selling out
by Douglas Messerli
August Strindberg The Red Room, translated from the
Swedish by Peter Graves (London: Norvik Press, 2009)
Although Strindberg had already
published one of his major dramas, Mäster
Olaf in 1872, his long fiction, Röda
rummet (The Red Room) of 1879 was
his first great success, and is often described as the earliest modern Swedish
novel. In noting that, however, one should not expect the kind of
psychologically-based, well-made fictions of such modernists as Joyce, Woolf,
Proust, and even fellow Scandinavian writer Knut Hamsun. The Red Room can hardly be said to have any coherent structure,
and, as a social satire of the whole Swedish culture, it has little concern
with character. Rather, it resembles in odd ways, as translator Peter Graves
suggests, the kind of overview of society that occurs in Dickens' novels. Yet
even here the similarities quickly disappear, since narrative is at the heart
of the great English writer's fictions, whereas Strindberg relies on a series
of comically imagistic sketches to capture his much beloved and obviously much
hated Stockholm.
To tell his story, Strindberg relies on what might be described as a
single thread in the figure of a young idealist Arvid Falk, following the
vicissitudes of his life along by tracing loose strings through the various
figures he meets along the way. Strangely, however, because of Strindberg's
buoyant comic timing and the large palette from which he paints his doctors,
lawyers, actors, artists, philosophers, journalists, do-good philanthropists,
publishers, carpenters, prostitutes, street urchins, misers, ministers, and
just plain drunks one doesn't, ultimately, feel the lack of coherency in this
work. Strindberg sets this whole world so a-whirling already in the second
chapter that by the last page the reader is dizzied enough that he has had
little time to realize that the merry-go-round upon which he has just careened
should have sent him wobbling off into chaos. That sense of dislocation,
perhaps, is why this work does seem, despite its numerous set pieces, so
modern.
Moreover, as anyone who has read of Strindberg's life up until the time The Red Room's creation realizes, most
of the various figures of satire have to do with careers with which he himself
had suffered and failed. Accordingly, there is, at times, a biting edge to this
work that will find its fulfillment in the author's later domestic dramas and
autobiographies of madness. But here, despite the constant sense of the
injustice and meaninglessness of the society at large, we do not ultimately
feel, as Graves puts it, the "disillusion and pessimism" that seem to
be "at the heart of the book."
The satire is ebullient
and hits home with an open, almost
Pythonesque, glee which
is, however, remarkably free from
bitterness....
Although The Red Room received
mixed reviews from the critics and was turned down for newspaper serialization,
the work quickly sold out and went through four editions in the next year,
allowing Strindberg at least a short period of economic relief.
From the very beginning of the book we quickly come to realize that poor
Arvid Falk is a kind of holy fool, a gentle, even bashful man, seldom able to
stand up to friends or enemies in his defense of goodness and meaningful social
involvement. His own brother has chiseled him out of some of his inheritance,
and others throughout the book will hit him up for money and even his suit and
overcoat whenever he is able to accumulate anything.
At work's beginning Falk has a respectable job, even if low-paying, as
an Assessor. But he can no longer bear to work at a place where no one shows up
until hours after starting time, spending most of their remaining hours in
countless meetings where nothing gets settled save the pettiest of decisions.
Despite no training in writing, he is determined to quit the government and
become a journalist. The ridiculousness of this decision is apparent to anyone
who has read Hamsun's novel Hunger,
published eleven years later, whose journalist hero nearly starves to death.
Falk similarly undergoes nearly every kind of deprivation possible. To start
with, even before he can raise a pencil to paper, he is accused by the press of
having attacked the government—a terrible blow to his socially-concerned
brother. Falk is innocent; the man to whom he has told his story and revealed
his decision returned home to immediately write a piece for one of the most
disreputable newspapers of the day.
The rest of Strindberg's work is centered on the assignments given Falk
and the individuals he meets along the way. A visit to a publisher lands an
immediate assignment to rewrite a German documentary, The Guardian Angel, about the surviving children of a couple
drowned in a shipwreck; fortunately, they were insured, but as they rush to
claim their inheritance they discover that the boat that carried their
inheritance had also sunk, and their parents had failed to pay the insurance
premium due on the day their death! Falk wisely rejects the assignment.
A visit to a religious charity portrays a mad man sitting behind a
churchlike-organ shouting messages to various employees through the trumpet
while pulling out its stops. A visit to a local
field uncovers artists living in shanty-like constructions, one painting
landscapes, the other religious subjects, while nearby two friends spend the
day reading philosophy. For supper they quickly gather up anything that might
sell (including each other's prized possessions), speeding them off to the
pawnbrokers, and gathering at a local bar to fill their bellies. It is the room
in the bar, nicknamed the Red Room, that gives Strindberg's work its title. And
it is in this room where Falk feels most a home, surrounded by seedy
Bohemian-like types.
I will not list every societal situation Falk must endure—he meets up at
various moments with a theatrical troupe, a beautiful prostitute, an entire
household of unemployed workers, and a disgusting-looking and profoundly
boisterous man of the medical profession; he visits the Swedish Riksdag
(parliament), attends a labor meeting, and finally, in complete despair,
travels with the doctor to the countryside for a few weeks of rest. Upon his
return he is seen as being a different man, a being who now has now sold out to
the barren and destructive society he has fought. Becoming a teacher of Swedish
Literature and History at a Girl's School, he smilingly attempts to keep a
bird's-eye view of the society. Strindberg writes:
But when he is tired of
family life and the falseness of society he
goes down to the Red Room
and meets that dreadful man Borg [the
doctor], his admirer
Isaac, his secret and envious enemy Struve...and
the sarcastic Sellén....
Of Falk, Borg writes:
He lives for his work and
for his fiancée, whom he worships. But I
don't believe all that.
Falk is a political fanatic who knows it would
destroy him were he to
let air reach his flame, so he smothers it
instead with these
strict, arid studies. I don't believe he will succeed
and however much he
controls himself I fear there will be an
explosion at some point.
Strindberg suggests, as I read it,
that there may be hope for some in Swedish society despite the impossibility of
their cause. It is the possibility of those explosions that promise change, and
in allowing their potential Strindberg appears to look ahead to the Futurists
and other literary movements of the new century.
Los Angeles, August 27, 2010
Reprinted
from Rain Taxi (Winter 2010/2011).
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