“Strindberg and the Western canon” is a huge topic, and has to be restricted in one way or another. I have done this in the sense that I have put brackets around Strindberg's position in our contemporary canon formation, instead focusing on Strindberg's own relation to the canon, how he saw it and evaluated it. Despite the obvious methodological difficulties of such a maneuver, I will do it in order to make a few essential distinctions about the canon and Strindberg's relation to it. Moreover, I have chosen not to make this attempt systematically but in a series of observations.
First of all: what is a canon? Aleida Assmann, eminent scholar of Memory Studies, has defined the canon as active cultural memory that has retained its power to speak to us. In this capacity, it must be distinguished from the archive, a storehouse of works that, at least temporarily, have been disconnected from their addresses (Assmann 2010:99). I would like to add that a specifically literary canon, particularly in the modern age, is also marked by constant re-reading and re-interpretation of the heritage, making the canon ever changing and also the object of criticism. There is a considerable difference between, say, literary and religious canon formations and how they work.
But what does the canon consist of in Strindberg's case? Is it a homogenous phenomenon? This leads us immediately to our first observation.
Strindberg's wide understanding of the canon
As active cultural memory, a canon can, according to Assmann, encompass three core areas: religion, history, and art. In all of these areas the canonical works or events have survived the normal fate of oblivion and achieved “continuous repetition and re-use,” as she phrases it (Assmann 2010:99). But in Strindberg's case it is necessary to have an even wider definition. His canon is rather written in the plural, comprising not only the canons of religion, history, and the arts, but also a variety of scientific discourses mixed up with pre-scientific and esoteric traditions in bewildering ways. This wide and transgressive view of the canon is linked to Strindberg's disrespect for literature or art as an autonomous field. Therefore, fiction, drama or poetry only occupied a minor part of his library. And some of his own works can not be described as fictional or poetic at all (Balzamo 2012:367).