The Mold of Writing: Style and Structure in Strindberg’s Chamber Plays by Erik van Ooijen (review)

Erik van Ooijen’s The Mold of Writing is a dissertation, which means that you can expect it to have a clear, transparent organization, to be up-to-date and explicit in its relation to the relevant scholarship on Strindberg’s five Chamber Plays, to be neither immodest nor excessively modest, and to be a usable contribution to the field. It is.

Van Ooijen writes in English; his English is very good (I am an English professor). Where he quotes at length from Strindberg scholarship in Swedish he translates, but gives the original in the footnotes. Even his references to French theory use the standard English translations. This book resets the discussion of the Chamber Plays among Strindberg scholars; by extending itself into English, it brings English readers up-to-date on the issues, which are important.

The book takes up the five titles that Strindberg fully endorsed as Chamber Plays: Stormy Weather, The Burned Lot, The Ghost Sonata, The Pelican, and The Black Glove. Each chapter is devoted to an individual play, in this sequence; each chapter usefully summarizes its direction and intention first.

Although he keeps all the main scholarship on the Chamber Plays engaged in his discussion, even quoting from dissertations published one or two years before his own, he nominates Egil Törnqvist as the preeminent, strategic Strindberg scholar with whom he must (persistently) agree or disagree.

Van Ooijen’s subject is “glitches” in Strindberg, specifically in the Chamber Plays, and what they can tell us about Strindberg’s writing and our commitment to reading him. The special alarm to English readers is that translators have regularly normalized Strindberg’s glitches, cutting off a large reading public and performances from what these signature disruptions might mean.

The Old Man in The Ghost Sonata, for example, tells the Student that he has heard only one other person mispronounce “windows” (vinduer) as he does. Dramatically, this binds their fates very clearly and quickly, for the other person mentioned was the Student’s father, and the Student quickly realizes that he is talking to the man who ruined his family. Yet the Student did not utter the word “window,” so most translators silently amend this regrettable howler by the master. Ezra Pound would have told them to “Wipe your feet.”

In a larger sense this (unconscionable) “treason” is a symptom of the clichés which govern literary judgment, which suggest that if you publish a lot it can’t be very good (or if you publish very little it must be very good, having profited from your demanding critical sense). Ibsen as a counter-example is always hovering over Strindberg, particularly Ibsen’s regular production of a play every two years with no distracting essays on horticulture, mysticism, or metallurgy. But if you invoke Ibsen you should remember instead his singularly positive appreciation of Strindberg. Ibsen treated Strindberg with a continuous respectful attention he gave no other living writer. He always kept his eye on Strindberg.

The Mold of Writing keeps its eye on Strindberg’s plays by proposing a hypothesis for what Strindberg actually writes. The title depends on van Ooijen’s early distinction between mold as form or container and organic mold that grows on or in or all over its host. (Van Ooijen quotes approvingly Strindberg’s own approving comments on mold as writing, as style).Genres are forms, and Strindberg’s writing gets all over them.

To his credit, to Strindberg’s and the reader’s profit, van Ooijen does not beat this clever mold/mold distinction to death: his scheme throughout is to limit interpretation (not spread it) wherever it would hide Strindberg’s singularity. Prismatically, he writes “Strindberg writes fast, and he leaves his texts as they are. Thus it is suggested how the event of writing is turned into a poetics or a principle of production” (178).

Van Ooijen includes The Black Glove, which...