Strindberg’s late works are marked by an ongoing battle between fiction and denomination, as well as between literary and communicative languages. These contentions make the late works contradictory, scar the texts, and threaten to tear them apart. The textual complexes of different, even oppositional, linguistic practices create fractures through which the work of different discourses becomes visible: this late style exposes the discursive conditions, the order under which this writing is at once made possible, formed, and delimited.

Rather than a reading of the late works as totalities, this study aims at uncovering various positions on the linguistic battlefield, relating them to the question of the subject in these works. The individual is not a steady, Copernican center with Strindberg – and as a writer, he is at the mercy of language. Strindberg’s work as a whole is characterized by a radical critique of linguistic hypocrisy, a critique that in the late works is expanded into a critique of language as such, and of the Babelic confusion that is Modernity, a confusion originally generated by the Fall.

Strindberg’s relation to this situation is on the one hand a “reactive” stance (see n. 1 on the list of publications), expressed in the commentary that is a dominant feature of many of his works, and on the other hand an investigation of different linguistic strategies to bypass the confusion of tongues. This confusion can be seen as an inflationary economy, consisting in more and more words and utterances (see n. 2). As a reactive writer, Strindberg develops a coercion to contradict, which together with other textual features, contributes to a splitting up of the text into a rhetoric of impatience. But this oppositional writing also becomes a dependence, with writing subordinated to the commentary of another work. The late works are formed under technological conditions in a state of rapid change: newspapers, photography, film, and gramophones develop into dominant media, and in different way Strindberg includes them in his works. The reactive attitude creates the grounds for an irrational politics, while the exploration of language generates radical experiments with form, perceptible in the presence of lists and nonsense as central dimensions of Strindberg’s writing. Strindberg tries to motivate and legitimize his works by pointing to relations impossible to visualize for either contemporary science or social conventions: he is writing paradoxographies. His late style produces a radical discard of the pretense of art; it is a gesture that only makes art possible again: a modernist art of systematic linguistic dislocations.

While Strindberg’s writing is radicalized, as for instance the chamber plays demonstrate, he aspires to a context. This is the reason his nonsense writing is firmly framed, subordinated within a frame which makes the work identifiable as deviation, and therefore manageable. At the same time, nonsense is no longer short on meaning, but rather carries an alternative meaning: nonsense is meaningful only as deviation from established meaning. List and listing are a recurrent feature in these works, and a dominant aspect of Strindberg’s preparatory work. But lists are not dialogic, but denominative: they are a form of bookkeeping. And through listing, Strindberg did what experimental poets would be doing long after him: he investigated the words as such, without engaging in any hermeneutical quest for their essence of meaning. But like bookkeeping, lists take part in an administrative discourse, which in different forms finds its way into the texts. This is made obvious by two of the most important of the late works, The Occult Diary, 1896-1908, and A Blue Book, I-IV, 1907-1912.

Strindberg’s notes about ownership, sale, and prohibition of distribution on the cover of the original manuscript of The Occult Diary, are administrative measures, emphasizing the divided nature of the diary: it does list the days, but is first and foremost an archive for observations, lists of observed or studied phenomena, and in it one can follow how Strindberg time and again returned to his archive, picked up useful episodes from it, and added commentaries (see n. 6).

The diary as archive brings to the fore practices from administration as well as from journalism: collecting, sorting, classifying, systematizing, storing – but also ways of writing. Strindberg becomes something of a paper operator. The diary’s listing of objects, people, observations turns it into a montage: it is a “paper machine”. Assembled by text, drawings, newspaper cuttings, playing cards, twigs, the diary is formed into an unfinished (in spite of its ending) and productive machine. The Occult Diary explores through this assemblage of different languages and signs, practices for making the world possible to write and read. These practices in turn anticipate aesthetically elaborated practices, such as narration and dramatization. In order to produce novels, poems, or plays, the writer must first see, and then establish connections between the different part of what has been observed.

Therefore, the question of the subject takes on central interest in the Occult Diary: it can be looked upon as a technology of the self, aiming at a late subject, prepared to die. This subject, for which the diary is a rescue operation, at the same time as it deconstructs it, does finally appear as a late subject: nothing more to tell, “Read in the afternoon the last of the Blue Book. Felt life had come to an end!”.

The subject is with Strindberg always written into an antagonistic situation, marked by the self’s will to individuality, while being challenged by the force of language and social power, by socially normative practices. Strindberg can, and must, be included within a dialectic of subjection and forming, of accommodation and resistance, in relation to governing: his characters are always in the process of being formed. The same goes for Strindberg as a writer: throughout his career, he looks upon himself as being in opposition; ¬ he notes that “I have never written governmental poetry nor ministerial literature”.

His late works, such as the chamber plays and The Great Highway, includes several scenes exploring how language directs and regulates its speakers: language forces people to accommodate, and it is the invisible condition for individuality and subjectivity. What Strindberg repeatedly discusses is the question of the subject, its agency and autonomy, the “inexplicable” as the definition of the human condition created by paradoxography.

Strindberg depicted his “Blue Books” as a kind of breviary, but the reader would soon be made aware that this definition did not hold (see n. 5). It is as if the breviary, based on one text every day to meditate upon, is transformed into memoranda, messages posted in a rush. This rupture of form is an expression of the status of the subject within the “Blue Books”. Instead of being a cog in a machinery, a part of a system, loyal and subordinated, the subject strives for a leading position, in order to control both himself and the system. And it is as Author that this subject appears… ¬ or not.

Strindberg composed an index that would make it possible for both himself and his readers to orient themselves among the more than five hundred essays or articles making up the “Blue Books”. This organizing of the text exemplifies how Strindberg, time and again, writes inside of an administrative discourse, its concepts and practices, and it then also becomes obvious how his work forms part of an order of power: the modern, administrated world, where power is executed through an endless circulation of memoranda, a constant (re)organization. It is thus not only accidental that Strindberg forms the so-called “Green Bag”, where he used to keep his manuscripts, into a systematized archive, with its documents distributed according to their classifications. The index to the “Blue Books” is then the textual equivalent to the physical sorting of the documents into different boxes.

Inquiry is the operative part of an administrative discourse, which contains questions regarding the governing, identity, and citizenship of the subject. This is most evident in The People’s State, 1910, a text that is Strindberg’s own inquiry into the constitution and legitimacy of power. But at the same time that this administrative discourse finds ways into Strindberg’s works, he also formulates a resistance against it. We find ourselves here inside the textual landscape of paradoxography. When Strindberg makes use of administrative discourse – memoranda, duty, accounting, and so on – he is not only metaphorically inserting a contemporary jargon into literary representation. Rather, Strindberg registers an ongoing transformation, or displacement, of the literary conditions of possibility. This project therefore tends to become a genealogy of the modern writer, the one working within the tension between market, administration and cultural policy.

In this way, the project raises a number of new research questions, regarding Strindberg’s works as well as the modern writer and the literary conditions of possibility. The relation between literature and kinds of administrative practices and discourses must be investigated in order to make these conditions of possibility visible, and to expand and deepen the question of the subject, of identity, subjection, and resistance.