Strindberg's Father: Symbolism, Nihilism, Myth

Strindberg's Father: Symbolism, Nihilism, Myth JOHN ERIC BELLQUIST As part of the Strindberg Festival held in Stockholm during May, 1981, the Stockholm Stadsteater presented a putatively polemical version of the play Fadren with the slightly reconstructed title Fadern instead. I In the foyer ofthe theater the play's audiences encountered displays intended to reveal the socio-economic plight of women in Strindberg's day; during the performance they were faced with Laura cast as a harassed, hapless victim rather than an implacable vampire; and upon its conclusion they departed in contemplation of the final image of the daughter Bertha, who had stood at the edge ofthe stage in order to focus the director's entreaties: the scarred survivor of an unfortunate parental conflict, an innocent victim ofyet another skirmish in the "battle ofthe sexes" in which the male (including by implication the author of the play) was primarily at fault. Neither Bertha nor her mother, nor apparently even her father, was meant to be aware of anything to do with that "psychic murder" ("sjiilamord") which Strindberg thought could be brought about in what he called the "battle of the brains" (hjarnomas kamp") instead. Yet in fact Fadern left an impression overwhelmingly different from what the director Jan HM<:anson desired. In the role of the captain Adolf, the actor Keve Hjelm had managed to transcend his director's peculiar intent, simply by conveying Strindberg's ineradicable subjectivity. At the Strindberg Symposium held as part of the Festival in Stockholm, Hjelm himself explained - much to HM<:anson's apparent consternation - why this had happened: for him The Father was a philosophical expression.of the existential plight of the human soul, not at all a mere excuse to issue ideological equivocations. The Father is certainly one of Strindberg's best plays - perhaps even the best. Unlike many of Strindberg's works, whose structures frequently seem discontinuous or internally arbitrary (though often, ofcourse, intentionally so), The Father moves relentlessly to its conclusion without respite. Every element of the play's action fits: plot, character, language, theme, and setting. This is Strindberg's Father 533 one reason why it has been read by some as a proto-expressionistic drama, a single "Ausstrahlung des Ichs" ("irradiation of the 1") analogous to a painting such as Edvard Munch's The Scream.2 Yet just as it is possible to include Munch among the Symbolist painters rather than label him an expressionist, The Father can also be likened to the Symbolist poet's "paysage d'ame," to a kind of "landscape ofthe mind" in which the rest ofthe characters either reflect orimpinge upon the captain Adolf, who moves in their midst as ifeverything in the play is important only in so far as it represents the contents of his own consciousness. These, together with Adolfhimself, in turn suggest the contents of the playwright's consciousness, which in the play become an intersubjective , at times even dream-like, aesthetic expression of reality. Strindberg was well aware that The Fathercould be read in this manner; on at least one occasion he did so himself. In November, 1887 (he had finished the play in February), he wrote the following remarks to the author and journalist Axel LundegArd: It seems to me as if I am walking in my sleep; as if poetry and life are mixed. I don't know if The Father is a poem or if my life has been one; but it appears to me as if this ought, in a given, soon approaching moment, to become dear to me, and then I shall collapse in madness and pangs of conscience or in suicide. Through much writing my Hfe has become a life of shadows; I think I am no longer walking upon the earth but floating without weight in an atmosphere not ofair but ofdarkness. Should light fall into this darkness I would sink down crushed! Strange it is that [in] an often recurring night dream I feel myself flying, without weight, find it completely natural, just as also all concepts of right. unright, true untrue in me are dissolved,.~d that everything that happens, regardless of how unusual it may he, appears as it should. Yes, but these are of course the just consequences of the new world view, indeterminism, and it is possible that my unaccustomedness to the new is what amazes and terrifies mel Even at the height of his "naturalistic" period Strindberg could be possessed by the vision of life as a dream, here expressed in the symbolic imagery of flight and weightlessness, darkness and death (all ofwhich in this instance suggest the iconography of Symbolist poetry and painting); these images had astrongly ethical significance too, suggesting either guilt or madness given the existential threat oflife's meaninglessness. For Strindberg the true and the untrue, the just and the unjust had become so mixed by the spirit of the age that the consolatory determinism of the naturalist had made way for an indeterminate chaos - "the modern fate," as he put it, which he had presented in The Father only particularly in the "form of an erotic passion'" Of course the crumbling of Strindberg's own marriage had contributed to the view of life in the words quoted above, just as The Father is clearly grounded in a plot of marital 534 JOHN ERIC BELLQUIST conflict. But it is also, as Carl Reinhold Smedmark has written, "the tragedy of the atheistic determioist"; that this tragedy can be thought of as embodying a mental reality simply reflects Strindberg's sense that life itself might be only a dream.' Indeed the imagery in the letter suggests that in so far as one can argue that the world of The Father is similarly dream-like, one might also say that although the play deals with the problem of atheism, it still does so symbolically, in a mythopoeic manner. That The Father will deal with the problem of atheism is implicitly established in the opening scene, where we are confronted with the Pastor and the Captain - a man of God and a man of secular authority, respectively. With reference to the sexual escapades of the lieutenant Niijd, whose very name