ABSTRACT
Strindberg’s intense revaluation of the artist’s relationship to reality during the Inferno Crisis resulted in changed attitudes towards representation. Having returned to Sweden in 1897 after many years abroad, he embarked upon the most productive phase of his career. Several plays of this period dramatise typically modernist modes of experience, including the search for lost identity, the shock of a fragmented, disintegrating self, and the lack of a stable external reality and a rational order of society. From the 1890s Strindberg increasingly rejected the phenomenal world that seemed to offer only deceptive appearances. He found that truth can only be uncovered beneath visible surfaces by way of poetry that taps into deeper layers of the mind. Testifying to Strindberg’s continued interest in the psychiatric research of his day, the unconscious in these plays becomes the projecting centre of the drama, the structural organising principle of the experimental works which Strindberg called his dream plays. In the ‘Author’s Note’ to A Dream Play (1901) he theorises his new style where he
attempted to imitate the inconsequent yet apparently logical form of a dream. Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality the imagination spins and weaves new patterns: a blend of memories, experiences, spontaneous ideas, absurdities, and improvisations.
(Strindberg 1998: 176)