Ibsen's dramatic art

"I have been more the poet and less the social philosopher than people generally seem inclined to think. My task has been the description of humanity" (Ibsen to the Norwegian League for Women's Rights, 1898)

“The individual must go through the evolutionary process of the race” (Ibsen; Note to Emperor and Galilean).

“You ought to make a thorough study of the history of civilization, of literature and of art…An extensive knowledge of history is indispensable to a modern author, for without it he is incapable of judging his age, his contemporaries and their motives except in the most incomplete and superficial manner.”  (Ibsen : Letter to John Paulsen while writing A Doll House, 1879)

Ibsen's career can be divided into three stages:

1. 1848-1863. the plays from Catiline up to Love’s Comedy and The Pretenders. These are plays mostly on Norwegian historical and literary sources.
2. 1864 - 1875 the middle period: Brand, Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, and the political comedy, The League of Youth.)
3. 1877-1899 the twelve-play Realist Cycle from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken.

The Realist Cycle

    The twelve plays from Pillars of Society (Samfundets støtter) to When We Dead Awaken (Når vi døde vågner) constitute a Cycle – a unified sequence with, in Ibsen's words, "mutual connections between the plays," that should be "experienced in the order in which they were written".   Until Ibsen's claim is accepted and followed through, discussion of the plays, however interesting and informative, will overlook their real achievement.  On this website, essays on the 'middle period' plays, Brand, Peer Gynt and Emperor and Galilean, are followed by close readings of the Realist Cycle plays, focusing on their structures and artistry, showing how they relate to each other within the Cycle's total design.  This is what I argued for in The Ibsen Cycle (1975) and now follow through on this website*.  Ibsen's big project, "the description of humanity", was to make his art encompass the evolution of human consciousness from cultural origins up to his own time ("the evolutionary process of the race”).   The sequence of plays in the Cycle re-enacts, in modern dress, the historical/cultural process through which we became who we are in the world we created.  The real marvel of the Cycle is the artistic mastery with which Ibsen rises to this challenge in play after play.  Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit is the map he used for this journey; however, his dramatic landscape contains figures and events from Ibsen's own life and experience as well as from his study of "the history of civilization, of history and of art", transformed into convincingly modern drama.    

 A major obstacle to appreciating Ibsen’s achievement is the ‘known Ibsen’, familiar to us through a century of commentary: a writer of ‘problem plays’, somewhat didactic but with mitigating ‘ambiguities’ and self-doubts; a moralist who presents for our deprecation individual specimens of human inadequacy; and who, later in his career, turns his 'unsparing gaze' upon himself; becoming an agonized narcissist using his art for cryptically confessional riddles for the public to unravel. Someone, in other words, perpetually and fretfully ill-at-ease with the world and himself: the opposite of the formidably detached and confident artist admired by Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and others who responded to the distinctive nature of his difficult art. Once an author is taken up by the world it will use him or her for its own agendas.  Ibsen remade in the image of John Stuart Mill proved irresistible to those for whom art has to earn its keep by its usefulness to various causes and interests of the age.  In 1898, near the end of his career, Ibsen addressed the Norwegian League for Women's Rights, protesting,  "I have been more the poet and less the social philosopher than people generally seem inclined to think."  After disowning feminist intentions attributed to him he confessed,  "I am not even quite clear as to just what this women's rights movement really is..My task has been the description of humanity: 

To be sure, whenever such a description is felt to be reasonably true, the reader will read
his own feelings and sentiments into the work of the poet. These are then attributed to the
poet, but incorrectly so.  Every reader remolds the work beautifully and neatly, each
according to his own personality.  Not only those who write but also those who read are
poets.  They are collaborators.  They are often more poetical than the poet himself."

This website does not present Ibsen as a teacher, philosopher, social reformer or spiritual guide but as an artist, by closely looking at the plays, analyzing their structures, thematic content, metaphors, visual and verbal imagery and dialectical procedures.  These are the essential elements of his artistry and furthering appreciation of this is what the following essays set out do in the hope that we can recover what,  in 1906, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in Paris, saw at a production of the The Wild Duck:

“There was something great, deep, essential.  Last Judgement.  A finality.  And suddenly the hour was there when Ibsen’s majesty deigned to look at me for the first time.  A new poet, whom we shall approach by many roads now that I know one of them.  And again someone who is misunderstood in the midst of fame.  Someone quite different from what one hears."