Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Where Ibsen’s strength was his intensity, Strindberg’s was his versatility. He had, in the words of one observer, a ‘mind on horseback’, a multi-faceted genius that, for some people, put him on a par with Leonardo and Goethe.⁵⁶ A novelist, a painter, but above all a playwright like Ibsen, he himself lived the great convulsions of the modern world. In an early book, such as By the Open Sea, completed in June 1890, his theme was, as he put it, ‘the ruin of the individual when he isolates himself’.⁵⁷ Borg, the central character, ‘has been forced to live too rapidly in this era of steam and electricity’, and is turning into a modern human being, deranged and full of ‘bad nerves’. These were the symptoms, Strindberg said, of an increased ‘vitality’ (stress) in life, which was making people increasingly ‘sensitive’ (psychologically ill). It resulted in ‘the creation of a new race, or at least of a new type of human being’.⁵⁸ Later, in the plays that he wrote after his own breakdown in his forties (what he called his ‘Inferno crisis’), he became more and more interested in dreams (To Damascus, A Dream Play), by what one critic called ‘an assertive inner reality, the sense of the illogical’s inner logic and the recognition of the supremacy of those forces (both within and without the individual) which are not wholly under conscious control’. He took a great interest in the new stage technology, to create ‘expressionist’ theatre.⁵⁹ In To Damascus, it is not even clear whether the unnamed characters are characters or else psychological archetypes representing mental or emotional states, including the Unknown, like one of Ellenberger’s Ur-phenomena. As Strindberg himself said, ‘The characters split, double, multiply; they evaporate, crystallise, scatter and converge. But a single consciousness holds dominion over them all; that of the dreamer.’⁶⁰ (This could be Hofmannsthal talking of Das Gleitende.) The play is quite different from By the Open Sea: here Strindberg is saying that science can tell us nothing about faith, that sheer rationality is helpless in the face of the most fundamental mysteries of life. ‘Dreams offered a means for giving form to apparent randomness – mixing, transforming, dissolving.’ And again: ‘Sometimes I think of myself as a medium: everything comes so easily, half unconsciously, with just a little bit of planning and calculation . . . But it doesn’t come to order, and it doesn’t come to please me.’⁶¹ Rilke said much the same about the ‘arrival’ of the Duino Elegies and Picasso spoke of African masks acting as ‘intercessors’ in his art.⁶²

The fact that Strindberg was so many things, and not one thing, his experimentalism (in other words his dissatisfaction with tradition), his turning away from science after his breakdown, his fascination with the irrational – with dreams, the unconscious, the stubbornness of faith in a post-Darwinian world – all this marked him as quintessentially modern, a focus of the many forces pressing in on individuals from all sides. Eugene O’Neill said Strindberg was ‘the precursor of all modernity in our present theater . . .’ He was, as James Fletcher and James McFarlane have said, the unique sensor of the age.⁶³