SOURCE: Weinstein, Arnold. “Child's Play: The Cradle Song in Strindberg's Fadren.” Scandinavian Studies 66, no. 3 (summer 1994): 336-60.

[In the following essay, Weinstein highlights the child's voice in Fadren.]

1

Fadren has long been seen as predominantly a war between the sexes, and it is hard not to view the role of the child, Bertha, as something of a pawn. As is well known, the play revolves around the power struggle as to who will finally control the fate of the child, and this nineteenth century custody battle finishes with Laura's triumphal cry, “Mitt Barn! Mitt eget Barn!” (98) [“My child! My own child!” (49)], leaving little doubt as to the central issues of the text: ownership, control.

But does the child herself have a voice?

This question is not irrelevant. The first time we meet her, she bursts into the room where the Captain and the Pastor are speaking, and she cries for protection against the spirits, spirits who turn out to be disturbingly (and invasively) lingual in nature. The child's seances with the Grandmother, we understand, turn crucially on issues of language and voice, or—more pointedly—the very origins of language and voice. The human child holds the pen over the paper, but the spirits are to do the writing; and they corral speech as well, since even to mention them orally is to invite revenge: “för mormor säger att andarne hämnas om man talar om” (39) [“Grandma says the spirits get revenge if you tell” (17)].¹ This night Grandmother is furious, however, because the child's writing turns out to be suspiciously recognizable, “cribbed” from elsewhere: “Och i kväll, så tror jag att jag skrev bra, men så sa mormor att det var un Stagnelius, och att jag narrat henne” (39) [“And tonight I thought I was writing well, but then Grandma said I got it out of a book, and that I had tricked her” (17)]. Strindberg is already hinting, here, at the scandal of textuality, the impossibility of being original in an always/already discursive world, a preformed network that precedes the human subject and governs both utterance and gesture. We shall see the full force of this view again, at the end of the play, when the Captain cites chapter and verse on the key topic of cuckoldry and the enigma of paternity, enlisting himself in a sort of serial parade of undone fathers. But what most strikes us in this initial scene is the riddling of the child's “own” voice, the presentation of the child as a mute stage for warring, alien voices, be they from Stagnelius or other spirits.

Later, in the second act, we encounter again the issue of a child's voice, only this time the spirits have taken over entirely:

BERTHA:
Jag törs inte sitta ensam däruppe, för jag tror att det spökar.
AMMAN:
Se där, vad sa jag! Ja, ni ska få sanna mina ord, i det här huset är ingen god tomte. Vad hörde Bertha för slag?
BERTHA:
Ah, vet du jag hörde en som sjöng uppe på vind.
AMMAN:
På vind! Så här dags!
BERTHA:
Ja det var en så sorglig, så sorglig sång, som jag aldrig hört. Och den lät som om den kom från vindskontoret, där vaggan står, du vet till vänster.

(56)

(BERTHA:
I don't dare sit up there alone. I think it's haunted.
MARGRET:
I knew it! I knew it! Yes, take my word for it, it's not Christmas elves that are watching over this house. What happened? Did you see something?
BERTHA:
No, but I heard someone singing up in the attic.
MARGRET:
In the attic? At this time of night?
BERTHA:
Yes, and it was so sad, the saddest song I ever heard. It sounded like it came from the store room, you know, to the left, where the cradle is.)

[25]

This sad song from the cradle—unlike any lullaby or vaggsång—may be understood as the very voice of the disenfranchised child, a kind of originary language of infancy that precedes the work of culture or the designs of the grandmother.² Coming to us as primitive music, it may be thought of as the Ursprache of Strindberg's play, a disembodied plaint that speaks of its severance and noises its hurt in ways that are hard to decipher and hard to ignore. For Fadren is child's play, and the cradle song represents a kind of pure rival discourse to the ongoing verbal exchanges of the play, as if Strindberg had wished to challenge the notion of infans as “speechless,” and hence set out both to graph the silencing of the child's voice and strangely to recreate that voice in cradle song and theatrical play. It will be objected that we never even hear this cradle song, but my argument goes the other way: we are attending, every minute of the performance, to its compelling music, in the unfurling logic and displacements of the play itself. This is hardly to suggest that Bertha is the occulted center of the play, but rather to establish the child's voice as the figurative core of Strindberg's scheme. It is a peculiarly free-floating voice, and we are not to find it lodged securely in Bertha or even in the cradle in the attic; we shall see that its primary locus, its genuine hiding place därinne, is in the Captain himself. The burden of the play is to broadcast that voice, to telefonera it to all the precincts of the stage, to bruit that voice with such power and pathos that all parties—not least the putative owner of the voice, the Captain—are subjected to its imperious governing authority.³

2

To read Fadren as the emergence of the child's voice may seem drastically reductive and univocal, but it should ultimately help us toward a view of the play's strange economy and poetry. The great Sophoclean dilemma of origins—can a man know where he comes from?—is given an apparent turn of the screw in Strindberg's heatedly gendered version: can a male know his child? A considerable amount of fanfare surrounds this riddle, peaking in the Captain's outcry that his connection with the child is tantamount to a secular afterlife: “För mig som icke tror på ett kommande liv, var barnet mitt liv efter detta. Det var min evighetstanke, och kanske den enda som har någon motsvarighet i verkligheten. Tar du bort den, så är mitt liv avklippt” (67) [“The child was my life to come. She was my immortality—the only kind that's valid, perhaps. If you take that away, you've cut off my life” (32)].⁴ This severance imagery recurs more than once, entailing cut off arms and a full scale botanical fantasia of grafted limbs and branches, and a psychoanalytic criticism would have no difficulty discerning a castration scenario in these utterances. Strindberg very likely saw the play's central agon in these colors: a strong but dignified man is cast into a cage of women/tigers, and is ultimately destroyed by them. Laura as antagonist wages a brutal Darwinian battle against her more refined husband, and her chief weapon is the corrosive power of doubt regarding paternity. Take this away, and the father's life is cut off at the roots.

Blockage, severance and mutilation are hence sounded as the central dynamics of the play, but underneath this curbing/chopping scenario something radically different is coming to life: a new circuitry, a finally released flow, a creatural itinerary that is at last completed and brought to light. The father is slated to lose his connection to the child, yes, but his deeper fate is to return to infancy. Nay, not return, but discover that he has never left. Fathering is exposed as a fiction in Fadren, and only when all the sound and fury of foiled paternity are past does the actual condition of the Strindberg male stand exposed. This new male comes outfitted with a special voice: he has been dispossessed of the confident and independent patriarchal discourse he thought was his, but speaks, instead and increasingly, what may be thought of as cradle song, a poetic language of willlessness and metamorphosis, a language of pure theater.

To appreciate fully this transformation, let us recall the Captain's initial proud posture. Free and impenetrable, he brags to the Pastor that “God's word” has no “bite” on him, and in this play of competing ultimacies and isms—closing emblematically with a doctor and a pastor disputing a dead man's exit—the Captain's integrity bespeaks a freedom of belief and self that Strindberg found at once admirable and illusory. Man of science and dignity, he prides himself on his intactness, his composure, his ability to decipher external signs such as meteors and heavenly bodies, his confidence in logical processes, such as cause and effect, by which the world is to be known and named.⁵ Just as receipts are to be kept, so the household economy can be assessed, so too does “recent research” indicate that there is only one kind of woman. This man professes to despise others who vacillate, and he understands his role in the social order to be one of authorized governance. About his daughter, he claims with utmost sincerity that he “äger första rätten att leda hennes naturell” (16) [“Should be making the decisions” (4)], it being naturally also the case that his wife “har sålt sin förstfödslorätt i laga köp, och avträtt sina rättigheter mot att mannen drager försorg om henne och hennes barn” (24) [“she sells her rights when she marries. In return her husband supports her and her children” (9)]. Exemplar of the Cartesian scientific legacy, confident in his prowess as thinker and his station as owner and ruler over those entrusted to his care, Strindberg's genteel and sympathique Captain represents no less than Patriarchy itself, and the burden of the play is to chronicle and to choreograph his spectacular fall.

At first, this fall rings Sophoclean and Shakespearean. Placed before the riddle of paternity, the Captain seems to be a nineteenth-century descendant of Oedipus, a proud man learning the dreadful limits of his knowledge, slated for an undoing of comparably massive proportions. The exiting of the blind Oedipus, led out by his daughter, broadcasts the same kind of grim news about male pretensions and power that will be exhibited at the end of Fadren. But the intrigue of Strindberg's play is also reminiscent of Othello, with Laura playing the double role of Desdemona and Iago, the wife whose virtue can never be known and the what-if? monster who can drive an honest man mad with consummate ease. Like Shakespeare, Strindberg has significantly reversed the Cartesian cogito, shown that doubt is at once corrosive and generative, that it dismantles what is given and goes on to build fantasies and “monomanier” of its own devising. At the height of his pain, the Captain exclaims to his brother-in-law that knowledge and belief are locked in a crazy dance:

Man vet aldrig någonting, man tror bara, inte sant Jonas? Man tror så blir man salig! Jo det blev man! Nej jag vet att man kan bli osalig på sin tro. Det vet jag.

(85)

(You're never sure of anything. The only thing you can do is have faith, isn't that right, Jonas? Have faith and you'll be saved! Oh, yes! But I know that faith can damn you! That I know!

[41])⁶

The nineteenth-century tug-of-war between scientific knowledge and religious belief is reconceived here, as belief becomes bottomless private obsession, resulting not in grace but in misery. We know that Strindberg regarded Fadren as an exemplary naturalist text, worthy of Zola's consideration. But, one also feels that Strindberg had a kind of large-souled allegorical drama in mind, that he endeavored to stage a nineteenth-century marriage in such a way as to mirror the great world forces at play in his time, not only the sweeping historical forces adumbrated by Hegel, but even more particularly the newer optics of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Marx. Hence the play treats us to disquisitions on genetic inheritance, on the exercise of will as power, on modern marriage as a business transaction with joint bank account. We feel Strindberg's cultural agenda here, his desire to write a play that keeps covenant with what is most unsettling and explosive in the burgeoning intellectual world around him.

3

But the play that emerges keeps covenant as well with what is most explosive within the Captain, and this non-programmed drama is ultimately what is most riveting about Fadren. The plan doubtless entailed writing a play in which the Father is overcome by the brutal forces he contends with, but the actual result is a dismantling rather than a collision, a disrobing of sorts by which Fatherhood—in all its guises: social, sexual, legal, epistemological—is shown to be a façade, a fraud. “Dismantling” and “disrobing” are themselves deeply theatrical gestures, because they hint at a kind of natural scheme behind our costumes and manners, while also acknowledging the power—indeed the magic power—of our robes and mantles. Just as Freud was to see the human psyche as a dramatic place, a Spielraum, so did Strindberg sense that the theater is a privileged locus for displaying these momentous “alterations,” the donning and removing of garments that make up our cultural and libidinal dance. The play charts, at its deepest and most engaging level, neither the plight of the child nor the war between the sexes, but the song and dance of the Father, a performance that effectively renders Bertha and Laura unnecessary—redundant—since the Father-amalgram is to be imploded and then revealed as precisely child/woman. Ultimately this transformation displays, as we shall see, astonishing parallels with Lacanian thinking, especially regarding Strindberg's representation of the itineraries of the Mother and the Father—she from pre-Oedipal to Oedipal, he from law-giver to infant—in strikingly lingual terms, as both a take-over of language and a weaning from language, expressible only in a new theatrical code, as cradle song.

Let us consider first the traditional prerogative of Fathers: the bestowal of a name, the certitude of origin, the authority of decision-making, the generative and ordering principle of Logos itself. This is all going awry in Strindberg's play. The Captain will lose control of his child because he will lose connection to his child: propriety and property are in trouble here, and “his child” comes to be understood as a kind of linguistic joke. If one imagines Fatherhood as a kind of vital center, an energy-producing sun in the social and familial solar scheme, then the play stages something of an eclipse, a power failure. Not only is Bertha lost, but all his “outreach” efforts come to nought: communication with other scientists nullified, management of household affairs exposed as chaotic. Above all, the male as producer-origin is to be pronounced obsolete; Laura gives him the news: “Nu har du uppfyllt din bestämmelse som en tyvärr nödvändig far och som försörjare. Du behövs inte mer, och du får gå” (74) [“Now that you've fulfilled your unfortunately necessary function as father and breadwinner, you're not needed any more, so you can go” (36)]. Darwin couldn't have said it better.

No reader or spectator of the play has ever been much in doubt about the fundamental cashiering of the father. But to view this struggle as essentially a clash of wills, a survival of the fittest—which is how Laura herself sees it, how Strindberg wants it to be seen—is to miss the darker and richer wellsprings of the father's collapse. His props are taken out from under him, yes, but the heart of the matter is to expose him, to expose the father, patriarchy in general, as an affair of props. The deeper pathos of the play revolves around a man coming to understand that he is a construct, an assemblage, a mask. Thus, alongside the splendid agon—Laura battling the Captain, Laura systematically taking over his prerogatives, using his own principles and propositions against him, even to the tune of controlling the writing and examining the accounts—we also have the spectacle of an inside job, a creature being undone from within.

Of course, we have been seeing this all along. The role of Margret in the play is crucial because it incessantly highlights the child in the Captain. Ranging from “Hör nu herr Adolf lilla” (35) [“Mastor Adolf, I want you to listen to your old Margret” (15)] to the chastising and altogether more fateful “Han skulle skämmas! Men gamla Margret hon hiller andock mest av sin stora, stora gosse, och han kommer nog igen, som det snälla barnet, när det blir urväder” (38) [“Shame on you! But old Margret is still fond of her great big boy. He'll return to her, like a good child, when a storm comes up” (16)], Margret's motherly solicitude tells us about a Captain who has never grown up, tells us that “growing up” is a cultural fiction, one that will fall apart “när det blir urväder.”⁷

And so the storm comes, and with it the sad song from the cradle, the new discourse of a man who can be both sick and up (for a while) before going permanently mute and down. It starts with irony and learned condescension. The Captain suavely explains to the doctor how new research has demonstrated the “instinktiva skurkaktighet” (62) [“instinctively wicked” [nature] (28)] of women, and with considerable dispatch ushers in his eavesdropping wife, so as to have it out at last. It is here that the play moves from confrontation to infantilization. With frightening lucidity, the Captain urges Laura to leave him intact, out of her own self-interest, but his words betray a creatural vulnerability that nothing can assuage:

Nu förhåller det sig med min sjukdom på detta sätt: mitt förstånd är orubbat, som du vet, så att jag både kan sköta min tjänst och mina åligganden som far, mina känslor har jag ännu något i min makt så länge viljan är tämligen oskadad; men du har gnagt och gnagt på den att den snart släpper kuggarne och då surrar hela urverket opp baklänges.

(64)

(Since you're so interested in my condition, here it is. My reason, as you know, is undisturbed, so I can handle my responsibilities both as a soldier and a father. As for my feelings, I can control them as long as my will is intact. But you've gnawed and gnawed away at my will until it's ready to slip its gears and spin out of control.

[30])

This somewhat eighteenth-century mechanistic view of the person represents the peak of the scientific tradition to which the Captain aspires, but the animalism of human relationships, the “gnawing” of one's will by one's mate, bespeaks another regime, one closer to vampires and parasites than to formidable but delicate machines. This speech may be thought of as a high moment in European drama, a moment where the dark savagery of Iago's torture of Othello is brought utterly into the light, yielding a clairvoyant warrior, one who sees exactly what is being done to him and how he is responding. There is dignity and pathos in the Captain's recognition, but that does not reduce his victimization one whit. Arguably the most mature line in the play in the Captain's request—request!—that he be allowed to stay sane: “Att jag får behålla mitt förnuft” (65) [“That I can keep my reason” (31)]. There is a startling recognition here about coming apart, and we shall see that this collapse of reason is like a curtain going up, a revelation of a prior self that has no cover any longer. Hence when the Captain laments the loss of his child as the removal of his afterlife, his “evighetstanke,” he signals the crucial directional shift of the play: from the future to the past.

4

In a striking intertextual reference, the Doctor mentions, at one point, Ibsen's Captain Alving from Ghosts: “när jag hörde fru Alving liktala sin döda man så tänkte jag för mig själv: förbannat synd att karlen ska vara död” (63) [“when I sat in the theatre the other night and heard Mrs. Alving in Ghosts talking about her dead husband, I thought to myself: what a damn shame the man isn't alive to speak for himself” (29)]. As Strindberg's Captain begins his descent into dementia, we are entitled to consider his plaint as the occulted material of Ibsen's text, as the generic discourse of fathers run amok, turned inside-out. Well before Freud unveiled his reading of Oedipus, Strindberg saw that the poise, prowess, and knowledge of homo sapiens were dreadfully two-tiered, that the male's secure station rested on an abyss, and that genuine scientific discovery—far from the realm of meteors and heavenly bodies—must consist in self-exploration, in turning the spectroscope “in,” turning it precisely into the microscope, as the play's little joke will have it. Just as the information we can receive of Jupiter is located in the past—“inte vad som händer, utan vad som hänt” (33) [“Not what's happening, but what has happened” (14)]—so too the scrutiny of the Captain's life must now proceed thither. When one can no longer “keep one's reason,” “då surrar hela urverket opp baklänges” and one simply unwinds, winds up backwards, where it all began. Discredited as origin and originator, cut off from progeny, the Captain begins his journey inward, to his own origins, and we now begin to see what he is, as the cradle song and the child's play commence.

This action begins conventionally enough, as the Captain trots out fragmentary memories surrounding Laura's pregnancy: his severe illness and feverish condition, overheard counsel between Laura and the lawyer, the crucial revelation that there must be a child if Laura is to inherit, and the cliff-hanging mystery as to whether Laura was or was not pregnant. With these elements of the comédie du boulevard, Strindberg makes the case for a putative hidden crime, an illegitimate child for purposes of inheritance, but as if he knew that the issue of inheritance itself—as Ibsen had so powerfully shown—is more an affair of genes than money, more a creatural than a financial legacy, Strindberg pushes his grand guignol scenario right to the limits: Laura crying in her sleep, and then, night before last: “Klockan var mellan två och tre på morgonen och jag satt uppe och läste. Du skrek som om någon ville kväva dig: ‘kom inte, kom inte!’ Jag bultade i väggen för att—jag inte ville höra mer” (69) [“It was between two and three in the morning and I was sitting up reading. You screamed as if someone was trying to smother you: ‘Don't touch me, don't touch me!’ I pounded on the wall because—I didn't want to hear any more” (32-3)]. Here is the direction the play could have gone: the Captain as calm, poised sleuth (“jag satt uppe och läste”) and Laura as tortured libidinal outlaw.

But the Captain's control and decorum are not maintainable, and the sexual violence cargoed in this scene—“kom inte, kom inte!”—can no longer be kept at a distance. “Jag ville inte höra mer” says the Captain, but the text shows him pounding on the wall, much as he is to batter the walls and break through the door later, as if the pounding on the wall were an ambivalent poetic code, announcing its desire for silence while expressing an urgency all its own. It is here that the roles change. The libidinal turmoil ascribed to Laura's nightmare quite simply moves into the Captain, and she will increasingly acquire his former control and mastery.

As for the father, he is gone. “Ser du icke att jag är hjälplös som ett barn” (69) [“Can't you see that I'm as helpless as a child” (33)]. And with this, the paternity plot disappears, along with its custody drama, and we see that the only child that counts, the one whose story must “out,” is the child hidden inside the father, the child whose pretensions to manhood—husband, military career, scientific program—are placed front and center on the stage, exposed as specious, and blown sky high.

[V]ill du icke glömma att jag är en man, att jag är en soldat, som med ett ord kan tämja människor och kreatur; jag begär endast medlidande som en sjuk, jag nedlägger min makts tecken och jag anropar om nåd för mitt liv.

(69)

(Won't you forget that I'm a man, that I'm a soldier who gives orders? I ask only the pity you'd show a sick person. I surrender my weapon and beg for mercy.)

[33]

The male burdens are too heavy; the male charade is over; the masquerade—“min makts tecken”—can be at last put aside. Maleness is shown to be an inhuman construct, and Strindberg, (rather shamelessly) echoing Shakespeare's apology for Shylock, posits creatural vulnerability as the first and last truth⁸:

Ja jag gråter, fastän jag är en man. Men har icke en man ögon? Har icke en man händer, lemmar, sinnen, tycken, passioner? Lever han icke ar samma föda, såras han icke av samma vapen, värmes han icke och kyles ar samma vinter och sommar som en kvinna? Om ni sticker oss blöda vi icke? Om ni kittlar oss, kikna vi icke? Om ni förgiftar oss dö vi icke? Varför skulle icke en man få klaga, en soldat få gråta? Därför att det är omanlight! Varför är det omanligt?

(69)

(Yes, I'm crying, although I'm a man. Doesn't a man have eyes? Doesn't a man have hands, limbs, senses, opinions, passions? Isn't he nourished by the same food as a woman, wounded by the same weapons, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? Why shouldn't a man be able to complain, a soldier be able to cry? Because it's unmanly? Why is it unmanly?

[33])

Here is the first open breach in the male armor, and through it still more devastating libidinal material is to emerge. The Captain and Laura finally set the record straight about their sexual arrangements, and there is something almost obscene, in the nature of violated taboo or transgression, in these revelations, as if we were sharing, along with the central parties themselves, the fierce affective truths of their sexual make-up, home truths they are only now truly confronting. We are not dealing with closely guarded secrets, with a concealed past that is finally exposed; instead, we are discovering only now how it has always been, and one feels that both the Captain and Laura are as astonished at these eruptive tidings—each one's own as well as that of the other—as the spectator is.

In the eyes of Laura, the Captain, with his “stora starka kropp” (“big strong body”), has ever been “ett jättebarn” (“a huge baby”), and the male agrees, tells us that he came unwanted into the world, and hence came deprived of will. His connection with Laura has always been, at heart, that of child to mother; their sexual congress is and always was transgressive:

varje gång dina känslor ändrade natur och du stod fram som min älskare, så blygdes jag, och din omfamning var mig en fröjd som följdes av samvetsagg såsom om blodet känt skam. Modren blev älskarinna, hu!

(70)

(each time your feelings changed and you came to me as a lover, I felt strage. Our lovemaking was a joy, but it was followed by the sense that my very blood was ashamed. The mother became the mistress—ugh!

[33-4])

These revelations are dreadful but neither deniable nor denied. Not unlike the Emperor's new clothes, the Captain's prowess goes up in smoke, as if it had been an optical illusion all along; she has given him his true colors, and he agrees: “Jag såg det, men förstod det ej. Och när jag trodde mig läsa ditt förakt över min omanlighet ville jag vinna dig som kvinna genom att vara man” (70) [“I saw but misunderstood. I thought you despised my lack of virility, and so I wanted to win you as a woman by proving myself as a man” (34)]. One feels that the very terms of the play are becoming increasingly specious and histrionic, that “omanlighet” and “vara man” are postures, perhaps impostures, that the elemental being is—trapped? fluid?—somewhere behind them, prior to gender markings, gradually coming into view. Childlike, will-less, extensionless, being systematically disempowered before our eyes, the figure of the Father emerges as a pure figure, a mannikin, a construct.⁹ That is why Strindberg's text may be regarded as “child's play,” as the spectacle of impotence and infantilization, of a man coming to understand his fictive status, of an undoing.

We are far, here, from battle cries and “hjärnornas kamp” (“battle of brains”). Not the war between the sexes, but the dismantling of the male, the going-out-of-business of the patriarchy is what Strindberg is, perhaps unwittingly, dramatizing. In the richest, most astonishing passage in the play, he transforms this drama of de-masculinization, of unmanning, into a well-nigh cosmic landscape that darkly expresses the true ramifications of the bloody business at hand. Women, the Captain realizes, contain the life principle; what, then, is man's fate?

Ja, ty hon har sina barn, men det har inte han.—Men vi och de andra människorna levde fram vårt liv, omedvetna som barn, fulla av inbillningar, ideal och illusioner, och så vaknade vi; det gick an, men vi vaknade med fötterna på huvudgärden, och den som väckte oss var själv en sömngångare. När kvinnor bli gamla och upphört vara kvinnor, få de skägg på hakan, jag undrar vad män få när de bli gamla och upphört vara män? De som gåvo hanegället voro icke längre hanar utan kapuner, och poularderna svarade på locket, så att när solen skulle gå upp, så befunno vi oss sittande i fullt månsken med ruiner, alldeles som i den gamla goda tiden. Det hade bara varit en liten morgonlur med vilda drömmar, och det var icke något uppvaknande.

(71)

(Yes, because she has her children, and he has none.—And so we lived our lives like everyone else, as unconsciously as children—filled with fantasies, ideals, and illusions. Then we woke up. We woke up, all right, but with our feet on the pillow, and the one who woke us was himself a sleepwalker. When women grow old and stop being women, they get beards on their chins. I wonder what men get when they grow old and stop being men. And so, the dawn was sounded not by roosters but capons, and the hens that answered didn't know the difference. When the sun should have been rising, we found ourselves in full moonlight, among the ruins, just like in the good old days. So, it wasn't an awakening after all—just a little morning nap, with wild dreams.

[34-5])

This remarkable outburst takes Strindberg's ostensibly naturalist play into an arena of figurative activity that constitutes a bold poetic landscape of surpassing eloquence. Laura speaks for the commonsensical reader who has lost his bearings, as she brands the Captain “författare” and refers to his words as “fantasier” and “visioner” (71-3).

But this tour-de-force declaration, however unrelated it may seem to the play's nitty-gritty custody battle, adumbrates the new Strindbergian dispensation, shows us what the world looks like when the male principle is quashed. It is a place that is turned inside-out, a time of slippage and transformation operating on the solid real world, a prodigious metamorphosis into dream and fantasy.¹⁰ Ordinary life, the life the Captain has led until now, was unconscious, and its goals, we now know, were based on “inbillningar, ideal och illusioner.” One remembers Schiller's famous treatise “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung,” with its special distinctions between subject and object, between innocent, seemingly direct renderings of the classics and the tortured, self-conscious mediated work of the (coming) romantics. Closer to our time, one thinks of Benjamin's influential notion of the aura, the indwelling radiance of an earlier art and culture versus the lusterless and spiritless artifacts and facsimiles of the modern era. To be sure, Benjamin was contrasting the authenticity and uniqueness of the material historical artifact with the reproductions made available by photography and film, whereas Strindberg is drawn to the crisis engendered by representation itself. Strindberg's Captain negotiates a fateful itinerary from vital integrity to facticity, facsimile, and fragmentation. His central trope is that of awakening, but it is deeply elegiac, an awakening to emptiness and decenteredness, an awakening that is ultimately a wake.

Here is what happens when “hela urverket [surrar] opp baklänges”: the creatural rhythms, the forward march of time (“vi levde fram vårt liv”), are radically altered, put into reverse. One wakes up, but feet-first, with “fötterna på huvudgärden”; and one is awakened into deeper reaches of irreality, rather than by the clear light of day, and the agent of awakening “var själv en sömngångare.” No less than one's connection with natural process is being sundered here, and we are issued into a world of barrenness and sterility, a post-sexual regime deprived of all vitality, condemned to imitation and histrionics. This new non-man is the partner for bearded women, and this reveille is sounded by capons, not roosters, is answered by “poularderna” rather than hens, so that we understand the new dawning to be an entry into facticity rather than truth, reflection rather than radiance, Schein rather than Sein. “Fantasier,” “visioner,” Laura has said, and she is dead right: her husband now understands his world to be, to have always been, a dream-world. This dream-world, untouched by the rays of the life-giving sun, is a place of ruins illuminated by the moon, and from this spectral artificial universe there can be no awakening, even though it is animated by wild dreams.

Strindberg's play charts the collapse of the fathering principle: no siring, no vital origin, no full presence, no immediacy, no innocence. Three quarters of a century before Derrida, he has prepared for us a portrait of différance and of the disinheritance that attends such a world view. “Ja det är rätt sjukligt här på orten för tillfället” (28) [“there's a lot of illness in the district just now” (11)], Laura has told the Doctor, and the reader has doubtless interpreted her words as mendacious and strategic, but there is indeed a sickness spreading out over this area, and—not unlike the plague that beset Sophocles's Thebes—the disease is perceptual and epistemological, as much as it is physical. An entire metaphysics is entering its death throes.

5

The Captain awakens to a world of facsimiles. And that is the news he brings, when he bursts through the tapestry door. The violence of breaking through the wall may seem grotesquely inappropriate to the book-bearing, reference-citing scholar who emerges, but Strindberg knows what he is doing. With its heavy overlay of Darwin, caged tigers, crossed horses and zebras, the play appears to trumpet animality as its dark secret, the hidden truth about human beings, the occulted violence därinne that must come out into the open and be seen. But the man who crashes through the door with books in his hand actually betokens the ultimate trauma and threat of this play. Citing the prior words of Homer, Ezekiel, and Pushkin on the riddle of paternity, Strindberg's Captain announces the regime of textuality itself, a regime of models and precedents, an always/already scheme in which the pretense of origin or originality is doomed from the outset. Those books indeed signal an epistemological Reign of Terror, because the aura of all things is gone, and there is no route back to genuineness and integrity. There are only copies, only appearances. The fierce comedy of generalized cuckoldry, of world history as the antics of gullible men, covers a still fiercer view of life as fascimile, of perception as groundless, of doubt itself as plague.

With crudeness and pungency, the papier-maché Captain drags his fellows into the carnival, exposes their ponderous complacency. The man of the cloth and the man of science each profess ultimacies, but their professions and beliefs are no less illusory and inflammable than anyone else's.

RYTTMäSTERN:
Hör du Jonas, tror du att du är far till dina barn? Jag minns at ni hade en informator i huset som var fager under ögonbrynen och som folket pratade om.
PASTORN:
Adolf! Akta dig!
RYTTMäSTERN:
Känn efter under perucken får du känna om inte det sitter två knölar där. Min själ tror jag inte han bleknar! Ja-ja, de prata bara, men herre gud, de prata ju så mycket. Men vi ä allt ena löljliga kanaljer ändå vi äkta män. Inte sant herr doktor? Hur stod det till med er äkta soffa? Hade ni inte en löjtnant i huset, vad? Vänta nu ska jag gissa? Han hette—(viskar Doktron i örat)—! Se ni, han blekna också! Bli inte ledsen nu. Hon är ju död och begraven, och det som är gjort kan inte göras om! Jag kände honom emellertid och han är nu—se på mig doktor!—Nej, mitt i ögona—major på dragonerna! Vid gud tror jag inte att han har horn också!

(86)

(CAPTAIN:
Listen, Jonas, do you believe you're the father of your children? I seem to remember you had a tutor in your house—a handsome devil everybody talked about.
PASTOR:
Adolf! Take care!
CAPTAIN:
Feel around under your wig and see if you don't find two little bumps there. Look at him—he's turning pale! Yes, yes, it was only talk, but how they talked! Well, we're all targets for that kind of ridicule, we husbands. Isn't that right, Doctor? By the way, how was your marriage bed? Wasn't there a certain lieutenant staying with you? Wait, let me guess. Wasn't he (whispers in the Doctor's ear)—Look, he's getting pale, too! Well, don't feel bad. She's dead and buried, so whatever she did can't be done again. Though as a matter of fact, I know the man and he's now—look at me, Doctor!—No look me right in the eye!—he's now a major in the dragoons! By God, I think you have horns, too!

[41-2])

Strindberg is pushing the comic givens of this situation in the direction that Ionesco will take, as he transforms men into rhinoceroses. Cuckoldry is generative drama, par excellence, and this passage emphasizes transformation, emphasizes the monstrously active and shaping character of belief—fantasies and visions, as Laura called them—that has no truck whatsoever with facts. “Hon är ju begraven, och det som är gjort kan inte göras om,” but suspicion and doubt, like some radioactive materials, live forever.

To move from fact to facsimile, from truth to appearances, is at once comic and tragic. “Men vi ä allt ena löljliga kanaljer ändå vi äkta män” is arguably the very kernel of Strindberg's play. The rough-and-tumble of the line is in keeping with the species that began on four feet before standing upon two, and what it does in between, supine, is simply not amenable to the proprieties of bourgeois discourse. But the Swedish term for “husbands”—“äkta män”—is richly overdetermined here, since the play is about the utter collapse of “genuine men.” And it is fair to say that the spectacle of a man uncovering his “ungenuineness,” his “oäkt” reality, is like waking up with your feet on the pillow: you can still see, but what you see is ruins, and the artificial light comes from the moon.

At the end of the play, nearing total collapse, the Captain reports on the peculiar warfare he has waged, a combat all the more lethal for being imaginary:

Nu är det bara skuggor, som gömma sig i buskarna och sticka fram huvudet för att skratta, nu är det som att slås med luft, att göra simulaker med löst krut. En fatal verklighet skulle ha framkallat motstånd, spänt liv och själ till handling, men nu … tankarne upplösa sig i dunster, och hjärnan mal tomning tills den tar eld.

(94)

(Now there are only shadows, hiding in the bushes and sticking out their heads to laugh. It's like grappling with thin air, fighting with blank cartridges. A painful truth would have been a challenge, rousing body and soul to action, but now … my thoughts dissolve into mist, and my brain grinds emptiness until it catches fire.)

[47]

A new dramatic formula emerges here, a recognition of the energies that can be liberated by the struggle with shadows and effigies, and one feels that the fierce explosion noted here—the brain grinding emptiness until it catches fire—is a clear stand-in for the missing sun, a way of saying that psychic disarray is a form of internal combustion, a generator that will fuel the antics on the moonlit stage.¹¹ This stage, this place of artifice, this arena of false awakening, hosts, we remember, “vilda drömmar,” and those wild dreams may be thought of as precisely the passions of sleep-walkers, the sound and fury (“inbillningar, ideal och illusioner”) of the people at the wake. And, as we saw in the farce of the Pastor and the Doctor turning pale and feeling for horns, the power and energy of these “dreams” is irresistible, turns the most regulated beings into puppets. And this place with reflected light, wild dreams, and careening figures is, of course, the theater.

6

I have been arguing that Strindberg's gambit, in Fadren, consists in moving beyond the war of the sexes in order to disassemble patriarchy itself, to expose the phallocentric world view as a fictive construct, to depict a new regime of representation, textuality and facsimile where there had been presence, origin, and aura. He can hardly have intended to do any of this. He must, indeed, have thought his play to be a vital blow against the encroaching feminist movement, indeed a last gasp of virulent male assertion.¹² But what he wrought tells a different story. It may be that paranoia got the upper hand in writing Fadren, that once he began to imagine a strong man's fall, he found himself mining rich ore, that he had only to consult his own fears and anxieties to imagine Laura's take-over. After all, the triumph of the matriarch is hardly a mystery for the patriarch: it is his intolerably precise nightmare.

The point of this is not to psychoanalyze Strindberg; it is merely to indicate the obvious: Fadren decimates its male protagonist. No wonder that feminist criticism has found Strindberg to be fertile ground: their concern with gender dynamics is surely no more urgent than his own concern, and the play is astonishingly fair-minded in its findings, underscoring the Captain's fatuous complacency, his legalistic bullying, and his serene sense of the centrality of his function within the world order. Strindberg has not balked at any of this, and he has drained the cup of male humiliation to the dregs, as he takes this man apart, all the while thinking he's waging war against women.

Paranoia? Masochism? Perhaps it is wiser to look at the text itself for answers, rather than inside Strindberg. What we cannot fail to see is that this initially agonistic play turns, at a certain moment, inside-out, as it seems to discover its deeper quarry: the exposure and undoing of the Father, as part of a general metaphysical collapse of staggering proportions. I would like to suggest that that course of action, that turn of events, struck Strindberg first and foremost as theater, as the kind of story that theater was uniquely equipped to tell. The drama of the Father turns out to be a crisis of representation, a devastating discovery that there is only representation. To move from original to facsimile, from sunlight to moonlight, is to discover that reality is nothing but theater. Theater is the realm where belief has become cancerous—where veta becomes tro—and in the hands of Strindberg these convictions move back and forth with lightning rapidity. We remember the Captain taunting the Pastor and the Doctor, yielding a putative on-the-spot metamorphosis. Horns? Or no horns? Strindberg's “truth” is of this kinetic order: not whether paternity can be proven or not, but the spectacle of doubt, belief, and transformation to which it gives rise. And at their best, these carnival scenes express something profound about psychic mobility and precariousness, about the roller-coaster world that lives inside of humans, waiting to be activated; when it is triggered, “då surrar hela urverket opp baklänges.”

Nothing expresses more cleanly this shape-shifting than the Captain's simple tribute to Laura: “du kunde ge mig en rå potatis och inbilla mig att det var en persika” (71) [“You could have given me a raw potato and made me believe it was a peach” (34)]. Potatoes becoming peaches is what theater is all about. This troubling world can be entered only when things are divested of their surface unity, exploded into replicas, made to shimmer in their multiplicity. Toward the end of this play a doll, a christening cap, and a child's rattle are removed from a drawer and brought into the light, and we can measure their meaning, their immense human and emotional reach, only when we go beyond their apparent contours. Things and gestures echo, resonate, have dimensions. When a man throws a burning lamp at his wife, an entire life is illuminated.

That larger illumination entails bringing the full spectrum of psyche and temperament to light, and the “moonlight” of the theater outperforms the natural sun in this area. Theater is make-believe, the place where actors, clad in costumes, give speeches, and pretend to be what they are not. The spectator in the theater knows this, is constantly aware that they are playing on stage, that he is witnessing a spectacle, a performance, an act of representation. Strindberg has understood that role-playing, far from being limited to theater, constitutes the modus operandi of the human subject, that shape-shifting is nothing less than business as usual in the cultural and libidinal arrangements meted out to the human species.

So it is that Fadren closes with a crescendo of metamorphic activity, as if it wanted to expose, once and for all, that the central psychic dynamic in human life is an affair of potatoes becoming peaches, and that the theater is a privileged arena for such exposures and such transformations. Old Margret has the place of honor here, because she has always known that make-believe governs human action; it is so with small children, and now she is to show us that it is so with grown-up children as well.

AMMAN:
Ack ja, men han ska höra på då! Minns han hur han en gång hade tagit stora kökskniven och ville tälja båtar, och hur jag kom in och måste narra kniven av honom. Han var ett oförståndligt barn och därför måste man narra honom, för han trodde inte att man ville honom väl.—Ge mig den där ormen, sa jag, annars bits han! Och se så släppte han kniven! (Tar revolvern ur Ryttmästarns hand.) Och så då när han skulle klä sig och inte ville. Då måste jag lirka med honom och säga att han skulle få en guldrock och bli klädd som en prins. Och då tog jag lilla livstycket, som bara var av grönt ylle, och så höll jag fram det för bröstet och sa: buss i med båda armarne! och så sa jag: sitt nu vackert stilla, medan jag knäpper det på ryggen! (Hon har fått tröjan på honom.) Och så sa jag: stig nu upp, och gå vackert på golvet får jag se hur den sitter. … (Hon leder honom till soffan.) Och så sa jag: nu ska han gå och lägga sig.

(90-1)

(MARGRET:
All right, but you have to listen! Do you remember once how you took the big kitchen knife and wanted to carve wooden boats and how I came in and had to play a trick to get it away from you? You were such a silly boy, and we had to trick you because you didn't understand that we only wanted what was best for you. And so I said, “Give me that snake, or it'll bite you!” And then you dropped the knife. (Takes the revolver out of his hand.) And then there were the times you didn't want to get dressed. And I had to coax you by saying you were getting a golden coat and would look like a prince. And then I'd take your little green jacket, which was just ordinary wool, and hold it out in front of you like this and say: “In with your arms, both of them!” And then I'd say: “Sit nice and still now, while I button up the back.” (He is in the straitjacket.) And then I'd say: “Stand up now, like a good boy, and walk across the floor so I can see how it fits. …” (She guides him to the sofa.) And then I'd say: “Now it's time for bed!”)

[44-5]

It is arguable that Strindberg never surpassed this beautiful sequence, even though his later work is technically more innovative, as it moves toward the surreal. Pure ballet of tumbling forms and shifting shapes, the evoked knife turns into a snake, so that Margret can remove its latter-day stand-in, the revolver. The choreography of displacement has become living theater. Sovereignly completing the snake-dance is the central metamorphosis of the piece, the rhythmic waltz that caps the play, brings into the open, at last, the flowing current and libidinal circuitry of Strindberg's scheme: the rich mantle of the past is at last figured forth in the green wool jacket that became the golden coat of the prince, and in this shimmering mantle of childhood, this coat of many colors, the Captain will, at last and definitively, cloak himself. Ensconced in his straight jacket, nearing the permanent silence of infans, completing his trek “baklänges” into the past, the Captain makes good on his voyage home, achieves his final identity, as Mallarmé said of Poe, “tel qu'en lui même enfin l'éternité le change.” An entire figurative odyssey comes into view once we measure the avatars of that mantle. The itinerary we can sight moves at once from and towards childhood, and the theatrical language is at once exquisitely eloquent and dense, and also heading toward speechlessness, to the ultimate regressive state, a total eclipse of consciousness. This is the true homing action of the play, and it can be termed child's play, for there is no other play imaginable for the psyche that has been center stage here. And this rich metaphoric plaint of displacement and hypnotism, with its gamut of snakes and gold, with its magic capacity to move the human subject—could this play avoid outright violence any other way?—is what I have called “cradle song,” is the theatrical, spectacular equivalent of that “sorglig sång” that Bertha heard in the attic.

The beauty of Fadren lies, at least in part, in the strange fullness of its theatrical language, a fullness beyond the ken of any single character. The Captain himself, to be sure, sees his downfall as a result of female wiles, and he reaches all the way into classical mythology in order to give its true measure: “Omfale! Omfale! Nu leker du med klubban medan Herkules spinner din ull!” (93) [“Omphale! It's Queen Omphale herself! Now you play with Hercules's club while he spins your wool!” (46)]. The sexual humiliation in this role reversal could hardly seem clearer. But little remains fixed in this swirling scheme. Hence Omphale reappears in the Captain's request for cover; Laura's shawl is spread out over him, and it occasions the softest, most lyrical outpouring of the play: warm, smooth flesh, vanilla-scented hair, birch woods, primroses and thrushes. But this shawl is transformed into a “cat,” and the Captain orders it removed, to be replaced by his “vapenrock” (“tunic”), occasioning the last and most extended reference to Omphale:

Ack min hårda lejonhud, som du ville ta från mig. Omfale! Omfale! Du listiga kvinna som var fredsvän och uppfann avväpning. Vakna Herkules innan de ta klubban från dig! Du vill narra av oss rustningen också och låtsades tro att det var grannlåt. Nej det var järn, du, innan det blev grannlåt. Det var smeden som förr gjorde vapenrocken, men nu är det brodösen. Omfale! Omfale! Den råa styrkan har fallit för den lömska svagheten, tvi vare dig satans kvinna och förbannelse över ditt kön!

(95-6)

(Ah, my tough lion's skin you wanted to take from me. Omphale! Omphale! You cunning woman who so loved peace you invented disarmament. Wake up, Hercules, before they take away your club! You wanted to lure us out of our armor, calling it nothing but decoration. But it was iron, iron, before it was decoration! That was when the blacksmith made the battle dress; now it's the seamstress! Omphale! Omphale! Brute strength brought down by treacherous weakness. Curse you, damned woman, and your whole sex!)

[47]

Reaching back into myth for the appropriate parallels and models, Strindberg's Captain once more reveals his emplacement in a textualized scheme, but what most strikes us here is the interpretation that is given to the Omphale story.¹³ The disarming of Hercules turns out to be a fable about disarmament proper, and Omphale is presented as “fredsvän,” the founder of “avväpning.” How does one un-weapon a powerful male? By calling “armor” mere “decoration,” “grannlåt.” Female cunning is enlisted, once again, in a project of dismantling, and the strategy consists in claiming that such protection is merely symbolic; Hercules's club and the Captain's armor are removable to the extent that Omphale can derealize them, deprive them of essence, transform them into “grannlåt,” into mere representation. The Captain's plaint is an effort to undo the damage, roll back the deception, return to the raw power that preceded the symbol, retrieve presence itself. Hence he speaks of iron and of blacksmiths, of substance rather than sign: “Det var smeden som förr gjorde vapenrocken, nu är det brodösen.” Something very grand is compressed into these strange lines, something virtually anthropological, entailing a shifting of cultures, a Kuhnian paradigm shift, a sighting of the fateful itinerary of power and belief, the moment they leave matter and move into effigy, leave the blacksmith to become the work of the seamstress.¹⁴ Yes, this is a war between the sexes, but it is also an evolutionary fable, a passing of power from a primitive, integral material scheme to a culture of representation, based on difference and displacement.

This yearning for a return to substance and presence is mouthed by a man in a straitjacket on the edge of silence, and it is not going too far afield to see in it a nostalgia for the phallocentric order that the play has been smashing for some time now. But the beauty of the play lies in its multiple tongues, and its modernity lies in its vertiginous semiotic spectacle that converts “grannlåt” back into “vapenrock,” showing that “mere” decoration, “mere” effigy, has a rich potency of its own.

Dismantling the father has been posited as the ultimate agenda of the play, but it is high time to recognize that the theater works in the opposite direction, that it discloses its truths through mantling, through the covers and decorations by which we code our lives and show what we are. The theater begins with the exit from the garden, and it has no interest in nakedness, since its gambit is “grannlåt,” since it knows we are all clothed by culture. Fadren is a play about mantles, about the astounding semiotic power they have, about the theater as a co-player in this war of isms, this competition between clergyman and doctor. The central icon of the play is the Captain's coat of many colors, the garment that accommodates both the green wool jacket and the golden coat of the past, that is mirrored again, reflected over in the lion's skin and the shawl, the armor made of iron that becomes mere decoration. This mantle itself—not what is under it—is the text's truest “article of belief.” Strindberg's dramaturgy consists in pirouetting this mantle, releasing its remarkable semiotic energies, showing how it broadcasts the life of its “occupant” in a theatrical code he himself cannot fathom. Longing for a return to origin and presence, the Captain is stranded in this new world of simulacras and signs, and it is for us—readers and spectators—to see that his actual life is written in these mantles.

Hercules himself thought that womenly chores were a humiliation, a threat to his manhood, but the tale of Omphale can be read otherwise, as a revelation of what Hercules could never say, as the index of a womanly side that is no less real for being unavowable. Fadren speaks of many mantles—of green wool and of gold, of shawls and of lion skin, of iron and of “grannlåt”—but it shows us only two: a Captain's uniform and a straitjacket. We are accustomed to thinking that the second undoes, destroys, the first, that the soldier/scholar is crushed back into madness and silence; but we are free, here as well, to read it otherwise, to grant the theatrical language its full due, to recognize that the uniform is the straitjacket. We then realize that that is what Strindberg has been telling us in his way, not openly in the ongoing warfare of the play, but surreptitiously, hauntingly, in that cradle song of displacement that Bertha heard, that music of children whom culture mantles and then moves about, as long as they live, in child's play.¹⁵

Notes

1. Harry Carlson suggestively links the mysterious script here to the “languages of the dead and of the dark world of unconscious impulses” (52). The burden of this essay is to show how remarkably living this language turns out to be.

2. John Eric Bellquist sees in the song to the presence of death, death as the immovable certainty that obtrudes in the Captain's nihilist scheme (538).

3. I am referring, of course, to the well known late passage where the Captain angrily confronts the Doctor: “Tyst! Jag vill inte tala med er; jag vill inte höra er telefonera vad man pratar därinne!” (85) [“Shut up! I'm not talking to you! I don't want to listen to you mouthing what they say in there!” (41)]. Barry Jacobs (113-121) has remarked that both telephones and spectroscopes were brand new to Sweden at the time of Strindberg's play, and that Strindberg's interest in perception and communication, clothed here in bold technological language, is notoriously difficult to render in translation (as Carlson's English shows).

4. Bellquist (536) refers to the child as an anchor that serves as a ballast against the free-floating “characterlessness” that Strindberg saw as the essentially modern condition.

5. Gail Finney argues astutely that the female sense-bound world proves to be more powerful than the male conceptual scheme (214-6); my argument for a kind of paradigm shift in the play has its parallels with Finney's gender analysis, but I ultimately think that Strindberg is moving beyond gender altogether in his mapping of power.

6. Carlson's translation misses the balletistic interaction of knowing and believing—veta and tro—that Strindberg achieves here.

7. Barry Jacobs (passim) passes in review the (sometimes insuperable) obstacles that hound English translators of Strindberg, and the menial use of the Swedish third person in these exchanges between the Captain and Margret ranks high on the list.

8. Shylock is doubtless the most conspicuous and conscious Shakespearean shadow in Strindberg's scheme, but, as the earlier parallels with Othello and Iago suggest, he does not stand alone. Still another Shakespearean candidate for inclusion would be Lady Macbeth, and Gail Finney has made a very persuasive case for the parallelisms between her famous “unsexing” (and the resultant feminization of her husband) and the gender/power arrangements between the Captain and Laura (223-5).

9. Once again one is reminded of Strindbergian “characterlessness” (as it is, for example, articulated in the preface to Fröken Julie), and it becomes clear that these views of the subject, of the cultural construction (and destruction) of identity, are astonishingly close to much current thinking about subjectivity.

10. Arthur Miller, himself a vital heir to the Strindberg legacy, reviewing the English translation of Olof Lagercrantz's magisterial Strindberg biography, has captured something of the irony and modernity of these strange cosmic landscapes: “the hallucinatory world Strindberg saw seems much closer now to being real. We really walk the moon, and with the press of a button can really crack the planet, and if we have mastered the physics of this magical power, the morals of it are, if anything, father from us than from Strindberg.” Strindberg himself experienced a comparable giddiness and precariousness upon completion of Fadren, as we know from a letter written to Lundegård on November 12, 1887, two days before the premiere in Copenhagen: “Det förefaller mig som om jag går i sömnen; som om dikt och lif blandats. Jag vet inte om Fadren är en dikt eller om mitt lif varit det; men det tyckes mig som om detta i ett gifvet snart stundande ögonblick skulle komma att gå upp för mig, och då ramlar jag ihop antingen i vansinne med samvetsqval eller i sjelfmord. Genom mycken diktning har mitt lif blifvit ett skugglif; jag tycker mig icke längre gå på jorden utan sväfva utan tyngd i en atmosfer icke af luft utan af mörker (298) [“It seems to me that I walk in my sleep—as though reality and imagination are one. I don't know if The Father is a work of the imagination or if my life has been; but I feel that at a given moment, possibly soon, it will cease, and then I will shrivel up, either in madness and agony, or in suicide. Through much writing my life has become a shadow-play; it is as though I no longer walk the earth, but hover weightless in a space that is filled not with air but with darkness” (Meyer, 182)]. Rarely have the trade-offs between life and art, the ontological tug-of-war that governs the artist's life and work, been presented with more clarity.

11. The image of the mind as generator is at the heart of Strindberg's city poem, “Gatubilder, III” (Ordalek och småkonst, 52), which is worth citing as further evidence of the Kuhnian or technological dimension of Strindberg's view of power. Note especially the metaphor of “mal ljus” (“grinds light”) which perfectly captures the shifting registers (from agrarian to hi-tech) that define the human brain's status as energy source:

    Mörk är backen, mörkt är huset—
    Mörkast dock dess källarvåning—
    Underjordisk, inga gluggar—
    Källarhalsen är båd dörr och fönster—
    Och därnere längst i mörkret
    Syns en dynamo som surrar,
    Så det gnistrar omkring hjulen;
    Svart och hemsk, i det fördolda
    Mal han ljus åt hela trakten.

    (Dark is the hill, dark the house—
    but darkest is its cellar—
    subterranean, windowless—
    and the staircase serves a door and window—
    and down there deepest in the darkness
    stands a humming dynamo,
    sparks flying around its wheels:
    black and horrifying, hidden,
    it grinds light for the entire neighborhood.)

    (trans. Rovinsky, 21)

12. Strindberg's views on this subject at this time have been amply documented; see Lagercrantz (191-208) and Meyer (168-78).

13. It goes without saying that Omphale has received various critical commentaries. Carlson (55-60) has seen her in terms of the Good Mother vs. the Terrible Mother, whereas Lagercrantz (193-96), following psychoanalytic studies of the play, has delved into the Oedipal dimensions of the twin stories: Hercules “serving” Omphale, and the Captain's son/lover relation to Laura. Granting the validity of these models, I would nonetheless like to see this episode in a more anthropological light, as a meditation on power and its shifting modalities.

14. Carlson (54-5) has drawn attention to the extended imagery of nets, webs and shawls in this play, and Jacobs (115) has made some very suggestive links between male and female lines, “spear side” and “distaff side,” or, as the Swedish significantly has it, “svärdsida” and “spinnsida.”

15. See Lagercrantz (194-6) for a similar reading of the uniform/straitjacket. Such a view fits perfectly into Lagercrantz's image of Strindberg as vacillating between the masculine and feminine components of his make-up; but the metamorphic, anthropological, and theatrical dimensions of this “child's play” have not been sufficiently recognized.

Works Cited

Bellquist, John Eric. “Strindberg's Father: Symbolism, Nihilism, Myth.” Modern Drama 17 (1986): 532-43.

Carlson, Harry, trans. Strindberg: Five Plays. New York: New American Library, 1984.

———. Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth. Berkeley: U of California P: 1982.

Eklund, Torsten, ed. Strindbergs Brev. Vol. 6. Stockholm: Bonniers, 1958.

Finney, Gail. Women in Modern Drama. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Jacobs, Barry. “Strindberg's Fadren (“The Father”) in English Translation.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 35 (1986): 113-21.

Lagercrantz, Olof. Strindberg. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1979.

Meyer, Michael. Strindberg: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1985.

Miller, Arthur. “The Mad Inventor of Modern Drama.” New York Times 6 January 1985.

Rovinsky, Robert T., trans. Forays into Swedish Poetry. By Lars Gustafsson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1978.

Strindberg, August. Fadren, Fröken Julie, Fordringsägare. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1984. Vol. 27 of August Strindbergs Samlade Verk.

———. Ordalek och småkonst och annan 1900-talslyrik. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1989. Vol. 51 of August Strindbergs Samlade Verk.