Play It Again: Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot

based on a lecture given at the IX International Ibsen Conference in Bergen, Norway

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I. Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot

      "The plot" wrote Aristotle, is "the soul of tragedy" and tragedy is the imitation of an action.   Plot, - the sequence and arrangement of the actions on-stage taking place before our eyes - "is the end for which tragedy exists...It is not for the sake of their characters that the agents engage in actions but, rather, for the sake of their actions that they take on the characters they have."[1]   Tragic drama enacts an 'agon': an action carefully structured through the devices of the theatre to create a dramatic rhythm whose effective climactic moments are the combination of reversal (peripeteia) and discovery/insight (anagnorisis). The dramatist steers the forces of the plot to these ends. . This is as artful and artificial a procedure as sonata form in music. Tragedy best arrives at this structure through conflict, and characters therefore will be created by the plot to take on the opposing sides of this conflict. In the Realist Cycle of 12 plays, from PILLARS OF SOCIETY to WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN, Ibsen employs an analytic and retrospective plot structure, taken from Greek drama, rather than the 'narrative' plot structures of BRAND, PEER GYNT, and EMPEROR AND GALILEAN.

      In Sophoclean drama antithetical forces or values engage in a collision that affirms the human capacity for heroism in the teeth of the manifest design of the gods.  In Ibsen's drama, the invariable plot is the devastating yet transfiguring emergence of the evaded Past into the life of the Present. A tragic dramatist's life's work usually reveals one or two major plot structures but a great number and variety of stories chosen to demonstrate the plot in widely different situations. The plot creates the catalyst through which an underlying tragic structure is revealed within the story.

II. Plot-Story Ratio of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos

       Sophocles' Oedipus tyrannos is the classic example of how the plot reconfigures and tragically re-enacts the pre-existing story. The story or myth of Oedipus, in a number of versions, long preceded Sophokles' play and was well-known to his audience. The story was capable of many plot choices; the plot determined which elements of the story the dramatist will bring into significant being. Sophocles selects from the various versions those aspects serviceable to his tragic plot, while transfiguring the old mythic material through the newly invented devices of the Greek theatre. His choice of plot, not the story, established the tragic status of the play.

      The story was well known: Though Laius and Jocasta were warned by Apollo a son would prove fatal to them, Oedipus is born. To frustrate the prediction the royal parents give him to a slave to destroy by exposing him on Mount Cithaeron. Taking pity on the child, the slave hands him over to the care of a shepherd from Corinth, who gives the infant to the childless king and queen of Corinth, Polybius and Merope. They raise him as their son and heir. Years later, a drunkard at a feast accuses Oedipus of not being their son and, though assured by his 'parents' this is not true, he goes to Delphi to ask after his true identity. Apollo's oracle does not answer this question but makes the horrible prediction that Oedipus will kill Polybius and marry Merope - at least this is what Oedipus hears as the atrocity against his parents.   He decides not to return to Corinth but to recreate himself abroad. He encounters a violent old man at a crossroads and, in anger, kills him and his retinue. After confronting the Sphinx menacing Thebes, he destroys her by answering her riddle.  Entering Thebes, he is rewarded with the hand of the Queen, Jocasta, thereby becoming 'tyrannos' of Thebes. Over the years he creates a family: two sons and two daughters.

     In contrast to the narrative methods of e.g. Shakespeare and Brecht, none of this story is presented on-stage. What we focus on as theatre audience is not the story, which occurred in extensive and arbitrary time and space outside the play, but what the plot will make of this story - how it will gather and shape it's elements into a new, terrible significance within the confined time and space of the stage performance. The arbitrary and wide-ranging details of the story are summoned to the tribunal of the plot's logical, forensic structure.. A violent, irrational past is revisited through Oedipus' newly alerted rational consciousness: much as the Athenian audience re-encounters its non-rationaal, primordial myths through the rational structure of the newly evolved theatric conventions.

      Through the agency of the plot the story becomes not a record of arbitrary actions performed over extensive time in the past but a terrifyingly condensed, logical, and inexorable agon of unfolding tragic knowledge enacted now in the immediate present of the performance. A swift sequence of confrontations leads Oedipus to discover his true identity while learning he is the criminal he set out to unmask and punish. His situation is not tragic until he is brought to 'see' these past events as he re-enacts them in the present. The past events are terrible but are tragic only by being known, tragically re-experienced as scenes in the mind's eye: the drunkard at the feast, the visit to the Oracle at Delphi, the encounter at the crossroads with the intemperate Old Man.  These are relived from a new, clarifying perspective as a horrifyingly determined sequence   

     Even more startling, the plot re-enacts the story's core past events: Tiresias' seemingly wild and senseless charge that Oedipus does not know his own identity repeats the drunkard's taunt in Corinth; the Delphic Oracle answers Oedipus once more, with a new riddle; Oedipus wrathfully confronts his uncle, Creon, seeking his death, as he had confronted his father; the Theban servant, the Corinthian shepherd and Oedipus gather once more at the conclusion of Oedipus's search for identity as they did long ago on Mount Cithaeron when Oedipus was an infant and his identity was about to be created. The story supplies the details of what he will come to know: the plot dramatizes the tragic agon of his knowing the past events while he re-enacts them.

III. The Plot-Story Ratio in Ibsen

         Ibsen's realist plays are structured similarly .   Events that occurred randomly in the past are  interrogated by a newly awakened consciousness that discovers in the events the logic of a tragic structure. 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 because it exists only on the terms present consciousness conceives and accepts.  Drama is the art form that best presents the recreation and interrogation of the past by the present. And, more startlingly, the power of present consciousness to transform the past.

              As John Gabriel Borkman proclaims:

  “… what has happened doesn't repeat itself either.   The eye transforms
         the action.   And so a newborn eye can transform an old action.” 3

         The capacity for the newborn eye to transform the old action, as in the plots of Sophocles and Ibsen, asserts the one freedom, (other than amnesia) we possess over the past. Oedipus cannot escape his past: but he can, and does, change his consciousness of it and act freely.   

        In Ibsen, the stories are records of arbitrary, open actions exhibiting rich variety of detail.   Reconfigured retrospectively the plots reveal ‘closed' structures of inevitable conflict, dialectical determinism, even nemesis within the once-arbitrary events of the story.  This dialectical engagement of the plot upon the material of the story is the essence of Ibsen's dramaturgy.

      A major difference between the stories devised by Ibsen and the traditional myths employed by Sophocles. is that the transformation which Sophocles' plots work upon the mythic material was evident to his audience who already knew the myths in their various versions.   Lacking this reservoir of myths sanctioned by and familiar to his culture, Ibsen had to devise his own stories for his plots to work upon: a problem he addresses in his early critical writings; on Paludan Müller's Mythological Poems and on The Heroic Ballad And Its Significance for Literature (1857).   In the Realist Cycle he smuggles traditional mythic and archetypal material into his stories; but this procedure, like the modern story itself, will be to a great extent opaque to his audience. Audiences and critics frequently are distracted from the dramatic structure unfolding in immediate sequence onstage and are tempted into piecing together a 'real' story ‘behind' the dramatic plotting.  Audiences, and critics like Georg Lukacs, expect a play to present its story, not interrogate it, and are baffled by Ibsen's classical procedure.  The complexity of response Ibsen requires from his audience, of having to pick up information, then distrust it and finally try to discover a more adequate account than first offered, creates a drama suitable to the intellectual relativity of  the modern world in which competing value systems have lost universal authority.

              The Ibsen plot's non-naturalistic timing, compression, ironic patterning of co-incidences, abrupt confrontations, are not unfortunate residues from the formulae of the well-made-play.   Ibsen is not offering a facsimile of everyday life and then, through recidivism to the old melodrama, failing to achieve the miniscule tics and nuances of slice of life realism.   The Ibsen plot is the operation upon reality of an insistent aesthetic structuring whose artifices need not be denied.

        As in Oedipus tyrannos, past events or precedent plots, now take the form of mentally re-enacted agons on-stage. Recollected urgently by the plot, they become intense realities of the present, transformed now in the light of newly awakened consciousness. Past events take on reality only as objects of present consciousness. .]

And it is because of this capacity for the newborn eye to transform the old action that the plot, in Sophokles and Ibsen, asserts a human freedom over the inevitable structure of the past. Oedipus cannot change his past: but he can, and does, freely decide tragically to know and acknowledge it, against the urgent advice of Tiresias and Jocasta. 

It is the function of the plots to bring about a vivid resurrection and recreation of past events, which are then experienced as mental actions in the immediate present . This means that the essential actions in Ibsen's plays take place within the characters' minds. In Jennette Lee's words:

One who is accustomed to think of plot and action as synonymous must dissociate the two terms in taking up the work of Ibsen. His plays have plot in abundance, but nothing happens in them, any more than in one of Mr. Henry James novels. The action takes place in the soul of a character or in the relation between characters. There are few incidents - unless one regards the adventures of the soul as such. [4]

The stories represent an area of the arbitrary, the accidental and external, the realm of seemingly free, spontaneous actions often exhibiting rich variety of detail. It is only when they are reconfigured as plots that the events of the stories reveal the 'closed' structures of inevitable conflict, logical necessity, design, nemesis.

    The Ibsen plot is the operation upon reality of aesthetically demanding structuring. There is no need to conceal its artifices: the movement of each act of a play to its peripeties and anagnoreses, its repetition of key words and phrases, its 'curtain lines'  and so on.  Instead, these artifices should be searched out and played up, making clear the selective intellectual and imaginative process Ibsen's plots bring to his fictive material and which he wants us to share in. The conjunction of convincing human characters and situations and at the same time the skillful retention of classic dramatic structure is the source of the dramas' power.

      The Realists in painting like Manet and the Impressionists (Ibsen's contemporaries) selected only those elements of the modern scene that could be made to conform to the needs and problems of the composition on the canvas.   Everyday reality was not the Truth the artists were trying to replicate: on the contrary, everyday reality was re-organized, often radically, for aesthetic integrity and included only as it was serviceable to the demands imposed by the canvas. The Salon that refused Manet or the Impressionists, preferred to exhibit the 'realistically' cluttered canvases of the genre painters.

      Similarly, good realistic dramatists (e.g. Harvey Granville-Barker), like the meticulously accurate genre painters, much more plausibly render the texture and rhythms of everyday life than the Realist Ibsen - as any comparison between a page or two of Ghosts and of e.g. Waste, or The Voysey Inheritance will reveal. The plot structure of The Voysey Inheritance is obscured by the ongoing story's cluttered rhythm of plausibly colloquial and inconsequential everyday discourse and an arbitrary-seeming abundance of anecdotal detail; catering for those who believe photographic verisimilitude is the ideal of art. A recent commentator insists Ibsen's art reveals a firm fidelity to the 'ordinary' - an astonishing verdict on his highly formal, highly histrionic and often occult dramatic  actions. The plot of Ghosts, by contrast, is an alarmingly felt presence violently reshaping the details of the realistic details into a clear dialectic. We need to see that this contrast is to the advantage of Ibsen's tragic play.

IV. Contrast between the Drama and the Novel

      To dwell upon the story of e.g. Rosmersholm, piecing together and re-organizing its details as a biographical structure, is to treat the play as if it were a case-history, not a play. . "If we resurrect Rebecca's past," writes Sigmund Freud in his famous study of Rebecca West, "expanding and filling in the author's hints, we may feel sure that she cannot have been without some inkling of the intimate relation between her mother and Dr. West...."[5]. He ingeniously unearths from the story the Oedipal coherence he himself already buried there, disregarding how the elements of the story are assembled by the plot, piece by piece, into the coherence of an aesthetic structure . 'Real life' individuals can be the subjects of case books compiled from the mutual interrogations of analyst and analysand: but fictive characters have no existence outside an artwork and patently have no psyches to be analysed.  The inability to make this distinction is responsible for a mass of irrelevant Ibsen commentary indifferent to Ibsen's artistry.

      By ignoring the play's plot structure, piecing together the 'author's hints' from a hypothetical past outside the plot, we may come up with an endless realm of conjecture on all the characters in the play, including no doubt, the childhood of Mrs. Helseth. The necessarily incomplete histories a playwright supplies his or her characters are not meant to lure us towards "filling in the author's hints'" and away from attention to the unfolding action of the plot but to serve, thematically, the plot emerging before our eyes. There is only so much fictional detail a dramatist can supply. Simply launching a story into the world renders it vulnerable to infinite speculative daydreaming on the part of those indifferent to aesthetic values. There always will be those who will fuss over "how many children had Lady Macbeth?"

      Reading the plays, we should imagine, not 'real life' events but an ideal theatric performance. Nor, contrary to what George Lukacs believed, in his study The Historical Novel is Ibsen creating, in the form of drama, what better would fit a novel. Lukacs takes the scene in Rosmersholm, Act III where Rebecca West describes to Rosmer and Kroll the nature of her step-by-step actions that led to Beate's suicide. Lukacs pays Ibsen the very back-handed compliment of establishing, through his "unflinching honesty" that a play such as Rosmersholm "could not become a real drama."

    The reason for this, he claims, is that "at the decisive moment" of Rebecca's confession,

     "we see that the actual drama, namely Rebecca West's struggle, tragic collision and conversion, is, as far as subject-matter, structure, action and psychology are concerned, really a novel, the last chapter of which Ibsen has clothed in the outward form of drama.[6]".

        Lukacs reads Ibsen's plays in the way A.C. Bradley read Shakespeare's tragedies: as skeletal Victorian novels where the reader is asked to supply the flesh of psychology and past motive that Shakespeare only implied. Instead of seeing the drama Ibsen has written, Lukacs laments the absence of the "actual drama" he believes the retrospective method is substituting for. His objections could apply as cogently to Oedipus tyrannos.

     In Rosmersholm, Ibsen is interested less in the violent story from the past than in the subtler movement of Rebecca's evolving consciousness, now, as the plot brings her, for the first time, to interrogate that past through the alienating perspective of her newly evolved identity. The somewhat lurid, 'Gothic' story is the material which the austere dialectic of the 'classic' plot works upon, reliving the past as a new dialectic of evolving consciousness in which the audience is made to participate. The past emerges as an estranging dimension of the protagonists' present identity. It negotiates the stages whereby tragic acknowledgement of this alien past is reached: a process that requires the alerted attention of the audience through each move within the taut dialectic of the performance. Michael Goldman describes the strategy of Ibsen's retrospective plotting in similar terms:

The neat interlinking of incident and information from the past that Ibsen developed … may too easily be misread as a kind of novelistic narration…. In performance, however, an Ibsen play strikes us not as a retrospective description of past events but as an unfolding succession of conflicts. Its dialogue constitutes a series of mini-crises that force bits and pieces of the past, with their attendant fears and desires, to be discovered, suffered, defined by the actor/character in the present. The emphasis is on the rendering of spontaneous choice in continually emergent situations. [7]

Certain facts from the story are recalled at certain moments by the plot, because only at these precise moments in the sequence do they gain their significance for the evolving dialectic. Goldman admonishes:

There is a tendency…to see the plot as an expedient, a way of delivering other, more important materials. From this point of view, the aim of the plot is to get out of the way with as little distortion of reality as possible. Any pressure the plot imposes is likely to seem a limitation on Ibsen's artistry. [8]

      He praises Ibsen's method for the unique formal or histrionic pressure the plot places on the actors, the escalating artistic demands for responsiveness their exchanges call for: a "dramaturgy of fear" - of confrontations, engineered by the plots, that do not permit evasion. The plots are not a means by which the stories get told: they are the essence of the plays, the primary reason for their being.

      In their ultimate, painfully arrived at identities, Rosmer and Rebecca achieve in the present the union that eluded them in the past. Rosmer's heritage of law, order, tradition and repression of the instincts is made to confront Rebecca's past of anarchic origins and a later history involving the transgressions of incest, adultery, and murderous action. Ibsen described the dialectic as a collision between the 'acquisitive instinct' that "hurries from conquest to conquest: and "the moral consciousness" that "has its roots deep in traditions and in the past generally."[9] Rosmer and Rebecca, ambushed by their pasts, give up an anticipated future of liberated action in the political world for the demands of an ancient, evaded, punitive justice The plot renders this outcome of the story inevitable.

        This could be fulfilled only by dramatic form, not by such a form as the novel. The past story is resurrected by the plot to reveal consciousness under immediate pressure - which the performative terms of the theatre make unique to the dramatic method. The past confronts the protagonists as a dimension -  an alien and estranging dimension - of their present identity. The plot of the play negotiates the stages by which tragic knowledge is reached: a process that needs to hold the alerted attention of the audience through each increasingly fateful move within the tautly stretched time of performance: compelling a heightened complexity of response by the audience to the shape the emerging material of the story is now taking on.

V. The Plot as Aesthetic Structuring

      The terms of the plot, revisiting and re-organizing the material of the story, allow the archetypal elements that may be dormant, or have been lost sight of, to be released and reveal themselves adequately and powerfully, as in the procedure Oedipus tyrannos where Apollo's early prediction of the events is fulfilled. In Rosmersholm, certain facts are recalled, such as those emerging through Rebecca West's confession, only at certain moments in the play because it is only at these moments in the performance that, through the organizing plot, they gain their meaning and significance. The story brings into the drama dimensions of the modern world in all its free-ranging and unorganized multiplicity.  A great variety of stories taken from the texture of the modern world might be chosen as serviceable to Ibsen's dramatic plotting. These provide his plays their particular contemporary characteristics and relevance and give to the Cycle as a whole a wealth of human detail. The details of the modern story generate metaphors and archetypes the plot fatefully gathers and re-organizes into a tragic dialectic.  The stories in Ibsen's Cycle, therefore, reveal a wide variety of modern situations but  the plots by contrast return again and again to the same dialectical action; the exposure of fatal contradictions within the 'given' situation at the opening of the play and the recollection and re-enactment of the evaded past. What is recollected is not only the personal histories of fictive individuals but, through a procedure of 'archetypal recovery', major formative phases of our cultural history.                 

    Rosmersholm and The Master Builder provide contrasting examples of plots that gradually return to a past story for a more fatefully conscious recreation of events performed earlier more arbitrarily and thoughtlessly.    The past history is revisited by consciousnesses (Rosmer and Rebekka) now brought to understand their nature and consequences for the first time.  Ibsen declared his lifework was to wrestle with the trolls that infest the mind and heart and hold a Judgment Day over the soul.  His dramatic method of devising a plot structure that revisits past events through a newly awakened consciousness, is the artistic expression of this resolve.   This is the essence of his entire drama, the 'Ibsen Secret' - and his plays cannot be understood unless we grasp this procedure.  It is the dialectical procedure, also, of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind.  In Hegel, the enlightened philosophic mind or spirit (the reader) returns to and re-enacts the essential stages of its evoluting consciousness.  It is both mistaken actor and critical observer of its actions, watching itself undergoing the tragic-comedy of errors of its old, deeply held but now superseded convictions. The goal is to re-experience and understand how we become what we are as modern humans. 

    This re-enactment of the earlier events also is a redemption of the past, an assertion of freedom over the past by the protagonists . What had been ignorantly suffered or lost in the past now can be recovered and transcended freely, even though painfully, by the enlightened consciousness. The audience, from its privileged position as spectator, follows the trajectory of the protagonists' experience.   There is no 'message' to be gained from this: only the experience of a human situation explored in adequate depth through a superb artistry.    Similarly, Sophokles beautifully constructed a tragedy in which Oedipus could not change the events that condemned him but he was free to discover and acknowledge their tragic truth and to pass judgment upon himself.  In their finally purified identities, Rosmer and Rebecca achieve the marriage that eluded them in the world of compromised action; and in The Master Builder, under Hilde's ambiguous promptings, Solness recreates his earlier Lysanger ascent and rebellion but now freely conscious of its subversive implications.

VI. Arbitrary Story vs. Logical Plot.

The histories, both given and implied, behind the plot of Rosmersholm, range too widely over time and space to be summarized. [10] They establish the totally disparate pasts of Rosmer and Rebecca which the plot then organizes into a clear dialectic confrontation. Rosmer's long established heritage of law, order, tradition and repression of the instincts - 'Civilization' - is made to confront Rebecca's past of lawlessness in origins, personal history and motives, involving the instinctual anarchy of incest, adultery, and concealed violence to gain her ends. Ibsen himself described the dialectic of the play as a collision between the 'acquisitive instinct' that "hurries from conquest to conquest": and "the moral consciousness" that "has its roots deep in traditions and in the past generally." It is for this thematic dialectic - the plot - that all the characters of the play are created and assembled.

The histories of the major and minor characters of Rosmersholm are selected not because they actually occurred in 'real life' and are taken from 'interesting individuals' Ibsen encountered, but because they contribute to a structure of metaphoric identities, events, perspectives that build up a richly enlightening dialectic. The plot gathers all the elements of the characters' life-histories and the fictive world in which these are stated to have been acted out, and condenses them into the judgment-day of the play's performed action. Rosmer and Rebecca are ambushed by their pasts and led inexorably to renounce an anticipated future advocating liberation in the political world to subject themselves to the demands of an ancient, evaded, punitive justice. In Rebecca's words as she prepares to end her life, "I am bound by the Rosmer view of life. If I have transgressed, I must atone."  The plot that has rendered this outcome of the story inevitable. The gradual evolution of a consciousness that will view the past events from a devastating new perspective is accompanied at the same time by a grimly ironic, undetected replay of the guilty events. Marvin Carlson has drawn attention to the plot's extraordinary symmetries where both Rosmer and Rebecca fatally re-enact, in sequence, the past histories from which they futilely endeavor to break free. For example, in one re-enactment: "The four specific actions taken by the dead wife are precisely repeated and in order, by Rebecca - indeed, they serve as one basis for the four-act arrangement of the play." [11]

The four actions performed in the past by the dead wife are:

(i) Beate revealed to Kroll that Rosmer is falling into apostasy. Rebecca urges Rosmer to do this in Act One.

(ii) Beate wrote a letter to Mortensgaard to protect Rosmer. Rebecca repeats this action in Act Two;

(iii) Beate hinted to Kroll at a relationship between Rosmer and Rebecca. Rebecca confesses this to Kroll in Act Three.

(iv) Beate threw herself into the millstream as do Rebecca and Rosmer in Act Four.

The plot of the play restructures the elements of the story into a tragic agon of re-enactment whereby these elements now take on clearer dialectical and archetypal identity. The characters, as Carlson notes, are set out in terms of clear ideological opposition:

Conservative Rosmer Kroll Mrs. Helseth Beate		Radical Rebecca Mortensgaard Ulrik Brendel Dr. West
	- - -  -

This opposition extends, metaphorically, into deeper and broader cultural, historical and archetypal dimensions. The individual stories of Rosmer, Rebecca, Kroll, Kroll's wife and children, Mortensgaard, Brendel, Mrs. Helseth, Beate, Dr. West, Rebecca's mother, Rosmer's father, etc., etc., can be extended and speculated upon indefinitely and ultimately to formless infinity by those disposed to this sort of thing; but the plot of the play by its form and compression, prevents this dispersion bynimposing unity and coherence upon the subject matter. This becomes evident, also, in the a:b:b:a symmetry of the plot's act by act progression:

ACT ONE: Evening:
Rosmer's Present.
Rosmer and Rebecca prepare to challenge society.
Ulrik Brendel appears, sharing this challenge Rosmer and Kroll break apart: Rosmer and Rebecca are united.
First suggestion of the dead wife's accusation
Play opens with a reference to the millrace beyond the window.

ACT TWO: Morning:
Rosmer's Past.
Kroll counterattacks.
Brendel also attacked by his companions.
Mortensgaard enlisted on the side of Rosmer.
The dead wife's accusation now openly articulated - by Kroll and Mortensgaard.
Rosmer as himself seen as sexual transgressor.
Rosmer and Rebecca begin to separate.

ACT THREE: Morning:
Rebecca's Past.
Full scale attack upon Rosmer and Rebecca by Kroll and his associates.
Kroll confronts Rebecca with the truth of her 'origins': illegitimate, incestuous relation to her father.
She also is seen as 'seducer' of Kroll, Beate and Rosmer.
Rosmer and Rebecca now seem poles apart.

ACT FOUR: Evening:
Rebecca's Present.

Rosmer and Rebecca give up their challenge to society, contemplating their defeat and separation.
Ulrik Brendel re-appears, sharing their defeat.
Rosmer and Rebecca now re-unite in a marriage and suicide.
Play closes with a reference to the millrace beyond the window.

     No realistic mimesis of everyday modern life would reveal such parallels and symmetries. The histories, inevitably, are inconclusive and incomplete. By containing only those details that will prove serviceable to the plot, they contain very evident lacunae of the kind described by L.C. Knights in 'How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?'. We know nothing of Rosmer's mother, nor precisely why Brendel was horsewhipped from Rosmersholm by Rosmer's father; little of how Mortensgaard's adulterous affair evolved or why Mrs. Helseth so detests Kroll's wife. The plots do not require more details from the story than Ibsen has provided. To search for more is to look outside the play and to abandon critical interpretation for daydreaming.

The dialogue of Rosmersholm's concluding moments closes off one vista after another of previous consciousness as it narrows down to a search for a new precision of motive and moral condition:

ROSMER: Husband and wife must go together.
REBECCA: Just to the footbridge, John.
ROSMER: And onto it as well. As far as you go - I'll go that far with you.
For now I dare to.
REBECCA: Are you sure beyond all doubt - this is the best way for you?
ROSMER: I know it's the only one.
REBECCA: What if you're deceiving yourself. If this is only a fantasy? One
of those white horses of Rosmersholm.
ROSMER: It could well be. We can never escape them - we of this house.
REBECCA: Then stay, John!
ROSMER: The husband shall go with his wife as the wife with her husband.
REBECCA: Yes, but tell me first: Is it you who follow me? Or is it I who follow you?
ROSMER: We can never get to the bottom of that.
REBECCA: I want so much to know.
ROSMER: We follow each other, Rebecca. I, you and you, me.
REBECCA: I believe that could be true.
ROSMER: For now we two are one.
REBECCA: Yes. Now we're one! Let's go gladly!

        The movement of the whole play began by opening up broad vistas of liberating action within the political world and now contracts to this impasse. The audience's attention focuses closely on each mental move by the protagonists. The wide world of opposing political factions, of a cultural war between extremists and their followers on both left and right, and of an envisaged new order transforming the world, has contracted to this couple's final anguished, mutual interrogation which is the quintessence of the play's whole wide-ranging dialectic. The lover-reformers who wished to unite to transform the world are driven to isolation, each from the other within their brooding, ever-more-narrowly circling retrospections. The darkening abyss within each is reflected in the darkness beyond: in the sparsely lit room and beyond, the night with its relentlessly awaiting millstream. These theatrical notations are as precise as in music and are meant to be appreciated as art, as aesthetic control. The pair's plunge into the millstream signals the closing off of the world they envisaged entering and transforming. The plot has manipulated dialogue and scene to this imploding spiritual condition. The vistas opened up by the protagonists' envisaged liberation from the past were, from the beginning, doomed by that past closing in on them inexorably.

VII. Plot and Story in The Master Builder

      In The Master Builder, the plot and its structure reconfigure the fragmentary material offered by the bewildering story in a dialectic directly opposite to the dialectic of inexorable closure of Rosmersholm. Though, again, a nemesis emerges from the action, the result is a progressive expansion of vistas opened up by the play's evolving visual and verbal imagery.  The play's conclusion in sunset with Solness's fall, signifies defeat; but this defeat is countered by the play's final statement - Hilde Wangel's exultant affirmation of victory.  This implies the fall of Solnessi is only part of the total action which includes Hilde's triumphant affirmation.

  The actual and implied details of the story could beget a whole series of novels: the childhoods of Halvard and Aline; their marriage; his career; the breaking of Old Brovik and of other rivals Solness "hammered to the ground"; the birth and brief life of the twins; the fire; Aline's disastrous reaction and later death-in-life; the love of Ragnar and Kaja; her mysterious visit to Solness and later enthrallment; Solness's visit to Lysanger; his climbing the tower and meeting with Hilde Wangel; her home life; his growing alarm about the younger generation. Here, as with the story of Rosmersholm, is a field for endless speculation: but the plot gathers these fragments into a meaningful structure. If we are to appreciate Ibsen as a major dramatic artist we should not ignore the difficult terms of his art.

The main 'arc' of the play is from Solness's tortuous confinement and brooding obsession in the opening scenes to his self-affirmation at the close. The three acts of the plot visually signal a liberation from initial confinement and brooding obsession through a sequence, act by act, of progressively expanding light and space, a visual emancipation of the scene accompanied by an increasing emancipation of metaphoric vistas in the dialogue. In Act One, the scene is an artificially lit, windowless workroom; in Act Two it is a drawing room with large bay windows and flooding light; in Act III it is open air, a verandah, the scene bathed in the light of a sunset. Like the contrasting movement of visual contraction in Rosmersholm (and Hedda Gabler), this visual expansion is repeated in the dialogue and action of the play. The awakening consciousness of Halvard Solness, under the prompting of Hilde Wangel, haltingly but gradually abandons its legacy of guilt and fear of retribution and joins in creating a version of the past which, though it may or may not be what "actually happened" is what "ought to" have happened because it recreates the past more adequately to the heart's desire.

    An empiricist's might object that a plot procedure that seems very cavalier with regard to the actual facts of the story must be wrong; but to 'radical idealist' something momentously right is taking place as the past is transformed through 'creative memory' into a narrative more adequate to the aspiring spirit. These contrasting perspectives on  the play  renders the text itself a violently contested site.  One element of this textual conflict is the openly mythic dimension that asserts itself again the realistic appearance of the action.  Solness (named after the sun) encounters Hilde Wangel at Lysanger ('lys' = light), and on her visit a decade later is challenged to ascend and fall at the autumnal equinox. The elaborate metaphoric detail and patterning in the play involves increasing light and space, a verbal imagery of churches, houses, castles in the air, a fire in winter, dead twins, helpers and servers (both visible and invisible), the collision of youth and maturity, harps in the air, a challenge to the Creator, and so on.  These are 'worked' for metaphoric and archetypal possibility, more than for factual value. Like a kaleidoscope the plot gathers the scattered elements of the story - its 'facts' - for a metaphoric reconfiguration.

     A struggle takes place to establish the dominant language of the play and, by means of the plot, the metaphoric language of Solness and Hilde asserts itself against the pragmatic language of, for example, Dr. Herdal or Ragnar Brovik. Remarkably, the play repeats the same action in each of its three acts: each act beginning with Solness's despairing self-recriminations in which the past seems to overwhelm and defeat him and each ending with his exultant affirmation of an alternative past. With each repetition, the plot gathers more and more of both negative and positive 'content' from the past story.  An incrementally increasing 'positive' past of Solness (the Lysanger ascent, the challenge to the creator and the alliance with the 'princess') is seen to struggle with an incrementally increasing 'negative' past (the fire and death of the twins, Aline's tragedy, the enthrallment of the Broviks and Kaja). This spiritual battle is metaphorically transposed in Hilde's imagination into the image of Solness struggling with the Creator at the top of the tower accompanied, by the sound of harps.

      Hilde brings to Solness a startling story that he is made creatively to recollect and that challenges his own selectively remembered past of guilty triumph and transgression against. Whether Solness acted as Hilde claims is kept ambiguous but the the play shows him accepting and developing the audacious dimensions of her version of the story until it becomes the subversive reality he acknowledges as his own. His "new born eye transforms the old action" of the past.

      Until Hilde's arrival, it was the self-punitive and penitential version of his past that controlled Solness.  This is similar to the constrictive judgment and demand for atonement of Rosmersholm. Against this, Hilde revives and activates the Faustian challenge of the Lysanger ascent. One reading of the play would see Solness destroying himself through a delusional acceptance of Hilde's misreading of past events. From an alternative perspective, he liberates himself by letting the metaphoric or mythopoetic significance of the story take hold of him. The decisive moment of this ambiguous action is at the conclusion of Act Two:

HILDA: (Look searchingly at him) Is it true, or isn't it?
SOLNESS: That I get dizzy?
HILDA: That my master builder dare not - can not climb as high as he builds?
SOLNESS: Is that the way you see it?
HILDA: Yes.
SOLNESS: I'm beginning to feel there's scarcely a corner in me that's safe from you.
HILDA: (Looks toward the bay window.) Up there then. All the way up.
SOLNESS: (Coming closer) In the topmost room in the tower - you could live there, Hilda. You could live like a princess.
HILDA: (Mysteriously, between earnest and jest) Yes, that's what you promised.
SOLNESS: Did I, in fact?
HILDA: Really masterbuilder! You said I was to be a princess. And that I'd get a kingdom from you. And so you took me and - Well!
SOLNESS: (Seriously) Are you quite sure this isn't some kind of dream - some fantasy - that's taken hold of you?
HILDA (Scornfully) That perhaps you didn't do it?
SOLNESS: I scarcely know myself - . (More softly) But one thing I know for certain - that I -
HILDA: That you - Say it now!
SOLNESS: That I ought to have done it.

     The scene concludes with Solness's promise to hang the wreath over his new home: that is to establish, in the present, a triumphant version of the past; to replace a debilitating one. In the modern bourgeois setting Hilda and Solness are validating a semi-mythic fable, of the Lysanger ascent, the towered castle with its princess, the singing in the air, the challenge to the Creator, the passionate embrace. Their ecstatic rewriting of the script of their mutually affirmed 'reality' will undergo further fabulous elaboration in the following Act. We cannot know if any of this recollected past actually happened and the skeptical critic (the play has many) may demur at the mythopoetic extensions of the story Hilda and Solness perform. We witness Solness taking Hilda's story, accepting its 'fabulous' dimensions, and asserting its ideal truth - "I ought to have done it." Whether the events actually happened in the past, their validation is happening now... The final scene of the play, of Solness's ascent of the tower, his challenge to the Creator, watched by Hilde and the crowd of spectators, is not just a recollection, but a re-enactment, of the most subversive elements of the past action.

HILDE (mountains) At beginning of the play	Tower	SOLNESS At Lysanger and the end of the play
SOLNESS (below) (windowless workroom) At beginning of the play	Churchyard	HILDE (below) Among spectators At Lysanger and the end of the play

      Solness and Hilde confront the past, 'remold it nearer to the heart's desire', freeing it from the constrictions of the moral and conventional terms that would oppose their vision. In the struggle for the play's dominant language, the plot's metaphoric and archetypal impulses strain against the tyranny of factual history; and this is true also of the play's final staged action: the tower ascent and the struggle with the Creator that Hilde envisions. Wonder and terror are generated in the onlookers by the somewhat banal act of a middle-aged architect with vertigo climbing a scaffolding while Hilde and the skeptical and resentful Ragnar duel to establish the appropriate language for the event :

HILDA: (With jubilant, quiet intensity) At last! Now I see him great and free again!
RAGNAR: (Almost speechless) But all this -
HILDA: This is how I've seen him all these ten years. How strong he stands! Fearfully thrilling, after all. Look at him! Now he's hanging the wrath on the spire!
RAGNAR: All this I'm seeing here is completely impossible.
HILDA: Yes, it's the impossible, now that he's doing. (With the inscrutable look in her eyes). Can you see anyone else up there with him?
RAGNAR: There's no-one else.
HILDA: Yes, there's someone he's struggling with.
RAGNAR: You're mistaken.
HILDA; Can't you hear singing in he air, either?
RAGNAR: It must be the wind in the treetops.
HILDA: I hear a singing. A powerful singing. (Crying out in joyful exultation) Look, look! Now he's waving his hat. Waving down to us here. Oh, wave back up to him there. For now, now it is fulfilled! (Snatches the white shawl from the doctor, waves it and cries out.) Hurray, for master builder Solness!
DR. HERDAL: Stop! Stop! For God's sake!

     In The Master Builder the attempt to find the adequate expression for what necessarily resists precise formulation opens up the dialogue of the final moments to such imagery as "castles in the air' a 'kingdom' and a battle with the Creator, a "great singing in the air" - dialogue that finds its visual stage counterpart in the sun-streaked sky, the ascending Solness above and, below, the gathered crowd of alarmed or rapt observers and the accompanying music. Against the triumph claimed by Hilda is counterpointed the negative voice of Ragnar and Herdal's alarmed warning as Hilda repeats the Lysanger action of waving the white object (this time Aline's shawl) that signaled the earlier act of worship and dangerous discipleship. Solness falls and is killed which would seem to validate Ragnar and Herdal's view of events: but Hilda's refusal to accept this as defeat - "But he went right to the top. And I heard harps in the air" and the visual symbolism of the ambiguous sunset scene - in striking contrast to the final darkness of Rosmersholm - insists that this is at the least a contested outcome. Retelling the story, it is possible to decide that Hilde is delusional and to see the play as a cautionary tale for middle aged men on encountering youthful sirens. However, to attend to the plot of the play, its evolution on the stage from the opening scene of tormented confinement to the final moments of exultant affirmation by both protagonists, (the expansive action attended by an emphatic on-stage visual and verbal imagery of increasing freedom), is to find such a cautionary reading drastically inadequate to our experience.

      The plot engaged with the past story, gradually discarded its negative content, and allowed its affirmative energies to emerge. The contrast with the plot movement of Rosmersholm could not be more emphatic. In Rosmersholm the re-enactment culminates in an act of freely chosen judgment and expiation upon actions and motives at last more adequately comprehended.  In The Master Builder a constricting and punitive version of the past is replaced by a version that re-asserts the human spirit's ambition for transcendence. The plots of the plays impose coherence upon the scattered details of the past. History is always about the present - about what the present decides to make of the past for its projects for the future. This redemption of the past is the subversive lesson Nietzsche's Zarathustra claimed to have given to humanity.

I taught them to work on the future and redeem with their creation all that has been. To redeem what is past in man and to recreate all "it was" until the will says "Thus I willed it! Thus I shall will it! - this I call redemption and this alone I taught them to call redemption.[12]

  The scenic progression of increasing light and spatial freedom from Act One's windowless space; to the light-filled, bay-windowed room of Act Two; to the final open air and splendid sunset of Act Three should encourage us to respond, imaginatively, to the dimensions of the play's multilayered action.   The diurnal and seasonal rhythms of the sun's rising and setting; the biological and contrast between generations, old and young; the wasteland theme of energies atrophied and sickly where, in a reversal of the Sleeping Beauty legend, the young 'princess' enters the enchanted realm, frees the young lovers, (Ragnar and Kaja) while releasing the old hero from his torment, to take his leave splendidly, like a superb setting of the sun demand that we see the play imaginatively. The texture of the play has the glancing, shifting quality of shot silk as the action moves through many dimensions of reality at the same time to its unnervingly ambiguous climax.  We should not look for what the play 'means' but appreciate what, as a consummate work of art, it does.