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Play
It Again: Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot V. The Non-realistic Structuring of the Plot . The Ibsen plot is the operation upon reality of aesthetically demanding structuring. There is no need to conceal its artifices: the movement of each act of a play to its peripeties and anagnoreses, its repetition of key words and phrases, its 'curtain lines' and so on. 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 and which he wants us to share in. The conjunction of convincing human characters and situations and at the same time the skillful retention of classic dramatic structure is the source of the dramas' power. The Realists in painting like Manet and the Impressionists (Ibsen's contemporaries) selected only those elements of the modern scene that could be made to conform to the needs and problems of the composition on the canvas. Everyday reality was not the Truth the artists were trying to replicate: on the contrary, everyday reality was re-organized, often radically, for aesthetic integrity and included only as it was serviceable to the demands imposed by the canvas. The Salon that refused Manet or the Impressionists, preferred to exhibit the 'realistically' cluttered canvases of the genre painters.
Similarly, 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 cluttered rhythm of plausibly colloquial and inconsequential
everyday discourse and an arbitrary-seeming abundance of anecdotal detail;
catering for those who believe photographic verisimilitude is the ideal
of art. A recent commentator insists Ibsen's art reveals a firm fidelity
to the 'ordinary' - an astonishing verdict on his highly formal, highly
histrionic and often occult dramatic actions. 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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