Two talks given to the Nansenschool (Nansenskolen) in Lillehammer, Norway on April 22 and 23 2009
Talk No. 1.
Ibsen the artist.
Recently in Pittsburgh my university put on a production of Ghosts (Gengangere). I was called in as an expert to speak to the audience about the play. This is an American tradition: for the performers and director to have a discussion with the audience after the performance. Someone in the audience asked me why, in the 21st century, we should want to perform this 19th. Century play. The questioner probably was expecting me to describe some uplifting lesson that Ibsen was delivering: e.g. that we should live our lives courageously, liberating ourselves to express our full humanity and so on.
Instead, I replied “because Ghosts is such a beautiful example of dramatic art.” Like a fine symphony or painting its value is in the intelligence and depth and skill the artist asks us to appreciate. A modern theater that could find no place for Ghosts or any of Ibsen’s plays would be a major loss to our culture. When we come to any work of art we should ask not what it ‘means’ but what it does. Gengangere shows us Ibsen the artist employing his imagination brilliantly, under the difficult discipline and rules he set himself. This aesthetic complexity requires from us the effort of a reciprocal attentiveness. In some sports there is something known as the ‘degree of difficulty’ by which performances are judged. People indifferent to the degree of difficulty involved find it hard to understand why one performance in e.g. diving, gymnastics, ski-jumping, or playwriting is better than another. To really enjoy a performance – or a reading – of Gengangere you have to see the degree of difficulty Ibsen has set himself; the rules of the game he is playing and then see what he does with these chosen restrictions. Ibsen is signifcant in our culture because he mastered a difficult and demanding art form. The difficulty of his performance guarantees the value of our encounter with him.
Learning to like Ibsen
When I was a student I had a rather negative idea of Ibsen. The critics and scholars I read did not make him seem very interesting. The literature that interested me in those days included strange, difficult and challenging works by Modernists like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot; Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett. (This was a long time ago!) These writers, like the modernist painters and musicians, were doing radically new things with their art forms so that while we watched, listened or read, we found ourselves entering new territories of the imagination.
Ibsen, I was told, was a writer of ‘problem plays’ – these were solid realistic works examining the social, moral and psychological problems of modern life. His plays were written to help us all lead better and more honest lives. He did not seem to be an artist to get excited about. He was not doing anything very imaginative, strange or difficult with his art form – the drama.
Then, sometime after graduating, I was asked to teach an Ibsen course for an adult education class in Cambridge. I rather reluctantly agreed (I needed the money) and it was while preparing a class discussion on Gengangere that I had my Epiphany or Revelation. While reading the play I kept saying to myself “this is not realism!” Like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke I was beginning to see that Ibsen was "misunderstood in the midst of fame. Someone quite different from what one hears.” Rilke wrote this way back in 1906, after seeing a production of Vildanden in Paris. And his words are still true: Ibsen interpretation is almost uniformly mediocre. The misunderstanding of Ibsen as a social reformer (something Ibsen protested against) has prevented us seeing the audacity and strangeness of what he has created as an imaginative artist.
The Strangeness of Ibsen’s Art
The first hint that something strange was going on in Gengangere was the time scheme of the play – which was impossible! The play begins in the morning before lunch and ends with sunrise the next day. That must be passage of at least sixteen hours. Yet the action of the play, which is interrupted only by lunch, is just two hours. Even in the most laid back households in Norway, lunches don’t go on for 14 hours! In a performance of Gengangere audiences are not aware of the impossible timing of the action because the events follow each other on stage with a relentless logic. When we watch the play we enter the imaginative time of the story which is not realistic time. The play, it seems, might not be copying everyday life. If the passage of time on the stage in Gengangere is not realistic, maybe the play is doing other, non-realistic things. When I started looking again at the play it began to remind me of other plays I had studied. What was happening on Ibsen’s stage seemed to have happened before.
Greek parallels
The swift, concentrated time scheme of the play reminded me of the relentless logic of Greek drama. In Sophokles’ Oedipus tyrannos (Kong Oidipus) for example, once the dramatic situation is set up (the terrible plague in the city) the action leads logically and swiftly to the catastrophe. Within just two hours Oedipus' entire past and present life is revealed as horrifyingly unknown. He discovers he is the criminal he set out to identify. Like Helene Alving in Gengangere, he starts his terrifying journey believing he is the innocent judge and in just two hours to discovers he is the guilty criminal as his world is destroyed.
Ibsen's perennial subject, the fateful interplay of past and present, resulted, I think, from a cast of mind that had much in common with Greek fatalism. As present consciousness is the past's sole means of existence, the past is only what present consciousness makes of it. (History always is being rewritten and contested because it exists only on the terms present consciousness conceives.) The dialectic of Ibsen's dramas is shaped from a Sophoclean mold. Events that occurred randomly in the past are interrogated by a newly awakened consciousness that discovers in the events the buried logic of a tragic structure. Drama is the art form that best presents the recreation and interrogation of the past by the present, as in the classic example of Oedipus tyrannos. In Gengangere, as in Oedipus tyrannos, past events now take the form of mentally re-enacted agons on stage. A dynamic relation exists between the story and the plot that reveals it. As in Sophocles' procedure, Ghosts enacts the dialectic whereby the past is ambushed and dredged up by the awakening consciousness of the present. Recollected urgently by the plot, arbitrary events of the past are revealed as tragically determined and become intense realities suffered by present consciousness. This process of Helene Alving's gradually awakening consciousness, shared by the audience, is the 'meaning' of the play.
I began to see to see other Greek patterns in this play. As I looked more closely, the modern surface of the play started to dissolve and reveal Greek ghosts from more than two thousand years ago. The Greek qualities of Gengangere were recognized as soon as it was published, (1881). When Ibsen was ferociously attacked on all sides, a lector on Greek philosophy at Christiana University, Peter Schøtt wrote: “Of all the modern dramas we have read, Gengangere comes closest to Greek tragedy.” I began to see that Gengangere not only comes closest to Greek tragedy in its structure and its tragic logic: it also resurrects characters and actions of three major Greek tragic plots: The Oresteia (Orestien) by Aeschylus; Kong Oidipus by Sophokles; and The Bacchae (Bakanninine) by Euripides. ).
Greek Ghosts that haunt Ibsen’s play.
1] In Aeschylus’ Oresteia the military leader, Agamemnon, returns from the Trojan War and is killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, the twin sister of Helen. In the second play of this trilogy, the Choephori - (Sonofferet) Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, returns home from a long exile at the moment his mother is arranging a fraudulent ritual at his father’s grave. Orestes joins with his sister, Elektra, and avenges his father by killing his mother. After this action he invokes the Sun and then suffers a mental breakdown. This plot is repeated, with variations, by Sophokles and Euripides in their 'Elektra' plays. The very title of the play Gengangere ('those that walk again) as well as its plot, recalls the phrase uttered in terror by Clytemnestra in The Libation Bearers as her son avenges his father, "the dead are killing the living." Helene Alving, the guilty wife in Ibsen's play, exclaims in terror as her son repeats an action from the past: "Ghosts! The two in the greenhouse - they walk again!" ["Gengangere. Parret i blomstervaerelset - gār igen"].
In Gengangere Helene Alving’s son, Osvald, returns home from a long exile at the moment his mother is arranging a fraudulent memorial service to his dead military father, Captain Alving. Thiis memorial action, conceals Helene’s actual hostility towards her dead husband. Osvald does not kill his mother but inflicts a punishment as terrible as Cltytemnestra’s. As she acknowledges her crime against her husband, she is faced with killing the one person she loves above all – her son. - in whom the husband's ghost with its craving for "joy of life" is resurrected. She condemns herself, and her life is destroyed. Through Osvald, therefore, the father is avenged.. The Libation Bearers closes with Orestes invoking the Sun. Gengangere close with Osvald calling for the sun.
2. In Sophokles’ Oedipus Tyrannos (Kong Oidipus) Oedipus defies the warning of his priest, Tiresias, and embarks on a quest to discover the truth that will end in the devastating knowledge that he is the guilty destroyer of his own family.
In Gengangere Helene Alving defies her priest, Pastor Manders and embarks on a journey towards a truth that ends in the devastating knowledge that she is the guilty destroyer of her family. In both plays, behind the appearance of the known world a terrible unknown world emerges to replace it.
3 In Euripides’ The Bacchae (Bakaninnene)) Dionysos, the god of wine and joy of life (livsgleden) avenges himself against the house of Cadmus that denied he was a god. Dionysos destroys both the young man, Penthéus and his mother, Agavé. At the end of the play Agavé must confront the dismembered body of her son whom she destroyed
The gods of tragedy are Dionysos the god of wine and livsgleden, and Apollo, god of the arts, whose symbol is the Sun. Are these gods present behind the action of Gengangere? The house of Alving had offended the values of joy of life livsgleden. Wine is repeatedly emphasized in this play: Osvald flirts with Regina as they open the wine bottles for lunch: and champagne is repeatedly brought up from the cellar. The wine rouses Osvald, the artist, to declare to his mother his craving both for livsgleden (joy of life) and for the Sun. The Sun appears at the end of the play. Its light floods the stage as Helene, like Agavé watches the destruction of her son.
These ghosts from the ancient Greek world shape the drama just as powerfully as does the equally powerful modern story of the collapse of the House of Alving. Even if audiences do not see the ghosts they probably subliminally respond to them because they are built into our cultural consciousness.
This was not the first time the Greek gods and their stories entered Ibsen’s drama. In his huge drama, Keiser og Galilaeer the hero Julian, worships them and defends the pagan gods against his Christian opponents just as Osvald passionately defends pagan livsgleden against Pastor Manders. To see the many perspectives of Ibsen’s strange imagination it is essential to know Keiser og Galilaeer
Ibsen as a Modernist
I was by now getting very interested in Ibsen. Gengangere, was looking more like 20th century Modernism instead of 19th century realism. For example, in T. S. Eliot’s play, The Family Re-union, the story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes is retold and replayed as a modern family in an English country house in the 20th century. Critics have admired the way Eliot blended together Greek, Christian and modern layers of consciousness in his drama. But I now could see that Ibsen had done the same - and, I think, did it better!
Then I started finding ghosts and archetypes (forbilde?) in the other plays: Antigone in Et dukkehjem; Sokrates and the sons of Oedipus in En folkefiende; the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in Vildanden. These ancient ghosts seemed to be invading the plays’ 19th century scenes, along with their ancient actions and stories. Ibsen’s ‘modern’ characters and dramatic actions were turning out to be both modern and hundreds and even thousands of years old. We are filled with ghosts, in other words.
I began ’researching’ to find out how Ibsen could have developed a Modernist method so far ahead of his time. And I discovered that these ‘Modernist’ ideas long ago had been developed in 19th century Europe - and especially in Germany. Finally, my researches led me back to the philosopher Hegel who had been the most influential philosopher in Scandinavia in Ibsen's time. Ibsen's own early critical writings are expressed in thoroughly Hegelian terminology. He had expressed amazement that there were thinkers who wrote on philosophy without knowing Hegel. Therefore, I felt obliged to read the philosopher. This led me to The Phenomenology of Spirit (Åndens fenomenologi )
The Hegelian Connection
This was not a joyful confrontation! As I soon found out, Hegel’s texts are fiendishly difficult (forferdelig vanskelig) to understand. However, as I struggled through The Phenomenology (in English translation) I started to find what I was looking for. Hegel’s text, like Ibsen’s, is filled with ghosts from the past. At the stage where Hegel describes the birth of the Western spirit, the origin of our modern identities, the spirits of Antigone, Oidipus, Orestes, and of the Greek gods, are resurrected in his text.
Åndens fenomenologi acts out, stage by stage, the evolution of human consciousness – exploring the process of how we became what we are in the world we inhabit today. To know who we are we need to go back and relive the dramas and conflicts out of which our modern humanity evolved. Hegel’s text is about how, as a species, we have gone through a long and often violent spiritual and cultural evolution. The Phenomenology shows how our modern identities, down the centuries, evolved out of a struggle between earlier forms of consciousness and how these earlier forms were vanquished and 'sublated' (superseded) by new ones better adapted to survive. Our modern consciousnesses, therefore, still contains layers of past cultural stages just as our bodies contain the record of our biological evolution.
In Hegel’s Fenomenologi each phase of the dialectical sequence is a totally different form of consciousness or way of seeing the world, from the previous phase. In the same way, each new play in Ibsen’s Cycle of twelve plays has its own unique nature. Each is a distinct world brought into being with its own themes, action, cast of characters, ambience, and imagery that makes it distinct from any other play in the Cycle. For example, Nora or Torvald Helmer of Et dukkehjem could not walk onto the stage of Gengangere nor could Osvald and Helene Alving inhabit the worlds of En folkefiende Vildanden, or Hedda Gabler. (Hilde Wangel, from Fruen fra Havet, is the exception tht proves the rule - and her transfer is to the totally different world of Bygmester Solness.)
When you look back over the whole Cycle, from Når Vi Døde Vågner (When We Dead Awaken) to Samfundets Støtter (Pillars of Society) you will see what an amazingly rich and haunted universe Ibsen has created.
Although the earlier forms of human consciousness have been supplanted like earlier species, they are not like the fossils we look at in a natural history museum. Instead, they remain inside us, as Helene Alving, tells Pastor Manders:
"It is not just what we inherit from our fathers and mothers that walks in us again (som gaar igen i os). It’s all kinds of dead ideas and dead beliefs and things like that. They are not living in us: but there they sit, all the same and we can’t get rid of them."
Reading Hegel often made my head ache - but there was one great consolation. When I saw ancient ghosts walking through Gengangere and the other plays, I was not going mad. Hegel reassured me this was a rational, even if highly imaginative, account of our human condition. In each Ibsen play, once the modern action begins, the spirits from the distant past are roused into life to walk again on the modern scene.
The theme of the living dead
The theme of the living dead is found, not just in Hegel but in pop culture in the form of ghost stories or vampire movies. I live in Pittsburgh. For a few years this was the home of the American Ibsen Theater. It was also the home of George A. Romero’s horror movies, like The Night of the Living Dead - which could be the title of Gengangere. Unfortunately the American Ibsen Theater never attracted the crowds that flocked to Romero’s movies.
Most great dramas have melodramatic elements. Scholars have noted Sophocles' melodramatics. Shakespeare’s Hamlet begins with a ghost and concludes with multiple carnage and King Lear begins and ends with plot devices a Victorian melodramatist would blush to be caught using. The past that haunts the present is found in philosophy and in horror movies. In Gengangere Ibsen raises the melodramatic to the tragic. He found in Hegel’s abstract text the possibilities for deeply moving human dramas. What makes the Cycle of twelve realist plays such a tremendous work of art is not Hegel’s philosophy but what Ibsen did with it. The deep and moving modern story of the house of Alving and its agitated characters is Ibsen’s own invention and so is the brilliant art of the play. These are not found in Hegel and they are what make Gengangere, along with the whole Cycle, a great drama.
Why did Ibsen make use of Hegel?
Many ambitious artists make use of imaginative and intellectual structures that allow them to expand their own artistic horizons. The Greeks used their myths. European artists used Christian myths to create huge works like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings or Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’. Modern artists have used Marxism or Eastern philosophies or the mythologies of many cultures to expand the horizons of their work. August Wilson has infiltrated African myth in his realist play cycle. In Ibsen’s time, especially after Charles Darwin, the Christian account of the world no longer explained the reality opened up by new knowledge. Hegel’s philosophy came before Darwin, but it could be adapted to the post-Darwinian imagination. Did Ibsen believe Hegel’s system was true? I believe he would have asked not whether it was true but whether it was adequate - as the basis for organizing a great dramatic Cycle.
What he then created: - a sequence of brilliant, humanly moving and fascinating works of dramatic art, with each play superbly shaped and plotted, is something very different from Hegel’s text. Hegel was the intellectual guide, the historicla/philosophical map of the territory that Ibsen recreated, in his own imagination, as a completely new country and its extraordinary inhabitants. This country was not the Norway he exiled himself from so many years, but a Norway re-imagined as a myth-filled and ghost-haunted space.
I do not believe Ibsen was a write of ‘problem plays’ that contained messages on how we should better organize our middle-class lives. Ibsen’s attitude to our human species is not a comforting one. He once wrote a poem regretting he was not around at the time of Noah’s Ark with a torpedo! Ibsen once said the purpose of his art was to make his nation “think greatly” (Å tenke stort”) The best artists seek to liberate our ways of seeing the world. The radical English poet, William Blake said he wrote “to open the doors of perception.” To do this the artist must first make us see the unreality of the world we believe to be real. This is what Ibsen’s theater does.
Negating false reality
Hegel wrote. “The known, just because it is the known, is the unknown"
Familiarity with our world prevents us seeing, how unreal its ‘reality’ is: even what a monstrous thing we have made of it over our long history. This is what Ibsen wants us to see. The moment the curtain goes up on an Ibsen play, the action is like an acid, corroding the image of reality it seems to be offering. It is, in fact, an anti-realism. The world the play presents to us is unstable from the beginning, filled with contradictions, secrets and lies - so that its claim to Truth dissolve before our eyes. By the end of Gengangere, what seemed to be the known world turns out to be the totally unknown. It has been devastated as if struck by an asteroid: or by Ibsen’s torpedo.
An Ibsen play involves two main actions:
1].The dialectic: the process of gradually exposing the unreality of the real until the world of the play is demolished.
2] The resurrection of ghosts and archetypes from the past that reveal their presences within modern reality.
The Contrapuntal Method.
The best way to approach a play is the way a conductor approaches a musical score: to explore its major themes, its structure, polyphony, tonalities and rhythms: to let yourself respond intuitively to the many levels of your consciousness the play is activating. This is what good art does: it opens up perceptions on many levels. It does not matter that after the experience you can’t say what it ‘means’. This is an important difference between art and philosophy. You do not need to understand a work of art – you need to experience it. To experience it adequately, you need to see what it is doing.
There used to be a beer advertisement in Britain that promised: “This beer reaches parts of you that other beers do not.”
Ibsen plays reach parts of you that other plays do not. Not only our emotional guts but also our intellects.
In music there is a method called ‘counterpoint’ when one melodic line is crossed and interwoven with other, different melodic lines. Ibsen’s plays employ a form of dramatic counterpoint: While the main story is being told, other stories, and other characters, from another dimension of time and place, - some from over 2,000 years ago, - interweave with the realistic story we are watching, like a séance, summoning ghosts from the distant past to walk in our world again.
The art of the play
As in Kong Oidipus, the play’s forward movement of about two hours is at the same time gradually recovers a huge past: the whole lifet, in fact, of Helene Alving, from her upbringing as a child to her present moment as anguished mother to Osvald.The past reveals the Unknown: whose consequences are working their destruction in the body of the child, Osvald. The Known world that Helene Alving so confidently controlled at the beginning of the play is now shattered by an Unknown world that has emerged and expanded beyond her control.
As is usual in Ibsen’s plays, everything turns into its opposite. The confident woman of the opening of the play, planning to dispose of the past completely so that the memory of her husband will be eliminated forever, ends up as his victim, helplessly crying out as her vocabulary is reduced to the terrified monosyllables “Nej; nei; nei; - Jo! – nei; nei!. The play began with Helene bitterly describing Alving as a dissolute figure of drunkenness and debauchery: the great wrong done to her, whose true nature must be concealed from public knowledge by a fraudulent memorial. But by the end, through one shock after another, she has journeyed so far in spirit that she remembers him as the joyful, life-craving young man whom she once helped to destroy. The suppressed truth of Alving is the Unknown that must now be rescued and revealed to the world. Just at the moment Helene Alving finally sees this, her fraudulent Memorial burns down.
As in the Greek plays, the dead prove more powerful than the living.
The Scale of the Tragedy
The play fits Hegel’s description of Greek Tragedy, which is not a conflict between right and wrong but between right and right – between opposing principles that fight to the death, like Antigone and Creon.. The marriage between the joyful young Lieutenant Alving and Helene, brought up by her society to put duty before livsgleden, was fated to bring them into conflict. On the surface, the past that is resurrected is the history of the marriage of Alving and Helene in a little town on the west coast of Norway. By inking this domestic tragedy so many themes and ghosts from Greek tragedy Ibsen allows us to experience, in modern terms, the classical Greek way of imagining the world. The dialectical logic of Gengangere reveals the gods as the directors behind the human scene. All the actions of the characters lead inevitably to what they desperately plotted to avoid. Within its single limited stage space and just two hours of time, however, the cast of five living and two dead characters resurrect huge themes and ghosts from the historical origins of Western civilization. The perspectives of the past increase enormously.
The beauty of Gengangere lies in its doing something so tremendous with such economical means; Ibsen set himself the greatest degree of difficulty and then did it so economically and so elegantly.
The Play as Comedy
Despite the tragic qualities of the play Gengangere contains a great deal of satiric comedy. I have had to convince directors that the name ‘Ibsen’ does not doom us to an evening of relentless gloom. Ibsen has a great sense of comedy, even if it can be a little grim. These directors are then surprised – and delighted – to find audiences responding to the comic elements of the play. Gengangere is often very funny! Engstrand, Manders and Regine, are totally incapable of entering the tragic dimensions of the play. They will cunningly survive. Tragedy is for the spiritual heroic, like Osvald and Helene, who will follow Truth even to the utmost desolation.
When the house of Alving falls the funds from the fraudulent Orphanage, together with Captain Alving’s name, will now be transferred to Engstrand's ‘home for wandering sailors’. This means the pious , respectable and hypocritical Memorial will be replaced by a riotous brothel set up with the help and blessing of Pastor Manders. Regine, Alving’s bastard daughter, will join them to get her hands on some of her father’s money.
It is hard to say which is the more shocking – the tragic ending or the satiric joke emerging from the tragedy. The tragic action of the play has an afterlife as farce and the ghost of Captain Alving is laughing in his grave, as James Joyce noted in his poem on the play. When it was pubished in 1881, Gengangere was felt to be highly offensive not just in Norway, but across the world. It created the greatest scandal in the history of the modern theater. When the play was performed in London on Friday the 13th March, 1891 the British press went into hysterics, calling it “an open sewer…a dirty deed done in public”..and so on and the critics called on the police to stop the play and arrest the actors: The play was banned from public performance in Britain for over twenty years and the ban was lifted only when the King and Queen of NORWAY arrived in Britain for a visit in 1914. (The British will always make allowances for Royalty.
It is not essential to know Hegel’s Phenomenology to see what Ibsen’s art is doing but Hegel’s text of is of immense value by providing us with a rational as well as imaginative guide for exploring Ibsen’s visionary landscape.
A question, often asked by anguished students is: “Even if we accept Ibsen intended all these dimensions to his art, how can the average playgoer b e expected to see them” The answer is that every major artist is more concerned with the ADEQUACY of his or her art than with the reader or playgoer's mental comfort. As with any major work, you are not going to experience all it offers at a single viewing.
Outside the theater, Ibsen is a classic to be studied and enjoyed like other classics where we have time to continue to make discoveries about his art. That is what makes a classic!
In 1879, the year he published Et dukkehjem Ibsen advised the young writer, John Paulsen, “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 .”
This means that without an extensive knowledge of history, of literature and of art we will be incapable of judging Ibsen’s plays except in the most incomplete and superficial manner. This happens to every major artist, of course. Life is short and Art is long and most of us don’t have time to go into great depth exploring every art work of art or literature from the Cave paintings of Lascaux to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. But we can expect our critics and interpreters to do this hard work for us to let us see what the artists are doing.
An artist is not a philosopher nor a teacher: his or her goal is to take up a medium and through it create a space in which we can expand our imaginations and our intelligence.
Ibsen takes tremendous care with his plots, making sure they are watertight, with every entrance and exit plausibly motivated, with each act leading to its crisis of reversal and revelation.. This integrity is his guarantee we can trust his art, that he has thought it through, thoroughly. For this reason his plays have what the supermarkets call a long shelf life – they have lasted while other plays that once created a greater sensation, have disappeared from memory.
The poet T.S. Eliot, like Ibsen was a Modernist. He described how he secretly smuggled his larger intentions into his plays while making them seem audience-friendly. He wrote to his fellow Modernist, Ezra Pound: “IF you can keep the bloody audience's attention engaged, then you can perform any monkey tricks you like when they aren't lookin, and its what you do behind the audience's back so to speak that makes yr play IMMORTAL for a while.” Ibsen was a master at keeping the bloody audience’s attention engaged; quietly pursuing his own huge project while the audiences, missing the big picture, became agitated, furious and sometimes even hysterical at each play’s appearance.
What I find so admirable is Ibsen’s respect for our intelligence. He does not loudly proclaim his big themes but pays us the compliment of waiting for us to discover them once we liberate our imaginations to see and appreciate the many dimensions of his wonderfully difficult art.
Lecture 2
The Art of the Cycle: Ibsen’s Supertext
Ibsen’s fame in the world is built on his realistic plays. His great achievement, it is claimed, is in having exposed ‘problems’ in nineteenth century society in plays that were accurate descriptions of characters and situations of Norwegians’ everyday world. This suggests Ibsen was a photographer reproducing what was in front of his eyes and, not an artist drastically reshaping reality to bring into being a great work of art. In fact, Ibsen’s plays have been criticized by some for not being like real life as we actually live it, day by day. And he would have agreed, for what he wanted to show was not what we think is reality, but, instead, a whole new way of envisioning reality.
Like the realist painters, his contemporaries, Edouard Manet and the Impressionists, Ibsen drastically re-arranged and reshaped the reality of his world so that it would confirm to his own idea of what reality actually was.Ibsen did not imitate life in Norway: he invented a fictional Norway as a theatric space into which metaphysical powers can be summoned. The Cycle of twelve plays, from Samfundets Støtter to Når Vi Døde Vågner are not a sequence of reports on the problems of Norwegian life but a huge gathering of spirits – a phenomenology of spirits.
This twelve-play Cycle is divided into three groups of four dramas (tetralogies). The first group is from Samfundets støtter to En folkefiende; the Second Group from Vilanden to Hedda Gabler; and the Third group from Bygmester Solness to Når Vi Døde Vågner. Each of these three groups has its own structure and themes that separate it from the others while at the same time building up the structure and shape of the whole Cycle.
What has led to Ibsen being so misunderstood is the Realist method he invented for the theater. This method seems to offer only images of everyday nineteenth century Norwegian society. If you look at the details of the plays steadily however, the images they present to us can transform into something quite different. It is somewhat like the effect of Gestalt imagery or the work of M.C. Escher in which different and contradictory things can be signified by the same image. (A well-known example is the duck that is also a rabbit.) This means Ibsen’s dramas can be both stories of modern life while at the same time resurrecting archetypal dramas that go back thousands of years..
Just as our bodies still contain traces of our biological evolution so our minds contain layer upon layer of our historical and cultural evolution. Our past is our present.
Therefore an art, like drama, that wanted to present an adequate portrait of our human identity would need to find a way of presenting these perspectives of our spiritual past behind the images of modern life. This is what Ibsen did, on a huge scale, in the twelve-play Cycle. When we look carefully at Ibsen’s realistic images we can detect mythic or historical figures from the human past invading the modern scene. The characters in the plays are not conscious of these dramas from the past, but we can train ourselves to be. This is one of the great pleasures of his art. In his ‘Epilogue’ to the Realist Cycle, When We Dead Awaken is a note: “In this country it is only the mountains that give an echo, not the people.” Ibsen wrote his Cycle of plays to allow us to hear these echoes from the past which modern life no longer hears. The plays help restore dimensions to our humanity which modern life has erased.
This idea of creating a modern text filled with echoes and layers of the past is the revolutionary method of a movement in art and literature called Modernism. In English language literature it was the method of the American poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and the Irish novelist James Joyce. All three, by the way, admired Ibsen’s work. What is surprising is that Ibsen, in the nineteenth century, should already have anticipated this twentieth century Modernist aesthetic.
As a student, I became interested in Ibsen when I discovered he was someone very different from what I had been told. I was told he was a writer of problem plays trying to encourage the middle class to lead better lives. But when I read his plays closely, he seemed to be doing something quite different and more exciting, more similar to Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. I began to ‘research’ on his background to find out what led him to create such an art form one so far ahead of his time; and my research finally led me to confront the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Frederick Hegel. One clue was Ibsen’s own declared admiration for Hegel.
The Hegelian Connection
This was not a joyful confrontation! As I soon found out, Hegel’s texts are fiendishly difficult (forferdelig vanskelig) to understand.However, as I struggled through The Phenomenology of Spirit I began to find what I was looking for. Hegel’s text, like Ibsen’s, is filled with ghosts from the past. The Phenomenology of Spirit (Åndens fenomenologi) acts out, stage by stage, the evolution of human consciousness – a series o f philosophical dramas, in fact, that explore the process of how we modern humans became what we are in the world we inhabit today. To know who we are we need to relive the dramas and conflicts that created our modern humanity.
The Phenomenology shows how our modern identities, down the centuries, evolved out of a struggle between earlier forms of consciousness and how these earlier forms were vanquished and superseded by new ones better adapted to survive. Our modern consciousnesses contains these past cultural stages just as our bodies contain the record of our biological evolution. Chapters VI. And VII set out a sequence of forms of consciousness that occurred in human history from the time of classical Greece to Hegel’s own day. Although they occurred in historical sequence these are all still forms of our modern consciousness that we must learn to explore. Each form is totally different and is unaware of the form of consciousness that preceded it. In other words, each is its own world. Similarly each new play in Ibsen’s Cycle of twelve plays has its own unique nature. The characters of each of the 12 plays in his Cycle are created by their own world. They do not know -and could not belong to - any of the worlds of the other plays.
When you look over the whole Cycle, from Når Vi Døde Vågner back to Samfundets Støtter, you will see what a rich sequence of separate worlds Ibsen has created. Everything that makes the Cycle a major work of art, - the human stories, the brilliant images, the skilful shaping of each of the plays and of the whole Cycle – is Ibsen’s own achievement. Hegel supplied the material that Ibsen drew upon, like any artist to shape into his own independent art.
I don’t know how much Ibsen ‘agreed’ with Hegel or how much he understood . I have always been interested in Ibsen as a dramatic artist. However, Hegel’s visionary philosophy was a major inspiration for Ibsen’s imagination and for his idea of a great Cycle of plays resurrecting the essential past of our Western Civilization.
The Two Sequences: Hegel and Ibsen
The first four dramas in Ibsen’s Cycle correspond to the first section of Hegel’s account that describes the arrival of Spirit (or Reason) in human history - the time of Greek civilization. . At the stage where Hegel describes this phase of spirit, the spirits of Antigone, Oidipus, Orestes, and of the Greek gods, are resurrected in his text. These same ghosts , and others, haunt the Cycle’s first four plays, Samfundets støtter, Et Dukkehjem, Gengangere and En folkefiende.
After this Greek and Roman phase, the Phenomenology explores the post-Christian world of Europe. The first very long section of this sequence is ‘Spirit in Self Estrangement’. that relives the human spirit’s loss of Hellenic freedom; the Christian myth of the Fall; the emergence of medieval feudalism culminating in the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV. What the sequence portrays is the painful spiritual division between:
{i} an ‘unhappy consciousness’ of loss of freedom in this world and
(ii) the spirit’s retreat, in compensation, to an ‘other’ world (jenseits) of Faith and mysticism.
This condition of consciousness analyzed by Hegel, is profoundly dualistic at all levels: cosmic, psychological, and social. It divides into a world of unequal classes, presided over by a lord and master of this realm. Its imagination divides between an unhappy reality and a fantasy world its imagination feeds upon. Hegel shows how this condition of dualism evolves, finally, into the post-feudal order of the sun king (Louis XIV and his flattering courtiers.. This sequence forms the longest and most intricate phase of spiritual evolution in the Phenomenology, and, I claim finds its parallel in the most richly and intricately detailed of Ibsen’s plays: The Wild Duck (Vildanden)
From his very earliest critical writings Ibsen, like Hegel, insisted modern consciousness was a continuum between the present and our total past. Ibsen insisted that this past was still alive in us, with “its memories …within us fermenting quietly and uncertainly until the poet came along and put them into words.” (Ibsen; 'The Heroic Ballad and Its Significance for Literature'). This includes forces from the pagan past that, he wrote “continued to live in the consciousness and faith of the people and there they have continued to live until our own day.”(Ibid) Modern consciousness, therefore, is a multilayered, active entity and a modern drama must find a way of including its layers if it is to be an adequate account of our humanity. I believe Ibsen found in The Phenomenology of Spirit a way of organizing and liberating his imaginative world, of expanding the conditions of his art.
The purpose behind the Plays
The intention behind the Cycle of plays is the expansion of our imaginations, getting us to see adequately, or “think greatly” (at tenke stort). Reading and seeing his plays creatively we continually will find surprises, new insights at every turn. The good news is that we do not yet ‘know’ Ibsen. There is still a lot for us to discover! Now let us look at one of the plays!
The Wild Duck
Ibsen’s plays are always doing more than one thing at the same time. Looked at closely The Wild Duck brings into focus other stories than the immediate one we are watching. The characters onstage are unaware of these other stories; but we can be aware of them with a little effort, because they have created our collective modern identity. As a member of Western culture, we have been shaped, both consciously and unconsciously, by the myths, and beliefs and traditions from this culture that Hegel and Ibsen are drawing upon.
Ibsen’s Dramatic Counterpoint
Ibsen’s dramatic method is a form of counterpoint, as in music where one musical pattern is crossed by other patterns. Ibsen’s counterpoint creates characters, actions, visual and verbal images which, are ‘realistic’ but bring into being other
Characters, actions and images from another time and place far back in our past
An image turn into another image as we look at it is, we saw, an effect of Gestalt pictures. and I think Ibsen’s art does something similar. Ibsen, as a painter, was aware of the Gestalt effect. In The Lady from the Sea the artist, Lyngstrand, tells Hilde Wangel he can see a future image of her where, "You'll be like both yourself and [Boletta] at the same time - in one gestalt, as it's called."[1] ( I én gestalt at kalde for.) The gestalt effect is a trick of the eyes, and eyes create a very important set of themes and images in Vidanden.
Optical references are sounded throughout the text of failing eyesight;(Werle and Hedvig) seeing with someone else’s eyes that were “not always clear-sighted”; (Gregers and his mother) and characters failing to see (Gina pleads with Hjalmar to “look at the child; of eyes of opening someone's eyes to the truth; of eyes perhaps seeing too much (Gregers, who asks Hedvig if she is sure the attic is an attic.) Old Ekdal sees the world through his hunter’s eyes and his superstitions, Gina's sees only literal reality, Relling's vision is cynical, and Gregers' wants to see the world transfigured into mystical idealism. Hedvig, we know is losing her sight and is surrounded by these competing visions of reality. Each character in the play sees reality from his or her unique point of view.
Then there is the presence of the camera, a silent, neutral recorder of the scene whose plain iomages are ‘retouched’ by Gina and Hjalmar. After Hedvig’s suicide the play's closing lines are a bitter disagreement between Gregers and Relling about what we have just seen. This emphasis on eyes and how we see and what we see alerts us to the fact that there is more to Ibsen’s realism than meets the eye. There is also the mind’s eye and the world that Ibsen sees in his own mind: a world different from the world most of us see.
The Scenography of The Wild Duck:
The dialogue of the play seems to be describing only factual accounts of past and present events. But Ibsen’s infiltrates his poetic metaphors through this dialogue. Gradually, a huge vertical landscape gradually emerges from the text: from the height of Høydahl to the depths of the sea. Høydahl with its gradually depleting forests was the lost natural world of the bear hunter, Old Ekdal nd of the wild duck in its earlier free life. It was also the place where Gregers Werle brooded in solitude for years, alienating himself from his community and preparing for his mission of redemption.. Below these heights is the human community and beneath that are the depths of the sea with all the “devil’s mess’ (alt det fandenskab) that flourished there and to which the wild duck, when wounded, dived down to die.
The vertical aspect of this landscape is then repeated in the Ekdal household; from the attic above with its mysterious wild duck and its fallen family to the lower depths below where Relling and his demonic companion create the ‘devil’s mess’ (fandenskab) of their lifestyle and to which, at his moment of crisis, they lure Hjalmar.
The lost natural world is replicated in miniature in the Ekdal attic with its wild duck, and then domestic pigeons and rabbits:. This devolution from free life to unfree is repeated in the Ekdal family. It regresses from the old hunter who shot nine bears, through his totally domesticated son, Hjalmar, and finally to Hedvig whose approaching blindness makes her the least free of all the family members.
Hegel’s account of the condition of dualism, of the world divided between unhappy reality and escapist fantasy, is also emphasized as the condition of Ibsen’s play: Here, see Ibsen the artist shaping the metaphoric space of his dramatic action, dividing his stage into two contrasting spaces both in the Werle home and in Ekdal’s apartment. Both settings emphasize the division between foreground and background spaces.
The foreground space is a place of work, the background a place of pleasure (with Werle) or escapist fantasy (with the Ekdals). The two stage spaces, therefore, represent contrasting conditions of spirit – unhappy or alienated reality versus an escape from this reality.
TWO VIEWS OF THE ACTION OF THE PLAY
The action of The Wild Duck can be seen in two radically different ways.
1. Gregers Werle descends from Høydal to a world of the insulted and injured Ekdals. He believes his father to be responsible for the fall that reduced Lieutenant Ekdal and his family to social disgrace and dependence. He discovers his ‘mission’ [opgave] to right the injustice. The family, however, is reconciled to its fallen condition, retreating from reality and living on Haakon Werle's largesse. The merchant controls the Ekdal lives, supplying Hjalmar with his trade, his wife, his father’s cost of living expenses; and supplying even the wild duck, - the central feature of the Ekdals' imaginative world.
Werle is, indeed a Providence (forsyn) to the family.
Believing truth will set the Ekdals free from all the lies and dependence, Gregers instead destroys Hjalmar's faith in his own identity as husband, father and family breadwinner. To overcome the crisis that results, Gregers suggests Hedvig sacrifice her most precious possession from Werle, the wild duck, to demonstrate her love for her father. When they believe this is what she has done, Gina and Hjalmar are reconciled and the marriage is saved. So Gregers’ messianic mission seemks to have been justified.
But out of view, Hedvig commits suicide.
As a realistic tragicomedy this creates ad very effecting human dreama, and it is the way it has been experienced by most audiences.. But, we can tell the story another way. Here is how one imaginative viewer described the play:
"Hedvig and her grandfather approach their world with a devotion and a ritual akin to religious reverence, for the attic with the duck and other treasures may be considered a metaphor for the Christian paradise: it performs in their lives exactly the same function as does a traditional church for many people. Existing on the top floor of the Ekdal microcosm, the attic is the summum bonum in their lives; it provides them, just like heaven, with a world of pure value, a world of nearly perfect orientation. The Ekdals keep returning to this private religion for sustenance just as people do with any traditional illusion that is sacred to them."
Maria Rilke, watching a performance of The Wild Duck in 1906 wrote to Clara Rilke that “all its splendour came from the inside and almost to the surface.” Ibsen, he added, was "misunderstood in the midst of fame. Someone quite a different from what one hears.” In the play he detected "something great, deep, essential. Last Judgement." [16] So it is possible for imaginative readers to see what Ibsen is doing: both writers, you notice, picked up on theChristian themes of the play.
Which brings us to: View No. 2.
The plot brings to mind a passage from the New Testament, Galatians, IV. “But when the fullness of time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law." A Son, Gregers,‘descends' from ‘above' (Høydal-High dale) to discover his ‘mission is to ‘redeem' a family - the Ekdals - who have ‘fallen' through the power of the law and from the control of his Father. The Son discovers this family is in the power of a Deceiver who lives a dissipated life below the Ekdal apartment with a ‘demonic' (demonisk) companion, an ex-student of theology. A deceiver and a demon living below already seems a comic reference to the devil, and the play will supply further imagery for this diabolic identity.
Gregers, the Redeemer and Relling the Deceiver clashed before, up at Høydal and now resume their quarrel. This detail fits medieval accounts of the clash of Christ and Satan. Gregers’ attempts to draw the family upward to an ideal it cannot meet. Relling, by his life lies, (livsløgnen) seeks to keep them down at his own level. By reconciling the Ekdals to their fall. Relling serves the interests of Haakon Werle by keeping the family safely reconciled to their alienated reality insead of rebelling against it. From this second, ‘archetypal' perspective, the play reveals an pattern of references, phrases and images evoking the Christian story: its major action (attempted redemption) and its principle figures (God, Son, Holy Ghost/Duck, Devil and fallen humanity. Holy Ghost/Duck? Already a suggestive pattern emerges behind the realistic method, of Father, Son, and Devil and an action of Salvation, and of diabolic deception. Though these details recall the Christian myth, this does not mean that Gregers ‘is’ Christ, and Relling ‘is’ the devil. They are ghosts summoned onto the stage by the human actions, somewhat as in a séance. The realistic actions bring on the ghosts.(gengangere)
In Christianity the great event was the arrival of the Son of God. This opens a whole new era of Spirit for the world. The opening scene of The Wild Duck is a dialogue on the unexpected arrival of the Son of Werle, the big event in the world of the play as was the arrival of Christ in the world – and in the Phenomenology at this phase of it text. The fact that the Father has a Son comes as a surprise to one of the speakers in the opening dialogue of the play: so it is also a new event in the world of the play.
JENSEN:I never knew before that (Merchant) Werle had a son.
(Aldrig vidste jeg før, at grosserer Werle havde nogen søn.)
We learn this Son always kept him himself away up at the Højdals-vaerket until this moment when he descends, to discover his messianic purpose of bringing Truth to a fallen humanity. Hints of the Christian story already begin to appear in the text and these will be amplified as the play progresses. After the servants discuss the arrival of the Son, the ‘fallen’ character of Old Ekdal enters. This sets of a whole sequence of images from Christian and other sources from the beginning of the play to the final duologue of Gregers and Relling at the end. Hjalmar Ekdal’s tragicomic situation, wishing to be given each day his daily bread but unable to forgive those who trespass against him, who is led into temptation by Relling and disastrously delivered from evil by Gregers, seems an irreverent evocation of the paternoster.
Can there be a pun in the very title of the play, Vildanden?
The Norwegian for 'duck'` is ‘and'; for spirit it is ‘ånd' (the two words, typographically are almost identical. I have been told by Mr. Salemonsen that in Nynorsk, in the definite form, they are identical, though pronounced differently, where a shift of tone changes the word's identity. ‘Vildanden’, without too much stretching of lingual decorum, stared at closely, might to Norwegians suggest Vildånden (wild/free spirit).
This would permit the trinity of Father, Son and Spirit (or Duck!). Even without the pun, the metaphor fits. The bird inhabited a region where as a free spirit (vildånden?) it once flew but is now reconciled to its loss of the natural world. Birds function as symbols of the spirit in a number of Ibsen’s plays: e.g. Love’s Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt. Ibsen's wordplay is an underrated aspect of his art.
The Wild Duck is uniquely rich in echoes and direct quotations from Scripture. Gregers, who complains of being one who has to "carry the Cross" of his identity (når en har det kors på sig), insists his destiny ( bestemmelse ) is to be "the thirteenth man at the table" (At vaere den trettende mand tilbords) as at a perpetual Last Supper. When Gregers reproaches Hedvig for not sacrificing the duck he says "I can tell by looking at your it is not fulfilled (det ikke er fuldbragt) from the 'consummatum est' phrase of Christ on the Cross. “It is fiulfilled” Hjalmar employs the phrase from Galatians IV : " But soon the fullness of time will come"( Men nu kommer snart tidens fylde ). He complains of drinking a bitter drink (den beske drik) like Christ in Gethsemane. Gina is created by Ibsen as a pragmatic literalist who has not skill in language and who is not given to metaphor; nevertheless she comes out with the very strange expression: “that blessed wild duck; there's been more than enough crucifying over her” (den velsignede vildanden, ja. Den gjøres der da krusifikser nok for.) Old Ekdal describes the depths to which the wild duck dived as “all the devil's mess found below” (alt det fandenskab som dernede finds). In Act V. Hjalmar Ekdal, recovering from their orgiastic night out calls Relling "a infamous tempter" (skaendige forfører ) and accuses him and Molvik and their life below of being "two scum filled with every vice" ( to avskum, så rige på alle laster ).
There is, I think, one very amusing pun that fits this pattern of Christian references. Relling describes Gregers as a ‘quacksalver’ –. (kvaksalveren) a quack savior. A Quack Savior is someone acting like a savior but being unqualified – which fits Gregers’ messianic actions.
But ‘kvak' also is the Scandinavian form of 'quack' - the cry of a duck. Gregers already had declared his ambition to be a clever dog that dives down to all the devil's mess to save endangered ducks! Ibsen's method is extensive is not solemn, and The Wild Duck often is very funny – as we found out at a performance in Pittsburgh a few years ago.
Old Ekdal’s name (ek, eik) (Oak dale) suggests pagan Man; his fall from innocence and disgrace evokes post-lapsarian Adam’s punishment after the Fall. The servant, Petterson, related how Werle was sentenced to hard labor or the penitentiary (bodsfaengslet).
We continually will find that what seems ordinary in Ibsen’s art is transfigured once we grasp his procedure. Ibsen describes his method as ‘galskap’ and the correspondence between the realist text of the play and its supertextual reverberations is far from solemn.
There is the sardonic pair in Relling and Molvik, which recreates the traditional medieval duo of physician and theologian, ministering to body and soul; and the diabolic connotations of their orgiastic lifestyle, that so appalled Hjalmar on his one visit to their realm below. There is the Christian theme of communal sharing of meals in a play where such feasting is so central to the action; the mystery surrounding the duck in its inner sanctum, disclosed with near reverence to Gregers;. the animals as background to the Ekdal family recalling well-known Christian iconography; the sacrificial death of Hedvig and the image of her being carried off stage like the deposition from the Cross.
The Hegelian underpinning to the play means detecting these correspondences is not arbitrary ingenuity, as in much symbol-unearthing, but can be located in rational intentions on the poet’s part. I have called this Ibsen’s 'Supertext’: the big archetypal text behind the realism. Critics who ‘know’ Ibsen was a writer of 'problem plays' or a psychoanalyst of 'fascinating characters' generally come to the plays looking for too little and find only that which confirms their preconceptions: they prefer to settle for a smaller play than Ibsen has written.Ibsen ‘s strategy behind his ‘realistic’ method requires the reader or viewer to see alternative layers, or perspectives, of archetypal presences from the past behind the modern realistic events presented. From his very earliest critical writings Ibsen insisted on this nature of modern consciousness: that it was a continuum between the present and our total past. This past was still alive, with “its memories …within us fermenting quietly and uncertainly until the poet came along and put them into words.” (Ibsen; ‘The Heroic Ballad and Its Significance for Literature’). This, Ibsen insisted, includes forces from the pagan past that “continued to live in the consciousness and faith of the people and there they have continued to live until our own day.” He never relinquished this vision and devised a revolutionary dramatic method for realizing it in the modern realist plays. Ibsen portrays modern consciousness as complexly multilayered. This, I believe, is ‘the Ibsen Secret’ that makes his realist method so compelling. Translators need to find a way of including as many of the the plays' layers as possible if they hope to engage in a genuine attempt at adequacy. .
There are many other textual and visual evocations from the spiritual dialectic the The Wild Duck is recollecting: from Cervantes, Shakespeare, perhaps Moliere. I have seen Shakespeare's presence and Helge Salemonsen has discovered echoes of Diderot's Rameau’s Nephew which appears prominently in the corresponding section in Hegel's similarly multilayered text. Ibsen’s plays are filled with such reverberations and cry out for the location of their innumerable sources.
Being baffled by a play is a better response than settling for a coherent but reductive explanation. As with listening to a great symphony, you are aware, watching or reading an Ibsen play, of more elements than you immediately can take in. I believe Ibsen found in The Phenomenology of Spirit a way of organizing and liberating his imaginative world, of expanding the conditions of his art. The intention behind the Cycle is the liberation of our imaginations, getting us to see adequately, or “think greatly”. I believe the aim of Ibsen’s art was not a truth to be conveyed, but the adequacy of the art form he is realizing in all its possible dimensions. Reading and seeing his plays creatively is to be liberated into his imaginative project, finding surprises, new insights at every turn. The good news is that we do not yet ‘know’ Ibsen; that there is a lifetime of discovery ahead for us! And for translators there lie supremely difficult challenges that will tax our own creative ingenuity. While translating him we should try to make ourselves Ibsen’s contemporaries and not force him to become our’s.
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