A Cook's Tour of Strindberg Scholarship

A COOK'S TOUR OF STRINDBERG SCHOLARSHIP THE IMAGE OF STRINDBERG is blurred abroad. Outside of Sweden the myths of Strindberg are still scattered about the literary landscape like so many Easter Island effigies, a little absurd in their distortion and ponderous inscrutability. "Bedeviled Viking," "Shakespeare of the North," "mad misogynist," "psychopathic Don Quixote of the bedroom." In one of the most recent studies, so notable a critic as F. L. Lucas finds that the "warped and poisoned personality" of Strindberg (p. 461)1 lies somewhere between Narcissus and Nazi Sturmfiihrer (p. 407). To him The Father seems "more squalid and revolting than tragic" (p. 358) and the later works are not so much dream plays as "scream plays." In short, confronted with the personality of Strindberg, Mr. Lucas doubts "if a more fantastic biped has walked the earth since the days of the pterodactyl" (p. 305). Genuine scholarship, it is true, is effectively exorcising these persistent devils, and moving toward a fidelity of image and a compassion of understanding. The place of Strindberg in world letters is becoming increaSingly clear. When Bantam can print 75,000 copies of a Strindberg paperback, and New York witnesses three Strindberg productions in a season, as it did in 1959-60, and a college course in Strindberg like the one at the University of California in Berkeley can command an enrollment of over one hundred, then surely enlightenment is on the way. But the fact remains that we know all too little about the real Strindberg and his plays. An abundant and sensitive literature exists around both Ibsen and Chekhov, but about Strindberg, most important of these three as a shaping influence on the contemporary theater, we in the United States at least have fragmentary and imperfect knowledge . A drama critic of my acquaintance has been put to it to discover one good essay in English on Strindberg for an anthology he is compiling, one essay of requisite breadth, depth, and imagination. In the first place, a scholarly Strindberg in English is a desideratum. The new translations that are appearing in increasing number are, it is true, workmanlike; but by and large they are based on the John Landquist edition of 1912-20 which must be described, whatever our affection for it, as an inadequate text according to contemporary editorial standards and one rendered obsolete by recent manuscript dis1 . F. L. Lucas, Ibsen and Strindberg (London: Cassell, 1962). Incidentally, Lucas seems not to know about Ernst von Aster's Ibsen und Strindberg (1921) and Sten Linder's Ibsen, Strindberg och andra (1936) . 256 1962 STRINDBERG SCHOLARSHIP 257 coveries. A glance at Harry Bergholz' essay "Toward an Authentic Text of Strindberg's Fraken Julie" will clarify the dimensions of the problem. Even if the alien editorial hand of Joseph Seligmann, which so stirred up Strindberg's ire, did no real harm to the play, still we need access to variant readings and Strindberg's own revisions. It does not matter much that "falcon" was revised to "cuckoo" and "cuckoo" to "falcon" and "falcon" back to "cuckoo" and "cuckoo" in turn to "falcon" (tug of war between editor and author), but we may quite understandably be interested in the excised references to Darwin and Mesmer in the preface, as well as to a few significant alterations in the play itself. Mr. Bergholz can well say: 'We have certainly a right to demand that we are given Strindberg's text as he wrote it."2 Carl Reinhold Smedmark, docent at the University of Stockholm and respected for his doctoral dissertation Master OZof and The Red Room,S is remedying the situation as rapidly as possible. He is already approaching the end of a project of unusual magnitude, the editing of all three versions of Master Olof, the prose text of 1872, the verse text of 1875-6, and the so-called "middle version" of 1874, which is relatively independent of the other two. The texts have been in print for some years, but the apparatus and commentary continue to appear in what will amount to at least seven fascicles of more than 300 pages each in the communications of the Swedish Foundation of Learning.4 The...