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Play
It Again: Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot III. The Plot-Story Ratio in Ibsen Ibsen's realist plays are structured similarly . In Ghosts, Rosmersholm, The Master Builder, events and actions arbitrarily occurring in the past are the material for the tragic agon of a mental re-enactment and interrogation in the present that reveals their tragic structure. As earlier events extensively unfolding arbitrarily over many years, they now are tragically re-enacted intensively in the mind within the condensed time of the performance. Events recollected from the past take the form of mental agons on-stage: intense realities of the present understood only now in the light of newly awakened consciousness. Past events take on reality only as objects of present consciousness, the past's sole means of existence. As the past can be validated only by present consciousness it is present consciousness; it is only what present consciousness makes of it. The past, (history) always is being rewritten because it exists significantly only insofar as it is validated by the present. 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.”
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 often exhibiting rich variety of detail.. Reconfigured as retrospective plots reveals ‘closed' structures of inevitable conflict, dialectical determinism, even nemesis within the 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. 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 recidivisms 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.
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