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Scandinavica Vol 52 No 2 2013
Stockholm’s Archipelago
and Strindberg’s:
Historical Reality and Modern Myth-Making
Abstract
The Stockholm Archipelago is ubiquitous in the prose, poetry,
drama and non-fiction of August Strindberg. This article
examines the interaction in Strindberg’s oeuvre between the city
of Stockholm as civilized space and the wild space surrounding
it, tracing the development of a literary myth of Eden in his
work. Strindberg’s representations of the shifting relations
between city and nature, it is argued, played (and still play)
an important role in the cultural construction of mythologies
of the loss of the wild space. The environments described in
Strindberg’s texts are subject to changes, shifts and repetitions
with variations, such that the archipelago in itself can be read
as a mirror of the polyphony of points of view, the variability
and the ambiguities we find in his oeuvre at large.
Keywords
August Strindberg, Stockholm Archipelago, city
in literature,
nature in literature, mythologies
Massimo Ciaravolo
University of Florence
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Scandinavica Vol 52 No 2 2013
August Strindberg’s home town of Stockholm, together with its wilder
counterpart, the archipelago or skärgård (literally meaning group,
or circle, of islands and skerries), plays a large part in Strindberg’s
literary universe as well as in his life. The archipelago is ubiquitous in
his oeuvre; it occurs in prose as well as in poetry and in drama, and
it characterizes both fiction, autobiography and non-fiction (essays,
letters and diaries). It can sometimes provide the setting to whole
works, but in a series of other works it can be included as one of the
settings, or even be mentioned peripherally. Images of the archipelago
can be conveyed while the author is living in that natural and social
environment, which frequently occurs in his letters, but he can also
recreate it at a great distance and with a nostalgic eye, as in the cases
of the novel Hemsöborna (The People of Hemsö), written in southern
Germany, and the collection of short stories Skärkarlsliv (Life in the
Skerries), written in Denmark.
1
An analysis of the functions and meanings of the archipelago
in Strindberg’s oeuvre appears as a still meaningful and needed
endeavour, although one half of a large work, August Strindbergs
skärgårds- och Stockholmsskildringar by Walter A. Berendsohn (1962),
has been dedicated to this subject. Berendsohn’s book is still useful
as a general survey of the topic and an almost complete catalogue of
Strindberg’s works in which the archipelago plays a part. Its limits are,
however, the vagueness in the analysis of themes and forms, in spite
of some interesting observations, and the sharp separation between
texts set either in the archipelago or in Stockholm or in the area of
lake Mälaren. Nothing is said about a common feature in all these
texts: the ways in which the urban experience and the natural spaces
are related. This leads Berendsohn, for example, to the paradoxical
(and interesting) conclusion that Götiska Rummen (The Gothic Rooms)
is a Stockholm novel and not an archipelago novel (Berendsohn 1962:
193-199), although its protagonists, as we shall see, live on an island
almost throughout the year. What if it were both things?
My purpose is to consider Strindberg’s representation of the
relation and the interaction between the big town of Stockholm and its
archipelago, i.e. between the civilized and the wild space. This relation
has been a major concern in Swedish culture since Strindberg’s
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Scandinavica Vol 52 No 2 2013
lifetime, when the middle class and their bourgeois lifestyle started
to expand, and the wild space began consequently to be conquered
by the civilized space, a process that has been going on up to present
time, often causing a sense of irremediable loss.
2
My aim is to consider
this phenomenon both as a real context in terms of geography, society
and cultural history – a context Strindberg was consciously part of
during the second half of the nineteenth and the first decade of the
twentieth century – and as a point of departure for the writer’s recurring
adaptation of the myth of Eden to the Stockholm area. The attempt
implies that these spatial relations, as they become text, are considered
– according to Jurij Lotman’s and Angelo Marchese’s suggestions –
as a significant structure conveying cultural models and conceptions
of life, rather than a set of ornamental or background descriptions.
3
The fascinating aspect is that these conceptions vary considerably
in Strindberg. The milieus are subject to interesting changes, shifts
and repetitions with variations, in such a way that the archipelago in
itself can be read as a mirror of the polyphony of points of view, the
variability and the ambiguities we find in his oeuvre at large.
4
Another
challenge for the modern reader is that Strindberg – as concrete
and precise as he always is in his observations
5
– creates a literary
myth of the
skärgård and of Stockholm’s relation to it. The ultimate
purpose of my article is to show how Strindberg’s representations,
undoubtedly subjective and unique, also partake in a wider Swedish
cultural construction of what Roland Barthes defines as contemporary
myths of our bourgeois world
6
.
Some limitations in the scope of my analysis must be pointed out.
It will not include works that deal with islands outside the Stockholm
archipelago, as the early play Den fredlöse (The Outlaw) from 1871,
set on Island in the Middle Ages, or the story ‘De lycksaliges Ö’ (The
Fortunate’s Isle), from 1884 and 1890, presumably describing a place
in the Atlantic or Caribbean. Also the lake Mälaren, which can be
included in the Stockholm archipelago from a geological point of view,
and Gamla Stan, the historical centre of Stockholm, originally an island
in this landscape, represent something different from what I want to
focus. I will therefore not deal with Gamla Stockholm (Old Stockholm)
from 1880-82, Strindberg’s collection of culture-historical essays, or