Ibsen's Dialectical Method

A
The 'given world' outside the theater: its false
'ordinary' consciousness made up of alienated history.
This 'everyday' world and its discontents is massively unaware of the
historical, cultural, spiritual, biological, natural, cosmic, 'archetypal' forces,
both 'negatively' limiting our world but also 'positively' surrounding it with
the neglected (repressed) presence of a more adequate human-spiritual creative functioning.
The Cycle will select its 'stories' or 'material' (B) from the 'unexamined' facts and fictions of this world.
This world, recreated in the theatre, must (C) through the plot be infiltrated, invaded, by the excluded powers.
 

B (The Story)
Ibsen creates stories of the human spirit's actions in the world; of transgressions, conflicts, events, all of which occurred arbitrarily in the past and are now recreated through actions in the present. These actions create the 'story' for the dialectic of the plot to work upon. The plot is not there to tell the story but to interrogate it. The story brings to crisis ideas and conventions the world takes to be normal or transgressive - the world as a prison of the spirit, the 'unawakened dead' that has betrayed our spiritual heritage and right to truth and freedom. The story told of actions committed unreflectively which now are re-enacted and understood for the first time.

  

C (The Plot)
Norway re-invented, in Ibsen's theatre as a space where the excluded archetypal powers can manifest themselves through the dialectic of the plot. First, by subverting everyday reality's Claim to be the 'truth' of our existence. This Claim must be unmasked as an elaborate lie or self-deception, imprisoning our potentially free, authentic, adequate human functioning; revealing fatal contradictions in 'B''s account of itself under rigorous analysis. Second by calling on the buried powers, having them invade, haunt and overthrow false reality that we might speak a more adequate 'language' 'act' a more authentic human existence. This more free adequate 'archetypal dimension is the Supertext.