Locating August Strindberg's Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Setting (review)

Locating August Strindberg's Prose makes a long overdue contribution to our understanding of the Swedish author's instrumental role in devising transnational prose modernism. Anna Westertåhl Stenport reads Strindberg's prose against that of Kafka, Conrad, Rilke, and Breton, among others, re-contextualizing some of his most radical texts. Strindberg, internationally regarded as one of the seminal figures of the first wave of modern drama, and more recently as an experimental visual artist (as revealed in the 2005 exhibition of his paintings and photography at the Tate Modern), wrote fiction and non-fiction in several languages (Swedish and French) set in widely ranging locations that chart the European urban, rural, and colonial landscapes. His heterogeneous and self-reflexive narratives follow extremely mobile characters as they cross over geographical, national, gender, generic, and linguistic boundaries, mirroring the author's permanent condition of self-imposed exile, or as Stenport puts it, his modernist "geographical vagabondage" (4).

The concept of literary setting is central to Stenport's project of re-locating Strindberg's prose in the heart of European modernism. All the five texts discussed in detail are transnational travel narratives. Stenport offers to explore what she considers original in Strindberg's prose, including "the complex construction of setting across national traditions, languages, and trajectories of travel" (6). This emphasis on the transient and constantly mobile settings of Strindberg's prose challenges the preoccupation with the delocalized authorial persona that has been found in Strindberg scholarship to date—this persona's modernist impulse is spent in gestures of subject-formation and identity-construction—and urges us to re-think prose modernism and its legacy in terms of literary setting.

Locating August Strindberg's Prose offers close readings of spatial descriptions in five texts, tracing each narrative's structural dependence on the construction of settings. Stenport asks questions about "how Strindberg writes about locations, where he writes, about which places, in what languages, and for what audiences" (6). This approach allows her to engage with larger questions about production and reception, in an effort to de-marginalize Strindberg's work. Since the texts analyzed are all founded on movement across cultures, subcultures, languages, and national borders, considered together they present a case study for how modernism formalizes transnational setting and subverts models of literary influence conceived as binary oppositions such as margin and center, import and export.

The initial chapter focuses on Strindberg's radical narrative of social transgression, A Madman's Defense (Le plaidoyer d'un fou, 1887-88), written in French in Sweden and set in multiple locations across Scandinavia. The frequently shifting settings—including apartment houses, railway stations, and anonymous boarding houses—suggest a constant state of transition and the gradual "de-housing" of the characters as they leave the safe haven of domesticity and venture into uncharted territories represented by divorce, lesbian desire, and male hysteria. These transgressions, coupled with a subjective narratorial voice, appoint the text a precarious position of transience and liminality. The first person narration by an increasingly unstable and irrational subject dismantles perceived gender-roles and undermines late-nineteenth-century novelistic genre-expectations, where the omniscient third person narrator stands as guarantee for narrative truth. Stenport effectively shows how the feminized journal form, which poses as a scientific case study of the narrator's wife, deconstructs its claim to the rational "defense" of its speaker's sanity.

A Madman's Defense is a fitting introduction to Strindberg's border-crossing modernism, a novel that challenged established paradigms of scholarly reception and gave rise to the long prevalent tradition of psychopathologizing the author through his text. In her next chapter Stenport turns to a lesser-known work, Among French Peasants: A Subjective Travelogue (Bland franska bönder: Subjektiva reseskildringar, 1889) with which Strindberg seems to have created yet another form, which could be designated as rural ethnographic modernism. The work is a non-fiction travel narrative whose subtitle alone undermines ethnographic claims to scientific...