographers like
Rousseau and Strindberg try to avoid renouncing their individuality and
being trapped in collective forms. This endeavour manifests itself in a
movement away from the ideal type described by Philippe Lejeune. In a
preface to Tjänstekvinnans son, Strindberg opposes genre
classifications. He uses the third person and makes no autobiographical
pact with the reader. The uncertainty lives on in Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and Inferno, which continually put forward and THE RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATION 433 withdraw
invitations to either autobiographical or fictional readings. The texts
are constantly moving into other genres or discourses: memoirs, diary,
letters, self-portrait, naturalist or allegorical fiction, documentary
or historical study. In the anonymous prose of Ensam, finally,
fiction as well as referentiality reaches a degree zero, and genre
awareness is no longer precarious. The awareness of genre is followed by
an acute awareness of and distrust in the fundamental notions and
matrices of autobiography. The dissertation studies narrative, images
and conceptual discourses as the means, by which the autobiographer
makes meaning. In each work, I describe a double movement: a strong
effort to make life coherent and readable, which is however counteracted
by a denunciation of the very forms used to achieve this effect. In the
field of conceptual discourses such as psychology, theology, sociology,
anthropology or history, I thus focus on Strindberg’s tendency to
denounce the authorities on whom he leans. His relation to his own
frames of reference is revisionist. Similarly, the incommensurability of
the images used frequently opposes their fixation into a personal myth.
In early works like Han och hon, the dissertation even tracks
down an ironic playfulness and self-conscious theatricality in the
presentation of self-images, which serve as a warning against taking the
later identifications and masks for firm and canonised truths. The most
important matrix is narrative. The dissertation particularly
concentrates on the plots that until Inferno serve as the main
instrument of understanding and of textual coherence. In each work, I
observe a departure from narrative time, e.g. the notion of growth and
progression, and from narrative structure. Tjänstekvinnans son contests
the validity of the great narratives belonging to the philosophy of
history. In its own writing of life history, the criticism of causality
and coherence results in a resistance to closure. The compositional
complexity of Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and Inferno shows
that narrating has become problematic. The plot is threatened by
reversibility, as narrative progression is counteracted by a cycle of
fall and regeneration. Beginnings lose their singularity, and endings
are no longer definitive. Strindberg also departs from narrative central
perspective. Scenes detach themselves from the whole and stand alone as
tableaux. In Inferno, the counterpart to this disintegration
is the use of the diary form. In the late works, Strindberg finds an
alternative to narrative time in rhetorical and thematic principles of
organisation. He approaches the spatial forms that became a
ground-breaking part of his post-Inferno dramas, and which Joseph Frank
described as emblematic of modernist prose. A Crisis in Representation
Strindberg’s autobiographical works manifest a strong will to knowledge.
But they also foreground difficulties in the understanding and
articulation of expe- 434 SUMMARY SUMMARY riences. Tradition is
regarded as invalid, the interpretive communities as false. Even
intimate relationships such as marriage or friendship are mistrusted.
The subject can only rely on itself, and this self seems insecure,
discontinuous and labile. The destabilisation of forms, genre, tradition
and self comes to a head in what I label a crisis in representation,
which leads Strindberg beyond the naturalism that he introduced in Tjänstekvinnans son. I read Le Plaidoyer d’un fou as
a transitional work. Its frame of understanding is naturalist; but the
central aspects of representation (perception, memory, interpretation,
articulation) have become so problematic that Axel cannot form a stable
image of his past. His lack of authority is demonstrated by his
hystericised discourse. Desire invades enunciation. Language, his
medium, seems as uncontrollable as woman, who is made a metaphor of the
unrepresentable. – Inferno is about horror, which again points
to the unknown and unrepresentable and makes interpretation imperative.
The relations with the outside world are intellectualised: in a
polymorphous semiotics, things, places, events and persons are made into
signs that have to be read allegorically. The many questions,
hypotheses and conjectures demonstrate the uncertainty common to
narrator and protagonist. God is invoked, but does not stabilise things,
for the field of religion is also decentred, conflictual and
reversible. At the same time analogy becomes a central cognitive
instrument. More than other epistemological paradigms such as
classification or historical progression, it makes knowledge itself into
an infinite series of displacements and condensations. Uncertainty thus
lives on in Strindberg’s experiments with religious forms. The closure
of this crisis consists in a displacement of epistemological
difficulties to ontological conditions. Focus is no longer on the
subject of knowledge, but on the order of the world. Inconstancy is thus
moved from modernity and individual life history to earthly life as
such. The accept of fragmentation, ambivalence, contingency and
instability in Strindberg’s post-inferno works at the same time implies a
departure from realist forms of representation. The dissertation
emphasises that this is no anti-mimetic departure from representation as
such, but rather a demonstration of the inadequacy of existing forms.
The crisis in representation is thus an important motive for the
creation of a modernist poetics. Between Realism and Modernism In order
to place Strindberg’s poetics of self-representation in literary
history, I present theories of realism and modernism. I introduce the
term ‘Strindberg’s impure writing’ to designate the intermediary field
occupied by his autobiographical prose and several other writings.
Impurity is opposed to the dominating view of art, especially to the
demarcations of the aesthetics of autonomy. It manifests THE RESULTS OF
THE INVESTIGATION 435 itself in a hybrid prose that combines
fiction, science and polemics. Strindberg is in a lifelong dialogue with
impure genres as the essay, travel literature, satire and, of course,
autobiography. He deliberately widened the boundaries of what could be
published as a novel, an autobiography or as non-literary
prose. His endeavours are demonstrated by a discussion of his use of a
homemade hybrid genre, the ‘vivisection’ "Hjärnornas kamp". The
dissertation points out the affinity between Strindberg’s impure writing
and literary realism. Among other things, it stresses his
anti-idealism, the radical referentiality of his texts, and the opening
of vocabulary and subject matter toward fields of experience, which
idealism had rejected as low, impure and prosaic. Strindberg’s realism
is never uncontested. On the one hand he tries to do better than Zola in
the field of documentary realism, on the other hand he unmasks realism
as a specific literary rhetoric. He uses well-known reality effects,
but he also breaks down illusions, not least by establishing a friction
with facts. With openly autobiographical references verging on tactless
indiscretion, Le Plaidoyer d’un fou thus challenges not only
the good taste and the beautiful illusions, but also fiction as such.
The crisis in representation leads to a move from realism to modernism. I
define modernism by three characteristics: 1) modernity is its horizon
2) the destabilisation of representation and the mortification of
traditional literary forms are its impulse 3) experiments with new modes
of expression form a central aesthetic effort. From the first pages of Tjänstekvinnans son, which describe national history as a series of permanent transitions, the modernisation of
culture forms the background of the works treated. The delegitimation
of tradition is also decisive for the crisis in representation, which
is, however, reinforced by individual factors that shake existential
confidence: divorces, exile, trials etc. An important side of the destabilised representation is
the writer’s distrust in his own medium. Throughout his
autobiographical writings, Strindberg stresses the faithlessness,
inadequacy and falseness of words. Ensam, e.g., focuses on misunderstandings and incongruities that separate people. In Inferno words
are opaque and hieroglyphic, full of esoteric meaning. They have to be
read allegorically, as some one else is speaking in tongues behind our
communicative intentions. I emphasise Strindberg’s active role in the
destabilisation of representation. By challenging the conventions of
interpretation, communication and literature, he participated in a
modernist negation of tradition. Ödeläggelse (Destruction) he called it, with a term borrowed from Swedenborg. Experimentally he represented the world as strange. To this purpose he confronted the extremes: the borderlines of culture, science, mind and literature. In Inferno, the hero is described as an avant-gardist explorer of an unknown world requiring a new language. Here 436 SUMMARY SUMMARY as elsewhere the annihilation of tradition is seen as the precondition for a new beginning. Just as in A Dream Play, Strindberg is in his self-representations trying to weave new patterns. The desire for literary renewal was already conspicuous when Strindberg declared that he wrote Tjänstekvinnans son in ‘a strange novelistic form’ and as a piece of future literature. Inferno was
launched as an ostentatious introduction of a post-naturalist poetics.
By no longer viewing the facts and objective structures of the past as
compelling determining factors, Ensam finally claimed a release
from realist constraints on poetic imagination. A poet detached from
time and space has the past at his free disposal. Here, the dissertation
sees an affinity to the view of history and the poetics of
postmodernism. This aestheticist freedom is, however, counteracted by
unresolved discords. Ensam is thus not the solution to the
problems of self-representation, but rather one out of several attempts
to break new ground. Like the whole body of works treated, it is
hypothetical and provisional. The muted aestheticism of Ensam is
not the most typically Strindbergian road to modernism. He did not give
up representation; he rather complicated it. Paradoxically, his return
to religion also led to modernism. The effect of his efforts to restore
faith and Christian literary forms was a devaluation of the normative
validity of tradition. His beliefs remained private, peculiar and
incapable of forming a shared frame of reference. That is why allegory
is transported from an ethical and religious register to an intrinsic
aesthetic. Forms borrowed from Christian tradition are thus detached
from their context and made available as artistic devices. Strindberg
set them free as artistic means of expressions – just like he in Ensam claimed
to have his own memories at his disposal as building blocks for his own
constructions. This is how the techniques of his post-Inferno works
were actually appropriated by German expressionism. Recurrent Patterns
The dissertation also points out several continuities between the works,
one of which is instability itself. Another is the use of a
melodramatic style as a non-modernist response to modern problems with
representation. In a separate chapter, I map a ‘melancholy pattern’ as a
dynamic constellation that links together themes and textual strategies
across the works and connects them with Strindberg’s other writings.
Its turning point is a fixation with separations. The dissociation of
the individual from community, which is the drive of autobiography, is
also one of the recurrent points of pain in his works and a factor,
which makes his self-representation so precarious. A symbolic loss of
communities frames his autobiographical suite from Ishmael in Tjänstekvinnans son to Ahasverus in Ensam. His works are full of premature babies and unhappy, weaned children. THE RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATION 437 The
process of separation leaves wounds to be reopened by future departures
from communities. The allergy to divisions thus also affects the
relationship to society, language, history and religion. That makes
individual experiences of loss converge with aspects of modernity,
especially its detachment of the individual from family and other
communities. The recurrence of the same structures in different fields
is exactly what constitutes a pattern. Self-images and social and
textual relations may all be connected with the ambivalence towards
separation. Strindberg’s characters are never closed and complete
entities. He rather depicts them as permeable; notions of invasion and
incorporation mark their bodily, mental and textual relations with
others. The denial of surrogates for the lost paradise leaves its mark
on the scepticism towards everybody who is in an authoratative position.
The dissertation reads Strindberg’s revisionism as well as the
resistance to narrative time in the light of the melancholy pattern. On
the other hand, it insists that these and other facets of his
autobiographical writings cannot be reduced to mere reflections of
psychological dispositions of the author. They are due to so many
private, aesthetic and epochal factors that I refrain from making
unambiguous and totalising explanations, and instead concentrate on
their effects. The Effects of Instability Regardless of their genesis,
the works treated here configure a transition to a post-traditional
modernity characterised by its constant renegotiation of know-ledge,
schemes of understanding and individual identity. The result of
Strindberg’s endeavours is surely no definite truth, neither the faith
of Inferno nor the aestheticism of Ensam, but rather
the mobility and the will to innovation that characterises the whole
series of self-representations and makes every single text transitional.
Provisionality is their hallmark. However, I emphasise that this is not
a renunciation of knowledge and self-representation. On the contrary,
Strindberg incessantly re-shapes versions of life history. The result is
also the texts themselves: a series of hardly domesticable, impure and
instable works that constitute one of Strindberg’s main contributions to
European literature. His autobiographical prose is, considered as a
whole, a great work in its own right. This is not the case in spite of,
but rather because of its impurity and instability.SummaryThe field of investigation In the dissertation Instability and Impurity: Studies in Strindberg’s Autobiographical Prose Writings,
I assume that instability, impurity and lability are characteristic
features of August Strindberg’s writings. Several studies have noticed
these aspects, but mostly casually and without systematic scholarly
discussion. It has been regarded as an aesthetic, cognitive, or even
ethical deficiency in his for – other reasons – canonised works. Here,
however, I propose a systematic discussion of it as a positive quality,
which brings Strindberg in contact with modernism and modern theory of
literature. For this reason, I focus on that which points forward in
Strindberg’s efforts. The dissertation aims at constructing the
modernity of texts that have long been part of literary tradition. It
does not intend to reconstruct Strindberg’s own intentions and contexts,
but rather to detach his works from them. The emphasis is on the
autobiographical texts regarded as texts and not as evidence of the life
of the author. This means that I see instability and impurity as a
textual problem. It is part of a poetics that I describe as Strindberg’s
impure writing, and which I construct by systematic readings in a
limited body of works, here termed ‘Strindberg’s autobiographical prose
writings’. There are several reasons for choosing the auto-biographical
writings as the primary material. Next to the dramas, I see them as
Strindberg’s most important innovative contribution to modern
literature. They raise such radical questions concerning representation
so radically that it is highly regrettable that Strindberg’s endeavours
usually have remained unnoticed in the comprehensive international
research on autobiography, which for several years has given the genre a
privileged position in textual theories. Defining a clear-cut body of
autobiographical works causes difficulties. In itself, autobiography has
been a challenge to generic distinctions, and further problems derive
from Strindberg’s blurring of the borderlines between fiction,
autobiography and other discourses. As an experiment, I have chosen to
discuss the rather heterogeneous group of texts, which Strindberg has
himself retrospectively labelled as autobiographical: the four volumes
of Tjänstekvinnans son (The Son of a Servant, written 1886), Han och hon (He and She, prepared for publication 1886), Le Plaidoyer d’un fou (A Madman’s Defence, written 1887-8), Inferno (1897), Legender (Legends 1898), Klostret/»Karantänmästarns andra berättelse« (»The Cloister/ The Quarantine Master’s Second Story«, 1898/1902) and Ensam (Alone, 1903). THE FIELD OF INVESTIGATION 429 Strindberg
surely wanted to set this group of texts off from the rest of his work,
and editors and scholars have followed his intentions. Nevertheless,
this dissertation assigns them neither a common essence nor distinctive
features that once and for all separate them from texts as
»Kvarstadsresan« or »Hjärnornas kamp«, which Strindberg did not include
on his lists of autobiographical writings. It rather sees the works
treated as instructively divergent. They span genres such as the novel,
short story, evolutionary autobiography, memoirs, self-portrait and
epistolary novel, and they also encompass several narrative modalities.
They thus allow a dialogue between different forms of written
self-representation and the expectations released by a specific genre:
autobiography. Thus, the delimitation of a body of works has other
advantages than the designation of an inner unity. It includes major
works from two fertile periods that also represent an important
transition in literary history: the shift from naturalism to
post-naturalist poetics. A central objective is exactly to construct
Strindberg’s road to modernism through a reading of his wrestling with
the forms of self-representation in an attempt to accommodate them to
the experience of modernity. Unlike the main currents in Strindberg
scholarship that have very often dealt with questions of influence,
biography, his place in the history of ideas and other often
extra-textual matters, the major part of this dissertation features
separate readings in individual works. This is also, what distinguishes
it from Michael Robinson’s inventive opening of the discussion of Strindberg and Autobiography (1986).
His focus is on self-representation rather than on autobiography as a
genre. Works and letters are treated as a total corpus; and quite often,
undoubtedly corresponding with Strindbergian intentions, quotes from
disparate sources are combined. While he tends to describe the
represented life as alienated in the forms of writing, I focus on the
interplay between life, self and writing as the irreducible aspects of
autobiography. In the last decade, comprehensive studies appeared in
some of the works treated here. In Levande död (1996), Ulf Olsson comments on Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and Inferno. The turning point in his readings is, however, allegory, and not self-representation. Self-representation is the pivot of Die Autorfigur (1999) by Wolfgang Behschnitt, who provides extensive readings of Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and especially Tjänstekvinnans son,
but also includes the dramas in his investigation. His description of a
dialectics between construction and negation of images of the author
throughout Strindberg’s works approaches my position; but while he tries
to reconstruct a logic, I also delineate the historical changes in
Strindberg’s method of self-representation and his poetics. That is why I
present readings of the singular works in chronological order. In each
case, I ask questions concerning genre, subjectivity and representation.
Inspired by structural theories, I study the construction of meaning
through narrative, thematic and discursive patterns. The focus is,
however, on the desta- 430 SUMMARY SUMMARY bilisation of these
patterns. Instability occurs in all the texts treated, but it does not
remain the same. In the succession of works, I follow the traces of a
crisis in representation, which reaches a peak in Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, Inferno and the second section of Legender.
As a whole, the dissertation is composed as follows: 1. Introduction 2.
Strindberg and Autobiography (including a discussion of
»Karantänmästarns andra berättelse«) 3. Tjänstekvinnans son 4. Han och hon 5. Le Plaidoyer d’un fou 6. Literary Impurity 7. Inferno 8. Legender 9. A Melancholy Constellation 10. Ensam 11.
Summary. The instability that I regard as constitutive for Strindberg’s
self-representations, is over-determined. It is typical of a tendency
within the genre: the modern, individual autobiography. To
stress his own individuality, the writer opposes the given forms of
representation. Instability is enhanced by individual dispositions like
Strindberg’s strong anxiety of influence and the complex, which I
describe as a melancholy pattern in his texts; but it also points to
displacements in cultural, biographical and aesthetic horizons of
experience caused by modernity. My main interest is not,
however, to explain the genesis of instability, but to study its
results. The most important of these results are the very texts treated:
versatile prose writings that avoid what Adorno called "false
reconciliation". Truly, the writing of autobiography is often an attempt
to find or create stable patterns of meaning by binding biographical
and textual elements together in intelligible wholes. This is one side
of Strindberg’s enterprise as well. However, it is balanced by an
inclination towards dissolution of meaning and decentering of the text.
The opposition to closure makes all works into provisional experiments. The Results of the Investigation The
Field of Autobiography The works discussed are not all autobiographies
stricto sensu. Nevertheless, they pose the crucial questions of the
genre, and they use its typical discourse. To understand this field, I
develop a conception of autobiography with life, subject and forms as
its irreducible, but interacting core aspects. I discuss genres as
formalisations of conventions of reading and writing. In the 1880s, the
dominating norm was still the modern autobiography in the tradition from
Rousseau. I de-scribe its horizon of expectations with reference to
Philippe Lejeune’s definition of autobiography as a retrospective
narrative written by a real person with a focus on his individual life,
in particular the story of his personality. Autobiography is referential.
Although this dissertation does not follow the biographical method in
its zealous mapping of the external referent of autobiography, it
maintains reference as a resistance to the free play of language or THE
RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATION 431 subjectivity. Most of all it
insists on discussing its textual functions. Strindberg deliberately
used autobiographical reference to challenge the dominating regimes of
representation, e.g. by publishing tabooed intimate matters related to
identifiable persons. That is why attempts to read Le Plaidoyer d’un fou as
pure fiction fail. Strindberg explores the boundary between fiction and
autobiography by making reference possible but uncertain. His use of
names and signatures only enhances this uncertainty by making the
contract between text and reader ambiguous. Thus, his texts approach the
purposely paradoxical reference of what some scholars have called
‘autofiction’. Autobiography depicts the routes of a life through a
historical, geographical and social world. What holds it together is,
however, not the referential facts, but the self-interpretation of a subject concerned
with its own identity. This makes autobiography an exclusive form of
life history. Large groups of people have been reluctant to focus on the
individual self. Nevertheless, most authors with literary ambitions
responded to the autobiographical central perspective as the dominating
norm. By the use of it, they were negotiating constitutive cultural
concepts regarding the subject, representation, meaning and identity.
The delegitimation of traditional collective paradigms of interpretation
made autobiography and the biographical novel into instruments for a
modern subject trying to re-define its relationship to its own identity
as well as to the social communities. Meaning was situated in the life
of the individual. The historical conditions of the genre are repeated
in the singular work: the impulse to write typically stems from a loss
of certainty, orientation and identity. Autobiography not only
describes, it also serves as a transformation of fundamental relations.
The writer recapitulates his past in order to create a new identity;
conversion is one of its basic forms. In Tjänstekvinnans son,
e.g., Strindberg drops his faith in God as well as in woman. In his
series of self-representations, Strindberg is in a dialogue with
important modalities of autobiography: the story of the formation of the
writer (Tjänstekvinnans son), the apology of the self (Le Plaidoyer d’un fou), the confession and the conversion (Inferno). He uses the centripetal rhetoric of the genre; in Inferno he even talks of finding his life’s ‘equation’. Nevertheless, he also opposes it by a series of centrifugal movements. In Tjänstekvinnans son,
instead of a synthesis the narrator refers the reader back to the raw
material, i.e. the singular biographical episodes and the many pages of
the book, and forward to future events. Here as elsewhere supplements
and deferment counteract closure. While Han och hon is an epistolary novel without a single perspective, Legender approaches
the memoirs by focusing on other people’s lives. Considered as a whole,
the group of texts that are treated form a series of re-definitions of
the self. Notwithstanding Strindberg’s penchant for mythologising
himself, I emphasise their hypothetical character, which is partly due
to 432 SUMMARY SUMMARY the challenge to the singular,
retrospective perspective caused by seriality itself. The individual
autobiography is not definitive, but only one version of a life
(hi)story. Strindberg’s continual self-revision represents an aspect of
modernity that has subsequently become generalised: the need for
constant renegotiation of identity. His autobiographical endeavour makes
it obvious that autobiography is bound to a modern subjectivity, but
not to early modern notions of autonomy, substance and authenticity. On
the contrary, he repeatedly contests the self, which is the subject and
centre of autobiography. Tjänstekvinnans son programmatically rejects its autonomy, unity and constancy. Whereas Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, Inferno and »Jakob brottas« depict an unstable and decentred subjectivity, Ensam maintains
notions of a centre, which is however empty. Following the movement
beyond the subjective central perspective, the dissertation highlights
the importance of the interaction with others for the writing of
autobiography, a fact that the ideology of the autonomous subject
obscures. As a written and published self-representation, autobiography
is also a communicative act. To become readable, the writing subject
must insert itself into a community of interpretation. Identity needs
social sanction. Very often, an impulse to write is an imbalance in
social relations. Strindberg’s characters feel slighted and denounced.
Their desire for recognition turns into a struggle for power, which
replaces dialectics with identity logics. I show that in this process
the dialogue with others is not perceived as an enriching correction of
subjective one-sidedness, but as an invasion of the ego. In Le Plaidoyer d’un fou other people’s unauthorised tales are motivating forces for Axel’s desire to claim his rights as the author of his own story.
A lack of supremacy leads to a panic enforcement of the principle of
individuation. In Strindberg’s case, the disturbances of the
interpersonal relationships are vehicles of experiments with forms of
self-representation that lead beyond the harmonising
subject-object-dialectics of the Bildungsroman and the Goethean
tradition of autobiography. Beyond Narrative: The Forms of Autobiography
The textual counterpart to this fight against the others is the
distrust with which the texts treated meet traditional literary and
rhetorical means of expression. In what Renza has called a
self-reflexive and ‘paranoid’ mode of writing, autobiographers like
Rousseau and Strindberg try to avoid renouncing their individuality and
being trapped in collective forms. This endeavour manifests itself in a
movement away from the ideal type described by Philippe Lejeune. In a
preface to Tjänstekvinnans son, Strindberg opposes genre
classifications. He uses the third person and makes no autobiographical
pact with the reader. The uncertainty lives on in Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and Inferno, which continually put forward and THE RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATION 433 withdraw
invitations to either autobiographical or fictional readings. The texts
are constantly moving into other genres or discourses: memoirs, diary,
letters, self-portrait, naturalist or allegorical fiction, documentary
or historical study. In the anonymous prose of Ensam, finally,
fiction as well as referentiality reaches a degree zero, and genre
awareness is no longer precarious. The awareness of genre is followed by
an acute awareness of and distrust in the fundamental notions and
matrices of autobiography. The dissertation studies narrative, images
and conceptual discourses as the means, by which the autobiographer
makes meaning. In each work, I describe a double movement: a strong
effort to make life coherent and readable, which is however counteracted
by a denunciation of the very forms used to achieve this effect. In the
field of conceptual discourses such as psychology, theology, sociology,
anthropology or history, I thus focus on Strindberg’s tendency to
denounce the authorities on whom he leans. His relation to his own
frames of reference is revisionist. Similarly, the incommensurability of
the images used frequently opposes their fixation into a personal myth.
In early works like Han och hon, the dissertation even tracks
down an ironic playfulness and self-conscious theatricality in the
presentation of self-images, which serve as a warning against taking the
later identifications and masks for firm and canonised truths. The most
important matrix is narrative. The dissertation particularly
concentrates on the plots that until Inferno serve as the main
instrument of understanding and of textual coherence. In each work, I
observe a departure from narrative time, e.g. the notion of growth and
progression, and from narrative structure. Tjänstekvinnans son contests
the validity of the great narratives belonging to the philosophy of
history. In its own writing of life history, the criticism of causality
and coherence results in a resistance to closure. The compositional
complexity of Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and Inferno shows
that narrating has become problematic. The plot is threatened by
reversibility, as narrative progression is counteracted by a cycle of
fall and regeneration. Beginnings lose their singularity, and endings
are no longer definitive. Strindberg also departs from narrative central
perspective. Scenes detach themselves from the whole and stand alone as
tableaux. In Inferno, the counterpart to this disintegration
is the use of the diary form. In the late works, Strindberg finds an
alternative to narrative time in rhetorical and thematic principles of
organisation. He approaches the spatial forms that became a
ground-breaking part of his post-Inferno dramas, and which Joseph Frank
described as emblematic of modernist prose. A Crisis in Representation
Strindberg’s autobiographical works manifest a strong will to knowledge.
But they also foreground difficulties in the understanding and
articulation of expe- 434 SUMMARY SUMMARY riences. Tradition is
regarded as invalid, the interpretive communities as false. Even
intimate relationships such as marriage or friendship are mistrusted.
The subject can only rely on itself, and this self seems insecure,
discontinuous and labile. The destabilisation of forms, genre, tradition
and self comes to a head in what I label a crisis in representation,
which leads Strindberg beyond the naturalism that he introduced in Tjänstekvinnans son. I read Le Plaidoyer d’un fou as
a transitional work. Its frame of understanding is naturalist; but the
central aspects of representation (perception, memory, interpretation,
articulation) have become so problematic that Axel cannot form a stable
image of his past. His lack of authority is demonstrated by his
hystericised discourse. Desire invades enunciation. Language, his
medium, seems as uncontrollable as woman, who is made a metaphor of the
unrepresentable. – Inferno is about horror, which again points
to the unknown and unrepresentable and makes interpretation imperative.
The relations with the outside world are intellectualised: in a
polymorphous semiotics, things, places, events and persons are made into
signs that have to be read allegorically. The many questions,
hypotheses and conjectures demonstrate the uncertainty common to
narrator and protagonist. God is invoked, but does not stabilise things,
for the field of religion is also decentred, conflictual and
reversible. At the same time analogy becomes a central cognitive
instrument. More than other epistemological paradigms such as
classification or historical progression, it makes knowledge itself into
an infinite series of displacements and condensations. Uncertainty thus
lives on in Strindberg’s experiments with religious forms. The closure
of this crisis consists in a displacement of epistemological
difficulties to ontological conditions. Focus is no longer on the
subject of knowledge, but on the order of the world. Inconstancy is thus
moved from modernity and individual life history to earthly life as
such. The accept of fragmentation, ambivalence, contingency and
instability in Strindberg’s post-inferno works at the same time implies a
departure from realist forms of representation. The dissertation
emphasises that this is no anti-mimetic departure from representation as
such, but rather a demonstration of the inadequacy of existing forms.
The crisis in representation is thus an important motive for the
creation of a modernist poetics. Between Realism and Modernism In order
to place Strindberg’s poetics of self-representation in literary
history, I present theories of realism and modernism. I introduce the
term ‘Strindberg’s impure writing’ to designate the intermediary field
occupied by his autobiographical prose and several other writings.
Impurity is opposed to the dominating view of art, especially to the
demarcations of the aesthetics of autonomy. It manifests THE RESULTS OF
THE INVESTIGATION 435 itself in a hybrid prose that combines
fiction, science and polemics. Strindberg is in a lifelong dialogue with
impure genres as the essay, travel literature, satire and, of course,
autobiography. He deliberately widened the boundaries of what could be
published as a novel, an autobiography or as non-literary
prose. His endeavours are demonstrated by a discussion of his use of a
homemade hybrid genre, the ‘vivisection’ "Hjärnornas kamp". The
dissertation points out the affinity between Strindberg’s impure writing
and literary realism. Among other things, it stresses his
anti-idealism, the radical referentiality of his texts, and the opening
of vocabulary and subject matter toward fields of experience, which
idealism had rejected as low, impure and prosaic. Strindberg’s realism
is never uncontested. On the one hand he tries to do better than Zola in
the field of documentary realism, on the other hand he unmasks realism
as a specific literary rhetoric. He uses well-known reality effects,
but he also breaks down illusions, not least by establishing a friction
with facts. With openly autobiographical references verging on tactless
indiscretion, Le Plaidoyer d’un fou thus challenges not only
the good taste and the beautiful illusions, but also fiction as such.
The crisis in representation leads to a move from realism to modernism. I
define modernism by three characteristics: 1) modernity is its horizon
2) the destabilisation of representation and the mortification of
traditional literary forms are its impulse 3) experiments with new modes
of expression form a central aesthetic effort. From the first pages of Tjänstekvinnans son, which describe national history as a series of permanent transitions, the modernisation of
culture forms the background of the works treated. The delegitimation
of tradition is also decisive for the crisis in representation, which
is, however, reinforced by individual factors that shake existential
confidence: divorces, exile, trials etc. An important side of the destabilised representation is
the writer’s distrust in his own medium. Throughout his
autobiographical writings, Strindberg stresses the faithlessness,
inadequacy and falseness of words. Ensam, e.g., focuses on misunderstandings and incongruities that separate people. In Inferno words
are opaque and hieroglyphic, full of esoteric meaning. They have to be
read allegorically, as some one else is speaking in tongues behind our
communicative intentions. I emphasise Strindberg’s active role in the
destabilisation of representation. By challenging the conventions of
interpretation, communication and literature, he participated in a
modernist negation of tradition. Ödeläggelse (Destruction) he called it, with a term borrowed from Swedenborg. Experimentally he represented the world as strange. To this purpose he confronted the extremes: the borderlines of culture, science, mind and literature. In Inferno, the hero is described as an avant-gardist explorer of an unknown world requiring a new language. Here 436 SUMMARY SUMMARY as elsewhere the annihilation of tradition is seen as the precondition for a new beginning. Just as in A Dream Play, Strindberg is in his self-representations trying to weave new patterns. The desire for literary renewal was already conspicuous when Strindberg declared that he wrote Tjänstekvinnans son in ‘a strange novelistic form’ and as a piece of future literature. Inferno was
launched as an ostentatious introduction of a post-naturalist poetics.
By no longer viewing the facts and objective structures of the past as
compelling determining factors, Ensam finally claimed a release
from realist constraints on poetic imagination. A poet detached from
time and space has the past at his free disposal. Here, the dissertation
sees an affinity to the view of history and the poetics of
postmodernism. This aestheticist freedom is, however, counteracted by
unresolved discords. Ensam is thus not the solution to the
problems of self-representation, but rather one out of several attempts
to break new ground. Like the whole body of works treated, it is
hypothetical and provisional. The muted aestheticism of Ensam is
not the most typically Strindbergian road to modernism. He did not give
up representation; he rather complicated it. Paradoxically, his return
to religion also led to modernism. The effect of his efforts to restore
faith and Christian literary forms was a devaluation of the normative
validity of tradition. His beliefs remained private, peculiar and
incapable of forming a shared frame of reference. That is why allegory
is transported from an ethical and religious register to an intrinsic
aesthetic. Forms borrowed from Christian tradition are thus detached
from their context and made available as artistic devices. Strindberg
set them free as artistic means of expressions – just like he in Ensam claimed
to have his own memories at his disposal as building blocks for his own
constructions. This is how the techniques of his post-Inferno works
were actually appropriated by German expressionism. Recurrent Patterns
The dissertation also points out several continuities between the works,
one of which is instability itself. Another is the use of a
melodramatic style as a non-modernist response to modern problems with
representation. In a separate chapter, I map a ‘melancholy pattern’ as a
dynamic constellation that links together themes and textual strategies
across the works and connects them with Strindberg’s other writings.
Its turning point is a fixation with separations. The dissociation of
the individual from community, which is the drive of autobiography, is
also one of the recurrent points of pain in his works and a factor,
which makes his self-representation so precarious. A symbolic loss of
communities frames his autobiographical suite from Ishmael in Tjänstekvinnans son to Ahasverus in Ensam. His works are full of premature babies and unhappy, weaned children. THE RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATION 437 The
process of separation leaves wounds to be reopened by future departures
from communities. The allergy to divisions thus also affects the
relationship to society, language, history and religion. That makes
individual experiences of loss converge with aspects of modernity,
especially its detachment of the individual from family and other
communities. The recurrence of the same structures in different fields
is exactly what constitutes a pattern. Self-images and social and
textual relations may all be connected with the ambivalence towards
separation. Strindberg’s characters are never closed and complete
entities. He rather depicts them as permeable; notions of invasion and
incorporation mark their bodily, mental and textual relations with
others. The denial of surrogates for the lost paradise leaves its mark
on the scepticism towards everybody who is in an authoratative position.
The dissertation reads Strindberg’s revisionism as well as the
resistance to narrative time in the light of the melancholy pattern. On
the other hand, it insists that these and other facets of his
autobiographical writings cannot be reduced to mere reflections of
psychological dispositions of the author. They are due to so many
private, aesthetic and epochal factors that I refrain from making
unambiguous and totalising explanations, and instead concentrate on
their effects. The Effects of Instability Regardless of their genesis,
the works treated here configure a transition to a post-traditional
modernity characterised by its constant renegotiation of know-ledge,
schemes of understanding and individual identity. The result of
Strindberg’s endeavours is surely no definite truth, neither the faith
of Inferno nor the aestheticism of Ensam, but rather
the mobility and the will to innovation that characterises the whole
series of self-representations and makes every single text transitional.
Provisionality is their hallmark. However, I emphasise that this is not
a renunciation of knowledge and self-representation. On the contrary,
Strindberg incessantly re-shapes versions of life history. The result is
also the texts themselves: a series of hardly domesticable, impure and
instable works that constitute one of Strindberg’s main contributions to
European literature. His autobiographical prose is, considered as a
whole, a great work in its own right. This is not the case in spite of,
but rather because of its impurity and instability.SummaryThe field of investigation In the dissertation Instability and Impurity: Studies in Strindberg’s Autobiographical Prose Writings,
I assume that instability, impurity and lability are characteristic
features of August Strindberg’s writings. Several studies have noticed
these aspects, but mostly casually and without systematic scholarly
discussion. It has been regarded as an aesthetic, cognitive, or even
ethical deficiency in his for – other reasons – canonised works. Here,
however, I propose a systematic discussion of it as a positive quality,
which brings Strindberg in contact with modernism and modern theory of
literature. For this reason, I focus on that which points forward in
Strindberg’s efforts. The dissertation aims at constructing the
modernity of texts that have long been part of literary tradition. It
does not intend to reconstruct Strindberg’s own intentions and contexts,
but rather to detach his works from them. The emphasis is on the
autobiographical texts regarded as texts and not as evidence of the life
of the author. This means that I see instability and impurity as a
textual problem. It is part of a poetics that I describe as Strindberg’s
impure writing, and which I construct by systematic readings in a
limited body of works, here termed ‘Strindberg’s autobiographical prose
writings’. There are several reasons for choosing the auto-biographical
writings as the primary material. Next to the dramas, I see them as
Strindberg’s most important innovative contribution to modern
literature. They raise such radical questions concerning representation
so radically that it is highly regrettable that Strindberg’s endeavours
usually have remained unnoticed in the comprehensive international
research on autobiography, which for several years has given the genre a
privileged position in textual theories. Defining a clear-cut body of
autobiographical works causes difficulties. In itself, autobiography has
been a challenge to generic distinctions, and further problems derive
from Strindberg’s blurring of the borderlines between fiction,
autobiography and other discourses. As an experiment, I have chosen to
discuss the rather heterogeneous group of texts, which Strindberg has
himself retrospectively labelled as autobiographical: the four volumes
of Tjänstekvinnans son (The Son of a Servant, written 1886), Han och hon (He and She, prepared for publication 1886), Le Plaidoyer d’un fou (A Madman’s Defence, written 1887-8), Inferno (1897), Legender (Legends 1898), Klostret/»Karantänmästarns andra berättelse« (»The Cloister/ The Quarantine Master’s Second Story«, 1898/1902) and Ensam (Alone, 1903). THE FIELD OF INVESTIGATION 429 Strindberg
surely wanted to set this group of texts off from the rest of his work,
and editors and scholars have followed his intentions. Nevertheless,
this dissertation assigns them neither a common essence nor distinctive
features that once and for all separate them from texts as
»Kvarstadsresan« or »Hjärnornas kamp«, which Strindberg did not include
on his lists of autobiographical writings. It rather sees the works
treated as instructively divergent. They span genres such as the novel,
short story, evolutionary autobiography, memoirs, self-portrait and
epistolary novel, and they also encompass several narrative modalities.
They thus allow a dialogue between different forms of written
self-representation and the expectations released by a specific genre:
autobiography. Thus, the delimitation of a body of works has other
advantages than the designation of an inner unity. It includes major
works from two fertile periods that also represent an important
transition in literary history: the shift from naturalism to
post-naturalist poetics. A central objective is exactly to construct
Strindberg’s road to modernism through a reading of his wrestling with
the forms of self-representation in an attempt to accommodate them to
the experience of modernity. Unlike the main currents in Strindberg
scholarship that have very often dealt with questions of influence,
biography, his place in the history of ideas and other often
extra-textual matters, the major part of this dissertation features
separate readings in individual works. This is also, what distinguishes
it from Michael Robinson’s inventive opening of the discussion of Strindberg and Autobiography (1986).
His focus is on self-representation rather than on autobiography as a
genre. Works and letters are treated as a total corpus; and quite often,
undoubtedly corresponding with Strindbergian intentions, quotes from
disparate sources are combined. While he tends to describe the
represented life as alienated in the forms of writing, I focus on the
interplay between life, self and writing as the irreducible aspects of
autobiography. In the last decade, comprehensive studies appeared in
some of the works treated here. In Levande död (1996), Ulf Olsson comments on Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and Inferno. The turning point in his readings is, however, allegory, and not self-representation. Self-representation is the pivot of Die Autorfigur (1999) by Wolfgang Behschnitt, who provides extensive readings of Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and especially Tjänstekvinnans son,
but also includes the dramas in his investigation. His description of a
dialectics between construction and negation of images of the author
throughout Strindberg’s works approaches my position; but while he tries
to reconstruct a logic, I also delineate the historical changes in
Strindberg’s method of self-representation and his poetics. That is why I
present readings of the singular works in chronological order. In each
case, I ask questions concerning genre, subjectivity and representation.
Inspired by structural theories, I study the construction of meaning
through narrative, thematic and discursive patterns. The focus is,
however, on the desta- 430 SUMMARY SUMMARY bilisation of these
patterns. Instability occurs in all the texts treated, but it does not
remain the same. In the succession of works, I follow the traces of a
crisis in representation, which reaches a peak in Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, Inferno and the second section of Legender.
As a whole, the dissertation is composed as follows: 1. Introduction 2.
Strindberg and Autobiography (including a discussion of
»Karantänmästarns andra berättelse«) 3. Tjänstekvinnans son 4. Han och hon 5. Le Plaidoyer d’un fou 6. Literary Impurity 7. Inferno 8. Legender 9. A Melancholy Constellation 10. Ensam 11.
Summary. The instability that I regard as constitutive for Strindberg’s
self-representations, is over-determined. It is typical of a tendency
within the genre: the modern, individual autobiography. To
stress his own individuality, the writer opposes the given forms of
representation. Instability is enhanced by individual dispositions like
Strindberg’s strong anxiety of influence and the complex, which I
describe as a melancholy pattern in his texts; but it also points to
displacements in cultural, biographical and aesthetic horizons of
experience caused by modernity. My main interest is not,
however, to explain the genesis of instability, but to study its
results. The most important of these results are the very texts treated:
versatile prose writings that avoid what Adorno called "false
reconciliation". Truly, the writing of autobiography is often an attempt
to find or create stable patterns of meaning by binding biographical
and textual elements together in intelligible wholes. This is one side
of Strindberg’s enterprise as well. However, it is balanced by an
inclination towards dissolution of meaning and decentering of the text.
The opposition to closure makes all works into provisional experiments. The Results of the Investigation The
Field of Autobiography The works discussed are not all autobiographies
stricto sensu. Nevertheless, they pose the crucial questions of the
genre, and they use its typical discourse. To understand this field, I
develop a conception of autobiography with life, subject and forms as
its irreducible, but interacting core aspects. I discuss genres as
formalisations of conventions of reading and writing. In the 1880s, the
dominating norm was still the modern autobiography in the tradition from
Rousseau. I de-scribe its horizon of expectations with reference to
Philippe Lejeune’s definition of autobiography as a retrospective
narrative written by a real person with a focus on his individual life,
in particular the story of his personality. Autobiography is referential.
Although this dissertation does not follow the biographical method in
its zealous mapping of the external referent of autobiography, it
maintains reference as a resistance to the free play of language or THE
RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATION 431 subjectivity. Most of all it
insists on discussing its textual functions. Strindberg deliberately
used autobiographical reference to challenge the dominating regimes of
representation, e.g. by publishing tabooed intimate matters related to
identifiable persons. That is why attempts to read Le Plaidoyer d’un fou as
pure fiction fail. Strindberg explores the boundary between fiction and
autobiography by making reference possible but uncertain. His use of
names and signatures only enhances this uncertainty by making the
contract between text and reader ambiguous. Thus, his texts approach the
purposely paradoxical reference of what some scholars have called
‘autofiction’. Autobiography depicts the routes of a life through a
historical, geographical and social world. What holds it together is,
however, not the referential facts, but the self-interpretation of a subject concerned
with its own identity. This makes autobiography an exclusive form of
life history. Large groups of people have been reluctant to focus on the
individual self. Nevertheless, most authors with literary ambitions
responded to the autobiographical central perspective as the dominating
norm. By the use of it, they were negotiating constitutive cultural
concepts regarding the subject, representation, meaning and identity.
The delegitimation of traditional collective paradigms of interpretation
made autobiography and the biographical novel into instruments for a
modern subject trying to re-define its relationship to its own identity
as well as to the social communities. Meaning was situated in the life
of the individual. The historical conditions of the genre are repeated
in the singular work: the impulse to write typically stems from a loss
of certainty, orientation and identity. Autobiography not only
describes, it also serves as a transformation of fundamental relations.
The writer recapitulates his past in order to create a new identity;
conversion is one of its basic forms. In Tjänstekvinnans son,
e.g., Strindberg drops his faith in God as well as in woman. In his
series of self-representations, Strindberg is in a dialogue with
important modalities of autobiography: the story of the formation of the
writer (Tjänstekvinnans son), the apology of the self (Le Plaidoyer d’un fou), the confession and the conversion (Inferno). He uses the centripetal rhetoric of the genre; in Inferno he even talks of finding his life’s ‘equation’. Nevertheless, he also opposes it by a series of centrifugal movements. In Tjänstekvinnans son,
instead of a synthesis the narrator refers the reader back to the raw
material, i.e. the singular biographical episodes and the many pages of
the book, and forward to future events. Here as elsewhere supplements
and deferment counteract closure. While Han och hon is an epistolary novel without a single perspective, Legender approaches
the memoirs by focusing on other people’s lives. Considered as a whole,
the group of texts that are treated form a series of re-definitions of
the self. Notwithstanding Strindberg’s penchant for mythologising
himself, I emphasise their hypothetical character, which is partly due
to 432 SUMMARY SUMMARY the challenge to the singular,
retrospective perspective caused by seriality itself. The individual
autobiography is not definitive, but only one version of a life
(hi)story. Strindberg’s continual self-revision represents an aspect of
modernity that has subsequently become generalised: the need for
constant renegotiation of identity. His autobiographical endeavour makes
it obvious that autobiography is bound to a modern subjectivity, but
not to early modern notions of autonomy, substance and authenticity. On
the contrary, he repeatedly contests the self, which is the subject and
centre of autobiography. Tjänstekvinnans son programmatically rejects its autonomy, unity and constancy. Whereas Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, Inferno and »Jakob brottas« depict an unstable and decentred subjectivity, Ensam maintains
notions of a centre, which is however empty. Following the movement
beyond the subjective central perspective, the dissertation highlights
the importance of the interaction with others for the writing of
autobiography, a fact that the ideology of the autonomous subject
obscures. As a written and published self-representation, autobiography
is also a communicative act. To become readable, the writing subject
must insert itself into a community of interpretation. Identity needs
social sanction. Very often, an impulse to write is an imbalance in
social relations. Strindberg’s characters feel slighted and denounced.
Their desire for recognition turns into a struggle for power, which
replaces dialectics with identity logics. I show that in this process
the dialogue with others is not perceived as an enriching correction of
subjective one-sidedness, but as an invasion of the ego. In Le Plaidoyer d’un fou other people’s unauthorised tales are motivating forces for Axel’s desire to claim his rights as the author of his own story.
A lack of supremacy leads to a panic enforcement of the principle of
individuation. In Strindberg’s case, the disturbances of the
interpersonal relationships are vehicles of experiments with forms of
self-representation that lead beyond the harmonising
subject-object-dialectics of the Bildungsroman and the Goethean
tradition of autobiography. Beyond Narrative: The Forms of Autobiography
The textual counterpart to this fight against the others is the
distrust with which the texts treated meet traditional literary and
rhetorical means of expression. In what Renza has called a
self-reflexive and ‘paranoid’ mode of writing, autobiographers like
Rousseau and Strindberg try to avoid renouncing their individuality and
being trapped in collective forms. This endeavour manifests itself in a
movement away from the ideal type described by Philippe Lejeune. In a
preface to Tjänstekvinnans son, Strindberg opposes genre
classifications. He uses the third person and makes no autobiographical
pact with the reader. The uncertainty lives on in Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and Inferno, which continually put forward and THE RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATION 433 withdraw
invitations to either autobiographical or fictional readings. The texts
are constantly moving into other genres or discourses: memoirs, diary,
letters, self-portrait, naturalist or allegorical fiction, documentary
or historical study. In the anonymous prose of Ensam, finally,
fiction as well as referentiality reaches a degree zero, and genre
awareness is no longer precarious. The awareness of genre is followed by
an acute awareness of and distrust in the fundamental notions and
matrices of autobiography. The dissertation studies narrative, images
and conceptual discourses as the means, by which the autobiographer
makes meaning. In each work, I describe a double movement: a strong
effort to make life coherent and readable, which is however counteracted
by a denunciation of the very forms used to achieve this effect. In the
field of conceptual discourses such as psychology, theology, sociology,
anthropology or history, I thus focus on Strindberg’s tendency to
denounce the authorities on whom he leans. His relation to his own
frames of reference is revisionist. Similarly, the incommensurability of
the images used frequently opposes their fixation into a personal myth.
In early works like Han och hon, the dissertation even tracks
down an ironic playfulness and self-conscious theatricality in the
presentation of self-images, which serve as a warning against taking the
later identifications and masks for firm and canonised truths. The most
important matrix is narrative. The dissertation particularly
concentrates on the plots that until Inferno serve as the main
instrument of understanding and of textual coherence. In each work, I
observe a departure from narrative time, e.g. the notion of growth and
progression, and from narrative structure. Tjänstekvinnans son contests
the validity of the great narratives belonging to the philosophy of
history. In its own writing of life history, the criticism of causality
and coherence results in a resistance to closure. The compositional
complexity of Le Plaidoyer d’un fou and Inferno shows
that narrating has become problematic. The plot is threatened by
reversibility, as narrative progression is counteracted by a cycle of
fall and regeneration. Beginnings lose their singularity, and endings
are no longer definitive. Strindberg also departs from narrative central
perspective. Scenes detach themselves from the whole and stand alone as
tableaux. In Inferno, the counterpart to this disintegration
is the use of the diary form. In the late works, Strindberg finds an
alternative to narrative time in rhetorical and thematic principles of
organisation. He approaches the spatial forms that became a
ground-breaking part of his post-Inferno dramas, and which Joseph Frank
described as emblematic of modernist prose. A Crisis in Representation
Strindberg’s autobiographical works manifest a strong will to knowledge.
But they also foreground difficulties in the understanding and
articulation of expe- 434 SUMMARY SUMMARY riences. Tradition is
regarded as invalid, the interpretive communities as false. Even
intimate relationships such as marriage or friendship are mistrusted.
The subject can only rely on itself, and this self seems insecure,
discontinuous and labile. The destabilisation of forms, genre, tradition
and self comes to a head in what I label a crisis in representation,
which leads Strindberg beyond the naturalism that he introduced in Tjänstekvinnans son. I read Le Plaidoyer d’un fou as
a transitional work. Its frame of understanding is naturalist; but the
central aspects of representation (perception, memory, interpretation,
articulation) have become so problematic that Axel cannot form a stable
image of his past. His lack of authority is demonstrated by his
hystericised discourse. Desire invades enunciation. Language, his
medium, seems as uncontrollable as woman, who is made a metaphor of the
unrepresentable. – Inferno is about horror, which again points
to the unknown and unrepresentable and makes interpretation imperative.
The relations with the outside world are intellectualised: in a
polymorphous semiotics, things, places, events and persons are made into
signs that have to be read allegorically. The many questions,
hypotheses and conjectures demonstrate the uncertainty common to
narrator and protagonist. God is invoked, but does not stabilise things,
for the field of religion is also decentred, conflictual and
reversible. At the same time analogy becomes a central cognitive
instrument. More than other epistemological paradigms such as
classification or historical progression, it makes knowledge itself into
an infinite series of displacements and condensations. Uncertainty thus
lives on in Strindberg’s experiments with religious forms. The closure
of this crisis consists in a displacement of epistemological
difficulties to ontological conditions. Focus is no longer on the
subject of knowledge, but on the order of the world. Inconstancy is thus
moved from modernity and individual life history to earthly life as
such. The accept of fragmentation, ambivalence, contingency and
instability in Strindberg’s post-inferno works at the same time implies a
departure from realist forms of representation. The dissertation
emphasises that this is no anti-mimetic departure from representation as
such, but rather a demonstration of the inadequacy of existing forms.
The crisis in representation is thus an important motive for the
creation of a modernist poetics. Between Realism and Modernism In order
to place Strindberg’s poetics of self-representation in literary
history, I present theories of realism and modernism. I introduce the
term ‘Strindberg’s impure writing’ to designate the intermediary field
occupied by his autobiographical prose and several other writings.
Impurity is opposed to the dominating view of art, especially to the
demarcations of the aesthetics of autonomy. It manifests THE RESULTS OF
THE INVESTIGATION 435 itself in a hybrid prose that combines
fiction, science and polemics. Strindberg is in a lifelong dialogue with
impure genres as the essay, travel literature, satire and, of course,
autobiography. He deliberately widened the boundaries of what could be
published as a novel, an autobiography or as non-literary
prose. His endeavours are demonstrated by a discussion of his use of a
homemade hybrid genre, the ‘vivisection’ "Hjärnornas kamp". The
dissertation points out the affinity between Strindberg’s impure writing
and literary realism. Among other things, it stresses his
anti-idealism, the radical referentiality of his texts, and the opening
of vocabulary and subject matter toward fields of experience, which
idealism had rejected as low, impure and prosaic. Strindberg’s realism
is never uncontested. On the one hand he tries to do better than Zola in
the field of documentary realism, on the other hand he unmasks realism
as a specific literary rhetoric. He uses well-known reality effects,
but he also breaks down illusions, not least by establishing a friction
with facts. With openly autobiographical references verging on tactless
indiscretion, Le Plaidoyer d’un fou thus challenges not only
the good taste and the beautiful illusions, but also fiction as such.
The crisis in representation leads to a move from realism to modernism. I
define modernism by three characteristics: 1) modernity is its horizon
2) the destabilisation of representation and the mortification of
traditional literary forms are its impulse 3) experiments with new modes
of expression form a central aesthetic effort. From the first pages of Tjänstekvinnans son, which describe national history as a series of permanent transitions, the modernisation of
culture forms the background of the works treated. The delegitimation
of tradition is also decisive for the crisis in representation, which
is, however, reinforced by individual factors that shake existential
confidence: divorces, exile, trials etc. An important side of the destabilised representation is
the writer’s distrust in his own medium. Throughout his
autobiographical writings, Strindberg stresses the faithlessness,
inadequacy and falseness of words. Ensam, e.g., focuses on misunderstandings and incongruities that separate people. In Inferno words
are opaque and hieroglyphic, full of esoteric meaning. They have to be
read allegorically, as some one else is speaking in tongues behind our
communicative intentions. I emphasise Strindberg’s active role in the
destabilisation of representation. By challenging the conventions of
interpretation, communication and literature, he participated in a
modernist negation of tradition. Ödeläggelse (Destruction) he called it, with a term borrowed from Swedenborg. Experimentally he represented the world as strange. To this purpose he confronted the extremes: the borderlines of culture, science, mind and literature. In Inferno, the hero is described as an avant-gardist explorer of an unknown world requiring a new language. Here 436 SUMMARY SUMMARY as elsewhere the annihilation of tradition is seen as the precondition for a new beginning. Just as in A Dream Play, Strindberg is in his self-representations trying to weave new patterns. The desire for literary renewal was already conspicuous when Strindberg declared that he wrote Tjänstekvinnans son in ‘a strange novelistic form’ and as a piece of future literature. Inferno was
launched as an ostentatious introduction of a post-naturalist poetics.
By no longer viewing the facts and objective structures of the past as
compelling determining factors, Ensam finally claimed a release
from realist constraints on poetic imagination. A poet detached from
time and space has the past at his free disposal. Here, the dissertation
sees an affinity to the view of history and the poetics of
postmodernism. This aestheticist freedom is, however, counteracted by
unresolved discords. Ensam is thus not the solution to the
problems of self-representation, but rather one out of several attempts
to break new ground. Like the whole body of works treated, it is
hypothetical and provisional. The muted aestheticism of Ensam is
not the most typically Strindbergian road to modernism. He did not give
up representation; he rather complicated it. Paradoxically, his return
to religion also led to modernism. The effect of his efforts to restore
faith and Christian literary forms was a devaluation of the normative
validity of tradition. His beliefs remained private, peculiar and
incapable of forming a shared frame of reference. That is why allegory
is transported from an ethical and religious register to an intrinsic
aesthetic. Forms borrowed from Christian tradition are thus detached
from their context and made available as artistic devices. Strindberg
set them free as artistic means of expressions – just like he in Ensam claimed
to have his own memories at his disposal as building blocks for his own
constructions. This is how the techniques of his post-Inferno works
were actually appropriated by German expressionism. Recurrent Patterns
The dissertation also points out several continuities between the works,
one of which is instability itself. Another is the use of a
melodramatic style as a non-modernist response to modern problems with
representation. In a separate chapter, I map a ‘melancholy pattern’ as a
dynamic constellation that links together themes and textual strategies
across the works and connects them with Strindberg’s other writings.
Its turning point is a fixation with separations. The dissociation of
the individual from community, which is the drive of autobiography, is
also one of the recurrent points of pain in his works and a factor,
which makes his self-representation so precarious. A symbolic loss of
communities frames his autobiographical suite from Ishmael in Tjänstekvinnans son to Ahasverus in Ensam. His works are full of premature babies and unhappy, weaned children. THE RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATION 437 The
process of separation leaves wounds to be reopened by future departures
from communities. The allergy to divisions thus also affects the
relationship to society, language, history and religion. That makes
individual experiences of loss converge with aspects of modernity,
especially its detachment of the individual from family and other
communities. The recurrence of the same structures in different fields
is exactly what constitutes a pattern. Self-images and social and
textual relations may all be connected with the ambivalence towards
separation. Strindberg’s characters are never closed and complete
entities. He rather depicts them as permeable; notions of invasion and
incorporation mark their bodily, mental and textual relations with
others. The denial of surrogates for the lost paradise leaves its mark
on the scepticism towards everybody who is in an authoratative position.
The dissertation reads Strindberg’s revisionism as well as the
resistance to narrative time in the light of the melancholy pattern. On
the other hand, it insists that these and other facets of his
autobiographical writings cannot be reduced to mere reflections of
psychological dispositions of the author. They are due to so many
private, aesthetic and epochal factors that I refrain from making
unambiguous and totalising explanations, and instead concentrate on
their effects. The Effects of Instability Regardless of their genesis,
the works treated here configure a transition to a post-traditional
modernity characterised by its constant renegotiation of know-ledge,
schemes of understanding and individual identity. The result of
Strindberg’s endeavours is surely no definite truth, neither the faith
of Inferno nor the aestheticism of Ensam, but rather
the mobility and the will to innovation that characterises the whole
series of self-representations and makes every single text transitional.
Provisionality is their hallmark. However, I emphasise that this is not
a renunciation of knowledge and self-representation. On the contrary,
Strindberg incessantly re-shapes versions of life history. The result is
also the texts themselves: a series of hardly domesticable, impure and
instable works that constitute one of Strindberg’s main contributions to
European literature. His autobiographical prose is, considered as a
whole, a great work in its own right. This is not the case in spite of,
but rather because of its impurity and instability.