GIACOMO JOYCE AND STRINDBERG'S LE PLAIDOYER D’UN FOU

James Augusta Joyce was no great fan of August Strindberg. “No drama behind the hysterical raving,” he is reported to have observed to Stanislaus.(1) He was equally dismissive of his countryman and fellow-writer James Stephens (“I don’t see why almost anybody couldn’t do that”) yet the two became close friends, particularly during their Paris years. Stephens was even tapped to complete the Wake if Joyce should be incapacitated.(2) The basis, if not the actual modality, of the friendship would appear to have been correspondences Joyce noted between his life and Stephens’, and these we do well to take as seriously as the author, if no more so: perceived coincidence of date of birth (Stephens was actually born ten days later than Joyce), imbrication of their initials in JJ&S (a preferred whisky), number and sex of offspring, and the like. It then seems defensible to take the possibility of perceived commonalities, such as the August/Augusta name pairing, as one avenue for an investigation of a similarly based relationship with Strindberg, albeit one more exclusively literary and much more ambivalent.

This essay initially considers three areas of rapprochement: literary models and techniques; literary issues of the day; and correspondence in the spheres of personal and family life, what Joyce, in light of his perception of Stephens, might even have considered significant affinities. The essay then examines Strindberg’s Le plaidoyer d’un fou, which Joyce is believed to have read in English translation shortly before composing Giacomo Joyce. Again, three topics are isolated, as exemplary of mutual concerns of the Irish and Swedish authors: the staging of a woman’s movement through physical and architectural space and light; this same woman as the object of the male gaze and desire; and woman as Eve, Mary, and Lilith, tempting as both virgin and whore.

In Zürich Joyce saw Strindberg’s The Dance of Death and The Ghost Sonata in German-language productions and himself owned copies of Miss Julie and The Father. Among Strindberg’s non-dramatic works Joyce had read, in Elie Schleussner’s “authorized” English translation, Strindberg’s The Confession of a Fool, which had been composed directly in French as Le plaidoyer d’un fou.(3) This was intended to pass as an autobiographical account, wholly subjective, apparently written with the immediacy of diary entries; in reality it is a memoir, still not without bias. Ellmann contends that in Trieste Joyce read yet another Strindberg prose work, again autobiographical, Tjänstekvinnans son or The Son of a Servant (female). Strindberg’s mother had been his father’s housekeeper and in the class-conscious environment of nineteenth-century Stockholm, Strindberg was acutely aware of his origins despite his father’s status as a shipping agent.

Thus, we have convincing evidence that early on Joyce had read or seen six works by August Strindberg. There is also considerable internal evidence in Ulysses that Joyce was also familiar with a collection of short stories, the first volume of which Strindberg published in 1884 as Giftas or Getting Married. In the Plaidoyer or Confession the protagonist Axel (for August) refers to this collection, topical in terms of the public debate of the day but fired in large part by his own domestic predicament and its antecedents. In his correspondence Strindberg wrote that the stories dealt with marriages and concubinages he had observed and, in general, with women’s issues. They also documented the effects on the spiritual development of young men and women of a repressive state church and hierarchical social system. These short stories had been translated into French, German, and English (although the English rendering was published in New York) well before Joyce’s Trieste and Zürich years. One story in the collection, which provoked a law suit against Strindberg, has a student speculating on the Eucharist, even down to the commercial names and prices of its constituents; we think of Stephen in Ch. 3 of the Portrait. The central episode of another story, entitled Måste (“Needs Must” captures the idea in English), recounts how a young schoolmaster spent Midsummer Day in June moving from one quarter of Stockholm to another, the unwilling participant in a number of experiences, at a restaurant, in a park, that would have a decisive effect on his life. The schoolmaster’s name is Albert Blom. Here we might recall that the protagonist of Ulysses was initially conceived of as a kind of Dublin Per Gynt. In an early review of Ulysses Mary Colm remarked that the confessional strain of the novel was similar to that of Rousseau and Strindberg, and Joyce, we are told, approved of the review.(4) Yet, on at least one point, Joyce is likely to have been critical of the collection of stories on marriage themes.

It might be thought that Joyce’s enthusiasm for the Norwegian authors Ibsen and Bjørnson and his study of the literary Dano-Norwegian language of the times would have created a receptive environment for viewing Strindberg’s work. Yet I would contend that Joyce’s overt stance toward Strindberg was in large part dictated by Strindberg’s reference to a “Norwegian male bluestocking,” clearly a dig at Ibsen, in the Plaidoyer (207) and by another story in the Giftas collection pointedly entitled Ett Dockhem (“A Doll’s House”), in which a husband and wife read Ibsen’s play and come to very different conclusions. Joyce would have judged Strindberg to have shown too little respect for the Norwegian master and is unlikely to have found Strindberg’s apparent misogynism, his disempowerment of female characters, to his liking.

On a more strictly personal and historical level the early careers of Strindberg and Joyce have a number of resemblances to which Joyce would have been attentive. While desultory medical studies (including the study of chemistry), private tutoring, book-reviewing, translation, self-imposed exile are the stuff of many a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, Strindberg’s early professional background bears an uncanny resemblance to Joycean matter. And to the resemblance in names noted above, we may add, in summary form, other family names: John as the name of Joyce’s father, Johan that of Strindberg’s uncle and of the protagonist in The Son of a Servant (plus Strindberg’s play The Father), a mother named Eleonora (called Nora) in Strindberg’s case, a paternal grandmother named Ellen in Joyce’s; birth dates of January 22 and February 2 (1/22, 2/2), both under the sign of Aquarius and the influence of Uranus and Saturn. More subjective, we have such details as the plot of Strindberg’s The Son of a Servant, in which the father dissipates an inherited family fortune and the mother, worn with child-bearing, dies in the young Johan’s presence. And, just to complicate matters, in 1912 James Stephens published The Charwoman’s Daughter. What Joyce may have known and made of all this is, of course, difficult to recover but it seems legitimate to suggest that, for Joyce, Strindberg was a “marked” author and that there existed a heightened climate for receptivity or rejection.

The documented exposure to Strindberg’s writings and possible reflection in Joyce’s mature oeuvre of theme and story lines from the Swedish author, such as Albert Blom’s June-day wandering in Stockholm, prompt a consideration of the early inspiration that Joyce may have drawn from Strindberg’s quasi-autobiographical compositional techniques, particularly as evidenced in Le plaidoyer d’un fou, and from the protagonist Axel’s early conception of Marie and women generally. This work reflects Strindberg’s friendship, then affair, with Sigrid Sofia Mathilda Elisabet von Essen, called Siri, who was from a Swedish-speaking army family in southern Finland. Strindberg would eventually convince her to leave her officer husband and marry him, upon which she pursued a mediocre acting career as well as bearing him several children. To sharpen the focus now to two works of principal interest, Schleussner’s English translation of Le Plaidoyer d’un fou appeared in 1912, the year of Strindberg’s death, and Joyce is thought to have composed Giacomo Joyce in July-August, 1914.

Although the Plaidoyer contains several scenes students of Joyce might wish to pursue (see below), we begin with a single descriptive moment from Strindberg that may be called “iconic” in a variety of respects. Siri is here called Marie, and Axel (for August) had first me her in the streets of Stockholm on a fine day in June. One day later, in her home:

I seemed to see her, as if in a vision, coming down the spiral staircase, which wound in endless perspective at the back of the galleries. She lifted the straight folds of her blue dress, showing her perfect feet and slender ankles, looking at me furtively, with a sidelong glance, tempting me to the betrayal of her husband, soliciting me with that treacherous and voluptuous smile which I had seen yesterday for the first time. (42-43)

In GJ Joyce too writes of “the windings of the winding turret stairs.”(5) Before a more detailed consideration of the two works we may note the two rather similar general contexts, marked by recurring antitheses and dichotomies. Briefly stated, these are the cities of Trieste and Stockholm, with outlying towns and islands; movement and stasis in the urban environment and its buildings; public and private space; the play of light and shadow; the Jewish but Italian father on the one hand, the Swedish-speaking Finnish husband and officer on the other; James the tutor, Axel the librarian, and their relative degree of culture and learning in contrast to the girl and woman. On a higher level of abstraction are issues of ethics and bourgeois morality versus temptation; amor and eros; adultery or the debauchery of youth; illness and health. From among this list of parallels and the like, I have chosen first to isolate the perception of movement through social and architectural space, and the accompanying chiaroscuro lighting effects.(6) First, a caveat: some of these correspondences will appear trivial and, for a literary bricoleur like Joyce, the simple product of a good memory and an iterative, mosaic-assembly-like approach to composition. It is the accumulated mass of such evidence that will be telling–if any is.

The poem is full of spatial displacements, involving the staging of overt and covert viewings of the young woman, in settings of light and dark. This we could put under the sign of spectacularity.(7) We tend to think of a viewer, and even more so a voyeur, as motionless, with an intent and unshifting focus. Thus, for all the movement in and around Trieste, family outings, shopping rounds, promenades, in which Joyce may have been or imagined himself a participant, he shares in little of the action. Over the sixteen pages of the loosely articulated, episodic poem, we visit a castle stairwell, a ricefield near Vercelli, the arches of riverside streets in Padua, a piazza, a snowy hillside for tobogganing, a variety of shops, a Jewish cemetery, the family’s rooms, a Catholic church, the “gods” (the upper balconies of a theater, loggione in Italian and in the poem), a long corridor, more stairs and halls, finally an empty apartment. This constructed space is often constricted, with the girl trapped by the male gaze, but also with a line of flight laid out. Stairways and hallways are always on the way somewhere, just as the maturing girl changes the visualized conditions of her relationship with the tutor. Similarly, the light effects are usually intermediate, in the process of transformation: creamy summer haze, twilight, hanging mists outside a lamp-lit room, raw veiled spring morning, a recalled view of Parisian rooftops or a narrow Parisian room, tawny gloom, yellow shadow, sindark nave, plunging gloom, torbid daylight. There is a single instance of “pure air on the upland road, raw sunlight in the morning” (8). And, interestingly, this evokes for Joyce the image of a girl on horseback–but no ordinary girl. “Hedda! Hedda Gabler!” he imagines himself calling. In Joyce’s handwritten clean copy of the poem, each pair of pages in the notebook is like the board of an old Snakes-and-Ladders game, rapid elevations into light and space, ensnaring wormholes that draw poet and reader into the darkness.

Axel too is concerned with lighting. In a park scene he and the baroness try “to differentiate between the apples suspended from the branches and half-hidden by the leaves.” Apples and flowers have all changed their hues. “There, you see, Baroness, how everything in the world is imaginary. Colour does not exist in the abstract; everything depends on the nature of the light. Everything is illusion” (60-61). Joyce, too, has a scene were the young girl is turned by the light green as graveyard grass (12). Although Axel expounds his theory on color with apparent confidence, he is in fact terrified by her “unearthly loveliness.”

The disheveled golden hair formed a luminous aureole around her pale, moonlit face; her exquisitely proportionate figure rose by my side, tall and straight and more slender than ever in the striped dress, the colours of which had changed to black and white. (61)

Social space, momentarily emptied of the female presence, also informs the works. Strindberg had an upstairs apartment with a dormer window on Kaptensgatan in the largely upper middle-class section of Östermalm in Stockholm. Here Axel receives Marie (see below) and this same room, now let from Miss Augusta, is ascribed to schoolteacher Blom in the story “Needs Must.” The perspective out over the city and harbor is detailed. Giacomo Joyce also has a view over rooftops: “Trieste is waking rawly: raw sunlight over its huddled browntiled roofs, testudoform; a multitude of prostrate bugs await a national deliverance. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife” (8). At another point, the theater and its patrons seen from the gods is a field against which the girl might be be observed. Joyce writes:

Loggione. The sodden walls ooze a steamy damp. A symphony of smells fuses the mass of huddled human forms: sour reek of armpits, nozzled oranges, melting breast ointments, mastick water, the breath of supper of sulphurous garlic, foul phosphorescent farts, opoponax, the frank sweat of marriageable and married womankind, the soapy stink of men. (12)

Strindberg also has a visit to the theater with “the mingled odours of painted canvas, raw wood, rouge and perspiration” (52). Here is Axel’s experience of the drinking party at which he excoriates the baroness for indulging in every whim and caprice to escape her bourgeois home life. It has much in common with the “Oxen of the Sun,” “Circe” and Nighttown.

At this moment the laboratory appeared to me to be a hallucination of my over-excited brain, the temple of monstrous orgies in which all the senses participated. The bottles on the shelves gleamed in all the colors of the rainbow: the deep purple of read lead; the orange of potash, the yellow of sulphur, the green of verdigris, the blue of vitriol. The atmosphere was thick with tobacco smoke: the smell of the lemons, used in brewing the punch, called up visions of happier countries. The piano, intentionally out of tune and badly treated, groaned Beethoven’s march in a manner which made it unrecognizable. The pallid faces of the revellers see-sawed in the blue-black smoke which rose from the pipes. (45)

After the drinking bout, the men leave for the brothel.

I turn now to the male gaze as oriented in these various spatial and luminous contexts.(8) We know Joyce to have been a foot fetichist and it will be of interest to find early evidence in Giacomo Joyce that may have quickened his interest. Two scenes in the Plaidoyer would have caught his attention, Joyce now the voyeur at one further remove. At an early stage of his infatuation, Axel imagines the exquisite beauty of Marie’s white limbs, and this sends him to illustrations of Greek goddesses (43-44). Later, received at her home (the very same house in which he had spent a miserable childhood) and she somewhat melancholic, he finds himself doing most of the talking. Then,

All at once my eyes, travelling round the room, were arrested by a display of her ankles underneath the tablecloth. I beheld her finely shaped calf, clothed in a white stocking; a gaily embroidered garter belted that charming muscle which turns a man’s brain because it stimulates his imagination and tempts him to the construction of the whole of the remaining form. Her arched foot with its high instep was dressed in a Cinderella’s slipper. (91)

Later he concludes that women are always conscious of being looked at when they exhibit more than their ankles. For Joyce, the chance look at “[a] skirt caught back by her suddenly moving knee; a white lace edging of an underskirt lifted unduly; a leg-stretched web of stocking. Si pol?”(9). And again, “Tightly capped and jacketted, boots laced in deft criss-cross over the flesh-warmed tongue, the short skirt taut from the round knobs of the knees. A white flash: a flake, a snowflake” (4). Or a flash of petticoat. This also has its Circean side later on in Giacomo Joyce, with Jim’s head between the knobby knees of a Parisian hairdresser. Joyce even gives a snapshot of shoes with bows likened to spurs (8). Shades of Bella Cohen! Both works have scenes of the young man’s almost preternatural awareness of the corporality of the woman’s arm when they are walking or standing together (Plaidoyer, 62, GJ, 10). At one point James sees the involuntary uncoiling of a strand of hair (11); Axel sees Marie arrange her hair and push a bit of errant lace back into her blouse (67).

The voyeur can be at a distance, as when Giacomo sees “a light in an upper room. She is dressing to go to the play” (6). But voyeurism can also take the form of an intense concentration on a person or part of the body in what is otherwise mutually shared social space. Some observant tags from the poem, again with an emphasis on light and chromatism: long eyelids, blue-veined child, slim and shapely haunches, then a sight down her back when he is asked to fasten the neck of her gown. He imagines her shift slipping its moorings and falling: “a lithe smooth naked body shimmery with silvery scales. It slips slowly over the slender buttocks of smooth polished silver and over their furrow, a tarnished silver shadow” (7).

The two works also offer scenes of the consummation of passion, real in Strindberg, imagined in Joyce, where the congress is mostly verbal. Again, visual impressions predominate. Axel has brought Marie to his attic apartment. “She looked like a girl of sixteen, so delicate, so pure were her contours; the dainty head with its masses of golden hair, half-buried in the cushions, might have been a child’s. Thus she reclined on my sofa, like a goddess, allowing me to worship her, while she regarded me with furtive glances, half shamefaced, half provoking” (184). And in Joyce: “She leans back against the pillowed wall: odalisque-featured in the luxurious obscurity. Her eyes have drunk my thoughts; and into the moist warm yielding welcoming darkness of her womanhood my soul, itself dissolving, has streamed and poured and flooded a liquid and abundant seed” (14). But I suspect that Joyce the author is having some fun at the expense of signor Joyce, Jamsey, the conversationalist.

Despite the repeated touches of what we might, awkwardly, call “portraitism,” the perspective remains resolutely male, that of the narrator and the poet. In both works this counts for more than objective reality, particularly that of the real woman, who never achieves the status of agent. Dialogue plays a very restricted role in comparison with the impact of visual scenes. And in spite of the three-dimensional architectural effects, there is a frontality to the images of women: no depth, and each replaceable by the other. The emotions of the two young women, when limned at all, are read through the eyes of Joyce and Axel. Joyce’s feelings are repeatedly deflated by self-irony and anticipated remorse; Axel’s range wildly and are almost exclusively dictated by the most selfish and idiosyncratic of concerns, even when masked as morality. He plummets from infatuation to loathing, from rapture to despair at the drop of a hat–or, better, a glove. Particularly in the first half of the novel, with the more significant points of contact with Giacomo Joyce, it is very difficult for the reader to assemble and assess a composite character for Marie from these emotion-driven snapshots, in which most of the emotion is in the eye of the photographer. This is less true in the case of Joyce, since the alternate identities he imposes on the Triestine schoolgirl, who has finally been identified as Amalia Popper (father Leopoldo), lack conviction, even in Joyce’s eyes. The girl is not entirely passive before the male gaze, but in distinction to Axel and Marie, her activity is scarcely ever directed toward her tutor, although he may be present. We see it through the prism of recollection, with chromatism supplied as much by the mood informing the memory as by the recalled scene. Strindberg writes from the moment, Joyce of the moment. Joyce’s overt agency stays within social proprieties, and even his imaginings stop short of violation, this being left to the surgeon’s knife, in the appendectomy that Amelia undergoes.

Since it is even more divorced from reality, we pause over woman’s darker side in the two works, already suggested in several excerpts. She appears in the apparently antithetical guises of virgin and whore, and in all intermediary shadings, a spectrum over which she never loses her mystery nor her affinity with the divine. For Axel, this face of the goddess is seen mostly before he is sure of his love and of hers. For Joyce, it alternates with the face of purity throughout the poem. Only a few Strindbergian antecedents will be noted in order to cite Joyce at greater length. “The statue of the Madonna had fallen down; woman had shown herself behind the beautiful image, woman, treacherous, faithless, with sharp claws” (38). “I suffered through her as if she were a diseased organ grafted on my sick soul” (42). Then the imagined descent of the staircase with which these remarks opened, the “treacherous and voluptuous smile.” Later, when Marie shows herself more convinced of Axel’s love, he sees her more positively, “coming up the marble staircase under the gilded ceiling ... her aristocratic figure clothed in a black velvet costume, trimmed with military braid” (116-17).

With Joyce, the evolution of this side of the beloved starts with a kind of pathological chromatism, painting with egg and egg white, the girl both edible and nauseating.

A ricefield near Vercelli under creamy summer haze. The wings of her drooping hat shadow her false smile. Shadows streak her falsely smiling face, smitten by the hot creamy light, grey wheyfaced shadows under the jawbones, streaks of eggyolk yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour lurking within the softened pulp of the eyes.(2)

Or is it all just an effect of the light? Later we read of whores’ eyes, “long lewdly leering lips: dark blooded molluscs” (5), “eyes that dim the breaking East, their shimmer the shimmer of scum that mantles the cesspool of the court of the slobbering James, ... kind gentlewomen wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths, the pox-fouled wenches and young wives that, gaily yielding to their ravishers, clip and clip again” (9). The darkest parodies of love in Giacomo Joyce are not staged with Amalia Popper at all, but in monstrous imaginings and personal reminiscences (the hairdresser, Nora): “a starry snake has kissed me: a cold nightsnake. I am lost!” (15).(9) The pupil has been replaced by a succubus, both generating and inhabiting the fevered dream.

The complex of concurrent, complementary, and antithetical images of woman gained in strength in the first public debate over women’s rights in the age of Ibsen and is neatly summed up in the title of Bram Dijkstra’s art history study, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture.(10) Today, we have a well informed appreciation of James Joyce and sexuality, with him displaying the insecurities and inconsistencies that all humans face as regenerative beings acting within social and cultural constructs and constraints,(11) and also of Joyce’s knowledge of early Irish legendary history and literature. Here we find the Irish goddess of territorial sovereignty, who seeks or dismisses a royal consort whose role was to rule, defend, and propagate the land that she herself incarnates. She may appear as an old crone, a young beauty, a goddess of battle or goddess of death, so that the alternance we witness in Giacomo Joyce also has native Irish antecedents at great cultural depth. This sovereignty figures bulks rather large in Joyce’s writings, yet at a studied distance from its exploitation by the Irish nationalist movement.(12)

There are a good many points of superficial contact between Strindberg’s Plaidoyer and Joyce’s Portrait and Ulysses, e.g., a family’s social slide, a worn mother’s death, Axel collecting other people’s impressions of him (compare Stephen’s many Is), Axel rushing through a library room comparing the anatomical features of Greek goddesses, medical and science students sitting around a table in laboratory, drinking and speaking abusively of religion and women before leaving for a brothel, diners obliged to listen to singing drunks in a nearby room, a protagonist climbing over the railing to get into a locked house at night, the proposal of a ménage à trois, and the like. These should not distract from the more difficult to assess assumption of narrative methodology.

In the Plaidoyer Strindberg writes his courting of Siri directly from his life into letters. With Giacomo Joyce, the Irish author seems to write Amelia Popper out of his life but will later incorporate descriptive moments from the prose poem in his subsequent work.(13) Whatever earlier, perhaps somewhat conflicted preoccupations he may have had with Strindberg as fellow-writer and contemporary of Ibsen, as generated both by coincidences in the personal sphere and by an interest in compositional technique, the Swedish author does not appear a significant factor in Joyce’s later writing. Strindberg should, on balance, be counted among myriad possible influences at a time when Joyce’s compositional techniques were being developed and when he may have been especially open to to impressions from narrative models in which a strong autobiographical constituent was recast and incorporated in two or more interdependent works, as in The Son of a Servant, The Confessions of a Fool, and the stories in Getting Married.(14) As far as we know, Joyce made no overt admission of any debt to the Swedish author–and why should he? Yet at a minimum we can say that Strindberg was securely located on Joyce’s mental map–August in the mind of Augusta. He has his place in the Wake, as “stringbag” paired with “bosse,” the name of Strindberg’s second wife, Harriet Bosse, and then as “Aweghost” in the anecdote of the Russian general who dared use holy turf as torche-cul and thereby offended the goddess of territorial sovereignty.(15)

In conclusion, it is then proposed that at the formative period in Joyce’s career to which we owe Giacomo Joyce Strindberg was more of live presence than has hitherto been recognized but, the possible loan of motif and detail aside, the primary influence was in the imaginative redeployment of autobiography, even pseudo-autobiography, intertwining personal experience with the matter of multiple other worlds.