“Shifts, reconnections, flowing movements” – Strindberg and the “mechanics” of the self

This article investigates how the self is thematized in August Strindberg’s naturalist works from the 1880s and 1890s, as well as in A Dream Play after the turn of the century. Focusing on the play The Father and the short stories “Samvetskval” and “Silverträsket”, and in dialogue with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s machinistic conception of the self, this article explores how Strindberg depicts a “mechanics of the self” marked by the interplay of external social regulations and internal psychological pressures which constitute the bourgeois subject. Further, this article shows how Strindberg’s measurements of the unclear coordinates of the “I” and mapping of the fluctuating movements of the “self” between containment and expansion are transposed to A Dream Play. Thus, this article proposes that A Dream Play does not exclusively thematize a longing for transcendence, as a certain current in Strindberg scholarship claims, but rather a longing for immanent changes of the self and possible expansions and spheres of movement of the “I”, closely tied to socio-economic questions.