Stockholm's Archipelago and Strindberg's
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61 Scandinavica Vol 52 No 2 2013 near but culturally still remote islands. And as he draws the public’s attention, he invites them to discover more, predicting the touristic development of the area with a mixture of environmental enthusiasm and bourgeois advertising strategy, as in ‘Livet i Stockholms skärgård’ 25
26 (Letter from Sandhamn). If the task of the modern reporter was to make the wide urban space familiar and recognizable for the growing reading public, as Eckhardt Köhn has pointed out (1989), Strindberg actively contributed, through these articles, to cross the border between society and wilderness and thus incorporate the peripheral archipelago into the urban sphere of Stockholm. The exciting sailing trip from Dalarö to Sandhamn described in ‘Huruledes jag fann Sehlstedt’ 27 (How I found Sehlstedt) is also symbolically significant, because Elias Sehlstedt, the grand old man Strindberg and his friends are visiting, was the first writer to make the Stockholm archipelago a literary landscape in his pleasant songs, poems and prose from mid-nineteenth century. 28
Strindberg. Strindberg can already be seen in these early articles, where the optimistic and curious bourgeois spirit prevails, to give expression to his anarchistic and antisocial feelings, too. In ‘Post-skriptum till Brev från Sandhamn’ (A Postscript to Letter from Sandhamn) the writer considers that the state and the institutions appear, from the point of view of an autumn and winter in Sandhamn, as ‘a fetish venerated more than God, a notion void of reality, and yet as real as anything can be’. 29 This meditation is connected to the episode of the clever pilot, who owing to a wrong manoeuvre in a stormy November night will undergo a trial and probably be imprisoned. This same episode becomes a short story in ‘Marcus Larsson advokat’ (Marcus Larsson the Lawyer) 30 , which is interesting from the spatial point of view, as it describes the passage from the wild space among the skerries to the trial at the Stockholm court. The narrator’s voice tends to express solidarity with the pilot, showing his dangerous life and pointing out extenuating circumstances. The pilot is however condemned in court, also because of the artist Marcus Larsson’s clumsy intervention as a defence lawyer. The wilderness does not seem to be allowed to exist 62 Scandinavica Vol 52 No 2 2013 outside the rules of legal society. A minor but interesting role is played by the archipelago in Strindberg’s breakthrough novel Röda Rummet (The Red Room) from 1879. Röda Rummet is mainly a Stockholm novel, but a contact with the archipelago occurs when the protagonist Arvid Falk must be literally cured of his two romantic illusions: social justice and love. To do so, his friend doctor Borg takes him drastically out of town – out of the polis, as it were, and the commitment it stands for – to the island Nämndö over the summer. The contact with the sea and the natural environment makes Falk healthy again, where being healthy means for him, in the bitter final perspective of Röda Rummet, losing every form of idealism and becoming a passive member of a ruthless society. As such, Falk can go back to Stockholm at the end of the summer. 31 At the beginning of the Eighties Strindberg, now a married man, spent four long summers with his wife and children on Kymmendö again, an often glorious time. 32 During this period the author’s democratic and utopian radicalism is strongest, and the contrast between the constrained life in a rotten, urban society and the free outdoor life outside of it becomes sharpest. The paradisiac existence on the island confirms Strindberg’s creed of revolution, and it is not by chance, as Gunnar Brandell observes, that his inflamed letters to Edvard Brandes, in the initial phase of their pen friendship, occur when the Swedish writer is on the island in summer. 33 On 22 July 1880 Strindberg declares himself ‘Jean Jacques’ intimate when it comes to a return to Nature’, and expresses, from this standpoint, the revolutionary hope that the existing society may be blown up and started anew. 34 And on 26 June 1881 he goes on to explain that he can only believe in a rebirth through a return to nature, the abolition of towns and the dissolution of the state, replaced by village communities without any chiefs. 35 In a very accurate manner, Sven-Gustaf Edqvist dissertation from 1961 illustrates Strindberg’s reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a support for the Swedish writer’s revolutionary and anarchistic creed. Together with Edqvist’s study, the other fundamental contribution that helps us to explore the dimensions of Strindberg’s adaptations of Rousseau’s ideas and literary universe is Elie Poulenard’s Strindberg
63 Scandinavica Vol 52 No 2 2013 circumstance in this inter-textual relation: Strindberg, a complex and contradictory writer, adapts to his own needs the texts by Rousseau, also highly complex and contradictory. The attraction felt by Strindberg is probably also due to this affinity – the mix of temperament and reason, religion and rationality we find in both authors. In Discours
(Discourse on the Origin of Inequality) Rousseau posits a radical opposition between the virtuous and free natural state of mankind, connected to the sphere of rural and rustic life, and the vicious and constricted condition experienced in the civilized and urban society. This opposition is important for Strindberg, as it reinforces his own doubts about the goodness of material progress, and his conception of art, science and industry as forms of luxury justifying and increasing social unbalance. There is however in Rousseau’s Du contract social (The Social Contract) also a more progressive and constructive legacy, which is equally important for Strindberg’s democratic stance during the first years of the 1880s: the free social contract of the origins, lost in the constrictions of present society, is not given once and for ever, but must be regained within the historical process. 36 This democratic stance is strong in Svenska Folket (The Swedish People), published in 1881-82, and is expressed through the author’s intention to write a Swedish history from the point of view of the anonymous people and of everyday life (Ciaravolo 2011). The archipelago plays a small but interesting part in this project, when fishing in the Middle Ages is described. 37 Writing about medieval herring fishing on the outer skerries called Huvudskären, in the south- eastern archipelago, is skillfully transformed into writing about the medieval traces in the Stockholm area at present, as the narrator explains that Huvudskären had been in the Middle Ages as they still were up to some decades previously (Berendsohn 1962: 28-29). The fact that Strindberg’s field studies in the early Eighties, illustrated by the painter and friend Carl Larsson 38 , could teach him something about fishing practice in the Middle Ages, visualizes the threshold between old and new, pre-modern and modern times, over which Strindberg consciously lived and worked in his peculiarly Swedish experience of
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