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Realism
and A Doll House
by Brian Johnston
I.
Realism and A Doll House
For
the first half of his career, Ibsen wrote mainly poetic and historical
dramas, but it is the Realist Cycle
- twelve plays of modern life - that made him famous. This realist drama
evolved from the poetic and historical dramas and continues their themes
and often their situations and characters. Theatre audiences today come
to Ibsen's Realism not from the Romanticism from which it emerged but
from a later realistic tradition that has discarded the ambitious perspectives
of Romantic art thatIbsen's realism retains. This means we tend to see
and perform Ibsen reductively, small scale, as if his drama was pioneering
work in the modest task of reproducing the reality of the world around
us instead, as is the case, of offering a radical counter-discourse
to it.
It is useful to keep in mind a distinction,
familiar to painting, between the 'realist' and the 'realistic'. The
'realistic' has always been with us since classical times throughout
a number of genres and styles; in the accurate rendition of persons
and objects. 'Realist' art, on the other hand, was a distinct stylistic
approach, as in Impressionism, which subjected reality to a highly demanding
aesthetic discipline. The artwork did not seek to render on the canvas
a facsimile of reality: instead it subjected reality to the transformative
recreation of the aesthetic discipline.
Ibsen's frequently dyspeptic comments on the world he found himself
in should lead us to question the idea that he sought to render faithfully
the experience of our everyday reality. Ibsen method was not to
imitate Norwegian reality but to reinvent it: - as a metaphoric
and histrionic space that could never exist in actuality. The great
difficulty Ibsen's art set itself was not to get his dramatic characters
to act and speak like modern men and women: it was to get them to embody
a new kind of poetry where archetypes from our cultural past
could invade and agitate his scenes of modern life. In the words of
his son, Sigurd Ibsen, "art gives liberty of action to forces and
possibilities to which life does not grant the chance of coming into
their rights." These forces and possibilities could exist only
under the peculiarly controlled conditions of art. This is one of the
principal strategies of modernist art: as in the art of Ibsen's lifelong
admirer, James Joyce.
When we acknowledge this we will discover that many of the seeming 'implausibilities'
of A Doll House, which directors might at first wish to cover
up, are deliberate aesthetic strategies of an art that is bringing on
stage forces and possibilities that off stage reality excludes. One
example that I will elaborate later is the uncanny way the 'world of
the play' responds to the triple iteration of the word 'wonderful' where,
on two occasions in Act One, the doorbell rings when it is uttered,
each time bringing on just those characters who will ensure that
idea of the wonderful will not take place. This obviously is more an
occult than a realistic timing.
In an Ibsen play the dramatic plot is a deliberately subversive perspective
brought to bear upon the idea of reality conveyed by the play's story.
By plot, we mean the sequence and arrangements of events on the stage
between the beginning and the end of the stage action. This is what
Aristotle meant when he described the dramatist as a maker of plots,
not a teller of stories. The story is the material which the plot will
significantly reshape into aesthetic significance before our eyes as
we watch the performance. It is not Nora and Torvald's life story that
we should focus on but what the play's three-act plot structure will
do with that story: the emphases, manipulations, artistic structuring
to which the plot submits the story. To interpret a play like A Doll
House by re-assembling the story behind the plot's structure is
as if one were to interpret a painting by Manet by trying to recreate
some hypothetical photographic "real object" behind it.
One still
hears that Ibsen's 'plot-driven' method does violence to our experience
of everyday reality. The point is, of course, that it is supposed to!
There even are attempts to tinker with the plot, even to
interpolate elements into it - a practice that, if one were to attempt
it with, say, a Beethoven string quartet, would provoke ostracism from
the musical community where the art form is taken seriously. If, like
naïve interpreters, one imagines the cast of characters of A
Doll House to be real, living men and women, the sheer plethora
of potential details would crowd upon and crush the stage and the play
could not proceed. Their ancestors, parents, siblings, acquaintances,
all of whom would impinge on actual life, would have to be accommodated.
Their physical conditions, internal and external, their unceasing subconscious
life, would all have a right to be represented. Otherwise, the artist
already is severely distorting the reality he or she claims to be reproducing.
Once one allows the principle of aesthetic selectivity one already has
separated art irremediably from reality. To accept this fundamental
principle of the realist - or any - aesthetic is to admit the necessary
artificiality of the enterprise. This makes absurd the tendency to morally
judge fictional characters. These characters are brought into being
for their indispensable function within the total aesthetic structure.
It is the height of absurdity to 'psycho-analyze' or morally condemn
them as if they had any choice in the matter!
Ibsen's theatrical method plays by the most difficult rules of any dramatist:
He has to create, within the confines of modern drawing rooms, huge
archetypal conflicts behind the rhythms and images of everyday life:
keeping to his actions of believable motives, entrances, exits, while
at the same time get getting the great ghosts, the powers, to invade
his plays as in séances. And the result has to be, as in a taut
musical structure, a work of controlled symmetry: in A Doll
House, a three act structure, each act containing its own peripety
and anagnorisis while enacting a progressively evolving dialectic in
three stages.
When interpreting or performing an Ibsen play we should search out,
from within its structure it's aesthetic terms of existence: what makes
it a work of art. The plot of the play, is not an unfortunate recidivism
to the well-made-play format that Ibsen so detested: the plot is the
organizing principle of his art. In A Doll House, it forms a
dialectic, in three acts, each act building to its own crisis
of peripety (reversal) and anagnorisis - perception. The average Norwegian
housewife of the 19th. Century was not likely to undergo three major
peripeties and anagnoreses in three days. Nor would that housewife find
all the characters around her, and their actions, carefully programmed,
on cue, to bring this about, while themselves following the same dialectic
trajectory!
As the second play of a 12-play Cycle, A Doll House is only one
stage of a long dialectical evolution that does not end until the last
play, When We Dead Awaken. Only by knowing the whole Cycle will
one be able to 'see' A Doll House adequately. Like all the plays
in the Cycle, therefore, the play has a double life:
(a) As part of
a huge completed design, the Collected Plays on the shelf, which Ibsen
asked us to read in the order in which they were written, to see "the
mutual connections between the plays"
(b) As the show we are putting on now, to be brought alive and re-interpreted
before a contemporary, first night audience without reference to the
Cycle.
A Doll House charts the possibility of the spiritual 'awakening'
of both Torvald and Nora; for both live in an illusory 'doll
house' idea of the world. Those who know Brand will recognize
this attractive young couple as Einar and Agnes - who have now married
and set up home and have their 'awakening' to reality yet to come. This
pair needs to be ejected from its illusory "Eden" and there
is a 'satanic' character Krogstad, provided for this service! If it
is Nora who awakens from a doll existence first, it is because it is
she, not Torvald, has been put through the violent shocks of the three
days. But the play ends with Torvald, and the possibility of his awakening
too.
This is less the mimesis of everyday reality than a carefully organized
dialectic game that has strict rules and sets itself difficulties
which raise the method to the level of major art. This is true of all
major drama, which gets us to accept the terms of the game because the
'pay-off' will be worthwhile. One of the rules of the game is to get
rid of everything irrelevant to the central action: to omit details
that do not serve the function of the work. As in painting, this involves
a selectivity that not only ignores or distorts things 'out there' that
don't serve the composition, but also requires incorporating elements,
not 'out there,' that are essential to it.
All dramas have 'gaps' which exclude elements irrelevant to the game
being played. As Aristotle noted, in Sophokles' Oedipus Tyrannous,
Oedipus and Jocasta seem not once to have discussed the nature of the
death of Laius, or their own extraordinary pasts, before the fateful
day of the plot. That huge implausibility of the story, outside
the plot, is needed to get the tragedy going. Within the structure of
the plot, however, the play exhibits a devastating logic. Shakespeare's
plays even have implausible plots, which we are willing to overlook
because the pay-off, the human drama that emerges through the expressive
verse rhetoric, is so compelling.
Ibsen's realist plays are more plausibly plotted, but there still will
be some very strange gaps. Thus, Torvald seems to have no parents, Nora
has no mother, Dr. Rank dies on cue, almost, and Christine Linde will
have her Act Three reconciliation with Krogstad in the Helmer home,
of all implausible places. Implausible, but metaphorically significant:
to juxtapose the tragically separated couple, below, who will join in
free union, with the dancing united couple, above, who will descend
to tragically separate. These are some of the many necessary shaping
devices - manipulations of reality - needed for the game Ibsen is playing.
Ibsen shapes his play to bring out certain large, archetypal conflicts
and presences. To do the big things, he will overlook some small things.
Minor dramatists take very great care of the small things and miss the
big ones. Ibsen's games play by the most difficult rules of any dramatist:
creating, within modern drawing rooms, large archetypal conflicts behind
images of everyday life. He must all the while sustain his actions of
plausible modern realistic motives, actions, dialogues, entrances, exits,
and yet still get the great ghosts, the archetypal powers, to invade
his plays.
As a play about spiritual rebirth within the modern world, its action
is set at Christmas - a time of symbolic regeneration; of the death
of the old year and the birth of the new. This seasonal feast, in Norway,
is given the pagan name of 'Yule (jul) and has the pagan associations
of feasting, dancing, gifts and the good life in material terms: the
pleasures of the senses, of beauty, art. But Christmas is a major event
in the Christian calendar, and Christianity celebrates quite opposite
values to the pagan: of renouncing this world, of sacrifice, of suffering.
It is earth renouncing, reverencing allegiance to values that are not
of this world.
Two couples, therefore, experience this 'turning point' of the year
in radically different ways. One couple has the pagan names of Torvald
(Thor) and Nora (Eleonora = Helen). Torvald, like Einar the artist in
Brand, adopts an 'aesthetic' attitude towards reality and the
play associates him with a preoccupation with costume, music, dancing,
'appearance,' aesthetic propriety: even on the aesthetics of emboirdery
versus knitting! The pagan tradition has been resurrected within the
Christian feast, and, reverences this world, its season of the yule
tree, the gifts, the tarantella dance, the feasting; and this goes along
with the young couple's whole outlook on life: the emphasis on joy,
the beauty of physical things, aesthetic values: The fantasies they
build up for each other in their doll house, of the heroic Torvald and
his beautiful bride-wife, derive from a pagan joy in this world and
its possibilities. But, like Einar and Agnes in Brand, they are
"dancing over an abyss" and do not know it.
The other couple, Christine and Krogstad, might be called the world's
insulted and injured that have lived through the 'sorrow' that Nora
wants her world to be "free of" (sorgløs). Their outlook
on the world, with Christine's life of sacrifice for others and Krogstad's
of guilt and painful expiation, is the 'Christian' one which will get
its wonderful reward this Christmas. These identities seem located in
their names: Christ-ine Linde (Kristine) and Nils Krog-stad. [1]
In the last act we have the two worlds vertically juxtaposed: the pagan
couple are heard dancing, 'above,' just before their world is about
to be smashed up : while the Christian couple, Kristine and Krogstad,
below, effect their 'miraculous' mutual salvation.[2] In this play Krogstad
will be 'redeemed' by Christine. In the contrasting names and actions
of the two couples, therefore, Ibsen already has hinted at other dimensions
assembling behind the modest seeming characters and their domestic setting.
These, and other discreet metaphoric presences make up what I have called
the Supertext that creates the
expanding dimensions of the Cycle. Ibsen called his plays poems and
the best way to approach A Doll House is to see it organized as intricately
and as imaginatively as the best poems.
The tragic action of Torvald and Nora also seems to re-enact
a well known Greek play about a marriage - Euripides' Alcestis,
in which a wife 'dies' to save her husband, as Nora, 'figuratively'
does in Act II when she decides on suicide to spare her husband. The
imagery of the play is first her death by drowning, and then, with the
tarantella dance, the death from the poison of the tarantula spider.
Nora's Greek-derived name now begins to be suggestive. When she finally
rebels against, not only her husband but also her whole society, she
takes on the identity of another Greek heroine, Antigone. In these first
four plays in the Cycle, the Greek ghosts are crowding back into the
modern world. Ibsen, in fact, is doing something which such modernists
as Thomas Mann, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, were to do after
him: of rediscovering archetypes of our communal psyche within the banalities
of everyday consciousness..
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1.
Krog seems derived from the world for 'crooked' or tricky - satanic
aspects; and Nicholas [Nils] already has made a diabolic appearance
in The Pretenders. Krogstad, of course, is only seemingly 'diabolic'.
2. This recreates the scene in Brand where Einar and Agnes are
dancing above an abyss just before they encounter the Christian priest,
Brand, who will smash up their child-like world.
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