Strindberg and the Visual Arts

DAUGHTER: Do you know what I see in this mirror? . . . The world as it really is! . . . Before it got turned around.
LAWYER: How did it get turned around?
DAUGHTER: When the copy was made.
LAWYER: Of course, that's it! The copy . . . I've always felt that this was a false copy.
—August Strindberg, A Dream Play ¹

August Strindberg (1849-1912) is one of those artists whose image persistently overshadows our perception of his work. The Strindberg as he "really is" keeps eluding us behind the personae assumed by or projected on this ever-antagonizing figure. Paradoxically, all his life, the writer, dramatist, visual artist Strindberg sought for nothing but the true image amidst the multitude of false copies and elusive doubles. Strindberg is known primarily as a dramatist, even though throughout his carrier he was preoccupied with the exploration of every imaginable media and discipline. We are just beginning to discover that his contributions to how we understand ourselves and how we conceive of the theatre today are far more complex and significant than it has been suspected. He was not only a novelist and a poet as well as a dramatist, but also an amateur painter, photographer, natural scientist, archaeologist, and occultist, just to mention a few of his oftentimes obsessive interests he actively pursued. What provides the common denominator to Strindberg's diverse activities, is the restless drive to seek out yet unexplored territories and to experiment with the newest media of his time, a drive that stemmed from the need to find adequate expression to his ever-changing perception of an elusive reality and his sense of split and fragmented consciousness in a crumbling and metamorphosing culture. In an essay from 1994, written in French, entitled "Sensations détraquées" ("Deranged Sensations"), Strindberg voices his transitional sense of himself and the world around him in an attempt to re-define both, as he perceives the pieces sliding apart producing distorted images and fragmentary reflections.

Am I out of kilter, since I was born in the good old days, when people had oil lamps, stagecoaches, boatwomen, and six-volume novels? I have passed with involuntary haste through the age of electricity, as a result of which I have possibly lost my breath and got bad nerves! Or is it that my nerves are undergoing an evolution in the direction of over-refinement, and that my senses have become all too subtle? Am I changing skin? Am I about to become a man of today? . . . I am as nervous as a crab that has cast off his carapace, as fretful as the silkworm in its metamorphosis. ²

At the core of Strindberg's research and experimentation with new forms and media is the urge to make sense of the perpetual change, the attempt to capture constantly evolving and transforming internal and external landscapes. He utilized every imaginable means to dig up traces of an immutable reality in an attempt to break through the prismatic surfaces of an elusive world. And this is what makes Strindberg one of the first playwrights with a truly modernist sensibility, who, out of his experience of crisis, re-defined drama and theatre for a new century to come.

There were periods in Strindberg's life (most notably his so-called Inferno-crisis, 1894-97) during which he gave up writing drama altogether to devote himself entirely to the observation of nature and to painting, photography, and optical experimentation. Yet, he emerged from his laboratory with a new dramatic paradigm that revolutionized the stage and launched a whole new approach to drama carried on by the Expressionist playwrights and by the Theatre of the Absurd. Visual perception occupied center-stage in whatever field he studied and whichever genre or medium he worked in. Whether he observed the natural, the spiritual, or the social world, he strove to unearth an underlying meaning by making connections via visual analogies and correspondences. He compared the contingency of...