The International Strindberg: New Critical Essays

A Nineteenth-Century Long Poem Meets Modernity: Sleepwalking Nights

A Nineteenth-Century Long Poem Meets Modernity: Sleepwalking Nights Massimo Ciaravolo Sleepwalking Nights on Wide-Awake Days: A Poem in Free Verse (Sömngångarnätter på vakna dagar: En dikt på fria vers, 1884, 1890)1 is one of August Strindberg’s texts that deals most explicitly, both in terms of its form and content, with questions of international late-nineteenthcentury modernity—including aspects of displacement and disjuncture both private and public. The poem details the experiences of a Swedish poet who travels from his hometown of Stockholm to France, stops in Grez-sur-Loing at an international colony of artists, and thereafter continues to a prolonged stay in Paris. The idea expressed in the title reveals the structure of the plot; the protagonist is a sleepwalker in the sense that he, during his journey and stay in France, dreams, or daydreams, of revisiting Stockholm. The poem thus juxtaposes several distinct geographical locations and mediates these through the practices of dreaming and subjective recollection. The multiple Stockholm places recalled by the poet include a church, a museum, a library, an academy of science with astronomical observatory, and other emblematic locations. These refer, concretely or symbolically, to his life and development. The flashbacks are connected to the exile motif that runs through the poem and provide a vehicle to intertwine autobiographical references with a modernity critique that links the personal with the public as part of a proto-modernist European poetic idiom. Although eminent Strindberg scholar Gunnar Brandell has defined this work as “undoubtedly one of the most important in his production” (18, my translation), Sleepwalking Nights still occupies a minor position in Strindberg’s oeuvre, internationally as well as in Sweden. Poetry is not this writer’s best-known genre; in addition, the hybrid form of the long 167 poem used in Sleepwalking Nights is difficult to place within a predominantly lyrical modern standard. Swedish anthologies of poetry seldom include Sleepwalking Nights, with the one exception of the self-contained prologue lyric “At Avenue de Neuilly” (“Vid avenue de Neuilly”),2 which is, in fact, one of Strindberg’s best-known poems. Sleepwalking Nights was composed when Strindberg left Sweden for France in the autumn of 1883. A later section, “The Fifth Night,” also called “The Homecoming ” or “The Awakening,” was written in the autumn of 1889, when the author had returned to Stockholm after his first period abroad (Spens, “Kommentarer” 407). In this fifth section of the poem, the poetic speaker, too, is physically back in his hometown. As he did in Paris, he strolls around, gazes, and reminisces. By interpreting the new signs of the city, he guesses what has happened there during his absence, while places and circumstances still evoke memories of events prior to his departure from Stockholm. Sleepwalking Nights is an innovative, hybrid long poem which is at the same time a travelogue, a flânerie, a reportage, and an autobiography in verse. In this work, lyrical subjectivity is interwoven with reflections on religion, art, philosophy, society, and politics as well as with recurring references to myth (Prometheus, Lucifer, the Wandering Jew, Faust, the Descent into Hell, and the Apocalypse). In his dislocation in Paris, while meeting modernity in the streets, the poetic speaker is engaged in an ambitious existential quest, which makes him critically reconsider his origin and past stages in life, and reflect on the meaning of development and progress, both on a personal and on a socio-historical level. This is a poem about European modernity, communicated in a voice both skeptical and enticed. Divided into five sections, five “Nights,” Sleepwalking Nights develops a coherent narrative despite its formal and thematic heterogeneity (Bellquist 73–114).3 In fact, the heterogeneity of this poem—as well as its relation to forms of contemporary prose narrative, including that of the urban novel, the reportage and the autobiography, its insistence on temporal and geographical displacements, its voicing of a modernity critique, and its explicit juxtaposition of Paris with Stockholm as mediated by dreaming and subjective recollection—suggests the radical modernity expressed in and through it. In this chapter, I seek to address these aspects by focusing on two specific traits. First, I address the significance of Strindberg’s adaptation and mixing of the knittel verse form, the nineteenth-century European long poem, and the contemporary forms of city life representation in literature. This mélange creates a poetic synthesis capable of transmitting a modernist experience in line with and in anticipation of Benjaminian modernity...