"The Zola of the Occult": Strindberg's Experimental Method

"I DON'T KNOW WHAT FATE HOLDS IN STORE FOR ME, but I feel the hand of the Lord resting upon me." So wrote Strindberg to a good friend and confidant in 1894. "A change is about to take place, whether upwards or straight down to the center of the earth, who can tell?" Two years later Strindberg plumbed the depths of his personal inferno, and out of the experiences of 1896 emerged a different Strindberg who created a new kind of novel and a new kind of drama. Since Professor Gunnar Brandell in his Strindbergs Infernokris has brilliantly charted Strindberg's course toward a new art form, all I propose to do here is to show that that course was less erratic than generally assumed and that in spite of the storms that beset him Strindberg never lost his way. Even two years before he enters the inferno he plots a course toward it. It was after leaving the pit of this inferno that he declared his intention of becoming a "lola of the occult.” The phrase, dropped in Strindberg's mind by a theosophist correspondent, is particularly apt since it suggests both how long and how short was the journey from naturalism to mysticism.