The Ibsen Phenomenon

Ibsen and World Literature
by Brian Johnston

III. Ibsen and Ireland

Casanova sees striking parallels between the situation of Ibsen in Norway and James Joyce in Ireland. Norway, colonized by Denmark culturally and by Sweden politically, like Ireland colonized politically and culturally by England, found itself also caught up in major issues of language. Landsmål influenced by German nationalist romanticism, ‘‘sought to put rural traditions at the heart of aesthetic concerns.’’ 24 Ibsen, like other Norwegian folklorists, set out on a cultural journey both imaginatively and actually, to gather the folk material that found its way in such plays as Olaf Liliekrans and Peer Gynt. However, he later abandoned the cultural nationalism of his earlier career and set out to link the literature of his country with that of modern Europe: to ‘‘awaken the people and lead them to take a larger view of the world’’25. The parallel with Joyce is remarkably close: the path that took Ibsen to create the ‘world-historical drama Emperor and Galilean and the twelve-play Realist Cycle was an act of cultural liberation from provincialism involving voluntary exile, that anticipated James Joyce's intellectualecolution, later..

Although the Irish George Bernard Shaw emphasized the social utility of Ibsen’s plays, the intellectual life of Ireland itself took on a different aspect altogether. A major strain of Irish nationalism was the ‘Celtic Twilight’ that attempted to shake off English hegemony through a Gaelic renaissance in poems, plays and novels based on Irish folklore. Ibsen’s own early nationalist work drew upon the repository of myth and archetypes buried, he believed, within Norwegian folk-consciousness. To ‘mine’ this buried cultural ore he created a dramatic sequence, Lady Inger of Østraat, The Feast at Solhaug, Olaf Liliekrans and The Vikings at Helgeland that, in a form of literary archaeology, excavated deeper and deeper layers of past Norwegian identity. Irish Nationalists like William Butler Yeats would have found this early phase of Ibsen’s career completely congenial.

As Edward Said noted, in Culture and Imperialism,26 in order to escape the degraded modernity of colonized Ireland Yeats invented a mythopoetic Ireland ‘‘amenable to his imagination’’ that, he believed, was shared with an imagined Irish people responsive to his program of the literary recovery of Gaelic legends. This is not unlike early work by Ibsen such as Olaf Liliekrans, whose ingredients resemble those favored by the Celtic Twilight. However, the Ibsen that Yeats encountered in the 1880’s was the author of so-called‘problem plays,’ championed by Archer and Shaw, who supposedly shone the hard light of his analytic method onto the non-poetic surface of modern reality. Yeats deplored the ‘joyless and pallid words’ of the literary movement he saw Ibsen inaugurating and towards which he was to remain permanently hostile.. In Plays and Controversies he records his dismay at witnessing the epoch-making performance of Ghosts at the Independent Theater on March 13 1891. His account notably contrasts with Shaw’s exultation at the event.

At the first performance of Ghosts I could not escape from an illusion unaccountable to me at the time. All the characters seemed to me less than life-size; the stage, though it was but the little Royalty stage, seemed larger I had ever seen it. Little whimpering puppets moved here and there in the middle of that great abyss. Why did they not speak out with louder voices or move with freer gestures? What was it that weighed on their souls perpetually? Certainly they were all in prison, and yet there was no prison. 27

In those references to the ‘great abyss’ and the ‘prison’ Yeats seems actually to have responded, if unconsciously, to Ibsen’s powerfully metaphoric art. Despite his appreciation of Maeterlinck and the French Symbolists, Yeats seems never to have discerned the symbolist dimension to Ibsen’s realism emphasized by Lugne´-Poe’s productions of the plays in France. Nor did he overcome his antipathy to Ibsen’s drama.

In this, his attitude was strikingly the opposite of his fellow Irishman, James Joyce who, from his schoolboy reading of Ibsen’s plays to the end of his life, maintained an admiration that amounted to discipleship. Richard Ellman noted that Joyce ‘‘found in the works of Ibsen a model for his own ideals of blunt subject-matter, artistic self-possession, and symbolically ordered work.’’28 In 1901, in a letter to the Irish National Theater, 'The Day of the Rabblement’ Joyce deplored the pusillanimity of the theater directors (including Yeats) who feared producing presenting Ibsen, Tolstoy or Hauptmann due to a ‘‘surrender to the trollsO´ of popular nationalism.29 A year later, Joyce and Yeats met in London and, in the course of the conversation, ‘‘the 20-year-old who so passionately admired the realism of Ibsen told his 37-year–old host that the latter’s recent plays based on Irish folklore showed that he was ‘deteriorating’.’’30

Unlike the British Ibsenists, Joyce saw Ibsen not as a polemicist and scold of conventional middle-class-morality nor as a writer of ‘problem plays’ but as an artist of almost awesome refinement and aloofness, to be placed in the same company as his favorite author, Dante. In his article on When We Dead Awaken Joyce insisted that the main interest of an Ibsen play was ‘‘the naked drama-either the perception of a great truth, or the opening up of a great question, or a great conflict which is almost independent of the conflicting actors, and has been and is of far-reaching importance’’.31 Joyce also responded to the emotional as well as the intellectual power of Ibsen’s work. During a performance of Ghosts in Trieste, for example, ‘‘when Osvald began to go mad Joyce writhed in pain in his seat and made wild gestures.’’32 Joyce never ceased to champion the cause of Ibsen. To Professor Siegmund Feilbogen, who employed him as a translator, ‘‘Joyce proved Ibsen’s superiority to Shakespeare so eloquently that he won Feilbogen over.’’33 This was in 1915, and Joyce’s admiration for Ibsen remained to the end. Transmogrified references to ‘‘the old masterbilker’’ and his works erupt throughout the arcane text of Finnegans Wake and in his correspondence Joyce frequently compared himself to Ibsen.34

As Casanova comments:

’’Joyce’s admiration for Ibsen was …a form of identification with a playwright from a small country recently liberated from political domination, writing in a language that was almost unknown in Europe, who gave form to a new national literature and at the same time became the spokesman of the European avant-garde by revolutionizing the whole of European theater. It is for this reason that Ulysses can be read, among other things, as a Dublin version of Peer Gynt.’’35

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24 Ibid. 158
25 Ibsen:
26 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, (New York 1993) 227
27 W. B.Yeats, Plays and Controversies (London; Macmillan, 1923) 121–22.
28 Richard Ellman, ed. Selected Letters of James Joyce (New York: The Viking Press 1975) 3.
29 James A Joyce, The Day of the Rabblement) (Letter, October 15 1901
30 Keith Alldritt,ˆW. B. Yeats, The Man and the Milieu, (New York, Clarkson Potter, 1997) 198
31 James Joyce, ‘When We Dead Awaken’, Fortnightly Review, Vol. 73 (London: 1900
32 Richard Ellman, James Joyce (OxfordUniversity Press 1983) 54
33 Ibid. 398
34 Richard Ellman, ed. Selected Joyce Letters cf. 103, 121, 125, 142
35 Casanova 249