AUGUST STRINDBERG’S NATURALISTIC SYMBOLISM

A disgruntled Maria Weyr wrote to her husband sometime in 1893 or 1894 about the habits of her new, unfathomable brother-in-law. He reads nothing but “works of science, . . . Balzac and the French psychologists,” she complained. When he writes, he does so as if he is “in a trance,” but he actually spends much of his time painting, and “there, too, he is a law unto himself, naturalistic symbolism, as he calls it.”1 Not long before, Weyr’s sister, Frida Uhl, had been courted with a painting titled Night of Jealousy (fig. 5), a sober, nearly monochromatic work that had been thickly, violently, and seemingly haphazardly executed with a palette knife. On the back of the cardboard support, the artist had dedicated the painting to his new fiancée, explained the motif, and signed his name, “the Symbolist August Strindberg.” Maria Weyr soon bade goodbye to the symbolist Strindberg from her parents’ house in Austria when he left for Paris in the late summer of 1894. Having spent the previous two years traveling between Sweden, Germany, and Austria, all the while occupied with painting, chemical experiments, and a scientific treatise that he intended to rival Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, Strindberg was preparing to conquer the Parisian avant-garde not only as a playwright but also as a symbolist painter. He was, he told a friend at the time, “the first to paint symbolic landscapes.” He had “a whole room full of great symbolist canvases” ready for exhibition, and he even seems to have lined up a dealer.2 Gearing up for his attack on French symbolist circles, Strindberg was also writing a number of essays in French, follow-ups to his 1887 series of essays titled Vivisections. With his paintings, plays, and this new series of Vivisections, Strindberg anticipated planting his “seed” in the brains of what he called the especially suggestible Parisians.3

Strindberg was one of the few to heed Émile Zola’s call to apply experimental methods to his various creative endeavors.4 Especially in the 1880s, however, Strindberg had maintained a certain ambivalence about Zola’s experimentalism, criticizing the French author for relying too much on analysis and ignoring his own self. By the 1890s, however, having immersed himself in French experimental psychology and having taken a particular interest in nature’s experiments as a methodological paradigm, Strindberg more fully embraced experimentalism as fundamentally important for, among other things, the style of painting he would call “naturalistic symbolism.” In the spring of 1894, not long before Strindberg left Austria for Paris, a French journalist had interviewed a number of foreign writers about Zola’s latest bid to join the French Academy. While most of those interviewed expressed a grudging appreciation for Zola but argued that his time had passed, Strindberg conveyed unabashed admiration. He defended Zola against his detractors, argued that the naturalist novelist had already achieved immortality, and demanded that the younger generation of symbolists recognize him as their master. “Is he not a psychologist,” Strindberg asked, “who has performed a thousand vivisections on the human Heart with the audacity of a surgeon! . . . Honor him, grateful fatherland! And you, symbolists, honor the master of Symbolism . . . and you, synthetists, honor the greatest of synthetists also superior in analysis.”5 This text might have sunk into obscurity had not a few months later the symbolist journal La plume announced the Swede’s arrival in Paris by reprinting Strindberg’s idiosyncratic plea for Zola to be appreciated as, of all things, the master of symbolism.6

Strindberg’s experimentation across a wide range of media and disciplines is often identified as the heroic crux of his modernism. And, indeed, in his prodigious output—twenty-two volumes of correspondence alone, compared to Zola’s mere eleven—Strindberg became a most energetic entrepreneur of experiment. He imbibed a range of experimental methods, fetishized them, and eventually promoted psychological experimentation as a key feature of his avant-garde modernism. In doing so, Strindberg capitalized on the shifting meanings of expérience in the late nineteenth century. Most often, he used the word experiment in a scientific sense to refer to the chemical, alchemical, and eventually psychological experiments that preoccupied him at various times in his life. Sometimes he used experiment in a more specifically Bernardian way to refer to a doctrinaire method beyond observation that emphasized doubt, objectivity, and synthesis. At times, Strindberg conflated naturalism, experiment, and analysis, even to the point of identifying experiment with a simplistic equation of naturalism and minute photographic detail. At other times, the word experiment enabled him to claim distance, in the name of objectivity, from ideas and practices that he knew were distasteful to many of his friends and colleagues. But, most often, Strindberg’s use of the term experiment shaded from one connotation to another, often combining different notions of experimentation in unexpected and highly creative ways. While the philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers diagnosed Strindberg’s unsystematic approaches to theory, method, and, indeed, experiment as symptomatic of schizophrenic tendencies, I take Strindberg’s creative approach to experiment as enabled by, and as a sign of, the not yet fixed discursive relationship between experimentation and modernist vanguardism, which Strindberg registered in the 1880s and came to exploit in the 1890s.7 More than any other fin-de-siècle figure, Strindberg enables us to see the strangeness of experimental art in the 1890s.

In fact, before the 1890s, Strindberg rarely used the word experiment (spelled the same way in Swedish as in English) to refer to his writing or his other artistic practices, more often preferring the Swedish word försök. Like the German Versuch and the Norwegian forsøg, försök is a less strictly scientific term that can also be translated as trial or attempt. In the digitized corpus of Strindberg’s work, which includes his published correspondence, the Swedish adjective experimentell and the French expérimental each appear only once, the former in a late novel and the latter in a letter to Zola, in which Strindberg claimed to have written his play The Father “with the experimental formula in view.”8 Instances where the verb form of försök appears in close conjunction with the verb experimentera confirm that Strindberg understood försök and experiment as similar but not entirely synonymous terms.⁹

Strindberg’s self-imposed shift from naturalism to symbolism gave rise to an intensive period of painting between 1892 and 1894 and to a theory of an “automatic art” based on chance, which was published in his second series of Vivisections as “The New Arts! Or Chance in Artistic Production.” While his symbolist visual practice was aimed at Parisian audiences, it was cultivated in Berlin, where Strindberg situated himself at the center of At the Black Piglet (Zum schwarzen Ferkel), the avant-garde circle named by Strindberg after the wine cellar the group frequented. At the Black Piglet, which comprised an international group of writers, poets, artists, and scientists, offered Strindberg an ideal environment in which to synthesize his belief in experimentalism, his interest in experimental psychology, and his knowledge of the pathological method in the service of his emerging symbolist practices, which, in the case of his visual practices, centered on visual and material regimes of chance.10

While the previous chapters of this study focused on the specific symbolist visual strategies of deformation and the arabesque line, this chapter takes a more wide-angle view on an artist who, while not primarily known for his painting, nevertheless engaged extensively with visual practices through painting, photography, art theory, art criticism, and theater.¹¹ I thus include here extensive discussion of Strindberg’s writings, which might strike the reader as only tangentially connected to Strindberg’s visual experiments with chance. But tracing Strindberg’s varied and often contradictory deployments of the concept of experiment, as well as those of naturalism and symbolism, is necessary in order to situate Strindberg’s painting practice and art theory, not as idiosyncrasies but as underwritten by the increased epistemological value conferred by French experimental psychology on nature’s experiments. One of the central arguments of this book is that many of the visual practices produced in the name of symbolism, which were later valued as modernist, were initially envisioned as reorientations rather than as rejections of naturalism. This is very much the case for Strindberg’s theory of automatic art and his quasi-abstract paintings, often seen as precursors to twentieth-century automatisms. This chapter reveals that Strindberg’s discursive construction of “naturalistic symbolism,” the painted form that this “naturalistic symbolism” took, and the essay theorizing this “automatic” painting practice were dependent on an epistemology in which nature’s experiments were the most effective and efficient way to construct knowledge about complex human psychological phenomena.

“With the Experimental Formula in View”: Naturalism, Experimental Psychology, and Strindberg’s Försökformel

Zola was undoubtedly the catalyst for Strindberg’s earliest attempts to apply his long-standing interest in scientific experimentation to his writing. Already by the early 1880s, having read Thérèse Raquin (1867) and Naturalism in the Theater (1881), Strindberg had begun pledging his allegiance to the French naturalist author. Strindberg claimed that he and Zola shared a common scientific education that engendered in their work a taste for analysis and a “microscopic gaze which seeks to penetrate to the core of things.”12 In Naturalism in the Theater, Zola expressed the hope that, “a man of genius . . . [would] emerge from the crowd to impose . . . a new formula” on drama, and with The Father, Strindberg aimed to prove that he was that man.¹³ In 1887, he sent Zola his own French translation of the play with a flattering letter, claiming that it had been composed “with the experimental formula in view.” As Strindberg summed it up for Zola, the experimental formula would “value the interior action at the expense of theatrical tricks, . . . reduce the decor to a minimum, and . . . maintain a temporal unity as far as possible.”¹⁴

Almost from his earliest encounters with Zola’s work, however, Strindberg confessed himself troubled by one aspect of Zola’s naturalism. In 1885, he complained that “Young Sweden . . . hides behind an aesthetic word that Zola unfortunately blurted out: analysis. This I would translate as indifference or opportunism on one’s own account.”¹⁵ Zola had allied experimental method with analysis much more closely in his theater treatise than in his essay “The Experimental Novel.” “Each era,” Zola wrote in Naturalism in the Theater, “has its own formula. . . . We are in an age of method, of experimental science, and we have above all the need for accurate analysis.”16 Strindberg’s problem with analysis, or at least with how modern Swedish authors had interpreted Zola’s meaning of analysis, was in the injudicious use of boring, minute detail, which rendered, he felt, a dispassionate, two-dimensional reality resulting in “canvases lack[ing] perspective.”¹⁷ For Strindberg, analysis that did not take into account the author’s own perspective was tantamount to opportunistic falsehood. Echoing Ferdinand Brunetière’s criticisms of “The Experimental Novel,” Strindberg asked whether it was really possible to experiment on anyone but oneself. The problem, he suggested, was that naturalists tended to have only a “scrappy knowledge of psychology,” and thus overreached when they “attempted to describe the all-too-obscure life of the soul.” He concluded, “There’s only one person’s life we really know and that . . . is our own.”18

Zola’s eliding of experimental psychology in favor of a discipline he called “the experimental novel” lay behind Strindberg’s initially ambivalent stance toward Zola’s experimental method, and indeed, Strindberg was already working to make up for Zola’s lapse, intensively studying scientific psychology and laboring to put it in the service of his own writing.19 In 1883, Strindberg’s library contained only eleven books that could be classified under the heading “philosophy and psychology,” but by 1892 that number had swelled to seventy-nine.20 Many of the works acquired in that nine-year period were experimental psychology texts written in or translated into French, including works by Théodule Ribot and Hippolyte Taine. Strindberg told a friend in 1886, with more than a touch of sarcasm, “I now have a whole library on madness, from which it transpires that everyone is crazy apart from the doctors. My delicate nerves and your love of animals are both signs of insanity.”²¹ This new “library on madness,” it seems, had already enabled Strindberg to regard pathology as a kind of construction.

Strindberg’s passion for scientific psychology had been ignited during a short stay in France in 1883–84, where he met the Norwegian authors Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and Jonas Lie, who had been intensively studying French experimental psychology and in particular altered states of consciousness. At the time, Strindberg was working on the poetry collection Somnambulistic Nights in Broad Daylight, which he would dedicate jointly to Bjørnson and Lie. A perceptive French critic characterized the poems, in 1884, as “naturalism mixed with the ideal.”22 For Strindberg, the Somnambulistic Nights represented a “struggle” with the new psychology, which he hoped would bear fruit after the volume’s publication.²³

Strindberg soon identified those first fruits as a multivolume autobiographical project, envisioned as a corrective to Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series in that it turned the scientific gaze onto the self. Strindberg told friends that he was reading so much “psychology, ethics, psychiatry, sociology and economics” that his “head [was] like pulp,” but he hoped that all this research would “enable me to analyze myself and discover what makes me tick.”24 In 1886, he sent the manuscript for the first volume, The Son of a Servant, to his publisher, claiming that the “psychological material” was “the most important element” and declaring this objective narrative of an individual’s psychological development to be an “‘evolved’ form of the naturalist novel” that he hoped would inspire the “literature of the future.”25 Believing that “literature should emancipate itself from art entirely,” he imagined that this new genre would take “The Experimental Novel” one step further. Rather than being merely scientific, literature would itself become a science.26

In The Son of a Servant, subtitled The History of the Evolution of a Human Soul, Strindberg presented his life as a collection of documentary raw material. He used the third person and a journalistic tone to suggest that his descriptions of subjective experiences were objective presentations of fact, and he claimed to have come to this quasi-scientific form as a young man. “Every citizen at a certain age,” he recommended, should “deposit his autobiography, written anonymously . . . in the communal archives—Now there’s documentation for you!”27 Strindberg undoubtedly knew that Taine had recommended exactly this kind of documentation as the basis for a new scientific psychology. When Zola published The Masterpiece in 1886, the same year that The Son of a Servant appeared, Strindberg seized upon the novel as proof that Zola’s methods had evolved in the direction of his own, for he saw The Masterpiece as above all an exercise in self-analysis that, like The Son of a Servant, transformed the novel into a primary document.

In the course of their correspondence in the late 1880s, both Strindberg and Zola recognized that their visions of naturalism were not entirely compatible. While Zola indicated that he had been moved by The Father and its “daring philosophical idea,” he was nevertheless “bothered” by “shortcuts in analysis” and found the characters too much like “mental abstractions.”28 Nevertheless, Strindberg knew the value of being seen as Zola’s follower, especially as he was hoping to have his plays staged in Paris at André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, a venue he would use as a model for his own theater venture.29 In late 1888, he announced to a friend, “Yesterday . . . I founded a Scandinavian Försöksteater (Th. Libre).”30 Based on Antoine’s example of a small theater open only to subscribers, Strindberg conceived his new theater as a closed, tightly controlled system. To Georg Brandes he wrote, “You have here . . . an attempt at la nouvelle formule . . . make the pain brief, let the action spend itself in a single movement! . . . I have been confirmed in my belief in my försökformel. In every play there is namely une scène! . . . Why should I bother with the other flummery.”31 Promoting himself to the influential Brandes, Strindberg claimed ownership of a “new formula,” a distilled naturalism based on Zola’s experimental method but not exactly synonymous with it. The theater, founded in Copenhagen, lasted less than a year.

Two pieces of theoretical writing linked to the short tenure of the Försöksteater sum up Strindberg’s attempts to justify his work using rhetoric allied to but not entirely beholden to experiment, and, moreover, reveal the increasing importance of nature’s experiments for Strindberg’s thinking: the 1888 preface to Miss Julie and the 1889 article “On Modern Drama and Modern Theater.” The preface, in which Strindberg both paid homage to and sought to supersede Zola, reiterates Zola’s claim of an ongoing evolution toward “reflection, investigation, and analysis.” Furthermore, Strindberg insisted that the particular innovations of Miss Julie in format, lighting, and makeup had all been arrived at “through trials” (på försök). And he intended, moreover, to use his audiences for his investigations, presumably at the Försöksteater: “In due course I would hope to have an audience so educated that it could sit through a single act lasting an entire evening, but this will first require some further investigations [undersökningar].”32 Strindberg argued that the controlled form of the play would heighten the aesthetic effect, give free rein to the audience’s reaction, and allow the individual’s imagination to complement and deepen the experience. The manner of controlling scenic conditions in unconventional ways to enhance these effects, which Strindberg called “cropping,” was inspired, he insisted, by the “asymmetry and cropped framing of impressionist painting.” “I have thereby succeeded,” he maintained, “in strengthening the illusion; for not being able to see the whole room or all the furniture leaves us free to conjecture, that is, our imagination is set in motion and we complete the picture ourselves.” With the feigned modesty of a scientist placing his faith in the power of his method, he concluded, “I have made an attempt [ett försök]! If it fails, there will surely be time to try again [att göra om försöket]!”33

In “On Modern Drama and Modern Theater,” Strindberg criticized naturalist playwrights for relying on the normal and the everyday. Most naturalists were simply realists, he argued, who produced a “kind of mis-conceived naturalism,” basing their works on minute everyday detail with no regard for what Strindberg called the “greater naturalism.” On this account he attacked Henry Becque’s The Crows (1882): “There we have the much-longed-for ordinary case,” he charged, “the rule, the universal human norm, which is so banal, so meaningless, so boring that after four painful hours you ask yourself the old question: of what concern is this to me?”³⁴ Drama, Strindberg contended, should be based instead on real but uncommon circumstances, “an unusual case,” he insisted, “but an instructive one, an exception.” He proposed studying these exceptions with his försökformel, in a tightly controlled manner, with a restricted set of characters, and with only one setting so as better to focus on determining the causal mechanisms of an event. “Our inquiring minds are no longer satisfied with simply seeing something happen,” he wrote; “we want to know how it happened. We want to see the strings, look at the machinery, examine the double-bottomed box.”³⁵

Toward the end of the 1880s, Strindberg became even more disillusioned with Zola, criticizing the 1888 novel The Dream as “an opportunistic Academy piece,” and even wondering if naturalism was itself “a spent force.”36 But in 1890, when Strindberg read Zola’s Human Beast, his objections vanished. He was so impressed with how the novel “confirmed” his own “experiences and observations” that he began rereading Zola and pledged to defend the author to a new generation of symbolists.37 Strindberg’s strategy was to position naturalism not as an aesthetic movement but as a scientific discovery, which made any rejection of naturalism and the experimental method mere vanguardist posturing. Recapitulating Zola’s insistence on experiment as the scientific confirmation of ideas, Strindberg now idealized both Zola’s experimental method and his own försökformel, suggesting that they were eternal and could be put in the service of any aesthetic practice, including the new emerging idealisms. By this time, Strindberg was well aware of the latest debates on symbolism in Paris and elsewhere. Entering into this polemic, he would take an unorthodox stance, defending Zola and naturalism as entirely compatible with the new tendencies, as long as Zola, as he would proclaim in 1894, was recognized as a psychologist. In 1892, he implored a correspondent to “re-read Zola! He is the man of today and the future of us as artists, yes even as scientists, for that is what he is!”38

Vivisections: Experimenting on Others and Selves

While he was adapting and promoting his försökformel for his new theater, Strindberg’s enthusiastic reading in experimental psychology resulted more directly in the psychological experiments that formed the basis for the Vivisections, which would eventually include his theory of “automatic” art. The first series, published in 1887 mostly in Danish and German periodicals, recounted Strindberg’s self-described experiments on others, while the second series, including “The New Arts,” was largely conceived as experiments on the self. This shift from the other to the self, or, more accurately, to an other self within, as a source of knowledge, while presaged by The Son of a Servant, went hand in hand with Strindberg’s self-conscious shift toward symbolism, most fully embraced in the 1896 autobiographical novel Inferno. “The only thing that exists is the self (le culte de moi),” he wrote to a friend in July 1894; “I know nothing about the world and ‘others’ except through my self.”39

Strindberg placed immense intellectual and literary importance on the Vivisections, calling them the basis for his “future work” and claiming that he had “discovered” through them “a new, higher, evolved form of literature.”40 Like the autobiographical project, the essays were to be “literature in the modern style,” quite literally scientific; he even considered giving the volume the subtitle “A Retired Doctor’s Observations (Notes, Dossiers, Stories, Memories).”41 Describing it elsewhere as a collection of “Psychological Studies,” he wrote to one of his publishers, “As the title suggests, my investigation focuses upon living persons. That some of them perish is quite normal with vivisections, when fistular canals are inserted all the way into their intestines.”⁴² Tellingly, while he encouraged directors to cut his plays as they saw fit, he would insist that the Vivisections remain intact.

Strindberg inaugurated the Vivisections by investigating his first wife, Siri von Essen, whom he was beginning to suspect of infidelity. There was almost certainly no basis for his suspicions, which were fanned by a growing hatred of the women’s movement, but he nevertheless intended to investigate this particular instance of the “woman question” by “researching [forska] and experimenting [experimentera].”43 Claiming at the time that his misogyny was “purely theoretical,” he intentionally began to inflict “psychic torture” on his wife under the objective banner of experiment.⁴⁴ He described the psychological means by which he hoped to extract the name of Siri’s lover, how he “read” her mind by fixing her with his gaze, and how he provoked unconscious responses through suggestive conversations, observing her facial expressions as they discussed, for example, massage. “The most complex mind-reading has elicited some vague hints,” he noted enthusiastically. “If you are ever moved to conduct an experimental psychological investigation,” he told a friend, “it can always be useful for you to have witnessed such an experiment.”45

Strindberg put these psychological experiments to more productive use in the essays. He had already referred to the autobiographical project as a form of psychological dissection and had conceived of a study of contemporary French peasants under the subtitle “Autopsies and Interviews.”46 But with the Vivisections, Strindberg not only co-opted the language of physiology and the long-standing, often caricatured image of naturalist novelists as anatomists (fig. 61); he also echoed Charles Richet and Henri Beaunis, who had used the term “psychological vivisection” to justify the methods of experimental psychology and in particular the use of hypnosis. Richet’s and Beaunis’s coinage attests to the optimism surrounding experimental psychology at the fin de siècle and the possibility, through studying nature’s experiments (such as altered states provoked by hypnosis), of finally rendering knowable human mental and emotional life.47

61	Achille Lemot, Gustave Flaubert Dissecting Madame Bovary, in La parodie (December 1869): 240.

In the Vivisection essay “The Battle of the Brains,” Strindberg detailed how, after being initially susceptible to the suggestions of a “magnetic” acquaintance, he overcame this hypnotic influence through observation, analysis, and experiment. The text recounts how he eventually planted his own ideas in his colleague’s brain through hypnotic suggestion, thus winning a violent psychological battle characteristic of the struggle for power in the modern world.48 “Mysticism—For Now,” an essay that Strindberg referred to as a “strategic lie,” took up the tradition of retrospective medicine promoted by Émile Littré and Jean-Martin Charcot in order to give a “physio-psychological account of prayer.”49 Analyzing a recent event in his own family—prayers for a sick child that preceded the child’s cure—he concluded that “belief is nothing more than a concentration of wish and desire, heightened to conscious will, and willing is the greatest expression of nervous activity.”⁵⁰ “Soul Murder (Apropos Rosmersholm)” is a wide-ranging discussion of psychological power structures between individuals and society held together by a “web of unconscious deceptions.”51 This particular essay is a veritable hodgepodge of contemporary psychological and psychiatric theory. It includes meditations on the fine line between sanity and insanity, literary examples, such as Hamlet, of what Strindberg called soul murder and soul suicide, and criticism of the asylum as a prison used to lock away troublesome citizens, a critique that echoes the rhetoric of the psychiatric reformers to whom Strindberg and Edvard Munch were close, discussed in the following chapter.

As the tortuous experiments on his first wife implied, Strindberg’s claims that he was experimenting enabled him to assert an objectifying distance from what he knew were some of his less palatable views. On numerous occasions, he claimed that his misogyny and his anti-Semitism were merely theoretical, although these claims are at odds with the highly questionable ways in which he treated women and numerous Jewish friends and acquaintances. In the 1890s, as Strindberg more often conducted psychological experiments on himself, this supposedly objective stance of experiment had additional advantages. His so-called experiments with mental illness, hallucination, hypnosis, and the like helped Strindberg to reconcile his own fascination with madness with a frequently expressed fear of being committed to an asylum.52 He vigorously defended himself against critics who pointed to contradictions in his writing as evidence of insanity by claiming that his experiments were all performed in the name of a greater aesthetic good. Such critiques “stem,” he argued, “from my having adopted, or tried out, different points of view in order to see things from many sides! That is rich and humane! Experimenting!”⁵³ Writing in 1890 to Georg Brandes, who had introduced him to Friedrich Nietzsche’s work two years earlier, Strindberg summed up his intellectual development as an ongoing evolution from a metaphysical, moralistic stance to socialism and, finally, to a new experimentalism that he had achieved with “The Battle of the Brains.” He would “henceforth . . . experiment,” he told Brandes, with Nietzsche’s viewpoint, in order “to see where it leads.”54 By 1890, just a year after his breakdown, Nietzsche had come to represent a stereotype of dangerous subversion, a pathogen with the potential to drive readers insane.⁵⁵ In claiming to experiment with Nietzsche, Strindberg once again emphasized that he was experimenting with the pathological.

By the end of 1890, Strindberg was making it clear that he had begun to turn Taine’s scientific criticism onto himself, and he implied that madness had become central to his method: “What, then, is the method in the supposed madness of my writing? . . . I don’t know. I let my mind work freely, . . . one thinks one works consciously, while all along the unknown, subterranean forces of race, heredity, epoch, govern one unconsciously. Popularly speaking, I think one could call me a Seeker, who experiments with points of view.” Like the experimenter who embraced doubt as a necessary aspect of his method, Strindberg characterized himself as “a doubter who believes fanatically in the justification of his doubt as a source of wisdom.” At the same time, he argued, this seeker was also something like a medium: “A complex of individualities, stemming from many crossbreedings of blood and brains, of many passed stages for which the author only makes himself a ‘writing medium’ . . . employing all the discoveries of contemporary philosophy, psychology and science.”56 The seeker and the doubter, the objective experimenter and the medium subject, the willed and the unwilled, the conscious and the unconscious—all were bound up in Strindberg’s self-construction as a man of the future. And, as he embarked upon a search for symbolist form, which included a quest to produce symbolist paintings, this self-construction would lead him away from the romantic notion of the artist insistently emphasizing his own subjectivity, and toward the late nineteenth-century image of the scientist intentionally courting his less willful mental functioning in order,57 in Strindberg’s case, to objectively investigate the self.

Visual and Material Regimes of Chance

In the early 1890s, Strindberg began a longer period of self-exile from Sweden, where he had had few professional successes. He moved to Berlin in the fall of 1892 and quickly established himself as an influential member of the Black Piglet avant-garde, whose members came together in the wake of Edvard Munch’s controversial solo exhibition at the Verein Berliner Künstler, which opened and soon closed in November 1892.58 In Berlin, Strindberg painted and became deeply involved in his chemical experiments, designed to overhaul the established system of elements. To support his unorthodox scientific experimentation, he sought out a self-identified scientific avant-garde from within the Black Piglet group, but he found less backing than he had initially hoped for.59 Strindberg’s fellow Piglet member, the German poet and writer Richard Dehmel, forwarded early versions of Strindberg’s scientific tract Antibarbarus to a chemist acquaintance who dismissively recommended that Strindberg first learn proper techniques of experimentation and then catch up on the last ten years of research in the field. Disillusioned by this advice, Dehmel lamented the fact that Strindberg was ignoring his writing and painting for chemistry.60 Another Piglet member, however, Carl Ludwig Schleich, who himself was attempting to overthrow established ideas in neurology, identified closely with Strindberg’s renegade project, believing that “someday the scholar Strindberg will be regarded as highly as the poet.”61

Members of the Black Piglet circle read and contributed to one of the foremost German publications of experimental psychology of the day, Sphinx, founded in Leipzig in 1886 with the unwieldy subtitle Monthly Journal for the Historical and Experimental Foundation of the Transcendental Worldview on a Monistic Basis (fig. 62). In its emphasis on experimentalism and its orientation toward French psychopathology, Sphinx perfectly encapsulated Strindberg’s concerns at the time. And when the journal widened its scope in 1892, changing its subtitle to Monthly Journal for the Life of the Soul and the Spirit, this foreshadowed Strindberg’s own turn to the occult, especially the scientific brand of occultism that Strindberg would find attractive in Paris in the mid-1890s (fig. 63).⁶² Sphinx probably introduced Strindberg to Justinus Kerner’s “Klecksographs,” which may have been Strindberg’s earliest encounters with graphic representations of chance. In 1886, Sphinx had celebrated the hundredth anniversary of Kerner’s birth with an article by Carl du Prel, a frequent contributor to Sphinx whom Strindberg greatly admired. Five years later, when the Klecksographs were published in a book, the journal reproduced them alongside Kerner’s poetry (fig. 64).⁶³ Kerner had ascribed his discovery of these accidental inkblots to his increasing blindness in the 1850s. Folding the paper, rubbing the wet ink together, and then unfolding the paper produced symmetrical images in which Kerner, a devotee of Franz Anton Mesmer, saw the work of spirit forces. With additional touches of ink, he subsequently enhanced the blots to bring out the specific features of the fantastical creatures he perceived (fig. 65).

62	Sphinx: Monatsschrift für die geschichtliche und experimentale Begründung der übersinnlichen Weltanschauung auf monistischer Grundlage 1, no. 1 (January 1886), front cover.

63	Sphinx: Monatsschrift für Seelen- und Geistesleben 7, no. 13 (1892), front cover.

64	“Aus Kerners Kleksographien,” Sphinx 11, no. 62 (February 1891): 113.

65	Justinus Kerner, Klecksograph (Inkblot), 1850s. Ink on paper. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, G18402.

Strindberg himself dated his fascination with the visual and material products of chance to a mid-1880s visit to a colony of Swedish artists in Grez-sur-Loing in the forest of Fontainebleau, where he had been intrigued by what his painter friends did with the chance remnants of paint left over on their palettes. This interest in chance deepened during his Berlin period, spurred on by ongoing engagements with photography that led Strindberg to explore photographic practices that did not involve a camera. One result of this interest would be his own “Klecksographs,” included in his Occult Diaries (fig. 66).⁶⁴ Like Kerner, Strindberg wrote that he was beginning to suspect that accident and coincidence were signs of a spiritual force that could be investigated scientifically through phenomena such as inkblots, cloud formations, “celestographs,” and pieces of burnt coal. Such chance resemblances and coincidences were given profound and complex meaning in Inferno. In clouds, Strindberg saw the head of Napoleon. In a photograph of the poet Paul Verlaine on his deathbed, he saw a demon. In burnt coal, he saw fantastic creatures that he captured in small charcoal drawings (fig. 67). And on Sphinx atropos, death’s head moths, he saw not only skulls but also Chinese characters.⁶⁵ Strindberg increasingly conceived of chance as tightly bound up with the natural world, and he came to see cultivating chance as akin to emulating nature’s own processes. Experimenting with nature’s chance occurrences would thereby become the basis for Strindberg’s “naturalistic symbolism.”

66	August Strindberg, Klecksograph, from The Occult Diaries, 23 February 1898. Ink on paper. National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, ms SgNM 72, 1898, 54.

67	August Strindberg, charcoal drawing representing partially burnt coal, 1896. Charcoal on paper, 8.9 × 12 cm. National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, ms SgNM 15:6,5.

Strindberg often wrote of painting and science as twin antitheses to his creative writing, with the latter remaining through much of his life his main preoccupation and most reliable source of income. He frequently associated both painting and science with periods of psychological crises. “I can’t deny,” he wrote in 1892, after embarking on a second intensive period of painting, nearly twenty years after the first, “that this resurgence of my first, youthful love, natural science, seems to me an autumn flower which must bloom before winter comes, just as my old flame, painting, had to reappear before I died. What battles haven’t I fought to suppress this passion for research [forskningslåga], which was ruining my writing and bringing my family to misère.”66 Strindberg had gone to Dalarö, on the eastern coast of Sweden, in the spring of 1892, where he often painted solitary flowers on desolate beaches (fig. 68).⁶⁷ In Berlin, no doubt affected by Munch’s efforts to establish a symbolist visual practice that Black Piglet member Stanisław Przybyszewski would soon term “psychic naturalism,” Strindberg continued the painting campaign begun in Sweden, but now explicitly under the rubric of symbolism.

68	August Strindberg, Flower on the Shore, Dalarö, 1892. Oil on zinc, 24.7 × 43.5 cm. Malmö Art Museum, Malmö, Sweden.

Night of Jealousy (fig. 5), the painting given to Frida Uhl as an engagement gift in 1893 and the first that Strindberg identified as symbolist, carried a much more evocative title than Strindberg’s earlier paintings. The title suggests that the work be read as allegory, but it differed in other ways from works done earlier at Dalarö such as Flower on the Shore (fig. 68). While both use the thicker paint application that Strindberg favored during his second painting campaign, applied with a palette knife rather than a brush, the Dalarö picture maintained conventional proportions of sea and sky, and used a lighter, more pastel palette. Night of Jealousy, by contrast, with its violent paint application, unusual composition, and somber colors, rejected landscape conventions almost to the point of abstraction. In 1894, Strindberg specified that he was the first to make “symbolist” or “symbolic landscapes,” not “symbolist paintings.” This was a crucial distinction, since the most familiar symbolist visual practice for Strindberg would have been that of Munch, who at that moment in Berlin was concentrating on themes of love and death as he worked intensively on his Frieze of Life motifs. While Munch’s “psychic naturalism” usually involved a radical thinning of paint, such that motifs fused with the material support of the work,68 Strindberg’s symbolist paintings emphasized the thickness of paint rather than the support, which in the early 1890s was rarely canvas and more often cardboard or zinc.⁶⁹ The support, in other words, rarely became a critical component of the work, although it did in the case of Palette with Solitary Flower on the Shore (fig. 69), with which Strindberg inserted himself into a long tradition of virtuoso paintings on palettes. The palette painting also signified the method theorized in “The New Arts”; the essay began with Strindberg describing his fascination with palette scrapings and also emphasized his use of the palette knife rather than the brush. Significantly, Strindberg signed this work by scratching his name into the paint in the upper right-hand corner, fusing himself with this defining tool of the serious artist.

69	August Strindberg, Palette with Solitary Flower on the Shore, 1893. Oil on wood, 38 × 34 cm. Private collection.

Strindberg highlighted the naturalism of “naturalistic symbolism” most obviously in his choice to focus exclusively on land- and seascapes, which no doubt hearkens back to his earliest encounters with vanguard painting in the form of impressionism. At the same time, he also conserved the equation, stretching back to Gustave Courbet, between realism or naturalism and raw materiality in the form of roughly applied paint, often given the plasterlike quality of having been applied and then smoothed over with a palette knife.70 The symbolist components of Strindberg’s practice, in other words, inhered less in the motif, and even less in the surface quality of the works, than in how Strindberg described his method, which started as an encounter with the material products of chance and proceeded to cultivate chance, bringing a number of the paintings from the early 1890s, including Night of Jealousy and High Seas (fig. 70), very close to abstraction. Perhaps the most radical of all of Strindberg’s paintings, and possibly the last painting he did in Paris in 1894, High Seas used a drier, more impasto paint application, and incorporated an additional technique of chance. Holding a flame to the work, perhaps from a Bunsen burner used for his chemical experiments, Strindberg burned portions of the paint surface, creating a sooty effect in some areas that could not have been entirely consciously controlled. Like Édouard Vuillard, Strindberg associated the acts of painting and viewing with both conscious and unconscious mental practices, with both the willed and the unwilled. Strindberg may have had his theory of automatic art in mind before he traveled to Berlin. But within the Black Piglet circle, he found the means with which to produce his first symbolist paintings and to begin theorizing “naturalistic symbolism” as reliant on chance and automatism.

70	August Strindberg, High Seas, 1894. Oil on cardboard, 96 × 68 cm. Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum, Stockholm.

“Deranged Sensations” and “The New Arts!”

Before Strindberg left Austria for Paris in the late summer of 1894, he submitted two Vivisections essays to La revue des revues, including “The New Arts! Or Chance in Artistic Production,” as advance guards for his assault on the capital. A third essay, “Deranged Sensations,” began appearing in Le Figaro’s literary supplement in November 1894, the same month that “The New Arts” was published. “Deranged Sensations” dramatically recounts the psychophysiological effects wrought by a train journey to Paris, and reveals Strindberg’s continuing dependence on a pathological method. Strindberg explained his intentions in the essay to the Swedish painter Richard Bergh. Curious about its effect on Bergh’s “delicate nerves,” Strindberg characterized “Deranged Sensations” as the product of a hard-won “favorable mood” in which he had tried to “anticipate the capacities of a future, more highly developed mental life.” At his regular Parisian haunt, he claimed, it astounded his audience as “new, extraordinaire but mad.” “Since my talent wasn’t in question,” he boasted to Bergh, “nor its originality, my madness only served as seasoning, and I’m now addressed as ‘Cher Maître.’”71

Strindberg introduced the essay by conjuring up a range of associative mental images that he said he had experienced during the train trip to Paris, a city he described as the “fair and factory of battling brains.” The train carriage was, he wrote, a “torture cell” filled with passengers “snatched from their environment” and packed in all together. Arriving in Versailles, he fell asleep, but soon woke up in an abnormal state, his faculties of perception and memory profoundly disturbed by the physiological effects of the long journey. “The jolts of the train had stirred up the pulp of my brain,” he wrote, “so thoroughly that I lost the ability to follow my thoughts. It was as if my connecting fibers had been broken, because I felt as if my head was empty; in each moment, I wanted to remember something that I could not recall.” A walk outdoors confirmed that his perception, and especially his vision, had been altered as a result of the voyage. He described the odd feeling of walking toward Versailles while the château appeared to remain the same size. The next day, retracing his steps, he manifested the same perceptual problem, but he now explained it as a psychophysiological disturbance, affecting his ability to perceive perspective in normal and conventional ways.

Strindberg—or, more accurately, the narrator of the story—then apparently experienced what might be termed a pathology of memory, which he diagnosed by identifying incongruities between what he saw before his eyes and the mental image he retained from his first trip to Versailles in the 1870s. He explained the gap as his memory’s being affected by his knowledge of the “grandeur” of Louis XIV’s reign and by his familiarity with modern architectural practices strikingly similar to those of Versailles. Suffering from what he determined was an irrational fear of the space between himself and the château, he found himself unable to approach the edifice any more closely, repelled by an unknown force. An act of will, however, enabled him to overcome this fear by “returning to [his] philosophical ideas,” recalling that other, similar abnormal perceptual phenomena had so far resisted explanation. This rationalization allowed him finally to enter the grounds of Versailles.

Once inside, Strindberg wrote that he experienced auditory hallucinations but wondered, hopefully, if they might not be explained by the evolution of his body and mind toward the modern. Are “my nerves . . . evolving towards more refinement,” he asked, “and my senses becoming more subtle? Am I going to have a new skin? Am I on the verge of becoming modern?” Returning to his lodgings, he slept for days, as a flood of sensations, memories, and emotions washed over him. Puzzling over cloud formations, and concerned that his house was moving for no reason, he continued to try to make sense of the odd phenomena he was experiencing. Finally, he decided to emerge again into the world: “stripped of the clothing of a civilized man . . . I see with the clearsightedness of a savage. I listen and I sense like a Red Indian!” He entered a woods, contemplated a pine tree, and when he reemerged saw only what at first appeared to be a vast desert, a scene that soon resolved itself into “the City, the great city, the greatest city in the world . . . the little dirty houses of buyers and sellers. Paris!! . . . It is really Paris!! Hail!”72

At once a meditation on altered perception and an homage to the dizzying sensory effects of Paris and its environs, the essay deployed the pathological method as a way of creatively approaching the world and of sloughing off civilization in favor of more primitive forms of perception. Strindberg thus positioned himself as both subject and object of the text, the first-person narrative of his own psychological experiences often colliding with the more objective-sounding assessments of those experiences. The text is constructed as a journalistic account of self-experimentation, a testing out of experience under different pathological conditions in order to achieve the pure perception of the noble savage, which in the end results in the essay itself, a product of the author’s modern primitivist imagination. “Deranged Sensations” declares not only that Strindberg had learned much from studying the pathological states of mind he either experienced or was capable of inducing, but that this method of investigation could result in a creative product. This particular stance toward experimentation, dependent on nature’s experiments, synthesized Strindberg’s psychological research of the 1880s with his self-conscious attempts to fuse naturalism and symbolism.

While “Deranged Sensations,” in its objectifying descriptions of Strindberg’s apparently willful attempts to make rational sense out of unwilled phenomena, implicitly combined the conscious and the unconscious to bring forth a creative product, “The New Arts” gave a more explicitly theorized account of how Strindberg envisioned the conscious and the unconscious combining to produce art, and painting in particular. In a letter to a friend, which included a description of a number of the paintings that he had sent ahead from Austria to Paris, he claimed to have “invented a new (that’s to say, old) kind of art,” which he called “l’art fortuite.”

It is the most subjective of all art forms, so that in the first place only the painter himself can enjoy (= suffer) the work because he knows what he meant by it, as do the chosen few who know the painter’s inner (= outer) a little (= a lot). Each picture is, so to speak, double-bottomed, with an exoteric aspect that everyone can make out, with a little effort, and an esoteric one for the painter and the chosen few. It should be pointed out that the pictures were painted in a half-dark room, and cannot on any account stand a full light; they appear best in strong fire-light or a half-dark room. All the pictures are painted using only a knife and unmixed colors, whose combination has been half left to chance, like the motif as a whole.73

The letter contextualized Strindberg’s ambitions for his painting and its accompanying theory among the symbolist visual practices that had been developed by vanguard groups such as the Nabis and At the Black Piglet. The idea of a privileged coterie whose members were to be initiated into an understanding of difficult, esoteric works echoed Maurice Denis’s intentions for his painting Décor, which Denis imagined would be understood on three levels, from the simplest to the most philosophical, the last being accessible only to the elect.74 This is one of the central paradoxes of symbolism, namely, that it ostensibly courted universal modes of communication, but that its practitioners often acknowledged that they anticipated communicating with only a select few, those who were already men of the future. Strindberg’s Neoplatonic vocabulary—including the terms exoteric and esoteric—was commonplace among Black Piglet members, as well as among the more occult-curious symbolist groups in Paris and elsewhere. A review in Sphinx of a recent book by contributor Raphael von Koeber on Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy emphasized the distinctions Koeber had made between exoteric and esoteric natures, while Édouard Schuré’s The Great Initiates reminded readers that “all the great religions have an exterior history and an interior history; one obvious, the other hidden.”75

At the outset of “The New Arts,” Strindberg declared that so-called primitive modes of making art, including craft, were due more to random acts of nature than to the willed acts of human beings. He linked these supposedly primitive modes with his own encounter with a set of panels he had seen while staying in Grez-sur-Loing in the 1880s. Using that journalistic tone so familiar from both his novels and his essays, he enumerated the banal subjects of the panels: “portraits of ladies; a) young; b) old, etc. Three ravens on a branch. . . . You know immediately what they are.” Immediately recognizing a work’s subject matter, however, offered little aesthetic pleasure. Pleasure in looking derives not from mimesis, Strindberg maintained, not from asking, What does it represent?—but from posing an altogether different and much more fundamental question: “What is it?”

Strindberg was soon told by his painter friends at Grez-sur-Loing that what he was actually looking at were “palette scrapings,” the remnants of whatever paint colors were left on the artist’s palette that could themselves serve as the basis for further inspiration if the artist was “in the mood” to “make some kind of sketch.” By mimicking nature’s own randomness, these palette scrapings constituted, Strindberg wrote, the basis for a more “natural” mode of creation. Harmony was already guaranteed, since the colors on the palette were left over from a previous, more conventional work. Liberated by the chance arrangement on the palette from having to make conscious choices about things such as color harmonies at the outset, the human soul could thereby express itself more freely: “the painter’s soul is able, with all its creative force, to look for the contours. . . . The hand moves the palette knife randomly.” The result, Strindberg argued, was an ideal and “charming hodgepodge of unconscious and consciousness,” which allowed the artist to reject mimetic representation in favor of an art produced in the same way as “capricious nature.” The artist remained appropriately unconcerned with, even unaware of, the final results, and the painting could therefore well and truly be called “natural art.”

Similarly, Strindberg insisted, the pleasure in viewing derived not from instantly recognizing the motif and acknowledging the artist’s skill in accurately representing it, but rather from the process of looking while letting the imagination wander through the different possible answers to the question “What is it?” To further clarify this kind of aesthetic experience, Strindberg described the pleasure he derived from seeing an object in the landscape that he could not immediately identify, giving a detailed account of how he understood his consciousness and unconsciousness to be functioning throughout the psychological experience of trying to figure out what he was looking at.

At first, it was a cow, then two peasants embracing, then a tree trunk. . . . This fluctuation of impressions was pleasing to me . . . an act of will and I no longer want to know. . . . I feel the curtain of consciousness rising. . . . No, I don’t want it to. . . . Again. . . . Now, it is a lunch outdoors, they are sitting down to eat. . . . But the figures are motionless as in a panopticon. . . . Ah! darn! the charm vanishes . . . finished. . . . It is an abandoned plough on which the laborer has thrown his outfit and hung his bag! Everything has vanished. There is nothing more to see. The source of joy has gone!

For Strindberg, it was obvious how this pleasure, which stemmed from the experience of perceiving an ambiguous object, related to the aesthetic experience promised by modern painting.

Does that not offer a striking analogy with modernist paintings, so incomprehensible for the “philistines”? At first one only sees a jumble of color; and then it starts to look like something. It looks like. . . . But no, it does not look like anything. Suddenly, however, a point is fixed like the nucleus of a cell. It grows, the colors cluster around it and accumulate. Rays form and spread into branches, into twigs just like ice crystals on the window . . . and the image presents itself to the viewer, who witnesses the act of the picture’s procreation. In this way, the painting is always new, changing with the light, it never tires, it is endlessly rejuvenated, endowed with the gift of life.

Aesthetic value, in Strindberg’s view, thus inhered in the work’s polysemous quality, from the extent to which the beholder could see different things depending on his particular “mental state.”

Although he claimed to have discovered aesthetic pleasure in palette scrapings a number of years earlier, Strindberg noted that he only “improvised” the “theory of ‘automatic art’” while molding a small clay figure (fig. 71).⁷⁶ What he initially intended to be a young supplicant was transformed into a weeping boy when, in frustration, Strindberg clapped his hand down on the figure’s head, metamorphosing the head into a tam-o’-shanter. After a few final adjustments, Strindberg declared the work “perfect,” and in a way it must have been, since he re-created the figure at least once more. Strindberg’s interest in modeling, however, appears to have been short-lived. Instead, he translated his deliberate attentiveness to chance into a method of painting by logically linking his experience in making the statuette to the pleasure of perceiving nature as infinitely suggestible, resulting in a theory that attempted to synthesize the conscious and unconscious functions involved in creation.

71	August Strindberg, The Weeping Boy, 1891. Gilded plaster, 20 cm high. Private collection.

Using the painting Wonderland (fig. 72) as his key example, he claimed to start from a motif not in front of him but already synthesized by memory and by knowledge of the conventions of painting. Strindberg’s motifs were always, it should be said, very conventional—landscapes, seascapes, and forest interiors such as Wonderland. Appreciating the pleasures of ambiguity and the role of the unconscious, Strindberg elaborated a painting process in which he paradoxically unwilled himself. He reworked initial marks, remained attentive to randomness, stayed open to suggestibility, and cultivated a chance application of paint. His goal was to mystify the motif, make it less fixed, and through the entire process bring forth a living, breathing, and ultimately “natural” painting. The theory of automatic art encouraged the artist to grope for form by paying attention to the automatic processes of perception and then to elaborate on those processes through the conscious functioning of the will. This was not unlike the multistep method of painting that Vuillard had developed a few years earlier, explored in the previous chapter. Strindberg’s automatic art sought to bring forth visual form through psychological experimentation on what he assumed were his own more primitive mental faculties in order to achieve a more pure, more true kind of art, a “naturalistic symbolism” not so much representing nature as emulating nature itself.

72	August Strindberg, Wonderland, 1894. Oil on cardboard, 72.5 × 52 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Strindberg conceived of his symbolist visual practice as an entirely new kind of painting, an advanced art for the future based not on mimetic representation but on the processes of nature investigated scientifically. He had no illusions, however, about the staying power of this new style and readily acknowledged that all vanguard art was destined to be superseded. Strindberg’s theory of painting instituted a willful attentiveness to automatism, to chance, to the Tainean petits faits of psychological experience that since the 1870s had been crucial to experimental psychology’s methodological imperative of nature’s experiments. He explicitly connected such phenomena to his own primitive mental functioning and to supposedly primitive, less evolved forms of art making, revaluing both as wellsprings of an entirely new kind of art. In 1894, Black Piglet member Franz Servaes declared that Munch was a more radical modern primitive than Paul Gauguin, in that Munch did not need to travel to Tahiti in order to experience the primitive; he was able to plumb the depths of his very own soul.77 Although Strindberg would publicly defer to Gauguin as much more savage than himself, he nevertheless aspired to be recognized among the era’s modern primitives, courting, in the essays “Deranged Sensations” and “The New Arts” and in his painting practice, the kind of praise reserved by Servaes for modern primitivism.78

Strindberg, Entrepreneur of Experiment

Strindberg repeatedly identified himself and his extraordinary faculties with the future and with an avant-garde revolution to come.79 In this way, he strategically adopted a rhetorical reversal similar to that used by Denis in his own manifesto for a new art, the “Définition du néo-traditionnisme.” The normal present, meaning normal philistine tastes, normal bourgeois values, and normal naturalism, were now judged abnormal. And all that was abnormal—the primitive, the insane, the automatic, and the unconscious—was newly valued, not simply as decadent appeals to antiestablishment values but as pathways to truth. This reappraisal of the pathological as useful, as a functional point of access, was made possible by positivist epistemologies that saw the pathological as a starting point for the scientific production of knowledge.80

The most obvious example of Strindberg’s method of experimentation on his own pathological states remains the autobiographical novel Inferno, in which Strindberg recounted how he encouraged his “other self” to come to the surface so that he could investigate his own alterity.81 The method was entirely in line with the French experimental psychology that he had been reading so enthusiastically since the 1880s. The experimental method privileged an objective exploration of pathologies as the basis for studying human physiology, sociology, and psychology. Only the explicit emphasis on the self, encouraged by discursive constructions that situated symbolism as “objectifying the subjective,” was ostensibly new. By 1896, Strindberg was proclaiming himself the “Zola of the Occult,” a “naturalist-occultist” who desired to “see first with my outer eyes and then with my inner eye.”82 He still understood himself fundamentally to be a man of scientific method, but now more than ever he pictured himself on the cutting edge of science, poised to take the work of Jean-Martin Charcot, Claude Bernard, and others much further than ever imagined, and to align himself with the period’s most radical investigators of the psyche. In 1894, he already felt that he had “scented this imminent major fin-de-siècle current in science.”83 “I am not a spiritualist,” he told one of his translators, “but it has been observed that in my research I have gone beyond routine science and established the transition to scientific occultism.”84 Situating himself in the lineage of the best-known nineteenth-century experimentalists, he emphasized that the domain might have changed but that the scientific methods of experiment remained unassailable.

Strindberg recognized that psychological self-experimentation could effect a synthesis of naturalism and symbolism, and he elevated this “naturalistic symbolism” to an art form that had as its aim new knowledge of universal experience. In the autobiographical novel Gothic Rooms, written in 1903, Strindberg summarized his experimental attitude in the guise of his main character, Arvid Falk: “He experimented with points of view, and like a conscientious worker in a laboratory set up control experiments, adopting tentatively an opposed position.” The stance of the experimentalist, Strindberg valiantly claimed, might have its perils. Conflating the heroic scientist with the tragic romantic genius, Strindberg brought experiment and vanguardism together: Falk “was a vivisectionist who experimented with his own soul, always suffered from open wounds, until he gave his life for science.”85

Ultimately, “naturalistic symbolism” was a kind of alchemical product. Strindberg attempted to reorient the natural sciences and scientific methods toward a synthetic art that would insert the self more completely into the natural order of things, and would in turn bring the spiritual and art back into the fold of the natural sciences. The formal innovations at which Strindberg arrived, including the near abstraction of paintings such as Night of Jealousy and High Seas, were like precipitates of this alchemical process. In other words, as in Paul Cézanne’s work, the deliberateness of the formal innovations in Strindberg’s writing and painting is uncertain. For someone who desired above all to know the truths of the universe, beginning with the self, experiment offered a way to that ultimate destination. The means of reaching it could be either scientific or artistic, but they were not in and of themselves constructed as the goal.

After Inferno, Strindberg relinquished many of his scientific aspirations, for the most part ceasing the chemical experiments that were “bringing [his] family to misère” and returning more seriously to writing plays and novels. Scholars have often interpreted this shift as the result of a newfound psychological stability after he returned to Sweden for good in 1898. But another explanation presents itself. By the early years of the twentieth century, having built up a robust rhetoric of artistic experimentation, having established himself as fundamentally engaged in his writing and his painting not just in försök but also in experiment, Strindberg could safely sever scientific experimentation from his experimentation in other domains.

One of Strindberg’s major contributions to modernism, therefore, was his entrepreneurial attitude toward experiment, his diffusion of experiment, largely by analogy, to all his practices, whether in the realm of science, literature, the theater, photography, painting, or sculpture. In 1904, in Black Banners, a biting critique of contemporary literature, Strindberg reminded his readers that he had built his entire oeuvre on his own experiences, for “experience is capital.”86 Strindberg’s thinking remained very much governed by the French language, in which expérience carries the double meaning of experience and experiment. Given that he so successfully consolidated the rhetoric and practice of experiment with the rhetoric and practice of vanguardism, he might as well have written that experiment was capital. The extraordinary products of Strindberg’s experimentation, like Cézanne’s, have taken on the status of almost accidental artistic discoveries—the surprisingly modern language of Strindberg’s plays and novels, the existentialist intimations of a number of the essays, and the protosurrealist emphasis on chance and the automatic in the paintings and art theory.87 But such supposedly unintentional “discoveries” are just as readily understood as constructed by and constitutive of nineteenth-century experimental cultures.