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Play
It Again: Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot
IV. The Plot a Liberating Re-enactment of the Story As in Oedipus tyrannos, these past events or precedent plots, now take the form of mentally re-enacted agons on-stage. Recollected urgently by the plot, they become intense realities of the present only, transformed now in the light of newly awakened consciousness. Past events take on reality only as objects of present consciousness. It is only in present consciousness that the past can exist (there is no other way it can manifest itself. The past, therefore,is present consciousness only; only what present consciousness makes of it. And this present consciousness transforms the old events into a new reality. As Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman proclaims:
And it is because of this capacity for the newborn eye to transform the old action that the plot, in Sophokles and Ibsen, asserts a human freedom over the inevitable structure of the past. Oedipus cannot change his past: but he can, and does, freely decide tragically to know and acknowledge it, against the urgent advice of Tiresias and Jocasta. It is the function of the plots to bring about a vivid resurrection and recreation of past events, which are then experienced as mental actions in the immediate present . This means that the essential actions in Ibsen's plays take place within the characters' minds. In Jennette Lee's words:
The
stories represent an area of the arbitrary, the accidental and
external, the realm of seemingly free, spontaneous actions often
exhibiting rich variety of detail. It is only when they are reconfigured
as plots that the events of the stories reveal the 'closed' structures
of inevitable conflict, logical necessity, design, nemesis. 2.
The Ibsen Secret, 95 |
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