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  • Interiority Conceits:Domestic Architecture, Graphophone Recordings, and Colonial Imaginations in August Strindberg's The Roofing Ceremony (1907).
  • Anna Westerståhl Stenport (bio)

As a cosmopolitan writer and émigré with personal experience of center-periphery paradigms that unevenly shaped discourses about literary innovation in the late nineteenth century, August Strindberg (1849–1912) wrote several modernist prose works that show how locations that have later seemed marginal to European literary modernism in fact are critical to its inception. Although the full extent of Strindberg's authorial identity as transnational and bilingual was quickly suppressed in turn-of-the-century Swedish culture, and largely has been in Strindberg scholarship since then, several of his most interesting prose works engage explicitly with displacements from nation, mother tongue, and national literary traditions. The French-language narratives A Madman's Defense [Le Plaidoyer d'un Fou] (1888/1895) and Inferno (1896) are a case in point. Written for international audiences and first published in Berlin and Paris, respectively, these works have because of their author's nationality largely been read as "Swedish," and have thereby also been marginalized in a European modernist tradition that emphasizes contributions of continental writers. Strindberg, however, wrote in and about most of the locations he lived in during a hectic decade and a half of vagabondage around Europe. One biographer counts 27 locations of domicile in Europe during the period 1883–94, with about a dozen more during the following four years (Brandell vols. 2 and 3). Upon his permanent return to Stockholm at the end of the nineteenth-century, Strindberg turns exclusively to [End Page 233] writing in Swedish (and largely about locations in Sweden). At the same time, though, his constructions of setting turn more experimental.

In one of Strindberg's last fictional prose pieces, The Roofing Ceremony [Taklagsöl] (1907), a modern, standardized, middle-class Stockholm apartment provides the exclusive setting. The novel operates on the premise that it is the private, stationary, and (relatively) permanent location of a domestic apartment that allows for narrative experimentation—extended monologues, jumbled chronology, flashbacks, and emulation of morphine-induced, semi-conscious, first-person speech. These strategies are meant to be understood as experimental, as seeking to investigate how drugs and dying affect consciousness and the retelling of events and experiences. Attempting to portray this experience as unmediated, the narrative posits figurations of direct and transparent access to the protagonist's interior. The Roofing Ceremony thus operates within a paradigm aligned with literary modernism's interiority conceit—the pretense at direct and unmediated thought transfer in novelistic form. Scholars have recognized that The Roofing Ceremony offers a break with the more conventional approaches of Strindberg's narrative techniques and argue that the novel "can be counted among the precursors to newer novelistic techniques" (Brandell cited in Ståhle Sjönell, "Kommentarer" 168, my transl.). Others argue that it foreshadows the method "Joyce used in the triumphant ending of Ulysses" (Lagercrantz 330; see also Perelli 143).1 The Roofing Ceremony is not an interior monologue, however. Although the vast majority of text is construed in the protagonist's first-person speech as monologues, these are inserted within a frame. This frame also contains dialogue and third-person narrative commentary.

What makes this novel modernist, I argue in this article, is instead the interplay between an attempt at first-person unmediated narration, modernism's interiority conceit, and the setting that allows for the experiment. The apartment setting is not an empty container waiting to be filled with narrative meaning in The Roofing Ceremony. In the novel, this setting is already mediated by specific aspects of period architectural discourse, audio and recording technology (like the graphophone and phonograph conceived as recorders and playback devices of the human voice), and transnational travel, including a rhetoric of ethnographic collecting and colonial imagination (particularly in relation to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, 1902). We cannot in fact understand The Roofing Ceremony's interest in conceiving a strategy, and formulating a range of tropes (like those of audio recording and play-back technology) to relay the disordered and irrational thoughts of a dying and drugged person, without realizing that the premise for this attempt is conventional, prosaic, domestic...

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