Strindberg as Dramatist by Evert Sprinchorn, and: August Strindberg: An Introduction to his Major Works by Birgitta Steene (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews EVERT SPRINCHORN. Strindberg as Dramatist. New Haven, Cf and London: Yale University Press 1982. Pp. xi, 332, illustrated. $30. BIRGITTA STEENE. August Strindberg: An Introduction to his Major Works. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiskell International; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press 1982. Pp. ix, 178. $28.75· More critical confusion swirls about August Strindberg than about any other modem dramatist. Evert Sprinchorn summarizes it well in his new book, Strindberg as Dramatist: In his native country, Strindberg has always been looked upon as a politicalfigure, apublicist and controversialist as much as dramatist and storyteller.... In Germany, on the other hand, [he] was accepted as a religious writer, exposing the vices ofa materialistic age.... Yetanother Strindberg emerged in France in the 1920s. It was the deranged Strindberg, the poet of the Inferno, who appealed to Cocteau, Artaud, and the surrealists.... In England andAmerica, he had even worse luck. Hecame on the scenejust at thetimewhen Ibsen was beinginstalled as a literary classic and enshrined as the saint of the feminists and liberals. Compared to the stolid and rational Norwegian, Strindberg seemed like a cranky upstart .... Everywhere, ... there was bound to be a misunderstanding of Strindberg as long as a part of the man was taken for the whole. (pp. 296-297) Despite all the misunderstanding, each generation seems to discover a new, often revolutionary, Strindberg that was not apparent earlier. The Germans found in him an expressionist, an innovator who forged new imagery for the time, and whose stark, pessimistic, dreamlike visions were exactly suited to the grim atmosphere of the First World War. Artaud saw him as a model in the effort to restore a mythic dimension to a realistic theatre sorely in need of mystery and magic. The Strindberg discovered in the 1950s was the dark humorist whose awareness of the cruel joke destiny played upon modem man, robbing life of meaning, helped set the stage for the theatre of the absurd. And in the late 1960s, Swedish directors revealed a Strindberg whose masterly dramatization of the dialectics of history foreshadowed and perhaps even surpassed Brecht. (The latter, as Sprinchom points out, disparaged Strindberg as a poet of the middle class, but there is evidence that Mother Courage was influenced by Strindberg's history play Gustav Adolf.) The conclusion to be drawn from this pattern of discovery is that there is not one Strindberg: there are several Strindbergs. Sprinchom successfully sketches convincing portraits of two of them: 1) the intellectual- the restless polymath and serious dilettante interested in everything from science to the occult, painting to music, the atom to the meaning of the universe; and 2) the theatrical visionary, working to shape drama into a more suggestive and supple medium, breaking old molds and leaving "behind nearly all the principles and rules of standard commercial theatrical fare and, in effect, [asking] his audiences to forget what they knew about the handling of plot and the drawing of character and to remember all that they might have known about variation of theme, use of counterpoint, resolution of discords, and the psychologically, rather than logically, satisfying fusion of seemingly unrelated elements that is characteristic of great music" (p. 232). 270 Book Reviews The old image of Strindberg has needed shattering for some time - the image of "brilliant but crazy," as Harold Clurman put it- and Sprinchorn's book is an important contribution to the demolition work. In its stead, Sprinchorn offers us a conscious, deliberate artist whose place in the history of drama we are only beginning to comprehend. The portrait evoked of Strindberg the dramatic poet, however, is less effective and convincing. Sprinchom is at his weakest when attempting to guide the reader through channels of meaning in individual plays. His choices of critical approaches are varied- now biographical, now Freudian, now Jungian- but eclecticism is not the problem. The problem is that all the choices tend to lead to reductive results. By and large, Sprinchorn avoids the extremes of biographical criticism that characterize what has been the traditional approach to Strindberg interpretation in Sweden for the past seventy years. No playwright has suffered more from the muddling of biographical research and literary criticism. The 1982 edition of the standard handbook...