Strindberg was not alone in his hope and belief in the ability of the photographic image to record the visible as well as the invisible. Jennifer Tucker, who has studied the relationship between photography and nineteenth-century science, has noted that although photography has been perceived as a medium of truth ever since its
586 Hemmingson 1989b, 74.
587 Carlson 1996, 3.
invention, its status was also questioned right from the beginning. Still, faith in the absolute truthfulness of photography remained strong throughout the century. Like other new technical devices, such as the telescope and the microscope, the camera was able to reveal things that the naked eye was unable to perceive.588 Tucker has also noted the special relationship that existed between photography and spiritualism; both were concerned with invisible forces that existed on the threshold of scientific understanding. Moreover, the chemical processes performed in the darkroom created a sense of mystery and evoked associations with alchemy.589
While Strindberg was influenced by the attempts of the spiritualists to photograph spirits, and probably on one level motivated by the hopes of establishing proof for occult and alchemical phenomena, his photographic experiments also manifested direct parallels with his paintings. He was inspired by the suggestive and purely visual side of photography at least as much as he was relying on it for scientific and occult purposes. As the artist and writer David Campany has observed in an essay on Strindberg’s photographic experiments, when Strindberg’s photographic activities started to move away from description, he became more and more interested in the medium’s potential as a means of visionary suggestion.590 Like his experimental method of painting that invited the element of chance to interfere with the image production, his “celestographs” and “cristallograms”
explored the poetic dimension of nature’s creative potential. The celestographs were made by exposing a photographic plate directly to the night sky. No mechanical apparatus or even a lens was involved in the process, and the image that appeared as a result was not a photograph of the night sky in any conventional sense. Its visual resemblance to the sky dotted with the light of heavenly bodies was, in effect, incidental – probably formed by microscopic particles in the air and impurities in the chemical process. However, this made the whole phenomenon no less fascinating to Strindberg. Indeed, it appeared to prove his Swedenborgian vision of the universe where the microcosm and the macrocosm correspond with each other.
In the celestographs, the connection between the image and the object is not indexical but analogous. Campany writes that in these images:
... what we see could be the heavens, or just a patch of ground, or mere photochemical stains. For Strindberg they were perhaps all these things at once, indivisibility: the infinite heavens and the earth, base material and the lofty representation, fact and wish. Worldly matter and the stars could resemble each other and be thought as part of the same whole.591
Similarly, in the photograms that explored the process of crystallization, Strindberg was interested in capturing the impression of natural processes that reflect analogies between living nature and similar processes in seemingly inanimate matter.
He noticed that when brine solutions were left to evaporate on sheets of glass the
588 See Tucker 2005, 4, 23, and passim.
589 Tucker 2005, 51-52, 77-78.
590 Campany 2005, 115.
591 Campany 2005, 115.
residue would create crystal formations that resembled various plant forms, such as ferns, grass, or tree branches. It seemed to him that these crystal formations were imitating living matter. The photogram was then created by laying the glass on photographic paper and making an exposure.
The same oscillation between the active and passive sides of creation which we have observed in Strindberg’s paintings also occurs in his photographic experiments and, similarly to the paintings, it is often quite difficult to determine what it is exactly that we see in these images. Olle Granath has suggested that Strindberg’s paintings can be seen as an artistic manifestation of the monistic principle. “It is quite conceivable,” he writes, “that, swept up in the act of painting, Strindberg experienced himself as realising his monism by raising a craft to the level of poetry, his paintings reconciling earth, sea, and sky into a single element.”592 Hence, it becomes apparent that the same monistic principles guided his writing, his painting, and his scientific experimentation during the 1890s. Douglas Feuk has written that in the landscape paintings from 1894 “the boundaries between air and water or earth and light often appear fluid”:
Each element looks as though it could be dissolved and transmuted into one of the others, and the real “subject” of the paintings is probably his dream of a secret concordance in which “everything is in everything” – and able to become everything else.593
Although Strindberg was not able to produce any major literary works during the most intense period of his crisis, he did write numerous short essays in both Swedish and French. These were published in the daily press, in literary as well as scientific journals, and in the collections Vivisections (1894) 594 and Jardin des Plantes (1896), and they dealt with a very wide spectrum of subject matter including alchemy and chemistry, hypnotic suggestion, biology, and art criticism. These writings reflect his wide interest in the theories of Ribot, Charcot, Darwin, Haeckel, du Prel, and towards the end of the decade with increasing vigour, Swedenborg.
Although the essays in the collection Jardin des Plantes appear as speculations on the physiology of plants and insects or, in the case of the opening essay “Stenarnes suckan” (The Sighing of Stones), on the mineral realm, their fundamental purpose lies in the exploration of what we have already seen to be the most acute issue of the fin-de-siècle – that is, man’s place in the world and his relationship to God.595 The artistic and scientific aspects in these texts are as deeply interconnected as in his photographic and painterly activities, and often quite directly related to them. For example, in “The Sighing of Stones” he ponders the process of crystallization in a way that reflects the motivation behind his simultaneous photographic experiments.
592 Granath 2005, 23.
593 Feuk 2001, 120.
594 The first volume of the Vivisections was published in 1887 and mainly explores themes connected to the naturalistic dramas that he was working with at the time.
595 See Robinson 1996, 13.
He wonders if it is possible for the elements to carry “memories” of their previous forms of existence:
... has this water in the form of steam, which may have passed through the lifecycle of plants several times, taken on and retained impressions of the plants’ forms, or has the water itself, since it left the lower stage of crystal form, its own higher aiming ability to shape the formation of crystal aggregates more freely, and is it water that has given form to plants or vice versa?596
Likewise, in his chemical and photographic experiments, the ultimate motivation seemed to be the hope of exploring the creative forces of life. Strindberg described himself during this time as a monist and a transformist. He believed that the potential for life was present everywhere in nature, even in seemingly inanimate matter, such as stones and minerals. In these ideas he was influenced in particular by the writings of Haeckel. According to the monistic principle that was popularized by Haeckel, all organic as well as inorganic matter is composed of a single substance that is capable of growth and transformation. Referring to Lavoisier's law of the conservation of matter, Haeckel used the process of crystallization as an example of matter seemingly coming into being anew. Like the opposite process of matter apparently vanishing, as in burning, it is a question of transformation.597
In 1892 Haeckel delivered a lecture in Altenburg entitled “Monism as connecting Religion and Science. The Confession of Faith of a Man of Science”
(“Monismus als Band zwischen Religion und Wissenschaft, Glaubenskenntniss eines Naturforschers”), which was published in the Altenburger Zeitung and later in the same year reproduced in the Berlin journal Freie Bühne für den Entwickelungskampf der Zeit. Since then it has been published as a book in several editions. The first English translation appeared in 1895. The purpose of this lecture, as the title suggests, was to establish a bond between religion and science. It summarized Haeckel’s earlier considerations on this theme, and it contained a basic formulation of the ideas he continued to reflect on in his later publications, most importantly in the extremely popular book The Riddle of the Universe (Die Welträthsel), but that did not appear until 1899.598 Hence, in the 1890s the little book on monism was probably the most approachable introduction to Haeckel’s ideas.
In the book Antibarbarus, published in German in 1894 and in Swedish in 1906, Strindberg endeavoured to establish a monistic chemistry. Haeckel points out in his lecture that the latest advances of chemistry have suggested that the elements may be reducible to one single original element but so far no further light has been shed on this issue: “Our modern analytical chemistry remains for the present at a standstill, in presence of some seventy irreducible elements, or so-called primary substances.”
596 “... har detta vatten i ångform, som många gånger kanske passerade växternas kretslopp tagit och bibehållit intryck av växternas former, eller har vattnet själv, sedan det lämnade kristallformens lägre stadium, en egen högre strävande förmåga av friare formbildning i kristallaggregaten, och är det vattnet som givit växterna formen eller tvärtom.” Strindberg 1921 [1886], 216-217.
597 Haeckel 1895 [1892], 17.
598 Di Gregorio 2005, 487-525.
However, he assumes that it was only a matter of time until empirical proof of the existence of this matter would appear, and its discovery would probably realize the alchemists’ dream of producing gold from other elements.599 Strindberg’s attempt seems to be a direct answer to this challenge proposed by Haeckel. From the point of view of modern chemistry Strindberg’s contribution may have value only as a curiosity but, as is always the case with Strindberg’s scientific writing, its poetic value highly exceeds the scientific impact. As Granath puts it, Strindberg’s
“scientific studies are as it were an attempt to prove what he had already discovered in his art; or conversely, they had their proof, indeed their very apotheosis, in his paintings.”600 Similarly, Feuk has written that while certain texts that Strindberg wrote in the 1890s are rich with overtly alchemical imagery, even the “more practical experiments are essentially a kind of magical-poetic-invocation”:
He once referred to his formulae and laboratory records as “sonnets in chemistry,”
and his imagination seems to draw him into the closest empathy with the matter burning in his china crucible. From these experiments we learn less about the chemical substances and more about Strindberg the man and his desire for change.601
However, none of this should be taken to indicate that Strindberg was not serious in his scientific activities. He sent reports of his experiments to scientific journals (some of which were actually published), and he had high hopes for Antibarbarus which he thought would revolutionize modern chemistry and earn him honour and publicity as a man of science. He actually sent a copy of Antibarbarus to Haeckel, who wrote back to thank him for not having said anything ”crazy” in it.602 He also sent his celestographs along with a written report to Camille Flammarion, the founder and first president of the Société Astronomique, who was known to take an interest in occult and mystical phenomena. Strindberg did not, however, receive any kind of response from the astronomer.603
Some commentators have seen a discrepancy in Strindberg’s thought between Haeckel’s approach which they have interpreted as essentially materialistic and Strindberg’s own spiritual emphasis. Carlson assumes that Strindberg liked to cite scientific sources as proof of his own position in the avant-garde of modern science, and he was perhaps too eager in this project to worry about any contradictions.604 Carlson’s judgement is probably correct to a certain extent but in the case of Haeckelian monism we do not need to assume a contradiction between materialistic and spiritual perspectives. For Haeckel, matter and spirit composed an indivisible unity where one could not exist without the other. He defines the monistic principle as “the conviction that there lives ‘one spirit in all things,’ and that the whole
599 Haeckel 1895 [1892], 20, 25, 29.
600 Granath 2005, 23.
601 Feuk 2001, 118.
602 Sprinchorn 1982, 55.
603 Sprinchorn 1982, 12.
604 Carlson 1996, 213; Sprinchorn 1982, 55.
cognisable world is constituted and has been developed, in accordance with one common fundamental law.”605
Moreover, Haeckel emphasizes that the inorganic and organic worlds are essentially unified.606 He maintains that monism is not to be understood as materialistic no more than it is to be understood as spiritualistic. These terms, according to him, are ambiguous and convey absolutely nothing; they could quite easily be substituted one by the other. Monism, however, is clear and unambiguous:
“for it an immaterial living spirit is just as unthinkable as a dead, spiritless material;
the two are inseparably combined in every atom.”607 Haeckelian Monism, although sometimes considered a crudely materialistic ideology, can also be perceived as a reformulation of Romantic Naturphilosophie. The Haeckelian idea of “one spirit in all things” is not very far from the Romantic view of matter being constantly informed by a creative spirit. Like the Romantic naturalists before him, and unlike most of his contemporary physicists, he provided a vision of nature in its entirety.
He, in fact, adopted the idea of cosmic unity from Goethe’s Faust, but rather than systematically applying Goethe’s thought, he employed the figure of Goethe as an ideal of a man who was able to combine art and science, and beauty and truth.608 Moreover, Haeckel identified an artistic element in nature’s way of creating. His elaborate illustrations of radiolarians, medusae, and molluscs in Kunstformen der Natur (1899-1904) induced the minutest detail of nature with a sense of beauty, organic symmetry, and the fantastic. The fact that beauty was found in these forms of nature appeared for Haeckel as proof that there was a bond between man and nature; this bond was constituted by the presence of “the spirit” everywhere in nature from humans to radiolarians.609
In Inferno Strindberg expressed his belief in the unity of mind and matter, which he considered to be the true meaning of monism:
... at a time when everyone was recognizing the homogeneity of matter, all proclaiming themselves to be monists without being so in fact, I went a step further, drawing the final conclusion from this doctrine and eliminating the frontiers separating matter from what was called mind.610
605 Haeckel 1895 [1892], 3
606 Haeckel 1895 [1892], 3
607 Haeckel 1895 [1892], 58.
608 Di Gregorio 2005, 488. Di Gregorio also points out that although Haeckel considered science to be the foundation of all knowledge, he did not believe it should be allowed to have the final word; science was merely the basis on which philosophical truths were to be constructed. Di Gregorio 2005, 496.
609 See Breidbach 2010, 14. Breidbach argues, moreover, that Haeckel’s vision of nature was filtered through the Art Nouveau aesthetics of the period. This made his images highly approachable for contemporary audiences, and they were then in turn applied as elements of Art Nouveau decoration. The most famous example of this is René Binet’s monumental entrance gate to the Paris World Exposition in 1900, modelled after one of Haeckel’s images of radiolarians. Breidbach 2010, 14-18; see also Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s article in the same volume, Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 2010.
610 Strindberg 1968 [1898], 143.
He related the monistic principle directly to alchemical ideas and to the Swedenborgian mysticism that had been introduced to him first through Balzac’s Séraphita and later directly through an enthusiastic reading of Arcana Coelestia.
Feuk has observed a kind of alchemical reverie in the celestographs and crystallographs which reflects “mediation over the links between the micro and the macro cosmos, between the earth-bound and the celestial, between light and dark, gold and dross...”611 In the novel Inferno the whole world becomes a network of symbols that have a highly personal meaning for the author. Whether it was a demonic force or a benevolent guiding spirit, there always appeared to be some higher power that was sending him messages and guiding his way in life. When one day on his way to the Luxemburg Gardens he sees a shop sign bearing his own initials, he perceives it as a good omen. Then chance leads him to a book stall where he picks up a book by the Spanish chemist and toxicologists Mathieu Orfila which he opens at random and immediately finds support for his hypothesis about sulphur containing carbon. A couple of weeks later he discovers a boarding house named Hôtel Orfila and makes his home there. All kinds of apparently accidental signs contained personal messages: a walnut germ examined under a microscope revealed an embryo with its hands clasped in prayer, and pieces of burned coal turned into sculptures that were fine enough to fool a painter friend (Strindberg is probably suggesting that it was Munch) into believing that they were sculptures made by the Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen – and not only that: they even had the power to frighten away sparrows that had come to Strindberg’s window in search of bread crumbs. Strindberg understood this as a confirmation “that there was a resemblance there perceptible even to animals and that there is a reality underlying the play of inert matter and flames.”612 According to Strindberg’s worldview, everything was subject to a great universal plan. Hence, the accidental images, which appeared in his celestographs or in his paintings, had the potential to carry highly important messages from a realm that was unattainable for the conscious mind. All this was a manifestation of the “theology of chance” that he had spoken about in a letter to his friend L. Littmansson in 1894: to create art that was original and always new, one had to work according to the creative powers of nature.613
Strindberg’s tendency to interpret seemingly meaningless everyday occurrences as the interference of evil powers has sometimes been understood as a sign of paranoia. There is no doubt that the so called Inferno period was a time of great psychological stress for the author, and he probably suffered a nervous breakdown or two. However, the novel Inferno reflects the popular ideas of the period, according
611 Feuk 2001, 127.
612 Strindberg 1968 [1898] , 152.
613 Strindberg was dreaming about composing music the same way he was painting, and he had come up with an idea for a Music-Kaleidoscope: “Du vet att man i väfverierna ritar mönster efter Kaleidoskop och derför äro byxtygerna alltid nya om våren. Hvarför inte ge ny musik fortuite om hvar vår. Slumpens teologi. Arbeta som nature, icke efter nature. Mins du att Ekström sökte att det skulle se tillfälligt ut. Han arbetar som Nevers-porslin uppfinnare; stänkvälling på måfå; inte två pjäser lika, aldrig tröttande. / Så målar jag! Derför kunna inte mina taflor kopieras (och svårligen säljas!)” Strindberg’s letter to Littmansson, Aug. 13 1894, cited from Eklund (ed.) 1968, 10, 215.
to which exceptional sensitivity and even mental illness could be beneficial for
to which exceptional sensitivity and even mental illness could be beneficial for