Dangerous Vicinity: Theorizing the Neighbour in August Strindberg’s "The Roofing Ceremony" (2018) (original) (raw)
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As a cosmopolitan writer and émigré with personal experience of center-periphery paradigms that unevenly shaped discourses about literary innovation in the late nineteenth century, August Strindberg (1849–1912) wrote several modernist prose works that show how locations that have later seemed marginal to European literary modernism in fact are critical to its inception. Although the full extent of Strindberg's authorial identity as transnational and bilingual was quickly suppressed in turn-of-the-century Swedish culture, and largely has been in Strindberg scholarship since then, several of his most interesting prose works engage explicitly with displacements from nation, mother tongue, and national literary traditions. In one of Strindberg's last fictional prose pieces, The Roofing Ceremony [Taklagsöl] (1907), a modern, standardized, middle-class Stockholm apartment provides the exclusive setting. The novel operates on the premise that it is the private, stationary, and (relatively) permanent location of a domestic apartment that allows for narrative experimentation—extended monologues, jumbled chronology, flashbacks, and emulation of morphine-induced, semi-conscious, first-person speech. These strategies are meant to be understood as experimental, as seeking to investigate how drugs and dying affect consciousness and the retelling of events and experiences. Attempting to portray this experience as unmediated, the narrative posits figurations of direct and transparent access to the protagonist's interior. The Roofing Ceremony thus operates within a paradigm aligned with literary modernism's interiority conceit—the pretense at direct and unmediated thought transfer in novelistic form. The Roofing Ceremony is not an interior monologue, however. Although the vast majority of text is construed in the protagonist's first-person speech as monologues, these are inserted within a frame. This frame also contains dialogue and third-person narrative commentary. What makes this novel modernist, I argue in this article, is instead the interplay between an attempt at first-person unmediated narration, modernism's interiority conceit, and the setting that allows for the experiment. The apartment setting is not an empty container waiting to be filled with narrative meaning in The Roofing Ceremony. In the novel, this setting is already mediated by specific aspects of period architectural discourse, audio and recording technology (like the graphophone and phonograph conceived as recorders and playback devices of the human voice), and transnational travel, including a rhetoric of ethnographic collecting and colonial imagination (particularly in relation to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, 1902). We cannot in fact understand The Roofing Ceremony's interest in conceiving a strategy, and formulating a range of tropes (like those of audio recording and play-back technology) to relay the disordered and irrational thoughts of a dying and drugged person.
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The relationship between forms of delimitation and expropriation of the commons through the management of the "public" have led to a world of enclosures and exact division lines. But this is not how the individual perceives and experiences space, this is how bureaucracy builds it. The body’s individual spatiality is understood as the complex topological extension configured by the sensible world at every turn, reflecting while allowing the crossings, junctions, intensities, densities, proximities, etc., which weave together the experiential fabric wherein he lives. This individual spatiality, when it resonates with others, produces a form of common spatiality, the understanding of which can and should act as a new frame of reference for intervention strategies and spatial politics in the contemporary world. The roofscape, as a space not fitting within the canonical division of public/private, is a unique study case to frame these new concepts.
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SWEDISH SUBURBS AS HETEROTOPIAS: TOWARDS A MULTICULTURAL LITERATURE OF PLACES
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Urban literary studies have become an important issue in contemporary multicultural Sweden, especially after the 70s, when the public housing project Miljonprogram ("Million Programme") was completed (1974). Nowadays, these areas are partly regarded as a political failure since they have become places of social and even racial segregation. A central cultural consequence of multiculturalism in Sweden is the so-called Invandrarlitteratur ("immigrants' literature"), mainly represented by second-generation authors. In this article, I will try to provide a concise but exhaustive understanding of how this kind of literature can reshape the Miljonprogram areas and define what Sweden is today. The aim is to show how these suburban spaces, through a chosen collection of three works, are narrated by immigrant authors not as sites, i.e. spaces as such, but rather as places, i.e. spaces whose meaning is provided by the (literary) subjectivities who live and act therein (Prieto 2013). Using the concept of heterotopia (Foucault 1986) and its defining criteria, I will investigate how these works perform a total reassertion of space, emphasizing the space described as rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari 2011) peripheries, i.e. the result of a sensitive relationship between self and space. This investigation is designed to reflect on how the perception of suburbs has changed from first to second-generation immigrant writers and it hopes to open a new research line in which stigmatizing dystopias can be replaced by heterotopias.