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Play
It Again: Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot
V. The Artificial Structuring of the Plot The 'artificiality' of the Ibsen plot: its non-naturalistic timing, compression, ironic patterning and co-incidences, are not unfortunate residues from the formulae of the well-made-play. Ibsen is not setting out to offer a facsimile of everyday life and then somehow failing to achieve the miniscule tics and nuances of current movie and T.V. 'realism' . Such realism has a not much more consequential ambition than to reproduce the unremittingly commonplace. The Ibsen plot is the operation upon reality of an aesthetically demanding structuring. There is no need to conceal its artifices in order to prove Ibsen can be as good as the latest practitioner of banal verisimilitude. Instead, these artifices should be searched out and played up, making clear the selective intellectual and imaginative process Ibsen's plots bring to his fictive material. In much the same way, Realists in painting, like Manet and the Impressionists, (Ibsen's contemporaries), select only those elements of the modern scene that can be made to conform to the needs and problems of the composition on the canvas. Everyday reality is not the Truth the artists are trying to replicate: on the contrary, everyday reality is re-organized, often radically, into aesthetic truth and included only as it is serviceable to the demands imposed by the canvas. The Salon that refused Manet or the Impressionists, proudly exhibited the realistically cluttered canvases of the genre painters. Good
realistic dramatists (e.g. Harvey Granville-Barker), like the
meticulously accurate Genre painters, much more plausibly render the
texture and rhythms of everyday life than the Realist Ibsen -
as any comparison between a page or two of Ghosts
and of e.g. Waste, or The Voysey Inheritance will reveal.
The plot structure of The Voysey Inheritance is obscured by the
ongoing story's fussy rhythm of plausibly colloquial and inconsequential
everyday discourse and an arbitrary-seeming abundance of anecdotal detail.
The plot of Ghosts, by contrast, is an alarmingly felt presence
violently reshaping the details of the realistic details into a clear
dialectic. We need to see that this contrast is to the advantage of
Ibsen's tragic play. |
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