[In the following essay, Bellquist presents a detailed examination of Fadren.]

As part of the Strindberg Festival held in Stockholm during May, 1981, the Stockholm Stadsteater presented a putatively polemical version of the play Fadren with the slightly reconstructed title Fadern instead.¹ In the foyer of the theater the play's audiences encountered displays intended to reveal the socio-economic plight of women in Strindberg's day; during the performance they were faced with Laura cast as a harassed, hapless victim rather than an implacable vampire; and upon its conclusion they departed in contemplation of the final image of the daughter Bertha, who had stood at the edge of the stage in order to focus the director's entreaties: the scarred survivor of an unfortunate parental conflict, an innocent victim of yet another skirmish in the “battle of the sexes” in which the male (including by implication the author of the play) was primarily at fault. Neither Bertha nor her mother, nor apparently even her father, was meant to be aware of anything to do with that “psychic murder” (“själamord”) which Strindberg thought could be brought about in what he called the “battle of the brains” (hjärnornas kamp”) instead. Yet in fact Fadern left an impression overwhelmingly different from what the director Jan Håkanson desired. In the role of the captain Adolf, the actor Keve Hjelm had managed to transcend his director's peculiar intent, simply by conveying Strindberg's ineradicable subjectivity. At the Strindberg Symposium held as part of the Festival in Stockholm, Hjelm himself explained—much to Håkanson's apparent consternation—why this had happened: for him The Father was a philosophical expression of the existential plight of the human soul, not at all a mere excuse to issue ideological equivocations.

The Father is certainly one of Strindberg's best plays—perhaps even the best. Unlike many of Strindberg's works, whose structures frequently seem discontinuous or internally arbitrary (though often, of course, intentionally so), The Father moves relentlessly to its conclusion without respite. Every element of the play's action fits: plot, character, language, theme, and setting. This is one reason why it has been read by some as a proto-expressionistic drama, a single “Ausstrahlung des Ichs” (“irradiation of the I”) analogous to a painting such as Edvard Munch's The Scream.² Yet just as it is possible to include Munch among the Symbolist painters rather than label him an expressionist, The Father can also be likened to the Symbolist poet's “paysage d'âme,” to a kind of “landscape of the mind” in which the rest of the characters either reflect or impinge upon the captain Adolf, who moves in their midst as if everything in the play is important only in so far as it represents the contents of his own consciousness. These, together with Adolf himself, in turn suggest the contents of the playwright's consciousness, which in the play become an intersubjective, at times even dream-like, aesthetic expression of reality.

Strindberg was well aware that The Father could be read in this manner; on at least one occasion he did so himself. In November, 1887 (he had finished the play in February), he wrote the following remarks to the author and journalist Axel Lundegård:

It seems to me as if I am walking in my sleep; as if poetry and life are mixed. I don't know if The Father is a poem or if my life has been one; but it appears to me as if this ought, in a given, soon approaching moment, to become clear to me, and then I shall collapse in madness and pangs of conscience or in suicide. Through much writing my life has become a life of shadows; I think I am no longer walking upon the earth but floating without weight in an atmosphere not of air but of darkness. Should light fall into this darkness I would sink down crushed!

Strange it is that [in] an often recurring night dream I feel myself flying, without weight, find it completely natural, just as also all concepts of right, unright, true untrue in me are dissolved, and that everything that happens, regardless of how unusual it may be, appears as it should.

Yes, but these are of course the just consequences of the new world view, indeterminism, and it is possible that my unaccustomedness to the new is what amazes and terrifies me³

Even at the height of his “naturalistic” period Strindberg could be possessed by the vision of life as a dream, here expressed in the symbolic imagery of flight and weightlessness, darkness and death (all of which in this instance suggest the iconography of Symbolist poetry and painting); these images had a strongly ethical significance too, suggesting either guilt or madness given the existential threat of life's meaninglessness. For Strindberg the true and the untrue, the just and the unjust had become so mixed by the spirit of the age that the consolatory determinism of the naturalist had made way for an indeterminate chaos—“the modern fate,” as he put it, which he had presented in The Father only particularly in the “form of an erotic passion”.⁴ Of course the crumbling of Strindberg's own marriage had contributed to the view of life in the words quoted above, just as The Father is clearly grounded in a plot of marital conflict. But it is also, as Carl Reinhold Smedmark has written, “the tragedy of the atheistic determinist”; that this tragedy can be thought of as embodying a mental reality simply reflects Strindberg's sense that life itself might be only a dream.⁵ Indeed the imagery in the letter suggests that in so far as one can argue that the world of The Father is similarly dream-like, one might also say that although the play deals with the problem of atheism, it still does so symbolically, in a mythopoeic manner.

That The Father will deal with the problem of atheism is implicitly established in the opening scene, where we are confronted with the Pastor and the Captain—a man of God and a man of secular authority, respectively. With reference to the sexual escapades of the lieutenant Nöjd, whose very name (as readers have noticed) suggests erotic satisfaction, the Captain has already done all he can in the interests of restraint; now he has found fit to turn to the pastor, who of course knows him well enough to realize the irony in the situation:

PASTOR:
Well, so you want me to preach to him. What do you think God's word will do for a cavalryman?
CAPTAIN:
Yes, brother-in-law, it does nothing for me, you're right …
PASTOR:
I certainly am!
CAPTAIN:
But for him! Try anyway.(6)

These words are perhaps only a hint, but they do introduce what is to become the play's tragically serious theme: confident though the Captain may be in his rejection of religious faith, and questionable though the ministrations of a Lutheran pastor may be in matters of sexual conduct, the Captain's atheism apparently has not been enough to enable him to settle this particular case regarding moral conflict. So too in the discussion that ensues in Scene 2, which centers upon whether or not Nöjd has fathered the child that one of the servant girls is going to bear, neither the Captain nor the Pastor is able to settle the question of paternity, just as ultimately the Captain will be unable to resolve his doubts about his own daughter's paternity either. The Captain, a man of natural science, is helpless in his arguments against Nöjd, so that turning the matter over to a court becomes his only recourse; the Pastor's appeal, in the end not even to religion but simply to common decency and honor, is only incidental. Religion, science, and common social morality are helpless against Nöjd's arguments.

While these two opening scenes may thus seem merely to present a well-constructed foreshadowing or microcosm of subsequent events, a kind of dramatic “argument” of the play, their language suggests still more than that. Natural science, after all, is a branch of scentific knowledge, or “vetenskap.” So the discussion proceeds in the interrogative mood, with the Captain, a man interested in researching the facts and in trying to arrive at scientific principles that might account for them, leading the investigation. “What have you done, Nöjd?” he asks, and after the pastor has asked Nöjd to “confess,” which leads only to evasion, “What does Ludvig have to do with this matter? Stick to the truth.”⁷ Then, in answer to whether or not Nöjd really is the child's father, comes the following:

NöJD:
How could one know that?
CAPTAIN:
What are you talking about? Can't you know it?
NöJD:
No—that one can never know.
CAPTAIN:
Weren't you alone then?
NöJD:
Yes—that time, but one can't know if one is the only one just because of that?
CAPTAIN:
Are you trying to blame Ludvig then? Is that your intent?
NöJD:
It's not easy to know whom one should blame.(8)

As the exchange here suggests, the Captain is looking for causes or origins, asking for the “whats” and “hows” of experience as he tries to affix the blame scientifically (“skylla” for him is less a moral than an empirical word). The answer given over and over to the Captain's repeatedly thwarted stabs at obtaining absolute knowledge is that though he may want to “know” what lies behind the measurable fact that the girl is pregnant, one simply cannot “know” anything about this at all. Were Nöjd to know that he indeed is the child's father, he declares he would gladly help the girl out, “men se det kan en aldrig veta” (“but you see, that one can never know”). Thus beyond their rejection of religious, scientific, or moral means of getting at the truth, the play's first two scenes have an unsettling effect: questions are raised without answers, then dismissed for arbitrary resolution by legally constituted authority, and what might have seemed the simple human capacity for ascertaining fundamental truths about experience is undermined. This occurs not by resorting to any pattern of imagery, but by a verbal pattern that repeatedly emphasizes the precariousness of abstract knowledge, so that in the dialogue with Nöjd the Captain discovers himself to be floating in an epistemological ambiguity analogous to the abyss of indeterminate chaos so vividly painted by Strindberg in the letter I have previously quoted. “Jag kan inte reda i det här,” the Captain says, “och det roar mig verkligen inte heller”. And while his use of “reda” ordinarily would signify getting things straight, which he here admits he cannot do, it also refers to “order” as opposed to “disorder”—a disorder with which he is now, as he says, displeasingly confronted.

What ultimately precipitates the Captain's tragic end is therefore primarily twofold (as I have said, simple social morality contributes little): doubt about the grounds or validity of natural science or naturalistic determinism, and an absolute disbelief in metaphysical consolation. Within this context whatever points of view one may adopt become arbitrary, like so many bundles of atomic energy colliding without a center; human characters become wills engaged in a struggle for the survival and dominance not of the species but of the individual in the present moment. In the well-known passage at the start of Scene 3, where the Captain, true to his character, tells the Pastor that he does not want to discuss Bertha's confirmation but rather her whole upbringing (“uppfostran”), the themes of religion, determinism, and chaotic indeterminacy or discontinuity are brought together:

Here the house is full of women, who all want to educate my child. Mother-in-law wants to make her into a spiritist; Laura wants to have her an artist; the governess wants to make her into a methodist; old Margaret wants to have her a baptist; and the servant girls want her in the Salvation Army. Naturally it isn't possible to patch together a soul in that way …⁹

A standard reading of these assertions—that they represent the Captain's paranoid (or even darkly comic) fear of a horde of women, tigresses whom he must ward off to preserve his very life—obscures what the passage is really about. As a Darwinian naturalist, the Captain knows that Bertha, whose “själ” (“soul”) is in the process of being “uppfostrad” (“brought up”), stands at the center of all those influences which determine human character; “patching together a soul” out of them yields what his science tells us we are made of. Strindberg himself wrote often of this “characterlessness” of the human character—indeed he was to do so again in the introduction to Fröken Julie shortly thereafter. Without some sort of metaphysical anchor (which early in The Father the Captain imagines he possesses by virtue of his own unquestioned paternity), such characterlessness can dissolve the mind into an indeterminate sea of chaos—of too many determining impulses washing in too many directions at once. The Captain's very philosophy, which gives him his reasons for trying to tear Bertha away (he wants, quite simply, to save her from determining impulses) ought to show him this is impossible (for he too really wants to determine her character on his own).

The passage on the house full of women reveals several characteristics of The Father which I have been attempting to point out. On the one hand, The Father can be read as tracing—or, if one's ideological position is more hostile toward Strindberg, perhaps only inadvertently revealing—the implications of the Captain's polemic against women. On another level, it presents the Captain's world-view (naturalistic determinism), while at the same time constantly reminding us how unstable this world-view is. Yet it is again this very precariousness which accounts in large part for the sense that everything in the play is somehow mysterious or uncanny, that it represents not just a physical, but a mental, reality. In the present instance, for example, the Captain conceives himself as being surrounded not just by women but by warring psychological and spiritual forces, which reflect Strindberg's theories about the psychology of suggestion; he seems really to be fencing with demons and powers rather than human beings. It is no mere coincidence that nearly all of the influences that the Captain cites as vying for Bertha's soul are religious or spiritual: despite his rejection of the supernatural, occult forces are at work behind the scenes, embodied especially in the spiritist grandmother, who remains continually off stage though her voice can occasionally be heard, and who terrifies Bertha by compelling her to practice automatic writing under the guidance of “the spirits” (“andarne”). The grandmother claims to be able to see realms inaccessible to the Captain's empirical science; she suspects his astronomy, declaring that he “inte kan trolla” (“is not able to practice magic”), because she knows that his scientific investigations threaten to demystify her mythic world.¹⁰ But his opposition to her only serves to spread doubt throughout all the relationships which focus upon the child Bertha (if he says the grandmother lies, then he is saying the mother Laura is lying, Bertha tells him; and then she herself will not believe him any more), so that once again what might under other circumstances be an apparently sensible skepticism vengefully is turned back upon itself—just as the grandmother says the spirits will take revenge if Bertha betrays her relationship with them. In this way the Captain's own viewpoint, with which he intends to counteract all the other influences that surround Bertha, simply becomes yet another point of view, so that once again it too lacks absolute authority.

I say “it too”—for by no means should the presence of occult, mythic elements in The Father suggest that in this play the powers provide a happy metaphysic that can solve the riddle of life, which the Captain's search for organic life in inorganic matter or his initial belief in the biological immortality of the race unfortunately cannot. The play takes its philosophical shape by confronting the spectre of nihilism. One way to understand Strindberg is to view him as a mythopoeic writer, for whom the age's chaotic swarm of points of view constituted the reality which he expressed and shaped through mythopoesis. Myth, as Ernst Cassirer writes, comes into being when the mind, charged with profound emotion, confronts reality and understands it as having animate significance; what compelled Strindberg more than anything else was the threat of chaos, of nihilism, of the abyss.¹¹ Out of such chaos his demons were born: in this case they became the occult house of women which encloses the Captain and his Nietzschean ethics. The conflicting points of view that cage in the Captain are not religious: they are mythopoeic expressions, first, of those naturalistic forces and influences, whether heriditary or environmental, that meet in the formation of the human character and account for the course of daily events, and second, of those negating impulses that deny all such influences any absolute status. Had The Father been written during or after the Inferno period, the house of women would be the Hotel Orfila with its demons and powers (described in the novel Inferno), or the house of vampires in The Ghost Sonata; but since The Father marks a transitional phase in the development of Strindberg's mythopoesis, more traditional representatives of Christianity, along with an occult spiritist, sufficed. The impulse is the same: they are a symbolic, mythic expression of determinism and its negation, of the position of the human self born mysteriously into a godless universe.

The second scene in Act II most clearly illustrates what I am calling Strindberg's mythopoesis in The Father; it sets the dominant tone of the play's mythic background and again combines several of the elements I have thus far traced. Here, late at night when Bertha ought to be sleeping (and hence at the time when one dreams), the old wet-nurse Margret reads the first two verses of the 391st hymn in the 1819 edition of Den swenska psalm-boken. Written by J. O. Wallin, whose poem “Dödens engel” also took up the same theme, this psalm derives from a tradition of Christian pessimistic poetry that flourished in eighteenth-century Sweden, a tradition which the mythologies of the Swedish Romantics attempted to displace:

A mournful and wretched thing
is life, and soon it's done.
Death's angel floats all about
and over the world calls out:
Vanity! Mutability!
Everything on earth that has a soul
falls to the earth beneath his sword
and sorrow alone remains alive
to carve upon the wide grave:
Vanity! Mutability!(12)

For a poet such as the Romantic Tegnér, such poetry led ultimately to a need for pagan, non-Christian solutions, though he could never completely shake off the underlying melancholy which gave rise to them in the first place; for severe Baptists such as old Margret, it merely meant that life was vanity, and that everyone must thus turn in devotion toward the Christian God. The Captain, in his demonic battle of intersubjective will with Laura, is already discovering just how lamentable and miserable life in fact is, and soon he will learn how swiftly it can come to an end: the doubt that Laura, like the ghost of Old Hamlet, has dripped into his ears is turning his life into a landscape of ashes. For him too all is vanity, everything is mutable. Yet seen from the point of view of the play, the Angel of Death scarcely reflects a Christian metaphysic or a mere borrowing of a familiar Christian motif; on the contrary, it is a mythic expression of the fact that, given the unquenchable doubt that consumes the Captain, death is the only absolute left in his world. And although the Captain himself is not present during the scene, its theme is linked directly to him. Bertha's fearful entrance during the reading of the psalm underlines the occult mystery that surrounds it: she is terrified by the mournful songs of ghosts in the attic, next to the cradle in which old Margret presumably once rocked not only her but also the Captain himself to sleep; so the Angel of Death has hovered over the entire household from cradle to grave. While to Margret it may represent grounds for Christian faith, with respect to the Captain and the world within which he moves it suggests the awful spectre of nihilism. Yet this does not make it any less a mythic spectre.

According to Cassirer, to the mythopoeic mind “reality” is indistinguishable from “dream”—which in Strindberg's case brings to mind his Inferno and post-Inferno work at once. In the novel Inferno and in A Dreamplay, where Strindberg's obvious affinity for myth led him to draw upon a wide range of mythological sources ranging from the world's great exoteric religious traditions to the esoteric and the occult, there is also a Strindbergian way of seeing things that suggests the manner in which the mythopoeic consciousness conceives reality. In other contexts I have tried to outline how an anatomy of Strindberg's mythopoesis might look; here I simply want to point out those aspects of Strindberg's mythmaking, such as the song of the Angel of Death or the envisioning of life as a dream, which appear in The Father and which link it with Symbolist literature and art.¹³

As I have already said, it is clear from the letter on The Father that the indeterminacy of modern life provided the vision of life as dream. Strindberg's psychology of suggestion, whereby physical reality including even human nature becomes determined by the manipulation of psychic forces, places life on a plane of consciousness where all that transpires recalls the contents of dreams too. The war between the sexes in The Father is thus psychic: one need only drop the seed of doubt into a character's mind and it will take him over to the point of obsession. And lest one think that the ease with which Laura brings about the Captain's psychic murder simply reflects a weakness of will that derives from his supposed mental illness, one need only consider the like ease with which the Captain himself, in Act III Scene 5, is able to insinuate the same doubt into the mind of the Doctor. Here too the power of doubt, that mental state which engulfs the Captain's mind, results explicitly from the problem of indeterminacy that the Captain must face: “Vad kan man veta?” (“What can one know?”) asks the Pastor, to which the Captain replies: “Nothing! One never knows anything, one only believes, isn't that true Jonas? One believes, so one is blessed! … No—I know that a man can be damned by his faith! That I know.”¹⁴ Indeterminism leads to doubt, then, and doubt merely feeds the persistence of chaos; all that remains is the myth of psychically warring wills, where characters “hypnotize” one another “waking,” where, even when one wakes, one finds oneself in the land of dreams amidst sleep-walkers:

… we and the other people lived forth our lives, unconscious as children, full of fancies, ideals and illusions, and then we awoke; it was possible, but we awakened with our feet at the head of the bed, and the one who woke us was himself a sleepwalker … when the sun was about to come up, thus we found ourselves sitting in complete moonlight amidst the ruins … It had merely been a little morning nap with wild dreams, and it wasn't any awakening.¹⁵

This passage directly foreshadows the closing scene of the play, where the Doctor answers the Pastor after the Captain has lost consciousness:

PASTOR:
Is he dead?
DOCTOR:
No, he can still awaken to life, but to what awakening we do not know.(16)

The Doctor's remarks here are purposely ambiguous. From the scientific point of view, the Captain might wake up only to be irreparably marred by a stroke; and of course old Margret thinks he will awaken to a Christian after-life. Or again, the Doctor is quite likely uttering the agnostic's opinion: there may be life after death, but we cannot know anything about it if indeed there even is any. The force of the play, however, suggests that we already live in the world of the dream, a dream from which we cannot escape, so that if the Captain does wake once more, he will probably find himself among sleep-walkers once again.

The Father, then, is about the tragic failure of the Darwinian naturalist's ideals, given the threat of nihilism that these ideals inevitably contain; the dream, presided over by the Angel of Death and the mental forces involved in psychic struggle, is the myth that encircles the tragedy. From determinism and evolutionism to nihilism, and from nihilism to dream and myth—thus one can trace the concentric spheres of the play's thematic cosmos. In conceiving his myth thus, Strindberg was scarcely alone; the imagery and myth of The Father suggest his place in literary and aesthetic history. In the opening of this essay I likened the world of The Father to the “paysage d'âme” of the Symbolist poet, a landscape of pure subjectivity in which the Captain walks, as it were, within his own hallucinatory dream. This is a structure which Strindberg elaborated upon in his later dreamplays, which contain the dreamers who dream them (To Damascus, A Dreamplay); it can be found in his work still earlier, in the hallucinatory poem “The Fifth Night,” composed in 1889 as a sequel to Sleepwalker Nights (1884), and even in the latter poem itself. What distinguishes these works from the Symbolist poem as such is just this concrete presence of the dreamer: in Symbolist poems, the “I” of the poet tends to be removed, and by means of a kind of “indirect discourse” the poetic image is made to express or reflect reality, both internal and external, as the contents of consciousness, while in Strindberg the dreaming consciousness is always concretely embodied, playing out its role upon reality's dreamed stage. Otherwise, however, the similarities are striking.¹⁷ The mysterious suggestivity of the language of Symbolist poetry, for example, involves an intellectually sophisticated kind of mythopoesis; as Baudelaire wrote, nature is a temple of living pillars, a forest of symbols which familiarly regard the man who passes there. Yet the Symbolist poets also display an obsession with the gouffre, the inner abyss, which has led some critics to refer to their attempt not at spiritual, but at negative, or even material transcendence.¹⁸ And this should bring to mind Strindberg's peculiar use of myth: in The Father he achieves more a mythopoeic apotheosis of that which negates metaphysical meaning, rather than that which might provide it. The same is true of Symbolist painting, with its darkly mythic iconography of the dream, of the fatal woman, of the mythic borderlines between the human and the bestial, between life and death.¹⁹ Of the Strindberg who wrote The Father one can say, as did Maurice Denis of Odilon Redon, that he was powerless “to paint anything which is not representative of a state of soul, which does not express some depth of emotion, which does not translate an interior vision.”²⁰ And just as Strindberg in his November letter defined his own interior vision as he had expressed it in The Father, so did Redon himself write of his own lithography that he used it “with the sole aim of producing in the spectator a sort of diffuse and dominating attraction in the dark world of the indeterminate.”²¹

Notes

1. “Fadern” is simply the currently accepted spelling of the inflected definite form, which in Strindberg's day was written “fadren.” For the 1981 production, Lars Bjurman and Jan Håkanson altered the play's text by exchanging some of its mythological references for allusions to the time's feminism, drawn from Strindberg's letters and polemical articles. See the program written and compiled for Fadern (Stockholm, 1980-81).

2. Carl E. W. L. Dahlström, Strindberg's Dramatic Expressionism, 2d ed. (New York, 1965). See also Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt (Boston, 1962), p. 104.

3. “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. Faller ljus in i detta mörker så dimper jag ned krossad!

   Eget är i att [sic] en ofta återkommande nattlig dröm jag känner mig flygande, utan tyngd, finner det helt naturligt, liksom också alla begrepp om rätt, orätt, sant osant hos mig äro upplösta, och att allt som sker huru ovanligt det än är, synes mig som det ska vara.

   Ja, men det är ju rätta konseqvenserna af den nya verldsåskådningen, indeterminismen, och möjligt är att det är af ovana vid det nya jag häpnar och fruktar.” August Strindberg, Brev, ed. Torsten Eklund (Stockholm, 1948-), 6:298. The translations are my own.

4. Brev, 6:282.

5. August Strindberg, Samlade dramer, ed. Carl Reinhold Smedmark (Stockholm, 1962-70), 3:194.

6. PASTORN:

   Nå, så vill du jag ska läsa över honom. Vad tror du Guds ord tar på en kavallerist.

   RYTTMäSTARN:

   Ja, svåger, inte biter det på mig, det vet du …

   PASTORN:

   Det vet jag nog!

   RYTTMäSTARN:

   Men på honom!

   Försök i alla fall.

   Samlade dramer, 3:214.

7. Samlade dramer, 3:214; italics mine.

8. NöJD:

   Hur ska en kunna veta det?

   RYTTMäSTARN:

   Vad för slag? Kan du inte veta det?

   NöJD:

   Nej si det kan en då aldrig veta.

   RYTTMäSTARN:

   Var du inte ensam då?

   NöJD:

   Jo den gången, men inte kan en veta om en är ensam för det?

   RYTTMäSTARN:

   Vill du skylla på Ludvig då? Är det din mening?

   NöJD:

   Det är inte gott att veta vem en ska skylla på.

   Samlade dramer, 3:215.

9. “Här är huset fullt med kvinnor, som alla vilja uppfostra mitt barn. Svärmor vill göra henne till spiritist; Laura vill ha henne till artist; guvernanten vill göra henne till metodist; gamla Margret vill ha henne till baptist; och pigorna, till frälsningsarmén. Det går naturligtvis inte an att lappa ihop en själ på det sättet …”

   Samlade dramer, 3:217.

10. Samlade dramer, 3:234.

11. See Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne Langer (New York, 1946), pp. 17-23 and 32-34.

12. En jämmerlig och usel ting
    är livet, och tar snarligt slut.
    Dödsängeln svävar alltomkring
    och över världen ropar ut:
    Fåfänglighet! Förgänglighet!

    Allt som på jorden anda har
    till jorden faller för hans glav
    och sorgen ensam lever kvar
    att rista på den vida grav:
    Fåfänglighet! Förgänglighet!

    Samlade dramer, 3:244.

13. See John E. Bellquist, “On Myth and Myth-making in Strindberg,” Scandinavica, 23 (1984), 51-52, and “Strindberg's Mythmaking,” paper presented at an annual meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Bloomington, Indiana, Nov. 1984.

14. “Ingenting! Man vet aldrig någonting, man tror bara, inte sant Jonas? Man tror, så blir man salig! … Nej jag vet att en man kan bli osalig på sin tro! Det vet jag.”

    Samlade dramer, 3:266.

15. … 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 solen skulle gå upp, sa befunno vi oss sittande i fullt månsken med ruiner … Det hade bara varit en liten morgonlur med vilda drömmar, och det var icke något uppvaknande.” Samlade dramer, 3:256.

16. PASTORN:

    Ar han död?

    DOKTORN:

    Nej, han kan ännu vakna till liv, men till vilket uppvaknande veta vi ej.

    Samlade dramer, 3:274.

17. On the indirect discourse of the image in Symbolist poetry, see Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal (New York, 1977), p. 38.

18. See Balakian, pp. 32-37 and 51; cf. Hugo Friedrich, The Structure of Modern Poetry: From the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Evanston, 1974), pp. 29-31, on the “empty ideality” of Baudelaire's poetry.

19. To take but one example, Symbolist painting is obsessed with representations of dark angels, including the Angel of Death. That Strindberg himself was interested in the iconography of Symbolism even at the height of his “naturalistic” period is most simply evidenced at the conclusion of Miss Julie where the beheading of the bird, which foreshadows Julie's suicide, is linked with the sermon on the beheading of John the Baptist, which the cook Kristin attends.

20. Quoted in Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art (New York, 1972), p. 71.

21. Quoted in Lucie-Smith, p. 78.