By the Open Sea

By the Open Sea is a novel by August Strindberg, originally published in Swedish as I havsbandet in 1890. Strindberg, who lived from 1849 to 1912, was the central figure of nineteenth and early twentieth century Swedish literature and one of the most important European playwrights and novelists of the period.

The novel is set in the Stockholm archipelago, the chain of small rocky islands stretching east from the Swedish capital out into the Baltic. The central character is Axel Borg, a young government inspector of fisheries who has been sent to spend an extended period on one of the outer islands to study the local fishing industry and to suggest various reforms that the central government in Stockholm believes are needed. Borg is a man of substantial intellectual and scientific training, with serious interests in marine biology, mathematics, and the philosophy of science, and he arrives on the island with the confidence of a representative of modern central European civilisation.

The novel follows what happens to him across the months of his stay. The fishing community on the island has its own established ways of doing things and its own internal social dynamics. Borg’s attempts to introduce more rational and efficient methods are quietly resisted. His developing relationship with a local young woman becomes complicated. His mental state, never entirely stable to begin with, deteriorates across the long stay in the isolated environment. The novel works through to a conclusion that is one of the most psychologically disturbing in Strindberg’s substantial body of fiction.

By the Open Sea was published during the period when Strindberg was working through his own difficult engagement with the philosophical and scientific ideas of the period, particularly Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and the various forms of biological determinism that the late nineteenth century European intellectual world was producing. The central character Borg is recognisably a version of the Nietzschean superman, and the novel can be read partly as Strindberg’s working through of what happens when such a figure is actually placed in a real human community.

The novel runs about three hundred pages in English translation. For readers approaching Strindberg beyond the famous plays Miss Julie and The Father, it is one of the most powerful of his novels. It pairs naturally with The Red Room and with the autobiographical works of the same period.