The Ibsen Phenomenon

Ibsen and World Literature
by Brian Johnston

II. London and Paris

The hostility with which practitioners and defenders of the traditional drama greeted Ibsen’s plays was not surprising. More surprising was the intensity, scale, and duration of that hostility, lasting decades. Performing an Ibsen play was considered virtually an insurrectionary act and Ibsen became the most vilified, championed, talked and written about individual in Europe. Divisions appeared even in the ranks of Ibsen’s champions, where, for example, he was differently perceived in Britain and France. The almost ‘‘exclusively moral’’ emphasis of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ commentary remarked by Henry James, meant that in Britain Ibsen’s plays were seen primarily as trenchant criticisms of contemporary life. As a consequence, the plays were praised for their realism, while their symbolic and poetic qualities mostly were ignored.

George Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891,1913) encouraged an idea of Ibsen as a writer of ‘problem plays’ concerned with eradicating the social and ethical ills of middle-class culture. As early as 1907, in America, Jennette Lee protested against this interpretation. ‘‘The conception of a problem play as one in which some problem of modern life is discussed by the characters and worked out in the plot is foreign to Ibsen, as to all great artists.’’11 Her prescient study, The Ibsen Secret, focused on the symbolism of the plays, this being the ‘secret’ she claimed for his art. She fastened upon the presence of a single symbolic object at the centre of each play, unifying the play’s details and constituting a ‘key’ to its meaning.

[Ibsen’s] work gives, first and foremost, a sense of intense reality – of actuality even. It is not until later that a hidden intent is guessed, and when this intention is traced to its source, the symbols discovered are original. Each of them – the pistol, the tarantella, the wild duck, the white horses, the rotten ship – reveals perfectly that for which it stands. They originate in Ibsen’s imagination, and serve his purpose because they are the concrete images of his thought.12

Lee rescues Ibsen from the realm of ‘social problem’ literature into which both hostile critics and enthusiasts confined it by insisting on an affinity between his art and that of other major imaginative artists, past and present.. Her Ibsen shares company, not with John Stuart Mill and the social reformers but with major poets and artists like Dante, Shakespeare, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Richard Wagner:

No one familiar with Wagnerian opera and with Ibsen’s dramatic form can fail to be struck by the kinship between the two.13 Wagner’s Motives are musical characters as Ibsen’s are pictorial…14 It is the close connection of plot and character and symbol that makes Ibsen’s plays as perfect and unique and satisfying in the realm of dramatic art as are the operas of Wagner in that of music.15 Towards this symbol the ostensible action of the play moves, and from it, it recedes. This object or event – as the tarantella – also stands for the character of the play, whose soul is the stage of the real action of the play; and thus the symbol stands, at last, for the play itself.16

The Ibsen Secret is somewhat limited by its insistence on the single, unifying symbol within each play, rather than seeing a whole play as suffused with metaphoric and symbolic detail: nevertheless, her imaginative account of Ibsen’s art still needs to be absorbed into Ibsen interpretation.

Pascale Casanova, in The World Republic of Letters, remarks how ‘‘the translation, interpretation and consecration of Ibsen’s work in England and France furnish a superb example of the different ways an author’s work may be annexed by two literary capitals having discrepant interests in embracing it…seen as models of realism on one side of the Channel, of Symbolism on the other…’’17 She examines the way in which authors from peripheral cultures acquire recognition and legitimacy in what Goethe termed the ‘‘universal world market of exchange.’’18 Writers from literatures outside major cultural and ‘legitimating’ centers as Paris and London are particularly likely to be metamorphosed according to the dominant agendas of the host culture. London’s theater culture lagged considerably behind that of Paris, its theatrical fare consisting mostly of bowdlerized adaptations of Parisian wellmade- plays. The champions of the New Drama in England therefore sought to establish an independent native drama that better reflected the realities of Britain’s modern, industrial-capitalist society. Casanova observes of Shaw:

[His] subversive political views, which led him to adopt realism and naturalism as methods of social criticismin challenging the aesthetic and moral close-mindedness of the English theater, together with the Independent Theatre’s acknowledged debt to Antoine’s Théâtre-Libre, which was famously associated with Zola, thereby encouraged a ‘‘social’’ interpretation of Ibsen’s work by members of the English avant-garde – the only interpretation, they felt, that was capable of doing justice to both its novelty and its modernity while also remaining fairly close to the modernist aims of the Norwegian dramatist.19

In France, by contrast, the Théâtre Libre’s naturalist interpretation of Ibsen was giving way to an appreciation of the plays as Symbolist in the manner of Maurice Maeterlinck. Even in England, A.C. Swinburne, in 1892, had deplored ‘‘the Ibsen and Maeterlinck ideal of dramatic dialogue.’’20 and Maeterlinck himself, in 1897, was to praise the simultaneous ‘‘interior and exterior’’ dialogues of The Master Builder.21 Aurelian Lugne´-Poe’s Théâtre del’Oeuvre, founded in Paris in 1893, enlisted Ibsen in the ranks of the Symbolists. According to Casanova, for his production of The Lady from the Sea, he ‘‘inaugurated a new style of acting, solemn and monotone, whose emphasis on speaking lines slowly…had the effect of making the text seem unreal.’’22 The production was a success and when Lugne´-Poe brought his Ibsen interpretations to Scandinavia the critical reception, including that of Ibsen himself, was generally favorable. Shaw gave qualified praise for the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre’s production of Peer Gynt in Paris in1896; and though Lugné-Poe was later to rein in the extravagant excesses of his Symbolist effects and settle for a more realistic performance style, the perception of Symbolist dimensions to Ibsen’s art provided a useful corrective to the relentlessly ‘realistic’ emphasis of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ commentary. In both London and Paris, as Casanova observes, ‘‘…[authors} from the periphery are able to obtain recognition in the leading capitals only at the cost of seeing their work appropriated by the literary establishment for its own purposes.’’23

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11 Jennette Lee, The Ibsen Secret: A Key to the Prose Dramas of Henrik Ibsen (1907)
(reprint, Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2001), 9
12 Ibid, 54
13 Ibid, 105,
14 Ibid, 108
15 Ibid. 109
16 Ibid. 56
17 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, translated by M.B. DeBevoise,
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2004) 157
18 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 14.
19 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 161
20 J.W. McFarlane, Ed., Ibsen, A Critical Anthology, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, Ltd. 1970) 146
21 Michael Meyer, Ibsen, A Biography (New York: Double3day & Company 1971) 700
22 Pascal Casanova, 162
23 Ibid. 161