The International Strindberg: New Critical Essays

Standing at the Bourne of the Modern: Strindberg’s Ecological Subject in By the Open Sea and His Archipelago Paintings - Linda Haverty Rugg

Standing at the Bourne of the Modern: Strindberg’s Ecological Subject in By the Open Sea and His Archipelago Paintings Linda Haverty Rugg One hundred years after August Strindberg’s death, the time may have come to consider his work through the prism of ecocriticism, an international theoretical approach that took shape in North America during the 1990s and has been gaining ground and momentum steadily since. To cite ecocritic Cheryll Glotfelty, one of the pioneers of the theoretical movement: “Simply defined, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies.”1 Glotfelty has placed ecocriticism in the company of other politically engaged approaches to literature, and with this in mind, one might also add that tracing the historical dimension of human representations of the natural world is an essential element of ecocritical thought. Much of ecocriticism to date has focused on American nature writing, but Strindberg’s observations on the environment, both essayistic and novelistic, offer an unusually rich field for ecocritical analysis on an international scope. His prescience and insights into ecology can shed light on a historical aspect of the rapidly evolving study of ecology and culture. While Strindberg’s earlier plays (such as Miss Julie [Fröken Julie, 1888] and The Father [Fadren, 1887]) are often described as “naturalist ” in terms of their relationship to Darwinian thought and their realist aesthetic, it is important to note that Strindberg was much more of an actual naturalist than this categorization of his dramas implies. 89 He authored a collection of essays on flowers and animals during the 1880s; he was deeply involved in (al)chemical experimentation and scientific writing during the period he painted his archipelago paintings; he immersed himself in the study of scientific experiments and movements of his time; and he would go on to author an essay on Swedish nature in 1897, an extended work on mineral prototypes in 1898, and numerous occasional pieces on scientific topics. Strindberg’s particular approach to science, however, exists in close relationship to his artistic vision. While he declares in the 1890s that he wants to give up literary writing for the higher calling of scientific experimentation, the way he looks at the world (and frames his scientific experiments) derives from the way he learned to see and express himself as an artist—both as a literary author deeply attached to images and precise description of the physical world, and as a painter. And conversely, his literary writing reflects a penetrating knowledge of science. The two optics of literature and science, usually opposed in present-day thinking, are, in Strindberg’s case, one. Much of Strindberg’s scientific experimentation and writing took place in Paris, and a number of his most important scientific texts were written originally in French. He desired an international audience for his discoveries, and the alchemical experiments that preoccupied him during his time in Paris were oriented toward a universalism in nature: the discovery of the essential material that makes up all matter in the world. But his nature writings in Swedish tended to focus on very particular aspects of the Swedish natural environment, though he felt that the conclusions he drew through specific observation had universal implications. So the dual optic of literature and science has a correlative dual nature in its oscillation between the microscopic and macroscopic, the particular and the universal. In order to demonstrate how Strindberg’s environmental optic works, I would like to focus on his paintings of the 1890s and his novel By the Open Sea (I havsbandet, 1890), describing and discussing what I take to be the ecological subject of Strindberg’s archipelago art. Peter Szondi wrote insightfully in the 1950s of Strindberg’s “I-dramas,” the dramas that express the perspective of an individual consciousness, one which in Strindberg’s case looks much like what we would imagine to be Strindberg ’s own. Strindberg’s prose fiction texts, often just as fascinating but less famous internationally than his plays, have often been interpreted similarly either as autobiographical or as expressions of the interior of a modernist psyche. This is not quite what I mean when I refer to Strindberg ’s ecological subject. While it is true that the novel I have chosen to...