8 - A modernist dramaturgy

Summary

Upon emerging from the artistic and spiritual ferment of his Inferno crisis in 1898, Strindberg returned to writing for the theatre with a series of plays that represent a radical departure from the classical model of playwriting. This turn was anticipated by themes and dramatic devices in earlier works, including The Father and Miss Julie, where the characters struggle to keep afloat while on board a sinking culture. By the late 1890s, however, a new consciousness had found expression in ever-shifting forms of drama, in continually modulating experimental techniques, and in bold structural patterns inspired by music, painting and the natural world rather than a conventional narrative perspective. The preceding Inferno years, during which Strindberg abandoned the practice of drama for the sake of science, the visual arts and attempts at making gold, yielded a transformation in drama. This shift in his dramatic techniques can be understood in the context of fin-de-siècle modernity reflected in the arts generally as they groped towards new conceptions of the human being in relation to a rapidly changing environment. In an essay from 1894 entitled ‘Sensations détraquées’ (‘Deranged Sensations’), Strindberg voices his transitional sense of himself and the world around him in an attempt to redefine both, as he perceives the pieces sliding apart and producing distorted images and fragmentary reflections:

Or do I feel displaced since, being born in the good old times, when people had oil lamps, stagecoaches, boat-women, and six-volume novels? I have passed with involuntary haste through the age of steam and electricity, as a result of which I have possibly lost my breath and acquired bad nerves! Or is it that my nerves are undergoing an evolution towards over refinement, and that my senses have become all too subtle? Am I changing skin? Am I about to become a man of today? I’m as nervous as a crab that has cast off its carapace, as irritable as a silkworm in its metamorphosis.

(SE, p. 128)