Although I did not know that the great and very influential Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849-1912) also wrote prose fiction, there is a book titled The Novels of August Strindberg, which asserts that The Roofing Ceremony [1906] is "Strindberg's most experimental, mot modern[ist] work of fiction... [in which] Strindberg seeks to convey the atmosphere of the mind, to create the illusion that we are capturing the very flow of consciousness, the fleeting thoughts and sensations registered by the human mind." If not a claim that Strindberg invented the stream of consciousness novel, this asserts Strindberg's priority to Italo Svevo, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. This makes The Roofing Ceremony of interest in the history of world literature, as well as being of interest as a heavily autobiographical piece by a writer who influenced Luigi Pirandello and Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and, especially, Samuel Beckett. (A cover blurb invokes Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, though Endgame also has echoes of The Roofing Ceremony.

The consciousness streaming on morphine toward the ocean of nothingness (dead) is that of a natural-history-museum curator. The short novel is not a natural history of estrangement, but the rancor into which a marriage turned is close kin to that in "The Dance of Death" (1900), Strindberg's most-performed play. The dying curator flashes back to a strained visit to his ex-wife, who was very impatient with his expressions of concerns about dangers to their son in her dwelling. He also recalls when he was happily married, which was before his wife came in contact with his relatives. It is the author's view as much as his protagonist's that "man's first and last illusion [is] to seek redemption through woman, why, no one knows." The curator's particular choice of savior betrayed him with a cousin and by becoming enmeshed in the glittering world of his more affluent relatives. Between what was for him the personal disaster of meeting up with the relatives from whom he had been estranged (and, soon, would be again) and his deathbed, were recriminations (going both ways, from as well as toward his wife), guilt, and the nasty vindictiveness of "The Dance of Death." I don't see the assessment by Eric Johannesson (in The Novels of August Strindberg) that "here he writes in a spirit of compassion and understanding, without anger or rancor." Maybe with the anger muted, but not the rancor, and with less hope than in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" or "The Dance of Death."

The 1987 translation by David Mel Paul and Margareta Paul also included two related shorter pieces that I like better than The Roofing Ceremony. There is an "Interpolation into The Roofing Ceremony" from around the same time (but not published in Swedish until 1984). There was no indication as to where in The Roofing Ceremony it should go. It also involves a dying curator. "As his own personality dissolved and a vacancy arose, he began to fill with the personalities of others, speaking with their voices," the interpolation begins. The voice coming from the chemically deranged curator tells a story with a plot, and includes a specific moral, in the form of "Nemesis, a classical divinity, who not only punishes arrogance and secret crimes but also stands beside one in prosperity and tries to cheapen one's happiness. This is so that no one will have to envy anyone else and complain of an unfair share." Belated success turns to ashes in an interlocked tale of a lawyer and a saloon-keeper in the interpolation.

Also included—last, though written and published first, in 1899, illustrated by Edvard Munch, whose portrait of Strindberg is reproduced on the cover of this book— is "Silver Lake," a tale of a youngish natural-history-museum curator who seeks and with great difficulty finds a perfect lake on a Baltic island from which he hauls a huge (and, thus, ancient) pike, another success that turns to ashes, along with his heretofore happy marriage. The inhabitants of the island believe that by fishing in Silver Lake brings disaster. The curse (Nemesis's again?) also includes more than a touch of Cassandra, that is speaking truth and not being believed. Although more folklorish (confronting the modern man of science with folk superstitions), the disaster of marital estrangement also haunts "Silver Lake." As in The Roofing Ceremony, the curator does not think he did anything wrong, and is shocked by the hostility of others that he does not think he did anything to provoke, though he feels guilt, and the reader is likely not to believe the curator is blameless for his predicaments.

I guess that rising paranoia is a leitmotif of modernist literature, and Strindberg was an early master of its portrayal. "Silver Lake" is more romanticist, The Roofing Ceremony more modernist (though not seeming to me to approximate how consciousness flow). I can't judge the fidelity of the translation, but it reads well in English.

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This is a contribution to msmorvay's "Resurecting the Oldies" write-off. My only previous Strindberg-related epinion is a review of the 1950 Swedish film of Miss Julie.


Recommended: Yes