4. Sascha Brosmer – untitled<\/p><\/div>\n

Missing letters are also the driving force in Strindberg\u2019s next and most famous play, Miss Julie<\/em> (1888). But here, Strindberg elaborates on his theory of soul murder by introducing the themes of insurance and fire. The battle of the sexes in Miss Julie<\/em> has its origin in the arson perpetrated in Miss Julie\u2019s childhood by her mother, an act whose motivation Strindberg fails or refuses to explain. The arson is damaging and contaminating, however, only to the extent that its effects were made uncontainable and irreversible when the mother sought to circumvent the institution of insurance. Only by seeing through the diversionary fireworks of the arson, one can discern the essence of the dead mother\u2019s malice. Not her arson, but her interception (of the letters that contained the fire insurance premium) was what caused the financial ruin of the house, and almost led the father to commit suicide, the soul murder that returns to fulfill its destiny in the daughter.<\/p>\n

Insurance asserts that since every conceivable loss can be replaced by some monetary equivalent, insured loss is loss already admitted and covered. The standard of mourned death, however, implies and hides the contrary notion of an always uninsurable loss. The fantasy of seamless replacement prepares, by proxy or inoculation, for this very catastrophe, but this calculability of the risk of loss reduces the living to their mere exchange value, thus turning what was a risk of loss to a generalized certainty of loss. As Laurence Rickels points out, the emergence of the great insurance houses in the seventeenth century occurred concurrently with the similar emergence of early modernity\u2019s mass and massive failure to mourn. When modern insurance companies in the seventeenth century arose as a response to the emergence of the colonial trade that created the need for expanded marine insurance coverage, this introduction of the risk-management instrument reflected a similar shift in the risk-management that lay closer to home, exemplified, for instance, in the transformation of Lloyds of London from a coffee house into an insurance firm, enacting the instrument of insurance\u2019s overtaking of coffee\u2019s role as the drink of the melancholic. As Rickels notes:<\/p>\n

Lloyd\u2019s of London accordingly holds the exemplary place of transit between conceptions of melancholia. From a humoral disorder which strikes selectively, either giving rise to genius in the one so inclined or incapacitating a certain physical type always predisposed to the illness, melancholia became the specter of uninsurable loss which endangers even innocent bystanders. (65-66)<\/p>\n

Strindberg was certainly familiar and familial with insurance, being a family member of one of Sweden\u2019s leading shipping houses.<\/p>\n

After suffering a setback in his youthful dream of becoming a playwright and an actor, Strindberg was offered a commission to write a short story for an insurance concern, Nordstj\u00e4rnan (\u201cThe North Star,\u201d Lagercrantz 46). Strindberg wrote a story about \u201cyoung Mia who is visiting Stockholm and writing home to her fianc\u00e9 Axel in the provinces\u201d and recalls for their joint edification the cautionary anecdote about a maternal uncle who left behind a wife and six children without life insurance benefits. In stressing the capacity of insurance to prepare for catastrophe, the story pleased the insurance concern so much that it hired Strindberg as the editor of its insurance magazine, Svenska F\u00f6rs\u00e4kringstidning<\/em> (Swedish Insurance Journal, Lagercrantz 46). But it did not take long before Strindberg again ran up against those missing places cycling back in the doubling technology of insurance. The magazine folded in six months, mainly because Strindberg turned the tables on the insurance concern and began \u201cto question,\u201d as Lagercrantz reports, \u201cthe legitimacy of the entire business; marine insurance became his favorite target [\u2026] Strindberg wrote in his magazine about British and German ship owners\u2019 disregard for their sailors\u2019 lives. He wrote that these magnates, in order to collect, had no scruples about arranging to rid themselves of a worn-out vessel, with total disregard for the crew\u2019s fate\u201d (46).<\/p>\n

Was this really so? Or was this but another expression of Strindberg\u2019s paranoia? Regardless, what comes through in this episode is not only Strindberg\u2019s fear of the persecuting power that lets a missive (be it a ship sent out bearing cargo) go missing, but also his wariness of accident insurance\u2019s sinister underside that endangers, rather than secures, one\u2019s cargo. Strindberg returned to this experience in Red Room<\/em> (1879), the novel that launched Strindberg\u2019s career as a writer, where he devotes a chapter to exposing insurance as a conspiratorial scheme of the large insurance houses. To celebrate the founding of Triton, a new marine insurance company, its founder gives a speech about the power of insurance:<\/p>\n

The merchant sends out his ship, his steamer, his brig, his schooner, his bark, his yacht, or what you will. The storm breaks his\u2014whatever it is\u2014to pieces. Well? The merchant says, \u201cgo ahead!\u201d. For the merchant loses nothing. That is the insurance company\u2019s idea and ideal. (Red Room<\/em> 117)<\/p>\n

But through the eyes of the hero Arvid Falk, the insurance company\u2019s boastful confidence before loss is exposed as applying only to the major shareholders (117). The major shareholders\u2019 security is paid for by the missing cargoes of small investors, who always lose out when there are accidents.<\/p>\n

In his works, Strindberg, the son of a shipping agency owner, lived out the struggle between the major shareholders and the small investors, i.e. between the shipping agent father\u2019s injunctive to mourn completely, and the persistence of a loss his mother entrusted to him in passing, an illicit, uninsurable transfer to which he would give the resonant name of soul murder. In the autobiographical text The Son of a Servant-Woman,<\/em> Strindberg lets the curtain drop on a primal scene of this transaction:<\/p>\n

Now, while she was still able to get up, she began to mend the children\u2019s linen and clothes, and to clean out all the drawers. She often talked to John about religion and other transcendental matters. One day she showed him some golden rings.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou boys will get these when Mama is dead,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhich is mine?\u201d asked John without stopping to think about death. She showed him a plaited girl\u2019s ring with a heart on it. It made a deep impression on the boys, who had never owned anything made of gold, and he often thought of that ring. (96)<\/p>\n

The passage raises several questions. Why \u201ca plaited girl\u2019s ring\u201d? What does the mother give to the son in making her death the condition of this transfer? Who is the girl for whom the ring was originally destined?<\/p>\n

The identity of the girl is just as hard for the reader to discern as it was for Strindberg. Strindberg was the third of twelve children, of whom only seven survived infancy. Such family history is not unique, as child mortality was high even in the nineteenth century\u2014although in Strindberg\u2019s family, it seems to have been exceptionally so. Nor is it unique that none of the biographies mention these five dead infants. Our refusal to acknowledge the death of the child grows directly out of their vulnerable proximity to death. In commencing his exploration of the missing links of German letters, Rickels puts the focus on the eighteenth century invention of the child-pupil, whose \u201cdouble but separate\u201d status doubles via analogy and genealogy that of the dead in their mortuary palaces (22-23). This newly cemented ontological status, coupled with the still high rate of infant mortality (as seen in the five infant deaths in Strindberg\u2019s family, for instance), created a massive occasion for mourning.<\/p>\n

A phantom is, as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok have shown, a traumatic loss buried within the body that, nevertheless, does not issue from an experience or a relationship that relates to the bearer of the crypt, not even as something repressed. Rather than being repressed, a phantom is an effect rather of encrypting. The unmourned loss of a child the parent buries in a surviving child\u2019s body is an instance of a phantom taking up residence in a specific location inside the body. Since a phantom transmission must escape detection in order to preserve the buried corpus whole, a phantom transmission is, therefore, an unspeakable, secretive affair, which utterly counteracts attempts at libidinal introjection\u2014that is, it severs the link of reference between words and some unconscious content (Abraham and Torok 171-72). Phantom words point, instead, to gaps in the introjective strivings of the ego, and to some catastrophe in the parent (174).<\/p>\n

The ring passed on by his mother did not, for Strindberg, function as a symbol, but as the phantom gap described by Abraham and Torok, a place in his corpus where he could carry his mother\u2019s melancholic incorporation of a lost daughter. In The Son of a Servant<\/em>, the passing of his mother inspires in John only the fantasy of a girl mourning over her mother.<\/p>\n

There was the only good thing that would come from the bottomless well of unhappiness: he would get the ring. He could see it on his hand now. \u201cThis is in memory of my mother,\u201d he would be able to say, and he would weep at the thought of her. But he could not stop thinking how fine it would look. (98)<\/p>\n

The only consolation for the mother\u2019s passing is the ring that contains the mourning for the mother. But this mourning, like a girl\u2019s ring, appears to belong to the daughter, not to the son. John cannot stop thinking about how fine it would look on him. A girlish vanity is thus the limit of his mourning and the affirmation of a daughter\u2019s survival in him.<\/p>\n

Although the name of Strindberg is associated primarily with the conjugal battle, the fact is the female figure that appears most persistently in Strindberg\u2019s works is not the wife, but the daughter. Strindberg\u2019s corpus is populated by figures like Miss Julie (Miss Julie<\/em>), Queen Christina (Queen Christina<\/em>), Agnes (A Dream Play<\/em>), Eleanora (Easter<\/em>), and Swanwhite (Swanwhite<\/em>). Judith looms large, though off-stage, in The Dance of Death I<\/em>, and takes center stage in The Dance of Death II<\/em>. In fact, in both Miss Julie<\/em> and Facing Death<\/em>, Strindberg portrays a situation where the mother has left and only daughters remain.<\/p>\n

Who was the daughter, then, whose unmournable loss Strindberg\u2019s mother passed down to him within a girl\u2019s ring? It is the name to be found entered in the Stockholm city archives. On record, two siblings, a girl and a boy, were born and died within the first three years of Strindberg\u2019s life, the first bearing the mother\u2019s name: Eleonora Elisabeth Strindberg, who lived from 5 May 1850 to 22 April 1851 (Stockholm Stadarkiv, D\u00f6d- och begravningskok 1748-1860 M-S<\/em>). She and the younger brother were the letters the mother had misplaced: a letter or two, a child or two. Late in his career, Strindberg was to memorialize this sister who died a few days before her first Easter (20 April) in Easter<\/em>, where he gives the name Eleonora to the sister who returns from melancholic phantom burial.<\/p>\n

In The Father<\/em>, Strindberg staged the secret infiltration of this unmournable loss of a sibling or two unimpeded by accident-proofing (such as insurance). Adolph\u2019s scientific research is, in one sense, his attempt to regain control over ghosts, of translating specters into life. This is the gist of Adolphs discovery in his own words: \u201cYes, yes! I\u2019ve been subjecting meteor stones to spectroscopy, and I\u2019ve found carbon, in other words, vestiges of organic life!\u201d (Selected Plays<\/em> 155). By using the spectroscope, Adolph seeks to create a circuit where life and live messages will not get dropped along the way and become specters. However, the fragility of Adolph\u2019s false sense of control over specters is highlighted by the out of control loss that hits too close to home, which The Father<\/em> can only name by proxy via the daughter Bertha\u2019s fears. As Bertha tells her father, a ghost dwells in the attic, mourning the survivors: \u201cSuch a moaning, mournful song, the most mournful song I\u2019ve ever heard. And it sounded like it came from the storage room up in the attic, where the cradle is, you know, the room to the left\u201d (169-70). This dead child, whose missing place was nevertheless represented by the empty cradle, is the source of Adolph\u2019s obsessive fear over the uncertainty of paternity. The fear that the child may not be his child analogizes the empty place dedicated to the child that no longer is.<\/p>\n

However, although The Father<\/em> and the essay on soul murder represent Strindberg at his most desperate, hovering between the futile attempts to gain control over the circulation of letters and succumbing to it in utter disintegration, Strindberg was slowly, painfully, building the communication apparatus that would give the vacuum some saving context at last. This he accomplished in part through his interest in technologies of live transmission that correspond to his role as the transmitter of life or undeath, as can be seen in The Dance of Death,<\/em> a play that restages The Father<\/em> in an attempt to find a solution to the problem of uninsurable messages left unresolved in The Father<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Dance of Death<\/em> takes place in a former prison on an island, now turned into the living quarters of Edgar, an artillery captain. Isolated from the mainland, Edgar and his wife Alice wage the seemingly eternal battle of the sexes, a manic attempt to obscure the vestigial evidence of unmourned death. But in this play, too, the center is missing. Just as the dead child dwells in the gap opened up as the question of paternity in The<\/em> Father<\/em>, so here, too, two dead children are mentioned in passing, casually dropped\u2014the names dropped.<\/p>\n

Kurt. Does he [Edgar] dance?<\/p>\n

Alice. Yes, he\u2019s really very funny sometimes.<\/p>\n

Kurt. One thing . . . forgive me for asking. Where are the children?<\/p>\n

Alice. Maybe you don\u2019t know that two of them died?<\/p>\n

Kurt. You\u2019ve been through that too?<\/p>\n

Alice. What haven\u2019t I been through?<\/p>\n

Kurt. But the other two? (Miss Julie and Other Plays<\/em> 133)<\/p>\n

However, in The Dance of Death<\/em>, Strindberg averts the soul murder that the vacuum of the missing child (or two) typically packs away but then releases. Instead, Strindberg prepares a place for the missing children in the telegraphic apparatus, through which Edgar gets in touch with the surviving pair of children who, though they live on the mainland, analogize the dead pair by their absence. For this reason, it is crucial that Strindberg stages the telegraph not as a writing or printing medium, but as an audio medium. By focusing on the telegraph\u2019s ability to send its signals audibly to those in-the-know, Strindberg figures the telegraph as a live transmission medium, as a telephone for the in-group. Thus when Kurt asks Edgar why he does not use the telephone, Edgar gives him an answer that identifies the telegraph as the better telephone. The telephone, Edgar replies, exposes the message, its live transmission, to possibilities of infiltration (\u201cthe operators repeat everything we say\u201d 130). Some loose-lipped operator could be listening in on the exchange, consigning the telephone to indiscretion and betrayal. As a result, the telegraph must fill in for the unreliable telephone as the medium that is more capable of receiving and containing the uninsurable ring.<\/p>\n

These apparatuses that straddle the divide between presence and absence provided the imaginative space within which Strindberg could restore the missing letters to relationality. As Strindberg emphasizes, the telegraph is a dwelling-place of specters. This the telegraph reveals in one seemingly harmless, and yet ominous, stage direction, which interrupts the small talk between Kurt and Edgar: \u201cThe telegraph begins tapping\u201d (Miss Julie and Other Plays <\/em>130). Strindberg makes sure this seemingly pointless stage direction is given its full due. As Edgar explains to Kurt, the telegraph cannot be turned off. The telegraph always stays on, always in the ready position to receive, thereby opening the here and now to some other place. In other words, technical media can mirror and double the radical exteriority incorporated within the body as a phantom, and serve as projection or endopsychic scan of its internal yet foreign topography.<\/p>\n

What this scan reveals is the missing letter that was circulating in transit. In a remarkable pantomime that takes place in the middle of The Dance of Death<\/em>, as Edgar is burning the love letters he had sent to Alice, the stage instruction notes that, suddenly, the telegraph gives a single click, upon which Edgar clutches at his heart in pain (164). Whereas in The Father<\/em>, the spectroscope\u2019s desire to dominate the specter resulted only in Adolph\u2019s obliviousness to Laura\u2019s control of specters via the post, in The Dance of Death<\/em>, Strindberg could imagine the ghost, passed down as a ring, giving him a ring through Edgar\u2019s telegraph. Here, the medium is the message, to the extent that the \u201cis\u201d prepares the interval whereby the non-being of the message can be contemplated. Even as the click sends electricity into Edgar\u2019s heart, threatening to annihilate him, the click also opens Edgar up to the possibility of the ghost\u2019s missing-in-transit existence. A single tap in Morse code is the letter E. The telegraph reroutes the letter that had gone missing and begins to spell out the forbidden name of the sister.<\/p>\n

Even after finding the missing letters and recognizing that they can exist only as missing, the melancholic must deal with the fragility of the encrypted ghost, now imperiled by the exposure to the outside. Of the two plays that started Strindberg\u2019s career, The Father<\/em> had dealt with the threat of self-destructive doubling (with the spectroscope). In Miss Julie<\/em>, Strindberg addressed the perils of the crypt\u2019s exposure. As the final passage shows, Miss Julie\u2019s suicide and Jean\u2019s anxieties are both reactions and a solution to the threat of exposure.<\/p>\n

JEAN. Don\u2019t think, don\u2019t think! You\u2019re taking all my strength away too, and making me a coward\u2014What\u2019s that? I thought the bell moved!\u2014No! Shall we stop it with paper?\u2014To be so afraid of a bell!\u2014Yes, but it\u2019s not just a bell\u2014there\u2019s somebody behind it\u2014a hand sets it in motion\u2014and something else sets that hand in motion\u2014but if you stop your ears\u2014just stop your ears! Yes, but then he\u2019ll go on ringing even louder\u2014and keep on ringing until someone answers\u2014and then it\u2019s too late! Then the police will come\u2014and then…<\/p>\n

Two loud rings on the bell.<\/em><\/p>\n

JEAN [cringes, then straightens himself up.] It\u2019s horrible! But there\u2019s no other way!\u2014Go!<\/p>\n

[MISS JULIE walks resolutely out through the door<\/p>\n

Curtain.] (Selected Plays <\/em>267)<\/p>\n

Two loud rings, a manuscript or two\u2014and the only way to stop the exhumation of these shallow graves is for Miss Julie to go and entrust Jean with the task of keeping her alive some other way. Jean must survive, in order to preserve Miss Julie from exposure. In the preface to Miss Julie<\/em>, Strindberg explains, \u201c[h]ence the servant Jean lives on; but not Miss Julie, who cannot live without honor\u201d (210).<\/p>\n