Nature's Dream Play: Modes of Vision and August Strindberg's Re-Definition of the Theatre

While August Strindberg's crucial influence on the development of modern drama is widely acknowledged, little is known outside Sweden, his native country, about his life-long pursuit of painting, photography, and the natural sciences and how these interests, in turn, fed into his work as a playwright. In the English-speaking world such limited familiarity with the scope of Strindberg's work and interests might be attributed to the scarcity of translations of his non-literary writings. ¹ But to an even larger extent, Strindberg's public image has been informed by the focus and attitudes of literary history and of Strindberg-studies that until recently tended to dismiss the playwright's pursuit of non-literary activities as insignificant digression. The currently emerging criticism, however, keeps shedding new light on his contributions to literary and theatrical modernism by placing his work within a wider cultural and interdisciplinary context. ²

Strindberg's uniqueness lies not in great achievements in all these various areas but in his eagerness to experiment and to break down barriers between genres, views, and fields of experience. His juxtaposition of multiple perspectives not only allowed cross-fertilization between various modes of art and thought but also helped him dramatize recurring concerns with cognition, perception, and representation. What I hope to demonstrate here is how Strindberg, by transcending the limitations of a given medium, was able to tie his photography and his reflections on the modes of vision into his dramatic experiments, thereby expanding the domain of theatre.

Strindberg's first serious involvement with photographic experimentation coincided with his so-called "naturalistic period" in the mid- and late 1880s. His photographs of this time, as we shall see, already anticipate the playwright's departure from naturalism. By the 1890s his preoccupation with photography and perception registers a crucial change in the artist's attitudes towards representation. Both his scientific essays and photographic experiments of this period abound in signs of his groping toward a new, non-Aristotelian dramatic technique. Although Strindberg seemingly abandoned drama during his so-called "Inferno crisis" (1894-97), he was actually acting out a drama of the playwright in transition. ³ His natural-philosophical speculations and experiments bear witness to how he discovered a "dream play" enacted by nature, which, in turn, seems to have propelled him towards a re-definition and re-location of reality and the dramatist's access to it. ⁴ In the early 1900s Strind-berg's interest in photography was re-kindled, and he actively experimented with photography until his last years. In 1906, he employed the Swedish photographer Herman Anderson as his assistant to help him build a camera without lens. With this "wonder-camera," as they called it, the two of them collaborated on a number of "psychological portraits" and remarkable cloud-studies taken in Stockholm. ⁵

This essay will focus on the 1880s and 1890s in order to explore how Strindberg's photographic experiments and speculations on perception at this time affected and anticipated the transformation of his dramaturgy in the 1900s. The playwright's quest for a new drama is particularly interesting in relation to photography, which in the late nineteenth century was considered the medium of documentary realism and exemplified the scientific and objective method of representation the naturalists strove for. Yet, photography could become for Strindberg a suitable vehicle by which to transcend naturalism, since from the beginning he seems to have been fascinated by an inherent ambiguity of the medium. A photograph could render reality with the force of evidence, and at the same time, it could present a perfect illusion. And illusion, by nature, implies the subjective manipulation of the image by both its creator and its viewer. Thus, Strindberg's pursuit of photography can be seen as part of an ongoing meditation over the nature of reality and its relation to...