Strindberg and the Greater NaturalismAuthor(s): Evert SprinchornSource: The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 13, No. 2, Naturalism Revisited (Winter, 1968), pp. 119-129Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1144416Accessed: 11/07/2010 11:47

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119

Strindberg and

the Greater Naturalism

EVERT SPRINCHORN

How much of a Naturalist was Strindberg? It is true that he first made interna- tional reputation as one, but a few years later he turned to symbolism and cre- ated the proto-expressionistic works that won him another and perhaps greater reputation. And though The Father and Miss Julie are generally regarded as mas-

terpieces of Naturalism, Zola, the chief apostle of the movement, found fault with The Father; and Miss Julie is less naturalistic than the preface Strindberg affixed to it would indicate. Miss Julie is the play that most nearly satisfies the require- ments of Zola's naturalism. Strindberg labelled The Father simply "a tragedy,"

Jean Gascon and Denise Pelletier in Dance of Death, 1966.

EVERT SPRINCHORN

but he gave Miss Julie the subtitle "a naturalistic tragedy." This subtitle and the

play's greater attention to physical detail are probably due to Zola's criticism of

The Father. Unlike many readers and spectators, who think that The Father was

written in white heat by an inspired madman, Zola found the play's design and

characters too obviously the product of careful calculation. The persons were too

abstract, too manifestly the figures in a mathematical formula. Furthermore, the ac-

tion was so radically truncated that the illusion of reality was bound to be shat-

tered.

Having taken the pains to prepare his own French translation, which he had

mailed to Zola with a covering letter in which he asserted that the play had been

"composed according to the experimental formula," Strindberg was undoubtedly

upset by the Frenchman's criticisms. He might well have replied that in a tragedy the characters should appear larger than life and possess a somewhat abstract

quality and that a too close attention to realistic detail would detract from the

grandeur of the design. The Father, after all, was meant to be a 19th-century ver-

sion of Greek tragedy. But Strindberg knew that unless he could find an audience

outside his own country, stolid, conservative Sweden would silence him or force

him to write nothing but fairy tales for the ladies' magazines. After standing trial

for blasphemy in 1884, he felt that his whole career as an original writer depended on attracting a European following. No wonder, then, that he took Zola's criti-

cisms to heart when he wrote his next play, Miss Julie. And having written it and

made one or two fair copies, he perhaps feared that the play would still not seem

naturalistic enough and that a foreword was needed to give his work a proper facade.

Strindberg's The Father.

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Irma Christennson, Inga Tidblad, and Ulf Palme in Miss Julie.

The two people Strindberg most wanted to please with his play were Zola and Antoine, respectively, the theoretician and the practitioner of the new movement. The Father was written before Antoine opened the doors of his Theatre Libre to the non-Boulevard drama, but Julie was written over a year later, by which time Antoine had become the most talked about producer in Paris. The Julie preface shows very clearly how alert Strindberg was to what was going on in the French

capital; there is scarcely a thought in it that is original with him.

Echoing Zola, he averred that the theatre had reached a crisis, that conventional

intrigue drama was dead, and that only psychological drama could hold the interest of a modern audience. From Zola, too, comes the Darwinistic remark about hu-

manity sloughing off its feelings as it evolves into a higher species which will not allow emotion to inhibit its thinking. From the Goncourt brothers: the idea of liter- ature as case history, in which the writer is little more than a doctor's recording secretary; and also the conviction that the conventional theatre is a declining art form fit only for women and children. From the French psychologists Ribot and Charcot: the theory that the ego consists of contradictory impulses, many of which

may be buried beneath the level of conscious thought. From Bernheim: the notion that hypnotic suggestion is a powerful force in life and much more common than

generally supposed. From his familiarity with the European stage, as reflected in the Parisian papers and journals: his call for solid rather than painted scenery (al- ready in use in theatres that could afford it); for asymmetrical sets (frequently used in French melodrama and also in some productions of the Meiningen players); for real props (a fetich of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen); for the abolition of foot-

lights to make facial expressions more true-to-life (the aim of theatre designers ever since the stage moved indoors in the 17th-century); and for acting that would

EVERT SPRINCHORN

permit the performer to turn his back to the audience (already practiced by Porel as actor in the 1870's and as director in the 1880's at the Odeon Theatre-Strindberg had seen him in 1876). Even the pantomimed action that Strindberg wanted to sub- stitute for an intermission may have its source in the growing Paris interest in

pantomime plays in the 1880's. In making these points he seems to be addressing himself mainly to the provincial theatres, urging them to catch up with the latest trends.

It is in Strindberg's plea for an intimate theatre that Antoine's influence is most

apparent. Antoine's unprecedented success was partly the result of staging his

plays in a small hall. Since his untrained actors did not know how to project in the manner of the skilled performers at the Boulevard theatres, they spoke in a natu- ral conversational tone and acted pretty much as people do in real life. Acting in the grand style would have been absurd in that space. Thus by a fluke Antoine hit on the right acting method for the naturalistic drama. The acting and the theatre were in almost perfect harmony. The effect was similar to that of Warhol's home movies a couple of generations later. For Strindberg the primary virtue of the in- timate theatre was that it could be supported by a small intellectual coterie so that the dramatist would not be forced to write down to his audience. Secondarily, it offered the opportunity for subtle effects, the play of expression on the faces of the

actors, the small gesture, the intimate tone of voice, all of which could not be "read" in the typical large theatre. The writing of the Julie preface, like the opening of Antoine's theatre, occurred at a time when the Naturalist movement was actually quite far advanced. Taine, Zola, the Goncourts had scored major victories all along the cultural front, and the theatre, that almost impregnable fortress of tradition and conservatism, had been the last area to be invaded.

It was, however, a critical juncture. The movement had won a major breakthrough in 1887 because of Antoine's young and enterprising spirit; but a group of young novelists, including some former Zola-ites, had estranged themselves from the move- ment because of the sordidness of Zola's La Terre. At the same time the Decadents, some of whom had begun as Naturalists, were gathering their forces and in the next

decade, under the banner of Symbolism, would outflank the Naturalists. Consequently, when Strindberg leaped into the naturalistic saddle, he rode off in all directions.

Yet underneath this literary opportunism he had drawn up his own naturalist plat- form. Up to the mid-1880's his principal concern had been with social questions. These he had resolved, at least temporarily, in The Author, the fourth volume of his autobiography, written in 1886. He thereupon turned inward for his material, a course that would lead eventually to A Dream Play. This change reflected the inter- est in abnormal psychology that developed parallel with the rise of Naturalism. (See page 113.) During August 1886 he steeped himself in the "whole literature of insanity," and a few months later he wrote The Father. Undoubtedly he felt he was on the right track because of recent tendencies in the work of Zola and Ibsen.

The bedrock of his philosophy lay in the conviction that life was to be viewed less as a struggle against heredity and environment, as the Naturalists insisted, than as

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THE GREATER NATURALISM

the struggle of minds, each seeking to impose its will on other minds. Powerful minds were like charged particles attracting weaker particles, thus building up mag- netic fields of influence. He found scientific support for his theory in the writings of Bernheim. Following up the latter's idea that "all who may be hypnotized are

susceptible to suggested ideas," Strindberg wrote "The Battle of the Brains" (1887), an essay in which he averred that "suggestion is only the stronger brain's struggle with and victory over the weaker, and that this procedure is applied unconsciously in everyday life," that is, in political, religious, and literary controversies, as well as in domestic squabbles. "Physical battle is now obsolescent." This essay, which might serve as a vade mecum for Madison Avenue and government propaganda offices,

provides the key to Strindberg's view of theatre.

At first he had aligned himself with the Naturalists because he saw them as exposers of the sham and "humbug" of modern civilization. If they were not precisely lovers of nature, as the Rousseau-istic Strindberg was, at least they were haters of the social establishment. At the same time he characterized realism (N.B., not Naturalism) as the tendency in art to create illusion by the careful rendering of significant de- tails. This was in 1889, after having written Miss Julie and acquainted himself with the plays of the Theatre Libre, he felt it was necessary to dissociate himself from at least one branch of the naturalist movement and to distinguish between the "great- er" and the "lesser" naturalism. The former is the naturalism

which seeks out those points where the great battles take place, which loves to see what one doesn't see everyday, which revels in the conflict of natural forces, whether they are called love and hate or rebelliousness and sociableness, and which cares not whether a thing is beautiful or ugly as long as it is magnificent.

The lesser naturalism allowed no scope for the personality of the artist; it was

merely a faithful imitation of nature, a kind of photography so inanely accurate that even "the speck of dust on the lens was included as part of the picture." The lesser artist presents ordinary events and can't see the forest for the trees, while the greater artist singles out the significant motif, which usually concerns life as struggle. The

greater naturalist follows the path cut by the Zola who wrote Germinal and La

Terre, but not the Zola who, in adapting L'Assommoir for the stage, stressed the environment of the action by having an extraordinarily faithful reproduction of a barroom erected in the theatre. The lesser naturalists follow in the footsteps of

Becque, whose Vultures, a realistic rendering of middle-class life, represents the

objective approach loved by those "who lack personality, the soulless ones, as they should be called." To Strindberg the great drama, the drama of Shakespreare, Ra-

cine, and Moliere, was essentially psychological drama, a conflict of wills, in which the stage apparatus was reduced to a minimum. Shakespeare required scarcely any sets at all, and the "marvelous vivisection" of Tartuffe "takes place on a stage with

two taborets." For the "battle of brains" no naturalistic set is needed. The Father

and Miss Julie can be acted out with a table and two chairs, and a few odd props, such as a birdcage, a lamp, and a straitjacket.

Now, to judge from the preface to Miss Julie, Strindberg wanted the set to be an

active force in the drama. Environment and heredity were to be the jaws of the vise

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EVERT SPRINCHORN

that would crush Miss Julie. However, as I have mentioned, the preface was written to sell the play rather than to explain it. If we look at the play itself, Strindberg actually describes a manor-house kitchen of which the audience sees only the corner containing the large glass doors leading to the yard. This vaulted entry is a little stage-left of center. The other walls and the ceiling of the kitchen are masked

by the teasers and tormentors, which means that in making some of their exits and entrances the actors would not use any doors. They would, in a sense, just fade in and out of the picture. Furthermore, the long, real kitchen table is cut off by the

drapes or curtains serving as tormentors, for the audience is supposed to see only one end of it. "As far as the set is concerned," wrote Strindberg,

I have borrowed from the Impressionists the idea of the asymmetric, truncated picture, and believe I have thereby enhanced the illusion, for, by not seeing the whole room and all its furnishings, the spectator will be induced to exercise his imagination to complete the room.

One would have surmised that both the action of the play and the naturalist concern with milieu would have led the dramatist to specify a box set. Yet Strindberg has

manifestly sought to avoid both this and the old-fashioned wing-and-drop set.

In this, as in his replacement of the customary intermissions with a pantomime and a

ballet, and in his reduction of the playing time to 90 minutes, his ulterior purpose was to ensnare and hold an audience. If life to him was a battle of minds, the theatre was a harmony of minds attained by the spectator's willing suspension of disbelief and the dramatist's hypnotic skills. If the subject matter were morally unpleasant, politically unpalatable, or logically impossible, a conflict of minds would arise and the author-hypnotist would have to enhance the spell. Conventional naturalism cre- ated the illusion of reality by the accumulation of details to establish the force of

environment, whereas Strindberg assumed that the spectators could best be en- tranced if they could be lured into the spirit of the game and made to supply what was missing. The dramatist's task was to supply what was significant.

One way of achieving harmony was to give the selected objects a symbolic mean-

ing. This is, of course, a basic artistic method, but Ibsen the realist and Zola the naturalist employed it with more than usual thoroughness, and Strindberg always appreciated the latter more as a symbolist than as a naturalist. However, symbols now were not to be linked to the realms of the ideal and the supernatural, but to adumbrate an inner, psychological action, to provide a focus for the mass of realis- tic detail, and to enlarge the scope of the work. In Zola's La Bete humaine the locomo- tive becomes a recurring symbol of the bestial drives of the engineer, just as in La Curee the entwining flowers (their names taken from seed catalogues) in the hothouse

suggest the irresistible force of the sex drive. Ibsen's method is most apparent in The Wild Duck, but even in A Doll House the denuded Christmas tree in the last act speaks vividly of the change in the Helmer household. In Miss Julie the boots waiting to be

polished and the gaping speaking tube convey the spiritual presence of Julie's father. The songbird in the cage, the bird that Julie insists is her only friend and that Jean so

brutally kills, underscores almost too heavily the situation in which the aristocratic

girl finds herself. The kitchen itself-naturalistic in that it takes us away from the

parlors and drawing rooms of conventional realistic plays and speeds us on the road

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Jean-Louis Roux, Denise Pelletier, and Jean Gascon in the Stratford, Ontario production of Dance of Death.

EVERT SPRINCHORN

down to Wesker's kitchen and LeRoi Jones' toilet-is symbolic of the servants' world into which Julie has lowered herself. For, in contrast to most naturalistic plays, Miss Julie shows us a character out of her milieu.

The point is that Strindberg sought to preserve the integrity of the symbolic prop or set against a growing tendency to obscure it by amassing random details; he sought this more assiduously than Zola did, possibly more than Ibsen did, and

certainly more than their successors did. He well knew that he was swimming across, if not exactly against, the main current of the 1880's. The realistic spirit of the century had made stage successes of American melodramas like Under the Gas-

light (1867) in which a train roared across the stage, of English dramas like Robert- son's cup-and-saucer comedies, remarkable for the absence of a painted moon and the presence of real handles on the doors in the canvas flats, and of sensuous French comedies like L'Ami Fritz, which featured both a cherry tree that shed its blossoms and a genuine gourmet's dinner whose aromas were wafted out to the audience. The fact that the latter play was staged at the Comedie-Francaise signaled the capitu- lation in 1876 of the bastion of the classic drama. Inevitably directors had to outdo one another in their search for novelty. In a letter of 1884 Strindberg joshingly told a Swedish producer that he was planning a modern comedy with "a locomo- tive (real, all fired up), a parsonage, an apple tree (real) in blossom, a tunnel, a train station, a room in a Swedish manor house, a mill, a coffin, a corpse, a bedroom with a double bed, a commode, and so on." His own ideas emerge from a letter written in 1889 advising his wife on how to stage his one-act play The Stronger:

Set up on stage a corner, a crib or stall ... of rehearsal props. Hang a few travel posters and theatre placards on the walls so that it looks like a cafe without the counter being seen. Set out an umbrella stand, a coatrack, etc.

This is the Julie method again, the method of selective realism, and it is the method

Strindberg was to develop later in such proto-expressionist plays as To Damascus and Charles XII, where each set is built up out of a few suggestive elements. About 1897 Strindberg impressed Yeats with these ideas for simplified and symbolic sets, and a decade or so later this approach to stage decoration, known as "synthesis," began to manifest itself in European theatres. One might be tempted to make some

large claims for Strindberg as a scenic innovator were it not that this "synthetic" method is at least as old as the Elizabethan theatre, and probably as old as the Greek.

Nevertheless, it is fair to regard Strindberg as a renewer.

As far as acting was concerned, Strindberg's views were, during the 1880's, more in line with the main drift of Naturalism. The dominant style in serious plays was

pompous and rhetorical, with the tragic actor relying on sweeping gestures and a voice that ranged from the elegaic to the stentorian. While this exaggerated style might be appropriate to plays with exotic settings and superhuman heroes, it rang false in plays with everyday settings and middle or lower-class people. In contrast was the mode of drawing-room comedy. The comic actors were masters of the

light touch, the quick give-and-take of witty dialogue, the small but expressive ges- ture. Compared to tragic actors, they were cool and detached. It was this comic

style that Strindberg in the 1880's opted for in his Naturalist tragedies. (I cannot

help but feel that for the same reason Chekhov wanted his plays performed by

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THE GREATER NATURALISM

comedians and not by tragedians, and that is partly why he called his plays com- edies: the tragic posture was alien to them.)

When asked for advice on staging The Father, Strindberg replied:

The play can easily be ruined and made ridiculous. I would suggest, although I usually stand on the sidelines, that the part of the Captain be given to an actor of lively disposition who with the superior, self-mocking, slightly cynical air of a man of the world, fully conscious of his own merits, goes in tolerably good spirit to meet his fate, wrapping himself as he dies in the spider webs that he cannot, be- cause of certain laws of nature, rip asunder.

A deceived husband is a comic figure in the eyes of the world, and even more so in the eyes of a theatre audience. He must show that he knows this, and that he too would laugh if only someone else were the victim.

This is what's modern in my tragedy, and woe betide me and the mountebank if he goes out and acts The Robbers in this year 1887. No shrieks, no preachments. Elegantly, calmly, resignedly-as befits a basically strong soul who accepts this modern fate that takes the form of erotic passion. Remember that a cavalry officer is inevitably a rich man's son of good breeding who lives up to his own high standards in social behavior and is also well-behaved towards his soldiers.

In a word, not the coarse boor of stage tradition and army cabals. Moreover, he has risen above his profession, has exposed it, and is a scientist. For me he represents here especially a masculinity that some have sought to debase, cheat us of, and ascribe to the third sex. It is only with his woman that he is unmanly, for the good reason that she wants him that way, and the law of accommodation requires us to play the role our mistress demands. Yes, sometimes we have to pretend to be chaste, naive, ignorant, simply to get her to copulate. (Letter of October 17, 1887.)

This was written a month before the Copenhagen production opened at the Casino Theatre. Having learned from that, Strindberg counseled the director of the Swedish production to play The Father in the manner of The Wild Duck as staged in Stockholm,

that is, not as tragedy, not as comedy, but as something in between. Don't use a too fast tempo, as we did here at the Casino at first. Much better to let it move for- ward slowly, quietly, evenly, until it picks up momentum by itself in the last act. Exception: the Captain's speeches when his obsessions break out. These should be spoken hurriedly, abruptly; should be spat out with constant sudden transitions. (Letter of December 23, 1887.)

Strindberg's advice can be misleading to modern actors and directors who do not set it against the background of 19th-century tragic acting. His later admonitions indi- cate that he would find American "Method" acting quite unsuitable-too small, too

easy, too mean, and too ugly. Twenty years after writing his principal Naturalist

dramas, Strindberg established his own intimate theatre, where he produced both The Father and Miss Julie. In 1908, when the Naturalist movement was everywhere triumphant, Strindberg abjured it in both stage decor and acting, declaring that Realism and Naturalism were past stages in the development of the theatre. He wanted more abstract sets and was constantly experimenting with the use of drapes. (He was reading Fuchs and Gordon Craig, and had met Craig once in 1906.)

Played on this "drapery stage," said Strindberg, The Father would be "elevated

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Anders Ek and Ingrid Thulin in Miss Julie.

from the heavy everyday world to the level of tragedy in high style. The charac- ters [would] be sublimated, ennobled, and appear as if from another world." (Letter of April 1, 1908.) During rehearsals he instructed his director to stage The Father as grand tragedy with magnificent voices and heightened emotions. The actress who took the part of the evil wife was told to be like the great tragediennes, but "of the

past and present simultaneously"-"not to be too tame, not to play it as comedy, not to fear the eruption of the passions, neither the profound hatred nor the soaring am- bition of this demon wife." (Letter of April 23, 1908.) We seem to catch here the first whiffs of expressionistic acting. But this, too, may be a false scent. For the actors at Strindberg's theatre were young and inexperienced like those at Antoine's theatre 20 years before, and Strindberg may simply have been trying to get them to

THE GREATER NATURALISM

project. Bearing this out is the advice he gives Falck in the role of the Captain. In contrast to what he told the actress playing Laura, Strindberg told Falck, the most experienced member of the troupe, to tone down his playing, to confine him- self to the low register of his voice, and to let the words come out naturally (letter of August 18, 1908).

Clear, forceful speech that would capture the rhythms of his dialogue was the cor- nerstone of Strindberg's conception of good acting. Professional actors were in

danger of slipping into the false accents of declamation. Strindberg's young actors, on the other hand, had not learned stage speech and were inclined to rattle off much of the dialogue, to breathe improperly and break up the rhythms, to swallow key words and to emphasize the wrong words. A professional speech teacher was hired, but she proved unsuccessful in Strindberg's view because she taught the actors to "declaim the conversations, not to speak them." Another reason for the change from Strindberg's 1880's approach was that the atheist who wrote the Naturalist

tragedies had been converted to mysticism and a belief in the afterlife. His former self appalled him. Yet the coarseness and cynicism of his earlier views are more in

keeping with the spirit in which the plays were written.

The salient fact emerging from all these contradictions, both real and apparent, is that the mantle of Naturalism did not sit comfortably on Strindberg's shoulders. When he wrote Miss Julie Naturalism had already arrived at a crossroads. Some of its adherents attempted to make the novel and the stage painstakingly accurate

copies of life. Holz, for example, set forth in the 1890's his theory of a "consistent

naturalism," which he summed up in the formula: Art = Nature - X, X representing such factors as the artistic means employed and the artist's personality. Strindberg would have no truck with this petty naturalism. The formula for the greater natu- ralism would have read: Art = Nature + X. He may have deliberately, as part of the experimental method, confounded art and life, but he did so not in order to re- duce one to the level of the other but to make both a little larger, a little more vivid, a little more meaningful. And the result was that by making the surface of one a bit more beautiful he made the depths of the other a bit more bearable.

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