Dangerous Seductions of the Past:
Ibsen's Counter-Discourse to Modernity

I. Creating a National Theater

In this country, it is only the mountains that give an echo, not the people. (Ibsen, working note to When We Dead Awaken)

Ibsen adopted the theater as his medium under the aegis of Ole Bull's Norwegian (Norske) Theatre in Bergen. At a fundraiser for this theater held in Christiania in 1851 Ibsen wrote a verse Prologue whose themes are proclaimed with the uncritical ardor suitable for the fundraising occasion. The Prologue claimed dramatic art would awaken the Norwegian people's spirit from a long winter's sleep in which it had forgotten its glorious Viking heritage. Viking life had been a 'poem' of 'sword and shield,' which later was sublimated into the art of the skald and minstrel. But an "awesome winter fell over the north," and the noble skald fell silent, "dedicated to death like one bewitched who has forgotten the word with which he can be released from his enchantment. " However, there remained a "harp of longing" within the people who could never be satisfied by alien customs and arts. Only a native art could interpret the longing of the people and its forgotten music, and this art would sing both about the past and the re-awakened life of the present.

Later that year, more soberly defending Frederik Paludan-Müller's poems against the strictures of another poet, Johan Welhaven, Ibsen argues strongly for the continued use of ancient myths in modern literature. The life of these myths, he insists, continues into the present - and constitutes the cultuiral heritage poets should draw upon.   It is a theme that will undergo a richer, more complex and darker development (as the ghosts that cling to the living) in Ibsen's later art. In this essay, the cause of establishing a Norwegian theatre as a means for the modern Norwegian consciousness to be awakened into awareness of the living Past, are firmly linked at the beginning of Ibsen's career as a dramatic poet. It will become Ibsen's major dramatic subject to the end.

One impetus behind this theatrical venture was a belief in the Norwegian people's desire to free itself from cultural dependence on Denmark, whose theater in Copenhagen was one of the most accomplished in Europe. In the words of Bjønstjerne Bjørnson, also in 1851, a Norwegian theater would permit Norway "to enjoy its own language and its own poetry on its own stage" - conditions essential if Norway is "to join the ranks of other nations." Or, in the words of M. J. Monrad in 1854, the desire for such a theater originated in "the deep national significance of theaters, the necessity of a truly national theater as a part of the self-revelation and development of nationality."   It is evident that the 'self' to be revealed and developed, here, is an objective, collective (national) one so that a poet's own self-determination would require a mutual exploration with his public of this shared collective identity.

Schlomo Sand, in The Invention of the Jewish People  (London: Verso 2009) has written: “A primeval ancestral identity, an image of biological genealogy, and the idea of a chosen people/race did not spring up in a vacuum.  For the consolidation of a national consciousness, civil or ethnocentric, it was always necessary to have a literate elite.  To enable the nation to “remember” and consolidate its historical imagery, it required the services of scholarly producers of culture, masters of memory… “ Sands cites Carlton Hayes, Essays on Nationalism (110): “…the upshot of the whole process is that a nationalist theology of the intellectuals becomes a nationalist mythology for the masses…The new middle-class intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into history; and the invitation-card had to be written in a language they understood.” 54    Cultural nationalism emerged in Europe when the former, medieval system of a universal Christian identity transcending national boundaries and ethnicities was irreversibly replaced. . In the nineteenth century, writes Sand, “the most basic divisions of labor had already seen the rise of individuals whose main activity or livelihood was the production and manipulation of cultural symbols and signs.”   54-55.  Nations and national identities are cultural inventions brought into being through the pressure of economic, political and hegemonic forces; and also in reaction to those forces.  The nationalist agendas of ruling elites both instigated and encouraged the desire for cohesive collective identity and unique ethnic identity was a very useful myth for this agenda.

The youthful Ibsen endorsed these nationalist aspirations; later he was to view them more critically. We can see their appeal for a dramatic poet: a domain of national identity would be something the poet shared with his public: the exploration of this identity in the form of historical dramas would be the poet and public's mutual self-discovery. It would provide the poet with a larger, more ambitious subject for his art than the immediate social scene.  The portrait of the present, in turn, would be richly layered with the cultural past.   And, of course, it would better justify the founding of a Norwegian theater.

Cultural nationalism's advantage for the dramatic poet lay in extending the audience's imagination beyond immediate events recorded in the daily newspapers into dimensions represented by myth, folklore, history and culture. It adds an alternative temporal dimension - the historial-cultural past - to that of the everyday present. A still living but repressed spiritual past, seeking to assert its presence on the stage of his theater and reclaiming its place in modern consciousness informs Ibsen's drama from the earliest plays up to the last, When We Dead Awaken .

  Cultural recovery of the living past was the program of the Romantic Zeitgeist and of many major artists and thinkers from Friedrich Schiller and Hegel to Richard Wagner, W. B. Yeats and Modenists such as Ezra Pound, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot.  Ibsen's early nationalism was no attempt to ingratiate himself with the Norwegian public, which preferred the Parisian confections of Scribe & Co.   Nationalism, by evoking myth, legend and cultural history, required from its audiences an effort of the imagination. It allowed the poet a more liberating imaginative space to operate within. A major writer's main concern is with the adequacy of his or her art. Once the ambitious cultural territory was mapped out it could be extended and enriched.  Ibsen never relinquished this archetypal extension of his artistry.  Recognising this is essential if we seriously wish to understand the plays of the Realist Cycle, from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken.

In 1857, in an essay on the heroic ballad, Ibsen contrasted the state of mind of fashionable theatergoers with the actual spirit of the Norwegian people. Fashionable audiences "visit the theater only when offered the opportunity of being titillated by some novel situation or excited by some novel intrigue" The 'people', on the other hand, are less interested in fashionable novelty than in recognizing elements of their identity stretching far back into the past.  He continues:

"If the new is to appeal to the people, it must also in a certain sense be old; it must not be invented, but rediscovered...it must not appear as something strange and incongruous in the conceptual range inherited by the peoples from their ancestors, and in which our national strength mainly resides."

The "conceptual range inherited by the people" is richer and deeper than the 'modernity' of the fashionable theatergoers. Within the popular imagination, the old, pre Christian religion and its figures "continue to live until our own day." It is evident the young Ibsen, (like Richard Wagner and the dramatists of the Celtic twilight) hoped to transform his theater into one that could address a people's consciousness attuned to a rich spiritual past.

The belief that the people possessed a rich vein of spiritual ore for the poet to mine (an image Ibsen uses in a later poem, The Miner) accorded with the nineteenth century Zeitgeist.  Like other believers in the treasures buried within the folk-consciousness, Ibsen later would undergo the disenchantment of discovering the 'people' were far from eager to claim its full cultural heritage. Then, as now, the everyday business of modernity and not the mythology and lore of the ancient sagas, proved more alluring. "In this country, it is only the mountains that give an echo, not the people" Ibsen recorded in a note to When We Dead Awaken.

In Culture and Imperialism Edward Said described the similar situation of W. B. Yeats in Ireland. Citing Seamus Deane, Said argued that Yeats, in order to escape the degraded modernity of a colonized Ireland, invented a mythopoeic Ireland "amendable to his imagination" - one that he shared with an imagined people, only to find this Irish people indifferent to his arcane reconstruction of their identity. Unable to ignore modern history, notes Said, Yeats tended to render actual historical events into occult events. Ibsen pursued a similar course in his 12-play Realist Cycle: recreating modern Norway as an occult and archetype-crammed space.

If the people as custodians of a consciousness rich with the past were to form an alliance with the dramatic poet, this would redeem both society and its art from the degradation of an alienating modernity. Richard Wagner, similarly, attempted to bypass alienated modernity in his music-dramas; to return to what he hailed as "that native, nameless poem of the folk." In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche, then his disciple (later scourge) turned in revulsion from a modernity that comprised only of:

"abstract man stripped of myth, abstract education, abstract mores, abstract law, abstract government; the random vagaries of the artistic imagination unchannelled by any native myth......Man today,. stripped of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots, be it among the most remote antiquities."

Antedating Wagner and Nietzsche, Ibsen similarly deplored the imaginative vacuity of modernity "stripped of myth", indicating a tradition of hostility to modernity we find, also, in James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and other modernists. Eliot hailed Joyce's use of "the mythic method" in Ulysses for making possible for art "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." In Cosmos and History Mircea Eliade noted how modernists like Joyce and Eliot sought to resurrect forms of archaic, archetypal consciousness; for example, the concept of the 'eternal return'. In Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, the 'intellectual' martyr-hero, Thomas, and the 'folk' Chorus of the Women of Canterbury, bond in an imaginative-poetic union from which the Knights, with their 'modern' twentieth century sensibilities and modes of discourse are excluded. Eliot, like Wagner and many Romantic artists believed a lifeline to a rich spiritual past lay in the uncorrupted conceptual range of the people, undistracted by superficial modernity. This optimistic union of poet and peasant was doomed to become increasingly tenuous as the work of scholars and poets set about recreating a 'mythic' past that became more and more esoteric and removed from the 'conceptual range of the people'.  

Two programs come into conflict in this recollection of things past. The first is a form of Platonic or Hegelian anamnesis or 'unforgetting' - a resurrection of spiritual life with which the modern soul in its alienated condition has lost contact. Artists then attempt to bring the 'living past' into the present by means of compelling and imaginative art works. The second program is the modern scholar and archaeologist's methodical investigation and reproduction of the past in sober and meticulous detail. The imaginative and the scholarly recreations of the past interacted and came into conflict; momentously, as with the famous quarrel between Nietzsche and Wilamowitz-Moellendorf over the spirit and the letter of Greek tragedy.

Cultural 'archaeology' that resurrected the immense past was as important a factor in nineteenth-century culture as the extraordinary scientific-industrial and social transformation of the modern world. Schliemann's famous excavations at Troy is one instance of the modern age literally digging "frantically for roots, be it among the most remote antiquities." Ibsen's career from Catiline to Emperor and Galilean reflects this 'archaeological' agenda: almost twice as many plays are set in a distant past as in the contemporary world. These are not escapist costume drama in the manner of Victor Hugo's Hernani . They are serious attempts to recover for the modern theater past phases of cultural life in terms of a modern aesthetic sensibility. In his essay on the heroic ballad Ibsen insists upon an unbroken chain of consciousness from the earliest times to the present in which the old mythopoeic forces continue their life. This substratum of cultural consciousness should be the poet's subject matter.

The mythopoetic and the scholarly recreations of the past made for an uneasy cultural alliance; their agendas were bound to clash. Ibsen seems satirically to stage this unhappy alliance in Hedda Gabler, in the incongruous marriage between Hedda and Tesman.  Like Julian with his precessionals of drunkards and whores, Hedda seeks to live mythically through her desperate designation of the alcoholic Løvborg as a resurrected, Hellenic Dionysus with vine leaves in his hair; whereas Tesman, soberly urging into pedantic life the domestic crafts of Christian, medieval Brabant, wishes only to bury himself among the archives of insignificant history.

Emperor and Galilean, where Ibsen explores far beyond the conceptual range of most Norwegian - or European - imaginations, uneasily combines, like Flaubert's Salammbô, both the imaginative and the scholarly enterprises. Emperor and Galilean offers a compelling account of Julian the Apostate's attempt to recover the life of the Hellenic spiritual past against the inertia, mendacity and pedantry of a Christian age that has become spiritually sterile and confused. It is not surprising that actions, characters, imagery and themes from Emperor and Galilean re-emerge, marvellouslyt miniaturized, in Hedda Gabler.

A clear continuity exists between Ibsen's early historical and later modernist work - an evolution of themes and forces in which, however, the relation of past and present will become reversed. In the earlier plays up to Emperor and Galilean Ibsen explores the past from the standpoint of his contemporary world and its cultural needs; in the later plays (specifically the Realist Cycle) he surveys his contemporary world from the reproachful perspectives of a past now betrayed by the present. The later Ibsen has enlisted in the ranks of the past's reproachful ghosts. By this manoeuver, Ibsen, I believe, entered into the Modernist agenda.

In a series of historical plays, from Lady Inger of Østråt (1855) to The Vikings at Helgeland (1858), Ibsen attempts, in a reverse chronological sequence - from renaissance to medieval to Viking time - an aesthetic/theatric archaeology of the Norwegian past.  Like Peer Gynt removing layer after layer of the onion, this represents an uncovering of layers of previous cultural identity. This historically reversed cultural chronology of the four plays also is an exploration of the literary styles or phases, appropriate to the historical/aesthetic consciousness each play and period. These plays are the youthful poet's attempt simultaneously to master both his art form, drama and his subject: Norwegian consciousness as it has evolved in cultural history. Exploring this evolution would be essential for adequately understanding modern consciousness itself.  Describing his procedure in Lady Inger, Ibsen stated: "I tried as far as possible to live myself into the ways and customs of that period, into their patterns of thought and modes of expression."

In its arts and philosophy, its cultural activities and artifacts, more than in actual historical events, a people grasps its essential reality and thereby make it available for later generations to repossess. Whatever the status of this Hegelian idea today, in his own day Ibsen could claim that by resurrecting past modes of cultural expression he was incorporating past phases of the people's spiritual heritage into the consciousness of his own modern art. How else could the past live again unless it was recovered imaginatively within modern consciousness which is the only medium in which the past exists.

The conceptual range of such an archetypal art ideally would both reflect and awaken forces and values buried within our modern psyches. The layered past would make up a conflict-filled continuum 'realized' through the medium of dramatic art. In its imaginative cultural space the poet could discover metaphors more adequate as a portrait both of his individual and his collective identity.  However, as the dramatist more deeply and widely explores this cultural past and imaginatively lives within it - a past now extending beyond Scandinavian culture -it starts taking on the nature of an alternative world - a world of presences, characters, forces containing as much attractive power for the poet as anything the modern scene can offer. The archetypal and symbolic vocabulary (the Supertext) of this alternative world sets up terms even hostile to the contemporary scene.

II. Modernity as a Defective Work of Art

The cultural past Ibsen explored comprised an alternative, imaginative 'occult' world inhabited by the presences and forces of world culture - the Weltgeist.  It set up a dialectic interrogationof the immediate, everyday world. There is actually nothing unusual about this. Our culture is permeated with the past, from its religious beliefs and rituals, its commemorative observances and ceremonies, its liturgical calendars,and its sense of cultural 'heritage'.   It uses history and tradition for positive reinforcement of its current political or cultural agendas, making history the servant of the present.  This idea of the past Edmund Burke invoked against Thomas Paine: a repository of national/cultural identity and a safeguard against innovations that threatened to erase that identity.  In a dialectical move by the cunning of Reason, however, the past invoked by Burke to defend conventional culture evolves as a major resource to attack conventional modernity.  Revolutionary thinkers invoked not only a utopian future but also the historical past that had been misappropriated by conventional culture.  Both 'left' and 'right' modernists now contested for the authority to interpret the culture's Supertext in support of their opposing agendas.

Present consciousness is a battlefield where the culture's ghosts assemble for a kulterkampf.  Thomas Paine implied that the cultural past should be erased from cultural memory: the strategy of most radical thinkers, however, was to rescue the past and re-create it nearer to the heart's desire. This was the program claimed by Friedrich Nietzsche:

I taught them to work on the future and to redeem with their creation all that has been. To redeem what is past in man and to re-create all "it was" until the will says "Thus I willed it!" - this I call redemption and this alone I taught them to call redemption.
(Thus Spake Zarathustra: tr. Walter Kaufmann)

The alternative imaginative world recreated from the past developed a counter discourse - independent of and hostile to conventional modernity.  This was the subversive strategy of Romanticism and its offshoot, Modernism. The past is invoked as a repository of values, liberties, dimensions of existence the dominant culture suppresses.    Ibsen's son, Sigurd Ibsen, wrote "Art gives liberty of action to forces and possibilities to which life does not grant the chance of coming into their rights." The 'rights' of these forces and possibilities set up the conditions of a culture war between past and present. This shapes the dialectic of Ibsen's Realist Cycle.  Behind the appearance of a modern world on the stage lies an alternative world of reproachful ghosts claiming their right to repossess modern consciousness.  There is a deep ambiguity in Ibsen's account of the past in the present: it is both the baleful influence of dead beliefs thwarting the spirit's struggle towards the light perceived by Mrs. Alving in Ghosts; but also, within that play, the suppressed "forces and possibilities" that could work for our liberation.

Ronald Barthes observed of Greek drama that the total corpus of myths upon which it drew made up “a second order semiotic system.”  Ibsen's program of imaginative emancipation repeats what Barthes observes of the very origins of drama in Greece: 

"Associated with the “loosening” of work time, the theater installed another time, a time of myth and of consciousness, which could be experienced not as leisure but as another life. For this suspended time, by its very duration, became a saturated time." (18)

In classical Athens, this infiltration into everyday reality of a myth-saturated consciousness, (the theater of Dionysus filled with the ghosts of the cultural past and of previous performances within that theater space) was one the whole community shared.  In the modern world, however, no such cultural consensus exists. Theater shares the modern world's division between conventional and unconventional, mainstream and minority cultures – facing each other in often mutual hostility or bafflement.

By extending his imagination into the supertextual heritage of his culture, Ibsen would experience greater alienation from one-dimensional modernity.   He fashioned out of the cultural past an imaginative alternative to modernity and, more startlingly, a method of transforming the people, events and things of the modern world back into mythic people, events and things.  His drama infiltrated the disfigured and inadequate scene of modernity with its archetypal heritage.    James Joyce, in Ulysses, similarly infiltrated archetypes of Western culture into the seemingly intractable banalities of everyday Dublin life:

When Ibsen took up the realist method, it was not faithfully to imitate a modernity for which he expressed little regard, but to reverse modernity's betrayal of its heritage, to negate the negation.   His myth-saturated imagination made his dramas a 'counter-discourse to the world's inadequate discourse. To take only the last four plays: an imaginative stage scene where Valkyrie-like Hilde Wangel descends from the mountains in response to Solness's fearful summons; in which a Rat Wife and her black dog emerge from the sea to lure to his death an unwanted child; in which Borkman can address the dormant spirits of his mountain kingdom; and in which the white-clad Irene can emerge from her tomb to confront her artist-betrayer, is a world responsive to occult dimensions to which everyday modern life is oblivious.  Ibsen's art refashioned the modern world into a more adequate representation.In 1871, Ibsen advised his friend Georg Brandes:

"What I recommend for you is a thoroughgoing, full-blooded egoism, which will force you for a time to regard yourself and your work as the only things of consequence in this world, and everything else as simply non-existent. … There are actually moments when the whole history of the world reminds one of a sinking shop; the only thing to do is to save oneself". (19)

Romantic and post-Romantic thought is aware of how much the vocabulary employed by a materialist culture is repressively limited; how what is essential to an adequate human identity has been sacrificed in order to further modernity's projects – religious, political, social, financial, academic, domestic and so on. 

Details of action, character, dialogue, scene in the everyday world in Ibsen's Realist Cycle are selected only insofar as they can take on the archetypal identity and action each play unfolds.  There is a continuous interplay between the mythopoeic realm and the modern reality that partly permits, partly frustrates its manifestation.   This dialectic gives to modern reality a shape and significance that the despiritualized consciousness of the modern world evades.  Art offers to the arbitrary.inchoate futility of history the coherence and significance of mythic and archetypal identity.  

This is a major function of religion and ideology. A believer's experience of modernity is transfigured by perspectives that transform the world's past and present. Artists who forsook the certitudes of orthodoxy sought to construct imaginative equivalents.  The everyday world is not intrinsically natural nor true but made by the blundering human consciousness spoiling and falsifying the material bequeathed by the Past. . At the end of his long life's work, in When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen has the artist Rubek comment on his portraits that really were of “alle de kaere husdyr” – all the dear domestic animals – and continues: “all the animals that humanity [menneskene] has distorted [forkvaklet] in its own image. And have distorted humanity in return.” (22)

The images of a distorted animalic humanity stand in contrast to Rubek's masterpiece, “Resurrection Day,” the naked young Irene, uncorrupted by the world and its unhappy history, “awakening to light and glory with nothing ugly or unclean to cast from her.” (23) This also reminds us of Brand's vision of a regenerate humanity arising from our disastrously fragmented human identity

....from all these stumps of Soul,
Torsos of amputated Mind,
These separated heads and hands,
A hero strong and whole shall rise
In whom God finds his greatest work
His heir, his Adam, young and free

Both the naked Irene and this Michaelangelesque Adam are metaphors for the Romantic ideal of uncorrupted humanity which we can only glimpse behind the unhappy portraiture of our distorted (forkvaklet) humanity that experienced the Fall into Time. Ibsen's realism depicts this Fall but also indicates more adequate dimensions of our identity; just as Rubek could not be content with the figure of Irene but had to surround it with images of animal-faced humans swarming up from the earth crust.

An image of our lost and of our potential humanity is glimpsed through the archetypal presences that take over Ibsen's realistic stage.  Assembled like the broken torsos and limbs of Brand's vision, they hint at the scale and power of our potential identity as well as at the extent of our loss.  The everyday world is an inferior or bungled work of art because it does not know itself, does no know what it has sacrificed of itself and maimed. Familiarity has hidden from us the monstrous strangeness of what we have settled for as 'life'  Ibsen wishes to estrange us from this familiar unreality, to 'negate the negation' and make us see it as riddled with contradiction and filled with neglected spiritual presence. This is his version of the Brechtian verfremdungseffekt - more radical because it does not take comfort in utopian ideology.

III. The Reproachful Ghosts of Ibsen's Realism

  In The Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks described how the early melodrama of France created the imagery and vocabulary of a new “moral-occult” universe to replace that sanctioned by pre-revolutionary culture and its theater. This melodrama was “a drama of emblems,” of violently opposed typological characters and actions, of astonishing manifestations from a natural world engaged in a conflict of Good and Evil.  Storms, earthquakes, fires, floods were elements of an extravagant and thrilling theatrical code, “an architecture of pure signifiers” within which the morally stereotypical characters menaced or were menaced. Miraculous “signs” could reveal the presence of good or evil and of providential intervention.  In contrast to this melodramatic semiotics, Brooks notes how “in a novel by Dickens or a play by Ibsen” there is a “movement of the plot toward discovery of identity, and the moral anagnorisis that accompanies it” that is contrary to the melodrama's dynamic interplay of bipolar, competitive signs. In the more Gothic versions of this melodrama the spirit-world mostly was demonic. Menacing the moral-human world (also bipolar in terms of good and evil) it had to be defeated by heroes and heroines of a reassuring conventionality. Every encounter with the demonic was almost always a triumphant reinforcement of the human community's conventional values and assumptions. The same formula is seen in most Mystery or Horror fictions: Sherlock Holmes confronts the fiendish machinations of Moriarty with all the moral rectitude and indignation of the most reactionary pillar of society.  The world that Dracula menaces is of a stultifying conventionality that only his demonic presence can make interesting.  Both the criminal and the occult realms are those which, along with the rebel and the revolutionary, menace the commonplace assumptions of  'normal' society.  This accounts for our guilty attraction to the villain, from Lord Byron to Hannibal Lector.  When the depiction of the conventional world is emptied of subversive thought and action, the transgressors acquire the fascination of the forbidden.When the attraction is openly acknowedged, melodrama disappears.

Reversing the dynamics of the melodramatic encounter with the occult, Ibsen takes the side of the reproachful and importunate ghosts, the archetypes that wish to possess, awaken and devastate us.  It is the conventional world that his drama recoils from as alien.  He creates a drama of occult presences, of the interplay of human, natural and supernatural forces, recovering for 'high' culture much of the power of the popular melodrama. In his drama an occult text engages with a realistic text for possession of the play's dominant language.  The combat often proves to be a mortal one.  The conditions of the everyday world frustrate the emergence of a potential human identity that demands existence, the “forces and possibilities” that, by coming into their rights, transform the terms of our existence. By means of this dialectic, Ibsen's was made plausible for modern drama a metaphysical landscape of the modern spirit. His middle-period plays Brand, Peer Gynt and Emperor and Galilean, mapped out a space (nature)and time (history)  later explored within the modern scene of the Realist Cycle.   Ibsen's wrote of “the trolls that infest the mind and heart” and he made his theater a battlefield whose ghostly combats beneath the realistic surface are fought to prevent the triumph of one-dimensional humanity.

This is an unfamiliar idea of 'realism' especially to the 'Anglo-Saxon' pragmatist tradition. It is, instead, heir to the dialectical tradition of  the Schillerian-Hegelian way of thinking in which "the known, just because it is the known, is the unknown."  This tradition goes back to the Greeks; to their theater and philosophy in which, for an Oedipus or Pentheus, the familiar world, "the known", can reveal itself as a treacherous illusion ("the unknown") as it is for a Nora Helmer or a Helene Alving.  An occult dimension to Ibsen's art is that of a reproachful, unrealized dsimensioln the given world conspires to prevent but that still haunts it.  John Gabriel Borkman's lament that the treasure-filled kingdom he sought to bring into being now lies leaderless, given over to the pillage of mediocre and visionless plunderers, could reflect the lament of the poet himself at seeing the heritage of the spiritual past as recklessly and as fatally disfigured as the natural world we have inherited.