Strindberg's Game of Normality: The Criminal, Visual Culture, and Normalization at the Fin de Siècle

Och härmed inträda vi på det mörka område, där zigenare, tattare, skojare och tjuvar hava uppträtt som lagstiftare . . .

—August Strindberg, Gamla Stockholm ¹

(And thus, we enter the dark regions where gypsies, pikers, swindlers and crooks have acted as lawmakers . . .)

The age of decadence or the fin de siècle seems to have been haunted by an unprecedented fear of abnormality. It was a nebulous threat, capable of materializing in ever new forms: the born criminal, the homosexual, or the urban masses. Accordingly, specialists on deviance, like Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso, wrote some of most widely circulated books of the 1880s and 1890s where they tried, in Daniel Pick's words, to "construct an ordered language for the containment of disorder" (1989, 138). And, in a parallel development, "normal," initially a term borrowed from medicine, gradually became an important tool for describing, surveilling, and managing human beings (Rose 1999 ; Canguilhem 1991).

August Strindberg, although rarely described as a decadent, can in many ways be read against this background. ² Normalization is both the precondition and one of the most central subjects of his work. ³ His texts often read like a hyperbolic "freak show"—just think about the ferocious caricatures in Röda rummet (The Red Room) or Svarta fanor (Black Banners)—but they can also be seen as an ongoing and often painfully contradictory attempt to come to terms with the process of normalization itself.

By studying Strindberg's representations of the criminal, I want to approach this fundamental theme in his work. My aim in this essay is twofold. First, I attempt to show how Strindberg was inspired by, and even participated in, the overarching cultural project of normalization and hygienization at the turn of the century. Through close readings of several texts about criminals, I show how Strindberg was especially influenced by contemporary techniques of visual identification and surveillance of "deviant" individuals. At the same time, I want to explore an often-overlooked aspect of his work: that he was, at least in a Scandinavian context, a pioneer of early detective fiction.

My second aim is to outline, with the analysis of Strindberg's crime fiction as a point of departure, some of the wider consequences of normalization. Normalization, I argue, was for Strindberg and his contemporaries part of a pervasive shift in what it meant to be a person. Following Ian Hacking and Michel Foucault, normalization is identified as an ambiguous process: on the one hand, it is intimately linked to new forms of authority and control (the "norm-" side of normality), but, on the other hand, it is always bound up with a discovery of "truth" about the individual (Foucault 2009; Hacking 1996). Unlike an abstract set of rules, normalization can be said to demarcate a space where, ideally, control and discipline become synonymous with freedom and individuality. I argue that the representations of criminals in Strindberg's work are different expressions of his tortured relationship with the processes of normalization, what I call a "game of normality" that is played out in his work.

The Scientific Gaze: "En brottsling"

Misstämning i naturen, något opp och nervänt . . .

—August Strindberg, "En brottsling" ⁴

(An unrest pervades nature, something disarranged . . .)

Strindberg returned to the criminal, this unnatural and frightening figure, again and again in several texts, roughly from the middle of the 1880s, when he first read the massively influential L'Uomo delinquente (Criminal Man) by Cesare Lombroso (first published in 1876), always emphasizing the need for detection and visual identification. The theme is prominent in works like Paria , I havsbandet, "Tschandala," Le Plaidoyer d'un fou, and the "vivisections" (cf. Lindström 1952, 191). All of Strindberg's texts about criminals are thrilling explorations of this unnatural type of human being. But, more importantly, as I will argue in this essay, these texts explore and expose the particular gaze and knowledge production that surrounded the criminal and other deviants. The stakes were high: representations of the criminal...