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Play It Again: Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot
by Brian Johnston

IX. Plot and Story in The Master Builder

In The Master Builder the plot and its structure reconfigure the fragmentary material offered by the bewildering story in a way opposite to the movement of inexorable closure of Rosmersholm. The actual and implied details of the story proliferate so diffusely they could beget a whole series of novels: the childhood's of Halvard and Aline; their marriage; his career; the breaking of Old Brovik and of other rivals Solness "hammered to the ground"; the birth and brief life of the twins; the fire; Aline's disastrous reaction and later death-in-life; the love of Ragnar and Kaja; her mysterious visit to Solness and later enthrallment; Solness's visit to Lysanger; his climbing the tower and meeting with Hilde Wangel; her home life; his growing alarm about the younger generation. Here, as with the story of Rosmersholm, is a field for endless speculation and daydreaming: but the plot of the play gathers these fragments into meaningful patterns.

The main 'arc' of the play is from Solness's tortuous confinement and brooding obsession in the opening scenes to his self-affirmation at the close. The three acts of the plot visually signal a liberation from initial confinement and brooding obsession through a sequence, act by act, of progressively expanding light and space, a visual emancipation of the scene accompanied by an increasing emancipation of metaphoric vistas in the dialogue. In Act One, the scene is an artificially lit, windowless workroom; in Act Two it is a drawing room with large bay windows and flooding light; in Act III it is open air, a verandah, the scene bathed in the light of a sunset. And, like the contrasting movement of visual contraction in Rosmersholm (and Hedda Gabler), this visual expansion is repeated in the dialogues and actions of the play. The awakening consciousness of Halvard Solness, under the prompting of Hilde Wangel, haltingly but gradually abandons its legacy of guilt and fear of retribution and joins in creating a version of the past which, though it may or may not be what "actually happened" is what "ought to" have happened because it recreates the past more adequately to the heart's desire.

From an empiricist's standpoint a plot procedure that seems very cavalier with regard to the actual facts of the story:must be wrong; but something momentously right is taking place from the 'radical idealist' view as the past is transformed through 'creative memory' into a narrative more adequate to the aspiring spirit. The text of the play itself is being contested from these contrasting standpoints. Details such as Solness's (named after the sun) encountering Hilde Wangel at Lysanger ('lys' = light), being challenged to rise and fall at the autumnal equinox; the whole immensely elaborate metaphoric detail and patterning in the play involving increasing light and space, a verbal imagery of churches, houses, castles in the air, a fire in winter, dead twins, helpers and servers (both visible and invisible), the collision of youth and maturity, harps in the air, a challenge to the Creator, - and so on are now being 'worked' for liberating metaphoric and archetypal possibility, more than for factual value. The plot, like a kaleidoscope, gathers the scattered elements of the story - its 'facts' - for a metaphoric reconfiguration.

A struggle takes place to establish the dominant language of the play and, by means of the plot, the metaphoric language of Solness and Hilde asserts itself against the pragmatic language of, for example, Dr. Herdal or Ragnar Brovik. Remarkably, the play repeats the same action in each of its three acts: each act beginning with Solness's despairing self-recriminations in which the past seems to overwhelm and defeat him and each ending with his exultant affirmation of an alternative past. Withj each repetition, the plot gathers more and more of both negative and positive 'content' from the past story.  An incrementally increasing 'positive' past of Solness (the Lysanger ascent, challenge to the creator and alliance with the 'princess') is seen to struggle with an incrementally increasing negative past. This spiritual battle is metaphorically transposed in Hilde's imagination into the image of Solness struggling with the Creator at the top of the tower accompanied, by the sound of harps.

Hilde brings to Solness a startling story that he is made creatively to recollect and then to link challengingly with his own selectively remembered past of guilty triumph and transgression against Aline. Whether Solness acted as Hilde claims is kept ambiguous but the the play shows him accepting and developing the audacious dimensions of her version of the story until it becomes a subversive reality that he acknowledges as his own. His "new born eye transforms the old action" of the story.

Until Hilde's arrival, it was the self-punitive and penitential version of his past that controlled Solness: similar to the constrictive judgment and demand for atonement of Rosmersholm. Against this, Hilde revives and activates the Faustian challenge of the Lysanger ascent. One reading of the play would see Solness destroying himself through a delusional acceptance of Hilde's misreading of past events. From an alternative perspective, he liberates himself by letting the metaphoric or mythopoetic significance of the story take hold of him. The decisive moment of this ambiguous action is at the conclusion of Act Two:

HILDA: (Look searchingly at him) Is it true, or isn't it?
SOLNESS: That I get dizzy?
HILDA: That my master builder dare not - can not climb as high as he builds?
SOLNESS: Is that the way you see it?
HILDA: Yes.
SOLNESS: I'm beginning to feel there's scarcely a corner in me that's safe from you.
HILDA: (Looks toward the bay window.) Up there then. All the way up.
SOLNESS: (Coming closer) In the topmost room in the tower - you could live there, Hilda. You could live like a princess.
HILDA: (Mysteriously, between earnest and jest) Yes, that's what you promised.
SOLNESS: Did I, in fact?
HILDA: Really masterbuilder! You said I was to be a princess. And that I'd get a kingdom from you. And so you took me and - Well!
SOLNESS: (Seriously) Are you quite sure this isn't some kind of dream - some fantasy - that's taken hold of you?
HILDA (Scornfully) That perhaps you didn't do it?
SOLNESS: I scarcely know myself - . (More softly) But one thing I know for certain - that I -
HILDA: That you - Say it now!
SOLNESS: That I ought to have done it.

The scene concludes with Solness's promise to hang the wreath over his new home: that is to establish, in the present, a triumphant version of the past; to replace a debilitating one. In the modern bourgeois setting Hilda and Solness are validating a semi-mythic fable, of the Lysanger ascent, the towered castle with its princess, the singing in the air, the challenge to the Creator, the passionate embrace. Their ecstatic rewriting of the script of their mutually affirmed 'reality' will undergo further fabulous elaboration in the following Act. We cannot know if any of this recollected past actually happened and the skeptical critic (and the play has many) may demur at the mythopoetic extensions of the story Hilda and Solness perform. We witness Solness taking Hilda's story, accepting its 'fabulous' dimensions, and asserting its ideal truth - "I ought to have done it." Whether the events actually happened in the past, their validation is happening now... The final scene of the play, of Solness's ascent of the tower, his challenge to the Creator, watched by Hilde and the crowd of spectators, is not just a recollection, but a re-enactment, of the most subversive elements of the past action.

Solness and Hilde confront the past and 'remold it nearer to the heart's desire', freeing it from the constrictions of the moral and imaginative norms that would oppose them. In the struggle for the play's dominant language, the plot's metaphoric and archetypal impulses strain against the tyranny of factual history; and this is true also of the play's final staged action: the tower ascent and the struggle with the Creator that Hilde envisions. Wonder and terror are generated in the onlookers by the somewhat banal act of a middle-aged architect with vertigo climbing a scaffolding while Hilde and the skeptical and resentful Ragnar duel to establish the appropriate language for the event :

HILDA: (With jubilant, quiet intensity) At last! Now I see him great and free again!
RAGNAR: (Almost speechless) But all this -
HILDA: This is how I've seen him all these ten years. How strong he stands! Fearfully thrilling, after all. Look at him! Now he's hanging the wrath on the spire!
RAGNAR: All this I'm seeing here is completely impossible.
HILDA: Yes, it's the impossible, now that he's doing. (With the inscrutable look in her eyes). Can you see anyone else up there with him?
RAGNAR: There's no-one else.
HILDA: Yes, there's someone he's struggling with.
RAGNAR: You're mistaken.
HILDA; Can't you hear singing in he air, either?
RAGNAR: It must be the wind in the treetops.
HILDA: I hear a singing. A powerful singing. (Crying out in joyful exultation) Look, look! Now he's waving his hat. Waving down to us here. Oh, wave back up to him there. For now, now it is fulfilled! (Snatches the white shawl from the doctor, waves it and cries out.) Hurray, for master builder Solness!
DR. HERDAL: Stop! Stop! For God's sake!

In The Master Builder the attempt to find the adequate expression for what necessarily resists precise formulation opens up the dialogue of the final moments to such indefinite imagery as "castles in the air' a 'kingdom' and a battle with the Creator, a "great singing in the air" - dialogue that finds its visual stage counterpart in the sun-streaked sky, the ascending Solness, above, and, below, the gathered crowd of alarmed or rapt observers and the accompanying music. Against the triumph claimed by Hilda is counterpointed the negative voice of Ragnar and Herdal's alarmed warning as Hilda repeats the Lysanger action of waving the white object (this time Aline's shawl) that signaled the earlier act of worship and dangerous discipleship. Solness falls and is killed which would seem to validate Ragnar and Herdal's view of events: but Hilda's refusal to accept this as defeat - "But he went right to the top. And I heard harps in the air" and the visual symbolism of this scene, in striking contrast to the final darkness of Rosmersholm, insists that this is at the least a contested outcome. Retelling the story, it is possible to decide that Hilde is delusional and to see the play as a cautionary tale for middle aged men on encountering youthful sirens. However, to attend to the plot of the play, its evolution on the stage from the opening scene of tormented confinement to the final moments of exultant affirmation by both protagonists, (the expansive action attended by an emphatic on-stage visual and verbal imagery of increasing freedom), is to find such a cautionary reading drastically inadequate.

The plot has engaged with the past story, has gradually discarded its negative content, and has allowed its affirmative energies to emerge. The contrast with the plot movement of Rosmersholm could not be more emphatic. In both plays, however, the realm of the arbitrary enacted by the stories is replayed by the liberating logic of the plots. In Rosmersholm the re-enactment culminates in an act of freely chosen judgment and expiation upon actions and motives at last more adequately comprehended: in The Master Builder a constricting and deadly version of the past is set aside and replaced by one that re-asserts the human spirit's Faustian ambition for transcendence. The plots of the plays impose coherence upon the scattered details of the past. In Nietzschean terms, History is always about the present - about what the present decides to make of the past for its projects for the future. This redemption of the past is the subversive lesson Zarathustra claimed to have given to humanity.

I taught them to work on the future and redeem with their creation all that has been. To redeem what is past in man and to recreate all "it was" until the will says "Thus I willed it! Thus I shall will it! - this I call redemption and this alone I taught them to call redemption.[12]

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