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Poet in the Laboratory: August Strindberg as Alchemist
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11866 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1994 |
4,451 Words |
| Author
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George B. and Laurie M. Kauffman
George B. Kauffman is professor of chemistry at California
State University at Fresno and a former Guggenheim Fellow. He
is the author of fifteen books and more than eleven hundred
publications on chemistry, chemical education, and the
history of science and technology. Laurie M. Kauffman is a
retired teacher with an interest in the humanistic aspects of
science. |
August Strindberg (1849-1912), universally recognized as Sweden's greatest writer, has been called "the Shakespeare of the North," "after Goethe . . . the most universal of all European writers," and, in Eugene O'Neill's words, "that greatest genius of all modern dramatists." The life of this creative and prolific but tormented writer was marked by mental and emotional instability. Nevertheless, Strindberg became the father of dramatic expressionism and a precursor of surrealism, and he exerted a profound influence on European and American drama.
His collected writings, in the standard fifty-five volume John Landquist edition,1 include 115 works: plays, novels, histories, essays, poems, and stories. His letters, most of them still unpublished, exceed fifty-six hundred. His plays abound with pre-Freudian psychological insights, and he was the first continental dramatist honored by a special issue of Modern Drama. In Sweden, a dozen films have been made from his plays and novels. His life and works have been extensively and meticulously investigated in literally thousands of books and articles, reminiscences, essays, bibliographies, and even plays.
Yet Strindberg's little-known chemical and alchemical research has been the subject of only a few generally unsympathetic and cursory reviews of his "scientific" books. Furthermore, only two of these reviewers were chemists. Strindberg's neglected scientific studies illustrate the differences between the approach toward science adopted by a gifted amateur, who happened to be a genius in his own field, and that of a professional scientist. They also illustrate the differences between some laymen's perception of what constitutes science and that of the trained scientist.
Traditionally, the humanities are considered to involve a large degree of subjectivity, whereas the sciences are characterized by a rigorous objectivity that leaves little room for poetic flights of fancy. Virtually all of Strindberg's literary and dramatic works are largely autobiographical; indeed, Edwin Bjorkman called Strindberg "the greatest subjectivist of all time." Although Strindberg would thus seem to possess the antithesis of the scientific temperament, his entire life and personality were a strange blend of contradictions and contrasts. Like Goethe, another complex and visionary genius of widely disparate interests and talents, he provides us with a case study of a first-rank literary figure who actively pursued theoretical and experimental work in the sciences. In Richard Vowles' words, "In Strindberg the empirical and the mystical meet in curious and hectic embrace."
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